Posted 11:38 AM by Scoobie Davis

Film and Video
I received a screener copy of the David Hoffman's historical documentary Sputnik Mania (view trailer here). The film mixes interviews, stock footage, and a good CGI dramatization of the orbit of the world's first artificial satellite. I recommend it.

Yesterday, I found a video I thought I lost years ago. Spike Jonze, director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, has directed music videos and commercials (e.g., Nike's famous post-apocalyptic Y2K commercial "The Morning After"--see addendum). A few years ago, I found a VHS demo tape of Jonzes' commercial work for Wrangler jeans (his Wrangler campaign was called "Amarillo by Morning"). The tape is a series of interviews of some hardcore rodeo people. Jonze interviews cowboys, former riders, rodeo groupies ("buckle bunnies"), and people who view it as a way of life. Even though the interviews were done for commercial purposes, the footage is a revealing ethnography of American rodeo people and culture. It's a shame that it's not available online.

Addendum: Spike Jonzes' "The Morning After":

Posted 7:00 PM by Scoobie Davis

Busy Busy Busy
But a link to a great video on the Moon blog.

Posted 12:10 PM by Scoobie Davis

The Washington Times and the Passport Scandal of 1992
On the Moon blog.

Posted 10:00 AM by Scoobie Davis

Racial and Religious Bigotry: An Overview of Recent Events
(UPDATED BELOW)
Sean Hannity and Hal Turner
Last night I noticed that this site received a lot of traffic because of Google searches of "Sean Hannity Hal Turner" (the Google search links to my post from this blog that has the transcipt of my radio conversation with Hannity about Republican sexual hypocrisy; at the end of the post, I have a list of Hannity links, including one to a Nation article by Max Blumenthal about Hannity's extensive relationship with violence-prone white supremacist Hal Turner titled, "Hannity's Soul-Mate of Hate").

I later found out by doing a Google Blog Search that on last night's Hannity and Colmes, Malik Shabazz, of the New Black Panther Party, was the guest because his group endorsed Barack Obama (an endorsement that Obama rejected). When Hannity brought up Jeremiah Wright's associations, Shabazz countered with accusations about Hannity's extensive ties with Turner (the video is here) Initially, Hannity--against all evidence--denied knowing who Turner was. In fact, Hannity allowed Turner to use his radio show as a medium to broadcast his hate-filled rants; Max Blumenthal and journalist David Neiwert extensively examined how Hannity helped to launch Turner's career. I also documented how Hannity was an unapologetic defender of former Senator Trent Lott's endorsement of Strom Thurmond's pro-Jim Crow Dixiecrat presidential run in 1948.

Wright Versus Parsley
People have been asking why the inflammatory racial remarks by Obama's former preacher Jeremiah Wright have received so much attention but the outrageous remarks by John McCain's "spiritual adviser" Rod Parsley have largely been ignored by the media. The quick answer: members of the sectarian right have been involved in the political game for close to 30 years and they are media savvy. Former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed may be a crook but he's nobody's fool; in the 1990's, when people like Michael Lind began exposing Pat Robertson's paranoid anti-semitic conspiracies in his book The New World Order (see Addendum), Reed and others devised the strategy of accusing the critics of the sectarian right, not matter how justified their criticisms, of being the religious bigots (Reed and others used the term "Christian-basher" as a catch-all term to describe critics. It didn't matter if the critic was pointing out Jerry Falwell's support of Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, Reed and others such as William Bennett played the religious card. It was no surprise when I confronted Sean Hannity about Falwell's fleecing of his flock and Robertson's desire to prevent the immigration of Hindus to the United States that he accused me of fomenting "hatred toward Christian conservatives." It also worked for Sun Myung Moon when he was convicted of tax fraud and conspiracy; he and his supporters made wild charges of religious and racial bigotry.

Michael Savage Tackles Racial Bigotry
Yesterday I also was going through the stations on my radio and briefly heard Michael Savage criticizing Obama for having Wright as his minister. Savage was outspoken in his opposition to racially intolerant language. A few years ago, I had the unfortunate experience of reading Savage's book, The Savage Nation. I wrote a review of the book. What struck me about Savage was that he went out of his way to make noxious and bigoted statements against blacks, Middle Easterners, Hispanics, and Koreans (click here and scroll down to "Savage Racism").

