It’s Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com and ardent proponent of school vouchers, making a point about the career prospects of kids failed by the public school system. Spotting an easy opportunity to shut him up by demagoging the hell out of this, voucher opponents make their move. Pound for pound, one of the dumbest, phoniest gotchas I’ve ever seen, which, after a month of fake outrage over Rush’s “phony soldiers” comment and MM’s alleged “stalking” of the Frost family, is really saying something.
Update (Bryan): About three years or so ago, when Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11 was all the rage, a couple of producers put a counter documentary together called FahrenHYPE 9-11. It stars Ron Silver and Dick Morris and refutes Fahrenheit 9-11 line by line. Moore started encouraging people in the States to illegally download torrent files of his film, burn them onto CD or DVD and send them to the troops in Iraq. I worked with a few other bloggers to counter that, raise some money and send FahrenHYPE DVDs to the troops. We just didn’t want Moore’s film to be the only one that got over there. We called the effort Truth for Troops. Well, it turned out that Overstock.com had bought the rights to FahrenHYPE 9-11, and when they learned of our effort, they donated free shipping and, iirc, thousands of DVDs to it. I believe that they matched our effort disc for disc, doubling the amount that eventually got sent to Iraq. They never sought any publicity or credit for it, they just did it.
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