He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

I know it’s MSNBC and everything, but I still had difficulty believing I actually witnessed this clip on Breitbart TV of a silly little man saying the Constitution is irrelevant and confusing because it’s, like, more than 100 years old.

That does seem to be the sort of thing only the very young might say. So long as they are also rather foolish.

So I did a quick search for ‘Ezra Klein graduated with degree in’, hoping against delicious hope he was some sort of classics major. Or something indicating this young feller had possibly been required to read other really, you know, old stuff like maybe the Gettysburg Address or the Bible or…oh, dear, did he just say what I think he said about the Koran? Maybe Burke (I kid). Marbury v. Madison. Or Robinson Crusoe (‘Friday’? What the hell kind of name is that? Oh. 1719. Nooo wuuunder.)

But his degree was in political science. So class assignments probably didn’t range far beyond reading the writings of 26 year-olds at the Washington Post, which he wanted to grow up to become when he was 26. And did!

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It’s fascinating to read Progressives as they think through a difficult policy problem. Kevin Drum writes (at Mother Jones!) that we can’t improve education or mitigate poverty:

“I continue to think that the biggest problem here is simply that no one has any really compelling answers. . . You can go down the list of every ed reform ever touted, and they either can’t scale up, turn out to have ambiguous results when proper studies are done, or simply wash out over time. . .

So is the answer to address concentrated poverty? Sure. Except that, if anything, attempts to address poverty have a worse track record than attempts to improve education.

I would really, really like someone to tell me I’m wrong. So far, though, no one has. At least, not to my satisfaction. But I’m willing to be schooled if anyone thinks I’m missing the big picture here.”

Wow, Progressives really are depressed this year. Ezra Klein mostly agrees, Matt Yglesias and Kevin Carey seem more optimistic. But I doubt any of them have compelling answers to Drum’s concerns.

So Kevin, Ezra, I’m here to tell you . . . you’re wrong. Let me rephrase that. You are right that all your Progressive solutions to these problems are perpetual and necessary failures. But there is a solution.

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The corruption of the Juicebox brigade starts to get exposed today. We’ll have more thoughts on this later, but only one theory makes sense: the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein MUST be a GOP plant. Creating a listserve where mainstream journalists could expose their leftist bias? Brilliant! (We’ve seen it…it really is the Rosetta Stone of media bias.) Kudos to you, Mr. Klein!

Journalists love whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them.

Journalists love transparency.  As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.

No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, technology and “the masses” uncovered the conspiracy:

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here. (more…)

This is a photo of Dave Weigel.

Dave Weigel is holding a “Teabag Them Before They Teabag You” doll.

Dave was hired as the “conservative writer” for The Washington Post despite his leftist leanings.

Dave is also a member of JournoList.

Leftist media hack and WaPo journalist Ezra Klein founded Journolist with far left crank Joe Klein from TIME magazine in February of 2007. Klein admitted that Journolist was an “insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another.” But, you had to be a leftist to join this group. It was an exclusive club. And, it grew to include 400 of the most prominent leftist American journalists who shared ideas and helped spin the far left narrative in the state-run media. This is where far left cranks colluded to spit out the DNC’s talking points and to defend President Barack Obama’s radical agenda.

Last week Dave Weigel was outed as a member of Journolist and resigned from his position as “conservative writer” for The Washington Post. The left was hoping this would be the end of the story. They were wrong. Yesterday, Andrew Breitbart announced that he would reward $100,000 to anyone who could provide the full “JournoList” archive, source fully protected.

Of course, this was too enticing a story for the left to ignore. In response to the news of a reward, JournoList member Ben Smith mocked Breitbart on his popular blog at The Politico:

This is a classic case in which secrecy produces wild imaginings. There aren’t many good conspiracies involving 400 people, some of them ideologues, some columnists, some mainstream media types like me who enjoyed access to that conversation, as I sometimes enjoy access to private conservative conversations at venues like New York’s off-record conservative Monday Meeting.

But that’s also a lot of money for a working journalist. I called Breitbart just now with a modest proposal: I’d sell him my own 55 contributions to the list, many of them just copies of blog items, all fairly dull — for a mere $5,000.

Of course, Ben Smith doesn’t want the truth to get out about JournoList, so he deflected the story by using Alinsky tactic #5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon… You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral arguments.”

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I’ve had $100,000 burning in my pocket for the last three months and I’d really like to spend it on a worthy cause. So how about this: in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I’m offering $100,000 for the full “JournoList” archive, source fully protected. Now there’s an offer somebody can’t refuse.

Yes, the mainstream media that came together to play up the false allegations that the “N-Word” was hurled 15 times by Tea Party participants at the Congressional Black Caucus outside the Capitol the day before the “Obamacare” vote, is the same MSM that colluded to make sure the American public accepted the smear, and refused to show the exculpatory videos that disproved the incendiary charges of Tea Party racism.

Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough. (more…)

Left wingers (including but not limited to the New York Times, Mother Jones, Think Progress, Washington Monthly and Ezra Klein) are trying to eliminate dissent in Congress by engaging in a coordinated attack on the idea of the Senate filibuster.  Clearly, the left hates extended debate and they are advocating that Vice President Joe Biden eliminate the filibuster by decree as President of the United States Senate.  They have no shame.

If you hate big government, you should love the Senate filibuster.  The filibuster serves the good government purposes of slowing legislation.  This allows citizens to understand and participate in the legislative process, provides scrutiny for complicated legislation and slows the process to confirm nominees.  The left absolutely hates the filibuster, because the filibuster prevents liberal Democrats from steamrolling moderate Democrats and Republicans when trying to pass legislation or confirming extremist judges with minimal debate.  A veteran Senate staffer tells Big Government that “the filibuster is a tool to slow down and make people really consider things. For those that believe in freedom and limited government the less the Congress does the better.”  Of course the left’s goal is to exterminate the filibuster from the Senate rules by setting the table for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to argue that a filibuster is unconstitutional, then for Vice President Biden to order that the rule be ignored.  (more…)

I find it a little ironic that liberals continue to ruthlessly attack Joe Lieberman for killing the public option (and it’s evil twin, the Medicare buy-in) given the central role that liberals themselves played in precipitating it’s demise. Including some of the very same individuals now vilifying him.

While Lieberman has been hammered by the left for many of the supporting reasons he has given for opposing the public option, the centerpiece of his argument has always been that the public option was a policy instrument designed by liberals to move the country towards a single payer system. Here is Lieberman speaking on Face the Nation back on Nov. 1 when this controversy initially erupted:

The public option I think was raised in the last year by people who really want to have a government-controlled health insurance system. That’s their right. I think they’re wrong.

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The public option has been a political football since early summer. The President has said more than once that he prefers it but will not demand it. This was considered capitulation by many on the left who see the public option as necessary for “real” reform. Meanwhile, belying the President’s public statements, there are reports that the President’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel has been quietly but firmly twisting arms in the back rooms to insure the public option is included in the final bill. Even now, pressure is mounting on Harry Reid to include the public option in the health reform bill he brings to the Senate floor.

In response to the tumult over what appears to be a small feature of the effort, more than one critic has wondered aloud why Democrats don’t just give up on the public option – which is opposed by every Republican – in order to reach a more bipartisan outcome. What exactly is so important about the public option anyway? And why do Democrats in particular seem so wedded to the idea?

There is a simple answer to these questions, but it’s an answer you’ve likely not heard from any institution in the mainstream media. The truth is that the public plan is a carefully devised scheme, a sneaky strategy, to deceive American voters. It’s a political marketing ploy designed to move the nation to a single-payer system – like the one in Canada – over the next decade. The public option is the Trojan horse. On the outside it’s all about “choice and competition”, but once it has been dragged within the walls of American medicine it’s true nature will become evident. By that time, it’ll be too late.

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