The Other McCain

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

‘Diversity Is Our Strength’ — And Also Leads to Hate-Crime Murder in New York

Posted on | May 19, 2013 | 19 Comments

Dan Riehl points out that “three Hispanic males” were implicated in the murder of a gay black man in Greenwich Village, a potentially relevant fact that the New York Times couldn’t be bothered to mention in maundering on about the historic vicinity of the crime:

Mark Carson did not hide that he was gay, and when he went out on the town he would often head to Greenwich Village, where years before he was born, much of the struggle for gay liberation unfolded. Yet late Friday night, just blocks from the Stonewall Inn, among the most important landmarks of that struggle, he was confronted with a man screaming antigay slurs, who then stalked him before pulling out a silver revolver and fatally shooting him, the police said. . . .
“There was a time in New York City when two people of the same gender could not walk down the street arm-in-arm without fear of violence and harassment,” said Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, whose district includes the Village and who hopes to become the city’s first openly gay mayor. “We refuse to go back to that time.”

No, Ms. Quinn, we are going forward to that time: A deluge of immigration, the breakdown of the family, the failure of public education, economic malaise — pious liberal sermonizing cannot eliminate the sources of social friction that lead to crimes like this.

Tres hombres decide to go swaggering muy macho through the West Village on Friday night, looking for somebody to fight:

According to Mr. Kelly, the gunman was in the neighborhood with two other men shortly before midnight when he urinated in front of the Annisa bar and restaurant on Barrow Street at West Fourth Street.
The man then went inside and angrily confronted the bartender with antigay slurs, the police said, pulling up his gray hooded sweatshirt, and revealing a silver revolver in a shoulder holster. He threatened the bartender that if he called the police, he would be killed, the police said.

Gun-control laws, hate-crime laws — none of New York’s laws could protect a “fabulous gay man” from Harlem and his boyfriend:

Both the victim and another man with him were wearing tank tops, cutoff shorts and boots.
“Do you want to die here?” Morales asked the victim.

Does this involve the Men on Strike phenomenon?

American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are consciously and unconsciously going “on strike.” They are dropping out of college, leaving the workforce and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. . . . [M]en aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers.

In a culture where the ordinary sources of male self-esteem are stigmatized, doesn’t violent machismo become more common?

 

 


Category: Crime, Culture, Gays, Racism

FMJRA 2.0: All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down

Posted on | May 18, 2013 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: In The Heat Of The Night

The Fate of Basseley Nakoula

#Gosnell Convicted: Quick Reactions

FMJRA 2.0: All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight

A Short Lesson in Liberal Media Bias: Has Alex Koppelman Forgotten Fitzmas?

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.13.13

World’s Youngest Blogger: Did You Love Momma Today?

My Wife Is a Soldier’s Mom

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.14.13

‘People Need to Be Sent to Jail’

The Obama Presidency, in One Tweet

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.15.13

ObamaGate Scandal Mania!

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.16.13

President Cosmic Lightworker Expresses Disappointment in Mere Mortals at IRS

One More Jump …

As You Can Perhaps Imagine, This Has Been a Rough Week for Charles Johnson

CNN Now Aiming for Zero Ratings

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.17.13

‘Hate-F*ck’ Hoaxer Meg Lanker-Simons Has Criminal Record for Gun Incident

Jahar, the Teen Idol Terrorist

Obama #IRS Scandal Amnesia

Our Lawless President: Obama’s IRS Thuggery Certainly Was No Coincidence

He Gets His Wings Tonight!

Apparently there was a shortage of people wanting to get drunk and get loud in the blogosphere last week.

Top linker of the week, and still champeen:

Rick’s Rants (22 the hard way)

There were a couple of near misses, but people seem more inclined to tweet or like posts on Facebook. This makes the wombat sad. Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA (and turn your favorite marsupial’s frown upside down) is Friday, May 24. No slacking off just because it’s Memorial Day weekend, now.

 

 

Category: FMJRA Award

Should IRS Standards for 501(c) Groups Require Proof of ‘Social Welfare’ Purpose?

Posted on | May 18, 2013 | 12 Comments

That’s what “many Democrats” seem to be saying:

“Partisanship or the perception of politics has no place in the IRS,” acting commissioner Steven Miller said in a brief opening statement to the Ways and Means Committee . . .
And many Democrats turned to what they saw as the bigger issue: A tax code that doesn’t make clear what kinds of political activities a tax-exempt social welfare organization can participate in.

Hmmm. My memory must be playing tricks on me these days. The phrase “tax-exempt social welfare organization” rings a bell, but for some reason I’m having trouble thinking of an example.

See, this “social welfare” aspect is very important to the IRS:

“. . . a paid employee of one of the nonprofits, Justice Through Music Project, a 501c3 ‘educational’ nonprofit. . . . Both JTMP and the other group, Velvet Revolution US, a 501c4 “action” nonprofit, are headquartered in . . . Bethesda, Maryland.”

“Justice Through Music . . . is a co-founder . . . of the Election and Media Reform organization, VelvetRevolution.us.”

“Election and Media Reform” are obviously the kind of social welfare purposes which legitimate 501(c)4 groups pursue.

An effort to “Prosecute Rove” is neither “transparently partisan” nor the action of a “tax-exempt  . . . racket,” right, Brad Friedman?

As the IG’s report details (to those who actually bothered to read it!), all of this was a part of the federal agency’s poorly executed attempt to screen a flood of incoming applications for tax-exempt 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) status in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. That infamous ruling, essentially paving the way for unrestricted money for campaign spending, resulted in an exponential increase in political organizations attempting to take part in a tax-exempt “social welfare organization” racket which illegally flooded the 2010 and 2012 election cycles with transparently partisan spending on direct political advertisements and other related efforts — in violation of the (unenforced) law.

Yes, it’s a terrible thing when people violate laws.

“Sandi Barton’s youngest daughter . . . was 14 when her grandmother, 65-year-old Julia Scyphers, was murdered — a crime that remains officially unsolved to this day.”

If only there were someone to call attention to these issues . . .

 

Category: Scandal, Taxes, The Kimberlin Files

Benghazi and Other ‘Concocted’ Scandals

Posted on | May 18, 2013 | 10 Comments

U.S. consulate, Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 11, 2012

“Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots — they carry out orders.”
— Andrew McCarthy

Well, that’s just “common sense,” but what does common sense count for nowadays? In an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN Thursday, Jay Carney dismissed the Benghazi scandal as a Republican “concoction.”

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom caught JournoLister Ezra Klein offering a similar argument that these aren’t really scandals, which sounds a bit like Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” talk:

“We lied about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, the Justice Department secretly seized phone records for the Associated Press, and the IRS used ‘inappropriate criteria’ to punish the president’s Enemies List, but these aren’t really scandals. Besides, those bitches deserved it. Shut up, Republicans.”

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard pointed out the pervasiveness of the media’s “Not Really Scandals” meme.

As is usual when this kind of elite “consensus” groupthink agenda gets rolling, the consensus is itself cited as tautological proof that skeptics are irrational, biased and therefore untrustworthy. You’re a Flat Earther or a Tinfoil Hatter if you think there was a deliberate effort by the White House to suppress the ugly truth, or if you believe that such a cover-up would actually amount to a scandal.

“Polls show that nobody cares! Shut up, Republicans!”

But no matter what the polls say — low-information voters care more about celebrity mastectomies than about politics — it’s obvious the administration is lying about pretty much everything. For example, IRS officials tried to blame the problems on an alleged “surge” in non-profit applications that didn’t actually happen, and this bogus rationale was offered via a dishonest ruse that they lied about.

OK, so if the first public excuse was a lie,  and we then learn that this was revealed via a phony set-up question, and if every new fact we discover — “Tell us about your prayer meetings” — tends to make the situation seem worse . . . Well, what would we know if we knew everything?

