Obama Still Hasn’t Responded to Republican Offer to Discuss Health Care

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A Republican congressman says it’s been nearly a month since he and 33 colleagues offered to meet with President Obama to discuss health care reform, and they still haven’t heard back from the White House.

“In the wake of Obamacare’s numerous failures, President Obama said that if Republicans had better health care reform ideas, they should say so,” Arkansas Rep. Tim Griffin said in a statement Wednesday. “That’s why 33 of my colleagues and I sent him a letter that included a list of nine proposals that would help build an open and innovative healthcare system, expand access, increase choice, and lower costs.  So far, our request for a meeting to discuss these ideas has been met with silence.  I hope President Obama meant what he said and will meet with us.  It’s not too late for a fresh start, so we can get real health care reform right.”

On Dec. 3, Obama challenged critics of his program: “If you’ve got good ideas, bring them to me. . . . [If] you still think this law is a bad idea then you’ve got to tell us specifically what you’d do differently to cut costs, cover more people, make insurance more secure.”

A week later, on Dec. 10, Griffin and 33 other GOP House members responded with a letter to the President highlighting nine separate areas of reform on which Republicans agree. “We appreciate your offer to discuss alternative proposals,” the letter said, “and we look forward to meeting with you at your earliest convenience.”

So far, apparently, that “earliest convenience” hasn’t arrived.

 


Oklahoma Police: Meth Mom Molested Her Kids While People Paid to Watch

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Natalie Lynn Webb

Natalie Lynn Webb, 30, of Elk City, Oklahoma, is being held on $2 million bond after her arrest last month on sex abuse charges:

Webb’s 9-year-old son told investigators that his 8-year-old brother and two 3-year-old sisters were repeatedly raped by their mother as other men and women looked on, according to the [Dec. 18 affidavit]. The boy told police that he saw his sisters resist as their mother dragged them into a room, then he could hear his sisters screaming and crying. Police also wrote that the boy told them he saw his mother using a foreign object in the abuse and that people may have paid his mother to watch the abuse.
One of Webb’s 3-year-old daughters corroborated her brother’s interview, telling investigators that it felt “nasty” when she was being molested, according to the affidavit. The 9-year-old said he also saw his brother being abused, but was able to avoid being sexually abused himself by running and hiding in a dumpster. In interviews with police, Webb denied sexually molesting her children. . . .
Webb told authorities that she often took methamphetamine and sold it out of her house; the 9-year-old described seeing needles around the house.
Webb admitted to authorities that she sometimes traded her food stamps for meth. During past interviews included in the affidavit, she demanded to take a polygraph test to prove that she had not sexually molested her children. In late November, Webb told officer Steve Bonds, of the Beckham County Sheriff’s Office, that she did not want to talk with the polygraph examiner after the examiner told her she failed the test. . . .
According to the affidavit, Webb has past felony convictions for child endangerment and possession of a controlled substance, along with misdemeanor convictions of unlawful possession of paraphernalia, bogus checks and unauthorized use of a credit card.

Just a meth-addicted mother raping her own children for drug money. Nothing to see here. Move along.

 

God and Meth at Yale

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Yale University English professor Samuel See promoted his services as a gay escort under the pseudonym “Ryan Cochran,” boasting: “I love sex and being with men. . . . I can get into all kinds of sexual and social situations — just name your pleasure. I’m down to earth, humble, personally generous, and horny a lot of the time.”

In May 2013, the professor married a man named Sunder Ganglani, who served as a Yale drama teaching assistant during the 2011-12 school year. By September, however, See and Ganglani’s split had become so acrimonious that they were both under court order not to contact each other. Professor See was “known as a brilliant writer and rising star in academia,” but he died in the New Haven jail at age 34 after being arrested for violating the protection order.

Professor See’s death prompted campus protests for “police accountability,” but it turns out he died of a drug overdose:

“Samuel See died of acute methamphetamine and amphetamine intoxication with recent myocardial infarction,” reports The Courant, citing the medical examiner. ”His death was ruled an accident.” . . .
See had been arrested Nov. 23 after a domestic altercation with his estranged husband. As police attempted to arrest See, he fought with officers and suffered minor injuries. He was found unresponsive in his jail cell the next morning.

Just a violent meth-addicted gay prostitute on the faculty of an elite university. Nothing to see here. Move along.

 

The Predictable Karma of #Shutuppery: Will Democrat Sue Jeanne Bonds?

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In case you’ve forgotten, Jeanne Milliken Bonds is a North Carolina Democrat operative who was implicated in the #Shutuppery efforts against @SisterToldjah and @LadyLiberty1885 last year. Now it turns out that a former Democrat candidate allied with Bonds is declaring bankruptcy and threatening to sue Bonds:

A former Democratic candidate for governor and state lawmaker has filed for bankruptcy protection.
The Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing will allow Bill Faison, a personal injury attorney, to restructure debt related to his Durham law firm, Faison and Gillespie.
In an interview, Faison said he expects to pay his debts in full, which are listed at more than $7.1 million. . . .
Faison represented Orange and Caswell counties in the state House for four terms before making a bid for the Democratic Party nomination for governor in 2012. He came in a distant third in the party primary. . . .
The court documents also indicate that Faison may file a legal claim against Jeanne Milliken Bonds, a Democratic political consultant and business partner.
Faison and Bonds, a former Knightdale mayor, planned to launch a political television show that never materialized under a company named Live Wire Media, formed shortly after the Democratic gubernatorial primary in May 2012.
Faison refused to comment about the Live Wire arrangement or his relationship with Bonds, saying it was part of the pending litigation. Bonds consulted for Faison during his gubernatorial campaign.

Is Jeanne Bonds an Internet troll or a campaign consultant? Well, she’s a Democrat, so I’m not sure the difference matters much.

 

Portrait of a Stalker Troll: @Repsac3, Also Known as Walter James Casper III

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Professor Donald Douglas has spent years fighting one particularly obsessed troll, Walter James Casper III, who might actually out-rank Bill Schmalfeldt in the Stalker Hall of Shame, because Casper has been cyberstalking Douglas for more than five years.

Among the significant characteristics of cyberstalkers is the disproportionality of their obsessions. Professor Douglas is not an academic celebrity or influential media personality. He’s a professor of political science at Long Beach City College in California. It is not as if he’s at Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Yale or some other big-money “prestige” school, and yet the fact that Professor Douglas is (a) conservative and (b) a blogger is sufficient to justify in Casper’s sick mind the most insane forms of stalking behavior.

Another characteristic of cyberstalkers is their resort to psychological projection: They are not obsessed with you — no! — you are obsessed with them, and don’t you dare accuse them of harassing you — of course not! — you are instead harassing them.

This kind of “accuse the accusers” tactic serves two purposes for the troll: First, it is a psychological rationalization by which he justifies his behavior and, second, it serves to obfuscate the situation in the eyes of law enforcement or other authorities.

Something else: The conflict between Casper and Professor Douglas is not about politics, nor is it about Professor Douglas.

That is to say, Casper’s espousal of left-wing political ideas is not the reason for his behavior, but simply a pretext, and if he weren’t harassing Professor Douglas, he’d be harassing some other target, selected more or less at random. There is, of course, a specific history to the conflict between them, but it is ultimately irrelevant. There are plenty of people every bit as left-wing as Casper who are not obsessive stalkers, and there are other conservative bloggers who might just as easily become targets for stalking, if ever they attracted the attention of such a grotesquely deformed personality as Casper.

Walter James Casper III has spent years smearing and harassing Professor Douglas, trying to get him fired from his job. This could (and in fact, often does) happen to any blogger who has a day job.

To get an idea of the pathetic nature of Casper’s obsession, he has devoted an entire blog, called “American Nihilist,” to his anti-Douglas jihad. In the past six months, that stalker site has attracted an average of about 15 visitors a day. By contrast, Professor Douglas’s blog has averaged nearly 2,000 visitors daily.

In other words, the readership for Casper’s anti-Douglas rantings is less than 1% of the readership of Professor Douglas’s blog and yet, despite such clear evidence that no one else shares his obsession, Casper continues doing what he does, apparently with no other purpose except to annoy the target of his weird fixation.

Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. Stalkers gotta stalk.

 


‘I Slacked Off in 2013’

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And So It Goes in Shreveport’s Pat Austin:

I slacked off in 2013 because real life kept me busy.  I probably suffered from some blogger burnout, too.  Like a lot of conservative bloggers, I got real disheartened after the last presidential election.  Between the two, I didn’t do a lot of relevant blogging last year.
I’m coming back off life support though, I think, and am feeling more motivated, as you may have noticed from the onslaught of posts over the past couple of weeks.  I’d like to thank Professor Jacobson for continuing to link and support me throughout my layoff.  I couldn’t ask for a better blog-buddy.

Oh, sucking up to Jacobson now, are we? Despite my hurt feelings, I sympathize with Pat’s “blogger burnout” issues after 2012. One of things I’ve done in the past year is to spend more time blogging about stories that aren’t politics — culture, crime, sex, education, media, etc. — but which reflect the forces that influence politics.

This isn’t to say I “slacked off,” but rather that I refocused as necessary to maintain interest. The habit of writing every day about something is impossible to escape, and is not really affected by the futility of the situation in Washington, D.C.

 

#Occupy Suckers: De Blasio’s Corrupt Connections to Wall Street Exposed

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If you thought his idealistic far-left supporters bothered to investigate the guy they elected mayor, you need to think again:

Mayor de Blasio’s ties to the Brooklyn Democratic boss he teamed up with to anoint the next City Council speaker run all the way to Hizzoner’s doorstep, The Post has learned.
Since 2012, de Blasio has refinanced both homes he owns in Park Slope through the firm where Brooklyn Democratic leader Frank Seddio formerly served as vice president — Wall Street Mortgage Bankers.
Public records show that the most recent deal came just three days after de Blasio’s primary victory on Sept. 10, when he refinanced his 11th Street home with the firm for $625,000.
In June 2012, he had refinanced another home his family owns down the block with Wall Street Mortgage Bankers for $630,000.

“Wall Street Mortgage Bankers“! Was there ever a name so perfectly calculated to epitomize everything the Left claims to hate?

There is no question but that New York’s new mayor, Bill De Blasio, owes his landslide victory in the November election to the Occupy Movement.
It was Occupy Wall Street’s minions, hemmed in by thug-like NYPD officers armed with sidearms, clubs and pepper spray cans, who in 2011 abruptly changed the national conversation about capitalism, introducing the concept of “We are the 99%,” and focusing attention on the enormous enrichment of the top 1% of Americans over the past several decades, as a direct result of public policies on taxation and de-regulation.
And it was that new focus on the country’s yawning wealth and income gap that provided De Blasio with his winning campaign theme.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss:

City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito fessed up Monday, admitting she failed to disclose years of rental income she received, as first revealed by the Daily News.
The East Harlem Democrat, who is Mayor de Blasio’s choice for Council speaker, acknowledged the lapse after The News reported that several people lived in a three-unit building she owns during a period when she reported no rental income on her city ethics forms.
“This was an unintentional mistake,” her spokesman, Eric Koch, told The News on Monday night.

The resemblance between Mayor De Blasio and a comic book villain is purely coincidental, but this “self-awareness fail” raises the question: Are liberals capable of learning anything? Is there no amount of betrayal and disillusionment which can cause liberals to question whether their ideals are, y’know, ideal? How many times do liberals need to go through this process — getting fucked raw by power-hungry greedheads masquerading as egalitarian reformers — before they finally recognize that progressive idealism is the Gospel of Chumps?

Say what you will about the GOP, at least when Republicans rip you off, sell you out, stab you in the back and fuck you over, they don’t claim to be doing it in the name of “social justice.”

 


‘Assange Told Him He Didn’t Care How the Information Was Obtained’

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Siggi Thordarson (left) with Julian Assange

My colleague Ali Akbar called my attention to this Rolling Stone story about Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, the hacking wunderkind who at age 17 became Julian Assange’s most valuable assistant. Thordason reveals the reckless ambition and cult-like paranoia inside the WikiLeaks freak show, and this 600-word excerpt is pretty brutal:

In the wake of the Manning cables, Assange wanted more newsmaking leaks, but the material coming in wasn’t meeting his insatiable appetite or ambitions. So Siggi reached out to Gnosis, a hacker group that made its name in December 2010 for compromising more than a million registered accounts on Gawker websites.
Gnosis tipped Siggi off to a notorious 16-year-old female from Anonymous named Kayla who had just helped hack HBGary, an IT security firm that worked for the U.S. government. Gnosis claimed to have an unpublished copy of HBGary’s database, including its clients’ names and e-mails. “Don’t release it,” Siggi messaged back. “Allow us.”
Anonymous, however, ended up leaking the files themselves, and Siggi told Gnosis that his boss was pissed. “You can’t really control Anonymous,” Gnosis replied. “You can kinda herd them in the right direction but other than that lol good luck.”
But that didn’t stop Siggi from trying. In January 2011, Siggi got word that DataCell, the hosting service behind WikiLeaks, had valuable contracts pulled by an Icelandic power company called Landsnet, and he wanted revenge. “I have a funny request for you,” Siggi wrote Kayla in one chat. “www.landsnet.is is something ‘Anonymous’ should take down if it’s possible.” Two minutes later, Kayla replied that she’d just unleashed a botnet against the website, a form of a cyberattack that swamps the site with requests. Siggi tried logging on to the Landsnet site. “Haha request timed out,” he wrote.
The attack didn’t stop there. When Siggi explained that the Icelandic government had made a deal to assume DataCell’s contracts, Kayla asked if he wanted her to take down one of its sites too. “Definitely,” Siggi replied. Minutes later, a ministry site was down. But as the sites fell, Siggi joked that Kayla might inadvertently knock Iceland’s power offline too. “If you see a button that says turn off electricity don’t press it please,” he wrote.
With his connections to the Anonymous cell more secure, Siggi suggested that the group could be of even greater help – getting them more secret documents that WikiLeaks could release. “I don’t care where the information comes from,” Assange had told him, which Siggi took as carte blanche to solicit stolen material. So Siggi had Gnosis introduce him to one of the most infamous hackers of all: Sabu, leader of the Anonymous offshoot LulzSec. In the spring of 2011, LulzSec had taken down the sites of high-profile targets including Fox, the CIA and PBS, whose Web page they replaced with the title “FREE BRADLEY MANNING. FUCK FRONTLINE!” But Sabu wanted proof that Siggi was who he said he was by speaking with Assange directly. Siggi claims to have complied and arranged the Skype call.
With Sabu convinced, Siggi put him on a job: to dig further into the Icelandic government’s computers to see if it had intel on the DataCell deal. Soon, Sabu delivered. Siggi says Assange told him to have LulzSec upload the files to a WikiLeaks FTP server, which they did. And Sabu soon had more secrets to offer. He told Siggi his crew had recently hacked Stratfor, a “global intelligence” agency and government contractor, and found more than 5 million confidential e-mails between Stratfor and companies such as Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, as well as government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
But as the e-mails poured in, Siggi began to grow anxious and questioned the scale of the operation. Even though he was the one who initiated the relationship with the hackers, he worried that they were going too far. “Crossing this line by accepting stolen information and publishing this is literally just breaking the law,” he says he told Assange. “You’re going away from being a journalist organization and threatening national security.” But, once again, Assange told him he didn’t care how the information was obtained. . . .

You should read the whole thing. It confirms in detail a lot of what anyone with common sense understood intuitively: Assange is an irresponsible psychopath, and contempt for the rule of law was the core value of the WikiLeaks/Anonymous project.

Assange’s supporters will accuse Thordarson of “betrayal,” but how could anyone expect loyalty within an enterprise so profoundly committed to criminality? The moral of this complex story is ultimately simple: Bad causes attract bad people.