DC McAllister Update

I don't even know this woman, and don't care about her one way or the other.

Mostly, it's just a thing on Twitter. She got fired. Okay. Life goes on.

Previously, "DC McAllister Fired."

And Bethany Mandel has been tweeting about this all day. Read the full thread:

Denise McAllister's public meltdown was indefensible and homophobic https://t.co/BtfvcsMrqx

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

A few thoughts on Denise and what happened this weekend: First of all, I am conservative and I was one of the many people who took issue with her original tweet (which did not applaud masculinity, but instead an incredibly subservience nobody should expect of a woman).

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

Her behavior in public and on the listserv for Federalist writers made it clear she was not mentally stable. She expressed some really not okay viewpoints that I was increasingly uncomfortable associating myself with. Her attack on my husband was a final straw.

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

Someone that unbalanced, that hateful, should not have a platform. To be clear, this is something everyone familiar with her work and her tweets have known for A LONG TIME. She attempted to doxx @beyondreasdoubt & her attacks on @BridgetPhetasy were the cruelest I have ever seen.

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

Just want to clarify myself a tiny bit: She should not have a platform among mainstream conservative websites. She can and should keep tweeting if that's what she wants. But nobody is entitled to publish whatever they want wherever they want. That's up to those sites and editors.

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) April 1, 2019

J.Lo Looks Phenomenal

Not sure about those tits (fake?), but those abs are da bomb, dang!

On Instagram, "I’m a hustler baby."

And at London's Daily Mail, "Jennifer Lopez, 49, looks phenomenal in a neon pink bikini on the set of her stripper film Hustlers... as her fiance Alex Rodriquez goes crazy for the snap."

Jennifer Lopez looks phenomenal in a neon pink bikini on the set of her stripper film Hustlers https://t.co/pAldQB41mb

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) March 31, 2019

Kendall Jenner See-Through

I haven't posted Ms. Kendall lately.

At Taxi Driver:

Kendall Jenner Braless in See-Through White T-Shirt - https://t.co/gkURcgyLPM - pic.twitter.com/txdUJbl1BC

— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) April 1, 2019

Alexis Ren Erotica

At Drunken Stepfather, "ALEXIS REN EROTICA OF THE DAY."

And on Twitter:

Sometimes I think I crave cities the way I crave the ocean and mountains. Each one has a different vibration, beating to its own drum. pic.twitter.com/uCdNvZBvvn

— Alexis Ren (@AlexisRenG) April 1, 2019

Battle Looms Over Gray Wolf Protection

This is interesting.

I don't support hunting wildlife simply for bragging rights and Instagram/ Twitter selfies. At one point there were millions of gray wolves covering every corner of the United States. Now, there's about 6,000. They're on the federal Endangered Species List. I don't have an opinion on whether federal protection is better or not, but it's worth considering. Conservatism is about conservation, and smart use of our natural resources is conservative.

In any case, at the Los Angles Times, "Plan to remove gray wolves from Endangered Species Act sparks battle":

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and environmentalists are at war over the agency’s latest plan to strip gray wolves of their federal protections and turn management of the often-reviled predators over to states and tribes. https://t.co/xgg8fQastb

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 28, 2019

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and environmentalists are at war over the agency’s latest plan to strip gray wolves of their federal protections and turn management of the often-reviled predators over to states and tribes.

“If the agency’s proposal gets finalized, we will see them in court,” Michael Robinson, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity said on Wednesday. “Delisting is simply out of the question.”

Surprisingly, however, in the latest chapter of a long-running battle to keep an estimated 6,000 gray wolves safe from trophy hunters and trappers, the center and the Humane Society of the United States are suggesting a compromise.

“We are proposing an alternate path forward — downlisting the gray wolf from federally endangered to threatened status,” said Brett Hartl, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. That action, he said, “would maintain federal protections the animal needs to survive in certain areas, while allowing states to share management oversight.”

His organization doesn’t oppose state management of wolves, but it does oppose hunting wolves for sport, he said. “Free-for-all hunting of wolves is not management, it’s slaughter.”

Similarly, Nick Arrivo, an attorney with the Humane Society of the United States, said, “We don’t oppose the idea of state management. The problem is that certain states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan have shown that they are not inclined to maintain healthy populations of gray wolves.”

Federal wildlife authorities removed protections from gray wolves in the Great Lakes region in 2011, allowing thousands of gray wolves in those three states to be hunted or trapped. The protections were restored by federal court decisions in 2014.

The prospect of removing wolf protections aroused rage yet again earlier this month when the Fish and Wildlife Service touted the species' recovery as "one of the greatest comebacks for an animal in U.S. conservation history,” a characterization that some conservation groups called misguided and premature.

David Bernhardt, acting secretary of the Department of Interior, said the plan to delist the species “puts us one step closer to transitioning the extraordinary effort that we have invested in gray wolf recovery to other species who actually need the protections of the Endangered Species Act, leaving the states to carry on the legacy of wolf conservation.”

However, the Humane Society, in a statement, warned that the plan catered “to a narrow group of special interests: the trophy hunters and trappers who want to kill wolves for bragging rights, social media opportunities and to increase deer and elk populations.”

It pointed out, for instance, that in November, “Americans were heartbroken” by the killing of the famous Yellowstone black wolf, Spitfire, by a trophy hunter in Montana.

It also argued that gray wolves are worth millions of dollars to the economies of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, studies show, because of the visitors they attract to national parks in the northern Rocky Mountains...

Keep reading.

Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History

At Amazon, Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.

Ann Coulter, Godless

At Amazon, Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

DC McAllister Fired

From the Federalist, a website I rarely, if ever, read.

She was a little too unflitered, it turns out, especially when going after Meghan McCain, whose husband, Ben Domenech, a known plagiarist, is a co-founder.

At the Washington Examiner:

The Federalist has parted ways with conservative writer @McAllisterDen after a bevy of complaints surrounding her attacks on Twitter of @yashar over his sexuality.https://t.co/Ni1hB0H2Kw

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 31, 2019

Just followed @McAllisterDen because anybody denounced as a "hater" by Meghan McCain must be good people.

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 31, 2019

What the Hell Happened to Rachel Maddow?

She was hardest hit by Trump's exoneration.

At Slate:

Rachel Maddow’s show this week has been a reminder that partisan paranoia has bipartisan appeal. https://t.co/Rmtuvyq53s via @slate

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) March 30, 2019

Sophie Mudd Red Bikini

At Drunken Stepfather, "SOPHIE MUDD BIG TITS OF THE DAY."

Previous Sophie Mudd blogging here.

No Dead Horses at Santa Anita on First Day Track Reopens (VIDEO)

Horses have been getting hurt and getting put down at Santa Anita. A lot of horses. It's become an animal rights issue.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Santa Anita breathes a sigh of relief after no horses die on first day back":

Seven horses draped in brightly colored silks thunder across the shadow of the splendid San Gabriel Mountains in a breathtaking combination of beauty and speed.

The small crowd is silent.

“I’m holding my breath,’’ says race-goer B.J. Ravitz.

It’s the first race at Santa Anita Park in nearly a month, a close contest, powerful animals dueling down the stretch, dirt flying, jockeys bobbing, high drama.

There are few cheers in a sea of stares.

“Everyone is worried about the horses,’’ said Abe Ravitz, the husband of B.J. “All I’m thinking is, if anything untoward happens today …”

The race ends clean, all seven horses crossing the finish line, and only then is there audible applause from the crowd, a reaction seemingly generated by the one outcome that everyone here is betting on.

No horse died.

“OK,” said racegoer Frank Reynoso, taking a deep breath. “That’s one.’’

It was that kind of a tightrope afternoon Friday as Santa Anita opened its doors for the first time since March 5, after 22 horses died in a little more than two months of its winter/spring meet, a 214% increase from the same span the year before.

The Stronach Group, owners of the track, has since made minor modifications to a track that was badly compromised with the unseasonably rainy winter weather. They also have revised medication policies and proposed prohibiting jockeys from using the whip unless for safety reasons.

But because there was no clear reason for the deaths, there could be no clear answers. That’s why so many people showed up at the track Friday with nerves jangling and fingers crossed.

For now, there is relief. In eight races, there were no fatalities, which brought a giant collective sigh. But everyone agrees that the healing of what’s arguably Southern California’s most picturesque sporting venue is just beginning.

“This is going to take a while,’’ said horse owner Samantha Siegel, sitting in a near-empty terrace section. “The public is probably a little shell-shocked at what’s going on. We’ve gotten a lot of bad exposure from everywhere. We’re going to need to go a long time without having something horrible happen.’’

The crowd was reminded of the trouble before even entering the track, as several dozen protesters stood on a grassy area outside the front gate waving signs and chanting.

“You say the track was safe to use but nothing’s changed, you bet, they lose,’’ they sang.

One of the signs read, “Stop Killing Horses.’’ One of the protesters was dressed in a horse’s head, and the message was clear.

“Horse racing needs to be abolished’’ said Heather Hamza, leading what she called a group of concerned citizens backed by the group known as Horseracing Wrongs. ‘’The world is watching this track. Every horse that is killed here will make big headlines. We need to be part of those headlines because we’re telling them to stop it.”

Hamza and her group urged the race-goers to look beyond the beauty of the sport.

‘’When you’re watching a horse race, it’s magnificent, it’s beautiful, it’s breathtaking,’’ she said. “But that doesn’t mean there’s not a dark, dirty, gritty underbelly behind it.’’

Once inside, fans were met with the usual promising announcements — “Welcome to Santa Anita Park! The track is fast and the turf course is firm!” — and folks cheered the return of ailing trumpeter Jay Cohen. But it wasn’t the same.

While the typically loud racetrack cheering returned in later races, there was a pall over the place as everyone tried to adjust...

Mackenzie Maynard's Sunday Forecast

At ABC News 10 San Diego:

Candice Swanepoel on Vacation in Tulum

At Drunken Stepfather, "CANDICE SWANEPOEL FLASH OF THE DAY."

Added: At Taxi Driver, "Candice Swanepoel Caught Topless on a Photo Shoot."

Rolling Stones Concert Tour Canceled on Doctor's Orders

Mick Jagger is suffering from an unspecified illness, and the band expect to return to touring upon his recovery.

At TMZ (via Terri Peters):

Rolling Stones Concert Tour Canceled Because of Mick Jagger's Illness https://t.co/G83XPDVSbo

— TMZ (@TMZ) March 30, 2019

Albert Camus, The Rebel

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt.

And the old paperback Vintage copy is available here.

A Long, Strange Trip for the Volkswagen Bus

I had a V.W. bug in high school, and one of my best buddies had a bus.

It was just the culture back then, and we didn't think that much more of it besides being in the moment and being cool.

At the Los Angeles Times, "The Volkswagen Bus’ long, strange trip from hippie van to hot collectible":

Vintage Volkswagen Buses have become hot collectors' items, fetching record prices. But some California fans fear the cars may lose their free-spirit mystique, writes @gustavoarellano. https://t.co/AKRaQKSb6Y

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 28, 2019

“You see? You see? You see?” Enrique Aragon shouts over the loud purr of his 1966 Volkswagen 21-Window Deluxe Bus as he gestures toward gawkers yet again.

For the last hour, the 42-year-old electrician and member of the Boyle Heights-based Volksstyle Car Club has cruised Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena in his dominguero. And all along the ride, people won’t let him be.

AAA tow-truck drivers pull up and mouth, “Beautiful car!” Middle-aged couples in Ohio State sweatshirts wave from a bar. Bearded hipsters offer the thumbs-up. Children flash a peace sign.

Nearly everyone else just stares.

Aragon is used to it. His ’66 is a glimmering shrine to Southern California car culture. He spent three years and $45,000 to restore it from a shell with no wheels or seats to its current, showroom-ready state. It has a two-tone brown paint job that tapers into a V in the vehicle’s flat front. A ragtop that rolls up like a carpet to reveal a sunroof. A windshield that pops open into two sides. Porsche hubcaps. Pleather interior. Chrome all around.

And the Bus’ namesake piece de resistance: 21 windows that wrap around the sides, the roof and the back so that a ride inside feels like putting wheels on the Crystal Cathedral.

“People point all the time,” he says. “Everyone trips out because they don’t know they’re still around.”

In fact, the Volkswagen Bus never went away, although at times it has fallen sharply out of fashion. And it’s back like never before.

From 1950 to 1979, the German automaker churned out over 4.7 million of them under different names and models —Westfalia, Samba, Kombi, Transporter — to create one of the most beloved lines of cars worldwide. Its basic frame — a raised, boxy body, a weak engine in the back, bench seats on the inside, a plethora of windows — attracted a devoted worldwide following. Aficionados turned them into everything from surf wagons and homes to taxis and work trucks. Even movable beer gardens.

“It’s the most easily recognized van or commercial vehicle on the planet,” says Brian Moody, executive editor for Autotrader.com. “Low operating cost, low purchase cost when Volkswagen made them. Globally, you can talk to a Brazilian who has great VW Bus memories. A Mexican. A European. An Indian. Not everyone had a Mustang convertible.”

But over the last decade, this once-humble workhorse has become something it’s never been: one of the hottest gets in the vintage auto world.

The Instagram generation has popularized them through the hashtag #vanlife, in which you can scroll through over 4 million photos of people posing in gorgeous locations with immaculately staged Buses. Meanwhile, baby boomers with nostalgia in their hearts and retirement savings in their pockets have pushed prices to record-breaking levels — the current record holder is a ’65 auctioned off in 2017 for $302,500 — with no cooling in sight, leaving longtime fans like Aragon both amazed and upset.

“All these high prices happened because of the internet,” he says. “It killed it. People used to have to work for Buses. You had to go out and look. You had to wait. Now, people just throw money.”

Nowhere is the current Bus-collecting frenzy more pronounced than in Southern California — Orange County in particular — where an alternative Bus universe first blossomed in the 1960s. There, the vehicle became a part of the social fabric, thanks to the region’s surfer and Kustom Kulture scenes. The area’s temperate weather ensured that the Bus, which has a tendency to rust quickly, had a far longer life than in the Snow Belt...

Devin Brugman Morning

On Twitter:

Aloha 🐆🐆🐆 @MONDAYSWIMWEAR pic.twitter.com/valiPSZdf9

— Devin Brugman (@devinbrugman) February 27, 2019

Morning ✨ pic.twitter.com/fPbUNE5w2K

— Devin Brugman (@devinbrugman) March 12, 2019

The magic hour ✨ New @MONDAYSWIMWEAR coming soon pic.twitter.com/DKFKjv5Pwv

— Devin Brugman (@devinbrugman) March 14, 2019

Jennifer Delacruz's Weekend Forecast

Calm, cool weather, which I love.

Here's the fabulous Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

'Gropin' Joe' Biden Gets Dragged for His Decades of Perverted Sexual Harassment

From the lead at Memeorandum yesterday, "An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden."

Added: At the Other McCain, "‘Creepy Uncle Joe’ Gets Busted by #MeToo (Hint: She’s a Bernie Supporter)."

And from perhaps the best feminist writer working today, Rebecca Traister, "Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer":

I decided to take a break from writing "Newman!" jokes on Twitter & instead write a real piece about Biden, & how he embodies so many of the wrong choices made by a Democratic party in retreat for the past 50 years. "Newman!" jokes will recommence shortly: https://t.co/SD8cURvDL0

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) March 29, 2019

It’s still three months before the first Democratic debate, nearly a year before Super Tuesday, and he hasn’t even declared yet, but poll after presidential poll continues to show 76-year-old former vice-president Joe Biden leading an enormous, diverse, and talented Democratic field.

It’s almost poetically appropriate. Biden carries himself with the confidence of a winner, despite not having won, or even come close to winning, either of the previous presidential primaries he’s entered. He is the guy whose self-assured conviction that his authority will protect him from rebuke has always preceded him into any room, whose confident sense of his own entitlement repels potential objection like Gore-Tex repels rain. He is the gaffe-master, the affable fuck-up, and also, oddly, the politician who’s supposed to make us feel safe. He is the amiable, easygoing, handsy-but-harmless guy who’s never going to give you a hard time about your own handsiness or prejudice, who’s gonna make a folksy argument about enacting fundamentally restrictive policies.

For his whole career, Biden’s role has been to comfort the lost, prized, and most fondly imagined Democratic voter, the one who’s like him: that guy in the diner, that guy in Ohio, that guy who’s white and so put off by the changed terms of gendered and racial power in this country that decades ago he fled for the party that was working to roll back the social advancements that had robbed him of his easy hold on power. That guy who believed that the system worked best when it worked for him.

Biden is the Democrats’ answer to the hunger to “make America great again,” dressed up in liberal clothes. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has in fact argued that Biden’s racial politics have offered a form of Trumpism on the left, a “liberal cover to white backlash.” To that I would add, he has provided liberal cover to anti-feminist backlash, the kind of old-fashioned paternalism of powerful men who don’t take women’s claims to their reproductive, professional, or political autonomy particularly seriously, who walk through the world with a casual assurance that men’s access to and authority over women’s bodies is natural. In an attempt to win back That Guy, Joe Biden has himself, so very often, been That Guy.

Now it seems, That Guy is widely viewed as the best and safest candidate to get us out of this perilous and scary political period. But the irony is that so much of what is terrifying and dangerous about this time — the Trump administration, the ever more aggressive erosion of voting and reproductive rights, the crisis in criminal justice and yawning economic chasm between the rich and everyone else — are in fact problems that can in part be laid at the feet of Joe Biden himself, and the guys we’ve regularly been assured are Democrats’ only answer.

Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, 18 years after Brown v. Board of Education, less than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and just three years after the Supreme Court case Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education would actually force many schools to fulfill the promise of integration put forth by Brown. Biden took office less than three weeks before Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court and a couple of years before the term “sexual harassment” would be coined by Lin Farley.

It was a period of intense partisan realignment, in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and early ’70s, in which the American left was nervously coalescing around the interests and increased liberties of racial minorities and women, the populations who were forming what would be the most reliable part of its base.

The right, meanwhile, was sucking strength from a backlash against disruptive social movements, growing fat and drunk on the language of piety and family values that would undergird its ultraconservative defense of the old power structures, self-righteously fueling up for the Reagan era. Republicans had, for the foreseeable future, won white men — America’s original citizens, the ones around whom our narratives and priorities are calibrated.

Rather than lean into an energetic defense of the values of liberty, equality, and inclusion that might define their role against the racist and anti-feminist backlash of the era, the Democratic Party appeared anxious to distance itself from being the feminized “mommy party,” and shunt to the side — rather than vigorously advocate for — the priorities of women, especially poor women, and people of color.

The party continued to be represented and led by mostly white men. And while officially Democrats remained on the progressive side, supporting reproductive rights, civil rights, and affirmative action, a contingent of Those Guys, Joe Biden notable among them, made folksy rationalizations for abrogating, rather than expanding and more fiercely protecting, new rights and protections. Those Guys soothed; Those Guys were familiar; Those Guys enjoyed their own power and wanted to reassure everyone that it wasn’t really going to be so dramatically reapportioned.

A young Joe Biden was reliably anti-abortion, claiming that Roe v. Wade “went too far” and that he did not believe that “a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” He voted consistently for the Hyde Amendment, the 1976 legislative rider which forbid government-funded insurance programs from paying for abortion, making abortion all but inaccessible to poor people. In 1981, he proposed the “Biden Amendment,” prohibiting foreign aid to be used in any biomedical research related to abortion. The next year, he supported Jesse Helms’s amendment barring foreign NGOs receiving United States aid from using that aid to perform abortion. Biden was one of two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary to vote for the 1982 Hatch Amendment, which would have effectively nullified Roe by turning abortion rights back to federal and state legislatures. At the time, he expressed concern about whether he had “a right to impose” his anti-abortion views on the nation. Then he went ahead and imposed those views anyway.

Over the decades, Biden has evolved on the issue, yet into the 1990s and 2000s, he voted for the so-called “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.” And he regularly declined to fully support the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have banned the wide variety of oppressive state restrictions on abortion.

Biden’s stances against women’s full reproductive freedom have been key to how he has proudly presented himself to the public. Even in the years since he has officially become pro-choice, he’s retained the sensibility first reflected in his comments about how women shouldn’t be wholly in charge of their own decisions, writing in his 2007 memoir that even though he’d vote against a constitutional amendment barring abortion, “I still vote against partial birth abortion and federal funding, and I’d like to make it easier for scared young mothers to choose not to have an abortion.” His is the language of restrictive authority dressed up as avuncular protectionism.

Biden wasn’t simply a comforter of patriarchal impulses toward controlling women’s bodies. Though he campaigned in 1972 as a strong supporter of civil rights, and initially voted in favor of school busing legislation intended to integrate schools in both the North and South, Biden changed his tune a couple of years into his Senate tenure. Faced with angry pressure from white constituents rearing back from integration measures that would mean busing white children into black neighborhoods, Biden previewed his anti-abortion agreement with Republican Jesse Helms by siding with him on anti-busing measures, calling the approach to school integration “a bankrupt concept” and “asinine policy.” Biden’s anti-busing stance offered an out for his Democratic colleagues, several of whom also turned on busing, helping to defeat the legislation.

In later decades, Biden’s legislative efforts reinforced other kinds of racial disparities...

Keep reading.

Hailey Clauson Stops Traffic (VIDEO)

Sports Illustrated pushed back the date of its swimsuit edition until May, supposed timed for the warmer summer season. So, still a couple of months away.

Meanwhile, here's the lovely Ms. Hailey: