Tag: Jul Thompson

Did a Liberal Jihadist Fabricate Paladino’s Emails?

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carlrally

With respect to the headline, Betteridge’s Law applies.

The tea party held its “yay Carl” “rally” on the steps of City Hall Wednesday, and here is the transcript of Jul Thompson’s remarks. Allow me to highlight this section:

The legend goes, that among his many other colorblind activities like employing scores of African-Americans, Carl Paladino is the primary financial support to an inner-city black church that ministers to the homeless. I wanted his campaign for governor to share this information after a liberal jihadist fabricated some emails and charged Carl with racism. But I can’t provide details, because as a humble man, Carl didn’t really want this information public.

I am that “liberal jihadist”. This is the second recent occasion on which Ms. Thompson has directly accused me of “fabricating” the Paladino email cache that my colleagues from WNYMedia.net and I released in 2010. Since she has repeatedly made that false accusation, it is incumbent on me to rebut it.

First of all, let’s re-examine Paladino’s own words. He never denied sending and forwarding the emails.

I re-sent emails that were sent to me by others… that’s all

The day the emails were released, Paladino’s own campaign released this statement:

Carl Paladino has forwarded close friends hundreds of email messages he received. Many of these emails he received were off color, some were politically incorrect, few represented his own opinion, and almost none of them were worth remembering.

We’re not surprised the political establishment feels threatened by Carl’s drive the take Albany back for taxpayers. Our campaign won’t be wading through the details of what is just another liberal Democrat blog smear.

No one said the emails weren’t his. No one said he didn’t send them. No one accused anyone of “fabricating” them.

Finally, if Paladino didn’t send these – if I ‘fabricated” them, why did he apologize for it in 2010?

REPORTER: Do you think it was appropriate to send out some of these emails

THOMPSON: I just said that, didn’t I? No it wasn’t. Was it appropriate for him to forward these things on? No.

Paladino said he did not create the emails, but merely forwarded them to friends before he became a candidate.

Paladino tried to explain himself during a brief appearance on the Fred Dicker Show on 1300 AM in Albany Tuesday Morning.

DICKER: Why did you pass this stuff along. Why didn’t you send it back and say, ‘return to sender? It’s too ugly.’ We only have about 40 seconds.

PALADINO: Well, you know, over the years, when your friends are sending you emails, ok, that are funny at the time, okay, that are not intended to be anything other than a humor amongst friends, that you re-send stuff. And I did that.

DICKER: You find…

PALADINO: … And I acknowledge that.

DICKER: … use of the word n****r humorous? I mean, that’s a pretty horrifying word these days. And understandably so, you know.

PALADINO: Well, they… well…. at the time and moment, okay when you see Ronald Reagan dressed in drag or you see a, uh (RADIO BREAK MUSIC PLAYS), uh, Obama, okay, picture…

DICKER: Yeah, the, uh, pimp’s outfit.

PALADINO: Whatever. That kind of stuff is going to happen, but that has nothing to do with the campaign.

and

“I regret having been somewhat careless in the way I re-sent e-mails that I received. I didn’t originate any of these e-mails. Whenever I received an e-mail that was political, off color, politically incorrect , whatever, …I sent it to a very specific bunch of friends who somewhat enjoy that sort of humor. “

Certainly someone innocent – someone who is a victim of a vicious fabrication – would never, ever apologize for something he never did and by which he was being victimized. Jul Thompson is, simply put, a liar.

Finally, if you doubt their authenticity, here is one of the emails that Paladino forwarded, and it specifically sent this video around: purporting to be footage of the “Rehearsal for the Obama Inauguration”, it depicts African tribesmen dancing in the jungle. To call this racist and vile would be an understatement.

Here is how that email was forwarded to Paladino (click to enlarge images):

Here is Paladino forwarding it out to his friends and colleagues:

Here is the reply from one of the recipients:

And Paladino’s defense:

Want to verify the authenticity of these emails? Why not contact one of the people who received it. In 2010, I redacted that information.  Now that an ally of Paladino’s has twice accused me of fabricating them, I must defend against such falsehoods.

Here’s another. It’s making fun of motivational posters, and I omitted the pornographic ones, but kept in the ones that use the word “fag”, denigrate black people, and mock those “damn Asians”.

When these were first released, part of the Paladino campaign’s strategy was to attack us, the people who published these emails for being liberal bloggers. It was true, after all – we were liberal bloggers. However, we never would have deliberately manufactured something out of whole cloth just to attack Carl Paladino. We have strong opinions, sometimes aggressively expressed, but would never fabricate some grand, international fraud.

Why would some tea party activist from some far-flung exurb be so invested in the travails of the Buffalo school district, with which she has no true interest and in which she has no genuine stake? On the one hand, this is sheer cultism at its core, protecting her Carl against the mean people; as if Carl couldn’t do it himself and needs her help. On the other hand, she agrees with the underlying goal, which is creating havoc in the public school to bring about political control and/or privatization. The target is the public school system in America, writ large.

Hey, It Could Have Been “Damn Ukrainians”

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carlThey held the “Yay Carl” rally on the steps of City Hall Wednesday afternoon, and it was sparsely attended. I drove by at around 5:15—Carl was waiting to speak and looking upon his creation—and most of the crowd was made up of reporters and curious passersby.

Carl, of course, went out of his way to promote this rally, sending out two emails to his followers about it in the past week. The Buffalo News reports that there were about 50 Carl supporters, but I question that number—there were about 50 people there altogether.

It was organized by a tea partier from Clarence whom I had to deal with as she worked from January—May to fail the Clarence school budget and elect two wholly unelectable school board candidates. She has no stake in the Buffalo Public Schools, except insofar as she wanted to defend the guy who sent out these emails to prominent western New Yorkers. There is no doubt that some of those emails were racist, many more were hardcore pornography, and all of them were unbecoming a public official, much less one who oversees Buffalo’s educational system.

Her co-organizer is tea partier Jul Thompson, the wife of perennial candidate Rus Thompson. Sources say they’re living in Niagara County now, so query what their stake is in Buffalo city schools, as well. She recently decided that she wanted to re-litigate the authenticity of the aforementioned Carl Paladino emails, and that would be great fun indeed. She also recently addressed the Buffalo School Board and opined on the “insightful” comments of racist white supremacist mass murderer Dylann Roof. Here’s video of it:

That’s pretty amazing to hear.

So, yesterday, she gave a speech to sort of in her own special way explain away Paladino’s “Damn Asians” commentary regarding UB’s International Students.

Hey, everybody! It could have been “damn Ukrainians” that Carl was talking about when he made false accusations against the International students at UB.

But you’ll recall Carl didn’t use Ukrainians because they’re Caucasians—he admittedly had to use a group that looked different. What do we call that again?

There goes that lib’rl media again, askin’ questions and transcribin’ answers!

All of this is a grotesque sideshow of white suburbanites coming to Buffalo to defend the indefensible, especially to tell black people that they really need to STFU about our Carl. You want to like and defend Carl Paladino and the things he writes and says, knock yourself out, but don’t pretend it’s not what it is.

“All of a sudden, I had a brainstorm: Why don’t we have a Pro-Carl Rally and show people in Buffalo how much support Carl really has,”

At most about 50 people, using the Buffalo News’ figure. Then again, most people who work are just leaving at 5.

These people have bought into the Paladino cult of personality, and they don’t so much follow an ideology or type of politics as they do one man. Cults of personality are unseemly; rare in the American body politic, and the easiest gateway to totalitarianism. Ironically—or perhaps just hypocritically—since 2007 these very people have aggressively accused libr’lz of being in the thrall of an Obama personality cult. Now, they organize “spontaneous” rallies of support for their dear leaders and some now back “The Donald” Trump.

All I want to know is, when will they be holding the rally in support of Joe Mascia? After all, Mascia is Carl’s guy. Mascia also owes the Buffalo News over $4,000 for lit they printed for him and he didn’t pay for.

The Buffalo Tea Party on “Race”

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Not that angry, not that mobby - Flickr - Photo Sharing! 2015-07-01 07-11-40

In the wake of the vicious, racially motivated mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, we have seen quite a spectacle—even longtime conservative supporters of the treasonous Confederate Flag have denounced it. Only the far fringes of the racialist right-wing movement have made excuses for what the shooter did, and why he did it.

Have you heard people accuse the shooter of being a “leftist“? White supremacy is an ultra-right-wing mindset because it takes something healthy, like patriotism or nationalism, and contorts it into hatred—often genocidal or nihilist. Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin were communists, but they weren’t nationalists. On the contrary, their ultra-left-wing ideology called for an international revolution of the proletariat in order to bring about what they perceived to be a just economic order.

By contrast, fascists such as Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler took some of the bits of Marxism—that the rights of the individual must be subsumed by the needs of the collective (in Marx’s view, that collective had to do with class—in fascism, it was the “nation” or the “fatherland” or the “volk”). Fascism was a corporatist system that also incorporated some form of ultra-nationalist xenophobia and hatred—national supremacy. Hitler’s Naziism was the purest and most evil distillation of that.

On the political spectrum, Naziism and fascism are ultra-right-wing, while communism is ultra-left-wing. After all, the fascists did to capitalism what they did to nationalism, and contorted it into something evil. Their only common threads were violence, dictatorship, and totalitarianism.

Therefore, when we are discussing ultra-nationalist white supremacists here in the US, not only do the true believers like this kid who shot up the Charleston church self-identify as hard right, but that’s just where it sits on the spectrum. Ultimately, ultra-nationalist, white supremacist, nativist thought is a perversion of conservatism itself. They take the notion of maintaining the status quo and distort it into spreading hatred of some “other”—usually a historically oppressed or powerless minority that can easily be demonized. In Germany, they perverted their nationalism into a virulent and genocidal hatred of Jews, Roma, Slavs, etc. In Serbia a hatred of Croats, and vice-versa. In Russia, a hatred of the West.

I’m not suggesting that the shooter was a Republican—just that he was a neo-Confederate ultra-right-wing genocidal monster.

No reasonable person on the left wants the Confederate flag banned because you can’t ban it—it’s political speech. It would be stupid to try, as the 1st Amendment protects the rights of people to be neo-Confederate racists and fly that flag.

Pointing out that someone made up Clinton/Gore badges with the battle flag on it back in 1992? We don’t know that it was sanctioned by the campaign, but if people are pointing out that the Clinton’s tolerance of that flag is different now than it was 30 years ago. That’s great! We should encourage people to assess the facts and alter their opinions accordingly. I’ll note that Governor Nikki Haley and Senator Lindsey Graham supported that flag flying on State grounds two weeks ago, and have recently changed their minds. Good for them.

