The Other McCain

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

U.S. Allies Like Poland Deserve Better Than #OccupyResoluteDesk

Posted on | August 7, 2012 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

Hinderaker has the right of it:

This deserves to be a major news story. Perhaps it would be, if America’s reporters and editors weren’t so busy working on the Obama campaign.

The topic?

Reflecting Warsaw’s long-standing anger over the 2009 cancellation of a controversial Bush-era anti-ballistic missile system President Bronislaw Komorowski said Poland should build its own missile shield to ensure national defence.
“Our mistake was that by accepting the American offer of a shield we failed to take into account the political risk associated with a change of president,” said Mr Komorowski in a magazine interview. “We paid a high political price. We do not want to make the same mistake again. We must have a missile system as an element of our defences.”

Read. Link. Share. BHO has treated domestic policy like a chamber pot, and foreign policy like a spittoon, with Michelle swapping them around ever other day.

Category: Barack Obama, Poland

Dennis Miller’s Opinion Of Harry ‘Dingius Maximus’ Reid Hasn’t Improved

Posted on | August 7, 2012 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

Dennis Miller doesn’t have the rhetorical heft of this old chestnut, but it’s still a noticeable rant. Video below the fold for autoplay reasons. Read more

Category: Democrats

LIVE AT FIVE: 08.07.12

Posted on | August 7, 2012 | Comments Off on LIVE AT FIVE: 08.07.12

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Sikh Diaspora Points To U.S. Apathy

A father holds his child at a candlelight vigil for the slain


Punjabi, Sikh organizations blame U.S., Indian governments for not taking security concerns seriously

NASA’s Curiosity Returns Images Of Martian Mountain
Rover lands successfully



Romney Trounces Obama In Fundraising For Third Straight Month
Obama fundraising e-mail pleads: “If we don’t step it up, we’re in trouble”



POLITICS
Christie Hails Tenure Bill As Victory

Governor Christie signs the tenure bill


Bill requires annual performance reviews, makes it easier to fire teachers

Mennonite Minister Faces Trial In Lesbian Child Custody Case



Federal Court Denies Ex-Governor Ryan’s Appeal

Claire McCaskill Takes Sides In GOP Primary

Justice Department Hits Gibson Guitars With $300K Fine Over Fingerboards



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Brent Steady Above $109 On Stimulus Hopes, Middle East Tension; NYMEX $92.20, Brent $109.53
Best Buy-Out Proposed For $8.8 Billion
UK Bank Standard Chartered Examined Over Iran Dealings
HCA Says Justice Department Probing Heart Surgeries
Bernanke To Economists: More Philosophy, Please
Lawsuit Accuses GM Of Blocking Plan To Save Saab
THQ Cancels Guillermo Del Toro’s Video Game
Apple, YouTube End Relationship
Wikipedia Goes Down After Cables Cut
Apple Expert Claims Buyers Mistook Samsung Tablet For iPad
Acer Asks Microsoft To Think Twice About Surface Tablet
Wozniak Slams The Cloud As “Horrendous”



SPORTS
Verlander Smokes 14 As Tigers Maul Yankees 7-2

Tigers starting pitcher Justin Verlander


Yankees’ Ivan Nova pounded for seven runs in five and a third innings

Seahawks Agree To One-Year Deal With Terrell Owens



Rangers Run Into Double Trouble In Boston, Fall 9-2 To Sox

NHL, Union Agree: No Need To Panic About Labor Talks

Gallardo Goes Seven To Get Tenth Win As Brewers Beat Reds 6-3

Sheets Now 4-1 With Braves’ 6-1 Thrashing Of Phillies

Clippard Blows Save, Nationals Beat Astros Anyway 5-4 In 11



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Miley Cyrus: Natural Born Thriller

Miley Cyrus


The Marie Claire interview & photoshoot

Sharon Osbourne Quitting “America’s Got Talent” After NBC Axes Son Jack

Robert Pattinson Not Moping

Elton John: Madonna Looks Like A Stripper; Her Career Is Over

Warner Brothers Moves “The Great Gatsby” To Summer 2013

Levi Johnson Wants Full Custody Of Son Tripp


Is This The Result Of The Unspeakable Armenian’s Sex Diet?

Jennifer Lawrence Negotiating $10 Million Payday For “Hunger Games” Sequel

Samuel L. Jackson Live-Tweets The Olympics

Kristen Bell Makes Everything A Little More Interesting



FOREIGNERS
PM’s Defection In The Dark Jolts Syrians
Crumbling: Nearly 20 Senior Syrian Officers Defect
Egypt Vows To Hunt Down Sinai Jihadis After soldiers Killed
PRC Leaders Hold Resort Talks As Transition Looms
Philippine Lawmakers Suspend Debate On Contraception Bill
Pakistan’s Extremists Whip Up Frenzy Over Burma’s Muslims
UN Chief Hails Sudan Oil Deal
As Greece Rounds Up Illegal Immigrants, Official Warns “Invasion” Threatens National Stability
Mali’s Militias Poorly Armed But Eager To Oust Jihadis



BLOGS & STUFF
NRO Corner: Pelosi Says “Harry Reid Made A Statement That Is True”
Wake Up America: Politifact Gives Harry Reid “Pants On Fire” Rating For Lies About Romney’s Taxes
Weasel Zippers: Harry Reid Doesn’t Want Your Sympathy
The Lid: Democrats Starting To Tell Harry Reid To STFU
GayPatriot: Harry Reid’s Real (Partisan) Goal
Newsbusters: CNN Plays “Only The Good Die Young” After Segment On Sikh Temple Shooting
Joshuapundit: Dick Morris Says The Trend Line Is Distinctly Pro-Romney
Power Line: Disillusionment With Obama Running Deep
Stop Andrea Mitchell: Pelosi Says Republicans Belong To The “E. Coli Club”
Gateway Pundit: It Begins. Justice Department Goes After Top Romney Donor
James Pethokoukis: Over The Last 30 Years, Taxes On Wealthy Have Risen Faster Than Their Incomes
Ed Driscoll: White House Press Corps Goes Seven Weeks Without A Question

Category: Live at Five

EXCLUSIVE: Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser Accuses Brandon Darby of Fake SWAT Calls, ‘Obstruction of Justice’

Posted on | August 6, 2012 | 44 Comments

A Democrat political consultant with ties to convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin has accused Breitbart.com contributor Brandon Darby of making fake SWAT calls against conservative bloggers.

In a thousand-word document sent to government officials, Kimberlin associate Neal Rauhauser accuses Darby of conspiring with a number of others — including employees of Republican consulting firm Hynes Communications — in an elaborate criminal scheme involving illegal so-called “SWATting” incidents aimed at four conservative bloggers: Mike Stack, Patrick “Patterico” Frey, Erick Erickson of Red State and Aaron Walker. The document (see full text below) describes Rauhauser’s accusations that the SWATting calls are “tied to an extortion attempt by Mike Grimm, Congressman from NY-13, an obstruction of justice attempt intended to deflect attention from James O’Keefe, and the whole thing is being wrapped up by Hynes Communications in an attempt to create another ‘Bill Ayers’ for the 2012 election.”

Furthermore, Rauhauser forwarded to an associate of Darby copies of e-mails he sent to a Republican member of Congress. In the e-mails he sent to the office of Rep. Sandy Adams (R-Fla.) in June and July, Rauhauser charges that Darby and others were engaged in a “conspiracy to obstruct justice.” The full text of those e-mails is also appended below.

Darby has previously said he intends to sue Rauhauser, and called the accusations “absurd,” and said that Rauhauser sent these materials to a woman named in a Townhall magazine article Darby recently published. Darby said in a brief phone interview that shows Rauhauser’s attempts to “social engineer” people through defamatory communications.

Rauhauser’s accusations against Frey, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, are part of a pattern dating back to July 2011. Frey had written about the sex scandal that resulted in Democrat Rep. Anthony Weiner’s resignation from Congress. Rauhauser was obsessed with that scandal, and wrote a series of post at the liberal Daily Kos blog accusing Frey of being the mastermind of an elaborate conspiracy against Weiner.

Frey has written that he suspects Rauhauser, along with Kimberlin and former Raw Story editor Ron Brynaert, of complicity in the SWATing call made against Frey in July 2011. Frey says that a voice analysis expert has identified Brynaert as having made the false call that sent armed officers to Frey’s house.

Congresswoman Adams is one of 87 members of Congress, along with Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who have urged the Justice Department to investigate the use of “SWATting” and other illegal harassment against political bloggers.

Kimberlin was convicted in 1981 of a weeklong bombing spree that terrorized an Indiana town and sentenced to 50 years in prison. After his release from federal prison in 2001, Kimberlin helped co-found two tax-exempt progressive non-profit groups, the Justice Through Music Project and the Velvet Revolution. Kimberlin has pursued legal charges against bloggers who wrote about his criminal past, accusing them of “harassment.” Rauhauser has worked as a political consultant for a number of Democratic candidates. Rauhauser has described Kimberlin as his “client” and has accompanied Kimberlin to numerous courtroom hearings.

* * * * *
* * TEXT OF RAUHAUSER DOCUMENT * *

Brandon Darby Swatting Calls
There are four false police reports I find particularly interesting, because they seem to be tied to an extortion attempt by Mike Grimm, Congressman from NY-13, an obstruction of justice attempt intended to deflect attention from James O’Keefe, and the whole thing is being wrapped up by Hynes Communications in an attempt to create another “Bill Ayers” for the 2012 election.

Mike Stack – Montgomery Township, June 23rd 2011:
Stack was used to push the message that a New York Democrat was going to have a sex scandal starting around the beginning of May 2011 and he was left holding the bag for what happened to Anthony Weiner. He was a liability after Weiner’s June 16th resignation, particularly since the news came out June 18th that the “teen girls” Weiner had been talking to were entirely fabricated. The false report seems calculated to shut him up.
A false report was made and the voice of the source seems to be Brandon Darby. This YouTube video is a composite of three false report calls and interview audio of Darby.
[EMBEDDED YOUTUBE VIDEO]
The underlying motivation for the Weiner stalk/smear is his reporting of Grimm’s extortion attempt in the fall of 2010.

John Patrick Frey – Los Angeles, June 30th/July 1st 2011:
Frey engaged former Raw Story editor Ron Brynaert in a call that straddled the midnight hour June 30/July 1. During this time there was an alleged false report made on him, again the voice is Brandon Darby. Frey banned Lee Stranahan from his blog, patterico.com, within about 36 hours. It should be noted that Darby and Stranahan own http://darbystranahan.com. Frey has been a vocal defender of James O’Keefe.
The best source for picking this apart is Lane Lipton aka @qritiq. She’s dug deeper into the details of the event’s timeline, Frey’s shifting, implausible explanations, and his use of an audio forensics expert to try to pin it all on Brynaert.
My read is that Darby and Stranahan did this on their own initiative, Frey was furious about it, but that he realized he was in deep and attempted to help with the cleanup by shifting the blame to Brynaert. Ron can’t make a false report call to save his life – he had a mental breakdown in the fall of 2010 and is incapable of remaining lucid during phone calls – I spoke to him once, and it was 30 seconds of me trying to answer questions and five minutes of him yelling at me.

Erick Erickson – somewhere in Georgia, May 27th 2012:
Erickson wrote about swatting, motivated by a conflict between Brett Kimberlin and Robert Stacy McCain. He also happened to contact his local sheriff’s department and warn them that such a thing was likely. A false report call, again the voice of Brandon Darby, was made. He tweeted about it, two minutes later he had a short blog post about it, and then he was off and promoting the smear – claiming that this was done by Brett Kimberlin or an ‘associate’ – an un-subtle way of saying ‘Neal Rauhauser’.

If I were investigating this, which I am, I would be focused on Hynes Communications in general and James Richardson in particular. This company, now Romney’s online rapid response vendor, seems a very likely candidate as the architect behind what has been directed at Kimberlin. Specifically:

• James Richardson is a Hynes Communications staffer
• James Richardson is a former contributor to Red State, Erickson is founder
• GA Senator Saxby Chambliss has been pushing for investigation into swatting
• Richardson and Brandon Howell run GeorgeTipsheet.com
• GeorgiaTipsheet.com has a Capitol Hill source -Dome Confidential
• We’re working on the assumption Dome Confidential = Chambliss staffer
• O’Keefe was funded by American For Prosperity
• Darby and perhaps Stranahan were funded by Americans For Prosperity
• O’Keefe money/front man is Erick O’Keefe of Sam Adams Alliance
• Emily Zanotti is a Hynes Communications staffer
• Emily Zanotti was formerly the online strategy person for Sam Adams Alliance

There are plenty of non-trivial business, personal, and financial links between a small group of people.
They’ve got a history of criminality involving complex deception.

Aaron Walker, Manassas Virginia, June 25th
Walker was outed as the operator of the Islamophobic Everyone Draw Mohammed blog January of 2012, he was arrested for assaulting Brett Kimberlin on January 9th at a contempt hearing for Seth Allen, whom either he or Frey had been guiding to smear Kimberlin. He was arrested again for a peace order violation in June, and this triggered the massive “Everyone Blog About Brett Kimberlin” smear, publicly announced by Lee Stranahan and promoted by Ali Akbar/National Bloggers Club.
I have some information regarding connections between Hynes Communications, Romney online rapidly response, and Ali Akbar, founder of the National Bloggers Club. The public information about ties are tenuous, but the tight coordination seen between NBC and Saxby Chambliss’s office makes this all very interesting.
It should also be noted that Walker is another former contributor to Frey’s blog, also banned under mysterious circumstances.
We don’t have audio of the call but I know it did occur – I’ve spoken to the officer who responded. I am presuming we’re going to find Brandon Darby’s voice again.

So, the things you are seeing here are:

• Grimm extortion attempt reported, Weiner set up in response
• O’Keefe grand jury in New Hampshire, lots of antics because I carried documents for the AAG on the case into a hearing in New Jersey.
• Hynes Communications attempting to solve several problems at once, turning Brett Kimberlin into Bill Ayers for 2012, protecting Eric O’Keefe/Sam Adams Alliance, etc.
• Frey faces a civil suit from Nadia Naffe, witness to O’Keefe’s behavior, and I’m the one who got her the lawyer handling the case.
What happened to Stack was real from what I can see. What happened to Frey was a soft pitch from Darby, and Frey either knew before it happened, or they informed him right after the fact. Erick Erickson’s event is clear and intentional fabrication and I want to know what role James Richardson and Emily Zanotti of Hynes Communications played in it.
I am assuming that Walker’s false report call was also Darby – they have pointedly not released audio.
Given the timing, immediately after a hearing against Brett Kimberlin, this is fabricated even if they did manage to get someone other than Darby to make the call.

* * * * *

RAUHAUSER E-MAILS TO OFFICE OF REP. SANDY ADAMS
(Note: Name of a congressional staffer has been redacted.)

swatting problem we know who the source of this is
neal rauhauser Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 9:46 AM
To: [NAME REDACTED]@mail.house.gov
[NAME REDACTED]
Congresswoman Adams recently led a group of 87 House offices in signing a letter regarding the hazard of “swatting”. You should take a close listen to this video.
You’ll hear the voice from the one legitimate swat call, which targeted Mike Stack in Montgomery Township, New Jersey. The call to John Patrick Frey was likely prearranged in order to cover up the first event and the call to Erick Erickson was certainly a fabrication intended to wind up public outrage and distract from the true source of this behavior.
[EMBEDDED YOUTUBE VIDEO]
The rest of the voice in the video is Brandon Darby. This man was an FBI informant from 2005 through at least 2008, and currently works with a man named Lee Stranahan they have a web site http://darbystranahan.com.
Lee Stranahan is a former contributor to John Patrick Frey’s site, http://patterico.com, but he was banned from writing there July 2nd, 2011. This was roughly a day after Frey’s own false police report event.
The details we have shared with the FBI and the local jurisdictions affected by these false reports are a bit dense for an introductory email, but the executive summary is that these men may have successfully pulled your office and 86 others into a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
I can forward you the rest of the information if you’d care to see it, I’m a D.C. area resident, and I’d be happy to meet with you and a few other staffers somewhere quiet so you can review the particulars before your boss gets drawn in any deeper. It’s best we move quickly on this a New York Times reporter has the story, and the the guy who made that video is part of a grassroots group that swings a lot of weight. It’ll break soon, Darby and Stranahan know this and they are already publicly blamestorming, having lost the support of “Brooks Bayne” in a messy online spat yesterday, and I’m sure more of the network of promoters will bail immediately when they understand what they’ve been duped into doing.
I have some other business on Capitol Hill later today I’ll just pass by your office, and if you’re available maybe we can discuss this in a quiet corner of the Longworth cafeteria.
Neal Rauhauser 2026421717
mailto:
[email protected]//
GV: 2026421717

From: [NAME REACTED] Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:30 AM
To: neal rauhauser
Hi Neal,
Thank you for the information, really appreciate it and I will pass it along to the Congresswoman. Please feel free to keep us apprised of the situation and to forward information as you see fit. Thanks again.

From: neal rauhauser [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 9:47 AM
To: [NAME REDACTED]
Subject: swatting problem we
know who the source of this is
[Quoted text hidden]
neal rauhauser Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:47 AM
To: [NAME REDACTED],
I spoke with a lieutenant at one of the police departments in New Jersey moments ago, and he’s sent me on to a detective who’s handling the case. It’s a bit of a muddle, there were three jurisdictions involved in the response. I don’t envy your comm director it’s a messy situation if it does prove out that the whole thing is another complex fabrication from the Breitbart camp.
Neal
[Quoted text hidden]

neal rauhauser Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 9:31 AM
To: [NAME REDACTED],
Is there a specific contact at the Department of Justice who is working on the swatting problem? This comparison of the swat callers voice and Brandon Darby seems very clear to me.
[EMBEDDED YOUTUBE VIDEO]
We’ve already given this, along with the background, to the effected municipalities, the FBI, the New York Times, the Orlando Sentinel, and I’ve taken the liberty of passing it to the Democratic party chairs in Brevard, Orange, Seminole, and Volusia counties.
I look forward to hearing back from you with the name of a specific person at the DoJ that you’ve identified as being responsible for following up on this very serious problem.

Neal
[Quoted text hidden]

neal rauhauser Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 11:19 PM
To: [NAME REDACTED],
Just writing to let you know that I think we have found the right FBI agent regarding the false police reports that were directed at Mike Stack, John Patrick Frey, Erick Erickson, and Aaron Walker. They have heard the audio comparison of the caller to Brandon Darby’s voice and I received a “can’t comment on current investigations” response, but the manner in which it was conveyed indicates to me that there *is* a current investigation.
I am sure we’ll all be relieved when this dangerous practice is brought to a halt, and it’s a bit of a shocking twist that it’s a highly visible conservative activist who is behind it, don’t you think?
Neal
[Quoted text hidden]

 

 

 

THE KIMBERLIN FILES:

 


Category: Brandon Darby, The Kimberlin Files

The Fail Starts With The First Word Of The Title

Posted on | August 6, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

“‘Zero‘ Dark Thirty“? Really? Those who are in the know say: “Oooh Dark Thirty”.

The Obama Administration is giving us the Full Riefenstahl in time for the election. What’s bad for them about this is that the administration’s success is predicated upon a willing audience. Instead, the shills assembling this flick will find themselves immediately pilloried, frame for frame.

I predict a Team America: World Police remix of ZDT within a month of the election.

Update: Hogewash concurs.

Category: Barack Obama

“Yes We Can” Didn’t Happen

Posted on | August 6, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

But let’s be generous with #OccupyResoluteDesk:

He did do that to our economy.

via Brietbart

Update: linked at American Glob. Go, Aliester!

Update II: linked at Jackie Wellfonder.

Category: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney

Go for the Gold, Melissa Seidemann!

Posted on | August 6, 2012 | 14 Comments

Having previously made clear my enthusiasm for water polo — the Official Olympic Sport for Guys Who Like Full-Grown Women — I am pleased to report that the U.S. team won its quarterfinal match yesterday, defeating Italy 9-6, thanks to Our Favorite Player:

Melissa Seidemann scored on all three of her shots and captain Brenda Villa added two goals to lift the United States past Italy 9-6 in women’s water polo.
Kelly Rulon scored twice for the Americans and Betsey Armstrong came up with 13 saves.
“I think the staple of our team is the defense. We count on Betsey so much, she did an awesome job today,” said Seidemann.

Yesterday, I got a note from Dana at First Street Journal, who is angry that ESPN magazine didn’t think Melissa — 6 feet tall, with a reported weight of more than 180 pounds — was suitable for their issue featuring the Olympic women’s water polo team nude:

Miss Seidermann worked hard to excel in water polo, a demanding, exhausting sport, and perhaps you can say that these particular photos were demeaning to all of the women on the team, but if they were going to do a photo shoot like this, Miss Seidermann should have been included, or the shoot not done at all. Weight bias is one of the last things in our society it’s not politically incorrect to express, but Miss Seidermann demonstrates that you don’t have to be a size six to be an athlete.

Exactly! If ESPN is going to treat Olympic athletes as sex objects, why cheat the deluxe-size ladies out of their moment of nude glory?

Is ESPN discriminating against Melissa? Are only skinny women deserving of admiration at ESPN?

This sends a very harmful and negative message to larger women — and angers those of us men who don’t mind a little more to love.

Category: Rule 5, Sports

Obligatory Post-Massacre Finger-Pointing Scapegoating Blame Game Open Thread

Posted on | August 6, 2012 | 34 Comments

“Both CNN and Fox News cut away when the U.S. Attorney took the stage and launched a lengthy speech which sounded like an Obama campaign speech. . . . Politics never is far behind a mass shooting, unfortunately.”
— William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection

Mainly, I’ve tried to keep my focus on aggregating facts about the Oak Creek shooting as quickly as possible:

There was a brief period last night, after I saw the Twitchy post about the insane reaction of lefties — “Michele Bachmann did it!” — where I indulged in some sarcasm at the expense of such fools. Even that, however, felt a little cheap and inappropriate, so I tried to dial down the snark. Permit me to point out what I did not do: I did not flinch.

When I first logged on to gather information about this crime, I saw a quote from one of the survivors at the Sikh Temple who called the shooting a “hate crime,” and I made that the title of my post. When the police chief said at the press conference that the shooting was being investigated as “domestic terrorism,” I added that to the title. When the shooter was identified as an Army veteran, I blogged that, and when he was ID’d as a neo-Nazi skinhead, I blogged that, too.

The timid defensiveness of some conservatives — who run away screaming the minute they hear the word “racism” spoken aloud — is the exact opposite of political wisdom. Having been so often and so unfairly accused of “hate,” they have internalized their liberal antagonists’ worldview to such a degree that they pre-emptively fear the smear:

“Oh, let’s denounce the crime, then move on and ignore it, because we might be targeted with a guilt-by-association smear attempting to connect us with this tattooed skinhead freak we never heard of until he killed six people.”

Not only is this reaction gutless — needlessly defensive — but it makes conservatives look like shameless political opportunists: If the guy who killed the Sikhs had been an Occupier or an Islamic jihadi, the right-wing blogosphere would have been raising hell. So when the shooter turns out to be somebody categorized as a right-winger, conservatives are not going to score any points for integrity and courage by whining that this is unfair and then trying to ignore it.

When the Left does this, we automatically notice it, don’t we?

Liberals were all up in arms in September 2009, screaming that the Tea Party had lynched a Census worker in Kentucky, until I drove to Kentucky and started reporting that this suspicion wasn’t justified by facts on the ground. When it eventually turned out that the Census worker had committed suicide and faked it to look like murder, the Left said nary a peep about their earlier misguided accusations about Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michele Bachmann.

Something similar occurred with the Tucson massacre in 2011: The Left jumped up and down pointing the finger at Sarah Palin. Then, when it developed that Jared Loughner was a left-wing dopehead obsessed with the 9/11 Truther conspiracy-theory “documentary” Zeitgeist, the liberal media suddenly lost interest in the political dimension of the shooter’s motive. “Just a random schizo,” the media sniffed, and pretended they never cared about Loughner’s politics.

So if conservatives slink away in silence after the Oak Creek massacre, we’ll look like a bunch of insincere punks. In truth, we have nothing to fear. I’m pretty sure there is nothing in the Republican Party platform that endorses the random shootings of people who wear turbans, so what the hell is all this scaredy-cat defensiveness about?

Anyway, having tried to restrain any urge toward political pontification in previous posts about this incident — waiting, at least, until we had some firm biographical details about the shooter — now I’m willing to relax a bit and see what folks have to say. I’ll update to aggregate commentary elsewhere.

UPDATE: Speaking of guilt-by-association, it has become unfortunately necessary to link to a disreputable publication quoting a disreputable source. The New York Times:

Officials at the Southern Poverty Law Center said they had been tracking Mr. Page for about a decade because of his ties to the white supremacist movement and described him as a “a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band.”
They said he played guitar and sang vocals for a band started in 2005 called End Apathy.
“This guy was in the thick of the white supremacist music scene and, in fact, played with some of the best known racist bands in the country,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the center. “The music that comes from these bands is incredibly violent and it talks about murdering Jews, black people, gay people and a whole host of other enemies. It is music that could not be sold over the counter around the country.”

The SPLC, of course, has spent the past 15 years irresponsibly lumping together criminal freaks like this skinhead hate-metal dude with law-abiding conservative political activists. I’m pretty sure that the Sikh religion is as “anti-gay” as some of the family-values groups tarred with the SPLC’s “hate” label.

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin:

I’ll leave the vulgar politicization of this evil massacre to others. The usual suspects are in full-blown Blame Righty Syndrome mode. They are as ghoulish and galling as the disgusting Westboro publicity hounds.

Click here to make a donation to help the victims’ families.

UPDATE III: In case you forgot, the blame-game drumbeat in September 2009 became so loud and incessant that Michelle Malkin finally confessed: “I killed the Kentucky Census worker — along with every conservative in America.”

UPDATE IV: Bill Quick at Daily Pundit: “At least he didn’t use an evil assault weapon.” Yeah, but you notice that the media makes sure to use the scary-sounding phrase “semi-automatic” every time they refer to his pistols, as if the victims would be slightly less dead if he would have used revolvers or a sawed-off shotgun.

This was one of my pet peeves about the media coverage of the 1999 Columbine massacre: Both Harris and Klebold carried 12-gauge shotguns, and Harris’s pump-action shotgun was the main cause of death in the school’s library. There was no public demand for a shotgun ban, however. Notably, the slaughter at Columbine High took place while the misnamed 1994 “assault weapons ban” was in effect, but this law did nothing to prevent Harris from getting a 9-mm Hi-Point carbine or Klebold from getting an Intratec 9-mm pistol.

Ordinary weapons firing ordinary ammunition — nothing exotic or illegal — and yet the victims were just as dead.

Maybe we should pass a federal law against evil.

UPDATE V: Mollie Hemingway at Ricochet notes that the major media were “somewhat cautious” in their reporting on this shooting, in contrast to the blatant irresponsibility of ABC News in blaming an innocent Tea Party activist for the Tucson massacre.

UPDATE VI: Linked by Bob Belvedere at The Camp of the Saints — thanks!

BTW, did you know that the shooter, Wade Page, was the product of what used to be called “a broken home”? And broken more than once, too. The Associated Press interviewed Page’s ex-stepmother — i.e., his father’s second wife, whom his father has subsequently divorced. That divorce has helped drive the downward mobility of working-class families over the past 40 years is one of the points made by Charles Murray’s most recent book.

However, it’s impossible to cite Murray’s research without being accused of racism — excuse me, RAAAAACISM! — and therefore the problems Murray addresses don’t get fixed.

When some broken and desperate soul commits a heinous crime like this, we aren’t supposed to mention how it relates to the Great Unraveling of our society, which continually gets worse because it is unacceptable to suggest that what is nowadays called “Progress” looks suspiciously like decadence.

Category: Crime, Wisconsin
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