Charlie Sheen Agrees With Smitty

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“I would disband the Fed, like now. Shut that motherf****r down now, and send the I.R.S. to prison.”
— Charlie Sheen, in his “Violent Torpedo of Truth” show Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

While I’d have a hard time picturing Smitty banging seven-gram rocks of cocaine and cohabiting with two porn “goddesses,” when it comes to abolishing the Federal Reserve system, I’m pretty sure Smitty and the Warlock are on the same page. “Winning!”

UPDATE: Linked by Mr. G. — thanks! Charlie Sheen’s visit to D.C. caused a minor scandal that didn’t involve coke or hookers, Kerry Picket reports:

DC’s Metropolitan Police Department rolled out the red carpet for Mr. Sheen by providing a high speed police escort from Dulles airport to the show’s venue downtown. . . .
Mr. Sheen arrived almost an hour late to his show due to a child custody hearing in Los Angeles with his ex-wife Brooke Mueller.
According to the Daily Caller, the TV actor said upon his arrival at the show, “I just landed.” He added, “We had a police escort and we ran more red lights than Brooke Mueller heading to a pawn shop.”

More than half of D.C.’s homicides go unsolved, but the police can make sure Charlie Sheen isn’t late for his show.

Erickson Must Be Relatively Less Cynical Than Me

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by Smitty

Erick Erickson seems shocked, SHOCKED! that that GOP is ceding the tempo on the debt ceiling:

Now the Democrats want to increase the limit on the national credit card instead of paying down the bill. They want a free pass to more spending. Instead, the Republicans should accept the fact that no matter what they do they will never win over the press and should instead refuse to raise the debt ceiling without massive cuts and entitlement reforms.

The American people understand what it means to refuse to pay down credit cards and instead get new credit cards. They understand that is what government is doing. And they are tired of it.

If the Republican Party will not aggressively fight for real cuts and real reform in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, if at all, it very much will be time for a third party in this country.

As I was arguing yesterday, you’ve had a century of development to get to this cliff edge. We didn’t just show up. The Ruling Class as divided the people, with the Left taking the port end of the income distribution, and the Right taking the middle. The ‘sudden’ emergence of the Tea Parties, which seem ancient in Internet years, still isn’t older that the Perot-vian flash in the pan, back when Newt Gingrich had credibility.

Thus, the threat of a third major party is more useful than an actual third party, in my opinion. Shaking loose the Specter or Murkowski in centrist no-man’s land is more useful than having conservatives fragment. The only winner in that scenario is the Ruling Class.

The debt ceiling is an important battle, but pay more attention to the Rand Paul/Marco Rubio/Jim DeMint triumvirate for cues. We go to battle with the leaders we have. Sprinklerman and Eric “YouWhittle” Cantor are trying to get some right rudder on the ship of state. However, the President is using signing statements in overt defiance of Congress. I submit that:

  • The Tea Parties have to keep the pressure on the GOP, but
  • More than bending the GOP around the edges a bit will prove counterproductive.

We have a small target to hit, people, and the chances of a catastrophic cock-up are non-zero. Take it calm, take it stoic, and keep the pressure on.

VIDEO CLASSIC: ‘Pure Bias, Which You Demonstrate With Every Breath You Take’

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Kerry Picket of The Washington Times has not yet identified the two dudes who hassled her at a press conference with D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, but the one dude (pictured above, right) let loose with a hissy rant of self-righteousness that will live in infamy:

“Don’t pretend that you’re not biased. . . . You are obviously hostile and filled with contempt. I have no interest in cooperating with you. You know that you’re dishonest, because you really have a point of view that’s filled with bias and prior conclusions. . . . And the people of D.C. have voted, have voted against vouchers. That either matters to you, and is dispositive because we have a representative democracy, or you are utterly driven by ideology — which is clearly the case. . . . Pure bias, which you demonstrate with every breath you take.”

Now let’s go to the video:

Just taking a wild guess — a shot in the dark — Mr. Hissy Self-Righteous will turn out to be a long-time public-school employee and/or a teachers-union activist. Nothing is more ironclad in the minds of such people than their inalienable right to employment at taxpayer expense. Because school-choice threatens to deprive them of their monopoly of feasting on the government teat, Kerry Picket’s questions about Gray’s opposition to vouchers were like garlic to a vampire.

There is a Memeorandum thread, with blog comment by Weasel Zippers, JammieWearingFool, The Right Scoop, Hot Air, Fire Andrea Mitchell and Verum Serum

UPDATE: A little birdy tells me I guessed wrong about these two guys. Not union. Not school officals. I’m kind of surprised (but perhaps shouldn’t be surprised) to learn that D.C.’s LGBT community is staunchly opposed to vouchers, because they oppose tax money being spent to send kids to church schools.

Greg Mortenson’s Hope and Change

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A topic we blogged last week gets a deeper examination from Alanna Shaikh at Foreign Policy:

The world was shocked by a report on CBS’s 60 Minutes this week that accused bestselling author and humanitarian Greg Mortenson of being a fraud. Not only were some of the stories from his book fabricated, 60 Minutes alleges, but the charity that Mortenson created to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan never built many of the facilities it has taken credit for. Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea didn’t, as it claimed, bring education to rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its finances are a mess, and the charity does not even seem to have kept track of how many schools it built or how many students attended them. . . .
Why, exactly, did we ever think that Mortenson’s model for education, exemplified in his Central Asia Institute (CAI), was going to work? Its focus was on building schools — and that’s it. . . .
Over the last 50 years of studying international development, scholars have built a large body of research and theory on how to improve education in the developing world. None of it has recommended providing more school buildings, because according to decades of research, buildings aren’t what matter. Teachers matter. Curriculum matters. Funding for education matters. Where classes actually take place? Not really.
The whole CAI model was wrong. But here’s the truly awful thing: Looking back, it’s clear that everyone knew that that CAI’s approach didn’t work. It was just that no one wanted to talk about it.

Read the whole story, which is quite timely.

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof was completely taken in by Mortenson’s idea of building schools as a better way to fight terrorism than, y’know, actually fighting terrorism.

Mortenson’s book reportedly sold 4 million copies, because it told the bien pensants what they wanted to hear: The key to peace is education! “The more I do this, I’m convinced that education should be the top global priority. . . . We can drop bombs, we can build roads, we can put in electricity, but unless the girls are educated a society won’t change,” Mortenson said in a university speech where he “was greeted by a standing ovation.”

Now, it appears that Greg Mortenson was just a slick flimflam artist with a clever and appealing narrative, promoting an impractical scheme that would not actually achieve its stated goals.

Sound familiar?

Perhaps you will be surprised to learn that the U.K. Guardian describes Mortenson as a “favourite of President Barack Obama.” Perhaps not.

Just A Conservative Girl Now In Her Terrible Twos

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by Smitty

Fellow Virginian and righteous blogger JACG passed her bloggiversary, with kind words for this blog:

I would like to say a special thank you to Smitty over at The Other McCain. Even while defending our country over in Afghanistan, he still finds time to read my blog and link to me from time to time. Love that linky love Smitty. He also cracks me up on twitter. He and his wife are still deciding on what to name his first born son that is due to make his first appearance this July. I think Herman Cain Smith should be the winner. Just think if he does become the president, the kid will know how far ahead of the curve his dad really is. How cool is that?

Herman is indeed a noble name.
Actually, Mrs. The Other Smitty and I are considering Nicholas Dietrich Smith, at the moment.

Royalists for Social Justice?

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After yesterday’s post about the royal wedding, I decided to develop the theme into a column for The American Spectator:

Conservatives, predisposed to defend all things traditional and hierarchical, might naturally be expected to admire the British monarchy. But the remarkable fact is that most of the Americans obsessed by the royal wedding (and the media shamelessly feeding that obsession) are not conservative. The Will and Kate wedding is being hyped, and the hype is being consumed, by Americans who see no contradiction between their commitment to egalitarian ideals and their celebration of hereditary privilege. Liberals who quiver in outrage that American millionaires pay only a 35 percent marginal rate on their incomes — an injustice they blame on the hated “Bush tax cuts” — nevertheless seem unembarrassed by their adoration of British royalty. But then again, liberals spent decades pining for the restoration of a Kennedy dynasty, so perhaps we should not be surprised by their fascination with the House of Windsor. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

Biden Commission

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by Smitty

Really? How will Slow Joe possibly help in any way that Bowles-Simpson did not? The assignment says more about giving the VP some LEGOs to play with than it says about serious analysis of the crisis.

In his “excessively partisan” speech last week at George Washington University, Obama announced the creation of a second deficit commission to be led by Vice President Joe Biden. He also asked congressional leaders to appoint four members each to represent them at the talks, for a total a 17 participants, including the VP.

But so far only six have officially been tapped to attend the May 5 meeting.

One desperately wants to be surprised by this sad turn of events, but even that is out of reach.

Disagreeing with Dyer at Hot Air, we don’t need to ‘Think Big’. We need to think small, think limited, think about what requirements we are meeting at which levels of government. OK, I’m not really disagreeing with Dyer on substance, merely his title.

The graphical take, via PowerLine: