Update: Rand Paul Campaign Worker Gets Even Nicer
Tim Profitt, the man who stomped on the head of the woman trying to hold up a sign outside the Paul / Conway debate last night, wants the woman he stomped to apologize to him.
I am not making that up.
When we spoke to Profitt, he asked that his face not appear on camera, but he wanted to defend himself. “She’s a professional at what she does,” Profitt said, referring to the MoveOn.org activist, “and I think when all the facts come out, I think people will see that she was the one that initiated the whole thing.” …
As for Profitt, he remains defiant. “I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Profitt said.
And when asked if he would apologize to Valle. “I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you,” Profitt said.
Yeah, that damned hippie, actually having the gall to come to a public pace and hold up a sign! She’s lucky nobody shot her dead. She should be grateful that Profitt stomped her head while she was pinned to the ground. She should man up and apologize for making him work through his horrific back pain to restrain her from exercising her free speech.
Okay, in case it’s not already blindingly obvious, nobody had any right to so much as touch the woman. The Paul supporters were already pushing the limits by blocking her from going where she wished. Just because she was going to do something they didn’t like did not give them license–but at least just standing in her way was inside the law, if somewhat dickish.
But when they laid a hand on her, that’s assault. Restraining her physically was way beyond what they had any right doing. Tackling her was asinine, and even more illegal.
But while the woman was on the ground, two large, grown men pinning her there, immobile and not even under any circumstances imaginable a threat to anyone, to put your foot over her head and neck and then stomp down–that is, as previously pointed out, crossing a major line. Back pain has nothing to do with it–even if there had been reason to pin her to the ground, she was pinned. Profitt’s actions were, to say the least, gratuitous.
But it should not be forgotten that touching the woman in any way, shape or form was also unacceptable. Plain and simple, you don’t touch someone who is doing nothing but exercising the same rights as anyone else. She had as much right to be there as the man who stomped her or the man who tackled her–another Rand campaign worker named Mike Pezzano–is also guilty of assault.
And the Rand Campaign is being classy about this. Although they eventually condemned the attack and disassociated themselves from the stomper (though not, as far as I can tell, from Pezzano–the condemnation and distancing was in reference only to one person, presumably Profitt), the campaign and Paul himself first attempted to not condemn what happened, but to instead blame the woman as much as the man who assaulted her. Paul, speaking himself on Fox (naturally) specifically about the incident, did not apologize or even condemn the act at first:
We want everybody to be civil. We want this campaign to be about issues. I will tell you that when we arrived, there was enormous passion on both sides. It really was something where you walk into a daze of lights flashing, people yelling and screaming, bumping up. And there was a bit of a crowd control problem. And I don’t want anybody, though, to be involved in things that aren’t civil. I think this should always be about the issues and is an unusual situation that so many people, so passionate on both sides jockeying back and forth and it wasn’t something that I liked or anybody liked about that situation. So I hope in the future it’s gonna be better.
“Both sides.” The men who tackled and stomped the woman were at fault, but so was the woman because she wanted to hold up a sign within sight of Paul. More right-wing false equivalency.
The thing is, this is not new. When I was going over the videos of the town halls last year for the previous post, I was reminded of what we saw then. Angry mobs of people screaming, chanting, shoving–acting like snotty, spoiled brats, unwilling to act in a civil manner, people whose only purpose was to snuff out the ability of the opposition to say anything without being shouted down.
In short, what happened yesterday was not exactly an isolated incident. We have the politicians themselves–not just people volunteering for their campaign–actually talking about “Second Amendment Remedies” and “violent uprisings” in the event they don’t win power at the ballot box.
These people are not about Democracy. They are not even about a Republic. They are about power, in their hands and nobody else’s. They are, in a word, thugs.
When I think of the liberty of libertarianism, this is what I see.
A Pinkerton man’s boot to the head of a demonstrator.
The Tea Part itself is basically about kicking progressives.
The same animus that drove the nut to shoot up that Unitarian church, that made that other nut to drive down to SF and shoot up the Tides Center.
http://www.examiner.com/cable-news-in-national/glenn-beck-says-progressives-must-be-eradicated
Hi Luis,
I think there is a hack on your site. Google blogd and top hit is B** U**** O***** no p***********
If I click the link I go to your page. But if i click cached I get your home page with B** U**** sprinkled throughout the page.
just an FYI
matthew
Matthew:
Thanks for the heads-up. Yes, you’re right–it looks like they did something for sure. Google shows the result, but the site itself looks clean. Am checking things out–this is definitely disturbing. Forgive me for excising the offending message from your comment, I don’t want it anywhere on my site, but it was invaluable for you to post it for me, thanks.
I have no idea if this hack is internal to my site or if somebody made Google think their site was mine, or even if Google itself was hacked… but I am definitely going to look into this.
Utterly bizarre.
Normally one would expect a simple compromised CMS store, but your pages look fine . . .
Did they hack you, get goog to spider you, then put everything back???
Found another bad google result:
http://imgur.com/nHsEV.png
but that’s pretty random in your content.
Very curious.
Just wanted you to be aware of this. Hope you can get this figured out.
best to you,
matthew
Maybe someone hacked his way into your site? I cannot imagine how else they could change your site name without stealing your URL.
It reminds me of a website that apparently got hacked in China. There was an English pizza delivery site called Melrose Pizza in Shanghai. Someone hacked into their site and changed their delivery phone number, stealing all their business.
I called the number to order a pizza once. The person at the other end spoke no English, and what was delivered certainly would not pass for a pizza in the USA. But a visit to their main branch was a wonderful pizza experience!
Luis, do yourself a favor and straighten this issue out before blogging anything further. Securing your domain is your first priority!
I’m 99.99% sure this is google’s problem.
Google’s cache of this page is bad but his db is OK.
If you search for the spam words now you’ll find a couple of other sites similarly hacked in google but not on the web.
One vector would be Google’s spider being sucked into a proxy that is inserting the spam words into the content without it figuring it out.
Not sure how that would work but that’s the only thing that makes sense to me.
Not that I know anything about securing websites.
Opps, doing some research:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/google-cache-adding-keywords
and switching Firefox to googlebot UA via this Extension:
http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/
I was able to verify that your wordpress config has been compromised.
hmm. Now it’s not giving me the hacked page any more with the UA set to googlebot.
?
Disregard my aboves. It is possible I clicked on a cached version of the page in my test at 17:08.
Since my last word on this, I have been at work solid, so I was not able to touch the issue until now.
My Web Host told me that Akismet was the problem, but I am pretty sure that it was only a vulnerability that was hacked into.
I seem to have fallen victim to what is known as the “Pharma Hack,” or the “Google Cloaking Hack.” Looks like it’s an attack which injects code into your site via vulnerable plug-ins–in my case, Akismet–and then specifically avoids visibility on the actual site, instead preferring to hijack your site’s Google traffic, hopefully without you knowing about it or (more importantly) doing anything to stop it.
Had Matthew not pointed it out, I likely would have continued to be unaware for some time.
A few sites explaining it:
http://wpblogger.com/google-cloacking-wordpress-hack.php
http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/04/wordpress-pharma-hack.php
http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/07/understanding-and-cleaning-the-pharma-hack-on-wordpress.html
Looks like this is gonna give me even more work to do… Lovely.
Just when I thought I could not respect and admire spammers more. Speaking of thugs… perfect post to discuss this in!
OK, just spent a few hours cleaning things up. I think I’ve gotten it, but will have to keep monitoring things. Short story is, it’s the hack I mentioned up above–the Pharma hack, which somehow gets access to your blog, possibly through vulnerabilities in plug-ins, plants itself in various files in your site, and injects code into your blog database which fools the search engines into thinking your site is now Spam Central for whatever they are selling. Your site remains apparently untouched unless you do a Google search for it, as Matthew so fortunately did (I owe you a beer, mate).
So, I updated all the software, deleted all the plug-ins and re-installed a subset with clean software, cleaned out the database, upped general site security, and various other stuff the sites were suggesting. So, hopefully, once Google comes back and scans the site, the cached versions will start disappearing and things will start returning to normal, Google-wise.
I should have known that the spammers would evolve beyond the comment-spam and referrer-spam that plagued me in the past… but hacking my site is not what I expected. Teaches me about the dangers of not keeping up to date on this crap.
Nice work, Luis.
Your site is as clean as a whistle now.
Does anyone know how to hack into the Pharma hackers? I would really like to do some damage to them and put them out of business permanently.
Those guys are pure pestilence~!