The Other McCain

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

Rule 5 Sunday: Amberleigh West

Posted on | March 6, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Playboy and Instagram model, sometime actress (The Last Movie Star) Amberleigh West was born in Mount Vernon, Washington in September 1991.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Lithium Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: MAGA-CPAC, The Surfrajettes, Abba, Tradwife Rule 5, Lucky Number Slevin, 5’5″ & 170 Pounds, The Murdaugh Murders, and Phyllis Kirk

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Evanna Lynch Stands by Her Woman, Fish Pic Friday – A Michigander – Christina Robinson, Thursday Tattoos, Wednesday Wetness, Gone Fishin’, Sunny Day, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Flotsam and Jetsam – Sunday Morning on the Wrack Line and Sunday Sunrise

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

It’s Almost as If Freddie deBoer Never Read ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’

Posted on | March 5, 2023 | 1 Comment

Freddie deBoer, future Republican?

If you don’t know who Freddie deBoer is, you should. He is one of those leftists who, a la Christopher Hitchens, refuses to follow the herd, to ignore facts and common sense, or to forgo necessary criticism of his own side of the aisle. Which means that sooner or later, by the inexorable logic of American politics, Freddie will eventually be forced to give up on his socialist vision and become a Republican. Make book on it. Perhaps his rightward journey will take years, and I may not live to see Freddie finally declare himself a conservative, so that when it happens, it will be up to my friends to celebrate my posthumous vindication: “Stacy called it!”

Pity poor Freddie, forced to toil endlessly alone in his apartment to keep his Substack going when, if he played his cards right, he could be in Boca Raton or Palm Beach, dining on prime beef and washing it down with fine wine, at the expense of hedge fund billionaires who’d pay him to be a Senior Fellow at some free-market think tank, and all he’d have to do to earn that generous bounty would be to put on a suit and tie and show up at a monthly seminar, maybe make occasional Fox News appearances, give a few campus speeches sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation, etc. (Get in touch, Freddie — I could make some introductions.) But in the meantime, there’s Freddie in his grubby T-shirt, alone in his apartment, staring into his laptop and, like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill, trying to talk sense to his fellow leftists.

Wednesday, our trip to National Harbor for CPAC took about two hours. My brother was driving, so I had time to read Freddie’s cri de coeur about the dumbed-down quasi-anarchism of his fellow leftists. The jumping of point for his essay was a woman who “started a Twitter storm, somehow, by publicly wishing that she could take her child onto the subway without exposing them to secondhand smoke”:

She was beset by a certain online species of ostensible leftist who is against ever trying to enforce any kind of rule, anywhere, ever. See, rules are the hand of oppression, or something, and since most of society’s rules are meant to be enforced by the police, trying to enforce them (merely wishing that they be enforced) is an endorsement of the police and their violence….
I find this attitude has become inescapable. . . .

DeBoer is shocked by the unreasonableness of his comrades in the same way Captain Renault in Casablanca was shocked to discover that gambling was going on at Rick’s. He knows damned well that you can’t have a mass movement on the Left without the type of kooks, misfits and ax-grinders whom Eric Hoffer described in The True Believer. If the animating principles of your movement include, e.g., an unlimited “right” to abortion, for any reason or no reason at all, even in the third trimester, certainly you should not be surprised to find yourself surrounded by people who are, to use a clinical term, emotionally labile.

Surveying the kook-swarm, deBoer laments that “contemporary left-of-center discourse” is afflicted by “total ideological poverty”:

Nobody has read anything, so nobody knows anything, so you’re constantly getting yelled at by self-described radicals who have no solid footing in any systematic approach to left politics at all. . . . They think that to be a socialist means to disdain all rules because there is no substance to their socialism at all.

Cheer up, my fellow neofascists! However bad things may be for us on the Right — and, objectively, they’re pretty bad — at least we’re not doomed to Freddie’s fate, alone in an apartment cranking out Substack laments about the unavoidable reality that most “self-described radicals” are just plain kooks. Sic semper hoc — ’twas ever thus.

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937

Why has this quote remained so epigrammatic? What accounts for the endurance of socialism’s “magnetic” appeal to kooks? Probably I could rattle off 1,500 words without exhausting the explanatory possibilities, but a theory about why kooks are attracted to socialism is unnecessary to the simple observation that, like Mary and her little lamb, wherever socialism goes, the kooks are sure to follow.

Something in this paragraph of Freddie’s lament caught my eye:

This backdoor anarchism that a lot of people have fallen into has no content. I understand: people don’t want to be elitists, don’t want to gatekeep, and don’t feel like they have the background knowledge to police anyone else anyway. I also understand that socialism just needs warm bodies, that we have to have converts if we’re ever going to make any kind of inroads into real power. But at this point, a dozen years after Occupy and seven years since Bernie’s peak, I feel confident in saying that the influx of people into socialism who had no interest in doing the work to understand socialism has become an albatross. We’re suffering from a profound information deficit and it’s impeding our growth. I genuinely feel that the recruiting efforts of the past decade-plus have proven to be a net negative. What’s the value of an army of new self-described socialists who can’t be bothered to do little things like “have a coherent vision of change and how to achieve it”?

Who could forget the smelly hippies of “Occupy Wall Street”? It was my misfortune to be nearly trampled by a mob of them when they tried to storm a Koch-funded event I was covering in D.C. in November 2011. Reeking of sweat and bad economic ideas, this disorderly mob inspired a friend who is a Republican consultant to remark to me, “I’ve never seen so many losers in my life.” As I observed in 2015:

What has resulted from this modernistic idolatry of democratic Progress — the utopian fantasy of an imagined future where we all live in absolute equality, free of “old-fashioned” beliefs — is a sort of social epidemic of bipolar hysteria, in which minds unmoored from cultural tradition constantly shift between utter confusion and radical certainty. Anyone who paid close attention to the “Occupy” protests of 2011 saw evidence of what kind of disordered personalities this progressive epidemic has produced. Young people who were clearly incompetent to manage their own lives nevertheless felt themselves entitled to dictate to the rest of us how “society” must be changed so as to “empower” these mobs of emotional unstable misfits. Refusing to take responsibility for their own failures, the Occupiers believed they were supremely qualified to pass judgment on the “system” that served as an all-purpose scapegoat onto which they could externalize blame for their misfortunes.

This isn’t merely my opinion, it’s a self-evident fact, and one which even a committed leftist like Freddie deBoer cannot ignore.

The saddest part is that deBoer is apparently such an idealist that he can’t turn his back on the socialist cause that magnetically attracts all these nudist sandal-wearers and sex maniacs, as Orwell categorized them. One wishes Freddie could muster sufficient cynicism to think about what he’d gain by going Right. Saturday at CPAC, I stood outside our hotel across the street from the Gaylord convention center and watched the Trump supporters making their way toward the conference, the well-groomed young men in sharp suits, the shapely young women in dresses and heels — a much better class of people, all around, than the smelly anarchist scum who comprise the leftist mob. All it would take for Freddie deBoer to become part of this well-dressed (and gainfully employed) Republican crowd is to admit that socialism is a failure, a utopian pipe-dream, a “strong delusion,” as Paul wrote to the Thessalonians.

Bookmark this post, friends. Freddie may be deluded, but he’s just too smart to remain deluded forever. As night follows day, eventually he’ll wake up and ask himself why he’s stuck there in his grubby T-shirt cranking out Substack posts for an ungrateful bunch of socialist kooks, when he could be collecting a fat six-figure salary as a Senior Fellow at a public-policy institute funded by hedge-fund billionaires, and giving foundation-sponsored speeches to crowds of sharp-dressed College Republican boys and their shapely young girlfriends.

When it happens, don’t forget it was me who prophesied it.



 

 

Category: Intellectuals

FMJRA 2.0: Too Much Too Young

Posted on | March 5, 2023 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Too Much Too Young

— compiled by Wombat-socho

No link to the SOTD, which is from Jason & The Scorchers album Wildfires & Misfires, an eclectic collection of outtakes, live tracks, and odd songs that never made it onto one of their regular albums. I’m kinda hoping Britney Spears covers it someday; it’s like the song was written with her (or somebody very much like her) in mind.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
In Defense of Scott Adams
Okrahead
The DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Evening Edition)
The DaleyGator
Okrahead
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

Obligatory CNN Mention
A View From The Beach
EBL

News From Gwinnett County, Georgia
The DaleyGator
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Home Is Nevada
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

NFL Star: ‘Hey, New York Taxes Suck!’
EBL
357 Magnum

Good News From California
Okrahead
The DaleyGator
EBL
357 Magnum

Rule 5 Monday: Lana Turner
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
EBL

WOW: Left-Wing Narrative on Train Wreck Debunked by … Washington Post?
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

If Fetterman Is Brain Dead, Maybe They Should Hook Him Up to Jumper Cables?
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Good-Bye, Mayor Frogface! Lightfoot Places Third in Chicago Reelection Bid
The DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Back to CPAC With the Big Yellow Button
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.01.23
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

CPAC: Founding Fathers
Okrahead
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.02.23
Okrahead
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

CPAC 2023: Celebrity Sightings
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.03.23
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

Top linkers for the week ending March 3:

  1.  EBL (17)
  2.  357 Magnum (16)
  3.  A View From The Beach (12)
  4.  Okrahead (9)
  5.  The DaleyGator (5)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

CPAC 2023: Trump Is Still the Big Dog

Posted on | March 4, 2023 | 1 Comment

Before former President Donald Trump spoke to a capacity ballroom tonight at CPAC, they announced the results of their 2024 presidential straw poll, and it wasn’t close: Trump 62%, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis 20%, and everybody else in single digits.

Of course, we’re still many months away from the first televised debates among primary contenders, but a result like that has to be encouraging to Trump, and discouraging to anybody else thinking they have a chance to take the Republican nomination away from the man who, in his fiery speech, promised “those who have been wronged and betrayed” that he will be “your retribution.” This was, among other things, a reference to the hundreds of his supporters arrested in the J6 Capitol riot.

Trump spoke for more than an hour and a half, and was repeatedly interrupted by chants of “USA! USA! USA!” More about the speech:

“The Republican Party was ruled by freaks, neocons, open border zealots, and fools,” Trump told CPAC, closing the four-day conference on Saturday. “We’re never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.”
“We are going to finish what we started,” he said. “We are going to complete this mission, we are going to see this battle through. We are going to make America great again.”
While criticizing Republicans who have proposed raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, Trump indirectly referenced Ukraine as he tries to distinguish himself from Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who has solidified his position as Trump’s chief opponent for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Trump is attempting to portray DeSantis as being closer to former President George W. Bush than his own “MAGA” base.
“We are never going back to a party that wants to give unlimited money to fight foreign endless wars, but demands we cut veteran benefits and retirement benefits at home,” he said.
“I’m the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent, and very easily, World War III,” he added, after which there were chants of “No more war!”
Trump also took on Democrats and his critics, describing them as people who “hate” the country and are seeking to “destroy it,” while contending they are “coming after” his supporters “and I’m just standing in their way.”
“Our enemies are lunatics and maniacs, and they cannot stand that they do not own me, they cannot shake me, they cannot control me,” he said. “I alone will never retreat.”
“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice,” he went on. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

Whatever his critics may say, the fact remains that Trump still has millions of loyal supporters who will show up to vote in Republican primaries, and unless something changes drastically in the next few month, it is unlikely that anyone — including Ron DeSantis — can stop Trump from being the GOP nominee in 2024.

 



 

 

Category: CPAC, Donald Trump

CPAC 2023: ‘Media Logistics’ & a Strange Memo From the National Affairs Desk

Posted on | March 4, 2023 | 1 Comment

The National Affairs Desk, 9:14 a.m. today

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Because I was busy doing other things, I didn’t notice this email that went out yesterday from CPAC Communications:

MEDIA LOGISTICS FOR CPAC IN DC 2023
Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center . . .
Saturday, March 4, 2023
2:00 AM – 5:00 AM: A security sweep will be conducted at this time. No media will be allowed onsite.
5:00 AM: Media Entry
Media entrance is located at the Maryland Ballroom Entrance. You will only be able to access the event at the Maryland Ballroom Entrance.
If you do not arrive at 5AM – you will have to wait in the general security line. There is not a press entrance.
All media must enter by 10:00 AM. Late entries will not be granted access. No exceptions. . . .
7:00 AM – 9:00 AM: Pre-Credential Press Pick-Up
Media registration will close at 9:00 AM and not re-open. All late arrivals will not have access to the event without a credential.

It’s 10 o’clock as I write this and, if I understand this email correctly, (a) even to get access to the conference area, I’ll have to go through the security line (metal detectors, etc.) with thousands of other people, and (b) I won’t be granted access to the media area at all. Which means that I’m probably going to be covering today’s events from here in the lobby of my hotel across the street from the convention center. Which is par for the course, really, and however badly screwed I am in terms of this “media logistics” arrangement, I’m not as badly screwed as my old buddy Mike LaChance, who came here to cover CPAC for Legal Insurrection. Mike also writes for Gateway Pundit and Twitchy, so it’s not as if he’s an obscure lightweight in the realm of conservative media. But somehow, the folks in charge of media credentials at CPAC didn’t understand how important Mike is. His email request for credentials apparently got lost in the shuffle, and no matter how many times he went back to media registration — five or six times, I think — they kept turning him down.

In other words, Mike’s going scorched earth and, for the sake of my own access, permit me to say as a professional journalist that I do not endorse scorched-earth reprisals like this, no matter how screwed-up the situation may be, objectively speaking. This official non-endorsement of Mike’s blood-oath vengeance crusade is necessary, you see, on the outside chance that CPAC staffers may actually bother reading my blog. But if they don’t understand how important Legal Insurrection, Gateway Pundit and Twitchy are . . . ? Well, even if I did endorse Mike’s anti-CPAC vendetta (which, I must repeat, I do not), the people who screwed Mike over on his credentials probably wouldn’t ever read my endorsement. Or, to quote Hillary Clinton: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”



 

 

Category: CPAC

CPAC 2023: Why Not This Guy?

Posted on | March 4, 2023 | Comments Off on CPAC 2023: Why Not This Guy?

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Vivek Ramaswamy is the longest of long shots among 2024 Republican presidential candidates, but anyone who knows me, knows I love an underdog. The official results of the 2010 midterms hadn’t been counted before I jumped aboard the “Cain Train,” backing Herman Cain’s 2012 campaign, which nobody gave a chance until, a few months and a few debates later, he zoomed to the top of the polls.

Ramaswamy’s speech yesterday at CPAC was lit, as the kids say. He is an outspoken and articulate critic of the religion of “Wokeism,” but more than that, is an enthusiastic proponent of American exceptionalism.

Having never paid any attention to him before, I knew nothing about this Hindu son of immigrants with the hard-to-spell name and, of course, being a brown guy named Ramaswamy is just one more disadvantage to his presidential prospects, but when you’re looking for dark horse candidates, you like ’em as dark as possible (no pun intended). Now let’s take a brief look at Ramaswamy’s bio:

Ramaswamy was born in 1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised there. His parents emigrated from Vadakkencherry, Palakkad, Kerala, India. His father graduated from a regional engineering college in Kerala and worked for General Electric as an engineer and patent attorney, while his mother graduated from Mysore Medical College and worked as a geriatric psychiatrist.

(You know who else worked for General Electric? Ronald Reagan.)

Ramaswamy graduated in 2003 from St. Xavier High School, a Jesuit high school in Cincinnati. He was his class valedictorian and a nationally ranked junior tennis player.
In 2007, Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. in biology. He wrote his senior thesis on the ethical questions raised by creating human-animal chimeras. His thesis was awarded the Bowdoin Prize for Natural Sciences, and a precis was published in The New York Times and The Boston Globe in 2007. In 2011, Ramaswamy was awarded a post-graduate fellowship by the The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. In 2013, he received a J.D. from Yale Law School.

(Uh . . . “Soros Fellowship”? He’s going to have to explain that, because certainly his opponents will try to make hay of that.)

In 2007, Ramaswamy and Travis May co-founded Campus Venture Network, a technology company that provided software and networking resources to university entrepreneurs. The company was acquired in 2009 by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. From 2007 to 2014, Ramaswamy worked at QVT Financial, where he was a partner and co-managed the firm’s biotech portfolio while simultaneously attending Yale Law School from 2010 to 2013.
In 2014, Ramaswamy founded the pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences, which focuses on applying technology to drug development, serving as CEO until 2021. He appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2015 for his work in drug development. . . .
Ramaswamy announced his candidacy on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight on February 21, 2023.

So the dark horse with the hard-to-spell name has a pretty impressive biography, and if Tucker Carlson is willing to host his campaign announcement, that suggests that I’m not alone in thinking this guy might just have a shot — a long shot, but a real one.

 



 

 

Category: CPAC, Election

In The Mailbox: 03.03.23

Posted on | March 4, 2023 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts. I promise they’ll be on time this week!
Obligatory pimping of new website for Friends of Fission-chan, which is throwing an SF convention at the end of September in Las Vegas.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

