In case you missed it: The New York Observer picked up the S.H.A.M.E. exposé on NPR host Adam Davidson last week, and came to the conclusion that S.H.A.M.E. “made a compelling case that Davidson is—if not complicitly, then inherently—conflicted.” (more…)

Separated at Stone Age: Holocaust-denier R J Rushdoony…
…and Holocaust-dreamer al-Zawahiri?

On Tuesday May 3, a lawyer for the rightwing Rutherford Institute sent a threatening letter to The eXiled to punish and intimidate us because we reminded our readers about the dark, extremist homophobic ideology behind the early years of the Rutherford Institute and its co-founder, John Whitehead. The Rutherford Institute has waged a 15-year public relations campaign to recast itself as a “civil liberties” outfit similar to the ACLU, yet this same “defender of civil liberties” wants to crush The eXiled’s First Amendment rights to free speech over the crime of reminding readers that the outfit was co-founded by one of the most extreme anti-Semitic, homophobic monsters of our time, a Holocaust denier and eugenicist named R. J. Rushdoony. (more…)

Update I below

On Thursday, we published an article documenting how last November’s strange anti-TSA hysteria was just the latest and most visible chapter in a decade-long corporate-sponsored rightwing war against public sector labor. Their goal: to prevent TSA workers from unionizing. (more…)

Really?

This is the year that the Republican right-wing, backed by corporate sponsors like the billionaire Koch brothers, have declared all-out war on public sector unions. It’s the culmination of a decades-long crusade against organized labor, which has only hit the national radar screen in recent months. The showdown in Wisconsin between Scott Walker and the unions has changed all that: suddenly, Americans had their eyes opened up to just how ruthlessly and cynically the Republican right was ready to fight to destroy public sector unions because they see it as a way to cripple the Democratic Party by killing off a major source of funding, as well as political muscle and votes. (more…)

Note: This letter, printed in The Nation on November 24, 2010, is a response to Glenn Greenwald of the libertarian Cato Institute‘s attack on an article we published, titled “TSAstroturf: The Washington Lobbyists and Koch-Funded Libertarians Behind the TSA Scandal.”

***

Normally both of us, no strangers to controversy, view attacks on our articles like today’s by Glenn Greenwald’s as a badge of honor. But we’re frankly puzzled—and disappointed, if that’s the right word—that the source of this attack is Glenn Greenwald, whom we’ve followed fairly regularly over the past couple of years and whom we both respect.

Greenwald’s column raises one potentially valid criticism of our article—our treatment of John Tyner, the self-described libertarian and “don’t touch my junk” hero of the anti-TSA protests. Based on reporting from the San Diego Union-Tribune, we speculated that Tyner may have set up his taped encounter with TSA agents—a claim that we also quote Tyner denying. We did not, however, claim that Tyner was affiliated with the Astroturf and/or Koch-funded groups mentioned later in the piece, and indeed we noted directly that Tyner denied any such associations in an interview with The Nation. In retrospect, our article was less than clear about Tyner’s lack of Astroturf affiliations, and we regret in particular including extraneous details from the Union-Tribunearticle about Tyner’s past—that he went to a private Christian school and lived in a Republican community near a Marine base—because it distracted readers like Greenwald from the article’s main findings. (more…)

This article was published in The Nation on November 23, 2010

Does anyone else sense something strange is going on with the apparently spontaneous revolt against the TSA? This past week, the media turned an “ordinary guy,” 31-year-old Californian John Tyner, who blogs under the pseudonym “Johnny Edge,” into a national hero after he posted a cell phone video of himself defending his liberty against the evil government oppressors in charge of airport security.

While this issue is certainly important—and offensive—to Americans, we are nonetheless skeptical about how and why this story turned into a national movement. In fact, this whole campaign feels a bit like déjà-vu: As the first reporters to expose the Tea Party as an Astroturf PR campaign funded by FreedomWorks and Koch-related front groups back in February, 2009, we see many of the same elements driving the current “rebellion” against the TSA: Koch-related libertarians, Washington lobbyists and PR operatives posing as “ordinary citizens,” and suspicious fake-grassroots outrage relentlessly promoted in the same old right-wing echo chamber. (more…)

“I will steal your hard-earned money!”

This article was first published on AlterNet.

Meg Whitman has always wanted to be Number One in her field. So although it must rankle Whitman that her $1.3 billion in wealth only ranks her as the fourth richest woman in California, when it comes to ranking “The Most Tight-Fisted Billionaire In The West,” no one comes close to Meg. For all her rosy campaign rhetoric about wanting to help California, unlike most billionaires in her category who go out of their way to make highly public donations to charities and the arts, Whitman has yet to perform a single significant charitable deed for the Golden State, or any state for that matter.

“[C]ompared with other leading Silicon Valley and political figures, Whitman appears to have otherwise invested less time, energy and clout on causes at the state, local and national level,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2010. “In contrast to others who have aspired to political office, however, Whitman does not mention any work on commissions, boards, advisory groups, charities or causes in her book or on her Web site.” (more…)