Posted 1:23 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Robert Greenwald on Terry McAuliffe's praise of Fox News. Want to know what happens when we sing FOX's praises?:

Posted 5:32 PM by Scoobie Davis

Barack Obama and Fox News
The other day I learned that Barack Obama would be interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Senator Obama has made it a point of his campaign to reach out to people who wouldn't ordinarily vote for a Democrat. No problem, so far.

However, I am concerned that an appearance on fox News will accord legitimacy to Fox News; Fox News deserves not one iota of legitimacy. That doesn't mean that Senator Obama simultaneously marginalize Fox News and reach out to Fox News viewers. In fact, I wrote about the subject a few months ago:

. . . The idea that by marginalizing Fox News and appealing to Fox News viewers are mutually exclusive is a prime example of a false dichotomy. Let me explain by first discussing the difference between loyal and casual Fox News viewers.

The Casual Fox News Viewer Versus the Loyal Fox News Viewer
Let's forget about appealing to the loyal Fox News viewer. As a group, they voted for George W. Bush over John Kerry by 88 percent to 7 percent. They are the "30-percenters" who think that George W. Bush is doing a good job. They are hopeless.

On the other hand, there are the casual Fox News viewers. These are people who are not particularly politically informed (that's not necessarily a bad thing). They get home from work and surf the channels for interesting shows, regardless of the channel. They watch Fox, but they also watch legitimate journalistic outlets. They don't pay enough attention to know about Fox News' agenda and lack of journalistic legitimacy.

I have a friend who is typical casual Fox News viewer. I told him about Fox News and he was shocked. He had previously thought of Fox as similar to CNN or MSNBC. He was outraged and vowed to take anything he saw on Fox with a grain of salt.

Reaching out to Casual Fox News Viewers by Marginalizing Fox News
By marginalizing Fox News, we can get the word out to the casual Fox News viewer that Fox is a pro-GOP political operation masquerading as a news outlet. This will turn many casual Fox News viewers into a non-Fox News viewers--leaving Fox News with a rump viewer demographic almost entirely composed of true believers, which will further marginalize Ailes and company.

Posted 3:53 PM by Scoobie Davis

My Open Letter to the Anti-Scientology Movement
On the Moon blog.

Posted 10:56 AM by Scoobie Davis

Fox News Democrat Tammy Bruce's Racist Cartoon
As I have written, there are two kinds of Democrats that Fox News CEO Roger Ailes likes to have on Fox News: 1) The "domesticated," non-threatening type--e.g., Susan Estrich, Kirsten Powers, Alan Colmes, Morton Kondracke, and Juan Williams; and 2) The type of Democrat who has nothing nice to say about the Democratic Party. Examples are Pat Caddell, Zell Miller, and Tammy Bruce.

Tammy Bruce is especially egregious member of the second variant of the Fox News Democrat. She even uses the pejorative term "Democrat [sic] Party." As I pointed out, in Bruce's book The New American Revolution, Bruce unceremoniously lumped DNC head Howard Dean with Ward Churchill and attorney Lynne Stewart who was convicted of aiding and abetting terrorists. In the book, she gives plaudits to Roger Ailes, David Horowitz, and Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times.

Recently, on Bruce's blog, she addressed the Mexican official who was caught stealing Blackberries from White House staffers. She did the post with a Jpeg of the Frito Bandito, the former cartoon mascot for Frito Corn Chips. The Frito Bandito was an offensive cartoon stereotype who spoke broken English with a thick, exaggerated accent. Frito-Lay dropped the Bandito in 1971 after protests from Hispanic groups. The first sentence of Bruce's blog post: "Stealing our stuff and taking things that don't belong to them apparently isn't limited to Mexican illegal aliens, it's also the preferred activity of Mexican government officials. Scum."

This isn't the first time Bruce has endorsed anti-Mexican bigotry. A couple years ago, I wrote about Bruce playing the Frito Bandito theme song on her radio show and supporting the candidacy of Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist for a congressional seat (as a member of the American Independent Party) Gilchrist is considering running for president this year as a member of the far-right Constitution Party.

Posted 9:28 AM by Scoobie Davis

Poisoning Young Minds: Miami University of Ohio Honors Discredited Former Moon Operative
Read my post on the Sun Myung Moon blog.

Posted 2:15 PM by Scoobie Davis

Fox News and Terrorism
In my previous post, I quoted Clinton campaign chairman and former DNC head Terry McAuliffe's kind words for Fox News. I just found out that Fox news analyst Newt Gingrich has some kind words for Democrats:

Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News Friday night, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the conservative pundit that "the left wing of the Democratic Party, frankly, kind of admires American terrorists."

Quick note: back in the 1980's, Gingrich's fellow Fox News analyst Cal Thomas wrote a newspaper column concerning a rash of arson fires of women's health clinics. I couldn't find the column but the gist of it was that Thomas informed people that he was pro-choice concerning that particular form of terrorism.

Posted 7:09 AM by Scoobie Davis

Last Night's Quisling Moment
Clinton campaign chairman and former DNC head Terry McAuliffe: ""You were the first ones to call it for Hillary Clinton. Fair and balanced Fox--you beat them all." Here's the video.

What a contrast McAuliffe is with current DNC head Howard Dean who here punks Sean Hannity and Foz News.

UPDATE: It didn't take long for Fox News to turn McAuliffe's plaudits into a promo:

Posted 6:51 PM by Scoobie Davis

Laughing about Scaife
(Updated below)
On Countdown yesterday, Keith Olbermann asked Hillary Clinton about her recent chumminess with Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire who funded various dirty tricks operations against the Clintons during the 1990's. Hillary laughed off the question and told the host that she believes in "redemption" (videos of Hillary laughing and Olbermann's befuddled response to the laughter are here).

For my own part, when it comes to megalomaniacal billionaires, Scaife is far less entertaining than Sun Myung Moon or Rupert Murdoch. Hillary might be amused that Scaife is financially backing the the neo-conservative think tank The Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a right-wing group that seeks to reduce the influence of mainline protestant denominations such as the United Methodist Church of which Hillary is a member. The Institute is involved in a particularly ugly lawsuit against the Methodist Church that will effectively take away funds that go to the church's efforts to feed children in developing countries. That's a little hard to laugh off.

UPDATE: It wouldn't take a cynic to suspect that the motives behind Scaife's support for Hillary is similar to Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos," an effort to cause massive infighting in the Democratic Party by buoying Hillary's quixotic campaign so that Obama will be, in Limbaugh's words, "bloodied up" for the general election. As Steve Benen noted, the endorsement of Hillary in Scaife's vanity newspaper, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, used the term "Democrat [sic] Party," a pejorative used only by wing-nuts and Fox News Democrats such as Tammy Bruce. for more on Hillary and Scaife, check out my previous post, "Notes of a Former Clinton Defender."

Posted 12:40 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Glenn Greenwald on William Kristol

Posted 3:07 PM by Scoobie Davis

Questions for George Stephanopoulos to Ask John McCain This Sunday
(Updated below)
On Sunday, John McCain will appear on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Cliff Schecter, author of the forthcoming book The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't, keenly aware of Stephanopoulos' behavior at last Tuesday's Democratic debate, has picked some really good questions for Stephanopoulos to ask McCain (Schecter's request to Stephanopoulos is very reasonable considering the advice that Stephanopoulos took for the Democratic debate).

Schecter has an impressive list of questions. Two of Schecter's questions are particularly relevant to me: Question Number Five "Doesn't your flip-flop on Jerry Falwell being an 'agent of intolerance' show your opportunistic pandering to the religious right?" and Question Number Twelve "[I]f Barack Obama must account for everyone he has ever passed within a 100 square mile radius of, then here are some associations you might want to explain, with the indicted, the white supremacists and the downright corrupt: Rick Renzi (indicted), Terry Nelson (racist ads against Harold Ford in 2006), Trent Lott (pining for a Strom presidency), The Wyly Brothers (corrupt), Bob Perry (Chief Swift Boater), Richard Quinn (white supremacist), Rev. Richard Land (homosexual hate), Ken Blackwell (Ohio election suppression), Charlie Black (lobbyist and according to John Gorenfeld's new book, Bad Moon Rising, Reverend Moon lover)."

One thought: Jerry Falwell, who mentioned in Question Number Five should also be listed in Question Number Twelve for various noxious actions such as his using the Bible to justify Jim Crow laws (Falwell's argument was that blacks were stricken with the "Curse of Ham" and thus were meant to be the servants of whites); Falwell blaming the 9/11 attacks on his fellow Americans (despite an initial apology, Falwell later stood by his original denunciation); Falwell's support of terrorism (Falwell's Moral Majority awarded a plaque to notorious Salvadorian death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson--know by friends and enemies as "Blowtorch Bob" for his favorite implement of torture); and anti-gay hate (Falwell once said that AIDS was God's way of "spanking" homosexuals).