I’ll note that, as far as I’m concerned, anyone who voices support for that flag or its continued flight over any state property anywhere—and that includes several state flags of Southern states—is voicing support for slavery, sedition, treason, and white supremacy. You can shout “heritage” all you want, but the heritage that flag represents is one of genocidal racism.

So it should come as a shock that a local leader of the tea party—a supporter and lackey of Carl Paladino and a vicious, unprincipled liar—affirms some of the hatred that the Charleston mass-murderer Dylann Roof espoused.

In a speech that she delivered—as a Grand Island resident, taxpayer, and voter—to the Buffalo Board of Education (on which Paladino sits), she said this:

Quoting a rather insightful comment from Dylann Storm Roof, the extremely disturbed young man who killed church members in Charleston last week, he said “Black people are racially aware almost from birth, but White people on average don’t think about race in their daily lives.”  He apparently tragically felt that needed to change, presumably in response to the violent race riots of late and the astonishing calls for violence against all Whites.

Holy. Shit.

Now, you can allege that I took this out of context. Here’s what preceded it:

I am personally very disturbed by the demand for a black superintendent.  Imagine the outrage if some were to insist upon only a white superintendent. Apparently, the reasoning being “No one can understand the needs of our children like a black person can.”  What, black children are different than white children?  How so?  Are they less capable?  Not as intelligent?  Does poverty affect their ability to learn?  I can tell you from experience, with proper structure and support, it doesn’t.  We believe the answer is NO, children do not have special needs based on the color of their skin, and children in Buffalo Public Schools do not belong to the black community alone.  We ALL care deeply about raising the level of achievement and providing a better future for ALL children stuck in failing schools.  To think otherwise is not logical.

So, within the context of some members of the Buffalo schools community preferring an African-American Buffalo schools superintendent, a Grand Island interloper wants the school board to know that racist mass murderer Dylann Roof made an “insightful” observation in his own semi-literate “Mein Kampf”.

The difference, in case it needs to be repeated, is that white people used to own black people, and that history of institutional, legal white supremacy and racism remains baked into our body politic. Yes, poverty does affect kids’ ability to learn, and countless scientific studies confirm that fact. From this article,

  • Children living in poverty have a higher number of absenteeism or leave school all together because they are more likely to have to work or care for family members.
  • Dropout rates of 16 to 24-years-old students who come from low income families are seven times more likely to drop out than those from families with higher incomes.
  • A higher percentage of young adults (31%) without a high school diploma live in poverty, compared to the 24% of young people who finished high school.
  • 40% of children living in poverty aren’t prepared for primary schooling.
  • Children that live below the poverty line are 1.3 times more likely to have developmental delays or learning disabilities than those who don’t live in poverty.
  • By the end of the 4th grade, African-American, Hispanic and low-income students are already 2 years behind grade level. By the time they reach the 12th grade they are 4 years behind.
  • In 2013, the dropout rate for students in the nation was at 8% for African American youth, 7% for Hispanic youth, and 4% for Asian youth, which are all higher than the dropout rate for Caucasian youth (4%).
  • Less than 30% of students in the bottom quarter of incomes enroll in a 4 year school. Among that group – less than 50% graduate.

So it’s not a question of lack of capability, but it’s untrue to suggest that poor inner-city minority kids are coming from the same environment as white kids from well-to-do homes. The schools aren’t necessarily failing because of the teachers or the curriculum or the superintendent—you have to attack systemic racism and the plague of poverty.

But this isn’t a course in sociology or neuropsychology, so let’s re-examine this amazing statement:

Quoting a rather insightful comment from Dylann Storm Roof, the extremely disturbed young man who killed church members in Charleston last week, he said “Black people are racially aware almost from birth, but White people on average don’t think about race in their daily lives.”  He apparently tragically felt that needed to change, presumably in response to the violent race riots of late and the astonishing calls for violence against all Whites.

No. Nothing about “Dylann Storm Roof” (and I question why the author used his full name here) is “insightful”. He was a homicidal maniac, and a neo-Confederate white supremacist, at that. In his mind, he was fighting for that racial collective of supposedly oppressed white folks, and used his words about racial awareness in an effort to spark a race war. To the extent that “black people are racially aware almost from birth”, that’s because being black in America is different from being white in America. The buzzword nowadays is “white privilege”, and it’s simply outrageous for some middle-class white woman from a tony suburb to come to Buffalo to lecture black people on their behavior and mentality.

What the author is doing is not only excusing Roof’s actions, but endorsing his thoughts and words. She agrees with his motive—to her, it makes sense what Roof does because of “race riots”, presumably the anti-police-brutality demonstrations in Ferguson and Baltimore, and she even manufactures some sort of “calls for violence against all Whites”.  I’m not saying some irresponsible protesters didn’t say such things, but that sort of inciteful language is no more outrageous than, for instance, a positive endorsement of the race hate manifesto of a mass murderer.

This is like your old German uncle reminding you that Hitler fixed the economy and saved Germany.

She concludes,

PLEASE stop telling our children from the time they are young that they are going to be treated differently simply because of their skin color.  PLEASE stop focusing on skin color and start focusing on the need to achieve.  Continuing this multi-generational failure is simply not an option anymore.

