The Other McCain

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

Call Me a Cynic

Posted on | April 1, 2012 | 39 Comments

My initial reaction to this story was “Book Deal, Movie Rights,” and I’m sure the Hollywood agents are begging her to sign:

A Texas newspaper has fired staff reporter Sarah Tressler after she was exposed — by a competing paper, natch — as a stripper. Tressler, who has a bachelor’s and master’s degree, worked as a society reporter for the Houston Chronicle and taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston. But for eight years, she also worked at upscale strip clubs.
Sarah Tressler blogged about stripping at “Diary Of An Angry Stripper,” writing articles like “Customers To Avoid List” and “10 Things You Should Know Before You Date A Stripper,” and tweeted from @AngryStripper. Yet she told “Good Morning America” that she never assumed she would be “outed” by anyone because it seemed “like such a mean thing to do.” (Houston Press, the paper that exposed her, said they only did it because it was a “good story.”) After getting canned by the Chronicle for not revealing the job, Tressler is now working as a teacher, and is also still stripping. . . .

My secret blog, “Diary of a Man-Whore,” never got many readers.

Go figure.

But I’m sure Tressler’s new career as a teacher will turn out as well as it did for that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader, right?

UPDATE: Almost forgot to hat-tip Instapundit. If Sarah Tressler doesn’t get a movie deal out of this, maybe she can fill in for Professor Reynolds next time he goes on vacation.

Category: humor, Sex, Texas

Piers Morgan: ‘What a Load of Fatuous Nonsense You Speak, Touré, Don’t You?’

Posted on | March 31, 2012 | 26 Comments

OK, I almost never watch CNN and hadn’t previously had a high opinion of Piers Morgan, but on the other hand, I’d never heard of this Touré character at all, until I saw the Breitbart headline:

MSNBC’s Touré Has Epic
Race-Baiting Meltdown On CNN

So I wondered what the heck this was about. Watch the video:

Touré, whose career has been mainly writing about hiphop music, thought Morgan wasn’t sufficiently aggressive in questioning George Zimmerman’s brother Robert Zimmerman. Morgan objects to being lectured about journalism, and then Touré tries to claim that Morgan doesn’t really know or care anything about the “American soul.” Read the transcript at CNN.

Anyway, I was tired and bummed out and about to go to bed until I saw this and, somehow, it cheered me up wonderfully. Don’t know why.

Category: CNN, Crime, Florida, MSNBC, Racism

The Riot Ideology

Posted on | March 31, 2012 | 51 Comments

Yesterday, I mentioned Fred Siegel’s The Future Once Happened Here in connection with the Trayvon Martin case. Siegel’s book is one of those timeless classics — like Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed — that I frequently recommend as guides to understanding important social phenomena more deeply.

The Future Once Happened Here recounts how liberal policy turned three once-great American cities — New York, D.C. and L.A. — into dangerous urban nightmares, and one of the things Siegel describes is the “riot ideology” whereby organized violence (or the threat thereof) is used to intimidate officials into doing the bidding of “community leaders.”

Having recently begun re-reading Siegel’s book, the latest news in the Trayvon Martin case is both familiar and disturbing:

The feet of thousands pounded the cracked pavement of Sanford’s 13th street . . . to reiterate that apathy won’t be an option for those moved and outraged by the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager.
The Goldsboro community played host to a march and rally Saturday organized by the NAACP that brought together a coalition of national civil-rights organizers, community leaders, clergymen and droves of local residents who joined the chants demanding the arrest of George Zimmerman for Trayvon Martin’s death.
The Rev. Al Sharpton came to a podium outside Sanford Police Department headquarters amid raucous cheers from many of the roughly 1,000 participants. But he revealed few details about a plan he unveiled Friday for economic sanctions to force authorities to arrest Zimmerman.
Instead, he talked generally about sanctions against corporations that support and fund stand-your-ground laws, but didn’t name specific entities or outline strategies.
Everything is on the table for the nonviolent civil disobedience that could come in the coming days, he said. . . .
A special prosecutor has been assigned to the case and the U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation.
“We want an arrest. Shot in the chest,” marchers said Saturday en route to Sanford Police Department headquarters. “I am Trayvon Martin.”

Wait: A special prosecutor? A USDOJ investigation?

Why not wait and see what happens with the investigation? Why this idiotic talk of “economic sanctions” and lynch-mob mentality toward Zimmerman? Why is MSNBC letting one its on-air personalities engage in such demagogic nonsense?

If George Zimmerman is not arrested in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin soon, the Rev. Al Sharpton will call for an escalation in peaceful civil disobedience and economic sanctions.

Civil disobedience toward whom? Economic sanctions where? In Sanford? A town of 53,570 people, 45% white, 30% black and 20% Hispanic? What possible good can Sharpton’s incendiary demagoguery accomplish for the people of Sanford? And isn’t it possible that, by purposefully inflaming racial animosity, Sharpton will make matters much worse for the people of Sanford?

If you’ve read The Future Once Happened Here, you likely suspect that Sharpton’s “activism” will produce only harm for those whose cause he claims to advocate. The consequences of the “riot ideology” are sadly predictable. Meanwhile, on the other coast:

Seven black teens have been arrested on suspicion that they committed a hate crime when they attacked a 15-year-old Hispanic boy while he was walking home from school in Southern California, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The March 14 beating in Palmdale was captured on video and posted on YouTube . . .
During the beating, the teens made racially derogatory statements that were captured on the video . . .

Perhaps Al Sharpton will call for “civil disobedience” there, too.

 

Category: Al Sharpton, California, Crime, Florida, Racism

No Mohawks for Jefferson

Posted on | March 31, 2012 | 13 Comments

Longtime commenter T.R. Sterling sends along this news item as fair warning for my redheaded son:

Derrill Rockwell told police he grabbed his rifle, the .22-caliber he kept handy to kill rodents around the house, about 5 a.m. Oct. 5 and walked outside to confront it.
The bird.
Possibly, he told police, the same fowl he suspected of harassing his cats recently around his home near Orchard Mesa Cemetery.
It was red, sitting at the top of a hill about 90 feet away from Rockwell.
“His intent was to spook it away,” Deputy District Attorney Jason Conley told District Judge Richard Gurley on Friday.
Rockwell shot once but said he didn’t see the bird fly away. Soon after, he heard a woman’s voice, moaning in pain. Rockwell discovered a 23-year-old woman, with a large red mohawk, with a gunshot wound to the head. . . .
Six days after the shooting, Rockwell told . . . police detectives . . . he fired the weapon after confusing the woman’s red mohawk hairstyle for a distant bird.

Category: humor

‘Due to Her Excellent Reputation Among California Democrats …’

Posted on | March 31, 2012 | 14 Comments

This was what you might call “a clue”:

Kinde Durkee, once a trusted treasurer to dozens of California Democrats, pleaded guilty in the biggest campaign embezzlement case ever to hit U.S. politics.
In a federal court in Sacramento, Durkee admitted to stealing more than $7 million from roughly 50 clients during an 11-year period from Jan. 2000 to Sept. 2011. . . .
Federal officials said Durkee’s motivation was simply “greed.” Durkee used the millions she stole from lawmakers such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to pay for a variety of personal expenses, including mortgage payments, American Express bills, her mother’s retirement home, payroll for her company, even tickets to the Los Angeles Dodgers and Disneyland.
Due to her excellent reputation among California Democrats, Durkee had easy access to as many as 700 campaign bank accounts. When California state election monitors began looking into funds missing from the campaign account of a local politician, Durkee simply moved money from other lawmakers’ campaigns to cover up her theft.
Feinstein and other California Democrats — including Reps. Loretta and Linda Sanchez and Rep. Susan Davis — have sued her for millions in lost campaign donations.

Are we shocked to learn that having an “excellent reputation among California Democrats” is not a recommendation of good character?

Honest people are despised by California Democrats.

Update (Smitty): linked at The Lonely Conservative.

Update II (Smitty): linked at The Temple of MUT.

 

Category: California, Crime, Democrats

Not Even #OccupyResoluteDesk’s Most Athletic Supporter, ‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran, Voted For BHO’s Budget

Posted on | March 31, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran, tanned, rested, and fresh from stickin’ it to the man while working out at his arrest with George Clooney, couldn’t muster the vigor to support his party leader’s budget:

Exhaustion, or closeted raaaaaacism? You be the judge.

Patrick Murray for Congress

Previous/More Antics:

via Red Alexandria

Category: Barack Obama, Democrats, Jim Moran

I’d Be All: “Did You Say Something About College Transcripts?”

