Have you been getting deluged by all that "Norm wrote" "Alice wrote" "Chris wrote" "Fred wrote" "Alphonso wrote" spam mail recently? If you even bothered looking at any of it (I always open junk like that in View Source so as not to activate any malicious code) you know it’s all been part of a stock "pump and dump" scam, one of many going about recently.
In most cases the companies themselves are not behind the scams. Some of these scams are believed to be related to professional Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers. Some fraudsters even gain access to legit logins on brokerage accounts to buy the penny stock they’ve artificially run-up.
In the beginning, it may have worked. Not too savvy investors believed they’d stumbled onto some secret they could exploit for money, even though people who buy into penny stock scams typically lose 25 per cent to 40 per cent of the investment’s initial value.
But these days, there are so many stock scam mails they seem to have lost their appeal. With dozens of "hot tips" it is difficult to pick a winner. Spammers may have diluted their own market…
Over the weekend another tidal wave of stock spam arrived. The Great American Food Chain (GAMN) would profit a 330 per cent gain, the spam promised, but instead the stock nosedived 11 per cent.
Ha! Serves them right. Trying to target their spam to actual stock market investors may have been too clever by half. I’ve never played the stock market, but I would imagine if I were an investor and I saw an obvious pump and dump scam arrive in my mailbox and it was about a stock I was invested in, I’d get my money the hell out of it fast. You could probably create a real time database to alert investors to pump and dump scams just by monitoring spam mail. It’s not a long term money making plan. But then crooks never think about tomorrow.
O.J. Simpson created an uproar Wednesday with plans for a TV interview and book titled “If I Did It” — an account the publisher pronounced “his confession” and media executives condemned as revolting and exploitive.
Fox, which plans to air an interview with Simpson Nov. 27 and 29, said Simpson describes how he would have committed the 1994 slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, “if he were the one responsible.”
I’m going to write a book and title it, "If I Was Gay".
When Polish student Michael Gromek, 19, went to America on a student exchange, he found himself trapped in a host family of Christian fundamentalists. What followed was a six-month hell of dawn church visits and sex education talks as his new family tried to banish the devil from his soul.
Welcome to America. You devil worshiping heathen foreigner you…
Things began to go wrong as soon as I arrived in my new home in Winston-Salem, where I was to spend my year abroad. For example, every Monday my host family would gather around the kitchen table to talk about sex. My host parents hadn’t had sex for the last 17 years because — so they told me — they were devoting their lives to God. They also wanted to know whether I drank alcohol. I admitted that I liked beer and wine. They told me I had the devil in my heart.
Luckily the kid was able to get himself into another family that wasn’t batshit crazy. I’m torn about all this though. On the one hand, this is not the image of America I want other nations to get. On the other, this is exactly why our political process here in America and why our foreign policy, is such a crazy mess and I’m not sure the rest of the world really understands that. Maybe they all need to be placed with batshit crazy fundamentalists. They need to understand our crazies. They need to know what they’re dealing with.
The parents of Russell Groff speak their minds about a post I made a couple days ago…
The court battle is not over, our son was buried like a piece of garbage, in a pine box, in a woods, where his grave will grow up with weeds. There is no perputal care. We will not stop till we get his remains buried properly, in a vault, in his family cemetery. You don’t bury someone you love like this. This has been very painful to go through all of this, losing our son, who was our live. Dealing with all of the evil that has been done. We have not been able to mourn our son, who was involved in a life style that destroyed his beautiful life, wasted, just never having a change to be somebody. He should not be dead!!! He was in essence brainwashed and endoctrinated into this lifestyle. He was controlled, manipulated, and alienated from the parents who loved him so much. This is the norm, though in a homosexual relationship. If this was such a loving relationship, why did he die of AIDS!!!!
…and so on. You can read both their comments (yes…they followed up on themselves) and my brief response back at the original post, Here.
An interesting postscript on the Maryland Senate race: Exit polls suggest that the "white lie" phenomenon, in which more white voters tell pollsters that they’ll vote for the black candidate than actually go through with it in the end, may have helped doom black Senate candidate Michael Steele. This is a phenomenon more often noted against Dems, of course, since African-American candidates are Democrats much more often than they’re Republican, but in this case, it may have harmed GOPer Steele as well.
