FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Today Mrs. Other McCain got the news that we had been turned down on a rental application for what we had hoped would be our new home, which is rather a bitter pill, considering that we now have less than five days to find a new home. Selah.
When you decide to go “all in,” you play the hand you’re dealt. I’m grateful for everyone who has hit the tip jar to assist in this unexpected emergency relocation, and tip-jar hitters will please accept my apologies for failing to send thank-you e-mails. I figured you were contributing to keep me reporting on “The Kimberlin Files,” and so I have kept reporting, rather than taking time to thank each of you individually.
Sunday, unfortunately, I wasted several hours composing a reply to an “Open Letter” posted by Seth Allen. About 2,000 words into my reply, I figured it was a waste of time, abandoned the draft and moved on. But this afternoon, during a phone call with a source, I was grumbling about the storm of infighting and recriminations among bloggers over the Kimberlin saga, an unfortunate development that has been a distraction and an emotional drain for the past several weeks. I’ve written nearly nothing about it, simply because it was fundamentally irrelevant to the important story I’ve been trying to cover.
Not to whine, you understand.
Mandy Nagy, Patrick “Patterico” Frey and others have been coping with these problems far longer than I have. Since October 2010, there has been a nearly incessant (but unseen) wrangling over the Kimberlin story, engendering much bitterness, weariness and demoralization. When I jumped onto this story May 17, I had no inkling of the background, and found myself inexorably drawn into a bunch of tedious personal drama that other people have facing for months.
Here I was, thinking we were trying to cover an important news story. Instead, I’d wandered into the International Championship of Butt-Hurt.
Celebrating Smitty’s return from Afghanistan, September 2011
FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Remember when an alleged “singer,” performing under the name Champagne Dream, recorded an unspeakably wretched version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”?
Alas, the video has been removed from the Internet, so that readers can no longer experience the weird combination of insane laughter and projectile vomiting that Champagne’s performance invariably produced. More than two years later, however, the April 2010 blog post about that bizarre musical monstrosity — “VIDEO: Hate Crime Caught on Camera!” — retains the all-time record for the most-commented post in the history of TheOtherMcCain.com.
We just recorded our 10 millionth hit — 6.7 million since Smitty switched us from the original Blogspot format to the custom WordPress site on New Year’s Day 2010 — and, in commemoration of this occasion, I asked Smitty to compile the list of Top 20 Most-Commented Posts:
What is most pleasing to me in this list is the extent to which it is dominated by original reporting. “Content is king,” they say, and some of these items were actual shoe-leather work, such as No. 14, my live report from Anchorage, Alaska, about the GOP Senate primary between Joe Miller and Lisa Murkowski.
Something funny to notice is how, sometimes, news just happens.
Two of the Top 20 (No. 5 and No. 13) were products of my November 2011 trip to the Americans for Prosperity Summit. I went to D.C. that weekend to see the GOP presidential contenders who were speaking at the Summit, and also expecting to drink free at the expense of some of my sources. But I accidentally found myself in the middle of a riot — “#OWS Protesters Attempt to Storm AFP Defending the American Dream Summit.”
That wasn’t something I planned or expected. I’d stepped outside to have a cigarette and wandered over to watch the Occupy DC protesters do their silly chants. Chris Moody of Yahoo News and Michelle Fields of the Daily Caller were standing in front of a cop car, watching them, too. We chatted a bit — reporters comparing notes — and then one of the Occupy leaders yelled, “Road trip!” That was apparently their pre-arranged signal to rush the doors, and I turned on my little pink camera (the famous “Barbie Cam”) to record the action:
Total chaos. When I wedged my way through the mob, trying to get inside to safety, I found that the cops had locked the doors to prevent the Occupiers from entering. So I was trapped in the middle of all these enraged smelly hippies, and noticed I shared this predicament with four other “civilians”: Two AFP Summit attendees, as well as Michelle Fields and her Daily Caller videographer.
When news breaks, every second counts. There is high value to being the first to get a breaking story online: “The need for speed.”
