24thState

Does Reboot Congress Have the Boot for McCaskill?

Missouri voters are a thougthfull lot. The "Show Me State" motto may not be as sexy as New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" but it is incredibly descriptive of how most Missourians think. Like the Missouri Mule made famous world wide for unparallelled service in World War I, the Missouri voter will not be lead by cattle prod or a ring in the nose, but must be persuaded. This is why Senate races are almost always very tight contests and the McCaskill-Akin race is no exception. The latest investigation from Reboot Congress may hold the bad news the McCaskill campaign fears most.

The pathetically unloveable McCaskill has seen her fate rise and fall as Missouri voters get momentarily distracted by the latest "shiny object" only to return to their predictable Show Me State conservative opinions. It is almost sad to watch Missouri's senior senator try so hard to position herself as a moderate and yet be totally unable to get her popularity above 50%. Thus, she appeared to be very vulnerable until the famous Akin gaffe apeared to give her the critical opening she needed.

Two polls now show that Missouri voters are back to rejecting McCaskill (Examiner and KOMU). This must be of great concern to McCaskill, especially in light of the investigation by Reboot Congress. Do they have the shiny object that will turn out to be the silver bullet?

The Headline "Why Isn't Capstone Development Listed on MCCaskill's Financial Disclosure" seems to suggest that there may be much more. I have a feeling there is.

Cyber Sleuthing for Dummies

 

Chad Garrison Fails To Do Homework, Again

Guest Post from Riverfront Patriot:

Chad Garrison of the Riverfront Times is a lazy blogger.  In addition to outsourcing all of his research (requiring frequent corrections), his brand of snark all too often leads to an embarrassing requirement for corrections.

 

Gary Wiegert filed to be a lobbyist for the St Louis Tea Party in Jefferson City.  He isn't being paid to do so, but because of the arcane rules created to make sure only the connected can speak with legislators, he filed as a precautionary matter.  The St Louis Tea Party is a 501(c), which means if he talks about us and our issues, he has to file.

 

So Garrison, following the lead of the ethically challenged Midwest Advocacy Group employee writing for FiredUpMissouri, accuses Gary of being a racist.  That is like, so 2009.  But it doesn't stop there.  What makes it fun is Garrison's little comments near the end of his post.

 

"For some reason, the St. Louis Tea Party has also lined up against local control, even though Mayor Francis Slay and most the city's elected officials are pushing for the change."

 

Oh Chad.  If only you would learn to do your own homework.  Don't you know that Mayor Slay is a racist too?  This is a video of a press conference where Jamilah Nasheed opposes St Louis Mayor Francis Slay in an incident concerning firefighters:

 

 

At the :53 mark, Nasheed accuses Mayor Francis Slay of using racial politics to divide the city.  He opposes her, and he thus must use race to divide.  In the local control issue,  Nasheed is now working on the same side as Slay, so it is time for someone else to take up the mantle of racist.

 

We might be offended, but we understand that "racist" for Nasheed is merely a code word for "disagreeing with Jamilah Nasheed."  Mayor Slay can attest to that.  We're not racist.  We were just the next in line to be called racist in an effort to gain political power.

 

The Tea Party is an easy target for lazy leftwing bloggers, because we call bullshit on the attempts to use race to divide Americans.  From a lying Emanuel Cleaver to a power-hungry Steve Tilley, we call out everyone, regardless of party or skin color.

 

Chad doesn't have that kind of character.  Or work ethic.  

Introducing PM

As regular readers of 24thState.com know, Editor, the founder of this blog, has asked me to help with the day-to-day work. There will be some minor changes. They will be gradual. But the focus will remain the same: 

From Springfield to Kirksville, from Kansas City to St Louis, we cover the state's news, views, politics, rumors, and elections.

It falls to 24thState.com's co-bloggers to cover all of that. Brian and Van have been doing much of the legwork recently, so how about a round of applause for those guys! They're irreplaceable.

To grow 24thState.com, to broaden our appeal, we need more content. Therefore, I'm looking for additional contributors to get better coverage of the state and topics important to Missourians. If you think you may be interested, please send me something to put on the blog. Email your news and other tips to pm at 24thstate.com.

The Project Manager

On Those Righthaven Lawsuits

Righthaven is a firm that is using copyright law to sue bloggers and online sites who post articles from the Las Vegas Review Journal.  The suits are so broad, basic internet protocol could put you at risk, and cost you thousands of dollars.  This is not a hoax.  This is real, and they are serious.

What can you to protect yourself?  First, scour your content, looking for links. 

Go to google and type in    site:yoursite.com "lvrj.com"

Look for results.

Then do it as      site:yoursite.com "las vegas review journal"

If either of those pull up information, go ahead and delete the post.  It won't make you entirely safe, but eventually the google cache will clear, and the internet wayback will be the only proof it existed.  You can also just delete the references and the text, without deleting your whole post.  While the impact on the google cache is about the same, it does make it harder for the lawyers to find you with basic searches. 

On this site, I didn't haven any text posted - just a link which I deleted anyway, because links equal traffic and influence, and the less their site has, the better.

There are a number of places going through the suits.  Google "fighting righthaven" and you'll get editorials, facebook pages, and even a site called righthavenlawsuits.com

Make no mistake - this affects us all.  Right now it's 100 sites, but if more newspapers signed on, no blog would be safe.  All of us have quoted newspapers and each other over the years.  Few have deep enough pockets to fight.  It certainly has a chilling effect on free speech.  If you can't discuss what a newspaper writes, what checks and balances are there on the newspaper?

Your ability to fact check a reporter, or extend the story with more background than a reporter had space to write about would be gone.  After all, if a newspaper can sell a copyright to sue you for $75,000 for proving them wrong, who in their right mind would publish anything critical about the newspaper?

At issue is not just the lawsuits, or copyright laws.  At issue is the freedom to discuss anything online.  Some bloggers have decided to fight back by not linking or talking about the stories.  That has limited use.  Unfortunately, the only really powerful weapons that bloggers have are crowd-sourcing and righteous indignation.   Considering that many, if not most of the suits are filed for out-of-state websites, the blowback locally is muted.

And in an act of kindness:  Yo, FiredUpMissouri.  You have a post that quotes the LVRJ in exactly the manner they are suing bloggers for.  Unless you want to end in court, it would be in your best interest to, uh, fix that. 

ShowMeProgress Showing Lack Of Economic Education

Something weird is happening over at ShowMeProgress.  The commentators are getting crazier and more strident in their progressive-populist rantings, and as they do so, the sand on which they build their arguments just isn't working anymore. 

Check out this doozy by Sarah Jo, which alternates between an attempt to use a graph to show that rich people cause depressions and some batshit crazy commenting about corporations wanting to screw the middle class because that's how they get their jollies.

Corporations sitting on piles of cash are NOT creating new jobs or hiring back their laid off employees. (Newsweek, Aug. 2, p. 26) The grim truth is that they are waiting until after the November 2nd  election because they don't want President Obama and the Democrats to get credit for improving the employment numbers. 

I'm guessing that Sarah Jo doesn't actually know anyone like this - precisely because it's so insane that only a complete distance from the perceived target would allow someone to believe this.  But this seems to be the arc of argument for SMP writers.  They've gone from analysis to the gnashing of teeth and the rending of garments about just how good they are as people because they care about other people.

It's branding gone bad.  What do you do when your political worldview is wrapped up in being a do-gooder, but you can't seem to do any good?  You lose it.

Part of the problem is the folks at SMP aren't really the producers - they don't make payroll and hope for success.  Like most progressive bloggers and many in academia (exquisitely laid out by VDH), they use their ideology as a crutch to explain their lack of financial success in a world that values it highly.  Compare this to the tea party leadership that has sprung up around the nation and you'll see a stark difference.  In St Louis, most of the people involved in organizing tea party events are married with children, and either run a small business or aim to some day.  They're fun to be around.  They're optimistic about their personal futures.  Certainly this isn't everyone, but the desire to be independent, take risks, and search for success is evident, and it is an experience outside of politics.  We want to hang out and associate with those who are trying to better themselves, which is why we have some many awesome immigrant stories in our ranks.

But none of us are the super rich.  Heck, none of us are the rich.  Some of us are downright poor, today, but we won't be tomorrow. 

This confuses the Left.  They're stuck calling us rich, like they think all Republicans are, but they're also tempted to call us poor and stupid, too dumb to know we're being used by corporate plutocrats.

In fact, that's the graph that Sarah Jo hyperventilates about.  Some dude built a graph about the correlation between the wealth gap and depressions, and it explains, like, everything! But the Democrats losing by 11 points in the Senate race are too scared to tell the truth!

Sarah's argument, once you get past all the invective and sentences that need exclamation points but don't get them, is that tax cuts are bad, and that essentially, we need to raise the income tax rates back up to 90% to protect the middle class, because that worked so well in the 40's and 50's.

There's just one problem, and it isn't the difference between causation and correlation, and it isn't the difference between wages and income, and it isn't the fact that JFK was the first one to cut those crazy tax rates, figuring out that rich people were still avoiding taxes, even though income was taxed at 90% (hello AMT!).

No, the real problem is the difference between being super rich, and being rich.  The rich want to cut income taxes.  These tend to be people earning income who work impossibly long hours and risk everything so they can improve the world around them.  Sure there are people who got trusts, or lucked into lotteries, or had a sports skill that got them paid millions, but many of those people go broke very, very fast.  Having money and making money aren't the same things. If you have $2,000,000, you feel pretty good, but it's pretty easy to lose it all. 

The super rich - those who have $30 million or more, tend not to have that concern.  It's very hard to spend that much money, and while you want to preserve it for your family, it's a very long way to fall.  You have a literal army of people to take care of those things for you, and that army is very good at getting favored status in investments, land deals, and hot stocks.  And make no mistake, it is the super rich that Sarah Jo is ranting about.  

It's clear the rich generally vote for Republicans and conservative Democrats, counting on them to be business friendly.  But the super rich, they tend to vote for and support Democrats.  They are insulated from the consequences of their decisions, and for many, income isn't the issue.  This is why a Warren Buffet complains about only paying 15% while his secretary pays 25%.  In Buffett's world, his decisions to use his tax accountants to pay himself in a way that minimizes his tax burden is the fault of the government, not a conscious choice on Buffett's part to work the system to his advantage.

Nothing is stopping Buffett from writing big fat checks for 90% of his wealth to the US Treasury, but he does not, because he knows that he can do a lot more with that wealth than the government can.  Now Buffett has perhaps seen the light, but when Sarah Jo makes the argument, the argument is that the Wealth Gap caused the current economic crash, just like it caused the one in the 30's.

So, to bring this full-circle.  Her problem is that the super rich, who she thinks of as evil Republicans, are actually evil Democrats, and the Obama administration is beholden to them.  Talk about your full-blown progressive meltdown.  The people writing checks to all those left wing websites and think tanks the progressives cite are the people they want to target?  Thank God they are all in the reality-based community.

Search Term Analysis Of @StlActivistHub Interests

I did a little experiment to figure out what is truly important to St Louis activists.  Using my deep knowledge of search engine contextual queries, I dug into the local activist hub and identified the most common terms for deep political analysis.

In order of importance:

Bill Hennessy: 256 results

Tea Party: 210 

Dana Loesch: 204

Gina Loudon: 190

Russ Carnahan: 170  (Russ Carnahan without mentions of Tea Party or Gladney):  1

Adam Sharp:  138

Jim Durbin: 129

John Burns: 94

John Loudon: 89

Jim Hoft: 46

Claire McCaskill: 25 results

Robin Carnahan: 17 results

Jay Nixon: 6 results

Keep in mind the activist hub writer Adam Shriver also had an anonymous blog called StLouisPushesBack he used to libel Tea Party folks until he was outed by this blog as the author.  That's an additional 139 blogposts, all attacking private citizens engaged in the political process.

When Shriver doesn't get attention, he heads to non-political websites to leave his troll droppings, posts pictures of the children of Tea Party activists, accuse leaders of embezzlement and fraud, and yes, he tried to tie the Carnahan firebombing to the Tea Party.  Writing several posts where you suggest that throwing a shoe in a carnival game or jokingly set a picture on fire (clearly mocking the shoe-throwing and effigy burning of the Islamic world) is the basis for throwing a molotov cocktail into a Congressional office is a clear attempt to tie the Tea Party to violence.  Note, when Chris Powers, a Carnahan employee, was identified as the suspect, Shriver didn't discuss the origins of left-wing hate.  He just backtracked and wrote that he didn't specifically name the Tea Party (he just wrote several posts for the "media" so they could write about how we caused the firebombing with our incendiary rhetoric). 

But what can you expect?  Shriver has only one goal - to get attention for attacking the Tea Party.  Without that, there's no reason for anyone to read him.  What does he offer in terms of thought leadership or legislative response?  Nothing.  He has nothing to offer to the conversation but smears and slime, which considering he's supposed to be a philosophy student and teaching assistant is really disturbing.  What it really comes down to is academia is so polluted, so lacking in difficulty or work that folks like Shriver can live off the money of others with no fear of losing their jobs.  That freedom and the copius time they have free from responsibility gives him the ability to go after the business interests of political opponents.

And for the last year, that's all he's done, cheered on by ShowMeProgress and other progressives too scared to do it themselves.  Shriver is a pretty typical archtype of the committed socialist.  A sad rural boy that went to college to get away from his background, he digs into academia to give him some sense of worth, trying to get away from his roots with degrees, but never shaking the idea that he's not good enough.  Isolated from anyone with real power, he licks the boot of those with authority to attach himself to their cause and give him pride.  His admission is his website, ostensibly designed to be a clearinghouse for progressive events, but only useful as an attack blog on personal citizens.  He has spent over a thousand hours in the last year focusing on private citizens, smearing them, calling them racist, homophobic, white supremacist, violent, lying, embezzlers.  That's the price he pays for attention.  He lies about decent people to get notoriety.  This vile strategy even got him a scholarship to Netroots Nation this year.  See how easy that is?  Be a dog, and the master pays your way.  

But dogs aren't men.  And hate can't fill you.  Thus Shriver increases the nastiness of what he writes, desperate for another fix.  And yet, he knows the truth about himself.  In the NAACP press conference and several times in public, Shriver tries to take steps back, tries to appear reasonable.  Like ancient Cataline, he knows his wretched nature, yet lacks the will to commit fully t his dark path.  He cannot believe that he is the lost one, and so he's forced to find compromises in his beliefs.  He's forced into logical twists and turns, suggesting that the Tea Party is real, but the St Louis Tea Party leaders are fake.  The thousands that show up are decent people, but each and every leader that steps forward is a cross between David Duke and Timothy McVeigh.  And the media is in on it too.  They have been duped by the Tea Party leaders, or they are in on it to sell papers.  And the local police and county prosecutors.  They're scared of the Tea Party because it's so powerful, and yet his exhaustive reporting shows that we're a paper tiger.  We're toothless because we didn't stop Prop A, but we're also toothless because we didn't get to 75% on Prop C.  We are simultaneously evil and stupid, wealthy and yet dependent on government, powerful and weak.  We are simply whatever he writes in hopes of getting linked.

Just know what you're dealing with.  Don't pretend he's an equal to other bloggers.  He's a Washington University financed hit man for the radical left.  Sadly for him, that is his sole purpose.  When the Tea Party leaders move on, the temporary high he gets from attacking us won't be there anymore.  He'll look for another fix, but without us, he has nothing.  He will return to the vile dust from whence he sprung.   That's the true nature of hate. 

It's Easy To Argue Against Opponents That Don't Exist

Clark at ShowMeProgress puts up a laughable challenge - he's asking Tea Party folks to berate Ed Martin for suggesting infrastructure jobs are always a bad idea.  This is an easy one.  Clark, like most left-liberals, thinks that the Tea Party hates all government.   He's like those sad commenters on newspaper sites who equate libraries, roads, and fire stations to socialist policies.

Luckily, limited government conservatives believe no such thing. We believe that as the Constitution is the legal document that governs the relationship between the federal government, the states, and local government, that the federal government should focus its attentions on those powers and responsibilities it explicitly is charged with in the Constitution.  You know, things like money supply, war, protecting the borders, and passing spending bills. 

Did you know that?  Did you know that spending bills are supposed to be passed each year?  Someone forgot to tell the Democrats that, as they refused to consider legislation because it could be used against them in the elections.  Frackin' cowards. But I digress. 

Ed did make a mistake.  Only a politician would waste their time on a washed up old lying hack like Jaco - going on the show may seem brave, but the sooner Jaco gets set out to pasture, the better. But that's also neither here nor there.  Here's the Jaco interview Clark is screaming about. 

JACO: Would you have been in favor of those kind of things -- maybe a son of the WPA -- to put people to work immediately on public-sector construction jobs.

   MARTIN: Emphatically yes.  I mean, emphatically yes.  And I think places like Highway 21 in Jefferson County, they're desperate to finish the roads. The federal government has a role to play, and I think you and I can talk about how big or small the role is. But public level infrastructure, I think we should have done that. We would have put, put people together. I mean, we built the Zoo, we built the memorials.  We should have said -- and even during the WPA, we sometimes said -- if workers need 20 hours each to build a 40 hour because we have two men that need a job, in this case two men and women, we'll split it up. You get 20 each. I'm emphatically for that.

A couple of points.  One - the argument against the stimulus was that it was wasted - sent to back state budgets who refuse to rein in spending during boom times, and targeted towards unions and other Democratic allies.  The stimulus was never targeted at repairing decaying infrastructure - that was the sound bite used to sell it. 

Two - if the purpose was to rein in unemployment, and the money was going to be spent, it would have been far preferable to spend the money on actual infrastructure, but stimulus spending by it's very nature isn't designed to work like that.  It was never going to work, both because the funding isn't set up to move quickly, and also because shovel-ready jobs don't exist.  You don't have a large supply of men, yes men, who can pick up shovels and go build Hoover Dam.  It's not 1932.

Three - Do they not read?

The federal government has a role to play, and I think you and I can talk about how big or small the role is.

The only way this become controversial is if you believe that Tea Party folks all believe that anarchy is the best way to run a nation.  Of course, this is exactly what Clark believes, because he's intellectually lazy.  He, and Hot Flash, and Willy K are progressives because they feel good about it. They actually say things like Republicans are selfish, and that's the only reason they don't vote to spread the wealth.

Martin says there is a role for the federal government to play, and the size of that role is debatable.  Yep - that's about what everyone believes.  And if you're going to spend borrowed money to keep people employed in a brutal recession, you might as well spend it on things that improve the community, and not just throwing cash at state governments unwilling to be responsible spenders themselves.

Here's an example of $500,000 of stimulus cash spent in Missouri.

Let's see here.  How much money did Robin Carnahan's office get from the stimulus?

  $500,000 to create a picture book showing people in state government.

$100,000 for initiative referendums.

$50,000 for absentee ballots.

$21,395 for provisional ballots.

Each of these was a backstop for state spending.  Each of those projects was authorized to help the state of Missouri spend national funds instead of state funds on state projects.

None of this bettered the state from an infrastructure standpoint.

Is there a role for the federal goverment in infrastructure?  Yes.

Does it need to be debated and discussed?  Yes.

Does that make every federal expenditure socialist?  No.

Does ShowMeProgress actually have any real questions, or do they lack the intellectual firepower or honesty to actually understand and report on what politicians say instead of creating strawmen who live only in the fevered imaginations of those who aren't paying any taxes of note anyway?

FiredUp Learns From Some Mistakes, But Needs Headline Help

.Sean is learning!  The Carnahan family's most highly paid political blogger is still cut-and-pasting stories from bigger blogs, but at least he's no longer posting stories before they've been published.  That's good, as posting a story before it's published and claiming your source was the unpublished story is, well, not possible unless you're coordinating third party attack ads in direct violation of campaign finance laws.

But sadly, some things never change.  Sean, whose slavish devotion to authority should be embarrassing to anyone over the age of six, posts a study by MIT showing premiums going down with Obamacare.

Oh wait, wait, that's not true.  He posts a "report" from a MIT professor, formerly an official with the Clinton Treasury department, based on information taken from the CBO and assertions of subsidies from the Senate report.

This same author, Jonathan Gruber, "assisted" Massachusetts with their healthcare system, currently in financial shambles with premiums skyrocketing and insurers bankrupt.  So what's the answer?  Make it 50 times bigger and add more subsidies!

Seriously - this is pure propaganda.  Gruber is cited by just about everyone on the former Journolist if you glance through Google News.  He's a shill with an agenda, and calling him an MIT economist without qualifying that he has been working to push universal, single payer health care through for years makes a mockery of his work as is, considering it's just a rehash of CBO information and Senate statements on subsidies.

When someone like Sean takes that further, it moves from dishonest to flat out lying.

But hey, in a state where 71% of voters, including 15% of Democrats vote to crush the individual mandate, you have to do something, right? 

Show Me Progress Gets Letters, Makes 24thstate Jealous

Show Me Progress hit an important milestone over the weekend, as a lawyer for political candidate Maria Chappelle-Nadal sent a takedown notice on a post ShowMeProgress put up.

Man, am I jealous.  I haven't ever got an official takedown letter from a lawyer.  Sure, folks write and threaten to sue, but that doesn't mean anything.  Sadly, Chappelle-Nadal's lawyer letter doesn't mean anything either, but still, it's so fun to print those things and share a good laugh.

To make it better, the letter comes from a Democrat, which gives SMP bonaf ides that they take on their own.  If someone who generally opposes you sends you a lawyer, it's time for mockery.  When someone on the same side sends their lawyer, it's a time for a lesson.

So congrats to Clark for sticking it to a politician, and for standing up for his rights.  Note in the post how polite his response is. That's the correct tone to take. 

Can you specifically cite which claims that I have made that you believe to be false, and can you please provide evidence to substantiate those claims? As I've previously stated, I would gladly retract any statements which are proven to be false, but I will not retract a statement without compelling evidence that it is false.

Arch City Chronicle joins in the pile-on, and bloggers around St Louis should take notice. If Chappelle-Nadal's lawyer keeps it up, we all need to pile-on, regardless of our political views.  So count me in to post what is needed to get sued if they continue.

Disclaimer:

Don't take this as an olive branch.  I do respect the work of the bloggers at Show Me Progress because they're sincere in their beliefs and straightforward about what they write. They're not co-opted by parties or a candidate, they do original research, and they should be the gold standard for progressive bloggers in Missouri.  They should be the ones heading to the DNC every four years, and you have to respect it.  FiredUp is a political operation funded to help the Carnahan family in particular and Missouri Democrats in general.  ShowMeProgress is a honest grassroots operation.

At the same time, since the arrival of the Tea Party, Show Me Progress, in particular Willy K, hotflash, and Clark have been childish and petulant in their insults, and while they avoid the personal attacks on other citizens engaged in political speech in their posts, they're clear enablers.  Under the new rules established by the left - those who engage are all fair targets.  While I can respect their work as bloggers, I'm never under any obligation to play nice with people who think the use of racist and homophobic slurs are acceptable political statements that can be quietly cheered even if you don't use them yourself.  

So no olive branch.  But I do stand shoulder to shoulder in support of any blogger who seeks to report the news and refuses to back down in the face of legal threat from an arrogant politician.