Redstate

Must clean that metadata first.

Hard copy or pdf only, hard copy or pdf only....

I always thought that was an urban legend. I'm a lawyer and we always scan before sending stuff, but I've always thought that was a little paranoid. guess not...

After fighting it out tooth-and-nail with friends and colleagues over the Mier... uh, recent unpleasantness, it's going to be a whole bunch of heap-big fun watching the Demos self-immolate and auto-discredit on a Biblical scale over the nomination of soon-to-be Justice Alito.

And this is only Day One!

Finally, this must be said and perhaps has not yet been said often enough: Thank you, Mr. President.

Since we were talking about the CBS docs in another thread... lets not forget that it's a computer file. Not exactly hard to fake metadata, for anyone. Really, anyone could have made it... though I assume the DNC would wish to, one might also think/hope they were less racist.

Oh please, Oh please, Oh please, Oh please, Oh please, Oh please, Oh please, Oh please, Oh please, Oh please, let them deny this one. Seriously, I'd love to see it.

I can't even stand to look at that!  I just spent the last three hours cleaning that crap up!!!  Small PR firm employee here; we publish a newsletter on behalf of one of our clients, a large membership organization, and those members without email addresses get the hard copy.  Those WITH email addresses get the email copy.  Unfortunately, it falls to moi to deal with the mess it makes of the HTML when they write it in word.

Sorry, personal sob stories are probably not what we want here, but I JUST finished this task, and looking at that stuff just makes me want to throw myself out of the office window (instead of taking the elevator down to my car).

Also, it makes me want to kick my fellow Democrats repeatedly and with gusto. (So right now, I guess I feel about like y'all do.)

Is it this Chris?  Oh my, we have a field day!  Somebody tell me this is true.....  I will do some of the very fun work if so.

CODEWORD MODERNITY

wierd...

When I check the metadata, it says the file was originally created on July 7, 2005, which was just after O'Connor resigned.

The DNC has had this piece waiting for almost 4 months!

Spelling error in a one word post.  Heh.

When I check the metadata, it says the file was originally created on July 7, 2005, which was just after O'Connor resigned.

The DNC has had this piece waiting for almost 4 months!

Who can vet this?  Make the connection.  I mean if it is that Chris, its a big scoop!  A stake in the heart of the stupid political philosophy!

I downloaded the copy as posted above and if you go to "File" and then "Properties" you see the same information.  

I wonder if any Italian-Americans will be donating to the DNC in the near future?

Check out the last bullet point. There may be an issue there, but I don't think they want to stick with it. Even assuming it completely misstates the holding and misrepresents the opinion, who is going to be swayed by an argument between Donald Trump, and investors convinced by Donald Trump to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars? This is a DEMOCRAT talking point?

Another case of trying to be too clever.

Mine comes up about an hour later (it's GMT); looks like that's just when the particular copy of the file was created on the local hard drive.

What is the DNC trying to say? That he's soft on crime?  In cahoots with the mob? Or that he screwed up a big, and potentially career making, case?  My first two choices are baseless smears and the third just seems like laughing when a guy trips and falls.  

That's ZULU time I believe.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

OK, that is perhaps a fair point and we should all have our C-BS detector on at all times when confronted with such manna from Heaven.  However, note that the following quote is pulled from the townhall.com piece Mike cited and comes right from Chris' MSNBC show this afternoon:

MSNBC's Chris Matthews: "[I]'m Sitting Here Holding In My Hands, A Pretty Disgusting Document, This Is Put Out Not For Attribution. But It Comes From The Democrats, They're Circulating It. I Can Say That." (MSNBC's "MSNBC Live," 10/31/05)

Recognizing that this was on MSNBC and probably therefore seen by no one outside of Chrissie's immediate family, it's still out there in the public record from someone the Demos can usually count on as a "friendly witness".  So it would appear that, even if the Democrats did not create it (I happen to think they did, but anyway...), they are certainly not making it a secret that they are more than happy to send it around.  Sounds like ownership to me.

They've probably had this "in the can" since the week after SDO'C announced she was riding off into the sunset and only updated it this morning when it became obvious that "Sam's The Man".  In their rush to get it out they forgot to "clean" their fingerprints - to say nothing of checking for illicit bigotry - and now have a potentially very smelly poop sandwich sitting on the plate in front of them.

Bad staffer - no double-decaf mocha latte for you.

The title is "how they made their $$, personal holdings, the whole deal" I guess it's a generic attack document. And I see I've just been pre-empted on "Last Saved By: AdlerD".

If its my pick of Chris, that is the wordsmithing he promotes.  More ammunition.

Or should Douglas really ask for a payraise?

A similar document like this was found on Estrada (actually an email) that pointed out he was doubly worrisome because he was a Latino.

Cue Italian-Amerian stereotyping.

OWNED

I saw the first minutes of Matthews grilling Howard Dean about this, and Dean's look was curious - he started by not knowing about it but accepted accountability for it. Interesting that he wasn't in flat denial right away - even an "I'll get back to you on it" attitude.

It seemed like he's willing to run it up the flagpole and see who salutes, and if nobody does, fold it up and bring out the next one.

Just a bit odd.

Devorah Adler is the DNC's newly appointed "research director," among her accomplishments being work for Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi and "preparing Gov. Dean for major TV appearances".

I'm drawing a blank on the other two; staff, I guess.

I don't understand why this document is causing anyone to salivate or giggle.  Did he lose a big case and let 20 members of a crime family off, or not?  So what?

about every "possible" for the SCOTUS.

I strongly suspect there is a similar hitpiece stored in some dem's computer on Luttig, Jones, Brown, McConnell etc.

over Miers.

Always more fun to watch the other side shoot themselves.

Codeword Modernity belongs in the chrono-synclastic infundibulum!

It would prove Dem's are in the throws of postmodern myopic reinvention.  If their hit piece authors are smarmy pointy head wordsmiths who actually believe!

I mean, this is choice:

"But the dialectic does not come cheap. It is not a pre-given totalizing frame, effectively rigging the results in advance. "

I can use that against them right now.  Payback...  Not cheap at all.  I am salivating, dang it.

Watch out for pre-given totalizing frames. You wind up in the hospital if the nail gun misfires through one of those babies!

The document itself was created July 7th, and was last saved July 8th.

I can't take it.  I'm on the floor with tears.  Have to write article, even if its not that Chris, its to  compulsive, can't stop myself.

"Saying the least here is saying a lot. It will be interesting to find out what, in these terms, the dialectic in action will give us."

I guess this is the dialectic in action. (laghing to hard to type)

money is tight these days, the fundraising is...

Babs Streisand is still in the bunker in fear of the earth ending hurricane so we can't get any wacko dollars from her.  Until then everyone is at minimum wage.

LOL

I especially like the title:

"how they made their $$, personal holdings, the whole deal"

Despondent, descpicable, desperate.

Elections Matter.

Fellow conservatives, find your backbone, and fight them

but I'm pretty sure that this is Chris Prendergast, Professor of Sociology at Illinois Wesleyan University that you're mocking here, as opposed to Chris Predergast, DNC Staffer.

If I really thought they were putting people who wrote like that in charge of actual political machinations, I'd go home and smoke see-gars, because it's considered bad form to interfere with your enemy's self-destruction.

why would that, or the price of tea in China, reflect on his suitability as a Justice? Hmmm?

Don't we do this as well?  I mean don't we do this kind of stuff on our side?

We focus on the finances of Democrat judicial nominees? We hint that Italian-American Democrat judges went soft on the mafia?

Because I sure don't remember ever seeing that.

I think we do Research.  This is what this looks like.  

I fail to see what's "disgusting" about this document. Is it harsh on Alito? Absolutely. He's an arch-conservative with a history of rulings guaranteed to make half of this country very concerned, so I'd expect the Democratic party to bring out every bit of ammunition they can find in opposition to him. The Republican party would do the same--and has.

Lacking a formal legal education, I can't speak to how supportable their analyses of the case examples are. No doubt they're framed in a way designed to persuade that these were the wrong decisions--but framing is not necessarily dishonest. I will leave the legal opinions to those qualified to write them. I have already seen Redstate articles attacking the way Democrats are describing Alito's rulings, and I expect that.

What baffles me is this seemingly manufactured outrage over what is, in the end, a fairly pedestrian example of a talking points memo. I see plenty in it that I'd imagine would aggravate conservatives, particularly in the descriptions of him as being anti-immigrant and hostile to civil rights--but nothing "disgusting" or bigoted or otherwise worthy of this kind of response. I see things like this said all the time about liberals by Republican politicians, particularly when it comes to the subject of abortion and women's reproductive rights.

Now as for spreading it on a "not for attribution" level and leaving all these electronic fingerprints on the Word doc? Moronic. If these people are going to try to put out talking points without attaching their names to them, they really ought to hire a staffer from the IT industry to sanity-check them. Pendergast and the others who worked on this now look like clowns, and they deserve to.

No, we do not try to insinuate that Democrats of italian descent are soft on the mob. And the research we do on judges is on their judicial record.

Come on-- let's hear it. I know you have it in you to defend Chuck Schumer's staff fraudulently obtaining Michael Steele's credit rating. Don't let me down.

If not, get it. Removes 95% of "Word fur" from HTML in seconds.

Its far fetched for sure but the metadata has prendergastc, the opensecrets has Chris Prendergast, and we have uber leftist Prendergast.  But I had so much fun I had to write it up.  Hey!  Break out the cigars!

The Inflamitory: An Interesting Postmodern Possibility

Naww, that one's a Brit. A "fellow" at Cambridge. The one we want is some puke in the basement of the DNC.

But I can dream can't I?

The Inflamitory: An Interesting Postmodern Possibility

Its my anti-liberal right wing reactionary hit peice.

this is a standard oppo operation that all campaigns do

Plus he won't be able to get any babes now that his salary is plastered all over the web.

The guy makes about 25 grand and now has to be the goat for this PR foul up?

Actually, I'm pretty sure that these low-paid staffers were just typing up stuff that others handed them.

This isn't a troll; I really don't get it.

The first thing I don't get is why Chris Matthews even bothered to research the ethnicity of of the defendants. If I were reporting on the document, the line of questioning that would spring to mind is: Why where the defendants acquitted? Did the prosecutor screw up (as the writers of the memo are presumably hoping to imply)?

Matthews, however, presumably called one of his reasearch assistants into his office, and told him, "I've got a case I want you to investigate. Unfortunately I don't the name or number of the case, but I've got the year and the name of the prosecutor, so you should be able to find it with enough work. When you do, I want you to report back to me with one piece of information: the ethnicity of the defendants."

I don't have the words to convey just how bizarre this is.

If the answer had come back that the defendents were black, I could sort of see someone making the argument that the Democrats were in dangerous territory; race is a sensitive issue in this country. But Italian???

Krempasky, since you agree with Chris Matthews that the piece was offensive, let me ask you this. Prosecutor Marsha Clark was critized by a number of people for her work on the OJ Simpson case. In light of the fact that the defendant in that case was an ethnic minority, was there any criticism of Clark which you did not find offsensive? More generally, if a prosecutor fails to win a conviction, and the defendant happens to be a member of an ethnic minority, does the ethnicity of the defendant exempting the prosecutor from all critcism?

There is your first problem.  I (by intentional choice) read all my email in a newsreader that cant deal with html at all (actually it can, I just havent turned the feature on).  Html emails are spam, as far as Im concerned.

Send the newsletter as text and most (but not all) of the word problems will go away.  

Im doing my best Buckley imitation, standing athwart the internet yelling STOP!

But our IT guy only works one day a week and won't give me an admin password.  I keep trying to convince him I a) know what I'm doing and b) wouldn't do anything I didn't know about, but he's stubborn that way.  I guess that's what happens when you're also the IT guy to some defense contractors.

Swamped at work; kids trick or treating; finishing a favor for a friend I promised would be done a couple of days ago -- I let fumigating slide.

My heartfelt apologies for letting you post here this long, unusually stupid moby. Goodbye.

As I recall, the defendant in the OJ Simpson case was a racial minority, not an ethnic minority, unless being from San Francisco now qualifies you as coming from a separate ethnic homeland. Could be.

Italian prosecutor losing to the Mafia...


Doesn't exactly take a research job, and the actual facts might get in the way of the talking point.

Assuming that these guys really are mobsters, failing to get them is something that it'd be fair to bring up in the course of a criticism of somebody.  Not as the central point, maybe, but the Democrats didn't seem to intend it as the central point.  

We send them out in both formats; client's members choose which to receive.  I wish all of them wanted plain text.

Sorry, RedState; I may have hijacked a small corner of this thread.

. . . next Season's Sopranos?

The orginal title suggests that someone took a document which had a format they liked, and used it as the starting point for a completely new document.

It is possible that only the final person in the authors list really worked on the actual document under consideration, and most of the metadata is "digital flotsam."

I have tons of documents for my business which I recycle over and over because I like the format, and I never bothered to make a template.

(BTW, not defending the document in any way, just pointing out a potential flaw in this analysis.)

I've been on the inside of political research before and, when you don't know anyone, the first thing you work with - after public data - is often random speculation and sterotypes.

In this case, I'd be willing to bet that whoever drew up the document said - "Ah ha, an Italian name!" and punched "Alito + Mob" into Lexis-Nexis and, poof, out that came.

that they would look for:

"Major Cases Lost,"

rather than "Mob" in relationship to him?

Trying to describe this as an appeal to racism, rather than his prosecutorial record seems to be the exact type of fishing expedition the Dems are being accused of.

are that the Dem's are racists (generally true).. focusing on an Italian blooded Judge losing a Mob case (they would say on purpose) instead of any myriad of complaints they normally would focus on (Alito restricting the right to kill a child in the womb, Alito trying to take guns away from  criminals while empowering a 90 year old lady to protect herself and Alito not understanding that illegal aliens should have at least twice as many rights than a typical citizen).

Where is the slime?

Is it because hes Italian and was unable to get a conviction in a mob case?

I dont see that as a slime.

And lots of prosecutors lose mob cases...so I dont know how that disqualifies him.

No.

Very convincing.

also need a return to sixth grade to learn subject/verb agreement:

Alito Wrote Opinion Holding that Certain Provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act Was Overridden by State Law.

Word is pretty bad at picking out the proper subject when a sentence has a number of nested phrases.  Using your brain instead of just hitting F7 and "change" on every suggestion can lead to better prose.  

compelling as your intended rhetorical. However, my take has the benefit of being more accurate.

Regards!

Try OpenOffice.

he's right :-). Giving managers root access is a canonical security violation. I'm even more doctrinaire in my shops (and I'm the manager).

When I get into the kind of mood that results in work like this, I just use my right hand. Only takes a few minutes. Vastly more efficient.

The worst of it is that these are the people who are teaching college kids.

But their continual attacks on anyone who is Conservative and a minority argues vehemently the opposite.  They pretend Yale graduate, Clarence Thomas is stupid, and no one in their party cares. They make racist jokes about Condi Rice, and no one in the black community screams in outrage.  They call Colin Powell the token black in Bush's Administration, and no one on the left steps up to disagree.

One might think/hope they were less racist, but then one would be delusional.

These guys have gotten away with blatant racism for too long.  It is time for a Democrat, someone in the black community, or someone on the left to step up and say, "Enough."

There are plenty of blacks who do, but then they get labelled Oreo, Uncle Tom, etc.

Of course, any black with conservative views gets labelled that way by leftists.

Prosecutor of Italian heritage who is unable to get some of his fellow goombahs locked-up, with the inference that said prosecutor went easy on the mobsters because they share a common heritage, and bada-bing - cue the theme music from The Sopranos.

If this were a RNC talking points memo vis-a-vis a Democrat SCOTUS nominee we would already be hearing phrases like "hate speech" being used to discribe it.

I did that. It's not bad, but it put in a bunch of deprecated FONT tags.

i mean... honestly interpreting this document as some sort of ethnic baiting, is well, it seems like to alot of people that is just insanity.

Just thought you should know that the San Francisco Chroncile, in its lead, quoted a redstate.org blogger.

Many of the conservatives who torpedoed Harriet Miers' Supreme Court nomination couldn't have been giddier Monday after President Bush picked "the Anti-Miers," as one opiner on redstate.org described appellate court Judge Samuel Alito Jr., the president's new high court nominee.

You can read the entire article here.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/11/0
1/MNGG3FH6UN1.DTL

But I am ROTFLMAO. And I do wonder if post-deconstructionists don't eventually go blind after writing too many papers. Too much jouissance, you know.

by tweaking your templates. I'll stop threadjacking now.

... it does come across that way. After all, there are a lot of Democrats in the world, just to give one example of a group that might take that view.

There are also quite a few others who will see it as exactly that. Chris Matthews did, to name one. I am pretty sure that a good portion of his audience will, correspondingly, be considerate of that view.

Regards

I read the document. It doesn't even have the word Italian in it. The criticism is that he was working on the longest criminal trial in American history and failed to get a conviction. Alito needs to use the tax payers money in a fashion commensurate with his stewardly role.

As for the ScAlito nickname, first of all, it's kind of cute, second the democrats didn't come up with it; he's had it for years. It's like saying Dems are smearing Bush by calling him Dubya; That's his nickname.

Lastly, this is America in the third millenium. Italian-Americans are not the oppressed minority that you're trying to make them out to be.

so one thing I don't get. when i was looking at this document, before i knew which part of it was suppose to be offensive, I couldn't figure out what people were talking about.

So why did the mobster thing jump out to you as ethnic baiting?  Does it even mention that hes an italian american?

I am sure a lot of people would not know that Alito is Italian without having it spelled out for them. Most people would probably assume he is Irish or perhaps Portugese. Or maybe German.

Sure it may have been created from another document, but so what?  Where it came from and what it says is still the material point.

Incompetence has been a hallmark of Bush appointees, and following the Miers debacle, it makes perfect sense for Dems to try and construct an image of incompetence for Alito.  It is simply continuing a narrative that stretches way back to the beginning of Bush's 2000 campaign.  Cronyism and incompetence define Dem's spin of Bush's political career.

It really does not seem like this has anything to do with race, this is simply a laundry list of talking points to throw at Alito.  Anyone who is shocked to see such hardball tactics should stop following politics, they are way too naive for this business.  

Isn't it ironic that conservatives, who consistently mock liberals for playing the race card, are just as quick to play the same card when it suits their purposes?

Finally, isn't it hilarious that the same people who turn a blind eye to Willie Horton ads and 'illegitimate black baby' push-polling in South Carolina are suddenly outraged about any perceived racism against Alito?    

seem that you were warned once before on a similar subject. Apparently you are under the misapprehensio n that the rules have changed. They haven't. But I'm sure you'll find a more congenial atmosphere for your "ironic" observations elsewhere.

What a bunch of freakin' idiots. Spin spin spin. Give it some legs. (Can't wait to hear the next step in the B.S. trail you started on the Lush Bimbaugh "show").

ANY two bit mentor of Ka-Ka-Karl can plant the name and company of ANYBODY in the Word property tag area. Great detective work - Dick. I'm just suprised you did'nt stick Hillarys or Kerrys name in the author line.

As Napolean Dynamite would say. "What an IDIOT!".

Cute name, nice racism, perfect storm of lefty allusions with no content.

Get back under the bridge.

Can someone exterminate this guy?

Why are you so upset.  I thought you guys love paper trails.  Sorry, you were caught.  I'll bet you are.

we merely deal with trolls, mobys, and the impolite. Rarely do we encounter a full-blown case of unmedicated psychosis.

Thanks for breaking the monotony.

Inciteful political commentary.

Thanks.

and I find it to be valid at that.  No where in this memo is the word Italian used.  The front page diary going on and on about "smearing" of Alito on ethics is amusing given the smearing of the DNC happening here.  It's called politics, its hardball, and you either swing at the pitch or get out of the batter's box.  Crying racism everytime there's something that could be construed badly (whether it's Willie Horton or Alito) is just sad, and I wish we'd all just get past it and stop putting racist motivations in the brains of the other side.

Imagine being dismayed about unwarranted cries of racism as a liberal. That's straight out of your side's playbook. Or didn't you hear about that little hurricane?

High marks for style on the paper trails comment.  Well played.

But I'm only upset that I had to look at the stupid meta-data.  I think the point in the paper was an inane one, but I'm not angry about it.

I may have misunderstood both Matthews and the original post, though.  See, I didn't even see it as "an Italian guy failed to get mobsters, he must be a mob sympathizer."  I saw it as, "Prosecutor Alito didn't get mobsters; he's not a good legal mind."  Again, stupid, but harmless.

Therefore, I read Matthews' criticism as, "Democrats 1) went after something irrelevant to judicial confirmations; 2) ignored real issues; 3) neglected the fact that criticizing an Italian for being soft on the mob could look really bad."

I mean, was I way off base here?  Or am I now off base in my reading of the reaction to the Matthews story?  Somewhere along the lines, I got my wires crossed.  Was it early or late?

Call me naïve or call me a partisan, but I have a really hard time believing that they were actually going for anti-Italian bias.

the twit group of Sharpton and Jackson that mentioned racism motivated it from within the Democratic party apparatus.  And no, Kanye West doesn't count.  Seriously, quit lumping liberalism in with its moonbat elements or the same could be said of lumping conservatism in with the Tim McVeigh's of the world - which I bring up to demonstrate the nonsense in doing so.

is that conservatives didn't invite Tim McVeigh to their national convention.

Pat Robertson with some frequency

Always a favorite with the 'too splenetic to proofread' crowd: "did'nt," "Hillarys," "Napolean."

Ah, I do love the angry Lefty trolls.

your point being that you guys are entitled to invite three nutjobs to speak at your convention for every one of ours that only attends?

I'm still waiting for an iota of evidence, BTW, that McVeigh was a conservative or even voted, for that matter.

Howard Dean comes to mind.

"We have to come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not," he said. "And this question, 40 and 50 years after Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] and the civil rights movement, is, 'How could this still be happening in America?' " - Howard Dean

Wasn't the Congressional Black Caucus on CSPAN, and wasn't the race card played?

go tell that to your boy Chris Matthews.  He's convinced of the source.

Make Word macros to insert desired tags (whatever you want, CSS-dependent tags etc.) directly & visibly into the formatted Word text so that you see things like <em>this</em>. Much of task may be automatable. Copy result from Word into plaintext. Thence into email message source. No?

maybe this needs a bump...

Of course this is all anecdotal, but here are two, let's say questionably motivated, columns from prominent, but not national, newspapers in just the past few days.

http://blogs.dfw.com/liberal_dose/2005/10/my_apologies_ha.html

http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/oct05/367053.asp

H/T The Corner http://corner.nationalreview.com/

It didn't take any effort at all to find these and they're hardly incendiary, but there they are nonetheless. If anything, they are lazy, slapdash, snide, bland and borderline thoughtless.

Still, there they are.

I have a friend whose dad was dark brown and mom was tan.  She took some grief about it when she was young (kids called her a ding dong). She told her husband about it, and now he teases her.  Problem is, he keeps getting confused about what Hostess product it is and calling her Twinkie.  (She doesn't get offended 'cause he treats her good.)

We laughed.

that some of the metadata may come from a previous document, not the one people are currently looking at.

In the famous Lincoln - Douglas debates, most of the major newspapers of the time considered Lincoln to be the superior orator, and the hands-down winner of the debates based on his masterful dialogue. After Douglas had finished a 20 minute description of the detailed political and social nuances related to the proposed idea of the "containment policy" for slavery, Lincoln had his opportunity to reply.

He simply said "No."

The crowd gave him a standing ovation, and newspapers throughout the world declared him as having decisively bested Douglas. In fact, one paper ran the headline: "Douglas POWNED by Lincoln"

I.e, is this MS Word document the bit of evidence you simply cannot explain away?  No matter how much James Carville rants?