Riehl World View

Tommy Christopher's Ignorance In Online Reporting

It's being asserted by some friends, one reporter and others that Mediaite's Tommy Christopher did adequate due diligence to prevent publishing bogus information on the Weinergate story. That's incorrect. I've employed more rigorous standards going back to 2005, when I began covering the disappearance of Natalee Holloway and other notable crime stories. There is no shortage of individuals looking to play a blogger, or a reporter on line, whatever their motivations.

@AceofSpadesHQ @DanRiehl Yeah I can't blame @tommyxtopher much on that...Obviously some whenever someone's wrong, but not much...

There are multiple publicly available databases to confirm, not only an adult individual, but their location, family members, financial and criminal history, and much more. And it doesn't take more than a name and a state to start. Good heavens, it's as if no one has ever heard of People Search, or Zabba, to name just two alternatives - though I usually do it myself, or with help from a friend, without cost. He could have discovered the fraud in five minutes before publishing BS. There are also multiple Wikis and resource pages with instructions on how to search what's generally called the Deep Web.

Another case in point, some of you may recall Jesse Griffen, an allegedly anonymous Alaskan blogger part of the pack obsessed with Sarah Palin. Before I was done, I revealed where he worked - a kindergarten- and cost him his job, as his online presence risked exposing children to his perversions, and even mentioned portions of his finances and extended family, as appropriate.

Despite claims of being an anonymous blogger at Immoral Minority, research suggests that, through possible misjudgment, Jesse Griffin appears to have created a situation in which he has been easily identifiable as the blogger Gryphen, particularly to children, perhaps for as long as two years. School-aged children who were PC literate apparently could have had access to information posted on his blog including questionable statements like this below - apparently posted by assistant kindergarten instructor Jesse Griffin himself when discussing a possible military draft. As of this minute, the content is still live.

Christoper didn't even need to go to that length if he had exercised a little patience, assuming he didn't want to simply try to exonerate Weiner, whatever it took. One can have an adult tell you where they work. By securing the main number from the phone listings, you then call and ask for said individual by name. They are either there and the same individual, or they are not. This ain't rocket science, people.

Phone listings, alternate online identities people use as part of their actual life, as opposed to playing games on Twitter, all provide opportunities for valid cross verification. Obviously, Christopher employed none of them, while lecturing others on his alleged tremendous professionalsim as a journalist. What he and his editor are are fools, which is precisely what someone played them for - that, or they were in on it and they were exposed by the New York Times. And ignorance is no excuse when you purport to be publishing real information from, or about real people that may have an impact on their lives, as well as, or the lives of others.

Stupid, lazy or corrupt - take your pick. But one, or more of those shoes fit Mediaite. If the shoe, like the package, fits, sorry, but you can't acquit. And it certainly should not be passed off as professional, and or competent.

Cedra Crenshaw vs King Samir Shabazz: The hand that rocks the cradle?

"I am up against the same machine that put Barack Obama in office. The machine came in, they wiped all of his competitors off the ballot, just like they're trying to do to me," grassroots Illinois state senate candidate Cedra Crenshaw told an Independence Day audience Saturday," drawing her secret weapon: "They can't call me a  racist, white, evil man." You can donate to her legal defense fund here.

By Sissy Willis of sisu

"You hear so much about conservative women leading this conservative movement in this country, and I really believe that conservative women are the most persecuted figures in politics right now," says Dana Loesch in a refreshingly candid Dana Show radio interview — crossposted at BreitbartTV — with "mama grizzly" Cedra Crenshaw. Does the hand that rocks the cradle still rule the world? More about that in a moment, but first a few excerpts from the interview:

She's a wife, she's a stay-at-home mom, she's an education reformer, she's an accountant, and she was fed up, and so she threw her hat in the ring.

She has enormous support from the grassroots movement, and she has terrified the Chicago Machine, who is trying to move heaven and earth to get her off the ticket.

The Tea Partiers love her. Listen to the Dana Show interview and her Independence Day speech, and you will understand the smart, common-sense appeal of this authentic American voice. Fellow Illinois Republican Adam Andrzejewski at Big Government has more:

Why is the machine afraid? Because a new class of leadership is starting to develop. These new leaders threaten to end the shell game of taxes, politics, and patronage. Cedra Crenshaw is one of those new leaders, and she’s is running for state senate against one of the Chicago Machine’s rubber-stamp apparatchiks.

