McIlheran Deals From The Bottom

Patrick McIlheran has a snide little post up, in which he cites the psuedo-news organization McIver Institute* who found that former Governor Doyle had slotted a handful of people into state jobs before leaving.

Even though every politician leaving office at any level has done this, apparently now it is a bad thing.

I guess that is because Scott Walker needed those spots for his cronies. So far, we know he's only found a spot for his former Director of Administrative (Lying) Services, Cindy Archer, as reported by his own newspaper.**

But that isn't even the most egregious part of his post.

McIlheran then has to go on lying about Russ Feingold, labeling him as being for infanticide. Gutter press, indeed.***

*Just how does that propagandist group keep their 501(c)(3) status?

** A quasi-news organization

***Factoid: McIlheran only buys Bibles with that pesky commandment about not bearing false witness redacted.

How Squawk Radio Wil Handle Their Cognitive Dissonance

The local squawkers will be needing to do some mental gymnastics this week after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel came out and endorsed both Russ Feingold (damn liberal media) and Scott Walker (damn liber- who? wha?).

The erudite James Rowen explains how Sykes, Belling and company will spin this into a way that looks rational to the irrational mind of your average talk radio adherent.

Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word

After getting busted for being a pants-on-fire class of liar, Belling admitted today that he was wrong with his silly argument that Russ Feingold faked being in front of his own home during a commercial shoot.

But if you were looking for Belling to be classy about it, you are in for a severe disappointment:

Feingold has spent so many years inventing his phony image of being a “maverick” while
actually voting in tandem with the Harry Reid crowd to tax and spend that he now looks
like a fake even in person. How else to explain the manufactured unnatural look in the ad
with the reality that it was indeed the actual Feingold at his house? Russ has been such a
fake for 20 years that he looks like a fake when he’s not really faking. It sure fooled me.
Russ, my deepest apologies.

But being the nice people we are, we at Whallah! would like to bring in an expert translator to say it for Belling:



But something tells me that Belling won't appreciate our help for some reason..

Belling Is A Double Liar

Mark Belling is being ridiculed in the paper for making the false accusation that Senator Russ Feingold had not actually been at this house during the filming of his most recent commercial. This is, of course, blatantly false.

The article does have a couple of key lines that gives an amazingly harsh and honest look inside squawk radio:

We asked Belling for his evidence.

"I have none," he said in an e-mail to PolitiFact Wisconsin. "It’s an accusation. They can deny it and if they're right, I'll admit it.

"But it's very fishy."

[...]

"I have no proof,’’ Belling said. "I'm making an accusation that it's faked, and they can confirm or deny it."

[...]

As for Belling’s accusation, the veteran talk show host tried to turn Feingold’s own ad against him, to suggest he’s so out of touch with state voters that he was even out of state when the ad was filmed. He said he based his assertion on his own review of the photography and on one unnamed source, who had no knowledge of how the shoot was conducted but who thought it looked fishy. As for Belling’s proof, we’ll use his own words to describe it: "I have none."

And we’ll add three words of our own: Pants on Fire.

It should be pointed out that, at least locally, Zach Wisniewski was the first to point out the allegation was false, a full week before Belling decided to come out with "his" findings.

Putting The Faux Into Faux Outrage

Charlie Sykes is leading the pack of rabid echo-maniacal bloggers in questioning whether the person that Senator Russ Feingold uses in his latest commercial is even a real person.

First, let me say that I don't know if it is a real name of a real person, or a name taken out of the blue. And frankly, I couldn't care less. But since the right want to make a deal out of it, let's look at some things.

First of all, as my good friend, Jay Bullock, points out, there would be good reason on why not to use a person's real name:

Consider: How do we even know it's a fake name? Because as soon as the ad appeared, the right-wing smear machine flew into action to see if they could find this "Elizabeth M. Ackland." Google searches, Lexus-Nexus searches--Charlie Sykes even went so far as to search cemeteries. This is not just a casual "I wonder who that is" curiosity. This is obsession. So if you want to believe that the motives of people like Charlie Sykes in digging obsessively for information about Ackland were entirely pure, be my guest. But you have to ask yourself: Why were the right wingers so hell-bent on finding Ackland, if she were real? Of what possible use to them would the information be about where she worked? Where she lived? Where her children went to school?

Yeah, scary. When you consider the way that the Charlie Sykes stormtroopers (not a Nazi thing--they embrace that for themselves) treat the personal and professional lives of those of us who are real and do attach our real names to what we do and our support for candidates, it would have been irresponsible for Feingold to subject an innocent person and her family to the hell that was sure to follow.

(You know Jay is hitting the nail on the head when Freddy The Fly Dooley starts to throw tantrums and resort to name calling.)

Illy-T reminds us that this is not an unusual course of action for the right wing hate squads, and reminds us of how Michele Malkin made life hell for a sick twelve-year-old boy and his family during the S-chip debate three years ago.

Illy-T and Jay also remind us that this isn't the first time that someone used phony people. Via xoff, we are reminded that Scott Walker had used paid actors to portray "real people" in a TV ad.

Out of curiosity, I googled mrs. capper's name. It came up with one hit, for a facebook page that belonged to a woman who most definitely wasn't my wife. Just because Sykes' stalking came up empty doesn't necessarily mean that the person doesn't exist.

However, there is one thing that my esteemed brethren of the left have missed. This one thing shows that Sykes is the ultimate master of all hypocrisy and why he is the one that put the faux in this round of faux outrage.

That one thing, my dear reader, is a name:

Liz Woodhouse.

Correctly Reading The Feingold/Johnson Poll

The right wingers are already trying to make hey with the latest poll results from Public Policy Polling. The wingers are misinterpreting the poll to think that Feingold is ahead by only a point or two.

However, the Chief points out a pertinent factoid:

Johnson is largely unknown to voters in the state. 62% have no opinion of him.

Thus, to correctly interpret the poll results, it should be thus:

• Feingold 45%
• Anyone but Feingold 27%
• Johnson 16%

In other words, Johnson is losing to an Feingold and anyone else. And for this, the GOP sold their delegate votes?

There's Reality, Then There's McBride's World

McBride takes after U.S. Senator Russ Feingold for--gasp--meeting with his constituents. (If Feingold was conservative, do you think she'd be first or second in line to decrying her own post as anti-Semetic?)

McBride tries to extract a blurb from an article covering the meeting and spinning it into an attempt at the old martyr routine-"They wanna shut up the conservatives! Whaaaa!"

As commenter Jay Bullock points out:

Based on what Jessica has excerpted here, the audience was complaining about bias.

Feingold, though, was complaining about media consolidation, which ought to be a concern of everyone everywhere, whatever your political stripe. When only a handful of large media conglommerates control broadcast, print, and cable, it wouldn't take much to shut off the spigot for one point of view or another.

And, absent strong net neutrality regulation, even the internet could cease to be truly independent.

You all can mock Feingold if you want, be at least be sure to talk about what he really said, as opposed to what your imaginations thought he said. And be sure you have your facts together, too.

But one other thing caught my eye. At the end of her post, McBride writes:

Russ Feingold, meet the Internet.

Whallah is sure the Senator knows all about the Internet. However, the question is, is McBride aware that not everyone else has access to it, or knows how to use it, or are the elderly and the poor beneath her attention