Steele lost by 10 points — a higher spread than some pre-election polls suggested. Exit polls show that white voters split their vote evenly between Cardin and Steele, well short of the percentage of whites that ordinarily back the GOP candidate in seriously contested races in Maryland. In pre-election polls, meanwhile, respondents were promising to vote for Steele at a higher rate: a Baltimore Sun poll from five days before the election had Steele leading Cardin among whites by seven points. So the Republican candidate may have been victimized by the "white lie" after all.
You know who else suffers from this phenomenon? Right…
…most of the measures on the Nov. 7 ballot in eight other states already have strong voter support. In fact, they may be even farther ahead than they appear, because polling on the issue has been consistently and inexplicably inaccurate.
Same-sex marriage ban supporters and opponents agree that pre-election polls often undercount support for the measures.
…
Polls that underestimated support for the bans were off by as much as 19 percentage points in North Dakota and 7 to 16 percentage points in six other states.
"What it means is that if history is any guide, which I think it is, you have to subtract at least four percentage points from pre-election polls to get a more accurate reading of what the results are going to be on election day," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a gay rights group working in opposition to the amendments.
Bans are expected to pass Nov. 7 in Idaho, Virginia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee. The races still appear close in Colorado, Arizona and Wisconsin.
…
Ban supporters also account for the consistent polling error in their strategies.
"We’ve seen it, I think, in every single case, that it is underpolled every single time," said Tom McClusky, vice president of government affairs at the conservative Family Research Council. "I’ve seen higher, but normally we would add 5 to 10 percentage points to any polling."
Gay rights supporters blame people’s unwillingness to express an anti-gay opinion to a pollster for the discrepancy between polls and the ballot box…
This is why we lost in Wisconsin and South Dakota, even though the polls said we could probably win. Arizona actually surprised me. I guess people are more honest about their opinion of gay people there. But this is something I’ve seen time after time, and not just regarding same sex marriage. When Anita Bryant went on her anti-gay crusade to repeal Dade County’s anti-discrimination law, the polls showed the race was close. It wasn’t even. The vote went against gay people by about four to one.
Call it, the Guilty Conscience effect. People know discrimination is wrong. Why else would you see so many cheap rationalizations for it? Gay people aren’t being discriminated against by the marriage laws…they have the same right to marry a person of the opposite sex anyone else does… And it’s surprisingly uncynical. In years of arguing online with bigots, I keep running into this dogged insistence that as long as someone has an excuse to discriminate, no matter how pathetically lame it is, they’re not really discriminating. I am not a bigot…I’m very sorry you feel you’re being treated unfairly…but my flimsy rationalizations serve to excuse me from any and all blame for the unfairness of your situation…not that I am admitting that it’s unfair…not that I would ever admit to being a bigot…I am a Good Person… And so on… It isn’t prejudice, if you say you don’t mean it.
Some years ago, shortly after I started working up here in Baltimore, I was talking to a group of co-workers about the upcoming elections. It was 1992, and Alan Keyes was running against Barbra Mikulski. It was his second try at becoming a senator from Maryland, and that year and in that workplace of mine, sentiment was running high against democrats. These were mostly all blue collar folks where I was working then. Though I worked mostly with the managers, most of them had worked up the ranks from the field technicians they now managed. Baltimore blue collar folks through and through. And all of them white males.
This particular group of them were ranting that day, on and on about how much they didn’t like Mikulski. Mikulski was too liberal. Mikulski was too democrat. On and on it went. I was amazed and appalled at how thoroughly the republican Mighty Wurlitzer had turned what had to have been at one point a bunch of solid blue collar union democrats into republican voters. After several minutes of Mikulski bashing one of them asked me what I thought of her. By then Alan Keyes had his own reputation in the state for being a pure to the bone nutcase. So I shrugged my shoulders and said, Well…there’s always Keyes." They looked at me…a group of about a half dozen or so white middle aged, blue collar guys, and one of them finally said, "You really play dirty don’t you?" But he was grinning. The rest of them were all shaking their heads and grinning ruefully. Then I realized. What I thought I was asking them was, "Okay…but would you vote for a nutcase?" What they heard was "Okay, but would you vote for a black man?" Keyes never had a chance with them, no matter how much Limbaugh managed to make them hate liberals and democrats.
