Gaylord. Heh. Sumptuous digs for a "populist" movement.

Saturday night was interesting. I needed to be in Nashvegas anyway, so I crashed the tea party at the Gaylord (heh!) Grand Ole Opry Hotel and Convention Center to catch as much video as possible. For those who don't know, Gaylord is among the most pernicious practitioners of gangster development around, demanding hundreds of millions in corporate welfare from communities on its path to profitability. Worse, they have willfully promoted the Grand Ole Opry as a cultural Mecca for people like Sarah Palin. So in the tradition of Sarahpalooza!, I stopped at the Opry.

As a citizen journalist with every intention of promoting my work via any number of sites where I have posting privileges, I went to make a You Tube video that will be available everywhere (including, and especially, my own website and Left In Alabama).

I introduced myself as Matt Osborne to everyone who asked. No one asked if I was with a media organization, including the woman who eventually "threw me out," until Sarah’s speech was over and I was literally leaving the way I’d come. I got silent video of convention participants and Judge Roy Moore of Ye Ten Commandments. I talked to "media colleagues" and got samples of the propaganda. Though I was refused entry to the ballroom to so much as take a photo of Sarah, I watched a little of her speech on somebody’s laptop.

After getting shots through the wide-open banquet hall doors, I proceeded to interview two participants off-camera for research purposes. I didn’t take quotes and continued introducing myself as Matt Osborne.

I say all of this as prologue to explain that I’m working on a video involving Andy Breitbart; I was hoping to run into him, but was more concerned with getting video to lay out the narrative of astroturfery and right-wing nontroversy. If you follow my posts at HP or my own blog, you know that these are very big areas of interest for me; they’re subjects on which Maddow has reported as well.

So just in case I ran into Breitbart, I had decided to adopt the O’Keefe method: I went under pretext. The best part is, I did not lie about these things, and still got plenty of video. As far as professional ethics go, I think I did pretty well. My girlfriend thought it would be fun to try and say she was a high school senior working on a report for her government class; she does in fact appear quite young, but she’s no professional. Nevertheless, it’s her camera.

I didn’t get to meet or see Breitbart. We were on my way out the same way I came in (the back door leads to the Opry Mills Mall parking lot; the facility has 24-7 public access) when I was stopped by a woman who claimed to be the event’s media liaison and a Gaylord employee, though I have reasons to doubt that.

She had the a sharp, angry tone of a harpy. Mind you, this woman had already caught sight of us and the camera shortly after we came in -- and did nothing! When I now held out my hand and introduced myself as Matt Osborne, she asked me who I was with and I suddenly grew devil’s horns. Remember, I had already done what I’d come to do; just to find out what would happen, I said two words that may get me in real trouble:

"Huffington Post."

Now, I might have said DailyKos; and indeed I do post here for one reason, and one reason only, which is all the awesome folks I met at NN. But Arianna's experiment in journalism has been in for especial disregard; it is not a "real media organization" (while Breitbart, who borrowed Arianna's business model to spread demonstrable lies and paranoid racist agit-prop, was a central figure at the convention). Of those media organizations with White house access, Huffington Post alone does not get invited to the tea party.

Apparently, Wing Nut Daily is more "respectable" -- the premier web organ of birther propagandists had enthusiastic support from convention staff.

She said I would have been treated like any other media organization if I had checked in with her, but I got VIDEO of their plan for me. No thanks — the media room was on the opposite end of the extremely large building, and reporters from other news agencies described an oppressive atmosphere. I don't need der kommissar watching me, either.

Remember, I used public access. I took video of people already appearing on video. I didn’t tape or record interviews. As far as ethics are concerned, I’ll gladly compare mine to James O’Keefe any bloody day. Which must be why I grinned when the harpy said she should have expected as much, that HP was "an unprofessional outfit" and we were the perfect example.

I tore a single page out of the Breitbart-O’Keefe playbook and she called me "unprofessional." Let that sink in.

Anyway: the harpy texted or tweeted someone. I did not have a press credential from HP (I don’t think they have any, actually) so I began to explain that I am an unpaid blogger at Huffington Post, as well as DK and LiA and and and...but she was already calling security as the words started coming out of my mouth.

The harpy said that I was to be detained and held for questioning, which was not about to happen for any number of reasons. It’s still the goddamn United States of America; I am not easily intimidated by civilians playing tinfoil god. I also found her highly offensive, so I just said "no" and turned to walk away.

Then the harpy followed me (she would follow me all the way to my car, she said). She attempted to taunt us (laughable) and hollered that we were in terrible trouble — which, in fact, we were; my girlfriend has breathing problems and was now having difficulty getting enough air.

When the harpy realized how I’d accessed the building, she took verbal offense that I had not paid $18 for self-parking. At that point I turned to her in an attempt at reconciliation; there were no grounds for arresting us, and my girlfriend was having a panic attack.

Which is the moment the harpy called the police. Irony: I was in a building full of people convinced the president was an illegitimate foreign agent bent on removing their constitutional rights.

We lost her and made a clean extraction, but there’s no video of all this — my girlfriend was so scared she thought she would drop the camera.

I will understand if Nico Pitney is forced to disavow me. That’s fine; I’ll take whatever bad-boy punishment Arianna determines — and make no whimper of complaint under the lash. (Though it would be great to get some consideration from George Soros, who has yet to send me that check we’re all supposedly earning in the liberal ’sphere.) The fact is, I haven’t made any money by being on HuffPo and that’s not what I blog there for.

Nor is that why I blog here, as I said. Which is the roundabout way of explaining that as of yesterday, the last all-liberal talk network in the world offered me a press credential. I'm showing up at NN this year as an official correspondent for the Head On Radio Network, and in the interest of journalistic ethics I just want to set some things in the permanent DailyKos record.

First: I barely knew Bob Kincaid when he invited me to come liveblog at NN '09. Second: doing that was the most awesome thing I had done since...well, in a very long time. Third: Bob and I only lately discovered that we can share skillz.

Long post, I know; sorry, but so much is happening all at once.