The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

#OccupyResoluteDesk Totally Knows Him Some Foreign Policy

Posted on | March 1, 2014 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Look at Obama just mop up the floor with Romney during the 2012 debates:


Five years of observing BHO, from Zelaya in Honduras, to Chavez in Venezuela, to the Green Revolution in Iran, to Libya and Syria, and now Russia/Ukraine lead to the following observation: I daresay Obama’s sympathies are totally with Putin, and all the other hard workin’ world leaders just tryin’ to keep civilization goin’.

The peasantry craving old-fashioned notions like rule of law, budgets, political- and religious expression are merely a pesky detail to remove.

Category: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Russia, Ukraine

Palin Vindicated on Russia, Ukraine: ‘I Could See This One From Alaska’

Posted on | March 1, 2014 | 34 Comments

She who laughs last:

Sarah Palin may be having a bragging rights moment.
In 2008, when she was the GOP vice presidential nominee, Palin questioned in a speech whether then-Sen. Barack Obama would have the foreign policy credentials to handle a scenario in which Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
“After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence — the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next,” she said in Reno, Nevada on October 21, 2008.
The former Alaska governor was happy to highlight her prediction on Friday and scold those who criticized her 2008 comments.
“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska,” she said on Facebook. That remark was a reference to a 2008 interview in which Palin argued that Alaska’s proximity to Russia helped boost her foreign policy experience.
Saturday Night Live parodied her remarks in a now-famous sketch with Tina Fey, who played Palin on the show, saying “I can see Russia from my house.”
On Facebook, Palin continued to explain how she anticipated a growing crisis between Russia and Ukraine, where there has now been an uncontested arrival of Russian military forces by air at a Russian base in Ukraine’s Crimea region. They are believed to be Russian land forces, according to a U.S. assessment.
“I’m usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine.”

And while Vladimir Putin was reportedly sending 2,000 paratroopers to the Crimean peninsula, what was Obama’s reaction?

President Obama himself, having delivered a limp warning to Vladimir Putin, decamped for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where he told a cheering crowd: “Well, it’s Friday, it’s after 5:00. So this is officially happy hour with the Democratic Party.”

 


Category: Barack Obama, Russia, Sarah Palin, Ukraine

Federal Judge Issues Devastating Opinion in Brett Kimberlin Copyright Case

Posted on | February 28, 2014 | 15 Comments

Aaron Walker discusses this at his blog, but the order itself is delightful reading in its own right, particularly when the judge recites the numerous federal cases Brett Kimberlin has filed previously:

Memo Opinion

 

What’s the Latin phrase for “pimp slap”?

 


Category: The Kimberlin Files

The Feminist Fringe

Posted on | February 28, 2014 | 12 Comments

As mentioned previously, I’ve been re-reading Susan Brownmiller’s feminist memoir In Our Time, and what stands out — if one reads with an informed and critical eye — is how Women’s Liberation (a/k/a “Second Wave” feminism) originated on the far-left fringe among women whose life experiences were atypical, if not downright weird.

Brownmiller herself had three illegal abortions before 1968, and her book’s biographical profiles of other feminist pioneers are littered with examples of how the movement’s leadership came out of the anti-war New Left and the bohemian “alternative lifestyles” of ’60s hippie culture. Here is Brownmiller’s description (pp. 189-192) of the founders of the Denver-based feminist newspaper Big Mama Rag:

Chocolate Waters, a Navy brat from Pennsylvania (she legalized her childhood nickname), got dumped in the city by her old college boyfriend. “Yeah, we were traveling across the country and he took off and left me with no money in one of those old-timey women’s bars. I was bisexual then, so I started hooking up with the dykes. At a women’s festival somebody had an idea about doing a newspaper. We passed around a sign-up sheet.”
Jackie St. Joan — then Jackie Bryson — arrived in Denver with her husband and two children. Her interracial marriage, the first in Virginia after the Supreme Court struck down the state’s notorious antimiscegenation statute in 1967, began to founder when the couple moved west. Jackie swallowed her pride and went on welfare for five months before she found work as a secretary. At a potluck dinner sponsored by the Denver Peace Coalition, she heard about plans for a women’s paper. . . . Big Mama Rag came to fruition late in 1971. Maureen Mrizek, radicalized at college in Carbondale, Illinois, set the tone of the first issue by asking, “How can you conquer an oppressor when you sleep with him every night?” . . .
After leaving her husband, Linda Fowler from North Carolina had taken her child to a commune in the Colorado Rockies . . . “Those were my days of pot and acid,” she says. “I was smoking dope, chopping firewood, learning carpentry, and trying to figure out who I was, and how lesbianism fit into feminism.” On a trip into Denver she stopped into a radical bookstore and saw Big Mama Rag. “The fog lifted,” she exclaims. “Within a month I left the mountains and got involved with the paper.” . . .
Some of the women paired off: [editor] Carol [Lease] with Linda, and Chocolate with Jackie, who solemnly chose St. Joan as her new last name. . . .
[In 1975] the women learned via the establishment media that “Carla Weinstein,” who’d been in on their start-up, was the fugitive Jane Alpert, wanted in New York on bombing charges. . . .

