The Other McCain

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

Steubenville Superintendent Indicted

Posted on | November 26, 2013 | 34 Comments

This is shocking:

Four school employees, including the superintendent and an assistant football coach, were indicted by a grand jury investigating a possible coverup in the Steubenville rape case. . . .
Superintendent Michael McVey, 50, was charged with tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice in the aftermath of the incident at the center of the case: the sexual assault of a drunken 16-year-old girl by two high school football players after a booze-fueled party in August 2012.
An assistant coach, Matthew Belardine, 26, was charged with allowing underage drinking, obstructing official business and making a false statement.
Two school employees, strength coach Seth Fluharty, 26, and elementary-school principal Lynnett Gorman, 40, were charged with failure to report child abuse.

Think back to when you were in school. Can you even imagine the school superintendent being indicted for obstruction of justice? 

When I was a sophomore in high school, the President of the United States resigned in disgrace, but the school superintendent? This beloved figure, Dr. Robert S. Alexander, was a pillar of the community, a paragon of integrity. They later named a high school after him:

“I went into education to try to form better citizens
from my students. I was hard, but fair.”

To think about Dr. Alexander (who gave me more than one paddling when he was principal of Turner Middle School) and what he meant to our community, my mind boggles at what a horrifying thing it must be for parents in Steubenville to try to uphold standards, when their school superintendent is charged with this crime.

 


Category: Crime, Education, Ohio

LIVE AT FIVE: 11.26.13

Posted on | November 26, 2013 | 14 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Obama Defends Iran Nuke Deal Against Critics

US “cannot close the door on diplomacy”

Senators writing new sanctions in case Iran cheats

Susan Rice Tells Karzai: Sign Or Else
National Security Adviser tells Afghan President alternative is complete US pullout

Thai PM Shinawatra Invokes Security Law As Protests Continue
Facing vote of no confidence?



POLITICS
Administration Launches Program To Let Users Avoid Healthcare.gov

“We’ve tried A! We’ve tried B!”

Pilot program would allow people to deal directly with insurance companies


Florida GOP Tells Radel “Quit Immediately”


Supremes To Decide On Review Of Obamacare’s Conraception Mandate

NYC Debates Plastic Foam Food Container Ban

Judge Sets Date For Detroit Bankruptcy Decision

Army Opts To Cut/End Special Duty Assignment Pay For Many Troops

Obama Heckled Over Immigration



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Oil Up On Uncertainty Over Iran Exports: NYMEX $94.48, Brent $110.78
Dow Ends At Record High, NASDAQ Slips From 4000
Fiat Punts Chrysler IPO To 2014
Walmart CEO To Step Down In February
BlackBerry Shakes Up Senior Management
Duke Building 30 Megawatts Of Solar Power In North Carolina
How To Dump Your iPhone: Google’s Schmidt Offers Instructions
The XBox Family Album
Eight Best Tablets Under $300 For This Holiday Season
Barnes & Noble Releases New Nook
Nokia’s New Windows Tablet Picks On The iPad Air



SPORTS
Kobe Bryant Gets $48M Worth Of Respect From The Lakers…

Home court advantage

…but is he still worth it?

Blazers Keep Rolling Against Knicks For 11th Straight Win

Questions Mount For RG3 And Redskins After Loss To 49ers

Jazz Beat Rose-less Bulls For Second Win Of Season

Bruins Snap Skid Against Pens In OT

Crawford, Wallace Lift Celtics Over Bobcats

Cardinals GM Defends Peralta Signing

Nats Trade Abad To Oakland For Prospect John Wooten



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Malin Akerman, Roberto Zincone Split

“Trophy Wife” star and new mom goes solo

In the midst of motherhood, divorce

Kelly Rowland Engaged To Manager Tim Witherspoon

Angelina Jolie: Brad, I Love You THIS Much!

Brittany Murphy’s Mother Disputes Poison Claim

Francesca Eastwood Getting An Annulment

Miley Cyrus’ 21st Birthday Party: Strippers, Booze, And The Lorax

Katie Couric Leaving ABC For Yahoo! News

Kim Zolciak – It’s Twins!

Jack Gleeson Ditching Acting After “Game Of Thrones”

Jason Patric, John Cusack Join Bruce Willis In Ensemble Thriller “The Prince”

Taylor Swift Snubs Harry Styles, One Direction At AMAs



FOREIGNERS
Qualcomm Faces PRC Antitrust Probe
Free Syrian Army Won’t Stop Fighting For Geneva Talks
Indian Court Finds Parents Guilty Of Honor Killing
France Sending 1000 Troops To Central African Republic
Fresh Chaos As Bangladesh Opposition Protests Poll Date
Singapore, ROK Revealed As Five Eyes Spying Partners
English Jobs At Risk If Independent Scotland Booted From Sterling, Scottish DFM Says
Ukraine President Defends Decision To Scrap EU Deal
London Slavery Suspects Former Maoist Activists
Australia Summons PRC Ambassador Over Air Defense Zone Announcement



BLOGS & STUFF
Proof Positive: Democrats Running For Reelection Run From Obamacare
Dead Republican Party: A Response To Professor Neil Ignatiev
Doug Powers: Latest Obama Strategy? “Sorry I Can’t Help You, But As You Know I’m Constrained By The Constitution”
Twitchy: Bless Donna Brazile’s Heart – Hackiest Obamacare Hack Tweet In All Of Hackdom?
American Power: Obama Heckler Is Illegal Alien
American Thinker: Black Mob Violence – New Denials…And New Violence
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Why Rob Ford Is Still Popular
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – Checking Out The States
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, November 25
Jammie Wearing Fools: If There’s One Thing I’m Certain Of, It’s That There Was Absolutely No Coordination On This “Berate Your Family” Thanksgiving Initiative
Pat Dollard: NYC Waitress Who Claimed She Wasn’t Tipped Because She Was Gay Faked The Receipt
Protein Wisdom: Obama Personally Lobbied On Filibuster Rule Change
Shot In The Dark: Priorities
The Jawa Report: Gurkha Who Beheaded Taliban Cleared
The Lonely Conservative: Now Obama Wants To Ruin Your Thanksgiving
Megan McArdle: The Post-Antibiotic World Would Have Fewer Miracles


Category: Live at Five

Because It’s Cute, That’s Why

Posted on | November 25, 2013 | 29 Comments

Do I need an excuse to post something this cute?

Meanwhile, my earlier hunch that the report of a gunman at Yale was a hoax turns out to be correct:

Yale’s New Haven, Conn., campus was put on lockdown after an anonymous male called 911 this morning to say his roommate was on his way to the campus with the intention of shooting people, according to officials.
New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman said there was “malicious intent” behind the call. However, after a search of the campus did not reveal any threats, he said authorities are “leaning toward this being a hoax.”
Esserman said once police identify the caller, that person “will face every charge possibly imaginable.”

Good luck with that. Patterico got SWATted more than two years ago and police have proven absolutely incompetent at solving it.

 

Category: Uncategorized

New Documents Expose More #FreeKate Lies, Also: ‘Her Issues With Her Dad’?

Posted on | November 25, 2013 | 76 Comments

Featured on the Today show, May 23

BOOM:

Accusations that Florida sex offender Kaitlyn Hunt was prosecuted because of anti-gay bias by the parents of her underage partner were denied by officials at the school that both girls attended, according to documents obtained from the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office. In fact, Hunt’s mother — who made the accusations of homophobia — herself expressed disapproval of her daughter’s lesbian affair . . .

Read the whole thing at Viral Read, the latest product of Jeanette Runyon’s FOIA request for documents in the case. Matt Ross at Conservative Hideout has more exclusive material, including this weirdness from Kaitlyn’s mother, Kelley Hunt Smith:

I told Kate I didn’t approve. I told her I didn’t feel like she was gay, and I felt like she needed to go talk to a counselor about her issues with her Dad . . .

Uh, “issues with her dad”?

 


Category: Crime, Florida, Gays, Kaitlyn Hunt, Sex

Did Yale Get SWATted?

Posted on | November 25, 2013 | 37 Comments

This strikes me as profoundly suspicious:

Police in New Haven, Connecticut, said they were searching Yale University for a gunman on Monday after an anonymous caller claimed his roommate was headed to the Ivy League school’s campus intending to shoot people.
No one was injured and no shots were fired, said New Haven Police Department spokesman David Hartman, who noted that witnesses reported seeing a man on the campus with a “long gun,” or rifle of some kind.
The department received an 911 call at 9:30 a.m. from a man on a pay phone near Yale’s campus, who stated that his roommate was en route to the Yale University campus “with the intention of shooting people,” Hartman told reporters.
“We have not yet identified that caller,” Hartman said. “He did not identify himself when asked, he did not remain on the 911 line when asked.”

OK, so you have anonymous report of a deranged gunman, but when the police show up — no gunman. 

Has anyone seen Neal Rauhauser around New Haven? Just sayin . . .

 

Category: Crime

How Do You Say ‘LOL’ in Spanish?

Posted on | November 25, 2013 | 43 Comments

Last week, supporters of “immigration reform” (amnesty) held a series of protests in Washington, and even the liberal American Prospect could not conceal what a pathetic failure it was:

[O]rganizers from the Southern Border Communities Coalition, which sponsored the event, had laid out rows of tables covered in white cloth and adorned with banners decrying the militarization of the border — “Keep Families Together,” “Bridges Not Border Walls.” A few hundred yards away, several large tents contained the “Fast for Families,” where a core group of four activists has been abstaining from food since Tuesday to protest Congress’s inaction on immigration reform. With the wind blowing ripples across the Capitol reflecting pool, the air was cold, the mood somber. After the event, a handful of journalists,  a small corps that still managed to outnumber the activists, mulled about the dry grass, but the scene was mostly empty.

More reporters than activists? This has inspired my suggestion for a bipartisan comprehensive reform plan: For every illegal alien we give amnesty, let’s deport one liberal journalist. The number of immigrants who get to stay would be limited to equal the number of media liberals who volunteer to leave. This is a win-win.

 

Category: Immigration

Blood, Horror, And Other Things I Found At The Library

Posted on | November 25, 2013 | 22 Comments

— Wombat-socho


Unusually, we don’t have any leftover recommendations from the comments the last book post two weeks ago, although for those of you who missed it, there’s some words from Tom Kratman in the comments. Worth looking at.


Going to start off with something from the Damning With Faint Praise file. Scrapyard Ship by Mark Wayne McGinnis came to me free through the Amazon Prime Lending Library program, and after getting a few chapters into it I have to say it’s worth about what I paid for it. As noted by some of the commenters on Amazon, McGinnis doesn’t seem to know much about the military except what he’s seen on TV, thinks you can land a 200-yard-long starship in the courtyard of the Pentagon, and has a real problem with consistency. Yes, this is a fast-paced adventure with Earth’s bravest and toughest soldiers – er, SEALs – off to save the galaxy from the insectile alien hordes, but what might have worked as a movie (preferably with an actual military adviser to clean out some of the obvious BS) fails as a novel, at least if you have any actual exposure to (or knowledge about) the military. Not recommended.


Speaking of Tom Kratman, I mentioned Come And Take Them in passing last time, but it deserves a bit more attention. I downloaded it earlier this month when it became available for the Kindle (and I had a few bucks to spare for it) and it is definitely a suitable addition to the Carrera novels which began with A Desert Called Peace. It is uncompromisingly bloody and brutal, and as a bonus, shows us Carrera’s opposition from inside their own heads as well. Some of the scenes will be familiar from The Amazon Legion since they deal with the same events but from a different POV. Recommended; if this is the sort of thing that you like, then you’ll certainly like this.


Also, since I’ve been playing a lot of Total War: Rome, I felt compelled to download a copy of David Drake’s Ranks of Bronze, which is a coming of age story built around the notion that one of Crassus’ lost legions was sold as slaves to aliens. Which brings us around to the stuff I actually checked out of the local library, since one of those books was Drake’s anthology Other Times Than Peace, which, contra Amazon, is not actually a Hammer’s Slammers anthology but a collection of several Drake stories from all kinds of places, including the Foreign Legions anthology (how’s that for recursion?) which is essentially the sequel to Ranks of Bronze that Drake himself didn’t think could be written. All good reading, and the influence of Drake’s background as a classics major from the University of Iowa is very evident in all three books.


On a related topic, Jack Campbell made a name for himself in the combat SF field under the name John Hemry with Stark’s War and its sequels. He has since moved on to greater renown as the author of The Lost Fleet, a series of books about two human civilizations (the Alliance and the Syndicate) locked in a century-long interstellar war. Long-lost Alliance hero, Black Jack Geary, is found in a survival pod decades after his presumed death, and succeeds to fleet command after an act of Syndic treachery kills the admiral in command. Geary has to contend with his own legend, a decay in fleet discipline, tactics and training, and scheming subordinates along with a desperate supply situation as he tries to bring the fleet home from deep in Syndicate territory. Unfortunately for me, I started with the second book, Fearless, in which his task is complicated by another legend, Captain “Fighting” Falco, lately rescued with POWs from a Syndic labor camp. Unlike Geary, Falco has political ambitions, and is willing to split the fleet to pursue them. This is a tense thriller of a space opera, which in different ways reminds me of Keith Laumer’s The Glory Game for its tight descriptions of space combat and also of the Bolo shared-world anthology Last Stand, which describes the horrific Last War; the haunting descriptions of things lost by the Alliance in the course of its long war against the Syndicate Worlds is very reminiscent of that fictional war. Campbell writes a gripping tale, and I can’t recommend it enough.


