The Other McCain

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

Zilla On Da Tech Guy’s Show

Posted on | July 7, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

As fortune would have it, I’m off to a retirement ceremony for my boss last year in Afghanistan, so I shan’t call in and harass. Nevertheless, the details are here, and you will be energized by taking in Pete’s show, which I can attest comes in just fine over the internet.

Also on the radio tomorrow is Valley of the Shadow. Check him out on the left coast!

Category: Da Tech Guy, Valley of the Shadow, Zilla of the Resistance

McCotter Is McGone?

Posted on | July 7, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Whoa. The Blaze reports that one of the few semi-real people inside the beltway has ejected:

After nearly 26 years in elected office, this past nightmarish month and a half have, for the first time, severed the necessary harmony between the needs of my constituency and of my family. As this harmony is required to serve, its absence requires I leave.
The recent event’s totality of calumnies, indignities and deceits have weighed most heavily upon my family. Thus, acutely aware one cannot rebuild their hearth of home amongst the ruins of their U.S. House office, for the sake of my loved ones I must “strike another match, go start anew” by embracing the promotion back from public servant to sovereign citizen.
I do not leave for an existing job and face diminishing prospects (and am both unwilling and ill-suited to lobby), my priorities are twofold: find gainful employment to help provide for my family; and continue to assist, in any way they see fit, the Michigan Attorney General’s earnest and thorough investigation, which I requested, into the 2012 petition filing.

Godspeed, sir. I hope this isn’t an indication of weirder revelations to follow.

Category: Thaddeus McCotter

‘Concentrated Campaign of Harassment … to Terrorize People into Silence’
UPDATE: Parallels to Rauhauser

Posted on | July 7, 2012 | 33 Comments

Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress is against such online harasssment when it’s directed at a feminist named Anita Sarkesian.

So maybe we can get Alyssa Rosenberg to take notice of online harasssment aimed at conservative women by her progressive friends? Probably not.

Perhaps Alyssa Rosenberg can ask Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin or S.E. Cupp what manner of “civility” they’ve experienced online over the years.

UPDATE: Helen Lewis of the New Statesman elaborates on the hate campaign against Sarkesian and says, “It looks like those charming chaps at 4Chan might have had something to do it.”

Those “charming chaps at 4Chan” were invoked by Neal Rauhauser after he helped the “Stop Rush” boycotters identify a Texas man who had infilitrated their group. “I have been sorely tempted to point him out to various actors — a guy like this, he could really produce some high quality entertainment for 4chan, Something Awful, Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc.,” Rauhauser wrote in an e-mail to Matt “Shoq” Edelstein.

Patterico noted how Rauhauser and his “Gaped Crusader” sockpuppet spoke the vernacular of hacker-trolls:

The Gaped Crusader, like Rauhauser himself, loves to speak in the idiom of 4chan-style hackers. Everything is “epic” and “lulzy” and there are a billion references to “lulzcows” and Encyclopedia Dramatica and the like.

UPDATE II: Lewis also mentions that the British parliament is debating a law that would “encourage service providers to identify internet trolls, without their victims having to resort to costly legal action,” and describes one troll’s threats against a member of Parliament:

A man who targeted [Tory MP] Louise Mensch was [in June] given a suspended sentence, and banned from contacting a list of celebrities. Few papers reported Frank Zimmerman’s full remarks, with the notable exception of The Guardian: they included a reference to the film Sophie’s Choice, in which a mother is forced to choose which of her children dies, and the following: “We are Anonymous and we do not like rude cunts like you and your nouveau riche husband Peter Mensch…  So get off Twitter. We see you are still on Twitter. We have sent a camera crew to photograph you and your kids and we will post it over the net including Twitter, cuntface. You now have Sophie’s Choice: which kid is to go. One will. Count on it cunt. Have a nice day.”

“We are Anonymous” — yet another parallel: Rauhauser became fascinated with Anonymous after they hacked the security firm HBGary, posting a series of items about the hacker collective and their targets under his “Stranded Wind” alias at Daily Kos:

Subsequently, Rauhauser boasted of being contacted by a “very big dog” in Anonymous who evidently agreed to assist Rauhauser and Brett Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution in a campaign of vengeance against their enemies. None of that, however, has ever elicited commentary from Alyssa Rosenberg and her progressive friends. We must assume they share Neal Rauhauser’s peculiar hatreds, and endorse his methods.

 

Category: Feminism, The Kimberlin Files

Forbath Lost Me At ‘Laws To Redress Want And Inequity’

Posted on | July 6, 2012 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

American Power links the Grey Lady soiling herself with Commie tripe. Lots of good analysis from Mr. Douglas, but I went non-linear in the second paragraph:

The Supreme Court is again putting up constitutional barriers against laws to redress want and inequity.

Never mind about the Supreme Court actively putting up barriers. The SCOTUS is chartered to interpret the existing barriers, and when it goes putting up resistance to government expansion, the SCOTUS frequently resembles a punctured prophylactic in its retention capability.

But what’s this folderol about “laws to redress want and inequity”? Really? You can legislate away envy? Inequity? We’re assuming (a) a rational comparison function is attainable, and (b) somebody reliable can broker it. But our government doesn’t tax, budget, or spend in a remotely forthright way. Thus, Forbath cannot be seen as making a rational argument. ‘Want’ and ‘inequality’ being so subjective, Forbath is either (a) a complete fool, recirculating his own Kool-Aid, (b) diabolical, and making emotional plays at people who really ought to discern the scam, or (c) a combination of (a) and (b). I’m going with (b), because I don’t think these Lefties actually believe in anything whatsoever.

From the standpoint of sheer hooey, this statement ranks just a little below the all-time stupidest thing I’ve seen in print, also courtesy of the Nattering, Yammering Turd-mongers:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

What idiots. The government is the traffic cop, not the automotive engineer. And when the traffic cop tries to exceed his bounds, it all comes up jackwagons. Would the NYT just please hurry up and die? We’re going to have a right jolly party, dancing on its bones.

Update: now a Memeorandum thread.

Category: New York Times

‘Her Fiancé, Garry Brown Sr., the Man Who Fathered 10 of Her 15 Children …’

Posted on | July 6, 2012 | 50 Comments

Something about hearing that sentence in the video stuck in my head, besides the fact that the sentence ended with “… was arrested,” but you have to do some research to discover that Brown is currently serving a five-year-sentence for dealing cocaine. The Florida woman’s name is Angel Adams and she says her children are “a gift from God,” although she doesn’t strike me as very angelic, and I’m not too certain that God approves of the lifestyle by which Ms. Adams found herself at age 37 with 15 children by three different fathers:

All this drama transpired in 2010, but the video — with nearly 2 million views — for some reason topped the recommendations by YouTube when I logged in today to upload a video about my own family. So I decided to do some research and, in a Tampa Tribune article, read this quote by a spokeswoman for a Hillsborough County non-profit agency:

“Children always are better with their biological parents.”
— Elaine Olszewski

Perhaps some people would care to debate Ms. Olszewski on the subject of whether there are exceptions to that general rule, and whether the case of Angel Adams is one such exception. You will notice that when a conservative proposes a general rule of human behavior, liberals are quick to cite some exception to that rule. However, when liberals propose general rules, no conservative is permitted to cite exceptions, and thus any attempt to discuss human behavior with liberals is doomed to end in the accusation that conservatives are arguing unfairly.

Of course, it’s probably a bit late for such a debate to have any meaningful utility in the case of Ms. Adams and her numerous progeny, but it might be helpful in determining appropriate standards for social agency interventions in the future.

The case of Angel Adams is also probably helpful as a basic political litmus test of sorts. You may have noticed that liberals delight in making crude jests about pro-life Christian families like the Duggars. Yet if anyone calls attention to the case of a hyper-procreative welfare mother with multiple babydaddies including an imprisoned cocaine dealer — a dreadful situation that imposes heavy costs on innocent taxpayers — the very same liberals will predictably scream, “RAAAAACIST!”

Yet it is not the race, but rather the behavior, of Angel Adams which is the problem, and her behavior is rooted in an attitude, one that is commonly labled “the entitlement mentality.” I’ve seen the entitlement mentality manifested in various ways by all types of people. No race has a monopoly on such selfish attitudes, but liberals go out of their way to justify the entitlement mentality when it comes to certain groups of people whom liberals apparently view as Official Victims of Society.

Liberalism, as a philosophy, requires such victims as proof that America is fundamentally unjust, thus in need of the kind of “reforms” that liberals advocate. Examining the arguments of liberals — to the extent that liberals actually engage in arguments, rather than mere name-calling — the conservative points out that much of the “social injustice” bemoaned by today’s liberalism is actually a direct byproduct of previous liberal “reforms.”

In the case of Ms. Adams, for example, one sees not only the result of LBJ’s “Great Society” expansion of welfare programs, but also a fairly predictable consequence of the Sexual Revolution that liberals insisted was necessary for Americans to escape the oppressive shackles of our nation’s puritanical Judeo-Christian heritage.

Was it really a coincidence that we were urged to discard pre-marital chastity and marital fidelity at just about the same time that we were told that the old-fashioned “Protestant work ethic” was obsolete, harmful and inappropriate for victimized minorities? I think not.

And about the same time that America’s ideals of sexual probity and economic self-sufficiency came under assault in the 1960s, a generation of youth were urged to “Tune In, Turn On and Drop Out.”

It seems a long way from the hippy-dippy hallucinogenic gospel of Timothy Leary to the arrest of Garry Brown Sr. for dealing cocaine, but one cannot say that this consequence — however unintended — was entirely unpredictable. If Professor Leary at Harvard thought it a fine thing for the offspring of America’s elite to experiment with “expanding their consciousness,” certainly he ought to have recognized that an egalitarian democracy would extend this privilege also to the less fortunate, who lacked adequate resources for coping with the results of drug addiction.

President Obama and his liberal friends like to lecture us about the alleged evils of “the 1%” — the ultra-rich who supposedly refuse to pay “their fair share” of taxes to support Angel Adams and her children (or to keep Garry Brown Sr. in prison). But where is the justice or morality in compelling the ultra-rich (or anyone else) to pay more to foot the bill for these predictable consequences of liberalism? How can anyone be faulted for an unwillingness to pay for new liberal “reforms” when they can see with their own eyes the endless misery produced by old liberal “reforms”?

Is Hillsborough County Circuit Court Judge Tracy Sheehan a liberal or a conservative? Is she a Democrat or a Republican? It doesn’t matter. The point is, Judge Sheehan is absolutely right:

TAMPA — A courtroom full of people who paid off Angel Yulee Adams’ debts and found a rent-free, six-bedroom home for her and a dozen of her children waited Monday morning for a sign of gratitude, a clue of cooperation. They waited for a thank you.
They didn’t get it. Angel Adams, 37, said she was glad to have the home. But she wanted them all out of her life.
“I’ve been railroaded since day one,” she said.
The state says day one was 21 months and 28 hearings ago, when Adams first landed in the courtroom of Hillsborough Circuit Judge Tracy Sheehan. Ever since then, Sheehan said, the state has tried to keep Adams and her children together. . . .
Judge Sheehan gave her a lecture.
Adams would not have sat through 28 hearings if her kids had been fed, got their medicines and were living in a good home, the judge said. “We know you want us out of your life,” she told Adams. “We will be thrilled to close this case when you have all these things.”
Adams sat at a table just below the judge’s bench, looking away from Sheehan.
“A lot of people have gone way extra miles for you,” Sheehan said. “Do you understand that?”
Adams replied quietly, “No comment, your honor.”
“Hear what I’m saying,” the judge told her. “Reach out your hand to these people instead of looking a gift horse in the mouth and asking for more, more, more.”

Did Judge Sheehan expect her lecture to do any good?

If so, she’s probably a liberal. Any conservative must be dubious of the likelihood that Angel Adams will be any more responsible in the future than she has been in the past. It’s not “racist” to be realistic about human nature, to expect that people who have lived their entire lives engaged in a pattern of helpless, irresponsible dependency will continue being helpless, irresponsible and dependent. But liberalism requires us to abandon common-sense judgment and pretend that human nature is an unknown quantity, an utterly unpredictable factor in the equation, so that we might somehow expect Angel Adams suddenly to change her ways and become a responsible, upstanding, productive citizen.

To expect gratitude from Angel Adams, the living embodiment of the entitlement mentality, is not just liberalism, it’s lunacy. Not that there’s much difference between the two, but sometimes we encounter a liberal who tries briefly to stand up against the lunatic tendencies of his philosophical peers.

Nearly a half-century ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to explain to his fellow liberals that the socio-economic problems afflicting black America could not be solved by increasing handouts or other standard bureaucratic interventions of welfare agencies. In his 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Moynihan sought to explain these problems in far greater depth than was acceptable to liberals who had become accustomed to addressing all such issues through the prism of “civil rights.”

Moynihan’s report made him a target of the Left, which memorably accused him of “blaming the victim,” as if assigning blame for a problem were more important than identifying the problem. The Left wanted to blame Evil Racist Capitalist Amerikkka for everything that was wrong with the black community, and Moynihan’s attempt to provide a more helpful explanation — to address a significant and relatively recent increase in what he accurately called a “tangle of pathology” in black urban culture — was condemned and suppressed.

This, as Kay Hymowitz explained in 2005, was the beginning of 40 years of lies, and keeping these lies alive is still the goal of the Left. The fact that the Left’s lies do nothing to help the children of Angel Adams is one of those facts we’re not supposed to notice.

UPDATE: Thanks to the clever reader who located this recent update on the perpetually victimized Angel Adams:

McElroy said a pair of officers attempted to question one of Angel’s sons about a rock throwing incident, when several family members, including Angel, her 21-year-old daughter, also named Angel, and two 13-year-olds attacked the officers.

It turned into such a “fracas” (to quote the news article) that police called for backup, and one of the backup officers used a taser on Ms. Adams, who was eight months pregnant with her 16th child.

She claimed to be the victim of “police brutality,” because she’s always got to be the victim of something other than her own stupidity, I guess.

UPDATE II (Smitty): Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

Category: Liberals, Racism

For The Record, Valerie Jarrett, We All Know Who Is The Divider-In-Chief

Posted on | July 6, 2012 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

She does not, as Breitbart claims, explicitly name the network that does not take editorial direction from her, but one may infer the network whose name rhymes with ‘jocks’ from Valerie’s line of bollocks:

The atmosphere in all 57 states will improve when that Jezebel is distanced from the levers of power.

Category: Uncategorized

Aaron Walker (and Freedom) Win Maryland Appeal vs. Brett Kimberlin

Posted on | July 5, 2012 | 19 Comments

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
A courtroom victory today in Montgomery County Circuit Court, reported by Dave Hogberg, witnessed by John Hoge, explained by Aaron Walker, and mourned by pro-Kimberlin troll Occupy Rebellion.

Witnesses report that Neal Rauhauser was in court with Kimberlin, at one point handing him documents.

Category: The Kimberlin Files

$1 Million Free Association Post

Posted on | July 5, 2012 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

This great graphic from the Vodka Pundit:
Recalls the ’80s clip:This recalls the lyric “Dressed up like a million dollar trooper”.

Has #OccupyResoluteDesk requested his SuperPAC return the cool million to that uncool bucket of misogyny, Bill Maher?

Category: Barack Obama, VodkaPundit
« 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