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Like any gathering of like-minded people, one of the more interesting facets of CPAC is the party scene, and one of the quirkier parties is BlogBash, put together by Breitbart acolytes and Karl Rove pal Ali Akbar.

One reason to pay attention is to see who will actually show up and be seen with the sleazy underbelly of the right-wing blogosphere. This is a group who honored white nationalist Robert Stacy McCain, and in an ironic moment, also wandering former managing editor Dana Loesch. Last time I checked, her lawsuit against the Breitbart empire was still pending.

Look who showed up this year to pay homage to the Deified Andrew Breitbart! Yup, Senator Troll Mansplainer himself came to tell those bloggers how dead mainstream media is, because of their exemplary work.

Cruz's paean to Breitbart got me to wondering whether it was Cruz who planted the bogus "Friends of Hamas" story that Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro choked so hard on. That would explain why Senator Troll would take time away from his mansplaining ways to show up at a bar out in the boondocks to drink a toast to Dead St. Andy.

In the video, organizer Ali Akbar explains how he was able to secure funding for the Big Bash this year -- getting all Republicans in Congress to donate. Other donors included Freedomworks, CRC Public Relations, and more. At the end of the evening, Foster Friess even made an appearance to wave at everyone, and possibly to drop a few thousand for them to continue their good works.

Akbar claims there is no equivalent to this on the left. He's correct, nor will there ever be. The left does not drop large chunks of cash on people who can't even bother to file for non-profit status while they're collecting the big bucks, who spend the better part of a year blogging about an imaginary bogeyman and who exemplify the negative aspects of "citizen journalism."

Bonus: Oops! Ali Akbar forgot to lock down his organizational group, it seems, and so his (and others') disdain for the American Conservative Union and its president in particular spilled out and over onto Breitbart Unmasked and RightWingWatch.

Last week, the Boston Phoenix published a fabulous long read on Nadia Naffe, James O'Keefe, and the slimy underbelly of conservative "journalism." I use that term guardedly and with a large grain of salt.

We've told pieces of Nadia's story here, here and here, but reporter Chris Faraone dug deep into the ugly that is conservative media and dredged a lot more sludge up to the surface. I highly recommend taking a few minutes and reading the whole thing.

Nadia's story is bad enough, but it isn't unique. Conservative media, particularly online, is nothing more than an organized and well-funded smear machine, and they don't care who they hit as long as they're viewed as an "enemy."

Charlie Pierce:

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This is not a story about free speech, but when it is published the right wing will squawk loud, long and hard about how it really is about free speech. They use free speech as a cudgel: They're always entitled to it, but the rest of us can just shut the hell up and sit down. For the right, free speech is only free when it supports their point of view.

In a nutshell, this is the story of slime merchant James O'Keefe's attempts to prevent the truth about the ugly underbelly of his smear operations from becoming known -- in part because that truth could well land him in prison -- and how his cohorts in the smear operation, especially his "legal team" in the L.A. District Attorney's office, have relentlessly attempted to keep that truth hidden.

Lies: James O'Keefe's Obsession With Frames

Nadia Naffe was once an associate of James O'Keefe's. She was recruited to play whatever role he could cook up in his latest frame scheme of the day, funded by his billionaires through his recently approved non-profit organization. You can see more examples of his duplicitous skulduggery here, here, here and here. Those do not include the evil he did to ACORN, NPR, Medicaid providers, Planned Parenthood, Abbie Boudreau and Shirley Sherrod, which are particularly insidious.

Yes, James O'Keefe is a slime artist, and once he and Andrew Breitbart found each other, they found that magic slime chemistry that kept the dream alive. There's little doubt their fraudulent campaign against ACORN resulted in that organization's demise, and his frauds have harmed countless other organizations, including NPR and Planned Parenthood. Yet despite all of the ratf*cking he's tried since then, the only one that's brought consequences for O'Keefe is the attempted wiretap of Senator Mary Landrieu's office in New Orleans -- which landed O'Keefe in jail and on probation.

Sex: O'Keefe's Fantasy Life

James O'Keefe also seems to have some issues with women. The incident with CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau was about as sexist as anything I've seen in this lifetime. Remember the plot? He was going to lure Ms. Boudreau onto a boat and feed her strawberries, get her drunk, hit on her, and have the tape running the entire time. His point? Who knows? Maybe he just wanted to embarrass her or worse, seduce her and sell the sex tape.

At any rate, his "assistant", Izzy Santa, intervened, warned Boudreau off from the plan and they got away unscathed.

However, that didn't stop O'Keefe. He recruited a new woman as his accomplice, and hatched a plan to go after banks that had been assisted by TARP funding. Somewhere along the way, he also got some legal eagle whispering in his ear that wiretapping was totally legal if there was suspicion of bribery or other nefarious activity.

The only problem I see with that stellar legal advice? It doesn't appear to give private individuals the right to wiretap the phones of a member of Congress, which is what Naffe alleges she did on O'Keefe's behalf.

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The Obama campaign's hugely effective attacks on Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital, including one of the best Democratic political ads produced in decades, have clearly knocked Team Willard off their game. They are apparently frustrated and angry, and they're looking to strike back.

"[Romney] has said Obama's a nice fellow, he's just in over his head," the adviser said. "But I think the governor himself believes this latest round of attacks that have impugned his integrity and accused him of being a felon go so far beyond that pale that he's really disappointed. He believes it's time to vet the president. He really hasn't been vetted; McCain didn't do it."

The idea that Obama "hasn't been vetted" comes directly from the late Andrew Breitbart's and his pet project, "The Vetting" which to date has produced nothing but a series of widely-mocked nothing burgers.

And that's because the idea that the president hasn't been vetted is deeply nutty.

First, Obama was vetted by the Clinton campaign -- who went very hard after his drug use to no avail. When it was clear he was going to the be the nominee, right-wingers immediately started churning out scurrilous books about him, and those authors were given extensive air time on Fox News. During the presidential campaign, there were endless stories about Jeremiah Wright, extensive speculation that Obama had been educated in an Islamic Madrassa , and hundreds, if not thousands of stories about the extent of his relationship with Bill Ayers (famously summed up by Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin when she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists").

Americans looked at all of this chatter and yawned. In November 2008, they promptly gave Obama a higher percentage of the popular vote than Ronald Reagan won in 1980.

Since he was elected, there have been a flurry of even more anti-Obama books accusing him of being corrupt, a "gangster," suggesting that he hates the West because of his "anti-colonial" Kenyan heritage and that he's a "Manchurian president."

Not to mention the fact that there's an entire "news" organization which has, since January 2009, peddled birtherism, hyped phony scandals -- and aired a program that consisted almost exclusively of paranoid right-wing fantasies about the president.

So yes, Obama's been vetted. And if Team Willard really thinks they can win the election by talking about Obama's cocaine use or Rev. Wright -- they are even more clueless than previously thought.

SAN DIEGO -- Explosive new information obtained by 10News reveals for the first time the payout for an undercover video that helped bring down the group ACORN.

James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the role of pimp and prostitute in the video, were both deposed in a civil suit. O'Keefe wore a suit, while Giles donned a dark blouse, in contrast to the images that are familiar to many.

Back in 2009, they were the ones applying the pressure. After posing as pimp and prostitute, the two filmed undercover footage at an office in National City that appeared to show ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera giving tips on bringing teen prostitutes across the border.

After the footage was posted by conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, Vera was fired. A state probe eventually confirmed Vera was simply playing along with the pimp conversation and had called police.

Eventually, amid a string of other videos, ACORN lost its federal funding and dissolved.

Vera filed suit, claiming O'Keefe had violated state privacy laws, and in a March deposition, there were some revealing statements from O'Keefe.

"He [Breitbart] said he would like to find a way for me to get paid to publish the videos," testified O'Keefe.
O'Keefe gave details about the payout. He testified that before the San Diego undercover taping, Breitbart first saw undercover ACORN videos from the East Coast and wanted to see more.

"Now we have evidence for the first time, Breitbart agreed in advance to participate in the violation of California law," said Gene Iredale, Vera's attorney.

O'Keefe said he was eventually paid $65,000 by Breitbart to blog about the video.

Vera's attorneys now plan to file suit against the estate of Breitbart, who recently died of heart failure.

Another key issue was why O'Keefe made only minimal attempts to follow up with Vera to confirm what was said in the footage.

"I did want to follow up," testified O'Keefe. "I just didn't end up following up."

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In 1990, Barack Obama gave a speech at Harvard in support of the first tenured African-American Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell. Video of the speech has been available for years. But Sean Hannity, Mediaite's Frances Martel and Breitbart acolytes have decided it's time to make a new bogeyman of Professor Derrick Bell, and by extension, President Obama. The video here is the full video of his speech as recorded by a local NBC affiliate at the time.

Before Andrew Breitbart's death, he was promising earthshattering video that would destroy President Obama. This is, apparently, that video. They needed a new Jeremiah Wright and figured Bell, being dead and all, might be just the person to fill the bill.

Of course, they did not publish the video in its entirety. Buzzfeed published a 77-second excerpt Tuesday morning, which Breitbart.com claims is heavily edited. PBS notes that the editing was likely done by the station itself at the time it was aired in 1991, and Buzzfeed licensed the clip for publication, as is.

Breitbart TV, on the other hand, aired a tiny little clip shown during a lecture by Professor Charles Ogletree which purports to have Ogletree claiming they hid the clip in 2008. Except the clip was not hidden at all, as PBS explains. In fact, part of the video was used in their documentary The Choice, which has been available on the Frontline site and on YouTube since it was aired.

Breitbart's heirs can't resist characterizing a man whose entire career was devoted to fighting for equality and civil rights for black people as a "racialist" as a way of once again emphasizing Obama's "otherness" to viewers and faithful conservatives everywhere. Racialism has several definitions, but is most often associated with racist, supremacist, or separatist views.

That is not who Derrick Bell was. In essence, Derrick Bell argued that it wasn't enough to say blacks were equal, but that equality was more than saying. It was doing. Here's an excerpt from his bio on the Visionary Project:

Bell's scholarly writings have placed him in the forefront of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a new jurisprudence that explores the influences of society's racism and sexism in the law's policies and precedents. CRT is the theory that race lies at the center of American life. It challenges people to consider in all things the relationship that exists between race, the justice system, and society.

Turning to Hannity's Foxification of then-Harvard Law Review President Barack Obama's speech in defense of Professor Bell, we begin with two wet-behind-the-ears kids who clearly need to study some history and maybe the definition of humility before swaggering onto Hannity's set -- Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of Breitbart.com and Joel Pollak, failed Skokie Congressional candidate and Breitbart.com Editor-in-Chief.

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On the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), I asked Andrew Breitbart and film director Steve Bannon what would make their upcoming video "exposing" Occupy Wall Street successful despite being panned by critics and audiences for their previous work, "The Undefeated" by about Sarah Palin.

Breitbart immediately went off.

Breitbart: Who's Andrew Metcalf, I want to see, this is always a fun gesture, is that your name?

Me: Yes that's my name, I just checked IMDB and ["The Undefeated"] got a 1.7; on Rotten Tomatoes it got a 0 percent.

Breitbart: Who do you work for?

Lady sitting next to me: Crooks and Liars!

Breitbart: Crooks and Liars, that's it, it's a radical left-wing website, he can answer for himself, the way you've presented yourself you represent Occupy very well.

Me: I'm actually asking a legitimate question, about one of your previous movies being panned by both critics and audiences. What's going to make this one any different?

At that point, Steve Bannon took over and notified me that the Sarah Palin flick did have a broad audience in DVD sales and pay-per-view orders. He said the movie was well-received by conservative critics and there wasn't one factual error in it.

Bannon: Professional entertainment critics, yes, they went after the film quite harshly, just like they did her... I showed the... the useful idiots of the entertainment business that completely vilified and eviscerated a woman that has a track record as a performer that actually stands for a populist agenda... you kind of asked it in a snarky way, but it is a legitimate question.

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I suppose it's fitting that an unfunny comedian would also just happen to be a Breitbart Big Government blogger and find himself performing at a Sarah Palin event back in the days when she pretended she might run for President. Yet, that is exactly what happened here, when Eric Golub decided it would be funny to mock special needs children in an unfunny attempt to mock liberals.

"The left should love Sarah Palin," comedian Eric Golub, who also blogs at Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, noted at the tea party-affiliated "Restoring America" rally in Indianola, Iowa. "She has a beautiful, adorable special needs child... For that reason alone, the left should worship Sarah Palin and adopt her as one of their own. Because the leftist haters are an entire political ideology of special needs children."

I'll give him this. Golub is an equal opportunity hater. He's just as likely to rip on Ron Paul as he is liberals. At the end of the day, all these self-professed 'tea party' types are just regular dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and Golub is no exception.

He's got a ways to go until he's number 1, though. You've chosen this video to land in the 37th spot.

Today's daily dose of wingnuttery was so rich I hardly know where to begin, so I'll just dive in. We begin with Pat Robertson, who is very, very worried about President Obama's visit to Indonesia.

Via Right Wing Watch:

Robertson: You know Lee the thing that somehow concerns me, they say he’s going back to the place that he spent his childhood, he spent four years in Indonesia, I don’t know if he was trained in a madrassa, one of those Muslim schools, but nevertheless that is his inclination. His father was a Kenyan socialist and he talks about the roots of his father. So he’s got an African and an Indonesian background. I don’t know what his mother was doing; she just sort of flitted around. But nevertheless, this may give him a warped perspective of what needs to be done to make America the greatest nation on earth.

Yes, of course. The President is going back to the country where he spent a few childhood years. Funny how Robertson never thinks about whether those childhood years were as great as he thinks they were, because you know, every 9-year old looks back with fondness on local children pelting him with rocks for being a black guy, after all.

Pat Robertson, king of the smarmy insinuation, pandering to the Christian loyalists waiting to lap it all up.

Then we have Rick Perry sounding the dog whistle for the faithful with this, via TalkingPointsMemo:

Rick Perry says President Obama, the son of a teen mother who frequently was absent from his life and often was stretched financially, grew up the easy way. It’s the latest in a series of winks at conspiracy-minded conservatives deeply suspicious about the president’s background.

Perry’s comments came as he discussed his new ad attacking Obama for saying US policymakers have grown “lazy” about honing America’s competitive edge, a comment that Republicans have inaccurately suggested was aimed at American workers. Asked by FOX News host Sean Hannity about the spot, Perry launched into a highly personal attack on Obama.

“It reveals to me that he grew up in a privileged way,” he said. “He never had to really work for anything.”

He added that “we need a president who has been through their ups and downs in life, and understands what it’s like to have to deal with the issues in our economy that we have today in America.”

Why that dirty, lowdown, food-stamp sucking President! Rick Perry's going to set the record straight about him, because you know, those poor folks just don't ever work for anything. They just wait for the government to hand it to them, right?

Finally, we have Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood editor-in-chief, John Nolte spewing a series of tweets hoping for violence against OWS protesters.

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Apparently there was a tea party convention in Illinois called TeaCon, which attracted very serious and sensible conservatives like Glenn Beck, Dana Loesch and the always, very serious Andrew Breitbart. Guess who else was on the bill? Rep. Joe Walsh, the deadbeat dad.

It takes a very bad family man to understand about the virtues of supporting the family values party I suppose. A judge ruled that he has to explain why he's 100,000 behind in child support.

A Chicago judge issued a preliminary ruling Wednesday against U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) in his child-support dispute with his ex-wife, ordering the Tea Party favorite to explain why he appears to be $100,000 behind in child-support payments.Cook County Circuit Judge Raul Vega also wanted to know why Walsh wasn’t in court Wednesday — the McHenry Republican’s ex-wife, Laura Walsh, was there — and initially said he expected him to show up for the next hearing...read on

Anyway, with the class and dignity that only Breitbart can bring to any event, he spews obscenities at Janeane Garofalo in this video and is just as vile in the next.

Little Green Footballs:

Here’s one of the star speakers at TeaBagCon this weekend, Andrew Breitbart, spewing obscenities at his enemies. He calls Janeane Garofalo “Hollywood’s sympathy f*ck,” to a wildly cheering audience of conservatives.
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He follows up this classless rant by telling union leaders James Hoffa and Richard Trumka; “F*ck you,” again to wild cheers and applause.

Meanwhile, we learn that one of the event’s main organizers, Chicago Tea Party Patriots Director Steve Stevlic, was arrested last September for soliciting a prostitute.

Teabag family values, proudly on display.

UPDATE at 10/1/11 11:02:00 am

And the scandal is getting even more interesting. Breitbart’s own far right blogger Warner Todd Huston notes that TeaCon organizer Steve Stevlic, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, may also have been playing some funny games with the Chicago Tea Party’s money.

You can click over to LGF and watch the other video. He's a very angry person. But I'm sure the Beltway media will still take him seriously because they love conservative street performers and the rodeo clowns they produce going back to Jack Abramoff.

Bill O'Reilly always pulls a sliver of a video during his Fox show to make sure his audience hears profanities or what he decides is vulgar language or inappropriate behavior from some lefty every chance he gets. Being part of the fair and balanced network I hope he'd give these videos a chance with his crowd. It would be the only fair thing to do.