The Other McCain

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

Remember Those Official Unemployment Numbers? They Just Made ‘Em Up!

Posted on | November 19, 2013 | 35 Comments

Ace of Spades pointed this out last night: Last year, when we were told that unemployment statistics indicated that the economy was improving, the people in charge of doing the counting were simply making up numbers, according to the New York Post.

But what difference, at this point, does it make?

 


Category: Economics

LIVE AT FIVESEVEN: 11.19.13

Posted on | November 19, 2013 | 8 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Car Bomb Kills 25 Near Iranian Embassy In Beirut

A Lebanese man tries to pull a corpse from a burning car

Cultural attache killed; over 150 wounded

Toronto Council Strips Power From Rob Ford
Mayor vows “outright war”

UN Disaster Chief Stresses Long-Term Needs For Philippines



POLITICS
Students Suffer Obamacare Sticker Shock

Obama greets supporters at Bowie State University

Premiums soar, coverage cut

NSA Vowed Repeatedly To Fix Collection “Errors”

Methodist Jury Convicts Pennsylvania Pastor Of Conducting Gay Wedding

Albuquerque Votes On Late-Term Abortion Ban

Arne Duncan Catches Heat For Pro-Common Core Racism

Governor Dayton Says No Minnesota Insurance Extensions Despite Obamacare “Fix”

Speaker Howell Warns Governor McAuliffe On Executive Orders



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Slips In Asian Trade As Global Supplies Rise: NYMEX $92.90, Brent $108.00
OECD Cuts Global Forecasts On Emerging-Market Slowdown
Most Stocks Fall After Dow Hits 16,000
JPMorgan, DOJ Near Agreement On $13B Settlement
Dollar Falls On Fed View, Euro Up
Government Finds Merit In Labor Claims Against Walmart
Sony Responds To PS4 Glitch Reports
Google Fined $17M For Circumventing Safari Privacy Settings
Google, Microsoft Modify Searches To Exclude More Child Porn
Slingbox Can Now Stream TV Onto Roku Players
PRISM Forces Yahoo To Add Encryption



SPORTS
Panthers, Refs Top Patriots

Cam Newton after his game-winning 4Q pass

Refs’ pass interference flag waived, Panthers win 24-20

Grizzlies Outmuscle Clippers

Giants Land Tim Hudson With Two-Year Deal

LaMarcus Aldridge Scores 27 As Blazers Top Nyets

Flames Edge Jets In Shootout

LeBron James Interested In Joining Beckham’s Miami MLS Bid

NHL, CBC Team Up For Another All-Access Series

Robinson Cano Not Budging Off Ten-Year, $310M Demand

Penguins Beat Ducks 3-1

Phillies Sign Catcher Ruiz For Three Years, $26M

Hurricanes Get Cam Ward Back In The Net, But Bruins Get The Win

British Parliament Honors Sachin Tendulkar

Nationals About To Learn The Price Of Preserving Their Core



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
CNBC Loses “Money Honey” Bartiromo To Murdoch’s Fox

Maria Bartiromo

Former “Closing Bell” hostess jumps ship after twenty-year stint at CNBC


“It’s A Wonderful Life” Sequel In The Works

Justin Bieber Party Features Naked Girls Everywhere


Brandi Glanville Gets Hammered, Talks More Trash About Vaginas

Taylor Swift Hints Jake Gyllenhaal Spoke To Her About Songs On “Red”

Dakota Johnson On “Fifty Shades Of Grey” Love Story: “The Sex Makes It Perfect”

CW’s “The Flash” To Get Standalone Pilot

Lindsay Lohan – Drugs & Booze & Rehab?

“Mob Wives” Star Linked To Kidnap, Robbery

Tenants Of Burned Hollywood High-Rise Sue Ashley Greene

Rita Ora Collapses During Photo Shoot



FOREIGNERS
The New Tone In The Iran Nuke Talks
Sardinia Hit By Deadly Cyclone, Flooding
Russia To Release Greenpeace Activist
Abbott Vows No Apology Over Indonesian Spying
Ukraine Parliament Holds Crunch Session On Tymoshenko Question
Nepal Holds Vote Amid Scattered Violence
PRC On Path To Further Reform One-Child Policy
CAroline Kennedy Draws Crowds In Tokyo As First Woman Ambassador
Narendra Modi Rips PM, Rahul, Digvijaya



BLOGS & STUFF
First Street Journal: Why It’s Absolutely NOT The Time To Go All Caspar Milquetoast With Iran
Proof Positive: Canadian Bakin’
Michelle Malkin: A Brown-Skinned Suburban Mom Responds To Common Core Bigot Arne Duncan
Twitchy: Liberal Comics, Giant Vulva Raise Money For Abortions In Texas
American Power: Doris Lessing, 1919-2013
American Thinker: What The Know-Nothings Know
The Necropolitan Sentinel: A Bad Contract And A Criminal Conspiracy
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, November 18
Jammie Wearing Fools: Obamacare’s Oregon Exchange Signs Up Zero People In Seven Weeks
JustOneMinute: Management For Dummies
Pat Dollard: Mark Levin – “If This Is Not An Impeachable Offense, What Is?”
Protein Wisdom: President Asterisk
Shot In The Dark: Post-Shakeout Reading
The Jawa Report: German Rapper Who Once Toured With DMX Now A Jihadi In Syria
The Lonely Conservative: Lowering Expectations – Obama Administration Now Hopes For Only 20% Failure Rate On Healthcare.gov
Megan McArdle: Obamacare’s New Metrics Clear As Mud


Category: Live at Five

Rule 5 Monday: Palate Cleanser

Posted on | November 18, 2013 | 15 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I don’t think there’s any question but that after the last post, you probably want something to get the Amanda Marcotte off your mind. Fortunately, this was delayed from yesterday for reasons. Enjoy.

Yankee Phil kicks off this week’s roundup with some plus-size model theft and a PSA regarding cold & flu season. Randy’s Roundtable follows with Nell McAndrew, Goodstuff introduces Elly Tran Ha, and Reaganite Republican goes with Miss Bikini Universe 2013. Ninety Miles From Tyranny checks in with Morning Mistress, Hot Pick of the Late Night, and Girls With Guns;Blackmailers Don’t Shoot focuses on Rima Fakih, and First Street Journal has Basic Training at Fort Jackson.

EBL’s herd of heifers this week includes a salute to the Marine Corps on their 238th birthday, Lara Logan, Adriana from healthcare.gov, Britain’s Horniest Student, and the Daughters of Alec Baldwin.

A View From The Beach offers Advertising Women, Dinosaur Seas Found Under The Chesapeake (has cavegirl content), Georgia Cavemen (ditto), Lesbians Cool To “Blue Is The Warmest Color”, What Do “Stakeholders” Do With Stakes?, Second Amendment Porn, Yes It’s Good Living On A Farm, and Gross In A Cute Way.

At Soylent Siberia, set the Snoochinator to 1983! Also, your morning coffee creamer and muffins, Overnighty Ali Rose, Monday Motivationer Andrea, the Soylent Veterans Day Salute, Overnighty Katie Fey, Tuesday Titillation Auburn Awesome, Favorite Forgotten 60s TV Shows, Humpday Hawtness Shannon Stewart, Falconsword Fursday Francesca B., A New Header For Irish, Corset Calliope, T-GIF Friday, and Weekender Andressa.

Proof Positive’s babe of the week was Alison Brie, his vintage babe was Greer Garson, Victoria’s Secret covers the Sex in Advertising beat, and of course there’s the obligatory 49ers cheerleader. Dustbury offers Rooney Mara and Daisy Fuentes.

