Click here: ppc1d1.mp3

(it’s slow to load)

This is the first 13 minutes of that meeting about pay-per-click. An outline of the itinerary was mailed to both Lance Dutson and his lawyer, but when they got there, they became intimidated, and started to rant that they would rather talk about the fictional attacks made on Dutson and his family. After a few minutes creating this smokescreen, they stormed out in mock ignominy.

After the lawyer’s outburst, there is a short, stunned silence. (People are amazed. Everyone in Augusta had been completely above board about everything, while Dutson had done nothing but lie.)

Then you can faintly hear a nervous tittering. Then the commentator tries to get back on track as the door slams, and Dutson and lawyer run like rabbits.)

A reporter (Tux Terkel?) followed Dutson to the parking lot, begging him to come back. No dice.

Every single piece of investigative “Journalism” for which Dutson became famous, was nothing but LIES

Not too long ago, a Maine blogger and web developer named Lance Dutson was quite accidentally thrust into the spotlight following an ill-advised lawsuit against him by Maine’s ad agency, WKP. Dutson had made a completely erroneous charge about the Maine Office of Tourism’s use of Google Adwords (PDF – slow to load:)

visitcamden.pdf

and he repeatedly attacked them with flaming rhetoric, accusing the MOT of many serious though non-existent crimes.

Both the director of this office and Maine’s public relations agency tried very hard to get Lance Dutson to the table to discuss these charges. But Dutson, who had been allowed to rant unchecked for 5 months by his wife, Camden National Bank’s main branch manager Janet Dutson, refused to answer the pleas.

Way back then, (3 years and 3 or 4  jobs ago) she was acting director and media liaison of the Chamber of Commerce whose website her husband had hijacked to post the above bogus press release. It was her job to monitor this feature for inappropriate content.

But she didn’t.

And even though there were no fewer than 6 attempts to contact her (this slow pdf letter was one of six similar letters from just this one agency) and get either her or her husband to the table, she brazenly ignored all rational pleas for sanity, and allowed her husband Lance to rave on.

So Lance Dutson kept loudly and falsely accusing the MOT on his blog -falsely citing multiple threats and deliberate snubs against him by these people – when actually, the exact opposite was true.

But when Dutson finally did agree to a face-to-face meeting with the MOT, he stayed for 5 minutes, then panicked and ran out the door.

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Here is the real truth about Google Adwords (link), as was presented at that meeting.

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When Lance Dutson was publicly exposed as a fool and/or liar by the MOT, Dutson apparently lost his cool, and became so irate that he started a vicious, lying smear campaign against the Lewis’

Dutson publicly blamed the MOT for the lawsuit, about which Dutson had already publicly complained: that it was over too soon, and that he had hoped to get more mileage, and ergo more notoriety, out of it.

On March 21, 2006, the MOT met with Mike Lawrence, Executive Vice President of (link) Cone, Inc (617)227-2111, who advised that the group of people being slandered by Maine Web Report should do nothing other than ignore the blog, or if palatable, engage the blogger in some sort of dialogue. xxxx got on the phone to WKP, and expended a good amount of energy trying to convince Warren Kremer Paino Advertising to back off of any type of legal intervention.)

Dutson started making up countless vicious accusations against the MOT director and his wife and repeating them ad nauseum. His blood-thirsty groupies swallowed every lie, never once asking for any proof or corroboration.

Sometimes the “evidence” he presented even contradicted the charges in his headlines. But nobody ever even bothered to read that far.

He obtained emails – some of them embarassingly private, and publicly posted these emails, editing out parts that would disprove his accusations. When people tried to point out the truth in comments on his blog, Dutson merely deleted the comments.

The MOT’s director had been gagged by his superiors in Augusta (Maine’s capital), and hearing nothing to the contrary, people believed Dutson.

Eventually, even mainstream Maine media picked up the nonsense … and still, deafening silence from Augusta.

A few opportunistic Maine politicians saw all of this as a chance to feather their own nests, and sadly, dignified the lying Lance Dutson, granting him interviews speckled with self-serving misinformation, and stroking Dutson’s huge internet ego.

Maine’s tourism director was unceremoniously removed from his position, with less than a week’s notice and no severance pay.

Both Dutson and the mainstream media gratuitously sneered that he had been “fired” for allegations of “corruption”. The blogosphere erupted into cheers that the little guy had won.

Lance Dutson crowed from the rooftops.

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Lance Dutson continued his attack, even after the director was replaced.

But the truth about Lance Dutson is finally spreading rapidly, with the help of the same blogosphere which had so unjustifiably elevated him to celebrity status in the first place.

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UPDATE one year later:

BTW, Jeff–

Here’s the (bad quality) recording of that meeting, up until Dutson stormed out. (VERY slow to load – 3 or 4 minutes- in IE, less in FF– but it will play)

There were several [sane, intelligent] professionals there who related just what happened. As he sat there, his neck got very red, then he spoke to his lawyer (provided by megalomanical right wing blogosphere impressario, Robert Cox)

They started to rant about “Who would decide what was relevant” and he beat that horse for awhile. He decided to make a case about Dutson’s phony charges of harrassment against him and his family. (All of those charges were lies, other than the one phone call made to him by Sherry Lewis.)

This lawyer is making no sense at all…very obviously engaging in obfuscation, with these rants. Setting the stage for a less humiliating strategic withdrawal.

Then he and his lawyer stormed out. Folks were totally amazed and bemused. A reproter chased dutson out otheparkinglot, beggin him to return, but he refused. (He then went home and wrote 8 pages of rather unstable angry rants to the MOT.)

Once he got to the meeting, he realized that he was among intelligent professionals, and that intimidated him. The lawyer rants about the [non] intimidation were just a smoke screen. They knew the meeting was about pay per click.

I admit that the tape “Proves”what happened much better to people who were there and actually witessed it. It starts with those present introducing themselves.

ppc1d.mp3 (Same MP3 as above)

[UPDATE 3/08: We can assume that this truth is why he has finally removed every single post about these things. These were his only claims to fame - his stairway to Washington politics, the only thing that bought him the seat on the Libby Trial, and the job as Collins' webmaster.

Now they're gone.

Finally, there are now more than just vacuous webrats reading up on it.

If anyone would like to see these posts, email me.

scammedinmaine@hotmail.com

I will send them.]