The Other McCain

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

How #StickToSports Became the New #LearnToCode — Deadspin Is Dead

Posted on | November 1, 2019 | Comments Off on How #StickToSports Became the New #LearnToCode — Deadspin Is Dead

 

“There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

What would Doctor Gonzo say to the former staff of Deadspin?

Deadspin is dead, for the time being.
The site is now without any editors or writers — after a staff revolt that erupted this week when parent company G/O Media demanded that the sports and culture site confine its coverage to sports.
As of Friday morning, all 20 of Deadspin’s previous editorial employees are no longer working for the company, a G/O Media rep confirmed. The spokesman added, “The company is recruiting new staff.”
The exits started after G/O Media fired interim editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky when he refused to follow the company’s mandate to stick to sports in Deadspin’s editorial coverage. That directive, from G/O editorial director Paul Maidment, appeared to be in response to a Deadspin article (which has since been deleted) complaining about autoplay video ads that the company was running on the site.
Managing editor Samer Kalaf, the last remaining senior edit staffer as of early yesterday, tweeted his resignation Thursday afternoon: “OFFICIAL STATEMENT: I have self-yeeted from Deadspin.” Word came Friday that staff writer Dave McKenna also had resigned.
Former Deadspin editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell wrote in a tweet Friday, “And with that, it’s over. Deadspin no longer employs a single writer or editor. I am gutted but so very proud of this group of people.” Greenwell exited Deadspin in August, which she previously said came “after months of being undermined by G/O Media management.”
In a statement earlier about the staff resignations, G/O Media had said, “We’re sorry that the staff that resigned couldn’t work within this incredibly broad coverage mandate.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders joined the discussion over the chaos at Deadspin, writing in an Oct. 31 tweet, “I stand with the former Deadspin workers who decided not to bow to the greed of private equity vultures like [G/O Media CEO] Jim Spanfeller. This is the kind of greed that is destroying journalism across the country, and together we are going to take them on.”
Deadspin was part of Univision’s sale in April of this year of Gizmodo Media Group to G/O Media, which is backed by private-equity firm Great Hill Partners and Spanfeller. Univision had acquired the assets of the former Gawker Media in a bankruptcy auction in 2016.

You will recall that Nick Denton’s Gawker got bankrupted by an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit from former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan. This result was cheered by #GamerGate because Gawker also owned Kotaku, a videogame blog that promoted “social justice warrior” (SJW) nonsense. Deadspin’s demise was another #GetWokeGoBroke episode:

Deadspin writer Drew Magary on Thursday morning said he was quitting. Writers Dom Cosentino, Luis Paez-Pumar and Dan McQuade also tweeted their farewells Thursday, adding to the seven who had resigned Wednesday.
Management fired back on Thursday, claiming that the staffers’ contention that non-sports were among the most popular posts was not true.
“In September, unsurprisingly, 24 of the top 25 stories on Deadspin were sports-related while non-sports content accounted for less than 1% of the page views on the site,” a spokesman said.
“While amusing, our readers haven’t actually come to Deadspin for stories like ‘Classic Rock, Ranked,’ or ‘You’re Goddamn Right It’s Layering Season,’ or ‘It’s OK to Logoff.’?”

“Kazika the Mad Jap” could not be reached for comment.


 

Category: Journalism, Media Bias, Sports

BREAKING: O’Rourke Drops Out

Posted on | November 1, 2019 | Comments Off on BREAKING: O’Rourke Drops Out

 

The avowed gun-grabber has run out of money:

Former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas is dropping out of the presidential race, ending a campaign in which he struggled for months to recapture the energy of his insurgent 2018 Senate candidacy on a national stage full of other big personalities and liberal champions.
Mr. O’Rourke made the decision to quit the race in the middle of this week, on the eve of a gathering Friday of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, according to people familiar with his thinking. He is not expected to run for any other office in 2020, despite persistent efforts by party leaders and political donors to coax him into another bid for the Senate.
His campaign has been under extreme financial strain, and Mr. O’Rourke’s advisers concluded that proceeding in the race might have meant making deep cuts to his staff in order to pay for advertising and other measures to compete in the early primary and caucus state.
Mr. O’Rourke planned to announce his withdrawal from the race in Iowa on Friday evening and follow up with an email message to his supporters. In that message, a draft of which was reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. O’Rourke said he was proud of championing issues like guns and climate change but conceded that his campaign lacked “the means to move forward successfully.”

Good-bye, and good riddance, Robert Francis O’Rourke. On Fox News minutes ago, Juan Williams asked, “Who gets Beto’s support now?” To which Dana Perino replied, “Well, he doesn’t have any support.”