Addendum: When William F. Buckley died a few weeks ago, he was largely credited with purging the conservative movement of kooks and anti-Semites, most notably the John Birch Society, from the ranks of respectable conservatism. This is based on a selective memory of Buckley. Certainly, he did what he could to expel some cranks from the movement--especially when they were relatively small groups like the Birchers (whose membership has never been more than 100,000).

However, Buckley was expedient; he offered support if the cranks in question had large constituencies. In Michael Lind's thought-provoking book Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, Lind notes his disillusionment with Buckley and other prominent members of the right who turned a blind eye to crackpot conspiracy theorists like Pat Robertson. Lind notes how Buckley applauded Pat Buchanan's divisive speech at the 1992 Republican convention. It was soon thereafter that Lind became familiar with the anti-semitic conspiratorial theories in Robertson's book The New World Order (the book recycled the theories of anti-semitic cranks like Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins (who as of 2005 writes for Holocaust revisionist and publisher Willis Carto). Robertson's worldview is far more extreme and paranoid than Robert Welch and his associates in the John Birch Society. Lind wrote several influential denunciations of Robertson and the book in the early 1990's and expected that his conservative colleagues would ostracize Robertson from the conservative movement.

The reaction to the questions Lind raised was swift and unequivocal. Buckley's National Review falsely informed its readers that "the liberal establishment" had gotten Lind "to do a hit on Pat Robertson." Buckley and other prominent members of the American right defended Robertson and went as far as to denounce a report by the Anti-Defamation League that documented Robertson's anti-Semitic writings and sources.

Buckley and his National Review had also turned a blind eye to the extremist and anti-democratic agenda of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Buckley and the National Review have accorded legitimacy to Moon's Washington Times, whose editorial board has fostered neo-Confederate and white nationalist views (also here). I have noted that National Review publisher William Rusher had praised a book whitewashing Sun Myung Moon's activities.

UPDATE: Buzzflash interviews Max Blumenthal about Sean Hannity and his relationship with Hal Turner:

Posted 10:09 AM by Scoobie Davis

Obama's Speech
I thought it was good. Currently Intrade indicates that Obama gained three percentage points regarding the Democratic nomination (InTrade investors are currently giving Obama a 75 percent probability of becoming the nominee).

Posted 4:29 PM by Scoobie Davis

Media Appearance
Today I appeared on Dave Congalton's San Luis Obisbo (CA) radio show (920 KVEC) to discuss David Horowitz. More details on the HorowitzWatch blog.

Posted 1:36 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Deconstruction of a Fox News Segment
(UPDATED BELOW)
On Sunday, the Fox News show America's Election HQ had a segment on faked memoirs (the reason for the discussion was the recent discovery that author Margaret Seltzer's memoir of a South LA gang-banger was forged. Host Bret Baier interviewed James Hirsen of NewsMax about the controversy. Hirsen said that the spate of forged memoirs by Seltzer, James Frey, and Misha Defonseca were a reflection of the "moral decay" in contemporary American society. Hirsen pointed out the the journalistic hoaxes by Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair as evidence that literary and journalistic fraud are major problems.

To the casual observer, this exchange seems fairly innocuous; it isn't.

By deconstructing and analyzing this segment, it is possible to see why this segment is a microcosm of Fox News' war on journalism:
1. First things first: The name of the Fox News program is America's Election HQ. I have previously written about how Fox News and other have attempted to co-opt the "America" brand.
2. I found it highly ironic that someone from NewsMax would discuss the issue of literary and journalistic fraud. NewsMax was founded by Christopher Ruddy, a journalist whose reporting on Clinton white House counsel Vince Foster's death was so sloppy that the Murdoch-owned tabloid The New York Post fired Ruddy, an indignity that writer Michael Tomasky called "a pretty good working definition of embarrassing." Even right-wing pundit Ann Coulter characterized Ruddy's subsequent book on Foster's death The Strange Death of Vincent Foster a "conservative hoax book." As I have pointed out previously, journalistic misconduct by reporters like Blair, Glass, and Janet Cooke is innocuous compared to operatives-posing-as journalists like Ruddy whose shoddy reporting on Foster's death was a flagrant attempt to inflict damage on the Clinton administration (current Fox News CEO and chairman Roger Ailes also spread baseless rumors about Foster's death).
3. NewsMax has been the source of other journalistic hoaxes about Hillary Clinton (here and here).
4. This isn't the first time that a NewsMax operative appeared on Fox News posing as an impartial observer. I gave an example during the 2006 election season of a NewsMax operative covering for Senator George Allen.

Moral decay, indeed.

UPDATE: Media Matters has more on Baier.

UPDATE II: Not surprisingly, yesterday NewsMax posted an article on its website by Ronald Kessler that falsely claimed that Barack Obama attended a July 22, 2007 sermon at his church in Chicago in which the pastor, Jeremiah Wright made incendiary comments (Fox News analyst William Kristol cited the article for his March 17 New York Times column). As it turns out, a quick Google search would have revealed that Obama was on his way to Miami and not in Chicago. This episode is another case study of how disinformation in the fringe media is recycled in respectable journalistic outlets.

UPDATE III: Kristol acknowledged the error.

UPDATE IV:Terry Krepel of ConWebWatch has more on Kessler.

UPDATE V: More on Kessler

Posted 2:19 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Barack Obama, "On My Faith and My Church"

Posted 11:20 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must See
Robert Greenwald at his best:

Posted 9:55 AM by Scoobie Davis

Former President Bush and Sun Myung Moon's "Holy Wine" Ceremony
Yesterday, I linked to a video of Sun Myung Moon's bizarre rant at the Washington Times' 15th Anniversary dinner party in 1997 (quick note: the expressions on audience members' faces is priceless). On the Sun Myung Moon blog, I have a post with a video of Unification Church president Michael Jenkins explaining to UC members how Moon ordered his subordinates to have former president Bush unwittingly participate in the cult's "Holy Wine" ceremony.

John Gorenfeld broke the Bush/Holy Wine story in his book Bad Moon Rising.

Posted 10:55 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must See
John Gorenfeld has the video of Sun Myung Moon's barely coherent rant at the Washington Times' 15th Anniversary Dinner Party. Concave and convex, indeed.

Posted 10:08 AM by Scoobie Davis

Announcement
This blog is 100 % Eliot Spitzer-Free

Posted 5:14 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Posts
On HorowitzWatch and the Sun Myung Moon blog. Note: last month, I was having a little trouble with the table comparing Moon and Barack Obama. I fixed it; check it out.

Posted 3:15 PM by Scoobie Davis

Cleanup and New Blogs
Over the weekend, I did a cleanup of my links--removing dead links and blogs that haven't posted in a long time. I hadn't added any new blogs recently so I'm looking to add new links. The other day I added three blog links: Political Realm, Washington Interns Gone Bad, and Politicky Bitch

Posted 9:24 PM by Scoobie Davis

Green Day

Posted 1:31 PM by Scoobie Davis

I've Heard It All: Karl Rove on McCain's "Black Love Child
(Updated below)
I was at lunch and was flipping through the radio stations and heard Karl Rove being interviewed on Sean Hannity's radio show. It wasn't a very interesting conversation until near the end. Rove complimented John McCain and his wife Cindy for their family values (more on that later). He mentioned Cindy's "love and devotion" for the ill three month-old infant she rescued from a Bangladeshi orphanage (the McCains later adopted the child).

Let's go back to the 2000 election. Rove was behind a whisper campaign right before the South Carolina primary (right after McCain trounced George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary). Among the rumors spread by Rove and company were that Cindy McCain was a drug addict and that the Bangladeshi child they had was McCain's black "love child."

On the subject of family values, McCain is slated to speak to the shadowy dominionist group, The Council for National Policy (CNP) and receive their blessing. Dominionism seeks to replace democracy with a nation ruled by biblical law. This involves punishment (often the death penalty) meted out to pagans, incorrigible children, homosexuals, blasphemers, and many others.

Doesn't the CNP realize that when Jesus spoke about sexual sin, he only spoke out against two groups: adulterers and men who divorced their wives (Mark 10:11: "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her." In case you didn't know, McCain started fooling around with Cindy while he was still married to his first wife, Carol, the woman who stood by him while he was in the Hanoi Hilton. Soon thereafter, McCain traded in Wife Number One for Cindy, a woman eighteen years his junior. Do you think the CNP agreed to the meeting so that they ambush McCain and then apply an old-fashioned biblical stoning to the adulterous miscreant? Just wondering.

UPDATE: Friday night, GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway was on Larry King Live and referred to the CNP as "cream-of-the-crop conservatives." Also, Rove made similar comments about McCain's daughter on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor.

Posted 9:58 AM by Scoobie Davis

Pastor John Hagee's Right-Wing Bloggers
John Hagee is one of those people who, at least until recent years, avoided mainstream media scrutiny because he had operated in fringe circles (I only heard about Hagee in the 1990's because I watched him on the Trinity Broadcasting Network--run by Paul Crouch and his Tammy Fay wannabe wife Jan for ironic enjoyment of Hagee's bombast--see addendum; I have written about Hagee before he made the national news with the McCain endorsement--click here, here, here, and here).

When Hagee's anti-Catholicism, anti-gay hate, bigotry against Muslims, and warmongering were given widespread media exposure after McCain enthusiastically accepted Hagee's endorsement, one thing I noticed was that the right's blogosphere was uncharacteristically silent. This is in sharp contrast to when Hagee gave a speech at AIPAC a year ago. I was one of the only people to note Scott Johnson hilariously cloying response to Hagee's bellicose speech. Johnson wrote: "[Hagee's] speech had me crying." In his post on the Hagee speech, Johnson cites another right-wing blogger, Pamela Geller of the Atlas Shrugs blog. Johnson embedded a video of part of Hagee's speech on his blog and noted that Geller was the person who recorded it. She is also the person on the audio portion of the video who can be heard repeatedly shouting, "I Love you! Woo Hoo Hoo!"(below is the video in question). Also, if you go to around the 4:00 mark on the video, Hagee has a message for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "I have something to say to the president of Iran: 'Mr. Ahmadinejad, don't threaten America!" You can hear Geller shout in applause, "Yeah, baby! Woo Hoo Hoo! I love it! [in a redneck voice] Kiss my Grits![unintelligible]"



Addendum: Gone Camping Were it not for the fact that fundamentalist buffoons like Hagee, the late Jerry Falwell, and Hal Lindsey have been taken seriously by policymakers, they would be good fodder for camp enjoyment, much like crushed velvet paintings of The Last Supper found in Tijuana bazaars.

I realize that many of your reading it consider my intellectual slumming unattractive. It does seem kind of smug for me to have enjoyed Hagee's sermons for their unintentional hilarity. I acknowledge that mocking the uneducated is unseemly. But at least you know where I stand. Let me ask this: what is worse: an ironic, snarky hipster or someone with an Ivy League degree like Johnson who takes a dangerous extremist like Hagee seriously and gives him credibility.

Posted 5:44 PM by Scoobie Davis

More on Sun Myung Moon and the Bush Family
Go to the Moon blog and scroll down to the February 29th post and check out the update.

Posted 10:02 AM by Scoobie Davis

Scaife-Funded Group Is At It Again
A Scaife front group, The Center for Media and Public Affairs, which received widespread derision late last year for its "study" that found that Fox News was was fairer and more balanced in its news coverage that the major networks, has a new study that found, not surprisingly, that favorable coverage by the major network evening news programs for John McCain has declined drastically since January. This was noted on fox News by Brit Hume on his 3/4 "Grapevine" report. Hume did not disclose that S. Robert Lichter, the president of CMPA, is a paid consultant for Fox News.

Posted 8:31 PM by Scoobie Davis

What I've Been Reading
I just got a call from the bookstore telling that they recieved my copy of John Gorenfeld's new book Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right and Built an American Kingdom. I look forward to reading it.

I have recently read two very good books:

The first book is Jacob Weisberg's new book The Bush Tragedy. A couple weeks ago, I attended a book party for the book at Arianna's house (no, I didn't crash the party; I was invited). I got a chance to chat with Weisberg for a couple minutes. When I finally got the chance to read the book, I was shocked. I always knew the Bush clan was dysfunctional but they are giving the Moons a run for their money. George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst president; if you want to know why, read Weisberg's book.


I was saddened when Will Eisner died a couple years ago. His last major work was The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In graphic detail, The Plot tells the story of the creation of one of the biggest literary hoaxes in human history, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As in Eisner's other works, The Plot show that Eisner is a master of both form and content, giving life to a subject that is not particularly amenable to sequential art.

Posted 2:42 PM by Scoobie Davis

Bad Moon Rising Now Available!
John Gorenfeld, the independent journalist who scooped the national press corps with his story on the bizarre Capitol Hill coronation ceremony in 2004, has a new book, Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right and Built an American Kingdom. This is a book that every American should read. Find it at your local bookstore or buy it at Amazon.com.