UPDATE I: Keith Olbermann has more questions. I didn't realize that McCain has been associating with a radical like G. Gordon Liddy. I read Liddy's book Will. The man is completely deranged and is completely unrepentant about his role in the Watergate burglary. Liddy also advocated the shooting of federal law enforcement agents in the head and the crotch (Liddy later backpedaled on his statements). If the media is going to rake Barack Obama over the coals about some very tenuous associations with William Ayers, then McCain deserves scrutiny for chumming it up with the likes of Liddy:

UPDATE II: Americablog has more.

Posted 1:18 PM by Scoobie Davis

Do The Evolution, Baby
I keep seeing commercials for Ben Stein's upcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. John Rennie and Steve Mirsky of The Scientific American have some concerns about the film.

In other Creationism/Evolution news, I received Chick Publication's 2008 catalog. On the cover of the catalog was the promo for a new Chick tract that will be released May 1. It an anti-evolution tract called "Moving on Up?" One of the favorite tracts with fans is the classic "Big Daddy?"

UPDATE: Two people in Singapore are facing some severe penalties for distributing the anti-Muslim Chick tract "The Little Bride," an inflammatory comic book that addresses Muhammad's nine year-old bride Aisha.

Posted 2:37 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Glenn Greenwald on narrative politics.

UPDATE: Salon.com has an excerpt of Greenwald's just-released book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.

UPDATE II: Watch Greenwald discuss the theme of his new book in the context of last week's Democratic debate.

Posted 2:16 AM by Scoobie Davis

Sign of the Times
I love to go to thrift stores. The books I find there that are just a few years old are either outdated (such as almanacs from previous years) or books that are an embarrassment (e.g., in the early 1990's, I noticed that a lot of thrift stores had copies of Ravi Batra's bestselling book from the late 1980's The Great Depression of 1990). The other day, I was in the Salvation Army and found a copy of David Frum's 2003 book The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (the back cover has an excerpt: "George W. Bush was hardly the obvious man for the job. But by a strange fate, he turned out to be, of all unlikely things, the right man" and the paperback edition has a cover photo of Bush in his flight suit).

Posted 7:23 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on the Moon Blog
It's about Moon's top aide Chung Hwan Kwak

Posted 2:31 PM by Scoobie Davis

Thanks
Since I let people know about my new YouTube video on Sun Myung Moon last Wednesday, about 1000 people have viewed the video. Moon has billions of dollars of ill-gotten money to line the pockets of politicians and members of the mainstream media. Critics of the Unification movement have considerably fewer financial resources than Moon (to say the least). However, we have the truth so it's a fair fight.

You can help out by doing one of the following things:
1. E-mail the video to friends, associates, and people whom you think might be interested in the content. You can either use your email account to send people the URL of the video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAAgzAL7QBw) or you can go to the video and use YouTube's "Share" function A(right below the video screen).
2. Counter the Unification Church's YouTube ratings manipulation by getting a free YouTube account and giving the video a good rating(I broke the story on the Unification Church's efforts to game the YouTube ratings system). What this does is to push this video closer to the top of a keyword search for information on the Unification Church on YouTube.
3. If you have a web site or blog, please link to it.
4. Place the URL on a bulletin board or discussion group

Thanks in advance.

Posted 9:42 AM by Scoobie Davis

Posting later today

Posted 10:25 AM by Scoobie Davis

My YouTube Video
"The World's Most Powerful Cult":

Posted 9:33 AM by Scoobie Davis

Notes of a Former Clinton Defender
Using this blog, I have had considerable success addressing many of the right-wing operatives were responsible for some particular noxious smear campaigns against Bill and Hillary Clinton during the 1990's. I challenged Matt Drudge about his libel of former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal. I had an on-air confrontation of Bill O'Reilly about his boss Roger Ailes' attempts to implicate the Clintons in Vince Foster's death. I confronted Rush Limbaugh about his lies about Al Gore. I turned the tables on Sean Hannity's attacks on Bill Clinton's sex life and also used Hannity's radio show to address Jerry Falwell's dirty tricks against the Clintons. I have successfully engaged in "hacktivism" against Fox News, Fox News operatives (click here, here, and here), as well as against anti-Clinton Scaife operatives, Christopher Ruddy and Joseph Farah, who were major players in what journalist Trudy Lieberman called "the Vince Foster Factory." I exposed Ann Coulter's book Slander as a literary fraud. I know all about the anti-Clinton right's mendacity and wild conspiracy theories.

During the past several years, particularly during the 2008 primary campaign, Hillary and her campaign has begun to work with many of these operatives as a part of her "kitchen sink" strategy to win the Democratic nomination:

• Hillary recently had a meeting with the editorial board of Richard Mellon Scaife's vanity paper Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. During the meeting, Hillary sat next to Scaife, the billionaire crank who bankrolled the Arkansas Project and who was a believer in the "Clinton Body Count" which posits that the Clintons are responsible for the murders of dozens of people. Scaife funded various operatives, namely Joseph Farah and Christopher Ruddy, who were propagating the various Vince Foster conspiracy theories. Also, Scaife's Tribune-Review continued to carry white supremacist Samuel Francis' column even after the Washington Times dropped it.


• Bill Clinton appeared on Rush Limbaugh's radio program right before the Ohio primary. Limbaugh has been a major Vince Foster conspiracy theorist who has spewed hate on his radio program (Limbaugh has continued to suggest that the Clintons will kill those who get in their way years after those theories were discredited). Limbaugh has a parody song on his radio show that mocked Vince Foster's death. Currently, Limbaugh is encouraging listeners to vote for Hillary in the primaries as a part of "Operation Chaos," an attempt to cause massive infighting within the Democratic Party.


• The Clinton campaign used the Drudge Report to circulate the picture of Obama in traditional Somali garb (Drudge has previously libelled former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, spread the false rumor that then-Enron CEO Ken Lay slept in the Clinton White House, spread the rumor started by Moon's Washington Times that Bill Clinton blamed 9/11 on America, and helped to popularize the Bill Clinton/Black Love Child rumor).


• The Clinton campaign has been distributing an article from the American Spectator that makes highly questionable accusations about an Obama adviser. The Spectator was subsidized by Scaife to publish the phony Troopergate story (the story led to the Paula Jones lawsuit and impeachment). Also, the Spectator libeled Anita Hill.


• Hillary and her campaign have been close to Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. Hillary has been close to Murdoch in recent years. A few days ago, Clinton campaign surrogate Ed Rendell complimented Fox on its "balanced" and "objective" reporting. Not only is Fox News a political operation, but its CEO and chairman Roger Ailes had spread conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's death and was the producer of Rush Limbaugh's television show that portrayed then-13-year-old Chelsea Clinton as the White House dog.


• Hillary recently endorsed Sun Myung Moon's Universal Peace Federation. Not only has the depraved cult leader exploited his followers financially, psychologically, and sexually, but Moon has used his ill-gotten money to engage in dirty tricks against Democratic presidential candidates.


• As I pointed out last year, Hillary had previously approached one of Sun Myung Moon's top operatives, Josette Sheeran Shiner, and cajoled Shiner to carry her syndicated column on the editorial pages of Moon's Washington Times.

Why are the Clintons and their campaign consorting with this assortment of lowlifes and paranoids? I can only speculate. One of the ironies of this is that Hillary unwittingly gives credibility to the paranoid rants by Limbaugh and company that she will do anything to gain power.

What Hillary and her people have done is unconscionable. I realize that in practical politics, it is sometimes necessary to associate with some unsavory characters but couldn't the Clinton people at least think back to what these people put Vince Foster's family through during their time of mourning?

Not only is it unconscionable but from a strategic standpoint, it's horrendous. Hillary's campaign got chummy with these right-wing operatives because they believed that they would help her win the nomination. It ain't gonna happen. Anyone who knows elementary math knows that Hillary's chances of garnering the nomination have been close to nil for the past few weeks. Hillary receives nothing by becoming chummy with people who have run roughshod over the American political process, destroyed lives, victimized people in mourning, encouraged the undermining of American elections, and debased American journalism. On the other hand, these bottom-feeders have benefited immeasurably by having a Democratic presidential campaign accord them legitimacy. The point is that any progressives who think they can work with the likes of Scaife, Ailes, Limbaugh, and Moon are kidding themselves. They are people who need to be discredited, marginalized, and defeated.

Posted 7:05 PM by Scoobie Davis

Huge Post Tomorrow

Posted 11:16 AM by Scoobie Davis

Karl Rove in Trouble?
Larisa Alexandrovna thinks so.

Posted 12:09 PM by Scoobie Davis

The Pure Love Studies Major
The scoop on the Moon blog.

Posted 9:30 AM by Scoobie Davis

Sean Hannity and Hal Turner
(UPDATED BELOW)
Buzzflash interviews Max Blumenthal, the author of the 2005 article in The Nation about Hannity's relationship with violent white supremacist Hal Turner, about the recent revelations concerning their quiet but extensive ties. I have more about this in my recent post on how the media have covered stories on racial and religious bigotry in recent weeks.

What Blumenthal says about Hannity's links to Turner and the white supremacist movement is revealing. It's no wonder, as Blumenthal tells the interviewer, that Hannity doesn't want to respond to the allegations.

UPDATE: Newshounds has more.

Posted 12:30 PM by Scoobie Davis

Posting Soon
I've been busy the past few days.