Sage Kotsenburg Stuck 'Holy Crail' in Olympic Gold Medal Victory

Obviously, I can't get enough of this guy. He's on top of the world.

More at CSM, "Sage Kotsenburg gold medal run: What's a 'Holy Crail'?":

In a triumph of creativity over gymnastics, American Sage Kotsenburg took the gold medal in a new Winter Olympics event: slopestyle snowboarding.

Kotsenburg was, for many, an underdog.

How did he do it?

Kotsenburg brought home the gold, in part, by using one of his newly patented tricks, something he dubs the "Holy Crail."

The Holy Crail is a two-handed grab done during three or four mid-air spins. Kotsenburg reaches behind his back and pulls on his board, while the other hand grabs the nose of the snowboard. The Denver Post's Jason Blevins writes that Kotsenburg unveiled the "Holy Crail" two weeks ago at Aspen's X Games.

Holy Crail is also the name of a sponsored TransWorld Snowboarding video series that features Sage Kotsenburg's journey to the Olympics. The first video aired in December 2013.  Coincidence?

Kotsenburg was a surprise gold medal winner, especially to medal favorites Canadians Max Parrot and Mark McMorris. Until now, snowboarding judges have tended to give the highest scores to those who performed the most difficult tricks. Parrot, for example, is a master of the triple cork and won the X-Games Big Air and Slopestyle contests with triples. (A cork or corkscrew spin is when the axis of the spin allows for the snowboarder to be oriented sideways or upside-down in the air, typically without becoming completely inverted.)

But the Sochi judges apparently chose creativity and style over gymnastic prowess. Kotsenberg, who didn't perform any triple corks, unexpectedly threw in a 1620 (4.5 rotations) Japan Air (the front hand grabs the toe edge just behind the front foot. The board is then pulled behind the rider) in his last run, and took home the gold.

TransWorld Snowboarding offers a trick by trick look at Katsenburg's gold medal run.

More.

Sylvester Stallone's Son, Sage Stallone, Dead for Days Before Being Discovered

It's already a sad story, but the delayed discovery kinda bummed me out yesterday.

The Los Angeles Times reports, "Sage Stallone found dead: Autopsy planned, some details emerge":

An autopsy is planned for Sage Stallone, actor Sylvester Stallone's eldest son, who may have been dead for several days before he was found Friday afternoon at his home in the Hollywood Hills.

Authorities told L.A. Now that foul play was not suspected in the death of the 36-year-old actor, writer and producer, who made his film debut opposite his father playing Rocky Balboa Jr. in "Rocky V."

Word that the younger Stallone may have been dead for a while comes via law-enforcement sources who spoke to TMZ, explaining that Sage's housekeeper had been following standing instructions not to enter his bedroom, but ultimately checked on him Friday after his mom could not get in touch with him.

More at the link.

Dude! American Sage Kotsenburg Wins Sochi Slopestyle Gold

That's so rad!

At NYT, "American Snowboarder Wins First Gold of Games":

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — The snowboarder Sage Kotsenburg is not someone to hold big ambitions or make grand plans. Before winning a qualifying event last month that helped send him to the Winter Olympics in slopestyle, he had not won a snowboarding competition since he was 11.

“A megadrought,” he called it.

And when he stood at the top of the course at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park on Saturday, he was not sure which tricks he would attempt. The one that mattered was one he had never attempted.

“I just kind of make things up,” he explained.

It was just another way that Kotsenburg, 20, is playfully different than most of his competitors, who have spent all winter perfecting runs that they imagined for months. And now Kotsenburg, from Park City, Utah, stands apart from the rest for the most unexpected of reasons. He has a gold medal, the first of these Games and the first in the debut of snowboard slopestyle in the Olympics.

His victory was not just an underdog tale. It sparked discussions, both among aggrieved competitors and in the wide world of snowboarding, about how such competitions should be judged.

Several athletes landed triple corks, a gyroscopic series of twists and flips, considered the must-do trick to elevate above the field. The favorite, Mark McMorris of Canada, landed two in his run. They were the types of runs that most predicted would win the event, but McMorris settled for a bronze medal. Staale Sandbech of Norway won silver.

Kotsenburg, a throwback in both style and vocabulary — rarely does a sentence go by without a “rad,” a “stoked” or a “sick,” and sometimes there is more than one — performed no such feats of conformity.

Slopestyle, long considered the purer, mellower cousin of the more -famous halfpipe, features a mix of rails to slide down and three large jumps to launch upward. Athletes are judged by the “overall impression” they make to the six judges, looking for an undefined combination of revolutions and style.

The vagueness is intended to spur creativity. And Kotsenburg, more than anyone, toted a unique style, combining old-school spins with newly invented contortions and grabs, sometimes with two hands.

Among his tricks was one performed while sliding down a steep rail near the top of the course, leaning back on two hands. Most call it a full layback. Kotsenburg calls it a stony surfer. A jump featured a two-handed grab nicknamed Holy Crail.

But the gold-winning stunt came at the end, on the last of three large jumps. Kotsenburg performed a 1620 Japan, four-and-a-half revolutions while grabbing the board in front of his front foot and arching his back like someone playing Twister on a flying saucer.

No one else did it. It is rarely seen. But Kotsenburg decided to try it, he said, about three minutes before his run.

“I had never, ever tried that trick before in my life,” he said.

I love this guy, heh.

Still more at the link.

And at London's Daily Mail, "'Wow I just won the Olympics': American Sage Kotsenburg wins first Sochi gold medal in Men's Slopestyle."

Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

Amazing.

This book's over 100 years old and still in print.

At Amazon, Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage.

American Jamie Anderson Wins Gold in Women's Snowboard Slopestyle

At LAT, "Jamie Anderson completes gold-medal sweep for U.S. in slopestyle":

SOCHI, Russia — She is a new-age, yoga-loving, mantra-chanting snowboarder who came to the Olympics with a "medicine bundle" in her backpack and an 80-something "spirit grandma" originally from Bavaria along for the ride.

Jamie Anderson came to Russia armed with support and will leave with a precious object to put alongside her mantra beads and clear quartz power stone.

An Olympic gold medal.

Anderson completed a weekend sweep for the United States in the new slopestyle event, winning the women's competition Sunday with an all-out performance in the second run, scoring 95.25, a run marked by clean landings. Enni Rukajarvi from Finland took the silver (92.50) and Jenny Jones of Britain the bronze (87.25), the first Olympic medal for her country on snow.

Jones, at 33 the oldest competitor in the final, was once a maid at a ski chalet. Wimbledon champion Andy Murray even joked, via Twitter, after her second run: "Jenny Jones! Is it wrong to hope everyone left falls?"

With Anderson's victory coming a day after Sage Kotsenburg took gold on the men's side, clearly the United States has claimed ownership of the slopestyle podium.

It could not have been a better script for U.S. snowboarding.

"Am I dreaming? Are you people real?" said Bill Enos, the U.S. slopestyle coach.

He touched the arm of a reporter in the mixed zone, saying: "Yes, oh, everyone here is real."

Keep reading.

Previous Sage Kotsenburg coverage here.

Joe Biden's Disastrous Foreign Policy Liabilities

Barack Obama's selection of Senator Joseph Biden was designed to bolster the Democrats' flagging standings on the national security issue. Biden, a 35-year veteran of the Congress, serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, looked to provide foreign policy gravitas to Obama's dangerous inexperience on the international stage.

Yet, as analysts and bloggers take a closer look, Obama's Biden pick may end up being a disastrous liability for the campaign.

For one thing, Biden's holds a near-religious commitment to diplomacy before the resort to military force in a crisis. Biden's hedging has left the Delaware Senator a legacy of vacillation and hypocrisy in foreign affairs. For some background, here's Michael Gordon:

As the Bush administration was fine-tuning its plan to invade Iraq, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. helped draft a proposed resolution that emphasized the need for diplomatic efforts to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs but gave President Bush the authority to use military force as a last resort....

Mr. Biden is widely seen as a liberal-minded internationalist. He has emphasized the need for diplomacy but has been prepared at times to back it with the threat of force. An early advocate of military action to quell the ethnic fighting in the Balkans, he has not been averse to American military intervention abroad. As the debates over Kosovo and later Iraq showed, he has been loath to give the United Nations a veto over American policy decisions. But he has also sought to ensure that the United States acted in concert with other nations.

The Los Angeles Times has more:

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. joins the Democratic ticket as an acknowledged foreign policy sage whose 36-year record has won him bipartisan praise as a liberal internationalist who generally hews close to his party's center. But he has sometimes found himself at odds with members of his own party as well as with Republicans.

Biden has frequently favored humanitarian interventions abroad and was an early and influential advocate for U.S. military action in the Balkans in the 1990s. He also advocates U.S. action to stem the continuing bloodshed in Darfur.

Some liberal Democrats remain distressed by his 2002 vote for the Iraq war, which Barack Obama opposed. Other critics say Biden was misguided or even naive in his most recent proposal to resolve sectarian conflict by giving broad autonomy to Iraq's three major population groups, the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. And he opposed last year's troop "surge," which by most accounts has contributed significantly to the reduction in violence in Iraq.

What appears to bind Biden and Obama in the realm of foreign affairs, however, is a shared belief in strong cooperation with America's traditional allies and in the use of force only as a last resort. The Democratic standard-bearers reject the belief of President Bush and some other conservatives that the United States should not hesitate to act unilaterally if other nations demur.

Biden's partition plan has not endeared him to Iraqis, as TigerHawk points out:

Reuters is reporting that Barack Obama's selection of Joe Biden is not popular among Iraqis, who very much dislike Biden's proposal to partition their country....

The Biden partition plan was a bad idea from the beginning, and all Iraqis should be grateful that - so far - it has gained no footing within the executive branch.

Anyway, it is a reflection of the diminishing political significance of the Iraq war that Barack Obama, who secured the Democratic nomination in part by making much of his opposition to the war and his plan to withdraw our troops on a fast schedule, is now able to pick as his running mate a senator who voted for the invasion in 2002 and whose favored "solution" would have required more rather than less American involvement in Iraqi domestic politics.

What's particularly bothersome about Biden is his shameless antiwar pandering.

Recall that Obama's greatest weakness on foreign policy is his awful judgment on the Iraq war. When the conflict was going poorly in 2004 he advocated sending more troops to rectify the "botched" Bush-Rumsfeld light infantry invasion and failed post-conflict stablity operations. Yet, when the administration made key strategic adjustements in 2006-2007, Obama was one of the most vociferous oppoents of the surge in the U.S. Senate.

Yet, by selecting Biden, rather than choosing a running mate who has consistently advocated firmness and careful resolve on the conflict, he's found a campaign partner who has eschewed strategic clarity and carried water for the antiwar hordes.

As the National Review noted, commenting on Biden's selection as veep:

...Biden is a typical liberal who has no claim to post-partisanship...

His vaunted foreign-policy judgment is seriously flawed. Although he was not as irresponsible as other Democrats in calling for an immediate pullout from Iraq, he opposed the surge and plugged for an unworkable plan to partition the country, one long ago overtaken by events, even though his office was saying as of only a week ago that he still supports it.

The cardinal rule of vice-presidential picks is: Do no harm. It remains to be seen if Biden will meet even this low standard.

Scott at Power Line agrees:

Rather than adding to Obama's attractions or neutralizing Obama's liabilities, if he does anything, Biden subtracts from Obama's strengths and contributes to his liabilities.

Obama's selection of Joe Biden may prove a disastrous liability, accentuating weakness in foreign policy rather than strengthening it. As Michael Rubin concludes:

Obama may have wanted Biden's foreign policy experience, but he may soon find that Biden's track record leaves a lot to be desired. On Iraq, on Iran, and elsewhere...

The New York Times has a lead story this morning entitled, "In Obama’s Choice, a ‘Very Personal Decision’.

Unfortunatly for the Democrats, Obama's choice may end up as a very personal disaster.

Election Gets Down to Basic Human Emotion

As seen in my last two posts - on drunk hillbillies and GOP lynch mobs - election 2008 has finally come down to base human emotions. Partisans on both sides see the stakes as high as any time in their lives, and they're willing to share the most unusual ideological sentiments and personal abominations.

Dana Milbank, at the Washington Post, shares his reaction to a McCain campaign rally, and the rage of the crowd:

Now, it's personal.

John McCain and Sarah Palin were backstage, and Lehigh County GOP Chairman Bill Platt was warming up the crowd of 6,000 at a rally here for the Republican ticket.

"Think about how you'll feel on November 5 if you wake up in the morning and see the news, that Barack Obama -- that Barack Hussein Obama -- is the president-elect of the United States," Platt said. The audience at the Lehigh University arena booed at the thought of it.

"The number one most liberal senator in the United States of America was, you guessed it, the ambassador of change, Barack Hussein Obama," he added. "This election is about preserving America's past and protecting the promise of its future."

The sage Platt had more information to disclose. "Barack Obama refused to wear an American flag on his lapel," he said of the man who, at the presidential debate the night before, was wearing a flag pin on his lapel. The audience booed. "Barack Obama, a man who wants to be president of the United States of America, removed the American flag from his chest because it was a symbol of patriotism. Perhaps Barack Obama doesn't put country first, but he puts fashion first."

The verbal barrage in the hall must have convinced McCain he was running with a rough crowd.

"Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners," he said when he took the stage.

And Platt wasn't the only inmate in the arena. Northampton County council member Peg Ferraro, in her turn at the microphone, spoke about Obama's "backgrounds and affiliations," calling these unspecified relationships "questionable" and asking: "Do we know who his friends are?"

The crowd engaged in a chant of "No-bama!"

State Rep. Karen Beyer darkly warned the crowd that "Barack Obama doesn't know anything about you."

Cindy McCain implied that Obama was trying to harm her son. "My son . . . has served on the front lines," she told the crowd, with her husband and Palin standing behind her. "Let me tell you, the day Senator Obama decided to cast a vote not to fund my son when he was serving . . . sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you. I suggest that Senator Obama change shoes with me for just one day and see what it means to have a loved one serving in the armed forces, and, more importantly, serving in harm's way."

Only the polka band, which entertained the crowd before the speeches, seemed unaffected by the pervasive anger in the arena. "Ha, ha, ha, come join my happy song," sang the man with the accordion. "Clap along!" The crowd clapped. "We're going to party tonight," he crooned, "with joy and laughter, that's what we're after."

Andrew Sullivan, who has no compunction against continued Trig Palin smears, calls the religious invocations at the rally (at the link), "the fruits of Christianism."

Fireloglake denounces the "slanderous" attacks, as if the months-long attacks against both John McCain and Sarah Palin have not sunk to the most vile slanders, slurs, and smears ever seen in a presidential election.

Even more interesting is Milbank's partisan reporting of the event.

No doubt both sides have invested the deepest personal emotions in the outcome of the race, but only a blind idiot could deny that the demonization of Republicans, after eight years of BusHitler, has now reached the truly unhinged heights of epic fever pitch.

The Left is Not What It Claims to Be

It's Paul Godfried, "The Modern Left Is Not Marxist, It's Worse":

*****

Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have certainly not shunned the Marxist label, it would seem today’s left is authentically Marxist.

But, except at its edges, the present left is not what it claims to be. Today’s left has a different origin and orientation from what has been historically understood as Marxist or Marxist-Leninist; and using that term to designate the characteristics of our current left is at best problematic. Neither Marxists nor Marxist-Leninist governments evidenced the cultural radicalism that today’s left expresses every day. Although there have been Communist Party members in Western countries who have been sexual exhibitionists, and even a brief period in Russia after the November 1917 Revolution when free love was allowed, generally communists have been on the conservative side of issues like homosexuality and the questioning of fixed sexual identities. The traditional left would have attributed our LGBT activities to “bourgeois decadence.”

In the Soviet Union and for a long time throughout the Soviet bloc, artistic experimentation was frowned upon, including music of the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone technique, as well as abstract expressionism. Communist regimes sent gays to labor camps, and communist revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara raged against homosexuality and, in Guevara’s case, blacks.

It is hard to view these Marxist revolutionaries as precursors of the present intersectional left. Indeed, corporate capitalists stand much closer to this force than traditional Marxists do or did. Are the executives at PepsiCo, Citibank, and the NFL, who support Black Lives Matter (BLM) and wish to stamp out opposition from the cultural right, economic revolutionaries yearning for a socialist society? Pardon my skepticism!

Real Marxism has been about socioeconomic contradictions and transformations, not about the need for transgendered restrooms and the abolition of gender roles. Communist parties in Western Europe after World War II vehemently opposed the immigration of cheap labor from abroad, viewing it as an attack on the indigenous workforce. The current left, by contrast, is about open borders and filling Western countries with impoverished Third World populations as an act of contrition for white Christian racism, or as a source of so-called cultural enrichment.

The Soviet regime and Communist parties outside the Soviet Union condemned the Critical Theory philosophy of the Frankfurt School as a distortion of Marxism. One can only imagine what they would have thought of the further evolution of what Lind and others have styled “cultural Marxism.” Lind correctly observes that the Frankfurt School in interwar Germany provided the cradle for this movement, which tried to fuse Freud’s theories about sexual repression with socialist economics. But the result looked much more like a cultural war against reactionary social attitudes than a serious effort to plan a Marxist economy.

After Critical Theory migrated to the U.S. by way of Columbia University in the 1930s, it came to look even less like Marxism and much more like a prelude to our current cultural revolution. Some socialist boilerplate remained attached to this brand of thinking, but it became extraneous to its real message, which is the subversion of what seemed to me as a child in the 1950s to be a normal society.

I am unwilling to concede to cultural Marxists a Marxist pedigree simply because they have claimed that ancestry. Nowadays, media and political celebrities claim all kinds of labels for themselves, and one can easily prove the falseness of most of them. What makes a lesbian feminist on Fox News a “conservative” other than the fact that she appears on a generally Republican channel and claims that she votes for the GOP? What makes a culturally radical commentator on CNN a “liberal” other than the fact that some in high places decided to apply this term to themselves? What does columnist Jonah Goldberg have in common politically or philosophically with Edmund Burke, or for that matter, CNN anchor Jake Tapper with Thomas Jefferson? If I decide to call myself something I am not, it does not become any more true regardless of how much media support I can find to back me up.

I concede to Lind that today’s cultural radicals, who are unfortunately becoming mainstream, are of the left. They are leftists because they are driven by four defining leftist principles or practices. One is globalism or universalism, which in the case of the current left takes the form of a boundless revulsion for Western Christian society and its majority white population. The left in its essence denies particularity and the sanctity of local and national traditions.

The second quintessentially leftist principle that informs our cultural revolutionaries is the worship of equality as the highest value. One can easily imagine non-leftists recognizing some limited good in the idea of equality, for example, granting legal equality to all authorized citizens or subjects of a state. But the left is fixated on equality and seeks to harness political and educational power to obliterate human distinctions.

The third leftist principle or practice is the call for expansions of what they call human rights, since the historically grounded natural rights do not advance equality or “human dignity,” by which they mean the extinction of social and historical distinctions. This inverts Aristotle’s sage advice at the beginning of Book Four of the Politics, that laws (nomoi) should fit specific governments (politeiai). The leftist position is exactly the opposite: Long established customs and conventions should give way to what journalists and academics deem conducive to greater equality.

A fourth leftist belief concerns the putative fluidity and malleability of human nature, seen for example in the insistence that all gender identities are subject to change. Public administrators and courts must defend our right to redefine our gender whenever we want; and others should then be required to treat us in accordance with our changing gender identity. This last leftist belief stands in striking contrast to the conservative notion that human identities are rooted in tradition and nature. Perhaps nowhere more than in this emphasis on gender fluidity do we behold the most radical form of the left, perhaps in an even more grotesque manifestation than in such harebrained schemes as nationalizing the economy...

*****

Still more at that link. 

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Sheriff Dave Ward and Ammon Bundy Meet on 'Neutral Ground' to Discuss End to #Malheur Occupation (VIDEO)

At the Portland Oregonian, "Sheriff, Bundy meet on neutral ground to discuss ending refuge occupation":

CRANE -- Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward, backed up by two other sheriffs, met face-to-face Thursday with protest leader Ammon Bundy to bring a peaceful end to a weeklong occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

"I'm here to offer safe escort out," the sheriff told Bundy. "Go back and kick it around with your folks."

The sheriff plans to call Bundy on Friday to see what he and his group have decided.

Ward was accompanied by three rigs carrying heavily armed law enforcement officers.

The parley took place in the open, standing at the intersection of a state highway and the back route to the refuge. It was another in a series of twists and turns the past week that have drawn national and international attention to this sparsely populated high desert country.

Ward was encouraged to reach out directly to the militants at a town hall meeting Wednesday night in Burns that drew an estimated 400 people. Several speakers urged the sheriff to do just what he is doing Thursday, and several ranchers had volunteered to join him if needed to end the occupation.

Bundy and about 20 other militants took over the headquarters compound of the refuge on Saturday and additional protesters have been arriving in the past day. Bundy, a member of an Arizona ranching family, has said repeatedly that the occupation was to protest the imprisonment of two Harney County ranchers and to demand that the federal government turn over ownership of federal land to local control.

The meeting happened in one of the most remote spots in Oregon, near where Highway 78 intersects with Lava Bed Road. This is largely flat terrain – sage country that hosts few people and sustains thousands of cattle. There has probably been no more unlikely place for the work of ending a confrontation that has turned life upside down in Harney County.

The protesters have been left alone at the refuge. They have been free to come and go at will and have dispatched supporters 30 miles to Burns for supplies. They have held daily news conferences, allowed reporters to explore outside the buildings and have hosted dozens of local residents who have come to talk.

Several protesters attended the town hall meeting but didn't speak – Ward said only local residents could have the mic...

Still more.

JetBlue Attendant 'Banging His Boyfriend When the Cops Showed Up'

This guy's getting a cheery write-up in People Magazine, "In His Own Words: JetBlue Flight Attendant Steven Slater's 20 Year-Career." And local news reports say he's out on bail, "Fed-Up Flight Attendant is Out of Jail." And Towleroad has the background, "JetBlue Flight Attendant Steven Slater Held on $2500 Bail."

But it's far left-wing Gawker that picks up on the oft-missed angle, "Cranky Flight Attendant Was Banging His Boyfriend When the Cops Showed Up":

Yesterday we heard how the disgruntled flight attendant's altercation with a passenger (which was related to a suitcase and/or overhead bin bonking Slater on the head) culminated in him announcing over the plane intercom, "To the fucking asshole who told me to fuck off, it's been a good 28 years. I've had it. That's it," then grabbed two beers from the galley, activated the jet's inflatable slide, and bolted off the job. The content of Slater's rant remains in dispute: Some say he called the passenger a "motherfucker" instead of an "asshole," and others dispute who told whom to "fuck off." (And although he seemed to suggest he'd been working as a flight attendant for 28 years, he started working for the airlines 20 years ago.)

Either way, the word "fuck" occurred twice, and the act of fucking occurred once: As soon as the surly steward arrived at his beachfront home in the Rockaways, he jumped into bed with his boyfriend, and was mid-coitus when the police arrived to arrest him for reckless endangerment and trespassing. The New York Daily News reports the scene of the arrest:

He boasted to skeptical cops that he really did escape by chute with his carry-on luggage.

"Oh, yes, I did! I threw them down first and I went down after," he told cops, sources said.

He was grinning as police walked him in handcuffs to a squad car. "He left with a big smile on his face," said neighbor Curt Karkowski.

The New York Post adds that Slater told authorities he was HIV-positive. During his arrest Slater was photographed in a sage green t-shirt and madras shorts. Many outlets have noted that Slater's MySpace profile (which we raided yesterday) testifies to a history of "alcoholism and substance abuse." Did a life crisis predicate the haughty high-flier's mid-tarmac meltdown? ...

More details at the link.

Actually, seems like a nice guy. But I can't help thinking of the gay hookup culture, reported last night. (And while gays are in the spotlight with the Prop 8 ruling, out in the real world it's like they're showing up for a job interview drunk and cursing. Those applications get thrown in the trash.) And if you missed it, you might need a drink while you're reading Out Magazine's, "Has Manhunt Destroyed Gay Culture?"

Manhunt is rarely mentioned in newspapers or magazines. Occasionally it shows up in stories about public-health crises (of which more later). A little more often, reporters discover the Manhunt profiles of public figures, who are subsequently embarrassed, or worse. The mayor of Spokane, Wash., and the chairman of the school board in Richmond, Va., for instance, both lost their office after their Manhunt profiles were made public. Last year, a 24-year veteran of the Norwalk, Conn., police department was arrested for having sex with two 15-year-old boys and trying to arrange to meet a third -- all of whom he found on Manhunt. Nude pictures from profiles reputed to belong to Thomas Roberts, the former CNN anchor, and American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken, were circulated on blogs and mentioned in gossip columns. And yet Manhunt members still seem to think they can get away with anything there: The profile of one of the world’s most powerful entertainment executives includes full-length naked photos of him, clearly showing his face, having sex with another man. Another famous master of industry advertises on Manhunt as a hung top, with a headless version of a widely published portrait of himself. God only knows how many more ticking time bombs lie among the profiles.

But the most powerful secrets that live on Manhunt aren’t the ones we keep from the outside world. The most powerful secrets on Manhunt are the ones we keep from ourselves. Practically every gay man has his own version of this secret, which we learned to keep while growing up in the closet: the secret fear that, if we were truly known, we would never be loved.

And speaking of the gay hookup scene, I guess TBogg's felicitous readers are on the inside (with respect to Greg Gutfeld's Muslim gay bar initiative):

Closeted homocons won’t go there because there are too many people around with cell phone cameras, and in general gay bars have been closing across the nation, including in NYC, because it’s easier to hook up online. On the plus side, that means Greggie & “friends” will be throwing their money away.

It's always something kinky at freaknozzle TBogg's.

RELATED: See Heather Robinson, "I Was an Eyewitness to Flight Attendant Steven Slater's Rant on Jet Blue #1052." (Via Memeorandum.)

Sistine Stallone, Sylvester Stallone's Daughter, Ready to Fly the Nest

At London's Daily Mail, "Sylvester Stallone's teen daughter is all grown up and ready to fly the nest."

"The 18-year-old is pursuing a career in modeling which may take her to New York City."

She's on the cover of Town & Country fashion and architecture magazine.

"Sistine shares the cover with fellow 'swans' Princess Olympia of Greece and Ella Richards, granddaughter of the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards."

Well, good luck to her.

Her brother, Sage, died in 2012. I'm glad the Stallone family is looking happy and well.

Democrats for McCain?

The more we get into the GOP primary season the less sure we are of a frontrunner, right?

I'm close to staking my reputation on McCain's emergence as the clear GOP standard bearer, but by the looks of this morning's Los Angeles Times' analysis you'd think McCain was still a longshot:

John McCain's victory in South Carolina puts the Arizona senator in a strong position to win the Republican presidential nomination -- but only if he can follow up with another win in Florida nine days from now.

"This is a huge win for McCain," said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican campaign manager who is not affiliated with a candidate. "He has the most momentum going into Florida next week."

South Carolina was an important test for McCain because its Republican electorate is dominated by Southern social conservatives, the voters who derailed his presidential campaign in 2000.

An exit poll of primary voters showed that McCain didn't win a majority among conservative or evangelical Christian voters this time, either - but he won just enough of their votes to deny victory to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who failed to unify social conservatives behind his cause....

McCain can now claim that he has won hotly contested primaries in the campaign's most conservative Southern state, South Carolina, and its most moderate Northern state, New Hampshire -- a useful argument in a party that is searching for a candidate capable of unifying its fragmented parts. That puts McCain "in the strongest position of any candidate at this point to win the nomination," Reed said.

But the results in South Carolina still fell short of the kind of unalloyed triumph for McCain that might have vaulted him into a clear lead.

Right...

And who's going to challenge McCain for the Republican mantle (he's hardly the underdog anymore)?

Perhaps Romney, if he can win some voters outside of his Mormon base. I don't think Giuliani's going to come out of Florida as the GOP's white knight. His strategy of holding back from the early contests has dramatically relegated him to the sidelines. Thompson's holding off on announcing his exit from the race, although it's clear that his third place finish yesterday is about as high as he's going to go. Sadly, Huckabee sullied himself in S.C., and I doubt he'll recover (he hasn't won since Iowa).

Having said that, I was impressed to see Pete Abel at The Moderate Voice endorse John McCain for the presidency as the choice for the Democrats in November!

Abel founded the moderate blog, Central Sanity ( which now looks to be going under). He writes from a decidedly eclectic persuasion, which sometimes results in unusual political positions. Frankly, I don't read him much anymore, because I can't stand the ideological hypocrisy at TMV.

That said, Abel makes an interesting argument this morning:

The contemporary Republican establishment does not like McCain and is expected to pull out the stops to derail him leading up to Florida and Super Tuesday. And if the Senator from Arizona still manages to win Florida despite that opposition, watch out. The week from Florida to Feb. 5 will get very ugly, to the point that some of us will be looking over our shoulders, fearful that the alert hairs on the back of our necks pre-sage the rise from the dead of the pre-reformation ghost of Lee Atwater.

What’s more, regardless of what the GOP Establishment thinks, the boost that McCain’s 2008 S.C. primary victory gives him among Republican voters could have precisely the opposite effect among Democrats.

BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) Democrats will remember, all too well, South Carolina’s role in their nemesis’s march to the GOP nomination in 2000 and, from there, to the White House. In turn, that memory will make BDS sufferers question the judgment of S.C. Republicans and thus force them to question the candidate for whom a majority of S.C. Republicans voted this year.

Other Democrats — who are not fond of Bush but don’t froth at the mouth every time they hear is name — will fear McCain for different reasons, namely: He is the one Republican candidate who consistently keeps pace with Sens. Clinton and Obama in head-to-head polls for the general election.

Collectively, these factors paint a grim picture for McCain in the 16 days remaining between now and the evening of Super Tuesday, when the polls close.

I won’t attempt to talk the Republican establishment or BDS sufferers out of their opposition to McCain. They’ve already lost their collective minds. But I do want to make a special appeal to non-BDS Democrats, whom I believe are still grounded in reality and who, at the end of the day, are not that much different than their moderate GOP counterparts like me.

Those Democrats should support McCain – if not in votes, then in dialogue – for two key reasons.

1. McCain raises the ire of the contemporary Republican establishment because he rejects their meaner instincts. As I’ve written before, McCain decries torture while the Establishment excuses it. He fights pork-barrel spending while they enable it. He calls for policies to combat global warming while they deny it. He seeks reasonable compromises on immigration policy while they stoke fear and prejudice.

2. McCain represents for Republicans what Obama represents for Democrats: a meaningful step away from the last 15-plus years. I’m not saying either man will revolutionize partisan politics as we know it, but both promise (at a minimum) evolutionary progress toward a different America. And if we truly believe country is more important than party, then we owe it to ourselves to boost the two candidates who (among all their peers) represent the best hope for moving us in a post-partisan direction, regardless of our individual party loyalties.

That’s my argument. Take it or leave it … but at least, consider it.

That's beefy.

What's not clear is why non-BDS Democrats should switch partisan loyalties to vote for a Republican?

Abel's right though: It is going to be a tough couple of weeks for McCain.

Still, I'm almost convinced that the political momentum of the electorate will overpower a GOP demonization campaign against McCain. Public opinion polls forthcoming this week will likely record a solid bounce in support for McCain as the GOP nominee. I've already noted many trends in public opinion here, and one in particular stands out: McCain stands above every other candidate in the race - Democrat or Republican - in leadership qualities and electability.

As McCain has progressed, I've been dismayed at denunciations of him among conservative bloggers (one said the thought of choosing him "makes me throw up a little in my mouth").

I find such sentiment strange and disturbing, considering the stakes for the country should the Democrats take power in '09.

It's a fascinating thing that some Democrats are now calling for a McCain presidency. I'd be even more fascinated if some regular old Republicans did so as well.

See more analysis at Memeorandum.

Kern County Hit Hard by Coronavirus

I had no idea the town of McKittrick, in Kern County west of Interstate 5, had so many oil wells --- especially wells that are still operating.

But the town's been hit hard, along with the rest of the county.

See LAT, "Kern County city gets hit with triple whammy: Lockdowns, oil slump and prison closing":

#KernCounty city gets hit with triple whammy: Lockdowns, oil slump and prison closing: #McKittrick #California 😷https://t.co/XBOjpp4p7c

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 6, 2020

TAFT, Calif. —  The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is slamming cities and towns across the state.

But for Taft, a city of roughly 9,300 people in far western Kern County, there have been a few extra punches to the gut.

With prices and demand for oil down, the thousands of pump jacks that ordinarily bob up-and-down on the horizon are at a virtual standstill. That is adding to the misery on main street, where restaurants, gyms, stationery shops and other stores have been ordered closed.

And then there’s the fact that another major employer, the privately owned Taft Correctional Institute, closed its doors on April 30 after sending hundreds of uninfected prisoners to coronavirus hot spots across the country. The decision to close the federal prison was made last fall, long before the pandemic struck, but now the economic pain is hitting.

“It’s been a rough couple of months,” said Mayor Dave Noerr, who is pivoting as fast as he can to get his town’s economy up and running again.

Taft sits at the base of the San Emigdio and Temblor mountain ranges, between the Midway-Sunset and Buena Vista oil fields, in the southwest corner of the San Joaquin Valley. The smell of oil in the air along Mocal Road, just to the northwest of town, is unmistakable.

Once known as Siding Number Two — a stop off the Southern Pacific railway — Taft was subsequently named Moro, then Moron, before town leaders settled on naming the area after then-President Taft in 1912.

It’s been the geographical center of the California oil industry, where companies such as Chevron and Aera siphon up crude from the vast reserves pooled under this remote, dry region dotted with sage brush, clover and buckwheat.

On April 27, Taft’s City Council voted unanimously to open up for business on May 3, in defiance of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s orders.

But two days later, Kern County officials asked Noerr to stand down.

Unwilling to give up, the mayor penned a letter with four county supervisors and state Senate Minority Leader Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield), requesting the governor modify stay-at-home orders.

“Local government should have the flexibility and discretion to navigate reopening stages in a timeline that works best for their communities,” wrote Noerr and those co-signing the letter. Noerr sits on a Kern County advisory board that is evaluating how best to respond to the governor’s orders.

“I hate to say it, but the civil unrest we have been seeing seems to be having a positive effect,” he said, referring to protests over the weekend and the governor’s decision to reopen beaches around the state.

Several counties and cities have pushed back against Newsom’s emergency orders. In the far northeastern part of the state, Modoc County opened up for business on Friday. Sheriffs in Del Norte and Humboldt counties announced they would not enforce the orders.

Kern County has also opted not to enforce the restrictions.

“I see no reason why we should remain closed,” Noerr said in an interview, last week, not wearing a mask. He said the overall economy of the town likely has shrunk by 40%. He doesn’t yet have the numbers to show the true impact.

Sitting at the base of a bronze statue dedicated to the 20th century oil worker pioneers who built the city and the region’s oil industry, Noerr pointed to Kern County’s COVID-19 numbers, which show that Taft now has 16 cases, and that hospitalization rates in the county have started to dip...

More.

American Politics in 2009: Who's Really Lost It?

Steve Benen, at the Washington Monthly, positions himself as some august sage of the netroots - a voice of moderation, wisdom, and restraint. He often floats off common leftists talking points as received knowledge, and I'm particularly amused at how he views rank-and-file conservatives as some kind of exponential Bonus Army of the unwashed right-wing lumpenproletariat.

Here's Benen in a post yesterday:

... there's something very wrong with our political system, put under a serious strain by the "conservative lunatic brigade," stuck in a "perverse nonsense feedback loop."

Birthers, Deathers, Tenthers. Beck, Palin, Limbaugh. Bachmann, Inhofe, DeMint, King, and Broun. A scorched-earth campaign intended to tear the country apart, questioning the legitimacy of the president, the government, and the rule of law. It's all very scary.

Josh Marshall recently noted, "It's always important for us to remember what the last eight years have again taught us, which is that America has a very strong civic fabric, one that can withstand, absorb and conquer all manner of ugly behavior. It can take in stride a lot of angry rhetoric, townhall fisticuffs and more. But as this escalates we should continually be stepping back and thinking retrospectively from the vantage point of the future about where this all seems to be heading."

The crazies have a political party, a cable news network, and a loud, activist base. They're mad as hell and they're not going to take their medications anymore.

And then here's Benen today:

President Obama wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps reinforce how far gone 21st-century conservatives really are.

This is no small, isolated fit, thrown by random nutjobs. The New York Times, Washington Post,LA Times, AP, and others all ran stories this morning about the coordinated national effort to either keep children at home so they can't hear their president's pro-education message, or demanding that local schools block the message altogether.

A Republican state lawmaker in Oklahoma said, "As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education -- it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality. This is something you'd expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq." Fox News personalities have adopted the same line, calling a stay-in-school message from the president "cultist" and reminiscent of "North Korea and the former Soviet Union"....

This is what American politics has come to in 2009 ....

Even Joe Scarborough asked, "Where are all the GOP leaders speaking out against this kind of hysteria?" They are, alas, nowhere to be found. As John Cole explained, "The entire party has been taken over by crazy people."

Well, if the "entire party" is now "crazy," then that's the new sane.

I mean really. Recall that Ian Gurvitz has called the conservative resistance to Barack Obama "Operation Monkeyshit."

We're getting all of this weird leftist pushback because there's a genuine revolt in Middle America against this administration - and leftists have no answer but to hunker down, smear, slur, and sensationalize. All Democrats can do is paint the great middle as a bunch of crazies, when in fact it's the Hope-and-Change freakshow that fostering the rebellion of concerned citizens.

If you check Charlie Cook's essay today, "Bleeding Independents," it's clear that "crazy" doesn't explain the kind of frustration and resentment that driving the exodus of voter support from this administration:

Independent voters -- fired up by the war in Iraq and Republican scandals -- gave Democrats control of both chambers of Congress in 2006. Two years later, independents upset with President Bush and eager to give his party another kick expanded the Democratic majorities on the Hill. Late in the campaign, the economic downturn, together with an influx of young people and minorities enthusiastic about Obama, created a wave that left the GOP in ruins.

That was then; this is now. For the seven weeks from mid-April through the first week of June, Obama's weekly Gallup Poll approval rating among independents ran in the 60-to-70 percent range. But in four of the past five weeks, it has been only in the mid-to-high 40s. Meanwhile, Democrats and liberals seem lethargic even though Republicans and conservatives are spitting nails and can't wait to vote.

What's going on? While political analysts were fixated on last fall's campaign and on Obama's victory, inauguration, and first 100 days in office, two other dynamics were developing. First, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression scared many voters, making them worry about their future and that of their children and grandchildren. And the federal government's failure to prevent that calamity fundamentally undermined the public's already low confidence in government's ability to solve problems. Washington's unprecedented levels of intervention -- at the end of Bush's presidency and the start of Obama's -- into the private sector further unnerved the skittish public. People didn't mind that the head of General Motors got fired. What frightened folks was that it was the federal government doing the firing.

Many conservatives predictably fear -- and some downright oppose -- any expansion of government. But late last year many moderates and independents who were already frightened about the economy began to fret that Washington was taking irreversible actions that would drive mountainous deficits higher. They worried that government was taking on far more than it could competently handle and far more than the country could afford. Against this backdrop, Obama's agenda fanned fears that government was expanding too far, too fast. Before long, his strategy of letting Congress take the lead in formulating legislative proposals and thus prodding lawmakers to take ownership in their outcome caused his poll numbers on "strength" and "leadership" to plummet.

The bottom line for Cook is that the Dems are almost certain to take a wallop in the 2010 midterms (and of course some are even suggesting that the GOP might take back majority control of Congress).

And why not? As Wednesday's Pew reporting indicated, "Congressional Favorability at 24-Year Low: Midterm Voting Intentions Evenly Divided."

When asked to look ahead to the 2010 races for Congress, voters divide almost evenly between the parties. The sizable advantage enjoyed by the Democratic Party in the past two election cycles is gone, at least for now. As in previous years, both parties command nearly unanimous support from their own ranks. But the Democratic edge among independent voters, critical to their large electoral gains in 2006 and 2008, has vanished. Republicans have gained 10 points since November 2006, on the eve of the midterms (from 33% to 43%).

Independents will be the key. And as they're joining the Republican "crazies," it's going to be the Democrats who'll be insanely scratching their heads in 2010, saying, "My God. What happened to the 'emerging Demcoratic majority'"?

Obama, the Democrats, and Iraq

Peter Wehner argues that the Democrats, led by Barack Obama, were against the surge before they were for it:

This is the week that the Democratic party ran up the white flag when it comes to the surge in Iraq. Leading the surrender was none other than Barack Obama, the Democratic party's presumptive nominee for president and among the most vocal critics of the counterinsurgency plan that has transformed the Iraq war from a potentially catastrophic loss to what may turn out to be a historically significant victory.

On Monday, Obama wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he acknowledged the success of the surge. "In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge," Obama wrote, "our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda--greatly weakening its effectiveness." A day later, Obama gave a speech in which he declared for the first time that "true success" and "victory in Iraq" were possible. In addition, the Obama campaign scrubbed its presidential website to remove criticism of the surge.

The debate, then, is over, and the (landslide) verdict is in: The surge has been a tremendous success.

Obama, in typical fashion, is trying to use the success of the surge he opposed to justify his long-held commitment to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq as quickly as possible. But turning Iraq into a winning political issue won't be nearly as easy as Obama once thought. He has stepped into a trap of his own making.

The trap was set when Obama repeatedly insisted that his superior "judgment" on Iraq is more important than experience in national security affairs. Judgment, according to Obama, is what qualifies him to be commander in chief. So what can we discern about Obama's judgment on the surge, easily the most important national security decision since the Iraq war began in March 2003?

To answer that question, we need to revisit what Obama said about the surge around the time it was announced. In October 2006--three months before the president's new strategy was unveiled--Obama said, "It is clear at this point that we cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve, and we have to do something significant to break the pattern that we've been in right now."

On January 10, 2007, the night the surge was announced, Obama declared, "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." A week later, he insisted the surge strategy would "not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly." And in reaction to the president's January 23 State of the Union address, Obama said,

I don't think the president's strategy is going to work. We went through two weeks of hearings on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; experts from across the spectrum--military and civilian, conservative and liberal--expressed great skepticism about it. My suggestion to the president has been that the only way we're going to change the dynamic in Iraq and start seeing political commendation is actually if we create a system of phased redeployment. And, frankly, the president, I think, has not been willing to consider that option, not because it's not militarily sound but because he continues to cling to the belief that somehow military solutions are going to lead to victory in Iraq.

In July, after evidence was amassing that the surge was working, Obama said, "My assessment is that the surge has not worked."

Obama, then, was not only wrong about the surge; he was spectacularly wrong. And he continued to remain wrong even as mounting evidence of its success gave way to overwhelming evidence of its success.

But Obama is not alone. Virtually the entire Democratic party, including every Democrat running for president, opposed the surge. For example, Senator Joseph Biden--considered by some pundits a foreign policy sage--declared, a few days before the surge was announced, "If he surges another 20, 30 [thousand], or whatever number he's going to, into Baghdad, it'll be a tragic mistake."

There's more at the link.

Wehner actually builds on a long story of Democratic surrender on Iraq, but what's interesting now is how the Obama turnaround genuinely demonstrates how wrong, for so long, the Democrats have been on this war.

See also, the Wall Street Journal, "Obama's 'Judgment' [on the surge]."

Dick Cheney at American Enterprise Institute

Here's Dick Cheney's lecture at the American Enterprise Institute today. His speech is simply riveting. His continued clarity on the exigencies of our national security is unparalleled. His understanding of our enemies is sage and statesmanlike. His indictment of the Democratic Party's counter-terror policies ... devastating. The text of the speech is here. Do yourself a favor: Take the time to absorb this presentation completely:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Pete Hegseth, William Kristol, and Mitt Romney compare Cheney's speech to President Obama's address on national security at the National Archives this morning.

Here's this from Romney:

Barack Obama is having a hard time going from politician to president. His speech and his policies have one foot in campaign mode and another in presidential mode. He struggles to explain how he is keeping faith with the liberal advocates who promoted his campaign but in doing so, he breaks faith with the interests of the American people. When it comes to protecting the nation, we have a conflicted president. And his address today was more tortured than the enhanced interrogation techniques he decries.

More at Memeorandum.

Sage Kotsenburg Olympic Spirit!

I didn't think to check Twitter earlier, doh.

This guy's so cool.

This is #OlympicSpirit: pic.twitter.com/HGBzLGqcql

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 9, 2014

And see Bill Plaschke's column, "American's slopestyle gold is totally random."

Education Gap Between Rich and Poor Is Growing Wider

But what about all that hopey-changey stuff?

At the New York Times:

The wounds of segregation were still raw in the 1970s. With only rare exceptions, African-American children had nowhere near the same educational opportunities as whites.

The civil rights movement, school desegregation and the War on Poverty helped bring a measure of equity to the playing field. Today, despite some setbacks along the way, racial disparities in education have narrowed significantly. By 2012, the test-score deficit of black 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds in reading and math had been reduced as much as 50 percent compared with what it was 30 to 40 years before.

Achievements like these breathe hope into our belief in the Land of Opportunity. They build trust in education as a leveling force powering economic mobility. “We do have a track record of reducing these inequalities,” said Jane Waldfogel, a professor of social work at Columbia University.

But the question remains: Why did we stop there?

For all the progress in improving educational outcomes among African-American children, the achievement gaps between more affluent and less privileged children is wider than ever, notes Sean Reardon of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford. Racial disparities are still a stain on American society, but they are no longer the main divider. Today the biggest threat to the American dream is class.

Education is today more critical than ever. College has become virtually a precondition for upward mobility. Men with only a high school diploma earn about a fifth less than they did 35 years ago. The gap between the earnings of students with a college degree and those without one is bigger than ever.

And yet American higher education is increasingly the preserve of the elite. The sons and daughters of college-educated parents are more than twice as likely to go to college as the children of high school graduates and seven times as likely as those of high school dropouts.

Only 5 percent of Americans ages 25 to 34 whose parents didn’t finish high school have a college degree. By comparison, the average across 20 rich countries in an analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is almost 20 percent.

The problem, of course, doesn’t start in college.

Earlier this week, Professor Waldfogel and colleagues from Australia, Canada and Britain published a new book titled “Too Many Children Left Behind” (Russell Sage). It traces the story of America’s educational disparities across the life cycle of its children, from the day they enter kindergarten to eighth grade.

Their story goes sour very early, and it gets worse as it goes along. On the day they start kindergarten, children from families of low socioeconomic status are already more than a year behind the children of college graduates in their grasp of both reading and math.

And despite the efforts deployed by the American public education system, nine years later the achievement gap, on average, will have widened by somewhere from one-half to two-thirds.

Even the best performers from disadvantaged backgrounds, who enter kindergarten reading as well as the smartest rich kids, fall behind over the course of their schooling.

The challenges such children face compared to their more fortunate peers are enormous. Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds are seven times more likely to have been born to a teenage mother. Only half live with both parents, compared with 83 percent of the children of college graduates.

The children of less educated parents suffer higher obesity rates, have more social and emotional problems and are more likely to report poor or fair health. And because they are much poorer, they are less likely to afford private preschool or the many enrichment opportunities — extra lessons, tutors, music and art, elite sports teams — that richer, better-educated parents lavish on their children.

When they enter the public education system, they are shortchanged again...

Keep reading.

More funding and additional education reforms will have only a marginal impact on improving student achievement, and hence reducing inequality. The most significant gains are likely to come from changes in the culture, especially the strengthening of the family in minority communities. It would help, too, if public schools were freed from the tyrannical and debilitating control of the Democrat-left and the corrupt teachers unions, which will do nothing to improve educational performance if such reforms weaken their power.

Frankly, if the Obama administration would just start a minority education voucher program so that poor families could afford to send their kids to schools like Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., then we'd be a lot better off.

Blog Watch: Digby's Hullabaloo

With this entry, the "Blog Watch" series comes to American Power. As regular readers may recall, the original goal of Blog Watch was to comment on political blogs that raised:

...significant questions involving style, analysis, and ideological orientation. I'm particularly interested in dissecting and challenging radical, antiwar bloggers.

So far, as things have developed, I've challenged not just antiwar ideology, but the whole mindless nihilism associated with the endless hard-left attacks on the Bush administration and all things Republican (my earlier entries in the series are here, here, and here).

That effort continues with today's dissection and rebuttal of Digby's Hullabaloo. Hullabaloo's a vile yet influential leftist blog (Digby's posts are regularly cited by some of the top Bush-bashers of the left-blogosphere). I have on occassion waded into the dark comment threads there, which feature all of the classic characteristics familiar to the paranoid hate-addled hordes of the radical set. Most of Hullabaloo's posts are written by Digby, whose biography at The Huffington Post notes:

"Digby" has been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a writer whose political and cultural observations have entertained and informed the blogosphere since 2002. They can currently be found at http://www.digbysblog.blogspot.com/ and http://www.laweekly.com/.

(Yawn here.)

Hullabaloo's a group blog, however. That slippery wannabe international relations blogger Glenn Greenwald did a guest gig at Hullabaloo some time back (my jaws clench and hackles rise at the mere mention of Greenwald, but I've made mincemeat of him elsewhere). One current Hullabaloo co-blogger is Tristero, which is the pseudonym for Richard Einhorn, a modern classical composer by profession. Tristero should probably stick to music, as his foreign policy analysis is nothing more than boilerplate antiwar hatred of the Bush adminstration's forward international policy.

In one of his recent posts Tristero claims Turkey was readying an incursion into Northern Iraq, despite news reports indicating that Turkish plans were merely preliminary, against the wishes of the United States government, and that strikes against Kurdish rebels in Iraq were nowhere near forthcoming. But such facts didn't stop Tristero from launching this outlandish diatribe against the administration:

As far as I can tell, this article contains no information to support the assertion that "a Turkish military offensive into northern Iraq" is unlikely and plenty of reasons to worry about the opposite. Anyone familiar with the situation care to explain? Juan Cole mentions it, with a slightly less optimistic take on the situation than the Times provides, but does not offer an opinion as to how likely it or unlikely a military incursion by Turkey could be.

A personal note: Once, I had a long private talk with an American deputy ambassador who had been stationed in Iraq during 2004. I brought up my concerns about Turkey and the Kurds and, with the kind of flattery ambassadors learn to dispense on a moment's notice, he expressed surprise that I, a mere musician, knew enough to ask questions about it. I, too, was surprised, but I was surprised that he thought the questions were that esoteric.

