Patterico's Pontifications

6/8/2011

LGF Is Actually Hallucinating On #Weinergate

Filed under: General — Stranahan @ 10:18 pm



[Guest Post by Lee Stranahan]

Another lie from Little Green Footballs – h/t to @marcoesquondola

also LGF says he left his "laptop" with the pic on it unattended..i listen to O&A every day and it was his ipad and pic wasn’t on

Here’s what Charles Jonson accused Breitbart of …

In fact, two nights ago, Andrew Breitbart went out drinking with Anthony and several others — and according to Anthony, showed the picture to numerous people, even leaving his laptop computer unattended with the picture on the screen for long periods of time.

One of those people was right wing flamethrower Ann Coulter. Here’s Anthony’s photo of Coulter reacting to the picture; notice that his computer is apparently there, but Breitbart is nowhere to be seen.

Breitbart owns a Mac Air, an iPad and an iPhone Blackberry. Look at the picture – that’s no Apple product.

lgf-lie3

And LizBuddie thinks it might not even be a computer.

That’s doesn’t look like a PC to me. Looks like a restaurant sign/stand, like the kind that hold menus.

And it seems Coulter is laughing at something she’s been told. Right? Not a picture on the imaginary Breitbart computer.

Chuck sees what he wants to see – maybe that’s where the little green footballs name comes from.

UPDATE: It’s a sign – here’s Google Street View

oiz-stand

But Charles – a ‘Mac junkie – won’t correct the obvious error.

liz-no

– Lee Stranahan

Little Green Liar Selectively Edits Breitbart

Filed under: General — Stranahan @ 9:48 pm



[Guest Post by Lee Stranahan]

Chuckles at Little Green Footballs is so desperate to recover from the fact that he was totally wrong about #Weinergate that he’s taken a frantic straw grasp to find SOME way to call Breitbart’s accuracy a HOAX.

I get it. But this is too pathetic for words. Chuckles wants to find a lie in Andrew Breitbart’s statement about the Opie and Anthony leak of the XXX Weiner photo. So he says that…

1) Breitbart CLAIMS that he’s only going to show the photo to news producers…
2) Andrew showed to people like Ann Coulter
3) Ann is NOT a news producer
– Q.E.D.– Breitbart is a LIAR

Quoting Chuck…

There are at least two big lies in this statement. First:

…it was necessary to show the pictures I had received from our source to several news producers, including several at major news networks, to prove that the additional material I described really did exist, which some have continued to doubt.

In fact, two nights ago, Andrew Breitbart went out drinking with Anthony and several others — and according to Anthony, showed the picture to numerous people, even leaving his laptop computer unattended with the picture on the screen for long periods of time.

One of those people was right wing flamethrower Ann Coulter.

Here’s a screen capture – watch those ellipses!

LFG-lie1

For Breitbart to be a LIAR! he’d have to saying that he had a policy of only showing the photos to news producers – so why show it to Ann or Opie or even Anthony? They aren’t news producers!

Oh wait! Chuckles did some selective editing. Here’s the whole quote…

Prior to the publication of our story on BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com this past Monday morning, it was necessary to show the pictures I had received from our source to several news producers, including several at major news networks, to prove that the additional material I described really did exist, which some have continued to doubt.

Oh, wait – that’s not a policy. That’s explaining what happened before the story even broken.

A screencap…

LFG-lie2

Selective editing, Chuck! Breitbart never said he was only showing it to news producers. He could show it to anyone he wants. But he’s shown it to some people. Not a mass audience, like Gawker or TMZ would. A  small group.And they laugh because it’s FUNNY!

Congressman lies to everyone for a week, blames a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy” – and there he is with his pecker out. Funny!

No lie, Chuck. Well, except the one you told.

– Lee Stranahan

Wisconsin Protesters Winning Friends and Influencing People…

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 6:55 pm



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

…by protesting at a Special Olympics event.

Via Althouse who amazingly didn’t show up at the event to scold them, and thus she had to scold them from afar.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

Against All Odds, the Weiner Saga Gets Worse (and Better) (Update: A Fourth/Fifth Woman and Two Female Perspectives on the Weiss Transcript) (Further Update: Sexting One Month After Wedding?!) (Further Update: Cordova Speaks, Withholds Evidence)

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 2:38 pm



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: Ace points out that the new woman was apparently being tweeted around a month after he got married. Un-fraking-believable. Was he sexting during the honeymoon, too?

Update: Gennette Cordova talks to the NY Times, proclaiming how innocent her exchange was and gosh that Weinerpic just came out of the blue! But there is really only one line you need to read in that piece.

Ms. Cordova provided a portion of her communications with Mr. Weiner to The Times, in which they messaged back and forth about the online detractors and their tactics. But Ms. Cordova would not make all of her interaction with him available for review.

“I have not sent him any suggestive messages,” Ms. Cordova said.

(emphasis added.)

The original post follows.

——————————-

All throughout this I kept thinking, “well, thank God he doesn’t have any children.”  It’s tough enough on the kids to have daddy cheating on mommy, but for it all to be a national punchline…?  Oy vey.  And I honestly thought it would make it easier for her to leave him, since he was obviously not particularly interested in honoring his wedding vows.

And well, that isn’t going to be true much longer.  The New York Times reports that Huma Abedin is pregnant:

Ms. Abedin, 35, is in the early stages of pregnancy, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.

The pregnancy, which the couple has disclosed to close friends and family, adds a new dimension to questions about the future of their marriage.

Yeah, no kidding.

Of course we should rejoice in every life brought into this earth, but what is this child going to face, now.  If there is any silver lining (besides the miracle of life itself) it is that maybe it will make Weiner finally take his marriage and his wedding vows seriously.  Maybe he will rise to the occasion.  We can hope.

And we can hope for the health of their unborn child and that the child doesn’t get too much crud about what daddy did.

Update: And just breaking tonight, a fourth woman.  Or a fifth, if like me you don’t believe Gennette Cordova’s denials.  This time this person was outted against her will:

if it were up to Traci Nobles of Athens, Ga., her contact with Weiner would have stayed a secret.

“I really regret that this was sent to you,” Nobles told the Las Vegas Sun, after confirming that an unnamed roommate went into her Facebook account, which had been inadvertently left open, and emailed the Sun a screen shot of a private conversation between Weiner and Nobles that appears to date from August. “She thought someone should know,” Nobles said.

Given the extent of the congressman’s flirtatious speech and physical details that have been made public, there’s little from the brief excerpt of the Nobles-Weiner conversation that could shock us. The bit of the conversation that was made available to the Sun shows the two exchanging terms of endearment such as “sexy” and “sugar” and arranging some sort of meeting for the next day — although it’s not clear from what’s presented whether it’s a meeting that was to take place online or in person.

And of course she fits the pattern of being a woman who publicly lusted for him:

Despite her reticence to reveal her private contact with Weiner, she’s not been shy about sharing her affection for the congressman publicly in the past.

She’s posted suggestive messages on his public campaign site several times, requesting right after the midterm elections to sit in Weiner’s lap, with an accompanying phallic joke, and encouraging him on more than one occasion to conduct his official business — especially if it would be broadcast on television — in the buff.

Nobles wouldn’t share any more of the exchange she had with Weiner after several requests. She and Weiner are Facebook friends.

So for now we aren’t likely to hear more.

On a tangentially related note, there are two women who offered interesting analysis of the now-infamous transcript with Lisa Weiss.  The first is Kiri Blakeley who captures exactly my thinking when reading it: that it as much about stroking his ego as anything else.  Meanwhile ex-girlfriend Kirsten Powers writes at the Daily Beast as a woman furious at him for lying to her:

This is my general view of sex scandals. But there is lying and then there is what Weiner did.  Due to nonstop meetings, I had not had time to watch his media blitz prior to my Greta interview and was slack-jawed when I saw clips of him the next day sneering and pointing fingers at other people for what he knew he had done. I am of the general view that politicians are not the most honest group of people, but, even using that very low standard, what I saw in those interviews was deeply disturbing. There is no way anyone can ever believe anything Weiner says again after that. In fact, I highly doubt that what he said in his press conference is even true.

Narcissism doesn’t begin to describe this kind of behavior. It seems there was nobody he didn’t lie to. The New York Times reported this morning that he told donors a week ago that the scandal was the result of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” and that “everything [would] be fine.”  We also learned after his press conference that he coached a former porn star with whom he had communicated online on how to lie to the media.

And then she really unloads on him.  I will put this below the fold because it is quoting from that transcript and it gets pretty raw:

(more…)

Eleventh Circuit Skeptical of Obamacare? (Update: Listen Now!)

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 12:38 pm



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: Listen now, here. (thanks @gabrielmalor)

Update (II): Ilya Shapiro shares his thoughts on the argument, here.

One should only be cautiously optimistic here.  We have two Democratic appointees (although one was originally appointed to the District Court by Reagan) and one Republican, and reading the tea leaves in oral argument is tough.  But this is still pretty encouraging:

Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal faced off against former Bush administration Solicitor General Paul Clement in what has become the largest and broadest challenge to the healthcare law. In all, 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business joined in urging the judges to strike down the law.

And in an ominous sign for the administration, the judges opened the arguments by saying they knew of no case in American history where the courts had upheld the government’s power to force someone to buy a product.

That argument is at the heart of the constitutional challenge to the healthcare law and its mandate that nearly all Americans have health insurance by 2014.

“I can’t find any case like this,” said Chief Judge Joel Dubina of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. “If we uphold this, are there any limits” on the power of the federal government? he asked.

Judge Stanley Marcus appeared to agree. “I can’t find any case” in the past where the courts upheld “telling a private person they are compelled to purchase a product in the open market…. Is there anything that suggests Congress can do this?”

So that is two skeptics, maybe.  And then there is the third judge:

Judge Frank Hull, the third member of the panel, repeatedly asked the lawyers about the possible effect of the court striking down the mandate, while upholding the rest of the law. She said the government had exaggerated the importance of the mandate. It will affect about 10 million persons at most, not the roughly 50 million who are uninsured now. She said the other parts of the law will extend insurance to tens of millions of persons.

So Hull seems to think the question is about whether the mandate is severable, not whether it can be upheld.  (For a discussion on the doctrine of severability, go here as a starting point.)  Interesting…

Now I should caution you that every lawyer has had the experience of leaving the court with signals that positive and still lost.  But this oral argument seems to have gone well.

Also I read somewhere they are going to air it tonight on Tv.  I will try to find video if and when that happens.  It should be interesting.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

Breaking: The X-Rated Picture Has Been Leaked (Update: Breitbart Violated the Flounder Principle) (Further Update: Opie Says He Accidentally Did What He Tried To Do)

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 10:40 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: In twitter, Opie explains how he got it.  Jump to the end for details.

Update (III): Breitbart talks to Fox News about it:

“I’m mortified,” Breitbart told Fox News.

The image of what are said to be Weiner’s genitals was posted online after Breitbart appeared on the satellite radio show of shock jocks Opie and Anthony Wednesday.

Breitbart said that while he was in the studio, Opie — real name, Gregg Hughes — snapped a photo of the graphic image “without my permission.” Breitbart said he’s shown the image to other members of the media as proof of his claims, but until now nobody has made that image public.

“This is the first time that someone surreptitiously grabbed a photo of it. This is a complete breach of our arrangement that the photo would not be made public,” Breitbart told Fox News. “It was a complete violation of trust.”

Breitbart claimed Opie’s co-host Anthony Cumia will issue a statement saying he’s “horrified” by the development.

Maybe Cumia will claim to be horrified, but then how does he explain this?

That is a screencap of a tweet he sent, with the address of the pic blocked out.  It’s not hard to find, but I am not posting a link here.

That all being said, I think Breitbart violated the Flounder principle.

He screwed up.  He trusted them.

Update (IV): You can read Breitbart’s statement, here. Its about what I understood it as. Breitbart asserts he didn’t know they were taking that pic. Still, he violated the Flounder Principle.

Update (V): At Mediaite Opie tries to make an apology that sounds sincere. This is his version. Opie tried to take a pic of it, Anthony stopped him because of his conscience. But little did they know it was going out anyway because the live feed camera captured it. An audience member saw it, captured it and sent it to them and then they felt the overwhelming need to tweet it themselves.

Eh, probably close to the truth, but I am underwhelmed with that defense.

We now resume our original post.

—————————–

Now this is just breaking but  the masters of taste (note: sarcasm), Opie and Anthony, have released a picture of a cell phone with the infamous previously unreleased photograph of Congressman Weiner’s um…  pelvic area.  My prediction on what the content was pretty close.  My only question was whether we would see Weiner’s face in it, and no, we don’t.  So technically we can’t be sure it is him in the picture.

Now, you might reasonably wonder if it is really the picture Breitbart had.  Ace says he heard through the grapevine that the pic is not really the one Breitbart was holding back.  But this is a rare case of me actually having a source myself, and yes, this is the pic Breitbart had but wasn’t releasing (intentionally).  I want to be very precise here.  My source (and I trust this person) says this is one of the pics that Meagan Broussard gave to Breitbart asserting that it was of the Congressman.

Mediaite has one version of the story:

What we can only assume is the worst couple weeks of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s life continues.Andrew Breitbart appeared on The Opie and Anthony Show on Sirius Radio this morning as the latest stop on his “I Told You So” Tour and showed the hosts, Anthony Cumia and Gregg “Opie” Hughes a picture that he said he wouldn’t release; a fully uncensored photo that purports to be of Weiner’s genitals. Breitbart showed the picture on his cell phone which he passed around. Unsurprisingly, the hosts quickly snapped a shot of the screen and tweeted the image out to numerous news outlets.

There hasn’t been any reaction from Congressman Weiner, or Breitbart.  My spider sense tells me that Breitbart is going to be pissed, too, because I think he genuinely felt that since Weiner ‘fessed up it wasn’t necessary to show it.

And for true ridiculousness, Mediaite shows us the picture.  Now if I had the real, graphic picture, I wouldn’t show it to you.  I don’t think Patrick wants his blog to be like that and I don’t want to be like that.  But I feel comfortable showing you the Mediaite pic because as you are about to see, you don’t really see anything.  And that fact makes it kind of worth talking about:

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Weird… Fast Eddie Schultz is Making Sense (Update: Against All Odds, the Clinton Angle Gets Weirder)

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 7:00 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: Okay, this is weird. Apparently Weiner has apologized to… Bill Clinton? You know because he officiated at their wedding and all…

Rep. Anthony Weiner explained himself and apologized for his conduct to Bill Clinton, who officiated his wedding to wife Huma Abedin, sources familiar with the call said.

Yeah, you know because when Bill Clinton is involved in a marriage, he expects the parties to be faithful…

The original post follows.

—————————-

First, I find myself mostly agreeing with Ed calling for Weiner to resign:

And then he tells his guests they are delusional:

Yes, that would make him the most rational and intellectually person at MSBNC.  Weird.

Also, I noted a a few other highlights in the second clip.  First, did Ed suggest that they still weren’t sure if there was a hack or not?  You know, his statement was so off-the-cuff and contradictory with the rest of it, I will assume that was a misstatement.

Second, Bill Press says that Weiner’s conduct was unacceptable but shouldn’t resign.  Funny, in’t just letting him go without even asking him to resign, accepting it?  Seriously, when was the last time a liberal politico said something was “unacceptable” and then advocated doing something about it?

Third, and isn’t it funny to see these liberals struggle to understand why it mattered?  This man has been married less than a year.  Did he even take a hiatus from his sexting for his honeymoon?  A man who cheats like this in the very first year of his marriage, never meant it when he swore to forsake all others, and to be faithful to her.  Ah, but then again, maybe the officiant at their ceremony omitted those words.

(more…)

“Don’t be so Jewish about it;” You MUST Watch These Daily Show Clips

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 5:59 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

I am the kind of person whose favorite moments on Saturday Night Live is when something goes wrong, especially if the actors/actresses start laughing despite themselves.

Probably on paper last night’s opening bit on The Daily Show was already pretty damn funny, as Jon Stewart pretends to resign for his failure to take full advantage of #Weinergate.  But then in the middle of a gag about making various alcoholic drinks to get him through the conference Stewart apparently pretty badly injures himself—as in a cut that might even need stitches.  And in an admirable act of professionalism, the bit goes on.

They should have simply made it one epic clip like Mediaite did, but instead they divided it up into bits.  So here is the fake press conference, part 1:

And that part is frankly just the warm up. Then John Oliver gets up on the podium and announces he is the new host and in the middle of that it starts to become clear that Stewart is really hurt and bleeding pretty significantly, leading Oliver to crack the joke quoted in the title. (And isn’t it awesome that these people are such good friends that Oliver can say that, and Stewart would just think it was funny–knowing Oliver didn’t mean anything by it?)

Now originally when writing this post, I planned to post the remaining clips but, frankly, that clip and the clip after it just isn’t loading for me. I am not sure if it is a technical glitch or if lots and lots of people are looking at these clips, jamming up their system. So you can either use the Mediaite link I mentioned above, or follow this link to the full episode, but either way you owe it to yourself to watch the whole thing, all nine minutes or so of it.

But in the later case, I must warn you, they show a pixelated image of Bret Favre’s junk in the second segment.

I will try to find an embeddable clip as the day goes on. So far my “mad Google skillz” have turned up nothing.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]


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