The Other McCain

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

Anatomy Of A Great Tweet

Posted on | January 6, 2013 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Look at this thing of beauty:

Category: Uncategorized

Damn It, Jim, I’m a Blogger!

Posted on | January 5, 2013 | 16 Comments

OK, so Pete Da Tech Guy wrote a post about loyalty, citing the persistence of my gratitude toward Alyssa Milano for an RT in September 2010.  Pete recalled that he had his own celebrity Twitter moment, a Tweet from William Shatner. (Eat your heart out, Jonah Goldberg!)

At the end of his post, Pete mentioned that he was still $370 short of his fundraising goal, and I was trying to think: How can we fix that?

Of course, Pete is famously Sicilian and naturally my mind started turning in that direction . . .

 

About 40 minutes passed and then . . .

How awesome is that? Not only did I get a Tweet from Captain James Tiberius Kirk, but it turns out he’s Twitter buddies with Alyssa!

Remember, however, that this happened because of Pete’s inspirational thoughts about loyalty, and there’s still his fundraiser to worry about, so please go hit Da Tip Jar.

As for me, I must keep pressing onward, to explore new Twitter frontiers, to boldly go where no blogger has gone before . . .

 

Category: Uncategorized

Hey, GOP: The IRS Is A Substantial Reform Target

Posted on | January 5, 2013 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Let’s face it: the IRS tax code is still a nightmare. It is too complex, too costly and too unfair. There is something fundamentally wrong when roughly 60 percent of hardworking taxpayers have to hire a professional just to do their taxes. You shouldn’t need an army of lawyers and accountants to understand our tax code. We need a simpler, flatter, fairer tax code that’s designed for taxpayers.
That’s why we have to start to work on real solutions to return accountability to our tax code by eliminating special interest loopholes. I believe in a simple principle. When it comes to the tax code, everyone should play by the same rules. Your tax rate should be determined by what’s fair, not who you know in Washington.

If the GOP wants to continue getting crushed in elections, just continue coloring within the Progressive lines, accepting the consumption of liberty by Leviathan. The tax code has long since ceased to become a means of funding legitimate government budgets. We don’t pass budget legislation anymore, and the taxes that are collected are pit into which all too small leap over shall fall. Way to go, DC: you’re as oppressive as King George III ever was.

But where is the reform? GOP candidates just repeat “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs,” as though the Federal government somehow isn’t shot through with rot and in need of a tear-down and retooling. We all know it does. So, if the GOP ain’t got the sack to:

(a) Articulate the real systemic issues,
(b) Lay them at the feet of the Body-surfing Hawaiian Orator,
(c) State what major chunks of the Federal Government are getting lopped off,

then just what good is the GOP, anyway?

via Insty

Category: GOP

‘Learning French,’ IYKWIMAITYD

Posted on | January 5, 2013 | 47 Comments

Valérie Allain as Mireille Belleau in French in Action (1987)

“Many have criticized the depiction of Mireille as gratuitously sexist. The camera often lingers on the actress’s chest and bare legs. ‘You’re seeing the videotape through a male gaze,’ said one female teaching assistant who asked not to be identified.”
— New York Times, March 4, 1990

Maybe Ace of Spades should teach a course, “Methods of Humor,” because he absolutely killed me with this casual walk-up to the joke:

Anyone keeping to those New Year’s declarations? I’m continuing trying to learn French . . .

Did my left eyebrow arch suspiciously at that set-up? I can’t say that it did, and I certainly didn’t suspect the punchline to which it was leading:

I’m mostly using “French in Action,” an immersion course from the 80s, which used to run on PBS. Anyone remember it? I actually did remember it — seeing it here and there — and it stuck in my mind chiefly because the main actress is gorgeous and has the highbeams on in 30% of her scenes (here, at about 1:40-2:00). I remember actually watching it just for the highbeams.
When the videos were used at Yale, three female students lodged a protest due to “sexism” — because the girl’s legs get featured a fair amount, and, of course, her highbeams. Which, in fairness, are halogen. Blinding.

It’s funny, but he’s not kidding. This French chick is, comment dites-vous? Oui, très érotique. Her name is Valérie Allain, and she was 21 when the series aired on public television. She’s now a 47-year-old mother of two, but thanks to the miracle of film, she is forever the delightful ingénue for students of French — and students of high-beams.

We’re talking high-beams of such startling intensity that you may never fully recover from the acute retinal trauma, my friends. Read more

Category: Ace of Spades, Celebrities, Culture, Education, Feminism, France, Hollywood, Movies, Rule 5

World’s Youngest Blogger:
Yeah, I Own Shakespeare

Posted on | January 5, 2013 | 11 Comments

How mean, green bovine?
Category: World's Youngest Blogger

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
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