Earlier this week, Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) went on MSNBC's Morning Joe and made some rather reasonable remarks about the racists who hate Obama: They exist, he said, and some of them go to town hall meetings. But not everyone who hates Obama is a racist.

But that was too much for the GOP, which seized on the comments and started sending the video around, saying, "Tom Perriello thinks we're all racists!" A "tipster" sent the video to Politico's Glenn Thrush, who found it "interesting" inasmuch as it was an opportunity to WIN THE DAY by talking about race all the time.

Here's what Thrush saw Perriello say when he played the video:

I conducted over a hundred hours of town hall meetings in my district in central and Southern Virginia, and the vast majority of them were civil; people disagreed passionately on ideological grounds. And there were the rare cases where very racist remarks were made. Sometimes they were called out by neighbors in the audience; sometimes they weren't. Clearly, race remains a factor in America, but there's also a lot of disagreement here that is genuine and not based on race, so I think we have to have both conversations.

Since he's interested in reporting things that actually happened, Thrush dutifully sat down and took the five minutes or so required to transcribe Perriello's remarks—just kidding! No, of course he didn't. Instead, he just cut and pasted a "transcript" of Perriello's comments that he got via e-mail from a GOP hack, who had conveniently cut out the parts where Perriello said "the vast majority of [meetings] were civil," and "people disagreed passionately on ideological grounds," and the racist remarks were "rare."

He also copy and pasted the GOP hack's comment that Perriello is exactly like Jimmy Carter and Nancy Pelosi and cries race all the time and is a pointy-headed college boy: "Much like Jimmy Carter and Nancy Pelosi, Tom Perriello is mistaking genuine opposition to the president's agenda for bigotry. These insulting remarks are yet another indication that Perriello's Ivy-bred elitism is impeding his ability to represent everyday Virginians."

Apparently he got caught, because today Thrush posted an apology:

As I was transcribing, I got an email from a NRCC spokesman Andy Sere, who wanted to comment on it, appending what appeared to be a full a transcript of the exchange.

A time saver, I thought, so I cut-and-pasted. What I didn't immediately realize was that Sere had replaced key words — that provided important context —with elipses. When the error was pointed out, I quickly fixed it.

Anyway, lesson learned, right, everybody? The lesson being that Politico will take literally anything, so keep up the good work, Andy.

NOTE: This post has been edited to reflect the fact that we misspelled the hell out of Tom Perriello's name.

Fox News wants to make out with Barack Obama. Get off the internet if you're gonna keep hitting the white wine, Kilmeade!

Update: Oh, it was a fake Twitter account to begin with.

It seems crazy now, but there was a moment when Blagojevich was actually sought after by news organizations, and not the other way around. But according to e-mails obtained by Gawker, Today dumped him because of an "NBC related" story that the show "need[ed] to cover—Leno getting his own show at 10 p.m."

Back in early December, Blagojevich was making a name for himself both as a crusader for the victims of the recession and as an obviously corrupt thug who was about to be arrested—the Chicago Tribune reported on December 5 that the feds were listening in on his phone calls. Sounds like a good guy to interview, for news and such! So on December 8, 2008—the day that Blagojevich appeared at a sit-in held by laid-off workers at an Illinois window factory and announced, "I don't care whether you tape me privately or publicly, I can tell you that whatever I say is always lawful"—Today Show producer Lexi Dauber set up an exclusive interview with Blagojevich for Matt Lauer. Here's the e-mail exchange between Dauber and Blagojevich's press secretary Lucio Guerrero confirming the interview for the morning of December 9 (click on the image for a larger version):

Unfortunately, "news" intervened. By 8:30 on the evening before Matt Lauer was set to interview a sitting governor who was being wiretapped by the federal government, Dauber e-mailed Guerrero with her regrets, citing the fact that the show had to make room for a segment about the announcement of Leno's new show at 10 p.m.:

It was obvious to anyone who was watching MSNBC and NBC on the day of the Leno announcement that the company's news properties were ordered to cover the story like a missing white girl. But it's nice to have the directive in handy e-mail format, and to know just what sorts of stories NBC News is willing to shitcan to make way for in-house press releases. Indeed, on the morning of December 9, Matt Lauer sat down with the New York Times' Bill Carter to talk about Leno and how "you're going to get to laugh along with him a little earlier in the evening."

