Here's a story. On the afternoon of Friday, November 21, 2008, an email bearing the subject header "confidential information" turned up in Gawker's tips inbox. The sender's email address was "harveydent701@yahoo.com," a dummy account. The only text in the email itself was "please consider the attached information."…
Camille Chidiac, the minority owner of Leonie Industries, which we identified last month as the Pentagon information operations contractor that ran an operation against two critical journalists, has admitted playing a role in the subterfuge.
Last night USA Today reported that two of its staffers, Tom Vanden Brook and Ray Locker, were the targets of a smear campaign, including fake Twitter accounts and web sites established in their names, launched by a Pentagon contractor specializing in "information operations." For some reason, the paper declined to…
Newt Gingrich never got to complete his political career. He only lasted as Speaker of the House, a job he'd successfully wrangled after plotting his path for a psychotic 14 years, for a couple of terms, the latter half of which he spent as an incompetent figurehead. He was reprimanded and fined for ethics violations…
Halfwit tabloid sex perv Andrea Peyser has a major Republican sex fetish. Yes, fine, that's a matter of record. But Andrea is, first and foremost, a professional sexxx journalist, and she takes that duty quite seriously. So it's alarming to learn that—in Andrea's unbiased opinion—Sharon Bialek (pictured), who…
Was the finance director of New York Rep. Mike McMahon's reelection campaign hired in 1927? Back then, it might have been a good idea to show how much 'Jewish money' your political opponent received. But not now! Not in 2010!
Jeffrey Lord of the conservative American Spectator has some "breaking news": Shirley Sherrod's story about her relative's "lynching" is false, and she is a liar. There, it's settled. Except that Jeffrey Lord doesn't know what "lynching" means.
Wow, who would have guessed??! It turns out Michelle Obama didn't order Iranian caviar, two whole lobsters, a lobster hors d'oeuvres and champagne from room service the other night, as the Post's Page Six claimed. The wife of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama ate an entirely different treasonous elitist…
You know a story is sketchy when even a British tabloid looks at it and goes, "You know, this seems a bit salacious and over the top," as the Daily Mail has just done with the rumor, dating to August but now resurfaced, about how Barack Obama maybe got too close to an anonymous young staffer during his 2004 senate…
Andy Martin is the habitual politician and "researcher" who created the original smear of Barack Obama as a secret Muslim in a 2004 press release, begetting a mutating series of email forwards still coursing through the internet. Last week, he was featured in a Fox News special that, in the words of the Times,…
When Barack Obama was 10, his grandfather would take him over to ole Frank Davis' house, where the two older men would drink whisky out of jars and play Scrabble. Sometimes Obama would help the men compose dirty limericks, or listen as Davis read poetry. This went on until the Democratic presidential nominee was 17,…
Hah. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter is upset about that New Yorker cover. Because he knows the power of images and of repeating smears, even for satirical or debunking purposes. Which is why, after he derides the cover, he then presents a list of every anti-Obama smear he can think of, all listed in bold text. Whoops! To…
Don't think for a second that Fox News has a monopoly on vicious, personal attacks against its media competitors. Daniel Saynt (pictured, left) of the blog Fashion Indie is in his own, particularly bitchy catfight with Sarah Conley and Julie Frederickson (pictured, right) of Coutorture. The battle started with a…
