The Other McCain

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

FMJRA 2.0: Beautiful World

Posted on | January 5, 2013 | 14 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Obama Promises 2013 Gun-Grab Bill; Warns ‘There Will Be Resistance’

Fiscal-Cliff Kabuki Nears Final Scene UPDATE: House GOP Wants More Spending Cuts Before Final Vote

Ted Cruz Vows to Lead Opposition to Dianne Feinstein’s Gun-Grab Bill

FMJRA 2.0: Heavy Metal

Tenured, Yes. Radical, My Ass.

CNN’s Foreign Subversive Piers Morgan ‘Threatens’ to Leave U.S. Over Guns

Late Entry for ‘Worst Person of the Year’

Rule 5 Sunday: Come Dancing

TINFOIL HAT: Sec State Injured, SEAL Killed During Iran Incident?

‘It Ain’t True’

Maybe We Should Send Charlie Sheen to the University of Maryland

The Chicago Way: Obamaland Reports 500 Homicides (So Far) This Year

‘Fiscal Cliff’ Deal Rumored; Obama Supporters Cheer Tax Increases on Rich

Penetration, However Slight

Palin: ‘Conservatives Must Stay Engaged’

House Passes Fiscal-Cliff Deal 257-167

The Demographics of Envy

Kathy Griffin, Andrew Sullivan and Other Desperately Unfunny ‘Faggot’ Jokes

Tina Brown’s Mysterious Career: How Much Is That Zeitgeist in the Window?

Subsidized Stupidity

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.03.13

Green Energy Underpants Gnomes

Gun Control and the Politics of Ignorance

Alternate Headline for Current TV Deal

@DailyPundit, Optimist At Large

It’s Never Enough for Liberals

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.04.13

If Current TV Was Worth $500 Million, How Is BuzzFeed Worth $200 Million?

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants, the only linker with more than 5 this week – Rick made eight the hard way, in a week where nobody else had more than four. Some people like Tweets and Facebook shares, but I for one care nothing for them. I say, there is nothing on God’s gray earth so exalted as that prince of internet acknowledgements, the link!

Thanks to everyone for their links. Deadline for next week’s FMJRA is Friday, January 11.

 

Category: FMJRA Award

The Incident at St. Aloysius: 911 Call in Illinois Raises Questions for Church

Posted on | January 5, 2013 | 20 Comments

Was something kinky happening in the rectory of a Catholic church in Springfield, Illinois? That would seem to be the implication of this story:

The pastor of St. Aloysius church on Springfield’s north end has been granted a leave of absence after he called 911 from the rectory and told a dispatcher that he needed help getting out of handcuffs.
“I’m going to need help getting out before this becomes a medical emergency,” Father Tom Donovan told a dispatcher who sounds a bit incredulous during the Nov. 28 call.
“You’re stuck in a pair of handcuffs?” the dispatcher asks.
“(I was) playing with them and I need help getting out,” Donovan responds.
Donovan told the dispatcher that he was alone in the rectory. It’s not clear exactly how he ended up in handcuffs or why he feared a medical emergency. His voice sounds garbled or muffled on the tape, and sources say that police discovered some sort of gag on the priest when they arrived.

A Catholic priest in handcuffs and “some sort of gag”? Sounds kind of kinky, but good luck getting an explanation from church officials:

The diocese has been tight-lipped about the matter, saying only that Bishop Thomas Paprocki granted Donovan’s request for a leave of absence at some point before Christmas. The diocese knows about the incident, given that Brad Huff, an attorney for the diocese, has been given a copy of the 911 tape by the Sangamon County Emergency Telephone System Department. Kathie Sass, spokeswoman for the Diocese of Springfield, said that the diocese also has a copy of a police report on the matter.
Sass would not disclose Donovan’s whereabouts or say whether he is staying at a church-affiliated location.
“I wouldn’t be able to tell you where Father Donovan is,” Sass said. “There’s a matter of privacy there.”

“A matter of privacy”? Not like the Catholic Church has any history of sex scandals involving alleged cover-ups by the hierarchy or anything.

The obvious suspicion is that the priest is now in one of those church-run therapy centers getting help for his problem, whatever it may be.

Catholic blogger Lisa Graas says “this story sends up some red flags”:

Maybe it was exactly as Fr. Donavan said. Maybe he was alone and simply playing with some handcuffs and got stuck. Or….maybe not. . . . I’m only saying that it’s a possibility that someone else was involved and thought it a funny thing to leave him handcuffed and, as a source said, gagged….or maybe came to Fr. Donavan knowing he had same-sex attraction just to set him up this way so that it would make news and damage the Church.

Lisa adds that (a) this incident made news while Illinois lawmakers were weighing same-sex marriage and (b) “this is being talked about on high-traffic ‘gay rights’ blogs already.”

Not only is the incident being discussed on gay blogs like Towelroad and Queerty, but it has also made headlines at Huffington Post, Mediaite and The Blaze. So the “matter of privacy” defense isn’t really effective, and gossip will run wild in the absence of a plausible explanation.

Category: Crime, Gays, Illinois, Scandal, Sex

If Current TV Was Worth $500 Million, How Is BuzzFeed Worth $200 Million?

Posted on | January 4, 2013 | 30 Comments

There has been a lot of noise in the wake of the sale of Current TV to Qatar-based Al Jazeera, and Ed Driscoll linked damn near all of it today, so there’s no point me re-hashing it here. What intrigues me is the valuation of the product. Was it worth $500 million to essentially buy a slot from major American cable TV providers?

According to the news reports, Al Jazeera does not intend to keep much, if any, of Current TV’s programming. That means it is willing to pay $500 million simply to be carried by the large cable providers. That implies that these providers have extraordinary market power. This should be raising lots of questions at the Federal Communications Commission.

Well, screw that regulatory nonsense, I’m talking raw market value. If a dismally unsuccessful news outfit is worth $500 million just to get their slot on cable TV, how does that extrapolate in terms of assessing the value of other media entities? When the Huffington Post was sold to AOL in February 2011, I thought the reported $315 million sale price was absurdly high for an outfit that, whatever its ranking or market share, had never made a profit. But now comes this startling estimate:

BuzzFeed, the six-year-old website that blends coverage of corgis and Congress in irresistible listicles, took another round of financing yesterday, and the Wall Street Journal’s Tom Gara now pegs the company’s valuation at around $200 million. I hear the same number from a source close to BuzzFeed’s investors.
That’s a heady valuation, though it’s only five times BuzzFeed’s expected revenue of $40 million in 2013, according to Gara. . . .
BuzzFeed has now raised about $46 million from investors, which puts it atop a list of media startups, backed by venture capital, that have emerged since the founding of the Huffington Post in 2005.

Forty-six million dollars of investment capital? For a Web site? An estimated value of $200 million? Excuse my extreme incredulity, but if they are so gosh-darn successful — “expected” revenue and all that — why did they need to raise another $19 million from investors, eh?

Does the phrase “dot-com bubble” ring a bell?

How about “pump and dump”?

Look, I kinda understood when a desperate sinkhole like AOL was willing to fork over $315 million for HuffPo. Even if it didn’t make a lick of sense as an investment, this is AOL we’re talking about — a company that hasn’t really made sense in a long, long time, and whose executives were therefore willing to pay a premium for buzz and market share, without any genuine likelihood of turning a profit. So . . .

What sucker does BuzzFeed have in mind? Where is the obsolete and desperate-to-seem-relevant circa-1994 online enterprise that will pay $200 million dollars for a site that has already (evidently) burned through its first $27 million of capital? Maybe . . . Yahoo?

If a bunch of rich Arabs can buy an entire cable TV network for $500 million — even a useless turd like Current TV — does it really make sense for anyone to pay $200 million for a mere Web site?

Color me skeptical. But hey . . .

Make me an offer, rich Arabs.





 

UPDATE: Linked by Ed Driscoll with a bit of wordplay on a line from A Clockwork Orange, a movie I’ve only watched all the way through once, when I was in college. I never was much of a Kubrick fan — a bit too ostentatiously artistic and cerebral for my taste in movies — but Alex does have some memorable dialogue.

 

Category: Blogging

Is Public Sector Racism Any More Effective Than The Historical Flavor?

Posted on | January 4, 2013 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Via Insty,

Court decisions dating to the 1950s theoretically ended racial segregation of higher education in the United States. But data to be presented today at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association show that the pace of desegregation has slowed over time. And in a finding that could be controversial, the study finds that states that ban the consideration of race in admissions may see the pace of desegregation accelerate.
The study is by Peter L. Hinrichs, an assistant professor of public policy at Georgetown University. He focuses on black and white students, not those in other racial and ethnic groups, and he examines “exposure” and “dissimilarity” (defined below) of black and white students as two measures of desegregation. Hinrichs uses federal data from every college, filed since the era in which desegregation started. He argues that these measures illustrate the extent to which colleges are truly desegregated, which may not be reflected simply by increases or decreases in black student enrollments (which can be concentrated at certain institutions).

Plus

Hinrichs is quick to say in the paper (and in the interview) that his findings do not suggest that states should ban affirmative action.

This blog is quick and unfailing to point out that raaaaacism is immoral, and attempting “to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption” is as much pure hooey as anything else these Progressives spew.
Oh, and look:

Category: Racism

News From the People’s Democratic Republic of 3600 New York Avenue

Posted on | January 4, 2013 | 13 Comments

The paranoid managerial regime now in charge of The Washington Times has announced a successful further liquidation of the kulaks:

The Washington Times summoned several staff members to the auditorium this morning. Inside sources say management has laid off approximately 25 employees in a newsroom of 90 . . .
Several employees who were not invited to this morning’s meeting… suspect that they will be fired separately. . . .
Meanwhile, TWT consultant John Solomon, who ridiculously insists he has nothing do with layoff decisions, is meeting with the remaining employees this afternoon to discuss operations.

Another Glorious Triumph of the Five-Year Plan!

Such helpless ineptitude would be funny if it were not so tragically sad. FishbowlDC also published a brutal resignation letter submitted last month by the paper’s former deputy editorial page editor:

The Washington Times today is the most unprofessional and dishonest organization I have ever encountered. I can’t continue to spend the lion’s share of my professional time fighting unethical practices being pushed by top leaders in the company.

