View John's Appearance on CNN

Click here to view John's appearance on CNN. The file is a 8.9 megabyte Windows Media File. Thanks to Brian Hamilton for hosting this file.

And here's a smaller file, 3.2 megs, of John's appearance, courtesy of CrooksAndLiars.com Read More......

Welcome CNN Visitors

AMERICAblog welcomes new visitors who might be finding us from John's appearance on CNN. Stay a while, join our discussions, and come back for more! Read More......

Open thread

So much Gannon news. Figured I'd give you a brief breather.

My appearance on CNN will now be at a few minutes after 10pm EST, on Aaron Brown's show. I'm still trying to narrow down the talking points - you really only want two, maybe three, points max that you're trying to get across. Suggestions for the top two points I should get across? Read More......

Catherine Crier interviews David Brock on Gannon-gate

GREAT show. Read More......

Video of Gannon CNN today

Crooks and Liars has the video. Watch it. This guy is quite a package. I have no idea if he's been stalked for the past two weeks, but judging by the fact that no one knew his real name until this past Monday night, and to the best of my knowledge we still don't even know where he lives, I find it hard to believe he's being stalked. The bigger story, I think, is that he finally admits that those Web addressed are his, and that he registered them for a client. So, he had a client that was somehow involved with gay escort services? And he decides he wants a career change, builds a Web site, and suddenly gets daily access to the White House, the president, and internal CIA documents. Hell of a career change.

The entire story is increasingly shifty, and increasingly troubling when you think that this man was granted unfettered access to the White House, and more. Read More......

Atrios catches GannonGuckert a bit factually-challenged

From Atrios:

Truly Devout

Today on Blitzer's pathetic interview, whiny JD Guckert claimed that people (bad evil liberals) had followed him to church.

Anything's possible, I suppose, but his real name was first revealed to the world Monday night at 11:54pm, after the week's prime churchgoing day was long over.

And, Guckert himself declared:

I'm a two-holiday Christian and I usually vote Republican because they most often support conservative positions.

Now, we could imagine that he's Catholic and one of those two holidays is Ash Wednesday, but Ash Wednesday happened after he announced that he quit, so, it's hard to imagine that people following him to church after he quit was the reason he quit...

And, to NPR he claimed:

FOLKENFLIK: It's hard to check what Gannon's real interests might be because he doesn't write under his real name. Monday, before his resignation, when Gannon spoke to NPR he said his family had been harassed ever since that press conference.

"That press conference" refers to the Bush conference from a couple weeks ago. Since, as he told Wolf, when he says "family" he means mother, brother, and sister-in-law, one wonders how all these evil people found them when, you know, NOBODY KNEW HIS REAL NAME.

Gosh journalisming is shur hard.

Read More......

In a nutshell

From the Poynter Institute's Web site:

From MIKE HUDSON, Niagara Falls Reporter: Jeff Gannon or J.D. Guckert or whatever his name is isn't a real journalist. Here at the Niagara Falls Reporter, we do 22,000 print copies a week, have a half million Web visitors and a Pulitzer Prize-winner and Peabody Award-winner on staff. Does anyone think we could get an audience with the President? This isn't an issue of old media versus new media. It's an issue of fraud. Among other things, I've had my nose broken over stories I've written, and the way Gannon folded like a cheap suit when his credibility was called into question should tell everybody what he's about. We're running the gay cheesecake shots of him next week, by the way.

This too:

I have read much more about the Gannon/Guckert situation in recent weeks than Eason Jordan, primarily because, at least what I've seen, the latter story seems to consist of more he said/he said, while the Gannon/Guckert story is a marvel of good, basic reporting: people noting his copying of GOP documents and using them in his "reporting", to finding the link to a Republican organization, to using his email address to uncover his real name, to finding his AOL page, to discovering the gay "escort" pages. The bloggers have acted as real journalists, just as Woodstein did back in the day. What have most -- not all, the Boston Globe being a particular exception -- of the mainstream press done? Ignore it or, when it became too big to ignore, criticize bloggers.

Read More......

In trouble with the local courts as well... to the tune of $20k and counting

Like we've been saying, how did this guy get access to the president and CIA documents with his increasingly troubling background?
Read More......

I'll be on Aaron Brown's show on CNN tonight, sometime around 10:10 or 10:15PM EST

Running to the store, more in a bit. Should be fun. I really like him. Eric Boehlert, the Salon.com media critic, will also be on. I understand that GannonGuckert may be on CNN at 8pm EST as well as during Wolf Blitzer now (I"m TIVOg)
Read More......

Senator Lautenberg demands answers from the WH about GannonGuckert

Ruh roh.
Read More......

Wolf Blitzer interviewing Gannon in the 5PM EST hour today on CNN

Wolf Blitzer is interviewing Gannon in the 5 o'clock EST hour.

CNN now has the story on their Politics home page Here

And Judy Woodruff just did a segment on it that wasn't too bad. Focusing on the just who does decide who gets credentials since McLellan and everyone else at the White House says it's not their responisiblity. Also a good question.
Read More......

Did Gannon update the naughty URLs just two months ago?

1. Here are the URLs in question, when they were first registered, and when they were last updated:



2. When did Gannon start working at the White House - he says two years ago, which would put it at 2003 - so he registered the naughty URLs before he went to the White House.

3. The records for the naughty URLs were all updated last November 26, 2004 - just two months ago, and well after Gannon had been at the White House for nearly two years, by his counting. Did he update those URL records himself? And if so, what exactly did he update? And who is paying the annual fee for those domains? This is important because Gannon is saying he's now born-again and that forgives his sins related to his building certain Web sites for a client - when exactly was he born-again, before November 26, 2004, and if so, did he update the sites last November AFTER he was born-again and while he was still paying regular visits to the White House?

4. Gannon posted his shirtless picture on AOL on February 23, 2000. In the photo he's wearing military dog tags, and he called the photo "usmc-07.jpg" (i.e., again reiterating the military theme).


He uploaded that military-themed sexually-oriented photo to the Web just two and a half months before the military-themed sexually-oriented URLs MilitaryEscorts.com and MilitaryEscortsM4M.com were created on May 11, 2000. I have no idea if there's a connection here, but it again begs more questions.

5. Putting aside the "escort" questions, for a moment, this guy wrote a slew of anti-gay articles for Talon. He wrote an article that defended Rick Santorum's man-dog-sex comments. He wrote an article calling Kerry "the first gay president." He gay-baited in his articles on a regular basis - albeit very deftly (article after article was a presentation of the religious right point of view on gay issues, while at the same time presented as an "unbiased" AP-style format). And now we find that he may own Web addresses that deal with gay sex, and may have updated them as recently as two months ago. That is family values hypocrisy and as a gay man it really pisses me off.

Gannon had no problem saddling up to the worst of the worst when it comes to gay civil rights issues, and now we find that there may be some gay skeletons in his closet that at the very least need some more explaining. Yes, Jeff, it's relevant. If you're going to write articles that consistently promote the anti-gay point of view, that defend Rick Santorum when he accuses us of bestiality, then you can't go doing stuff in your private and professional life that implies a more pro-gay bent. It doesn't work that way. As your favorite president likes to say, you're either with us or you're against us. Pick a side.
Read More......

Lots of Gannon links

1. Excellent summation of recent stories from Dan Froomkin at the Wash Post.

Religious conservatives apparently coming around on male prostitution:

Tim Graham, who served as White House correspondent for a national weekly Christian news magazine, had this to say on National Review's The Corner blog: "[A]s a one-time White House correspondent that asked clearly conservative (but tough) questions in the briefing room, I can only say I'm glad I got out before the left-wing bloggers exposed my unnatural attraction to sugared kiddie cereals. Can we start at square one and agree that these very personal attacks on Jeff Gannon are creepy coming from the libertine left?"

He added: "The White House press corps is not supposed to be a gang beating. It's supposed to present White House comment on the news of the day. Are the people really served by seventeen phrasings of the same attack question? Are they harmed by one question on a topic conservatives are interested in?"

Ethicist who has a problem with making sure people don't have links to criminal activity before entering the White House:

Wirzbicki and Savage quote her saying that the investigation of Gannon's personal life crossed traditional boundaries and was characterized by "mean-spiritedness and snarkiness. . . . Those are not tactics you would see practiced in most traditional newsrooms."

2. Gannon/Guckert plays all hurt-puppy with the hometown paper:

"There are people out there who will turn people's lives inside out," Guckert said. "They tried to intimidate me, punish me. Then they tried to embarrass me, and they've done a pretty good job of that."

Those people are called "Republicans."

3. Very good summary story on Alternet.

James Pinkerton, a media critic for Fox News, told the online magazine Salon.com. He recalled that in the six years he worked for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the White House was "strict about who got in. It's inconceivable to me that the White House, especially after 9/11, gives credentials to people without doing a background check. ... If [Gannon] was walking around the White House with a pass that had a different name on it than his real name, that's pretty remarkable."

Olbermann on his TV show Wednesday referred to Gannon as "HBO's Ali G, without the satire."

4. Eric Boehlert in Salon.com

He also noted that he's a graduate of Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism -- which is a two-day, $50 seminar run by Morton Blackwell, a longtime Republican activist who co-founded the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and has said that those on "the ultra left harness hate and envy in their quest for unlimited power."

Gannon: "I'm a two-holiday Christian and I usually vote Republican."
- vs. -
Gannon in the next paragraph: "I'm a Christian. Not only by birth, but by rebirth through the blood of Jesus Christ."

Read More......

9/11 Could Have Been Prevented

It seemed unfair to say for so long: surely 9-11 could have happened on anyone's watch. But simple, common sense steps were never taken by the Bush administration in the nine months of increasing terrorist threats that led up to that tragedy. The latest proof?

According to the New York Times,

"In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 commission."

Maybe these were just lost in a stream of daily data? Nope, the 52 warnings about Al Qaeda represented HALF of all intelligence reports from April to Sept. 2001. In other words, EVERY OTHER REPORT was a warning that Al Qaeda was about to attack.

Think this isn't a bombshell right up there with Condi's admittal of Bush knowing "Bin Laden Determined To Attack US"? Then why this:

"The Bush administration has blocked the public release of the full, classified version of the report for more than five months, officials said, much to the frustration of former commission members who say it provides a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation system," according to the NYT.

Link this with reasonable steps like making sure that the names of people flying into this country are checked against known terrorist lists and it becomes clear: 9/11 could have been prevented. By the way, it's more than four years after 9-11 and they STILL don't have a combined watch list that is cross-checked against passengers on airlines. Top Al Qaeda leaders known to us could STILL fly into the US under their own names and not be caught.

The next 9/11 could be prevented, too. But will it?
Read More......

Bush Thinks The Ill and Dying Are Frivolous

In his State of the Union speech, Bush said, "Justice is distorted, and our economy is held back by irresponsible class-actions and frivolous asbestos claims -- and I urge Congress to pass legal reforms this year."

I guess he was referring to problems like this:

"W.R. Grace and Co. and seven high-ranking employees knew a Montana mine was releasing cancer-causing asbestos into the air and tried to hide the danger to workers and townspeople, according to a federal indictment unsealed Monday. More than 1,200 people became ill, and some of them died, prosecutors said," according to USA Today.

Why doesn't the press ask Bush about this alleged crime and explain why he thinks the more than one thousand sick or dead Montanans are "frivolous'? Read More......

North Korea Has The Bomb

Yes, on Bush's watch North Korea claims it has the bomb and doesn't care who knows it. And those US-sponsored talks? Nothing doing. Of course, the US could always threaten to unilaterally invade. Oh wait, our military is so stretched thin that it CAN'T attack North Korea. Bush's response to Korea's claim: no biggie, we figured as much.

As blogger Michael Hawthorne points out, Iran isn't particularly intimidated by our overworked military, threatening a "burning hell" for any aggressors.

Link this with Bush cozying up to Pakistan -- which sold nuclear material and know-how to any and all comers and has been rewarded with our largesse -- not to mention Bush's utter failure to spend the mere hundreds of millions it would take to lock down the nuclear weapons loose in Russia and the former Soviet countries. Thanks for keeping the world safe (for the spread of nuclear weapons), Mr. President.
Read More......

Did Gannon or didn't he help launch prostitution Web sites?

Washington Post:

"Among the domain names registered by Gannon's company several years ago, but never launched, were Hotmilitarystud.com, Militaryescorts.com and Militaryescortsm4m.com..."

NPR:

"As for those Web sites, Gannon said he created them for clients of a software company he used to work for. And Gannon says his Christian faith has enabled him to receive forgiveness for the sins of his past."

So did he or didn't he? And again, why doesn't the White House care when this man had access to the president? Read More......

Boston Globe on Gannon

It's not about "gay sex," folks. Geez. Reporters here the word "gay" somewhere in the story and they get all squeamish. This isn't a sex story. And it's not a gay story. It's a story about the Bush administration continuing its agenda of using fake media to put out its message. It's the Bush administration not seeming to care, still today, that a guy with apparent ties to male prostitution Web addresses is getting access to the president and CIA documents. The White House is literally laughing this story off. That's the story. Read More......

Wash Post's Dana Milbank on Obermann's show on MSNBC

This is a great segment. Funny as hell too. Kudos to CrooksAndLiars.com for putting this up. Milbank really nails it. Read More......

CNN.com on Gannon

The article has obviously been scrubbed by their editors, who feared getting into the prostitution thing. Still, it adds fuel to the flames. Read More......

Cox News Syndicate on Gannon

Cox's report on Gannon. Their editors obviously chickened out on the MilitaryEscortsM4M.com stuff. I'm sure they're not happy they pulled it after the NY Daily News and the Wash Post quoted it. Read More......

Open thread

I was up to 3 dealing with Gannon-gate. Any news? Read More......

EU snubs Condi, will lift arms embargo on China

Hmm, despite all of the flowery "oh, Condi is doing such a great job in her European tour" reports that are being churned out by our spineless media, Condi seems to be losing an especially big battle on China. The EU says it will start selling arms again to China.
Read More......

NY Daily News: "Bush press pal quits over gay prostie link"

They blew the entire story wide open. No holds barred.

Bush press pal quits over gay prostie link

BY HELEN KENNEDY
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - A conservative ringer who was given a press pass to the White House and lobbed softball questions at President Bush quit yesterday after left-leaning Internet bloggers discovered possible ties to gay prostitution.

"The voice goes silent," Jeff Gannon wrote on his Web site. "In consideration of the welfare of me and my family, I have decided to return to private life."

Gannon began covering the White House two years ago for an obscure Republican Web site (Talon-News.com). He was known for his friendly questions, including asking Bush at last month's news conference how he could work with Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."

Gannon was also given a classified CIA memo that named agent Valerie Plame, leading to his grilling by the grand jury investigating her outing.

He came under lefty scrutiny after revelations that the administration was paying conservative pundits to talk up Bush's proposals. By examining Internet records, online sleuths at DailyKos.com figured out that his real name was Jim Guckert and he owned various Web sites, including HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscorts.com and MilitaryEscortsM4M.com.

"The issue here is whether someone with connections to male prostitution was given unfettered access to the White House and copies of internal CIA documents. For a family values administration, that's pretty creepy," said John Aravosis, one of the bloggers chasing the story.

The White House didn't return a call asking how someone using an alias was given daily clearance to enter the White House.

On his TalonNews Web site, Gannon had written that liberals were out to get him because he's a white conservative man who owns a gun, drives a sport-utility vehicle and is a born-again Christian.

Yesterday, however, he abruptly quit, and all of the stories he wrote were erased from the Web site. A great many were on gay issues, including one detailing John Kerry's "pro-homosexual platform" that was headlined mockingly, "Kerry Could Become First Gay President."

Read More......

Here's Kurtz's Wash Post story on Gannon. And a few thoughts by me...

It's not bad (though he does fail to mention the Plame connection). To his credit, he does mention the names of the Web addresses Gannon owned - which now opens up that door to the entire media. But, I still think this story deserves a bit more than a Style section piece. I mean, we're not talking about whether Laura dyes her hair here. And I still think Kurtz's story, and the critics quoted in it, miss the main point here.

This story isn't about some guy's private life. (Not to mention, even if it were about his private life, since when was a gay private life off-limits political territory for this White House?) This story is about some nobody who owns Web addresses dealing with call-boy services getting favored access to the family-values White House, the president and internal CIA documents pertaining to Valerie Plame. It's about the White House blowing off the entire story, and claiming there are lots of reporters like Gannon at the White House. Really? Do the other White House reporters use pseudonyms and collect male prostitute URLs too? Cool. This White House is more swingin' than I thought.

Then there's the religious right, oh so silent throughout all of this. What do they think about the White House giving Mr. MilitaryEscortsM4M.com a prime seat at the table? And what do they think about the White House shrugging the whole thing off, especially since the religious right has made pornography and obscenity one of their top four issues for this entire administration (and let's not even talk about the gay angle to this story - that would be another of the 4 apocalyptic issues the religious right is focusing on). Yeah, I wonder how they feel about Scott McLellan pretty much laughing off this entire affair.

We can't stop here. And we won't. The Daily Kos-sacks are still digging away, as are the rest of us. And I suspect you aint' seen nothing yet. The White House has a lot of questions to answer. And hopefully Kurtz's story blew any journalistic reticence about reporting on this out the window. Read More......

End of the night, hopefully, open thread

A special thanks, and request, to the Daily Kos folks who got this story rolling and who have found most of the dirt on Gannon. As you get updates and post them on your site, please email me the links. I'm trying to digest everything here and summarize it, keep track of it, and overall make it easier for journalists and other newbies to get a handle on (as they probably don't have the time we do to read everything). It's been hell tracking all the news on this, so any help folks can give in sending me updates would help a LOT, and it can also ensure I give credit where credit is due :-)

Thanks all, this has been an amazing day.

PS This is a fascinating piece the Daily Kos folks put together about the linkages between Valerie Plane and Jeff Gannon. This has all the feelings of a larger scandal.

NB I knew I couldn't stay away. David E's Fablog obliterates Howard Kurtz's and Wolf Blitzer's interview about Gannon. Read More......