K-Lo, reacting to the Romney/Illegal story, with this gem:
My question is: Do we really have to stake out presidential candidates homes? It’s a wonder anyone decent runs for office.
CITIZEN JOURNALISM, BITCHES!
*** Update ***
Good. I am not the only one.
tim serbo
obviously not. we should only stake out the homes of private citizens who can’t summon wealth and connections to their defense. what, you want us to pick on POWERFUL people?
Michael D.
Our Lady or Perpetual Outrage is also upset.
demimondian
I’ve heard that Romney’s counters are clearly Formica!
ArchPundit
It’s an interesting feeling to have Diet Mountain Dew clear out your nasal passages. Very tingly.
tim serbo
so’s his forehead, Demi.
Punchy
So Gramamae Frost solves all of his Malkin probs by declaring for Preznit of 2008.
Robert Johnston
Aside from the obvious IOKIYAR, I’ve got to question why anyone would think that Mitt Romney–dog torturer, man who thinks his children’s work on his campaign is the moral equivalent of laying life down for country, and man running a campaign entirely without political principle–is decent. Sure, he’s a better man than Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, but that’s not saying much.
Jake
At least she seems to accept that every GOP candidate must have something to hide.
But his jaw is of brick and his shoulders cold-forged steel!
Dreggas
Oh…M’God.
I thought nothing would render me speechless ever again but…wow…
Zifnab
I’ll drink to that.
Jen
Ummm, yeah. Here are some other tidbits from the NRO
The good thing is that they are completely oblivious to the way normal people think. Normal people think that if you’re running for the highest office in the land, then nearly everything you do outside your home is fair game to be discussed. That includes John Edwards’ haircuts and Mitt Romney’s hiring practices. Normal people do not think that if you’re a brain-damaged 12 year old with a speech impediment talking about health care, that everything inside and outside of your home, your genealogy, the type of woodworking your father does, and your countertops, are fair game.
And in their oblivion, they press on, pretending that these “issues” are somehow going to mean their butts are not toast in 11 long, long months…
Jen
Sorry, I know it was supposed to be funny and I kinda ranted, but I just can’t help it. There’s something really *wrong* with them, you know?
Krista
I love how she tries to make her horrible treatment towards the Frosts sound oh-so-innocent. “I just drove by once!”
She conveniently neglects to omit two facts: 1) she drove by slowly enough to gather an awful lot of detail about their home; slowly enough to definitely creep out anybody living in that home, and 2) she then raised all sorts of allegations (posed as “innocent questions”) about this family, inspiring who-knows-how-many other nutbars to also swing by the Frost’s home and see what they could find.
I never use the “c”-word when referring to another woman, but in her case, I am sorely tempted…
Cindrella Ferret
What? Establishment journalists staking out a wealthy, powerful candidate? Shame! Poor Mitt. He does have those five sons to defend him from the liberal media terrorists. Gosh he could have had his hair messed up by those big meanies.
Evidently, the only way to protect America is to make sure some guy from Guatemala isn’t raking Mitt’s leaves. It must be great being a Republican these days. The national security Party indeed. Defending America from people who bus tables at small, locally owned diners and pick vegetables for a living.
Makes me want to whistle the theme from Bridge on the River Kwai.
Whoa! Do I hear Kate Smith warming up in the wings? Shazam!
James F. Elliott
That K-Lo and Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage (thank you for that moniker, John) are perpetually obtuse is unsurprising. But I don’t think this reflects all that poorly on Romney. Right around the time he decided he would pretend to give a shit about illegal immigration, it was brought to Romney’s attention that his landscaper employs illegal immigrants. So he told them to shape up or be fired. Now, say what you will about his apparent tendency to “trust but not verify,” when their noncompliance was brought to his attention, he fired the landscaper.
This shouldn’t be so much about Romney’s “hypocrisy” — which we all know is legion — but his complete inability to follow up on whether or not his contractors follow his instructions.
Jay
I wasn’t aware that there was any.
Jen
It’s not really a defense of Romney, but whose landscaping company doesn’t hire illegal immigrants? NPR this morning said approximately 1 out of 4 landscapers are illegal nationwide. Where I live, a little closer to the border than Massachusetts, I would say 3 1/2 are probably illegal. One of our more frothing representatives is well known in her district to have staffed the old homestead more or less exclusively with illegal immigrants.
So instead of scandal brought to Romney, why doesn’t it prompt a reaction along the lines of, “Since avoiding the labor of illegal immigrants nearly anywhere in the country, even if you’re an anti-immigration wingnut, is virtually impossible, can we have a *realistic* discussion of immigration rather than xenophobia and pandering to mouth-breathers, now?”
My next step is to nominate that sentence for least grammatical sentence not uttered by Bush, ever.
Pistol Pete
It is unfortunate we have to scrutinize every detail in a politician’s life. On the positive side, the public has a very short attention span. This minor snafu has already been replaced by the much larger scandal of the deception about Iranian nuclear capability.
Paul L.
You are being misleading and appear to be missing the point.
Malkin is not upset about staking out a presidential candidate’s homes like K-Lo. She is upset by your side’s double standard.
When your side does it, it is investigative reporting. When Malkin does it, It is “harassment” / “stalking” / “swiftboating”.
Amazing, are you the same guys who complained about checking up/”stalking”/”swiftboating” of the Frost family on S-chip?
D-Chance.
Because they (the Republicans) HAVE to. He’s all they got.
Right now, what other options do they have? Giuliani and his problems? Thompson, who acts like he doesn’t give two shits whether he’s there or not? McCain, with all his flip-flopping and pandering? Huckabee and his Creationism and NIE ignorance and other recent problems? Ron Paul?
Let’s face it… for a party who’s been touting all the great successes of the last 7 years, they’ve managed to draw very few qualified people who want the job as Next Leader of the Party. In fact, they’re abandoning ship en masse. The Republcian Party late 2000’s looks and acts like the Democrats late 1970’s/early 80s. They see the handwriting, and they’re cashing in their chips while chips are still in front of them. But they are leaving.
Jen
Paul, what does this have to do with Duke Lacrosse?
Nylund
A real question about Romney’s faith.
As we all know, Mormons “baptize the dead” by proxy. Meaning, in a temple somewhere, a mormon spoke the name of your grandmother and mine as the temple converted them to the LDS church so that they could go rule planets like the prophet Joseph Smith. My question relates this to the idea of war if Romney were to be elected.
Does this mean that the LDS church would have implicit approval from the United States president to not only convert the faiths of all our soldiers after they died to mormonism, but also the faiths of all those Iraqis that die as well? How do you think the muslim world would feel about a US president converting the religions of their dead relatives?
Zifnab
You can’t scare up votes without convincing people that Jose, the lawn guy, got smuggled in with a bunch of towel heads covered in TNT. Admitting that we can’t just deport every illegal en mass makes America look weak. Much better to propose mass deportations, then scream like stuck pigs about our terror-loving surrender-monkey colleagues across the aisle who won’t let us try and do it.
Damn! Beat me to it!
Don
Personally I think this is less a story about Romney being at all hypocritical than it is an example of how the reality of our economy doesn’t at all intersect the implausible plans all the politicians are touting. But, if this supposed difference in reaction to this vs the treatment of the Frosts is what Malkin is upset about then she should get her reasoning facilities checked. There’s a fairly notable difference between a citizen who speaks up about an issue and a politician running for an office.
Furthermore, the smears that Malkin and her crew did on the Frosts were half-assed and inaccurate or misleading. “They go to an expensive private school!” and they’re on a scholarship. “Look at how much the house is worth on the tax assessment!” without checking (or admitting) when and for how much the it was purchased.
Unless there’s a subsequent discovery that nobody on that lawn was actually an illegal immigrant there’s almost no parallels between Malkin et all’s smear-job and this discovery of how Romney’s reality doesn’t match his rhetoric.
Peter Johnson
I doubt that. The guy’s worth about a quarter million. I’d guess granite or marble.
Peter Johnson
I mean quarter billion.
tBone
You’d have a great point here, if Romney was a brain-damaged 12-year-old who was not seeking the Presidency.
It doesn’t involve stem cells, either. Someone must have upgraded the conversation tree module for the Paul script.
No. [/Simple Answers to Simple, If Gramatically Challenged, Questions]
Zifnab
And yet his health care is paid for by the state of Massachusetts – i.e. the Massachusetts taxpayers.
I guess the Frosts are dirty little welfare queens, but Romney is just a hard working government employee. IOKIYAR strikes again!
Dulcie
Damn you, Beauchamp!
When did Malkin become a “reporter”? She’s a crazy woman who runs a blog for cheeto munchers. This is the person who made a bunch of nutty allegations based on a drive by viewing of the Frost home. This is the person who “knew” the Frost’s had money because they had granite cabinets. I’m sorry, but baseless smears and speculation do not a journalist make.
Dulcie
And not even real Cheetos. The generic ones they sell at Big Lots.
Egilsson
Hey John, read this column: http://mediamatters.org/columns/200712040007?f=h_column
I think you will think it’s amusing, in a make-you-cry kind of way.
LITBMueller
Well, since “I [heart] Huckabee” is now coming in near the front of the pack, I suggest he make sure that no “Illegal Children of God” are watering his petunias, muy rapido!!!!
r€nato
that’s what I was thinking. I mean, what would you think of a neighbor who ran around accosting other neighbors’ landscaping crews, demanding proof of citizenship from brown-skinned workers?
And let’s take this a step further. When you go out to eat, do you demand to inspect the kitchen staff to see if there’s any illegals there?
This whole anti-immigration jihad has the potential to turn us into a police state and a nation of snitches. I say, ‘police state’ because if we really wanted to get a handle on illegal immigration, the government would issue counterfeit-proof citizenship documentation to all legal citizens and you’d be required to provide such documentation upon demand by law enforcement, at any time.
Do we really want to live in that kind of nation???
r€nato
fyt.
Pb
You must be new here. Wake me up when John Solomon and Joe Klein get fired.
r€nato
Just because I own a toolbox, it doesn’t make me a mechanic.
It sure is tiresome pointing out the patently obvious to the deliberately obtuse.
r€nato
you know, this kind of thing makes me uncomfortable. It’s JFK-redux. I don’t at all agree with the tenets of LDS (I think it’s downright weird-ass shit, even judged by the standards of the Bible, which I already consider plenty weird), but I’m willing to concede to Romney the good faith that he is not going to try to convert everyone to Mormonism or be a puppet of the LDS elders should he shudder get elected.
OTOH, if there were a Scientologist running for president, you can be damned sure I’d be examining his/her beliefs.
There’s your moral/ethical ambiguity for the day…
Dreggas
Down south there are programs run by high schools offering monetary rewards for turning in your classmates for whatever offenses. Since 9/11 we have been told to report any activity we find “suspicious”. The police and fbi as well as the pentagon have been caught spying on peace protesters and anti-war groups. The Boston PD is asking parents to allow them to enter their homes without a warrant at any time to conduct searches of their kids rooms. We are all but living in a police/security state and it is not just being done by republicans, dems bear part of the blame as well.
John S.
Sorry one-note Paul, but unless you can tie all this in to the Duke Lacrosse players, we don’t care what you have to say.
r€nato
No, I would not say we’re there yet… but we are well on our way, that’s for sure. Freedom is seldom lost in one fell swoop, it’s usually a series of small steps.
Dreggas
No that’s called smart, scientologists are fucking crazy, just walking past their main HQ in Hollywood is creepy.
jcricket
I’m not sure how many more times we’ll have to say it (probably a lot), but this is the difference between the left and the right.
The left understands journalism, and wants it to actually work (treat rumor as rumor, fact as fact, not get spun). The right thinks journalistic objectivity means uncritically reporting rumors and spin that helps their side and demonizing the other side.
They seem to have gotten journalism and PR mixed up.
Buck
It is the American people who are clamoring for a police state. The majority of them anyway.
The Other Steve
Yes, but he could very well change his mind on those issues by next tuesday.
The Other Steve
I want to know why Romney doesn’t mow his own lawn, like the rest of America.
demimondian
C’mon, Paul L. Don’t make a liar of me — you have to be able to tie hypocritical reporting standards about scary brown people to the Duke Lacrosse scandal!
[And the rest of you? Please put your hands down. This is Paul’s question, and I’m quite confident he can answer it without anybody else’s help.]
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“She is upset by your side’s double standard.
When your side does it, it is investigative reporting.”
It isn’t ‘our side’. It’s the Boston Globe, who are actually, umm, reporters, doign investigations on public officials running for public office. And, yes, it is investigative reporting.
Perhaps you might want to Google ‘New York Times Co. v. Sullivan’ to remind yourself on how public figures and private citizens are treated with regard to reporting and libel.
Punchy
I’ll do it for ya, Kris. That woman is CRAZIEEEEE.
demimondian
I think Krista is absolutely right to never refer to a female as merely the embodiment of one of her secondary characteristics. So I will never call Michelle Malkin as a “contemptible corporate whore”, no matter how accurately that summarizes her output.
jenniebee
I really don’t get why Malkin is tying this anti-immigrant nose-poking around Dems’ necks (ok, I understand why she’s trying it but not why anyone believes it). I’m not particularly upset, let alone surprised, that Romney’s lawn service hires illegal immigrants, and I don’t expect that most Democrats are. His Republican opponents for the nomination are probably delighted by it.
So kudos to Malkin for preserving her integrity by standing by the side of all her fellow stalkers-for-a-cause out there, but Michelle: it doesn’t mean you’re right; it just means they’re as nucking futs as you are.
Now could we please please get some reporting about something important, like what the candidates think are appropriate levels of regulation in the financial markets and whether or not we should allow our relationship with Musharef to cool, in light of his coup?
demimondian
No.
Tune in tomorrow for another episode of SATSQ.
Now, stay tuned for our breaking news item: White girls still disappearing badly!
Krista
LOL, Punchy.
Zifnab
Oh. Lame. Tell me when they bring back “Dead Porn Stars and Pedo-bait”. Jean Bene Ramsey 10-year-old wild goose chases and ANS in clown make-up are the only things that do it for me anymore.
cleek
pshaw! the synecdoche is a wonderful figure of speech.
r€nato
you know what? I retract what I wrote. I just learned that Romney is a bishop in the LDS church. JFK was not any kind of church official. Two different things.
r€nato
The Graeme’s likely made themselves public figures when they agreed to be a part of the pro-SCHIP advertising.
r€nato
…adding, the bar for ‘public figures’ is rather low, IIRC. About the only way to remain a private citizen, is to be an agoraphobic… and even then it’s sketchy.
r€nato
that’s for sure. A lot, a lot, a lot of Americans are OK with giving up their freedoms in exchange for security or less crime or less illegal immigrants, because they think it’ll only be those other people who are affected.
These folks who think like this, are usually white Christian middle-to-upper-class folks.
SenderC
I want to know why Romney doesn’t mow his own lawn, like the rest of America.
Heck, the Five Brothers with a couple of riding mowers and some blowers could knock that yard out in less than half an hour. And Mitt might strap down the dog and go get some ice cream with them afterwards.
demimondian
FWIW, a “bishop” in the CJCLDS is not at all the same thing as a bishop in any of the churches of the Orthodox or Roman Catholic traditions. An LDS bishop ie is essentially a lay congregational official, not an ordained administrator of a group of congregations.
grumpy realist
Malkin has reasoning facilities? (blinks eyes) Do we have any evidence of this?
That woman has addicted herself to the adrenaline of rage.
Bubblegum Tate
True–then you become a “famed agoraphobic” and cable news will repeatedly stick you on their talking-head shows to balance out the horrendous non-agoraphobic media bias, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a Stalkin’ Malkin in your bushes reporting on the condition of your hovel.
Innocent Bystander
“I want to know why Romney doesn’t mow his own lawn, like the rest of America.”
Yeah…or why he’s so cheap to pay a reasonable wage for manual labor. I’m betting he told his grounds supervisor “I don’t want to have illegals doing the work, but I don’t want to pay more than $.50/hour. You figure it out (wink, wink)”
Paul L.
Looks like Crooks and Liars lives up to their name and gets it wrong and overlooks the double standard.
Malkin blames the “liberal media”–for reporting the facts
Par for the course.
jcricket
I think, for the most part, that it is true there are “no jobs Americans won’t do”. However, there are some “wages Americans won’t accept”. When the wages fall below that, it is preferable (sadly) to go unemployed or attempt to scrounge together multiple other positions than to work in the slaughterhouse up to your knees in freezing-cold pig blood, while risking injury/death, for $5.15/hour.
I know all these businesses “couldn’t afford” to raise their wages to something that Americans would accept, but that just shows how much John Edwards’ “Two Americas” theme is correct. All the measures of economic growth show that things are going great – corporate profits are up, so to with productivity, unemployment is low, stocks are pretty high – yet people are earning less than ever.
We need some new measures.
John S.
And what exactly is the error in what C&L had posted about Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage?
Oh, I know…they didn’t mention what it has to do with the Duke lacrosse players!
Good catch.
Downpuppy
Except that the landscaper says Romney never mentioned it, and Romney obviously never followed up to see if he had done anything, or even (God forbid) stepped outside & actually talked to anybody on the crew.
Chuck Butcher
Well, let’s look at this, 30% of the illegal employees are in construction. I am a construction contractor. I make strictly legal hires. I have to pay for that. Once all govt is paid off employees are 150% of wage, and that I pay. I am in competition with cheats. I get hurt. My guys wages are driven down as is my end. I don’t like it.
Employers need an accurate verification system and along with it, real serious sanctions. Remember, if I refuse to hire someone who is a minority and they ARE legal I’ve discriminated. It is quite possible to hire legally, you just have to pay for it. If everyone has to pay for it the playing field is leveled.
Mitt is just another cheap rich asshole.
Beej
There is one sure way to end all but a thin trickle of illegal immigration and everyone, including the Repugs, knows what it is. Pass a law fining anyone who employs an undocumented worker and make the fine large enough to really sting-say $250,000 per infraction (or, what the hell, make it $1,000,000 per infraction). Then hire enough immigration agents to do the employer checks that are going to be required. It’ll never happen, of course, the GOP’s corporate and business supporters would have a cow, man. Still, it would be nice to hear someone suggest it at one of the Repug debates and see what the candidates have to say about it.
Tax Analyst
Ooh…Ooh…Krista, I’m a fully-certified male-sexist pig, can I call her the “c” word?
Pretty please.