For Lazy Readers, from 2012: When Fixers Get Book Deals that Flop

Ed.-Not even that long after Deborah Jeane Palfrey's body had cooled, the very class of people (who had worked in the same office as the scum who ran her to her death), Allison Leotta, who left her job to write her "big book," penned a fictionalization of the DC Madam case. Regardless of what she'd probably say about the case, one would have to assume it would always be fiction. But, hey, these are flush times for the people who serve the people who serve power. Or are they? And regardless of what most of them will say, they're not protecting you, unless of course it's an unforeseen side-effect. Then, they'll take all the credit in the world for it at the DOJ.

I don't serve anybody's fucking agenda.

This, presumably, being the Land of Opportunity for professional fixers--the people who wipe the congressional asses of eternal children with impulse control problems for a living--Leotta scored what I would never want or accept: a book deal with the rapidly sinking (good) publishing powerhouse Simon & Schuster. 

Thankfully, the book didn't go anywhere, so I hope she's saddled with all that debt I assume was in her standard contract under "recoupable losses," or whatever guarded language they & their attorneys hid it under. You see, the public, contrary to whatever they might say, hates the truth, so the lack of sales on her part was a little hard for me to fathom. However, being human, or facsimiles thereof, the American public will do anything they can to run away from stories with a bad ending--in Jeane's case, her death. This doesn't keep some of them from speculating about the case along flat-earther lines. How could it when our toxic culture produces concentrated radioactive irrationality as its greatest export?

When I found out about this stupid woman's piece of crap novel, I was outraged. Indeed, as in other cases, I found it important to counter her comments. So, as you can imagine, I posted comments online at some of the sites that were opening their doors to her (hey, don't they for everyone?) as though it were coordinated from the start since she wasn't giving away any secrets on endemic corruption anyway, just bullshit wrapped in...don't know, don't care.

And so, here's where it went: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2012/06/former-ausa-allison-leotta-writes-novel.html

PS: There are no pictures in my book either, fuck you very much.

Dumb cup of coffee™

It's National Coffee Day, and I don't care.

What's going on?

I've been writing again. For over a year after the completion of my first book, I took time off to rest and recuperate, it being a five year journey, and a solitary one at that. Some of what I've been working on is general research into future projects that are non-fiction, while others are short stories--most in early drafts, embryonic form--and one fictional screenplay that might end up being a short film of around ten minutes, one reel.

My feeling now is that I would prefer to work on fiction with some non-fiction essays and research on a few narrow topics. I'm not telling what they are right now for a variety of reasons. Pets, caring for my ailing mother, yardwork, work of all kinds, & helping my niece do homework. Life's pretty good right now. No one's fucking with that. Expectations require throwing money. In other words, serious enquiries only. I am very open to questions and comments about the DC Madam book. However, I know a waste of time when I see one and you'll be ignored if you ask impertinent ones or simply want to have some catharsis with me thanks to your bad childhood.

Speaking (more like writing-or "writhing") of that, as the world has become more hopelessly lost, I've become more obsessed with cinema, not really a surprise, but there it is. Because of that, I'm thinking of keeping this blog going but starting another one that's only about movies, therefore, it will have reviews and some commentary, observations, and whatnot, on the current state of cinema and where it's been.

Oddly, the hits to the blog have risen substantially while I've been fucking around on Twitter. Top three nations of readers are as follows, in order: USA, France, & the Ukraine, fancy that. Yes, the less you write, the more people want to read. Human beings are perverse like that.

And in the spirit of that thought, that's all you're getting for now.

DC Madam trial transcript links

Ed.-I posted these not long ago, it's just down the page a few posts, but to newer readers (?), this should make things easier: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2012/12/dc-madam-trial-transcripts.html

 For reasons unknown, I was the first to post these online in their totality. Insofar as I can tell, no one else has followed suit. 

What libertarianism really is, at base

It doesn't get any closer to the truth than this: 

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted,
socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The
other, of course, involves orcs.  

 This was a quote from writer John Rogers, I couldn't have put it any better myself, and yes, I know idiots obsessed with both novels, right Greg?

"Who are you?"

Why do people ask this? That's like asking someone to describe a color. Everything you would want to know is on this blog. Take a look around, read. I'm a writer, that's who I am. By this point, I've made it clear where I stand on most issues, political, cultural, and otherwise. Beyond my book Let the Dead Bury the Dead, most of the answers to your questions are here.

The rest you don't get to know because all men are islands and all the self-help gurus can't get their shit together either.

Postscript: I make no claims of perfection.

A Recent Reflection on the DC Madam Case

Everyone has an opinion, even people who clearly don't know anything about the topic and weren't involved. This is typical of people the world over, but this obsession, then, with being "right" takes over, which is very Germanic, yet in its worst form, uniquely American. 

Few know it, but this dumbo mining camp of a nation was founded on a conspiracy theory, a pervasive form of mental illness in the modern world to explain things simply: that the Vatican was working to enslave Protestants in the Colonies through the throne of King George III. It didn't matter that there was no truth to it, many believed, and it was part of motivating a normally apathetic mob into action (it still didn't work on everybody, just the incredibly stupid ancestors of the Tea Party movement). People believe what they want.

