I’ve gotten involved in a new project.  It’s an incredibly exciting experiment.

And it launches on Saturday!

What on earth am I talking about?

Tune in at 2:30 on Saturday on the NARN broadcast.   

More tomorrow

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing off and on about the situation that local conservative volunteers and bloggers are in – and about the need to get rallied for the new electoral season.

I wasn’t just flapping my gums to enjoy the sound of it.

More details later this week.

I am not a golfer, but I do love post-golf parties.

So I’ll be attending the Post-Tournament gala for the Millard Fillmore Memorial KARNation Open Championship Celebrity Charity Golf Outing Classic, tonight at an undisclosed location in the south ‘burbs.

The Head of Alfredo Garcia is live-blogging the festivities at the tourney, which teed off about half an hour ago.

Last week, I wrote that conservative activists are tired; as Gary Miller wrote, they’ve been ridden hard and put away wet for five straight election cycles now.  It puts a strain on people, their finances, their families, their real lives.

My article sounded downbeat.  It probably was. 

Of course, I knew there was more to come.  The good news and the bad news: the future of this state once again depends on it.  We’ve seen exactly how stark this state’s choice is; the last legislative session, the DFL’s “your money or your life” hysteria, the bridge collapse and DFL’s schizophrenic response (lurching drunkenly from demanding more money to trying to indict Tim Pawlenty for murder), the miasma of Minneapolis show the mistake the voters made.  And like the morning after a dumb one-night-stand, the state is starting to wake up to the mistake it made last November.

My job – our job – is to make them want to chew their arm off rather than wake them up for the next session.

In my homage to the “Class of ’04” – the raft of great bloggers that got into the racket about this time  three years ago – I noted that this city is blessed with the most vibrant, intelligent, on-the-ball center-right blogging community anywhere in the country.  Anywhere in the blogosphere.  And like most groups of conservatives, it is an organic, self-forming, un-directed mass – a free association of equals.

And so it should stay.

But as we approach yet another “Must Kick Ass” election, we – the Upper Midwest’s center right, freedom-loving, hard-working, blog-for-the-love-of-blogging independent alternative media – need to roust ourselves from our weary hibernation.  And maybe focus just a bit.

Because this year, there is more Ass to kick than ever.

And like Bill Millin on Sword Beach, a group of us are going to start moving toward the breach. 

More – much more – on that next week.

In a sense, I’m loathe to run this contest – it’ll necessarily drive some traffic to a bunch of blogs I really don’t like all that much. 

Still, the truth must be told It’s Friday and I need a good laugh.

What are the Twin Cities’ unintentionally funniest leftyblogs and leftybloggers?

I’m not talking about the thin film of TC leftybloggers that are actually fairly sharp thinkers and good writers.  And there are a few of ’em out there, although you have to look hard to find ’em.  (I’ve credited a few of them in this space before, so don’t come yapping at me now). 

No, I’m looking for the ones that are so overwrought they shoot steam out their ears; the ones so far gone in conspiracy theory that they make great party reading; the ones we laugh at, not with. 

I’ll take nominations the rest of today and maybe tomorrow, and run the “real” poll on Monday morning. 

History calls, ladies and gentlemen!

Question:  Where did this come from:

Is this the first signs of the City Pages rightward turn? CP attacks Al Franken in what they claim is “a lighthearted story not meant to be a huge expose.” This is a perfect example of conservative framing: Al Franken should not be considered a serious candidate, we have anecdotal evidence that you should take at face value.  

Was it:  

1. Scrappleface, impersonating a rabid paranoid leftyblogger?
2. Dementee, impersonating a rabid not-too-bright leftyblogger?
3. Sisyphus, impersonating a rabid bipolar off-her-meds leftyblogger?
4. Ryan Rhodes, impersonating a seriously impacted leftyblogger?

Of course, the answer is “None of the Above”.  It’s from “MNBlue”, a piece entitled “First signs of the City Pages rightward turn?”  (Via MDE)

The world of competition is crowded with legendary rivalries; Man U and Arsenal; Chicago and Green Bay; the Beatles and the Four Seasons; Turkey and Greece; Tastes Great and Less Filling. 

But perhaps the most crowded, intense competition there is is the “Twin Cities’ Unintentionally Funniest Leftyblog” competition.

We may need to have a formal poll, one of these days, to pick a “winner”. 

MNBlue, though, has to make the short list.  Peopled by the likes of the permanently-shrieking longtime Saint Paul DFL dynastician and blood pressure patient Andy “Disarm the Law-Abiding!” Driscoll, the audibly-doddering conspiracy wacko Grace “the troops are a bunch of thugs” Kelly, and “The Big E” (where “E” apparently stands for “Easily Mocked”), it gives Sue Lenfestey and Cucky Stool runs for their money. 

Poll. 

Hmmm.

I smell a contest coming!

It’s been a hard year for a lot of conservative activists – including bloggers.

Remember, especially in Minnesota, the GOP relies on volunteers to do most of its grunt-level organizing, sign-posting, call-banking and door-knocking – the stuff for which the DFL pays a small army of “activists”. 

And each and every campaign in recent memory – 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 – has been a “Make Or Break” campaign for the Minnesota GOP; in each election, Minnesota flirted with purplehood; Minnesota’s legacy as a big-L “liberal” state hung in the balance, and held on by a thread. 

For Minnesota’s conservative volunteers, for four straight election cycles, it was “just one more big push”.  And they delivered; they turned out in droves; they worked countless hours; like the patriots that won this country’s independence, they devoted hours and weeks of their lived for the pure love of the cause; the Democrats’ paid help, like a horde of Hessians, showed up because that’s where the money was. 

And they worked wonders.  They got the word out.  But for the Ventura fluke, they’d have gotten Norm Coleman into the governor’s mansion in 1998; they contributed mightily to his performance against Wellstone, before the late Senator’s death; they almost pulled off what a generation ago would have been unthinkable – putting Minnesota in the Red column, twice. 

And they’re tired.  Some of them are very, very burned out.  I’ve talked with some of them, men and women with families and day jobs and lives, who’ve put all of them to some degree aside every two years for going on a decade now. 

And some of them don’t know that they can do it again.

It’s similar among bloggers.  The “Class of ’04” – the surge of center-right blogs and writers that kicked off during the ’04 campaign – was, and remains, the most dynamic group of political bloggers in the US.  But you could feel a collective fatigue, in some ways, after the ’06 elections.  Many of the ’04 blogs went dormant; some of the bloggers flamed out (although the MOB’s attrition is lower, I suspect, than for just about any other group of 100-odd blogs you can find); others, tired of having to churn stuff out every day, dropped their own blogs to join one the big superblogs (Freedom Dogs, Anti-Strib, TvM) that are positioned to be so very important in this next go-round.  I know I took a step back from politics for a while after the election, and I’m still not entirely back into it.

Yet.

But that’s going to have to change.  There’s a new election season coming up, and it’s going to be huge – even without  the Republican National Convention and the hordes of mischievous pranksters following it to Saint Paul next September.  It’s going to be a donnybrook, on the state and federal levels, here in Minnesota.  The Presidential context will once again have Minnesota teetering on the brink of Red and Blue, and our ten electoral votes are mighty tempting to both parties.  The Senate race will be the dirtiest in Minnesota history, and the ACORN volunteers will be floating down our streets on waves of George Soros’ money.  In Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty stood athwart the flood of DFL tax-‘n-spend proposals like the Finns at Suomussalmi, outfoxing and outmaneuvering his bovine, lumpen enemies and their “All Your Money Is Ours!” platform.  The Dems’ majority in the House is built on sand, with a bunch of seats held by DFLers who won by paper-thin margins in traditionally-GOP-leaning districts; expect them to pour on the money, the dirt, and the media play to keep it that way. 

So the GOP is going to have to call on the things that really make it a contender in this next election; its’ strength in the parts of this state that actually pay the way; its volunteers that make it competitive everywhere; and finally, the alternative media, blogs and talk radio.

Who’s going to pull that all together?

Well, stay tuned.

Ed and I talked about Ellen Goodman’s intensely stupid wrapup from Yearly Kos (Motto:  “If you’re not irate to the point of incontinence, you’re probably a spy”) in which she lamented the supposed dearth of female bloggers, on the show last Saturday. 

Nevertheless, there is another, less flattering way in which broadband has followed broadcast and the liberal political bloggers mimic the conservative talk-show hosts. The chief messengers are overwhelmingly men — white men, even angry white men.

I began tracking the maleness of this media last spring while I was a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. An intrepid graduate student created a spreadsheet of the top 90 political blogs. A full 42 percent were edited and written by men only, while 7 percent were by women only. Another 45 percent were edited or authored by both men and women, though the “coed” mix was overwhelmingly male. And, not surprisingly, most male bloggers linked to male bloggers.
…
Next year, Yearly Kos will undergo a name change. The assembly of progressive bloggers will call themselves Netroots Nation. But when will the members of these netroots look more like the nation?

The answers, of course, are head-smackingly obvious to anyone who doesn’t depend on Media Matters for their talking points; when non-whites and non-males want to. 

Because setting up a blog is probably easier than subscribing to the typical newspaper.  In fact, I’ll let you prove it to yourself.  Anyone who’s interested – especially you ladies out there – go to one of these sites (like this one if you’re right-of-center, or this one no matter what you are) and go to town.

From that point on?  It’s entirely up to you!  The blogosphere doesn’t care (indeed, needn’t know, and frequently has no idea) if you’re white, black, female, hispanic, gay, or even human. Indeed, many of the best conservative bloggers are, counter to the left’s inherently paternalistic stereotypes, women:  Michelle Malkin, the Anchoress, Ann Althouse, Little Miss Attila, Mary Katherine Ham, Baldilocks, La Shawn Barber, and the list goes on and on.  Good female leftybloggers are much rarer – hysterical scolds are more the norm – but they do exist. 

But we’ll come back to that.

Jeff Kouba notes the blazingly obvious in a way that eludes Ellen Goodman (with my emphasis added):

Hard to imagine anything more wide open than the blogosphere. There’s no gatekeeper standing there with an iron rod ready to beat back any woman who aspires to enter.

Women have just as much opportunity as men to wade out into the Sea of Bytes and try and carve out an audience for themselves.

And Jeff notes…:

The blogsophere is both a seductive angel and a cruel mistress. It is fair and not fair. It rewards talent, or loses it in the shuffle…Maybe female bloggers (I refuse to use “women” as an adjective) do experience abuse in ways that men don’t. Just ask Michelle Malkin. But to allow oneself to be cowed and driven away by sickos, maladroits, cowards, misogynists and neanderthals is a choice one makes for oneself.

One can sure invite abuse when you write a blog – or, indeed, put yourself out there in any way at all.  I remember getting anti-semitic death threats twenty years ago at KSTP-AM (although I’m as Jewish as a bacon cheeseburger; this was two years after Alan Berg was murdered in Denver, so it wasn’t entirely an academic issue to me (“Gosh, Mitch, why do you support “shall issue” laws?”).  And while I’ve done OK since the blog started, I’ve drawn my share of drooling moral incontinents to my comment section (never moreso than when Democratic Underground, Jesus General or the Freep linked to me, although most of the real persistent jagoffs came from another pack of delusional hysterics. 

Threatening anyone for what they say, or believe, is a loathsome thing, and should be punished to the full extent of both the law and society’s ability to inflict shame.  It doesn’t matter who the sender or receiver are.  Period.  If it were in my power to find out and punish (or at least humiliate) someone who sent a threatening email to, say, the shrieking hysterics at Shakespeare’s Sister, I’d do it as quickly as I would for someone threatening Michelle Malkin.  There is no compromise there.

Speaking of shrieking hysterics, MNob – a woman who writes for pretty much every leftyblog in the Twin Cities sorosphere, and who is reputed to be a lawyer, although I know I’m not paying her for legal advice, ever – tried to take Kouba to what passes for “task”, in her little world, writing this time at “Yowling From The Fencepost“:

Shorter Jeff Kouba: “Why, no, I’ve never received anonymous email with images of my face photoshopped onto a mutilated and ejaculate-covered corpse with my home address posted below. Why do you ask?”

So to sum up the “logic” of MNob’s “keen” “legal” mind:

• Kouba: the blogosphere is a meritocracy.
• MNob: But some women get threatened!  Come see the violence inherent in the system!

Even a strawman can get blog space for free at blogspot, I guess.

I don’t go to any leftyblogger for cool, incisive logic, least of all any blog that’d publish MNob – but sometimes, one has an academic craving to try to follow these “ideas” to their conclusions.

The blogsphere is (putatively) a male preserve, BUT there is no barrier to entry to anyone so there’s no real reason for this, BUT some slimebags send abusive emails to some female bloggers.  So – what do we do?  Create a DFL-like quota system? 

Aren’t women “tough” enough to handle the scrum of political blogging?  Clearly not true – Michelle Malkin, the Anchoress, Ann Althouse, Little Miss Attila, Mary Katherine Ham, Baldilocks and La Shawn Barber all give much better than they get. 

Besides reveling in misplaced victimhood, what would MNob suggest?  An affirmative action program for under-blogged womyn?  A non-profit that teaches women and minorities how to blog (oh, wait, we already have that)?  A “Fairness Doctrine” and a set of “Speech Codes” to “level the playing field?”

Or is it just more fun to complain about the thin little fringe of a***ipes, politics irrelevant, whose anonymity gives them cover to say and do things they’d never dare in person? 

Sort of like a lot of anonymous bloggers, come to think of it?

King smacks a bad puppy:

My contention thus far is that dogs use explanations to give their readers the impression that they know that which they cannot yet really know. Attempting to connect dots of a rare event at this stage is highly premature.

The puppy – the not-exceptionally-astute author of the City Pages’ “Best Leftyblog of 2006” (see: “Damnation by Faint Praise”) “Cucking Stool” – took a thwack at King’s economic analysis of the Bridge collapse. 

Read the whole thing.  Ask yourself “have I checked my tire pressure since I got to work?”  Then send the whole thing to Nick Coleman.

It was June 27th when we noticed that Jeff Fecke of the Minnesota Monitor was playing fast and loose with the rules of journalism (to say nothing of blogging).

It was July 2nd when we noted that there was at the very least a strong appearance of plagiarism on the part of this “journalist” whose publication is funded by liberals with deep pockets and which has gone as far as hiring former Strib reporter Eric Black to burnish its reportation as a “journalistic” endeavor. 

We noted, correctly, that despite their own self-published “Code of Ethics” that bids them to “Admit mistakes and correct them promptly”, there’s been nary a peep from the “New Journalists” at the Minnesota Monitor explaining, much less admitting to, these problems.

Their “code” seems to be entirely based on denying responsibility for their “mistakes”.

So when will the “Monitor” follow its own code of ethics?  Or are they above all that?

I’m not asking because I expect an answer, of course.  They won’t.  I just want reinforce the salient point in the minds of the Twin Cities’ online news consumer; the credibility, ethics and talent in the regional online alternative news market is overwhelmingly congregated on the right.

(more…)

Writing about the President’s visit on Saturday to the site of the 35W River Bridge collapse, Jeff Fecke of the Minnesota Monitor wrote:

Bush will be in town Saturday to survey the damage caused by the deadly collapse of the bridge, and to attend the Republican Party’s summer meeting, which is being held in Minneapolis.

Michael Brodkorb left two comments:

Have you confirmed with the White House that Bush is speaking at the Summer RNC meeting?  Have you confirmed this with the RNC? I haven’t seen this reported anywhere. 

[and…]

According to my source, the meeting has adjourned. President Bush did not attend the meeting, nor was he ever scheduled to attend the meeting.

The President landed in the Twin Cities (I watched it on TV) around 9:30, and got to downtown Minnepolis within the following hour; the RNC had reportedly adjourned about the time the President landed.

So – Jeff Fecke?  Where did you get this little tidbit?

To be fair – we have no indication that the statement was plagiarized, per se.

But what is the source of this apparently utterly-fallacious statement?

Friday, we noted that Cucking Stool, the City Pages’ “Best Leftyblog” for 2006 (and thus either the most overrated blog in the Twin Cities or the most cursed one) hinted at smack to be laid down…eventually.  By…someone.  About…something:

a small cadre of Minnesota bloggers is preparing to prove it. It will probably start off as just a sprinkle; then it will rain harder, and finally all of the collected grime of empty moralisms will be washed away. Or something like that. It should be fun.

And to track and document this surge in righeous niggling, the Cucking Tool proposed…:

In order that the blooming of the thousand flowers can be collected, Spot suggests using a Technorati tag and/or category “judgmentalism.”

And after a week, the fruits of their “labor” are…

…well, I hate to be, um, judgementalist, but…ow.  Cuck – there’s not a lotta righteous, or anti-righteous, Minnesota indignation (counterindignation?), is there?

The moral (or “moral”) world awaits the wave of tribulation.  I guess.

Oh, and by the way, Cuck?  While I don’t go to you for blazing insight (although the City Pages thinks you’re cute and all, so don’t mind me), I should point out that in my bit about leftybloggers’ response to the death of Norm Coleman Senior, I wasn’t wanting them to send me condolences, as you put it, so much as chiding some of your scumbag friends.

Again, a fine distinction. 

Y’know.

My NARNII colleague Ed noted something that I’d noticed and started writing about myself; the local leftymedia’s caviling and cavorting over the death of Norm Coleman Sr.:

the Minnesota open-borders contingent turned themselves into the equivalent of Fred Phelps when they decided to picket the home of Senator Norm Coleman — as he and his family prepared to bury his father, Norm Coleman, Sr. Coleman’s presumed opponent for the 2008 Senate Race, Al Franken, couldn’t breathe a word of sympathy for Coleman, and some — not all — of the liberal bloggers here in the state followed his lead.

He went on to quote a pretty ghastly, self-indulgent bit of rationalization on the part of the ghouls “protesters” who tried to disrupt the Coleman family’s mourning.

And I join Ed in noting…:

we should acknowledge those who did show class. Liberal bloggers and Coleman opponents MNPublius and Centrisity had the class to acknowledge the personal loss of our state’s Senator. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who follows these two blogs. Others … didn’t, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone, either.

In no case would anyone who watches some of those hamsters be surprised.

The frothy jags that bring you “Cucking Stool” have a mission for you!

What if all the religious conservatives and the other self-appointed dispensers of truth who huff and puff daily from the moral high ground were really moral and ethical midgets?

 Hm.  In other words, “what if people who stand for moral standards have human frailties and flaws, and are imperfect – sometimes flagrantly so?”

I guess the answer would be “They’re human.  Get a life”. 

Limited capacity thinkers? 

[cheap shot on] then they’d be leftybloggers [/cheap shot off]

This could be big, boys and girls. Really big.

What could be big really big, you ask?

And now, a small cadre of Minnesota bloggers is preparing to prove it. It will probably start off as just a sprinkle;

…followed by a muted dripping and a flush, I’m guessing… 

then it will rain harder, and finally all of collected grime of empty moralisms will be washed away. Or something like that. It should be fun.

Fun, huh?

Hm.  No, like most Twin Cities Leftyblogger efforts, it will probably turn out to be an embarassment.  Twin Cities’ leftybloggers, for all of their sturm und drang, have tended to be generals in the bedroom and whores on the battlefield; big talkers and little doers.  As “journalists”, they’re proven themselves (so far) incapable of covering a one car crash.  As “investigators”, they’ve embarassed themselves.  While some of them are excellent (and some are friends of mine), their collective track record so far is a weary “STF What?”

So bring that “little cadre” on.

In order that the blooming of the thousand flowers can be collected, Spot suggests using a Technorati tag and/or category “judgmentalism”

Alternatively, I’d suggest “wankers gone wild”, “cheap imitations of blogs that matter”, “monkeys flinging poo”, or “Junior’s First Attempt at Electronic Activism”. 

We had the beginnings of a much better discussion about social conservatism (or, if you’re hopelessly dramatic, “Judgementalism”) over on one of Andy Birkey’s posts at MinMon. 

After having a great interview with him on Saturday’s NARN broadcast, I’m remiss in not posting a link to NZ Bear’s relaunched Victory Caucus website. 

So go read it.

I left this comment at the Monitor, in Andy Birkey’s thread in which he claims that, since there are Republicans who commit domestic abuse or patronize hookers, the party should regarded “with suspicion” on gay marriage:

So Since Perfection Is The Standard…

…you’re set, Andy – because remember, you’re impugning the entire GOP‘s policy on gay marriage, all millions of us, all of the thousands of elected Republican officials, because of the actions of two Minnesota and one national Republicans, let’s hold you, Andy, to the standard you’ve set for us (and, while we’re on the subject, me):Three weeks ago, some of us caught Jeff Fecke committing a slew of, at the very least, ,journalistic gaffes:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Someone else found something.

He’d seem to be, at the very least, guilty of extremely slipshod basic journalism, and possibly plagiarism.By your own logic, Andy, the reader should regard all of you MNMon reporters with suspicion because of Fecke’s trasgressions.  The GOP wants the people to trust them on social policy; the Monitor wants people to trust them on news.  The only real difference; about .0001% of Republicans have been accused of domestic abuse or caught with their phone numbers in a hooker’s phone book, behavior that 99.999% of Republicans condemn. 

In the meantime, 16% of Minnesota Monitor reporters have been alleged to be slipshod reporters and/or plagiarists.  And since the Minnesota Monitor, breaking its own “Code of Ethics”, has neither publcly acknowledge nor corrected these “mistakes”, it implies that 100% of the Monitor approves.

So do you have different moral standards on different issues? 

Or do you perhaps see where maybe the point of your article is logically void?

Read both bits.  Place your bets.

Any state legislator that has ever bounced a check should be disqualified from budget debates. 

Any solon that has ever gotten a speeding ticket should be disqualified from speaking about crime. 

Any elected official that has gotten less than a “C” in a class, ever, should be barred from debate on education.

Absurd, right?

Not if you’re a kept leftyblogger, apparently.

Let’s back up a bit.

Gay marriage, to me, is not the most important issue on the public plate right now.

Oh, make no mistake – I think “marriage” should be a purely religious institution, and that the state’s only interest in a perfect world would be that of enforcing a civil contract.  Hence, I think that civil unions, as a contractual entity, should be legal.  For that matter, I think that any church or religious body that can theologically justify “marriage” between people of the same sex should be able to do it (although suffice to say that I’ll have an interesting time debating that bit of instatheology).

I believe this because, while I think there’s a legitimate case to be made for same-sex civil unions, there is none I can see for gay marriage. 

But since I, myself, am divorced, apparently according to kept leftyblogger Andy Birkey, I should just shut up and let everyone who’s never held out an opinion about what marriage should be about.

In this piece, Birkey takes the crimes, found and alleged, of three Republican legislators (two in Minnesota, one national)…

…and says:

These “pro-family” failures demonstrate that we should be suspicious when politicians try to legislate rigid traditional standards on people’s private romantic lives, because chances are, they won’t be able to live up to the expectations they set for the rest of us.

Get that?

Out of millions of Republicans, and dozens of GOP legislators in this state, the failures of two people invalidate the entire case against same sex marriage? 

Wow.

Since the Democrat majority leader got pulled over for Drunk Driving after the last session, the DFL should be ignored on public safety issues?

So since a number of prominent DFLers supported Kathleen Soliah, we should ignore the DFL on terrorism and crime issues?

Because of William Jefferson, Democrats should shut up about corruption?

Because Jeff Fecke has never admitted to cribbing AP quotes, we should ignore everything the Minnesota Monitor says?

(That last may be a bad example).

What bloggers do to the mainstream media – fact-check them, hold them accountable – some commenters in turn do to bloggers.

My long-time regular commenter Master of None has taken a particular interest in the Minnesota Monitor’s financing.  He (along with Learned Foot) has, apparently, expertise to match interest in the field, as he noted (several times)in the comments to this post, about the Monitor’s dilatory sense of self-accountability:

There is fairly compelling evidence that the Center for Independent Media is organized as a 501(c)(3) public charity. The CIM pays stipends to all of the MiniMoni bloggers, and requires them to write not only for MiniMoni, but to also publish their own blogs.

IRS rules for 501(c)(3) bars them from being active in politics, with pretty precise guidelines for what is permitted and what is not permitted. It seems like these rules should apply to not only MiniMoni, but also to the blogs that are operated by the CIM fellows.

Do you know any Tax lawyers in MOB that might be able to comment on this?

Learned Foot at KAR continued, digging into the tax status of the Center for Independent Media and one of its major benefactors:

Well, wonder no longer! While MinnMon and CIM aren’t forthcoming about their sources of income, at least we now know where $100,000 of it came from:

$100,000 to the Center for Independent Media. This grant will support the Center’s efforts to strengthen its New Journalist Program by establishing a national branch in Washington, DC. The fellowship program, with operations currently in Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa, mentors and trains state-based political news bloggers in investigative reporting with the aim of creating a robust corps of citizen journalists to add diversity and local expertise to media coverage of important issues. Fellows serving in the New Journalist Washington DC Program will focus their coverage on Congress, federal agencies, the presidency, Supreme Court and the influence of lobbying, the national press corps and campaign finance.

From the Sunlight Foundation! And what is the Sunlight Foundation’s raison d’etre?

Transparency! In government!

We’ve noted this in the past.  What I haven’t done, so far, is note what “Master of None” did in the comment above:  non-profit organizations incorporated under 501c3 status have rules to follow when it comes to political partisanship, rules that 527 status doesn’t have.

The battle has moved to the Monitor’s comment section, where Master asks:

So Robin, is CIM a 501(c)(3) or not?

You’re getting plenty of money from 501(c)(3)  public charities.  Do you really think it’s appropriate to run a leftwing blog site using tax exempt charitable donations?  Don’t you think the Red Cross or perhaps United Way could make better use of that kind of money?

As with the prior questions of the Monitor – on the whole plagiarism issue, for example – the Monitor remains officially silent.

A request to the Center for Independent Media asking their non-profit incorporation status remains unanswered.

I’m going to start a new non-profit.  With help from my anonymous donors, I’m going to defend leftybloggers from people who attack their own logical, rhetorical and ethical lapses. I’ll call myself a “Citizen Advocate”.  I’ll even publish a Code of Ethics.  To wit:

1. I will defend leftybloggers to the best of my ability against having their rhetorical, logical and ethical flubs dissected
2. If I screw up, I’ll admit my failure
3. I’ll be honest about my motivations, so people can judge for themselves my credibility.  I won’t try to pass myself off as something I’m not. 

There.  I should be legal now.  Onward and upward.

The other day, Learned Foot started digging into one of Minnesota Monitor’s financiers. 

Yesterday, a fella named Bretton Jones, writing for a blog called “Minneapolitics”, swung at Foot’s fastball like Stevie Wonder going for a Johann Santana slider at 3-2…

…ooops, sorry.  I forgot Rule 1 of my Code of Ethics.  Let’s try again. 

Bretton “Mister” Jones “And Me” took a mighty thwack at Foot’s piece:

Let’s go a’ dissecting shall we?

“But we rip mostly because they are a paid propaganda arm of the Democratian Party (not in actuality, but de facto), who try to sell themselves off as a legitimate news source.”

What is the Kool Aid Report a de facto propaganda arm of?

Mr. Jones, are we sure we’re clear on the concept?

Learned Foot is clear about the fact that he’s a satire-oriented “Thunderjournalist” with explicit biases.  He has never passed himself off as a journalist (although when he puts on his “researcher” cap – he’s a lawyer, after all – he routinely shreds the Monitor, the Strib and other purported “journalistic” outlets). 

The Monitor, however, does try to pass itself off as “journalists”, albeit “progressive” ones.  The goal seems to be to present something passing as “news” to the audience.  Foot is merely showing that audience – those who don’t already know, anyway – the funding that motivates their biases.

It’s called “transparency”.   

 Next they pull from another blog [Mine, as it happens.  Mr. Jones apparently doesn’t know how to link].

“We conservative bloggers give the Minnesota Monitor a hard time. As has been amply observed by many local center-right bloggers, the MinMon is supported by the “Center for Independent Media”, which until fairly recently shared offices with “Media Matters for America”.

So this guy has proven that there were people at MM4A that had an idea to form an org to give grants to media orgs to create solid citizen and/or advocacy-oriented journalism.

Um, no, Brandon, and that’s really not the point.  OF COURSE I haven’t “proven” anything – although the fact that they shared office space certainly lends the appearance of a connection, something the reader should be aware of – but the point is, we dont’ know where their funding comes from.  If they want to pass themselves off as “journalists”, bully for them, but unless they’re open about disclosing the hand that jerks their leashes, someone needs to find it out for the audience.  

Then he drops the SOROS-BOMB. Watch much Bill O’Reilly, fella?

Actually, no.  Never have.  Go back to Talking Point Central and get a new cliche!

And citing Soros in caps may pass for cutesy among the “truthiness-based community”, but that pesky fact of the Center for Independent Media’s old connection to Soros-funded Media Matters just keeps rearing its head.  

Mr. Jones returns to citing me:

“The Center for Independent Media pays a group of local bloggers a fairly fat stipend, by blogging standards, to write for the Minnesota Monitor. One must, on the surface, give the CIM and the Monitor some points for at least trying to put up a good appearance; they bandy their “Code of Ethics” about with giggly abandon.”

Now compare what MN MON and CIM do to what Fox News is and ask yourself which is a greater affront to reality.

While the Fox News reference is a strawman, and a dumb one at that, to be fair I did expect a Halliburton reference.  Point for Mr. Jones.

Everyone knows not only Fox’s purported orientation, but the sources of its funding.  It’s a publicly-held corporation.  Rupert Murdoch is among the most public people in the world.  There is no mystery. 

On the other hand, the Monitor would have the uninformed reader (what other kind of liberal reader is there?) that they are an organic, independent body that owes no fealty above the Center for Independent Media.  Foot, and the rest of us, are showing that it’s simply not true.

Which doesn’t bear on their right to present their product, their way.  We’re just making sure the full story is available to the reader (since the Monitor damn sure won’t).   

 Sure MN MON exists to push a certain values-laden agenda. So do I. Is this some big f-ing secret? No. This Thursday I will be doing video coverage at Fair Vote MN’s Fund Raising Party to promote IRV in St Paul. Whether or not I’ve (not yet) recieved funding from the CIM wouldn’t be an issue either way. I do it cuz I love it and like meeting cool new people. If I got paid, whatever.

“I think it’s fair to say that some of their “journalists” make a game effort to try to meet that “code”; an examination of Minnesota Monitor’s coverage shows that the “code” gets ignored when convenient. And while questions have been raised about CIM’s funding, they’ve never revealed anything – although the phrase “liberals with deep pockets” has slipped out in informal conversation.”

Got any examples? Didn’t think so.

Um, Mr. Jones?  I shouldn’t have to babysit your narrative for you, but I’ll show you some mercy.  Your post – the one I’m fisking at this moment – started with an example from Learned Foot.  A minor, but I might suggest important point.   You following me?

Didn’t think so…

DAMN!  I just realized – I’ve breached my Code of Ethics again!  Where I set out to defend Mr. Jones, I’ve lapsed into attacking him!

OK.  Cleansing breath.  Back on task.

The rest of the article is mostly the author, who doesn’t use their real name, blathering about various grants given out by the Sunlight Foundation to promote transparency and ethics, used in “quotes” of course, while never once pointing out a contradicting act on behalf of one of the organizations. I hope they’re not trying to sound all revealing and suggestive, cuz all I see are facts.

Right.  That was Foot’s point. Facts.  Facts that it’d be useful for the otherwise-uninformed reader – the only kind the Monitor would seem to have, except for those of us who read it for fisking material or for gross, unacknowledged journalistic gaffes (at best; at worst, systematic violations of intellectual property rules) to know when assessing this partisan organ’s credibility.

In the end this guy’s just pissed off cuz nobody gave him any money.

I’ll hand it to you, Bretton “Mister” Jones:  what you lack as a writer, you make up for as a clairvoyant.

No, I’m lying.  You don’t.

And…crap…I see that I’ve wandered away from my mission as a Citizen Advocate again.  I’ve trashed my “Code of Ethics”…

…or not.   Depending on who funded me in the first place.

Wouldn’t you like to know who!

(more…)

We – local center-right bloggers – spend a lot of time beating on the Minnesota Monitor, the local group leftyblog funded by a variety of liberals with deep pockets.

Part of it, of course, is the extremely shoddy level of “Journalism” that some of their “citizen journalists” – who were, at last report, paid $1,500 a month for their efforts, a princely sum in the world of blogs – exhibit, as well as their seeming unwillingness to follow their own “Code of Ethics” – itself a matter of longstanding derision.

But at the end of the day, it’s all about following the money. Minnesota Monitor is funded by a group called the Center for Independent Media, a group that started life sharing offices with the George Soros-funded attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”. They initially denied any connection (and the CIM eventually relocated its offices) – but the Monitor and the CIM has been pretty mum about its funding.

Which doesn’t mean the truth isn’t out there somewhere.

Learned Foot at KAR has been doing some digging:

Well, wonder no longer! While MinnMon and CIM aren’t forthcoming about their sources of income, at least we now know where $100,000 of it came from:

$100,000 to the Center for Independent Media. This grant will support the Center’s efforts to strengthen its New Journalist Program by establishing a national branch in Washington, DC. The fellowship program, with operations currently in Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa, mentors and trains state-based political news bloggers in investigative reporting with the aim of creating a robust corps of citizen journalists to add diversity and local expertise to media coverage of important issues. Fellows serving in the New Journalist Washington DC Program will focus their coverage on Congress, federal agencies, the presidency, Supreme Court and the influence of lobbying, the national press corps and campaign finance.

From the Sunlight Foundation! And what is the Sunlight Foundation’s raison d’etre?

Transparency! In government!

If a website actively rejects transparancy in the woods and nobody hears them…

…no, wait. Foot is fixing that.

And I don’t think he’s done yet.

UPDATE:  Either is Jeff “El Jeffe” Kouba, who’s dug a little further still.

I made it to the MOB party last night – fashionably late, for a change!

These things are always a dizzying melange.  I always meet scads of interesting people.  Where to start? 

• Met JRoosh from Roosh Five, one of my favorite newer MOB blogs, who had his own account of the evening.
• Most of the TvM crew was there – Gary, the Ringer (fully recovered from his car accident, or so it seemed), and of course Jeff Kouba, whom I believe I met for the first time. 
• The Lady Logician and the Logical Husband. 
• Neal (Neil?) Krasnoff from Loyal Opposition.
• Ben from Hammerschwing, who, I learned, is in seminary.
• John from Policy Guy, who, last I saw, was hanging out with Erik “the Transit Geek” Hare. 
• Wog from Wog’s Blog, who’s counting down toward a liver transplant one of these days.
• Lileks and the Giant Swede.
• The whole crew from Freedom Dogs – Derek, Lassie, Guy, Jonez and Pinkmon Diamond Dog
• Brad Carlson and his wife Jennifer, who took plenty o’pictures
• An ailing but ebullient Joe Tucci
• Night Writer – really the First Familiy of Minnesota blogging, with Mall Diva, Tiger Lilly, and their small crowd of devotees.  The Writer had an account of the evening, by the way, including a photo of me, captioned: “The Reverend Mother spent part of the evening eavesdropping on Mitch Berg. “He’s really interesting,” she said. “Is there anything he doesn’t have an opinion on?” [Hm – come to think if it, probably not…] If so, we haven’t found it. I do know he likes Springsteen [ well, yeah] and, along with Strommie, the Mall Diva [Oh, Writer – I’m so not like Strom…].
• Anti-Strib Tracy and his vastly better half.
• Much less of Speed Gibson than I remember – congrats!
• My neighbor John, from Crazy But Able (whom I’d nearly run down on my bike on Friday while he was walking with his wife and baby around Como) who captured the event with a lot of photos – which are, amazingly, very good. 
• My other neighbor, Flash, from Centrisity
• Dan, the Northern Alliance Wannabe
• King
• Michael
• Bob Davis and Sarah Janecek over at the radio table.
• AAA and…Carrie?  Keri?  Caray?  Anyway, Andy bought me a drink, so there’ll be nothing but favorable reviews of his presence.  Andy reviewed the event, throwing down on the mostly-absent Fraters…
• …who did, in fact, send Atomizer and the Atomizerette to represent.
• Eva Young, who does a lot less name-calling in person than on her blogs.
• Joel and Mrs. Rossennbeerrgg Rosenberg.
• Doug was there, too…

I know I’m missing some.  Cue me in!

And I can hardly wait for the next one!

UPDATE:  Gotcha, Joel.  Got Doug Bass, too.

Of course, I need to shout out to the ones everyone missed; Katie from Yucky Salad, Cathy from the Wright, Jordan and Mark, the Fraters, the Powerguys, Swiftee, Yossarian, Doug Williams, Steve Gigl, Jay Reding…

But it’s summer.  We’re happy anyone at all takes such a gorgeous evening and comes out.

It’s now been two weeks since my series (parts I, II and III) on the Minnesota Monitor’s  shoddy journalistic practices, including slipshod attribution at the very least, and in the worst case plagiarism. 

As noted in last week’s followup, the Monitor’s “Code of Ethics” not only frowns on both, but bids the “Citizen Journalist” to…:

Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.

In the past two weeks, we’ve noticed a few things; Jeff Fecke (the subject of the series) has become a fanatic attributor. 

But we’ve noticed no admission from the Monitor.  No correction.  No retroactive statement about the attribution of any of the quotes.

No answer to my fairly direct question:  “Were the quotes plagiarized?”

Or “if not, where did they come from?”

Where is the admission?

Does the Minnesota Monitor hold intellectual honesty (to say nothing of the Associated Press’ intellectual property – which is, indeed, what their content is) so cheaply?  Or is that below the prerogatives of the paid-for leftyblogosphere?

When will they start to follow their “Code of Ethics?”

Huge day in the world of the Northern Alliance and the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers today.

 I’ll be talking with Joel Rosenberg and Andrew Rothman about the latest on last month’s shooting in Coon Rapids last month.  Is it an official coverup?  It’s looking interesting.

 I’ll also be talking with The Transit Geek, Erik Hare, about the Met Council’s plot to tear the guts out of Saint Paul,

Don’t forget the Volume I guys, John, Brian and Chad from 11-1, and Volume III, King and Michael, from 3-5!

And then tonight, the highlight of the social season, the THIRD ANNUAL MOB SUMMER BASH at Keegans, Saturday night! The Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is a non-partisan group of bloggers who exist, mainly, to further blogging in Minnesota. As such, we invite all bloggers, and for that matter all non-bloggers, to come on down!

Swiftee rhetorically guts a dimbulb commenter. 

The world wins.

One of the things for which I’m most thankful for blogging is the huge number of really great people it’s helped me meet.  Before this blog started, I was a fairly-newly-divorced guy, pretty much head-down with kid stuff and maintaining a career in a then-deteriorating software market.  The blog, and the show after it, introduced me to an awful lot of people.  Some have become fast friends, others co-conspirators, still others acquaintances whose company I relish. 

Gary Miller paid me a really nice compliment on Thursday:

While linking for accuracy is the currency of the ’sphere, few outside of the likes of Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds and a handful of others can be said to be truely effusive with their praise of small(er) fry.

Few, that is, with the notable exception of Mitch Berg…For the past several years, Mitch has generously found ways to to shine a light on the best blogging in town. 

It’s hard not to; there’s so much of it!

Seriously, thanks, Gary.  This region is crawling with great blogs – almost too many, in the sense that there are so many that are so good, and only so many hours in the day to read ’em.  There are dozens of absolutely essential bloggers in the upper midwest who may clock between 30 and 200 visitors a day, each of whom deserve an order of magnitude more. 

And it’s hard to start a blog these days.  Chad and Brian and I had this conversation after the show years ago (and it gives me pause to note that the NARN’s been on the air long enough to be able to say anything was “years ago”) – we are all keenly aware that we got into blogging back when there was still a lot of sod to be turned; when a lot of blog readers’ habits were just starting to form.  It gave us a lot of positive inertia.

But even then, Shot In The Dark got on the map due to the very kind, mostly-undeserved attention paid it by the likes of James Lileks, Hewitt, and especially Glen Reynolds (and, one glorious evening in 2004, all three of them simultaneously, online and on the Hewitt Show) as well as the Powerline guys, Gerald Van Der Leun, Kim Du Toit, and many more. 

So while I don’t believe in Karma, I do  think what goes around comes around.  And I do believe in making sure the world – or the part of it that reads Shot In The Dark – should see some of the great bloggers lurking in the Twin Cities. 

And so I hatched a plan. 

But more about that on Monday.

UPDATE:  Of course, it’s more than just the Twin Cities.