Please join in celebrating our Constitution’s latest victory at the Independent Policy Forum, The Supreme Court and the Battle for Second Amendment Rights, tonight at 7PM Pacific time.

The Supreme Court has now given us two historic decisions, the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller case and the 2010 McDonald v. Chicago case, wherein the “right to bear arms” has been clearly established as an individual right, and a right which cannot be infringed by the states. Join Stephen P. Halbrook (Research Fellow, The Independent Institute), whose work has been cited repeatedly be the Supreme Court, and Donald E.J. Kilmer, Jr., Professor of Constitutional Law at Lincoln Law School of San Jose and attorney at law, as they discuss the Second and Fourteenth Amendments and what it means to take the Bill of Rights seriously.

And kudos to The Independent Institute for creating this sharing opportunity.

UPDATE: 10:04pm eastern IndependentInst-1: Everyone’s moving into the their chairs, please forgive the delay, we should begin broadcasting in a few minutes.

10:08pm They’re on air, but you have to click the play button.

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.

The relaunch of the Republican National Committee website is a disaster. Your first clue is the word “beta” displayed in the header when you open the home page.

Beta is a term used by software developers to describe a work in progress, not yet ready for public use. From Media Gods:

Define Beta

keywords=programming, programmer, software, developer, software development, process, code, systems

Traditionally, a step in the software development process where completed software is tested by “real-life” users to find bugs or design issues that may have been overlooked in the formal testing.

Real-life users, yes. But for an application like this, the testing should not be done in the public domain. That is a totally clueless way to invite criticism, which certainly is what has happened. A password protected wiki that could be accessed by thousands of dues paying party faithful would have been fine.

As you can see from the screen shot of the initial “splash page” above, the layout breaks the first rule of website design right from the getgo — it wastes the entire first view on the header and the plain tan background for a video that does not come up playing. Should you make the hapless mistake of hitting the PLAY arrow and starting the obnoxiously loud and jumpy video, you will also find there is neither a PAUSE or a STOP button to turn the thing off. You have to go to the right bottom corner and hit the SKIP VIDEO link.

The whole site reeks of neophyte web designers who were so intrigued by the bells and whistles that they forgot to deliver the message. One can imagine that the RNC spent big bucks on some web design company to achieve this mess, so you will not want to waste your political donations on them. Bypass these losers, and donate directly to the candidate of your choice. There are some good Republicans out there, and even (dare we say this) a few good Dems. And to really optimize the effectiveness of your cash contributions, consider an Internet-savvy advocacy group like Numbers USA that really makes a huge difference on Capitol Hill.

At The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder summed it up best — Top Ten Reasons Why The GOP Website Relaunch Is Fizzlin’

10. In a section devoted to “future leaders,” there were none.
9. In the subsequent rush to get up a “future leaders” page, they choose “you.”
8. The last GOP accomplishment cited on the accomplishment page was from 2004.
7. The what’s up page — hip! starts with this sentence: “the internet has been around for a while now”
6. Administrator passwords were accidentally posted.
5. When the RNC hosted a kick-off conference call, the website was down….

The big launch occurred yesterday morning, so the Blogosphere has had a day to consider and react. Here are some of the opinions.

WSJ Washington Wire — New GOP Web Site Reaches for Grassroots

…. the opening on Tuesday was decidedly low-key. There were a few notices on friendly Web sites and a bit of congratulatory tweeting among the GOP technorati. Democrats sniped about a malfunctioning “Future Leaders” page, which the RNC said it quickly fixed. But several of the interactive pages, including Steele’s own blog, “What up?” were drawing little response.

It’s all a reminder that the Republican Party still has lots of work to do to recapture the energy of the 1980s and 1990s – or catch up to Democrats in use of technology. It’s also perhaps a reflection of the perennial organizing problems that the party has had with its highly individualistic members.

Christian Science Monitor — New Republican Party site crashes hours after launch

There’s a metaphor lurking in here somewhere. The same day GOP Chairman Michael Steele unveiled a new online home for the Republican Party, the website apparently crashed, leaving users unable to log on….

The site was meant to rival the digital operation run by the Democrats and President Barack Obama, who used social networking to great effect in the 2008 elections….

[By early Tuesday afternoon] bloggers had found a mass of bugs and glitches, including repeated php problems. By 3:30 p.m. EDT, GOP.com slowed to a crawl, eventually shutting out users. The official cause? A network error…. Democrats … are basking in the glee of their technically inept rivals.

Sadly, No! — Fly, my little monkeys, fly!

I’m sure some focus-group weasel will force them to take this down soon, but for the time being, this is actually the title of Michael Steele’s official blog at the GOP website:

Perhaps the most discouraging message of the new website occurred when you clicked the link to the “Future Leaders” page. That resulted in this message: “404 Error: This page could not be found.”

 

UPDATE, 10/16:  Just in case you need any more convincing to avoid the national Republican organizations and donate to individual candidates, see this article by Michelle Malkin — An ACORN-Friendly, Big Labor-Backing, Tax-and-Spend Radical in GOP Clothing.

This is a notice for all bloggers. We are asking that you do not read or link Politico from this point forward. They have violated the cooperative spirit of the Blogosphere.

This boycott will continue until they drop their ridiculous threats accusing College Politico of trademark infringement. Here are some details:

A collegiate blog is facing legal threat from Politico, generating blogger sympathy in a fight over its domain name.

In a Sept. 16 letter to Stephen Gutowski, operator of thecollegepolitico.com, the company has claimed trademark infringement. The cease-and-desist demand, says Gutowski, calls for all use of his site to be relinquished to Capitol News Company LLC, publishers of Politico, within 10 days. Capitol News representatives, Dow Lohnes PLLC, contend his site and its contents are “confusingly similar” to their trademarks.

The origins of the word, “politico,” date to 1630, and signify a person active in party politics, according to Princeton’s WordNet.

Politico via counsel has issued similar cease and desist letters. In December 2007, the company forced the hand of an electronic trade publication aimed at political marketing to Hispanics. In a letter to readers, publisher Arturo Villar said the publication “reluctantly” changed their name from La Política to CandidatoUSA. Capitol News also holds the rights to Campus Politico, Wall Street Politico, Hollywood Politico, Mobilepolitico, El Policito and Politico TV.

“From a legal standpoint, [Politico] probably has a reasonable claim,” said Robert Cox, president of Media Bloggers Association. “The issue is whether people are likely to be confused.”

“It’s not even a close call,” said Jerald Fritz, Politico’s general counsel. “Brand and names are essential for any venture … we’re aimed at protecting our mark.” Fritz referred to Ford Mustang, Apple Computers and Greyhound as trademarks supportive of Politico’s claim. “There are countless examples. You can go on and on,” he said.

Ron Coleman, a commercial litigator and trademark lawyer at New York and New Jersey’s Goetz Fitzpatrick LLP., has targeted weak points in Politico’s argument on his blog, Likelihood of Confusion. Notably, said Coleman, generic words do not enjoy trademark protection, while descriptive words may only become trademarks if they have acquired distinctiveness.

“Politico’s problem is that although it may indeed be able prove that ‘POLITICO’ has acquired distinctiveness for online journals, it is still a rather weak trademark because of its descriptiveness,’ he said.

For example, search engine optimization gurus and sploggers (spam blogs) often utilize hyphens to trigger keywords in URLs that may create this kind of confusion. Helpful to Gutowski’s defense may be the lack of hyphenation in the address of thecollegepolitico.com. A Go Daddy query for “the-college-politico.com” (which also happens to be available for purchase) would yield far more results associated to Capital News’ trademarked Politico.com than his hyphen-less address.

If the trend continues, multiple sites, including politico.blogspot.com, mondopolitico.com and sandiegopolitico.com, may face legal battles over use of the word “politico” in their domain name.

In a live by links, die by links New Media world, some bloggers have even called for a ban on linking to Politico. “The blogosphere has been very good to Politico, and I think they should bear in mind the ill will they’re incurring as a result of their heavy-handed legal tactics,” said Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds in a recent post. “Until this threat is withdrawn, I plan to boycott Politico, and I encourage others to do the same,” stated a post at Patterico’s Pontifications.

The College Politico has been credited with breaking several stories and picked up by The Washington Post, USA Today and The Huffington Post. His coverage exposed Lyndon LaRouche supporters were behind “Obama=Hitler” signs.

“I certainly didn’t create [thecollegepolitico.com] with any odd intention of somehow tricking people into thinking I was affiliated with Politico,” said Gutowski, who has drawn support from a host of bloggers. “This seems like an ugly attempt to intimidate me into handing over a brand which I’ve worked extremely hard to build.”

“Politico has offering no compensation in the demand, and has asked that Gutowski, a recent graduate of Pennsylvania’s Messiah College, write the company a letter declaring he will permanently cease and refrain from all future use of “The College Politico” or anything similar to “politico.”

The current conflict echoes a two-and-a-half year battle between Microsoft and Lindows.com, Inc., in which Microsoft accused its competitor of trademark infringement. Lindows maintained the term “windows” was generic, and Microsoft agreed to pay $20 million in exchange for the Lindows name and a clutch of websites.

There are other nouns enjoying widespread implementation in the Blogosphere, such as pundit. Glenn Reynolds was likely the first to use it, but he isn’t suing all the others who admired him and piggy-backed on his idea — Gateway Pundit, PoliPundit, and Daily Pundit, who named the Blogosphere.

Related:

Patterico’s Pontifications — Politico to College Politico: Give Us Your Domain or We Will Sue You

Spread the word far and wide: we will not stand for such thuggish tactics. ….Until this threat is withdrawn, I plan to boycott Politico, and I encourage others to do the same.

Riehl World View — Politico: All Your Politicos Belong To Us!

Well, it was a nice word while it lasted, dating back to 1630. Now it seems the growing power of New Media has convinced Politico that they get to own a noun!! Man, wouldn’t I love to have me one of those.

Hot Air — Who owns the word “politico”?

It’s no surprise that the word gets exercised in the blogosphere, and also no surprise that a journalistic enterprise would want to use it for their somewhat unconventional approach to political coverage. But does that mean that they’re the only ones who can use that word?

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Boycotting Politico so far:Stop the ACLU

American Daughter

Christmas Ghost

Rosemary’s Thoughts

No Sheeples Here

POWIP | Piece of Work In Progress

Patterico’s Pontifications

Spread the word far and wide: we will not stand for such thuggish tactics.

Ace of Spades HQ

Riehl World View

No links to Politico until this gets resolved and … I’d encourage other bloggers to climb on board.

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.

Joseph Farah and Jerry Corsi on Obama at 6PM Eastern

To listen on your computer, click this link to bring up the webcast page.

To listen live by phone:
Phone-Number to Dial: 218-486-3696
Use Conference ID: 104568#

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The Andy Caldwell Show at 4PM Pacific

Our chief editorial writer, Harris Sherline, will be a guest on The Andy Caldwell Show today from 4 PM to 5 PM PST.

To listen on your computer, click this link to open a radio on your computer screen.

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.

As so often happens we write a post that lends itself to an update. Well, last week I wrote the following:

The Obama campaign is driven by being an antidote to the Bush administration which, like it or not and for many different reasons (partly George’s own fault, partly through media projection), is a laughing stock not only in NZ, but around the world. Anything but Bush. Mark my words: The Obama camp is going to drive that point hard over the next two months, that McCain will be “four more years of failed Bush policies,” and the McCain camp would be wise to do as much as they can to distance themselves from the Bush administration.

OK, so that may not be the most prophetic statement ever made and may be quite obvious to anybody with a pulse who has been paying attention to the campaign with only one eye half-open — but it is nevertheless true. And here is a perfect example of the left doing just as I predicted:

…The point is that Palin, and the circus she’s brought to town, are simply a bountiful collection of small lies deliberately designed to distract the country from one big truth: the havoc that George Bush and the Republican Party have wrought, and that John McCain is committed to continuing.Every second of this campaign not spent talking about the Republican Party’s record, and John McCain’s role in that record, is a victory for John McCain.

Her critics like to say that Palin hasn’t accomplished anything. I disagree: in the space of ten days she’s succeeded in distracting the entire country from the horrific Bush record — and McCain’s complicity in it. My friends, that’s accomplishment we can believe in.

Just look at the problem John McCain faced. George Bush has a disastrous record, and the country knows it. John McCain — the current one, not the one who vanished eight years ago — has no major disagreements with George Bush (and I’m sorry, wanting to fire Donald Rumsfeld a bit sooner doesn’t qualify) and wants to continue his incredibly unpopular policies for another four years. The solution? Enter Sarah Palin, a Trojan Moose carrying four more years of disaster.

So there it is: Voting for McCain is four more years of Bush according Arianna Huffington, a very popular and influential blogger on the left. It’s all on.

But let me point out a few things. Whatever were the reasons that McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, it wasn’t them or the GOP who started sounding any horns about it. They put her out there, and the MEDIA created the firestorm — not the GOP. We can sit around and discuss all day long the idea that this is just what McCain and the GOP hoped for, and that is probably a valid topic for discussion. My view is that the media, like most of the rest of the population, has a short attention span. We have collectively short memories, and the media is no different. Nobdy had heard of Sarah Palin until she was announced as McCain’s VP running mate, and the media scrambled for stories to report on. Then they became a dog with a bone: They will chew it for all it’s worth, and when the bone is pulp and has lost its flavor, the media will be onto the next bone. Just keep that metaphor in mind.

There were some other points made in Arianna’s article that need to be addressed to keep matters in perspective. Huffington continues:

And the plan has worked beautifully. Just look at what’s being discussed just 57 days before the election. Is it the highest unemployment rate in five years? The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? The suicide bombing yesterday in Iraq that killed six people and wounded 54 — in the same market where last month a bomb killed 28 people and wounded 72? That the political reconciliation that was supposedly the point of “the surge” is nowhere near happening? That Iraq’s Shiite government is now rounding up the American-backed Sunni leaders of the Awakening? That the reason 8,000 soldiers may be leaving Iraq soon is so more can be deployed to Afghanistan where the Taliban is steadily retaking the country?

First she cites the “highest unemployment rate in five years” which is true, but it’s only slightly higher than where it had been hovering until now; a rate of umemployment equal to that which existed during the Clinton administration when that was considered OK. A pending recession in the balance, the Fannie/Freddie bailout, and the slumping housing market is not solely germaine to the United States. This is global. Here in New Zealand we’re already in recession, and the housing market has declined severely. Property values are low; nobody in their right mind is selling; it’s a buyer’s market. In a country of only 4.1 million people 39 finance companies have gone belly-up since May 2006, leaving many investors with virtually nothing. The whole world is feeling the pinch.

Regarding the Iraq situation, all I can say is that war and conflict is fluid; the dynamics change every day, sometimes every hour. It’s not a scripted one hour TV drama. And whatever happens overseas, the war will ALWAYS be a drum the left can beat like a life insurance policy that guarantees them a certain return on the investement.

The funny thing is that most people who have an interest, I believe, already have their minds made up regarding for whom they will vote. All this back-and-forth slinging of mud by sycophants on both sides is just media fodder. It’s nothing more than a really bad bloody soap opera, reminding me of this line from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Or the lyrics to the song, “Limelight“, from drummer/lyricist, Neil Peart (a big Ayn Rand fan, BTW), of the musical band Rush, paraphrasing Shakespeare in the last stanza:

Living on a lighted stage
Approaches the unreal
For those who think and feel
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage.
Cast in this unlikely role,
Ill-equipped to act
With insufficient tact
One must put up barriers
To keep oneself intact.

Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem

Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme.

Living in a fisheye lens
Caught in the camera eye
I have no heart to lie
I can’t pretend a stranger
Is a long-awaited friend.

All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage

By now everyone knows that former presidential candidate John Edwards had an affair with a blowsy bleached campaign video producer while his wife battled cancer. What a loser! What a schmuck! But to Washington insiders, the sorry parade of politicians who can’t keep their pants zipped up is old news. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s official mistresses to JFK’s legendary two-at-a-time late night “secretarial support,” from Bill’s “first humidor” to Eliot’s fatal fling, we are used to their steamy exploits. The real story has been the media coverage, or lack thereof.

We first noted this in our post The Silence of the Media Lambs and again in our follow-up post Update on “The Silence of the Media Lambs”. Now others are catching on.

One Los Angeles Times writer sees this as a landmark in the relative roles of old and new media (that’s Internet speak for traditional newspapers and bloggers):

Old media dethroned
Tim Rutten  |  August 9, 2008

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it — reporting that turns out to be largely correct — and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion….

So far, so sordid.

But what’s really significant here is the cone of silence the nation’s major newspapers — including The Times — and the cable and broadcast networks dropped over this story when it first appeared in the tabloid during the presidential primary campaign. Next, the Enquirer reported that the unmarried Hunter was pregnant. Still no mainstream media interest. Indeed, never in recent journalistic history have so many tough reporters so closely resembled sheep as those members of the campaign press corps who meekly accepted Edwards’ categorical dismissal of the Enquirer’s allegations….

[When Edwards admitted his deception], the illusion that traditional print and broadcast news organizations can establish the limits of acceptable political journalism joined the passenger pigeon on the roster of extinct Americana.

Note the reference to the media as “sheep” in this article! You heard it first here.

And while we’re on this subject, that queen of peerless prose — Maureen Dowd — does a wonderful job of deconstructing Edwards’ self-diagnosed narcissism. It’s your day off. Have some fun and read the whole thing. Here’s a bit:

John Edwards’s confession was a little bit breathtaking.

Not the sex stuff. That happens here all the time.

And certainly not covering up the sex stuff. That happens here all the time, too….

The stunning admission Edwards made … was that he’s a narcissist.

He admitted that wallowing in “self-focus” out on the trail and thinking you’re “special” can result in a solipsism that “leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you’re invincible and there’ll be no consequences.”

Auto-psychoanalysis by the perp. That’s really rich….

Well, as Tim Rutten so astutely observed, the old media is dethroned. But the definitive point that started their long downhill slide occurred in the fall of 2004. The bloggers exposed the TANG memos touted by Dan Rather as computer-generated forgeries, affecting the outcome of the presidential election.

Another memorable haymaker was landed by the bloggers when the Canadian Liberal government tried to silence their press and cover up a kickback scandal in April 2005. That episode produced this wonderful editorial cartoon, which applies equally well to the present situation:

Related:

CNN — Edwards could face political free fall from affair

John Edwards, who made his marriage a central part of his overall message during the 2008 Democratic primaries — was dealt a political blow Friday after admitting to having an extramarital affair….

CNN contributor James Carville, a former aide to Bill Clinton — who acknowledged an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky in his second term — said Edwards’ career is in dire straits.

“Certainly, his political career is in shambles. It’s not going to come back.”….

The former North Carolina senator, who was often mentioned as a possible candidate for Obama’s vice presidential pick, does not believe that his admission will have a long-lasting impact on his career….

The Caucus — The Early Word: Examining the Edwards Delay:

As he admitted to an extramarital affair, John Edwards released a deeply self-reflective (or, as The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye put it, “excruciatingly personal”) statement on Friday. But today, the media are taking to self-reflection in discussing why a story that had been floating around for ten months, broken by a tabloid, was all but ignored by mainstream news organizations.

The Times’s Richard Pérez-Peña and Bill Carter look into why many news organizations, including this one, did not devote major resources to pursuing the story…

Stop The ACLU Blog — Elizabeth Edwards speaks. Predictably, Elizabeth Edwards vows to stand by her man. And she does what all professional politicians do when caught in wrong-doing. She blames the media for reporting it (at long last):

Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some most recently caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences….

John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me…. This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well.

Is this disingenuous or what? “I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage…” They both knew about this before he ran in the presidential primary. Oh, well, she is a lawyer too.

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.