Behold, the story no one else in the media will even ask about.

In 2011, at least three women warned the head of the San Diego County Democratic Party of stories in the community about then-Rep. Bob Filner making inappropriate advances toward professional women with whom he'd come in contact through his political position.

Former California State Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña, San Diego County Democratic Central Committee member Martha Sullivan, and Escondido City Council member Olga Diaz all brought uncomfortable incidents to the attention of Jess Durfee, who was until the end of 2012 Democratic Party chairman for San Diego, the eighth-largest city in America.

What happened next illustrates the enormous challenge the situation presented to local Democrats, who were looking to Filner as their best shot at retaking the mayor's seat in the heavily Republican community for the first time since 1992. It also reveals the party's short-sighted and ultimately self-destructive failure to do due diligence on the accusations, which were presented to the party secondhand and yet failed to trigger any kind of substantive investigation, or even an intra-party conversation with a lawyer.

***

"I began hearing these consistent stories of inappropriate behavior, where he would segue from, say, a site visit to their school and follow them back into area away from other people on the visit, and start to proposition them and get physical with them and ask them out on dates or even grab them in public, in front of other people," Saldaña said. "As I had these conversations over a period of several days and heard these consistent stories about his behavior, I started connecting the dots and went to the county party chairman and said, 'I think we have a problem here'."

She brought six women's stories to Durfee in the summer of 2011, she said, though she did not have any direct experience of inappropriate conduct herself.
We're all wondering, 'Why didn't the chairman listen to our concerns?

"We're all wondering, 'Why didn't the chairman listen to our concerns?'" Saldaña said. "His defense now is that he spoke to Filner privately and Filner assured him no one had filed a formal complaint .... I mean, he wasn't harassing people in his office the way he's accused of now. He was harassing constituents, or professional women who basically needed to maintain a working relationship with him. So of course they weren't going to file a formal complaint against a seated congressman."

...

But let's cut to the chase of the main takeaway from Durfee's "investigation" of Filner's behavior, which consisted of only slightly more than asking Filner himself if he harassed women.

"He felt very confident nothing would come up during the campaign," Durfee recalled. "He assured me that would not happen. He emphasized that. He said, 'In all my years in Congress, I've never had a sexual harassment complaint against me.'"

Emphasis added to emphasize his emphasis.

Durfee's "investigation" then proceeded to asking Filner's office managers if he hit on women in his office. They said he didn't. (It later turned out he did.) He didn't bother asking a lawyer for his opinion on the the need for further investigation, or about the city's ultimate potential liability should Filner tell one of his employers she should stop wearing panties to work. (He did do that.)

Durfee says he did not take the complaints to the central committee.

That said, it continues to be unbelievable to me that Nancy Pelosi did not hear all about this years ago.

People gossip about being grabbed, kissed, slobbered on, and skeeved on. It's what they do.

And Washington, DC, is a very small town, and everyone works for the same damn industry. It's far less diverse a city than even movie-dominated LA.

It is simply not believable that the national Democratic Party didn't know this. Almost all of his victims were Democrats themselves, women coming to him with Congressional business, etc.

Are we to believe that Democratic women don't tell other Democratic women when a sitting Congressman pats their ass and drools on their face?

Posted by: Ace at 04:01 PM | Comments (184)
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Let me explain the headline: The quote is actually from MSNBC. But I don't wish no to play into NBC's corporate game of pretending the two are different. One is merely the id of NBC and the other is its public face. But they share reporters, management, facilities, and so on.

They are the same entity and should be treated as such.

So, anyway: NBC News can now report that the Boston Bombers were rightwingers, like Joseph Stack also was a rightwinger.

I don't suppose this needs rebutting but Mediaite did so anyway.

While Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a “fan” of Jones, he was also a fan of that centuries-old piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He called the work a “good book.”

The elder Boston Marathon bomber was, of course, deeply involved in the Islamic religion, jihad, martyrdom, and opposition to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Once known as a quiet teenager who aspired to be a boxer, Tamerlan Tsarnaev delved deeply into religion in recent years at the urging of his mother,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “Tamerlan quit drinking and smoking, gave up boxing because he thought it was in opposition to his religion, and began pushing the rest of his family to pursue stricter ways, his mother recalled.”

Video of Alex Wagner throwing up stupid dishonesty all over herself at the link.

Oh: Almost as ridiculous as the NBC Clownshow is Sydney Leathers.

Yeah this happened. Sydney Leathers on Sean Hannity.

Do we really need to hear more from Sydney Leathers? Do we really need to further explore how cybersex with an old horny goat happens?

more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:15 PM | Comments (165)
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What does the law matter? The law is just some words on a piece of paper.

We always knew this "Democratic Republic" thing was a fad.

The weakling secretly craves the order the strong man brings, and America -- and especially its disgusting institutions -- are weaklings in all ways, intellectual, moral, and physical.

So here we go. New Executive Laws now on tap.

— In another setback for President Obama’s health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.

The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.

The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed. When asked in recent days about the language — which appeared as an answer to one of 137 “frequently asked questions about Affordable Care Act implementation” — department officials confirmed the policy.

The discovery is likely to fuel continuing Republican efforts this fall to discredit the presidentÂ’s health care law.

Likely, yes.

Posted by: Ace at 01:47 PM | Comments (300)
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Incredible.

I guess this picture...

...is rather misleading, is it not?

Posted by: Ace at 11:52 AM | Comments (390)
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Peggy Noonan also called for the president to make a "classy" gesture and inform his more wild-eyed supporters that we're still permitted to criticize our political leaders. Incredibly, this right persists even when the leaders in question are, yes, black.

This is the reason many people don’t like ObamaCare. It’s also part of why people wind up making fun of the president at state fairs. (On that, everyone should breathe deep and remember, as the noted political philosopher Orson Welles once put it: “It’s the business of the American people to take the mickey out of the president.” It’s not only what we do, it’s what we should do. Welles was speaking on a talk show; it was the 1970s; he was talking about people making fun of some Republican president, Nixon or Ford. So what? They can take it. And they’re not kings. Let me suggest a classy Obama move that might go over well. From his Vineyard vacation spot he should have the press office issue a release saying his reaction to finding out a rodeo clown was rudely spoofing him, was, “So what?” Say he loves free speech, including inevitably derision directed at him, and he does not wish for the Missouri state fair to fire the guy, and hopes those politicians (unctuously, excessively, embarrassingly) damning the clown and the crowd would pipe down and relax. This would be graceful and nice, wouldn’t it? He would never do it. He gives every sign of being a person who really believes he shouldn’t be made fun of, and if he is it’s probably racially toned, because why else would you make fun of him?

Peggy Noonan is right to note that Obama is so narcissistic to believe the only reason someone might have to not be smitten with him is racial animus.

This is not a delusion confined to Obama, however; it dominates the minds of his cultists.

The White House has heeded the call for comment on the new Speechcraft Trials. By supporting the New Inquisitors.

While the president has not offered his thoughts on the controversy, a White House spokesperson who is also a Missouri native said the incident was “certainly not one of the finer moments in our state.”

He means the mockery -- not the subsequent state ban-for-life for political speech.

And the Inquisitors' work is not yet done -- but then, Inquisitors' work is never done. There are always new dimensions to the heresies to be uncovered.

The rodeo clown and the organization that hired him have apologized for the incident. The president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association has resigned and the clown has been “banned for life” from performing at the state fair. A number of state officials have condemned the clown and the NAACP has called for a full investigation into the incident.

Of course the left is fully in support of the Inquisition -- you didn't really think they were serious about Free Speech and "dissent is the highest form of patriotism," did you? A representative piece comes from Tommy Christopher, Mediaite's go-to clown for defending the indefensible (no link).

Tommy the Simpleton seems to think we need to restrict free speech rights because #Justice4Trayvon.

It seems like only yesterday when the conservative media went from ignoring the killing of unarmed 17 year-old Trayvon Martin to shrieking at the top of their lungs that President Obama should shut his Kenyan yap about it. Maybe thatÂ’s because it pretty much was yesterday, but a new day has dawned, and the conservative media has found something of sufficient gravity for the President to weigh in on: a rodeo clown whose minstrelsy has drawn the condemnation of Republicans in the former Confederate State of Missouri.

[T]he [Peggy Noonan reference to Obama's ten billionth Martha's Vinyard vacation] was a nice touch, and so is the subtle inference that the President isn’t “classy,” but it’s Peggy Noonan‘s feigned ignorance about the “racially toned” nature of the show that’s really priceless. While it’s true that there is no history of racists putting on whiteface and explaining politics to people as they would to a sleeping toddler that they don’t want to wake up, Peggy Noonan is still old enough and wise enough to understand what was wrong with this. That she then expects to snap her fingers and have the President do a tapdance for her so she’ll think he’s “classy” is the white icing on the privilege cake.

Incidentally, if we're talking about Racist References to President Downtime's frequent vacations, then I have to give the editors at Twitchy props for the most Racist headline ever about President Seven Iron.

And, from @championcapua, let's check in to find out what the Smartest Woman in the World thought about punishing free speech just a few short years back. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:50 PM | Comments (362)
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He is right, I suppose, and I guess I shouldn't overread into the remark; and yet I can't help but think, like any nobleman, he rues the day Guttenberg created his cursed invention and made the commoners less pliable and acquiescent than they had been.

He doesn't say this, precisely, but he sure does seem to hint that he misses the days when the oligarchy controlled the facts, the ideas, and The Narrative.

"IÂ’m a student of history, and I love to go back and read a particularly great book like [Henry] KissingerÂ’s book about diplomacy where you think about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the balance of power and how difficult it was for countries to advance their interests and years and years of wars," Kerry said to a gathering of State Department employees and their families.

"And we sometimes say to ourselves, boy, arenÂ’t we lucky," Kerry continued.

"Well, folks," he said, "ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.

"It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest," said Kerry.

He goes on to speak of a rise in sectarianism and religious extremism and how the world is more complex because of it is so filled with ideas and passions.

Everything he says here is actually right, I think. It's not a particularly interesting or novel idea. (John Kerry has precious few of those.) People have been saying things like this for a long time.

And yet... I don't know. There's a bad taste to it. It's not what he says but what he seems to suggest: A longing for the simplicity of Iron Rule, Official Positions, and Control of Ideas.

Although he seems to be talking about the proliferation of terrorist-friendly ideologies, I can't help but remember the New Class calls the Tea Party "terrorist" every other day.

Posted by: Ace at 11:00 AM | Comments (271)
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At NRO, Michael Auslin calls for dramatic and quite possibly violent action to safeguard the dignitas of our post-Roman Caesar.

By now all America has heard of the national tragedy that occurred in Missouri. A rogue rodeo clown insulted the dignity of our princeps civitatis, I mean, President of the United States, at the Missouri State Fair. According to Tribune of the People, I mean U.S. Representative, William Lacy Clay, the offending clown threatened the safety of our Nation by showing “hatred, intolerance and disrespect.” This was echoed by provincial deputy governor, I mean state lieutenant governor, Peter Kinder, who “condemned the actions disrespectful” to our President.

The voice of the People has been heard, and already the announcer and president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association has resigned and the threatening clown banned for life from working in Missouri’s rodeos. Yet, as Censor, I mean State Representative, Steve Webb declared, “sometimes apologies just won’t do.” Indeed, the officials of the Missouri Colosseum, I mean the Missouri State Fair, have demanded that the state rodeo association “hold all those responsible for this offensive stunt accountable.”

My fellow citizens, this is not enough. Never before has our Republic faced such a threat to our leader or our national future. Never before has the dignitas of our leading citizen been so violently attacked.

He then recounts some of the attacks on the dignitas of previous Caesars, but they were not Caesars at all, but merely proconsuls, so those cases can be easily distinguished.

Byron York similarly notes the sudden and unexpected urge to "punish your enemies," as a very wise guest-lecturer on Constitutional law once said.

The controversy over the incident seemed to have two parts. One was outrage in some quarters over the obvious disrespect and ridicule directed at the president. The other was outrage over the suggestion of violence toward Obama — in the form of an encounter with the bull — that was the premise of the act. This is the most complete video of the incident available; you can watch it to judge for yourself.

Of course the Missouri State Fair can do what it wants, but the lifetime ban seems excessive. Any president comes in for a fair amount of public mockery, and what happened at the State Fair does not seem worse than the mockery of the president that occurred — without consequences like lifetime bans — during George W. Bush’s years in the White House. It’s not necessary to recite all the insults, threats, and other offenses directed at Bush during his presidency; if you were awake during those years, you know there were a lot of them. But perhaps it would be useful to list a few, and ask whether they resulted in punishment and professional exile for those involved.

Read him for those.

Skipping to the "violence" suggested by the stunt -- which is silly, because assassins do not employ rodeo bulls as their modus operandi, and furthermore because clowns being hit by rodeo bulls is nothing strange in a rodeo. It is the whole point of the clown. The rodeo clown was asking, effectively, would you like to see the President do what I do every working day?

In what way is that any sort of "threat" against the president? The "threat" has been contrived, ginned up, and sprinkled with fauxtrage in order to achieve the real end, which is to simply punish anyone who declares that the Emperor has no clothes, lest the crowd pick up the chant.

But let's entertain this idea that the rodeo clown's silly prank was a "threat." Have any previous presidents similarly suffered such threats? And if so, what Lifetime Bans befell the perpetrators?

As far as the use of violent imagery and the president is concerned, the Bush years saw imagery much more serious than a bump from a bull. For example, the 2006 film “Death of a President” was a faux-documentary that told the story of a fictional Bush assassination, including a graphic depiction of the Bush character being shot in the chest. After its premiere at the Toronto film festival, where it won the International Critics Prize, “Death of a President” was handled by a major American distributor, Newmarket Films, and was reviewed, seriously and on its own terms, by the Washington Post, New York Times and other major press outlets. The film’s makers were not banned for life from the movie industry or anything else; the director has since made several films that have shown at festivals around the world and is now working on a documentary on David Bowie.

In the 2004 novella “Checkpoint,” author Nicholson Baker depicted a conversation between two men planning to assassinate Bush. “He’s one dead armadillo,” says one character, speaking of the president. The Washington Post was impressed by the book’s “fanciful flourishes and fierce, furious fits of anger.” Baker was not banned from anything and is still writing and being published today.

In June 2006, Alan Hevesi, then the comptroller of the state of New York, delivered a college commencement address in which he paid tribute to Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer by calling him “the man who, how do I phrase this diplomatically, who will put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.” Hevesi later apologized, explaining that he merely intended to praise Schumer’s courage and toughness. Hevesi was not banned from office; he was, in fact, re-elected as comptroller later in 2006. (He didn’t stay much longer, resigning when he was indicted on corruption charges.)

America is in a very strange and dark place.

What makes me especially aghast is that, while I understand, perhaps, that cultists must dismember those who insult the Prophet of Government, I do not understand why the Prophet of Government himself has not stepped forward to tell his cultists to chill out and remind them that dissent against the government and its leader -- even, nay, especially mocking dissent -- is not only permitted in America, but rather the whole point of it.

He could reap quite a bit of goodwill by simply saying, "Guys, come on, it's okay to mock me."

And yet he silently blesses the actions of his cultists.

This man was a guest-lecturer in Constitutional law.

Did he miss this part of the Constitution?

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Comments (453)
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There's shocked, and then there's shocked, and then there's what I am right now, which is not very shocked.

Swiped from Hot Air.

President Barack Obama privately derided the controversy over the blockbuster June 6 revelation of the National Security Agency’s far-reaching capabilities as “noise rather than something that’s real and meaningful,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

And what did Obama consider to be truly real and meaningful, unlike the "noise" about the NSA possibly (probably) infringing our rights to be free from government searches?

Well, one of his fake political micro-initiatives, naturally.

Instead of showcasing the presidentÂ’s June 6 speech about a new plan to boost Internet use in schools, the major media in the United States and abroad were focused on SnowdenÂ’s claims that the NSA was copying huge quantities of private, commercial and criminal emails from around the world.

"A new plan to boost Internet use in schools" is what Obama considers his "real and meaningful" work, so much as to make him denigrate American's concerns over the abuse of the security state.

I can't seem to help thinking that this is a classic sign of narcissism-- whatever the narcissist wants, that is clearly the most important thing in the entire world, and these other things that you might think are important, well, that's just something stupid for babies, isn't it?

A new plan to boost internet use in schools. What the hell is this, 1996? This is what this brain trust thinks is a major policy initiative in education?

Oh, and his plan gets better, if that's possible.

The school-Internet project, dubbed ConnectEd, is expected to cost roughly $5 billion. Obama wants to pay for the program by having the Federal Communications Commission raise taxes on cell-phone owners, without any agreement from Congress.

Obama is pushing the controversial fund-raising scheme, according to the Washington Post, and told his staff that “We are here to do big things — and we can do this without Congress.”

I take my previous criticism back -- that is real and meaningful, though not in the way he imagines.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:05 AM | Comments (268)
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Lean Forward!

MSNBC fails geography. http://t.co/D0k8VimYpD pic.twitter.com/2hP6B2vEN0

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) August 14, 2013

None of those cities are in even remotely the right spots.

Geography...how does it work?

Added: Below the fold, just how far off MSNBC was on EVERY single one of them. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 08:00 AM | Comments (339)
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Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:35 AM | Comments (416)
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