The Other McCain

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

Vote Democrat! ‘Your Slave-Holding, Murdering, Adulterous, Baby-Raping, Incestuous, Snaggle-Toothed, Backward-A**ed, Inbreed, Imported Criminal-Minded Kin Folk’

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 26 Comments

A guy named Eddie Maxwell e-mailed Alabama state legislators to express his concern for preserving the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. It was an open-CC e-mail, and what ensued was a flaming open-CC’d response by Alabama state Rep. Joseph Mitchell, whose colleagues and constituents were shocked by the venomous hostility.

Uh, no comment from Sean Penn’s son.

Category: Alabama, Democrats, Racism

The Fanatic Disciples of Equality

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 19 Comments

The top 13 threads this morning at Memeorandum are about the Supreme Court arguments over same-sex marriage — the latest items being by Dana Milbank and Megan McArdle — and it’s tedious beyond words simply because it’s so far above our pay-grade.

This is a pageant of the elite. Once the Nine Robed Ones agreed to hear these cases, anything that you or I might think about the subject ceased to matter. The Supreme Court has in recent decades become the antithesis of democracy, the weapon employed by those who, unwilling to work patiently to change law by the usual processes, instead seek to have their opponents’ views ruled unconstitutional.

A 5-4 decision = “shut up.”

What’s a blogger to do? It’s not as if anything I write here will be footnoted in the court’s ruling. My opinion is entirely moot, as is yours.

We could examine the bogus presumption of superior wisdom invested in the Supreme Court, the idea that the justices are more enlightened than the rest of us, simply by their tenure on the bench. But this is easily disproven, merely by citing the absurd pretzel logic of Justice William Douglas’s infamous 1965 argument in Griswold:

In other words, the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion. . . .
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen.

Any honest person can see that Justice Douglas began with the object of achieving a desired result (i.e., nullifying Connecticut’s law restricting contraceptives) and then went rooting around in court precedents to improvise some justification for this conclusion. A similar process was at work in 2003 when Justice Anthony Kennedy decided to strike down the Texas sodomy law, and improvised this ridiculous gibberish:

The Nation’s laws and traditions in the past half century are most relevant here. They show an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.

Ah, yes — the “emerging awareness” principle, forever enshrined in our hearts, right next to the “penumbras, formed by emanations,” as the defining quality of what America is all about. For these intellectual abstractions, patriots marched bleeding through the snow at Trenton.

We are too accustomed to this decadent age described by Yeats:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

What the intensely passionate desire is that the Nine Robed Ones will overturn “Prop 8,” the California referendum passed by a narrow majority in 2008. I wrote about the reaction that year:

Taking to the streets in furious indignation, activists created an “enemies list” of those who had contributed to support the measure, targeting them for boycotts and protests.
The elderly co-owner of a Mexican restaurant, who had given $100  to support the referendum, was  driven to tears as she confronted “60 members of Los Angeles’ LGBT community” who demanded an apology and an equal contribution to a proposed effort to repeal the referendum. . . .
One activist who helped compile the enemies list told Time magazine: “My goal was to make it socially  unacceptable to give huge amounts of money to take away the rights of one particular group, a minority group.” Of course, the  restaurant owner’s $100 contribution to the “Yes on 8” cause was not “huge,” but the principle is the same.
As the California activists spewed their fury — allegedly vandalizing Mormon temples, making terroristic threats toward Catholics, and hurling racial epithets at African-Americans (who voted 3-to-1 in favor of Prop 8, according to exit polls) — their vitriolic rage highlighted how the progressive rhetoric of “rights” undermines and destabilizes political consensus. . . .

You can read the rest at The American Spectator, but it’s not as if it matters. Justice Kennedy will decide what result he wants and then gin up an argument to justify that 5-4 decision and, whatever the result may be, the fanatic disciples of equality will continue using terroristic threats to intimidate all who might disagree with them.

 

Category: Supreme Court

Can the Shoe Leather Fund Send Me to South Carolina? O, Ye of Little Faith!

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 21 Comments

OK, I never heard the name “Curtis Bostic” until last week, when he finished second to Mark Sanford in the South Carolina 1st District primary. Now, Bostic has been endorsed by Rick Santorum and polls show Bostic doing better than Sanford against Stephen Colbert’s sister.

So it’s obviously time for a road trip and, with the GOP runoff next Tuesday, it looks like I’ll spend Easter weekend in South Carolina.

This will be the first road trip in my new role as Editor in Chief of ViralRead, which is kind of appropriate in that I first met Ali Akbar during the now-legendary NY-23 Doug Hoffman campaign that started this whole gonzo campaign-trail trip that has since taken me as far as Alaska, to provide on-the-scene coverage. And so Ali double-dog dared me: He’s created a special ViralRead shoe-leather account and challenged me to raise $1,000 to cover this trip.

Can our readers do it? I have no doubt.

There have been times of doubt these past five years. The morning I left for Alaska in 2010 — on a one-way ticket, counting on readers to make sure I got home — my wife was in tears. But I told her, “This is what the readers are paying for, honey. It’s show time.”

A few days later, I was watching Todd Palin read stories to Trig in their living room in Wasilla. Readers were amazed — heck, my wife was amazed — but the thing that amazes me is that people don’t believe miracles can happen. Our entire lives are miraculous, if you think about it, and our doubt is actually ingratitude for God’s many blessings.

Think about this: On July 1, 1863, my great-grandfather was in the opening fight at Gettysburg. An illiterate farmboy, a private in the 13th Alabama, he was captured when the Union’s Iron Brigade turned the right flank of Archer’s brigade just east of Willoughby Run. Pvt. Winston Wood Bolt spent the next two years as a prisoner of war in Fort Delaware, where the inmates ate rats to survive. But if he had not been captured, I might not be here.

Two days after my great-grandfather was captured, the 13th Alabama, as part of Pettigrew’s Division, took part in what became known as Pickett’s Charge. The regiment went over the wall at Cemetery Ridge and suffered devastating casualties in that conflict.

A miracle, you see? And my own father — grandson of Private Bolt — was wounded within an inch of his life by German shrapnel while fighting the Nazis in France. The rest of his life, he bore that scar on the back of his neck, and you could see that if the shrapnel had penetrated another inch, he would have died that day in 1944, but when they got him to the field hospital, the medic told him, “You got a million-dollar wound, Mack.” It wasn’t bad enough to kill or permanently maim him, but he wouldn’t have to go back into combat again.

If my very existence is a miracle, why should I ever doubt that, if there is work for me to do in South Carolina this Easter weekend, our readers will make it happen? There are signs and omens, my friends. This runoff in South Carolina is important, or I never would have noticed it. And if Ali doubts you can send me there, let him doubt no more.

Contribute what you can — $5, $10, $25, whatever you can afford — and help make another miracle happen. This gonzo experiment in reader-supported journalism has only just begun, and the five most important words in the English language are still . . .

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

Category: Shoe Leather Fund, South Carolina

The Power of Prejudice

Posted on | March 26, 2013 | 20 Comments

Rule One of “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog” is shameless blogwhoring. Think of it as an existential philosophy: In the New Media environment, that which is not promoted does not exist.

“I blogwhore, therefore I am.”

So, after I was the first to report Rick Santorum’s endorsement of Curtis Bostic in South Carolina, I sent out an e-mail promoting the exclusive to several friends and was quite taken aback when one friend replied with a rant informing me that “gay marriage is going to happen,” that opponents “are on the wrong side of history”and that Republicans will “never win again until they move the f–k on.”

It was like the Monty Python “Argument Clinic” sketch. It was shocking because the article I sent hadn’t said a word about same-sex marriage. I was reporting the news, not pushing an opinion. From the standpoint of pure blogwhoring, my friend could hate Rick Santorum’s guts and be voting for Elizabeth Colbert Busch. Just link me, damn it.

The opinion-driven way of thinking is another existential reality of the New Media age. Because we all have the “means of production” at our fingertips, there is a tendency to make our engagement with the online world a function of our own personal preferences: We consume only what interests us or what we find agreeable, and our production of online content is geared toward obtaining hegemony for our worldview.

In fact — and if you haven’t noticed this, you’re not paying close enough attention — we increasingly treat sources of information as if we were choosing them as our personal companions. The question that determines our choices is not whether someone reports useful facts or provides pleasurable reading, but whether we like them, whether we view them as “good” people, as being “on our side.”

The correct word for this is prejudice.

Why did my friend react instantaneously to my e-mail about Santorum’s endorsement with a rant about gay marriage? Why did my friend think I was in need of a lecture about this? I don’t know, but it struck me as evidence of a prejudiced attitude.

My own prejudice has always been in favor of underdogs. There is nothing like an upset — David slays Goliath, FGCU makes the “Sweet 16” — to make for a great story. So on the morning after the March 19 South Carolina primary, I took a look at the result and said, “Hey, maybe this Bostic guy could pull off a surprise.” It’s a long-odds proposition, but the thing about a situation like this is that if you thought about the odds against it, you would never bother paying attention at all. And I try to keep in mind that when Whittaker Chambers quit the Communist Party and became a conservative, he thought he was joining the losing side.

Oh, yeah — almost forgot — the latest poll out of South Carolina shows Curtis Bostic doing better than Sanford against the Democrat.

But I’m prejudiced, remember?

UPDATE: This moring, I found myself compelled by circumstance to link the infamous Will Folks. Now? I find myself linked by Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post, whose cheerleading for Mitt Romney in the 2012 primary campaign didn’t endear her to many conservatives. This shows the impermanence of political alliances and also human sacrifice! dogs and cats living together! mass hysteria!

 

Excepting only Mardi Gras in New Orleans, there is nothing in this world wilder than a South Carolina Republican primary.

 

Category: Blogging

‘We Record What Is to All Known’

Posted on | March 26, 2013 | 36 Comments

The Fall of Man (or, Adam and Eve), Hendrick Goltzius, 1616 (detail)

“The true origin of marriage, venerable brothers, is well known to all. Though revilers of the Christian faith refuse to acknowledge the never-interrupted doctrine of the Church on this subject, and have long striven to destroy the testimony of all nations and of all times, they have nevertheless failed not only to quench the powerful light of truth, but even to lessen it. We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. God thus, in His most far-reaching foresight, decreed that this husband and wife should be the natural beginning of the human race, from whom it might be propagated and preserved by an unfailing fruitfulness throughout all futurity of time. And this union of man and woman, that it might answer more fittingly to the infinite wise counsels of God, even from the beginning manifested chiefly two most excellent properties — deeply sealed, as it were, and signed upon it — namely, unity and perpetuity. From the Gospel we see clearly that this doctrine was declared and openly confirmed by the divine authority of Jesus Christ. He bore witness to the Jews and to His Apostles that marriage, from its institution, should exist between two only, that is, between one man and one woman; that of two they are made, so to say, one flesh; and that the marriage bond is by the will of God so closely and strongly made fast that no man may dissolve it or render it asunder. ‘For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.'”
— Pope Leo XIII, “On Christian Marriage,” 1880

 

Category: Family, Marriage, Religion

South Carolina ‘Cash Money’ Loyalty

Posted on | March 26, 2013 | 22 Comments

OK, we all remember Will Folks, right? The guy who claimed he had an affair with Nikki Haley? The guy is a lowdown polecat, which is another way of saying he’s a South Carolina GOP consultant — or, at least, he used to be one, although his anti-Haley smear may have made him too radioactive even by South Carolina standards.

Payback is hell, as they say, and apparently “Sic Willie” decided to get himself some payback against the Mark Sanford campaign last month:

Former S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford has retained longtime “Republican in Name Only” Wesley Donehue to advise him in the crowded GOP primary for the Palmetto State’s first congressional district. . . .
Last September (a mere five months ago) Donehue offered a graphic description of Sanford at college GOP forum.
“Mark Sanford is a piece of human shit,” the strategist told roughly a hundred college Republicans on the campus of the University of South Carolina. . . .
Loyalty in South Carolina politics is based on one thing: Cash money. That means Donehue will call anybody anything if you pay him enough money.

So if you’re for Mark Bostic in the South Carolina runoff — and certainly, I believe you should be for Bostic — then you can understand why I felt obliged to do what I swore I’d never do, namely link that lowdown polecat Will Folks. It’s a tough world down there in South Carolina politics, as my old buddy Jeff Quinton could explain at length.

Speaking of explaining at length, Dana Loesch was able to express her mystification at the Mark Sanford revival in 140 characters or less, but it took me more than 800 words:

Democrats were exultant when former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford finished atop last week’s Republican primary in a special election to fill the 1st District congressional seat vacated by Tim Scott’s appointment to the Senate. In a 16-candidate GOP field, Sanford got 37 percent, nearly three times the vote of his nearest rival, former Charleston County council member Curtis Bostic. Sanford’s advantages are even larger than the vote totals would suggest: He reportedly has a 15-to-1 campaign cash edge over Bostic and the former two-term governor is almost infinitely ahead in terms of what political strategists call “name recognition.”
Alas, name recognition is a two-edged sword for Sanford, who is perhaps best known for an embarrassment that made the phrase “hiking the Appalachian Trail” a smutty double-entendre in 2009. One late-June weekend that year — the weekend of Father’s Day, to be exact — the governor’s whereabouts became a national mystery. Neither his family nor his staff nor South Carolina law enforcement could find Sanford, whose name had been bandied about as a possible 2012 Republican presidential contender. Before search parties could be sent to find the allegedly missing hiker, however, Sanford flew back from Argentina to South Carolina and held one of the most surreal press conferences in political history. He told how a “remarkable friendship” with a woman he met in Argentina a year earlier had “sparked into something more than that.” He spoke of “trying to get my heart right” and said he had “spent the past five days of my life crying in Argentina.” Sanford’s description of Maria Belen Chapur as his “soul mate” was, as Daily Caller columnist Yates Walker said, “possibly the most sociopathic moment ever captured on live television.”
Sanford was censured by the state legislature, his wife divorced him, and last year he announced his engagement to his Argentine soul mate. His supporters use the word “redemption” to describe the former governor’s potential comeback, but the reaction of other Republicans could best be described as Fear and Loathing. . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator. Did I mention Joe Biden will be campaigning for the Democrat? The going has gotten weird again, and I’ve got a feeling it’s about time for the weird to go pro.




 

 


Category: Election, Fear. Loathing., South Carolina

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.26.13

Posted on | March 26, 2013 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Obama Pushes Immigration Law

Smugness personified

Smugness personified

Expects debate next month on “comprehensive, sensible” reform


Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Michigan Affirmative Action Case
Michigan’s constitutional amendment banning affirmative action in college admissions previously struck down by 6th Circuit


Central African Republic’s President Flees To Cameroon
Capital overrun by rebels; thirteen South African soldiers killed



POLITICS
Red State Democrat Tim Johnson Joins Senate Exodus, Won’t Run Again In 2014

Senate Banking Committee head Tim Johnson (D-SD)

Senate Banking Committee head Tim Johnson (D-SD)

Never fully recovered from 2006 cerebral hemorrhage; seat expected to fall to GOP

Michele Bachmann Faces Congressional Ethics Probe


Captured Jihadi Reveals Al Qaeda Plans

Rahm Emanuel Defends Decision To Close 54 Chicago Schools

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Reportedly Considering Formation Of Political Group

U.S. Jails Chicom Engineer For Six Years; Passed Military Secrets To PRC

Police: Suicide Seen In Mississippi Lawmaker’s Death (Video)

Pennsylvania Sheriff Charged Over Alleged Threats

Biden’s Weekend Flights To Delaware Costing Taxpayers Plenty

Craft Brewers Have Good Day In Texas Senate



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Continues To Rise Following Cyprus Bailout Deal: NYMEX $94.80, Brent $108.13
Asian Shares, Euro Spooked By Cyprus Bailout Details
Soda Sales Lose Their Fizz In 2012; Dr. Pepper Least Affected
Investors Ask To Withdraw From Chesapeake Bond Litigation
SEC Approves NASDAQ’s $62 Million Facebook Payout
Boeing Hails Successful Dreamliner Test Flight
Atlantic City’s Revel Casino Files For Bankruptcy
Worries Over Wegman’s In Boston
Raytheon To Lay Off 200
Google Taps “White Spaces” For Broadband In South Africa
T-Mobile’s New Contractless Data Plans Debunked
Apple Buys Indoor GPS Specialist
Sony Announces More Indie Partnerships, “Blacklight: Retribution” and “Primal Carnage” For PS4
The Promise And Limits Of Google’s “Data Liberation Front”
LinkedIn’s Search Updates Bring It Closer To Facebook, Google+
Facebook Rolls Out Replies And Threaded Comments On Page Posts And Popular Profiles
PRC State Media Bashes Apple
Steve Jobs’ Life Gets The Manga Treatment



SPORTS
Denny Hamlin Has Compression Fracture In Lower Back After Last-Lap Crash

Logano, Busch and Hamlin shortly before the crash

Logano, Busch and Hamlin shortly before the crash

Auto Club 400 ends with Hamlin in an ambulance

Devils Lose To Senators In Shootout

Hot Hornets Halt Denver’s 15-Game Run

Brewers Sign Kyle Lohse To Three-Year/$33 Million Deal

Jazz Tunes Up Against The Sixers

Alyssa Thomas Leads Terps Past Spartans

Surging Wild Topple Stars 7-4

Wall Scores 47 To Lead Depleted Wizards To Win

Rodriguez, Romero, And The Nationals’ Bullpen Shuffle



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
No Doubt, They’re Dating!

