Archive for October 15th, 2010
Wayne Madsen writes on Article 4 of the 25th Amendment
I think Wayne Madsen is a very nice man who is a very intriguing writer never afraid to go out on a limb — but I don’t think anyone can legally maneuver Article 4 of the 25th Amendment against Obama, as he claims Democrats are actually planning sometime after November’s disastrous election.
You can read Madsen’s piece for yourself, but the gist is this:
* Madsen argues Article 4 of the 25th Amendment was almost used against Ronald Reagan after his assassination attempt, because while recovering from that horrific attack his body was weak and the pain medications and whatnot he was on, compounded with the stress of being shot (which is devastating to even a 20 year old) made Reagan lethargic, slow on his feet, and very sleepy for a while after the incident. Madsen says the Cabinet started preparatory work on invoking the 25th Amendment that would have made George H.W. President in 1981…but that it was decided Reagan would recover and there was no danger to the presidency.
* Madsen further states that Obama’s detachment, his inability to focus, his preoccupation with having fun, playing golf, throwing parties, etc. qualify as an argument form of “incapacity”, as his behavior and disregard for duties is on par with an invalid president incapacitated by some illness or accident that renders this person more or less Obama-esque in all intents and purposes.
* If Article 4 of the 25th Amendment is invoked, the Cabinet would have to vote to oust the president and the Vice President would then be the final signature on the document removing him from office. At that time, Joe Biden would become the 45th president…and he would need to select a Vice President the Senate would confirm. That person would, according to Madsen, be Hillary Clinton, who would become our first female Vice President and would more likely than not run for president herself in 2012.
Like I said, Madsen is an interesting and colorful writer. You have to give him that.
But, he overlooks the giant elephant in the room: black voters. Even if Obama suffered a massive seisure and was comatose, like in the movie Dave, unless Will Smith was brought in to play Obama for the last two years of his term (also like in the movie Dave, subsituting Kevin Klein for Smith in the scenario), blacks in Chicago, New York, DC, LA, etc. would riot. I think the usual suspects of Spike Lee, Jesse Jackson, Henry Gates, Al Sharpton, et al would stoke this — and there would be absolute bedlam with large parts of urban centers set afire. If anything should happen to Obama, this is what will happen. It might even happen in 2012 when he loses his re-election. It’s why I believe John McCain just sort of gave up his presidential campaign in October of 2008…he didn’t really want to win, because winning would be accepting the presidency while fire trucks, SWAT teams, and the National Guard all raced to places like a set-ablaze city of Chicago.
I do remember that scene in Air Force One where Glenn Close had to decide whether or not she was going to declare Harrison Ford incapacitated while his plane was hijacked and he was running around on board doing his yippe-kae-yay John McClain impersonation. She stupidly didn’t sign the form, when she should have, because THE PRESIDENT WAS TAKEN HOSTAGE ON AN AIRPLANE. That pretty much qualifies as incapacitation in my book. It’s also pretty much what that 25th Amendment article is for, whether when written “airplane hijacking” was considered a possibility or not.
There’s an interesting big in Madsen’s piece about large Democrat donors telling Obama he needs to move to the center or they’re not going to open their checkbooks to him for 2012.
That’s actually something I want to help facilitate starting November 3rd — putting pressure on the wealthy Democrat donors to put the brakes on their support of the Left. It’s an avenue we can work to great effect for the next two years…where we can simultaneously take down the fundraising operations of people like Claire McCaskill as well, so we can not only cut off the big money going to the DC but we can target Democrats like McCaskill and dry up her donor pool so this fool can be removed from office in 2012 along with Obama.
Donors are notoriously skittish when the public casts a bright light on them…but rooting these people out is a boring and time-consuming endeavor that people don’t especially want to invest much effort in. It works though, and Democrats’ anemic fundraising for the 2010 midterms is proof their donors don’t just write checks for their own personal amusement.
Read Madsen’s piece and offer your two or three cents below. It IS interesting stuff, and if nothing else it reminded me of the need to target those Democrat donors in a coordinated and sustained way for the next two years.
How much ground have Christine O'Donnell and Sharon Angle gained since their debates?
Can you take some time today to dig around and see what you can find in terms of voter reaction to Christine O’Donnell and Sharon Angle’s respective debates?
Did their debate performances move undecideds either way?
