The Other McCain

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

To the Reader Who Bought the $949.72 Acer Aspire 17.3-Inch Notebook Computer

Posted on | October 29, 2011 | 12 Comments

Thanks! My knowledge of computer hardware is so primitive I don’t know why this particular computer costs more than $900, but because you bought it through the Amazon Associates link here at the blog, I got a sweet 4% commission of $37.99.

We’re coming up on the end of the month, and one way readers can help support the blog is by shopping via our Amazon Associates links: Books, clothing, gourmet food, electronics — they sell everything at Amazon, and everything you buy through the links here kicks me a 4% commission. Somebody bought Bose QuietComfort noise-cancelling headphones for $349.95 (a $14 commission for me) and somebody else ordered a countertop combination microwave/conventional oven for $182.99, kicking me a $7.32 commission.

With just three purchases, then, these readers put $59.31 in my pockets. Although most purchases via our Amazon Associates links were much smaller, every little bit helps and it adds up. It doesn’t matter, by the way, what you buy: Click any Amazon link on the page, browse around, make your purchase and — as long as you reached Amazon through the link here — I get the 4% commission.

It takes a couple of months for the payments to go through, so I’m just now getting paid my commission on August sales. Therefore, with two days left in October, this is your last chance to make Amazon buys that will pay me a commission before the end of the year, when I’ll be out on the road covering the Iowa caucuses. We appreciate your patronage.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Amazon

Ace Don’t Love Him No Herman Cain

Posted on | October 29, 2011 | 96 Comments

Everybody knows I love Ace, so much so that I laugh even when he’s viciously mocking my candidate:

[H]e talks like a f–king dumbass much of the time, and when he’s not talking like a f–king dumbass, he’s doing an empty folksy pander which is all very nice for those who are receptive to it but says nothing about policy or ideas or competency for office. . . .
Cain could very well win the nomination, if people just want an angry old dude spouting dumbass crap as their nominee. Which is what I think the people actually want, and I’m sick of instructing them that maybe they should rest their Emotion Muscles a little bit and work out their Thinking Muscles some more.

One way or another, you gotta admit that’s funny.

If you don’t like Herman Cain, you think it’s funny that Ace is calling him “an angry old dude spounting dumbass crap” because you agree.

On the other hand, if you do like Herman Cain, you think it’s funny that Cain’s improbable success has driven Ace to the point of helpless exasperation where he’s writing this kind of stuff.

Obviously, I’m in the latter category.

And I know Ace’s basic problem: He was in the room when Rick Perry announced at the Red State Gathering. Ace was lured to South Carolina and told he was buying a one-way ticket to glory on the Smilin’ Texan Express. (“Howdy. Thank you, Erick.”)

Alas, there was a detour on the road to glory: Three September debates in which the Smilin’ Texas was first kinda OK (Sept. 7 at the Reagan Library), then kinda bad (Sept. 12 in Tampa) and then Holy Creeping Jeebus Did He Ever Stink the Place Up (Sept. 22 in Orlando), followed by his embarrassing wipeout in the Sept. 24 Florida GOP straw poll.

Has any dream ever died such a hard death so quickly? It took just six weeks — a mere 42 days from his Aug. 13 announcement to the Sept. 24 straw poll — for the Perry bandwagon to crash and burn. And rather than blaming their humiliation on the geniuses who convinced them the Smilin’ Texan was all that and a stack of pancakes, instead the disappointed bandwagon-jumpers blame . . . Herman Cain.

Look, it’s not just Ace. I’ve witnessed the same reaction from other people who jumped on the Perry bandwagon and who, to this day, will tell you that Rick Perry is the only viable alternative to Mitt Romney so that to be for Herman Cain (or any other Republican candidate except Perry) is to be de facto pro-Romney, as they see it. Read more

Category: Ace of Spades, Election 2012, Herman Cain

#OWS ‘Adult Party Entertainment’?

Posted on | October 29, 2011 | 14 Comments

You can’t make up this kind of stuff:

MANCHESTER – A city woman is accused of pimping a 16-year-old girl she met in Victory Park during the Occupy NH demonstrations.
Justina Jensen, 23, of 341 Hanover St., is charged with felony prostitution. Police allege Jensen met a teen at the local protest, which is an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, and used the Internet to arrange a first liaison for the girl with a man who turned out to be an undercover police officer.
Police said the teen’s mother called them Thursday about noon to say her daughter was missing and that her photograph had been posted on a website advertising adult party entertainment.

