The Other McCain

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

The Stalinist at Montclair State

Posted on | November 10, 2012 | 38 Comments

Smitty blogged about this Monday, but amid the election excitement, I worry that it may have been overlooked. During an Oct. 25 debate at Montclair State University, Professor Grover Furr denied the systematic mass murders committed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin:

“What you said is a bulls–t. It’s wrong. It’s a lie. . . . I have yet to find one crime that Stalin committed.”

Watch the video again and notice (around 1:50) that there is applause when Professor Furr makes his adamant defense of Stalin:

It is genuinely frightening that this apologist for totalitarianism is tenured at a state university, and doubly frightening that students would applaud him. A reporter for the student newspaper evidently didn’t even realize that what Professor Furr said was controversial, which tells you a lot about how dangerously dumbed-down our education system has become. The murderous brutality of Stalin is one of the best-established facts of 20th-century history, and whatever “research” Professor Furr claims as the basis for his bizarre revisionism is likely akin to the “research” of Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers and other fringe crackpots.

Gabriella Hoffman reported this at College Reform and Front Page Magazine, and it was also picked up by World Net Daily, but . . . that’s it?

I mean, you have this lunatic praising Stalin at a public university in New Jersey and the New York Times can’t be bothered to take notice? Is the strange career of Professor Furr undeserving of attention by, say, the Chronicle of Higher Education? Is this not newsworthy?

Hoffman takes this rather personally because, as she explains at her own blog, her family fled the Soviet Union. What I can’t understand is how this Bolshevik creep could be hiding in plain sight on a university faculty without attracting widespread notoriety.

David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks has a profile on Professor Furr, who teaches multiple “humanities” courses at Montclair State, assigning a syllabus crammed with radical anti-American writers. Professor Furr is the author of a book, Kruschev Lied, which presents itself as “proving” that Nikita Kruschev’s famed 1956 denunciation of Stalin was false:

Virtually everything we thought we knew about the Stalin years turns out to be wrong.

That’s from a flattering review of Professor Furr’s book by Roger Keeran, a “labor studies” professor at Empire State College (part of the State University of New York system), who is co-author (with Thomas Kenny) of Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus it would appear that pro-Soviet “history” is something of a fashionable trend in academia, and that the comrades in the faculty lounge openly promote Stalinism on campus with impunity. But if Howard Zinn is now deemed respectable, this shouldn’t really surprise us.

UPDATE: Montclair, N.J., is in Essex County, which voted 77% for Obama. Maybe that explains something, huh?

UPDATE II: Montclair is also home to many elite journalists, including the executive editor of the New York Times.

So that probably explains something, too.

 

Category: Education, History

FMJRA 2.0: Luxury Cage

Posted on | November 10, 2012 | 11 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

SCENES FROM OHIO ‘ALL-STAR’ RALLY

OHIO: MATH IS HARD

I Had Been Repeating That The Internet Changed Everything

ELECTION NIGHT RESULTS HQ; UPDATE: OBAMA WINS RE-ELECTION; AMERICA HOPELESSLY DOOMED

@PruPaine #JustABlogger Electoral Vote Entry: Don’t Settle For Egg On Obama’s Face; Give It The Full Omelette

Ben & Jerry’s Are To Ice Cream What Clooney Is To Acting

Words Matter, But The Motive Behind Them Drives The Deed

FMJRA 2.0: After The Flood

OHIO OR BOSTON?

Monsters on the Internet: Sociopathic Sadism and Bill Schmalfeldt’s Madness

VIDEO: Axelrod Laughs About Libya

Rule 5 Sunday: Medicine Show

LIVE AT FIVE: 11.05.12

By ‘Research’, Furr Means ‘Whitewash’

OHIO: IT’S MITT’S TO WIN

Wild-Ass Scenarios? Chill.

OHIO: ROMNEY AIRPORT RALLY — LOOKING LIKE A WINNER, MITT!

Election Day Reminder

ELECTION DAY UPDATES

Blame Bush, You Fools

On the Encroaching Gloom: ‘We Are Permanently and Irretrievably Screwed’

You Stay Classy, Luis Cortez!

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 11.08.12

Great One From Erickson

“We’ll Fight Again Tomorrow”

Deer: They’re Also Racist

Top linkers this week:

  1. Lonely Conservative (10)
  2. Daily Pundit (7)
  3. Hogewash (5)

No doubt the shock of the election returns was responsible for depressed morale and linkagery in the days following the election returns, but thanks to all who linked regardless. Deadline for sending in links for next week’s FMJRA is Friday, November 16.

