There were five winners in today’s first-of-its kind Twitter presidential debate. They were Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Buddy Roemer, and Mitt Romney. All of them are running for president, and all of them skipped the event, missing out on the most dignity-shredding, IQ-lowering pseudo-event of the campaign so far.
The six candidates who participated did themselves no damage. They couldn’t if they’d tried. The debate, put on by TheTeaParty.net and a grab-bag of conservative groups, attracted an audience of devout activists, smart-assed liberals, and easily-ignored interest groups. They started early, tweeting thoughts @140townhall and clicking a button on the event website that informed fellow tweeters who they thought would win.
“@TheHermanCain Will you be able to out debate Pres. #Obama as you did Pres. Clinton?” asked @BradMarston.
“@TeamBachmann You go!” tweeted LisaRichards124. “You're a real conservative & we need You! Keep speaking out & don’t give up!”
Shortly after 3 p.m., when the event was supposed to start, the conservative radio host Rusty Humphries began his live broadcast. His theme song was a straight rip/loving tribute of the theme from Team America.
RUSTY! Heck yeah! On the air, and he's gonna save the day, yeah!
It took a while for things to get going. Humphries killed time by interviewing the moderator, the author and TV pundit S.E. Cupp, about the meaning of it all.
“This is, I think, as substantive as you can get,” said Cupp. “You have a limited amount of time, a limit amount of text.”
What was wrong with the candidates that didn’t show?
“I question their judgment,” said Cupp. “They’ve got a captive audience.”
“I think some of this is cowardice,” offered Humphries. “Mitt Romney thinks he's going to sail to the nomination.” ...>more
This isn’t your typical Jim Lehrer-moderated debate on PBS.
Next week, seven Republican presidential candidates will take the virtual stage on Twitter in what’s being billed as the first “Tea Party presidential debate.”
The website "TheTeaParty.Net" says seven candidates for president have agreed to participate in its July 20 Twitter debate. The group will pose questions to the candidates on the social networking platform. The candidates are expected to respond in real-time.
Radio host S.E. Cupp will moderate the event, which viewers can watch live at www.140townhall.com.
“It’s about time the candidates started acknowledging the relevance of social networking,” Cupp said in an email. “Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are democratizing the media and changing the way we consume news. It was only a matter of time before someone thought to put the traditional debate format online.”
The group says Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will participate.... >more
David Neiwert reports at Crooks And Liars:As Eric Boehlert notes, Andrew Breitbart has a real credibility problem, and it extends well beyond his journalistic malfeasance in the ACORN video hoax.
His website, Big Government, is similarly developing a reputation for running blatantly dishonest commentary, often in the cause of defending the videos and their makers or likewise attacking ACORN. The latest example was pointed out by Matt Tatum at AmSpec and Dave Weigel, who both called out this atrocity from "historian" Michael Zak at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Government" blog:
Democrats used the Klan to suppress their political opposition, with vote fraud and intimidation and violence. Klansmen aimed at African-Americans, nearly all Republicans in those days, and at white Republicans who tried to help them. Once threatened by the KKK, Republicans could in many cases save their lives only by publicly swearing allegiance to the Democratic Party. According to a southern governor, "Few Republicans dare sleep in their houses at night."
"The suppression of enough GOP votes could ensure a Democratic victory," wrote one historian. "There's no question that Klansmen closely watched the polls" - easy to do before the secret ballot was introduced in the United States in the 1880s. All too often, Republican ballots were not even counted.
Like ACORN, the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity until Republican politicians and journalists sounded an alarm. In 1869, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK's Grand Dragon, ordered the Klan disbanded. Why? The national organization was getting too much attention, so Klansmen would have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as the Red Shirts in South Carolina and the Men of Justice in Alabama. Nonetheless, most members of these spin-off groups considered themselves to be Klansmen.
Good God. It's hard to know where to begin. Let's try with Weigel's observation:
The fact that the KKK suppressed and terrorized black voters while ACORN, well, doesn’t — sort of left out here.
More to the point, the entire raison d'etre of the Klan was to disenfranchise black voters, to terrorize them into submission and to ensure that they could not participate as full citizens. According to historians, they killed an estimated 20,000 people in the years 1866-1870 alone (see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, p. 49). Indeed, the Klansmen of the postwar period essentially negated the war's outcome by destroying Reconstruction through a campaign of terrorist violence that encompassed massacres, white citizen militias destroying black townships, and the complete destruction of the voting franchise for black people, thereby ensuring white rule for the next century and beyond. (For more on this, be sure to read Stephen Budiansky's riveting account, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, which was excerpted in the New York Times.) ...>more
"For many months now, your colleagues in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee leadership have engaged in a series of disparagements and ad hominem attacks about us, apparently as part of a concerted political and fundraising strategy," wrote Philip Ellender, Koch's president of government and public affairs. "So you can imagine my chagrin when I got a letter from you on June 17 asking us to make five-figure contributions to the DSCC. You followed that up with a voicemail indicating that, if we contributed heavily enough, we would garner an invitation to join you and other Democratic leaders at a retreat in Kiawah Island this September." ...>more
Former Washington Times columnist Eliana Benador, who was fired for writing a piece speculating that former Rep. Anthony Weiner had converted to Islam and was pushing a "socialist political agenda," has found a new home for her controversial work: Tea Party Nation.
RightWingWatch.org, a watchdog for conservative media that is part of political activism group People for the American Way, excerpted Benador's debut column on the conservative social networking site, meditating on the "invasion of America" by "non-European immigrants."
"As we celebrate America’s Independence Day, it’s noteworthy that the percentage reduction of original American voters, might have been a defining factor in the election of someone like the current president, who among other goals, seems to be keen in opening further our borders to endlessly increasing numbers of immigrants who, regardless of their skin color, are bringing in a whole new texture of culture, 100% foreign to what America’s origins were as its wonderful adventure began back in 1776," Benador wrote.
Tea Party Nation has previously published writings that warn of the impending "extinction" of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) population. ...>more
"Big Journalism" Crank Pens Weirdest, Craziest Load Of Crap Ever: "...She dresses like a lady, modest but fashionable...I’ve never seen her in a Hillary-style pants suit... Blood libels..." Jeezus, Where Does Breitbart Find These People?The attacks on Palin were and are blood libels.
The latest ghoulish assault — liberalism is socialism as lynch mob — on her was the mob frenzy to analyze some 24,000 Palin e-mails from her tenure as Alaska’s governor.
When Obama’s twenty-year discipleship to Jew-hater Jeremiah Wright was finally revealed, the liberal media dismissed this disgusting alliance as nothing more than guilt by association. We wonder if liberals would have the same attitude if it were revealed that a Republican presidential candidate attended KKK meetings for twenty years.
We sort of doubt it.
Wright’s church is the black ideological mirror of the KKK. But for the liberal media the Obama/Wright man-crush was of zero interest. And there certainly was no clamor to turn up, let alone comb through, any juicy correspondence or cyber trail Obama may have left behind as a state legislator and U.S. senator.
Much to the chagrin of the propagandists who masquerade as journalists, the mountains of e-mail reveal Palin as a hard-working, effective public servant: transparent, humorous, distrustful of oil companies and willing to take on the corrupt Republican Party elite of Alaska.
Nevertheless, the blood libels will continue because liberals simply cannot bear the notion that a smart, beautiful and independent woman can be ideologically conservative... >more (if you can stand it)