So, the 14-year-old girl sexually assaulted at Occupy Dallas, the 11-year-old boy who got drunk at Occupy Missoula, now the 16-year-old pimped out at Occupy New Hampshire. Anybody see a pattern here? I mean, if it was Catholic priests doing this stuff, somebody would have noticed the pattern.

Category: #Occupy, Progressivism

Did Anybody Think The Super Committee Was Anything Other Than An Exercise In Pluckin’ That Chicken?

Posted on | October 29, 2011 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Megan McArdle

We’re still where we were six months ago: Democrats are determined to have substantial tax increases, and the GOP is determined not to.
The good news for budget hawks is that there will still be some movement because if the Supercommittee doesn’t come to a deal, then automatic cuts will be triggered. For libertarians, this actually looks like a very pleasing prospect.
The bad news is that $1.2 trillion is hardly enough to address our future budget problems, and there’s no indication that there’s any hope of a bigger deal.

In nautical terms, we may have come to all stop on the main engines as a result of the 2010 election, but we still have way on, and the helm still has us pointing to disaster.

Anybody who seriously thought, or still thinks, that we’re not going to get into some wrenching brinksmanship with a side order of disaster? The mere existence of a Super Committee is an admission that the senior heads in both chambers of Congress are useless. These risible clowns in the Senate have not passed a budget in > 900 days. That would seem to put the 1,000 day mark somewhere around the traditional State of the Union Address at the end of January.

I’m going to have to see if Tabitha Hale plans any protest to mark the sad abdication of basic responsibility on the part of the Democrat Senate.

Update: via American Power, the risible clown Trumka spews falsehood:

Trumka, you are false, lack credibility.

Update II: Linked by The Lonely Conservative.

Update III: Jazz the Mighty picks us up at Hot Air.

Category: Democrats

#MDCAN: Greetings From Annapolis

Posted on | October 29, 2011 | 8 Comments

ANNAPOLIS, Maryland
When I pulled into the driveway of the fabulous Doubletree Inn, I saw them: About 15 protesters, standing in the rain, holding up signs: “Stop the Hate.” I rolled down the window, smiled and gave them a cheerful thumbs-up, muttering under my breath: “Shouldn’t you people be sodomizing 14-year-olds under a tarp in a park somewhere?”

The organized opposition to “Islamophobia” scoops up the usual detritus of the Left — the same scum found in the “Occupy Wall Street” camps — and adds an extra dose of indignant Muslims and their dhimmi pals. There is a fundamental dishonesty involved in their insistence that it is an irrational phobia to call attention to the fact that jihadi killers daily plot our destruction. It is “hate” and fear-mongering, say the protest mobs, to take seriously the oft-reiterated vows of radical Muslim clerics to institute a global caliphate, destroying Israel, destroying Christianity, destroying America.

Yet we notice that, rather than protesting outside the mosques run by radical imams, the advocates of tolerance are protesting outside a hotel where a bunch of mild-mannered and mostly middle-aged Americans have gathered to discuss the preservation of American constitutional liberty.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Anyway: The Maryland Conservative Action Network‘s “Turning the Tides” conference is scarcely the “extremist” hatefest the protesters would have you believe, and a handful of Anne Arundel County police are in the lobby to make sure that there’s no trouble.

BTW: Who was Anne Arundel? A Christian, a colonist, the daughter of a powerful Catholic nobleman, the bride of Cecil Calvert (the 2nd Lord Baltimore), the mother of nine children.

The protest mobs would have hated her.

UPDATE: Conservatives in Maryland are fired up for Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who is running for Senate as a Republican in 2012 taking on Democrat Sen. Ben Cardin. He’s @DBongino on Twitter.

Bongino Fever: Catch It!

UPDATE II: Cain Train in the house!

UPDATE III: Herman Cain wins the straw poll “by a wide margin.”

UPDATE IV: Jeff Quinton reports Cain’s straw-poll victory.

Category: Maryland

#OWS: Public Radio Producer Fired After Taking Advice From Conor Friedersdorf

Posted on | October 29, 2011 | 41 Comments

Caitlin Curran had a job as a WNYC radio producer. Then she listened to Conor Friedersdorf. Now she is the 99%:

It all started with an article on The Atlantic‘s web site. Conor Friedersdorf’s piece “Occupy Wall Street’s Greatest Strength Is Neutering It,” echoed what many people are wondering about the movement: what are they fighting for? . . .
My boyfriend, Will, and I decided to take Friedersdorf’s words and use them, perhaps more literally than he intended. We printed them out, taped them to poster board, and headed to the Occupy Wall Street march in Times Square, on October 15. . . .
I thought all of this could be fodder for an interesting segment on The Takeaway — a morning news program co-produced by WNYC Radio and Public Radio International — for which I had been working as a freelance web producer roughly 20 hours per week for the past seven months. I pitched the idea to producers on the show, in an e-mail.
The next day, The Takeaway’s general manager fired me over the phone, effective immediately. He was inconsolably angry, and said that I had violated every ethic of journalism, and that this should be a “teaching moment” for me in my career as a journalist.

Curran goes on about how she’s a martyr for the First Amendment, but she wasn’t fired for exercising her right to be an obnoxious lefty — plenty of those on the WNYC payroll — but for being an obnoxious lefty stupid enough to listen to Conor Friedersdorf. Basically, she flunked an IQ test: “But Conor Friedersdorf thought it was a good idea!”

Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard Tweeted:

I’m picturing Curran in the unemployment office, trying to explain her situation to the lady behind the desk: “See, there was this awesome article in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersorf . . .”

UPDATE: Linked by Don Surber and God’s Own Crunk — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!


Category: #Occupy, Progressivism

Don’t Forget To Thank ObamaCare For Further Societal Collapse

Posted on | October 29, 2011 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Via Insty, we have Chateau Heartiste

Men don’t “treat women as toys”. Men get the sex while the getting’s good because women allow — nay, PREFER — themselves to be toyed with by the kinds of men who are good at it.
In other words, Mr. Bennett, women GET EXACTLY THE KINDS OF MEN they deserve. Even more dispiriting to your conception of the universe, women get the men they WANT.

Now, for a quick bit of Google, knowing that the buried details may be for better or worse, consider, emphasis mine:

The first sort of marriage penalties affects low- and middle-income couples who would get their insurance without employer assistance but with government subsidies. The penalties accrue through the “caps” on premiums. In the House plan, an unmarried couple living together with each earning $25,000 would pay no more than $3,076 in combined premiums each year. If the same couple got married, their annual cap would skyrocket to $5,160 – a 68 percent punishment just for saying “I do.” (The penalty in the Senate bill is slightly lower, at 48 percent.)

Now, if you’re a serious SoCon, you know that your marriage is a religious expression of destiny in your life. A government mugging for the privilege of the sacrement is just another brick in pharaoh’s pyramid.

Too, if you think that marriage is something the government should regulate, then maybe families need to pay more, as they could lead to children, which are not cheap, if The World’s Youngest Bloggers bills are indicative. And he’s a stout lad.

No, the real point to be garnered here is that the federal government Has. Precisely. Zero. Validity. In. Doing. This.

Marriage is not an interstate consideration, but tampering therewith, and offering significant financial savings for shacking up, is going to increase shacking up dramatically among those for whom marriage is not the biggest religious issue.

I guess if your goals are to destabilize American society, so that there is increased demand for social workers, this may all be part of the plan. We’ll probably get more blog posts bemoaning the fact that the boys, lacking married fathers in a family setting, no longer recall how to be men.

Category: Marriage, Sex

First Weekend In November:
Defending The American Dream Summit

Posted on | October 29, 2011 | 1 Comment

by Smitty


A few heads will be attending, among them are a few with whom I hope to score photos:

  • Mark Levin, Radio Host
  • Herman Cain, Businessman and GOP presidential hopeful
  • Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst
  • Jonah Goldberg, New York Times best selling author
  • Andrew Breitbart Conservative commentator and author
  • Ken Cuccinelli Virginia Attorney General
  • James O’Keefe, Conservative film maker

Sure, listening to red meat speeches in person is kind of inspirational. However, I’d argue the real value is getting to meet other bloggers and readers. The internet and blogs has first and foremost meant that politics is not a spectator sport. You can, indeed you really must, join the chorus, have fun, and let the Ruling Class Overlords know that we’re Americans, not a beat-down pack of Russian serfs who are going to let the nomenklatura run roughshod over us.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Category: Fear and Loathing at Defending the American Dream, Fear. Loathing.
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