[Guest post by Lee Stranahan]

Another late night Betty chaos show. Live at 12:30am Central, 10:30pm Pacific, 1:30am Eastern. Mountain, you figure it out.

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– Lee Stranahan

Here is StarChild111’s Twitter image. (She is Betty/Nikki Reid.)

Here is where it came from.

Here is Marianela’s Twitter image.

Here is the source image.

H/t Joe Brooks on Twitter. Follow him at twitter.com/joebrooks.

Conclusion: Marianela was using a fake picture even when she messaged Mike Stack.

Another clue.

UPDATE: “JohnReid9,” long suspected to be an alias for Nikki, has told Gennette Cordova that he/she/they are getting ready to release Gennette’s emails. And Gennette is back public again. It’s drama on an unprecedented scale and it’s happening right now.

UPDATE x2: On Twitter, Dan Riehl thinks he found the original Nikki picture.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: Via Daniel Riehl, I have an update.  See below.

Surely you have noticed before that this site has gotten a lot of spam.  It seems to have kicked up recently (and I do appreciate it when you guys help me find it).  I try to keep on top of it, mainly by blacklisting the website they are promoting.  And I certainly don’t like to highlight spam.

But I am going to make an exception with this one.  Mind you, this comes from a post jokingly giving us Obama’s new Motto and it has the usual boilerplate language that sounds like it was written in Japanese originally:

Hardly ever do I encounter a weblog that’s both educated and entertaining, and let me tell you, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Your idea is excellent; the issue is something that not enough individuals are talking intelligently about. I’m very comfortable that I stumbled across this in my quest for something regarding this.

And then it follows with a fake name and a link to a commercial site (I did delete the link).  But here’s the kicker.  Look at the signature:

amish lancaster county

That’s right.  Apparently, the Amish are giving us spam, now.

And sadly Amish Tech Support appears to have gone dark.  So what do we do?

Update: I am a little surprised to have an update on this, but…  not only are the Amish spamming, but they are sexting, too.  Only it’s about to get less funny:

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[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Gee, it’s almost like as if they should have found out what was in it before they passed it:

President Barack Obama’s health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.

The change would affect early retirees: A married couple could have an annual income of about $64,000 and still get Medicaid, said officials who make long-range cost estimates for the Health and Human Services department.

Up to 3 million more people could qualify for Medicaid in 2014 as a result of the anomaly. That’s because, in a major change from today, most of their Social Security benefits would no longer be counted as income for determining eligibility. It might be compared to allowing middle-class people to qualify for food stamps.

Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster says the situation keeps him up at night.

Read the whole thing, and then pray the Supreme Court saves us from this monstrosity, especially because some Democrats think this is a good thing–hence why the term “screw up” is in quotes.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Buckle up this will probably be a longish post, but that was the unifying thread to several stories I ran across.

I have said recently that it is wrong to act as though the worst thing a person can be is a hypocrite.  Often the hypocritical element is the element that redeems otherwise appalling conduct.  For instance, Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy in writing a Declaration of Independence that was incompatible with slavery while owning slaves mitigated the evil of owning slaves.  I fully believe Jefferson endangered his mortal soul with the sin of slavery and hypocritically penning the Declaration of Independence didn’t make thing worse for him, it made it better.

But nonetheless, hypocrisy is evidentiary useful which is precisely why people get lazy and focus purely on the hypocrisy element.  But there are times where hypocrisy, or contradiction generally, is useful.

Take for instance, this appalling story I saw yesterday:

Or for those who can’t view video, here’s the story:

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I sense impatience among some of you regarding this Betty and Veronica story. Let me explain why it matters. Someone is out there faking identities and convincing journalists they are real. Someone faked IDs that fooled someone with White House press credentials. There is potential criminal activity here. If Anthony Weiner is behind it, there could be a prosecutable offense. It’s not just resignation, disgrace, and a future re-election bid or CNN show. It’s jail.

Interested yet? Good. There’s also the little matter of the truth. If he didn’t do any of the above, we should know that too. That would be less exciting but still the truth.

And it is still interesting whether Weiner was behind this or not. We get to explore who was behind the deception. It’s a fascinating mystery. If you like spy stories you should love this.

But there has been some crazy theorizing going on. The problem is, people are getting confused about the facts. So let’s get back to basics. What do we know and what do we not know?

Let’s start by clearing away the underbrush. Two journalists — Tommy Christopher and Jen Preston — have muddied the waters by making overly confident pronouncements about the situation. Yesterday I called on both to back up their statements, and both backed away from them.

First, Tommy. we have to back up statements they had made about the Betty and Veronica affair. Tommy recently wrote:

The main thrust of the story was that Rep. Weiner had not made inappropriate contact with “Betty,” and [a point about Andrew Breitbart]. Both of these things are still true.

Last night on the Stage Right show I got to confront Tommy about this oh-so-certain pronouncement. He basically backed away from what he had said and admitted that the best he can say is that there is no evidence of inappropriate contact — quite a different thing from pronouncing it didn’t happen. If you didn’t hear the interview, it is worth your time. Tommy made several amusing pronouncements, claiming that Betty/Nikki and Veronica/Marianela “fooled me into telling a true story” and that “They basically told me nothing.” Quite a change from “The Under-Aged Participants That Add Clarity And Exoneration.”

Now let’s take Jennifer Preston of the New York Times, who said of the Betty/Nikki Reid and Veronica/Marianela Alicea sock puppets:

Now there is evidence that one or more people created two false identities on Twitter in order to collect information to use against him.

“Him” refers to Weiner. Yesterday on Twitter I asked Jen Preston the question I asked her so many times before: how does she know this?

I first asked Mickey Kaus: “WHY are we assuming that people who covered for Weiner are his enemies? @nyt_jenpreston may say so but it makes no sense to me.” She responded: “Leading question, mr. prosecutor. Dismissed.” (You can hear the gavel coming down, can’t you? She does fancy herself the judge, doesn’t she?) I repeated the question later in the day, and she ignored the question several times while responding to others. The closest she came to an answer was this: “Read piece carefully,.again. They told MS [Mike Stack from the PatriotUSA76 crew] they had evidence. Then in elaborate ruse…why? No idea.” Ah, so she doesn’t really know why they were doing this? SarahW clarified the point, and I don’t want you to miss this exchange, so I will blockquote it:

What if they were “collecting evidence” about what Weiner’s contacts would say – but info for Weiner’s benefit?

Preston responded:

anything is possible. the key here is to be open to all sorts of possibilities…who knows.

Indeed. I actually agree with that. The problem is this Strange New Agnosticism regarding the motives of the sock puppets conflicts with Preston’s own statement in her news article that the sock puppet accounts were created “in order to collect information to use against him.”

See that word “against”? I helpfully bolded it so you would see it. That was Jen Preston’s confident declaration: that the Betty/Nikki and Veronica/Marianela were Weiner’s enemies. She didn’t know that to true, but she said it anyway. It even ended up being the headline of her piece: “Fake Identities Were Used on Twitter in Effort to Get Information on Weiner.” For all we know, they were used to get information for Weiner.

Of course, I confronted her on this, contrasting her new open-mindedness with the language from her article, and she responded testily: “MS said they offered him evidence they had collected against Weiner. Am done debating w/ a prosecutor. Bring it to a jury.” Heh. But the bottom line is that she is now claiming she knows nothing. As she said to Ace: “Am still looking into all this. I think the key to figuring it out is to remain open to the idea that it could be anyone.”

So forget Tommy Christopher’s pronouncements. He doesn’t know anything. (“They basically told me nothing.”) Forget Jen Preston’s pronouncements. She has no idea either. (“it could be anyone.”)

If you’re feeling especially quixotic, you can ask them to retract or clarify their previous Very Certain Pronouncements that they have now declared inoperative. But I warn you: you won’t get anywhere. They are both invested in the Obama-style “As I have always said . . .” routine of pretending like they aren’t saying anything different today, even though their previous declarations have been shown utterly lacking in foundation.

Well, that took a while. Now that we have spent all this time dispelling some inaccurate pronuncamientos rendered by our journalistic betters, I have no time or energy left to discuss the rest of it. Rather than issue some crazy theory, let me throw this out there for you:

1. Some of the screenshots I linked yesterday — the public messages from Nikki Reid to the Dan Wolfe crew — I believe to be real. I’ll have more to say about this if I get time.

2. At least one of the screenshots looks like a bad Photoshop. Check out the GennetteNicole DM and the way the date stamp jumps upward to the time stamp:

I can’t see how that’s a real screenshot of anything. It looks to my amateur eye like a very bad Photoshop.

3. If Nikki was really pro-Weiner (now we’re entering the realm of speculation), as her statements to Tommy Christopher indicate, then she was possibly trying to peddle some B.S. material to Mike Stack through Marianela. And she was possibly considering making fun of him after he publicized them. The screenshots I published yesterday sound a lot like what Marianela told Stack that Nikki had. So perhaps Nikki is the ultimate source of the stuff we saw yesterday. The person who posted the screenshots is likely either Nikki or someone to whom she gave the stuff.

OK, I said I wouldn’t do any theorizing and now look at me. Let’s get back to facts. Tommy Christopher talked to somebody. He has a phone number. He has the IDs. There are clues. He obviously isn’t my friend any more. Can someone try to light a fire under him and get him to reveal this stuff? A crime may have been committed with the fake IDs.

That’s all I have time for now. Now come on: isn’t this interesting?

Once there was this criminal who didn’t want people to know his real name. So he gave police a fake name.

So then of course he was declared a “fake person.” And prosecutors couldn’t file charges.

Because how can you file charges against a fake person?

See what I mean?

P.S. If this makes no sense to you, you haven’t been following the ins and outs of Weinergate to the nth degree. Which, hey. That might be a good thing.