“Cruise director”? I’d rather you thought of me as Rick Blaine in Casablanca: “We’ll always have CPAC.”
Yeah, that’s me. Bogie, hardened and cynical: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” The rest of you starry-eyed idealists are Ilsa or Lazlo, but I’m too wised-up to fall for that sentimental nonsense.
According to a State Department filing by Barbour’s former lobbying firm, The Embassy of Mexico decided to retain Barbour’s services on August 15, 2001, to work on, among other things, legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for foreigners living illegally in the United States—what opponents of immigration reform call “amnesty.”
“Haley Barbour and I will lead the BG&R team,” wrote Lanny Griffith, Barbour’s former business partner, in the filing. According to subsequent filings, Barbour’s work included “building support in the legislative branch for passage of a bill related to Section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.” As part of that work, Barbour’s firm arranged meetings and briefings with “Senators, members of Congress and their staffs, as well as Executive Branch Officials in the White House, National Security Council, State Department, and Immigration & Naturalization Service.” Barbour’s firm charged Mexico $35,000 a month, plus expenses.
(Via Hot Air.) That will go over real good with GOP primary voters in Iowa, I’m sure.
President Barack Obama’s proposed $3.7 trillion budget was slammed by the left and the right Monday. Outraged liberals called it a callous assault on the poor; dismissive conservatives labeled it a debt-riddled assault on future generations.
Which begs the question: Is Obama’s budget blueprint exactly what the president needs to capture the broad political center in the runup to 2012?
CNN’s Alan Silverleib clearly intends to signal that the answer is “yes,” which is the entire point of asking the question. Expect to see many further reiterations of this bogus theme in coming weeks, as the MSM pose their flexible “Moderate Obama” presidential action figure as a super-hero standing guard against “extremism” of all kinds.
You wouldn’t know that, given the way he has obsessively hounded me over a single blog post I wrote in December when Julian Assange was arrested. Recognizing that my attempts to clarify were a violation of the First Law of Holes, I posted my mea culpa, dropped the subject and moved on, but Tommy remains fixated. He even brought his Mediaite camera into the smoking area at CPAC to do an “ambush” interview:
[3:15] “I believe in ‘Thou shalt not’ . . . Wait a minute: I don’t believe in heavy petting before marriage, so how the hell can I be accused of being pro-rape? . . . I was angry at Jill Filpovic for taking the occasion of the accusations against Julian Assange to lecture us, as if we needed to be lectured, about ‘no means no’ and ‘stop means stop.'”
Among the personalities in this video, you’ll notice my filmmaker buddy Ladd Ehlinger Jr., as well as Angel Fleming of Fleming and Hayes, whose colleague Shane Hayes walks into the video toward the end.
I’m reposting this video as evidence that Tommy Christopher is weirdly obsessed with me. Consider the vast and absurd disproportion: I’m a freelance journalist and blogger, whereas Tommy is political editor and White House correspondent for Mediaite. This means that Tommy is being paid a full-time salary to pursue his bizarre Javert-like vendetta against a “popular conservative blogger,” as he describes me.
Frankly, I think it’s the “popular” part that bugs him most, but at any rate, there’s no way on earth I could be viewed as an appropriate subject for the kind of scrutiny involved in this video, or in Tommy’s previous blogging about me. It is not false modesty to say that covering the “Stacy McCain beat” is below Tommy’s pay-grade.
Notice also how Tommy pompously declares at Mediaite, “As you can see from this clip, McCain still holds many opinions that I find objectionable” — which is rather transparently his main point: The unimpeachable righteousness of Tommy Christopher.
Such preening moral narcissism, the pharasaical desire to strut one’s superior virtue like a peacock flaunting his tail, is the inescapable essence of liberalism. But you don’t need me to tell you that, when Thomas Sowell has written an entire book about it: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.
One might describe the liberal’s typical pose as, “I have noble sentiments and virtuous opinions — admire me!” This is why they constantly accuse others of harboring malign motives (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) and why nothing so outrages a liberal as when you deny them the admiration they so desperately crave.
If you’ve ever gotten into an argument with a liberal, you recognize this holier-than-thou game for what it is. One minute you’re arguing about a specific incident (in this case, the charges against Julian Assange) and then next thing you know, the liberal starts lecturing you as if you were a third-grader, demanding that you accede to whatever point he’s pushing. He throws out a hypothetical case or employs some inapt analogy that he thinks will prove him right, and if you call him on that, he’ll take the argument off in some other direction. This is when you realize that the supposed subject of the argument is merely a pretext, and that the real point he’s trying to prove is actually quite simple: “I’m better than you.”
Certainly, no liberal should ever imagine that he’s going to win an argument by trying to make my inferiority the point of contention.
OK, fine: Let us stipulate that you are in some sense a better person than one particular skinny redneck. Exactly what have you proven by that kind of argument, except that you think you can build yourself up by tearing other people down? At the end of the day, the facts of the case are not changed by your mere opinion, and you’re still an obnoxious domineering know-it-all who can’t stand to see other people happy.
Journalism is a profession woefully infested by math-impaired liberals, which may explain why the media have badly misconstrued the Obama administration’s federal budget plan. Here’s the Washington Post‘s spin:
President Obama will respond to a Republican push for a drastic reduction in government spending by proposing sharp cuts of his own in a fiscal 2012 budget blueprint that aims to trim record federal deficits by $1.1 trillion over the next decade.
In what alternative universe can a reduction of $110 billion per year (the simple math of $1.1 trillion divided by 10) in an annual projected deficit of more than $1.3 trillion be called “sharp cuts”?
President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget proposal, which the White House described as a “down payment” on fiscal austerity, proposes reducing the deficit over 10 years by less than what the deficit is projected to be in 2011 alone.
Obama’s budget does nothing to rein in entitlements — which represent by far the greatest obligation of the federal budget — and also leaves in place the administration’s cost projections for “Obamacare,” which independent actuaries say are greatly underestimated.
GOP, Independents Blast Proposed Budget
Boehner: “He’s going to present a budget tomorrow that will continue to destroy jobs by spending too much, borrowing too much, and taxing too much.’’
One of those weird stories that just drops out of the sky: Regular readers will recall my occasional go-rounds with atheist blogger Barrett Brown, who first appeared on my radar amid the 2009 LGF blogwar and has since occasionally popped up from time to time. My status as a sometimes combatant with Brown resulted in me getting a tip that Brown has evidently become a public-relations agent for the hacker group “Anonymous,” which launched cyberattacks against critics of WikiLeaks.
Unfamiliar with (and not hitherto interested in) this aspect of the WikiLeaks controversy, I’m not sure what Brown’s trying to do. Some of what he has posted on behalf of “Anonymous” reads like demented satire. He may be joking, or perhaps just trying to insert his name into the middle of a story that interests him.
On the other hand, if he’s serious, he’s insane, because to make himself an online spokesman for “Anonymous” would almost certainly suffice as probable cause for a search warrant to determine how Brown is in contact with a group suspected of criminal activity online.
Maybe Barrett Brown’s computer activities are squeaky clean and perfectly legal, and he therefore feels entirely safe using his DailyKos diary to bait the Justice Department into launching an investigation of him. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but trying to elicit a search warrant that results in the FBI seizing your computer would seem rather an elaborate P.R. stunt, even for a self-dramatizing narcissist.
On this side of the pond, Wyblog informs us that Miley Cyrus is slated to host an upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live. Remember when that show was funny? Me, too. But we’re both pretty old.
I’d like to know just how Dustbury found Abi Titmuss. Especially in that very appropriate lack of costume. On the other hand, finding out that Christina Ricci no longer looks much like Wednesday Addams (or Morticia, for that matter) is depressing, and I’m just going to move along.
At this point I must pause and give honorable mention to Great Satan’s Girlfriend, who adorns her every post with Rule 5 goodness. Come for the cheesecake, stay for the meaty politico-military main course!
Fortunately, Maggie’s Notebook is there to restore my spirits with a nice collection of J-Lo pix, some of which are mas desnuda que los otros.This is followed up with an interesting photo essay on dictators’ wives, which includes some very attractive young ladies as well as some who have aged quite well. Make with the clicky and check it out!
