The Other McCain

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

Friday News Dump: D.C. Won’t Prosecute David Gregory’s Clear Violation of Law

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 7 Comments

District of Columbia Attorney General Irvin Nathan won’t prosecute David Gregory “despite the clarity of the violation of this important law” — the city’s ban on high-capacity magazines — and as Professor Glenn Reynolds says, “you can tell how proud they are of this decision by the fact that it came out on a Friday afternoon.”

So the Network Celebrity Loophole in D.C.’s draconian gun laws is now an established principle of jurisprudence in our nation’s capital.

Category: Celebrities, Crime, NBC

NYT Has Bum Strapped To Column, Plus, Introducing: ‘The Krugmanerrand’

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

Emphasis mine:

Finally, just consider the vileness of that G.O.P. threat. If we were to hit the debt ceiling, the U.S. government would end up defaulting on many of its obligations. This would have disastrous effects on financial markets, the economy, and our standing in the world. Yet Republicans are threatening to trigger this disaster unless they get spending cuts that they weren’t able to enact through normal, Constitutional means.
Republicans go wild at this analogy, but it’s unavoidable. This is exactly like someone walking into a crowded room, announcing that he has a bomb strapped to his chest, and threatening to set that bomb off unless his demands are met.

The only way in which Krugman could seem to be rational is if one were to accept that the Progressive Project has affected some kind of Article V re-write of our Constitution, via stare decisis, over the last century. If you accept such an oath-shattering premise as driving the pretzel logic of our Ruling Class, then, sure: the idiocy of Krugman and the rest of the Beltway Clown Car comes into focus.

Once we’ve departed the Rule of Law, and the beautiful people can get away with breaking the law on TV, because

D.C. attorney general Irvin B. Nathan announced his decision Friday afternoon by releasing a letter to an attorney for NBC. Nathan wrote that though the device Gregory held up “meets the definition” of the criminal statute, he wrote that prosecution “would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia nor serve the best interests of the people of the District to whom this office owes its trust.”

After a line of nonsense like that, why not just mint coins in Weimar German denominations?

Here’s how it would work: The Treasury would mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion (or many coins with smaller values; it doesn’t really matter). This coin would immediately be deposited at the Federal Reserve, which would credit the sum to the government’s account. And the government could then write checks against that account, continuing normal operations without issuing new debt.

The Krugmanerrand

Why bother with a denomination at all? As long as we’re punching the clown, just slap an ? symbol on the thing and declare victory. We’re a fundamentally unserious people with a fundamentally unserious government, advised by fundamentally unserious ‘eclownomists’: we deserve a fundamentally unserious currency.

via jwbrown1969

Category: Uncategorized

A Lesson from Lindsay Lohan

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 18 Comments

Last weekend I remarked that I’ve had several long conversations with Ali Akbar about plans for his Viral Read news site. One of the things I’ve repeatedly stressed is how important it is in the news business to be task-oriented and mission-focused. People must be judged strictly on their ability to get the job done. It doesn’t matter whether you “like” somebody or not. It’s not about friendship or popularity. The key to survival is to focus on the task in front of you — cranking it out day after day on deadline — while ignoring all merely personal considerations.

This is one of those big Life Lessons that young people have to learn the hard way, if they are ever to succeed at the highest levels. The real world isn’t like high school. A childish fascination with “popularity” is counter-productive in most real-world work environments. People who attempt to manipulate their way to undeserved success by playing office-politics games will ultimately produce harmful effects to the organization.

Well, so much for the lecture. What got me thinking about this topic was a long article by Stephen Rodrick in the New York Times about the difficulties of working with Lindsay Lohan. Desperate to rescue her career from her self-inflicted disasters, Lohan agreed to work with Paul Schrader, a 65-year-old director who was himself desperate to maintain his viability in the 21st-century movie market.

The set-up: Schrader is attempting to make a feature film on a shoestring budget of $250,000, and it is a measure of how far Lohan has fallen that she’s willing to participate in this project. What Lohan can’t seem to understand is that show business is a business:

The first child of a drug-abusing, felonious stock trader and a failed dancer, Lohan survived her Long Island childhood, moved to Hollywood and became America’s newest sweetheart with winning turns in “The Parent Trap” and “Mean Girls.” She cut an album that went platinum. In 2006, she was the best thing in Robert Altman’s “Prairie Home Companion.” The future was hers to write.
Then­­ — as the voice-over in an “E! True Hollywood Story” would put it — it all fell apart. Big-budget films need insurance in case an actress dies or becomes incapacitated and can’t go on with a role. Lohan’s misadventures made her uninsurable, her work dried up and she settled in as a generation’s snarky punch line.

This should put Lohan’s tabloid-headline life into proper perspective. Undeniably talented, Lohan can’t find work because her personal problems make her an unpredictable workplace liability. Read more

Category: Celebrities

@Gabby_Hoffman Strangely Uncomfortable With Federal Ponzi Scheme

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Gabby Hoffman seems uncertain about whether the additional money the government is extracting is going toward anything useful:

Hoffman, a 21-year-old Virginian who works at a nonprofit, estimates her paycheck will be roughly $30 less this biweekly pay period, or about $780 annually, thanks to the end of a two-year cut on payroll taxes, which fund Social Security. The tax has risen back up to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent, costing someone making $50,000 annually about $1,000 per year and a household with two high-paid workers up to $4,500.
“As a newly-graduated person, someone coming straight out of college, I don’t like the idea of having less money coming to me due to the selfish interests of people in Congress who don’t have any interest in reducing our financial problems,” Hoffman told FoxNews.com. “This is an impediment for future economic growth. It’s going to make it harder for young people like myself to get married, find a better job, you name it.”

Read the whole thing.

I, for one, hope to hear from Paul Ryan at CPAC13 just how the GOP proposes to emancipate Americans from working on the Social Security Plantation. There has got to be some way to craft a legal theory that a Ponzi scheme is a Ponzi scheme, despite the dodgy SCOTUS history.

via Sissy Willis

Category: Uncategorized

You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 7 Comments

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

Commenting on the indoctrination conducted daily in American public schools — “Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm, mmm, mmm!” — Greg Gutfeld observes that this is the only way the Left can win:

 

Notice that some of Gutfeld’s colleagues suffer under the widespread delusion that this kind of brainwashing doesn’t happen in their child’s public school. But political correctness (i.e., cultural Marxism) is nowadays universal and pervasive in the government education system. There is no such thing as a “good public school.”

Why aren’t you homeschooling your children?

 

Category: Culture, Education

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) to Retire

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 10 Comments

This news creates a huge opportunity for Republicans in 2014 in an increasingly GOP-leaning state:

Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller will not run for reelection in 2014, passing up a bid for a sixth term and putting in play a Senate seat in deep red West Virginia.

(Via Memeorandum.) The big question, of course, is whether West Virginia Republicans — from the party leadership down to the grassroots — can come together and nominate an electable candidate who can generate widespread enthusiasm from the conservative base.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey offers this analysis:

[Republican Rep. Shelley] Moore Capito has a lot more experience in running for office in West Virginia than previous candidates. She may not be a Tea Party darling — at least not yet — but she has been an effective campaigner in the state. It certainly seems to have provided the impetus to drive Rockefeller into retirement in a state that kept re-electing Robert Byrd even when it became clear he wasn’t up to the task.

After two years of woe for Senate GOP campaigns caused by incompetence and internal divisions, we have to cross our fingers and hope that Republicans can avoid needless blunders in 2014.

Category: Democrats, Election, Senate, West Virginia

AR-15 Saleswoman of the Year?

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 12 Comments

Patterico nominates Sen. Dianne Feinstein for an NRA Lifetime Achievement Award:

Perhaps no single American in the country’s history has done more to put high-powered rifles and high capacity magazines in the hands of United States citizens.

The irony — it burns!

Category: California, Democrats, Patterico, Senate

Shorter Joe Scarborough: ‘Who Do You Think You’re Calling Chauvinistic, Bitch?’

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 16 Comments

Gee, why so defensive, Joe?

“You really — knowing me and seeing me work around here for five years — you want to call me a chauvinist on television?” Scarborough asked, with Brzezinski replying that she wasn’t calling him that.
“I said the way you’re acting is chauvinistic,” she responded, “especially the way you were handling this conversation. It’s not funny.”
“Do I act like a chauvinist in Congress, the way I ran my office there, the way run my office here? I am a chauvinist?” Scarborough repeatedly pressed, as they argued and talked over each other. . . .
“You can’t throw around attacks like that,” he said, “because you’re embarrassed about what Barack Obama’s doing.”

You know how to win that game? Don’t play it. That is to say, why even bother trying to jump through their feminist hoops? It only proves that they have authority to boss you around. If some woman ever called me “chauvinistic”? Hey, how nice of you to notice, sweetheart.

Now run along and get me a cup of coffee. Cream only.

Category: Feminism, MSNBC
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