Obama smear campaigner Larry Sinclair arrested after press conference

My first plunge into the frothy cesspool of US politics the other day resulted in a rude reminder of just what lurks out there, so at the risk of once again having my entire post swallowed up and regurgitated with my name changed on the right-wing drivel and splog site Free Republic, it’s time to take a look at what happened yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

That’s where Larry Sinclair, perpetrator of one of the most vile smear campaigns ever thrown at a US presidential candidate, got his chance to blow 3000 bucks and state his case before an invited press.

Well, turns out the man with the long criminal record and outstanding warrant was arrested shortly after and is now in custody.

So far the mainstream press has ignored his claims, including this recent development.  Even Fox Spews - Fare for the Unbalanced - has ignored the guy.

Granted, the Globe - no not the Boston Globe, the Alien Headhunters Kidnapped Pam Anderson’s Unborn Teenage Love Child supermarket checkout Globe - ran something on him a few months back, but from the wires, the mainstream newspapers, tv stations, websites?  Nada.

Given that there is nothing to substantiate his claims, is there any other reaction more appropriate?

I think there is.  Publish!  Get him on Larry King!  Get him on Jon Stewart!  Tell the world!  Let everyone get a good, long look at the level to which the enemies of a good man are willing to sink in order to draw attention to themselves and maybe even make a few bucks in the process.

It’s like Scientology.  The more you read about it, the more you realise not only how crazy the inventor must have been, but how deluded his followers are.

 

Too bad we can’t just ignore the Larry Sinclair smear campaign against Barack Obama

Mark June 18th on your calendar.
That’s the day the National Press Club in Washington, DC will give centre stage to the man behind one of the sleaziest smear campaigns ever perpetrated against a US presidential candidate.
Larry Sinclair has for months been blathering on his blog and in a YouTube video that Barack Obama has a dark secret his supporters wish would just go away. He says Obama likes to sleep with men.
Difficult to do, but in case you missed it, here’s a little rundown of his claims:

• Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair had sex in a Chicago hotel room in late 1999 while Sinclair was on parole.
• Barack Obama supplied the cocaine and crack cocaine he smoked while Sinclair performed oral sex on Obama
• Donald Young, the gay choir director at Obama’s former church, contacted Sinclair in December, 2007 shortly before Young was murdered. Sinclair says Young told him he had a similar relationship with Obama.
• Sinclair now claims to be getting death threats; cancel the press conference or get shot.

With the possible exception of The Cleveland Leader which points out Sinclair failed a polygraph test, the mainstream press has completely ignored him. So has Barack Obama, but leading up to Wednesday’s presser and beyond, you have to wonder for how long he can hold off.

There have been so many rumours circulating about Obama and his wife - Obama’s a Muslim, Obama’s book contains racist remarks, Obama’s hiding his birth certificate, Obama’s wife has been seen on video calling people “whitey” from a church pulpit, and other trash - they’ve set up a website to fight the smears. They even ask readers to send in new rumours they’ve heard so they can address them.

What’s notable is they still have yet to mention Sinclair. But with more than 1.25 million hits on the Sinclair blog and hundreds of thousands having seen the YouTube video, they can’t deny nobody’s heard of it.

A number of prominent liberal blogs have said the National Press Club is simply feeding the troll by taking Sinclair’s 3000 bucks and booking his room. Thousands have already signed a petition asking the NPC to cancel the event.

I hope the press conference is held and I hope Obama does get around to Sinclair. There’s a risk that the ranks of Sinclair’s deluded fans and followers will grow in giving this guy the limelight, but if you’ve set up a website to counter rumours and allegations only to ignore the worst, it will be viewed as running away from the issue or pretending it doesn’t exist. Obama has to defend himself.

Besides, Sinclair may be renting a pulpit and floor space and hoping the cameras and scribblers show up, but he must know that going to the press is a double-edged sword. If they do decide to run with this story, playing up Sinclair’s dubious past is the most likely angle they’ll take. Sinclair’s police wanted poster on charges of theft and forgery will surely be included.

But if the world does turn out to be flat and Sinclair’s allegations somehow prove to be true, Obama should be shunned and banished from the stage forever, but not for taking drugs and having gay sex. What country on earth would want to have as its leader someone with such horrible taste? Have you watched that video? Surely if Obama was bent in that direction and could have his pick of lovers and rent boys, he could do one hell of a lot better than Larry Sinclair.

