The LGBT Weekly followed up on the Rachel Maddow report involving me and Romney finance co-chair Frank VanderSloot. (VanderSloot once outed me as gay in a newspaper attack ad. He bought the ad because he disapproved of my investigative series about child molesters in the Boy Scouts.)
Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal rose to VanderSloot's defense, saying "private citizens" shouldn't be scrutinized for donating to politicians or political causes.
But Media Matters examined the stories on Fox and in the Wall Street Journal. The stories were misleading because they omitted or downplayed a crucial fact. VanderSloot is not a "private citizen"; he is the national finance co-chair of the Romney campaign, one of the largest and most visible donors and fundraisers for Romney. As someone who apparently has significant influence over Romney, VanderSloot should be scrutinized, Maddow and others have argued.
I've received a flurry of phone calls but only commented once, to independent journalist Jody May-Chang, who was the first person to contact me.
The tour for my book, Buried in the Sky, is coming together. It now has about 20 stops, starting in Kathmandu, Nepal. For more details about it, the latest is at my book website.
Buried in the Sky has also been getting some good reviews and has been selected by a few book clubs.
Meanwhile, I am hunting around for topics for my next book, so if you have any ideas, let me know.
"As long as Westerners have been scaling the Himalayas, Sherpas—inhabitants of Nepal’s most mountainous regions—have climbed with them, not merely as porters but as expert mountaineers. Yet they have never been given their due. Here is the story of Chhiring Dorje Sherpa and Pasang Lama, who participated in the 2008 assault on K2 that left 11 climbers dead, though they themselves survived. The book takes pains to explore their culture and the burden felt by such impoverished young men who take on dangerous work that pays well yet remains an offense to the mountains they revere. Sobering."
A clandestine meeting at midnight starts a rookie reporter on an investigation that led him to expose the extraordinary story about "missing" court cases and a pedophile. Watch it here
