Good Charlotte kills

The latest fatal fad for kids:

Hannah was a happy 13-year-old until she became an 'emo' - part of a sinister teenage craze that romanticises death. Three months later she hanged herself. Here, her devastated mother tells other parents: No child is safe.
On the night before she died, she came into their room, kissed her father Raymond on the cheek and cheerfully told him: "I love you, Dad."
The following day Hannah's mother Heather went to check on her daughter and found her hanging by a tie from the top rail of her bunk bed. . . .
Why on earth did their daughter — a popular, intelligent and attractive girl — do such a thing?
They could find only one clue: Hannah was what is known as an "emo".
Some describe it as a cult or a sect, but in reality the term — derived from the word "emotional" — encapsulates a trend that is becoming hugely popular among Britain's schoolchildren. . . .
Hair is all-important: often dyed black and straightened, it is worn in a long fringe brushed to one side of the face.
Music also plays a critical role.
Emos like guitar-based rock with emotional lyrics.
American bands such as My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte and Blink 182 are particular favourites.

Let's face it, suicide sometimes reflects a rational assessment: "OMG! I'm the kind of pathetic wuss who listens to Blink 182!" The amazing thing is that all Blink 182 fans haven't killed themselves. Yet.

Parents, if you've got a teenager, just don't let them listen to any of that "emo" crap, which is for losers, nerds and wienies. Make sure your kids listen to the Stones, Zep, ZZ Top, Van Halen -- good old red-blooded rock 'n' roll, man.

Jodie Foster's gay divorce

Celebrity news update:

Hollywood star Jodie Foster has ended her 14-year lesbian relationship with film producer Cydney Bernard.
The split comes just four months after Miss Foster broke her silence about the relationship, which was long an open secret in movie circles.
Ms Foster revealed her domestic situation for the first time a speech to a gathering of fellow Hollywood stars in Decemeber.
The 45-year-old star of Panic Room, The Accused and Silence Of The Lambs, who was collecting an award, pointedly thanked: "My beautiful Cydney, who sticks by me through all the rotten and the bliss."

So, they'd been going strong as a secret for 14 years, but five months after Jodie tells the world -- kaput.

See? This "coming out" stuff is highly overrated. It's much better for gays to hide in the closet. The shame and secrecy keeps you close.

I wonder if the voices in John Hinckley's head will tell him to go kill Jodie's ex-girlfriend?

Brand damage

Republicans are starting to realize that the policy blunders of Team Bush and the GOP Establishment have badly hurt the party's image:

They said the first was an outlier. The second, a fluke. But after losing their third seat this year in a special election, House Republicans faced the possibility on Wednesday that if they don't repair their image with voters, they could be in for another rough November.

Understatement of the year!

A Democratic pick-up streak that started with Rep. Bill Foster's upset victory in the March election to replace former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) crested Tuesday night, when Democrat Travis Childers won a solidly Republican open seat in Mississippi.
The GOP spent one-fifth of its available national party cash for House races on the Mississippi seat. Vice President Dick Cheney campaigned there. President George W. Bush and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain pitched in with automated phone calls. Their candidate lost anyway. Meanwhile, reeling House Republicans unveiled a new slogan this week --"Change you deserve" -- only to watch Democrats gleefully note that it is already used to market an antidepressant.
Several House Republicans say the losses reveal a voter disconnect with their party, rooted in dissatisfaction with Bush, which GOP candidates will have to repair district-by-district this fall. Some, including McCain and several members of the Illinois congressional delegation, appear to believe that to "re-brand" the Republican Party, they must first distance themselves from it.

In six months time, there will be a smoldering crater where the Republican Party used to be. The GOP is heading for one of its worst years since 1974. And the blame belongs squarely on the shoulders of Team Bush. This administration has been a political failure, and it's time this failure was acknowledged.

Silky has Hope

Will the endorsement of a smarmy trial lawyer make a difference?

At a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Wednesday evening, John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama, who was on the stage with him, to be the Democratic nominee for president.
Sounding a theme of a nation divided into parts by walls, Mr. Edwards said, "The reason I am here tonight is that Democratic voters in America have made their choice and so have I."
Mr. Edwards then went on to say, "There is one man who knows in his heart that it is time to tear down that wall and make one America, Barack Obama."

What a phenomenally stupid thing to say. In a nation of 300 million people, there is only one man who has this great truth "in his heart"?

Eh, who cares? Edwards' value to Obama is that Edwards had been Kerry's running mate in 2004 and was the third leading candidate in the primaries this year. Edwards has made a career pushing logical fallacies with emotional resonance, and his latest expedition into incoherence won't bother Obama.

However, Edwards has 16 pledged delegates who could help move Obama that much closer to the nomination.

Sean Penn, brain-dead

Interviewed at Cannes:

”I don't have a candidate I'm supporting and I'm certainly interested and excited by the hope that Barack Obama is inspiring,” he said, but went on to accuse him of a “phenomenally inhuman and unconstitutional” voting record.
”I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn't become a greater man than he will ever be,” Penn said. “This is the most important election, certainly in my lifetime, and maybe ever.”

BTW, guess who joined Penn on the red carpet at Cannes? Natalie Portman:

Portman, 26, said she would not be endorsing Obama or his rival, Hillary Clinton, but added: “I think it's a very exciting year for our politics, that for the first time in a while we have a choice of who we like better instead of who we hate least.”

Just what I needed. Another flimsy excuse to blog about Natalie Portman.

Rangoon or bust!

A "humanitarian invasion" of Burma? Surely, you jest. I know I do. How do you say "sarcasm" in Burmese?

Megadittos

Over at the American Spectator blog, I linked Rush Limbaugh's discussion of Tuesday's Mississippi congressional defeat, which El Rushbo blames on "the Republican establishment . . . the country club types who are in the process of destroying the Republican Party . . . the pseudoconservatives of the New York Times and the DC-New York media establishment who think that Rockefeller Republicanism and country club Republicanism is the future of the party."

There can be no doubt, I believe, that Limbaugh is talking about David Brooks, Bill Kristol, Michael Gerson and other such Republican critics of limited-government conservatism. By the way, as James Antle notes, Gerson's column today -- as usual, hyping Bush's "compassionate" agenda -- got a quick smackdown from Dr. Coburn:

Unfortunately, all Gerson has shown is that demagoguery is the last refuge of a former administration official looking for a legacy.

Ouch. The gormless Gerson deserved that.

Fairly unbalanced

This Fox News anchor rolls his eyes and his voice drips with sarcasm as he keeps throwing GOP talking points at Bob Barr:



The anchor begins the interview this way:

"So, could he be a spoiler for John McCain? . . . Libertarian nominees have never managed to get more than 1 percent of the vote in presidential elections . . . . Do you really think you have a realistic chance of getting elected, and if not, then why are you doing this?"

Barr gives a 45-second answer, then the anchor says:

"Let me stop you there. In a close race, you could turn out to be the kind of spoiler for John McCain that Ralph Nader was Al Gore eight years ago. . . ."

The anchor then reads back to Barr a quote from Newt Gingrich. So the Barr candidacy is only of interest to Fox News insofar as Barr threatens to be a "spoiler for John McCain." (In point of fact, it was not Nader, but Pat Buchanan who delivered the fatal blow to Gore in Florida, due to the Palm Beach County "butterfly ballot.")

Is Fox News in the business of reporting the news, or is it in the business of electing John McCain? I can understand an unabashed GOP publicist like Stephen Spruiell parroting the Gingrich spin, but nobody ever expects anything except Republican talking points from National Review anymore. I thought Fox, at least, wanted to maintain some semblance of independence.

UPDATE: It's not that I've got anything against Republican talking points per se. I like this RNC ad, for example:



(Via Hot Air.) That's a campaign ad that doesn't pretend to be anything but a campaign ad, whereas the Fox anchor was delivering Republican talking points as if they were actually news.

'Thank you, West Virginia!'

Hillary Clinton vows to continue her divisive race-baiting campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, no matter what her critics say:



I didn't hear Rush Limbaugh's show today, so I don't know what to think about this yet.

Pre-teen pole dancers?

Michelle Malkin rightly denounces as "pedophilia chic," Beyonce's new line of slutwear for toddlers. In the process, she links back to her own post from October (a post I must have missed at the time) about a scene from "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," in which a Hollywood producer records video of Bruce Jenner's pre-teen daughters (Kim Kardashian's half-sisters) dancing on a stripper pole:

Where are the feminists who should be denouncing this exploitative crap? Teaching 9- and 11-year girls to imitate strippers? Might as well sign them up now as Future Dates of Elliott Spitzer.

It's not just celebrity sleazoids who are pushing to sexualize kids. I reported about the academic pro-pedophile movement in 2002.

Hillary foe declares victory

But he's not going home:

It isn’t just Barack Obama’s camp that’s starting to claim victory over Hillary Clinton. Some conservatives are, too. Richard Collins, the Texas GOP activist and fundraiser behind the anti-Clinton site StopHerNow.com, has declared her, well, stopped.“Sen. Clinton has been whupped and its over,” Collins told us. . . .
Not that Collins’ work is done. Late last week, he announced the debut of Stop-Him-Now.com to help take down Obama.

This morning I drank my coffee from a promotional StopHerNow.com mug I picked up at CPAC in 2006.

Hillary's Hillbilly Heaven

Oh, what a beautiful sight at TPM from John Marshall, who provides this map of Appalachia:



And then this map of counties where Hillary's won Democratic primaries by 65% or more:



Marshall then asks, "So what is it about this region?" Hey, man, ask Obama. We're just bitter, and that's all there is to it.

Sing it, Tex:

Blues in the blood?

Blogging over at The American Spectator about a Dutch blog that erroneously stated that I'm not related to Crazy Cousin John:

I am a distant cousin of John McCain, a kinship that can be traced back to two brothers, Hugh and Alexander McCain, who migrated westward from South Carolina circa 1800. One branch of the family ended up as plantation owners in the Mississippi Delta, the other branch ended up as East Alabama dirt farmers. I'm a proud descendant of the Alabama dirt-farming McCains.

Following that link to the 2000 Salon article, I noticed this paragraph:

Tracing the genealogies of slaves is often easy, because slaves frequently adopted the surnames of their owners. In 1876, for example, a Mary J. McCain married Isham Hurt. The two had a son, blues guitarist "Mississippi" John Hurt, in 1892 on Teoc, the plantation community where the McCains owned 2,000 acres.

The mighty McCain mojo might be hereditary.

Who's to blame?

The Republican brand is badly damaged:

The sky is falling on House Republicans and there is no sign of it letting up.
The GOP loss in Mississippi’s special election Tuesday is the strongest sign yet that the Republican Party is in shambles. And while some Republicans see a light at the end of the tunnel, that light more likely represents the Democratic train that is primed to mow down more Republicans in November.
The third straight House special election loss in three conservative districts this year is a clear indication that the GOP brand is turning off voters and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is in disarray.

Let the hunt for scapegoats commence! The Republican Party's professional apologists will scour around for excuses, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that the Bush presidency has been a political failure.

Republicans lost 31 House seats and six Senate seats in the 2006 mid-term elections, and the GOP's grand poobahs tried to ignore the significance of their defeat.

One of the big reasons for the 2006 disaster was that John McCain's amnesty bill alienated many blue-collar voters who had been voting Republican in recent elections. Yet not only did McCain try to pass amnesty again in 2007, but then the Republican Party nominated the La Raza-loving author of this anti-American legislation as its 2008 presidential candidate.

It was President Bush himself who, in January 2004, proposed guest-worker status and amnesty for "undocument workers." In his second term, Bush pressured Republicans in Congress to support such legislation. No doubt other factors are involved in the collapse of the GOP coalition, but it's imp0ssible to ignore the role of Bush, McCain and amnesty in this disaster.

Some of my conservative friends are engaged in a "rally 'round the GOP nominee" effort, and their motives I won't impugn. It seems to me, however, given the mounting evidence that Republicans are doomed to defeat in November, that the smart thing for conservatives to do would be to get as far away as possible from this impending disaster.

On Nov. 5, when there's nothing left of the Republican Party but a smoldering crater, you want to be in a position to say, "I told you so."

UPDATE: Dad29 likes my line from yesterday:

Conservatives are like a battered wife in an abusive relationship with the GOP, except that we can't even get a restraining order.

I think my obstreperous attitude toward the Republican elite my be rooted in my experiences as an ex-Democrat. I was born and raised a yellow-dog Democrat and remained fiercely loyal to the party long after many of my friends and neighbors had become "Reagan Democrats." (To give you an idea of what a hard-core partisan I was, I voted for Mondale in '84 -- in Georgia, a state where Reagan got 60% of the vote.)

For years, I gritted my teeth and put up with the idiotic liberals who kept bringing disaster on the Democrats. I didn't even bother to vote in 1988. And then in 1992, along came Bill Clinton, a Southern governor who at least made an effort to distance himself from the Dukakis/Cranston wing of the party. Clinton fooled me so completely that I became an enthusiastic supporter --bumper stickers on the back of my car, the whole deal.

Fool me once, as they say. The three most significant initiatives of the Clinton administration were: (a) gays in the military, (b) socialized medicine, and (c) the bogus "assault weapons" ban. You may say I'm ignoring other major Clinton initiatives, but these were the most significant to me, in that I was 100% against them.

I had voted for a "Sam Nunn Democrat," and had gotten a San Francisco Democrat instead. The "assault weapons" ban was the real deal-breaker. My reaction could be summed up in four words: F--- you, Democratic Party.

By 1996, I'd swung so far to the right that I couldn't bring myself to vote for that mushy middle-of-the-road sellout Bob Dole, the "Senator From Archer Daniels Midland" whom Newt Gingrich once dubbed "the tax collector for the welfare state." In 1996, I voted for Harry Browne.

Having been screwed, blued and tattooed by the Democrats, I'm now intensely skeptical of those conservatives who urge me to act on motives of Republican partisan loyalty, despite every evidence that the GOP has nothing but contempt for its conservative supporters.

UPDATE II: Philip Klein of The American Spectator dubs John McCain "the only electable candidate in [the GOP] once Rudy Giuliani's post-9/11 popularity vanished," causing me to register my astonishment. That GOP Kool-Aid must be powerful stuff.

P.S.: So far as I know, the term "pre-mortem" was coined in October 2006. With all the gloomy GOP omens this year I say, why wait until October?

'Please come to Denver'

Thousands of left-wing freaks are coming to Denver, and the city's freaking out:

Planning for the worst during the Democratic National Convention requires one of the best, and that expertise doesn’t come cheap.
Denver is paying $225 an hour - or $9,000 a week - to Ellis M. Stanley Sr., an emergency management veteran who has been tapped to serve as director of DNC planning for the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
Stanley, who has overseen planning for major events including the 1988 Democratic convention and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, stands to make up to $280,000 while under contract with the city through August.

The 1996 Olympics -- yeah, that turned out swell.

Michelle Malkin has dubbed Stanley an "expert on moonbat management," but I wonder if Denver put this job up for bids? I probably could have come up with a lot cheaper security plan for the Democratic convention. Hire a bunch of bitter Bible-clinging gun-toters, give 'em plenty of .12-gauge shotgun ammunition, and if anybody wants to start any trouble, Go ahead, punk, make my day.

P.S.: The post title is from the second verse of Dave Loggins' 1974 hit, "Please Come to Boston":

GOP VP DOA

Immediately after finishing a gloomy assessment of Republican prospects in November, I saw Michelle Malkin's reaction to the news that open-borders Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is now considered the top contender for GOP running-mate:

Can someone please fast-forward to 2012? Please.

Agreed. But if things keep going in the current direction at the current rate, there won't even be a Republican Party by 2012. I couldn't help but think of Dante's inscription at the portal to Hell:

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

I'm tired of hoping that the Republican Party will ever recover its senses. Conservatives are like a battered wife in an abusive relationship with the GOP, except that we can't even get a restraining order.

Or maybe I'm just depressed.

Polls and possibilities

As of today, the Real Clear Politics poll average shows Barack Obama at 47.8%, John McCain at 43.3%.

Obama has just weathered two months of unceasing bad press, beginning with the first ABC News story about Jeremiah Wright on March 13. Then there was Bittergate (April 11), his poor performance in the Philadelphia debate (April 16), his defeat in Pennsylvania (April 22), Wright's media tour (April 25-28) and flag-stomping Bill Ayers (May 5).

After all this, then, Obama holds an average lead of more than 4 points in eight polls done since April 30. Moreover, in two of those polls (CBS and ABC) Obama hit 51%. McCain has not hit 50% in a head-to-head matchup with Obama since an early January USA Today poll.

With even James Carville now ready to stick a fork in Hillary Clinton's campaign, and an Obama-McCain general-election contest now all but certain, those polls should give pause to pundits who are busy plotting scenarios in which John McCain wins in November.

Is a McCain victory even possible?

Well, anything is possible, I suppose, but it's hard to see it as a likely scenario. Bush's approval numbers continue to reach new nadirs, the wrong-track numbers are near the 80% level, and Democrats have a double-digit edge in generic congressional numbers.

So far as polls can forecast, then, Republicans are sailing for a November electoral disaster on the scale of 1964 or '74. Meanwhile, we see the GOP standard-bearer distancing himself still further from the party's conservative base, e.g., endorsing the global warming hoax.

What we don't see, however, is conservative pundits bluntly acknowledging this pessimistic picture, or naming names in terms of who is responsible for the startling decline of GOP fortunes since 2004.

On Jan. 20, 2005, the political forecast was for continued Republican dominance. Within 22 months, however, the GOP lost its congressional majority. The party establishment apparently learned nothing from that mid-term defeat, and so the downward spiral of Republican fortunes appears likely to continue this fall. By Jan. 20, 2009, Democrats will control the White House and both houses of Congress, and the GOP will be right back where it was in 1993.

If conservative pundits do not begin assessing blame for this looming debacle, other pundits will. And those other pundits will blame . . . conservatives.

'Indistinguishable'?

Thanks for the traffic, Michelle Malkin, but I was stunned at your statement that Bob Barr is "virtually indistinguishable from all the other remaining presidential candidates" on illegal immigration. As I report at the American Spectator blog:

"If a person is illegally in this country, the taxpayers of this country and the government of this country owe them nothing," Barr said.
"This notion that government owes something to people, simply because they're here, does not resonate with me as somebody who believes in responsible government. If one were running a charity called the United States of America, that would be one thing. This is not a charity, this is the people's business. . . . I disagree with the [1982 Plyer v. Doe] court decision . . . that decided that children of illegal aliens, people who are in this country unlawfully, have a right to a public education paid for by the taxpayers of this country. That is an improper, irresponsible decision."

For some reason, none of the MSM reporters at the event thought that quote newsworthy. But it's certainly distinguishable from anything John McCain has ever said.

UPDATE 5/13: A source in the Barr campaign tells me they were bombarded Monday with hostile, vitriolic e-mails from John McCain's supporters. I myself was unaware that See-Dubya is a McCainiac, as indicated by his comment on my Monday morning post:

Ron Paul grew a moustache?

By which See-Dubya apparently means to dismiss Barr as an anti-war crackpot. Well, Barr's never trucked with Truthers, at least. And the Spectator's Philip Klein sees a difference:

On international affairs in general, his tone was a lot more measured than what we've seen from Ron Paul -- there were no stinging critiques of U.S. as an imperialist nation.

Barr voted for the Iraq War, but now believes it was a mistake and wants to "set in place a plan" to "dramatically decrease the military, the economic, and the political footprint we maintain in Iraq."

But his language remained cautious. He opposes precipitous withdrawal, and described it as "foolhardy" to announce a timetable for pulling out of Iraq.

"Only a fool would signal to whoever their adversaries are when we would be drawing down our troops," he said.In response to another question, he added that "the doctrine of preemptive war has no basis in traditional and historical notions of America's security."

Barr's a big boy who can defend himself, but I have a hard time reconciling the way some of my friends are now calling for conservatives to rally 'round the GOP banner with the way they were talking in January and February.

I turned on the radio Monday morning and actually heard Laura Ingraham making apologies for John McCain, the same day he moved to Bush's left on "climate change." Now he's not just a RINO, he's a green RINO -- and he approves this message:

Gag me with a renewable energy source. Drew M at AOSHQ:

Boy, I am glad I live in NY and don't have to feel bad about not voting for the guy . . .

Yeah, Maryland is also deep Blue, so I get a free vote, too.

It's Barr Day!

Raining cats and dogs in DC -- we had flood warnings last night -- as I get ready to head down to the National Press Club for Bob Barr's 11 a.m. press conference. As I explain at the American Spectator blog:

Hate to spoil any surprises, but as a general rule, politicians don't book an NPC press conference to announce they're not running for president.

The L.A. Times today mentions Barr in talking about Ron Paul's forces opposing Sen. John McCain inside the GOP:

Paul's candidacy [is] a reflection of a powerful lingering dissatisfaction with the Arizona senator among the party's most conservative conservatives. . . . [T]hat situation could be exacerbated by today's expected announcement from former Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia for the Libertarian Party's presidential nod, a slot held by Paul in 1988.

Ralph Z. Hallow of The Washington Times has a story about Republicans who fear the potential impact of a Barr LP candidacy:

Republicans, both publicly and behind the scenes, are saying that a Barr run could hurt him financially and sink Mr. McCain's Republican candidacy in the general election, likely against Sen. Barack Obama.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Times today that "Bob Barr will make it marginally easier for Barack Obama to become president. That outcome threatens every libertarian value Barr professes to champion."

Electing the co-author of McCain-Feingold would threaten no libertarian values?

BTW, back in February, I was the first journalist to report on the "Draft Barr" movement that led to this campaign. That movement was hatched during CPAC. I first heard about it Feb. 8, a few hours after Barr introduced Ron Paul:

What did she get for $20 million?

Hillary should demand a refund:

Clinton aides continued to insist that she will remain in the race even while confirming that she is $20 million in debt. "The voters are going to decide this," senior adviser Howard Wolfson said on "Fox News Sunday," acknowledging the $20 million figure. . . .

As of a month ago, most of that debt was reportedly owed to the firm of former Clinton top strategist Mark Penn:

A source who has had close connections with Penn got word to me that he believes the Clinton campaign is $10 million in debt to Penn, Schoen & Berland, which is owned by Burson-Marsteller. The campaign's March report to the Federal Election Commission recorded indebtedness to the company of nearly $2.5 million (with its expenses for the month listed at $3.1 million).
My sources suggest that Clinton's full indebtedness may be revealed only gradually. This money link helps explain why Penn is still around even though organized labor demanded his scalp last summer and he is blamed inside the campaign for failing to perceive the public's demand for "change."
Just how much money Clinton owes Penn could cause major difficulties. If not repaid
promptly, would it constitute an illegal financial contribution? Because the British WPP owns Burson-Marsteller, would that debt constitute an illegal foreign contribution?

This is one of my pet peeves about political professionals in both parties. The top operatives get rich running campaigns, and they get paid whether the candidates win or lose. There is a built-in bias for operatives to respond to every problem in the campaign by saying, "The solution is to give me more money." The pollsters always want more money for polling, the media strategists want more money for ads, etc.

What results is a high "burn rate" -- spending campaign funds as fast, or faster, than they come in. These contributions often come from true-believer types, in response to "urgent" appeals to the effect of, "Help us save America!"

Those donors are getting ripped off, if that money goes mainly to line the pockets of some bigshot operative. And how can a candidates, in good conscience, ask students and housewives to work as unpaid volunteers while, at the same time, the campaign is pouring out millions in fat fees to expensive consultants? The consultants, strategists, and pollsters get paid, win or lose.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: There are McMansions in Virginia horse country -- and yachts on the Chesapeake Bay -- that were paid for with consulting contracts on losing campaigns.