The Other McCain

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

John Hawkins Interviews Herman Cain

Posted on | April 10, 2012 | 8 Comments

Herman Cain sees the bright side of his recent experiences:

At the colleges and the universities, it’s standing room only in these auditoriums with these college students which is very, very inspiring — and they are paying attention. They have awakened to the hypocrisy of this administration.  But I plan to continue to stay focused on the mission, which is to defeat Barack Obama.

Read the whole thing. It is Cain’s relentless, cheerful optimism that makes him such an inspiring figure, and I hope the college kids get that.

UPDATE: Almost forgot: Cain Solutions Revolution will have an event at the Capitol on Monday, April 16 — register now!

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain, John Hawkins (Right Wing News)

LIVE AT FIVE – 04.10.12

Posted on | April 10, 2012 | 29 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
WaPo/ABC Poll: Obama Leads Romney 51-41 Among Adults

President Obama

President considered to be more likable; Romney leads by only 4 points on handling economy

Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion
Inflating a new tech bubble?


Syrian Troops Fire Across Turkish Border Near Refugee Camp
Also, no pullback from cities



POLITICS
Study: Obamacare To Add $340 Billion To Deficit

Fist bumps!

George Mason study avoids double-counting in White House, CBO estimates

Romney Halts Anti-Santorum Ads During Bella Santorum’s Illness



Teen Drivers Blowing Off Anti-Texting Push

Md. General Assembly Adjourns After Passing “Doomsday” Budget With No Tax Increases

Obama Visits Florida, Pushes For “Buffett Rule”

Attorney General Dismisses O’Keefe Video As A Stunt



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Falls Below $102 Amid Signs Of Weak US Economy
AOL Sells Over 800 Patents To Microsoft For $1 Billion
PRC Posts Trade Surplus In March
Time For A “Backdoor” IRA?
US Stocks Stumble Monday After Disappointing Jobs Report
Treasury Freezes Pay For GM, Ally, AIG CEOs
US To Propose New Mortgage Lending Rules
Treasury Yields Fall To One-Month Lows
National Database Planned To Combat Cellphone Theft
Iran Close To Internet Blackout
RIM Nuking PlayBook Side-loading Apps
AT&T Unlocking iPhones For Deployed Servicemen?
WinPhone Has Nasty Pr0n Addiction?
Commodore Founder Jack Tramiel Dies, 83
New York Phone Booths To Get A “SmartScreen” Digital Makeover



SPORTS
Goodell Upholds Bounty Penalties

Suspended Saints coach Sean Payton

Commissioner rejects appeals from Saints

Rangers’ Darvish Roughed Up, But Wins MLB Debut

Mavericks Done With Lamar Odom And Vice Versa

Matusz Struggles As Yanks Break O’s Win Streak

Marlins’ Guillen On Hot Seat Over Castro Remarks

Another Day, Another Bear Victim: Memphis Rips Clips 94-85

Fundamentals Fail Nats In 9th As Mets Pull Out 4-3 Win



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Her Dad Says Amanda Bynes Wasn’t Drunk On Night Of DUI Arrest

Amanda Bynes

Well, okay then!

Brooklyn Decker In The Sun

Canadian Actress Arrested After Traveling To NY, Stalking Alec Baldwin

Mandy Moore Pregnant?

Axl Rose Denies Dating Lana Del Rey

Kristen Wiig On Life After SNL

Jennifer Lopez Buys Casper Smart A Birthday Truck



Eva Longoria Says She’s Still A “Hopeless Romantic”

Mattel Debuts “Hunger Games” Barbie

Fox Renews “Glee”, “New Girl” And “Raising Hope”

Scarlett Johansson – Sex Shop Poster Child



FOREIGNERS
Syria Cease-Fire Unlikely After Cross-Border Attacks
Russia Warns Norks Not To Proceed With Launch
Muslim Brotherhood Chooses Chaos For Egypt
64 Yemenis Killed In Clash With Al-Qaeda
PM Cameron To Visit Burma As EU Mulls Sanctions Lift
Mugabe Battles For Life In Singapore, Cabinet Meetings Suspended
Mali’s Junta Leader Doesn’t Want Foreign Forces Fighting Rebel Tuaregs
Death Toll In Nigeria Bombing Rises To 41
PRC Jails Land Rights Lawyer



