The Other McCain

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

Washington Post Leads Palin Boycott

Posted on | January 22, 2011 | 15 Comments

Being a professional Sarah Palin-hater worked out so well for Keith Olbermann, now Dana Milbank and the Washington Post join the parade — which looks a lot like lemmings going off a cliff.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Why they do it:

After days of relentless attacks by media across the fruited plain, Sarah Palin’s unfavorable rating hit an all-time high this week. …
From January 8 [the day of the Tucson Massacre] through January 16, CNN ran 80 stories that included the name of the former Alaska governor.
That’s roughly nine pieces per day, during which her name was mentioned approximately 664 times or over 70 times every 24 hours!

(Hat-tip: Van Helsing at Right Wing News.)

UPDATE II: William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

Rarely do we get such a clear example of the bias of the mainstream media and the extent to which it fears and hates Sarah Palin.
But since she is “not electable” because of this media bias, we should throw Palin overboard and demand she not run and not be taken seriously by Republican voters, right?
Because Dana Milbank and the Editors of The Washington Post get to pick our candidates, right?

Category: Sarah Palin

Olbermann Out at MSNBC

Posted on | January 22, 2011 | 27 Comments

Contract negotiations evidently fell through:

Keith Olbermann, the highest-rated host on MSNBC, announced abruptly on the air Friday night that he was leaving his show, “Countdown,” immediately.
The host, who has had a stormy relationship with the management of the network for some time, especially since he was suspended for two days last November, came to an agreement with NBC’s corporate management late this week to settle his contract and step down.
In a closing statement on his show, Mr. Olbermann said simply that it would be the last edition of the program. He offered no explanation other than on occasion “all that surrounded the show – but never the show itself – was just too much for me.”
Mr. Olbermann thanked his viewers for their enthusiastic support of a show that had “gradually established its position as antiestablishment.”
In a statement, MSNBC said: “MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I expect Lawrence O’Donnell to get the 8 p.m. spot. Rachel Maddow’s good, but she doesn’t have a Y chromosome and MSNBC is run by greedy sexist pigs.

UPDATE: Background from Howard Kurtz:

A knowledgeable official said the move had nothing to do with Comcast taking control of NBC next week, although the cable giant was informed when it received final federal approval for the purchase that Olbermann would be leaving the cable channel. This official described the dramatic divorce—Olbermann was about halfway through a four-year, $30 million contract—as mutual.
Olbermann, who quit MSNBC once before — in 1998, ripping his bosses in the process—almost single-handedly revived the network by leading it on a leftward march and aggressively attacking the rival operation he called Fox Noise. But his relations with top NBC and MSNBC executives sharply deteriorated when he was suspended for making donations to Democratic candidates, and they began to talk about how the channel was now on solid enough footing to survive without him.

If Olbermann was too much for the suits at Comcast, they’re not going to want Little Miss Lesbian anchoring their 8 p.m. hour. Bet $20 it’s O’Donnell.

UPDATE II: The great thing about Olbermann was, he was so easy to parody, even a kid could do it.

UPDATE III: Professor Glenn Reynolds: “He was a useful idiot for a while. Now he’s no longer useful. Expect to see more of this kind of thing. . . . I was only on Olbermann’s show once, on election night 2004, when he was still more or less sane.” More or less.

UPDATE IV: As might be expected, several huge Memeorandum threads about this story. More from Donald Douglas at American Power, Left Coast Rebel, Jammie Wearing Fool, Ed Driscoll, Sister Toldjah, Gateway Pundit, William Jacobson, Nice Deb, Pamela Geller, Hot Air, Yid With Lid and Michelle Malkin.

UPDATE V: Aaron Goldstein at The American Spectator:

Scarcely a fortnight ago, Keith Olbermann was calling for Sarah Palin’s dismissal from politics.
Now Olbermann has been dismissed from the airwaves.
This is what we call poetic justice.

UPDATE VI: Let me show you the kind of stuff that used to drive me nuts when I was a newspaper editor dealing with Associated Press copy. The AP’s David Bauder:

Keith Olbermann was MSNBC’s most popular personality and single-handedly led its transformation to an outspoken, left-leaning cable news network in prime time. Despite that, he often seemed to be walking on a tightrope with his job. Friday night, it snapped.

“Despite that”? Don’t you mean, perhaps, because of that? Bauder evidently doesn’t stop to think if maybe Olbermann and the anti-Republican agenda at MSNBC had stayed out past their curfew. Once Bush was out of office and Obama became president — elected with the help of gale-force media tailwinds — what was the point of being the anti-GOP network? Where did that make sense from a market-share perspective?

By moving left in 2006 — becoming the raging liberal doppeganger of Fox News — MSNBC pushed CNN into third place. But then what? Where was the audience-growth strategy? They couldn’t go farther left, and the steady diet of liberal indignation had reached its saturation point. Well, never mind the bias. Bauder reports what I’d expected as soon as I heard the news of Olbermann’s departure:

MSNBC announced that O’Donnell, who had frequently filled in for Olbermann before starting his own 10 p.m. show, will take over Olbermann’s time slot starting Monday. “The Ed Show,” with Ed Schultz, will move to 10 p.m. Cenk Uygur of the Web show “The Young Turks” will fill Schultz’s vacated 6 p.m. time slot.

If MSNBC won’t keep Olbermann, Schultz’s days as Cable TV’s Angriest White Man are likely numbered.

Category: MSNBC

Blame America First!

Posted on | January 21, 2011 | 9 Comments

“Loughner is a pathetic symbol of the ignorance and paranoia eating away at American politics.”
— Alice Miles, “How paranoia infected America,” The New Statesman (U.K.)

How is it that one psychotic is made a symbol for all the other Americans who haven’t shot their members of Congress? If random criminals are to be said to symbolize America, why not the mafioso rounded up this week?

Why not Charlie Sheen?

No, when a British writer wants a “pathetic symbol” of America, it can’t be gangsters or Mr. Hookers-and-Blow. It’s got to be the 22-year-old Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferer who, despite the fact that he had no connection with conservatives — and not even much connection with reality — provides Alice Miles an excuse to criticize conservatives:

What Palin and others on the right in particular do have to answer for is not Loughner’s behaviour, but the diminution of political debate in the US; the way populist poses have taken the place of argument. They have seized on the First Amendment right to free speech and twisted it to encourage dishonesty and stupidity. Uninterested in facts, they offer a dangerously combustible mix of religion and politics, an elision of dogma, morality and “patriotism” which mirrors the similarly ignorant ramblings of other extremists. The internet fuels this ignorance, allowing myths such as Obama’s supposed foreign nationality to spread.

We’re uninteresting in facts, you see. We’re encouraging dishonesty and stupidity, and we’re using the Internet to fuel ignorance.

There’s something “pathetic” here, all right, but it’s not America.

Category: Arizona, Crime

The Economics of Love

Posted on | January 21, 2011 | 27 Comments

That’s when she told me a story
About free milk and a cow.
She said, ‘No hugging, no kissing
Until I get a wedding vow . . .’

Research affirms old-fashioned common sense:

As women progress in educational and professional opportunities, their odds of finding a committed man appear to go down.
That’s one of the findings in the new book “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying,” by researchers Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker at the University of Texas at Austin.
Researchers found that since women in the 18- to 23-year-old group feel they don’t need men for financial dependence, many of them feel they can play around with multiple partners without consequence, and that the early 20s isn’t the time to have a serious relationship. But eventually, they do come to want a real, lasting relationship. The problem is that there will still be women who will have sex readily without commitment, and since men know this, fewer of them are willing to go steady.
“Women have plenty of freedom, but freedom does not translate easily into getting what you want,” Regnerus said.
The wide availability of pornography has also influenced the dynamics of relations between men and women, Regnerus said. A segment of 20-something men are content to have their sexual experiences by themselves, removing them from the pool of available partners. That means high-quality men – likely those who want monogamous, committed relationships – are still eligible for dating, but the overall dating pool has shrunk, meaning some women will be left unsatisfactorily single.

Which is to say that it is in women’s long-term best interests to organize a nookie shortage — making sex available only on condition of marriage — and to revile as sluts those floozies who refuse to cooperate with efforts of the Nookie Cartel to increase the value of the aforesaid commodity.

But why lecture, when it has been so well expressed in a song?

UPDATE: Linked by James Nicholas, the father of two girls. Having daughters tends to help a guy get in touch with his inner social conservative.


Category: Culture, Economics, Marriage, Science, Sex

Feminism Is to Honest Debate What Kermit Gosnell Is to Humanitarianism

Posted on | January 21, 2011 | 3 Comments

Which is to say, its antithesis:

I think we’re all pretty well agreed that if the charges against Kermit Gosnell are true, then dude is a criminal and needs to go to jail. Killing a baby after it’s born and has taken breaths? Is not abortion. It should be, and is, a crime punishable by law. And Kermit Gosnell is being criminally prosecuted.

That’s Jill Filipovic at Feministing, whom last we encountered when she chose the occasion of Julian Assange’s arrest to lecture us about “no means no” and “stop means stop” but who, evidently, can’t get her mind around such a complex concept as “Thou shalt not kill.”

Fortunately, there is no need for me to refute Filipovic’s counterfactual insistence that the Gosnell case has nothing to do with the legality of abortion, because her late-term fisking has already been accomplished:

So, um… very glib, very semantic, but, even granting the Humpty Dumpty power to just say “these were not abortions” despite the fact that the women showed up for abortions at a place known for late-term illegal abortions and the doctor performed what he called an abortion, in fact 33 counts are about illegal abortions. The eight murder charges are just about the babies he decided it would be easier to deliver and kill. . . .

That’s Ace of Spades, Esq., and you should read the whole damned thing.

Category: Abortion, Ace of Spades, Feminism

Professor on Aborted Babies: ‘I Look at Them Unflinchingly and See Meat’

Posted on | January 21, 2011 | 57 Comments

“I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies. You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.”
— Paul Z. Myers, University of Minnesota biology professor

UPDATE: Linked by Sister Toldjah — thanks! — and by Doug at Daley Gator, who sees “moral retardation” at work. Both relate this to the heinous case of Kermit Gosnell and, as further proof of his fanatical blindness, Professor Myers declared of the “house of horrors” in Philadelphia: “This is not about abortion.”

Ed Morrissey reports that Gosnell has been denied bail, and calls to our attention Michelle Malkin’s column explaining how the politics of “choice” made the Philadelphia horror possible:

[T]he grand jury itself pointed out that loosened oversight of abortion clinics enacted under pro-choice former GOP governor Tom Ridge enabled Gosnell’s criminal enterprise – and led to the heartless execution of hundreds of babies. Mass murder got a pass in the name of expanding “access” and appeasing abortion lobbyists. As the report made clear: “With the change of administration from [pro-life Democrat] Governor Casey to Governor Ridge,” government health officials “concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”

Read the rest of that. As for Professor Myers and other academic propagandists of the Culture of Death, I remind you of Abraham Lincoln’s remark that “the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” And godlessness has been the official philosophy of American schools for more than one generation.

UPDATE II: Vox Day:

This is the naked face of atheism, ladies and gentlemen. Look on it well and remember it, because it usually doesn’t dare to show its disgusting and anti-human nature so openly.

Maybe you want to read the extremely graphic Philadelphia grand jury report on Gosnell’s house of horrors. Or maybe it will suffice to see the jars of baby feet kept in the abortionist’s clinic.

Today is, after all, “Ask Them What They Mean by ‘Choice’ Day.” And there is a Memeorandum thread.

Category: Abortion, Crime, Culture, Daley Gator, Ed Morrissey, Education, Jill Stanek, Michelle Malkin, Minnesota, Sister Toldjah

Bin Laden Tells France to Surrender

Posted on | January 21, 2011 | 3 Comments

As if they needed to be told:

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden called on France to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in exchange for releasing French hostages being held by affiliates of the extremist group, according to a new audio message broadcast on an Arabic news channel Friday.
“The exit of your hostages out of the hands of our brothers depends on the exit of your troops from Afghanistan,” bin Laden said in the message broadcast by al-Jazeera.
Bin Laden reminded the French people of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s refusal in November to withdraw the French troops from Afghanistan and to negotiate with al-Qaeda over the hostages.
“Your president’s rejection is a result of being a hireling to America and a green light to kill the hostages … his stand will cost you a high price on different aspects inside or outside France,” he said.

France has “troops”? I’m shocked.

Category: Aghanistan, France

The Governor California Deserves

Posted on | January 21, 2011 | 8 Comments

Wrecking the state in the name of civil rights:

Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday called education funding a civil rights issue, defending his plan to eliminate redevelopment agencies as necessary to reduce California’s yawning budget deficit and to push more tax revenue to schools and public safety.
“We take from redevelopment and we put $1 billion into schools – that’s a good thing,” Brown said at a Sacramento breakfast celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “We’ve got to make sure whatever we do, we give a chance to those who are coming along in the next generation. And that is a civil rights issue.”

Of course, that $1 billion will go to pay inflated salaries for the teachers-union goons who control the Democratic Party in California, but if you point out that Brown is just using tax dollars to pay back his party’s political special interests, you’re raaaaacist!

Category: California, Education, Taxes, Unions
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