A black child in Buffalo’s inner city doesn’t need to be told that he’ll be treated differently because of his race. As a black person in America, she’ll live it almost every day. She’ll be faced with signs of white supremacy and racism every day—whether it’s overt or closeted; shouted with a Hitlergruß, or spat in whispers. Whether it’s being racially profiled as a shoplifter in a store, pulled over while driving prudently through Kenmore, or listening to the misguided and tone-deaf condescending speeches from white suburban tea party loons, a black person’s racial identity and self-awareness isn’t something that he has some responsibility to tone down; it’s not a disease, but a symptom of a wider, more pervasive disease.

The disease is white supremacy and racism, and no approving recitation of a mass murderer’s Buffalo News comment posing as a “manifesto” is “insightful” enough to quote, or to change that.

Quoting approvingly from a murderer’s regurgitation of a white nationalist hate group’s ideology isn’t the way forward for poor black kids in failing schools.

5 Years Later, Tea Party Wants to Re-litigate Carl’s Emails

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news_0The tea party have decided to come after me. Bereft of ideas, strategy, or success, this ragtag grouping of political nobodies have decided to accuse me of a “fraudulent email scam”, going on to suggest that I “admitted” to having “fabricated” some emails way back in 2009 in order to do some sort of political harm to then-Deputy Mayor Steve Casey.

All of this is so outrageous and untrue as to be defamation per se, insofar as it specifically accuses me of fraud.

It’s quite odd that this is coming up now, and I can only attribute it to the fact that Jul Thompson is friends with the woman who is running the effort to kill Clarence schools. The post accuses me of perpetrating a fraud; i.e., that I somehow manufactured and concocted Carl Paladino’s XXX-rated and racist emails from 2010. The post was posted Monday to a tea party blog run by Jul Thompson, the wife of Carl’s driver, John “Rus” Thompson.

Immediately after the post was brought to my attention – around 1pm Monday – I called Rus’ cell phone and left a message. I have not heard back. I also left a comment at the blog post; it remains unpublished, stuck in the moderation queue, (note that the time stamp is wrong, and I likely posted it at 1:27 pm).

I posted a quick response yesterday to buffalopundit.com, but let me be clear: I am a lawyer. To fabricate emails and accuse anyone else of sending them would, frankly, put my license to practice law at jeopardy. I don’t put my livelihood at risk for anyone or anything – not to bring down Carl Paladino or Steve Casey or Byron Brown or Steve Pigeon or anyone. So, let’s operate under this singular assumption:  Jul Thompson is a liar. While I may be a public figure, she is accusing me of fraud – a crime – and that is libel per se.

Here is my reply to the false and defamatory blog post: 

Have you ever known someone who leaves a wake of destruction behind them? Case in point, Alan Bedenko, liberal blogger, formerly wrote for ArtVoice, then left with Jeff Kelly and other staff to write for The Public, another liberal rag.

*Geoff Kelly. But never mind.

I sat with a friend today and shared with her my frustrations over my inability to persuade Carl Paladino’s Campaign for Governor in 2010 to answer the ridiculous charge that he was a racist, which were predicated upon emails Bedenko fabricated to “take him out” of the race against Andrew “2nd-Amendment-be-damned” Cuomo. As I attempted to provide her with some documentation to that effect, I found this little gem below, that I had never seen before. I had, at the time, shared the article from the Niagara Falls Reporter in which Bedenko had admitted to having fabricated some emails to sully the reputation of then (real) Mayor of Buffalo Steve Casey.

Let’s be 100% clear here. I have never fabricated any emails to sully the reputation of Steve Casey, or of Byron Brown. I have never fabricated any emails to anyone, anywhere, and I have never fabricated any emails about – or from – Carl Paladino.  Anyone suggesting that I did (or that I would) is a liar. 

I am prepared – at any time – to produce the emails in question to anyone, provided that my source’s identity remains protected. 

I don’t know the author but he is spot-on.

[I omitted here a lengthy paean to Carl Paladino, the savior and messiah of the Buffalo School system].

If I had a million dollars… I would sue the pants off of Alan Bedenko, challenge him to take a lie detector test and let him perjure himself in a court of law. Carl Paladino is one of the finest men I’ve ever known, and he, students and families of the Buffalo Public Schools and the people of New York deserve far better than being lied to by a nutcase on a liberal jihad and held hostage by the race-baiters of the School Board and the Buffalo Teachers Union. It’s a rare bird with “intestinal fortitude” that would subject himself to the outrageous and unrelenting bogus accusations of racism. We who know Carl, know that he is making an enormous sacrifice committing himself to this otherwise impossible task. He has given up his precious time, reputation and personal comfort because he cares so deeply for raising the level of achievement and providing a better future for the residents and families of the City of Buffalo. Jul Thompson Founder, TEA New York

Jul: Presumably Carl can provide you with the filing fee to sue me. I mean, you wouldn’t have standing to sue me, and Carl’s well past the one-year statute of limitations to do so. If I had fabricated those emails – you know, the racist, pornographic emails that Carl had sent and forwarded, including the one showing a horse having anal sex with a human female – why didn’t Carl go ahead and sue me back in 2010? 2011? 2012? 2013? Go ask any of Carl’s bigshot buddies whether he sent them. Ask Jamie Moses. Ask Larry Quinn. I can give you more names, if you want – names of people who might not necessarily be public figures. Email me at buffalopundit[at]gmail.com and I will give you a list of the names of people who received the pornographic and racist emails that Carl sent. Any time.  The reason why Carl never sued me? He sent them. They’re his.

Mrs. Thompson went on to regurgitate a 5 year-old blog post from a guy I contacted on Twitter yesterday. Here is the relevant exchange:

Could some of the Paladino e-mails been forgeries? This, and other questions, that the Albany press refuses to ask by Jerry Myrle Fuller Sunday, April 18, 2010 (Note: Most of you know that I am not a reporter by trade or training, and that my area of expertise is meteorology, so if this reads like a first-person journal entry, that is part of the reason. It seems to flow a little better that way.) By now, most of you have heard about the e-mail leak from a liberal blog known as wnymedia.net that purports, in big letters, to be displaying the scandalous “racist and sexist e-mails” put forth by Buffalo developer and Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl P. Paladino. Immediately I became suspicious. The article asserted that the e-mails were real with all the authority of a Facebook chain message. So, I did some research. Initially, this article was going to be a plain old rant about how this state seems to treat upstate politicians with a lot less respect than downstaters, pointing out the curious parallel between this and Chris Collins’s alleged “lap dance” comments that were unverifiable and blown way out of proportion, killing his proposed campaign for governor. It is no coincidence that both came from Buffalo, and it is also no coincidence that it has been decades since the state of New York has had a governor from the upstate region. However, I began to notice something: while for a few days, it appeared that Paladino’s campaign would indeed go down in flames, as would-be supporters ranging from Curtis Sliwa to Mark Williams disavowed him over the controversy, something funny happened: Paladino’s die-hard supporters rallied around him harder than ever. Paladino has a strong cult following, with passionate and outspoken supporters– something I really don’t see outside the political class for Lazio or Levy. They began to see the outrage over the e-mails as over the top. This led to wnymedia.net trying to push its rebuttal and insist that Carl Paladino was a dirty racist unfit for the office of governor of New York. So, I looked into wnymedia.net– specifically Alan Bedenko, the man who portrays himself as “buffalopundit–” to see who this guy was. To put it bluntly, he’s an ambulance chaser (i.e., an auto injury attorney) who joined the Democratic Party in 2003. Having sporadically read his commentary, he’s always been fairly strongly liberal. This was relatively mundane information, but then I stumbled on a little item from the Niagara Falls Reporter (a local alternative tabloid in the Niagara Falls area) that had something eerily familiar. The article dates to February 2009 and stems from an unrelated e-mail feud between Sam Hoyt and Buffalo City Hall (my emphasis added):

Well, let’s get one thing clear. The author admits that he’s no reporter, and boy is he right. I defend people against whom lawsuits have been brought. I am not an “ambulance chaser”, and haven’t done plaintiff’s personal injury work since 2001. Indeed, even accused drunk drivers know this!

Anyhow, here the author embedded the text from Mike Hudson’s Niagara Falls Reporter:

Big catfight in Buffalo last week between amateur bloggers Alan Bedenko of Buffalo Pundit and Glenn Gramigna of New WNY Politics, precipitated by the self-important Bedenko’s decision to publish what he even said was a series of fraudulent e-mails purporting to have been sent between some top aides to Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown last summer. Clearly, the e-mails were meant to slander and defame the people at Buffalo City Hall. Why Bedenko, who is an attorney in real life, chose to publish them is anyone’s guess. Enter Gramigna, who openly speculated that — since Bedenko was the only one to publish the lurid e-mails — perhaps Bedenko in fact had been their author. Actually, the theory makes a lot of sense. The e-mails were shopped to various news outlets last summer, and my impression was that they were created in response to the publication by the Niagara Falls Reporter of another series of e-mails between the married state Rep. Sam Hoyt and a young and comely Albany intern he was carrying on with. The Hoyt camp openly accused Brown’s first deputy mayor, Steve Casey, of being behind the leaking of the Hoyt e-mails — which were genuine — and Casey, perhaps coincidentally, figures prominently in the admittedly fraudulent e-mails published by Bedenko. Also perhaps coincidentally, Bedenko was a strong supporter of Hoyt during the last election cycle, has been a consistent critic of the Brown administration and was, after all, the only one to publish the garbage. Anyway, he phoned Gramigna “in a rage” and, being a lawyer, claimed his rival to be guilty of defamation. For his part, Gramigna is every bit the clueless lump comedians make fun of when discussing bloggers, and immediately posted a retraction. One question remains: Who did write the slanderous and potentially damaging e-mails Gramigna ascribed to Bedenko? Bedenko vehemently denies he wrote them, of course, but who knows?

Glenn Gramigna was being paid by one Syaed Ali, who is widely thought to have been the author of the emails in question, and had no proof other than “open speculation” that I wrote the emails, because Chris Smith published them. Makes perfect sense, right? It’s logic for idiots! But be clear: nowhere in any of these articles have I “admitted” to having forged anything; on the contrary, I vehemently denied that I wrote them then, and I vehemently deny I wrote them now, because I didn’t write them. I didn’t even publish them.

Alan Bedenko has a history of questionable e-mail “leaks” that pre-dates the Paladino e-mail flap. As I understood it, reporters are supposed to check the reliability of their sources before quoting their allegations as fact– something that did not appear to happen when these e-mails were leaked and subsequently went viral. Considering that I’m pretty sure wnymedia.net isn’t on most of the Albany press members’ must-read lists (their articles rarely show up on the major blogs), I’d venture to say there was also some shopping going around with the Paladino story as well.

What “history of questionable e-mail “leaks”? The Syaed Ali stuff? Hell, you can go right here and read all about that, from that time. Here is the article I wrote about Gramigna immediately after he published his “speculation”, and I expressly threatened to sue him. It should also be noted that I never published the emails in 2009 – it was Chris Smith who did so.

From that article: UPDATED: Gramigna has retracted what he wrote, and what his source told him. That’s appreciated, but still horseshit. Apart from this morning, when I called him in a rage, I can honestly say that I’ve never exchanged a single word with Gramigna, despite having helped him promote his dreck-laden site when he started it. His business model is: get local politicians to buy ads, print positive crap about them and negative crap about their opponents. Look for an alternative to completely decimate that business model, coming soon. If I had written the offending emails – which I didn’t – I would have reprinted them last summer, when they were originally sent. They are alleged to have been sent by Mr. Gramigna’s newest advertising client, Syaed Ali. But I didn’t print them last summer. Indeed, I alluded to them a couple of times only in an off-handed manner. I had theories as to who might have been sending them, but someone in law enforcement somehow landed on Mr. Ali, and he alleges that he was subsequently placed into custody and that his belongings have been confiscated. I’ve gone on record saying that, if what Ali said is true, it’s a grave injustice. Furthermore, if I had sent them, I wouldn’t have pimped them to mainstream media – I would have posted them on my site contemporaneously so that the TV and other reporters would give me linkage and credit. But I didn’t write them, I wouldn’t have written them, I have nothing to gain from writing them, and never in my wildest dreams would ever conceive of writing something like that about anyone, much less an elected official. For Gramigna, acting apparently as a conduit for the flailing Ali, to even suggestthat I was behind those emails is a disgrace – and a defamatory one, at that. I have my disagreements with the Brown administration – I don’t like their secrecy, I don’t like their sense of entitlement, I don’t like their Machiavellian machinations to try and upset ECDC and its endorsed candidates, and I don’t necessarily think that they do the best job for Buffalo. That doesn’t mean I would ever stoop so low as to spread vicious, defamatory rumors about him or his officials.

I am not trying to claim that the entire thing is an absolute hoax. Paladino himself has acknowledged that at least some of the e-mails in question were in fact authentic. Many of them, knowing Paladino’s public persona and admitted racial insensitivity, aren’t even all that surprising. However, there is the question that if Paladino in fact did not author some of these alleged e-mails, why did he not come out and deny them? The best answer that I can give is that Michael Caputo didn’t even try to do so. Caputo, after the e-mail controversy broke, stated repeatedly that “We’re not sure about the authenticity of the emails, and we don’t care. I’m not even going to comment on the emails. It’s not something I care to look at.” He has characterized the leak as a “liberal Democrat blog smear” and has declined to delve into the details.

Carl is a lawyer. It doesn’t matter what Caputo did or didn’t say. Carl had until 2011 to go ahead and sue the crap out of me if the emails were frauds. I’m just a middle-class lawyer/blogger and he’s a multimillionaire. Why didn’t he just sue me if it was false?

There could be lots of reasons. The biggest is that they’re provably genuine. Next would be that bringing that lawsuit would have opened up Carl’s own reputation to scrutiny. He knows better than to subject his reputation to the discovery process. Lots of reasons.

As for Syaed Ali, the idea that I wrote emails accusing Byron Brown of being gay is so palpably riduculous and false that Gramigna himself retracted the allegation. Mike Hudson didn’t because Mike Hudson knows how to write a story without crossing over the lines of libel, and didn’t directly accuse me of anything. Jul Thompson is a liar, and “Tea New York” is liable for her defamation. 

I don’t know yet whether I will pursue legal action, but I do know that I now – after 5 years – have to establish, once and for all, the authenticity of Carl Paladino’s emails. That means I now have to produce the emails in an unredacted format, and journalists and laypeople will be perfectly free to inquire of these judges, appointed bureaucrats, elected officials, prominent businesspeople, and developers whether Carl Paladino sent these racist, pornographic, and offensive emails. Given Mr. Paladino’s current status as an elected member of the Buffalo school board, and given the controversy over his ongoing battle with a predominately African-American minority on that board, I don’t know that the timing of this is something that he welcomes, but either way, he has the Thompsons to thank.

Lying Liar Jul Thompson

3 comments

WNY Tea Party: Objectively Pro-Horse Porn

The tea party have decided to come after me. Probably because Jul Thompson is friends with the woman who is running the effort to kill Clarence schools. That’s the only explanation for bringing up 5 and 6 year old lies.

Remember: Jul Thompson is a liar. 

Have you ever known someone who leaves a wake of destruction behind them? Case in point, Alan Bedenko, liberal blogger, formerly wrote for ArtVoice, then left with Jeff Kelly and other staff to write for The Public, another liberal rag.

*Geoff Kelly. But never mind.

I sat with a friend today and shared with her my frustrations over my inability to persuade Carl Paladino’s Campaign for Governor in 2010 to answer the ridiculous charge that he was a racist, which were predicated upon emails Bedenko fabricated to “take him out” of the race against Andrew “2nd-Amendment-be-damned” Cuomo. As I attempted to provide her with some documentation to that effect, I found this little gem below, that I had never seen before. I had, at the time, shared the article from the Niagara Falls Reporter in which Bedenko had admitted to having fabricated some emails to sully the reputation of then (real) Mayor of Buffalo Steve Casey.

Let’s be 100% clear here.

I have never fabricated any emails to sully the reputation of Steve Casey, or of Byron Brown. I have never fabricated any emails to anyone, anywhere, and I have never fabricated any emails about – or from – Carl Paladino.  Anyone suggesting that I did (or that I would) is a liar. 

I don’t know the author but he is spot-on.

[I omitted here a lengthy paean to Carl Paladino, the savior and messiah of the Buffalo School system].

If I had a million dollars… I would sue the pants off of Alan Bedenko, challenge him to take a lie detector test and let him perjure himself in a court of law. Carl Paladino is one of the finest men I’ve ever known, and he, students and families of the Buffalo Public Schools and the people of New York deserve far better than being lied to by a nutcase on a liberal jihad and held hostage by the race-baiters of the School Board and the Buffalo Teachers Union. It’s a rare bird with “intestinal fortitude” that would subject himself to the outrageous and unrelenting bogus accusations of racism. We who know Carl, know that he is making an enormous sacrifice committing himself to this otherwise impossible task. He has given up his precious time, reputation and personal comfort because he cares so deeply for raising the level of achievement and providing a better future for the residents and families of the City of Buffalo.

Jul Thompson
Founder, TEA New York

Jul: Presumably Uncle Carl can provide you with the filing fee to sue me. I mean, you wouldn’t have standing to sue me, and Carl’s well past the statute of limitations to do so.

If I had fabricated those emails – you know, the racist, pornographic emails that Carl had sent and forwarded, including the one showing a horse having anal sex with a human female – why didn’t Carl go ahead and sue me back in 2010? 2011? 2012? 2013? Go ask any of Carl’s bigshot buddies whether he sent them. Ask Jamie Moses. Ask Larry Quinn. I can give you more names, if you want – names of people who might not necessarily be public figures. Email me at buffalopundit[at]gmail.com and I will give you a list of the names of people who received the pornographic and racist emails that Carl sent. Any time. 

The reason why Carl never sued me? He sent them. They’re his. Now, let’s take a look at the nonsense that Jul Thompson (the wife of Rus Thompson) has found:


Could some of the Paladino e-mails been forgeries?
This, and other questions, that the Albany press refuses to ask
by Jerry Myrle Fuller
Sunday, April 18, 2010

(Note: Most of you know that I am not a reporter by trade or training, and that my area of expertise is meteorology, so if this reads like a first-person journal entry, that is part of the reason. It seems to flow a little better that way.)

By now, most of you have heard about the e-mail leak from a liberal blog known as wnymedia.net that purports, in big letters, to be displaying the scandalous “racist and sexist e-mails” put forth by Buffalo developer and Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl P. Paladino. Immediately I became suspicious. The article asserted that the e-mails were real with all the authority of a Facebook chain message. So, I did some research.

Initially, this article was going to be a plain old rant about how this state seems to treat upstate politicians with a lot less respect than downstaters, pointing out the curious parallel between this and Chris Collins’s alleged “lap dance” comments that were unverifiable and blown way out of proportion, killing his proposed campaign for governor. It is no coincidence that both came from Buffalo, and it is also no coincidence that it has been decades since the state of New York has had a governor from the upstate region. However, I began to notice something: while for a few days, it appeared that Paladino’s campaign would indeed go down in flames, as would-be supporters ranging from Curtis Sliwa to Mark Williams disavowed him over the controversy, something funny happened: Paladino’s die-hard supporters rallied around him harder than ever. Paladino has a strong cult following, with passionate and outspoken supporters– something I really don’t see outside the political class for Lazio or Levy. They began to see the outrage over the e-mails as over the top. This led to wnymedia.net trying to push its rebuttal and insist that Carl Paladino was a dirty racist unfit for the office of governor of New York.

So, I looked into wnymedia.net– specifically Alan Bedenko, the man who portrays himself as “buffalopundit–” to see who this guy was. To put it bluntly, he’s an ambulance chaser (i.e., an auto injury attorney) who joined the Democratic Party in 2003. Having sporadically read his commentary, he’s always been fairly strongly liberal. This was relatively mundane information, but then I stumbled on a little item from the Niagara Falls Reporter (a local alternative tabloid in the Niagara Falls area) that had something eerily familiar. The article dates to February 2009 and stems from an unrelated e-mail feud between Sam Hoyt and Buffalo City Hall (my emphasis added):

Well, let’s get one thing clear. The author admits that he’s no reporter, and boy is he right. I defend people against whom lawsuits have been brought. I am not an “ambulance chaser”, and haven’t done plaintiff’s personal injury work since 2001.

Big catfight in Buffalo last week between amateur bloggers Alan Bedenko of Buffalo Pundit and Glenn Gramigna of New WNY Politics, precipitated by the self-important Bedenko’s decision to publish what he even said was a series of fraudulent e-mails purporting to have been sent between some top aides to Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown last summer. Clearly, the e-mails were meant to slander and defame the people at Buffalo City Hall. Why Bedenko, who is an attorney in real life, chose to publish them is anyone’s guess. Enter Gramigna, who openly speculated that — since Bedenko was the only one to publish the lurid e-mails — perhaps Bedenko in fact had been their author. Actually, the theory makes a lot of sense. The e-mails were shopped to various news outlets last summer, and my impression was that they were created in response to the publication by the Niagara Falls Reporter of another series of e-mails between the married state Rep. Sam Hoyt and a young and comely Albany intern he was carrying on with. The Hoyt camp openly accused Brown’s first deputy mayor, Steve Casey, of being behind the leaking of the Hoyt e-mails — which were genuine — and Casey, perhaps coincidentally, figures prominently in the admittedly fraudulent e-mails published by Bedenko. Also perhaps coincidentally, Bedenko was a strong supporter of Hoyt during the last election cycle, has been a consistent critic of the Brown administration and was, after all, the only one to publish the garbage. Anyway, he phoned Gramigna “in a rage” and, being a lawyer, claimed his rival to be guilty of defamation. For his part, Gramigna is every bit the clueless lump comedians make fun of when discussing bloggers, and immediately posted a retraction. One question remains: Who did write the slanderous and potentially damaging e-mails Gramigna ascribed to Bedenko? Bedenko vehemently denies he wrote them, of course, but who knows?

Glenn Gramigna was being paid by one Syaed Ali, who is widely rumored to have been the author of the emails in question, and had no proof other than “open speculation” that I wrote the emails, because I published them. Makes perfect sense, right? It’s logic for idiots!

Alan Bedenko has a history of questionable e-mail “leaks” that pre-dates the Paladino e-mail flap. As I understood it, reporters are supposed to check the reliability of their sources before quoting their allegations as fact– something that did not appear to happen when these e-mails were leaked and subsequently went viral. Considering that I’m pretty sure wnymedia.net isn’t on most of the Albany press members’ must-read lists (their articles rarely show up on the major blogs), I’d venture to say there was also some shopping going around with the Paladino story as well.

What “history of questionable e-mail “leaks”? The Syaed Ali stuff? Hell, you can go right here and read all about that, from that time. Here is the article I wrote about Gramigna immediately after he published his “speculation”, and I expressly threatened to sue him. From that article:

UPDATED: Gramigna has retracted what he wrote, and what his source told him. That’s appreciated, but still horseshit.

Apart from this morning, when I called him in a rage, I can honestly say that I’ve never exchanged a single word with Gramigna, despite having helped him promote his dreck-laden site when he started it. His business model is: get local politicians to buy ads, print positive crap about them and negative crap about their opponents. Look for an alternative to completely decimate that business model, coming soon.

If I had written the offending emails – which I didn’t – I would have reprinted them last summer, when they were originally sent. They are alleged to have been sent by Mr. Gramigna’s newest advertising client, Syaed Ali. But I didn’t print them last summer. Indeed, I alluded to them a couple of times only in an off-handed manner. I had theories as to who might have been sending them, but someone in law enforcement somehow landed on Mr. Ali, and he alleges that he was subsequently placed into custody and that his belongings have been confiscated. I’ve gone on record saying that, if what Ali said is true, it’s a grave injustice.

Furthermore, if I had sent them, I wouldn’t have pimped them to mainstream media – I would have posted them on my site contemporaneously so that the TV and other reporters would give me linkage and credit.

But I didn’t write them, I wouldn’t have written them, I have nothing to gain from writing them, and never in my wildest dreams would ever conceive of writing something like that about anyone, much less an elected official.

For Gramigna, acting apparently as a conduit for the flailing Ali, to even suggestthat I was behind those emails is a disgrace – and a defamatory one, at that.

I have my disagreements with the Brown administration – I don’t like their secrecy, I don’t like their sense of entitlement, I don’t like their Machiavellian machinations to try and upset ECDC and its endorsed candidates, and I don’t necessarily think that they do the best job for Buffalo. That doesn’t mean I would ever stoop so low as to spread vicious, defamatory rumors about him or his officials.

I am not trying to claim that the entire thing is an absolute hoax. Paladino himself has acknowledged that at least some of the e-mails in question were in fact authentic. Many of them, knowing Paladino’s public persona and admitted racial insensitivity, aren’t even all that surprising. However, there is the question that if Paladino in fact did not author some of these alleged e-mails, why did he not come out and deny them? The best answer that I can give is that Michael Caputo didn’t even try to do so. Caputo, after the e-mail controversy broke, stated repeatedly that “We’re not sure about the authenticity of the emails, and we don’t care. I’m not even going to comment on the emails. It’s not something I care to look at.” He has characterized the leak as a “liberal Democrat blog smear” and has declined to delve into the details.

Carl is a fucking lawyer. It doesn’t matter what Caputo did or didn’t say. Carl had two and a half years to go ahead and sue the shit out of me. I’m just a middle-class lawyer/blogger and he’s a multimillionaire. Why didn’t he just sue me if it was false?

There could be lots of reasons. The biggest is that they’re provably genuine. Next would be that bringing that lawsuit would have opened up Carl’s own reputation to scrutiny. He knows better than to subject his reputation to the discovery process. Lots of reasons.

As for Syaed Ali, the idea that I wrote emails accusing Byron Brown of being gay is so palpably riduculous and false that Gramigna himself retracted the allegation. Mike Hudson didn’t because Mike Hudson knows how to write a story without crossing over the lines of libel, and didn’t directly accuse me of anything.

Jul Thompson is a liar.