The Other McCain

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

‘It’s a Beautiful Story. And It’s a Lie.’

Posted on | April 16, 2011 | 8 Comments

A soi-dissant philanthropist is exposed as a liar:

Some of the most inspiring and dramatic stories in the best-selling book, “Three Cups of Tea,” by Greg Mortenson, are not true, multiple sources tell “60 Minutes” . . .
The stories in “Three Cups of Tea” have become the source of inspirational speeches Mortenson is paid to make and the partial basis for donations of nearly $60 million to the charity he founded. . . . Mortenson’s charity, Central Asia Institute, has spent more money in the U.S. talking about education in Pakistan and Afghanistan than actually building and supporting schools there . . .
The heart of Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea” is the story of a failed attempt in 1993 to climb the world’s second-highest peak, K2.
On the way down, Mortenson says, he got lost and stumbled, alone and exhausted, into a remote mountain village in Pakistan named Korphe.
According to the book’s narrative, the villagers cared for him and he promised to return to build a school there. In a remote village in Pakistan, “60 Minutes” found Mortenson’s porters on that failed expedition. They say Mortenson didn’t get lost and stumble into Korphe on his way down from K2. He visited the village a year later.
That’s what famous author and mountaineer Jon Krakauer, a former donor to Mortenson’s charity, says he found out, too. “It’s a beautiful story. And it’s a lie,” says Krakauer. “I have spoken to one of his [Mortenson’s] companions, a close friend, who hiked out from K2 with him and this companion said, ‘Greg never heard of Korphe until a year later,'” Krakauer tells Kroft.

Read the whole thing. After 9/11, Mortenson shared his “philanthropic” opinion of the War on Terror:

“I’ve learned that terror doesn’t happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It happens because children aren’t being offered a bright enough future that they had a reason to choose life over death.”

Which is utterly misguided: Osama bin Laden is from one of the richest non-royal families in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed Atta was from an affluent Egyptian family and had a college degree in architecture. But one finds this Mortenson quote all over the Internet, because liberals desperately want to believe that poverty causes terrorism. If this were true, supposedly, we could “fight terrorism” by sending money and Peace Corps volunteers to the Third World, just as liberals believe we can “fight crime” at home with welfare, summer jobs programs, etc.

The moral of the story, of course: If it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not true. But there’s always someone clever enough to cash in by telling liberals what they want to hear.

Which brings us to the Question of the Day: “Liberals pride themselves on being tolerant. Are they really just suckers?” I think we all know the answer to that question, but the liberal author, Sally Kohn, goes on to make reference to the “pathetic self-loathing” of liberals.

Really, did she have to remind us of “Conscious Men“?

Category: Corruption, Pakistan

Separated At Birth, Reynolds/Grant Ed.

Posted on | April 16, 2011 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

This is precisely what it appears to be, a blatant attempt at blogwhoring. You will likely never see me mention the dude on the right again. I thought the height of his acting career was getting his chops busted by Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary

Category: Instapundit, Uncategorized

Shouldn’t A Renowned Constitutional Scholar Know That?

Posted on | April 16, 2011 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Bernstein at Volkh raises the ugly point, emphasis mine:

Remember Iran-Contra? The problem for the Reagan Administration there was that Congress banned the president from allocating money to the Contras. The Administration, quite illegally in my view, tried to get around that ban by using funds from arm sales to Iran to subvert the Congressional ban.
At least the Reagan Administration had the decency to do this secretly, knowing that it was acting unconstitutionally. Moreover, the Reagan folks at least were able to claim that they technically weren’t violating the Congressional ban, because they weren’t using Congressionally allocated funds, but the proceeds from arms sales.
The Obama Administration, by contrast, seems to be brazenly violating the Constitution. As I tell my constitutional law students, Congress’s ultimate power is the power of the purse. If Congress objects, for example, to military action engaged in by the president, it can simply refuse to allocate funds.
But the Obama Administration’s position seems to be that so long as it issues a signing statement refusing to abide by restrictions on funding that it deems to interfere with executive prerogatives, it can simply create the funding out of thin air. If there is no statutory funding for the czars, where exactly is the money coming from?
This is a very dangerous position for the Executive branch to take, and I hope even Obama partisans will recoil at this. Imagine if a future Republican president gets the U.S. involved in a deeply unpopular war. A Democratic Congress passes a military spending bill that specifically denies the president authority to spend any additional money on that war after a 60 day period to get the troops out. The president signs the bill, but with a signing statement that says that the bill’s ban on war funding violates the separation of powers and therefore “the executive branch will construe the relevant section not to abrogate these Presidential prerogatives.” Democrats, and anyone concerned with the Constitution for that matter, would be up in arms, and rightly so.
If Obama had such serious constitutional objections to Section 2262, he had only one constitutionally proper move to make, and that was to veto the bill.

So, now what? Does Sprinklerman call the bluff, or is this just another notch in the chastity belt? These are some mighty ugly precedents. If the line is not drawn here, then where? The Libya business, and now this, seems like it points to a Mel Zelaya-esque disregard for both spirit and letter of the Constitution, as well as the centuries of development since the signing.
More at The American Thinker.
Bonus: in case you missed it, the literary event of 2009! Yes: Czar d’Oz.

Category: Barack Obama

Sissypuss Has An Industrial Strength Tinfoil Hat Competition Entry

Posted on | April 16, 2011 | 12 Comments

by The Blog Kitty

It all clicked. I get it. The point of the Obama/Trump birther conspiracy. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Hawaii’s most famous son. Jon Meacham, useful idiot par dreck-sellance gives us the clue here:

But that’s another story. Little is known of the story of the native-born clause. As reconstructed by Akhil Reed Amar of Yale, the provision is rooted in the framers’ fears not of immigrants, who were allowed to hold any other federal office, but in anxieties about imported noblemen.

Now, it can be revealed. The Obama birther business is all merely a front. To what end, you ask? To trick states like Arizona into writing legislation that could apparently cause difficulties for a sitting President, and whip his followers up into a froth. Then, like Meacham, they scream about the need to amend the Constitution to remove this archaic restriction. It all seems so nice. So reasonable. So only-the-most-raaaaacist-twit-in-the-country-could-argue-against-it.
And so it is done. And then what happens? Does the Ruling Class install Prince Charles over the old colonies, to tidy their atrocious accent? No, something more. . .spooky. . .

Soros

Past all this nonsense, here is the rub: we have 330+ million citizens. The argument that the Constitution should be amended should be built upon the argument that the opportunity costs of such an awesome candidate existing elsewhere in the world outweigh the political costs of Amendment, even in the face of all of the other issues currently besetting the country.
No, I don’t think such an übermensch exists, and I hope that this post has blown the idea out of the water on both silly and practical grounds.

Update: Memeorandum thread.
And it looks like Da Tech Guy is playing this one straight:

Trump’s shots have become body blows that are lowing the president’s defenses and Public Television that has always been there to help defend the democrats who fund them are going to try to soften the blows.

Trump is not my choice for the nomination, he’s not even in my top 5, but he has done serious damage politically to President Obama and as long as he is in play he will continue to do so. As Rush Limbaugh has said, the media will tell you who they fear, right now they fear Trump.

Category: Barack Obama, humor, Sissypuss the Blog Kitty

As Hollywood Turns: Charlie Sheen’s Ex-Wife Brooke Mueller Trying to Pawn Stuff

Posted on | April 16, 2011 | 3 Comments

Definitely not “winning”:

Brooke Mueller walked into a pawn shop in Inglewood, CA. early Thursday morning, and tried to hock an expensive men’s watch and a stereo . . .
Brooke was desperately trying to get cash for the two items … but the store would not make the purchase because Brooke did not have a valid I.D.
Brooke certainly shouldn’t need the money, because she’s getting $55,000 a month in child support, not to mention the multi-million dollar settlement she scored in her divorce with Charlie Sheen.

Let’s see: $55,000 a month = $660,000 a year.

And yet she’s pawning stuff? She’s required to undergo mandatory drug testing as part of the divorce settlement. If you’re thinking Brooke’s back on the crack, you’re not alone:

“Man, I ain’t never seen some sh*t like that, a cute a** white b**** looking for some candy on these streets,” said a man who identified himself as T-Mac.

I’m trying to picture a reporter, notebook in hand, taking down that quote from “T-Mac.”

Category: Uncategorized

London’s Gay ‘Kiss-In’ Protest

Posted on | April 16, 2011 | 3 Comments

This image is from a video posted by the U.K. Guardian:

Two poofters got bounced from a Soho pub after they started kissing and — because everything is now political — there was a protest:

The pub at the centre of a homophobia row closed its doors, as hundreds of people prepared to attend a “gay kiss-in” protest there.
The John Snow, in Soho, central London, became the focus of unwanted attention when James Bull and Jonathan Williams were asked to leave on Wednesday night by a staff member who allegedly described the couple’s kissing as “obscene”.
Williams tweeted about the incident, which propelled him and Bull, who were on their first date, to the attention of national media, leading to plans for a “gay kiss-in” Facebook event, scheduled for 7pm on Friday. The John Snow, perhaps wary of the impending siege, closed at around 3.30pm, leaving bemused drinkers locked out on the street with beverages in hand, according to one bystander.
About 300 people attended the scheduled kiss-in, which took place despite the closure of the pub and included Bull, Williams and gay rights activist Peter Tatchell. Just after 7pm mass co-ordinated kissing took place in the street, to whoops of encouragement from a growing crowd. “It’s still a victory,” said Paul Shetler, a senior director at an IT firm. “They’ve wound up losing a night’s takings because they couldn’t have a bunch of men with tongues in each others’ mouths.”

