ARE
(TEA PARTY) REPUBLICAN
EXTREMISTS THE ENEMY AND TRAITORS TO AMERICA? by R. Blackbird
Extremist (Tea Party) Republicans are selfish, power hungry,
hateful of the poor, disloyal to the nation and its people,
dishonest, avaricious, scornful of the nation's history, the dignity
of its institutions, its standards of political morality, and
its vision of advancement for all the people. The Republicans love
war as long as they and theirs do not have to put on helmets and
carry guns into the fighting. They use lies to start wars that kill
hundreds of thousands of innocents and thousands of our own military
service people. They love massive war-time profits, unavailable to
their rich masters if war is absent.
Those Extremist
Republicans hate the rest of us, which they must, in order to pass
away from themselves and onto us, the financial burdens and losses
their crimes, schemes and thefts cause. They are prolific,
incessant, and destructive liars. They are blasphemers for they
insist that their hateful and destructive deeds are the work of God.
They are apostates for they gleefully attack the poor, the
immigrants, the old and the sick, of whom God has commanded all of
us to be mindful.
There is no reasoning with them, for all their logic is built on
false premises. There is no appealing to them for honor's sake for
they have lost all sense of shame and have no honor, there is no
appealing to them for the nation's sake for that it what they hate
the most.
Extremist (Tea Party) Republicans are the enemy.
Fake News,
Fake Reporter
Why was a partisan hack, using an alias and with no journalism
background, given repeated access to daily White House press briefings?
Not only that but because the Secret Service investigates everyone they
give press passes to, why would they allow a Gay Pornography Webmaster
to receive those credentials. Does the White House have a new policy on
pornography? Inquiring minds want to know.
Excerpts from an article
By Eric Boehlert on salon.com.
Feb. 10, 2005
When President Bush bypassed dozens of eager reporters from nationally
and internationally recognized news outlets and selected Jeff Gannon to
pose a question at his Jan. 26 news conference, Bush's recognition
bestowed instant credibility on the apparently novice reporter, as well
as the little-known conservative organization he worked for at the time,
called Talon News. That attention only intensified when Gannon used his
nationally televised press conference time to ask Bush a loaded,
partisan question -- featuring a manufactured quote that mocked
Democrats for being "divorced from reality."
Gannon's star turn quickly piqued the interest of many online
commentators, who wondered how an obvious Republican operative had been
granted access to daily White House press briefings normally reserved
for accredited journalists. Two weeks later, a
swarming investigation inside the blogosphere into Gannon and Talon
News had produced all sorts of damning revelations about how Talon is
connected at the hip to a right-wing activist organization called
GOPUSA, how its "news" staff consists largely of volunteer Republican
activists with no journalism experience, how Gannon often simply rewrote
GOP press releases when filing his Talon dispatches. It also uncovered
embarrassing information about Gannon's past as well as his fake
identity. When Gannon himself this week confirmed to the Washington Post
that his name was a pseudonym, it only added to the sense of a bizarre
hoax waiting to be exposed.
On Tuesday night, the reporter who
apparently saw himself as a trailblazing conservative "embedded with the
liberal Washington press corps" abruptly
quit his post as Washington bureau chief and White House
correspondent for Talon News, that after earlier taunting those digging
into his past that he was "hiding in plain sight." Contacted by e-mail
for a comment, Gannon referred Salon to the message posted on his
Web site: "Because of the attention being paid to me I find it is no
longer possible to effectively be a reporter for Talon News. In
consideration of the welfare of me and my family I have decided to
return to private life. Thank you to all those who supported me."
The Gannon revelations come on the
heels of the discovery that Bush administration officials
signed lucrative contracts for several conservative pundits who
hyped White House initiatives and did not disclose the government's
payments. The Talon News fiasco raises serious questions about who the
White House is allowing into its daily press briefings: How can a
reporter using a fake name and working for a fake news organization get
press credentials from the White House, let alone curry enough favor
with the notoriously disciplined Bush administration to get picked by
the president in order to ask fake questions? The White House did not
return Salon's calls seeking answers to those questions.
