The Other McCain

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

‘Hvilken Stilling Skyder Du På’?

Posted on | September 28, 2013 | 45 Comments

That’s Danish for, “What position are you shooting at?”

That question appears as a subtitle caption in video footage from Syria, so we can assume that it was a Danish video crew covering this scene with rebel gunmen in a firefight against Assad forces. In reply to the question, one of the gunmen answers, “We got one of them. So there is only one left.” (“Vi fik en af dem. Så er der kun en tilbage.”) But then the gunman decides to stand up to get a better look . . .

 

That didn’t work out so good, eh? (Hat-tip: Blazing Cat Fur.)

Deadly blunders are to be expected when you send a bunch of untrained amateurs up against a professional army.

By the way, the subtitle “Gud er det største!” (at the 51-second mark) is a Danish translation of “Allahu akbar!”

UPDATE: Bob Belvedere points out that the same shot killed two rebels.

 

Category: Military, Syria, Terrorism, Video

Sex Charges Against Two Basketball Coaches at Same Nevada Middle School

Posted on | September 28, 2013 | 46 Comments

In August, police in Clark County, Nevada, arrested Alphonso Washington, 47, and charged him with “misdemeanor lewdness . . . alleging he inappropriately touched female students” at Lied Middle School, where he was coach of the girls’ basketball team.

Friday, the boys basketball coach at the same school, 44-year-old Michael Barclay, was “charged with attempted statutory sex seduction and attempted lewdness.” The Daily Mail describes the case:

According to the police report, Barclay chatted with students through Facebook and talked with them about watching pornography.
In the spring of 2012, the 44-year-old teacher took a 14-year-old boy, who played basketball at the school, out to dinner, according to Barclay’s arrest report, and the two then went to Barclay’s home.
At the house, Barclay began to talk to the boy in detail about his own past sexual encounters, and the conversation eventually led to Barclay soliciting oral sex from the boy and offering to perform oral sex on the minor, the arrest report said.

Clark County, Nevada, went 56% for Obama last November, and given that both Washington and Barclay are members of the teachers union, they’re probably just a couple of typical Democrat voters.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex

James Fallows, Eminent Fool, and the Surprising Vindication of John C. Calhoun

Posted on | September 28, 2013 | 76 Comments

“The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.”
— John C. Calhoun, Disquisition on Government, 1848

The current phony crisis, in which Sen. Harry Reid has declared that the House must approve the Senate’s spending bill or else the government will shut down, has inspired The Atlantic‘s James Fallows to an extravagant exercise in rhetorical excess:

In case the point is not clear yet: there is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored. If someone can think of a precedent after the era of John C. Calhoun . . . let me know.

This is as absurd and inappropriate as it is ignorant. To find a recent precedent, we need only go back to the 1990s, when the budget impasse between the new Republican majority in Congress and President Clinton led to a (partial) government shutdown. Or, really, we might consider the extraordinary process by which Reid and Nancy Pelosi shoved ObamaCare through the legislative grinder — “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” as Pelosi infamously said — as more truly “radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government” than anything Republicans in Congress are doing now.

Having deliberately ignored the made-for-TV dramatics, I am not the least alarmed by this phony crisis, which is neither particularly new nor remotely frightening. Democrats and their comrades in the media (Fallows was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter) are dishonestly characterizing opposition to ObamaCare as “extremist,” per se.

This is the exact opposite of truth: It is ObamaCare itself that is truly “extremist,” a measure that could only be rammed through Congress with late-night arm-twisting sessions. Were the 34 House Democrats who voted against ObamaCare in March 2010 “extremists”? Or were the millions of voters who elected a Republican House majority in the 2010 mid-term landslide “extremists”?

James Fallows is a partisan Democrat who evidently does not even read conservatives, and who declares illegitimate any reporting that takes seriously the claims of the president’s Republican opponents:

As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a “standoff,” a “showdown,” a “failure of leadership,” a sign of “partisan gridlock,” or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement, represents a failure of journalism and an inability to see or describe what is going on. . . .
For examples of coverage that plainly states what is going on, here is a small sampling: Greg Sargent, Derek Thompson, John Gilmour (on why Ronald Reagan believed in compromise), Jonathan Rauch, Brian Beutler, Jonathan Chait, Andrew Sullivan (also here), Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas, Dan Froomkin. On today’s Diane Rehm show News Roundup, panelists Ruth Marcus, Janet Hook, and Todd Purdum all said with a bluntness unusual for a D.C.-based talk show that we are witnessing the effects not of gridlock but of one party’s internal crisis.

Only those who share the partisan Democrat views of James Fallows,  in other words, are avoiding the “failure of journalism.”

Fallows would have us believe that “what is going on” is not a routine exercise in budget brinksmanship — something to which we have become accustomed as a ritual of divided government — but rather an “internal crisis” exclusive to the Republican Party.

In other words, Democrats are not responsible for anything, Democrats have no obligation to consider the views of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the duly elected representatives of taxpaying citizens, because . . . well, why, really?

Perhaps James Fallows considers the illegitimacy of Republican opposition to ObamaCare self-evident or perhaps, more likely, he expects all his readers to share his partisan Democrat views, and thus also expects them to accept without question the intended putdown of his comparing conservative Republicans to John C. Calhoun.

As the cited passage from Calhoun’s Disquisition demonstrates, however, the South Carolinian who served as Secretary of War (1817-1825) Vice President (1825-1832) and Secretary of State (1844-45) was quite a profound political thinker. Lincoln biographer Thomas L. Krannawitter has called Calhoun “a public intellectual of the highest order . . . renowned for his public oratory . . . a remarkable man, and a uniquely gifted American politician.” Calhoun saw in the successive crises of the 19th century evidence of a dangerous tendency toward the centralization of power in Washington, so that control of the national government conveyed to the party in power an authority that was effectively unlimited. Calhoun articulated the doctrine of States’ Rights as a check on this unlimited authority. Calhoun’s doctrine has been disparaged because of its association with slavery and racial segregation, yet we can trace its historical origin to the Founding Fathers themselves, in a context having nothing whatever to do with slavery or race.

It was Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who, in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99, invoked the authority of the states to declared the Alien and Sedition Acts null and void. If we examine that crisis, we see that supporters of the Adams administration’s pro-British policy in foreign affairs had in essence sought to outlaw dissent — an odious restriction on First Amendment freedoms.

The next crisis came during Calhoun’s vice presidency, when the so-called “Tariff of Abominations” was passed. Calhoun authored the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” which condemned the tariff act as ” imposing duties on imports — not for revenue, but the protection of one branch of industry at the expense of others,” declaring the measure “unconstitutional, unequal, and oppressive, and calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the country.” This was a matter not just of policy, but of philosophy, because Calhoun saw that the protectionist measure involved using federal power in ways not contemplated by the Founders, nor consented to by the states in ratifying the Constitution. By gaining a majority in Washington, certain interests sought to enrich themselves through the exercise of federal tax policy, and this abuse was the result of a centralizing tendency that negated the Constitution’s limitations on federal power, converting it “into a great consolidated government, with unlimited powers.”

Well, here we are in 2013, eh?

Nearly $17 trillion in debt — $16,955,657,321,974 as of noon today  — we have added nearly a trillion dollars a year (more than $1.8 billion per day) to the national debt every year since 2008, and it is this endlessly escalating debt that keeps bringing us to these budget crises.

There were no such conflicts during the first two years of Obama’s presidency for the simple reason that he took office when Democrats held an irresistible majority in Congress and could enact whatever policies suited them, including not only ObamaCare, but also a wasteful “stimulus” that added roughly a trillion dollars to the national debt in one fell swoop while doing nothing to restore economic prosperity.

America’s problem, as complex as it may sometimes seem, is really quite simple: We have a federal government with too much power, that spends hundreds of billions dollars more per year than it collects in revenue, and which spends that money to support a system of entitlement programs that is bankrupting us, as well as a regulatory bureaucracy that stifles economic growth. An ever-increasing national debt caused by annual federal budget deficits is the result of Democrat policies that favor the endless expansion of entitlements and bureaucracy, even while they refuse (for the sake of political convenience) to enact the taxes that would be necessary to eliminate the deficits at present spending levels.

Democrats know damned well that the kind of tax increases necessary to generate another $1 trillion a year in federal revenue would strangle the U.S. economy and generate a political backlash. Therefore, Democrats like James Fallows deceptively claim that it is opposition to their policies — and not the policies themselves — which are the cause of our nation’s fiscal problem, and to silence all who speak out against Democrat policies by labeling opponents as “radical” and “dangerous” extremists.

James Fallows (Harvard ’70) is a fool whose only purpose in life is to support the endless errors of the Democrat Party, and to whom truth is always subordinate to partisan interest. Fallows has never been anything but a pretentious hack, as his latest enthusiastic eruption of wordy nonsense should make clear to anyone who had not previously recognized Fallows for the eminent fool he truly is.

And, of course, John C. Calhoun was a Democrat.

 

 

UPDATE: Linked by Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints, Walla Walla Tea Party Patriots, The Lonely Conservative, Regular Right Guy,  God’s Own Crunk — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!


Category: Budget, Constitution, Democrats, History, Intellectuals

Lesbian Pedophile Molests 3-Year-Old Girl, Faces Federal Child Porn Charges

Posted on | September 27, 2013 | 189 Comments

Sex offender Angela D. Martin was arrested again last week.

FBI press release, Sept. 20:

Wallingford Woman Charged with Producing
and Distributing Child Pornography

Deirdre M. Daly, Acting United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, and Rhonda M. Glover, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, today announced that Angela D. Martin, also known as Angela Haussmann, 29, of Wallingford, was arrested yesterday and charged by federal criminal complaint with production, distribution, and possession of child pornography.
The criminal complaint alleges that, in August 2013, Martin sexually abused a female child, filmed the abuse with her cell phone, and then e-mailed the video to another individual in California. The victim was approximately 3 years old at the time of the abuse.
In addition, it is alleged that between August 2013 and September 19, 2013, Martin possessed and distributed other child pornography that she received from other individuals.
The complaint further alleges that Martin is a registered sex offender as the result of a prior felony conviction in the state of Connecticut for second-degree sexual assault of a minor.
Martin appeared today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Joan G. Margolis in New Haven and was ordered detained.
If convicted of the charge of production of child pornography, Martin faces a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment of 25 years, a maximum term of imprisonment of 50 years, and a fine of up to $250,000. If convicted of the charge of distribution of child pornography, Martin faces a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment of 15 years, a maximum term of imprisonment of 40 years, and a fine of up to $250,000. If convicted of the charge of possession of child pornography, Martin faces a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment of 10 years, a maximum term of imprisonment of 20 years, and a fine of up to $250,000. The penalties in this matter are enhanced based on Martin’s criminal history.

Dead Nixon tipped me to this story via End Time Headlines, and I’ve searched several places without success for information about Martin’s 2006 sex offense in Connecticut. She was only 22 at the time, and we don’t know how old her first victim was. Martin was released from prison in February 2009 and was arrested for another offense barely four years later, so she’s obviously a hard-core pervert.

Lesbian pedophiles don’t make headlines very often, probably because the media are afraid of being accused of homophobia if they make a big deal of cases like coach Reanna Jewell, 25, who had sex with a 16-year-old female basketball player; P.E. teacher Rita Brum, 24, who had sex with a 17-year-old female student; and P.E. teacher Abigail Holloway, 33, who was arrested for an affair with her female student that began eight years earlier when the girl was 13.

And now that gay marriage is legal, well, who are we to judge?

“It was a quiet ceremony. Elizabeth Miklosovic had an outdoor wedding in June 2004 in Michigan’s Manistee National Forest, where the couple lit candles and exchanged vows. Miklosovic’s marriage lasted only a few months, however. Later that year, the mother of the bride found out that her daughter had, at age 13, become the lesbian ‘wife’ of Miklosovic, who had been the girl’s language arts teacher at Baseline Middle School in South Haven, Michigan. For some reason, state law did not recognize the legitimacy of Miklosovic’s pagan lesbian marriage, and she was convicted of felony sex offenses and sentenced to prison.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Sexual Anarchy: Progress, Perversion and the ‘Emerging Awareness’ Doctrine,” The American Spectator, June 26

Sex offender Elizabeth Miklosovic, convicted in 2005

Of course, Miklosovic married her pagan child-bride in 2004, and maybe when she gets out of prison, society will be more tolerant.

Because . . . progress!

UPDATE: Just a few more examples:

  • Theresa Gooch, 24, was arrested in August, after police say she had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl at the Sacramento children’s shelter where Gooch was a counselor.
  • April Beal, 27, was convicted in August of having sex with a 13-year-old Ohio girl.
  • Amandika Adams, 23, pleaded guilty in March to having sex with two Ohio girls, 13 and 15.
  • Christina Regusters, 19, was arrested in Philadelphia in April and charged with kidnapping and molesting a 5-year-old girl.

UPDATE II: Thanks to Dead Nixon in the comments for pointing to an online record showing that Angela Martin’s previous conviction in Connecticut involved a minor between the ages of 13 and 15. And, in reaction to another comment, there’s this:

That second Tweet is what we call “dark sarcasm,” which is certainly protected as First Amendment free speech.

 

Category: Crime, Gays, Sex

Horror in Nairobi: Muslim Terrorists Tortured, Raped, Mutilated Victims

Posted on | September 27, 2013 | 45 Comments

The British Independent quotes an account from a Kenyan newspaper about the gruesome atrocities perpetrated against victims of the Westgate Mall attack. The Independent is careful to note that these details have not been officially confirmed. Then again, we don’t even have a confirmed number of dead and injured from the attack yet, and so we must be cautious about the press accounts. With those caveats in mind, here it is via Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugged:

Soldiers told of the horrific torture meted out by terrorists in the Nairobi mall massacre yesterday with claims hostages were dismembered, had their eyes gouged out and were left hanging from hooks in the ceiling.
Men were said to have been castrated and had fingers removed with pliers before being blinded and hanged.
Children were found dead in the food court fridges with knives still embedded in their bodies, it was claimed.

Are these accounts true? We don’t know, but at a time when Al Gore and White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer are comparing Republicans to terrorists, perhaps we could get someone in Washington to pay attention to this latest expression of the “Religion of Peace.”

 

Category: Kenya, Terrorism

Liberals Use Counter-Factual Arguments to Defend Academic Anti-Gun Mania

Posted on | September 27, 2013 | 39 Comments

University of Rhode Island Professor Erik Loomis

Glenn Reynolds notices a Salon columnist falsely accusing him of trying to get Erik Loomis fired over last year’s Newtown controversy.

Whether or not Loomis should have been fired, the fact that he made his unhinged comments while an untenured assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island certainly suggested Loomis may have doomed himself to that awful limbo of “adjunct faculty,” which would be a sad fate for America’s leading scholar of gay lumberjacks. Loomis’ progressive defenders tended to minimize his online meltdown:

As Professor Donald Douglas has explained, before Loomis deleted his Twitter account, it “was practically flooded with blood from all the violent tweets and retweets he’d been sending out.” Unless you consider Tweeting “Fuck the NRA” and re-Tweeting messages about “fuckers” deserving to be “beaten to death” to be appropriate forms of expression for an assistant professor of history, this meltdown was . . . well, arguably problematic.

Let’s re-visit just a few Loomis highlights, shall we?




The general tenor of Loomis’ Twitter discourse was not professorial, and his December 2012 eruption of obscene hatred toward the NRA was simply the tip of a large iceberg of evidence that Erik Loomis has some sort of personality disorder.

Certainly, I would not want my children exposed to the rantings of this unbalanced madman in their university classes. It was perhaps in reaction to the understandable concerns of parents and taxpayers that University of Rhode Island President Dr. David M. Dooley felt the need to repudiate Loomis’ bizarre rhetoric. Toleration of this kind of behavior in the name of “academic freedom” is what leads to situations like Hugo Schwyzer boning coeds in his “porn studies” classes. If it were up to me, a kook like Erik Loomis wouldn’t be allowed with half a mile of any university, but Glenn Reynolds never said that, and Salon’s Paul H. Rosenberg is dishonest to suggest he did. This dishonesty is Rosenberg’s way of defending University of Kansas journalism Professor David Guth.


University of Kansas Professor David Guth

Now, in point of fact, Professor Guth’s anti-NRA rant was even more misguided than Professor Loomis’ anti-NRA rant. Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis didn’t use a handgun or an “assault rifle” to commit his massacre; he used a shotgun — the kind of weapon specifically approved by Vice President Joe Biden.

So unless David Guth is an extremist who proposes banning civilian ownership of shotguns, his wishing death on the children of NRA members was not merely hateful and tasteless, but also wrong.

Liberals have never let being wrong stop them from spewing hate and, whenever anyone calls their attention to facts that contradict their warped ideology, liberals will then resort to making up new lies in an attempt to discredit the truth-tellers. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

Category: Education, Intellectuals

U.S. Judge Richard W. Roberts Expresses Political Sympathy With Gay Terrorist

Posted on | September 27, 2013 | 66 Comments

Floyd Corkins is the lunatic homosexual who, angry at Chick-fil-A and guided by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map,” sought to commit mass murder at the Family Research Council:

Corkins retrieved a firearm from his backpack and pointed it at the security guard. The security guard charged Corkins and a struggle ensued, during which Corkins fired three shots, striking the guard in the arm. Despite the gunshot wound and Corkins’ subsequent discharges of the gun, the security guard, Leonardo Johnson, heroically succeeded in disarming the defendant and forcing him to the ground and onto his belly.
According to a statement of offense, signed by the defendant as well as the government, Corkins targeted the Family Research Council because of its views, including its advocacy against recognition of gay marriage. He entered the building with the intention of shooting and killing as many employees of the organization as he could.
“A security guard’s heroism is the only thing that prevented Floyd Corkins, II from carrying out a mass shooting intended to kill as many people as possible,” said U.S. Attorney Machen. “Our entire community is thankful to the hero who stood up to this heinous attack. Today’s 25-year prison sentence demonstrates the steep price to be paid for turning to violence to terrorize your political enemies.”

One of those whom Floyd Corkins intended to kill — although he didn’t know her name — was an intern named Anna Maria Hoffman:

While interviewed by the FBI, Corkins admitted that he wanted to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the guard.”
I was one of those people who could have been his victim. I was on the 6th floor of the FRC building working on my pro-life internship assignments. I could have lost my life. . . .
It is time to stop Southern Poverty Law Center labeling FRC, and other organizations that just want to make society a better place, as “hate groups.” I only pray that people will learn from this shooting that wrongful labels and violence are not ways to solve political disagreements. Let’s stop the hate to prevent acts of violence like this shooting from occurring again.

Because Anna Maria and her sister Gabby are friends of mine, the hateful motivation of Corkins’ crime is particularly offensive to me, but I guess Judge Richard W. Roberts doesn’t really care:

Prosecutors sought a sentence of 45 years for the would-be mass murderer. Judge Roberts sentenced him to only 25.
In announcing his sentence, Roberts stated (in part):

You are not alone in criticizing those who oppose gay rights, but a man killing opponents does not change the opponents’ minds. It does not open their hearts. It does not bring about gay rights. If anything, it makes opponents more entrenched. If anything, it feeds whatever moral arsenal they perceive to fight against gay rights. Many indications show the opponents losing favor, but it has not been because of anyone killing them.
When a president thoughtfully spoke up, it shook loose many of the entrenched opponents in his faith community. When some women and men highly revered in America chose to come out, that added far more support for gay rights than murder ever will. That’s how we affect positive change in this country, not by shootings.

Ed Whelan is correct, if somewhat restrained, in calling these remarks “grossly ill-conceived.”

Why would a federal judge feel obliged to express sympathy with the motives of a political terrorist? How many other lunatics are out there, feeling the same kind of fathomless rage that inspired Floyd Corkins, who now have every reason to believe that if they act on that rage, a judge will sentence them leniently because “thoughtful” people share their hatred of people like Anna Maria Hoffman?

 

Category: Gays, Terrorism

Dehumanizing Sex

Posted on | September 27, 2013 | 12 Comments

A basic error at the core of the gay-rights crusade in recent years is what I call the Desire Is Destiny Fallacy, wherein all sexual desires are self-legitimizing — a human right — and any opposition to or criticism of anyone’s desire is an infringement of their personal autonomy.

We are told that everyone is morally obligated to pursue the fulfillment of their wildest personal fantasies, and that it is oppressive to expect them to restrain their appetites. Thus, anyone who feels same-sex attraction but does not act on that attraction is said to be a “closet case,” afflicted with psychological “hang-ups,” a sexual phony who is condemned as a sort of collaborator with the anti-gay regime.

The flaw in this twisted logic becomes apparent when we transfer the paradigm to the sphere of aberrant heterosexual behavior.

Heterosexual perversity involves appetites which, according to the Desire Is Destiny Fallacy, are every bit as “legitimate” as same-sex attraction. Yet who would make excuses for Hugo Schwyzer or Anthony Weiner? Certainly not me, even though their particular interests fall within the same heterosexual category as whatever disorderly impulses may lurk beneath my own blandly normal life. What might any of us do, if there were a powerful political movement urging us to do it, and defending our right to do whatever we wished?

We recognize how the Desire Is Destiny Fallacy — the radical logic of “sexual liberation” embraced by the gay rights movement — leads to disastrous anarchy when we encounter Orlando Shaw, the Nashville man who fathered 22 children by 14 different women.

Bad behavior is a consequence of bad ideas, and Alessandra attempts to contrast “wholesome” sexuality with these bad ideas:

The majority of cases of sexual harassment, molestation, and abuse are perpetrated by people who also have consensual sexual behaviors. It’s the people who claim “they just want to love each other” (LGBTs) or who claim “I just want to have consensual sex” who do a lot of the harm and violence in the sphere of sexuality today. Once a person believes they should pursue any sexual kick that pops up in their minds — because they have labeled everything “normal” — it doesn’t matter to them if they are doing harm, because they no longer care about how deformed and harmful their minds are. They believe any sexual attitude and behavior is legitimate and normal, and this takes precedence over everything else, including the rights of others not to be harmed.

Read the whole thing.

 

Category: Gays, Sex
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