The Other McCain

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

My Celebrity Brother-in-Law

Posted on | February 18, 2020 | Comments Off on My Celebrity Brother-in-Law

 

 

You probably never heard of Bucyrus Copper Kettle Works, which has occupied the same building in the same small Ohio town for more than 140 years. My wife’s brother Rex has worked there as a coppersmith for about 30 years. You can see Rex at work in this episode of Our Ohio, a series that airs on Ohio public television:

 

Click here to see a selection of the products they offer.




 

Category: Family, Ohio

Bernie Wants to Make Everything Free …

Posted on | February 18, 2020 | Comments Off on Bernie Wants to Make Everything Free …

 

. . . so “Free the Nipple,” I guess?

A topless protester disrupted Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign rally in Nevada on Sunday — moments after Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced the Democratic presidential candidate to the stage.
De Blasio had just introduced Sanders to the crowd in Carson City as the “next president of the United States,” when Sanders entered the stage with his wife as the song “Power to the People” played.
That’s when a fully clothed woman jumped up and tried to wrest the microphone out of the Vermont senator’s hand, before grabbing another one from the lectern, and started speaking about the candidate’s support for dairy farmers.
“Bernie, I’m your biggest supporter, and I’m here to ask you to stop pumping up the dairy industry and to stop pumping up animal agriculture,” she said. “I believe in you…” she continued, before the mic suddenly went dead and security moved toward her.
Sanders moved to the edge of the stage as a string of women then paraded across holding images of cows — followed by a topless woman, who gestured to Sanders as members of his security detail positioned themselves between the two.
“This is Nevada. There’s always a little excitement — at no extra cost. Except we have a lot of water on the stage,” he said as he returned to the stage.
The protesters were prompted by the senator’s support in 2018 for legislation that provided emergency financial support for dairy farmers across the country because of the falling price of milk.

If you’re protesting dairy subsidies, I suppose showing your udders makes sense. By the way, I believe a majority of Trump supporters agree with me in opposing federal agriculture subsidies on limited-government principles. Nor do we mind attractive young women going topless, but the word “attractive” doesn’t describe most of Bernie’s supporters.




 

Category: Bernie Sanders

Wait a Minute: Did Joe Biden Suggest Bernie Voters Are White Supremacists?

Posted on | February 18, 2020 | Comments Off on Wait a Minute: Did Joe Biden Suggest Bernie Voters Are White Supremacists?

 

The same day he claimed illegal aliens “are better Americans than most Americans are,” Biden decided to exceed his daily gaffe quota:

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” white supremacists were “very enthusiastic” about President Donald Trump.
While criticizing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for not disowning his supporters’ attacks, Biden said, “I know you’re seeing what has been online, the vicious, vicious threats, the misogynistic things they’ve said referring to the women who are leaders of the Culinary Union, and they received death threats. I mean, this is way, way — this is Trump-like. Way over the line. And I think Bernie has to disavow this.”
Host Nicolle Wallace said, “Do you think Bernie Sanders is acting Trump-like in his refusal to disavow people that may be unsavory but that are very enthusiastic about him?”
Biden said, “By the way, the white supremacists are very enthusiastic about Trump.”

What does this imply? If leaders of the Culinary Union have received death threats, have the police investigated? Do we know that Sanders supporters are responsible, or is this just what Joe Biden is assuming? And what was that “white supremacists” remark meant to signal? Was it just a random jab at Trump, or did he mean it as a dog whistle aimed at the black voters in South Carolina he’s counting on for his “firewall”? Did Biden mean to imply that, because Bernie supporters behave in a “Trump-like” way, they are somehow soulmates of the white supremacists who are “very enthusiastic about Trump”?

Go back and look at Nicolle Wallace’s question, though: Is this why she abandoned the Republican Party and became an MSNBC host, because she finds grassroots GOP voters to be “unsavory” people?

 

Think back to how Wallace backstabbed Sarah Palin, and think also about how she and the other members of the Bush-era GOP apparatus never expressed any real support for the Tea Party movement. Some Republicans have never actually liked the kind of people who vote Republican — the “credulous boomer rube demo,” as Rick Wilson says — and we should be grateful that Trump has flushed them out in the open, so everyone can see these #NeverTrump types for what they are.