Now, before I start in on the next book, I want to say that when it comes to horror, my tastes are very narrow and tend to the Lovecraftian as opposed to traditional works such as Dracula. The entire zombie craze of the last couple of years interests me not at all, either as entertainment or as an analogy to our current cultural/political mess. Still…I do like me some John Ringo, even if I haven’t read all his stuff, and the snippets he posted on Facebook of Under a Graveyard Sky sure looked interesting…so when I saw it at the local library, I had to pick it up. Turned out it was well worth it. Unlike the pneumonic plague that devastates the world in Ringo’s The Last Centurion, the plague that turns most of humanity into zombies here is man-made, and while a vaccine can be made, it seems there aren’t nearly enough monkeys to go around. So the Smith family leaves New York in their sailboat, only to find that there’s a lot of zombies at sea as well – and people that need help. So the Smiths and some of the folks they rescue become Wolf’s Floating Circus, a band of seafaring freebooters hoping to save what – and who – they can, while putting down every zombie they can find afloat. Because you can’t save the survivors if the zombies are still around. Parts of the novel are extremely creepy if not downright horrific, arguably worse than anything in Ringo’s Posleen War novels, and that includes Watch on the Rhine. Other parts (such as the last concert in New York City), you won’t know whether to laugh or cry. If you’re a fan of John Ringo, you probably already have this, but if not, you should definitely get it. For Trixie, if nothing else.


Help keep a wombat in protein bars, e-books, and ambient electronic music. Buy stuff through the links below.

Category: Books

Do Democrats Think They Can Spin Their Way Out of the ObamaCare Catastrophe?

Posted on | November 25, 2013 | 47 Comments

One of the things you may have noticed in the past couple of weeks is that some liberal pundits are claiming that ObamaCare is essentially a public relations problem: The program is just wonderful, but there have been some P.R. problems with the rollout.

Democrats need to learn that denial is not the name of a river in Egypt:

Democratic leaders claim the bungled launch of Obamacare is just the latest news sensation — a media-stirred tempest that looks in the heat of the moment like it could upend the midterm election, but ends up fizzling well before voters head to the polls.
Some party strategists say they’re in denial.
And that perceived gap between party spin and facts on the ground is fueling worries that the White House and Democratic higher-ups aren’t taking the possible electoral blowback seriously enough or doing enough to shield their candidates. Democratic contenders in the toughest races are distinctly less convinced that Obamacare will fade as an election-year issue — and they can’t afford to just cross their fingers that things get ironed out or that Republicans revert to political hara-kiri.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a forum hosted by BuzzFeed recently that the rollout won’t “hurt us in 2014,” adding that “we’re proud” of the law. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in a recent appearance on CNN, went so far as to assert that Obamacare would be “an advantage” for Democratic candidates next year.
“Democrats will run on the Affordable Care Act and win,” she has also told reporters.
The White House, meanwhile, has come across as equally dismissive of Obamacare’s consequences for 2014.

Anyone who doubts the devastating impact of ObamaCare’s failure need look no further than NY-23 where Democrat Martha Robertson is trying to run away from her previous support of the policy. This is a “purple” district that, on paper, should be competitive for Democrats, but Robertson’s campaign is in complete meltdown mode. And speaking of complete meltdown . . .

We are starting to see a broad polling trend for Barack Obama, and it should have the White House worried — but maybe Obama’s fellow Democrats in Congress even more.  The latest CNN poll confirms what the Washington Post/ABC poll first noticed, and what the CBS poll corroborated — Obama’s approval decline involves more than just his performance.  The Americans public is souring on Obama as a person and as a brand, and that spells real trouble for his agenda . . . .

There are limits to what media spin can accomplish, and trying to tell people who lost their insurance that this is good news, that the president had a good reason to lie to them — that won’t sell.

 


Category: Barack Obama, Health Care
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin