Washington Times: Big Oil Smear Backfiring on Big Blue Lie Machine

Reading an article like this one from today's Washington Times must make the folks at ProgressNow feel deservedly silly and their favored candidate Mark Udall just plain hopping mad:

Bob Schaffer's opponents have spent the past two months tarring him as "Big Oil Bob," an advocate of oil drilling and an energy-industry insider. Maybe he should thank them.

Two polls show Mr. Schaffer, the Colorado Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, has erased a double-digit deficit and pulled within a nose of Democratic foe Mark Udall.

The reason, according to one poll, lies in fuel prices. Since gas hit $4 a gallon here, a majority of Colorado voters have come out in favor of offshore oil drilling and exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, said a Quinnipiac Poll released last week.

At the same time, Mr. Schaffer went from trailing Mr. Udall by 10 percentage points in June - 49 percent to 39 percent - to a 44 percent to 44 percent tie in July. The June survey of 1,351 likely Colorado voters had an error margin of 2.7 percentage points; the July poll of 1,425 likely voters had a 2.6-point margin.

ProgressNow of course has reason to feel silly, having spent so much time and money on a full-fledged Internet campaign to tar the candidate they hate as "Big Oil Bob." The absurdity of their facile ad campaign had been pointed out as early as April.

And why might Mark Udall be angry? Besides the plummeting poll numbers? Perhaps his wife Maggie Fox's intimate connection with the 527 group League of Conservation Voters so singularly obsessed with tarring Bob Schaffer?

Politics is a fickle game. At some point, enough of the public comes to see through the deception - though the ill winds may yet again work against common sense and decency for a time. But for now, it's sure funny to see the tar blow back on the Big Blue Lie Machine.

PlagiarismNowAction Expanding its Reach

This week, Lynn Bartels of the Rocky Mountain News promoted a new Michael Huttner web site. Michael Huttner is a lawyer with lawyer like ethics. He operates ProgressNowAction in a way that appears to be willing to plagiarize other's work, claiming it as their own product of months of research. He also apparently feels free to remove posts from liberal writers that don't fit his agenda.

His new site will doubtless be operated to the same low standards as what we have come to call PlagiarismNowAction.

The site has one YouTube video, which indicates that they will be going into the video editing business. The video is of such poor quality that one is reminded of what one might see out of a high school video class. They tried to stuff a minute's worth of ideas into 30 seconds, perhaps on the theory that their audience has a very short attention span.

We asked, in a comment to the article:

I'm more than a little curious as to why Bartels would promote the new Huttner site. It has one item, and that item is a 30 second YouTube commercial with such poor production values that it needs to be played over and over to understand what it is trying to say.

Did [ Lynn ] Bartels or her editors actually look at the Huttner site to decide if it was really newsworthy, or is Huttner such a valued source that the RMN just pumps out what he says without any quality check?

We received no answer.

Permanently Forfeiting the High Ground

PlagiarismNowAction, aka ProgressNowAction is at it again. Alan Franklin, the "author" who apparently lifted three paragraphs from Wikipedia and only slightly modified a fourth and then had the gall to claim that what he wrote was the result of "months of research" has written (or maybe copied) a challenge to Bob Schaffer.

He titles it "Bob Schaffer, the hideout candidate." The election is almost 13 months away. Even if Schaffer started issuing position papers, no one would pay attention except for PlagiarismNowAction.

We, on the other hand, have some questions that deserve answers now:

Hey Alan, am I getting your name right? Do you want to explain again how the Wikipedia editor actually copied your work from an email? When I asked for the email, you couldn't, or wouldn't, provide it. Do you want to explain how it is possible to duplicate the "months of research" in 30 minutes of Google searches? Dan Haley quoted your web site as only needing to be right half the time. Does that apply to original writing too? Curious minds want to know.

I love publicly reminding you about this stuff because you have no answers that make sense. You will never again have the high ground on any subject. Posture to your heart's content.

ProgressNow Attacks to Distract Attention from Udall's Attacks

How foolish, embarrassed, obsessed, outrageous, and "phony" does Boulder liberal Rep. Mark Udall look for his time-wasting resolution against Rush Limbaugh? How bad is this self-inflicted political wound?

It's so bad, that the Rocky Mountain News reports today an effort by Udall's Left-wing surrogates at ProgressNow to rehash tired and discredited charges against Udall's Republican opponent, Bob Schaffer.

Writes the Rocky:

On Wednesday, Schaffer said the contributor was not himself a party to the case before the board. Schaffer dismissed the allegation as an attack by Democrats on his support for school choice.

[ProgressNow leader Michael] Huttner, a lawyer who teaches at the University of Denver Law School, agreed that Schaffer did not violate Colorado's campaign finance law. But Schaffer's vote is still a conflict of interest that should be illegal, he said. "It's a loophole in the law," Huttner said.

Schaffer took contributions from David Brennan for his 2004 Senate race and again this year for his 2008 run. Brennan heads White Hat Management, which runs charter schools.

Huttner said he'll present a petition this morning calling for Schaffer to return the contributions or resign.

Even ProgressNow knows there is nothing to the controversy. They're just doing the best to take the media scrutiny off Udall for his foolish, embarrassing, self-obsessed, and phony attack on Limbaugh.

What's ironic is that neither Udall's time-wasting resolution nor Huttner's media-clamoring demand is grounded in reality. But when has the truth slowed down the Left's attacks before?

Why We Are Different

One of the obligations of a blog or blogger who wants to be taken seriously is to admit mistakes without being asked. A few days ago, we had a link to the Aspen Daily News go bad. We assumed, incorrectly, it now seems, that it was done maliciously.

It turns out that the newspaper has a routine practice of moving items to its archives and assigning a new url. One of the essays on the subject was "Liberals are Dumb as Dirt, Sometimes." That title seems doubly appropriate in this internet age. What if everyone changed url's quickly after publishing them the first time? Google would either double in value or go broke, and we're not sure which.

Note that ProgressNowAction, aka PlagiarismNowAction and Colorado Media Matters would never consider publishing something like this. Does that make us better than them? Maybe not, but it makes us different.

When Looking For Dirt...

The left wing echo chamber has bounced a story about a single Bob Schaffer campaign contribution for weeks now. It started at ProgressNowAction, affectionately known as PlagiarismNow to this author because last spring it appeared to have lifted, word for word, three paragraphs from a Wikipedia article and only slightly modified a fourth without attribution for the body of one of its hit pieces.

It moved to the Denver Post for two printed articles. A far left wing Denver Post blogger, David Siorta, has worked it over as has about every left wing Colorado blogger we know of. It isn't news, it is a manufactured "controversy," and thus hasn't made it into responsible outlets like the Rocky Mountain News or the Gazette. We don't know of any of the smaller papers around the state that have repeated it, which doesn't speak well of the Denver Post's judgement.

Today, the Denver Post left winger is up for some well deserved criticism by a fellow Denver Post writer David Harsanyi for defending John Edward's hedge fund machinations while going after Bob Schaffer. He observes that Sirota isn't consistent:

Now, let’s remember, only days earlier, the same progressive was hyping a concocted “scandal” over Republican Bob Schaffer, for which he admitted he had not a shred of proof and not a single reputable person said had any merit.

That’s quite a display of consistency. I guess activists have their own set of rules.

Actually, only Democrat activists have their own set of rules. They use a microscope for Republican dirt and blinders for Democrat filth. We try to be consistent here.

Anyone Notice A Difference?

Read the post immediately below this one. It is a carefully laid out comparison of the Bob Schaffer position on Education vs. the Mark Udall position. It is long and thoughtful, as are all of his pieces on his Best Destiny site.

Since he is not blowing his own horn, I'll blow it for him. If you want to understand the intricacies of CSAP, you should slide on over for an unbiased (everyone has biases, some hide them better than others) look:

CSAP Impressions Part I
CSAP Impressions Part II
CSAP Impressions Part IIB
CSAP Impressions Part III
CSAP Impressions, Part Last
CSAP Impressions, Post Script

These essays were written by a guy who draws no money from any source for his essays, either here or on his other blog. Compare the quality of his work with anything the Democrat hate machines like Colorado Media Matters, Colorado Pols, Square State, and ProgressNow put out. Most, if not all get paid by sources they won't name (thought ultimately to be Tim Gill and George Soros).

They have a candidate who is so liberal that he has never been called a moderate by any source we know of. People who are as far left as Mark Udall win in Boulder, but not in all of Colorado. Given that positioning, what are these paid media mercenaries left with? They try to trash Schaffer and sites like this one any way they can.

Over the next year to the election, you can expect quality from those who do their writing out of conviction, and name calling trash from the far left Democrat sites who get paid for propaganda. Watch and see.