The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 12.21.20

Posted on | December 22, 2020 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Our favorite shielder dressed up for the holidays.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Not A Word About Self-Defense
EBL: Ralph Peters – The War In 2020, also, Bill Barr Is A Big Fat Failure
Twitchy: “Coronavirus” Stimulus Bill Includes No Less Than $10 Million For “Gender Programs” In Pakistan
Louder With Crowder: Mike Rowe Blasts Politicians Arbitrarily Deciding Which Employees Are “Essential”, also, Tulsi Gabbard Unloads On “Heartless Bureaucrats” Approving Vaccine For Congress Before The Elderly
Vox Popoli: Conspiracy Theorists Conspire, also, The Nurse Is Dead, Allegedly
Stoic Observations: Cyberpunk 2077

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Biden Administration Faces A Legitimacy Crisis
American Greatness: Congratulations, National Review! You Got Your Wish! also, GA State Senate Says Election Results Are “Untrustworthy”, Certification Should Be Rescinded
American Power: Public Schools Are Losing Their Captive Audience Of Children
American Thinker: The AMA Lied – How Many Died? also, Fighting On
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: WaPo Cartoonists At It Again, also, Cuban Dictatorship Confiscates 25 Tons Of Humanitarian Aid Sent By Miami Churches
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For December 18, also, Election Fraud Update For December 21
Cafe Hayek: COVID Hypocrites  – And Liars
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday, also, It’s A Year-end Wrap-up On Midrats!
Da Tech Guy: Five One-Liners Under Other Peoples’ Fedoras, also, Chicago Mayor Lightfoot’s Status As A Fraud Solidified
Don Surber: Open Borders, Let In COVID, also, 2020, The Year The Experts Killed Us
First Street Journal: Conservative School Administrators Forced To Resign Over Social Media Posts
The Geller Report: 379,000 Illegal Ballots Cast In Michigan, And Now We Have Receipts, also, Redacted Information In Dominion Audit Report Shows Races Were Flipped
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, The Star Of Bethlehem
Hollywood In Toto: Promising Young Woman Shows The Limits Of Cinematic Rage, also, Turbulence is The Over The Top Christmas Thriller To Stuff Our Stockings
JustOneMinute: Waiting For The Defense Bill Veto
The Lid: BLM Protesters Disrupt Holiday Fundraiser For Kids With Cancer
Legal Insurrection: Sidney Powell May Get To Prove Her “Kraken” Case – As A Defendant In Civil Suits, also, Tables Turned – Restaurants Organize To Ban Gov. Cuomo From All NYC Establishments
Michelle Malkin: Some Church Lives Matter More Than Others
Nebraska Energy Observer: Now What, America? also, Random Observations
Power Line: Birx Busted, also, History Repeats
Shark Tank: Rep. Sabatini Accuses Speaker Sprowls Of Targeting His Conservatism
Shot In The Dark: Future Alternative, also, A Bad Look
STUMP: NY State Climate Investing Goals – Who’s On The Hook?
The Political Hat: Gaia Faith – Cult Of Gaia, Sacrifices For Gaia, Matricide Of Gaia, also, The “Bad Touch” Biden Commemorative Cake
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, also, Ranger Training Battalion CO Relieved
Victory Girls: An Open Letter To The American Coward, also, The Collapse Of The American Education System
Volokh Conspiracy: Ted Cruz’ Terrible Case For Keeping Out Hong Kong Refugees
Weasel Zippers: CDC Urging States To Vaccinate Black/Brown People Ahead Of Whites, also, Conservative Occupation Of Oregon Capitol Grounds Continues
The Federalist: The American Left Has Now Fully Embraced Racism, also, NYT Continues Blackout On Swalwell’s Bang Bang Fang Fang
Mark Steyn: Catch-Up Conservatism, also, Surrender Nothing

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Category: Linkagery

Be Patient

Posted on | December 21, 2020 | 2 Comments

How long will it take for the Biden-Harris administration to become a catastrophe of historical proportions, such a flaming dungpile of disaster that even Democrats are horrified by the result?

Perhaps quite quickly, but it may take several months for the enormity of this massive political failure to become apparent. As conservatives, we ought not grow impatient. Don’t try to create trouble, but rather let this fraudulence proceed to its inevitable collapse, and then be prepared to say, “See? We told you it wouldn’t work.”

Joe Biden has obtained the presidency under terms that guarantee failure. Insofar as he attempts to appease his party’s radical base, Biden will alienate the middle class and wreck the economy. If, on the other hand, Biden tries to perform a high-wire balancing act to placate his corporate sponsors with more “moderate” policies (while still, of course, making “progressive” gestures for the sake of the party base), the radicals are not so stupid that they won’t see through his charade. Biden will be damned if does, and damned if he doesn’t, because the Democratic Party has become a self-contradicting hodgepodge of incompatible interests.

