The Other McCain

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

K-Lo Slams Contraceptive Culture

Posted on | February 27, 2011 | 46 Comments

Too many conservatives nowadays are unwilling to take on the cultural issues that underly much of the debate over public policy, so kudos to Kathryn Jean Lopez for directly addressing the accusation that Republicans, by seeking to defund Planned Parenthood, are “waging war on contraception”:

The debate in Congress was given momentum by the Live Action investigatory videos, which raised significant questions about what exactly Planned Parenthood is doing; but the rest of us need to discuss why we’ve let Planned Parenthood step in as a mainstream Band-Aid, throwing contraception and even abortion at problems that have much more fundamental solutions.

Lopez concludes:

As evidence of the reckless and dangerous callousness at institutions supposedly dedicated to women’s health — failure to report the sex trafficking of minors, failure to report child abuse — continues to emerge, we can’t afford to lose sight of another, more fundamental conversation that we’ve got to have, among friends, in our homes and churches — a talk about what it means to be human.

The “Republican war on contraception” rhetoric — recently employed by Amanda Marcotte at Slate and Amanda Terkel at HuffPo  — gets translated by the New York Times into a “Republican war on women”:

Republicans in the House of Representatives are mounting an assault on women’s health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception and life-saving cancer screenings and cut nutritional support for millions of newborn babies in struggling families.

Understand the fundamental premise being expressed by this rhetoric: Access to contraception is such a sacred right that access must be subsidized by taxpayers, and any opposition to such a policy is contrued as inherently hostile to women. This worldview makes contraception the essence of womanhood, a belief that is not merely unnatural, but is in fact anti-nature, because from the standpoint of human biology, reproduction is the entire purpose of sex.  Read more

Category: Contraceptive Culture, Planned Parenthood

Was Hoax Call to Scott Walker a Crime?

Posted on | February 27, 2011 | 6 Comments

Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection reports that the liberal blogger who impersonated David Koch in a prank call to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker may have violated Wisconsin law.

Category: Legal Insurrection, Wisconsin

Texas Terror Update

Posted on | February 27, 2011 | 9 Comments

I was getting ready to leave for my Ohio trip when Eric Dondero of Libertarian Republican called Thursday to tell me about his scoop about Texas terrorism suspect Khalid Aldawsari, who wrote in 2009 that he was “falling in love” with his English-language tutor, Sarah Rice Stender. I took an hour to put up a quick post, and was on the road when Eric called with an update — a Chattanooga TV station had confirmed that Aldawsari “previously studied at an English language center at Vanderbilt University” — so I called Wombat and asked him to add an update.

There wasn’t time, however, to try to put this scoop into context. Who is Sarah Stender and what (if anything) was the significance of Aldawsari’s infatuation with her?

Bryan Preston of PJM was the first to identify Aldawsari’s online profile, including the Saudi student’s Facebook account and blog, From Far Away. Dondero went through the blog to locate the post in which Aldawsari wrote about Stender:

I am falling in love of her…..
She is goregeous that I cann’t forget her just right away…
I am asking Allah the great to covert her to Islam and marry me.

What was at first confusing was that Stender’s Facebook profile (she was Facebook “friends” Aldawsari) listed her affiliation with Vanderbilt University. Initial news accounts reported that Aldawsari had attended Texas Tech, and later transferred to Southern Plains College near Lubbock, but it was not until later that his English-language studies at Vanderbilt were reported.

Subsequent reporting has actually confused the situation somewhat, because it appears there was more than one Sarah Stender at Vanderbilt. The New York Post identified Stender as “a 58-year-old former professor of medicine” at Vanderbilt. But that doesn’t match the Facebook profile of Aldawsari’s Sarah (which has recently been taken offline) and it seems unlikely that an 18-year-old would have been lovestruck by a middle-aged professor, calling her “gorgeous.”

Online records show another Sarah Stender, from Memphis, who received her bachelor of arts in political science and religious studies in May 2010, and it is almost certainly this Sarah Stender — perhaps the daughter or niece of the professor? — with whom Aldawsari was infatuated. Note that in his blog post about Sarah, Aldawsari describes her as being interested in talking about religion, so this makes sense.

The British Daily Mail mentions Stender in a long feature about Aldawsari, but so far no one has interviewed Stender to learn her impressions of the Saudi student who expressed such ardent interest in her. Was this just a transient crush? Did Aldawsari ever make overt advances toward Stender? If so, how did she respond? And if she rejected him, did this affect his attitude toward the U.S.?

These questions remain unanswered. Meanwhile, the New York Post reports today:

A powerful Saudi chemical company aligned with the oil-rich kingdom’s royal family were the financial bakers of the Texas student who plotted a host of brutal bomb attacks on targets in New York and around the country.
Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, a huge conglomerate that is largely controlled by the Arab state’s ruling family and run by Prince Saud bin Thunayan Al-Saud, paid for a scholarship that allowed terrorist Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari to go to Nashville to learn English.

And in a Saturday article that mentioned Aldawsari’s infatuation with Stender (but did not name her), the New York Times reported:

According to Mr. Aldawsari’s journal, he had planned to carry out attacks for years, long before he came to the United States on a student visa in September 2008. He wrote that he viewed his scholarship and his enrollment in Texas Tech University as a means to put him in place and give him the resources to attack targets. “And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives, and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad,” he wrote.

If true, then Aldawsari’s entire three-year “student” sojourn in America — including his English lessons with Sarah Stender — was merely a ruse, a means to a deadly end.

Category: Education, Immigration, Tennessee, Terrorism, Texas

The Other Shoe Drops: ‘Sexy, Classy Guy’ Chris Lee Was Looking for Trannies

Posted on | February 26, 2011 | 22 Comments

Two transsexual hookers contacted Gawker to tell about responding to this Craigslist ad:

Sexy Classy guy for passable TS/CD – m4t – 39 (Cap Hill)
Date: 2011-01-14, 8:55PM EST
New to area. Very fit classy, successful guy. 39, 6ft 190lbs, blond/blue. smooth hard body. Looking for a sexy ts/cd that i can spoil. I promise not to disappoint.

This revelation would help make sense of things that might have otherwise been inexplicable:

Chris Lee’s resignation from the House on Feb. 9 may be the quickest political downfall in history. . . .
Lee’s sudden exit took many people by surprise. Hadn’t other members of Congress admitted to worse than an unconsummated, PG-13 flirtation and managed to stay in office? . . .
But if Lee was using the Internet to meet up with transgender women, it now makes a lot more sense why he would have decided to resign so quickly: Lee may have thought if he quit the House immediately, he’d be able to avoid having his “secret” exposed and spare himself any further embarrassment. No such luck.

Now that Kathleen Parker is leaving “Parker Spitzer,” perhaps CNN will hire Chris Lee to co-host.

Category: Scandal

‘Parker-Spitzer’ to Become ‘Spitzer’?

Posted on | February 26, 2011 | 15 Comments

The logical consequence of one of the worst programming decisions in the history of television news:

“Parker Spitzer,” CNN’s troubled prime-time talking-head program, is losing its Parker.
Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion writer, will leave the ratings-deficient show after just four months, the network said Friday.
The program, which airs at 8 p.m. weeknights, will be replaced starting Monday by “In the Arena,” which CNN described as an “ensemble” program that will feature Eliot Spitzer, Parker’s co-host on “Parker Spitzer.” . . .
Parker writes an op-ed column for The Washington Post that is syndicated nationally and will leave to “focus on her writing,” CNN Executive Vice President Ken Jautz said in a face-saving staff memo released to the media. . . . .
“Parker Spitzer” has occasionally finished fourth in its timeslot behind Nancy Grace’s program on CNN’s HLN . . .
Perhaps worse, the program’s audience spiked during a week earlier this month when Parker was off the air. The program had its best weekly ratings in early February, fueled by interest in the crisis in Egypt, with Spitzer as solo host.

So CNN keeps Spitzer, but dumps Parker, evidently deciding that she was the problem, rather than the disgraced former New York governor.

And notice who isn’t getting fired: The CNN executives who came up with this retarded idea for a show.

Category: CNN

Malkin Pimp-Slaps Weigel

Posted on | February 25, 2011 | 25 Comments

MARION, Ohio — My buddy Dave Weigel has got arrogance like Rosie O’Donnell’s got double chins.

His smart-ass attitude already cost Dave a job at the Washington Post (as he has admitted), but his excessive arrogance still gets the best of him, and so today Dave decided to do something extraordinarily stupid: Point his snark at Michelle Malkin.

Dave, Dave, Dave — will you never learn?

I’d take time to explain Dave’s mistake here, but I’m on deadline for an offline project, so I’ll summarize what Dave did wrong in a single word: Everything.

And just FYI to Garance Franke-Ruta: Prank phone calls are not “gonzo journalism.”

UPDATE: Oh, what the hell? If I’m going to get sidelined and procrastinate, I might as well go whole-hog with it. Here’s Weigel’s lede:

MADISON, Wisc. — Michelle Malkin promises to do “the reporting the Tea Party-bashing national media won’t do on the rabid outbreak of progressive incivility and violence at Big Labor protests across the country.” Sounds promising! But here’s what she delivers. . . .

Weigel then goes on to bullet-point the contents of Malkin’s latest column, “Hate-a-rama: The vulgar, racist, sexist, homophobic rage of the Left.” He then wrote, “This isn’t really reporting. This is googling,” a sneer he retracted after Malkin pimp-slapped him and pointed out that she had done follow-up interviews with various victims of left-wing protest thuggery.

But you see that Dave was, once again, doing the arrogant show-off thing, as he made sure to rub that Madison dateline in Malkin’s face: “I just spent four days in Madison and the state Capitol, reporting, and saw absolutely no violence.”

For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t matter whether you think the Left or the Right is more guilty of over-the-top behavior at protests. Nor does it matter whether you think the mainstream media exaggerates right-wing misconduct while ignoring left-wing misconduct. Malkin has been the target of about as much leftist thuggery as anyone, so she is an authority on the subject, and as to the media’s bias, I’ve certainly discussed that recently (see here and here).

No, the issue here is Dave’s arrogance, his “Look at Me, I Just Spent Four Days in Madison, Reporting” show-off stunt.

And I blame myself.

After he got canned from the WaPo in July 2010, I talked to Dave by phone about his situation, and he said that several news organizations had expressed an interest in hiring him. So I told Dave, basically: “Make sure you get a travel budget.” Given the choice between two jobs with roughly equal salary, I advised him, take the one that offers you more travel money.

One of the sad realities of modern journalism is that there’s less and less money for reporters to travel and do on-the-scene reporting. Whatever Dave’s grievous faults — and grievously hath Dave answered them — he’s a good reporter, so one way he could really distinguish himself from those blogging-from-Starbucks pundit types was to become Dateline Dave, the Man on the Scene.

I haven’t had time to follow Dave’s reporting from Madison, but I reckon my advice might have had a little something to do with his Wisconsin sojourn — and now look what it has led to!

Well, let’s hope Malkin’s Pimp-Slap Heard Round the World knocks some sense into the boy’s head. As for Malkin, she doesn’t do as much on-the-scene reporting as she used to do, but she is still a reporter by habit and training, and she works very hard at what she does. She sure as hell didn’t deserve that sneering condescension from Weigel.

“Experience keeps a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other.”

UPDATE II: Any of my conservative friends tempted to derogate Weigel’s reporting skills should check out this article in which he goes behind the scenes with the protesters who turned the Wisconsin Capitol into a radical commune, which includes this interesting sentence:

The “War Room” of the Teaching Assistants Association is tucked away on the third floor.

Hmmmm. So the  University of Wisconsin Teaching Assistants Association — i.e., a bunch of left-wing grad students — played a leadership role in the sit-in.

And “War Room”? #NewTone!

Category: Dave Weigel, Michelle Malkin

Bloggers vs. Academic Freedom?

Posted on | February 25, 2011 | 9 Comments

“Current political threats to academic freedom have intensified with the rapid growth of new media and Internet connectivity that has made it possible for talk-show hosts, bloggers, and well-funded interest groups to supplement the trustees, politicians, corporate and religious groups, and journalists who previously put untoward pressure on the university.”
— American Association of University Professors

Category: Education

Greetings From Ohio!
UPDATE: Klanville, USA?

Posted on | February 25, 2011 | 25 Comments

MARION, Ohio
One of my 18-year-old twin sons has a girlfriend here, and he has a four-day weekend break from the Christian academy where he is currently a senior. So he spent his hard-earned money to rent a car and I was enlisted as driver to bring him here. We left Hagerstown, Md., at 8 p.m. last night, driving through rain that turned to snow as we got north of Columbus, Ohio, and arrived here at 3 a.m.

We slept in the living room of the girlfriend’s family’s home, and when I woke up at 9 a.m., I immediately set up my laptop and ordered my son to get me connected to the household WiFi system, the password of which is more complex than the encryption at the CIA. Once that was accomplished, I ordered my son to go to the nearby Bob Evans restaurant and fetch me breakfast and a copy of the Columbus Dispatch.

He took the girlfriend with him.

The snow is about six inches deep outside, and still coming down. And now the son and girlfriend have returned. The top front-page headline in the Dispatch:

Panel rejects union favoritism
In another blow to organized labor and the legacy of former Gov. Ted Strickland, the Ohio School Facilities Commission yesterday repealed policies favoring unions for school-construction projects.
The commission, now controlled by appointees of GOP Gov. John Kasich, unanimously approved a resolution stating it no longer would approve contracts in which those bidding for projects were required to designate who would do the work, how much they would be paid or other mandates.
The move reverses policies enacted under the former Democratic administration that allowed districts to require the payment of prevailing wages and the use of project labor agreements mandating the employment of union workers.
“We hope to make our scarce tax dollars go farther,” said Ohio Budget Director Timothy S. Keen, who chairs the commission. . . .

Suck it, AFL-CIO.

OK, so now you know what’s going on with me, and what’s up in Ohio. And it’s time to eat my breakfast.

UPDATE: Here’s a photo of the front page of the Dispatch:

Sorry for the poor quality of the photo, but if you’ll look at the lower right corner of the paper, you’ll see this headline:

Ohio ‘patriot’ organizations doubled, report finds

Ah, yes, it’s our good friends at the SPLC, their scaremongering propaganda turned into a local story by Dispatch staffer Randy Ludlow:

Reflecting a national trend, the number of anti-government “patriot” groups doubled in Ohio between 2009 and 2010, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The conspiracy-minded organizations, which generally view the federal government as their foremost enemy, expanded from 13 to 27 in Ohio, the report says. Nationally, their numbers grew 61 percent, to 824 groups.
“Patriot” groups, including self-styled militias, have grown amid economic frustration and “the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at minorities and the government,” the report states.
The report reflects a number of radical-right groups scattered across the state but does not estimate their number of members.
Ohio Homeland Security Executive Director Rob Glenn said the numbers belonging to such groups are limited but that state officials continually are looking for signs that extremists might move from rhetoric to violence. . . .
Glenn said the state has trained more than 350 police officers to recognize the signs of hate groups and others, including left-wing and radical environmental groups, that might be moving toward violence.
Of foremost concern is “homegrown violent extremism” that constitutes terrorism, he said. “That’s what keeps us up at night,” Glenn said.

Someone at the Dispatch needs to teach their copy desk how to write better headlines:

HEARTLAND OF HATE
Racist Reign of Terror in Bloody Buckeye State

That stuff sells newspapers, and if you’re going to publish press releases from the SPLC on your front page, you might as well go whole-hog with the sensationalism. Get your money’s worth, see?

Alternatively, you could do some actual reporting and see whether there is any justification for the SPLC’s claim of an alarming surge of extremist activity in Ohio. Except for his phone call to the OHS executive director, Ludlow’s actual “reporting” on the dreaded extremist menace was summarized in a single sentence:

The Dispatch attempted to contact the Ohio Minutemen Militia, which bills itself as a new statewide group, but received no response to an e-mail seeking comment.

Somebody phone the fucking Pulitzer Committee. We’ve got a winner!

One phone call, one e-mail, and the rest of it just repeats the SPLC press release — and this story made Page One!

Interestingingly enough, I went over to check the SPLC’s “Hate Map” to see what kind of extremist action was (allegedly) happening in Ohio and discovered that this town we’re visiting, Marion, is headquarters of the Brotherhood of Klans, which the SPLC describes as “one of the largest and most widespread Ku Klux Klan organizations in the United States.”

Great: My son’s girlfriend lives in Klanville, USA.

So far, I haven’t seen any brownshirts goose-stepping down Main Street here, but a quick search online reveals that, according to the Census Bureau, Marion County is 91% white. And the other 9% are presumably living a nightmare of fear, dreading the next midnight raid of the Klan.

Or so you might believe if all you had to go on was the SPLC and the half-assed “reporting” of the Columbus Dispatch.

Category: Ohio
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