The Other McCain

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

Neo-Pagans Taking Over GOP?

Posted on | April 7, 2013 | 64 Comments

Liberals have spent decades warning that Christian conservatives were attempting to use the Republican Party as a vehicle to impose their theocratic beliefs on America, I guess that’s why nobody was looking when the Wiccans, Druids and Odinists took over:

A New York City councilman who was arrested Tuesday in an alleged plot to rig this year’s mayoral election is a “prince” in a cult that practices an ancient pagan religion, the New York Post reported Saturday.
Republican Dan Halloran, a councilman from Queens, converted from Catholicism to the pagan belief known as “Theodism” in the 1980s. Members of Halloran’s group “wear medieval garb, make sacrifices to multiple gods and compete in combat games” as part of “the pre-Christian Germanic religion, whose believers drink mead or whiskey from horns and dress like characters in a Renaissance fair,” the Post‘s M.L. Nestel reported. Halloran was “publicly flogged and lost a spear-throwing contest as part of his Theodish punishments,” and formed his own tribe of Theodish followers known as New Normandy, according to the Post report. . . .

You can read the rest at ViralRead. I got it via Memeorandum and the Daily Mail. It’s hard to keep from laughing when you read about people whose “religion” involves spear-throwing contests.

The more you learn about this nonsense — read the Wikipedia page about Ásatrú — the more childishly ridiculous it is: Play-acting as Norsemen, in a cult that was started in 1976 in Watertown, N.Y., by a guy whose previous gig was as founder of “The Coven Witan of Anglo-Saxon Wicca.”

The good news is that very few Americans are stupid enough to fall for that kooky stuff. As Lisa Graas reported in 2011, a survey found 768,400 Neo-Pagans in the U.S. (0.28% of the population), which is larger than the CNN audience, but still too small to really matter in politics.

Some people take CNN seriously, however . . .

 

Category: New York, Religion, Republicans, Scandal

Legislation Via Regulation

Posted on | April 7, 2013 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Because the Constitution is, like, over 100 years old, we can safely ignore the notion of representative democracy.

Category: Uncategorized

Bill Schmalfeldt’s Very Bad Idea
UPDATE: Maryland Resident Brandishes AR-15, Recently Banned in Maryland UPDATE: Schmalfeldt’s Gun Is a Toy UPDATE: No, Says Schmalfeldt, He’s Actually Armed; Dangerous? Maybe

Posted on | April 6, 2013 | 28 Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt never gets any good ideas, so it takes a particularly bad idea for me even to bother noticing. Remember, Schmalfeldt is the guy who got banned from Daily Kos for his grossly offensive writings about anal sex. Schmalfeldt is habitually dishonest, and one of his most heinous lies involved a vicious attack on Andrew Breitbart’s memory:

In July, Schmalfeldt created a Web site called “Big Damnation” which he promoted with a Twitter account called @DeadAndrew that mocked Breitbart as supposedly repenting his conservative “sins” (and denouncing his former colleagues) while suffering in Hell.
Bill Schmalfeldt is a remorseless liar and, after this vile project was exposed, Schmalfeldt deceptively used his phony “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner to promote his dishonest (anti-Breitbart) version of this controversy. In doing so, Schmalfeldt (a) defended Brett Kimberlin and (b) pretended that he wasn’t responsible for the “Big Damnation”/@DeadAndrew atrocity, as Lee Stranahan has explained.

As I said, Schmalfeldt never gets any good ideas, but this latest one is particularly bad: “Team Kimberlin” T-shirts!

For obvious reasons, no decent human being would link any site run by Bill Schmalfeldt, and I can’t help but wonder: How much do would-be members of “Team Kimberlin” know about the man with whom they would be associating themselves by buying those T-shirts?

Brett Kimberlin, the “Speedway Bomber” — what do they know about him? Do they know about Vietnam veteran Carl DeLong, whose leg got blown off by one of Kimberlin’s bombs? And do those “Team Kimberlin” members know about the little girl whose grandmother got shot to death in what investigators believed was a murder-for-hire plot?

“For three consecutive summers, 1974 through 1976, they took vacations of a week or longer in Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii. Sandi couldn’t get time off from work, so on these summer trips it was just the two of them — Brett and Jessica.
“Eyebrows levitated. A drug-dealing colleague had memories of conversations with Kimberlin that struck him as odd: ‘We’d see a girl, who was pubescent or prepubescent, and Brett would get this smile and say, “Hey, what do you think? Isn’t she great?” It made me very uncomfortable.’ Another recalled Kimberlin introducing Jessica as ‘my girlfriend,’ and if irony was intended, it was too subtle to register. To a coworker . . . Sandi confided that Kimberlin was ‘grooming Jessica to be his wife.’ To another, Sandi explained that although Kimberlin’s relationship with Jessica was chaste, he intended ‘to wait for her and would marry her.’”
— Mark Singer, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, Page 78

There’s just so much to learn about Brett Kimberlin:

As thoroughly despicable as Brett Kimberlin is, it takes an especially depraved character to admire Brett Kimberlin.

And few characters are more depraved than Bill Schmalfeldt.

UPDATE: Schmalfeldt would be easier to hate, if he weren’t so hopelessly stupid that you almost feel sorry for him:

Almost, I said . . .

UPDATE II: Well, if Che Guevara gets a T-shirt . . .

UPDATE III: Further scrutiny of the photo in which Schmalfeldt appears to brandish an AR-15 reveals that the gun is, in fact, a toy.

UPDATE IV: OK, so Schmalfeldt’s been all up in my timeline on Twitter this morning, accusing me of “libel” and insisting that indeed he was brandishing a genuine AR-15 rifle in that photo he posted to the Internet. Therefore, I apologize for my mistake in correcting what I previously thought was a mistake, and hereby correct the record by stating that Bill Schmalfeldt is in possession of a semi-automatic weapon with a high-capacity magazine and, probably, lots of ammunition.

Also, he’s crazy as hell. But there’s never been any doubt about that.




 

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


 

Category: Bill Schmalfeldt, The Kimberlin Files

FMJRA 2.0: Main Sequence

Posted on | April 6, 2013 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Teaching by Example

Why Did Those Racist Crackers at CNN Keep Roland Martin From Being a Star?

#SC01 UPDATE: Mark Sanford Cites His Vote for DOMA in Local TV Roundtable

Bostic Campaign ‘Surging’ Before Runoff?

Will Folks: ‘My Sacred Honor Requires Me to Endorse DCCC Fundraising Poster Boy’

FMJRA 2.0: No Bicycles

Sometimes, It Really Matters

The Final Push in South Carolina: Candidate Showdown at Aunt Chilada’s

LIVE AT FIVE: 04.02.13

Fear and Loathing in the Lowcountry UPDATE: Trail Hiker Wins GOP Runoff

LIVE AT FIVE: 04.03.13

Illinois Family Institute ‘Hate Group’; Racist Murder Gang, Not So Much

My Thing, Your Thing, Our Thing UPDATE: Apparently, It’s #WAR

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 04.04.13

Amanda Marcotte: So Dangerously Crazy, Even Conor Friedersdorf Fears Her Now

‘Undocumented Workers’: Dating Underaged Girls Americans Won’t Date

Teen Sex News: Federal Judge Orders ‘Morning After’ Pills for Underage Girls

Did SiteMeter Commit Suicide?
UPDATE: It’s Working Again, But Unfortunately, My Traffic Sucks

Classic: Anti-Gun Pennsylvania Mayor Drunkenly Seeks Oral Sex — at Gunpoint

Top linker this week was The (Perhaps Slightly Less) Lonely Conservative, with seven links. Nobody else came even remotely close. ;_;

Deadline for submitting links to next week’s FMJRA is Friday, April 12.

Category: FMJRA Award

‘Billions and Billions and Billions’: Biden Has No Comment on Fisker Failure

Posted on | April 6, 2013 | 15 Comments

“This is seed money that will return back to the American consumer in billions and billions and billions of dollars of good new jobs.”
— Joe Biden, Oct. 27, 2009

“With the help of UAW lobbying efforts for advanced vehicle manufacturing and federal dollars, the plant will become a production facility for Fisker Automotive, a new American car company that plans to produce 100,000 electric hybrid vehicles per year by 2014.
“GM’s former Wilmington [Delaware] assembly plant was selected for its primary global production facility based on its size, production capacity, access to shipping ports and rail lines, and skilled workforce.”
— United Auto Workers, February 2010

“Once again, the American public lost when the Obama administration attempted to pick ‘winners and losers’ in the free market. Today the electric car company Fisker Automotive, which received nearly $200 million in taxpayer money, is laying off three-fourths of its U.S. workers.”
— Sarah Palin, April 5, 2013

When Democrats piss away taxpayer money on useless boondoggles, they always do so while proclaiming their noble intentions, and the credit they get for their good intentions is sufficient to excuse their failures in the eyes of media stooges who consider it a career duty to help elect Democrats. It was therefore a rare moment in October 2011 when ABC News reported that Fisker — the company that Biden declared would bring automaking jobs back to Delaware — had instead pocketed its taxpayer-subsidized federal loans and was building cars in Finland:

But two years after the loan was announced, the company’s manufacturing jobs are still limited to the assembly of the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car in Finland.
“There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle,” the car company’s founder and namesake told ABC News. “They don’t exist here.” . . .
Fisker Automotive, backed by a powerhouse venture capital firm whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore, predicts it will eventually be churning out tens of thousands of electric sports sedans at the shuttered GM factory it bought in Delaware.

Friday, we got the inevitable denouement:

Green Jobs: Taxpayer-Funded Fisker
Will Lay Off 75% of Workforce

Really, this is a drop in the bucket, compared to the “punch to the gut” unemployment situation, for the simple reason that Fisker never employed many Americans: Its U.S. workforce was only 200 people, of whom 160 got laid off Friday.

Twitchy is on the story, as are William Teach at Right Wing News, Rick Moran at American Thinker, Paul Swansen at Liberty News and the Washington Free Beacon. Yet when we consider the laudatory media fanfare that accompanied Biden’s 2009 promise of “billions and billions and billions of dollars of good new jobs” for his UAW buddies in Delaware, it’s strange to notice how the usual suspects of liberal journalism show no interest in following up on the story. Has anyone in the White House press corps bothered asking the obvious question?

Not that Joe Biden could actually answer any such questions — the man is a complete ignoramus about economics — but why won’t the media at least ask these questions, and get his stupid self-serving excuses on the record? Well, heaven forbid that the media should ever be honest enough to acknowledge that Sarah Palin was right . . .

 

Category: Economics, Environmentalism, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin

World’s Youngest Blogger: YEAH!

Posted on | April 6, 2013 | 11 Comments

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

If Obama Has Lost Garance …

Posted on | April 6, 2013 | 27 Comments

Garance Franke-Ruta is a serious lefty writer, and also a friend of mine, and she gets all critical theory in analyzing President Obama’s declaration that Kamala Harris is the “best-looking attorney general,” saying that the president’s error was “in introducing an observation from the system of beauty into a forum that was about the system of power.”

As a journalist, I must note that Obama’s remark was factually inaccurate: Pam Bondi is much better-looking than Harris.

Permit me also to observe that the widespread outrage over the president’s compliment could be interpreted as further proof of Rush Limbaugh’s Undeniable Truth of Life #24: “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.”

This great truth has been misunderstood as “sexist” or “misogynistic,” an accusation that is only true under the definition of those terms as describing any man who disagrees with a feminist.

Is life unfair to unattractive women? Yes. No one can argue with that. But life is also unfair to short guys — studies show that taller men have higher incomes, so that their competitive advantage in the Darwinian mating pool yields compound interest: Women prefer taller men and richer men, and the fact that taller men are also generally richer . . . well, unfair, eh?

Alas, the Marxoid practitioners of critical theory have shown little interest in the grievances of runts, even as the patriarchal oppression of women has spawned an entire industry: Women’s Studies departments at universities, a vast library of feminist literature, and terroristic militants who enforce a de facto policy of excluding from public life anyone who questions the basic premises of feminism.

Compelling critics into fearful silence is, after all, why the coven of witches at Harvard insisted on destroying Larry Summers — to make of him a scarecrow example, to warn others that any speculation about “innate differences” between men and women will not be tolerated in the corridors of elite academia, where young geniuses are indoctrinated to accept without question the egalitarian dogma of the One True Faith.

In this environment — one in which the slightest skepticism toward the One True Faith is viewed as heresy — even the President of the United States can be compelled to apologize for what was intended as a jocular compliment.

Well, I could write thousands of words about this and not finish, but it’s not yet National Offend a Feminist Week (which this year will be May 6-12). However, I would like to tell a brief story to help explain Garance Franke-Ruta’s grievance.

Last Monday, I covered a candidate forum in Hilton Head, S.C., featuring Mark Sanford and Curtis Bostic. The forum was held at a restaurant, Aunt Chilada’s. When it was over,  I decided to have lunch at the bar. There were three blue-collar workers, employees of an industrial air-conditioning contractor, also having lunch at the bar.

These guys were flirting with the young barmaid — “chatting her up,” as the Brits would say — and the barmaid didn’t seem to mind in the least. She bantered with the guys, volunteering the fact that she was a college student who also worked nights at another bar, and suggesting they stop by to see her there, too. The barmaid didn’t impress me as particularly beautiful. She was, however, young and slender and, for a bunch of guys who spend their days with a bunch of other guys sweating on construction sites to install HVAC systems, the chance to talk to this college-age girl who, working for tips, had an obvious incentive to be friendly, was not a chance to be missed.

Were those guys “sexist”? Were they engaged in harassment? Was this what lawyers would call a hostile work environment?

Bullshit.

It was just guys being guys — authentic, normal, natural — and if the barmaid wasn’t offended by their attentions, why should anyone else be offended on her behalf?

Feminists don’t generally inhabit the milieu of barmaids and blue-collar guys. Feminism flourishes in the white-collar world of office life, and especially in the world of intellectuals, the only place such a War Against Human Nature can avoid contact with the stubborn realities of life.

Garance Franke-Ruta is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, not a would-be school teacher working as a barmaid to pay her way through state university. Like all intellectuals — and certainly, any political journalist qualifies as an intellectual to some degree, under Friedrich Hayek’s definition of that term — Garance expects to be judged by the quality of her work, and is offended by the idea that “the system of beauty” might intrude itself into her sphere of activity.

But it inevitably does, doesn’t it?

Even in the world of progressive journalism — yea, verily, even among feminists themselves — a certain career premium is afforded to the pretty “lipstick feminist,” the telegenic “It Girl” who can manage to be sexy even while she’s denouncing the Damned Misogynistic Patriarchy.

Can you say “Naomi Wolf,” boys and girls? It certainly did not hinder her career as a feminist intellectual to be green-eyed and dimpled, and there are many other progressive females who have learned that good looks can be advantageous to their advancement as feminist spokespersons. And I suppose there are scores of highly qualified left-wing women intellectuals who watch MSNBC every day and see Krystal Ball making an idiot of herself and wonder, “What’s she got that I ain’t got?”

Well, a six-figure salary at MSNBC, for starters.

And if you don’t understand why feminism can never rid the world of that kind of blatant unfairness, ladies, you obviously haven’t been paying enough attention to what Rush Limbaugh has been trying to explain to you all these years.

Feminist are so cute when they’re angry. And they’re always angry.

 

Category: Barack Obama, Feminism, Intellectuals

Long Overdue Brutal Honesty

Posted on | April 5, 2013 | 14 Comments

Some helpful background:

James Lohr, who has the words “Hard” and “Luck” tattooed where his eyebrows would be, was taken into custody early Friday in Colorado Springs. He was wanted for questioning in the slaying of Department of Corrections Director Tom Clements. . . .
Lohr has been wanted in Las Animas County in southeastern Colorado. He was arrested for violating a protection order in Trinidad on Dec. 1, 2012, after police found that he’d been drinking with friends at a tattoo shop. According to court documents, drinking was a violation of a protective order against him, and he was arrested. Lohr then failed to appear in court in that case Feb. 20, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. . .
Lohr has a criminal record going back to 1992. In 1996, after he pleaded guilty to burglarizing a home, court records show he was ordered to have no contact with his estranged wife after she told police he repeatedly broke into her home and stole items to pawn.
In 2006, Lohr was charged with burglary with a weapon and assault causing serious bodily injury. Court records show those charged were dismissed because of a lack of evidence.

Burglary and assault and violating parole are not “hard luck.”

Also, getting tattoos on your face? That’s not “hard luck,” either, unless you attribute your hopeless stupidity to “hard luck.”

Next time someone expects you to feel sorry for criminals — as victims of society — just keep this idiot in mind.

 

Category: Crime
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