Marion G."Pat" Robertson / AP

As promised, here is part 3 of my little serial about Pat Robertson, his great big house up on Warm Springs Mountain, and the day his bodyguard pulled a gun on me.

If you haven't read them yet, please read Part 1 and Part 2 first. This will make a lot more sense with those under your belt.

Below is the actual story that ran in The Roanoke Times & World News on Sunday, Jan. 8, 1995 -- without the million-dollar photo that Stephanie Klein Davis shot of that house.

As I've mentioned before, I can't find that picture of the house in The Roanoke Times files. But you can find it yourself with Google Earth. Here are the coordinates: Latitude 37°54'48.95"N; longitude  79°51'46.36"W.

Pat named this place Higher Ground.

And by the way folks, I learned some years ago that Pat had this place on the market. It's entirely possible that he sold it, and that I'm unaware of that transaction. So he may not be the owner anymore.

Pat Robertson's hideaway

Summary: A PRIVATE RETREAT is how TV evangelist Pat Robertson describes the house. With 11,000 square feet, it has given Bath County folks a lot to talk about.

They say faith can move mountains. If the Rev. Pat Robertson is any example, perhaps it also can build mansions on top of them.

When he grows weary from feeding the hungry, saving souls, collecting millions for his Christian ministry and charting a conservative political course for the future, the nation's leading televangelist unwinds in a stately mountaintop villa high over U.S. 220 in Bath County.

Read more »

In advance of Sarah Palin's visit Sunday (you'll have to skip Sunday services if you want to be there) here's an 8-minute gem from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

It quotes McCain calling parts of the book "wrong" and one of his top aides, Nicolle Wallace, trashing other sections of 'Going Rogue' as "fiction."

Watch the clip!

Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Charlottesville

Oops!

Looks like the Danville Tea Party is NOT going to burn Tom Perriello in effigy after all. The event is off.

Greg Sargent has the story:

Nigel Coleman, chairman of the Danville Tea Party, says the local property owner hosting the rally asked him to pull the plug.

“We will not be going forward with the plan,” a crestfallen Coleman told me by phone moments ago. “We had to cancel it. The property owner won’t allow us to do it. The media attention was something that he didn’t want.”

Coleman said he was upset that people had gotten the wrong idea about his plan. “I’m disappointed that the story got out of hand and people misinterpreted something we thought would be a little historical lesson. They made people believe that we were committing an act of violence,” he said, adding that the “they” in question were the “liberal blogs.”

Coleman told The News & Advance in Lynchburg that he really boned the publicity for the event, and suggested it had given Tea Parties elsewhere a black eye:

“I feel like I obviously handled this poorly, as far as the press goes,” Coleman said. “We really should have thought this through more ... and seen how this was going to affect not only us, but other TEA parties and the TEA party movement in general.”

Check out the Danville Tea Party's Web site for more on their defense of what they were planning to do.

Note: In an earlier post I wrote the Tea Party/effigy burning was slated for this past Saturday. It's unclear to me whether that was correct. The Chatham Star-Tribune report suggested it was slated for Saturday Nov. 14. But The News & Advance report says it was for Saturday Nov. 21.

It is not even Thanksgiving yet and we already have a boycott! This may be one festive holiday season indeed.

The American Family Association has called for a boycott on Old Navy, The Gap and Banana Republic, three chain stores that are all owned by the same company.

The reason? Said retailing company has consistently refused to use the word "Christmas" in its late-in-the-year advertisements, opting instead for the unAmerican, highly suspicious term "holiday." (Watch this YouTube video to see how wrong the AFA is about that).

Joe McCarthy would be proud. From the AFA Web site:

For years, Gap has refused to use the word Christmas in its television commercials, newspaper ads and in-store promotions, despite tens of thousands of consumer requests to recognize Christmas and in spite of repeated requests from AFA to do the same.

Read more »

Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Charlottesville

A bunch of Tea Partyers are having a little rally in Danville tonight. Everyone who shows should leave their Xanax at home, so as to better facilitate mouth-foaming anger.

They're going to burn Rep. Tom Perriello in effigy, because of his vote in favor of health-insurance reform. You want to be worked up for something like that, you know?

The Chatham Star-Tribune has the story:

Danville TEA Party Chairman Nigel Coleman said, "We were outraged to find that Tom Perriello had voted in favor of this bill. I was with dozens of 5th District voters in his office two days before the vote and we pleaded with him to stand with us against the Pelosi plan.

"At this point we feel we have no representation in Congress."

The Danville Tea Party Web site takes it a bit further, though. Nancy Pelosi is "a treasonous witch." (They plan to burn her in effigy, too). Support for health-insurance reform "is treason against the United States."

So we burn them in effigy.

I don't get it. What is wrong with these people?

Don't they realize this is precisely what crowds of angry Islamic extremists do -- to President Bush, for instance -- to send a message that he and the United States are the epitome of evil?

Let's emulate the terrorists!

Can't they comprehend how much they're marginalizing themselves?

Don't they get it that the whole country is going to shaking their heads and tittering about about that gang of dumb-as-a-doornail rednecks in Virginia who burned THEIR OWN leaders in effigy, rather than, say, Osama bin Laden?

Jeez. It kind of makes you wonder where it's going to end.

Marion G.

Note: If you haven't read part 1, please read that first. This part will make a lot more sense with that under your belt.

The day after my telephone call to Pat, photographer Stephanie Klein-Davis and I got an early start on our jaunt up to Bath County. Even though Pat Robertson had sharply objected to us taking pictures of his mansion (which I could understand), we still needed that photo.