Recall that LBJ thumped Goldwater in a landslide in 1964, and yet his administration became such a complete disaster that he did not even seek his party’s nomination in 1968. It seems to me quite likely that Biden will be an even worse president than LBJ, and no amount of media spin will be able to save him from complete disgrace. Selah.




 

Category: Joe Biden

The Wedding Was Lovely

Posted on | December 21, 2020 | 2 Comments

I’d love to show you photos of the wedding, but the couple asked that no one post pictures — our crappy cellphone photos — and instead wait until the professional photographer’s work was available. So I’ll have to make do with words to describe the lovely ceremony in the ornate lobby of the Morris Performing Arts Center. The ceremony was bilingual, with the bride’s Ecuadoran grandfather, a pastor, performing the ceremony in Spanish, translated by a cousin. You could tell that the pastor deeply cherishes his oldest granddaughter, and the effect of his matrimonial sermon was to convey what an awesome duty my son has taken upon himself in marrying her, as he will be held to the highest standards.

The reception was at the equally ornate Palais Royale ballroom, where I’m told that Frank Sinatra once performed back in the day. Dinner was exquisite, with a “surf-and-turf” combination of filet mignon and broiled salmon as the entree. And I suppose it would not violate the rules to share one photo from the reception.

 

That’s the newlywed couple, with our youngest daughter Reagan on the left and son Jefferson, the best man, on the right. It was good to have the family together for the weekend, even amid a pandemic. We must now load up the van for the long ride home, while the newlyweds travel to a tropical destination for a long honeymoon and get started on that most valuable endeavor, i.e., supplying us with more grandchildren.




 

Category: Family

Rule 5 Sunday: Santa Ereshkigal

Posted on | December 21, 2020 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Been a while since I’ve posted anything from Fate/Grand Order, but every year they have a moderately silly Christmas event in which one of the Servants plays the role of Santa; last year it was Attila the HunSanta riding her magic sheep to distribute presents and save Chaldea from a deadly fever by rescuing the Sumerian goddess of the underworld, Ereshkigal. Eresh hasn’t played the role of Santa yet, but a man can dream…
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Poor goddess. She looks exhausted after dragging those presents all the way here from Kur.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick of the Late Night, Ninety Miles Mystery Box Episode #1204, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Options Friday, also, the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Alison Krause, Sovereign Grace, Samson et Dalila, Christina Perri, Lindsey Boylen, Shirley McLaine, Brenda Lee, Lohengrin, Kylie Minogue, Ann Reinking RIP, Les Troyens, Francesca di Rimini, Jennifer Zetlan, Danielle Talamantes, Liz Callaway, Jill Wagner, Natalie Dormer, Gotterdammerung, and MAGA December Saturday.

A View From The Beach: Dominique Swain, Fish Pic Friday – Mermaid Torie, Local Scientists Go After Sharks, Truckin’ Into Thursday, Virginia Cuts Menhaden Fishery 10%, Some Wednesday Wetness, About A Maid I’ll Sing a Song . . ., Tuesday Tanlines, Reds, Specks Return to Delaware Bay, Your Monday Morning Stimulus Package, And #HimToo!, Palm Sunday and And #HimToo!

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe this week is Daliah Lavi, and Red Pilled Jew has Women Named Nazgul.

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: The Mountain Road

Posted on | December 21, 2020 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: The Mountain Road

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Rule 5 Sunday: Santa Upton
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Holiday News Down Home
EBL

SCOTUS Rejects Texas v. Pennsylvania
A View From The Beach
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Igneous
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

Four Trump Supporters Stabbed as Antifa/BLM Thugs Attack Rally in D.C.
EBL

‘Good People Carry Guns and They Will Shoot You, a Lot — Graveyard Dead’
EBL

Attorney General William Barr Resigns
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.14.20
Dark Brightness
Proof Positive
EBL

N.Y. Cathedral Shooter Was Immigrant Criminal With Violent Record
Dark Brightness
EBL

‘Anna Reportedly Got Angry’
Bacon Time
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.15.20
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Mathematical Analysis Documents ‘Strange Voting Patterns’ in Election
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.16.20
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Mom Blames Atlanta Police for Her Son Getting Beaten in Massive Brawl
EBL

Can Mere Words Describe How Bad ‘Doctor’ Jill Biden’s Dissertation Really Is?
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.17.20
A View From The Beach
EBL

Celebrate the Joyous Occasion of the Return of the Big Yellow Button
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending December 18:

  1.  EBL (17)
  2.  A View From The Beach (8)
  3.  Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for the linkagery!

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Category: FMJRA Award

Do You Have Enough Ammunition?

Posted on | December 20, 2020 | Comments Off on Do You Have Enough Ammunition?

