R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Clearly, nothing commands more respect than these serious-minded feminists dressed as giant “lady parts”, eh?

You’ve got to love the unintended hilarity of this scene outside the GOP Convention in Tampa.

Ladies, I may begin to respect you when you begin to respect yourselves. Certainly not before.

Stoutcat

H/T: HotAir

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be “Showgirls”

Sadly, it’s likely that bit of paraphrased advice will have absolutely no effect on the children involved in a show called “Dance Moms” on the Lifetime Network.

The Lifetime Television Network claims to be for women. Its mission statement:

Lifetime Networks is a diverse, multi-media company, committed to offering the highest quality entertainment and information programming content that celebrates, entertains and supports women. Through its award-winning public affairs initiatives, the Company also advocates a wide range of issues affecting women and their families.

Nowhere in their statement do they mention the well-being of little girls, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that this network would choose to produce an episode of a show called “Dance Moms” in which little girls are basically taught a bump-and-grind routine, dressed in nude costumes bedizzened with sequins and feathers, and required to peform said routine in front of the cameras. Yeah, that celebrates, entertains, and supports women, all right.

Tuesday night’s episode, titled “Topless Showgirls,” featured girls as young as eight performing a sexually charged, provocative showgirl-like routine in a local dance competition, donning barely-there sparkly flesh-colored bras and panties to give the illusion of nudity.

“All the girls and I feel kind of nervous because we feel kind of naked,” one of the dancers said prior to taking the stage…

The raunchy routine involved girls thrusting their chests forward and backward, shimmying across the stage and even pretending to cover themselves up with big feathers as they bounced from the stage. [emphasis mine]

The woman in charge of all of this, Abby Lee Miller, teaches the little girls this routine:

“I’m hot, I’m mean, you can’t have me, you can’t afford me,” Miller recited to the girls as she taught the moves, before telling the cameras: “The moms are ridiculous because all they’re worried about is their kids and their bodies and blah blah. Once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. This is show business kid.”

“You can’t have me, you can’t afford me.” Honestly, I can’t think of anything more horrifying than having a daughter of mine under the thumb of a woman like this for any reason whatsoever.

Read the whole report at Fox News and prepare for your blood to boil.

It’s funny. Rush Limbaugh lost a few advertisers because he implied that a 30-year-old woman who demanded that others pay for her sex life was somewhat less than virtuous; liberal men and women were predictably “outraged” by his calling a slut a slut. Perhaps it’s time to reset the concept of outrage back to where it belongs–by reacting strongly when people actually do things like this to exploit children.

You can email Lifetime Network… well, no, apparently you can’t contact them via email. But their phone number is 212- 424-7293.

If any of these girls are able to escape the influence of their “dance” instructor and their Rose Hovic-type mothers, I fear many of them are still destined to grow up to be latter-day Sandra Flukes.

Stoutcat

Flipping the Switch: Your Tax Dollars at Work

Yes, we’ve poured billions of tax dollars subsidizing the building of massive wind farms throughout the Columbia River Gorge. And now the turbines are being turned off because they’re producing too much power. And we’re paying them to shut down!

Fox News reports:

Wind farms in the Pacific Northwest — built with government subsidies and maintained with tax credits for every megawatt produced — are now getting paid to shut down as the federal agency charged with managing the region’s electricity grid says there’s an oversupply of renewable power at certain times of the year.

The problem arose during the late spring and early summer last year. Rapid snow melt filled the Columbia River Basin. The water rushed through the 31 dams run by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency based in Portland, Ore., allowing for peak hydropower generation. At the very same time, the wind howled, leading to maximum wind power production.

Demand could not keep up with supply, so BPA shut down the wind farms for nearly 200 hours over 38 days… [Emphasis mine]

…Now, Bonneville is offering to compensate wind companies for half their lost revenue. The bill could reach up to $50 million a year.

The extra payout means energy users will eventually have to pay more. 

Of course they will. And most people aren’t happy with the solution. Even environmentalists think it’s a bad idea — not because of the waste of money, energy, or resources, you understand, but because it looks bad for business:

“It sends a very poor signal to the market about doing business in the Northwest,” said Rachel Shimshak, executive director of the Renewable Northwest Project. “We want the Northwest to be a good place to do business.”

 

Sadly, the Bonneville Power folks can’t really do anything about it. Why? (All together now…) Because of environmental regulations! Apparently shutting down the hydropower instead of the wind turbines is bad for the salmon in the river. Too much water over the dam is as bad for the fish as… well, supply your own bad pun here. 

 

I’d like to know why there isn’t a plan in place to handle the surplus energy that might be (and apparently has been) generated. Surely some of our tax dollars went to develop all sorts of contingencies about the combined power supply… and the best they could come up with was just turn it off? No way to divert the extra power to other areas of the region? Couldn’t we sell it to Canada? It’s not like we’d need to build a pipeline or anything.

 

In clean energy parlance, this is evidently a case of dammed if you do and damned if you don’t.

 

UPDATE: Ed Morrissy at Hot Air beat me to this by 10 minutes!  And he’s got video.

 

Stoutcat

 

UC-D’s Morally Bankrupt “Kent State” Moment

We’ve all seen the video: The Man (in the form of local police) pepper spraying a long line of apparently peaceful “Occupy” protesters on the campus of University of California-Davis. Of course, you can always count on the usual suspects (in this case, Joy Behar and her Weird Sisters of The View) to leap to a grossly overstated moral equivalence:

“A lot of people watching are too young to remember Kent State in this country, where the police shot a couple of students,” observed Behar. “It’s outrageous, this type of behavior cannot be tolerated by the police!”

Right. Useful-idiot college kids who, in practicing their juvenile brand of civil disobedience, were warned they would be sprayed, consented to it, and then were shocked —shocked! — when it actually happened. But that was okay, because all of the news outlets picked up the video and made the kids look completely awesome!

With that in mind, I dedicate the following lyrics to Joy Behar (with absolutely no apology to Neil Young):

News cameras and SWAT teams coming,

We’re finally on NBC.

Occupying and drumming, drumming,

Pepper-sprayed at UC-D.

—

Gotta get down to it

Spray is making us cry

(At least it’ll kill all the fleas)

Get all the cameras

And film us crying like girls

How can we lose on NBC?

—

News cameras and SWAT teams coming,

We’re here for the world to see.

Idiotic and drumming, drumming,

Pepper-sprayed at UC-D.

Pepper-sprayed at UC-D.

Stoutcat

The Media Really Do Think We’re Idiots

Back in mid-October, Business Insider ran a snarky little article, entitled, “Tea Party Or Occupy Wall Street? Bet You Can’t Tell The Difference“. Glynnis MacNichol starts out with this facile comparison:

Ever since the Occupy Wall St. movement caught the mainstream media’s attention the group has frequently been dubbed the Left’s version of the Tea Party… Certainly the coverage often sounds the same. Namely, a lot of cable hosts and newspaper pundits broadly speculating in bold terms what it might all mean. 

For the most part their conclusions fall along partisan lines and sound something like this:

• The [fill in the group] is irresponsible, uneducated, dangerous and isn’t at all representative of the country.
• The [fill in the group] is a true American patriot, voicing the opinion of many, about the reality of the country, and is being treated badly by the press.

Sadly, Ms. MacNichol doesn’t bother to go any farther than her compatriots and delve into why one group might be considered dangerous while another might actually represent a majority opinion. She compounds her error by presuming her readership is as ignorant as she is:

Check out the signs we pulled from protests from both groups (some in 2009, some in the last month) and see if you can correctly choose which sign belongs to which group.

It’s not as easy as you think. [Emphasis mine]

Actually, if you’ve been paying any kind of attention, it really is quite easy. Click the link to go to the “bet you can’t tell the difference” slideshow. If you’re not a complete moron, you should be able to distinguish which are which with little trouble. My comments for each photo below. But take the quiz first: bet you can tell the difference!

 Click here to see photos and guess which are which.

Click MORE to see my comments.

Somebody Better Tell Joe Biden

UPDATE: MSNBC beclowns itself while attempting to make a fool out of Sherriff Wright.

You all may remember that  in mid-October, Vice President Joe Biden was in Flint, Michigan, speechifyin’ to police, firefighters, and members of the public. During his no doubt almost presidential eloquence, VP Biden made a dire prognostication about the safety of Flint’s citizens:

“In 2008, when Flint had 265 sworn officers on their police force, there were 35 murders and 91 rapes in this city. In 2010, when Flint had only 144 police officers, the murder rate climbed to 65 and rapes–just to pick two categories–climbed to 229. In 2011, you now only have 125 shields. God only knows what the numbers will be this year for Flint if we don’t rectify it.”

Fortunately for Flint, the Veep’s figures and conclusions were a bit off, and Flint is still as safe as it ever has been recently. But Joe is firmly convinced that the only way to keep the folks safe is Obama’s jobs bill.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, one Sherriff is recommending that the citizens arm themselves. In response to an attempted rape in a local part, Sherriff Chuck Wright said:

“Our form of justice is not making it… Carry a concealed weapon. That’ll fix it.”

 

The sherriff also displayed  a pack in which a gun could be carried by a jogging woman. Here’s a lawman who wants to keep people safe. And he understands that the police can’t always be there: 

“I’m tired of looking at victims saying, ‘There’s life after this’ … I’m tired of saying, ‘We’re sorry, we can’t keep them in jail.'” Wright said in his view, gun control is, “How fast can you can get the barrel of your gun back on the target?”

Wright said the attack is not the fault of Millken Park. He said, “It’s a nice place for families.” He said officers patrol the area all the time and respond to various calls there. He said, “Don’t blame anyone for having an animal on their property … We can’t get it all.”

He ended by saying again, “I want you to get a concealed weapons permit. Don’t get Mace. Get a firearm.”

Sherriff Wright clearly understands the old adage, ” When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” It’s too bad Joe Biden doesn’t get that.

 

Stoutcat

Tony Bennett: What A Difference A Day Made

You probably heard or read about Tony Bennett’s incredibly wrong-headed, not to mention nonsensical statement to Howard Stern the other day, about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks:

“Who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists, or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don’t make a right. They flew the plane in, but we caused it. We were bombing them, and they told us to stop.”

In an attempt to control the damage, yesterday, Mr. Bennett “clarified” his remarks:

“I am sorry if my statements suggested anything other than an expression of my love for my country, my hope for humanity and my desire for peace throughout the world.”

In other words, sorry you didn’t like what I said. Buy my new album anyway.

Sorry, Mr. Bennett, but if I thought about you at all, you’d realize that I’ve got a cold, cold heart on this matter. Time after time we have to deal with all the liberal spinning. And the way you look tonight after your second statement makes me think you’re going to be a stranger in paradise. For once in your life, can’t you find it in your heart to realize that you’re having the good life, and the best is yet to come–because you live in America.

And if I ruled the world, you’d be walking down the boulevard of broken dreams for your comments.

Stoutcat

Fairey Attacked by Danes

Serial art plagiarist Shepard Fairey, the man responsible for stealing a photo and making it an icon, was attacked last weekend in Copenhagen after he failed to understand that history has meaning.

Fairey had been in the city creating a series of “street art” murals on the sides of buildings.  The Guardian reports:

“The LA-based artist believes the attack was sparked by a misunderstanding over his mural commemorating the demolition of the legendary “Ungdomshuset” (youth house) at Jagtvej 69… Fairey’s installation, painted on a building adjacent to the vacant site, depicted a dove in flight above the word “peace” and the figure “69”…

“Within a day of completion, the mural was vandalised by protesters, with graffiti sending messages of “no peace” and “go home, Yankee hipster“. Fairey subsequently collaborated with former members of the 69 youth house to redecorate the lower half of the installation. His new version contains images of riot police and explosions, together with a new, more combative slogan: ‘Nothing forgotten, nothing forgiven’.” [emphasis mine–what a magnificent phrase!]

But even after that capitulation, some residents were not happy with the American “artist”. At a subsequent party, Mr. Fairey and a friend were accosted by a youth; in the resulting scrum, the Yankee hipster received a black eye and some bruises.

While he declined to file a police report because he was fearful of bad press–“not-so-street artist whiner Shepard Fairey can’t hold it down in a fight so he snitches to the cops“–he promptly whined to that same press by penning a nearly 3,000-word screed at the Huffington Post, which amazingly contains the following line:

“I grew up in skateboarding and punk rock, which are both incredibly creative…”

That tells you pretty much everything you need to know about Mr. Fairey’s outlook, and I strongly suggest that you avoid reading the rest of the self-righteous screed at all costs. The article, of course, doesn’t tell you about Fairey’s lack of talent, or his career history of plagiarsim, stealing the work of real artists, branding it as his own with no attributions, and laughing all the way to the bank. For a fascinating expose of his trail of plagiarism, see this scathing and in-depth critique of his work.

The people who attacked Mr. Fairey clearly were wrong and should not have done so. However…

Karma’s a b*tch, you Yankee hipster!

Stoutcat

Joe Biden vs. Tea Party “Terrorists”

As most of you know by now, during last week’s debt debates, our Vice President agreed with an elected member of Congress that members of the Tea Party “acted like terrorists”. While the Representative, Mike Doyle (D-PA) should most definitely be ashamed for saying such a thing, for the Vice President of the United States to agree with him is absolutely unconscionable.

While the office of the Vice Presidency may not be worth a bucket of warm spit, the current office holder is proving that he is worth even less than that.

In reading a variety of commentary around the internet about Mr. Biden’s deplorable decision to tar staunch American patriots with the brush of terrorism, I came across a post from a blogger in Delaware, Joe Biden’s home state. The blogger, Evan Queitsch, has written an open letter to VP Biden, and has done an eloquent job of portraying Tea Partiers and their goals and ideals. It is such a good piece that I requested (and received) permission from Mr. Queitsch to re-publish the letter, and have done so in full below. I urge you to visit his blog, DE Conservative, for more interesting posts.

Mr. Queitsch’s letter starts after the break. I hope you will read it all.

Stoutcat

MSNBC Fail: Contessa Brewer Does It Again

Amazingly enough, there are times when I feel sorry MSNBC. And yes, now that Keith Olbermann’s gone, it’s mostly when Contessa Brewer says something stupid.

Like this:

In case you didn’t know either, Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama has three degrees: economics, political science, and law.

Okay, I don’t really pity MSNBC. I actually pity Rep. Brooks for having to suffer fools like Ms. Brewer.

Stoutcat

H/T: HotAir