Patterico's Pontifications

4/29/2013

Tsarneavs Received Over $100K in Government Handouts

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:33 pm



Whee!

The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.

“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today.

Your tax dollars, hard at work.

Congressman Mike Rogers Is SWATted — And a Curious Coincidence Involving Neal Rauhauser

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 12:01 am



“Mike Rogers (former FBI) called for [Bradley] Manning’s execution and he’s from MI-08 . . . we want [Anthony Weiner’s replacement Mike] Grimm, Rogers out /w Anon boot print on their asses . . .”

— Neal Rauhauser

Congressman Mike Rogers was SWATted Saturday night:

Police surrounded the Michigan home of Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) Saturday night after a prank 911 phone call, Rogers’ office confirmed to TPM Sunday.

“Last night police investigated a threat to our home in Howell,” Rogers said in a statement emailed to TPM Sunday. “I appreciate the quick and professional response of the Howell Police Department and the Livingston County Sheriff. While this turned out to be an unfortunate prank, it is a reminder of the the real threats faced by our law enforcement community every day.”

The prank, according to a Rogers spokesperson, was a fake 911 call in which someone claimed to be the congressman.

Rogers is a co-sponsor of CISPA, a bill that has angered many people in Anonymous.

But there is another interesting fact about Rogers that is less well known: he was targeted by Neal Rauhauser. Rauhauser, speaking to Barrett Brown in an Internet Relay Chat as “Carlito2000,” said the following to Brown:

[14:11] Stranahan is a dopey former liberal porn guy scam artist who also worked on the movie
[14:12] jesus
[14:12] Keep in mind Grimm (former FBI) is going down in NY-11, Mike Rogers (former FBI) called for Manning’s execution and he’s from MI-08
[14:12] and Coleen Rowley in MN-02 is former FBI turned whistleblower
[14:12] so, what’s the specific evidence of Darby being involved in Swating, and we’re talking about PAtrick Frey SWAT correct?
[14:12] we want Grimm, Rogers out /w Anon boot print on their asses, and we push Rowley in 🙂

But do we know that “Carlito2000” is really Neal Rauhauser?

Yes, we do. We know it from his own mouth. He made the admission in a leaked recording of a phone conversation between Rauhauser and Kelly Hallissey. Click here and scroll ahead to 18:00, and this is what you will hear Rauhauser saying:

Rauhauser: The log that was published, the #3 of him talking to Pat Frey? There’s an IRC exchange with someone named Carlito2000?

Hallissey: Uh-huh.

Rauhauser: And he publishes actual logs but he changes the names. That was me, that was that night, that was on 2600.

So you have Rauhauser admitting that he talked to Barrett Brown, saying that he wanted two Congressman — Anthony Weiner’s replacement Mike Grimm, and Michigan congressman Mike Rogers — out of office “w/ Anon boot print on their asses.”

Anonymous, it need hardly be added, is generally thought to be behind most SWATtings in the country.

The chat above, where Rauhauser as “Carlito2000” tells Brown that Rogers called for Bradley Manning’s execution, is not the first time that Rauhauser has waved that particular red flag in front of Anonymous. Three weeks after I was SWATted, Rauhauser tried to incite Anonymous against me in a similar fashion on Daily Kos — in a post that mentioned me prominently:

Breitbart’s Big Government, where Patterico is a contributor, is nothing but the same sort of trouble we see with News Corp. Deception, intrusion, and intimidation when caught are the order of the day for them. They do this on behalf of the neo-fascist American right.

One of the politicians supported by this group is Mike Rogers, the Congressman from Michigan’s 8th District. This guy has an interesting past, quitting his job with the FBI just six months short of vesting. Curious, eh?

Rogers was John Boehner’s choice to head the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee. They’re supposed to be doing stuff like watching over the NSA so they don’t waste a billion dollars on a three million dollar problem and get all up in our civil liberties while also failing to stop the 9/11 attack. Instead, Rogers crows about this oversight (after the fact) committee’s work to find and kill bin Laden – more pure fabrication – finding him is President Obama’s success.

And it’s not just bin Laden that Rogers wants dead; he’s publicly called for the execution of Bradley Manning.

So while Anonymiss and I are busy figuring out how to get these guys matching sets of handcuffs, they go out and make fools of themselves trying to get the boys to attack us on behalf of a political faction that’s calling for the execution of a man that parts of Anonymous are determined to free?

Who here would like to offer a prediction as to how this set of maneuvers will turn out for Mr. Frey? And will the wrath flow back and hit @AndrewBreitbart, getting Big Government torn to shreds by an aroused hive just like The Sun was?

Then you have the rampant evidence of the hostility that Rauhauser and/or his friends have shown to five other SWATting victims besides Rep. Rogers. Here are the names of the SWATting victims and the dates of our SWATting incidents:

Just some of the examples of Rauhauser’s and his friends’ hatred for us:

Rauhauser called SWATting victims Mike Stack and me the “Weinergate perps” — before our SWATtings were publicly known.

Rauhauser sent a document to law enforcement with information on a number of his enemies, including me, Stack, and Aaron Walker — all SWATting victims. Here is a screenshot from one of Rauhauser’s crazy documents:

That’s three SWATting victims named in Rauhauser’s nutty screed.

Rauhauser is, according to convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin, an “associate” of Kimberlin’s. Critics of Kimberlin have been SWATted including me, Aaron Walker, and Erick Erickson. Erickson was SWATted two days after he started criticizing Kimberlin. Walker was SWATted the same day he won a major court battle with Kimberlin.

(If you doubt Rauhauser’s connection to Kimberlin, or the way that he groups critics of Kimberlin’s with the late Andrew Breitbart, doubt no more. Just last night, on an Internet radio show, he boasted: “Breitbart fucked with me, he fucked with Brett [Kimberlin], and now his ass is dead.” Listen to the audio clip here.)

I was SWATted hours after I put up a post suggesting that a possible frame-up of Lee Stranahan for threatening a woman in Boston sounded like the type of thing Neal Rauhauser might do.

Erik Rush was SWATted two hours after arguing with “Team Kimberlin” member Bill Schmalfeldt, who has had Rauhauser on his radio show.

None of this is an accusation. I am not saying Neal Rauhauser (or any other specific person) has done any SWATting. Maybe it’s a supporter of his. Maybe it’s an enemy of his trying to frame him.

But doesn’t this sound like something the investigators of Mike Rogers’s SWATting should know about?

P.S. Here is the by-now traditional roll call of the SWATted: Congressman Mike Rogers; Wolf Blitzer; Ted Lieu; Erik Rush; Ryan Seacrest; Russell Brand; Selena Gomez; Justin Timberlake; Rihanna; Sean Combs; Chris Brown; Tom Cruise; Paris Hilton; Clint Eastwood; Brian Krebs; the Jenners and Kardashians; Justin Bieber; Miley Cyrus; Ashton Kutcher; Simon Cowell; Aaron Walker; Erick Erickson; Mike Stack; and me.

MORE: Rauhauser called Rogers an “election rigging loser” in this post, and this post says Rauhauser’s “Progressive PST” social media organization aided Rogers’s opponent, Lance Enderle.

4/28/2013

“Breitbart fucked with me, he fucked with Brett [Kimberlin], and now his ass is dead.”

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 10:50 pm



Heard him say it, just now, on the Vince in the Bay show.

About 1:01:30 at this link. (That’s one hour, 41 minutes, and 30 seconds into the show. Working on a clip to upload.)

UPDATE: Here you go.

Wolf Blitzer Victim of Attempted SWATting

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:47 pm



WaPo:

Montgomery County police received an urgent message at about 6:25 p.m. Saturday saying someone had been shot at Wolf Blitzer’s home in Bethesda. Officers streamed toward the CNN host’s residence near Congressional Country Club. They set up a perimeter.

But a dispatch supervisor was immediately skeptical, and a call to CNN confirmed it: The message was a fraud. Blitzer was fine — was, in fact, out of town. The authorities were dealing with another case of “SWATing,” in which someone jolts police into action with a fake distress call and technological trickery.

There was another SWATting last night, of Michigan congressman Mike Rogers. That SWATting merits another post, for reasons that will become readily apparent. It may or may not be a coincidence that Blitzer spoke to Rogers two days before the SWATtings on Blitzer’s show. The SWATting of Rogers is very, very, very interesting . . . for reasons that will be apparent in my next post.

But for now, let’s do the traditional roll call of the SWATted: Wolf Blitzer; Ted Lieu; Erik Rush; Ryan Seacrest; Russell Brand; Selena Gomez; Justin Timberlake; Rihanna; Sean Combs; Chris Brown; Tom Cruise; Paris Hilton; Clint Eastwood; Brian Krebs; the Jenners and Kardashians; Justin Bieber; Miley Cyrus; Ashton Kutcher; Simon Cowell; Aaron Walker; Erick Erickson; Mike Stack; and me.

Video: Abortion Clinic Worker: If the Baby Is Born Alive, We Put It In a Solution to Kill It. If You Have It At Home? Flush It!

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:29 pm



It’s another undercover video from Live Action, the organization founded by Lila Rose. Kyle Smith at the New York Post gives you the lowlights:

The employee assigned to take note of medical history reassured the woman, “We never had that for ages” (a seeming admission that a baby did survive abortion at the clinic at least once) but that should “it” “survive this,” “They would still have to put it in like a jar, a container, with solution, and send it to the lab. . . . We don’t just throw it out in the garbage.”

Oh, and this innocuous-sounding “solution” was, of course, a toxic substance suitable for killing an infant.

“Like, what if it was twitching?” asked the pregnant woman.

“The solution will make it stop,” said the clinic employee. “That’s the whole purpose of the solution . . . It will automatically stop. It won’t be able to breathe anymore.”

That’s not all:

The employee also advised the pregnant woman to murder her child should the infant unexpectedly be born at home.

“I don’t want to like go into labor at home,” the pregnant woman said. “Like what if it like pops out, like, at home?”

“If it comes out then it comes out. Flush it!” said the employee.

Should the child be born on the floor? “We’ll tell you to put it in a bag or something and bring it to us,” the employee advised.

Watch the video, if you can stomach it:

Both people on the left and right look at a video like this and become concerned that a crime may have been committed. The difference is, people on the right are worried that babies are being murdered. People on the left, by and large, are worried that the taping occurred without permission.

No doubt the clinic will fire the lady for telling the truth and pretend like there is no issue.

4/27/2013

New Suspect Charged with Sending Ricin-Laced Letters

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:27 pm



The new guy they have arrested has a history of antagonism with the Elvis impersonator they previously arrested. The linked article details his arrest, but he has since been charged as well.

To me, the most interesting part of the story lies not in the details of the new suspect, but in the skimpy evidence that supported the charges against the first guy:

The letters spoke of “Missing Pieces” and were signed “I am KC and I approve this message,” both standard parts of e-mail messages sent to numerous public officials by Mr. Curtis, who had been on a one-man campaign for more than a decade to expose what he alleged was an illicit organ-harvesting scheme at a Tupelo hospital.

Mr. Curtis was arrested on April 17. While he was in custody, federal agents searched his home — tearing up the bed and the ceiling, according to Mr. Curtis’s stepfather — as well as the home of a former wife, but they found no evidence tying him to the letters.

Law enforcement officials said on Saturday that the letters were carefully written to mimic Mr. Curtis’s characteristic phrasing and concerns. While they regretted having arrested a man they now consider innocent, they wanted to move quickly to prevent more poisoned letters from being sent, one official said.

That’s all it took to arrest the guy? Letters written to mimic his phrasing and concerns?

Obama Manipulates the GDP Number to Manipulate You

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 12:01 am



The Obama administration is re-jiggering the numbers that describe our economy, so that the description of how we are doing will improve even when the reality remains unchanged. Shocker, huh?

The current change is to the method of calculating Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The Seeking Alpha blog explains:

In March 2013, the U.S. government invented a new way of calculating GDP. The Financial Times reported that starting from July 2013, U.S. GDP would become 3% bigger due to a change in statistics. [GDP] now includes R&D spending, art, music, film royalties, books, theatre. This change in GDP statistics has not been implemented elsewhere in the world. So the U.S. is the first to accomplish this rewriting of the GDP number.

Research and development (R&D) spending, which shouldn’t even be accounted for as investment, adds a significant amount to the U.S. GDP number. It accounts for around 2% of U.S. GDP. Art, music, film royalties, books and theatre add another 0.5% to U.S. GDP. Another adjustment has been made to pension accounting. Previously, pension spending was included in GDP. After this adjustment however, we also look at the “promise” to pay out pensions. So we are talking about imaginary numbers that are now included in GDP. A last example is found in real estate. Commissions, legal bills and expenditures on real estate transactions are included in GDP as “investment.” Obviously these expenditures aren’t associated with real production.

One of the consequences is that comparing the GDP number between other countries and the U.S. is not transparent anymore. It is like comparing apples and oranges. GDP should measure real production (like building a factory) and what the U.S. government added here is not real production. It is a measure of spending in the economy and there are items in the GDP number that don’t add real value to the economy (like writing books).

Bad enough. But the GDP number is already a joke in many ways. Let me describe one: the way that it favors government expenditures over private expenditures. As Peter Schiff recently pointed out on his podcast, when government hires someone, we count that as part of GDP, but when private industry hires someone, we don’t. The example given by Schiff is this: an engineer is fired from private industry, and takes a government job as a janitor at 1/2 his former wage. GDP now increases, because his private industry job did not count in GDP — but his government job does.

After hearing this, I sought out a link that would explain the concept. I found one here, at the Library of Economics and Liberty:

Today I’d like to draw attention to one of the peculiarities of GDP. For your consideration:

Scenario 1. Tomorrow, ExxonMobil spontaneously hires an unemployed petroleum engineer for $100K per year. She spends a year looking for new oil, finds nothing.

Scenario 2. Tomorrow, the federal government spontaneously hires an unemployed petroleum engineer for the same $100K. She spends a year looking for new oil, finds nothing.

So, how do these two alternative scenarios impact the official GDP figures?

Scenario 1 has zero impact on GDP: No oil to sell=no extra consumer purchases=no extra GDP. As the Bureau of Economic Analysis says, “Personal consumption expenditures…is goods and services purchased by persons…”

Scenario 2 raises GDP by $100K. As BEA says, “Government consumption expenditures…consists of…compensation of employees…”

That particular example is becoming moot, with the inclusion of R&D in GDP, but the distinction between most government and private jobs remains.

Hiring a worker who (through no fault of her own) accomplishes absolutely nothing raises GDP if the government does the hiring. Hiring a worker who (through no fault of her own) accomplishes absolutely nothing does nothing to GDP if the private sector does the hiring.

Why? Because GDP counts government salaries as “government expenditures” as soon as the government hires a person. But the “consumption” and “investment” parts of GDP only count genuine purchases by the private sector (leaving the oddities of imputed spending for the coda below).

(That particular example is becoming moot, with the inclusion of R&D in GDP, but the distinction between most government and private jobs remains.)

We’ve discussed on this blog how economic data and indicators are often flawed. The Dow Industrial Average is a joke. Unemployment numbers don’t begin to give an accurate picture of the true state of unemployment in the nation, and ignore the explosion of disability claims. And now, I learn, GDP is distorted to favor government spending, and is manipulated by politicians to make imaginary improvements in the economy appear real.

Thank God we have Big Media in our corner, at least, explaining these deficiencies to the general public at every turn, so that voters are not misled.

I’m OK! I’m OK! I’m not passing out, don’t worry, I’m fine. That was just a more pronounced eye roll than usual, that’s all.

4/26/2013

Interview with Tsarnaev Carjacking Victim

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 9:32 pm



On a normal day, this would count as the most interesting thing I had read all day. But the NYT Pigford story came out today, so we’ll call this the second most interesting thing I read all day:

After a zigzagging trek through Brighton, Watertown, and back to Cambridge, Danny would seize his chance for escape at the Shell Station on Memorial Drive, his break turning on two words — “cash only” — that had rarely seemed so welcome.

When the younger brother, Dzhokhar, was forced to go inside the Shell Food Mart to pay, older brother Tamerlan put his gun in the door pocket to fiddle with a navigation device — letting his guard down briefly after a night on the run. Danny then did what he had been rehearsing in his head. In a flash, he unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door, stepped through, slammed it behind, and sprinted off at an angle that would be a hard shot for any marksman.

“F—!” he heard Tamerlan say, feeling the rush of a near-miss grab at his back, but the man did not follow. Danny reached the haven of a Mobil station across the street, seeking cover in the supply room, shouting for the clerk to call 911.

His quick-thinking escape, authorities say, allowed police to swiftly track down the Mercedes, abating a possible attack by the brothers on New York City and precipitating a wild shootout in Watertown that would seriously wound one officer, kill Tamerlan, and leave a severely injured Dzhokhar hiding in the neighborhood.

Read it all.

Awwwww: Sorority Scold Resigns

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:27 pm



I guess somebody decided that the “HORRIBLE, I repeat, HORRIBLE PR FOR THIS CHAPTER” was coming from her, rather than “people being fucking WEIRD at sports” and “people LITERALLY being so fucking AWKWARD and so fucking BORING.” What has the world of sororities come to?

A University of Maryland student, who sent a profanity-filled email to her sorority sisters that went viral, has resigned from her role in the Delta Gamma sorority, the organization announced on its website.

“Delta Gamma has accepted the resignation of one of its members whose email relating to a social event has been widely distributed and publicized through social media and traditional media channels,” the statement read.

I don’t know if she quit the whole sorority or just her role as whatever the heck she was when she was yelling at everybody.

Too bad. She was kinda funny.

I’m linking my Paul Anka/Sorority Scold hybrid again, because not enough people commented on it before, which makes me want to scream profanities at all of you in all caps. The girls get skirts!

Breitbart Was Right: New York Times Does Front-Page Story on Rampant Pigford Fraud

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:37 am



Alternate headline: New York Times reveals its racism.

Andrew Breitbart would tell anyone who would listen, at great length, about the Pigford fraud. Pigford was a class action lawsuit brought by black people who claimed to be farmers, and said the Agriculture Department had discriminated against them in making loan decisions. A court case had identified 91 potential claimants — but the Obama administration decided to engage in a more massive payout: $50,000 to virtually anybody who claimed that they had “attempted to farm” but could not because of discrimination.

Dangling $50,000 checks in front of people, while requiring almost no documentation (an affidavit from a pal backing you up was plenty good enough), predictably led to rampant fraudulent claims:

“It was the craziest thing I have ever seen,” one former high-ranking department official said. “We had applications for kids who were 4 or 5 years old. We had cases where every single member of the family applied.” The official added, “You couldn’t have designed it worse if you had tried.”

. . . .

In 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and North Carolina, the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.

In Maple Hill, a struggling town in southeastern North Carolina, the number of people paid was nearly four times the total number of farms. More than one in nine African-American adults there received checks. In Little Rock, Ark., a confidential list of payments shows, 10 members of one extended family collected a total of $500,000, and dozens of other successful claimants shared addresses, phone numbers or close family connections.

The scope of the problem runs into billions of dollars:

[A]n examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion.

Especially infuriating: when prosecutors were given a test case of fraud, in which the claimant admitted lying in his application, they declined to prosecute — and the reason both amuses and infuriates:

In Arkansas, prosecutors rejected a test case against a Pine Bluff police officer who had admitted lying on his claim form. Paula J. Casey, the United States attorney in Arkansas in 2000, said that singling out one individual raised questions of selective prosecution.

“The defendant could go to the jury and say: ‘Everybody else did this. Why am I standing here?’ ” she said.

There’s so much fraud, you see, that you can’t prosecute just one person. So you can’t prosecute anybody.

This is, of course, absurd logic. If it’s hard to prosecute people for reasons of proof, and you have someone who confessed, it’s not “selective prosecution” to charge that person. This reasoning, followed to its logical conclusion, would make it impossible to prosecute Internet fraud, which is certainly rampant and difficult to prosecute.

But, you see, there is a difference. The government does not aid and abet Internet fraud as a general rule. Prosecuting an Internet fraud case would not be embarrassing for the Obama administration.

Not so for a Pigford fraud case.

The article is stunning — and an incredible vindication of Andrew Breitbart:

Andrew’s site actually gets a nod in today’s article:

Public criticism came primarily from conservative news outlets like Breitbart.com and from Congressional conservatives like Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, who described the program as rife with fraud. Few Republicans or Democrats supported him. Asked why, Mr. King said, “Never underestimate the fear of being called a racist.”

The Pigford fraud is not news to you folks. It was featured prominently here in several posts, many by Lee Stranahan, who worked closely with Andrew on the story. You can read the posts by searching the site for Pigford (just hit this link), but in all the coverage, one video stands out in my memory. It was published in this post. When I went to grab the embed code, it had a pitiful 891 views.

The video has to be seen to be believed. It shows someone coaching an audience on how to fill out the paperwork to get their $50,000 check. Watch the video to make your own judgment about the general attitude towards the truth in that room — both on his part, and on the part of the laughing audience. He tells people that there are four questions on the form, and that they must all be answered yes to get a check. He analogizes it to the four bases you must touch to score a run in baseball — and if all the bases aren’t touched, you go back to the dugout, meaning you don’t get a $50,000 check. He carefully explains that if they SAY they tried to farm, they DID attempt to farm, as far as the government is concerned. To call this a “wink and a nod” is being kind.

Excellent article by the New York Times. Congratulations to them, to Andrew Breitbart, and to Lee Stranahan for getting out the truth on this story.

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