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Occupy DC” protesters just attempted to force their way into the Washington Convention Center where the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is holding its Ronald Reagan tribute dinner for the “Defending the American Dream Summit.” I was in the middle of the scrum of smelly hippies when they stormed the doors and have multiple photos and video which I’m uploading now. . . .
Got that online, sent it out via Twitter and e-mailed a tip to Instapundit, while waiting for the video to upload to YouTube, then embedded that in the first update. By 9:20 p.m., it was linked at Instapundit and by 10:30 p.m., I was enjoying free beers at the expense of my sources — as originally planned.
Then, the follow-up: The next morning, while driving home from the Summit, I rummaged through my pockets, found Michelle Fields’s business card and called her up, switched on my digital recorder and conducted a brief interview while I drove up I-270. Recognizing the news value of what she had told me, I exited the freeway at Gaithersburg, went into a Burger King (free WiFi), set up my laptop, transcribed the recording, and posted the exclusive: “‘F– Michelle Fields!’ — Interview With Reporter Harassed at Occupy DC Protest.”
At 10:52 a.m., that was also linked at Instapundit. Then I finished my breakfast, got back in my car and drove home, knowing that by the happy coincidence of good luck and experienced news judgment, I’d just scored another important exclusive.
Later today we will record our 8 millionth visitor to the blog. We got our first 3.3 million at the old Blogspot site (March 2008-December 2009) and, since switching to the custom domain with WordPress software in January 2010, have added another 4.7 million visits.
We recently recorded our best month to date with 339,343 visits in July so — assuming we can keep this up, and the Blog Gods of the Cargo Cult do not become offended again — it’s possible to estimate that we could reach the cumulative total of 10 million visits sometime in April or May.
Submitting such requests is a hassle, as I’ve always loathed filling out applications. However, I’m sure my request will be approved, as I had no problem getting credentials from CNN for the Sept. 12 Tampa debate. But whereas I was credentialed as a correspondent for The American Spectator, I’m a bit nervous about how the public-relations office at CNN will respond when Smitty and Wombat apply for credentials to cover the Vegas debate for TheOtherMcCain.com.
Ceremonial cross of John Frum cargo cult on the island of Vanuatu
Something has gone drastically wrong, and I can’t figure out what it is. About a month ago, as Wombat noted in his Aug. 28 FMJRA round-up, we got no fewer than six Instalanches in the span of a single week. There are bloggers who’ve worked for years without getting a ‘Lanche, and so we may have exhausted our karmic quota of linky-love that week, which would explain the 17% decline of traffic from August to September.
An extrapolation of that trend would mean that unless this problem can be reverse-engineered and corrected — unless we can get the blog back into the “sweet zone” — our traffic will decline to near-zero by this time next year. At least, that’s what my calculations show, but I was never much for advanced math.
Despite my wife’s pleadings (“Stacy, get off the computer before you go crazy. No, wait. Let me re-phrase that . . .” ) I’ve devoted many hours to examining causes of my increasing ‘Lanchelessness, pondering the snowball of anti-momentum that threatens to destroy everything we’ve worked so hard to build. And what brought this to the crisis point today was the professor’s post at 2:21 p.m.:
What was the point of devoting ten long months to covering the Herman Cain campaign — going back to the days of “Herman Who?” — if nothing I’ve written about Cain since his Florida Straw Poll victory is ‘Lanche-worthy? The message seems to be that I have nothing meaningful to say on the subject, now that fully-employed professional Washington political experts have taken notice of the guy.
Unless, of course, somebody slips rohypnol in your drink at a party and you wake up the next morning with 10,000 new readers, trolls all over your comments, and a vague sense of guilty pleasure.
The same young blogger who wrote to Doug Ross sent me an e-mail seeking my advice and I replied, in part:
“Always drink beer in a bottle, because if a fight breaks out, you’ve got a weapon right there in your hand. Smash the bottom of the bottle against the bar, brandish the jagged shards like a knife (what they call a ‘Puerto Rican switchblade’) and loudly threaten to slice the throat of the first motherf—-r that gets in your way while you move warily toward the door.”
Do that just once at a Heritage Foundation cocktail reception, and the motherf—-rs won’t dare cause you trouble again.
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, AFGHANISTAN — Fourth of July. My seventh wedding anniversary. Seven mega-hits on the blog. They managed to figure out the proxy settings so that I can put up a proper post. Woo hoo!
In this recent mobile planning meeting, we see Stacy McCain, the passenger, discuss the importance of the number seven for a revenue generating idea he has for the blog. Wombat, the driver, tries to comprehend the brilliance on display. (Caution: F-bomb at the end):
By the Power of Kindle, I’m enjoying Toll’s Six Frigates. Don’t let my squid bias put you off: this is something every American should read. The details of the politics at the Founding differ from the politics of today less than you might think. Human nature is constant, after all. Technology is the variable, and that mostly affects the time involved for events to unfold.
The Ruling Class in the United States today is as foreign to the ideal of liberty as the Brititsh Parliament was in the time of the Founders. Blogs and their readers are going to drive the emancipation of Americans from the Progressive overlords.
Happy 4th of July, all you right wing extremists!
And thanks to “A Point of View” for a wonderful extended review.
Long may Stacy and Smitty reign and rain down on enemies left and center.
I’d say “read the whole thing”, but that would be self-serving.
UPDATE (RSM): Here are the details of visitor 7,000,000, who lives in California, uses a Safari browser, and clicked onto the site at precisely 3:43:13 p.m. PDT (6:43:13 p.m. EDT):
The SiteMeter total this morning was nearing 6,990,000 visits, meaning that we are now within 10,000 hits of the 7-million mark.
As we are currently averaging more than 8,000 hits a day, we should cross this traffic threshold tomorrow, the 4th of July, which seems entirely appropriate. Incidentally, we set a new record for monthly traffic in June — nearly 300,000 hits — and we thank all our readers, as well as all the blogs who’ve linked us. According to e-Referrer.com, our Top Ten sources of traffic are:
One of the common complaints of newbie bloggers is that it’s impossible for them to break through into the top ranks of the blogosphere, because Big Bloggers hog up all the traffic. But notice that two of our top referrers — Conservatives4Palin and Legal Insurrrection — didn’t even exist when I started blogging full-time in March 2008. Continue reading The 7 Millionth Hit Approaches →
“All politics all the time gets boring after a while. . . . Even a stone political junkie cannot subsist on a 24/7 diet of politics. The occasional joke, the occasional hot babe, the occasional joke about a hot babe — it’s a safety valve to make sure we don’t become humorless right-wing clones of those Democratic Underground moonbats.”
— Rule 5(b), “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year,” Feb. 15, 2009
Tuesday afternoon, I got a sample of the awesome power of Ace’s traffic when he linked my post about Christina Hendricks, temporarily overloading the servers and producing about 5,000 visits in the span of three hours. What would traffic have been like, if the servers hadn’t overloaded? Dunno. But that surge was as impressive as Christina Hendricks’s cleavage an Instalanche.
Very often I get criticized for running funny or trivial stories, or going off-message. There is a contingent of folks who want their political sites doing nothing but relentlessly messaging. . . .
They seem to make the error of not realizing that for a message to be effective, first, it must be read in the first place.
And being a little idiosyncratic and random and funny and goofy helps with that. Whether the Seriousness Brigade realizes that or not. . . .
It’s interesting to note that Rush Limbaugh gets the same kind of complaints that Ace gets. Every time Rush talks about golf or the NFL, some listeners call in and demand that he “stick to the issues.”
When you decide to go “all in,” you play the hand you’re dealt. I’m grateful for everyone who has hit the tip jar to assist in this unexpected emergency relocation, and tip-jar hitters will please accept my apologies for failing to send thank-you e-mails. I figured you were contributing to keep me reporting on “The Kimberlin Files,” and so I have kept reporting, rather than taking time to thank each of you individually.
