In right-wingerland, it's Let's-Make-Brett-Kimberlin-Famous day, part 2. (A couple of posts down, we discussed the first Kimberlin Day.) Although this business may strike you as silly or overblown, comedies may become tragedies. And the most tragic outcome of all would be to give a Romney administration an excuse to spy on the left.

So attention, attention must be paid.

Basically, a lot of Breitbart-linked right-wing bloggers are claiming that they have been attacked by a conspiracy of left-wing terrorists. Supposedly, these Obama-loving bounders use Caller ID spoofing (a real thing) to bring the cops charging to the homes of innocent right-wing bloggers.

The Breitbarters are also claiming -- without offering any proof, so far -- that this conspiracy is led by one Brett Kimberlin.

As we noted in earlier posts, this Kimberlin fellow has become a right-wing bete noire. In the rightist imagination, this former con (and con artist) is a Leader of the Left -- even though actual left-wingers never heard of him. I'm not sure why the right has focused on this guy, although there does appear to be some sort of personal contretemps between Kimberlin and a right-wing lawyer. I haven't really followed the details of that.

Let's look at the timing. Then let's ask ourselves that famous question: Cui bono? Who benefits?

A few days ago, right-wing blogger Patterico -- a.k.a. Los Angeles prosecutor John Frey -- revealed that he had been victimized by a similar caller ID spoofing gambit at some point last year. Frey's column sent dozens and dozens of rightist bloggers into high dudgeon. En masse, and without evidence, they all insisted that this was the dastardly doing of Evil Kimberlin, funded by Evil Soros and Evil Streisand.

We're all familiar with the way right-wing writers all suddenly start saying the exact same thing at the exact same time, like robots. And that's how May 25 became Let's Make Kimberlin Famous Day.

Frey further said that the caller ID spoofing gambit is a common left-wing tactic called "SWATting." Where does that term come from? From the late Andrew Breitbart, supposedly. We're supposed to believe that Breitbart knew the terminology, sources and methods of the great left-wing terror conspiracy.

Then, just as the brouhaha over Kimberlin Day 1 died down, the cops showed up at the home of a Red State writer euphoniously named Erick Erickson. This attack followed just a little too closely after the great Day of manufactured frenzy. Which leads us to that famous question:

Cui bono? Cui freakin' bono, dudes?

How could anyone on the left possibly benefit from such nonsense?

The benefit to the right, by contrast, should be clear even to a child.

Now, maybe Evil Kimberlin (who is hardly my idea of gentleman) really did do it. Maybe he's Just That Crazy. Maybe he decided that he had nothing better to do than to give the right a propaganda triumph.

Or maybe -- just maybe -- the rightists decided to give themselves a propaganda triumph. Gee. Ya think?

Let's put it this way: Suppose a lefty blogger were "SWATted." What theory of the event would become immediately popular in BreitbartWorld?

Caller ID can be spoofed by pretty much anyone. That part's easy. Framing someone else takes more skill. I have reason to suspect that something of the sort is in the offing (see below), so right now I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Spooked up. Many of you may not understand what we are dealing with. The Breitbart group is not just a propaganda network: They're spooks -- private spooks. They're in the business of covert ops.

Does that statement sound paranoid? Allow me to offer you some hard, irrefutable proof in the form of a document which comes from the team of Breitbart's dirty trickster James O'Keefe. (Also see here.)

As you may recall, O'Keefe has pulled a lot of shady stunts, including a Watergate-ish attempt to eavesdrop electronically on a senator. Andrew Breitbart claimed that O'Keefe was not an employee, even though he (Breitbart) paid him (O'Keefe) regularly. Hidden financing and plausible deniability are standard tactics for covert operatives.

You will have a very thorough understanding of the caller ID spoofing brouhaha once you've read how O'Keefe planned to fake out CNN. Here is his plan to "spoof CNN and get them to report on a topic that is entirely false."

Spoofing CNN

We should entice them with some video that they want to believe. The media has been in a frenzy for the past few years on a relatively small number of topics and subjects.

1. Tea party racism
2. Arizona racism
3. Sarah Palin
4. GOP leadership scandals

If we were to offer CNN evidence of racism, playing on these currently relevant issues, and produced enough supporting evidence to prove the claim we make, have them write a story and then prepare our allies to pounce, it could be a good way to undercut their credibility.

Things we could do to entice them:

1. False video evidence
2. False textual evidence and documents
3. False interviews

The false video evidence, for one, could be focused on the incident with Congressman John Lewis where he said he was called a "nigger" by tea party protestors, even though the video evidence disproved his claim.

Spoofing video evidence proving Lewis' claim, along with a good story that the tea party had suppressed such evidence, might be enough for CNN to report on the story.

The document goes on to describe exactly how the video evidence could be ginned up.

The danger is, of course, that the lie becomes the official truth, and so it would be necessary to immediately deconstruct this story on friendly networks and media outlets. The goal isn't to draw out the scandal after all, rather just to embarrass CNN by having them report a false story. So immediately reporting on the falseness of the story would be key...

Uproariously, O'Keefe calls his operation Project Veritas.

Obviously, what he is up to is not "investigative journalism." This is spook stuff, pure and simple. And I really must congratulate him: This document is a fairly professional job -- not up to CIA standards, but still rather better than his clumsy maunderings in the senator's office.

Again, read the whole document. Then look back at the Erickson/Frey claims of caller ID spoofing. Then ask yourself: Cui bono?

Get real: There is no left-wing terror organization, and any attempt to create that impression is straight out of the Frank Kitson playbook. There are no private left-wing intelligence operatives of any kind in the United States. If liberals had their own version of Project Veritas, I would have heard of it by now. You would have heard of it too. O'Keefe freely plays his games without any fear of being countered by an opposite force.

Some attention -- not enough -- has been paid to a related O'Keefe scheme in which he planned to "seduce" a CNN correspondent named Abbie Boudreau. But the conspiracy outlined above is more germane to our present discussion.

A long time ago, a reader wrote to me and said that Breitbart used the word "BIG" on all of his sites because the word is actually an acronym: Breitbart Intelligence Group. I didn't (and still don't) take that claim seriously. Nevertheless, I find the nomenclature amusing and will henceforth employ it. All in good fun.

Dragging me into this. The post you are reading right now is one that the Breitbart Intelligence Group probably wanted me to write. Earlier today, I got a comment which had a very familiar ring:

What a strange, hilarious spin you are putting on this Kimberlin thing! The people who have teamed up to defend the first amendment rights of a blogger by exercising their rights, *those* people are crazy. Uh-huh. If the shoe was on the other foot, you'd call them heroes. Hell, you're a blogger too, you should be joining them.

After being on the wrong side with Weinergate, you'd think you'd be a bit more careful. Now that there has been another "SWATing" incident, meaning another sheriff department can corroborate that it happened, are you still going to act confident that they're making it up? What if the police investigation concludes that it's real, what then?

After Weinergate, you should be more careful. They were right before.

