Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter rips modern journalist ethics

The really amazing thing? Her quotes about the way real journalism used to be - they sound like the blogs today (other than the booz, I clearly don't drink nearly enough).

The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity.

When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found and told the truth.

'Pack of dogs' sound familiar? Read the rest of this post...

VIDEO: Alan Colmes actually makes Ann Coulter shut up

UPDATE: Ok, you whiners, she didn't shut up by normal people's standards. But by Ann Coulter standards she was virtually Helen Keller. She didn't know what to say. Yes, she still talked - I mean, hello, it's Ann Coulter - but Colmes had her a bit freaked, I think. And she made an ass of herself.

She was speechless, and Hannity literally didn't talk for 3 minutes (call the paramedics). Wow. Watch this. Read the rest of this post...

Maureen Dowd rips Bush a new one over Putin

LOVE her. Wonder if she's anybody's fag hag yet? Read the rest of this post...

Bush administration drops the ball with reservists

Nice way to take care of the troops who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Bush team. One particular soldier who recently testified on the problems, John Allen, was bumped out the system losing money and benefits and his wife was refused entry while in labor at a hospital in Fort Bragg.

Hundreds and perhaps thousands of injured Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers -- including many severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan -- have either lost or risked losing medical care and thousands of dollars in pay for months because a "convoluted" personnel system dropped them from active-duty status...

Read the rest of this post...

GOP congressman proves that it doesn't take brains to be elected to office

I'm not sure how many more years, wars, and deaths the GOP can continue to milk "you're with us or you're against us" crap. Love to see what this guy says when Bush forces us to have a draft. Read the rest of this post...

From the mouths of Arkansas...

While the mainstream media in the big cities frets over how to handle the gay hooker story (see no hooker, speak no hooker, hear no hooker), less cosmpolitan spots like Arkansas hit the nail on the head.

This is just a snippet:

What does the affair tell us about White House security amid the "war on terror"? That's hard to say. So far nobody's explained how a man with no journalistic credentials and a phony name passed muster with the Secret Service. One reasonable presumption might be that a high-ranking White House official must have vouched for him, but given the Washington press' reluctance and GOP control of Congress, we may never know.

McClellan pleads no contest.

"In this day and age," he said, "when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide, to try to pick and choose who is a journalist."

Um, Scottie, how about somebody who has ever worked as a reporter for a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio station? Most people would start there. Google "James D. Guckert," our hero's real name, and you won't find a long list of professional accomplishments. None, actually....

As if to demonstrate that people on the cultural left often don't think any better than their putative opponents on the right, online publications like Salon.com ran letters from gay readers denouncing his forced outing as "homophobic."

Excuse me, but when you pose for explicit photos and advertise your services on the Internet, it's not private, it's public.

More typical was Kurtz's complaint that "I didn't go into journalism, frankly, to be looking at Web sites like hotmilitarystud.com." Well, frankly, I never expected to read anything like the Starr Report.

Try to imagine the uproar if the Bill Clinton White House had pulled something similar. Every committee in Congress would run televised hearings 24/7. On "Hardball," GOP attack blondes would be speaking in tongues. Tim Russert might simply explode.

The bitterest irony, of course, is that Bush, the most theatrically "manly" president since Ronald Reagan, might never have been elected but for his 2004 campaign's calculated appeal to homophobia.

Read the rest of this post...

Afternoon open thread

La la la Read the rest of this post...

NFL: Nazis and Bin Laden, ok. Gay? Not so much.

Interesting story, by way of OutSports.com, 365gay.com and Rex Wockner.

Let's hope it was a simple oversight by the NFL and it will be fixed quickly. Read the rest of this post...

FOX News covers Gannon, and actually obliterates him. Hell freezes over. Chickens grow lips.

Seriously. FOX's coverage rocked. And they did such a good job covering it that the wingnut at Accuracy in Media, the one who thinks prostitution is simply someone's "sex life," flipped out. I think, perhaps, we've developed the ultimate insult for the mainstream media over the entire l'affaire Gannon: FOX covered it better than you.

Brutal blog has the transcript.

JANE HALL: I just wonder whether a guy whose obviously phrasing left wing questions would've had a press credential for 2 years and was funded by a GOP related group ... It's hard for me to imagine that this could've happened if the bias were on the other foot. So, that is what's partly amusing about it to some people....

JIM PINKERTON: Right, although I think you were unfair calling him 'right-wing' in your intro.

ERIC BURNS: Really?!?

JIM PINKERTON: I do ...

NEIL GABLER: I think you were unfair calling him a 'journalist'.

[Eric Burns & Cal Thomas erupt in chuckles]

JANE HALL: Well, I think he was biased when he called him a 'journalist'....

NEIL GABLER: There are many many journalists - and we know alot of them - who ACT like partisan hacks. This guy WAS a partisan hack. And there's a difference.

CAL THOMAS: I'm not a partisan hack, but I play one on TV. Is that it, right?

NEIL GABLER: Yes. He worked for a GOP operative. He would not have been credentialed and was NOT credentialed by Congress for precisely that reason. Among other things, they have a rule that if you're a lobbiest for an organization, you can not be credentialed. So, this issue here is that this person should have NEVER been credentialed, was not credentialed by Congress, and we know the ... I know there's some Democrats that disingenously are trying to investigate how he got credentialed. We KNOW how he got credentialed -- the White House wanted him there. They wanted him to ask softball questions and ...

ERIC BURNS: What about the guy Jim mentioned asking hardball questions? They certainly didn't want that, did they, Neil?

NEIL GABLER: Well, then he shouldn't even be there. But the point of the fact is I don't know whether or not he got a daily credential every single day as Guckert did. Every day for ... for years ...

JIM PINKERTON: I agree that Guckert/Gannon getting a pass ... I worked in the White House for 6 years and I can tell you that there's somebody, you know, with a false name is ... but the Secret Service ...

NEIL GABLER: On a daily basis.

JIM PINKERTON: [nodding] On a daily basis takes an incredible ammount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House. That I would ...

ERIC BURNS: So it wasn't just that someone overlooked this. It was complicit.

JIM PINKERTON: It was conscious, yes, and some investigation should proceed and we should find that out....

ERIC BURNS: But the point is, Jane, we have a finite ammount of space here and there has to be some distinction ...

JANE HALL: There has to be and I talked to a White House press person who was arguing Jim's point - you don't want to restrict free speech - but there's actually a serious question of security for the President. If you have that kind of a lapse and somebody is intervening, that's a serious issue....

NEIL GABLER: Guckert, by the way, thanks among other people Karl Rove for his insistance, encouragement, and guidance. I think that is very, very interesting.

ERIC BURNS: [dryly] Well, he's a polite fellow ...

Read the rest of this post...

Activist Judges At It Again: Supreme Court Says 'Don't Kill Kids'

Yes, in a decision that will surely infuriate the far right, those wacky activist, unelected justices at the Supreme Court have ruled 5-4 that the United States can no longer execute minors. According to the New York Times, this affects about 70 juvenile murderers who will now be pampered by spending the rest of their lives behind bars.

It's infuriating, but this means the US will be forced to join the rest of the civilized world in not killing kids -- we'll have to break away from the few nations still brave enough to execute minors; fine, upstanding countries like Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China.

It's very hard, coming so soon on the heels of that wacky activist decision that said we can't kill the mentally retarded either. As Justice Scalia almost said in his dissent, "This sucks." Read the rest of this post...

Oscars & ABC censor Robin Williams - was going to joke about SpongeBob and the religious right

Yes, now it's no longer politically correct to make fun of idiots like James Dobson who think cartoon sponges are part of a secret homosexual plot to take over our children. And the worst part is, networks like ABC aren't just complicit, they're leading the charge for the wackos. As a protest, Robin Williams showed up on stage Sunday night with tape across his mouth:



Reuters does a good job of explaining the story.

More details on what was nixed. It's absolutely ridiculous. See, if Robin had just stuck to discussing $1200 a weekend male hookers in the White House, he'd have hit a topic that the religious right and the Bush administration have no ire about at all.

Someone in Hollywood, please get me a samizdat copy of the Robin Williams skit - you know we'll post it (and keep you anonymous). Read the rest of this post...

Editor & Publisher looks at how blogs handled the GannonGuckert affair

A really nice piece. And a great example of how traditional media found a way to work with the blogs to the benefit of both, and the larger story.

By this time, the liberal blogs were probing Talon News, finding that it was closely affiliated with another site called GOP USA.com. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of the pajamadeen went to work on the alias angle. A few days later, the popular blogger Atrios suggested that Gannon's real name was James D. Guckert....

It was amazing to see how many participants, at how many sites, took part, and the skills at their command, mainly Web-based. The material the detectives at DailyKos and other blogs drew out of obscure or abandoned Web sites — and caches — regarding Talon, Gannon, and a dozen other threads was astounding, although I couldn't quite tell if any of the searches and grabs required talents well beyond the reach of even the most advanced computer wonks.

Within 24 hours, the gumshoes had confirmed that Gannon was Guckert. Meanwhile, someone linked Guckert to setting up half a dozen sex-oriented Web sites with names like militaryescort.com. Hours later someone else posted a screen capture of a "JDG" in his underwear from an abandoned AOL hometown page, and he sure looked like Gannon/Guckert. Certainly that was just coincidence?

Then Gannon/Guckert told Strupp that he had indeed set up sex sites "for a client," but claimed they had never been activated.

Well, I was growing impressed with blog research. Cutting away the over-the-top rhetoric, snarkiness, and conspiracy theories, most of their far-fetched facts were standing up. So when Americablog uncovered what appeared to be nude photos of Gannon/Guckert advertising his wares as an escort, along with something of a paper trail linking him to those sites, I was no longer skeptical. Soon The Washington Post was citing this evidence.

Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Off in search of the perfect cup of coffee. Read the rest of this post...

The Oregonian on the anti-gay anti-AARP ad

It's a pretty good commentary. Check it out. Read the rest of this post...

DANGER ALERT! Seniors shopping for prescription drugs from fuzzy foreigners. DANGER!

Oh heavens no, the seniors are looking at completely unsafe countries such as the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Don't they know that they are playing with fire because we can never trust those shifty foreigners? I mean heck, those damned Canadians are shifty enough. Try and forget for a moment where many of the Big Pharmaceutical companies are located for the purpose of this fear-based policy. (Whether or not these pharmaceuticals, approved by the FDA or not, are safe is yet another question.)

• Novartis - Switzerland
• Bayer - Germany
• GlaxoSmithKline - UK
  
• Hoffmann LaRoche - Switzerland
• Aventis (who provided 2.6M extra flu shots to the US last year during the crisis) - France

Now compare this to foods people might eat on any given day:

• Bananas - Central America
• Lamb - New Zealand
• Beef - Canada (with and without Mad Cow)
• Lobster @ Red Lobster - Central America
• Shrimp - Vietnam/SE Asia
• Dannon products (yogurt, etc) - French company
• Coffee - Central America, Vietnam, South America
• Hellman's Mayo (Unilever) - UK/Netherlands
• Bertolli Olive Oil (Unilever) - UK/Netherlands
• Nestle products - Switzerland
  
• NutraSweet (in all of its goodness) - US of A
  

Read the rest of this post...

Kettle Vs. Pot: US Chides Iraq On Its Human Rights Record

The irony is so thick here, I'm just gonna play it straight. In its annual roundup of human rights abuses from around the world, the US details the abuses of the interim Iraqi government, which include torture, rape and illegal detentions. Needless to say, none of these charges include the abuses of the US soldiers in Iraq, just the Iraqis. (Imagine them sorting it all out: "Hey, Ahmad, did you sodomize that 17 year old kid or was that me?")

Of course, this Congressionally mandated annual report doesn't detail the abuses by the US government either here in our country or anywhere else around the world. Obviously, it never occurred to anyone that we would ever be part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Sadly, there is virtually NOTHING we detail being done by other countries that the US cannot be justifiably accused of doing on some level as well.

Finally, look at the countries who come off as among the worst in this roundup: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Jordan. How can you be spreading freedom when your staunchest allies can't even respect basic human rights in their own countries? And of course the countries that aren't responsible for a catalog of sins are the very allies who have distanced themselves from us: Canada, France, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Japan and the people of Great Britain, to name a few. Sad. Read the rest of this post...