It’s Thursday and the day after the State of the Union address. Amazingly, I’m not hung over. President Obama didn’t say “let me be clear” one time last night (that I caught). Although he did say “Middle Class,” “jobs” and “Main Street.” (My own personal drinking game.) Let’s open this thread.
The teabuggers were pretty stupid. An expert weighs in:
The affidavit itself reads like a bad script for an episode of the A-Team. Two members of the group dressed up as telephone repairmen and attempted to gain access to the telephone closet. They headed for the Senator’s office, attempted pretexting and were directed to the GSA office down the hall where the plot was uncovered when the pair were asked for identification and claimed to have left it in their van.
Now it is quite possible that a GSA employee would have been trained to recognize a telephone company ID badge, but I don’t know what one looks like and the typical security guard at a non-government facility wouldn’t either. For a few hundred bucks the conspirators could have bought a second hand badge printer on EBay to create their own badges and greatly reduced the chance of getting caught.
Using fake ID reduces the risk of being caught but increases the penalties if caught. Possession of a fraudulent access device is a federal crime, as is possession of means to create fraudulent access devices. Using real identification greatly increases the risk of being caught, but some do so anyway.
The post goes on to identify some of the security procedures of a federal building. Don’t let conservatives tell you that this is just some young guys pulling a prank. These guys are a part of the conservative think tank system. Each of them get some kind of paycheck from the VRWC. Dai was also representing himself as some kind of national security expert and was paid for this. O’Keefe was funded by Breitbart and Flanagan belonged to some conservative think tank. These three guys also started “alternative” conservative newspapers at their college, which is apparently how to get noticed and invited into the VRWC.
Oh, my. They just can’t help themselves, can they?
TeaParty.org, a Houston-based group founded by Dale Robertson, yesterday sent an email fund-raising solicitation, obtained by TPMmuckraker, headlined “Obama Pimping Obama-Care, One Last Time!”
The photograph below — showing the president as a stereotypical African-American pimp, sporting a pencil-thin mustache and a zebra-striped, fur-brimmed fedora, complete with a feather — illustrated the theme:
