What We Know about the Young Republican Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. From Gawker.com

[Ellipsis]

http://gawker.com/5457611/what-we-know-about-the-young-republican-gang-that-couldnt-shoot-straight?skyline=true&s=i&autoplay=trueames


O'Keefe
O'Keefe came to fame last summer when he and his colleague Hanna Giles dressed up for Halloween early and walked into ACORN offices nationwide pretending to be a hooker and a pimp seeking tax advice, thereby blowing the lid off the sordid scandal that was ACORN's free tax advice to people pretending to be hookers and pimps. The sting was tightly coordinated with the launch of Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com and promoted beyond saturation by Fox News, which heralded the pair as the conservative answer to 60 Minutes. We've asked Breitbart whether O'Keefe and his pals were on assignment for Big Government when they were arrested, but haven't heard back. The Washington Independent's David Weigel says his sources are saying they weren't.

And, of course, Fox News, which was one of the outlets that pushed hardest to turn O'Keefe into a folk hero, is taking the position that this Landrieu office incident is a story "that probably needs a lot of context and a lot of looking into" before anyone jumps to conclusions. Unlike, say, videos of a white boy in garish pimp clothes which are prima facie evidence of ... something.


Robert Flanagan
Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, the acting U.S. Attorney for the western district of Louisiana. Which makes it rather awkward that he was arrested in, and is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney for, the eastern district of Louisiana. The elder Flanagan ascended to the gig just one week ago after his Bush-appointed boss left office; none other than Sen. Mary Landrieu has submitted recommendations for his replacement to the White House.

Stan Dai
Dai appears to be a long-time conservative rabblerouser: A Stan Dai was the head of George Washington University's Conservative Student Union, and a GWU student by the same name was quoted in 2004 in support of some pro-life student activists engaging in political theater at a John Kerry campaign event. And a then-17-year-old named Stan Dai in Naperville, Ill., told a USA Today reporter covering a student anti-war protest in 2003: "The people who organize the anti-war movement annoy me." This picture is from the Facebook page of a Stan Dai who attended GWU and is friends with Joseph Basel, one of the other plumbers busted yesterday. UPDATE: Lindsay Beyerstein finds two delightful datapoints about Dai: He was the recipient of a scholarship from the conservative Phillips Foundation, which also awards the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship (he'd approve!), and he is an assistant director at Trinity University's Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence, which trains people how to be spies.


Joseph Basel
A Joseph Basel is listed as one of 15 University of Minnesota-Morris College Republicans who attended George W Bush's inauguration in 2005 with the help of Sen. Mark Dayton, and there's a Joseph Basel on Facebook who attends the University of Minnesota-Morris and is friends with Stan Dai and James O'Keefe.

[tridim]

1. The neo rat fuckers.

Guaranteed there are many more who haven't been arrested yet.

[starroute]

2. When are people going to realize that being Facebook friends...

...isn't a real hot idea if you're also going to engage in illegal conspiracies together?

[Ellipsis]

3. Kick for edit : Gawkers change.. from Basels attending Obama's Inaugural - to Bushes in 05

...thought that was kinda weird.

[Scurrilous]

4. K & R

:thumbsup:

[tanyev]

5. LOL. One of the commenters went to school with Stan Dai:

You have no idea what it feels like to actually know one of these assholes and be subjected to their one man shows in class. This is Christmas Day.

He was everything you can imagine and more. I absolutely believed I would see his name in one of these things on e day; I just thought he would be shooting up a federal building. In the scary times of 2004 these assholes thought they'd built a permanent majority of far right shit-heads and could say and do whatever they wanted without consequences. He hijacked every class discussion in his own personal diatribe about his opinions on everything. He was the first person I heard use the term Islamo-Fascist. He truly believed liberals were anti-American and wanted to bring a America down - not to score political points but because he truly believed it. He was linking illegal immigration and terrorism back then. He and his other Defense of Democracies "fellow" somehow took over the 9-11 remembrance service and turned it into a rousing Proud to be an American skit with the only speaker a fellow from Heritage. The College Republicans weren't enough for him so he either started his own group and newspaper. And the College Republicans at GW then were Bush hacks, through and through. And the professors would actually indulge this shit because they knew if they pushed back he'd be on Fox News the next day. The absolute worst of the worst, a criminal of the lowest order. These are people who think Nixon was misunderstood and Bush didn't go far enough, and in 2004 - 2005 they thought they were on a power upswing.