LIVE AT FIVE – 05.19.11

This 4-minute video features an interview by Lynda Waddington of the Iowa Independent. But never mind that part: Pay attention to the enthusiastic reaction Herman Cain generates from the grassroots GOP in Cedar Rapids, Iowa:

You see what I’m talking about? People love this guy. He is a people person. And that makes a huge difference at the retail-politics level, which is what the Iowa caucuses are all about. And by the way . . .

HERMAN CAIN MONEY-BOMB!

UPDATE: Cain surges ahead in Daily Caller poll.

UPDATE II: “Insidious,” says Ace of Spades: “For the first time in my life, I’m proud to be an American.”

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain, Iowa, Republicans, Video

Tiny Endangered Fish Hampers U.S. Border Enforcement in Arizona

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | 16 Comments

When Audrey Hudson of Human Events e-mailed to ask if I’d be interested in her story about the pupfish, I sent her back a six-word message: “What the hell is a pupfish?” Here’s part of her story:

Federal agents must abandon their vehicles and chase drug smugglers and illegal aliens on foot through 40 acres near the Mexican border because of a pond that is home to the endangered desert pupfish.
It’s part of the agreement between the Homeland Security and Interior departments on how best to protect the ecosystem, frustrating lawmakers who say it also prevents agents from conducting routine patrols. . . .
The two-inch, bluish pupfish lives in the Quitobaquito Pond and spring channel in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument west of Tucson, Ariz. . . .
Lawmakers are frustrated over the territorial battles between the government agencies that are charged with protecting the environment and protecting the border.
They say federal land managers are using environmental regulations to block the Border Patrol from accessing protected portions within 21 million acres on the southern border and 1,000 miles along the Canadian border . . .

Read the whole thing.

Category: Arizona, Environmentalism, Immigration

Defeat Obama Radiothon Thursday!

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | 1 Comment

The Campaign to Defeat Obama will have a radiothon Thursday night with guests including Michelle Bachmann, Andrew Breitbart, Phyllis Schlafly, Rick Santorum and . . . well, me, among many more.

You can read more about this big event here. They’ve got a Facebook page and you can follow them on Twitter (@DefeatBarack). Here’s one of their latest TV ads:

The Campaign to Defeat Obama

Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Tea Party

Newt Gingrich to Democrats: ‘Hey, No Fair Quoting What I Said on National TV!’

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | 10 Comments

“Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate.”
— Newt Gingrich, in Fox News interview Tuesday

UPDATE: Oh, this is classic: Newt’s spokesman Rick Tyler calls Gingrich’s critics “sheep,” whom he accuses of “not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list.”

Newt Gingrich, Grassroots Populist Outsider!

Tabitha Hale is so over you, Newt.

UPDATE II: “We’re all RINOs now, my friends,” says Allahpundit.

Seriously, though, I’m pissed. For the press secretary to a career politician to accuse his critics of being concerned about “cocktail party” invitations?

What part of “fuck you, Rick Tyler” is so hard to understand?

Category: Election 2012, Newt Gingrich

On Media, Money and Membership

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | 27 Comments

“Since 2003, Soros has spent more than $48 million funding media properties, including the infrastructure of news — journalism schools, investigative journalism and even industry organizations.”
— Dan Gainor, Vice President for Business and Culture, Media Research Center

Did Mitt Romney Mention That He Can Raise $10.25 Million in Eight Hours?
— New York magazine

Arrogance, vanity and myopia are not traits particular to Republicans, and one might even suppose that perhaps liberals are more prone to such personality flaws. Nevertheless we are struck by the sharp contrast between how George Soros employs his wealth — to build a media infrastructure for advancing his broad political agenda — and how wealthy Republicans spend their own money: To advance the narrow personal ambition of Mitt Romney.

Why are rich Republicans so clueless? They are shoveling money at a candidate who suffers tepid support among the GOP grassroots and is therefore unlikely to win the nomination. The only purpose served by their contributions would be to pay salaries for Romney campaign staff and fees to Romney’s consultants, and to buy airtime to broadcast Romney’s campaign ads.

So Romney’s wealthy contributors are clueless as per the political landscape for the 2012 presidential campaign. But they are also clueless as to the entire question of how best to spend their money if — as we might reasonably suspect — their general desire is to advance the Republican cause. What Soros does with his money is infinitely smarter than what Republicans do with theirs.

It was my friend Jimmie Bise Jr. who pointed this out in September 2009: During a single three-month span of that year, Republicans contributed $4.3 million to the doomed campaign of Charlie Crist.

How’s that workin’ out for ya?

Jimmie has calculated — and I agree with his calculations — that you could run a pretty spiffy little conservative New Media operation for $500,000 a year if you knew what you were doing. But the problem is connecting (a) people with $500,000 to (b) people who know what they’re doing in terms of online news.

If you grant that Jimmie and I are correct about this estimate, do the math yourself: For the $4 million that the permatanned RINO Charlie Crist collected during that single three-month span of 2009, you could fund eight spiffy little New Media operations for a year (or four such operations for two years). And FEC contribution limits do not apply to people making “investments” in news operations, so that the rich Republicans would not be restricted in their generosity toward New Media, as they are toward political candidates.

Soros has figured this out. Rich Republicans have not. Read more

Category: Journalism, Mitt Romney, Uncategorized

REVEALED: The Secret Source Who Helped U.S. Forces Get Bin Laden

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | 9 Comments

Last night, I received an e-mail tip:

The Pentagon just released a photo of the Pakistani man who gave the CIA credible information that led them to Osama bin Laden.
He is eligible to get the $25M reward the US Gov’t was offering.

Now we can reveal this exclusive photo: Read more

Category: Pakistan, Terrorism

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Love Children (Yep. I Said ‘Children,’ Which Is Plural)

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | 24 Comments

The first fallout of Tuesday’s big reveal: A 2003 story by the Daily Mail about Tanner Tousignant — teenage son of a former stewardess on Arnold’s private jet — suddenly seems a lot more credible.

However, when Gawker recycled the Tanner tale, the reporter on that old Daily Mail story said, “Nuh-uh. That’s the wrong love child. Must be another one.” So, the tabloids kept digging and — bingo!

Mildred Baena is the mother of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child, RadarOnline.com and Star magazine have learned exclusively in a joint investigation.
Baena, 50, worked as a housekeeper for Arnold, Radar and Star have learned.
Baena and Schwarzenegger, 63, conceived their illegitimate child more than a decade ago,behind the back of the Hollywood superstar’s wife and Kennedy heiress, Maria Shriver . . .

Old habits are hard to break, and shagging the help appears to have been an old habit of Arnold’s. One might profitably compare Schwarzenegger’s situation to that of IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

It’s not as if there were no warnings about Strauss-Kahn’s habits. And he is now reportedly prepared to assert that the hotel maid he is accused of raping is a liar, claiming that he had consensual sex with her, a claim that her lawyer angrily rejects:

The woman, 32, a widowed immigrant from Guinea who was granted asylum seven years ago, has not been publicly identified by the authorities in New York and has made no public statements about what prosecutors say was an attack by Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, a Frenchman, as she prepared to clean his hotel room on Saturday.
But her lawyer said she had been unable to return to her job at the Sofitel New York or to her home, as both had attracted swarms of international news media. In short, the case has been devastating, the lawyer, Jeffrey J. Shapiro, said in an interview . . .
“There is no question this was not consensual — she was assaulted and she had to escape from him, which is why when she finally got out of the room, she reported it to security immediately,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It doesn’t matter what Mr. Brafman says, and it doesn’t matter what the defendant says. Her story is her story, which she has told to everyone who asked her, and she is telling the truth. She has no agenda.”
Mr. Shapiro said his client “did not even know who this guy was” until she saw news accounts, adding, “She is a simple housekeeper who was going into a room to clean a room.”

Droit de Seigneur, indeed!

UPDATE: Why is it that Little Miss Attila can never resist the urge to scold me in public?

Are we sure we want to conflate rape with consensual sex?

There was no conflation. When I said that the two situations might be profitably compared, I knew exactly what similarities I had in mind:

When the boss does the help, consent becomes problematic, oui? This is the whole point of sexual harassment law, am I not correct? That the unequal power relationship is exploitative? As I say, old habits die hard: A man who becomes accustomed to shagging the help when he is young and attractive will not necessarily take ‘no’ for answer when the help stops saying ‘yes.’ Shagging the help is shagging the help, and is bad business under all circumstances.

(The links are to the specific Twitter messages; 140 characters being an insuperable difficulty to extended argument.) Permit me to say that my mind often functions in gestalt mode: I see a pattern in the dots and, this seeming obvious enough to me, I make the mistake of assuming that others see the same pattern. So I will merely point out the dots, without bothering to explain what I see as the connection, and this sometimes leads to confusion as to my meaning.

This is an acknowledged fault of mine. But as I have said before, just because you don’t know what I’m doing, don’t make the mistake of assuming that I don’t know what I’m doing.

Little Miss Attila’s scolding, however, is another one of those gestalt patterns. Exactly what it means, I’m not sure, but it is perhaps significant.

UPDATE II: Fox News had the Mildred Baena story on their Web site this morning, but didn’t mention it on air until 2:15 p.m. ET. And while the Arnold’s love-child baby-mama story is all over the We Smirch celebrity gossip aggregator, it seems no political blogger wants to go near that TMZ birth-certificate story.

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Category: California, Celebrities, Scandal, Sex

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The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.19.11

VIDEO: Iowa Loves Herman Cain

Tiny Endangered Fish Hampers U.S. Border Enforcement in Arizona

Defeat Obama Radiothon Thursday!

Newt Gingrich to Democrats: ‘Hey, No Fair Quoting What I Said on National TV!’

On Media, Money and Membership

REVEALED: The Secret Source Who Helped U.S. Forces Get Bin Laden

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Love Children (Yep. I Said ‘Children,’ Which Is Plural)

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

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