OBAMA STAFFER, ROMNEY OPERATIVES GO TO WAR OVER NEW MEDIA
Sic Willie over at FITSNews broke the story yesterday that Laurin Manning, a staffer for presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and one of the premier bloggers in South Carolina, “helped create the Palmetto State’s most aggressive pro-Mitt Romney website.”
The site, called “A Daily Shot,” is currently managed by a pair of Romney operatives. The duo also runs “Under the Power Lines” - a site used to operate much of Romney’s “new media” campaign within the state.
The FITSNews post noted that, “it was the Romney campaign’s affiliation with this company which caused the National Hotline to sever its relationship with the pro-Romney bloggers back in February of this year.”
Since that post, The Palmetto Scoop has obtained an e-mail addressed to Wesley Donehue and Michael Rentiers in which Manning says she’s “highly disappointed” in how the website has devolved into “immaturity” and that she not only taught Donehue and Rentiers how to operate new media, but that they have taken credit for some of her ideas. Further, she says, she still owns the rights to “Under the Power Lines” and much of its design aspects on both websites.
Manning also referenced The Shot’s coverage of Rep. Thad Viers’ recent legal troubles and how her attempts to refute certain statements made on the site were deliberately censored.
Here’s the e-mail in its entirety:
Wes and Mike:
I don’t know who’s in charge of The Shot these days, but I’m highly disappointed. First of all, y’all posted my comment about the Natalie/Thad/Jon post (along with your own rather immature response to my post), and then the next morning it was deleted.
I posted the comment again, and it was never accepted. Here is the text of the second comment on this post:
Why’d you delete my comment and your nonsequitur comment responding to my comment telling me I needed to “grow up”? lol. I’m the only commenter in this thread actually commenting under my own name, and I wrote nothing potentially libelous or even inappropriate. So I’m posting it again. If you can’t take the criticism, the blogosphere really isn’t the place for you. Here goes…
A Friend - there is no way we are publishing your allegations without either proof or your real name.
- The ShotCut the crap, guys. You don’t even know how to post under the moniker “The Shot.” If you did, it wouldn’t say posted by “Anonymous” at the top of the comment. (As frequently as y’all change site layouts and URLs, one would think you’d learn how to use an interface as simple as Wordpress.) Furthermore, you have no means of assessing the authenticity of those who do purport to write under their “real” names.
Posting on Thad’s trial…fine. He’s a public figure. But bringing Natalie’s private life into this post was totally amateur and inconsiderate. She is not a public figure as Thad is. Yes, there is a baby on the way, and the baby will be brought into the world and nurtured and loved. Natalie will be a wonderful mother.
I can’t believe the level to which you people stooped today. You’ve hurt someone who didn’t ask for it — someone who’s never wanted to be in the limelight.
This was a great site at first. Now it seems like all you guys do is dump on John McCain, promote your own site traffic numbers, and (as of now) discuss the private lives of private individuals who’ve never done anything to any of you.
You guys started this site with the purpose of providing a more unbiased news aggregating service than SC Hotline. As much as I’ve criticized SC Hotline for various reasons in the past, they would never, ever have posted something like this.
I’d like to remind both of you that I designed the shot glass artwork on the site (for no compensation), I redesigned Keith Kelly’s entire site for no pay, and I educated Wesley about RSS and CMS (Joomla), allowing y’all to plan for a functionally better dynamic site. Had I not done so, the site would still be on a rudimentary MS Frontpage chassey.
On top of all that, after having designed the artwork and website for “Under the Power Lines” (and, I’d like to remind you that I own the URL www.underthepowerlines.net, which displays my artwork), and I didn’t complain when Wes got some worthless graphic design firm out of Georgia that gave him a free iPod to totally rip off my design. That was my intellectual property, and any artist with integrity would never agree to blatently rip off another artist’s work. But I never said anything because it wasn’t worth it to me to have bad blood with y’all. This state is too small, and I don’t like making enemies.
Bottom line: I taught you guys a LOT about this stuff, and it pisses me off that you wouldn’t even publish my comment–which I’d posted under my own name–defending my friend who’d wrongfully suffered an attack on your site. Your product has gone down the toilet. You don’t stand for the same things you claimed to stand for when you started the site in the wake of SC Hotline’s nasty treatment of Bob Staton. I feel like I don’t even know you all. I just can’t express how awful I think it is that you waded into the private matter of Natalie’s pregnancy. If you all are the pro-lifers you claim to be, you ought to respect the fact that she chose to have the baby. It would have been much easier in many ways for her not to have it. I can’t imagine enduring the judgment and humiliation that she has — in large part thanks to your efforts to drive up your sitemeter statistics.
Laurin
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 11:05 am and is filed under Around the state, Primary Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] http://www.palmettoscoop.com/2007/06/21/one-two-three-four-here-comes-a-blog-war/ Posted by schotline Filed in SCHotline, Press Release [...]
Sounds like Ms. Manning is now a political casualty. She will probably be back in law school in the fall. I doubt she will be on the O’bama campaign much longer. Viewed as a traitor she will be. Fired she will become another south carolina political whore trying to get some cred.
I think Oh Mercy might be Yoda.
Open your eyes to a world of hope!
http://www.myspace.com/ronpaul2008
Oh Mercy, you really think she’ll be fired from the campaign for this? are you serious? I think a car she used to own now has a Romney bumpersticker on it too!!! Ahhhhh!!
This is more than much adiue about nothing.
btw…we have a new blog coming soon@wordpress.com and by the way dumbass its spelled the french word for good bye isn’t spelled that why schmuck. My yiddish is far better than your french and you are probably much more of a shmekle than a shmuck and that the same time quite a f$CKing putz.
And as the Jesus Freaks say, Have a Blessed Day!
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Oh Mercy, you are a feisty little one correcting spelling in a blog comment, and throwing out insults to boot - just a tip I think that ‘O’bma’ might be spelled just Obama without an apostrophe after the O - unless the guy you are thinking of is Irish?
However where you put “its spelled” should have had an apostrophe because in that usage its was short for “it is” and therefore should have been “it’s.” Also, read your first sentence again:
“and by the way dumbass its spelled the french word for good bye isn’t spelled that why schmuck.”
How stupid would one have to be to write such an improper sentence as that while trying to lampoon another for minor grammatical mistakes.
I make no claims whatsoever that this post is devoid of grammatical errors technical or otherwise, and rarely would ever stoop to such low brow tactics except for the sheer purpose of pointing out what a hypocritical fool you must be. I surmise probably just a thoughtless hothead, more so than the common idiot your comment seems to suggest. Oh and use capital letters for French and South Carolina, and you have a blessed day yourself, but spend a little more time on your English than your Yiddish.
The lady makes some good points, and all y’all can do is snipe? Interestng….very interesting indeed. How about taking the post, reflecting a bit, and seeing if she is right, learning from the mistakes and becoming better people as a result?
If someone cannot help but attack the inocent, they deserve no plave here or aywhere else. Having beeninvolved in politics in GA, SC, PA, VA on local to federal levels, I must admit that I am disappointed how people attack other, rather thanobjectively considering their political stands.
Hey Laurin, I am a Republican teacher coming to South carolina, and need assistance in creating a website to assist my students in the lowcountry, and want to start building a blog for SC educators…how about some help? I have not built a blog before, and I assure you, it will not be immature and attack without information. Send me an e-mail at: wlr107@teacher.com.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
WLR
(Hey- if you guys decide not to post it, how about e-mailing it to her for me, eh? The request is genuine.)
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce