PRWatch took notes on this week’s Heritage Blogger’s Briefing, a storied weekly tradition that only just partered up with Breitbart.com. Rep. Jeff Landry of Louisiana was the guest, playing the air-punching freshman role that Rep. Joe Walsh and Allen West have demo’d in the past. But the star, as far as the left was concerned, was Caitlyn Korb – holder of a once-boring, now-exciting job of flacking for ALEC.
“You’ve probably been somewhat alarmed by some of the headlines of late,” said Heritage’s Rob Bluey. “It’s certainly not the evil and shady organization that some in the liberal media would have you believe it is.”
Korb was up. The left, she said, had “been doing everything in their power to shut us down.” It had made “ridiculous accusations, such as we killed Trayvon Martin.” ALEC’s allies needed to “call out these people that are attacking us.” Starting this week, at some point, a website called IStandWithALEC would go up to collect solidarinosc statements.
She was pushing on an open door. Today, the National Taxpayers Union’s Andrew Moylan published a long piece on the unfairness of ALEC attacks. “Liberal activist groups hate the limited government principles of ALEC and other organizations like it and they are intent on stamping them out of existence,” he said. (Moylan didn’t attend the Briefing himself.) The rally around ALEC has taken longer than the rally around the Kochs – who, remember, were the original targets of anti-ALEC campaigns – but the D.C. conservative culture is generally a little friendlier to ALEC, a little more surprised at the anti- campaign.
About that, though. In D.C. libertarian circles, there’s some murmuring about a totally sourceless rumor posted by Robert Wenzel at EconomicPolicyJournal. Yesterday he put up a quick, two-graf post titled “the drugged lady sings,” predicting that “this power opera [the Koch-Cato fight] will end with a key Cato player led off the stage, and the statute of limitations hasn’t expired, so handcuffs are not out of the question.”
The anti-Cato chorus has peddled rumors before – I remember some whoppers during the 2008 intra-libertarian fight over Ron Paul’s newsletters – but joy-seeking liberals should know that D.C.’s free market activists are getting a little rattled.
