The Other McCain

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

About Today’s FMJRA Award

Posted on | May 16, 2011 | 7 Comments

You might notice that the Full Metal Jacket Reach-Around Award is currently allocated to “Steve Eggleston, Irresistible Sex God of the Innerwebs.”

A technical problem developed on the site this morning and Steve said he knew how to fix it. Helpful assistance was also offered by Jimmie “The Awesomeness” Bise. Given that the Pentagon has seen fit to deploy blog sidekick Smitty to Crappybandwithistan, this WordPress functionality savvy was greatly appreciated.

So in addition to owing these dudes lots of beers, I also feel obliged to link them like a mofo. You should go hit their tip jars immediately.

Category: Blogging

Her Name Was Simona Rudina …

Posted on | May 16, 2011 | 13 Comments

Tel Aviv, June 10, 2001 (Photo by IDF)

. . . and she was just 17 years old. Simona was born in Lithuania, when that nation was still under the heel of Soviet despotism. When she was 3 years old, her family emigrated to Israel.

On the evening of June 10, 2001, Simona and some friends wanted to attend a dance party for young emigres from the former Soviet Union. As her father later explained, Simona and her friends hadn’t gone to the Tel Aviv beach in three months, because of the wave of Palestinian terrorism known as the Second Intifada. “With all the terrorist attacks, they were not comfortable walking along the seashore,” he said.

However, Simona had just passed a literature test with a high score — a cause for celebration — and so her father didn’t object to her going with her friends to visit a beachfront dance club popular with teens. “They tried on a whole pile of clothes, and finally Simona settled on Rita’s one-sleeved black blouse with sequins, and matching black pants,” her father recalled.

You may have noticed I’m speaking of Simona Rudina in the past tense. Go ahead and Google her name and you’ll find out why. Read more

Category: Israel, Terrorism

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.16.11

Posted on | May 16, 2011 | 7 Comments

TOP NEWS
Euro Slumps To Seven-Month Low As IMF Head Arrested

Dominique Strauss-Kahn leaves an NYPD precinct for court

Not the first time Strauss-Kahn has had female trouble, either; chances of defeating Sarkozy as Socialist candidate next April now pretty much zero unless he’s cleared of rape charges


Lebanon Complains To UN After Border Protests Result In Ten Dead, 112 Wounded
Palestinians shot while trying to climb border fence during Nakba protests

Pakistan/US Relationship At Crossroads, Kerry Warns
Chairman of Foreign Relations Committee sets positive tone despite mutual suspicion, recriminations over Bin Laden raid



POLITICS
Gingrich Calls GOP Medicare Plan “Too Radical”

Former speaker appears on Meet The Depressed

“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering.” Wait, what?

Scott Brown Chalks Up DiMasi Charges To One-Party Corruption

Colorado Redistricting Effort Tripped Up By 4th CD Hurdle

Obama Warns Of New Financial Crisis If Debt Limit Not Raised

Jerry Brown Not Giving Up On Tax Hikes To Balance California Budget

Does Romney Think Big Government Is Good For Business?



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Euro Zone To Back Portugal Bailout, With New Caveats
European Stocks Open Lower
Teva Buys Generics Maker Taiyo
Nikkei Hits One-Month Low
Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Service Fueled Playstation Network Attack
Endeavour Fueled For Next-To-Last Shuttle Launch
Why Nook Color Tablet May Find A Niche



SPORTS
Heat Flounder As LeBron Struggles Against Bulls

LeBron James argues with a ref in the fourth quarter

Miami goes down in flames 103-89

A Rotten Time For Jorge Posada As The Yankees Core Ages

Police: Kenya’s Marathon Champ Jumps To His Death



Carl Crawford A Pro To The 8th Degree

Astros To Announce Sale Of Team Today

Sharks Collapse In Second Half Of Game One

 



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Pippa Hits Madrid With Her Old Flame And The Girls

¿Excúseme, de dónde es la barra?

Clubbing!

Tamera Mowry Gets Married

Ex-MTV VJ Sued: “He Used Me For My PlayStation!”
Is that what the cool kids are calling it these days?

Mariah Carey Turned In Drinking In The Hospital?



“Jersey Shore” Cast Takes Italy By Storm

Botox Mom Investigated By CPS After “Good Morning America” Interview



FOREIGNERS
British Defense Chiefs Want NATO To Step Up Attacks In Libya
Eight Killed In Syrian Crackdown Near Lebanese Border
27 Killed In Guatemala Massacre Near Mexican Border
Zurich Voters Reject Ban On Assisted Suicide
Saudi Diplomat Killed In Pakistan
Abbott: Australian Labor Party “At War With Itself”
Tunisia Arrests Al-Qaeda Bombers
Muslim/Coptic Clashes Flare Up Again In Egypt



BLOGS & STUFF
Atlas Shrugs: Israel Under Attack
Abu Muqawama: Just Another Sunday In The Levant
Samizdata.net: France In Disarray, Perhaps, But Why Disbelief?
Power Line: Paper Turns Thumbs Down On Obama’s Stimulus
National Review: Newt Tacks Left
Paul Ryan: The Budget Debate All Americans Deserve
NewsBusters: ThinkProgress Falsely Accuses Ron Paul Of Comparing Social Security, Medicare To Slavery
J. Christian Adams: Senate GOP Embarrasses Dems Over Boeing
Lonely Conservative: Union Whistleblowers Beaten, Threatened

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five

Rule 5 Sunday: Soft Power

Posted on | May 15, 2011 | 7 Comments

Welcome once again to our weekly admiration session devoted to the many glorious examples of the Lord’s creation, or, as it’s more commonly known, Rule 5 Sunday. We begin this week by providing you with this helpful graphic from Soylent Green, which will explain in brief and pithy fashion why it is you’re examining, say, Charlie Laine‘s contributions to modern life. That’s right. It’s [expletive deleted] SCIENCE.

As if that weren’t enough, Soylent scours the pampas of Argentina, the posh studios of Buenos Aires, and the files of various advertisers of fine corsetry to bring us more lovely young ladies in their altogether. FOR SCIENCE. Remember that Soylent Green is brought to you mostly by the letter S, as in nSfw, IYKWIMAITYD. (You certainly ought to by now.)

Fishersville Mike would like to interrupt all the unseemly carrying-on over some marriage in the UK to mention that Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton got hitched. He’s got a nice clip of Miranda singing “Gunpowder and Lead” over there, too.

Randy’s Roundtable was one of the blogs affected by Google’s thumbfingered Blogger outage last week, but he managed to repost his Julie Montouret entry from last Thursday. Meanwhile, That Mr. G Guy apparently is unaware of Tommy Shaw’s warning concerning girls with guns. Elsewhere, the Eye of Polyphemus focuses on Jenna Fischer, the POH Diaries take a gander at Pippa Middleton, and A View From The Beach offers a different take on fantasy girls.

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe of the week is Barbara Bouchet; also, the not yet vintage Claudia Jordan. Over at Dustbury, the search for fresh faces brings us former J-pop singer sifow and Selita Ebanks; Postaldog, on the other hand, has Joanna Krupa.

Did you somehow miss Troglopundit this week? Catch up in a hurry with his The Week In Automotivators, featuring a nice assortment of Rule 5 pix.

Over at The Camp of The Saints, it was time for Bob’s annual Six Days of Cheesecake, and I’m not talking about dessert, I’m talking classic cheesecake, more classic pix, still more for Hump Day, yet more on Thursday, also Friday and Saturday with Bettie Page and Margaret Lee, among others. Not content with this extravaganza, Bob offers an illustrated essay on marital relations, specifically wife spanking.

We end Rule 5 Sunday as we end all our Rule 5 posts of late, with the links of the DaleyGator, who has the best slideshows. 🙂
This week, the DaleyBabes include Jennifer Metcalfe, Olivia Wilde, Dianne Kruger, Holly Valance, and Corissa Furr; also, a Hooters bikini contest.

Thanks to all for their links! To be included in next week’s Rule 5 roundup, please send an e-mail with those links to Rule 5 Wombat by May 21.

Category: Rule 5

Shocking: Government Wastes Money!

Posted on | May 15, 2011 | 7 Comments

I’m sure you’ll be stunned into silence by the startling revelation that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is not a model of efficiency:

The federal government’s largest housing construction program for the poor has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them.
Nationwide, nearly 700 projects awarded $400 million have been idling for years, a Washington Post investigation found. Some have languished for a decade or longer even as much of the country struggles with record-high foreclosures and a dramatic loss of affordable housing.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the nation’s housing fund, has largely looked the other way: It does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals, instead trusting local agencies to police projects. . . .

Read the whole thing. (Via Memeorandum.)

Category: Corruption

The Very, Very Bad President

Posted on | May 15, 2011 | 34 Comments

It is nowadays said by many that Barack Obama is the worst president in American history. If this is so, President Obama will have eclipsed a mark that most observers believed would stand unchallenged until the final trumpet: The abysmal record of James Earl “Jimmy” Carter.

One of the reasons, I believe, that so many younger voters supported Obama in 2008 is that no one under 30 could remember how genuinely awful the Carter presidency was, nor could they recognize the similarities between the unbounded Hope inspired by the vague promises of the Democrats’ 2008 candidate and the tremendous expectations for national redemption that were invested in the 1976 Democratic candidate. The parallels and analogies, however, were readily apparent to those old enough to remember the Era of Malaise and, as soon as I got a detailed look at the Democrats’ economic agenda in December 2008, I declared bluntly: “It Won’t Work.”

More than two years later, with unemployment again on the rise — “Unexpectedly!” — and a “double-dip” housing recession now increasingly evident, I consider my prediction amply vindicated, and the only question remaining about the Obama presidency is, “How much more Carteresque will it become?” Frankly, I think our current president still has a good way to go before he can merit the claim of being worse than Jimmy Carter, and too many Americans have forgotten exactly how wretched Jimmy was.

Not content to have accumulated an embarrassingly bad record as president, Carter then went on to become America’s worst ex-president: Popping up in the media from time to time to criticize his Republican successors. (As a measure of the catastrophic damage Carter did to his own party’s reputation, the GOP controlled the White House for 20 of the 28 years after he left office.) No matter how many times he was laughed to scorn or ignored as irrelevant, Carter seemed to believe himself entitled to impose his transparently partisan opinions on a nation that wished he’d go away. Finally, in March 2007, Carter had the unmitigated gall to claim that President Bush was “the worst in history.”

This astonishing assertion was sufficent to inspire Investor’s Business Daily to publish a 10-part series on Jimmy Carter’s record, which began:

So Jimmy Carter calls the Bush administration “the worst in history.” This from the man who wrecked the world’s greatest economy and made a nuclear Iran and North Korea possible.
We didn’t think we’d see the day when a president-elect of France would be more appreciative of America’s role in the world than one of our own former presidents.
But here is Carter telling the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that President Bush’s “administration has been the worst in history,” one that has “endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war even when our own security is not directly threatened.”
Later, Carter called his comments “careless or misinterpreted.” But given a chance to retract, he didn’t. Apparently the man whose idea of leadership was to sit in front of a fireplace and blame everything on America’s “malaise” does not consider Islamofascists turning passenger jets into manned cruise missiles and flying them into skyscrapers a direct threat.
Nor does he consider himself responsible for the chain of events that gave us not only 9/11, but al-Qaida, the Taliban, Hezbollah and a nuclear Iran and North Korea. . . .

That IBD series came to my attention today because one of our longtime readers, Mike in Ardmore, contacted me to ask if I knew of any article that detailed Carter’s failures. Some research revealed that the series was still online via the Wayback Machine, which we are pleased to make available to our readers:

JIMMY CARTER: Profile in Incompetence

  • Part I: Look Who’s Talking — So Jimmy Carter calls the Bush administration “the worst in history.” This from the man who wrecked the world’s greatest economy and made a nuclear Iran and North Korea possible.
  • Part II: ‘Malaise’ Maestro — When it comes to economic performance, there’s no contest: Apart from the early years of the Depression, Jimmy Carter’s brief tenure as president was the worst in the 20th century.
  • Part III: Carter Planted Seeds Of Al-Qaida — After being told over and over by President Jimmy Carter that America’s ability to influence world events was “very limited,” the Soviet Union believed him and invaded Afghanistan. And al-Qaida was born.
  • Part IV:Iran: Carter’s Habitat For Inhumanity — In the name of human rights, Jimmy Carter gave rise to one of the worst rights violators in history — the Ayatollah Khomeini. And now Khomeini’s successor is preparing for nuclear war with Israel and the West.
  • Part V: Carter’s Red Carpet — On President Jimmy Carter’s watch, more territory was lost to tyranny than at any other time since Yalta. And he’d have us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear.
  • Part VI: A Feeble President — When men of strength are presented with difficult problems, their responses are firm and decisive. Jimmy Carter spent four years as president of the United States responding with weakness.
  • Part VII: Friend Of Dictators  — In foreign policy, Jimmy Carter proved his presidency the worst ever by subordinating U.S. interests to his vague “human rights” policy. All he did was enable dictators to take him to the cleaners.
  • Part VIII: Camp Hype — It’s often asserted that while Jimmy Carter’s presidency was marred by error and incompetence, the peace deal he brokered at Camp David was an unmitigated triumph. Time to pop that bubble, too.
  • Part IX: Carter’s Oil Crisis — Of all the errors Jimmy Carter committed, none has earned him more well-justified scorn than his handling of the 1970s energy crisis. True enough, he didn’t cause it. But he did make it much, much worse.
  • Part X: Carrying Over Carter’s Ineptitude — In 1976, Americans thought they were sending an outsider to the White House. Today, the same policies so thoroughly discredited by Jimmy Carter’s disastrous presidency define the Democratic Party.

So there you have it: The definitive chronicle of Jimmy Carter’s rotten presidential record. You may want to bookmark this page for future reference, just in case you encounter someone who doesn’t realize just how bad Carter really was. And the next time one of your conservative friends swears that Barack Obama is the worst president in history, you can send them this post and say, “Maybe he’s not the worst — yet.”

Of course, Obama’s still got another 20 months remaining in office, so he might hold the uncontested title soon enough.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!


Category: Barack Obama, History, Jimmy Carter

Frenchman Shocked to Discover It’s Illegal to Sodomize Your Hotel Maid in U.S.

Posted on | May 15, 2011 | 29 Comments

Even in New York City!

The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was taken off an Air France plane at Kennedy International Airport minutes before it was to take off for Paris on Saturday and arrested in connection with the sexual attack of a maid at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, the authorities said.
Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, who was widely expected to become the Socialist candidate for the French presidency, was apprehended by detectives of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in the first-class section of the jetliner, and immediately turned over to detectives from the Midtown South Precinct, officials said.
The New York Police Department took Mr. Strauss-Kahn into custody, where he was “being questioned in connection with the sexual assault of a hotel chambermaid earlier this afternoon,” Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said Saturday night. “He is being arrested for a criminal sex act, attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment.” . . .
Mr. Browne said that it was about 1 p.m. on Saturday when the maid, a 32-year-old woman, entered Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s suite — Room 2806 — believing it was unoccupied. Mr. Browne said that the suite, which cost $3,000 a night, had a foyer, a conference room, a living room and a bedroom, and that Mr. Strauss-Khan had checked in on Friday.
As she was in the foyer, “he came out of the bathroom, fully naked, and attempted to sexually assault her,” Mr. Browne said, adding, “He grabs her, according to her account, and pulls her into the bedroom and onto the bed.” He locked the door to the suite, Mr. Browne said.
“She fights him off, and he then drags her down the hallway to the bathroom, where he sexually assaults her a second time,” Mr. Browne added.
At some point during the assault, the woman broke free, Mr. Browne said, and “she fled, reported it to other hotel personnel, who called 911.”

I’m sure lawyers for Strauss-Kahn will explain to the judge:

  • He’d been watching too much TV and figured, if Charlie Sheen could do it, why not the director of the IMF?
  • In France, sodomizing your chambermaid is a traditional custom.
  • Something about the phrase “room service” got lost in translation.

(Via Memeorandum.) Excuse my sarcastic tone of my response. My sympathies are entirely with the victim, despite my habitual wisecracking — including my Twitter suggestion that Charlie Sheen should be the next director of the IMF.

Others are similarly unable to resist the sarcastic temptation, including Gary Pearson on Twitter: “The leader of the IMF was charged with sexual assault of a maid. Usually the IMF’s rape of the third world is a little more symbolic.” And there’s this from the Economist:

It makes you want to join the tea party
Leave aside the details of the allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty) Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.

Irony piled up so high you can’t see the top of the stack.

Category: Crime, France, New York, Sex

‘Atlas Shrugged: Part I’

Posted on | May 15, 2011 | 12 Comments

A review by Wombat-socho

It’s been a month now since Atlas Shrugged Part I hit the theaters for a limited run. Between tax season and the classes I needed to finish off for spring semester, I didn’t get a chance to see it until this weekend. While I’m no Ayn Rand fanboy, I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged as a novel well enough, long speeches and all. So when I heard that somebody was trying to get a movie version of Rand’s classic dystopian novel done, I figured I ought to at least take a look, especially when people started making noises about how the scriptwriters had managed to cut the book in all the right places so that one could actually see the whole story on film in less than a week.

Despite what the critics and others have said, it’s a decent movie. While the book can be tough going at times, partially due to the aforementioned speeches, the movie instead moves along at a good clip; the ninety-seven minutes were up before I knew it. Taylor Schilling and Grant Bowler do well as Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, and the rest of the largely unknown cast turns in decent performances as well. So on its own merits, it’s an okay movie, and if I hadn’t read the book before, I probably would have come out of it with much the same reaction: I got my money’s worth.

Since I have read Atlas Shrugged, though, I have to answer the inevitable questions that arise when a book (especially one that has such a large and passionate following) gets converted to a movie. First, is the movie faithful to the book? Generally, yes; this is no bait-and-switch job (as with Paul Verhoeven’s execrable Starship Troopers) where nothing remains intact but the character names. The flow of the main plot is intact, with very slight revisions to allow for the changes in the last half-century since the book came out; the subplot of the atmospheric static motor is also intact, and the contrast between the passionate love of Dagny and Hank and the loveless (to put it mildly) parasitic relationship posing as marriage between Hank and Lillian Rearden shows up even better on the big screen than it did in the book; Rebecca Wisocky plays the bitchy Lillian to the hilt, and would deserve an Oscar nomination if the award meant anything any more. If you’re a hard-core Rand fan, you can find plenty of nits to pick, I’m sure, from the casting of Taylor Schilling as Dagny — instead of some raven-haired no-nonsense sort like Angelina Jolie or Janine Turner, although they’re both a bit old for the part now — to the deletion of quite a bit of dialogue and monologue both. I think that the changes and cuts made to the book in order to make a decent screenplay actually improved the movie. All of the characters’ personalities are essentially the same, the major plot points have remained intact, and much of the background matches up better to the events of the last half-century than it did when the book was originally published.

So. Movie wins at translating Rand’s opus to the big screen; movie also wins on its own merits as an entertaining drama. Two thumbs up, say I; this is a movie well worth your time and money, and sod the critics who say otherwise.

Visit the Official Atlas Shrugged Movie Web Site!

Category: Movies
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