Your Move, Bill

So professional gadfly Bill Donohue tried to get some (more) attention for himself yesterday by calling on the DNC to disinvite progressive bloggers who are credentialed for the convention who don't meet his ethical standards. Because, you know, organizations are always putting litmus tests on the journalists who cover them. I only mention this because of this awesome reply from one of the bloggers cited.

"If Donohue is so focused on sex," Towleroad's Andy Towle responded on Monday, "his time would be better focused on healing the epidemic of sexual abuse against children by clergy in the Catholic church, and considering the facts on the use of condoms, which the Church has said have no effect on the prevention of AIDS, rather than attempting to influence American politics by limiting the Democratic ideals of free speech, inclusion and tolerance."

It is to laugh.

Protecting Expert Bloggers

David Appell thinks the blogosphere sucks because sometimes bloggers have opinions about which they are not complete experts. Horrors! While there is no substitute for experience, this is probably a pretty common lament of those self-described "experts" who are horrified that the rabble is thinking on their own rather than feeding on expert information like birds. Chris Bowers deals with this nicely, but I would add that there are plenty of bloggers who ARE experts in their respective fields, be it the numbers of politics, the environment, health care, foreign policy, Iraq, what have you, and who do offer insight that you would only find in obscure academic journals, and they can make it accessible and edifying, and help those of us dilettantes with working out these issues. For instance, without someone like Pam Spaulding, who gets a nice profile from her local newspaper in Raleigh, I would lose a crucial perspective on LGBT issues and would find it more difficult to work out my own opinions on that subject, which is virtually uncovered in major media.

Another one of these experts is the science blogger PZ Myers, who has roiled professional outrage specialist William Donohue of the Catholic League by calling a Eucharist a cracker. No, really.

Here's a story that will destroy your hopes for a reasonable humanity.

"Webster Cook says he smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn't eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it."

This isn't the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. It is just a cracker! [...]

Would you believe this isn't hyperbole? People around the world are actually extremely angry about this — Webster Cook has been sent death threats over his cracker.

He then asked his readers to send him a Eucharist wafer so he could do rude things with it on YouTube, which I think is where Donohue's head exploded. They're now trying to bully Myers and are demanding that he be fired. He needs some help:

So far today, I have received 39 pieces of personal hate mail of varying degrees of literacy, all because I was rude to a cracker. Four of them have included death threats, a personal one day record. Thirty-four of them have demanded that I be fired. Twenty-five of them have told me to desecrate a copy of the Koran, instead, or in some similar way offend Muslims, because — in a multiplicity of ironic cluelessness — apparently only some religious icons must be protected, and I would only offend Catholics because they are all so nice that none of them would wish me harm. I even have one email that says I should be fired, that the author would like to kill me, and that I only criticize because Catholics are so gentle and kind.

Oh, and of course, the university president's office has also received lots of mail demanding my immediate ouster (keep in mind, though…Catholics are no threat to anyone at all.) I don't know how much, but since Donohue published the president's email address and not mine, I imagine it's much greater than what I've seen. Those lovely Dark Age fanatics at the Catholic League have started a write-in campaign to start up an inquisition.

So no poll-crashing today. Instead, I would appreciate it if you would write a short note to President Robert Bruininks in support (he's going to hate me for this). I have to ask for a few constraints, though: only do so if you are willing to sign a real name to it — most of the complaint mail I'm getting uses fake names, making it much less persuasive — and that, unlike the religious screeds I'm seeing, you take the time to proofread and send him something that at least looks like a high school graduate wrote it, which will put you way above the level of the hate mail. Be polite and rational, too!

You can email him at: bruin001-at-umn-dot-edu. Myers is a really good science blogger who has the gift of lucidity, and he doesn't deserve this kind of harassment.

Hagee-ography

This story that John McCain is endorsing an end-time Rapturist and anti-Catholic is starting to get some traction.

Calling Pastor John Hagee a "bigot," the conservative Catholic League is calling for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to denounce/renounce/reject his endorsement Wednesday.

With a Youtube link to prove his point, Catholic League president Bill Donohue said Hagee "has waged an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church. For example, he likes calling it 'The Great Whore,' an 'apostate church,' the 'anti-Christ,' and a 'false cult system.' ..."Senator Obama has repudiated the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, another bigot. McCain should follow suit and retract his embrace of Hagee."

Today Donohue noted that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee expressed disappointment that he hadn't received Hagee's backing.

"If Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama were fighting over the support of Louis Farrakhan, we'd say they're nuts," Donohue said. "So what are we to conclude about McCain's embrace of Hagee, and Huckabee's lament for not getting the bigot's endorsement?"

Glenn Greenwald did an interview with Bill Donohue yesterday. Donohue is a nutcase, but he can get press attention as well as anyone I've seen. This isn't likely to go away.