This text reminds me of certain comments I got during the Weinergate affair -- specifically, of the time I was flooded with messages directing me to the work of the Mighty Seixon, a long-time GOP operative (posing as a "liberal," a la Lee Stranahan) who created an entire damned blog just to counter what I was saying. Roughly ten seconds after that blog was conjured into existence, I received comments informing me of Seixon's work. Throughout the scandal, I received other missives which, in essence, held out hoops that I was meant to jump through.

Basically, the comment reprinted above was meant to bait me into writing the very post you are reading now. In all likelihood, the BIG bloggers want to have some fun at my expense. It's not a major thing for them, just a sideline amusement.

C'est la vie. They can't harm me in any way. They simply refuse to understand that my motives are not their motives. I have no ambition, I write only to write, I don't ally myself with any cause or group, and I'm not playing the kind of games that they love to play. This blog will continue as always.

So why does this post exist? To give the Project Veritas memo wider publicity.

Something wicked this way comes. The comment contains one line which we may consider a slip-up: "...are you still going to act confident that they're making it up?" Until just now, I never expressed any confidence that the caller ID spoofing scandal was concocted. Indeed, in my previous post, I stipulated that the spoofed phone call was real.

Whenever the BIG righties pull a stunt like this, they always have one of those moments. You know -- like when Tony Perkins gets all jumpy as he starts talking to Janet Leigh about his mother.

I'm troubled by this bit of Noman Bates-y bean spillage: "What if the police investigation concludes that it's real, what then?"

Dude! You're talking too much. Learn to be more subtle.

It seems very likely that the Veritas gang wouldn't have initiated a stunt like this unless they have already concocted a plan to mislead the cops and make the charge against Kimberlin stick. How could they accomplish that trick? Right now, I can't guess. But the whole business is clearly engineered. (Remember, Breitbart had obtained all of the incriminating photos well before the Weiner scandal even broke; they knew the endgame before the opening moves.)

Maybe Project Veritas has confederates among the constabulary. That sort of thing has happened before: I used to live in L.A., and I well recall the Ramparts scandal. (There have long been rumors that the cops who showed up at the Watergate were somehow "in on it." I don't recall the details, and I don't know how credible those rumors were. Another post, perhaps.)

Keep in mind what Frey does for a living. He must have contacts. Just sayin'. Permalink

Earlier today, I confessed to my ladyfriend that I got screwed by a woman named Rosie Gray. Deeply ashamed, I promised that it would never happen again.

Rosie works for a hip new site called Buzzfeed which caters to a younger crowd. Politically, it has a rep -- unearned, methinks -- for skewing liberal-ish. Rosie works for Ben Smith, recently wooed away from Politico.

And who is Smith working for? This story posted by the St. Louis Activist Hub (a site previously unknown to me) uncovers a series of tweets that explain what Rosie was up to. The tweets prove that Ben Smith and Rosie Gray are working on behalf of a Breitbart-linked conservative blogger network.

To set the scene, let's note the obvious: The Republicans are starting to worry about their reputation for nuttiness. The birthers will never stop birthering. Two nominees for the GOP nomination have spoken in favor of seccession (at least theoretically). Rush Limbaugh screeched that Sandra Fluke was part of a conspiracy. Fox News has become the "All conspiracy all the time" network. Jon Huntsman has said that the party has become so extreme that even Ronald Reagan could no longer attain the nomination. Breitbart's sites brim with paranoia and vitriol. And then there's Glenn Beck, the King of Kooks.

The right knows that these wackos frighten middle-of-the-road Americans. But the GOP can't bridle the extremists; the beasts will accept neither tether nor cage.

Time for an attack based on that familiar "false equivalence" gambit. You know what I'm talking about: "Well, sure a few people have made a few extreme statements, but it happens on both sides. On the right, you have Glenn Beck. And on the left, you have..."

Well, who do we have?

It must have been pretty difficult for them to come up with any liberal-ish equivalent to Beck. This being the one-year anniversary of the Weiner scandal, they decided to target little old me.

Yeah. Me. A guy in an attic in Baltimore who runs a third tier (if that) blog. A guy who can't stand Obama (for reasons best explained in a recent Bill Maher riff). A guy who, if he does vote Dem this year, will do so with the faint taste of upchuck in the back of his throat. A guy who says all isms are prisons. A guy who disdains groups. A guy who defines himself politically with the phrase "I like Ike."

I want no allies and represent no constituency. My words -- whether wise or foolish -- are mine alone. That stance brings the only true freedom a writer can have.

You must be asking: "What proof is there that Cannon was targeted? And where's the proof that the right was manipulating Buzzfeed?"

The evidence comes in series of tweets to Ben Smith from a Breitbart-linked blogger called Ace of Spades. Ace's blog played a key role in the Anthony Weiner scandal. As the aforementioned St. Louis Activist notes...

However, what I want to focus on is not so much which side is wackier, but rather how BuzzFeed came to report this story.  As can be seen quite clearly, it directly followed a script provided to them by right-wing blogger Ace of Spades, who has a vested interest in the story, since he spent weeks bullying Gennette Cordova online and later claimed to have been threatened via anonymous email.  In other words, he's not just someone reporting on the story; he's someone in the story.

Ace started tweeting BuzzFeed about his great story idea several days ago:

The tweets speak for themselves. Please note the reference to "Drudge." Apparently, the possibility of getting a link from Magical Matt was enough to cajole Ben Smith into joining forces with the Breitbarters.







Now I'll reveal the part that the St Louis Activist could not have known.

Roughly 24 hours after that last tweet -- while Ben Smith was probably doing the bbq thing -- I got an inquiry from his employee, Rosie Gray.

I'm a reporter for BuzzFeed Politics. Not sure if you'll know anything about this, but someone tipped me off that there are people who still believe that Anthony Weiner was hacked. I know you were all over this story a year ago, but do you know anything about the continued existence of this belief?

I told her that, as far as I knew, the only person who held to that unfathomable belief was an odd fellow named Joseph Cannon. Of course, I stopped writing (or caring) about the matter ages ago. I went on to say...

Considering the sheer paranoid weirdness of the Glenn Beckified right these days, I'm not going to apologize, even if you do find my take on that matter eccentric.

I know something of the weirdos who remain obsessed with Weinergate and I don't want to get dragged into their madness.

I then went on to describe what I knew of the "twilight war" that arose out of Weinergate. As discussed in the previous post, there is a strange subculture (composed of both right- and left-wingers) who remain fixated on that event. Or rather: They are now fixated on battling each other, having left Weiner himself far, far behind. Although I've occasionally kept an eye on those twilight warriors (whose antics are well-described by the St. Louis Activist), my own interests have moved elsewhere.

So who was the "someone" who tipped off Rosie about me? Obviously, it was Ace of Spades.

Ah, they remember me on the right...!

I still think fondly of the army of sockpuppets they sicced on this blog during Weinergate. I especially liked the heartfelt messages that pretended to be from longtime fans, even though these "fans" had no clue as to what I had written in the past. Last year's scandal was a lot of work for no pay -- but it was great fun, nonetheless.

I still giggle when I think of the writer for the National Review Online who got on the highest of his high horses and excoriated me as a typical representative of those wild, wacky liberals. Folks, you simply haven't lived until you've been labeled an extremist by the son of Lucianne Goldberg.

