For those of you interested, we now are Podcasting content at Media Matters. So check it out.

- "Jeff Gannon" was executive director of the Free Speech Foundation

- ProBush.com is being sued by former SD Senator James Abourezk (they called him a "traitor")

- ProBush.com is being represented by the Free Speech Foundation

- Jon Lauck was one of the original lawyers on the case for the Free Speech Foundation ProBush.com

- Jon Lauck was one of the team running the Daschle vs. Thune blog (and paid by Senator Thune's campaign)

Ding.

Jesse takes a whack:

Republicans tend to run a big-play offense. Move the ball 70 yards in a play, then pound it in the last few yards mercilessly. The big plays aren't anything new, streak runs or fade patterns, but they've practiced them to the point of near-perfection. Democrats tend to play ball control. It's a slower offense that can be more varied, but the goal is to move forward a few yards at a time. The problem is, the gameplan isn't working. Republicans know we're moving for short yardage, so there's no reason to send anyone deep. And we keep doing it, keep doing it, over and over to the point where people are watching not to see if we'll win, but if we'll ever change the plays. We have the personnel, we have the ability - it's just that we lack faith in the protection and the execution to make that change.

The Dems are that team that wins with a really great QB but fails to build an offensive or defensive line worth a crap who gets owned when the hall of famer QB retires. Our coaches also have a habit of being confused by offenses that have been run time and time again, when they should just be playing smashmouth and run it up the gut.

More digging into the connections between Jeff Gannon/JD Guckert and Senator Thune's 2004 campaign:

On June 3rd, 2003, Neal Tapio, former treasurer of the Minnehaha County Republicans and a temporary Republican candidate for Senator in the South Dakota race, issues a press release that criticizes the Argus Leader's coverage of Daschle. On June 5th, 2003, Guckert/Gannon writes his first piece about Daschle. It specifically mentions Tapio's press release, and it focuses exclusively on the Argus Leader's coverage of Daschle.

It's also the first time Gannon has written a piece where Daschle is the focus. (In a few earlier pieces on other subjects, he included quotes from Daschle.)

So, was Neal Tapio coordinating attacks on The Argus Leader with Jeff Gannon? And what did Senator Thune or the GOP know about it? Did money change hands, or did meetings take place?

Steve Soto:

First, if he hasn’t done so already, AARP Chief Executive Officer Bill Novelli needs to call Karl Rove and demand that the White House condemn the ad and the tactics of the USAN. Of course Rove will not do this, and Novelli should tell Rove that failure to do this will be interpreted by the AARP as a sign that the White House supports and was a partner in this smear and in future smears.

Second, the AARP should do a press conference after the call to Rove for two reasons: first, they should show the despicable ad to the media and point out to what lengths Bush’s supporters will go to smear the AARP; secondly Novelli should reveal at the press conference that he has demanded the White House repudiate the ad and the USAN smear campaign, and has received no such repudiation from the White House. As a result, Novelli should tell the media that the AARP will assume the White House supports this smear.

Read the rest.

AARP = Gay marriage was just too much for the b.s.-o-meter to stand. It just went off the charts, there's springs all over the place. It's a hell of a mess.

Pennywit understands what this portends for the WOT

While Jon Henke has the definitive roundup in "Right Wing Tools". Amen to that, brother.

ALSO: The AARP responds on their blog

Gannon/Guckert and South Dakota Editor at Odds Over Daschle Race

Guckert defended his work on Tuesday and said he did not write anything that wasn't true or was not also being reported by several conservative South Dakota blogs. "I think it was spot-on," he said about his coverage of the Daschle campaign. "The Argus Leader's news about Tom Daschle was underplayed."

Although Guckert said he was not paid by, or directed, by Daschle's opponents (in South Dakota or in Washington, D.C.) to write about the Argus Leader, he admitted to sharing information with local blogs, such as Daschlevthune.com and SouthDakotaPolitics.com.

"We traded information back and forth," he told E&P.; "But having some special relationship, I would not characterize it as that. We were pursuing the same story."

Thune also appeared on Gannon's Web-only radio show on Feb. 8, 2004. He eventually beat Daschle in what many considered to be a major upset, given Daschle's standing as Senate minority leader.

After the electlon, it became known that one of Gannon's blog comrades received $27,000 from the Thune campaign, and another took $8,000.

I was wondering why my hate mail spiked today. The loons at Free Republic have noticed our Hume campaign.

I like his show. Wish more Dems would talk like him.

Straight Out of Fargo

To hear some Democrats tell it, the GOP should be afraid. Schultz is coming after them and doing it on their own turf, smack dead in the middle of Red State America. Al Franken and Air America shattered the myth that liberals won't listen to talk radio. But Schultz isn't interested in just preaching to the converted. He wants to do something even more ambitious: save souls behind conservative lines. So far, he's had tremendous success. He's been sitting behind a mike in Fargo for 20 years, but during the past 12 months he's gone national in a big way. Schultz has the fastest growing radio show since Rush Limbaugh's—81 markets and counting. He can be heard inside Republican fortresses like Waco, Texas, and Phoenix, Ariz. His syndicator, Jones Radio Networks, says he'll be on the air in 150 to 200 markets by the end of this year.

Straight Talk from the Heartland : Tough Talk, Common Sense, and Hope from a Former Conservative
by Ed Schultz
(related)

AARP is GAAAAAAYYYY. Gaaaaayyyyy and... liberallllll!!! Aiiieeeee!!!!!

We now return you to a society in decline.

Ok, so I didn't completely fall all over myself, eh? My head? Giant. And all that weight? Boy, does it show up on TV. Heh. Indeed.

UPDATE: Check out Patrick's after-action report. One of the more interesting things is people telling me it was good that I kept calm and cool. And that's part of the reason I'm always defending Howard Dean. It's not "crazy" to be a strong advocate of your views. I have a strong dislike of the conservative movement and what it does to America, but that doesn't mean I run around all day like the 9/11 conspiracy caller we got, grasping at people's lapels and begging them to "listen to the truth". Frankly, I'm one of the more easy-going guys you'll ever meet.

And yes, I'd host a Crossfire type show with Patrick. Only: no neckties. I hate them. I'm more comfortable in t-shirt and jeans.

UPDATE 2: You can see the video now from the C-Span site.

It's not just Oliver Willis, partisan Democrat saying this. The American people want an opposition party.

"American want Democrats to stand up to Bush," the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire reports. "Fully 60%, including one-fourth of Republicans, say Democrats in Congress should make sure Bush and his party 'don't go too far.' Just 34% want Democrats to 'work in a bipartisan way' to help pass the president's priorities."

Ignore the right-wing echo chamber's mindless handwringing about "obstructionists". Even some Republicans don't want the lunatics running the asylum. Stand up for what's right. No to privatizing social security. No to tax evasion laws that saddle our future with debt. Stand the hell up.

This Monday, February 21st - President's Day - I will be appearing on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, along with Patrick Ruffini (formerly of GeorgeWBush.com). Tune in to C-Span at 7:45AM...

Program available coast-to-coast, on cable and satellite... Developing...

The bloggers in South Dakota want to know what relation, if any, the junior Senator had with the fraudulent journalism of Jeff Gannon.

Thunewatch

So far, Sen. John Thune has avoided questioning about what he knew and when he knew it about "Jeff." If the South Dakota and national MSM does their jobs, that pass should come to an end, starting now.

Don't Worry About the Government

So, we can only conclude that Thune appeared on Gannon’s show as payback for all the shitty stories he had already written about Daschle and to butter him up so he would continue writing shitty stories, which in turn Thune’s paid bloggers could hound the legitimate South Dakota media with. (Sidenote—why the South Dakota media, in particular the Argus Leader, has not yet exacted their revenge on Gannon remains a mystery.)

"It’s time for a new McCarthyism"

That was the rallying cry by Ann Coulter, one of the keynote speakers at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference. Ann's hate invective was surrounded by conferences on why the UN is evil, how liberals dominate the media (someone tell Fox News and Rush) and that famous left wing indoctrination zone commonly referred to as public education.

This was not some obscure political meet up, where the lunatic fringe trades conspiracy theories and pudding recipes. This was the premiere gathering of the right, presided over by no less than the vice-president of the United States. It was a meeting of the almost uniformly Caucasian elite conservative movement to discuss, quite literally, their plans to destroy what's good about this country.

I've been told many times that the left needs to be more accommodating to the right, that it just has to sit down and chat with them in order to come to some consensus about how best to go about the business of America. The problem is that this Pollyanna view of things has no basis in reality. The conservative movement controls all three branches of government, it dominates the media, and daily increases its grip on our nation's cultural values. Yet, these people consistently see themselves under siege by a vast network of largely ineffectual liberals. This siege mentality has led them to one conclusion: liberalism must be destroyed. That has created an atmosphere in which the press is no longer simply held in scorn for being "liberal", but is now hounded if it isn't suitably deferential towards the President and his party. They no longer agitate for a place at the table, they want to control the entire table.

You cannot deal with that sort of ideology in any sort of accomodationist manner. Liberals need to understand this, from Democratic senators in Washington who still – still – refuse to vote their conscience out of some sense of loyalty to a long-dead notion of civility in Washington, to progressive pundits who actually believe that their right-wing counterparts in the nation's media are actually there for a give-and-take rather than a chance to paint everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman as a terrorist sympathizer.

Wake up, folks. We're in an ideological war with these folks and the sooner you realize that the better. The goal of the modern conservative movement, as embodied by George W. Bush, is not just a simple majority of conservative thought – rather, it is the elimination of everything but conservative thought. In their dream world, a debate over war in Iran would be between differing ideas on whether a standard issue invasion or a tactical nuclear strike would best suffice. Any other sort of rational solution would be relegated to derision in the right-wing media echo chamber.

The only way to get around this is to simply reject them. By reject them, I mean deny them any sort of adult consideration. Cease the boneheaded notion that they may actually "have a point", because at best they're looking for somewhere to stick in the knife. Don't simply wonder how anyone can accept what passes for news on Fox and try to explain to others how wrong they are. Simply reject it. It isn't news. It's a propaganda network. I've personally given up on the mainstream media to be any sort of referee or gatekeeper anymore. The media is a tool to be used, and no more. The value of more partisan media increases every day and I get more out of listening to Air America or Democracy Radio (or watching Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart) than I ever could simply twiddling my thumbs and waiting on the old media cartel to even remotely "get it". The right long ago decided to make the press its whipping boy while also crying that they were being victimized by it. It's a win-win, and the situation we live in today is a direct outgrowth of that. The most lunatic right-winger can have their twisted ideology treated as normal in a polite society, one in which an advocate of killing journalists and the New McCarthyism is fetishized to the point of absurdity. In an environment like that, you simply cannot rely on factual information to "debunk" the nonsense.

You have to fight fire with fire and deny the entire framework any sort of validity from the get-go.


The Clinton Wars
by Sidney Blumenthal
(related)

Gannon got press credentials before Talon News existed -- confirmed by the White House.

Former Talon News reporter James Guckert obtained his first White House press credentials as a representative of the pro-Republican Web site, GOPUSA, not as a Talon News reporter, as previously believed, Press Secretary Scott McClellan told E&P; today.

McClellan said White House Press Office staffers considered the obviously partisan site to be a legitimate news organization when they gave Guckert, a.k.a. Jeff Gannon, the first of numerous day passes in February 2003.

"He faxed a letter in on his GOPUSA letterhead, they checked that it was a Web site he worked for," McClellan explained, referring to his staffers who handled such credentialing at the time. "There was a check to make sure it was a news organization and a news Web site. There was a determination made at that point that it was legitimate."

Consider this: would an organization like Moveon.org have received press credentials? Of course not. But that's what GOPUSA is, and these guys knew it.

For almost two weeks now, Matt Drudge has been trying to make up a phony controversy over Chris Rock hosting the Oscars. A few in the lapdog media have followed his league, reliable righties like Joe Scarborough. But for the most part, nobody really cares. Why? 'Cause we know that Rock is a frickin' comedian. And a good one, too.

Amazing. In an age in which people of every possible demographic are primed to screech, "I'm offended!" folks got the joke. More astonishing was Drudge's suggestion that academy members fear that Rock might "tarnish" Oscar's rep.

Rock would need superpowers to tarnish a show twice hosted by noted pratfaller Chevy Chase, and whose 1995 host, David Letterman, presented a dog that spun in circles whenever the audience applauded. Must I mention Rob Lowe painfully "singing" to Snow White in 1989 or the naked man who in 1974 "streaked" across the stage?

People tune in precisely to see who will cuss, trip or insert a Jimmy Choo pump or Gucci loafer into his or her mouth. Surely Crystal, Chase, Letterman and Goldberg made a discomfiting joke or two before they hosted.

Joe Conason digs up some info related to previous speculation of mine...

Gannon went much further, however, in accusing reporters at the state's most important newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, of shilling for Daschle and, worse still, of colluding with the senator in the intimidation of his political adversaries. Such wild attacks were then played back on the Thune-financed Web logs, which attracted substantial attention in the Senate race and influenced coverage in the South Dakota media.

What I wonder is what the connection between the Thune campaign, the Thune bloggers, GOPUSA, Jeff Gannon and the National Republican Senatorial Committee is...

America speaks:
1. Reagan
2. Clinton
3. Lincoln
4. FDR
5. JFK
6. GWB

How the hell do Bill Clinton and Reagan outpoll Lincoln?

When the President of your nation chooses a man who oversaw death squads to be the chief intelligence officer in your country....

I don't know what the heck you can say. Especially since the media will ignore it, the administration's apologists will defend it, and America will lose just another piece of its soul.

Damn them.

Ezra's looking at his "book", if you can call it that.

...the most distasteful piece of waste I've handled since maturation imbued me with the good sense to stop handling garbage. I think I was three years old, then. Why is Hugh so bad? Well, aside from the towering egotism and the blistering partisanship, the guy is constantly lying.

He was full of it when he was on MSNBC yesterday with Jeralyn, and so was he when he made appearances on Fox & Friends and The Chris Matthews Show.

Hewitt is a third-tier talk show host, nationally syndicated but doomed to always be below the Limbaughs, Hannitys, and Ingrahams on the right wing chat show circuit, so he's latched on to blogs as his thing and made himself the self-appointed spokesperson (there's a lot of that going around) for blogging. Except, he's fraudulent.

This guy had an "in". Who?

"Jeff Gannon's" incredible access

James Guckert's mysterious career as a White House correspondent for Talon News just took another strange twist. And once again, the newest revelation raises the central question: Who broke the rules on Guckert's behalf to give him access to the White House? Despite administration claims that Guckert simply followed established protocol in order to routinely slip inside the White House briefing room, it now appears clear that Guckert, who just months before his 2003 debut as a cub reporter was offering himself up online as a $200 an hour male escort, benefited from extraordinarily preferential treatment, likely granted by someone inside the White House press office.

Frank Rich's column on fake news is well worth reading, too.

Bush strikes out in N.H. on Social Security

White House aides collected empty chairs in an echoing Pease International Tradeport hangar before Bush took the stage since only about half of the 2,000 free tickets were taken.

And those who did come gave Bush a welcome that paled in comparison to his fall campaign rallies.

Dedicated backers said they liked the president's pitch.

But others left shaking their heads at Bush's controversial gambit.

``Yes, there are problems with Social Security down the road, but where's the immediate problem?'' asked Paul Guercio, a 58-year-old unenrolled research scientist from nearby Lyman, Maine.

``The president tells a good story, but I think this is scare tactics.''

They're gonna keep pushing the social security thing, but unless they say "we need to privatize social security to beat Al Qaeda" (something they would say), this thing should be dead and buried and retired to the dustbin of really bad ideas.

ck_walk110604 002.

No offense to this dog, but seriously - had CK entered the competition he would have won by a good margin. A considerable one.

GOP operative accused of theft

The young Nevada man designated to chair the upcoming 2005 Young Republican National Convention in Las Vegas has been accused of embezzling registration fees from around the country to pay off bar tabs, personal loans and credit card debts.

Nevada's national committeeman for Young Republicans filed a criminal complaint Monday with the Reno Police Department alleging Nathan Taylor received more than $25,000 in registration fees and donations through his corporation, YRNC 2005, and spent almost all of it in the past year for personal use.

(via PW)

I met Matt Margolis about 2hrs ago...

UPDATE: Bob Cox does NOT have a photo of me shaking Margolis' hand, however.

And isn't it just stereotype for bloggers to meet, then all rush back to their computers to write about it?

Gonzales continues Ashcroft anti-first amendment, anti-porn crusade.

Gonzales Seeks to Reinstate Obscenity Case

The Bush administration said Wednesday it would seek to reinstate an indictment against a California pornography company that was charged with violating federal obscenity laws. It was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' first public decision on a legal matter.

Billed as the government's first big obscenity case in a decade, the 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates Inc. and its owners, Robert Zicari, and his wife, Janet Romano, both of Northridge, Calif., was dismissed last month by U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster of Pittsburgh.

Lancaster ruled prosecutors overstepped their bounds while trying to block the company's hard-core movies from children and from adults who did not want to see such material.

Gotta appease the far religious right, nevermind the first amendment.

FDR's grandson on Brit Hume's malicious distortion of his grandfather's words:

ROOSEVELT: That is exactly it. And he rearranged those sentences in an outrageous distortion, one that really calls for a retraction, an apology, maybe even a resignation.

Video here.

Dear Leader:

"Benefit cuts is an interesting word"

Yes, yes them is.