The Other McCain

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

MSNBC: Trolls Under a Bridge

Posted on | January 19, 2014 | 5 Comments

Let’s start with this: I don’t give a damn about Chris Christie. Didn’t give a damn about him before “BridgeGate,” and don’t give a damn about him now. Nevertheless, influential people in the Acela Corridor feel otherwise, and the attempt by the liberal media to take down a Republican is always newsworthy, whether or not the Republican is anybody I give a damn about. And Jennifer Rubin — who predictably has a fangirl crush on her Acela Republican pinup idol — devastates the media’s takedown effort on Governor Fat Boy:

The bridge scandal started out as a test for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R). Now it has become a test for the media. MSNBC, which long ago stopped being a news outlet in the sense of going out to find facts and is largely indistinguishable from Democratic Party talking points, has been going 24/7 since the bridge story broke. No surprise. But then Saturday MSNBC decided to throw even the pretense of journalism overboard.

Read the whole thing, which is interesting even if you wouldn’t vote for Chris Christie under any imaginable circumstance. As bad as he is, at least he’s not a liar from Hoboken.

Ali Akbar makes the case that bloggers have had an impact here:

While big media is busy obsessing over the supposed bridge scandal with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a moderate Republican, they’re getting backlash from their viewers. So instead of 100 articles about “bridgegate,” there are now 50 articles about “bridgegate” and 51 articles of the media examining its own coverage of “bridgegate.” It’s definitional insanity! In every single poll, the public is telling the media to move on from this story. The public is so disinterested in the story,that even in this hyper-partisan climate, no one’s opinion of the Governor has changed. But the Sunday shows couldn’t get away from it all. . . .

Read the whole thing.

 

Category: Chris Christie, MSNBC

Stand By For GOP Disaster On ObamaCare

Posted on | January 19, 2014 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Pardon the pessimism, but the GOP seems to differ with the Administration more on style than substance, as Hayward notes at Breitbart:

…indications are that the Republicans are backing away from ObamaCare, or at least from efforts to kill it. Jon Terbush at The Week delivered the news in an article entitled “It’s Official: The Republicans Are Done Trying to Kill ObamaCare.” Actually, the body of the article makes it sound more like the GOP leadership still wants to repeal, or mostly repeal, ObamaCare and replace it with a Republican alternative proposal, which is more a change of tactics than strategy.
“In that light, simply saying that an official GOP alternative is on the way is a big step away from the nihilistic rhetoric of the past,” writes Terbush.
But their rhetoric was never entirely nihilistic; that’s a false Obama talking point echoed robotically by the media. There have been solid GOP alternatives since Day One of the ObamaCare disaster. It sounds as if the Republican leadership wants to bring the entire party together behind something they can officially brand as The Republican Alternative ™ and push with a united effort. Until now, some strategists have suggested that would be a mistake, because it would give the Democrats and their media allies a target to demolish, drawing attention away from ObamaCare’s failure. It sounds like the time for standing back and letting Americans get a taste of the nightmare souffle whipped up by the Administration’s gremlins – supposedly with nearly zero oversight from the Smartest President In History – is over, and the GOP wants an alternative they can run on.
The troubling thing about Terbush’s article are the indications that groups like the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce are giving up the fight and making their peace with ObamaCare as a permanent tumor in the American system.

The over-arching, fundamental, intrinsic problem with ObamaCare is that it was Ever. The. Government’s. Constitutional. Job. To. Pull. This. Stunt.

This country is riddled with little brain-dead proto-Commies who think “liberty” means getting the government out of the womb and into the wallet. Wow, that sentence looks stupid, but it seems a fair assessment of the idiocy under consideration.

Getting into blogging a half decade ago was about joining the chorus of Buckley wannabees, standing athwart history asking: “Why’re they calling me a thwart? And why’s Obama prescribing the IRS as a treatment for thwarts?”

Five years on, the question has morphed into: “After years of hearing about ‘Constitution this’ and ‘Founding principles that’ from the Repubulican Party, where is the reformer attitude that the thwarts thought they were supporting?”

Not only is ObamaCare a dead parrot, the whole New Deal has completely run out of gas. I do not want to hear another godforsaken word about trying to shore up these entitlements. I want to hear about the transition plan that protects both those who’re locked into these bad ideas from total loss, and also protects the young from increased abuse from the bureaucracy.

