The Other McCain

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

Two Words: ‘Surgical Sterilization’

Posted on | August 16, 2011 | 44 Comments

A writer at the parenting blog Babble, pregnant with her fourth child, writes about the prospect of her husband undergoing vasectomy. And as always when that topic — or tubal ligation for women — comes up, I find myself startled by the blithe attitude so many people take toward such a genuinely drastic step.

“Snip! Snip! Hee hee hee hee!”

Last year, writing about the 50th anniversary of the contraceptive pill, I pointed out a seldom acknowledged fact: “Female Sterilization is the method used by 17.8% of American women 15-44. . . . Oral Contraceptives are second at 17.3%.” 

Think about that: Nearly 1 in 5 American women of childbearing age has undergone surgical sterilization. This ought to be genuinely shocking, the subject of sociological study. What does this incredible statistic say about a society so vehemently hostile to human procreation that it spends many millions of dollars each year to permanently extirpate the reproductive capacity of its women?

Yet the very fact that this practice is so widespread prevents anyone from daring to comment critically about it, for fear of seeming to be “intolerant” or “judgmental” toward the victims of this surgical war against human fertility.

“Snip! Snip! Hee hee hee hee!”

Go on, laugh. I’m sure the guards at Dachau enjoyed a hearty chuckle now and then.

Category: Contraceptive Culture

The Pappas-Palin Drama

Posted on | August 16, 2011 | 49 Comments

Last night I wrote a post at The American Spectator entitled, “Dear Governor Palin: Please Call Me,” an attempt to clear up a misunderstanding of an incident that transpired Friday while Sarah Palin was at the Iowa State Fair.

While the governor has not yet called, I have spoken to people familar with the situation who are aghast at how the Daily Caller’s Alex Pappas, Politico and the Spectator‘s Quin Hillyer have misinterpreted the incident. One of the people to whom I spoke was Michelle McCormick of Iowa for Palin, who was with the governor at the time she called Pappas to dispute a headline (which, it turns out, was from Fox Nation, not from the Daily Caller) suggesting that Palin had endorsed Mitt Romney.

Now, let’s get one thing clear up front: McCormick is among many Palin supporters who believe that she is going to announce a 2012 presidential campaign within a matter of weeks. I have gone on record as rejecting that belief as a delusion. However, there are enough people telling me not to rule out the possibility — and some of those are swearing up and down they definitely know she will run — that I’m beginning to question whether I’ve completely misread the tea leaves. So . . .

A headline appeared online suggesting that Palin had endorsed Romney, and Palin decided to personally intervene to correct the record. That much of the Palin-Pappas tale is true, and I think it may be highly suggestive that she is indeed seriously considering an entry into the 2012 field. What is false about the developing media version of the Palin-Pappas narrative, according to McCormick and others, is three things:

  1. Governor Palin did not personally dial up Pappas’s number. She asked around among her aides if anyone knew how to get in touch with Pappas. One member of her advance team, Jason Recher, had Pappas’s number, called him and then handed the phone to the governor.
  2. Governor Palin did not summon a Politico reporter to listen in on the call. Palin was in the middle of a gigantic crowd of people at the Iowa State Fair, and her half of the conversation may have been overheard by others. There was no way, amid the press of the throng, that anyone outside that swarm could have been summoned at all, and the idea that Palin would be doing favors for a Politico reporter is ridiculous.
  3. Governor Palin wasn’t screaming angrily at Pappas. Again, Palin was in the middle of a crowd, which was quite noisy, and if her voice was loud, it was because she was trying to make herself heard amid the hubub.

After the conversation was over, and Palin realized that the misleading headline wasn’t Pappas’s fault, she asked one of her aides to contact Pappas and apologize for the mistake. Pappas says that the aide did not actually apologize, but I have no idea what was said in their conversation, so I can’t speak to that. But Palin’s supporters are furious at Pappas for “whining” (note the quotation marks) about the incident, and incensed by Hillyer’s characterization of Palin’s behavior as that of a “difficult diva.”

Now the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin has jumped on the dogpile, accepting Hillyer’s characterization of the incident as gospel, and what is being lost amid all this unnecessary drama is the actual political news value: Sarah Palin is serious enough about a 2012 presidential bid that she evidently considered it an urgent matter to knock down any suggestion that she had endorsed another candidate.

UPDATE: Let me direct a word or two toward some of the people who are saying that it would be crazy for Palin to get into the 2012 field at this point, and impossible for her to win, if she did.

First, I’m inclined to agree, which was why I was willing to declare last night that anyone who still believes Palin will run is suffering from a True Believer delusion.

Second . . . eh, not so fast, buddy.

Dan Riehl is about the last person on earth I’d accuse of being a True Believer, and yet his own reading of tea leaves leads him to think that Palin is absolutely serious when she says she’s still considering a 2012 run. Knowing Dan like I know Dan, I consider that highly significant.

Furthermore, many people who are disparaging Palin’s chances are supporters of one or another of the current GOP candidates, and some of them are conspicuously aboard the Rick Perry bandwagon. But let me point you to a Tweet that Tony Lee of Human Events sent yesterday in which he suggests we may now learn how much of Perry’s victory over Kay Bailey Hutchison in last year’s GOP primary was due to Palin endorsing Perry. And then there’s some guy predicting that Perry’s campaign will “self-destruct” within a month.

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been hearing from people who say that Perry is a lot weaker candidate than Perry’s supporters imagine. We will wait and see about that. There have also been people telling me that they expect the Bachmann campaign to “implode,” and we’ll wait and see about that, too.

But if Bachmann does implode, and/or the Perry machine proves to be less than the unstoppable conservative juggernaut it has been hyped up to be, then the GOP field could develop a vacuum of the kind that nature proverbially abhors. So it may be that Palin is preparing a contingency plan for a campaign just in case such a scenario develops.

If the mood strikes her and the opportunity seems right, she could announce her candidacy on short notice and then quickly mobilize such a contingency organization. The money from tens of thousands of small donors would come flooding in and at that point I, for one, would be unwilling to wager $20 against her chances of being the Republican nominee when all is said and done at Tampa next summer.

Should Sarah shock the world by running in 2012 and confound conventional wisdom by winning the nomination, there are many who contend that she could not possibly beat Obama in the general election. Yet those would be the same people who now say she won’t run at all, so why should we believe their forecasts then, after she will have already twice proven them wrong, first by deciding to run so late, and then by winning the nomination against their advice?

UPDATE II: Stacy Drake at Conservatives for Palin also communicated with Michelle McCormick to set the record straight. I am loath to blame my friend Quin Hillyer for this kerfuffle — he’s a Southern hothead like me, and perhaps too prone to quick judgments — while Alex Pappas is, after all, a recent University of Alabama graduate whose youth might excuse his unfortunate part in the drama. What I don’t understand is why other reporters aren’t seeing this as I do, namely as a tiny yet tangible clue that Palin is seriously considering a 2012 run.

Category: Election 2012, Media Bias, Sarah Palin

Marcus Bachmann and the Dangerous Modern Myth of ‘Sexual Orientation’

Posted on | August 16, 2011 | 47 Comments

My friend Da Tech Guy got into an argument with Cynthia Yockey about Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus. Everyone is jumping up and down yelling that he sets off their “gaydar,” pointing especially to his (alleged) involvement with the NARTH “reparative therapy” movement. Between that and his (alleged) gay mannerisms, these armchair sexuality sleuths have concluded that Marcus Bachmann is a closet case, another Ted Haggard scandal waiting to happen.

What is at the heart of such speculation is a myth that arose in the 20th century, based largely on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey, which holds that all human beings have an inborn sexual essence which must be fulfilled in order for them to be psychologically healthy. This myth of “sexual orientation” (sometimes known as “sexual identity,” as it pertains to transgenderism) has so pervaded our culture that most people are no longer capable of understanding it as myth.

