Lindsay Lohan Begins Serving Life Without Parole Two Weeks in Jail

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She’s not a victim:

With a thick glass partition separating them, Lindsay Lohan received her first visitor in jail – her attorney.
“Understandably, Lindsay’s having a difficult time adjusting as it would be for anyone,” Shawn Chapman Holley told PEOPLE after the brief visit with her client Tuesday. “She’s trying to make the necessary adjustments to an extremely stressful and difficult situation. There were some tears.”

Boo hoo. Let Merle Haggard explain something very basic:

“I turned 21 in prison
Doing life without parole.
No one could steer me right, but Mama tried.
Mama tried to raise me better,
But her pleading I denied.
That leaves only me to blame, ’cause Mama tried.”

We all fail from time to time and, no matter how often I succeed, every time I fall short of my own expectations or disappoint others, the sense of failure is psychologically devastating. So why do I sometimes seem so unsympathetic to my fellow losers and screw-ups?

Because misguided sympathy can be a poison.

Everyone must come to grips with and make sense of their own failures. Excuse-making, blame-shifting, scapegoating — “It wasn’t my fault!” — prevents us from learning the lessons of our failures. If it wasn’t really our fault, there’s no need for us to change and improve and strive to prevent repetition of the failure.

Persistently attempting to externalize blame for our own failures is a recipe for moral disaster. Offering criminals ready-made scapegoats for their resentments and excuses for their crimes is neither merciful nor “tolerant.”

Other people with far fewer advantages than Lindsay Lohan have overcome far worse problems than she’s ever experienced. Like Merle said, that leaves only her to blame for her “extremely stressful and difficult situation.”

Irony Alert: Eric Boehlert Is an Expert on What Is ‘Ugly and Contemptible’

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“. . . that didn’t stop him from launching the smear campaign. And that’s what Andrew Breitbart and Fox News and the right-wing media does. They’ve been doing it for a long time and it’s sort of ugly and contemptible, and if he had any decency, he’d apologize to Shirley Sherrod. He’d also stop with this incessant race-baiting that we’ve seen.”
— Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America

Much, much more at Memeorandum, including an ill-considered anti-Breitbart piece by David Frum and a kind of wishy-washy piece by Jonah Goldberg.

A couple of points: First, Andrew Breitbart didn’t fire Shirley Sherrod; Tom Vilsack did. Secondly, according to Steve Doocy, “Fox News never mentioned the story until after Sherrod had quit” — and if Doocy is right, as Dan Riehl says, the administration’s pre-emptive Blame-Fox excuse is non-operative.

Is This What They Mean By
‘Junk In The Trunk’?

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by Smitty

The Puffington Host reports the cover for Stacy’s cousin’s book has been released:

TFA states that she “writes about her experiences on the campaign trail, how the party veered so far off track, why she is still a Republican, and more.”

This blog applauds the way Meghan has courageously gone to that traveling trunk and torn through that layer of junk at the bottom.

So many people, tragically, just meander through life, piling up the old luggage full of boarding passes; travel guides; foreign coinage; that other blue sock with the white argyle pattern whose purportedly solitary mate was thrown out roughly two years ago; food wrappers from that teeny bit of cheating on the diet; un-mailed post cards written out to that handsome fellow in Ibiza who turned out to be such a cad (though clearly not a hockey cad!); even *gasp* the voodoo doll for–

People need closure. This book promises to be exactly the sort of purging Meghan and, yes, even the GOP, so desperately need, as they desperately seek some form of irrigation for their closure — some epistemic tsunami, if you will, that can expunge the collective trunks and mental cobwebs full of old nonsense holding back progress.

We’re pulling for you, Meghan. In the vast intellectual tug of war, we’ve got the moral equivalent of a towing hawser hitched up to that trunk, and gang of impressed lackeys heaving around trying to move that overloaded junk container in some useful direction.

Keep up the great work and fantastic leadership, Meghan; we need you, lady.

Further reading at Left Coast Rebel

Election ’08: Virtual High-Fives and Online Obamagasms for Journolist

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As previously noted, the Daily Caller must have the complete Journolist archives, and now they share the unsurprisingly ecstatic Election Night reactions from?progressives.

UPDATE: Instapundit has been a one-man aggregator of all things Journolist the past couple of days. James DeLong’s point that reporters on the list might be accused of “hijacking” the publications that paid their salaries is solid.

That everybody and his dog is currently commenting on this story is one reason I haven’t done much blogging on the subject.

UPDATE II: My American Spectator colleague John Tabin:

Particularly disturbing is Spencer Ackerman saying it’s a good idea to hurl bad-faith accusations of racism. . . . We’re talking about a guy who was fired from The New Republic after starting a blog called “Too Hot for TNR” to denounce his employer. He then took a flamethrower to all his bridges by airing gripes about all his coworkers.

Think about a kid fresh out of college who lands a job at The New Republic — a real plum gig, starting out the career climb so far above the lower rungs of the journalism ladder — and then bites the hand that feeds him, so as to get fired within two years for insubordination.

This kind of arrogance, which transcends political categories, is quite common among young writers. They are very aware of their own intelligence and abilities, but fail to recognize that brains and eloquence are no substitute for knowledge and experience. Having previously succeeded spectacularly by virtue of superior IQ, they resent having to “pay their dues” doing journalistic scutwork and become impatient for glory. The Internet (and especially blogging) makes such glory-seeking  easier and, by the time the Young Turk wises up to his errors, he’s burned more bridges that Sherman’s Army.

The Case of the Fake Kosher Sausage

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Impersonating a Jew for carnal purposes:

A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with a woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew.
Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left.
When she later found out that he was not Jewish but an Arab, she filed a criminal complaint for rape and indecent assault.
Handing down the verdict, Tzvi Segal, one of three judges on the case, acknowledged that sex had been consensual but said that although not “a classical rape by force,” the woman would not have consented if she had not believed Kashur was Jewish.
The sex therefore was obtained under false pretences, the judges said. “If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated,” they added.

Obtaining sex “under false pretences” is a crime in Israel? It’s against the law in Israel to get sex by feigning interest in “a serious romantic relationship”? OK, you bachelors out there, let’s have a show of hands: How many of you guys have ever lied to get some nookie?

Everybody? I thought so.

Just don’t try that in Jerusalem, buddy. And let this be a lesson to you Israeli ladies: Just because a goyim tells you it’s kosher . . .

(Via Memeorandum. More at Da Tech Guy.)

Blog Hardware Update

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by Smitty

At The Other McCain, our relentless struggle for world conquest has always been distracted by shiny things that can improve our blog-fu.

You may already know that this blog is hosted by Silver Logic, who may be worth considering if you’re escaping the Blogger ghetto (NTTAWWT).

For a reasonable price, I scored a HDC-TM55. The simplicity of the features, the zoom, the stabilization, and the ability to do some basic editing on-camera make this a worthy blogging component.

Right now I’m chilling on the windward side of Hawaii at an old shipmate’s place on He’eia Pond.

View Larger Map
Looking East across the bay at the air station about 4 nautical miles away, I was able to capture a fighter aircraft landing at the air station. The clip itself isn’t interesting at all. What I think is notable is being able to go for a moving target at some range without a tripod, and then having some onboard editing capability to shave off the even less interesting bits. My netbook (see below) just doesn’t have the guts to do any editing at all, at least with Avidemux under Windows 7. Possibly it’s the OS or the editor, but I think that the hardware just isn’t what you want for even casual editing.

This blog post is composed on an a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 using Emacs, as I’m just a trifle nutter that way. Yeah, the data plan costs a bit, but, if you want to blog live events like Beck’s Restoring Honor or the 9/12 March on DC, you sort of have to be packin’ the gear.

And I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know much about video editing, so anyone with suggestions about tutorials or software under ‘Doze or Linux to try (NTTAWW Mac, I just don’t have one), feel free to light up the comments.

Drip, Drip, Drip: Leaks From Journolist Reveal More ‘Progressive’ Genius

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It’s becoming obvious that the Daily Caller’s Jonathan Strong either (a) has obtained the entire archives of Journolist, or else (b) is receiving batches of e-mails directly from someone who does have the full archive.

Monday, Strong published e-mails in which Journolisters collaborated in an effort to limit coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s rants during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign. Tuesday, Strong revealed still more damaging e-mails in which Journolisters likened Tea Party protesters to Nazis:

“You know, at the risk of violating Godwin’s law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts?” asked Bloomberg’s Ryan Donmoyer. . . .
“I’m not saying these guys are capital F-fascists,” added blogger Lindsay Beyerstein [who has written for Newsweek, Salon, Slate], “but they don’t want limited government. Their desired end looks more like a corporate state than a rugged individualist paradise. . . .”

Lots more there, including an NPR producer fantasizing about the death on Rush Limbaugh and a UCLA law professor speculating about the possibility of shutting down Fox News. (Note to Jonathan Zasloff: The FCC can’t “simply pull their broadcasting permit,” because they are a cable network, which is not FCC-regulated broadcasting.)

What I find perplexing is that, so far as I can tell, neither Donmoyer nor Beyerstein had ever covered a Tea Party rally in person before speaking so authoritatively (in summer 2009) about the protesters’ alleged motives. Evidently, they were just watching TV coverage or reading stuff on the Internet and basing their opinions on that.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that avowed progressives would not like Tea Party activists even if they did meet them in person, but on what basis could Beyerstein state with such certainty that the protesters “don’t want limited government” if she had never even talked to any of them?

And why is Beyerstein wasting her time trying to be a journalist? If she has the ability to read the minds of people she’s never met, she could make a fortune as an online psychic.

Georgia Primary: Ray McKinney Leads 12th District; Liz Carter Leads 4th District

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With 60% of precincts reporting in the GA12 GOP primary — to take on Democrat Rep. John Barrow in November — Ray McKinney has 45% of the vote in a four-candidate field. Unless he gets more than 50%, there will be an Aug. 10 runoff. Barrow holds off Democratic primary challenger Regina Thomas by a 2-to-1 margin, which will disappoint her supporters at Daily Kos and other liberal blogs. The disgruntlement of Thomas voters could hurt Barrow’s chances for re-election in a district that Democrats have barely won in recent mid-terms.

Meanwhile, with just 25% of precincts reporting in the 4th District — to take on Rep. Hank Thompson — our blog’s beloved Liz Carter appears on her way to a solid victory in the GOP primary, with 55% of the vote in a four-candidate field. Yank Hank!