The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.18.11

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | 2 Comments

TOP NEWS
Senator Coburn Quits “Gang Of Six”

Bipartisan group can't reach agreement

“I’m not going to put my credibility on the line for something that I don’t think will fix the problem.” Apparently Senate Dems can’t face reality that Social Security, Medicare are broke; agreement that spending needs to be cut but no agreement on what’s going to get cut

Strauss-Kahn’s Alleged Victim Experienced “Extraordinary Trauma”
Lawyer says chambermaid’s life turned upside down

Flooding Hinders Mississippi River Shipping
Barges resume movement after day-long halt

Even The French Can’t Hide From The Internet
Days of covering up pols’ peccadilloes are over



POLITICS
Big Oil Tax Vote Fails In Senate

Begich, Landrieu, Nelson not following the leader

Three Democrats oppose bill calling for punitive repeal of oil companies’ tax credits

Gingrich Apologizes To Ryan For Medicare Comments




Lawmakers Defend French Fries As Government Limits Potatoes In School Lunches

Geithner Wants Debt Ceiling “Done And Clean” In July



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Euro Stocks Seen Higher; Limited Gains
Lower HP Outlook, Economic Concerns Sink Dow
Oil Futures Rise As Dollar’s Decline Continues
“Corporate Accountability” Killjoys Want McDonald’s To Axe The Clown
Probes Into Banks’ Mortgage Lending Grow
TransCanada Sticks To Alaskan Pipeline Plan As Rival Bows Out
Netflix Now Largest Source Of Internet Traffic
Intel: Windows On ARM Won’t Run “Legacy Apps”



SPORTS
Timberwolves’ GM Hints That NBA Lottery Is Fixed; Fine On The Way

Timbermutts' GM David Kahn

Last-place team hosed out of first draft pick, GM cries foul

Nowitzki Scores 48 As Mavs Win Big

Cancer Claims Twins’ Legendary Slugger Harmon Killebrew



Structure Collapses On Lightning, Bruins Win 6-5

Kemp and Kuroda Lift Dodgers Over Brewers

Gonzalez Sparkles In A’s 14-0 Rout Of Angels

Yankees Pull Out All The Stops To End Six-Game Skid



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Shocker: Lisa Edelstein Not Returning For Eighth Season Of “House”

No more Cuddy?

Wouldn’t take salary cut

Arnold’s Son: Some Days I Just Want To Be Normal

Kelsey Grammer Trying To Rip Custody From Ex Camille

Oprah’s Star-studded Final Show Details

Standing Ovation At Cannes For Mel Gibson And “The Beaver”

Keanu Reeves Passes On “Akira”



FOREIGNERS
Egyptian Saif Al-Adel Interim Al-Qaeda Chief
Queen To Visit Massacre Site, War Memorial
Journalist Detained In Syria Released By Iran
Pakistan Militants Storm Police Checkpoint
Gaddafi Oil Minister Defects?
Syrian Activists Call For Nationwide Strike
“Land Mine” Melons Go Off In PRC Fields



BLOGS & STUFF
Jonah Goldberg: Ben Stein v. The Maid
Neo-Neocon: Perp-Walk The Ruling Class? L’Horreur!
Volokh Conspiracy: Senate Oil Bill Was Unconstitutional Anyway
American Digest: Slow Impoverishment In American Middle Class Life
AmSpecBlog: Good News – Foggy Bottom Snubs Carter & Friends
Big Journalism: CNN’s Sex Scandals Story Leaves Out Spitzer
Allahpundit: Feingold Says Democrats Opposing Obama EO Are Corporate Tools
Daily Caller: Palin Says Obamacare Waivers In Pelosi’s District Seriously Corrupt
Daley Gator: Obama-Run GM Sponsors And Celebrates PRC Agitprop Film

— compiled by Wombat-socho
“…just in the nick of time, I looked at his hand”

Category: Live at Five

Rachel Maddow’s ‘Man Cave’ Moment: Planned Parenthood Does Oil Changes?

Posted on | May 17, 2011 | 15 Comments

Monday night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow went off on a tangent so incredibly weird that it is almost impossible to describe. The topic was Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who had apparently signed legislation defunding Planned Parenthood in his state. Maddow then evidently decided that guys in the audience failed to understand why Planned Parenthood is so vital, suggesting that what Planned Parenthood mainly does is health-care “maintenance” for women. Watch the video:

Question: Why is it only women who require “routine maintenance”? Is there no special need — a need so urgent that it must be subsidized by taxpayers — to provide health-care for men?

It’s almost as if Rachel Maddow were saying that men and women are biologically unequal.

But surely she doesn’t believe that? Or does she?

Category: MSNBC, Planned Parenthood

Tina Brown + Newsbeast = Profit?

Posted on | May 17, 2011 | 7 Comments

Tina Brown, empress of the recently merged Newsweek/Daily Beast, tells Joe Pompeo of Yahoo that her operation will be profitable at some point “in the next two to three years.”

Mark your calendars, then: Newsbeast will be in the black by May 2014 at the latest. According to Tina Brown, that is.

Do you trust Tina Brown? Jeff Bercovici of Forbes suggests you keep a few grains of salt handy, noting that Brown appears to be moving the goal posts: In October 2010, she told the Wall Street Journal she expected Newsbeast to reach profitability within two years. She has thereby pushed back the projected profitability point by 18 months.

More grains of salt, reminding you what I wrote as soon as the merger was announced last November:

Looking through the history of Ms. Brown’s career – Tatler, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Talk — it’s hard to resist the suspicion that Newsbeast (or whatever the resultant hybrid is called) will be mainly about celebrities, both as subjects and as writers.
The investors can expect to lose a crapload of cash in the process. The New Yorker reportedly lost $42 million in three years (1995-97) under Ms. Brown’s editorship. Talk lost an impressive $80 million during its two-year existence. Whatever else you might say about Tina Brown, she’s undeniably brilliant at convincing investors to lose money on her projects.

Brown’s business model is obviously the same as Arianna Huffington’s: An updated online version of the old reliable pump-and-dump. Carve out a slice of online readership, then sell those “eyes” to some larger entity.

Arianna sold HuffPo to AOL. To whom will Tina sell Newsbeast?

You want to invest in a New Media project? Just hit my tip jar.

Category: Journalism

Newtmania: Not Happening

Posted on | May 17, 2011 | 22 Comments

Ed Morrissey writes up a blogger conference call that Newt Gingrich held today, as does Philip Klein at the Examiner:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, speaking on a Tuesday conference call held to respond to his controversial comments about Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, said that he didn’t go into his interview with NBC’s David Gregory “hostile enough” and should have pushed back more forcefully against the “gotcha” questions the host asked.
But he argued that this controversy, which many have argued spells the end of his candidacy, will be fixed in a matter of days, and he likened his experiences to Ronald Reagan’s.
“Every once and awhile there’s going to be a problem, and you gotta spend three or four days fixing it,” he said. “If you go back and look at Ronald Reagan’s record, the opening week of the campaign in Sept. 1980, they didn’t have a very good week. And they had to go back and fix it. This happens occasionally. The trick is to relax, look at it, try to figure out what happened, and keep moving.”
Gingrich said he should have been better prepared for the “adversarial nature” of “Meet the Press.”
“I didn’t go in there quite hostile enough, because it didn’t occur to me going in that you’d have a series of setups,” Gingrich said. “This wasn’t me randomly saying things. These were very deliberate efforts to pick fights.”

Newt didn’t realize David Gregory was going to play “gotcha”? Hello? But the comparison with Reagan is a bit much. The 24/7 New Media environment — including cable TV, talk radio and the blogosphere — didn’t exist in 1980. 

Does the acronym WCFCYA mean anything to you?

This is where Newt’s long, long political record works against him. Leave aside the ex-wives and the half-million-dollar Tiffany’s account. That’s just a distraction. The fact is, Newt has a record to defend, he’s opined on a variety of topics during TV appearances and speeches, and his difficulty in meeting Gregory’s “gotcha” attacks exposes that vulnerability. And if he thinks he can bamboozle Republican voters, he’ll get more of what he got in the “Rebuke in Dubuque“:

For me, of course, it’s personal. I was there in the ballroom at the Hotel Saranac on Nov. 3, 2009, when Doug Hoffman gave his concession speech. Lot of red-rimmed eyes in the crowd there that night. But there is no crying in journalism . . .

Still, I haven’t forgotten. Michelle Malkin has not forgotten. There are lots of us who remember that Newt suppored Dede Scozzafava against the Tea Party movement’s first national hero.

Newt will not win the Republican nomination. Not while I live and breathe. Hit the freaking tip jar.

UPDATE: Karen Martin of the Spartanburg Tea Party recalls the Hoffman campaign:

I sent him money, I called his campaign office and talked to his staffers, I was on his email list. It was my first realization that from that moment on … NO politics were local. What happened in that district “somewhere in NY” could potentially mark a point in time when the tide turned and the Every Man could make a significant impact.
And I remember how enraged I was when Newt Gingrich mocked us. Tried to destroy Doug’s candidacy. Endorsed and praised and supported that abomination of a women. Not once. Not a couple of times. For weeks. And he … was “on our side.”

As I have argued, the Hoffman campaign actually did “mark a point in time when the tide turned.” That’s why, on Election Night 2010, in Boca Raton, Florida, I walked outside of Allen West’s victory party and placed a call to Doug Hoffman.

Those of us who were involved in the NY-23 — and that includes a lot of our blog readers here who gave money to Hoffman — knew we were in the middle of a crucial moment. And the fact that Hoffman lost didn’t change that. What was important was the fight, and the fighter who had the guts to tell the clueless GOP establishment to go to hell.

UPDATE II: Had to do this:

Category: Newt Gingrich

Stuff Spell-Check Won’t Fix

Posted on | May 17, 2011 | 25 Comments

Sissy Willis re-Tweeted a link to a post at The Anchoress in which Max Lindenman talks about the growing menace of bad punctuation, including people who don’t know the God-Fearing American Way of putting commas or periods inside the quotation marks.

Go read Lindeman’s post, and then come back here and we’ll have a little talk, OK? Read more

Category: Culture

Chris Matthews Goes Off on GOP ‘Hate’; Mark Levin Goes Off on NBC News

Posted on | May 17, 2011 | 13 Comments

Watching MSNBC is fun from an anthropological perspective. This is the kind of stuff that liberals believe. This is how their minds work. Here is Chris Matthews accusing Republicans and the Tea Party of hate:

What is so bizarre about that is that this wasn’t some off-the-cuff  gaffe. It was an actual scripted segment, during which Matthews used the words “hate” or “hatred” ten times in less than two minutes.

Following up on David Gregory’s idiotic race-baiting on Meet the Press, yesterday Mark Levin went off on NBC:

” ‘Some people think that when you called Obama the food stamp president, you know, that has a racial connotation.’ Really? Isn’t that interesting?
“Well, some people think, Mr. Gregory, that your question has a racial connotation. Not just race-baiting, but prejudice, because apparently now it is the official position of ‘Meet the Press’ that if you’re on food stamps, you’re black. I just wanted to clarify that point, because otherwise the question makes no sense. Or, that a majority of the people are on food stamps are black, which is not true. And yet that is the inference. Well, why would Mr. Gregory make that inference? Sure he’s not prejudiced? Why would he do that?”

Category: Mark Levin, MSNBC, NBC

The Terrorist Times

Posted on | May 17, 2011 | 5 Comments

The New York Times publishes an op-ed column by Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestine Liberation Organization. If you click that link, be prepared to wipe the blood off your computer screen.

Category: Israel, New York Times, Tea Party

Herman Cain: Georgia GOP Speech

Posted on | May 17, 2011 | 13 Comments

I’d asked around to see if someone had video of the full speech that Herman Cain gave this past weekend at the Georgia State Republican Party Convention in Macon. Thanks to Omega Six for finding it:

Isn’t it time you joined the online grassroots army at Citizens for Cain?

Category: Election 2012, Georgia, Herman Cain, Video
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