Europe’s largest-circulation newspaper runs photo of naked 13-year-old

It always bugs me how many hits I get on this blog from knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers looking for kiddie porn, naked 10-year-olds and similar illegal content.

It’s a Google phenomenon, I guess. If you’ve built up a collection of posts with completely unrelated tags or words in the title that add up to a string of words one of these losers is typing in, Bang! Someone looking for naked kids comes to your blog.

But they wouldn’t even have had to have gone online had they been lurking around German newspaper stands on August 3, 2003. That was the day that Bild, Europe’s largest-circulation newspaper and world’s fifth-largest, ran a photo of a naked 13-year-old girl.

An excerpt from the Spiegel online article which translates what Bild wrote as a caption:

Hotsy-Botsy, this summer is becoming a catwalk for naked children.** The sun is stroking our beautiful women in their birthday suits more beautifully than ever before. Melanie from Leipzig, too, just can’t keep her clothes on in this heat. Do your clothes slip off in this desert heat, too? BILD is seeking the hottest summer girl. Send us your beat the heat photos.

The editors give a gosh-we-didn’t-know-she-was-underage excuse, which is funny because as the excellent Bildblog points out - in German - Melanie’s write-up that day was the only one in the series which didn’t mention her age.

I guess given the tabloid’s reputation for getting it wrong willfully or through incompetence it would be asking way too much to expect Bild’s editors to adhere to one of the guiding principles of journalism: when in doubt, leave it out.

But like the old line, Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, here they must have been saying Who cares? As long as our sales aren’t the only things that are firm.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

**Literal translation of the German Nackedei, which you call kids as they run around naked.

Blogging about blogging isn’t all that bad, is it?

Caution: 525-word ramble ahead.

A reader who sometimes emails in his comments rather than place them in the appropriate box had this to say about my recent post on how if I were to quit blogging, I’d do it My Way.

Not being a blogger, I’m not really qualified to comment about the content.  However, I’ve noted in general that I’m not fond of songs about singing, movies about movie-making, and blog posts about blogging kinda fall into the mold.  To be good, a blog poster must have a unique experience to share with the world, and the greatest blogs are like that.  Your friend the psych nurse is about as unique as they get.  You, as an expat small-town Canuck are similarly imbued with a perspective that lends itself to insights no-one else will have.

Blogging about blogging seems somehow to be merely filling space.  On the other hand, one of your best efforts was the 20 commandments one.  Like I say, not being a blogger, I’m not really qualified to comment about the content.

I agree with him up to a point.  It’s true you will never turn on the TV News to hear the announcer say: Today at an editorial meeting this station’s editors decided to place the item you are about to see two items down from the item you just saw because… well actually we had to decide it by an arm-wrestle followed by rock-paper-scissors, and Susan won.

The media doesn’t like to talk about itself or other media because it’s generally seen as navel-gazing.  Still, most every newspaper and newsmagazine has a media page where the trivialities of news personalities and media trends are written up and discussed.  The media also makes the news when it’s a big business story, and editorial content there is often brought up.

Unless of course you’re talking Richard Quest at CNN, where getting caught with in the park with your pants down and your wing-wang out and tied to a rope while snorting illegal pharma products won’t generate so much as a burp’s worth of mention down in Atlanta. 

So when a blogger blogs about blogging when his blog isn’t mainly about blogging but about getting down what’s going on in his head while living this Canadian-expat-in-Germany life so that one day when they drag what’s left of him out from under the wheels of a bus his wife, daughter and people closest to him will be able to say, “yeah, I really knew him…”  is that such a bad thing?

I don’t think so. 

If you’re talking about the process of doing this very public and at times very thought-provoking hobby - and a hobby is all it will ever be to me - you can’t help but want to discuss the things you go through.  So many issues come up, be they about relationships, online etiquette, joy, frustrations, fatigue, the learning process and so forth.

I realise it could get a bit repetitious, so I try to pace myself, but there’s simply so much going on while doing this, it can’t be just ignored. 

So forgive me if sometime over the next couple of days I post the third one in a row about blogging.  It’s just kind of built up to it. 

Score one for Toytown Germany

Ever been on a forum for a while and notice that it’s always the same-old, same-old? The same people talking about the same things, usually pointless banter, often turning into infantile squabbles, name-calling, and other crap you thought you’d left behind before high school?

Sometimes, though, you run across a gem of a post. Like this one today on Toytown, a forum for English-speaking expats living in Germany. Seems a few women in Munich had been noticing that in the city’s main central square Marienplatz, they were getting hit on. A lot.

So one member - a good-looking 23-year-old woman who became suspicious after being chatted up three times in two months by German men all in the same small area of town - decided to test things out. Even better, she brought along a fellow forum member to take photos.

Hanging out on the square for a while, sure enough, a guy came up and started to chat her up, followed by his wingman. As the post says, both are members of the Munich Lair, an online club for guys who get together to try to pick up women.

Great stuff. A little investigative reporting, a little story-telling, photos to back it up. Brilliant!

Former US Attorney general Ashcroft has heart attack in Hamburg

We have once again roused our reporter out of hibernation for another Definitely Not the Daily News world exclusive.

By Kathy Kitzler

Hamburg (DNTN) Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft has suffered what appears to be a heart attack while on a personal visit to the northern German port city of Hamburg.

Ashcroft, whose brilliant career at the US Justice Department included having a statue’s naked boobs covered up so he wouldn’t be photographed in front of it at press conferences, keeled over just as he was about to enter the tropical aquarium exhibit at Hamburg’s zoo.

“There’s this funny-looking house-like thingy outside the entrance with all this carved wood and stuff,” said a family friend. “John’s a little short-sighted, so he got up on tippy-toes to get a closer look. Poor bastard had a seizure right on the spot.”

The temple was hand-made in Nepal using ancient woodcarving techniques. It is dedicated to Lord Shiva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism.

“That Cheever guy must have been one sick and depraved bastard as well,” said a weakened Ashcroft in a telephone interview from his hospital room, adding he thought the temple’s location couldn’t be worse.

“Imagine putting full-colour carvings of people engaged in such disgusting and immoral acts right in plain view at the entrance to a zoo, right where all those kiddies walk by!

What the hell is wrong with German people, anyway?“

The temple has been standing for nearly five years at the entrance to Hagenbeck’s, famous for being the first zoo in the world to come up with the idea of displaying animals in natural settings rather than cages.

Witnesses say they never noticed anything unusual about the building until the Ashcroft incident.

“It’s a good thing he wasn’t watching the boob tube,” said one 10-year-old zoo visitor. “You see this sort of thing on TV all the time here.”

Antipodean reaction to Ashcroft’s apparent angina attack was swift and decisive.

“That’s it, I’m headed to Hamburg,” said one well-known Australian nurse and blogger, adjusting her corset while logging on to a travel website. “I just love all those cute little figurines and stuff. Do you think they’d let me make a few plaster casts?”

© 2008 lettershometoyou

A few signs bloggers are taking themselves much too seriously

• Targetting fitness tips to bloggers as if the breed were something special and the advice didn’t apply to the rest of the real world. All together now! Climb those stairs, say hello to Mom, put on shades and suncream, go outside, breathe deeply…
• Nutrition advice for bloggers as per above.
• Worrying about what happens to your blog after you die. Guess what? You won’t care.
• Wait a minute. Maybe you will. I first heard of this via Raincoaster, who pointed out that no matter how successful a blogger you are, there will always be someone out there with more readers and a more loyal following. Even if the blogger died more than six months ago. Not to make light of suicide - far from it - but where do the desperation that drives you that far end, and the obsession to blog forever, overlap? Think about it. If you want to, you can write hundreds of entries, time-posting them so that they publish on the dates and times you choose in the future. After you die, but before pre-paying your hosting fees, if you have them. I don’t know… I think it would make responding to comments a bit of a problem.
• Reading too much into one executive’s move a while back from dusty, crusty old CBS News to shiny, new, hip and happening news blog The Huffington Post. I’d be willing to bet they simply offered her a shitload more money.
• Writing a diary about your blogging habits. Don’t millions already consider their blog to be a diary? I guess it would look something like this: Dear offline diary. Woke up, scratched privates, logged on, blogged. Went offline, wrote this. Went back online, wrote some more. Went offline, wrote a bit more about what I wrote online. Went online… The really obsessives could start a new blog which tracks the offline diary which tracks their main blog.
• Getting bummed out about your blog and generally not having fun. The writer says he has people come to him “…feeling despondent (about) their underperforming blogs.” Lighten up, already! Everyone goes through a slump now and then. When in doubt, go out.
• Like me. I was going to list ten, but have to stop here.
• © 2008 lettershometoyou

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Buy, sell or hold in a market stacked against you

Own shares? Wish you didn’t?

There’s something unseemly about talking about money. These days people are more likely to spread details of their sex lives around the globe than talk honestly about how they feel about personal investing, savings or money itself. But like sex, some seem to need it more than others, it’s hard for most to get by without it, and a little more from time to time never hurt.

But with all the news about a panic interest-rate cut following stock market dives around the world on fears of a U.S. recession, because Joe Average American can’t pay his mortgage, because unscrupulous bankers lent money they never had to people who didn’t read the fine print on mortgages whose payments were set to explode months later and doom them to default, mortgages which were then bundled together and sold to suckers investors half-way around the world who also never bothered to read the fine print and didn’t know what they were buying into anyway…

…when you factor in sky-high oil prices coupled with a possible collapse of the shrinking U.S. dollar, it helps to step back, cut through the crap and gain a little perspective on what’s only the latest in a long line of financial crises born of greed and swindle.

One of the things I used to do as a way to make a living was cram myself into a van along with a driver, soundman, cameraman and technician, spin through the green hillsides of the Hong Kong New Territories, past stinky tofu and joss stick hawkers and through a long, dirty tunnel into Asia’s Manhattan to interview stock brokers and company analysts on daily matters financial.

Then I’d go back through the tunnel to the bureau, cut the best two quotes, lay a bunch of wallpaper footage of stock market traders talking on the phone, people buying things, and of course lots of money - people counting out money, bits of change falling out of pockets… well, not quite that bad….

…but anyway I’d put together a little package, gussy it up with little tidbits of what was happening in the markets around Asia and the world, add a few items of business news, go get slapped on so much make-up I’d put a corpse to shame, plunk myself in front of the camera and then try to look and sound like I knew what I was talking about. Sometimes, I even succeeded. It was a great job, paid the rent and then some on a Hong Kong shoebox apartment, and I even got to learn a thing or two.

Like for instance:

• Nothing personal if that’s your line of work, but they’re all full of shit. Next time you see Gordon Gotbucks up there on CNBC Squawkbox blabbering on about where the Hang Seng is going to trend for the next fortnight or next year, throw a brick at it. Can ol’ Gordo predict the next September 11? The 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan? A civil war in China? These things have and will move markets up or down, but the thing is, nobody can predict the news.
• All they want is your money. Because at the end of the day, whether you’re buying, selling or watching it melt before your eyes, you will always pay a fee to whoever is doing the buying and selling. With online trading the fees have been cut to a fraction of what they used to be, but there are more playing the game. It always will be the oil that greases the skids and keeps them fat and happy on their yachts. Sure, you will always be given the line that stocks outperform over the long term, but I have yet to see an investment fund brochure that didn’t have a caveat at the bottom in fine print: past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
• The game is stacked against you. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I do know there are honest people in the business, but the fact of the matter is that insider trading is what makes the markets go ’round. I had colleagues ask me to give them hot stock tips. When I said I didn’t have any, they didn’t believe me. What? Aren’t you getting any inside dope from them? One of those colleagues, btw, is now anchoring on a well-known financial news channel.
• If you’re reading this on a computer, you’re already rich, you’re just trained to think you’re not. The finance industry has a vested interest in making sure you know that someone else has more money than you do, you should envy him for it, and adjust your portfolio accordingly. Step back. If your pile is small, count your blessings. If it’s large, look where you could spread it around to do some good. Just remember to keep receipts to deduct those donations at tax time.

Oh, and a precious few tips gleaned from some of the sharks:

1. Never catch a falling knife. Translation: never buy shares in a company whose share price is falling.

2. Sell everything when you start to hear cab drivers and fitness instructors giving investment advice.

3. Buy the hell out of the market when there’s blood on the streets.

Only three? Hell, two of them contradict each other. Seriously, I know very little about this. I was only a business reporter for four years. That’s where the cynicism comes from, I guess.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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