Clinton’s Sockpuppets Strike Again!

Via Ann Althouse, news today that Hillary Clinton's Sockpuppet Army® has struck again. This is so utterly clumsy, it's laughable.

Easiest to find is this, from the WaPo:

[R]eaders of Blue Hampshire — about 800 a day, a relatively small but consequential group that includes party activists and state Democratic leaders — recommend "diaries" that visitors should read. Yesterday, four readers who created new accounts and recommended pro-Clinton postings were traced back to Clinton's campaign. And those readers, Blue Hampshire noted, didn't disclose their relationship with Clinton. In the blogosphere, there's a word for this frowned-upon behavior: "sock-puppeting."

WaPo links to the relevant post at Blue Hampshire, which shows the ineptitude of the puppetry:

Recently, we admins noticed this comment thread on a recommended diary, and the oddities it posed made us look a little deeper than we normally would.

As the comment thread revealed, users pinballwizard, elf, shley24, MTAY all registered in succession to recommend the diary. A further look by us revealed that:

* they had registered within minutes of each other, including another user a bit later, janbaby, who was not among the recommenders,

* the same IP address was used by all of them, and is registered to the Clinton campaign,

* two other recommenders, blues and kmeisje, also registered from the same IP address.

Between her campaign stops having more plants than the average commercial greenhouse and the sockpuppets, it's getting a bit crowded over in Hillaryland. We can see this causing problems for Clinton in the future.

Monsters At Christmas

Regardless of the outcome of the legal proceedings against these two, there has to be a special place in Hell already all made up for them when they arrive. On Christmas Eve, a family daughter and her boyfriend gunned down three generations of the woman's family, including children aged 3 and 6 years.

Twice wounded, her husband and his parents already gunned down, Erica Anderson huddled with her children and pleaded with Joseph McEnroe to spare their lives.

"You don't have to do this."

But her pleas prompted no mercy. McEnroe apologized before telling his victims, "Yes, we do."

Then he fired the last blasts in a Christmas Eve shooting spree that killed three generations of a family in a rural Carnation home.

He shot Anderson a final time, then turned a .357 revolver on 6-year-old Olivia and 3-year-old Nathan.

The final, frantic moments of the lives of six people were outlined Friday in murder charges filed against McEnroe, 29, a Target clerk, and his unemployed girlfriend, Michele Anderson, also 29.

The defendants are in the King County Jail with bail denied, accused of killing Michele's parents, her brother, his wife and their two children.

Each faces six counts of aggravated first-degree murder — the only crime punishable by death in Washington. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg has 30 days from the couple's scheduled Jan. 9 arraignment to decide whether to pursue capital punishment. The only other sentencing option under the law for the crimes upon conviction is life imprisonment without release.

"Given the magnitude of this crime, I pledge to give this case serious consideration for the state's ultimate penalty," Satterberg said.

Monsters exist, they just aren't the kind fiction writers like Stephen King come up with routinely. Cases like this are why there should be a death penalty. The reasons the daughter wanted her family dead are so trivial as to defy belief. The family was "stepping on" the daughter. So we have self-esteem issues leading to the brutal murder of an entire family. Including little kids.

There really are monsters.

Opening Day Approaches

The Opinion Journal surveys the candidates as the Iowa caucuses approach. Less than one week out from the political opening day of the primary season and the Democrats are the ones with the biggest potential winners and losers in the Hawkeye state.

The first contest of the Presidential election season is finally upon us with Thursday's Iowa caucuses, and for our money it comes both too early and too late.

Iowa arrives too early this cycle in that it comes a full 10 months before the general election next November. We think the public was better served when the first primaries didn't begin until much later. In 1976, Ronald Reagan barely lost to President Ford in New Hampshire in February, but he was still able to make a contest of the nomination by winning the North Carolina primary in late March. That the Iowa home stretch is taking place this year when most families are preoccupied with the holidays is especially silly.

But Iowa comes late because the truncated nature of this primary season means the candidates have already been campaigning for more than a year. As Karl Rove wrote on these pages, both parties need to think about changing a nominating process that has turned into a two-year marathon yet could still yield nominees the public barely knows. There has to be a better way. Our own suggestion would be for primaries that began in the late spring and played out over three months, culminating in the nominating conventions close to Labor Day. Either that, or bring back the smoke-filled room.

This time we are nonetheless stuck with what we have, and at least Iowa will begin to cull the field. This year the state's caucuses seem especially important to the Democrats. Barack Obama and John Edwards need a victory to show they can challenge the Hillary Clinton juggernaut. Mr. Edwards has invested heavily in the state, and if his message of "two Americas" can't win amid the liberals who dominate Iowa's Democratic caucus-goers, it's not going to win anywhere.

With his recent rise in the polls, Mr. Obama has the new burden of higher expectations. Mrs. Clinton can afford to lose and fight on with her money and organization. As the upstart, Mr. Obama has to show he can put together enough of an organization to defeat her in Iowa and develop momentum to overtake Mrs. Clinton's lead in New Hampshire and beyond.

Go read the rest. Their take on Clinton is - to be kind - unkind. But that really isn't surprising given the almost frantic message try outs the Clinton campaign has been making lately. They've been all over the map trying to find one message that excites voters and have come off badly as a result. I still think that a third place finish in Iowa will cause sever problems for Clinton going forward. I don't know if it will be enough to completely derail her, but it will be a huge blow.

I do hope the parties get their collective acts together before the next election, though. This two year campaign is much too long. And the way the state parties have hashed up the schedules for primaries is not helping at all.

Ice Sculpture

Britain's Daily Mail has suddenly noticed that the Midwest of the United States is suffering through a brutal cold snap - which makes for a pretty spectacular picture.

It looks like a spectacular scene straight from a fairy tale.

But instead this winter wonderland is actually situated on the east shore of Lake Michigan in the United States.

After weeks of freezing temperatures, a thick coating of icicles has completely transformed the landmark South Haven lighthouse.

It really is a spectacular picture. For comparison, here's a picture taken in December, 2005 posted on Flickr. There are some other winter pictures here. None look as extreme as this year's icing.

Department Of Cosmic Justice

This is so ironic that no fiction writer would dare to try to put it in a story; nobody would believe it. A burglary suspect arrested by police cleverly gave a false address to avoid a search of his residence. The suspect was released after arraignment. A few hours later, said suspect became the victim of an armed robbery.

Whereupon he gave police his real address.

Police say 22-year-old Daniel Cabral was arrested Wednesday and charged with burglarizing a University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth building. He was arraigned and released until his next court date.

Hours later, he was robbed at gunpoint while walking home from a bar. He reported the robbery to police, this time giving them his real address instead of the phony address he reported earlier in the day, according to authorities.

Police arrested two suspects and a man accused of being an accomplice after the fact. They also obtained a search warrant for Cabral's real address and found computer equipment that had been taken from the UMass building as well as power tools that had been reported missing from a local theater.

Sometimes that old karmic wheel spins really, really fast, doesn't it?