The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘They Should All Be in Prison’

Posted on | December 8, 2012 | 10 Comments

Last night, Lee Stranahan and Mandy Nagy were guest hosts at Own the Narrative Network and, listening to the podcast this morning, I was impressed with Lee’s skills as a radio emcee. He’s really got a quick wit, as his intro of Nagy demonstrates:

“Mandy is one of my favorite people. . . . There’s a group of people who don’t like Mandy and, oddly, I think they should all be in prison.”

Which is funny as hell, if you know that Brett Kimberlin first threatened to sue Nagy in October 2010, when she published her profile of the “Speedway Bomber” at Breitbart.com.

Among other topics discussed by Lee and Mandy last night on OTNN are the latest federal indictment against former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown, so you should take a listen:

 

You can follow Lee Stranahan and Mandy Nagy on Twitter.

 

Category: Talk Radio

Armey’s Exit and the Mystery $12 Million

Posted on | December 8, 2012 | 12 Comments

Mother Jones reports that a pair of Knoxville-based mystery corporations contributed $12 million to the FreedomWorks super-PAC in September. Dick Armey, whose exit from FreedomWorks made headlines this past week, says he knows nothing about it.

Neither does FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, “whom Armey has accused of misappropriating FreedomWorks resources for his own personal benefit,” to quote Mother Jones.

For the record, I ain’t got no $12 million, and the only person I know in Knoxville is Professor Glenn Reynolds. If Insty’s got $12 million, he’s being awfully quiet about it.

Category: Uncategorized

Fiscal Clif Bar

Posted on | December 8, 2012 | 39 Comments

by Smitty

The tasteless joke that is the ‘Fiscal Cliff’ negotiation continues to be the antithesis of mature, rational, representative government. Also, it tastes like sawdust held together by gluten. The cynical question moves to: Who is doing a better job of phoning it in?
One is tempted to reciprocate #OccupyResoluteDesk’s four-year finger pointing odyssey, and say ‘BHO’.
But who knows about that, or anything else in our shiny new Age of Uncertainty. Have a look at Front Page, with Allen Barton:

A crucial point comes in ~7:40, where the exploration of the GOP’s strange comfort level with Progressivism comes in.

I don’t want to sound all uppity and stuff, but I could find myself moving toward a conclusion that the GOP has manipulated Conservative desires for Constitutional government merely for power gain. It’s almost as if the GOP tries to bribe voters with patriotism, while the Democrats bribe voters with bread and circuses, and neither wing of the Progressive Party gives a flying French fornication about limited government.

Now, that’s a hyper-cynical take on the situation. They told me that if I voted for Romney, the rich would engaged in Olympian bunfights and succeed in crushing the economy. Fortunately, our “Lawd and Say-vee-uhh” Barack Obama will make sure nothing like that happens.

What I badly need to see between now and 2014 is a genuine reform plan from the GOP. Not new porcine lipstick, but a genuine admission that this pig ain’t got wings, the government has ceased to be representative of the people, and here is an across-board-reform plan. If the GOP doesn’t re-invent itself, then the 2010 election shall have likely proven the last gasp of any Constitutional government, as we capsize into a full-on, third world tyranny.

Category: Uncategorized

David Brooks, Ignorant Tool At Large

Posted on | December 7, 2012 | 23 Comments

by Smitty

Two things are constant, and there are three things rivaling the sunrise for invariance: death, taxes, and the codpiece-like dumbness of David Brooks:

Over the past month, the Republican Party has changed far more than I expected. First, the people at the ideological extremes of the party have begun to self-ghettoize. The Tea Party movement attracted many people who are drawn to black and white certainties and lock-step unity. People like that have a tendency to migrate from mainstream politics, which is inevitably messy and impure, to ever more marginal oases of purity.
Jim DeMint, for example, is leaving the Senate to go lead the Heritage Foundation. He is leaving the center of the action, where immigration, tax and other reforms will be crafted, for a political advocacy organization known more for ideological purity and fund-raising prowess than for creativity, curiosity or intellectual innovation.

Note to David Brooks: There. Will. Be. No. Reform. DeMint departed a Senate that hasn’t passed a budget in north of three years, to the cheers of quislings such as yourself.

The Republicans may still blow it. If President Obama is flexible and they don’t meet him partway, Republicans would contribute to a recession that would discredit them for a decade. But they are moving in the right direction and moving fast. These are first steps, and encouraging ones.

Listen, you pathetic little crease-monkey: President Obama is never flexible. You are.

via Hot Air

Update: linked at The Daley Gator

Category: Uncategorized

New Charges Filed Against Former ‘Anonymous’ Spokesman Barrett Brown

Posted on | December 7, 2012 | 13 Comments

Barrett Brown, whose online meltdown led to his September arrest for threatening an FBI agent, has been indicted for last year’s Stratfor hacking.

UPDATE: Brown acted as an unofficial spokesman for the Anonymous hacking conspiracy for more than a year and was raided (but not arrested) in March at the time the feds busted the “Lulzsec” splinter cell of Anonymous. Because Brown was not arrested, there was widespread suspicion from March onward that he was cooperating with authorities as an informant, in a deal similar to the one whereby “Lulzsec” leader Sabu ratted out his comrades.

Six months after the March raid, Brown posted a series of bizarre YouTube video rants in which he threatened by name an FBI special agent, and was charged with three federal counts related to that incident. Brown’s belated indictment for the December 2011 hacking of Stratfor (and distribution of illegally obtained credit card information) may help explain the strange paranoia that led to Brown’s September meltdown.

UPDATE II: Associated Press via Washington Post:

Barrett Brown, 31, was indicted in Dallas this week on a dozen charges that include aggravated identity theft and device fraud. He is accused of making public an Internet link providing access to credit card information stolen from Stratfor, which had emails taken during that same hack released by WikiLeaks. . . .
Brown was a de facto spokesman for Anonymous, willing to speak for a movement that prides itself on anonymity. The Stratfor breach claimed by Anonymous ravaged the company’s servers, leading to the disclosure of thousands of credit card numbers and other information.

You can click here to see the 12-count federal indictment.

UPDATE III: Brown’s egomaniacal arrogance caused him to be regarded as a selfish “famewhore” by some Anonymous members. When he emerged as the media-grabbing face of the hacker movement in 2011, I predicted that Brown would become a focus of law-enforcement scrutiny. Logically, Brown could not speak for the Anonymous hackers without communicating with them, and thus surveillance of Brown could lead the feds to other members of the group. Whether or not that’s what led to the subsequent arrests of Anonymous hackers, it’s now becoming evident that the feds have been watching Brown closely for months:

The new charges stem from a Christmas Day attack against Stratfor, a U.S.-based intelligence gathering firm, in which Anonymous hackers stole some 5.5 million emails, some of which were later published on WikiLeaks. Brown allegedly facilitated the hack by posting a hyperlink in an Internet Relay Chat channel he controlled, thereby providing others access to the credit card information and identities of 5,000 individuals in the Stratfor database.
That’s count one: knowingly trafficking in stolen authentication features. Count two alleges that Brown kept at least some of this credit card information for several months in an attempt to defraud the card holders. He is also charged with 10 counts of aggravated identity theft. All told, Brown could face up to 45 years in prison and a $3 million fine on the new counts alone.
Another Anonymous hacker, Jeremy Hammond, has been accused of orchestrating the Stratfor attack and could face life in prison.

So one of his erstwhile comrades is facing life, and Brown himself could spend 45 years in the pen. Guess that book deal won’t work out, huh?

UPDATE IV: I first became aware of Barrett Brown in October 2009, when he evidently got the idea that it would be cool to dogpile on Charles Johnson’s attacks against me. Rather than argue with him about that — or even mention his name — instead I put up a post mocking his former role as spokesman for an atheist group.

For a while thereafter, Brown would occasionally pop up online harassing me about one thing or another, and every so often I’d heap more scorn and mockery on him. In December 2010, I mocked Brown’s weirdly grandiose scheme for “Project PM”:

Has Barrett Brown slipped a cog? Is he zany, daft, wacko, loony, bonkers, Froot Loops, and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?

Brown reacted by threatening to sue me for libel, which I laughed off as ridiculous, the evidence of Brown’s derangement being quite obvious. It was about two months later (February 2011) that somebody sent me an e-mail informing me that this narcissistic nutcase had made himself the public spokesman for Anonymous. Now here we are 22 months later, with Barrett Brown under arrest and threatened with the possibility of decades in federal prison. Perhaps his atheist pals will recommend that Barrett take comfort in praying to infinite eternal nothingness.

UPDATE V: Robert McMillan at Wired points out something I’d forgotten about Barrett’s September video rant:

The self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesman said he was expecting to face fraud charges after his apartment was raided back in March. He mentioned them in a long, rambling video posted to YouTube the day on the same day he was arrested in September. “I bring in no money. I have $25,000 I brought in the last year from this f–king book deal. that’s it.” he said. “A f–king fraud charge for a f–king writer activist who has no fucking money.”
Later in the video, Brown railed against FBI Agent Robert Smith, saying that he was going to “ruin” Smith’s life “and look into his f–king kids.” The Anonymous activist said he was angry that feds were contemplating obstruction of justice charges against his mother.

Brown knew he was being investigated in connection with the Stratfor hacking, which explains a lot about his agitated state in that video. It doesn’t explain, however, why he was ranting about Jennifer Emick, HB Gary and other stuff he had been discussing with “Carlito2000.”

 

Category: Barrett Brown, Crime

As With #Benghazi Four, So Will Obama Do For The Country At The Fiscal Cliff

Posted on | December 7, 2012 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

There really isn’t any need to let Benghazi fall off the radar. Sure, a huge component of the Fiscal Cliff fracas is to control the narrative, and turn John Bohner into Emmanuel Goldstein, spray tan edition.

Obama is at least in character. All politics, all the time. Hence the murky lead-in to Benghazi, the snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory when under stress, and the subsequent creep show as President Take-no-responsibility seeks anything else under the sun to discuss.

But wasn’t Simpson-Bowles conceptually similar to proper security in Benghazi? Don’t leaders plan their way out of crises, rather than foment them?

And is Boehner a crappy substitute for Woods and Doherty, attempting to offer some kind of defense?

Meanwhile, Cassone’s dirge bears repeated playing and viral spreading:

Category: Uncategorized

VIDEO: ‘Miracle on Wall Street’

Posted on | December 7, 2012 | 1 Comment

Yes, Corporate America, there is a Santa Claus! His name is Barack Obama and, as CronyChronicles.org explains, he’s stuffing the stockings of his fat-cat friends with your tax dollars:

Nothing says “Christmas” quite like government bailouts:

In 2012, the U.S. federal government gave $300 billion in benefits to businesses and special interest groups. . . .
The government should be ensuring a level playing field where businesses can fairly compete to serve consumers, instead of taking money from taxpayers and giving it to politically connected interest groups or using the tax code to benefit certain industries.

Learn more at CronyChronicles.org.

 

Category: Corruption, Economics, Taxes

I Can’t Tell If @AlGore’s Latest Idiotic Utterance Is A Sign Of Improvement

Posted on | December 7, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

Al Gore still owns what, I feel, is the dumbest utterance by a public figure, emphasis mine:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

No, Al, NO. This government can’t even pass a budget, can’t deal responsibly with the bills, leaving this idiotic ‘Fiscal Cliff’ crap hanging over the end of the year. The U.S. Government couldn’t redeem a coupon for a free package check in the Castro District, much less redeem any human anywhere. Oh, and I’m supposed to revere these bureaucrats or something, not bash them the way, say, Jews or Christians are pilloried in modern discourse. Whoops.
Treacher points to Jeff Poor, quoting Al, emphasis mine:

“On a national level, to use a computer term — our democracy has been hacked,” Gore said. “It no longer functions as it is intended to — to serve the public interests.”

WUT? Now, while I don’t think this quite rises to the level of theological idiocy present in “the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption”, we must admit that the elimination of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all INDIVIDUAL aims, and its replacement with “serve the public interests” a PLURAL goal, as still fairly jacked up.

Does the relatively less jacked up nature of the second utterance indicate improvement, or should we suspect that Al Gore’s head, so oxygen deprived in its nether lair these years, is still severely damaged?

Category: Uncategorized
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