OOPS – I Confused New Haven Register and New Haven Independent … Cancel That Last Post

From my California outpost, after midnight on the East Coast, I just realized all by myself that my last post was a dumb mistake.

I have fused an article by Abbe Smith in the New Haven Register with one in the New Haven Independent by Melissa Bailey. Neither one was edited. 

I’ll leave the errant post up on the blog so everyone can see what this is all about. I’m adding a note at the top: THIS ITEM IS INCORRECT AND IS BEING DELETED IN 24 HOURS. SEE THE FOLLOWING POST FOR EXPLANATION.

The funny thing is that the two different articles still reinforce my main point: that it’s hard to figure out what is going on with Linda McMahon’s tale of having been on food stamps, or having saved S&H Green Stamps, or both.

Here’s the language of the New Haven Register article, at http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2010/10/01/news/new_haven/doc4ca5af62623ac126531710.txt: “[Darnell Goldson] points to her past challenges, which include going through bankruptcy and being on food stamps, as part of her strengths.”

Here’s the language of the New Haven Independent article, at http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/goldson_backs_mcmahon/: “[Goldson] said McMahon is an inspiration because she made her millions after starting from meager means and at one point subsisting on food stamps.”

Here’s the language of my internal critic: “Stop blogging in the middle of watching the San Francisco Giants play the San Diego Padres!”

Apologies to all.

Irv Muchnick

This post has been removed.

SEE THE NEXT POST FOR EXPLANATION.

Sound Advice to Linda McMahon From a Friend

I’ve needled a certain former Republican politician and current political columnist by calling him Kevin “Don’t Call Linda McMahon My Mouthpiece” Rennie.

But Rennie has a blog today that I, personally, don’t much disagree with. See “Whoops! Mrs. McMahon Learns Republicans in Connecticut Don’t Talk Minimum Wage,” http://www.dailyructions.com/whoops-mrs-mcmahon-learns-republicans-in-connecticut-dont-talk-minimum-wage/.

I do think there’s an element of Kabuki that prevents open discussion of many topics, with minimum wage being only one of them. Wasn’t it Michael Kinsley who defined a gaffe as “telling the truth by accident”?

However, I also think the McMahon candidacy is based more than most (as in, just about entirely) on theater — which makes her tripping over her lines a kind of just dessert. Rennie’s Hartford Courant colleague, Rick Green, was right in noting that what mattered here more than anything else was the process; the panic and backfilling by her handlers the second Linda went off-script.

If McMahon really wants to slay a sacred cow on behalf of some abstract libertarian principle, well then, go for it,  O Small Businesswoman. Then we can have that discussion. I’m of the opinion that there’s no such thing as a neutral libertarian; that person always has an agenda, and McMahon’s own is very easy to isolate.

In sum, I would concede to Rennie that life can be unfair to politicians of all stripes, and that it was just a tiny bit unfair to Linda McMahon in this episode. But, heck, the rickety edifice that is her political career as a whole has been more than fair to her body of zero accomplishment, and she can take full ownership of the minimum wage issue.

After all, McMahon’s small business expertise is her calling card.

Even if she thinks World Wrestling Entertainment is a small business.

Even if she thinks talking about the employee health-care conundrum at McDonald’s is on point.

Irv Muchnick

ow many of those entertainers ended up with broken necks?  I am sure Dave can give you a number. I believe that information would be shocking and give people some understanding as to why pain pills become a part of most wrestlers lives. It also leads into the next question about early deaths. Andrew Martin had CTE. Andrew did not get CTE by walking down the street and tripping on his shoelaces. Andrew got CTE from working in the scripted WWE matches. Does Linda feel any responsibility for Andrew’s condition?

‘Linda McMahon, Laughing in the Face of History’

“Linda McMahon, laughing in the face of history”

by Emma Mustich

Salon

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/10/01/linda_mcmahon_history

Muchnick to Do Live Twitter Commentary on Monday’s Blumenthal-McMahon Debate

Author and journalist Irvin Muchnick, whose investigations of death in the pro wrestling industry have become part of the coverage of the U.S. Senate campaign in Connecticut, will be doing live commentary on his Twitter feed next Monday, October 4, when Democratic candidate Richard Blumenthal and Republican candidate Linda McMahon hold their first debate.

The debate  itself, from the Bushnell Memorial Theater in Hartford, will be broadcast live on Fox Connecticut, Channel 61, starting at 7 p.m. Eastern time. Fox Connecticut also will stream the coverage live at http://ctnow.com.

Muchnick is the author, most recently, of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death (ECW Press). He is also lead respondent in the landmark freelance writers’ rights case, Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, which the U.S. Supreme Court recently sent back to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Muchnick blogs about the Blumenthal-McMahon campaign at https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com. He is @irvmuch at Twitter.

Media inquiries: media@muchnick.net

Can You Smell What Linda McMahon’s $50 Million Is Cooking? Roll Call’s Story on Linda’s Lobbying Lie Is Buried

Except for a single tweet by the Hartford Courant’s Capitol Watch blog (which did not post an item on the same subject on the blog itself), there has not been, by my reckoning, a single substantial pick-up of the Roll Call report about video of Linda McMahon, in Waterbury in April, telling tea partiers that she has not lobbied.

Richard Blumenthal dribbles some politician’s b.s. about his military record – on which he deserved to get proportionately called out, by the way – and The New York Times goes all sticky-wet.

But a near-billionaire owner of a publicly traded corporation spends $50 million on her Senate campaign as an “outsider,” and lies about the company’s million dollars of lobbying expenditures, and it’s just another day at the carny-politico office.

For those of you who haven’t caught up with the Roll Call piece, probably through no fault of your own, see “Worse Than Minimum-Wage-Gate: Linda McMahon Lied About Lobbying $$$,” https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/%E2%80%98worse-than-minimum-wage-gate%E2%80%99-linda-mcmahon-lied-about-lobbying/, and “Background on Roll Call Expose of Linda McMahon’s Lie About Lobbying,” https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/background-on-roll-call-expose-of-linda-mcmahons-lie-about-lobbying/.

Irv Muchnick

Muchnick Flashback: ‘Wow, That Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast Sure Types Fast’

I have nothing but sympathy for journalists who screw up — I do it myself here and there. But I have nothing but contempt for people who don’t own up to their mistakes and correct them.

As noted in the previous post, Brian Lockhart of Hearst blew Lloyd Grove’s profile of Linda McMahon in The Daily Beast out of the water. TDB refuses to comment on or correct the story. For the full background, I reprint below my September 2 post.

***************

Wow, That Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast Sure Types Fast!

Published September 2, 2010

“The Wrestler Could Win” is the headline on Lloyd Grove’s piece about Linda McMahon at The Daily Beast, http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-02/linda-mcmahon-rising-in-connecticut-/.

Yes, sir. And The Daily Beast could use a bullshit detector.

As a public service, your humble blogger is providing McMahon’s story about her bankruptcy – with more holes than John Lennon’s Blackburn, Lancashire – as transcribed  by stenographer Grove (TDB), followed by an English translation (ET).

TDB: “She was married at 17 and soon pregnant.”

ET: Linda married Vince McMahon in 1966. Their first child, son Shane, was born on January 15, 1970. In fairness, I don’t know if Linda was pregnant at any other time in the intervening three-plus years.

TDB: “She was a stay-at-home mom with two little kids and Vince was working for his father, a small-time wrestling promoter, and having a hard time making a living.”

ET: As noted, Shane was born in 1970. Daughter Stephanie was born in 1976. By today’s standards, Vincent J. McMahon might be casually called a small-time promoter – but, come on, Vince Senior in the 1970s was doing big business throughout the Northeast, including in the population centers of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, and Baltimore. Why Vince Junior would be “having a hard time making a living” through that period is not at all clear. In 1971 young Vince replaced Ray Morgan as the host of the syndicated television programs of the World Wide Wrestling Federation, as it was then known; he became a full-time employee of his father’s company no later than 1972. In 1974, when Linda was still a stay-at-home mom with just one little kid, Vince started promoting coast-to-coast closed-circuit shows like Evel Knievel and Ali-Inoki.

TDB: “At one point, when they were living in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in the 1970s, they went bankrupt and briefly depended on food stamps.”

ET: The McMahons’ heretofore known bankruptcy filing was in Connecticut in 1976. If there was an additional earlier bankruptcy, that is huge news – as is the undocumented assertion that they were on government assistance. But you never know with TDB, which may be conflating “food stamps” with “S&H Green Stamps,” a staple of middle-class homes of that period, for which there was no social stigma whatsoever. “After our son Shane was born,” Linda tells stenographer Grove, “we saved S&H Green Stamps and actually bought a high chair and Shane’s formula with them.” Well, give that resourceful homemaker a prize!

***

Eight hours ago stenographer Grove suggested on Twitter that he would have more to say “As soon as I recover my equilibrium from that chair you hit me in the head with.” He seems still not to have recuperated from my devastating attack of electrons via the ether. Grove makes the exercise of fact-checking a piece of journalism sound more painful than the real steel chair shots to the head that have been administered to the late Shane Cade and the late Chris Kanyon, among many others of Linda McMahon’s wrestlers, both dead and not yet dead.

Irv Muchnick

Hearst Reporter Lockhart Closes the Loop on Linda McMahon’s ‘Second’ Bankruptcy

Brian Lockhart, the Hearst investigative reporter who today published an in-depth story on the subject, has blogged “A few loose ends from the McMahon bankruptcy story.” See http://blog.ctnews.com/politicalcapitol/2010/09/30/a-few-loose-ends-from-the-mcmahon-bankruptcy-story/ Good work here, across the board.

I’m going to take the liberty of quoting at length what Lockhart has to say about the grossly irresponsible interview of McMahon in The Daily Beast. Then I’ll show how the lies propounded there remain current in McMahon’s campaign narrative and need to be aggressively stamped out.

First, Lockhart:

[The Daily Beast profile] raised new questions about the bankruptcy because of the following sentence: “At one point, when they were living in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in the 1970s, they went bankrupt and briefly depended on food stamps.”

Democrats jumped all over that line because it appeared that McMahon either could not get the story that she has been telling on the campaign trail to connect with voters straight or because the family had actually gone bankrupt twice and this was the first time it had been mentioned during the Senate race.

“Neither Linda, nor the campaign, has ever insinuated there were two bankruptcies,” McMahon spokesman Ed Patru told me in an e-mail. He said Daily Beast reporter Lloyd Grove “mistakenly noted in a recent report the McMahons went bankrupt while living in Gaithersburg. I have made Grove aware that the political world is turning on its head over this issue … They did not declare bankruptcy in Gaithersburg. They were just poor.”

I e-mailed The Daily Beast asking them to confirm they had been contacted by Patru and that Grove had made a mistake.

Andrew Kirk with The Beast replied, “We have no comment on the private discussions that have taken place between Lloyd Grove and Mr. Patru.”

I asked if The Beast had issued an update/clarification/correction, because I hadn’t seen one.

“No. We clearly state if an article has been updated on the piece,” Andrew wrote back.

The article has yet to be updated.

***

Lockhart, unfortunately, ignores the emotionally volatile reference to “food stamps.” This is important because later in appallingly inept writer Lloyd Grove’s account, government food stamps seem to be conflated with S&H Green Stamps, a well-known customer-loyalty reward program of a supermarket chain.

And the Linda McMahon propaganda machine has run fast and hard with that confusion. The “Mothers for Linda” section of her campaign website uses it. Today, in a New Haven Register story about the support for McMahon from Darnell Goldson, a Democrat, Goldson is quoted as citing “her past challenges, which include going through bankruptcy and being on food stamps, as part of her strengths.”

So, back to work, Connecticut reporters. What’s the deal with “food stamps” and “S&H Green Stamps”?

Full background on this and other fantastical dimensions of the Linda McMahon biography is in this blog’s archives.

Irv Muchnick

Rick Green (Hartford Courant) Has Best Takeout of Linda McMahon Minimum Wage Flap

“Linda McMahon Won’t Forget The Minimum Wage Again”

http://blogs.courant.com/rick_green/2010/10/whats-interesting-about-linda.html

Linda McMahon Bankruptcy Story Gets Full Treatment in Hearst Connecticut Newspapers

Brian Lockhart of Hearst is the first Connecticut journalist to investigate in depth Senate candidate Linda McMahon’s oddly touted tale of having gone bankrupt in 1976.

See “McMahons’ bankruptcy a murky chapter in her rags-to-riches tale,” http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/McMahons-bankruptcy-a-murky-chapter-in-her-682114.php.

As I suspected and have written, the bankruptcy seems to have stemmed, at least in part, from Linda’s husband Vince’s ill-fated investment in the closed-circuit telecast of the 1974 Evel Knievel Snake River Canyon Jump, and to a lesser extent the 1976 Muhammad Ali mixed boxing-wrestling fight with Antonio Inoki.

The Lockhart article leads to one minor correction of what I have been saying on this blog for some time. I had read that the McMahons lived in New Britain prior to moving to Greenwich. But it appears that their pre-Greenwich place of residence was actually West Hartford.

I can’t fault any of Lockhart’s enterprise or reporting here. But there’s one additional piece that he or other journalists need to pick up: Linda’s recent carny-like interview in The Daily Beast in which she left the impression that she went bankrupt not because she was the wife of a high-wire businessman who left a trail of huge debts, but because she was something of a welfare mom some years earlier in Maryland. The Daily Beast even reported that McMahon was on food stamps for a while — though the account is so contorted that government food stamps seem almost interchangeable with S&H Green Stamps, an unremarkable 1970s middle-class institution.

In the last 24 hours Linda McMahon has been caught musing out loud about “review” of the federal minimum wage, lying about World Wrestling Entertainment lobbying, and now fudging on disclosure of crucial details of a bankruptcy that she wears as a perverse badge of honor in her campaign biography.

Next, let’s hope, is a good thorough look by a Connecticut newspaper at WWE occupational health and safety standards, which are responsible for what The Nation and The Huffington Post — borrowing a phrase of your humble blogger’s — are calling “the body count.”

Irv Muchnick