We’re here at TPM HQ watching the CPAC conference. And Wayne LaPierre is discussing discrimination against certain classes of assault rifles.
Just when the election court in Minnesota had given Norm Coleman’s legal team a break by reversing itself on a decision to strike a witness’ testimony because Norm’s lawyers withheld evidence from the Franken team, it turns out there’s more evidence related to Coleman’s lawyers’ contact with this same witness that they still hadn’t divulged until Franken’s lawyer brought it out this morning on cross examination of the witness.
At issue: secret emails between Coleman’s lawyers and the witness informing her that they were going to put off disclosing her name and statements to the other side. Happily, Coleman’s lead lawyer threw his fellow lawyers under the bus in explaining the “mistake.” But how much of this was a mistake and how much of this was deliberate litigation strategy is not immediately clear. Let’s just say it smells a bit.
It’s pretty clear the three-judge panel has had it with Coleman’s lawyers. It’ll be interesting to see whether this latest episode exhausts any remaining benefit of the doubt they have in favor of Norm’s team.
Having observed this game for a long time, I still
wonder why people go there. That Bobby Jindal story about being there in the office of the sheriff when he was busting through the red tape, even telling the goofball government authorities that they could come arrest Bobby too … well, turns out Jindal didn’t mean it in the sense of its actually being true. He meant it more in the very loose sense in which you say something happened when it didn’t happen because you heard much later that something kind of like that had happened when you weren’t there.
Late Update: Sort of funny to watch again in light of today’s revelation.–DK
Matt Cooper just talked to David Keene, head of CPAC, the sponsor of the big conservative confab down in DC this weekend (and a very big player in movement conservative circles) about whether we should be writing the obit of the GOP …
Bob Reich on what today’s economic numbers mean why Obama will probably have to come back for more Stimulus.
Matt Cooper talks with former House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) at the CPAC conference about what conservatives need to do to regain power:
As a rule, I try to avoid link war nonsense and getting into spats with other sites. But I’ll make a small exception because it illustrates a point. Yesterday, we published a post by Zack Roth noting a number of reasons to question whether the main anecdote in Bobby Jindal’s GOP response talk on Tuesday night ever really happened. And I should mention that the first people to raise the key issues were diarists at Kos, who Zack links to in the post.
Not long after the piece ran we heard from Ben Domenech, a young conservative writer, pointing to what he claimed were problems with the piece. And then this morning he followed up by sending in a post on the topic at Redstate.com, the conservative website where he’s on the board and where I believe he was also a founder. The post is by Erick Erickson, the site’s Editor-in-Chief.
Now, when I wrote the first draft of this post, Jindal had not yet admitted that the story was in fact false, which further clarifies the matter. So, as usual when I get an email from someone saying we got something wrong, I went to read the post with a tight knot in my stomach. But when I read the post it was all what lawyers would call ‘non-responsive’ — a lot of claims and facts and noise, none which addressed the points we actually made. What there was a lot of was trash talk and insults. Zack Roth as a “leftist activist pseudo-journalists” and a “leftist activist posing as a journalist” — there are many permutations, as you can see — and a lot more.
All of which is to say, as I referenced in the title, a very low ratio of facts to rage — F/R ratio. I don’t pretend that low F/R ratios are limited to the right. Far from it. And solid facts, if they undergird substantial allegations, can merit some outrage. But I do think this is one of the reasons why the second generation of web-based conservative news and politics sites have had some difficulty getting traction on key news stories, rather than the reasons they imagine.
Bobby Jindal’s people have been spinning the Katrina story very hard all day. It’s been pretty amusing to watch. Zack Roth deciphers the up-is-downism emanating from Camp Jindal.