There is an ammunition shortage in America. Gun sales soared to record levels in 2020, and the demand for ammunition is insatiable, a problem the NRA’s Mark Keefe illustrates with anecdotes:

Just two weeks ago, I received a call that probably should not have surprised me.
“Do you have any .30-30?” This was not a question I was expecting. I mean, after all, there might be some parachute-cord-wrapped lever-actions somewhere if they haven’t been snarfed up, but .30-30 ammo? Really?
It seems the friend of a friend was heading out on a hog hunt and left it too late to buy ammunition. Nowhere in northern Virginia could you find a box of .30-30 on the shelf. He was headed for a wild boar trip and had exactly four rounds. I dug into my personal stash to make sure his hunt wasn’t ruined, but this is a symptom of a much larger issue today.
Back in April, one of our field editors received a call from a pretty prominent gun shop asking, “How much 9 mm do you have?” He answered and was told that he would be paid twice what he paid for it, and a truck would be there tomorrow. . . .
With the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, riots and then the most rabid anti-gun platform ever introduced being pushed by the Democratic party, it’s no wonder that people have increased their demand for guns and ammunition. When a candidate for national office — even a poorly performing one — utters, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” what did you think was going to happen? . . .
I personally watched a fellow who entered the gun shop wanting a Glock and left with a Uberti single-action revolver in .45 Colt simply because it was the only handgun in the store. Once that was gone, the shelves were bare.

Americans are the most heavily armed nation on the planet. There are more guns in America than there are adult citizens. Despite this, the perceived threat to gun ownership from the Democratic Party — and the crimes perpetrated by the kind of people who elect Democrats — is sufficient to incite fear among some gun owners that they don’t have enough guns yet. President Obama was the greatest gun salesman in American history, but it appears that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will out-do even Obama. Do you have enough ammunition? Well, you’ll never know the answer to that question until you run out.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)




 

Category: Crime

A Grim Anniversary in Kansas

Posted on | December 20, 2020 | Comments Off on A Grim Anniversary in Kansas

Twenty years ago this week, the people of Wichita, Kansas, awakened to startling news: Four people had been murdered — shot to death, execution-style — after an ordeal of sadistic torture. The only surviving witness, a 25-year-old school teacher, had been shot in the back of the head and left for dead with her four friends. Somehow, she not only survived being shot, but walked a mile through the snow, naked and barefoot, to summon help. She was able to give police a description of the two men who had perpetrated what became known as “The Wichita Massacre,” and everyone who learned about the crime was horrified.

The thing is that most people never heard of this atrocity. The national media ignored The Wichita Massacre because the perpetrators were black and the victims were white. So it was never reported on CNN or NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR — none of the media that have devoted endless hours to promoting the Black Lives Matter movement ever gave a minute of time to the murders committed by Reginald and Jonathan Carr:

The Carr brothers were from Dodge City. Both 22-year-old Reginald and 20-year-old Jonathan had lengthy criminal records.
On December 8, 2000, having recently arrived in Wichita, they robbed and wounded 23-year-old Andrew Schreiber, an assistant baseball coach. Three days later, on December 11, they shot and mortally wounded 55-year-old cellist and librarian Ann Walenta as she tried to escape from them in her car. She died three days later in hospital from her wounds.
On December 14, the brothers broke into a house at 12727 E Birchwood Drive in Wichita.

What the Carr brothers did inside that house is so grotesque I won’t even bother summarizing it, except to say they were convicted of nearly 100 felony counts, including kidnapping and rape, in addition to multiple counts of murder. While there was no evidence that what happened was a “hate crime” — robbery appears to have been the motive — several commentators at the time noticed that the Carr brothers had targeted only white victims, which at least suggested that these two criminal predators had a distinct preference in terms of their chosen prey.

In 2014, there was outrage when the Kansas State Supreme Court overturned the death sentences against the Carr brothers. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 8-1 to restore those death sentences. During oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito said the Carr brothers had commited “some of the most horrendous murders that I have seen in my 10 years here, and we see practically every death penalty case that comes up anywhere in the country. These have to rank as among the worst.” In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “These defendants tortured their victims, acts of almost inconceivable cruelty and depravity described firsthand for the jury by the lone survivor.”

The point that cannot be overlooked in this case is that these murders never would have happened if Jonathan and Reginald Carr hadn’t been turned loose on the streets after their previous crimes. Anyone who pays attention to news about crime and justice recognizes the pattern — career criminals, set free on probation or parole, tend to escalate the severity of their crimes. Over and over, you see that murders are perpetrated by criminals who already had a lengthy record of “minor” crimes.

Yet we find that “progressives” believe that we are locking up too many criminals. Just pray that none of the monsters turned loose by Soros-sponsored district attorneys like L.A.’s George Gascon ever show up in your community. The national media will ignore your death.




