The the annals of cool and unique ideas, the ultra conservative Breitbart website has decided to satirize themselves.

This weekend, they did an amazing story about President Obama’s nominee for Attorney General, Loretta Lynch.  And that would have been cool except they did not know who Loretta Lynch is.  And their brain neurons did not synapse far enough to realize that maybe, just maybe, there might be more than one Loretta Lynch in America.

They headlined.

The prosecutor has a long career built of some high profile cases but there is one case Lynch was involved in that few are talking about. Lynch was a part of Bill Clinton’s Whitewater probe defense team in 1992. In 1992, the Clintons came under fire for investing in a perennially failing Arkansas real estate company known as Whitewater Development, a venture heavily subsidized by Clinton friend Jim McDougal in an effort to soften the losses the Clintons were experiencing as investors. blah, blah, blah, etc ….  The Clintons escaped any convictions in the probe. A New York Times article from March of 1992 reported that Lynch was one of the Clintons’ Whitewater defense attorneys as well as a “campaign aide.”

Anyway, the article goes on for paragraphs of purple prose about how well connected Loretta Lynch is to those evil, evil, holy cow evil Clintons.

Oops.

Wrong Loretta Lynch.

Clinton’s Lynch is one the left, Obama’s on the right.

But, let’s not stop there.

Oh no.  Let’s continue this fun.

After about 48 hours, Breitbart issued a correction.  Here’s how it looked. The story stayed exactly the same, except at the bottom …

So you read a whole book about how Winston Churchill had a secret life as a whoremongering mass murderer and then the last addendum says … “oops, wrong Churchill.”

Hey Brietbart — oops, wrong profession.

Thanks to Brian and David for the heads up.

Those of you not on Facebook might enjoy knowing that I have a day job.  I write for Outsmart Magazine, which my friend Glen Maxey says is weird because I’m neither.

You might like this month’s column.  It makes me laugh!

As does this —

A mess of you have asked me why Battleground Texas didn’t work.

I’ve kinda been coy because of Reagan’s 11th Commandment.  However, I am not truly convinced that these people have the total interest of the Democratic Party at heart. One thing is clear, however, they are capitalists.  And boy howdy!, did they ever prove that.

The best story I’ve seen on the matter is in the Austin American Statesman.

The Davis campaign boasted of raising more than $36 million, nearly keeping pace with Abbott’s fundraising had he not embarked on the campaign with $21 million already in the bank. But that isn’t the whole story.

While the Abbott campaign had direct control over all its money, only about $22.3 million in contributions flowed directly to Davis; the rest was shuffled through two committees, with some of it returned to her mostly as in-kind contributions.

The middle men consultants got rich and candidates from the state house to the court house got screwed.  There are so many lumps in the kitty litter that I doubt it will ever get cleaned out.

Regardless of personalities, the whole concept is deeply flawed.

The worst part is that they own the data that volunteers collected.  If a candidate wants to use that data, she has to hire these particular consultants.  It’s no secret that the guy who owns Battleground Texas also owns Ready for Hillary.  At a Ready for Hillary meeting I attended, they readily admitted – even with some excitement – that we were supposed to go out and get email addresses and phone numbers for them which they, in turn, would “sell” to Hillary.

Retail politics.

Volunteers were not allowed to keep the data they collected at block walks and phone banks.  This is data the local Democratic Party might want to use in a  school board race or a state house race in two years.  It’s gone from the grassroots and now owned by a retail organization.  You pay to play.

However, it turns out that most of their data is as worthless as corn flake recipes.  The “fellows” they hired for a pittance were given unrealistic goals.  You cannot block walk 200 houses in one afternoon in Texas in the heat.  I personally saw one fellow make up data and enter it into their database because the person over him was threatening to fire him.  No data is better than bad data.

An old Texas farmer had trouble with people stealing his watermelons.   So, he posted a sign on his fence that said, “One of these watermelons is poisoned and only I know which one.  Good luck!”  The same is true with untrustworthy data.  It’s like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.  You cannot rely on getting out of the pool smelling like roses.

Paul Stafford, the Democratic candidate in Dallas County’s House District 115, said he appreciated the help he got from Battleground Texas. But he said that at times its volunteers had a “lack of expertise.”

“There were some deficiencies that became more glaring as the election drew closer,” Stafford said.

In some cases, he said, Battleground representatives, using faulty voter data, knocked on the doors of people who opposed him.

“If you come into an organization that’s touting itself as having an ability to do X, Y and Z, and mobilizing voters, and candidates rely on that, we hope they can deliver that effectively and efficiently,” Stafford said. “When that doesn’t happen, it’s really disappointing.”

That is why their predictions about the outcome were so wildly and embarrassingly wrong.

There are going to be people who disagree with me.  That’s fine.  I quit needing new friends about 20 years ago and, to be honest, there’s a couple of old ones I’d just as soon be rid of.  However, I think you’re going to see county chairs across this state come out to say they never saw where $36 million went.

For those who are truly interested, read the entire Statesman column.  In my mind, it’s right on target.

There’s more troubles outlined here in the Washington Post.

I will eventually write something funny about Battleground Texas but right now, it just hurts too much.  When you rely on people to do what they say they can do and then they fail so spectacularly and arrogantly, it takes a while to laugh.  Meanwhile, Battleground Alaska sounds like a good idea to me.

Right here in Dallas, the heart of Texas, there’s some goings-on among Republicans.

Last summer, The National Center for Policy Analysis, Dallas’ most prominent conservative think tank, “erupted in personnel and management squabbles.”

Here’s the deal.

President and CEO John Goodman, who has led the center since its creation in 1983, was fired in a unanimous vote of the board of directors, according to a statement issued by the center.

At the time this happened, Goodman announced …..

“It is a coup,” Goodman said. “There’s a huge disagreement about the management of the organization, with board members threatening to sue other board members, and threatening to sue me.

“This is terrible,” he added. “Dallas needs a think tank. But Dallas is proving that it’s not ready for it.”

Well, it wasn’t quite that simple.  A couple of weeks later, it was announced that Mr. Goodman had been boinking one of the employees and was also fired for breach of fiduciary duty.  He was being paid half a million dollars a year and still couldn’t afford to have his zipper welded shut.  Her name is Sherri Collins and she’s probably not who you want representing the Temple of Free Markets.

In early June, Collins, then 47, was arrested at a house in Frisco for assault and criminal mischief. According to Frisco police, Collins had assaulted a “boyfriend” (not Goodman) by trying to hit him with a fake plant and throwing things across the living room at him. It wasn’t Collins’ first brush with the law. Texas Department of Public Safety records show she had been arrested four times in North Texas between 1997 and 2009, on charges ranging from assault and theft to criminal mischief.

So who could see trouble coming with this woman?  Well, certainly not the top thinker of the Libertarian movement.

The Lovely Couple

So, if your organization is trying to recover from a nasty little squalid office love affair and some fiduciary irresponsibility, what do you do?  You bring in intellectual gravitas.

Or not.

Tea party favorite Allen B. West was named Friday to be the new CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas think tank that has focused on market-based solutions for health care and tax and fiscal policy.

Oh hell, yes.

Allen West.  Head of a think tank.  Will the ironies ever cease?

By the way, Dallas has a Democratic mayor and a Democratic County Judge.  Allen West ain’t getting no damn key to the city!

Thanks to Jean and David for the heads up.

In Kentucky, 37 year old Deborah Delane Asher was arrested for trafficking of a controlled substance and possession of methamphetamine.

Which came as a shock to everyone!

Her mug shot.

Thanks to Brian for the heads up.

Through the miracle of modern big time journalism, I am able to bring you a photograph of the arrival of the new Republican congress in Washington Dee Cee.

Thanks to Shorpy and Fred Farklestone for the heads up.