They have learned something from Pat Robertson

Now we all know how hypocritical tele-evangelists like Pat Robertson have become very rich by picking the pockets of little old ladies in the Appalachians while telling them they needed the money to fight the devil. It would appear that the wingnuts at RedState have picked up on this trick. They are asking for $25,000 to fight the liberals because apparently all the programmers are liberals.

When we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features – and to add new and even better ones – as soon as we could afford to.

Unfortunately, we still can’t afford to. But we’re convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

There is a little problem with this alleged cash crunch as Jane Hamsher explains:

RedState is now owned by Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Human Events, Regnery, Evans-Novak Political Report, the Conservative Book Club and other conservative publishing enterprises.

According to Hoovers, Eagle Publishing had $8.3 million in sales in 2006.

When the sale was announced, Robert Bluey at Human Events wrote:

The site’s managing editor, Erick-Woods Erickson, said the new arrangement would provide RedState with the resources it needs to continue playing a leading role in the conservative movement.

Hey, it worked for Pat Robertson and it would seem that the RedState audience isn't much smarter than Pat's.

Hat Tip to Atrios

Update
Pledge Week
Perhaps I was wrong it's not the Pat Robertson model RedState has adopted but the PBS model.