The Other McCain

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

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

Posted on | January 2, 2013 | 23 Comments

When Charlie Sheen recently made headlines by shouting “lying faggot assholes” at the opening of his new bar in Cabo, the joke was that it was “homophobic” nature of his words that constituted something truly scandalous. Charlie’s whore-mongering and cocaine habit are not controversial — “Hey, who are we to judge?” — but it’s an impermissible ThoughtCrime for him to speak the word “faggot.”

This reveals the totalitarian impulse behind identity politics and what is dismissively called “political correctness”: Attempting to control thought by setting boundaries on language, supposedly to protect those who are victimized and oppressed by society. It is not necessary to present evidence that Charlie Sheen has ever harmed homosexuals — or that his words were motivated by hostility to homosexuals — in order for the Thought Police to make a political example of him with the casual accusation of “homophobia.”

The moral of the story is clear: Whore-mongers and drug addicts are OK with the Thought Police, but woe be unto ye homophobes!

Anyway, Kathy Griffin made a spectacle of herself on New Year’s Eve by sexually harassing her CNN co-host Anderson Cooper who — in case you missed the news — is gay.

Griffin is what is known, in gay jargon, as a “fag hag”: A woman who tries to be “one of the boys” by hanging around gay bars.

The psychology of the fag hag is probably worth an essay of several thousand words that I don’t feel an urge to write today, except to say that these are usually rather unattractive women who seem to derive a secondhand frisson from socializing with ostentatiously gorgeous men in a hypersexualized environment. This satisfies an immature impulse — a desire for superficial “popularity” — and provides the fag hag with a low-risk source of male companionship, along with an obvious excuse to protect herself from feelings of sexual rejection.

Which, if you’re Kathy Griffin, you’ve had to deal with a lot.

Griffin has parlayed her fag-hag act into a career, having discovered that gay men will buy tickets to hear ugly women tell raunchy jokes, in much the way that its always the old fat drag queens who serve as wisecracking emcees for transvestite beauty pageants. Ace of Spades remarks on Griffin’s act:

Kathy Griffin, who is to comedy what Cher is to music, that is to say, irrelevant and old and weird-looking from plastic surgery, continues scrabbling at her last possible handhold of cultural relevance. . . .
Almost all of the media continues chasing the same minority cohort — liberal, urban, sexually loose.

Two words, Ace: Disposable income.

Unlike the respectable bourgeois suburban Republicans working to pay their mortgages and send their kids to college, the hip urbanites have money to throw away on name-brand fashion products and other gaudy expensive baubles that the Wal-Mart shoppers don’t buy. Also, the urban market in New York, L.A. and D.C. includes people who are cultural trend-setters in ways that pudgy accountants in New Jersey, Bakersfield and Fauqier County can never hope to be. But I digress . . .

Speaking of people Ace despises, Andrew Sullivan has treated us to a hilariously pompous display of hand-wringing as he announces he will take his “Daily Dish” blog — which in 2011 switched to Tina Brown’s Daily Beast after years under James Fallows’s Atlantic umbrella — back to a stand-alone site with a $19.99 subscription model:

In return for purchasing a subscription, Sullivan promises his readers, “No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews … just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.”
For now, Sullivan is offering readers a chance to sign up for $19.99 a year, which he notes, “translates to $1.67 a month.”

Translation: “I think I can make more money this way, but let me drape this crude financial calculus in a lot of altruistic anti-commercial argle-bargle, just to maintain my credibility as an intellectual idealist — which is, of course, my stock in trade.”

Me? I’m just a Shameless Capitalist Blogger, reminding you once more of The Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

At least I spare you the phony “progressive” idealism, eh?




 

UPDATE: Bill Quick at Daily Pundit:

What all this glosses over, I think, is that The Daily Beast didn’t want to keep Sullivan on.
I wonder why?

That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I mean, it was regarded as something of a coup for Tina Brown to sign Sullivan in April 2011. Now, barely a year and a half later, she decides he’s not worth the cost of keeping? Hmmmm.

UPDATE II: Christine Haughney of the New York Times:

Mr. Sullivan said in an e-mail message that he could have remained at the Daily Beast under a new contract. But he said that as he and his two partners started negotiating, they “began to see the overpowering logic of real independence.”
He added that the Dish is going to stay in New York City, where he and his two business partners are based, “for the foreseeable future.” He added, “We need to be together as a group.”

It’s important to understand that Sully had “real independence” at his blog for many years, from 2000 until he transferred it under Time magazine’s editorial umbrella. He subsequently switched it from Time to the Atlantic and then to Tina’s Daily Beast, so that he’s been sort of a blogging free agent all along.

So it’s difficult to see why, amid contract negotiations with Tina, “the overpowering logic of real independence” should suddenly occur to Sully and his business partners. Something about this narrative doesn’t exactly add up, does it?

 

Category: Ace of Spades, Andrew Sullivan, Celebrities, Culture

The Demographics of Envy

Posted on | January 2, 2013 | 17 Comments

“No one has been through the fire more so than our congressperson, and we in the district have sent him back because we have faith in him, and that he has our interests in mind, and quite frankly he’s one of us.”
— Keith L. T. Wright, co-chairman of the New York Democratic Party, praising Rep. Charles Rangel, June 25, 2012

“It is the inordinately selfish . . . who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness.”
— Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, 1951

Advocates of economic redistribution do not generally think of themselves as motivated by selfishness. Egalitarianism typically presents itself as a species of humanitarian philanthropy so that its political advocates are seldom compelled to defend their implicit claims to be acting in the altruistic spirit of charity.

The Democratic Party gets a free pass in this regard. Let any thievish political scoundrel put a “D” beside his name, and he thereby gains for himself the presumption that his every impulse is motivated by a selfless concern for the plight of the downtrodden poor.

As a hustle — a scam, a racket — this is brilliant. And it is an insult to people with common sense to expect us to buy into this hustle.

So last night, as the House debated the “fiscal cliff” deal, I was insulted when Charles Rangel got up and began ranting about how wrong it was for Republicans to want to reduce the deficit by cutting spending.

While I have been unable to find a transcript or video of that speech, it was shocking to think that Rangel expected his political sermon to be taken seriously, given what we know about his own shabby ethics:

A House panel on Tuesday [Nov. 16, 2010] found Representative Charles B. Rangel guilty of 11 counts of ethical violations, ruling that his failure to pay some taxes, improper solicitation of charitable donations and failure to accurately report his personal income had brought dishonor on the House. . . .
Since the accusations were first raised two years ago, Mr. Rangel has acknowledged bookkeeping errors in his financial disclosure forms and has said that his failure to pay more than $60,000 in taxes on rental income from a Dominican beach house was an oversight, caused, in part, by his inability to speak Spanish. . . .
The investigation of Mr. Rangel began after news reports that he had accepted four rent-stabilized apartments at prices hundreds of dollars per month below market value.
In the months that followed, Mr. Rangel confronted more ethics accusations. He was accused of failing to declare hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal assets on his financial disclosure forms, failing to pay state and federal taxes on rental income on his villa in the Dominican Republic and helping to preserve a tax loophole worth hundreds of millions of dollars for an oil company at the same time that he was seeking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center from a company executive.

Every cell of Charles Rangel’s being  is corrupt and immoral. His entire career has been one enormous lie and everyone who ever voted for him should feel a deep sense of personal shame. Yet despite his proven wrongdoing — which would have been enough to send any  ordinary citizen to federal prison — this congressional crook was re-elected by his constituents and remains a Democrat in good standing.

Why do Republicans sit silently and accept this? What combination of cowardice and stupidity in the GOP leadership grants a free pass to such despicable creatures as Charles Rangel?

Do Republicans actually believe that citizens of Harlem and other such deep-blue districts are incapable of understanding that the absurd philantropic pose of Democrats like Charles Rangel — “He has our interests in mind”! — is a perverse crime against truth?

