Made of Straw

Also on the Fred front, Captain Ed does a bit of Internet sleuthing:

"It doesn't take long for provocateurs to crawl out of the woodwork to attack candidates, especially in stealth attacks. With Fred Thompson, they've apparently started before he officially enters the race -- and in one case, race is the operative word. Apparently hoping to confuse web surfers looking for Fred's website at www.imwithfred.com, a new site has appeared at www.imwithfred2008.com -- only this site welcomes people to the Ku Klux Klan, 'Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America!' It includes links to a variety of disgusting racist sites.

"Who would post something like this as a smear on Fred Thompson? Someone a little too stupid to cover his tracks, possibly? A DNS search gives us an answer. The domain name, registered through GoDaddy (no great shock there), belongs to: Henry Reynolds . . .

"The phone number listed on the domain record, which I won't post here, goes to an answering machine for the 'law offices of Henry Reynolds.' I left a message asking for comment on this website, and then decided to take a look through OpenSecrets and the FEC to see if Mr. Reynolds has a history of supporting Fred Thompson, or even the KKK. Actually, it turns out that a Mr. Henry Reynolds in the same zip code working as an attorney has a small record of political donations -- but in another direction:

"4/6/2005 - $500, MoveOn.org

"9/22/2004 - $500, DNC Services

"4/5/2004 - $250, John Kerry"

How 'bout that.

In the wake of the Kos convention, Time's Jay Carney is feeling misunderstood:

"One commenter reads too much into a statement I made on the panel to the effect that 'Time will always have conservative columnists.' I was asked about columnists like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, the fact that they were terribly wrong on Iraq (and, to this audience, wrong in general on most subjects) and why Time continued to publish their columns. When I said Time would always have conservative columnists, I meant, simply, that as long as there is a stable of columnists at Time, there will be some among them representing conservative political views. The fact that conservative pundits appear in Time does not make the magazine itself conservative. The reader who claims that I 'admitted Time is and always will be a conservative magazine' must be having a Gonzales moment."

Conservative bloggers are taking note of the SEC settlement involving a key Kos ally. Here's Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media:

"Jerome Armstrong, the blogger who gave us MyDD and is a co-author of a recent book on 'people power' with Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, has agreed to pay nearly thirty thousand dollars to the Security and Exchange Commission over allegations 'that Armstrong touted the stock of a software company, without disclosing that he was being paid to do so.'