Another Fake Hate Crime? Arrest Discredits Tennessee Anti-Gay Case

Posted on Comments

Paris, Tennessee, is a town of 10,000 people about two hours west of Nashville, but it made national headlines last month:

Joe Williams, Tennessee Health Food Store
Owner, Beaten In Alleged Anti-Gay Hate Crime

Williams said three men beat him unconscious and wrote a “three-letter homophobic slur” on his forehead in the Nov. 20 attack:

The victim, identified by Fox 17 as 32-year-old Joe Williams, told the Paris Post-Intelligencer that a man had come into the shop earlier that day and asked him about his sexuality, before responding that he could not shop there if he was gay. He also said that he was called derogatory names during the beating, which took place as he was in the process of closing up the business for the night.
“I just fear for my life,” Williams told Fox 17. “I’m to the point now where I’m worried to even go outside … I live my life as a gay man and wasn’t ashamed of it and I just feel that I was targeted for that for that reason.”
The suspects also set Healthy Thyme on fire, causing about $5,500 in damages,according to WPSD.

Whether or not Paris, Tennessee, is such a hotbed of homophobic hatred as to cause Williams to fear for his life, however, it now appears that this alleged hate crime never happened:

A man who told police he had been robbed and beaten at a Paris health food store a few days before Thanksgiving was arrested after he allegedly withheld information about the incident and has now been charged with filing a false report.
Joe Williams, 32, of 803 E. Wood St. was arrested [Dec. 20] after turning himself in at the Henry County jail.
Williams originally told officers he had been beaten and robbed Nov. 20 at Healthy Thyme, which is at the same address as Williams’ home. . . .
Officers later found inconsistencies in Williams’ story. Paris Police Sgt. Ricky Watson said Williams failed to bring up certain facts known to investigators on three different occasions.
“He was given three opportunities to disclose that information, and he chose not to,” Watson said.
That leaves investigators trying to determine how much of Williams’ story might have been true.
“We’ve not been able to verify or dispel any of the statements made about the actual robbery or fire,” Watson said. “We’re looking into Mister Williams, and we’re looking into whether it did or did not happen.”

The apparent fakery by Williams probably won’t be reported in bold headlines by some outlets that reported the story originally.

 

If He’s Lost Lawrence O’Donnell …

Posted on Comments

. . . Edward Snowden’s status as progressive hero is over:

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell skewered Edward Snowden’s Christmas address on Thursday, saying the National Security Agency leaker’s claims are “wildly overblown.”
“Every time he speaks, every time, he will say things that are absurdly, wildly overblown,” O’Donnell said. “He says that the government is, quote, ‘watching everything we do.’ That is of course impossible.”
“No one is watching everything we do. That capacity doesn’t exist,” he continued, adding, “I find it odd that every time he speaks he says provably untrue things like this.”

 

Edward Snowden never fooled me: From the get-go, I recognized this allegedly heroic “whistleblower” as another deluded anti-America traitor like Bradley — eh, Chelsea — Manning or perhaps even an outright paranoid kook like Barrett Brown. (Both Snowden and Brown are high-school dropouts, coincidentally or not.)

Manning, Brown, Snowden and, for that matter, Michael Hastings, all exhibited the symptomatic effects of a psychological complex we might call Post-Republican Anti-War Syndrome.

The tensions and frustrations of the Bush era — beginning with the disputed election of 2000, continued by the 9/11 attacks and on through the “War on Terror” and the invasion of Iraq — simply overwhelmed the fragile minds of some vulnerable people, and the election of Obama was insufficient to cure their madness. (Alabama moonbat blogger Roger Shuler is a textbook case.)

The anti-war movement of the Bush era summoned forth an army of kooks. It gave them a sense of purpose and focus for their alienated rage. When Bush (and “Bush’s war,” as the Left habitually called Iraq) went away, the malcontents and nutjobs were incapable of adjusting to the post-Bush reality because, in point of fact, they had never been very well-adjusted to begin with.

