The Other McCain

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

‘It Appears He Was Drinking Heavily Before Climbing Behind the Wheel …’

Posted on | June 20, 2011 | 19 Comments

. . . of his 2007 Porsche 911 GT3. And now Ryan Dunn, one of the young idiots who became famous for being famously stupid on the MTV series “Jackass,” has gone on to that Big Reality Show in the Sky:

The double fatal crash happened at about 2:38 a.m. on Route 322 near Pottstown Pike in West Goshen Township.
According to the police report obtained by CBS Philly, Ryan was driving his 2007 Porsche 911 GT3 when it crashed into a wooded area and burst into flames. Both Dunn and his passenger, who has not been positively identified, died as a result of injuries they sustained in the crash.

Over the guardrail, into the tree, fiery death. And I know you’ll be shocked to learn that police believe “speed may have been a contributing factor to the accident.”

Wow. Driving fast in a Porsche 911? Imagine that.

Also, at 12:15 a.m. — about two hours before the fatal crash — Dunn reportedly Tweeted a photo of himself drinking with two buddies.

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenter who called attention to this episode of BBC’s Top Gear, which points out that the Porsche 911’s rear-engine design makes the car prone to skidding sideways — a drifter’s dream — so that it was once notorious as “the Grim Reaper’s company car”:

While I’ve never driven a Porsche, I have taken a few curves at high speed. Doing so safely requires (a) fresh tires, (b) a car with a low center of gravity, and (c) a careful attention to the momentum/traction situation. Were I to hazard a guess as to how Dunn wrecked, I’d imagine he came up short on (c), and started losing traction before he realized he was going too fast for the curve. Whether he was drunk or merely tired at 2:30 in the morning, the Porsche 911 doesn’t seem to be the most forgiving sports car on the market. Here’s the Associated Press report of the fatal crash:

Category: Celebrities

Why Is David Epstein Still a Columbia University Professor After Incest Plea?

Posted on | June 20, 2011 | 41 Comments

Jackie Carrero and Mikey Zhong of the Columbia Spectator note that David Epstein is still employed as a political science professor at Columbia University, even after he copped a guilty plea (to the misdemeanor of “attempted incest”) in connection with a case that made headlines in December.

Epstein, who had used his blog at Huffington Post to attack Sarah Palin, was arrested and charged with having sex with his adult daughter. And, as was reported at the time, “according to the criminal complaint from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, professor David Epstein’s incest was committed between July 2006 and June 2009 at a University Apartment Housing building on 120th Street.”

So (a) it went on for three years, and (b) it happened on university property.

Neither the university nor Epstein has commented on the case since his May 10 guilty plea, but the question remains: If a professor committed such a crime on university property, wouldn’t Columbia be justified in firing Epstein? Surely such behavior violates some aspect of university policy, and yet it appears that Epstein remains a full-time faculty member in good standing.

The mind boggles . . .

UPDATE: Welcome, Fox Nation readers!


Category: Crime, Education, Intellectuals, Scandal, Sex

WeinerGate: Who Is Starchild111?

Posted on | June 20, 2011 | 17 Comments

At least one reader has complained that it’s time to move on from WeinerGate, and I’m entirely willing to do so — but the dadgum story won’t stop, and stuff just keeps popping up.

This “Betty and Veronica” mystery continues bubbling. The person whom Tommy Christopher dubbed “Betty” was  “Nikki Reid” a/k/a “Starchild111,” an alleged teenage girl who was one of Anthony Weiner’s Twitter correspondents. But no one can now verify her existence, and a New York Times report suggests that Nikki/Starchild was in fact some sort of sockpuppet honey-trap conjured up by Weiner’s enemies:

I’m just throwing this stuff out there, because now that the story is past the point of purely political interest — nobody’s partisan ox is going to be gored by further WeinerGate developments — it would be rather irresponsible to ignore the remaining loose threads.

