Tag: politics

One step closer

The Treasury knew:

At the first Congressional hearing into the I.R.S. scandal, J. Russell
George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, told
members of the House Ways and Means Committee that he informed the
Treasury’s general counsel of his investigation on June 4, and Deputy
Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin “shortly thereafter.”

Obama apologists have been quick to point out that there is no evidence that Obama knew anything about the politically driven IRS attacks on conservative groups and the media.

To which the veteran scandal observer can only reply: there is no evidence… yet.

Thus leading to the obvious next question: who did the Treasury officials tell?

Rubio fails to follow the logic train

The Republican Senator doesn’t think through the logical implications of the accusations he is directing against the Obama administration:

“So in the span of four days, [there were] three major revelations about the use of government power to intimidate those who are doing things that the government doesn’t like. These are the tactics of the third world. These are the tactics of places that don’t have the freedoms and the independence that we have here in this country.”

They are the tactics of the third world.  They are, unsurprisingly enough, the tactics of a president who is himself an immigrant and a third worlder.  They are the tactics of a place that no longer has the freedom and independence and population that it once had. And yet, even as he laments this, Rubio is actively campaigning to legalize millions of third worlders who illegally settled in the country and add tens of millions more to their ranks.

Welcome to Third World America.  This is merely the smallest taste of what it is going to look like.

Tears of a clown

As Dennis Miller noted, at this rate, Obama is going to admit he was born in Kenya sometime next week. Did I not tell you in 2008 that his administration was going to be more entertaining than a barrel of monkeys?  And note that as a general rule, history tends to indicate that the conspiracy theorists often err on the side of being insufficiently pessimistic.

UPDATE: You know it’s bad when even the administration enthusiasts at the New York Times are desperately casting about for something positive to talk about, but wind up throwing in the towel: 

 Maybe, while he’s crisis-managing, the president could also figure out a way to show people government working at something other than reorganizing troubled agencies. Maybe he could start off with passing a bill that’s supereasy. I notice that in state legislatures, when times are tough, parties are sometimes able to get together in order to pick a new state thing. You know, state bird, state animal. Some states find this so relaxing they never stop. (New Mexico has an official state guitar, state tie and state aircraft, which, unfortunately, is the hot-air balloon.)

The United States has a few of these items, like a bird and an anthem, but there’s plenty of territory to cover. The president could demand that Congress pick an official national rock.

The idiot whistle

Whether the subject is equality in the distribution of wealth, sex, or marriage, you can always be certain of one thing.  The appeal to equality is simply the idiot-whistle being blown to summon the support of the unthinking, it has absolutely nothing to do with the objectives of those appealing to that mythic state.

A homogamy aspect is confident enough to admit what was always obvious from the start:

It’s a no-brainer that (homosexual activists) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. …(F)ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.  The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago.

Vladimir Ilyich had a term that accurately describes those non-activists who support “marriage equality” for reasons of fairness.  Useful idiots.  What the sexually abnormal mean by “marriage” is not what it means to most people, and by expanding the definition they are actively and admittedly seeking to destroy both the institution and the sacrament.

Perhaps this will wake up the media

The Obama administration is spying on them too:

As it turns out, the big Friday story of Bloomberg journalists snooping on its clients was just amateur hour compared to what the AP was about to serve. In fact, the Watergate affair may soon appear like a walk in the park compared to the First Amendment shitstorm that is about to be unleashed following the just reported news that the US Department of Justice had “secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.” First amendment? Freedom of speech and press? Surely not when it comes to the Nobel-peace prize winning President and those who dare to expose his secret ways. And what’s worst, is that the AP breach has all the makings of a spiteful hack driven by personal vengeance against one of America’s premier news outlets.

Probably not.  La carte noire, don’t you know. The media will find it very difficult to turn on Obama unless he starts sending killer drones after AP reporters, and even then, the likes of Eleanor Clift will be babbling about how targeted media assassinations are popular moves that make the president look “decisive”.

This comment at Zerohedge cracked me up: “Obama has a free ride from the press and he is even going to fuck that up….classic.”

Impeach Obama

It won’t happen due to his all-important carte noire.  But as George Will points out, by past standards, there is little question that Obama now merits impeachment on the basis of the IRS actions:

George Will joined the chorus talking about the prospect of impeachment for President Barack Obama after last week’s admission from the Internal Revenue Service that it had targeted groups with the phrases “tea party” or “patriot” in their tax-exempt applications for extra audits….

Will noted that one of the items in the 1973 impeachment articles of then-President Richard Nixon, which ultimately led to his resignation, described the Nixon administration’s use of the power of income tax audits in a “discriminatory matter.”

“This is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate summer here in Washington,” Will said. “’He has, through his subordinated and agents, endeavored…to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigation to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner,’ — Section 1, Article 2, the impeachment articles of Richard Nixon.

Now, I very much doubt Obama knew anything about the audits; I doubt he knows very much about what is going on under the aegis of “his” administration.  He has never been anything more than a tool for certain Chicago interests and their allies.  But he is still nominally in charge, he is still the man sitting in the Oval Office, and he is therefore responsible for the actions of the administration.

Adios ProFootballTalk

I used to like ProFootballTalk when it was actually about what happened around the NFL.  But I found myself reading it less and less often last season even though I was still actively following the NFL.  Now that it’s an advocacy site primarily concerned with what Tim Tebow SHOULD do, and what the NFL SHOULD do, and what team owners SHOULD do I can’t even stand reading it anymore.  It’s just one stupid left-liberal crusade after another; the final straw for me was the campaign to save Chris Kluwe’s job because he supports homogamy.  Followed, a few days later, by the continued campaign to change the Redskins name; a name that troubles no one, including the overwhelming number of American Indians, outside the media.

Now, I actually liked Kluwe.  But he was bad last year.  Very bad.  When the Vikings needed a big kick, he shanked it.  When they needed him to drop it inside the five, he booted it out of the end zone.  And the hypocrisy PFT showed in distinguishing how they covered Kluwe’s comments about homosexuals (isn’t it wonderful that he speaks out on such an important issue) compared to the way they covered Chris Culliver’s (the NFL should discipline him and the 49ers should consider cutting him), was simply outrageous.

So, besides Football Outsiders, what is the best NFL site to replace it on the sidebar?

The irony is thick indeed

Karl Denninger points to Attorney General Eric Holder’s deeply ironic posturing:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has told Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback that a new state law attempting to block federal regulation of some guns is unconstitutional and that the federal government is willing to go to court over the issue.

But Brownback replied in a letter Thursday that Kansans hold dear their right to bear arms and are protecting the state’s sovereignty. Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a former law professor who helped draft the law, accused the nation’s top law enforcement official of “blustering” over the issue.

“The people of Kansas have clearly expressed their sovereign will,” Brownback said at the conclusion of his letter. “It is my hope that upon further review, you will see their right to do so.”

To summarize:  The Executive Branch official responsible for upholding U.S. law is appealing to the U.S. Constitution in order to overturn a Kansas law meant to protect the people of Kansas from the federal government’s violation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

One can only conclude that the Red Americans aren’t merely lawless, they’re humorless and delusional

The British vote for independence

UKIP is  slashing away at Tory support in the local elections, largely due to David Cameron’s treacherous refusal to hold the referendum he promised on the European Union:

Ukip has seen 117 councillors elected, of which 110 are gains,
with 4 councils to declare. It has 634 second place candidates and only 32
candidates polling under 10 per cent, according to a Ukip spokesman. 

Now that UKIP has won more than a quarter of the vote, the two major parties, and more importantly, the BBC, can no longer get away with pretending all the British people who are not interested in serfdom to the Lords of Brussels are “fruitcakes, loonies and closet
racists”.

One hopes that having been betrayed by Cameron once, the British people will not be foolish enough to fall for the blandishments of the stealth Europhile as he vows to “work really hard” to win back their vote by promising them the same referendum he already promised and denied them.


There is no point in supporting the Conservative Party in the UK, because there is nothing left to conserve. All the various political issues are secondary to the primary one of national independence, which makes UKIP the only reliable party and the only one worth supporting.

The One Million month

Thanks very much to everyone who visited here in April, especially those who took the time to get involved in the various discussions in the comments.  I remember scoffing when ten years ago a reader predicted that this blog would one day have a million pageviews in a year, so it seems incredible to me that VP and AG now see that level of traffic in a single month. 