Unless you've actually written a thesis in your life and you can back up your statements, I don't care. You have to make me care by making real effort. I will not debate idiots. There it is.

C'est la vie

You have to laugh when things begin to happen--constructive ones, nothing weird, now--without any effort: writing, creating, and even traffic to your website. It seems the less you do these days, the more happens, and that makes a lot of sense in an era where there's to much coming at you, so, you look for your own "port in the storm." People need some kind of a niche that makes some kind of sense in a chaotic and confusing world, God knows.

This makes all the sense in the world, and in that spirit, without much effort, my site traffic has tripled (not a BIG deal, mind you) without any effort and me neglecting this blog for about a year to finally catch my breath--what little there is of it. What's always interesting are the "whys." Everyone wants to know why. I'm no exception.

I've written on a wide variety of topics: the DC Madam (which went on far longer than I would have imagined), geopolitics, history (a lifelong interest), art (ditto), cinema (a more recent obsession), tidbits of high weirdness, and simply put, my observations on any number of subjects. I make no claims of being a scholar of them, but there it is: I have many interests, too many. What you find when you write about certain topics is that they have a tendency to come looking for you eventually. The Internet is like that. These things don't happen when you simply write a letter and post it.

And so, as America careens over yet another cliff of its own making, I believe some, a tiny percentage of this site, will assist in making a little sense of the mess we're going to be in very soon. I don't claim to have the keys to the crapper like everyone else, but I do have my own unique insights into the nature of things in human society. I'll be writing a little more frequently here. However, don't expect anything. ;0)

Noah Isenberg's Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (2014) review

Professor Strowski:  Now I am here, to bring you home.

Dr. Erich Vornoff:  Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home. ...

-Bela Lugosi, from Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster, 1955

The American films (and even a few that weren't) of Edgar G. Ulmer are deeply rooted in the immigrant experience, that irresolvable tug between assimilation and preserving one's identity and traditions. Author Noah Isenberg has illuminated this and many other key elements that combined to create a unique voice in cinema in his biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California Press, 2014) and drawn the best roadmap (with a few detours, pun intended) so far into the many mysteries of that voice. As anyone familiar with biographies knows, things have a way of keeping their secrets. But the author's extraordinary and unprecedented interrogation of Ulmer's vast body of work provides incredible insight and corroboration into his life, and he marshals his information from every conceivable direction in a way that would probably make his subject very proud if not a little bemused.

The essentially itinerant director's professional life began not too many years after becoming a refugee with the internal collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1916, beginning as it has for many talented emigres fleeing social and political chaos, a process that continues into today. Like so many, Ulmer came to America with great aspirations and a hopefulness that with retrospect now probably seems naive; his first stop was typical for so many immigrants, and where one might think: New York City, during the early 1920s, working on the design of a Max Reinhardt stage production, a first for almost everyone involved. It wasn't long before the young and bright-eyed Austrian had headed to Hollywood, where, like most of America and its many claims to exceptionalism, success is a coldly loaded word. What better, tragic frission could an artist steeped in German Expressionism with its play of light and shadow want? Not a lot of it was going to end on a happy note, and neither do most of films of this underappreciated king of Poverty Row filmmaking who created such classics as the Laemmle era Universal horror The Black Cat (1934), the Poverty row classics such as Blubeard (1944, starring John Carradine), the legendary noir Detour (1945), and the captivating & shimmering noirish moral parable of Ruthless (1948, co-starring the suave and inimitable Ulmer co-conspirator Louis Hayward).

This is all fine and well--but, who was Edgar G. Ulmer, really? It's like asking who Charles Foster Kane, Dr. Mabuse or Jesus of Nazareth was. Luckily, we have more clues on hand, albeit often, as in the rest of life, flawed ones...

 Ulmer's a name which crops up constantly in writing on cinema, especially in cult and noir circles, but how many would know of his design and preparatory work for F.W. Murnau on the classic Sunrise (1927) and Tabu (1931)? I had only an inkling, if that, and had only read musings that the filmmaker had worked on a few Expressionist movies, but they were only vague allusions to the fact that he was one of the few keeping Murnau's memory and technique alive in the Hollywood system. He had popped back and forth between Hollywood and Europe as early as 1929 when he co-directed the proto-verite classic People on Sunday (or the German title: Menschen am Sonntag, 1930), along with Robert Siodmak, from a treatment that had been co-written by the great Austrian director Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann, all of whom would go on to direct noir classics in America...or at least that's how some of the stories go. Untangling the legends and myths from the facts took Isenberg over a decade; his subject was often the worst source of information, as it were. There are reasons for this that have a lot to do with filmmaking and the kind of people who become motion picture directors: they're storytellers as well as notorious bullshitters, which is often how they get their vision onto the screen in the first place, they lie to achieve it, they're tricksters. 

Anyone familiar with Fritz Lang's stories about his own life and career will be recognize Ulmer's propensity to lie about himself and to exaggerate his experiences and accomplishments (including participation in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & Metropolis). Lang himself simply made things up to tell a better story; so too did Ulmer, and so many other directors over the years. Not all of this was intentional and shows that for many of them the creative process is never over. This bleed of one's life and work shows so clearly in Ulmer's filmmaking. Additionally, directors are usually intuitive psychologists and master manipulators, again, for aforementioned reasons. It takes a lot of effort to put your signature to a movie effectively and for it to retain your vision and style. Therefore, to do it in less than a week of shooting time, which was typical for Ulmer due to economic restrictions--low budgets--and end up with something somewhat coherent and even memorable is something short of a miracle. Ulmer was able to repeat this miracle many times over. This also means that he produced a lot a bad work out of sheer necessity. Even in those circumstances, he was able to imprint most of his movies with memorable themes and moments that contained not only some of his greatest dreams and aspirations, but those of audiences of his era, and ours.

Long relegated to the margins, Ulmer's body of work has been championed by everyone from the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, the leading theorist-directors of the French New Wave, to contemporary hipster movie buffs, and of course, academia. Isenberg shows us the availability of many of these movies and draws us another path to them, again, with no discernible detours. Thanks in part to the Internet, and like such luminaries in other mediums like H. P. Lovecraft, Ulmer is probably more known and popular today than he was when he was alive. My own Ulmer collection has grown in leaps and bounds as of late and announcements of new restorations of his work have been growing periodically over the last few decades, often to great acclaim.

I first came upon Ulmer's work as the Hollywood cult director of Black Cat (because of its stars Bela Lugois & Boris Karloff and the fact that it was--loosely--"based on Poe"), which is maybe the most unique horror film in the horror canon, never mind Universal's. Isenberg notes ably that the movie went on to inspire The Rocky Horror Picture Show for its own high camp value, which is impossible to debate as the movie revels in its perversity, it's simply true--artistic truth. What first strikes the virginal viewer of Black Cat is the familiar use of Expressionist technique; this of course is obvious, but we shouldn't think this was done by someone who had fled a Hitlerean Europe. Ulmer, as stated earlier, was already installed in the American movie system. A fateful decision of running off with the married wife of a cousin of the Laemmles appears to be the deciding factor that relegated him to Poverty Row, he was blacklisted, even after the regime at Universal changed in 1936 to a man named Rogers after its bankruptcy. Not even hits like Black Cat & The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) could save the Laemmle-run studio from cost overruns during the Great Depression.

 Well before the rise of NSDAP & Hitler, talent like Ulmer, Murnau, Joe May (née Mandle, another Austrian), the Hungarian Paul Fejos, Josef von Sternberg (a child of immigrants), even Bela Lugosi, were already working in Hollywood and were "refugees" after Nazi Germany became a reality. They were a different kind of emigre talent, some of whom never quite felt at home in America, or anywhere, and many of them had emerged from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the aftermath of WWI. Movies aren't made in a vacuum.

Again: who was Edgar G. Ulmer? We're never going to know entirely, but thanks to studies like this, we can get an idea. Without excessive sentimentality, Noah Isenberg has advanced our knowledge of this great, dark prince of the cinema through a study of his films that delivers to us many answers and many more questions about an often tortured life at the margins. Ulmer has finally come home.

What was the DC Madam case about?

With the blessed passing of yet another election cycle, we might reflect on another one from the recent past which resulted in a significant routing of the GOP by the Democrats: the deeply contentious 2006 national midterms. There's at least one major political sex scandal that takes down a significant politician in the United States every election cycle, generally speaking, two years, with overlap for higher office.

After the fall of the Director of the CIA at the hands of the surveillance state, we might reflect on the DC Madam case and look at the same themes and actions at play.

Jeane got this, maybe more towards the end:

On 3/15/08, Jeane Palfrey <jeanepalfrey@sprynet.com> wrote:

Bil… yes, I saw it. This further supports my belief that escort and adult services – which cater to powerful and influential clients – are being used as the new "hunting grounds" in American politics. –Jeane PS if interested, I will be on Geraldo and Coast to Coast Radio (10:30pm PDT) tonight. Newsweek also has done a piece on me, that is coming out in Monday's edition. It should be available online, by late tonight/tomorrow.

Yet, it appears that the GOP practically brought their own scandal to the attention of the American public. This kind of calculated stupidity is completely in character for them. I walked away from this train wreck a few days after this email. This all began with a leak by federal prosecutors to Bill Bastone and the Smoking Gun, they wanted it out there.

Why do this? Damage control knowing that you can redefine a problem. 2006 had a lot to do with corruption, how much the public will take of it, and damage control rather than the willingness to change or to take responsibility like adults. There are no adults, don’t kid yourself. You look at events differently once you’ve been on the inside of them. Whether others like it or not, Jeane allowed me to take in a lot for a purpose. She invited me to sneak a peek behind the curtain, and indeed, some impotent clowns resembling the Wizard of Oz were incompetently pulling levers that affect people’s lives, tripping, falling over each other, and they were just as blunderingly human and frail as I expected them to be. What the case was about is right in front of your eyes, every day, therefore invisible. It wasn’t a mistake that defense and intelligence technology contractor SAIC and the CPU giant Qualcomm were in Jeane’s phone records, or that they were visiting my website any more than it was that so many arrows pointed to San Diego and numerous military personnel, many of them officers. It wasn’t coincidence that put Lockheed Martin in her phone bills for her escort service, that a World Bank executive was in them, that a major league GOP operative like Jack Burkman was too, and there were many others, others I haven’t even included in my account of what I believe happened and what the case meant. Judge Kessler saw no coincidences when she granted Jeane subpoena power over the intelligence community.

