Classic Republican Fiscal Conservatism at RedState

Spend it even when ya ain't got it:

"So we’ve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand – hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation."

Just like their puppet masters in the GOP. Atrios has this up:

Dear RedState Reader:

I have, as they say, some good news and some bad news.

(Short version: We need you to open your wallet and give what you can to build RedState 3.0. Go here to help. We need the money ASAP.)

The good news first: RedState.com is about to embark on a major upgrade of our website that will make it easier, more informative, and just plain more fun for you to visit.

The bad news: our liberal “friends” – you know, the ones who believe so strongly in free speech and open debate – have done what they can to prevent us from making these improvements, so that our influence will be minimized just as we head into the 2008 presidential primary season.

No, our Blue State buddies haven’t succeeded in stopping us from improving our website. But they’ve made it more difficult and more expensive – which is why I’m coming to you for help.

Let me explain …

You see, when we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features – and to add new and even better ones – as soon as we could afford to.

Unfortunately, we still can’t afford to. But we’re convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

So we’ve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand – hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation.

Here, specifically, is what we’re planning to accomplish with your generous financial support …

There's more, but you get the idea. It's the fault of liberals that they can't run their website because... hell I don't know.

If we click on over to redstate and donate one penny online to their cause... Would it cost them more to process the payment than they would take in? evil grin

I know, I know! A penny for their thoughts is overpaying...

[update] American Street has some more to add to this:

...this bit of blegging by redstate.org not only caused much laughter but charges they were fleecing their readers due to their parent corporation’s profit margins. How many bloggers have had grander designs than they ever could afford to build? How many don’t have corporate sponsors and work for free? Plenty, which is why some can be justifiably outraged. But, on the other hand, if their readers have that kind of cash that they’re willing to be snookered out of, that provides some room for mirth.

Atrios, then Kos, then Jane Hamsher weighed in on that one. Maybe they should hire a Mexican to do the geek work no conservative knows how to do.

And much laughter was shared amongst the left...

[update deux] I am glad I didn't waste my time overpaying with that penny... From Jane Hamsher at FDL:

Yesterday Daily Kos readers decided to make fun of Red State's "Vast Left Wing Conspiracy Fundraising" pitch by calling for PayPal donations of 1 cent. The logic was that PayPal charges a minimum of .30 for a transaction, so Red State would be paying .29 cents per donation.

Which is ridiculous. I don't approve of screwing with someone's fundraising like that, but that's beside the point -- PayPal doesn't charge you more than the amount of the transaction.

So Erick Erickson of Red State should've just left it there, but he couldn't, and instead decided to by issuing threats regarding the personal information of PayPal donors:

But, we do get their name, credit card billing address, and email address. Those are actually valuable pieces of information.

Coming from someone else, it might sound quite idle. But RedState bloggers have a history of outing the identity of anonymous online folks, so I think it's a threat that can safely be take seriously, and abusing that information would be a violation of PayPal's terms of service.

An Offer That Scares the Hell Out of Washington D.C.

Via Lukery at the Booman Tribune and Let Sibel Edmonds Speak:

Former FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has promised to tell us everything she knows about treason at the highest level of the US government - with one proviso:

"Here's my promise to the American Public: If anyone of the major networks --- ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, FOX --- promise to air the entire segment, without editing, I promise to tell them everything that I know."

Edmonds, "the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America," has been trying to expose criminal activity, treason, at the highest levels of the US Government - Congress, Pentagon and State Dept - since she became aware of the crimes in 2001 and 2002.

Edmonds has exhausted every conceivable channel in the courts, Congress, and elsewhere, and is now willing to risk criminal charges to ensure that the American people learn how their government really 'works.'

BradBlog has the exclusive.

I am willing to bet, no matter how credible Sibel Edmonds charges have been decreed by those that have heard her testimony in Congress, there will be no takers on this blockbuster of a story because the CORPORATE OWNED MEDIA are just shills for the CORPORATE OWNED GOVERNMENT... Welcome to "Corporate America" run-amok under the guise of the conservative agenda of privatizing everything as a solution to problems that didn't really exist in the first place.

bush, Dems, Iraq WMDs and The Vast Right Wing Conspiracists

(H/T Stephen D at The Booman Tribune)

Ok... So now all of the big Blogs and Bloggers on the faaarrr right wing whakosphere edge are saying it is a vast conspiracy by George Bush and the Democratic party to hide the "fact" that all of those WMDs were found in Iraq.

Glen Greenwald gets the scoop here:

Melanie Phillips is a British neoconservative who has devoted herself to warning England that Muslims are taking over and destroying its culture. Her book, oh-so-cleverly titled Londonistan, warns of "the collapse of traditional British identity and accommodation of a particularly virulent form of multiculturalism."

She has described James Baker and Jimmy Carter as "the kept creatures of the Arab world" who "are intent on smoothing the path to Israel's destruction." She thinks global warming is a "con-trick" because everything is "well within the normal cyclical fluctuations in temperature from century to century." And on and on and on. Needless to say, she is a deeply admired figure in the world of Fox News and right-wing blogs.

But all of that is rendered moderate, restrained, sober and even sane by a new article she wrote for the British magazine, The Spectator (headline: I Found Saddam's WMD Bunkers), which claims that: (a) WMDs really were found in Iraq after the invasion, (b) they were located in vast underground bunkers (c) which contained "nuclear, chemical and biological materials", but (d) the U.S., through negligence, failed to secure those sites and, as a result, (e) the WMDs were stolen by The Terrorists and/or Syrian agents, who now have them and are actively plotting (along with China, Russia and North Korea) to use them against the West, but --

(f) because the Bush administration is so embarrassed by their failure to prevent the theft of all these dastardly weapons, and because Democrats are embarrassed by this discovery because it proves that Saddam really did have WMDs all along, they have all jointly created a vast conspiracy where they conceal the discovery of WMDs in order to cover up for their negligence.

You can head over and see what this is all about, but the fact that so many faaarrr right wingnuts are biting on this absurd conspiracy is telling of just how out of the mainstream these dangerously deranged people are. Greenwald also points out the fact that all of the right wingnuts conveniently forget to mention that the Republic party is involved in Melanie Phillips motherload of a conspiracy theory, as well as some other sad facts about the right wingnuts.

Some of the wacky wankers pushing this story of a vast conspiracy theory:

Instapundit (i.e., Glenn Reynolds)
Powerline
Michelle Malkin
Pajamas Media
David Horowitz

I am wondering if these tweedledumbs and dees are expecting another two ton feather in their caps for the pajama wearing types' typical coverage of the ridiculous?

There is no vast conspiracy here, but this sure does expose the vast amount of empty space between the right wingnuts ears.