This ain’t Hell, but you can see it from here …but you can see it from here

I’ve always been a quiet fan of Sniper’s work, but this one really shines

I guess we’re the last blog on the internet to post this. Sorry, I’ve been playing Tinker Toys with new furniture all weekend.

We at This Ain’t Hell have been following Adam Kokesh for almost three years now and anticipated his run at Congress. Now other bloggers have picked up on our ground work. Cassy Fiano interviewed Kokesh’s opponent Tom Mullins in the New Mexico 3rd District Republican primary. Here are some excerpts from Fiano’s questioning;

Cassy Fiano: What are your thoughts on Adam Kokesh’s anti-military activities?

Tom Mullins: I disagree with Adam’s positions regarding our military. I support Guantanamo Bay being open. We are not occupiers. Adam’s activities offend the many veterans, including my father, that I have met. We are not the world’s policeman. We have a volunteer military. Our military men and women deserve support from our elected officials and all members of the American public. I don’t understand how Adam’s actions are “Constitutional”. Adam is nothing more than an Internet Celebrity and a War Protester. I don’t believe New Mexicans agree with his views or his methods to share or voice them.

CF: What made you decide to run for office?

TM: I have never run for nor held public office. I have watched silently as our country is being destroyed. I became more active in the past few years… but became frustrated. When asked what I could do, I decided the most important thing I could do would be to take away the job of the person making these decisions and responsible for holding the executive branch accountable. This is personal. My children’s future and our nation’s future is at stake. I’ve already served as a Tea Party organizer, and now is the time for me to serve our country and New Mexico as its next Congressman.

I’ve been battling along side Bev Perlson, Concretebob and Suzanne, among others on The 9-12 Project website over Kokesh’s candidacy for the last two days. It’s clear to me that Kokesh’s supporters are nothing but a bunch of Ron Paul retreads with screen names like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson with mud-puddle-deep intellect. They use the Constitution as a shield to protect them from serious discussion. They’re fond of saying brilliant things like “Kokesh is the Real Deal” without any idea of what might actually be a real deal.

This fellow Tom Mullins appears to be a genuine Republican whose heart is in the right place. I rhink he deserves our support. You can become a fan of Mullins on Facebook and donate to his campaign at his website.

Thanks to Ben for the link to the interview.

ADDED: An update from the NM GOP state preprimary convention;

3rd Congressional District

• Tom Mullins – 80.5 percent

• Adam Kokesh – 19.5 percent

It’s not clear at this point if Kokesh has earned his way on the ballot. There’s some sort of recount going on and there’s also a question about whether numbers should be rounded up. Stay tuned.

Apparently, a candidate needs to garnish 20% to appear on the ballot. Thanks to my mole in NM.

Howell Raines is the disgraced former editor of the New York Times who was forced resigned due to his involvement in the Jayson Blair scandal. He was responsible for the “diversity above all” atmosphere that inhabited the newsroom at the Times that allowed Jayson Blair to be continually promoted despite his shoddy reporting. Raines also quite clearly failed to do his job as an editor and failed to pick up on the fact that Blair was embellishing most of his stories.

But despite his obviously failings as an editor and his role in creating one of the biggest journalistic scandals in recent history, Raines still thinks that he comment with authority on the state of media in America today. In a column in the Washington Post, Raines goes after Fox News for its coverage of the healthcare issue. Here is the opening paragrah:

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

I think a better question would be who hasn’t tried to blow the whistle on Fox News? The only point to MSNBC’s existence (which ironically evolved from a network Roger Ailes founded) seems to be to bash Fox News. Not to mention the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and just about every other major newspaper in the country runs a hit piece on Fox or one of its anchors on a pretty much a weekly basis. Oh and if you want to talk about propaganda campaigns, why not talk about the slobbering love affair that was the mainstream media’s relationship with the Obama campaign in 2008?

The American people and most of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The elections of 1948, 1960, 1964, 2000 and 2008 confirm the point, with majorities voting for candidates supporting such change. Yet congressional Republicans have managed effective campaigns against health-care changes favored variously by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. Now Fox News has given the party of Lincoln a free ride with its repetition of the unexamined claim that today’s Republican leadership really does want to overhaul health care — if only the effort could conform to Mitch McConnell’s ideas on portability and tort reform.

Healthcare was not the dominant issue in all those elections and those presidents weren’t elected simply to reform healthcare. Anybody with any sense of American political history in the 20th Century would know that. Nice try changing history Raines.

My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox’s financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes’s proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him. (Remember his ridiculing of one early anchor, Paula Zahn, as being inferior to a “dead raccoon” in ratings potential when she dared defect to CNN?) It’s as if we have surrendered the sword of verifiable reportage and bought the idea that only “elites” are interested in information free of partisan poppycock.

Having watched Paula Zahn’s show on both CNN and Fox, I can say that is definitely a proven fact that a dead racoon is more interesting and could garner better ratings.

As for Fox’s campaign against the Obama administration, perhaps the only traditional network star to put Ailes on the spot, at least a little, has been his friend, the venerable Barbara Walters, who was hosting ABC’s Sunday morning talk show. More accurately, she allowed another guest, Arianna Huffington, to belabor Ailes recently about his biased coverage of Obama. Ailes countered that he should be judged as a producer of ratings rather than a journalist — audience is his only yardstick. While true as far as it goes, this hair-splitting defense purports to absolve Ailes of responsibility for creating a news department whose raison d’etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation’s political discourse.