We don’t know, and thus we must be cautious in asserting that we’ve found the “smoking gun” that will result in federal indictments, the resignation of a half-dozen Cabinet secretaries, perp walks for White House staffers and the Impeachment of the President.

On the other hand, when the best excuse Obamaphiles like Ashley Banfield can come up with is that the President of the United States doesn’t know anything about anything and his administration is plagued by rampant stupidity, we should probably keep asking questions.

“In the Obama era, the question isn’t whether you’re paranoid. It’s whether you’re paranoid enough.”
— Professor Glenn Reynolds

 

 


Category: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Libya, Scandal, Taxes

He Gets His Wings Tonight!

Posted on | May 17, 2013 | 49 Comments

The back of this T-shirt asks, ‘What do you do?’

So the final jump of Airborne school was supposed to happen Thursday night and graduation was supposed to be noon Friday. But the C-130 was grounded by mechanical problems, so my Army son didn’t get to make his fifth jump until about 5 p.m. Friday, and the graduation is supposed to happen about 10 p.m. tonight.

He finally got to be first out of the plane on this jump. Private McCain was Number 15 in his “chalk” and was supposed to jump first, but they kept messing around with the jump order, and he didn’t get to be first man out of the plane until this time. The jump was “awesome,” he reports, although the landing was the hardest yet, but he was uninjured and so he made it through.

Saturday, about noon, Private McCain boards a bus for Fort Bragg, where he reports for Special Operations Preparation Course (SOPC), which is designed to get him ready for Special Forces Assessment/Assignment and Selection (SFAS). These are extremely rigorous courses, and the attrition rate is very high. But he’s made it through basic, advanced infantry and now Airborne school, so he’s already pretty doggone elite.

Eventually, I hope to get my own T-shirt: “I Could Tell You What My Son Does for a Living … But Then I’d Have to Kill You.”

HOOAH!

 




 

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 

Category: Military

Our Lawless President: Obama’s IRS Thuggery Certainly Was No Coincidence

Posted on | May 17, 2013 | 27 Comments

Dan Collins calls attention to Obama’s dog-whistle tactics, as described by Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal:

The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as “less than reputable” to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. . . .
The president derided “tea baggers.” Vice President Joe Biden compared them to “terrorists.” In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. “Nobody knows who’s paying for these ads,” he warned. “We don’t know where this money is coming from,” he intoned.
In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: “All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.”

Ed Morrissey politely refers to “circumstantial evidence” that the IRS was in the tank for Obama’s re-election. Of course, they managed to keep a lid on the scandal until after the election:

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said [NBC’s Lisa] Myers . . . “[W]hat would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

Just another random coincidence, you see? But at least one member of Congress is having none of these lame-ass “I don’t remember” excuses:

 

Category: Barack Obama, Scandal, Taxes, Tea Party

Obama #IRS Scandal Amnesia

Posted on | May 17, 2013 | 16 Comments

VIDEO: ‘I Don’t Remember’ Who
Targeted Conservatives, Ex-IRS Boss
Testifies in Scandal Hearing

It would be a gross understatement to say that ex-IRS acting commissioner Steven Miller was an uncooperative and unhelpful witness at today’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing. Everything about the IRS scandal can apparently be divided into two categories:

  1. Things Steven Miller does not know;
    and
  2. Things Steven Miller can not remember

Despite this, some actual information got pried loose today:

The hearing’s one clear revelation came when Mr. Miller conceded that the I.R.S.’s apology for targeting was prompted by a question planted by the agency last Friday at an American Bar Association meeting. At that meeting, Lois Lerner, the head of the I.R.S.’s division overseeing tax-exempt organizations, was asked about an inquiry of the targeting issue, eliciting an apology that quickly leaked out of the closed-door session. The I.R.S. then scrambled to issue a formal release on the issue.
Mr. Miller divulged that the exchange was not an impromptu apology but a planned exchange between Ms. Lerner and Celia Roady, a tax attorney at the Washington law firm Morgan Lewis. That revelation only underscored the ham-handed way the scandal has burst into view.

