carlos lam goes on the lam

probably the biggest story out of indiana yesterday is that of carlos lam, former deputy prosecutor in johnson county. lam got in trouble for an email he wrote to wisconsin governor scott walker suggesting he take inspiration from bob roberts in his battle with the state's unions:

I've been involved in GOP politics here in Indiana for 18 years, and I think that the situation in WI presents a good opportunity for what's called a "false flag" operation. If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the public unions. Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC and umbrella union organizations in the protest. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions.

when lam's email became public, his first impulse was to lie and say his account had been hacked:

Lam, who had asked that his name not be used, said he was particularly concerned since "the person who wrote this seems to know a lot about me" and his account "had been hacked in the past." On the advice of Cooper, he took down his Facebook page, changed his cell phone number, email passwords, "library, medical, bank, student loan, and a whole host of records," and was afraid for his and his family's safety.

to his credit, later that day he confessed and resigned from the prosecutor's office. but the part about taking down his facebook page and phone numbers may be true after all. i can't find him on facebook, the phone number he signed at the bottom of his letter to walker has been disconnected, and now his blogs have disappeared.

when i heard about this story, my first reaction was that i recognized his name, because i'd come across him before on the local blogs. so i checked his blogger profile, where he had two blogs: PERFblog and Catholics Allied for the Faith. as of this morning, both blogs have been deleted... but both are at this moment still in the google cache.

PERFblog was a deeply wonky blog about indiana retirement benefits, so it's a difficult read, but even if the jargon looks like alpha-bits to your eyes, it's easy to understand sentiments like this:

Given this reality, state government will eventually (a) tell public employees to get screwed because the money's just not there, (b) cut the budget to fund retirees' pensions, or (c) change the system so that the liabilities don't grow as quickly. I really hope that (c) is the choice, but we public employees have to do our part: we cannot let union/collectivist leaders scare our fellow public servants into believing that a defined benefit plan is the best retirement option for public employees!

i've taken the liberty of fishing PERFblog out of the google cache and reposting it here on my site. as for his catholic blog, though it's as firmly right-wing as PERFblog, full of references to snowflake babies and latin mass, i'm not archiving it because it's not germane to this discussion. for the time being, it's still viewable in the google cache, though it will disappear within a few days.

but though he can delete his blogs, he can't delete the comments he left on other blogs. lam was an occasional commenter at conservative blogs such as advance indiana and ogden on politics—the short-lived PERFblog was even on ogden's blogroll. neither blog has mentioned lam's resignation, nor the reason for it. he was also a frequent commenter on the investing site seekingalpha.com, leaving some 1,300 comments there over the past couple years.

i must say that, after skimming through his comments on those sites (well, i got bored after about 8 pages of seeking alpha comments [out of 88]), i haven't found any bombshells. don't get me wrong: his right-wing politics shine through. but in the context of right-wing blog comments, his comments are run-of-the-mill. certainly nothing that rises to the standard of encouraging an elected official to engage in psy-ops against his own constituents. maybe he just kept those sorts of ideas confined to private correspondence. ¶