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Under the Fedora: Olympics, Rumors and Dying Churches
The Olympics have begun, some thoughts:
Am I the only one who thought the James Bond queen skydiving business was tacky?
If you are going to do pop culture of England over decades, can you do it without a single clip from Dr. Who a series that has been around nearly 50 years?
Michael Phelps broke the record as the greatest Olympic medal winner in history, yet earlier this week people are shocked SHOCKED that Michael Phelps failed to qualify in one of the Olympic races.
Guys he won a ton of medals last time, if he had never won another one he would still be one of the greatest Olympic athletes ever.
I swear the Vatican must be the just about only state that doesn’t field an Olympic team. Then again what event would a priest have time to train for?
I’d actually like to see them in at least once Olympics, I’m sure they would be treated with less deference that certain other states are.
The IOC caved to Arab states by not permitting a moment of silence for the murdered Israeli athletes at the London Olympics.
Jacques Rogge capitulated to the 46-member bloc of Arab and Muslim countries because of the threat of Arab countries to boycott participation in the Games.
Spitzer, who jumpstarted an international campaign to garner a minute of silence at the London games, reported that Rogge told her that “his hands were tied” by the influence of the 46-member group.
Her rejoinder to Rogge: “No, my husband’s hands were tied, not yours.”
If the arabs wanted to leave the game, he should have said: Fine, go, you can return when you learn the difference between barbarism and civilization.
Unfortunately not only was such an impossible thought not forthcoming but at the insistence of the Lebanese team a barrier was erected between them and the Israeli athletes.
This is simple cowardice, it is why the barbarians will continue to approach the gates and will end when the people cry enough, and not before.
Let the record show that both Bob Costas and the Italian teams showed more guts than the IOC
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Speaking of cowardice the whole Chick–Fil-A business reeks of cowardice and opportunism. Michael Graham noted it best when he pointed out the contradiction of welcoming a mosque that preached death to gays while denouncing a restaurant that supports the actual definition of marriage.
Apparently it’s OK to kill gays as long as you let them marry first.
What was that line from the African queen:
By the authority granted to me by his Imperial Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm the Second I pronounce you man and wife – proceed with the execution.
I was on a radio show this weekend where a caller bluntly said anyone who doesn’t support gay marriage is a racist.
Apparently every US president who ever lived was a racist until recently, so was Barack Obama. So was every member of the media who didn’t back the idea just 20 years ago or less.
There is nothing so intolerant than a tolerant leftist.
On Twitter Dana Loesch noted a comment by the Mayor of Philly
Alternate headline: Philly mayor sez banning biz based on owner’s beliefs is an “American value.”
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) July 29, 2012
I don’t see why anyone is surprised. I seem to remember the democrats being big on telling people they weren’t welcome if they advanced idea they didn’t like, you know people like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner,
The real big shock that Amanda Marcotte and Robert Stacy McCain are on the same page concerning restricting Chick-Fil-A, I suppose both are thinking in terms of broken clocks.
There is a lot of fuss being made about Dick Cheney saying Sarah Palin was a bad pick in 2008. I think the anger is misguided for a couple of reasons, first of all to a traditional pol like Cheney that’s not an unreasonable statement, she was certainly less qualified in terms of experience that Joe Biden, but not less qualified that Barack Obama. (However talent-wise she outstripped them both.)
Additionally Cheney has served well, but like everyone makes the occasional mistake, I’m going to go spastic because he happens to get one wrong.
Me I think Palin was an incredible pick, think of all of the races that were won by Palin’s endorsement in 2010 and think of Tuesday. She endorsed Ted Cruz back in May. Monday the MSM was reporting the race was “tight”
Ted Cruz won by 13 points.
That’s Sarah Palin, Political venture capitalist
During the 2008 Race Sarah Palin earned political capital with the voters. She spoke plainly and honestly and won her base over. After the campaign she wrote her best selling book and she and her family found themselves comfortable.
She could have sat back, after all her books and TV series were popular and profitable, she could have held court and been courted by pols all over the country and been a standard visit on the “Pay homage to get elected” tours.
Instead she took her political capital and invested it.
Tip O’Neil used to tell the story of Tom Harkin back when he was in the House, he was in an iffy district for Dems and was getting a lot of pressure on a vote for labor they were threatening to primary him when Tip called in Labor and quipped that he had only voted against them three times in his time in congress saying how amazing it was that in all those year there were only three times Labor got it wrong.
Unfortunately that broke the ice and that’s how the difference between Tom Harkin as a former congressman and Tom Harkin as a longtime Senator from Iowa today.
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The Huff post ran an interview with Harry Reid yesterday, in it Reid claims a person at Bain told him Romney didn’t pay taxes for ten years.
Amazingly 3rd party rumor made the Washington Post
Harry Reid: Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years
I’m fairly new to the world of writing but even I know basic standards:
Mind you the Washington post isn’t citing an unnamed source that has talked to them, they are reporting that someone else (Harry Reid) claims that an unnamed source said something.
I don’t claim to have been in this business all that many years, but I know enough that I can’t report hearsay.
Stacy McCain IS a real reporters and says this:
This is one of those “too-good-to-check” situations, and there are obvious problems with Reid’s claim. Isn’t the provenance of the claim intrinsically suspicious? How the hell would an investor in Bain Capital know how much taxes Mitt Romney paid? (Phil Klein made this point.) And why would a Bain investor call Harry Reid to make this claim? Who is this mysterious investor who’s got Harry Reid on speed-dial? Do they talk regularly? What else has he told Harry?
These questions — who, what, when, where, why, how? — are obvious, as I say, and reporters are supposed to ask them. However, if it is now the practice of the WaPo to repeat anything said by anybody on the Internet, why isn’t Ed O’Keefe quoting Allahpundit?
By the way, some random guy on the Internet told me Obama was born in Kenya. Now, do I know that’s true? Well, I’m not certain. But let me just toss it out there.
I’ve written about China’s ghost cities and my opinion that before Rob Eno of Red Mass Group noting Elizabeth Warren’s China quip put together this video
We have serious problems here but China is one big bubble waiting to burst and that is what Elizabeth Warren
Finally the left is in shock over the Pope appointing “The Father of Prop 8” as the Arch Bishop of San Francisco
This is juxtaposed against the Episcopal Church’s endorsement of cross dressing clergy & same sex marriage.
The media keeps pushing the Catholic Church to go in the direction of the Episcopalians but where has this direction gotten them?
This is no longer George Washington’s Episcopal Church – in 1776 the largest denomination in the rebellious British colonies. Membership has dropped so dramatically that today there are 20 times more Baptists than Episcopalians.
U.S. Catholics out-number the Episcopal Church 33-to-1. There are more Jews than Episcopalians. Twice as many Mormons as Episcopalians. Even the little African Methodist Episcopal denomination — founded in in 1787 — has passed the Episcopalians.
Seeing these results, is it any wonder that when our liberal friends advise us to follow the path of the Episcopal church we have the same suspicion that Snow White should have had when the old women offered her the apple.
See you next week
Under the Fedora Movies Mistakes and reviews
I’m starting the column as I watch the previews before the movie Ted. They seem to be unending. The one that jumps out at me is the new one for the Hobbit. I’ve seen it before on TV and online but it is really special when seen on the big screen.
The Lord of the Rings Movies were triumphs of the cinematic art, that’s a big mountain for the Hobbit to climb but I suspect it and Jackson will do it.
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There are two big developments in the Brett Kimberlin Story, first there is an utter defeat in Court but that defeat is just a start:
I’m very delighted at Aaron Walker’s victory but the fact that he had to go though he had to go through months of this stuff, and the expenses involved in this is a national disgrace.
And it’s not over. Stacy McCain doesn’t have a fixed abode yet, Patterico, Erick Erickson and Wolfe’s swatters are still at large.
There is quite a slog to go through before this is done, but there was, at least to me an even more interesting development to this story. Salon came out and Defended Kimberlin. The question to me is why
There is, in fact, no real plus side to defending Brett Kimberlin. At best he is a small player in the big game and even if he were more, Kimberlin & co are only effective if there is no attention to their activities.
With federal suits, the attention of bloggers around the nation, nearly 90 members of congress either signing documents against Swatting or asked about the same and Robert Stacy McCain not only continuing his revelations but getting so many instalanches it’s a wonder Charles Johnson hasn’t climbed onto a ledge, And argument for Kimberlin’s potential value and effectiveness for the left would be less plausable than the success of a national letter writing campaign in behalf of The Secret Life of Desmond Pfeiffer.
So if this is the case why on earth would Salon bring up the name of Kimberlin, let along defend him? Why would the left invest an asset that has existed for so long in such a losing endeavor? Why even if the MSM is doing their best to ignore developments even bother making the argument from the left in defense of the speedway bomber a figure that a party might not want to associate with in an election year?
I think this is preparing the ground for new revelations that might suggest there is more here than meets the eye.
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There is a lot of angst on the left over the PA voter ID law. The media is speculating hundreds of thousands of Democrat voters will not be able to produce a valid ID particularly in cities. One local paper is simply breathless over it:
Second comes the GOP’s own admission — conveniently after the fact, of course — that their agenda was indeed political. The moment came last month at a GOP State Committee meeting, when House Republican Majority Leader Mike Turzai recounted Republicans’ legislative accomplishments for the year. Among them, Turzai announced to enthusiastic applause: “Voter ID — which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done.”
Pennsylvania didn’t need the voter ID law. There was no credible evidence of voters impersonating other voters at the polls. There was one reason, and one reason only, to pass the new requirement, and it wasn’t the security of the ballot. It was the outcome of the election. We knew it all along. Now the GOP House leader has put it out there for everyone to see.
Left unanswered is the question why a democrat voter would be less likely to have an ID, an item that is highly necessary these days, PARTICULAR in a city than a republican.
Why should the use of an item needed at any bank, to cash any paycheck or government check, to use a credit card, an item you are asked to produce at a hospital, at a supermarket or even to buy booze cause the results of an election to change? Do Democrats need these ID less that republicans?
What could possibility be going on that would cause the passage of a strong voter ID law backed by an Army of Davids equipped with iPhones and internet connections along with an energized Tea Party with volunteers willing and able to serve as poll watchers to strike such fear into the hearts of Democrat leaning Union Stewards and Machine Pols who in the past have managed to deliver their precincts to their party by overwhelming margins?
I suspect the people screaming the loudest know the answer and that’s why they are screaming.
Meanwhile while the left complains about a lack of official documents among voters they are now obsessing about Mitt Romney’s Tax returns and once again there is an obvious question that isn’t being asked:
Maybe it’s just me but if the IRS saw something untoward during in Mitt Romney’s tax returns, I have a feeling that they would not hesitate for one minute to pursue it and extract every penalty that would be due.
Now Warren Buffett for example has a big back tax bill that both the Huffington Post and the Blaze has reported on. Maybe it’s just me but I’m thinking if Mitt Romney had a similar problem, if he owed taxes, or had a big penalty or had to go to court to defend such issues we might just have heard about it during the Massachusetts Gov Campaign, or during his Senate Campaign vs Ted Kennedy, or the 2008 Presidential Campaign, or even in the primaries in 2012…
…but we haven’t.
Well after all everybody knows the IRS isn’t interested in digging into the finances of people they think they can get money out of?
This election isn’t going to be close.
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Ernest Brognine has died. I grew up on McHale’s Navy and by an odd coincidence was watching bits of season one last week. Borgnine has worked steady in films and even stars in a new picture that was released this year. I suspect his 10 years in the Navy and Italian upbringing had something to do with his work ethic.
Borgnine’s best work was In film, and he won an Oscar for Marty but he will be most remembered for the PT 73 to one generation
and as Mermaid Man in the Spongebob Cartoons to another.
Funny about that isn’t it?
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Haven’t talked much Doctor Who, but Rich’s comic blog has a Doctor Who James Bond crossover going on, apparently in this story Bond is a Time Lord and the different actors are regenerations of him.
Don’t care for the current version of Bond myself.
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The All Star Game was yesterday and I don’t care. When they decided it was OK to end in a Tie instead of playing it out I lost interest.
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Sadly recently found out that an elderly friend’s wife has been diagnosed with Cancer when I mentioned to someone that she was going through chemotherapy at 80+ the person I talked to asked why she was bothering? It reminded me of an old joke:
Three people are in conversation when one mentions an acquaintance of the three has just died at 84. While the first express sorrow the 2nd person declares that nonsense saying:
“He lived a full long life, had a great time and lived into his 80’s. There is nothing wrong with dying at 84.”
At this the 3rd man replies: “Easy for you to say, you’re not 83. “
Every life has value, that’s what pro-life is all about.
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My review of TED is available at Amazon.com you can read it there but here is a quick peek concerning something I’ve seen brought up in a lot of reviews
At first glance the idea that John has a smoking hot successful girlfriend, Mika Kunis makes no sense until you realize that every single other male Character in the movie and frankly almost all the female ones are even more dysfunctional or downright sick compared to him. In the population of this movie Mark Wahlberg’s character IS the pick of the litter.
This movie wasn’t as good or as bad as people said it was.
See you all next week.
Under the Fedora: Morale, Ratings and Old Yellowstain
If a Super PAC doesn’t raise any money does it become a mediocre PAC with different Tax Rules?
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Last week’s big news is the Supreme court’s 5-4 ruling on Obamacare yet, as you might guess I’m not too fond of it but electorally I see this as a disaster for the left
The president has been giving individual organization wavers. Mitt Romney has already said he will give the entire country a waiver to Obamacare. This means that in 2016 the democrat candidate will have to revoke that waiver in order to implement it.
So every four years the question will be before the American People: “Do you want Obamacare implemented or not?”, until it is implemented or repealed.
Democrats this is the political ground you wanted, I hope you enjoy it.
It’s actually funny to watch the left go after Romney for acknowledging the reality of the situation.
Well, I said that I agreed with the dissent. And the dissent made it very clear that they felt it was unconstitutional. But the dissent lost — it’s in the minority. And so now the Supreme Court has spoken. And while I agreed with the dissent, that’s taken over by the fact that the majority of the Court said it is a tax, and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There is no way around that.
When you are reduced to hitting Romney for saying what the Supreme Court said is what it said, that’s gotta be a bad sign for the left.
Victor Davis Hanson Wrote a piece full of worry and woe concerning election 2012 that prompted a long reply from me that said in part:
Yes we have to work hard, yes we can’t slack and yes I do expect these folks to be fight so dirty as to make a mud hole look like a bidet, but perception doesn’t trump reality. Cripes the president just won the biggest victory of his presidency in the supreme court and vulnerable democrats are still running away.
Now you might see the odd democrat in comparatively safe seat such as Nikki Tsongas.
willing to own Obamacare but I’m pretty sure you won’t be seeing candidates in swing districts doing this.
I wonder if she would be so confident if she realized that the GOP was spending 2.2 million dollars on congressional races on Boston TV.
Run that through your head a second in a year when Democrats can’t even pay for their own convention, a year when the president is reduced to begging newly weds for a share of their dowry and birthday money the GOP finds their prospects good enough to put 2.2 mill into the pot in Massachusetts.
Another interesting difference, look at that Tsongas interview, I asked her about the Swattings and she wasn’t familiar with them meanwhile…
When the time for my question came I mentioned the Aaron Walker Swatting asking if they would sign onto senator Chambliss’ letter if elected and would support a new such letter assuming a president Romney won. Their answers were notable in several ways.
Firstly they all knew about the issue. That might not seem odd but in the last 48 hours I’ve talked to more than a dozen offices of house and senate members for comment and the majority of the offices I spoke to had no idea what SWATTING was, yet all three of these potential congressmen knew about the issue and spoke forcibly on the subject
That says something doesn’t it?
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If that isn’t enough for somebody to worry about this interview was interesting…
Remember when the left was marrying itself to the occupods and I said this:
I keep expecting some elder statesman of the left to play Admiral Akbar, and shout to the Democrats who are jumping on the Occupy bandwagon: “It’s a trap!” But it looks like there aren’t any adults left to do so.
The adults never came but the media has conveniently forgotten the democrat party’s love affair with the occupods.
Hopefully the GOP will be running ads all this fall to remind them..
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How bad are things at CNN? They were likely the only people in the world who thought Anderson Cooper telling people he was gay was news.
“Coming Out” has become a cheap way to get a little press from the MSM. Every few months you hear about some person who doesn’t have a show or a prospect of a show. (David Ogden Stiers being the latest). Considering the culture of the entertainment industry that has all the bravery of jumping in front of a bandwagon.
Now if Anderson Cooper announced he was straight (like Dan Riehl), THAT would have been news and if he came out as a Believing Roman Catholic Republican, that would be an act of bravery.
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Speaking of ratings I’ve talked about what an Instalanche is. For those unfamiliar this is what it does to your stats here is an example
I bring this up because Robert Stacy McCain is now in his 48th day of covering the Brett Kimberlin story knocking off a total of 60 posts. Glenn Reynolds has instalanched him 42 times in that 48 days.
In my experience an Instalanche brings anywhere from 5000-10,000 hits the first day and say another 10-20% of that number the next, say 5500-12,000 hits overall, multiply that by 42 days and you get between 231,000 & 504,000 in 42 days.
Considering how much attention a single instalanche brings. Can you imagine regularly daily instalanches brings to a subject that people might wish are not discussed?
Kimberlin must be kicking himself for contacting Mrs. The Other McCain’s employer.
Politically this is going to end very badly for them.
Meanwhile Aaron Worthing/Walker has his court day the 5th. On the 4th he told of the hearing that led to his silencing:
I have gotten some criticism for representing myself. I won’t say I was the most stellar advocate. Not all lawyers are trial lawyers, and I know I am not one of the great ones yet. I hope to change that with experience. But at the same time, I think I did an adequate job. I don’t believe I lost because of a poor presentation. I believe I lost because the judge disregarded the law, and it is hard to see how a more experienced lawyer could have forced a judge to follow Supreme Court precedent. But maybe that is just my ego talking; I report, you decide.
But there was a more basic reason why I didn’t hire a lawyer. You shouldn’t have to hire a lawyer, damn it—doubly so when you are unemployed. You shouldn’t have to pay money in order to maintain your freedom. That’s not freedom! Judges in the district courts should have been sufficiently solicitous of the First Amendment that they should not have allowed a man like Kimberlin to penalize a person for protected speech.
Read the entire thing. That we are at a point where he even has to have a 2nd hearing simply amazes me.
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I spent a good chunk of my 4th with some friends that I hadn’t seen in a bit just sitting and talking with our spouses.
The older I get the more things like this become appealing.
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Finally , there are reports that John Roberts changed his vote on Obamacare, first preparing to overturn it and then around May changing his mind.
Now if Justice Roberts wants to change is mind based on the law, or the court arguments or some other precedent that’s fine, but if the chief justice of the supreme court changed his ruling either because of pressure from the left. That’s just cowardice.
If the above is true than Justice Roberts has earned the nickname “Old Yellowstain”, but lets take it one step further. Let’s say he didn’t make the change because of pressure from the left. What if he thought it would be politically advantageous to the right and rules that way accordingly.
That would not only be a national disgrace but an insult to every person who has sat on a jury sequestered from their family.
I’ve said it before the everybody deserves a Mulligan and I can give Roberts one here, but if he thought he was going to make friends on the left by doing this, he’s is pretty gullible.
Hope you enjoyed the 4th, see you next week.
Brett Kimberlin planned parenthood and the world’s smallest Instalanche
Well “Everybody Write about Brett Kimberlin day” has come and gone and there have been some interesting developments since then:
- Item: Hundreds of bloggers wrote about the Kimberlin case, it’s history and the attempts by Kimberlin and his friends to silence conservative bloggers. It dominated the stats at Memeorandum Friday
- Item: Patrick Frey known as the blogger Patterico came out publicly on his “Swatting” providing audio of the actual 911 called used to summon police to his house. He and Aaron Worthing appeared on Glenn Beck’s program to tell their stories of harassment that took place after they choose to write about Kimerlin as his associates
- Item: Robert Stacy McCain appeared on the WCRN Morning show on Memorial Day to speak about his own family’s flight for their safety to an audience reaching six states
- Item: Red State Writer and CNN contributor Erick Erickson found himself the latest victim of the tactic of “Swatting”, Fortunately he had the foresight to inform local authorities before writing about Kimberlin that such an event might take place.
- Item: The Wikipedia entry for Brett Kimberlin was removed and then replaced after an exchange where an editor at Wikipedia argued that the entry was “overly negative” and when the entry returned a new edit from Kimerlin associated Franz Libekin Ron Brynaert stated that Kimerlin was the victim of right wing harassment.
- Item: In a court hearing before a retired judge that apparently had little understanding on what the internet is blogger Worthing was placed into custody the court deeming his writing about Kimberlin as a violation of a peace order.
Most amazing of all in the days preceding and following this Memorial Day weekend, the day when we as a nation remember those who died to secure our rights under the 1st Amendment we have American writers, harassed, Swatted (at risk of their lives) , forced to flee from their homes and states, and now imprisoned for daring to use their first amendment rights to write about Brett Kimberlin and his band…
…and the mainstream media has not a word to say.
That this is happening to Americans in America is a shock, that the media is not reporting it is a bigger shock but the biggest shock of all is that the left is apparently standing behind Mr. Kimberlin and his buddies, when normally such a guy would have been thrown off the bus a long time ago.
What on earth can these guys have on the left and the media that they would cover for them for so long? Or are the prospects so slim for the left in election 2012 that they can’t spare a single ally, not even this one?
As Glenn Reynolds might say, “They told me that if I voted for John McCain allies of the president would intimidate and jail those who would oppose those who support him and they were right.”
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BTW by the time you read this I will have met with local detectives, as I’ve written a bit about Kimberlin and his band including Franz Leibkin Ron Brynaert in order to make sure no surprises take place. It’s true Sicilians are rarely the target of this kind of thing but you never know.
One last thought, when my oldest found out I was writing about Kimerlin he told me he would be leaving any unmarked packages for me to open. It’s kind of sad when your children have to think about things like that.
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Another small irritant this weekend was the Boston Celtics victory over the Philadelphia 76ers. As a New Englander the victory itself was most welcome but the constant drumbeat about how poorly the Celtics played and the burying of them as a team before a single minute of the Eastern finals had taken place is just ridiculous.
Of course it seemed less ridiculous when the Heat slaughtered them in game one, but that why these series are the best of seven.
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Russia and China are blocking any possible UN action on Syria as the government slaughters their own civilians. The most extraordinary thing about this action is how unextraordinary this is to anyone who has followed the cold war.
Many of the youth of the left might be confused by this as their elders have talked about the evils of the US and extolled communism and socialism, what they forget is their older leaders are the same guys who defended these types for decades.
One can debate if the US should or should not intervene in Syria, that’s legit, but the reality that Russia and China will always do their best to protect any nation that chooses to slaughter their own people can’t be debated. It is a simple fact.
Remember when everybody told us how people would like us better once we had Bush out and Obama in?
Poles and Polish-Americans expressed outrage today at President Obama’s reference earlier to “a Polish death camp” — as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.
“The White House will apologize for this outrageous error,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “will make a statement in the morning. It’s a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence.”
The president had been trying to honor a famous Pole, awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to bear witness to the atrocities being committed against Jews. President Obama referred to him being smuggled “into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.”
Good thing we have someone that Europe can respect in charge
Oh and you know how everyone gets their knickers in an uproar if anyone calls Obama a socialist? Well while the press has focused on Bob Dylan getting the medal of freedom another recipient of the award for some reason didn’t draw much attention:
President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday to Dolores Huerta, an 82-year-old labor activist and co-founder of the United Farm Workers union.
Huerta is also an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.
DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.”
Yup, keep moving, nothing to see here.
Lyla Rose has struck again at Planned Parenthood with a series of stings that not only showed the group doing sex selective abortions
Planned Parenthood railed against the sting and claiming the video is “edited” but still fired the staffer in the video while saying:
This spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation of America also told The Huffington Post that the organization condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender, but its policy is to provide “high quality, confidential, nonjudgmental care to all who come into” its health centers. That means that no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in those states that explicitly prohibit sex-selective abortions (Arizona, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Illinois).
Hot air asks a logical question:
Far more troubling is the statement in the first excerpt that at once condemns gender-selective abortion, then insists that Planned Parenthood will provide them, apparently as a privacy issue — but not in four states that explicitly prohibit the practice. If Planned Parenthood really “condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender,” then why perform them at all on that basis? They don’t have any specific obligation, legal or otherwise, to provide services that truly contradicts with their value systems.
That’s a good point but the real question is one I’ve asked before: Why would Planned Parenthood condemn sex selective abortions?
