The Other McCain

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

Tina Brown’s Bankrupt Magazine Newsweek Calls Mitt Romney a ‘Wimp’

Posted on | July 29, 2012 | 22 Comments

Newsweek magazine lost $20 million last year, each weekly issue therefore representing an operating loss of $400,000. Two years ago, Sidney Harman bought the magazine (and its $50 million debt) for a token $1, and subsequently merged it with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, which has spent the past four years losing $10 million annually in its own right. Tina Brown has now deployed the notoriously rugged he-man stud Michael Tomasky to describe Mitt Romney as a wimp.

Yeah. Profit is for wimps, I guess.

Category: Election 2012, Media Bias, Mitt Romney, Newsweek

The Olympic Princess Fantasy

Posted on | July 29, 2012 | 46 Comments

U.S. gymnast Gabby Douglass, 16, is nicknamed “The Flying Squirrel.”

“The reigning world champion Jordyn Wieber left the Olympic gymnastics arena in tears on Sunday after failing to qualify for the finals of the all-around competition.
“Wieber, 17, of DeWitt, Mich., was long considered one of the favorites to win the gold medal in the sport’s glamour event. . . .
“But in the qualifying round Sunday, Wieber simply could not deliver.”
— New York Times

Can we talk about Olympic women’s gymnastics as a cultural phenomenon? As a focus of widespread interest, the sport entered public consciousness in 1972 with Russian gold medalist Olga Korbut’s performance in Munich, then intensified in 1976 when Rumania’s Nadia Comaneci scored an unprecedented perfect “10” in Montreal.

Comaneci won the gold medal when she was only 14 years old.

She had been training at coach Bela Karolyi’s gymnastics school since she was 7. While she was being celebrated with slow-motion montages on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Nadia was also being declared a “Hero of Socialist Labor” by Rumania’s vicious dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu.

The general American attitude toward such feats during the Cold War was that, yes, of course the Communist countries dominated certain sports where, in a totalitarian dictatorship, children could be sent to train year-round at early ages in order to provide their governments with a propaganda coup in international athletic competition.

We weren’t too impressed with the quadrennial Helga-and-Boris Show at the Olympics: Yeah, the East Germans just won the women’s shotput.

America had football and NASCAR and Arnold Palmer. We didn’t give a damn about some hypermuscular Commie sideshow freak.

Women’s gymnastics, however, was different. For some reason, the spectacle of petite teenagers doing backflips and cartwheels had a marketing appeal that other sports lacked. Women’s gymnastics had the same basic “ballerina princess” vibe as figure skating.

This was especially true of  the floor exercise. The vault, the uneven bars, the balance beam — yeah, OK, but the floor exercise was performed to music, so it was like dancing, and this appealed to the whole “ballerina princess” fantasy embedded deeply in the mind of every girl who ever took six weeks of dance lessons.

So while Americans moms have never gone nuts encouraging their daughters to compete with Helga the German shotput champ, from 1976 onward there was a rush of moms signing up their little girls for gymnastics. It’s not about athletics, it’s about the princess fantasy.

We are not supposed to notice or comment on this phenomenon, because it contradicts the androgynous gender-neutral ethos of feminism. The fact that the Olympic princess phenomenon represents the preferences of women themselves — the persistent admiration of distinctly feminine traits — is one of those “false consciousness” things, a violation of the egalitarian ideal that the gender theorists insist is an expression of oppressive patriarchal norms.

Feminists believe that men and women are exactly the same in their aptitudes and interests. Any observable difference between them can only be the result of discriminatory sexist social expectations. Larry Summers was practically lynched at Harvard University for doubting this.

Kyla Ross, 15, is the youngest U.S. Olympic gymnast

Something else you’re not supposed to notice or comment on: As a cultural ideal, women’s gymnastics is kind of weird.

In no other sport are top competitors so young. Kyla Ross, 15, is the youngest member of the U.S. Olympic team, whose other members — Gabby Douglass and McKayla Maroney, both 16, Jordyn Wieber, 17, and Aly Raisman, 18 — bring the average age up to 16.4.