UPDATE: Guess this fund-raising idea didn’t work out:

 

How about, “Hell, no, you won’t!”


 

Category: Democrats

Jabba the Hut Gets Hired by Seattle Schools to Humiliate White Racist Kids

Posted on | November 1, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

Say hello to Tracy Castro-Gill:

In October, Seattle public schools unveiled a “framework” to inject “math ethnic studies” into all K-12 math classes, teaching “how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.”
Students will be asked to “identify the inherent inequities of the standardized testing system used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color” and “explain how math dictates economic oppression.”
“Why/how does data-driven processes prevent liberation?” it asks. “How important is it to be Right? What is Right? Says Who?”
The curriculum was pushed by the school district’s ethnic studies program manager, Tracy Castro-Gill . . .
“I am an educator of color in Seattle whose job is anti-racist work within the school district. Seattle is very white — nearly 70%. It’s also one of the most liberal cities in the US, and these liberal, white Seattleites hate being called racist, but the thing is – a lot of them are,” she wrote. . . .
“I’m fairly radical atheist and consider myself a far left anarchist who fights for racial justice,” she wrote. “My parents are both Trump supporting Republicans.”

If you knew someone was a radical atheist anarchist, would you let them anywhere near your children? No, of course not, but the Seattle public school system hired this deranged lunatic to teach kids that “math dictates economic oppression” against “communities of color.”

2 + 2 = RAAAAACISM!

Jabba the SJW Hutt here is actually part of a national trend, as public schools are instituting “social justice” programs and eliminating honors classes which are deemed “racist.” Ace of Spades comments:

Academic achievement is racist.
This is, of course, the inevitable end-point.
Do they even realize what they are strongly, strongly implying when they make claims like this?

I don’t know. Maybe they could read a racist book or something. But who am I kidding? These people are too stupid to read books.


 

Category: Education

The Democrats’ 2020 Implosion

Posted on | November 1, 2019 | Comments Off on The Democrats’ 2020 Implosion

All their “rising stars” have fallen to earth:

This primary is turning into a giant bonfire of once-promising political talents who could make national reporters swoon.
As far back as 2017, Vogue and other national glossies gushed over the presidential potential of Kirsten Gillibrand.
Beto O’Rourke was the favorite subject of glowing profiles in national publications throughout 2018.
Julian Castro spent much of the past decade being touted as “the Latino Obama.”
Cory Booker was the subject of documentaries and a social media star . . . and like the rest, he’s an afterthought.
And as our John McCormick notes, Kamala Harris’s campaign may be reaching the stage of an M.Night Shamalayan character — long since dead, but still walking around in denial of this difficult truth.

Read the whole thing. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Elizabeth Warren will be the Democratic nominee in 2020. Perhaps one major reason Democrats have been in such a hysterical rush to impeach President Trump is because they see what anyone else with two eyes and a brain can see — Trump will stomp Warren like Godzilla stomping Tokyo. Notice — you could scarcely miss it — that this “UkraineGate” frenzy boiled over just about the time the first few rounds of TV debates among the Democrat hopefuls had made clear that (a) Biden was hopeless, and (b) none of the “rising stars” had a chance. Biden’s poll numbers began to sag and Warren’s numbers started rising, and then — BOOM! — Schiff and the House Democrats hit the panic button.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)


 

Category: Democrats

The Deep State and UkraineGate

Posted on | November 1, 2019 | Comments Off on The Deep State and UkraineGate

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate keeping up with the day-to-day partisan warfare in D.C.? Many journalists crave such a diet, but I find it tedious, mainly because it’s “pack” reporting, everybody chasing the same story, whereas I prefer to find some little-noticed incident nobody else is covering and turn that into a story. All this to explain why I dread this “UkraineGate” impeachment carnival — the Beltway press corps will love it, but there’s no real fun to be had in trying to cover the same story that’s being covered by a thousand other reporters and drawing commentary from a thousand pundits. How can I possibly make any really valuable contribution to such a story? But never mind my personal problems, there’s a witch-hunt underway in Washington:

Though Democrats have been working hard to keep the identity of the whistleblower under wraps, reports this week published his alleged identity — and conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh says that now that more details are out, it’s painfully clear why Trump’s political enemies wouldn’t want the whistleblower identified.
“The guy was a plant in the White House by the CIA to do exactly what he did,” Limbaugh said Thursday. “We know his name. He’s one of a dime-a-dozen Yale or Harvard graduates, literally a 30-year-old Pajama Boy doing the bidding of John Brennan in the White House.” . . .
“This guy’s a leaker! He’s not a whistleblower!” said Rush. ” … This guy was involved from the get-go, starting in 2016, doing John Brennan’s bidding from the West Wing on furthering the whole Trump-Russia collusion operation of which there wasn’t one!”
“[T]hey don’t want us to know who he is for these obvious reasons,” he added. “Now Schiff and his buddies are saying, ‘Well, we don’t need to know the young whistleblower’s identity. We don’t really need to hear from the whistleblower.’ Of course we don’t now … ”
Limbaugh stressed that “everybody has known who this guy is for weeks,” including Trump and his aides, yet his name wasn’t leaked until now, which he described as “a classic illustration of the swamp protecting itself.”

All very true, and since the nation’s most popular radio host has said it, there’s not much for me to add. Nevertheless, I must try:

Nancy Pelosi proclaimed Thursday that the party-line impeachment vote in the House of Representatives was about protecting “democracy.” Madame Speaker was actually close to speaking the truth for once, because what the impeachment circus is about is protecting Democrats, particularly the Obama administration officials who sought to sabotage President Trump both during the 2016 election campaign and after Trump won. The vote Thursday — 232 to 196, with all but two Democrats in favor and all Republicans voting “no” — followed several days of secret testimony in deranged California Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee, conducted prior to any authorizing vote on the House floor. Now that Democrats have formally voted to climb aboard the “Ukrainegate” impeachment train, however, Pelosi and her party have signed a sort of suicide pact. They must destroy the president in a desperate effort to prevent Americans from learning what Obama, the Democratic Party, and “deep state” bureaucrats did to Trump.
It was perhaps symbolic that this House vote happened on Halloween, inspiring the president to remark on Twitter: “The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!” . . .

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


 

Category: Democrats, Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi

In The Mailbox: 10.31.19

Posted on | October 31, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 10.31.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #791 – Naughty Halloween!
EBL: Erdogan Pal Donates To Ilhan Omar, Omar Helps Erdogan, Media Mostly Ignore It
Twitchy: Talks Between Whistleblower’s Legal Team & Schiff’s Staff Halt – Whistleblower Unlikely To Testify
Louder With Crowder: Austin, TX Rolls Out Transgender Education For Eight-Year-Olds, also, Trump Tweets Hero Dog Pic, Fake News Is Investigating

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Mothers, Teach Your Daughters
American Greatness: Stapling Green Cards To Diplomas Is Stupid & Suicidal, also, Reversing The Venality Of American Politics
American Power: House Votes For Impeachment
American Thinker: Why Is Vindman A War Hero But Flynn A Traitor?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Hate Speech News
Babalu Blog: AOC’s Democratic Socialists So Communist, Not Even Cuba’s Socialists Want Anything To Do With Them
BattleSwarm: al-Baghdadi/ISIS/Syria/Turkey/Kurds Happy Fun Ball Update
Camp of the Saints: The Present Crisis – Out (Finally) In Paperback
Cafe Hayek: Reality Remains Mandatory
CDR Salamander: When Allies Have Carriers, Everybody Wins
Da Tech Guy: A Political Horror Story – What America Would Be Like If The Democrats Win In 2020
Don Surber: Highlights Of The News
First Street Journal:  The Washington Post Uses Its Freedom Of The Press To Criticize Freedom Of Speech
The Geller Report: Muslim Commissioner Of Virginia’s Human Rights Commission Declares Gays “An Abomination To The Human Race”, also, Envoy Reports Iran has Spent $16 Billion On Militias In Iraq & Syria
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, I Have A Couple Of Words For The Democrats In Congress
Hollywood In Toto: Feminist Terminator – Dark Fate Refuses To Go Full Woke
Joe For America: Gohmert – Dems’ Impeachment Coup “About To Push This Country Into Civil War”
JustOneMinute: More Tea Leaves On The Impeachment-Lite Drama
Legal Insurrection: New Polls Show Biden Losing Ground To Trump, Warren, & Sanders, also, House Approves Trump Impeachment Inquiry Rules Mostly Along Party Lines
The PanAm Post: Why Not Jeffersonian Ward Republics?
Power Line: The 2020 Presidential Campaign In 30 Seconds, also, A Tough Trump Policy On Russia Nobody Talks About
Shark Tank: Ted Yoho Retiring From Congress After This Term?
Shot In The Dark: Some People Did Something To Some Armenians
The Political Hat: Happy Halloween (2019)!
This Ain’t Hell: Drunk Sailors Attack Police Car In Japan, also, SEAL Chief Edward Gallagher To Retire As PO1
Victory Girls: Mazie Hirono’s Constitutional Brilliance
Volokh Conspiracy: A Few Thoughts On Kansas v. Glover
Weasel Zippers: For Some Reason Biden Now Talking About His Parents’ Sex Life, also, Durham Knows The Crimes, At Least Some Of The People Involved, & Potential Charges
Mark Steyn: Rot In Helm, also, Bonfires & Vanities

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

Katie Hill and Her Victimhood Narrative

Posted on | October 31, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

As I remarked the other day, the Katie Hill sex scandal is actually a media scandal, given the role played by the “Democratic Party operatives with bylines” in helping elect the naked bisexual to Congress. Of course, then, when her own unethical behavior forced her from office, the disgraced Democrat claimed to be a victim of “right-wing” forces, and the media labored to give this lie an artificial appearance of truth:

New York Times political writer Lisa Lerer made Tuesday’s edition with news of the resignation of the formerly rising Democratic Rep. Katie Hill of California, after a bizarre sex scandal involving campaign and congressional staffers, and fueled by explicit photos first reported by a conservative website.
The headline was loaded to show how disturbed the Times felt about the spectacle of a Democratic congresswoman forced out of office in such fashion: “Revenge Porn Reaches Washington.” . . .
Lerer tried to muddy the waters while blaming “the conservative news site RedState.” . . .
Lerer compared Hill’s unseating to the supposedly disparate treatment of Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican accused of similar relationships with staffers.

Did I miss something? Have we seen photos of Duncan Hunter smoking a bong in the nude? Do we have screenshots of text messages confirming any three-ways involving Duncan Hunter? If the New York Times ever got hold of such evidence, I’m sure they’d publish it, but until they do, perhaps they should grab a hot cup of shut the f–k up. And while her media enablers repeat Katie’s dishonest narrative, the disgraced Democrat plans to sue everyone who told the truth:

Embattled Rep. Katie Hill hired revenge porn warrior Carrie Goldberg to sue over leaked nude snaps that emerged in the sex scandal that led to her resignation, The Post has learned.
The California congresswoman retained the noted Brooklyn attorney’s services after an onslaught of compromising photos surfaced on the conservative site RedState amid her ongoing divorce.
“This is a historic situation where an alleged abusive ex, bloodthirsty opposition, and a media without morals joined forces to hijack a brilliant young woman’s hard-fought congressional seat. It’s a new low for democracy,” Goldberg told The Post. . . .
“Everybody who participated in Representative Hill’s humiliation is on notice that we will track them down,” Goldberg said. “Anybody who continues to share, barter, peddle, sell images of Representative Hill will be found out and be brought to justice one way or another. Whether you are an ex-partner, a political opponent, a publisher, or the Republican National Committee, don’t think for a second you’ll be getting away with destroying a woman’s life.”

Ma’am, your client was smoking a bong in the nude. Perhaps you should reconsider your legal strategy. “Discovery is a bitch,” you know.

By the way, Red State never published the worst of those photos. What was most damaging to Katie Hill in Red State’s reporting was not “nude snaps,” but rather screenshots of text messages verifying (a) the nature of Ms. Hill’s involvement with a young female campaign aide, (b) concerns about Ms. Hill’s mental stability and alcohol intake, and (c) suspicion of her subsequent involvement with a male congressional staffer. It was (c) that represented a violation of House ethics rules, and the media is now helping to conceal that inconvenient truth by pretending this scandal is about “misogyny,” “revenge porn,” blah blah blah.

Nevertheless, she persisted:

“I am leaving because of a misogynistic culture that gleefully consumed my naked pictures, capitalized on my sexuality and enabled my abusive ex to continue that abuse, this time with the entire country watching,” Rep. Hill told her colleagues.
“I am leaving because of the thousands of vile, threatening emails, calls, and texts, that made me fear for my life and the lives of the people that I care about.”
“I am leaving because I didn’t want to be peddled by papers and blogs and websites, used by shameless operatives for the dirtiest gutter politics that I have ever seen,” she added.

How about, “I am leaving because I got caught violating House ethics rules against having sex with staff members”? No? You won’t tell the truth even after you got caught? Just another typical Democrat.

By the way, remember when Democrats went to court to unseal the records in the divorce of a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate? That was in Illinois, 2004. Jack Ryan was forced to quit, enabling a Democrat state senator to win the election. Maybe you heard of that guy.


 

Category: Democrats, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

Hillary in Greenface Excites the Muse

Posted on | October 31, 2019 | Comments Off on Hillary in Greenface Excites the Muse

by Smitty

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Category: Uncategorized
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