The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Indianola ‘Clusterf**k’
UPDATE: Iowa Rally Organizer Trashes Palin to NBC News?
UPDATE: Palin Blames O’Donnell?

Posted on | August 31, 2011 | 55 Comments

UPDATE 4:15 p.m. ET: Holy stinking crap!

Tea Party of America President Ken Crow told NBC News, “I had to cancel Ms. O’Donnell” after a conversation with Sarah Palin aides — and is now hopeful Palin will attend the Saturday rally in Indianola.
He was told by Palin’s team that he’d have a final answer shortly.
This comes after failed Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell was in, then out, then back in, and now indefinitely out. And Palin was in, then “on hold.”

What a nightmare: Crow makes Palin the bad guy, telling NBC News (!!) that it’s Palin’s fault that O’Donnell got dumped, thus feeding the MSM’s “diva” meme. I’m beginning to believe one friend’s conspiracy theory that this is all being orchestrated by Rick Perry’s campaign.

UPDATE 4:25 p.m. ET: Ace ponders the What Were They Thinking questions, but never mind the thinking, it’s the saying that’s the real issue: Why would Crow tell NBC News — the propaganda apparatus of the DNC — about a conflict between Palin and O’Donnell, knowing how harmful such a narrative would be to Palin?

UPDATE 4:48 p.m. ET: The raw craziness reaches stratospheric levels:

An O’Donnell aide told RCP that the former GOP candidate for senator in Delaware had texted Palin to ask about the rapidly developing situation but had not received a response.
While it is clear that O’Donnell’s proposed speaking slot was not acceptable to Palin’s camp, the Palin aide denied that anyone on the Palin team had explicitly demanded that O’Donnell be removed from the speaker’s list.
Palin’s concern arose, the aide said, when an O’Donnell aide suggested to event organizers that Palin wanted the Delawarean to share the stage with her.
“They haven’t spoken in over a year,” the aide said of the two women.

According to whom did an O’Donnell aide do this?

How did Palin’s aides learn about this? From “event organizers”? Why would Palin’s aide then tell this to a reporter? Does the aide think that making O’Donnell the villain will make Palin look good?

UPDATE 5:10 p.m. ET: Linked by Iowa’s Shane Vander Hart who prefers “disorganized mess” as a family-friendly way to describe this clusterf–k.

UPDATE 5:30 p.m. ET: More from Ace:

Before inviting O’Donnell, did it occur to [the Iowa organizers] they should run that by their headliner/whole reason to have the rally in the first place?
Did none of them wonder about this at all?

Good question. But now Crow appears to be trying to blame it on Palin, and Palin’s staff is pointing the finger at O’Donnell. And all of this is being played out in headlines in the MSM because nobody involved seems to know how to say “no comment” when a reporter calls — unless it’s me calling, in which case either (a) my calls go straight to voicemail or (b) nobody will talk on the record.

PREVIOUSLY (12:17 p.m. ET): An uproar has suddenly erupted over Sarah Palin’s planned Sept. 3 appearance at a Tea Party rally in Indianola, Iowa. It has been reported she cancelled her appearance, but my impression — I can’t say who I’ve talked to — is that Governor Palin very much wants to appear at the event.

The reported cancellation might be best interpreted as a “final warning” gesture from Team Sarah to the event organizers: Get your act together.

Based on what I’m hearing, Ken Crow’s Tea Party of America has undergone predictable problems because the Indianola rally is the first event the group has ever sponsored. TPA gained instant credibility by recruiting longtime Des Moines Tea Party leader Charlie Gruschow, but Crow previously has had limited involvement in the movement. Once Palin was announced as the event headliner, many other people wanted to get involved, and basic problems common to volunteer organizations developed. Disputes arose over questions about what level of security was required for Governor Palin, and about who else would speak during the rally.

The recent controversy over whether Christine O’Donnell would speak at the Indianola rally was the public tip of a submerged iceberg of behind-the-scenes conflict surrounding the event, evidence of organizational ineptitude that one person described bluntly as a “clusterf–k.”

The very latest word — which arrived while I was writing this — is that Palin’s previously “cancelled” appearance is now un-cancelled, but this unfortunate public controversy can be taken as further indication of the risks involved in volunteer grassroots organizing.

UPDATE: Scott Conroy cites “two sources close to [Palin]” — I’m not going to grumble about unreturned calls right now — about “issues regarding the hosts” of the rally, and also quotes TPA’s Crow:

“The truth of the matter is you’ve got a couple old cowboys running a Tea Party and we’re not professional politicians,” Tea Party of America President Ken Crowe told RCP earlier on Wednesday morning. “I’m way green.”

Alex Pappas at the Daily Caller quotes Crow:

An organizer of the much-publicized tea party rally in Iowa this weekend says Sarah Palin would not be doing herself any favors if she drops out of the event.
“I hope that isn’t so…It would hurt her more than hurt us,” event organizer Ken Crow, the co-founder and president of the Tea Party of America, told TheDC.

Pathetic. You get Palin to headline your rally, screw up the planning and then — when Palin’s people become uncomfortable with your bungling — say her cancellation would hurt her more than it hurts you?

You never would have had a rally if it hadn’t been for Palin agreeing to appear, and she never would have agreed to it if Charlie Gruschow wasn’t involved. Everybody in the Iowa grassroots tells me they love Charlie, an experienced organizer, but Ken Crow? “Never heard of him before this.”

UPDATE II: Dave Weigel at Slate:

I met Crow in Iowa this month (I’ve been unsuccessful reaching him today) and he struck me as a classic Tea Party archetype — an amateur with big Field of Dreams ambitions. He made me well aware of all the projects he was working on but seemed a little laconic for a guy putting on a mega-rally.
“It’s gonna be televised on C-Span,” he said, “and maybe Fox, too.”
Reading up on Crow today, we find that he’s a talky activist prone to showing how much he knows. For example, on Palin: “I know for a fact she ain’t gonna run.” That’s the guy bringing Palin to Iowa for an event that reporters are attending because they wonder whether Palin will run!

Exactly. Crow’s doing an Amateur Hour act in Iowa, and he seems to be trying to convey the impression that he’s doing Sarah Palin a favor by “letting” her speak at an event that wouldn’t be a blip on the radar outside Iowa if Crow hadn’t been billing Palin as the headliner for more than a month!

UPDATE III: From the Wall Street Journal article, which has since been corrected, but which gives this background on the previously reported “cancellation”:

The former governor will now appear at a Friday event in Des Moines sponsored by the group Conservatives4Palin. It is currently scheduled for 8 p.m. at The Machine Shed Restaurant, though the location will probably have to be changed, the person close to Ms. Palin said. Ms. Palin is still scheduled to appear at a Tea Party Express tour stop Monday in New Hampshire.
Ms. Palin may still hold an event Saturday, the person said, though she has no firm plans. It’s also possible she could still attend the Indianola tea party rally, the person said.
The former governor’s team decided to back out Tuesday night after rally organizers re-invited Ms. O’Donnell to speak on stage. Organizers had booked Ms. O’Donnell, who lost her 2010 bid for a U.S. Senate seat from Delaware, to speak but quickly withdrew the invitation in an effort to avoid controversy.
A Tea Party of America leader told Ms. Palin’s aides that the former governor told him to re-invite Ms. O’Donnell, which is not true, the person said, adding that there were also issues over fund-raising and logistical changes that were not approved by Ms. Palin’s team.

If you read that carefully, you see that Palin’s team was signalling that they’d come to Iowa and do their own event, if they had to, rather than to be jacked around about this Indianola rally.

The “amateur hour” aspect shows in the decision to invite — and then dis-invite and re-invite — O’Donnell. What happened, I am told, is that once O’Donnell was announced, the organizers got e-mails from some Tea Party supporters and/or Palin fans who don’t like O’Donnell.

So then it was decfided to tell O’Donnell “no,” but you don’t ever do that.

This is just basic event planning stuff: If someone is announced to speak, but then for some reason either the organizers or the speaker change their minds — “schedule conflict.”

An unfortunate and unspecified mix-up happened, you tell the media, and you “look forward to working with [whoever] in the future.” Both the organizers and the bumped speaker get to save face, and nobody outside the tent knows what the real reason was. It’s just common courtesy.

The last thing you ever want to do in a situation like that is to appear to be publicly trashing somebody you had previously invited to your event. But that’s exactly what it looked like with the on-and-off scheduling of O’Donnell. Somebody failed to think through the possible consquences of making her a late-minute addition to the schedule, and when they started getting blowback, they pulled the trigger too quick — axing O’Donnell without considering the consequences of that, either — and then were forced to re-invite her:

Crow called the handling of O’Donnell a “mistake.”
“I didn’t handle it the way I should have,” he said. “We handled it incorrectly.”

Well, no duh. But Crow is meanwhile trying to spin this as an “aw shucks we’re just ordinary folks” thing, when Crow is the know-it-all self-promoter who got himself into a position where he’s clearly over his head. So when the WSJ quotes “a person close to” Palin as having “cited ‘continual lying’ from event organizers,” you maybe able to make a good guess who they’re talking about.

UPDATE IV: This “clusterf**k” in Indianola gives liberals in the media another chance to dump on Palin, as if this were all somehow her fault, when Palin had nothing to do with what went wrong.

Category: Election 2012, Iowa, Sarah Palin, Tea Party

Should I Stay In Afghanistan, Where It Sounds Relatively Safe?

Posted on | August 31, 2011 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Via Memeorandum, the Hill posts: “Obama targets GOP for fall offensive“, emphasis mine:

“Kill the body, and the head will die.” — Joe Frazier

President Obama is preparing to fight a political war this fall on two fronts — the first against Republicans who want his job and the second against Republicans who want to make his job more difficult.

Obama is taking dead-aim at the latter group, targeting Congress in a fall offensive that the president’s reelection campaign hopes will bruise the overall GOP image beyond repair.

Not that I’m in the GOP, but I live close enough to DC that collateral damage from all of this anti-New Tone rhetoric is a concern.

Would that the young man who is whipping himself into a bureucratic frenzy with all this pugilistic talk could come over to someplace ending in -stan and walk around a while in some body armor. I daresay that might help him burn off a little bit of blood sugar. Read the whole thing.

The country needs a calm, serious, honest look at the problems caused by federal overreach, not this silly attempt at a high-school halftime pep talk. Read the whole thing, and then point and laugh. After the chuckle, get back on task brushing these Lefty nitwits aside, in that exceptional American fashion.

That is all.

Category: Uncategorized

Bad Liberal Policy in California

Posted on | August 31, 2011 | 12 Comments

Leave it to those crazy left-wingers in California to do something so completely stupid, it’s hard to believe anyone would support it.

According to one conservative blogger, staff for “the bill’s sponsor, California Democratic Assemblywoman Toni Atkins” — what a radical kook! — have confirmed “that the legislation had been voted out of the state Senate Appropriations Committee by 6-3.”

You’re probably asking yourself, “What lunatic policy are those demented moonbats in Sacramento planning to impose on the long-suffering taxpayers of California this time?”

It’s gotta be outrageous, right? Read more

Category: California, Liberals

Thanks for Answered Prayers, and Guess Who’s Going to New Hampshire?

Posted on | August 31, 2011 | 24 Comments

OK, let’s start by saying that I’m waaaay behind on thank-you e-mails to those who’ve hit my tip jar in the past month. I’m going to catch up, I promise, but first, Da Tech Guy has an excellent point about answered prayers:

So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’ All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom (of God) and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides. Matthew 6:31-33

Admittedly, when I went to that mud-soaked festival in West Des Moines on Aug. 5, I wasn’t seeking the Kingdom of God, I was covering a political campaign. And when I uploaded video of Michele Bachmann’s Christian testimony it never occurred to me that it would provide such an unexpected blessing in such an unimaginable way.

With bills piling up here at home, I’d been wondering how I was going to fund further travels from the Shoe Leather Fund. How could I expect the tip-jar hitters, who gave so generously for my “Fear and Loathing in Iowa” trip to hit the tip jar again in September, when I hadn’t even been able to find time to thank them for what they’d already given in August?

Then that video got hijacked– what an amazing blessing in disguise. And if readers don’t mind, I hope some of the newly-created “Legal Defense Fund” can be applied to buy a train ticket to Boston.

You see, I’d been wondering if I should fly to Iowa for Saturday’s Tea Party rally with Sarah Palin. But now it is being reported that she’s going to New Hampshire right after that event, and my buddy Pete Da Tech Guy in Fitchburg, Mass., lives within driving distance of Manchester, N.H. — site of the noon Tea Party Express rally on Labor Day.

A one-way AmTrak ticket from D.C. to Boston is $162, and I’m sure my buddy Pete will pick me up at the Boston train station and be eager to join me on a trip to cover Governor Palin in New Hampshire. How I’ll get from there down to Florida for the debate in Tampa on Sept. 12 . . .

We’ll see. The important thing now is to hit the freaking tip jar, and then go read Da Tech Guy’s brilliant post. It’s like an answered prayer.

Category: Da Tech Guy, Election 2012, Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire, Sarah Palin, Shoe Leather Fund, Tea Party

LIVE AT FIVE – 08.31.11

Posted on | August 31, 2011 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Joy and Tears In Libya As Eid Arrives Without Qaddafi

Sign of the times: man moves to close a cemetery gate in Tripoli

Shortages of everything but happiness as Libyans celebrate fall of the regime
Rebels plan to lay siege to Sirte, trade time for lives

Meteorologists Cast Wary Eye On Katia
Storm has hurricane potential

Purge Follows “Fast and Furious” Gunwalking Scandal
Whistleblowing acting ATF director reassigned; top Federal prosecutor in Arizona resigns



POLITICS
O’Donnell Dropped From Iowa Tea Party Event

Former Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell speaks to Virginia Tea Party members

Removing a distraction from possible Palin announcement?

Cheney Versus Powell: Round Two, FIGHT!

General Petraeus Retiring After 37 Years To Head CIA


At American Legion Convention, Obama Vows To Spare VA From Budget Cuts

Convicted Polygamy Cult Leader In Coma, Near Death

Romney Blasts “Career Politicians” On Perry Turf

Federal Judge Blocks Key Parts Of Texas Sonogram Law



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Exxon Reaches Arctic Oil Deal With Russians
European Stocks Gain After US Fed Minutes
Dow Shakes Off Irene, Closes Higher On Light Volume
Oil Hovers Below $89/Barrel
Consumer Confidence Plummeting, But Shoppers Keep Spending
B&N Opens Its Books On The Nook
Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi To Merge LCD Operations
HP Says “One Last Batch Of TouchPads And That’s It. No, Really. We Quit. Maybe.”
Meet The Craziest Sony Product Of 2011
Facebook Pays $41K To Whitehat Hackers
WikiLeaks Fails To Redact Names In Latest Batch of Stolen Docs
Windows Phone Apps Benefiting From HP And Google?



SPORTS
Serena Williams Dominant In Opening Round

Serena Williams at the US Open

Crushes 54th-rank Bojanovski in less than an hour

NCAA Orders 8 ‘Canes To Repay Benefits, Sit Out Games

Yankees’ Sabathia Guts Out Win Against Red Sox



L.A. Kings Change Uniforms, Drop Purple

Halladay Cuffs Reds, Phillies Win 9-0

After Being Hit With 3-Year NCAA Penalty, Pearl Resigns, Goes Into Marketing

Feldman Spot On As Rangers Edge Rays

Wizards’ Young Considering Playing In China

Nationals Beat Jurrjens Like Rented Mule, Rout Braves 9-2



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Darryl Hannah Arrested At White House

Daryl Hannah arrested during protest

Cuffed and booked during oil pipeline protest

Angelina Jolie: No Secret Wedding In The Works

George Clooney’s On A Boat, Y’all

“House” Scoop: Urkel Goes Directly To Jail


Justin Timberlake & Jessica Biel Off Riding Bikes In Toronto

Glee! Spoilers

Court Crushes Jon Cryer’s Appeal, Orders Payment of $8K/Month Child Support

Britney Credits Dad For Saving Her Life

Alicia, Jen, And Demi: Divine Denim Divas



FOREIGNERS
Libya Rebels Give Qadhafy Loyalists Ultimatum
UK Releases $1.6 Billion In Libyan Bank Notes
ANC’s Malema Hearings To Resume After Protests
Israel Intensifies Training Of Settle Security Teams
Aquino Calls On PRC To Invest In Philippines
Intercepted Calls Show Pakistan/Taliban Connection In Kabul Hotel Attack
Seven Dead In Chechnya Terror Attack



BLOGS & STUFF
American Spectator: Why Perry Can Beat Obama And Romney Can’t
Allahpundit: Not Buying The Alan Lichtman’s Keys BS
ZeroHedge: How The Economy Quietly Entered A Recession On Friday
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin Heading To New Hampshire After Iowa Speech
Lonely Conservative: Mayor Tells Labor Leaders To Allow Republican Lawmakers In Labor Day Parade Or Pay Up
NRO’s Corner: White House, Eric Cantor Spar Over Disaster Relief
Ed Driscoll: Stop Waiting For the Newsweek Sales Bump
Maggie’s Notebook: Zilla’s First Blogiversary
Jonah Goldberg: Seduced By The Cult Of Experts


SOTD: Movie Star

Category: Live at Five

No Honor Among Thieves, No Curiosity Among Journalists: Perez Hilton Re-Pirates Video, CBS News Repeats Smear

Posted on | August 30, 2011 | 104 Comments

The piracy of my video and the smearing of Michele Bachmann continue, despite my having done two posts — here and here — explaining the true story. Here is a screen-cap from Perez Hilton’s site, showing that he downloaded and re-uploaded the pirated/edited “Who likes white people?” video, imprinting it with his own watermark:

Look closely, and you’ll see that Perez’s re-pirated version had already gotten more than 30,000 views (the screen-cap was done at about 8 p.m. ET today) which is of course in addition to the many thousands who had viewed the first ripoff/smear version at the “On Knees” anti-Christian blog. But wait — it gets better:

Yeah — Michelle Castillo of CBS News (!!) made this smear job the No. 1 selection in “Top 5 Viral Videos of the Week.” You can skip ahead to about the 40-second mark of the video:

Castillo writes:

Everything that comes out of Michele Bachmann’s mouth is gold. A new video has her asking a crowd of people, “Who likes white people?” It doesn’t make any sense, so many explanations are surfacing from “White People Soul Power” being the band that played before, to the fact it was raining and Bachmann is asking about “wet” people.

What about the explanation “surfacing” from the guy who was there with the video camera, huh? But never mind that now. Before I continue excoriating Castillo and CBS News specifically, let me say that I have no earthly idea who originated this bizarre supposition that Bachmann was referring to the name of a band. She actually said, “Who likes wet people?” — a joking reference to the fact that it had been raining all day at the Aug. 5 Christian music festival — and there was no band performing with “White” in its name.

Because here is the weird thing: The lineup for the entire concert is online! Bachmann had been scheduled to be there about 6 p.m. but ran late, and so she didn’t speak until after 8 p.m., following Tim Cooper & Friends on the main stage. I know this because I was at the festival to cover Bachmann’s appearance, but it doesn’t take Woodward and Bernstein investigative reporting skills to discover, on the Spirit Midwest Ministries site, under a tab labeled “news,” that their media contact person is Julie Barnes, whose phone number is 515-577-8035.

So any reporter who had seen that silliness about the “White People Soul Power Band” — c’mon, really? I mean, really? — could have spent less than five minutes online, learned that there was no such band at that festival, and called the festival’s promoters to ask them the blindingly obvious question: “Did Michelle Bachmann actually say that stuff about ‘white people’?”

Evidently, however, Michelle Castillo of CBS News doesn’t know how to do a Google search, or browse a Web site, or pick up a fucking phone — what a brilliant journalistic innovation that would be — and call Bachmann campaign spokeswoman Alice Stewart (whose contact information is not top secret) and ask her what this is all about.

No, not at all. But please notice this curious fact:

Yeah, the time-stamp: “6:44 p.m. Aug. 30,” by which time Chris Moody’s accurate post at Yahoo News — identifying my video as the source from which the pirated/edited smear video was stolen — had been a top item at Memeorandum for more than 24 hours!

But wait, it gets better, because here are my two posts on this topic:

  1. Monday Aug. 29, 9:10 p.m. — MY VIDEO of Michele Bachmann’s Christian Testimony Used in SMEAR JOB
  2. Tuesday, Aug. 30, 10:58 a.m. — Lowlife Who Pirated My Video Apologizes for Smearing Michele Bachmann

If Michelle Castillo has the advanced journalistic skills necessary to click that second link, she will discover that, when informed that his copyright infringement was the subject of contemplated legal action, the video pirate had published an apology and deleted the video from his YouTube channel early this morning, more than 12 hours before Castillo included his piracy as the No. 1 selection in the CBS News “Top 5 Viral Videos of the Week.”  

As a veteran of 25 years in the news business, I promise you that if I were Michelle Castillo’s boss, I’d have several choice words to say to her, the mildest of which would be, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

And I’ll have a few more things to say about the egregious incompetence being practiced by the mainstream media in regard to this story, but first I’ve got to call my lawyer. CBS is going to be getting a letter from my lawyer P.D.Q., and if Michelle Castillo is not instantly terminated for this astonishingly shoddy excuse for journalism, I’d be greatly surprised.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! As for the Professor’s remark about funding my retirement, it may take years of expensive litigation to force the thievish scoundrels to pay up, and in the meantime I’ve got bills to pay, so please hit the freaking tip jar.





UPDATE II: Linked by Bob Belevedere at The Camp of the Saints — thanks!

Just got off the phone with my lawyer, who was finishing up the demand letter to Perez Hilton, whose site has a statement about their willingness to protect the intellectual property of others, with contact information for complaining about copyright violation.

In such letters, it is customary to demand that a retraction/apology be published with the same prominence as the original item about which complaint is made. But having included pirated video in their “Top 5 Viral Videos” round-up, what will CBS News do?

Besides firing Michelle Castillo, I mean . . .

UPDATE III: Thanks to Dana Loesch at Big Journalism for this link to a corrective video by our friends at the Media Research Center:

See? That’s what’s called “fair use” — employing a brief clip from my video in pursuit of truth, as opposed to recycling the pirated ripoff smear video in pursuit of a lie, which is what CBS News has done without even the slightest suggestion of effort toward what lawyers call “due diligence.” (Take notes, kids, this could be on the final exam.)

Meanwhile, our fellow fedora-wearer Ed Driscoll takes a walk down Memory Lane, to that long-ago era when Ken Layne was interested in truth.

UPDATE IV: Maetenloch at Ace of Spades HQ:

Even though it wasn’t what she said and made no sense in context, Ken Layne of Wonkette ran with it proclaiming Bachmann to be a crazy racist. But when it was shown to be a blatant hoax (with the original poster apologizing) he refused to make any corrections and has doubled down on the snark.

Now, I think some people may be misunderstanding my end of this situation. Bachmann is the one with the case for defamation, and that’s her business. My lawyer is pursuing action for copyright infringement, and you see how — with the pirated/edited video having been re-uploaded by Perez Hilton and recycled by CBS News — the original pirate set in motion a chain of events that is now beyond his control.

Already, I’ve seen at least two other versions of the pirate’s ripoff version re-uploaded to other YouTube accounts. (My lawyer is sending takedown notices as quickly as time permits.) Evidently, people do this kind of stuff — re-uploading ripoff videos — all the time, seeking to gain extra views to their YouTube accounts through online thievery.

The YouTube pirates may be doing this in ignorance of copyright law. Ignorance of the law is no defense, of course, but in most cases the original copyright owner is a big commercial enertainment outfit — Time/Warner for example — and once the pirated video is deleted from YouTube, their interest in the pirate ends.

In my particular case? Not so much.

“Good Lord these people are stupid.” You can say that again, brother. This left-wing anti-Christian jackwagon ripped me off and dishonestly edited my video to create a false smear against Michelle Bachmann, an honorable member of Congress, deserving of admiration and respect. The pirated smear video was then posted at numerous Web sites, recycled by other pirates, and included as the top item in a “viral video” roundup by a major news organization.

Dude.

I rattled the tip jar to get enough money to travel to Iowa to cover the campaign leading up to the Ames Straw Poll. I stood in the rain and mud at that festival to get video of Bachmann’s Christian testimony. And you’re going to take my hard work, funded through contributions from my loyal readers, hijack it and pervert it into a vicious smear?

Don’t you see what an overwhelming incentive I have to extract the maximum legal penalty from your sorry ass? And don’t you know that there are many thousands of people — including some very shrewd lawyers — who have been waiting many years for just such an opportunity as this, with some anonymous blog-pest like you caught red-handed in undeniable wrongdoing?

You had better pray God will have mercy on you.

Because my lawyers sure as hell won’t.

UPDATE V: Linked by Donald Douglas at American Power — thanks!

UPDATE VI: Mike at Cold Fury mentions the “fake but accurate” standard that CBS made infamous.


Category: CBS, Media Bias, Michele Bachmann, Video

Jane Jamison, R.I.P.

Posted on | August 30, 2011 | 30 Comments

Dell Hill from Uncoverage.net called today to tell me that the blog’s founder, Jane Jamison, died Saturday. Dell told me — I hadn’t previously known — that her name wasn’t actually Jane Jamison, but that this was a pseudonym she used to keep her life as a political commentator separate from the liberal world in which she might actually need to apply for a job.

She lived in the San Francisco Bay area, and was regular a radio guest on Jaz McKay’s popular afternoon program on KNZR 1560 AM in Bakersfield. She once got me onto Jaz’s show as a guest, which was pretty cool. Jane was also a contributor at Right Wing News, where John Hawkins has a brief remembrance.

Dell explained to me something else I hadn’t realized, that he became a blogger at Uncoverage.net after reaching Jane’s site through a link here. He said he noticed she seemed very busy, putting up lots of posts every day, and offered to contribute. She accepted his offer and now, it appears, Dell will keep Uncoverage.net going online after Jane’s death.

Ironically, Dell never actually met Jane in person. He lives in the Northeast, while she lived in California. I met Jane when she attended CPAC. She will be missed. Our sympathies to all her friends and family.

UPDATE: Yid With Lid has a photo of the lovely Jane. Linked by The Lonely Conservative and by Fleming and Hayes — thanks! — and now a Memeorandum thread.

Category: Uncoverage

Consumer Confidence Sags; Fed Wants More Stimulus; Gold Gains $38 an Ounce

Posted on | August 30, 2011 | 6 Comments

The relationship between these factors is not entirely coincidental:

Gold prices soared Tuesday as Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans called for further monetary easing. The rally continued in after-hours trading after the Fed’s latest minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee meeting in August showed a growing number of presidents calling for more stimulus.
Gold for December delivery surged $38.20 to settle at $1,829.80 an ounce at the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The FOMC report is online here. It’s worth noting that gold is still below the record price near $1,900 it set Aug. 22, but the talk of more “easing” (Fed-speak for deliberate inflation) suggests that predictions of gold prices reaching $2,500 within the next few months are not unrealistic. My point is that rising gold prices cannot be dismissed as a mere speculative “bubble” so long as inflation undermines the dollar, bad fiscal policy undermines treasuries, and gloomy economic prospects undermine stocks.

The stock market nowadays is kind of a perverse measurement, as the talk of more stimulus from the Fed was cited as the cause for Tuesday’s $20 gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In other word (a) the economy sucks, so (b) the Fed will do more stimulus, which means (c) cheap money for major financial institutions, so (d) buy, buy, buy!

If such dubious Wall Street logic worries you, you’re not alone:

Confidence among U.S. consumers plunged to the lowest level in more than two years as Americans’ outlooks for employment and incomes soured.
The Conference Board’s index slumped to 44.5, the weakest since April 2009, from a revised 59.2 reading in July, figures from the New York-based research group showed today. It was the biggest point drop since October 2008. A separate report showed home prices declined for a ninth month.

Let me point out something curious: Even though unemployment is around 9%, it’s been more or less stable at that rate for the past year. If the unemployment rate is not getting worse, then why is consumer confidence trending downward?

Simple answer: Inflation.

People get a lingering sense of unease when inflation silently erodes their earnings, even if they don’t have any reason to fear losing their jobs. And the biggest single asset that most people own is their homes, the value of which has actually been declining all year long. So they’re paying higher prices for consumer goods and services, even while the value of their homes decline, and it is thus hardly surprising that consumer confidence is down.

Think about what all this means: The housing market in the tank, consumer confidence down, Fed officials calling for “QE3.” As I’ve said before, “None Dare Call It Stagflation” — i.e., a return to the economic swamp into which Keynesian policy led us in the 1970s. And if this analysis is correct, gold is actually a bargain at $1,830.

However, because I don’t want to accused of hyping a “bubble,” here’s a video in which Alix Jones of TheStreet.com interviews market strategist Phil Streible, who is bearish on gold:

Streible may be right and I may be wrong. What do you think?


Category: Economics, Gold
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