Hmmm, what else happened on the morning of December 9? Oh—Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested by FBI agents at his home in Chicago. So, yes, in NBC's defense, the interview almost certainly would never have happened anyway. But according to the e-mails—which Gawker obtained from Illinois under the state's Freedom of Information Act, because we really thought the State was onto something—Blagojevich was scheduled to show up at NBC News' Chicago studio for a remote at 5:45 a.m. He was arrested at his home at 6:15 a.m., after an FBI agent woke him with a phone call to let him know they were outside. So it's possible that if Today hadn't bumped him for Leno, he might have left his house before the feds got there. Or maybe they were sitting on his house 24 hours a day and would have just popped him as he was leaving. Or maybe they would have tailed him to the studio and arrested him live on the air! We'll never know, because NBC News is Jeff Zucker's personal PR shop and makes a mockery of the the "values" that Brian Williams and his colleagues claim, preposterously, to stand for.

After being contacted via e-mail for comment for this story, an NBC News spokeswoman asked us not to publish it until she could talk to us about it on the phone. So we called her, and she refused to comment for the record.

Also, here's what Guerrero e-mailed back to Dauber after she cancelled the interview, about 10 hours before his boss was arrested:

Also he is very proud that he totally knew that John Edwards slept with that lady and he is mildly embarrassed at totally being positive that Gary Condit killed Chandra Levy, and he would like an apology from anyone whose recollection of the latter might've colored their response to his insistence on the former.

And he is kind of sorry that he totally thought Bush would be a wonderful bipartisan president back in 2000, but he points out that Gore would've probably not been very good either so whatever, get off his back.

(Of course if it hadn't been for Bush's terrible unwillingness to send all the Mexicans back to Mexico and then build a wall, Mickey would never have realized how terrible Bush was, years after everyone else did!)

His page at the Atlantic loads exceedingly slowly; a post alerting readers to the attack shows up on the Daily Dish RSS feed:

It looks like Sullivan's measurable traffic hasn't dropped off in the last hour, which one would expect in a denial-of-service attack.

TehranBureau, a site that has been aggregating reports from inside Iran, was shut down yesterday—allegedly by some sort of hacking:

Reines, pictured with his boss, is the guy behind the "reset button" misspelling fiasco that sparked a war between Russia and the United States more than three weeks ago, and Smith goes deep on the episode, offering a richly layered and prodigiously sourced 1,100-word tick-tock of a stupid thing that happened more than three weeks ago!

Reines forgot to spell-check the button. He apologized for it in a kind of funny statement. But Smith gives it the Cuban Missile Crisis treatment, using words like "drama" and "buzzing" and "tussles" and "blunder" and "appalled" to describe petty complaints from the media regarding Reines' failure to tuck them in at night during Clinton's first trip to Europe and the Middle East—one reporter even wrote on his blog about it!

Ben, this is three weeks old. Please reread your boss' memo about the "velocity" that Politico stories need in order to be "ESSENTIAL READING" so Politico can become a "KEY OUTLET" and you can "OWN THE MORNING"—hey wait, Drudge linked to it. OK, then. Keep up the good work?

Twitter, a service which lets users post brief, 140-character messages for friends and perfect strangers alike, has already evolved its own telegraphic grammar of @ signs ("tweets," or messages, directed "at" a specific user, yet posted publicly) and # signs (denoting a topic for the message). Add to that services like TinyURL and Bit.ly which condense Web addresses into short, unreadable masses of characters. It's also spawned a cottage industry of applications which people use to post messages, with oddball names like Twhirl and TweetDeck and Ping.fm. The result are messages like these:

It's the very definition of too insidery. How are tech newcomers supposed to decode all these inscrutable traditions.

So when a tipster asked me if Kawasaki's Twitter account had been hacked, after it started displaying some incomprehensible messages about fried chicken, I stared at it for a while. Eventually I gave up and just called Kawasaki to ask.

Yes, he told me, when I reached him at an airport, his account had been hacked, but it was probably his fault. "I was using a new service called Adjix, and I did something too fast," he told me. "I can't explain it." Sort of like Twitter.

Kawasaki then suggested I speculate that he faked the hacking to get more attention. He added that he loved the hacker's tweets about fried chicken, and would gladly add it as a topic to his website Alltop.com. See? Everything on Twitter ends up being about self-promotion.

Update: Adjix president Joe Moreno, in an email, said that Kawasaki mistakenly broadcast his login credentials over the service, allowing a hacker to take control of his account.

Kawasaki's hacked Twitter page:

She was intrigued that Obama's Irish ancestors hail from a town called Moneygall in Co. Offaly. Immediately she began, as she always does, playing around with the word.

"That's what this crisis is all about," she said. "Money and the gall of people and how they treated it."

Ok, we made fun of that line, earlier this week, but, you know, that's an off-the cuff bit of meaningless "wordplay" there. Surely more time was spent crafting lines for her famously witty and daring column, right?

On St. Patrick's Day, the president spoke a bit of Gaelic, dyed the White House fountains green and talked about his distant relatives in the tiny Irish town of Moneygall, aptly named since money and gall are the two topics now consuming him.

Sigh. There is also a bit about an "Irish temper" and some cutesy Irish immigrant expression she claims her dad used to say involving a "boiled carrot" (Irish food is terrible), but otherwise the rest of her day-after-St. Patrick's Day column is about AIG.

Also, Demi Lovato wears fake hair, ROFL!!1!!!. We're terribly disappointed that the hacker didn't seize his chance to start a Twitter feud with the Kutchers ("@aplusk: more like ass-cot!!!"), add the missing, terrible stanzas to Miley's duet with Margaret Cho, or pit inappropriate suitors Justin Gaston and Stephen Baldwin against each other in a battle royale that would begin with chest shaving and end in church on Sunday. The screenshots (courtesy of ONTD) are below.

• Miley's twitter got hacked. [ONTD]

Since time immemorial the New York Times has kept its rich old conservative readers slightly satisfied with some token conservative voices in the Op-Ed section. For many, many years there was reliable old Bill Safire, the Nixon speechwriter, a member of the smart old educated class of Republicans who were able to write up support for disastrous policy implemented by the corrupt and incompetent with smart, almost plausible-sounding arguments. He left, replaced with John Tierney, a libertarian-leaning sort who didn't last long on the op-ed beat and now writes "researchers say a counterintutive thing" features instead. And there is David Brooks, a quietly doctrinaire Republican who fancies up his usual party line with armchair sociology. But Brooks broke with the party this year, calling Sarah Palin a cancer, leaving only poor, dumb, Bill Kristol. Bill Kristol, who tried to sell America on Sarah Palin, and ended up repeatedly embarrassing himself, over and over again, and losing John McCain his election.

Now he just mumbles about hating the mainstream media, to all his mainstream media friends, in the pages of the New York Times. Already the vultures are wondering who'll replace him—you can be terribly wrong and stupid and remain a Times columnist indefinitely, but you must be terribly wrong and stupid in the service of the conventional wisdom. So Tom Friedman's Iraq columns get a pass, as does Maureen Dowd's constant stream of nonsense.

But Kristol is no longer merely just a hack, he's a failed hack. No one bought his line this year. So maybe someone nutty and anti-Palin like, say, David Frum is next for the Affirmative Action Conservative Slot?

Noonan, remember, was caught on a live mic talking about how the selection of Sarah Palin as VP was "bullshit." A fact that was referenced repeatedly by Ken Auletta! So what did Noonan spend the bulk of her time on the panel (subject: "Covering the Candidates") doing? Defending Sarah Palin.