Rangel is peddling the Big Lie, and until the GOP stands up to Big Liars like him, spare me your lame excuses about “demographics”:

Americans have been repeatedly told in recent years that “the rich” (however that term is defined) are not paying “their fair share” of taxes, and that this greedy unfairness is the explanation of anything that needs explaining. Did the local factory lay off workers? The rich are not paying their fair share! Is your daughter struggling to repay her student loans? The rich are not paying their fair share!
Especially in the “swing states” during last year’s election campaign, voters heard this Democrat message so often, in so many iterations, that it must have seemed like the universal panacea, a sort of snake-oil miracle cure. Whatever your problem — obesity, dandruff, halitosis, chronic flatulence — the Democrats promised to cure it by finally forcing the rich to Pay Their Fair Share. This message proved to be amply satisfactory to people too stupid or too lazy to bother themselves with arithmetic. Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that comparatively few of those math-deficient voters are themselves rich.
Since their Election Day catastrophe, Republicans have been wringing their hands over “demographics” (by which they mean black and Hispanic voters), but exit-poll data show that economics may explain more than demographics. Barack Obama spent much of the campaign espousing a message that pitted “the rich” against “the middle class,” but in the end, a majority of the middle class actually voted for Mitt Romney. While the Republican challenger got 53 percent among those earning more than $50,000 a year — who comprised 59 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls — Obama won by piling up massive margins among the poor and those struggling at the lower edges of middle-class status. Although voters making less than $30,000 a year were only 20 percent of the electorate, Obama got 63 percent of their vote, and he got 57 percent of those with annual incomes between $30,000 and $50,000. Among the Seven Deadly Sins, not even Lust is more important than Envy when it comes to electing Democrats. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 

 


Category: Budget, Charlie Rangel, Congress, Conservatism 101, Corruption, New York, Taxes

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.02.13

Posted on | January 2, 2013 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
House Approves Fiscal Cliff “Compromise”

Republicans oppose bill 85-151; Democrats push it through 172-16
When will we ever get spending cuts?

Great Successor Calls For Better Living Standards & Weapons For Norks
Lotsa luck with that, chubby.

France’s Hollande Vows To Revive Supertax
Still plans to raise top rate after 75% tax struck down on technical grounds



POLITICS
Minimum Wage Gap Between States Grows Wider

A fistful of dollars, not coming to a paycheck near you

Washington State went to $9.19/hour yesterday, other states also bump minimum wages

Maine Says F. Lee Bailey Too Crooked To Practice Law

Colorado Pot Clubs Celebrate The New Year With Newly Legal Weed

Pennsylvania Governor To Sue NCAA Over Penn State Sanctions

Chicago’s Cardinal George Opposes Proposed Gay Marriage Bill

Alaska Senators Join Chorus Of Pols Rejecting Congressional Pay Raise

SecState Clinton Getting Blood Thinners To Dissolve Clot

Drilling Rig Grounded On Kodiak Island Provokes Usual Chorus Of Whining About Arctic Drilling



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Rises To Two-Month High On Fiscal Cliff Optimism; NYMEX $91.81, Brent $111.11
Asian Stocks Rise, Yen Sinks As US Passes Budget Deal
Singapore Avoids Recession With Q4 Growth
Tribune Company Exits Bankruptcy
Lights Go Out On 75-Watt Bulbs
AA Flight Attendants Poised To Approve US Air Merger Plan
Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille, Ten Other Games
iPhone 6, iOS 7 Start Showing Up In Usage Logs
Intel To Unveil Set-Top Box, TV Service At CES
Open WebOS Ported To The Nexus 7 Gives Us The Touchpad Go That Might Have Been
Wary Of Instagram-Like Backlash, Foursquare makes Privacy Tweaks



SPORTS
Nuggets End Clippers’ Win Streak At 17

Denver forward Danilo Gallinari knocks the ball loose from Clippers center DeAndre Jordan

Swarming defense key to a 92-78 win for Denver

#13 Seminoles Beat NIU 31-10 In Orange Bowl

Rays Avoid Arbitration, Sign David Price To One Year/$10 Million

Stanford Wins Rose Bowl, Beats Badgers 20-14

Blazers Spoil Stoudemire’s Debut, Beat Knicks 105-100

Andy Reid: Fired By Eagles, Hired By Cardinals?

NHL Lockout: Neither Side Saying Much, But There Appears To be Progress

Pistons Hold Off Kings 103-97 For Third Straight Win

Jets Fire GM Tannenbaum, Keep Coach Ryan



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Scarlett Johansson On Marriage

Scarlett Johansson

“It isn’t important. I’m not having kids any time soon.”