The unpredictable effects - except that I knew they would be the bad kind of unpredictable - of destabilizing Iraq on its neighbors were among the many reasons I thought the Bush/Iraq invasion was major league cuckoo. By 2004, however, I had come to the genuinely terrifying conclusion that I, a mere musician, and my colleagues for the past year, a bunch of loudmouth bloggers who refused to accord any respect to those who believed in "the triumph of hope over experience," understood the world far better than America's political and media leaders. That may sound like a boast but really it's not. It highlights how profoundly incompetent, claustrophobic, and twisted American political discourse had become, and still is.

It chills me to the bone to realize that Walter Russell Mead, an old friend who has since gone on to acquire an enormous reputation in international affairs, got Bush/Iraq wrong and I got it right. There is something profoundly out of whack in this country for something like that to be true. But it is. And it wasn't just a lucky guess on my part; I wasn't guessing. Nor was it an excusable mistake on Walter's part, not only because it wasn't simply one mistake, but because it was an inexcusable cluster of serious mistakes for anyone to make who claims expertise in foreign policy.

The citation of Juan Cole is odd, since Cole fails to support Tristero's main point. Perhaps Tristero thought that bandying about Cole's name would lend some credence to his argument, although Cole's radical views have long been marginalized (Cole's reputation in the historical profession is controversal, and his application for a post at Yale University was rejected on the grounds of anti-Americanism and shoddy scholarship). But what's more interesting is all of Tristero's unwarranted assertions of superior foreign policy knowledge. Tristero's post is dated October 10, and this is just weeks after General David Petraeus testified to Congress on America's military success in Iraq, a performance that has been greeted by a growing sense that events in Iraq have improved dramatically.

But such views are par for the course over at Hullabaloo. In a characteristic post, Digby dismisses mainstream policy discourse as mere "incoherence" :

Something very disconcerting has been happening in our discourse for some time, even worse than the up-is-downism that has characterized the most unctuously presumptuous members of the Cheney administration. It's no longer just Bush who is blatantly dumb on TV. A lot of public figures these days adopt all the poses and cadence of ordinary conversation, but actually speak in some sort of gibberish language that makes no sense.

As an example of this, Digby attacks Mitt Romney, and she cites his (objectively sensible) views in this YouTube as "complete nonsense":

Also, after the recent commanding debate performances by Rudy Giuliani, Digby pulls up some partisan hack piece at Slate calling Rudy a liar, and then argues:

I don't think Rudy cares about facts any more than George W. Bush does, and undoubtedly doesn't know them in the first place. After all, Bush lied repeatedly during both of his presidential campaigns, just as he's doing now when he claims that SCHIP will allow rich people to steal from the taxpayers. (Like he thinks that's a bad thing.) They just make things up because they don't care to know the truth ... and it doesn't matter....

In any case, the bar has been set very low for GOP presidents. Yet they seem to be able to set it lower each time. If Giuliani wins we will not only have an idiot for president we will have a dangerously unstable idiot for president who is even more arrogant and malevolent than the one we have now. I have a sneaking feeling "competence" is going to be the least of our problems.

That's it? A couple of factual discrepancies over New York City tax policies during the 1990s and you have the basis for a complete smear of the entire GOP establishment as a bunch of liars! "Bush lied, people died!" Haven't we heard that before? It's so simplistic, and it would be just a matter of odd fascination if it weren't for the fact that these innacuracies go over as mainstream analysis in contemporary left-wing policy circles.

But I truly understood the true nature of Digby's hard-left ideological project after reading her denunciation of Bill Cosby's appearance last weekend on Meet the Press. Digby mounts her attack on Cosby with another volley of the "gibberish" line, laced with extreme exaggeration for effect:

I just suffered through one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. I watched Bill Cosby ramble on like he was drunk, dominating the conversation, for nearly an hour on Meet The Press, most of the time speaking pure gibberish.

(Imagine him doing it in his patented Fat Albert voice as well...)

The context for Cosby's Meet the Press appearance is the release of his new book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, which is coauthored by Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a well-respected child psychiatrist who specializes in African American issues. The book argues for a closer look at black American culture in an effort to find solutions to the current African American crisis.

Now, I watched the show, so I can attest to the real reason Digby attacks Cosby as incoherent: Cosby argues that the contemporary black family is dysfunctional - especially families of lower socioeconomic attainment - and these families have failed to provide the model of stability and responsibility that is the necessary prerequisite for success in life, educationally, professionally, and socially. Digby cites this passage from the interview transcripts to illustrate Cosby's alleged gibberish:

MR. COSBY: “Somewhere in my life a person called my father has not shown up, and I feel very sad about this because I don’t know if I’m ugly, I don’t know what the reason is.” And so there’s a great deal that a person has to put up with.[...]

MR. COSBY: ...in times of need, etc., etc. So when you look at education, it is my belief that it is there with a very ugly head. However, it is also my belief that this is not the first time my race has seen systemic or institutional racism. There were times, even worse times, when lynchings were acceptable. Sure, the newspapers wrote about it, but it happened. Juries were set and freed the, people who did the, the lynching. Therefore, we knew how to fight, we knew how to protect our children, protect our women. Today, in lower, lower economic areas, some people—not all—some people are not contributing to that protection. Therefore, when you see these numbers, you see, you see numbers and the character correction has not happened. Many times it’s the TV set, a BET or, or videos played, kids look at it and they admire it. It’s the proliferation of drugs into the neighborhood.

Cosby's been been at the forefront of a recent movement to pinpoint the causes of the contemporary African American crisis at the level of the family. His speech at the NAACP's 50th commemoration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision sparked a vigorous debate in the black community over institutional versus individual factors in the crisis of poverty and crime among black youth today.

Cosby wasn't speaking gibberish last Sunday on Meet the Press. Indeed, his comments were far from incoherent. A written transript - like that provided by Meet the Press - can't do justice to the syncopated down-home patterns of Cosby's speech.

I listened with ease as Cosby spoke truth to the pathologies of contemporary black America. He speaks with the voice of the traditional black elder sage who's been down with the brothers in the 'hood and knows "what dey got t'do" to rise up from the depths of danger and despair. Cosby's voice is the powerful trumpet of contemporary black conservatism, a movement which doesn't discount America's history of institution racism. Instead, black conservatives focus on educational excellence as a means of advancement within the society. They stress neighborhood safety and security, and most of all they denounce the endless cries of "racism" which cast blacks as the "victims" of an irredeemable racial caste system that locks them in the dire straights of socioeconomic inferiority. Black conservatives look within, to the heart and soul of the indiviual, for answers to the problem of black uplift.

And this is why Cosby's attacked mercilessly by Digby ("it's all gibberish"), as well as the entire class of left-wing victimologists. The conservative position on individual responsibility challenges the enduring shibboleths of the radical sociology on race. This nihilist ideology (which inherently offers no compelling policy alternatives) is anathema to the future chances of America's black youth, and the entire anti-Bush, anti-traditionalist project mounted at Digby's Hullaballoo holds disastrous implications for the future of American public policy.

So, as we see here and elsewhere, conservatives have a continuing interest and responsibility to challenge and rebut this radical left-wing dogma. The stakes are incrediby high: For although the radicals propose absolutely nothing of reason and hope, such "discourse" is becoming all too common within the broader tide of leftism that gaining traction in the poltical system. All conservatives need to join together to beat back this antiwar, multicultural, statist onslaught chipping away at our common political decency and vitality.

See also the previous entries from Blog Watch: The Blue Voice, Firedoglake, and Glenn Greenwald.