Non-conformists, radicals, misfits, druggies, divorceés, lesbians and, of course, a terrorist bomber: Such were the freaky ingredients of the fringe movement that feminism was in its origins. And I point this out because one sometimes hears people who are ignorant of feminism’s radical beginnings express the mistaken belief that there is, or once was, a “mainstream” feminism which has somehow been “hijacked” by radicals.

No, the women’s movement was radical from the start, and if you ever thought feminism was “mainstream,” you just weren’t paying very close attention. Not paying attention to the radical fringe may seem like a safe bet — “Just ignore those kooks!” — until one day you notice that the kooks and radicals have taken over the country:

Outrage Over Sexist Remarks Turns
Into a Political Fund-Raising Tool
In the past few months, Republicans have called Wendy Davis, a Democratic candidate for Texas governor, “Abortion Barbie,” likened Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Senate candidate from Kentucky, to an “empty dress,” criticized Hillary Rodham Clinton’s thighs, and referred to a pregnant woman as a “host.”
Democrats do not just get mad when they hear those words. They cash in.
In fact, they are trying to find even more examples by tracking Republican opponents, their surrogates and conservative news media personalities, then blasting their comments out to supporters to build voter lists and drum up donations, casting aside the well-worn advice to shrug off sexist comments lest they draw attention to gender over issues.
It is proving effective. Emily’s List, the political action committee that backs female candidates who support abortion rights, has raised a record $25 million this election cycle. . . .

So, a pro-abortion group has raised a record sum to elect Democrats, who are now The Abortion Party. If you are against abortion, you’re anti-woman, see? And this startling turnabout — a revolution in morals, standing common sense on its head — has been accomplished by those weirdo radicals you ignored for so long.

 

Category: Feminism

Kimberlin Attacks @AceOfSpadesHQ’s Lawyer, Cites ‘Breitbart Unmasked’

Posted on | February 28, 2014 | 32 Comments

As a specimen of shamelessness, Brett Kimberlin has few equals in human history. The experience of being sued by Kimberlin offers a front-row seat to witness how utterly arrogant he is — as impudent as a four-year-old throwing a tantrum, lacking any regard for the rights of others, and with no sense of shame over the spectacle he creates.

In one of his most recent outbursts in the federal RICO lawsuit — dubbed Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al., by my co-defendant John Hoge — the perjuring bomber filed “Motion to Disqualify Counsel for Defendant Ace of Spades for Multiple Conflicts of Interests.”

This is noteworthy because:

A. Here you have Kimberlin, who once plotted from his jail cell to have a federal prosecutor assassinated, now presuming to appoint himself the arbiter of professional legal ethics.
B. Kimberlin actually includes among his exhibits a post at the pro-Kimberlin site “Breitbart Unmasked” attacking Ace’s lawyer, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen.

It’s astonishing, really, and a good occasion to remind you that Kimberlin’s self-described “associate” Neal Rauhauser was trying to “dox” Ace of Spades for months before I ever heard of Brett Kimberlin. This goes back to “WeinerGate” in 2011, which was the event that brought Rauhauser into the Kimberlin orbit. Patterico and Ace of Spades did some of the most effective blogging about the “WeinerGate” scandal, which made them a focus of Rauhauser’s obsession.

Is it merely coincidence, therefore, that identifying Ace is part of Kimberlin’s strategy in this federal lawsuit? Give me a break.

So, in the process of infringing Ace’s free speech rights, now Kimberlin wants to deprive Ace even of his right to legal counsel.

Utterly shameless.

Ace has handled this lawfare harassment with remarkable sangfroid, and let me quote what Ace wrote on Feb. 19:

[Levy] has kindly agreed to represent me in fighting Brett Kimberlin’s motion to compel a third party to give him my name and address, so he can then sue me in a suit which, in my opinion, is entirely baseless, and once again an attempt to chill Free Speech rights.
Which is what this has been about since the beginning.
What makes me particularly happy that Mr. Levy is representing me is that he is, by his confession, a “lefty.” It has bothered me from the outset of this entire affair that people who I thought might take an interest — people in the left-leaning media who ought to care about attempts to chill and punish Free Expression, left-leaning bloggers whose very jobs put them in danger of having the same tactics used against them — failed to do so.
Instead, what seems to have happened is everyone just “picked teams,” based on the typical tribal impulses. If anyone on the left wrote about this — not because they agreed, politically, with any of Brett Kimberlin’s targets, but because they supported the principle that people ought to be free to comment on news and newsworthy stories without the threat of a lawsuit hanging over them. (One person did cover it, briefly, in an “Interesting Thing Going on on the Internet” sort of way, but without actually examining the issues raised.)
And as far as the media, I’m afraid, the idea seemed to be “a pox on both their houses.” One guy is using the courts to pound critics and stifle free speech; but on the other hand, these guys are conservatives, so, of course, they are Unpeople, and They Were Probably Doing Something Bad Anyway. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

 

Category: Ace of Spades, The Kimberlin Files

‘Fairness’ and Feminism

Posted on | February 28, 2014 | 67 Comments

Just to refresh my memory, I’ve spent the past few days re-reading Susan Brownmiller’s feminist memoir In Our Time. You have to be a hard-boiled, strong-minded conservative not to be outraged by Brownmiller’s account of the extreme workplace inequality that once typified her own field, journalism. And the implicit assumption — this is one of those premises that the Left smuggles into arguments, hoping no one will notice — is that inequality is unjust and unfair.

The fact is that, at the time of the feminist revolution, nearly all adults were married. The median age at first marriage in the 1960s was about 21 for women, about 23 for men. The birth rate was high, the average woman had three or four children, and so the normal situation — the circumstance of the typical American adult — was that Mom was home with her children and Dad was working to support the whole family. Dad’s paycheck was the family’s entire income.

It was a man’s world, baby.

From our perspective in 2014, therefore, it seems completely shocking that women in journalism — an “enlightened” field, dominated by liberals — were consigned to subordinate roles, so that Newsweek, for example, mostly employed women as fact-checkers, and NBC News had only one woman as an on-air TV reporter.

This was the perspective of Brownmiller and other female journalists who joined the Women’s Liberation movement in filing discrimination lawsuits against news organizations in the 1970s.

However, the perspective of the unmarried childless career woman was statistically abnormal at the time  and, in point of fact, is still abnormal: Most women will marry and have children and, whether they work outside the home or not, it is in the interest of married mothers and their children that their husbands be able to earn enough to support them — what some have called the “family wage” concept.

If you have read Caroline Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility (and God knows, I have seized every opportunity to encourage people to read it for the past six year), you know that feminism was not really about women vs. men, it was about career professional women — the single and childless — against wives and mothers. In case the underlying significance of this is not clear, I’ll tell you that on page 6 of In Our Time, Brownmiller reveals that by 1968, she had already had “three illegal abortions, one in Cuba and two in Puerto Rico.”

Abortion and contraception — the Contraceptive Culture — are integral to the professional ambitions of a certain percentage of women, a percentage that is certainly larger now than it was in 1968, but it is only feminist ideology that claims the interests of the childless unmarried professional career woman are coterminous with the interests of all women, and which insists that every example of statistical inequality is evidence of discriminatory unfairness.

You have to be blind or brainwashed not to see the fraudulence of this argument, the claim that women benefit collectively from the privileges that feminist “fairness” provides to elite women. The truck driver’s wife has no stake in this game of “discrimination” played by professional career women. That is a self-interested game played for the benefit of the college-educated career elite, and the vast majority of American women don’t give a damn what percentage of Fortune 500 executives are female.

Once you recognize feminism as the attempt of an elite group of women to advance their own narrow interests by representing them as the collective interests of all women, the claims of “unfairness” and “discrimination” appear in a different light. Most women are not trying to climb the corporate ladder at a Fortune 500 company and yet the grievances of such career women are the engine that drives the constant reiteration of the formula “inequality = injustice.”

And this is where the Marxist origin of feminist ideology becomes highly relevant. When I describe feminism as the ideology of man-hating socialist lesbians, I’m not joking. Sure, there are heterosexual capitalist women who call themselves “feminists,” but if you examine the biographies and ideas of the women who contributed most to the development of feminist ideology, you cannot help noticing the preponderance of Communists and lesbians. For example, feminist “consciousness-raising” was directly borrowed from Marxism by two “Red Diaper babies” (i.e., children of Communist Party members), Kathie Amatniek and Anne Forer, the latter of whom explained to Brownmiller:

“In the Old Left, they used to say the workers don’t know they’re oppressed so we have to raise their consciousness. One night at a meeting I said, ‘Would everybody please give me an example from their o0wn life on how they experienced oppression as a woman? I need to hear it raise my own consciousness.’ Kathie was sitting behind me and the words rang in her mind. From then on she sort of made it an institution and called it consciousness-raising.”

This idea that every misfortune and disappointment experienced by women can be attributed to “oppression” by men is an analog of the Marxist concept that every problem of industrial workers — the proletariat — was the fault of the capitalist bourgeosie.

In other words, there are no coincidental, individual or random problems, but rather every problem is viewed as the result of deliberate, collective, systematic oppression — “class struggle,” in the Marxist idiom — and the challenge of the revolutionary vanguard is to inform the oppressed that they are, indeed, oppressed. That is to say, the oppressed must have their consciousness raised, which is what the entire academic field of Women’s Studies is about.

Conservatives recognize that the Marxist viewpoint in economics is an error, based on the false assumption that economic activity is a coercive zero-sum game, where the wealth of the rich is derived by imposing poverty on the exploited toiling masses. “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one,” as Ronald Reagan famously said.

Yet in recent years, it seems to me, conservatives have ceded the premise of feminism’s quite similar argument, so that people calling themselves conservatives are eager to make a “me, too” claim that they’re also in favor of equality, without bothering to examine the meaning or consequences of “equality” in this context.

Marriage is, or at least it should be, based on voluntary cooperation between men and women. If mothers wish to raise their own children, rather than outsourcing the care and education of their offspring to others, then their husbands must be able to earn an income sufficient to provide for the whole family. In such a family-oriented economy, men will be more likely than women to participate in the wage-earning work force; the consequence of this will be that men, on average, will have more years of continuous job experience; as a result, men will, on average, earn more than women and be more numerous in the ranks of management; and the resulting statistical inequality is not systemic unfairness, but a consequence of choices made by individuals.

In the past half-century, the “family wage” system has broken down even as divorce has become widespread and more than 40 percent of children are now born to unmarried women. Are these unrelated phenomena? Is this coincidental? I think not, and neither does Helen Smith, whose book Men on Strike is all about how social changes have harmed men.

All of this is mere preamble, however, to the latest zany ideological excursion by the woman Maetenloch calls “Everyone’s Favorite RadFeminist.” Yes, Radical Wind — she of “PIV is always rape, OK?” fame — has graced us again with her enlightened views:

That’s because the central cause of women’s impoverishment isn’t impersonal and institutional, but comes from men individually stealing from women in their individual homes. The owner, husband, master, stealing from the woman’s own pocket. I only realised how literal it was quite recently. This is the primary pattern of women’s crippling poverty. It became clear to me after hearing story after story of women being ransacked to the bone by their own husbands or boyfriends, it was typical of every abuse story I’ve heard of – these men systematically stealing their salary, signing credits, debts or mortgages in the woman’s name, binding women in suicidal financial situations or reckless business plans, stealing women’s property, flats or houses by signing it in their (the man’s) name, taking siege of the woman’s flat or house and refusing to move out, spending women’s income on drugs, cars, expensive restaurants, gambling, prostitution or whatever their pet fetish is, controlling access to their bank account, or systematically sabotaging their access to work, income or property in any form, by moving her far away from her work, wrecking her chances to find employment in any way possible, sabotaging her relationship with her employer, or finding ways to cut her benefits for childcare, preventing her from using the money she has for herself, etc, etc. The list is endless.

You can read the whole thing. Ask yourself: What kind of men is she hanging out with? This is the simplest explanation for why feminism is a left-wing phenomenon. Left-wing women hang out with left-wing men and left-wing men are selfish jerks.

Sic semper hoc.

By the way: Planned Parenthood will spend $16 million in the 2014 election cycle, because . . . equality!





 

Category: Abortion, Contraceptive Culture, Economics, Feminism, Planned Parenthood

In The Mailbox, 02.28.14

Posted on | February 28, 2014 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Gay “Jim Crow” In Waiting?
Batshit Crazy News: Barrett Brown Gets “House Of Cards” Nod?
The Looking Spoon: Imagine All The Sheeple
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Jeremy Clarkson Is Awesome
First Street Journal: The Commander In Chief And The Minimum Wage
Michelle Malkin: Alec Baldwin, Drama Queen
Doug Powers: Had a Bad Experience Because Of Obamacare? Lying Harry Reid Says You’re A Liar
Twitchy: Gasbag David Corn Claims Conservatives Don’t Understand “Reserach”, Gets Creamed


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: America And The Aggressive (Regressive) Left
American Thinker: Obama’s Minimum Wage Ruse
BLackfive: Terry Francona – From Battlefield To Major League Baseball
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Public Pension Watch – Blue Ribbon Panel Report On Funding
Conservatives4Palin: NYT Thinks The Main Victim In The IRS Scandal Is…The IRS
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, December 27
Jammie Wearing Fools: White Boy Biden Says Voter ID Laws Evidence Of Zealotry And Hatred
Joe For America: Murder Blackout In The Name Of Amnesty – The Jamiel Shaw Vigil
JustOneMinute: Fun With The Minimum Wage
Pat Dollard: Federal Appeals Court Rules California School Can Ban US Flag Shirts During Phony “Cinco De Mayo” Holiday
Protein Wisdom: I’m Just Going To Put This Out There
Shot In The Dark: Do The Right Thing
The Jawa Report: Report – Armed Man Take Airport In Crimea
The Lonely Conservative: Obama Will Veto Bill To Stop IRS Abuse; Dems Kill Amendments In Senate
This Ain’t Hell: CIA Steals FBI’s Al-Qaeda Mole, Gets Him Killed
Megan McArdle: JC Penney Does The Dead Cat Bounce


Deadline to submit links for this weekend’s FMJRA is noon on Saturday.
DO IT.
On the other hand, I think we have plenty of links for Sunday’s Rule 5 post. -_-


Category: Linkagery

Ace Spanks Weigel

Posted on | February 28, 2014 | 14 Comments

Spanks him hard over his defense of Alex Sink. Here’s the question: Why is it so important to be fair to Alex Sink?

Oh, because Alex Sink is a Democrat.

The media must be fair to Democrats. The media must never assist Republicans in “swiftboating” Democrats.

Alex Sink made a gaffe — a clear, obvious gaffe — and so the media clean-up crew must explain why it’s not really a gaffe.

Weigel’s entire generation of journalists have had their perspectives warped by the experience of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Imagine you’re 30. The Lewinsky scandal happened when you were 14. The Florida Bush-vs.-Gore election deadlock happened when you were 16. You were 17 when the planes hit the towers, 19 when we invaded Iraq, 20 when Bush beat Kerry.

If you were a Democrat during all that, your entire adolescence was spent in a seeming nightmare: Republicans were raping you in broad daylight, and there was no way you could stop it. So you became a journalist — because you want to “make a difference” — and the difference that you want to make is to ensure that Democrats win, period. You have no principle beyond partisanship.

Republicans? Shove ’em through a plate glass window.

Because that’s fair. They deserve it. They’re Republicans.

Now, Weigel is actually better than most. He used to be a libertarian. But he shares the generational assumptions typical of 30-somethings in the press corps, and does not want to be seen by his peers as enabling the Fox News-talk-radio-Drudge axis.

It has always been true that the media are liberal. Studies indicate that journalists vote Democrat by a 9-to-1 margin. But the bias has gotten worse — it is now quite shamelessly deliberate — because young liberal reporters see themselves as battling to prevent the return of that nightmare era when Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. This is why they consider Benghazi and the IRS “phony” scandals, because if those stories should gain traction, the nightmare might return.

It’s results-oriented journalism, really.

They don’t actually care about the facts. They care about creating a narrative that will win elections for Democrats. Period.

 

Category: Ace of Spades, Dave Weigel
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