It was far too early to take notes, but I'll sum up Peggy's arguments: "Sarah Palin, fresh, new, American, real, six-pack, women, sexism?, the American people." The experience was strange because every single person sitting in the room—the panelists, the moderator, the audience, the security guards—was well aware how dumb Sarah Palin is. But there was Peggy, gamely searching for some all-American Reaganesque prose to elevate Palin into something legitimate. The panel was about the media, so the bold political hackery was jarring and out of place, like when those crazy Christians wave signs at the funerals of dead soldiers saying God killed them because of fags. There's a time and a place for your brand of lying, Peggy. It's on the weekend talk shows, after you sign on as a speechwriter for the sure-to-be successful Palin administration. There are lots of political hacks writing columns; but Noonan always wants to pop up as some sort of spokeswoman for Middle America, in the most patronizing way possible to actual Middle Americans.

You failed at the New Yorker Festival, Peggy Noonan.

The contrast between Noonan and the other panelists was what made the entire ordeal grimace-worthy. Bill Keller has more political pressure on him than almost anyone in the entire media. But when Ken Auletta asked him how it affected him when the McCain campaign charged the Times with being in the tank for Obama, Keller said (approximately): "It makes me want to find the toughest, hardest story about McCain we have and put it on the front page the next day."

That's called honesty, Peggy Noonan. Retire with your trademark false grace. [Pic via Startraks]

I never spent a single hour at Columbia School of Journalism, except when I gave a lecture to journalism students - and I was about as popular as a fire hydrant at the Westchester dog show.

It's only those who are lucky enough to work for Rupert Murdoch who know what I am talking about.

Wouldn't that mean "extremely popular?" I guess we'll never know.

• From Paul Malmont: "I was in a car with him on the way to Amityville, hearing great stories about his career. For example, he had once slit the tires on his own father's (also a reporter) car to keep him from beating Steve to a story. Another thing he was quite proud of was he claimed to have written the book that killed Elvis. Apparently it was rumored that a book Steve had written, Elvis - What Happened? had been pried from The King's cold dead fingers - he had been reading it on the toilet when he'd had a heart attack.
  After A Current Affair I went to work on the rookie season of Good Day New York - Fox's local morning show. My job was to get in early, get the coffee going and pull gossip stories from the wire. When I say early, I mean like 4AM early. On more than one occasion I would come in to find Steve and several author Aussie reporters and producers crashed out on office desks they had pushed together. Apparently they would drink hard at the Racing Club across the street and not bother going home."
• "When ever Steve was covering a mob trial that was being heard in Brooklyn, he would stop into my local watering hole which was a Thai restaurant with a bar in front that seated about ten. The crowd was always mixed, middle age Gays and Brooklyn Heights locals . Steve would come in and after two visits knew and remembered everybodys name. Over the course of an evening he would consume about 10 to 15 drinks and still appear coherent . He would then use the pay phone to phone his story in and uaually a drive came in to scoop him up and drive him home.
  The first time he came in I was wary of speaking to him knowing his politics and the Post’s. But the funny thing is he never pushed his politics at the bar Instead he would talk of mob trials old time Hollywood , New York , movies and whatnot. He was actually fun to talk, never condescending. He had a great memory. Never saw him drop dead drunk but I heard the stories and seeing him in action I can believe them."
• "A favorite Steve story told by reporters covering the Michael Jackson child molestation trial is how he would turn up in the middle of the day or later, already trademark soused. One day he was so drunk he came out of the courthouse men's room having forgotten to tuck himself back in, let alone do his fly up, and walked unsteadily away down the corridor, to the gapes of onlookers."

"We make quite a bit of money," said John Fox Sullivan, CEO of Atlantic Media's National Journal Group, noting the public-policy advertisers eager to reach the influential attendees.

Gotta be able to afford that Olympics coverage somehow.

[Ad Age]