Earlier today, Sarah Palin made the shocking announcement that she will be resigning as governor of Alaska (link). Unlike probably everyone else, I'm not going to bother speculating on her reasons, but instead on what her supporters can do. Assuming, of course, she does want to continue with her political career, one of the best things her supporters could do for her would be to go after those who've smeared her. The smear campaign that the mainstream media and others conducted against her was probably unprecendented, yet due to her supporters not understanding how to do things in an effective way, it hasn't had a great cost to those who engaged in that campaign.
On the other hand, if smearing Palin had resulted in someone's career being negatively affected, that would associate a cost with such smearing.
So, how do you do that? I'm not going to go into too many details, but if enough people linked some of the individual entries on the Sarah Palin smear page to the names of those persons involved, that would send a strong message.
For instance, if you see an Associated Press article from Justin Pritchard, link his name to the entry about his misleading Palin report like so: Justin Pritchard. And, likewise with the other people listed on that page; when discussing them, link their names to the corresponding entry on that page or similar. If enough people do that, it will send a very strong message to those who'd tell lies about her.
UPDATE: I really don't like giving away the store, but let me provide a counter-example. Someone named Erik Sean Nelson just today wrote a "joke" article about Palin at the Huffington Post called "Palin Will Run in '12 on More Retardation Platform". That was too much for the HuffPost, and they pulled the article. Now, if I were going to write a post about that article, I'd prominently feature his name and make him - and his beyond-sleazy "joke" - into the centerpiece of my post. My goal in that would be to make sure that those searching for his name months or years down the line would be able to find what he did.
Now, compare that to the posts about this issue at HotAir and at FreeRepublic. The first doesn't mention his name at all, the second only includes it in the body of the post:
hotair.com/headlines/?p=44853
freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2285113/posts
And, of course, both give the HuffPost perfectly good links. In other words, at the same time as they aren't striking out - except in a temporary fashion - at the author of the piece, they're helping the place where the smear was published. That's not that smart, but it's something I've seen repeated countless times before.
I'll be offering some live coverage of the July 4th Independence Day tea parties in this post. In the meantime, if you're looking for specific locations where you can protest and wave your loopy signs, see teapartypatriots.org, surgeusa.org/actions/july4.htm, teapartyday.com, or reteaparty.com/teaparties.
But, before you go, please take a look at my extensive tea parties summary. At that page, I lay out all the reasons why those who aren't extreme fiscal conservatives might want to do something more effective instead.
UPDATE: Apparently the most professional "party" this time is the one in Dallas (dallasteaparty.org/2009/06/americasteaparty). It features headliners like Mickey Dolenz from the Monkees and Internet superstar Stephen Crowder. In keeping with their habit of playing dress-up, they've also got a Thomas Paine impersonator. On an ironic note, they've got Michael Cutler from the Center for Immigration Studies, despite the fact that many loony libertarians think there shouldn't be a border at all. Speaking of which, former Bob Barr running mate Wayne Allen Root will be there, perhaps to try to sell the crowd used cars.
UPDATE 2: I enjoy parts of the last photo here, although I'm too much of a gentleman to try to figure out what sort of message they're trying to send.
UPDATE 3: These might be taken out of context, but here are two pictures from the big Dallas event showing very few people there:
twitpic.com/9bco5
twitpic.com/9bd34
They do have a horse there however.
UPDATE 4: As could be expected, Glenn Reynolds links to some of the events (link). There are more here - including someone apparently promoting Alex Jones' Infowars - and here. Explaining to the loons what's wrong with some of those signs is left as an exercise.
UPDATE 5: Sign from the Austin, Texas party: "Change is what Germany wanted in 1932" (link).
I'm going to start using the tagline "Home of the smart and effective opposition to Obama and the Democrats."
Glenn Reynolds links to this further example of tea party stupidity from Jim Geraghty:
But if I may make a recommendation, try to walk away with something of a plan (after attending one of the tea parties). As (Instapundit) and I have noted, chanting and waving signs are great, but if you really want to influence the way government works, you have to put yourself in front of the folks who make the decisions. And those at the lowest levels - city and town councils, mayors, county boards, members of Congress - are rarely used to crowds of people passionately making the case for spending less money.
1. It's good that he's encouraging people to do more than just wave loopy signs, but it's not good that he considers waving loopy signs a valid endeavor.
2. The only extent to which the "partiers" give a whoop about "spending less money" is when it comes to their own pocketbooks. Remember: these are "Taxed Enough Already" parties, not "sound fiscal management" parties.
3. For an example of a "crowd of people passionately" making their case, see this example of intimidation.
4. None of the tea partiers that I've seen so far has made any sort of case, but have simply whined. Making a case involves making a valid argument, and none of the ones I've seen so far have been able to do that. All they've been able to come up with is demands, shouted or printed on loopy signs. For whatever reason, none of them have been able to rise to the level of asking politicians tough questions. And, none of their leaders - including Reynolds, Geraghty, and all the rest - are trying to help them rise to that level.
5. There are things far more important than fiscal, but that's all the partiers and their leaders are concentrating on. Massive immigration will lead to even more spending, yet those pulling the strings on their "movement" support massive immigration and in all except a few cases the partiers aren't even mentioning that. Sonia Sotomayor will affect the U.S. for decades to come, yet that's completely off the partiers' radar. Their leaders are concentrating on issues that, in the greater scheme of things, aren't nearly as important as others.
From this:
The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) officially opposed Bork, whose nomination by President Ronald Reagan was rejected by the Senate in 1987, "because of the threat he poses to the civil rights of the Latino community," its president reported in one of several documents from the group that the Senate Judiciary Committee released Wednesday.
And, from this:
Remember how George W Bush "got tough" on illegal immigration in an attempt to push through comprehensive immigration reform? Welcome to the Obama administration's version (link, from Jeanne Meserve of CNN):
In a signal that the Obama administration is changing tactics in dealing with illegal immigration, hundreds of businesses were notified Wednesday that federal authorities will be taking a closer look at their employment records to determine if they are hiring illegal aliens.
Kelly Nantel, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said businesses in every state and industry are being audited, "from agriculture-related businesses, to service businesses, to high-tech industry and everything in between." The companies were selected based on leads from ICE offices around the country.
On Wednesday, 652 audit notices were issued. By comparison, only 503 such notices were issued in all of fiscal year 2008, according to an agency statement.
The goal for this is obvious and, while it's certainly welcome, no one should be fooled into complacency. Even CNN references the Bush administration in their article, although they don't mention why he did something similar. Meserve did ask about the status of immigration raids, with Nantel saying they hadn't been put on hold but unable to provide any current statistics.
Damien Cave of the New York Times offers "Big-City Police Chiefs Urge Overhaul of Immigration Policy" (link). Several police chiefs of major cities have reiterated their support for comprehensive immigration reform and their opposition to the 287g program [1]. Their supposed solution would only solve the situation temporarily, if that. The "reform" they support would lead to more illegal immigration, and the problems they pretend they want to solve would simply recur sooner or later. If they're sincere - and not just playing politics or trying to obtain race-based power as I strongly suspect - their only option would be to support strong enforcement of our laws in order to reduce the numbers of illegal aliens in the U.S. Instead of doing that, they're supporting something that would lead to even more of their supposed issues.
As for Cave, he draws a partially false distinction between "crimes and violations of immigration law, which are civil." See this for a longer discussion, but only overstaying your visa is a civil violation; crossing the border (even if caught months or years later) is not just a crime, but it can be a felony. Perhaps Cave should have asked the chiefs about that.
[1] Those mentioned in the article are: John Timoney of Miami, Art Acevedo of Austin, and Art Venegas, former chief of police in Sacramento.
From this:
Some of the Washington area's wealthiest residents hired illegal immigrant women who had been forced into what experts called human slavery by a Falls Church man, federal prosecutors said...
The list of Lubis' 50 clients divulged in court filings by federal prosecutors includes a high-profile Washington attorney, multiple doctors -- among them a high-ranking doctor at a Maryland hospital -- and an engineer who invented an electric backup system for houses that use well water. No charges have been filed against the people who employed the women, and The Examiner has chosen not to release their names...
Obviously, it would be great to find out who the "high-profile Washington attorney" is, and who the others are, especially if they have links to the wider immigration issue.
From this:
A U.S. federal probe has found that about a third of American Apparel's factory workers in the Los Angeles area had supplied suspect or invalid records and were not authorized to work in the United States...
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency found that some 1,600 current employees at American Apparel's Los Angeles factories appeared to have gained employment due to "suspect and not valid" eligibility documentation, the company said in a filing...