The situation "begs further
investigation," says James Pinkerton, a media critic for Fox News who
has worked for two Republican White Houses. "In the six years I worked
for Reagan and Bush I, I remember the White House being 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."
Gannon reportedly did not have what's
known as a "hard pass" for the White House press room, which allows
journalists to enter daily without getting prior approval each time.
Instead Gannon picked up a daily pass by contacting the White House
press office each morning and asking for clearance. Mark Smith, vice
president of the White House Correspondents Association, says it's up to
White House officials to decide whom they want to wave in each day.
"They don't consult us." If they had, Smith says, he would have been
"very uncomfortable" granting Gannon the same access as professional
journalists.
And the association never would have
backed a reporter using an alias. Says Pinkerton: "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." Smith, who covers the
White House for Associated Press radio, says he "could have sworn" that
he saw credentials around Gannon's neck with the name "Jeff Gannon" on
them.
"Somebody was waving him into the White
House every day," notes David Brock, president and CEO of Media Matters
for America, an online liberal advocacy group that led the way in
raising questions about Gannon and Talon News.
Earlier this week, when asked about
Gannon's access, White House press secretary Scott McClellan essentially
threw up his hands and said he has no control over who is in the press
room and whom the president calls on during his rare press conferences.
"I don't think it's the role of the press secretary to get into the
business of being a media critic or picking and choosing who gets
credentials," he told the Washington Post.
"That's like [McClellan] saying, 'I'm
chief of staff at a hospital and when a patient dies in surgery and it
turns out the guy operating wasn't a doctor ... [it's] not my business
to be a medical critic,'" says Ron Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal
reporter who has
written extensively about the inner workings of the Bush
administration. "Nobody is asking him to be a media critic. They're
asking him to make sure people in the press room -- the ones using up
precious time during extremely rare press conferences -- are acting
journalists, honest brokers dealing with genuine inquiry to get at the
truth."
Suskind questions the White House's
explanation that Bush had no idea who Gannon was when he called on him
during the press conference. "Frankly, my sense is that almost nothing
happens inside the White House episodically. They are so ardent with
their message discipline. It all happens for a reason."
And it's not as if finding out the
connection between Talon and GOPUSA was difficult. The Standing
Committee of Correspondents, a group of congressional reporters who
oversee press credential distribution on Capitol Hill, did just that
last spring when Gannon approached the organization to apply for a press
pass. "We didn't recognize the publication, so we asked for information
about what Talon was," says Julie Davis, a reporter for the Baltimore
Sun who is on the committee. "We did some digging, and it became clear
it was owned by the owner of GOPUSA. And we had asked for some proof of
Talon's editorial independence from that group ... They didn't provide
anything, so we denied their credentials, which is pretty rare," says
Davis. She adds, "There's limited space, and particularly after 9/11
there's limited access to the Capitol. Our role is to make sure
journalists have as much access as possible, and to ensure that
credentials mean something.
Talon's unusual access to the White
House has upset journalists at other small outlets who don't enjoy the
same privileged connections. "We're a weekly newspaper with a
circulation of 22,000 and I'm pretty sure we couldn't get a White House
press pass," says Mike Hudson, editor of the Niagara Falls Reporter in
Niagara Falls, N.Y. "How does Gannon, which isn't even his real name,
get past security?" Hudson wrote to Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y.,
asking her office "to look into how a partisan political organization
and an individual with no credentials as a reporter -- and apparently
operating under an assumed name -- landed a coveted spot in the White
House press corps."
Slaughter, a vocal critic of the
administration's pundit payola practices, wrote to the White House on
Monday urging Bush "to please explain to the Congress and to the
American people how and why the individual known as 'Mr. Gannon' was
repeatedly cleared by your staff to join the legitimate White House
press corps."