Great: The only questions anybody at the IRS can answer are the questions asked in a “planned exchange” set-up.

 


Category: Taxes

Jahar, the Teen Idol Terrorist

Posted on | May 17, 2013 | 45 Comments

Irrationality comes in many varieties, including tribal loyalty, religious fanaticism and anti-social alienation:

Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left a note claiming responsibility for the April 13 attack, reports CBS News senior correspondent John Miller.
Sources tell Miller that Tsarnaev wrote the note in the boat he was hiding in as police pursued him, and as he bled from gunshot wounds sustained in an earlier shootout between police and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
The note, scrawled with a pen on the interior wall of the cabin, said the bombings were retribution U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims collateral damage in the way Muslims have been in the American-led wars. “When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” the note added.
Dzhokar said he didn’t mourn older brother Tamerlan — the other suspect in the bombings — writing that by that point, Tamerlan was a martyr in paradise — and that Dzhokar expected to join him there.

Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch examines Dzhokhar’s theology of jihad and declares it orthodox: This fanatical loyalty to one’s fellow Muslims transcends all other obligations, so that the Chechen immigrant can attack innocent civilians in America, the nation that gave refuge to his family, because of U.S. military action in Aghanistan and Iraq — and become a martyr in paradise as a result.

As insane as this belief may seem, is it any less rational than the lovestruck admiration of Dzhokhar “Jahar” Tsarnaev fans?

Since his arrest in April, 19-year-old Tsarnaev has grown into a bit of an online heartthrob, with supporters setting up special Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr pages in his honor, using the hashtag #freejahar. The fans declare his innocence, refer to him by his nickname of Jahar, write about how they wish they could get in touch with him (and, in one case, “curl up and take a nap” in his soft hair), publicize items like hand beaded “Free Jahar” bracelets, and note that he’s “beautiful,” “hot” and “too pretty to be guilty.” One Kansas teen even told the New York Post that she was going to get a Tsarnaev quote tattooed onto her arm, though she soon after changed her mind.

Jahar is “too pretty to be guilty”? Such a decadent superficiality — the erotic obsession with physical beauty — is symptomatic of a cultural pathology, a potentially fatal sickness in the West.

Are good looks and fame are all that matter, so that even a bloodthirsty mass murderer can become a “heartthrob”?

Psychologist Jill Weber, author of “Having Sex, Wanting Intimacy: Why Women Settle for One-Sided Relationships,” told Yahoo! Shine that Tsarnaev may attract certain young girls because he’s a bad character, and because that’s both excitingly rebellious and also provides a chance to “help” someone.
“Similar to the fascination teen girls have with vampire characters in movies and books, dark characters are a way to forge a separate identity and to defiantly (or rebelliously) declare oneself as independent of authority figures,” she noted. “Some of this is normal teen development, but being drawn to a criminal is a dysfunctional way to forge independence.”
She added that girls who are hyper-socialized “toward caring about the feelings of others to the expense of their own are more easily drawn to relationships with dysfunctional or even sociopathic men,” and have difficulty seeing that certain men are simply unhealthy.

“Similar to the fascination teen girls have with vampire characters in movies and books” — uh, how recent is that? Were teen girls fascinated by vampires in, say, 1950? Was the film career of Bela Lugosi a result of teen girls identifying with “dark characters”? Or is it the case that this obsession is a symptom of a sick society?

Psychologically healthy people do not manifest this kind of “fascination” with monsters. A devotion to “dark characters” as a means of “forg[ing] a separate identity” is indeed, as Weber says, symptomatic of defiance toward “authority figures,” and any Christian would recognize that God is chief among the authority figures whom such teenagers are defying. Perhaps some pastor will be inspired to write a sermon about this, but I’m a journalist, not a preacher.

Defiance of authority — adolescent rebellion against one’s parents — is an immature, selfish and anti-social tendency, and adults in a healthy social recognize it as such. For decades, however, our decadent cultural elite have justified teen rebellion as legitimate. The consequence of indulging defiant youth is a phenomenon Midge Decter analyzed in a 1975 book, Liberal Parents, Radical Children.

Nearly four decades later, many adults in America are so confused about their own values that teenage rebellion manifests itself in ways that are incomprehensible and nihilistic. This is what the 1999 Columbine massacre really should have taught us. If “authority” has nothing more hopeful to offer youth than pep rallies, “popularity,” and the prospect of still more schooling — all the cool kids must go to college — is it really so surprising that some kids become alienated, submerge themselves in violent fantasy and, occasionally, go on murderous rampages?

Say what you will about Jahar Tsarnaev, his motivation was not more irrational than that of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

The inchoate rage of alienated youth expresses itself politically in the perpetual adolescent rebellion of adults who refuse to grow up. What else can we conclude about the anarchistic impulses of the Anonymous hackers and Occupy protesters?

Progressives, willing to accept as legitimate the grievances of any potential allies in their war against The System, organized anti-banking mobs that attracted dangerously violent rapists and other criminals. Once a movement begins to demonize cops — and the Occupiers were as much anti-cop as they were anti-anything else — bad things predictably will happen, including women being raped in tents by smelly hippies.

Or consider, as further evidence, a few recent revelations about members of the “progressive netroots community”:

Are these typical progressives? It would be unfair to say so, but all of these kooks and criminals were accepted as members — and in some cases, recognized as leaders — of a movement that persistently accuses conservatives of complicity in extremist violence. From the 2009 death of a Kentucky census worker to the Tucson massacre to the Aurora shooting spree, wherever there are victims, there are progressives trying to blame right-wingers for their deaths.

The anti-social ideology of the Left promotes paranoia, and the #FreeJahar mob’s belief in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s innocence involves conspiracy theories as twisted as the 9/11 Truther stuff of Zeitgeist that inspired Tuscon shooter Jared Loughner’s madness. Matthew Feeney at Reason magazine pointed out how a writer at Truther nutjob Alex Jones’s InfoWars peddled a Boston “inside job” theory:

What appear to be private contractors, wearing unmarked, matching uniforms and operating an unmarked SUV affixed with communication equipment near the finish line of the Boston Marathon shortly after the bomb blasts – can be seen beforehand, standing and waiting just meters away from where the first bomb was detonated.

Nearly a month after the bombing, the InfoWars kookery is still online without apology or retraction, an expression of the childish irresponsibility of those who promote such nonsense. Speaking of childish irresponsibility, the New York Times:

[Dzhokar Tsarnaev] was popular — “he had a lot of girls hitting on him,” said Junes Umarov, 18, a close friend who is also of Chechen descent — but even other close friends could not say whether he had a girlfriend. . . .
Mr. Umarov has known Mr. Tsarnaev since 2004, shortly after his family came to the United States. Young Dzhokhar sometimes stayed at his home for weeks during summers, goofing around with Junes and his siblings.
Visits to the Tsarnaev household were different. “Every time we went to Dzhokhar’s house, his brother would make us work, do a bunch of push-ups, get us in shape, because we were staying inside playing video games all day,” Mr. Umarov said. “His brother never gave him wrong advice. So he looked up to his brother.” . . .
One night, exactly one month before [the Boston Marathon bombing], Mr. Tsarnaev appeared at Mr. Umarov’s home in Chelsea, not far from Cambridge, with a friend. They carried a load of fireworks. The three chatted about college over burgers at a Five Guys restaurant and then headed for Admiral’s Hill, a former Navy barracks on the waterfront, to set off the fireworks: pinwheels, Roman candles and other largely innocuous types.
Then they went home. “That’s the last time I saw Dzhokhar,” Mr. Umarov said.

Really? You’re going to report as unquestioned fact Junes Umarov’s claim that he knew nothing of Dzhokhar Tasnaev’s Islamic radicalism? How are you different than these legions of lovestruck teenagers swooning over their “too pretty to be guilty” #FreeJahar idol?

UPDATE: You saw this coming, right?




 

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Crime, Culture, Terrorism
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