I love Waffle House and wish we had one in Nevada.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: It Really Was A Beautiful City
EBL: Openly Gay Democrat Mayor Busted For Child Pr0n, also, 3 March 1861 – The Emancipation of the Serfs
Twitchy: Gisele Fetterman Got a Little Too Honest About Her Twisted, Toxic Relationship With Her Husband, also, Former Dem Rep Hallucinates “Long Time Florida Republicans” Trash Talking DeSantis, And People Are Skeptical 
Louder With Crowder: Elementary Schoolers Force White Kids To Say ‘Black Lives Matter’ Or Catch A Beating, Plus-Size Chick Says Weight Loss Is Racist And We Should Trust Her Because She Has A Master’s Degree, and America’s Sheriff roasts murder suspect who bragged about killing in rap song, yet cried like a baby when caught
Vox Popoli: The Decline of Europe, Stillborn in Singapore, and The Faith of the 150 Holy Fathers
According To Hoyt: Roll To Disbelieve, A Passion For Control, and Incomprehensible Abundance
Monster Hunter Nation: WriterDojo S4 E8 – Censorship is $#!*
Gab News: Why Worldview Matters

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Ukraine is the Dress Rehearsal for WWIII
American Conservative: Dragging The Church Of England To Extinction, Today’s Psychology Can’t Help American Men, and Nayib Bukele: Serious About Saving Civilization
American Greatness: Arizona School Board Cuts Ties With Christian University After ‘Witchy AF’ Board Member Says Its Biblical Values Make Her Feel Unsafe, Biden DOJ Says President Trump Can be Sued Over January 6th Protests, and Columbia University Drops Standardized Test Score Requirement for Application
American Power: Epic Tank Battles in Ukraine, Dubious Alliances – Germany’s New Peace Movement Has Some Explaining to Do, and Biden Administration to Adopt Trump-Era Policy on Those Seeking Asylum in the U.S.
American Thinker: What’s Next for Wokeism?, also, If Red China Invades America, Will Leftist Rejoice?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Lithium Friday
Babalu Blog: Shame on AMLO – The Cuban doctors scam in Mexico, Reports from Cuba: Cuba’s demographic crossroads: No young people of working age in sight, Building explodes in Old Havana, two Cubans dead, and Cuban dictatorship targeting children, seniors, and the disabled since the July 2021 protests
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm for March 3
Behind The Black: Endeavour docks with ISS, JAXA reschedules first H3 rocket launch following investigation, ESA attributes Vega-C launch failure to faulty nozzle from the Ukraine, SpaceX launches another 51 Starlink satellites into orbit, and AGs from 22 states blast Biden’s attempt to illegally insert racial quotas and climate change into federal contracting law
Cafe Hayek: A Telling Tale of Toil
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: Nothing Beyond the Current Moment
Da Tech Guy: Science vs “The Science” or This Ongoing Culture War
Don Surber: Tough Libel Laws Will Save Journalism
First Street Journal: WWIII Watch: New York Times OpEd says only way for Ukraine to win quickly is for full NATO weapons and troops deployment, When supposedly responsible people make irresponsible promises, The one-world-government folks want to subject the United States to the United Nations, when they haven’t gotten their way under our laws, and The government in the Mile High City wants to run your life for you
Gates Of Vienna: Knife Jihad in Gothenburg, also, It Takes a Train to Cry
The Geller Report: TRUMP: ‘WE’RE NOT GOING TO LET THEM’ STEAL THE ELECTION IN 2024, also, Which Lawmaker Accepted More BlackRock Money Than Any Other Member Of Congress?
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, When DART Met Dimorphos, and Disinformation Lawfare
Hollywood In Toto:  Hollywood in Toto Podcast – Corbin Bernsen Finds Faith, Enduring Success, also, Showtime’s Waco: The Aftermath Boosts Media’s Jan. 6 Narrative
The Lid: Biden’s FAA Nominee, Phil Washington, Is Embarrassingly Unqualified
Legal Insurrection: Surprise! Biden’s FAA Nominee Doesn’t Know Anything About Aviation, Democrat Maryland Mayor, Mentored by Buttigieg, Arrested on Child Pornography Charges, Republican Mayor of California City Eliminates Homeless Problem, and Trustees Appointed to Florida’s New College by DeSantis Shutter School’s DEI Office
Nebraska Energy Observer: Experts, Expertise, Aristocracy, and False Prophets
Outkick: Mark Harris -Ja Morant Needs To Drop The Tough Guy Act, For Himself And For The City Of Memphis, Pete Maravich’s NCAA Scoring Record Lives! Antoine Davis Finishes 4 Points Shy, And Then There Was A Fight, C.J. Stroud Pretty Much Tells The Bears To Not Draft Him, Jordan Spieth Says PGA Tour Changes Would Not Have Happened Without LIV Golf’s Pressure, and Instagram Slaps CDC Vax Label On Danica Patrick’s Photo For Attending JP Sears Comedy Show
Power Line: Thoughts from the ammo line, Thought for the Day: Depressing Liberals, and Lawyer shaming — as someone might say, not a joke
Shark Tank: State Senator Lauren Book Pushes Medically Assisted Suicide Bill
Shot In The Dark: Planting Season, also, Riddle
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday: The Mechanism of Moral Development
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, US military support for Somalia to increase, Secretary of the Army discusses plan in case of war with China, and John Loveridge – Another Phony Beirut Survivor
Transterrestrial Musings: The John And Giselle Romance, Student-Loan SCOTUS Arguments, and Biden Sets Israel On Fire
Victory Girls: Biden Admin Admits Going Green Is More Important Than Energy Security
Volokh Conspiracy: Tennessee Bans Pornographic Performances by “Male or Female Impersonators” Where Minors Can See Them
Watts Up With That: Gas Power Is Cheaper Than Wind, Despite Carbon Brief’s Claims, also, Reliable vs. Intermittent Generation: A Primer (Part I)
Weasel Zippers: Biden Breaks With Woke Democrats Over “Wacky” DC Crime Bill, Won’t Veto GOP Attempt To Stop It, Poll: 61% Believe Feds Helped Incite Capitol Riot, and James Bond Novels To Get Woke Rewrite
The Federalist: Major Doctors’ Organization Publicly Embraces Dismembering Babies Until Birth, Critical Race Theory Teaches Kids To Hate Each Other, And The Proof Is On The Playground, Utah Considers Ranked-Choice Voting In Primaries Despite Disasters In Alaska And Maine, The Sex-Ed Industrial Complex Revolves Around Planned Parenthood And Is Fueled By Your Tax Dollars, and Virginia AG Probes Mounting Religious Discrimination Cases After Hospital Revoked Covid Jab Exemptions
Mark Steyn: Mea (Disingenuous) Culpa

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Category: Linkagery

CPAC 2023: Celebrity Sightings

Posted on | March 3, 2023 | Comments Off on CPAC 2023: Celebrity Sightings

Sarah Palin says, “Hi!”

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Wandering through the exhibition space here at CPAC, we turned a corner and saw people standing in line. “What is this about?” my friend asked. “Book signing,” I guessed, without any idea what author might be up at the head of this queue. But then I looked and saw it was … her.

From the moment she was announced as John McCain’s 2008 running mate, Palin has been adored by grassroots conservatives. The first time I covered her, at a rally in Lebanon, Ohio (“Sweetheart of the Heartland,” Sept. 10, 2008), it was obvious that she had ignited a populist fuse which, it could be argued, ultimately elected Donald Trump in 2016.

So, while I am generally immune to starstruck celebrity fanboy behavior — a professional journalist shouldn’t act that way — I decided I needed to get in that line with the rest of the fanboyNMs. When I finally got to the front of the line, there was only time for a brief conversation, as other people were waiting their turn. But I did mention the time in 2010 I visited Wasilla and hung out with her family, including little Trig, and also that my old friend Lynn Vincent was her co-author on Going Rogue. Palin said, “Tell Lynn I said, hi!” And then I had to make way.

Roaming the corridors later Thursday, I bumped into my fellow American Spectator contributor Jeffrey Lord. Don’t know why I look so glum in the picture. Probably needed to visit . . .

The lobby bar — this is where the real action is at CPAC. Never mind all those politicians and pundits blabbing on the main stage, I must be among the genuine grassroots. Or, at least, my old buddies.

Stacey Lennox of PJMedia was telling me very interesting off-the-record stories about people who shall not be named. One thing about being a journalist is, you hear so many juicy stories that you can’t ever publish because you’re sworn to secrecy by your sources. I never burn a source, and my sources never burn me, because they know there’d be hell to pay.

Talk-radio star Larry O’Connor pretending he doesn’t know that crazy old guy, but me and Larry go way back to Tea Party days.

Superstar lawyer Ron Coleman has represented many conservatives in court. As for the question of whose beers those are, my attorney advises me I have the right to remain silent. The one thing I’m certain of is, I didn’t pay for those beers. Professional journalists always dodge the tab.

Townhall columnist Kurt Schlichter is a former Army officer and practicing attorney, but he’s never claimed to be a professional journalist, which probably explains why he got stuck with the tab.

Between uploading these pictures and doing some other work this morning, time has flown, but I have lots more photos piled up that I’ll be posting later. Meanwhile, I need to get showered and dressed for another day of covering CPAC with professional journalism. IYKWIMAITYD.



 

 

Category: CPAC
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