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Trinity United Church Of Christ
info@tucc.org

This list ncludes some media contact information, because I've been hearing some want to let it be known how they feel about how the media has handled this issue. It is far from complete, of course. More a sample of what is out there.

The biggest offense in the Wright tapes - when played in longer segments than Fox or ABC (which supposedly played it before Fox or CNN) or any other outlet has played them - is no one has captured the sentiment around the words beyond the Noise Level. Wright is talking to a community that feels like America has left them behind - economically, politically, socially, demographically. As Jimmy Boegle put it, "Why do you think it's impossible to love your country, yet still be ashamed of it?" Which a poster on Reddit added "I remember Trent Lott saying something like "It's possible to support troops while opposing the president." Which are variations of exactly what Wright was saying in the 'God Damn America' speech. Using the quote of a Reagan appointee.

Interesting news from Newsmax.  I know, but here's the link http://www.newsmax.com/...  I see this race turning itself upside down.  What's a white racist to do?  Vote for Jesse Ventura?  This obviously will influence the Dems strategy as this ticket could possibly go after untouchable AA support and females.  To me, this could be as shrewd a move as McCain could make.  Pray for a hard core evangelistic McBush clone.  If Condo comes on, it's gonna be an even wilder ride this November.

This isn't much of a diary, and it's my first one so be nice :)

I think the following story just shows a pattern of how Hillary lies about her and her family escaping danger.  This woman can not be trusted.

I'm seeing many people trying to look at the Wright situation as some part of the 'kitchen sink' strategy.  As much as I would agree that Clinton surrogates have pushed race around, and many are in fact taking joy and joining the likes of Hannity in attacking Obama over this - Clinton's official campaign must be given the benefit of the doubt here, for multiple reasons.

Alright so there is this article being spammed in various diaries and conservative blogs. It was published in Newsmax, (the right wing rag) and it is the author's contention that he attended a service at Trinity and that Rev. Wright made "anti-white" statements and that Obama was personally there to hear them and that he personally witnessed them praying together. Here is the article: LINK.

Anyway, the Obama campaign responded by saying that he was in Miami that day, so not in attendance. Meanwhile, I took literally TWO seconds of my time to google "Obama Miami July" to find, of course, that he was in Miami speaking the La Raza Convention on July 22, the supposed date of the sermon. Below the fold is the video and a link to the schedule that shows Obama speaking.

Can you believe it, and all this time I was so worried. Man I'm so glad I was wrong, now we can just relax and chill a while. What? You mean you haven't heard? Yes it's true, well to some people it is.

Over the years I've had so much stuff just show up in my e-mail. Some of it ordinary spam others presents from admirers, good and bad. Most the time I just delete it or send it to bulk mail. A couple of months ago a news letter began to appear. The things they were saying were so outlandishly right wing that I had to keep it, for comic relief if nothing else.

Here comes the calvary. Even though this was, up until now, a dead story, leave it to right wings mouthpieces to re-hash, and exhibit unrivaled hypocrisy.

The more she talks, the deeper she digs ....

Once upon a time, Charles Barkley claimed to have been misquoted in his own autobiography ... Well, today Ms. Coulter pulled the same stunt.  And, in so doing, she's dug herself into even deeper a hole.

In response to the National Jewish Democratic Council's (NJDC) call for media outlets to stop booking Ann as a guest Coulter told NewsMax that she was misquoted by NJDC (which is NOT true -- more on this in a moment).

Next Coulter proceeded to shoot herself in the other foot by saying:

"Let's rewrite the NJDC statement to refer to what I actually said: 'How does someone who says it would be better if everyone were a Christian or practicing Jew continue to receive a megaphone and platform from the news networks? When will the media say ‘enough is enough’?

"Who's engaging in hate speech now?" she asked

Umm, Ann ... YOU ARE!

The very first thing I want to say in this diary is to take it with a very large grain of salt. That is because it is from a gossip column in a Murdoch-owned paper, that quotes NewsMax as a source! Anyhow that being said, there is so much to be ourtaged at in such a short paragraph, that I don't know where to start.

I am also not sure how fair-use comes into play here, given that the whole thing is only a paragraph long.

All that said, it seems the Iraqi's are spending $40 million to renevate their NYC digs:

(Cross-posted from My Left Nutmeg.)

Our favorite senator is this month's Newsmax magazine cover boy, having given an "exclusive" interview to the right wing equivalent of the Weekly World News where bashes George Soros as "anti-American" in between reciting other Administration talking points verbatim and receiving some embarrassingly over-the-top verbal fellatio:

The folks at NewsMax launched their response to Al Franken's announcement that he was running for Coleman's Senate seat with the same sort of wit as exhibited (and panned) on the sample of Fux's 1/2 Hour News Hour.

Hoping to reprise such classics as 'Kerry, the dishonorable hero' (SwiftLiars, 2006), their offering consists primarily of quotes from either his many books or his show.  Most lines leave me wondering why that line was worthy of mention, like:

"When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both."

— Franken's book "Oh, the Things I Know"

"No child left behind is the most ironically named piece of legislation since the 1942 Japanese Family Leave Act."

— speech at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2003

"There's no liberal echo chamber in this country. There's a right-wing echo chamber. I want to create a countervailing echo chamber."

— interview with the Chicago Tribune

http://www.newsmax.com/...

And such is the conservative grasp of irony and hypocrisy.

I was just voting on the NewsMax site (to which I have given my fake email address in order to see what the nutsacks of the world are up to), and after I voted, I ended up on this hilarious page.  They appear to be serious.

Ann Coulter's new book is selling so well, that they've discounted it to $4.99.  Act Now!

Generally speaking Profiling is a bad thing. It's a shortcut, a cheat.  The Automatic judgement about one particular class or group of people, regardless of their own individual characterists is stereotyping - it's bigotry.  Plain and simple.  

Or is it that simple?

The GOP certainly seemed to be quite fond of the idea when it comes to law enforcement and terrorism, yet completely allergic to it when it applies to hiring, lending and apartment hunting.

There's even been a bill recently introduced - with bipartisan support - that would allow racial and ethnic profiling of Muslims.

On last nights Hannity and Colmes the argument was put foward without hestitation that we need to focus on who these terrorist are.  "They aren't going to send a 70-year-old woman out as a Suicide Bomber?"

Well, actually they just might do exactly that - particularly if they know were busy looking the other way.  In fact, they just might have started already.

Wingnut website NewsMax is an abomination. Yet it serves a useful purpose: if you want to know whether a putative Democrat has stabbed the party in the back recently, you probably can find his or her latest screed there.

And as should be expected, former New York City mayor and full-time Bush asskisser Ed Koch is a frequent contributor to NewsMax. And as also should be expected, Koch fully backs an independent bid by Joe Lieberman.

Oh, Koch still loves Hillary Clinton even though she cut a $5K check to Ned Lamont last night. But first things first for the ex-mayor: he must work to get Lieberman elected before he lends his turncoat support to others. File what follows under "you couldn't make this shit up."

Glenn Greenwald has an essential piece on the current movement of far-right and white supremacist tactics into the purported "mainstream" of conservative bloggers -- Front Page Magazine, Michelle Malkin, and others.

I'll quote some key points (all emphases are mine), but you need to go read the whole thing:

One of the favorite tactics used by [white supremacist] groups is to find the home address and telephone number of the latest enemy and then publish it on the Internet, accompanied by impassioned condemnations of that person as a Grave Enemy, a race traitor, someone who threatens all that is good in the world. A handful of the most extremist pro-life groups have used the same tactic. It has happened in the past that those who were the target of these sorts of demonization campaigns that included publication of their home address were attacked and even killed.

But these intimidation tactics work even when nothing happens. Indeed, these groups often publish the enemy's home address along with some cursory caveat that they are not encouraging violence. The real objective is the same one shared by all terrorists -- to place the person in paralyzing fear. [...]

This weekend, prominent neoconservative David Horowitz proclaimed that the United States is fighting a war and "the aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists." In particular, he cited the now infamous NYT Travel section article on Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld's vacation homes as evidence that the employees of the NYT are among the enemies in this war, and he then linked to and recommended as a "proposal for action" this post from his associate, Front Page contributor Rocco DiPippo.  [...]

DiPippo published the home address of NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, along with directions to his home, and linked to a post by right-wing blogger Dan Riehl which contained directions to Sulzberger's home along with photographers of it. In a now-deleted post, DiPippo also published the home address of Linda Spillers, the NYT photographer who took the photograph of Don Rumsfeld's vacation home (with Rumsfeld's express permission), and he urged everyone to go (presumably to the home address he provided) and confront Spillers about her actions.

I want to re-emphasize this point. Rocco DiPippo was, as near as we can tell, the individual who first published the home address and home phone number of the photographer involved in an attempt to solicit an intimidation campaign against her.

This is no low-rung blogger, as most of the far-right bloggers who got caught promoting the campaign against the photographer and NYT staffers tittered in their own defense once things went much too far -- this is a writer for Front Page Magazine. Nearly the entire far-right conservative blogosphere links to them, and protestations of integrity notwithstanding, continues to do so -- in large part because of the far-right tactics of thuggery which Horowitz makes his stock in trade. DiPippo has yet to face any consequences for his actions -- apparently because Horowitz himself was their promoter.

That was not an isolated incident. This week, Bartholomew's Official Notes on Religion reported on the new "project" implemented by the group StopTheACLU.org. As that group describes it, the project is called "Expose the ACLU Plaintiffs," and promises to publish the home addresses of all individuals who are "using the ACLU" in any First Amendment lawsuit based on the Establishment clause which challenges the constitutionality of governmental promotion of Christianity. The first such enemy targeted for this treatment is a Jewish family in Delaware who sued their local school district over its alleged promotion of Christianity in the public schools. [...]

Stop the ACLU is not some fringe, isolated group. To the contrary, the "official blog" of StopTheACLU.org is StopTheACLU.com (h/t Hunter), a very prominent player in the right-wing blogosphere. That blog is the 14th most-linked-to blog on the Internet, and is often promoted and approvingly cited to as a source by numerous right-wing bloggers such as Instapundit and Michelle Malkin. The blog Expose the Left (which aspires to be the C&L of the Right), yesterday condemned the "nutcases on the left side of the blososphere" who "are sending unfounded attacks" against StopTheACLU for this plainly despicable thug behavior.

These self-evidently dangerous tactics are merely a natural outgrowth of the hate-mongering bullying sessions which have become the staple of right-wing television shows such as Bill O'Reilly's and websites such as Michelle Malkin's (who, unsurprisingly, has become one of O'Reilly's favorite guests). One of the most constant features of these hate fests is the singling out of some unprotected, private individual -- a public school teacher here, a university administrator there -- who is dragged before hundreds of thousands of readers (or millions of viewers), accused of committing some grave cultural crime or identified as a subversive and an enemy, and then held out as the daily target of unbridled contempt, a symbol of all that is Evil.

Malkin frequently includes contact information for the identified Enemies, and O'Reilly often shows photographs or video of them on multiple programs. These bullying tactics of intimidation -- whereby people who are often just private individuals and who have no defenses (as opposed to, say, prominent politicians or media figures) are singled out for widespread public rituals of contempt -- have quite foreseeable consequences, chief among them placing those targets in fear of retribution. Publishing the home addresses of such individuals is not some wholly different approach, but is merely the next small and foreseeable step, an obvious outgrowth of the hate sessions on which many leading representatives of the Right now heavily rely.

The critical point here, just in case anyone is still unclear, is that the far-right tactics of thuggery -- tactics mainstreamed directly from white supremacist groups and organized intimidation campaigns meant to endorse and assist assaults and actual murders of abortion doctors -- is now a commonplace and eagerly embraced tool for the online so-called "conservative" movement. It simply can't be denied or dismissed as elements of an unknown "fringe" -- look at any right-wing blog, and you'll see links to, advertisements for, or endorsements of the above sites and, in many cases, explicit endorsements of the very "outing" campaigns that they are becoming known for.

Malkin, FrontPage, StopTheACLU, and similar sites are among the most prominent destinations on the right, attracting large hives of supporters that then move the themes of thuggery and intimidation throughout the movement. They're the cornerstones around which the online far-right is built. In other smaller cells of the movement, linking to and being promoted in turn by the "big boys", the racist targeting (primarily against Muslims) becomes even more pronounced, and the rhetoric of violence leaps from the implicit thuggery of the "prime" sites into the more blunt and explicit pronouncements of the far-right underbelly that represents their targeted readership.

These aren't isolated incidents. This is the face of right-wing extremism as it attempts to mainstream itself through figures like Horowitz, Malkin, and a variety of others. And the conservative blogosphere endorses it, promotes it, assists it, and applauds it when it happens.

Read Glenn's entire piece, and internalize it.

Updating this story about the far-right smear campaign that went much, much too far, here's the current status. After the news that both Rumsfeld's office and the Secret Service considered the "story" to be a non-story, and gave the photographer permission for the supposedly terrorist-enabling pic in question, the story on the right melted into little more than the usual blustering and outrage.

Jonah Goldberg, called out in the earlier story, has updated his post with a correction. Good for him.

RedState has continued to post their petulant outrage at me, personally, and still refuses to issue a correction of their fraudulent story or a condemnation of bloggers on their side of the aisle that issued addresses and threats -- though a diarist on their site did so for them.

David Horowitz has posted a rebuttal essentially saying that even though he was wrong on the facts, perhaps Rumsfeld was intimidated into giving the Travel section permission to photograph his house, and appears to stand by and enhance his basic delusional premise that the puff piece was an intentional hit against Rumsfeld -- a danger that apparently neither the Department of Defense or the Secret Service was able to see when giving permission for the piece. No condemnation whatsoever, quite notably, of the actions of one of his own "reporters", who in a crass intimidation attempt posted the personal information of the photographer involved.

Michelle Malkin responds in a rambling and self-absorbed post that barely -- barely -- admits the fact that the article was done with the permission of Rumsfeld and the Secret Service, and continues the Horwitzian premise undaunted. She can't quite manage a direct condemnation, either, instead referencing times when figures on the left did similar stunts against the right. (Publishing addresses of figures on the right like Malkin and the Swift Boaters, that is, not promoting fabricated stories in an attempt to incite or declaring children fair game.)

(Of course, Malkin can't post much about this, since she spent today at a Freeper protest of the "treasonous" New York Times that attracted fewer participants than a Little League softball game.)

Let me show people how it's done, since apparently this is harder than it looks.

The Secret Service can't believe the crazies are upset over the NY Times travel section photos.

A spokesperson for the Secret Service has told me that the New York Times article providing details about the homes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld is not a security threat, as many conservative commentators have been trying to argue.

Relatedly, Rumsfeld's spokesperson also confirmed to me that his office gave a Times photographer permission to photograph his home [...]

But I just got through talking with Hollen Wheeler, director of public affairs for Rumsfeld's office. She confirmed what Glenn Greenwald has reported -- that the photographer, Linda Spillers, had been granted permission to photograph Rumsfeld's house by Rumsfeld himself.

"She got approval to take a picture," Wheeler told me. "She called, we said fine, go take the picture. And that's it."

Wheeler also added of the picture: "It's already out in the public domain. I'm a little confused about why this has caused such an uproar." [...]

I also checked in with Jonathan Cherry, a spokesperson for the Secret Service, which guards Cheney [...]

[W]hen I asked him directly whether the story posed a security threat, Cherry emailed:

No, it is not a threat.

That's why people take the right-wing bloggers as seriously as tin foil hat conspiracy theorists.

I referred yesterday to one of the most current bugaboos of the far right, the notion that the New York Times had "outed" the St. Michaels, Maryland vacation homes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in a Travel section story about the small town -- a fact that had been reported repeatedly, in the press, including by conservative crank sites such as NewsMax. They were especially incensed at a picture of Rumsfeld's driveway that accompanied the article.

As Glenn Greenwald and others have documented, the supposed "outrage" was completely bogus. That did not, however, stop far-right bloggers from posting the home addresses, home telephone numbers, maps, and other personal information of not just the New York Times figures involved, but also calls for more personal actions to be taken:

Let's start with the following New York Times reporters and editors: Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., Bill Keller, Eric Lichtblau, and James Risen. Do you have an idea where they live?

Go hunt them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous - grab for the golden ring.

There's still another apparent problem, though, in addition to the obvious horror of the above statement and the simple fact that the original "outrage" was transparently bogus from inception.

Greenwald did something that the entire far-right movement never thought of. He contacted the photographer, and learned an interesting fact:

Ironically, photos were taken with Secretary Rumsfeld's permission.

[Greg Sargent at the Prospect has now confirmed this with Rumsfeld's office -- Hunter]

So it wasn't just an overhyped story. It was false, in premise and in reporting. That Rumsfeld and Cheney owned lavish vacation homes in St. Michaels has been a well-reported story since last year: the photographer took the photo in question with the explicit permission of Donald Rumsfeld.

What do you think has happened since then? Have prominent right-wing bloggers who egged their more thuggish far-right readers on by promoting this bogus and fabricated "story" issued corrections? Have they spoken up against members of their blogosphere who posted personal information or made threats against the photographer, reporters, or New York Times editors involved?

Nope.

Michelle Malkin has so far issued no correction, and is for now ignoring the fact that, once again, a story she hyped and over-the-top actions she incited were based on false information. Again.

Powerline has issued no correction, and is similarly ignoring the episode.

RedState, on the other hand, has posted three responses to being called out for their promotion of a faked story. Twice to be outraged at my naughty words and insolence; once to defend Online Integrity by saying that while they are signatories, it doesn't apply in this case either, so there.

And yet, in all those posts, no correction as to the facts of their puffed-up story. None. And quite notably in the string of posts -- no condemnation of the actions of the conservative bloggers in question.

NewsMax? No correction. No condemnation of the thuggery.

Front Page Magazine? No correction. No condemnation of the thuggery.

Jonah Goldberg? Oh, he's jumped on with both webbed feet. He's so late to the party they're already trying to get the spilled punch off the floor, and he's down there trying to suck it out of the carpet.

More below the fold...