A website run by the conservative Tea Party movement was overrun by the denizens of 4chan on Tuesday.
Website vulnerabilities on the official teaparty.org website allowed pranksters to divert surfers landing on the photo section of the site to smut and shock sites. It's unclear what website security shortcomings were exploited in that attack and whether these are now closed. Boing Boing has screenshots from the attack in a short article here (NSFW).
The assault coincides with ongoing DDoS attacks by members of 4chan against entertainment industry websites in protest against legal actions against torrent tracker website The Pirate Bay.
"Operation: Payback Is A Bitch" began over the weekend as an attack against Aiplex, an Indian firm that acts as a hired gun for Bollywood film studios, resorting to DDoS attacks on websites hosting BitTorrent trackers that fail to respond to takedown notices. The attacks moved on to assaults that flooded websites maintained by the MPAA and RIAA and, most recently, ACS:Law. ...>more
U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller, who in a recent Project Vote Smart survey opposed federal spending on agriculture, is acknowledging receiving farm subsidies during the 1990s from land that he owned in Kansas.
Miller spokesman Randy DeSoto said Miller, who is from Kansas, purchased the farmland in 1990 when he was in the Army and essentially rented it out to be farmed, finally selling the last of the 140 acres that was being farmed in 1998.
Remember Phil Davidson, the failed GOP candidate for Treasurer of Stark County, Ohio? Well, he hasn't let that setback stop him. He's already thrown his hat into the ring for the Tea Party ticket for 2012!
The Washington Post, possibly suffering a massive brain seizure due to the heat, referred to the Beckapalooza at the Lincoln Memorial as a “grassroots” event. Oh, absolutely; I’ve lost track of how many up-by-the-bootstraps, grassroots mobilizations had rallies with custom-built stages, state-of-the-art sound, high-end multi-camera video production and five or six Jumbotrons.
And, oh, did they use those Jumbotrons — to crank out a steady diet of smarmy, syrupy video trailers full of classically empty nationalistic propaganda language about the Greatest Country In The World and the Greatest People On Earth. The stage production may have been pure Albert Speer, but the video pieces were pure Reifenstahl. For a bunch of people who cherished freedom and hated being made to do something, they sure did enjoy being told what to do. Not even the most craven, tweedy Liberals enjoyed being bossed around more than this bunch.
The Posse and I could only stand in awe at the high number of pasty, doughy, Twinkie-fed folks who turned out to help Restore Honor. It’s almost a good thing Glenn Beck didn’t schedule a march, because he’d have been sued by the families of the nearly 100,000 heart attack and heatstroke victims among the roughly 200,000 who Restored Honor on Saturday. It was at this rally that the folding camp chair would become symbolic and synonymous with your slackly-rallying Teabagger.
I thought it was interesting that Beck made such a bit deal about his people not bringing signs. Did they honestly think they could cover up the rank hate and racism that oozes out of them? They may not have had signs, but we saw some nasty t-shirts at that rally. Besides, we’ve already seen plenty of them for the past year and a half, so it’s not like the rest of us don’t know who they are, and where they’re from, and what they stand for, and what they’re about... >more
NEW YORK — Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they would work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene."
Paladino, a wealthy Buffalo real estate developer popular with many tea party activists, is competing for the Republican nomination with former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio. The primary is Sept. 14.
Paladino first described the idea in June at a meeting of The Journal News of White Plains and spoke about it again this week with The Associated Press.
Throughout his campaign, Paladino has criticized New York's rich menu of social service benefits, which he says encourages illegal immigrants and needy people to live in the state. He has promised a 20 percent reduction in the state budget and a 10 percent income tax cut if elected.
Asked at the meeting how he would achieve those savings, Paladino laid out several plans that included converting underused state prisons into centers that would house welfare recipients. There, they would do work for the state — "military service, in some cases park service, in other cases public works service," he said — while prison guards would be retrained to work as counselors.
"Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we'll teach people how to earn their check. We'll teach them personal hygiene ... the personal things they don't get when they come from dysfunctional homes," Paladino said. ...>more
Last Saturday, July 31, was a day made of FAIL. The “Uni-Tea” rally was an event organized by New Jersey neo-con Jeffrey Weingarten to prove that the Tea Party wasn’t a hotbed of racism by pushing the microscopic numbers of black people who are willing to teabag for Republicans into the front lines.
Still, there were probably twice as many black people on the speakers list as there were in the actual crowd. And oh, what a crowd — an event which predicted attendance in the thousands was lucky to have two hundred people, of which less than half a dozen were people of color.
The Tea Party protests too much, we think; the more noise they make about how they aren’t racist, the less everybody believes them, especially while they continue to step on their own cranks as their supporters show up at public rallies with racist signs and their candidates for elected office pop off in public about blacks and Muslims.
An endless procession of pro-rightist shills lead by black Republican David Webb, were paraded across the stage mouthing the standard rightist tropes about free enterprise and picking one’s self up by one’s bootstraps — basically, saying what the crowd of pudgy Caucasians in folding camp chairs wanted to hear. Deneen Borelli ranted about Obama’s supposed “war on fossil fuels” and the offshore drilling moratorium even as Gulf Coast ecosystems and economies are devastated by the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Black Republican David Webb Was MC For the Event
The most gob-smacking of the bunch, though, had to be Janks Morton who, after going on for so long about God that we found ourselves silently begging him to stop, looked us all right square in the eye and told us that “healthcare is a privilege”. Yes, that’s right; this tool was basically telling us that people with catastrophic injuries and illnesses should be allowed to remain sick and debilitated — and probably die — because they aren’t rich enough to afford the “privilege” of healthcare.
The day’s headliner, Little Andy Breitbart, was in fine form, accusing the opposition of doing everything he’s guilty of — including the ham-handed doctoring of video footage — and accusing his opposition of (wait for it) slandering “the good name of Karl Rove”, while totally avoiding the issue of his own attempt to slander USDA employee Shirley Sharrod with hacked-up video footage edited to make Sherrod seem to be saying the opposite of what she actually said. He continued to hammer on that tired old “politics of personal destruction” riff while totally ignoring his destruction of ACORN with James O’Keefe’s video footage which was edited in the manner of an old Benny Hill sketch. He pissed and moaned about how the mainstream media was mistreating the Tea Party, even as he and the Tea Party were relentlessly fawned over by Fox News and now he is gaining a crowd of fans from the neo-Nazi crowd on Stormfront.com.
