Spike Lee is a Pussy

My wall post on Spike Lee's Facebook page had a brief life, inspiring a few "Likes" before it was deleted. Here's what I wrote:

Spike Lee's first offense was to tweet Zimmerman's address, implicitly encouraging a mob to flock there and extract their own "justice." Spike Lee's second offense was tweeting THE WRONG ADDRESS. Spike Lee sent a mob to the home of an innocent elderly couple, who were forced to flee for their lives. Mr. Lee, are you going to "do the right thing," apologize, call off the mob, and compensate the elderly victims of your little race war?

The cynical race-baiter apparently doesn't like having his actions questioned.

What a pussy.

UPDATE: Spike Lee apologized to the innocent elderly couple and offered them some compensation, but only AFTER the couple hired a lawyer. To the best of my knowledge, Spike Lee has never atoned for having intended to send a mob to the home of a man who has not been convicted of a crime. In other words, still a pussy.

Did Al Sharpton Kill Trayvon Martin?

If the facts are as alleged, and Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman and slammed his head against the sidewalk, I wonder: what could have provoked such behavior from Martin?  Zimmerman's numerous calls to 911 are well-known, but no one has suggested that Zimmerman had a pattern of reacting to suspicious persons with physical violence sufficient to justify Martin's use of potentially lethal force against Zimmerman.

 

If Martin's use of force was not grounded in fear for his own life, what was going on? 

 

Could Martin have been influenced by the culture of grievance peddled by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, among others?  Was Martin offended that Zimmerman questioned whether he was legitimately in the area?  Did the countless apologists for urban pathology make him feel justified in responding violently to a perceived affront?  Did he perceive the Neighborhood Watch not as a response to more than 200 crimes in the neighborhood during a six month period, but as another attempt to keep the Black Man down?

 

Did Al Sharpton kill Trayvon Martin?

 

The Left's Creepy Paternalism

 

When Carbonite CEO David Friend explained his decision to pull his company's ads from Rush Limbaugh's radio show, he said the following:

 

"No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady."

 

Similarly, when President Obama explained his decision to call Sandra Fluke and offer his support, he said he did so after "thinking about his daughters."

 

From both men, the language is that of adults discussing children -- a father defending his daughter's performance in a school play -- not adults discussing another adult in the context of a battle over the First Amendment.

 

Leftist women, having played the victim card for so long, must feel like they've hit the jackpot: here's the President of the United States, infantilizing a thirty year old law student.  Just think of the government programs we'll be able to wring out of this!

 

Leftist women may have won this skirmish, but they ought to be very concerned about the cost.  This creepy paternalism from the Left, regarding women as tender beings requiring protection, is the real War on Women.  Today, paternalism is being exploited as a wedge to water down the First Amendment in the name of Obamacare and "reproductive justice;" the same paternalism was once used to deprive women of the vote in order to protect them from a political world deemed too rough for their sensibilities.

 

If American womanhood was really as fragile as David Friend and Barack Obama would have us believe, then one could hardly blame educational and professional institutions from closing the doors to us.

 

Fortunately, there are plenty of American women ready to disprove the slander that we are like so many daughters waiting for our Beneficent Governmental Father to protect us.  If you'd like to meet some of us, check out your local Tea Party or GOP.

 

The Great California Dust Bowl

The First Lady recently traveled to Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas to announce an overhaul of the nutritional and dietary guidelines for the American military. Less fat; more veggies, fruit, and whole grains.

"Don't worry, you'll be a vegetable guy soon," she reassured one reluctant airman. In reality, if that reluctant airman is left to enjoy his patty melt in peace, he'll have an environmentalist to thank.

More than half of the country's fruits, nuts, and vegetables are grown in California, mostly in the San Joaquin Valley. California's share of nationwide crop production is as follows:

Artichokes 99%, Asparagus 44%, Broccoli 92%; Carrots 65%, Celery 95%; Garlic 91%; Lettuce 78%; Cantaloupe 61%; Honeydew 73%; Onions 35%; Bell Peppers 51%; Spinach 72%; Processing Tomatoes 93%; Almond 99%; Apricots 94%; Avocados 85%; Strawberries 92%; Dates 82%; Figs 96%; Grapes 89%; Kiwi 97%; Lemons 91%; Nectarines 98%; Olives 96%; Peaches 76%; Pistachios 98%; Plums 94%; Walnuts 99%; Honey 11%; Milk and cream 22%. (Stats courtesy of Devin Nunes (R. CA-21))

Unfortunately, environmentalist attorneys armed with the Endangered Species Act are starving the fertile farmland in California's great San Joaquin Valley in order to provide habitat for salmon and a three-inch bait fish known as the Delta Smelt. When the rains are abundant, the farmers can bring forth the San Joaquin Valley's bounty; but when rains are scarce, Northern California, with one third of the population and two thirds of the water, prioritizes fish over people and refuses to deliver water to the Valley.

In some San Joaquin Valley towns, unemployment approaches 40%, and unemployed agricultural workers line up at food banks to receive bags of carrots grown in China.

Congressman Devin Nunes (R. CA-21) introduced H.R. 1837, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act, to pre-empt the California laws that prioritize bait fish over farmers and farmland and rationalize the usage of California's abundant water supplies. The bill passed the House 246-175, but faces an uncertain future in the Senate. California Senator Dianne Feinstein is dead set against it, and Obama has promised to veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

The San Joaquin Valley's need for water is something that should unite both sides, the Democrats who want us to eat our vegetables and the Republicans and San Joaquin Valley residents who want to go back to work producing food for America's tables. But Obama doesn't need to do anything for California to be assured of its support in November, so he allows the San Joaquin Valley to become a dust bowl in order to please the environmentalists in his base.

The good news is, the First Lady might not be able to scrounge up enough vegetables to turn us all into pale, scrawny vegetarians. The bad news is, that piece of lettuce on your bacon cheeseburger will probably come from China.

Sandra Fluke and the Rise of Fourth-Wave Feminism

Feminism comes in waves.

First-wave feminism was concerned with the right to vote and property rights.

Second-wave feminism was concerned with legal and social barriers to educational and professional opportunities for women. In second-wave feminism, porn was bad.

Third-wave feminism gave us the indulgent academic disciplines of ecofeminism and queer theory; Slut Walks; and girl bands. Porn was acceptable again.

Sandra Fluke's remarks before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee mark the public debut of fourth-wave feminism. In this wave, activists are no longer concerned with rights or legal impediments, because those battles have largely been won by the first and second waves. For example, reproductive rights would seem to have been settled by the second-wave feminists and the Supreme Court case of Griswold v. State of Connecticut, which overturned states' laws banning contraceptives, so what's left to fight about?

Watch Sandra Fluke's remarks again, if you can. She describes how the women at (Catholic) Georgetown University have suffered "emotionally, medically, and financially" because of the University's religiously-based refusal to cover contraceptives in its insurance plan. She tells the tale of a friend with polycystic ovary disease who, unable to afford the $100/mo unsubsidized cost of the oral contraceptives used to treat her disease, stopped taking the pills and subsequently lost an ovary. She tells the tale of another woman who felt "embarrassed and powerless" at the drugstore counter when she realized that her contraceptives were not covered by insurance.

Embarrassed, powerless, don't know where to turn: that is American womanhood to a fourth-wave feminist. If the first wave gave us the Suffragettes and Carrie Nation, the fourth wave has given us whiny little bitches and fainting women. These women, Sandra Fluke instructs us, HAVE NO CHOICE but to go without contraception, which can cost over $3000 while a woman is in law school.

Fortunately for Sandra, she was only giving opening remarks at a committee hearing and not formal testimony before Congress, or she might have to answer for having provided false testimony. The medical histories are protected by privacy law and are therefore completely unverifiable, but Fluke's assertions concerning the cost of contraception are very easily challenged.

The woman with polycystic ovary disease, the woman who was "embarrassed and powerless" at the pharmacy counter, and the married couple who just couldn't fit contraceptives into their budget are all examples of Silly People. Silly People who, when confronted with an unmanageable expense, didn't make any effort to find a workable alternative, just whined about it to anyone who would listen. If these Silly People had picked up a phone, they would have quickly learned that oral contraceptives can be obtained from WalMart or Target for $9 per month. Assuming 34 months to complete a J.D., that would amount to just over $300, well short of the $3000 claimed by Sandra Fluke.

For the sake of these Silly People, Sandra Fluke would have us toss the First Amendment overboard, and force Catholics to subsidize a product which violates their religious beliefs and conscience.

When these Silly People, these whiny little bitches and fainting women, came to Sandra Fluke with their tales of contraceptives denied, did she help them research cost-effective alternatives? I'll bet she didn't; women who were actually empowered to act on their own behalf would be less valuable to her as props in a campaign against organized religion and religious liberty.

And that's what this battle is about. No one is preventing women from using contraception, the battle Sandra Fluke is fighting isn't about women's rights at all. The battle is about the threats to religious liberty posed by a President who regards it as seditious for a religious institution to openly disagree with him, and whose most tender feelings for the Constitution occur when he imagines rewriting it. We must make sure Barack Obama and Sandra Fluke end up on the wrong side of history.

San Francisco Killed the Golden Goose

When Larry Ellison's BMW Oracle Racing Team won the America's Cup yacht race in 2010, Ellison won the right to choose the location of the America's Cup Finals in 2013, and he chose to bring the race to San Francisco.

Unfortunately, portions of San Francisco's waterfront are in a state of crumbling disrepair, unable to safely bear the weight of the new infrastructure necessary to accommodate staging and the millions of viewers expected to visit the waterfront to enjoy the race. As part of the negotiations with San Francisco officials, Larry Ellison offered to spend $150 million of his own money to renovate Piers 30-32 (pictured above) in return for long term development rights.

But the devil is in the details, and as the deal neared its final approval, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors kept asking for more and more concessions. It wasn't enough that Ellison was going to spend his own money to fix something that San Franciscans couldn't figure out how to fix themselves, the Supervisors had to wring every last drop from him. He's rich, he can afford it. Soak him, where's he gonna go?

He went John Galt. Ellison has walked away from his offer to spend his own money to fix San Francisco's rotting piers. He will confine the race infrastructure to a different portion of the waterfront, and Piers 30-32 will be left to fall into the San Francisco Bay.

In my 2010 post San Francisco's Great America's Cup Swindle, I predicted a similar outcome:

Try to do anything on the waterfront, and you'll be faced with decades of opposition from environmentalists who find an endangered snail on a piling, residents who don't want the view from their houses altered, native tribes who throw an arrowhead in the water and claim the area as sacred ground, and community organizers (aided and abetted by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors) who demand massive set-asides for San Francisco's vocal oppressed people, including a guarantee of racing team jobs for low-income minorities.

If you think I'm kidding, you don't know this town. The promise of future development rights on the San Francisco waterfront is a promise of decades of misery, expense, and litigation. If the America's Cup race organizers are smart, they'll decline the opportunity to leave their hearts, minds, and wallets in San Francisco.

Even my grim prediction proved too optimistic; I thought the Board of Supervisors would at least wait until after the race to screw Larry Ellison.

In an unusual move, NBC will be broadcasting the America's Cup Finals from San Francisco. The broadcasts will likely feature shots of well-dressed worthies sipping champagne by the Bay, followed by shots of the crumbling piers. I predict that NBC will be unable to resist spinning the visual narrative into an argument for redistribution, a story of Two San Franciscos: one prosperous and glittering, one starved of capital (specifically, other people's capital, preferably taxpayers' capital) and allowed to decay.

And NBC will be almost right. The contrast between the muscular materialism of a yacht race and the decrepitude of San Francisco's piers will be instructive, as a lesson in the wealth that can be created when people are free to spend their own money vs. the decay that results from relying on the redistribution of wealth to solve your problems.

San Francisco killed the Golden Goose. I'm proud of Larry Ellison for walking away.

Party On, Sandra Fluke

I don't care how much sex Sandra Fluke has.  Whether or not she is a slut, she is an offensive idiot.

 

By suggesting that the struggle for free contraception is the defining women's struggle of our time, she has belittled the lives of American women who struggle to balance the demands of work and family in a declining economy, and whose struggles are much more important than a college student's desire for consequence-free sex.

 

No, Sandra, forcing people to pay for your contraceptives is not a "women's issue."  It is a whiny, coddled, greedy child's issue.  By cynically pitting women against the religious freedoms guaranteed by the first amendment, Sandra Fluke has engaged in demagoguery of the worst sort.

 

When I think of "women's issues," I think of things like: the prevalence of undiagnosed heart problems in women; public schools' increasing success at substituting their own values for those we teach at home; breast cancer; growing old alone; no fault divorce; a culture of death that equates feminine empowerment with killing our children in the womb; the degradation of the "hook-up" youth culture; and taking care of our parents while we are still raising our children.

 

I don't give a moment's thought to whether some privileged co-ed is required to pay for her contraception out of her own pocket.  I've got real problems to worry about and real bills to pay, and I am outraged that Sandra Fluke is trying to co-opt American womanhood for her petty, greedy, oppressive, bullying campaign.

Andrew Breitbart

I never met Andrew Breitbart, but I was fortunate to be present for his remarks to the California Young Republican Federation Convention in 2011. The Convention was held in San Francisco, the Belly of the Liberal Beast, and he encouraged us to "come out of the closet" and meet the beast head-on.

He was inspiring, engaging, compelling, vintage Breitbart, but the wild delivery and passion aren't what I remember most. I remember his call for courage. The courage to be Conservative in a state run on a European welfare state model, the courage to be the target of hate, the courage to fight the battle that must be fought when everyone around you is telling you to sit down, shut up, and eat your biodynamic vegetables.

I work in San Francisco, and after I heard of Breitbart's untimely death I couldn't bring myself to go to the office and spend eight hours among Liberals. Breitbart would have relished the challenge, donned a Guy Fawkes mask and a superhero cape and charged right in. And that's what made him special.

I will be courageous tomorrow. Today, I grieve for the man and his family.