24thState

Akin and the GOP - If Only Romney had Newt's Brain

During the GOP presidential primary, many of us bemoned the lack of a perfect candidate which lead someone to suggest "Newt's Brain for President". Hilarious! So many of us had issues with him, but his rhetorical skills are in a class by themeselves. So thinking about how badly Republicans up and down the party structure have handled the Akin issue, I had this wishful thought. What would Newt have said about Akin, were he the nominee.

"You know, I disagree with what Akin said about rape and pregnancy. I think he has his facts wrong on the science, and I disagree with him, but....
For the President of the United States to stoop to the level of character assassination that he did and suggesting that a sitting member of Congress in any way suggested that rape was sometimes legitimate is inexcusable and way beneath the dignity of the office. That kind of character assassination is to be expected from consultants and operatives, but for the President, the one who is supposed to unite Americans, to be so divisive as to invent a supposed "Republican war on women" and then twist a man's words way beyond what he was clearly trying to say, to fit that derisive narrative is something he should be ashamed for doing. And if he is not ashamed, that is because you guys, in the fawning media refuse to vet this guy and hold him accountable. That is shame to you.

More from what I wish Romney has the cajones to say:
If we are going to accuse anyone of implying there are "legitimate rapes" how about turning your guns away from Akin, the father of two daughters (and four sons) who is probably one of the cleanest members to ever serve in Congress, and look at Clinton and the Kennedy family, the ones the left holds up as the greatest defenders of women."

Kevin Horrigan Misplaces His Keys To Success

hotflash over at ShowMeProgress is all atwitter over a Kevin Horrigan column about being born lucky.

In the poorly reasoned, Keys To Success, Horrigan uses Malcolm Gladwell, Warren Buffett, St Augustine, and Ben Stiller in Zoolander to make the premise that Americans are spoiled, selfish brats who think they are self-made, but in reality were just lucky they were born in the United States.  In Horrignan's mind, everything we individually have is based on the luck of being born in the United States to parents who gave us money, smarts, work-ethic...

And thus, we should give everyone else a break because we would all live miserable lives if we weren't so lucky. 

Horrigan missed the boat on that one.

I'll start with one important area of agreement.  Everyone born into the United States, at this point in time, and whose parents managed to bring them here when they were young, is extraordinarily lucky.  You had no choice to be born, but your placement at this time in this country is rivaled only by the incredible odds of you being conceived, outlasting the millions of other competitive sperm and the unlikely chance that you would emerge healthy from your mother and survive the infant mortality rate that has been the normal human condition until the last half of the 20th century.

You yourself are lucky.  But the society you have been born into was not created by luck.  And the society you hand over to your children and your children's children will not be based on luck.  Horrigan makes a critical error in reducing the societal experience down to the individual experience.  What we call luck is really chance.  Chance is not based on probablities, and those probabilities can be altered with action.  For example. 

If you're standing in a heavy rainstorm, you're 100% likely to get wet 100% of the time.  If your father purchased an umbrella for you and you choose to stand under that umbrella, you may still get wet, but you won't be as wet as if you had nothing.  Your father's decision to buy an umbrella and your decision to use it contribute to your probablity of staying dry.  Going one step further, if your grandfather built a house, and your father kept that house up, and you have have done the same, your chances of getting wet are almost nothing.

You went from a 100%  chance of getting wet, to an almost 100% chance of staying dry.  That you yourself did not build the house does not mean that you did nothing to keep it standing.  Your grandfather built the house, and thus you remain dry. Your grandfather and his countrymen worked together to insure that your house wouldn't be flooded, or burnt by neighboring counties, or destroyed in a thermonuclear explosion.  He worked and saved that his grandchild might have the opportunity to be dry.

In doing so, he created a future for you.  He fulfilled the generational compact that has been in place throughout human history,  You were given opportunity by your ancestors, and thus you do your best to create and leave behind a legacy that will protect your children, grandchildren with the society you leave behind.

What Horrigan seems incapable of understanding about success is that the opportunities and conditions that make success possible are not the same as the outcome when individuals make their decisions. Under Horrigan's carefully selected choices, birth is the sole arbiter of success.

He points to Bill Gates and Jeb Bush. 

In response, I'll give you Billy Carter and  Libby Gates.  Billy Carter was the loser brother of President Carter.  Libby Gates is the sister of Bill Gates.  Under Horrigan's reasoning, the success that Bill Gates and Jimmy Carter created for themselves should have been easy for Libby Gates and Billy Carter to emulate.  And yet, they somehow didn't.

Bill Gates spent over ten thousand hours working on computer code instead of playing baseball, dating women, or reading dark hippie poetry.  Without his purposeful work, the opportunites he was given would have amounted to nothing.  Bill Gates made the most of his opportunities, standing on the shoulders of the giants before him, and in doing so, he revolutionized the modern world.  

Luck only put him in the boat.  The choices of his family going back generations, and that of his neighbors and countrymen going back generations, made it possible for him to spend those 10,000 hours becoming an expert.  

Do you see where Horrigan went off the rails?  It's not in chiding people that they should show a little humility and thank God for His blessings, which are immense.  It's not that we as a society shouldn't be thinking about how we plan to take care of the less fortunate.  It's the overwhelming arrogance of writing a column intended to shame people for their success in life, negating any role they or their family played in bringing them to this moment in time.  It's the failure to recognize that choices in life have consequences, and the choice to create cradle-to-grave entitlements for a society endangers the stability of the society not just for ourselves, but for our grandchildren.

Why do you think that so many grandparents are in the Tea Party?  They recognize that the attempt to spend public money as recklessly as we have is evil, because it burdens those who are not yet born with crushing debt.  We want our children to grow up in a society as good or better than the current one we inhabit.  The healthcare bill represents a turning point that threatens the Republic because it forever alters the relationship between the citizen and the state.  It moves from regulating healthcare controlling it.   

And so we fight the healthcare law, and the overspending, and take time from our families and our businesses to make a better society, so that 50 years from now, leftists scolds like Kevin Horrigan will have the good fortune to write poorly reasoned columns accusing those future Americans of being lucky for being born here.

From The Archives: NBC News Sues George Bush For Campaign Ad

I thought I would dig this up from the 2004 campaign archives.  See if you can spot the similiarities:

Dear George W. Bush Supporter

Change never comes easy. There are always those who will do everything they can to defend the status quo and stand in the way of progress.
And that's why NBC News is suing George W. Bush's campaign.
NBC News claims to be fair and balanced, but their parent corporation, GE funds Democratic governors and a whole host of dangerous progressive causes.  NBC isn't suing Democrats.  In fact, some Democratic senate candidates are even bragging about using their appearances on the channel as fundraisers.
And now, they're threatening to sue our president.
Will you join George in pledging to stand up to corporate interests like NBC News that try to censor the voices of the American people?
We need George to continue protecting Missourians. He's a third generation government servant and former small business owner who, as president, worked with both sides of the aisle to fix Medicare, education, and an economy in recession. 
It's easy to see why NBC News wants to stop George when you take a look at his opponent, Senator John Kerry. He's a long-time Washington insider and one of Tom Daschle's top allies from the Senate leadership -- exactly the type of left-wing candidate NBC News loves to support.
NBC can try to stop George from speaking out, but he's not going to back down.
Let's show NBC News and other corporate interests that democracy can't be bought. Stand with George today:
http://mo.georgewbushc.com/FightBackPledge
Thanks, and let's keep fighting,

Missouri State Director
Bush/Cheney Election 2004

Wow.  That is some powerful stuff.  A political campaign decides to go after the biggest network news channel using the president's name as an attempt to fundraise.  Who could imagine that such a thing was acceptable?  The most powerful man in the world, attacking the media of being left-wing partisan hacks!

Of course, it didn't happen.  This is an Organizing for America email altered to say George Bush instead of Robin Carnahan, and NBC News instead of Fox News.  

It's based on this Washington Post story from 2004, when the Bush campaign pulled an ad that had footage from NBC News.

President Bush used a campaign video to unveil a new reelection slogan yesterday, "Strong Leadership in Times of Change," but the debut was short-lived because of a dispute over some of the footage.

The Bush-Cheney campaign yanked the video, titled "Responsibility," from its Web site after about five hours in response to objections from NBC News about the use of a clip from the president's appearance broadcast Sunday on "Meet the Press."

Note the difference. NBC News complained that the Bush campaign was using footage of Bush speaking.  The Bush campaign pulled ad within five hours.  Robin Carnahan edits footage of her opponent in an interview, then goes crying to the media about censorship when Fox News does the same thing that NBC did in 2004.

Note to that Fox News did the same thing to Republican candidates for president in 2007, and 2008, as I pointed out two weeks ago.

I haven't seen any stories from the Missouri media that point this out.  Both the KC Star and the Post Dispatch are happy to talk about Robin's lawsuit, but none of them want to do the honest work of reporting this is standard for television news networks.

What are we to think?  Is it that the newspapers and television stations don't have the staff or the ability to ferret out the truth?  Or is it that they lack the integrity to report honestly on Carnahan's sinking campaign?

The truth is out there.  Who will report it? 

But let's not turn this to the media.  OFA and President Obama have entered a very dangerous arena, where they legitimize the demonization of entire networks.  Does this mean the Republican leadership, when it wins in November, can freeze out CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and the New York Times, because they support left-wing candidates?  Can the next Republican President just decide to pick a news organization and make them the devil?

Of course not.  Only far left authoritarians are so afraid of reporters that they'll threaten an entire network.

November is coming.  Vote Accordingly.

 

 

 

Tea Party Does Job Patrick Martin Of Arnold-Imperial Leader Is Afraid To Do

A commenter named Fact Checker has been gracing my posts - leaving disgruntled comments where he tells everyone how stupid they are.

Personally, I find it stupid that someone would leave comments on a local blog with an IP pointing to Leader Publications, Inc, the offices for the Arnold-Imperial Leader.

The timing couldn't be more perfect.  Pat Martin, the editor of the Leader, just came out with an editorial where he mocks the Tea Party and complains about the event put on by the Jefferson County Tea Party with support from other local tea parties.

Sadly, Pat doesn't know what the hell he is talking about.  Or at least he pretends he doesn't, making the claim that the people who showed up at the Arnold City Council didn't live in Arnold.

Except for the ones that do. 

The bigger question is why Pat Martin, who is supposed to be a journalist of some type, considers citizens rising up against corruption to be a bigger threat than the actual behavior of corrupt officials.

And Pat knows exactly what I'm talking about.  Back in February of 2009, when the Jefferson County Dispatch 911 board was paying ACORN And SEIU  $187,000 to run their political campaign, Martin wrote an editorial attacking the process.

That was the last Pat would write about the issue.  Once the e911 law passed, Martin shut his mouth and refused to say another word, even when evidence obtained through Sunshine laws showed that the JeffCo 911 board was working to subvert the Leader and had personally attacked Pat Martin as "Rat Martin."

His words to me at the time were that since the tax increase passed, the people in charge, including Bob Sweeney who served both as counsel and as the VP of Power-Union, had a slush fund they could now use, and there was nothing he could do.

Get that?  The newspaper editor was afraid of the powerful politicians, and didn't want to rock the boat.

Today, Bob Sweeney is at the center of the Arnold City Council Election Scandal.  He is financed with money from outside of Arnold.  Patrick Martin, apparently once again afraid to speak truth to power, said nothing and says nothing.  When citizens seeking to expose corruption in Jefferson County voice their opinion (corruption that Pat Martin knows exists but is unwilling to fight), Martin only has contempt.  He mocks Ken Horton for being in Imperial, but doesn't address the issue of why Ken and a large group of local and regional Tea Party folks showed.  Patrick Martin is fine with the Arnold City Council being funded outside of St Louis, but not so hot with Tea Party groups lending their support.

Let me explain it in simple terms.  Patrick Martin, we're doing your job, because you're too much of a coward to do it yourself.  Thank you for the editorial.  We'll be sure to print it out and take it door-to-door so Arnold voters know where their newspaper editor stands on issues of public corruption.  With bought and paid for politicians.

 

 

 

Continued: Understanding The Factual Error In The Virginia Young Story On Carnahan

I posted on a column containing a major mistake concerning the Robin Carnahan record yesterday, and received two notes back from Virginia Young, the Post Dispatch writer on my request for a correction.  I understand that a correction is painful.  It looks back rather than forward.  It's an admission of a mistake.  And it's double-work, as Virginia has other news stories to write.

But it's necessary. If newspapers are to be trusted, then newspaper reporting has to be factual.  It is our duty, and their obligation to point these problems out, and the newspaper to correct them in a swift and public fashion.  Conservatives in St Louis already think the Post Dispatch is hopelessly biased.  Many don't subscribe or read because they think the PD is in the tank for Democrats.  While I think the paper does have problems, it's also fair to note that there are professionals working at the paper and the editorial page is not the news section.

Corrections of factual errors are a wonderful way to showcase objectivity and integrity.  Dismissing reader concerns tends to leave the paper open to ridicule, lower circulation, and ultimately decline.  And that's a problem, because newspapers fill an important role in American society.  But they have to fill that role to remain relevant.

Here's the original article and my first response.  Continued in this post is the extra reasoning I sent to Ms. Young to show her how her article contained factual errors.  Her final response was that she would read the case.  I only wish she had read it before she wrote a factually incorrect story on Robin Carnahan's voter rolls lawsuit and its outcome:

Dear Virginia,

Thank you for responding.  I understand your reasoning, but the story as you wrote it is incomplete.  Without getting into the twists and turns of the full case, your summary sentence is, to be fair, wrong.  Your summary states the suit was dropped by a federal judge, and that Carnahan did all she was legally required to do.  This is incorrect.  A federal judge did rule against the case, and it was her opinion that Carnahan did all she was required to do.  But that was overturned on appeal, which means that a higher court decided Laughrey’s opinion was wrong, and that Carnahan actually did not to all she was required to do.

http://www.justice.gov/crt/briefs/missouridecision.pdf

Laughrey said Carnahan only had to coordinate.  The Eight Circuit Court of Appeals stated Carnahan had to make reasonable efforts to clean the rolls, which she did not do.  They overturned an evidentiary decision about survey responses from Local Election Authorities and sent it back to the district court to use those surveys to determine if Carnahan had done all she had to do.  In doing so, they took the extra step of making it clear that if the local election authorities were unsuccessful, the state of Missouri would need to make changes including ceasing to delegate to the LEO’s.

In other words, Carnahan was not found to have done all she was required to do legally.  Laughrey’s opinion was found to be incorrect in the manner she made the decision, based on the evidence needed to make a correct judgment.  That’s a pretty stunning reversal.  It’s basically a nice legal way of saying take another look, because we don’t want to make you look bad.  
 
After winning on appeal, the case was dropped by federal prosecutors in a new administration.  A more accurate statement, using the later Eight Circuit Court of Appeals decision, was that Carnahan was found to not have done all she needed to do, but the case was dropped by the Justice Department before a legal remedy could be applied.  In fact, that’s the exact opposite of the outcome you wrote about.  Without getting into the political motivations of the suit, your statement could only be seen as factual if it was written before March 2008.  Would you write a sentence about someone being convicted of murder in 2006, if in 2008 that conviction was overturned and the person set free?

Of course not.  While the sentence is only a small part of the article, it gives the impression that Carnahan won her legal battle, which is untrue.  Later in the article, you even brought up cases where she did not win the legal battle, strengthening the impression that she won the previous case.

I’ve provided the Eighth Circuit decision for you in the pdf link above.  United States V Carnahan was no small matter.  It had impact on later cases, including Harkless V Blackwell in Ohio, and is expected to be used in future NVRA litigation.  If future researchers read your article, they could be misled by your reporting. 

At the very least, a next sentence should read, the judge’s decision was reversed by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, but later dropped by the Justice department before a final resolution. Leaving it as you have creates a false narrative in the news story that creates the impression that you were covering up the case for Carnahan by stopping your research in 2007.

As you can see, I put no small amount of effort into doing the research and providing a summary for Virginia to evaluate.  I did so in a polite manner, in order to help the paper correct something they published.  While it might be an annoyance to correct a mistake, it was also an annoyance to have to do the research and write out an accurate response.

Young's original message to my first post, which I informed her I would be posting: 

Thanks for your comments. My reading of the clips showed that both  sides made arguments about the suit and the dropping of the suit being  politically motivated. Obviously, a fuller explanation could have gone into  the twists and turns. If it comes up again, I'll try to include more  background. But that it was dropped was still the end result.

While polite, this was a dismissal of my argument.  She writes that the end result was the same, which is that the suit was dropped.  This was the disputed portion of her original writing.

In 2007, a federal judge dropped a Department of Justice lawsuit that had accused Carnahan of failing to require updated local voting lists. The judge said Carnahan had done what was legally required.

Young's failure to understand the full case, and not being aware of two more years of litigation or the reversal by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, caused her to write a statement that was factually inaccurate.  The judge dropped the case, but it was overturned.  Overturned. The judge was told to go back and try again.  Readers of Young's original article were misled, and now have an inaccurate view of Carnahan's legal prowess as well as her competence as a Secretary of State.

At question is whether Carnahan's tenure as Secretary of State justifies a promotion to Senator.  The intent and the clear wording of Young's statement suggests that Carnahan did her job and did it well.  Is that true?  We can not say for certain because the Obama Justice Department dropped the lawsuit.  Used as evidence of competence versus ineptitude, this case has to be considered neutral. 

Yet faced with this, and knowing that the longer it's on the page, the less likely anyone will read it, Young's response is, I may or may not get back to you at an indeterminate time.  Her response is that the time and care I took into attempting to educate her was a waste of my time.  Her response is that she is either too busy, or not interested, in producing accurate newspaper reports.

As I said - if newspapers cannot learn to quickly identify mistakes and provide a swift and public correction, we are left with only two conclusions.  They are not interested in correcting mistakes because they lack integrity, or they are not interested in correcting mistakes because it would cast certain candidates in a negative light.

Both are unacceptable.

 

 

Correction Request. Post Dispatch Reporter Virginia Young Makes Huge Mistake In Describing Robin Carnahan Voter Rolls Lawsuit

Reading back through the Post Dispatch piece by Virginia Young, I caught a huge whopper of a mistake in listing her record as Missouri Secretary of State.

In 2007, a federal judge dropped a Department of Justice lawsuit that had accused Carnahan of failing to require updated local voting lists. The judge said Carnahan had done what was legally required.

The case in question was one of the first I wrote about, and it involved Nanette Laughrey making the outrageous claim there was no voter fraud in Missouri.  These two sentences would be a fine beginning to the story, but they are not the end of it.  Young does not go on to mention that the case in question was pursued on appeal and won by the Bush Justice Department.  The case was moving along quite nicely until is was suddenly dropped in 2009, one month after Carnahan announced she was running for Senate. 

This is no minor matter. The Wall Street Journal described the case, publishing accusations that the case was dropped for political reasons and not based on merit.  Like the Black Panter intimidation scandal, the case was simply let go.

How did Virginia Young miss this?  Her description of the case missed a full two years of the case, and doesn't cover the fact that it has been used as evidence of the politicizing of the Obama Justice Department.  At the very least, getting the facts right that the 2007 decision by Laughrey was not the end of the matter requires a correction

Here's the relevant information from the Wall Street Journal:

Last year, Justice abandoned a case it had pursued for three years against Missouri for failing to clean up its rolls. When filed in 2005, one-third of Missouri counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents. What's more, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who this year is her party's candidate for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, contended that her office had no obligation to ensure individual counties were complying with the federal law mandating a cleanup of their voter rolls.

The case made slow but steady progress through the courts for more than three years, amid little or no evidence of progress in cleaning up Missouri's voter rolls. Despite this, Obama Justice saw fit to dismiss the case in March 2009.

This is the case Young wrote about it.  A correction on the piece, explaining the case was appealed and was successful until it was dropped by the Obama Justice Department seems prudent.  Without the correction, it would appear that Young deliberately omitted relevant facts in an attempt to portray Carnahan in a positive light, that of defeating a lawsuit by doing what was legally required.

That was not the case.  Carnahan was spared further scrutiny of her record by an Obama Justice Department that refuses to respond to accusations of not wanting to pursue voter roll lawsuits for political reasons.

I have contacted the reporter and asked for a correction.

 

Steve Kraske Confused About Fox News/Carnahan Lawsuit. Google Provides Answers

Steve Kraske has a column wrapping up the week at the KC Star where he makes the Robin Carnahan/Fox News suit out to be some kind of political decision.

Fox said the effect of the spot is to depict the network’s Chris Wallace as endorsing Carnahan.

That’s silly. What’s even sillier is that all the news coverage of the lawsuit resulted in even more exposure to a hard-hitting, anti-Blunt ad.

For a network that tilts right, you wonder about its logic. It’s another mystery, all right.

It's not a mystery at all Steve.  Fox is defending its broadcast, not worrying about the effect of the lawsuit on the coverage of the ad.  You know - they're acting in what they perceive to be the interests of Fox, not the Blunt campaign.

Contrast this to the behavior of the news media and folks like Kraske, who don't even bother to do basic research on past instances of television networks telling candidates not to use their work.

Using the magic of the internet, let me show you what a journalist should be doing.

Oct, 26, 2007 - Fox Bars Republican Presidential Candidates from using Fox News images in their campaigns

October 25, 2007 - Fox orders halt to McCain ad.

February 11, 2004 - Bush Campaign Video Pulled (on request of NBC News)

Wow.  It looks like with just a little bit of research, one could see that there isn't really that much there, there.  It seems to be normal for news networks to tell candidates to not edit video of their broadcasts to make campaign videos.  In other words, it's a non-story that folks like Kraske turn into a story.   

Instead of doing any research, the newspapers, including Jake Wagman of the Post Dispatch, write about the situation to give it more coverage than it deserves.  In Wagman's case, he took it further, linking to the donation page for Robin Carnahan, twice. 

The Post Dispatch Political Fix blog has never linked to a Roy Blunt campaign donation page.  If Kraske is curious how a news organization can slant coverage to benefit a campaign, he need look no further than Missouri newspapers.  

 

Howard Kurtz Gives Outdated SEO Advice To Journalists

Instapundit links a Washington Post article by Howard Kurtz, bemoaning the inclusion of search friendly writing into journalism.  It's not a bad piece towards the bottom, and I do suggest all journalist types read it, but what Kurtz reveals about internal Washington Post technical policy doesn't help him make his point.  From his intro, titled, "Appeasing the Google Gods."

"I can no longer file a story in our computer system without filling out a box, a small gray square that may well determine the future of serious journalism.

The box is supposed to contain words and phrases that will help me reel you in. Search has become a journalistic obsession on the Web, and with good reason."

Newspapers are notorious in general for not understanding SEO.  They’re behind the times, which is why bloggers eat their lunch in the search engines.  They don’t understand search engine algorithms, long tail keywords, or better yet conversion.  And Kurtz displays his ignorance.  Adding keywords to your editing software is an older type of SEO strategy.  It was popular in the 90's, but by 1998, algorithms stopped paying attention to metadata in indexing.  By 2002, all the major engines dropped metadata for indexing and ranking, but developers, those lovable scamps, continue to add those boxes of keywords to enter.  Mind you, most developers don't have a clue about SEO.  And when you add staff who know even less, you have monkeys filling out boxes for no purpose.

In short, Kurtz starts his article out complaining about the necessity of adding keywords and phrases without recognizing he’s wasting his time.

What they should be doing, is linking out to blogs and other trusted domains as sources and as story extenders.  These blogs reciprocate with links back to the individual page of the writer’s story, driving relevant traffic and “google juice.”

And that's just the stuff they should have been doing since 2002.  Today, you see share buttons on every major site, but newspapers don't have a clue how to harness, track or convert social media traffic (like Facebook link embeds in the update stream), even though it's often as big or bigger than traffic from Google.

Personally, Facebook is now my number two traffic source, just behind Google.  Google has increased every year, but Facebook has only been relevant for six months.

Someone ought to tell Kurtz.  I hope he's at least getting paid by the hour to fill out those boxes.  Someone should get some benefit.  And in general, if you're a writer, you should be careful about addressing technical issues you know nothing about.  Your layers of fact-checkers and editors might not "cache" it.

ahahaha. ahem.

Star and P-D Blink Blankly in the Face of Facts

It's usually a bad idea to write an editorial without all the facts.  For some reason, the KC Star and the STL Post-Dispatch thought otherwise.  I have heard NO proof from either publication that ginormous, moneyed interests and insurance companies are behind the Prop C effort.  Nor have I seen any correction to the specious arguments made in opposition to Health Care Freedom.  I have the feeling that if the Star and P-D were a single person they might respond like this:

Jake Wagman Once Again Turns Water To Whine For Carnahan Campaign

I don't know what to think about Jake Wagman.  Everyone says he's a good guy, but when he posts Far Left Wing attacks on Ed Martin based on the Carnahan Family Blog's Website, I have to wonder if he has any shame left at all.

Here is the story, sourced from FiredUp Missouri: 

Martin: Carnahan, Obama want to take away freedom to find "salvation"

This is based on comments Ed made on Gina Loudon's show.  I'm not trying to whitewash this in any manner.  I say you listen to Ed's words and read the transcript, and take it at face value.  What does he say?

The growth of government imperils religious freedom.  The growth in government regulation squeezes out the choices you make, from birth to death, and leaves no room for private religious expression.

Exhibit Number One is Obamacare: 

Section 1501 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act adds a new chapter to the Internal Revenue Code mandating all “applicable” individuals either obtain health insurance that meets the bill’s “minimum essential coverage” standards or pay a penalty on tax day.

Section 1501 also spells out exceptions, those who are not considered “applicable” individuals, both for the mandate and for the penalty. Illegal aliens, foreign nationals and incarcerated prisoners, for example, are exempt from the mandate. The extreme poor and members of Indian tribes, while not exempt from the requirement, are nonetheless excused from paying the penalty.

But section 1501 also carries a pair of “religious exemptions” that will allow the Amish to escape the mandate but require Muslims and other religious objectors to get creative.

The law creates a religious exemption for those who are members and faithful adherents of a “recognized religious sect or division” with “established tenets or teachings” barring the “acceptance of the benefits of any private or public insurance.”...

The health-care reform bill’s language, however, specifically states that for a sect to qualify for the religious exemption, it must fall within the definitions of section 1402(g) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. That section requires a sect to have been in constant existence since at least Dec. 31, 1950, and requires the sect to reject not only insurance but also have sworn off receiving all benefits from the U.S. Social Security system.

In this very clear example, the government is establishing classes of people responsible for purchasing insurance based strictly on their religious status.  It is no stretch to say that if you want to skip Obamacare, just become Amish.

In the most recent, most public debate on the growth of government, the US government is determining how you live your life based on whether or not you qualify for a religious exemption.

Now if Jake doesn't understand that, he's not required to write about it.  But to publish a hit piece designed to make Ed Martin look like a religious zealot because he doesn't understand it is journalistic malpractice.  It's lazy, it's irresponsible, and it's unacceptable.