After experiencing the reflective retrospectives of Civil Rights, The Youth Movement, and Vietnam in the '60's, America stepped off the bus in Hollywood from Hayseed KS in 1970 and immediately walked off into the darkness with Mr. Sugar Daddy Pimp.
I have known a lot of flaky people throughout my life, but the so-called left-wing progressives of modern America have taken the pie crust to an all-new level! Just a few short years ago, I continually felt that this preconception must have just been the result of my misguided imagination, but early last year I learned that the pie in the sky was most definitely real. The Babygate phenomenon had taught me this cruel lesson. The right wing press didn't teach me this lesson; the flakes, con artists, and marks populating my own side of the political spectrum did.
Recent events made me laugh so hard that I nearly fell out of my chair! First Shailey Tripp says she is going to answer questions on her blog for the last time. Then she proceeds to not answer any questions of any significance. Then she removes all the comments from the post. Then she reinstates them. Her particular blogger pals claim to still vigorously support Shailey because only they are fully aware that she is doing the right thing by removing her blog. A few questions arise, but for the most part, only the crickets are chirping. Then the editor of Shailey's book posts in extravagant detail how she had personally given a copy of Boys Will Be Boys to a well-known, award-winning journalist with The New York Times. This blog post was celebrated with great delight by both the blogger and her readers. (Oh, Todd Palin will get his comeuppance now! Break out the orange jumpsuit in his size because this story is about to go viral!) The celebration lasted about three hours, until the word got out from Kathleen Baker precisely why Shailey Tripp had closed her blog. For the ridiculously low, low price of $14 a minute ($30 minimum per call) you, too, can converse directly with the ex-prostitute/masseuse who self-published two small books and now works for an ex-porn star! (Good job, Kathleen. The truth needed to be reported.) The celebratory blog post and its comments mysteriously disappeared! Within an hour, a short post was put in its place. Of course Kathleen's report, and the obvious truth of the whole mess, was not mentioned.
Let's review, shall we? According to the text of Boys Will Be Boys, Shailey Tripp was offered at least $100,000 for her story by The National Enquirer. The editors of the paper later rescinded this lucrative offer and reduced their proposition to an undisclosed amount, most likely a few thousand dollars. Months later Shailey Tripp attempted to auction off her e-mail collection one at a time in what turned out to be an uproarious late-night extravaganza of bidding that shocked even me! I cannot recall exactly what the final high bids were, but they were in the thousands for single messages of very short duration. The portions of the messages publicized for the bidders were of laughable insignificance. One can only hope that the actual full messages offered for sale in this overnight fiasco offered genuine material of value, but who knows at this point? The particularly flaky part is that not only did the bidding go into the stratosphere, but none of the bidders produced the cash after the auction was completed. Maybe one or more of the bidders made an after-hours deal on the side, but if so, I am not aware of it. So ends another flaky fiasco spawned by Babygate.
The next big money-making scheme hatched by Shailey Tripp was to self-publish her material. There is nothing at all wrong with that idea. She should have done that in the first place instead of slapping her credibility upside the head by initially involving herself with The Enquirer. Did her lawyer give her bad advice? I definitely think so. I personally provided Ms. Tripp with extensive advice about self-publishing. Did she heed this advice? Yes, except in issues in which my advice conflicted with Ms. Tripp's inflated view of herself and her desire to make as much money as easily as possible. She priced her CreateSpace book at the absolute maximum she thought she could get away with. $21.50 for 280 spacious pages of a self-published book on any subject except how to pick up girls (for boys) or how to have sex with vampires (for girls) is ludicrous. Anyone who has been around the block a few times in the current publishing climate knows this. It is also quite obvious that any book by an unknown author needs a Kindle version priced very low for that special Amazon market that absolutely dominates the sales of most any self-published book of recent years. Selling your Kindle, and other e-book formats for $18.95 only from the author's website utilizing PayPal is a patently absurd marketing strategy. Any book can be priced at $3-10 in the Kindle format and Amazon pays the author a 70% royalty, which is more than fair. Can you spell g-r-i-f-t-e-r?