I thought about that all during this campaign here in Maryland, whenever the polls said that Steele was either winning, or close to it. All I had to do was stroll around my neighborhood and look at all the GOVERNOR EHRLICH signs in the yards, and not a single STEELE sign among them. But if it was racism that killed Steele’s chances among the Limbaugh republicans here, let it be said that he wasn’t above playing the race card himself. During the 2002 campaign, as Ehrlich’s running mate, Steele was asked if he supported adding sexual orientation to Maryland’s anti-discrimination laws. He instantly responded that there were already plenty of laws on the books protecting gay white men from discrimination.
Dig it. He took a question about gay rights, and turned it into a matter of race; of privileged white faggots riding on the coattails of the black civil rights movement. That’s straight out of the republican play book. I’d figured that Steele held the same cheapshit prejudices toward gay people Ehrlich did, or else Ehrlich wouldn’t have brought him onto the ticket. What I saw then was that he was just as big a race baiting thug as any other republican in the state.
And it came back to bite him in the ass. Welcome back to the world of the suspect classes Michael. You might have thought that being accepted into the republican machine was your ticket out of all that. It wasn’t.
Buoyed by a national tide against Republicans, Mayor Martin O’Malley declared victory in the governor’s race last night, appearing to have prevailed in his long and difficult campaign against a popular incumbent. Despite a poor showing in the crucial Baltimore suburbs, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said he will not concede until thousands of absentee ballots are counted.
With more than four-fifths of the state’s precincts reporting, Ehrlich, Maryland’s first Republican governor in a generation, faced a large deficit that he could overcome only by capturing the vast majority of absentee votes.
…
Ehrlich told several hundred backers at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore early this morning that his administration had a "decent shot" at another four years.
"We don’t know, folks, we just don’t know," Ehrlich said. "We will count the votes. We will count all the votes. … We’ve been around 20 years, and we’ve got a decent shot to be around four more."
Ehrlich’s speech interrupted O’Malley’s televised victory declaration, prompting boos from the crowd at the Hippodrome who could see the governor’s image on a big-screen television.
"I’m still waiting for the call, by the way," O’Malley said.
He’ll be waiting a long time. A lot of people in this state are under the mistaken impression that Ehrlich is a moderate. He’s nothing of the kind. He’s an Ellen Sauerbrey right wing republican kook who’s only real difference from Sauerbrey is that he was willing to put up the appearance of being a moderate so he could win elections. He has not governed as a moderate, except when he knew damn he didn’t have the votes in the statehouse to win on a particular issue. Maryland limits governors to two terms, so you would have seen a much more hard line Ehrlich in his second term, particularly if he had presidential aspirations. You can see what he’s really made of now. It’s Ellen Sauerbrey loosing badly all over again.
Republicans said they believe the governor can make up ground when the record number of absentee ballots are tallied. More than 190,000 people requested absentee ballots after calls by Ehrlich and Democratic leaders to use them as a means to bypass the state’s new electronic voting machines. More Democrats than Republicans requested absentee ballots, however.
Election workers will begin counting those ballots on scanning machines tomorrow, but election challenges from the lawyers who have been retained by both political parties could prevent a winner from being officially declared for weeks. The last time an election was this close, in 1994, the losing candidate, Ellen R. Sauerbrey, pursued a legal challenge for two months and never conceded defeat.
Go for it Bob. Let the people in the rest of the state see the real you finally.
"Father, give us grace and mercy. Father, help us this next week and a half as we go into national elections, and Lord we pray for our country. Father, we pray that lies would be exposed. We pray that deception would be exposed."
Be careful what you ask God for. Because you might get it.
I’m stealing this from Steve Gilliard, because I want to make sure you read it. But then he reposted from Wonkette. Late Night Shots is a young republican social networking website. Next time you hear some republican halfwit on Captial Hill bellyaching about welfare moms and raising the minimum wage, remember this…
As we’re sure you know by now, Late Night Shots is a closed social networking site for DC’s best and whitest. We turbos have a lot to learn from them. Their message board is home to some of the best entertainment on all the internets — but because of the closed nature of the site, not everyone can join in the fun. Thankfully, Intern Lauren is a card-carrying LNS member, and she’s gathered excerpts from some of last week’s best posts on the LNS forum. See what the fuss is about, after the jump.
My boyfriend’s dad
Posted By: HHHS00 on 10-23-2006 12:40 pm
I recently found out that the dad of the guy I am hooking up is a dentist. Where I come from dentists are looked at as sheisters. I think this guy may have been hiding it from me, and in my mind he lost some serious points after this revelation.
Lying about Greek affiliation
Posted By: very concerned on 10-19-2006 11:20 am
At age 29 if you’re dating a chick, how big of a problem is it if you’re digging through her desk and you find out that she was lying about what sorority she was in. This happened to a friend of mine.
RE: Lying about Greek affiliation
Posted By: problem on 10-19-2006 11:23 am
I think that’s a bit of an issue. More than the lying, you don’t want to date a girl who couldn’t get into a good house. It spells problems down the road.
Interview Mentality
Posted By: Williams College on 10-26-2006 1:49 am
Am I wrong to think it is a big advantage to go into an interview on the hill with a chief staff assistant knowing that he was an R.A. during college and that you were a D3 varsity athlete. It has always given me a leg up, both in terms of toughness and maturity, and I feel like it always will.
what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: cashmoney on 10-25-2006 6:21 pm
gifts? education? do you draw your line at maintenance?
RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: taxman on 10-25-2006 6:23 pm
Someone should receive absolutely no more than 30 k/yr and car payments from parents. If you’re above that, you really have problems. Girls may be entitled to a bit more than that with shopping and everything, but I feel like 30k is pretty reasonable.
RE: what are acceptable handouts from parents
Posted By: the cleaners on 10-26-2006 11:07 am
What is an acceptable allowance to give your girlfriend. $200 per week?
Absolutely no more the 30k a year. And car payments. Absolutely no more. Geeze pal…I guess you’d have committed suicide or something if you’d had my childhood, and mine wasn’t so bad by comparison. I never went to bed hungry. Never. But I wore a lot of second hand clothes until I was about 12 or so. And it wasn’t until I was 14 that we even had a car in the household. Color TV didn’t come into the house until I was about 15. A fine night eating out was a trip to Howard Johnson’s or Hot Shoppes. Vacations were to Ocean City New Jersey or Rehoboth Beach. The most exotic vacations I had when I was a kid were the two trips we made by train to Fort Lauderdale Florida when I was 7 and 8. I lived in apartments my entire life, until June of 2001 when I settled on Casa del Garrett, the little Baltimore rowhouse I have now. Home ownership did not come into my life until I was 47. And for all that, I’ve had it good compared to a Lot of other Americans.
My first real job was flipping burgers at a fast food joint. There was no money for college but I did manage three semesters of community college until dad died and I had to work full time to keep the household afloat. Mom was able to co-sign for the loan on my first car when I was 20, but I had to make the payments myself. Does it really hurt that much to have to buy your own goddamned car when you’ve clearly had the best education money can buy and on top of whatever golden job the republican network has dropped in your lap, your parents are throwing 30k a year at you too?
If I hear one more jackass pundit bellyaching that democrats are out of touch with America’s working families I’m going to fucking scream.
I Was Just Looking For A Massage And Your Name Happened To Come Up…
Okay…he’s saying that he just had a massage. No sex. Question: why is the head of one of the biggest mega churches in the country going to a guy like Mike Jones, who advertises himself as offering a "Swedish style massage with the pleasure of the man in mind. If you like a strong muscle man to bring pleasure to you then please call me. I am a muscle stud with a friendly personality…" and says among his other attributes, that his thighs are 24 inches? What the hell does thigh measure have to do with giving you a massage? And Jones is in Denver, not Colorado Springs. Why isn’t Haggard going to one of the many fine (and professional) massage clinics that a simple google search turns up right in Colorado Springs? Because they wouldn’t sell him Meth?
And… Where did Haggard find this guy? I doubt it was in the Yellow Pages. Here’s his web site (via Raw Story/PageOneQ). Compare this guy’s advertising with the Colorado Springs Search For Fitness page I linked to above and tell me they’re both in the same line of business.
"Hi Mike, this is Art. Hey, I was just calling to see if we could get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply. And I could pick it up really anytime. I could get it tomorrow or we could wait till next week sometime and so I also wanted to get your address. I could send you some money for inventory but that’s probably not working, so if you have it then go ahead and get what you can and I may buzz up there later today, but I doubt your schedule would allow that unless you have some in the house. Okay, I’ll check in with you later. Thanks a lot, bye."
He must have bought some and then thrown it away, and then decided to buy some more so he could throw that away too. And he wanted to give Mike some money for inventory so Mike would have even more that he could buy…and then throw away.
Oh…and…
Haggard says he bought the meth from a gay escort, 49-year-old Michael Jones, after contacting him for a massage.
Right. And maybe he wanted to be escorted somewhere too. Like…back to where he left his brain.
Hot damn! I just wandered over to the Freeper HQ, and scanned the recent thread about Haggard. Some Freeper posted…
"To: UncleJeff
Produce the voicemessages and emails ASAP. Let’s see them. I call Bull$*&T
15 posted on 11/02/2006 4:42:57 PM PST by sappy
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]"
So, naturally, I created a profile and immediately posted a response linking to the (alleged) audio of the voicemails (I think the link was posted here somewhere, but I could be wrong…) and then waited for my post to be ‘reviewed’.
Within minutes, the entire thread had been taken down and my posting privileges revoked…
I feel like I’ve accomplished something today. :)
This has been another episode in the Adventures of Obviousman…
This is beautiful! A stirring testimonial to all those hard working gay republicans in Washington…the congress critters…the gay staff of anti-gay congress critters…all who work diligently every day to deny equal rights not only to themselves, but to all gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans.
LAC DU FLAMBEAU, Wis. (AP) — A man attempting to rob a fireworks shop fired his shotgun, igniting fireworks and starting a blaze that destroyed the business, authorities said.
No injuries were reported at North American Fireworks, the Vilas County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement Saturday. A 20-year-old man was being held in jail after being tracked to a home about 10 miles away.
The owner told deputies a male entered the business Friday wearing a ski mask and armed with a shotgun. He fired indoors, and a shot apparently ignited fireworks, authorities said.
The owner was able to wrestle the shotgun away and remove the man’s ski mask, but the suspect fled on an all-terrain vehicle that had been idling outside, deputies said.
The fireworks began to burn out of control, destroying the rest of the building.
Ever notice that fireworks stores tend to be located well away from…well…everything else around them…?
Jim Valentine lumps gay people and pedophiles together. And he doesn’t want any of them living in Idaho.
The Post Falls business owner posted a message in bold letters on his reader board this morning: “Peds queers fags your (sic) in Idaho now…”
That’s what northbound drivers on Pleasantview Road see when they drive past the sign for his landscape supply and horse-boarding business, Dixie Services.
And…guess who’s flag he’s flying…
“People are kind of numb. I think they need to wake up a little bit,” said Valentine, who drives classic cars emblazoned with the Confederate flag. One has a horn that plays “Dixie.”
Yes Jim…people are kind of numb. And you’re kind of a numbskull. Well…I hear Idaho has its share of folks who greatly admire the Third Reich and fly the swastika, and never mind that the closest they’ve ever been to Germany is a side order of sauerkraut. Why not idiots who love the Antebellum south and fly the confederate flag too. Maybe he’ll take confederate money in exchange for his services.
You have to wonder what southerners think of all this. Ex governor of Virginia, senate candidate and all around racist prick George Allen grew up in California, yet his college dorm was festooned with confederate battle flags, and the occasional noose. He’s as southern as a Hollywood riverboat, but he longs for Dixie just like Jim does. Like all those northwestern American Slavs, Saxons and Jutes dressing up in their brownshirts and swastikas, fantasizing themselves pure blond-haired Aryan stock and longing for the Vaterland. And come to think of it, Hitler was an Austrian anyway, not a German.
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