Unspeakable Armenian Not Suffering From Morning Sickness
The rest of us are nauseous enough, thanks

Paparazzo Killed In Hit & Run While Trying To Snap Bieber’s Ferrari

Hugh Hefner & Crystal Harris Tie The Knot


Strictly Hush-Hush: Len Goodman Gets Married Again

Jennifer Lawrence: Addicted To Junk Food & Reality TV

Ryan Seacrest: Hosting New Year’s Eve Without Dick Clark “Surreal”



FOREIGNERS
Thousands March Against Hong Kong Leader C.Y. Leung
61 Killed In Ivory Coast New Year’s Stampede
Venezuelans On Edge Amid Shifting Signals On Chavez’ Condition
Israel Eases Some Restrictions On Gaza
NYT Reporter Denied Visa, Kicked Out Of PRC
Teenage Indian Student Busted By Singapore Cops After Bomb Threat
Is India’s Government Serious About Amending Rape Laws?



BLOGS & STUFF
Gateway Pundit: Fiscal Cliff Deal Actually Adds $4 Trillion To National Debt
Protein Wisdom: Define “Postmodern Compromise”
ZeroHedge: Putting America’s Tax Hike In Perspective
NRO Corner: It’s Not Gridlock, It’s Collapse – Our Crisis Is Political, Not Economic
Legal Insurrection: Group Claims To Have Hacked Subscriber Database Of NY Newspaper That Published Gun Owner Map
Weasel Zippers: Assploding Irony – Journal News Hires Armed Security Guards After Publishing Map Of Gun Owners
Power Line: An Optimistic Take On The Cliff Deal
Breitbart: Hollywood Gets Tax Incentive Extension
NewsBusters: Michael Moore’s New Year’s Resolution
Ed Driscoll: CNN Rings In The New Year
JustOneMinute: Obamacare – The War On Marriage Continues

Category: Live at Five

House Passes Fiscal-Cliff Deal 257-167

Posted on | January 1, 2013 | 41 Comments

Earlier today, it was reported that House Republicans would insist on adding spending cuts to the version of the fiscal-cliff deal that the Senate passed. However, faced with the likelihood that President Obama would denounce such a measure, and the Democrat-led Senate would reject the House version, the decision has now reportedly been made to permit a straight up-or-down vote on the Senate bill. It is currently being “debated” on the House floor and is expected to pass.

UPDATE: Darrell Issa has an interesting theory on the Republican Senators who voted for this deal:

BLITZER: All of those 89, including all of those conservative Republicans, including Pat Toomey and others, they were wrong?
ISSA: You know, Wolf, frankly I can’t account for what happens after midnight and all of that partying and revelry and drinking that goes on on New Years Eve at 2:00 in the morning.

Just don’t say they were “spending like drunken sailors.” At least sailors spend their own money.

They just began one hour of final debate on the bill at 9:46 p.m. ET, which means the vote should conclude shortly after 11.

UPDATE II: And they just voted to pass it, 257-167, with Democrats voting overwhelmingly in favor, and Republicans voting against it by about a 2-to-1 margin.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Barack Obama, Budget, Congress, Senate, Taxes

Palin: ‘Conservatives Must Stay Engaged’

Posted on | January 1, 2013 | 27 Comments

by Smitty

Best wishes to everyone for a happy New Year! In the coming days there will be a great deal of debate about the goings-on in the political arena and the shenanigans in Washington. Constitutional commonsense conservatives must stay engaged and hold our “leaders” accountable to the voice of average everyday hard working Americans or we will very soon become an enslaved, bankrupt former nation of greatness. So, please keep the faith heading into this new year. And for now, remember to be grateful for the blessings and opportunities God has given us as independent individuals, as caring members of families, as honorable businesses and communities, and as countrymen who understand this most exceptional nation’s foundations of strength. We’ve been given all this for yet another year; let’s not take it for granted. In this new year, as jobs change with doors closing and opening, kids growing, relationships evolving, and life throwing curveballs, may you resolve to stay engaged and optimistic. May you pick your battles wisely. And may you live life vibrantly! God bless you all and God bless our great country as we promise to live out 2 Chronicles 7:14. Here’s to liberty!

– Sarah Palin

It’s easy to succumb to despair and anger, get emotional, throw a fit. Fine get it out. Call them all everything under the sun. Block out a “pouty day”.