Category: FMJRA Award

The Slut Paula Broadwell

Posted on | November 10, 2012 | 110 Comments

Let’s just go ahead and get this out of the way, eh? Aren’t feminists who embrace the “slut” label (e.g., “Slutwalk“) all about empowerment and liberation? And if you are an empowered liberated woman, what difference does it make if you’re married or your partner is married? All those silly vows — “Forsaking all others” and so forth — are just oppressive tools by which the patriarchy subjugates women, and anyone who buys into moral ideals of marital permanence and lifelong fidelity has succumbed to what the Marxists would call “false consciousness.”

Stipulate that adultery has occurred and continues to occur even in the most traditionalist societies, as for example the infamous Beecher-Tilton scandal. We can’t blame feminism for everything.

Still, doesn’t it just make sense that the cheating husband will have more opportunities to cheat in a culture where rhetoric about the sexual empowerment of women is so widely accepted that anyone who dares question it is condemned as a misogynist or a puritanial religious fanatic? In the case of Gen. David Petraeus and his affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, is there no one who can defend the marital rights of Holly Petraeus, the general’s wife of 37 years, without being accused of hypocrisy, prudery or sexism? And what about the husband — father of her two sons — whom the slut Paula Broadwell betrayed?

Taylor Berman at Gawker examines the evidence that Scott Broadwell suspected his wife was cheating with Petraeus and wrote a letter to New York Times advice columnist Chuck Klosterman and received a published answer informed by political correctness and moral relativism:

Don’t expose the affair in any high-profile way. It would be different if this man’s project was promoting some (contextually hypocritical) family-values platform, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. . . . This is between you and your spouse.

Right: Adultery is only a scandal if it involves hypocrisy, and only Republican “family-values” spokesmen are capable of hypocrisy, so the adultery of an important Obama administration official should be viewed as strictly a private matter. If it weren’t for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all.

According to her Wikipedia page, Broadwell remained an Army reserve officer while she was knocking boots with the CIA director and was only recently elevated to the rank of lieutenant colonel, a promotion she never would have gotten had her illicit affair been exposed earlier. And it appears the slut was very cunning in her seduction:

Paula Broadwell, 39, has said she often conducted interviews with Petraeus while jogging. The pair met in 2006, when she was attending the Kennedy Center for Public Leadership at Harvard.

Ah, yes — the elite institution, and the ambitious West Point graduate using her sexuality to gain advantageous access to the Alpha Male, who had conveniently tucked his wife into a political sinecure with the Obama administration’s pet bureaucracy:

His wife, Holly, the daughter of a West Point superintendent, heads the office for service-member affairs in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created by the 2010 financial-regulation law.

Give the Missus a do-gooder job to keep her busy while you’re keeping busy with other things, eh, General?

Of course, the feminists will cry foul that I am interpreting this tawdry human drama ideologically, even while they themselves view it through the lens of their own narrow ideology. My point is not that feminism causes adultery, but rather that the feminist rhetoric of “empowerment” provides a convenient rationalization for such behavior, and that feminism privileges the interests of a relatively small cadre of women (elite careerist strivers like Paula Broadwell) over the interests of others.

The inherent selfishness of feminism — its meaning as the expression of the power-oriented ambitions of a self-interested elite — is what needs to be examined. As is so often true in radical politics, the demand for “equality” is a precursor to the demand for hegemonic superiority.

UPDATE: More details emerge. It seems that David Petraeus may have had more than one extra-marital sweetie, and that his affair was discovered when the FBI began investigating e-mail threats that Paula Broadwell had sent to the general’s other side-piece:

The identity of the woman who received the e-mails was not disclosed, and the nature of her relationship with Petraeus is unknown. The officials said the woman did not work at the CIA and was not Petraeus’s wife, Holly. The law enforcement officials said the e-mails indicated that Broadwell perceived the other woman as a threat to her relationship with Petraeus.

John Hinderaker notes that the general’s e-mail correspondence with his lover included thousands of messages, which suggests that the CIA director was spending way too much time dealing with his irregular personal life. One argument for monogamy: It’s less time-consuming.

 

 

Category: Feminism, Military, Scandal, Sex

Bizarre Statistical Improbabilities

Posted on | November 10, 2012 | 58 Comments

What are the odds that two players in the same hand of Texas Hold ‘Em will both have outstanding hands — four of a kind or a straight flush? The odds against this are high enough that casinos offer so-called “Bad Beat” jackpots to be paid out in such rare instances. If there were such a jackpot for against-all-odds election results, Dan Collins says the house should be paying it out this year:

St. Lucie County in Florida had a 141% turnout on election night. President Obama also managed to win 99% of the votes, according to the numbers, in various districts in Broward County.
The sheer number of voters shocked the Supervisor of Elections there, though in this piece she’s not asked to comment on the amazingly lopsided voting percentages in some of the districts. It’s really quite impossible that any candidate, much less one with approval numbers the likes of those enjoyed by Obama, should prevail so hyperwhelmingly. I expect that Nate Silver won’t be calculating the likelihoods, but if there were statisticians willing to address the matter, I think we would find that the numbers are far outside the realm of reasonable probability.
The infinitessimal statistical probabilities materialized in Broward County, FL, were not limited to that county. In polling locations in Philadelphia where Republican observers were thrown out, Mr. Obama received once again over 99% of the votes cast. In Cleveland, he received 99.8% of the votes in 44 districts, and he benefitted from 108% turnout from eligible voters in one county in Ohio.
It takes a special kind of person not to see how such amazing, astounding, mind-bending statistical anomalies could crop up in so many precincts all in one election.

Read the whole thing. This isn’t a conspiracy theory so much as it is a recognition of the Democrat Party’s tradition of vote fraud. Two of their most important constituencies are tombstones and vacant lots.

 

Category: Election 2012

Less ‘Representative’, More ‘Democracy’

Posted on | November 10, 2012 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

Jerry Wilson over at Goldfish and Clowns offers up a fine post that is worth your time in full, but here is a taste (emphasis mine):

Economically, there will continue to be no sense of urgency until either Obamacare’s reality in the form of slashed Medicare coverages starts adversely affecting a multitude of families, the tax burden for all who actually pay taxes becomes onerous or the government stops handing out money. If the first two happen, they happen. The latter is far less likely to take place unless it is forced, and the only way that can happen would be if House Republicans refuse to pass any more appropriation bills, thus shutting down the government, until a genuine deficit reduction program is installed. That said, it’s doubtful the GOP has the guts to turn off the money spigot and shut government down, no matter the pain it causes, until Obama and the Democrats agree to genuine financial reform. However, nothing else short of another massive terrorist attack or full blown war on American soil will get the public’s attention.

I submit that this is true insofar as it goes, but the real problem here is indifference. Not just on election days, but the other 2 * 365 – 1 days in between*.

Folks, if we don’t explicitly keep our Republic, it will be taken from us!

I’m preaching to a choir here, so the real question is how we can broaden the discussion past the choir. Guys like Glenn Beck and Mike Church have been instrumental in my own personal education on what this country really was intended to mean. It did not seem possible to me that a society could achieve the level of daftness the U.S. did on the 6th of November. BHO should have been overwhelmed at the polls, far past the reach of any minor accounting boo-boos that may have crept in.

The notion of division of labor goes back a really long way in economics. Yes, we use elections to divide the work between a handfull of officials and the rest of the populace. Sure, it would be swell if we had some higher-caliber statesmen in play. But we the people can’t expect to tune in for elections only and expect the country to stay on course. DC is a tiny fraction of the total area of the country, and holds a distorted, statist worldview. The Silent Majority is pulling off a major sin of omission, methinks.

*Don’t get pedantic with me about leap years and goofy off-year elections like Virginia’s.

Category: Uncategorized

ORCA: Romney’s Killer Fail

Posted on | November 9, 2012 | 61 Comments

Back home this evening after a 12-day road trip to Ohio, I’m perusing accounts of how the Romney campaign recruited 37,00 volunteers to participate in its ORCA project to monitor Election Day turnout, a project that turned out to be a spectacular failure of epic proportions. The name that keeps coming up in these accounts is Dan Centinello, deputy political director for the Romney campaign:

Centinello was quoted in The Huffington Post on Nov. 1 touting ORCA to volunteers in these grandiose terms: “There’s nothing that the Obama data team, there’s nothing that the Obama campaign, there’s nothing that President Obama himself can do to even come close to what we are putting together here.”

That’s a boast suitable for framing, eh? Centinello is an experienced operative whose LinkedIn profile traces his career going back to his start with the Republican Party in San Diego in 2005, his subsequent work with the 2006 California gubernatorial campaign of Arnold Schwarzenegger, on to Romney’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential primary campaign, Chris Christie’s 2009 gubernatorial campaign in New Jersey, and Roy Blunt’s 2010 senatorial campaign in Missouri. He was hired as a deputy to Romney campaign political director Rich Beeson in April, not long after Romney essentially clinched the GOP nomination.

Nothing in Centinello’s resumé suggests that he is the kind of clueless bungler capable of devising a digital Rube Goldberg device like ORCA and yet his fingerprints are all over this laughable catastrophe. The scope of the failure is hard to exaggerate and John Ekdahl at Ace of Spades HQ explains that the failure was predictable:

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of “rah-rahs” and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame. . . .
They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

When your “training sessions” seem more like an multi-tiered marketing sales pitch, this is not generally a good omen. In hindsight, the bad omens were there all along. In July, Centinello’s name cropped up in an account by Sascha Issenberg of Slate about “a new data-science team within Romney’s strategy department,” which was at that time evidently involved in trying to copy the Obama campaign’s strategy:

“We watch where the president goes,” says Dan Centinello, a Romney deputy political director who oversees the weekly meetings. “We’re trying to piece together what we think are his top ranks.” . . .
Romney aides scoff at the glowing pieces written about Obama’s data-driven methods, but their obsession with reverse-engineering his analytics is its own concession. It is the statistician’s version of trailing a motorcade in a honking bus to find out where the president is headed, in the hopes of later divining why. “It’s one thing to know ours,” says Centinello, “but it’s even better to know what his strategy is.”

This is the guy who, three months later, was personally answering e-mails from volunteers asking questions about the ORCA system, as Bethany Mandel of Commentary reports:

Shoshanna McCrimmon signed up to volunteer on Romney’s website several months ago. She was contacted by Dan Centinello of the Romney campaign and underwent online and phone training that lasted for several hours in order to volunteer locally on Election Day. . . .
Thousands of man-hours went into designing and implementing a program that was useful on one day and one day only, and on that day, it crashed. My source familiar with the campaign described it this way, “It was a giant [mess] because a political operative sold a broken product with no support or backup plan. Just another arrogant piece of the arrogant Romney campaign.”
The operative in question, Dan Centinello, Romney’s Deputy Political Director, was Shoshanna’s only point of contact with the campaign. After a two-and-a-half-hour conference call with volunteers across the country, Shoshanna still had questions about minor details about ORCA and volunteering at her polling place. Her emails were answered within 24 hours, always by Centinello. There appears to have been no delegation on Centinello’s part, and every question sent was answered by the ORCA project manager personally. It’s likely that if this was taking place with the thousands of volunteers in Project ORCA, Centinello was spending hundreds of hours answering basic questions from volunteers that could have been addressed by lower level staffers.

So the deputy campaign manager apparently didn’t have sufficient staff to handle the massive internal communications load necessary when dealing with an organization of 37,00 volunteers using customized software that had never been adequately field tested. Anyone could anticipate trouble in such a situation and yet, before Election Day, a Team Romney spokeswoman was bragging on TV about how 800 volunteers in Boston were going to run this awesome ORCA operation:

“The Obama campaign likes to brag about their ground operation, but it’s nothing compared to this.”
— Gail Gitcho, Romney campaign communications director

Yeah: Team Obama had “nothing compared to this” colossal disaster. Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica discusses the basic problems:

[A]ccording to volunteers who saw and used the system, it was hardly a model of stability, having been developed in just seven months on a lightning schedule following the Republican primary elections. . . .
To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. . . .
Orca turned out to be toothless, thanks to a series of deployment blunders and network and system failures. While the system was stress-tested using automated testing tools, users received little or no advance training on the system. Crucially, there was no dry run to test how Orca would perform over the public Internet.
Part of the issue was Orca’s architecture. While 11 backend database servers had been provisioned for the system –probably running on virtual machines — the “mobile” piece of Orca was a Web application supported by a single Web server and a single application server. Rather than a set of servers in the cloud, “I believe all the servers were in Boston at the Garden or a data center nearby,” wrote Hans Dittuobo, a Romney volunteer at Boston Garden, to Ars by e-mail.
Throughout the day, the Orca Web page was repeatedly inaccessible. It remains unclear whether the issue was server load or a lack of available bandwidth, but the result was the same: Orca had not been tested under real-world conditions and repeatedly failed when it was needed the most.

From the perspective of volunteers in key swing states, ORCA was a Kafkaesque nightmare, as Joel Pollak writes at Breitbart.com:

At one point during Election Day, the system had malfunctioned so badly that desperate volunteers wondered if the program had been hacked.
Romney volunteers in Virginia confirmed that the campaign had relied entirely on Project Orca to turn out the vote in key areas such as Roanoke, where Romney and Ryan had made appearances. Volunteers who had driven to Virginia from safely-Republican Tennessee were shocked at the disorganization they encountered.
While the Romney campaign waited for Orca to function as planned, the Obama campaign had placed signs outside every one of the city’s thirty-three polling places, and was fully staffed with two volunteers outside each polling place, and a strike list volunteer inside, all day long from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. The best that the short-handed Tennessee volunteers could manage was 40% coverage of polling places; the local GOP, they said, had relied entirely on the campaign’s centralized Orca system in Boston to turn out the local vote.

John Ekdahl notices that top staff on the Romney campaign are trying to claim that ORCA actually worked and otherwise covering their asses:

Please, if anyone at the RNC is listening, do not let these guys near a major political campaign ever again.

Accountability? What a concept!

UPDATE: An Ohio reader e-mails:

On Saturday and Sunday, I walked my precinct for the Romney Campaign and received a list of voters from which I was to survey and find out if they were planning to vote on Tuesday and if so when.
Knowing one of these voters was well into her 90s and I was pretty sure had voted absentee, I took the liberty of checking against the Hamilton County Board of Elections records of who voted early and had returned their ballot. I was able to check off one-third of the voters I would have otherwise contacted, 32 of 106, and avoid having any of them or their friends or family find out just how inept the Romney folk were for contacting someone whose ballot was mailed back in weeks earlier.
When I returned to the Victory Center and told the person in charge that I found one-third of them had already voted, I was not thanked for finding this out, praised for efficiency, or anything like that.
No, the 22-year-old bitched at me for not following the procedures set forth in the instructions by the “professionals.”

UPDATE II: Ben Howe’s sources with the Romney campaign lay the blame with the consultants running the campaign:

The result of all of these false numbers and inaccurate ground reports is simple: Mitt Romney had no idea what was coming on election day and his false sense of confidence directly translated into how the campaign operated in the closing weeks. In the words of one source, it was a con job.

UPDATE III: Lots of interesting input in the comments — our readership evidently includes plenty of IT geeks — and this from Adjoran:

It sounds like a violation of the First Rule of Management: “You cannot manage what you do not understand.”

There’s also the saying, “Personnel is policy.” If you get the right people in management roles, they’ll hire the right people to do the work and manage them well. On the other hand, if you get the wrong person in management, he’ll inevitably hire people who don’t have enough knowledge to criticize his mismanagement, so that there is no possibility that feedback within the organization to expose incompetence and failure. This is a general trend in organizations, not limited to campaigns and politics.

 

Category: Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Mitt Romney, Republicans

Paragraph 11 Explains Petraeus Departure

Posted on | November 9, 2012 | 30 Comments

by Smitty

In case anybody wondered why David Petraeus ejected:

“I wanted him to continue,” she said. “He was good, he loved the work, and he had a command of intelligence issues second to none.” Feinstein added that Petraeus will no longer be required to testify at hearings next week related to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya Sept. 11.

Military justice considers extramarital affairs, ripe ground for blackmailing, to be security threats and possible grounds for court martial, The Associated Press reported.

If Petraeus doesn’t run for POTUS on the 2016 GOP ticket I don’t know how I’m going to muster enthusiasm to fall in line for the conservative Charlie Brown parade.
After John McCain and Mitt Romney, I really need somebody with the stature and courage of DP to call for another head-on charge at Lucy, clutching balls the way she does, only to offer another grotesque yank at the last second, letting conservatives fall down, gasping. Again. For another four years. In the name of Progress.
Ah, political fantasy football.

via Drudge

Category: Politics

‘An Awful Lot of Stupid People’

Posted on | November 9, 2012 | 54 Comments

“You know, I’ve always known this but I’m coming to the conclusion yet again, that Republican leaders are really stupid people. And I’m coming to the conclusion that there are an awful lot of stupid people posing as commentators on cable TV.”
— Mark Levin

UPDATE: Here’s the audio via The Right Scoop:

Category: Mark Levin
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin