So very interesting....

Please pardon me for getting out of my box here, but the idiot who tried to play James O'Keefe is apparently a staffer for Rep Thad McCotter.

Someone else with the same name?

Doubtful.

 

Tommy

 

Comments

[Southern Beale]

How very strange. I'm sure this will be ignored.

[pansypoo]

where are the libs doing this on the vast rite wing conspiracy?

[Kibitzer 2006]

My initial reaction was that coincidence was pretty likely. Remember all of the infamous socialists that supposedly showed up on the White House guest list? “Howting” sounded like a fairly common name, and “John M.” sounded fairly common as well.

Fortunately, we have actual data. To my surprise, according to the Bureau of Census, in the 2000 census there were fewer than 100 Howting’s recorded. They only publish surnames with more than 100 occurrences (for privacy reasons), and Howting doesn’t show up. There were exactly 100 Copperwheat’s, Vidaurrazaga’s, Ziegelhofer’s, etc.

BTW, there were also fewer than 100 T’s, so either Tommy has a very small extended family or they are all militia types who refuse to answer the census :). There were however 26876 Te’s and 23968 Tea’s--possibly variant spellings of T.

Full disclosure: There were also fewer than 100 Kibitzer’s, but we’ve always been a secretive bunch.

--Kibitzer

[Kibitzer 2006]

Correction: There were only 850 Te’s and 983 Tea’s. The 26876 and 23968 were their ranks in order of decreasing frequency. We regret the error.

--Kibitzer

[Tommy T]

Kibitzer - how many of them are GOP activists who work for a guy who thinks Breitbart's methods were praiseworthy?

I'll bet that narrows the pool down to one.

:-)

Tommy

[armored goldfish]

I love how the fellow's approach is the War on Straw: "So how can I shake down politicians?" All this while going through the effort of making up fake biographies.

[Kibitzer 2006]

Kibitzer - how many of them are GOP activists who work for a guy who thinks Breitbart's methods were praiseworthy?

I'll bet that narrows the pool down to one.

:-)

Tommy

My point exactly. At first I supposed there were probably a gazillion Howting's, and that at least a trillion of them would be named John, and of those at least billion of them would have "M" as a middle initial, and of those at least a million would be wingnut-sleuth-wanabees. (OK, scale all those numbers down a bit.) Anyway, I thought the probability of a name collision was at least greater than epsilon.

Given that there were apparently fewer than 100 Howting's in the US in the first place (in 2000), it seems that the probability of a name collision is about 0.

Yep, I think it's the same guy.

--Kibitzer

[Tommy T]

Just heard back from Michael Powell at the NYT (apparently some scurrilous blogger let him know about the Thad McCotter connection).

He found out this morning that Mr. Howting left staff two months ago (or so they say).

Tommy

[Kibitzer 2006]

Scurrilous blogger? I wonder who that could have been.

--Kibitzer