The Other McCain

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

More Trouble for Fake News, Inc.

Posted on | February 16, 2017 | Comments Off on More Trouble for Fake News, Inc.

After Likening Trump to Hitler,
Journalists Upset They’re Not
Getting Called on for Questions

This is causing tantrums at the Clinton News Network:

President Donald Trump held a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, but he got through it without answering any questions about his campaign’s reported contacts with Russian intelligence agencies.
The reason for this was simple: Trump only called on sympathetic conservative news outlets including Townhall and the Christian Broadcasting Network over more traditional media outlets.
CNN reporter Jim Acosta, who drew the ire of the White House earlier this year when he tried to ask the president a question during a press conference, tried to get a question in about Trump’s Russia ties, but was promptly ignore as the president walked away at the end of the conference.
Appearing on CNN afterward, Acosta said that Trump’s decision to only call on sympathetic outlets was part of a broader strategy to avoid facing any tough questions about his administration.
“He got no questions at this news conference about this major news that we’ve seen breaking in the last 24 hours… that associates of the president, aides of the president during the course of the 2016 presidential campaign with Russians… who are known to the U.S. intelligence community,” he said. “This president, this White House, has come up with their own solution for, basically, questions that they don’t want to answer at this point.”

The whole “Russian intelligence” angle is leftover dirt from last year’s election campaign, and the Democrats-with-bylines promoting at CNN and other outlets are merely frustrated that their candidate didn’t win.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias

Is This Fake News?

Posted on | February 16, 2017 | Comments Off on Is This Fake News?

The headline is disturbing:

Spies Keep Intelligence From Donald Trump
U.S. intelligence officials have withheld sensitive intelligence from President Donald Trump because they are concerned it could be leaked or compromised, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

But if you keep reading, you find this:

A White House official said: “There is nothing that leads us to believe that this is an accurate account of what is actually happening.”
A spokesman for the Office of Director of National Intelligence said: “Any suggestion that the U.S. intelligence community is withholding information and not providing the best possible intelligence to the president and his national security team is not true.”

(Via Memeorandum.) So, both the White House and the intelligence director deny the story, which is based entirely on anonymous “current and former officials.” If the story was true, it would be very bad news, but as it is, it’s just very bad journalism.

 

Category: Donald Trump, Journalism, Media Bias

A Murder in Cleveland

Posted on | February 15, 2017 | Comments Off on A Murder in Cleveland

Police say Alianna DeFreeze (left) was murdered by Christopher Whitaker (right).

Christopher Whitaker, 44, is a convicted sex offender. In April 2005, a woman let Whitaker into her apartment in the Cleveland suburb of Bedford Heights because he said he needed to use the restroom:

Whitaker went into the restroom and emerged with a pair of scissors. He choked the woman unconscious.
He sexually assaulted while she was unconscious and stabbed her twice in the neck with the scissors.
Whitaker served four years in prison.

Rape and aggravated assault and he gets only four years in prison? Whitaker probably won’t get off so lightly for his latest crime:

Alianna DeFreeze, the 14-year-old Cleveland girl whose body was found earlier this month in an vacant house days after she was reported missing, was beaten and stabbed to death, according to court records.
Christopher Whitaker is accused of abducting DeFreeze, raping her and inflicting blunt-force injuries, stabbing and puncture wounds that killed her, Cleveland police detectives wrote in records filed in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court that were made public on Tuesday. . . .
Whitaker, 44, is scheduled for an arraignment hearing Thursday after a grand jury handed up a capital indictment charging him with aggravated murder, rape, kidnapping, aggravated burglary, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence.
Whitaker is the first defendant that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley will seek to put to death since taking office in January.
“The facts of this case together with his violent criminal history compels this Office to seek the death penalty,” O’Malley said.
Whitaker is being held on $3 million bond.
The records made public after Whitaker’s indictment offer the first official glimpse into as to how the girl may have died. . . .
Whitaker was arrested Feb. 2 after the medical examiner identified him through DNA evidence collected during the investigation, police said.

Everybody has to think of that 2005 crime. Rape a woman, choke her unconscious and stab her in the neck with scissors and . . . four years?

The murder of Alianna DeFreeze calls attention to Cleveland’s downward spiral. In 1950, the city had more than 900,000 residents. Today, fewer than 400,000 people live in Cleveland. The city’s population has declined by 80,000 just in the past 15 years. On average, since 1990, Cleveland has lost 4,700 people every year, and this exodus means the city has many abandoned houses like the one where Alianna’s body was found:

The empty house at 9412 Fuller Ave., where 14-year-old Alianna DeFreeze’s body was found in late January, tells a story all too familiar to public officials and community groups waging a daily fight against blight. . . .
In 2013, Deutsche Bank bid just $2,000 for the property at sheriff’s sale, a public auction that ended litigation over nearly $74,000 of unpaid debt, interest and fees. Months later, the bank turned around and sold the house to a local investor for just under $7,000. . . .
“My construction yard is right around the corner from there, and I’ve wrecked houses on that street within the last year. And it’s been vacant for a long time,” said Bob Deskins of Lightning Demolition & Excavating, the company that boarded up the house’s windows and doors after DeFreeze’s body was discovered. “Everything is gutted out. The hot water tank is gone. Whoever bought the house wasn’t doing anything to it.” . . .
Deskins lost an adult daughter, Angela, to an East Cleveland serial killer a few years ago. He described blighted properties as crime scenes in waiting. “You can’t do it right in the street,” he said. “You need these abandoned houses to go into to commit these crimes.”

Angela Deskins, 38, was one of three women, along with Shirellda Terry, 18, and Shetisha Sheeley, 28, murdered by Michael Madison in 2012 and 2013. The murder of Alianna DeFreeze came to my attention because I happened to be reading a story by feminist Catherine Young:

For as long as feminism has existed, feminists have been accused of hating men. Pleas for equal rights, franchise, and financial independence have been met with not just ardent and sometimes violent opposition, but the persistent, insidious untruth that feminists desire nothing more than to emasculate and eradicate the male sex and “take over.”
While hating men isn’t a core tenet of feminist ideology, a curious trend has taken hold online over the past couple years: ironic misandry. Women attach #KillAllMen and #BanMen hashtags to news stories of male-perpetrated violence against women or legislation sponsored by male politicians designed to cut back on women’s rights. From the celebration of “Gleeful Mobs of Women Murdering Men in Western Art History” by the Toast to the bracelets proclaiming that “All Men Must Die” and mugs filled with “Male Tears” for sale on Etsy, the idea of telegraphing male hatred in public as a performance has really caught on. The thinking seems to be this: If men continue to insist that striving for gender equality is the same as hating them, why not lean into it?

You can read the whole thing, but the reference to “news stories of male-perpetrated violence against women” made me curious: Who are these males perpetrating violence against women? So I did a Google search for “rape+kidnap+murder” and found the story of Alianna DeFreeze. There was also the story of Brian Golsby, 29, who is charged with aggravated murder, rape, kidnapping and aggravated robbery in the death last week of 21-year-old Ohio State student Reagan Tokes. And the story of Kenneth Gadson, 32, charged with raping and murdering Rina Shimabukuro, 20. You might want to check to see if any feminists have mentioned these cases (with or without “ironic misandry” hashtags), but my hunch is, no, they haven’t taken notice of these crimes. Jessica Valenti’s latest column is about abortion, and Amanda Marcotte’s latest column is about immigration. A cynic might suspect that feminists don’t actually care about “male-perpetrated violence against women,” but instead merely exploit such crimes if and when they find a case that fits their political narrative. You’re not a cynic, are you?

 

Category: Crime

Feminism’s Rhetorical Abracadabra

Posted on | February 15, 2017 | 2 Comments

You have to study rhetoric and logic and the techniques of propaganda if you are to understand how feminism succeeds. Having read all the major works of feminist theory, and having also read many other lesser-known but influential works (including popular Women’s Studies textbooks), I am not deceived by their obfuscation. “Oh, we don’t hate men,” the feminists will protest, when called out for their anti-male rhetoric, insisting that it is only “misogyny” or “patriarchy” or “rape culture” that is the object of their criticism. Yet all of these jargon phrases are merely synonyms for male evil. The very foundation of feminist theory is that males are perpetrators and beneficiaries of an unjust system of oppression of which all women are victims. The male is to feminism what the Jew is to anti-Semitism and, like the Jew-hater who recycles Hamas propaganda about the plight of Palestinians while pretending not to endorse Islamic terrorism, the feminist promotes atrocity narratives that demonize males, while pretending not to be a man-hater. Read more

Category: Education, Gays, Sex Trouble

If I Didn’t Have Such Sterling Confidence In Press Integrity, I Could Begin To See Anti-Trump Bias In The Reporting

Posted on | February 15, 2017 | Comments Off on If I Didn’t Have Such Sterling Confidence In Press Integrity, I Could Begin To See Anti-Trump Bias In The Reporting

by Smitty

Oh, and, by the way: this is awesome:

Category: Uncategorized

In The Mailbox: 02.15.17

Posted on | February 15, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.15.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


As you may have heard via Sarah Hoyt on Instapundit, Kim du Toit’s wife Connie has died from cancer, and Kim is trying to put his life back together. There’s a GoFundMe if you want to help.


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Asshat Of The Day – Bill Kristol
Michelle Malkin: Bumps In The Road – Trump Vs. Obama
Twitchy: Wegmans Gives Awesome Response To Calls For Boycott Over Trump Wine
Louder With Crowder: Canada’s Kathleen Wynne Visits Mosque To Preach Tolerance, Gets Put In Corner


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: There Is No Such Thing As An Alpha Female
American Power: Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism Of The American Revolution
American Thinker: The Muslim Face Of The New Democratic Party
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BLACKFIVE: Kelly Crigger’s The Comfort Station
Bring The HEAT: World Of Warships – Kitwar’s Ranked Battle
Da Tech Guy: Mike Flynn – The Deep State Establishment Fights Back
Don Surber: Bill Kristol Lets His Fascism Slip
Dustbury: Meet The Invalid
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Lock Them Up – Anti-Trump Lunatics Vow Not To Pay Taxes
Joe For America: IRS Kills Obamacare Mandate Requirement
Power Line: Is The New York Times A Serious News Source?, also, Democrat Comeback On Hold In Minnesota
Shark Tank: Florida Lawmakers Consider Forbidding Teachers From Withholding Recess
Shot In The Dark: Focus
STUMP: Mortality Monday – How Many People Will Die In The U.S. In 2017?
The Geller Report: Orban – Hungary Will Welcome “European Refugees” Fleeing Multicultural West
The Political Hat: The Latest In Social Justice – Anti-Miscegenation
The Quinton Report: Valentine’s Day – From Russia With Love
This Ain’t Hell: Another One Bites The Dust
War Is Boring: Trump’s Foreign Policy – Putting America Third?
Weasel Zippers: California Spent On High-Speed Rail And Illegal Immigrants While Ignoring Oroville Dam, also, Former Obama Officials And Loyalists Waged Secret Campaign To Oust Flynn
Megan McArdle: Why Some Consumer Costs Just Grow And Grow


Today’s Digital Deals

Category: Linkagery

White People Are ‘Lazy,’ Immigrants ‘Work Hard and Really Want to Succeed’

Posted on | February 15, 2017 | Comments Off on White People Are ‘Lazy,’ Immigrants ‘Work Hard and Really Want to Succeed’

 

Bill Kristol let his open-borders enthusiasm lead him into a swamp of delusion in a recent discussion with Charles Murray:

“Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in…? You can make a case that America has been great because every — I think John Adams said this — basically, if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two, three or four generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled — whatever,” Kristol said.
“Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico, who really want to work hard and really want to succeed. They really want their kids to live better lives and aren’t sort of clipping coupons or hoping that they can hang on and meanwhile grew up as spoiled kids and so forth. In that respect, I don’t know how this moment is that different from the early 20th century.”

Here is the video:

 

(Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady.) Kristol is guilty of recycling a misleading liberal myth about American immigration history, where a sentimental view of past immigrants — the Irish, the Italians, etc. — is used to justify our current policy (or lack thereof). According to what we may call the Emma Lazarus School of Immigration Policy, the success of America in assimilating previous influxes of Irish and Italian and Jewish immigrants means that we can just as easily assimilate immigrants from Syria and Somalia. Unfortunately for Kristol (and for America) this is false. To the extent that the Irish, Italians and Jews are actually assimilated, this was quite a tumultuous ordeal of slums, crime, riots, treason, etc. Exactly how “assimilated” were Sacco and Vanzetti? How “assimilated” were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? And as for the Irish, well . . . Ted Kennedy?

Go sell your misty-eyed tales about Ellis Island wherever you can find a market, but it is foolish to make nostalgia the basis of our immigration policy in the 21st century. Stop accusing Americans of bigotry because they suspect (and rightly so) that the influx of illegal immigrants is harmful to their interests. Scott Morefield cites a recent study:

51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native households. . . .
Immigrant households have much higher use of food programs (40 percent vs. 22 percent for natives) and Medicaid (42 percent vs. 23 percent). . . .
Welfare use varies among immigrant groups. Households headed by immigrants from Central America and Mexico (73 percent), the Caribbean (51 percent), and Africa (48 percent) have the highest overall welfare use. Those from East Asia (32 percent), Europe (26 percent), and South Asia (17 percent) have the lowest.

This is what is omitted from Kristol’s conflation of Ellis Island-era immigration with our current situation — the liberal Welfare State. The immigrant who arrived in America in 1880 or 1920 did not have a “right” to public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security, etc., because those programs did not exist at the time. In point of fact, the Democrat Party from FDR to LBJ owed its political ascendancy to its status as the party of federally funded entitlement programs which were overwhelmingly supported by the so-called “ethnics,” i.e., the Ellis Island immigrants and their descendants. It was not until the 1960s, when urban race riots and a surge in violent crime sparked “white flight” from the cities, that these white “ethnics” reconsidered their political allegiances.

You cannot have a Welfare State and open borders, too, because welfare sabotages the incentive to hard work and, as the data about welfare utilization by immigrants shows, government benefits become a redistribution program, transferring taxpayer money to foreigners. To characterize the taxpayer’s resentment of this as “racism” (as John McCain and other open-borders enthusiasts have done) is a smear that the taxpayer is not too stupid to recognize as an insult.

Finally, Mr. Kristol, can you please stop “white-shaming”?

The other day, I noticed a young feminist of Puerto Rican ancestry make some really obnoxious anti-white statement on Twitter, and it hit me that what she was actually doing was something Jeanne Kirkpatrick correctly analyzed in 1984: “They always blame America first.”

Anti-white rhetoric is a proxy for hating America. Despite all the talk of “diversity,” the majority of Americans are white. Therefore, to hurl insults at white people is a way of insulting America itself. To have a prominent conservative join in on this game, by smearing the white working class as “decadent, lazy, spoiled,” gives credence to the alt-right paranoid chatter about “white genocide” and, we might well wonder, is it really paranoia when we see so many voices uttering these anti-white sentiments even in the Republican Party?

 

 

Our nation is currently teetering on the brink of anarchy because we have too long tolerated divisive hate-mongering by the Left, which exploits ethnic resentments in a cynical identity politics hustle, telling minorities that all their problems are the fault of white people. At the same time, the poor are told to blame their problems on the rich, women are told to blame their problems on men, and gay people are told to blame their problems on heterosexuals. All of these allegedly oppressive forces — racism, sexism, homophobia, greed — are allegedly represented by the Republican Party, and embodied by the demonized villain Donald Trump, so that all of this “social justice” rhetoric adds up to a political idea so simple it can be summarized in two words: “Vote Democrat!”

Your basic problem, Mr. Kristol, is that you are an intellectual, and are guilty of over-thinking everything. Donald Trump, however grievous his faults may be, does not have this particular problem.

Our President is not a man devoted to intellectual abstractions, but is rather more like General Patton: “Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. . . . Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose.” That’s how Donald Trump thinks — maintain the strategic offensive and stop worrying about whether liberals call you a “racist” or whatever. Liberals are always going to sling those accusations at Republicans, no matter what, and if you waste time and energy defending against that stuff, you’ll lose sight of the objective, i.e., winning.

On Oct. 8, when the very worst of the accusations against Donald Trump appeared to have fatally wounded his campaign, I declared he could not possibly win, but a month later, he won anyway. And in achieving this against-all-odds victory, it might be argued, Donald Trump rescued the Republican Party from itself. For too long, Republicans have let themselves be intimidated by those who insist that it would be political suicide to attack head-on the problem of illegal immigration. Trump triumphed by ignoring those fears, and if Bill Kristol is still too attached to his pet intellectual abstractions to recognize the significance of this, well, who is it that has become decadent and lazy?

It is not “anti-immigrant” to enforce our immigration laws, nor is it “racist” to object to anti-white rhetoric, and the conservative movement needs intellectuals who can think clearly about these subjects.



 

 

 

Category: Donald Trump, Immigration, Politics, Racism

In The Mailbox: 02.14.17

Posted on | February 14, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.14.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Michael Flynn Resigns – Government Leakers Trying To Take Trump Down?
Twitchy: Nancy Pelosi Gets Punked By Flynn Parody Account. And It’s On Video
Louder With Crowder: Beyonce Loses Grammy Awards, Whiny Liberals Cry RACISM!


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Australian Conservatism Is Finished
American Power: Playboy Magazine Bringing Back Naked Women
American Thinker: Obama Failed To Transform America, But He Definitely Transformed The Democrats
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Air Traffic News
BLACKFIVE: Garden Of Lamentations by Deborah Crombie
Bring The HEAT: More Climate Change Fraud – “NOAA Cheated And Got Caught”
Da Tech Guy: Christopher Harper – Me And The New York Times
Don Surber: David Duke Endorses Keith Ellison For DNC
Dustbury: Waiting For 222
Hogewash: Footnote Du Jour
Jammie Wearing Fools: After Trash Talking Trump For A Month, California Officials Now Begging For His Help
Joe For America: NYPD Opens Full Can of Whoopass On Illegal Immigration Protesters
JustOneMinute: Out Like Flynn
Power Line: No Vote Fraud, Eh?
Shark Tank: New Bill Would Protect Religious Expression In Public Schools
Shot In The Dark: Parallels
STUMP: Actuarial Assumptions And Professional Ethics
The Geller Report: Al Franken Claims Even Some Republicans Say Trump’s Not Right Mentally
The Jawa Report: Where Is Dr. Rusty Shackleford? Career Change Edition, also, Milo The Fatwa Yiannopoulos
The Political Hat: Culpability By Presence
This Ain’t Hell: Matt Uhrin Honored For Rescuing Flag From Protesters
War Is Boring: This Weird Little Company Wants To Build The Next A-10
Weasel Zippers: The Twenty Cities With The Highest Numbers Of Illegal Immigrants, also, Hezbollah Leader Says “Idiot” President Donald Trump’s Travel Ban “Criminal And Racist”
Megan McArdle: This Valentine’s Day, Have One Last Fight


Today’s Digital Deals

Category: Linkagery
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