Author: buffalopundit

Shoes

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UK Border

During my recent travels, I was lucky enough to encounter a security scheme that was distinctly post post-9/11 and rational.

Security at Toronto Pearson and London Heathrow did not make us remove our shoes.

At Pearson, it was because my family holds NEXUS passes, meaning we are pre-screened and designated as low-risk, trusted travelers. We flash the NEXUS card and get to cut the line, and when we arrive at screening, we were able to keep our shoes on. Oh, glorious day! 

Although Heathrow made us remove iPads as well as laptops from our carryons, shoes could stay on there, too.

When approaching security at T5 at Heathrow, there were greeters at the entryway handing out free liter-sized ziploc bags for passengers to use for liquids. There were easily 20 open security lanes, all moving rapidly with minimal lines. The bins used for loose items were conveniently obtained via an automatic dispenser under the conveyor belt – not by having to go back for a mess of buckets for 4 people and their stuff.

But the shoes – not having to remove shoes makes a huge difference in terms of speed and at least perceived convenience.

Paladino and Thompson Either Lied or Hacked

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In Sunday’s Buffalo News, Bob McCarthy lazily transcribed tea party guy and Paladino henchman Rus Thompson thusly: 

[Rus] Thompson said the Paladino campaign engaged investigators to track the email trail.

“So we know where it came from,” he said.

I wrote about that here, yesterday. Paladino and Thompson both cite the release of the emails as being the last straw in the Higgins – Paladino relationship, because Paladino accuses Higgins of leaking them. Thompson tells McCarthy that they had proof via some “investigation”. 

But others who were involved in that campaign say there was no such “investigation”. 

Anyone with even minimal knowledge knows that you can’t “investigate” and “track” an outgoing email trail unless you have access to the recipient’s email. One can’t go into Paladino’s outbox and determine what the recipients of a particular email did with it. You can’t determine what any of the recipient’s recipients did with a particular email, etc. If Paladino felt it was embarrassing and caused “anguish” for his racist, pornographic emails to reach the general public, it was his responsibility to not share them. 

On the other hand, if Paladino and Thompson are alleging that an investigator really did learn who sent the email to me, the only way that could have happened is if they hacked into or otherwise illegally accessed my personal Gmail account – i.e., committed a crime. It’s lose:lose. Had Bob McCarthy verified the information his dopey source mouthshat at him, he could have factored that into the semi-informed, drool-moistened nonsense he wrote regarding a turning point in the relationship he was profiling.  

Here’s what McCarthy’s source had to say for himself when challenged yesterday: 

That’s pretty definitive and not open to interpretation. Rus KNOWS. 

Watch Rus take the “investigation” bike and start pedaling backwards: 

 

The timestamp is about 3 – 4 hours later than EST, and as of this morning there’s no reply to that. Why? Because there is no “investigation”. There was no fantastical “tracking” of what one of the people on Carl’s email list did with the emails once they received it. They can’t produce the name of the person who disclosed the emails to me, and they have absolutely no proof that Higgins or his staff provided me with the emails. 

When you let sources lie to you on the record, and you don’t reach out to other people involved to verify the information, you’re committing some pretty shoddy “journalism” there.

Paladino, Higgins, and McCarthy

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In an article that appeared in Sunday’s Buffalo News, Congressman Brian Higgins and his cousin-by-marriage Carl Paladino exchanged metaphorical f*ck yous. Frankly, it’s hardly news that a Democratic politician is at odds with opportunistic tea party figurehead Carl Paladino. 

But in Bob McCarthy’s article, it was revealed that the rift became irreparable after Chris Smith, Marc Odien, and I reported on Paladino’s happy forwarding of ugly racist and pornographic text and images to political figures and developers around the region. 

Release of the emails

Paladino’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign seemed doomed after a Buffalo website revealed his practice of emailing racist and pornographic jokes to friends.

At the time, Caputo (who has since broken with Paladino) told reporters he had been approached by a Higgins “emissary” who promised “everything would come out” if Paladino ran for governor.

Though he sent jokes to many friends on his email list, Paladino then and now blames Higgins’ staff for the leak.

“That was the end,” Paladino says now. “I knew he did it. And it only caused more anguish in the family than we already had.”

Typical narcissistic tween stuff, that. Paladino doesn’t blame himself for sending out images using the word “nigger” or showing the President of the United States and his wife as a pimp and whore – it’s someone else’s fault that he got found out, causing “anguish” to his family.  Had he kept his racism and pornography to himself, Mr. Paladino could have saved his own family all that “anguish”. 

[Rus] Thompson said the Paladino campaign engaged investigators to track the email trail.

“So we know where it came from,” he said.

I publicly challenge Rus Thompson – Paladino’s driver and errand-boy – to release the “investigation” that “tracked” the email trail. I would like to see proof in some form to back up what he’s talking about. Does Rus really think, for instance, that if he forwards one particular chain e-mail that Microsoft and Bill Gates will pay him money? 

Higgins denies that he or his staff leaked the emails, pointing out that Paladino’s email list included dozens of people who could have released the jokes.

Here’s a question – at any point do you think that the Buffalo News’ Bob McCarthy contacted Chris Smith, Marc Odien, or me to ask us to confirm or deny whether we received the Paladino emails from Brian Higgins or his people? Do you think that the author of this article made the effort to take to Facebook, Twitter, this blog, Artvoice, WNYMedia.net, or asked one of his colleagues for our numbers to see what we had to say about this particular matter? 

At no time did McCarthy ask the people who published the emails where they came from, or whether they came from a Higgins source. Think about it – the emails were sent to a long string of people. They were not secret – many, many people knew about them and former campaign manager Michael Caputo has stated that he knew about the emails, that he knew they were an issue, and that they focus-grouped them, finding that the racist ones were particularly problematic. 

When your campaign knows that the emails are an issue, and that any one of the recipients – or the recipients’ recipients – could have leaked them to the press, pointing the finger at the local Congressman who disagrees with your conclusion that Obamacare is worse than 9/11, to maintain a feud over them is idiotic. 

In the end, Carl Paladino is unable and unwilling to acknowledge that his own behavior is his own fault. These are things that normal people learn before they enter middle school. And journalists learn to check their sources – if Paladino and Rus Thompson say they know how the emails got to Chris, Marc, and me, you should probably check with one of us. 

Bias in the Newsroom

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Next time you listen to a newscast – a purportedly straight newscast reported-on by Steve Cichon or Dave Debo, or anchored by John Zach and Susan Rose – remember that this banner is now hanging in that station’s newsroom: 

That’s after the station spent all day last Thursday “covering” this anti-gun rally in Albany, joining with Carl Paladino to sponsor a bus caravan of WBEN listeners to the rally. 

The funny thing is that protests in Albany are a dime a dozen, and the only novelty about this one is that it was populated by underemployed conservatives who are not used to activism that goes beyond stating their name and location for a call screener. 

WBEN’s blatant anti-SAFE Act propaganda and agitation are all well and good, I suppose, but the station should no longer masquerade as a straight news outlet. It has crossed the line into issue-based PAC and should register with the Board of Elections. Thursday’s newscast and subsequent talk shows were nothing more than an infomercial for people who think that limiting magazine capacity from 10 to 7 rounds is “tyranny”. 

Andrew Cuomo and Reductio ad Hitlerum

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At yesterday’s WBEN-sponsored gun rally in Albany, where we were meant to understand that a reduction of legal maximum magazine size from 10 to 7 is a Constitutional infringement, there were the predictable ad hominem attacks against Governor Cuomo. Some of the protesters likened the Governor of New York State to Adolf Hitler, the genocidal totalitarian dictator of Germany from 1933 – 1945, who waged total war against free peoples throughout the world. So, here’s a handy chart to help set that record straight. 

A Question

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Which is Buffalo and WNY’s bigger problem?

The poor quality of substantive policy decisions, or the process and its utter lack of meaningful merit or transparency? Or is it simply that the process is the direct and intended result of poor policy, thus making the whole thing an interconnected, overcomplicated mess that help keeps government acts and omissions from adequate public review and scrutiny? 

 

Paladino: Un-American Obama's Values not American, But I'm No Birther (Update)

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Carl Paladino claims he’s no birther; those birther bumper stickers he’s been telling his Thrifty and Dollar rent-a-car employees to slap on vehicle bumpers are really about…

“I’m not a birther, I’m an American,” he declared. He said he was “fed up” with Obama after the attack and murder of four Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11. He said the president is not telling the truth about what happened and that Obama defies basic American precepts and has weakened the country.

“For that reason, I don’t believe he is an American. I don’t think he fosters the American ideals,” Paladino said. “I could care less where Obama was born. I don’t feel he is an American with American values doing the best for America.”

Well, there you are. Carl says he’s not really a birther, so we’ll print what Carl says and accept it at face value. But is it the truth? On Saturday, I linked to Carl’s latest email compendium of Obama hatred, which contains this (everything is [sic]): 

….FINALLY the REAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE….

 It appears this might be getting legs, we can only hope!

CAN’T BELIEVE SNOPES VERIFIED THIS AS TRUE, SINCE THEY TEND TO DENY ANY OTHER FACTS ABOUT HIM.

 Obamas authentic birth certificate from Coast Memorial Hospital , in Mombasa , KENYA . Now the task is to get the courts to authenticate it and then kick Obama out of office, something they are loathe to do.

 Here it is! The document we have been waiting for! Now if only SOMEONE in Congress or the Supreme Court will act on this!

This is what Obama has spent almost $2M (so far) to hide.

Here’s a close-up of the top of the document where you can plainly read his name and his parent’s names, etc..

A British history buff was asked if he could find out who the colonial registrar was for Mombasa in 1961.

After only a few minutes of research, he called back and said “Sir Edward F. Lavender Note the same name near the bottom of the photo above.

Source(s): Kenya Dominion Record 4667 Australian library.”

And here is a close-up of the bottom of the document where you can read “Coast Providence�of Kenya ” and the…

It goes on like that for quite some time; it’s 1,220 words long. That’s how “not a birther” Carl Paladino is. That’s the city’s singular paper merely transcribing that Carl says he’s not a birther, but on October 15th he was emailing a veritable Orly Taitz-worthy birther tome to his copious email recipient list.  Why is this, you think? Why deny what he quite clearly is? Bad for business? Here’s what Thrifty has to say about it: 

Thrifty Car Rental does not condone the placement of political materials on our corporate rental cars nor is it associated with any particular political position. The alleged incident involves a licensee of ours, acting as an independent business operation. We have been assured that the situation has been rectified.

We are meant uncritically to believe that it wasn’t until the September 11th Benghazi attack that Carl Paladino became “fed up” with President Obama. Here’s a gem from February 2012: 

See? The worst pundit ever says Obama is giving up American sovereignty willy-nilly! Carl wasn’t “fed up” then? He wasn’t fed up with Obama when, for instance, he went all-in for Newt Gingrich, and declared that Mitt Romney was “not conservative”?

Not only did Paladino circulate the above-quoted birther nonsense in mid-October, but he found and shared the information to his “friends” in August, well before the attack in Benghazi: 

Let’s not forget those heady days in 2009 – after Obama’s election, and before Paladino’s “values” became widely known. There was this (partial scan): 

 Also in 2009, early birther-movement-adopter Paladino forwarded to his large list of email followers a trope called “meet the Soetoros“, to further indicate that Obama is an Indo-Kenyan candidate. 

Carl Paladino has every right to use “America” as many times as possible in any sentence he concocts, and he’s wholly entitled to believe whatever nonsense he peddles. But when he makes a claim about not being a birther, perhaps we should examine whether that’s true or not. Again: 

For that reason, I don’t believe he is an American. I don’t think he fosters the American ideals,” Paladino said. “I could care less where Obama was born. I don’t feel he is an American with American values doing the best for America.

Also, America. How do you not care where Obama was born when, in the next sentence you aver that Obama is not “an American”? How do those two statements jibe? And who is Carl Paladino to lecture anyone about American values and American ideals?  Thank God Carl hasn’t found out about this BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO OF OBAMA BEING BORN IN KENYA. 

Obama Sr filmimg his sons birth in Kenya from Peter R on Vimeo.

 The Frankenstorm brings with it lots of rain. You may want to double-check that it isn’t really Mr. Paladino pissing on your leg. 

 

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