If the Vichy GOP doesn’t get that the New Deal is dead, and wants to try to keep ObamaCare afloat, it’s got another thing coming.

Category: Health Care, Republicans

Journalist @CalebHannan Exposes Sociopath and Is Accused of Transphobia

Posted on | January 19, 2014 | 46 Comments

On Oct. 18, 2013, MIT-trained aeronautical physicist Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt — a former Pentagon contractor who had worked on the Stealth bomber project — committed suicide, which must have been difficult: It’s hard to kill a person you invented.

Known as “Dr. V” in the world of golf, the person who died of an overdose last fall in Gilbert, Arizona, had won fame as the reclusive inventor of an innovative putter, the Yar Oracle GX1. What made the putter an overnight sensation in 2012 was its claim to scientific superiority on the basis of Dr. V’s advanced knowledge of physics.

Except “Dr. V” had no such knowledge and was not a Ph.D.

Never attended MIT. Apparently had no college degree at all.

As reporter Caleb Hannan learned, Essay Anne Vanderbilt was a Pennsylvania native whose birth name was Stephen Krol, a former auto mechanic who had been married and divorced twice before deciding, at about age 50, that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body.

Seven years ago, now living in Arizona, “Dr. Vanderbilt”  met Gerri Jordan, a retired Bank of America senior analyst, who became both Vanderbilt’s girlfriend and president of Yar Golf:

In 2008, [Vanderbilt] tried to kill herself with an overdose of prescription drugs and carbon monoxide poisoning from closing herself in a garage with her car running. A police report offered some explanations for why she might have tried to take her own life — Yar’s business was slow and Dr. V’s romantic relationship was on the ropes. She had recently fought with her girlfriend, Gerri Jordan, president of Yar Golf. Jordan told police that she and Dr. V were in a monogamous relationship and that they had gotten into an argument two days before. She had found Dr. V in the passenger seat of her car after the suicide attempt and tried to keep her awake. Jordan had also presumably been the first person to read the suicide note Dr. V had taped to the window of the car door, which read in part, “Tell Gorgeous Gerri that I love her.”

Narcissistic sociopaths have trouble coping with failure, and there can be little doubt that “Dr. Vanderbilt” was in fact a con man person, as Caleb Hannan discovered:

I heard from a mysterious “silent investor” whom both Jordan and Dr. V had alluded to in our previous talks. His name was Phil Kinney. He was a retiree from Pittsburgh and he said he wasn’t the only one who had put money into the company. He had invested $60,000 — money that he believed he’d never see again. . . .
Dr. V had told him that she was a $1,000-an-hour consultant. She said she was one of the original designers of Bluetooth technology. She even suggested that her status as a Vanderbilt provided access to some exclusive company who could help Yar’s business. Kinney said Dr. V told him she was good friends with the Hilton family, and that the relationship would pay off in the form of putters sold at their hotels. Kinney also recalled a trip he had taken to Arizona where, in Dr. V’s house, she had shown him a computer that she said mirrored the one in Phoenix’s airport traffic control tower.

This shameless liar had evidently conned the old man out of tens of thousands of dollars, and was hiding another busted scam:

I also found a lawsuit filed against the town of Gilbert, Arizona, in July 2007. The plaintiff’s name: Essay Vanderbilt, who had accused the town and three of its employees of sexual discrimination. The suit alleged that the previous year Vanderbilt was working as a “vehicle service writer” in Gilbert’s Fleet Management Division. In other words, at the same time that Dr. V claimed to have been working on top-secret government projects in D.C., she was actually coordinating car repairs for a Phoenix suburb. Vanderbilt didn’t win her case. . . .

The claim of sexual discrimination failed not merely because it was untrue, but also because Vanderbilt had lied her way into the job, making up jobs she never had and schools she never attended. Her entire existence was an enormous lie and, like all sociopaths, she feared nothing so much as exposure of the truth.

Once you know someone is a liar, it is impossible ever to trust them again, and the sociopath’s exploitation of credulity therefore depends on concealment of their deceptions.

Caleb Hannan is a reporter who followed the old newsroom maxim, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” And if someone tells you they are an MIT-trained physicist — especially if that claim is basic to their story — this is the kind of biographical fact a diligent reporter must verify. So when Caleb Hannan attempted to verify the facts about “Dr. Vanderbilt,” he quickly discovered that her story didn’t check out.

Then weird things started happening, things which might surprise people who haven’t had any experience dealing with sociopaths. “Dr. Vanderbilt” and her girlfriend Gerri Jordan claimed victimhood:

The last time I heard from Dr. V she warned me that I was about to commit a hate crime. But before that, I received a voice mail from Jordan.
Neither of them had contacted me in months, since I had sent an email trying to confirm what I had discovered, and Jordan wrote back to deny everything. “Your attack tale should be published in the National Enquirer,” Jordan wrote, “right next to the article on Martians … If I am to believe your diatribe, what you are telling golfers is that the most scientifically advanced Near Zero MOI putter, and the science of the Inertia Matrix was invented by a lesbian auto mechanic.”

Jordan and “Dr. Vanderbilt” threatened Caleb Hannan and accused him of crimes and you can real the whole thing.

Predictably — that is, if you’ve been paying attention to these things — the sociopath’s posthumous enablers ganged up on Caleb Hannan, accusing him of transphobia and breaches of ethics:

Dr. V Is Dead, Caleb Hannan Is
Celebrated: Why We Can’t Accept
Lazy, Transmisogynistic Journalism
— Audrey Zee, Autostraddle

Careless, Cruel, and Unaccountable
— Melissa McEwan, Shakesville

Caleb Hannan, Gender Identity
and Journalistic Ethics
— Jonathan McLeod, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Digging Too Deep
Grantland’s exposé of a trans con artist
privileged fact-finding over compassion
— Josh Levin, Slate

All of this is preposterous hysterical bullshit. Caleb Hannan spent months working on that story, and didn’t publish it until three months after “Dr. Vanderbilt” committed suicide. His attackers — mimicking the tactics of “Dr. Vanderbilt” — are trying to make the story about Caleb Hannan, but he is merely the storyteller.

Josh Levin’s claim about “moral dilemmas” involved in the story is insulting. The villain in this story is the phony “Dr. Vanderbilt,” who was responsible for initiating a chain of events that Caleb Hannan merely describes. Remember the old “Schoolhouse Rock” jingle?

Mr. Morton is the subject of the sentence
And what the predicate says, he does.

The same is true of Caleb Hannan’s story: “Dr. Vanderbilt” was the subject of the sentence and the predicate was “lied.”

Professor Donald Douglas called my attention to this story because he was himself targeted by this “Accuse the Accusers” tactic:

This is the problem with sociopaths who claim victimhood: Invariably, the con man will succeed in deceiving some people who, buying into the clever victimhood narrative, will attack those who tell the truth. If you arrive late to the story, it is easy to become confused by the claims made on behalf of the sociopath by defenders who hurl accusations of mala fides at the truth-tellers. “Dr. Vanderbilt” has acquired a mob of defenders who insist that this is a story about “transmisogynistic journalism,” when in fact it is the story of a dishonest creep who committed suicide rather than cope with exposure of the truth.

If those who are attacking Caleb Hannan genuinely want to rectify an injustice, perhaps they could ask a few questions about the still unsolved murder of Julia Scyphers. Somehow, I doubt they will.

 

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Category: Crime, Gays

B.A. in Special Snowflake Studies

Posted on | January 18, 2014 | 58 Comments

Instapundit wants to be lenient on Randye Hoder — “it’s not a ‘useless’ degree if in fact it teaches students ‘to think critically and analytically, read widely and write well’” — which means that I’m obliged to play bad cop with this overindulgent mother:

My oldest child, Emma, just returned to campus after a long holiday break to finish up her last semester of college.
But even before she has put the final period on her senior thesis, friends and family have been bombarding me with one question: What is she going to do after graduation?
The job market is, after all, awfully tough. Just this month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a study showing that “recent graduates are increasingly working in low-wage jobs or working part-time,” if they’re lucky enough to find work at all.
The bright spot, according to the Fed analysis, students who majored in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — areas in which recent graduates “have tended to do relatively well, even in today’s challenging labor market.” But Emma is a student of the much-maligned humanities — an American Studies major with a focus on the politics and culture of food at a small liberal arts school. . . .

Whoa. Stop right there: “an American Studies major with a focus on the politics and culture of food at a small liberal arts school.”

First of all, that’s not “the humanities.” It just isn’t.

Second, if you’re going to study some ridiculous made-up gimmick of a major — “the politics and culture of food”? really? — why on earth would you study it “at a small liberal arts school,” i.e., an expensive college for overprivileged trust-fund babies?

[W]e are not immune to the high cost of college. Emma’s father and I have made sacrifices to give her, and her brother, the kind of education we value. There will be loans to pay when she graduates—and, yes, my husband and I will foot that bill.

Oh, now I see! Mommy and Daddy will pay the bill for their daughter’s luxurious four-year-vacation — “the kind of education we value” — because their Special Snowflake (a) didn’t have the scores to get into Berkeley, and (b) Cal State’s for losers.

See, this is the niche that “small liberal arts schools” fill: The offspring of permissive parents who will give their Special Snowflakes whatever their selfish hearts crave. The kid isn’t smart enough or hard-working enough to get into a genuinely elite school, but they’re just too doggone special to attend a state school (let alone community college), and so there’s always that trendy little campus that will charge them $35,000 a year to pretend that they’re better than those disgusting low-brow slobs at State U.

This is not about education, it’s about aspiration.

The “small liberal arts school” is a luxury that the rich can afford, but borrowing money to attend one? That’s just crazy.

Maybe Randye Hoder‘s daughter can apply her knowledge of “the politics and culture of food” at Burger King.

 


Category: Education

Latina Actress Blacklisted for Supporting Republican Candidate

Posted on | January 18, 2014 | 60 Comments

If I had ever heard of Maria Conchita Alonzo before now, I don’t remember it, but I know I’ll never forget her after this:

A famed actress is facing backlash in San Francisco’s Latino community, after she voiced support for a conservative candidate for California governor.
Maria Conchita Alonso starred in a campaign ad for Assemblyman Tim Donnelly of San Bernardino County, a Tea Party favorite who is seeking the Republican nomination. . . .
“Politicians and big government are killing our prosperity, pushing welfare costs through the roof and driving our schools into the ground,” Donnelly said in the ad.
Standing next to Donnelly, Alonso jokingly translated in Spanish, “We’re screwed.” . . .
Alonso is an actress of Cuban and Venezuelan descent. She is perhaps best known for her role in the movie “Moscow on the Hudson” which also starred Robin Williams.
The actress was to perform next month at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco’s Mission District in a Spanish-language version of “The Vagina Monologues,” scheduled for a run from February 14th through 17th. The show is being produced by none other than Eliana Lopez, wife of San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi.
“We really cannot have her in the show, unfortunately,” Lopez told KPIX 5. . . .
“Of course she has the right to say whatever she wants. But we’re in the middle of the Mission. Doing what she is doing is against what we believe,” Lopez said.

Regular Right Guy notes the irony that Alonzo escaped totalitarianism in Cuba only to suffer political repression in San Francisco.

A couple years ago, Alonzo called Sean Penn a “communist a–hole,” a statement that everybody knows is true, but which has so much more authority when it is said by a refugee from Cuba.

By the way, Michelle Malkin had a very heartfelt column this week about the hurtfulness of left-wing identity politics. It is sadly remarkable how some “progressives” think it is clever to deride Malkin — an Oberlin College alumna who is one of the most successful businesswomen of the New Media age — with such grossly derogatory slurs as “Manila whore” and “Subic Bay bar girl.”

UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread with more commentary by Ann Althouse, Vox Day and Darleen Click at Protein Wisdom.

 

Category: California, Celebrities

The ObamaCare ‘Death Spiral’ Debate

Posted on | January 18, 2014 | 26 Comments

ObamaCare is exactly the kind of policy failure its opponents predicted, although it has also failed in a few unpredicted ways. The only way anyone can call ObamaCare a “success” is in a political sense, i.e., it helped re-elect Obama. We might also say ObamaCare is a “success” in the sense that its unmistakable failure will likely be leveraged as an argument for a single-pay government takeover of health care in some future Democrat administration, but we have not yet reached that point. Where we are now is Ezra Klein and other liberals trying to pretend that ObamaCare’s failure is not yet certain:

Ezra Klein is back in line. The Journolist founder, who now runs Wonkblog for the Washington Post, took some flak from other left-liberal journalists last year when he acknowledged that the ObamaCare exchanges had serious technical flaws. But now, as we move into Phase 3 of the ObamaCare failure — the unraveling of its economic assumptions — Klein and his wonkblogger staff are in full denial.

James Taranto’s recounting of the arguments is amusing, with Ezra Klein in the role of the Monty Python pet shop owner who insists that the Norwegian Blue is merely “pining for the fjords.”

 


Category: Barack Obama, Health Care

Mexican Murder Suspect Is Finally Deported After 13-Year U.S. Crime Spree

Posted on | January 18, 2014 | 30 Comments

Mexican criminal Fabian Godinez-Oseguera deported by ICE.

This case “ought to make your blood boil,” indeed: Fabian Godinez-Oseguera was wanted on a warrant in Mexico for a 2000 murder. He fled to the United States and — despite multiple felony convictions here and having been repeatedly deported to Mexico — was still running around loose in Washington State until 2011:

A former Bremerton man has been transferred to the custody of the Mexican Attorney General’s Office to face murder charges there from 2000.
Fabian Godinez-Oseguera has been deported to Mexico four times in the past. Each time, he returned to Kitsap County, where his wife and children reside.
Kitsap County Sheriff’s spokesman Scott Wilson said Godinez-Oseguera has had many interactions with local law enforcement, using a variety of aliases. He was arrested in 2006 by Bremerton Police under the name Francisco Ramos Campos for outstanding warrants ranging from marijuana possession to DUI to unlawful possession of a firearm.
According to Andrew Munoz, public affairs officer for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Godinez-Oseguera is a documented gang member who has been involved in methamphetamine trafficking. He was remanded from Kitsap County Jail in October 2011 to the custody of ICE. He was presented for federal prosecution and sentenced. After serving a 13-month sentence at the NW Detention Center for Civil Immigration, ICE officers have now turned him over to Mexican authorities.

Let’s recap: A drug dealer and gang member wanted for murder in Mexico repeatedly returned to the United States “where his wife and children reside” and evaded apprehension for his crimes by “using a variety of aliases.” If that’s not enough to make your blood boil, how about this Obama administration press release?

A former Seattle-area man was deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operation (ERO) Thursday to Mexico where he faces homicide charges.
Fabian Godinez-Oseguera, 37, also known as “El Güero Loco,” was turned over to Mexican authorities at the U.S.-Mexico border at El Paso, Texas.  . . .
“Criminals who seek to escape responsibility for their actions by fleeing to the United States will find no sanctuary in our communities,” said Nathalie Asher, field office director for ERO Seattle.

Three words: Bull. Fucking. Shit.

Foreign criminals are provided sanctuary in many U.S. communities. Michelle Malkin has written extensively about “sanctuary cities” like New York, San Francisco and Seattle that have an official policy of deliberate non-cooperation with immigration enforcement.

Has anyone ever heard Obama — or any member of his administration or any Democrat member of Congress — say a single critical word about these “sanctuary cities” that make an open mockery of our nation’s immigration laws? Of course not. They’re all liars.

They should be ashamed of themselves, but if they had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t be Democrats, would they?

(Hat-tip: Larwyn at Doug Ross.)

 

Category: Crime, Immigration, Mexico

Federal Court Upholds Bloggers’ Rights

Posted on | January 18, 2014 | 22 Comments

Eugene Volokh cites a ruling yesterday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Obsidian Finance Group v. Cox:

The protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others’ writings, or tried to get both sides of a story. As the Supreme Court has accurately warned, a First Amendment distinction between the institutional press and other speakers is unworkable: “With the advent of the Internet and the decline of print and broadcast media … the line between the media and others who wish to comment on political and social issues becomes far more blurred.” Citizens United, 558 U.S. at 352. In defamation cases, the public-figure status of a plaintiff and the public importance of the statement at issue — not the identity of the speaker — provide the First Amendment touchstones.

This is obviously relevant to the Maryland lawsuit Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., as well as to the federal lawsuit that my co-defendant John Hoge has dubbed Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al.

It’s interesting that the Ninth Circuit cited the Citizens United case, which figured prominently as a casus belli for the anti-Clarence Thomas campaign of Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution.

It’s also interesting that in neither his state nor federal lawsuits against bloggers does Brett Kimberlin mention his role in founding Velvet Revolution which, the last time I checked, was located at the same Bethesda street address — i.e., Kimberlin’s mother’s basement — listed on Kimberlin’s legal filings in both cases.

 

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Category: Blogging, Constitution, The Kimberlin Files
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