The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week included Miss Haiti Mondiana Pierre, Yaritza Reyes, Marisa Ramirez, Famke Janssen, Moyoko Sasaki, Jacinta Rokich, Stefanie Guillen Evangelista (Miss Aruba), Adwoa Yamaoah (Miss Canada), and Michelle Lewin. Also, Friday and Saturday Beauty!

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox is Saturday, November 23.


Category: Rule 5

Never Doubt @AmandaMarcotte’s Commitment to Baby-Killing

Posted on | November 18, 2013 | 57 Comments

For some reason, the world’s most fanatical feminist decided to follow her own logic to the absolute nadir of absurdity:

Catching cold is the “consequence” of being around
other people. I assume you refuse antibiotics, correct?

Taking antibiotics terminates more life than an abortion.
One organism < the billions you kill with antibiotics.

So, babies are bacteria and abortion is like antibiotics. This nonsense conclusion is where the syllogism leads, which tells you there must be at least one flawed premise to the pro-choice argument.

BTW, bacteria don’t cause colds and antibiotics don’t cure colds.

Amanda Marcotte hates babies and wants to kill them.

 


Category: Abortion, Feminism

The Douchebag Manifesto

Posted on | November 18, 2013 | 50 Comments

Portrait of the hacker as a young douchebag.

“The hypocrisy of ‘law and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct action.”
— Jeremy Hammond, Nov. 15, 2013

“I gotta be me, as the douchebag credo goes.”
— Ace of Spades, Nov. 20, 2012

Where do they come from, these douchebags? Suburbia, mainly. You can read a thousand articles telling you Jeremy Hammond was from Chicago, but in point of fact he was from Glendale Heights, a DuPage County suburb about 30 miles west of Chicago.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Jeremy Hammond’s parents were divorced. Nearly all of these left-wing fringe types come from what used to be called “broken homes” back in the old days, before we were taught politically correct euphemisms for social dysfunction.

They’re angry, see, and their anger becomes the organizing principle of their lives, so they must act out in some way. Lashing out at scapegoats, they externalize their inner pain, believing that whatever object they make a target of their anger deserves to be hated.

Costuming their personal grievances in the rhetorical wardrobe of politics, the seek out others like themselves as a sort of support group, engaging in protests as performance with history as the imagined audience, basking in the warm glow of the admiration they strive to deserve by acting on behalf of “social justice” or some other cause.

Lee Harvey Oswald, Jeremy Hammond — they differed in method more than they did in basic personality structure.

Ace has been on a riff lately against “millennials” — following on Kurt Schlicter’s sarcastic #caring attitude — and talking about the entitled narcissism of the Special Snowflake™ generation. Of course, narcissism isn’t anything new, but what is new (or, at least recent) is the relative ease with which these cravers of admiration can find an audience in the Information Age. Kids turn on the TV and watch “reality” shows where pseudo-celebrities with no talent play-act their scripted dramas. Then they switch on their video game systems for some competitive play-acting in multi-player environments. Then they hop on the Internet where everybody’s got a YouTube channel and a social-media presence. Everything is play-acting and everyone is (potentially) a star.

We’re about 20 years into the World Wide Web era, and no one under 30 really has any useful memory of the world that existed before the Internet, Playstation and 140 channels on cable TV. Are we therefore actually surprised that young people have become self-absorbed and have trouble understanding politics as something different from other media-generated celebrity image-making?

So when I saw Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond’s courtroom statement, my reaction was a shrug of resignation: Of course he blames Bush. Of course his “political” rationalizations are a bunch of empty clichés about “racism” and “imperialism.”

As an aside, do none of these punks bother reading books? Do they not realize that their protest dramas are just re-enactments of previous protest dramas, all of which ended in disappointment (and sometimes death) for the deluded idealists?

More than six decades ago, Eric Hoffer published The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. The copy on my desk is 177 pages, including endnotes. Any reasonably literate person could finish reading this book in a single day and be forever inoculated against the True Believer delusion. Why, then, do young kooks continue replicating the errors Hoffer so clearly described?

