Fuck its silent in here.......

[Slaky]

I have always assumed that if Glen Beck called someone a Neo-Nazi it was intended as a compliment. 

That's not a farfetched assumption.

I just heard the tape on the radio.  He said, "I don't know these people at all.  That one's Madona.  I think that one (Urlacher) is a neo-Nazi."

Does he really think he's being cute by being flippant about people he admits he doesn't know who they are even by sight?  What does this say about the people who listen to him?  About the network that gives him airtime?

It says that he has massive ratings and millions of people find him entertaining as hell.

[Quality Start Machine]

I have always assumed that if Glen Beck called someone a Neo-Nazi it was intended as a compliment. 

That's not a farfetched assumption.

I just heard the tape on the radio.  He said, "I don't know these people at all.  That one's Madona.  I think that one (Urlacher) is a neo-Nazi."

Does he really think he's being cute by being flippant about people he admits he doesn't know who they are even by sight?  What does this say about the people who listen to him?  About the network that gives him airtime?

It says that he has massive ratings and millions of people find him entertaining as hell.

Most of Beck's viewers want to be affirmed, not entertained.

[Slaky]

I have always assumed that if Glen Beck called someone a Neo-Nazi it was intended as a compliment. 

That's not a farfetched assumption.

I just heard the tape on the radio.  He said, "I don't know these people at all.  That one's Madona.  I think that one (Urlacher) is a neo-Nazi."

Does he really think he's being cute by being flippant about people he admits he doesn't know who they are even by sight?  What does this say about the people who listen to him?  About the network that gives him airtime?

It says that he has massive ratings and millions of people find him entertaining as hell.

Most of Beck's viewers want to be affirmed, not entertained.

I'd believe they get both of that. My family loves these clowns. It's essentially watching them spout their nonsense and yelling "YES! THAT'S SO RIGHT!" Then they regurgitate it back to me because I "love Obama".

[J. Walter Weatherman]

Well the obvious silence about Journolist members conspiring to call people racists to deflect attention away from their favored candidates is pretty telling around here. When something you know is wrong, but can't bring yourself to say is wrong, it becomes non-news to you guys. Just like Journolist members wanting to change the subject. Fuck its silent in here.......

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/when_tucker_carlson_asked_to_j.html

I hoped to let my quick accounting of the constant inaccuracies in the Daily Caller's selective quotations from Journolist stand as my last word on the matter. But Tucker Carlson's sanctimonious and evasive statement on the way his site has been covering this story deserves a response. So allow me one more post.

Tucker's note doesn't bother to mention the actual questions that have been raised: That his stories have misstated fact, misled readers, and omitted evidence that would contradict his thesis. He doesn't explain how a thread in which no journalists suggested shutting down Fox News can be headlined "Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News." He doesn't tell us why an article about the open letter that originated on the list left out the fact that I subsequently banned any future letters from the list. He doesn't detail why his stories haven't mentioned that one of his own reporters was on the list -- his readers would presumably be interested to know that the Daily Caller was part of the liberal media conspiracy.

Instead, Tucker says, well, trust him. "I edited the first four stories myself," he writes, "and I can say that our reporter Jonathan Strong is as meticulous and fair as anyone I have worked with."

If this series now rests on Tucker's credibility, then let's talk about something else he doesn't mention: I tried to add him to the list. I tried to give him access to the archives. Voluntarily. Because though I believed it was important for the conversation to be off-the-record, I didn't believe there was anything to hide.

...

I then wrote this e-mail to Journolist:

As folks know, there are a couple of rules for J List membership. One is that you can't be working for the government. Another is that you're center to left of center, as that was something various people wanted back in the day. [Update: I should also note that I didn't allow media reporters onto the list, just so I've got all the rules down.] I've gotten a couple of recent requests from conservatives who want to be added (and who are people I think this list might benefit from), however, and so it seems worth asking people whether they'd like to see the list opened up. Back in the day, I'd probably have let this lie, but given that Journolist now leaks like a sieve, it seems worth revisiting some of the decisions made when it was meant to be a more protected space.

As I see it, the pro of this is that it could make for more fun conversations. The con of it is that it becomes hard to decide who to add and who to leave off (I don't want to have to make subjective judgments, but I'm also not going to let Michelle Malkin hop onto the list), and it also could create even more possible leaks -- and now, they'd be leaks with more of an agenda, which could be much more destructive to trust on the list.

I want to be very clear about what I was suggesting: Adding someone to the list meant giving them access to the entirety of the archives. That didn't bother me very much. Sure, you could comb through tens of thousands of e-mails and pull intemperate moments and inartful wording out of context to embarrass people, but so long as you weren't there with an eye towards malice, you'd recognize it for what it was: A wonkish, fun, political yelling match. If it had been an international media conspiracy, I'd have never considered opening it up.

The idea was voted down. People worried about opening the archives to individuals who could help their careers by ripping e-mails out of context, misrepresenting the nature of the ongoing conversation, and bringing the world an exclusive look into The Great Journolist Conspiracy, as opposed to the daily life of Journolist, which even Carlson describes as "actually pretty banal."

Apologetically, I went back to Tucker and delivered the bad news. But I still liked the idea of a broader e-mail list, and I offered to partner with him to start one. "There was interest," I told him, "in creating a separate e-mail forum with a more bipartisan flavor (such that Journolist could keep its character, but something else could provide the service we're talking about), and if that's something you want to do, I'd be glad to work on it with you."

...

[J. Walter Weatherman]

(continuing)

... At every turn, he's known about evidence that substantially complicates his picture of an international media conspiracy. He knows I tried to let him in, odd behavior for someone with so much to hide and so much to lose. He knows I let one of his reporters remain a member. He knows I banned -- and enforced the ban -- on the sort of coordinated letter that served as example one of the list's conspiracy. He knows -- and never, to my knowledge, corrected -- that his reporter misrepresented the dates of Dave Weigel's posts to make it look like things he wrote at the Washington Independent were written at the Washington Post. And that's not even to mention the more prosaic deceptions of his selective choice of threads, truncated quotations, and misleading headlines.

When I e-mailed him to ask about some of these omissions, his response was admission mixed with misdirection. "I don't have nearly the grounding in this that Strong does, but according to him you often come off as a voice for moderation, and I'm pretty sure he will make that clear in a subsequent story." Ah, the old "we'll be more truthful later."

Tucker chose the good story over the real story. His traffic numbers reflect the popularity of his choice. Journolist has taken the Daily Caller from about 50,000 hits a day to more than 200,000. There are a lot more answers in those numbers, I fear, than in his editor's note.

[Slaky]

For whatever it's worth, just on entertainment alone, I found this amusing:

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/ex-tea-party-spokesman-mark-williams

[Wheezer]

For whatever it's worth, just on entertainment alone, I found this amusing:

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/ex-tea-party-spokesman-mark-williams

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4e9SUwL4JM

[J. Walter Weatherman]

For whatever it's worth, just on entertainment alone, I found this amusing:

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/ex-tea-party-spokesman-mark-williams

Somewhat relatedly, this is the lamest attempt to smear Shirley Sherrod I've seen yet...

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/26/sherrod-story-false/

It isn't true.

Shirley Sherrod's story in her now famous speech about the lynching of a relative is not true. The veracity and credibility of the onetime Agriculture Department bureaucrat at the center of the explosive controversy between the NAACP and conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart is now directly under challenge. By nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court. All of them dead.

...

In her speech, Ms. Sherrod says this:

I should tell you a little about Baker County. In case you don't know where it is, it's located less than 20 miles southwest of Albany. Now, there were two sheriffs from Baker County that -- whose names you probably never heard but I know in the case of one, the thing he did many, many years ago still affect us today. And that sheriff was Claude Screws. Claude Screws lynched a black man. And this was at the beginning of the 40s. And the strange thing back then was an all-white federal jury convicted him not of murder but of depriving Bobby Hall -- and I should say that Bobby Hall was a relative -- depriving him of his civil rights.

Plain as day, Ms. Sherrod says that Bobby Hall, a Sherrod relative, was lynched. As she puts it, describing the actions of the 1940s-era Sheriff Claude Screws: "Claude Screws lynched a black man."

This is not true. It did not happen...

This sounds like some hard-hitting stuff.

What's his evidence that she fabricated the "lynching" story?

How do we know this?

The case, Screws vs. the U.S. Government, as she accurately says in the next two paragraphs, made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Which, with the agreement of all nine Justices of the day -- which is to say May 7, 1945 -- stated the facts of the killing of Bobby Hall this way:

The arrest was made late at night at Hall's home on a warrant charging Hall with theft of a tire. Hall, a young negro about thirty years of age, was handcuffed and taken by car to the courthouse. As Hall alighted from the car at the courthouse square, the three petitioners began beating him with their fists and with a solid-bar blackjack about eight inches long and weighing two pounds. They claimed Hall had reached for a gun and had used insulting language as he alighted from the car. But after Hall, still handcuffed, had been knocked to the ground, they continued to beat him from fifteen to thirty minutes until he was unconscious. Hall was then dragged feet first through the courthouse yard into the jail and thrown upon the floor, dying. An ambulance was called, and Hall was removed to a hospital, where he died within the hour and without regaining consciousness. There was evidence that Screws held a grudge against Hall, and had threatened to "get" him.

...

In other words, the Supreme Court of the United States, with the basic facts of the case agreed to by all nine Justices in Screws vs. the U.S. Government, says not one word about Bobby Hall being lynched. Why? Because it never happened.

So why in the world would Ms. Sherrod say something like this?

No idea...

You can't make this up.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

He then goes on for another 3000 words about "what appears to be a straight-out fabrication" by "a liberal or progressive political activist" who appears "prone to exaggeration if not worse."

You know... Because Bobby Hall's extrajudicial killing at the hands of a mob and with the complicity of white authorities didn't even involve a rope at all. The nerve of this woman who "stood up in front of the NAACP and said something that was completely, totally, untrue"!

Again, I have no idea what Sherrod's motivation in saying something so factually untrue could be. Is she simply ignorant of the facts? A serial exaggerator who got caught? A political activist hard at work spinning for credibility? No idea. I simply know she said something --indeed made a big deal of it -- that is factually, provably untrue.

And her new liberal media buddies, predictably, are unwilling to call her on it.

There's more.

Typical liberal media buddies.

The "there's more" is another fact that Sherrod lied about, this time through omission—a damning truth that liberal or progressive political activists don't want you to know: namely, that Hugo Black, Robert Byrd and Richard Russell, Jr. all prove that liberals and progressives are the real racists.

Shameful.

But there's hope.

There is no reason in the world this episode cannot move race relations forward. Ms. Sherrod seems like a good person. But as with alcoholics and drug addicts, those addicted to the potent political cocktail of the progressive racism variety need somehow to be able to summon the guts to stand up and say the problem is not with Fox News or Andrew Breitbart or Tea Parties or anyone else.

Fox News and Andrew Breitbart are not the ones who killed Bobby Hall and then overturned his conviction.

Fox News and Andrew Breitbart are not the ones who killed Shirley Sherrod's father in 1965.

And Fox News and Andrew Breitbart are not the ones who went out of their way to honor Hugo Black and Richard Russell with a Supreme Court nomination and the naming of a Senate Office Building.

We know who did these things. And when Shirley Sherrod finally gets a minute's peace -- so should she.

Then we can all finally move on from our shameful progressive racist past.

[CT III]

Whatever Tank.  Anything you can do to distract from the fact that all those liberal journalists you voted for are attempting to make us all queer.

[R-V]

He then goes on for another 3000 words about "what appears to be a straight-out fabrication" by "a liberal or progressive political activist" who appears "prone to exaggeration if not worse."

You know... Because Bobby Hall's extrajudicial killing at the hands of a mob and with the complicity of white authorities didn't even involve a rope at all. The nerve of this woman who "stood up in front of the NAACP and said something that was completely, totally, untrue"!

Again, I have no idea what Sherrod's motivation in saying something so factually untrue could be. Is she simply ignorant of the facts? A serial exaggerator who got caught? A political activist hard at work spinning for credibility? No idea. I simply know she said something --indeed made a big deal of it -- that is factually, provably untrue.

And her new liberal media buddies, predictably, are unwilling to call her on it.

There's more.

Typical liberal media buddies.

The "there's more" is another fact that Sherrod lied about, this time through omission—a damning truth that liberal or progressive political activists don't want you to know: namely, that Hugo Black, Robert Byrd and Richard Russell, Jr. all prove that liberals and progressives are the real racists.

Shameful.

But there's hope.

There is no reason in the world this episode cannot move race relations forward. Ms. Sherrod seems like a good person. But as with alcoholics and drug addicts, those addicted to the potent political cocktail of the progressive racism variety need somehow to be able to summon the guts to stand up and say the problem is not with Fox News or Andrew Breitbart or Tea Parties or anyone else.

Fox News and Andrew Breitbart are not the ones who killed Bobby Hall and then overturned his conviction.

Fox News and Andrew Breitbart are not the ones who killed Shirley Sherrod's father in 1965.

And Fox News and Andrew Breitbart are not the ones who went out of their way to honor Hugo Black and Richard Russell with a Supreme Court nomination and the naming of a Senate Office Building.

We know who did these things. And when Shirley Sherrod finally gets a minute's peace -- so should she.

Then we can all finally move on from our shameful progressive racist past.

I'm kind of disappointed Taibbi didn't wait a couple days to write this so he could have included Lord's jaw-dropping obliviousness in it.

On the Tea Party side, I've decided it isn't even necessary to have the debate over whether or not the Tea Partiers are racists. It's enough to point out that the Tea Party and its sympathizers contain too many people like Andrew Breitbart (the idiot blogger from the Big Government website who originally posted the Sherrod video), Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck, all of whom popped huge public woodies the moment the Sherrod video surfaced.

It's just not necessary to say whether or not these people are racists. All that needs to be pointed out is that when they get a chance to gape at a video purporting to show a black Obama official confessing to having mistreated a white farmer (it turned out to be the opposite of that, of course), or a tape of Black Panther King Shamir talking about "killing cracker babies," the word that best describes the emotions they display at these times is glee.

They enjoy these morbid stories about offenses to white dignity way too much. I caught Glenn Beck talking about some case involving a Black Panther who was intimidating people at a voting booth back in 2008 – the guy had this pervy smile on his face that made him look exactly like one of those creepy dudes sitting hunched over at the edge of the bed playing the cuckold in cheating-wife porn videos. Over the Black Panthers! Who the hell has even seen a Black Panther since the seventies? The whole thing reminds me of that Chris Rock routine about Native Americans – "When was the last time you saw two Indians?"

[J. Walter Weatherman]

For what it's worth:

http://spectator.org/blog/2010/07/26/sherrod-story-true

What on Earth is Jeffrey Lord talking about on the mainpage? He says that the sentence "Claude Screws lynched a black man" is untrue. Lynching is defined as an extrajudicial killing by a mob (which can be as few as two people). The fatal beating of Bobby Hall most certainly qualifies.  Radley Balko expounds on the specifics, but honestly, even if you mistakenly believe that only hanging qualifies as lynching (which, again, is simply not true), zeroing in on this particular hair as one worth splitting strikes me as utterly bizarre.

http://spectator.org/blog/2010/07/26/taking-issue-with-jeff-lord

A regular part of writing for a political magazine or website is that you sometimes disagree with what is written, or even with decisions to publish certain articles. Such is my sentiment today with Jeff Lord's  piece on Shirley Sherrod. I am rendered speechless by a 4,000-word article that is based around the suggestion that somebody is a liar for saying that a black man was lynched, when he was merely beaten to death by a white sheriff who evidence suggests had previously threatened to "get him."

[Canadouche]

Beck is a genius panderer who, let's face it, probably believes about 25% of what he says.  And he's rich because of it. 

Keep that in mind -- if you can figure out a way to say things that fill people like MikeC with unbridled joy and affirmation, and if you can say it to a large enough audience, you'll be rich. 

[J. Walter Weatherman]

Beck is a genius panderer who, let's face it, probably believes about 25% of what he says.

That's more Bill O'Reilly's game: pure cynicism.

I'm fairly confident that Beck is a genuinely crazy person who gets high on his own supply of bullshit.

[Canadouche]

Beck is a genius panderer who, let's face it, probably believes about 25% of what he says.

That's more Bill O'Reilly's game: pure cynicism.

I'm fairly confident that Beck is a genuinely crazy person who gets high on his own supply of bullshit.

He cries on command.  And he actually rehearses it first.