Either abortion kills a human child or it does not. If an unborn child is just a clump of cells, if abortion is not the taking of a human life then it doesn’t matter why a person chooses to have an abortion any more than why they might have plastic surgery?
The moral and intellectual circles one has to navigate to support Planned Parenthood and abortion are getting harder and harder to navigate.
Do you remember this funny scene from the Big Bang Theory featuring Barry Kripke and his IPhone.
Well I have good news for Barry Kripke my son Sam just picked up an IPhone with Siri and as of the latest version if you asks Siri to “Wecommend a Westurant” it gives you the name of local eating places.
I wonder if Barry might can trade in his old version for the latest model?
Finally last week I commented on my recent Instalanche drought, well Glenn Reynolds promptly lanched that column but of course that didn’t apply to my blog. Monday however he linked to my post announcing I was covering the morning drive on WCRN. I looked at my stats and that lance provided a total of …16 hits. That had to be the smallest Instalanche ever.
Bottom line, God has a sense of humor.
See you next week.
Today is “Everybody Blog/Tweet/FB About #brettkimberlin Day”
Abdul: What is your name?
Father O’Malley: William O’Malley.
Abdul: I did not call you.
Father O’Malley: You called for all the Jews. I’m Jewish, just like Jesus Christ. You take one, you gotta take us all.
If you are at all aware of the existence of the Right Side of the Blogosphere you should know today has been dubbed: ” Everybody blog about Brett Kimberlin day”
This was coined by Lee Stranahan in response to the forced repatriation of Robert Stacy McCain, writer for the American Spectator, Reporter for 30+ years, member of the Axis of Fedora, and lean mean blogging machine who say the story of the attempt to silence blogger Aaron Worthing, immediately recognized it as newsworthy and pursued it to the point where it has been necessary for Mr. McCain to relocate himself and his family out of his home and out of his state for their own protection.
With the aid of the Ray Kroc Memorial Media Centers nationwide Mr. McCain has continued to tell this story stressing that it is Mr. Kimberlin, his violent past, his lawfare against conservative writers and sites and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that left has showered him with that is the story.
Mr. Stranahan has helpfully provided excellent resources to research Mr. Kimberlin and I expect at least dozens if not hundreds of bloggers to participate. This is no small thing as the aforementioned Breitbart blogger Lee Stranahan has on his own site (but curiously not crossposted at Breitbart) noted the following:
In political blogging, we often toss around highly charged words with great abandon. We say politicians we don’t like are scary and crazy and dangerous.
Brett Kimberlin is actually dangerous.
Full stop. No metaphor. No exaggeration. Brett Kimberlin is dangerous. As in — he blew up bombs and police suspected he did it to cover up a murder. People in Indiana tell me that witnesses disappeared during the trial. Worse, Kimberlin has shown no remorse for the bombings and went to great lengths to make the lives of his victims miserable.
Please, do not lose sight of this. This isn’t a time for loose rhetoric. This is real. It’s real and it’s serious in a way that many ‘political stories’ frankly are not. In that sense, this story is way beyond politics.
And that doesn’t even take into account the legal/financial risks involved.
Yet bloggers are going to be writing about Mr. Kimberlin anyway declaring: “I am Breitbart“, “I am Robert Stacy McCain” and repeating those words of Fr. O’Malley: “You take one, you gotta take us all.”
With all due deference to Stacy McCain and Lee I immediately recognize this as newsworthy and the bloggers inaction and the MSM’s inaction are the story today, much more than Brett Kimberlin himself. Think about it:
An American Reporter living in America has been forced to relocate himself and his family for their own safety and nobody wants to cover it except conservative bloggers despite great physical & financial risk.
It’s as if the entire right side of the blogosphere has become Pam Geller & Robert Spencer for a day.
To me this is story #1. It goes beyond political considerations. The Story of Stacy McCain’s flight, like the Molly Norris story, is a tale that has never failed to outrage the average American when I tell them face to face and would outrage the nation, yet thanks to the MSM inaction nobody has heard it.
To be sure there are other questions worth asking after today:[list type="arrow"] [li]
- Will the organizations of the left that have funded Mr. Kimberlin continue to do so?
- Will the online left back Mr. Kimberlin?
- Will Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog continue to work with him?
- And just how many bloggers will participate (and will there be any conspicuous by their absence)?
[/li] [/list]
These stories are all newsworthy but none of them in my mind surpass what I am about to type:
At the start of the Memorial day weekend, when we celebrate and remember those who have died to protect our constitutional freedoms as elaborated in the Bill of Rights, an American Journalist and his family are in hiding for their own safety for daring to exercising those rights the men and women we honor died for.
That’s the bottom line.
A final irony. This Memorial Day weekend marks the anniversary of the breaking of the Anthony Weiner story, a story that Robert Stacy McCain immediately recognized as newsworthy but the mainstream media did not, instead along with the online left, they attempted to use it to attack Andrew Breitbart believing his lies right up until the point when he confessed them. As Stacy McCain said at the time:
This story is what we call “news.” No matter how unseemly or inconsequential the story may superficially appear to be, it is entirely legitimate and potentially significant, and it is therefore a dereliction of journalistic duty to ignore or dismiss it.
That decision to ignore this story by the MSM led to an op-ed in the NY Post and an appearance on Fox 25 for me. I wonder who will be the blogger that gets the same due to the MSM’s inaction this time?
Update: Two important questions from yesterday Valley of the Shadow:
Why has the Major Media ignored this domestic Terrorist, Brett Kimberlin and the damage he has done to people? And why is KPFK still a 501c3 when they campaign for Progressives throughout most of the day?
and an Ex Con’s view:
Apathy or Courage? What you Choose Today Will Affect Our Nation
Your call.
Update 2: Via Michelle Malkin who has promoted her Wednesday post today the Washington Examiner has broken the MSM silence in an opinion piece:
Nowadays, Kimberlin targets conservative bloggers like Aaron Worthing and Robert Stacy McCain in Maryland, and Patrick Frey of Patterico’s Pontifications in California. Why? For publishing facts about Kimberlin’s criminal record.
Kimberlin harasses his targets by, among many other ways, filing false charges in courts that require expensive, time-consuming litigation, disrupting his targets’ workplaces, and dropping dark hints about spouses and kids.
The first leak in the dam.
Update 3: A lot of people are writing about Brett Kimberlin but one blogger in particular is telling a story that the others may not know:
In the last radio interview Andrew Breitbart ever gave, on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Breitbart talked about a new ruthless tactic used by thugs against political opponents:
[O]ne of the things they’ve done to people who have worked with me in the past, including an L.A. prosecutor, is to “SWAT.” That means that they’re spoofing phones, pretending to be somebody else’s phone, calling 911, and saying “I killed somebody” and then the person’s home is met with the guns drawn, the SWAT and the helicopters, in a horrifying act. It’s happened twice: once in New Jersey, once in Los Angeles, with an L.A. County . . . prosecutor who [is] associated with me.”
I am that L.A. County prosecutor. And in this post, you’ll hear the hoax call that sent police to my house, pointing loaded guns at me.
THE NIGHT I COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED BECAUSE OF MY BLOGGING
This is the phony 911 call that caused it:
Read the whole thing and think about it for a second. We are talking an LA County prosecutor almost shot by police because of this call. And he is not the only one:
Listen to the voice on the calls, they sound the same Patterico again:
Although I am an L.A. County Deputy D.A., it is certain that I was “swatted” because of my blog and not because of my job. As Andrew Breitbart noted, this happened to two people within the course of a single week: a man in New Jersey and myself. Both of us had had contact with Andrew Breitbart. Both of us were writing about the same story. And both of us received email threats days before we were swatted. The threat to me said, in part: “Please think about your family. This story is not worth it. I can assure you that.”
Read his entire post and marvel. Those behind this and enabling this are simply evil, there is no other adjective to describe it.
This is happening to Americans in America. If we as Americans let this go on then we are dishonoring those who we remember this weekend who died to preserve our rights.
Which side are you on? It’s time to make your choice.
Update 4: One other point from the Patterico story that is worth repeating in case it wasn’t clear from the excepts above
I met personally with the nationwide experts on swatting in December 2011: the FBI office in Dallas, Texas. They told me that swatting is an extreme form of harassment — and that swatters typically combine swatting with other forms of harassment, including: complaining to the victim’s workplace, defaming the victim online, “Googlebombing” the victim, publishing the victim’s address online, filing phony reports of criminal activity by the victim, and so forth.
All of these things have happened to me and other critics of Brett Kimberlin since July 2011. The harassment has been relentless and has occurred almost every day. It would literally take a book to catalogue it all. What you read in this post, incredibly, is only part of it.
Why target me? Well, I first wrote about Brett Kimberlin in October 2010, after getting a call from Andrew Breitbart. Andrew told me that his site was going to publish a post about a domestic terrorist named Brett Kimberlin. The story sounded interesting, and I published a post about Kimberlin shortly after the Breitbart post (penned by Mandy Nagy aka Liberty Chick) was published.
Are we as Americans going to allow this?
Update 5: Smitty links and provides a hilarious Naked Gun reference and the Blaze writes about the story. Look at the comments from those on the left at the Blaze. To my readers on the left I ask: Are you going to stay silent on this or not?
Update 6: Here is an example of an “Everybody blog about Brett Kimberlin day” from: No one of Any Import:
I’m only making light of my own confusion. The way this guy likes to destroy lives is no laughing matter.
The details of how he came to be entangled with Patrick Frey (Patterico), Aaron Walker (Worthing), Mandy Nagy (Liberty Chick) and a dude named Socrates, well they are making my eyes swim. And I haven’t even gotten to Walker’s megapost yet!
So I’m going to defer to these people at these links, if you would like to see a bigger picture. I will stick to enumerating why I call Brett Kimberlin a Very Bad Actor. Then I’ll sit back and see if he tries to sue me or some such.
[list type="arrow"] [li]1. Bombing
2. Lying
3. Serial suing
4. Threatening
5. Making a living off progressive donations for bad music composition. Or maybe I should thank him for that.
[/li] [/list]
Now as a military wife I think she is very important myself but a question. If She can find this with simple google searches etc, how is it the MSM or even the leftist trolls at the Blaze can’t? Is this willful ignorance, or deliberate silence?
Update 7: Stacy gives an important shoutout to the National Bloggers Club
The National Bloggers Club has been a valuable ally in supporting and defending bloggers targeted by harassment and intimidation. Today is “Everybody Blog Brett Kimberlin Day.” I join with National Bloggers Club president Ali Akbar in sincerely requesting that readers concerned about defending First Amendment rights online visit the club’s special site, KimberlinFiles.org, and please give generously. Fellow bloggers can help by including the image and link in their coverage of the Kimberlin case.
Meanwhile That Mr. G Guy, The Return of Cincinnatus, The Radio Patriot weigh in as does Barbara Espinosa who says this:
Why do I want to know?
He has threatened my friend Robert Stacy McCain “The Other McCain”. His latest target is Stacy McCain, who has abandoned his home and taken his family to a safe haven.
Andrew warned the world about this guy six months before he died on Hugh Hewitt.
Follow the money, The funding of Kimberlin’s projects — tens of thousands of dollars from the George Soros-connected Tides Foundation, as well as foundations associated with Barbra Streisand and Sen. John Kerry’s wife — thus supported all of Kimberlin’s activities, including his effort to have O’Keefe and Giles prosecuted for their ACORN takedown.
Barbara is not a Sicilian but although she lives in Arizona she remains a Texan. If Mr. Kimberlin chooses to go after any blogger the choice least conducive to his continued health and well being would be Barbara.
Update 8: Lady Liberty 1885 writes a letter to Babs:
I want to ask you a question. Do you know who Brett Kimberlin really is? Maybe you should find out and think about a little stricter vetting of you who give grants to.
BTW there are going to be a lot of bloggers that I don’t list simply due to time, that doesn’t change my admiration for you all.
Update 9: The Evil Blogger lady not only writes about Kimberlin but provides a reference list. and the Souper Mexican joins in.
Meanwhile Ladd Ehlinger who has been on this story from the start doesn’t mince words
I’m worried for Mike Stack (who was also swatted), because Brietbart.com is currently being run by a nutless wonder who has refused to cover this story. Stack has felt abandoned to fend for himself — and for some reason, now thinks Ron Brynaert is on his side.
I know it’s difficult for people in the media to understand how the subject of a story can feel abandoned. “Geez! We’re a news-media-expose place! We’re not friends!”
No, sorry. When regular people in flyover country are suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of stuff you do and write, and suddenly have their lives threatened because of your work, you and your news-media-outlet have a moral obligation to them to at least cover the story.
That means you cover the story if their lives have been threatened. “Swatting” is news-worthy even in an ivory tower, and there’s no excuse for being quiet on it. Unless you’re a nutless coward.
You hear me, Joel Pollack?
That’s gonna leave a mark.
Update 10: Welcome to the Daily Gator & All American Blogger whose post includes this tweet from Andrew Breitbart circa Oct:
Better late than never.
Update 11: I’d like to give a special shoutout to a person not involved in “Everybody blog about Brett Kimberlin day a young man on the left named Dominic Nanni. Although we disagree on most things here is our exchange on this subject when I tweeted him the Patterico link:
I’m proud of this young man, he will make no friends with his fellows on the left for this tweet but he saw something wrong and will not support it.
Update 12: Glenn Beck is INTERVIEWING PATTERICO & Aaron in live RIGHT NOW! This changes everything, it also means that I won’t be breaking news on Monday during drive time. The PJ Tattler says this:
He deserves the notoriety. So do his financial backers: Barbra Streisand, George Soros and Teresa Heinz Kerry are among the left’s leaders who fund this convicted perjurer, convicted bomber and career criminal.
I wonder if the MSM will ask those questions before we do?
Update 13: The Lonely Conservative says this:
Kimberlin poked a bees nest, and the bees are really going to start swarming today. Just wait until he sees the next Google alert. Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall for that?
Thanks to his liberal benefactors Kimberlin has the resources to take on a handful of bloggers. But what’s he going to do now that so many of us are weighing in? It’s like trying to take down an angry swarm of wasps with a fly swatter.
and Pundette channels the Right Wing Granny
Patterico’s chilling account of harassment
If you’ve ever wondered why I sacrifice credibility and validity by blogging under a silly pseudonym, well, it’s not only because I’d rather not embarrass my children with my [ahem] profound political and cultural observations.
If you don’t get why this is important, now hopefully you do.
Update 14: John Hawkins interviews Stacy McCain (I’ll have my chance in a few days on air) meanwhile Dan Riehl weighs in:
Memeorandum is fast filling up with links, headed up by a shocking story posted at Patterico’s blog. Yet, that’s only one chilling tale from Kimberlin’s long and still growing list of crimes and misdeeds, including felonies, from the record and rap sheet of Brett Kimberlin, a man embraced by some of the most powerful Progressives and their institutions in American politics.
Shame on them for embracing and empowering such a small, evil man, all this time ignoring his pathetic and pathological actions, only because he assisted them in moving their ideological and political objectives forward.
Will this be another huge story the MSM ignores and the left ducks on Memorial day weekend?
Update 15: Conservative hideout is in, and interestingly enough we have posts up at Mediate and Dave Weigel who says this:
Have the “Blog About Brett Kimberlin” brigades figured out the legal risks of the enterprise? Are dozens of tweeters and bloggers, with no support networks, going to start fighting off lawsuits? Right now their allies include The Washington Examiner’s op-ed page, Red State, Michelle Malkin, and the Breitbart network. So, we’ll see.
Breitbart network? I didn’t see a post there on the subject but it’s interesting to note Weigel’s post at Slate went up 3+ hours ago with only one comment.
Watch for the comments at these sites, they should be revealing.
Under the Fedora: Catholics, Black Panthers and Friends
Saturday I attended the 12th annual Catholic Men’s Conference at the DCU center in Worcester (formally the Centrum for any expats living elsewhere for a while) a few quick thoughts from it:
It’s quite a sight to see hundreds of men in line for confession. Particularly if in your parish only a few people regularly confess.
Even if you are that rarest of people a married catholic priest you still make wife quips
It’s one of the few places when you will see George Weigel of National Review,,,
…and the Quarterback coach of the New Orleans Saints Joe Lombardi, speaking at the same event
[
And really where but in a conference of men can you hear a priest give a speech on confession and Masturbation?
These men’s conferences have since the first one in Worcester that dozen years ago have sprung up around the country and have been an important part of re-catechizing the faithful, particularly when the MSM and the Culture delight in the abject hatred of the faith and present their image of it accordingly.
There is nothing so frustrating to secular humanists and the media as a well catechized Catholic.
…
Driving home from the conference yesterday I heard on the Radio that the new Black Panthers have put a prize on the head of George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin last month
You know last time I mentioned the murder rate of young black men in the inner city. I don’t remember the New Black Panthers offering a bounty on any of their killers of those young black men.
Apparently the New Black Panthers hold the same rules for certain words as they do for the killing of young Black men. It’s apparently OK to murder a young black man provided the killer is also black.
I suspect the mothers of those young Black men murdered by gang and drug violence every year might disagree.
Of course it could be economic considerations. If the New Black Panthers offered a bounty for the killers in black on black violence, the payoffs might bankrupt them.
Since Mr. Zimmerman is Hispanic I wonder if La Raza will be providing protection or a counter bounty if someone collects the bounty on Zimmerman?
Twitchy reports Spike Lee is re-tweeting Zimmerman’s home address. If Zimmerman is murdered I wonder if La Raza will be taking these names down?
Here is a story Spike Lee hasn’t bothered to re-tweet:
Investigators with the Sanford Police Department are still trying to figure out exactly what happened during an altercation which resulted in a fatal shooting in the Twin Lakes area. The shooting happened just after 7 p.m. Sunday evening on Twin Trees Lane. A man who witnessed part of the altercation contacted authorities.
“The guy on the bottom, who had a red sweater on, was yelling to me, ‘Help! Help!’ and I told him to stop, and I was calling 911,” said the witness, who asked to be identified only by his first name, John.
John said he locked his patio door, ran upstairs and heard at least one gun shot.
“And then, when I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on the top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point.”
That story BTW is from Feb 27th Tom McGuire also picks up on something the MSM has not:However, one wonders what the City Manager means by “We are aware of the background information regarding both individuals involved in this event.” Isn’t the second individual Trayvon Martin, and what (if anything) do they know that the public does not?
It has been reported that Trayvon Martin was on a ten-day suspension from school, but those records have been kept from the public. I have not checked Mr. Martin’s high school, but as a guide, some other Miami high school imposes ten day suspensions for fighting, but also as a culmination of repeated violations of the dress code or smoking bans. The police know, but we don’t, and the Martin family attorneys are keeping a lid on this.
And Dan Riehl has noticed some interesting photoplay that’s being used. There is more here.
The truth is I don’t know what happened that night and neither do any of the people currently beating their breasts. What I DO know is this the actual facts no longer matter to those who have decided the death of this young man will be a fundraising, propaganda or political plus to them and they intend to use this fellow’s corpse for as long as the media will let them get away with it…
…which will be at least till November of this year.
I wonder if bloggers who talked about “waving the bloody shirt” during Iraq will come to the same conclusion here?
One last think the same people who are have used this shooting
Speaking of a narrative, remember a few years ago when the media was all a-twitter over a protest in front of his house. Apparently he is much more level headed about threats to city employees in his neighborhood these days:
So where is Russ Carnahan now that Occupiers have not only vandalized the home of a city employee — who reportedly lives but a couple blocks from Carhanan — but the very neighborhood in which Carnahan lives? Don’t you think if tea partiers were spray painting threats like the below in his neighborhood, he’d be quick to make a statement about it since he was so quick to lie earlier?
I’ll tell you where he is, he is in the same place where the MSM is on the killings of Jews in France by a self styled Al-Qaeda member named Mohammad. They know nothing they see nothing.
Well maybe the MSM doesn’t see anything but the Jews in France do.
In the past few years, the number of French Jews immigrating to Israel has doubled. Hundreds of French Jews have bought apartments in Israel. It’s their “pied-a-terre” in case the situation gets darker in Europe.
According to the statistics available, due to aliyah and assimilation, French Jewry is projected to experience a dramatic decline from 520,000 in 2000, to 480,000 in 2020, to 380,000 in 2050, and to 300,000 by 2080. The Jewish population in the United Kingdom will also decline to 240,000 in 2020, 180,000 in 2050, and 140,000 in 2080.
It looks like our Muslim friends in the Arab world/Muslim world remaking France and the UK in their own Judenrein image.
Why do I suspect there are 80 and 90 year old people in German Nursing homes smiling when they read that story?
BTW my friend Pam Geller also sees it and writes about it, loudly. The media will never forgive her for that.
Just saw this tweet concerning this as I was writing:
If you want to know why those who afford it choose home schooling and or private and Catholic Schools this says it all.
Finally I want to quote a story from Tip O’Neill’s Autobiography Man of the House:
Jack (Kennedy) must have been everywhere during that campaign, and he must have approached me seven or eight different times to ask me to be with him. Again and again I explained that Mike Neville was my pal, that Mike had served in the legislature with me, and that he deserved my support.
“But I’m going to win,” Jack said.
“Maybe you will” I told him, “but I’m with Mike Neville if I’m with him alone. And I’m going to make damn sure we carry North Cambridge.”
JFK never forgot that O’Neill was loyal to his friend. I was reminded of that when I saw this from Stacy McCain concerning Rick Santorum:
Let me tell you something: I remember when Charles Johnson tried to throw Pamela Geller under the wheels of his Little Green Bus, and I stood up and said not just no, but hell, no.
Maybe Rick Santorum’s not your favorite candidate. Maybe Pamela Geller’s not your favorite blogger. Maybe Rush Limbaugh’s not your favorite talk-radio host, but conservatives can’t let liberals tell us who our friends are.
Don’t let liberals tell you what to think. Don’t play along with the “gotcha” game. Don’t help them defame people’s reputations.
By God, REMEMBER BREITBART!
If Stacy McCain is with you, he is with you. Ironically I’ll always owe Charles Johnson a debt of gratitude because his attacks on Stacy led to my friendship with him.
Life’s funny like that.
R.S. McCain: Complaints About the Cain Campaign? Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
My good friend, and frequent contributor to The Minority Report, Robert Stacy McCain knocks this one out of the park!
I love how everyone has an opinion about how others should run their campaigns… if they really knew of which they speak they would have put it in practice already on their own campaigns or getting paid to advise campaigns!
Another thing Republicans and Conservatives need to remember is that this primary is ours, stop the backbiting and stop letting the Left and a complicit media control the narrative it’s our primary and they don’t have any business interfering in it… period!
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
For the past several days, in conversation after conversation, I’ve listened while friends told me what’s wrong with the Herman Cain campaign. Some of these friends are enthusiastic Cain supporters, some are not. And as I told several people who criticized the campaign’s handling of the sexual harassment allegations, “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. Any 24-year-old with a semester of Leadership Institute training could do a better job than they’ve been doing.”
Look, I’m no campaign strategist. But you don’t have to be a campaign strategist to see that, for example, HermanCain.com is without question The World’s Suckiest Campaign Web Site.
Just in terms of doing my job I noticed this months ago, because when you click the “Newsroom” tab on the site, a reporter might expect to find an archive of press releases. What you find instead is some kind of 1996-era “frames” format with out-of-date news articles about the campaign – which doesn’t even include links to the original articles.
OK, so click the “Press Resources” link at HermanCain.com and we find — wait for it – a form you can fill out and request information.
Fill it out. Maybe they’ll get back to you.
If I were the manager of a campaign paying good money for a Web site and somebody provided me with a useless piece of crap like HermanCain.com, either I’d be in jail for attempted murder or else he’d be in jail under indictment for fraud and theft by deception.
There is no excuse for this. I could pick up my cell-phone this very minute and, just from the numbers in my speed-dail, give you the names of six professionals who could design a better Web site than HermanCain.com. Five months ago, Steve Foley of Citizens4Cain published an open letter to the Cain campaign telling them what a wreck their Web site is and . . . no response.
Nobody home. Nobody cares. Crickets chirping.
When the campaign has failed to fix a blindingly obvious and basic problem like that, months after they’ve been told about the problem, it does not inspire confidence. And this kind of problem — which can be seen by anybody who cares to look — is replicated throughout the Cain campaign’s operations.
People with years of experience in the campaign business keep talking my ears off, telling me stuff the Cain campaign is doing wrong, and I don’t know what to tell them, except that they’re telling me the umpteenth version of the same story I’ve been hearing from everybody else. If I had any influence at all with the campaign, they’d have long ago re-hired Dan Tripp and given him two orders: Kick ass and take names. They’re not listening to me, they’re not listening to Steve Foley, they’re not listening to anybody, and so all I can do is to do my job — I’m a journalist, not a campaign strategist — and try not to worry about it.
The reason I wrote that 500-word rant is because today I noticed bloggers demanding that Herman Cain fire his chief of staff Mark Block:
Herman Cain’s Worst Enemy
– Michelle Malkin
Dear Herman Cain
– Erick Erickson
Cain campaign: We’re sticking with Mark Block
– Ed Morrissey
In Erickson’s post, he writes:
Herman, you said you’d surround yourself with the best people and you’ve surrounded yourself with Class A failures. The problems you are facing are problems of campaign staffing. You’ve failed to live up to your own standard of hiring the best people.
Which is pretty damned categorical, and which might have more credibility if Erickson’s buddies – “the best people” — weren’t the guys piloting the hopelessly doomed Rick Perry campaign.
Malkin’s complaint, basically, is that Mark Block is a lying scumbag. Having spent a good deal of time covering Republican campaigns, however, I’m willing to attest that “lying scumbag” and “GOP political operative” are pretty much synonymous. The key thing is to hire effective lying scumbags, and the “Blame Rick Perry” move was pure genius. For two or three days, everybody was screaming bloody murder about Block trying to pin the blame on Curt Anderson, which bought Team Herman enough time to come up with a better story.
Guess what? It worked.
But if you’re a conservative who wants to get quoted in the mainstream media this week, hurry up and denounce Mark Block:
Cain chief of staff under fire
Conservative pundits and former Cain staffers are calling for the resignation of Herman Cain’s chief of staff, who they say has damaged the GOP candidate’s credibility.
The calls for Mark Block to resign come as Cain’s campaign deals with sexual harassment allegations that threaten to ruin his candidacy. . . .
“Mark Block has to go,” prominent conservative blogger Ed Morrisey of Hot Air wrote Wednesday morning. “If he’s not gone by tomorrow, no one will take this campaign seriously again — nor should they.”
No expertise is required to identify and criticize the Cain campaign’s errors. Everybody with two eyes and a brain can see it. And yet . . .
Cain’s fundraising surges past $9 million
Herman Cain has raised more than $9 million since Oct. 1, his campaign announced Thursday, more than doubling his cash haul for 2012.
More than $2 million of that total was donated within the last 10 days, as Cain battled mounting allegations of sexual harassment from his time as president of the National Restaurant Association.
Cain only raised $4.7 million from May through Sept. 30, although it was not until his Sept. 24 victory in the Florida straw poll that the candidate began to rise in Republican polls. The campaign has now raised a total of $14.1 million. . . .
For the past 40 days, while the Cain campaign has broken every single maxim of Political Communications 101, they’ve been raising money at the pace of $225,000 a day. If that’s failure, it’s the kind of failure many campaign operatives would kill to have.
Despite everything, Herman Cain is No. 1 in the polls.
And next time I see Mark Block, I expect him to buy me a beer for calling him an “effective lying scumbag.”
Obviously, it was intended as a compliment.
The Politico Media Harassment Scandal
As readers of my blog, ResCon1 know, I’m with Jeffrey Lord, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham: This is a high-tech lynching of a highly accomplished black man who threatens the liberal order. Indeed, it’s no “Herman Cain sexual harassment scandal”; it is, instead, a Politico media harassment scandal.
I say this because, as Robert Stacy McCain has observed, Politico has presented no real and discernable evidence against Cain. The charges, such as they are, are so vague and lacking in specificity that they could include even innocuous behavior which no reasonable person would find objectionable.
And of course, we have no way of knowing whether the charges are credible because Cain’s accusers are being protected by a cloak of anonymity.
This may be standard journalistic practice, but it’s also highly unethical in my opinion: Concealing the identities of the accusers allows them to level ruinous charges against high-profile figures, but without ever having to subject themselves and their allegations to critical scrutiny.
Yet, it’s a basic principle of American justice (enshrined in the Sixth Amendment) that the accused has a right to confront his accuser.
Then, too, there is something called the statute of limitations: The charges against Cain date back at least a dozen years, Stacy notes. And the passage of time and distance make it increasingly difficult to gauge whether these charges were and are legitimate.
As Quin Hillyer points out, “people are falsely accused of all sorts of things, all the time.” Still, says Quin, “There is every reason for people to look into this further, and every reason for Cain to give a full accounting.”
Fine. Let Politico “look into this further.” And, should they find anything real and credible, then they can rush into print with their story. But you don’t publish a piece — and you don’t smear a man — based on flimsy and anonymous accusations.
And by the way: I don’t think this story makes Politico any more or less liberal than the next conventional media outlet; it just makes them typical, and that’s the problem: Too many (liberal) American journalists, especially in and around the beltway, think that it’s OK to smear people; and that it’s especially OK to smear conservative black men. It’s not. It’s wrong, and it has got to stop.
As Aaron Goldstein writes, the truth is that a lot of people are terrified at the prospect of a Herman Cain presidency, and, in large measure, because Cain is a black conservative. And many of these people will do anything — anything! — to stop Cain.
That’s understandable, I suppose, if you think that the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment rightfully own the black vote. But what’s more difficult to fathom is elite conservative criticism of Cain. He has not handled this controversy well, we are lectured. He has been amateurish and slow to respond.
Yeah, I suppose there’s a small element of truth to that charge. Cain is an unconventional politician running an unconventional race. He’s also wonderfully human. And he was caught off guard by an unfair and distant nonstory.
But what’s beyond dispute is that Cain has confronted these allegations forthrightly, with grace and with dignity. And, so long as he is under fire, no conservative should abandon him to the savagery of the Left. Ride to the sound of the guns.
Originally published at the Daily Caller and cross-posted at ResCon1.com.
Politico’s High-Tech Lynching of Herman Cain
Another high-vis, conservative black man. Another legacy media hit job. Another high-tech lynching. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Of course, the original high-tech lynching was perpetrated by National Public Radio against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. This latest act of character assassination is being spearheaded by Politico against Herman Cain.
Cain is being charged, in the court of public opinion, with committing sexual harassment back when he was president of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s. There’s only one problem, and it’s not just that the statute of limitations for Cain’s alleged crime has passed.
No, the real problem with Politico’s story is that it refuses to identify Cain’s accusers.
The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said; and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association.
The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures…
Politico has confirmed the identities of the two female restaurant association employees who complained about Cain but, for privacy concerns, is not publishing their names.
In other words, there is no story here. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution says explicitly that the accused has a right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”
True, the court of public opinion is not the same as a court of law. Still, the same basic principles of fairness and decency ought to apply in both venues. The media must not character assassinate people with anonymous accusations which, if true, could destroy reputations and end careers.
In short, name names or shut the hell up.
UPDATE: Robert Stacy McCain agrees: There’s a lot less to Politico’s hatchet job than meets the eye. “We know nothing about the accusers,” Stacy writes,
and the specifics of the accusations from a dozen years ago are reported rather vaguely by Politico:
“episodes that left the women upset and offended” and “physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable and that they regarded as improper in a professional relationship.”
All in all, it’s a long run for a short slide. Unless and until we have some specifics — including names, dates and places — my instinct is to agree with [Herman Cain spokesman J.D.] Gordon that this is “part of a smear campaign.”
Originally published at ResCon1.
From Doug Hoffman to Herman Cain: Continuing the Tea Party Momentum
“Busting the balls of the Establishment is a process not an event.”
– Robert Stacy McCain, Nov. 12, 2010
Steve Foley and I were having a laugh yesterday about the success of the Herman Cain campaign, which has made us look like geniuses, having lined up early with the self-described “dark horse” who’s now gaining ground on the front-runners.
Steve launched Citizens4Cain.com in January, when the general attitude toward Cain was “Herman Who?” But the online grassroots army had actually been in the planning phase for weeks. Steve and I had our first phone conversation about it sometime in November, after I’d mentioned Cain near the end of a Nov. 13 post about the blog-war between Patterico and Jeff Goldstein.
It’s kind of characteristic that I’d bury something like that near the end of a long post about something that would only interest a relative handful of diehard readers. Dan Riehl used to chide me about doing long posts, or doing multiple updates to a post on a breaking story, because that’s not the way you’re supposed to do it. People like blog posts to be short, and it’s better to have updates as new posts of their own, rather than to update a previous post.
Sometimes, however, doing it the “wrong” way is the best way to do things, as for instance when — in one of the most crucial presidential elections in American history – you decide to back a hopeless longshot with zero name recognition that everybody says can’t possibly win.
Genius, you see?
Of course, the odds against Herman Cain being sworn in as the 45th President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2013, are still astronomical, but merely the fact that Cain is being talked about as a real contender now is a huge achievement. He’s come farther than anybody ever thought he’d go, so it’s kind of hard to say now that he can’t go all the way.
But it’s all about busting the balls of the Establishment, as I explained Nov. 12 in “No Regrets About Delaware,” and as I said, it’s a process, not an event. However unfortunate Christine O’Donnell’s defeat, her victory over Mike Castle in the GOP primary was something to be proud of, and if you don’t understand why that is, I’ll have to take you all the way back to the Doug Hoffman campaign in NY-23, which is where I first met Steve Foley. But before we go back that far, let me quote myself at length from that Nov. 12 post:
Conservatives were told for decades that Arlen Specter was the best they could hope for in Pennsylvania, a state that was alleged to be trending inevitably toward Democrats.
In the words of a very wise man: “Heh.”
Not only did Toomey chase Specter out of the primary and beat Joe Sestak on Election Day, but Pennsylvania Republicans won the governorship and five House seats, defeating incumbent Democrats Kathy Dahlkemper (PA-3), Bryan Lentz (PA-7), Patrick Murphy (PA-8), Chris Carney (PA-10) and — sweetest of all — 26-year incumbent Paul Kanjorski (PA-11).
So much for that inevitable trend, you see.
The trend-hoppers thought jumping aboard the Obama express was their ticket to ride, and instead it was their ticket to political oblivion.
Charlie Crist embraced the stimulus. Good-bye, Charlie!
Mike Castle voted for cap-and-trade. Good-bye, Mike!
I’m reminded of what a GOP operative said to me shortly after the NRSC endorsed Crist in May 2009: “All they care about is getting their chairmanships back, and they don’t care how they get there.”
Yeah. Fuck John Cornyn, fuck the NRSC and fuck your chairmanships, you treacherous bastards.
One of the most important lessons of history is that there is no such thing as an inevitable trend. Men make trends, and not the other way around. And I wonder where we would be today had it not been for Doug Hoffman’s decision to fight the GOP Establishment in NY-23. Most people have no idea how crucial that campaign was to what has happened since — and what’s still happening now. But on Election Night 2010, while the crowd in Boca Raton celebrated Allen West’s historic victory, I placed a call to Hoffman at home in upstate New York:
A mere 18 months after a Time magazine cover story declared Republicans an “endangered species,” Democrats suffered their worst loss in any congressional election since 1938.
“I think my campaign, and the people who were supporting me, woke up America and said, ‘We’re fed up. We have to do something about it. We’re not going to take more spending, more taxes, and more government regulations,’?” Hoffman said. “I’m disappointed that I’m not going to be part of the excitement and going to Washington, but if the legacy of my race last year is the people who are going to Washington this year, then I’m very proud to watch what’s happening tonight, and anticipate the Republicans taking over the House.”
It was a long drive from Boca Raton back home to the hills of Western Maryland — including an overnight stay in the Daytona Beach motel where I wrote that 1,000-word article for the December/January issue of The American Spectator – and I had a lot of time to think about what it all meant. What seemed crucial to me was to maintain the political momentum of the Tea Party, to keep the conservative grassroots fired up and, incidentally, to continue the process of busting the balls of the GOP Establishment.
The most obvious candidate to do that was Sarah Palin, but it was also obvious that Palin was in wait-and-see mode and wasn’t ready to come out campaigning for president right away. All along, I knew that 2012 speculation would become the constant topic of pundit speculation as soon as the mid-term election was over, and we needed to have somebody ready to step up and carry the Tea Party banner. If Palin eventually decided to run, OK, we’d cross that bridge when we got there, but with the Establishment types already talking about Romney and Pawlenty as the front-runners, we needed somebody now. But who?
And that’s when I thought of Herman Cain.
I’d interviewed Herman in Atlanta in 2007, barely a year after he’d been diagnosed with cancer, and was struck by the fact that his analysis of what was wrong with the Republican Party was the same as my analysis of what went wrong with the Republican Party:
“They didn’t stick to principles,” he says, when asked why Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 elections. He criticizes Republicans in Washington for spending irresponsibly, failing to pass Social Security reform and, especially, not heeding their grass-roots supporters on immigration policy.
“They were not listening to people outside Washington. If they would have listened, they wouldn’t have lost,” says Mr. Cain, explaining that he finds people are eager to tell him their views on political issues.
“I’m like a walking poll. … It’s not scientific, but it’s pretty darned consistent,” he says of what he heard about immigration last year. “Republicans were screaming, ‘Secure the borders first.’ ”
Republicans in Washington “are too afraid of their political shadows,” Mr. Cain says. He adds that many of his colleagues on corporate boards are so “disgusted” with Republicans that they have stopped contributing to the party, telling him: “When they start acting like Republicans, I’ll write some more checks.”
Considering the party’s prospects in 2008, he asks, “Where’s the excitement? Where’s the fun? There is none.”
Then I’d seen Cain speak at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in June 2010 and was so impressed — the crowd reaction was phenomenal — that I’d called up Smitty raving about it. And at the end of his speech, Herman added a line to suggest that Republicans keep in mind there might be a “dark horse” candidate in 2012:
Now, here was a stone-cold crazy idea: A guy who had never held elected office running for president. But wasn’t Doug Hoffman a guy who had never held public office? And, in the subsequent historic mid-term Republican landslide, didn’t we elect lots of other people who had never held elected office, including Allen West? And don’t all the really genius ideas sound crazy at first?
Herman Cain was perfect. As I later said, he’s “Steve Forbes with charisma” — a guy with a business background who can also fire up a crowd. The very fact that he was regarded by all the “experts” as a hopeless long shot made him the dream candidate for Tea Party activists, who love nothing better than to prove the experts wrong. So Nov. 13, at the end of a long post about the Patterico-Goldstein feud, I wrote this:
This isn’t 2003-2005. The GOP isn’t riding high in the saddle with control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. The Republican Party reached its low ebb of 2008 by following the advice of Karl Rove and others who thought they were The Smartest Guys in the Room. The establishmentarian political style of the Bush era isn’t going to defeat the Obama Machine, and Republicans aren’t going to win future battles by promising a return to the status quo ante.
People are sick and tired of that same old politics-as-usual crap. . . .
The Republican Party “brand damage” problem, a legacy of the Bush era, is not going to be repaired by nominating unprincipled career politicians . . .
Yeah: Herman Cain. Having backed a few can’t-possibly-win underdogs in the past couple of years — I went all-in for Rubio when he was 35 points down — I’m taking a long, hard look at that dark horse. . . .
That was written less than two weeks after the 2010 mid-terms, and you notice the reference to Marco Rubio. The way I see the narrative arc of the Tea Party movement as a political force, it came into its own in May 2009 with the “Not One Red Cent” rebellion against the attempt of the GOP Establishment to “fix” the Florida Senate primary for Charlie Crist. It continued with Doug Hoffman’s campaign in NY-23, and then carried over into the Scott Brown campaign in Massachusetts.
After Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, the movement appeared to lose focus, but that was only because the people in the movement were involved in hundreds of local elections all across the country, from the city council level up to Senate campaigns. It wasn’t about rallies and speeches any more, it was about doing the hard work necessary to elect candidates sworn to oppose the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda. The Establishment won its share of GOP primaries — they wouldn’t be the Establishment if they weren’t powerful — but we beat enough of their pets that they by God know we’re not just going to roll over and take it anymore. And if the process of busting the Establishment’s balls is going to continue in 2012 . . .
Well, when Steve Foley called me last November and started talking about Cain, I was all in, just like I went all in for Hoffman and Rubio.
With Michele Bachmann’s campaign now apparently falling apart, Herman Cain is the logical choice for conservatives who want to keep the Tea Party momentum going in 2012. It’s still one of those genius ideas that everybody says is crazy, but it’s looking a lot less crazier every day.
CITIZENS FOR CAIN
Join the Online Grassroots Army
Cross-posted from The Other McCain
