Teach Yourself Java While Still at the Bookstore

Out of thousands of comments made about the PAC expenditure story, this one on Balloon Juice is my favorite:

Roger Cadenhead, who posted this, is someone who has churned out a large number of computing books, many with titles like Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 24 Hours or Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days. As a software engineer, these titles make me doubt Cadenhead’s credibility. It might-just-be possible to learn a substantial amount of Java in 21 days (it is a very large language once one counts the libraries), but I don't know any non-trivial computer language in which most people can be fluent in less than six months.

As the author of more than a dozen Teach Yourself Subject in Refreshingly Short Time Period books, I occasionally get sent the link to Google director of research Peter Norvig's essay Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years and Abstruse Goose's comic strip on the easiest way to teach yourself C++ in 21 Days.

I'm currently working on Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, so these guys are hitting me right in the meal ticket.

The official reason for the titles of these books is that each chapter is designed for readers to accomplish in that time period. So if you read Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours, and I strongly believe that you should, you can read each chapter and complete its projects in an hour. The same goes for Sams Teach Yourself Java 6 in 21 Days, but you get one day for each chapter because the material is harder. Whether you complete these books in 24 consecutive hours or 21 consecutive days -- or space it out and take breaks -- is up to you.

The unofficial reason for the titles? If I called my next book Teach Yourself C++ in 10 Years, it would sell as well as Lose Weight by Watching Your Diet and Exercising Regularly and Become a Millionaire by Working Hard for 40 Years and Saving Your Money.

The Norvig essay ends with a line that my publisher should use on the next edition: "[G]o ahead and buy that Java book." -- Peter Norvig, Google

Java · Publishing · Time · 2010/04/01 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Hamsher and Greenwald Respond to PAC Story

The piece I wrote on Jane Hamsher's PAC expenditures has drawn responses from both Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, the cofounder of the Accountability Now PAC. They claim that I am engaged in "an attack meant to shut down fundraising" and "standard political cult behavior of trying to smear those who oppose the Leader."

Hamsher submitted her comment to Mediaite:

Glenn runs Accountability Now, which is a non-partisan organization, and I run FDL PAC, which is a progressive organization. FDL PAC went well beyond the level of disclosure required by the FEC, and I'm extraordinarily proud of what we managed to accomplish on a shoestring budget. There wasn't one meal, entertainment expense or travel receipt in the report. Not that there would have been anything wrong if there had been, but between FEC compliance and program costs, there wasn't a penny to spare. This was an attack meant to shut down fundraising, no different from the attacks on ACORN or the labor unions by the right. There are many ways to engage in a political disagreement that don't involve trying to destroy an organization's ability to pay its staff a living wage for the work that they do. This wasn't one of them.

Greenwald made his in response to a blogger on Balloon Juice who called Accountability Now a failure. Some of his points address that blogger, who retracted his post, but the rest appears to be a response to my story. Greenwald claims that he's being attacked for being a tough critic of Obama:

This smear comes from one place: blogs that are devoted to revering Barack Obama and despising anyone who speaks ill of him. Just like Bush followers invariably tried to slime the personal credibility of anyone who dissented from their movement (Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson, Paul O'Neill, David Frum), the real purpose of this is to try to smear Jane Hamsher (and, much more distantly, me) for the Crime of Speaking Ill of the Leader. If enough money signs are thrown around enough times with her name, Obama cultists who view her as a Traitor will declare that some great impropriety has taken place. But the smear lacks even a single concrete accusation, let alone a true one.

That's why it's all coming from Obama-revering circles. It has nothing to do with the issues raised and everything to do with the standard political cult behavior of trying to smear those who oppose the Leader.

In this case, it backfired. What you said was blatantly false. You were so reckless in what you said that you had to retract it. Every actual fact that you cited was disclosed long ago by Accountability Now as clearly and publicly as possible.

Being able to accomplish what we accomplished with AN, with a tiny budget of small donors who were never asked again to donate, is one of the things about which I'm most proud in terms of the work I've done in the past 18 months. What is missing more than anything from Washington is a credible infrastructure to recruit and support primary challengers against unaccountable incumbents, and from scratch, we created that. Every last aspect of the group's activities and finances were publicly disclosed way beyond what the law requires. The ones who have been exposed and whose credibility has been damaged are people (like you) willing to spout false and baseless accusations without bothering to do the slightest work to first find out if what you're saying is true, all because the people you’re smearing don't sufficiently revere your Leader.

Neither Hamsher nor Greenwald point out any specific errors of fact in the story, which reported what the FEC filings reveal about their PAC expenditures.

Greenwald's wrong when he states that I used figures from the Accountability Now year-end expense report in my story. I added up the numbers myself from the FEC filings because there were some minor differences.

Contrary to his claim that it would be "impossible to have greater disclosure of expenses than what we provided," his PAC could have answered questions about its FEC filings sent to its treasurer. They had four days. I even told Hamsher in advance that the story was being published Monday and told her everything it would cover. That's how she was able to prepare an expense report that came out around the same time I published my story.

I'm catching hell in a 1,100-comment Daily Kos post about Greenwald's response. One commenter asked, "who are you that a blogger should give you an interview?"

I find that question ironic, given the fact that we're talking about grass-roots PACs like the one Firedoglake operates. Am I important enough to deserve an answer to my questions? It's not for me to decide. My mother says I'm plenty important.

On a site like Daily Kos, any user can publish a diary that gets a great deal of attention. My story has drawn 1,400 comments and was promoted by users to the front page, despite the fact that site publisher Markos Moulitsas disliked it. So if anybody is declining to answer questions on the grounds that the blogger isn't important enough for their time, that seems like a bad policy to me.

The suggestion that I'm doing all of this because I love Obama and I hate his critics is completely false.

I love Joe Biden.

I gave him $250 minutes before he dropped out of the presidential race. He sent me a nice letter in response.

Politics · Pacs · Campaign Finance · 2010/03/31 · 24 COMMENTS · Link

Who the Hell is Rogers Cadenhead?

There's a new story on Firedoglake this morning titled Who the Hell is Rogers Cadenhead? The author goes through my background and describes me as a "semi-deranged" former journalist. That's disappointing. Not fully deranged?

A lot of people on Firedoglake and Daily Kos are questioning my motives and accusing me of writing a "hit piece" against Hamsher. I do not regard it as a personal attack to investigate how a PAC spends its money and ask the founders about specific expenditures. A PAC is answerable to the public, which is why the Federal Election Commission requires it to file reports. If Hamsher and FDL Action PAC treasurer DeVeria Flowers refuse to answer questions that's their prerogative, but it does not engender much confidence in the operation of their PACs.

One of the commenters on Firedoglake claims that by asking questions about these expenditures I am JAQing off:

JAQing off is the act of spouting accusations while cowardly hiding behind the claim of "Just Asking Questions".[1] The strategy is to keep asking leading questions in an attempt to influence listeners' views; the term is derived from the frequent claim by the denialist that they are "just asking questions", albeit in a manner much the same as political push polls. It is often associated with denialism in general.

The Internet is a weird place.

Politics · Firedoglake · Jargon · 2010/03/30 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

A Daily Kos User By Any Other Name

I posted the story about Jane Hamsher's PAC expenditures on Daily Kos, where it has attracted more than 1,100 comments in six hours. It also earned me a warning from a site administrator because I referred to the real names of two members who post there as Nyceve and Slickerwink:

The publication of DKos users' real names here -- if they have not revealed them on this site -- is forbidden. Your use of nyceve's and slinkerwink's real names violated that prohibition. Don't do it again.

I wasn't able to comment until I agreed to never ever never do it again.

I can understand why that rule is in place, since there's a rule on the Drudge Retort against posting personally identifiable information about another member of the site. Most of the time that junk is part of an effort to intimidate someone.

In this case, though, it was a surprise to get in trouble for it. Noelle Cigaroa Bell identifies herself by both her real name and Slickerwink in her Huffington Post columns, and Eve "Nyceve" Gittelson does the same on the FDL Action PAC blog and elsewhere. They want people to know their real names and their pen names.

If it ever comes up again that I'm writing about a Kos user, I'll make sure they are OK being identified.

Publishing · Etiquette · Daily Kos · 2010/03/29 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

How Jane Hamsher Spends Her PAC Money

Firedoglake publisher Jane Hamsher has become one of the most polarizing figures in the liberal blogosphere, moving people sharply to the pro or con column with her outspoken opposition to the health care reform bill, appearances on Fox News bashing the Obama administration and the letter she sent with conservative activist Grover Norquist demanding the resignation of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Hamsher wields a lot of influence by operating two Democratic political action committees, FDL Action PAC and Accountability Now PAC. By the end of 2009 these PACs had accumulated $454,000 from thousands of individual donors. Because all PACs are required by law to report their donors and expenditures with the Federal Election Commission, I thought the FEC disclosure database would provide a revealing glimpse of how money is moving through the netroots.

PACs have different policies regarding whether they compensate the people who run the committees. Some don't accept one cent of donor money and devote it all to their cause, while others pay themselves salaries, travel expenses and office rent. I interviewed Darcy Burner, a former Democratic Congressional candidate from Washington state who runs the not-for-profit Progressive Congress Action Fund, to learn whether it's common for left-wing PACs to pay themselves. "The bigger PACs require full-time staff to operate -- to raise money, to vet candidates [and] to file reports," she said. "I think the key question would be more one of whether people giving the money understand what it will be used for. ... There's a trust relationship with donors that requires some truth and transparency about how money is going to be used."

The FEC reports show that Hamsher's PACs are a significant source of income for Firedoglake, but my experience trying to question her about them suggests that she's not big on transparency.

FDL Action PAC supports liberal causes and candidates, often with targeted campaigns such as "Tell Blanche Lincoln and Mike Ross to Act Like Democrats." Accountability Now's stated goal is to recruit primary challengers against members of Congress who "sell out the interests of their constituents in favor of corporations," according to its site.

Accountability Now collected $113,695 in donations during 2009, as it reported to the FEC, and spent $169,992 that year on nine consultants. Six of those people managed the committee: The PAC paid Hamsher $24,000, another $24,000 to PAC cofounder Glenn Greenwald of Salon.Com, $65,710 to two executive directors and $38,047 to two management consultants.

The PAC also paid $4,000 to Firedoglake for "rent," according to its FEC filings. This expenditure is difficult to understand. Hamsher has operated her web site out of post office boxes at UPS Stores in Los Angeles and Falls Church, Va., and the Accountability Now web site states that "we have purposely avoided hiring a large staff or incurring the type of unnecessary expenses typically incurred by PACs (including even office rentals) in order to make our donors' contributions last as long as possible."

Out of the $234,920 raised by FDL Action PAC in 2009, $44,192 was paid to Firedoglake and other business entities affiliated with Hamsher, according to FEC filings. The PAC paid $16,411 to Firedoglake for "shared general administrative expenses," $14,111 to the site for "list purchase," $9,920 to CommonSense Media for "online advertising" and $3,750 to KMP Research for "strategic consulting."

The reasons for the expenditures are provided on the filings by PAC treasurer DeVeria Flowers. The list purchase is presumably the sale of a mailing list from the Firedoglake web site to its own PAC. CommonSense Media is a liberal ad network run by Hamsher and KMP Research is a business entity that Hamsher uses in both PACs to pay herself. It has the same post office box as Firedoglake in Falls Church.

Two people who Firedoglake paid to work towards passage of health care reform in 2009 don't show up in FDL Action's FEC filings for the year. FDL raised funds in July 2009 for Eve Gittelson and Noelle Cigarroa Bell to "work full time on this until a bill passes." Gittelson and Bell, who write online as Nyceve and Slinkerwink, announced six months later that they "no longer work with, or receive funds" from Firedoglake. None of their political activity is reflected in the PAC's filings, which raises the question of where donations were sent and how the women were paid.

Trying to understand how the PACs operate, I interviewed several former Firedoglake employees and tried unsuccessfully for the last five days to get Hamsher or Flowers to answer questions about specific expenditures. Flowers did not respond to emails. In an email exchange Sunday, Hamsher refused to answer any questions about how her PACs spend their money.

Instead, Hamsher questioned me repeatedly to see if I'd tell her which employees talked to me and what allegations they might have made. "I'm assuming from your answer that no former FDL employees have made statements or provided any information that will be used in the article," she wrote in an email, "since you have not informed me of nor allowed me to respond to any."

With one exception, the employees spoke to me off the record so I'm not passing along what they said. They were asked the same questions posed to her. PACs are accountable to the public for where their donations are spent. The only person who had trouble giving me an answer was Hamsher.

In December, Hamsher used FDL Action to urge the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation to fire Sen. Joe Lieberman's wife Hadassah Lieberman as a consultant because of her work for a health industry lobbying firm. Hamsher wrote, "Each year they take in hundreds of millions of dollars from people who want to end the suffering of those who are fighting breast cancer. How these donations are channeled, therefore, is of great concern to those those who have invested untold amounts of money and support in its work."

The same principle is true here. As of this morning, FDL Action PAC has collected more than $270,000 from around 9,100 individual donors.

In the six years since she founded Firedoglake and named it after her fireplace, dog and the Los Angeles Lakers, Hamsher has built a well-oiled outrage machine that's now firmly pointed at the White House and its Democratic allies in Congress. These headlines from Hamsher's blog posts show that she's mad as hell and she's not going to take it anymore:

• White House Executive Order: ---- --- to Planned Parenthood
• Do Conrad and Durbin Just Love Banks, Or Really Hate Students?
• Ha Ha. ---- You, Harry Reid. Kicking Your Ass is Going To Be Fun

Hamsher's exceptionally good at getting people to put their money where her mouth is. But because Firedoglake is a blog that's dependent on financial support from PACs, it makes me wonder how much of her outrage is real and how much is driven by the constant need to fire up donors.

I posed that question to David Ferguson, who used to be in charge of Firedoglake's "Late Night FDL" feature under his pseudonym TRex. He replied, "I would hope that Jane wouldn't be so cynical as to exploit her readers in any way. I do know that working for her, there was a constant sense of crisis. Everything was always a blazing, four-alarm emergency, and I think some of that is what comes through on her blog. I don't know whether that's something she's working for effect or if that's just the way she is. Some of her alliances over the last year have genuinely surprised me, though, particularly with regard to the flap over the health care bill."

2009 Accountability Now expenditures to managers and consultants:

The photo of Hamsher was taken by Neeta Lind and is available for reuse under a Creative Commons license.

Politics · Pacs · Firedoglake · 2010/03/29 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Glenn Beck Begs Listeners Not to Throw Bombs

On his talk radio program today, Glenn Beck begged his listeners not to use guns or bombs to respond to the passage of health care reform in Congress. In a long diatribe in which he claimed that today's Democratic leaders were violent radical Marxists in the '60s, Beck said, "They need you to pick up a gun or a bomb. They need you to break the law. They need you to become them in the 1960s."

Beck claimed that the United States is "entering a very dangerous phase" by design of the Obama administration, which he said is intentionally provoking the public by passing health care and moving next to immigration reform.

"If you were in the 1960s and you were a radical and you believed in a Marxist revolution, you were crushed," he said. "And who crushed you? Well, the good God-fearing grandparents that we all had that were going to church. They stood up. ... Who crushed you? LBJ and Nixon. The Man."

Although President Obama, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and most other Cabinet members were too young to have been part of '60s counterculture or had absolutely no ties to the radical movement, Beck maintained that today's Democratic Party is led by '60s radicals who pursued the violent overthrow of the United States.

"If I were a radical in the '60s and I was sitting back and saying OK how did we lose? We lost because we weren't in power," he said. "You must have power. It's not enough to be out on the streets. You must be Richard Nixon. You must have radicals at the top. If I again am sitting there and I'm listening to that and I think, you know what really killed us here is that Americans don't like bomb throwers. They don't like hippies. ...

"If you're going to take over, if you're going to end it, if you want to have the true fundamental transformation of America, what you do is you have to reverse the roles. You have to put yourself in the role of LBJ the Man. And you need to put the Man, you need to put the good Christian people, in your role from the 1960s. The ones with the signs and the banners in the streets because you can manipulate them like crazy -- because you know what the Man did to you that pissed you off. You know what the Man was doing to you that made you say I gotta get a bomb. And you also know that doesn't work."

Comparing the American people to a child being disciplined by its parent, Beck said, "Why do you think they are needling and poking and prodding all the time? Why do you think they slap you down on health care and just when you're getting up they punch you in the face with immigration? Why do you think they're being so divisive? ... They gave us a spanking on health care and then they punched us in the face. They want you to say daddy doesn't love me. They need you to be estranged from them."

Beck's advice: "Do not play in to their game. They hold all of the cards. Do not do anything but get on your knees. As we turn to Him He will turn to us. This is His land. Let it play out His way. Do not pick up anything except your soul. They need you to become radical."

In a Gallup poll released yesterday after the House approved health reform, more Americans supported the health reform bill than opposed it by a margin of 49 percent to 40 percent.

Beck, however, fears that the passage of Democratic legislation by a Democratic president and Democratic Congress will lead to revolution. "I'm thinking ... if there's a revolution now, it ends the way the French Revolution did, which is Napoleon, a dictator, bloodshed -- awful, awful things."

• Video of Beck's diatribe
• Transcript from GlennBeck.Com

Radio · Politics · Crime · 2010/03/24 · 17 COMMENTS · Link

Andrew Breitbart Lied to Pimp ACORN Story

Clark Hoyt, the ombudsman of the New York Times, has finally figured out that Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe lied to the media about the way O'Keefe was dressed during the ACORN sting videos last fall:

... O'Keefe almost certainly did not go into the Acorn offices in the outlandish costume -- fur coat, goggle-like sunglasses, walking stick and broad-brimmed hat -- in which he appeared at the beginning and end of most of his videos. It is easy to see why The Times and other news organizations got a different impression. ... The Times was wrong on this point, and I have been wrong in defending the paper's phrasing. Editors say they are considering a correction.

The Times reported several times that O'Keefe was wearing a ridiculous pimp costume during the visits to ACORN offices, an impression furthered by O'Keefe when he wore it during an appearance on Fox News.

As the story was first getting national attention, Breitbart wrote in his column for the Washington Times that O'Keefe was dressed that way:

When filmmaker and provocateur James O'Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN -- the nation's foremost "community organizers" -- dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for - and getting -- help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice.

As Breitbart had to know at the time, since he had viewed all of the videos and was publishing them on his Big Government web site, O'Keefe was dressed conservatively in a button-down shirt while talking to ACORN workers. He only wore the pimp costume in footage shown of him getting out of a car, which was filmed separately and edited into the videos to mislead viewers.

Telling people O'Keefe wore that pimp getup helped give the story wider media attention and made ACORN workers look stunningly stupid for not seeing through the ruse.

Dig into any story pimped by Breitbart and you'll catch him spreading half-truths or brazenly false information. Though he employs the trappings of journalism, he engages in practices that no professional journalist could get away with at a reputable organization.

In May 2001, the Drudge Report ran a story that quoted Breitbart and chided the New York Times for not covering Sidney Blumenthal dropping his libel suit against Drudge:

"What the NEW YORK TIMES is doing with its sin of omission concerning the Drudge case is no doubt a form of libel of its own, corporate news slander of the highest degree," said Professor Emeritus Andrew Breitbart of the Cashmere Institute of Media Studies.

The Cashmere Institute of Media Studies does not exist. It's a phony organization named by Breitbart as an in-joke that would be spotted by his personal friends. Breitbart was editing the Drudge Report at the time, and he either quoted himself or Drudge quoted him.

When I was a newspaper reporter, I would have been fired if I pulled a stunt like that to inject my opinion into a story. But Drudge and Breitbart have the good fortune to work in online agenda-driven journalism, where no one is ever held accountable for being wrong. Breitbart lied back then, lied about the ACORN sting and will probably lie in furtherance of the next scoop he peddles to the mainstream media.

He can't be trusted.

I wonder how long it will take the Times and the rest of the major media to figure that out.

Related blog entries:

• Simon Owens interviews Brad Friedman, the liberal blogger who has doggedly pursued a correction from the Times

Journalism · Politics · Prostitution · 2010/03/21 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

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