There are pictures of McCain with Hagee, video of McCain happily accepting Hagee's endorsement, and even today, McCain gave a weaselly "I don't endorse everything he says" comment:

"Well I think it's important to note that.pastor john Hagee ..who has supported and endorsed my candidacy supports what I stand for and believe in. When he endorses me, it does not mean that I embrace everything that he stands for and believes. And I am very proud of the Pastor John Hagee's spiritual leadership to thousands of people and I am proud of his commitment to the independence and the freedom of the state of Israel. That does not mean that I support or endorse or agree with some of the things that Pastor John Hagee might have said or positions that he may have taken on other issues. I don't have to agree with everyone who endorses my candidacy. They are supporting MY candidacy. I am not endorsing some of their positions."

Let's make this clear: Louis Farrakhan is well past his prime and yet his endorsement of Barack Obama sparked a continuing firestorm, despite the fact that Obama fully distanced himself from it. McCain is accepting Hagee's endorsement. This is a guy who believes in Armageddon and worse.

CUFI's politics, as compared to average political views of Jewish Americans, veer far to the right, lie along the extreme end of the theocratic spectrum and espouse an intransigent and radically bellicose approach to Mideast politics. CUFI is allied with the hard Israeli right and, most recently, has been organizing to block efforts by the current Olmert administration, writes journalist Bill Berkowitz, towards any Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that would divide Jerusalem. CUFI's extremity goes beyond the politics of its allies in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud Party - one of CUFI's key founding executive board members, Jerry Falwell, once preached that "millions of Jews will be slaughtered", called Jews "spiritually blind" and stated, in 1999, that the coming 'anti-Christ' Falwell expected would be a Jew. CUFI regional director George Morrison has predicted "another Holocaust" and another regional director, Dr. Chuck Missler, currently sells an audio lecture series entitled "The Next Holocaust" and has said that Auschwitz was "just a prelude". In his 2006 book "Jerusalem Countdown", Pastor John Hagee's seemed to blame Jews for the [last] Holocaust (for disobeying God) and identify Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust as God's way of driving Jews to settle in Palestine. He has called also liberal Jews "poisoned". The core of the following assembled material I put together, last fall, for the benefit of a potential financial benefactor, to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who- as a Jewish-American -was torn between concern over the growing influence of Christian fundamentalism in the US military and loyalty to Jewish groups and institutions in his area which had received financial support from Christians United For Israel and its supporters.

John McCain's judgment is to welcome the support of someone this divisive and hateful. Let's remember this.

Please Try To Ban My Blog, William Donohue

There's no such thing as bad publicity:

An anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ infuriated Catholics and even led to threats, but the artist says offers to buy or exhibit the piece have been pouring in.

Artist Cosimo Cavallaro said Saturday that because of "some people who are fanatics" and the threats he received, he had stored the sculpture in a refrigerated truck in an undisclosed location.

A Manhattan gallery on Friday called off a planned exhibit of the 6-foot sculpture called "My Sweet Lord" amid a deluge of complaints from Catholics, including Cardinal Edward Egan.

They were offended by the confection, which does not include the loincloth typical in religious portrayals of Christ. Many also were outraged that the gallery planned to display the sculpture during Holy Week. The exhibit was to have run from Monday through Easter Sunday inside Manhattan's Roger Smith Hotel.

Why do these religious fanatics make the same mistake every time of publicizing the hell out of things people would otherwise never hear about? Cosimo Cavallaro is about to be made unfathomably rich for making Jesus out of chocolate. Meanwhile, actual artists toil in obscurity. Lesson learned: offend more people.

Time To Stop This

Chris Bowers:

Both Democrats and the netroots won a big victory today when John Edwards refused to cave into the pressure of a right wing smear job [...]

Still, despite our victories, this is far from over. First, because he refused to cave to right-wing pressure and establishment campaign advice, Edwards will receive a significant amount of criticism. When this happens, we need to remember that he stood with us during this fight, and so we have to stand with him against the forthcoming attacks. This goes for everyone, whether or not you are an Edwards supporter. He didn't throw us under the bus, and so we can't let him get thrown under the bus, even--especially--if another Democratic campaign is trying to do the throwing.

Second, while Edwards did not cave into right-wing pressure, which was dutifully stenographed by the media, the power structure that allows Republicans to push any conceivable smear of Democrats and progressives into national focus is still fully operational. The current, bullshit attacks on Pelosi are a case in point. As such, it is time to turn our attention to how this story was reported on in the first place.

It is bitterly ironic that established news outlets are failed to provide context, do proper research, vet sources, and otherwise uphold basic standards of journalism on a story about bloggers. After all, bloggers often receive exactly the same criticisms from the established media. However, few people heard about William Donahue's long history of vicious religious intolerance--instead, they only heard that he was a Catholic who wanted Amanda and Melissa fired. Also, few people heard that John McCain's staff has been criticized for controversies far surpassing this--instead, most were given the impression that this was the first case of a blogger / campaign controversy. Others heard outright falsehoods about the story, such as the notion that Amanda tried to delete her past comments.

BlogPAC, to which I am a donor (little something called disclosure, media), has an email form for you to send the New York Times, AP, MSNBC, CNN, and the other news orgs. who willfully printed the words of William Donohue as if they were the Gospel, as if he's the arbiter of what constitutes moral behavior. I urge you to use the form and let these organizations know that we're not going to take this.

Matt Taibbi, one of my favorite writers working today (even if he speaks to my more cynical side), did a well-regarded article for AlterNet about punishing the right-wing smear merchants and liars. He was responding to the "Barack Obama studied at a madrassah" smear, and I don't know if it applies to this situation, but it's worth thinking about.

I know for sure that if I made a journalistic "mistake" of that magnitude, I'd be spending the rest of my life picking strawberries in the Siberian tundra. Most print journalists I know would expect the same thing; the legal ramifications alone of intentionally going to print with a story that missed by that much would guarantee that 80 cents out of every dollar you made for the next ten years would go to the victim of your libel. That's unless you're Tom Friedman and you can use congenital idiocy as a defense in court.

For some reason, however, we never see full-blown libel suits in high-level political journalism. Moreover, there appears to be a completely different standard for talk-radio and TV talk-show hosts, who are somehow allowed to lie and fuck up with impunity, and still remain employed. I get the feeling that as a society we have decided to give a collective pass to serial media swindlers like Sean Hannity simply because we never expect them to actually document the "facts" that come spewing in mass volumes out of their zoster-covered mouths every day. We actually expect them to pull most of their material out of their asses, and are mostly content to address the problem by pompously correcting their errata post-factum in whiny media-crit outlets like...well, like this one. Actual real punishment never seems to be forthcoming [...]

The lesson of all this -- and of the Iraq war, the Swift Boat controversy, and indeed the whole careers of swine like Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and the like -- is that unless you prevent the lie from coming out to begin with, it doesn't really matter what happens afterward. In the Internet age, and with no kind of regulation of the "facts" that are circulated on afternoon radio, once that genie is out of the bottle, he's staying out [...]

If the press is serious about saving itself as a social institution, it has to start policing its own business. We all have to encourage the likes of Barack Obama to hire the meanest lawyers on the planet and to file the hairiest lawsuits imaginable against the Hannitys, Gibsons, and Savages of the world. We have to impress upon the victims of these broadsides that choosing to ignore that style of libel is a betrayal of the public trust and an act of political cowardice that the rest of us end up paying for in spades. That's the ugly truth: Until one of those monsters goes down in a fireball of punitive litigation, we are all fucked. And it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Obama did appear to get the message by freezing Fox News out of any press availability. Edwards may have to do the same with any organization that continues to print blatant claptrap like the rantings of William Donohue, an anti-Semitic bigot who has the gall to lecture about decency.

Maybe it's by rewarding people like Congressman Anthony Weiner, who went on the floor of the House today and repeatedly used the phrase "Republic Party". Maybe it's contacting reporters directly (all their emails are public) and pitching stories to them the same way the right peddles their nonsense. We simply have to create an environment where those in the media who lie, or commit sins of omission, lose their place in the debate. There has to be an actual consequence for slander.

Ridiculous

So some right-wing loudmouth gets all squishy about John Edwards hiring Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan to blog for them, claims anti-Catholic bias, and the Edwards team capitulates?

The right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps -- John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned.

The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare's Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs. A statement by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan "anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots," and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign.

An Edwards spokesman is saying this isn't true but being very noncommital.

If it is true, it's ridiculous. William Donohue is a bomb-thrower in his own right, as Media Matters documents. Similarly, the McCain campaign has hired a Free Republic denizen whose comments are similarly overheated. My point is, who cares? Why are conservatives allowed to play the martyr by expressing shock at all the mean comments those mean old bloggers are making, and yet never get called on their own comments? Why is this an issue at all?

And I have to say this reflects very badly on the Edwards campaign. The wingnuts on the right are sharks: they'll find any pretense to go after you. Why would you listen to them and heed their calls? This is a total capitulation and it shows not a lack of judgment, but a severe lack of fortitude. Nobody who William Donohue reaches with this nonsense is going to vote for Edwards anyway, period. They end up coming out looking like they gave up in the face of a Swift-Boating. Shame on the Edwards campaign if this is true, for letting Amanda and Melissa hang out to dry for no discernible reason.