Spin - The Art of the Prank

August 20, 2007January 15, 2019

Karl Rove Legacy?

On August 17, 2007, Bill Moyers commented on the Rove Legacy on his PBS Bill Moyers Journal. Yesterday, The Village Voice ran James Ridgeway’s Grime Pays: a chronology cataloging Karl Rove’s “legacy” of dirty political tricks starting in the early 70’s.

Here’s the Moyers video (via MediaChannel.org), followed by a few highlights from the Voice article:

Here are highlights from The Village Voice, Grime Pays article:

1970: Rove pays visit to Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer. Disguised as a volunteer, Rove steals official campaign letterhead and sends out 1,000 invitations to people in the city’s red-light district and soup kitchens, offering “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing” at Dixon headquarters. When hundreds of homeless and alcoholic Chicagoans show up at a fancy Dixon reception, Rove succeeds in embarrassing the candidate. Dixon still wins the election.

1971: Rove drops out of college to devote full time to College Republicans, where he becomes protégé of dirty trickster Lee Atwater, the group’s Southern regional coordinator. Rove becomes executive director, then national chairman.

1972: Under mentorship of dirty trickster Donald Segretti (who later went to jail for Watergate), Rove paints McGovern as “left-wing peacenik,” in spite of McGovern’s World War II stint piloting a B-24. Rove also works as staff assistant to George Bush Sr., then chairman of Republican National Committee (RNC). Continue reading “Karl Rove Legacy?”

August 17, 2007January 15, 2019

Savvy by Proxy

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press
by Jay Rosen
PressThink
August 14, 2007

Conservatives think the ideology of the Washington press corps is liberal. Liberals think the press is conservative in the sense of protecting its place in the political establishment. Karl Rove once said that the press is “less liberal than it is oppositional.” (A fascinating remark coming from Rove, since it apppears to put him at odds with the conservative base.)

Whereas I believe that the real””and undeclared””ideology of American journalism is savviness, and this is what made the press so vulnerable to the likes of Karl Rove.

Savviness! Deep down, that”s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in”” their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it”s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It”s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness””that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political””is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain. Continue reading “Savvy by Proxy”

August 17, 2007January 15, 2019

Next is the Constitution

What edits on Wikipedia have been made by people in congressional offices, the CIA and the Church of Scientology? A new online tool called WikiScanner reveals answers to such questions.

Is The CIA Editing Wikipedia?
by Brian Bergstein
Time.com/AP
August 15, 2007

As the Web encyclopedia that anyone can edit, Wikipedia encourages participants to adopt online user names, but it also lets contributors be identified simply by their computers’ numeric Internet addresses.

Often that does not provide much of a cloak, such as when PCs in congressional offices were discovered to have been involved in Wikipedia entries trashing political rivals.

Those episodes inspired Virgil Griffith, a computer scientist about to enter grad school at CalTech, to automate the process with WikiScanner. (It’s at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr but intense attention has knocked it out of service many times this week.) Read the full story here.

Thanks Toni Dalton

August 16, 2007January 15, 2019

George Wallace for the Big Job

Submitted by Ethan Persoff:
Alabama needs “The Little Judge” – George C. Wallace for the Big Job

Here is a 1960/1961 pro segregation comic book commissioned directly by George Wallace during his campaign for governor of Alabama. This booklet is credited as one of the principle reasons Wallace won the gubernatorial election, later allowing him to become one of the South’s most iconic and hostile voices against intergration and civil rights. George Wallace for the Big Job is also one of the most covered up pieces of comic book history, as most copies were destroyed or hidden away. We present it now, all sixteen pages, in full, for the official and permanent record. Here’s the first page:

For more, visit http://www.ep.tc/georgewallace. This comic is also included as Issue Nineteen of Comics With Problems

[Editor’s Note — According to Wikipedia: “In the late 1970s Wallace became a born-again Christian, and in the same era apologized to black civil rights leaders for his earlier segregationist views, calling these views wrong. Continue reading “George Wallace for the Big Job”

August 6, 2007January 15, 2019

How Much Does the Truth Cost?

Global Warming Is A Hoax*
The Truth About Denial
by Sharon Begley
Newsweek Cover Story
August 6, 2007

*Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change.

Aug. 13, 2007 issue – Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate’s Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with “the overwhelming science out there, the deniers’ days were numbered.” As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. “I realized,” says Boxer, “there was a movement behind this that just wasn’t giving up.” Continue reading “How Much Does the Truth Cost?”