For the past week, we’ve been thrust into the sort of maelstrom John Grisham conjures for his characters: for whatever reason, out of the blue, one day ordinary people find themselves up against a ruthless conspiracy bent on their destruction.
We’d never heard the term “Puma Hunter” until this week, though we were aware of sporadic attacks on people like Darragh Murphy at PUMApac.org or Will Bowers, two of the most prominent and outspoken Democrats who witnessed the brutal attacks of the Left upon Hillary Clinton supporters during the primaries, and, like us, decided they could not “shut up and sit down” once the Left’s “Lightbringer” was awarded the nomination and began his general election campaign. PUMA stands for “People United Means Action”, which sums up the grassroots movement that emerged after the DNC’s Rules & Bylaws Committee met on May 31st, 2008 and essentially awarded the nomination to Obama, despite the clear will of the voters. On that day, many of us saw the fix was in, and we became determined to make sure the American people would ultimately realize a coup within the DNC itself had installed George Soros-funded socialists in place to seize and forever alter the former Democrat Party.
Writers for PUMA sites were viciously attacked by the Hope and Change Gang from the very beginning, because we, to this day, refuse to be silenced about the thuggery, voter fraud, intimidation, harassment, and extortion the Obama campaign used to win the nomination and general election. The news media has completely ignored all of this, but those of us who campaigned on the ground for Hillary Clinton across the country saw, firsthand, the Alinsky Methods playbook used page by page against anyone and everything that stood in Obama’s way.
“Puma Hunters” appear to be a page from the same book that spawned armies of cyber trolls to serve Obama. Unlike trolls used generally speaking, working off new talking points each day to attack Obama’s opponents on policy points, “Puma Hunters” are operatives that focus specifically on destroying the lives of PUMAs: they libel and defame us, they make us unemployable by filling internet searches with false accusations of racism, they harass us at work to the point where companies cut our contracts for fear of losing business, etc. From what you’ve all, collectively, helped us gather in terms of clues this week, we believe these “Puma Hunters” are being directed by the DNC and Organizing for America, on some level, to berate, harass, and personally destroy moderate Democrats, Independents, and the newly minted former-Democrats who remain committed to exposing Obama for who he really is, and who his followers and goons really are.
What follows is our understanding of “Puma Hunters”, a recap of what’s happened to us this week, and all the information we have, so far, illustrating the coordination of multiple Leftist sites like The Daily Kos and DemocraticUnderground on “Puma Hunting” expeditions, with very likely direction from the DNC and other Obama-controlled organizations themselves. With your help, we believe we’ll ultimately be able to directly prove the Puma Hunters, as well as the trolls and Internet fabrications like “Ellie Light”, are getting their marching orders from some entity like David Axelrod’s consulting firm, which specialized in astroturfing and Internet campaigns.
Like a John Grisham novel, there are many twists and turns in all of this. Little, average people are up against giant, powerful, ruthless machines. It’s chilling to believe donors to the DNC are actually funding, in some way, attacks on Democrats themselves, just because those Democrats don’t fall lock-step into the new Liberal-Socialist Democrat party. We believe there’s a real story behind this “PUMA hunting” that, if properly investigated, could bring down a large part of the Alinsky machine. If everyone who is being attacked devoted time and energy into identifying the attackers, and it emerges these attackers are all linked, it won’t take much investigative work to determine who’s ultimately coordinating all of this harassment, who is paying these attackers to destroy the lives of private citizens, and who in the White House knows and approves of what’s going on.
This is, clearly, much bigger than the personal attacks on us here in Chicago.
This is the way business is done in Obama’s “Golden Age of Hope and Change”.
Backstory:
Until the week before Christmas, we did not involve ourselves in the Massachusetts Senate race because Martha Coakley stood by Hillary Clinton in the primaries, despite immense pressure from the Kennedy Family, John Kerry, and Deval Patrick to back Obama instead. We have no idea how much harassment Coakley received for her decision, but we imagine it had to be considerable. We know what Obama’s goons do to regular people, so we shudder to think what they’d to do someone as high-profile as Coakley. Though we didn’t want the current Liberal-Socialist Democrat party to maintain its super-majority in the Senate, we stayed out of the Massachusetts race in deference to Coakley’s Team Hillary resolve.
Things changed for us when news of Blanche Lincoln’s Louisiana Purchase and Ben Nelson’s shameless Cornhusker Kickback exposed the level of graft, corruption, secrecy, closed-door-deals, and undemocratic activity Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Obama were engaged in to ram the Healthcare Rationing Bill through the Senate, in the dead of night, on Christmas Eve. This behavior horrified us. The Democrats in power heard clearly from voters across the country that they did not want the Senate to rush through any bill with the economy-altering power of this Rationing measure, and yet, Democrats deliberately chose to vote on legislation most of them hadn’t even read, in the cover of darkness, in the middle of the night, while most Americans were distracted with holiday preparation. They thought people wouldn’t notice what they were up to, but they were wrong. We noticed, and we decided to do the only thing we could do at that moment in time: back Scott Brown for the Senate in Massachusetts to send Democrats a message. If they could lose “The Kennedy Seat” over their reckless and dangerous handling of healthcare reform, then not a single Democrat in office would be safe in 2010.
Looking at Scott Brown for the first time, we instantly liked what we saw — and we’re not just talking about his layout for Cosmo. We believed Brown would actually read legislation before voting on it. Even more refreshing than that, we knew Brown would think for himself and would not just do what Harry Reid told him to do — especially not with something that will raise taxes, decrease access to medical care, bankrupt many doctors and hospitals, and cut Medicare benefits to millions. Coakley lost our support when she went back on her campaign promise to vote against the Rationing bill; once she won the primary, she decided she already won “The Kennedy Seat”, and her arrogance in treating voters like peasants (culminating in her aide, Michael Meaghan, actually pushing a reporter to the ground when he dared to ask her a question about her sudden willingness to do whatever Reid told her to do in the Senate) offended us.
To help Scott Brown, we thought of two things to benefit his campaign:
(1) Stir up our readers to volunteer for him
(2) Mitigate any attacks the Left would use against him based on his Cosmo photo spread
Since we’ve been attacked for two years now by the Left, and have watched other PUMAs attacked as well, we can fairly accurately anticipate a large portion of what these people will do to someone. We knew they’d try to turn Brown’s decades-old photoshoot against him, so we decided to get in front of it by calling Brown “Hottie McAwesome”, and making his Cosmo spread a net-positive for our readers, and all who’d use search engines to find those photos once Democrats got around to attempting to use them against him. Well, idiots, those photos are great. In fact, they’re awesome. Scott Brown is awesome. He’s also, still, at his age, hot. So, “Hottie McAwesome” caught on as a Brown nickname, and started appearing on signs in photos all around Massachusetts.
In the last days of the campaign, when Coakley tried to ridicule Brown for those Cosmo shots, it was Coakley who looked stupid, not Brown, because people had already seen Hottie McAwesome in all his glory…and they liked what they saw.
Almost immediately after beginning the “Hottie McAwesome” campaign here on HillBuzz, we received warning from Democrats here in Chicago that we “needed to stay out of the Massachusetts race”. So much was riding on that special election, in terms of the Healthcare Rationing bill, that “too many people are watching this and they are going to come after you for helping Brown”. The people warning us were good Democrats, big in the fundraising community, whom we know from Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign. It’s very rare for them to ever chime in with anything to us, but whenever they think we’re on to some story the DNC does not want us talking about, they’ll caution us that “talking about this will cost you work, and draw more attention to you than you want”, and advise us to drop the topic. Since all of us work as freelancers, in the private events, grant writing, and nonprofit world, in a city controlled by Liberals, trust us when we say we do not take warnings like this lightly. We’ve struggled for two years now since Obama supporters started blackballing us around Chicago for not backing “The One”. We’ve lost work whenever Obama’s goons harassed our employers for having us on the payroll, and we found ourselves axed because of that. ”I just can’t be associated with you, because you’re on a Banned list, and I don’t want them coming after me, too”, is something we’ve heard a lot of since the day we launched this site in February 2008 to combat everything immoral and undemocratic the Obama campaign was doing to both Hillary Clinton and her supporters.
On January 9th, we ran a “Who’s Mad At Us Today Report”, addressing these warnings, and noting that, after serious consideration on our part, we were going to continue to support Scott Brown because we felt (and still feel, clearly) Democrats had abused their super-majority in the Senate and that the people of Massachusetts needed to take back “The Kennedy Seat” from the DNC to “teach Democrats a lesson” (borrowing a favorite meme of conservatives we hear time and again towards the GOP). Naively, we thought there wasn’t much less the Left could do to us, really. Our freelancing careers are pretty much over in Chicago, save for gigs we still get from fellow PUMAs who won’t abandon us. We have no delusions of ever again being able to land contract jobs working for the City of Chicago, especially not after we opposed the Olympics scheme and helped rally people for Rio. We’re aware that in a Liberal-controlled city there are severe financial and professional consequences for exercising free speech and dipping our toes in political activism.
But, the fate of the country meant more to us than anything the Left would throw at us in punishment. We decided to continue supporting Brown, despite multiple warnings that a maelstrom was being prepped for us at the DNC, because we felt this race was too important to allow the Massachusetts machine to win.
Scott Brown was elected to the United States Senate on January 19th, 2010 — to rapturous cheers here at Buzzquarters in Chicago, and around the country.
On January 20th, the Left decided to escalate their usual attacks on us, this time personally outing one of us, calling him a racist, and advocating for the destruction of his personal and professional life.
It seems they were so upset Brown won “The Kennedy Seat” that they moved quickly to punish anyone they felt had in any way contributed to that stunning win: and we became a target.
Since beginning this site two years ago, we’ve maintained it anonymously as “The HillBuzz Boys” here in Boystown for several reasons that should be obvious to you:
(1) We like having jobs and want to be able to eat dinner once in a while.
(2) Politics is our hobby, not our profession. In Chicago, particularly, a hobby like this will cost you employment, guaranteed, so why do that to ourselves?
(3) We enjoy having personal lives. Being gay, but refusing to toe the line, in a Liberal-controlled city means immediate pariah status for any of us who dare to publicly call the Left out on anything.
(4) We never intended to make politics our lives. HillBuzz itself exists by pure accident. It was started as a little blog to give Hillary supporters in Chicago a place to post articles and plot strategy during the worst days of the 2008 primary, when Obama was winning a string of February caucuses and Tim Russert, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, and the rest of Obama’s media cheering brigade kept berating Hillary Clinton to “just quit already” and her supporters to “shut up and fall in line”. Once Clinton suspended her campaign, we kept this site running to fight the PUMA fight…and to work with Republicans for the first time in our lives to defeat Obama, since we knew what he would do as president. Hint: it’s exactly what he’s done this past year. We pegged Sarah Palin early on as McCain’s VP pick, and have liked her for years, ever since we heard about her battle with the corrupt idiots in Alaska like Ted Stevens. So, of course, it was natural for us to back Palin whole-heartedly in everything she did, and continues to do, to this day.
We’re surprised as anyone at the evolution we’ve made, starting out on this site as lifelong partisan Democrats, finding ourselves relentlessly attacked by our own party, losing our livelihoods because of an election decided years ago at this point, and being villainized at every turn by a well-organized Leftist machine that’s aimed at anyone who opposes the socialist takeover of this country.
Sometimes, it feels less like something John Grisham would have written and more like a Stephen King paperback.
*************
Specifics of the January 20th “Racist” Attack:
As noted in the Backstory above, the recent volley of attacks on us started on January 20th, 2010 at a site called “TheBigotBasher.wordpress.com”. This site appears to be run by someone named Sean S. living in Birmingham, England, who is listed in various records as a “consultant” of some stripe. BigotBasher made an entry on January 20th entitled: “Scott Brown and a hate site — The making of a Republican Campaign”. In that post, BigotBasher uses one of our real names, randomly runs a photo of one of us with Michael Steele from an event here in Chicago (when he could have just as easily used a photo with one of us and Whitney Houston or Lady Gaga, as we’ve met them as many times as Michael Steele), and flat-out calls not only this site, HillBuzz, “a hate site”, but calls one of us, personally, a racist. That is the very definition of libel.
Despite numerous notices for TheBigotBasher to remove the libelous racist accusation, Sean S. has refused to comply, in clear violation of WordPress terms of service (TOS). To date, for whatever reason, WordPress has refused to take action against Sean S. and remove all posts using our names, likeness, and the defamatory racist slurs. If you know a way to contact WordPress directly, we’d appreciate your help in getting TheBigotBasher scrubbed, since this is the originator of all attacks against us this week.
What follows is where things get really interesting, in the Grisham sense, because it’s clear to us the Left coordinated this attack upon on. ”TheBigotBasher” is an obscure blog that gets almost no traffic. According to Alexa.com, it’s ranked 9,459,458 in the US and is so little-read that it doesn’t even turn up in the global Internet rankings. By contrast, our site, HillBuzz, is currently ranked 14,852 in the US and 95,972 in global rankings.
On any random day, something we write has a fair to good chance of being picked up in the mainstream, because we have a lot more eyes focused on us daily. We find it impossible to believe people read “TheBigotBasher” waiting for scoop to drop on anyone, so that a link to libelous content on BigotBasher can be spread lightning speed across the Leftist blogosphere, destroying someone’s name and reputation across the Internet forever.
Almost IMMEDIATELY after BigotBasher launched his attack on us, that post was picked up by The Daily Kos and DemocraticUnderground. A host of other Leftist, Obama-supporting sites followed suit, repeating TheBigotBasher story as fact.
It is now impossible for us to ever remove all of this libel from Google searches. We intend to sue as many people involved in this attack as possible, and will devote YEARS to go after anyone running that racist charge against us, but the Left scored a victory here because we are now required to devote part of our day to fighting this battle instead of continuing what we do here every day, which is to look at the political world from our moderate Democrat perspective and call the current DNC and White House out for their radical socialist ties.
The end game in all of this for the Left appears to be to shut us down, make us shut up, and scare us into submission. They have personally destroyed one of us here. They’ve made him unemployable in Chicago. We have no idea how we are going to help him recover from this, but after this attack by the Left, his life as he knew it is done.
And, yes, in addition to the financial problems this causes, it has a personal impact, too. Do you know what happens when you’re dating someone and that guy decides to Google you one day, just for fun, and stories accusing him of being a racist turn up on Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, and other places? That person breaks up with you, if you didn’t already guess that, because he wants no part of being with a guy who’s getting attacked like this — for fear these people will come after him next because he’s associated with you. At this point, after suffering through the maelstrom for two years, we just have to take lumps like that as being par for this course. Our support for McCain/Palin in 2008, and our continued support for Governor Palin, makes us damn-near undateble in the LGBTQ community, since in Boystown, the only voting ever done is blind Democrat Liberal voting. The fact we have many Republican friends now makes us pariahs. But, throw in attacks like what Daily Kos, DemocraticUnderground, and BigotBasher have done, and the quality of our lives is further diminished. We’re truly being prevented from enjoying our lives to the fullest, being kept from employment opportunities, and being alienated in our community because of the attacks launched against us on a personal level by the Left — all because we dare to discuss politics and use our little niche here on the ‘Net to fight for the country we love as best as we know how.
The Left, through BigotBasher, made its attacks on us personal…and we tell you all of the above to stress what a personal impact this has. Just imagine if this sort of thing was done to you. What would your friends and family think when they Googled you? What would prospective employers think? Do you think you’d get the job you were applying for if a company thought they could be on the receiving end of harassment from the Left, too, if you were collecting a paycheck there?
Now, we’ve been aware of attacks like this on other people — on the personal level — launched by the Left before.
The Left called Bill and Hillary Clinton racists in 2008.
The Left called Geraldine Ferraro a racist.
The Left called Lynn Forester de Rothschild a racist.
The Left called John McCain and Sarah Palin racists.
If you do not fall to your knees and worship at the merest thought of Obama, “The Lightbringer”, you are called a racist.
This is the Left’s favorite weapon. They use it a thousand times every day.
But, for some reason, few people ever stand up to the charge. Few people ever seem to go after the people who make these sorts of claims, and who ruin people’s lives in anonymity. Why is it allowable for someone like BigotBasher to post someone’s real name, use a real photo, and make false charges of racism designed to ruin a person’s life…when BigotBasher remains anonymous? Why does WordPress allow BigotBasher a platform to launch an attack like this?
Why are Daily Kos and DemocraticUnderground so quick to broadcast libelous accusations against private citizens with impunity?
How are all of these sites being coordinated, so that something posted on an obscure blog like BigotBasher on January 20th can be reposted and distributed to millions of people by close of business that same day?
Who are the people behind attacks like this?
Who is coordinating them?
Who at the DNC knows what’s going on, and are those people writing these scripts and using people like BigotBasher to punish those who don’t heed warnings and fall into line the way the DNC and Obama White House wish?
If Obama and everything he is doing to this country are so wonderful, then why do his supporters and followers employ tactics like this to attack those who don’t embrace him?
That’s the most important question of all, really, because it’s so counterintuitive. If this really was the Lightbringer. If this really was a new messiah. If Obama had any idea what he was doing and if he was really good for this country, then thuggery would not be needed to silence his critics and prop this empty suit up. If Liberals really were right, and if they really did know what was best for this country, then no bullying would be required to make anyone “fall into line”.
Wouldn’t we all be gladly drinking the Kool-Aid and riding on our unicorns if the Hope and Change Gang was right?
***********
What We’ve Learned So Far About How Puma Hunters Are All Connected:
(to be updated later today, as we are still sorting through all the clues you have collectively uncovered, tying BigotBasher to other sites such as Rumproast.com, Daily Kos, DemocraticUnderground, Snarkopolitan, Bettycracker, and posters calling themselves Sean S., “Wonk Hussein”, “Kevin K.”, JohnD, and other aliases, which appear to be the same three people who have been coordinating hits on PUMAs since the PUMA movement began in the summer of 2008).
If you have any information about attacks against other PUMA sites by these people, and other instances where they’ve libeled private citizens as racists, outed their real identities, and coordinated efforts to make them unemployable through libel and slander, please let us know.
It appears there could be a RICO case against everyone in the Left coordinating this. The crux of it is “tortious interference of contracts”, as well as libel charges. Essentially, whoever is running these attacks for Obama on private citizens is costing PUMAs employment, as well as inflicting permanent personal damage to them. Thus, those people should be held responsible for lost wages and the enormous monetary costs of hiring PR experts and Internet gurus to work for the next several years at removing every instance of the Left calling these private citizens racists.
If someone has to mount efforts like this to take back their good name, then the people who launched these attacks — and the people who instructed them to do so — need to be held accountable for it.
Related? Watch this Space:
By Michelle Malkin • January 25, 2010 03:18 AM
Who is Ellie Light?
I predict you’ll start seeing the question as a popular bumper sticker soon (a la “Who is John Galt?”…and voila, someone has already made a t-shirt!).
It’s a handy rhetorical rejoinder the next time the White House or your nutroots neighbors and co-workers try to tar the Tea Party or any other grass-roots revolts against President Obama as phony, top-down operations.
When Obama’s Soros-funded, Big Labor-directed, K Street-organized goons engage in classic projection and you need a glib way to call out the pot calling the kettle black, just snap back:
Who is Ellie Light?
A Cleveland Plain Dealer blog first broke the story over the weekend of a “suspicious” letter-writer named “Ellie Light” who submitted more than a dozen pro-Obama letters to the editors in recent weeks using addresses from Philadelphia to California and all points in between. Open-source-optimizing blogger Patterico has added much more information on both “Donald Trump Astroturfing” (”a letter published in multiple places from one person claiming to live in multiple cities”) and “David Axelrod Astroturfing” (”identical letters published in multiple places claiming to be from different people”).
Kudos to the Plain Dealer for smoking out the initial ringer and Patterico and his readers/tipsters for delving deeper. But so much for the rest of the vaunted gate-keepers of the Fourth Estate, eh?
The bogus letters are just the latest example of Obama theater — doctors in costumes, town hall stage props, trumped-up Obamacare anecdotes, kiddie proxies, etc., etc., etc.
Underscoring this administration’s dependence on centrally planned, teleprompter-dependent perpetual campaigns of manufactured support, the other half of Obama’s Astroturf Twin Power — David Plouffe — will soon rejoin Chicago cronies David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and the rest to rescue the Democrats in a new expanded role as outside White House adviser.
A reminder from my August 21, 2009 column on Corporate Shills for Hope and Change:
Money from pharmaceutical firms and health care companies is dirty, evil, and corrupting – except when key members of Team Obama are pocketing it. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs derides grass-roots opponents of socialized health care as industry-funded lackeys with questionable motives and conflicts of interest. But what about the corporate shills at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Two weeks ago, the White House embraced $150 million in drug industry ads supporting Obamacare. This week, Bloomberg News reported that White House senior adviser and chief campaign strategist David Axelrod’s former public relations firm, AKPD Message and Media, has raked in some $24 million in ad contracts supporting Obamacare – along with another p.r. firm, GMMB, run by other Obama strategists.
The ads are funded by Big Pharma, the AARP, AMA, and the powerhouse Services Employees International Union (whose Purple Shirts dumped $80 million in independent expenditures to get Obama and the Democrat majority elected). In trademark Axelrod-ian style, the special interest coalition adopted faux grass-roots names – first under the banner of “Healthy Economy Now” and more recently as “Americans for Stable Quality Care.”
Because, well, “Corporate Shills for Hope and Change” doesn’t have quite the same ring of authenticity.
Astroturf master Axelrod was president and sole shareholder of AKPD from 1985 until last December, when he resigned to take his White House position. His son, Michael, works there. So does former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. Axelrod is prominently featured on AKPD’s website, from a founder’s quote on the front page (“CHANGE IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO FIGHT FOR”) to the glamorous election night photos of Plouffe and Axelrod with the Obamas. AKPD still consults with Axelrod on “strategy and research” for the Democratic National Committee. The firm owes Axelrod $2 million, due in annual installments of $350,000, $650,000, $400,000 and $600,000.
That Axelrod and his old firm benefit mutually from their respective roles selling Obamacare should be gobsmackingly obvious. Axelrod pushes the White House plan on TV news shows. AKPD derives mega-income from ad contracts selling the White House-endorsed plan. The windfall allows AKPD to settle its debts with Axelrod, whose name, face, and high-powered ties are critical to future wheel-greasing for AKPD — and future salary-earning for Axelrod’s son and close associates.
The ‘Turf Gang: Gibbs, Plouffe, Obama, and Axelrod
Plouffe authored an op-ed for the Washington Post over the weekend crusading to save the Demcare government takeover. His Washington Post byline does not mention his position at AKPD and does not disclose his financial conflicts of interests in promoting Demcare while serving as senior adviser to AKPD, which raked in an estimated $24 million in drug industry ads supporting Demcare along with Obama-tied p.r. firm GMMB.
Another MSM failure to keep readers fully informed:
David Plouffe, campaign manager of Obama for America and Obama-Biden 2008, is the author of “Audacity to Win.”
On a related note, check out this recent Craigslist advertisement in the Astroturf gang’s hometown of Chicago soliciting paid canvassers for a Democratic National Committee-tied entity:
Background on Grassroots Campaign Inc. :
Grassroots Campaigns (GCI) is an independent organization that does strategic consulting, fundraising, and field organizing for good causes and candidates. We specialize in building and running face-to-face outreach operations in neighborhoods and in high-traffic public venues to build support for groups, issues, and campaigns.
GCI was founded in December of 2003, and by April of 2004 had opened offices in 40 cities throughout the country. By July 2004, we had over 2,000 staff knocking on doors and talking to voters on behalf of the Democratic National Committee. With continued work on behalf of MoveOn PAC in October, we added a volunteer force of 50,000 individuals canvassing their neighborhoods in 17 of the most hotly contested swing states of the 2004 Presidential Election. Since 2004, we’ve continued to partner with groups and campaigns to advance good issues, raise money for progressive causes, help take back Congress, and build activism at the grassroots level.
The people at GCI are seasoned organizing and fundraising professionals with a commitment to positive reforms. Our staff has over 150 years of professional experience. They have:
• Designed and implemented electoral, initiative, legislative, corporate, small donor fundraising, and petition gathering campaigns;
• Put together organization membership drives and raised over $500 million;
• Ran conferences of a couple hundred to a couple thousand college students;
• Trained thousands of professional organizers and campaign staff;
• Worked with scores of different groups on the national, regional, state, Congressional, local, and campus levels;
• Recruited and trained hundreds of thousands of volunteers;
• Helped launch or run over a dozen different organizations;
• Sat on the boards of directors for many groups and campaign steering committees.
Via Slate from 2004, GCI’s “for-profit canvassing” is seen as the “DNC’s secret weapon:”
Voters this fall in Democratic strongholds are witnessing an increasingly common sight. Staked out on busy sidewalks in at least 38 American cities, political activists carrying credit-card authorization forms are drumming up donations for the campaign to defeat George W. Bush. Outfitted in T-shirts emblazoned with star-spangled Democratic National Committee logos, these earnest young men and women come across as grass-roots volunteers of the most enthusiastic sort. Little old ladies interrupt their strolls to thank them for their hard work.
But appearances can be deceiving. The organization behind these fund-raisers is Grassroots Campaigns Inc., a for-profit company that counts the Democratic National Committee as one of its flagship clients. It’s a safe bet that few pedestrians talked into donating $149—”the price of a bus ticket from Washington, D.C., to Crawford, Texas”—realize that once these canvassers beat their daily quota, they keep up to 30 percent of the take.
In the rapidly shifting terrain of political fund raising, Grassroots Campaigns Inc. has emerged as a juggernaut.
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
Pretty much sums up the last year of the Obama White House — and the year to come with Axelrod, Plouffe, Gibbs, Jarrett & Co. working hard with their ringers and stagehands to put message over matter.
Who is Ellie Light?
***
Reader Bill e-mails about the Craigslist/DNC paid canvassing ad…
The ad offers a salary of $24k per year and says that the hours would be 80-100 per week.
Assuming 80 hours (the lower end)
$24,000/ 50 weeks (assuming 2 weeks paid vacation) = $480 per week
$480 / 80 hrs. = $6 per hour
Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
I wonder if these community organizers will be advocating for an increase in that?
by Rodan ( 288 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Politics at January 25th, 2010 - 8:00 am
Barack Hussein Obama still doesn’t get why the Radical Progressives lost the Massachusetts Senate race. He is in denial that the American people are rejecting his Un-American agenda. Instead of doing a Clinton-like move to the Center, he has doubled down on Leftist policies. He is proposing a special tax on banks. This has rattled the market. He has engaged in Populist rhetoric against his former Wall Street allies to boost his popularity. This tactic is not working and clearly Obama doesn’t get it.
So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”
But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people.”
Read the rest.
Mark Steyn gets this one correct. Obama believes that the American people don’t understand what he is doing. This is far from the case, they know exactly what he is doing. Americans are rejecting the Totalitarian agenda of the Progressive Movement. Mr. Hussein is an elitist who doesn’t understand the average citizen. That is why he’s in the situation he’s instead of admitting his policies are unpopular, he blames Bush. Barack Hussein Obama lives in a fantasy world of his own making. Reality is hitting him and he doesn’t know what to do.
Tags: Mark Steyn
288 Comments »
Detroit in Ruins: The Consequences of Failed Ideology
JD Hayworth Begins Slugging
[looks like 2012 will be the ‘end of the world’ after all due to the clusterf*ck the globalist bankers and their lackeys the eco-commies and the illegals have visited upon us]
“The outlook for next year and the year after is worse,” says veteran California observer and journalist Peter Schrag, over a BLT lunch at a casual-but-chic cafe in the Berkeley foothills. “The stimulus money goes away. The tax increases [passed in February 2009 after weeks of acrimonious debate] expire. If we’re up shit creek now, we’re going to be further up shit creek two years from now.” Since the state, unlike localities, cannot declare bankruptcy, if its tax revenues continue to wilt it will have no choice but to dramatically scale back its spending on big-ticket items such as education, healthcare and prisons.”
[and yet the liberals quoted in this piece still cling to more taxes on the producers as the answer-amazing-guess they’ll be sleeping on a bench themselves in 2 years as “Atlas Shrugged” becomes the new California-based reality show]
to Rush ( His idea during the Clinton plague upon America ) I am starting a file on “The One,” mostly starting from the election date. 
The election results were long expected, but now that the day has arrived it’s quite a letdown, anyway. Reading about the joy expressed by Hamas and Syria and Italy and Indonesia… contemplating Obama’s Secretary of State, or (God help us) Defense… Thinking about the USA becoming just like Sweden, only with a real army, and aircraft carriers, and nukes… First Lady Michelle…
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
you too!
![[MCLEOD-12-20+at+12.37.10+PM.png]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_L5X0O1k6cRw/S0USwacSR4I/AAAAAAAACpE/mkj42ESW9Zk/s1600/MCLEOD-12-20+at+12.37.10+PM.png)
Photo from Chicago on Thurs, as the O was arriving.
