The Other McCain

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

‘Silence’ Calls For Simon And Garfunkel

Posted on | May 6, 2012 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

Hello Stalin, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a Romney softly creeping
Left hids seeds while I was sleeping
Capitalism planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I taxed alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my ‘prompter to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a Friedman quote
That got my goat
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
Composites talking without speaking
Legislators voting without reading
People writing budgest that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

“Fools”, said I, “You do not know
My power like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might fool you
Take my arms that I might con you”
But my words, like campaign promises fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To propaganda god they made
And the blogs flashed out their warning
In the posts that the were forming
And the post said, “‘Silence’ Calls For Simon And Garfunkel:
A Parody Swell”
And whispered in the sounds of silence

via Bluegrass Pundit

Category: Barack Obama

France To U.S.: We Will Make The Election Of Obama Seem Smart

Posted on | May 6, 2012 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

According to Breitbart, Nicolas the Short has been ousted in favor of Francois Holland. Holland seems to favor:

  • raise taxes (including a marginal tax rate for earnings above $1 million to 75%),
  • lower retirement age, and
  • boost spending levels

I suppose that’s one reaction to economic reality: deny it categorically.
Zerohedge plays the Ancien Régime card:One is tempted to call this a common dog, but the pharaohs weren't commoners.
Free-associating, the Egyptian motif recalls Napoleon and the Rosetta Stone, which gets us to Frank Zappa and the perfect goodbye song/employment suggestion for Sarkozy: A Little Green Rosetta at the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen:
On a possibly related note, the Greeks don’t seem to be dealing with reality well, either. This is a great time to get everything you can out of the stock market, according to Sissypuss the Blog Kitty.

Update: echoed at The Daley Gator

Category: France, Greece

Little Joe In Big Trouble?

Posted on | May 6, 2012 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

It’s not over until it’s over, but the fact that the Boston Herald is even floating this kind of question would seem to indicate that Sean Beilat is putting the polling hurt on Joe Kennedy:

The marquee name isn’t doing much better for Joe K. than the faux Native American heritage is for Elizabeth W.

Sean Bielat for Congress!

via Breitbart

Category: Massachusetts, Sean Bielat

Arianna’s Power Scaled Back at AOL?

Posted on | May 6, 2012 | 21 Comments

Remember when AOL bought Huffington Post — for a “bazillion dollars,” as Joe Coscarelli says — and everybody’s first question was, “On what planet does this deal make basic business sense?”

Here you had the erstwhile America Online, which had made big bucks back in the original 1990s Internet boom, when dial-up modems were still the deal, before Gmail, before you bought high-speed digital access through your cable company (or logged on at free WiFi hotspots). Having failed to exploit its original massive footprint in the online world, AOL decided to buy HuffPo, a content provider that has “succeeded” — i.e., getting lots of page-views — without ever turning a profit on that traffic.

What’s the value of a money-losing content provider to a desperate declining online service provider? Such were the calculations required to make sense of AOL reportedly paying $315 for HuffPo’s estimated 25 million monthly “unique visitors.” Maybe you need an MBA to figure that out, or maybe I just didn’t do enough drugs back in the ’70s, because it made no damned sense at all to me. Reacting to the $315 million pricetag, I asked: “Did they misplace the decimal point?”

What it looked like, frankly, was the old pump-and-dump mentality of the Dot-Com Bubble era, hyping a start-up company to sell at an inflated price to an investor with more money than sense. And the suits at AOL certainly fit that description. As I noted at the time of the deal, AOL had reported losses of $782 million in 2010. These guys are experts at losing money, so therefore it made perfect sense for AOL to pay 10 times HuffPo’s 2010 estimated gross revenue (not profit, mind you, just revenue) and let Arianna “take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group,” with “oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations,” but even such services as Mapquest.

As might have been expected, that bizarre arrangement couldn’t last long, and there was a report this week that Arianna’s vast powers have recently been somewhat curtailed:

Arianna Huffington acknowledged Thursday that her portfolio at AOL Inc. is being scaled back to include only the Huffington Post, undoing a structure put in place when her website was acquired by AOL last year. . . .
After buying the Huffington Post for $315 million, AOL gave Ms. Huffington editorial oversight of all its properties, including tech-news site TechCrunch, the patch.com network of local news sites, MovieFone and MapQuest. In addition, more than 30 AOL properties, such as Politics Daily, were absorbed by the Huffington Post.The management structure created tensions with staff at some of the properties. Patch management, for instance, differed with Ms. Huffington over strategy for the local news sites, according to people familiar with the matter. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington quit in a public spat with Ms. Huffington.

Ah, remember that news last September? My headline at the time:

Arianna Huffington Fires Tech Blogger
AOL Paid $30 Million to Buy Out

TechCrunch was a valuable property, because Michael Arrington was a valuable blogger, and the fact that he was willing to walk away from a brand he had created was one of those “Houston, we have a problem” moments, a signal that whatever skills Arianna Huffington brought to AOL, personnel management wasn’t one of them. Read more

Category: Huffington Post

Shout Out To #Fauxcahontas

Posted on | May 6, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Elizabeth Warren continues to epitomize the crumbling of the Progressive Left. This does not mean she should be bereft of soundtrack. Something appropriately Native American-sounding, yet of European origin, suggests itself:

Also packin’ the hits: Belvedere.

Category: Progressivism

Dreams of My Ghostwriter’s Ex: Did Bill Ayers Use Dead Weather Underground Terrorist Diana Oughton as Model for Obama’s ‘Composite’ Girlfriend?

Posted on | May 5, 2012 | 88 Comments

“I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books.”
— Christopher Buckley, Oct. 10, 2008

In 2008, conservative journalist Jack Cashill presented evidence that Barack Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father had been written with the assistance of Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground radical who was Obama’s neighbor in Chicago. Now, the revelation that an ex-girlfriend in Dreams was a “composite” or “compression” of several women — as President Obama reportedly told biographer David Marannis — has focused new attention on Cashill’s argument that Ayers was Obama’s ghostwriter.

The so-called “New York girlfriend” in Obama’s memoir bears specific resemblance to Ayers’s ex-girlfriend Diana Oughton, one of three Weather Underground members killed in 1970 when a bomb the terrorist group was building accidentally exploded.

Like the girlfriend in Obama’s memoir, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes, and came from an affluent background. Furthermore, Oughton’s family estate in Illinois is strikingly similar to one described in a sequence in Dreams when Obama and his “New York girlfriend” visit her family. Cashill wrote in a 2010 article at The American Thinker:

One weekend, the woman invites Obama to her family’s country home, which had been her grandfather’s, and “he had inherited it from his grandfather.” The library is filled with old books and photos of the grandfather with presidents, diplomats, industrialists. “It was autumn,” Obama recalls, “beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore.” . . .
According to a Time Magazine article written soon after her death, Oughton “brought Bill Ayers and other radicals” to the family homestead in Dwight, Illinois. . . .
The main house on the Oughton estate, a twenty-room Victorian mansion, was built by Oughton’s father’s grandfather. Formally known as the John R. Oughton House, it was placed on the national historic register in 1980. Despite forty years of encroaching development since Oughton’s death, aerial photos show the Oughton estate (103 South Street) with a small lake in the middle and a thick ring of trees around it, very much like the estate in Dreams.

In the wake of Maraniss’s report that Obama had admitted the “New York girlfriend” was “compressed” — a composite character — the similarities to Oughton previously noted by Cashill caused the Bookworm Room blog to remark: “I mean, what are the odds that you’d combine a whole lot of different women in your life, and then come up with Bill Ayers’ girlfriend?”

Cashill says that Ayers’s own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, show him to be “obsessed with Oughton.”

