The Other McCain

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

Right-Wing Extremist Attacks Black Transvestite in Homophobic Hate Crime

Posted on | August 24, 2013 | 33 Comments

Yes, it’s true. A 21-year-old black transvestite was killed and, as every MSNBC viewer knows, the Republican Party is directly responsible for all crimes motivated by homophobia and racism. And so the only question we need to ask is, “In which redneck backwater of Bible-thumping hillbilly hatefulness did this crime occur?”

A notorious hotbed of Tea Party extremism: Harlem, New York.

Maybe Brian Beutler can blame this on the NRA or something.

 

Category: Crime

The Foul Stench of @BrianBeutler’s Truthlessness Has Become Intolerable

Posted on | August 24, 2013 | 100 Comments

Brian Beutler‘s day job selling cheap Mexican heroin at the playground near an elementary school wasn’t producing enough revenue, and his weekend gig pimping kidnapped orphan girls to Saudi oil sheiks still didn’t make the nut. The cost of living is outrageous in DC nowadays and so, finally, Brian Beutler was forced to the desperate resort of doing something genuinely heinous, writing lies for Salon.com.

Yesterday, an AOSHQ co-blogger let his hatred of Maureen Dowd get the better of him and actually linked a Salon takedown of her. As much as I despise Maureen Dowd, however, the fact that she was denounced by Alex Pareene makes me think the old gal must have accidentally written a couple of factually accurate sentences lately, because if there is anything that Salon hates more than facts, it’s accuracy.

Generally speaking, every word published by Salon is the exact opposite of truth, and they only employ writers so fanatically dishonest that even such infamous organs of mendacity as the New York Times and the Washington Post want nothing to do with them.

Anyone published by Salon is a wretched human stain, and they’re never going to get a link from me, but Brian Beutler’s deliberate dishonesty got him a Memeorandum thread yesterday, and also today Pete Da Tech Guy went off on Beutler in fine form:

It’s about exposing you by simply reporting actual facts as they happen and the actions of those who support you politically will be the witnesses against your claims as Nathan said to David:
‘I will bring evil upon you out of your own house…You have done this deed in secret, but I will bring it about in the presence of all Israel, and with the sun looking down.’

Read the whole thing because it’s not often Pete goes Old Testament.

Remember that Brian Beutler was a JournoLister and is part of the “Juice Box Mafia,” which means he’s guaranteed employment by the Ezra Klein/Matt Yglesias consortium. And obviously, that helps supplement his income from sex trafficking and heroin dealing.

If anyone accuses me of a couple minor errors of fact here, it’s still more accurate than anything written by that hired liar, Brian Beutler.

UPDATE: Donald Douglas at American Power links — thanks! — and someone on Twitter remarked that I didn’t fisk Beutler “argument” which, of course, I wouldn’t, because I refuse to direct any attention to such an outrageous compendium of falsehoods.

Of course, I wouldn’t mind if readers wanted to bother dissecting Beutler’s nonsense in the comments. He is essentially saying that the Right is obsessed with race — never mind how the Left has been harping on racial issues every day since the dawn of history — and that the actual facts about crime are only relevant insofar as they can be used to support liberal arguments for gun control, etc.

And if you don’t agree with Brian Beutler, well, shut up, racist!

 


Category: Crime, Media Bias, Racism

Q.E.D.: @MaxBoot Is a Lying Swindler

Posted on | August 24, 2013 | 46 Comments

Daniel J. Flynn is a gentleman and a scholar and a fellow contributor at The American Spectator, which sure as hell has never paid either of us $2 a word — !!!! — the rate that Wall Street Journal editor Gary Rosen offered The Lying Swindler Max Boot to, in essence, re-write a column about football by Flynn that WSJ editors rejected.

Flynn has a new book out, The War on Football: Saving America’s Game. Flynn wished to promote his book and, of course, Gary Rosen and the editors of the Wall Street Journal were under no obligation to publish Flynn’s column. But once Flynn had submitted his column and they had rejected it, what the WSJ were certainly wrong in doing was to offer an exorbitant rate to Max Boot (two bucks a word? for an op-ed essay?) to write a piece derived from Flynn’s ideas.

Flynn has a column at The American Spectator telling his side of the story. As for Max Boot and Gary Rosen, their side of the story is the rationalization of thieves who have been caught red-handed.

Gary Rosen plotted this crime, and Max Boot signed his name to it.

To hell with Max Book and to hell with Gary Rosen. Here I paraphrase from Ken White’s memorable denunciation of Charles Carreon: Fuck Max Boot and Gary Rosen. They are vermin. They’re not forgivable. Let any good they have ever done be wiped out. Let their names be synonymous with dishonest swindling thievery. Selah.

I just blocked @MaxBoot on Twitter. Every honest man must.

 

 

UPDATE: Following up:

Every honest man must do this, or no one is safe from these thieves.

Category: American Spectator, Books, Football, Journalism

Family Terrorized as Michigan Teachers Support Colleague Who Molested Boy

Posted on | August 24, 2013 | 518 Comments

Former middle-school teacher Neal Erickson, 38, pleaded guilty in May to having sex with a boy beginning in 2006 — when the boy was a 14-year-old eighth-grader — until 2009. His fellow teachers in Ogemaw County, Michigan, supported Erickson, writing letters to the judge asking for a lenient sentence. Any parent would be horrified by the sentiments expressed, for example, by Rose City teacher Sally Campbell:

“Neal made a mistake. He allowed a mutual friendship to develop into much more. He realized his mistake and ended it years before someone anonymously sent something to the authorities which began this legal process. . . . Please also consider that this was a one-time relationship with only one student and ended long before being found out. Both parties have gone on with their lives.”

He molested a 14-year-old boy, ma’am. To call this “a one-time relationship” — words fail. A relationship? A middle-school teacher and a 14-year-old boy in a “relationship”? Are you insane?

The parents of the victim in this case were outraged to see Erickson’s fellow teachers supporting this confessed criminal pervert, whose molestation of their son caused horrible problems:

The victim’s mother also spoke prior to sentencing, telling Erickson he violated her son and caused a rift in the family. She said the family appeared happy on the outside, but on the inside, the home was a “battle zone.”
“We couldn’t figure out why (the victim) hated us,” she said. “He went after his father. There were physical fights.” . . .
“You were his teacher,” she said. “You were his mentor. You were his friend. And you violated him.”
She added the victim kept the sexual encounters a secret and suffered because of it.
“He kept all of this a secret, and he went through emotional pains,” she said.

Permit me to digress: Do you think there might be . . . oh, I don’t know, an agenda involved here? Do you think Neal Erickson’s fellow teachers would have supported him like this if he had carried on a secret three-year sexual affair with an underaged girl? I think not.

Because it was a gay thing, see, Neal Erickson has “rights,” just like Kaitlyn Hunt has a “right” to have lesbian sex with a 14-year-old.

Nobody in the gay-rights movement or the educational establishment wants to admit that this is what is going on, that they are making excuses for gay people to have sex with minors, but that’s what it’s really about. It’s a good thing Neal Erickson isn’t a Catholic priest, or else this might be an actual scandal. But I digress . . .

Thank God, Circuit Court Judge Michael Baumgartner disregarded the pleas for leniency and imposed a 15-30-year sentence:

After making a decision on the sentencing, Baumgartner said he could not believe people were supporting Erickson after the issue came to light.
“I’m appalled and ashamed that the community could rally around, in this case, you,” he said.
“What you did was a jab in the eye with a sharp stick to every parent who trusts a teacher,” Baumgartner added.

 The family of the victim has demanded that the teachers who supported criminal pervert Neal Erickson be fired, and have begun a petition drive to recall school board members who supported the criminal pervert. And guess what happened next?

A garage fire at John and Lori Janczewski’s house on Grandjean Road near Rose City destroyed the couple’s garage and melted the siding on their home early Saturday morning.
Lt. Melvin Matthews, post commander for the Michigan State Police Post in West Branch, said the fire is being ruled as arson. He said evidence gathered at the scene is being analyzed by the MSP crime lab, and new leads gathered since the incident occurred are being investigated.
The Janczewskis believe it was someone responding to their outspokenness against several West Branch-Rose City teachers and a board member, who they said publicly supported Neal Erickson, a former WB-RC teacher who recently pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct against the Janczewski’s son. . . .
John Janczewski said he doesn’t understand why someone would do something like this to his family.
“We don’t deserve this,” he said in tears. “We’re not a bad family. We’ve done nothing but stand up for our son, the victim. They could have killed my whole family. Whoever’s done this has no remorse. They have no soul.”
John Janczewski said he and his wife do not plan to stop. They are currently circulating petitions for the recall of WB-RC board member Mike Eagan.
“Whoever’s done this, we’re not going to quit,” he said. “We’re not giving up. We’re going to continue to fight, until the end.”

School teachers who are insane enough to support a criminal pervert are insane enough to commit any crime themselves.

Erica Ritz told the Janszewski family’s story Monday at The Blaze.

It’s time to wake up, America: Our country is now so close to the gates of Hell you can feel the heat and smell the brimstone.

 

 


Category: Crime, Education, Gays, Michigan, Sex

That Psycho-style Imagery In The Anti-Cuccinelli Ad Was Surely A Tribute To Anthony Perkins, Not An Attack

Posted on | August 23, 2013 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Oh, those humorless Republicans. Up in arms, as usual:

In his letter to the [Virginia] Board of Elections, Mr. Webster also raised questions about the propriety of the McAuliffe Campaign not being required to endorse publicly the mud slinging “attack ads” against Mr. McAuliffe’s Republican opponent being aired by the Democratic Party of Virginia (DPVA). The McAuliffe Campaign recently transferred $2.5M+ to the DPVA ostensibly to pay for the attack ads.

For example, the one accusing Ken of ‘Waging War on Abortion‘.
I. . .suppose one can consider abortion a topic one could go to war with, if the Kermit Gosnell carnage on the receiving end is any indication.

However, the [Virginia] Board of Elections tabled Mr. Webster’s complaint until such time as Board members can review the DPVA ads to determine if they advocate the defeat of the Republican candidate, Ken Cuccinelli.

Hopefully the viewers understood what I, for one, took as a Hitchcock allusion.

One cannot fail to appreciate the brass-knuckle politics at work. Ken has only been doing fantastic work in public service these years, and yet he keeps drawing attention to McAuliffe’s SEC investigation. Terry outsourcing the dirtiness lets

Democrat Terry McAuliffe, struggling to create a positive image for himself in Virginia’s governor race, is setting the stage to shift the dirty work of negative advertising this fall to others.
Mr. McAuliffe, a prolific former Clinton fundraiser who is far outpacing his Republican rival, has shifted millions of his campaign dollars to the Virginia Democratic Party, where it can be spent on attack ads against Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II and get-out-the-vote efforts.
The tactic allows him to keep his own advertising and message positive, polishing an image that still suffers with voters in a race in which both candidates with high negatives are vying to be the least unpopular.

Another ad focuses on Ken Cuccinelli’s efforts to protect the citizens of Virginia from being defrauded by Global Warming Hoaxer Michael Mann, whose hockey stick did for infamy what Wayne Gretsky’s did for the NHL. Makes sense, really: the Global Warming farce dovetails with Terry McAuliffe’s GreenTech farce.

Ken actually has a record of public service, and serious ideas about government. Terry. . .raises funds. I guess if you’re committed to living in a banana republic, in a bleak future with President Benghazi at the helm of a sinking ship of state, maybe having her lackey as governor serves a twisted kind of logic.

Ken Cuccinelli for Governor

McAuliffe is clearly more fit to govern Illinois, or maybe just go straight to the joint.

Category: Election, Virginia

Mystery in #FreeKate Case: What Does Kaitlyn Hunt’s BFF Julia Gilmore Know?

Posted on | August 23, 2013 | 178 Comments

An intriguing detail I reported last week on the Kaitlyn Hunt case:

[Assistant state attorney Christopher] Taylor also recounted a May incident in which Hunt violated the no-contract order by communicating with the victim “through a third party, Julia Gilmore.” In May, Gilmore told a local TV station she “has been friends with Hunt for five years” and, at a Wednesday [Aug. 14] hearing in the case, Hunt’s attorney attempted to compel the prosecution to provide Gilmore’s address, but prosecutors said they don’t intend to call Gilmore as a witness.

Amid all the shocking allegations in the prosecutor’s petition for revocation of bond, the mention of Julia Gilmore seemed trivial, but I was intrigued by the description of the Aug. 14 hearing:

8/14/2013 DEF/ATTY GRAVES/ASA WORKMAN PRESENT FOR STATE’S MOTION FOR PARTIAL CLOSURE OF COURTROOM GRANTED, ONLY IMMEDIATE FAMILY WILL BE ALLOWED IN COURTROOM, DA [defense attorney] MOTION TO COMPEL ADDRESS OF JULIA GILMORE HEARD, SA [state’s attorney] ARGUES THAT THEY DONT HAVE THE ADDRESS OR INTEND TO USE HER AS A WITNESS, COURT ADVISES THE SA IF THEY DECIDE TO USE HER THAT THEY NEED TO SUPPLY DA WITH THE ADDRESS 30 DAYS BEFORE TRIAL DATE, DA RULE TO SHOW CAUSE ON CYNTHIA VOEGTLIN AND ON MIAH SHEPHERD HEARD, DA TO RESET DEPOS, CASE CONTINUED UNTIL 9/26/13 @ 9:00 **CARD GIVEN**

Kaitlyn Hunt’s attorney asked the prosecution to provide Julia Gilmore’s address. I’ve seen evidence Gilmore was in regular communication with Kate Hunt as recently as July, so why would Hunt’s lawyer need the prosecution’s help to find Gilmore now?

This is a question to which I don’t know the answer. Nor do I know why Hunt’s lawyer was so interested in finding Gilmore or why the lawyer thought she was important to the prosecution’s case. But there are dots here, and these dots seem to form a non-random pattern.

Meanwhile there is gossip that “LT,” who was mentioned in testimony by Detective Jeremy Shepherd during Tuesday’s hearing, is Kaitlyn’s new girlfriend Latasha Thomas, 27, who was arrested in 2006 for a traffic violation and marijuana possession and arrested again last year on a felony domestic battery charge.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Detective Shepherd described text messages sent by Kaitlyn Hunt to her underage victim, now 15, boasting that someone had asked whether Kaitlyn shared the younger girl’s . . . uh, companionship with “LT,” to which Kaitlyn replied no, that the younger girl was “all mine.” Watching that testimony, I was not sure about the relevance, but the gossip I’ve heard (and this is only gossip so far) is that Kaitlyn had moved in with Thomas after her arrest, and that Gilmore was reportedly also one of their roommates at some point.

OK, that’s the gossip. Now we return to the prosecutor’s petition for bond revocation, which describes a  May 21 text exchange between Kaitlyn Hunt and her younger victim, “CS”:

CS: “[The prosecutor] asked me today if anyone saw us in the bathroom when we would do stuff. Should I have said names?”
KH: “No! Say nobody.”

There has been speculation that perhaps this other person “in the bathroom when we would do stuff” was Julia Gilmore, but that’s just speculation, of course. However, it would make sense that Gilmore, Kaitlyn’s best friend, who purportedly acted as go-between in Kaitlyn’s violation of the no-contact order, was aware all along of the nature of Kaitlyn’s involvement with the underage victim.

Much about this situation remains mysterious. For example, given that Latasha Thomas has a criminal record, including for drug use and domestic violence, why would Kaitlyn Hunt’s parents — knowing that Kaitlyn was out on bond — permit their daughter to associate with someone like that? And why was Kaitlyn’s lawyer so interested in Gilmore, if Gilmore was not a prosecution witness? Is it possible that there has been some sort of falling-out between Kaitlyn and her best friend, raising concern that Gilmore might testify against Kaitlin?