(Jonah Goldberg thinks Mussolini invented liberalism. And Jonah is a regular talking head on teevee.)

Well, enough of the fond memories. Back to our story...

My answer to Rosie apparently did not supply her with sufficient red meat. Her job was to please Ace, and my words would not suffice.

So instead of attacking me (with one small exception), all of the right-wing blogs spent much of that day attacking a couple of strange, little-known individuals named Brett Kimberlin and Ron Brynaert. For some reason, these two fellows have become fixation points for the Weinergate obsessives. Kimberlin, a smooth-talking scoundrel, has no discernible link to the Weiner affair. Brynaert is (allegedly) writing a book about the scandal; alas, he seems to be under a lot of psychological stress and his actions have become quite bizarre.

The Breitbart brigade tried to present Kimberlin and Brynaert as liberal icons and the leaders of a left wing terror squad. So I wrote a post (which you can scroll down to read, if so inclined) which pointed out one simple fact: Most liberals never heard of those two. They're not leaders. They're unimportant. The former Weiner obsessives were now obsessing over a couple of "lefties" that nobody on the left cares about. (Sort of like the Saul Alinski propaganda meme.)

That, in brief, is what I wrote. Guess what happened next?

Rosie published a story called "Meet the Weiner Truthers."

("Weiner Trutherism" is Ace of Spade's neologism. Rosie picked it up like a good little typist.)

This story allegedly details how those wacky, wacky liberals remain determined to prove Weiner's innocence. Rosie quotes at length from my own post -- the one about Kimberlin and Brynaert.

Here's the problem. My story didn't talk about "the Weiner truthers." I never once focused on Anthony Weiner per se. In that post, I never addressed the question of whether he was hacked.

Instead, I talked about Kimberlin and Brynaert, a couple of Charlie Nobodies whom the Breitbarters have transformed into scarecrows to frighten the gullible.

Most of Rosie’s piece consists of yanked-out-of-context quotes from yours truly. She makes it seem as though I'm talking about an issue I never intended to address! The quotes are cleverly arranged to convey the impression that I'm either exposing or speaking on behalf of a group of liberal conspiracy buffs.

At first, I thought that Rosie had simply misunderstood. So I (twice) tried to post a comment to the Buzzfeed site offering a polite correction. They refused to publish my words.

That’s when I found out about the tweets which prove that Rosie was working for Ace of Spades -- that is to say, for the Breitbart network. Her initial letter to me was a set-up.

Now, I'm not here to talk about Weinergate per se. Maybe I will do so at another time -- when the "twilight warriors" have calmed down. (Similarly, I won't talk about 9/11 until the "controlled demolition" freaks have learned how to behave.) If you never liked what I had to say on that subject, fine.

As Don LaFontaine might have put it:

In a world where Fox Nation can accuse OSHA of being party to a communist plot (because the agency advised outdoor laborers to drink plenty of water!) ...

In a country where Glenn Beck earns $80 million a year selling ancient and long-exposed fascist lies about Woodrow Wilson (of all people)...

In a society where millions believe the president to be an atheist Muslim socialist (a contradiction in terms)...

In a blogosphere where conservatives continually declare that global warming is a socialist plot, that the Illuminati is real and that the apocalypse is nigh...

ONE BLOGGER who is not a conservative stands up for his right to say a few things that others might consider unpopular, eccentric and even outlandish! But he does so only occasionally. And in a polite tone of voice. Unless you piss him off.

The important aspect of this post has nothing to do with me, and nothing to do with Weinergate. All of that is a distraction.

Focus on the tweets.

What do they tell you about Buzzfeed? What do they tell you about Ben Smith?  Who is in charge of whom?

Think about it: Fox News and Rush Limbaugh speak only to the like-minded. To get a new propaganda meme out to a mixed audience, the rightwingers need to use an allegedly "liberal" site, preferably one that is popular with the kids. They need, in short, a front group.

Focus on those tweets. And don't trust anyone who works for Buzzfeed. Permalink

(Update II: It's pretty clear now that Buzzfeed fucked me over royally. Buzzfeed poses as a hip, vaguely left-friendly site that appeals to the young. But as my follow-up story proves, Buzzfeed is really part of the Breitbart propaganda machine.)

(Update: Some people are coming here from Rosie Gray's piece on Buzzfeed. Alas, Gray didn't quite understand my point. Twice now, I've tried to submit a (polite) correction, but Buzzfeed either won't or can't publish it. If anyone's interested, I can display it in this space tomorrow.)

I didn't want to write about the latest Big Meme sweeping across rightwingerland, but a few words are necessary. Maybe more than a few.

In a couple of previous posts, I made fairly oblique reference to a weird subculture of bloggers -- on both the right and the left, though most of them are hyper-conservatives -- which arose out of Weinergate. Their obsession with that scandal soon went way beyond Weiner, and perhaps even beyond conventional left-right politics. A very personal twilight war broke out.

Frankly, I never could understand what this war was all about. But a few facts became clear:

1. These twilight warriors are obsessed with hacking and related matters. Some of them claim to have worked with Anonymous and LulzSec and allied organizations.

2. They use obvious sockpuppets. If you visit their microblogs, the self-astroturfing is evident.

3. They are forever claiming that the FBI and/or the cops are going to arrest their opponents very soon. (On what charge? God knows.) Both the left-wingers and the right-wingers make this claim.

4. The rage level runs white hot. This war goes beyond politics. It's personal.

5. Most of the right-wingers inhabit BreitbartWorld, where everyone reveres the underhanded tactics of James O'Keefe.

6. The most prominent of the left-wingers is a bizarre IT specialist named Neal Rauhauser, whom I believe to be the latest online incarnation of a fellow named John Dean, a.k.a. SluggoJD and a few other things. (Assumed identities play a huge role in these realms. In an earlier post, I discussed the reasons why I think the two are one and the same.) Dean, who claims to be a cyber-detective, is a fairly well-known -- though rarely well-liked -- figure throughout blogistan left. He used to be an occasional presence on this blog, although I always kept him at arm's length. Whatever the name or nick, he is not a man I trust. Or they are not men I trust. Whatever.

7. The twilight warriors often lose the ability to write comprehensibly. For example: I tried very hard to get a straight story out of Rauhauser, but he kept presuming that I was familiar with people and events about which I knew nothing.

It was best, I decided, to let these unhappy personages fight among themselves. Still, their rage-games threatened, one day, to take a more serious turn.

One of the Breitbarters calls himself "Patterico." His real name is no secret: He's John Frey, a prosecutor for the L.A. D.A.'s office. Frey initiated a multi-blog day of fury when he published a post alleging that he was set up by a phone hacker. If I understand the story correctly, the hacker called the police from what seemed to be Frey's number and claimed to be a man who had just shot his wife.

Serious business, that. Frey, quoting the late Breitbart, insists that this is a common left-wing tactic called "SWATting." (If it's a left-wing tactic, then why don't any lefties mention it?)

Although proof is lacking, Frey seems to think that the hacker is someone named Brett Kimberlin.

If you just now said "Brett who?" -- you are probably a liberal. Kimberlin is a huge effing deal on the right. After Barack Obama, he's the man conservatives love to hate -- so much so, they even have an entire blog devoted to Brett. Pretty soon, they'll be selling Brett merchandise.

The Breitbarters claim that Kimberlin is funded by Evil Soros and the Even More Evil Barbra Streisand. They also claim that Brett Kimberlin started Raw Story. (I doubt that.) Word has it that Glenn Beck is going to be on the Kimberlin case.

If you look at Memeorandum right now, it's all Kimberlin, all the time. (Update: It is no longer Kimberlin Day on Memeorandum, a news aggregation site which updates feed continually.)

Basically, Kimberlin is the new Saul Alinski: In right-wing mythology, liberals consider him il capo di tutti capi. Kimberlin is the alpha dog, the leader of the pack, the bomb-tossing Messiah of the Progs.

Or so the Breitbarters would have people believe.

Meanwhile, actual liberals have little or no idea as to who the guy is.

I first got a whiff of the right's Brett-mania maybe four or five years ago, when I received a flurry of crankish emails accusing me of being involved in some sort of conspiracy with That Bastard Brett. (Why were these accusations directed at me? I had, and have, no idea.)

The name "Kimberlin" was puzzling, but it did ring a very distant bell. Then I recalled that, back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, a prisoner named Kimberlin made weird claims about Dan Quayle which became the basis for a series of Doonesbury comics. Something about selling pot. It was all very droll.

If you want a fuller story on Kimberlin, convicted for several bombings back in the '70s, you may want to go here. Author David Weigel seems to think that the conservative pile-up on Kimberlin is a manufactured mania, and I must agree that Kimberlin Hate Day does seem rather ginned-up and astroturfy.

Today, the right side of the blogosphere is trying out a fascinating crowd-source experiment. For months, a few conservative writers -- most of them using pen names -- have been in a pitched battle with a convicted felon-turned-activist named Brett Kimberlin. By any reasonable definition, Kimberlin is a public figure. Mark Singer, who was snookered by Kimberlin into writing a bogus New Yorker story, eventually turned on his source and made him the subject of a book. When Kimberlin resurfaced in the world of "black box voting" activism, conservative bloggers started to ask questions about him. Skip to May 2012. Blogger Patterico says he was the victim of a hoax that brought armed police officers to his home. The blogger "Aaron Worthing," identity exposed by a frivolous lawsuit, is counter-suing.

The goal of "Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day," as far as I can see it, is to make Kimberlin famous again.

Weigel was soon contacted by one Ron Brynaert, of whom we must now speak, although I had hoped not to. Brynaert also figures heavily in Frey's conspiracy theory. Although "Patterico" is not the clearest of writers, he seems to think that Evil Brett and Evil Ron are working together on some evil scheme funded by Evil Soros.

Before proceeding, please understand this: I don't know exactly what happened to Frey, and right now I have bigger fish to fry than to scrutinize every jot and tittle of his claims. (A couple of those fishes are downright Moby-sized.) In fact, I would have preferred to ignore this whole business.

But a couple of weeks ago, I had my own unsettling run-in with this Ron Brynaert character, who fancies himself to be the expert on Weinergate. He also loves to make wild, paranoid claims about everyone who ever had more than ten words to say about the matter. Brynaert has gone beyond left and right; he's off the map and zooming through the fourth dimension.

When Brynaert contacted me, I had forgotten that he had been an editor at Raw Story. He seemed miffed that I had temporarily misfiled his name in my memory.

He wanted to know why I thought Neal Rauhauser and "John Dean" were one and the same. I told him. Then he asked me again. I told him again. Then he asked me again, implying that I was hiding something...

Ron was defining himself as a truly strange person.

He sent me long, snarling, venom filled letters that didn't make much sense. (His surreal missive to Weigel gives a flavor of what to expect when Ron Brynaert puts you on his pen pal list.) I tried to be uncharacteristically nice, even when he insinuated that I was up to no good.

Brynaert's obvious psychological pain helped me to keep my composure. I politely told him that I couldn't really follow what he was going on about, but that he might do better if he stepped back and took some time off. The message was simple: "Time to chill, dude." Sweartagod, that was all.

That was enough.

Ron Brynaert became convinced that I was part of the Great Conspiracy Against Ron Brynaert. This, despite the fact that he originally wrote me; I had wanted nothing to do with the guy or with any of the "twilight warriors." According to Brynaert, other members of the Great Conspiracy Against Ron include the Breitbart crew, Neal Rauhauser, blogger Brad Friedman, Brett Kimberlin, maybe Glinda the Good Witch -- and, oh, hell, just everyone.

I normally keep private emails private, but that privacy policy goes bye-bye when a correspondent starts tossing threats. Here's Brynaert to yours truly:

You're definitely going to be contacted by NYPD detectives and lawyers from one of my sources who is prosecuting Rauhauser for harassment.

I am a crime victim.  I was extorted for $20,000.

Do not write me again unless you want to help me.

I do not need to be menaced anymore.  Because of your bullshit blog post I have JDSluggo sending me nasty emails and smearing me just like he did years ago.

This is for real.  Not a blog war.  Not an ARG.

You should be ashamed of your self for the letters you sent me.

I'm so tired of you cowardly conspiracy theorists spreading fake news, smearing people and pretending you are sane.

You are a horrible man.  Like I need this when right wing smearers are threatening me and accusing me of crimes?

I warn you that this is not a joke...and you better never email me anything menacing or nasty again....nor allude to me on your blogs.

I'll be reporting the blackmail threat to the NYPD in the next few weeks and I will make sure detectives contact you...because this is a really shameful thing to write a scared crime victim.

Let me stress again: I had had absolutely no desire hear from this guy. Arguably, he harassed me. Maybe "harassed" is too strong a verb; "pester" gets closer to the mark. At any rate, readers know that my attention had switched ages ago from Weiner to very different matters; although I gave the twilight warriors the occasional wary glance, I wasn't really keeping track of their antics. (By the way, can anyone tell me what an ARG is?)

Of course, no detectives or lawyers have ever contacted me. Won't happen.

Still, this man's bizarre outburst was unnerving. So I asked around: Who IS Ron Brynaert?

The response was quick and clear: Ron Brynaert was once a promising writer and investigator, but he became completely unglued after he lost his job at Raw Story.

It is a sad but simple fact of life that one out of ten people go stark raving bonkers. After reading the letter above, you may come to your own conclusion as to whether Ron Brynaert is Dude #10.

Let's get back to Patterico/Frey. He rather scurrilously tries to tie Brynaert in with Brad Friedman. (I used to be on good terms with Brad, but I got peeved at him back in 2008. That was a bad year for a lot of people.) It's true that Brad allowed Brynaert to write one (1) post on his blog -- at a time before the man's psychological state had become clear. I'm sure Brad now regrets the whole thing.

Frey accuses Brynaert of working with Kimberlin, and so do many of the other twilight warriors. (He's called a Kimberlin "sycophant" here. I would apply only the first syllable of that word to Brynaert.) Oddly, in his ranting letters to me, Brynaert seemed to agree with the Breitbarters that Brett Kimberlin was the font of all evil.

Bottom line: It's ridiculous for Frey to scry conspiracy in the ravings of an individual who has so thoroughly lost sight of reality that he alienates everyone he bumps into.

Frey has accused Brad of stalking him, although Frey presents no evidence.

(It is true that Brad used to work with Kimberlin on something called the Velvet Revolution. I never pressed Brad about that business back when he and I were talking. In more general terms, I've let Brad know that some of his associates were very iffy, particularly the "controlled demolition" whackadoodles who would occasionally contribute to his otherwise fine blog. Also speaking in general terms, I should note that Kimberlin has been portrayed as a very persuasive con artist.)

Frey/Patterico's blog post includes a recording of the call that inaugurated the right's Let's Make Kimberlin Famous Day. I don't recognize the voice of the guy who called the police, but it's definitely not Rauhauser. (Yes, I've spoken with Neal/John/whomever on the phone, although I now regret doing so.)

Clearly, though, the impersonator is a very troubled individual. To my mind, the "schizy" quality of the guy's voice narrows down the list of chief suspects. You may be able to hazard a guess as to whom I consider a likely candidate.

There's one other possibility, of course.

This whole business -- the phone call, the SWAT meme, the inauguration of Let's Make Kimberlin Famous Day -- might be an O'Keefe-esque deception operation. Everyone knows that the Breitbarters love to pull crap like that. Who knows? Perhaps the fellow who called the cops on that night is the same guy who engineered the "Betty and Veronica" mind-screw directed against Tommy Christopher of Mediaite.

(As noted above, I'll be moderating comments very heavily, as per the posted rules. Go ahead and accuse me of censorship. I giveth not a rodent's buttocks.) Permalink

Who says there are no decent people in congress? Here is Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, going after CISPA.

I'll say it again: The best solution is a constitutional amendment that forbids the intelligence agencies from storing private electronic communications without a warrant. Yes, lots of people have proposed constitutional solutions to various problems -- proposals which never go anywhere. But this amendment could garner support from both the left and the libertarian right.

So how do we start? Permalink

The Bain of our existence: Mitt Romney says that anyone who attacks Bain Capital is "attacking capitalism." By this logic, if you criticize the new Avengers flick, you're saying you don't like movies. If you don't like the newest sandwich at Subway, you're attacking the very concept of food.

Vote suppression: Slate has published an incredibly good piece on Republican vote suppression efforts. As you know (or should know), fraud perpetrated by voters intentionally misidentifying themselves is next to nonexistent. We're dealing with a mythical animal here; there's better evidence for the existence of the Maryland Goat-Man than for organized voter fraud. By contrast, vote-rigging via computerized counting machines is a very real threat. What irks me is that ill-informed citizens may not understand that the former has no relation to the latter.

This blog used to be devoted to the controversies surrounding electronic vote-counting devices. I stopped writing about that issue because Brad Friedman does the job much better, and because I couldn't figure out a way to talk about electronic vote manipulation without adding credibility to the myth of widespread voter misrepresentation. Hell, just figuring out the right way to word the previous sentence was tough!

As one might have predicted, GOP operatives are casting aside the pretense that their efforts have anything to do with ending voter misrepresentation. They are now claiming that voting is a privilege, not a right -- and you pretty much give up your privileges if you show signs of voting for the wrong party or candidates.

Whether it’s onerous (and expensive) voter ID rules that will render as many as 10 percent of Americans ineligible to vote, proof of citizenship measures, restricting registration drives, cancellation of Sunday voting, or claims that voting should be a privilege as opposed to a right, efforts to discount and discredit the vote have grown bolder in recent years, despite vanishingly rare claims of actual vote fraud. The sole objective appears to be ensuring that fewer Americans vote in 2012 than voted in 2008. But as strange as the reasons to purge certain votes have been around the nation, things have grown even stranger in recent weeks in Ohio, where GOP lawmakers have gone after not only voters but the federal courts, in an effort to wiggle out of statewide voting rules.

More:

The GOP’s argument goes even further than pitching ballots tainted by worker error, though. In legislation proposed last year (and withdrawn after it was poised to be rejected by a voter referendum), another provision would bar poll workers from helping voters find the correct precinct if they showed up at the wrong place. That’s right. A proposed GOP reform would ensure that poll workers have no obligation to tell you anything at all if you ask them a question pertaining to precisely the thing they are meant to do—facilitate voting. The language Ohio Republicans tried to insert into the omnibus voting law would provide that “it is the duty of the individual casting the ballot to ensure that the individual is casting that ballot in the correct precinct.”

This presents a deeply troubling new strain in the effort to shrink the vote; a new argument that has nothing to do with stamping out fraud at all.

Hillary for Veep? Skydancing published a piece yesterday on the recurrent meme that Hillary Clinton will replace Joe Biden on the ticket. Also see Riverdaughter here and Michael Tomasky here. Yes, this scenario could happen. One day, I may tell you the circumstances under which Obama might replace Biden outright, although I feel strongly that a Hillary/Joe job switch is not in the cards. But I strongly doubt that Joe Biden is going anywhere.

First and foremost, Biden just hasn't been that bad. Veeps don't get un-veeped if their greatest sin is dorkiness. They've got to do something seriously wrong.

Second, Hillary's positive ratings would vanish overnight if she were on the ticket. Right now, the Fox Newsers are careful not to slam Hillary because they want to encourage the Hillary-loving Obama-haters to stay home on election day. (And who could blame them if they did?) But the moment she got on the ticket, the right-wing news cycle would turn into a 24/7 barrage of Clinton-hate. We would relive it all: Monica, Whitewater, Waco, Mena...all of your favorite hate-memes from the 1990s. And the hate would come in hyper-concentrated form. It would feel like getting a blast of pure sulfur or capsaicin in the face, every minute of every day for months.

Don't pretend that the attacks would not have an impact. The lesson of our time is that propaganda works.

Also, if Clinton climbed aboard the ticket, the Obama-loving Hillary-hating progs of 2008 would be discouraged from going to the polls. Many of those voters no longer have much love for Obama, but they sure as hell hate anyone named Clinton.

Obama is better off sticking with boring old Joe. The worst thing the Foxers and the Bratbiters can say about Joe Biden is that he shoots from the lip. Permalink

I just witnessed my first house auction, purely as a looky-loo. Nice little place on a fairly large lot. It went for $85,000. A previous owner of the property happened to show up; he too was playing looky-loo. We got to talking, and he said that he had sold the place in 2005 for almost exactly $100,000 more.

Obviously, this is far, far from the most extreme case of home depreciation. But this anecdote tells you something about the shape of our economy. Is Fox News still trying to convince people that our big problem is inflation...? Permalink

I'm still working on the Big Something, and I'm a little surprised to see that no-one has guessed it. There are lots of stories about it on the net, if you know where to look. The stateside media blackout has been remarkably effective.

I've also been reading books about Glenn Beck and Fox News (authored by Dana Milbank and David Brock, respectively). One theme keeps coming up: Conspiracy.

Fox News is Conspiracy TV-- a fact which became undeniable when they decided to promote the rantings of Glenn Beck, kook extraordinaire. Beck's main trick (which he borrowed from the John Birchers) is simple: He takes a lot of familiar conspiracy memes that have circulated on the anti-Semitic far right for decades, lops off the overt anti-Semitism, and sells the results to a huge audience. And I do mean huge: Even after being kicked off of Fox, Beck is still earning $80 million a year.

Most people don't realize that all of the outrageous guff Beck peddles about Woodrow Wilson traces back, ultimately, to various "underground" works written by American fascists. Don't believe me? Check out this blast from the past, which demonstrates that Beck's favorite riffs originated with a notorious bigot named Gerald Winrod. Unless you have studied the history of the American fringe, as I have, you can't understand where Beck-ism comes from.

(I pity any naive kids who listen to Beck's crap. It's all new to them. They might even take it seriously.)

Beck stumbled big time, of course, when he openly acknowledged that he drew from sources like Cleon Skousen and Elizabeth Dilling. Citing Lousy Liz was way, way too obvious: Dilling used to flog the Protocols, for crying out loud. Most Americans would not have known her name, but a lot of Jews -- quite properly -- keep track of these things. Beck, like many another recovering alkie, lacks impulse control, so he was bound to make a slip-up of this sort eventually.

Beck is but a symptom of a larger disease. My point is this: On Fox News, everything is a conspiracy. Paranoia is their product.

There's only one area of conspiracy theory that the Fox-ers consider out of bounds: Anything that has anything to do with the intelligence communities of the U.S., the U.K. or Israel.

This means that Fox has it all backwards. Most of the conspiracy theories that have become so popular in recent times are, in fact, absolute hogwash. But history tells that there have been real conspiracies -- and the genuine ones usually trace back to the spooks. Conspiracy is what covert operatives do.

Did you know that Bill O'Reilly has written (or co-written, which usually means lending his name to) a book about the JFK assassination? I'm sure he's taking the lone nut line, although he may decide to go for the blame-the-commies angle. (Is Edward Epstein still around to offer advice? I think he is.) I'm also sure that the book will get on the bestseller lists and stay there for the anniversary of the assassination. Jim DiEugenio's long-promised magnum opus won't get anything like that level of attention, even though it will contain a lot of bombshell material released via the Assassinations Records Review Board. The very idea of Bill O'Reilly poring through the thousands of pages of new material released by the ARRB is rather amusing.

(Hell, the idea of Bill actually sitting down to read a book is rather amusing. And if Bill-O or anyone else tells you that there's nothing interesting in the ARRB documents, he's fibbing.)

Which brings us back to our larger point. Bill-O, if ever he took notice of a guy like me, would probably make a sneering reference to those awful, awful conspiracy buffs. But his network, Fox News, exists to promote conspiracy theories.

Just to prove the point, here's Bill-O's latest, in which he "proves" -- using the scholarly technique of proof-by-assertion -- that the entire Occupy movement is a conspiracy directed by Evil Soros and the Institute for Policy Studies (a long-time far-right hate-magnet).

It gets worse. When OSHA published a squib recommending that people working outdoors drink lots of water to avoid heatstroke, Fox screamed that this advice was all part of a socialist "Obama regime" conspiracy to control even the most minute aspects of our lives. Of course, as this blogger points out, OSHA offered the exact same advice under Bush (and probably under every preceding president for as long as there has been an OSHA). 

If you're a Fox Newser, it's okay to say that OSHA or Occupy is a conspiracy. But it's not okay to say that spooks killed JFK.

Maybe we should get Glenn Beck in on this. I'm sure he'll find some way to place Woodrow Wilson on the Grassy Knoll.

So what is Fox News? One of the recurrent themes in Brock's book, The Fox Effect, is that Fox is an anomaly in the Murdoch empire. America's most notorious propaganda network is surprisingly independent. Many readers will have a hard time getting their heads around that concept, since we all know that Rupert is a detail-oriented control freak.

(Incidentally, Fox responded to Brock with an absolutely hilarious hit piece.)

But Fox News really is a strange beast, and it gets stranger the closer you look. The rest of the Murdoch empire fears Fox. That's the word Brock uses, and he cites examples.

Let's put it this way: Murdoch supported Obama in 2008. Murdoch has also said that he believes that man-made climate change is a genuine, serious threat. Rupert Murdoch is probably the only human being who might be allowed to express those views on Fox News. And even then, the Fox crew would bring on "experts" from the Heartland Institute to rebut him on global warming.

I'm not sure what to make of this situation. But I can tell you this much: The distinction -- one might even say the rift -- between Fox News and the rest of the Murdoch organization is real. Any Theory of Fox (or Theory of Murdoch) must start with that understanding. Permalink

Posting may be light, because I'm working on something big. In fact, I plan to do up a video presentation on a huge story that could destroy the Murdoch/Fox empire.

No, I'm not talking about the phone hacking scandal. Think bigger. Much bigger.

Actually, the real work was done by some very prestigious foreign news firms. What infuriates me is that no-one in the U.S. wants to talk about the solid investigative work done by these teams. I'm not just talking about a FOX News blackout; you would expect them to avoid this tale. No-one wants to discuss the story -- not CBS, not NBC. The NYT did a brief piece which was heavily biased in favor of Murdoch, and which ignored the real evidence. A few other American news sources have mentioned the story, but not in a way designed to turn on all the lights.

Instead, American news junkies are being force-fed piffle.

Why is that? Permalink

Bill Maher recently quipped that Barack Obama is half-black and half-white, and that he (Maher) hoped that the second administration would be the black one.

Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is another black politician. He had to backtrack after loudly denouncing Obama's recent ad criticizing Romney's past at Bain Capital. (I happened to like that ad.)

Now Harold Ford -- another black politician, who was once hounded from office by what I consider a genuinely racist campaign -- is saying that Booker got it right the first time. Shame on Obama for going after Bain, or so sayeth Ford.

One could also mention Sanford Bishop of Georgia and Artur Davis of Alabama. (Davis will probably make a formal shift to the Republican party fairly soon.) I don't know much about this guy, other than the obvious fact that he's being groomed for big things, but I don't see a John Conyers there.

The question is simple. Why is it that the only up-and-coming black politicians who stand any chance of getting somewhere in the Democratic party always turn out to be Blue Dogs? This didn't used to be the case. I wouldn't have voted for Jesse Jackson back in '88 if I thought he was anything like the guys mentioned above. If Jackson (at least the Jackson of old) were running today, he would slam Romney on Bain every minute of every day, without mercy and without apology.

In response to Bill Maher: I hope a second Obama administration turns out to be the Democratic one. But I'm not holding my breath. Permalink

This morning I saw a BookTV lecture by Noam Scheiber, the New Republic editor who recently wrote The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery. While listening, I flashed on a famous anecdote about Bill Clinton.

As recounted by Bob Woodward in The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House, Clinton vented to his advisers: "'Where are all the Democrats?' Clinton bellowed. 'I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans,' he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. 'We're all Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn't that great?'"

How can we update that formulation to explain the Obama years?

As Scheiber noted, most of Obama's policies have reflected the Clinton-era Republican viewpoint. For example, Obama's misguided health care initiative reflects not what Clinton tried to do, but the official Republican response to what Clinton tried to do. That policy was later enacted on the state level by Mitt Romney.