Oughton’s “badly mangled” body was found in the rubble of a townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village destroyed by a March 6, 1970, bomb blast. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Oughton had been studying for a master’s degree at the University of Michigan in 1966 when she met and fell in love with Ayers, then a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Oughton followed Ayers into the radical “Weatherman” faction, which split from SDS in 1969, and was a participant in the violent “Days of Rage” protests in Chicago. The explosion that killed Oughton and fellow Weather Underground terrorists Ted Gold and Terry Robbins occurred while they were constructing a bomb they reportedly planned to plant at a NCO dance at the Fort Dix, N.J., Army base.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

SOURCES:

 


Category: Barack Obama, Books

Knuckle-Dragging Creationist Threatens College With Unorthodox Thoughts & Shield Of Faith, But Mostly Thoughts

Posted on | May 5, 2012 | 47 Comments

by Smitty

Insty relates the outrageously outraged outrage of the faculty at the Methodist college Emory University, in the Druid Hills section of metropolitan Atlanta. Stacy McCain has not denied having too much fun figuring out what sort of rituals those Druid Hills Methodists were getting up to in their groovy grove. Apparently those Methodists are hard core Evolutionists, and cannot countenance the withering intellectual assault of an unhinged Demogorgon who would utter such over-the-top phrases as:

“You have a theory in which you place your faith, and I have a theory in which I place my faith,” Carson said in a speech posted on YouTube. “I say you can believe what you want but I simply don’t have enough faith to believe what you believe. I’m a person of faith so I have to believe in God. You know that always gets them.”

This has sparked the rebuttal from one

Arri Eisen, Ph.D., Emory University Department of Biology. “What worried me the most was the fact that he said if you do accept evolution that you’re somehow ethically lacking.”

Carson doesn’t seem to make a statement of that sort in the proffered video clip:

From Wikipedia:

In 1987, Carson made medical history by being the first surgeon to successfully separate siamese twins (the Binder twins) conjoined at the back of the head (craniopagus twins). The 70-member surgical team, led by Carson, worked for 22 hours. At the end, the twins were successfully separated and can now survive independently.

CBS has done a lousy job connecting the letter with any statements made by Carson. Given the propaganda campaign against George Zimmerman, one views CBS Baltimore as guilty of a hatchet job here. Then again, maybe Eisen and the Biology crowd are worried that the lack of repeatable experiments to prove any evolutionary theories has them looking like global warming hucksters.

I have personally studied Biochemistry at George Washington University. It ain’t beanbag. When there is a repeatable experiment that goes from the periodic table of elements to self-replicating life, the evolution shall have evolved a leg to stand on. Until then, how about more work and fewer potshots at skeptics, eh?

Category: Education, Georgia

Not #ReadyToGo? New Hashtag Doesn’t Fill Ohio Arena for Obama Campaign

Posted on | May 5, 2012 | 17 Comments

The Obama campaign, after watching its previous Twitter slogans swiftly hijacked by Republicans, rolled out #ReadyToGo for its official kickoff rally in Columbus, Ohio:

Speaking at his first official campaign rally six months and a day before Election Day, a fiery and combative Obama, his sleeves rolled up, touted a “forward-looking America” while taking a series of shots at his likely opponent before a raucous audience in this swing state. . . .

Unfortunately for the “fiery and combative” incumbent, a lot of Ohioans were apparently not #ReadyToGo to his rally:

But the arena was not a sell out. The 14,000 in attendence left empty sections in the upper deck of the 18,300 seat arena, a different image than four years ago when the president — then a fresh-faced senator who changed the political landscape — addressed sell out crowds across the country.

More from Todd Starnes of Fox News:

Romney’s national press secretary, Ryan Williams, found his way to a seat in the arena and later characterized the speech as “a retread, a cut-and-paste job of President Obama’s 2008 campaign rhetoric.
“Unfortunately,” Williams continued, “for him this time around he has a record to defend, a record of exploding deficits, job losses and fiscal mismanagement in Washington.” Twitter was abuzz with photos and comments about vast areas of empty seats in the arena’s upper deck.

UPDATE: Yeah, it looks bad for O:

His first stop was at Ohio State University where he and his crack staff expected an “overflow” crowd. Turns out, the only thing that overflowed was the empty seats, and maybe some toilets. Even indoctrinated college kids aren’t turning out in big numbers for the Messiah Obama anymore. It’s reported that there were at least 6,000 empty seats at Obama’s “overflow crowd” rally.


Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Ohio
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