If you’ve been around the internets very long, you’ll be familiar with the content producer’s dilemma. We produce, put the stuff on the web, everyone enjoys it and, uhh… every now and again, we have to ask you to kick in a few dollars so that we can keep doing the work.

Now it’s my turn.

I’ve been doing this for about six months now and while many days come and go without anything particularly noteworthy happening, every now and then I do have a moment where, I think, I’m doing really good movement work. Whether it’s the birther videos, or asking Republicans how they justify voting against the Al Franken anti-rape amendment, exposing David Vitter’s racism, or demonstrating that even after six months of debate, republicans still couldn’t tell me how many of their constituents were uninsured, or holding Andy Breitbart accountable, or chatting with Trent Franks and dredging up some ugly primordial race issues…

Well, the point I’m trying to make is that you have a reporter getting up every day, trekking to the Hill and generating primary reports from a perspective that is all but dead on the Hill – that of a progressive. My intent isn’t to pat myself on the back, and god knows there are a lot of progressive reporters in DC that are more talented than I am, but… None of them are doing what I’m doing in terms of staking out the Hill and conducting video interviews using questions derived from the populist progressive base.

Anyway, I’ve probably already overcooked this goose. If you like what you see here, please drop some coin in the paypal sidebar widget

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or email me for a snail-mail address, mstark_at_starkreports_dot_com.

Thank you.

MS

The dynamic duo! Enough to strike fear into hearts of liberals everywhere (or at least a sense of superior bemusement). For the life of me, I don’t know how wingnut space-time didn’t collapse on itself into a far-right-wing singularity.

Honestly, King used to talk with me fairly frequently and said some pretty nutty things. When I posted the videos, he stopped talking to me. On the other hand, Congresswoman Bachmann used to ignore me and walk with head bowed in silence as I peppered her with questions. For some reason or another, more recently she’s been very friendly and open.

I, obviously, was wondering why these two hadn’t signed on to Paul Ryan’s roadmap for America.

The Senator was one of four that initially signed on to a letter asking Harry Reid to include a public option in the “side-car” reconciliation health care bill expected to come out of the Senate.

Representative Rohrabacher tells StarkReports that he doesn’t regret hanging out with a bunch of Afghani mujahadeen.

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan has circulated a “roadmap” for America – a document laying out Republican ideas. In it, he privatizes social security and cuts the rate of Medicare growth, amongst other things. I’ve been asking Republican Representatives if they like the plan and expect to endorse it.

Virginia Foxx had a pretty unique response (again). She asked the cops to save her from the scary questions.

In a nutshell he says reconciliation can only be used for budgetary matters, even though he concedes that it’s been used for social legislation in the past. The difference between those cases and this one, he says, is that previous mal-uses of reconciliation were overwhelmingly bi-partisan. To him the 60 Democratic votes the legislation has already achieved counts for nil since there was no substantial Republican support.

This argument should really be offensive, especially when you consider the number of voters represented by the 60 Senators that voted for the bill compared to the number represented by the 40 that voted against it.

I brought up the second round of Bush tax cuts which required Dick Cheney, acting as tie-breaker, to cast the deciding vote. Hatch pointed out that it was a $350 billion bill; this health care bill deals with $2.5 trillion. Of course, Democrats will say that the health care bill is, at worst, revenue neutral and that in may even reduce overall costs.

In any event, it’s not clear to me why Democrats could not have raised the same hue and cry when tax cuts were passed over their objections. Why couldn’t they have said that such a partisan use of reconciliation would doom the Senate?

Again, I didn’t get to ask everything I would have liked. For example, the delay of this bill has caused an immediate reduction in Medicare payments to doctors treating the elderly. Is it fair to say that Republicans cut Medicare again?

With that said, Hatch makes it clear that a filibuster will not hold; that other Republicans will join with Democrats to defeat Bunning’s hostage-taking gambit.

Now the question is: Why in the world hasn’t Harry Reid scheduled the cloture vote?

At the conclusion of this interview, I was given a letter signed by Hatch, Cornyn, Kyl, Sessions and a few other Republicans that took AG Holder to task for not naming the lawyers he has on staff that previously represented Gitmo detainees. That made his answer here pretty obvious.

His staff was antsy; I could tell they had to be somewhere, so I tried to accommodate them as best I could. (Don’t get on the bad side of staff!)

But… I really want to know… If a lawyer had previously defended a rapist, or for that matter, a drunk driver, child abuser or wife-beater, should they be allowed to work at the Justice Department? How do we know where their loyalties lie?

NYT Magazine:

Arianna [Brown's daughter] told me that he showed up for his first real date with her mother, Gail Huff, a TV newscaster to whom he has been married for more than 23 years, in pink leather shorts. It’s family lore.

The pinkish color drained from his face when I asked him about it during a conversation in his campaign office just before we took off in the truck. He clarified that the shorts weren’t something that he went out and purchased — it wasn’t like that at all. “I did the couture shows, and instead of paying in cash, they paid in clothes,” he said. “And one of the things I had to wear were leather shorts. And these happened to be pink.”

As he told the story, he seemed, almost in spite of himself, to get into it. “If I wore these now,” he said, “I’d get shot. But it was the ’80s. Pastels were in. It was all pastel-y.” The shorts went with his tan at the time and a pair of white shoes that he owned, so he gave them a whirl. “Gail comes out and she’s like, ‘Those are pink shorts.’ I said: ‘Yeah, you like them? They’re great. Comfortable. Feel this leather.’ ” With this last phrase, he slowly stroked the side of one of his thighs, apparently miming the gesture he made in front of her.

He emphasized: “This isn’t cheap leather. This is, like, $750 shorts back then.” He shook his head at the memory. “Crazy stuff.”

I’ll post more on this later, but for now, I’ve only got time to post what I wrote for the BradBlog (who have been doing stellar work on the media end of this). More soon:

I recently attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in D.C., with video camera in hand, to report on the attendees. I was particularly interested in interviewing James O’Keefe, the miscreant (and accused felon) responsible for the ACORN video media hoax that The BRAD BLOG has been meticulously detailing for several weeks, including the important focus on how the mainstream corporate media (the old-media) has been had by the scam.

O’Keefe’s phony “pimp” story has been debunked, but, as Brad Friedman has shown, the old-media remains remarkably reticent to admit their errors, and the publisher of the videos, O’Keefe’s employer and promoter, Andrew Breitbart has been unwilling to help them off the hook. Witness the outrageous email responses from the NYTimes’ Senior Editor for Standards Greg Brock and then from their Public Editor Clark Hoyt, when it was shown to them that “the paper of record” had been had — that O’Keefe had never “visited Acorn offices…dressed so outlandishly” in the now-infamous “pimp” costume as the paper had reported, as O’Keefe had represented, and as Breitbart himself had claimed in his own column, to the public.

While I didn’t get the chance to speak with O’Keefe, I did catch up with his partner in fraud, Hannah Giles. Alas, she was surrounded by a protective coterie and fled without answering any questions when one of her entourage recognized me.

But then my luck turned. I trekked to the basement to cover the “XPAC” party and found myself standing shoulder to shoulder with Breitbart, O’Keefe’s promoter, publisher and employer, and owner of the website which launched the infamously damaging, misleading, deceptive and highly doctored video tapes. I had previously questioned Breitbart at a press conference at the National Press Club press last October. He’s had a pretty easy ride of it since then, facing questioning only from a largely adulatory press.

Though old-media, as Brad has shown, have been remarkably reluctant to demand answers to hard questions from Breitbart — or any of the players involved in the ACORN secret video scheme — I felt it important to do so for a number of reasons. The results were revealing, both in Breitbart’s insanely manic demeanor, and in the substantive content of his answers to my questions.

Ultimately, as I believe you’ll find in the video, he reveals a lot about his own editorial judgment, professionalism and reliability — none of it is good…

The Breitbart/O’Keefe media fraud has been wildly successful for the pair, helping to launch Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com site late last year. But, unfortunately, it’s hurt a great number of innocents.

Lost in the outrage against the New York Times for having fallen for the scam without bothering to fact-check, as The BRAD BLOG has been detailing for the past several weeks, is the fact that Breitbart and his ward O’Keefe, have accomplished a despicable goal: They’ve all-but destroyed an organization committed to helping those Americans most in need. Real people — thousands of children amongst them — will suffer hardship as a direct consequence of Breitbart’s and O’Keefe’s mendacious and malicious hoax, and singularly partisan political agenda. When will the media get around to telling that story?

And what of the damage that disreputable propagandists like Breitbart and O’Keefe bring to the real citizen journalists in the new media — those of us striving not to sell a political agenda under false pretenses, but rather, hoping to document facts, truth, and on-the-record positions of those who would corrupt our system through disingenuousness, self-enrichment and lies?…

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