The Other McCain

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

If She Were a Sioux Indian . . .

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | 17 Comments

. . . Victoria’s Secret model Jessica Hart’s tribal name would be “Speaks Truth to Losers“:

Jessica has some hard truths to deliver for all you regular Joe’s out there in the event you spot her or another model at a bar and want to make a move.
“Don’t,” she warns. “If you see me, or another model, in a bar wait until you are spoken too before you speak. If we are interested in you we will make the first move.”

So you can probably scratch “score with a Victoria’s Secret model” from your to-do list, guys.

Category: Celebrities, Rule 5

The Scandal That Will Rock 2011

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | 6 Comments

The dirty scam that is the Pigford case, via Breitbart TV:

Lee Stranahan explains at Big Government. When Breitbart went into all-Pigford-all-the-time mode a few weeks ago, some people didn’t get it. “Is this just vengeance for the Sherrod dust-up?” and so forth. But there’s a serious scandal here.

With Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives, the GOP committee chairs get to decide what to investigate, and when they start holding hearings to get to the bottom of this dirty business, it’s going to make huge headlines. The way the plaintiff’s attorneys hosed the taxpayers on the Pigford class-action case is a shame and disgrace to the American legal system.

Perhaps we can persuade Republicans to stick an earmark into an “omnibus” bill, funding a USDA research project to determine whether the corpses of tort lawyers can be used as fertilizer or cattle feed.

Category: Andrew Breitbart, Scandal

Party of Sodomy and Abortion Suffers Demographic Decline — Unexpectedly!

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | 11 Comments

That’s not actually the New York Times headline:

Power in Congress Will Tilt South and West 

The latest Census report is not good news for the Party of Baby-Killing and Barebacking.

“This is about as bad as it could get for Democrats, and as good as it could get for Republicans,” Dave Weigel explains. “The Democratic caucus in the House is about to see internal warfare in the rust belt and northeast, as their members are forced into Thunderdome battle for the diminished number of seats.” Dave lays out the winners and losers of the upcoming House re-apportionment:

WINNERS: Texas +4, Florida +2, Arizona +1, Georgia +1, Nevada +1, South Carolina +1, Utah +1, Washington +1
LOSERS: New York -2, Ohio -2, Illinois -1, Iowa -1, Louisiana -1, Massachusetts -1, Michigan -1, Missouri -1, New Jersey -1, Pennsylvania -1

Read the rest of Dave’s article because he points out that it’s actually worse for Democrats than it looks from numbers alone. In part because of the mid-term wipeout, eight of those states (five winners, three losers) have Republican governors and Republicans in complete control of the legislature, whereas Democrats only exercise such total power in two states (Illinois and Massachusetts), both of which are losers.

This means that the odds of Democrats recapturing the House of Representatives before 2023 are roughly equal to the chances of Andrew Sullivan siring a baby with Ellen DeGeneres. And because lame-duck Democrats couldn’t pass the DREAM Act — under which four semesters at a community college would have made Khalid Sheikh Mohammed eligible for citizenship* — they won’t get any help from their plan to quickly transform illegal aliens into Democratic voters.
* A mild exaggeration.

Of course, because the Electoral College is affected by reapportionment, this is also not good news for Obama’s re-election campaign, which is why he’s handing Republicans a knife and inviting them to cut their own throats:

President Barack Obama told Congressional Hispanic Caucus members Tuesday that he’ll renew his push for comprehensive immigration reform in 2011 — even though such an effort would face even longer odds in a Congress where Republicans control the House.

It’s never safe to underestimate the stupidity of Republicans in Congress, but they would be breaking new frontiers of stupidity if they fall for this one.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: The amazing Ed Driscoll notes that Democrats have had many warnings that the Liberal Lifestyle™ is a demographic dead-end. The future belongs to the fertile.

UPDATE II: Donald Douglas blogs about the four-seat gain in Texas, where Hispanics Latinos Democrats are trying to claim that the GOP risks a “backlash” from partisan redistricting. Because I’m fluent in Spanish liberalese, permit me to translate:

“Whatever you do, Republicans, don’t screw us over the way we’d screw you over if we had enough power to screw you over.”

Let’s hope when the GOP legislature in Texas re-draws the district lines, they remember that the Democrats sent Tom DeLay to prison for the crime of trying to help Republicans get elected.

UPDATE II: Shocking news from Instapundit:

STOP THE PRESSES: States With Lower Taxes,
Smaller Government, Fewer Unions
Seeing The Most Population Growth.

Category: Census, Dave Weigel, Democrats

Rape: I’m Against It

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | 29 Comments

Also arson, armed robbery and extortion. Pretty much everything that’s illegal, I’m against it — fireworks and high-speed driving being the two (usually) victimless crimes of which I’m most fond.

However, nobody’s asked me today about why I hate Nanny State anti-fireworks laws (“Light Fuse, Get Away“), nor have I been asked to debate whether the 55-mph  urban freeway speed limit is the first step down the slippery slope to fascism (it is).

Instead, because Tommy Christopher decided to make a big deal of my argument about the Julian Assange rape case with feminist Jill Filipovic — who wouldn’t vote for a Republican if you put a gun to her head — a certain Republican communication strategist decided it’s time to play “Let’s Do a Beatdown on Stacy McCain,” and sent me these questions:

  • Do you believe that a woman, while asleep – whether from alcohol or rohypnol – is capable of providing consent?

Obviously not. Rohypnol is illegal. Alcohol is legal, but should be used in moderation. Friends don’t let friends get drunk and hook up with strangers.

  • Do you believe promiscuous women deserve to be raped, rgardless of their chosen partner’s proclivities?

No one “deserves” to be raped, just as no one deserves to be robbed or murdered. If I advise against parking your car in Southeast D.C. with the windows down, the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition, that doesn’t make me “pro-car theft.”

  • Do you believe that rapists of chaste women deserve a greater punishment, than those of promiscuous backgrounds?

No. Nor do I advocate greater punishment for (a) car thieves who smash the windows of locked cars and hot-wire the ignition, compared to (b) car thieves who opportunistically take advantage of idiots who leave their keys in the ignition.

The way the Grand Inquistor framed that particular question conflates different issues in a troubling way. There is the implicit accusation that I am in favor of something I’ve never advocated (leniency for rapists based on a moral judgment of their victims) so as to set me up either as pro-criminal or else as a moralitic prude who lacks sympathy for The Fallen Woman. But this is not at all the issue that got me arguing with Jill Filipovic over the Assange case, and I don’t like being put in the dock for a cross-examination full of deliberately leading questions.

My point is this: Promiscuity makes women vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and disease. This is not my opinion, but a statement of fact.

As to why this is so, I’ve been pondering an argument that involves selection effects (i.e., what kind of guys go trolling for random hook-ups?) and the law of large numbers (i.e., every additional hook-up increases your odds of experiencing The Tragic Hook-Up From Hell). But that would be a very long and difficult essay to write. Nobody’s offered to pay me for such an article and I don’t have time to write it anyway, because I’ve got to answer yet more accusatory questions from a Republican communications strategist.

  • Do you recognize a difference between cases where the rapist is unknown to the victim versus date rape?

As noted in a previous post, Assange’s (alleged) victims find themselves in a he-said/she-said situation, after consenting to sex with a guy they barely knew. This is a good example of the inherent risks of consenting to sex with guys you barely know. In a legal system where the burden of proof rests on the prosecution, the difficulty of proving a date-rape accusation is self-evident, as there is unlikely to be any incontrovertible evidence of coercion or force.

So that’s the legal reality, which cannot be wished away, and therefore women should be strongly cautioned against putting themselves into predicaments where they risk being victims of a crime where successful prosecution is so difficult.

  • are you speaking only to date rape, within a Western country, or does your view extend to victims in developing countries?

If you’re looking for someone to defend the brutality of thugs in Third World pestholes, you need to look elsewhere.

  • have you written anything, prior to this occurrance, about rape?

Interestingly enough, I wrote a column about a case a few years ago in Floyd County, Ga., where a star athlete was acquitted of raping a girl in a classroom at a high school. That column appeared in the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, but I don’t think it’s available online now. Strange as it may seem, the forces of organized liberalism all sided with the accused rapist in that case, while I argued on behalf of his alleged victim. I don’t know whatever happened to the girl, but the star athlete is now a defensive end for the New York Jets. Maybe he was truly innocent. Or maybe his encounter with the criminal-justice system caused him to straighten up and fly right.

  • Please point out any particularly important articles authored by you, or your quotes, defending women’s honor.

Let me ask that you talk to Wendy Shalit, author of A Return to Modesty, about the feature article I wrote about her when that book was first published. Ditto the feature articles I’ve written about Michelle Malkin, Phyllis Chesler, Tammy Bruce, etc. Does the name “Pamela Geller” ring a bell? I don’t suppose that any of the articles I’ve written about Sarah Palin (here, here, here, just for example) would meet your “particularly important” standard, since you obviously never read The American Spectator.

  • Are you aware of the sex trafficking and rape statistics within the US?

I could Google it. Are you blaming me personally for these statistics, or is this question just another non sequitur?

  • Have you done any mission, or other aid work in developing countries where sex trafficking & rape are pandemic?

Ma’am, I’m a journalist, trying to eke out a living on the Internet, and have neither the time nor money to engage in save-the-world crusades. But now that you mention it, I’ve been to Africa with a Christian missionary who carries an AK-47 and rescues victims of terrorism. So I’m familiar with the atrocities perpetrated by thugs in Third World pestholes, if that’s your question.

The Grand Inquistor’s point, of course, is that I am her moral inferior and that she is therefore entitled to interrogate me to prove her point.

None of this is going to mean a damn thing to the prosecution of Julian Assange, nor is it going to help any rape victim — not here in America, not in Sweden, not in “developing countries.” But doing a beatdown on the Designated Scapegoat makes people feel good about themselves, which I guess is far more important for them than anything else I might have done with the time it took to answer these questions.

Have a nice day! 🙂

UPDATE: Tabitha Hale would never date a scumbag like Julian Assange.

UPDATE II: Stixblog weighs in on the “culture of victimhood” aspect of the Assange case. Ann Coulter addressed this in her bestseller Guilty: LIberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America. Liberalism’s perpetual celebration of victimhood is one of those ideas that have consequences.

UPDATE III: Speaking of Ann Coulter, her latest column is about Julian Assange.

Category: Crime, Feminism, Republicans, Uncategorized, WikiLeaks

Damn You, Obama: FCC ‘Net Neutrality’ Decision Forces Me to Blog About the World’s Most Boring Public-Policy Debate

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | 3 Comments

Please, somebody, book me a dental appointment for a root canal, but don’t expect me to get into the soporific wonkfest of blogging about Net Neutrality. During BlogCon in September we were having a fun discussion of politics when some idiot brought up Net Neutrality — and there went 20 minutes of our lives we can never get back.

All that needs to be said about Net Neutrality is, the Left is in favor of it, which means it must be bad and therefore, I’m against it.

End of discussion.

Democrats controlled Congress for four years and were unable to enact Net Neutrality. Why? Because every time they scheduled a hearing, congressmen found themselves slipping into a semi-comatose state after the first five minutes of testimony.

So having failed at legislative implementation — hey, at least the DADT debate gave people a chance to discuss sodomy, which is at least interesting — now Obama has his FCC director enact the damned thing by executive fiat.

Which means everybody’s blogging about it, and it can no longer be safely ignored. Not only that, but now Republicans will have to waste valuable time in the 112th Congress trying to repeal this disaster.

The Tyranny of Tedium: Hearings, amendments, boring op-eds in all the big newspapers, 15-minute segments of wonks endlessly debating this ennui-inducing issue on cable-news networks . . .

Damn you, Obama. Damn you to hell, sir.

Category: Uncategorized

Your Daily Julian Assange Update: The Left’s ‘Mind-Bending Contradictions’

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | 11 Comments

Instapundit linked the Hot Air headline — “Anti-Americans vs. feminists: The Leftist meltdown over Assange” — which more concisely captures the contradictions than does the Daily Mail the headline, “Fancy that! The Left is at war with itself over Mr WikiLeaks.”

The backstory: A few days ago, the Guardian — Britain’s leading newspaper of the Left — shocked its readers, who had become accustomed to the paper’s heroification of WikiLeaks found Julian Assange, by publishing a lengthy report on the rape accusations against Assange in Sweden. Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips attempts to explain this under-the-bus treatment:

[T]he whole world-view of the Left rests upon its iron-clad conviction that America is a global conspiracy of evil from which all bad things ultimately emanate.
So the Left knew for a certainty that the rape charges were false and that Assange was a martyr. . . .
To understand why there is such an ear-splitting screeching of brakes from The Guardian, it is necessary to consider the mind-bending contradictions of what passes for thinking on the Left.
For it believes certain things as articles of faith which cannot be denied. One is that America is a force for bad in the world and so can never be anything other than guilty. Another is that all men are potential rapists, and so can never be anything other than guilty. . . .

So, when confronted with this head-exploding cognitive dissonance, what does an American-hating feminist need most? A scapegoat:

Got raped? It’s your own fault, you filthy whore.

This is the headline on a blog post by Anna Tarkov, who adds: “I’d like to hear some explanations now on why anyone should ever read another word this disgusting misogynist ever pens. I know I won’t.”

The “disgusting misogynist”? That would be me. Read more

Category: Crime, Feminism, WikiLeaks

Look Up the Word ‘Puerile’ . . .

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | 11 Comments

. . . and you’ll find a photo of Rick Gervais, who is solicited by the Wall Street Journal to contribute a column, “A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m An Atheist.”

A Freudian would have a field day with a column in which Gervais rambles on and on about being an 8-year-old boy growing up in a working-class home in Reading, England. His childish rebellion, fenced around with self-justifying rationalizations, becomes the impregnable fortress of his worldview, and anyone who disagrees is a figure of ridicule, like his poor ignorant Mum.

Category: Religion

LIVE AT FIVE – 12.21.10

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | Comments Off on LIVE AT FIVE – 12.21.10

TOP NEWS
FCC Set To Enact Strong Net Neutrality Rules

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski

Proposed rules don’t apply to wireless providers

Commanders In Afghanistan Seek Raids Into Pakistan
Only CIA drones and CIA-supported Afghans have crossed the border


Senate Vote On START Treaty Could Be Defining Moment For Obama
Failure to get treaty approved likely to be seen as weakness



POLITICS
Senator Coburn Issues List Of Most Wasteful Federal spending For 2010

Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-Okla.)

Leading the list: Veterans Affairs Department spending $175 million to maintain buildings it can’t use

Soldiers, Marines Have Mixed Reactions To DADT Repeal

Governor Paterson Fined For Accepting Free World Series Tickets

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) To Hold Hearings On Radicalization Of American Muslims

Environmental Groups File Notice To Sue EPA


Governor-Elect Brown Terminates Stimulus Watchdog



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Toyota Agrees To $32 Million Fine In Safety Probe
ROK Stocks Hit 38-Month High As Norks Back Down
SEC Investigating Hurd’s Departure From HP
Apple: OS X Downloads No Longer To Carry Apps



SPORTS
Bears Maul Favre, Vikings, Win NFC North With 40-14 Victory In The Snow

The Bears' Devin Hester returns a record punt for a touchdown in the third quarter.

Favre got sacked in the second quarter, and it was all downhill from there

Mavericks Cool Heat’s 12-Game Streak With 98-96 Win

Hiller Blocks 45, Ducks Shut Out Bruins (Video)


Coach K Ties Dean Smith At 879 Wins



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Shania Twain’s Engaged!

Frederic Thiebaud and Shania Twain

The lucky fellow is an exec for Nestle

Steve Landesberg, 65, Dies From Cancer

No Truth To Lohan Party Rumors At Betty Ford, Says Dad

Vince And Kyla Welcome A Daughter

Tracy Morgan Recovering From Kidney Transplant, Will Miss At Least Two “30 Rock” Episodes

Cameron Diaz Vacations With A-Rod & His Kids

Sebastian Bach Rips Dr. Drew: “What A Quack!”



FOREIGNERS
Ill Prepared For Snowfall, Britain Grinds To A Halt
Israeli Air Force Hits Targets In Gaza After Palestinian Mortar Attacks
Al-Qaeda Christmas Bomb Plot Foiled In UK
Thai Government Ends State Of Emergency In Bangkok After Eight Months



BLOGS & STUFF
GigaOM: Yes, By God, We’re STILL talking About Net Neutrality
Fausta’s Blog: Nina, What Congress Passed Was – Forgive The Expression – A Tax Increase
AmSpecBlog: Chris Christie In Perspective
NRO: “Meanwhile, de Rugy Goes All Laffer Curve”
Hit & Run: Chris Christie Commutes Brian Aitken’s Sentence


— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five
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