This was a tale of partisan politics and statism, but also where the lines blur in those constructs, because interests overlap, making for the strangest bedfellows of all. Why the 2006 midterms? I believe this election is the key to understanding why an interim-appointed U.S. Attorney named Jeffrey A. Taylor decided to move on Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the press-dubbed “DC Madam,” only one month after she’d shuttered her escort service. I’m assuming here that someone tipped her off. Why waste millions on a small escort service like that? This was first of all about damage control for the part of the public that can be reached when presented with stupid things like facts and corroborated evidence, empiricism, stuff that's not entertainment. Without wanting to, I have no faith in the rank-and-file of either major party, and I think Palfrey’s own apathy about politics and her ignorance of it was instrumental in her undoing, word to the wise. Being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind doesn’t elevate you to the throne.

She knew some significant things about her predicament and her place, but clearly, not enough. What still surprises me is that before I brought the timing of the search of the Vallejo residence to her attention, she, her counsel, and others assisting her, hadn’t considered it—not even journalists she was encountering were expressing their observations of this. For an openly partisan Republican prosecutor to move on a suspect who, perhaps unknowingly, holds information damaging to his party and other related interests, is an unmistakable political act. Breaking the law to achieve damage control and to protect the defense and intelligence contracting game was implicit to their theater and the media was only too happy to play along.

Not even a nearly unprecedented economic crisis was going to overcome the racist backlash over the 2008 election of Barack Obama and it temporarily breathed new life into an ashen GOP, perhaps for the final time, since it was coming from a demographic of angry, aging white Americans whose political significance has been rapidly eroding over the last few decades. In their bigotry, they fear this massive influx of Hispanic refugees, most of them desperate Mexicans fleeing social chaos, generations of poverty, the militarization of the drug war, corrupt federales, goons, police, the cartels, and enslavement in the maquiladora factories that line the Free Trade Zone along the border, and now, private security, the CIA and drones. Such a happy family relationship between nations brought the dictator Porfirio Diaz to remark, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Yet, thanks to this ruthless repression and exploitation, there were some unexpected results: a new dynamic where Latin Americans are now heading towards being the future of politics, and possibly the labor movement, in the United States. And with this realization among the nativist rabble element came the inevitable Know-nothing reaction of hounding immigrants, which, like lynching, is a time-honored American tradition. Does the public ever truly learn? Which one would that be in a divided nation when these racists are becoming the minority? They're also the staggering idiots who tolerate an emergent police state and runaway defense spending while at the same time painting themselves inaccurately as rebels. That's called a fool. This is why it wasn't surprising to me that these same people--if you want to call them that--run to conspiracy theories that never truly touch on those power centers. Chasing ghosts and being ineffectual is the safest thing in the world. 2006 wasn't especially different from now.

At this, the halfway mark of the second and unfortunate term of George W. Bush, when the future Tea Party members were cheering the illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and police state tactics in the war on terror, Republican Party officeholders were paying the price for more skeletons in their closet than the Marquis de Sade or Al Capone. The litany of corrupt acts, antisocial behaviors, and general high weirdness, was widespread enough in their elected ranks to warrant decades of inquiries, yet, no, according to President Obama, we must “continue to look forward,” sounding as much like Scarface as the Republicans. Of great note, one of the cappers that went over the line was Florida congressman Mark Foley, who was accused of pedophilia. This is all about breaking the law and surviving through until the next ever-tightening election cycle. Controlling the DOJ never hurts. Besides, you can always fire your Attorney General and appoint another one the public can grow to hate as an arch-criminal the more they get to know about them. Almost a year earlier the profoundly illegal warrantless wiretapping program that bypassed the judicial oversight of the FISA court (housed at the DOJ, and I suspect they knew), initiated by the White House, was no longer being sat on by the traditionally submissive New York Times. (They had done this for a full year, so that the 2004 elections could pass by safely for the GOP, at least regarding that particular skeleton.)

You know that there’s a political crisis going on when the culture of politics has shifted so far to the right, that all the partisan hacks can talk about is a non-existent center. Most of what you’re going to be hearing from the official channels when a system ossifies is unbridled crap and lies, more obfuscations, apologies to power, ignoring the growing herd of elephants (the only one), until this game no longer works. Rather than looking at all of what we’re learning about rampant corruption as an excuse to cop-out (pun very much intended) and run to the temporary safety of jaded apathy, we should be glad that we know about these crimes at all, because knowledge really is power. But then the problem is that you’re forced to decide to do something about it. I made that decision getting involved in this case, hoping that I could bear witness to history and to accumulate whatever materials I could for the record. I was successful in that endeavor. Too often, the residue of events is lost to the ages. Collecting these materials was done so that the information could be out there and the public has the option to discover, more generally, how the private sector and government collude, and I've put it out there, with more to come.

