2010

Grand Old Police Blotter: CPAC of Thieves Edition

CPAC's not just all about hatred of gays. It's a regular criminal family enterprise, if WorldNutDaily is to be believed:

Someone this week leaked a juicy story to WorldNetDaily indicating that $400,000 in donor funds had been embezzled from the American Conservative Union, an old-line conservative advocacy group that organizes the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The premiere Republican political convention, CPAC is the testing ground for GOP presidential contenders that has been addressed by everyone from Ronald Reagan to Dick Cheney. ACU apparently disclosed the theft in its recent tax filings, noting that it had referred the case to the authorities. WND points out that the nonprofit group's bookkeeper was the ex-wife of ACU chairman David Keene, and that she had been fired earlier this year.

The story is an especially nasty hit on ACU by an organization that would normally be considered a friend. But not only did the conservative website best known for its regular "birther" updates break the news of the ACU scandal, but WND also took the opportunity to pile on Keene. WND dragged up a host of other scandals from the ACU's past, including the fact that Keene's son is serving a 10-year prison sentence for a road rage incident in Virginia in which he fired a gun at another motorist, narrowly missing his head. At the time, David Michael Keene was apparently working for his father at ACU. According to WND, the incident proved even more embarrassing for the elder Keene, who is a high ranking member of the National Rifle Association and currently poised to become its next president.

It's unusual for conservatives to air their dirty laundry like this, and it came during a serious internecine ideological battle in the conservative movement that's largely about gays. Over the past few weeks, CPAC organizers have been fighting over whether or not the gay conservative group GOProud should be allowed to participate in the conference. Last year, CPAC allowed GOProud a table in the exhibit hall, and social conservative groups went bezerk, threatening to boycott. During the conference, a speaker from the California Young Americans for Freedom gave a homophobic rant attacking CPAC for allowing GOProud a spot at the conference. This year, GOProud is looking to be more involved, and again the evangelicals are in a tizzy, threatening to boycott the conference and generally throwing bombs at ACU, which has been putting on the show since the early 1970s.

So David Keene's son is a convicted homocidal nutjob and his ex-wife's an alleged thief, according to WorldNutDaily. Of course, WorldNutDaily's usually full of shit, although the kid's shooting incident is a verifiable fact. This smells of a turf war, and I expect to see many more deserving casualties before the war is over.

CPAC tried to force Concerned Women of America and the Family Research Council to shower with GOProud, and they're having none of it. They'll only shower with James Dobson.

All That and a Bag of Dicks

Andy Sullivan's milky loads wrangler, Patty Appel, has given up any hope of a career in journalism and has devoted his life to polishing Andy's toy trophies. Here, he's proffering a "Moore Award" to this post, which Patty would have written himself -- under Andy's signature -- if only he'd had the intelligence, wit and (Andy's artificial) testosterone necessary to craft such a masterpiece.

But being a subnormal dick is its own reward. Here's a glimpse at Patty's First and Only Life:

I get up around 8 am, check Memeorandum, and skim new items in my RSS reader until about 10 am. As I’m reading, I open around fifty posts in tabs for closer inspection. I then read through those tabs, delete most of them, and draft the best. According to Google Reader, I have 1,086 blogs in my RSS reader and have read 16,070 posts in the last 30 days. This is down from a high of about 32,000 posts during the height of the election. The blogs are sorted into different categories: politics, right partisans, left partisans, science, economics, pop culture, and so on. Depending upon the news of the day, I will focus on one folder or another. I’ll also look through the 450 or so e-mails that the Dish inbox gets everyday. I draft posts steadily until noon or 1 pm and break for lunch.

After lunch, I’ll take care of any other Dish related work I might have and then I return to reading. At this point, I will usually draft a half dozen posts for the weekend. We try to bank most of the weekend in advance, which requires finding posts and articles that will still feel fresh a couple of days down the road. Weekends consist of magazine articles, science writing, religion, out of the way pop culture items, and other fairly timeless posts. After that, I will check back in with the news of the day and will start blogging up the next morning. At 6 pm or 7 pm, I break for dinner. After dinner, I will usually return to the blog and finish scheduling posts for the next morning. Depending upon the tempo of the news, I work anywhere from ten to fourteen hours a day.

Now that's living!

If you're so inclined, you can congratulate Patty on his life's work by voting in his little contest and then leaving a comment for him on the results page. If you don't want Joe Miller to be the person most humiliated by write-in voting in 2010, that is.