The Other McCain

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

Probably Not a Trump Voter

Posted on | January 25, 2017 | 1 Comment

Browsing around feminist Tumblr blogs, I encountered this headline:

DC Metro Rape Highlights Why
Women Are Always Aware of Rape

The blog links a Huffington Post column by Soraya Chemaly last May:

This rape has made the police and media sit up and pay attention to street harassment, which is common on DC streets and elsewhere. While the DC Metro system can be faulted for many egregious and dangerous faults, in point of fact, the system is pioneering in it efforts to understand and address the risks that users, particularly women, face in public transit.
For more than a year now the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMTA) has been working with Stop Street Harassment and Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS) to raise awareness and develop responses to the problem. . . .
Most men I talk to don’t think the threat of rape is a real consideration on a regular basis for the women they know and many openly dismiss the idea that women think of rape when they experience street harassment.

About 20 years ago, I moved to the D.C. area and for many years, rode the Metro system to work almost every day, on the Red Line from Shady Grove to Union Station near the Capital. Anyone familiar with the area around Union Station knows that aggressive panhandlers (i.e., the “homeless”) are a common nuisance, and the D.C. government doesn’t seem to care about this problem. Being a Caucasian in business attire makes you an automatic target for these dope-addled moochers, who evidently believe that any white guy wearing a tie must be rich.

The D.C. government seems indifferent to the negative impact that these hordes of persistent beggars have on perceptions of the city, and if it bothered me, certainly it is not difficult to imagine that women in Washington fear for their safety. It’s the “Broken Windows” phenomenon, where tolerating minor public disorder sends a signal that the community is not serious about enforcing the law. And, of course, racial identity politics is a factor because the panhandlers in D.C. are black, and one can imagine the uproar that might be caused by a crackdown on Washington’s “homeless” population. So day after day, people endure these hassles and I don’t doubt that the problem of “street harassment” for women in D.C. is as bad as Soraya Chemaly describes it.

Well, Soraya Chemaly is not only a feminist, but also a liberal Democrat, and when such people talk about “street harassment,” they do the kind of politically correct tiptoe dance that requires them to ignore the, uh, demographics of this problem. Everyone remembers the 2014 video of a woman walking through New York City and being catcalled. This video was intended to be the great “a-ha!” moment proving the pervasiveness of misogyny and objectification in American society, but then people started noticing the ethnicity of the catcallers. Hannah Rosin at Slate:

But the video also unintentionally makes another point: that harassers are mostly black and Latino, and hanging out on the streets in midday in clothes that suggest they are not on their lunch break. As Roxane Gay tweeted, “The racial politics of the video are f–ked up. Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?”

“It’s a racist production about white women not wanting attention from black and Latino men,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds observed. And that was the last we heard from the feminist “street harassment” discourse, because the Race Card always trumps every other card in the identity-politics deck. So when I was browsing the “rape culture” tag on Tumblr, in my daily search for fresh feminist craziness, this Soraya Chemaly column from May 2016 caught my eye:

Rape is what gives pervasive and damaging harassment its power. Thirty-seven percent of girls in high school report not wanting to go to school because of harassment. . . . Between 65% and 85% of women in the US report experiencing street harassment.

And the headline item which Soraya Chemaly employed as the hook for her diatribe about “harassment” was a rape on the D.C. Metro. Hmmm.

 

A 39-year-old woman was raped at knifepoint on a moving Metro train just before 10 a.m. [April 12] in the Wheaton-­Glenmont area of Montgomery County, prosecutors said in court [May 23].
“This is a horrifically terrifying experience. It certainly was for the victim in this case,” Assistant State’s Attorney Elizabeth Haynos said in court. . . .
The suspect, John Prentice Hicks, 39, of Northeast Washington, was making his first court appearance in Montgomery County District Court in the case. . . .
According to Haynos and Metro Transit Police, on April 12, Hicks approached a seated passenger aboard a northbound Red Line train and began speaking to her. He allegedly pulled out a knife, forced her to a different part of the car, raped her, then ordered her to another area of the car, and forced her to perform a sex act, court statements and records allege. . . .
According to an arrest document signed by Metro Transit Detective C.H. Dorrity, investigators used high-definition surveillance video inside the Glenmont station, records from the suspect’s Metro SmarTrip card, and the woman’s recollection to identify Hicks.
Metro police officers also recognized him as the suspect in an indecent-exposure case that took place on Metro, according to Haynos.

Now, according to Chemaly’s column, what makes this relevant is that indecent exposure is “an every day form of street harassment.”

Every day? Really? But never mind that. More importantly:

The man accused of raping a woman aboard a moving D.C. Metro train in April dodged arrest just a week before the brutal attack for an indecent exposure charge aboard the Metro. . . .
Court records revealed the Metropolitan Transit Police Department positively identified Hicks as the likely culprit of an indecent exposure incident on a Metro car April 2, reports The Washington Post.
Despite reportedly having strong evidence to arrest and charge Hicks for the April 2 crime, police failed to get a warrant for Hick’s arrest. It is unclear why authorities failed to arrest Hicks in the week before the April 12 rape.

In other words, this is a story about the failure of law enforcement to apprehend a dangerous criminal. But wait — there’s more:

In court Monday, Haynos cited a series of earlier convictions for Hicks: first-degree sexual abuse in 1995, attempted second-degree child sexual abuse in 2000, and unauthorized use of a vehicle in 2000 and 2007.

This guy already had three criminal convictions on his record, including two sexual abuse charges, and yet when he allegedly committed indecent exposure on the Metro, police failed to put him in jail?

Beyond providing further proof of how shoddy the police are in D.C., what this story (and Soraya Chemaly’s column about it) shows is the way liberal arguments create distorted perceptions of reality. Feminists want to use “street harassment” as a way to demonize men and why? To encourage women to support the feminist cause and vote Democrat. But when we start taking a closer look at the facts of “street harassment,” we notice that the perpetrators aren’t likely Republican voters.

It’s all about the narrative, as the late Andrew Breitbart used to say. One of the incidents that caused Andrew to rethink his youthful liberalism was the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing. Here was a highly accomplished black man, nominated for the Supreme Court by a Republican president and yet, because Democrats had cynically calculated that “harassment” was an issue that could help them get a large share of the women’s vote, Thomas was subjected to what he called a “high-tech lynching.” If the GOP had done to a black Democrat what Democrats did to Clarence Thomas, we never would have heard the end of the accusations of “racism” from liberals. There is a partisan double-standard in the media, confirmed a few years later when liberals circled the wagons to protect President Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

This kind of dishonest and manipulative exploitation of divisive issues is entirely partisan. It’s about electing Democrats. The crude “feminist” messaging that accompanied the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign was transparently an exercise in political propaganda. As last weekend’s Women’s March on Washington showed, “feminism” is now simply a partisan movement which seeks to convince women that they are “systematically oppressed,” that their oppressors are Republicans, and therefore, women should vote Democrat.

Well, OK, fine — let’s turn rape into a political issue and just start grabbing stories about rape arrests to prove our point: Timothy Wayne McLean Jr. (Durham, N.C.), Marco Antonio Garcia Perez (Highland, Calif.), Allen Mays (Lincoln Parrish, La.), Arturo Bedolla (Memphis, Tenn.), Toney Moore (Harlan, Ky.), Kamai Clerveaux (Miami, Fla.) and Rafael Alfredo Pabon (Cabarrus County, N.C.). That’s seven rape stories from around the country this week, and so far I haven’t seen a single feminist blogger or columnist mention any of these crimes. Why do you think feminists don’t want to talk about these accused rapists? My hunch is that it’s because the suspects are probably not Trump voters.



 

 

Category: Crime, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 01.25.17

Posted on | January 25, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.25.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
BattleSwarm: Ted Cruz Makes Deadspin His Bitch
EBL: Jenna Jameson’s Awesome Slam Of Bill Maher
Michelle Malkin: Ultrasound – The Anti-Science Left’s Bugaboo
Twitchy: Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) Sends Heads To Desks By Declaring This Federal Spending a “Human Rights Issue”
Louder With Crowder: Live Action Exposes Planned Parenthood’s Lies About Prenatal Care


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: America’s Second Civil War
American Thinker: America, At Last The Land Of Can-Do
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Bring The HEAT: Why Is It Taking The Air Force So Long to Jump On The Light Attack Bandwagon?
Da Tech Guy: The Illegal Immigrant Vote – Another Trump Trap For The MSM
Don Surber: President Trump Just Forced The Press To Cover The March For Life, also, Fighting The Fourth Branch Of Government
Dustbury: Rolled Back Into The Parking Lot
Hogewash: Defamation Du Jour
Jammie Wearing Fools: Dopey Swedish Pol Resigns After Asking If Someone Could Shoot Trump
Joe For America: Islamic Leader Warns That If U.S. Moves Embassy To Jerusalem, It’s War
JustOneMinute: Building The Wall
Power Line: The Myth of Obama’s Popularity, also, How Green Was My Tesla
Shark Tank: Gov. Scott Challenges Speaker Corcoran Over “Corporate Welfare”
Shot In The Dark: When Narratives Collapse
The Geller Report: Trump To Sign Executive Orders Restricting Migration From Muslim Nations, also, Trump Halts Obama’s Last-Minute $221 Million Gift To Palestinians
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – BOLO Red Panda
The Political Hat: In Canada, Free Healthcare May Soon Mean Morally Acceptable Organ Harvesting – From The Living
This Ain’t Hell: We Need More Airborne Rangers In Congress, also, Someone Escaped Norkiland?
War Is Boring: We’re Worried About The Nominee For Air Force Secretary
Weasel Zippers: Just Days Into The Trump Administration, Corrupt Employees Already Being Fired At The VA, also, Ted Cruz Introduces Bill To Allow States To Reject Refugees
Megan McArdle: Aetna Threatened Obamacare, But Didn’t Start The Fight
Mark Steyn: Wrong And Wronger


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Category: Linkagery

The Huge Wall™ of America

Posted on | January 25, 2017 | Comments Off on The Huge Wall™ of America

 

Did I ever tell you my youngest daughter is a genius? All my kids are smart, but Reagan is 99th percentile smart, and last month she was talking about The Huge Wall™ of America. China has its Great Wall, but President Trump is going to build a Huge Wall™ and, considering his successful career in real-estate development, shouldn’t we expect this project on the Mexican border to be a huge success? My daughter Reagan expressed the idea that the new border wall could be a major tourist attraction, and why not? There could be shopping (The Huge Wall Mall) and resort hotels (The Trump Wall Casino) and all sorts of commercial development along the border. Restaurants, playgrounds for the kids, water parks and roller coasters — like Disney World, except huge.

The New York Times reports:

President Trump on Wednesday will order the construction of a Mexican border wall — the first in a series of actions this week to crack down on immigrants and bolster national security, including slashing the number of refugees who can resettle in the United States and blocking Syrians and others from “terror prone” nations from entering, at least temporarily…
“Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night. “Among many other things, we will build the wall!”
Mr. Trump will sign the executive order for the wall during an appearance at the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday, as Mexico’s foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, arrives in Washington to prepare for the visit of President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico.

The secret to making this project work, as my genius daughter perceived, is capitalism. Democrats spent eight years talking about “infrastructure investments” during the Obama administration, but President Trump is actually going to do it. The Huge Wall™ of America is going to be the biggest federal infrastructure project in American history. It’s going to make the Hoover Dam look like a kid’s Lego toy set by comparison. By unleashing the power of free enterprise along the southwestern border — retirement communities! golf courses! multiplex cinemas! — The Huge Wall™ of America will generate enormous new tax revenues.

Think about the I-10 corridor from Texas to California — miles and miles of empty scrub land, full of coyotes, rattlesnakes and jackrabbits. Yes, and 50 years ago, the area of central Florida that is now Disney World was nothing but swamps, cattle farms and citrus groves. Under the Trump administration, which has already shown a cheerful willingness to ignore radical environmentalist dingbats, the federal government could build all kinds of dams and reservoirs and irrigation projects to turn the southwestern desert into an oasis. NASCAR tracks and football stadiums! Concert venues and skyscrapers! Nuclear power plants! If the Arab sheikhs could turn Dubai into an international resort destination, why can’t we make The Huge Wall™ of America even more spectacular?

Texas, New Mexico, Arizona — there’s six Senate votes and 43 in the House right there, not even counting California, so the political incentives are obvious enough. What we really need, though, is to get Wall Street to see the possibilities. Once the real-estate speculators get a whiff of the enormous profits to be made by investing in land near the The Huge Wall™ of America, this thing could take off like a rocket. And when it does, remember it was my 14-year-old genius daughter who foresaw it.

Don’t just dream big, America — dream huge.



 

Category: Donald Trump

Great Again: Dow Hits Record High

Posted on | January 25, 2017 | 2 Comments

Thank you, Mister President:

Dow 20,000 is finally here.
After weeks of close calls, the Dow made history on Wednesday by blowing past that key level for the first time ever.
The historic milestone leaves the Dow up a stunning 1,667 points since President Donald Trump’s victory in November. The achievement is evidence of how optimistic investors have become about the prospects for the U.S. economy.
“The stock market has given him this extraordinary vote of approval. Happy days are here again,” said Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research.
Wall Street is clearly betting that Trump’s plans to slash taxes, ramp up infrastructure spending and cut regulation will make the American economy grow faster.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Category: Economics

Teacher Sex Scandal Blackmail

Posted on | January 25, 2017 | 2 Comments

Texas teacher Thao Doan allegedly paid $28,000 to her victim, his mother says.

A bizarre school sex scandal in Texas includes claims of blackmail:

Dallas ISD police say a middle school teacher was being blackmailed by a teenage student she was sleeping with.
Court documents show Thao “Sandy” Doan paid about $28,000 to the student after he threatened to tell police.
Doan taught math at Raul Quintanilla Senior Middle School in West Oak Cliff. She was arrested last Friday.
The mother of the teen says she tracked the source of some suspicious text messages to a teacher, who she had met many times at school events and who taught her son math when he was in the eighth grade last year.
The mom reported the texts to the school, which called Dallas ISD police and removed the teacher from class the same day.
Nidia wanted to speak about her son as long as FOX4 didn’t use her last name.
“This really changed my son,” she said. “This really turned my son into another person that he wasn’t.”
Nidia says text messages, also quoted in court documents, tipped her off to her son’s alleged blackmail of a teacher. She’d later learn the teacher is accused of having sex with her son when he was 14 years old.
“At times, he started getting into drugs, drinking, leaving the house. And he would probably get money and just leave the whole weekend,” Nidia said. . . .
A search warrant affidavit added Doan confirmed the student received an image of her exposing her breasts and that the two engaged in explicit texting. She also told police she began receiving demands for cash in exchange for the student’s silence beginning last New Year’s Day.
Police say Doan withdrew money from her bank and took out payday loans to the tune of an estimated $28,000.

America’s public education system is a criminal enterprise.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

 

Category: Crime, Education, Texas

Petroleum Is Good, Liberals Are Crazy

Posted on | January 24, 2017 | 2 Comments

For eight years, President Obama did everything in his power to punish the people who produce the fuel that makes capitalism work. It took Donald Trump just two days to turn that around:

Trump signed executive orders that will make it easier for TransCanada to construct the Keystone XL pipeline and for Energy Transfer Partners to build the final uncompleted portion of the Dakota Access pipeline.
The Keystone XL would bring oil from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska, where it would connect to an existing pipeline to bring the crude to Illinois. Former President Barack Obama refused to approve the cross-border project, saying the environmental review was not adequate in light of its route through the Sandhills ecosystem in Nebraska. . . .
Obama also backed a delay to completion of the Dakota Access pipeline, which would bring oil from North Dakota to Illinois. . . .
In December, the Army Corp of Engineers said it would deny Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners the easement it needs to complete the final stretch of the $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline. Jo-Ellen Darcy, United States assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, said the best path forward was to explore alternative routes for the pipeline, something Energy Transfer Partners says it will not do.
Tribe members and protesters have been camped out for months in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, in opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline.

Americans love petroleum. We love the internal combustion engine. We love fast cars and big trucks. Environmental activists . . . not so much.

Q. How many hippies does it take to pave five miles of highway?
A. Only one, if you spread him real thin.

Dirty hippies don’t like Donald Trump for some reason.

 

Category: Donald Trump, Environmentalism

Because Sluts Should Be Ashamed

Posted on | January 24, 2017 | 1 Comment

Great minds think alike and, at the very moment I was tsk-tsking over Meghan Murphy’s sad fate, Zaklog the Great was posting this video:

 

Now, one of my pet peeves is video bloggers (“vloggers”) who post splendid rants but fail to provide transcripts for those us who would like to be able to quote what they say. As if he could read my mind, Zaklog the Great had a transcript ready when I asked for one:

I’d like to talk a little bit today about slut-shaming. There’s a real problem with it these days. We simply do not have nearly enough.
Let’s spell out exactly what the phrase “slut-shaming” means, shall we? It means criticizing a woman for promiscuous sexual behavior. Why, exactly, is this bad? Oh . . . I see. It’s unfair! Men do not get treated the same. Well, you’re kind of right. Men are not held to account for our sexual behavior nearly enough. This is unfair. I don’t know if I would say unjust because “fair” is a loose word, easy to sling around. “Just” . . . is a bit more hard-edged, however.
But, if you have an important rule that is not being enforced even-handedly, the sane decision is not to abolish the rule for everyone, but to enforce the rule for those who have been getting off light. We need more slut-shaming for men.
But don’t get me wrong. This is not just about men. There is also a dreadful dearth of slut-shaming for women these days.
You may object, however, that these rules against sexual promiscuity are not important, that, in fact, they are silly, and outdated, and passé. To that, I have a few replies. First, how’s that gonorrhea infection treating you? Did they get to it before it rendered you permanently sterile? Second, yes, these rules are important, and even more so for women than for men.
You see, and I know this is unfair, women tend to bear the consequences of irresponsible sexual behavior more heavily than men do. First, we have to establish some basic facts. Sex, you see, is how we get more people, who, in common practice, start out as babies. Now, there are all kinds of fantastic things that can be said about babies, but two drawbacks cannot be debated: Babies are expensive and babies are time-consuming.
Why do I bring this up? Well, if two people are having casual sex and a baby results, who generally ends up responsible for it? That’s right, the woman. Even if she manages to get child support from the father, which is a doubtful proposition in that situation, that is still a large burden for one person.
So, in purely practical terms, women tend to bear more of the costs of promiscuous sex. But that’s not all. You see, and I hate to break this to those of you who’ve been listening to feminists, but women and men are not the same. Women and men do not react to sexual intimacy the same way. And years of playing genital-tag leave different marks on women than they do on men.
There was a study a few years ago that showed that the odds of a woman being happy in her marriage go down as her number of lifetime sexual partners goes up. It also showed no such pattern among men. Is this unfair? Yes. It’s also reality. Sorry.
You put these two important facts together and it looks like enforcing societal rules against sexual promiscuity is even more important for women than for men. These rules protect women far more than they do men.
Now, societies have basically two options for enforcing their various rules: ostracism or force, mockery or the barrel of a gun. I, personally, think ostracism would be by far the preferable option here. Perhaps you disagree.
So yeah. Slut-shaming. We could really use more. Now go out and do your part!

Exactly right. Why does shame exist, anyway? Because if people were not shamed for doing bad things, they might do bad things all the time, like posting video rants and not providing a transcript. Shame on vloggers who do that — and praise to Zaklog the Great!

 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 01.24.17

Posted on | January 24, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.24.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Obama State Dept. Flunky Marie Harf Hired By…Fox News?
Twitchy: Senior Secret Service Officer In Hot Water Over Facebook Post
Louder With Crowder: Hypocrisy Exposed! Crowder Crashes #WomensMarch As Undercover Transgender!


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Is It Okay To Punch A Nazi?
American Thinker: Chronicles Of Self-Destruction
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s First Full Presidential Day Work News
Bring The HEAT: The Strange Case Of Lieutenant Commander Lin
Da Tech Guy: Baldilocks – Post-Inauguration Short Takes, also, John Ruberry – Why Is Chicago So Corrupt?
Don Surber: “Citizens Impeachment! Citizens Impeachment” /Gomer Pyle, also, West Virginia Almost Abortion Free
Dustbury: I Think She Wears A Small
Hogewash: Yours Truly, Johnny Atsign
Jammie Wearing Fools: Failing NY Tabloid Attacks Tom Brady For Friendship With Donald Trump
Joe For America: No More Spanish! White House Announces English-Only Website
JustOneMinute: Waves In The Pacific
Power Line: Burn, Baby, Burn?, also, Governor Dayton Collapses
Shark Tank: Obama’s Last-Minute Gift Of $221 Million To The Palestinian Authority
Shot In The Dark: Dear “Feminist” Bobblehead
STUMP: Actuaries On Social Security – Schobel On Reforms, Myers On History, And Foster On Medicare/ACA
The Geller Report: Anti-Trump Protester Lights Girl’s Hair On Fire (Video), also, HuffPo Attacks Trump For Vow To Fight “Radical Islamic Terrorism”
The Jawa Report: Banned From YouTube – Boobies, Not Banned From JihadTube – Death To America
The Political Hat: Tweens And Sharia Law
This Ain’t Hell: Veronica Dale Hahn Stole $400K From VA, also, Old Enough To Know Better
War Is Boring: A Professor Claimed Video Games Make People Better Shooters – Then His Study Got Retracted
Weasel Zippers: Sharia Supporting Womens’ March Organizer Encourages Lawbreaking By Creating Sanctuaries For Illegals, also, Trump Asks FBI Director Comey To Stay On
Megan McArdle: The Democrats’ Rise Is Far From Inevitable
Mark Steyn: When The March Is Over


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