LIVE AT FIVE: 07.25.12

Test my logic. One can be fairly certain a lady like Andrea Mitchell is not a bitch; therefore, Romney’s use of ‘foreign’, which she clearly heard, must be something other than a dog whistle. Maybe ‘foreign’ is just a non-domestic word:

The irony here is that Barack’s foreign upbringing was part of his glamor in 2008. He was the urbane, cosmopolitan wunderkind who brought Hopium and Change-oom from exotic places.

Clearly, Romney’s use of ‘foreign’ is going after ‘alien to traditional American thought’. And, yes, the Marxist underpinnings of Obama’s collectivist thinking are foreign, to put it as mildly as possible.

For safety reasons, I recommend Andrea Mitchell and Amanda Marcotte maintain a two-mile standoff, lest their combined intellectual suction trigger a singularity.

What has that foreign influence wrought: Under Me “People Have A New Attitude Toward America” And “More Confidence”

Also, via The Lonely Conservative, more piling on for “You didn’t do that”:

Category: Election 2012, Mitt Romney

Is Barack’s “I Didn’t Do That” Reclama Of His 13 July Roanoke Speech Worthy?

Posted on | July 24, 2012 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

BHO in Roanoke delivered, after the opening rah-rah, about 5k words. He Who Is Too Cool to release his college documentation had to take to YouTube and deliver this:
Emphasis still mine:

“Those ads taking my words about small business out of context; they’re flat out wrong. Of course Americans build their own business. Everyday hard-working people sacrifice to meet a payroll, create jobs, and make our economy run.
And what I said was that we need to stand behind them as America always has. By investing in education, training, roads and bridges, research and technology. I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message because I believe we’re all in this together.”

And here is a hefty, contextual quote from the speech: Read more

Category: Barack Obama

Not Surprising: Tina Brown’s ‘Newsbeast’ Still Losing Millions of Dollars a Year

Posted on | July 24, 2012 | 14 Comments

“The investors can expect to lose a crapload of cash in the process. The New Yorker reportedly lost $42 million in three years (1995-97) under Ms. Brown’s editorship. Talk lost an impressive $80 million during its two-year existence. Whatever else you might say about Tina Brown, she’s undeniably brilliant at convincing investors to lose money on her projects.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Nov. 11, 2010

Some 20 months after it was announced that the worthless magazine Newsweek would merge with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, we learn that Brown’s deep-pocketed patron Barry Diller has taken over controlling interest from the family of Rep. Jane Harman (D-Hezbollah).

Peter Lauria of Reuters explains the incredible sums of cash Tina’s “Newsbeast” has lost in the past couple of years:

The Harman family confirmed its ownership stake has been diluted by its decision to cap contributions to the loss-making venture, but would not give a figure. . . .
Sidney Harman acquired Newsweek from the Washington Post Co in August 2010 for $1 plus the assumption of the magazine’s more than $50 million in liabilities.
Barry Diller launched The Daily Beast under the auspices of former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown in October 2008. . . .
[M]edia reports have estimated losses at The Daily Beast at around $10 million annually.
Diller and Harman decided to merge their titles in November 2010 — the rationale was to leverage the combined audiences to cross-sell advertising at both publications and subscriptions for Newsweek. . . .
So far, however, the combined venture is still losing money, according to Diller, though he has said this year’s loss will be substantially less than last year’s. He did not give a figure and Brown has called reports of $30 million in losses last year “excessive.”

OK, if $30 million is an “excessive” estimate of their 2011 losses, but nobody’s arguing with estimates of $10 million of red ink a year, isn’t it a fair guess that Tina has pissed away at least $50 million in the past four years, including about a million a month since the merger?

Y’know, with a million bucks a month, maybe I could put together a kinda trendy Web site or something. Even without Barry Diller-sized cash infusions, we haven’t done too badly.

Hit the freaking tip jar. Like you were a multimillionaire media mogul and Tina Brown was giving you a hand job in the backseat of your limo.

Because we all know that’s how she does it, right?

PREVIOUSLY:

Nov. 11, 2010: The Weekly Newsbeast?
Jan. 3, 2011: Tina Brown/Sidney Harman Strangulation of Newsweek Now Nearly Complete
April 12, 2011: They Won’t Work for Tina Brown
May 17, 2011: Tina Brown + Newsbeast = Profit?

Category: Newsweek

Old and Boring: ‘Safe Sex’
New and Hot: ‘Let’s Make Babies’

Posted on | July 24, 2012 | 26 Comments

Young folks have discovered a kinky new sexual phenomenon: If a man places his penis inside a woman’s vagina, she can have a baby.

This shockingly weird activity is being promoted by a Web site called 1Flesh.org, whose founders describe their revolutionary idea:

We want awesome marriages and mind-blowing sex lives. We want women and men to be respected and loved for who they are, to the very depths of their being. We want sex free from fear, love free from use, and a world of people who love and respect their own bodies. In short, we want sexy back. In fact, we demand it.

Wow! What a bizarre concept: Sex that begins with “I do,” and ends with “Till death do us part.” Being fruitful and muliplying!

Exactly how dangerous is this “one flesh” concept? It has already been denounced by Amanda Marcotte, and you know what that means.

It’s 100% pure awesomeness.

1Flesh.org
Let’s Do It Until Amanda Marcotte Screams

UPDATE: Jackie Wellfonder explains that 1Flesh.org was the brainchild of “Bad Catholic” blogger Marc Barnes, who announced it in late June and has already been denounced by Amanda Marcotte. Which means you should follow Marc Barnes on Twitter, because he’s awesome.

UPDATE II: For my own thoughts on the Contraceptive Culture, please see, “The Pill at 50: Unhappy Un-Birthday” (May 8, 2010).

UPDATE III (Smitty): Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: Contraceptive Culture, Religion, Sex

2012 Not The Most Important Election Ever–It’s A Constitutional Referendum

Posted on | July 24, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

You can either give #OccupyResoluteDesk the heave-ho, or PYHBYLAKYAG: Put Your Head Between Your Legs And Kiss Your Arugula Goodbye.

If Obama retains any grip on power, the evidence of his disregard for the Rule of Law, Separation of Powers, and the Constitution in general points toward increasing over-reach. A suspension of elections prior to 2016 doesn’t seem far-fetched at all with this chap in office.

He’s still busy trying to explain how his entire “You didn’t build that” speech was taken out of context. But, no, every miserable Commie syllable of that wretched speech was consistent with every Commie day of this misbegotten administration.

As nailed by Ramirez:

Maybe Amanda Marcotte can explain it all for #OccupyResoluteDesk

More good blogging at Nice Deb.

via Breitbart

Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012

What A Breathtakingly Stupid Thing To Say, @AmandaMarcotte

Posted on | July 24, 2012 | 41 Comments

by Smitty

It was desegregation that caused white America to believe that the government had stopped “protecting” them, and so they needed guns.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) July 23, 2012

1789	United States Bill of Rights
1955	American Civil Rights Movement (note Wikipedia’s effort to work contrary to the purpose of integration by hyphenating the page title. Good work, segregators!)

So you’re arguing that exercising a Constitutional right which had been granted 166 years previously was actually motivated by fear?

Lord have mercy, Amanda: that is about the most jacked up, ahistorical, illogical pile of hooey I’ve heard since the last time #OccupyResoluteDesk opened his pie hole. Please just take a vacation, de-program yourself, and come to grips with the certainly messy, but increasingly pro-liberty, history of your country. It’s taken a long time for technology to get us to where we can realize the dream of the Founders. Those getting zany with the airbrush, like you are here, are no help whatsoever.

More at Protein Wisdom.

Update: Andrew J. Patrick is also an Amanda fan.

Update II: linked by That Mr. G Guy, and Hogewash. Thanks!

Category: Racism

Axelrod’s Nixonian Manipulations: Tax Flap Is About Mitt’s Mormon Millions

Posted on | July 24, 2012 | 63 Comments

Back in March, when the fight for the Republican Party nomination was still very much in doubt, I warned that the “electability” arguments made on behalf of Mitt Romney were apt to be falsified by a liberal media that would not hesitate to make Romney’s Mormonism an issue:

If they can’t beat Romney with the “greedy Wall Street 1-percenter” class-warfare argument, the Democrats will not hesitate to Do Whatever It Takes to Win.
If Romney gets the nomination and we reach late September with Romney leading the polls, what do you think the Democrat-Media Complex will do? Whatever It Takes to Win, sweetheart.
Can’t you see the five-part New York Times series on the history of Mormonism? Can’t you see Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News and David Gregory on Meet the Press doing Serious Journalism about all the beliefs and practices of the LDS, and ponderously asking What It Means for America?

That was March 6 — Super Tuesday — and I continued pointing out recurrences of the “Mormon Mitt” meme over the ensuing weeks. The closer Mitt came to clinching the GOP nomination, the less secretive the Democrat-Media Complex became about their belief that Romney’s religion would be a general-election vulnerability.

As I predicted in March, however, playing the Mormon card would be a last-ditch measure, to which the media and the Obama campaign (but I repeat myself) would resort only after the class-warfare argument failed. What I didn’t expect in March was that the class-warfare argument would fail as early as it apparently has, and that Democrats would arrive at their last ditch by late July.

The Obama campaign invested many millions of dollars in TV ads hammering Romney as a rich guy who outsourced jobs to China, blah blah blah and . . . Nothing. Zero. Zilch. The RCP poll average hasn’t shifted noticeably in Obama’s direction, his campaign spending is out of control, Obama stepped on a land-mine with his “you didn’t build that” gaffe, and the major swing states are still in play for the GOP.

If things keep going on the current path, Obama’s looking like a certain loser on Nov. 7. It is thus a curiously timed coincidence to see John Heilemann of New York magazine speculating that the reason Romney won’t release his tax returns is because . . . MITT’S A MORMON!

The depth to which Romney has dug in his heels has naturally provoked a welter of speculation about what in God’s name is in the returns—and just how bad it could be. . . .
My own guess, however, is that apart from one or more of these elements, what the Romney tax returns would lay bare is the extent of his donations to his church. In this case and all others, charitable donations are something to be proud of, an entirely honorable thing. But for a candidate who has taken extravagant pains to avoid discussion of his supremely prominent role in contemporary Mormonism, the idea of a wave of news stories detailing the tens of millions of dollars that he has given to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — surely making him among its most generous funders in the modern era — must be a kind of nightmare. . . .
One sign that this issue is weighing on Romney’s mind was the performance that his wife, Ann, turned in on Good Morning America last week. In an uncomfortable exchange with Robin Roberts about her husband’s position on the tax returns, Mrs. Romney said, “You should really look at where Mitt has led his life and where he’s been financially. He’s been a very generous person. We give 10 percent of our income to our church every year. Do you think that is the kind of person that is trying to hide things?”

Heilemann expresses this as his “own guess,” but then immediately points out how Ann Romney’s Good Morning America interview “was seen in Chicago,” i.e., by the Obama campaign:

[I]t suggested that, far more than Bain, the question of the tax returns is getting under the Romneys’ collective skin. That is certainly how it was seen in Chicago. And that is why, though some combination of Team Romney’s attacks on Obama, the Olympics, and the nominee’s selection of his running mate may have the effect of shifting the subject, the effect will only be temporary. For beyond what Chicago is gleaning from its polling and focus groups, the president’s people see in the issue of the tax returns a way to get inside his head.
“One of the things we learned during the Republican primaries is that you can rattle Romney more easily than people think,” says a senior Obama strategist. “And when he’s rattled is when he makes mistakes.”

Reverse-engineering Heilemann’s article permits us to understand what this “controversy” is really all about. The media have made a big deal about Romney’s tax returns at the behest of Obama campaign. Heilemann and others spent weeks singing in unison from this particular hymnal, eagerly and shamelessly doing David Axelrod’s bidding. And why does Obama’s campaign team want those IRS documents (which they’ve obviously already seen themselves) made public?

For the exact reason that Heilemann suggests: Because Romney’s tithing makes him one of the leading funders of Mormonism in the entire history of the LDS church.

Heilemann’s sycophantic stenography conveys Axelrod’s purpose: Mitt isn’t “hiding” anything that Axelrod doesn’t already know about, OK?

It would be a violation of federal law for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to provide copies of Romney’s tax returns to the Obama campaign, but when has Geithner ever shown any reluctance to violate federal law? Does anyone really believe that Obama’s re-election campaign is more scrupulously law-abiding than Nixon’s historically notorious Committee to Re-Elect the President?

Hell, no.

Axelrod and his henchmen know exactly what’s in Romney’s IRS returns and have a strategic purpose in mind for this information, but they also know that they can’t use it unless Romney himself releases those documents. And they’re so eager about this that they are unable (or perhaps consider it unnecessary) to conceal their intentions from friendly liberal reporters like John Heilemann.

So when I woke up this morning and saw Heilemann on MSNBC telling Joe and Mika what political use the unreleased IRS documents would serve for the Obama campaign, I knew that this was like a strategy memo straight from David Axelrod: If, as some have urged, Romney were to release a full decade of his tax returns, we would learn that Romney’s cumulative contributions to the Mormon church have added up to a Very Large Number. Imagine the reaction if the New York Times could publish this headline:

TAX FORMS SHOW MITT ROMNEY GAVE
MORE THAN $50 MILLION TO MORMONS

Getting that Very Large Number into the public domain is what this media-generated controversy is really all about.

Whatever else is in Romney’s IRS file is incidental to Axelrod’s strategic purpose of using the tax forms to make Mitt’s Mormonism a Legitimate News Story, to justify all those “in-depth reports” and “investigative series” about the LDS church.

And they think we’re too stupid to see what they’re doing.

PREVIOUSLY:

April 20: Drip, Drip, Drip: ‘Mormon Mitt’ Meme Keeps Popping Up in Mainstream Media
April 18: CNN’s Jack Cafferty: ‘Lingering Questions About Mormonism … Odd and Insular’
April 17: Romney Booster Jen Rubin Getting Worried About ‘Mormon Mitt’ Meme?
April 16: Ain’t I Done Told Ya So? (Part III)
April 5: Framing the Narrative: Using Evangelicals as Hook for MSM ‘Mormon Mitt’ Meme
April 5: Ain’t I Done Told Ya So? (Part II)
April 2: Ron Paul Supporter Challenges Romney Over Mormon Doctrine in Wisconsin
March 6: If You Think Mitt Romney Is ‘Electable’ …

Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Mitt Romney, Religion

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The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.25.12

If Mitt Romney Used A Dog Whistle, Would A Bitch Hear It?

Is Barack’s “I Didn’t Do That” Reclama Of His 13 July Roanoke Speech Worthy?

Not Surprising: Tina Brown’s ‘Newsbeast’ Still Losing Millions of Dollars a Year

Old and Boring: ‘Safe Sex’
New and Hot: ‘Let’s Make Babies’

2012 Not The Most Important Election Ever–It’s A Constitutional Referendum

What A Breathtakingly Stupid Thing To Say, @AmandaMarcotte

Axelrod’s Nixonian Manipulations: Tax Flap Is About Mitt’s Mormon Millions

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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