 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Nevada, Racism

Joe Biden: DACA Recipients Are ‘More American Than Most Americans Are’

Posted on | February 18, 2020 | Comments Off on Joe Biden: DACA Recipients Are ‘More American Than Most Americans Are’

 

Remember, he’s the Democrat who’s gonna win working-class voters:

During a campaign rally in Reno, Nevada [Monday], former Vice President Joe Biden (D) said illegal aliens who are shielded from deportation by former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are “more American than most Americans are.”
While speaking to a crowd of supporters, Biden accused American citizens of being less American than even the roughly 800,000 to 3.5 million DACA illegal aliens living in the United States while touting his plan to provide them all with amnesty:

Once again, legalize all the DACA students. These DACA students are more American than most Americans are. No, I’m serious. Think about it. They come along when they’re eight-years-old and their mom says they’re crossing the … they don’t know where they’re from. They’ve never been [to their native country]. They’ve been good, decent citizens and they’re great additions. By the way … you know our Social Security system is still solvent? Because of immigration. They didn’t cost us anything, they’re paying for it … and there’s a reason why it’s moving. . . .

Biden has routinely used this talking point on the campaign trail, most recently telling Iowa voters that DACA illegal aliens are “more American than most Americans” because they have “done well in school.”

From Biden’s open-borders perspective, being an American is not about anything except going to school, paying taxes and voting Democrat. If you don’t vote Democrat, you’re un-American, according to Democrats, who are determined to import good “Americans” who will vote for them.




 

Category: Immigration, Joe Biden, Nevada

In The Mailbox: 02.17.20

Posted on | February 17, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The IRS Thinks Your Security Sucks
EBL: James Cagney – How To Dance Down Stairs
Twitchy: Brian Stelter Now Very Concerned With Government Institutions Becoming Political Weapons
Louder With Crowder: Girls Sue To Block Transsexuals From Competing In Womens’ Sports

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: You Can’t Be Right About Everything, also, Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Weekend Edition
American Conservative: West Point Prof Pens Blistering Takedown Of US Military Academies, also, Jordan Peterson Deserves Love, Not Spite, In His Time Of Darkness
American Greatness: Leftists Organized Barr Attack Letter, also, Reaching Peak Progressivism
American Power: Democrats Scramble For The Black Vote
American Thinker: Two-Tiered Justice System On Full Display, also, Canada – A Totalitarian State In Progress
Animal Magnetism: While We’re Traveling…
Babalu Blog: Univision Anchor Bashes Florida’s Cubans, Nicaraguans, & Venezuelans For Not Embracing Socialist Sanders, also, Spain Uncovers Cuban Spy Ring Operating At Highest Levels Of Government
BattleSwarm: Rule In The Time Of Coronavirus, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
Cafe Hayek: Heat And Light, also, Americans’ Shocking Prosperity
Camp Of The Saints: The Pandering Pimpsqueek, Michael Bloomberg
CDR Salamander: Chinese Box, also, Japan Moves Out In Counter-Air
Da Tech Guy: Bloomberg Everywhere, Steyer Nowhere, & Other Thoughts Under The Fedora, also, What if Brady Goes Somewhere And Doesn’t Bring A Super Bowl?
Don Surber: Manchin Is A Munchkin, also, Mini Hillary Begins Making Excuses For Her Flop
First Street Journal: Economics 101 – Amy Klobuchar Doesn’t Understand What She’s Doing
The Geller Report: Democrat Senators Hold Secret Meetings With Iranian Leaders, also, Muslims Slaughter 24 Christians, Including Pastor, Kidnap Three Others From Service In Burkina Faso
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, A Civil Rights Victory In Virginia
Hollywood In Toto: Freedom To Laugh Tour Takes On AOC, Hillary, And Others, also, The Assistant Puts Us In Harvey Weinstein’s Crosshairs
JustOneMinute: Now It’s Barr Vs. Trump, Unless It’s Not, also, Clouds On The Blue Horizon
Legal Insurrection: Journalists Really Mad That Trump Attended Daytona 500, also, Media Pushes False Narrative That Buttigieg, Klobuchar Are Moderates
Megan McArdle: Theories That Collapsed In New Hampshire
The PanAm Post: Cubans Fight Back Against Military-Style Repression, also,  Hollywood Celebrities Applaud Karl Marx At Oscars
Power Line: Topless Protester At Brainless Rally, also, Scenes From The Media Meltdown
Shark Tank: Scalise Endorses Maria Elvira Salazar For Congress
Shot In The Dark: The MNDFL – Literally The Nanny State
STUMP: Mortality With Meep – An Introduction To Cancer Statistics
This Ain’t Hell: Chow Thief Alexander Vindman Won’t Face Disciplinary Action, also, Buttigieg Called Out For Overstating His Military Experience
Victory Girls: Prager U Makes “Comedian” Samantha Bee Mad, also, Border Patrol Tac Units Deployed To Sanctuary Cities
Volokh Conspiracy: Short Circuit – A Roundup Of Recent Federal Court Decisions, also, A Nondelegation Challenge To Trump’s Travel Ban
Weasel Zippers: NYC Thief Thanks Democrats After 139th Arrest, Release, also, Bloomberg Suggests We Need to Ration Care
Mark Steyn: Looking For Love In All The Woke Places, also, A Valentine From Mohammed

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

Democrats Subvert U.S. Iran Policy

Posted on | February 17, 2020 | 1 Comment

Sucking up to the mullahs:

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and other Democratic senators had a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Jahad Zarif during the Munich Security Conference last week, according to a source briefed by the French delegation to the conference. Murphy’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment by press time.
Such a meeting would mean Murphy had done the type of secret coordination with foreign leaders to potentially undermine the U.S. government that he accused Trump officials of doing as they prepared for Trump’s administration. In February 2017, Murphy demanded investigations of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn because he had a phone call with his counterpart-to-be in Russia.
“Any effort to undermine our nation’s foreign policy — even during a transition period — may be illegal and must be taken seriously,” Murphy said in 2017 after anonymous leaks of Flynn’s phone call with Russian ambassador Sergey Kisylak were published. He also strongly criticized the open letter some Republican senators sent Iranian leaders during the Obama administration’s campaign for a nuclear agreement.
However, Murphy has previously defended rogue meetings if they’re done by Democrats such as former Secretary of State John Kerry.
“Unless it was authorized by the president or secretary of state, conducting independent foreign policy sends mixed signals to our adversaries,” said Christian Whiton, former State Department senior advisor in the Trump and George W. Bush administrations. “It seems very unpalatable. If we want to talk to Iranians, they know how to reach us and they don’t need to go through an intermediary.”
A State Department official who spoke on background said that the State Department was not aware of any side meetings with Iranian officials that Murphy was engaged in.

Their partisanship knows no limits — anything is OK, including the terrorist regime in Tehran, as long as it’s anti-Trump.




 

Category: Democrats, Iran

Double Standards at the Anti-Trump DOJ

Posted on | February 17, 2020 | Comments Off on Double Standards at the Anti-Trump DOJ

 

Roger Kimball examines how the Deep State protects its own:

The news Friday that the Department of Justice had decided not to charge former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe got me thinking once again about the legend chiseled into the façade of the Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.”
Is that what we have? Michael Horowitz, the Obama-appointed inspector general, concluded that McCabe had lied under oath. But as Andrew McCarthy noted last summer, “Government officials who leak while demonstrating their contempt for Donald Trump manage to land on their feet.” Like James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, McCabe left his government job to be a commentator on CNN.
Clapper, McCarthy pointed out,
is best known for lying to Congress about the government’s bulk collection of telephone metadata . . . and for discussing Steele dossier information with CNN shortly before the network published a report about it . . . CNN missed out on former Obama CIA director John Brennan, who falsely denied to the Senate that his agency spied on the chamber’s intelligence committee. Brennan, who said he was really sorry, was inked by MSNBC.
Contrast what happened with McCabe, Clapper, and Brennan with what happened to George Papadopoulos, who told the FBI he had met the international man of mystery Joseph Mifsud slightly before he had joined the Trump campaign when, in fact, it was slightly after he joined. Result: he is nabbed, disembarking from a plane at night, thrown into jail overnight, and was later sentenced to two weeks in jail.
Or contrast McCabe’s fate with that of Roger Stone, a former advisor to and pal of Donald Trump’s. Stone was subjected to one of Robert Mueller’s signature pre-dawn raids, hit with seven felony counts for allegedly obstructing Congress’s Russia investigation, lying, and threatening a witness (who later said he did not feel threatened). Prosecutors — including a couple who were on team Mueller — initially recommended a jail term of nine years — for a nonviolent first-offender. . . .

Read the whole thing. Remember the Strzok-Page “insurance policy”? During the 2016 campaign, the bureaucrats believed Hillary Clinton’s election was guaranteed, but if somehow Trump won, they were prepared to sabotage his presidency, which they never accepted as legitimate. Despite the obvious success of Trump’s presidency, the Democrats employed by the government still don’t accept that any Republican deserves to wield executive authority, and continue doing everything possible to obstruct and embarrass the administration.




 

Category: Corruption

Men and Women Are (Still) Different

Posted on | February 16, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

How did basic biology become “controversial”? Girls have to file a federal lawsuit to prevent males from competing in girls’ sports, and you’re a bigot — a hater, a proponent of transphobia — if you take the side of the plaintiffs in what would seem like a slam-dunk case to anyone with an iota of common sense. Alas, common sense is prejudice, according to the High Priesthood of Wokeness in the Temple of Gender Ideology.

 

As I have argued elsewhere (“A World Without Norms: The Influence of Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’”), this confusion can be traced to exactly one book by an influential professor. Because Gender Trouble has become required reading for so many university students, Judith Butler’s ideas have permeated the culture of the intelligentsia and have, in the process, corrupted the feminist movement. Much of this mischief can be understood as misinterpretation of Professor Butler’s authorial intent; there was a reason she wrote that book, but because she did not explicitly state her purpose, the collegiate reader was left free to draw his or her own conclusions from Professor Butler’s opaque text.

‘Gender Trouble’ made Professor Judith Butler a major academic figure.

It was not until 2004, in her anthology Undoing Gender, that Professor Butler bothered to explain what few readers of her most famous book could have understood: Gender Trouble was intended as a defense of “butch”/“femme” identities within the lesbian community. To understand why a professor of philosophy would have felt the need to publish such a book in 1990, it is necessary to study the so-called “Sex Wars” that erupted within the feminist movement in the 1980s. This controversy centered on the 1982 Barnard College conference “Toward a Politics of Sexuality.” Pornography was the dividing line between the two sides of the “Sex Wars,” and the radical feminists (who were anti-porn) were also critical of the lesbian BDSM scene, which was celebrated by such of the Barnard conference participants as Gayle Rubin. Let anyone who has a copy of Gender Trouble handy search the index for Gayle Rubin, read Professor Butler’s text and notice where she first cites Rubin. On page 39 of the 1999 second edition of Gender Trouble, we find this sentence:

This utopian notion of a sexuality freed from heterosexual constructs, a sexuality beyond “sex,” failed to acknowledge the ways in which power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a “liberated” heterosexuality or lesbianism.

That sentence is footnoted and, turning to the notes (p. 201), we find:

See Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole S.Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 267–319. Also in Pleasure and Danger, see Carole S. Vance, “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” pp. 1–28; Alice Echols,“The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968–83,” pp. 50–72; Amber Hollibaugh, “Desire for the Future: Radical Hope in Pleasure and Passion,” pp. 401–410. . . .