BLOGS & STUFF
Michelle Malkin: New Black Panthers Call For Race War (Again)
Gateway Pundit: Zimmerman’s Family Says Attorney General Holder Won’t Arrest New Black Panthers Because He’s Black
Volokh Conspiracy: Is Sotomayor The First Disabled Judge?
Riehl World View: Romney Embraces Huckabee – So Begins The GOP’s War On Traditional Conservatism
Weasel Zippers: WaPo Blames Trayvon Martin Shooting On “Dirty Harry” Movies
NYT Media Decoder: Limbaugh Leaving AM Station In Philly – For An FM Station
Lonely Conservative: Creepy – Image OF Obama Adorns White House Basketballs
Washington Free Beacon: Minority Report
Walter Russell Mead: The Myth Of America’s Decline
NRO Corner: Mead And The “Best Way Forward”
Belmont Club: The Apostate’s Screed

Category: Live at Five

Ashley Judd, Victim of the War on Women

Posted on | April 10, 2012 | 65 Comments

OK, I was ranting about this on Twitter and somebody said I should turn it into a blog post. I protested that this really deserves the Ace of Spades touch, but then I thought, “Oh, what the heck. I’ll give it a shot.”

Ashley Judd, rich and famous star of stage, screen and television, is now 43 years old, and maybe she’s gained a few pounds. So the tabloids and gossip blogs started in on her, saying she was a “cow,” and had “had some work done,” blah blah blah.

I didn’t notice or care. I’m trying to do politics here, not TMZ.

I don’t watch much TV. Except for news, the main thing I watch on TV is Storage Wars on A&E and Man vs. Food on the Travel Network. So as far as I know or care, Ashley Judd could be 300 pounds with a face as hideously overworked as Nancy Pelosi’s and who cares?

Well, Ashley Judd cares, and she wants you to know she’s a victim!

The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.

(Oh, good Lord — she’s plagiarizing Naomi Wolfe, am I right?)

As an actor and woman who, at times, avails herself of the media, I am painfully aware of the conversation about women’s bodies, and it frequently migrates to my own body. I know this, even though my personal practice is to ignore what is written about me. I do not, for example, read interviews I do with news outlets. I hold that it is none of my business what people think of me. . . .

(Yadda yadda yadda. Not like I’m vain or anything.)

However, the recent speculation and accusations in March feel different, and my colleagues and friends encouraged me to know what was being said. Consequently, I choose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle. The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about. . . . .

(Excuse me while I climb up on this cross and suffer as an atoning sacrifice, because you’re in need of a millionaire St. Ashley.)

The following examples are real, and come  from a variety of (so-called!) legitimate news outlets (such as HuffPo,  MSNBC, etc.), tabloid press, and social media . . .

(And here she cites the various things said about her recently. I’ll spare you the tedious details and cut to the Womyn’s Studies lecture.)

That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.
A case in point is that this conversation was initially promulgated largely by women; a sad and disturbing fact.

(Holy crap! If she keeps going this way, she’s gonna be name-checking Shulamith Firestone with footnote citations to Robin Morgan!)

News outlets with whom I do serious work, such as publishing op-eds about preventing HIV, empowering poor youth worldwide, and conflict mineral mining in Democratic Republic of Congo, all ran this “story” without checking with my office first for verification, or offering me the dignity of the opportunity to comment. It’s an indictment of them that they would even consider the content printable, and that they, too, without using time-honored journalistic standards, would perpetuate with un-edifying delight such blatantly gendered, ageist, and mean-spirited content.

OK, enough: You can go read the whole damned preachy treatise for yourself. I’m just stunned that this woman — a movie/TV star, which is by definition a looks-oriented gig — suddenly decides, at age 43, that being judged for her looks is a bad thing.

This didn’t bother her, apparently, when she was cast in 1996 to play a young Marilyn Monroe. But now, 16 years later, it’s bad to judge her for her looks because, well, the tabloids and HuffPo are saying not-nice things about her looks. She’s a multimillionaire star, and she’s also a victim of the misogynistic patriarchy.

Except it’s not really about her, it’s about all girls and women everywhere, on whose behalf she suffers on her cross, St. Ashley of Hollywood.

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenter who reminds us that Ashley “Don’t Objectify Me” Judd, posed topless for the December 2006 cover of Marie Claire magazine. The patriarchy made her do it!

UPDATE II: Linked by Bob Belvedere at the Camp of the Saints — thanks! — and by Dan Collins, who remarks:

The way the system is rigged, women can’t win, which is why Ashley Judd is so unsuccessful, so bereft of the rewards that society unfairly lavishes on men.

Victim of the effin’ patriarchy — and don’t deny it, you oppressors!

Category: Celebrities, Feminism, Hollywood

This Is Probably a Hate Crime

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 9 Comments

WARNING: We apologize to readers for the disturbing neo-Confederate imagery in this shocking eight-minute video that shows Read more

Category: Video

Stephen Green’s Hair Of The Dog

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | Comments Off on Stephen Green’s Hair Of The Dog

by Smitty

George Will owns it at the outset, but the closing Lincoln bit was a nice touch:

Category: Uncategorized, VodkaPundit

Blaming Citizens United For Gingrich Is Like Blaming Kel-Tec For Trayvon Martin

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

Possibly too soon for the analogy, but this bit from Adam Clancy at The American Interest is really that off-putting (emphasis mine):

But as Gingrich found out all it now takes is the support of one billionaire to keep your campaign alive indefinitely. For Gingrich, that billionaire is the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam. Adelson donated $5 million to the floundering Gingrich campaign after Iowa. When that failed to resuscitate the campaign Miriam kicked in another $5 million in the lead-up to South Carolina. And as if to prove that casino owners can be just as profligate as their customers, Adelson donated another $5 million in mid-February after it became apparent that Gingrich’s win in South Carolina was not the game changer they had hoped it would be. All told, the Gingrich super PAC “Winning Our Future” raised $18.8 million through the end of February, of which the Adelsons contributed $16.5 million. It is fair to say that without the Adelsons’ largesse, enabled by the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, Gingrich would have gone quietly into the good night.
As well as prolonging the primary, Citizens United also made it a nastier process. Mitt Romney ran a traditional, pre-Citizens United campaign. He performed well in Iowa despite the state not being a naturally fertile ground for his brand of Republicanism. In friendlier territory in New Hampshire, Romney won a convincing victory. He emerged from the Granite State as the overwhelming favorite and proceeded to South Carolina with at least one eye on the general election. What Romney’s campaign had not counted on was Sheldon Adelson’s checkbook.

What is with all this emoting about nastiness? This whinging about on the topic of money in politics is a Progressive’s erotic legislation dream:

  1. Stir up the angst about the money.
  2. Write another atrocious piece of legislation.
  3. ???
  4. Progress!

Let it be. There is no way under the sun that you’re going to achieve human redemption through the rule of law, much less stink-free electoral campaigns. The solution to bad speech is more speech, but it does not follow that the answer to odious legislation/court decisions is more legislation/litigation:

But fortunately, voters are not mindless automatons. They evaluate the messages being presented to them and compare them with elected officials’ records in office. An incumbent with a good record will find his ads reach a receptive audience. Conversely, an interest group whose agenda is broadly unpopular with voters is going to have a harder time using ads to reduce the candidate’s poll numbers.
Relatedly, as Meg Whitman recently learned, advertising dollars are subject to diminishing returns. If the average voter sees candidate A’s ad 10 times and candidate B’ ad only once, that’s likely to give candidate A a sizable advantage. But if the average voter sees candidate A’s ad 1000 times and candidate B’s ad only 100 times, the gap is unlikely to matter. Indeed, some voters might get so tired of seeing candidate A’s ads that they vote for candidate B out of spite.

