The Other McCain

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

Mr. Nobel Peace Prize Works His Magic: Israel Now at War With Syria?

Posted on | March 24, 2013 | 17 Comments

All it took was an Obama trip to the Mideast, and suddenly everything seems to be flying completely sideways:

Reuters is reporting that Israel has fired upon and destroyed a machine gun position in the Golan Heights. It is unclear at this moment whether this is merely spillover from the Syrian civil war or whether this is a new front opening for Israel in the middle east.
Israeli Spokesman Ofir Gendelman stated on his Twitter page, Israeli forces “destroyed a Syrian machine gun nest that fired twice in the last 24 hours on Israeli patrols operating to safeguard the border.”

Meanwhile, there are confused and conflicting reports as to whether Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has been shot by an Iranian bodyguard.

UPDATE: Erik Ortiz of the New York Daily News:

Online reports of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s death appeared greatly exaggerated Sunday.
Arab media said Assad was purportedly shot by one of his Iranian bodyguards Saturday night and was in serious condition.
He was supposedly taken to Al-Shami Hospital in Damascus, where surrounding roads were closed off.
Israel News One’s website even reported that Assad had been “assassinated.”
But online updates said the Syrian leader’s shooting was false and that he  was alive and in high spirits. The conflicting reports highlight the chaos that  continues to engulf the country, which has been mired in a bloody civil war for  two years.

It’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on in this kind of situation unless you can independently confirm the reports, which I can’t.

Meanwhile, it’s hard not to notice that while Obama worked actively to encourage the overthrow of the regimes in Egypt and Libya, he’s been willing to let this situation in Syria — where Assad is essentially an Iranian puppet — linger for two years.

UPDATE II: Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard:

On Friday, President Barack Obama left Israel, after spending a couple days with the leaders of America’s closest ally in the region.
Now today, two days later, Israel has acknowledged that it fired at a military position in Syria. . . .
The sequence of events leads one to ask, what did the two leaders, Obama and Netanyahu, discuss regarding Syria when they met multiple times this last week in Jerusalem? And what did they agree to do to deal with the Syria issue?

Just another wonderful coincidence for the Lightworker.

UPDATE III: Andrew O’Shea at ViralRead is still updating on whether or not Assad has been shot and is or is not dead.

 

Category: Barack Obama, Israel, Syria

FMJRA 2.0: March Madness

Posted on | March 24, 2013 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Missing Word in RNC Report: ‘Blog’

S.C. Primary: Will Tea Party Rally Behind Curtis Bostic Against Mark Sanford?

In Defense Of BlogBash And CPAC

Sarah Palin, Phillis Schlafly, Mrs. Other Smitty, And #CPAC2013

Some People Like To Go To CPAC, But Other People Like Us We Gotta Work

The Fight Begins Now: Mid-Term 2014

FMJRA 2.0: You Belong To The City

Two Teens Found Guilty in Steubenville Rape Case; Media Malpractice Exposed

The Huffington Post Lies About Steven Crowder’s CPAC Monologue

Rule 5 Monday

In Missouri, ObamaCare Sucks Even Harder Than Military Service

Rainy Day D.C. Getaway: Did Kimberlin Send a Photo-Stalker to CPAC Blog Bash?

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 03.19.13

Like Ferris Bueller’s Sister

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.20.13

The Rush to Judgment: Is Torrington Destined to Be the Next Steubenville?

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 03.21.13

Under the New Pope’s Teaching, Should Pelosi and Biden Be Ex-Communicated?

Would Libertarians Practically Achieve
“A World Without Moral Judgments”?

VIDEO: Dana Loesch on Sequestration

Narcissism and the Self-Esteem Cult

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.22.13

Slouching Toward Cougartown

This Will Not End Well for the Donald

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (22)
  2. The Lonely Conservative (5)

Links were down this week; some will blame a CPAC hangover, others sequestration…anyway, thanks to everyone for the linkagery! Deadline for next week’s FMJRA is Good Friday, March 29.

Category: FMJRA Award

‘You Better Back It Up’: Security Guard Tasers Aggressive Woman on Video

Posted on | March 24, 2013 | 26 Comments

What led to this dispute at an Atlanta mini-mall in January, I don’t know. This video went viral and already has more than 2 million views. By the time the security guard’s camera starts rolling, two obstreperous women are hurling the “n-word” and various obscene slurs at the guard, who repeatedly warns them to leave. Finally, after one of the women physically assaults the guard, he zaps her with the taser:

Via Donald Douglas at American Power (“Ghetto Mom Tasered“) and Big Fur Hat at I Own the World (“Meanwhile, The Left’s Enemy is Anyone Trying to Keep This Culture From Spreading“). As you watch the video, notice that the guard kept trying to go back inside the mall, but returned to the entrance because these women — and their ill-mannered children — continued causing a ruckus on the sidewalk. The guard was simply trying to keep the peace, and these women wouldn’t let him. From Christian Moore and Mike Morris of the Atlanta Constitution, the shocking sequel:

The security guard who became an internet sensation after posting videos of himself fighting crime at downtown’s Metro Mall was arrested late Thursday afternoon and charged with battery.
Atlanta police officers were called to the mall near the Five Points MARTA station after Darien Long, 45, allegedly tackled a patron to the ground unprovoked. . . .
It’s been a tough week for the vigilante guard, who, before his arrest, learned he was fired, effective at month’s end.
“The party line is that they can’t afford me,” said Long, the onsite manager of the mall who became a hero to many for his no-nonsense approach to dealing with criminals. “But it’s not like I make much money.” . . .
Long will be missed by merchants including Francisca Shokane, who owns a hair salon in the mall.
“Before they hired Darien, they used to rob our customers and snatch pursues,” Shokane told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Now it is much better and safer. They don’t come in here and bother us anymore.”
Metro Mall management could not be reached for comment.

Darien Long ought to be a national hero for his one-man war against the Thug Culture. Where’s Bill Cosby when we need him?

 

Category: Crime, Culture

How Franklin Foer Fired Timothy Noah

Posted on | March 23, 2013 | 30 Comments

First, some idiot kid name Olga asks Nate Thayer to write for free. Then Matthew Yglesias buys himself a million-dollar D.C. townhouse. Now, an award-winning liberal journalist gets the ax:

On Thursday, New Republic columnist Timothy Noah received an email from editor Frank Foer asking him to meet at 2:30 pm on Friday. During the meeting, Foer told Noah that he was out of a job.
When Noah got to the New Republic’s lobby, on the way out the door, he decided to tweet the news himself: “I just got fired from @tnr. Don’t have a clue why. Anybody got a job?”
“All I got was your column isn’t a good fit for the direction the magazine is going in,” Noah told The Huffington Post shortly after.

Hmmm. “Your column isn’t a good fit.” Let’s imagine what Franklin Foer would have said if he had really been honest with Noah:

Dude, you’re 54 years old. Fifty f–king four, an aging Boomer with a loyal readership of aging Boomers, and that’s not where the action is these days, unless we want our advertising base to be mainly AARP, reverse mortages and Super Beta Prostate. Which we don’t, for obvious reasons. . . .
For crying out loud, Marty sold us to a 29-year-old multimillionaire. Think about that, OK?
Do you think Chris gives a damn about your Hillman Award? And so what, you wrote a book? About income inequality — as if Mister Facebook Wonder Boy is losing sleep over that.
What? . . . Well, yeah, but “quality” is in the eye of the beholder, really. Nowadays, it’s all about the clicks, Tim.
I’ve seen the analytics and, quite frankly, you’re not pulling your weight. Page-views, Facebook “likes,” re-Tweets — pick a metric, doesn’t matter. BuzzFeed gets more hits on a cute kitty video than most of your stuff gets.
Chris wants more hip, sexy content. He uses that word a lot, “sexy.” There’s basically two kinds of writing for him: “sexy” and “sucks.” And I’m not saying your stuff sucks, Tim, but it’s not sexy. I mean, when did you ever have a column go viral on Reddit, huh? When did any college kid ever re-Tweet you with an “LOL”? . . .
Sure, sure. I know you can try harder, Tim, but your salary is just too high for what we get in return, traffic-wise. I’ve got kids e-mailing me stuff every day, begging me to publish their stuff for free. These kids are desperate — liberal arts degrees from good schools, tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, working part-time at Starbucks and just trying to catch a break.
Why should I keep paying you big bucks for un-sexy columns when these kids write pretty good for free? Besides, you’ve got less than 6,000 Twitter followers, Tim, and some of these kids have 10,000 or more, so they can really drive the hits. And you’ve got, what? Fourteen hundred Facebook friends? There are high school kids with twice that.
It’s a business, Tim. Not personal. Chris doesn’t want to be the bad cop, so it’s my job to cut you loose. And trust me, you won’t be the last. There’s way too much un-sexy around here.

That’s what Franklin Foer would have said, if he were honest. But guys like that don’t get paid to be honest, do they?

 

Category: Journalism

The 1% Progressive Bloggers Club and the Bourgeois Dialectic of Comrade Yglesias

Posted on | March 23, 2013 | 55 Comments

Friend of the proletariat Matthew Yglesias (Photo: Matt Roth)

The news that left-wing blogger employee of Slate magazine Matthew Yglesias has purchased a $1.2-million townhouse in D.C.’s Logan Circle neighborhood has produced much chortling. Yglesias, after all, mocked property rights as the “myth of ownership.” Andy at AOSHQ says:

So, party at Matty’s this weekend? I mean, I’m sure he won’t mind if we crash the joint, what with that myth of owning private property and all.

Twitchy enjoys the rich irony, but before the “Occupy Yglesias” movement encamps on his patio — “a converted Victorian rowhouse, the unit has original exposed-brick walls and a private patio” — let’s observe a couple of key points:

  1. Yglesias is entitled — He is, after all, a graduate of the Upper East Side’s prestigious Dalton School (annual tuition, $38,710) and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University (annual tuition, $54,496), so you don’t expect him to be hustling on the Internet for nickels and dimes, do you? No, he’s a fully-credentialed member of the meritocratic elite and therefore entitled to the prestigious positions he held at The American Prospect, The Atlantic Monthly and the Soros-funded Center for American Progress before landing at The Washington Post Co.’s online loss-leader, Slate.
  2. He has his progressives defenders — Politics is a team sport, and one of Yglesias’s ideological comrades sniffs that critics are “playing ‘gotcha’ politics” (which thoughtful progressives never do, y’know) and defends the role of the intelligentsia in the struggles of the proletariat: “Yglesias can only be a hypocrite for purchasing an expensive home in a buyer’s market if you believe that class sympathies can only be extended to people in the same class as the sympathizer.”

What. Ever.

Journalism is a job, not a monastic order or a missionary crusade.

It’s ridiculous to expect writers to take a vow of poverty, even if their job requires them to pretend to believe in egalitarianism.

And certainly Yglesias isn’t stupid enough to believe that crap.

Wake the hell up, you people. Read more

Category: Blogging, Economics, Progressivism

The Other War on Women, or: It’s Not Harassment When Democrats Do It

Posted on | March 23, 2013 | 16 Comments

He “pulled a weiner”:

A state representative in Massachussetts is  being investigated after allegedly sending pictures of his genitals to a  government computer.
The investigation is ongoing and the  committee has not formally reprimanded the individual in charge, but it is being  widely reported that Democratic State Representative John Fresolo is the one  behind the scandal.
He allegedly sent ‘lascivious photos of his  privates’ to a computer at the State House, and an aide complained to the Ethics  Committee to start the investigation.
House Speaker Robert DeLeo has not confirmed  any accusations in the case except that he did say there was ‘sufficient cause’  for an investigation.
‘In order to protect the integrity of the  Ethics Committee investigation, Speaker DeLeo will have no further comment on  this matter,’ spokesman Seth Gitell said. . . .

(“You reporters need to stop asking so many questions! Can’t you see we’re busy orchestrating a cover-up here?”)

This is not [Fresolo’s] first scandal, as he has a  history of violence towards his family members that has put him in trouble with social services.
In 2005 he reportedly physically abused his  then-13-year-old daughter, and that came nearly a decade after he was arrested  for beating his then-wife in 1996. She later dropped the charges.
Blogger Michele McPhee reports that he is now on paid administrative  leave, which is allegedly angering his colleagues.
‘It’s bad enough that he pulled an Anthony  Weiner and had pictures of his penis on State House computers, but then he tried  to get his per diem pumped up. No one puts in for 220 days of commuting and with  his commute that’s a lot of money,’ a state representative told her on the  condition of anonymity.

Via Memeorandum, with more at Weasel Zippers, Gateway Pundit and The Daily Caller.

 


Category: Democrats, Massachusetts, Scandal, Sex

This Will Not End Well for the Donald

Posted on | March 22, 2013 | 44 Comments

So, the Vulgar King of Obnoxiousness decided to throw down on Twitter with Michelle Malkin, and perhaps this reminder is unnecessary:

Trump has a rather long history of hostility toward conservatives like Malkin, a New York Times bestselling author and New Media entrepreneur who created the popular Hot Air political blog as well as the innovative Twitter aggregation site Twitchy, as well as her own highly trafficked site, MichelleMalkin.com. It is highly unlikely that she will back down in her battle with Trump.

Trump is a bully who is used to pushing people around and, unfortunately, some Republicans have been willing to enable his bullying. Quite frankly, he’s one of those celebrity characters — like Geraldo “El Spitto” Rivera — whom Fox News executives tolerate because they’re good for ratings. Also (and I think I’m not the only one who sees this) there’s a kind of old-boys attitude with Bill O’Reilly in particular: Geraldo and Trump are “one of the guys,” and so the brass at Fox are apt to indulge their hateful attitudes toward Malkin. But don’t for a minute think that Malkin is  going to put up with Trump’s bullying.

 

Category: Fox News, Michelle Malkin

Slouching Toward Cougartown

Posted on | March 22, 2013 | 21 Comments

From fame to shame: NFL cheerleader (left) in her police mug shot (right)

Jeff Gurner at Viral Read reports the disturbing story of the woman who was arrested for making advances on a 12-year-old boy:

Elizabeth Leigh Garner, a former Tennessee Titans cheerleader, was indicted last week on charges of aggravated sexual battery and solicitation of a minor for child rape.
The 42 year-old denies the allegations and told police “that she was drunk that evening and that she got the boy confused with a man that was also at the residence.”
According to the Mufreesboro police report, the boy stated “she was asking him if he had ever been with a woman,” and that Garner then touched him “on the outside of his pants” and made “an attempt to take his shorts off” while offering to “perform oral sex on him.”

Well, if being drunk were a valid defense against criminal charges, there would be a lot fewer people in prison, but given the description of her actions in the police report, does anyone buy this over-the-hill NFL cheerleader’s excuse that she was “confused”?

It is routinely expected that lots of guys reading this will react by saying, “Where were these sexually aggressive NFL cheerleaders back when I was an adolescent fantasizing about them?” We are all reminded of that famous scene in Animal House where the Playboy Bunny comes flying through the kid’s window: “Thank you, God!”

Yet there are reasons why sexual fantasies — lust for things that are abnormal or taboo — are best restricted to the realm of fantasy. Sexual taboos serve a social purpose; the indulgence of what advocates of sexual liberation call “transgressive” behavior inevitably leads to trouble.

The seemingly widespread phenomenon we might call the Mary Kay LeTourneau Syndrome, of middle-aged women seeking to validate their sexual attractiveness by seducing boys, should be viewed as disturbing evidence of cultural decadence. Perhaps some “pro-sex” feminists would defend this trend as evidence of advancing equality, but if so, it is the worst sort of equality, namely a descent into utter degeneracy. (And, to do the feminists’ work for them: If men value women primarily for their sexual attractiveness, isn’t the patriarchy to blame if women feel compelled to seek validation in this perverse manner?)

On the fringes of society, we have seen those who argue that pedophilia should be understood as a valid “sexual orientation,” rather than as a dangerous perversion. We have seen such attitudes apparently embraced even among the elite, as in Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors, the tip of an academic iceberg of pro-pedophile intellectualism, or in the Columbia University professor’s “consensual adult” incestuous affair.

In a society where the Supreme Court has declared that an “emerging awareness” should govern the legal status of sexual behavior, who can say which way this awareness will further emerge? A constitutional right to donkey sex may seem far-fetched today, but there was a time when the idea of ex-NFL cheerleaders stalking boys with offers of oral sex seemed equally far-fetched. Our society has already slid far down the slippery slope, and who knows when we’ll hit rock bottom?

 

 


Category: Crime, Culture, Sex, Sports
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