Since the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the Freudian concept of “repression” has been hijacked by the advocates of liberation, who insist that it is an infringement of civil rights to expect people to resist sexual urges. I’ve sometimes called this the “Desire Is Destiny” theory of sexuality, but you could also think of it as a particular manifestation of the Veruca Salt Syndrome: I want what I want and I want it now!

Given the high-profile status of the Official Gay Rights Movement as a loudly influential constituency of the Democratic Party, we most often encounter this liberationist argument in association with homosexuality, and most people never even notice how this dangerous idea — the belief that we are entitled as a matter of right to the satisfaction of our erotic desires — is well-nigh ubiquitous throughout our society.

When you see a businessman divorce his wife of 30 years in order to marry his receptionist, or when Mary Kay LeTourneau wrecks her life to pursue a taboo romance with Vili Fualaau, these are manifestations of the same basic concept at the root of the gay-rights lobby’s “born that way” argument: Desire is destiny, and of all the happiness that we are free to pursue, no pursuit is more important than a sexual partner who fulfills our deepest longings. Read more

Category: Gays, Michele Bachmann, Sex

The Wrongness of Krugman

Posted on | August 16, 2011 | 13 Comments

Kevin Williamson disassembles the Nobel Prize-winning Keynesian:

Paul Krugman continues his campaign to discredit the economic success of Texas, and, as usual, he is none too particular about the facts . . .
A booming population leads to growth in jobs. But there is another half to that equation: A booming economy, and the jobs that go with it, leads to population growth. Texas has added millions of people and millions of jobs in the past decade; New York, and many other struggling states, added virtually none of either. And it is not about the weather or other non-economic factors: People are not leaving California for Texas because Houston has a more pleasant climate (try it in August), or leaving New York because of the superior cultural amenities to be found in Nacogdoches and Lubbock. People are moving from the collapsing states into the expanding states because there is work to be had, and opportunity. . . .

Read the whole thing. Like all Keynesians, Krugman is adept at cherry-picking data to fit his own narrative and then attempting to discredit antagonists by claiming that they are the ones engaged in special pleading.

Category: Uncategorized

LIVE AT FIVE – 08.16.11

Posted on | August 16, 2011 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Rick Perry’s Coming On Hard

Texas Governor Rick Perry campaigns in Iowa

Hits Romney on jobs, Bachmann on experience
Accuses Federal Reserve of playing politics with the money supply


Google’s Patent Play: $12.5 Billion For Motorola Mobility
Real prize in Motorola purchase is their trove of seventeen thousand patents

This Is What An “Anonymous” Protest Looks Like
Media seems to outnumber protests as hackers demonstrate against BART’s shutdown of cell service to prevent flash mobs



POLITICS
Starbucks CEO Urges Fellow CEOs To Halt Campaign Donations

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

Says Congress and Obama need to work on reducing debt, deficit

Obama Says He’ll Challenge Congress With His Jobs Package




NY State Union Ratifies Contract Sought By Governor Cuomo

Tea Party Activist Confronts President On Civility

Osama Raid Movie Faces More GOP Opposition

LA Protesters Turn Out For Secure Communities Meeting



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
RIM Left In “No Man’s Land” By Google Deal
Asian Shares Rise, Euro Steady Ahead Of Summit
Oil Falls To Near $87 As Week-Long Rally Stalls
Red Ink Sinks Evergreen Solar
When Marketing Goes Wrong
Verizon Wireless Testing Entry-Level 200MB Data Plan



SPORTS
Jim Thome Hits Home Run #600

Jim Thome unloads a three-run dinger - number six hundred - in the seventh against the Tigers

At 40, Thome is oldest player to hit 600. Also, Twins win 9-6.

Winnipeg Jets’ Rick Rypien Found Dead At Home

Aggies’ Big 12 Divorce Inevitable?



Jeter Leads Yankees Past Royals, Back Into Tie For AL East Lead

Marcos Ambrose Gets First Sprint Cup Victory

Dodgers Hit Into Triple Play, Four Double Plays, Lose To Brewers 3-0

Fish Flop In Ninth, Fall To Rockies 7-4

Nationals Ink First-Round Pick Anthony Rendon



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
TLC Cancels “Kate Plus Eight” After 150 Episodes

Kate Gosselin and her eight kids

Still no hope of normal childhood for kids

Taylor Swift Has A Marilyn Monroe Moment (Video)

Still A Peach In A Bikini, Halle Berry Celebrates Her 45th Birthday At The Beach



The Curse Of Batman: Another Accident On The Set Of “The Dark Knight Rises”

Charlie Sheen Pelted At Gathering Of The Juggalos

“Glee” Comes To Fashion’s Night Out

Oscars: Billy Crystal “Itchy” To Host Again

Mike Myers Expected To Close “Austin Powers 4” Deal



FOREIGNERS
Gaddafi Isolated As Rebels Advance; Aide Flees To Cairo
Wave Of Bombings In Iraq Kills 60
Iranian Snipers Deployed To Syria As Part Of Crackdown
Is Corruption The Price India Pays For High Economic Growth?
Second Tibetan Monk Sets Himself On Fire In PRC
Heavy Snow Wreaks Havoc In New Zealand



BLOGS & STUFF
NRO’s Agenda: Matthew Yglesias Is Wrong As Usual, This Time About Rick Perry’s “Weird Ideas”
Vodkapundit: The Media Assault On Rick Perry Begins
Sister Toldjah: The Theocracy Is Coming!!!!
AmSpecBlog: Ron Paul And The Media
The POH Diaries: Obama Says, “I Reversed Recession Until…”
Allahpundit: Obama – How About I Show You My Economic Plan Next Month?
Lonely Conservative: Time To Play “Name That Bus Tour”
The Sundries Shack: Obama Tells Business “You Idiots Just Don’t Understand The Free Market!”
Marginal Revolution: How Are Nominal Wages Sticky For The Unemployed?
American Power: Capitalism In Crisis?
Pirate’s Cove: Obama’s Apparently Got A Vision Problem
JustOneMinute: All He Is Saying, Is Give War A Chance


SOTD: Make A Circuit With Me

Category: Live at Five

Blogging About Pathetic Perverts and Also Andrew Sullivan’s Sarah Palin Toe Fetish

Posted on | August 15, 2011 | 84 Comments

Sarah Palin thronged by admirers during her Friday visit to the Iowa State Fair.

HARTSELLE, Alabama
Does the headline seem a tad redundant? Never mind. My travels around Iowa and yesterday’s 700-mile trip with Ladd Ehlinger down here to Alabama have kept me offline so much that I haven’t had much time to keep up with headlines, e-mails and such. (I’m waaaaaay behind on thank-you notes to tip-jar hitters.) So now I’m doing some catch-up blogging, and the first thing I stumbled across was the POH Diaries post about a 56-year-old music teacher who “was caught nude performing sex acts on a childlike doll that police say he had cut holes into.”

Was it a boy doll or a girl doll? The newspaper story doesn’t say:

Officers were called to Allendale Elementary School on Prescott Way in Spring Hill amid reports of a white male with a duffle bag under a bridge on school property. . . .
According to Torroll, he suffers from an attention deficit disorder which he says affects his inability to resist certain sexual impulses, though none of which involve children. . . .
On the Web site DannyTorroll.com, the Web site for the Danny Torroll Skool of Music and Art, Torroll says he teaches “eight very gifted students” ranging in age from seven to 12-years-old.
He describes the school as “an anomaly in the upper education platform for serious students of all instruments,” according to the site.

Is he teaching flute lessons to these “very gifted students”? And if he has the “inability to resist” an impulse to have sex with a doll outside an elementary school, what other impulses does Danny Torroll find irresistible? Again, the article doesn’t tell us. But speaking of twisted freaks with irresistible impulses . . .