Not only has Shailey Tripp obviously chosen a path not designed to bring the most readers to her book, therefore expanding the knowledge of her subject matter to large numbers of American voters, she has shut off the most cost-effective marketing tool available to any self-published author, a blog. Does anyone remember the temper tantrum she threw when she absurdly surmised that the Lifetime network had stolen her story when it produced a movie about a prostitute masseuse on the loose in Odessa TX in 2004? That was almost as absurd a rant as Dr. Brad Scharlott claiming that Trig Palin must be related to Trooper Wooten because a detailed photo analysis of their ears looked alike! Shailey Tripp is far from the only flake on this pie. She is just the most recent to expose her flaky crust in such sordid detail.
NIAFS is an equal-opportunity public service site. No punches are pulled and no one is immune to investigation just because he or she is apparently speaking from the left side of the political spectrum. Nothing has changed concerning my opinion of Shailey Tripp or her book, Boys Will Be Boys. I still think she is basically telling the truth about the most significant parts of her story. However, I have viewed her as one of the flakiest people I have ever encountered since I first learned of her story. What is shocking to me is not that she is a flake, but that she is far from alone among the Babygate bloggers in this respect. What is even more shocking is the degree to which most of the blog cult members continue to put up with this level of extreme flakiness.
Let me reiterate. There will be no Wild Ride published by Fred, at least not as a book successfully marketed nationally the way most of us would so desperately like to see. One of the following issues would promptly halt its commercial success dead in its tracks. First of all, Fred does not own the photos and e-mails you want to see published. Secondly, no one is going to believe that the real Fred is a person who has been consumed by the subject matter of Babygate or is qualified to discuss the topic. The third reason is that real authors do not publish ghostwritten books, and that is precisely the scam certain individuals are trying to pull. Lastly, even if the scam could be successfully launched, the media would uncover the obvious weaknesses in Fred's past in about five minutes with Google. Sean Hannity would personally go apeshit on the air as soon as he learned the identity of Fred's ghostwriter! If you think the right wing media trashed Joe McGinniss in a hurry, wait until they get a whiff of Fred and his pals!
Why is Paradigm Shift the only book that discusses Babygate in detail? I truly do not know. All I do know is that there are no flakes on Floyd. I arrived in California the first time crossing the border into Lake Tahoe on a motorcycle in 1971, and my progressive thought processes were in place long before that. America will never turn itself around in any significant, lasting manner until the left wing stops following flaky leaders. Until that point, we are all trapped being just Bozos on This Bus.
27 comments:
Floyd -- This is IMHO your most interesting post since I can remember. An excellent summary that contains details I did not know. And sorry to be so dense,
Floyd, I have tried to disagree with you (does that even make sense? LOL) for a looooong time. I thought you were too jaded, you had something up your behind, you had too many bones to pick with other bloggers - and it scared me away from you (I am so sorry, I am another one who flaked out on you with the interview thing we were to do...huge regrets) BUT....in the last few months, I find that you make SO much sense. I still don't understand some of your inuendo and wish you would stop speaking in riddles, LOL...but - I do agree with you. WTF is going on here with the other bloggers? Everyone knows and won't tell. (OK that goes for you, too! In plain English!) Your book is amazing btw. It took me forever to get to it but I am so glad I did!
Welcome to my world, Jill. I am so glad to have you back! Now if I could just get the rest of 'em to wake up, maybe we could all get somewhere in exposing Sarah Palin and Babygate once and for all. Yes, you did miss your chance to have an interview in the book alongside the one with Bree, and I was disappointed when that happened. As far as your questions go, the story is not mine to tell, so I have had to obtusely hope that readers would take my hints and discover the truth for themselves. If you will contact me directly at ice9, I shall be glad to give you more details.
