Kenneth Vogel (via Steve Benen):
Inside the resort at the beginning of the conference, “there was an atmosphere almost of paranoia,” said Gary Ferdman, a Common Cause official.
Ferdman had reservations at the resort and stayed there Thursday and Friday night. He said he was told Saturday that his lunch reservations at the resort restaurant had been canceled and was urged to check out and leave promptly by a member of Koch’s large security detail.
Security manned every doorway and stairwell near the ballrooms where Koch events were held, and threatened to jail this POLITICO reporter while he waited in line at the resort’s cafe, after he stopped by a Koch conference registration table.
The resort grounds were “closed for a private function,” the resort’s head of security, James Foster told POLITICO, ushering the reporter outside, where private security guards, wearing gold lapel pins bearing Koch’s “K” logo, threatened “a citizen’s arrest” and a “night in the Riverside County jail” if the reporter continued asking questions and taking photographs.
I wonder what ED’s freedom-loving friends who work for the Koch brothers will say about this?
Also too again, first amendment rights. Heh indeedy.
Davis X. Machina
No state agent, so no coercion. Just a muscular form of free association in action.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
kerFuFFler
At least no one stomped on anyone’s head….
Elvis Elvisberg
Conservatism is dead in this country, of course. It’d be great if there were libertarians concerned about concentration and abuse of power, rather than locked in on their Larouchian obsession with government alone.
Our discourse is broken because the Republican Party has abandoned all policy beliefs, of course, but it sure would be great if we had a few good conservative voices in the public sphere, to say nothing of some institutional support. Alas.
Mark S.
@Davis X. Machina:
That is correct. Radley Balko fully supports private police forces that are unencumbered by the Constitution. If you don’t like it, nothing prevents you from hiring your own police force to protect yourself.
Free-dom!
freelancer
He has written about this. He thinks the protestors’ pockets are lines with Sorosbucks.
kerFuFFler
Why is my comment awaiting moderation? Have I done something to get on some sort of list?
EdTheRed
I can picture the scene now, later that evening as Vogel sits in front of the Chief of Police of Riverside:
Vogel: The Koch brothers treat peasants like people, man.
Riverside Police Chief: The Koch brothers draw a lot of water in this town. You don’t draw shit, Vogel. Now we got a nice, quiet little resort community here, and I aim to keep it nice and quiet. So let me make something plain. I don’t like you sucking around, bothering our citizens, Vogel. I don’t like your jerk-off name. I don’t like your jerk-off face. I don’t like your jerk-off behavior, and I don’t like you, jerk-off. Do I make myself clear?
Vogel: [after a pause] I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.
GregB
I am curious as to what will be the response if some well armed liberals start showing up at conservative events?
Suddenly patriotic gun owners will be deemed armed thugs bent on intimidation.
This whole thing so rotten.
A Writer At Balloon-Juice
@freelancer:
I think that was a different article. Let me check though.
EDIT: He just wrote making fun of liberals who don’t like Kochs. He hasn’t defended the private security force intimidating journalists, not yet.
suzanne
@Elvis Elvisberg:
I’m not so sure of that. “I got mine, fuck you” is a policy.
Mark S.
Could they be any more like Bond villains? Also, does Nick Gillespie’s leather jacket have a K on the back of it? I’ve never seen the back of it.
gypsy howell
Well shiiiii-iiiiit*, we didn’t shuck out billions of dollars to Blackwater/Xe for nuthin’. Now that they have their “training” (at our expense) in foreign lands, our oligarchs can sic them on us here at home.
A frightening, and yet completely predictable, result.
(*Yeah, I’m rewatching S3 of the Wire)
Warren Terra
@kerFuFFler:
The usual reasons include the following (and this really should be in the Balloon Juice FAQ, which isn’t loading for me right now):
1) You used certain words frequently connected to online marketing. The most common mistake is mentioning a certain male-organ drug whose name is found within the word “Socia|ism” and other useful, innocuous words. Apparently mentioning foot apparel can also do it, among other banned words. Circumlocutions abound.
2) You have previously posted using the same email address and a different pseudonym.
3) You included more than three hyperlinks.
There may be other common triggers, but those are the ones I know of, assuming Cole didn’t just take a dislike to you personally – and the only cases I can recall of that happening required long-term persistent dickery.
Redshift
@kerFuFFler: I was going to refer you the the FAQ, but the entire content of it seems to have gone missing. (Possibly since the upgrade?)
Davis X. Machina
@Mark S.:
You left out the disclaimer: (Freedom®, Freedom of Speech®, Freedom of Assembly® and the whole fine line of Freedom® products, are registered trademarks of the Republican National Committee. All rights reserved, used with permission.)
You did have permission, didn’t you?
jwb
@kerFuFFler: Nothing personal, just the usual FYWP.
freelancer
@A Writer At Balloon-Juice:
Right, but there’s a subtext of a zero-sum game, that if you aren’t getting paid by the Kochs, you’re whoring for Soros, as though people couldn’t be motivated enough by the perverse, asymmetric injection of metric fucktons money into the body politic.
So yes, he hasn’t written about private security for Billionaires being thugs, but no one does, really, because it’s kinda/sorta to be expected. My point, I guess is that what he has written about the conference and the protests is a bit of a strawman.
Mark S.
@Davis X. Machina:
They can sue my ass. I have a whole team of shithouse lawyers just aching for a brawl.
DPirate
I’ll say that it is a private resort and a private function, and if the politico reporter feels he was wronged, he has access to civil redress in court. Why are you even copy-pasting this story?
Any intimidation used on him by private security not empowered by the resort itself should have been returned by the reporter in like measure, along with heaps of abuse, whether it cost him a couple teeth or not. Calling these people security lends a legitimacy that doesn’t exist, really. As presented in the excerpt, they are simply thugs and anyhow just private citizens. Allowing yourself to be treated that way will only encourage them to treat others the same. Besides, if they do anything other than bluster, he can sue the Kochs for it, if they’ve been hired by them.
Redshift
But wait, isn’t a resort reservation a contract that’s absolutely sacrosanct, like a bankster’s bonus? Or is it more like a union contract or a mortgage, which can just be canceled whenever it’s convenient?
Pooh
@DPirate: What could possibly go wrong if badassery is the preferred method of dealing with this kind of thing?
If all reporters
carried gunswere menacing thugs too…JPL
Free Enterprise is hard work.
pragmatism
this will only make the glibs say “DougJ is stalking you Radley” for the umpteenth time. thereby ignoring the substance of the post.
trollhattan
Sign over resort front door:
“We reserve the right to refuse service to any damn hippie we want’s to refuse, got it?”
Sign over service help entrance:
“el trabajo te hace libre”
donr
“He said he was told Saturday that his lunch reservations at the resort restaurant had been canceled and was urged to check out and leave promptly by a member of Koch’s large security detail.”
Is this an example of Koch-blocking?
freelancer
@trollhattan:
El Godwin.
RSR
Leave Koch ALOOOONE.
(That’s what she said.)
General Stuck
@Davis X. Machina:
Libertarian law of the jungle. The monkey with the biggest bone wins, so long as they are private bones. Perfectly natural in a free world.
aimai
@gypsy howell:
Ha! I recognized that right away. I think I’ll go back to watching it again too.
aimai
bkny
couldn’t the politico guy sue if he’d been subject to a ‘citizen’s arrest’. it is revealing though of the piggies’ fright at being publicly outed.
kdaug
Leave our paid opinion-makers aloooone!
Chad N Freude
@freelancer: I was going to say something like “Translated from the original German”, but I like yours better.
kdaug
@RSR: Goddammit, I need to read through the comments before posting.
Jason In the Peg
@suzanne: Say what you want about the republican ethos but at least it’s an ethos.
Wait, did I just Godwin this?
Nylund
If this were Tea Party protesters outside of a George Soros event, the narrative would be quite the opposite.
va
The golden Koch guards did nothing wrong, because they do not Have Power to abuse. Only the federal government Has Power. Q.E.D.
Barb (formerly Gex)
It’s only a problem when the police force of the state impinge on your freedoms. This is simply the market place deciding who should and who shouldn’t get to be free.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Mark S.:
Did the reporter make his escape by hijacking and driving away a plastic bubble topped all-terrain vehicle, from the set of a fake Moon landing?
Davis X. Machina
Blessed be the Market, the righteous Judge.
kindness
@kerFuFFler: The Koch’s were just checking up on you (and your kids, pets, job, neighbors).
pragmatism
the kochs have dumped a couple of hundred K into the congressional oversight committee, 100K to issa and his subcommittee chairs. that’s small compared to the $44 M dumped into oil and gas lobbying but they’ll get a good bang for their buck with issa’s crew.
jeffreyw
Reporter shoulda carried a box of treats up to those guys as an offering.
Zifnab
If nothing else, this says a great deal about corporate efficiency. If this had been a prank on a government agent (like Shirely Sherrod) or the leak of government information (like the status of CIA agent Valerie Plame) you’d see virtually no action at all.
gypsy howell
@aimai:
January has become our annual 5-season Wire-a-thon, spilling into February this year. A welcome diversion from real life.
jeff
I’ve noticed for some years that the very wealthy are perfectly happy to have cocktails, eat dinner, and exchange family anecdotes with people that are absolute monsters. (I see this often, for private reasons.)
I also see the same phenomenon amongst biologists and geneticists, who, no matter how laudable their own motives, will sit and chat with unreconstructed racists who are activists in racist theory, because they are “colleagues.”
(I see this occasionally, for weird reasons.)
