The Other McCain

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

Keep The Resistance Alive

Posted on | December 29, 2013 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

Instapundit points to Fox’s article: “Popularity of ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ plates in Virginia suggests Tea Party still strong“:

“It is a symbol of frustration … a symbol of disgust with the government,” David Dwyer, a former Hampton Roads Tea Party chairman, told the newspaper.

The sales figures for the “Don’t Tread on Me” plates indicate more than just Tea Party members are buying them, which Dwyer suggests is an indication the movement’s mantra of less-government and no new taxes resonates with many Americans.

Here’s mine:
But in Insty’s comments,

Oxbay
And yet a majority of Virginia voters elected a corrupt slimeball.

Hey, man: that’s MY greasy, cretinous, incompetent boob of an Illinois-style bag of corruption you’re talking about there. Show some more disrespect.

cgage
Paying an extra $10 to get the plates gives more money to the gummint. Kinda defeats the purpose, no?

Yes, but people look at license plates. The Northern Virginia traffic sucks so bad, you’ve got time to study plates, crank on sudoku, chat up your father on the hands-free (my personal fave). So getting the ‘reform’ message out there is worth the sawbuck.

But back to Oxbay’s point, Ken Cuccinelli was a casualty in the war between the reform-oriented base of the GOP, and the Progressive elite of the GOP, which chiefly exists as a shock absorber for all reform-oriented thinking.

Reform is not a sprint. Anybody who thinks that 2014, together with 2016, even if they prove to be Republican wave elections, is going to un-frack our un-representative federal government, is naïve. It’s not about replacing one set of goons with another.

The reform we need is a renewed sense of self-government, so that ideas such as ObamaCare are laughed down outright, instead of plodding forward to the tune of Black Sabbath.

Bonus heh  (h/t:IMAO).

Category: Culture, Republicans, Virginia

FMJRA 2.0: 2013 Finale

Posted on | December 29, 2013 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Special Snowflake Syndrome

So, Justine Finally Landed …

Rule 5 Sunday: Transfer Station Blue

Where We’re Heading

Phil Robertson 1, Political Correctness 0

Crime Is a People Problem

A Positive Aspect Of The “Duck Dynasty” Kerfuffle: Identifying The Fools

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.23.13

@Alexs1776 Brings The #Boom

‘Discrimination,’ Arguing by Exceptions, and the Obvious Insanity of Androgyny

#SouthSudan: Please, Pray for Peace

#SouthSudan 3 U.S. Troops Wounded as Rebels Fire on Transport Plane UPDATE: Four U.S. Casualties; Rebels Claim Overthrow of Oil Region Capital

Bill Whittle Meets Black Sabbath

In Which @AceOfSpadesHQ Expresses an Unexpected Distaste for Blood

FMJRA 2.0: Painkiller

Obama to #SouthSudan: Good Luck

Fred Reed Encounters Maureen Dowd; Demolition Ensues

#SouthSudan: It’s Civil War Now

The Sudden #SouthSudan Crisis

Today’s Ray Of Hope: Baal Going On Enforced Diet, Film At 11

@NYPolJunkie Knows Her Some Snark

In The Mailbox, 12.24.13

Reagan and the ‘Welfare Queen’

The World’s Worst Pro Se Litigant Says ‘Defendant Walker Has Gone Rogue’

#SouthSudan: Words Aren’t Enough

Re: @X3n0ph0n and the Burden of Proof

The Anthropogenic Global Offgassing Change Climate

Probably Should Take The Day Off

Obviously a Satire

Egypt Is Ahead of Us

‘But … They Were in Love’

Value Judgments

Two Words You Probably Never Want to Think About: ‘Botched Vasectomy’

You Stay Classy, MSNBC!

Blame @Instapundit for This

A Bad Christmas for Neal Rauhauser

Three Gay Men Laugh About Oral Sex With Anderson Cooper’s Mother

Last Night, I Hit Rand Simberg’s Tip Jar for $10, Because … Science!


Top linkers this week

  1. EBL 34 (including 24 BSC)
  2. Rick’s Rants 33
  3. Dead Citizens Rights Society 26
  4. Regular Right Guy 10
  5. A View From The Beach 7

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for the first FMJRA of the New Year is noon on Saturday, January 4.


Shop Amazon – New Year New You

Category: FMJRA Award

Are You Ready for BBW Barbie?

Posted on | December 28, 2013 | 43 Comments

They should call her “Belinda,” because all girls named “Belinda” are fat. There — that’s the only joke I have for this story:

A controversy is brewing over a request to remake Barbie in way contrary to the iconic image so many girls knew growing up.
Plus-Size-Modeling.com is suggesting Mattel create a plus-size Barbie. While some say more realistic curves would be a better role model for girls, others say an overly large Barbie would be an unhealthy example.
Plus Size Modeling conducted a poll on its Facebook page on Dec. 18 asking, “Should toy companies start making Plus Sized Barbie dolls?” In just under two weeks, a picture of the poll has received over 40,000 likes, 5,000 comments and 2,700 shares.
“Sure, but Barbie doesn’t need a double chin,” one comment said. “You can be ‘plus size’ w/o the double chin. They could make a ‘thick’ Barbie.”
“Portraying Barbie as a realistic woman with real curves is a very good idea and would send the right message to young girls about self-esteem,” another comment said. “Making a morbidly obese Barbie is BAD!!”
Then there’s this opinion:
“Okay I honestly don’t think how a Barbie looks affects a child’s self-esteem. When I was little I didn’t wanna look like Barbie. Lol. I didn’t think about my looks at all I just wanted to play…”

I dunno. If “Plus-Size Barbie” is a success, why not “DTF Middle-Aged Cougar Barbie”? “Crack Whore Street Walker Barbie”?

(Hat-tip: Modern Comments on Twitter.)

 

Category: Culture

Another Fake Hate Crime? Arrest Discredits Tennessee Anti-Gay Case

Posted on | December 28, 2013 | 26 Comments

Paris, Tennessee, is a town of 10,000 people about two hours west of Nashville, but it made national headlines last month:

Joe Williams, Tennessee Health Food Store
Owner, Beaten In Alleged Anti-Gay Hate Crime

Williams said three men beat him unconscious and wrote a “three-letter homophobic slur” on his forehead in the Nov. 20 attack:

The victim, identified by Fox 17 as 32-year-old Joe Williams, told the Paris Post-Intelligencer that a man had come into the shop earlier that day and asked him about his sexuality, before responding that he could not shop there if he was gay. He also said that he was called derogatory names during the beating, which took place as he was in the process of closing up the business for the night.
“I just fear for my life,” Williams told Fox 17. “I’m to the point now where I’m worried to even go outside … I live my life as a gay man and wasn’t ashamed of it and I just feel that I was targeted for that for that reason.”
The suspects also set Healthy Thyme on fire, causing about $5,500 in damages,according to WPSD.

Whether or not Paris, Tennessee, is such a hotbed of homophobic hatred as to cause Williams to fear for his life, however, it now appears that this alleged hate crime never happened:

A man who told police he had been robbed and beaten at a Paris health food store a few days before Thanksgiving was arrested after he allegedly withheld information about the incident and has now been charged with filing a false report.
Joe Williams, 32, of 803 E. Wood St. was arrested [Dec. 20] after turning himself in at the Henry County jail.
Williams originally told officers he had been beaten and robbed Nov. 20 at Healthy Thyme, which is at the same address as Williams’ home. . . .
Officers later found inconsistencies in Williams’ story. Paris Police Sgt. Ricky Watson said Williams failed to bring up certain facts known to investigators on three different occasions.
“He was given three opportunities to disclose that information, and he chose not to,” Watson said.
That leaves investigators trying to determine how much of Williams’ story might have been true.
“We’ve not been able to verify or dispel any of the statements made about the actual robbery or fire,” Watson said. “We’re looking into Mister Williams, and we’re looking into whether it did or did not happen.”

The apparent fakery by Williams probably won’t be reported in bold headlines by some outlets that reported the story originally.

 

Category: Crime, Gays

If He’s Lost Lawrence O’Donnell …

Posted on | December 28, 2013 | 44 Comments

. . . Edward Snowden’s status as progressive hero is over:

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell skewered Edward Snowden’s Christmas address on Thursday, saying the National Security Agency leaker’s claims are “wildly overblown.”
“Every time he speaks, every time, he will say things that are absurdly, wildly overblown,” O’Donnell said. “He says that the government is, quote, ‘watching everything we do.’ That is of course impossible.”
“No one is watching everything we do. That capacity doesn’t exist,” he continued, adding, “I find it odd that every time he speaks he says provably untrue things like this.”

 

Edward Snowden never fooled me: From the get-go, I recognized this allegedly heroic “whistleblower” as another deluded anti-America traitor like Bradley — eh, Chelsea — Manning or perhaps even an outright paranoid kook like Barrett Brown. (Both Snowden and Brown are high-school dropouts, coincidentally or not.)

Manning, Brown, Snowden and, for that matter, Michael Hastings, all exhibited the symptomatic effects of a psychological complex we might call Post-Republican Anti-War Syndrome.

The tensions and frustrations of the Bush era — beginning with the disputed election of 2000, continued by the 9/11 attacks and on through the “War on Terror” and the invasion of Iraq — simply overwhelmed the fragile minds of some vulnerable people, and the election of Obama was insufficient to cure their madness. (Alabama moonbat blogger Roger Shuler is a textbook case.)

The anti-war movement of the Bush era summoned forth an army of kooks. It gave them a sense of purpose and focus for their alienated rage. When Bush (and “Bush’s war,” as the Left habitually called Iraq) went away, the malcontents and nutjobs were incapable of adjusting to the post-Bush reality because, in point of fact, they had never been very well-adjusted to begin with.

Hey, whatever happened to Cindy Sheehan?

Inevitably, national security required President Obama to continue (and even in certain cases to expand) many of the programs and policies for which his left-wing allies had furiously denounceed Bush, so that there developed a distinct new fringe which we might best describe as pseudo-libertarian or crypto-anarchist. Glenn Greenwald, for example, has never to my knowledge offered any criticism of the economic interventionism of the domestic Welfare State, but he rants endlessly about the alleged authoritarianism of America’s national security establishment. This has lately put Greenwald at odds with some liberals:

In a confrontational interview with MSNBC anchor Kristen Welker, progressive journalist Glenn Greenwald said that he’s a defender of Edward Snowden’s actions in the same sense that MSNBC is a defender of President Obama.
Greenwald said that he believes “every journalist has an agenda. We’re on MSNBC now, where close to 24 hours a day the agenda of President Obama and the Democratic Party are promoted, defended, glorified, the agenda of the Republican Party is undermined. That doesn’t mean the people who appear on MSNBC aren’t journalists. They are.”
“I do defend [Edward Snowden],” Greenwald said, “just like people on MSNBC defend President Obama and Democratic Party leaders 24 hours a day.”

It is certainly true that MSNBC is purely partisan, but what conservatives need to understand is that speaking this truth doesn’t make Glenn Greenwald any less crazy than when he was using sockpuppet accounts to defend himself online back in 2006.

My conservative friends may share with libertarians an honest suspicion of an intrusive all-powerful federal government, and thus welcome the Snowden leaks as proof that Big Government cannot be trusted. But America still has dangerous enemies who wish to do us harm, and if the NSA says its data-collection programs were part of an effort to protect us from such enemies, we must distinguish between (a) legitimate concern about unconstitutional abuses, and (b) an exaggerated paranoia that justifies the plainly criminal actions of Manning and Snowden.

Yes, it’s fun to skewer Democrats for their hypocrisy by forcing them to defend Obama’s surveillance state, but conservatives would be just as guilty of hypocrisy if we justified breaches of national security merely to score points against Obama. Insofar as our discussion of this is concerned with persuading moderates to side with conservatives — and in our hyper-partisan age, few people who pay attention to public affairs are either moderate or persuadable — the lesson of this teachable moment is the ultimate futility of “anti-war” radicalism. If even a Nobel Peace Prize-winning progressive like Barack Obama finds himself obliged to employ U.S. military force overseas, to send armed drones to kill terrorists and to maintain a vast high-tech surveillance system for keeping an eye on our enemies, isn’t it obvious that America’s foreign policy problems can’t be blamed on GOP neocon warhawks?

Conservatives don’t have to embrace kooks like Glenn Greenwald or traitors like Edward Snowden to make that point, and if this is one of the rare occasions when Lawrence O’Donnell is right — no, the NSA is not “‘watching everything we do” — it just serves to contrast with O’Donnell’s otherwise impeccable record of being wrong.

 


Category: Military, MSNBC

Four U.S. Troops Released in Libya

Posted on | December 28, 2013 | 6 Comments

The post-“Arab Spring” anarchy continues:

Four American military personnel assigned to the United States Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, were detained Friday and then released after being held for hours by the country’s Interior Ministry, American officials said.
The four were believed to have been reviewing potential evacuation routes for diplomats when they were detained, according to the initial reports received by officials in Washington. . . .
After running into a problem at a checkpoint — many of which are run by local militias — they were detained and later moved to the Ministry of the Interior . . .
The buzzing sound of drones filled Tripoli’s sky for hours as rumors spread through the capital that four Americans were missing.

So, the U.S. helps Libyans overthrow their dictator, and now our troops are getting hassled by “local militias” at a checkpoint? This is a persistent problem in the Third World: A shortage of gratitude.

Kevin D. Williamson once described Bush’s War on Terror as an ill-conceived “program to make Anglo-Saxon republicans out of obscure desert savages.” Obama’s policy is no less ill-conceived.

 

Category: Libya

‘Descent Into Madness’

Posted on | December 28, 2013 | 80 Comments

Otto Muehl was a radical artist who in 1978, at age 53, founded a commune in Austria known as the Friedrichshof, which had as its goal “the destruction of bourgeois marriage and private property.” Instapundit linked to an article about a new documentary:

Paul-Julien Robert grew up on a country estate with dozens of adults; but he had no idea which one was his father. In the European free-love commune, where he was born in the late 1970s, pretty much all of the men had slept with his mother, any of them could be his dad.
Founded as a utopia where possessions, childcare, and love were communal, traditional family structures were banned. Paul-Julien was an unwitting participant in a social experiment that would end in police raids and the commune’s architect jailed for having sex with minors.
Otto Mühl, who was also a celebrated artist, founded the commune at Friedrichshof near Vienna in Austria in pursuit of a better society, but also to cure his loneliness. At the head of this sprawling collection of men, women, and children, the power he assumed over so many lives drove him to take an ever more authoritarian approach. By the end Friedrichshof was effectively a cult.
The commune’s descent into madness was documented on video  by the inhabitants . . .

Whoa. Full stop. “The commune’s descent into madness”? Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that the commune was founded in madness, and that the insane principles of its founding were then manifested in ways any wise person could have predicted?

Here’s a clue for you kids who have never studied history: Whenever someone uses “bourgeois” and “traditional” as epithets, you need to stay the hell away from whatever utopian scam that person is trying to put over on you. Hostility to private property and contempt for sexual morality are anti-social attitudes betokening the kind of dangerous radicalism that has only ever led to anarchy and totalitarianism (first one, then the other). The charismatic misfit’s destructive impulses are disguised as a sort of humanitarian idealism. The existing order is denounced as cruel and unjust, and its overthrow is advocated as the necessary first step on the road that will lead to Heaven on Earth. Gathering around him other ambitious dreamers, and attracting to his radical cause such natural-born fools as are easily deceived by talk of “Peace” and “Equality,” the leader requires of his followers sacrifices that serve chiefly to aggrandize the leader.

This is the basic story of many radical movements — you could read Daniel Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left to study the remarkable persistence of certain themes — but those of us who remember the 1960s and ’70s need little reminding of the Manson cult, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Jonestown massacre.

Anyway, it was as predictable as clockwork that the founder of a “free love” cult like the Friedrichshof would ultimately prove to be a selfish pervert. Exactly how many young girls he had, or at what age he preferred to have them, most online sources aren’t clear, although one does find this quote: “I’m not a child molester. This is nonsense. The girls were all developed.” Trace that back to its original source and translate from German:

Interviewer: They were 13, 14 years old.
Muehl: So what? Charlemagne married a twelve year old.

 One obituary in German quoted him:

About the then 14-year-old who testified in the trial against him, he even remarked: “She undressed herself, the door was open. I’m not a hypnotist.” And: ”Why should the government dictate when you should have sex?”

See? It’s just an old guy banging 14-year-olds, why should the government care? You silly bourgeois! They were “developed”!

This “descent into madness” was the logical destination of the Friedrichshof for pretty much the same reason that sexual assault plagued the encampments of “Occupy Wall Street.” The alleged high-minded idealism of radical leaders is always exposed as a hypocritical mask for selfishness, and the idiots who are attracted to radical movements never have the kind of common-sense skepticism that would cause them to examine the leader’s altruistic pose and ask, “What’s in it for him? What’s his cut of the action?”

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”

You didn’t expect me to believe that crap, did you?

 

 

Category: Sex

Phil Robertson 1, Political Correctness 0

Posted on | December 27, 2013 | 142 Comments

Oh, the GLAAD Butt-Hurt! The most popular family in America could not be defeated by the Sensitivity Outrage Brigades:

Phil Robertson, the patriarch of A&E’s Duck Dynasty clan who was suspended from his hit reality series on Dec. 18 following some incendiary comments about gay people, won’t be put on hiatus after all.
The network and the Robertson family announced Friday that Phil will still be part of the series — and since he didn’t miss any filming, his temporary suspension will have no effect on the upcoming fifth season.

Fact: The “Duck Dynasty” audience is about 10 times larger than the combined audience of CNN and MSNBC.

More at Memeorandum, including commentary by Twitchy, Weasel Zippers, The Daily Caller and NewsBusters.

UPDATE: In case you were wondering about those ratings. The Season 4 premiere of “Duck Dynasty” in August drew 11.8 million viewers, making it the most-watched reality-show episode in cable TV history. Meanwhile, in the 8 p.m. hour on Thursday, Dec. 19, CNN drew 528,000 viewers and MSNBC got 699,000 viewers, for a combined total of slightly more than 1.2 million viewers.

 


Category: Culture, Gays
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