"ICE's notification provided no indication that the company knowingly or intentionally hired unauthorized aliens and no criminal charges have been filed against the Company or any current employees," it added...
Will there be criminal charges filed against past employees? Will AA be fined? What explanation do they have for such a large percentage of those hired having "suspect and not valid" identification?
Note also that shortly after the start of the probe, Fabian Nunez joined with past/current company lawyer Peter Schey - someone with a series of links to the Mexican government - to oppose immigration raids in general and to oppose raiding AA in particular.
From this:
The nomination by President Obama of 2nd Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court is more than alarming to an innocent man who was convicted of murder and spent 16 years in prison before being cleared and released.
Jeff Deskovic, whose pursuit of freedom has been chronicled by the New York Times and others, told WND that the last six of those years are directly attributable to decisions endorsed by Sotomayor...
...According to reports, his lawyer asked a court clerk about the [habeas corpus] deadline and was told it had to be mailed by that date. Wrong. The court rules required delivery by that date.
When the paperwork arrived late it was dismissed. Eventually Sotomayor and other appellate judge found that such a mistake didn't "rise to the level of an extraordinary circumstance" and dismissed it.
"The district court correctly dismissed Deskovic's petition as untimely," the appeals court decision from Sotomayor concluded. A subsequent appeal was dismissed with the terse: "It is ordered that said petition for rehearing is denied."
Six years later, after the Innocence Project helped discover the real murderer, he was released.
As previously discussed, Youtube is soliciting questions to be asked of Barack Obama at his healthcare townhall on July 1, 2009. Since I'm not a healthcare expert and since, unlike many others, I know my limitations, I decided to go meta instead. I was able to successfully add the following video to the list of replies here. (Note: I took a screengrab in case it goes missing like others did for the CNN/Youtube debate).
Here's the script:
My Question for President Obama's July 1 Healthcare Town Hall Meeting
Here's my question: Is this contest a sham?
Everyone else asking a question might have valid concerns...
but, they aren't experts on healthcare policy.
If we want a real debate, wouldn't it involve your experts being asked very tough questions by a wide spectrum of opposition experts?
Isn't Youtube setting you up with easy questions that you can use to promote your policies...
rather than trying to make you defend your policies to those who are very familiar with these issues?
And, with all the Hollywood production values you've come to expect, here's the video:
UPDATE: The event sounds like a complete sham, as I predicted (it wasn't that difficult). There's a live-blog here, and according to this:
[The] meeting included questions from a single-payer advocate, a liberal activist from Health Care for Americans now, and a member of the SEIU, who asked what she could do to help Obama pass health care reform.
According to the first link, Obama even worked in an "I feel your pain" moment:
The president asks her to come over to him – he says he will work with her to try and find help, but right now, he doesn’t want her to be alone. Now he explains why she is an example of why the system is broken... “Debbie, you are exhibit A,” the president says to the woman, before repeating the commitment to get health care reform this year.
Seriously: this is how things are done in totalitarian countries.
UPDATE 2: Even Charles Babbington and Philip Elliott of the Associated Press more or less admit this was a sham (link):
[Debbie Smith from the Exhibit A quote above] is a volunteer for Organizing for America, Obama's political operation within the Democratic National Committee. She obtained her ticket through the White House...
But details on exactly how to do those things were generally lacking in his hour-long town hall forum before a friendly, hand-picked audience in a Washington suburb...
Some of Obama's questioners Wednesday were from friendly sources, including a member of the Service Employees International Union and a member of Health Care for America Now, which organized a Capitol Hill rally last week calling for an overhaul...
Glenn Reynolds directs our attention [1] to a report [2] from Marathon Pundit. It's one more example of just how clueless the leaders of the tea parties are (bolding added):
Steve Grove of Youtube writes (youtube.com/blog?entry=20h2yiH79Tc):
President Obama is taking your questions this Wednesday in a special online health care town hall event. With health care at the top of the President's agenda, he is opening up the White House to questions via YouTube... He'll answer some of the most popular questions during the event, which we'll stream live from the White House YouTube channel.
In a word, this is a sham. And, it's similar to all the other shams that Youtube, CNN, Obama, and others have conducted for the past couple of years; see the popular voting systems summary for the background. Basically, the president of the U.S. is trying to fool people, and a private company is helping. In the current case it's even more obvious: they'll only choose "some" of the questions, and how exactly they're determining popularity isn't spelled out. In brief, Youtube is going to choose videos that are basically just set-ups from those who aren't experts in this field.
There are two things to do here (but that won't be done): do an end-around such filtering by trying to ask Obama and other politicians questions in person (see question authority), and for an actual expert to submit a very valid but adversarial question that Obama would have trouble with. If that question is selected, then it might make Obama look bad. If that question is not selected (the far more likely option), then the fact that Youtube didn't choose it can be used to make Youtube look bad.
UPDATE: The things I do for you! I just spot-checked about 15 of the 300 or so videos, and all are as bad as we've come to expect. Almost all boil down to one simple phrase: "when do I get *my* pony?" While some of those people may have valid concerns, the "questions" they're asking will simply give Obama an entree to a stock response. They're doing a public disservice by simply acting as foils for Obama. If they really wanted to do a public service, they would find an expert to ask the questions about their concerns instead of simply posting worthless vanity videos. Just because you have a case doesn't mean you should do your own lawyering.
UPDATE 2: I added my own video.
Brittany Levine of the Miami Herald offers "Sen. Nelson rallies against student's deportation" (link):
Sen. Bill Nelson has called for authorities to halt the deportation of a Miami man whose immigration story has inspired protests and riled up immigration activists throughout South Florida.
In a letter last week addressed to a top federal immigration official, Nelson praised Walter Lara, a 23-year-old who is to be deported July 6. He called him ''exactly the type of person'' a new immigration bill is ''trying to help.'' Lara's story ''vividly illustrates'' the need for Congress to pass the DREAM Act, Nelson, a Democrat, said.
Now, for the facts that neither Levine nor Nelson will tell you, see the last link. The bill both support would not just lead to more similar cases, it would let foreign citizens take college educations away from U.S. citizens. Senator Nelson is turning his back on U.S. citizens in order to support foreign citizens, and his constituents should respond by turning their back on him.
Late last year, David Rohde of the New York Times was kidnapped in Afghanistan and, in order not to increase his worth to his captors, the NYT worked with other news organizations to keep the news secret. Another source that agreed to keep it secret was Jimmy Wales, head of Wikipedia. The details - at least from the NYT side of things - is in "Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia" by Richard Perez Pena (link).
There certainly is a strong moral side to this issue, but at the same time it's highly doubtful that Wales would have done the same for a reporter from, say, CNS News or for an independent such as Michael Yon (who told the truth about the story, link). And, as others point out, the NYT hasn't been shy about releasing sensitive information on those who are not employed by them.
However, to concentrate just on the Wikipedia-related aspects, this incident shows yet again that you cannot trust anything you read at that site. In this case, Wales admits that their very special rules - including their "Reliable Sources" rule (WP:RS) - were used to keep something they knew to be the truth out of an entry.
Two news agencies - both with their own brief entries at Wikipedia, and including one established in 1963 - reported the truth about this story, but Wikipedia didn't consider them to be reliable sources.
In other words, the two news agencies reporting the truth were, according to Wikipedia, not reliable sources. At the same time, the New York Times - which was not reporting the truth - was, again according to Wikipedia, a reliable source.
You cannot trust anything you read in Wikipedia.
Jack Cashill is back with shocking news: "Breakthrough on the Authorship of Obama's 'Dreams'" (link). Visiting that page, I was half expecting to find some actual evidence that Bill Ayers had written Dreams From My Father. Instead, all he has to offer are "Mr. West" and "Mr. Midwest", two researchers who don't want to give their names. (Maybe Larry Johnson knows who they are):
Mr. West's analysis was systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning. Of the 759 matches, none were frivolous. All were C-level or above, and I had no doubt of their authenticity.
Yes, that's right: there's no actual evidence, such as incriminating documents of some kind showing Ayers transmitting book passages to Obama or the like. Instead, all it is is the same old similarities between Obama's book and those from Ayers. The easier explanation is that Obama was inspired by things Ayers said or wrote, and maybe Ayers even helped edit parts of it. At this point in time, this story is just speculation, and there's no way it would break out until they find some sort of documents clearly linking Ayers to major parts of the book. If they even exist, those documents have probably already been thoroughly deleted by now.
While they're wasting their time on that, Obama is promoting actual policies that may have an extremely delitirous impact on the U.S. Instead of chasing pipe dreams, opponents should concentrate on those. See the question authority summary for a technique, and see Obama immigration for just one of his incredibly flawed policies that opponents should spend their time on.
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