The Other McCain

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

It Was Almost My Pulitzer Moment Covering #Occupy, But Then It Turned Into A Madison Rising Groove

Posted on | February 10, 2012 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

I got alerted by a phone call from somebody that #Occupy was going to stage a demonstration down by Radio Row. So I hied me there post-haste, camera ready. Security was not briefed beforehand, leading to an interesting encounter:

And here is the actual cut:

Update: here is further coverage of actual #Occupy activity at CPAC.

Category: CPAC

Hands Off My Health Care Rally

Posted on | February 10, 2012 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Americans For Prosperity are bringing it, and you should, too 27 March is a Tuesday. I will take the day off to be there and blog this, because it is Simply. Too. Important. to neglect.

Hands Off My Health Care Rally
Upper Senate Park, Washington, D.C.
March 27th at 1:00PM

March 23, 2012, marks an important and unfortunate anniversary. It will have been exactly two years since President Obama forced his unpopular health care takeover onto the American people.
As you are most likely aware, the Supreme Court will be considering the constitutionality of several elements of the President’s health care takeover. This may be our best chance to overturn this offense against our health care freedoms.
That’s why Americans for Prosperity will be hosting a Hands Off My Health Care rally for free-market grassroots activists from across the country at Upper Senate Park on March 27th. Come join us!

Category: Tea Party

Is This CPAC, Or A Mosh Pit?

Posted on | February 10, 2012 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Steven Crowder and a friend whose name eluded me presented a rap video this morning at the Blog Awards that was wild and sure to go viral–if he ever makes the thing public so people can, you know, view the thing.

Dana Loesch was one of the presenters, in a Ramones T-shirt:
And then I caught this young student down on the exhibit floor, right when Madison Rising was about to stage a performance:
Check back for that–security was doing its job right at the edge of sanity, and nearly tossed M.R. out for looking too close to #Occupy for comfort. I shot some video that I will post Real Soon Now.
Category: CPAC

Vote Obama, So That That The ACORN-Sponsored Pre-Teen, Undocumented Prostitutes Can Keep The American Holocaust Going Strong

Posted on | February 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Sorting out the play-by-play, a wee birdie explained to me:

  1. The Plan B manufacturer tested the ‘morning after pill’ in young girls.
  2. The FDA was set to approve Plan B for girls age 11 and up.
  3. Sensing that those advocating life would pitch a fit, Sebelius at HHS over-ruled the FDA, making sure that Plan B would only be available age 18 and up.
  4. Some with knowledge of internal FDA comms are aware that, once Obama wins re-election, concern will shift away from the petty thoughts of the bitter clingers, and back to maximizing the American Holocaust.

The Pharmalot blog has a post on an unprecedented override of the FDA by Health and Human Services, emphasis mine:

Two months after US Department of Health & Human Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took the unprecedented step of overruling the FDA and thwarted a move to ease access to the Plan B pill, a coalition of reproductive rights advocates has asked a federal judge to reopen a 2005 lawsuit that challenged FDA access restrictions but was effectively ended by the HHS decision.
Led by the Center for Reproductive Rights, the advocates want a ruling that would end a decade-long battle and allow the emergency contraceptive, which is also known as the morning after pill, as well as generics to be immediately approved for unrestricted, over-the-counter sale. Currently, the pill is available only to women age 17 and older without a prescription, and only behind counters.
“The FDA has continually treated emergency contraception completely different than it has any other medication,” Suzanne Novak, senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, says in a statement. “We are asking the court to recognize that the FDA has failed to meet its obligation to the public and make decisions based on science, rather than politics.”
Here is the motion to reopen the lawsuit and add Sebelius as a defendant and the motion for summary judgment.
The move is likely to keep a highly controversial issue in the public eye. After Sebelius overruled the FDA, which had decided to approve wider access to younger teenagers, the Obama administration was accused of politicizing the agency, given that some believe the pill is akin to abortion and appealing to conservatives is a priority in an election year. . ..

The deliberately inflammatory post title connects this disgraceful news with the 2009 ACORN news delivered by O’Keefe and Giles. It is hypothetical, but tragically near-fetched.

Is the Obama administration willing to make human sacrifices to win re-election? One could interpret this news that way.

Category: Barack Obama, Culture, Election 2012

Celebrating The Crowd At CPAC, iv
The Ideas, Reasoning Power, and Imagination of Crowds

Posted on | February 10, 2012 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Le Bon, on the emphasis for lots of staged imagery from fascists.

Whatever be the ideas suggested to crowds they can only exercise effective influence on the condition that they assume a very absolute, uncompromising, and simple shape. They present themselves then in the guise of images, and are only accessible to the mases under this form. These image-like ideas are not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession, and may take each other’s place like the slides of a magic lantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in which they were placed one above the other. The explains how it is that the most contradictory ideas may be seen to be simultaneously current in crowds. According to the chances of the moment, a crowd will come under the influence of one of the various ideas stored up in its understanding, and is capale, in consequence, of committing the most dissimilar acts. Its complete lack of the critical spirit does not allow of its perceiving these contradictions. (Le Bon 82-83)

All Le Bon is really noticing here is that information dispersal in a crowd (or society in general) is completely unpredictable. Most signals attenuate rapidly. Only relatively low-information signals “Hope and Change” or ones that have been in circulation for a very long time (The Bible) have much penetration. The crowd, itself, never thinks at all; only the members of the crowd have cognition, and then to the extent that the crowd members have information. So it looks a dumb beast, despite technological improvements.

Category: Uncategorized

A Tale Of Two Viral Ads–Mark Oxner In Florida, Brian K. Hill In Connecticut

Posted on | February 10, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Ladd Ehlinger’s yeoman work in support of conservative candidates in even the toughest political races is something of an inspiration. His Turn This Ship Around has managed to bring out the highest virtues of the Raaaaacism Industrial Complex.Not that there is any racial over- or undertone to the project, mind you. Barack Obama is portrayed captain of the now-pirate vessel U.S.S. Constitution, a. . .sqaure-rigged oared vessel? The ad serves the cogent point that future generations stand to be enslaved by the current policies of Barack Obama and the Democrat Senate that suck too much for adult budgeting. The children in the video seem a representative population sample. So from what sort of mind could a charge of raaaaacism emerge?

Mark Oxner was the original user of the ad, with the bird-brained Alan Grayson appearing bird-bodied alongside Obama. According to the Examiner,

Oxner is obviously trying to go after his opponent Alan Grayson, as well as President Obama, but does it cross the line into racism with its slave ship meme? Facebook thinks so; it has refused to run the ad.

The ad made a slim blog called Lightweight Racist, with a masthead I shan’t deconstruct. Not much to see other than the name of the blog. Also, We Are Respectable Negroes has enough lit-crit afoot to excite Jeff Goldstein. A taste:

Is race an element here? I am not sure. This anti-Obama campaign commercial could be one more example of the “benign” myopia that is common to the white racial frame (“how could anyone be offended by a boat, an allusion to slavery, and a black captain whipping his crew? How shocking!). Alternatively, the racial ideologies at work here could be more sinister, as any reference to “white slavery” has historically done potent political work from the Revolutionary War to the present (with the Tea Party faithful using that very same phrase to oppose the Obama administration and play on white racial resentment and anxiety).

WARN and its ilk have been a chorus of crickets since military veteran Brian K. Hill used the same basic ad. Hill, of course, is running for Senate in Connecticut. Oh yeah, and he’s. . .black.

It is, of course, written in the Gospel According to Marx that every single white male utterance is awash in raaaaacist concupiscence. This has been socially constructed Truth since the first Noble Savage, Adam, was ejected from #OccupyEden on the Mother Continent. Of course, Adam slapped fetters on the first human with relatively more skin pigment he saw, and became the Original, Evil Raaaaacist. Adam’s sin was passed down on the Y-chromosome to all modern male conservatives of European extraction. Leftists, of course, have said enough Hail Alinskys to absolve themselves of Adam’s crime.

With that introduction, you may find the following chats with Hill and Oxner at CPAC12 of interest.
Brian K. Hill is an impressive American and worthy political candidate, in my estimation, given a 7-minute exchange:

Mark Oxner talks about the blowback against the Turn This Ship Around ad. I had slight confusion as to whether Mark had been the producer of the video, or was in fact the candidate:

On a personal note, it is a privilege to have been blessed with the resources and location to go to CPAC and meet Americans who are turning this ship around. Knowing the situation, I can tell you to stand by for ‘high winds and heavy seas while the ship is coming about’. Watching these clips, I wonder if I’ll ever evolve into much of an interviewer. But the real battle is showing up, and putting forth the effort.


