The Other McCain

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

UPDATE: GOP’s Dan Bishop Wins Special Election in North Carolina’s 9th District

Posted on | September 10, 2019 | Comments Off on UPDATE: GOP’s Dan Bishop Wins Special Election in North Carolina’s 9th District

UPDATE 11:25 p.m. ET: In addition to Bishop’s win in the Ninth District, the GOP also picked up a victory in a special election in the Third District, where Republican Greg Murphy beat Democrat Allen Thomas by 19 points, 59%-40%. What went wrong for Democrats? As the Daily Caller notes: “McCready came under fire after he accused Bishop of having no faith in public schools, however, the North Carolina Democrat sends his children to an $18,000 a year private school.” Oops.

When early polls showed Bishop trailing, the media began calling the Ninth District a “bellwether” of prospects for the 2020 election, but now we can expect them to forget NC-9 ever happened. Except of course, Trump will just rubbing salt in their wounds:

UPDATE 10:20 p.m. ET: Republican Dan Bishop has apparently won the 9th District special election in North Carolina. With all but two precincts reporting, Bishop has a margin of more than 4,000 votes over Democrat Dan McCready. With 99% of precincts (208 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ………. 94,984 ….. 50.81%
Dan McReady ……. 90,824 ….. 48.59%

UPDATE 10:05 p.m. ET: With 92% of precincts (193 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ……. 89,941 ….. 50.78%%
Dan McReady ………….. 86,120 ….. 48.62%

With only 17 precincts still to be counted, and Bishop leading by nearly 4,000 votes, this is starting to look like a win for the Republican.

UPDATE 9:30 p.m. ET: With 67% of precincts (140 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ……. 72,682 ….. 50.27%
Dan McCready ………….. 71,082 ….. 49.16%

Still too close to call, but encouraging.

UPDATE 9:15 p.m. ET: Bishop takes the lead with 58% of precincts (122 of 210) reporting:

Dan Bishop ………….. 66,956 ….. 50.05%
Dan McCready ……. 66,074 ….. 49.39%

UPDATE 9:10 p.m. ET: With 55% of precincts (115 of 210) reporting:

Dan McCready ……. 65,673 ….. 49.92%
Dan Bishop ………….. 65,138 ….. 49.51%

OK, now we have legitimate good news. McReady’s lead is now barely 500 points. Bishop might pull this out yet. Cross your fingers.

UPDATE 9 p.m. ET: With 40% of precincts reporting:

Dan McCready ……. 56,921 ….. 50.39%
Dan Bishop ………….. 55,415 ….. 49.05%

You see that Bishop is closing the gap, but without knowing which precincts are still unreported, we don’t know if this trend will continue.

UPDATE 8:20 p.m. ET: With 14% of precincts reporting:

Dan McCready ……. 47,439 ….. 54.15%
Dan Bishop ………….. 39,727 ….. 45.35%

I’m informed that this reflects a surge of absentee ballots being reported from precincts in urban Mecklenburg County.

UPDATE 8 p.m. ET: With 3% of precincts reporting:

Dan McCready ……… 23,526 ….. 50.44%
Dan Bishop ………….. 22,895 ….. 49.09%

PREVIOUSLY (7:32 p.m. ET)

Polls closed at 7:30 p.m. ET in North Carolina’s 9th District special election, where Republican Dan Bishop is facing Democrat Dan McReady. Trump carried the district by double digits in 2016, and he held a giant rally Monday night in Fayetteville, but Republican leaders were lowering expectations today in what is regarded as a toss-up.



 

Category: Congress, Election, North Carolina

CNN Story ‘Simply False,’ CIA Says

Posted on | September 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Never trust CNN:

The Central Intelligence Agency on Monday evening slammed what it called CNN’s “misguided” and “simply false” reporting, after the cable channel’s chief national security correspondent authored a hole-filled piece claiming that the CIA had pulled a high-level spy out of Russia because President Trump had “repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.”
The extraordinary CIA rebuke came as The New York Times published a bombshell piece late in the evening, which largely contradicted CNN’s reporting. According to the Times, CIA officials “made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia” — weeks before Trump even took office.
Concerns about media reporting on Russian election interference drove the decision, according to the Times, which described the source as “the American government’s best insight into the thinking of and orders” from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Former intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction,” the Times wrote.

In other words, what really endangered the source was the media asking questions about where the CIA was getting its Russia information, and let us ask, why was the media asking those questions? Could it be because Obama administration officials, including CIA Director John Brennan, were feeding the media the “Russian collusion” narrative, which naturally led reporters to try confirming the leaks from Brennan & Co.?



