Sunday late night

Who's still awake, and why? Read the rest of this post...

From now on he's "Senator Thune, who was elected with the help of a gay male prostitute"

As John shows below, the South Dakota press is finally writing about the relationship between Senator John Thune and Jeff/Jim. From here on out, based on all the work Jeff Gannon/James Guckert did on his behalf, Senator John Thune, should always be referred to with a descriptor that ties him to Jeff Gannon, for example:

Senator John Thune, who was elected with the aid of a gay male prostitute,

Variations that would also work:

John Thune, whose paid campaign bloggers worked closely with a gay hooker,

Or

Senator John Thune, who teamed up with a gay male prostitute during his campaign..

You get the drift...If the shoe were on the other foot, we would never hear the end of it from the right wingers. Gannon/Guckert and Thune should be forever linked and we have to do our part to make it happen. Read the rest of this post...

Sunday evening open thread

What's up? Read the rest of this post...

TIME mag White House correspondent tells BBC that GannonGuckert story has "sex, national security, intrigue" - but then Time doesn't cover it. Bravo.

Money quote:

According to Matthew Cooper, the White House correspondent for Time Magazine, Washington has been lapping up this case of sex and subterfuge in the city.

"It's got everything that gets gossip going. It's got sex, it's got national security, how did he get so close to the president? The pseudonym, it's got intrigue, so it's the kind of thing that gets people talking," Mr Cooper said.

But apparently not writing, as Time has chosen not to write about the story that it says has it all, and has all of Washington talking. Read the rest of this post...

Wounded Italian journalist says US may have shot her on purpose

Maybe Eason Jordan needs to get his job back...

Sgrena, who works for the communist daily Il Manifesto, did not rule out that she was targeted, saying the United States likely disapproved of Italy's methods to secure her release, although she did not elaborate.

"The fact that the Americans don't want negotiations to free the hostages is known," Sgrena told Sky TG24 television by telephone, her voice hoarse and shaky. "The fact that they do everything to prevent the adoption of this practice to save the lives of people held hostages, everybody knows that. So I don't see why I should rule out that I could have been the target."

Italian officials have not provided details about the negotiations leading to Sgrena's release Friday after a month in captivity, but Agriculture Minister Giovanni Alemanno was quoted as saying it was "very likely" a ransom was paid. U.S. officials object to ransoms, saying it encourages further kidnappings.

So Bush's buddy Berlusconi is paying money to terrorists so they can buy more weapons to kill more US troops and more Americans on airplanes. Isn't that special. Are we winning yet?

And now for the even creepier part of the story:

Sgrena said the driver began shouting that they were Italian, then "Nicola Calipari dove on top of me to protect me and immediately, and I mean immediately, I felt his last breath as he died on me."

Suddenly, she said, she remembered her captors' words, when they warned her "to be careful because the Americans don't want you to return."

Sgrena wrote that her captors warned her as she was about to be released not to signal her presence to anyone, because "the Americans might intervene." She said her captors blindfolded her and drove her to a location where she was turned over to agents and they set off for the airport.

Yeah, wonder if the MSM is even going to look into her charges. Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Off to meet a pow-wow of DC political Internet lefties. Read the rest of this post...

GannonGuckert: Another Small Market Paper Nails It

Yes, while all the papers of record either ignore or do a shoddy job on GannonGuckert, columnist Edward Cone for the News-Record lays it out nicely.

"Certainly we can add a new definition of the term "house organ," and it's fun to imagine the hyperventilation of the commentariat had someone working as an alleged gay prostitute been so welcomed by the Clinton White House," writes Cone.

"But Guckert's avocation is the least-creepy aspect of this story. Talon News has been shut down and Eberle exposed, er, shown to be a propagandist. Yet the Guckert saga is not an isolated series of events. Instead, it is the latest example of a media strategy built not just on spinning a message, but on co-opting the mechanisms of message delivery."

Thanks to Deano for pointing us to this story.

MSM: This story has YET to be thoroughly investigated. Question Number One: Jim Guckert was snuck into the White House Press Room on a day pass before he had written a single news article for anyone. He wasn't even affiliated with any news outlet -- real or imagined -- anywhere in the world. He was a plant. Who at the White House put him in the press room?

Read the rest of this post...

Senator Thune (R-SD) denies ties to male hooker

From the Rapid City Journal. Still percolating, this story.

"If this would have been a liberal reporter who was caught as a gay prostitute advertising himself for sex, John Thune and Dick Wadhams and the far right would have been attacking him vociferously," Hildebrand said.

But the most important part of the story was that a person with that background and no legitimate journalism standing got White House press access, he said....

Then, of course, we have GannonGuckert issuing his standard totally contradictory admission/denials:

During a telephone interview Friday, Gannon declined to discuss his personal life or involvement in the sexually oriented Web sites.

"Like anyone else, I have a past. I made mistakes in my past. And there are things I've done in the course of my life that I'm not proud of," Gannon said. "But I've had good fortune, and I believe in a God of redemption . who will allow you to leave the past in the past."

Gannon said that although some of what people said was true, there also were "so many wild, inaccurate things out there," in relation to his personal life.

"That's the reason I haven't been talking about it," he said. "There will be a time for that, but while this whole thing is going on, I couldn't deal with it. I have a team of lawyers looking at all the things out there, who said what."

Nothing in his past personal life should reflect poorly on Thune, President Bush or the conservative cause, Gannon said.

Oh, where to begin? Mistakes in your past? You were soliciting prostitution on the Web up until a week ago. You found God's redemption? Was that before or after you tried to sell your male prostitution Web address for $7500 a pop last week? There are some wild and inaccurate things out there about you? Like what? We proved you're a male hooker, and you've refused to deny it in interview after interview - are you still trying to cast doubt on that? Also, when you charge $200/hour and $1200/weekend for sex it's not your "personal life" - it's your business, otherwise you wouldn't be required to pay taxes on it (speaking of which...). And finally, your being a prostitute shouldn't reflect badly on Thune, Bush or the conservative cause? Really, because they welcome gay prostitutes now? Funny, I thought they were all pushing to write all gays out of the Constitution. Now they welcome us? Especially hookers?

Thune's campaign paid Lauck $27,000 and Van Beek $8,000 to be research consultants. Van Beek now works for Thune, and Lauck continues to help maintain the conservative political blog, South Dakota Politics. Lauck said the recent publicity about Gannon's personal life didn't mean that his reporting was inaccurate, or invalid.

"It's weird, but I try to leave personal lives out of it," Lauck said.

Senator Thune's office defends gay prostitution as simply "someone's personal life." God bless America. Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Have at it Read the rest of this post...

The LA Times printed my op ed on their GannonGuckert coverage

Actually, they were quite nice about it. They have a special Sunday Opinion op ed column called "Outside the Tent." In it, they invite critics of the Times to pen a column zinging the paper for some screw-up. It's running today. Take a look.

For any LA Times readers wondering what the story is that your paper didn't tell you about - read it here. For more background on the story, you might want to start with this short and to the point article by the NY Daily News.

For anybody having trouble with that link, I'm reprinting it here:

OUTSIDE THE TENT
Sex, Lies and Spies: This Isn't News?
By John Aravosis
John Aravosis is a writer and political consultant and the editor of AMERICAblog.com.

March 6, 2005

An experimental column in which the Los Angeles Times invites outside critics to slap around a newspaper whose editorial endorsed TWO candidates for mayor.

*

Bloggers uncover that someone working as a reporter in the West Wing is also advertising himself as a $200-an-hour gay escort — someone whose name, a year earlier, had appeared in the U.S. attorney's subpoena of White House documents during the investigation of the Valerie Plame-CIA scandal.

The mainstream media, including the Los Angeles Times, remains largely silent. Why?

The story of James D. Guckert (a.k.a. Jeff Gannon) broke Jan. 26. It started as a blip of a controversy over a little-known "reporter" for a conservative website asking a kiss-up question at a White House briefing. Bloggers investigated "Gannon's" identity and found that he had little training in journalism and an apparent connection to male prostitution. Bloggers wanted to know how someone with this background had for two years received White House "day pass" press credentials. Within days, the story exploded online, yet it took a month for The Times to give the story a mention, and then its coverage was a textbook case of how not to write the news.

The piece cited or quoted by name five sources as well as an unnamed media critic — none expressing any outrage — as well as Guckert himself. It failed to quote the bloggers who broke this story — including me — or anyone who thought Guckert's ability to waltz through security with a pseudonym and get within a few feet of the president during a time of war might be a serious issue.

That's not to say we Internet sleuths didn't get an honorary mention. The story called us "left-wing bloggers" and "gay activists" (not all of us are), diminishing our credibility and helping to keep our ample and well-sourced evidence out of public discourse.

It's not as if bloggers were the only ones on the case. Democratic Sens. Harry Reid, Richard Durbin, Edward M. Kennedy, Frank Lautenberg and John Kerry have asked the White House to investigate. And senior House Democrats have called on the federal prosecutor investigating the leaking of the identity of CIA agent Plame to subpoena Guckert's diary.

In labeling the story "White House Notebook" and treating it largely as a look at the imprecision of attempting to define "journalist," The Times missed the more serious news angle — the apparent breach of White House security by someone with a troubling past.

And then there are the obvious questions about whether he might somehow fit into the Bush administration's ongoing campaign to neutralize the media by paying off pundits like Armstrong Williams. If nothing else, there's a story too in the fact that the administration has said nothing since the story broke about its pressroom ally's extracurricular activities — a rank case of family values hypocrisy.

I can think of three possible reasons The Times didn't cover this obviously major story with any vigor:

(1) Trepidation about gays, sex and power. In the age of wardrobe malfunctions, news organizations are extra cautious about covering anything involving s-e-x. And a gay angle only makes things more confusing. Would you be anti-gay or pro-gay if you wrote about an allegedly homophobic journalist who happened to be gay? Answer: Allegations of prostitution aren't just about someone's private life, they're about a crime that can lead to blackmail, especially if state secrets are involved. And in any case, your readers are adults — give them the facts and let them decide for themselves.

(2) Reverse liberal guilt. Too sensitive to right-wing accusations of being liberal, traditional media have overcompensated by becoming too timid in covering certain stories. They seem loath to aggressively report on scandals involving Republican politicians, in general, and this White House in particular.

(3) Blogophobia. Liberal bloggers scare the mainstream media. Media critics fret over our supposed lack of professional credentials, even though many of us are journalists. They doubt our facts but don't independently investigate the stories.

The lack of coverage plays into the hands of the White House. Mainstream media editors act as if our investigation of Guckert is about prurience and lacks merit. But there is more than enough evidence to make any reporter want to check out the possibilities of White House deception and media manipulation.

The Times' editors shouldn't allow themselves to think they are above the fray. In truth, they are failing to speak truth to power.

Read the rest of this post...