http://theweek.com/...
The lawsuit has not been going well for the magazine. In July, Judge Natalia Combs Greene rejected a motion to dismiss the suit. The defendants appealed, and last week D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion again, opening the door for the discovery phase of the lawsuit to begin.
There's too much good stuff to try to paste in quotes here. Climate scientist Michael Mann sued the National Review for defamation, causing the smug jerkoffs (Rich Lowry, Mark Steyn) over at Nationa Review in engage in some internet-style trollery, such as writing troll posts about how shitty the judge was, and
"teaching [Mann] a thing or two about the law and about how free debate works in a free country.”
Tough guys!
But apparently not too tough to call out his readers' promises to provide financial help if needed....because it apparently is needed (maybe because the National Review has lost tens of millions of dollars in the free market it champions).
This is our fight, legally. But with the global-warming extremists going all-out to silence critics, it’s your fight too, morally. When we were sued, we heard from many of you who expressed a desire to help underwrite our legal defense. We deeply appreciated the outpouring of promised help.
Now we really need it.
Unless things take a drastic turn for the National Review in the later development of this suit, they are going to have to ask for a lot more in handouts from rightwing sugar daddies or gullible readers.
At the same time, ThinkProgress broke a story this week on a big scam being advertised in the National Review (which they stopped running after being called out on it).
http://thinkprogress.org/...
Pairing survivalist panic to more mainstream conservative tropes is Frank’s calling card, pervading his pitches for the other products in the 4Patriots line. Power4Patriots reveals “the dirty little secret that president [sic] Obama and the big energy monopolies have been trying to bury.” There’s a “cover-up,” a “conspiracy that runs all the way to the top” to make “power rates skyrocket.” Moreover, “thanks to the shaky state the liberals have put our country in, our government isn’t ready to handle the situations that are coming our way…Ask anyone who lived through Hurricane Katrina!” The solution is to buy Power4Patriots’ books, videos, and “CD-ROMs,” which will teach you how to cut your power and heating bills by “up to” 75 percent.
Likewise, Frank’s SurvivalSeeds4Patriots missive warns that “the frightened hordes clear out the grocery stores in hours and people [will] get more and more desperate” in the crisis “about to hit the US.” Save yourself by purchasing Frank’s “painstakingly researched” personal plant seed vault.
This reminds one of Glenn Beck's scammy food kits and gold pitches, but with an even more aggressive sales strategy. It's a classic white-collar crime scam.....the fake name, shell companies, and shady marketing. The reporter had no trouble discovering the fraud after doing some digging [I saw these same kind of stupid but widespread scams from white-collar criminals in the loan modification industry, or any boiler room).
While the National Review may have once gotten away with some kind of boast about being an 'intellectual' rag on par with The Nation, it's clearly degenerated into angry internet trolling by overgrown teenage Caucasian men being bankrolled by loony scam ads.
In the unfolding plutocracy of America, we see how even the market of 'ideas' for the rightwing is being financed, propped up, and perpetuated by a small number of wealthy ideologues, just like the rest of the astroturfed conservative movement.
Conservatives like to point Buckley’s legacy and the Review as the reasonable, moderate edge of an regressive, reactionary party. In its history, the magazine has consistently staked out far-right positions that favor whites over nonwhites and plutocrats over the middle and working classes.
National Review authors have railed against racial integration, called Hitler a left-wing radical, and argued with a straight face that African-Americans are inherently more violent and less civilized than whites.
Lowry himself famously declared “We’re winning” the War in Iraq just before catastrophic waves of sectarian violence engulfed the country and permanently scuttled the American-led reconstruction effort.
Somewhere, Bill Kristol is probably masturbating (and not just in written format)