Left Behind
No, I don't mean the apocalyptic fiction stuff; I'm talking about this guy:
Nearly 10,000 of the biggest donors to Republican candidates and causes across the country will probably receive a foreboding “warning” letter in the mail next week.The letter is an opening shot across the bow from an unusual new outside political group on the left that is poised to engage in hardball tactics to prevent similar groups on the right from getting off the ground this fall.
Led by Tom Matzzie, a liberal political operative who has been involved with some prominent left-wing efforts in recent years, the newly formed nonprofit group, Accountable America, is planning to confront donors to conservative groups, hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions.
One can only imagine the outcry if threatening letters were sent to the biggest donors to Democratic candidates and causes. I guess some like Matzzie are so obsessed with finding fascists under their beds that it's only a matter of time that they start behaving like ones.
Funny part is, this will probably only motivate donors to give in an election year they might be more prone to sit out.
--
“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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References -
And a political opponent to boot.
Got a nice shirt for ya. Boots, too.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent ).
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )Come on, that's the laugh out loud funniest comment in the entire diary.
There's gotta be an unwritten rules exception for that kind of self parody.
--“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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| parent )"That Sam-I-am! That Sam-I-am! I do not like that Sam-I-am!"- Dr. Seuss
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| parent )And the sig makes it so right:
One would, of course, expect a bumper-sticker philosophy to be straightforwardly described by very small sentences.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )I'm a long time out of law school, but an implied threat of criminal prosecution of this sort sounds like extortion to me--and given the use of interstate communications to communicate the threats it brings the feds into the game. It'd probably be good for Republican fund-raising to see this clown dragged off in handcuffs in front of cameras. FBI agents carry tasers, right? Bonus.
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)Not quite as distasteful as the letters of some on the Republican side to black and hispanics warning of dire consequences of voting, since presumably these donors are better educated and able to handle themselves... but distasteful all the same.
--More Wagster!
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)and thankfully not connected to either official Democratic campaign efforts or the Obama campaign. But not nearly as bad as say institutionalized attempts by the Republican party at voter caging and other efforts to deny citizens the vote.
--GW Bush, leading contender for worst President ever.
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)....generally give money to politcal parties. It might almost be worth it just to get on this leftist scumbag's list! :^)
--The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools. -Herbert Spencer
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)I don't think we need Mr. Matzzie's services just yet but it is good to know there are men like him willing to do what has to be done in order to win in November.
--But she's a queen, and such are queens
that your laughter is sucked in their brains. -D. Bowie
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)With Jesse Jackson falling into disfavor, a new generation of left of center extortionists need to be groomed for advancement.
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| parent )What's this got to do with the State? This is a private group sending private letters. It's hard to imagine what kind of "threat" could be credible, so I'd call this a pretty stupid idea, but the fascist comparison is silly.
--The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.
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)I suppose I could write a diary called "Right Behind" and then we'd form a perfect ass. This is just another outrage du jour, anyone who knows anything (and I assume large donors know quite a lot about the process) won't be intimidated at all. Besides, the guy has a history of failing to get funding for his ideas according to the article, so I doubt anything will come of it. But yes, if he were to actually be successful at it it would be a bad thing (not that I've heard much outrage about similar right wing efforts from conservatives over the past few years).
--I blame it all on the Internet
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)Mr. Matzzie needs to get a life. So do these people-
"We thought, 'Let's try and start a movement where even while walking down the street, people would hold up the O and you would know that they were for Obama,' " says Husong. Much thought went into the relatively simple idea. "You interlace your hands in a circle, the interlacing being a symbol of different types of people coming together and the circle a symbol of unity,"
They spent way too much time on this.
--"That Sam-I-am! That Sam-I-am! I do not like that Sam-I-am!"- Dr. Seuss
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)also works for me. [Our conservative friends should feel free to mentally subtract out the Republican-bashing parts if preferred... he can't help himself.]
It's a terrible idea and deserves bipartisan condemnation.
--Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
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)I'm cool with this . . .
Anyway, is this so-called "threatening letter" better, worse or equal to selling merchandise that portrays Barack Obama as the Anti-Christ?
--Fence post turtles -- They don't get up there by themselves, some moron had to put 'em there.
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| parent )There is no such thing as a Strong Defense winning battles. Toujours l'audace, gentlemen. The Richard Mellon Scaifes and the Wyly Coyotes and all the rest of 'em can make all the donations to the mudflinger 527s they'd like, with perfect anonymity.
Or so they hope. This has nothing to do with Liberal Causes, it's about rooting out and exposing the filthy sponsors of the mudflinging.
Sun Tzu says: "Disciplined, wait for disorder; calm, wait for clamor." Every lie these bastards tell should be run to ground. Let the Scaifes and Wylys emerge like badgers smoked out from their holes. Money can't save you from a determined investigator. They can ha-ha all they like from inside their bastions, but they're big targets.
We used to have an FDC guy, every time we'd take incoming fire, he'd run out with his tape measure to measure the impact crater. Bravest man I ever saw. He'd run back in, do some rough conic section work and guesstimate coordinates for counterbattery fire, walking the rounds out along the known vector line.
Same story here.
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| parent )It just means you're asking for an air strike.
There's playing to win in a way that works, and then there's trying to put on the brass knuckles and just injuring your fingers. The Democrats know how to play dirty (see, f'rex the "Voting for Bush is the moral equivalent of dragging a man to death" commercial), but there tend to be a lot of well-meaning folks who try and just cock up the execution. Like those guys at MoveOn who tried to make a Bush=Hitler video that just came off as looking kind of dumb.
When you try to play dirty and fail, it's worse than playing dirty and succeeding, because then you look both cruel and weak (which, btw, is also a good statement of everything wrong with U.S. foreign policy). Again, look at 2006--the GOP tried every trick in the playbook, but came across as looking both villainous and ineffectual.
There are also ways of going fairly negative and still running a clean campaign. I think the most brilliant of these was Clinton in '92. He was of course lucky because he had the media in his pocket (and got some Karmic payback for this when his wife lost the nomination because the media swooned over Obama), but he ran a masterful campaign by harping both on the recession and how he would stick it to "the rich."
But trying to intimidate GOP donors unless you've got a massive legal apparatus in your back pocket just makes the targets feel contempt for you and also causes the targets to have a nice victim card that they can play.
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| parent )An arty or mortar crater leaves a signature. If it's relatively shallow, it's a mortar. If it's deep, it's arty. If it's wide, it's a rocket. The conic section tells you both incoming vector and angle of impact. The enemy FDC uses optimal propellant. The weights and ranges of the enemy munition were known, we faced a lot of 82mm mortar and 122mm rockets, with known firing tables. Therefore, computing counterbattery fire was a straightforward proposition.
We knew counterbattery fire worked, because the attacks morphed into shoot-and-scoot missions. We'd look at the maps, guess where they'd set up next, say 500 meters away on the next level piece of ground. They knew us and we knew them. We were dug in and they were in the open, so we shot a lot of Killer Junior airburst out of 105 and 155 howitzers.
Americans own artillery. We are the best on the planet when it comes to the King of Battle. Frederick the Great cast the words "Ultimo Ratio Regis" on his cannons, for they are the Last Argument of the King.
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| parent )Then counterbattery fire is straightforward and effective.
But if, OTOH, you're a less efficient military, then your counterbattery fire is not going to be as good and going to draw an airstrike.
My point was to run with your earlier metaphor (which may have been a bad idea on my part). The folks who are trying to engage in this preemptive stare-down are not the political equivalent of U.S. artillery. Full stop. They're going to be ineffectual and only wind up looking both mean and weak.
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| parent )Oppo intelligence uses spies. People have no idea how effective an industrial or political spy can be. If I wanted to attack Scaife, I'd apply for a job as a DBA inside any of his organizations. I've got the quals and security clearances to get inside anyone's organization. I know the right noises to make, give me six months and I'd have every goddamn password to every system inside every organization he touches via email. Not some, all. Just get me inside his firewall, he'd be in jail in a year.
