Huge props and deep thanks to Tom Blumer of that gem of a business blog, Bizzy Blog, for cc-ing me on this email to Michelle Malkin and for trying to set the record straight. G-d bless him for taking the time and trouble. I am struck by his consideration in this matter.
Bloggers know that credit and atttribution is the currency in which we trade (it sure ain't the dough). I worked for weeks on Obama's foreign campaign contributions and credit card fraud story -- studying thousands of pages of FEC documents. Atlas readers Laura, Cathy, John Jay, Graeme and others provided invaluable analysis and help. All 53 posts dating back to July 2008 are here and here.
Set the record and straight and get it right. Here is Tom Blumer's email to Michelle Malkin (completely unprompted by me, though I am enormously grateful):
Michelle,
In your otherwise excellent column today, in the "online donor credit-card fraud" section, you wrote:
Weeks before the 2008 presidential election, investigative journalist Ken Timmerman blew the whistle on rampant phony straw contributors slipping through the Obama donation site.
Timmerman's work, based on the Hot Air link you cited, was published on about September 30, 2008.
Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs, who you did link to in the "Foreign funny money" section of your column, was also on top of the credit-card fraud problem in late July, specifically citing "Good Will" about two month earlier than Timmerman:
HERE
She had an American Thinker column on August 14, 2008 which detailed foreign AND credit-card fraud issues:
HERE
For reasons which perplex me to this day, a host of other commentators and conservative bloggers, I would suspect including Timmerman (whose Newsmax article is no longer available), took the results of Pamela's work and presented it as if it was their own, or at a minimum egregiously downplayed her role in gathering and assembling the damning information.
Because of their reluctance to give credit where due, it's understandable that you might believe that Timmerman, Powerline, and several others who got to the story much later were the story's originators. They clearly weren't.
Pamela Geller was the whistleblower. If we had been paying closer attention (myself included), we might have amplified her whistle loud enough to have stopped the madness we are currently enduring known as the Obama administration.
Regards,
Tom Blumer
BizzyBlog.com