 

Category: CNN, Corruption, Russia

He Was the Walrus, Goo Goo Ga Joob

Posted on | September 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

They are the egg men:

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he had fired national security adviser John Bolton after a string of disagreements over how the U.S. should handle North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran.
Trump announced on Twitter that he had asked for Bolton’s resignation on Monday night, saying he had “disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions.”
“I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning,” Trump said on Twitter.

Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who quotes J.P. Freire: “Press is about to go from ‘John Bolton is a radical warmonger who never should be permitted near the Oval Office’ to ‘This is a story of how a reasonable, respected expert was dismissed by a chaotic, megalomaniacal Administration, and whatever his critique is, we agree!’” In other words, everything Trump does is wrong, because Orange Man Bad!

Ace of Spades has a nice explanation of the staffing problems that have plagued the Trump administration:

[Trump] had to rely heavily on Establishment GOP and NeverTrumpers to serve as his top staffers, and those people then got to pick the next level of staffers and the levels after that.
These people made sure that their people — GOPe people, NeverTrump people — got in to the Trump Administration, and that the few conservatives with government experience or subject-matter expertise who were actually Trumpites were kept out.
I know a guy who had a great deal of experience in diplomacy and was a day one Trump supporter. And I mean a public supporter; he put his name to it.
He was literally told, “That’s going to count against you” when he sought a State Department posting under Trump, the man he had publicly supported.
And in fact it did; he was given the runaround in his interview process until anti-Trump forces could fill the job that Trump wanted him to have with an anti-Trumper.
So Trump doesn’t have a lot of people he can call upon to serve, and a lot of the people who he could call upon have already been frozen out by the anti-Trump political staffers he put in place because he had few other options.

In other words, because most veteran GOP operatives were anti-Trump, once these operatives established themselves within the administration, they made it impossible for Trump to hire people who might actually be loyal to him. So the President is surrounded by people who never wanted him to be President, and who are deliberately sabotaging his presidency.



 

Category: Donald Trump

In The Mailbox: 09.10.19 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | September 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Stupid, It Burns
EBL: Warren & Clinton Plotting Together Against Biden?
Twitchy: Yep, She Has No Soul – Lisa Bloom Sent Harvey Weinstein Unbelievably Cruel Memo On Rose McGowan
Louder With Crowder: LGBTQ Zine Miffed That Killer Clown From IT Isn’t A Gay Ally

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Angry Spider, also, Podcast #120 – The Anglo-Saxon Female Mind Virus Episode
American Greatness: It’s Official – The Democrats Just Want You Dead
American Power: President Trump’s Assault On Free Trade
American Thinker: Did Boris Johnson Just Rope-A-Dope His Way Into A Hard Brexit?
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Sunflower Uprising – A Call For Nonviolent Protests Against The Communist Regime
BattleSwarm: MIT Media Lab Epstein Funding Scandal Prompts Director Resignation, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
CDR Salamander: Sea Shepherd, Public/Private Partnership, & Protecting Our Seas With Paul Watson On Midrats
Da Tech Guy: Stop Making Excuses For Your Kids Diet, also, Missionary
Don Surber: Think Progress Wasn’t Crazy Enough For Democrats
Dustbury: Dustbury – Charles G. Hill (1953-2019)
First Street Journal: The More The Democrats Keep Talking, The More Likely It Is They’ll Lose
Fred On Everything: Unused Militaries
The Geller Report: Indicted ISIS Sniper Came To US Thanks To Visa Lottery, also, Jewish Students Violently Attacked by Muslim “Youths” In Warsaw
Hogewash: Moon Wrap, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Are You Ready For A Woke Christmas Slasher Film? also, Will Media Weaponize Jojo Rabbit Against Trump?
Joe For America: Rashida Tlaib Claims President Trump Is Afraid Of Non-White Women
JustOneMinute: Send Better Nukes!
Legal Insurrection: Trump Administration Turns Out The Light On Obama Lightbulb Rules, also, Beta Undermines Democracy – Falsely Claims Stacey Abrams Was Robbed In GA Governor Race
The PanAm Post: A Perspective From Mexico
Power Line: Montgomery County’s Disgrace, also, Flag Battles In Massachusetts
Protein Wisdom: R.I.P. Charles G. Hill, AKA Dustbury
Shark Tank: Mucarsel-Powell Admits Obamacare Unaffordable
Shot In The Dark: Since “Fake news” Is All The Rage
STUMP: Some Videos For A Sunday
The Political Hat: Climate Madness – Pandemic In The Democratic Presidential Primary
This Ain’t Hell: SEALs Behaving Badly? also, Another Six Are Home
Victory Girls: Kamala Harris – Lies, Damn Lies, & Distortions
Volokh Conspiracy: English School Mandates Trousers For All, Girls Not Having It
Weasel Zippers: “Mad Dog” Mattis Leaves Andrea Mitchell Speechless – NATO Is Stronger Under Trump, also, NYT Cheers Twelve-Year-Old Drag Queen
Mark Steyn: The Rubber Hits The Road, also, Triumph Of The Will

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

She’s Crazy and Married to a Democrat

Posted on | September 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

But I repeat myself:

Democratic congressman Joe Cunningham’s wife is furious that their taxpayer-subsidized healthcare plan declined to pay for therapy sessions, according to a rant on an insurance bill she posted on Instagram.
The South Carolina Democrat is currently serving his first term in Congress, where members are given access to Obamacare “gold” plans from Blue Cross Blue Shield and are responsible for paying about a quarter of the premiums. The plan is apparently not good enough for his wife, Amanda Cunningham, who told her Instagram followers she would be urging her husband to do something about it.
“I’m gonna have a little bit of a rant here on social media because I think this is important,” she said on her Instagram story last week. “I’ve been going over my not-a-bill bill here from Blue Cross Blue Shield, and realizing that once again, all of my mental health therapy sessions are denied, in addition to all of our marriage counseling sessions.”
“It’s just mind-blowing to me that these basic well-known needs, that mental health is health care, are still being denied, that we’re still fighting for these absolutely basic things, it’s unbelievable to me,” she said.

Wait a minute, she’s getting “mental health therapy sessions” and also “marriage counseling sessions”? Does the name Eagleton ring a bell?

Never mind the coverage gaps in your health insurance plan, lady, you’ve just told the entire world that (a) the Congressman is married to a lunatic, and (b) your marriage is circling the toilet bowl.

Yeah, I understand that mentally-ill women are a crucial part of Democrat grassroots coalition, but having the congressman’s wife babbling insane nonsense on Instagram might not be a winning strategy in South Carolina’s 1st District, which was represented by Republicans since 1981. Trump won that district by double-digits in 2016, and Cunningham is likely to be a one-term fluke, especially once voters in the district realize that he’s married to a deranged woman who demands insurance coverage for her marriage counseling sessions.

By the way, Amanda met her husband when they were both working on a luxury yacht in 2011. She’s a yoga instructor.

(Hat-tip: Rollo Tomassi on Twitter.)



 

Category: South Carolina

No, the KKK Hasn’t Taken Over Arkansas (and Never Trust the SPLC Anyway)

Posted on | September 9, 2019 | 1 Comment

Picturesque downtown Harrison, Arkansas.

Harrison, Arkansas, is a prosperous little town in Boone County, adjacent to the Missouri border and just 30 miles from the resort of Branson. Located in the scenic Ozarks, Harrison wants to be known as the “Best Small Town in America.” Unfortunately, they have a public-relations problem involving a Klan kook, Wikipedia and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Let’s start with the Klan kook: Thom Robb calls himself the “national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” Robb lives about 10 miles from Harrison and his “Knights” receive mail at a post office box in Harrison, which gives the town a dot on the SPLC “hate map.”

This reflects a problem I’ve addressed at The American Spectator (“Another Dot on the ‘Hate Map’,” Feb. 22), where the SPLC targets entire communities as “hate” locations based on dubious claims, in order to create an exaggerated sense of menace for fund-raising purposes. By the standards of the SPLC, just about every Baptist church in America could be designated an “anti-LGBT hate group,” and if hate groups are everywhere, what’s the point of all those dots on the map?

How many “Knights” does Thom Robb command? If he wanted to organize a KKK rally, how many Klansmen would show up?

Like so many of the dots on the SPLC’s “hate map,” Robb is just one guy with a P.O. Box, and if his “Knights” are a serious threat to anyone, certainly the FBI should be able to handle them. Smearing an entire town of 13,000 people on the basis of their proximity to this one guy is irresponsible, and by engaging in such smear tactics, the SPLC is arguably creating hate where it would not otherwise exist.

So now, Wikipedia, where the entry for Harrison, Arkansas, includes this:

The predominantly white community is noted for its racial history, which includes two race riots in the early 20th century and an influx of white supremacist activity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. . . .
In the 1970s, Thom Robb, a national leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, moved to a neighboring town. In 1982, Kingdom Identity Ministries, an anti-gay Christian Identity outreach ministry identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was founded in Harrison.

Now, the history of race riots in Harrison in 1905 and 1909 is very real, but the information about “Kingdom Identity Ministries” is misleading, since the founder of that group, Mike Hallimore, doesn’t live in Harrison or even in Boone County, but instead lives 20 miles away near Jasper, which is in Newton County. As for being a “predominantly white community,” yes, Boone County is about 98% white, and the population is growing, from about 28,000 in 1990 to more than 37,000 now — a 32% increase in less than 30 years. So it would seem that being unintentionally notorious as a center of “white supremacist activity” hasn’t really hurt Harrison, and maybe it helped. Like, if you’re in a crime-plagued city like St. Louis or Little Rock and want to move somewhere safe to raise your kids, Harrison might be the place to go.

Notwithstanding the possibility that their “white supremacist” reputation is actually good publicity, folks in Harrison are upset about the way their community is represented by Wikipedia:

The Wikipedia page for Harrison is the first hit when “Harrison, Arkansas” is searched on Google.com.
Harrison’s Wikipedia entry had 9,360 page views from July 8 through Aug. 8, averaging 293 per day. . . .
Since the entry for “Harrison, Arkansas” first appeared on Wikipedia in 2002, the article has been edited more than two dozen times specifically regarding the terms “klan,” “KKK” and “race riots,” dating back to 2007. In most cases, one editor removed the reference, then another added it back in.
Harrison’s Wikipedia entry currently contains these two sentences: “Race riots by whites in 1905 and 1909 drove away black residents, establishing Harrison as a sundown town. Today (2019) it is known as a center of white supremacist activity, including the national headquarters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Layne Ragsdale, public information officer for the Harrison Community Task Force on Race Relations, said the city has been trying to remove those sentences, but every time, they pop back up in the article.
“It was almost so fast it looked like it was a bot changing it back,” she said, referring to a computer program that performs tasks automatically. “We thought we could just go in and change it. But a few minutes after we changed it, they’d change it back.” . . .
Harrison’s race relations task force was formed in 2003 to promote diversity and respond to racial-bias accusations against the city.
Ragsdale said the task force has battled white supremacists on several fronts, most visibly alongside city streets.
When a billboard went up in Harrison in 2013 that read “Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White,” the task force responded with a “Love Your Neighbor” billboard campaign.
The task force has served as a sort of quick-response crisis-communications team, but it has been unable to remove the disputed Wikipedia sentences.

 

Far be it from me to endorse hate, but as for that billboard, can we have a brief discussion of whether it is actually true? Because I think most Americans understand racism to be a bad thing, and avoid saying or doing anything that could fairly be labeled “racist.” But when you see someone call themselves “anti-racist,” isn’t that person usually a left-wing “social justice warrior” type? Doesn’t “anti-racist” advocacy involve a lot of guilt-trip stuff about 400 years of slavery, blah, blah, blah?

My willingness to raise such questions, and my skepticism toward “social justice” quite generally, goes a long way toward explaining why the SPLC has had me on their radar for the past 20 years. I simply refuse to accept that liberals have a monopoly on moral virtue, and thus hesitate to condemn others who stray beyond the limits of political correctness that liberals seek to impose on public discourse. From time to time, I might say something “offensive,” and would not wish to have my reputation destroyed because of it, so why should I help the SPLC and other self-appointed liberal Thought Police destroy the reputation of others?

Well, last month, the Associated Press ran this headline:

Arkansas, home to supremacist groups,
weighs hate crimes law

As you might have expected, the article included this:

Long before a mass shooting killed 22 people at a Walmart in Texas, the threat of white supremacy was well known in neighboring Arkansas, where extremist groups over the decades have made their home in the mountains and dense woods of the state’s remote rural areas. . . .
Such groups have long flourished in the Ozark Mountain region near the Missouri border where towns are small and scattered far apart and the population is overwhelmingly white.
The largest town, Harrison, population 13,000, was the site of riots in the early 1900s that drove out most of its black population. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of several Klan factions, and the white supremacist Kingdom Identity Ministries are based in the Harrison area. . . .
“Once they get a toehold people follow them in there,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, referring to the remote, wooded area. The group tracked 14 hate groups in Arkansas last year.

As far as I know, all these “hate groups” the SPLC claims are located in Arkansas are basically like Thom Robb and his KKK “Knights,” just one guy with a post-office box, yet the Associated Press uses this to depict the entirety of the Ozark region as “remote rural areas” where everybody is a Klan kook or some other kind of dangerous extremist.

And you know something? That might be good publicity for Harrison, in a way. Like I said, there are plenty of people living in or near big cities where drugs and crime are out of control, and the blessings of “diversity” are otherwise a nuisance, and probably some of those people read the Associated Press article about “remote rural areas” of Arkansas and think, “Hey, maybe I should consider moving to Harrison.”

