The Other McCain

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

NV-2 New Ad: ‘We Were Promised Recovery, We’ve Been Given Misery’

Posted on | September 8, 2011 | 8 Comments

The special election in Nevada’s 2nd District is Tuesday, and in his final TV ad, Republican Mark Amodei targets the SCOAMF’s economic bungling:

Amodei, a former state senator and Nevada GOP chairman, has sought to link Marshall to President Barack Obama.
“We were promised recovery. We’ve been given misery,” Amodei says in his ad, as pictures of Obama, Vice President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid fill the screen. “Let’s get Washington’s attention.”

NV-2 — which covers basically the entire state, minus the Las Vegas area — is a reliably Republican district and this special election is to fill the seat vacated by GOP Rep. Dean Heller, who was appointed to replace John Ensign in the Senate. Early voting has been under way for two weeks, and Republicans are encouraged. But unions are dumping money into Democrat state treasurer Kate Marshall’s campaign:

Heading into the final stretch of the race, Marshall, the current state treasurer, has out-raised Amodei and also had more cash left in her war chest as of Aug. 24, the last date covered by the pre-election campaign finance reports filed on Thursday.
But outside groups have also dumped more than $800,000 into the race, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics. The National Republican Congressional Committee alone has spent about $600,000 and the conservative super PAC American Crossroads has spent about $195,000.
Polls indicate the race is tight. One recent poll from Daily Kos/Public Policy Polling, Amodei, a former state senator, earned 43 percent of the vote to Marshall’s 42 percent.

One of the outside groups helping offset the Democrat’s money advantage in NV-2 is the Conservative Action Fund, which is also supporting Bob Turner in Tuesday’s NY-9 special election. This is a time when your contributions — $25, $50, $100 — can make a big difference.

MARK AMODEI for U.S. CONGRESS
Make Sure Harry Reid’s Congressman Is a Republican

Category: Congress, Election, Nevada

VIDEO: Herman Cain Smacks Around Liberals in MSNBC Post-Debate Panel

Posted on | September 8, 2011 | 31 Comments

Seven minutes of pure awesomeness:

If that’s not worth a $25 contribution, I don’t know what is.

HERMAN CAIN for PRESIDENT
Making Liberals Look Even More Stupid
Than They Usually Look

Category: Debates, Election 2012, Herman Cain, MSNBC, Video

Sexualizing 3-Year Olds on Cable TV? Hooker Costume on ‘Toddlers & Tiaras’

Posted on | September 8, 2011 | 18 Comments

Meet 3-year-old Paisley, a pageant contestant on the TLC series Toddlers and Tiaras, whose mother got the genius idea to dress her as Julia Roberts’s prostitute character from Pretty Woman:

The Parents Television Council is understandably outraged:

“We have a serious problem when The Learning Channel features a toddler, who probably hasn’t even learned to read, dressed as a prostitute showing off her sexy strut,” says Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the PTC: “There’s no question, TV executives are complicit in robbing these small kids of their childhood. For years we’ve seen adult sexuality being inappropriately and aggressively foisted on innocent young children, but children today are being sexualized at younger and younger ages.”

Paisley’s mom doesn’t understand why everybody’s so upset:

The mother of the 3-year-old girl dressed as a prostitute on “Toddlers and Tiaras” tells TMZ, she’s a good mom — and insists “no harm was done to my child” by dressing her as a hooker.
Wendy Dickey tells us, her kid had no idea what she was dressed as anyway — and the costume was “less revealing than gymnastics wear and swimsuits.”
According to Wendy, the hooker outfit . . . “is a lot less harmful.”

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Celebrities, Culture, Scandal, Sex

4th Circuit Court To Virginia: If We Say You Lack Standing, We Can Ignore You

Posted on | September 8, 2011 | 23 Comments

by Smitty (via Lisa Graas)

I don’t want to get too upset about this horrendous abortion of a legal opinion handed down from the 4th Circle of Hell, emphasis mine:

The decision is no surprise given the stacked nature of the panel, as computers at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that randomly selected the panel of three judges from the appeals court to conduct oral hearings on the legal debate surrounding the law picked three judges from a evenly-divided court who are all Democrats. All three judges listening to two legal challenges were appointed by Democrats — Judge Diana Motz, the senior member of the panel, is a Clinton appointee while Judges Andre Davis and James Wynn were appointed by Obama.

The three judges dismissed the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the national health care law’s individual mandate by saying the state lacked the standing to sue. As a result of the decision, the panel did not delve into the merits of the case itself and whether the Obama administration has the Constitutional ability to compel citizens to purchase health care, which could pay for abortions with taxpayer funds and include rationing. The judges disagreed with Virginia’s contention that it was an injured party because it passed a law before Obamacare making it so Virginia residents are not required to purchase health care insurance.

Thanks, judiciary, for kneecapping my state’s efforts to protect my liberty from a rapacious federal government. You craven judges draw much vacuum. Thankfully, the Cooch responds, via email:

RICHMOND, VA (September 8, 2011)- Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli responded today to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Virginia’s lawsuit against the federal government’s health care reform act.

“Obviously, we are disappointed in the ruling. Our disappointment not only stems from the fact that the court ruled against us, but also that the court did not even reach the merits on the key question of Virginia’s lawsuit-whether Congress has a power never before recognized in American history: the power to force one citizen to purchase a good or service from another citizen,” said Cuccinelli.

In summarizing the ruling, Cuccinelli noted that, by resting its decision on an alleged lack of standing by the commonwealth to even bring its lawsuit, the court dismissed Virginia’s claimed injury as illusory.

“Contrary to the court’s suggestion, this suit has always been about vindicating the power of the Virginia General Assembly to legislate about a subject that has historically been viewed as falling within the areas the Constitution left to the states. Health, safety, and welfare issues have long been recognized as being part of the powers reserved to the states by the Constitution,” Cuccinelli said.

Cuccinelli noted that the court’s stated reasons placed the ruling’s reasoning at odds with constitutional design. “In rejecting Virginia’s right to bring the action, the court said that allowing such suits would allow the states to serve as ‘roving constitutional watchdogs.’ This was exactly a role that the Founding Fathers planned for the states to have. As James Madison wrote, under the Constitution, ‘the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments…Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments [state and federal] will control each other…'”

Cuccinelli continued, “Not only does the court’s opinion reject the role of the states envisioned by the Constitution, it dismisses an act of the Virginia General Assembly-the Health Care Freedom Act-as a mere pretense or pretext. It is unfortunate that the court would be so dismissive of a piece of legislation that passed both houses of a divided legislature by overwhelming margins with broad, bipartisan support.”

Cuccinelli vowed to appeal the court’s ruling.

Diana, Andre, James: may the Almighty have mercy on you.

Update: More at Legal Insurrection and Ace of Spades.

Category: Health Care

Gov. Benzene: Huntsman a ‘Green’ Phony

Posted on | September 8, 2011 | 19 Comments

For weeks, I’ve been mystified and irritated by the media’s love affair with Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor who joined the Obama administration just about the time most conservatives were joining the Tea Party movement.

Why the hell is this guy — “Governor Asterisk,” an irrelevant distraction, a Charlie Crist clone who represents no actual GOP constituency — being included in the Republican debates and treated with fawning deference by the media? After last night’s debate, when Huntsman attacked Rick Perry as “anti-science” for his skepticism toward global warming, I remarked, “Might as well invite Al Gore to the GOP debates.”

Turns out that remark was more accurate than I suspected because, just like Gore, Huntsman is a two-faced hypocrite whose “green” rhetoric doesn’t match his record. Although Huntsman has been called “the greenest Republican in the presidential race” — which may account for the MSM’s otherwise inexplicable crush on him — his actual record has been exposed by the Environmental Integrity Project in a devastating report full of nasty little details like this:

[E]missions at two Huntsman Chemical plants increased significantly between 2009 and 2010, by more than 50 percent at the company’s facility in Port Neches, Texas. While the candidate is no longer a manager of The Huntsman Corporation, recent data show that he is heavily invested in the company. Furthermore, John Huntsman Jr. was a member of the board of directors when Huntsman employees committed the illegal acts that led to the company paying a substantial civil penalty and saw two managers sentenced to jail terms for illegal releases of benzene. . . .
None of the other candidates has a history of actual regulatory run-ins with the EPA, and none of them has a family connection with a corporation that is a major polluter today.

So while managers of his company go to jail for illegal pollution, Huntsman wants to go to the White House as a Friend of Gaia.

No wonder the liberals love him: He’s almost as phony as Obama.

UPDATE: Liberal commentator Jeff Greenfield sneers at Huntsman:

There is, of course, no formal political equivalent of the Lady Byng Trophy. Instead, every four years, the press corps dubs one candidate the exemplar of tough, honest, truth-telling, willing to confront his or her party’s orthodoxies with a cold blast of reality. That candidate wins praise from columnists; a warm embrace from a news magazine; admiring profiles on network news shows.
The only thing the Lady Byng winner never wins — never, ever, ever — is a presidential nomination.

There ought to be a lot more such sneering.

UPDATE II: The one candidate South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley won’t endorse.

Category: Election 2012, Environmentalism, Jon Huntsman

I’ll Give You Toxic, Rove: I Want Out Of Social Security

Posted on | September 8, 2011 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

Understood, Karl, you’re making the point in the context of electoral politics. The calculus is that a third of the country is conservative, another third is wee Socialist sheep, and those cancel. Thus, the election amounts to figuring out who courts the independent third of the country most effectively.

The difficulty of this approach is that you’re accepting an aggregation of large chunks of the electorate. Voters don’t actually vote in slabs; those polling percentages are numbers on paper, not the actual people. This top-down, Socialist sheep approach to government is at the heart of the problem.

A conservative, liberty-oriented approach would be to have a Social Security amnesty day. Let everyone of voting age now, and when signing up for the Selective Service hereafter, make a yes/no decision to emanicpate themselves from the entitlement scourge.

That is, let me just walk away from Social Security as though it was a girlfriend whom I did not think would prove a junkie, because heroin is so passé. Sure, I’m eating some financial loss, but the sunk cost of entitlements is nothing compared to the marginal disaster of this idiocy. I won’t even go on and on about how ‘unfair’ it is that I’ve paid into something for a couple of decades that leaves me nothing more than a brace of puncture wounds to the jugular. Toxic, indeed.

And that’s not even mentioning the World’s Youngest Blogger. I hope to be able to discuss our current entitlement slavery with the WYB in the past tense, some day. Our struggle for liberty and emancipation from the false, unsustainable nonsense known as Progressivism will continue to be steep, as a result of feckless talking heads like you, Rove. The good news is that there are still Americans of courage who are willing to call a Ponzi scheme a Ponzi scheme. Is the simple truth toxic? Only if you’re a vampire, and the truth arrives inscribed on a religious symbol.

The good news about the simple truth is that it matters not who bears it.

Via Instapundit, some additional grist.

Category: Uncategorized

Young, Famous, Beautiful and Stupid

Posted on | September 8, 2011 | 32 Comments


“I love Barack Obama. I voted for him and I will forever be proud of my vote, so I can’t say anything bad against him . . . Why is nobody reading? I feel like, in our generation, people don’t read. . . . They don’t read books, they don’t read the paper, they don’t read the news. So obviously you are incredibly ill-informed to the point where they will go do these tests in Middle America, And they’ll ask, ‘OK, what party are you?’ And they’ll say, ‘Republican’. ‘Why?’ And they can’t even tell you. They have no idea what the Republican Party stands for.”
— movie star Mila Kunis

UPDATE: Kitty in the comments suggests we should call Ms. Kunis’s attention to this video about Obama voters:

Of course, my favorite Obama voter is still Peggy Joseph:

Category: Celebrities, Liberals

The Secret Of The Left’s Success: Ignore Inconvenient Facts

Posted on | September 8, 2011 | 37 Comments

by Smitty

Greg Sargent cries out from the ComPost: “The secret to the right wing noise machine’s success”

It’s simple: Keep making noise, regardless of the facts, and hopefully with a big assist from the major news orgs, until the other side caves from sheer exhaustion, in order to make the noise go away.

Conservatives and Tea Partyers have managed to generate a third straight day of outrage about Jimmy Hoffa’s non-call for violence on Labor day. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is now raising money off of Hoffa’s speech, circulating an email with a subject line that says: “Take us out?” It calls on Obama to “condemn this call to violence against Republicans.”

The Tea Party group Americans for Prosperity is also citing Hoffa’s “take these sons of bitches out” line as proof of “hate” from “left wing labor bosses.”

Of course, these folks know that Hoffa didn’t call for violence at all. His quote was actually a call for people to go out and vote.

Thanks a ton, Greg, for that narrowing of the focus to the present tense, at the expense of the context.

For those paying attention, no one has much difficulty with Hoffa engaging in loutish speech. Hoffa is only memorable in the light of calls from the likes of Senator Durbin, in January:

Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democratic leader in the Senate, today cited imagery of crosshairs on political opponents and Sarah Palin’s combative rallying cry, “Don’t retreat; reload.”

“These sorts of things, I think, invite the kind of toxic rhetoric that can lead unstable people to believe this is an acceptable response,” Durbin said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

So, Greg, if you have shred #1 of intellectual integrity, maybe you can help the rest of us not in the media priesthood understand the underlying rules whereby some people are allowed to use arguably aggressive language, and others are in some kind of hot water over using simple graphics.

Is a request for a simple, fair, evenly applied ruling on the tone of public discourse such a troublesome matter, Greg? I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt, and not conclude that you’re a propaganda-peddling crapflooder.

But let’s be clear what the real goal is here. It’s to get the other side — Hoffa, the White House, whoever — to cave and issue an apology out of sheer desperation to make the noise go away. An apology would reveal Dem weakness and validate the right’s outrage and its ongoing storyline about labor thuggery. And heck, even if they don’t get an apology (which has not yet been forthcoming from Hoffa or the White House), the right’s undeniable skill at keeping the noise going at full blast has other benefits. It keeps the base stoked. These folks are very good at this game.

Hoffa is irrelevant. As are you, Greg. But the commitment to reality avoidance and fact distortion that you represent, now: that is a troublesome matter.

More from The Camp of the Saints.

Category: Uncategorized
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