Brian K. Hill for Senate


Mark Oxner for Congress

Category: Connecticut, CPAC, Election 2012, Florida

Celebrating The Crowd At CPAC, iii
The Sentiments and Morality of Crowds

Posted on | February 10, 2012 | Comments Off on Celebrating The Crowd At CPAC, iii
The Sentiments and Morality of Crowds

by Smitty

Writing in the late 1800’s, and looking back to the French Revolution, Le Bon sees a spontaneous crowd as a truly dumb beast:

The creation of the legends which so easily obtain circulation in crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity. It is also the result of the prodigious perversions that events undergo in the imagination of a throng. The simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally transformed. A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first. We can easily conceive this state by thinking of the fantastic succession of ideas to which we are sometimes led by callup up in our minds any fact. Our reason thus us the incoherence there is in these images, but a crowd is almost blind to this truth, and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact. (Le Bon 60-61)

I would contend that what Le Bon is saying is that information disperses poorly in a crowd. A piece of information is not a drop of india ink in a glass of water. Signals are attenuated in a brutal way. This is why politicians communicate via bumper stickers written in crayon. Only the briefest monosyllables can get through.

Technology has improved matters to a degree. PA systems mean a speech can be heard at some distance. When cellular networks can take the load, they permit people to traded text messages, or even pull information from the internet.

Also deserving credit for keeping things calm: the Second Amendment. ‘An armed society is a polite society’ as Heinlein noted. The notion that individuals need not be defenseless, even in a crowd, adds calm to any situation, and maturity to actions.

Unfortunately, the Progressive mob that seems to be in charge also seems to take Le Bon too literally, projecting its own fear onto the mob. Believe me, Princess Pelosi: the only threat to you and your ilk is your own evil, not the Tea Partiers.

Previously. . .

  1. Celebrating The Crowd At CPAC, i
  2. Celebrating The Crowd At CPAC, ii
Category: Uncategorized

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 Goes Worldwide: Meets With Japanese Tea Party Leaders

Posted on | February 10, 2012 | 6 Comments

Left to right: Yuya Watase of the Tokyo Tea Party and Jikido “Jay” Aeba of HRP
wait while Herman Cain listens to translator Yuki Oikana.

WASHINGTON, D.C.
Yesterday afternoon I got a phone call from one of Herman Cain’s aides, asking if I could attend a meeting at 5 p.m. Well, sure, of course, but what was the meeting about? It was explained to me, and I was subsequently informed that I would be the only reporter in the room, at Mr. Cain’s specific request. The story was truly remarkable, and the exclusive is now online at The American Spectator:

Herman Cain’s famous 9-9-9 tax proposal has inspired international admiration, and two Japanese activists hope to bring their own version of the Atlanta businessman’s plan to their country.
During a private meeting Thursday with Tokyo Tea Party leader Yuya Watase and Jikido “Jay” Aeba of Japan’s Happiness Realization Party (HRP), Cain agreed to travel to Japan and speak at events to promote the idea.
“I would love to come and address your event in Japan, if that is something that you all would want me to do. . . . I would be honored to do so,” Cain told Aeba and Watase, who have organized public rallies against government proposals for higher taxes in Japan.
Cain’s 9-9-9 plan helped boost the retired restaurant executive to the top of the polls in October. His proposal — which would replace the current tax code with 9 percent flat taxes on personal income, corporate income and retail sales — was praised by the Wall Street Journal and others who credited Cain’s campaign with making tax reform a central focus of the debate among Republican presidential contenders.
Aeba, whose fledgling HRP has made tax reduction and economic growth a key part of its policy agenda, told Cain he wanted to adapt his 9-9-9 plan at an even lower rate: 7-7-7.
“We got this idea from the Americans for Tax Reform, Mr. Grover Norquist,” Aeba told Cain through a translator. When he heard Aeba pronounce “7-7-7,” Cain laughed approvingly.
“I understood that without translation,” Cain said, and immediately asked whether the 7 percent rate would be revenue-neutral. . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator. I expect there will be a press release and video clips from the meeting at CainConnections.com later today.

Left to right: Yuya Watase of the Tokyo Tea Party, Jikido “Jay” Aeba of HRP,
Herman Cain and Cain’s economic adviser Rich Lowrie.

Category: CPAC, Herman Cain, Japan, Taxes, Tea Party
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