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| parent )I suspect, though, that this is a plan that lacks the sort of strategic depth necessary to succeed. The research of digging up dirt and the work of holding people's feet to the fire with respect to violation of somewhat obscure statutes requires time, dedication, and legal expertise. I doubt the AA folks can muster those from their resources.
If they succeed, more power to them. But I doubt that they will.
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| parent )And there are lots of them. The one sovereign rule of hubris is this: the bigger you get, the tougher it is to hide. With a relatively prominent url, there are hundreds of amoral black hats in Romania who are begging for a trivial Western Union transfer to grift out every succulent detail about any living person.
A few years back, the CEO of Sun Microsystems was asked about privacy. He replied, "Privacy? You already have zero privacy - get over it."
Now just think that one through.
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| parent )Just priceless.
--“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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| parent )Networked systems generally don't have one huge lock that you can get through once as a contractor.
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| parent )on Winders boxen, so delicious and vulnerable and eatable, once you're inside the building. Don't kid yourselves. If it came out of Redmond, it might as well be shrink wrapped on styrofoam.
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| parent )would seem rather apropos to this conversation.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )If you're a contractor looking at servers in some small subnet, personal emails won't be routed through any links that you might snoop.
If you're a contractor looking at personal Windows workstation and they don't use encrypted mail delivery and storage (in 2008?) then sure, you can read that person's email, but you probably still don't have the right inboxes to read and learn the network topology, much less get access to what you're implying.
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| parent )and not that pathetic verbal judo, you'll be sure to let me know, woncha?
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| parent )Mastering sudo doesn't help in understanding the problem with your scheme to bring down Scaife. Maybe you should expand your 'mastering' horizons.
--“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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| parent )# cat /etc/sudoers
...
Username ALL=(ALL) ALL
...
Watch out Macallan, now I have all your credit cards!
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| parent )upon which corporations of vastly differing motives project their aims and ambitions. And when they've got a problem I solve it.
You can thank whatever gods you worship I don't play the black hat game. There are two things I swore I'd never do when I entered software seriously. First, I'd never develop a homing algorithm for a missile, two, I'd never open anyone's digital drawer without their knowledge and permission.
I have long since mastered sudo. Scaife could be brought down in a heartbeat. You have no earthly conception of how powerful the black hat community truly has become. Let's put it this way: if we ever attacked Hizb'allah or the Chinese, everything with a digital connection from your cell phone to your Net connection to your Aitch Dee Teevee would go black. Your PIN number? A trivial problem once you've got the right person inside the firewall. 99.9999999% of every attack on a secure network is from inside the firewall. The script kiddies are nobodies. Scaife is just enough of an idiot to already have enough contractors inside his firewalls to be compromised in less time than it will take you to formulate your next reply, and it would take less that ten grand to do it. On that you can bet the farm.
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| parent )I have the (mis)fortune of being part of a group, formerly known as #goonies, of which a member named Coolio (look him up on wikipedia as Dennis Moran) was responsible for the limited death of yahoo, cnn, amazon, and many others back in the day. Yes, it is ridiculously easy to shut down massive amounts of the internet and cause all sorts of havoc. Most, however, have outgrown it.
-bro
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| parent )Eating is for predators. Who go to very considerable trouble to crap in quiet places nobody can smell.
Has the Darwinian predator model never entered y'all's minds? Predators don't have many babies, and few of those survive, but they do clean out the herbivores with their many babies. Keep them fast on their feet and sharp in the mind.
It's been a great while since the Conservative Buffalo has met up with a predator worthy of pulling it down. Mr. Darwin solves all problems.
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| parent )Are generally small scale. Which in the end, can annoy people here and there, but are no big deal. Destroying the root servers however....
-bro
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| parent )Ok, say you get a job at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. They give you root access to some db and app servers probably sitting in some xen guests probably sitting in a subnet with no outbound access. Uhh, how do you get any info on Richard?
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| parent )I'll let you google it up.
