In a startling discovery reported by The Hill newspaper, it was found that Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster during the 2008 Presidential run, was given $5.97 million of Obama’s 787 billion dollar stimulus package. It was also discovered that this $5.97 million dollar was used to save only 3 jobs at Mark Penn’s public relations firm.

Hilary Clinton's Pollster gets 5.97 Million from TARP funds

This is just one example of how Obama administration gave away the 787 billion dollars in tax payer money (our money) to people close to his administration, rather than using it for the intended purpose of creating millions of small business jobs.

~~By InsightAnalytical-GRL

Here’s a nugget from The Hill.com:

Mark Penn’s two firms awarded millions from stimulus for public relations work

According to the story,

A contract worth nearly $6 million in stimulus funds was awarded by the Obama adminstration to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008.

Federal records show that a contract worth $5.97 million, part of the $787 billion stimulus Congress passed this year, helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.

Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was awarded through a subcontract to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland, according to federal records.

Federal records also show that a former adviser to President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign received nearly $70,000 from that contract to help alert viewers in difficult-to-reach communities that their televisions would soon no longer receive broadcast signals.

MORE

Specifically, the Obama adviser worked on the ad messaging aimed at Hispanics, only 39 days before the digital transition on June 10.

Just this past Tuesday, Republicans John McCain and Tom Coburn held a news conference to complain that the advertising campaign was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

However,

McCain and Coburn did not show any indication that they knew two Democratic political strategists received funding through the grant.

Hey, I guess that means that Republicans don’t really read large stimulus bills, either!!

…And, of course, Republicans NEVER waste taxpayer dollars, either!

Sigh. This game is getting so old…

But, the question that lingers about Hillary Clinton and whether we assume that this is part of a deal Hillary Clinton cut with Obama after the 2008 primaries were over. I guess I would lean toward that assumption!

Hillary Clinton’s pollster, Mark Penn, received funds for two of his firms from the recent stimulus bill.  The same bill that was supposed to put jobless Americans back to work.  The evidence that this bill was merely a pay off to all of DC’s cronies continues to pile up. 

Mark Penn received nearly $6 million in funds (From the New York Daily News):

Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn is looking at some pretty sweet numbers – namely $6 million in federal stimulus contracts awarded to two firms he controls.

The Hill newspaper reported Wednesday that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus package helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global PR firm headed by Penn.

The Obama administration awarded the contracts to Burson-Marsteller to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television.

A portion of the funds also went to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, according to federal records.

Please save the moral equivalency – this is rampant on both sides of the aisle and the corruption needs to be stopped!

The Kind, Compassionate, Caring Liberals Speak:

“If you don’t pass this legislation (Cap & Trade), then … the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area,” the official said. “And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

So either pass Cap & Trade and destroy jobs and the economy or we’ll come in Soviet style and crush you with something far, far worse.

There’s a word for that, actually two: Blackmail. And Oppression.

And these are the caring and compassionate Liberals…

EPA Lisa Jackson, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Copenhagen at the Global Warming Alarmist Love-in also stressed that the U.N. summit was not the “impetus” for her agency’s big ruling, but a fortuitous coincidence.

There are no coincidences in politics. Especially Liberal politics.

So Obama tauts his  Jobs summit where he talks about creating Jobs, only he excludes two of the biggest Small Business originations because they said bad things about him, and then has his minions threaten to destroy the economy if we don’t get a jobs-killing Cap & Trade disaster passed.

But he Cares. He cares so much it hurts!

You.

Are Liberals going cuckoo for coco-puffs? Is the stress of their grand schemes failures finally getting to them?

Obama continued his campaign (Not leadership) for his “Jobs” ideas:

LA Times: In an unusually aggressive move, Obama opened the meeting by accusing Republicans of “rooting against” an economic recovery, according to an account provided by Republican aides.
He also complained that Republicans were “stoking fear” about actions taken in Washington, said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who attended the meeting. White House aides did not dispute the accounts.

“That’s just not the case,” Cantor said in an interview. “It’s the policies that are stoking fear.”

With Cap & trade, now “Command and Control” along with the Health Care Colossus staring you in face like a couple of Mother Tyrannosaurus Rex’s  staring at you next to their nests barring their massive teeth, why would you hire people right now?

But the Liberals are not the one’s spreading fear and intimidation. No, that’s the Republicans.

And the Liberals believe that.

Fascinating…

“So, passing the right kind of legislation with the right kind of compensations seems to us to be the best way to reduce uncertainty and actually to encourage investment,” the official said.

Orwell would be proud.

You get to choose death by angry Tyrannosaur  or death by Raptor.

Congratulations!

No uncertainty here.

You’re Dead.

But don’t you feel better about it. They care.

And your helping to save the planet from all those nasty, evil  Human Beings!

Charleston WV Daily Mail: “It’s a good thing for those pushing the health care overhaul in Congress that the American people don’t get a vote,” commented Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac university’s polling institute.

Ain’t 2009 American Democracy just grand!

That same poll:

Voters disapprove by a 63 percent to 38 percent margin of the health care proposal under consideration in Congress, and they disapprove 56 percent to 38 percent of President Obama’s handling of health care.

Voters also said by a 63 percent to 30 percent margin that extending health insurance to all will raise their cost of health care.

Another Raptor anyone?

Houston Chronicle: “Using uncertain and highly questionable science to institute volumes of onerous new regulations on employers who have never before been subject to EPA regulation is unprecedented and shows a real disregard for the preservation of American jobs, as well as families and businesses struggling to make ends meet,” Governor Perry wrote in the letter “(he sent to the EPA).

An EPA spokeswoman did not have an immediate response to the letter.

Andy Wilson, the global warming program director for the group Public Citizen, said Perry’s claims were “full of half-truths and mischaracterizations.”

Perry “has decided that railing against the federal government is a good substitution for real action on clean energy and climate change,” Wilson said.

And so the Religionists diminish and demean yet again. Does this all sound vaguely familiar?

More robotic parroted liberal ad hominems.

Are you feeling the love from your Representatives yet?

UN Climate Guru and Ringmaster of the Copenhagen Circus-Yvo de Boer: “If I were a businessman, I would say, ‘Please, please, please do a deal in Copenhagen, and please, please, please make it market-based.’ Because if we fail to get a market-based deal here, and if the U.S. Senate fails to pass cap-and-trade legislation, then the EPA will be obliged to regulate. And every businessman knows that taxes and regulations tend to be a lot more expensive and lot less efficient than market-based approaches.”

I’m guessing he’s never run a business.

Angry Tyrannosaur or Raptor? Hmmm..

How about NEITHER?

No, can’t have that. That’s not on the Liberal Agenda.

So choose.

Oh, while your deciding which fate you’d like, Chew on these Stimulus “Save or Created Job” Nuggets from The Hill: A contract worth $5.97 million, part of the $787 billion stimulus Congress passed this year, helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008.

Now isn’t that special!

Feel the love!

$2 million dollars to job saved. Aren’t you proud of Obama!

White House officials have said the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the stimulus helped to create 1.6 million jobs. White House aides also have noted that the national employment report for November showed dramatic improvement compared to early this year.

A White House spokeswoman on Tuesday responded to the GOP report by saying Sen Coburn’s previous reports on stimulus spending have been filled with “false or misleading claims.”

That sounds familiar?

“In the end, even if there are a few unwise projects, it is only a handful out of the over 50,000 projects that have been approved to date,” said Liz Oxhorn, a White House spokeswoman.

Nothing to see here. It means nothing. Move along…

GOP senators also blasted a $1.57 million grant to Penn State University to search for fossils in Argentina and a $100,000 award to a liberal-leaning theater in Minnesota for socially conscious puppet shows.

Read: Extreme leftist “politically correct” 2 Mommies, 2 Daddies, “non-judgmental” indoctrination.

Two million dollars in stimulus money went to build a replica railroad as a tourist attraction in Carson City, Nev.

Is it going to be a replica of Harry Reid?

A dinner cruise company based in Chicago received nearly $1 million in funds to combat terrorism.

Well, that will put the terrorists over attacking a Dinner Cruise on the Chicago River! Damn! That would have brought America to it’s knees! That was such a good idea! Well, I guess they’ll just go home…

The National Institutes of Health got $219,000 in funds to study whether female college students are more likely to “hook up” after drinking alcohol.

Really? People have to study this one?

They’re sadder than I was in college then.

Half a million dollars went to Arizona State University to study the genetic makeup of ants to determine distinctive roles in ant colonies; $450,000 went to the University of Arizona to study the division of labor in ant colonies.

Feel like an ant under a magnifying glass yet??

“In the end, even if there are a few unwise projects, it is only a handful out of the over 50,000 projects that have been approved to date,” said Liz Oxhorn, a White House spokeswoman.

And just think of all the jobs saved by this valuable research!

And these jobs will be “saved” from the Tyrannoaurus or Raptor that the rest of us get to chose our economic death from.

But don’t worry, they care.

They care so much it hurts.

And pain is good for you.

While the Tyrannosaur or Raptor tear you into little bits.

I will give Lord Doom, Al Gore the final word: (Sydney Herald Sun)

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?

A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.

These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged.

Too bad there’s no Tyrannosaurus Rex to eat these lawyers!

Command and Control! “veni, vidi, vici”

America 2010: Command & Control

Do you want slather yourself in BBQ sauce or butter?

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clintons pollster in 2008.

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clintons pollster in 2008.

Source:
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/71353-mark-penn-got-6-million-from-stimulus

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/71353-mark-penn-got-6-million-from-stimulus

Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster during the 2008 primaries, received 6 million taxpayer dollars to settle campaign debts.  In the process, he is purported to have saved 3 jobs.  So you decide.  Is 6 million of our hard earned tax dollars worth 3 jobs?  And how long did these “3 jobs” last.  For 2 million each, I certainly hope they last for at least 5-10 years.  I’m not sure, but if this doesn’t amount to a scandal, what does?  Meanwhile, unemployment looms at about 10 percent nationwide…

 SUCKERS!

As you know, Mark Penn’s firm received $5.9 million Stimulus money for doing PR work on the Stimulus bill.

Sounds clean. Right? Well no. Penn was for a while the lead PR guy for Secretary of State Clinton’s presidential campaign, but a bill totaling $5.4 million was never paid to him. Until of course, Penn’s firm got approximately the same amount for doing “P.R. work” on the stimulus.

The cronyism of the Bush team could not have gone away faster. Right? The good news is that the Penn pay of $5.9 officially saved 3 jobs at Penn’s firm. Now I really feel good.

Two Progressive Crooks

Obama, and the Progressives, paid the Unions back for assisting them in getting elected. Billions of dollars from the American Recovery Act, better known as the stimulus that failed, went to special interests groups like the unions. Now we learn that others have benefited from the stimulus as well.

Mark Penn, a pollster for Hillary Clinton, received $5.97 million dollars from the $787 billion dollar stimulus package. Again, it pays to be friends with progressives. Help a progressive get into office, and you will be highly rewarded. This has been shown, time and time again, since the end of the 2008 election.

The Hill reports:

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008.

Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.

Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was issued to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, according to federal records.

Want to know the scam being played on America? This contract was “awarded” 39 days before the digital television transition was scheduled (June 12). What taxpayer wouldn’t like to be “awarded” $6 million dollars for 39 days of work?

Hillary owed Mark Penn about $13 million for his work on her failed presidential campaign. Word is that Obama promised to help ol’ Hillary pay off her debt and it looks like he made it come true. And on top of that, Obama saved 3 jobs at the cost of $2 million per job. That’s our stimulus at work and how the taxpayer’s continued to get screwed by President Hopenchange.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/71353-mark-penn-got-6-million-from-stimulus

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008. Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008.

Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.

Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was issued to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, according to federal records.

Federal records also show that a former adviser to President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign received nearly $70,000 from that contract to help alert viewers in difficult-to-reach communities that their televisions would soon no longer receive broadcast signals.

The adviser, Alfredo J. Balsera, who heads a public-affairs firm based in Coral Gables, Fla., helped craft Obama’s Hispanic advertising message.

Republicans on Tuesday criticized the federal spending on the advertising project as a waste of taxpayer dollars. They noted that the advertising campaign took place on May 5, only 39 days before the digital television transition was scheduled (June 12)

GOP Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Tom Coburn (Okla.) held a news conference Tuesday to blast 100 “wasteful” projects funded by the $787 billion economic stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year, concluding that at least $7 billion of the $217 billion spent through November was wasteful and mismanaged

The GOP senators highlighted the direction of the stimulus funds on the same day Obama outlined a new series of proposals for creating jobs that Republicans view as another stimulus measure. The proposals include tax cuts for small businesses, tax incentives for employers to hire new workers and infrastructure spending.

The need for additional measures has raised questions over the efficacy of the stimulus package passed earlier this year.

White House officials have said the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the stimulus helped to create 1.6 million jobs. White House aides also have noted that the national employment report for November showed dramatic improvement compared to early this year.

A White House spokeswoman on Tuesday responded to the GOP report by saying Coburn’s previous reports on stimulus spending have been filled with “false or misleading claims.”

“In the end, even if there are a few unwise projects, it is only a handful out of the over 50,000 projects that have been approved to date,” said Liz Oxhorn, a White House spokeswoman. “The real question here is whether Recovery Act critics will at long last acknowledge that well over 99 percent of the projects are sound, effective and working as promised.”

McCain and Coburn did not show any indication that they knew two Democratic political strategists received funding through the grant.

A review of federal records by The Hill revealed Penn and Balsera received money from the economic stimulus program.

Burson-Marsteller, which Penn heads as CEO worldwide, won the $5.97 million contract through Young & Rubicam. (Burson-Marsteller has been a part of Young & Rubicam Brands since 1979.)

A contract award summary posted on Recovery.gov, the government website that tracks stimulus spending, states Burson-Marsteller was awarded a competitive contract by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to help prepare “unready households for the DTV transition.”

The purpose of the campaign was to “bolster the reach, penetration and impact of the FCC’s DTV readiness messages in selected markets, specifically among the groups that had been determined to be the most at risk.”

Cassandra Andrade, a senior associate with Balsera Communications, said, “I can see where there’s concern, but the contract was strictly based on our merits. We’ve been working on multicultural outreach for many years.”

Andrade said her firm worked to contact Hispanic television viewers in Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Andrade noted that according to Nielsen, a media-research company, there was a sharp decline in the number of unready homes in the week leading up to the digital transition and that 97.5 percent of households were ready for the switch.

A spokesman for Penn, Schoen & Berland and a spokeswoman for Burson-Marsteller did not respond to a request for comment.

Penn received scrutiny during and after the 2008 presidential campaign for the role he played in Clinton’s unsuccessful White House bid. Some Clinton supporters questioned whether his service was worth the millions in fees he billed to the campaign.

Penn’s firm billed the campaign $5 million for polling and at least $8 million for sending out direct-mail pieces, according to Time magazine. Clinton’s campaign finally paid off the debt in July.

Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said the three jobs saved at Burson-Marsteller represented a poor value for taxpayers.

“It illustrates a very poor way to create jobs,” Kyl said.

Kyl said the appropriateness of Democratic strategists receiving funds “depends on whether they exerted some influence.”

The digital television advertising campaign ranked as No. 3 on the list of 100 projects that GOP senators on Tuesday highlighted as “pure waste” in the billions of stimulus funds spent this year.

At the top of the GOP list is a $5 million grant from the Department of Energy to create a geothermal energy system for the Oak Ridge City Center shopping mall in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The main problem with the project, say Republicans, is the fact the mall has been losing tenants for years and is mostly empty.

GOP senators also blasted a $1.57 million grant to Penn State University to search for fossils in Argentina and a $100,000 award to a liberal-leaning theater in Minnesota for socially conscious puppet shows.

Two million dollars in stimulus money went to build a replica railroad as a tourist attraction in Carson City, Nev.

A dinner cruise company based in Chicago received nearly $1 million in funds to combat terrorism.

Half a million dollars went to Arizona State University to study the genetic makeup of ants to determine distinctive roles in ant colonies; $450,000 went to the University of Arizona to study the division of labor in ant colonies.

The State University of New York at Buffalo won $390,000 to study young adults who drink malt liquor and smoke marijuana. The National Institutes of Health got $219,000 in funds to study whether female college students are more likely to “hook up” after drinking alcohol.

The University of Hawaii collected $210,000 to study the learning patterns of honeybees, and $700,000 went to help crab fishermen in Oregon recover lost crab pots.

Every morning, I have the same routine: make coffee, shower, have breakfast, read tweets.  At times, checking e-mail leapfrogs twitter (especially during midterms and finals when my inbox is flooded with student e-mails), but for the most part– that’s the routine.  To say the least, a vast change from a black-and-white memory I have of my father sitting back in his worn-in easy-chair, coffee on coaster to his right, and newspaper in hand.  Within the multitude of reasons for this, I submit they key lays in “active passivity.”

In 1997, Paul Levinson’s The Soft Edge noted that “speed is [...] the essence in delivery of news, [therefore] we might expect the online newspaper to easily exceed the sometimes soggy mess of print delivered to our doorstep only in the morning” (183).  As I write this post, my living room’s bay window offers a picture of a particularly grey, windy, rainy front yard and driveway.  The very driveway where a morning paper would be delivered.  While the physical elements do play a roll in my lack of enthusiasm toward retreiving a paper amid raindrops and wind, Levinson’s note of “speed” plays much more of a vital factor in my decision to not pay for news delivery (the monetary cost also playing a bit of a role).

Having covered the ‘passivity’ in “active passivity,” here’s where the footwork comes in: harvesting news sources.

Just months ago, I found most of my news from RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds.  Most blogs and news websites offer an RSS Feed somewhere within or surrounding the text of an article/post.  If a website or web log does not offer a ‘clickable’ RSS link, secondary sites like Feedburner.com would provide writers with a unique RSS Feed URL.  Plugging that URL into a Feed Reader (much like those you see in the picture to the right) provides instantaneous updates to one’s blog or homepage.  The screen-shot provided comes from my iGoogle homepage.  Fully-customizable, iGoogle delivers immediate article/posts/news from websites/blogs I’ve visited and harvested for content.  In fact, popular sites like The Drudge Report and Huffington Post both represent “aggregators,” or sites that conjure a majority of content from outside sources (Drudge is more exemplary of this characteristic).

Recently, my aforementioned iGoogle homepage has collected a serious layer of dust.  Truthfully, multiple layers.  The central reason: Facebook’s Newsfeed and my customized Twitter-Feed.  Both tools represent vehicles for news information and, better, a lack of initial RSS/website harvesting.

Now, because I share tastes in news stories with my “friends” (Facebook) and “followers” (Twitter), I read about news that they find interesting.  Which brings me to the premise of this post: “Facehoo!”

As you can see, the following post from a former classmate came to my attention three days ago.  The link Samia shared with her friends delivered me to the original article at MediaPost.  The most interesting component of the article comes here:

Yahoo users will see friends’ Facebook activities in “Yahoo Updates,” a tab found on key properties within the Web portal such as Yahoo Sports, News and Finance. (Mark Walsh)

This post arrived just days (if even that) before Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s open-letter to the Facebook community, when he revealed the network had exceeded 350 million users (side note: notice the RSS Feed icon in the upper-left corner of the screen shot).  Further down, Zuckerberg acknowledges the same changes shared in the link provided above.  The partnership between Yahoo! and Facebook will undoubtedly result in an increase in Facebook users.

Think to those people who Mark Penn refers to as New Luddites, people who “don’t use [technology] because of age” among other characteristics (Microtrends, 257).  Though this group may have ignored the initial surge toward Facebook (and social networking as a whole), e-mail (specifically Yahoo! e-mail) and Yahoo! are two elements of the Web they all know.  Once they initially notice “comments,” “status updates,” and “sharing” links, this group will be lured to Facebook from their Yahoo! homepage.

This initial introduction to, what Howard Rheingold refers to as “reputation management” or “social filtering,” trail-blazes a way for more “active passivity” news sources.  Rheingold cites examples such as:

“Epinions [who] pays contributers of the most popular online reviews of books, movies, appliances, restaurants, and thousands of other items. [...] Slashdot and other self-organized online forums [that] enable participants to rate the postings of other participants in discussions, causing the best writing to rise in prominence and most objectionable postings to sink” (Smartmobs, 114-115).

All of the above, plus popular cites like Digg, all play into this individual news collecting trend of “active passivity;” a definite eVolution to take note of during the initial stages of this “Facehoo!” partnership.

News item: we now know that Al Franken used the wisdom gleaned from Chris Anderson’s idea about the Long Tail to win his election.

The Long Tail, the idea championed by Chris Anderson, and Microtrends, the book by Mark Penn, converge in this story. And you can throw a little Seth Godin and Tribes into the mix.

You probably know the concept of the Long Tail by now. A Border’s or Barnes and Noble store will stock books that have the best chance of selling. Amazon sells the same books, and some 80% of the books sold on Amazon are stocked in a typical physical retail bookstore. But 20% of sales for Amazon are from the “long tail.” (A quick read for this idea, and it is pretty good, is the wickipedia article on the Long Tail).

The traditional way to make money was to market to the masses. But increasingly, the way to reach people is with narrower niche marketing. This is really the end game of the long tail – it enables one to market, very successfully, to an increasingly narrow niche. Mark Penn describes it this way in Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes:

All these people out there living a more single, independent life are slivering America into hundreds of small niches. (The number of households in America has exploded, even though population growth has slowed dramatically).
This book is about the niching of America. How there is no One America anymore, or Two, or Three, or Eight. In fact, there are hundreds of Americas, hundreds of new niches made up of people drawn together by common interests.
You can’t understand the world anymore only in terms of “megatrends,” or universal experiences. In today’s splintered society, if you want to operate successfully, you have to understand the intense identity groups that are growing and moving, fast and furious in crisscrossing directions. That is microtrends.
A microtrend is an intense identity group, that is growing, which has needs and wants unmet by the current crop of companies, marketers, policymakers, and others who would influence society’s behavior.

The number crunchers keep examining the last election. Here is a revealing description about the Franken win (let me recommend, don’t let your politics, one way or the other, get in the way — – pay attention to the marketing implications). I first read this in a Daily Kos post, but the source is Long-Tail Nanotargeting from Politics Magazine.

Thanks to Democrat Al Franken’s Senate campaign, we now have a proven model to move beyond [the old campaign voter targeting] strategies. We do it by tapping into the concept of the “long tail,” an Internet marketing theory popular in the corporate world. It’s based on the idea that the Internet audience is extremely fractured. So, instead of identifying the most universally persuasive messages and broadcasting them to a wide audience, in the long-tail model you take the most persuasive messages and nanotarget each one to the right niche.
People don’t go to one place, looking for one thing. Their whims take them to a million places. The trick is to be everywhere, with tightly targeted messages. It’s about showing them highly relevant factoids/ads tailored to the whim they’re currently indulging, which if clicked, will redirect them to a relevant part of your website or related off-site content. In short, long-tail nanotargeting takes those little gems—be it an endorsement, video, news story, or ask—and shows it to the people who would care. To this end, we ran more than 30 million impressions for the Franken campaign across five horizontal ad networks, two vertical networks and dozens of local news outlets.
We nanotargeted more than 125 niche groups, with more than 1,000 pieces of creative, for less than $100,000. On Google alone, an acquisition budget of less than $20,000 got us more than 20,000 clicks, 5,500 active e-mail sign- ups, and more than 2,500 donors. We were able to reach persuasion niches (this is akin to someone opening up and reading a mail piece) for a fraction of a penny per impression, and less than 50 cents per interaction.
They targeted geographic and demographic niches online. They tested messages to see what worked best. Here’s an example:
In real terms, Minnesotans who were searching for cheap gas or researching fuel-efficient cars saw ads about Franken’s plan to lower gas prices.

The long tail has made Amazon successful, helped elect Al Franken, and, I suspect, will be the way to go for an ever growing number of businesses. It is the internet that makes this possible. But it is understanding the long tail, and implementing strategies that take advantage of the long tail, that will make people more successful.

———

You can purchase my synopses of The Long Tail and Microtrends, and my colleague Karl Krayer’s synopsis of Tribes, with audio + handout, from our companion site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.

The Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who is now enjoying very good poll numbers has paid off every creditor, except for the political consulting firm owned by her campaign polling person, Mark Penn……after paying Penn’s firm, she would still have more than a million dollars in her campaign’s bank account. Prohibited from doing anything to raise money because of her official position, one wonders what is going to happen to all of that spare change?…….and of course, other people can work to get donations for her campaign fund anytime they want…..Now lets see….Didn’t she say several times this week that she wasn’t gonna run for president?…..I know I heard that…….Right?

Barack Obama may be joking about his blackness, but as Gary Younge, the excellent Guardian journalist based in New York City (and a neighbor) breaks it down in the commentary for the BBC below, there’s something racial about recent events.  Gary rounds up the usual reference points: Joe Wilson, Strum Thurmond, Jimmy Carter, tea-baggers and this placard above which speaks for itself. But Younge also reminds us that it was Hillary Clinton and her former campaign adviser Mark Penn who first questioned Obama’s American-ness. Remember Penn’s advice to Clinton during the Democratic Primary campaign to point Obama as not “… fundamentally American” because of his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii.

As Obama told Letterman: “I was black before the election.”

Worth a listen. Abour 13 into the broadcast.

Here.

Mark Penn is a fairly well known public relations executive for PR agency Burson-Marsteller.  He is known because he was dropped from Hillary Clinton’s campaign after Burson-Marsteller signed the country of Columbia to a contract—a conflict with Clinton’s position on Columbia.  Fear not, Mr. Penn stayed in the public eye.  The Wall Street Journal hired him to write a online column for them called Microtrends.  Microtrends is the name of a book published by Mark Penn.  You can find the online columns at  http://www.markpenn.com/.   So the column is by name, publicity for his book Microtrends:  The Small forces behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes.  There is a Facebook application for Microtrends as well.  But how far should a supposed news column go as promotion?  Remember on complaint against public relations is that it creates news content that people do not know is really PR.  True, public relations uses news releases and video news releases to stimulate media stories about their clients or their own organization.  Media relations has been a standard element of public relations since newspaper became popular in the early 1900s. 

Penn wrote a column about glamping.  Glamping is some glamorous form camping.  The idea is that instead of a tent and a sleeping bag.  You have a “tent” that recreates a luxury hotel room for you.  You can learn more about glamping at http://goglamping.net/.  So what is the ethical concern?  After the column was written, Burson-Marsteller used the column in efforts to generate business.  Gawker.com broke the story and their take on the events are below:

“By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients. Burson Executive Vice President (and former Bill Clinton speechwriter) Josh Gottheimer urged Burson’s senior staff—including Founding Chairman Harold Burson, US President & CEO Patrick Ford, and others, to use Penn’s column as a tool to approach clients in the camping industry about business. Not only that—he recommends that Mark Penn “send a note” to the CEO of these potential clients requesting a meeting.”

http://gawker.com/5346078/leak-how-mark-penn-converts-his-wall-street-journal-column-into-pr-clients?skyline=true&s=x

The main stream media picked it up from Gawker.com.  The New York Times ran a story questioning the ethicality of the column.  Here is a part of their story:

“The Wall Street Journal said on Thursday that it would keep the public relations executive Mark J. Penn as a columnist, and that the paper’s ethical standards were not violated when an executive at Mr. Penn’s firm set out to use one of his columns to drum up business.

In a column published online last Saturday, Mr. Penn, president and chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, one of the world’s largest public relations firms, extolled a kind of luxury camping (called “glamping”) that he wrote was an untapped market for hotel chains and resorts. Two days later, Josh Gottheimer, executive vice president of the firm, sent an e-mail message containing the column to colleagues, and wrote, ‘This is a great excuse to call’ sporting goods companies and other businesses, ‘this week while the column is fresh.’” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/business/media/28penn.html?_r=1&ref=business

The defense offered by Penn was that he did not know his company would use his column for promotion.  But he added that he saw no reason that this would not happen again in the future.  So Penn did not plan to write a column for his company’s benefit.  But his company saw a potential benefit and acted upon it.  Neither sees a problem with it and say they might do it again in the future.  The Wall Street Journal accepted this idea and Penn continues to write his column.  The Journal noted that their was an element of promotion to any guest journalist—having a column is promotion for the columnist.

Questions to Consider

1.  Why does this situation make Penn and Burson-Marsteller look bad?
2. What are the ethical issues in this situation?
3. If you were management at Burson-Marsteller, what would you have said about the effort to gain clients from Penn’s column?
4. The column was used to solicit clients.  Does it matter whether or not Penn intended the column to be used in that fashion?  Why or why not?
5. What is the problem with letting guess columnists use the Wall Street Journal for their own promotional ends?
6. How aware are readers that guest columns will have a promotional element to their writings?

Political consultant and PR flack Mark Penn has long been campaign consigliere to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, most recently in Hillary’s disastrous 2008 Democratic presidential primary run, which was a flameout of historic proportions.

And Penn’s penalty for concocting the worst political campaign strategy, well, ever?

A biweekly column in the Wall Street Journal.

(Hey, Journal editors: I haven’t mowed my yard all summer – doesn’t that at least get me a monthly spot?)

Anyway, Penn’s WSJ column this week touted what he’s dubbed “glamping:”

[W]elcome to the early stages of the era of “glamping” — glamorous camping.  It’s a visit to the outdoors, but updated and upscale. While it’s just starting to take off, it’s likely to grow significantly based on emerging travel and vacation trends.

Penn proceeded to promote the potential of this microtrend:

[T]he big hospitality chains are missing out on an opportunity to go mass market.  Demand is growing for this kind of vacation . . .  A company like Embassy Suites, which caters to family crowds, would be an ideal candidate to extend glamping to the middle class. But all of the major chains could get involved.

And Penn’s employer, PR giant Burston-Marsteller, tried to make that happen by distributing Penn’s WSJ column to potential clients. Snarky-but-sometimes-reliable website Gawker outed Penn and the Journal and called their defense of the promotional play “pathetic.”

Cut to the New York Times, in which Journal deputy managing editor Alan Murray said:

“[I]f anyone is touting their business interests in our columns, that is a problem, and that’s what the conflict-of-interest agreement deals with.”

Actually, Mr. Murray, it’s someone touting their business interests with your columns.

Maybe you need a policy about that.

It has taken a while to track Mark Penn down. Especially if you want to talk about the remarkable way that Hillary Clinton’s presidential run self-combusted last year. Penn has kept a reasonably low profile – limiting big interviews to his Microtrends books, and – you imagine – nursing a few grievances about the fallout.

There’s no other way to put it, but Penn has been absolutely excoriated for his efforts last year. There was plenty of pent-up emotion waiting to be unleashed, with several stories gleefully recounting his reported missteps and revelling in the personality clashes that lit up Hillary’s team.

I make no apologies for any of that. But I have always wanted to interview Penn because – for better or worse – he has played a pivotal role in defining political communication over the past 30 years. Luckily he agreed to sit down, and  no subject was off-limits. This story examines his claim that it is far too early to write Gordon Brown off. Meanwhile, a fuller Profile will run in PRWeek’s next issue, investigating where it all went wrong, and what he plans to do next.

Even with all of that coverage, there was still plenty of stuff that was left unpublished, which I am running after the jump. He hits back at the charge that the microtrend era is over and aggressively defends his record. The repositioning, perhaps, is in full swing.

A common charge that is now levelled at Penn is that the 2008 election illustrates that his vaunted microtrend strategy no longer applies in a landscape that has been dominated by big themes like the economy and the environment. His response:

It’s always been a world of both, whether it was the kind of strength of experience that Hillary was offering, or whether it was Obama’s message – there always has to be a global message. But you should never underestimate that Obama’s critical path to success was his microtargeting of core, particularly youth, constituencies in caucus states. On the mass message front, in the primaries, Hillary wound up with more delegates out of the primary battles and won those battles. Obama had a director of microtargeting – so this is a classic false choice between the two.

I wrote about microtrends because there are so many books at present about the bigger trends, people were seeing a lot forest but not seeing the trees. Teaching people to get down to the next layer of information is increasingly important in an internet world, because you can bring together marketplaces and people that were previously too small to bring together in a single community. Now you can organize them across communities – you can sell to them across communities. The power of one per cent has never been greater – and it would be a mistake to underestimate that.

If you take a look at the financial crisis, sub-prime mortgages defaulting were a mere 1.7 per cent of all mortgages. Look at the power of the microtrend and the failure to really understand what was developing because it would have been perceived as too small to be important. It was the most important thing in the world.

Penn pushed the line last year that Obama owed his success to caucus state wins, which were less significant than Hillary’s success in bigger primary states. It’s a dubious argument and attracted a lot of flak. I asked him whether he thought Obama’s success ‘vindicated’ his microtrend strategy, but – unsurprisingly – he stopped short at that point. Either way, I’m not sure that his Obama argument holds much water in terms of justifying microtrends. He’s on safer ground with the rest of his response.

Next up, how can his background in polling really move communication forward? Penn liked this question. It wasn’t about 2008.

The Penn Schoen polling can be really predictive but it also includes a really complete scan now of all of the information on the web. It means creating certain indexes – we can look at words that appear next to your company’s name multiple times. Let’s say the word monopolist appears within +/-10: that’s a problem. We can also create both objectives in terms of image and also measure progress in that fashion.

In terms of the marketplace generally there’s a lot more openness to polling than there was 5-10 years ago. Part of that is polls have become somewhat less expensive because of the ability to poll on the internet. Second, I think that oftentimes they are driving multimedia campaigns that are combined with advertising so those larger budgets also support the messaging.

There are many people who would question just how predictive Penn’s polling is after last year, but I feel that he makes a strong argument for better use of numbers in comms. It is always a major issue in the industry and anything that can improve quantification is welcome.I also like the idea that it can drive larger campaigns than purely PR.

Part 2 will follow soon, with, among other things, Penn pointing to Karl Rove to prove that things aren’t so bad for him after all.

Yesterday, both David Cameron and Patrick Sullivan (seen to the right, together) warned against complacency in the upcoming General Election, and it appears that PR guru (for Bill Clinton no less) Mark Penn, agrees. Mark goes one step further and openly discusses the possibility that Gordon Brown could still win the next election, with the right PR. (He’s not talking proportional representation!)

Whether he’s just angling for some work, or cementing his lefty views – who knows? The point is that he’s right.

Gordon Brown could still win the next General Election.

What we need to do is make sure this doesn’t happen, by getting out onto the streets, onto the information superhighway and into the voter’s heads. Convincing a life-long socialist isn’t an easy task, and anyone who’s been on the doorstep will know that. There are certain challenges to be overcome when discussing the matter of ‘owing’ which many people feel. This morning, I was outraged to hear someone who felt they were owed a huge sum of money from the state, because they never bothered to save for their old age.

But we should remind people that they are owed something by the state. They are owed their individualism. They are owed their liberty. They are owed the ability not to worry about big brother gazing down at you, ID card in hand, stop-and-search warrant at the ready. Enough is enough.

So let’s get at it. Knock on those doors. Write those blogposts. Help fix Britain.

Mark Penn, the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, thought he might be able to get back into public political prognostication a year after his biggest professional failure. In a Politico piece, Penn predicts the reaction of Americans when unemployment hits ten percent, what he calls a “political tripwire.”

Unless some tough decisions are made soon, rising jobless figures will most likely hit what could be a public opinion and political tripwire: 10 percent unemployment.

If and when the country crosses that line, it will be the No. 1 news story for days, recent stock market gains could recede, and consumer confidence will fall. And whether or not the economic crisis is coming to an end, such a high unemployment level has the potential to undermine the hard-won confidence enjoyed by the Obama administration. The Republicans will quickly claim all we have is more debt and fewer jobs.

Let’s get something straight: unemployment will creep past ten percent. Even the Obama administration acknowledges this.

But let’s also examine Penn’s accuracy with previous predictions and success as a political consultant on the big stage. It’s not pretty.

1.) Penn’s strategy memo for Clinton, written on March 30, 2007, predicts the unelectability of Barack Obama due to his lack of American roots:

But he also called Obama “unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,” and wrote, “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” Penn proposed targeting Obama’s “lack of American roots.”

2.) Josh Marshall points out in a 2008 post that Penn, quite frankly, sucks at advising Democratic presidential campaigns.

But some knowledgeable campaign watchers have now confirmed me in my impression that virtually every Democratic primary campaign Penn has run going back to 2000 or earlier has lost — Checchi, Blanchard, Cuomo, Lieberman, Deutsch. The guy has an absolutely terrible record.

Oh yeah – he lost in 2008 too.

As we examine the success or failure of the stimulus going forward, there are many people more qualified than Mark Penn to accurately and truthfully discuss its impact.

I don’t want to keep blogging about paid content and micropayments; the concepts have been dumped on enough throughout the blogosphere, including right here. But when I read all the respectful MSM coverage still being given to Steven Brill’s Journalism Online, I start feeling like Will Ferrell’s character in Zoolander. I mean, why is anyone still listening to this guy? Am I taking crazy pills?

Brill had a couple business successes earlier in his career, including American Lawyer and CourtTV. But in the past two decades, he’s been far more famous for his flops: Brill’s Content, Contentville and, just this past week, airport-verification service Clear.

I don’t mean to suggest that people should ignore Brill because not all of his ventures have panned out; even the best entrepreneurs can’t be expected to bat 1.000. No, people should ignore Brill because, the more he talks about his plans for paid content, the more it becomes clear just how clueless he is.

When I first heard of Journalism Online, I was definitely intrigued. While I was skeptical of most of the existing plans for monetizing content, I figured that if enough smart people take a whack at the problem, they will eventually come up with some innovative solutions. So if Brill wanted to experiment and try to save journalism, more power to him.

That view lasted right up until the moment a few months ago when I read Brill’s “secret” memo on his plan to save the New York Times. Specifically, this:

There would be a five cent charge to forward an article to someone else …  This would either produce revenue from the widespread current “copying” of copyrighted material or encourage people to get their friends to become paying customers. In other words, these pass-alongs would become viral marketing that produces sales.

It’s true that this idea hasn’t been mentioned in more recent iterations of Journalism Online’s model. Perhaps someone sat Brill down and explained that a “referral fee” is generally when a business pays a customer for marketing their product, not the other way around. Or perhaps they pointed out that the Copy and Paste functions would dismantle any referral paywall faster than a buch of East Berliners with sledgehammers. Still, this wasn’t a half-baked idea Brill threw out in the midst of a brainstorm and then quickly dismissed as impractical; he actually thought enough of it to publish it on Romenesko.

OK, so has he learned anything in the past few months? On the basis of this week’s story in the Washington Post, I’d say not much. First of all, Brill still thinks that the way to save journalism is by making people pay for reduced functionality: “[Brill] reasons people will have less reason to stop buying the print editions if they can’t get as much online news coverage for free.” (Yet another paid-content advocate who wants to give readers the finger.)

Second, his projected conversion rate of 10 percent of all online readers to paid is what the Post charitably terms “optimistic” (I would have gone with “delusional”). As the article notes, most industry studies put the rate at around 2 percent. Coincidentally, that’s about the rate at which my company has upgraded users to our premium membership, although I should point out that we serve a niche audience and that our membership includes a number of discounts on top of premium articles, whereas Brill is talking about content-only subscriptions across an entire industry. I’d be very curious to see how well Journalism Online’s profitability model holds up if you reduce that conversion rate by a factor of five, or even 10.

[Harmonic hack convergence update: Turns out that 10-percent figure comes from a study by Penn, Schoen & Berland. That's Penn as in Mark, erstwhile Hillary Clinton strategist and proponent of the theory that bloggers are taking over the world. Or was it snipers?]

The main lesson I learnt from the long Democratic Primaries last year was if you run a campaign that descends to racism and then further descends to a not so veiled threat about the potential assassination of a prospective Presidential candidate while running leaflets with his head in the sights of a sniper rifle,

do not be surprised when some of your more extreme supporters become nutters.

A disaffiliated group of Hillary supporters came together after the DNC Rules Committee on 31 May compromised and allowed Representatives from Florida and Michigan to vote at the Democratic National Convention. It was a compromise because the rules were clear that Florida and Michigan as a result of pushing their Primaries forward should not have delegates. The Republican Party imposed a similar punishment, although they originally agreed to seat just half the usual delegate number.

Hillary Clinton signed a pledge that all other Democratic Candidates supported that supported the punishment. It was called The Four State Pledge. This was on September 1 2007

All was well and good then, all the candidates agreed the punishment. They agreed not to participate. She told New Hampshire Radio, she was proud of its place as the first real Primary. Hillary Clinton stated clearly that the election in Michigan would not count, she said (on audio), “It’s clear, this election they’re having is not going to count for anything, but I just personally did not want to set up a situation where the Republicans are going to be campaigning between now and whenever, and then after the nomination, we have to go in and repair the damage to be ready to win Michigan in 2008.” She added later she “is totally dedicated to New Hampshire”.

It is also of note that during that interview that she said all the candidates were extremely good and that she would not go negative. A misspeak?

From that interview, it also appears that she was not quite as hot on gay rights as the PUMA revisionists say.

After Florida and Michigan had their Primaries her position changed. Her campaign had lost in Iowa. It was clear that Hillary was no longer going to be given an automatic shoe in of the Democratic candidacy for President.

So she became all in favour of Florida and Michigan having full voting rights at the DNC. I guess her signature was another example of her misspeaking.

This is the statement issued by her campaign in Feb. 2008

“With regard to Michigan and Florida, our position is clear. We’re going to ask our delegates to vote to seat the delegations from Florida and Michigan. We do not think that that many Americans should have their votes and their voices and their preferences denied. We had an enormous turn-out, in particular in Florida, the largest turnout in the history of the Democratic primary in Florida. And we believe that it is critically important that those delegates have an opportunity to express their preferences at the convention. I don’t believe that anyone seriously thinks that we are going to have a national convention in which the delegations of Florida and Michigan are not going to have a say. So that is our position.” Clinton Campaign Feb. 2008

The Hillary crazies are upset that Howard Dean as Chair of the Democratic Party sought to uphold the rules that she agreed to. One Year Later they remain bitter.

It should be noted that a large chunk of Michigan voters came out to vote Anyone But Hillary

Hillary Clinton 328,309 55.23%
Dennis Kucinich 21,715 3.65%
Christopher Dodd 3,845 0.65%
Mike Gravel 2,361 0.40%
Uncommitted 238,168 40.07%

The 40.07% that voted “uncommitted” came out to vote for the candidate that was NOT HILLARY CLINTON. If the likes of PUMA want to do some weird calculation of the Popular vote, excluding all caucus state estimates (which he won almost all of), then the uncommitted votes either need to be added to Obama or deducted from Hillary votes.

They reject absolutely any account of racism from the Clinton camp. So the fact that key members of her campaign team were using racist dog whistles is fine to them. Billy Shaheen suggested that Obama may have dealt drugs without any evidence supporting that allegation. BET chief Robert Johnson alluded to Obama’s admitted drug use as a teenager to suggest something similar. Both of them had direct ties to Hillary’s campaign, he did not disassociate herself from them.

These were of course the same tricks tried on Jesse Jackson. He was accused of associating with Farakhan, Obama was accused of going to a racist church. The Hillary camp lured the media who were bored by a 6 week lull in the Primaries and kept pushing 5 second tapes of Rev Wright that rather more forcibly used the same logic for 9/11 as Ron Paul. Is Ron Paul a “racist black man”? The logic of Right and Paul on this is however sound. If you drop bombs on people – they are going to want revenge.

What was done to Jeremiah Wright, who served in the US Marine Corps, was trusted enough to tend President Eisenhower and who was a confidante of Bill Clinton was a disgrace.

The few seconds of clips were ALL that could be found, from dozens of tapes that had been sent to the Media.

Then there was the “affirmative action candidate” meme. Expressed by yet another Clinton campaign member. Geraldine Ferraro said of the then candidate, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.” It was not a one off for her. In the Washington Post, 20 years before the Obama comment she said, “if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn’t be in the race.”

Who would have thought that being black was a head start in America? Especially if you were from a one parent family.

Even at the DNC Rules Meeting, Harold Ickes, the Clinton spokesman, got an “affirmative action” dig in.

There has been not one shred of evidence that the same level of bigotry in terms of sexism was applied to Hillary Clinton by any of his official campaign team. Samantha Power called Hillary a monster and was SACKED. Hillary did not sack Ferraro, although after she quit Hillary condemned her remarks.

If the remnants of the PUMA groups believe President Obama was responsible for the sexists on the internet, or for those selling Hillary nut crackers (there were also Obama ones available), then what was done to Obama by well known blogger Larry Johnson was in the same way her fault. The Whitey Tape accusations were nothing but disgusting racism.

Johnson now has the audience he deserves though. While he tries to move to be a less partisan site, refocusing on attacking his pet hate of Cheney, his audience and front page writers are still lunatics. He has outsourced who gets blocked to an appropriately named blogger, SusanUnPC. His radio show host is a Paulie Abeles with very dubious history. He helped foster the “birther” movement through TexasDarlin. Although they have since parted ways.

I trust that the Secret Service now understands who they are dealing with if and when they read posts like this on NoQuarter.

Comment by politicalidentitycrisis | 2009-04-27 00:18:57
I think it would be very apropos for the swine flu to hit DC, especially if The One were to get the swine flu. Yes, very apropos.
Reply to this comment

Comment by FLDemFem | 2009-04-27 00:50:38
Washington DC is primarily populated by black people. Most of them do not have health insurance, or adequate health care. If the swine flu were to hit DC in large numbers, it would be devastating. It is quite possible that hundreds, if not thousands, of people would die. Obummer wouldn’t be in town, he would go to Camp David. Or not step off the grounds of the White House. He wouldn’t be exposed. But it’s nice of you not to think of that and wish something like this on the premier black city in the country. For political reasons, of course. Never mind the human toll, as long as Obummer feels bad, that’s what really counts, right?
Reply to this comment

Comment by politicalidentitycrisis | 2009-04-27 08:35:19
As a matter of fact, yes! Most of DC voted for him if I remember correctly. A natural cleansing of the stupid people who are destroying the country, if not the world. Nature takes care of things…so F!@# you!

The association of Larry Johnson with the likes of TexasDarlin and TechDude, whose posts his site have now removed gave rise to the “birther” conspiracies. Again no racism there. For more on the stupid birthers read http://www.yestodemocracy.com/yes_to_democracy_no_to_pu/2009/05/worst-birther-lawyer-ever-birther-slapdown-update.html

The Muslim hatred still continues at NoQuarter.

I have previously posted on DU about the concerns I have about this left over rump movement of hate and how various members of the so called “PumaSphere” have gone so far as to issue death threats against the President. I believe that they have encouraged them and that some of their Leaders know exactly what they are doing by winding up these often disturbed individuals.

The problem is that it is clear that many of these disturbed people are being used. They are bitter, often old ladies. Almost all white, with a few exceptions. Well in that context, in the UK there are Asians who vote for the BNP. They remain bitter even though the election is over.

In part, because they are stupid enough to think that the President is a Muslim, or simply out of pure ignorance or racism, they want an all out war with Islam.

The PUMA FEC Dodger In Chief wrote this

murphy 05.21.09 at 2:02 pm

puma bear — absolutely agreed.

we should have dropped a bomb on Mecca on Sept 12, 2001 and another one on Messina the next day if the islamic leaders of the world didnt immediately surrender.

Oh and the last time I looked, the FEC Dodger in Chief had still not donated to Hillary Clinton.

This movement is the monster child of Mark Penn, someone who I place at around the same level of Dick Cheney. He created an image of Hillary Clinton that does not exist in reality. This image cost Hillary her nomination. He modelled her to become a right wing thug. Who can forget “hard working, white America”?

PUMA was created at The Confluence. A semi Liberal blog with its own pet misogynist pig. They are still bitter nuts who were happy to vote for McLame.

I NO LONGER CONSIDER THIS CRAZY MOVEMENT TO BE A SIMPLE LAUGHING MATTER. THEY NEED INVESTIGATING.

Thankfully, the results of the Primaries do not have to be left to the PUMA revisionists. There are enough others out there.