LIVE AT FIVE – 03.02.11

Charlie Sheen — I’d given Charlie a good going-over Monday, and didn’t feel like going over him again. Maggie’s Notebook has more. Sheen-blogging can be addictive, and there’s just so much there to work with. Charlie featured his two substandard live-in trollops in a Tuesday interview. He’s the highest-paid star on TV and he’s shtupping a couple of not-even-pretty bimbos? Crazy. And now his ex-wife is going to the cops to try to save her kids. This morning on “Morning Joe,” the guys were yukking it up over Charlie’s misfortunes, but Mika kept saying: “He really needs help. . . . This isn’t going to end well.” I think the operative phrase is, “a danger to himself and others.”
“Fox Geezer Syndrome” — Old people who watch Glenn Beck are being brainwashed, according to people who don’t like Glenn Beck.
Julian Assange — He’s started mentioning “Jews” and “media” in a kinda creepy way. No rush to “Judgment at Nuremburg” or anything, but it does set the Spidey-senses tingling.
Media Distorts Wisconsin Polls — William Jacobson has been all over this story, and I heard Rush Limbaugh talk about it today. Long story short: It’s 20 months until the next election, so any poll about this kind of stuff is only a crude intrument, rather than a certain predictor of what public opinion will be when it’s actually time to vote, which is all that really matters in politics.
Bullhorn Evangelist Charged With Masturbating in Public Park — What is it about Louisiana? First, Jimmy Swaggart, now this guy.
Did Tucker Carlson Call Sarah Palin a MILF? — Rachelle Friberg says he did so on Twitter, before deleting the offensive Tweet and joking: “Apparently Charlie Sheen got control of my Twitter account last night while I was at dinner. Apologies for his behavior.” (Hey, Tucker: Did you know Charlie Sheen is actually on Twitter now?)
Natalie Portman Denounces Dior Designer — OK, you’re John Galliano, top designer for Dior, and you’ve recently been accused of calling a woman “dirty Jew face.” What to do next? Get drunk in a bar and start proclaiming your admiration for Hitler and making references to people being “gassed.” So then you get yourself denounced by a Dior-endorsing Oscar winner who happens to be Jewish. Obviously, this is a sign you need to be hanging out with . . .
Charlie Sheen — Because, in the time it took me to write this post, a judge slapped a restraining order on Charlie’s ass.

As Mika said, this isn’t likely to end well. Get help, Charlie.

UPDATE: Charlie’s Twitter account got more than 300,000 followers in a matter of hours. Among the 10 people he’s following? Alyssa Milano.

Alyssa: Please, please try to talk Charlie into getting help. He’ll listen to you.

UPDATE II: More “winning” for Charlie:

Police have removed Charlie Sheen’s children from his Los Angeles mansion under instruction from a judge who ordered they must be returned to his soon-to-be ex-wife Brooke Mueller, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned.
“My fangs are dripping tiger blood,” a furious Sheen told RadarOnline.com exclusively as cops were taking twins Bob and Max from his home.

The situation is reaching the not-funny-any-more stage, as I explain at The American Spectator:

Los Angeles Times media critic James Rainey said TV news networks are “aiding and abetting” Sheen’s “epic meltdown,” a spectacle he called “nauseating.” It is certainly no longer a laughing matter. Sheen’s popularity helped him amass nearly a half-million Twitter followers within hours of joining the microblogging site Tuesday afternoon. But if Sheen’s downward spiral into madness continues much further, all those people may soon be following a corpse.

Seriously.

UPDATE III: Tweeted this:

The link is to a Los Angeles Times article:

Psychologist Deborah Serani, writing at Psychology Today, joined the camp that thinks he might have bipolar disorder. (Last week, celebrity-addiction celebrity Dr. Drew Pinsky suggested that Sheen was “clearly manic.”) A lengthy analysis of Sheen’s recent comments on Time Magazine’s Healthland blog made a similar suggestion.
“His recent ranting behavior has led viewers to question whether the actor was still on drugs and denying addiction. Or whether he was exhibiting manic symptoms of bipolar disorder. Or some combination of the two. Sheen’s negative drug test suggests that addiction is unlikely to be his only problem,” wrote Maia Szalavitz.

I submit that no experienced psychologist who watched Sheen’s recent interviews could dispute that he is exhibiting multiple symptoms of manic-phase bipolar disorder. But the symptoms of a dude on the deep end 0f a long cocaine binge are quite similar, so until they can get Sheen into a secure in-patient facility and ascertain that he’s not coked out, a diagnosis of his underlying mental health will have to wait.

Y’know something? My buddy Joe at Valley of the Shadow has been bugging me to start rattling the tip jar for a trip to cover the California GOP convention March 18-20. If we can make that trip happen, and Charlie’s meltdown hasn’t put him in jail, the hospital or the grave by then, I might cruise over to “Sober Valley Lodge” and see if I can help Charlie chill out a bit.

Category: Celebrities, Jimmie Bise Jr.

Report: Obama Smashed the Tea Party Through a Plate-Glass Window

Posted on | March 1, 2011 | 13 Comments

“What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. . . . If the right forces us all to either defend [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
— Spencer Ackerman, from “JournoList,” April 2008

That tasty reminder of how our tolerant liberal media friends conceive their jobs was recalled by Ed Driscoll in linking to this astonishing exclusive at Ace of Spades HQ:

Obama Reportedly Suggested Tea Partiers
Are Partially Motivated By Race

Kenneth T. Walsh, in a “Special Report” for US News Weekly (2/26) titled, “Race in the Era of Obama,” writes that in May 2010, President Obama “told guests at a private White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing activists in the anti-incumbent ‘Tea Party’ movement. … A guest suggested that when Tea Party activists said they wanted to ‘take back’ their country, their real motivation was to stir up anger and anxiety at having a black president, and Obama didn’t dispute the idea. He agreed that there was a ‘subterranean agenda’ in the anti-Obama movement — a racially biased one.”

Astonishing, as I say, that the President of the United States himself would resort to such Ackermanism. But isn’t this really the same thing Obama was saying in April 2008 when he told his rich San Francisco donors that middle-class voters “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”?

As Ace says, we can no longer pretend that these “racist teabagger” smears are ginned up by liberal political operatives and reporters, “and that our post-racial president has nothing, nothing at all to do with them.”

Obama now owns all five A’s in “raaaaacism.”

Category: Ace of Spades, Barack Obama, Ed Driscoll, Racism, Tea Party

A Beatles Lyric Comes to Mind

Posted on | March 1, 2011 | 6 Comments

“Well, she was just 17, you know what I mean …”

It takes on a completely different connotation if you think of it in terms of front-page headlines:

Prince Andrew risks losing ambassador job as
girl in underage sex case reveals meeting him
— Daily Mail

The lads on Fleet Street know how to play a story like that:

Serious doubts are being cast on Prince Andrew’s suitability to represent Britain following revelations that he spent time with a girl of 17 while she was being sexually exploited by one of his billionaire friends.
The Duke of York, 51, was pictured with his arm around the bare midriff of Virginia Roberts, a vulnerable teenager hired to work as an ‘erotic masseuse’ and perform sexual favours for American businessman Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.
Later, she claims, Epstein’s friend Ghislaine Maxwell told her: ‘You did well. He had fun.’ . . .
Andrew, who works for the Government as an ambassador for foreign trade, remains close to Epstein, 58, and stayed at his New York mansion as recently as December – despite the financier admitting to child sex crimes in 2008 and being placed on the US sex offender register.
But the full extent of the prince’s proximity to Epstein’s offences was not known until Miss Roberts broke her silence this weekend. In a civil writ against the businessman, she alleged that her duties included being ‘sexually exploited by Epstein’s adult male peers including royalty’. . . .

Yeah, that will sell a few papers, especially when accompanied by this photo:

This photograph proves absolutely nothing, of course, except that Andrew knew the girl well enough to pose for a picture with her. And her assertion that she was “sexually exploited by . . . royalty” is not a criminal accusation, but was instead made in a civil lawsuit against a billionaire financier. So take that under advisement. Still . . .

Oh, boy, what a great scandal!

The Prince, a paedophile and the sex slave teen
— Telegraph

Category: Great Britain, Scandal, Sex

Jane Russell, R.I.P.

Posted on | March 1, 2011 | 14 Comments

The passing of Hollywood screen legend Jane Russell reminds us that nowadays everything is political. When someone famous dies, we can’t be permitted merely to remember the person’s life and work. No, the celebrity must be placed in political context, for how else shall we know whether to remember them fondly or not?

Turning dead people into political symbols, when they aren’t around to clarify the record themselves, is something profoundly distasteful. Neverthless, the post-mortem is political for many writers nowadays:

The last time I saw the late Jane Russell in the flesh was five years ago. . . . I remember being surprised to find out that Russell had always been a staunch Republican. Despite the notion today that most Hollywood celebs are liberals, many stars of the 1950s were quite conservative. Jane Russell was right up there with Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Lou Costello, June Allyson, Dick Powell and Jimmy Stewart. During a speech in 2003, she announced that “these days I am a teetotaling, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist.” She sure didn’t come across that way in her delightful discussion that night.

Why does the writer (Danny Miller of Huffington Post) have problems reconciling Russell’s “delightful discussion” with the fact that she was a “staunch Republican”? Whence this automatic assumption that no Republican is fun-loving, clever or cheerful? Put aside that question for a moment, and ponder how the writer subsequently subjects Russell to a litmus test:

Unlike many of her conservative colleagues, Russell was certainly no homophobe. She spent a lot of time in the Q&A waxing nostalgic over her openly gay choreographer in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Jack Cole. She repeatedly called him a genius and said he was largely responsible for the success of the film since neither she nor Marilyn Monroe could dance a step when they started shooting. Jane always seemed to enjoy her status as a gay icon, and she commented on the bizarre bit of homoerotica in the film when she sings “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love” in the middle of a training session for the Olympic team.

Where to begin unwinding this Gordian Knot of liberal assumptions? Let’s begin here: Why is it that a disagreement over public policy (laws treating homosexuality as a “civil right”) should be authomatically conflated with personal prejudice (“homophobia”)?

And perhaps next let’s go here: Is it really so contradictory that the “staunch Republican” Russell should notice and comment on the “homoerotic” implications of a scene where those implications are plainly obvious? Or is it really so odd that Russell “seemed to enjoy her status as a gay icon”? Has the writer failed to notice that Ann Coulter celebrates her status as the “right-wing Judy Garland”?

In an otherwise enlightening and admiring retrospective on Russell’s career, the HuffPo eulogist can’t resist sticking in the political dagger:

Some of Russell’s past affiliations I find completely perplexing, like her involvement with Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum.

“Perplexing”? Really, Danny Miller? I rather think this perplexity could be solved by reference to your third paragraph:

I was surprised to learn about the incredible work Jane Russell did for the rights of adopted children. After a botched abortion left her unable to have kids, she adopted three children in the 1950s but faced major hurdles in the process, especially when she tried to adopt a child overseas. She started working to change the laws, testifying before Congress, and was instrumental in the passage of the Federal Orphan Adoption Amendment of 1953. . . . Whenever the studio sent her on a publicity tour, she spent much of her time in that area working for this cause but she didn’t advertise her achievements. That night we saw her, whenever anyone tried to compliment her about her life’s work she just shrugged and said “That’s where God put me.” Normally such comments would make me cringe but Jane was so humble and sincere that I could see how her deep faith has guided her life in so many positive ways.

Hello? Don’t you think, Danny Miller, that Jane Russell and Phyllis Schlafly would agree — if they agreed on nothing else — that abortion is a very bad thing? Does it really seem so implausible that Russell might have had a special understanding that abortion victimizes women? And don’t you suppose that Russell’s advocacy on behalf of adoption was, as she said, a sort of divine mission — redemption through humanitarian penance?

To push back against this politicized post-mortem is to risk trying to win an unseemly battle over the corpse of the dearly departed. Danny Miller’s article is certainly worth reading, whatever its flaws, as opposed to Amanda Marcotte’s attempt to use Russell’s death as an occasion for — I’m not making this up — deconstructing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a “proto-feminist satire” that undermines patriarchy by making fun of “how privileged men become dull and weak because they’re so shielded from challenge.”

If the thought of such silliness makes your head hurt, and you’d rather remember Jane Russell as simply one of the most beautiful stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, please permit me to recommend Bob Belvedere’s “Gentlemen Prefer Jane.” You’ll certainly get an eyeful there and, of course, more than an eyeful is wasted.

Category: Camp of the Saints, Celebrities

Bye-Bye, Bardella

Posted on | March 1, 2011 | 1 Comment

For reasons previously explained, the press secretary for Rep. Darrell Issa was in an untenable position and has now been fired for it:

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) fired Kurt Bardella, one of Capitol Hill’s top press secretaries, after he provided e-mailed correspondence with other journalists to New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich.
Issa, in a statement Tuesday afternoon, said that the “information shared with Mark Leibovich appears to have been limited to Kurt’s own correspondence with reporters,” claiming that the internal workings of the committee — which include sensitive documents — had not been jeopardized.
“Though limited, these actions were highly inappropriate, a basic breach of trust with the reporters it was his job to assist, and inconsistent with established communications office policies,” Issa said in the statement released Tuesday afternoon. “As a consequence, his employment has been terminated.”

(Via Memeorandum.) One of the things that congressional staffers must always keep in mind is that they collect their salaries from the taxpayers, and that they cannot use their positions for personal or purely partisan purposes. If you want to go be a political operative, or if you want to hustle up a freelance income, no problem — but first, quit your job, because you can’t do that other stuff while you’re on the congressional payroll.

In Bardella’s case, it doesn’t appear that he was engaged in anything that compromised his boss, nor do we have any reason to believe that Bardella was hustling a buck or pushing a political agenda. However, any e-mails Bardella received as a result of his position on the congressional staff were official communications — the property of the congressman’s office, and therefore not Bardella’s to do with as he pleased.

By sharing those e-mails with Leibovich, Bardella was violating his official responsibilities. From a more pragmatic perspective, once it became known that Bardella and Leibovich were engaged in a project that excluded other journalists — and, indeed, a project that subjected those journalists’ e-mails to Leibovich’s scrutiny — it compromised Bardella’s standing as an honest broker of information.

Note to my congressional sources: You need never fear exposure for your secret leaks to me. I’m not sure how Politico got wind of Leibovich’s dealings with Bardella, but I’ll carry your secrets to my grave.

Category: Congress, Darrell Issa

Soap Operas Are Not Documentaries (and ‘Feminism’ Is a Word With a Definition)

Posted on | March 1, 2011 | 32 Comments

There has been, as Da Tech Tech Guy notes, quite a bit of sex talk lately on the right side of blogosphere. The Kathryn Jean Lopez column that inspired my musings on the Contraceptive Culture leads Little Miss Attila to many musings of her own, including this:

[A]s a former hippie I find the notion of staying on oral contraceptives for more than several years at a time fairly shocking . . . Manipulating your hormones is a short-term strategy; one doesn’t run a body that way.

The “former hippie” comment caught my eye, being old enough to remember the hippie era. It’s weird how some parts of hippie culture survived and some parts didn’t. Fashionable people are all into food that is organic and natural (being “natural” was a big thing with the hippies), but the same fashionable people do not object to women dosing themselves with synthetic hormones in order to maintain an artificial sterility.

Resisting the temptation to write another essay on that topic, instead I’ll note Attila’s invocation of Wendy Shalit (whom I first interviewed in 1999, shortly after publication of Shalit’s first book, A Return to Modesty). Attila sees “sexual freedom” as a Frankenstein monster rampaging out of control:

[W]hat we’ve created at this point is a situation in which women and girls attempt to ignore their own emotions and “out-detach” the boys. In practice, this means many have trained themselves to be sexually available, and make no demands whatsover–and, yes: in some circles, a request to spend time with a guy doing anything other than sex is considered a “demand,” as Wendy Shalit has documented extensively in her books. . . .
[W]e have to get back to a place wherein “sexual freedom,” as a cultural norm, actually includes the freedom to say “no.”

By all means, read the whole thing. Part of the problem Attila is examining is one of culturally-induced expectations.

Popular culture is saturated with messages that “everybody’s doing it,” and this message is conveyed in so many ways — from Cosmo magazine to sitcoms to Cialis commercials — that young people may not even recognize it as a message. Young people may believe that’s just the way things are and, to the extent that they are bothered at all by the hypersexualized culture, what bothers them is their inability to get their own experiences to match the excitement and glamour of sexual adventure as depicted in the media. Read more

Category: Ace of Spades, Feminism, Hollywood, Little Miss Attila, Sex

VIDEO: The Fight in Wisconsin

Posted on | March 1, 2011 | Comments Off on VIDEO: The Fight in Wisconsin

Check out FreedomConnector.com.

Category: Video

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The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE – 03.02.11

Clearing the Browser Tabs Tuesday

Report: Obama Smashed the Tea Party Through a Plate-Glass Window

A Beatles Lyric Comes to Mind

Jane Russell, R.I.P.

Bye-Bye, Bardella

Soap Operas Are Not Documentaries (and ‘Feminism’ Is a Word With a Definition)

VIDEO: The Fight in Wisconsin

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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