The Other McCain

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

Elizabeth Warren’s Iron Maiden Tribute Band Is A Huge Hit

Posted on | June 24, 2012 | 9 Comments

by Sissypuss the Blog Kitty

FITCHBURG, MASSACHUSETTS
Art and politics have just had another one of their strange collisions.

Elizabeth Warren hides her hefty biceps by day through the use of an expertly tailored wardrobe.

Warren and her band, "Pseudajawea" rocking out at Partner's Pub in Fitchburg, Massachusetts

 Friday night Pseudajawea rocked Partner’s Pub, and Strolling Drone correspondent Sissypuss was there to take in the show.
The entire set was filled with excitement, as the Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate flexed considerable heavy metal chops, blending them with contemporary props like a 30 pound dumbbell made from a printout of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA/ObamaCare.)
Things veered in the direction of tense when some Cherokee women made it close to the stage.
Calling an audible to the band, Elizabeth had them segue into Run to the Hills,

brandishing her copy of ObamaCare at them while yelling “Enslaving the young and destroying the old!”, for all that might have been closer to a Trail of Tears reference. Security escorted the Cherokee women from the venue.Rejoining Warren on the stage in her old role as drummer was Teresa A. Sullivan, fresh from a stint as President at the University of Virginia. Fortunately the band sounded better that the steaming pile of malarky that Sullivan and Warren attempted to pass off as scientific research in 1989. Warren’s grasp of public conduct is roughly as risible as her genealogical efforts.
With Martha Coakley on lead guitar and Dede Scozzafava on bass, Pseudajawea is a musical, if not political, force with which to reckon. Look for their first collection of Iron Maiden covers, The Number Of The Powerslave Campaign Contributions That Will Give Us Piece Of Mind, next month.

Much love to Political Clown Parade for indulging this blog’s whacky photoshop ideas.

Category: Democrats, Farce, Massachusetts

The Afghanistan War Was A Total Success

Posted on | June 24, 2012 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Insty points to HotAir on the Afghanistan Surge being mishandled. This argument operates under a misapprehension that any of Obama’s Afghanistan policy was ever serious in the first place.
Obama campaigned in 2008 on the notion that the unpopular Iraq war was a distraction:

Democrat Obama declared that the failed policy in Iraq — which he argued was never the central front in the war on terror — has distracted attention from the growing terrorist threat in Afghanistan and proves the need to withdraw from Iraq. “If another attack on our homeland comes, it will likely come from the same region where 9/11 was planned,” he said in a speech in Washington. “And yet today, we have five times more troops in Iraq than Afghanistan.”

Safely sworn into office, Obama offered the Afghanistan question the Full Hamlet:

There is every sign that President Obama is now taking too much advice and that it is make up your mind time on Afghanistan. Nato’s new secretary general, the former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has openly voiced his worries about the rising scepticism being voiced by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic about the viability and value of the Afghan mission.
The immediate cause for Obama’s indecision is whether to agree to McChrystal’s request for extra troops, somewhere in the region of 40,000 according to most reports, for Afghanistan.

What observers fail to realize is that the only point to Obama’s Afghanistan policy was to say something, anything that sounded halfway credible in 2008. When the Iron Triangle came to collect on the campaign promises, Obama’s 2009 response could be summarized as: “Wut?” By then, it was too late. The Afghanistan War gambit had already hit its peak success on 04 November 2008. That our military had been flanked from uphill on the org chart would take years (including one from my life) for everyone to discover.

Let us be perfectly clear: while it’s still not a bad thing that the United States elected a black man in 2008, it is a colossal shame that the first President elected, who happened to be black, lacked both the erudition of a Thomas Sowell and the courage of an Alan West. Come November, we must send Obama back to Chicago, where surely his résumé and command of hooey will land him a job as a starting pitcher for the Cubs, with no appreciable degradation from Barack’s success as president.

Category: Aghanistan, Barack Obama

Sunday Morning Meditation

Posted on | June 24, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

For those who’ve enjoyed my bits of doggerel, I was checking to see if you can do SVG in WordPress:
And the answer is ‘Sure, as long as you do not mind an Internal Server Error in lieu of what you really wanted.’
Here is the poem layed out less experimentally:

Cross

The vertical line of God
Interacts with time we see
Along the line of our lives.

Hard to discern, you’ll agree
As through the Valley we’ve trod
Dodging the evil one’s knives.

Could we our futures foresee
As each of us forward strives
The same path should we have trod?

And who among us conceives
If our will truly be free
A brutal trip to the sod?

No, we would rather have wives
Kids by a dozen shoes shod
Bouncing them all on the knee.

Swimming among the world’s cod
World to make meaning contrives
To locate the core of ‘be’.

The ones who hunger stand awed
Realizing they’ve no plea:
God _only_ real meaning gives.

Category: Religion

Neal Rauhauser’s Bizarre Suspicions, and Profiling the (Hypothetical) ‘UnSub’

Posted on | June 23, 2012 | 80 Comments

‘Deeply disturbed … narcissism … sociopathic’?

“Please think about your family. This story is not worth it. I can assure you that. . . .
“I am trying to help you, a lot of people are very disappointed that this story has continued.”
— “Alicia Pain,” June 23, 2011

“Another possible outcome would be a two digit body count from some mosque in Virginia after Aaron goes full tilt Jared Loughner on the congregation. . . .
“I continue to be the sort of guy who can get a counter terror [special agent] in the D.C. area on the phone in short order.”
— Neal Rauhauser, Feb. 16, 2012

“In a message posted in the comments of a blog in October 2011, Rauhauser explained that he and someone he describes as ‘a very big dog from the Anonymous pen’ conspired to use Brett Kimberlin’s non-profit Velvet Revolution as a vehicle to exact vengeance on (a) his personal enemies, (b) the security firm HB Gary and (c) ‘Breitbart associates.'”
— Robert Stacy McCain, June 15, 2012

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
SWATting victim Mike Stack accused Brett Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser of criminal harassment. On May 24, the day he was due to appear at a New Jersey courthouse for a meeting intended to resolve that case, Rauhauser sent an e-mail to Stack that included this:

Given that Doug [Stewart] was in court with us, as well as others who may not have spoke up, I think it’s very dangerous that we should appear together at a known time. You haven’t faced this stuff yet, but Gabbie [Giffords] took a bullet through the back of the head and Gabe Zimmerman died along with five others in Tucson. What McCain & Walker are doing is *way* more intense than the stuff that [led] up to that mass shooting. I am truly worried we could end up caught in the middle of a gunfight between deputies and some extremist group. It’s never been made public, but there were members of Michigan Militia periodically patrolling the Occupy Lansing camp because they got a hint I was there, and before that it was some League of the South guy in South Carolina who got interviewed by FBI hate crimes squad.

These insinuations are either (a) insane or (b) dishonest, or perhaps (c) both insane and dishonest. There is no other possible explanation for Rauhauser’s bizarre claim that Aaron Walker’s defense against Brett Kimberlin’s intimidation tactics — and my reporting on Walker’s plight — were likely to lead to a massacre comparable to Jared Loughner’s criminal rampage in Tucson.

Please note that I reported on Loughner’s crime both on my blog and at The American Spectator. In point of fact, “the stuff that [led] up to that mass shooting” was Loughner’s slow-motion descent into psychosis, a mental deterioration influenced by the atheist 9/11-Truther conspiracy cult “documentary,” Zeitgeist.

What other “stuff” does Neal Rauhauser mean to say caused Loughner’s murder spree? Sarah Palin’s “target” map? “Incivility”? Rauhauser doesn’t say, nor does he acknowledge that Loughner was a paranoid psychotic deluded by left-wing conspiracy theories.

” I am truly worried we could end up caught in the middle of a gunfight between deputies and some extremist group”? What deranged nonsense is this? Who could possibly take Neal seriously?

Only a handful of people knew or cared about the Stack-Rauhauser case. There were some people working behind the scenes trying to get somebody — anybody — in New Jersey or New York media to cover that story, and nobody was interested, even though it involved Mike Stack, who played a key role in exposing the Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal.

Yet here was Rauhauser, the defendant in a criminal harassment case, sending a private e-mail to Stack — the plaintiff in that case — attempting to convince Stack that they were both in danger of dying in a violent attack by an armed gang of right-wing extremists.

The Michigan Militia! The League of the South! All these shadowy menaces, Rauhauser wanted Stack to believe, were such a looming threat to public safety in Somerset County, N.J., that it was dangerous for Stack and Rauhauser to “appear together at a known time.”

And why? Because of Aaron Walker and me!

Rauhauser then went on in his e-mail to Stack to cast a penumbra of suspicion around Patrick “Patterico” Frey who, like Stack, had been targeted for SWATting in the wake of WeinerGate:

If Frey or anyone around him can shift blame to you for anything that has happened they will try that.
The FBI agent in charge of counter-terror for NYC was interested after I told her a bit about what you had been close to, but after some consideration I think it is unwise for you to approach them on your own. I also think you might have some sort of claim against Frey, but it’s not as clear as what Nadia [Naffe] has.
I will write a note introducing you and Jay Leiderman. He is Nadia’s lawyer, he is not mine, so you would be talking to him as if he were going to be your counsel in a civil suit against Frey, and he will advise you on the particulars of talking with the feds after what you have seen. . . .
We’ll look what I have over — you, me, and qritiq, then we’ll share it with Allyn Lynd, the FBI agent who is most known for dealing with stuff like that. I think this is a separate issue from Frey and so forth – we can do this without either of us being exposed to any trouble.

This is such a convoluted wad of misleading lunacy I scarcely know how to begin unraveling it. How is it, for example, that Rauhauser imagines Patrick Frey would want to “shift blame” to Stack?

Blame for what? What crime is Frey alleged to have committed for which he would, according to Rauhauser, want to falsely blame Stack?

How does this relate to Nadia Naffe, nemesis of James O’Keefe? What does Rauhauser claim Frey or O’Keefe (or their unknown accomplices) have done that would be of interest to “The FBI agent in charge of counter-terror for NYC” or “Allyn Lynd, the FBI agent who is most known for dealing with stuff like that”?

Stuff like what? What horrific criminal malfeasance does Rauhauser know of, that would require the intervention of these authorities?

Uh . . . SWATting by a member of a notorious computer hacking gang?

Why was Rauhauser name-checking FBI Agent Allyn Lynd in this private e-mail in May 2012 when, in October 2011, Rauhauser was boasting of his connection with “a very big dog in the Anonymous pen”? How is it that Neal was pushing this disjointed crazytalk at Mike Stack, barely six months after Rauhauser himself was proud to proclaim his association with hackers linked to an international criminal conspiracy?

Can you say, “consciousness of guilt,” boys and girls?

While I hate to put any more crazy ideas into Neal Rauhauser’s demented mind, I wonder if the FBI might soon be reading this blog post.

To put it a bit more plainly, I wonder if some of my sources — who tell me they’ve been talking to the FBI — would e-mail the agents a link to this post, so that the agents could ask the clever folks at the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico to ponder a few hypotheticals.

Suppose there was a certain person (we’ll call him “UnSub”) who knew himself to be implicated in serious crimes. Suppose that UnSub displayed an obsessive interest in secrecy and deception. Furthermore, suppose that UnSub believed himself to be under investigation.

How would such a person behave? Is it possible — and I’m just throwing this out there, as a hypothetical possibility — that UnSub would attempt to deflect attention from himself by making accusations of wrongdoing against others? Would UnSub try to destroy or conceal potential evidence? Could we, perhaps, expect UnSub to taunt his victims or send veiled threats to potential witnesses against him?

Just kind of thinking out loud here, you understand. Purely a matter of abstract speculation, perhaps of interest to the BSU analysts at Quantico only as an exercise in psychological theory.

Maybe the BSU analysts could factor in some other variables. Say, for instance, if UnSub liked to brag about his connection to law enforcement officials, or exhibited the kind of sadistic personality that would brag about using martial arts to inflict pain on a woman.

Do you think FBI criminal profiling specialists would be interested to learn that UnSub had previously engaged in behavior “disturbing enough to result in a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation“?

What the psychiatrist found was a man who was deeply disturbed, possessed of the worst narcissism he’d ever seen. [UnSub] had reactive attachment disorder. He was sociopathic, and his behavior resulted in [UnSub] facing various difficulties socially and professionally.

Like I said, sort of an abstract hypothetical we’re talking about here, the type of case study that might interest FBI-BSU strictly as the subject for what you might call a “clinical exercise” or something.

Maybe it would come in handy to law enforcement officials who had spent an entire year trying to solve a mysterious crime. Also, I think it might be helpful to FBI agents who were ready to apprehend a deviant “sociopathic” criminal like that: How would UnSub react if he thought he were under surveillance and the feds were about to move in? Would this kind of psychological stress make him a potential threat to himself and others? Shouldn’t law enforcement agents be informed that UnSub had boasted about carrying a concealed handgun?

Glock 19, the 9x19mm compact frame, fits my hand like a glove. When I used to carry this I’d load half a dozen frangibles — Glazer Safety Slugs — which are safer in urban environments. The rest of the stack would be Remington Golden Sabers — the right stuff according to FBI barrier tests.
Today what I have is not so potent, but it’s much more concealable.

The customary phrase, I believe, is “armed and dangerous.”

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

Category: The Kimberlin Files

In Which I Take Fast, Furious Cheap Shot At Jay Carney

Posted on | June 23, 2012 | Comments Off on In Which I Take Fast, Furious Cheap Shot At Jay Carney

by Smitty

President Obama may have to clear a high bar in order to lock down Fast and Furious documents from the prying eyes of congressional investigators. . .

An imaginary exchange at the daily White House Press Briefing. . .

Carney: Now, I am not privy to the Fast & Furious documents that are in contention between the Attorney General and Congress. However, our interns now are distributing some hard copies of declassified, redacted documents to the press. . .

Wendell Goler Have you reviewed these yourself?

Carney: I was privy to a late draft that was pretty much down to definite articles and prepositions, plus most of the punctuation.

. . .muttering in the press pool. . .

Is there some sort of problem with what the interns distributed?

What the press corps saw.

What the press corps saw.

Jake Tapper: Dude: where are the redacted documents? This is several copies of the cover of The Black Album, by Metallica! Nice Gadsden serpent, by the way.

Carney: Those zany interns! Well, maybe the President has adopted the whole “Don’t tread on me” ethos. Obama has always empathized with the whole Tea Party/#Occupy concept, you know. At any rate, that conclude’s today’s briefing. I’ll have to get back to you on the precise meaning of this document release.

Update: Oh no. Daily Pundit may have seen through the redaction.

via HotAir

Category: Democrats, Farce, humor

#ThingsDemocratsPromiseForVotes Silencing Bad, Bad Conservative Blogs

Posted on | June 23, 2012 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

I was at a dry, dry talking head show today. But at least there was access to the tubey-nets for Twitter hijinks:

Category: Democrats, humor

Imani Gandy, #StopRush and Neal Rauhauser: Confirmation and Credibility

Posted on | June 23, 2012 | 10 Comments

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
The Brett Kimberlin story — necessarily involving the activities of Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser — keeps moving forward every day. This brings us now to a follow-up on two recent stories:

Neal Rauhauser turns up in those stories as a trusted associate of “Stop Rush” leader Matt Edelstein (aka “Shoq”), who assigned Rauhauser to investigate “Randy Hahn,” a Texan suspected of being an infiltrator of their anti-Limbaugh boycott group.

Those stories were based on interecepted e-mails and recorded phone conversations published by Brooks Bayne at The Trenches.

How do we know that the story was legit? The proof is in the statement issued this week to The Trenches by attorney Imani Gandy.

Gandy was eager to disavow having been closely involved with the “Stop Rush” leadership, and similarly eager to deny having anything to do with the recorded phone call. Why this eagerness? Because if Shoq was in Florida when he recorded that call, the recording would be illegal under Florida law and, as Gandy is a lawyer, it would be a clear-cut ethics violation for her to be complicit in such a crime.

Yet in the process of making those denials, Gandy ended up confirming the authenticity of both the recording and the e-mails published by The Trenches — and this is important why?

Because (a) it confirms that my reporting is accurate, (b) this has the collateral effect of confirming Rauhauser’s involvement with the “Stop Rush” boycotters, and (c) Shoq’s defenders cannot deflect blame by discrediting “Randy Hahn.” Nobody involved in the story trusts “Randy,” and discrediting him does nothing to detract from the legitimate news value of the story. It was the attempt to discover and expose this infiltrator in their midst which revealed key facts about the anti-Limbaugh conspiracy — including the roles played by Edelstein, Rauhauser and MSNBC host Krystal Ball — and the actual identity (or moral character) of “Randy Hahn” is irrelevant to those facts.

This illustrates something basic about journalism that readers need to keep in mind: Facts are facts, and the story is the story, independent of who is telling the story or how the facts are obtained. I don’t have to like my sources — or even trust my sources — in order to obtain facts from them, and you don’t have to like me or agree with my politics in order to accept the credibility of my reporting.

If the stories I report turn out to be false, OK. But if the facts check out and the stories withstand close scrutiny, then whatever credibility is thereby obtained must be extended to the next story.

Only once during the course of this 37-day story have I chased any wild geese: On June 13, I linked and quoted an e-mail sent to Brooks Bayne claiming to identify the perpetrator of the “SWATting” calls. Patterico immediately disputed that claim, and maintains his own clear suspicion that Ron Brynaert was responsible.

Here’s the thing: I don’t claim to have any idea who SWATted Patterico or Mike Stack or Erick Erickson. I’m not a cop, a lawyer or a detective. All I can do is report what’s out there — including assertions by people who may or may not know what they’re talking about — and leave it to the cops and lawyers to do their jobs.

So it doesn’t matter whether I share anyone’s suspicions about the identity or motives of the SWATter. If Britney Spears sent me an e-mail and blamed it on Kevin Federline, I’d report the fact of the claim without pretending to know whether the claim was indeed factual.

That’s something that people need to be clear about, because there’s a lot more of this story left to report, and readers have to exercise judgment just the same as reporters have to exercise judgment.

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

Category: The Kimberlin Files

FMJRA 2.0: Blow My Fuse

Posted on | June 23, 2012 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

E-Mails Expose MSNBC Host’s Involvement in #StopRush Boycott

‘Persona Management’ for Wackjobs: Rauhauser’s Methods of Deception

Team Kimberlin’s Busted Hustle Now Beginning to Unravel Rapidly
UPDATE: Perhaps Not a Coincidence

‘Scrubbed’ Writings Show Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser’s Obsessions

Neal Rauhauser: Internet Super-Spy!

BREAKING: Motion Filed Seeking Federal Injunction on Behalf of Blogger

What? Paul Lemmen Challenges My Title to ‘King of Butt-Hurt’ Championship?

Recording: Leader of Anti-Limbaugh Effort Brags About Obama Campaign Ties

The Kimberlin Files: Ali Akbar, the Fight for Liberty and … a Disturbing Silence

Neal Rauhauser’s Criminal Complaint Against Blogger Greg W. Howard

Obama Has Learned Nothing

Slathering S.A.L.V.E On Your Kindle

‘Iowa Boy,’ ‘Stranded Wind’ and the Sadistic Personality of Neal Rauhauser

First Principles Blog Series On Taxation

FMJRA 2.0: Saturday Afternoon Baseball Edition

A: To Justify Fascism

Hey, Greece: Just Remember, Austrian Economics Don’t Work

Announcement: S.A.L.V.E.

LIVE AT FIVE – 06.19.12

Bob Belvedere Hates Trees While Being The Most Beautiful Man On The Planet

MSNBC: The ‘C’ Is for ‘Crazy’

House Committee Approves Contempt Charge, Obama Invokes Executive Privilege, Katie Pavlich Sells More Books

LIVE AT FIVESIX – 06.22.12

Top linkers this week:

  1. (tied) The Conservatory and EBL (10)
  2. (tied) Lonely Conservative, The Camp Of The Saints, and Daley Gator (9)
  3. (tied) Before It’s News and That Mr. G Guy (7)
  4. Da Tech Guy (6)
  5. Hogewash (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Links for next week’s FMJRA are due on Friday, June 29.

 

Category: FMJRA Award
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