A very good friend of mine recently dined with a member of the Likud party in New Jersey, and told me how nice it was without batting an eyelash.
As we’ve been instructed, the rich form their own natural race, and even if they are ideological enemies, they are, at bottom, family….and you are not.
freelancer
@gypsy howell:
I’m sorry, you’re talking about The Wire, right? This “The Wire“?
Warren Terra
@jeff:
Speaking as a biologist and a geneticist, I can only say that I’ve never met these people you’re talking about.
Elvis Elvisberg
@Jason In the Peg: I disagree. I think it’s, “say what you will about the tenets of libertarianism, at least it’s an ethos. Republicans believe in nothing.”
Jim, Once
This was the comment about McMegan that I loved best in your ‘agony’ link, Doug –
@Warren Terra:
Speaking as the spouse of a biologist and geneticist, I’ve talked to way too many of them. The first time it happened, I was pretty shocked.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Elvis Elvisberg: They believe in the tribe. They know for sure there is an us and a them. There is a good and evil. They only know how to polarize and demonize.
Loneoak
@Warren Terra:
Try Bruce Lahn of U Chicago and HHMI Fellow, buddies with J. Phillipe Rushton.
Jim, Once
@Jim, Once:
And this would be why my husband, now retired, has no desire to ever meet with his coworkers again.
jeff
@Warren Terra:
Well, you may have: how would you know? I don’t want to name anyone, but there are some you certainly must know. To be clear, I’m talking about biologists who warmly tolerate other researchers who are dyed-in-the-wool racialists. I’m not going to name anybody, because it’s irrelevant to my point and would be inflammatory.
Davis X. Machina
@Barb (formerly Gex): So do ants. It doesn’t reflect nearly as bad on the ants.
Warren Terra
@jeff:
I’m not a vertebrate geneticist. Maybe on the more medical end of the “geneticist” spectrum you encounter more people obsessed with these questions, who wind up associating with truly vile people. But the young experimental geneticists I know, many of whom I know very well, are on the whole about the most enlightened people you’d care to meet.
ed
Shorter Resort’s Head of Security, James Foster.
piratedan
@Elvis Elvisberg: I dunno, I think Republicans are mostly concerned about getting paid, not sure if there’s any more reasonable explanation for what they do. Their party has devolved into one big ad agency, they’ll say anything or take up any position as long as there is money in it. Do you see them complaining that the Dems have stolen their health care positions from the last 20 years? Hell no, not even a sanctimonious peep out of any of them about it.
JCT
@Loneoak: Hah! Exactly who I was thinking of when I saw the original comment — beat me to it. I tease my oldest (UChicago undergrad) about this guy from time to time. Some very funky ideas rattle around my old field.
Thoughtcrime
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Why, yes. And here’s proof:
http://www.007magazine.co.uk/moonbuggy/moon_buggy1.htm
TomG
So everyone in this thread just “knows” exactly what Radley’s response would be?
Stay classy guys.
Chyron HR
@TomG:
Shyeah, look at the libtards predicting future events based on an analysis of similar data sets. What a bunch of libtards, amirite?
Omnes Omnibus
@TomG: if it turns out that his response is different than that predicted here, let me know and I will eat one of my hats. Howzat?
Loneoak
@JCT:
I’m a ethicist/philosopher of biology and I’m actually writing a paper about Lahn’s nonsense at the moment.
DonkeyKong
So now, we can call Balko a….wait for it…wait for it..Koch Whore.
Thanks folks, I’ll be at John Galts Disdain Shack all week.
jeff
@Warren Terra:
I understand, and I totally and completely accept what you say as the truth. I think that’s awesome, too, that the young people are not tainted with this nasty and unsupportable racial stuff.
I don’t want to name the researchers I’m thinking of, but you should know well enough who I’m thinking about. Everything is a possible entry point to race for them, and every finding is a finding for East Asian and European supremacy.
Anne Laurie
@DonkeyKong:
I like it, but it’s probably a little unvarnished for Politico. How about “Balko is a Koch man-of-negotiable-affections?”
jeff
@Loneoak:
Yeah, that’s one I was thinking of. There are tons, and I think “racialism” is becoming more acceptable in certain sectors.
sistermoon
Slightly off topic…
On MSNBC, all hell is literally breaking loose in Cario.
The revolution is being televised…
lovable liberal
Why didn’t the threat of citizen’s arrest inspire laughter – or at least dreams of a big settlement?
John Cole
If there is anyone who is more easily baited into exploding than Radley, I have no idea who it is. Too funny.
Who do you want to taunt into exploding next, Doug?
Radley Balko
I think you’re confusing mockery with exploding, John.
BAWOON JOOZ
“Also too again some more of additionally guess what else,”
Syndicalist
You know, I think it’s hilarious how you ersatz leftists attack libertarians for being pro-capitalist and then turn around and support the Democratic Party, which is also pro-capitalist.
Funnier still that an opportunistic, banner-chasing phony like John Cole (who merely changed from an asshole partisan Republican into an asshole partisan Democrat) has the gall to question the integrity of others.
Yutsano
@Syndicalist: I suppose you’ll be demonstrating your Communist credentials any moment now? It’s okay, I got most of the night still, I’m patient.
Or put more bluntly:
Amy
Just out of curiosity, if your ex showed up at the hotel where you were holding your wedding and demanded to be let in so that s/he could protest the event, would you want the venue to let her/him disrupt your wedding? If not, can you explain the difference between that situation and this one?
Zero
So what does Balko have to do with any of this? Did Balko kick the “Reporter” out of the Hotel? Did Balko endorse the actions taken there?
Syndicalist
@Yutsano: Nice flippant response.
Struck a nerve, didn’t I? Good.
brantl
@Radley Balko: I think you’re confusing mockery with exploding, John.
brantl
@Amy: Yes, this gentleman did nothing to disrupt their event. And if your ex took a room in the hotel and didn’t disrupt your event, you wouldn’t have any business calling your thugs on her, now would you? You idiot.
shoe on the other foot?
Did your blog remark on this?
Didn’t think so. You guys are partisan douches.
shoe on the other foot?
moderation, really?
John Cole
@Syndicalist: You do understand that I didn’t write this post, don’t you?
Frederick
See this post right here is why I’m not of the Liberal/Progressive persuasion anymore… you couldn’t find a better target than Radly Balko? Really? What has this sight done even remotely approaching the real world good that The Agitator has?
Is this the Obama effect, to make good intentioned Leftys side with The State in all it’s oppressive glory over the civil rights of everyday people? Is this why the illegal surveillance of citizens by the FBI/CIA, the torture of detainees at Guantanamo, and the President’s declaration that he has the right to murder any U.S. citizen without even so much as a trial has been allowed to go on, because you’re busy with the Koch Bros instead of galvanizing political opposition to these atrocities?
Pococurante
@John Cole: So that was the point of DougJ’s exercise then.
Classy.
mr.fundamental
Obama is a human turd.
Frederick
That’s a little rough hewn, Mr Fun, but not far from the truth. That’s probably why it’s more important (easier) to smear Radly Balko in an attempt to discredit the already loathsome Koch Bros instead of dealing with the problem in your own house.
john b
@Frederick:
You do realize that illegal surveillance, gitmo and other abuses you mention are frequently discussed here, right?
oh right, you don’t because you just came here from balko’s site and probably won’t be back.
mr.fundamental
well Radley does come across with a Reagan-esque vibe about him. but if you’ve been paying attention he has softened quite a bit over the years, from a libertarian posture to more of an overall liberal one, based more on a genuine compassion than on a rigid principle. he has grown far more critical of those in charge – be they business leaders or governmental leaders – than he had been in the past, and is less likely to pull up shy in his criticism when it comes to this country. maybe the Exceptionalism has worn off. so, the people here – and the blog owners – don’t appear literate, unfortunately. not worth our time, Frederick.
Tone in DC
Who let the Freeper and RedState refugees in here?
The line for wingnut welfare forms at Scaife’s house. The Kochs will simply sic Xe/Blackwater on any non-wealthy visitors trying to ask them for work.
mr.fundamental
also, there is no Left in America. I certainly wouldn’t look to the Democrats for that.
Frederick
I don’t know exactly who you’re referring to. I have no love for the Freepers, believe me. I myself am a refugee from Crooks & Liars, Eschaton, and The Daily Kos. I’ve commented on this blog multiple times, pre-2008. I’d didn’t leave the Lefty blogosphere, it left me, when it decided that everything Bush did was okay now that it was brand Obama.
So what was the reason again to stop long enough to bring up Balko?
LJM
Wouldn’t it be cool if the folks at BJ had done a fraction of the work devoted to uncovering and reporting the abuses of the powerful against the poor and disenfranchised that Balko has?
But no, they’re too busy with petty posts like this. It doesn’t matter that Obama is doing this on a regular basis. Sure those are poor people being destroyed by Obama and his ilk, but they’re not Americans. And it’s not like their lives are being destroyed by Rebuplicans, this time. Libertarians (which I’m not, but who would NEVER advocate for the kind of carnage above, being perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans alike) are the problem!
This is why thinking people don’t take this site very seriously.
BAWOON JOOZ
So if we’re attacking people based on what they DON’T write about, I suppose Balloon Juice is part of the shush-shush coverup conspiracy to deflect scrutiny away from civil liberties and civil rights abuses by the USG and smaller municipalities? Is that how this works?
Why don’t you guys care about police shooting little girls? Do you all own stock in the prison industry? Or maybe SuperMaxIncorporated is one of your funders? Is that it?