It appears the Playboy bloggers may have screwed up their investigation badly.
Whether or not their basic premise is correct, they clearly made some bad mistakes and implied things they shouldn’t have. Failure of journalism, especially fact checking.
Be My Blog 
in the end i don’t see what the enthusiasm is about anyway. tea party? tea bagger party!! how could derivative traders, who arguably greased the whole crisis, be the source of much wisdom? the policy of this populist would precipitate total banking collapse. indeed crisis breeds simple-minded non-solutions and armies to demand them.
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The whole “tea party” thing is a big fake “spontaneous” career builder for Santelli. It’s just the latest talk radio demagogue bullshit.
They overshot by declaring a vast AstroTurf conspiracy. Looks like the usual empire building with damaging sound bites, instead.
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If they overshot, it wasn’t by declaring a vast astroturf conspiracy.
Rather, they overshot by declaring a connection between Santelli’s rant and the vast astroturf conspiracy that no one is denying A) exists and B) routinely does this stuff. That left them open potentially to a libel case (though, not a very good one, I think), and Playboy editors reacted [overreacted] by pulling the page. Dumbasses.
Sure makes you want to work for a crack outfit like Playboy.Com, doesn’t it?
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I should have said “declaring it to be a vast astroturf conspiracy.” my error.
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I don’t think they overshot by much. The McArgleBargle pushback is pretty weak. She points out that the smoking gun is the chicagoteaparty.com domain registration, and says basically, “Hey, this is just naked opportunism. That’s just how we roll.”
Except. There are a whole bunch of domains of the form ${city}teaparty.com in registration now, but most of them were registered within a few hours and days after Santelli did his dance on the floor of the Chicago merc. (I’ve watched a lot of CNBC, and there’s no doubt he’s a moderately voluble on-air personality, but he really went into a space I’ve never seen him go when he invited all the other traders on the floor to cheer him on. That was highly unusual. Most of the time, they’re screaming at each other so loudly that he’d have to set off a flash-bang to get their attention.)
What’s the other ${city}teaparty.com name I found registered before Santelli’s rant? Doop-de-doop… why, it’s newyorkteaparty.com. I’m seeing a pattern.
McArgleBargle also says, “No one in August knew that there were going to be massive bailouts and stimulus packages against which they could protest. On the other hand, if you think that taxes are going to go up, it’s not crazy for founding-fathers-obsessed conservatives to start registering any domain that involves tea parties.” To which I call bullshit. They registered for Chicago and New York, but they left Atlanta and Houston alone until after Santelli’s rant? Amusingly, there are a bunch of ${city}teaparty.com domains that got registered a few days before Santelli’s rant.
So yeah. Count me in the group who thinks CNBC threatened a suit and Playboy.Com crapped in their pants. That’s a failure in journalism, right there.
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Meanwhile, do I have to point out how utterly ludicrous it is to use the Boston Tea Party as a theme for a protest against a tax increase?
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As you can see I do find the whole thing both ridiculous and sinister.
From my own point of view it’s not necessary to assume anything other than Santelli’s ambition and CNBC’s collusion in setting this thing up. That’s bad enough.
And the Koch/Scaife Axis of Money has paid for enough lies and destructive demagoguery in the last 20 years that they’re anathema, anyway.
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