The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.11.12

Posted on | May 11, 2012 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Sheriff Joe At Bay?

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio arrives at a news conference in Phoenix

“I am not going to surrender my office to the Federal government…I will fight this to the end.”

Romney To Woo Evangelicals At Liberty U.?
Will give commencement address Saturday

Edwards Prosecution Ends With ABC Video Of His Shameless Lies
Could get thirty years in the slammer for illegal use of campaign funds to hide, support mistress Rielle Hunter



POLITICS
House Shifts Budget Cuts From Defense To Social Programs

House Speaker John Boehner

Legislation not likely to be taken up in the Senate

Vikings On Verge Of Extorting New Stadium From Minnesota Taxpayers

SecDef Warns Against “Pet Projects” In Defense Budget

Christie Vetoes Bill For Obamacare State Insurance Exchange

Toddler Flagged On TSA No-Fly List, Removed From Flight

Sarah Palin Endorses Cruz In Texas, Fischer In Nebraska Senate Primaries

Kyrillos, Hoping To Unseat Menendez, Still Largely Unknown By NJ Voters

Bristol Palin Rips Obama For Taking Advice From Daughters On Gay Marriage



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Continues To Slide On Lack Of US Demand, Eurozone Instability; NYMEX $96.20, Brent $112.96
JPMorganChase Blows $2 Billion On Derivative Bet Gone Bad
Dow Squeaks Out 20-Point Gain After Six Days Of Losses
P&G To Move Skin Care/Cosmetics Group To Singapore
Facebook IPO Overvalued At $96 Million, Says Investor Poll
Credit Easing In US, Bernanke Says
Avoiding The Next Big Bank Bailout
Sony Reports Record $5.7 Billion Annual Loss
Bing Redesign Stresses Social Component
Microsoft’s Windows RT Firefox Ban: A Quick Explanation
Will Google Battle Get Oracle Just $150K In Damages?
Pebble Smartwatch Sells Out, Collects $10 Million On Kickstarter
Max Payne 3 Trailer Released
Blackberry 7 Smartphones Get Nod From DoD
Fannie Mae Finally Stops Racking Up Debt At The Treasury



SPORTS
Sixers Knock Off Bulls 79-78, Advance To Second Round

The Bulls' Carlos Boozer shoots as the Sixers' Spencer Hawes defends

Sixers will face Celtics in their first second-round trip in eight years

Garnett Carries Boston Into Second Round Over Hawks, 83-80




Rangers Top O’s 7-3 To Earn Doubleheader Split

Sabathia Notches 10 Ks, Yankees Take Series With 5-3 Win Over Rays

Anaheim Ducks Sign Boudreau To Two-Year Extension

Beckett Booed Off The Field As BoSox Lose Again, 8-3 To Indians

Strasburg Punches Out 13 As Nats Avoid Sweep



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Bruce Willis Debuts Daughter Mabel Ray

Bruce Willis and his youngest daughter

Mom, Dad and baby vacationing in Budapest

NBC’s “Community” Renewed for 4th Season, 13 Shows

“30 Rock” Coming Back For Final Season

Rihanna Drops Chris Brown

Johnny Depp Angry At Vanessa Paradis Rumors

What’s Bugging Halle Berry?

Sean Bean Arrested For Harassing Ex-Wife

Howard Stern Predicts Britney Will Be “A Train Wreck” On “X Factor”

WWE Star John Cena Files For Divorce



FOREIGNERS
Christians In Syria Living In Uneasy Security
Egyptian Rivals Trade Barbs In Historic Debate
Germany Remains Opposed To Calls For Stimulus
Greek Socialists Try For Unity Government After Talks With Democratic Left
India Steps Into PRC/Philippines Spat Over South China Sea
Putin Tells Obama He’s Too Busy To Attend G-8 Summit
Tymoshenko Ends Hunger Strike After Move To Hospital
Red Cross Suspends Most Operations In Pakistan
Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Kicks Off With Horse Show



BLOGS & STUFF
Bristol Palin: Hail To The Chiefs – Malia And Sasha Obama
Weasel Zippers: Biden Apologizes For Forcing President’s Hand On Gay Marriage
Legal Insurrection: U. Penn Law Also Identified Warren As Minority
Right Sphere: Guy Claiming Obama’s Auto Bailout Got Him A Job Has Actually Been Working Since 2006
Maggie Gallagher: Is Fox News Pro-Gay Marriage?
Jonah Goldberg: The Messenger Shooting Begins
Pirate’s Cove: The Cost Of Globull Warming Legislation
Lonely Conservative: Sometimes Obama Forgets About The Miserable Economy
Washington Free Beacon: Co-host Of Obama Fundraiser Under SEC Investigation
This Ain’t Hell: Why The Internet Has Milblogs And Why Spencer Ackerman Can’t Be One Of Them
NRO Corner: Poll – Walker Up Early In Wisconsin Recall Election

Category: Live at Five

Kate Beckinsale’s Ghastly Vagina of Death: Another Ex-Starlet Aborts Her Career

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 60 Comments

Formerly attractive actress Kate Beckinsale, before she
turned her vagina into a political statement.

Maybe you have heard of Kate Beckinsale, an actress who used to be considered attractive. In fact, when she was still young — about 15 years ago — guys who saw her nude scene in Uncovered widely regarded Beckinsale as “hot.” As recently as last week, if you had asked guys to name some reasonably good-looking actresses in their late 30s, Kate Beckinsale might have made the top 10.

Then she killed it.

Her vagina, I mean.

When Smitty took note of the “Funny or Die” video Monday — it wasn’t funny, and therefore, died — I didn’t immediately realize that the producers of that unfunny partisan political ad had actually got a moderately well-known actress involved in their miscalculated election-year slur. Then I read Wyblog and learned the shocking truth.

Judy Greer? Andrea Savage? Never heard of ’em. But Kate Beckinsale? Yeah, that name rang a bell in a “nice rack, pretty face” kind of way.

Why would an attractive, young and reasonably successful actress get herself mixed up in that feminists-mocking-Republicans crap? There is a reason that kind of stunt-politics stuff is monopolized by D-listers and over-the-hill has-beens like Ashley Judd.

If an actress is young and hot, the last thing in the world she wants is to get mixed up in politics. Young hot actresses in Hollywood are cast for roles based entirely on the fact that they are young and hot, and their box-office appeal can only be damaged by taking controversial stands on political issues. The people who buy movie tickets don’t care whether an actress is Republican or Democrat, as long as she’s got a nice rack and a pretty face. As Sam Goldwyn once said, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”

Few things are more annoying than a starlet who supposes that she is employed on the basis of her extraordinary talent. Congratulations, darling: You remembered your lines and hit your mark. Let’s just call the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences right now and nominate you for an Oscar in the “Best Rack” category, OK?

What happens with such people, I think, is that they get so used to being catered to and fawned over, they actually start thinking of themselves as superior beings, and imagine that we lesses mortals are actually in need of enlightenment from them.

So when Kate Beckinsale chose to turn her vagina into a political statement, she killed it. And by “it,” I mean her vagina, which by logical extension is ultimately what we refer to when we speak of an actress as having “sex appeal.”

Abortion is about death, Ms. Beckinsale, and by publicly enlisting your vagina on the side of death, you killed it. Christian Toto reminds us:

Beckinsale, who stars in the upcoming “Total Recall” remake, once said she couldn’t believe anyone would actually admit to being a Republican in the first place.

We come to bury Kate Beckinsale’s vagina, not to praise it. After having bared her young tatas in Uncovered, the notorious homewrecker stole another woman’s husband while he was directing her in a forgettable vampire picture nine years ago, when she was still young and reasonably attractive — before she killed her vagina.

So now the remake of Total Recall will star a once-attractive actress with a dead vagina. The critics might not notice, but we will.

 

UPDATE: Some progressive troll on Twitter decided to complain about “objectification,” which prompted me to respond:

When an actress stars in a POLITICAL AD about ‘MY VAGINA,’ don’t complain about “objectification,” OK?

The title of the Funny or Die video was, after all, “Republicans, Get in My Vagina.” That is to say, Beckinsale and her colleagues thought it would be “cute” to make their vaginas the point of the “joke.” And we can say nothing in reply except polite demurrals?

Nuh-uh. Homey don’t play that.

RECENTLY:


Category: Abortion, Celebrities, Hollywood, National Offend a Feminist Week

#ObamaForgot

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Yet another brutal hash tag game. Click the image for my input.
Sometimes I am almost funny.
The Melvins video:
Poor Sooper Mexican. Hopefully the brain recovers.

Category: humor

BREAKING: Missing Girls Found Alive; Kidnapper Adam Mayes Commits Suicide

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 10 Comments

Alexandria Bain, 12, Kyliyah Bain, 8, are reported safe

This guy was on the FBI Most Wanted List:

It’s the end of the line for fugitive Adam Mayes. The two Hardeman County [Tennessee] girls that he abducted were found alive Thursday evening. 8-year-old Kyliyah and 12-year-old Alexandria Bain are alive and safe.
Mayes was found near County Road 183 in Alpine. He is reported to be dead. Sources close to Fox 13 are reporting that Mayes died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

This story was just headlined on CNN.

UPDATE: MSNBC reports more:

Adam Mayes, suspected of kidnapping Jo Ann Bain and her three daughters, has been captured and is near death, according to reports from WMCTV.com in Memphis, Tenn.
The two younger daughters, Alexandria, 12, and Kyliyah Bain, 8, were both found safe and are now with authorities, WMCTV reported.
The Union County Sheriff’s Department found Mayes with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the Memphis station reported. Initial media reports say that he was found at a church near Alpine, Miss., about 45 minutes from the Tennessee border.
Mayes was charged with the first-degree murders of Jo Ann Bain, 31, and her eldest daughter, Adrienne Bain, 14, whose bodies were found buried outside Mayes’ mother’s home last week.

UPDATE II: While the initial reports said Mayes was already dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, there now seems to be some confusion. At any rate, this was a very strange crime:

Bain’s mother-in-law earlier said she believed Mayes killed the girls’ mother and her eldest daughter, and then ran away with the the two girls because he believed the girls were his own children.
Josie Tate, the mother of Mayes’ wife Teresa, told ABC News affiliate WTVC that her daughter and Mayes fought often over whether Mayes was actually the father of JoAnn Bain’s two youngest children.
Bain and her eldest daughter, Adrienne, were killed in their Tennessee home on April 27, and then taken with the two youngest daughters to Mayes’ home in Mississippi, according to police affidavits. Teresa and Mayes have both been charged with murder, but Mayes remains at large and on the run. The FBI has placed Mayes on its Top Ten Most Wanted fugitives list.

UPDATE III: Now Fox News reports Mayes dead:

The Mississippi man suspected of kidnapping four women in a Tennessee family and killing a mother and daughter died after shooting himself Thursday evening, a law enforcement source tells Fox News. . . .
Mayes and his wife, Teresa, are charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Jo Ann Bain, 31, and her daughter, Adrienne, 14. Their bodies were found buried outside the Mayes’ home a week after they were reported missing by Jo Ann Bain’s husband, Gary.
Mayes’ mother-in-law Josie Tate told The Associated Press that Mayes thought the missing sisters might actually be his daughters and it caused problems in his marriage to her daughter, Teresa, who is jailed in the case.
In an earlier interview, Tate’s daughter, Bobbi Booth, said Teresa Mayes suspected her husband was having an affair with Jo Ann Bain.

OK, to sort out what is a bizarre and confusing story: Mayes was married to Teresa, who suspected him of having an affair with Ann Bain. But Mayes then kidnappeed Ann Bain and three of her daughters, the youngest two of which he believed to be his own children. He killed Bain and the oldest daughter. Mayes’s wife and mother have both been charged in connection with those murders.

UPDATE IV: America’s Most Wanted provides background on the crime:

Search warrants were executed at the Mayes residence in Mississippi, and during the search, two bodies were found in shallow graves behind the home. The bodies were positively identified as Jo Ann and her eldest daughter, Adrienne.
Mayes’ mother, Mary, has also been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Invesigators say Mayes had a plan to kidnap the two youngest girls. Cops say Jo Ann Bain and her daughter, Adrienne were killed in their home in Tennessee and then transported to Mayes’ house in Guntown, Miss.
Teresa and Mary both allegedly confessed during a police interview and said they witnessed Mayes digging holes in Mary’s backyard — where the bodies of Jo Ann and Adrienne were found. Cops say Teresa also told authorities that she was there when Adam killed Jo Ann and Adrienne in the garage of the Bain home.

Category: Crime, Mississippi, Tennessee

Silly AFP, Thinking BHO Will Hold To Any Prior View

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Watch this ad:

Here is the WaPoo with some background:

The House voted Wednesday to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank for another three years, permitting the agency to continue providing hundreds of millions of dollars in trade assistance to U.S. firms.
Lawmakers approved the plan 330 to 93, easily surpassing the two-thirds majority needed to pass the measure under a suspension of the normal House rules. All 183 Democrats voted for the bill, along with 147 Republicans, but 93 GOP lawmakers voted against it.
Signaling how quickly Congress hopes to resolve a weeks-long dispute on the agency, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has said that the Senate likely will move quickly to approve the measure.
The agency’s charter expires this month, and the bank is on the verge of hitting a $100 billion borrowing limit. The proposal approved Wednesday would raise the bank’s borrowing limit to $140 billion over the next three years. The limit would jump to $120 billion immediately, and then by $10 billion the next two years, so long as the bank’s default rates stay below 2 percent. As part of the deal, the Treasury Department will have to submit regular reports on the status of negotiations with other countries to cut or reduce import and export subsidies.

Because nothing says ‘reform’ quite like business as usual.

In this Breitbart audio excerpt from “Dream From My Father”, #OccupyResoluteDesk admits both to #Occupying a corner of the playground, and bullying a girl. No word on whether Coretta grew up to be a feminist or not.

Category: Barack Obama, Economics

‘Zimbabwe’ Ben Bernanke, AC/DC Fan?

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:

From the lows in March 2009, 1150 S&P points have been ‘created-or-saved’ thanks to central bank largesse. That is a cost of $2 million for every S&P 500 point since the Fed started to expands its balance sheet by $2.3 trillion. Money-well-spent, we are sure you’ll agree.

I love the sound of financial manipulations in the morning. It sounds like Bernanke's zipper!
I am reminded of being very young, (was I even four years old?) at the grocery store with mom. She paid for our stuff, and handed the cashier a $10 or $20, and he made change. Seeing that mom had a higher number of bills and coins than she had started with, I valiantly attempted to argue that she had made money in the transaction. Indeed, you have to view the insanity of our financial system through a four-year-old’s to see any sense to it.

Alternately, the S&P score is all just an expensive AC/DC reference:

Category: End The Fed

Probably Just a Coincidence

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 33 Comments

After public schools have spent the past two years engaged in elaborate (and federally funded) “anti-bullying” programs — with especial emphasis on protecting kids from the evils of homophobia — the Washington Post publishes a 5,000-word article portraying Mitt Romney as having been a high school bully who picked on gay kids.

By the way: The typical news story is 450-750 words. Five thousand words is enough copy to fill two entire pages of a newspaper.

We’ve never seen Barack Obama’s college transcripts, or senior thesis, and the only former girlfriend of his we know about is a composite perhaps based on a dead ex-girlfriend of his ghost writer, radical terrorist Bill Ayers. But the Washington Post can send a reporter out to do deep investigative journalism on Mitt Romney’s high-school days.

This is probably just a coincidence.

UPDATE: Question the timing, you say?

Funny how this appears one day after Obama’s forced-by-my-daughters’-emotions evolutionary announcement of support for same-sex “marriage.”

A Shermanesque statement from Professor Jacobson:

I once participated in a group which gave someone a wedgie when I was at summer camp in the 1960s. That’s why I’ll never run for President, my record is stained.

Dang it — another possible GOP contender fails the media vetting. At this rate, I’ll never get that ambassadorship to Vanuatu.

UPDATE II: These paranoid conspiracy theorists are everywhere!

Some critics saw the timing as evidence of media bias, suggesting that the motive had to do with making Romney look intolerant just as Obama had voiced his support for same-sex marriage.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, interviewing Romney on his radio show a few hours after the story landed online, said that since “everyone’s talking about same-sex marriage and tolerance and unions and what do you stand for, it’s amazing the timing of this Washington Post story … would seem to me it was somewhere shrink-wrapped, waiting to be unwrapped at the right time and this was the right time.”

Indeed. To report a story like that — to track down and interview somebody’s high-school classmates from a half-century ago — must have taken many weeks, if not months. The writing and editing of a 5,000-word story is not easy work. If you cranked out a thousand words a day (quite a rigorous pace, for original reporting), that’s a full week just to write the story, once you’d done all the interviews.

So, yeah, maybe they had it “shrink-wrapped,” ready to go.

UPDATE II: To give you some understanding of what it takes to produce 5,000 words of original reporting, I’ll cite a an article I wrote for the print edition of the American Spectator a couple years ago. “Battle Cry in the North Country” was 1,417 words and was written during a daylong gonzo frenzy in an airport lounge in Buffalo, N.Y., after I’d spent three weeks covering the Doug Hoffman campaign in NY-23. (I’d only been told that morning that I’d have to file by 5 p.m. to be able to get it in the December-January print edition.)

Cranking out 1,400 words in a single day left me completely fried. Now, try thinking about the amount of work needed to produce an article more than three times that long.

UPDATE III: You might ask, “How can the Washington Post afford to make such a massive investment of journalistic resources in vetting a politician’s activities in high school 50 years ago?” Well, if you’re willing to lose $22.6 million in a single three-month period . . .

UPDATE IV: Yeah, you get in a hurry on a 5,000-word story, and you’re bound to make a few mistakes, like claiming a guy has “long been bothered” by an incident he didn’t even know about until your reporter asked him about it. (Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

 


Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Media Bias, Mitt Romney

SEO, Social Networking and Other Crap I Don’t Have Time to Worry About

Posted on | May 10, 2012 | 11 Comments

If I had wanted to be a geek, I would have gone to Geek School and by now would probably be living in a mansion paid for with patent royalties and stock options. Instead, I became a journalist and — despite having nearly 12,000 Twitter followers — it never occurred to me to develop a comprehensive “digital strategy.” Maybe I can assign Smitty and Wombat to try to understand this stuff and put it to use for us:

The number of online news consumers has grown consistently over the past half-decade, yet not every publication has gotten the same lift as The Atlantic, whose web audience has catapulted from approximately 500,000 to 13.4 million monthly visitors since taking down its paywall in early 2008. . . .
Bob Cohn, who was recently promoted to editor of The Atlantic Digital, rejoices the change. “Before, it seemed Demand Media was going to own the Internet by assigning stories based on search returns. It was a cynical approach to journalism,” Cohn recalled. “We’re no longer writing to get the attention of Google algorithms. We’re writing to get you to share it, to digg it.”

Digg it. We’ve got those “share this” buttons at the bottom of every post, so if you wanted to Digg this, you could. Also, you could Tweet it, or link it at your Facebook page, or send it by e-mail to your friends. Especially if your friends are influential bloggers who might throw some more traffic our way, like Aleister at American Glob, for example.

See, that’s what we professional journalist types call a “transition,” whereby we change topics so seamlessly that the reader doesn’t even realize that all that stuff about “digital strategy” was just bait on the hook to get them to go over and hit Aleister’s tip jar.

It’s important to learn little tricks like that, and never publicly explain these tricks except in humorous “jokes,” because otherwise people might figure out that you’ve actually got a “digital strategy.” Read more

Category: Blogging
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