The Other McCain

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

#ProgressiveChristmasCarols A Cradle In The Shadow Of A Tax Increase

Posted on | December 8, 2012 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

For a limited time only, David Gergen sporting a red mohawk:

And a rare RSM cameo:

Category: humor

They’re Still Hating Breitbart

Posted on | December 8, 2012 | 8 Comments

After screaming into the phone in frustration, I caught my breath and calmed down, finally paraphrasing scripture: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Never mind to whom I was talking or what the original subject of my rant was, the bottom line is something some of us have been saying for months: “Damn, I miss Andrew.”

Of course, Breitbart himself was often frustrated — in his “righteous indignation” mode — at the apathy and incompetence he encountered when dealing with the ossified GOP Establishment.

Despite the mythical image of Breitbart as an invulnerable superhero who went from one triumphant victory to another in his war against the “Democrat-Media Complex,” Andrew experienced discouragement just like anyone else. While he was always sanguine in public, understanding his role-model status in exemplifying the “happy warrior” spirit, he didn’t mind sharing his disappointments privately with friends.

This morning, Da Tech Guy had Aaron Walker’s attorney Dan Backer on his radio show for a two-hour special about the Kimberlin saga. The astonishing news this week — Judge Richard B. Potter’s dismissal of the Virginia lawsuit Walker v. Kimberlin, et al. — was a main topic. I called in during the second hour of the show, and there was extensive discussion of how to get courts, cops and reporters to start taking this story seriously. People have been SWATted, other people have been sued, arrested, wrongly accused, threatened, harassed and cyberstalked, people have lost their jobs or had their employment jeopardized, and yet there continues to be a false narrative about this story that it’s “just about politics” or “just a bunch of crazy people arguing on the Internet.”

Frustration and discouragement are natural, and it is difficult to see the way forward without visionary leadership. “Damn, I miss Andrew.”

OK, so . . . Bill Schmalfeldt.

Bill Schmalfeldt of Elk Ridge, Maryland, a.k.a. “Liberal Grouch”

You remember: Two weeks ago, the deranged Schmalfeldt threatened to call my wife and, over a span of 48 hours, sent me more than 200 Twitter messages inspired by his obsessive rage. He had been attacking me since June, but I’d tried to ignore it until Schmalfeldt’s madness escalated to such an intensity that I felt obliged to turn on the light and let people watch the cyberstalking cockroach scurry away.

Do you know how much Bill Schmalfeldt hated Andrew Breitbart?

Two weeks ago — the day after Thanksgiving, the same day he went nuts on Twitter — Schmalfeldt took over the “Breitbart Unmasked” site that for the past nine months has been used to attack various targets of what I’ve called the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis. But even before that, four months ago, Schmalfeldt did something so perverse and hateful that decent people can scarcely comprehend it.

In July, Schmalfeldt created a Web site called “Big Damnation” which he promoted with a Twitter account called @DeadAndrew that mocked Breitbart as supposedly repenting his conservative “sins” (and denouncing his former colleagues) while suffering in Hell.

Bill Schmalfeldt is a remorseless liar and, after this vile project was exposed, Schmalfeldt deceptively used his phony “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner to promote his dishonest (anti-Breitbart) version of this controversy. In doing so, Schmalfeldt (a) defended Brett Kimberlin and (b) pretended that he wasn’t responsible for the “Big Damnation”/@DeadAndrew atrocity, as Lee Stranahan has explained.

This is important to understand because, as I have previously pointed out, the original reason Aaron Walker became a target of Kimberlin is because Walker was CC’d on an e-mail sent to Andrew Breitbart that became part of a police report.

That is to say, Walker was collateral damage, a target of convenience, in Kimberlin’s larger project of destroying Breitbart. This project has continued even after Breitbart’s death, and Schmalfeldt appears very much to be part of that project, although whether he’s being paid or is just a moonbat volunteer is not clear.

Two weeks after his “Big Damnation”/@DeadAndrew atrocity project was exposed, Schmalfeldt used his “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner to attack me as “one of the few odious wisps of intestinal gas still floating in the air, emanating from the decomposing empire of the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.”

Like everything else Schmalfeldt writes — his initials are “B.S.” — this is laughably wrong. I was never part of Breitbart’s “empire,” never contributed to nor was paid by any of Breitbart’s enterprises.

Rather, I was just one of many friends that Andrew made over the course of his career. I first met him at CPAC 2007, and interviewed him later that year for a Washington Times feature story. This friendship continued over the next five years and, as chance would have it, I was among a dozen or so people hanging out with Breitbart in a hotel lobby on the eve of an AFP Michigan conference the weekend before he died. Somewhere online, there’s video of the speech I gave at the D.C. memorial for Breitbart, but I’m not in a mood to look that up now.

My point is that (a) Schmalfeldt is a liar, (b) he’s part of a much larger project aimed at destroying the conservative citizen-journalism movement that Breitbart helped inspire, and (c) the reason I became a target is that, like so many other targets of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis, I’m trying to carry on this movement. As I wrote on May 18: Who Warned Us About Brett Kimberlin?

People better wake up. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

And remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

 

 

 


Category: Andrew Breitbart, The Kimberlin Files

World’s Youngest Blogger: Portrait Of An Artist As A Very Young Man

Posted on | December 8, 2012 | 8 Comments

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

‘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
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