Posted 12:55 PM by Scoobie Davis

Happy Halloween!
I'm gonna party!

Posted 10:54 AM by Scoobie Davis

Busy!
I'm working and putting together a Halloween costume.

Posted 11:40 AM by Scoobie Davis

More Evidence of The Wingnut Implosion
Former(?) Scaife operative Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily: "Obama: Never a Christian"

Posted 8:32 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Glenn Greenwald on the changing rhetorical landscape.

Posted 10:32 AM by Scoobie Davis

Best Summary of the ACORN Pseudo-Scandal
Christopher Hayes in The Nation:

the ACORN-Truthers persist in believing something that on its face is manifestly and obviously absurd. But this isn't some fringe movement. This is being cynically fomented by everyone in the entire right-wing noise machine, from talk radio, to Fox News, all the way up to the actual members of the ticket, Sarah Palin and John McCain. My suspicion is that the people who are fomenting this garbage, the RNC, Sarah Palin, Fox News and others know that it's bullshit.

But for frank political reasons they are heavily invested in reducing the number of poor people and black people who vote. Black people are going to vote for Barack Obama in overwhelming, historic numbers. Poor people vote for Democrats by massive margins as well. Ergo, the Republicans want to keep them home. Simple as that. Increasing the likelihood that these voters are struck from the [rolls], or intimidated into staying home redounds to their benefit.

Posted 10:20 AM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on the Sun Myung Moon blog
click here

Posted 12:16 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Josh Marshall on ACORN, the Bush Department of Justice, and voter suppression.

Posted 11:59 AM by Scoobie Davis

Go Figure--Lesbian Fox News Democrat Praises Gaybashing Movie
I had previously noted that An American Carol writer/director David Zucker made the transformation from liberal Democrat to Bush-supporting Republican because, after 9/11, he believed that the GOP would do a better job fighting terrorism. Fair enough, but I wondered why Zucker would put an unfunny lesbian-baiting gag in his new film An American Carol (go to 0:30 of the Carol trailer).

Fox News Democrat and lesbian Tammy Bruce loves Zucker's film. I had previously wrote about the homophobic images on Bruce's web site. Whatever.

UPDATE I: An American Carol continues to tank. I and others noted that the opening weekend of Carol and the Bill Maher film Religulous, they both had about the same box office despite Carol being on about three times as many screens. On Monday the 13th, Religulous had box office receipts that were more than double those of Carol ($316,711 versus $145,000).


UPDATE II: An American Carol cast member and lifelong Republican Dennis Hopper came out for Obama.

Posted 2:02 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Palin and the Chipmunks:

Posted 10:53 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Josh Marshall "The Gist of the ACORN Story":

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. . .

Read the whole article.

UPDATE I: I also agree with The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder that the GOP, Drudge, Fox News are trying "to pre-emptively delegitimize Obama's victory."

UPDATE II: Andrew Burmon "Behind the GOP's voter fraud hysteria"

Posted 1:31 AM by Scoobie Davis

Religulous/An American Carol Postscript
Last week, I wrote about the relatively strong showing of the Bill Maher film Religulous at the box Office compared to the heavily-promoted right-wing film An American Carol.

Last weekend's box office confirm previous trends, Religulous had a higher box office with $2,200,000 than Carol with an anemic $1,505,000--despite the fact that Religulous is showing on roughly one-third of the screens (note: Religuous added an additional 66 screens).

What is more revealing is the box office dropoff from weekend one to the second weekend. A rule of thumb is that if the dropoff is less than 40 percent, the film is doing fine. Religulous had a 35 percent dropoff while Carol reduced its traffic by 58.8 percent.

Posted 9:22 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Media Landscape and An Obama Administration
Today on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Paul Krugman echoed some concerns he recently addressed on his blog about the right's media apparatus and what it did during the Clinton administration and what is will certainly do during an Obama administration:

Something very ugly is taking shape on the political scene: as McCain’s chances fade, the crowds at his rallies are, by all accounts, increasingly gripped by insane rage. It’s not just a mob phenomenon — it’s visible in the right-wing media, and to some extent in the speeches of McCain and Palin.

We’ve seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons — they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate.

I have addressed these matters on this blog. During the Clinton administration, there was an massive ratfucking campaign by deranged billionaires (namely Scaife, Moon, and Murdoch) who promoted paranoid conspiracy theories about the Clintons that paralleled those put forth by Lyndon LaRouche--namely that the Clintons were operating a drug smuggling operation and other criminal enterprises and the "Clinton Body Count," the view that Bill and Hillary eliminated dozens of political enemies as well as friends (such as Vince Foster) who "knew too much."

Those who promoted these hateful conspiracies included the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, Rush Limbaugh, now-head of the Fox News Channel Roger Ailes, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, and Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily (who at the headed a Scaife-subsidized front group The Western Journalism Center whose existence centered around legitimizing various Vince Foster conspiracy theories put forth by other Scaife-paid operatives).

One important consideration is that those who put forth these hate-filled and loony theories have not paid a price for their insane rantings. That won't be the case under an Obama administration; I'm more optimistic than Krugman. Expect the usual suspects to go by the playbook they did during the Clinton years. However, expect them to fail and pay a price. I'm not suggesting that there is parity between the right and left's media--the right still retains a huge advantage in promoting memes (e.g., the right's media successfully got the mainstream media to take the bait about the largely bogus ACORN voter fraud allegations). However, now we have sites like Media Matters for America, the Huffington Post (which serves as a sane counter to the Drudge Report), and there is the left's blogosphere. The right's media apparatus can't run roughshod over the truth as they had done in during the Clinton administration. It's not 1993 anymore and I suspect the right will learn this the hard way in 2009.

Posted 10:06 AM by Scoobie Davis

Fox News, ACORN, Bill Sammon, and William Ayers
I watched Fox & Friends this morning and when they weren't spreading the voter fraud meme over the ACORN voter registration flap (in an attempt to provide cover for GOP disenfranchisement strategies), they were discussing William Ayers. During the discussion of voter fraud, they interviewed Fox News analyst and former Washington Times reporter Bill Sammon (I've written about Sammon before--also here).

Posted 2:49 PM by Scoobie Davis

The Mainstream Media, The US Council for World Freedom, and John McCain
Will the mainstream news media pick up the story of John McCain's ties to the terror group, misnamed The US Council for World Freedom? I noticed on my Statcounter stats that someone from CBS News in New York got to my recent post on McCain's ties to the group via a Google search of "The US Council for World Freedom." Let's wait and see.

UPDATE: I just noticed a query by the Washington Post too.

UPDATE II: The Washington Post has a story:

McCain and the U.S. Council for World Freedom

By Glenn Kessler
When John McCain severed his ties with a group linked to ultra-rightwing death squads in Central America may make a difference considering some of the literature associated with the U.S. Council for World Freedom.

McCain has said he resigned from the Council's board in 1984 because he was uncomfortable with the group's activities, but his name was still on the group's letterhead in 1986. He also attended the group's "Freedom Fighter of the Year" award ceremony on Oct. 3, 1985.

On July 15, 1985, the group's newsletter featured an article by Robert H. Goldsborough that appears to belittle concerns about then-President Reagan's decision to visit a cemetery with 49 graves of Waffen-SS officers.

"Those misguided souls who accused President Reagan of insensitivity for visiting the German cemetery at Bitburg are wallowing in ears of pity over the past crimes of the Nazi regime which collapsed over 40 years ago," the article begins. "They want to keep the memory of the holocaust alive so that it can never happen again. Crocodile tears! It is happening again ... and again, and again, right now, in the modern world; only the crimes of today are not being perpetrated by the Nazis but by their philosophical and demonical soul mates, the communists."

The article goes on to argue that Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua are engaged in "Holocaust now."

Goldsborough, identified on the web as a former staff investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, is author of a book called "The Network of Power" which purports to reveal the "the handful of powerful unelected men who secretly rule America." In an interview conducted in 1998 that appears on the web, Goldsborough identified who he felt were the "top four world elite who he thought controlled the world" -- Edward Bronfman of Seagrams and the World Jewish Congress; then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin; then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan; and financier George Soros.

Goldsborough, now associated with a group called Americans for Immigration Control in Monterey, Va., did not return a call left on the group's answering machine.

Posted 3:28 AM by Scoobie Davis

At the Movies: Religulous is Strong and An American Carol Tanks
Last week, I was flipping the channels and noticed that The View was on. I don't think I have ever seen a full episode of the show but it mentioned that two of the guests would be Bill Maher and Kevin Farley. Both are in films that were released last weekend--Maher film is a slam of religious folly, Religulous and Farley is in David Zucker's lampooning of Michael Moore and the American left, An American Carol.

I wanted to write a post about both films but was discouraged because I figured that because An American Carol was heavily advertised on Rush Limbaugh's show (Limbaugh gave the film a big plug on his show) and heavily promoted on right-wing talk radio and the fair-and-balanced channel that it would kick ass at the box office and that Maher's film would tank because we live in a highly religious nation.

I was wrong. An American Carol and Religulous did roughly the same at the box office this weekend ($3,810,000 and $3,500,000 respectively). However, Religulous was on fewer than one-third of the screens as An American Carol. The per-screen average revenue for Religulous was $6,972 while An American Carol had an anemic $2,325 average.

I don't know why Religulous did so well. I have an idea why An American Carol tanked. I had seen the trailer for the film and it looks like it was made for the kind of people who enjoyed The 1/2 Hour News Hour (remember that?).

UPDATE I: They didn't screen An American Carol to critics, a sure sign that the producers didn't want negative reviews to hurt the opening weekend box office. Well, the reviewers paid to see the film this weekend and the reviews are not good.

UPDATE II: One thought I have about writer Director David Zucker. He is a former liberal Democrat who embraced the right's foreign policy views after 9/11 because he believed that Republicans were more capable of dealing with terrorism. What events caused Zucker to embrace the hard right's homophobia? (e.g., 45 seconds into the trailer).

UPDATE III: Religulous did more business than An American Carol on Sunday 10/5 and Monday 10/6

Posted 12:08 PM by Scoobie Davis

John McCain, The U.S. Council for World Freedom, the World Anti-Communist League, and Sun Myung Moon
(Updated below)
This morning on Meet the Press, when the topic of the discussion was the attempts by the McCain campaign and the right's media to link Barack Obama to former Weather Underground member William Ayers, Democratic strategist Paul Begala noted that McCain has his own problem with consorting with extremists considering his membership of the board of the U.S. Council for World Freedom, an affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), headed by former general John Singlaub. Begala noted that the Anti-Defamation League has documented how the WACL (now known as the World League for Freedom and Democracy) “has increasingly become a gathering place, a forum, a point of contact for extremists, racists and anti-Semites.”

That's putting it lightly. I have done some research on the WACL for my Sun Myung Moon blog when I heard that Moon had been a major financial supporter of the League in the 1970's and 1980's. The definitive book on the League is Scott and Jon Lee Anderson's Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League. I used information culled from the book for my YouTube video "The World's Most Powerful Cult." What the book documents is shocking. The League has served as a resource for neo-Nazis (Roger Pearson,former chairman of the WACL, was expelled when media stories emerged that he been in various neo-Nazi organizations including Willis Carto's notorious Liberty Lobby). The League did what it could to prop up undemocratic regimes and aided Salvadorian terrorist death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson whose nickname "Blowtorch Bob" was coined because of his favorite instrument of torture (quick aside: D'Aubuisson had also received support from figures beloved by "values voters": Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell).

The big difference between Obama and McCain: Obama did some educational reform projects with William Ayers decades after his Weather Underground activities. McCain was affiliated with the WACL at the time in which it was a nest of neo-Nazis and was openly supporting terrorist like D'Aubuisson. How come I didn't know about McCain's affiliation with the group until today?

UPDATE I: The Center for Media and Democracy's SourceWatch has more on The U.S. Council for World Freedom.

UPDATE II: Welcome Crooks and Liars readers. Check out the front page of this site for other informative posts. Also, check out the sidebar for transcripts of on-air conversations I've had with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and others--they're priceless. Also, check out my blog devoted to exposing Sun Myung Moon's rise as a Washington power player.

Posted 3:26 PM by Scoobie Davis

I discuss Sun Myung Moon with NPR's Juan Williams
On the Moon blog

Posted 2:15 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman on Election 2008 in Ohio

Posted 12:05 PM by Scoobie Davis

Funny
One of the featured posts on Democratic Underground is one encouraging people to contact the Washington University debate hosts to make sure that Sarah Palin doesn't have an earpiece transmitter during her debate with Joe Biden tomorrow.