It still might take a few days for this to turn up in any polls, but you might start noticing a chain in tone in comments about the two of them on various forums.
**************************************
UPDATE: Here’s a blurb from AceofSpades talking about Christine O’Donnell making up 10 points to now be only 11% behind Commie Coons…and that’s a few days after her debate.
I really think she will win this. I can visualize her on election night giving her victory speech. I can see her in the Senate as clear as day come January.
I feel about her the way I felt about Scott Brown in Massachusetts when the RNC and all the Eeyores were poo-pooing his chances.
Every day, I really like this lady even more. I have to say this, because my friend Althea said it yesterday to me, but it’s like what would happen if I would run for Senate myself. As a Republican. The same thing would probably happen to you, too, because if you aren’t someone who was born into privilege and groomed your whole life to be the heir to a dynasty then you probably have things in your background that are kooky and colorful…especially if you have been interviewed on TV or radio when you were in your 20s and 30s.
So, when O’Donnell says that “she’s us”, she really is.
And I like that because we need “us” not “them” in the Senate representing Delaware.
I really, really think she’s going to pull this off…hence the joint Obama-Biden visit to Delaware today. Why would they be there if Commie Coons really has this all locked up? Makes no damn sense.
Why you need to finally put Clinton Derangment Syndrome behind you — and that it's time you saw that repeating stale old memes only helps the Left
Today I want to address something I repeatedly see conservatives do that I think is just pure foolishness — namely, engaging in masturbatory, pointless, fetishistic Clinton Derangement Syndrome.
The Clintons have not been president since January of 2001. Whatever obsessive outrage you have over President Clinton having an affair and cheating on his wife is sick. You don’t know these people and you have no business being upset by anything in their marriage . You are a hypocrite of the highest order for talking out of one side of your mouth about family values and the sanctity of marriage but then going off onto weird attacks on Hillary Clinton for deciding to make her marriage work and not get divorced.
I was in a longterm relationship with a guy named Harvey who cheated on me and it was the most humiliating and horrible thing I’ve ever had to go through. Instead of leaving him, I tried to make it work and salvage what we had, but ultimately we parted ways…because he wanted to be with a different guy every week and I really liked having our oddball, makeshift little “family” here in Boystown. But, I did my very best to save what we had because I loved him. I don’t care what anyone says about me for that, because it was not as simple as “he cheated, so throw him out”. This sick and twisted irony is that I’m someone who would never cheat, so it’s an even bigger punch to the face to be betrayed like this because it’s something I would have never done to Harv.
It’s profoundly unfair that Hillary Clinton has millions of people out there who sit on high benches, wearing their living room curtains as robes, judging her for making her marriage work. My parents are divorced. Out of my circle of friends, maybe three of them have parents that are still together. All marriages go through rough spots and in my anecdotal (and personal) experience, almost all men seem to cheat. If you’ve got one that doesn’t, you best hang on tight to him.
It’s now been 12 years since the Monica Lewinsky affair and I think it’s time to stop throwing that in Hillary Clinton’s face. I don’t care if you don’t like the woman. You need to stop doing this because it makes you look crazy, petty, and sick. Enough is enough. When I campaigned for Clinton in the 2008 primaries, I heard a lot about “she should have left him!” all across Iowa, in particular, and I have to say that it did not leave a very good impression of the people of that state as I look back on the campaign. It’s, in fact, the first thing I think of when I hear “Iowa”, all those obsessed, judgmental, mean-spirited people who saw me approach their door, with my Hillary buttons on, just waiting to shout something about the Clintons’ marriage at me — angry they didn’t get divorced.
“Are your parents still alive?,” I remember asking one particularly shrill woman.
“Yes”, she answered.
“Are they still married?”.
“No”.
“Are you married?”.
“Not anymore”.
“Why not?”.
“I divorced him ’cause he cheated”.
That was your choice.
Just as it was my choice to try to get past Harvey’s cheating and make things work between us. And I don’t regret my choice, even though I also don’t regret the fact that Harvey and I aren’t together (and aren’t even friends now). But, I made a commitment to him and I did everything I could to honor that…just as Hillary Clinton did to honor her marriage to her husband…which continues to FLOURISH to this day.
It’s now the year 2010.
There is someone in the White House who actively hates this country. The current first couple are two people who spent the last twenty years in Jeremiah Wright’s pews, listening to him rail against America and all it stands for. Obama repeatedly talks about ending the idea of American exceptionalism and surrendering the idea of our sovereignty to what he calls a higher, world power.
In 2008, the Left seized control of the Democrat Party and pushed Obama as its nominee for president so the Left could do everything it’s been wanting to do for decades. The Left started plotting the Obama takeover of the party because they saw in him someone who hates America and would go along with whatever they wanted. It’s not Obama that’s done everything that’s happened in the last two years: these are not HIS ideas, he did not write the Obamacare bill, he’s not pushing all of the demented legislation that’s tanking the economy. This man is signing off on things, but he’s just a figurehead who was promised Air Force One, endless parties and balls, and someday his face on money or Mount Rushmore (he dreams). He’s an egoist of the highest order who has completely delegated all the responsibilities of the presidency to those in the Left who elevated him to this station.
Besides the marriage thing, the other thing I’ve had just about enough of is conservatives calling Hillary Clinton a Leftist.
You look really stupid when you do this.
Think about it.
If HRC was really a Leftist, then why did the Left sandbag her for Obama in 2008?
If what you insist is so true, then why wasn’t the Left behind her in the nominating process and why isn’t she president today?
Some of you have a conveniently nebulous memory of the 1990s and everything that’s happened since.
The Left hates the Clintons with a passion because the Clintons not only took the party deliberately towards the center (and away from the McGovern/Carter/Mondale/Dukakis crazies),but established the Democrat Leadership Council as a rival power center to the DNC itself so that moderates and conservatives could maintain a voice of control in the party. The Left fought against the DLC tooth and nail for YEARS, finally defeating it in 2007-2008, by way of the Soros-funded nutroots, ACORN, the SEIU, and other arms of what would become Obama’s campaign organization.
It’s apocryphal to call Hillary Clinton a Leftist, because if she really was a Leftist, as you claim without merit, then she’d be president right now. It just makes no sense for the Left to have invested so much time, energy, and money to defeat the Clintons in 2008 if they were perceived as Left enough to install HRC as president. Why take the risk on the unknown that is Obama if the Left really believed HRC was one of them?
You really need to think about, and answer that question, if you are one of these people who keeps parroting the meme that Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is such a Leftist.
The Clintons are Democrats and will always be party-loyal. That’s an understandable blow to me as someone who really loves these people and can’t imagine a life where I don’t support the two of them (three, counting Chelsea). They have always been very kind to me on a personal level, and the first political campaign I ever got involved in was Clinton ’92. The Clintons made me comfortable with being a Democrat, back when I still was one, because they reined in the lunatic fringe and kept the Left locked in the closet. I know that conservatives are obsessed with being purists and spending all of their time and energy obsessing over how far various people fall from ideals but I’ve never had the luxury of all that surplus time and energy to waste on that nonsense.
I’ve always liked Hillary more than her husband, I think mainly because she’s a sarcastic smartass like myself, though she’s smart enough to not let that show as much as I do. As president, she would have terrified our enemies because I don’t doubt for a minute she’d have the guts to nuke Iran into a giant glass parking lot if pushed to it — which is just one of the reasons the Left hates this woman and sabotaged her 2008 presidential bid. She’s a hawk, like I am, and she’s a former Goldwater Girl conservative in the way that I’ve always been conservative, even if I grew up with the Democrat label because that’s the one you identity-acquire being born and raised in inner city Cleveland.
When I got to see Hillary Clinton two or three times a week for a stretch during the 2008 campaign, back when she knew the DNC would not allow her to claim the nomination, but she kept fighting anyway, I saw with my own eyes a woman who was putting herself through all that grief and effort because she believed America needed her to fight for it. She didn’t want the country to go backwards, and she didn’t believe Obama was equipped to be president. So she kept fighting hard to underscore all of that for as long as she could in hopes people would wake up and break free from the media thrall the were in with all that Hopeychange nonsense.
“Well, why did she become part of his administration? Why did she help him?” is another asinine thing I’m tired of listening to.
By all accounts, even from some of her worst detractors, Hillary Clinton is the sole adult in this administration. She was asked to serve as Secretary of State and she accepted that mission. This is who she is. There are a great many things I am asked to do every day that I personally don’t enjoy or have the energy to do, but if I believe in the root cause I’ll do whatever I have to do, whether I want to or not. This is how Hillary Clinton is. Would YOU turn down the chance to represent the country you love to the world and travel the globe with a platform to make the world better in the areas you’ve dedicated your life to? Would YOU pass up that chance to, as a woman, be only the third female to hold that position and have the opportunity to show people in repressed countries that women are just as equal and powerful as man?
And, yes, she took the job also for her own strategic benefit. I’m happy to no longer see many out there howling that “she should have stayed in the Senate”. Really? Because then she’d have to not only vote on all the crazy things the Left pushed in the last two years but would have to now be out campaigning her heart out for all of these lunatics who backstabbed her. Instead, she’s abroad somewhere, doing her own thing, letting the Democrat Party that betrayed her collapse upon herself while she’s burnishing the foreign policy credentials that will remove one attack against her (namely, she has no foreign policy experience) when she runs for president again in 2016.
I will always love, admire, and support Hillary Clinton because she’s a very big part of my life. I resent when some of you out there send me nasty messages like “You need to change the name of this site” and “You need to renounce Hillary”. You know what: you need to go f*** yourselves. That’s right. I said it. You have no right to tell me what I should or should not call our site. You have no right to tell me what to think, what to write about, or what to like or love. You are delusional if you think otherwise and I really don’t care if you continue to read us or not.
It’s really clear that as Hillary Clinton left politics for the State Department, HillBuzz evolved into something that’s apart from her, her political ambitions, and HillaryLand in general — but she’s where our origin was, where our heart is. She’s the reason all of us here met as friends, and all the adventures we had together on the campaign trail for her made us closer as friends than we ever could have imagined.
I have a very hard time believing I’ll ever support the Democrats in anything ever again…even for Hillary. You have no idea what a nightmare this is for me, or how much I struggle with the idea of a Hillary 2016 campaign. I love the woman. I spent every cent I had and invested two years of my life into her presidential campaign back in 2008. I went to 27 states, drove thousands of miles, slept in offices and under picnic tables in some cases, and was busy 19 or 20 hours out of a day for long stretches going all-in for her.
But, the Democrat Party has so revealed itself to be everything I’m against — everything that’s bad for America — that I just don’t want any more Democrats in the White House. I think ever again, for the rest of my life. Even if it’s Hillary herself, because I don’t want the Left to ever come this close to power again, as long as I live. The damage these people have done in two years sickens me. I can’t ever be a part of electing a Democrat, not unless the Left is completely purged from the party, and I just don’t see Hillary or anyone else being able to do that between now and 2016 (her last real chance to run).
Politics is a rough and tumble world to live and breathe in, especially when you’re someone like me who wears his heart on his sleeve and is genetically so loyal to people I care about. I wish Hillary Clinton was a Republican. I wish she had stayed a Goldwater Girl and had been a Mary Matlin to Bill Clinton’s James Carville. I wish she could run for president as an Independent and not have to depend on the unions and the Left and all those lunatics for votes to get into office — because I just can’t bear the thought of every having to be on the side with those dreadful people again. I just won’t do it.
I can’t do it.
Not after everything I saw and went through in 2008.
This is my small part of the massive tragedy that is the Obama presidency. So much has been destroyed by the Left’s power grab these last two years.
It should be so clear to all of you, especially to conservatives, who the Left really is…it’s Obama, and those who pushed him to where he is.
It was not the Clintons in the 90s, whom the Left declared war on…so calling them Leftists is not just factually inaccurate, but it’s just plain foolish. If you are going to be of any use towards taking back this country and saving America from the Left, you need to be smarter than this…and not just repeat tired old memes because that happens to be a habit of yours.
It’s just like hitting Hillary on her marriage…or being a conservative who beats up on me because I’m a Hillary guy who’d happily take any number of bullets for a woman I will always admire…or you’re one of those who keep harping on us to change our name. Why don’t you change yours? I’m sure I could think of some choice options that would apply, because two can play those games, and I’d play to win.
If any good can come from the Obama presidency, it should be the closing of the book on Clinton Derangement Syndrome because it’s now been factually proven that the two people some of you spent years hating and fearing are nowhere near the nightmare the Left really and truly is, as manifested in the Obamas and what they are doing to this country.
THAT is where your attention and focus needs to be, instead of obsessing over someone’s marriage in the 90s or taking potshots at a woman who’s not even in politics anymore.
The only way to defeat Obama, and the Left that powers him, is to get FOCUSED and work aggressively to make sure he does not win a second term in two years…because in that term he would really ramp up his efforts to make the most of that opportunity to really stick it to America.
I’m a former Democrat who is going to continue doing everything he can to make sure a conservative is elected in 2012 to right the course of this country. I don’t care what it costs me. I don’t care what grief I take because of it. I don’t care how exhausting it all is. This is the one thing I can do for the country I love and I will not be censored, bullied, attacked, threatened, maligned, or intimidated in any way that prevents me from doing it.
When I see memes being pushed, even by longtime readers and posters here, that I think are destructive to the goal of defeating the Left, I am going to call people out on it. I’m not going to tolerate the parroting and spreading of garbage about someone being too old to be president or the Clintons being Leftists or more endless harping about an affair that happened 12 years ago.
Not on my watch, not when there’s the Obama administration to stop in its tracks before it can do more harm to the country.
If you don’t like any of this, then tough.
This is reality. If you aren’t part of the solution, then you are part of the problem and America has enough problems right now.
It’s time to focus on those and put whatever sniping and obsessive CDS you have against the Clintons aside and focus on getting America back on its feet and putting more conservatives into office to replace the Leftists there currently.
Current president's brother Malik marries third wife: a teenager
Our current, illustrious, light-bringing, oceans-lowering, miracle-working, “The One”, president is now the proud brother-in-law of a teenaged girl…who has become the third wife of his brother Malik in Kenya.
Disgusting.
Shameful.
I’m a big fan of the TV show “Fringe” on FOX and the defunct mid-90s “Sliders” (also from FOX) where people travel to alternate universes where everything is bizarre and different, completely removed from our own reality here.
This is what every day of the Obama presidency feels like.
Let’s just break this down a minute.
The current President of the United States has a brother named Malik who is a polygamist.
The president’s brother is a polygamist.
THE PRESIDENT’S BROTHER IS A POLYGAMIST.
The president’s polygamist brother has now married a teenaged girl.
The president is now the brother-in-law of a teenaged girl in a polygamist marriage.
Another show I watch is Brothers & Sisters on ABC (because the character Scotty is totally my dream boyfriend). On that show, a character named Holly suffered brain injury in a car crash at the end of last season…and she has no short term memory. People have to re-introduce themselves to her every day because she forgets everything since 1995 or so whenever she goes to sleep. For some reason, she keeps insisting she’s the star of the show “Thirtysomething”, and Sally Field has to slap her back to reality (“Weren’t you in Mrs. Doubtfire?”). So, the people around Holly have to keep bringing her up to speed on what’s going on in the world around her, like she’s Rip Van Winkle in pantsuits, time-traveling from 1995 to the present by way of the sleepy time express every night.
I can just imagine sitting with Holly saying, “The current president is a Marxist who was raised in Hawaii under the mentorship of Frank Marshall, an admitted pedophile. Before that, he lived in Indonesia and attended school as a Muslim. He was adopted by a Muslim named Soetoro and to this day refuses to show his birth certificate because of either a name change that happened to it because of that adoption or because of whatever was written on it about the identity or ethnological makeup of his father, who was a Kenyan who would have been listed as “African Arab” on his birth certificate and not “black” the way he wants him to be. The American media didn’t look into any of this, and won’t talk about it now. They also won’t talk about the fact that no one knows how this president got into Columbia or Harvard when he appears to have gotten Cs and Ds in most of his classes, was made president of the Harvard Law Review without ever writing an article, and published two books that were ghost-written (one by William Ayers, an unapologetic terrorist, and the other by Jon Favreau, but not the director, the one that’s a little punk). The media won’t talk about Jeremiah Wright or the hate-church of black liberation theology this president sat in for over 20 years, or his desire to see America taken off a capitalist system and made into a socialist “paradise” with him as the dictatorial “Dr. Utopia”. This president supports building a Victory Mosque symbol of Islamic conquest at Ground Zero, calls anyone who opposes him a racist, and believes midwesterners are bitter, religion-and-gun-clinging yokels he looks down upon.
Oh, and his brother in Kenya just married his third wife…who is a teenager”.
I don’t think I’d have enough time in a day with Holly to tell her about Aunt Zetunia in Boston or describe all the things Michelle Antoinette has done since the Obamas moved into the White House.
I can’t imagine Holly being able to take all this at once, or believe a word of it, without passing out at some point.
Then, her brain would reboot and I’d have to go through all this again.
I just don’t have the strength for that.
Not even for a chance at Scotty.
Identifying Internet Scams — National Student Exchange edition
Today someone I know tried to do me a solid by forwarding an email she’s received multiple times (16 so far) regarding a job solicitation by a man named Jayson Sparks at National Student Exchange. She knew I’m a freelancer, without a permanent steady job since 2008, and that I’m always looking for ways to make money from home. So, she saw this home-based, web-only, sales opportunity offering a high pay of $36.28/hour and immediately sent it to me, thinking it was a valid job. This was incredibly thoughtful of her, and I love getting job leads from friends, but I detected this as an identity theft scam almost the instant I read it.
Just like we’ve done in the past with Troll Dissection 101 breaking down why a message on the Internet appears to be from a troll, I thought it would be useful to many of you if I dissected why this message with a job opportunity is an identity theft fishing expedition someone looking for a job might easily fall for.
Here’s the message that was forwarded to me, by a “Jayson Sparks”, claiming to be from the National Student Exchange organization:
—– Original Message —–
From:
To:
Sent: Wed Dec 31 20:00
Subject: Fwd: NSECMy name is Jayson Sparks;
I am a hiring manager with National Student Exchange Center (NSEC),
a non-profit international student exchange organization, specializing in managing exchange programs for university and college students from all over the world.
I would like to offer you a job of an Area Representative with our organization.An Area Representative’s responsibilities include
* Distributing of educational materials and grants from our sponsors
* Preparing materials that will be used for country & state guides for foreign students
* Working with host families, helping to resolve their issues, responding to their concernsJob Requirements
* 1-2 years of previous sales experience are required.
* Previous sales experience in admissions or personnel placement is preferred.
* Telephone appointment setting and interviewing experience.
* Strong communication skills, both on the phone and in person, are required.Please note that you will need a PC with Internet connection,
as well as a working cell phone or a landline to successfully perform as a Student Organization Representative.This job would allow you to work from home or office,
since all your functions will be done through a web-based interface, which can be accessed remotely.The starting salary is $ 36.28 per hour, which can be increased depending on your performance level.
We offer paid holidays, vacation, and education reimbursement for full-time and part-time employees.
Our work environment is very dynamic.
Our people are valued.Apply today for a rewarding experience in the international education & student exchange industry!
Please forward your resume along with your contact information to the following email: 4jayson AT usa-newresume.com* NOTE: I removed the email of the person who forwarded this to me to protect her identity and altered the 4jayson email so that someone would not accidentally click on it and send anything to this scammer…but remove the spaces and turn the AT into its symbol and that’s the email that was provided.
Here’s why I knew this was a scam:
(1) In this economy, with near 20% unemployment in big cities like Chicago, no employer needs to send emails out doing recruiting for positions. At the most, they’ll put an ad up on Craigslist or through professional recruitment services…but they won’t start an email chain letter to be forwarded around the world. I don’t even know how someone would actually go about trying to recruit job applicants using only email. It’s so scattershot in terms of finding people to do the jobs you need done. It does not appear the originator of this message bought a fundraising or campaign list — or any other sort of “list” that would laser target desired applicants — it just appears to be random distribution relying on forwarding of the email from friend to friend. So, I’d advise you all to be wary of anything unsolicited that comes into your inbox from an unknown sender, period…but especially anything advertising jobs.
(2) This email offered no website to go to where an application, job description, or other information could be viewed. That’s highly suspicious because maintaining a website puts an entity on the grid, where that person is trackable, so anything that does not have a website attached to it immediately registers as a scam to me because I then believe this is a person who is trying to deliberately stay off the grid and not be tracked. That should raise concern.
(3) The name “Jayson Sparks” sounds made up. I know that an increasing number of people have bizarre names in 2010, and I’ve known legitimate, real people named “Jayson”, but “Jayson Sparks” feels like a name some spammer in Asia or Africa made up to sound American.
(4) While the text above reads like professional English (and not the Engrish, disjointed, babblefish translated text Asian spammers especially use), this is not the way employers do recruiting in this country…so my bet is that this is still an Asian or African scammer trying to mine information for identity theft here in the US.
(5) The $36.28/hour is such a weird number for posted pay. I bet this person, in whatever country they live in, took a high paying salary in his own currency and then converted that into dollars, not knowing how much an American would typically make an hour…or how much an hourly rate would have to be for a person to throw all caution out the window and leap at an opportunity to submit his or her resume. $36.00, even, no change, would be an absurd hourly pay. But it’s made all the more suspicious with that .28 stuck on the end. This should be a major red flag for everyone.
(6) Look at the email given at the end and see how unprofessional it looks: 4Jayson? Can you imagine a real recruiting firm you’ve ever dealt with using this as a legitimate email address? It’s suspicious because most American business emails follow a convention that would be JSparks@whatevercompany or Jayson.Sparks@VeridionDynamics or whatever. Jayson claims he’s with National Student Exchange, but his email address is usa-newresume.com. What exactly is usa-newresume.com and what relation does this have to the National Student Exchange? Having “USA” in there also makes me think this is an Asian or African spammer, because overseas addresses usually have some kind of country identifier in them.
Because I’m me, and I seem to play amateur detective all day, I did a search on National Student Exchange to see if this was indeed a real organization. It is, and it works with reputable schools doing student exchange programs. I could not immediately find a phone number or email for NSE itself, but I contacted one of the Coordinators listed in the search results at one of the participating schools. I read her the email and asked her if she’d ever heard anything about this before.
She said this was the first she’d heard of this email but that she was 100% certain it was a scam.
“Nobody in higher education pays $36 an hour for anything”, she told me. We talked for a little while about what sort of scam this might be, and she agreed with me that it seems someone is trying to get people to send their resumes in so that he can steal personal information off them.
Think about it: your resume has your home address, your phone number, and your personal employment history on it. Someone could easily start impersonating you using this information.
One way I can think of to use these resumes is for illegal aliens to start impersonating you looking for jobs using fake IDs and bogus Social Security numbers but using your life’s history as a template. They could apply for jobs using your good name, with any reference calls made in pursuit of this scam turning up real positive information on you…with the person on the other end of the phone never realizing that “you” weren’t really YOU the calls were being made about.
There’s probably some way these resume could be used to open fake credit cards and take out bank loans too. There’s an awful lot of information in a resume…so it’s best not to ever send that out into the world unless you know who you are sending it to.
That’s why I’ve never liked sites like CareerBuilder.com or Monster.com where you can post a resume up for the world to see. It’s scary to think about scammers and spammers mining for information on these sites, but I bet more of them are using these listings than reputable employers actually seeking personnel.
To conclude this mystery, the NSE coordinator asked me to forward the email I received from Jayson Sparks on to the president of the NSE so she’d be aware of it. Hopefully some IT person at NSE will be able to identify where these emails are being sent from and the police can become involved to end this scam. If this is coming from Asia or Africa, as I suspect, it doesn’t seem like much can be done about it because from everything I have seen about law enforcement in these countries in the area of cybercrimes, it’s the wild, wild, west and then some.
If you have more info on this particular scam, or other cyber scams you’ve noticed, please chime in on this thread below. I think this info could really help some people avoid falling into these traps.
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UPDATE: Here’s a note I got from the president of the NSE, Bette Worley, regarding this scammer:
Hello Kevin,
We have had a flood of calls and e-mails to this scam. We are not the National Student Exchange Center and we exchange students only within the US and Canada; not the world. Jason is an imposter and/or a scam artist. This has been going on for the last month and is increasing in repetitive e-mails. We can trace the scam to the United Kingdom, but that is as far as we can get. We would be as happy to see this go away as you are.
We have been unable to identify any such organization, but the e-mails are everywhere; especially in the UK and other parts of Europe.
Bette
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UPDATE: I’m really glad a reader forwarded this email scam to me because it appears to be much, much more widespread than I guessed.
Since I wrote this article a few hours ago, we’ve already gotten about 150 hits via Google from people searching for some combination of “National Student Exchange email”, “NSE scam”, “NSE job email”, etc.
I think people are doing what I did when the email was forwarded to me: emailing to check out what NSE was before they went ahead and complied with the email and sent their resume to this person named “Jayson Sparks”.
I’m glad some of them have been landing on this page, where there is definitive word from the NSE president Bette Worley that this, in fact, is not a real job offer and that people should NOT send their resume to this person.
If anyone reading this is part of cyber crimes with the government or involved in law enforcement in any way, we’d love for you to chime in on the thread if anything more can be done by people getting these emails to get some sort of authority to address what’s going on.
The sender of the emails appears to be in Great Britain — and we at HB have had dealings with various trolls in England…and the authorities there don’t seem to take cyber crimes, identity theft, and the like particularly serious. For whatever reason.
But if you are landing here because you were curious about this email, we repeat DO NOT SEND YOUR RESUME TO THIS SCAMMER.
Friday Open Thread: October 15th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Friday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
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Last night I discovered the Halloween equivalent of “Nationality Expertism” (that thing a lot of people in Chicago do where they ask “What’s your nationality?” but refuse to accept American as a valid answer…and this leads to us not liking that person or wanting anything to do with him…and it’s always a him, except in one lone instance where a woman asked one of us this back in Naples, Florida in 2006…other than that, Nationality Experts are all guys, and are only found in Chicago in our experience).
There’s a guy who works in one of the bars, who’s new, and started talking to me a month or so ago. We’ve both been busy, so even though we exchanged numbers, we never ended up going out, but I did like him and had been open to the idea of something happening…until last night.
I asked him what he was going to be for Halloween and he said he wanted to be an altar boy, which I didn’t think was appropriate…but I’m not going to lecture someone I barely know about why I think it’s wrong to dress up as religious figures for Halloween. I’ve talked about this here repeatedly, and am strongly against the weird fetish many gay guys seem to have with making fun of nuns and priests (and altar boys…which are usually paired with a priest to make allusions to the 1980s scandals, which originated all of this garbage).
Instead of hectoring, I told the guy that his altar boy costume was certainly “one idea”, but asked him why he was not dressing up as an Imam or something Islamic, like maybe Muhammad. I told him that dressing up as altar boys, priests, nuns, etc. was so cliche in Boystown and that if he really wanted to dress as something religious and mock it, then Islam was definitely the way he should go. He’d get all sorts of attention for that, I’m sure.
I was really disappointed in this guy, because though he’s working in a bar right now, he actually graduated from architecture school (but can’t find a job), is funny, and is pretty much adorable. He kind of looks like a ferret that was turned into a dude and is all wiry and tall, and ferret-y in the good way I like (which presumes there’s a bad way, though I’ve never encountered it).
But, honestly, I don’t want to see someone who thinks it’s fun to dress up as an altar boy for Halloween. I’ve always had a problem with the gay community’s push to make fun of the Catholic church and Christianity…while NEVER doing the same thing to other religions, most particularly Islam (which, technically, is more of a terror cult than anything else…and in my opinion needs to be ridiculed, just like the KKK in the 30s, so people stopped living in terror of whatever the next fatwa will be).
I’m still going to talk to the architect-bartender the way I have been, but we’re not going to go out now, no matter how opposite-of-busy I find myself after the November elections. Just like with the nationality expert garbage, this wanting to dress up like an altar boy for Halloween is a warning sign flashing to let me know there are probably loads of other things this guy and I wouldn’t mesh well with. If I let the altar boy thing go, I just know I’m setting myself up for him to say something rotten about Governor Palin, or worse, little Trig, because if this guy embraces one Boystown cliche I don’t like (making fun of the Catholic Church as Halloween costume) then I cringe thinking of what else is in his repertoire.
Better this ends before it even began…where we stay acquaintances who say hello in the bar or when we’re walking around in the neighborhood and carry on conversations no deeper than what he thought of this season of True Blood or what we both read Blair Kamin say about this or that canceled architecture project here in Chicago.
It’s sad, too, because someone who went to architecture school is a guy I expect to be at least somewhat creative — and the best he could do was altar boy? Really? That’s like going out with someone you think is all rough and tumble cowboy and then seeing him run crying from the room when he spots a spider. Which has happened to me too.
Epic fail.
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12 Million Hits Watch: it looks like we’re now in the homestretch for the 12 million hits milestone, which we figure will be right around Halloween sometime. It’s wild to think we’ve reached this in just two years, with just this little site on WordPress and not an actual, professional looking site of our own (yet). What’s really funny to us is that we now get more traffic than a lot of sites that attack us, which we think makes them attack us more, because they’re upset by all of this. That’s hilarious because they started out trying to make a website and we just lucked into this without any sort of plan and now here we are, two years later, and our dumb luck and happenstance ended up evolving into something better than those geniuses put all that forethought into. It’s really fun driving the Left crazy like that. We hope to do it for at least 12 million hits more.
