The recent threads at DU about John Edwards raised a couple of new items to research. There are three points that appear to be true, their connections not noted previously, and which raise some interesting issues for all of us. Here is the link to what I posted about this in that thread, in case you later want to read it:


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...

Let me now connect a few dots.

1. Rielle/Lisa Hunter was married to Kip Hunter, son of Boulder DA Alex Hunter in the JonBenet Ramsey murder story.

2. After the Hunters divorced, Rielle is said to have rented a room in the house of investigative reporter Ann Louise Bardach and actor Larry Lesser.

3. Bardach reported extensively on the JonBenet story including a 1997 Vanity Fair story established the starting point, provided a version of the people and events that would define the story going forward, and defined what were legit things to investigate.

If this is true, then it raise a number of the usual questions about biases in the reporting. I am not familiar enough with the JonBenet case to notice anything myself, so I did a quick look to see if anyone else had and to see if she had done any articles about Edwards.

I had been vaguely aware of Bardach from Slate and from TV, but I was shocked when I looked at the CV on her site bardachreports.com -- she was everywhere, presented as an expert on Cuba, Castro, Posada, Elian, anything in Florida, and much more. If you do a search, you find her articles, books, letters, ... everywhere and almost every topic -- plus screenplays, conferences, TV interviews, high profile parties (e.g. with friend Ariana Huffington). When I looked at them, I found that I clearly remembered reading various of them, whether directly or as part of a blog or column online.

The volume of her writing staggering, particularly since so much of it is said to have involved extensive research. I assume she must have researchers and others assisting her, but did not see anything about that while doing a quick search. Given her visibility, I am surprised that there is no wiki or other site with basic bio info beyond degrees from Hunter College and NYU and where she worked as a reporter. Maybe I missed somewhere obvious.

Hope that some of you might be able to shed some light on this. After Walter Cronkite retire, I have become increasingly unsettled when I find too many things which I believe to be true and reliable are derived from a single source and not from independent reporting.

Finally, some mild WARNINGS. While I was researching these topics, I was distracted by several side topics. Some of these led to sites considered unreliable and I have treated them as such, but they sometimes have links to some ok sites that I would not have found otherwise.

Second, when I have been lazy and used Google to search on some of these terms, after an hour or two I start getting strange results back from Google that I know are the result of someone poisoning the Google cache, probably some kind of proxy attack that likely involves blogs and dns redirection. This could be caused by everyday criminal malware from Eastern Europe or China trying to get you to click-through to malware sites or to use google.com to automatically redirect to sites malware.

The strange Google results show just lots of unrelated keywords for the item and often a url to China, the Ukraine, or some strange proxy. If you try to save the page or print the page of Google results, the page usually changes by something first triggering a refresh. Screen capture will get an image.

If any of you encounter this, please post a simple confirmation in this thread and send me a private message to me with more details.


The poor stay poor, the righ get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

- Leonard Cohen