He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

From AFP:

The images of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs have circled the globe, but they are particularly disturbing to the French. French law prohibits publishing the images of handcuffed suspects before they are convicted. Many in France are shocked by the media coverage of a man that was until recently seen as a possible candidate for president.

The man who “runs the world’s money” has also been called, “The Great Seducer.” While I think they had something else in mind when they were talking “seduction,” there are some similarities here between taking our cash and taking whatever else you might think you want at the moment.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is the head of the International Monetary Fund and currently in jail for allegedly trying to rape a hotel employee while staying in a $3,000 a night room in New York.

This is what the media has mentioned early and often, but they are not interested in telling people who Strauss-Kahn really is.

The Great Seducer is a leftist millionaire Socialist who lives tax-free while taking $100 billion of our dollars in 2009. Wikipedia also calls him a “former Communist.” Not sure when he made the move from Communist to Socialist, but whatever fine line there is between the two, we know he likes taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. Here’s your modern day Robin Hood, folks.

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Deborah Gardner, Peace Corps volunteer, brutally murdered in Tonga

That great lefty favorite, the Peace Corps, just had a 50th birthday! You can tell, because it’s demanding presents. The Lefties who totally love conscience-salving stints in third world countries rejoiced and then swiftly returned to their soy lattes and organic arugula. Senator Harry Reid issued a breathless, sycophantic statement in which he, being Harry Reid, couldn’t resist making things up, pouting and petulantly trying to cling to funding.

…

“However, I’m deeply discouraged that Republicans have proposed slashing significant funding for a program that trains workers for a 21^stcentury global economy, builds good will around the world and promotes public service. Instead of reducing the effectiveness of a highly cost-effective program, we should cut government spending in a smart, responsible way that targets waste and excess while keeping our economy growing.”

Of course, he had nothing to say in response to charges that perhaps the Peace Corps isn’t so peaceful. At least not for the women who were raped – and then blamed for being raped - during their stints in the corps. No ado was made about the House hearing on Wednesday investigating the same either, nor the legislation proposed by Congressman Poe (R-TX) that would require some Peace Corps oversight. In fact, the New York Times reported that Democrats wished to, as always, sweep such things under the rug in fear that their precious funding might be lost:

But whether such a bill would pass Congress is unclear. Representative Niki Tsongas, Democrat of Massachusetts, is co-sponsoring Mr. Poe’s bill, but other Democrats are skittish about it. They worry that the legislation, and Wednesday’s hearing, might be used to undermine the Peace Corps — the legacy of a Democratic president — and cut its funding.

Hey, what’s a little rape, with the added insult of victim blaming, as long as we keep our sweet, sweet funding? You know what I am skittish about, Democrats? Funding an organization wherein women are raped, assaulted and even murdered; 1000 women have been sexually assaulted while in the Peace Corps in the past decade alone. And 23 Peace Corps volunteers have been murdered since its creation. This isn’t new, either. Peace Corps volunteer Deborah Gardner lost her life in Tonga in 1976.

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This news comes as no surprise, but as was the case with the ACORN video exposé, the target of Live Action’s investigation is not any specific branch manager.

N.J. Star Ledger has the report:

PERTH AMBOY — The man and woman walked into the Planned Parenthood clinic in Perth Amboy sounding like the operators of a child sex ring looking for help with their business.

They told the manager they would bring in girls as young as 14 for tests, birth control and abortion referrals and wanted to know what kind of questions to expect from clinic employees.

The manager was helpful. She coached them to lie about the age of the girls’ sex partners. “If they are a minor, we are obligated if we hear certain information, to kind of report (it),” the manager said. “So as long as they just lie and say, ‘Oh, he’s 15, 16,’ ’’ no one should question them.

But the man and woman were actually members of Live Action, a California-based anti-abortion group that targeted Planned Parenthood clinics in five states and Washington, D.C., last month. The scenes were videotaped and posted on YouTube, and today created a national uproar.

Tonight, Central Jersey Planned Parenthood fired the manager, identified in the video as Amy Woodruff, and beefed up security around its clinics. (more…)

Over the past four years, our investigative team has revealed repeated cases of Planned Parenthood affiliates covering up the statutory rape of underage girls and enabling sexual abusers.

The footage corroborates a 2002 extensive study of Planned Parenthood clinics performed by Life Dynamics. Through a series of phone calls, the study documents over 90% of over 800 abortion clinics willing to cover up sexual abuse.

In ten Planned Parenthood clinics, Live Action videos depict investigators posing as underage girls, as young as 13-years-old, saying they were impregnated by men over twice their age. Planned Parenthood’s typical response? “Whatever you tell us stays within these walls” (Alabama). Or, “I didn’t hear the age, I don’t want to know the age” (Indiana). Or, “You don’t have to say anything” (Arizona). Or, “Just say he’s 15″ (Tennessee).

We have also chronicled Planned Parenthood workers giving outright medical misinformation and manipulating vulnerable young women to purchase abortions. We’ve shown Planned Parenthood willing to accept funds for race-based abortions of unborn Black children. And for those who are willing to face the ultimate abuse of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, we’ve released a video revealing what abortion does to the defenseless unborn child.

What will it take for Congress to stop funding this abusive and corrupt billion-dollar organization? What will it take for the Department of Justice to launch a thorough investigation of Planned Parenthood’s sexual abuse cover-up and medical misinformation? What will it take for us, the American public, to say, “Enough is enough!”

Hopefully this:

Our investigative team has taken things a step further. We have intensified the scenario. During the past three years of research, our team became aware of the horrific connection between human sex trafficking and “confidential” abortion clinics that refuse to report abuse. Read the testimonies of human trafficking victims. You’ll find heartbreaking stories of manipulation, rape, sexually contracted diseases, and coerced abortion.

Think about it. Where is a pimp going to send his victims if they get pregnant on the “job”? An abortion clinic, and preferably one that won’t ask any questions. What if those victims are young girls, kidnapped or drafted in from the US, or trafficked in from other nations? Planned Parenthood has demonstrated that they do not report abuse. They are experts at turning a blind eye and asking for “as little information as possible.”

But would Planned Parenthood go as far as aiding and abetting the sex trafficking of underage girls?

This video reveals a top-level Planned Parenthood worker, the manager of Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey’s second largest clinic, making a secret deal with a pimp.  Watch and listen as the Planned Parenthood manager, Amy Woodruff, advises the pimp how to make the trafficking of underage girls look “as legit as possible” (her words). Watch and listen as the manager advises the pimp how to ensure that his 14-year old victims of trafficking can still make money for him after secret abortions by performing sex acts “waist up” (her idea). Watch as she advises the pimp to instruct his girls to lie on the paper work about their ages, and identify themselves as “students” to get cheaper contraception and avoid mandatory reporting laws.

We are calling on Congress to immediately freeze all funding of Planned Parenthood.  We request that the Department of Justice and FBI launch a full-scale investigation of Planned Parenthood and prosecute the aiding and abetting of human trafficking.

We are also calling on state authorities to immediately revoke the licenses of all Planned Parenthood clinics found covering up sex abuse. (more…)

Unable to discuss facts in any logical, coherent way, or even engage in civil discourse, the modern left has two modes of argumentation: tu quoque and ad hominem. The former translates roughly as “and so are you,” while the latter means to attack the person instead of the point. In logic, both of these tactics are considered the lowest form of debate, but for the intellectually bankrupt and emotionally overwrought left, they’re the only tactics they have.

Exhibit A — a masterpiece of the genre — comes in the form of this pre-Father’s Day column from Colbert King of the Washington Post: “On Father’s Day, hypocrites are all in the family.” And away we go:

Family, marriage and the contribution of fathers come together as topics for reflection on Father’s Day. So I’d like to know why Barack Obama, a husband and a father in a family structure that encompasses bonds deemed essential to our society, is constantly and savagely attacked by conservative leaders whose personal circumstances undermine the family values they espouse?

Consider Obama: Raised by a single mother in a middle-class family where hard work and education were watchwords, Obama graduated from two of the top schools in the country, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His legal scholarship was recognized when he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He married and, equally important, has stayed married to Michelle Robinson, a Princeton graduate and Harvard Law alumna. He lives with his wife, two children and his mother-in-law. Obama: constitutional law professor, civil rights lawyer, state legislator, U.S. senator, 44th U.S. president, family man.

Let’s set aside for the moment the misrepresentation that the Community Organizer was ever a “constitutional law professor,” when he was more a gloried graduate teaching assistant than a real professor. Let’s also overlook his background as state senator “present,” and his very brief tenure in the U.S. Senate — a seat he won not in the general election against the hapless Alan Keyes but earlier, by taking out both his primary challenger and the real Republican candidate through the mysteriously obtained (hello, David Axelrod!) divorce records of his opponents.

Having set up an amazingly irrelevant straw man, even by the low standards of the left, King proceeds to demolish it: (more…)

Part one of a series.  Find parts two here and three here.

In researching the ever-intensifying Massachusetts Senate race between Democrat Martha Coakley and her Republican challenger Scott Brown, it only takes a few keystrokes to unearth her ongoing history of questionable judgment and puzzling prosecutorial decisions.  Even though the election has been effectively nationalized, with some polls showing the underdog Brown within two points or so of the colorless Coakley, she remains largely unknown outside New England.

So as a public service to the voters of the Bay State, during the run-up to the special election on Jan. 19, Big Journalism will be offering some of the Martha’s Greatest Hits, so that they can fully make up their minds whether she would make a suitable successor to the late Edward Moore Kennedy – who, as you recall, began his illustrious career by being expelled from Harvard for cheating, went on to drown Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, and then turned to a life of drinking and debauchery, including the infamous “waitress sandwich” with soon-to-be-retired Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, before attempting to inflict “universal health care” on the country shortly before his death last year.

You can read all about Ted here in this classic profile of the last and worst of the Kennedy brothers by the late Michael Kelly.  Be sure to read the whole thing, just to get a flavor of the kind of candidate Massachusetts voters seem to like.

Homework done?  Good.  Because Martha Coakley, the current Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and thus its top law enforcement officer, is shaping up as a worthy heir to the Lion of the Senate. (more…)