With a few notable exceptions, most blogs hide their traffic reports these days, but I think this is a tactical blunder.  The primary problem with doing so is that it allows the Left to dishonestly attempt to marginalize right-wing blogs in the eyes of others.  Recall that I have been portrayed for ten years as an extremist whack-job whose writing no one ever read even as the readership steadily grew, and I was regularly reminded that PZ Myers, John Scalzi, and a number of other left-wing bloggers had much bigger blog readerships than I did… until it was revealed late last year that the traffic here alone, (never mind that of the  WND columns that those bloggers were reading and attacking), passed up some of those blogs almost two years ago!  Never forget, the Left is heavily dependent upon lies, and one of their biggest lies, perhaps the one to which they resort the most readily, concerns their pretense that their opinions enjoy much more popularity than they actually do.  Therefore, the more metrics that are visible to everyone, the less they can get away with it.

That is why I make my Sitemeter and Google Analytics statistics public.  (VP uses the old template, which is why there is no monthly traffic widget in the sidebar as is the case with AG.) That’s why I’ve begun a quarterly Top 10 Game blogs report that I expect to expand to a Top 25 report in the second quarter. That’s why I encourage everyone who is in any way sympathetic to the neoreactionary traditional Relightenment to be open and public with their statistics. The truth is on our side. Victory through data!

Let’s face it, it is very difficult for the rabbits of Whatever to continue to claim that the Chief Gamma Rabbit of their warren is a vastly influential individual, or that their sick transquax-gendered view of human intersexual relations is the mainstream perspective, when everyone now realizes that Whatever has only two-thirds the traffic of my blogs and one-quarter that of the Great Prophet of the Crimson Arts.  Open metrics make it clear that it is the influential Cathedralites such as Jim Hines (Alexa Rank 729,110) and Making Light (375,254), who are actually the marginal ones. Despite their artificially elevated positions in the field of SF/F, they cannot maintain sizable blog readerships, not even with the benefit of occasional puffing by their ideological allies in the mainstream media.  They may be big fish, but they are big fish in a much smaller pond than the ocean they try to claim.

It’s not that their opinions aren’t relevant or that no one shares them, it is merely that their perspective is nowhere nearly as dominant as they are desperate to have you believe.  They can run from debate, they can refuse to permit substantive criticism, they can wield their banhammers to hide from even semblance of genuine discourse on their sites, but the one thing they cannot avoid is the harsh light of statistical reality exposing their pretensions.

It is ludicrous to imagine that it is popular writers such as Sarah Hoyt and Larry Correia who are the societal outsiders when their influence is an order of magnitude or more larger than most of the supposed “big names” in modern SF/F.   Sure, the Cathredralites sell more books and appear more often in the mainstream media, for the time being, because their capture of the genre’s gatekeepers means they control access to its media and distribution channels. But what we are seeing now is the early stages of a Fox News-style transformation in the SF/F industry, as new media outlets and new transmission channels is in the process of seriously upending the tilted playing field.  The cultural battle in SF/F isn’t over, as the self-appointed winners would have you believe, the heavy cavalry is just beginning to enter the field and the unarmored footmen without shields are quaking.

However, the fact that the Left is wrong about equality, wrong about economics, wrong about the past, and wrong about the future does not mean there is nothing that we of the Right cannot learn from them.  The one thing the Left does very, very well is the force-multiplication of its various assets, no matter how small and insignificant they truly are, and that is something that the neoreactionary Right will have to learn in order to mitigate the damage our progressive counterparts have inflicted upon us and upon themselves.  That’s why I’ve created the Standout Authors and Friends of Narnia, and I encourage other writers and bloggers of the Right to devote at least some effort to building up others of the Right even as they continue to pursue their own diverse and independent ambitions.

Consider that Prospect Magazine declared the top World Thinkers of 2013 on the basis of 10,000 votes.  10,000 votes!   That’s nothing, and yet the Left will gravely – and absurdly – pretend, on that basis, that Richard Dawkins is widely considered to be the greatest intellectual of our time. 

We can do better. We should do better. We will do better.