She’s an accountant who wants to spearhead a forensic audit of Illinois state government. A former auditor at Deloitte and Touche, Cedra supports an audit of the half a trillion dollars of Democrat-controlled state spending during the blow-off historic corruption of Blagojevich/Quinn. The Democrat Machine — contractors, politicians, and patronage army — stand in naked fear of the result that such an audit would bring.

"The mainstream media is completely ignoring you," Loesch notes, "because you defy their narrative of what conservatism is." Crenshaw agrees, but with new-media avenues like the Dana Show itself, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, fire-breathing bloggers and twitterers and Tea Party energizers, she's been able to disintermediate the media powers-that-be to get her narrative across loud and clear:

People in this state, they want jobs. They want economic growth. They're not interested in more handouts and more promises … My opponent, he's got no solutions except more tax increases.

While uniters like Cedra Crenshaw are pursuing the American Dream, dividers like New Black Panther Party Philadelphia chapter leader "King Samir Shabazz" (at 2009 street festival above) pursue the nightmare part of Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare: "I hate white people. All of them! Every last iota of a cracker, I hate him! You want freedom? You're going to have to kill some crackers! You're going to have to kill some of their babies." Whatever gets you on the evening news. Shabazz was caught on tape intimidating voters at the polls in November of 2008, but in his infinite and inscrutable wisdom, Attorney General Eric Holder is dropping charges.

Contrasting the public faces of Cedra Crenshaw and King Samir Shabazz, the words of William Blake's The Tyger" come to mind: Did he who made the Lamb make thee? We found a timely interpretation of the riddle in Juliette Akinye's provocative and insightful blogpost "Scarred Souls: More About Abortion" (h/t twitter buddy King Shamus of Blog de KingShamus), where the blogger AKA Baldilocks casts the old-fashioned notion of women as civilizers of men in a contemporary light:

There might be a little preaching. That's an essential part of me. He's a part of me…

All women should stop creating the exterior and — more importantly — the interior conditions under which abortion is an option. And by that I mean that all women should stop giving themselves to men who they are not sure will love, cherish and protect them and any prospective offspring they may create by having sex with each other …

You see, there’s this thing about women, a thing that makes us different from men, aside from the physical aspects. When we lie down with a man, we are giving him more than physical pleasure and doing more than gaining physical pleasure for ourselves.

When a woman has sex with a man, she joins her soul with him [For those of a more scientific bent, it's a matter of chemistry — oxytocin, the "cuddle hormone"] …

Think about all the illegitimate black children there are in America and think about the fact that black women have the highest rate of abortion of any women in America. That statistic says that there are very many black women who are giving themselves to men who don’t care about them.

Here's the kicker that illuminates the disjunct between Cedra Crenshaw's and King Samir Shabazz's American dreams:

And, on top of that, we can take these effects and mirror them onto black men, too many of whom are angry at the world, angry at black women, and angry at themselves (black-on-black crime). That anger almost always stems from observing or experiencing the spiritual, moral and worldly failure of their mothers.

It's the nanny state, stupid! The unintended consequences of the debilitating dependency fostered by those handouts Cedra Crenshaw's supporters want no more of.

Update: Related thoughts and video from Ed Morrissey:

“Mama grizzlies” actually fits better in the Tea Party movement, which I’ve argued is driven in the main by activist women. These are women with families who aren’t focused on what government can do for them, but what government should be doing, period. They’re defending their turf rather than looking for handouts, and defending their children from expansionist government and the massive spending that their children’s children will have to repay. It’s a good brand to stake out for Palin, but she’s been doing that all along with the Tea Party movement (as has Michele Bachmann). This just puts a label on it, and one that sounds much more assertive than “soccer moms” did.

Crossposted at sisu, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.

Guardian: US Right Wired, Ready To Rumble

I mean rumble in a good way. Good heavens, it's the Guardian. I guess being overseas allows them to actually write a frank and fairly positive story about the 9/12 protests and what's beginning to happen across the board as far as Tech on our side. Check out their last graph for instance.

