Quote for the Weekend

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Darth Chipmunk

“Barack Obama is a radical. We should not be afraid to say that.” -Andrew Breitbart

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What Happened at Ace of Spades HQ? (Updated)

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Darth Chipmunk

There was a big commenter dust-up over at the Award-winning  AoSHQ friday night. Comments are gone. Not deleted. Not turned off. Completely inaccessible. As a result I can’t see the thread to read what happened. Ace posts a hint:

Jimmah, however, has decided to set blog policy for me, and several others have decided to challenge me on the point as well.

I will have to end commenting until I can figure out how to ban them.

It takes stepping over a wide, obvious line to get Ace talking ban hammer. I’ve trolled at Ace since Late in Bush’s first term. I made it daily reading in about ’07 and I started commenting a year or two ago, usually as a snarky sock. I’ve never seen the moron nation do anything to push Ace this far.

You expect to be knifed in the front by your enemies. It’s too much to be knifed in the back as well.

Again, I realize most people understand without being told.

My mistake here is thinking some people will understand if told — no, the sort of person that doesn’t know until told also won’t know after he’s told.

Thanks for everyone who understands without being told.

For the rest, registration is coming, possibly Monday. I do not have the time or patience regarding continuing arguments about Standard Blog Policy — standard blog policy on any blog, at any time, let alone now, when I’m under siege — and I simply will not be entertaining any more arguments about it.

You can be stubborn about a lot of things, but when you get stubborn over another man’s right to make his livelhood as he believes right, and to protect himself and his family as best he knows how, you’ve gotten stubborn about the wrong thing, and the last thing.

And also, you’re a bad person with a deep psychological problem, and no, merely being “conservative” does not make up for your selfishness and arrogance. You might want to consider character-building exercises over reading about politics. Before one’s a good conservative, one ought to strive to first be a good human being.

Without the latter, the former isn’t worth shit.

If anyone can share what happened, please comment. Or send me a message through the contact form on the About page.

[Added:] @tmi3rd tweets that Jimmah:

Questioned Ace’s manhood over the Kimberlin thing, then doubled down on doubling down. ‪#acedark

@Polliwogette adds:

Ace had been warning people from the previous thread and I guess a couple just couldn’t stop.

[Added II:] Follow:

[Added III:] Jeff has the skinny posted in The Empire:

So, yesterday was the Great American Blog-Out in support of all the victims of Brett Kimberlin’s legal harassment of his critics, and the extra-legal (and illegal) harassment and threats made by his followers.  Specifically, SWATting.

So, Ace put up his post here.  Well written, impassioned and sad, because in the comments, Ace revealed that he would not be accepting the Breitbart award, due to concerns over his physical safety.  He was unnecessarily hard on himself, as usual, and as usual, most of us tried to buck him up with humor.

And then some commenters lost their fucking minds and started writing these types of comments:

“Pussy.  I’d have gone because I ain’t a-skeered of no man.”

And it went downhill fast from there. Read the whole thing.

[Added IV:] In the meanwhile, there’s a mirror site allowing comments, here.

[Added V:] It seems, for the moment, that Ace is allowing comments on threads… apparently pending a registration system.

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Have a Great Weekend

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Darth Chipmunk

Go outside. Get some fresh air and sunshine. That is an order.

See you Monday!

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Blogger Day of Silence

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Darth Chipmunk

Please contact your member of Congress to get them to investigate the SWATtings and other harassment of bloggers.

Who will protect the freedom to blog?
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

Free speech is under fire. Online thugs are targeting bloggers (mostly conservative, but not all) who have dared to expose a convicted bomber and perjuring vexatious litigant now enjoying a comfy life as a liberally-subsidized social justice operative. Where do your elected representatives stand on this threat to our founding principles?

On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) bravely stepped forward to press this vital issue. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Sen. Chambliss decried the “harassing and frightening actions” of Internet menaces who have recently gone after several conservative new media citizen journalists and activists. (VIDEO here.)

GOP Rep. Ken Marchant of Texas also added his voice, telling Holder in a statement that he is “very afraid of the potential chilling effects that these reported actions may have in silencing individuals who would otherwise be inclined to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech.” And the American Center for Law and Justice, a leading conservative free speech public interest law firm, announced it was providing legal representation to the National Bloggers Club – a new media association that has provided support and raised funds for targets of this coordinated harassment. (Full disclosure: I volunteer on the National Bloggers’ Club board of directors.)

The ACLJ described the importance of the case very simply: “Free speech is under attack.”

Sen. Chambliss and Rep. Marchant called specific attention to one terrifying tactic against these bloggers: SWAT-ting. These hoaxes occur “when a perpetrator contacts local police to report a violent incident at a target’s home.” Callers disguise their true identities and locations in order to provoke a potentially deadly SWAT/police response descending upon the targets’ homes.

As online conservatives and now ABC News have reported, recent SWAT-ting victims include New Jersey-based Mike Stack, a blogger and Twitter user targeted last summer after helping to expose disgraced former N.Y. Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner’s shady social media activities; California blogger Patrick Frey, a deputy district attorney at Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office who recently posted a bone-chilling account and audio of his summer 2011 SWATting at his blog, Patterico.com; and CNN Contributor and RedState.com managing editor Erick Erickson, whose Georgia home was targeted by a faker claiming an “accidental shooting” there late last month.

A common thread among these and other online targets: They have published web links, commentary, or investigative pieces related to Brett Kimberlin, the infamous “Speedway Bomber.” In 1978, Kimberlin was sentenced to more than 50 years in federal prison for drug dealing, impersonating a federal officer, and a week-long bombing spree in Speedway, Indiana. The violent crimes left one victim so severely injured he committed suicide. A civil court awarded the widow of the victim, Carl Long, $1.6 million. Kimberlin was released from jail in 2001, but has yet to pay up.

Investigative journalist/researcher Mandy Nagy, who blogs at the late Andrew Breitbart’s Internet media powerhouse Breitbart.com, dared to chronicle Kimberlin’s lucrative business and political ventures over the past two years. Kimberlin has a large hand in two well-funded outfits, Velvet Revolution and the Justice Through Music Project, that have received funding from the likes of George Soros’s Tides Foundation and left-wing activist/singer Barbra Streisand. The charitable groups have viciously attacked prominent conservative individuals and groups, including Breitbart, investigative journalist James O’Keefe, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Nagy has been hounded relentlessly online and falsely accused of wild criminal conspiracies by Kimberlin associates for blowing the whistle on his shady online network.

After providing brief pro bono legal services to a liberal blogger who refused to whitewash Kimberlin’s past, conservative blogger and lawyer Aaron Walker lost his job. His employer was terrified by the thought of Kimberlin bombing his office and also fired Walker’s wife, who had worked for the same firm. Walker is embroiled in Kafkaesque, free speech-squelching litigation with serial lawsuit filer Kimberlin in Maryland. Last week, an inept judge who admitted abject ignorance about the Internet – and appalling apathy toward key, free-speech Supreme Court cases — essentially gagged Walker from exercising his First Amendment rights and blogging about Kimberlin. (AUDIO at Lee Strahanan’s. Transcripts at Patterico’s.) Kimberlin pulled off a snow job in court, bizarrely claiming that an independent online effort to support Walker and expose Kimberlin’s past amounted to a criminal terror campaign against him. Renowned constitutional law professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA is providing pro bono help to appeal the order against Walker.

National Bloggers Club President Ali Akbar was targeted for spearheading charity efforts for Kimberlin targets; stalkers publicized his mother’s home, and Texas authorities are now investigating. Another conservative blogger who had the audacity to report on Walker’s plight, Robert Stacy McCain, was forced to move out of his home last month after Kimberlin phoned his wife’s employer and intimidated his family.

Never in the eight years that I have worked as an independent blogger have I seen such a concerted threat to the fundamental right of citizen journalists to speak their minds freely and without fear of bodily harm. As former Justice Department official Christian Adams points out, it is a federal violation of 18 U.S.C. §241 to conspire to deprive someone of his “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

Members of Congress swore an oath to uphold the Constitution — all of it. Who means it?

***

Who to call:

GOP House Speaker John Boehner
Online contact form
Phone: (202) 225-0600
Fax: (202) 225-5117
Twitter

GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor
Web form
Phone: (202) 225-2815
Fax: (202) 225-0011
Twitter

Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
Web form
Phone: (202) 225-4965
Twitter

GOP Rep. Frank Wolf (Va.) – Ask him to investigate Kimberlin-related charities.
Phone: (202) 225-5136
Fax: (202) 225-0437
Twitter

GOP Rep. Darrell Issa
Web form
Phone: 202-225-3906
Fax: 202-225-3303
Twitter

US Department of Justice
Office of the Attorney General Public Comment Line – 202-353-1555
Email AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Twitter

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Media Exposed as Complicit in Protecting Obama

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Darth Chipmunk

Sometimes, “I told you so” just doesn’t cut it. At National Review, Stanley Kurtz posted documentation to Obama’s socialist ties and the media’s refusal to cover the story:

Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.

Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows:

Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.

Kurtz points out that this isn’t new information:

In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot smear.” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press.

MSM fumbled on purpose while Ben Smith was waiting and ready to run interference:

When the New Party controversy broke out, just about the only mainstream journalist to cover it was Politico’s Ben Smith, whose evident purpose was to dismiss it out of hand. He contacted Obama’s official spokesman Ben LaBolt, who claimed that his candidate “was never a member” of the New Party. And New Party co-founder and leader Joel Rogers told Smith, “We didn’t really have members.” But a line in the New Party’s official newsletter explicitly identified Obama as a party member. Rogers dismissed that as mere reference to “the fact that the party had endorsed him.”

Yea. And with that the whole thing fell off the radar.

Anyway, this news is currently all over the blogosphere. But Rusty at Jawa Report has the takeaway:

So, best case scenario: Obama lied to the New Party members in order to get their vote, and then lied to the American people about the lies he told the New Party.

That’s the sympathetic reading: Obama is the most crass, dirty, lying, kniving politician we’ve had in the White House since Richard Nixon. A Chicago politician’s politician. A guy with more in common with Rod Blagojevich than with Dennis Kucinish, and someone who could make Bill Clinton blush for shame.

Again, that’s best case scenario.

Then comes GOLD:

If Kurtz’s facts are right, though, the sympathetic reading is probably not the correct one. Obama’s ties to the radical left are much deeper than he would have you believe, he has actively lied about them, and he has tried to suppress any and all discussion of these ties by attacking those that report them — equivocating such reports with other more bizarre claims, such as birtherism.

I’m going to have to rethink my utter rejection of much of what Glenn Beck has been saying for the past four years. Suddenly the notion that Obama is intentionally subverting the economy as a means to remake America after the model of European socialism doesn’t seem so far fetched.

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Reuters Notices Conservatives Adopting Alinsky Tactics

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Darth Chipmunk

Nick Carey posts a Reuters article acknowledging the success of the right in successfully utilizing social media and community organizing tactics to win in Wisconsin:

The conservative activists have literally taken a page out of a left-wing radical’s guide to organizing – as many have read the late Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”

“There was no manual for organizing on the right, so we adapted it to the conservative cause,” said Brown, of We the People of the Republic, a Tea Party group based in Madison, Wisconsin. “The left has been good at it for 100 years, so what better place to start?”

The unions, with a reputation for excelling at grass-roots organizing, not only failed to oust Walker – but he beat his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by an even bigger margin than his 2010 gubernatorial victory.

And:

“Not only is the Tea Party alive and kicking, those guys ran a great get-out-the-vote campaign,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist and chairman of the CivicForum PAC political group. “They have given away the secret recipe for what could win the election for Mitt Romney.”

“This is a paradigm shift,” added Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative group chaired by former Republican House of Representatives Majority leader Dick Armey that provides training and resources to Tea Party activists. “If the grassroots embrace a cause, they make all the difference.”

It makes a difference, too, if the grassroots don’t want to be there in the first place. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to blog. And I bet a lot of the grassroots didn’t want to be out there knocking on doors. I’d venture to guess that many were even resentful that the recall forced them to be out there. Because that’s how I feel. The idiots in charge have forced me to become involved through their incompetence, their obtuse, destructive partisan governance, their divisive rhetoric and “wars” on whatever. And I’m not just angry about it. I’m absolutely seething. Wisconsin may have been satisfying. But it was a bucket of water on a nuclear meltdown.

#WAR

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The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Darth Chipmunk

NewsMax has an article posted by Alan Dershowitz outlining State Attorney Angela Corey’s response to his (expert) opinion about the level of disclosure reflected in her affidavit in the George Zimmerman case. Her response is to threaten a lawsuit for libel and slander against him and Harvard, his employer.

When the communications official explained to her that I have a right to express my opinion as “a matter of academic freedom,” and that Harvard has no control over what I say, she did not seem to understand.

She persisted in her nonstop whining, claiming that she is prohibited from responding to my attacks by the rules of professional responsibility — without mentioning that she has repeatedly held her own press conferences and made public statements throughout her career.

Her beef was that I criticized her for filing a misleading affidavit that willfully omitted all information about the injuries Zimmerman had sustained during the “struggle” it described. She denied that she had any obligation to include in the affidavit truthful material that was favorable to the defense.

She insisted that she is entitled to submit what, in effect, were half truths in an affidavit of probable cause, so long as she subsequently provides the defense with exculpatory evidence.

She should go back to law school, where she will learn that it is never appropriate to submit an affidavit that contains a half truth, because a half truth is regarded by the law as a lie, and anyone who submits an affidavit swears to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I’m not a lawyer or justice scholar or even court junkie. But even to a squirrel like me that seems pretty elementary.

The judge deciding whether there is probable cause to charge the defendant with second degree murder should not have been kept in the dark about physical evidence that is so critical to determining whether a homicide occurred, and if so, a homicide of what degree. By omitting this crucial evidence, Corey deliberately misled the court.

Corey seems to believe that our criminal justice system is like a poker game in which the prosecution is entitled to show its cards only after the judge has decided to charge the defendant with second degree murder.

To the point:

Even if Angela Corey’s actions were debatable, which I believe they were not, I certainly have the right, as a professor who has taught and practiced criminal law nearly 50 years, to express a contrary view. The idea that a prosecutor would threaten to sue someone who disagrees with her for libel and slander, to sue the university for which he works, and to try to get him disbarred, is the epitome of unprofessionalism.

More than that, a State Attorney is supposed to watch over us and protect us. That’s not melodrama, it’s a job that carries serious responsibility and power easily abused. Dershowitz is literally watching the watchers. It speaks volumes that Corey would turn and attack him when, if she is in the right, she should simply ignore him.

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