Meanwhile, I will have no comment on the former Hillary Clinton intern who how has a new line of work. While I’m sure that some readers will be eager to research the young woman’s career in . . . er, the adult entertainment industry, I repeat that I have no comment.

Category: Anthony Weiner, Scandal, Sex

If We Outlaw Martian Voting, Then The 2012 Election Will Be Swarmed By Disenfrachised Martian ‘Voters’

Posted on | June 20, 2011 | 29 Comments

by Smitty

Does anybody understand the meaning of this buffoonery from E.J. Dionne, Junior? Emphasis mine throughout the post.

Rigging the 2012 Election

WASHINGTON — An attack on the right to vote is under way across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we’d condemn it as election-rigging. But it’s happening here, so there’s barely a whimper.

The laws are being passed in the name of preventing “voter fraud.” But study after study has shown that fraud by voters is not a major problem — and is less of a problem than how hard many states make it for people to vote in the first place. Some of the new laws, such as limiting the number of days for early voting, have little plausible connection to battling fraud.

These statutes are not neutral. Their greatest impact will be to reduce turnout among African-Americans, Latinos and the young. It is no accident that these groups were key to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 — or that the laws in question are being enacted in states where Republicans control state governments.

How, precisely? How would it follow that treating the identification requirement to vote as similar to, say, checking in for a flight (as distinct from clearing the TSA), reduce turnout?

Paradoxically, the rank partisanship of these measures is discouraging the media from reporting plainly on what’s going on. Voter suppression so clearly benefits the Republicans that the media typically report this through a partisan lens, knowing that accounts making clear whom these laws disenfranchise would be labeled as biased by the right. But the media should not fear telling the truth or standing up for the rights of the poor or the young.

Wait, E.J.: shouldn’t you establish that voter suppression has occurred, prior to connecting that dot to any major party? Oh, yeah: that would be an example of an honest argument. Given that you are sort of without fact #1 to stand on, it more logically follows that you’d not bore your reader with those pesky ‘fact’ things.

Sometimes the partisan motivation is so clear that if Stephen Colbert reported on what’s transpiring, his audience would assume he was making it up. In Texas, for example, the law allows concealed handgun licenses to work as identification, but not student IDs. And guess what? Nationwide exit polls show that John McCain carried households in which someone owned a gun by 25 percentage points but lost voters in households without a gun by 32 points.

Stephen Colbert is a comedian; do you normally accept his show as fact, E.J.? And what a crappy correlation==causation argument you have here. Could it be that student identification is insufficiently rigorous? Can you check in for the aforementioned plane flight with a student ID? I would be generally surprised if you could.

In part because of a surge of voters who had not cast ballots before, the United States elected its first African-American president in 2008. Are we now going to witness a subtle return of Jim Crow voting laws?

Given the systemic intellectual dishonesty of your post, Dionne, it strikes me that the greater threat to the integrity of the vote is from the Left, which, having spewed such inflammatory lies as contained in your column, will be forced to back up the lies with various acts of propaganda.

Whether or not these laws can be rolled back, their existence should unleash a great civic campaign akin to the voter registration drives of the civil rights years. The poor, the young and people of color should get their IDs, flock to the polls and insist on their right to vote in 2012.

Why, yes: yes, they should. Legally. They call these events ‘elections’.

If voter suppression is to occur, let it happen for all to see. The whole world, which watched us with admiration and respect in 2008, will be watching again.

Taken slightly out of context, as snarky post as this, the last paragraph almost seems a threat. But E.J. is a swell guy, and he would never do anything less that fair, balanced, honest, honorable, morally sound, and highly respectable. We just have to make sure the little green men don’t get too near his polling place.

On the other hand, Legal Insurrection, looking on the bright side, figures it might allow time for a vacation.

Category: Uncategorized

He’s Got His. Have You Got Yours?

Posted on | June 20, 2011 | 11 Comments

A sad bit of bitter irony:

While unemployment among the general population is about 9.1 percent, it’s at 16.2 percent African Americans, and a bit higher still for African American males. . . .
[N]ow it’s at Depression-era levels. The most recent figures show African American joblessness at 16.2 percent. For black males, it’s at 17.5 percent; And for black teens, it’s nearly 41 percent.

By the way, has anyone heard from Peggy Joseph lately?

Category: Barack Obama, Economics

Consider the Source

Posted on | June 20, 2011 | 15 Comments

Wes Pruden would have ripped my hide off — this, I freely admit.

You don’t hang a story on a single source, especially if that source is anonymous. My old boss at The Washington Times would never in a million years have authorized a story like the two-sentence item I published Friday on The American Spectator blog. So I broke the rules with that item about Sarah Palin’s campaign plans, and must therefore suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — as well as the snarktastic reaction of Fishbowl DC’s Betsy Rothstein:

My Source, My Source, My Source
“My source told me what my source was told. Did someone misinform my source? I don’t know. It is what it is.” — Conservative blogger Robert Stacy McCain to The Daily Caller‘s Jonathan Strong, who asked McCain, “Is your (anonymous) source 3rd or 4th hand? Just curious.” McCain wrote on The American Spectator blog Friday that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is expected to announce her presidential intentions this week. Palin replied over Twitter, “Really? Hmm, guess they forgot to inform me what I’m ‘expected to do’ next week.” McCain updated his post with the above Palin line and this remark: “OK, fine, governor, but I was reporting what my source had been told. Has my source been misinformed?” We think he’s going to be waiting awhile.

This is amusing. First of all, Rothstein is a DC media gossip columnist who is becoming notorious for her favoritism. (Dave Weigel loathes her.)

Rothstein was recently (and glowingly) profiled by Tommy Christopher at Mediaite. And on Friday, the New York Times reported that the sources for Tommy’s big WeinerGate scoop about “Veronica and Betty” were evidently fictional. Yet Rothstein, while mocking my Friday scoop, can’t be bothered to notice that her friend Tommy appears to have fallen for a hoax.

Rothstein’s most recent item mentioning Tommy was on June 14, when she quoted his oracular pronouncement via Twitter: “Journalism isn’t about what you ‘think’ or ‘believe.’ Skepticism and curiosity are hammer and nails. Takes skill to build something.”

Heh.

At least I know that my source is a real flesh-and-blood human being. And to repeat what I wrote in a follow-up Friday: I stand by the story.

Category: Journalism

Fake Twitter Girls?

Posted on | June 20, 2011 | 13 Comments

Friday, Jennifer Preston at the New York Times had an intriguing story about the “Betty and Veronica” sideshow of WeinerGate.

I was up to my neck in Right Online at the time, and so didn’t get around to blogging about it Friday, but to those of us who followed WeinerGate in-depth from Day One, this is one of those dangling loose threads — along with “PatriotUSA76″/”Dan Wolfe”/#bornfreecrew — that inspires continued fascination.

The bottom line? Don’t assume that people whom you know only through the Internet are who they really say they are, nor should you assume that people who profess to be “on your side” actually are.

Ace of Spades goes wading into the tall grass of this spooky swamp of mystification.

Category: Ace of Spades, Anthony Weiner

‘The Problem … Is That Thomas Doesn’t Care What the New York Times Thinks’

Posted on | June 20, 2011 | 10 Comments

Those are some of Professor Glenn Reynolds’ thoughts on exactly why the editors of the New York Times would assign a reporter to do a 2,700-word hit piece on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Twenty-seven-hundred words.

That’s four times the length of a typical news story, and the piece essentially re-hashes a Democratic Party talking point about Thomas’s alleged “conflict of interest” which Democrats say should force Thomas to recuse himself from the upcoming case on the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

Is there any chance — any chance at all — that the editors of the Times would ever consider themselves obliged to devote such resources to advancing a Republican talking point?

And they wonder why they’re losing influence . . .

Category: Instapundit, New York Times, Supreme Court
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin