Earlier tonight, Phil of The Albany Project called, practically bursting at the seams.

"Dude, dude, the tattoo! Isn't it hilarious!"

Say what?

"The tattoo! Roger Stone's tattoo! Hahaha!"

Realizing something must be up, I clicked on over to TAP, and found this:  read more »

After Roger Stone's forced resignation, it seems that the last pieces of the republican dirty tricks campaign are being cleaned up. Here's another piece of the puzzle.

In Caputo and Stone are Liars, we asserted that the origin of Roger Stone's email list itself was a blast email by Ben Smith, which the latter had mistakenly sent in a way that let every recipient see every other recipient.

In short, [Ben] inadvertently produced a media contact list. That list seems to be the one that the Caputo/Stone emails are going to; it contains my non-Daily Gotham email, and features several people whom we know to be getting these messages - Matt Stoller, Phillip Anderson, Yoda of Room 8, myself, Azi Paybarah, and others. It notably does not contain the people who are not getting the emails, but logically should be. Such as, say, Liza [Sabater].

Ben just confirmed that we were right. Various members of his family are also getting the Stone NYFacts.net emails, for which there is no other realistic explanation. Ben previously confirmed that Roger Stone himself was copied on that email.  read more »

Soon after The Albany Project and Daily Gotham revealed that Michael Caputo's smear campaign against Eliot Spitzer came directly from Roger Stone in Joe Bruno's office, revealing that Caputo and Stone were liars when they claimed they weren't working together, Roger Stone allegedly took his anger out on Eliot Spitzer's elderly father.

The threatening call made to Bernard Spitzer, Eliot's 83-year-old father, undeniably came from Roger Stone's own apartment. But Roger Stone has sworn that he wasn't there, blaming a one-armed man...[Correction...he blames Dale Hemmerdinger explicitly]...for making the phone call using a tape of Roger Stone's voice spliced together to say all those horrible things to Spitzer, Sr. Stone's proof that it couldn't have been him was that on the night in question he was at the theater watching, appropriately enough, Frost/Nixon.  read more »

Roger Stone, Republican astroturfer and Joe Bruno surrogate, is a nasty piece of work:

Lawyers representing Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s father, Bernard Spitzer, say a prominent political consultant who has been working for State Senate Republicans threatened the elder Mr. Spitzer this month in an anonymous, invective-laced phone message.

The allegations against the consultant, Roger J. Stone Jr., were laid out in a letter sent Tuesday to Senator George H. Winner Jr., an upstate Republican who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Investigations and Government Operations. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

What kind of man is Stone? The kind who would say these things to an 83-year-old man:

In the message, the caller says, referring to a potential subpoena: “There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.”

What does he say in his defense? That, obviously, Spitzer's people infiltrated his apartment and simulated his voice to make the calls. Seriously, that's what he's claiming. I'm surprised he didn't try to pin the blame on the CIA, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Wildlife Fund.

A letter to the editor in the Albany Times-Union makes an astute observation widely applicable to coverage of the Bruno-inspired drama in Albany:

Most of the New York media has been self-indulgent and lazy, choosing to focus obsessively on the childish feud between Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

Indeed. The laziness extends to media coverage of Emailgate, in which New York Progressive blogs conclusively proved that the so-called grassroots campaign of NYFacts.net and SpitzerFile.com is an astroturf operation launched and maintained by Joe Bruno's consultant Roger Stone. The evidence is startlingly clear, so let's take another look at it.

(X-Posted @ TAP)  read more »