When I quit five years ago — immediately after it was announced that Solomon had been hired from the Washington Post to replace retiring editor Wes Pruden — some of my co-workers thought I was crazy. Most of those people were subsequently laid off and, whenever I run into one of them nowadays, they congratulate me on having had the foresight to get out while the getting was good.

UPDATE: Veteran photographer Rod Lamkey, sports writer Patrick Stevens and web editor Ted Starkey were reportedly among the kulaks liquidated by the regime in the latest purge. One staffer, Steve Repsher, who got re-hired after being laid off in 2009. was laid off again, but not before remarking the irony:

UPDATE II: By my count, the Washington Times is on its fourth editor in five years. Editor No. 3, Ed Kelley, was hired in June 2011 and lasted only 16 months in the job. David Jackson was hired as his replacement (Editor No. 4) in November. Meanwhile, John Solomon (Editor No. 1) was re-hired by the Times as a consultant in June (after he left the Daily Beast in January) and was reportedly the man in charge of “reviewing all the departments to decide who they retain” in the latest round of layoffs. You have to be sort of a Kremlinologist to understand who’s who in the Supreme Soviet of the People’s Democratic Republic these days.

UPDATE III: In November, Washington Times editorial page editor Brett Decker resigned and, about three weeks later, Kerry Picket announced she was leaving the paper to join Breitbart.com:

“This is a smart move for Breitbart News and a huge blow to the Washington Times. There is no other way to spin it,” said former TWT editorial page editor Brett Decker, who was Picket’s boss from 2009 until last month. “Kerry’s online reporting generates millions of pageviews a year. During my last days at the newspaper, she had about 1 million pageviews for a single post.”

When Kerry walked out, among the valuable assets she took with her was a Twitter following of more than 12,000. Is there any staffer remaining at The Washington Times who has a social-media presence that size? The newspaper’s main Twitter feed has barely 60,000 followers. (By comparison, David Limbaugh has 87,000 Twitter followers, Dave Weigel has 98,000 and Mark Levin has 190,000.)

This just goes to show the myopia of management. A couple days ago, The Glorious Peoples Commissar David Jackson published a “vision” paper with a lot of blather about becoming a “digital-first news organization” in which “our Internet and online audiences will become our first thought.”

This would seem rather difficult when there’s apparently no one in the organization with a significant social-media presence.

Category: Journalism

DeMint At Heritage

Posted on | January 4, 2013 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

It sounds as though DeMint hopes to do more as a thought leader at Heritage than he did in elective office.

Why was he incapable of being a ‘big ideas’ guy in office?

The ‘optimistic, positive ideas’ pitch sounds swell, but I thought that’s the approach on which Romney finished a powerful, strong second. See what I did there? Avoiding talking about how we got spanked by broadband, breech-loaded baloney is, itself, tantamount to pure hooey.

You can paint the bleak reality of today’s 5Ws without appeal to violence.

Category: Uncategorized

Tee Hee Hee: Stacy’s Cousin Makes Hawkins’s 20 Most Annoying Libs List

Posted on | January 4, 2013 | 25 Comments

by Smitty

I should like to meet Maggie Moo some day to assure her that, while bearing her no personal animosity, this blog finds her ideas emblematic of how jacked up her generation and this country are:

18) Meghan McCain: The GOP and Meghan McCain have the same sort of great love we’ve seen between Chris Brown and Rihanna. Who’d have ever thought that the Republican Party’s pale imitation of Paris Hilton would still hate us after all this time besides — well, everybody?

Defining Quote: “…I’ve spent most of my adult life fighting for change from inside the Republican Party….If I don’t see some changes in the next four years, I’m going to consider registering as an Independent in 2016.” — Megan McCain

Great post. Thank you, Hawkins!

via Insty

Category: Meghan McCain

It’s Never Enough for Liberals

Posted on | January 4, 2013 | 37 Comments

Having just raised taxes — before the “ink from the autopen” is even dry — Democrat Maxine Waters is demanding still more:

The first thing that we’ve got to do is look at where we still have unfairness in the tax system and make sure that the people of influence, the billionaires and the millionaires and the corporate interests are paying their fair share.

Meanwhile, Donald Douglas reports, liberal talk-radio host Thom Hartmann wants America to “outlaw billionaires“:

I think we should have a wealth tax in the United States and I think all wealth over $1 billion should be taxed at the 100 percent rate. If you can’t make it on a thousand million dollars, a billion dollars is a million dollars a thousand times, if you can’t make it on a billion dollars, well, there is no therefore. There’s nobody who can’t make it on a billion dollars. So, any wealth over a billion dollars, a hundred percent of it goes to help those of us who have less. You can call it redistribution of wealth, that’s fine, I am perfectly comfortable with that language. I think we should outlaw billionaires.

“Eliminationist rhetoric“! But what about those Qatari billionaires who just bought Al Gore’s Current TV? Should they have been outlawed before or after they paid Gore a cool $100 million?

Category: Liberals, Taxes
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