Adrian Smith, who apparently knows the Beatrice Fiddler uses typepad.

Third district congressman Adrian Smith just keeps making life more interesting.

A few days ago, I wrote about his lies on SCHIP – now, his official congressional website is blocking incoming links from blogger accounts!

The same Lisa Hannah of Smith Watch who did the hard work on the aforementioned entry posted this over at New Nebraska Network — her step-by-step attempt to solve the mystery of why Adrian Smith’s official congressional website wouldn’t load from the link on her blog.

Of particular note is the response from the Blogger.com technician. Again, these are the Blogger.com technician’s words, not Lisa’s:

The problem isn’t with your link. It’s with THEIR server. It’s rejecting (giving a 404) when the link comes from blogspot. What a douche this guy is. He’s blocking requests when it comes from bloggers.
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His Official Government Website, that WE pay for (well I’m guessing on that part), is throwing up a 404 when the referrer heading comes from blogspot.com. I tested from one of my test blogs and it doesn’t work either, also uploaded a test page to googlepages (a different domain) and it works. So it really is blogspot they are blocking via the referrer.
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Looks like you can get a new blog post out of this. Congressman Adrian Smith is afraid of Bloggers!

So to sum up, everything on your end is correct. It’s the dear congressman that is playing games. Notice how his taxpayer server is also configured to Identify itself as NOYB (none of your business). Nice guy. Nebraska huh? Without looking I’m going to guess he’s a Republican.
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Looking around, I don’t see many others but you linking to him from blogspot, so it must’ve been you that scared him. Great Work!!!

That’s just such a pathetic thing for them to do. I shouldn’t be surprised I suppose, but good god.

UPDATE!!! (11/05) You may notice in the comments that there is a post from GovTrends, who take responsibility as the “website vendor” for Smith.

Upon further investigation we discovered our servers were set by default to block all referring traffic from Blogspot due to the proliferation of spammers. So, in effect, this ‚Äòblocking‚Äô of Blogspot is affecting all of the websites on our server…To be clear, neither us nor our client were aware of the blocking being done prior to today (we have over 2000 different websites on our blacklist that we download from gotroot.com) and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused Blogspot bloggers.

I was a little suspicious that such a large vendor with a client list such as theirs would be completely clueless about this, and fortunately for all of us, Lisa Hannah again does the legwork. She contacted GovTrends, who failed to give her any kind of satisfactory answer, so she put their words to the test:

He said, as you can see, their servers are set by default. He kept on wanting to tell me about some site on the internet that tells about the biggest spammers, and that blogspot.com was one of them…

So, we have Smith’s office continuing to refuse to comment on this, and a provider wanting us to take them at face value.

So let’s look at some of the clients that they serve, as noted on their site:

- JP Morgan
- NYC Health
- Sirius Satellite
- Snapple
- Godiva Chocolatier
- WebMD
- Wharton: University of Pennsylvania
- The Bahamas

So far, their own site and the ones I’ve tested that I can see they run have all been accessible through Blogspot.com.

GovTrends pleads ignorance regarding the blogger blocking, saying it was just automatic for all their clients due to apparent “spamming” from blogger.com (still not actually sure how incoming links from a blog can be spam, but anyway). Yet this threat posed by blogger.com is apparently so severe that none of their large clients – nor GovTrends themselves – have incoming blogger links blocked.

Adrian Smith, who is either a liar or a moron.

Nebraska’s three congressmen continue to spew the repeatedly-debunked Bush administration rhetoric against SCHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. I’m careful to not say Republican Party rhetoric, because some of the bill’s most outspoken supporters have been Republican. In spite of several people’s claims that a bi-partisan bill is needed, this is a bipartisan effort.

In her New Nebraska Network post Rep. Smith Misleads Constituents Regarding SCHIP, Lisa Hannah of the extremely thorough SmithWatch blog has contributed a point-by-point response to Adrian Smith’s latest batch of claims. But her terminology is too generous – he’s simply lying. Based on his campaign statements and quotes in interviews (and third-person anecdotes), I have little respect for the intellectual capacity of our third district congressman. But I refuse to believe he’s so thick that he really has no understanding of the bill.

Here’s a taste:

CLAIM #1 - The current SCHIP bill would make it possible for illegal immigrants to receiving federal benefits.

FACT - Sec. 605 says, “Nothing in this Act allows Federal payment for individuals who are not legal residents.” Further, funds could be denied if this does occur at the state level.
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CLAIM #3 - The bill would not serve poor children first, and would allow states to cover families making $84,455 per year, even though it exceeds 300 percent of the federal poverty levels.

FACT - Sec. 114 specifically notes that no child can be covered in a family that makes over 300% above the poverty level ($61,950).

Currently, the only state covering families above 300% is New Jersey, at 350%. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer tried to get coverage for up to 400% ($82,600), but was denied.

The present bill would allow an exception for these two states, but this has to be approved by HHS. New requirements would be issued to keep higher guidelines, but after Oct. 1, 2010, if those requirements were not met, those states would not get federal funds for children above 300%. If they did meet requirements, their federal matching rate would still be reduced.

Overall, 70% of children covered would be in families that are at 200% of the poverty level or less ($41,300 per year). Currently, 31 states have their SCHIP levels set at 200% or less (Nebraska is at 185%).

Two of the comments by NNN reader ColumbiaDuck demonstrate even a further level of dishonesty on the part of the Bush administration and their mouthpieces:

I would like to make one minor correction – New Jersey is the only state that would be allowed to cover over 300% in the most recent bill. And, as you note, they can only do this if they show they are making a targeted effort to reach those under 200%. New York is not allowed to go over 300% (and would need a waiver to go over 200%).

Another reason this is a disingenuous argument for Republicans to make – BUSH’s HHS approved the Jersey waiver. So he was for covering up to 350% until he was against it (ie until he could use it as a political weapon).
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If New York’s petition earlier this year had been approved, then they too could have gone above the 300% threshold. However, it wasn’t.

Ironically, it was the Bush people who rejected New York’s application. So they absolutely know that the 400% number (82,000) is total b*llsh*t, yet they say it again and again and again. The only way that number could have been real was WITH the approval of GWB.

For the Lee Terry fans, here Kyle Michaelis of NNN offers a response to the 2nd district congressman’s similar lack of honesty about the bills he votes on.

Chris Reed is a Union-Tribune columnist whose career aspirations seem to be little more than being the buffoon that eagerly carries out the paper’s constant smears against Mike Aguirre.

UT cartoonist Steve Breen, fighting the stereotype of cartoonists being geeky, overweight middle aged men.

In his latest blog entry, he does his best to bring more eyes to cartoonist Steve Breen’s best efforts to earn brownie points with his bosses.

The gist of this all is that city attorney Mike Aguirre suggested – in the midst of the wildfires heading rapidly toward San Diego with zero percent containment – that San Diego implement a city-wide evacuation plan. There has been some dispute and misunderstanding over whether or not Aguirre’s suggestion of “implementation” meant carrying out the planned evacuation or formally adopting an official plan.

In a bureaucratic environment, where things like plans and studies and whatnot have to be formally adopted, I read Aguirre’s suggestion of implementing a plan as “figuring out a definite plan and making sure that it is officially in place,” which is also how the San Diego Reader’s Don Bauder interpreted it:

In a memo of Oct. 22 that I will quote in full below, Aguirre recommended a voluntary evacuation PLAN. That is much different from a voluntary evacuation. He stressed the possibility of respiratory damage from smoke. He suggested officials contact nearby cities such as Yuma in the event that winds shifted and San Diegans would be in harm’s way. At the time of the memo, Highway 8 was open, and could have accommodated people leaving if lung damage became severe. He did not recommend a voluntary evacuation — just a PLAN for one. In the U-T’s story, the police chief, fire chief and mayor’s office falsely said Aguirre urged an exodus.

He goes on to reprint the memo in his entry. But folks like the Union-Tribune, the mayor and his staff, Aguirre’s other political enemies in San Diego government, and Voice of San Diego’s Scott Lewis all read it to mean “Aguirre says abandon the city now.”

Pat Flannery of Blog of San Diego had this:

I-15 was closed, I-5 was in imminent danger of being closed. There were fires on both sides of I-8. What if the high winds had continued through Tuesday? Even the military firefighting helicopters would not have been able to fly. And we were minutes away from losing SDG&E power. That was the situation on Monday morning.

In other words, the city was in danger of needing to be evacuated, and without an implemented plan, it would have been mass chaos. Mike Aguirre committed the apparently unforgivable sin of wanting to avoid mass chaos.

Well, in response to that memo, people have been using this as an opportunity to paint Aguirre as being some kind of emotionally unstable alarmist. I really, truly do not understand how someone could look at this situation and see this, but the same old people who want to pile on this guy and get him out of office are using everything at their disposal to do so.

Aguirre contacted Lewis again in an attempt to clarify his stance from the article linked above. Apparently Aguirre thought Lewis was talking about adopting an official plan, and Lewis thought Aguirre was talking about firing the starting pistol on the mass exodus. So in his follow-up, Lewis uses the opportunity to mock Aguirre, but does include this, which reinforces Aguirre’s assertion:

He said all he wanted was for the mayor and police and fire chief to design a plan to evacuate the entire city. He said the evacuations — and the shelters being set up — beginning Monday were occurring “willy-nilly.” He said he wanted the city to have a better plan and to set up shelters outside the city in El Centro, Yuma, Ariz. and other regional areas.

Not actually UT columnist Chris Reed; they made me take down his picture.

This all gets back to what it means to implement a plan.

But instead of talking about whether or not San Diego should have such a plan, how it should be structured, and other aspects that might accomplish silly things like saving people’s lives, the debate has successfully been recentered to whether or not Mike Aguirre is crazy and whether or not he’s telling lies and changing his story.

So anyway, I got away from my original point. Obviously, no politician or political figure should be above criticism. I mean, I make my living on the fact that I believe that. But seriously, it compromises the integrity of the whole world of political commentary and discourse when this is what it has come to – particularly when a paper brings their news department along with their editorial goals.

That is why I think it’s pretty darn pathetic that both Reed and Breen are using their platforms to point more fingers to encourage more people to laugh at Mike Aguirre for wanting to have a plan in place to evacuate the city in case 2.6 million people were going to be burned alive.

This is considered political satire, since Democrats apparently can’t get enough of blaming everything on George W. Bush.

Problem is, this is reality.