The ideas offered by the Clinton-era "Reagan Republicans" are considered heretical by today's conservatives, despite their canonization of Saint Ronnie. We all know what would happen to any Republican who dared to suggest the kind of massive tax increase that Reagan countenanced. Jon Huntsman has said, I think correctly, that Ronald Reagan likely would not get anywhere near the Republican nomination today.

So: If Clinton was an Eisenhower Republican -- in hindsight, not such a bad thing to be -- then what is Obama?

A lot of my readers would feel comfortable calling our president a Reagan Republican, if only because Obama has (foolishly) praised the way Reagan transformed the political landscape. But Obama could never be that kind of transformative figure. He's a center-rightist. His notion of bipartisanship (at least for the first two and a half years of his administration) has been to negotiate surrender terms before the onset of battle. Obama never gave serious consideration to the kind of tax increases that Reagan reluctantly considered necessary.

Many would feel comfortable calling Obama a George H.W. Bush Republican -- although here again, the terminology fails us, since one could argue that Obama (at least for the first two years) operated somewhere to Poppy's right. Bush the elder also allowed taxes to increase. And give the guy credit: He knew better than to linger in Iraq.

Perhaps we should keep things a little vague. Let's call Obama a "Bush Republican" and then let each listener or reader decide if the reference goes to Poppy or Dubya. Obama is more liberal than Dubya, but not by much. I believe our current president would have preferred to let the tax cuts on the wealthy expire, but he didn't fight very hard to make that happen. Obama has been even worse than his predecessor on privacy issues, and a good deal better when it comes to Supreme Court nominations. "Bush lite" seems appropos.

What label, then, do we affix to his opponents, to the Tea Party freakazoids who routinely call Obama a Marxist/socialist/Islamofascist? My first instinct would be to call those guys "John Birch Republicans," even though that term doesn't really cover it. I've read a fair amount of Bircher literature from the 1960s; it was plenty crazy, but not as crazy as what passes for political rhetoric these days.

Perhaps we should call them Jack D. Ripper Republicans, in honor of George C. Scott's character in Dr. Strangelove. Or how about "Ayn Rand Republicans"? A useful term, that, but it doesn't go far enough. I think she would have had contempt for the insane Islamophobes and Jesusmaniacs who now control much of the conservative movement.

Some of my readers might like the label "Glenn Beck Republicans." Even though Becks' star may have fallen -- nobody quotes him nowadays -- a Beck-ish ideology still holds sway over millions. The maniacal, ultra-conspiratorial, yet undeniably popular claptrap promoted by Beck and his comrades-in-crazy explains why the Republicans in Congress feel justified in nonstop obstructionism. Example:

Last week, House Speaker John Boehner once again threatened that Republicans would not vote to increase the debt ceiling unless Democrats agreed to certain tax and spending policies sought by the GOP. Republicans have used this tactic repeatedly in the past few years, each time bringing the nation closer to the brink of default.

These people are so wedded to an extremist ideology that they consider ending the American experiment preferable to compromise.

In the end, we may have to settle for calling these people bonkers. Just that simple: The modern GOP has been taken over by Bonkers Republicans.

A lot of centrists rooted for Romney to win the nomination on the grounds that the other candidates (Bachmann, Perry, Paul) were of dubious sanity. Romney isn't crazy, but he lacks humanity, conviction, conscience, courage, or any clear goal beyond a personal ambition. He has not stood up to the most odious voices in his party, even on occasions when doing so might have benefited him politically. Since he stands for nothing, he won't stand up to the tea-stained radicals who now control his party. The Glenn Beck-ish wackos will thus control the presidency.

And so that's the story of Election 2012: A Bush Republican versus a Bonkers Republican.

What a dispiriting choice. What a horrifying choice. If, as Garrison Keillor once sang, we're all Republicans now, then I like Ike. Permalink

Conservatives never let the facts get in the way of the party line.

The right inists that the Occupy movement is aligned with, sympathetic to or manipulated by the Obama administration. The reactionaries will not let go of this fixed idea, even though all of the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Example: Three young "anarchists" associated with the Occupy movement have been charged with plotting to bomb Barack Obama's campaign headquarters and Rahm Emanuel's home. (The accused are quite young, of course. Don't trust anyone under thirty; most of 'em are borderline retarded.)

As always, there are indications that the terror plot was engineered by the very forces that now claim credit for preserving the peace:

But outside court Saturday, Michael Deutsch, the attorney representing the men now known as the “NATO 3,” said they were railroaded — “a Chicago Police set-up, entrapment to the highest degree.”

Deutsch said three undercover cops nicknamed “Nadia,” “Mo” and “Glove” befriended his clients on May 1: May Day, an international day of labor solidarity.

Two of the nine arrested people were themselves undercover cops, Deutsch said. And those undercover officers “egged on” the accused men, he said.

“From our information, the so-called incendiary devices and the plans to attack police stations — that’s all coming from the minds of the police informants and not coming from our clients, who are non-violent protesters,” he said.

Firedoglake has more on the entrapment issue.

The details I have been able to gather from speaking to arrestees personally make it seem like the police have, in the past 48 hours, fabricated all of these details about having some investigation in progress.

There is much more to say on the topic of entrapment, but at this time I want to focus on the right's narrative that the Occupiers are Obots. That claim is nonsense. It seems quite clear that, even if the charges against those young anarchist dolts prove to be false, said dolts are not fans of the president.

And Obama is no fan of the protesters.  Dave Lindorff has been going over some newly-released documents which demonstrate that Obama's Department of Homeland Security directed a nationwide crackdown of the movement, despite official denials.

The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC).

On December 12, when Occupy planned anti-war protests at various US ports, Verheyden-Hilliard says the new documents show that the NOC “went into high gear” seeking information from local field offices of the Department of Homeland Security about what actions police in Houston, Portland, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles planned to deal with Occupy movement actions.

Another document shows that earlier, in advance of a planned Occupy action at the Oakland, CA port facility on Nov. 2, DHS “went so far as to keep the Pentagon’s Northcom (Northern Command) in the intelligence loop.”

Would Bush have reacted in a different fashion? I doubt it.

Since the police response has obviously been coordinated the DHS, Obama arguably bears indirect responsibility for street-level misbehavior by the cops. In that light, let's take another look at Firedoglake's coverage of the three arrested anarchists. Sarah Gelsomino, acting as legal counsel for the three, makes some rather chilling accusations:

They were driving in a car and were pulled over without any kind of justification or reason by the Chicago police department. They were surrounded by police and they were questioned for a very long period of time about what they were doing in Chicago, why they were here to protest, what their political affiliations were, how they identified politically—All kinds of absolutely outrageous questions that certainly do not indicate any kind of illegal behavior because it is not constitutional simply to accuse them of a crime because of a political belief.

If Obama were locatable anywhere on the left, why does his Justice Department continually target progressives?

The Obama administration has done nothing to impede the outrageous cop practice of confiscating cameras from bystanders recording the anti-Occupy police actions.

Just ask Carlos Miller. The photojournalist has been arrested three times. His “crime?” Attempting to photograph police actions in the U.S. Most recently, in January, Miller was filming the eviction of Occupy Wall Street activists from a park in downtown Miami.

In twist that’s become too familiar to many, the journalist became the story as police focused their crackdown on the scrum of reporters there to cover the eviction. Miller came face to face with Officer Nancy Perez, who confiscated his camera and placed him under arrest.

And Miller is not alone. Since Occupy Wall Street began last September, more than 75 journalists have been arrested.  My colleague Josh Stearns has chronicled these arrests since the movement’s earliest days. Stearns expects to see an uptick in arrests as thousands of protesters and reporters converge on Chicago.

The courts have upheld the public's right to videotape, but that right means nothing if the cops won't observe it. Why hasn't the Justice Department cracked down on police abuse?

I strongly urge you to read Rick Pearlstein's expose in Rolling Stone. When this administration goes looking for (non-Islamic) terrorists, it adheres to the old policy of "Left eye open, right eye blind." As Pearlstein documents, right-wing terrorists pose a far more serious threat -- yet their groups are seldom infiltrated, and their members need never worry about entrapment.

The contrasts are extraordinarily instructive. When federal law enforcement agencies take an affirmative role in staging the crimes, the U.S. Justice Department then prosecutes, leaving more clear-and-present dangers relatively unbothered, the State is singling out ideological enemies. Violent white supremacists are not one of these enemies, apparently – because, as David Neiwert, probably the nation’s top journalist on the subject, told me, the federal government has much less often sought to entrap them, even though they are actually the biggest home-grown terrorism threat.  That is unconstitutional, because law enforcement’s criterion for attention has been revealed as the ideas the alleged plotters hold – not their observed violent potential.

But don't worry your pretty little heads over the epidemic of far-right insurrectionism that followed the election of Barack Obama: all told, according to a forthcoming data analysis by Neiwert, there have been 55 cases of right-wing extremists being arrested for plotting or committing alleged terrorists acts compared to 26 by Islamic militants during the same period. The right-wing plots include the bombing of a 2011 Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane and the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009. Neither of their perpetrators, it goes without saying, had been arrested before they attempted their vile acts; neither required law enforcement entrapment to conceive and carry them out. It's just too bad for their victims they did not fit the story federal law enforcement seeks to tell.

The irony is overwhelming. Right-wing terrorists hate Obama and would probably murder him if they could. Nevertheless, Obama's Department of Homeland Security ignores the right and focuses with laser-like intensity on anyone who might be left of center. Our first black president coddles racist thugs, preferring to target naive young "anarchist" cranks. Meanwhile, the anarchists themselves -- whose political philosophy strikes me as a muddled and incoherent stew -- seem to dislike Obama rather intensely.

Yet folks who get their facts from Fox News will tell you that Obama is Lenin and the Occupiers are his Red Army.

We can't have a useful national dialogue if half the country insists on a narrative located at a 180 degree remove from reality.  

Update: Mahablog was kind enough to cite this post in an article entitled "Obama Behind Plot to Blow Up His Own Headquarters!" That post includes some hilarious examples of the "Obama controls Occupy" narrative to be found on right-wing blogs. The rightists are too stupid to notice that the arrests contradict their preconceptions.

Calling Alex Jones! We need a right-wing conspiracy theory to bring everything together. The theory should explain why Obama would direct a plot to blow up his own headquarters and why Obama would entrap the anarchists. The theory should explain why Obama would engineer the Occupy movement and why Obama would sic police thugs on the Occupiers.

Coming up with a single theory for all of this contradictory activity will take enormous creativity. But I have faith in our nation's paranoid class. Permalink

The libertarian conspiracy...

(Shall I work that phrase into every post from now on? Well, I'll try.)

...has spent millions of dollars making the public believe that rich people are "job creators." When Nick Hanauer -- a billionaire venture capitalist, and thus presumably not a Jesus-hating Marxist -- offered up a challenge to that doctrine in his TED talk, he was censored. Reason given: His view was "too controversial."

Oh really? Here's a sample of what he said:

I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it's a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the other way around.

Anyone who's ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn't just inaccurate, it's disingenuous.

For crying out loud. That's controversial?

I can recall a time when that sentiment would have been considered about as controversial as saying that water is wet. Back in the '70s, a politician might have said those exact same words from the podium at the Republican convention. Everyone in the audience would have thought: "Of course. In the end, it's all about the consumer. The customer is king."

Now, we live in an age when the average consumer is considered an impediment to the efficient running of the economy. On Wall Street, the bankers treat their customers the way grifters treat rubes -- or, better, the way muggers treat muggees.

The only thing holding back hiring is lack of demand. The problem is not unions or regulations or unpredictability or sunspots or an imminent attack from Loki and the Chitauri. The problem is the fact that Mr. and Ms. Average don't have any long green in their wallets. The Libertarians want all workers to segue into the lumpenprole lifestyle, sleeping in old cars and feasting on cold hot dogs -- and then those same "conservative" geniuses cannot understand why the working class no longer purchases goods and services.

TED stands revealed as just another libertarian propaganda forum. Awful Ayn used to exist on the fringe; now, from beyond the grave, she sets the party line. Deviationists must be re-educated or sent to Lubianka. To paraphrase Dick Nixon, we're all Randroids now. Permalink

The libertarian conspiracy has used all of its formidable propaganda resources to insure that the Unites States does not institute the only measures which can save us from economic disaster. One such measure is inflation -- a controlled inflation.

Ian Welsh's post on the "Dutch disease" set me to thinking, once again, about the vast possibilities offered by inflation. If the dollar were worth less, foreigners would want to purchase more American goods. Those impossible-to-repay home loans would become very-possible-to-repay home loans. Paying back China becomes much less painful. Newly printed dollars -- and I would argue that a controlled inflation should take the form of actual, physical cash -- could be used to provide jobs to the unemployed and homes to the homeless.

It's also true that ultra-low interest rates helped to create the financial crisis in the first place. Paul Krugman once uttered a very simple truism:

Deflation redistributes wealth from debtors to creditors.

Whenever anyone speaks of the virtues of a controlled inflation, the fearmongers bring up the specter of Weimar, of hyperflation. But hyperinflation is a very different animal, with differing causes.

Inflation can be good. And for precisely that reason, the right-wing press has expended a great deal of energy trying to convince the populace that the greatest menace facing this country was and is inflation. As we've noted in previous posts, Fox News heavily pushed the nonsense spewed by a group called the National Inflation Association -- run by pump and dump stock scammer Jonathan Lebed. Lebed's gang tried to convince the populace that onions would soon cost about fifteen bucks.

Absurd.

Inflation cannot be said to exist unless wages and home prices go up. Is that happening? True, some commodities have risen in price, due, in large part, to the shark-like shenanigans of Wall Street speculators. But inflation is a wage-price spiral; if your wages aren't on the increase, your economic problems require another label.

I can only repeat the words I wrote last year:

I suspect that the people screeching about hyperinflation want this country to collapse. They want Apocalypse Now. These people have a vision: They want to replace our current system with their proposed libertarian paradise. You can't build a New Jerusalem without first whipping up a proper Armageddon.

Permalink