Or how about Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts on the Sixties? It would be impossible, I think, for anyone who had read that book to sign on for the whole hippy-dippy peace-and-love bullshit agenda. So why isn’t that book on the syllabus in high-school advance placement civics classes?

Oh, wait . . . Never mind. It just dawned on me that our public education system is dominated by leftists who very much want kids to sign up for the whole hippy-dippy peace-and-love bullshit agenda.

Few of these kids, thank God, take up the radical cause with the kind of dramatic seriousness that leads them to federal prison:

Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison Friday for his role in the December 2011 hacking of Strategic Forecasting (StratFor) and a number of other websites targeted by members of the so-called “hacktivist” group known as Anonymous. The feds had more than enough evidence to convict Hammond. He had a prior conviction on a similar crime and was potentially facing more than 30 years this time, so the best he could do was cop a plea deal. Before he was sentenced Friday by U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska, however, the 28-year-old hacker once known as “Anarchaos” had a political statement to share with the world, a statement that could be summarized in two words: Blame Bush.
Although he was only 15 when George W. Bush was elected president, Hammond declared in federal court in Manhattan, this was a traumatizing experience for him. “My introduction to politics was when George W. Bush stole the Presidential election in 2000, then took advantage of the waves of racism and patriotism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked imperialist wars against Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hammond declared in his manifesto. “I took to the streets in protest naively believing our voices would be heard in Washington and we could stop the war. Instead, we were labeled as traitors, beaten, and arrested.” Hammond added that he had “been arrested for numerous acts of civil disobedience on the streets of Chicago.”
Ah, yes, “civil disobedience,” otherwise known as crime. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator and, please, you stupid kids: How about reading a book once in a while?

 

 

Category: Crime, Culture, History, Intellectuals

Michelle Malkin Rips Up Arne Duncan

Posted on | November 18, 2013 | 29 Comments

The battle against “Common Core” curriculum took a weird turn last week when Education Secretary Arne Duncan blamed opposition to this nonsense on “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” Ri-iight.

Michelle Malkin is on the warpath:

Over the last 10 months, Common Core has imploded under withering scrutiny from the tax-paying public, informed parents and educators, and more national media. States under both Republican and Democrat governors have adopted moratoria on the untested standards, withdrawn from the costly testing consortia, and retreated from partnerships with Common Core-promoting educational software data-miners like inBloom.
There’s much more to the fight than simple left-right divisions. The Common Core peddlers include meddling, Fed Ed Republicans from Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee to progressive billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates to Newscorp. media giant Rupert Murdoch and dozens of educational corporate special interests that stand to gain billions from the Common Core testing/textbook/data-mining boondoggle.
The Stop Common Core movement includes social conservatives, libertarians, teachers’ union members, charter school advocates, Catholic school principals, urban and suburban parents, New York City Democrats, Tea Party Republicans, homeschoolers, and concerned activists from all parts of the political spectrum concerned about the feds’ encroachment on family and student privacy.

Read the whole thing. Except for the 2006-2007 fight against John McCain’s amnesty plan, I’ve seldom seen her this fired-up.

If what’s wrong with our education system could be fixed by more federal money and more federal control, schools would have been steadily improving as federal involvement has vastly increased over the past several decades. The fact that a larger federal role in schools is not correlated with improvement — well, that’s evidence, isn’t it?

 

Category: Education, Michelle Malkin

The Exceptional Jeremy Lott

Posted on | November 18, 2013 | 15 Comments

When I first started writing for The American Spectator, Jeremy Lott was my editor. He has since joined the RealClearPolitics family of sites, but continues to be one of the most lively and versatile writers around. Unlike a lot of conservative journalists, Jeremy has no evident ambition to be regarded as a pundit. His specialty is good feature reporting, which he displays in an American Spectator article today on local elections in Whatcom County, Washington:

There was cursing from Republicans all over Whatcom County as the results of the county council elections slowly rolled in. The right-of-center bloc of four councilmembers had enjoyed a one-vote majority going into the elections, which put three of their seats at risk. All three lost, leaving Sam Crawford as the single conservative voice in county government.
Whatcom County offices are usually non-partisan in name only. Candidates here are endorsed and campaigned for by parties. Local Democrats dearly wanted these county officials to go down, and go down they did.
The Democrats’ campaign pressed two points against their opponents: 1) they are Tea Party-connected extremists; and 2) they want to allow the construction of the deep water Gateway Pacific Terminal for exports to Asia, which would mean more coal-bearing trains running through the most granola-crunching parts of Bellingham.

Read the whole thing, and when you’re done with that, read Jeremy’s review of Charles Murray’s new pamphlet, American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History:

Folks have been taking exception to American exceptionalism for a long time. It’s possible Joseph Stalin coined the term when he denounced the “heresy of American exceptionalism” in 1929, though if so it was something of an accident. The important word at the time was not “exceptionalism” but “heresy.”
The Soviet ruler was appropriating an idea with a pedigree and applying it to his own secular faith. Pope Leo XIII had denounced a group of heresies colloquially known as “Americanism” in an encyclical in 1899, and Pope Pius IX did something similar in 1864.
Leaders do not declare heresies for the hell of it.

Read the whole thing. Good writing by a good guy.

 

Category: Journalism

The Parable of Banging the Babysitter

Posted on | November 18, 2013 | 188 Comments

It was perhaps inevitable that the Christian homeschooling movement would have a sex scandal sooner or later, but . . . Doug Phillips?

Former Vision Forum Ministries president Doug Phillips reiterated [Thursday] that his decision to resign from his leadership position was the proper outcome following his acknowledgement that he had “inappropriate relationship” with a woman who was not his wife. . . .
On Nov. 11, the Vision Forum Ministries board shutdown the non-profit, two weeks after Phillips publicly announced his resignation.

Maybe someone else saw that coming, but when I found out about this last night on Twitter, I was stunned. Apparently, this has been buzzing around since Phillips announced his resignation in late October, but I missed that news. The details of the scandal have been rather hush-hush. In his Thursday statement, Phillips vaguely acknowledged that “there was an inappropriate physical component with an unmarried woman” which “was intermittent over a period of years.”

Why the awkwardness in that confession? Well . . .

If we can believe blog commenters:

The affair was with a younger woman (girl) in her teenage years who was very involved with the ministries of both [Vision Forum] and the church. She also helped greatly with the family’s children as a nanny for many years.
This affair has gone on at least 10 years — although she is of age now, she was not when the affair began. . . .
This woman went unmarried all through her 20?s to be there for [Doug Phillips]’s every need and whim. When she finally realized she could no longer continue the affair, due to God’s conviction and disgust with the hypocrisy, she made it clear she would expose him if he didn’t confess.
I believe this will slowly be revealed in public.

Face it, as far as this woman herself is concerned, her identity must already be known by everyone who knows the Phillips family. How many people could fit that description? So she will no doubt eventually step out of the shadows and tell the whole sordid tale.

Or maybe collect a large payment to keep her mouth shut.

What I can’t understand — the mind boggles at the thought — is how any Christian girl could let herself be talked into this. Stipulate that Doug Phillips was a hypocritical horndog who deserves to burn in Hell. Still, what kind of arguments did he make to persuade this girl that it would be OK for her to have sex with him? “Oh, yeah, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery, except for humping the nanny.’ That was in the original Hebrew text, but it’s left out of these ‘modern’ translations.”

This is a horrible thing, and I joke about it for the same reason I joke about a lot of horrible things. Sarcastic humor is a defense mechanism, because if I couldn’t make wisecracks about wretched stuff like this, it might drive me to utter despair.

Obama is president, which is enough despair for anyone.

 


Category: Religion, Scandal, Sex
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