Friday, October 31, 2014

BREAKING NEWS! -- Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo Gang and Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) Engaged in a Scam and Swindle to Get Birthers' Money!!

UPDATE IV:  Told ya so, it was all about money, and lies to get money.

"After two years of denying he personally profited from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office investigation into the validity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate, the head of the sheriff's Cold Case Posse admitted to CBS 5 Investigates that he accepted a large monetary gift from one of the sources in the investigation.

Mike Zullo is the man Sheriff Joe Arpaio tapped to head the investigation. Zullo manages the Cold Case Posse and is in charge of the posse's fundraising and financial management.

In response to questions emailed to him last week regarding personal use of the posse's money, Zullo responded on Tuesday:

'My answer to this question is emphatically No! These accusations that you claim you have heard are absolutely unfounded, slanderous and completely fabricated.  They are designed to cast me and this organization in a disparaging light. I am appalled at this accusation!'

One day later, after faced with evidence provided by CBS 5 Investigates, Zullo sent another email. . ."

Read and watch KPHO, Birther posse chief: I accepted $10,000 from source.

UPDATE III:   More Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) "doublespeak, double-talk and jive" saying nothing, and more proof that  Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo Gang and the Pastor are engaged in a scam and swindle.

Listen to Birther Report,  Fireworks: Carl Gallups Takes On Col. Lawrence Sellin; Sheriff Arpaio's Obama ID Fraud Investigation.

Doublespeak is "language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words."

And double-talk is "a form of speech in which inappropriate, invented or nonsense words are used to give the appearance of knowledge and so confuse or amuse the audience."
UPDATE II:  When warned that birther 'nuts' could damage his campaign, 'Sheriff' 'Scooby Doo' Arpaio responded "There ain't gonna be no damage control, you'll get more money [in campaign contributions] than you'll know what to do with."

How much money?  How about $7-8 million!!

Read Obama Conspiracy Theories, Arpaio’s millions.

I wonder what the cut is for Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man)?

UPDATE:  Since breaking the news that Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo Gang and Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) were engaged in a scam and swindle to get birthers' money,  Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) has gone silent.

What happened to the criminal investigation(s), "the two news conferences, one with Arpaio and one with Zullo", and the universe-shattering disclosures?

 Of course, since it is/was all a scam and swindle to get birthers' money, none of it will ever happen.

Birthers, hear me now, can you say sucker?

"How a power-abusing scoundrel such as Arpaio turned the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office into a 20-year-plus reign of self-aggrandizement is the subject of a new documentary, aptly named The Joe Show, which [had] its world première on Wednesday, February 26, at the Sedona International Film Festival."

Read Phoenix NewTimes News, The Joe Show Documents a Measly Sheriff's Rise to Celebrity and Power-Abusing Tyranny, which notes that part of the show is "declaring Obama's birth certificate a fraud."

An earlier post that discusses a 64 page article with a complete timeline of the delusions and lies promoted by Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang and Pastor Truthiness aka Huckster and Con Man, and concludes by asking whether Birthers are idiots, racists, or simply engaged in a scam and swindle.

In the movie the Sheriff confirms it is the later, designed to pull in campaign donations

From Read Phoenix NewTimes News, Joe Arpaio's Investigating Federal Judge G. Murray Snow, DOJ, Sources Say, and Using a Seattle Scammer To Do It:

"[At] a strategy meeting during Sheriff Joe Arpaio's 2012 re-election campaign that included Arpaio, his top flack, Lisa Allen, Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan, and campaign manager Chad Willems.

The group huddled in the back of a Fountain Hills restaurant to discuss how to spin Joe's negatives -- the misspending of more than $100 million, the deaths in the jails, the scores of millions in lawsuit payouts -- for the public.

At some point, Arpaio's 'birther' investigation came up. You know, the one in which President Barack Obama's birth certificate gets investigated by both the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's Cold Case Posse, a nonprofit organization, and MCSO Deputy Brian Mackiewicz, whom Arpaio flew to Hawaii as part of this snipe hunt, at a cost of nearly $10,000 to taxpayers.

Arpaio's March 2012 press conference -- in which the sheriff and the Cold Case Posse's 'lead investigator,' ex-used-car salesman Mike Zullo, declared Obama's birth certificate to be a forgery -- was in the planning stage when the scene was filmed.

At the mere mention of the birther investigation and the future press event, Allen and Willems practically rolled their eyes.

Willems called the birther probe 'nuts.'

Allen said the sheriff might as well go the press conference 'in big ol' clown shoes.'
Arpaio shrugged, literally.

'There ain't gonna be no damage control,' Arpaio promised Willems. 'You'll get more money [in campaign contributions] than you'll know what to do with.'

Wilier than the cartoon coyote, Arpaio had tapped into a nationwide right-wing anti-government, anti-Obama feeding frenzy with his birther probe and with his tirades against the U.S. Department of Justice, which was investigating him for abuse of power and other issues and is now suing him in federal court.

'The DOJ is a hot item everywhere,' Joe told his flunkies.

See, whenever Arpaio's never-ending political campaign sends out an e-mail blast begging for loot from Obama-haters, it reels in contributions from retired, far-right ofays all over the country.