Raines conveniently fails to mention that Huffington is an unabashed liberal who runs a left-wing news website whose “raison d’etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation’s political discourse”. Naturally she is going to attack someone who she views as competition. Not to mention that Walters is also a frequent guest on Fox, especially on O’Reilly’s show.

I also have no doubt that Ailes is in the ratings business before the political business. If left-wingers like Olbermann and Maddow could pull the ratings they would be on Fox. But instead they are stuck getting their asses beat by their competitors on Fox because their shows suck.

The conclusion:

As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.

So what would the fuck would you call journalism Mr. Raines? Continually promoting a reporter who obviously was fabricating many of his stories simply because he was black? Compromising sensitive national security programs while you keep quiet about your own reporters being kidnapped in Afghanistan? Displaying an incredible amount of bias towards conservative and Republican political figures? If thats your version of journalism, than I guess the New York Times is the most pure journalistic institution in the country.

The fact that the Washington Post would print trash like this written by a hack like Raines says a lot about the state of “America’s old-school news organizations”. They are in their death-throes, but they refuse to admit it.

Last month Jonathon Turley the GWU law professor said that if the Stolen Valor Act stands up to judicial scrutiny, it would criminalize bar pick up lines. Well, here’s a test case for him;

A Sterling Heights man police said illegally wore a U.S. Marine uniform in a downtown nightclub and falsely told police he just returned from Iraq pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor Thursday.

De Hieu Tran, 41, pleaded guilty at a pre-trial hearing in Ferndale 43rd District Court to charges of wearing a uniform when not in service and driving on a suspended license, according to court records.

He faces up to 90 days in jail and a $500 fine on the uniform charge and is scheduled to be sentenced in Ferndale District Court at 1 p.m. April 8.

Ferndale police said they spotted Tran at the Boogie Fever nightclub about 11:30 p.m. May 22, 2009 wearing a camouflage Marine uniform.

“He stated he had just returned from his fourth tour of duty in Iraq a couple of hours earlier,” said Ferndale police Sgt. Patrick Jones. “He had captain’s bars on the collars of the uniform. The officer questioned him and determined he was impersonating an officer.”

Yeah, that’s the fastest way to get arrested - wear a camouflage uniform to a place called Boogie Nights. That doesn’t stand out at all.

Thanks to one of our lurkers, Chris, for the link.

I know I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. In today’s Wall Street Journal, the editorial board warns Illinois governor, Pat Quinn, against raising taxes with a piece entitled Maryland’s Mobile Millionaires.

Thanks in part to its soak-the-rich theology, Maryland still has a $2 billion deficit and Montgomery County is $760 million in the red. Governor Martin O’Malley’s office tells us he wants the higher rates to expire “as scheduled at the end of 2010.” But there are bills in both chambers of the legislature to extend the surcharge. The state’s best hope is that politicians in other states are as self-destructive as those in Annapolis.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 2300 millionaires fled Maryland between 2007 and 2008 when Governor O’Malley hiked taxes on millionaires from 4.75% to 9.3%. Now, I’m no millionaire, but my new job is a stone’s throw from Maryland, so I could choose either Maryland or West Virginia for my new home. I chose West Virginia and my income tax withholding tumbled $1800/year. Since I’m not a millionaire, to me that’s a lot of money. I could go on about the savings that resulted from my choice to move to West Virginia, but you probably wouldn’t believe it.

So if thousands of millionaires left, how many non-millionaires left, I wonder, and how much additional income taxes went with them?. Did I mention that the Republican governor, Robert Erlich left O’Malley almost a billion dollar surplus in 2007 and by the end of the year O’Malley was raising taxes? So when will liberals learn about tax hikes?

The folks at POW Net sent me this article from KATU’s local news about an 80-year-old busted in Portland Oregon named Lafayette Keaton who has been playing hero for decades. In the audio file above, you listen to him ramble on about his war experiences. The story he’s reciting about the Los Banos rescue happened when he was 15 years old.

Yeah, he spent time in the Army, but he never served in any war - he showed up in Korea after the shooting stopped. He never went to Ranger School, according to Fort Benning, never went to jump school, according to Fort Benning. But fraud is nothing new for Keaton;

In addition to his lies, Keaton has just been indicted on voter and Social Security fraud, accused of stealing the identity of his dead son and dead brother.

But that’s not all.

In 1960 he was convicted of endangering a child. In 1972 he was convicted of kidnapping a toddler he fathered, but he got that conviction expunged.

In the 1980s, he was sent to prison for taking thousands of dollars from the state for creating a fictitious foster home. Up until that time he worked as a juvenile parole officer.
It was then Keaton began rewriting his history.

He’s nothing but a petty criminal - good on the locals for busting him.

ADDED: The folks at POW Net send this link to their collection of Keaton’s chicanery with a proviso that that this only the tip of the iceburg, but that law enforcement agencies are holding much of his antics close to their vests.

Also I could not help but notice that the signs say SocialistWorker on the bottom.

I get that grammar errors happen but if your going to protest about increased tuition for college education, perhaps you should double check it first before becoming your own worst argument. I mean you are on FailBlog, the mother of the Epic Fail. Sucks to be you.

Fixed