Hey, whatever happened to Cindy Sheehan?

Inevitably, national security required President Obama to continue (and even in certain cases to expand) many of the programs and policies for which his left-wing allies had furiously denounceed Bush, so that there developed a distinct new fringe which we might best describe as pseudo-libertarian or crypto-anarchist. Glenn Greenwald, for example, has never to my knowledge offered any criticism of the economic interventionism of the domestic Welfare State, but he rants endlessly about the alleged authoritarianism of America’s national security establishment. This has lately put Greenwald at odds with some liberals:

In a confrontational interview with MSNBC anchor Kristen Welker, progressive journalist Glenn Greenwald said that he’s a defender of Edward Snowden’s actions in the same sense that MSNBC is a defender of President Obama.
Greenwald said that he believes “every journalist has an agenda. We’re on MSNBC now, where close to 24 hours a day the agenda of President Obama and the Democratic Party are promoted, defended, glorified, the agenda of the Republican Party is undermined. That doesn’t mean the people who appear on MSNBC aren’t journalists. They are.”
“I do defend [Edward Snowden],” Greenwald said, “just like people on MSNBC defend President Obama and Democratic Party leaders 24 hours a day.”

It is certainly true that MSNBC is purely partisan, but what conservatives need to understand is that speaking this truth doesn’t make Glenn Greenwald any less crazy than when he was using sockpuppet accounts to defend himself online back in 2006.

My conservative friends may share with libertarians an honest suspicion of an intrusive all-powerful federal government, and thus welcome the Snowden leaks as proof that Big Government cannot be trusted. But America still has dangerous enemies who wish to do us harm, and if the NSA says its data-collection programs were part of an effort to protect us from such enemies, we must distinguish between (a) legitimate concern about unconstitutional abuses, and (b) an exaggerated paranoia that justifies the plainly criminal actions of Manning and Snowden.

Yes, it’s fun to skewer Democrats for their hypocrisy by forcing them to defend Obama’s surveillance state, but conservatives would be just as guilty of hypocrisy if we justified breaches of national security merely to score points against Obama. Insofar as our discussion of this is concerned with persuading moderates to side with conservatives — and in our hyper-partisan age, few people who pay attention to public affairs are either moderate or persuadable — the lesson of this teachable moment is the ultimate futility of “anti-war” radicalism. If even a Nobel Peace Prize-winning progressive like Barack Obama finds himself obliged to employ U.S. military force overseas, to send armed drones to kill terrorists and to maintain a vast high-tech surveillance system for keeping an eye on our enemies, isn’t it obvious that America’s foreign policy problems can’t be blamed on GOP neocon warhawks?

Conservatives don’t have to embrace kooks like Glenn Greenwald or traitors like Edward Snowden to make that point, and if this is one of the rare occasions when Lawrence O’Donnell is right — no, the NSA is not “‘watching everything we do” — it just serves to contrast with O’Donnell’s otherwise impeccable record of being wrong.

 


Four U.S. Troops Released in Libya

Posted on Comments

The post-“Arab Spring” anarchy continues:

Four American military personnel assigned to the United States Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, were detained Friday and then released after being held for hours by the country’s Interior Ministry, American officials said.
The four were believed to have been reviewing potential evacuation routes for diplomats when they were detained, according to the initial reports received by officials in Washington. . . .
After running into a problem at a checkpoint — many of which are run by local militias — they were detained and later moved to the Ministry of the Interior . . .
The buzzing sound of drones filled Tripoli’s sky for hours as rumors spread through the capital that four Americans were missing.

So, the U.S. helps Libyans overthrow their dictator, and now our troops are getting hassled by “local militias” at a checkpoint? This is a persistent problem in the Third World: A shortage of gratitude.

Kevin D. Williamson once described Bush’s War on Terror as an ill-conceived “program to make Anglo-Saxon republicans out of obscure desert savages.” Obama’s policy is no less ill-conceived.

 

‘Descent Into Madness’

Posted on Comments

Otto Muehl was a radical artist who in 1978, at age 53, founded a commune in Austria known as the Friedrichshof, which had as its goal “the destruction of bourgeois marriage and private property.” Instapundit linked to an article about a new documentary:

Paul-Julien Robert grew up on a country estate with dozens of adults; but he had no idea which one was his father. In the European free-love commune, where he was born in the late 1970s, pretty much all of the men had slept with his mother, any of them could be his dad.
Founded as a utopia where possessions, childcare, and love were communal, traditional family structures were banned. Paul-Julien was an unwitting participant in a social experiment that would end in police raids and the commune’s architect jailed for having sex with minors.
Otto Mühl, who was also a celebrated artist, founded the commune at Friedrichshof near Vienna in Austria in pursuit of a better society, but also to cure his loneliness. At the head of this sprawling collection of men, women, and children, the power he assumed over so many lives drove him to take an ever more authoritarian approach. By the end Friedrichshof was effectively a cult.
The commune’s descent into madness was documented on video  by the inhabitants . . .

Whoa. Full stop. “The commune’s descent into madness”? Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that the commune was founded in madness, and that the insane principles of its founding were then manifested in ways any wise person could have predicted?

Here’s a clue for you kids who have never studied history: Whenever someone uses “bourgeois” and “traditional” as epithets, you need to stay the hell away from whatever utopian scam that person is trying to put over on you. Hostility to private property and contempt for sexual morality are anti-social attitudes betokening the kind of dangerous radicalism that has only ever led to anarchy and totalitarianism (first one, then the other). The charismatic misfit’s destructive impulses are disguised as a sort of humanitarian idealism. The existing order is denounced as cruel and unjust, and its overthrow is advocated as the necessary first step on the road that will lead to Heaven on Earth. Gathering around him other ambitious dreamers, and attracting to his radical cause such natural-born fools as are easily deceived by talk of “Peace” and “Equality,” the leader requires of his followers sacrifices that serve chiefly to aggrandize the leader.

This is the basic story of many radical movements — you could read Daniel Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left to study the remarkable persistence of certain themes — but those of us who remember the 1960s and ’70s need little reminding of the Manson cult, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Jonestown massacre.

Anyway, it was as predictable as clockwork that the founder of a “free love” cult like the Friedrichshof would ultimately prove to be a selfish pervert. Exactly how many young girls he had, or at what age he preferred to have them, most online sources aren’t clear, although one does find this quote: “I’m not a child molester. This is nonsense. The girls were all developed.” Trace that back to its original source and translate from German:

Interviewer: They were 13, 14 years old.
Muehl: So what? Charlemagne married a twelve year old.

 One obituary in German quoted him:

About the then 14-year-old who testified in the trial against him, he even remarked: “She undressed herself, the door was open. I’m not a hypnotist.” And: ”Why should the government dictate when you should have sex?”

See? It’s just an old guy banging 14-year-olds, why should the government care? You silly bourgeois! They were “developed”!

This “descent into madness” was the logical destination of the Friedrichshof for pretty much the same reason that sexual assault plagued the encampments of “Occupy Wall Street.” The alleged high-minded idealism of radical leaders is always exposed as a hypocritical mask for selfishness, and the idiots who are attracted to radical movements never have the kind of common-sense skepticism that would cause them to examine the leader’s altruistic pose and ask, “What’s in it for him? What’s his cut of the action?”

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”

You didn’t expect me to believe that crap, did you?

 

 

Category: Sex

Phil Robertson 1, Political Correctness 0

Posted on Comments

Oh, the GLAAD Butt-Hurt! The most popular family in America could not be defeated by the Sensitivity Outrage Brigades:

Phil Robertson, the patriarch of A&E’s Duck Dynasty clan who was suspended from his hit reality series on Dec. 18 following some incendiary comments about gay people, won’t be put on hiatus after all.
The network and the Robertson family announced Friday that Phil will still be part of the series — and since he didn’t miss any filming, his temporary suspension will have no effect on the upcoming fifth season.

Fact: The “Duck Dynasty” audience is about 10 times larger than the combined audience of CNN and MSNBC.

More at Memeorandum, including commentary by Twitchy, Weasel Zippers, The Daily Caller and NewsBusters.

UPDATE: In case you were wondering about those ratings. The Season 4 premiere of “Duck Dynasty” in August drew 11.8 million viewers, making it the most-watched reality-show episode in cable TV history. Meanwhile, in the 8 p.m. hour on Thursday, Dec. 19, CNN drew 528,000 viewers and MSNBC got 699,000 viewers, for a combined total of slightly more than 1.2 million viewers.

 


Last Night, I Hit Rand Simberg’s Tip Jar for $10, Because … Science!

Posted on Comments

Global warming “hockey stick” theorist Michael Mann has sued several critics, a litigation that Mark Steyn calls “a textbook example” of “bollocks on stilts.” When Mann first sued in October 2012, Ken White at Popehat called it “Butt Hurt in the First Degree”:

[T]he complaint seems almost calculated to support likely conservative narratives about it. It’s very heavy on arguments by authority, citing the National Science Foundation and Columbia Journalism Review and Discovery Magazine and others for its propositions that the defendants are simply wrong in their criticisms of Mr. Mann. It fairly drips with righteous indignation over the existence of persistent global warming deniers. Global warming skeptics have been asserting that the scientific establishment is hostile to any dissent on global warming; this complaint isn’t going to dispel that impression. . . .
[T]he complaint misconstrues hyperbolic rhetoric and statements of opinion as false statements of fact.

Strong language is not defamation, and disagreement is not a tort, but attempting to sue one’s critics into silence is all the rage lately. There was an appeals court ruling in the Mann case and defendant Rand Simberg has a tip jar, so I hit it, with malice aforethought.

If there’s anything I hate worse than a phony scientific “consensus,” it’s a tenured academic suing honest citizens who work for a living.  Michael Mann is a professor at Penn State University. Has anyone in the vicinity of State College, Pa., heard any salacious rumors about Professor Mann? Molesting coeds, peddling methamphetamine, that sort of thing? Have you had a sordid encounter with Professor Mann at a Rest Area on the Turnpike? Now is the time to come forward and spill the beans.

Clearly, we must question the morals and/or sanity of a university professor who would sue Rand Simberg, and there have been reports recently that suggest America’s so-called “scientific community” is populated by madmen, criminals and degenerates. The Environmental Protection Agency’s top climate-change expert John C. Beale copped a plea for swindling the government and an Iowa State University professor faked an AIDS vaccine to defraud the National Institutes of Health for $19 million in research grants. Given this evidence of widespread moral turpitude among Official Credentialed Scientists, who knows what kind of depravity Professor Mann might be involved in, especially now that he has gone so far as to sue Rand Simberg?

So if there is gossip in Professor Mann’s neighborhood of a “rape dungeon” in his basement — ghastly screams in the night, truck-stop hookers buried in his backyard, etc. — please let us know.

Otherwise, go hit Rand Simberg’s tip jar, because . . . Science!

 


Three Gay Men Laugh About Oral Sex With Anderson Cooper’s Mother

Posted on Comments

The weirdest thing is that Anderson Cooper himself introduced the topic in a discussion with Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan:

“My mom once wrote a romance memoir about men she had dated — and I use that term loosely — and she described one guy she was currently dating — my mom was 85 at the time — as the Nijinsky of cunnilingus. And she made me proofread the book.”

Much laughter ensued, and never mind the lifelong tragedy of Anderson Cooper’s mother, 89-year-old heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, who was the object of a notorious custody battle in the 1930s, who was married four times, and whose son Carter Cooper — Anderson’s older brother — committed suicide at age 23 in 1988.

We can only imagine what an old-fashioned Freudian analyst might say about Cooper, Savage and Sullivan sitting around laughing on national TV at Cooper mother’s sex life. However, I’m reminded of an observation Barbara Dafoe Whitehead made in The Divorce Culture: The emotional climate in certain types of families is hot or cold, but never appropriately and comfortably warm.

Anderson Cooper’s CNN show is third in cable news ratings, with 528,000 viewers, compared to 699,000 for Chris Hayes on MSNBC and more than 3 million for Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Maybe people don’t want to watch gay men talk about old women’s sex lives.

 

 

UPDATE: Curious as to who the other guests were on that Anderson Cooper segment, I checked the transcript:

Joining me now is Dan Savage, author of “American Savage,” Andrew Sullivan from andrewsullivan.com, a CNN panelist and founding editor also of “The Dish,” also CNN commentator, Michaela Angela Davis and senior legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin . . .

OK, so three gay men, a former fashion editor at Essence magazine, and a Harvard lawyer who was on “Journolist” — with such a “balanced” panel as this, is it any wonder that Anderson Cooper reaches only 12 percent of the cable-news audience? Of course, I understand that when you’re producing a New York-based show the day after Christmas, it might be difficult to find, say, a Presbyterian heterosexual guest, but is CNN even trying?

 

A Bad Christmas for Neal Rauhauser

Posted on Comments

Regular readers of this blog need no introduction to Neal Rauhauser, the disgraced former Democrat campaign consultant and associate of bomber/porogressive activist Brett Kimberlin. A few months ago, Rauhauser stalked my Army son’s Facebook page.

The latest weird turn in Rauhauser’s weird career is that his ex-wife evidently showed up on Twitter, complaining that Neal still owes some $47,000 in child support for the two children — now ages 17 and 13 — of their marriage, which ended a decade ago. Now, this caveat is necessary: I cannot verify that the Twitter account is his ex-wife’s nor, if it is indeed her, can I vouch for the accuracy of all she alleges. However . . .

A diarist at Daily Kos put up a post last Saturday which, with the necessary caveats, is certainly worth excerpting at length here:

During the years that Neal Rauhauser has been involved in internet intrigue while neglecting to pay child support, his ex-wife Nancy went through ovarian and breast cancer . . . Nancy holds no illusions about getting money out of Neal but she’s making the effort because her son and daughter asked and she wants them to go to college. For Nancy, “it’s all about the kids.”
Unfortunately Nancy lives in Nebraska and in order to get the state involved in collecting child-support across state lines she needs to give them a verifiable address for Neal. That’s no easy task. Neal tells no one where he lives, not even his mother, he has no driver’s license and he travels by train and bus. The man leaves no paper trail. So Nancy joined Twitter (where Neal hangs out) in early December as part of her quest for her children and that’s why the need for a restraining order and private security. . . .

Yeah. According to this DKos diarist, when his ex-wife joined Twitter, Rauhauser began harassing her:

Nancy has documents showing her ex-husband was clinically diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder overlaid with Reactive Affective Disorder. Neal Rauhauser is a certified Sociopath.
So in the two weeks she’s been on Twitter, Neal has begun harassing Nancy, her children and her relatives with phone calls and text messages. He also did what he calls a SWAT lite and called Child Protective Services on his ex-wife. Other strange things have been happening recently too: someone attempted to hack Nancy’s eBay account, someone attempted to use her daughter’s social security number and someone accessed her son’s school records and found out where they live.
This is why security and a restraining order are needed . . . And why a lawyer is wanted by the Rauhauser children.

To repeat: I have not verified this information. However, the “SWAT lite” — reporting his ex-wife to Child Protective Services — certainly sounds like Neal Rauhauser’s usual tricks.

There is nothing that Neal Rauhauser hates more than when people tell the truth about Neal Rauhauser. We’ll see what happens.

– – –