The Other McCain

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

Will ObamaCare Cover This Injury?

Posted on | January 4, 2013 | 7 Comments

An unexpected occuptional hazard:

CLEVELAND — A woman was seriously injured after a bizarre incident inside a local strip club early Wednesday morning.
It happened at Christie’s Caberet in The Flats, just after 1 a.m.
According to police, 22-year-old Lauren Block, of Richmond Heights, was reportedly on the second floor of the club when she went over the balcony and landed on her head. . . .
[A] witness said he was getting a lap dance from Block on the second floor of the club when something went terribly wrong.
The reporting officer said this of the incident: “(The witness) stated that (the dancer) grabbed the rail, as he was facing away from the balcony, and she tried to complete some sort of jump/dance move, and accidentally went head first over the rail.”
Block reportedly fell 15 feet and suffered “major head trauma.”
She was taken to MetroHealth Medical Center, where she is listed in critical condition.

If Sandra Fluke can demand free contraceptives, surely strippers should be covered for major head trauma. Health care is a human right!

Category: Ohio

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.04.13

Posted on | January 4, 2013 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Boehner Barely Survives As Speaker

House Minority Leader Pelosi yields the gavel to reelected Speaker of the House Boehner

Ten Republicans withhold votes, cutting margin to three; Pelosi also suffers five defections

Disputes Brewing If Chavez Too Sick To Attend Own Inauguration
Venezuelan government says president suffering from severe lung infection

Argentina Reasserts Claims To Falklands
President Kirchner releases letter calling on UK to obey UN resolutions, talk about islands’ sovereignty



POLITICS
First Faux-Indian Senator Sworn In As 113th Congress Convenes

Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) takes the oath of office

Some moron from a family of drunks, politicians and rapists (BIRM) also sworn in

MSNBC Wets Itself Over “Diversity” Of 113th Congress

IL Senate Democrats Wave White Flag On Gay Marriage, Gun Control Bills

Feds Approve Health Insurance Exchanges In Seven More States

First Hindu Congresswoman Takes Oath On Bhagavad Gita

Senator Mark Kirk Makes Dramatic Return After Stroke

Boehner Says No More One-On-One Meetings With Obama

Administration Delivers Delayed Regulatory Agenda; Could Cost $123 Billion To Implement



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Prices Slip On Profit Taking After Fiscal Cliff Rally: NYMEX $92.92, Brent $112.14
Google Beats The Rap
ADP Estimates 215,000 Jobs Created In December
Welcome To The Fiscal Farce
Nordstrom, Costco Report Higher December Sales
Stocks Drop After Fed Signals End To Bond Buys
Spam Canner Hormel Buys Skippy Peanut Butter From Unilever
Can Waze Save Apple Maps?
Samsung Still Rules US Mobile Market
LG, Panasonic, Sony TVs Will Use Android Phones As Remotes
Sprint Set To Unleash Prepaid Service This Month
Snapchat’s Vanishing Photos: The Latest Photo Sharing App
Minecraft Achieves 5 Million XBox Downloads, 17.5 Million Total



SPORTS
Ducks Run Past Wildcats At Fiesta Bowl

Ducks RB De’Anthony Thomas returns the opening kickoff 94 yards for a TD

And then they ran up the score to 35-17 over Kansas State

McNabb Says Eagles Shouldn’t Hire Kelly (Video)

Knicks Steamroll Spurs 100-83

Andy Reid, KC Chiefs Nearing Deal

Penn State’s O’Brien Stays Put After Interview With Browns

New Day, Same News In NHL Lockout Talks

Even Sergio Romo Gets Hosed By The TSA

Murray Chass To Give Up Hall Of Fame Ballot After One Last Dumb Vote

Unsigned Kyle Lohse Hasn’t Talked To Cardinals In Months



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Jenny Craig, Medifast Uninterested In Unspeakable Armenian As Spokesthing

Unspeakable Armenian: REJECTED

Jenny Craig looking to promote “real weight loss for real women”. ‘Nuff said.

Kelly Clarkson: Weight Loss Is For Love

Bradley Cooper & Zoe Saldana Split Again

Bethenny Frankel Still Living With Jason Hoppy After Legal Separation

Frank Ocean Busted For Weed On The Go, Driver’s License Confiscated

Lindsay Lohan Paid $100K To Party At Posh London Gala On New Year’s Eve

Britney Spears Working On Next Album

Blacks Turn Out In Force For Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”



FOREIGNERS
Former Delhi Policewoman Says Criticism Of Police In Gang Rape Case Well Deserved
Delhi Rapists Charged With Kidnapping, Rape And Murder; Police Will Seek Death Penalty
State Department Warns Richardson, Schmidt Not To Visit North Korea
Morsi Aide Rapped Over Call For Jews To Return
Suspect In NY Subway Bomb Plot To Be Extradited From UK To US
Malala Yousafzai’s Father Given Consulate Post In Birmingham; Family To Stay In UK
Mexican Troops Kill Twelve In Zacatecas Gunfight
Rebels Threaten To Quit Congo Talks
It’s Cash Only At The Vatican After Bank Of Italy Cuts Off Credit Card Processing



BLOGS & STUFF
Power Line: Better Late Than Never – Boehner Swears Off Secret Deals
Hit & Run: Boehner Re-Elected Speaker But Loses Libertarians’ Votes
Just One Minute: Kevin Drum On Lead And Crime
Hot Air: Pelosi Tells GOP “You Really Ought To Take Back Your Party”
Fred Barnes: The President Who Wants It All
Via Meadia: US Electricity Use Falls As Economy Greens
Bryan Preston: Are Women No Longer Allowed To Fight In Al Jazeera’s “War Room”?
Media Decoder: Time Warner Cable Says They’ll Keep Open Mind On Reinstating Al Jazeera (Formerly Current TV)
Sense Of Events: Americans Are “Liberal-tarian”
Breitbart: FBI – More People Killed With Hammers, Clubs Each Year Than Rifles
Gateway Pundit: Former Dem NYC Mayor Candidate Mark Green Equates Gun Owners To Child Molesters
Israel Matzav: “Unprecedented Support For Israel,” My Tuchus
American Power: Online Pay Models In 2013
NRO Corner: Clinton Adviser Rips Fox News Producer For “Asinine” Question

Category: Live at Five

World’s Least Intimidating Criminal

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 12 Comments

Say hello to Zachary Dalton Howard of Niceville, Florida. About 10 p.m. on Dec. 22, according to the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Department, 22-year-old Howard walked into a convenience store “dressed in a long black coat, hoodie and blue jeans. He told the clerk he had a firearm but never showed a weapon. He left without getting any money after the clerk showed him an empty cash register drawer.”

Howard then went to a nearby Winn-Dixie grocery store, where he called his mother for a ride home.

After he was arrested, Howard told deputies he never had a weapon. He has been charged with one count of robbery.

(Via Florida Sun-Sentinel and Huffington Post.)

Category: Crime, Florida

Joe Biden, Class Act

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 8 Comments

Three headlines from Drudge:

Remember when they said Sarah Palin wasn’t ready to be vice president?

Category: Uncategorized

Memoir, Narcissism and the Problem of the Unreliable First-Person Narrator

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 18 Comments

In addition to its advice about “Crazy Hot Sex” (“10 Secrets to Intense Action”), the February issue of Cosmo features an interview with an actress you probably never heard of before. Julianne Hough tells Cosmo that when she was studying dance in London as a girl, she “was abused, mentally, physically, everything. . . . I was a tormented little kid who had to put on this sexy façade because that was my job and my life.”

Shocking, but have Hough’s abusers been prosecuted? No:

Hough declines to say who abused her or provide other details.
“I’m a very forgiving person, and I don’t want to hurt anybody,” she says. “What’s past is past.”

Unless it is Cosmo‘s purpose to expose the shameful secrets of abusive dance studios — a criminal enterprise in need of investigation — one might be tempted to think that the primary journalistic purpose here is to let Julianne Hough tell her dramatic tale of victimhood. And Cosmo evidently didn’t bother to contact anyone at London’s prestigious Italia Conti Academy of Arts, the alleged scene of her abuse, to attempt to verify these disturbing (but rather vague) claims by Hough.

My own purpose is not to dispute the truth of Julianne Hough’s tale. For all we know, her experiences in London were every bit as horrible as she suggests, and Scotland Yard may yet launch an investigation that exposes the Italia Conti Academy of Arts as a criminal den of sadistic depravity. Readers meanwhile can believe whatever they want. I don’t care.

Rather, it is the entire confessional genre that is the object of my critique. In recent decades, we have become so accustomed to these shocking first-person revelations — “I Was a Teenage Call Girl” and so forth — that we seldom ask what usefulness they provide, and credulously accept the truth of even the wildest tales, without pausing to wonder if the tale-teller might have a motive to exaggerate or otherwise distort the facts.

We’ve seen where this leads: James Frey became a bestselling author whose memoir A Million Little Pieces was featured by Oprah Winfrey:

In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey’s Harpo Productions lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears.   When the camera then returned to a damp-eyed Winfrey, she said, “I’m crying ’cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much.”

Unfortunately . . .

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey’s book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states.”
In addition to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book’s most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim.

How shocking: The criminal drug addict was also . . . a liar.

Well, a lesson learned the hard way, huh? Unfortunately, not:

Oprah Winfrey has a new book scandal on her hands. A “memoir,” praised in her O Magazine as “startlingly tender,” has been revealed as a complete work of fiction.
“Love and Consequences,” written by Margaret B. Jones, a self-described half white, half Native American foster child and former drug runner, has been revealed as a fake. The fictional story was actually penned by Margaret Seltzer, a white, private-school educated writer.

The problem in both cases was that these liars’ tales were (a) cleverly told, and (b) stories that many people wanted to believe were true.

Good liars are like that: They have a keen sense of what the listener wants to believe, and a capacity for telling lies that seem plausible to the intended audience. Evidently, book editors and TV producers are particularly gullible, if the tale and teller appeal to their sympathies. But why bring Obama’s Dreams From My Father into this? Read more

Category: Journalism

@DailyPundit, Optimist At Large

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

But since [the re-election of Rep. Boehner as Speaker] just a squabble over the leadership of the minority faction of the Ruling Party, none of this has a great deal of meaning in the larger scheme of things. No matter who is in charge of the GOP faction, everything will continue to go to hell in the same way it has been going to hell for the past several decades.

I just wonder where Bill gets his supply of rose colored glasses. The #FiscalCliff kabuki was only a 60-day stay of execution for the sequester. Then there is the debt ceiling. If the purpose of the #FiscalCliff, besides thrashing the holidays of all paying attention, was to destroy public interest in paying attention to what these yahoos are doing with the public purse, it was largely successful. Speaker Boehner’s resumption of the gavel was anticlimactic, despite a minority of the peanut gallery stimming itself about unseating him.
From Boehner’s remarks:

Our government has built up too much debt. Our economy is not producing enough jobs. These are not separate problems.
At $16 trillion and rising, our national debt is draining free enterprise and weakening the ship of state.
The American Dream is in peril so long as its namesake is weighed down by this anchor of debt. Break its hold, and we begin to set our economy free. Jobs will come home. Confidence will come back.

As I was able to Tweet the good speaker for his immediate inattention:

Category: Bill Quick, John Boehner

Alternate Headline for Current TV Deal

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 17 Comments

The top of Memeorandum is cluttered with news that Al Gore’s Current TV was sold to Al-Jazeera, but Allahpundit nails the real story:

Al Gore opposed to paying his ‘fair share’

Liberal hypocrisy, thy name is Al:

Al Jazeera did not disclose the purchase price, but people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1 . . .

Unfortunately for Gore, they couldn’t manage to close the deal until yesterday, so he got screwed out of a few million bucks. The bonus kicker:

Glenn Beck reportedly tried to buy the network last year [but] was told that they wouldn’t sell to someone who wasn’t “aligned with our point of view.” So, naturally: Al Jazeera.

No word yet on whether Al Jazeera, the pro-Islam network based in Qatar, will re-hire Keith Olbermann, who quit Current TV in a huff and filed a $70 million lawsuit against the network. Certainly, if it were a matter of being “aligned with out point of view” . . .

 

Category: Media Bias

Gun Control and the Politics of Ignorance

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 18 Comments

“Senator Feinstein’s latest attack on the Second Amendment relies entirely on public ignorance of firearms and their legitimate uses,” writes William A. Levinson in an American Thinker article answering the question, “Why Does Anybody Need a 30-Round Magazine?”

It’s important to consider worst-case scenarios: Suppose that you found yourself in a conflict with multiple assailants, each armed with 9-mm pistols, each with a magazine capacity of 10 shots. In that situation, a 30-round magazine gives you equal firepower (without reloading) to three attackers. You may not be able to imagine such situations, but sometimes the unimaginable happens, and who is Dianne Feinstein to tell other people what precautions they are permitted to take?

The Politics of Ignorance is what enraged me so much about the so-called “assault weapons” ban that Feinstein supported in 1994. Repeat after me: A semi-automatic rifle is not an “assault weapon.”

Feinstein and her allies in the Clinton administration were exploiting public ignorance. They had polls and focus-group information showing that “soccer moms” — suburban middle-class white women, a key “swing” constituency that Democrats sought to win over — supported restrictive measures against guns, in large part because of (arguably racist) fears about inner-city drug gangs.

Despite headline-making incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing and the Long Island commuter-train massacre, the political impetus behind the law (officially titled the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994”) really had nothing to do militias or mass-shooting sprees, and everything to do with fears of the criminal violence associated with the crack cocaine epidemic.

Ultimately, of course, the crime problems of the 1980s and ’90s were “solved” by a drastic increase in incarceration rates due to mandatory sentencing laws (especially for drug offenses) and so-called “three strikes” laws, as well as improvements in law-enforcement tactics and private security. The widespread use of video surveillance at retail venues and advances in DNA testing, to mention just two examples, have not only helped police solve more crimes, but also have a significant deterrent effect, because would-be criminals know the greater risks of apprehension.

The Feinstein-backed “assault weapons” ban was classic Clinton-era pandering: A largely cosmetic response to media-hyped hysteria, producing a law that did not actually ban anything — existing weapons were not outlawed, but merely the manufacture or importation of such weapons — and the prohibited weapons were only superficially different from weapons that remained fully legal.

That idiotic law expired in 2004, thank God, but gun-control advocates continue relying on appeals to ignorance, particularly when talking about the so-called “gun show loophole.” What this rhetoric is about is trying to inhibit the private re-sale of weapons, thus depriving gun owners of the full economic value of their assets.

Many millions of Americans own guns and these are actually economic investments, as firearms tend to retain value. There is a ready market for antique and collectible guns. A model 1911 Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol can sell for more than $1,000. And so the family gun cabinet represents a real financial asset to the owner — if he is permitted to re-sell them.

However, when liberals talk about “closing the gun-show loophole,” what they actually mean is requiring these private gun owners to run background checks on purchasers, just like federally licensed gun dealers. This would impose an all-but-prohibitive restriction on the private seller — how much would compliance cost? — and thus makes it practically impossible for him to reap the full value of his asset. True, he could sell his guns to a licensed dealer, or place them for sale on consignment with such a dealer, but in the process he would lose not only the price difference between wholesale (what the dealer pays the seller) and retail (what is paid by the dealer’s customer), but also the convenience of being able to sell the gun himself.

There are millions of guns owned by individuals in this country that have been re-sold over and over — from one private citizen to another — without any licensed dealer being involved in the transactions since the day they were first sold, brand-new. If your brother-in-law admires your Winchester .30-06 or your Mossberg 12-gauge and offers you a fair price for it, you can sell it to him.

You could sell your guns at your next garage sale, if you wanted to, and why not? It’s your gun, isn’t it? It’s a free country, isn’t it?

Well, not if Dianne Feinstein gets her way.

 

 


Category: Constitution, Crime
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