Until this week, what little was known
about Gannon was vague. But several Web sites he is connected with
provide some possible clues. Introducing himself to readers of his
ConservativeGuy.com Web site, Gannon once wrote, "I've been a preppie, a
yuppie, blue-collar, green-collar and white collar. I've served in the
military, graduated from college, taught in the public school system,
was a union truck driver, a management consultant, a fitness instructor
and an entrepreneur. I'm a two-holiday Christian and I usually vote
Republican."
When the recent controversy erupted,
Gannon positioned himself as more of an ardent right-winger, not to
mention ardent Christian. On JeffGannon.com he wrote, "I'm everything
people on the Left seem to despise. I'm a man who is white, politically
conservative, a gun-owner, an SUV driver and I've voted for Republicans.
I'm pro-American, pro-military, pro-democracy, pro-capitalism, pro-free
speech, anti-tax and anti-big government. Most importantly, I'm a
Christian. Not only by birth, but by rebirth through the blood of Jesus
Christ." Posting on the right-wing FreeRepublic.com, Gannon, while
working as a White House reporter, once urged fellow Freepers to stage a
demonstration outside Sen. John Kerry's headquarters and chant Jane
Fonda's name and throw DNC medals, a reference to the Vietnam ribbons of
honor Kerry threw away during an antiwar demonstration in the early
1970s.
As a would-be reporter, Gannon often
copied entire sections from White House press releases and pasted them
into his stories, according to an analysis done by Media Matters. This
despite the fact he once ridiculed legitimate journalists for "working
off the talking points provided by the Democrats."
According to his bio on Talon's Web
site (which has now been removed), he's a graduate of the "Pennsylvania
State University System," which could mean anything from Penn State to a
much smaller state-run school such as West Chester University. 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." Blackwell's journalism
seminar aims to "prepare conservatives for success in politics,
government and the news media," according to the institute's Web site.
The classes are also designed to "bring balance to the media."
It was Blackwell, serving as a Virginia
delegate to the GOP convention this summer, who handed out purple
bandages in an effort to make fun of Kerry's Vietnam War wounds. They
read: "It was just a self-inflicted scratch, but you see I got a Purple
Heart for it?" Blackwell also served as a mentor to a young field
organizer who is now Bush's deputy chief of staff. (Karl Rove called
Blackwell just days after winning the 2000 election to thank him for his
help.)
What likely forced Gannon to quit Talon
News Tuesday were the revelations uncovered by bloggers such as
World O' Crap,
AmericaBlog, Mediacitizen, Daily Kos and Eschaton, along with their
readers, about Gannon's past. For instance,
bloggers uncovered evidence suggesting that the person and company that
own the Web site JeffGannon.com also registered the gay-themed sites
hotmilitarystud.com, militaryescorts.com and militaryescortsm4m.com. And
according to this online research, that company, Bedrock Corp., is owned
by a man named Jim Guckert, leading to speculation that Guckert and
Gannon are one and the same. Bedrock is based in Wilmington, Del., where
Gannon apparently is from.
As for Talon, its Web site says it is
"committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news coverage to our
readers." The site is run by Bobby Eberle, a Texas Republican Party
delegate and political activist who also runs GOPUSA.com, which touts
itself as "bringing the conservative message to America." As Media
Matters documented, "In addition to Eberle's dual role as the head of
both entities, both domain names TalonNews.com and GOPUSA.com are
registered to the same address in Pearland, Texas, which appears to be
Eberle's personal residence. The TalonNews.com domain name registration
lists Eberle's e-mail address as bobby.eberle@gopusa.com ... Talon News
apparently consists of little more than Eberle, Gannon, and a few
volunteers, and is virtually indistinguishable from GOPUSA.com ...
GOPUSA's officers and directors show a similar lack of journalism
experience, but plenty of experience working for Republican causes."
After Media Matters highlighted the background of Talon's "news team,"
Talon quickly yanked their bios from the site.
There is evidence that ownership of
both Talon and GOPUSA changed hands Monday, just as the Gannon
controversy was growing. More recently, many archived stories, including
some dealing with the issue of homosexuality and defending the ban on
gay marriage, were scrubbed from the Talon site. Eberle at Talon and
GOPUSA did not respond to calls seeking comment.
Last year Gannon and Talon made a blip
on the Beltway radar over an interview Gannon did with former U.S.
diplomat Joseph Wilson, whose wife, Valerie Plame, was exposed as a CIA
agent by conservative columnist Robert Novak. That potentially illegal
disclosure prompted an independent counsel investigation. Gannon
apparently attracted investigators' attention when, in the interview
with Wilson, he referred to an unclassified document that may have been
distributed to conservative allies in the press to bolster the
administration's case that it was Wilson's wife who suggested he be sent
to Niger to investigate the claim that Iraq tried to purchase uranium,
or yellowcake, from the African nation.
It's likely Talon and Gannon would have
remained obscure had the swaggering reporter not popped his now famous
question to Bush. The details surrounding the Jan. 26 press room
incident are telling, as they highlight the elasticity Gannon and other
partisan advocates often use in their "reporting." Gannon asked Bush,
"Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S.
economy." He continued, "[Minority Leader] Harry Reid was talking about
soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on
the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social
Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to
work -- you said you're going to reach out to these people -- how are
you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from
reality?"
Reid never made any such comment about
soup lines.
That afternoon conservative talk show
host Rush Limbaugh crowed that Gannon's question was "a repeat, a
rehash, of a precise point I made on this program yesterday." However,
Limbaugh conceded that Reid had "never actually said 'soup lines.'" That
was simply Limbaugh's exaggerated characterization of Reid's concerns.
Gannon either heard that phrase on Limbaugh's show or read it in
Limbaugh's online column and then inserted it into his loaded question
to Bush. On Feb. 2, with Gannon under fire for his lack of journalistic
ethics, Limbaugh suddenly flip-flopped and told listeners that Gannon's
question about Reid and soup lines "was an accurate recitation of what
the Senate Democrat leaders had said." Then, in a Feb. 7 article in the
Washington Post, Gannon finally conceded the quote was made up, but
suggested he had nothing to apologize for.
All of which begs the question, "Who
are they issuing credentials to?" asks Hudson at the Niagara Falls
Reporter. "Could a guy from [Comedy Central's] 'The Daily Show' get
press credentials from this White House?"
New Questions Surface About Discredited Conservative Reporter
SEE ARTICLE ABOUT JEFF GANNON/JAMES GUCKERT PORNO SITES ON WEB - UGH!
Documents just released by the Secret
Service show that Jeff Gannnon/James Guckert visited the White House
more than 200 times between 2003 and early 2005, attending 155 of 196
press briefings but also showing up many times when the president and
much of the press corps were somewhere else.
Raw Story has the story and a glimpse at the documents. The
documents come from the Secret Service, which turned them over to Reps.
John Conyers and Louise Slaughter in response to a Freedom of
Information Act request the two Democrats filed.
On a first read, the documents raise a
few questions that we'd like to see McClellan address. First, if White
House day passes -- and the abbreviated security check that goes along
with them -- are meant for the occasional use of reporters who don't
need a permanent "hard" pass, why was Gannon allowed to use such day
passes more than 200 times in less than two years? Is anyone else
allowed, in effect, to turn a day pass into a "hard" pass, or was Gannon
alone in his near-constant day pass access?
Second, in the post-9/11 world, is it
too much to ask that the Secret Service keep track of who is coming and
going at the White House? As Raw Story notes, the Secret Service
security logs produced to Conyers and Slaughter contain some days where
Gannon appears to leave the White House never having arrived in the
first place. On other days, Gannon is shown arriving but not leaving.
Maybe it's just sloppy bookkeeping, but how hard can it be to get this
stuff right? The White House isn't exactly Grand Central Station, and
the Secret Service checks everyone who comes and goes. Is there a reason
other than ineptitude for missing many of Gannon's entries and exits?
And if it's just ineptitude, what is the president going to do about
that?
By John
Byrne of RAW STORY - Click Here for the full story |
