A libertarian group is trying to score political points off the Aurora shooting with a controversial new billboard. From top to bottom, the left side of the billboard reads “Kills 12 in a movie theater with assault rifle,” followed by a photo of alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes, followed by the text “Everyone freaks out.” The right has a picture of president Obama with the text “Kills thousands with foreign policy ... Wins Nobel Peace Prize.” The ad was put up by the Ralph Smeed Foundation. “We’re not saying that Obama is a lunatic," insisted one of its members.

From Leah Nelson:

The billboard is the work of the Ralph Smeed Foundation, an obscure libertarian organization that apparently takes great pride its rotating roadside messages.

A spokesperson for the organization explained to the Idaho Statesman:

“We’re all outraged over that killing in Aurora, Colo., but we’re not outraged over the boys killed in Afghanistan. … We’re not saying that Obama is a lunatic.”

Who the hell his Ralph Smeed, you ask?

According to the foundation’s official biography/hagiography, he was “a not-so quiet blend of Barry Goldwater, Walter Matheau and H. L. Menkin” who served as a Goldwater delegate to the 1964 GOP convention, where the scurvy “Rockefeller Republicans” did “everything they could to sabotage Goldwater’s campaign and thus followed one of the worst defeats that any Republican candidate had ever suffered.”

In a 2010 article written not long before Smeed’s death, the Statesman wrote:

Smeed, 88, is a Caldwell businessman and former newspaper columnist who calls himself the "Curmudgeon." He is famed for his iconoclastic billboard near his Farm City development and on the way to the College of Idaho, which he attended in the 1940s. For decades, the billboard critiqued politicians and other public figures with pithy jibes.

James Holmes has been officially charged with 24 counts of murder and 116 counts of attempted murder. Holmes is the sole suspect in the shooting at a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 and injured 58. Before his appearance in court today, his second so far, the former head of the Colorado public defender’s office predicted, “There’s probably charges that can be brought [on behalf] of anybody who was present. The state will need to decide how they approach all of those charges." The judge was also set to hear arguments regarding a package Holmes mailed to his psychiatrist that his lawyers argue was illegally apprehended and leaked to the public by the government.

"Anonymous" sources and DNA "evidence" that turns out to be false attempt to tie Occupy movement to a brutal murder.

On Tuesday, the local New York City NBC affiliate ran a story based on an unnamed source leaking information on a murder case, with the following headline, "DNA links Occupy protest scene to 2004 murder." There had been a break in the eight-years-cold investigation of the murder of Sarah Fox in Inwood Hill Park. DNA evidence recovered from her CD player, found near her corpse, matched DNA taken from a chain used to hold open a subway door in the fare strike conducted by wildcat transit union members and Occupy Wall Street activists.

The article appeared to be based on a single unnamed source, seemingly speaking from within the NYPD investigation, though not even the basis of the source's expertise was given.

Then it seems the police already had a main "person of interest" in the case, Dimitry Sheinman, a person with no ties to Occupy Wall Street (He's lived in South Africa until recently), well before the DNA evidence surfaced. At the end of the article it states that "Sheinman remains a leading person of interest."

So...the NYPD is collecting DNA from Occupy protest scenes? Outrageous, not to mention how incredibly expensive it would be to do DNA testing on all of any such samples.

Then on Wednesday, comes this New York Times report:

A link between DNA from the unsolved killing of Sarah Fox, a Juilliard student, in 2004 and DNA taken from a chain placed at the site of an Occupy Wall Street action in March may be the result of a laboratory error, according to two people briefed on the investigation.

One of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it appeared that the DNA recovered from skin cells on the slain woman’s portable compact disc player and from the chain found this year came from a Police Department employee who works with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

And now Thursday, that same local NBC affiliate reports this:

Two sources said officials are investigating whether at an NYPD lab technician came into contact with both pieces of evidence, causing the match.

How would both samples be tainted unless they weren’t working from a database match, but from some manufactured reason to check the DNA samples side by side?

NBC also reports that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was "Asked Wednesday why police tested the chains for forensic evidence, Kelly said, "If we are able to identify someone who committed a crime using forensic evidence, we are going to use it."'

Also a statement from an Occupy Wall Street spokesman, "I hope the person or persons who killed this young woman are found and brought to justice," said Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for Occupy Wall Street. "We don't know anything about it... I hope no one jumps to any conclusions."

As the media has already "gone there," I hope they also now continue to hammer Ray Kelley about his program of collecting DNA from protest sites, because that's the only actual scoop in this whole story.