Three-fifths of the U.S. team members are no older than the minimum age of 16 (Ross is able to compete because she turns 16 before the end of the calendar year) and none is 19 or older.

Basically, by the time you’re old enough to buy a drink, you’re over the hill in world-class women’s gymnastics which, for the sake of honesty, should be renamed girl’s gymnastics.

Four years ago, it was suspected that some of the Chinese gymnasts were underage — not the first time such suspicions had arisen.

At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the Chinese were caught using a 14-year-old on their team. In no other sport does youth  provide such an advantage, as the New York Times explains:

Using younger, but obviously world-class, gymnasts is an advantage because small bodies in earlier stages of puberty can pull off bigger tricks in the air. Growing taller and maturing, with accompanying breasts and hips, complicates flips and twists.

In other words, it’s not a sport for grown-ups. Pubescent girls can perform at levels that no mature woman can hope to match, and the petite physique type which is ideal for women’s gymnastics is ideal in no other sport. As a matter of fact, the intense training and strict diet required of a top competitive gymnast has the effect of delaying normal physical development.

Olympic gymnasts can therefore be described as abnormal in roughly the same sense that a 6-foot-6, 300-pound defensive tackle is abnormal. But the gigantic tackle isn’t an NFL All-Pro at 15 years old and a washed-up has-been by age 20.

Feminists complain that Barbie dolls present little girls with an impossible ideal, but isn’t the same thing true of Olympic gymnastics?

We aren’t supposed to notice or mention this, because the celebration of Olympic achievement — “USA! USA! USA!” — is marketed so heavily on TV as to permit no space for critical thought.

Responsible adulthood, however, requires us to resist the mindless consumption of whatever TV is selling, and “Olympic fever” is a made-for-TV commodity whose value should be viewed skeptically.

If there is to be a competition to determine which nation has the most highly-skilled diminutive adolescent girls, it is my patriotic duty to hope that America wins the contest. But I reserve the right to observe that this is a freakishly weird thing to compete over.

UPDATE: Linked by Ann Althouse who quotes her own 1988 letter to the New York Times, suggesting that the sport of gymnastics artificially favors a certain body type. That’s not my point at all. Rather, I am pointing to the cultural factors that made this one sport (rather than say, the mile run or the pentathlon) such a celebrated part of Olympic competition. It’s a matter of market appeal, and the popularity of women’s gymnastics therefore has a significance — it tells us something about our culture, although I’m not sure what that something is.

Category: Culture, Feminism, Sports

Did University of Colorado ‘Student Mental Health Service’ Director Blow It?

Posted on | July 29, 2012 | 56 Comments

It would probably be libelous to call somebody a “pill-peddling quack,” so you should try to avoid doing that:

Attorneys for 24-year-old James Holmes disclosed he was a “psychiatric patient” of Dr. Lynne Fenton in a court motion Friday, as they sought to discover the source of leaks to media outlets that he sent the psychiatrist a package containing a notebook with descriptions of an attack.
The revelation is the first indication that Holmes may have sought help before the rampage that killed 12 people and wounded 58. . . .
The University of Colorado’s website identified Fenton as the medical director of the school’s Student Mental Health Services. An online resume stated that she sees 10 to 15 graduate students a week for medication and psychotherapy, as well as 5 to 10 patients in her general practice as a psychiatrist. Schizophrenia was listed as one of her research interests.
Fenton worked for the U.S. Air Force in Texas as an acupuncturist before joining the University of Colorado in 2005.

Wait — an acupuncturist? The medical director of your university Student Mental Health Service is an acupuncturist? And she’s been disciplined by the Colorado Medical Board?

Records show Fenton has faced some trouble in her career. She was disciplined by  the Colorado Medical Board in 2004 for prescribing herself Xanax while her  mother was dying, state records show. She also was disciplined for prescribing  the sleep aid Ambien and the allergy medicine Claritin for her husband, and  painkillers for an employee who suffered from chronic headaches.

I’m sure Dr. Fenton is a nice person and I’m sure advocates of acupuncture will say it’s a perfectly legitimate and scientific type of treatment. The problem here is the liability incurred by the University of Colorado in hiring Dr. Fenton, now that one of her former patients is accused of shooting 70 people, 12 of whom died.

Acupuncture is . . . well, exotic would be one word for it.

If you’re a lawyer preparing to defend the university in a situation like this, do you want to have to explain acupuncture to a jury? Fairly or not, a lot of people hear “acupuncture” and classify it with herbal remedies, aromatherapy, and other such not-quite-standard holistic stuff.

It’s like finding out that your financial advisor is consulting tarot cards.

We can presume that most of the patients Dr. Fenton saw at the university Mental Health Service were routine stress-and-depression cases: The student with a Prozac prescription who needs a monthly appointment to get ber prescription re-filled, and so forth. Nothing major that would create a liability for the university if something goes wrong, and so anything problematic in Dr. Fenton’s background was no big deal — until one of her patients went on a murderous rampage. Now the university is a tort magnet, with the prospect of a jury being confronted with the question: Were university officials negligent in hiring as medical director of the Student Mental Health Service someone whom the plaintiffs’ attorneys will try to portray as a pill-peddling quack?

Of course, it’s unlikely any jury will ever hear such a case, because lawyers would advise the university to settle the claims out of court. And if this is how it plays out, then the taxpayers of Colorado will be on the hook for several million dollars’ worth of settlements.

Here’s the irony, though: The University of Colorado could not have expelled James Holmes for being a dangerous psycho, because that would have exposed the university to a claim that they were violating federal law by illegally discriminating against the mentally ill.

Society is being held hostage by the tort bar, so that plaintiffs’ lawyers are dictating the rules. There’s a word for this: crazy.

Category: Colorado, Crime

Paul Krugman Couldn’t Manage A Paper Route. Who In Their Right Mind Would Nominate Him For Fed Chair?

Posted on | July 29, 2012 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Admittedly, newspapers are headed down the extinction trail on our current national course, along with liberty. So in that sense, why not hand over the Federal Reserve to a boob like Kruge?”

[Quantitative Easing] is very uncertain in its effect, but the [Federal Reserve] should be doing more of that.”


For something relatively more credible than Krugman and the Federal Reserve, how about nominating KISS (in full costume of course) to manage U.S. monetary policy?

Via American Glob ad Weasel Zippers.

Update: linked at Daley Gator, who would at least entertain the question of landscaping work by Krugman.

Category: Uncategorized

Commie Punks Protest Olympics

Posted on | July 28, 2012 | 23 Comments

A policeman is attacked by protesters in London

The scum of the earth — wretched asinine left-wingers — have descended on Ye Merry Olde to make an Olympic-class nuisance of themselves:

Hours after the opening ceremony fireworks echoed around east London, up to 400 demonstrators marched through a neighborhood near the Olympic Park to protest what they called the “Corporate Olympics.”
The event, organized by Counter-Olympic Network and supported by 35 groups ranging from Occupy London to ecological and local anti-austerity campaigners, targeted issues including free tickets for sponsors, missile sites on residential blocks and the ethics of Olympic corporations such as BP and Dow Chemicals.
“A significant number of people in this country — about 20 percent, according to a poll — are not happy with the Olympics because of the involvement of large corporations about which are significant concerns,” said Julian Cheyne of the Counter-Olympic Network. “We are representing their views and making sure that opinion is expressed.
“It is shameful that BP is a sustainability partner of the Olympics after the damage it did to the Gulf coast with their spill, and Dow Chemicals are not meeting their moral and ethical obligations to help the victims of the Bhopal disaster.”

Julian Cheyne, just so you know, is a former resident of an East London housing co-op that was demolished five years ago to make way for the Olympics. He has managed to hustle his “victimhood” into a sort of career as the Official London Olympics Denouncer. The bottom line of all this agitated whining? They hate capitalism:

About 500 people critical of the economic impact and corporate flavor of the London Olympics marched Saturday near the Olympic Park, determined to send a message that Britain is not united in backing the games.
The protest march came hours after police arrested more than 130 bicyclists who had defied an order to avoid cycling in groups around the stadium during Friday night’s opening ceremony. . . .
Occupy London, part of a global movement that has waged demonstrations against financial institutions and capitalist policies, said some cyclists were members of the movement. They said police cordoned off more than 100 cyclists at one road junction near the stadium as Friday’s ceremony was beginning and held them there several hours.
Saturday’s protest, the largest so far against the games, drew a mix of left-wing and green activists who decry the Olympics as a corporate juggernaut rolling over residents and their civil rights.

The alleged violation of their “civil rights,” you see, justifies the protesters in disrupting traffic and attacking police. Hat-tip to Tom Lamb for this video which, according to the protesters, shows police brutality against a man in a wheelchair but looks to me more like a bunch of smelly Occupy scum assaulting a cop:

Category: #Occupy, Great Britain

Will the Last Democrat Leaving Missouri Please Turn Out the Lights?

Posted on | July 28, 2012 | 41 Comments

The state that once gave America such powerful Democrats as Harry Truman and Dick Gephardt is now turning deep, deep Republican red:

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) trails all three of her potential Republican rivals, according to a new survey conducted for two Missouri news outlets, cementing her status as this cycle’s most vulnerable incumbent.
Businessman John Brunner (R) holds the largest advantage over McCaskill, leading by a 52 perent to 41 percent margin. Former state Treasurer Sarah Steelman (R) leads by a 49 percent to 41 percent margin. And Rep. Todd Akin (R) leads by a 49 percent to 44 percent margin.
McCaskill’s big problems come among independent voters. She scores just 40 percent among independents against Akin, and she’s mired in the mid-30s when she’s matched up with Brunner and Steelman.

Doug Powers points out that Romney leads Obama by nine points in Missouri. In 2008, Obama came within 4,000 votes of winning Missouri.

So if Obama is running eight points behind his 2008 margin in Missouri, what are his chances of carrying other Midwest states like Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa? Not too good, I’d guess.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

Category: Uncategorized

Florida: The Creepy State

Posted on | July 28, 2012 | 13 Comments

Shaped like a flaccid penis, this geographical appendage has apparently become the receptable of all perverse weirdness on the East Coast.

Exhibit A — The Creepy Puppeteer:

A Florida puppeteer known for community involvement was arrested and charged with conspiring to kidnap a child and possession of child pornography, according to a criminal complaint filed in a federal court in Tampa court on Friday.
A day earlier, federal and local agents arrested Ronald William Brown, 57, after uncovering graphic Internet chats in which he talked about abducting, murdering and cannibalizing children, referring specifically to his interest in a boy attending his church, the complaint says.
In a search of Brown’s computer investigators came across pornographic images of children, including some of boys in bondage and others in which the subject appears to be dead, according to the 29-page complaint.
Brown, who lived alone in the Whispering Pines mobile home park in Largo, had ties to many organizations in the Tampa Bay area, including the Gulf Coast Church, the Pinellas County School District, the Christian Television Network, the city of Largo, and Gulf Coast Jewish Family & Community Services, the Tampa Bay Times reported. All said Brown had been hired or volunteered as a performer, instructor or mentor, according to the report.

Exhibit B — The Creepy Cop:

A South Florida police captain has been arrested on charges that he forced a  15-year-old girl to disrobe so he could check whether she was having sex.
Broward County prosecutors say 46-year-old Miramar police Capt. Juan De Los  Rios is facing two counts of lewd and lascivious conduct by an adult against a  minor. Each count carries a potential 15-year prison sentence.
Authorities say De Los Rios encountered the girl and a 19-year-old man in the  back seat of a car. The two told him they were just talking and not having sex.  But prosecutors say De Los Rios told the girl to take off her clothes so he  could make sure.

Are these extreme examples? Perhaps, but about what you’d expect from a place that put creepy Jim Greer in charge of the state GOP.

Category: Florida

The Suspicious Mr. Williams

Posted on | July 28, 2012 | 22 Comments

Quote of the Day:

Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, said, “In more than 15 years of investigating political corruption, I’ve never seen a more suspicious set of facts.”

The circumstances definitely raise questions.

Category: Corruption
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