The Blog That Goes Ping

That’s what I’m talkin’ bout.

It’s been less than two days since he crossed the delegate threshold to become the Democratic presidential nominee and Sen. Barack Obama’s mark on the party is already being felt.

On Good Morning America Thursday, ABC News’ Chief Washington Correspondent George Stephanopoulos reported “the Democratic National Committee will no longer accept contributions from federal lobbyists, will no longer take contributions from PACs” in keeping with Obama’s well-publicized policy.

[From Obama's In Control: No More Lobbyist Contributions To Democratic Party - Politics on The Huffington Post]

I don’t actually think that policy is very well-publicized. I hope it gets more so.

GRAND RAPIDS — Kent County Republicans continue to claim a recent break-in at their Grand Rapids headquarters was politically motivated

And one party leader publicly blamed unnamed Democrats in a mass e-mail sent to supporters.

“We knew the Democrats would do anything to win, but we didn’t expect this!” wrote Kent GOP Chair Dave Dishaw in a note asking for money to help cover “costs” and support candidates. [...]

Moore also said he received threatening phone calls two weeks ago when Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama held a rally in Grand Rapids, though he did not report them to police.

[From GOP blames Democrats for break-in; police find no political motive - Latest News - The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com]

I guess Mr. Dishaw thinks that G. Gordon Liddy has defected to the Democrats…

I imagine that there are a lot of people on his mailing lists which will eat that fundraising letter right up.

A polygamous community in Texas that follows the teaching of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints practices pedophilia, torture and child abuse under the guise of a religion, according to a woman who escaped the sect with her eight children five years ago.

“I think it’s a form of pedophilia hiding behind a religion as a protection,” Carolyn Jessop told TODAY’s Matt Lauer from Salt Lake City on Tuesday. “There’s just a desire to control and manipulate and torture people, and religion is just used as the cover.”

[From Woman describes ‘escape’ from polygamy - TODAY: People - MSNBC.com]

Man, wouldn’t it be interesting if Romney were the candidate right now?
If this stuff is all true as reported — not that I have reason to doubt it, but it’s always wise to be cautious about atrocity tales which accompany and justify government action — holy crap, this was a horrible, abusive hellhole.

“The method he would use with infants was a form of water torture,” Jessop said of her former husband. “He would spank the baby until it was screaming out of control, and then he would hold the baby faceup under a tap of running water so it couldn’t breathe. He would do this repeatedly. Sometimes, it would go on for an hour, until the baby was so exhausted it couldn’t cry anymore. This method he called ‘breaking them.’”

Neo-Nazi Threatmaker Accused of Working for FBI | Hatewatch:

New Jersey radio host Hal Turner is well known as one of the most vicious neo-Nazis in America, a man who routinely suggests killing his enemies.

Hal TurnerRailing against President Bush, he told his audience last June that “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems.” He has written that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border” and argued that killing certain federal judges “may be illegal, but it wouldn’t be wrong.” In 2006, after he published an attack on New Jersey Supreme Court justices that also included several of their home addresses, state police massively beefed up security for the members of the court, checking on one justice’s house more than 200 times.

Hal Turner is one serious extremist. He may also be on the FBI payroll.

On Jan. 1, unidentified hackers electronically confronted Turner in the forum of his website for “The Hal Turner Show.” After a heated exchange, they told Turner that they had successfully hacked into his server and found correspondence with an FBI agent who is apparently Turner’s handler. Then they posted an alleged July 7 E-mail to the agent in which Turner hands over a message from someone who sent in a death threat against Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.). “Once again,” Turner writes to his handler, “my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy.” In what is allegedly a portion of another E-mail, Turner discusses the money he is paid.

On Thursday, as the E-mail exchange was heatedly discussed on a major neo-Nazi website, Turner suddenly announced he was quitting political work. “I hereby separate from the ‘pro-White’ movement,” he said, adding that he was ending his radio show immediately. “I will no longer involve myself in any aspect of it.”

A friend recently quoted Ram Dass to me: “Police create hippies. Hippies create police.” Here police seem to be creating right-wing hate propaganda… which of course creates a need for police.

It would be awesome to find out exactly who was responsible for the brilliant plan of keeping an extremist propagandist on the air, just so that of the people who listened to him and were incited to hate and violence by his rhetoric, the small percentage who contacted him about it could be arrested.

…Never Attribute To Malice What Can Adequately Be Explained By The Sheer Weirdness of the World We Live In.

If you’ve been tuning in to the mainstream news you know that a bunch of tiny Iranian ships threatened an American navy destroyer, and we have video/audio of it.

If you’ve been tuning in to slightly less mainstream news, you know that the Iranians deny making the threats and point out that the voice making the threats sounds nothing like the Iranian officer who was speaking at the time, and appears to be clumsily cut in to the audio.

Given the atmosphere of mostly baseless panic about, and aggression towards, Iran that has been encouraged in America in the last couple years, it seemed logical, at least sort of, to think of this as a manufactured “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” intended to justify a war, just like the fake Weapons of Mass Destruction intelligence.

But so clumsy! So obviously fake! There wasn’t even a Colin Powell presentation before the U.N.! Surely they’d do a better job this time around wouldn’t they?…

Via GniobGniob, there are reports coming out that it may have been the maritime radio equivalent of an internet troll. One who’s been doing this for 25 years.

‘Filipino Monkey’ behind threats? - Navy News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Navy Times:

“Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where theare is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern [who is speaking on the radio channel] is very hard to do,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told Navy Times during a brief telephone interview today.

Indeed, the voice in the audio sounds different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser Port Royal over a radio from a small open boat in the video released by Iranian authorities. He is shown in a radio exchange at one point asking the U.S. warship to change from the common bridge-to-bridge channel 16 to another channel, perhaps to speak to the Navy without being interrupted.

Further, there’s none of the background noise in the audio released by the U.S. that would have been picked up by a radio handset in an open boat.

So with Navy officials unsure and the Iranians accusing the U.S. of fabrications, whose voice was it? In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.

Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment.

Several Navy ship drivers interviewed by Navy Times are raising the possibility that the Monkey, or an imitator, was indeed featured in that video.

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

And the Monkey has stamina.

“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”