Not all the heat on the court

Not all the heat on the court

Hayden Panettiere smooches ex-BF Wladimir Klitschko at the Heat-Bobcats game

Lindsay Lohan Parties Before Court-Ordered Rehab

Matt Lauer/Ann Curry “Today Show” Fallout Was Personal

Deadline Lifts The Shell Off The Ninja Turtles

Candace Bushnell Hits Back After Sarah Jessica Parker Slams “Carrie Diaries”

Eva Mendes Wants Paparazzi Protection For Dogs – Hers And Ryan Gosling’s, Anyway

James Franco’s Neighbors Pissed – He’s A Trashy Nuisance

Ashley Greene Condo Fire Ruled Accidental

Liam Hemsworth Spotted At Miley Cyrus’ House After Four-Week Separation

MTV Music Awards Move To Brooklyn

Kate Upton: I’d Love To Go To The Prom, But…



FOREIGNERS
Five Afghan Police, Eight Jihadis Killed In Suicide Bomb Attack
Peng Liyuan: New First Lady Of Fashion?
Police Say Berezovsky Died By Hanging, No Sign Of Struggle
FedEx Delivers Giant Pandas To Toronto
Egyptian Prosecutor Orders Arrest Of Activists For Inciting Friday Riot At Muslim Brotherhood HQ
Vietnam Accuses PRC Over Paracel Islands Trawler Attack
Earthquake Hits Guatemala City; No Reports Of Damage Or Death After 6.2 Quake
Aussies To Withdraw Most Of Their Troops From Afghanistan
Egypt To Extradite Qaddafi-Era Officials To Libya
Britain’s Top Spy Steps Down After Just Six Years Atop MI5
Oman Grants Asylum To Gaddafi Family



BLOGS & STUFF
AmSpecBlog: Anthony Lewis, RIP
NewsBusters: Rachel Maddow Thinks Obama Avoids MSNBC Because He’ll Get Asked Tough Questions
Allahpundit: Mark Warner Suddenly Discovers He’s Pro-Gay Marriage Too
WSJ: Marriage And The Supreme Court
Weasel Zippers: Rand Paul, Mike Lee, And Ted Cruz Tell Reid They’ll Filibuster Any New Gun Control Legislation
Power Line: Why Has Obama Turned His Back On Iraq?
Michael Walsh: The Obama Era
Erika Johnsen: Oh, Joy – Obama Creates Five New National Monuments
Robert Costa: Scott Walker Writing Book With Former Bush Adviser
Emily Miller: Mayor Bloomberg’s Irresponsible Gun Attack Ads
Gateway Pundit: The “Responsible” Man In Bloomberg’s Anti-Gun Ad Has Finger On Trigger, Never Shot A Gun In His Life
Lonely Conservative: nanny Bloomberg Insists Government Has The Right To Infringe On Your Freedoms
Jawa Report: Americans Should Surrender Freedoms When Government Infringes
The Blaze: MSNBC President Mocked Keith Olbermann And His Pants
Maggie’s Farm: Three Cheers For The Nanny State
Legal Insurrection: Nanny Statist Of Mind
Extrano’s Alley: Gropers Buying Another 360,000 Rounds
Breitbart: Obama Kids Vacationing At Bahamas Atlantis Resort
Scared Monkeys: Mississippi State Rep. Jessica Upshaw Believed To Have Committed Suicide


Got a link you think I’d like? E-mail me.


Category: Live at Five

Headline Contrast

Posted on | March 25, 2013 | 18 Comments

DHS To Buy 360,000 More Rounds
of Hollow Point Ammunition

 

NYC Mayor Bloomberg: Government has
right to ‘infringe on your freedom’

They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney, etc.

 

Category: Uncategorized
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