 

Category: Crime, Kansas, Media Bias

The Lewinsky Scandal and Media Bias

Posted on | December 19, 2020 | 1 Comment

My American Spectator colleague Melissa Mackenzie provides a walk down memory lane exposing the media’s partisan double standard:

For a damaging story about a Democrat to be true, DNA must be found on a blue dress. There must be Blue Dress Proof™. It’s not enough to have a witness and a victim. It’s not enough to have a computer, a cache of validated emails, thousands of affadavits signed under the threat of perjury. There must be actual DNA, videotaped evidence. If the bad guy is a Democrat, there must be Blue Dress Proof.
For a damaging story about a Republican to be true, nothing has to be true at all. Third-hand hearsay about hookers and pee, a smile on a face, or a sarcastic tweet or phrase taken out of context can make even the most absurd conclusion be portrayed as fact and conveyed as truth in perpetuity. If the bad guy is a Republican, no proof is needed. . . .

Read the whole thing. The Lewinsky scandal erupted two months after I arrived in D.C. as an assistant editor at The Washington Times, and I have vivid memories of how that went down. What happened was that Clinton’s first finger-wagging denial — “I did not have sex with that woman” — was a tactic used to buy time while his spin doctors went to work devising a message that could enable him to survive the scandal when, inevitably, it was revealed that Clinton was guilty as hell.

A basic element of the Team Clinton strategy was to confuse the issue, to persuade middle-of-the-road voters that the scandal was “just about sex,” to distract from the obstruction-of-justice claim related to the Paula Jones civil-rights lawsuit. Whatever your opinion about Paula Jones, or the wisdom of the Supreme Court decision allowing her lawsuit against Clinton to go forward, once Clinton decided to litigate the case (rather than to pay Jones a settlement), the plaintiff had a right to truthful testimony in the case. Lawyers for Jones, tipped off by Linda Tripp about Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, subpoenaed Lewinsky’s testimony. Team Clinton then (a) arranged through one of Clinton’s donors for Lewinsky to get hired at the New York offices of Revlon, and (b) dispatched Clinton’s lawyer Vernon Jordan to have Lewinsky sign a false affidavit, denying any sexual activity with the president and saying she couldn’t attend a deposition because she had moved to New York.

This was straight-up obstruction of justice and suborning perjury and, among other things, Bill Clinton was disbarred as a result. But because of Team Clinton’s media spin — “It’s just about sex! Everybody lies about sex!” — most Americans never understood the real issue.

A series of court decisions had determined that plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases could use evidence that a “hostile work environment” existed because of a pattern of harassing behavior. Paula Jones, as an employee of the state of Arkansas, had been subjected to sexual advances from Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and suffered retaliation when she refused those advances. The reason Monica Lewinsky mattered was that the Jones lawyers were seeking to demonstrate that Bill Clinton made a routine practice of engaging in sexual affairs with female employees or with women he met as a result of his political position.

Personally, I take a dim view of the whole field of “sexual harassment” law. My essentially libertarian position is that employment is a matter of mutual agreement, and if an employee does not like workplace conditions — for whatever reason — the thing to do is to quit. Tell the boss “take this job and shove it,” and walk out the door. If you are a woman and your boss is a creepy womanizer (like Bill Clinton), there are many ways to deal with that problem without filing a lawsuit. Democrats, however, have embraced a theory of “employment rights” that turns practically every workplace grievance into a potential lawsuit, and “sexual harassment” cases like Jones v. Clinton have proliferated as a result.

Bill Clinton was elected with the avid support of feminists who had weaponized “sexual harassment” accusations in the 1991 Tailhook scandal, which wrecked the careers of several Navy officers, and certainly the Commander-in-Chief could not be exempted from this standard. The reason why Republicans repeatedly invoked “the rule of law” in the Lewinsky scandal was that Clinton was claiming that his obstruction of justice in the Paula Jones case — a crime which would have subjected any other citizen to imprisonment — did not “rise to the level of impeachment,” in the phrase popularized by Clinton’s surrogates.

Many of the same Democrats who supported impeaching President Trump over a phone call to the newly elected president of Ukraine claimed that Clinton was above the law when it came to obstruction of justice in the Paula Jones case. Why? Because “everybody lies about sex.”

Had it not been for the media furiously spinning in Clinton’s defense in 1998, he would have been forced to resign, because responsible journalists would have made clear what was at stake in this case. Professor Glenn Reynolds comments about the Lewinsky scandal:

“I think the Clinton/Lewinsky affair was a real turning point with the press. When it first broke, I remember Sam Donaldson saying that if it was true, obviously Clinton would have to resign. But within a few days the Democrats, very much including the press, had circled the wagons around Clinton and were willing to recycle any pro-Clinton talking point, and scoff at anything that hurt Clinton, in a way that was, at the time, unprecedentedly brazen.”

Indeed. And we are still paying the price.



 

Category: Bill Clinton, Scandal
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