The ordinary reader (i.e., the college sophomore for whom Gender Trouble is the assigned text for her “Introduction to Women’s Studies” class) could not possibly be expected to grasp the significance of Professor Butler’s sourcing here. Perhaps, if she were diligent, this typical student might visit her college library and check out Carol Vance’s Pleasure and Danger, an anthology of the works presented at the 1982 Barnard conference. However, the student cannot possibly be expected to understand the controversy that surrounded that conference, which was protested by feminists who had the support of such notable pioneers of the movement as Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin. Nor is it likely that the college sophomore assigned to read Gender Trouble will do enough research to discover that Rubin and Hollibaugh were both active proponents of the lesbian sadomasochism scene. Nor would the typical student be aware that Rubin had expressed support for the gay pedophile group NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) and criticized laws against child pornography.

Context is everything in interpreting Gender Trouble‘s original purpose, a fancy philosophical justification of the “butch”/“femme” identities closely associated with the lesbian BDSM practices for which Rubin’s “Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” was an academic Trojan horse. A generation of college-educated young women (and men) have had their perception of “gender” warped by Professor Butler’s dishonest book, whose author deployed an impenetrable façade of academic jargon to conceal from the unsuspecting reader the subtextual argument which her choice of sources signified to those of her peers directly familiar with the “Sex Wars” controversy. Today’s 19-year-old, enrolling in a Women’s Studies class, cannot be expected to know anything about that 1982 Barnard conference, and certainly can have no concept of what the San Francisco gay “leather” scene was like in 1982. It was in that scene, of course, that homosexual men promiscuously engaged in anonymous encounters that incubated the AIDS epidemic.

Gayle Rubin was directly familiar with what was happening in that scene during the late 1970s and early ’80s, because she was part of a small group of lesbian and bisexual women associated with The Catacombs, a notorious gay BDSM club (see “The Catacombs: A Temple of the Butthole,” Chapter 9 of Professor Rubin’s anthology, Deviations). If you don’t know what practices made The Catacombs notorious, I’ll spare you the details, but the point is that Rubin was part of that scene which, through the auspices of Rubin’s ideological comrade Pat Califia, expanded its original all-male clientele to include “other groups — kinky lesbians, heterosexuals, and bisexuals” (Deviations, p. 226). Rubin and Califia were also co-founders of Samois, a “lesbian-feminist BDSM organization” they started in San Francisco in 1978. Highly relevant to 21st-century Third Wave “queer feminism” and its celebration of polymorphous perversion, the consequences of making the leather/BDSM scene “inclusive” were deadly. Cynthia Slater, a bisexual woman who in 1974 “co-founded the Society of Janus, which quickly became a point of connection between straight, bisexual, and gay sadomasochists in the Bay Area” (Deviations, p. 233), “introduced a couple of her female lovers” to The Catacombs and one of these women, Professor Rubin explains, was Pat Califia, who in 1979 organized the first lesbian S&M night at The Catacombs. Alas, Cynthia Slater died of AIDS at age 44 in 1989, which was eight years after the first known AIDS-related death of a Catacombs regular, Tony Tavarossi, who had been a pioneer of the San Francisco gay leather scene back in the early 1960s.

The “kinky” BDSM culture that Gayle Rubin represented as her “Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” at the 1982 Barnard conference was directly implicated in the death of Cynthia Slater, and yet no college student assigned to read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble today is likely to connect the dots when Professor Butler cites Professor Rubin.

Men and women are different, and these differences are rooted in biology, specifically the different roles men and women assume in the process of reproduction and child-rearing. It is possible for intellectuals (particularly LGBT academics like Butler and Rubin) to ignore the fact that human beings are mammals, and that the biological differences between male and female (“sexual dimorphism,” to use the scientific term) are necessary to the reproductive process.

 

What does the word “sex” mean, after all? Perhaps the hedonist thinks of sex only as a recreational activity, but scientifically, sex among mammals is inextricably connected to procreation. In the final analysis, Third Wave “gender theory” is just The Culture of Death dressed in drag, so to speak, and I wish feminists — including those radicals who fought against pornography in the “Sex Wars” of the 1980s — would give thoughtful consideration to what religious conservatives have been saying for years. We have seen a generation of young minds warped by the wicked ideology of “gender” that now threatens to destroy the category of women, without which feminism can have no meaning.




 

Category: Sex Trouble, The Transgender Cult
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