The Other McCain

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

Early Release

Posted on | May 14, 2020 | Comments Off on Early Release

— by Wombat-socho

Well, I caught some lucky breaks yesterday, and I’m out of the homeless veterans’ shelter. Planning to stay out, too; the VA has put me up at the Candlewood Suites down the street from the Convention Center, and I’m going to abuse their wifi to catch up on lost blogging time over the next few days. In fact, I intend to stay holed up in my room all weekend, for I have a lot to post about. Much thanks to those of you who hit the tip jar in response to Stacy’s kind words the other day, and to those of you who bought things through my Amazon links in April.

For what it is worth, Gauleiter Sisolak has graciously decreed that some businesses may open but others may not, and the decision on which is which appears to have been made with the same careful attention lavished on the rest of the state’s response to Corona-chan, which is to say none. For example, this skin care salon is barred from opening, while barber shops and beauty salons are allowed to open for business. The casinos on the Strip are not yet open, with MGM looking to reopen its properties by “early June” and others as early as Friday. Restaurants are gradually reopening as well. This is a Good Thing, since unemployment in the state is currently sitting at 25%, mostly here in Clark County, and the state’s unemployment system is completely FUBAR, so much so that the state is considering waiving civil service rules in order to hire temporaries. The phone system is completely overloaded and the online web portal is scarcely better, so there’s a lot of pissed-off unemployed people around with time on their hands, and Sisolak may find himself staring down the barrel of a hostile legislature after this fall’s elections.

That having been said, while the local economy is struggling to get back on its feet, you can get some pretty amazing deals on hotel rooms and airline tickets if you want to come down here. Rooms at the Stratosphere and some of the downtown casinos are going for rates on Priceline not usually seen until the December doldrums, and Southwest is offering double frequent flyer miles on top of $49 fares for those who book now. (Unsolicited plug.) Stop by and say hi, why don’t you?

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Fear. Loathing., Nevada

The Cult of Eternal Lockdown

Posted on | May 14, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how badly Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 response has been, and it has been a catastrophe from the very beginning. In early March, when the country was already becoming concerned about the spread of the virus, Whitmer did not cancel the Democratic presidential primary, and indeed, there was record turnout for the March 10 primary, which turned into a “super spreader” event in metropolitan Detroit. She has since bungled practically every aspect of the pandemic, including her deliberately punitive and irrational lockdown policy. Now she would have us believe that she is the real victim of all this:

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said Wednesday that the lockdown protests are “racist and misogynistic” and called on those with a platform to discourage the demonstrators.
Whitmer told ABC’s “The View” that the protests are “really political” as demonstrators have brought nooses, Confederate flags and Nazi symbolism.
“This is not appropriate in a global pandemic,” she said. “But it’s certainly not an exercise of democratic principles where we have free speech. This is calls to violence. This is racist and misogynistic.”

I have no idea who brought nooses, etc., to these protests, although I suspect these were false-flag agents provocateurs — leftists pretending to be part of the protest and acting in ways intended to discredit Whitmer’s opponents. None of this, however, justifies her policies:

The Cult of Eternal Lockdown is always willing to seize on anything that looks like “evidence” of their own superior knowledge, while ignoring every fact that might contradict their worldview. It does not support their argument, for example, to point out that three states (New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts) have a combined 42,326 deaths from COVID-19, which is nearly half of all U.S. deaths from the disease. All three of those states voted for Hillary Clinton by landslide margins, so their disproportionately deadly outbreaks don’t support the Dumb Republicans theory of the pandemic. Nor can any of the Eternal Lockdown cultists explain why Ohio, under Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, has a per-capita coronavirus death rate 73 percent lower than the rate in neighboring Michigan, where Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has enforced one of the most draconian lockdown regimes in America.
Whitmer’s latest “scientific” exploit involved revoking the license of a 77-year-old barber who had reopened his shop in violation of her orders. Such authoritarian gestures are perfectly acceptable under the lockdown logic that prevails among Democrats and their media allies. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: Democrats, Fear. Loathing., Michigan

The ‘Deep State’ Unmasked: Joe Biden Targeted Trump Aide Gen. Flynn

Posted on | May 14, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

Remember when anti-Trump rhetoric was about his supposed violation of “norms”? Remember when Trump’s criticism of hostile media was considered a threat to a free press? Yeah, forget all that:

The director of rapid response for former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign called CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge a “right-wing hack” in a tweet that was later deleted.
Andrew Bates criticized Herridge in the deleted tweet for her exclusive reporting obtaining acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell’s notification to Congress.
The notification contained a list of dozens of former Obama administration officials who reportedly asked for documents that led to the identity of former national security adviser Michael Flynn being “unmasked” from intelligence reports between the 2016 election and President Trump’s inauguration.
A copy of the list, later obtained by The Hill, includes Biden and former White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. . . .
“Attacking the press and attempting to intimidate independent media is a standard part of the authoritarian playbook,” Biden said in a statement earlier this month. “Efforts to undermine public confidence in the integrity of fact-based reporting violate our core American values and threaten our very system of government.”

As recently as May 3, the Biden campaign considered it “authoritarian” to criticize “independent media,” but when the media reports that Biden was part of the Obama administration’s illegal surveillance of their political opponents, suddenly the standards change. You are a “right-wing hack” if you think it was wrong for Biden to exploit the U.S. intelligence apparatus as a weapon against Trump’s incoming administration by “unmasking” Gen. Flynn’s communications.

They think we don’t see this. Democrats think the American people are too stupid to understand what’s happening here. I hope they’re wrong.




 

Category: Corruption, Joe Biden

Ahmaud Arbery: Focus on Media Bias, Because ‘The Issue Is Never the Issue’

Posted on | May 12, 2020 | Comments Off on Ahmaud Arbery: Focus on Media Bias, Because ‘The Issue Is Never the Issue’

 

Andrew Branca, an attorney specializing in self-defense cases, has referred to the “propaganda circus” surrounding the death of Ahmaud Arbery. One of the problems I’ve encountered is that, while my attention to the case has focused on the issue of media bias, which is what this “circus” is actually about, many people seem to think it is necessary to engage in arguments about the incident itself. But this is exactly what the “propaganda circus” seeks — to take a case that ought to be a matter for a judge and jury to decide and transfer jurisdiction to the “court of public opinion,” for a trial-by-media, with people reacting to what cable TV talking heads say about the case. You see this in the comments on my American Spectator column Monday, as well as my blog post Monday.

A 1960s radical once said: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” Whenever the Left seizes on some incident like the Arbery shooting, they do so to advance their agenda, and the role of supposedly “objective” journalists in assisting this project is what we need to focus on: What propaganda methods are involved?

First, consider the factor of selectivity. We must keep in mind that the United States has approximately 14,000 homicides in an average year — about 1,200 homicides per month, 40 homicides per day. Very few of those crimes ever get national media attention. It must be noted that about half of U.S. homicide victims are black, as are about half of known perpetrators of homicide, despite the fact that black people constitute only 14% of the U.S population. Black-on-black violence is a disproportionate amount of crime in America, whereas situations like the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery are quite rare.

So the media have chosen a rare type of incident to make a national story. Why? The agenda is unmistakably political:

Satilla Shores is a predominantly white neighborhood, one the Daily Beast’s Justin Glawe describes as featuring “several homes … decorated with Trump flags, one bearing the president’s smiling face with the phrase, Make liberals cry again.” . . .
>Advocates for Arbery argue his killing is a very clear case of racial profiling; in his caption for the video, Merritt wrote, “Ahmaud Arbery was pursued by three white men that targeted him solely because of his race and murdered him without justification.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by others, including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who tweeted Tuesday, “The video is clear: Ahmaud Arbery was killed in cold blood.”
Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election and who has said she hopes to become Biden’s running mate, demanded a “full investigation, appropriate charges, and an unbiased prosecution.”

That’s how the left-wing site Vox spun the story last week. They scarcely bother to conceal their message: “Trump voters are racist. White Republicans are the reason Ahmaud Arbery is dead.”

Yet it must be kept in mind that white-on-black homicide is a statistical rarity, a tiny fraction of the 14,000 homicides committed annually in the U.S., crimes that the national media typically ignore. The selectivity involved is driven by a partisan political motive, a desire to inflame public opinion in a way that is disadvantageous to Republicans. Another propaganda factor involved in the media’s coverage is omission.

 

Most Americans have never seen that 2013 mug shot of Ahmad Arbery, because the media do not wish to acknowledge his criminal record:

 

This is highly relevant to the circumstances of Arbery’s death, because Gregory McMichael, now charged with murder, was an investigator on that 2013 case in which Arbery was charged with bringing a pistol to a basketball game between Brunswick High (his alma mater) and their arch-rival Glynn Academy. Arbery was sentenced to five years’ probation in that case, and was subsequently convicted for violating his probation:

In an email [Ware County prosecutor George] Barnhill wrote to the state attorney general’s office on April 7, he asked to be taken off the case, stating that his son, an assistant district attorney in the Brunswick prosecutor’s office, had handled a felony probation revocation case involving Mr. Arbery. He also said Gregory McMichael had helped with “a previous prosecution of Arbery.”
Court records show that Mr. Arbery was convicted of shoplifting and of violating probation in 2018; according to local news reports, he was indicted five years earlier for taking a handgun to a basketball game.

How many CNN viewers know about this? And in the endless discussion of the case, how often is the significance of this information pointed out? Because, you see, first of all, that if McMichael recognized Arbery as he ran down Satilla Drive (“hauling ass,” McMichael said in his statement to police), he would have been aware that Arbery was a convicted felon with a history that involved firearms. Was it reasonable for McMichael to believe Arbery had a weapon? Could this explain why the former police officer decided to get his gun and pursue Arbery? Furthermore, because George Barnhill’s son was also involved in prosecuting Arbery, this helps explain why the case didn’t result in an immediate arrest, because Barnhill (who was chosen to handle the prosecution after the Glynn County D.A. recused herself) had to recuse himself after Arbery’s family objected to his possible conflict of interest. My purpose in drawing attention to this is not to argue about the shooting, but rather to show how the omission of these facts distorts perceptions of the case.

So, two methods of propaganda — selectivity and omission — are part of how the media have shaped the narrative of Ahmaud Arbery’s death, and they have done this to advance a political agenda: “Blame Trump!”

When the 36-second video clip of the shooting went viral last week, it was presented without context — or worse, was presented with the inflammatory false context of a “black jogger” being “hunted down” when, as we now know, Greg McMichael and his son believed themselves to be in pursuit of a burglary suspect. Again, this is not to argue about the case, as such, but rather to address the propaganda methods used by the media to advance their political agenda. If all you knew about the case is what you saw in that 36-second video clip, you’d certainly be angry about it, and if you were told that Ahmaud Arbery was just out for jog, you’d be even angrier. Even after it was explained that Arbery was a convicted felon whom the McMichaels suspected of committing burglaries in the area, you might still be angry, but there is a wide distance between (a) what actually happened, and (b) perceptions created by how the case has been portrayed in the media. “The issue is never the issue.”

It would be impossible for me to list everything that is being omitted, or at least not being properly emphasized, in coverage of this case. If you’re going to do hourly updates on cable news about a story, wouldn’t it behoove you to explore the story in-depth, rather than just showing the same video clip over and over and soliciting commentary from politicians and pundits? CNN can’t be bothered, however, and instead all the really useful reporting is done by other organizations, for example the Daily Mail, which interviewed the guy who called police to report Arbery’s trespassing at 220 Satilla Drive:

The witness’s timeline tallies with a recording of a 1:08pm non-emergency call released by the Brunswick Police Department and published last week by DailyMail.com. ‘There’s a guy in the house right now, a house under construction,’ the male caller says in the clip.
The audio is redacted to protect his identity but DailyMail.com can confirm it’s the same voice as the man we spoke to.
He claimed there had been a rash of thefts in Satilla Shores recently that included pistols and rifles stolen from people’s vehicles. Police have said they recorded one burglary in the area since January; there are no records matching claims of firearms thefts from vehicles.
However, he said he had never personally seen Arbery before and had no evidence he was linked to the theft or any other crimes.
‘I saw him running down the street and I know someone matching his description had been entering vehicles and been on people’s docks,’ the witness added.
‘So I went down there to call the police and get a closer look.’

Notice the phrase “people’s docks.” In case you haven’t looked at a map of this neighborhood, it’s waterfront property, on the north bank of the Little Satilla River, and there are boat docks behind the homes on the even-numbered addresses on Satilla Drive. While it’s not Palm Beach or Malibu or some other luxurious resort location, having a riverfront property with your own private boat dock is rather a sizable investment.

 

If you believed that your property was at risk of being stolen or damaged by intruders, it would not be unreasonable to call the police when you saw suspicious activity in the neighborhood. Does that explain why Gregory McMichael and his son thought it would be a good idea to grab their guns and set off in pursuit of Arbery? No, except that there apparently was concern about crime in the neighborhood and — just speculating here — maybe the senior McMichael, an ex-cop, was feeling ornery that Sunday afternoon. It’s one of those situations where you ask, “What the hell were they thinking?” However, you could ask the same question about Ahmaud Arbery’s behavior that day.

Watch this report from Savannah’s WSAV-TV:

 

You’ll see that there’s not only the video we’ve all seen — Arbery evidently checking out the unfinished construction site at 220 Satilla Drive — but also other videos, from the same site, taken at night and showing someone who may or may not be Arbery inside the site. According to the report, these other videos date back as far as October 2019. So it was not a matter of paranoid imagination when a 911 caller told the dispatcher the day Arbery shot that this was an “ongoing situation.” There is yet another video I’ve seen which shows Arbery exiting the site at high speed (“hauling ass,” as Gregory McMichael told police), perhaps because he realized that the neighbor had called police.

Recall that, just two years ago, Arbery got busted for shoplifting and violating probation. Even if you think he was just out for a jog and decided to check out this construction site, what would Arbery think when he saw the neighbor standing in his driveway talking on the phone?

“Oh, no. They called the police. Better get out of here.”

This is speculation, but it is a fair guess that if Arbery thought police were on their way to investigate his trespassing on this property, he wouldn’t stick around to explain himself to the cops. You can read the police report yourself and see what allegedly happened thereafter, and you can also read George Barnhill’s letter asserting that the McMichaels’ actions did not violate Georgia law. Many people — including Dana Loesch — have criticized Barnhill’s argument. That’s immaterial to what I’m saying about media bias. If all you know about this case is what you’re getting from CNN or MSNBC, you know a lot less than half the story.

The media are deliberately distorting the case, using it as propaganda to incite racial anger to advance their political agenda.

Stop arguing about the case, and instead “turn the camera around,” as Andrew Breitbart used to say: Force the media to defend their bias. Hold them accountable for their selectivity and omissions. Why are they reporting on this homicide, rather than covering any other of the approximately 40 homicides that happen every day in America? What makes this Georgia case more important than any other case?




 

Category: Crime, Georgia, Media Bias, Racism

Tater Tots With Russia Sauce

Posted on | May 12, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

Simple recipe:

  • 1 fat bald CNN personality with zero self-awareness;
  • Several dozen of his own words;
  • Combine ingredients. Bake for one minute and six seconds. Laugh.

 

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Apologies for the lack of blogging today. I crawled down through the layers of media bias in coverage of the Ahmaud Arbery case, got about 1,000 words into a post and then had to make a run to Little Caesar’s for dinner. Will try to finish that and post it later tonight. The difficulty, of course, is that I want it to be 100% accurate, and to avoid any appearance of justifying the actions that resulted in Arbery’s death.

Speaking of lack of blogging, a reader was asking about Wombat’s extended absence. I can report that Wombat is alive and healthy, but his current housing situation does not permit him to blog. He expects to have this problem solved soon, and we may have him back as soon as this weekend. Meanwhile, readers can hit Wombat’s tip jar to encourage him during this difficult time of Fear and COVID-19 in Las Vegas.




 

Category: CNN, Russia

Georgia on My Mind

Posted on | May 11, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

“It seemed like a good idea at the time” is not a strong defense in a murder trial, and the question everybody seems to be asking in regard to the death of Ahmaud Arbery is why Gregory McMichael and his son thought it was a good idea to grab their guns, jump in their truck and go out in pursuit of a man they assumed to be a fleeing burglary suspect.

It is not my habit to play Monday-morning quarterback in controversial murder cases. I’m not a lawyer, and my opinion in such matters is no more valuable than anyone else’s. However, I’ve spent more than 30 years in the news business, and I know a thing or two about media bias. In 2009, when I saw a bunch of pundits pontificating about the alleged “lynching” of a census worker in Kentucky, I got the wild idea to hit the road and investigate the reality of the story on the ground. As it turned out, the census worker had committed suicide and staged it to look like a lynching, in an insurance fraud scheme, but by the time the truth came out, the pundits who had smeared this Kentucky community as a haven of “anti-government extremism” seemed to have lost interest.

Could it be that the media’s coverage of the Ahmaud Arbery case is similarly biased? I’m trying to resist the itch for a road trip, but meanwhile I’m sick and tired of the way the story is being spun:

Brunswick is a seaport town on the Georgia coast with which I have a personal connection. During World War II, my maternal grandfather moved to Brunswick to work in the shipyard and my grandmother joined him there, working in the canteen that served meals to the more than 16,000 workers who built 99 “Liberty ships” in the Brunswick yards in a span of about three years. Founded in the 1770s, Brunswick remains today a major harbor, and its picturesque Old Town district attracts many tourists who visit nearby Jekyll Island and St. Simons Island.
Brunswick seldom makes national news, but that changed last month when the New York Times devoted a 1,700-word article to the February shooting death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. Why would this homicide be worthy of national attention? Because Arbery was black and the man who shot him is white and, until the case became the subject of round-the-clock coverage on CNN, no charges had been filed in the case. Now that 34-year-old Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael, have been charged with murder and aggravated assault, one might hope that journalists would be content to leave the matter to the justice system, but that’s not how the media operate in such cases. Instead, Americans are still being bombarded with updates and commentary on the alleged “lynching” of Arbery, who is described as a “black jogger” who was the victim of racism. . . .

You can read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: American Spectator, CNN, Crime, Georgia, Media Bias, New York Times, Racism

R.I.P., Little Richard

Posted on | May 9, 2020 | Comments Off on R.I.P., Little Richard

 

“A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom!”

Arguably the most exciting words in the history of music, the opening lyrics of “Tutti Frutti” announced the arrival of a bright-burning star who, in a period of two years, created the sound of rock-and-roll. You could say Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley had a larger influence, but nobody was ever more exciting than Little Richard. His falsetto whoops and earthy blues vocal style, combined with his boogie-woogie piano, highlighted a unique blend of talents by a sensational showman.

Beginning with “Tutti Frutti,” Richard Wayne Penniman rattled off a string of hits: “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin,” “Rip It Up,” “Ready Teddy,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Lucille,” and “Jenny, Jenny,” among others. The Beatles famously covered “Long Tall Sally” as well as Little Richard’s version of “Kansas City,” and in the 1970s, I remember Johnny and Edgar Winter including “Slippin’ and Slidin” in their rock-and-roll medley. Nobody quite personified rock-and-roll as a wild and dangerous sound quite the way Little Richard did, with the sexual innuendo of his lyrics, his pompadour hairstyle and those crazy leering eyes.

R.I.P., Little Richard. Your legend lives on.




 

Category: Music

Headline of the Week

Posted on | May 9, 2020 | 1 Comment

An instant classic:

EXCLUSIVE: ‘I have no other talent’:
Gold Coast influencer breaks down
in tears as she loses followers on
‘porn’ website OnlyFans due to
the coronavirus pandemic and
can no longer pay her rent

Australia’s Gold Coast is near Brisbane, and I have no idea why this particular bimbo would think she could make a career out of selling dirty pictures of her coochie on the Internet:

A distraught Gold Coast influencer had a breakdown last week because the coronavirus pandemic led to a drop in followers on her X-rated OnlyFans account.
Billie Beever, who has 113,000 Instagram fans and supports herself by posting adult content on the subscription website, cried as she revealed she can no longer pay her rent.
The 27-year-old charges $12.99-a-month for access to her pictures and makes extra through tips and requests — but jobless fans can no longer afford to follow her.
‘Everyone on TV is always talking about how everybody has lost their jobs and people can’t pay for anything anymore, but I’m losing subscribers on OnlyFans and that’s my main source of income,’ sobbed Billie in a now-removed TikTok video.
She continued: ‘I can’t pay my rent, I can’t work. Even if I was to go back to work, what am I meant to do? Strip clubs are all closed, you can’t even be close to somebody because of social distancing.
‘I have nothing else going for me, I have no other talent. I’ve got nothing else. I can’t dance, I can’t sing, I can’t do anything. I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do. I just want everything to go back to normal so people can keep subscribing.’

Well, I suppose, she could become a politician and make regular appearances on CNN, which is what whores with no talent do in America. And speaking of people making money on the Internet . . .

Because nobody would pay to see pictures of me naked, I was forced to become a blogger, and making jokes about politics is even less lucrative than what Billie Beever does. Somehow, I managed to endure this shame without ever being tempted to run for Congress or appear on CNN. And you should probably hit my tip jar in gratitude.

(Hat-tip: @ground_miller on Twitter.)




 

Category: humor
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