Bend your ears boys and girls for another of Baron von Münch-Kane’s once-spun yarns and twice-told tales.

In this Hitchcockian melodrama, I’m a former English professor, not a red herring. I’ve got a dog, a wife, and several coffee houses that depend upon me, and I don’t intend to disappoint them all by getting myself slightly killed. 

Not that I mind a slight case of mistaken identity now and then, but I get kind of unreasonable when a leftist droid at Live Leak and fellow cronies at Little Green Footballs post my blog URL at The Millstone Diaries identifying me as the alleged cop killer Jerry R. Kane. 

Late Friday and early Saturday morning, I began receiving death-threat comments on my about page condemning me to the nether regions of Hell. Although I was grateful for the attention, I wondered what I could have written that created such a stir and what the devil it was all about. 

I soon discovered that a leftist dreg posted a news story “Relatives ID West Memphis Shootout Suspects” by Zack McMillin and Marc Perrusquia at Live Leak and wrote above it:

You can go to Jerry Kane’s Web site – See link below….Sounds familiar – Tea Party, NRA, Marxism, Jews

http://imkane.wordpress.com/about/

A bit later I found the following at Little Green Footballs posted in:  What Right Wing Extremist Violence?

Charles this is supposed to be the site of the alleged West Memphis shooters Jerry Kane and Joseph Kane. (Gee, more Jew bashing White Supremacists, who’d of thunk it?)”

[Link: imkane.wordpress.com...]

And of course the good little Leninists kicked the post through the comment section a bit before one of the more learned in the English alphabet noticed a glaring difference between middle initials “A” and “R” in the name Jerry Kane. 

Perhaps when these red-diapered droids were young and impressionable their parents told them that they couldn’t have Cabbage Patch kids, Tickle Me Elmo dolls, and Transformer toys until the great storehouse had enough to redistribute to all children. 

Their deranged hatred for anyone on the right daring to express a diverse worldview prevents them from distinguishing between those who criticize statist thinking and white supremacists who truly hate blacks, Jews, feminists, homosexuals, and environmentalists. 

Leftists imagine themselves as architects building a better world where everyone shares with everyone else, where no one is poor, and where everyone works their hardest for the benefit of others. 

Like Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s Vara Pvalovna, they have become fixated on the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and share her fourth dream of a radiant future, all the while denying the historical reality that the ten planks supporting their utopian fantasies have never increased civility within the social order, but brought instead only death, destruction, and ruin to society. 

In the world of the left, truth is subordinated to the demands of ideology. There’s no such thing as a lie; there’s only expedient exaggeration to promote their anti-American, statist agenda.  

So don’t be fooled boys and girls; leftists are not good-hearted, misinformed, misled folk. They presume that anyone who thinks differently from them is a violent, anti-Semitic, racist, redneck richly deserving of their insults and smears; therefore, they vilify and slander those with whom they disagree with deliberate malice and forethought.

Unconstrained by print and broadcast media, editorial policies, physical distribution, and budgets, internet journalism is replacing the traditional modes of information and idea sharing. And newspapers are failing. Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, discusses the revolution in this article — Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

….It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem….

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work….

This is a good read, very well done. Shirky talks about the print media from the revolution started by Gutenberg, the new revolution which will kill publishing in general, and points at CD publishing as well. All will die, because the problem they solved with their infrastructure, distribution, simply no longer exists.

The same is true for broadcast or cable TV, actually, if you think about it. Distribution no longer requires any particular centralized infrastructure. You can get virtually any programming you want over the internet without any television channels involved.

Which leaves journalism itself. The internet will increasingly be all that is needed for any of it.

Related:

1.  Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. delivered the leynote address at the nation’s first-ever conference on News Literacy, held March 11 - 13 at Stoneybrook University in New York.

Journalism – whether published in newspapers or magazines, broadcast on television or on the radio; or consumed online or on a mobile device – is under enormous stress, both from the permanent shifts set off by the Internet and from the cyclical forces unleashed by this current severe economic downturn.

But something even more fundamental is going on around us and it’s at the heart of this conference and our common desire to carry the banner for News Literacy far and wide. Journalism is being transfigured by the new information ecosystem and its very definition is changing. Given the volcanic explosion of Web sites, search engines and social networking channels, how could it not?….

Sulzberger, it should be noted, is chairman of the board of The New York Times Company, and in his speech at Stoneybrook argued for the survival of traditional journalism:

While Wikipedia and online aggregators serve their purpose, serious news gathering operations are more necessary than ever as the public and private decision- makers and the concerned public gathers the news and information needed to more thoughtfully progress into a most uncertain future….

…what do we need to do to earn enough revenue to maintain robust newsrooms and uphold the rights and privileges granted to us by our Constitution?….

At The New York Times Company, we are focusing on three key levers to achieve this breakthrough moment: attracting more users, deepening their engagement and then earning revenue from their usage. To do all this will require making bets on how this new medium will evolve and making investments in that vision….

2.  David Carr, columnist for the New York Times, wrote an article on the subject the week before the News Literacy conference was held — United, Newspapers May Stand:

Even casual followers of the newspaper industry could rattle off the doomsday tick-tock: a digitally enabled free fall in ads and audience now has burly guys circling major daily newspapers with plywood and nail guns. The Rocky Mountain News is gone, The San Francisco Chronicle is on the bubble, and dozens of others are limping along on the endangered list….

Most aggregators are not promoting newspaper content; they are repurposing it to their own ends. Newspapers’ audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place….

Carr argues for the “walled garden” approach to news — no more free content on the Web, tiered Web access, charging aggregators for referrals, regulatory reform. Carr is in fact the poster boy for those journalists that Shirky describes as obsolete and in a state of denial.

As the bloggers are gradually assuming the news dissemination mantle being shed by the untrustworthy mainstream media, we have learned to vet our material by using several online data sources — Wikipedia, Answers.com, Snopes, Urban Legends, Truth-o-meter, ScamBusters, FactCheck, and more.

But then the question arises, “Can we trust these websites?” Sadly, not necessarily. Many of them have a liberal bent. Even if this is not expressed in downright misinformation, it can manifest in their choices of what to emphasize and what to suppress, or in which references to use as source material and which to exclude.

As they say, follow the money.

A case in point is highlighted by the National Rifle Association (NRA), in which the bias against gun rights by FactCheck is exposed. And, no surprise, it turns out that the same funding source supports both FactCheck and the Brady Center, an institution iconic for opposing gun rights.

Factcheck And Brady Campaign Share Same Sugar Daddy
Impartial? Independent? NO!
FactCheck and Brady Campaign in Bed with Annenberg Foundation

FactCheck supposedly exists to look beyond a politician’s claims. Ironically, in its analysis of NRA materials on Barack Obama, these so-called “FactCheckers” use the election year campaign rhetoric of a presidential candidate and a verbal claim by one of the most zealous gun control supporters in Congress to refute facts compiled by NRA’s research of vote records and review of legislative language.

There’s another possible explanation behind FactCheck’s positions. Just last year, FactCheck’s primary funding source, the Annenberg Foundation, also gave $50,000 to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence for “efforts to reduce gun violence by educating the public and by enacting and enforcing regulations governing the gun industry.” Annenberg made a similar grant for $100,000 in 2005. (source)

Regardless of the cause, it’s clear that while FactCheck swoons over a politician’s rhetoric, NRA prefers to look at the more mundane details – like how that politician voted on a bill and what kind of impact that legislation had or may have had on law-abiding gun owners….

To read multiple detailed examples for which FactCheck was specifically untruthful about Obama’s position on Second Amendment issues, go here.

The weblog platform Blogger, which started the Blogosphere phenomenon and was eventually purchased by Google, has blocked publication of several weblogs that oppose the candidacy of Barack Obama for president. In each case, the owner of the blog was notified that the blog had been reported as a “spam blog.” Such blogs, with automatically generated commercial content, are not allowed on Blogger.

In fact, none of the blocked weblogs violated the Blogger agreement — all had content personally composed by the owners. All they had in common was a specific political focus. This oppression of the free speech of one political class of weblogs is a tremendous black eye for Google, which already has a bad reputation among bloggers because of its cooperation with Chinese government censorship.

All of the weblogs targeted are part of the Just Say No Deal coalition, which has one simple slogan — NObama. From their central coalition website:

We are a coalition of millions with one thing in common: NObama. If you thought you were aone, you’re wrong.

This is a fairly large coalition, and filled with passionate political activists who post frequently and write thoughtful content. While the only requirement is opposition to the Obama candidacy, most members are Hillary Clinton supporters. As the steward of the coalition’s central website notes:

Just Say No Deal is not affiliated with any political campaign, has not endorsed any candidate, and contrary to rumors – is not funded by the GOP. I should know…I put it on my credit card.

[Miami-based public relations consultant Diane Mantouvalos organized a conference call among about 40 bloggers to start the coalition, according to a WaPo article.]

Stop The ACLU Blog first reported this on Sunday afternoon:

Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Sites on its Blogger Platform

It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign and decided that its contribution would be to shut down any blog on the Google owned Blogspot.com blogging system that has an anti-Obama message….

But the first comment under that post explained the problem in a nutshell:

The problem with blogger is that a group of people with an ax to grind can report any blog as spam and after enough complaints, it’s automatically suspended until a real live human being can get around to examining it. If enough complaints are registered with blogger, you might get a response within 5 days but it takes a concerted effort. This is a huge problem with blogger and something google needs to get a handle on.

None of the affected weblogs have been able to add new posts since June 25. These are the weblogs that we know have been blocked:

• Blue Lyon — moved to WordPress
• Come A Long Way — moved to WordPress
• Hillary or Bust — moved to its own domain
• McCain Democrats — remains dark at the time of this post
• NObama Blog — moved to WordPress
• The Political Lizard — created a new Blogger location, trying to stay one step ahead of the Obamaniacs
• Reflections in Tyme — remains dark at the time of this post

Other Blogger-based weblogs opposed to Obama have been flagged as spam prior to this. These include

• Uppity Woman
• Pan Metron

They continue to fight to stay on Blogger, by repeatedly going through a word recognition verification program to prove that their blogs are not spam.

Uppity Woman has been struggling:

Anti Obama Blogs Locked Due To False “SPAM” Reporting — Updated June 27

My own blogger “unblock request” was completed for the third time again this morning. It was completed the first time on June 3 and the “verification” that it was listed mysteriously disappeared on June 17. I filled it out again on June 17. The “verification” for that request was gone this morning. So I have submitted the “request” again….

…I can honestly say that the word verification I have to go through to write a post is horrendous and the worst I have ever seen. Sometimes I have to try a half dozen times. I no longer have “autosave,” so everytime I want to save my work, I have to verify and then “save as draft”. Then I have to reopen the post and go through the same process to save or publish. Blogger just isn’t worth it.

Uppity Woman has opened an alternative location on WordPress.

Pan Metron reports:

Obama and the politics of intolerance

Having been involved in online communities discussing this year’s political race for over a year, it is clear that the Obama camp has never been about tolerance or playing fair. They have ostracized and belittled supporters of other candidates, written threatening e-mails, and worse.

Plato said “the measure of a man is what he does with power”, so it is instructive to see how these zealous Obama supporters behave now that they have won the nomination. The measure is alarming: they continue to be intolerant and to use dirty tactics to suppress, rather than debate, alternative viewpoints.

I found this out first-hand last week when some Obama zealots repeatedly flagged my blog as “spam”, taking advantage of a weakness in blogger.com’s architeture to illegally prevent me from publishing new posts on my own blog. The reason is, presumably, because I have posted criticisms of the duplicity of Barack Obama and the underhanded tactics of his supporters.

Ironically, I hadn’t really been posting that much lately. I was mulling things over. Could I really vote for John McCain? And what about all those Democrats whom I respect who are now rallying around Obama – could they be trusted to keep the causes I believe in alive even though they’re working to elect a purely Bonapartist, power-hungry Chicago politician?

The answer comes not from above nor from my conscience, but from the dirty move by Obama supporters to suppress my blog: hell no. I will, I reaffirm, never support this candidate or the corrupt and abusive minions who are frothing at the mouth for him. Shame on them, on all of you who pull dirty tricks for power. What happened to the politics of “hope” and to the sentiment that this is not a “liberal America or a conservative America” but the “United States of America”? You never gave a damn about that, it was all pandering. You deserve to lose and lose big….

Blue Lyon has moved to WordPress, commenting:

It appears that Blogger can’t tell the difference between a spam blog and one that’s been around for three years and has nearly 700 posts.

The Political Lizard took a different tack, creating The Political Lizard Annex, another Blogger website, noting at the original location:

THE LIZARD IS UNDER ATTACK — This blog has been temporarily shut down because Google has fallen victim to unscrupulous Obama supporters.

Other NObama folk, secure in their own domains, take notice. No Quarter comments:

Obama Thugs, In League with Google, Bully Bloggers

Give the Obamabots credit. They are clever at exploiting loopholes and finding ways to shut down opposition voices. Come to think of it, the Soviets were pretty good at that kind of information control and intimidation as well.

BuzzMachine has this to say:

Nobama blogs kerfuffle

The fear online has been that false information could be spread. It’s another fear that speech can be silenced…. The point … is that rogues can cause trouble.

Our fellow conservatives at Rhymes With Right began good coverage on Saturday:

This hasn’t gotten any MSM play …. the Obama “No Dissent Express” bus to Hell has driven over a number of PUMA bloggers this week — as a number of them were mysteriously shut down/blocked by Blogger as “spam blogs” after multiple reports by other users….

Why raise this issue now? Because I can imagine a similar effort against pro-McCain blogs come September and October. These people have no scruples against silencing members of their own party — why would they respect the free speech rights of members of the GOP?

It’s true that we here at American Daughter are mostly conservative political activists. And the bloggers affected by this current attack favor different legislative approaches to governance than we do. But as conservatives, we are deeply committed to free speech and open discussion as the foundation of an informed electorate. To see so many intelligent voices silenced is just as hurtful to us as it would be if they were fellow conservatives.

Addendum: There is also extensive coverage at Bloggasm where the writer conducted phone interviews with several of the affected bloggers.

An articulate voice that gave newspaper readers a close-up view of the war is dead in Iraq. Andrew Olmsted, who blogged for the Rocky Mountain News, was silenced by an ambush. Based in Fort Carson, he was in Iraq training the Iraqi army. Editor & Publisher has the story:

‘Rocky Mountain News’ Army Blogger Killed In Iraq
By Joe Strupp  |  January 04, 2008 5:25 PM ET

Andrew Olmsted, a U.S. Army major serving in Iraq who blogged for the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, died yesterday. His blog at the newspaper site, “From the Front Lines,” now includes postings by several relatives who say they have been notified of his death.

The Rocky Mountain News confirmed the death early this evening, but offered no details….

You can read his last post here — From the Front Lines, December 26, 2007.

Andrew left a post to be published in the event of his death. You can read it on his own website here or at Obsidian Wings here. In part:

….if you think I wasted my life, I’ll tell you you’re wrong. We’re all going to die of something. I died doing a job I loved. When your time comes, I hope you are as fortunate as I was.

Every time we lose one of our soldiers, we are all diminished. The “bell tolls” for all of us. It is especially sad to lose a familiar blogger. Go with God, Andrew.

Two long-lived US newspapers have just closed following declining circulation. The Wall Street Journal has their obituary:

Cincinnati Newspaper Closes After 126 Years
January 2, 2008

The Cincinnati Post published its final issues Monday after 126 years of publishing. The front-page headline proclaimed “30,” the number traditionally used by journalists and others to signal the end of a dispatch. After the last Post was printed, its sister Kentucky Post marked the final run for both daily newspapers. The Posts had struggled for decades amid a national decline in afternoon newspapers and in multiple daily newspapers in U.S. cities. E.W. Scripps Co., based in Cincinnati, decided in July to close the Post newspapers when a joint operating agreement with Gannett Co. expired at the end of the year. The Post newsroom was down to about 50 people at the end, and its daily circulation was less than a tenth of the 270,000-plus it enjoyed in 1960.

News seekers are turning increasingly to the Internet for their information. Many feel that since the mainstream sources have become biased and inaccurate, they might as well surf the weblogs, which at least are pretty upfront about their advocacy issues. And by reading several blogs, one can get a pretty well-rounded picture of events.

The American Daughter Media Center maintains an easy-to-use list of the US metropolitan daily newspapers’ online versions. We provide this to empower our fellow bloggers and others who want a quick and easy trip around the news of the day. Check it out here.

Two new voices have joined the Blogosphere. Both are former governors of Virginia. I see a unique advantage here, because traditionally the concepts that shaped our nation were strongly influenced by Virginians — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, etc. So as these two address issues of interest to Virginia and to the larger body politic of the United States, we can anticipate some really useful ideas.

My favorite of the two is Jim Gilmore’s blog, Virginia Patriot. It really has the flavor of an inclusive, conversational weblog. In this, it reflects the accessible personality of its creator, a true man of the people. Jim is the son of a grocery store meatcutter and a church secretary, who served a tour in the US Army before doing his college graduate work. As governor, he always seemed to have an attitude of service.

From Jim Gilmore:

Welcome to the Virginia Patriot, my official blog where I will discuss the issues of spending, taxes, immigration, national and economic security, property rights, transportation and Iraq. …I plan on staying involved in public service and I hope to continue discussing the important issues of the day with each and every one of you.

Former Virginia governor and later US senator George Allen, on the other hand, was born to privilege — his father was a legendary NFL coach. Every aspect of his demeanor reflects this, and when in office he seemed to feel the entitlement of aristocracy. (This attitude caught up with him in an unguarded “macaca” moment, costing him a second senate term and the previously on-track opportunity to run for president of the United States.) He avoided military service through a student deferment. Although presented online in weblog format, Allen’s website has more the flavor of a political self-service, and is correspondingly titled George Allen! Nevertheless, he remains an articulate conservative spokesman, and we can expect intelligent discourse here.

From George Allen:

Welcome to my blog! My hope is for the site to serve as a forum where we can discuss some of the major issues facing Virginia and our Nation as well as share our observations on current events, history and politics. And yes, you can expect a lively discussion on sports.

Dear readers, go visit them.

As our online news magazine has evolved, we’ve developed guidelines for our writers to keep the entire publication consistent and respectable. The “resepectable” part is the difficult one. It’s labor intensive to standardize format, but straightforward.

As far as the general tone of our articles, we said we wanted them to be sufficiently hard-hitting to speak to our “good old boy” readers and our military readers (we see the traffic coming from the DOT-MIL servers). But we also want to be respectable enough not to offend our many readers who are genteel society ladies.

It’s a hard line to steer down the middle of those two requirements, and as executive editor I have a tough time replacing some of the words in the submitted articles. Our writers, understandably, often use a bit of invective when describing incumbent politicians and other miscreants.

The difficulty lies in choosing replacement words that will not lose the sense of what they intended to say. Quite often I have just replaced their vocabulary with the standard @%&$#@! and most readers realize what was intended. But that is a cop-out.

We’ve been following the commentary in the United Kingdom on this story which we referenced in our previous article. From a very dignified, very restrained British counterpart comes this priceless gem which we just had to share:

At the end of the day it is we the people to blame for electing the complete … words fail me … to positions of power to implement these policies in the first place.

You’ve just got to love those Brits!

Two lady soldiers who returned from military service, Heidi Theiss and Kit Jarrell, became powerful bloggers. They took up many issues, but one of their most successful efforts seeks to raise public awareness about our national vulnerability to illegal immigration. To this end they launched Guard The Borders, a weblog devoted to news about border issues. Most importantly, they organized a coalition of many weblogs (over seventy widely read websites) to carry syndicated articles, or “blogbursts,” written by members of the coalition, to reach a very extensive audience. [Full disclosure -- our American Daughter Media Center has been an active participant from the moment we learned about their efforts.]

This and similar grassroots efforts were noted in today’s Wall Street Journal Online:

How Conservatives Enhanced Online Voice
Talk Radio Blends With Blog Postings To Boost Message
By JUNE KRONHOLZ and AMY SCHATZ

Political activism on the Internet — and in the so-called blogosphere, in particular — has long been considered a liberal stronghold. But conservative bloggers show increasing signs of their own coming of age.

They took a major leap forward by playing a central role in scuttling the Senate immigration bill. Meanwhile, many of the most popular talk-radio hosts are now posting on blogs, and the frequent collaboration of the two media is creating a unified conservative voice that is likely to be an important factor in the 2008 elections….

But the immigration bill marked the first time conservative Web logs could claim to have targeted and derailed a major piece of legislation. The triumph underscored their increasing influence and signaled that the balance of online power may be evening out in the political arena.

The confluence of blogs and conservatives’ dominance on radio is an especially potent mix….

Historically, Republican bloggers haven’t generated the same kind of Internet traffic as liberal writers, even though conservatives have dominated talk radio. The defeat of the immigration bill suggests that may be changing and illustrates the tactics that bloggers could use to influence the 2008 campaign.

By endlessly picking through the evolving immigration legislation, bloggers kept up a steady stream of material for each other and their readers. Talk-radio-show hosts relied on the bloggers for material, but so did voters, who swamped Senate offices with calls and faxes at the urging of conservative Web sites….

Hooray for us!

The ever-reliable Wall Street Journal has surfaced yet another attempt by Democrats to subvert the democratic process through deceptively titled campaign “reform.” Read this post, here. As I have said many times before, whenever a Washington politician talks about “reform,” watch either your wallet, your back, or both.

You can worry even more any time “reform” is proposed by a Massachusetts Democrat, as it has in this case. Marty Meehan, a leftist (what Massachusetts congressman or Senator isn’t?) member of the thoroughly corrupt Massachusetts contingent, has proposed legislation that would force grassroots campaigns to register as lobbyists. Now why would a corrupt politician, who depends on the labyrinthian campaign finance system to carry out his plans, want to pass legislation that that makes life even tougher for some of us? Hint: it certainly isn’t for “reform” purposes.

As I’m sure most of you recognize, this will merely hamstring groups that rely on the grassroots support of little guys like you and me, groups who usually have a real beef, like for instance trying to stem the flow of illegal immigration. Instead of “reforming” the process, this is just another backdoor attempt at stifling free speech, so the wonderful Congressmen and Senators can conduct business as usual without the bothersome anklebiting we grassroots activists occasionally trouble them with, and move more deliberately forward to the socialist nation they are preparing for us.

This legislation is backed by Democracy 21, a deceptive name for a very anti-democratic group. And as with virtually all of the campaign “reform” we have already suffered, the real player in the shadows is George Soros, about the most corrupt, evil, anti-reform minded person on the face of the planet.

Regarding this and other issues, I refer you to a blogger I just stumbled upon, Centerman. I have not checked out a lot of his posts, but those I have provide a lot of good , factual background on George Soros’s demonic, anti-Democratic, anti-Republican campaign finance “reform” movement.

Businessman and freelance writer Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst (1987-1993). His writings have been published in the Washington Times, FrontPage Magazine, DefenseWatch, Soldier of Fortune and others. You can read more of his articles on his blog, Truth and Consequences.

[Editor's note: We're delighted that our contributor, Jim Simpson, has discovered one of our favorite bloggers. Back in July 2005, when Centerman wrote his very first blog post, we had the privilege of leaving the very first comment. A few days later Centerman wrote a post titled I Love American Daughter and we have deemed him a gentleman and a scholar ever since!]