The Other McCain

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

Stand Your Bus On Me

Posted on | June 17, 2012 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

This is a great parody of the Ben E. King classic, as former intelligence associates come to grips with the sad reality that, when the chips are down, Barack is somewhere else, fundraising, and under the bus they go:

via Yid With Lid

Category: Barack Obama, Election, humor, Video

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

Posted on | June 17, 2012 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

It looks as though the Greek election is another exercise in playing soccer on a long street with a can, kicking that can down another block.

The collapse of the Eurozone has become like the decline of the Warsaw Pact, only more complex and prolonged. Pro-austerity forces have won the latest election in Greece – sort of. Official projections show centre-Right New Democracy slightly ahead of radical socialist Syriza, which gives New Democracy an advantage in parliamentary seats. Syriza has conceded the election. However, reports say that New Democracy’s likely coalition partner, the austerity-minded centre-left Pasok, is unwilling to serve in a government that doesn’t give some role to Syriza. Syriza says no to a “grand coalition,” which means Pasok may be bluffing its way out of having to share the burden of austerity with New Democracy. Talks will begin and New Democracy has three days to form a new government. So the Euro is safe until the next election – in six weeks time?

Stanley veers off target in the conclusion:

Like communism, the Euro was sold to the poor of Europe as a magic bullet that would bring instant and lasting economic growth. One certainly can’t blame them for buying the propaganda, especially considering that several prominent Britons did, too.

Also, many prominent Britons did not. Thus, it may be time for a broad reverse psychology tactic. Tell the Greeks that what they ought to pursue is completely unworkable. Make them curious about common sense. Let them stumble upon it and think workable policies are their own idea. Can’t go any more wrong than the rest of the silliness over there.

Category: Greece

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

Posted on | June 17, 2012 | 56 Comments

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Earlier this year, Neal Rauhauser “scrubbed” from the Internet several of his online writings in an apparent attempt to conceal evidence that he has been cyberstalking and harassing his enemies, including the late Andrew Breitbart, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and the group of Tea Party activists who exposed Rauhauser’s role in the 2010 “TwitterGate” scandal.

Cached versions of Rauhauser’s deleted posts were preserved by some of the conservatives he targeted, and show Rauhauser’s fetish for secrecy and his obsession with his various enemies. For example, on March 14, Rauhauser published a post on his blog (nealrauhauser.wordpress.com) entitled “Playing Detective,” in which he described his attempt to find the real identity of a Tea Party activist who uses the Twitter handle @ZapEm. She produced on online video documenting evidence that Rauhauser organized the “beandogs” who harassed conservative Twitter users in 2010.

“Someone with some paid services I don’t have gave me the name of a couple in New Jersey,” Rauhauser wrote, describing his attempts to locate @ZapEm (see complete post below). “I wrote a nice note to the Morristown [i.e., New Jersey] Tea Party leadership, hoping that they may have had their fill of her antics. . . . Then I called the chief of police in Morristown and we spent a few minutes on the phone.”

In follow-up posts the next day, Rauhauser wrote that ZapEm is “mentally ill” from schizophrenia and has a “behavior disorder,” even as he described his own clearly obsessive search for the woman’s real identity. He described being contacted by a New Jersey Democrat with information potentially identifying the targeted woman, announced plans to hire a private detective to find her in New Jersey, and wrote that he had “started reaching out to Muslim attorneys in the area.”

Rauhauser, who previously worked as a consultant for Democratic politicians, has in the past year joined forces with Brett Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c) activist group Velvet Revolution, and also has ties to the “Occupy” movement and the “Anonymous” computer hacking conspiracy. Kimberlin made headlines in the past month for his harassment of bloggers who have written about his criminal past as Indiana’s notorious “Speedway Bomber.” Last month, blogger Aaron Walker was arrested after a Maryland hearing about Kimberlin’s complaint against Walker’s writings.

Several of the posts deleted from Rauhauser’s blog (but preserved in cache form) relate to his penchant for maintaining secrecy in his online activities. In a March post entitled, “Hiding in Plain Sight,” Rauhauser described how to “truly, deeply hide” ownership of Web sites “from a server you control without revealing its location to others.” In other March postings, Rauhauser claimed to have been targeted by a “a violent, Islamophobic nativist hate group” and wrote about “various stuff I’ve done to confuse those intent on finding and harming me.” 

One undated article by Rauhauser (uploaded at Scribd.com and later deleted) is entitled “Geolocation Lulz” and describes methods by which Rauhauser masks his IP address and location while posting comments on Web sites to “goad” enemies. Another article by Rauhauser dealt with “persona management,” i.e., protecting secret online aliases, and he also wrote about offering three classes to teach his Internet strategies: “Security & Anonymity,” “Grassroots Intel Analyst,” and “Counter Intel/Counter Troll.”

Recently published e-mails show Rauhauser soliciting a California attorney, Jay Leiderman, to assist New Jersey conservative activist Mike Stack in filing a nuisance lawsuit against Los Angeles County deputy district attorney Patrick Frey. Both Stack and Frey were victims of so-called “SWATting,” a dangerous hoax in which calls to 911 emergency numbers are used to dispatch police to the target’s home with the false accusation that the target has committed a violent crime.

At his Patterico site, Frey published an account of his SWATting, and has mentioned that one anonymous Twitter account (“LulzShack”) exhibited inside knowledge of that 2011 incident. Stack was SWATted after he helped expose Rep. Anthony Weiner’s cybersex scandal. Patterico wrote on May 25:

As Andrew Breitbart noted, this happened to two people within the course of a single week: a man in New Jersey and myself. Both of us had had contact with Andrew Breitbart. Both of us were writing about the same story. And both of us received email threats days before we were swatted. The threat to me said, in part: “Please think about your family. This story is not worth it. I can assure you that.” . . .
Writing at Daily Kos, Rauhauser suggests I should be harassed online.
Three days after I was swatted, Rauhauser wrote a post titled “Patterico’s Penalization” that made bizarre accusations about me, and accused me of working with a “cyberstalker” named Seth Allen — a blogger who had criticized Brett Kimberlin so tenaciously that Kimberlin (frivolously) sued Allen for defamation.

In multiple postings at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” alias, Rauhauser wrote obsessively about his theories that the so-called WeinerGate scandal was a hoax, which Rauhauser implied had been orchestrated by Frey.

Another obsessive interest of Rauhauser’s was O’Keefe, whose undercover video “sting” of the community organizing group ACORN launched Breitbart’s “Big Government” site in 2009. In posts that Rauhauser scrubbed from his blog, he describes his communications with Nadia Naffe, who admits having stolen O’Keefe’s e-mails, and who made headlines earlier this year by falsely accusing O’Keefe of sexual assault. Earlier this week, in an e-mail sent to blogger Paul Lemmen, Rauhauser claimed that he was working with the New Hampshire attorney general’s office in an effort to prosecute O’Keefe for a video “sting” operation about voter fraud in that state. Rauhauser said he had “hand carried a letter from [a New Hampshire associate attorney general] into an injunction hearing in New Jersey” involving Naffe and O’Keefe.

A September 2011 e-mail from Rauhauser to leaders of the “Occupy Boston” protests shows that Rauhauser was representing himself as an agent of Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution group, and that Rauhauser was acquainted with “Anonymous” hacker Gregg Housh. Last year, Housh’s colleague Barrett Brown announced that they had signed a book deal (reportedly for a “six figure” advance payment) to write about the activities of “Anonymous.” Brown had become a public spokesman for the computer hacking group, and was reportedly raided by the FBI earlier this year when charges were filed against the so-called “LulzSec” cell of Anonymous.

In a comment posted at a progressive blog in October 2011, Rauhauser described being contacted by a “very big dog from the Anonymous pen” who agreed to assist Velvet Revolution in an apparent plan to attack enemies of Rauhauser and Kimberlin.

Rauhauser’s tendency to boast — he frequently writes about his contacts with law enforcement and congressional staffers — and his demonstrable habits of deception make it difficult to take any of his claims at face value. In the sampling of Rauhauser’s writings that I have appended below, he makes a number of accusations of criminal wrongdoing against various individuals, attributing to these persons malicious intent. Readers are cautioned that many of Rauhauser’s claims about his chosen “enemies” are probably false, and may constitute libel. In republishing them here, I disavow any intent to endorse the claims made by Rauhauser and furthermore note that Rauhauser is a public figure who, by attempting to hide his potentially libelous writings by deleting them from his site, has waived whatever copyright claims might otherwise have prevented their republication under “fair use” doctrine.

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

* * * * * * *
** ARTICLES BY NEAL RAUHAUSER **

Playing Detective

March 14, 2012
I have a bit of quite time the next few weeks as some other stuff gets sorted out, so I am free to set aside my poor Google intelligence collection skills and actually do some genuine detective work.
First, for background, we’re talking about An Inconvenient Kook, a woman I’ve tentatively identified as Michelle Lessick aka ZAPEM. All I had to start was:

  • The Twitter username @ZAPEM (now @Repository1) and a now defunct WordPress blog
  • Records of various streams of tweets and writings, which are a fairly distinct personality showing delusions of persecution
  • An email from Patrick Read aka @SwiftRead naming her as Michelle
  • A tip that her last name was Reilly, perhaps Nagy-Riley, which I believe to be incorrect
  • A tip that her name might be Lessick
  • Assertions that she was a police dispatcher and her husband a police officer
  • Many indications she lived in northern New Jersey

I did quite a lot of digging with Google and finally did locate the connection to the name Lessick, which can be seen in the link containing her name. I chased various permutations of this name and the Jascawow alias using a variety of search tools and came up empty.
Someone with some paid services I don’t have gave me the name of a couple in New Jersey with the last name of Lessick, Republicans in their mid fifties. For various subtle reasons I was fairly sure the wife was not the woman I was seeking, but I thought that perhaps Michelle was a daughter in her late twenties to early thirties who had developed schizophrenia, or another relative in the area who is on disability and not visible to typical search methods. I spent a few minutes on the phone with her last night and I’m sure that she is not the one, nor does she seem to be covering for someone she knows.
I wrote a nice note to the Morristown Tea Party leadership, hoping that they may have had their fill of her antics. My source for much of the information I do have is someone on the right who feels her conduct is weird, dangerous, and embarrassing to the rest of them. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find someone local who holds similar views of her.
I went through the Morristown Democrats I could find online, sending email and making calls. I signed up for Topix and posted a request there looking for an activist in the area who can help me make connections. Then I called the chief of police in Morristown and we spent a few minutes on the phone. They don’t have their own dispatchers and he gave me the number to call at the county dispatch center.
Due to Donald Payne’s death I’ve felt it was inappropriate to bother the folks on Capitol Hill, but I will probably go down and make a few inquiries next week.I’ve got fifteen more days to do such things until Aaron Walker’s assault trial. Maybe I will get a break on this, maybe I am going to have to grind through a civil suit, we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes.

—

Geolocation Lulz

(Undated)
When kooks follow you around mouthing off about “getting your IP” it’s game on. Check your IP every time you sit down in a coffee shop. Get a lulzy one, like you’re in Vienna, Virginia, but the address resolves to Staten Island? That’s a perfect time to post a comment on some dipshit’s WordPress. Goad them later, but give it a few weeks.
Happen to be visiting the U.S. Capitol? And the person who is going to “get your IP” suffers from delusions of persecution, believing the government is after her? There’s no better time than to visit the House cafeteria in the Longworth building, and post a comment to aforementioned dipshit’s WordPress, knowing your delusional kook will be brought in to investigate.
Keep that host name in mind, some weeks later set up a new Cisco router at home, and capture the mysterious looking ip nat translation table when two of your machines are running torrent. Replace your home IP with housegate12.house.gov, and post the pastebin link to Twitter with some cryptic comments. Hours of fun ensue as kooks go through the torrent peers, looking for ‘clues’.
Kooks once determined I lived in Bethesda, Maryland. Google “Bethesda IP address Comcast”, and in the first page you find a lovely map that leads to a house just north of the NIH complex. Take the IP, get the ‘show ip address’ and ‘show arp’ from your shiny new Cisco home router, edit in the IP from the map in place of your own, then fiddle the MAC address table so any pro will know it’s a game. Put this up on yfrog, then go away for twelve hours. Be sure to get a trollish friend to point it out, laughing at your rookie mistake, so that kooks will know it’s an important ‘clue’.
And then harden the perception that this is an actual address by using Foursquare to check in to a location at the NIH complex itself.
Tweet that you’ve finished receiving the backup torrent from Encyclopedia Dramatica (ie you’re a 100% peer) and that you’ve served up 101G to other EDiots. Promptly drop torrent 30 seconds later, lulz for hours as kooks waste the afternoon trying to dox the completed peers.
CODA
A competent adult, reading this, would say “LOL, internetz”. A troll would say “Hey, I gotta try some of this myself.” Here is how a delusional kook might interpret it. ••••Mention of Virginia address confirms the subject is stalking a Virginia resident –and that must be ME! I must seek a protection order at once. Posting from the Longworth building cafeteria is a lie, he works for a Congressman; we need a call/write in campaign to find out which office. There is a MAP. The map shows a HOUSE. That is where he lives, or it’s his girlfriend, or maybe it’s a safehouse for George Soros when he is in D.C. Mention of Encyclopedia Dramatica. This man is either Garrett, or Zaiger, or maybe he’s Joseph Evers. Look, there’s a cell phone number for him …
So that’s that. Maybe two or three hours of effort total, mostly the run to the Medical Center red line stop when I was in the area anyway, and kooks have been chasing their tails for weeks and weeks.
So, kooks … you guys want me to leak additional IP addresses for you to investigate?

—

A Woman’s Place…

March 24, 2012
Lately I have been chatting a bit online with @NadiaNaffe, the latest in a string of woman @JamesOKeefeIIIhas attempted to victimize by drugging them and then taking advantage of them. There are civil and criminal things afoot here, so I won’t say much more, but this is a trend for the American right … and it’s not working in their favor.
Nadia is the third case where I’ve seen a woman who was working with some right wing oppo thing end up facing sexual harassment/sexual assault. Each time the operation has been blown to bits by the inability of a male leader to respectfully handle the women around him.
As for the other two, one was brassy, aggressive, and after an initial period of shock she has heaped punishment on the ones who offended her, and that included giving me all sorts of things they really didn’t want the world to know. A similar event happened over a year ago, I happened to get into a conversation with the victim of that one, and now a packet of information goes to anyone new the ringleader recruits. He seems puzzled as to all the trouble he is having …
This failure to recruit and retain women, which is far different from having men running female sock puppets, is a deadly peril to the right. They’re already behind the eight ball demographically and at a top level the puzzling anti-contraception debacle is comical, yet painful to watch. I can’t tell what they were thinking –attack contraception, accept an end to abortion as a compromise? Instead a generation of women who enjoy active sex lives are feeling like they’ve had their privates groped by some dirty old man.
I’ve spent the last couple of years researching, teaching, and building capacity –opposition stuff, policy stuff, and if I couldn’t get along with women I wouldn’t have 10% of what I do now. Some examples of a woman’s place include …
I get several complex bits of intel daily –summaries of what is happening in various areas that interest me. Some are lone gun operations, others are teams, but the glue that holds them together are women who have picked a specific issue to stand guard over day in/day out.
I sometimes make new things that need testing –there are a quartet of women between thirty and fifty in my chat client who I can give something partially finished and they’ll grind on it to see if it’s any good. These three classes I’m working on, Security & Anonymity, Grassroots Intel Analyst, and Counter Intel/Counter Troll? My progress would be limited and one dimensional if I weren’t sharing the work with my relentless reviewers.
I get texts pretty much every day, invariably starting with “You need to look at” followed by a link. There are a couple of women who took off with my Analyst’s Shoebox method of handling Google Alerts over a year ago and not much gets by them. Friends, enemies, the issues of the moment, they all have alerts and I generally hear about stuff without having to spend a lot of time digging on my own.
If I want to know what’s happening with the Occupiers in New York, Washington D.C, Denver, Chicago, Oakland, or any of the other hot spots my sources are almost invariably women. This group is a mixed bag –most of my contacts have passed the age of thirty, but there are a few in their mid twenties out on the road who are intent on growing their influence networks, and they’re treasure.
You might start getting the idea that I’ve got some weird problem working with men, but that’s not the case. There are half a dozen toolsmiths in my close circle, men from their early twenties to early sixties, and the more aggressive personalities online, with two notable exceptions, are all male. This just seems to be a natural break point in duties –women will favor relationships, and words, and regular schedules, while men will favor tasks, math, and projects.
So that’s that. The right is old, white, male dominated, racist, misogynist, and they’re chewing up their record keepers, their peace keepers, sometimes with disastrous results.

—

In Which James O’Keefe Obstructs Justice

March 22, 2012
I recently wrote Deleting (Almost) All Your Email, where I talked about my scanty inbox, with just 68 messages as of this afternoon, and how reading the HBGary emails as I wrote this reportchanged my views. I just don’t keep email any more –I get up to 500 messages and it’s time to clean house. I do memorialize important discussions by printing to PDF, but I never want to face what Aaron Barr of HBGary did.
And I will never face what James O’Keefe is going to, because I couldn’t be as foolish, sloppy, and criminal as he is even as an act. I’ll explain …
James probably made his final error by getting into conflict with @NadiaNaffe. This is the third time he’s had some weird sex/refusal/attempt to video tape someone in the context of his ‘journalism’ and this young lady has a unique advantage over the other two, in that O’Keefe made one disastrous error.
Nadia was involved in a sting operation aimed at journalist Charles Seife. The roots of the failed “To Catch A Journalist” effort were simple –Seife knew something was up with O’Keefe’s Project Veritasand he was asking to see the IRS documentation. He isn’t the only one and that isn’t the only problem charity he is involved in –others have questioned the nature of the Muslim Education Action Center, a sock puppet O’Keefe rigged up to smear National Public Radio.
While Naffe was in the field O’Keefe gave her his iPhone and he remained nearby in a car, using her Android phone and laptop to conduct other business. He failed to delete his accounts when they switched phones.
So understand what happened –O’Keefe walked away leaving Naffe with his email going back to 2004. Shehas had this information since October of 2011 and he’s been jacking with her the whole time. She has already released details of Izzy Santa’s settlement with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.
So far the matters are civil in nature, revealing a troubled young man who is either unable to respect, or completely unaware of the boundaries a woman his age would have. But what is not being said here is even more interesting to me.
O’Keefe was caught attempting to wire tap Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones in the company of the son of one of the two U.S. Attorneys for Louisiana, which got him federal probation. His taping of ACORN workers in Maryland was a clear violation of state wire tap laws, and he recently found similar trouble in New Hampshire.
Despite the questions about IRS filing status for two non-profits and multiple wire tap events some mysterious force keeps the New Jersey federal probation office responsible for O’Keefe from having him picked up for probation violations and referring him for further prosecution.
The contents of Ms. Naffe’s phone are likely the tool needed to break loose that log jam and put an end to O’Keefe reckless endangerment of any young woman who makes the mistake of associating with him, as well as the hazard his smear operation represents to our democracy.
O’Keefe is scrambling to put a lid on this –suing Naffe for the return of these emails. If there is evidence of crimes committed in those messages, which seems certain given what is already known about O’Keefe’s activities, this is obstruction of justice.
The solution to this problem is quite simple –Naffe can provide the content to those who have already subpoenaed her, then turn the content into the FBIsomewhere outside of New Jersey. The combination of other O’Keefe victims, who have resources and no entanglement, coupled with the FBI receiving the email outside the reach of whatever is happening in New Jersey, will be an unstoppable combination.

Update (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: The Kimberlin Files

A: To Justify Fascism

Posted on | June 16, 2012 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Q (emphasis mine):

Although Hood believes the self may be the greatest trick our brain has ever played on us, he concludes that believing in it makes life more fulfilling. The illusion is difficult–if not impossible–to dispel. Even if we could, why deny an experience that enables empathy, storytelling and love?

Insty links the SciAm review of a new book which is worth bringing up in discussion. If you want to factor out any theistic concept of a soul or notion of free will in one fell swoop, this sort of materialistic reduction is the way to go.

And it’s cool, too: once we’ve got life reduced to measurable bits of matter, and have nuked the idea of a ‘self’, we can set about the elimination of the individual and manage society through a series of spreadsheets. The molecules made us do it–how could there be a Devil?

This is not an evangelical pleading, though. My secular answer to this discussion is that the self, and freewill, have got to be taken as an assumption. That is, barring clear genetic-level defects like Downs, free moral agency has got to be the default position for the individual. Otherwise, we remain a societal collection of infants, forced into heroin addiction and inter-species romance because we’re, you know, victims.

Maybe there is some middle ground here, some non-slippery-slope argument. Self portrait of a ProgressiveHowever, we will no sooner make some famous last concession to the purely materialistic worldview then some power-mad individual is going to use that concession as a pretext to herd people. E.g. ObamaCare. As you love liberty, don’t give up the conceptual ship of freewill, or you’ll be awash in authoritarianism!

Category: Progressivism

World’s Youngest Blogger Game Face

Posted on | June 16, 2012 | 14 Comments

by Smitty

I don’t know if I’m really keen on soccer as a kid sport. Football turned me off in 7th grade when I realized the other kids were more interested in causing lots of injuries than actually, you know, playing the game.
For team sports with testosterone, it’s probably lacrosse in summer and hockey in winter. Or whatever the WYB wants to do. I’m just the facilitator.

Fear. You can start feeling it early.

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

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

Posted on | June 16, 2012 | 48 Comments

‘Speedway Bomber’ Brett Kimberlin was sentenced to 50 years in 1981

“Who wants to get involved? Easier, and surely safer, just to duck one’s head and hide, and hope the danger visits someone else.”
— Ace of Spades, “Kitty Genovese and the Conservative Media,” May 21

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Until a month ago, Brett Kimberlin and his associates had recorded what must have seemed, from their perspective, to be an uninterrupted series of victories in their ruthless war against their chosen targets. They had sued Seth Allen, threatened Patrick “Patterico” Frey, gotten Aaron Walker and his wife fired from their jobs, and harassed or menaced in various ways a number of other people, including Mandy Nagy, James O’Keefe and the late Andrew Breitbart.

What is amazing is how this intimidation campaign had gone on for months, dating back at least to October 2010 and involving multiple targets, without gaining wider attention.

Today — 30 days since Walker published his 28,000-word account of how he says Kimberlin tried to “frame” him on a bogus assault charge — the tables have clearly turned. More and more people are learning the shocking truth about Brett Kimberlin, his criminal past, the suspicious activities of Kimberlin’s 501(c) non-profits, the bizarre behavior of Kimberlin’s associates and the still-mysterious “SWATtings” of Mike Stack, Patterico and Erick Erickson. Members of Congress have called for an investigation and major organizations like the American Center for Law and Justice have become involved.

Friday night, we got yet another Memeorandum thread, this one on David Hogberg’s report at Investors Business Daily that criminal charges against Aaron Walker have been dismissed, although the ridiculous “peace order” against Walker apparently remains in effect. Michelle Malkin calls it a “free speech win,” but warns that there is still “a long fight ahead on many fronts.”

Indeed, while we are clearly winning, we have not yet won, and there can be no letting up in this fight so long as “Team Kimberlin” (to use Ken at Popehat‘s excellent phrase) continues to menace innocent Americans whose only “crime” is telling the truth. Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints is fond of quoting General Patton’s famous lecture on tactics:

“Now there’s another thing I want you to remember. I don’t want to get any messages saying that ‘we are holding our position.’ We’re not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy. We’re going to hold onto him by the nose and we’re going to kick him in the ass. We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose!”

Every day, we grab hold of some piece of the Kimberlin saga — some previously unreported fact or overlooked detail, some development on the legal or political front — and we push it as hard as we can, making the story new and fresh every day. One month into this epic battle of informational warfare, there is now a nationwide readership of thousands following this story with fascinated interest, and I am keenly aware of the need to keep moving the ball down the field, like a football team driving toward a touchdown.

Thursday at Brooks Baynes’s site The Trenches, Patrick Read published an e-mail from Kimberlin associate Neal Rauhauser to Michael Stack that is another eye-opener about Rauhauser’s secretive disinformation operations:

Let this email serve as an example of how Neal Rauhauser . . . and his associates “infiltrate the right-wing,” per his now-deleted-from-the-internet article (here).He uses intimidation, references to the FBI & threatens others with “lawfare” (frivolous lawsuits) to gain alliance & information.

Please read the whole thing. As Patrick Read remarks, Rauhauser’s actions appear very much like witness tampering.

There is much, much more of this stuff that has yet to be revealed and explained. Like Patton said, “We are advancing constantly.”

UPDATE: Patterico has video of Michelle Malkin speaking at Right Online about the bloggers who have been threatened and harassed by Brett Kimberlin, and also video of a certain “hockey mom” from Wasilla saying “the SWATtings must stop.”

Unfortunately, although I was invited to Right Online, I wasn’t able to attend this year’s conference — I had to travel to the D.C. area Friday for a meeting with a source — but Ali Akbar is in Las Vegas representing the National Bloggers Club.

UPDATE II: Linked by That Mr. G Guy — thanks! — and by Doug Hagin at Daley Gator, who invokes a famous general’s words. The same general also once advised:

“Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number. The other rule is, never fight against heavy odds, if by any possible maneuvering you can hurl your own force on only a part, and that the weakest part, of your enemy and crush it. Such tactics will win every time, and a small army may thus destroy a large one in detail, and repeated victory will make it invincible.”

UPDATE III: Want to see something that completely exposes the dishonesty of Team Kimberlin? As I explained Thursday, Neal Raushauser has been obsessed with Patterico for nearly a year, and this obsession is shared by the site I call “Not Brett Kimberlin,” which denies its association with Kimberlin, even as it relentlessly targets the people on Kimberlin’s (and Rauhauser’s) enemies list. Here is the topic-cloud from that site:

You see that Patterico and Aaron Walker are the two most common topics on the Not Brett Kimberlin site, which is ostensibly devoted to “Unmasking the Hidden Truth About Andrew Breitbart.” Yet Breitbart himself (with whom, perhaps not coincidentally, Rauhauser was also pathologically obsessed) has been dead for three months, and this anti-Breitbart site continues stumbling on in zombie fashion, ranting against Patterico, against Walker, against me — against anyone, that is, who threatens to expose the misdeeds of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser axis.

Kimberlin, Rauhauser and their associates evidently think they are so much smarter than everyone else that they can do stuff like this without their motives and purposes being obvious to us all. Their imagined mental superiority leads them into foolish blunders — as when the Not Brett Kimberlin site hilariously declared in March that Ace of Spades is actually a woman — and is fundamentally symptomatic of their profound personality disorders.

There was some political utility, from the perspective of the Left, in having a site devoted to “unmasking” (by which they mean, smearing) Andrew Breitbart, a famous figure in conservative New Media. But now that Breitbart is dead, the Not Brett Kimberlin site exposes itself as the outworkings of a deranged mind, haphazardly smearing a bunch of people most Americans never heard of, but who loom large as demonized scapegoats in Rauhauser’s paranoid worldview. A couple of useful questions:

  1. What was the very first post at Not Brett Kimberlin? It was an attack on Breitbart for his role in the Citizens United documentary Occupy Unmasked (the link is through an “anonymizer” filter, because that site is infested with spyware viruses and other creepy hacker stuff.)
  2. What was the subject of Neal Rauhauser’s September 2011 e-mail on behalf of Kimberlin’s 501(c) Velvet Revolution? He was reaching out to leaders of “Occupy Boston,” via an introduction made through Gregg Housh of the “Anonymous” hacker conspiracy

Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

UPDATE IV: The new (anti-Kimberlin, pro-freedom) Velvet Revolution blog has video of the reaction when the latest news about Aaron Walker’s case reached a certain bunker in Berlin:

Friday at Right Online, they had a special remembrance of Andrew Breitbart, and let’s not forget this warning from Andrew:

 

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

UPDATE V (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE VI (RSM): Also now a Memeorandum thread, and be sure and read the latest: “‘Scrubbed’ Writings Show Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser’s Obsessions.”

 

 

THE KIMBERLIN FILES:

 


Category: The Kimberlin Files

FMJRA 2.0: Saturday Afternoon Baseball Edition

Posted on | June 16, 2012 | 12 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

A High Time on the Low Road: Smears Target Brett Kimberlin’s Enemies List UPDATE: SWATting Supect ID’d?

‘Team Kimberlin’ Meltdown Continues

Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser, and Their Transparent Empire of Lies UPDATE: ‘Anonymous’ Connection

HUGE! Neal Rauhauser’s Vicious Lies Exposed by Yet Another Leaked E-Mail

TEN MILLION HITS! and Presenting … Our Top 20 Most Commented Posts

‘Why In The Hell Is Eric Holder Still Attorney General?’

Neal Rauhauser’s Game Plan Involving Velvet Revolution and Anonymous

#BrettKimberlin Says He Was ‘SWATted’; Why Do Maryland Cops Say Otherwise?

Neal Rauhauser’s Online Slander Factory

FMJRA 2.0: Exactly What You Wanted

‘Making Love Out of Nothing At All’ #VanJonesTearJerkers

Rule 5 Sunday: Train In Vain

LIVE AT FIVESIX – 06.11.12

The Lonely Conservative Completely Wrecked My Morning

Florida Rep. Sandy Adams Leads 85 House Republicans in ‘SWATting’ Letter

LIVE AT FIVESIX – 06.12.12

Private Sector’s Doing Fine

Time to Ask: What Did Brett Kimberlin Know and When Did He Know It?

Patterico: ‘Certain Big Media Reporters Are Scared to Write About Kimberlin’

Separated At Birth? JR/WJ Edition

‘Real Reporter’ @NYT_JenPreston vs. Blogger @Prepostericity (Seth Allen)

Top linkers this week:

  1. (tied) Lonely Conservative, The Camp Of The Saints, and The Conservatory (8)
  2. (tied) Daley Gator and Daily Pundit (7)
  3. Darth Chipmunk (6)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Links for next week’s FMJRA are due Friday, June 22nd.

 

Category: FMJRA Award

First Principles Blog Series On Taxation

Posted on | June 16, 2012 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

First Principles was taking me to task in the comments over on the Norquist post. This is the kind of back-and-forth that can be highly educational, if one can dodge the temptation toward ad hominem.
FP:

When it comes to political hot points in conservative political circles in Nevada, the Grover Norquist/Americans for Tax Reform “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” may be the most singularly significant. It has become, for some, THE litmus test for who a “real” conservative is and isn’t. But is that fair? Does the pledge make sense politically, policy-wise, or philosophically?
This blog was conceived specifically to answer questions like that, and now – with several Republican primary races pitting Pledge-signers against non-Pledge signers (both arguing over who the “true conservative” is) – is as good a time as any to explore this issue.
This is often painted as a “pragmatist vs. purist” argument – but I think that is too glib, especially for something as complicated as tax policy. And it lets both signers and non-signers off the hook when it comes to truly understanding – and explaining to their constituents! – the complex budget bills they’re considering.
I’m going to explore this on multiple fronts and in multiple posts to follow, but the bottom line is this – the Pledge is an un-serious document, poorly tailored to promote sound, conservative economic policy.

Read the whole thing, including the outline for the series.

Reacting to that outline, what seems strange is the tacit acceptance that DC has eminent domain over the individual citizen wallet. While I stood chided for calling Norquist’s tax pledge “necessary but insufficient” (I guess the contention lies in the use of “necessary”), what I hope to see from FP is some discussion of the 1913 Wilsonian debacle of Amendments 16, 17, & the Federal Reserve Act.

It’s my contention that the Federalist chain of command, (local, state, and federal government entities) was short-circuited in 1913. When DC gave itself the power to inflate the currency, senators became beholden to voters and not their sending state governments, and your very wallet became a wholly owned subsidiary of the IRS, the course was laid in for our current crisis. States balance their books somewhat regularly, mainly because “Federal dollars” can be caused to appear when desirable to paper over the worst of the  embarrassments.

And I’m not a huge Norquist apologist. The commenters on the last post featuring him pointed out some border security questions. And his Pledge might be more honored in the breech than effectual. In a postmodern world, we have an Administration trying to argue that ObamaCare is a tax when you stand here, and a penalty when you stand there. So our government rapes us and refers to it as “intense massage” where taxes are concerned. Hence my sub-loyal approach to thinking about the GOP Establishment.

The argument that Norquist’s Pledge is worse than nothing seems over-stated. Efforts have to start somewhere. You can contend that the Pledge is sub-optimal. Fine. But some credit where due is in Order. Grover has helped call attention and trigger public involvement. That’s why the Left goes after him. That’s why he offers closing speeches at CPAC. Pretending that Norquist isn’t swinging a mean bat and isn’t contributing a hefty amount to the effort to recover liberty seems a trifle peevish, in my book.

Thus, I’m interested in seeing if FP is going to accept the cancer that is federal over-reach on taxation. Admittedly, any radical operation to remove the tumor by repealing Amendments 16, 17 & the Federal Reserve isn’t going to happen. But the historical evidence is that our current course is disastrous, and that DC has handled money and power like teenage boys with whiskey and car keys. I’d personally delegate tax collection back to the states, and let them compete economically. Let DC return to its enumerated powers, handling multi-state and international affairs, and checking the power of the states over individuals. Because I’m retro like that. Sure, we’re engineering in some inefficiency. Yes, it’s much harder for the aggregate muscle of the U.S. to be brought to bear internationally. The price of freedom and tyranny avoidance is both individual involvement and a measure of inefficiency.

Category: End The Fed
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