The Other McCain

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

Discount Death

Posted on | November 23, 2012 | 20 Comments

You stay classy, death merchants:

A Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in southern Florida is offering a black Friday discount — including $10 off a visit to the abortion center today.
Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast offered the special, saying, “Visit our West Palm Beach or Kendall Health Center for special after Thanksgiving savings on Friday, November 23rd.”
Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek noticed the Black Friday discount and responded, “Planned Parenthood brings new meaning to the term, “Black Friday,” doesn’t it?”
This is the same abortion business where the chair of the national Democratic party headlined a small rally last year.

You may wonder, how can Planned Parenthood afford to offer discounts? Because they’re funded with your tax dollars, of course.

A tougher question: How do they sleep at night?

Category: Abortion, Florida, Planned Parenthood

‘Tidy’ and Other Rauhauser Signatures

Posted on | November 23, 2012 | 11 Comments

Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

Everybody has writing habits, and people tend to develop a recognizable style. For example, some people have trouble distinguishing “it’s” (contraction of it is) from “its” (possessive of it) or “you’re”/”your,” and repeated errors of that kind become a sort of fingerprint by which one can recognize their writing. Jack Cashill famously exposed Bill Ayers as the ghostwriter of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father by comparing the literary style to Ayers’s Fugitive Days.

This is how it is possible to state as a fact that it was Neal Rauhauser who, behind the pseudonym “Carlito2000,” was feeding disinformation to former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown in the days before Brown was arrested for threatening an FBI agent. In transcripts of an online chat posted by Brown on Sept. 10 — just two days before his arrest — “Carlito2000” told Brown:

Jen Emick & William Welna getting cornholed by #treehouse on 2600.net … logs posted by Bitchiest aka Kelly Hallisey … ringleaders there are Bratty (Kelly), Render64 (her man), Pythorian, girlfriday, DingoLingo & humu … Emick has been circulating among right wingers for a while now … Approached by @ZAPEM, tentatively Michele Lessick a while ago. Very likely was working with @Liberty_Chick (Mandy Nagy) and @dmatthewstewart (Douglas Matthew Stewart) in pursuit of Anonymous … they hassle @AnonyOps, @AnonyNewsNet, claiming they are Neal Rauhauser, and otherwise act stupid … Emick has appeared just once as “Cream” on @BrooksBayne site thetrenches.us, as secret source on Rauhauser … there is a huge split there – Darby/Stranahan get crosswise with Bayne, nasty civil war stared a month ago … nachash (@doxbin) release big torrent on @Sanguinarious (Welna) and there was a Jen Emick funpack … funpack contains a doc about pursuit of Brett Kimberlin, straight out of HBGary playbook, and it was NOT in the initial dump UGnazi took from Emick … source is believed to be Tom Ryan, canna go into details on how we sorted that out … So, its in Emicks’s directory but the writing ain’t her or ZAPEM, seems very much to be @Liberty_Chick style … So, its in Emicks’s directory but the writing ain’t her or ZAPEM, seems very much to be @Liberty_Chick style … sadly, I am a subject matter expert on this anondrmama … So Darby is under suspicion as being the SWAT caller that triggered #Swatgate … … calls on Mike Stack aka @CryingWolfeBlog 6/23/2011 @Patterico 6/30/2011 @EWErickson on 5/26/2012(?) … and alleged event for @AaronWorthing on 5/29/2012, but no audio has been released … SWAT of Stack was done to cover their tracks – they took out Weiner because he triggered the extortion investigation into former FBI agent turned Congressman Mike Grimm … 2012 calls are due to some stuff with James O’Keefe – Rauhauser appear at some hearing in NJ about him [ @Patterico dox @NadiaNaffe, Rauhauser hooked her up with @LeidermanDevine, epic lawsuit ensued … So New Hampshire state grand jury on O’Keefe, NY federal grand jury on Grimm, D.C. federal grand jury on O’Keefe, and Chicago cybercrime task force wants swatters, they get info on Darby … Darby is FBI snitch from RNC 2008, was involved in making OccupyUnmasked movie, which we are trolling the fuck out of … he was the SWAT caller, we think, and he was implicated in the murder of Palestinian peace activist Riad Haad, in Texas, about six years ago … Stranahan is a dopey former liberal porn guy scam artist who also worked on the movie … Keep in mind Grimm (former FBI) is going down in NY-11, Mike Rogers (former FBI) called for Manning’s execution and he’s from MI-08 … and Coleen Rowley in MN-02 is former FBI turned whistleblower … we want Grimm, Rogers out /w Anon boot print on their asses, and we push Rowley in 🙂 … Frey was 2nd of 4 politicall ymotivated … and that is the best evidence – Darby is a ringer for the swat caller … @OsborneInk did the audio mashup … best jurnos on this mess … @OsborneInk @LiberalGrouch @beezling @BreitbartUnmask @ronbryn (crazy as fuck) … it’s a lot, I know … but we on it non-stop, so if you need clarification we will provide

The boldfaced names highlight subjects of Neal Rauhauser’s conspiracy-theory obsessions. Nobody else but Neal would connect @ZAPEM (who helped expose Rauhauser’s role in the 2010 “TwitterGate” scandal) with James O’Keefe, Brandon Darby, HB Gary, Patrick “Patterico” Frey and Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY). All of these subjects figure in a 1,000-word document Rauhauser sent to government officials in June.

We could pause to wonder why Neal spins these wild conspiracy theories, supposedly connecting a New York congressman with a Los Angeles County deputy D.A. and various bloggers in an ever-expanding cast of characters. It’s like a Hitchcock thriller directed by Cecil B. DeMille, if Hitchcock and DeMille collaborated on the script during a three-week psychedelic drug binge with Oliver Stone.

Whatever method there is to Rauhauser’s madness, however, his writing style is quite distinctive, as alleged mastermind Patterico explains:

“Tidy little package.”
Bwahahahahahahahaha.
Anyone who has followed Neal Rauhauser for any length of time sees the words “tidy little package” and chuckles — or perhaps laughs out loud, as I just did. You see, Rauhauser loves to use the word “tidy” in connection with compilations of evidence.

There are “more than 9,000” reasons to read the whole thing.

 

Category: Patterico, The Kimberlin Files

‘Democracy’ in Egypt

Posted on | November 23, 2012 | 19 Comments

Headline from the New York Times:

President Morsi in Egypt Seizes New Powers

So, Obama supported the “democratic” uprising that toppled the U.S.-friendly dictator Mubarak and brought to power Morsi, who now assumes dictatorial powers, and we are led to ask, “What was the point of ‘Arab Spring,’ anyway?” If all that has been accomplished is to substitute a new dictatorship for the old dictatorship, how does the Obama administration claim that its policy advanced the cause of democracy?

From such questions, other questions naturally arise, e.g., How is the Obama administration’s “pro-democracy” policy different than the Bush administration’s “pro-democracy” policy? and, Why do we give a damn whether the Egyptians have democracy or not?

Meddlesome busybodies and utopian idealists — to the extent that these are separate categories — may accuse us of cynicism for asking these questions, but it’s difficult to understand how any of them can describe the effects of Obama’s policy in Egypt as a success. Perhaps a good time to re-read Jeanne Kirpatrick’s seminal 1979 article in Commentary, “Dictatorships & Double Standards.”

 

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Category: Egypt

Carefully Worded Thanks

Posted on | November 23, 2012 | 14 Comments

by Smitty

It is Robert Jensen’s good fortune to be blatantly, thoroughly, categorically wrong, lest somebody go all self-fulfilling prophecy on him, and drag the stinking carcass of his bogus ideas in the direction of reality:

Forget all that turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, today should be a day of fasting and atonement for American “sin.” That’s according to Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Jensen, known for his hard-left politics, also calls Thanksgiving a “white-supremacist holiday.”
Jensen’s opinion piece “No Thanks for Thanksgiving,” appeared on the far-left, Soros-connected website Alternet on Thanksgiving eve. In it, he wrote how Native Americans suffered because of the “European invasion of the Americas.” He went on to compare the Founding Fathers to Nazi Germany. “How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis?” he asked.

The First Amendment is a beautiful, two way street, and I hope the rest of the country joins me in a finely crafted blend of thankfulness to the Founders, along with forgiveness and laughter directed at Jensen for acting like such a pathetic little crapflooder.

Jensen, a mind is a terrible thing to waste in the manner you seem to choose. Repent, and strive to be less a knucklehead in the future, and we’ll all thank you for it.

via Drudge

Category: Uncategorized

Sow Crap Policy, Reap Policy Crap

Posted on | November 23, 2012 | 33 Comments

by Smitty

If you think having the ship list to port is a bad idea, I have news for you about the efficacy of mustering the crew on the port midships quarterdeck to form a union and fight the list:

On Tuesday, CCAC employees were notified that Obamacare defines full-time employees as those working 30 hours or more per week and that on Dec. 31 temporary part-time employees will be cut back to 25 hours. The move will save an estimated $6 million.
“While it is of course the college’s preference to provide coverage to these positions, there simply are not funds available to do so,” said CCAC spokesperson David Hoovler. “Several years of cuts or largely flat funding from our government supporters have led to significant cost reductions by CCAC, leaving little room to trim the college’s budget further.”
The solution, says United Steelworkers representative Jeff Cech, is that adjunct professors should unionize in an attempt to thwart schools seeking similar cost-savings efforts from avoiding Obamacare.

You can have your opinion about forming a union. I have a one-word rebuttal: “Michigan”.

However the issue isn’t so much the idea of unions as Cech’s non-approach to analysis. CCAC isn’t the bad guy here. The pencil-necks of DC that excreted ObamaCare are. The wrong-headed notion that law == magic, and that ObamaCare could somehow has a positive effect, is at the root of the problem. As I had noted in the post “Mini Jobs Blow” we’re seeing nothing other than the importation of failed policy ideas from Europe.

Can’t tell if this is the Hope, the Change, or the Forward.

via Insty

Update, also via Instapundit: “Letter: Employers using loopholes in ACA”

When my better half told me that her boss was thinking about cutting all full-time employees to part time in order to avoid the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act insurance requirements (for full-time employees), my initial response was, “Surely the federal government wouldn’t have allowed such a blatantly obvious way of getting out of the requirement.” But that turned out to be false.

In fact, major names in the service/hospitality industry (e.g., Denny’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Longhorn Steakhouse) are already in the process of going to a part-time employee schedule for all employees. Thus, as a very possible consequence of the short-sightedness of the Affordable Care Act legislators, more people will be working two jobs to make ends meet.

Read the whole thing, and cue Ray Davies

Update: thanks, Instapundit!

Update II: linked at Hogewash.

Category: Health Care

@Karoli: Weiner Truther? And Other Questions of Remaining Interest

Posted on | November 23, 2012 | 35 Comments

“I am here today to again apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment I have caused.”
— Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), announcing his resignation from Congress, June 15, 2011

Two days ago, I called attention to an article by Karoli, a Crooks and Liars contributor, who wrote an article in defense of Neal Rauhauser and Brett Kimberlin. I made this point:

Karoli’s excuse-making amounts to a Rauhauser-influenced conspiracy theory, as she accuses Andrew Breitbart, Patrick “Patterico” Frey, Aaron Walker and others of engaging in a plot against Kimberlin and Rauhauser, which she calls a “Right-Wing Blueprint.”

This is important: Karoli is an intelligent progressive activist, a fluent writer viewed as a serious person, a valued member of the online Left. She is not a clown or a troll. Therefore, to find Karoli parroting Rauhauser’s version of events, including demonstrable falsehoods, is disturbing. Next thing you know, Karoli will be shouting into a webcam like Barrett Brown, ranting about HB Gary and Jennifer Emick.

Humor aside, it is to be remembered that Neal Rauhauser was one of the original “Weiner Truthers,” arguing that Anthony Weiner was the victim of some kind of hacker honey-trap masterminded by right-wingers. Rosie Gray of Buzzfeed, May 26, 2012:

Joseph Cannon describes the “weird subculture of bloggers”that sprung up around Weinergate.
Cannon was a more vocal proponent of the theory when the story broke, but “Their obsession with that scandal soon went way beyond Weiner, and perhaps even beyond conventional left-right politics,” he writes. “A very personal twilight war broke out.”
A major locus of modern Weiner trutherism is BreitbartUnmasked.com, a site “dedicated to unmasking the underbelly of Andrew Breitbart and his crew of rogues, criminals, wannabe journalists, various right wing extremists and the religious intolerant,” per its “About Us” section. Breitbart Unmasked features a large GIF of Breitbart’s face morphing into a mask, and lists the name of everyone in Breitbartworld, from editors of Breitbart.com to people only tangentially related.
One of its related Twitter accounts, @OccupyRebellion, regularly tweets about Weinergate and the alleged conspiracies therein.

Yeah. You criticize Neal Rauhauser, “Occupy Rebellion” is gonna get all up in your face on Twitter. So now look at this from Karoli’s article:

From the moment the Anthony Weiner scandal broke, Neal Rauhauser smelled a rat, and as it turns out, he was right. If you are Andrew Breitbart and information comes to you that there’s a certain loudmouthed New York Congressman who happens to have a propensity to flirt with young women online, you might give serious thought to providing a few “friendly” young women for him to flirt with.
No one doubts Anthony Weiner had a weakness for flirtation. Rauhauser doesn’t deny that. But that weakness was exploited by Andrew Breitbart in order to discredit and ultimately force Weiner into an early retirement. A few sock puppet girls, some provocative tweets, and away we go.
How James O’Keefe-ian. A Breitbart signature takedown with cooperation from the good Congressman himself.
I’m certain the Breitbots expected all left-wing outrage over the setup to evaporate when Rep. Weiner resigned. Remember Andrew Breitbart hijacking that press conference?
Yet. One person wouldn’t let it go, and that one person was Neal Rauhauser, who kept on with it and keeps on with it until this day.

Did you catch that? The article Karoli links as proving Neal was right? Rauhauser’s own Daily Kos diary from July 28, 2011, under his “Stranded Wind” alias, which begins this way:

I’ve been all over Patterico for the last several weeks, as he looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate, but the other players have been getting attention, too.

Wow: Rauhauser’s own claim to have identified Patterico as orchestrating the (non-existent) right-wing conspiracy against Weiner is cited by Karoli as proof that Neal was right! So if Rauhauser were to assert that he once worked as a body double for Brad Pitt, Karoli would link that as “proof” of Neal’s muscular physique. This is an invalid circular argument which accepts mere assertion as “evidence.”

However, we can take Rauhauser at his word that he was “all over Patterico” in July 2011, as witness his Daily Kos diaries:

Seven posts in the span of 23 days — why? Weiner confessed and resigned in mid-June 2011 and, since then, Weiner himself has never claimed that he was the victim of anything except his own stupidity.

Why, more than two weeks after Weiner’s admission of the unfortunate truth, would Rauhauser still be pushing the conspiracy theory explanation of WeinerGate and implausibly pretending that Patterico was to blame for it? It’s hard to explain by any normal logic. And what was it that made Patterico so peculiarly a target of Rauhauser’s wrath? Remember that on June 4, 2011 — nine days into the WeinerGate scandal — Rauhuser published this absurd claim without offering any evidence:

Congressman Weiner was stalked and set up by a Christian Infowar Militia cell based largely in Oklahoma City.

So, on June 4, Neal stakes his reputation on the (non-existent) “Christian Infowar Militia cell.” A month later, however, Neal is offering a new villain: Patrick “Patterico” Frey. How and why did Rauhauser change his mind? If there was no evidence that any Oklahoma-based “cell” stalked and “set up” Weiner — and Neal never offered anything to support that wild-eyed nonsense — what credibility did Rauhauser bring to his subsequent theory that Patterico was the secret mastermind, a claim for which Neal similarly never produced a scintilla of evidence? What could possibly explain the sudden shift in Rauhauser’s interests? Why should anyone believe anything Rauhauser has to say about any of this?

None of these obvious questions seem to have crossed Karoli’s mind. She simply accepts Neal’s finger-pointing at Patterico, without ever wondering why Patterico was singled out this way. Could it have something to do with “Alicia Pain,” the mysterious character who began cyberstalking Patterico after Weiner resigned? Patterico, June 30, 2011:

The person claiming to be “Jennifer George” who called Lee was a hoaxer.
There really was a person who threatened the real Jennifer George, and that person pretended to be Lee Stranahan.
That person hates Lee, and Breitbart.
I have been very busy and probably don’t know all the reasons why this couldn’t possibly be the case. So tell me.
UPDATE: Point #1 could be wrong, and the theory still holds.
UPDATE x2: I’m feeling better about the theory with each passing second.
Hi, Neal!

“Alicia Pain” shows up in the comments, as do I: Someone linked my blog in the comments, sending traffic to my site that I noticed, so I showed up at Patterico’s to ask why Rauhauser was suspected of involvement in the whole “Jennifer George” incident — evidently an attempt to discredit Stranahan, who had been following up loose ends surrounding WeinerGate.

Three hours after Patterico brought up Rauhauser’s name in connection with “Jennifer George,” Patterico was SWATted.

Probably just a coincidence, I’m sure. Ask the Gaped Crusader.

UPDATE (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE II: John Hoge says, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn up in the comments section.” My apologies to anyone confused by what’s going on down below. I try to avoid the “amateur detective” motif in blogging; I’m a journalist, not a cop or a spy.

UPDATE III: Linked by Patterico — thanks! — and since someone in the comments asked for a brief summary of Who’s Who in this twisted saga, I’ll direct you to Patterico’s July 12 post, “The Kimberlin Story: The Short Version.”

Now a Memeorandum thread.

 

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Category: Conspiracy Theories, Patterico, The Kimberlin Files

Whittle Channels Kipling

Posted on | November 22, 2012 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Ah, the cultural recovery effort:

Can the natural rhythm of excellent poetry overcome the lack of a rap beat?

Update: thanks, Instapundit!

Category: Uncategorized

World’s Youngest Blogger, Fashionista

Posted on | November 22, 2012 | 21 Comments

by Smitty


Gray knit sweater, featuring spiraled cables on the sleeves, by Dad. Patterns are for wimps.

Category: World's Youngest Blogger
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