The Other McCain

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

#YouDidntDoThat Because You Were Buried In Jacked-Up Regulations

Posted on | July 27, 2012 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Representative Mike Kelly on the topic of HR 4078:

To provide that no agency may take any significant regulatory action until the unemployment rate is equal to or less than 6.0 percent.

In fairness to #OccupyResoluteDesk, enacting this would severely limit the amount of kickbacks, graft, carve-outs, chiseling, thuggery, corruption, patronage, favors, handouts, grease, vigorish, and influencing that the administration could engage in.

Who is turbulent Congressman, and how dare he limit the administration to doing its job?

via The Blaze and NVAPatriot

Update: oh and here is Gerry Connolly, doing Virginia proud:

House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Darrell Issa asked Connolly if he would object to the typo being fixed, since the Republicans unanimously requested it. Connolly chortled triumphantly, “This member will reserve the right to object at the appropriate time.”
Genuinely pissed off, Issa retorted, “Nothing could be more insincere than to pick on professional staff on a typographical error. If we have to … go to the Rules Committee, I guess we will, but I’m really sorry to see that kind of an attitude on what the gentleman and all of us know was simply a typographical error.”
Connolly then played ball like a girl, whimpering to the chair, “Did this member hear … the distinguished chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee characterize a member as insincere?”

Chris Perkins for Congress

Sad embarrassments like Gerry Connolly must go!

Update: Hogewash is onboard.

Update II: Red Alexandria makes a good point, although whether or not Connolly actually read the bill by his very own self would be an interesting question to ask of the man.

Update III: Not sure I agree with Bill Quick, but that too is an interesting point. Ah, the joys of enforcing perfectionism against the opponent. . .

Update IV: Jackie Wellfonder brings it: #YouDidntDoThat Because You’re Betting on Government, Not We the People.

Category: GOP

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.27.12

Posted on | July 27, 2012 | 13 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Syrian Legislator From Aleppo Defects To Turkey

Wounded five-year-old carried to aid station in Aleppo

State Department accuses Assad regime of planning a massacre in rebel-held city

London Mayor Chides Romney Over Olympics Remarks
Boris Johnson unhappy with comments that London isn’t ready

High Winds Sweep Through Midwest, Northeast
Tornado strikes Elmira, NY



POLITICS
DEA Arrests 91, Seizes Over $36 Million In Synthetic Drug Crackdown

Special Agent Joe Arabit talks with reporters about Operation Log Jam

Also seized: synthetic marijuana, precursor chemicals

Pew Poll: Voters Don’t Care About Romney’s Mormonism

Philly Alderman Slams Chick-Fil-A, But Happy To Let City Cash Their Checks



Florida Lt. Gov Apologizes For Saying Lesbians Don’t Look Like Her

WH Press Secretary Says Obama Not Going To Push For Gun Control Legislation

Pennsylvania Auditor General Calls For Changes At Penn State

O’Malley To Announce Special Session For Gambling



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Up Slightly As Equities, Euro Gain: NYMEX $88.97, Brent $104.38
Asian Stocks Climb As Draghi Vows To Save Euro
Facebook Meets Targets, Shares Slump
Drought Has Commodity Prices Sizzling
Samsung Widens Lead Over Apple In Smartphone Market Share
Contra Weill, Former Senator Gramm Argues Breaking Up Banks Won’t Make Them Safer
Spanish Unemployment Nears 25%
Amazon Has Steepest Profit Drop In A Decade After Warehouse Splurge
Early iPad, iPhone Prototypes Revealed In Apple-Samsung Trial
Google Offers Ultrafast Fiber-Optic Internet In KC For $70/month
Yammer To Remain Free After Microsoft Purchase
Crysis 3 On Wii U a Possibility
Apple Disappoints At First Black Hat Conference
Valve Boss Calls Windows 8 A Catastrophe



SPORTS
On World Stage, Culture Clashes Inevitable

Saudi judoka told she can't wear hijab

Much whining from Muslims, complaints from others over IOC gaffes

Time For Sox Is Now

Pirates Prospect Homers On First Pitch, Astros Fall Again, 5-3

NBA 2012-13 Schedule Features Early NY Clash, Christmas Finals Rematch

Tebow Makes Splash On First Day Of Jets’ Training Camp; Avoids Talking About QB Controversy

Harvey Fans 11 In Debut As Mets Top Snakes 3-1, Stop Skid

Nationals Hit Twenty Games Over .500 With 8-2 Battering Of Brewers; Tied For Best Record In Baseball



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
“Mad Men” Creator Weighs In On Peggy’s Future, Season 7 Outlook

Eilzabeth Moss and Jessica Pare

Also, the mega-Megan backlash

US Beach Volleyball Players Refuse To Ditch Bikinis For Olympics

Kristen Bell & Fiance: Justin Bieber Not The Best Beighbor



“Grey’s Anatomy” Exclusive: Eric Dane Checks Out

Russell Brand Avoids Jail For Smashing iPhone

More Stuff About Kristen Stewart Cheating Than You Ever Wanted To Know

“New Girl” Casting Scoop: Meet Zooey Deschanel’s New Love

“Cloud Atlas” Trailer With Halle Berry, Tom Hanks Hits The Web



FOREIGNERS
PRC Charges Bo Xilai’s Wife With Murder In Death Of UK Businessman
Turkey Says They’ll Act To Stop Kurdish Rule In Syria
More Empty Stomachs For Norks As Kim Plans Reforms
PRC Raises Beijing Flooding Body Count To 77 After Public Outcry
Raul Castro Says Cuba Willing To Sit Down With US
Iran Nuke Talks Limp Forward
Extradition-Wary Enviropest Watson Jumps Bail In Germany, Flees Country
Putin To Discuss Kuriles With Japanese Foreign Minister



BLOGS & STUFF
Washington Times: UN Gun Grab Flops
PJ Tatler: Romney’s Rookie Mistake In London
Beltway Confidential: You Can Favor Gay Marriage And Still Believe In The Right To Oppose Gay Marriage
Weasel Zippers: Mumbles Menino Admits He Can’t Block Chick-Fil-A From Boston
American Thinker: Rahmbo Says Chick-Fil-A Values Not Chicago Values
Volokh Conspiracy: Chicago Alderman Doubles Down On First Amendment Violation
Michael Totten: Like It Or Not, Jerusalem Is Israel’s Capital
Lonely Conservative: Gee, MF Global’s Jon Corzine Sure Is Tight With The Folks At The Department Of Justice
Legal Insurrection: WaPo Columnist Fears Voters Will Think It’s Okay To Vote Against Obama “And Not Be Thought Of As Racist”
Jim Geraghty: “We Tried Our Plan And It Worked” Going To Hurt Obama Just As Much As “You Didn’t Build That”
Joshuapundit: The WSJ’s Washington Wire Misrepresents In Order To Slam Romney
Gateway Pundit: Romney Tells London Supporters He’s Looking Forward To Having Churchill’s Bust In The Oval Office Again
NRO Corner: Don’t Tell Me How To Defend My Family
Hit & Run: Kid’s Hot Dog Stand Shut Down By City Before It Even Opens

Category: Live at Five

Alienated and Angry and Arrogant

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 25 Comments

We have recently been presented with the puzzle of James Holmes, who has been arrested for the massacre that killed 12 people and wounded dozens more at a Colorado movie theatre. You have to shake your head in dismay at reading stories like this:

Holmes was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. . . .
It gave the graduate student a $26,000 stipend and paid his tuition for the highly competitive neuroscience program at the University of Colorado in Denver. Holmes was one of six neuroscience students at the school to get the grant money.

Then there was the report that Holmes had sent a package to a psychiatry professor detailing his mass-murder plans. At some point, we’ll get the full background on how Holmes went from being a promising science student to being a cold-blooded killer.

Tonight, however, I’m thinking about Lee Harvey Oswald.

A few days ago, I explained my idea for a book about the 15 years in American history from 1948 to 1963, from the re-election of Harry Truman to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This idea was inspired, as I said, by Robert Bork’s observation that the radical uprising of the 1960s could not have succeeded as swiftly and easily as it did, if the Establishment had not “already been eaten hollow” by liberal beliefs.

Well, what about Lee Harvey Oswald? Wouldn’t Oswald’s life during this era provide some interesting episodes for the narrative history I have in mind? So I went to Amazon and found a 1978 book, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, by Edward Jay Epstein.

In 1948, when he was nine years old, Oswald’s mother divorced his stepfather, a divorce that had the effect of drasttically lowering the family’s socio-economic status. By the time he was 15, Oswald became an avowed Marxist, and at age 20 defected to the Soviet Union.

This was a rather extreme manifestation of alienation. What happened? Oswald later said that he became attracted to Marxism after he was handed a Communist Party pamphlet by a woman protesting the execution of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, and Oswald was living in New York at that time, so this seems plausible.

One other interesting tidbit: Oswald’s favorite TV program was I Led Three Lives, based on the story of Herbert Philbrick, who infiltrated the Communist Party for the FBI.

While the Communists were the bad guys and the FBI agent was the good guy in the series — which aired 1953-56 — it would appear that Oswald identified with the villains.

Think about that. And consider something else: Over and over again, those who encountered Oswald described him as “arrogant.”

Oswald was intensely alienated from American society, he was very arrogant, and he identified with his nation’s Communist enemies.

Lee Harvey Oswald is, of course, just one character in a very large historical narrative of an era which preceded the eruption of Sixties radicalism, but he strikes me as a sort of symbolic harbinger.

American have become unfortunately accustomed to tragedies inflicted on innocents by angry, alienated young men. Where did it begin?

 

Category: History

World’s Youngest Blogger At 1 Year: Already A Big Planner

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 15 Comments

The World's Youngest Blogger expounds on his plan to rebuild America using Legos and blocks.

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

Romney Busted? No, Obama

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty (via JWF on Twitter)

Well, Romney is at least showing interest in being busted:

At an event in London, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, “I’m looking forward to the bust of Winston Churchill being in the Oval Office again.”

Romney’s trip to Ol’ Blighty might help to explain the attempt to play an Anglo-Saxon race card. Breitbart, however, reports that the Anglo-Saxon kerfuffle was Rancid Pile of Hooey #8,442 from #OccupyResoluteDesk:

Obama’s desperate Media Palace Guards don’t want to talk about the flood of bad economic news we’ve been hit with this week, and they surely don’t want to talk about Obama’s revealing “you didn’t build that” comment for another day. So, ever in search of a new distraction-narrative, what we are now witnessing before our very eyes is the media ginning up a coordinated attack against Romney based on an unsourced quote that the Romney campaign has already denied.
In an email the Romney campaign just told me: “Flat out. Wasn’t our campaign.”
Won’t matter though; the media has a failed president to save.

Will not November come, so we can rid ourselves of this turbulent turdmonger?
More at The Corner:

Unfortunately, the alleged statement by the unnamed Romney adviser, if it actually happened as relayed, distracted attention from the underlying reality behind the sentiment expressed, and by the unfortunate choice of an outdated term, let the statement become the issue. To be fair, the adviser was probably somebody who followed the European financial press closely, where the term Anglo-Saxon is a standard and uncontroversial term for describing the English-speaking economies, especially in the French press. However, in a campaign, nobody is going to stop to be fair.

Update: linked at Hogewash

Category: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney

“We Tried Our Plan And. . .” “We Don’t Have A Definitive Solution. . .We Just Don’t Like Yours”

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

While this new Romney ad is good. . .

I think the mail on #OccupyResoluteDesk’s speechifying is better answered by TurboTax Timmy, back in February:

It should be increasingly clear to all that, while America is not a failed state, we are under a failed Administration.

Category: Barack Obama

Barack Obama Is the Antichrist — and Other Neutral Objective Facts

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 22 Comments

“I agree with the late Hunter S. Thompson that a lot of what passes for ‘objective journalism’ is bullshit. . . . The reason so many Americans hate the news media is because so many supposedly ‘objective’ journalists are transparently dishonest in what they’re doing.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, April 16, 2009

The futile pursuit of that elusive phantom, “objective journalism,” may be more than a mere waste of time, but also a disservice to readers:

A new experimental study . . . finds that opinionated reporting is better at motivating the politically unengaged than objective reporting.
For years, much of the media has assumed that objective education, alone, was enough to promote a healthy democracy. What traditional media failed to realize is that a good chunk of the population needs a reason to care in the first place. “News articles that are written through the eyes of a mere observer, without a perspective or slant, can foster political disaffection among citizens,” explains author Minha Kim of Sungkyunkwan University.

An “experimental study”? The science is settled! The study itself appears to be motivated by left-wing sentiment, but makes valid points:

In situations where news consumers have well-established knowledge of important issues and converse frequently with fellow citizens, objective reporting actually promotes the legitimization of political actions, resulting in stronger participatory intentions on the part of the news consumer. An obvious limitation of journalistic objectivity is that a journalist must take on the role of a disengaged third person, but the willful ignorance of such a practice is not supposed to be the goal of the public journalist. Instead, objectivity needs to be distinguished from social detachment, and it is the latter rather than the former that a journalist needs to overcome. Although it is true that objectivity and social detachment overlap each other to a certain extent, a careful examination of the desirable journalistic role allows the two to be distinguished from each other.

Of course, this study doesn’t really tell us anything that students of Gonzo journalism didn’t already know. Outside of hard-core political junkies, nobody gets much excited about political news reported with bland even-handed neutrality by a bunch of faceless nobodies.

Grant that somebody has got to perform the thankless task of filing that toothlessly objective Associated Press story about the State of the Union speech, and we would be shocked if we picked up our local paper and saw an article like this on the front page:

PRESIDENT’S SPEECH REACHES HISTORIC
NEW LOWS IN SHAMELESS DISHONESTY

By Helmund Gormworthy
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Obama’s annual State of the Union speech was a gigantic lie from start to finish, as he told one fib after another in an increasingly desperate effort to hide the multiple failures of his administration.
“My fellow Americans,” Obama began, in an obvious attempt to conceal his Kenyan ancestry, before proceeding to tell Congress a series of big fat whoppers in a deceitful lecture that continued for more than an hour before concluding with a trite and transparently insincere, “God bless America.”
During the course of his 72-minute speech, the president told 64 outright lies and more than three dozen half-truths, according to an analysis provided by the Republican National Committee.
“Frankly, the overwhelming stench of bullshit nearly made me vomit,” Speaker of the House John Boehner said afterwards. “This was the most heinously dishonest speech I’ve ever been forced to sit through. Not even Bill Clinton told this many outrageous lies.” . . .

You see my point, perhaps. What we are becoming accustomed to in the New Media age, however, is selecting our news from a vast smorgasbord of choices that didn’t exist 40 years ago, when the average person could choose from one local newspaper and three broadcast TV channels. Today there are not only multiple cable-TV news outlets — Fox, MSNBC, CNN — but also talk radio and a bewildering profusion of online sources, many of them strongly opinionated or at least quite selective in terms of their coverage.

I take it for granted that anyone reading this blog is a highly engaged news consumer, who is also gathering information from many other sources, and this assumption frees me from the burden of reporting everything in an entirely balanced way, as though my lack of objectivity might unfairly prejudice the reader’s viewpoint.

The larger the outlet, and the more it strives to be a “one-stop” outlet for news, the greater the danger that the biases of the editors and reporters might distort public perception.

This is why the biases of NBC Nightly News (about 8 million viewers) matter more than the biases of Fox News (about 3 million viewers for The O’Reilly Factor), especially because no one who tunes in to watch Bill O’Reilly is misled into thinking that he is strictly neutral in his viewpoint. I’ve repeatedly pointed this out: The combined audience for the “Big Three” evening news broadcasts is six or seven times larger than the Fox News audience, so why the Media Matters obsession with the alleged evils of right-wing bias at Fox?

What must be fought against is the journalistic herd instinct, the phony manufactured “consensus” of the Conventional Wisdom. The phenomenon we call “liberal bias” is merely one variety of this problem: Most news reporters and editors are liberal Democrats and therefore, however much they may pretend to be providing Neutral Objective Journalism, their coverage will necessarily reflect certain biases of their herd, for example in regard to the evils of homophobia, the dangers of global warming and the benefits of socialized medicine.

Those of us who don’t share those biases, and who wish to counteract the incessant yammering from vendors of Conventional Wisdom, are freed from any need to pretend that what we write is “balanced” to the point of being neutral. This doesn’t free us, however, from the need to provide readers with facts. Expressing our opinions is only helpful insofar as we are giving the reader access to facts they might not see in the mainstream media. One of my beefs about coverage of the 2010 mid-term elections is that it tended to downplay the sheer size of the Republican victory:

Buerkle’s victory brings to 63 the number of House seats gained by Republicans in the mid-term election. That’s the GOP’s biggest net gain in any election since 1938, and gives Republicans 242 House seats — the most they’ve held since 1949. Their majority is bigger by 12 seats than the one captured by Newt Gingrich’s GOP in 1994.

Nearly two years later, most people still don’t realize that the Republican victory in 2010 was actually bigger than in 1994, and I believe this lack of public awareness explains the persistent obstructionism — the do-nothing inertia — of Harry Reid’s Senate Democrats. Media talking heads keep whining about the alleged unwillingness of Republicans to “compromise,” but why should they compromise with the vastly unpopular liberal agenda of Democrats who just got embarrassed by one of the most lopsided electoral ass-whuppings in American history?

For essentially the same reason, I think the mainstream media are underrating the prospects of a landslide win for Mitt Romney in November. Defeating an incumbent president is, historically, a very difficult task. If you exclude LBJ’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968, only three times since 1932 has an incumbent president been defeated: When Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976, when Ronald Reagan beat Carter four years later, and when Bill Clinton beat George Bush in 1992. But all three of those elections occurred when the economy was bad, and this year the economy is much worse than it was in 1992, if not (yet) quite as bad as it was during the 1970s era of “stagflation.”

So when I went to an Obama campaign event in Virginia, which is supposed to be a crucial “swing state” this year, and found hundreds of fired-up Tea Party protesters outside the event, it struck me that the Conventional Wisdom might be completely wrong: Maybe Virginia will be safely Republican in November, and the public perception of Obama’s economic ineptitude will be so widespread that, rather than Obama hoping to win “purple” states like Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, the Democrats will find themselves fighting desperately to avoid defeat in previously “blue” states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

I’m not saying that will happen, but it could happen, and the only reason most in the media are ignoring the possibility of a complete Democratic meltdown this year is that the Conventional Wisdom blinds them to evidence that might indicate that possibility. They haven’t even acknowledged the significance of the Republican landslide in 2010, and seem to have in mind that this was a trivial aberration.

Everybody seems to be taking for granted that this is going to be another election decided by a few percentage points in the popular vote and a slight tilt in a few key “battleground” states and who knows? They’re probably right. But if things start shifting toward a GOP landslide, don’t let the mainstream media tell you this is a shocking and unexpected development, because there are plenty of little clues that this is well within the range of possible outcomes, although not what you’d call a “likely scenario.”

The prejudice of political pundits is to keep their predictions strictly within the realm of the most likely scenarios, which is why really important shifts in the electoral landscape are always a shock to the people who manufacture and consume Conventional Wisdom. Back in March, I warned that if Romney got the nomination and polls showed Obama losing ground, the media would start playing the Mormon card, so I was scarcely surprised to see Brian Williams raise the issue during his interview with Mitt.

That’s a legitimate issue for a Republican, whereas no one in the media can be permitted to mention the 20 years Obama spent in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s anti-American church.

Such are the parameters of public discourse as established by the Conventional Wisdom, and we aren’t supposed to notice the resultant artificiality of our political conversation.

Only by stepping outside that consensus to call attention to the overlooked facts — or to provide an interpretation of facts that doesn’t fit neatly within the consensus — is it possible to see anything other than what the Conventional Wisdom machine dispenses. If it were indeed a fact that Barack Obama is the Antichrist foretold in Bible prophecy, for example, you’d never see that reported on NBC News. The appearance of apocalyptic omens from the Book of Revelation would not be headlined as such in the New York Times.

RIVERS OF BLOOD, DARKNESS AT NOON
Women, Minorities Hardest Hit; GOP Denies Responsibility

Satan could not be reached for comment.

 





 

 


Category: Fear. Loathing., Media Bias, Neutral Objective Journalism

Michael Moore: Can I Out-Stupid @AmandaMarcotte? Why, Yes, The Founders Might Say That I Can

Posted on | July 26, 2012 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

Listen, Michael Moore, you corpulent Commie: the inalienable right of every man to defend himself is precisely what the Founders protected with the Second Amendment. The First Amendment means that the government cannot purge your rotten mind of its Marxist filth, and the Second Amendment means that you can defend all 17 feet of your circumference*.

As with Amanda Marcotte’s infamous tweet, Michael Moore’s absurd, ahistorical fantasies would have earned him a musket butt upside his fat head from just about any of the Colonials who fought, froze, marched and died for years to deliver the liberty that one who of the sort who “. . .never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it” so casually trashes in word and deed.

I’d close on a “get stuffed”, Michael Moore, but you’re clearly long since overachieved on the gluttony. However, Tina answers both you and the PHB in today’s Dilbert:
via The Blaze

Update: linked by Andrew J. Patrick, who would attempt to educate the hapless Moore.

*A prime number pulled from the air. I did not actually perform an orbit of Michael Moore to quantify his Jabba-the-Hut-ness.

Category: Culture
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