The Other McCain

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

@Alexs1776 Brings The #Boom

Posted on | December 26, 2013 | 16 Comments

by Smitty


From the last press conference a week back, emphasis mine:

On Obamacare, the president allowed he’d made mistakes when it came to the health care rollout. “Even though I was meeting every other week, every three weeks with folks and emphasizing how important it was that consumers have a good experience … the fact is it didn’t happen in the first month, first six weeks in a way that was at all acceptable, and since I’m in charge, obviously we screwed it up.”

You’ve got to respect a leader that’s singular in his understanding of who’s in charge, and somehow, ambiguously, vaguely plural in his grasp of who tubed it.

When #OccupyResoluteDesk says ‘we’, I take him to mean ‘you’. You bitter racist cling-ons, you.

via @Alexs1776

Update: welcome Instapundit readers!

Category: Barack Obama

‘But … They Were in Love’

Posted on | December 25, 2013 | 6 Comments

Dante Mobley, 30, accused of sex with 14-year-old.

The accused 30-year-old perpetrator tried to deny it, but his 14-year-old victim offered a familiar defense in his behalf:

In the Bunnell case, the parent of a 14-year-old girl in Bunnell called cops at 4 a.m. on Dec. 22, to report that the girl had snuck out through the kitchen window sometime during the night. She didn’t know where the girl might have gone, or with whom. A short time later, 911 got a report that a girl matching the missing teen’s description was seen running from 611 S. Bacher Street in Bunnell.
As cops investigated the incident, their suspicions fell on Dante Mobley, a 30-year-old resident at the Bacher Street address . . .
When cops spoke with the girl, she told them that she’d been communicating with Mobley by text and Facebook messages that night, and that the two of them had “made arrangements for both of them to meet up late at night,” according to Mobley’s arrest report, and that the pair had intercourse three or four times in the van. The girl told police that she had provided Mobley with a bag of condoms — and that she knew his age. The girl told police that the couple knew what they were doing was wrong, the report states, but that they were in love.

Of course, this happened in Florida, the Jailbait State, where The World’s Most Famous Sex Offender just got out of jail last week.

 


Category: Crime, Sex

Egypt Is Ahead of Us

Posted on | December 25, 2013 | 8 Comments

Is our State Department paying attention?

Egypt’s military-backed interim government declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization Wednesday, intensifying its campaign of arrests and prosecutions targeting its members and tightening the noose on the group’s network of charities and businesses.
The unprecedented executive decision likely ends any chance of reconciliation between the government and the 85-year-old Brotherhood, still Egypt’s most organized political group. It marks a stunning reversal of fortunes for the long-outlawed organization that saw member Mohammed Morsi reach Egypt’s highest office in the country’s first democratic election, only to be ousted in a popularly backed military coup in July. And it takes a step that not even autocrat Hosni Mubarak took in his nearly 30-year rule.
Hossam Eissa, deputy prime minister and minister of higher education, read the government’s declaration, saying the decision was in response to Tuesday’s deadly bombing in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura which killed 16 people and wounded more than 100. It was the deadliest militant bombing since Morsi’s ouster and showed growing reach of the country’s Islamic insurgency, previously concentrated in the northern Sinai.

And, hey, how’s that “Arab Spring” workin’ out for ya?

 

Category: Egypt, Terrorism

Obviously a Satire

Posted on | December 25, 2013 | 37 Comments

When Donald Douglas posted this photo at American Power, I immediately recognized it as an ironic put-down of feminism:

Two key clues to the satirical intention:

  1. A poster in the background showing Austrian economists — Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, et al. — signals a libertarian/individualist orientation, directly contradicting the statist/collectivist radical egalitarian worldview of feminism; and
  2. Her breasts. A young woman with such a splendid rack would have no motive to adopt the victimhood mentality of feminism.

Yes, I suppose the severe gaze — the nerd-girl glasses, the emotionless of her expression — could mislead you into thinking that this young lady is a grim man-hating ideologue, but trust me: This photo is a clever joke, a statement against the casual promiscuity associated with contemporary “pro-sex feminism.”

 

Category: Feminism

Probably Should Take The Day Off

Posted on | December 25, 2013 | 34 Comments

by Smitty

Santa is low-key this year. The World’s Youngest Blogger has puked about five times today, the check engine light on the car is going to cost ~$1,200 to turn off, and the prescription sunglasses have pulled a Snowden on me.

Whaddayagonna do? Get frisky with a steak this afternoon, say I:

Category: Culture

The Anthropogenic Global Offgassing Change Climate

Posted on | December 24, 2013 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

That the climate changes is a no-brainer. Of course it does. I admire the Left’s rhetorical trick of silencing opposition at work here, akin to asserting that the Earth rotates, such that anyone daring to fall short of total agreement is claiming a static planet. Bravo. And, also, apparently, the sun doesn’t have anything to do with altering the Earth’s climate. None. A scientist hath issued a bull. Apparently word of Ace’s famous line reached Scotland:

“If only there were some… natural mechanism by which to explain variations in global temperature. It would have to be massive, though. On the scale of our own Sun.

The AGW crowd had to try to beat back the sarcasm, I guess:

Until now, the influence of the sun on past climate has been poorly understood. We hope that our new discoveries will help improve our understanding of how temperatures have changed over the past few centuries, and improve predictions for how they might develop in future. Links between the sun and anomalously cold winters in the UK are still being explored.

Dr Andrew Schurer

School of GeoSciences

Sounds like some great weasel-wording to me, Andy! Quick, let’s mount up the EPA posse and commence to crucify our economy while those “anomalously cold winters” are being further “explored”.

I care about climate and the environment. Conservation is conservative after all, and totally common-sense. Conservation is as common sense as heterosexuality and life beginning when a person’s information is complete, i.e. conception. I truly get conservation. Phil Robertson gets conservation; he needs plenty of great outdoors to give rant-free, non-homophobic interviews like his recent GQ offering, for example.

The pseudo-scientific joke afoot these days is like that of a feedback loop, having all the appeal of a microphone in front of a loudspeaker. This metaphorical Telefunken U47 is set up when public money is given to any group, e.g. the DoD, who are rewarded for Chicken Little-ism. I get it. We’re talking about a business model here. “The Commies are coming! Our precious bodily fluids are threatened!” Appeals to fear work great! What, just because I’m a veteran means I’m verklemmt, and can’t call it like I see it? Any group placing itself beyond criticism is suspect.

“I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis,” spake the Instapundit.

Two points for the AGW crowd:

(1) Your butt looks big.

(2) You’re going to have to make some personal sacrifices to put some urgency in all this. Do something like head up a project to start doing reverse-osmosis water production, to reclaim desert. If you did that in the Sinai, you might even ease some of the political tensions there.

Maybe I should be more trusting of academics. I guess if they hadn’t spent the last decade cying havok and loosing the hounds of Alinsky, I might take them more at face value, instead of farce value.
Bonus: Rush transcript from August. He’s certainly as authoritative as these AGW rodeo clowns.

Category: Global Warming

Re: @X3n0ph0n and the Burden of Proof

Posted on | December 24, 2013 | 15 Comments

John Hoge takes notice of Team Kimberlin publicist Xenophon:

If the post that went up Monday evening at Breitbart Unmasked (No, I won’t link to it.) is any indication, TDPK truly misunderstands the memorandum Aaron Walker filed in the Maryland Kimberlin v. Walker, et al. case. And he misunderstands its significance.

Having previously addressed Walker’s filing, I will excerpt, but not link, Xenophon’s typically boastful output:

A federal judge dismissed Walker’s federal lawsuit against Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser, and Ron Brynaert with prejudice over a year ago, but the vexatious Mr. Walker has learned no lessons from that blistering rejection of his paranoid style.
Instead, he tries to re-litigate all his failures once again in a grand unified conspiracy theory.

This has been recycled endlessly by Team Kimberlin: Walker’s lawsuits against Kimberlin were dismissed and therefore . . .?

If Walker failed to prove his claims against Kimberlin, this is because the plaintiff has the burden of proof in a civil suit. But as Kimberlin is now the plaintiff, and Walker among the defendants, the advantages of the defense have been transferred to Kimberlin’s antagonists. Xenophon evidently doesn’t recognize the significance of this, assuming that because Walker lost as a plaintiff, Walker will also lose as a defendant. Further demonstrating a deficiency of understanding, Xenophon continues:

Mr. Walker and his four co-defendants are being represented in the state defamation case by two attorneys, Marc Del Bianco and Francis Ostronic, neither of whom were party to Mr. Walker’s filing. Both of them will be asked to account for it anyway. Walker has tried to exercise leadership by claiming to represent everyone’s interests, including Kimberlin Unmasked. Walker’s filing leaves competent counsel with a dilemma: they can either move to have Walker’s novella-length screed stricken, and apologize to the court, or they can walk away from the case while there is still time to reach cover.
Either way, they should politely tell their client that he has done them no favors and ask him to please shut up.

Even if we stipulate Xenophon’s (and Kimberlin’s) claim that Walker’s filing was improper, why should my attorney be required to apologize on my behalf for what my co-defendant Walker has done without my knowledge, permission or authorization? But such are the implausible assumptions that Team Kimberlin rely on, and Xenophon piles up these assumptions in profusion:

According to our sources Mr. Kimberlin has found a very competent attorney to handle the work of dismantling Mr. Walker on a witness stand.

Uh, “dismantling Mr. Walker on a witness stand”? This requires the assumption that one or the other of Kimberlin’s lawsuits will eventually make it to trial when, in fact, there have been only two procedural hearings to date, and the next hearing in the Maryland case — where the various preliminary motions will be heard — is not until Jan. 13.

Many of the defendants in the federal suit (myself among them) have not yet been served, and we are therefore very early in the game, which is ultimately unlikely to result in a trial, because Brett Kimberlin is completely full of crap. Legal scholars can ponder what “completely full of crap” means, but permit me to express doubt that any “very competent attorney” is likely to agree to represent Brett Kimberlin.

 

Category: The Kimberlin Files

#SouthSudan: Words Aren’t Enough

Posted on | December 24, 2013 | 17 Comments

There has been relatively little conservative commentary on the crisis in South Sudan. Part of this could be explained by low expectations: Anarchy in Africa is not exactly unusual, and why should this particular episode of mayhem deserve our attention? Part of it may be due to the sense that no important American interest is affected by events in South Sudan. But it may be that conservatives are just overlooking an excellent opportunity to hoist President Obama by his own petard, to cite this crisis as further evidence of the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s ineptitude.

Rick Moran at American Thinker expresses a pessimistic view:

Things are getting out of control in South Sudan. There are now reports of massacres, mass graves, rape, and it’s getting worse. A refugee crisis is brewing as tens of thousands flee the ethnic cleansing underway.
South Sudan could easily become another Somalia — a failed state run by gangs and warlords who target the innocent. Will the world stand by and let it happen again?
Of course we will.

Quite likely true, but why should we pass up this chance to point out the vast distance between President Obama’s “Hope and Change” rhetoric and the dismal result of his policies? Because the dismal result is staring the world right in the face:

U.S. Marines stood by to help evacuate Americans in South Sudan as the top U.N. official there warned Tuesday of a “breakdown in respect for the most basic rights of people” amid the country’s widening military and humanitarian crisis.
U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Toby Lanzer tweeted that more accounts were reaching him of human rights abuses amid widening violence that has stoked fears of an all-out civil war in the world’s newest country.
In Geneva, Switzerland, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called human rights abuses in the country a “serious and growing” problem.
“Mass extrajudicial killings, the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and arbitrary detentions have been documented in recent days,” Pillay said, according to the statement. “We have discovered a mass grave in Bentiu, in Unity State, and there are reportedly at least two other mass graves in Juba.”
One U.N. official saw 14 bodies at the mass grave in Bentiu and another 20 on a nearby riverbank, said Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the commissioner.
“As for the other two reported graves in Juba, we are still working to verify but it is very difficult, and there are reports that some bodies may have already been burned,” she said.

The New York Times reports:

On Monday, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, urged a major increase in peacekeeping troops in the country, where the organization’s bases in Juba and other cities have become de facto sanctuaries for tens of thousands of civilians trying to escape the violence. Bor, the capital of Jonglei state, and Bentiu, the capital of Unity state, an oil producing area, are considered especially tense and dangerous.
Hundreds of people, and possibly many more, have been killed in more than a week of clashes and confusion around the country. . . .
On Monday, the Pentagon said it was stepping up its planning to evacuate Americans and protect those who remain in South Sudan. About 150 Marines and six transport aircraft are being sent from Spain to Djibouti, where an emergency force was created in the wake of the deadly attack on the American Mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.
The move was hinted at in a letter President Obama sent to congressional leaders on Sunday in which he said that he might take “further action” to support American citizens and interests in the strife-ridden region.
The United States also put forward a Security Council resolution on Monday to approve Mr. Ban’s plea for more international peacekeepers. . . .
“The leaders of South Sudan face a stark choice,” said Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations. “They can return to the political dialogue and spirit of cooperation that helped establish South Sudan, or they can destroy those hard-fought gains and tear apart their newborn nation.”
Diplomats from Africa, the United States and elsewhere have tried to bring the warring parties to the table, hoping to cobble together a cease-fire before the cycle of violence gathers momentum and leads to a protracted civil war.

So far, U.S. policy in South Sudan is to issue strongly worded warnings that the combatants ignore. Good luck with that.

 

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Category: Sudan
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