Coming soon to a pub near you . . .

Category: Gays, Great Britain

The Ryan Budget

Posted on | April 16, 2011 | 11 Comments

I’m tempted to call it “The Savage Young Ryan Budget,” but seriously, folks: House Republicans did the smart thing yesterday, and don’t let worry-wart Allahpundit tell you any different.

Not a single Democrat voted for it, and DCCC Chairman Steve Israel’s boast that this will help Democrats recapture the House is nonsense. Let the Democrats spend the next 18 months trying to demagogue entitlement reform all they want — the pressure is now actually on Senate Democrats for 2012.

The willingness of the House GOP to lay down a marker — take a vote on a definite proposal for fixing the entitlement mess — shows they’ve learned the lessons of 2005-06, when Republicans botched the entitlement-reform debate.

Here’s what most people miss about that: The Republicans controlled the House, and Tom Delay could have rammed through any proposal that the White House wanted. But the GOP wanted to play defense, so it was decided that the thing to do was (a) to send Bush out giving a lot of speeches about entitlement reform, and (b) let the Senate do a lot of debating about entitlement reform.

Talk, talk, talk — and the Senate never passed anything, so there was never any specific plan on the table, with numbers and stuff, that people could look at see what was actually being proposed. Democrats got an opportunity to do their usual demagoguery — “Those evil Republicans want to take away Granny’s Social Security check!” — without ever being forced to vote up-or-down on anything.

The House vote to approve the Ryan budget changes that. Now the Democrats who control the Senate have before them a specific plan, already approved by the House, upon which they can now be pressured to act. And with Democrats defending lots of vulnerable Senate seats in 2012, the question becomes: Where’s Harry Reid’s budget?

No more “talk, talk, talk,” you see. Reid can’t just kick the can down the road like he did last year, when he and Nancy Pelosi decided not even to pass an FY 2011 budget, because they wanted to play politics instead. Paul Ryan and the House GOP just called Harry’s bluff.

Obama’s gimmicky and unrealistic “framework” for deficit-reduction won’t work as actual legislation. Harry Reid and the Democrat-controlled Senate are going to have to come up with an honest-to-goodness budget, and the House is going to be sending over appropriations bills that will require senators to take votes, if the federal government is to be funded for FY2012.

Actual legislation. Actual votes.

The fun-and-games of just talk, talk, talking is over. And I’m convinced that Harry Reid can’t match the determination of the House Republicans, so there’s no way the Democrats can “win” this part of the process.

The American people aren’t as stupid as Democrats think.

Category: Budget, Democrats, Election 2012, Harry Reid, Paul Ryan, Senate

The Savage Young

Posted on | April 16, 2011 | 7 Comments

My hometown friend George Hall occasionally used to say he’d like to start a band called “The Savage Young.”

George and I had both been caught up in the second wave of Beatlemania that swept over teenagedom in the middle and late 1970s, years after the Beatles had broken up, and a lot of us “inherited” record collections from older brothers and sisters. (I got the Beatles Greatest Hits 1962-66, a double-album, when my brother went off to college in 1975.) Second-wave Beatlemania got a boost in 1976 from the release of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Music album (with great old classics like “Long Tall Sally” and “Slow Down,” as well as Beatle-written tunes like “You Can’t Do That”), and another boost in 1977 from their live album recorded at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964-65.

At some point in 1976, I read Hunter Davies’ The Beatles: An Authorized Biography (published in 1969), and was fascinated to learn the early history of the group: Playing “skiffle” as The Quarrymen, a series of name changes, early personnel like Pete Best and Stu Sutcliffe, the tiny clubs in Liverpool, then the pivotal period when they traveled to Hamburg and had to play multiple sets every night in rowdy bars in the Reeperbahn district. It was during their Hamburg period that the Beatles wore leather jackets and, under the influence of art students Astrid Kirscherr and Klaus Voorman, adopted their soon-to-be famous hairstyles. But they were still a bunch of tough-looking greasers when Astrid first took their photos in the Hamburg rail yards (above).

It also was while in Hamburg that the Beatles, performing as back-up group, recorded several tunes with Tony Sheridan, including the single “My Bonnie.” Tracks from the Hamburg sessions were eventually released in 1965 as an album called The Savage Young Beatles, and it was from that title that my friend George got the half-joking idea that there should be a rock band called “The Savage Young.” Read more

Category: Ed Driscoll, Music
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