PRG Update - May 7, 2008
Paradigm Shift Newsletter

Open Letter to Senator Hillary Clinton

On April 30 PRG published an Open Letter to Senator Hillary Clinton regarding the Laurance Rockefeller Initiative. This letter was published to the websites for PRG, American Chronicle, OpEd News and the National Ledger. It was also sent out to approximately 5000 television, radio, internet and print media.

The two pages receiving the most initial hits were:

http://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/Open_Letter_Clinton-Hillary.htm

These two pages quickly rocketed to the top of the search returns for both Google and Yahoo using the following search criteria: open letter to Senator Hillary Clinton, open letter to Senator Clinton, open letter to Hillary Clinton

At this time all Google links to pages containing a full copy of the Open Letter, including the PRG and American Chronicle pages, were stripped (or blocked) from the Google search returns. They have not returned. Fortunately, this did not happen at Yahoo where these pages are at or near the top of the listings.

Efforts by PRG to reach Google to determine why this had happened have been fruitless, and PRG is seeking pro bono legal assistance from 1st Amendment specialist attorneys in order to open a dialogue with Google to resolve this matter.

Google is known to block page links (not the same as pornography filtering), and it is possible these search returns were blocked on request by someone within the Clinton campaign in connection to the pending primaries in North Carolina and Indiana. Hopefully, Google will reveal who did request these blocks.

As of May 7, 2008 a new webpage with the

http://www.x-ppac.org/Open_letter_hillary_clinton.htm

Open Letter to Senator Hillary Clinton has been posted on the X-PPAC web site. PRG and X-PPAC will watch carefully the progress of this web page in search engine results.


X-Conference 2008

The conference went well and was well received. The press conference at the National Press Club went particularly well.

It lasted 45 minutes and was filmed in full by several groups.

One version is up on the PRG website now. The quality is poor and other versions will be added soon. This press conference will be receiving much more attention in the near future. DVDs of the PC will be mailed out soon to several hundred key media.

X-Conference 2008 Numbers

Advance booking: 216
Walk-ins: 125
Total paid attendees: 341
Comps (Speakers/spouses, VIPs, VIP guests, staff, exhibitors): 47
Media: 26
Total persons in attendance: 414

Total revenue: $56,656
Conference cost: $61,314
Additional operating costs: $2,000
Loss: $6,658

Two-Conference Financial Outcome

PRG entered the 2007 conference cycle with $50,000 in debt, much of that owed to past X-Conference speakers. Due to an infusion of funding PRG entered the 2008 conference cycle with $20,000 in debt, none of which was owed to X-Conference speakers.

PRG enters into the 2009 conference cycle with $15,000 in debt, none of which is owed to speakers or vendors.

Immediate Financial Priorities

1) Finding new additions to the PRG funding support group.
2) Marketing X-Conference 2009.
3) Paying off the outstanding PRG loans.

To all those who attended and/or supported X-Conference 2008:

Thanks so much for helping to keep PRG's advocacy work on track.

___________________________________________________

Paradigm Research Group
4938 Hampden Lane, #161, Bethesda, MD 20814
PRG.nul 202-215-8344
www.paradigmresearchgroup.org

Paradigm Research Group

Notice - May 9, 2008

To All Surpporters of the Disclosure Process:

The home page for PRG's Open Letter to Senator Hillary Clinton located at:

http://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/Open_Letter_Clinton-Hillary.htm

remains fully blocked by Google from appearing on the Google search listings after it initially rose to the top of the search listings circa May 1.

A mainsteam media journalist contact of PRG is pressing Google for an explantion and so far is getting nothing but noise back from Google.

There has been no problem whatsoever at Yahoo where this page is fully listed under the appropriate search criteria. PRG applauds Yahoo.

Please post The Open Letter to Senator Hillary Clinton letter on your websites and forums. If you cannot post the letter, then link to the page.

PRG will do its best to find out why this page was blocked, who blocked it and whether there is any connection to someone within the Clinton campaign staff.

PRG will not be censored by Google or any other billion dollar multi-national corporation without a fight.


Regards,

Stephen Bassett
Executive Director
Paradigm Research Group

Paradigm Research Group

Media Notice - Google Blocking Update - May 9, 2008

Shortly after a well known journalist contact of PRG's contacted the Google press office for the second time the Open Letter to Hillary Clinton located at:
http://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/Open_Letter_Clinton-Hillary.htm
reemerged on the Google search listings.

It was at the top of the search listing on May 1 for [Open Letter to Senator Hillary Clinton] when it along with other sites were stripped from the listings.

As of today it can only be reached by using very restrictive search criteria. What that means is that the hit counter for the page was zeroed out when the block was taken off.

There are several ways Google can block a page. One is to simply block the specific address for a page. That's 100% effective.

Another is to zero out the hit count for that page so it plunges downward in the listings essentially out of sight.

Google can also block the page from appearing under some search terms and not others.

PRG requests that you please visit the source page often over the next few days to drive the hit count for the page up and thereby drive the page higher and higher up the search returns under all search criteria. This will help to keep Google honest.

That said, this breach of censorship has been fully documented and PRG has no intention of dropping the matter with Google.

PRG very much suspects that this entire episode was to limit any damage to the Clinton campagin going into last Tuesday's election. Which is to say that another reason all the pages in question have reemerged onto the Goolge listings is the North Carolina and Indiana primaries are over. If true, this act of censorship by Google would be even more egregious.

Please visit:

http://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/Open_Letter_Clinton-Hillary.htm

early and often.

Thanks,

Stephen Bassett
Executive Director

'Natural fluctuations,' not censorship

Billy Cox

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080508/BLOG32/853787079

Published Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 6:09 p.m.

Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination appears to have capsized this week with a big loss in North Carolina and a whisker-thin victory in Indiana. And with that defeat, apparently, go whatever hopes some activists held out for the declassification of UFO data.

Anticipating such a finale, Washington lobbyist Stephen Bassett flooded media markets with 5,000 e-mails in a last-ditch effort to prod pundits into questioning her documented intrigues with disclosure advocates. Bassett’s missive, slugged “Open Letter to Senator Hillary Clinton,” went out April 30.

The letter was posted on his own Paradigm Research Group Web page, as well as several other sites. Bassett monitored the traffic as hits for “Open Letter to Senator Hillary Clinton” nudged PRG and American Chronicle into the top two slots in Google’s search engines, with PRG and OpEd News at 1 and 2 in Yahoo.

Then, 36 hours after posting — an unanticipated event. Search returns for Bassett’s letter vanished. From Google. But not from Yahoo. On Yahoo, “Open Letter” links to PRG and OpEd remain firmly embedded in the first and second slots.

“I was absolutely stunned when it happened,” Bassett says by phone from Virginia. “It caught me completely off guard. I checked it every 15 minutes. Then it disappeared. Thirteen years of following my stuff (online), and nothing like this has ever happened before.”

Now, Bassett is accusing Google of deliberately blocking his “Open Letter.” You can still scroll way down and find it linked to other sites, but Bassett says it reeks of censorship. He suspects someone with the Clinton campaign or at Google put the kibosh on “Open Letter” to protect the senator during what may have been the most decisive week of her White House bid.

From its corporate communications office in Mountain View, Calif., Google issued a written statement Wednesday afternoon to deny participating in any willful chicanery:

"Google has not taken any action against this content, and we are not blocking it from our index. URLs can move in and out of Google's index as part of natural fluctuations in what we crawl and index."

Bassett isn’t buying it.

“I think the idea that (the key word) returns could be 1 and 2 on Yahoo and nowhere on Google is pretty remote,” he says. “If Google is screwing around with listings for political reasons, the implications are massive.”

PRG Press Release - 5/14/08

May 14, 2008

Press Release

Memo

To: Dan Abrams, Wolf Blitzer, Lou Dobbs, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Bill O'Reilly, Brit Hume, Tim Russert, Joe Scarborough, George Stephanopoulos, Chris Wallace and the rest of the political press corps

From: Paradigm Research Group

When are you going to ask Senator Hillary Clinton about the Rockefeller Initiative?

Rockefeller Initiative

http://tinyurl.com/2o526u

http://www.presidentialufo.com/clinton.htm

Open Letter to Senator Hillary Clinton
http://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/Open_Letter_Clinton-Hillary.htm