blogger

There has been so much news this week that this story went pretty much unnoticed:

Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist and wife of Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, posted an E-mail exchange between herself and an unnamed, unwitting conservative blogger to her Facebook page Tuesday night.

The blogger emailed Schultz on July 9 to say, smugly: "Dear Ms. Shultz, We are doing an expose on journalists in the elite media who socialize with elected officials they are assigned to cover. We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him. Care to comment?"

Schultz, of course, is married to Brown. She wrote back a day later: "Dear Mr. [Name Deleted]: I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He's really cute. He's also my husband. You know that, right?"

The unnamed blogger has yet to respond back to Connie. Apparently he's in an undisclosed location blaming the liberal media for his mistake.

As you have most likely heard by now Anthony Weiner has admitted to sending the lewd photos of himself over the internet, including the now infamous bulge shot.

I can't begin to explain how frustrating this is. It's not for the main subject of this story, his bulge and internet habits, but rather for his handling of the whole situation. Weiner went out and made false claims of being hacked and a lot of his supporters, including myself, accepted that story. He lied to us all and that is inexcusable.

If Weiner would have come out last week and said "hey I made a stupid mistake and there might be more of these out there. I apologize for this", but he didn't. He became defiant and took to lying, knowing tons more evidence was floating around the inter-tubes.

Stupid? Stupidity doesn't even begin to describe this!

Then we have the whole Andrew Breitbart angle. Breitbart has no journalistic standards what-so-ever and sure didn't exhibit any in the handling of this story, but he did get it right. I know a lot on the left will still take to blaming Breitbart, but let's be honest with ourselves; if some blogger on the left got a picture of Boehner's flannel-clad boner that he sent to some girl, it would be picked up by every other blog on the left. That's the name of the game we all play.

There is one place that I still lay blame on this story and that is with the media. Yeah they should have reported it, but they have also kept on this story non-stop. Part of the blame does go to Weiner and his crap story at the beginning, but this story still garnered much more attention from the media than did the Mark Foley story, which is very similar except the fact that Weiner wasn't engaging in this activity with underage children.

But how does Weiner get off?

Just like deciphering the start of a problem in grade school, you always got to look deep into the facts to distill rightwing rhetoric. Since the Tucson shooting the right has strummed up the chorus to scream and shout that the left needs to stop politicizing the event. While there was some politicization from the left, none of it has been as vitriolic as that coming from the right. It’s the old “practice what I preach, not what I do” rhetoric we have sadly become used to.

I pointed some of this out earlier this week when wingnut blogger Jim Hoft started a big stink saying that President Obama lied at the memorial service when he said Gabby Giffords first opened her eyes. It got so bad that the doctors actually had to stop treating patients to go out and answer questions about it, backing up what the President said. Of course to the right these doctors are nothing but leftist liars, which is really ironic when you think about how the right always says doctors hate Obama because of health care reform.

Sadly though that smear was just the start of it. Jim Hoft is continuing to point out the evils of the memorial event:

Just when you think popular right wing blogger Jim “Dim” Hoft (Gateway Pundit) couldn’t possibly post anything more stupid than his last post, he finds a way to take it to the next level of numbskullitude.

Today’s entry in the “Hoft Chronicles of Sheer Stoopit” has him trying to claim that the White House prompted the audience to applaud at the “Together We Thrive” memorial (with his usual taste and class, Hoft calls it a “pep rally”): If White House Was Surprised by Applause at Tucson Pep Rally… Why Did They Ask For It On Jumbotron?

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy either:

The Republican National Committee has cancelled a fundraiser with conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is under fire for promoting an edited video that falsely portrays former Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod as having boasted about discriminating against a white farmer looking for her assistance.

Breitbart was scheduled to appear with RNC Chairman Michael Steele at a reception later this month in Beverly Hills.

Of course the RNC is treading lightly here. Breitbart is the BFF of the right-wing blogosphere and teabaggers, and the RNC doesn’t want to upset them, so they are in spin mode on the cancellation:

We are working on scheduling and we fully plan to have another event scheduled soon based on our existing trips to California,” an RNC spokesman said in a statement sent to CNN.

The spokesman said the fundraiser was cancelled “To better capitalize on the fall fundraising season that happens post-Labor Day, while also lowering costs by utilizing existing trips to California.”

The party that doesn’t mind spending thousands on strippers is now wanting to lower costs? Sure they are.

Via Techcrunch comes a very interesting story out of Pennsylvania. Republican Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate, Tom Corbett, has subpoenaed Twitter in attempts to identify some anonymous critics:

The account @CasaBlancaPA, whose owner is identified as ‘Signor Ferrari’ (a criminal in the film Casablanca, played by Sydney Greenstreet) on Twitter, links to this blog in the bio section. The blog, hosted on Google’s Blogger service, is dedicated to “exposing the hypocrisy of Tom Corbett” according to its subtitle.

This will be one of those cases to keep an eye on.

One of the bigger wingnut bloggers, Dan Riehl, is out using the horrible accident that Harry Reid’s family was in to push the lie of “death panels”:

Come on, Harry - do your civic duty. The nation's broke and counting on you guy. Pull the plug and get back to work. And don't bill us for a full day today, either. This is no time to be sloughing off. Air freight her home, you can bury her during recess on your own time and dime. Or are you going to bill us for that, too?

And I sit here thinking of how the wingnuts like Malkin go off on hissy fits everytime some anonymous commenter posts on a progressive blog saying they wish Cheney’s last heart attack would have done him in, or that Rush would have died in the hospital. These people aren’t just hypocrites, they are sick and twisted assholes.

This is just to priceless:

The FBI, alleging a plot to wiretap Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's office in downtown New Orleans, arrested four people Monday, including James O'Keefe, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group's credibility.

FBI Special Agent Steven Rayes alleges that O'Keefe aided and abetted two others, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, who dressed up as employees of a telephone company and attempted to interfere with the office's telephone system.

A fourth person, Stan Dai, was accused of aiding and abetting Basel and Flanagan. All four were charged with entering fedral property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

James O’Keefe is a blogger for Andrew Brietbart’s BigGovernment web site and was one of the filmmakers who “exposed” ACORN. Over night O’Keefe became a hero of the right. I wonder how they will treat him now?

Last November a document got leaked out, which outlined a new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) being authored by the Obama administration. The internet part of this is really infuriating:

• * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
• * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
• * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
• * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)