An incredible effort was mounted to neutralize the destructive potential of what the charges against the late Ms. Palfrey were really about. To re-frame a story, and by doing so, redefining it, is a common practice in, ours, the most propagandized modern society outside of the former Soviet Union and China under Mao. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." This is why corrupt government contractors need to operate in the dark, and that’s what the DC Madam case, a branch of Hookergate, was about: to hide their criminal behavior and bury the evidence of their much greater crimes. When you keep raising this glaring discrepancy between how Palfrey was treated under the law on the one hand and how her privileged clients were on the other, and it’s never addressed in any substantial sense by government prosecutors, career spokesmen like P.J. Crowley, those clients like Senator Vitter, law enforcement, the hierarchy at the DOJ, you begin to realize the fix is in. Mind you, this was being said by many of us during the proceedings very loudly, and to no avail, because the mainstream press did its best to let it die by its own hand, and I mean that literally, because they also knew that Jeane was suicidally inclined. Brecht couldn't have dreamed this nightmare up. That's not murder, it's willful negligence

There had been a very serious scandal in 2006—one of many—that eventually fizzled-out named “Hookergate,” the standard cigar and hooker parties that are held in and around the Beltway for hungry contractors, to obtain coveted, high dollar jobs and assuage the seething addictions of sociopath Republican horndogs (as opposed to Democratic ones) with a taste for the high life on your dime. Yes, this is all about the war on terror and the moronic, runaway militarization of America, the biggest buyer of unnecessary, clunky military hardware in the entire world, six hundred times the spending in this area than of all the other nations of the world combined. That’s pretty stupid—nay—exceptional. We not only have the right to blow our balls off in this manner, but we still somehow have the right to speak about it thanks to a historical accident that began during the Colonial period, freedom of speech and the press. Things working out will never be good enough for the species. In our meanness and selfish tendencies that have been fostered into the emotional equivalents of plutonium, another poison we’ve refined, so as to illustrate our collective wretchedness, we have contaminated the world with our greed. From the moral rot of John Jacob Astor, to the senseless greed of the speculator Jay Gould, America’s first millionaires, on down to the Robber Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, men who childish fools have emulated ever since, we compromised with the bad guys and lost our way long ago as a nation, and we’re finally running out of road for the last time. This is our last chance. All of this is what the DC Madam case was about, the culmination of generations of baseness and barbarity. Either this is the beginning, the end, or both, but we’ve undoubtedly come full circle, which is rarely a good sign for the little people out there, the rest of us out here in television land.

This has happened before. Our out of control defense spending is doing to American democracy what it did to that system in Athens, first, by bankrupting their Treasury, then the inevitable collapse into anarchy and dictatorship, wrought by irrational military adventurism. Ask the Greeks how long it’s taken to come back from that one. And, so today, we have a similar situation in place thanks to the same kinds of criminals bent on power at any cost: a crisis on several fundamental levels—political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental. Not so long after Jeane died I conveyed to her former counselor Montgomery Blair Sibley that she may as well have stayed alive since, what with the encroaching economic catastrophe, she could have walked out of prison once there was no money to house her anymore (it elicited no response). What was the DC Madam case about? The fall of America by militarized self-immolation and general greed, nihilism.

Wayne Madsen & Me

Where to begin with this guy? OK, I'm not going to, but at some point this well known crank got involved with the DC Madam case doing--I have no idea what the hell he did for Jeane, frankly, but it couldn't have been much since he wasn't hired by her to do general research for her defense. For several months I did this work for Jeane at her request (I had a co-researcher who had also been tapped for this work). 

Initially, we looked into what was then known as the "Poway Mafia," that is, former-and-convicted California congressman Randy Cunningham, convicted-and-former defense contractor Brent Wilkes, the convicted-and-former "number three" guy at the CIA, Kyle Foggo, and a few other players who Jeane felt were related to he case. There was a lot smoke there, but we were only able to go so far with limited resources and time. At the end of the project, we, that is me and my co-researcher, made reports as to the aforementioned--how these players related to her and the escort service and why she was being prosecuted in such a manner. Also, we looked deeply into subpoenaed Verizon phone records that went far deeper than the scanned copies that were and still are online, basically who had a specific phone number, and when, numbers that were in her records as potential client-callers. I was paid by the federal defender's office, normal for indigent defendants, then did the rest pro bono.

Jump to two weeks ago: the UK's paper the Guardian/Globe, without vetting his wacky, rumpled self mistakenly quoted Wayner in an article about an EU deal with the NSA allowing them to conduct massive surveillance. I don't even care about the details, because, yes, he was an NSA analyst at once time, ages ago, claims to still have "sources" inside, or in the intelligence community, writes crappy, baseless articles about it, and is generally ignored as a nut in DC and the rest of the sane, civilized world, and for good reason. If you're a normal, well-balanced human being, go read his writing and tell me he's not nutty as hell. I don't see it happening.

The Globe had to pull a front page article quoting Wayner. Of course, it being the UK, the rest of the press there swarmed around the publication and wrote about it, gleefully. I was a little shocked, but unsurprised, when Damian Thomspon wrote a pretty scathing blog piece at the Telegraph about Madsen and the Globe. I won't recount it and leave it to the reader to check it out and decide for themselves, but in my humble opinion, it's spot-on. 

I left this comment two weeks ago after reading it: 

Madsen tried to attach himself to the DC Madam case for a time as well. Where do I think he got the "Obama is gay" theory? From Larry Sinclair. Ironic that you have Moynihan's Twitter quote on here since he quoted me out of context in one of his inane editorials back in 2008 when Ms. Palfrey was still a name in the news.

I did general research for her on the case & was told by a few sources about a "big party" that Larry Flynt was holding for Jeane, to assist her in some way, and who was there but Wayne Madsen. One of my sources (author Bill Keisling) remarked at how slovenly & disheveled he was, wearing a rumpled suit and sounding like the nut described in this story. He also said it kept him awake at night thinking that someone like Madsen had been working for the NSA, ostensibly competent people hired to "protect" the security of the United States, scary.

Indeed, Mr. Madsen once wrote an article claiming that a "shadowy source (it's almost always that way, hence why no one credible listens to him) that the DC Madam had a CIA controller, something of that nature, but so inane and absurd it doesn't warrant further mention.

Then there's Montgomery Blair Sibley, who, as is generally known in DC, is an unhinged scion of old Beltway aristocracy, the Blairs & the Sibleys--they once owned and inhabited the Blair House before Truman's renovation of the White House, it was expropriated. That, I think, created some long-term crusade by Sibley and his late father to be a thorn in the side of the US Courts, one reason why he's currently disbarred.

But just over five years ago, he was representing the DC Madam, who abruptly fired him in January 2008. Not long after that, he was representing Larry Sinclair, the Obama accuser who claims that he & the now-president had sex and imbibed in cocaine in the back of a limo in Chicago in 1999, all a patent lie by a career-liar of another stripe.

I assume that Sibley and Madsen struck up a relationship during the DC Madam proceedings and that the connection between Sinclair probably emanates from that relationship, however, Sinclair got a lot of ink back in 2008 and is still trotted out by uninformed GOP occasionally to smear the current president, to no avail. 

And there it is, my opinion.Whatever this guy gets involved with loses its credibility. He has a negative-Midas touch--everything he touches turns to shit.
 Luckily, none of this wiped-off onto Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden.

And so, here we are, two weeks later, and the Wayner responds with a predictably feeble "I know you are, but what am I?":

It would seem that it was Mr Janovic, who lives in Indiana far from the DC environs, who interjected himself on the Palfrey story and my investigation. The late Palfrey contacted me and this guy Janovic, who apparently blogs from a basement, decided to involve himself from afar and tried to obtain my sources and records as the following email will attest:

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Janovic [mailto:myboigie@earthlink.net]
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:56 PM
To: jeanepalfrey@sprynet.com
Subject: RE: Today's piece

Jeane:

They would have to tell us this, definitely, but that's about all they would tell us. Perhaps I can just ask them ourselves? Perhaps Mr. Madsen could direct me to the resources, links, directories. There are those who would know, it could accelerate this particular research.

warm regards, Matt Janovic

The email is real, by the way. His take on it is not. His take on my life is also inaccurate and childish, but that's Wayner for you.

I responded, and this piece will be my final one on this:

Mr. Madsen's reputation speaks for itself, however, besides his poor grammar, he's wrong: the late Ms. Palfrey approached me and the email there--which is one I sent to her--is being re-contextualized. This is how he works normally, to take information and to recast it as something else. He's a laughingstock in DC and rarely, if ever, reveals his sources because they're as bogus as he is.

As for me "trying to obtain" his sources, read the last sentence, I wouldn't want them. Also, I assume that Montgomery Blair Sibley supplied him with the email, fine, but Google his name for what he's been up to recently and you'll understand the sheer nuttiness I experienced having just nominal contact with these people. Right now, the disbarred Mr. Sibley is still trying to wrong-headedly obtain another fifteen minutes of fame doing more pointless court filings to "prove" that President Obama's birth certificate is fake. I wish I could make this up. Mr. Madsen is a conspiracy nut's conspiracy nut, I doubt he was especially good at his NSA analysis job, and what he writes is paranoiac drivel.

The fact is, Jeane approached me first, not the opposite, a week earlier. The above email wasn't an especially relevant one and I believe it was about her prosecutors--doesn't matter, it was a minor issue and isn't even remotely what he's saying it is. I would never want his research materials because he's not good at it, not good at analysis, and as this article makes plain, he has a roundly bad reputation as a crank.

Again, his contention that I "interjected" myself into the case is a bald misrepresentation of fact. His inaccurate personal attack is also a misrepresentation of what really happened, something he's well known for as this article makes plain. Most of his audience is mentally unwell. Frankly, this guy is making me laugh at such an incompetent response, but that's Wayner for you. 

I could go on about what a pain in the ass he's been over the years. In one case, he poisoned the well with Siegelman case in Alabama and maybe even sent other cranks my way to cause me problems, like Andrew Krieg, but it's not worth my or your time, rest assured.

Where it all ends:  http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100224022/guardianobserver-pulls-front-page-nsa-story-after-source-turns-out-to-be-a-fruitloop-who-thinks-obama-is-gay/#comment-966678938

Trying to Get the Word out on the DC Madam case: Am I Being Hacked?

Ed.--This has been going on for more than a few months: I attempt to send an email to a journalist at one of their articles, say at The Telegraph, Disnfo.com, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo (this one took, no response--did it ever make it?), and numerous other progressive web sites and news publications. Either I cannot successfully send the filled-out form/message, or I get no replies, having no idea if they ever got the national security information about the DC Madam case I was apprising them of. I'm sure a few of them got it and reflected on their mortgages, sure. I've even had a semi-retired journalist who covered the intelligence beat who told me they contacted some of their other colleagues who are still working with no responses, no apparent interest. This, of course, is going on their word, a person I've never even spoken to on the phone, so there it is, I have only their word, and in these times, that ain't enough.

Do I know that I'm being hacked, can I prove it? No, but I was during the case and was surveilled, unquestionably, and it followed me onto Facebook and maybe now onto to Twitter, although it seems far more blunted. Now that we know Facebook was giving the NSA direct access, some of the harassment I was subjected to on there could be viewed in a new light. But like the victims of COINTELPRO and all the other government/private harassment programs targeting dissent in the US, I cannot prove it without herculean effort. We're talking numerous filings of FOIAs (Freedom of Information Act requests for documents on myself, whether I was being watched), but anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of this knows the Government isn't going to cough it up without one hell of a fight.

What I'm asking my readers is this: I need your help in sending out this form email that I'll paste-in below. I just attempted to send it to the journalist James Fallows at The Atlantic without any luck. It could be nothing, it could be a glitch on their part, there could be a cookie in my browser doing it, but I cannot get to the bottom of it, there seems to be no other solution then to have others send these emails on my behalf. There's nothing in this email message that I haven't written or published here on this blog, it's generalized. If you know a serious journalist covering national security issues, or you simply read on the subject a lot and have a reasonably secure email account, I need you to submit this letter to news sites, blogs, journalists, progressive web sites, and so on, I need your help and would appreciate it greatly. Thank you.

And without being too prolix, here's the text of the letter. Anyone who sends it off in my name, unredacted and unaltered has my full permission:  

Good day, I was a member of the DC Madam's defense team back in late 2007, early 2008. We were granted wide-ranging subpoena powers over the telecoms as well as the intelligence community by Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler, who, I might add, was shortly after that replaced without any explanation by a board of judges (a board she was on!) by former FISA Court judge James Robertson. He quashed all of that once on board for reasons that I think were obvious: the case involved surveillance, most likely of her escort service which had a large percentage of defense/intelligence contractors, military and intelligence officers, and a whole lot more. No one seems to want to touch this element of what was erroneously defined by the MSM as a simple sex scandal--it was not, it was far more. I don't expect you to answer because I'm always meeting a wall of silence on this.

I was hired as a general researcher by the late Ms. Palfrey in December 2007 and paid by the federal defender's office for my work, but I did far more pro bono after that month. Indeed, we were going through the subpoenaed phone records that had been provided by one of her carriers, Verizon, but AT&T and Sprint had yet to comply when Judge Kessler was abruptly replaced in the middle of the night in late November. But, we had the records that went much deeper into who had a phone number and a cell or landline--the whens and wheres--and came up with a stunning array that represented the national security state and their contractors and employees on both fronts. One of them was Ret. Col. Ron Roughead, brother to now-retired CNO Gary Roughead. The former worked for SAIC the last I knew and that firm came up in materials and outside of them so many times as not to be coincidental. I could go on and on with the very solid connections between players, but I will leave you with one example: there was one call, and one call only, from a former Verizon engineer with a Muslim name who was also an early war on terror arrest, in the DC area. I won't name him here, but his story was in the press and articles can be found online.

I should also add that we found some indications of intelligence activities in a hack of her email account going back to fall of 1998--yes, it could have been anyone, but they were being forwarded all of the ingoing and outgoing items in it, beyond the sophistication of the average internet user that year. It was a Yahoo.uk account. We got bounce-backs that I identified when the surveillance account was closed. Oddly, the bounce-backs contained the text of a 419 scam, a Nigerian one that's well-known, a fake barrister's note. This wasn't directed at us and was a clear glitch. It has been written that--and I cannot speak to the veracity of it--419 scams have been known to be used as covers for intelligence operations. And there is more, much more. I wrote an account on the case that's heavily-detailed and contains literally hundreds of emails between the late Ms. Palfrey, myself, and others, primary documents, court filings, etc., down to her autopsy report. The story's not cold, incidentally, since no one ever got to the real dynamics of it, other than myself and a few others. The press was ill-equipped to do so, or unwilling, but I cannot say decisively.

This NSA story, I believe, has a direct relation to what happened to Ms. Palfrey and her escort service. I've experienced strange online harassment, visits from contractors to my blog (http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com), hacking of accounts--you name it, outside of physical confrontation and/or shadowing. I implore you to at least consider this story in light of recent events, to look deeper, or to pass some of this along, and this is just the tip of the iceberg here.

Regards, Matt Janovic, writer and private researcher

Was the Boston Marathon Bombing Done Over a Sleight?

Even in the earliest reports, we've been seeing that the Tsarnaev family was dysfunctional. Zubeidat Tsarnaev, the mother of the bombing suspects, was busted for shoplifting at a Lord & Taylor fashion shop. Now we're finding out that she was on the same terror watch list as her oldest son. 

Another of their store locations was on Boston's Bolyton Street, where the bombings took place, and where video captures of her two sons were taken moments before and after the blast. With the evidence is mounting against the deceased suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dzokhar, and with some arrows pointing at the mother, investigators in Dagestan speaking with associates of hers, I wouldn't be too surprised if she was arrested soon.

We might just find out that there was no sound ideological or religious justification (you think?) behind the bombing at all. What it could have been was retribution directed at Lord & Taylor and Boston in general for charging their mother with shoplifting. If she was guilty, and they were of what they're alleged to have done, what you have is nothing more than a pack of criminals and nothing close to terrorists. All of Zubeidat's crazy conspiracy theories about what might have occurred conveniently point away from her sons in the face of almost irrefutable physical and photographic evidence, as well as eyewitness testimony from the carjacking victim they kidnapped and confessed to. Her theories, by obvious implication, then, point away from her. 

The uncle on the father's side of the family might know a lot more about this woman than he's stated so far, and what they were capable of, what he might have thought they were headed towards. But who could predict something so crazy? I'm also betting that the enigmatic "Misha" is more of a red-herring thrown out there by the parents.

This has nothing to do with Islam.

why every american should read let the dead bury the dead

Too often mislabeled as a “routine” sex scandal by the press, and a prostitution/racketeering/money laundering case by government prosecutors, the charges leveled against the “DC Madam” were a mockery of justice without precedent. This is a tale of institutionalized crony capitalism and the return of aristocracy into a corporate mold. Let the Dead Bury the Dead sheds new light on the investigation, legal proceedings and the phenomenon of the DC Madam, from a witness to history. Drawing from his direct involvement in the case—as well as from a significant array of primary historical materials never before seen by the public--the author will illustrate that there was nothing normal about how the charges against the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey were applied, quite the contrary. From the mainstream media’s attempts at defining and dismissing many explosive facts and patterns in the case to the legal proceedings and show trial, the DC Madam story illuminates textbook examples of prosecutorial misconduct, information warfare, judicial abuse, and political damage control. Possibly a harbinger of things to come, the subsequent death of the DC Madam stands as a shadow testament to the political crisis that ran riot in America under President George W. Bush, and that continues into the present. Media, government and the business sector colluded to bury the story, and for the most part, they have, until now.

              Many Readers Will Learn for the First Time that:

-The DC Madam's phone records are littered with phone calls from defense-intelligence contractors.

-Palfrey claimed to have received multiple calls from Brent Wilkes, the government contractor who bribed convicted California congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

-Palfrey’s legal problems began innocuously thanks to a Postal Inspector, spiraling out of control from
there.

-Deborah Jeane Palfrey “knew” less than she let on and can be counted as an arbitrary victim of power.

-Palfrey was granted wide subpoena powers over the American intelligence community and all Beltway
law enforcement.

-There are more many more “big names” in her legendary phone records yet to be published.

-Porn publisher Larry Flynt assisted Palfrey more than previously thought, promising her a form of asylum in the aftermath of her trial.

-Palfrey was under periodic observation longer than previously reported by federal law enforcement and persons unknown.

-Palfrey was much fairer than the typical American employer by miles.

A reflection on Metropolis

Fritz Lang was a Futurist by default, as was his wife, Thea von Harbou, and by default, fascists, but Lang "rehabilitated" himself in the end, while Von Harbou died of shame like a lot of Germans in the aftermath of WWII...

Sing along comrades!

F-S-B, S-V-R, M-O-U-S-E!

from russia with...nada

Wow. I've noted for some time that Russia was second to the US in hits to my blog. Now they've ceased altogether, incredible. This happened with China back around 2007. Things must be getting bad for free speech there! In Russia, you don't surf the Internets, only secret police do, all day, all night!

 Postscript  03.19.2013: Russia is back, but with far lower traffic than normal.

Wilde Expectations

When it's suggested to me that I should get out more often, I tell them to take the lead.

how to deal with mooks & online trolls in one simple step

As anyone who's put up with these assholes for even a moment knows, mooks & trolls need air to survive just like the rest of us.

The best thing to do is: Never respond to them and their childish baiting & lies. 

If they defame you, if they smear you, find out, document, and wait for later. If they've gone over the legal limits of our proscribed rights in society, the onus will be on them. The best thing to do is to never respond.

Hard, I know, and we all slip at some point. There are times to set the record straight too. But the fact is, these assholes exist in a fringe echo-chamber. Normal people don't listen to or buy into their lies. That's all you need to know in the end. Let them do all the talking, the defamatory scribbling--let them dig their own graves. It's about all they're good at.

Let the fuckers suffocate.

In Russia, accent speak for you: a panoply of picklesmells

Ya'lls:

How to shut up a conspiracy nut momentarily: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof#Science_and_other_uses

Dennis Hopper's shithoard is still up for sale:  http://gawker.com/5986447/there-are-two-days-and-20-hours-left-in-the-dennis-hopper-estate-sale?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_twitter&utm_source=gawker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

The best evidence that Bobby Flay isn't seen in the Patterson-Gimlin film of nineteen-and-eleventy-twelvty: http://www.bigfootencounters.com/files/mk_davis_pgf.gif