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Harrison, Arkansas, were to experience an economic bonanza as a result of the SPLC and media smears? Affluent white folks start moving to town and then, unexpectedly, every hipster in the Midwest decides Boone County is a happening place, and next thing you know, downtown Harrison is full of bicycle-riding techies tapping away on their laptops in organic fair-trade coffee shops.

“Gentrification” in the Ozarks? Don’t laugh. It could happen, if the SPLC and the media keep giving Boone County so much free publicity.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

If you enjoy my work — which so often involves finding stories that are below the radar even of most conservative media — I’ll remind you that this is a reader-supported venture in gonzo journalism, and that The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are still:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Just this morning, Mrs. McCain mentioned some pressing financial needs, so anything you could contribute — $5, $10, $20, whatever — would be deeply appreciated. Thanks in advance, and God bless.



 

Category: Arkansas, Racism

Rule 5 Sunday: All Hail KBDaBear

Posted on | September 9, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I got nuthin’. Fresh out of inspiration. Fortunately, @KBDaBear is a public benefactor who routinely posts quality totty to Twitter, and the brunette below is part of his Sunday Swimwear thread. Go forth and enjoy. Also, belated thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links last month. It’s very much appreciated.

It looks like a Holstein pattern, but it’s not.

We begin with Hot Pick of the Late Night from Ninety Miles From Tyranny, followed by The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #734, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, we have Rule Five Cause Analysis Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s herd this week includes the Iranian Mata Hari, Carolina Reaper Challenge, Aliette Opheim, Neerja Bhanot (RIP), Kylie Rae Harris (RIP), Felicity Huffman, Margaret Gorman, Nova Scotia Rule 5, and Mary Kate Malat.

Bacon Time brings us Classic Swimsuits.

We regret to announce the passing of longtime Rule 5 contributor and all around good guy Charles Hill, former fellow ASA trooper, proprietor of the Dustbury blog and its periodic Zooeypaloozas. Charles died of complications from an auto accident on September 3. See you at Fiddler’s Green, my friend.

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Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts

 

 

 

Category: Rule 5

Ace Is Sick and Tired of Jim Swift

Posted on | September 8, 2019 | 1 Comment

One of the amazing things about Ace of Spades is that he will use some of his best material as just throwaway stuff. Like, he’s got a sidebar item now pointing out that Jim Swift, formerly of the Weekly Standard, and currently with the Bulwark, is still ax-grinding against Salena Zito.

OK, I know Salena Zito — a popular reporter and columnist — but I had only the vaguest idea of who Jim Swift is, and I’d never heard of this particular controversy before today. Last year, a bunch of anonymous Twitter accounts began promoting what they claimed was evidence that Zito was plagiarizing, inventing quotes and otherwise engaging in bad journalism. Zito defended herself by producing notebooks and recordings of interviews, and her editors stood behind her reporting.

The reason why Zito became a target was that she had traveled extensively in the small towns of the American heartland to do reporting that contradicted a narrative beloved by the liberal media and the #NeverTrump crowd. Whereas Trump’s critics had asserted that many people who voted for him in 2016 were dismayed and disappointed by his performance as President, Zito talked to lots of Trump voters who were basically happy with the job Trump’s done in the White House. So the hit-job on Zito was not merely an attempt to destroy her career, but also to discredit her account of the pro-Trump mood in the heartland.

Back in January, when Jim Swift was hired at the Bulwark, Ace noted Swift’s role in “attempting to scalp-hunt Salena Zito,” pointing out that this was particularly egregious given that Zito was a reporter for the Washington Examiner, which was owned by the same company (Clarity Media Group) that also owned the Weekly Standard. As Ace says in his current sidebar item:

I’ve heard that Clarity Media were enraged by Jim Swift’s scalp-hunting political op against a fellow employee of Clarity Media, and this was one of the very last straws that led to Clarity Media saying, “F–k you, we’re not even going to wait more futile months for you to try to find a new buyer, we’re pulling the plug, shutting you down, and making a new magazine with your subscriber list.”

Is that true? I don’t know, but it certainly would ill behoove an employee of a major media company to engage in public attacks on the credibility of another employee of the company, especially considering how the Weekly Standard was circling the toilet bowl at that time.

The real question is, why is Swift still grinding that ax? He went to war against Zito and lost and yet, rather than dust himself off and move on, he returns to the battlefield, reliving his defeat.

To quote Wombat: “Who the hell are you, buddy?”

Well, once Mark Sanford defeats Trump, I’m sure everything will work out fine for Jim Swift and his Bulwark buddies . . .



 

Category: Journalism
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