Then, if all of your efforts thus far meant anything, get up and get back in the fray. A huge chunk of the battle was showing up. Another chunk is having the stamina to outlast the Godless Commie enemies of liberty. I’m not saying be detached and high minded. You’re not Mitt Romney or George W. Bush, sufficiently insulated from all this that you can buy privacy and gaff off the moocher hordes that rejected limited government.

The bad guys want you to give up. Deny them joy.

Category: Sarah Palin

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

Posted on | January 1, 2013 | 13 Comments

Excuse my failure to comment previously on the Glorious Passage of the Great Compromise in the Senate, but I’ve been working on an American Spectator column about this shameful travesty while waiting to see what the House does. Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and other House Democrats just gave a press conference demanding an up-or-down vote on the Senate bill. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Senate bill would provide a pathetic $620 billion in additional revenues over the next decade, while providing an even more pathetic $15 billion in spending cuts. (Insert punchline here.) Sen. Rand Paul sums it up:

“Mark my word, you will raise tax rates and you’ll feel good because you went out there and you got those rich people. . . . You campaigned against rich people and you got enough envy whipped up in the country, and you’re going to stick it to those rich people. But guess what? You may not get any more revenue. You may not get any more economic growth. But you can say, ‘I stuck it to the rich people.’”

 

Damn the Democrat Party. Damn them all to hell.

UPDATE: In the interests of bipartisanship and the Starbucks “Come Togther” spirit, I’ll quote Tom Blumer’s PJ Media column:

What Breitbart understood, and what all too many establishment Republicans and even conservatives don’t, is that there is no accommodating the left . . . The left is hellbent on fundamentally transforming the country into a socialist utopia which has never succeeded anywhere it has been tried, and the press is determined to help them do that. Folks, no matter what you do, they’re going to hate you . . . So you might as well do the right thing and follow your beliefs and principles.

Damn the Republican Party. Damn them all to hell.

UPDATE II: Oh, wait, CBO has re-calculated its estimate:

The Senate deal to avoid the “fiscal cliff” will add roughly $4 trillion to the deficit when compared to current law, according to new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). . . .
The CBO says the budget agreement will lead to an overall increase in spending of about $330 billion over 10 years. . . .
White House officials and lawmakers who voted for the bill argue the bill would raise $620 billion in new tax revenue compared to current policy.

Which is to say, they lied. Damn them all to hell.

UPDATE III: The ritual kabuki dance continues: House Republicans are demanding that additional spending cuts be added to the Senate bill, and the amended bill would then have to be sent back to the Senate for yet another vote

This is screwing up my plans to file my American Spectator column and be done with this godawful mess. Damn them all to hell.

 


Category: Barack Obama, Budget, Congress, Nancy Pelosi, Rand Paul, Senate, Taxes

Penetration, However Slight

Posted on | January 1, 2013 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

Legal Insurrection

The bill raised taxes by over $600 billion, in addition to Obamacare taxes already coming on line, yet the Senators can claim it was a massive tax cut because the vote took place after midnight, so technically the Bush tax cuts already had expired.

Oh, Senator Warner, you’ll be facing some questions come 2014, sir.

Update: and Moe Lane says Virginia is ‘low risk’. Well, we’re just going to have to set about changing that, then.

Category: Virginia

Sneaky Tea Party Extremists!

Posted on | December 31, 2012 | 24 Comments

The latest news from Manhattan rural Oklahoma shows the danger posed by Harvard graduates racist hillbillies joining Occupy Wall Street Tea Party extremists and engaging in violent terrorism:

The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.
Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday.
People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said.
Cops found the stash in the couple’s West Ninth Street home Saturday when they went there to look for Gliedman, 27, who was wanted for alleged credit-card theft.
A detective discovered a plastic container with seven grams of a white chemical powder called HMTD, which is so powerful, cops evacuated several nearby buildings.
Police also found a flare launcher, which is a commercial replica of a grenade launcher; a modified 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun; ammo; and nine high-capacity rifle magazines, the sources said.

Sounds like these Harvard graduates Oklahoma trailer trash were planning real trouble. Imagine how angry liberals would be if Naomi Wolf Pat Buchanan was defending the “civil rights” of these terrorists.

Category: #Occupy, Terrorism
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