Category: Blogging

McKay Coppins, Concern Troll

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Every newsroom is a seething cauldron of frustrated ambition. It’s been that way forever, and is true everywhere.

Nobody goes into the news business with the goal of being the headline writer on the obituary page, but somebody’s got to do it, and the phenomenon of the “disgruntled staffer” is not really interesting unless the guy shows up for work one day with a high-powered rifle, four or five clips of ammo, and a grim determination to finally get his name on the front page.

It was in this light that I read McKay Coppins’s BuzzFeed article today about “disgruntled staffers” at Breitbart.com.

To make a long story short: So what?

There’s nothing in this article that was really news to me. I know nearly everyone at Breitbart.com, and like all of them — just for example, I was hanging out with Andrew at the 2007 YAF West Coast conference where he first met Alex Marlow — and if some of them don’t like other . . . again, so what?

Is there some rule that everybody in a news operation must like each other? Or that the staff writers must always agree with the editorial choices of management? If so, nobody ever told me about it, and I’ve been in the news business since 1986.

In other words, whatever your opinion of the internal quarrels of the Breitbart.com staff — who’s right or wrong, who’s good or bad — it’s really just the typical grumbling common to all news operations.

The same backstage rivalry goes on every day at Fox News or CNN or the Iowa Hog Farmers Gazette.

And what McKay Coppins has done is to exploit that for profit at BuzzFeed, playing “concern troll,” as if he admired Andrew Breitbart and shared Breitbart’s goals or ideals. He didn’t.

Finally, to my friends at Breitbart: If you don’t like your job or you don’t like your boss, you can always quit.

If you feel that your value to the organization is insufficiently appreciated, the smart thing to do is to offer your resignation and seek employment elsewhere. I’ve often reflected with amusement that, when I resigned from The Washington Times in 2008 — after they hired a guy from the Post to replace the retiring Wes Pruden — they were willing to let me walk away.

Since then, they’ve gone through three editors, massive layoffs, a disastrously expensive blunder of a Web site re-design and, when last I heard, were about to hire their fourth editor in as many years.

Me? I’m a correspondent for The American Spectator and run a blog that averages more than a quarter-million hits a month.

That may not seem like much, but it ain’t failure, and is much better than the misfortune of folks who got laid off in the staff-cutting bloodbaths that followed my departure from the Times.

Moral of the story: If you think the guys running the operation don’t know what they’re doing, get out while the getting’s good. Otherwise, shut up and do your job.

And don’t ever tell McKay Coppins jack shit, either way.

The Democrat Graveyard Whistling Choir Ignores ‘Preference Cascade’ Scenario

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–

Ed Driscoll points out that the “War on Women” hero/martyr Sandra Fluke drew a much smaller crowd than did the actual victims of the “War on Coal” in Grundy, Virginia.

As they say, the plural of “anecdote” is data, and these are just a couple of points on the scatter-chart which are beginning to form into a clear pattern that looks a lot like an Obama meltdown. Democrats don’t want to admit this, of course, and Nate Silver is a Democrat, which is the only plausible explanation for why the Magical Forecasting Model™ still gives 2-to-1 odds for Obama.

This creates a serious problem for Nate, who now has only 15 days to walk that back. If he were to shift one net point per day from now until Nov. 6, the Magical Forecasting Model™ would have it at Obama 52.6%-Romney47.4% on Election Day. Yet insofar as Silver’s predictions are a proxy for the popular vote, there is an increasing likelihood that the Magical Forecasting Model™ would have it bass-ackward: Romney now leads the RCP average, and is ahead by 2 points in the latest Battleground Poll, to say nothing of Romney’s 7-point lead in Gallup.

Something else: Look again at Real Clear Politics, and you notice that the last time a national poll showed Obama at 50% or better was a CNN poll taken Sept. 28-30.

When an incumbent president has been below 50 percent throughout October, on what factual basis does Nate Silver justify the persistent advantage for Obama in his Magical Forecasting Model™?

Even if you think Obama could still pull out a narrow win — and the cable news networks now seem to feel obligated to feature hourly showings of Electoral College map scenarios to that effect — the precise 67.6% chance offered by Nate Silver is absurd. So unless there is some game-changing event in Obama’s favor over the next two weeks, Silver’s probably going to be hard-pressed to shift the odds toward Romney quickly enough to be “right.”

Whistling past graveyards is not science, Nate, and the aroma of bovine excrement is not perfume.

Quinnipiac has Obama up 5 points in Ohio, but Quinnipiac is the same outfit that had Obama up 10 points in Ohio — an absolute absurdity — a month ago. Even stipulating the bogusness of Quinnipiac’s D+9 sample, however, Mitt has gained 5 points in Ohio according to them, while the Democrat polling firm, PPP, shows Romney gaining four points since their previous Ohio survey.

If Romney has gained either 5 points in a month (Quinnipiac) or 4 points in a week (PPP) in what everyone acknowledges to be the most crucial swing state, exactly how the hell does Nate Silver justify his Charlie Sheen pose? #Winning!

Here’s something else for you, Nate: Why does the Battleground poll (which you consider reputable) now show the exact same margin, 49-47 as the Rasmussen poll, which you consider so unreliable? Is it possible that Rasmussen’s methodology is actually providing a more accurate measurement of public opinion than your Magical Forecasting Model™ had hitherto acknowledged?

Tonight’s debate is about foreign policy. When CBS News (not exactly a right-wing outfit) is all over the bungle in Benghazi, and the president’s spokeswoman is compelled to deny that the death of a U.S. ambassador is a policy failure, excuse me for suspecting that tonight won’t be an easy win for Obama. Yeah, maybe the talking heads on MSNBC will score it a “win” for President Gutsy Call, but what about those patriotic red-blooded American swing voters in Ohio? Probably not so much.

The dots are beginning to form a pattern, as I say, and the Graveyard Whistling Choir can ignore the pattern only at peril of their credibility. Is there a phrase for this? I think we know:

Public-opinion polls are lagging indicators in politics. By the time a shift in the trend becomes clear from poll data, the causes of the shift are days or weeks in the past. It is therefore unwise to extrapolate the current trend forward or to begin thinking of polls as supernatural prophecies that predict future events.
With all those caveats in mind, however, Mitt Romney enters the final two weeks of the presidential campaign looking very much like the next president of the United States, and it is not merely poll data that creates this impression. President Obama’s own campaign has begun to emit clear signals that the incumbent’s re-election prospects are dwindling, and anecdotal evidence of strong Republican momentum is not hard to find these days. We cannot predict what will happen in tonight’s third and final presidential debate (9 p.m. ET at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida), but it is a fairly safe guess it won’t have the game-changing impact of the first debate on Oct. 3, one of two apparent pivot points that triggered Obama’s downward slide. While the impact of Romney’s one-sided victory over a listless Obama in Denver has been universally acknowledged, it would be wrong to overlook the political effect of the other pivot point, the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
The Benghazi attack appears to have started slowly sapping Obama’s support in late September. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator. And please pay close attention to the last three words.

 




 

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@HatingBreitbart Shall Be Seen Alongside 2016 As Essential For Understanding The Obama Era

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by Smitty

An absolute must-see. And must-own.

My old Nokia N97 was immortalized about midway through the movie, where, after he was done addressing the Tax Day Tea Party in 2010, I asked him a question:

Other famous folks included, but not necessarily making the credits, were Da Tech Guy, Marooned in Marin. Dave Weigel is in there a bit, though his position is ambiguous on a good day. Also, some guy named Dan Riehl. Stacy says his voice is heard in the New Orleans party scene, but I missed that.

The new thing that I learned from the movie was the influence Orson Bean had on Breitbart; I had heard Andrew say that the Clarence Thomas hearings had affected his thinking, but his father-in-law seems to have impacted Breitbart’s transition to conservative stalwart, as well. But the movie isn’t really so much a biography of Andrew Breitbart as it is a summary of his actions while prosecuting his #War against the mainstream media. I personally attended and blogged considerable portions of the 2009-2010 events in the movie. Thus, it’s a fantastic summary of events to which I stood on the edge, observing closely.

Will there ever be another strange, inverted period in American history like the last four years? God forbid. We are witnessing the death of the Commie-infested media, and Andrew Breitbart played the role of its Jack Kevorkian. Someone was asking on Twitter if there will ever be another Breitbart, as though Andrew were some Arthurian figure. Responses:

  • No: Breitbart, MLK, George Washington, &c are all Highlander figures. “There can be only one”. But they do precipitate out of the solution that is history, as needed.
  • Yes: there is a Breitbart in each one of us, albeit a microscopic grain in the case of Lefty tools. That is, even the gimpiest Legacy media gimp, and I’ll throw out Chris Matthews for a name, probably still at least dreams of his pre-gimp days. Breitbart, while no military veteran, can be seen as having ‘supported and defended the Constitution of the United States against all enemies. . .domestic’.

And thus I salute this fine American.

 

Left Celebrates ‘Hating Breitbart’ Opening by Acting Like the A–holes They Are

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Tonight my co-blogger Smitty is going to see the new Andrew Marcus documentary Hating Breitbart for the first time. I’ve seen it twice — at the world premiere at the Republican convention in Tampa and at the D.C. preview showing Oct. 8.

Last night at the first commercial showing of the film in D.C., a fanatical Breitbart-hater named Ryan Clayton was reportedly ejected from the theater for disruptive behavior.

The bozo actually appears in the film. He’s a familiar type on the Left, the posturing “activist” who plays hero by Standing Up to Right-Wing Evil:  “Admire my courageous truth-telling!”

Such people don’t realize what tedious stereotypes they are. If Ryan Clayton had a line of trademark fragrances, it would be called “Sanctimony.”

Neal Rauhauser, Who Drove Barrett Brown Off the Deep End, Continues Unrelenting Harassment of His Targets

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Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“There’s nothing stopping them. They feel like they have the right to do anything they want to anyone who gets in their way.”
– Jennifer Emick, describing the online savagery she’s experienced since exposing “Anonymous”

When last we took note of Brett Kimberlin’s evil minion Neal Rauhauser on Oct. 2, Rauhauser had helped instigate Nadia Naffe’s lawsuit against Patterico. Being busy with campaign coverage, I overlooked Patterico’s Oct. 4 post about that lawsuit:

Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser recently admitted in a complaint to my office that he introduced Naffe to attorney Jay Leiderman:

I brought this situation to the attention of Los Angeles attorney Jay Leiderman, then introduced he and Naffe, and he is now representing her in a civil case against Frey.

In the same document, Rauhauser declared that if Naffe is successful, he believes it will put an end to my career as a Deputy D.A.:

[T]he lawsuit he faces from Nadia Naffe is another matter and it is understood that if she prevails that may put an end to Frey’s career in the DA’s of?ce.

That’s how Rauhauser operates: Once he targets somebody as an enemy, he becomes fixated and obsessed, and endeavors to get others to assist him in harassment of the target. Be sure and read the entirety of Patterico’s post, and especially notice the March 23 Tweet from the “Breitbart Unmasked” account.

Keep in mind that Rauhauser’s implacable hatred of Patterico dates back to July 2011, in the wake of the Anthony Weiner sex scandal when (a) Patterico was “SWATted,” and (b) Rauhauser posted a series of diatribes at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” alias:

In a July 27 post, “Weinergate Perps Pay Dearly,” Rauhauser said Patterico “looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate.” Rauhauser has never produced a scintilla of evidence to support that bizarre accusation. Weiner had resigned from Congress on June 16, 2011, after admitting “he had in fact sent the [Twitter] image and had had inappropriate online exchanges with at least six other women. ” So there was no reason at all — in late July, six weeks after Weigner resigned — for anyone to imagine a “planner/operator” as being “behind” the scandal, let alone to accuse Patterico.

Rauhauser was Patient Zero in a weird epidemic of left-wing paranoia that became known as “Weiner Trutherism.” Rauauser’s irrational demonization of Patterico might be laughed off, were it not for the fact that several people — now evidently including Nadia Naffe and attorney Jay Leiderman — have assisted Rauhauser in his harassment of Patterico. And what Rauhauser has done to Patterico is typical of what he does to everyone he targets.

Take, for example, Jennifer Emick, an online researcher who last year helped expose members of the “LulzSec” criminal hacker conspiracy, a rogue offshoot of “Anonymous.” Rauhauser discovered that Emick was an acquaintance of Aaron Barr, the former CEO of HB Gary Federal, a security firm that had unsuccessfully sought a contract to provide its services to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which had been targeted by “Anonymous.”

Rauhauser magnified the association between Emick and Barr into one of his typical conspiracy theories. It was apparently Rauhauser who got Barrett Brown so stoked up with paranoid rage last month that Brown unleashed a crazed video rant that got him arrested for threatening an FBI agent:

“I got to find out, thanks to a hack — thanks to another f–king stroke of luck, thank God — that HB Gary, since mid-February, had hired an FBI informant . . . making up reasons to raid Barrett Brown and get his information. . . .
“It turns out — from the e-mails that were stolen two months ago and that, thank God, I have — that that guy was an old military buddy of HB Gary executive Jim Butterworth. . . . I know what’s been done to me by these f–king contractors . . .
“FBI agent Robert Smith is a criminal who’s involved in a criminal conspiracy that has, thank God, been revealed, part of which was evident months ago, because I told the f–king FBI agent Daniel Forseck . . . when his f–king little Jennifer Emick — f–king informant, HB Gary employee — bragging about the sh-t, she gave me the number. I guess she wanted to talk to me and see what I’d say.”

The derangement evident in Brown’s 13-minute video reflected many of the same weird obsessions — HB Gary, Team Themis, Tom Ryan — that have crowded Rauhauser’s mind since his “Kookpocalypse” rant in February. (See my June 19 post, “Neal Rauhauser: Internet Super-Spy!” Patterico also has more background on Rauhauser’s “Kookpocalypse” episode.) Given that Barrett Brown had also been attacking Rauhauser’s enemies (me and Patterico) a couple weeks earlier, it was obvious who was feeding Brown’s paranoia.

Since Brown’s arrest in September, the harassment of Jennifer Emick has escalated and Neal Rauhauser has directly involved himself in this harassment, filing a false report with the city where Emick lives and sending defamatory e-mails to the sheriff’s department in the county where Emick lives. In his report to the city, which he posted on his blog, Rauhauser wrote:

I am being harassed by a mentally ill resident of the city . . .
I have worked as a political consultant since 2010 and Emick is one of a handful of deeply disturbed persons who have become fascinated with me. This all seems to be connected to events in the spring of 2010, when I worked for the primary challenger to pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District.

This is a bald-faced lie. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Bart Stupak campaign, Emick never wrote a word about Rauhauser until he began attacking her — because of her online acquaintance with Rauhauser’s nemesis “Zapem” — and his claim that Emick is harassing him is the exact opposite of truth.

We are looking at another classic example of Rauhauser’s “accuse the accusers” strategy: Malign the target to pre-emptively discredit them, and to create confusion on the part of courts and police as to who is the victim and who is the victimizer.

Rauhauser’s assertion that Emick is “mentally ill” or “deeply disturbed” is part of this strategy. Rauhauser himself is a twisted Gordian knot of sociopathic tendencies, exhibiting habitual dishonesty, narcissistic grandiosity, persecutorial delusions and a sadistic delight in inflicting suffering on others. He has the sociopath’s cunning intuition, an ability to spot weak-minded people who are vulnerable to his manipulative behavior, and to solicit their assistance in his various schemes.

Neal also has the narcissist’s arrogance, so that he boldly lies to law-enforcement officials without any apparent fear of apprehension, because he thinks himself infinitely smarter than those to whom he lies. And why shouldn’t he believe this?

Rauhuaser has sent his conspiracy-theory treatises — filled with all manner of false and defamatory assertions — to the FBI, to various state and local law enforcement agencies, and even to members of Congress, and never once suffered any serious legal consequence for this peculiar habit. Probably, officials receiving his e-mails dismiss Rauhauser as a harmless kook, and underestimate the harm done by his online behavior. (Cops are apt to view such conflicts as  “just a bunch of crazies arguing on the Internet.”) 

One of the best analyses of Rauhauser’s personality is Ladd Ehlinger Jr.’s “A Breathtaking Lack of Empathy.”

Rauhauser seems incapable of caring about the harm he does to others. Barrett Brown is now in federal custody, and perhaps headed to prison, because of Neal’s manipulations, yet rather than acknowledge his role in inciting Brown’s meltdown and repenting of his evil behavior, Rauhauser just moves on in search of other targets to menace and manipulate.

Soon, however, a Virginia court may bring a certain amount of justice to Rauhauser, who is a co-defendant in Aaron Walker’s lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin. William Hoge has been chronicling the procedural progress of that lawsuit, and if you have followed the case, you know that at the next court hearing on Friday, Oct. 26, it’s possible that Kimberlin will be held in contempt of court.

And those who have studied Rauhauser’s modus operandi will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Neal has begun touting the “Kookpocalypse Konclusion . . .  I just got the word – close of business next Friday it’s all gonna happen,” with a countdown clock to Friday, Oct. 26.

So Rauhauser’s recent flurry of online evil — the “doxing,” the posting of photos of his targets and their homes, the e-mails to law enforcement, et cetera — could be interpreted as reactions to the legal pressure being brought to bear against Rauhauser’s client/associate Kimberlin. Neal exhibited a similar pattern of behavior in the weeks before the March raid on “LulzSec.”

Weird things involving Rauhauser’s targets are happening on a daily basis, and these things should not be dismissed as coincidences.

GALLUP: ROMNEY 52, OBAMA 45 — Let the Great 2012 Liberal Freak-Out Begin!

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They convinced themselves that Obama “won” Tuesday’s debate, but Romney actually gains in the first Gallup national tracking poll with post-debate reaction? Oh, boy.

UPDATE: Ace explains what happened:

 The debate was not a victory for Obama. It was a confirmation of Romney’s acceptability, plausibility, and fitness for office.

Yesterday, Sully admitted he had been “on the ledge”:

Guess what?

UPDATE II: Ed Morrissey points out that these latest numbers indicate that neither of the past two debates helped Obama among likely voters.

 




 

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For What It’s Worth

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— by Wombat-socho


Maetenloch over at AOSHQ had this list of top-ranked conservative websites, courtesy of Doug Ross at DirectorBlue who did the grunt work of sorting through Alexa to figure out who’s hot and who’s not.


The good news is that we’re hot: #96 on the list, just a few spots behind Dan Riehl (#93) and Ann Coulter (#91). There’s some weird stuff on the list that I’m not sure qualifies as “conservative”, strictly speaking, including the Volokh Conspiracy (#97) and the various Gannett military papers such as the Army Times, but it’s not my list so I don’t get to say who’s in and who’s out.


No Buffalo Springfield link, much less video. I hate that song.

Did You Say ‘Preference Cascade’?

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“One might have thought that the 2010 mid-term elections . . . would have convinced the Left that they had miscalculated. Instead, they placed their confidence in Obama’s ability to navigate the new environment . . .
“Everything seemed to be proceeding in accordance with those beliefs until Romney dismantled Obama in Wednesday’s debate — a psychological shock that has unhinged the Left, causing them to begin lashing out furiously and rather erratically at anyone who suggests that the dam has broken and that the ‘preference cascade’ may doom Obama to defeat in November.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 6

“[I]t is possible to imagine a scenario where Mitt Romney comes into the Oct. 16 debate sitting on a 4-point lead in the national polls with just three weeks to go before Election Day. And if I can envision such a scenario, you know that Democrats must be imagining the same possibility with a sense of Fear and Loathing.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 7

As a great man once repeatedly said, “Don’t get cocky,” but there are good reasons for Republicans to be optimistic with 22 days remaining in the 2012 campaign. Ed Driscoll has previously invoked the phrase “preference cascade” to describe what we may see if Americans wake up to the reality of the SCOAMF’s incompetence. And today Ed Morrissey employs the same phrase:

I don’t think that Obama has lost the election yet, but there is only three weeks to go now. This is when preference cascades begin to materialize, and usually away from the incumbent, who has had nearly four years to make the case for re-election.

Exactly. While defeating an incumbent president is always an against-the-odds project, history would suggest that (a) the debates would be a decisive factor, and (b) the shift toward the challenger wouldn’t happen until fairly late in the campaign.

If this is what we’re seeing now, then Obama’s poll surge in September — on Sept. 29, he led the Real Clear Politics average of national polls by 4.3 points — was in fact a mirage. Whether or not those of us whom Jonathan Chait called “poll denialists” were right about the skewed samples, Obama’s poll lead prior to the first debate was actually an illusion that did not take into account the underlying reality of (a) Obama’s failed policies and (b) his inability to defend those policies when challenged by Romney outside the media filter.

So far, only one poll (Pew) has shown Romney leading by 4 points nationally, and Romney’s biggest RCP lead was 1.3 points on Saturday, but the latest Gallup tracking poll has Mitt leading 49-47, and if Obama doesn’t score a clear win Tuesday, the whole thing may shift toward an outright Romney landslide.

The RCP Electoral College map currently has the race at Obama 201 and Romney 191, with Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the “toss-up” category. By this point in 2008, John McCain’s campaign was in meltdown mode and had already pulled out of Michigan. For Romney to win any of those four states would almost certainly be decisive: If Mitt wins Michigan he won’t lose Ohio, and if Pennsylvania is even competitive in the final week of the campaign, Romney could win as many as 300 of 538 Electoral College votes.

What will happen in Tuesday’s debate? Both campaigns are “working the refs” with CNN’s Candy Crowley as moderator, Michelle Malkin reminds us of “plant” infestations at town-hall debates and Noel Sheppard quotes Ed Hart: “We will know in the fullness of time.”

Keep watching the slo-mo walkback by Nate Silver, whose Incredible Mystical Forecasting Model™ has now raised Romney’s odds to a precisely calculated 36.7% after having him at 12.9% Oct. 4.

UPDATE: The Insta-Driscol-lanche! Thanks, Ed.
 




 

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