The Other McCain

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

Credit Where Due: David Brooks Put It Well On Maher

Posted on | March 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

While this blog is normally unafraid to deliver the napalm shower for David Brooks, it would be ungracious not to give him a shout for this bit on Maher’s show. Props to NewsBusters for staring into that abdominal wound Maher calls a show:

MAHER: Their confidence is off the chart. If I had a nickel for every kid who come up to me and said, “I’m going to be on your show. Oh, it’s a fact.” I’m like, “Well, actually, it’s not a fact.”
BROOKS: That’s not necessarily a sign of high self-esteem though to want to be on this show.

Category: New York Times

Congrats To Another Black Conservative

Posted on | March 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

ABC is celebrating his sweet tooth anniversary.
I note with some shame that we’ve not been among his top referrers. We need to be linking the chap more.

Category: Blogging

Nina Totenberg, You Ignorant [SNL Reference]

Posted on | March 26, 2011 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

If you need any reminder of the contempt with which our Ruling Class elites hold the average American, check this Totenberg/Krauthammer transcript over at NewsBusters.
What really frosts my cake is that I really don’t think these people who are so quick to tell me how much smarter they are actually possess significantly superior intellect. Rather, they’ve been enjoying such an extended self-congratulatory “cirlce of relief”* that they actually believe their own line of nonsense.
Nina: beat it! And take Al Gore with you!

*as one of our commenters recently expressed the notion

Category: Liberals

Weiner Schnitzeled?

Posted on | March 26, 2011 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

Trying to go for a slightly less gruesome title than The Lonely Conservative. I can’t think of too many people I’d rather see squeezed out of Congress due to gerrymandering.
If they screwed up and left me in charge, I should like to see an open source map algorithm, as well as completely open data used to generate the smallest ‘reasonable’ congressional districts. There would still be politics about how the algorithm is constructed, and how input data are delivered, I am sure.
However, achieving transparency in our government should involve removing as many places for people to trade horses in smoke filled rooms as possible.

Oh, and here is a bit of topical ‘HEH‘.

Category: New York, The Lonely Conservative

Precociously Skanktastic

Posted on | March 26, 2011 | 21 Comments

Risking the wrath of feminists — who are already accusing her of misogynistic “slut-shaming” — Jennifer Moses wonders why “sexual liberation” must now be extended to middle-schoolers:

Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this — like prostitutes, if we’re being honest with ourselves — but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards? . . .
In recent years, of course, promiscuity has hit new heights (it always does!), with “sexting” among preteens, “hooking up” among teens and college students, and a constant stream of semi-pornography from just about every media outlet. Varied sexual experiences — the more the better — are the current social norm.

Among the many, well, interesting responses to Moses’s column, Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams begins mockingly:

Watch out, little girls. High heels cause sluttiness — and a lifetime of regret. But it’s not your fault if you don’t know that yet. It’s your mom’s.

Williams then goes on to accuse Moses of promoting a “mind-set [that] reduces . . . girls to the role of gatekeepers of male sexuality rather than participants in their own,” while she (Williams) would prefer that girls “think, instead, of sex as something to be shared with another person.”

EARTH TO MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

Slap! Slap! Wake up, you stupid woman! We are talking about teenagers here. A teenage boy’s penis is a heat-seeking missile, an indestructible cyborg that will not stop until it accomplishes its mission. Whereas our mission, as parents, is to prevent the predatory adolescent RoboPenis from getting its infrared sex-radar targeting system locked onto our daughters.

All that starry-eyed idealism about thinking of “sex as something to be shared with another person” may be fine for romance novels or Hallmark greeting cards, but it makes no sense at all when “another person” is a horny, hormone-addled teenage boy. Might as well teach sheep to think of mutton as “something to be shared” with wolves.

UPDATE: Awarded Bob Belvedere’s “Spot-On Quote of the Day” at Camp of the Saints — thanks.

As explained to Richard McEnroe in the comments below, the temptation to write an entire essay on this was resisted because (when I wrote it Friday night, forward-posting it to Saturday afternoon) I was very tired, recovering from my recent cold. But to add some background . . .

I’d just gotten through writing about billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein when, while browsing Google News headlines, I saw the Jennifer Moses WSJ column. Immediately recognizing that Moses’s viewpoint would enrage the so-called “pro-sex feminists,” I did a quick search and saw Williams’s reaction cited at numerous blogs.

While I hesitate to connect the Epstein story with Williams’s liberationist philosophy — obviously Williams would not endorse or excuse Epstein’s crimes — thoughtful minds reading both stories together might be inspired to ask: Whose side of the Moses-Williams argument would Epstein take?

And I think it obvious that Epstein would wholeheartedly agree with Williams that a girl’s sexuality is “something to be shared with another person” — although Epstein might add the caveat that “another person” should be a hedge-fund billionaire with a mansion in Palm Beach.

Which isn’t at all what Williams means to suggest, of course, and she isn’t at all to be blamed for Epstein’s criminal predations. But that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

So while I’m not trying to make Williams the co-villain in a farfetched moral panic about negligent moms enabling billionaire perverts — “Soon to be a Movie of the Week on Lifetime Channel!” —  there is yet something problematic in her theme of promoting an attitude of “sexual sharing” among young girls. The question automatically arises, “With whom will this ‘sharing’ take place? At what age? And under what conditions?”

Here we stumble onto the “is” and “ought” distinction. Williams certainly must have in mind some ideal situation, the World As It Should Be — an “ought” — wherein teenage girls are enlightened and empowered and thus exercise a preternaturally wise agency over their sexual lives. These ideal girls in an ideal world as imagined by Williams would never yield to peer pressure or tumble into the sack with the first semi-cute guy offering a four-pack of wine coolers while his parents were out of town.

In this Williams-imagined Utopia, teenage boys are perfectly amenable to the “sharing” ethos of sexuality, and are never a bunch of foul-minded oversexed animals just trying to score some action.

In other words, the ideal advocated by Williams requires that the existing reality of actual teenage human beings — an “is” — be completely transformed into an “ought” that, even if it could possibly be achieved, isn’t going to be achieved by the time some mouth-breathing pimply high-school sophomore boy asks your daughter out on a date Saturday night.

Whereas the ideal espoused by Jennifer Moses can be achieved immediately, merely by parents acting the way responsible parents of young girls have always acted:

“No, you are NOT leaving this house wearing that skirt! And tell that creepy Josh What’s-His-Name to stop calling you all the time! . . . . Well, if that’s the attitude you’re going to take, young lady, you can march yourself right back up to your bedroom, because you’re grounded for two weeks — and I’m taking away your cellphone!”

Problem solved. And no philosophical discussion about your daughter’s “sexuality” required.

Call this the Occam’s Razor Principle of Parental Authority: When in Doubt, Send the Kid to Her Room.

Category: Sex

Geraldine Ferraro Passes, Sarah Salutes
Update: Another WBC WTF

Posted on | March 26, 2011 | 16 Comments

by Smitty (via Snark and Boobs on Twitter)

News of the passage of Geraldine Ferraro saddens all. Prof. Jacobson has the shorter tribute: “I liked her, even when I disagreed with her.”
Sarah Palin offers an extended salute:

On the Passing of Geraldine Ferraro
by Sarah Palin on Saturday, March 26, 2011 at 9:29pm

My family and I would like to express our sincere condolences to the family of Geraldine Ferraro. When I had the honor of working alongside Geraldine on election night last year, we both discussed the role of women in politics and our excited expectation that someday that final glass ceiling would be shattered by the election of a woman president. She was an amazing woman who dedicated her life to public service as a teacher, prosecutor, Congresswoman, and Vice Presidential candidate. She broke one huge barrier and then went on to break many more. The world will miss her. May she rest in peace and may her example of hard work and dedication to America continue to inspire all women.

– Sarah Palin

Heaven rest Geraldine Ferraro

Update: from the Department of Tsk, Tsk, Tsk. (Thanks again to S&B)

Update II: via Doug Powers @Michelle Malkin:

In the name of the Savior you clowns at Westboro claim to serve, will you please give your nonsense a rest alongside the deceased!!!

Update III: Conservative Girl With A Voice gives good palate cleanser.

Category: Uncategorized

Federal Reserve Offers Increased Kinetic Mumbojumbo Action (KMA)

Posted on | March 26, 2011 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

It’s almost as if (a) people are gaining the impression that central banking is the all-time winner in the Faustian bargain sweepstakes, and (b) the word about the peasants gathering pitchforks and torches is reaching fairly high places.
The Wall Street Journal reports that quantitative easer-geezer Ben Bernanke

in April will start holding quarterly, televised news conferences, in the central bank’s latest effort to better explain its actions.

Despite the best efforts of apologist blogs, like fawner The Classic Liberal, the American people seem unshakable in their belief that the Federal Reserve is somehow negatively affecting the value of their currency. Hence the publicity press:

“The introduction of regular press briefings is intended to further enhance the clarity and timeliness of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy communication,” the Fed said.

Mr. Bernanke has held news conferences only twice before. Last month, he took questions from the media at the National Press Club in Washington, rejecting complaints from China and other emerging economies that the Fed’s policies were driving up food and energy prices around the world. Two years earlier, he took questions from the press to defend the government’s controversial bank rescues during the financial crisis.

A television interview Mr. Bernanke gave in 2009 was the first by a Fed chairman in more than two decades. He has participated in just one other, last December.

I, for one, feel bad that any posts I have put up in this blog may have contributed to the smoothness of Bernanke’s scalp, or the whiteness of his beard. It’s not a good thing to feel so passionate about the Constitution, separation of powers, and solvency of the country that you can’t get past the vast power wielded by this unelected, unaccountable, opaque Creature from Jekyll Island.
Instead, we should be thankful that one of our brilliant, urbane, philosopher overlords would condescend to explain to us low-brow rubes at the crayon level all of these mighty things occurring well over our heads.

The Blaze has your Beck Federal Reserve fix.

Oh, and also from The Classic Liberal, on the U.S. Code:

The next printing will come out in 2012, but the 2006 with annotations was 356 thousand-plus-page volumes that cover every aspect of life as we know it. The next one will add many new sections and probably more than 100,000 pages.

If Al Gore doesn’t silence himself and limit the Gore Effect, we’ll be burning that thing for warmth. RTWT. Weep.

Category: Blogging, End The Fed

Fortunately, It’s Wisconsin …

Posted on | March 26, 2011 | 23 Comments

. . . so liberals will have plenty of cheese to go with their whine, as the new law limiting the power of government-employee unions is enacted. Note the biased implication of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel headline:

Collective bargaining law published despite restraining order

Yes, despite the judicial majesty of Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi, as if thousands of years of ancient legal precedent enabled a county judge to prevent the enactment of a state law.

Evidently, Republicans haven’t won anything in Wisconsin for so long, Democrats have forgotten what defeat looks like.

Category: Unions, Wisconsin
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