Category: Blogging

Memo From the Lunatic Fringe: LGF Attacking ‘Anchor Baby Malkin’

Posted on Comments

Diary of Daedalus shows that a Little Green Footballs commenter got 11 “updings” for this insightful offering:

More fake outrage against our First Lady: Anchor Baby Malkin fails miserably at attempting to mock the First Lady’s “Evolution of Mom Dancing.”
The Obama Derangement Syndrome is more dangerous than syphilis.

Here is the video that inspired the LGF comment:

Leaving aside entirely the epithet “anchor baby” (which leftists have falsely used for years against Malkin, the daughter of legal immigrants), where is the evidence that Malkin was trying to stir up “fake outrage”? She was merely parodying Michelle Obama’s dancing with Jimmy Fallon of “Saturday Night Live.”

Thin-skinned liberals can’t take a joke. And their indignation toward alleged right-wing racists is . . . well, convenient.

 

Bill Schmalfeldt Praises Kimberlin for ‘Social Justice,’ Then Deletes Tweet

Posted on Comments

Today there was a peace order hearing in Maryland in the matter of Bill Schmalfeldt v. John Hoge, which Aaron Walker describes briefly, with the interesting news that Brett Kimberlin showed up for the hearing.

Schmalfeldt gushed on Twitter that the “high point” of his day was meeting Kimberlin: “I don’t care what he did in the past. He is redeeming himself every day by trying to bring social justice to the world.” Schmalfeldt deleted that Tweet, but Lee Stranahan has the screen-caps.

Schmalfeldt’s concept of political redemption is, of course, the same hustle that Kimberlin has been selling for years. Kimberlin has been called a “world-class liar” and a “top-flight con man” and over the years he has managed to dupe many people smarter than Bill Schmalfeldt.

As for what Kimberlin “did in the past,” read “When ‘Jessica’ Was 10, 11, 12” and see if you think Kimberlin, who served 17 years of a 50-year-federal sentence, can ever bring enough “social justice” to make anyone forget his career as the “Speedway Bomber,” a crime spree for which Kimberlin has never even admitted his guilt, much less apologized.

Admitting his guilt for the bombings of which he was convicted, you see, might require Kimberlin to address his motives for those crimes and . . . well, maybe you ought to read that article to understand the problem there.

The profound irony of Bill Schmalfeldt being indifferent to Brett Kimberlin’s crimes, of course, is that Schmalfeldt has harassed Lee Stranahan (and Stranahan’s defenders) in part on the basis of Stranahan having once shot some “erotic photography,” which Schmalfeldt tries to depict as evidence of moral turpitude and even criminality.

All of Brett Kimberlin’s enemies are very bad people, Bill Schmalfeldt would have you believe, whereas Kimberlin is a saintly instrument of “social justice.”

UPDATE: To show Schmalfeldt’s bully-boy modus operandi, check out this account by his erstwhile Public Enemy Number One, defenders of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. In order to get the “information” he wanted, Schmalfeldt contacted a woman and, in quite vulgar terms, warned of the evil that would befall her if she didn’t “start telling the truth and telling it real quick.” Consider the consequences Schmalfeldt threatened:

“Now, do you wanna play dumb and lose your kids? Or do you wanna play smart and keep what you got?”

A real sweetheart, that Bill. And if he thinks it is protected First Amendment speech — much less journalism — to send people messages like that, he will probably have another think coming, sooner or later.

 

Shorter Wonkette: Butt-Sex Jokes Are Only Funny When Liberals Tell Them

Posted on Comments

“The daughter of liberal academics from Lincoln, Neb., Ms. Cox moved to Washington from New York in May 2000 with her husband, Chris Lehmann, an editor at The Washington Post Book World. She was writing her own satirical blog, theanticmuse.com, after bouncing from editing jobs at The Chronicle of Higher Education, America Online and National Geographic. She was fired from The American Prospect magazine after six weeks (during which she playfully called its co-editor, Robert Kuttner, ‘Crazy Bob’ behind his back) and was required to sign a confidentiality agreement about the terms of her dismissal.”
— New York Times, April 18, 2004

“Now I just wait, wait, wait for that crazy blog-money to start rolling in.”
— Ace of Spades, May 25, 2004

Younger readers, or those older readers who have only recently discovered this “blogging” thing, may not remember the Wild West era of the blogosphere, when the prevailing formula seemed to be to write something so outrageous that people couldn’t possibly ignore it.

Before corporate suits and political power brokers took over — before AOL was willing to pay $315 million for HuffPost — no one expected bloggers to strive for respectability. Or accuracy, even.

As recently as 2006, for example, a liberal blogger might gain fame for “reporting” as fact that a federal grand jury had indicted Karl Rove and, when this dubious “news” turned out to be false, cover his tracks by spinning a conspiracy theory about a White House cover-up of Rove’s alleged crimes.

Those of us who remember those pioneer days of the digital frontier will, of course, remember that Wonkette used to do a lot of butt-sex jokes, which was no hindrance to her being named Washington editor of Time online. It is odd, therefore, to find Ana Marie Butt-Sex lecturing the world about the evils of “Jackass journalism” as practiced by Michael Goldfarb, Ben Shapiro, Jason Mattera and others whom she labels “minions” of the late Andrew Breitbart. This irony is not lost on Matt Vespa:

Ana Marie Cox built her career on blogging jokes about anal sex at the reprehensible guttersnipe site Wonkette. She presented herself as a rambunctious youngster, but it turned out she was already pushing 30 and just naturally behaves like a annoying, hyperactive juvenile. Both Time and later the Guardian hired her in full knowledge of this colorful journalistic career.

Damn it, Vespa, get your facts straight: By the time Ms. Cox started blogging as Wonkette, she wasn’t just “pushing 30,” she was already at least 31 years old.

What this story is actually about, however, is the Left’s continued struggle to maintain narrative control. If irreverent humor or inaccurate reporting help advance legislation, policy and candidates favored by the Left, then such things are not only permitted, but encouraged. However, any errors of fact or lapses of decorum by the Left’s antagonists are portrayed as entirely and permanently discrediting: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

Truth is whatever the Left says it is. Anything that contradicts this Truth must be destroyed By Any Means Necessary. Everything you ever needed to know about the Left’s moral relativism was explained in 1965:

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
– Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 1965

How convenient, you see, that there is a vast machinery devoted to destroying anyone who questions the Left’s hegemonic claim to Truth, so that every error made by any of Breitbart’s “minions” becomes a permanent stain that discredits not only the erroneous article, but also the entire alternative media enterprise of the Right.

We are supposed to accept this kind of criticism from Ms. Cox without thinking “butt-sex jokes.” Good luck with that.

And if Ace ever got “that crazy blog-money” for writing about butt-sex, he’s been awful quiet about it. Uh . . . sources say.

School Officials Helping Spread Sequestration Political Message

Posted on Comments

The Lonely Conservative relays the e-mail message sent by her child’s school principal:

Act to STOP Sequestration now
Take Action!
Our students deserve the best education
Without action, sequestration cuts will take place THIS Friday, March 1.
It is anticipated that the cuts to education and other domestic programs will be 5.3 percent, and will impact federal funds for school budgets for the 2013-14 school year.
These cuts would affect millions of students and lead to potentially significant job losses and program eliminations for the nation’s schools, the educators who run them, and the students they educate.
According to reports recently issued by The White House, New York will lose approximately $42.7 million in funding for Kindergarten to 12th grade education. For children with disabilites, New York will lose approximately $36.3 million in funds for nearly 500 teachers, aides, and staff. And Head Start and Early Head Start services would be eliminated for approximately 4,300 children.
Our children cannot afford these devastating cuts — they deserve the best education that our global economy demands.
Tell Congress to stop these cuts to our childrens’ future. Our children deserve better.

The Lonely Conservative noticed that this message sounds oddly like the fundraising/scaremongering e-mails sent out by Stephanie Cutter: “Where do you think our middle school principal got his talking points?”

She’s not planning to shut up.

One Million Moms, Combined, Doesn’t Add Up To A Single Sense Of Humor

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

This GEICO ad is nowhere near as vulgar as the recent Onion dustup:

The joke, like good saucy humor, is served up incomplete. You have to want to view the actress as doing more than serving a stereotype for there to be substantial naughtiness going on here.

Furthermore, it’s a good teaching opportunity. A really good SoCon parent is going to say to his son: “Hey, getting yourself alone with Yolanda Be Cool, while not without testosterone appeal, is a sure ticket to misery.”

Then again, One Million Moms is a part of the American Family Association, which has been labeled a hate group by the Southern (Intellectual) Poverty Law Center, which means that OMM can’t be all bad.

via The Daley Gator and The Lonely Conservative

The Troll R.J. Sterling: Charles Johnson Fanboy Enjoys #TwitterGulag Tricks

Posted on Comments

For some reason — and “reason” is perhaps not exactly the word to describe the irrational motives of moonbats — a certain Twitter account got up in my face yesterday. The troll seemed to be dogpiling attacks by thin-skinned Charles Johnson after I made a jest:

Notice that I did not include Johnson’s Twitter handle in that Tweet. No need to give him the recognition. But when the Wicked Witch gets annoyed, the flying monkeys attack, and so “Battle Damage” started flinging poo, CC’ing various others (inter alia, Brett Kimberlin fanboy Matt Osborne) to invite them to join an anticipated beatdown that, unfortunately for him, backfired pretty quickly. Then “Battle Damage” started threatening to send people to “Twitter gulag” — using the spam-block to try and get their accounts suspended — and when I called attention to that abuse of Twitter’s terms of service, “Battle Damage” began deleting the threatening Tweets.

A real classy operator, this guy.

Some spectators to this conflict had dealt with “Battle Damage” in the past, and gave me a heads-up to who I was dealing with:

Sources say “Battle Damage” is R.J. Sterling, a lonely middle-aged nerd who works at a restaurant in Pennsylvania.  His thuggish Twitter tactics have been previously described:

This is the evildoer. An Applebees employee, people. Your neighborhood bar and grill is a haven for leftists, people. Leftists who get us thrown into Twitter gulag.
That’s not all: we have a source on this guy. This source told us the following:

But the most useful thing we actually learned, is that RJ is… how should I put this? Not that important, but still connected enough to do damage with TwitterGulag. He’s not like, Shoq’s right-hand woman or anything. But you can definitely tell that RJ idolizes Shoq. . . .
He mostly uses the internet to hit on 21 year-old girls (he’s like 45, btw) by playing the “nice guy” card; and decrying the wickedness of ”the patriarchy”. . . .
RJ is not important because he’s making decisions, or giving orders. He’s important because he relays and amplifies the words of shoq, subculture, lizardoid, etc. to the nerd community. He’s nothing but a lackey– but a lackey who uses whining victimhood to motivate his devoted followers (mostly ignorant young girls) to come to his rescue. . . .
RJ’s preferred (and cowardly) method of trolling is to scan through #tcot, looking for bios he doesn’t like. Then he posts screenshots (without @’ing the person) on his TL, with a whiny tirade about how terrible that person is for not believing in socialism. *snort* THAT is very suspicious as well. RJ knows that he can get in trouble by @’ing random people. A LOT of people have been trolled by one of RJ’s followers and then tracked it back to his TL. When people see that he screenshot their tweets/bio and mocked it to a bunch of people, they naturally tweet @ RJ, and tell him to fuck right off and stop being a little bitch. Then, of course, he blockreports them.
It’s absolutely baiting behavior.

You can read the whole thing. 

While I cannot vouch for the accuracy of that report — I hadn’t previously paid any attention to this clown — it pretty much fits what you’d expect a Charles Johnson fanboy to be like, eh?

Consulting the Legal Department

Posted on Comments

My previous observation that no one could be sued for libel for merely describing the self-evident fact of Bill Schmalfeldt’s derangment drew a mildly critical e-mail from a lawyer friend:

Not to be a pedant, but the reason it’s not defamatory is that it’s a statement of opinion based on disclosed facts, and therefore not subject to defamation analysis.
Statements of opinion (except for those implying that they are based on hidden, false facts) can’t be defamatory.
Like if you called me a jerk. That can’t be defamation.

To this, I replied:

“Opinion”? Don’t try to fool me with all your high-falutin legalistic argle-bargle, sir!
I’m a professional journalist. I deal with facts, and the Neutral Objective Fact is, this guy is a certifiable nutjob.
Any journalist who says otherwise should turn in their press credentials, clean out their desk and find another line of work.

On at least one previous occasion, Bill Schmalfeldt suggested that certain lawyers he doesn’t like deserve “to have their knees broken with baseball bats.” (You could look it up.)

It it merely an opinion to say that Schmalfeldt’s nuttier than a fruitcake, loony as a goony bird, a few fries short of a Happy Meal?

No, I state as a fact that Bill Schmalfeldt is neurologically impaired, mentally defective and psychologically abnormal.

The kook  is ranting about Lee Stranahan’s teeth, for God’s sake!

Your Honor, I rest my case.

However, aware that a federal judge has recently declared notorious lunatic Barrett Brown mentally competent to stand trial, I wish to reserve my right to the “satire” defense, which Schmalfeldt himself used to defend his statements about anal rape.

Yeah, they banned Bill from Daily Kos for that. And anybody who’s too crazy for Daily Kos will have a hard time proving libel merely because I state the obvious truth that he is bonkers, unhinged, off his rocker, daffy, mad as a March hare and not in his right mind.

 

And Now, Helpless Victim Bill Schmalfeldt Heroically Suffers Glorious Martyrdom

Posted on Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt: Not cropped to ‘look positively demonic’

“Let’s talk about R.S. McCain, as well — Robert Stacy McCain. Here he writes column after column after column about me, in which he refers to me in the most defamatory ways, about being deranged . . . and he takes that picture of me that was taken several days after surgery . . . crops it to make me look positively demonic, and then when I ask him to denounce this death threat, I get a ‘don’t contact me’ e-mail back. Where’s your humanity?”
— Bill Schmalfeldt, Feb. 20 podcast

“Stranahan would f–k you up the a– while picking your pocket, then wipe his d–k on your t-shirt.”
— Bill Schmalfeldt, Feb. 11 on Twitter

Perhaps there is no need to point out the contrast between Schmalfeldt in attack mode and Schmalfeldt in victim mode. Da Tech Guy isn’t buying Schmalfeldt’s fainting-couch act:

Really, you have a guy on twitter with under 150 followers who has his tweets “protected” and people are trying to silence him? Who is actually going to pay money to silence somebody that nobody hears?

The demonstrable insignificance of Bill Schmalfeldt certainly provokes the question, “Why does anybody even notice him?” And the answer is, because of his relentless harassment, he requires attention — preferably, the attention of qualified professionals in the field of forensic psychology, but until such time as the profilers at Quantico take an interest, he’ll just have to settle for whatever attention he gets.

Most people have never had to deal with a deranged cyberstalker, and therefore have no idea what one obsessed kook can accomplish in terms of online harassment. Over Thanksgiving weekend, Schmalfeldt sent me more than 200 unsolicited harassing Twitter messages in the span of 48 hours, including threats to contact my wife.

This was relatively mild in comparison to the months of nearly constant harassment Schmalfeldt has directed at Lee Stranahan. Imagine the effect when Bill Schmalfeldt sends disturbingly obscene messages — dozens of them, scores of them — every day for weeks on end, directed at one person. And because Schmalfeldt cyberstalks his targets, obsessively monitoring their online activities, anyone publicly communicating with his targets is liable to be included as a CC recipient of these kinds of messages, as in this Tweet that Schmalfeldt CC’d to blogger John Hoge (click the image to enlarge):

Stranahan repeatedly asked Schmalfeldt to cease this behavior, but Schmalfeldt persisted, which is why Schmalfeldt was charged with online harassment last week, and this explanation from Aaron Walker really should not be necessary:

Folks, do I have to explain this to you? Well, in case I do, this is not the case of Lee Stranahan v. Bill Schmalfeldt. This is The State of Maryland v. Bill Schmalfeldt. . . .

Anyone familiar with stalking knows how difficult — indeed, perhaps sometimes impossible — it is to dislodge the stalker’s psychological fixation on the object of his obsession: Bill can’t help himself.

Thus the absurdity of Schmalfeldt claiming it is “defamatory” for me to describe him as “deranged.” His derangement is self-evident, and I have merely described it. When someone behaves in ways that are demonstrably crazy — and keep in mind that Schmalfeldt has been relentlessly harassing Lee Stranahan for months now — you don’t need an advanced degree in psychology, and are not at risk of being sued for libel, if you say they are daft, zany, bonkers, wacko, demented, warped, nuttier than squirrel farts and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

 “The sky is blue,” according to the National Weather Service.

Now that Lee Stranahan has brought Bill Schmalfeldt’s dangerous craziness to the attention of authorities in Maryland, suddenly we are asked to believe that Schmalfeldt is a victim. Schmalfeldt accuses Stranahan of “inciting unstable people” (click the image to enlarge):

Lee Stranahan describes Schmalfeldt’s victim motif:

Bill Schmalfeldt has been predicting for days that my pointing out things he’s currently saying about me and family would create an atmosphere of hate. . . . And sure enough; his predictions came true as he’s gotten two mysterious threats that he is blaming on…me.
This is more harassment from Bill Schmalfeldt; a game of accuse the accuser.

“Accuse the accuser” is a tactic Schmalfeldt seems to have learned from his friends Brett Kimberlin and Neal Rauhauser, and if you suspect that this is not entirely coincidental, you’ll probably want to see where Schmalfeldt had a chat with his “buddy” Neal.

The charges against Bill Schmalfeldt are a matter of public record, and Schmalfeldt’s continuing harassment of Lee Stranahan is both (a) legitimate news, and (b) additional evidence.

Would you be surprised to learn that Schmalfeldt now claims to have proof that Stranahan was responsible for the death threats?

How amazing this is — not.

Part of the “accuse the accusers” game is the You Can’t Catch Me move that Neal Rauhauser has repeatedly employed: Using proxy trolls and sockpuppets to accomplish his purposes, then pretending innocence and claiming that anyone who suspects him of involvement is paranoid. Because you cannot prove that Neal did it (and keep in mind, Neal has written lengthy online treatises about methods of Internet deception), therefore your suspicion toward him is irrational — and thus evidence that you lack credibility.

Ah, but who laughs last? Little did Neal Rauhauser suspect the mind-blowing announcement that Lee Stranahan got his teeth fixed:

How will Bill Schmalfeldt explain to a neutral third party why topics like my teeth or my wife’s sex life are legally valid areas of obsession for him? I don’t know.

Stranahan’s prediction that the “haters will blow their gaskets” at that news was presented by Schmalfeldt as evidence that Stranahan had advance knowledge of the Twitter death threats against Schmalfeldt, and now the Heroic Victim of Glorious Martyrdom will have something new to explain to his handful of followers.




 

 

PREVIOUSLY: