If you want to play the “Roy Blunt was having an affair with his now wife while still married to his former wife”, keep in mind that two sides can play at that game.  No evidence of Blunt’s “affair”.  Robin Carnahan’s relationship with her now husband, however, seems to have been admited to by Carnahan and her staff (her now husband was still married to his ex wife at the time.  Catherine Favazza has all the details. [An Affair to Remember in the Missouri Senate Race?]

SEIU thug Elston McCowan just can’t seem to keep his story straight.

As 24thstate.com’s Jim Durbin points out, Reverend Elston McCowan is having some consistency issues with his version of the events on the night of Congressman Carnahan’s health care town hall.  His original story of that night’s events come from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article published on August 8th.

But Elston McCowan, an SEIU staffer, said Gladney was actually an instigator. McCowan accused Gladney of attacking him as he walked to his car. McCowan said he suffered a dislocated shoulder.

“Out of nowhere, the guy just assaults me,” said McCowan, 47, of St. Louis.

McCowan’s quote makes it clear that he was jumped by Kenneth Gladney.  This wording makes it clear that there was absolutely no interaction between the two before the altercation.  If only McCowan would have stuck to this story.

After much backlash (and probably a lot of coaching from the SEIU), McCowan is changing his story.  His new version of events appears in, wait for it, Links: The International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Walking outside, McCowan saw Gladney selling buttons of Obama in blackface and Obama smoking weed. Feeling insulted, McCowan asked why a black man would be hawking material denigrating the first black president as he pointed to one of the buttons.

“When I pointed at the button, Gladney slapped my hand. So I told him not to hit me and pointed at it again and repeated my question. He smacked my hand even harder, hit me several times and pushed me down. As I went down, I grabbed him by reflex to break my fall. I hit my shoulder and something popped. I lost consciousness for a moment but soon realised that Gladney continued to hit me.

“Another SEIU guy, Perry Molens, came over and told Gladney, ‘He’s a minister and won’t fight back. He can’t see out of one eye. Stop hitting him!’. When Gladney kept on, Perry tried to get him off of me and threw a punch in the process.

“I don’t know why Gladney had an attorney on hand, but his attorney came over yelling ‘You two attacked him!’. Gladney went off to find cops and told them to arrest us. The cops wouldn’t listen to us and did what the Tea Party people told them to do. They arrested me, Perry, a newspaper reporter and three supporters of healthcare reform.”

This is a decidedly different story.  No longer is McCowan claiming that Gladney attacked him out of nowhere.  He now says that the dispute was over buttons of Obama in blackface and smoking pot.  It is a seemingly small change in the story, but if McCowan is willing to lie about how this we know he is certainly willing to lie about who the instigator was.

Here’s the other problem: No one can prove that these buttons exist.  Here are the six buttons that Gladney attorney David Brown says Gladney was selling (via same 24thstate.com posting)

Not one of those even has Obama pictured in it.

Jim put out a challenge: Find a picture of the buttons that McCowan was supposedly questioning.  A blogger by the name of Adam at St. Louis Activist Blog claimed to find the conclusive evidence.  He’s got a screen cap of a button with Obama in it that was on the board of another one of the button sellers (apparently another black conservative who was selling buttons for Gladney attorney David Brown The owner of this board is David Brown himself.  He runs a business on the side selling merchandise at political events.  He sold some of his buttons to Gladney.).

This is Adam’s conclusive evidence that a button of Obama smoking weed existed.  The problem is that the picture shows nothing of the sort.  In fact, I’m betting that most people here on RedState have probably seen the source image for this button several times.

Now, I will grant that I am one of the biggest squares around.  Even I can tell that this is not a picture of Barack Obama smoking pot.  It’s just your average, every day cancer stick (AKA tobacco cigarette).  I guess I could give a certain amount of leeway given the replacing of the word HOPE with DOPE why one would make this mistake considering that you really can’t see the difference on a low-resolution image taken from a YouTube video.  You would think that someone would make sure their evidence was air tight before going to print with it. {Oh, and Andy.  I’ve got a screen cap of your post.  Don’t try to send it down the memory hole.}

While it is true that Andy has shown that more than six buttons were for sale, there is still no evidence to support McCowan’s assertion.  He has already told two different versions of what happened that night.  How many more does he have to tell before he finally admits the truth?

Then again, McCowan isn’t the only one lying from that night.

Note: Corrected information comes from a follow-up post by Jim on 24thstate.com.

Instapundit:

Of course, Obama’s plan — and Big Government in general — is all about ensuring that we don’t have the right to decide how to spend our dollars but should instead let somebody else take them at gunpoint and decide how they’re spent. If the health care “reform” passes, you won’t have the option of directing your dollars where you think they should go. And to the pro-Obamcare folks, that’s not a bug, it’s the whole point.

54% Say Passing No Healthcare Reform Better Than Passing Congressional Plan

It’s not quite victory as we don’t actually control Congress, but damn, it’s good to see that we are winning the people over.

Make sure to take an extra person or two to your next townhall.  It seems to me that the tactic is working.

Keith Hennessey does a remarkable job taking apart the President’s arguments from his town hall in Portsmouth the other day.  Warning:  It is quite long, so be prepared to dig in.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote a very dishonest op-ed ["Defending the Indefensible"] attacking what they call “opponents of health reform”.  Here is my response that I left for them on their web site:

This is Elston McCowan.

Elston K. McCowan is a former organizer – now the Public Service Director of SEIU Local 2000 – and board member of the Walbridge Community Education Center, and is a Baptist minister, has been a community organizer for more than 23 years, and now, he is running for Mayor of the City of St. Louis under the banner of the Green Party of St. Louis.

[ed: This was from before the election.  McCowan is now a former nominee of the Green Party.]

All of that sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?  Well, except for the position with the SEIU and the whole Green Party thing (think Cynthia McKinney).

The problem with McCowan is that he is something more.  McCowan is a thug.

You’ve actually seen McCowan before.  He was in a video that has been played on just about every blog on the right, mentioned on countless radio programs and has even seen play on cable news.  The video sparked the protest that I attended on Saturday outside of the SEIU office here in St. Louis.  See if you recognize him now.

(Click image to view original YouTube video of the aftermath)

This is one of the men (along with another upstanding citizen in a SEIU shirt) who did this to Kenneth Gladney:

Kenneth, like many other protesters, went to the townhall on Thursday seeking to voice their opinion.  He had hoped to spread the message of liberty by passing out the Gadsden flag.  McCowan beat Kenneth over a flag*.  He found the message of liberty to be too much so he tried to stop Kenneth’s freedom of speech with his fists**.

And just think that these fine, upstanding individuals now claim that Kenneth attacked McCowan.

Don’t let them get away with this.  Stand with Kenneth.  Attend your local town hall, tea party or any event where you can speak your mind.  I suggest you organize something yourself if you can’t find an event near you***.  Heck, even if you are the only one that shows up, don’t let your voice be silenced.  Send the message loud and clear:

h/t to Bill Hennessy for the news.

*Don’t tell me there isn’t a certain sense of irony involved in beating a man passing out the Gadsden flag emblazoned with the words “Don’t Tread On Me”.

**How very becoming of a minister.  Remember that from his profile?

***Here in the St. Louis area there is a program called 99 Corners.  Individuals have pledged to organize protests on major street corners.  This could be a great way to get involved in your neighborhood.

Just click here to schedule a meeting with your Congresscritter to share your thoughts about healthcare reform.

Awful nice of the Obama Campaign, or Administration…or whatever, to help us out with this.