A story about a mansion without a picture of it is about as useful as a car with no tires, you know?

We took the newspaper's white Ford Explorer, which sported signs on each side with "The Roanoke Times & World News" in large, hard-not-to read letters. Bath County is about two hours north of Roanoke by car.

The only problem was, we didn't know exactly where Pat's 11,000-square-foot house was. All we knew was it was off the road that ran along the spine of the Warm Springs Mountain.

A little geography lesson is in order here: Warm Springs Mountain tops out at a little more than 4,000 feet above sea level. It's a long damn mountain -- 20 or more miles long, and it runs kind of southwest to northeast, more or less.

On the west side is the valley through which U.S. 220 passes. This is the main drag through most populated part of Bath County, and it touches the unincorporated and incorporated villages of (from south to north) Carloover, Healing Springs, Hot Springs, Mitchelltown and Warm Springs.

On the mountain's east side is another valley -- this is where the lower elevation sections of Virginia's Douthat State Park are located.

Read more »

Rep. Eric Cantor (R), House minority whip

Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Henrico, the House minority whip, has stepped it big time. It will be interesting to see if, or how, he tries to extricate himself from the double-heresy he committed last week.

Cantor, who is Jewish, blanched at some Tea Partyers assembled in Washington, D.C. Friday who were demonstrating against health-care reform. He basically called out one of them who held a sign likening President Obama's policies to Hitler's and the holocaust.

He said that was "inappropriate."

The problem for Cantor is, these kooks are like the "birthers" and the 911 "truthers." They alone have cornered the market on good and evil and the American dream.

Disagreeing with them means you are unAmercian or just plain stupid. Either gets you added to their fast-growing list for those to be purged after their revolution.

Cantor committed an even worse heresy, however, during an interview with Bloomberg when he criticized radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh for comparing Obama to Hitler.

Doesn't he know what happens to Republican who criticize the great El Rushbo? The next thing they know, they find themselves genuflecting involuntarily and begging for forgiveness.

Marion G."Pat" Robertson / AP

This is one of my favorite "war stories" from journalism.

It took place at the end of 1994 and continued  into 1995, and involves televangelist and Christian Broadcasting Network founder Marion G. "Pat" Robertson, a mansion he built on a mountain north of Roanoke, and the extreme efforts he took to keep The Roanoke Times from taking a picture of it.

It also involves the National Enquirer and one of its ace reporters, the late, great David Duffy. He was one of the most extraordinary characters I've  met in this business (mostly, we're a hideously boring lot). But we'll get to that part a bit later.

I and my wife and our (then) three kids moved to Roanoke from Annapolis in June 1994, when I started my new job as the City Hall reporter for The Roanoke Times. A few months after we arrived, Donna and I got away for a few nights up in Bath County, (i.e. Deeds Country) at a bed and breakfast in Warm Springs. It is a bit more than a 2-hour drive north of Roanoke.

This was in October of 1994, and Bath County at that time had zero stoplights, a population of about 5,100, gorgeous mountains and valleys, and the grand old hotel and golf resort known as The Homestead, in Hot Springs. (Donna and I were back there in September -- nothing in Bath has changed). More than 80 percent of the county is national forest. Here is a map.

Read more »

Joseph Farah

Poor Joe Farah.

The blacklist-loving and "birther" editor-in-chief of the nutzoid news Web site WorldNetDaily can't get on Fox News. Or any other mainstream broadcast media.

They are deliberately ignoring him, he suggests. Fox Views is doing almost the same thing to him and WorldNutDaily that they complained the White House is doing to them:

But let me tell you just how biased ALL of these shows and networks are when it comes to this eligibility issue. Up until May of this year, I would regularly, at least once a week, get an invitation to be on these shows - especially Fox News.

Do you know that since I launched the "Where's the birth certificate?" billboard campaign out of total frustration with the rest of the media I have not been invited on any cable news show? Do you think that's a coincidence?

I was interviewed by CNN a couple weeks ago in what I can only characterize as an effort to ambush me. But, as far as I know, the program - or whatever it was - has never aired.

It might be that they believe Joe is a kook. WorldNutDaily has gone a little crazy with this "birther" nonsense, after all. The site breathlessly boasts that they have done more than 300 stories on that dumb subject.

By Grant Jedlinsky / The Roanoke Times

Or perhaps it's the conditions Joe imposes when he's invited on air. One time Farah was invited on Bill O'Reily's show, one of Joe's conditions was no yelling by Bill. Surely that was the deal-killer.

Or maybe MTV has worked some behind-the-scenes magic to freeze out WorldNutDaily after WND, and Farah, ripped bits out of context from "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" and wrote rabid articles about that book (which MTV published).

There are a lot of plots out there, after all. Some of them MUST be directed at WorldNutDaily and Joe Farah.

Joe is doing more than whining, though. He's not going to take it, he warns:

Well, Mr. Nice Guy has been around this business for 30 years and knows where a lot of bodies are buried.

And if I have to redirect some of my attention toward reporting on the media, I will do it.

Consider that a warning.

Consider this a shot across the bow.

I can't wait!

By Grant Jedlinsky / The Roanoke Times

Rupert Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal. The media mega-mogul also owns Fox News, aka Fox Views.

Which is why it was so interesting yesterday when Thomas Frank, in the WSJ's notoriously conservative opinion pages, called Fox Views' slant "the obvious conclusion drawn by anybody with eyes and ears."

Frank goes further, and goes on to call the entire network a bunch of whining crybabies:

But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.

As the Obama administration has discovered by now.

Worth a read!