All of which makes Kibbe think that those Democrats who try to pigeonhole the tea parties as a crank phenomenon are playing into the anti-Obama movement's hands. "The Democrats who want to marginalise this movement are making a big mistake. They are insulting the people who they should be courting, and every time they do that our numbers seem to double in size."

They actually do a pretty good job of handling the whole thing. Pity American media doesn't seem up to it. That graph above might apply to them every bit as much as it does to the Democrats. Read the whole thing.

Republicans steal Barack Obama's internet campaigning tricksSince their election disaster, the right has used new media to gather strength, culminating in last weekend's huge protest

For Telford, though, dismissing the eruption as extremist or racist was to miss the point. For him, the 9/12 rally marked the moment at which conservative America finally embraced the new world and recovered its confidence. He believes the movement is now close to catching up with the Democrats in terms of internet savviness; in some ways he contends it has even surpassed them, particularly on Twitter, where much of the heavy lifting behind the so-called "tea parties" against Obama's tax and other policies is being done.

That cloud hung over the conservative movement for many weeks. A sense of crisis set in, he recalls, with bloggers, strategists and Republican politicians scrambling in different directions.

"There was a real lack of leadership, a lot of confusion."

But then, almost imperceptibly, something started to happen. Telford noticed Google groups popping up, listserves on which people would send angry emails back and forth. The anger was stimulated by Obama's $800bn stimulus package that was introduced five days into his presidency.

With very little leadership, the Google groups began to co-ordinate their response. People took on the onerous job of poring over the bill's hundreds of pages of small print in search of wasteful spending, following the Wikipedia model of crowd-sourcing.

They began to uncover items that looked suspicious or ridiculous: electric golf carts, snow machines, a crime museum in Las Vegas. They passed the examples on to mainstream media outlets, notably the new face of the right, snake-tongued Glenn Beck of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel, who used it as ammunition to attack the young administration. The anger grew. When Americans for Prosperity put up its own petition against the bill on its website, it had 500,000 signatures within days.

"It was a huge wake-up call to all of us," Telford says. "On the right, people had known new media was important but they were still hesitant about it. After the stimulus experience, no one was left in any doubt about its power."

Less than eight months later, the seed planted in those anti-Obama Google groups has burst into flower on the streets of Washington. Tens – or even perhaps hundreds – of thousands of livid demonstrators filled the capital, brandishing banners saying "Don't tread on me!" and "Obamunism" – a reference to the president's perceived socialist or even communist tendencies. "Liar! Liar!"they shouted, echoing the outburst of a Republican congressman to Obama's face last week.

The noise of that startling crowd could be heard rumbling on throughout this week. Democrats rushed to dismiss the display of rightwing force as the work of mavericks and extremists. Jimmy Carter upped the ante by suggesting the vitriol was racist: many people in America, he said, believed a black man should not be president.

Short Sighted Bloggers Busted In Cloakroom Circle Jerk

I don't much care for uncalled for rudeness out here and have watched a lot of dopes strut and pluck their stuff before they crash and burn like the second-tier hacks that so many of them are without saying much of anything about it. Unfortunately, both Stacy McCain and Donald Douglas have crossed a line they should have never crossed by continuing to harangue a dear friend. That would be a blogging colleague of mine for years, Cassandra at Villainous Company, who, like me, has probably forgotten more about blogging than these two hand creme dreamers can seem to gather up in those shriveled little heads they seem so fond of stroking for one another to get themselves off so seemingly obsessively these days.

Oh dear - and I see another pro and good old time friend Miss Atilla has gotten drawn in? Really, this is just too much, guys. You really are making yourselves look like asses. And I don't mean as in SondraK, who, for my money, still has the best ass in the blogosphere and forever will. She could shoot these two idiots just for kicks and giggles after riding them hard for a bit and and putting them away wet to dry off hanging in that cloakroom of theirs where they are really starting to look like they belong.

Douglas insults Cassandra while whipping out his sitemeter stats for all the world to see,

Cassandra at Villainous Company also attacked my Erin Andrews entry. It's true that Cassandra has never liked "Rule 5" babe blogging, and she's taken Robert Stacy McCain to task for it. And yet, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Meanwhile, Stacy McCain evidently feels, at some point when he wasn't slobbering all over Donald's knob, er, I mean, head in the blogger's changing room, I suppose, he must pile on with some senseless nonsense of his own - not that that should be a surprise coming from him all too often these days.

Regret to inform you, Howard, but you just became Cassandra's least favorite media critic:

So, let's see how old Donald, who forgot to duck, or only does that when Stacy drops his jeans, ... let's see how his sitemeter actually measures up in the Erin Andrews Google Bomb race. See, I was smart enough to run the very same track. But I simply stood my ground and by my principles, taking a different approach. I just took exception to Donald's post, while knowing precisely how this years-old game is played - placing some keywords in a manner this little mutual admiration society never took the time to learn. 

It's hard to beat the data presented here for those interested in building traffic, and especially those bloggers within the "Rule 5 community."

Gawd, I really am tired of reading tripe like that directly above. Perhaps you can sense it, yes? So, let's take a look. Wow, look below at all that blood rushing to Donald's head. Stacy must have really been on his game, or lower than his old knees usually allow him to get that day, wouldn't you say?

The 7-day traffic data was saved yesterday from my Sitemeter hit-counter. The entry for yesterday, July 24th, is incomplete because I saved the screen-capture when I woke up, around 6:00am. For more information, Click the Sitemeter link above and look around at the various categories. You'll notice how traffic spiked after I first posted on Erin Andrews last Sunday, July 19th. Also, my eXTREeMe Tracker hit-counter records 12,010 unique visitors for Tuesday July 21th, which is when the story really hit the mainstream press. The eXTReMe Tracking statistic is my blogging record.

Donald even screen-capped his sitemeter by week for all to see. I suppose doing a week, as opposed to a month, does help it look a little larger, sort of like I imagine one of those cremes numb-nuts like these two hand maidens order while watching late night TV just a wishin' and a hopin' for a lingerie ad when the Mrs. is asleep.

To cut this, and them short - as if they could get much shorter without being impossible to see when it comes to Erin Andrews videos, here's my monthly. Please note that, as regards Erin Andrew's posts, I bested Donald's "personal best" significantly each and every day he would purport to brag about. Now, I'm accustomed to hearing that from his wife, (Oh, how I love snark, when not doing a substantive post!) but this is the first time I ever looked at his and my own sitemeter stats together. Mature and intelligent bloggers eventually get over that, or at least obsessing over it in public so, as these two seem to always be doing these days.

Most importantly, I'd call your attention to July 23rd when I recorded just over 47,000 uniques - far from a site record, by the way. But it had nothing to do with Erin Andrews videos, or girlie pics, it was a substantive essay on Obama's burning down of his post-racial theme due to his rhetoric on Crowley-Gates.

As, I hope, it was a high-quality blog opinion post, it was linked far and wide (which puts you further out ahead link-rating-wise in any next Google Bomb race against some of the increasingly more insufferable, circle-jerking drones out here btw) and it all but amounted to Donald's week in just a single day. But they know all about building site traffic. Oh, yes, I see.

I'll stop soon. I'm off and running, again, yesterday and today due to another quality post - that on Gates' charity misdeeds. I mean, really, who has time for all these silly rules, what with so much good blogging to be done? And please do forgive me for going on too long about two otherwise intelligent, capable men who really can produce some quality blogging when they try - and they aren't cloistered in the cloakroom fantasizing about rules and gangs and their respective members, I guess) which ultimately drives them to come up so short on the blogging end.

I just figured since I really do like them all, I'd take this opportunity to chime in on behalf of my old blogging and dear friend Cassandra. And I'd show my pals Stacy and Donald how an experienced, accomplished blogger really grows his stature and sometimes takes another blogger or two down with some style and wit.

It's all about learning, fun and friendship out here, anyway, right? I trust you won't really take offense at my lesson, while opening the cloakroom door so every one can take a peek at the circle jerk I've been all but forced to watch go on for some months. You got your links out of it, which seems to be all you really care about out here any more. That's a typical newbies disease, I should add. Now, you two boys, please do carry right on. Just try not to get any on you before you come out of that cloakroom ofyours. And, heavens, leave my darling Cassandra alone - not that she, or any of the fine, ... experienced lady bloggers out here, too many to list, or link, need my help, btw. Or I may just have to swing back around and re-visit the issue again just for old time's sake.

Good day. And, really, do have fun! I always do. It's the first and only real rule of blogging if you want to last and succeed. Never doubt that, my dear, dear friends. But be careful when it's at another's expense, because they just might have a friend ready and able to stomp all over you. And things that get trampled in the cloakroom of life aren't the labels I suspect you two otherwise fine bloggers want to get caught wearing too often out here in plain sight.

At least, I hope that's not the case. And puhleaseee! mind that substance running down your faces if you come by this way out from the cloakroom today. Some people really do have sensibilities, yanno?

Sorry, but them's the rules on this here racetrack - and just the way I roll. No offense. But like every truly good blogger, I make my own rules, often as I go, and no one else ever will, or needs to, don'cha know!

So, good day. I'm off to hopefully find some quality material to post so I can grow my blog the only way one ever really grows ... and lasts in the blogosphere FWIW.

Meet Adrienne Ross

Meet Adrienne Ross, who blogs at Motivation: Truth and has so many wonderful new pictures of Sarah Palin up today. Adrienne is a solid supporter of Sarah Palin's and, from an email, quite an impressive individual, herself.

As I added in a previous post, she strikes me as the salt of the earth kind of person we need more of to take this country back from government's hands. Let's hope!

Say hello to Adrienne's blog and enjoy the pics!

WCBSTV - NY: This Is Good To See

This isn't CBS network, it's WCBS-TV 2 in New York. They've launched a blog watch page. It has some solid links that to me reveal a genuine desire to actually engage the broader blogosphere as many of us know it everyday. It isn't just Politico, or the large media blogs for a change.

The 21st Century has seen the rise of an increasingly powerful political force, one whose influence stems from its diversity of opinions and experiences.

The Blogosphere is a virtual community of millions of web logs - websites run by everyday people from around the world, posting their opinions on a litany of topics online.

Stacy McCain: Jacksonian Conservative?

A revisitation of Levin v Squishes, commentary on Stacy and our very own Conor (with one N) Friedersdorf. I didn't know he wrote for Culture11. That explains a lot.

Still, despite some myths Stacy concocts about himself—ol’ Stacy wasn’t just a columnist down in Georgia, he delivered the papers, even printed ‘em up, makin’ the ink and pulp with his bare hands, all between drags of a de-filtered Marlboro Red—Stacy’s actually quite capable of producing prose that’s light on its feet and even (gasp!) reasoned arguments.

... This one (feud) involves the priggish J-school grad Conor Friedersdorf, a former guiding light of the thankfully deceased Culture11, who got his panties in a bunch when he heard Mark Levin use harsh language on his talk radio program—oh dear! Rod Dreher soon stopped by to wag his finger, opining that “conservatism” would win if only its adopted the gentlemanly rhetoric of Wendell Berry.

Whenever I come across people like Dreher and Friedersdorf piously attacking movement types, it miraculously makes me want to stick up for the Dittoheads (quite an accomplishment.)

Does Sullivan Have Womb Envy?

Via JWF, who points out Sullivan can't even keep his distorted facts straight. Other than mental ilness, as some suggest, I really can't think of another explanation for his obsession other than womb envy.

You would think the endless ridicule might make the guy reconsider going down this road again, but here he is back with the Trig Palin conspiracies. This is really bizarre.

Links Abound

Via Larwyn and Doug.

Credibility And The Tea Party Movement

In a video at link below - after some brief side discussion between people with both the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party - a fairly obvious nutcase gets up in an open mic forum and makes some outlandish claims. Contrary to Charles's claim the audience as a whole is not eating it up. But of course Andrew Sullivan is quick to jump in to use it as proof that the Tea Party movement is deranged.

I neither know, nor care what lgf's problem with Glenn Beck is. But in allowing his own bias to get the best of him, Charles is casting aspersions where they don't belong and squandering his own credibility in doing so. It's unfortunate to see.

At Glenn Beck Tea Party: 'Burn the Books!'

This is some really deranged stuff, and the audience is eating it up.

Looks like the Tea Party people need to switch to decaf.

I thought the idea of the tea parties was a good one. Unfortunately they seem to have been hijacked by the kooky right.

Where are all the sane Conservatives?

The problem is that they were given airtime and the audience was allowed to respond in such a way as to show that they agreed with them: demonstrating the kinds of people who attend these kind of events.

This makes conservatives look bad.