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Does the GOP Pay Friendly Bloggers?
jamie writes "According to the conservative political journalism site Daily Caller: '"It's standard operating procedure" to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that "at least half the bloggers that are out there" on the Republican side "are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales." Or in some cases, it's the ads themselves: ads at ten times the going rate are one of the ways conservative bloggers apparently get paid by the politicians they write about. In usual he-said she-said fashion, Daily Caller finds a couple of obscure liberal bloggers to mention too, but they fully disclosed payment and one of them even shut down his blog while doing consulting work, unlike Robert Stacy McCain and Dan Riehl."
The article is making the case that conservative bloggers aren't just paid by conservatives in general to blog about conservative things, but that further they're paid by specific candidates (in Republican primaries, for example) to blog in favor of that candidate and bash opposing candidates.
If correct, that's a little different than the situation you're describing.
Do you even own a television? Have you watched any of these so-called liberal media outlets? They all supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, spoke about taxes on the top 5% of the income distribution as hurting public school teachers, and never pointed out that "death panels" and other bullshit lies about the health insurance reform were bullshit lies. They also seem to believe that Republicans just happened to develop all sorts of principled objections to middle-of-the-road policies around January of 2009.
The whole affair was a whirlwind media circus trial orchestrated by conservatives who didn't think poor people had a right to fight back against the banking industry.
Democrats may have their own skeletons, but ACORN isn't one of them.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Less than what was donated by Richard Mellon Scafie and his ilk.
I swear, Soros is held up as some kind of boogeyman while conservatives seem to ignore the numerous benefactors they have. And all you can name is Soros? Sheesh.
Then again, by just watching Fox, you're funding terrorists.
Thanks, really.
People who earn $250,000 a year are not rich
You are delusional.
50% of households in the country makes less than $45,000 per year.
3.17% of households in make $150,000 or more.
1.5% of households in the country makes $250,000 or more.
Source
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Most people use rich when they mean someone who has accumulated a lot of assets, US tax rates tend to tax heavily people without assets, but who earn a large income. Those who have few assets and low incomes have nothing to take, and those who have assets aren't taxed because there are many ways to use them to generate benefits without earning an income:
municipal bonds are an easy one
structuring payments to be capital gains rather than income--you need enough assets to start a company and enough personal capital to be taken seriously on your own.
use of a charitable foundation to provide access to power and a small wage to friends/progeny
There are others but those are easy to see and common ones.
Finally, incomes are highly correllated with high land value areas so costs of living are usually much higher (with most of the real benefit (economic profits) flowing to the well established land owners surrounding those high land value cities. Most of these land owners are high asset but low income folks again.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
has found no evidence the association or related organizations mishandled the $40 million in federal money they received in recent years.
That's a very specific exoneration; that is, mishandling of funds.
In no ACORN office did employees file any paperwork or do anything illegal on the duo's behalf.
Also extremely specific.
They refer to "edited" and "misleading" ... and "deceptive" and "phony" - in that order - tapes. There is no citation for those claims, and the progression from edited->misleading->deceptive->phony is ... interesting. They're claims about the tapes progressively get worse while no actual information is cited; i.e., they appear to be building their case on their own previously presumed fact.
And the piece ends with this:
One of the activists, James O'Keefe recently pleaded guilty to charges of entering federal property under false pretenses when he attempted to embarrass Senator Mary Landrieu because of her support for national health care legislation.
An unrelated ad-hom attack on the activist; "he was guilty later, so why should we trust him in this one?.
Lastly, your link is old. It's from June. The case is still going on, and there is much more recent news, such as a Federal court ruling against ACORN (your link mentions the decision that has now been overturned, a former ACORN worker pleading guilty of voter fraud ("Maria Miles, 37, of Milwaukee, admitted to submitting multiple voter registration applications for some people and to scheming with other Association of Community Organization for Reform workers to sign people up several times in an effort to meet the organization's voter registration quotas."), etc.