The Other McCain

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

Pansexual? That Sounds Like A Member Of A Splinter Group That Broke Off From The Church Of Appliantology

Posted on | April 14, 2011 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

Dear Irene:
No.
Yours,
Smitty

Sixteen-year-old Irene Rojas-Carroll, an activist who calls herself a “pansexual,” is the star of a San Francisco Chronicle story on a controversial California bill to mandate that schools pay tribute to homosexual pioneers in their history lessons.

Sexuality needs to return to being a private matter if the country is ever to recover. What Irene legally gets up to in her spare time could not interest me less. Nor do private peccadilloes require historical focus at the public school level. I suppose some kinks in history depended upon the kinks of the figures in question.
However, “pansexual” is such an absurd marketing gimmick that the only thing that comes to mind is Joe’s Garage. Have some self-respect, Irene. Rise above the level of a Frank Zappa satire with your humanity.

Category: Sex

Having Met Todd Palin …

Posted on | April 14, 2011 | 130 Comments

. . . I would advise anyone to avoid ever insulting the man. He is not particularly tall, nor ostensibly stocky, an easygoing, modest and quiet man by nature. Mr. Palin reminds me very much, however, of certain fellows I grew up around and, if I judge the man rightly, you’d never want to make him angry.

When such a man decides you’re in need of a good old-fashioned ass-whupping, he’s unlikely to deem you worthy of advanced warning. Which was why I posed a question to Mr. Palin’s wife via Twitter:

Dr. Bradford Scharlott is an associate professor of communications at the University of Northern Kentucky, who has called attention to himself by publishing a 29-page “academic” treatise, the essence of which is an allegation that Todd Palin is a liar:

The theory is that Sarah Palin is actually the grandmother of her purported son Trig, not the mother, and that she staged a gigantic hoax during the campaign to cover up this fact. . . .
Scharlott’s article walks through all the evidence supporting the theory, including the photos of Palin in what is said to have been a late-stage pregnancy, the leisurely 20-hour trip home that Palin took after she supposedly went into labor in Texas, the refusal of the hospital where Trig was supposedly born to even confirm that he was born there (let alone who was the mother), strange statements from Palin’s doctor and the McCain campaign, and so on.

As I say, I have met Todd Palin, seen Trig scamper around the living room of the Palin family’s lakefront home in Wasilla, and watched Todd read a storybook to the adorable little tyke. Todd just rolled his eyes in disgust at my cautiously indirect mention of the “Trig Truther” nonsense, but I’d double-dog dare any of those fools to try presenting the so-called “evidence” for their lunatic theory while Todd Palin was in the room.

Yet I didn’t need to meet Todd and Trig to recognize Trig-Trutherism as lunacy. In August 2009, while dealing with vicious anti-Palin blogger “Audrey,” I wrote: 

[T]he moonbats are insinuating that Bristol is actually Trig’s mother, and Sarah his grandmother . . . Such insinuations collapse at first contact with reality:

What the Trig Truthers are trying to insinuate is that Bristol gave birth in April, conceived again almost immediately after Trig’s delivery and then, barely eight months after the birth of her first child, delivered her second child — healthy and apparently full-term — shortly after Christmas.
To the extent that this is not a medical impossibility, it certainly seems both unlikely and unnatural to say nothing of what we bloggers sometimes call “nucking futs.”

So if Palin’s pregnancy was a “hoax,” if she faked a pregnancy to disguise the fact that Trig was in fact Bristol’s child, this would seem to require that mere days after giving birth to Trig — scarcely permitting time to heal from that experience — Bristol became pregnant again so as to give birth to full-term baby Tripp exactly 255 days after giving birth to Trig.

Normal gestation period is 40 weeks (280 days). There have been instances where, impatient with the normal post-partum healing period (six weeks is usually recommended), ardent couples have conceived again within a month or two of giving birth.

Such are the circumstances of the phenomenon commonly called “Irish twins,” two babies born to the same couple less than a year apart. But it is ludicrous to suggest that this could explain Trig and Tripp as both being Bristol’s babies: At a bare minimum, allowing just two weeks after an April 18 childbirth before she again ovulated, this would put the second conception date no earlier than May 2. A second baby born Dec. 29 would make the gestation period for Tripp just 241 days — more than a month premature.

How many 34-week babies weigh 7-and-half pounds?

As if this were not in itself ironclad disproof of the Trig-Truther theory, there is still the matter of Trig being born with Down Syndrome and, as I first pointed out on Sept. 1, 2008, this is a condition closely correlated with advanced maternal age. At age 44, the odds of Sarah Palin giving birth to a child with Down Syndrome were 1-in-140, compared to 1-in-1,400 for a woman under age 25. Given that Gov. Palin was thus ten times more likely than Bristol to give birth to a Down Syndrome child, and in light of the more-or-less impossible odds against Bristol giving birth to a 7-and-a-half-pound baby after a 34-week gestation . . .

Well, what part of “nucking futz” is so hard to understand?

It’s crazy, is what it is, and the craziest part of it is that these fools are calling Todd Palin a liar. By my calculations, the campus of Northern Kentucky University is just about a 15-minute drive from the airport in Florence, and if Professor Scharlott gets the ass-whuppin’ he deserves, don’t say I didn’t try to warn him.

UPDATE: Jesse “Gryphen” Griffin claims that he corresponded with Scharlott for two months, and that Scharlott shared an advance draft of this paper with him. This indicates that Scharlott is knee-deep into the festering swamp of Palin Derangement Syndrome.

UPDATE II: Kudos to former Palin spokesman Bill McAllister who, upon receiving a copy of Scharlott’s paper, called the professor “despicable” and a “scoundrel.” McAllister declared: “If we ever meet, I’ll slap you. . . . In a different era, I’d challenge you to a duel.”

McAllister wrote an op-ed column for the Alaska Dispatch, explaining how Scharlott’s paper tries to connect dots that aren’t actually connected. But this is what conspiracy theorists always do, and why any reputable university would employ such a despicable scoundrel is beyond me.

UPDATE III: Justin Elliott of Salon notes that the Scharlott paper is being “shopped” by a publicist named Jennifer Campana, who may be the same Jennifer Campana described in a 2009 Los Angeles Times story about layoffs in California. (Disprove it!) And Elliott’s article also reminds us of Dave Weigel’s rebuke to Trig Truthers:

Trig Palin is Sarah Palin’s son and it’s irresponsible to suggest otherwise. . . .
Were Sarah Palin to become president and everything the Trig Truthers believed to be proven right, it wouldn’t matter at all. But they won’t be proven right. All of the evidence indicates that Trig Palin is Sarah’s son, and none of it suggests otherwise.

Let anyone go read Scharlott’s paper:

  • On Page 2, he says there was “insufficient evidence for the press to conclude that Palin was telling the truth about Trig.” So, according to Scharlott, anyone can accuse someone else of lying and the burden of proof is on the accused.
  • On Page 3, Scharlott uses the tendentious phrase “purported birth,” the kind of dirty trick that would never get past the copy desk at any reputable newspaper.
  • On Page 4, Scharlott cited the long-since-deleted Daily Kos poster “ArcXIX,” and then an Anchorage Daily News reporter who cited the “ArcXIX” post as the basis for treating the Trig-Truther story as a legitimate topic.
  • On Page 5, Scharlott writes that the John McCain presidential campaign “chose to reveal on September 1 that Bristol was pregnant, alleging that she was in her fifth month — and thus, the logic went, she could not be the mother of Trig, who was allegedly born on April 18.”

Now, amidst all this “allegedly alleging” stuff, you see how Scharlott engages in insinuation, seeking to play on the suspicions of readers predisposed to doubt any word a Republican says, especially when it involves a pre-demonized personality like Sarah Palin.

As for it being “alleged” that Bristol Palin was five months pregnant on Sept. 1, she gave birth on Dec. 29 — a fact not in dispute — almost exactly four months later. (Last time I checked, 5+4=9.) And if it is merely “alleged” that Trig was born on April 18, on what basis does Scharlott suppose otherwise?

Does Scharlott mean to insinuate (just taking a wild stab in the dark here) that Trig was actually born to Bristol before April 18, which would for the purposes of the Trig-Truther theory provide additional time for Bristol to get pregnant again and have a full-term baby (allegedly!) in late December?

OK, fine: Where is there any evidence that Trig Palin was born before April 18? There is none. And so all Scharlott’s “allegedly alleging” insinuation is irrelevent nonsense.

I’ve just skimmed through Scharloff’s paper and highlighted problems from the first five pages. Let anyone else go take a look at the whole 29-page paper and see for themselves: As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there’s no “there” there.

UPDATE IV: Tom Maguire at Just One Minute linked Sully, who continues to express outrage at “the strange — and, frankly, incredible — stories Sarah Palin has told about her fifth pregnancy.”

But let’s face it: Sully would find any story involving a vagina “strange”and “ncredible.” Also strange and incredible: Nothing from Ace about this?

Damn. That boy’s slipping in his old age.

UPDATE V: Linked by Josh Painter at Texas for Palin — thanks!

UPDATE VI: The Lonely Conservative points out medical studies showing that women pregnant with Down Syndrome babies tend to gain less weight during pregnancy, which goes toward rebutting the whole “but-she-didn’t-look-pregnant” meme of Trig Trutherism.

Category: Sarah Palin

Usefully Dealing With Birtherism

Posted on | April 14, 2011 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

It’s really cool of The Donald to go all high dudgeon about the birther nonsense this late in the presidential term. Dealing with it in a useful way, in contrast, is Arizona, whose ‘fool us once’ measure goes to the Senate.

As with checking for valid ID at a polling place, checking for valid eligibility of people getting on the ballot is one of those common sense measures. It’s a good litmus test for idiots, too: why would anybody oppose this with wholesome motivation? Seriously, such could exist, but it’s hard to imagine what they would be.

Category: Arizona, Barack Obama, Gateway Pundit

Eating Crow About Sprinklerman

Posted on | April 14, 2011 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

Indeed, Boehner’s great big little cuts seem hardly a cause for capillary bleeding. The anti-Boehner chorus was a tad too shrill, in my estimate. Then again, I had relatively low expectations for the 112th Congress.

You have to understand that our Ruling Class overlords still expect Americans to balk at the pain of any real political chemotherapy. Hence Boehner’s shenanigans. Still, one can’t talk trash at this level without being willing to eat crow:

Yummy!

Da Tech Guy opines:

If Boehner is throwing away the trust of the activists who got him that chair then the GOP will deserve all that they get from it.

Forced to admit Riehl is spot on here:

The GOP has been reluctant to go after Obama as hard as he does them all the way back to 2008. Short of Sarah Palin being elected as a Representative from Alaska tomorrow and then elected Speaker the day after that, I’m hard pressed to see a way for things to change given current leadership.
Part of it may have to do with race, some of it may be traditional GOP fears of losing media battles, still more of it may come from weak and shriveled old GOP hands in Washington too long, who believe business as usual is going to get done in Washington the way it always has. It isn’t.

My gut is that the GOP is timid because they know the jig is up but do not know the reliability of the Tea Parties.

Category: Da Tech Guy, Dan Riehl, GOP, Weimar America

‘No Poor Man Ever Gave Me a Job’

Posted on | April 14, 2011 | 35 Comments

As an impoverished American — hey, buddy, you wanna try raising six kids on a freelance journalist’s income? — I look on in amusement at the self-described “Patriotic Millionaires” who insist that they should pay more taxes. I agree with Moe Lane: “Raise Your Own Damned Taxes.”

Contrary to all the class-warfare demagoguery pouring forth from Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself), conservatives do not oppose tax increases because we are beholden to the rich. Rather, the question is whether wealth does more good when it is invested in the private sector, to create jobs and economic growth, or surrendered to the federal government as taxes to support the metastatic growth of a pestiferous bureaucracy. Rich liberals have always failed to understand blue-collar conservatism, seeking to explain away working-class support of free enterprise as the consequence of a proto-fascist “Authoritarian Personality” or (more recently), bitter gun-and-Bible clinging.

Permit me to remind you exactly how old this game is:

“If you dismiss a priori the possibility that there are rational grounds for resisting the Liberal view of things, one necessarily looks elsewhere than to reason for explanations,” Buckley wrote in his 1959 classic, Up From Liberalism. Buckley observed that “one needs no advanced degrees in clinical psychology and psychoanalytic theory in order to penetrate the fallacy of The Authoritarian Personality” — the most famous work of Adorno, a leader of what has become known as the Frankfurt School of political theory.
Adorno claimed to have proven scientifically that American conservatism was rooted in psychological maladjustment, fostering a tendency toward authoritarianism, which he asserted was the fundamental source of European fascism.
However, as Buckley explained, Adorno’s argument was a tautology based on the implicit presumption that all opposition to liberalism was illegitimate and therefore irrational. Adorno’s theory was “marvelously convenient” for liberals, Buckley said, and it has been recycled periodically ever since.

In fact, whatever the cultural component of conservatism, the Ordinary American’s resistance to redistributionist Welfare State policies is rooted in a common-sense view once magnificently expressed by Ronald Reagan: “No poor man ever gave me a job.” Read more

Category: Budget, Conservatism 101, Economics, Moe Lane, Taxes

It’s Time Everyone Keep Their Naughty Bits Under Control

Posted on | April 14, 2011 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

This blog was relieved to hear that Girl On The Right’s cleavage is of the ‘First, do no harm’ variety.

In fact, I like to think they improve any environment I happen to be in.

Well, there you have it. Uplifting freshness for all. GOTR is responding to the The Carbon Trust Footprinting Certification Company.

No one, and I mean no one, can convince me that the climate change cabal is anything but a money-making scheme, similar to the pet rock craze of the 70s.

I think the pet rocks themselves may have been more clever. Still no word on what they’re doing with men’s underwear, but something that binds and chafes likely awaits.

Category: Blogging, Uncategorized

The President’s Speech: OK With Pepper

Posted on | April 14, 2011 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

There were about five references to sharing in the speech, as I read it on the WSJ. The whole sharing concept, and the generally surreal approach to governance evidenced by the administration, brings to mind none other than Pepper, by the Butthole Surfers:

Marky got with Sharon
And Sharon got Sharice
She was sharing Sharon’s outlook
On the topic of disease

Read more

Category: Barack Obama

It’s a ‘Framework,’ Not a ‘Plan’

Posted on | April 14, 2011 | 7 Comments

Last night I glanced at the White House talking-points outline of Obama’s Big Important Speech and had to smile at the effrontery of this part:

$4 Trillion in Deficit Reduction: The President is setting a goal of reducing our deficit by $4 trillion in 12 years or less. This deficit reduction would be phased in over time to protect and strengthen our economic recovery and the recovering labor market.

A very old Beltway trick: First, project the budget waaaayyy out in the future, where hypothetical rates of economic growth are always robust, revenue gains are inevitably encouraging and political opposition magically vanishes.

Next, propose reductions in spending that only get semi-drastic in the far-off-in-the-future years of such a forecast.

Voila! You’ve “reduced the deficit” by an Impressively Large Number!

Except, of course, that you haven’t done any such thing. Because (a) the anticipated economic growth never matches the hypothetical forecast, (b) the cuts in spending you “projected” to make six, eight, 10 years in the future don’t actually happen, and instead (c) spending continues to grow due to what’s known as “baseline budgeting.”

So it’s easy as pie to do what Team Obama has done here: Propose $4 trillion in deficit-reduction over 12 years, which when you do the math only amounts to $333 billion a year in spending “cuts” (or tax increases), except that trying to apply math to this “framework” is hopeless, because we’ve got no freaking clue what the economy is going to be doing in 2022 — by which time, of course, Obama will have long since become a very wealthy ex-president who can play golf even more than he does now.

Speaking of the Impressively Large Number trick, here’s another timeless variation: Just make up some numbers.

Call it $38 billion and if it’s actually only $334 million — hey, the president already called it “historic,” so who’s going to notice the discrepancy?

UPDATE: William Teach at Pirate’s Cove calls attention to the fact that Dan Balz of the Washington Post recognized The Big Speech as mere campaign politics.

Category: Barack Obama, Budget
« 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