Posted on | March 31, 2012 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Via Hot Air’s Quotes of the Day:

“Following a front-page Wall Street Journal article Thursday reporting that employees at Bain Capital, Romney’s former private-equity firm, were allowed to invest their retirement money in companies the firm acquired through a special share class, the Obama camp is seeking Romney’s old tax returns to see if they contain information about the investment arrangement…

Look, until we have a full vetting of #OccupyResoluteDesk, we should not want to hear one more godforsaken thing about any records for, well, anyone else.

Category: Barack Obama

Olbermann’s Career: The First Time as Tragedy, the Second Time as Farce

Posted on | March 31, 2012 | 37 Comments

Huffy self-righteous liberalism is not a rare commodity, and the supply greatly exceeds the demand, so Keith Olbermann’s belief that he had cornered the market on progressive bombast was bound to lead him to a sorry end sooner or later:

For nearly a year now, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt have been building their liberal cable news channel, Current TV, with the mercurial television anchorman Keith Olbermann at its center.
This week, the center collapsed.
Current said on Friday afternoon that it had fired Mr. Olbermann — one of the nation’s most prominent progressive speakers — just a year into his five-year, $50 million contract. It was the culmination of months of murky disputes between Mr. Olbermann and the channel that he was supposed to save from the throes of ratings oblivion. . . .

(Ten million a year!)

In his 40 weeks on Current TV, he had an average of 177,000 viewers at 8 p.m., down from the roughly one million that he had each night on MSNBC.

Quick math: $10 million divided by 177,000 = $56 per viewer! Nice work if you can get it. Fortunately, Olby intends to sue the bastards:

Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract. It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently.

Good on ya, Keith. We’ve always thought of Al Gore as a greedy, dishonest two-faced swindler, and look forward to you proving this in court. We are also comforted to know that (a) no other network will want to hire a demanding prima donna with a reputation for suing his erstwhile employers, and (b) you’ll be spending your own money paying lawyers to pursue a tort claim against your fellow liberals.

A win-win.

What shall we say of Keith Olbermann’s embarrassing self-destruction? He flourished at MSNBC during the Bush years, his verbose lectures channeling the rage felt by disempowered leftists who had previously only seen their sentiments expressed in Daily Kos rants, C-SPAN fulminations from congressional Democrats, and anti-war chants at A.N.S.W.E.R. rallies. As soon as the “outs” became the “ins” — after Democrats won Congress in 2006 and Obama took the White House in 2008 — the militant rhetoric of progressive resistance lost its focus and, to some extent, its audience.

If dissent is the highest form of patriotism, as liberals so often told us during the Bush years, then Olbermann’s claim to “patriotism” expired as soon as Obama took the oath of office. Dissent became the property of the Tea Party movement, and Olbermann’s denunciation of Tea Partiers lacked the prestige of “courage” he had enjoyed when he was posturing as the Last Honest Man, standing up to the Military-Industrial Complex and punctuating his sermons to the President of the United States with sarcastically contemptuous “sirs.”

By the time Olbermann left MSNBC in January 2011, his act had been obsolete for two years, as I observed then:

By moving left in 2006 — becoming the raging liberal doppelganger of Fox News — MSNBC pushed CNN into third place. But then what? Where was the audience-growth strategy? They couldn’t go farther left, and the steady diet of liberal indignation had reached its saturation point.

Olbermann didn’t understand this, and neither did the executives at Current TV, a network that isn’t carried by enough cable systems to reach an audience nearly as large as that of MSNBC which (although it is available everywhere) still gets just 1 million a night in primetime. For Olbermann to become the franchise player at a minor-league MSNBC wannabe never made sense as an economic proposition: Was Olby so much better than Lawrence O’Donnell that lefties would seek out his show on the What’s-It’s-Name Network?

There is, of course, a massive Memeorandum aggregation about this news, with commentary by Hot Air, Outside the Beltway, PJ Tatler, Weasel Zippers, National Review, Ann Althouse, and Jammie Wearing Fool among others. Of course, the question now is, what next for Olbermann? Now that he’s been fired by a low-rent operation like Current TV, it’s hard to imagine he has any future in “news.” I can’t see him pitching cubic zirconia jewelry on HSN, but maybe he’ll turn up next season on A&E, bidding for lockers on Storage Wars.

You may remember that, when Olbermann blamed the Tea Party for the Tucson massacre, he prompted a Very Special Comment in reply:

“Good night, Mr. Olbermann. Good night, and good riddance.”

Category: Keith Olbermann
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