The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : The Not So Smoking Gun

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Mary Katherine Ham has great post exposing the dishonest attempt by MSNBC, the DNC, and Think Progress to use a memo written by the leader of an obscure grassroots organization to create the impression of a highly-orchestrated national campaign to disrupt town hall meetings.

She writes:

Right Principles PAC was formed by Bob MacGuffie and four friends in 2008, and has taken in a whopping $5,017 and disbursed $1,777, according to its FEC filing.

"We're just trying to shake this state up and make a difference up here," MacGuffie told me during a telephone interview. He's surprised at his elevation to national rabble-rouser by the Left.

Right Principles has a Facebook group with 23 members and a Twitter account with five followers. MacGuffie describes himself as an "opponent of leftist thinking in America," and told me he's "never pulled a lever" for a Republican or Democrat on a federal level. Yet this Connecticut libertarian's influence over a national, orchestrated Republican health-care push-back is strong, indeed, if you listen to liberal pundits and the Democratic National Committee, who have crafted a nefarious web out of refutable evidence.

Think Progress highlighted his memo's directives to "‘Yell,’ ‘Stand Up And Shout Out,’ ‘Rattle Him’," calling it a "right-wing harassment strategy against Dems." The blog falsely connected MacGuffie to the national conservative group FreedomWorks through the most tenuous of threads. The Think Progress link that purports to establish MacGuffie as a FreedomWorks "volunteer" leads to his one blog posting on a Tea Party website (on the free social networking site, ning.com). Think Progress calls Tea Party Patriots a "FreedomWorks website."

The problem is it's not a FreedomWorks site, according to FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon. FreedomWorks is a "coalition partner" of TeaPartyPatriots.org, but does not fund the site in any way.

The whole thing is well worth a read.

sfsa| 8.6.09 @ 5:01AM

The day that cmc audio rca H1N1Upper East Siders have wbt audio rcabeen waiting for has finally arrived: Hilary Duff has reported to the set to begin shooting her role on "Gossip Girl"!audio rca

wbt binding postsYou'll recall that when Season 2 ended, it was graduation time and most of the show's main characters were headed off to college. That's where Duff comes in. The actress/singer plays Olivia Burke, a famous movie star (what a stretch) who attends New York University in hopes of enjoying a traditional college experience.
wbt rca
It's there at NYU that she'll become roomies with Vanessa (Jessica Szohr) and get close to Dan (Penn Badgley), Vanessa's BFF. (Check out how she's looking at him in these photos!)
wbt rca type sockets
What will wbt rca type plugsDan's ex, Serena (Blake Lively) -- who went off to Brown University -- say? Will Vanessa approve? It's not clear yet exactly what's going to happen, but you can be sure there's gonna be plenty of drama worth texting to Gossip Girl!cmc

Tim| 8.6.09 @ 9:36AM

According to the Soviet terminology, the peasantry was divided into three broad categories: bednyaks, or poor peasants, seredniaks, or mid-income peasants, and kulaks, the higher-income well-endowed farmers who were presumably more successful, efficient farmers and had larger farms than most Russians peasants. In addition, there was a category of batraks, or landless seasonal agriculture workers for hire.[1]

After the Russian Revolution, Bolsheviks considered only batraks and bednyaks as true allies of the Soviets and proletariat. Serednyaks were considered unreliable, "hesitating" allies, and kulaks were seen as class enemies because they owned land and were independent economically. However, often those declared to be kulaks were not especially prosperous. The average value of goods confiscated from kulaks during the policy of "dekulakization" (раскулачивание) at the beginning of the 1930s was only $90-$210 (170-400 rubles) per household.[1] Both peasants and Soviet officials were often uncertain as to what constituted a kulak, and the term was often used to label anyone who had more property than was considered "normal" according to subjective criteria. At first, being a kulak carried no penalty other than mistrust from the Soviet authorities. During the height of collectivization, however, people identified as kulaks were subjected to deportation and extrajudicial punishment, and those people were often killed.[2][3][4]

In May 1929 the Sovnarkom issued a decree that formalised the notion of "kulak household" (кулацкое хозяйство). Any of the following characteristics defined a kulak:[1][5]

use of hired labour;
ownership of a mill, a creamery (маслобойня, butter-making rig), other processing equipment, or a complex machine with a mechanical motor;
systematic renting out of agricultural equipment or facilities;
involvement in trade, money-lending, commercial brokerage, or "other sources of non-labour income".
By the last item, any peasant who sold his surplus on the market could be automatically classified as a kulak. In 1930 this list was extended to include those who were renting industrial plants, e.g., sawmills, or who rented land to other farmers. Grigory Zinoviev, a well-known Soviet politician, said in 1924, "We are fond of describing any peasant who has enough to eat as a kulak." At the same time, ispolkoms (executive committees of local Soviets) of republics, oblasts, and krais were given rights to add other criteria, depending on local conditions.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulaks

コピーブランド| 8.6.09 @ 10:31PM

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