The Other McCain

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

Jeff G. Schools Shep Smith

Posted on | February 24, 2011 | 9 Comments

“Let me clue you in here, you vapid hair-do . . .”

Just in case you’re wondering when Jeff went sour on Shep, let’s go back to September 2005, when Shep’s melodramatic flair was viciously satirized here, here and here.

Shep brings to his coverage the kind of detached stoicism one usually finds on the front row of a Liz Minelli concert.

And don’t you dare get between him and a parking spot.

Anyway, Jeff’s dispute with the vapid hair-do has something to do with labor unions and Jeff isn’t toeing the Trumka line, so I guess that makes him a bad Jew.

BTW, there is already a #BadJew hashtag on Twitter, and a support group of sorts. Mazel tov!

Category: Fox News, Protein Wisdom, Unions

LIVE AT FIVE – 2.24.11

Posted on | February 24, 2011 | Comments Off on LIVE AT FIVE – 2.24.11

TOP NEWS
Qadhafi Loyalists Dig In To Defend Tripoli As Revolt Spreads

Anti-Khadafy protesters in Tobruk, 2/23

Rebel forces take Misurata; heavy fighting reported in Sabratha

Obama Tells Qaddafi Violence Must Stop
Yeah, that’ll leave a mark




Hopes Fade In Christchurch As Search Continues
92 dead so far from yesterday’s quake; over 200 still missing and unaccounted for



POLITICS
DOJ Drops Defense of DOMA

The Attorney General. slacking off as usual

Michael Steel: “While Americans want Washington to focus on creating jobs and cutting spending, the president will have to explain why he thinks now is the appropriate time to stir up a controversial issue that sharply divides the nation.”

Obama Sits Out State Fights Over Unions

Indiana AG Fires Assistant Over “Live Ammunition” Tweets

CAIR, ACLU Sue FBI Over Surveillance In California Mosques


2010 Census Shows Oregon With Surprising Increase In Asians, Hispanics

Goldman Sachs Claims GOP Cuts Would Slow Economy



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
London Oil Futures Hit $113/Barrel On Libya Unrest
Apple Shareholders Nix CEO Succession Dsiclosure (Video)
Asian Stocks Mostly Down On Oil Prices And Wall Street Sluggishness
Top SEC Lawyer And His Bros Inherit $1.5 Million In Madoff Profits
Apple To Unveil IPad 2 On March 2?
The IPad Finally Has Competition: Motorola Xoom Review



SPORTS
Carmelo Anthony Helps Lead Knicks Over Bucks With 27 Points

Carmelo Anthony makes his debut with the Knicks

Helped stanch Bucks’ late rally with two field goals

Surging Sharks Deal More Pain To Pens

Tiger Eliminated At Match Play Championship



Does Wainwright’s Injury Put Reds Back In The NL Central Driver’s Seat?



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
D.A.’s Offer: Six Months In Jail For Lindsay

The courtroom styles of Lindsay Lohan

Lohan Says No Deal, Headed For Trial

I Tried To Dress Conservative!

Justin Tennison Of “Deadliest Catch” Found Dead In Hotel

Brooke Mueller Moves Back In With Charlie Sheen




8 Ways The Oscars Are Going To Be Radically Different This Year

Billy Ray Cyrus: “I’m Mending My Family”

Clooney: I’ve Done Too Many Drugs And Chicks For Politics

Rosie & Oprah: The Other Rift

Paramount Buys “Old Man’s War”, Wolfgang Petersen To Direct



FOREIGNERS
Countries Scramble To Get Citizens Out Of Libya
Saudi Arabia: Stifling Revolution With Riyals
Gaza Rockets Hit Beersheba
What Next For North Korea’s Hungry People?
Protests In Greece Over Austerity Measures
Zimbabwe: TV Viewers Charged With Treason



BLOGS & STUFF
Power Line: The Left’s War On The Kochs
JustOneMinute: And A Subsequent Administration Can Decline To Enforce Obamacare
Weasel Zippers: Santorum Rips Left For Distorting Crusades
Terry Jeffrey: Do Wisconsin’s Public Schools Deserve To Survive?
Helen Smith: Manning Up Or Wimping Out
POWIP: Has Clawback Finally Clawed One Of Obama’s?
Goldfish And Clowns: The Unbearable Lightheadedness Of Being Doug Mataconis

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five

‘Bad Jew!’

Posted on | February 23, 2011 | 33 Comments

A Jewish supporter of FreedomWorks is confronted by a leftist protester who accuses him of “not healing the world” (tikkun olam):

(From Ben Howe at Red State.) This angry woman screaming “bad Jew” exemplifies the moralistic radical certainy of the Left. For all their sermons about “civility,” the Left never hesitates to unleash this kind of frenzied carnival of hate against their designated scapegoats, without concern for whether they thereby create a climate in which a union goon roughs up Tabitha Hale.

As Lenin said: “Who, whom?”

UPDATE: Tikkun olam is a rabbinical concept that might properly be translated as “for the public good,” but which in the modern era has been politicized by many on the Left, so that it is indistinguishable in their interpretation from “social justice.” Most famously, Michael Lerner — a 1960s anti-war radical who once led an SDS splinter group called the Seattle Liberation Front — named his magazine Tikkun.

UPDATE II: Having watched this video a few more times, I noticed the older woman in the background holding up this poster:

The AFL-CIO is “healing the world”? Really? Richard Trumka and his corrupt cronies are pursuing tikkun olam? And then look at the self-righteous indignation on the young woman’s face:

This is a woman utterly convinced that she is on the side of Good and Right, and that anyone on the other side must therefore be an agent of Evil and Wrong, which is why she does not hesitate to condemn the FreedomWorks supporter is a bad Jew. And the fact that she has worked herself up into this paroxysm of fury on behalf of the AFL-CIO . . . How do you even begin to talk sense to such a person?

Category: Unions, Video

Thugs for Social Justice: Union Goon Gets Rough With Tabitha Hale on Video

Posted on | February 23, 2011 | 50 Comments

AFL-CIO rent-a-mobsters, including members of the Communications Workers of America, descended on the D.C. offices of FreedomWorks today for a protest. Tabitha Hale had a video camera going when she got shoved by a CWA goon:

Michelle Malkin has more details.

UPDATE: “There Goes the Union Civility Again.”

The Underground Conservative: “Is this what Rep. Michael Capuano meant when he said ‘Get a little bloody when necessary’”?

UPDATE II: Tabitha’s Tweet about the incident:

UPDATE III: Dana Loesch reacts:

Mike Capuano could not be reached for comment.

UPDATE III: Duane Lester: “Perhaps in lieu of compensation, Mr. Union Thug will just have to go through some counseling at the new civility institute in Arizona.”

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit recalls that FreedomWorks was targeted by death threats last year.

Now a Memeorandum thread.

UPDATE IV: Dan Riehl: “So much for civility, it appears it’s given way to assault and battery.”

Bryan Preston points out the obvious: “One of the absolute dumbest things anyone can do is take a swing at another person when that other person has a video camera on and recording. The momentary swing become permanent evidence of assault.”

CWA is obviously recruiting its goons from the shallow end of the IQ pool these days. I mean, hitting a girl? “There was a time when even union thugs would have left a young lady alone,” Da Tech Guy says.

Professor Glenn Reynolds: “[T]ake a look at the video and you’ll see the angry, yet impotent face of today’s labor movement.”

UPDATE V: Linked by Doug at the Daley Gator — thanks!

UPDATE VI: OK, pay attention here, because this confused me at first. Allahpundit was carrying on about speculation that this was Tabitha’s fault:

And so an obvious Narrative question presents itself: She must have been asking for this somehow, but … how? Perhaps she was invading this fine gentleman’s “personal space?” Or perhaps she somehow “manufactured” the confrontation to precipitate a little thuggery, thereby painting poor liberals in a bad light.

What? What was Allah getting at here? Then I saw that Allah had linked a Tweet by Nathan Wurtzel, who was calling attention to Tweets by Oliver Willis of Media Matters:


Willis has denied that the first of those Tweets had anything to do with this Freedomworks incident, and the second was his reaction to Wurtzel’s accusation that Willis was saying this was a “manufactured” incident.

OK, fine: If Willis says this was merely coincidental, I’m prepared to accept his word for it. Total coincidence — nothing whatsoever to do with the chatter that was all over Twitter. Willis just happened to have this sudden sense of foreboding about “manufactured conservative confrontations.”

And this is the point in the movie where Haley Joel Osment tells Bruce Willis: “I see manufactured confrontations.”

UPDATE VII: Linked by Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress — thanks!

UPDATE VIII: Let’s engage in a little hypothetical scenario, shall we? Suppose that a liberal activist had been assaulted on camera at a Tea Party event — on the streets of D.C., three blocks from the Capitol, in broad daylight. Do you suppose sucn an incident would have been mentioned by a mainstream news organization or two?

I ask this, because as of 8:25 p.m. ET, the only Google News results for the Tabitha-gets-thugged incident are from conservative outfits, including Powerline and the Daily Caller.

The Journolisters never report any story that portrays the Left in a bad light. But let a psychotic left-wing Zeitgeist cultist commit a mass murder, and watch the Journolisters rush to blame that on the Right. And even after the leftist leanings of the gunman are revealed, the Journolisters will refuse to acknowledge their error, nor will they admit that the error was caused by their habit of recycling Democrat propaganda and calling it “news.”

It is a key tenet of Democrat propaganda that the Right (and only the Right) is crammed full of hate-filled kooks who can be incited to violence by the “vitriolic” rhetoric of their spokesmen. In order to foster that perception, however, the Journolisters must be careful never to call attention to acts of violence (or expressions of hate) emanating from the Left.

So it is that these supposed arbiters of objectivity present a twisted picture of the world as distorted as the reflection in a funhouse mirror.

UPDATE IX: Little Miss Attila: “This is why we should try to have a second camera, so we can record it when the person with the first camara gets attacked.”

UPDATE X: Dave explains that this is the “New New Tone” — as opposed to the Old “New Tone,” which was what liberals demanded while they were falsely accusing the Tea Party, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh of inspiring mass murder. Then there was the Slightly Newer New Tone, which was when liberals accused conservatives of being “defensive” because conservatives kept pointing out that false accusations of inspiring mass murder were, in fact, false.

UPDATE XI: “Bad Jew!”

Category: Tabitha Hale, Unions, Video

‘Incredibly Sexist Assertion’

Posted on | February 23, 2011 | 10 Comments

The Lara Logan story proves to be the gift that keeps on giving, thanks to a predictable pattern: Someone attempts a reaction more complex than “rape is bad,” and immediately gets shouted down by angry feminists.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Thank God for Nirs Rosen’s ne plus ultra moonbat response, or otherwise I might have been denounced even more thoroughly than I was. (Getting myself denounced by feminists is sort of a hobby.) But today I got coincidentally linked by a feminist whose chief target was Toronto Sun columnist Peter Worthington:

There’s an understandable feeling of horror that 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan would be attacked and “brutally sexually assaulted” for some 30 minutes while covering crowds rejoicing the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. . . .
Should women journalists with small children at home, be covering violent stories or putting themselves at risk? It’s a form of self-indulgence and abdication of a higher responsibility to family. . . .
Apparently, against the advice of her bosses, Logan insisted on staying with the crew when they returned to Egypt.
It was the right thing for her to do journalistically — unless, of course, she had small children, which was the case. Her son (from a second marriage) was born in 2009 and should have taken precedent over her wishes to cover the world’s biggest story for the moment.
This holds true for any woman covering wars or revolutions. . . .

You can read the rest of that, but you’ll probably find more amusement reading the hissy-fit reaction of Renee Martin at Ms. Magazine:

As I read this incredibly sexist assertion, I kept waiting for him to suggest that men had the same responsibility to put their children ahead of their careers, but of course that was just wishful thinking. The truth of the matter is that it takes a man and a woman to create a child, but it is only mothers who are set up with the narrative that they must be continually self-sacrificing. We appease women by claiming to celebrate Mother’s Day once a year, but this demands that women continually put aside their personal desires or ambitions. It depoliticizes motherhood and keeps women compliant.

You can read the rest of that over-the-top screed. And it is the over-the-top quality of Martin’s reaction that elicits attention.

However offended anyone might be by Worthington’s “incredibly sexist” column, isn’t he expressing rather a common-sense sentiment by saying that the mother of a two-year-old ought not be deployed to a de facto war zone? Isn’t it also common sense to say that a mother’s relationship to her young children, her daily involvement in their lives, is more important than that of the father?

It certainly doesn’t strike me as a “sexist” attempt to justify male supremacy, much less an expression of “misogyny” (a word that Martin slings about casually, as feminists always do) to say that motherhood is a special role, deserving of special protections.

Isn’t it actually more misogynistic to derogate motherhood, and to say that a women’s role in child-rearing should be treated as an afterthought? Yet a fanatical commitment to equality is one of those ideas that have consequences, and if motherhood is an obtacle to equality, then feminists are compelled to insist that motherhood be trampled into the dust.

For the sake of grim irony, I should point out that in her blog bio at Womanist Musings, Renee Martin writes: “I am the mother of two darling little boys that fill my life with hope.”

Martin’s attack on motherhood as a “self-sacrificing” endeavor overlooks the fact that marriage and responsible fatherhood also require sacrifice of men. A single fellow can pursue the footloose-and-fancy-free life to his heart’s content, but once he’s got a wife and children, he has a duty to devote himself to their support, and society will judge him according to how well he meets that duty.

Speaking of which, you ought to hit my tip-jar, sparing me condemnation for failure as a breadwinner.

Dr. Helen Smith has some related thoughts on women’s expectations of men. Of course, she’s got the husband of every blogwife’s dreams.


Category: Feminism

Mike Capuano: Thug 4 Life

Posted on | February 23, 2011 | 12 Comments

“He’s a thug, plain and simple,” says Pundette, after Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Mike Capuano demonstrated the liberal “New Tone” at a union rally in Boston:

“I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary,” Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Ma.) told a crowd in Boston on Tuesday rallying in solidarity for Wisconsin union members.

Head-busting union goons — like the SEIU thugs who recently roughed up a Tea Party supporter in Denver — are surely grateful to know they have Capuano’s enthusiastic support. Because of the decline of union membership, most young people today know little of the coercion, intimidation and outright terrorism by which Big Labor has always operated, and it still goes on to this day. As Karen Kerrigan noted in a 2002 article, “According to the National Institute of Labor Relations Research, there have been over 9,000 reported acts of union violence since 1975. These incidents have included intimidation, sexual and racial harassment, physical violence, vandalism and even death.”

Big Labor likes nothing better than having its Democrat buddies in charge, so they can use the force of government to extract money from the pockets of the unwilling:

Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.

As Mike Hendrix at Cold Fury points out, this creates a “nice, tight, and very vicious little circle”: Taxpayers are forced to pay more to government employees, who are in turn forced to pay dues to the unions, which then give money to elect Democrats, who then give generous concessions to unions — and round and round we go!

Da Tech Guy was at the rally in Boston and got this video of a union member who expressed the basic rationale of Big Labor:

“You want to go make seven, eight dollars an hour, go make seven, eight dollars an hour. You know, we fight for what we believe in here so we can make prevailing wage and have benefits.”

Implicit in this assertion is the belief that the only way anyone can ever receive higher wages is through the “collective bargaining” (or to say it more honestly, the organized intimidation) power of unions. That this belief system amounts to a license to commit extortion against employers, and an authorization of violence against uncooperative workers, is self-evident.

The labor-union mentality involves a vast galaxy of false and pernicious beliefs that require more time to explain and unravel than I’m willing to devote to the topic here. However, the net effect is to convince workers of their own lack of individual agency, so that they think their working lives have no value except what they can extort through “collective bargaining.” Where that mentality can eventually lead may be surmised from Da Tech Guy’s Examiner column:

The basic union argument was that Wisconsin was trying to bust unions. A former nonunion ironworker who now was in the union talked about how he found himself protected by the solidarity and the contracts of the union and made a strong case for his side.
On the other side a gentleman from the former Soviet Union equated the union side to the old communist apparatchiks of his youth where the benefits were actually shared by a few.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: As only Jeff Goldstein can say, “What? Too soon?”

Once you decide that the ends justify the means, it’s only a matter of time before you find yourself pondering what Hayek meant to explain in “Why the Worst Get on Top.” This is why the pervasive corruption of labor unions (e.g., the Missouri local president who embezzled nearly $70,000 from an SEIU-affiliated union) should never surprise us. Do we really expect to find honest men in charge of an extortion racket?

Category: Cold Fury, Da Tech Guy, Democrats, Massachusetts, Pundit & Pundette, Unions, Wisconsin

Judge Decides Federal Government Has Authority to Control ‘Mental Activity’

Posted on | February 23, 2011 | 15 Comments

Paging George Orwell!

As previous Commerce Clause cases have all involved physical activity, as opposed to mental activity, i.e. decision-making, there is little judicial guidance on whether the latter falls within Congress’s power. . . . It is pure semantics to argue that an individual who makes a choice to forgo health insurance is not “acting,” especially given the serious economic and health-related consequences to every individual of that choice. Making a choice is an affirmative action, whether one decides to do something or not do something.

Professor William Jacobson reacts:

Our thoughts are now actions. There literally is nothing the federal government cannot regulate provided there is even a hypothetical connection to the economy, even if the connection at most is in the future.

The Commerce Clause has proven voracious enough to swallow the rest of the Constitution. Any scraps left over will be devoured by the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

Category: Constitution

Palin, Newt, Huck and Cain, Oh My!

Posted on | February 23, 2011 | 25 Comments

Rounding up some 2012 news: Both Doug Brady at Conservatives for Palin and Josh Painter at Texas for Palin liked my reaction to “worthless two-faced backstabbing crapweasel” Frank Bailey.

What Bailey has done — trying to cash in with a “tell all” book damaging to his former employer — is a breach of a fundamental principle, best expressed by Elbert Hubbard: “If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.”

Think about it: The only thing that makes Bailey’s ax-grinding manuscript newsworthy is the fact that he once worked for Sarah Palin. So what he is selling (or attempting to sell) is the access he gained because of the services for which she paid him, and the trust she placed in him. She actually gave Bailey the password to her e-mail account! And this is how she is repaid? Ed Morrissey nails it:

Maybe someone should work on the title.  “Blind Allegiance”?  His allegiance seems to have been pretty conditional on getting favorable positions in the Palin administration, and when he didn’t get them, the allegiance apparently turned into dislike rather easily.

Of course, anti-Palin trolls (are these people paid to do this?) quickly infested the comments of my post about Bailey, citing this, that and the other thing “revealed” by disclosure of confidential communications.

Question: Why are we always getting these “insider” smears of Sarah Palin but yet we never see any leaked internal e-mails from Team Obama?

Answer: Because Democratic operatives actually believe in their cause, whereas too many GOP operatives are just in it for themselves.

Bailey seems to imagine imagine himself as doing God’s work in backstabbing his former employer. You may search Scripture to your heart’s content and I guarantee you will never find praise for selfish and disloyal servants.

Nor, for that matter, will you find any scriptural blessing for serial adulterers:

Newt Gingrich’s speech at the University of Pennsylvania Tuesday night quickly took a turn for the dramatic when the first student to question him brought up his admitted extra-marital affair and accused him of being “hypocritical” for espousing moral values.
“You adamantly oppose gay rights… but you’ve also been married three times and admitted to having an affair with your current wife while you were still married to your second,” Isabel Friedman, president of the Penn Democrats, said to Gingrich. “As a successful politician who’s considering running for president, who would set the bar for moral conduct and be the voice of the American people, how do you reconcile this hypocritical interpretation of the religious values that you so vigorously defend?” . . .
Gingrich has admitted that he had an affair with a staffer, now his third wife, in the 1990s — the same time he was advocating for the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the wake of the former president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. A damning Esquire profile last year shed light on that affair, as well as one he had with his second wife while still married to his first. While the source of Gingrich’s heckling Tuesday night was a Democrat, it nevertheless underscored the trouble many Republicans expect him to face with skeptical religious conservatives in Iowa if he ultimately decides to run for president.

Well, they’re not going to let him forget that, are they?

It has been said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but that doesn’t work too well as a campaign slogan. Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery, but forgiveness isn’t the same thing as a presidential endorsement.

Republicans almost universally acknowledge Gingrich as one of the great political thinkers in the party and admire his ability to articulate the conservative message. But a Gingrich presidential campaign involves little problems of a strictly biographical nature like that, to say nothing of his Dede Scozzafava problem.

Meanwhile, it looks like our friend Lisa Graas is on the Huckabee bandwagon for 2012, with a combination book review and interview:

In the book, Huckabee offers the pro-life view very eloquently, however he did not explain what legislation he would support on the issue of abortion, so when I spoke to him, I had to ask him about that. I decided that the best way to determine what his position is would be to ask him which sitting Supreme Court Justice he likes the most. He responded, without any hesitation whatsoever, “Scalia.”

You should go read the whole thing, because I like Lisa, even if I don’t like Huck. But you all know who I do like, and our friend Matthew Newman at Old Line Elephant has an interview with Herman Cain:

NEWMAN: Do you believe that never holding elected office will be a hindrance to your campaign?
CAIN: Many reporters and members of the elite political class would like you to believe that attending an Ivy League school or having a lifelong political career is essential to succeeding in public policy and public service. Such a perspective indicates how out of touch they are with the American people. Most Americans cannot identify with lifetime politicians. They can identify with someone who has run several businesses, raised a family, survived cancer and achieved his American Dream.
And besides, all of the people in Washington, D.C. have political experience. How’s that working out, for you?

Go read the rest of that. You’ll also want to read Cain’s column in Investor’s Business Daily:

Being in a leadership position without leading is called position-ship.
And when you truly lead, you will be criticized because working on the right problems, setting the right priorities, surrounding yourself with the right people and developing the right plans will not make everybody happy.

This column was called to my attention by a Cain supporter who pointed out that Sarah Palin promoted it on her Facebook page and her Twitter feed. That prompted me to do some thinking out loud at The American Spectator:

Was the former Alaska governor signaling that she might not run in 2012? Or, perhaps, was her promotion of Cain’s column — praising Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s leadership — a backhand dig at Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who punted in his own showdown with Democrats and unions?

Reading the tea leaves is a favorite game of pundits, and I don’t usually bother with guesswork and predictions. Best to stick with what you actually know, and what I know is that Palin did everything in 2010 that a presidential contender would do in preparation for a 2012 campaign. So she has put herself in position to run, but the decision to run or not . . . wow, that’s tough.

If Palin runs in 2012 and loses, all the naysayers will say, “See? We told you so.” And then she would be finished, unless she’s able to stage one of those long comebacks like Richard Nixon did after losing to JFK in ’60 and getting beat for California governor in ’62. On the other hand, if Palin were to decide against running, the naysayers will say, “Chicken!” So she’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

And so we are left to ponder this one little tea leaf — Palin pushing Cain’s column — asking, “Does it mean anything?”

Maybe she just saw the column, agreed with it, and wanted to share it, without consideration of Cain’s status as a potential 2012 rival. And it’s no sweat off her nose: She’s the Big Name no one can miss, whereas for many voters, he’s still “Herman Who?”

On the other hand . . . Well, I’m sure you can see what might be on the other hand.

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin
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