As far something up my behind, yes there is something: Babygate and the fact that SP and the CNP have gotten away with the political crime of the century. Yes, I am very jaded, and I do have bones to pick. None of this changes the fact that I am on your side, as well as that of independent thinkers, liberals, Democrats, and progressives. However, I refuse to look away from the many issues that have slapped me in the face over the past four years and clearly indicate that something is just not right about some of the bloggers and authors who are supposedly leading the Babygate movement.
Here is Mara's comment. There was a technical problem.
"Floyd -- This is IMHO your most interesting post since I can remember.
An excellent summary that contains details I did not know. And sorry to
be so dense."
I could be wrong, but I don't think Allison removed that post because of Shays new "venture". Being editor of her book I would assume she knew what was going down, I feel it was another reason. I am however disappointed in Shailey.
Allison is a smart person. My guess is that when she discovered exactly what Shailey was up to, she had a sudden attack of disappointment in Shailey, too.
Surely someday the entire tale will be told. But it requires that all of the anonymities be dropped and all involved go on the record. You've done that from the beginning Floyd, and for that I salute you. I lost heart when the publication of Joe McGinniss's book didn't bring her show to an abrupt halt. Truthout, which I will no longer read, was more interested at the time in an internal publishing spat than the issue at hand. NYT dredged up Janet Malcolm's questionable old history re McGinniss. Something stunk.
My opinion is that at this point it's going to take a highly-regarded historian, willing to put the Palins into a larger context and in book form, to write the record. And how many historians would want to go slumming with the Palins? I guess we'll see.
You are absolutely right, Nancy Drewed. The anonymity is at the heart of the problem, and I have been saying that for four years now. The leading bloggers are nothing more than the Tabloids of the Internet. Publish a big teaser title, add the word UPDATE a time or two, post the same photos over and over, write thousands of words that amount to much ado about nothing. Hide behind it all with more teases and endless anonymous blogging and relentless rants of anonymous commenters. As Jon Lovits would say, "Yeah, that's the ticket!"
I now take issue with Shailey because she literally straight up lies. She emailed me with a statement of what I assumed to be truth (despite it being, once again, vague as hell). THEN, on her facebook page, she literally contradicts exactly what she told me in a bad way. This is a woman who uses whatever people are talking about to her advantage, even when she knows nothing about it or it has nothing to do with her. That's dangerous in many ways. I wish her well but want nothing to do with her ever again. I hate unnecessarily defensive people more than anything, and she was just rude at times when people presented anything that was a sane, balanced argument to the contrary. Other commenters who do the same thing, take note. You are not making your argument or team look good by acting rudely defensive.
I will say that Trig does look like Wooten in a number of pictures. Though he will look like anyone if you think about it hard enough. Looks don't determine parentage with Children who have special needs. People need to get over thinking Trig is a biological relation. Face it.
I hate the bloggers you mention in general because they have no sense of ethics or decency. I can accept Grpyhen because he admits he's an ass. I barely accept politicalgates because most of their posts in general come from balanced though, though there are several posts with no veracity to them, namely Paternitygates and other scandals that don't matter to politics and are merely based on town gossip and people not directly connected to anything.
to FLoyd, dont you find it odd that these bloggers swear they know all that Sarah Palin is and her closest buddies (Barb swears she or he knows every single person who interacts with them) yet no one knows the name of the woman who sometimes watches Trig when Sarah's on business. Isn't that suspicious to you? These bloggers are deluded. Kathleen holds Dunn's book up to God as being the quintessential book on Palin yet she still believes the Curtis/Track lie, despite Dunn helping to prove it is a lie. go back and read. It is Dunn who specifically calls absurdity to the shotgun wedding scenario and Sarah's claim that they get married because they didn't want to spend anymore time apart. He goes on to write that she and Todd just spent the summer in Dillingham together right before they wed. crickets?
Allison has a good mind yes, but she goes out on a limp a time or two as well. Bloggers won't be respected unless they're fair and just. Allison lost then for me and entered in IM land towards the end. Like Gryphen, she ignores truth to write hate. I have proven to Gryphen many things that he refuses to believe are true. Allison is no different.
Well, most politicalgaters have always been skeptical of both Fred and Shay. When Shailey began blogging, she lost many regular pogates readers who live in Alaska because he descriptions of Alaska were written with a fictional way of writing. Akpetmom comes to mind. I would never wish anyone harm and hope all, especially Sarah, are doing well. I know the Palin kids are living contently. That is clear by word of mouth and their current paths. I pray bloggers aren't losing sanity over any of their internet work. It's not worth it. Sarah's too inconsequential and there are far too many other bigger things to be concerned with than obsessing over a Downs child's parentage.My thoughts on Trig: until his mother somehow discovers that is her child, is this all not hopeless?
Floyd, can you provide a link to the item Kathleen Baker wrote? I missed it and would like to read it.
What Kathleen wrote were two short comments within the post linked here, so it is not easy to find. Allison made her long post and Kathleen's comment both occurred on 4/27/12, the date of this post. Go to the first comment and scroll down about 100 comments. (That number is just an off the cuff guess; I didn't count them.) The first comment is just a few below a long one by ProChoiceGrandma, and there are follow-up comments.
http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2012/04/31-gop-men-vote-against-violence.html#disqus_thread
Here is a direct copy and paste of both comments by Kathleen:
You can now speak to Shailey Tripp directly. Shailey Tripp I am now on Dial A Star 888-695-4543 Ext. 109087 www.DialAStar.com. Caller must spend a minimum of $30 on each call. The rate is $14.00 per minute. Dial A Star. dial-a-star.com/ - Diese Seite übersetzen . Daisy
De La Hoya; Rate : $10.00 / min; 1 (888) 695-4543. Shailey Tripp; Rate :
$14.00 / min; 1 (888) 695-4543. Amber Buhl; Rate : $6.00 / min; 1 (888)
695-4543 ... Caller must spend a minimum of $30 on each call.
Floyd, I read your book. Not to be picky but I was taken aback that your insistence that certain things are true that hold no water, but mostly I was taken aback at your defense of Larry King as a good person working in network television. Have you met him? Worked with him. I have. The man literally does no work on his own, writes nothing of his own, has no awareness of anything around him. He says nothing that isn't on his cards. When he met Chris Reeve post-accident, he extended his hand to greet him. There are certainly people I respect, even people who have reputations for professionally destroying those who cross them, BarbaraWalters-style.
For the most part, your book is old and presumptive. The history aspect is decent, though one-sided. You defend leaders with grave moral problems yet condemn Palin for the same or lesser problems. You call people whitetrash for no reason and hardly any proof if any proof at all. These are all people. You may not agree with them politically but they are people who don't deserve to be labeled by the likes of you. You basically indirectly claim you and your kind are perfect and are exempt from any judging because you're "progressives."
Hypocritical in the worst way.
"Willow's college classmates don't judge her "
High School dropout Willow is not now, and never will be in college
"Bristol coworkers don't judge her"
Bristol doesn't have a job, thus she HAS no co-workers to judge her
"Track army buddies don't judge him"
They don't want to have anything to do with him, which is why he never travels with his unit or attends their functions. All REMF's are judged by their buddies hence the term "Rear Echelon Mother F@#$%!" and they are definitely not looked upon fondly by real soldiers who put their lives on the line everyday
Shailey, Allison, Malia Litman and BladeKatz of Sarah's Scandals have each been claiming that Shailey's representation by DD Entertainment and her work at Dial a Star are supposedly not the big opportunity/"feels like Christmas" situation Shailey was referring to. And Shailey said that if this other opportunity did come true then she wouldn't be working at Dial a Star anymore -- she posted this at her Facebook page recently.
But none of that matters. I'm Media Insider, and when I commented at Shailey's blog that her shutting down her blog was a huge blow to her credibility (little did I know she was also about to hook up with DD Entertainment and world of porn stars) she went absolutely, fucking batshit. I told her about the two powerful editors in the traditional newspaper world I had been slowly, painstakingly "working" to hopefully gain some interest and traction around researching Shailey's story, and the former Watergate scandal reporter who was one of these editors. And instead of paying attention to what I was trying to tell her she went into one of her usual bipolar episodes or whatever. Very strange. She also did not openly say that she was simply deleting her BLOG and not her entire WEBSITE. It took her a long time before she finally clarified that, which would have helped matters greatly. She was initially acting like her entire exercise of posting material online had been an "expressing myself/venting my spleen" project and that she was going to remove her presence from the Net; she never clarified that she was simply deleting the blog portion of her site, not the entire site until well after the kerfluffle in the comments had happened.
Even so, I'm SO fucking glad I didn't get my friends further involved with her extremely labyrinthine, snakelike, convoluted, and inconsistency-riddled story. Her flakiness and mental problems combined with a massively oversized ego do not help her any.
Personally, at this point I am more interested in Keshawn Thomas' story. Shailey has never fully owned up to ruining another woman's life like she did with Keshawn; instead, Shailey just becomes very evasive and says she is under court order not to have contact with Keshawn for a year. If Shailey ever did want to expose "sex trafficking" then her participating in hiring other women to work as prostitutes for her is a big part of the story. However, since Shailey's charges for operating a house of prostitution were dismissed, legally it probably wouldn't make sense for her to suddenly ADMIT all that she did and provide detailed INFO about hiring other women out in her business.
How many other women did she hire, for example?
Media Insider
PS: I also secretly hoped Shailey would be more forthcoming about Todd's fondness for sex with men, well documented in the gay community in Alaska. But since she has often publicized her own involvement with Todd as an "affair" (this is how the promotional text on Dial a Star describes their relationship) she probably doesn't want to admit that there were many, many other ways that Todd was getting his sexual kinks satisfied. Too much of a blow to the ego! :)
Hi MI. Just to let you know, I really, really miss your blog. I hope someday you start it up again.
That being said, I also hoped you would be the one to expose Alaska's Power Bottom Boy to the world since you have many contacts there. An ebook on Amazon would do the trick, I think. Shailey's creds are all shot to hell now.
It all makes me wonder how the Palin's got such a stranglehold on people given their own personal secrets they really would prefer the world not know about. Having power is one thing, but having power at the risk of such an expose and managing to keep that power is quite another. I just don't know how they do it.
It's never too late, you know. Keep up the good work!
Hi Balzafiar,
I just happened to see your comment --- thanks very much! :)
I wanted to publish a book but the legal issues of pretty much EVERYTHING I wanted to share were going to get me in SO MUCH TROUBLE -- I'd have to be as rich as the Palins to even begin to be able to publish it, unfortunately. Anonymity doesn't protect you from lawsuits. Pen names can be exposed when you work with a third party publishing platform like Amazon''s Createspace and their Kindle department, too -- if they get complaints they can and will turn your information over to the authorities. Whistleblowers are not safe with them.
I don't have a LOT of contacts in Alaska at this point, unfortunately. Just some in the gay community and also a few who left Alaska and aren't there now. I don't think I could really frame a book around their information because I've already pretty much published their gossip and I'm not really in a position to take things any further based on their info.
Probably my firmest, juiciest contact was my DWTS production person/costume person; THAT person has a world of stuff to share with the world about the faux "famblee valooos" Palins.
Gryphen deleted a comment I made recently in which I talked about how Bristol binged and purged towards the end of her DWTS run and that's why in that one pic of her with the flowing black tarantula/Stevie Nicks-inspired outfit she didnt' have quite as much pudge going on. Mama Palin gave her some pharmaceutical help to help her lose weight, too. Which is unbelievable since Sarah Palin would have known that taking such drugs endangered both Bristol's health and the health of that baby she was carrying at the time.
Not sure why Gryphen chose not to publish this. If anything, it paints Bristol in a more positive and sympathetic light. The "reasoning" of this horrific stage mom pressuring Bristol to redeem the family name before millions was pretty much "Who cares if my daughter gets sick or miscarries her child?" Truly awful pathology.
Bristol did have one health scare with a racing heart once during rehearsals. (Which in some ways was kind of funny because she hardly MOVED at rehearsals and didn't go for more than a few hours per week. So the racing heart wasn't from exercising, that's for sure.) The Palins LOVE their drugs and I think we will be hearing more about mysterious health scares from some of them in the future which will be drug-related.
Hint -- if you want to anchor on to a specific comment click on the time date and it will take you directly to a link for the comment which you can copy/paste.
By the way I did not make a specific claim that Shay's new dial a star venture was the reason for her closing her blog. Another reader suggested that possibility.
I realize that you did not make that specific claim, Kathleen, but surely most of us can at least begin to see that Shailey's greed has been blinding her perspective from the beginning. The simple fact that it was you who posted this information gives it credibility. Thank you for your helpful comment, and thank you to Patrick for his thoughtful response to my link at PoliticalGates last night.
You could always contatc her lawyer for free or just email her for free. You are trying to conect things to make someone look flaky but there is nothing about this that is flaky. None of the people on Dial A Star are porn stars, mostly just on reality tv. Shailey is not represented by D& D Entertainment, she is represented by her lawyer. I work for a small paper in her community and her lawyer sent me a media package. However my editor will not let me print anything about Shailey Tripp. I work for the Times Picayune. Our editors feel that if all the blogs collectively wrote about Shailey and Todd's connection then maybe a story could get going, but since everyone is in disagreement noone feels there is a strong interest in this story. It is more about the making money issues than quality or truth of the story. For the record the proof Ms. tripp has is pretty convincing. Have any of you interviewed Shailey? Contacted her lawyers? Or just asked her to clarify things that seem "off"? Or have you just made assumptions and put pieces together that you think make sense?
I asked Shailey how much money she had made off Dial A Star, she said zero. She also does not know about any porn chat that has to do with Dial A Star. I believe her. I do not get the impression she is greedy, just a struggling mother of two. And to the person who claims to have the ability to get Shailey's story into the press, did you ever contact her lawyers for mor einformation or ask them to clarify some facts for you?
I have seen the areas of Wasilla Shailey described in the early days of her blog. Many sled dog owners used to live off that road directly and they used to run their dogs on four wheelers on trails that are not sidewalks. I have interviewed people in that community and they have verified that the way Shailey described that part of Alaska was how the area was before 2004.
I personally think Shailey has actual mental problems. Either she's an excellent actress at acting happy and giddy, she's delusional, or she's nuts. There were points, when she had a chatroom on her blog, that she almost positively described her sex with the first dude. Now, I am a victim of childhood sexual abuse and it's taken me 25 years to not freak the hell out when people, out of the blue, even lightly touch my shoulder. She cannot claim she was led into some organized crime web and "abused" and talk the way she did.
I understand her children come first. But she was incredibly unstable in general.
I recently came across her ex mother in law, Jason's mother. Not only is this woman desperate to see her grandbabies but a facebook status update from earlier this year read, "TEAM PALIN" under a picture of Couric and Palin in the Today versus GMA contest.
Interesting no?
No, it is not interesting, it's actually pathetic. But I don't expect you to understand, you were the victim of childhood sexual abuse 25 years ago and you obviously need to find professional help immediately. You're the one who has mental issues. You have never met Shailey Tripp in your life but you comments imply a personal relationship. That's a sign of mental illness. Although I don't work in the field I did graduate from college and I have a B. A. in Psychology. You should be in therapy, not trolling the internet!
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