Huston characterizes as “whimpering” objections by liberal news site Talking Points Memo to having its reporter barred from the event — while Huston and other right-wing writers graced the speaker’s podium, and conservative blogger Kathleen McKinley, who has a reader blog hosted by the Houston Chronicle, appeared to have no trouble gaining access to the summit.

Huston said it was no surprise that tea party group King Street Patriots shunned unfriendly liberal media members.

He writes:

After all, these leftists don’t want free and fair elections. They want to be able to steal elections at will. Efforts like TTV’s threaten the left’s power to steal close elections as they have so many times.

The whining aside, it is a fact that everyone involved at the event are from the conservative side of the aisle. It is the contention of TTV that truing the vote is good for the right because vote fraud is nearly an exclusive crime of the left.

Huston notes that former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams (whose allegations that DOJ colleagues unfairly dismissed claims of voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers Party were recently refuted by an internal review) spoke about a section in the Help America Vote Act requiring states to maintain clean and accurate voter registration rolls.

Huston writes:

Adams informed us that the Democrats refuse to follow the law and carry out these required purges of illicit registrations.

He said that one of the things that could really shut down Democrat[ic] vote fraud is to enforce this provision. He hoped that groups could sue under this provision and force Democrats to obey the law.

King Street Patriots first garnered media attention last fall with allegations of massive voter fraud in Harris County, calling into question thousands of voter registration applications — with the cooperation of then-Harris County tax assessor-collector Leo Vasquez, a Republican.

The photo that Huston posts is of self-described ‘ACORN whistleblower’ Anita MonCrief and Earl Johnson, the leaders of the Houston-based Crispus Attacks Tea Party.

Tucker Carlson (ZUMA Press)

The offices of The Daily Caller evoke a long-ago era of journalism, circa 2005 or 2006, before the Los Angeles Times closed its big-city bureaus, The Washington Times fired 60 percent of its staff, and magazines from Gourmet to Portfolio shuttered for lack of revenue. A staff of 21 reporters and editors sit in blindingly white offices and a wide-open center space, cranking out content for the site’s January 11 launch. Other possible hires walk in and out of Editor-in-Chief Tucker Carlson’s office, past a lounge inhabited by liquor bottles and a sleeping dog, and decorated by clocks that tell the time in far-flung and random locations: Pyongyang, Jackson Hole, Washington, Honolulu.

“I just thought it was funny,” said Carlson, chewing on a piece of Nicorette. (He quit smoking last year, on his 40th birthday.) “We dispatched some intern to go and get those signs made. Actually, it was $150 — I never would have done it if I’d thought it would be so expensive. But something about it amused me. They’re on velcro. We swap ‘em out — we’ve got a whole drawer full of ‘em.”

[GOP1]Last February, Carlson — the conservative former host or co-host of shows on CNN and MSNBC, and still a Fox News contributor — gave a speech to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in which he urged activists on the right to “copy” the journalistic model of The New York Times. “They need to get out, find out what’s going on, and not just analyze things based on what the mainstream media has reported,” Carlson said. He was roundly booed. Four months later he officially announced plans to launch a news site “along the lines of The Huffington Post” with an ideology “not in sync with the current program.” When he talked with TWI on Wednesday, Carlson suggested that the desire for news like that, and the potential to break big stories, was greater than ever.

“When was the last time you saw, on television, a straight explanation of what’s in the competing House and Senate health care bills?” Carlson asked. “What’s in them? People want to know that!”

In the time between that announcement and next week’s debut, Carlson and his partner Neil Patel — a former aide to Dick Cheney — raised money, scouted out staff (“we didn’t ask about ideology,” said Carlson) and held poker games at their original, grimier office in Washington’s Dupont Circle. A June launch date was pushed into autumn, and then pushed back again. The reason, explained Patel, was that “our aspirations kept growing.”

“The size of the staff is much bigger than we started with,” Patel said. “We were very lucky to get the amount of money we did based, basically, on a PowerPoint.”

As they convinced funders and advertisers that the online journalism model was viable — “two years ago, who would have thought that The Huffington Post would get more traffic than The Washington Post?” — they expanded the scale of the enterprise. When they go live, it will be with more than $3 million in start-up capital, enough to run the site for at least a year.

That site will bear as much of a resemblance to The Huffington Post — the juggernaut that now clocks around 17 million hits per month — as Carlson speculated that it would back last summer. According to Carlson, there will be at least one editor monitoring and posting stories “24 hours a day, around the clock, in the office.” The top story of the moment will run at the top of the page, with more content running beside it. Stories written by the magazine’s reporting team, which includes Washington Times veteran Jon Ward and Government Executive’s Gautham Nagesh, will be cycled in, marked as “DC Exclusives,” much the way that stories by Huffington Post reporters trade space with headlines that link to stories from other publications. A staff blog — possible names include “Caller ID” and “The Daily Trawler” — will indulge in more humor, some of it written by long-time conservative blogger Jim Treacher (real name Sean Medlock) who moved to Washington from Indianapolis after Carlson gave him a call. And an iPhone app is on the way.

“Tucker is one of the most talented journalists I know,” said Ana Marie Cox, a host and reporter for Air America Radio who spars with Carlson in online chats hosted by The Washington Post. “Given free rein, he’ll definitely produce something interesting, compelling, and conversation-starting. Whether that thing can wind up being a financial success, I have no idea. If I could answer such questions I would not be a journalist.”

Carlson and his staff are spending the final hours before the launch polishing off content that can break out of the gate — exclusive interviews, lists like the Top 15 Most Wasteful Stimulus Projects, and short features from think tankers and established politicos. Arianna Huffington will have one of the first pieces on the site. Carlson, who started his career as a magazine writer, is working on an investigative piece for later. When Carlson talked to TWI on Wednesday, he had a wallet full of business cards handed to him by excited political candidates, Tea Party activists and PR flacks who’d heard him speak at Grover Norquist’s weekly meetings of the conservative movement. It was the first time, said Carlson, that he’d ever gone to the meeting. He wanted as much news, and as many stories, as possible. Whether they came from ax-grinding researchers or established reporters didn’t much matter.

“If there’s a story whose facts are verifiable, and it generates interest, and it comes from Satan himself, I will take it and I will pay him a reporting fee,” Carlson said. “But if we take a piece from Satan, that does not mean we’re on board with Satan’s agenda. It just means that the provenance of the piece, the origins of the piece, is not the most important thing. People don’t give you stuff because they love journalists. They give you that stuff because they’re pushing an agenda.”

The New York Times-style investigative journalism that Carlson has told conservatives to cultivate will not largely come, as the Times’s investigations come, from inside the organization. The Daily Caller is taking one page from Andrew Breitbart, whose biggest story — a multi-city hidden-camera investigation of ACORN — came from two freelancing conservative conservative activists. The Daily Caller’s investigative pieces will come from outside; some will develop in-house, but most are being sought out from the ever-expanding population of journalists who need work. “Our view,” said Carlson, “is that there are enough seasoned freelance journalists out there that you can let them do it.”

Veterans of other new media start-ups are sold on what they’ve heard about the “HuffPo of the Right.” Conor Friedersdorf, a freelance journalist who worked for the short-lived site Culture11, contrasted Carlson’s focus on journalism with the much-praised, quick-hitting tactics of Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism.

“I hope that The Daily Caller aspires to produce writing that is as well written and professionally edited as the stuff that the talented Tucker Carlson writes for Esquire,” said Friedersdorf. “The alternative — the Andrew Breitbart model — is to publish poorly reasoned, atrociously edited screeds on the cheap, on the assumption that ideologically friendly readers will keep clicking anyway.”

Carlson’s full-time staff, still taking shape this week (Helen Rittelmeyer, slated to be a reporter, left Monday for a job at National Review), is skewed toward younger reporters who had, in his view, the “energy and temperament” for the job. They don’t have hard quotas for blog posts, articles, or pageviews. They seemed ready to work hard without that.

“I keep reading all of these Nick Denton memos for Gawker,” said Carlson, “these ferocious memos to writers where it’s like ‘get a million pageviews this week or you’re fired!’ Maybe we’ll have to do that! But it’s not my personality at all.”

Whenever he’s asked, Carlson will happily admit the lofty goals he’s set for the site. It’s got to fill the gap that the “pathetic” media has left in coverage of how government works. It’s got to generate buzz and drive the conversation, getting stories that other media have to chase and topping a million page-views a month, “although one word I’ll never use is ‘metric.’” It’s got to be fun. That’s the point of the foreign clocks and the random posters Carlson has placed around the office. But there’s the occasional strange found object that makes a greater point, like the photo of a joyful Korean businessman perched on top of his store during the L.A. riots, holding a rifle.

“Because he’s taken the time to defend himself with a firearm,” explained Carlson, “he’s not going to be victimized by the racist mobs below. He is smiling. That’s a smile that reflects both his self-satisfaction and also the promise of America. The promise of America is ‘We’ll let you do what you want, as long as you defend yourself.’ I just love that. I’ve had that over every desk I’ve ever had as an adult.”

When we pour $10 or 30$ billion into AIG, it doesn’t vanish into thin air. It goes to someone else. Earlier evidence suggested that Goldman Sachs had massive exposure to a potential AIG bankruptcy. And it’s been alleged — though not on any harder evidence than a certain elementary logic — that AIG got saved in part because of people tied to Goldman who were running Bailout Inc. last fall.

Whatever the truth of that, I think it’s time we know more clearly where the $100 or so billion we’ve ‘loaned’ AIG so far went. (There’s been some data on this. But I don’t believe it’s been exhaustive or particularly detailed.) And where’s the next dollop of money likely to go? Whoever these recipients are, they are by definition companies that are in the capitalism business who made a bad bet on AIG, probably a lot of bad bets on AIG.

They don’t seem to be taking the hits, however. Taxpayers are the ones paying for the bad bets.

But let’s just ignore investigating all that and blame the whole thing on irresponsible homeowners instead. It makes for a better viral video.

Frank said he had no idea the waivers were being required, and vowed to get rid of them — immediately.

Here’s the exchange:

TPM: The next question goes to mortgages, to shift a little bit. Countrywide executives testified before your committee last summer that they were requiring borrowers who had loan modifications to sign away part of their legal rights … a recent investigation found that Fannie and Freddie now make the same waiver requests of folks who are getting their loans modified. Were you aware of that? Do you think that’s a troubling trend?

FRANK: Yes, uh, it’s a very troubling trend. We were not aware of it. As a matter of fact, by the time that question was posed, Countrywide had been bought by Bank of America, and Bank of America has ended that practice. … I have friends who said ‘well, Bank of America’s too big, shouldn’t we stop them from buying Countrywide?’ … [M]y answer was, I would have been happy if Syria bought Countrywide, because it was one of the most irresponsible institutions out there. Bank of America has done a very good job … I did not know until you just told me that Fannie and Freddie were doing that and I can pretty much guarantee you that we will have put an end to that within a few days.

I’ll keep you posted on what happens with the waivers.

As Josh Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo reported Saturday, Rep John Conyers (D-Mich), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee wrote an angry letter to Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security, saying the disclosure, by at least one “federal law enforcement official,” according to The AP, was “very disturbing” and warrants an investigation.

In fact, the disclosure wasn’t just disturbing –- it was either illegal, or it was approved directly by the U.S. attorney general. And, it endangered Onyango and any of her family that continue to live in Kenya.

According to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, 8 CFR 208.6, it is illegal to disclose that a noncitizen has applied for political asylum, without her explicit consent “or at the discretion of the attorney general.”

The Supreme Court, in United States v. Ray, explained the reason: because the applicant or her family could be subject to retaliation in their home country.

As an immigration authority fact sheet, cited by the court, explains: “Public disclosure of asylum-related information may subject the claimant to retaliatory measures by government authorities or non-state actors in the event that the claimant is repatriated, or endanger the security of the claimant’s family members who may still be residing in the country of origin.”

According to Amnesty International, the last year in Kenya has seen a crisis of deadly political violence and grave human rights violations.

In other words, this leak wasn’t just a typical ugly attack against the Democratic presidential nominee — it may have been an unusually dangerous one.

Whatever you think of the [Alaska Gov. Sarah] Palin speech, whether it was cynical or alienating to anyone outside the base, it was solidly written. I’d even say well written. [Sen. John] McCain’s wasn’t. It was decidedly second rate, not just badly delivered but clumsily written (except for the part about his POW experience, which I assume he has on file: that worked). How did that happen? Everyone knows McCain is a bad public speaker, so one would assume his campaign would it least give him a rock solid text to work from. But I suspect the campaign only has so many first-rate people on hand, and all of those people in the McCain campaign were tasked with taking care of Palin, leaving the top of the ticket to the second-stringers.

I can speak to this a little bit.

Palin’s speech was written by Matthew Scully, a former speech-writer for President George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, Mark Salter — McCain’s personal speech-writer, adviser, friend and biographer — has been working on the GOP presidential nominee’s speech for weeks. I’ve heard him say so. I don’t think anyone would refer to Salter as a “second-string” anything in the campaign. I can’t say why the finished product seemed so “second-rate,” but McCain definitely had his No. 1 guy working on it for a very long time. I guess they can’t all be home runs, or “hat tricks” to use Palin’s preferred analogy.