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| parent )“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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| parent )when Bush tries to push another intrusive abrogation of our privacy and rights through the Congress?
Honest men have nothing to fear from their government.
Bwahaha! Gosh, accountability and openness and all that jazz is now a Threat? The tsunami of PAC sewage washes away all semblance of fair play and democracy, and you feel searching about for Fascists Under the Bed is a problem. The obscene incest between the No-Bid Contractors and Bushco/Cheney LLP doesn't bother to hide under the bed. Fascism is what fascism does: fascism is an unholy union between government and industry.
If that does not sum up the Bush administration, nothing can.
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)I didn't think anyone here would have the complete lack of perspective necessary to actually defend this, but I guess I should be happy to be proven wrong so quickly and easily.
Well done.
--“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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| parent )Maybe it's less a matter of perspective, than an illustration of some other "vision" problem. And not ours. Speaking as a liberal Democrat, I can say that Mr. Mattzie's notion of ginning up some astroturf "pressure" "group" to try to put the kibosh on conservative donors' political giving is:
a) stupid
b) nothing particularly new (left or right)
c) almost certainly doomed to failure
d) did I mention "stupid"?
Outside organizations like AA (and this clown couldn't even pick an original acronym!) pop up like mushrooms, watered by the drizzling piss of our political process, every election year, and rarely if ever have any lasting effect - outside of maybe enriching their organizers in some small way - before the normal processes of the market devolve them out of existence. Why this marginal nonsense reads like any sort of "fascism" to you is a mystery: when Tom Mattzie is found to have organized and recruited a homegrown militia in mono-color shirts to picket and/or firebomb the homes of Republican donors or whatever, get back to us.
Meanwhile, I have to find myself in agreement with the spokesman for one of AA's ostensible targets:
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| parent )No matter how carefully you write something, people will think you've said something else. I didn't say this dude is a fascist, I said he's a dumb ass. Clown works too.
However, just because he's stupid, and thuggish nonsense like this will backfire, let's not pretend it isn't thuggishness or that it would be tolerated if Democratic donors were targeted.
--“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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| parent )Since the airing of information is the kind of work that makes a republic function. Besides, folks who go into national politics know that it's a dirty business and that if you have stuff to hide, you're better in another line of work.
This AA stuff working as ideally envisioned is the kind of rough-and-tumble opposition that makes politics work.
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| parent )Uhh, Mac: let's see:
I read and re-read this section of your post pretty carefully, and I'm not sure where any misinterpretation fits in...
Anyway, as far as "thuggishness" goes, this is pretty thin stuff: I see it more as the political equivalent of various "consumer boycott" movements: which have, IIRC, a fairly spotty record at actually accomplishing much*.
And, if it were "Democratic donors" who were being targeted? Just IMHO, it would be just as stupid: and besides, Republicans usually crank up more sophisticated organizations to deal with tihs sort of stuff: "K Street Project", anyone?
*other than making Proctor & Gamble can its old 19th-Century Man-in-the-Moon logo because some religious nuts thought it was related to "Satanism"
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| parent )Did you notice how you had to bold a section to make your point? IOW, that you had to separate it from context to get where you were going. If you are familiar with Matzzie's obsessions over the last several years, the context should make sense.
Unless of course you think saying, "Bush's concentration on Africa is making him behave like a liberal" is exactly the same as saying "Bush is a liberal". If you do think that, I can see where the confusion would lie.
--“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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| parent )The whole thing makes me wince with embarrassment.
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| parent )Or bagmen like that bozo Harry Sargeant III about which I wrote some while back? The crickets chirped merrily on that diary. But let someone threaten to shine a flashlight on the giving habits of Periplaneta americana conservatii, wow, that's my Lack of Perspective showing.
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| parent )“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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| parent )http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/8/115557/4023/828/564642
Left Behind ... fiction used in an Campaign Ad... The gutter of politics... :(
--Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers. Be open to wonder and at the same time subject all claims to knowledge, without exception, to intense skeptical scrutiny. Be aware of human fallibility. Cherish your species and your
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)“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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| parent )