Patterico's Pontifications

9/30/2010

Educational Details Misrepresented on LinkedIn Page of . . . Hillary Clinton? (Update: Another Resume for O’Donnell Making Similar Claim About Oxford Has “User Verified” Tag)

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 6:45 am



That is, unless she didn’t construct the page herself:

I thought Hillary Clinton went to Yale Law School. Clinton claims to have gone to Harvard. But in an investigation conducted by patterico.com, I have obtained the following statement from Harvard Law School spokesman T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII:

Harvard Law School has no student or education record for an individual named Hillary Clinton. Nor would we ever accept a Yalie.

Thanks to reader Y.K., who passes along several other LinkedIn pages he suspects are inauthentic, such as:

  • Joe Biden — Odd capitalization; sparse detail; content not plagiarized from Neil Kinnock
  • Bill Gates — lists Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as having started in 2000 when it was founded (under a different name) in 1994

Y.K. makes a good point: social networking sites can indeed be faked.

Now: Christine O’Donnell’s LinkedIn page was different from the above pages in several important respects. It was far more detailed than any of the above profiles, with an extensive resume and educational history. She had 84 connections to others — far more than any of the above profiles. And when her campaign was initially asked about the inaccuracies, spokespeople did not initially assert that the page was fake.

If you are a candidate who has been accused of misrepresenting her educational history, your spokespeople need to approach you when the media raises further questions along the same lines. If your spokespeople approach you with questions about a page you didn’t create, you need to say so, immediately.

This did not happen. And that makes it a story — one reported in the Associated Press and at the Web sites of the New York Times and Washington Post. Whether it is discussed here at patterico.com or not, this story is being discussed. You can ignore it or not, but it’s news.

As I said last night, if this is not Christine O’Donnell’s profile, someone faked it. That person needs to be exposed. O’Donnell needs to cooperate in exposing the person. The actions may be criminal. She should file a report with the appropriate law enforcement agency and let them take it from there.

I’ll let you know if she does. I don’t know, though. She didn’t file a report in 2008 when political opponents allegedly vandalized her home, so I’m not sure she would file a report over something like this.

I hope she does. We need to find out who the imposter is. Maybe it’s the same person who smeared Hillary with that calumny about Harvard Law School.

UPDATE: Uh-oh.  This resume (noted by a commenter last night) makes a similar claim about Oxford . . . and has a “user verified” tag. (Already noted by Ben Smith at Politico.)

UPDATE x2: A ZoomInfo spokesman claims that the “user verified” tag means O’Donnell verified the information on the ZoomInfo profile herself.  Color me skeptical: how in the world would he know?  ZoomInfo and LinkedIn should be more transparent — for example, they could release the e-mail address used by the person who set up the account.

I am amazed (and yet I’m not) by the people who want me to ignore this.  Joe Biden misrepresented his own academic record and I mocked him unmercifully for it.  Why would O’Donnell deserve different treatment?

77 Responses to “Educational Details Misrepresented on LinkedIn Page of . . . Hillary Clinton? (Update: Another Resume for O’Donnell Making Similar Claim About Oxford Has “User Verified” Tag)”

  1. As a Yalie, I am required by law to boo and hiss that she was alleged to have gone to HLS.

    But in truth, i don’t think that actually counts as defamation, even if we have in fact beaten Harvard law school in the rankings for as long as i have kept track of these things (since around 1995).

    Sorry, i cannot resist ragging on Harvard. Its in the contract we sign as students when we become yalies.

    (Btw, they have a big Harvard-Yale football game. But coming from places that do football right, its actually one of the most pathetic displays you have ever seen. its like going to an illegal dog fight and it turns out to be between two chihuahuas.)

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  2. btw, vanvoorhees is lying. they take yalies all the time. And vice versa.

    Of course i know that you are referring actually to iowahawk, but i don’t want someone to innocently believe that harvard is that hardcore in its rivalry.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  3. Technically, it would read Jan 2001-Jan. 2009, a small detail

    ian cormac (6709ab)

  4. oh, and patterico, you totally missed this. hillary was alleged to live in “greater detriot.” huh?

    She lives now in Washington, she was from chicago, but they own a house in upstate NY. i could be wrong, but i believe she has no ties to detriot.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  5. If they do not all run out and immediately file a police report then we know all we need to know about them.

    Watching Yale and harvard play football is like watching Perez Hilton and Markos Moulitsas in a slap and tickle fight.

    JD (b82a9e)

  6. “As a Yalie, I am required by law to boo and hiss that she was alleged to have gone to HLS.”

    O’Donnell, meanwhile, is setting herself up in contrast with “yale values.”

    imdw (2020d4)

  7. JD,

    At the very least, her campaign did not respond to this competently.

    At the very least.

    Patterico (6dc05f)

  8. J.D.

    > Watching Yale and harvard play football is like watching…

    well thank you for that mental image. 🙂

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  9. No argument from me there, Patterico. But noting that her campaign handled it poorly and demanding that she file reports with the authorities for suspected identity theft are quite a bit removed.

    JD (b82a9e)

  10. it also depends on how good the police are.

    I mean in maryland, they stink. We had a bomb threat against one of our employees. one police officer actually said, “its not against the law to threaten someone.”

    I had to get involved and explain to the police how many laws have been potentially broken, citing specific sections of the MD Code. And even then, they didn’t do squat. i mean i would still advise my client to call the police in that situation, but i wouldn’t expect very much out of them.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  11. “Demanding”?

    Observing.

    Patterico (6dc05f)

  12. I had noticed the Detroit deal, btw. Just thought the education was the useful parallel.

    Patterico (6dc05f)

  13. JD,

    If it were proven that she lied about whether she constructed this page, would you still support her?

    Patterico (6dc05f)

  14. The Delaware Senaate race is mostly notable for how John Cornyn’s NRSC knee-capped the Team R nominee on election night cause of she wasn’t the one they wanted to join their little senate club of pansy-assed Team R cowards what have since moved on to pining for 6 more years of Lisa Murkowski.

    happyfeet (19c1da)

  15. “The Delaware Senaate race is mostly notable for how John Cornyn’s NRSC knee-capped the Team R nominee on election night cause of she wasn’t the one they wanted to join their little senate club of pansy-assed Team R cowards what have since moved on to pining for 6 more years of Lisa Murkowski.”

    On that night the hopes I had that the NRSC would spend millions in DE were dashed.

    imdw (8bb588)

  16. That seems to be the key, the Senate caucus went overboard to salvage Murkowski over Miller, has ratified her defection, even though she stand for
    practically everything the tea party is against

    ian cormac (6709ab)

  17. “The Delaware Senaate race is mostly notable for how John Cornyn’s NRSC knee-capped the Team R nominee on election night cause of she wasn’t the one they wanted to join their little senate club of pansy-assed Team R cowards what have since moved on to pining for 6 more years of Lisa Murkowski.”

    I too had great hopes that the NRSC would spend millions in DE.

    imdw (0472a5)

  18. Phony – she uses Hillary Rodham Clinton and has for years and years.

    Noah (026d7f)

  19. Patterico – I cannot vote for her, nor would I donate to her campaign. I do think she would be better than Hairy Reed’s pet Coons, but all in all, my thought that the voters in Delaware were absolutely cornholed with their lousy choices remains unchanged.

    JD (fb34b2)

  20. She will do as Pat asks just as soon as OJ finds the real murderer.

    Ed from SFV (de2c81)

  21. Patterico – Investigative journalism at its finest!

    Doing the job the MFM will not.

    daleyrocks (940075)

  22. Apparently Coons has done nothing wrong worth mentioning as the attacks on her are 3/1 over any scrutiny of the opponent.

    ian cormac (6709ab)

  23. There will probably be a wave of these now. One person does it and the next has to top it.
    Finding the originator can be next to impossible. Create an account from the Starbucks free wi-fi network or public library and the trail can go cold pretty quickly.

    VOR2 (8e6b90)

  24. Any more information on/activity with those 84 connections? Very interesting indeed.

    Diane (3fff24)

  25. I’m not going to put too much stock in the ZoomInfo page. It looks to me like anybody can “claim” a page, with no verification that you are actually the person referred to by their automated search tools.

    As for O’Donnell responding, yes, of course she and her staff should be direct and forthright in responding. But I’d probably recommend that she just ignore all questions regarding these issues. There are, as has been noted in previous threads on this subject, reasonable explanations as to how slightly misleading information made its way into her LinkedIn profile, and ZoomInfo, from my past experiences with it, is an entirely automated system that, while impressive in some ways, is also full of lots of dated or misleading information. And at any rate, the ZoomInfo profile appears to correctly identify the Claremont Institute, rather than Claremont University, and says she got a “certificate” on a particular topic from Oxford University, which (based on my understanding from the LinkedIn post conversation) is substantially accurate.

    My point being that where there’s a reasonable, but complicated explanation about something that’s really tangential to anything the race is really about, responding at all is usually a waste of time.

    PatHMV (140f2a)

  26. PatHMV: At the time of the account’s creation (and excuse my ignorance about the system) there seemed to be no problem listing specific details about her other qualifications, job history, etc. Why not include those two courses in that section for clarity if the automated education section wasn’t accurately interpreting her record?

    I’m trying to imagine myself in this situation and under no circumstance would I allow any ambiguity about whether I attended either institution.

    All of this under the assumption that the account is, in fact, her own creation.

    Diane (3fff24)

  27. Speaking only for myself, I agreed with one ‘Madawaskan’ two weeks back that Ms. O’Donnell, in a clinical sense and paraphrasing, has “a screw loose, perhaps two or more”. I think [he] said “something squirrelly going on”.

    I believe I can say now, without fear of contradiction, that our dear blogger similarly has another, admittedly different, screw loose, fallen.to.the.floor.kicked.and.lost.forever.

    Back away slowly.

    gary gulrud (790d43)

  28. Evidently she likes to knock back a few cocktails of witches brew and do some drunk resume writing.

    I think she should change the subject back to the issues she is running on and just say she is running a campaign right now and will get to the bottom of this distraction later.

    She needs something like that “Reputation Defender” service I’ve heard advertised. Give ’em the straight dope and let them scour the web and clean up her name.

    And mount a breathalyzer next to her keyboard

    SteveG (cc5dc9)

  29. Sacrifice your credibility and your ability to persuade is dead.
    Patterico.

    Enough said…

    The Emperor (6e616b)

  30. Diane, my own experience at LinkedIn is that in many places it tries to artificially limit your options. For example, when I link to another person, I have to select how I know that person. One option is “we’ve done business together,” and then I have to select one, and only one, of my listed positions as the position through which we’ve done business. But with many people, I’ve known them through several different positions and in many different contexts. Am I being misleading if I pick one position but not another? If I list him as a “friend” when in fact we’ve also done business together?

    The system is better now than it used to be, but I remember very well when I first started using it how limiting it could be in some respects.

    PatHMV (140f2a)

  31. Meanwhile, Chris Coons supports repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and supports “marriage equality” for the LGBT community. (source). Based on the title of an article he wrote 25 years ago, “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist,” I don’t think I’m likely to agree with many of the substantive votes he’ll make if he’s elected to the U.S. Senate. (Of course, Coons has a reasonable explanation for his 25-year-old article and has himself declined to attack O’Donnell on personal grounds, as he believes this election should be about the issues facing Delaware and the country, and I agree with him about that).

    O’Donnell was not the candidate I wanted to win the primary, to be sure. But that’s no longer the choice facing us. We get either Coons or O’Donnell to represent Delaware in the Senate. I’m supporting O’Donnell unless she’s proven to be an axe murderer, so based on the only two options before us, I’d support her EVEN IF she made a cold, calculating lie on her resume (which I don’t believe she did), because the alternative is a hard-core, liberal Democrat in that seat. If she were running against a Ben Nelson, then maybe it would be a tougher call, but she’s not.

    My own state’s Republican Senator has MANY personal failings and I frankly don’t care for him much at all, on a personal level or as a human being. But he’ll vote to confirm conservative judges and voted against Obamacare and Cap and Trade, so I’ll be pulling the lever for him next month over the Democrat, even though of the two of them, I would prefer to be friends with the Democrat.

    PatHMV (140f2a)

  32. It doesn’t make “the same claim”, or a “similar claim” about oxford. It explicitly states that she got a certificate, and what the certificate was for. It does not suggest she attended classes or did post-graduate work at Oxford.

    Of course the news is making news of this, because they are in full “tear-down” mode. I thought the point of blogs was to point out when the media was getting things wrong, not parrot what they get wrong because “it’s out there anyway”.

    There is a point where your “speaking the truth to power” just becomes “trying to make sure your predictions come true”. As a person who has been defending you in other venues, I’m pretty much done with it now.

    It could just be that those of us who grew up in the evangelical christian community just have different sensibilities. I was well aware of witchcraft and wiccans when I was in high school — heck, we had a teacher invite a wiccan student and her witch mother (“White Witches”, they assured us) to our class to teach us about their beliefs. I understand the belief that you follow the ten commandments to the letter, and trust God to honor your commitment. I get the idea that masturbation is most often associated with lusting after women as sex objects, and is therefore a sin. I even understand the fear that injecting human brain tissue into mice could be a stepping stone to man trying to be like God.

    What I don’t get is why some career politicians get barely a one-day story when they make up stories about their life, but some senatorial candidate from Delaware makes NATIONAL NEWS because some online resume lists “Oxford University” as a place where they took a class, when the truth is that, well, they took a class located at Oxford University, but you know, the class wasn’t actually taught under the auspices of Oxford University.

    As if the people who would vote for O’Donnell are goint to do so because she has some hoity-toity (sic) prissy stuck-up university listed in an online resume.

    Hey, it’s not like she lied about GOING TO VIETNAM, or about getting shot at while visiting afghanistan, or about why her parents got together, or about marching in a parade with Martin Luther King, or any of tne myriad of meaningless personal histories that get scrambled in the daily political maelstrom.

    Are we to believe that nobody could possibly dig up a single item where Coons has ever embelished or misrepresented his life in some way? Or that if we bothered to find it, any national news outlet would cover it?

    Charles (dce15e)

  33. “Meanwhile, Chris Coons supports repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and supports “marriage equality” for the LGBT community.”

    Thank you tea party for giving this guy a lead!

    imdw (8a8ced)

  34. I’ve got no dog in this fight. But I do wonder if anybody else is like me – extremely careless about stuff like LinkedIn. I signed up because some people were requesting to connect with me there. I spent about 2 minutes on the profile thing. And I’ve clicked on something in it every once in a blue moon because it was nagging me in my email. But I couldn’t tell you what it says about me off the top of my head.

    O’Donnell strikes me as a pretty careless person in terms of precision of speech especially. She seems to say a lot of things without thinking first. Then she gets stuck and has to figure a way to talk her way out of the hole she’s dug.

    Not impressive – but possibly not fatal.Depends.

    Gesundheit (cfa313)

  35. Patterico

    I have created a completely BS profile on the site.

    we’ll see how much it takes to create a “user verified” profile. So far all they have done is the usual “give us an email” and then sending a verification email.

    Btw, this profile was last updated last march.

    why would she create a resume at that time. didn’t she know she was running for congress?

    But a claim based on a website that i literally never heard of before today seems sketchy at best.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  36. Patterico,

    Here is my prediction regarding Christine O’Donnell. It is a prediction that many here will disagree with, and some will be offended by it. If you want to discuss my prediction in person at an event the first Friday of some future month, I will be more than happy to elaborate.

    First, I predict if O’Donnell is elected she will be a vocal and, even if quirky, reliable vote for conservatives. She will vote against Cap and Tax and vote to repeal Obamacare.

    But she may not be a permanently reliable vote in the future as her own vanity, and need for approval, will affect her future choices. Watching her past appearances and the way she handles herself, one can only conclude that she has a desire for approval and will go wear that wind blows her.

    This leads to the second, and more offensive, half of my prediction.

    Second, if O’Donnell loses she will make a career of being the newly liberal “jilted idealist.” She will appear on MSNBC and talk at great length about how her whole career she was manipulated by “moneyed interests” and powerful forces who wanted to use a young woman in order to manipulate the public. She will become the professional “exposer” of conservative lies.

    If MSNBC wants dirt on ISI, they will have O’Donnell on to discuss how they manipulated and used her. Independent Women’s Forum? She will say it is a lie. She will argue that those who attacked her on the right are sexists and the true face of the conservative movement.

    She will become the darling of those liberals who believe that conservatism is a conspiracy against the people, or those who want to present the lie that it is a conspiracy.

    When asked about her former “conservative friends,” she will use the same language she uses to excuse her hanging out with witches in high school. She will say that she was young, naive, and manipulable.

    She won’t be the first “jilted conservative,” but she will be one. She is too vain to not be.

    She join all of those pundit voices who get too much heat from their side and find that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” makes for a degree of popularity and financial success.

    I believe this to be true with every fiber of my being.

    If I am wrong, I will be happy to eat crow. I will dance the I am eating crow dance. But these things have happened too often in the past, on both sides of the aisle, for me to believe otherwise.

    Christian (c92ec1)

  37. Btw, here is something interesting…

    I am using google chrome. so you might have to do this differently in your browser.

    But i right clicked on the picture of O’Donnell at the zoominfo thingy.

    Then i chose to “open image in a new tab.” so a new tab opened and i looked at the address of the picture. It says:

    http://www.zoominfo.com/search/profile/personimage?accountId=726830&imageUrl=http://stmedia.startribune.com/images/126*150/O'Donnell091910.jpg

    Now look at that name for the picture after the last backslash. O’Donnell… 09… 19… 10… as in, September 19, 2010.

    And then try this. start after the http, and type that into your address bar. you then get a very unflattering picture of her.

    so… how did that get into her profile?

    More in a moment.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  38. Also the biography on the zoom info site is, well, weird. Here are some odd passages.

    > Some of her most recent television appearances include debating the ethics of human cloning and embryonic stem cell research on The O’Reilly Factor

    That would be the maligned mouse with human brain debate. Is that something she wanted to highlight?

    > Christine combined her faith with her God given talent working as an independent marketing consultant on Mel Gibson’s breakthrough film The Passion of the Christ.

    Do most people refer to themselves as having “God-given talent?”

    But here is the really out of place part. Remember, this was supposedly updated in march of this year. but she supposedly writes:

    > After being initially out of political favor with the Delaware Republican Party for seizing votes which may have otherwise gone to the 2006 US Senate nominee Jan Ting, her steadfast stance on moral and social issues and continued efforts to be accessible have drawn enough favor with the party to earn her the 2008 nomination…. Christine is also working on a book… She also hopes that by releasing the book as her campaign kicks into high gear, she will gather enough attention locally and nationally to defeat Joe Biden, whose focus on the Presidency has left Delaware citizens wondering whose interests he is really serving.

    You get that? This profile, supposedly updated this year, talks about the desire to win the 2008 contest against Joe Biden. But nothing about any plans to run this year. In fact, best I can tell the whole thing cuts off in 2008 before the election. In fact, it seems to have cut off before Biden lost the race for the nomination and certainly before he was nominated to be Veep.

    And that book, by the way, was never written or at least never published. Who leaves a reference to an abandoned or failed book project on her site?

    And, well, why would a person running for office put out a resume like as if they were seeking a job in a regular company?

    And finally what is all this third person stuff? I know Bob Dole likes to tell us what Bob Dole thinks, but most people refer to themselves in the first person.

    None of this proves it is a fake. I mean Christine O’Donnell has done enough strange that I can’t rule her out as the author. But it is very strange. And if a person created a fake linked in account, why wouldn’t they also create a faked zoominfo account?

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  39. I don’t think that Hillary’s last name was Clinton when she was in college.So Harvard wouldn’t have a record for Clinton, but what about Rodham?

    Charles Curran (1fdb1f)

  40. Aaron, good defense points. Perhaps this was put up by staff. Why? Because it’s a free way to help give voters a good impression, just as most have Facebook profiles now (often managed by staff).

    That’s the impression I get of the third person commentary.

    Why would O’Donnell act like a job seeker when running for office? alternatively, consider that she didn’t expect to win the general, and has been running for this office for many years, and probably also is seeking a conventional job.

    However, it would be interesting if someone, noting O’Donnell’s trust breaking mannerisms in prior interviews, put her in a position where she would be honestly defending herself, and many wouldn’t believe her. The girl who cried wolf.

    Proving such a stunt was committed against her would help the O’Donnell campaign, as the Palin attacks helped Palin, and would bolster many of O’donnell’s stronger claims (such as the bush hiders).

    She should be able to get information about the email address used to register that account, and perhaps an IP address.

    Dustin (b54cdc)

  41. well, it is interesting now that zoominfo is claiming she wrote it, but no one asked the obvious follow up: how do you know?

    Right now no one has checked the obviously fake profile i have created.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  42. What I don’t get is why some career politicians get barely a one-day story when they make up stories about their life, but some senatorial candidate from Delaware makes NATIONAL NEWS because some online resume lists “Oxford University” as a place where they took a class, when the truth is that, well, they took a class located at Oxford University, but you know, the class wasn’t actually taught under the auspices of Oxford University.

    As if the people who would vote for O’Donnell are goint to do so because she has some hoity-toity (sic) prissy stuck-up university listed in an online resume.

    People might vote for her because they believe her promises to do x,y,z, and thus, whether she lies a lot is a relevant issue to them.

    She knows she has no certificates from Oxford. Whoever made that claim was lying. Maybe they were really dang clever and trying to hurt her, but either way, it’s not OK to do that. It’s no surprise that O’Donnell makes major news for this. It’s one of those races.

    Dustin (b54cdc)

  43. Dustin

    > as the Palin attacks helped Palin

    More like how Daniel Webster has been helped by Grayson’s dishonest attacks. 🙂

    Btw, if you go to legal insurrection they have a hilarious video doing the same thing to Grayson. “Alan Grayson… hates children… hates the elderly… loves Satan.” The announcer is what makes it hilarious.

    If O’Donnell didn’t write these, she needs to take action to get to the bottom of it.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  44. dustin

    well, that being said, how much coverage is there about grayson. and that is not only a lie, but it is a lie about his opponent which is worse. he is not only demonstrating a character flaw, but he is trying to win the election by misrepresentation of his opponent’s positions.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  45. dustin

    i mean i want to be clear. you are absolutely right. if you are lying, then you have to wonder whether they are lying about, say, what they promise to do in office. its a serious problem.

    But definite socialist v. maybe insincere conservative… if i voted there, it wouldn’t be tough.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  46. An obvious and harmless village idiot is FAR preferable to an effective and devious and evil Marxist who does not wish us well.

    Intelligence is NOT a requirement to serve in the legislatures, and may, in fact, be a detriment since it seems to interfere with the functioning of common sense.

    I believe that the only way to solve our problem (being bribed with our own tax money) permanently is to do away with elections. I would propose that all individuals over the age of 25 be eligible for random selection into public office. All would be required to serve a term in some office if randomly selected. We could transform the government into the semi chaotic and harmless entity it needs to be.

    List the benefits… Start with the fact that no campaigning means no contributions, thus no bribery, etc.

    Cool it with the Wiccan, no matter how dumb or incompetent she is, she is better than the Marxist.

    Nica in Houston (32bfff)

  47. Nica,

    “cool it”

    Ummm how? How much longer can this train wreck go on?

    EricPWJohnson (f666b2)

  48. But definite socialist v. maybe insincere conservative… if i voted there, it wouldn’t be tough.

    Comment by Aaron Worthing

    Without a doubt, my vote would go to O’Donnell. Coons is that bad. He’s not a marxist, but he’s really terrible.

    Dustin (b54cdc)

  49. UPDATE x2: A ZoomInfo spokesman claims that the “user verified” tag means O’Donnell verified the information on the ZoomInfo profile herself.  Color me skeptical: how in the world would he know?  ZoomInfo and LinkedIn should be more transparent — for example, they could release the e-mail address used by the person who set up the account.

    I am amazed (and yet I’m not) by the people who want me to ignore this.  Joe Biden misrepresented his own academic record and I mocked him unmercifully for it.  Why would O’Donnell deserve different treatment?

    Patterico (6dc05f)

  50. A.W. – I did not fake my LinkedIn Profile or the information contained in it. The people I have directly linked with, for which permission is required, obviously know this since we are acquainted.

    With O’Donnell’s page down, the 84 people with whom she linked cannot be verified or asked when they were invited to link with the page.

    daleyrocks (940075)

  51. Mean while loser, how is Christine O’Donnell going to vote when she gets elected versus Coons? While you are wasting your time and everyone else’s looking for some fraud, ODonnell will have closed in another 5 points no thanks to you. Not helping anyone but yourself.

    michael evans (ac4f78)

  52. how is Christine O’Donnell going to vote when she gets elected versus Coons?

    With all due respect, can you find me some info about this on her site? I don’t think the ‘Why Christine?’ section is adequate.

    To be honest, I’ve paid a lot of attention to her, watched her debate Coons, and as far as I can tell, she’s simply a ‘party of no’ type, refusing to support dumb ideas. I’m very happy with that stance, but I also realize there are many temptations in DC. O’Donnell is on notice that she must resist those temptations, or some people will point out when she falters.

    no thanks to you.

    That’s what you say, Michael, but I feel the same way. O’donnell and other reform candidates do not feel much pressure to stay honest from the likes of you.

    Dustin (b54cdc)

  53. The Hillary Clinton link stated that she did her final thesis on Saul Alinsky.

    Verrrrry interesting.

    Rew (a5deca)

  54. “Not helping anyone but yourself.”

    michael evans – More cheetos for you. Shut up, you big fecal head. Heh.

    daleyrocks (940075)

  55. Patrick, I can’t speak for others, but I’ve never been terribly impressed with the plagiarism and education charges against Biden. They’ve always struck me as largely overblown and hyper-technical, much as it appears to me that your continuing criticisms of O’Donnell are. In fact, I’ve generally felt that trying to turn minor indiscretions (at most) such as Biden’s probably cribbing from some Kinnock speeches becomes a real distraction from highlighting the REAL problems of Joe Biden, namely that he’s a complete idiot.

    As I said, I don’t have a terribly high opinion of Christine O’Donnell. I thought Delaware Republicans should have supported Mike Castle. But they didn’t, and no matter her faults, I’d much rather have a Senator O’Donnell than a Senator Coons. So no, I don’t see much point in joining the media throngs trying to attack her right now. I’d rather devote my energy into: 1) careful scrutiny of Coons’ background and positions, and 2) supporting O’Donnell in areas where she can be supported, such as by opposing Bill Maher’s 2-bit blackmail attempts to get her to come on his show.

    I’ve not been impressed with RedState.com for some time, but this past week I was very impressed with Eric Erickson’s conduct. He wrote a solid, conservative critique of the GOP’s Pledge. That was right and appropriate, as there was plenty of room to criticize it from a conservative stand-point. Then he started to get lots of offers from TV stations to come on the air to talk about those criticisms. TV stations that never wanted to hear from him to criticize the Obama/Reid/Pelosi agenda. So he’s declined most of the interviews rather than allow himself to be used for the media’s ends of harming conservative candidates.

    This doesn’t mean we should whitewash all allegations against conservative candidates. Certainly not, we should strive to hold our candidates to a higher standard. That’s why I thought it was very appropriate, in the primary, to point out O’Donnell’s potential personal flaws. But we also need to get conservatives elected and, perhaps more importantly, keep hard-core liberals out of office, and there comes a time when we need to focus on that.

    It’s not a matter of covering up anything, but of choosing our focus.

    PatHMV (140f2a)

  56. Daley

    well it is clear that both sites need to be more transparent.

    i am right now running an experiment on them. i created two obviously fake names. they said it might take up to 3 days to appear. so let’s see if this is marked user verified.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  57. 1) careful scrutiny of Coons’ background and position

    Yes, PatHMV, that would be awesome. It’s clear that brushing him aside as a marxist is not effective because Delaware has rejected that point (for good reason).

    But what does Coons believe? His jobs plan is actually pretty stupid. He claims O’Donnell’s jobs plan (get out of the way) is no plan at all, which is also pretty stupid of Coons. He claims he’s for balancing the budget. That’s a bold claim for someone who wants to legislate as a democrat in the US Senate. How does he articulate how to get there? As far as I can tell, he just says he did so in a small county (large for Delaware, but tiny anyway).

    If Stubbornfacts ran some analysis of this, I’d read it and I’d hope it got a lot of links.

    Dustin (b54cdc)

  58. Dustin: “With all due respect, can you find me some info about [how O’Donnell is going to vote]?”
    “I will always vote in favor of life.”
    Pledges to vote against all earmarks & pork barrel spending. (Aug 2006)
    Demand a Balanced Budget amendment. (Jul 2010)
    Limit federal spending growth to per-capita inflation rate. (Jul 2010)
    Pledge of Allegiance should include “Under God”. (Aug 2010)
    Increase oil refinery capacity; drill offshore for oil. (Aug 2008)
    Build more oil refineries to reduce gas prices. (Aug 2008)
    Explore proven energy reserves & keep energy prices low. (Jul 2010)
    No global taxes to the UN. (Aug 2008)
    Identify constitutionality in every new congressional bill. (Jul 2010)
    Audit federal agencies, to reform or eliminate them. (Jul 2010)
    Moratorium on all earmarks until budget is balanced. (Jul 2010)
    Strong support of 2nd Amendment rights. (Aug 2010)
    Defund, repeal, & replace federal health care with free market. (Jul 2010)
    Don’t grant terrorists precious Constitutional rights. (Aug 2010)
    Employer penalties for hiring illegal aliens. (Aug 2008)
    Make English America’s ONE official language. (Aug 2008)
    “I will never vote to increase taxes.” (May 2008)
    Adopt a single-rate tax system. (Jul 2010)
    Repeal tax hikes in capital gains and death taxes. (Jul 2010)
    Strategy to bring troops home from Iraq: it’s called victory. (Aug 2008)
    Consider military action against Iran. (Sep 2006)
    Stay in Iraq until its government is stable. (Sep 2006)

    Icy Texan (cc5e5e)

  59. Doing the work that Daily Kos won’t do? Well good luck there Patterico with whatever it is you think you are doing. You have been an extreme disappointment! I certainly hope the Marxist doesn’t pass the crap and tax as Harry Reids pet in the next Congress, well we know he will and really Reid and the gang can all thank the holier then thou right of center bloggers for all their hard work at keeping a lame story moving.

    JadedByPolitics (5ecbe6)

  60. I love every single one of the positions Icy Texan has quoted.

    Dustin (b54cdc)

  61. What state is this again?

    Last I checked we’re supposed to be having a Senate race, which is pretty damned important to the future of America, and it’s a real nail biter too!
    But the two girls in it are named Barbie and Carly.

    No Christine on the ballot.

    papertiger (b91fb3)

  62. I admit to not getting it. Why is it that you wanted Castle ( you know. .the democrat in Rino clothing) to win so badly you are to the point of obsession about this?

    Noelie (257d26)

  63. Noelie, I agree, you don’t get it. If you think this is loyalty to Castle, you need to back that up. It seems some people really are obsessed with bashing him, continuously, for no apparent reason.

    He’s done. Forget about him. People talking about the issues are not trying to do Castle some favor.

    Compared to simple scrutiny of this matter, it’s a lot more damaging to O’Donnell’s cause to bash many Delaware Republicans who supported Castle. Why bother with that? Is it because it’s more important to cut O’Donnell’s support base to the most pure, than to appeal to moderates?

    When you say you don’t get it, and then insist on some crazy conspiracy of anger, you come across as impossible to work with.

    Dustin (b54cdc)

  64. “Mean while loser, how is Christine O’Donnell going to vote when she gets elected…”

    Who can say for sure?

    My best GUESSES are…

    1.) She has little chance of winning the election.

    2.) If she ever does manage to win an election, her sole criteria in carrying out her duties will be: What’s in it for Christine O’Donnell?

    Dave Surls (f8819a)

  65. In the meanwhile, with our state rollerskating on glacier ice toward a cliff, we have pat here bent on doing oppo research against a Republican who already won her primary in a State so far away, nobody who lives there even visits his blog.

    Buy a clue man.

    So anybody wondering how many illegals Carly has/had on the domestic payroll for the Fiorina household?
    Rich girl like her. She needs to get out ahead of this.
    Has anybody ever inquired?

    And what about “don’t you dare call me Ma’am” Boxer?
    How many illegals do you think she has working on the Boxer Plantation. Only had sixteen years to investigate, and I’ll betcha any damn thing you want to bet nobody asked the question.

    papertiger (b91fb3)

  66. papertiger is asserting that this is a California-specific blog.
    I guess it’s time for all of us undocumented types to vamoose!
    But where will JD, Aaron, DRJ -et al- and myself go?
    Oh wait, here’s a place . . . “bradblog”. Sounds nice. I’m gonna check it out. Y’all come looking for me if you don’t hear from me soon.
    [Hey, there’s a familiar name! How are ya doing, Hooten? My, what a mighty sadistic grin you have there –]

    Icy Texan (cc5e5e)

  67. I hear a lot of Murlowski followers also insist people like me stay out of alaska’s business.

    Screw that. Some of these states screw the entire country with their policies. These Senators don’t really represent their states anyway. They represent their political parties. I have an interest in Delaware’s Senator being honest, conservative, and competent.

    I suppose papertiger is from Delaware? Does he have complaints about my Senator Cornyn? It’s so far away from Delaware.

    I don’t really get the point papertiger is making about Fiorina’s maid. Can someone explain it to me? O’Donnell’s problems are not invented from thin air, and they are pressing problems for her campaign.

    Dustin (b54cdc)

  68. The Zoominfo has a wall’o’text, in third person, and another odd professional photograph.

    The wall of text MIGHT be believable if it looked like a bio someone would type up in their word processor and toss online, but someone who doesn’t bother to put in paragraphs isn’t likely to spend time on a picture unless there’s no other way.

    (I just checked– you can put in paragraph breaks. In three days, my online pseudonym will have a user verified page. With Jenny’s phone number.{867-5309})

    It “corrected” my job title in the Navy to AT2 from AT2/Cal Tech, so it does have an auto-correct mode.

    Foxfier (24dddb)

  69. And I just claimed George Washington, President of 123ABC@example.com (a web generated profile) using an @icqmail.com address.

    Not going to complete that one…..

    Foxfier (24dddb)

  70. Patrick, I can’t speak for others, but I’ve never been terribly impressed with the plagiarism and education charges against Biden. They’ve always struck me as largely overblown and hyper-technical, much as it appears to me that your continuing criticisms of O’Donnell are.

    I’ve heard people say that about the plagiarism charges. I think the claims regarding his academic record are anything but overblown. He flat out lied.

    As I said, I don’t have a terribly high opinion of Christine O’Donnell. I thought Delaware Republicans should have supported Mike Castle. But they didn’t, and no matter her faults, I’d much rather have a Senator O’Donnell than a Senator Coons. So no, I don’t see much point in joining the media throngs trying to attack her right now. I’d rather devote my energy . . .

    Devote your energy to anything you feel like devoting it to. Me, I get a bee in my bonnet about weasels. And if O’Donnell is a weasel, I will not support her even though she is not an axe murderer. So you and I just don’t see eye to eye on this.

    A little surprising, but it happens.

    Patterico (c218bd)

  71. Somebody needs to go look for Icy Texan.

    DRJ (d43dcd)

  72. East of the Sierra, I don’t get a vote.

    And if this isn’t a California specific blog then it will have to do until the uber-class allows one to be invented.
    There are a thousand bad things going on here that need attention and you want to waste time on one person that might be a weasel?
    How about Villaragosa – isn’t he weasely enough for you?
    How about Gavin Newsome – could there be a more oily character running for Lt Governor?

    You could pick any of a thousand weasels whose election will be more impactful directly on your mortgage, your kids lives, your job.

    And besides, Christine O’Donnell just by winning a primary has already born such positive fruits as this;
    Maine’s Olympia Snowe Courts Tea Party in anticipation of 2012.

    A weasel’s primary function.

    papertiger (a71a7f)

  73. I just spent some timeless time in the strangest place with the weirdest creatures. What an experience! In this alternate world everything I know to be true was wrong. It sure made for some head-scratchin’, I tells ya. And while I’m not sure how long I was there, for some reason everything that happened seemed to sync up with “Dark Side of the Moon”. Very strange, indeed.

    As for my guide — well — if only he had a brain . . .

    Icy Texan (cc5e5e)

  74. This from O’Donnell’s Tutor at Oxford:

    Friday, October 1, 2010Christine O’Donnell at Oxford: some notes from summer 2001
    In the summer of 2001, I was a doctoral student in classics at the University of Oxford, and looking for summer employment. I signed on with a group called the Phoenix Institute to do a tutorial at Oxford on postmodernism and natural law.

    This was my second summer with the Phoenix Institute. The Phoenix Institute was a group of Jedi academics; rebels and renegades against the evil empire of politically correct university life. Their summer school at Oxford ran three weeks, and was intended to give intellectual alternatives to the philosophical morass of postmodern moral relativism.

    Although we were never an Oxford University course, we drew heavily on the faculties of Oxford and Cambridge for our lectures. The organizers had put together a star-studded cast of lecturers, and partly as a result we drew students from Latin America, the US, and Europe.

    My role was to run the tutorials: these were modeled on the Oxford tutorial system, and were designed to give an intense analysis of the lectures, the readings, and the students’ papers. The students were broken down into groups of four for a weekly one-hour tutorial with me. The basic text that summer was C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1944), his classic case for the importance of natural law in ethics. In addition, the students were assigned 25-50 pages of readings for each of the nearly daily lectures.

    I required the papers to be written in disputatio format. This format demands that you furnish the three best reasons against your case before you are allowed to set forth your reasons for your case. So, for example, if you wanted to argue for communism, you needed to give the three best reasons in defense of capitalism before you could make your case for the merits of Marxism. If, on the contrary, you wanted to argue in favor of free markets, you needed to set forth the best three arguments you could find in favor of Marxism before you put forth your case for capitalism.

    The purpose of the disputatio format was to enforce intellectual honesty, to enhance critical thinking skills in the writing of papers. The students had to think seriously about the other point of view before setting forth their own. Then and now, I self-identified philosophically as a Thomist and politically as a neoconservative. But as a teacher, I didn’t do indoctrination. The point of the tutorials was to help the students learn to think.

    The first tutorial was nearly always a something of a shock for the students. Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago put it brilliantly:

    There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2+2=4….The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society.(The Closing of the American Mind, 1985)

    Exactly. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man was a frontal assualt on moral relativism, and the students were not quite sure what to make of it. The opening chapter is a critique of emotivism, a theory of ethics then somewhat in vogue at Oxford under the influence of analytical philosophy. Lewis went after this with some gusto: “It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals…Their heads are no bigger than ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”

    For Lewis it was one of the central problems of relativism that it was normally only directed at other people’s values: relativists usually “will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the two wars.” After going through some of these values in detail, Lewis wrote: ” It will be seen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street in peace-time, are the ultimate values: those things which can alone produce or spiritualize comfort are mocked. Man lives by bread alone and the ultimate source of bread is the baker’s van: peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers.”

    During the summer of 2001, we worked through key aspects of natural law theory from a variety of perspectives. The final exam contained two questions: 1. agree or disagree with the view of natural law expressed in Sophocles’ Antigone using a disputatio format; 2. agree or disagree with Thomas Jefferson’s quotation from 1782: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?”–again using a disputatio format.

    Christine O’Donnell was a joy to have in the tutorials: intelligent, engaged, dynamic, good with questions and interested in ideas. Her paper on cloning was one of the two best papers written for me that summer. She successfully completed a rigorous, intellectually demanding course that was the equivalent of a course in the humanities at any graduate school at any university. As a result, I was happy to write recommendations for her for future graduate study.

    The course we did that summer in Oxford is nearly a decade old, but the basic issues we addressed are eternal. Today, too many of the Republic’s leaders have abandoned the natural law tradition of the Declaration of Independence for a murky moral relativism–a relativism that is both destructive of democratic values and philosophically bankrupt. Christine O’Donnell would bring to the US Senate a deepened commitment to the philosophical convictions of the Founding Fathers at a time when the philosophical bankruptcy of too many leaders is mirrored in the economic bankruptcy of the federal government. She would surely add intellectual and philosophical depth to a Senate that at this point in its history badly needs both. http://presidentaristotle2010.blogspot.com/2010/09/christine-odonnell-at-oxford-some-notes.html

    davod (bce08f)

  75. online resume is really needed specially if you want to apply for IT jobs on the internet “`-

    Sodium Ascorbate (74105f)


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