Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Online Poker Cheats

U.S. prosecutors made new allegations on Tuesday in a probe of the Full Tilt Poker website, accusing self-styled "Poker Professor" Howard Lederer and professional poker champion Christopher Ferguson and others of paying themselves more than $440 million while defrauding other players.

In a motion filed in federal court in New York to amend an earlier civil complaint, the prosecutors accused Full Tilt Poker of running a Ponzi scheme that continued even after the original charges were filed...


John Lehman: U.S. Navy Weakened by Thought Police

The Navy’s former top civilian has rocked the service in a military journal article by accusing officials of sinking the storied naval air branch into a sea of political correctness. Former Navy Secretary John Lehman, himself a former carrier-based aviator, wrote that the swagger and daring of yesterday’s culture has given way to a focus on integrating women and, this year, gays.

Pilots constantly worry about anonymous complaints about salty language, while squadron commanders are awash in bureaucratic requirements for reports and statistics, he added.

“Those attributes of naval aviators — willingness to take intelligent calculated risk, self-confidence, even a certain swagger — that are invaluable in wartime are the very ones that make them particularly vulnerable in today’s zero-tolerance Navy,” said Mr. Lehman, who led the Navy in the Reagan administration.“The political correctness thought police, like Inspector Javert in ‘Les Miserables,’ are out to get them and are relentless.”...


Google Refuses to Police Their Service

A Google search for Santorum has generated some inappropriate results since gay columnist Dan Savage organized an online campaign to link graphic sexual terms to the socially conservative senator’s name.

Now, the Republican presidential candidate says he’s convinced Google could do something to remedy the issue, if the company wanted to. “I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you're a responsible business, you don't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

He continued: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can't handle but I suspect that's not true.”...



Warner Todd Huston Calls Out Our Narcissist in Chief

Back on Sept. 20, President Obama stood with the folks from the Open Government Partnership to get a group photo taken. But, even in a photo of over a dozen folks, as far as Obama was concerned it was all about Obama.

There he is, calling attention to himself like a ten-year-old on the carousel trying to get the attention of mommy and daddy.

Worse, he’s covering up one of the participant’s face! How gauche.

Even MSNBCs Rich Shulman couldn’t take the self-centered, arrogance of our president. Under the photo, Shulman wrote, “I don’t know much about diplomatic protocols, but I would guess that waving during the group photo is something to avoid.”

That’s our narcissist in chief!

Bonehead Tony Bennett

I've long believed that the public acclaim given Tony Bennett is due more to his left-leaning politics than his singing abilities. After all, there's a whole lot of crooners who had purer, more powerful, more disciplined voices than Bennett but, because they were further to the right, have been given shorter shrift from the powers that be. (Andy Williams, Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, and Sammy Davis Jr. come to mind.)

Anyhow, to illustrate how far Bennett's leftist tilt goes, here's a clip from his appearance on the Howard Stern show where he not only tells a whopper of a lie about George W. Bush but then justifies the 9/11 jihadist attacks. "But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists?...They flew the plane in but we caused it."