Anyway, here’s video of a local TV report about Tuesday’s hearing. Notice that Kaitlyn’s dad walks out of the court with his second wife.

In many of their public appearances in May, Steve and Kelley would appear together as if they were still married, when in fact they’ve been divorced for at least five years, and both have remarried. In fact, Kelley’s current husband is actually her third husband, because her second marriage, to an immigrant from the Caribbean, was reportedly annulled.

Because the dysfunctionality of the Hunt family didn’t fit the desired “wholesome all-American” media narrative, their divorce was never mentioned, and Kaitlyn’s stepparents were kept out of the picture.

The whole “Free Kate” myth was a gigantic lie from the start.




 

UPDATE: Thanks to the keen-eyed readers who spotted Latasha Thomas in the video above, leaving the courtroom after Tuesday’s hearing. Furthermore, video from WPEC-TV shows that LT arrived with Steve Hunt and his wife. Here are two screen-caps:

The WPEC-TV story notes that Kaitlyn’s mother, Steve’s ex-wife Kelley Hunt Smith, did not attend Tuesday’s hearing, perhaps because she didn’t want to answer questions about prosecution charges that she assisted Kaitlyn’s violation of the no-contact order.

UPDATE II: OK, now it gets weird. A search of court records for Latasha Thomas’s October 2012 case, when she was charged with domestic battery, shows that at her first court appearance, Thomas was ordered to have no contact with Katlin Sanders. According to the Palm Beach Post, Katlin Marie Sanders graduated from Sebastian River High School in June 2012. So, in October 2012, there was a “domestic violence” case in which Thomas, 26 at the time, was accused of attempting to strangle a girl who had just graduated from high school four months earlier? And now, less than a year later, we find Thomas in a relationship with the most famous teenage lesbian in Indian River County Florida America human history?

Anybody got any thoughts on this? It’s just weird, like Sebastian River High School is some kind of lesbian magnet.

RECENTLY:

 

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

Mama: #FreeKate Is Being Treated Like a Real Criminal at Indian River County Jail!

Posted on | August 23, 2013 | 139 Comments

Kaitlyn Hunt: She’s in real jail, like a real criminal.

Support Honesty remarked on Twitter that Kelley Hunt Smith seems shocked that her precious little pervert “was not placed in the special Privileged Pretty White Girl Jail for Internet Superstars”:

Simple question for Kelley Hunt Smith:

WHY DO YOU THINK THEY
CALL IT ‘JAILBAIT’?

Notice that, according to Kelley Hunt Smith, “having a typical teen relationship” is when a 14-year-old freshman girl gets fingered in the high school restroom toilet stall by an 18-year-old senior, who then gets the 14-year-old to run away from home to spend the night sharing her underage vagina with a tattoo-covered dildo-wielding lesbian.

Maybe this is “typical” at the Hunt household, but Florida law does not yet recognize the constitutional right to “Hunt family values.”

Because they’re all “full of hate and bigotry,” I guess.

 

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

Space Opera

Posted on | August 23, 2013 | 165 Comments

—Wombat-socho

Last week we looked at classic military SF involving soldiers on the ground; this week, we’re going to do the same with space navies.
Any discussion of space opera HAS to start with E.E. “Doc” Smith, who single-handedly created the genre with two epic series. The Skylark of Space is the first of four novels in which Richard Seaton matches wits, engineering skill and diplomacy against his nemesis, “Blackie” DuQuesne, in an epic struggle prefiguring the battles between Reed Richards and Victor von Doom. To give you some idea of the scale Smith was operating on here, by the fourth novel Seaton and DuQuesne have been forced to join together in an epic intergalactic war against psionic chlorine-breathing aliens who seek to exterminate humanity and its allies, and the weapons are entire suns teleported from a third galaxy into the home systems of the chlorine-breathers so as to trigger novae. More familiar to most fans are the Lensman novels, which begin with Triplanetary and continue on for five more novels concluding with Children of the Lens. These chronicle the adventures of the Galactic Patrol, its leaders the incorruptible Lensmen, and especially Kimball Kinnison, the protagonist of most of the novels and the first Second Stage Lensman. Battles interplanetary, interstellar and finally intergalactic are found in plenty, with humanity and its allies not always having the technological edge. Pretty much everything that comes in later space operas is rooted in Doc Smith’s works, no matter how dated they seem now. Truly, he’s one of the giants on whose shoulders modern SF stands.

Space operas were very popular in the 1920s and 1930s, with John W. Campbell Jr., Jack Williamson (The Legion of Space), and Edmond Hamilton (Crashing Suns, Captain Future) all making their names in the subgenre; Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Foundation and Empire both have plenty of space opera content, especially in the second novel where the Foundation finds itself fighting first the dying remains of the Galactic Empire and then the implacable armadas of the Mule. Campbell’s early works can be found in the collection The Works of John W. Campbell .

After that, space opera died out for a few decades as larger-than-life supermen and wars on a galactic scale got shoved into the background in favor of things like character development, dystopias, and other topics not so reminiscent of SF’s pulp ancestry. However, the 1970s brought us (along with the accursed “New Wave”) two new takes on the old space opera theme. Larry Niven’s Protector brought large-scale warfare into Known Space for the first time (there would be more later, as Niven opened up the Man-Kzin Wars to other authors: The Best of All Possible Wars being a selection of the best of those) and C.J. Cherryh made a major splash in the field with the Hugo-winning Downbelow Station , which began the Alliance-Union series of novels. Orson Scott Card’s novelette that would later become a full novel, Ender’s Game , also came out in the 1970s; all brought a fresh approach to the genre.

The Mote in God’s Eye by Niven and Jerry Pournelle, not so much. While dealing with the classic themes of alien contact and having its share of flashy spaceship combat, The Mote in God’s Eye got criticized for all manner of things ranging from the form of humanity’s government (an empire? how archaic!) to perceived defects in the asymmetrical aliens and their society. Still, it’s a great book, a cracking good read, and a thumb in the eye for folks who thought traditional space opera was dead.

The 1980s brought Ian Banks’ Culture novels, which featured plenty of space warfare, often involving self-aware warships with names such as No More Mr. Nice Guy, So Much For Subtlety, I Thought He Was With You, Just Another Victim of The Ambient Morality, Shoot Them Later, and Now We’ll Try It My Way. Probably the best place to start is with Consider Phlebas . David Brin’s Startide Rising pits a single starship crewed by men and (mostly) dolphins against a smorgasbord of hostile aliens, and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion is also worth your time.

Probably the biggest/longest of all these space operas is the one written as a far future analog to C. S. Forester’s tales of Horatio Hornblower. I am of course referring to David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels, which begin with On Basilisk Station and now include thirteen novels in the main sequence, which does not include another nine novels in three spinoff series or the six “Worlds Of Honor” shared-universe anthologies; things have gotten complicated enough that there’s now an Honorverse companion, House of Steel, with enough technical detail to please the most obsessed of gearheads.

Also worth mentioning are the relatively recent Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell (beginning with Dauntless), and Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky, which provides an interesting counter-argument to Arthur C. Clarke’s classic cautionary tale “Superiority”.

Two series that don’t fall neatly into last week’s post or this one are Chris Bunch and Allan Cole’s Sten Adventures, which start logically enough with Sten. Sten’s adventures as grunt, spy, pilot and commander for the Eternal Emperor make the series very hard to categorize, but it has something for pretty much everyone. Also not neatly shoved into a particular box is Michael Flynn’s Spiral Arm series, which starts simply enough with The January Dancer, gets completely out of hand in the two subsequent novels, and ends in On the Razor’s Edge with a pilgrimage to Holy Terra of the Taj, The Wall, and the Mount of Many Faces; a civil war among the Shadows of the Central Confederal Worlds; and a family reunion. Tasty adventure simmered in a rich stew of Indian, Chinese, Russian, American and Gaelic cultures before being served up hot and bloody. I cannot recommend these – or the Sten novels – highly enough.

I’m sure I’ve missed somebody’s favorites. Post your recommendations and complaints in the comments.

Category: Books
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