So, while I’m no more enthusiastic about batteries of negative advertising artillery than the next bloke, I submit that the electorate itself is doing as good a job or better as Congress in dealing with the situation.

Category: Election 2012, Newt Gingrich

In Case You Haven’t Noticed Yet, Everybody Recently Went Crazy

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 29 Comments

Everybody but me and you, that is, and one of us is probably on the verge of cracking up under the enormous stress that seems to be driving people off the deep end lately.

Either we’re in the midst of an epidemic of mass hysteria, or else all these people jabbering like magpies on the Internet are describing a reality with which I’ve lost touch, because it makes no sense to me:

Mitt Romney: He’s Inevitable! Electable! Invincible!

Crazy, right? But kooks who believe such things seem to be everywhere nowadays, especially on the Internet:

U.S. Senator Calls President ‘Stupid’ on Twitter

 You don’t even have to look for this stuff. It’s everywhere:

Toddler on Easter egg hunt stumbles on live GRENADE…
which has to be blown up by bomb squad

It’s impossible to parody such madness. For instance, some crazy people still believe stereotypes about black people being good at basketball, but you’d better keep your distance from such wackjobs, or else you’ll never get a job at National Review. (Did somebody say “rim shot”?)

Jeff Goldstein won’t be sending his application to National Review any time soon, because if he was ever in the same room with Rich Lowry, he’d never be able to resist the urge to punch him out.

Some kook — and the Internet’s full of ’em lately, I tell ya — will almost certainly interpret that link as an “endorsement” or “defense” of what John Derbyshire wrote, which is a popular game crazy people play: Demanding that you denounce something somebody else wrote or said or did as if you’re in charge of what other people write, say and do.

Mandatory denunciations were part of the Moscow Show Trials and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The attempt to impose intellectual conformity, under threat of denunciation if you don’t conform, is totalitarian. It wasn’t necessarily suprising, then, to find myself today denounced as an Enemy of the People here and there for refusing to agree with Big Brother that We Have Always Been at War With Eastasia. And people seem to be so stressed-out about this that even the mildest disagreement causes them to erupt in fury. You’d never believe the indignant tone of the e-mail I received today from a liberal atheist, to which I tried to respond as calmly as possible:

I made no “assertion that atheists are more likely to be bigots.” I said there was a significant overlap between “the New Atheism” and evolution-based “Scientific Racism,” an overlap of which Derbyshire is an example.
There are certain people — I’ve met them — who have gotten off into the pessimism thing, reading a lot of Nietzsche and Spengler, etc., and thus are filled with a doomsday horror about the Decline of the West, the kind of theme that inspired Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz.
While I am not necessarily of the opposing school (which we might call Pollyanna Conservatism), the market for right-wing pessimism is overcrowded already and I never cared much for Nietzsche anyway. If I were offered a six-figure fellowship at the Declinist Foundation for Doom and Gloom, I’d take it, of course, and please let me know if there’s a publisher interested in my idea for a book called Where Are We Going? And Why Are We in This Handbasket?
Nevertheless, I see no reason to apologize for observing that fanatical atheists are usually also fanatical about other things. Some atheists are fanatical environmentalists, and some are fanatical racists. Some of them are even fanatics about bicycling.
Me? I’m just trying to make a living, buddy. And it’s a damn hard dollar.
— RSM

It’s important not to take these liberal kooks too seriously, but at the same time, you want to keep a close eye on them, because you never know when one of them will snap and start spouting profanities and racial slurs on national TV, like Susan Candiotti on CNN:

Category: CNN, Fear. Loathing.

This Would Only Matter If It Was, Say, A Ron Paul Campaign Office

Posted on | April 9, 2012 | 21 Comments

by Smitty

I, for one, rejoice at the vast strides Barack Obama has made in reducing the number of bogus attacks on campaign offices for insufficient diversity:

Original photo.

If a GOP contender published that, the media would be on it like libelous edits on NBC. It’s just one more way BHO is winning the hope to change the future! Yes, that’s correct: despite all claims to the contrary, our President has balls!

Category: VodkaPundit
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