Willems essentially admitted as much in another scene from the film.

'Now, with Arpaio going to battle with Barack Obama,' Willems said, 'it's meant literally millions of dollars for his campaign.'

As everybody knows, Arpaio was re-elected in 2012, but the investigation into Obama's birth certificate continues apace, according to both Arpaio and Cold Case Posse 'commander' Zullo.

At the beginning of May, Arpaio mentioned the birther probe during a speech before a group of Silicon Valley conservatives.

Around the same time, he appeared on The Right Side, a conservative cable-access show in Mountain View, California. He told host Chris Pareja that the inquiry into Obama's birth certificate was going strong.

'I'm not done with that yet,' Arpaio insisted. 'People think I surrendered. No . . . I'm trying to find out who's behind it now. That's the key. You can always have a crime to investigate, but I think you would like to know who did it.'

The sheriff said he was after whoever created this 'forged, fraudulent document,' meaning a computer scan of the president's long-form birth certificate, released by the White House in April 2011.

Arpaio's statements have paralleled assurances from Zullo during periodic interviews with Florida pastor/radio host Carl Gallups that new revelations concerning the Obama birth certificate are on the way.

Critics of birthers regularly mock Zullo's vague pronouncements on Gallups' show as never resulting in any 'new' finds.

Why, even the information disclosed during Arpaio's two birther-themed press conferences in 2012 were a rehash of debunked conspiracy theories. . .

Zullo promised to release 'universe-shattering' results of these investigations in March, a deadline Zullo since has extended indefinitely."

The article goes on to describe how Arpaio is "getting played" by "person who purportedly convinced Arapio of [his] paranoid fantasy . . . [a] computer fraudster [who was ] the subject of a 2010 Playboy exposé titled 'The Man Who Conned the Pentagon', and concludes:

"Arpaio's racist, wing-nut supporters would consider it an act of bravery that their hero is investigating federal officials getting in the way of keeping despised Latinos in their place.

Meaning more money in the sheriff's perpetual re-election kitty and proving that bogus investigations continue to pay off."

Friday, October 10, 2014

The Nonsense of Pastor Poppins

UPDATE VI:  "A German scientist named Klaus Conrad coined [the term] apophanie (from the Greek apo, away, and phaenein, to show) in 1958 . . . [to describe] the acute stage of schizophrenia, during which unrelated details seem saturated in connections and meaning. Unlike an epiphany—a true intuition of the world’s interconnectedness—an apophany is a false realization. . . . a weakness of human cognition: the 'pervasive tendency … to see order in random configurations,' an 'unmotivated seeing of connections,' the experience of 'delusion as revelation' . . . 'the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidences.' . .

expert detectors of conspiracies in random events, whispers in radio static, and the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese."

Read Slate, It’s All Connected

UPDATE V:  Extraordinary coincidences are not godly miracles, in fact "extremely improbable events are commonplace. Since that may sound like a contradiction, let’s take a closer look.

The improbability principle is composed of five laws, analogous to the four laws of thermodynamics or Newton’s three laws of motion. These laws, the law of inevitability, the law of truly large numbers, the law of selection, the law of the probability lever, and the law of near enough, explain exactly why we should expect to encounter highly unlikely events, and indeed why we should expect to do so on a regular, even frequent, basis. Any one of the laws acting by itself can lead to a highly improbable event—like people winning the lottery twice, or 26 black numbers coming up one after another in roulette. (The details of these as well as many other apparently extraordinarily unlikely events are given in my book.) But the impact of the principle gets even stronger when the laws intertwine and work together."

Read Slate, It’s Not Actually a Miracle.

UPDATE IV: Pastor Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Poppins) is fond of citing current events as fulfillment of 'prophesy' of the soon-to-be apocalypse (in support of his personal religious myths of course). Why are people addicted to such 'predictions?' Read The New York Times, Bold Predictions: Always Enticing, Often Wrong.


UPDATE III: Mike did a beautiful take down of Bob's complaint that he wasn't getting a social security COLA increase, pointing out that people are fiscal hypocrites.

The scary part, neither of them thought it was the lest bit ironic. Bob and Joe (who called later), people like him, and Pastor Poppins of Pensacola are clueless.


UPDATE II: Then Pastor Poppins of Pensacola spoke approvingly of the Republi-con bestiality candidate.

I wonder if his church members would agree?


UPDATE: On today's show, Pastor Poppins of Pensacola just said there were WMDs found in Iraq after the invasion.

Still makin that bitter medicine of the truth (there were no WMDs in Iraq) go down, with those spoons full of lies.

What do Pastor Poppins of Pensacola and Paul the octopus have in common? Nonsense correlations. Read The New York Times, The Oracle of Oberhausen.

So Thursday's question will be:

Is God speaking to us through Paul and oil spills and our very own Pastor Poppins, Pensacola's prophet with 'special insight', or

Is it just ""temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events," also known as synchronicity.

Tune in from 4:05 to 6:00 p.m. at 1330 AM WEBY (and on line, courtesy of Cyber Smart Computers) and find out.