Why can’t Andrew Sullivan resist the impulse to mock Sarah Palin?

Really, Sully: Did you have to turn a photo caption of Sarah Palin’s toenails into a post? Is your sadistic compulsion to diminish and ridicule women so overwhelming that you lack the willpower to necessary to fight the urge? Do you lack even the basic self-awareness necessary to recognize that your persistent symptoms of Palin Derangement Syndrome reinforce harmful stereotypes of gay men as vicious weaklings with “mommy issues”? And if not, are you such a reckless misogynist as to disregard how your attacks on Governor Palin foster hostility to women in politics?

Expecting restraint and self-awareness from Andrew Sullivan is a doomed hope, of course, but it is interesting to see that Sully’s PDS has continued long past the point where any serious observer believes Palin will run for president in 2012. Read more

Category: Andrew Sullivan, Election 2012, Sarah Palin

Unlike a Wall Street CEO, Blogger Can’t Afford Mistresses in Three Countries

Posted on | August 15, 2011 | 18 Comments

Meet John Duffy, a multimillionaire investment banker who is probably about to become a few multi-millions poorer when his wife’s divorce lawyers get through with him:

John Duffy, 62, the married CEO of the Keefe, Bruyette & Woods investment bank, has lavished millions of dollars’ worth of homes, jewelry and sexy outfits from Victoria’s Secret on stunning women in three different countries, according to his estranged wife, who is suing him in Manhattan Supreme Court.
His wife, Kathy Duffy, 59, charges in a salacious divorce proceeding that her husband has been engaging in “public and notorious adulterous relationships” and has doled out costly gifts to a trio of women in the United States, Canada and the Dominican Republic, a source said. . . .
Kathy’s lawyer described her client — who incredibly turned down a $20 million settlement offer — as “devastated.”
But “obviously, I cannot comment on details of the case,” said the lawyer, Leslie Barbara. . . .
One of Duffy’s alleged trysts involves the tattooed, blond lead singer of a rock band, a source said.
The singer allegedly netted a $73,000 car, a Rolex watch and other gifts from Duffy totaling more than $770,000, the source said.
Duffy, nicknamed “Duff,” has claimed that he had met the woman by chance in a Manhattan bar and decided to bankroll her music career.
His wife also claims that another woman received a $345,000 condo in Yonkers and a Connecticut spread worth more than $465,000, the source said. The homes were both bought within the past eight years.
The third woman received a home in tropical Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, a source said.
Duffy also bought her furnishings, paid for her educational expenses, a car and other gifts totaling more than $800,000, his wife claims.

(Via Memeorandum.) Quick arithmetic reveals that Duffy (allegedly) paid more $2 million to these three women, data which some graduate student in economics could probably turn into a master’s thesis on the market value of mistresses. What are we to make of the fact that his wife of 35 years has reportedly turned down a $20 million settlement offer? Three alternative hypotheses:

  1. Her lawyers figure they’ll get a lot more than $20 million if they take the case to trial.
  2. Her lawyers considered $20 million a lowball bid, and have leaked details of the case to the press in a gambit to get him to pay $25 or $30 million, thus to avert the days of disastrous headlines that a trial in public court would produce.
  3. Mrs. Duffy doesn’t really care so much about the final value of the settlement, but is instead focused on getting personal revenge against her philandering husband by exposing the fact that he was, in essence, paying premium prices for cheap hussies.

Let’s face it: The $2 million in “gifts” Duffy paid to these three mistresses in the past decade would have bought him 1,000 trysts with as many $2,000-a-night call girls as he wanted. And a hundred high-priced hookers a year would probably be enough even for Charlie Sheen.

But what this pathetic scandal actually reveals is the true motives behind Democrats’ class-warfare rhetoric. When Obama talks about “millionaires and billionaires” flying around on corporate jets, he knows that many beta males have enough imagination to be envious of what those Wall Street big shots are doing with their wealth.

The oft-remarked “growing gap between rich and poor” involves carnal rewards, as well: Laid-off factory workers can’t even afford a $20 hand job from a local crack whore, while John Duffy’s buying one mistress “a home in tropical Santo Domingo,” a half-million-dollar spread in Connecticut for another mistress and a Rolex watch for a tattooed singer.

Where’s the social justice in that, huh?

Of course, from a free-market perspective, this shows that the stupendous incomes of the rich are not hoarded uselessly, but are instead distributed throughout the economy in various ways, including the gifts that fat-cat investment bankers lavish on their mistresses, and income earned by lawyers on both sides of the eventual divorce.

Frankly, I’d rather see John Duffy’s mistresses or Mrs. Duffy’s lawyers get that money than to see it sucked up by the IRS and used to hire a bunch of government bureaucrats. Mistresses and divorce lawyers aren’t trying to enforce a bunch of atavistic rules imposed by a freedom-destroying regulatory state. And government bureaucrats seldom provide me with entertaining headlines about high-profile sex scandals.


Category: Economics, Scandal, Sex

Michele Bachmann to Begin Three-Day South Carolina Bus Tour Tuesday

Posted on | August 15, 2011 | 5 Comments

Michele Bachmann greets a supporter Friday, Aug. 5,
at the Spirit Midwest Christian Music Festival in West Des Moines, Iowa

HARTSELLE, Alabama
Fresh off her victory in the Iowa GOP straw poll, Michele Bachmann will bring her campaign to South Carolina tomorrow, kicking off a three-day bus tour of the Palmetto State with a 12:30 p.m. rally at Spartanburg’s Beacon Drive-In, to be followed by events in Greenville, Columbia, Florence, Myrtle Beach and Mount Pleasant. Here’s the press release:

**MEDIA ADVISORY**

REMINDER: Team Bachmann Rallies South Carolina
Voters During Bus Tour of the Palmetto State

Washington, D.C. – Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann will kick off her bus tour of the Palmetto State on Tuesday, August 16, 2011. Throughout the tour, Bachmann will rally voters and discuss the important issues facing our nation including the debt crisis, job creation, and economic growth. The following events, which occur in Eastern Daylight Time, are open to credentialed media:

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

“Join Team Bachmann!” Spartanburg Rally
12:30 pm ET
The Beacon Drive-In
255 John B. White Blvd.
Spartanburg, S.C.

Greenville Town Hall
3:00 pm ET
TD Convention Center (formerly Carolina First Center)
1 Exposition Dr.
Greenville, S.C.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

“Join Team Bachmann!” Columbia Rally
12:00 pm ET
The Hall at Senate’s End
320 Senate St.
Columbia, S.C.

“Join Team Bachmann!” Florence Rally
4:00 pm ET
Florence Civic Center
3300 W. Radio Dr.
Florence, S.C.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Myrtle Beach Town Hall
12:00 pm ET
Sheraton Myrtle Beach Convention Center Hotel
2101 North Oak St.
Myrtle Beach, S.C.

“Join Team Bachmann!” Mt. Pleasant Rally
3:30 pm ET
Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum
40 Patriots Point Rd.
Mt. Pleasant, S.C.

Speaking of road trips: Right now, I’m in beautiful Morgan County, Ala., recovering from my 10-day “Fear and Loathing in Iowa” trip at the home of legendary Alabama political operative Stephen Gordon. In April, the guy I call “Gordo” was the victim of a horrible car crash when another driver crossed the center line and hit him head-on. Emergency personnel responding to the scene of the accident had not expected Gordo to survive. He suffered a broken leg, a broken arm, a crushed foot, broken ribs, broken sternum, collapsed lungs, a concussion, and various lacerations and contusions. So he’s lucky to be alive, but is now up and around and as feisty as ever, although with a noticeable limp and taking serious medications to cope with pain from his injuries.

Gordo’s condition is kind of a cautionary tale that reminds me why my wife always worries about my road trips. Read more

Category: Alabama, Election 2012, Michele Bachmann, Shoe Leather Fund, South Carolina
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