February 19, 2005 by s.z.

From the "Small World" File Steve Findley, who is on the GOPUSA board of directors, is also the founder and President of Titan Dynamics Systems, which is now a "wholly-owned subsidary of The Allied Defense Group."  Besides making military products, Titan Dynamics also offers other services, to include coming to your business and setting up "battlefield effects" for your next "training exercise." Full Service BES Missions Titan offers hardware, ordinance and personnel as a turnkey package for your next training exercise. Contact us and let our personnel design battlefield effects to meet your exercise objectives. We will set-up and operate the battlefield effects during your training exercise as embedded OPFOR or as out-of-play contractors. Let us support your next training event thus eliminating your workload with on-time, trouble free, superior battlefield effects. How many people need trouble free, superior battlefield effects for their training exercises these days?  (Only Custer Battles and its ilk come to mind.)  What the heck are embedded OPFOR?  What the heck does this all of this mean?  I don't know.  But I was impressed by the photo of their personnel dressing up like soldiers and showing off their guns: 4:37:38 PM

The Eberly Brothers' Greatest Hits Just for fun, let's take the Wayback machine to August 2000.  The place: the Republican convention in Philadelphia.  The issue: the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, has chosen a running mate with a, GASP, lesbian daughter.  Our guide will be this Salon article from the period, which was cowritten by Dave Cullen: Even delegates from Texas -- which drew attention Tuesday when delegation members bowed their heads in prayer as openly gay Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., gave a speech on trade -- were reluctant to criticize Mary Cheney or the selection of Dick Cheney as Bush's running mate. [...] "If she were speaking about these matters on stage, I'd be highly offended," said Bobby Eberle of Houston. "The GOP doesn't support that kind of activity. But Bush picked Dick Cheney because of his long history of public service." Eberle said he sat "silently and respectfully" through Kolbe's speech. Yes, the GOP doesn't support speaking about homosexuality (well, unless one needs to denounce it in order to defend marriage), but so as long as Mary stays silent and offstage, it's okay that she exists.  Bobby, of course, would never associate himself with such people . . . And that's why we think it's sad that, as reported by the Houston Chronicle, Bobby is now a non-person. Though Eberle was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2000, Texas Republican officials this week declined to talk about him and even denied knowing him. And now that Jeff Gannon aka Jhiemn Guckerrttgh (you can see why he changed his name to something easier to spell and pronounce) has been trotted out to deny: (a)  knowing anybody in the White House, (b) getting any advance info about the invasion of Iraq, and (c) getting a classified memo about Valerie Plame from anybody, you can expect Jeff to be erased from public memory. Oh, and speaking of the Houston Chronicle, we believed them when they said that direct marketing mogul Bruce Eberle (the one who folded his "Millions of Americans" site into GOPUSA) is Bobby's brother; however, apparently the Eberles are just "relatives."  We are regret any damage to Bruce's reputation that our report might have caused. But speaking of Bruce, while we haven't verified any of this information, we do find this "Animal People" report from 2000 very interesting: Would You Buy an Appeal from Fundraiser Bruce Eberle? (apparently Animal People began investigating Eberle when his company started sending people on various pro-animal mailing lists questionable appeals for funds). Eberle clients have reportedly included former U.S. president Ronald Reagan; Oliver North, who was a central figure in the Iran/Contra scandal of the latter Reagan years in the White House; and former Los Angeles police officers Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell, who were sentenced to serve 30 months apiece in jail for allegedly committing the videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King in 1992. Their appeals said they were "political scapegoats of black radicals and self-serving liberal politicians." [...] "A few years back," Eberle admited, "we raised funds for a POW group. After a number of years we began to doubt their ability to fulfill their commitment to their donors. We terminated our relationship. That was several years before this same client engaged in activities that eventually came before a special committee of Congress. The truth," Eberle insists, "is that we were victimized by the political establishment," although Eberle also claims that Eberle & Associates helped to elect key members of the Republican majorities prevailing since 1990 in the U.S. Senate and since 1994 in the House of Representatives. "We accurately reported to the donors precisely what was related to us by the client," Eberle maintains. "Unfounded charges of fraud were made against us by self-serving politicians, but when the dust cleared and the matter had been reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission, we could hold our heads high. Some still quote out-of-context from that hearing, but the fact is that we did nothing wrong." Or at least nothing prosecutable: under court rulings which hold that the right of free speech prevails over accountability, nonprofit fundraisers enjoy much more leeway in what they can tell prospective donors than for-profit advertisers. "Operation Rescue" (not the wacko anti-abortion group) was a really scummy group that claimed that it had proof that American GIs were still being held as prisoners of war in Vietnam, and that it needed money to rescue them.  Many familes were victimized by it. (Read the Animal People report for details.) Anyway, per Animal People, the media reported that Paula Jones had received more than $100,000 from a fundraising campaign that was supposed to be paying her attorney fees.  But the Rutherford Institute, which was actually paying Paula's legal bills, claimed they hadn't received any of the money. Bruce W. Eberle & Associates was the fund raiser for the "Help Paula" fund drive.  The media obtained a copy of the contract she signed: it had the words 'legal fund' scratched out, and indicated that the money was to go instead directly to Paula, minus the firm's share.  Since that wasn't what the fund raising appeals said, it seems that Paula and Bruce conned a bunch of dopes out of over $100K. Eberle also did some fundraising for John Ashcroft.  However, a 1998, St. Louis Post-Dispatch story claimed that, "Half of every dollar Senator John Ashcroft [R-Missouri] has raised this year for his political action committee has been plowed back into direct-mail advertising. A tiny portion, just $1,000 so far, has gone to conservative Republican candidates--the people Ashcroft pegged as prime beneficiaries when he announced last year that he was setting up a PAC. The biggest share by far, $529,903 as of June 30, has gone to direct mail companies--most of them controlled by or associated with Bruce Eberle."  Ashcroft fired Eberle in November 1999. Eberle sued Animal People for their report.  A settlement was reached wherein 160 words were deleted from the report.  Presumably the report online is the expurgated version which Eberle agreed is truthful. Oh, and here's part of Bruce's notice to his Millions of Americans mailing list that they will now be serviced by Bobby and GOPUSA:  Before I sign off, let me take this opportunity to thank you for all your efforts to preserve our American way of life. Today our traditional American values, our Constitution, and our heritage of individual freedom is under attack from liberal groups and organizations who have no regard for the foundations of a free society. Unless you and I and leaders like Bobby Eberle continue our efforts to defend American institutions, sound economic policy, a strong national defense, and our traditional moral values, our nation will be in great jeopardy. While Bruce claims that his efforts are about protecting our values, Constitution, national security, and very way of life from the evil liberals, a visit to www.millionsofamericans.com indicates that it's mostly about signing petitions.  The site says that MillionsofAmericans was "born from Election Integrity 2000 -- an online project to mobilize Americans against every attempt to overturn the fair election results in Florida."  Then they sent petitions to demand that Al Gore resign.  The next petitions were to get John Ashcroft confirmed.  They sent a thank-you petition to Jesse Helms upon his retirement.  They sent a "get well" petition to Rush Limbaugh, to ask him to regain his hearing after the Oxycontin abuse caused nerve damage.  Etc. None of this had any actual impact on anything, so is seems (at least, to me) that MillionsofAmericans was just being used by Eberle to get names for his mailing lists and fundraising appeals.  Bruce probably is conservative, but that doesn't stop him from fleecing the wingnuts who think that signing a petition will change things. Since (IMHO) GOPUSA also contains a great deal of hucksterism at its base, it is interesting to speculate how it got a "reporter" accredited to the White House, and how it became involved in the Thune/Daschle race.  Did the Thune campaign just shoot GOPUSA a few bucks to do some work for it because GOPUSA had both Bruce mailing list of 250,000 wingnuts and a guy with contacts in the White House press offfice,  or was somebody higher in the food chain involved? One would think that people like Rove could afford better stooges, but hey, maybe you go into a dirty tricks operation with the tools you have, not the tools you would like. UPDATE: Sisyphus Shrugged has the NY Times piece wherein Bobby says he never suspected a thing about Jeff having a past or being a crappy journalist.  As Julia says, Bobby is an engineer, and we all know that engineers are easy-going free spirits who don't believe in checking on stuff.  Oh, and I like the new info that Bobby bought MillionsOfAmerican's.com.  Since MofA is basically just a mailing list and a bunch of email addresses, I wonder what use Bobby had for such a property, and why he purchased it last spring.  Think it had anything to do with the Thune campaign?  4:11:17 PM

Today's JimJeff Wrap-Up Well, JimJeff GuckertGannon came out of his self-imposed one-week exile to re-exploit his 15 minutes of fame some more. But first, CBS News.com has a very interesting story by Dotty Lynch, Senior Political Editor for CBS News -- it seems to be the first mainstream media report to mention Karl Rove's name in connection with GannonGuckertGate: Rove-Gannon Connection? [...] The architect of the Bush victories in 2000 and 2004 came through the ranks of college Republicans with the late Lee Atwater, and their admitted and alleged dirty tricks are the legends many young political operatives dream of pulling off. So when Jeff Gannon, White House "reporter" for Talon "News," was unmasked last week, the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable. [...] But what Gannon was up to was not just writing opinion columns or using a different technique to get information. He was a player in Republican campaigns and his work in the South Dakota Senate race illustrates the role he played. It is also a classic example of how political operatives are using the brave new world of the Internet and the blogosphere. Gannon and Talon News appear to be mini-Drudge reports; a "news" source which partisans use to put out negative information, get the attention of the bloggers, talk radio and then the MSM in a way that mere press releases are unable to achieve.  [...] Daschle aides told Roll Call, "This guy (Gannon) became the dumping ground for opposition research." The connections are so strong that there is an FEC challenge which could be a test case on the limits of the use of the Internet in federal campaigns. Ms. Lynch is right about how JimJeff's influence went beyond the wingnut site GOPUSA.  After his pieces appeared on Talon News, they were frequently copied on FreeRepublic and other message boards (often by JimJeff).  Jeff appeared several times on Sean Hannity's radio program.  Jeff eventually got his own radio show, through a venture with FreeRepublic.  And, of course, by being allowed to speak in White House Press conferences, he was able to get messages spread on TV and by the mainstream meda.  Was this just due to the collaberation of JimJeff and Bobby Eberle, or was somebody else pulling their strings?  I suspect that the code of omerta will keep us from ever finding out. Anyway, as they say, read the whole thing. (And also be sure to read Joe Conason's Salon piece about Gannon and the attack on Daschle.)  Now, on to Jeff's tearful but indignant interview with Howie Kurtz: "I've made mistakes in my past," he said yesterday. "Does my past mean I can't have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?" Well, America should be a country where even a guy who advertised his penis size in an effort to sell his sexual services should be able to be President, but since Jeff's chosen niche is the wingnutty Republican one, I kinda doubt he's going to find much work as pundit.  And as for being a journalist, well, since he hasn't been one yet, I'd guess that it's his lack of integrity and minimal talent that disqualify him, not his past. Gannon chastised his critics, breaking a silence that began last week when liberal bloggers disclosed his real name, James Dale Guckert, and a Web page, which he paid for, featuring X-rated photos of himself. "Why would they be looking into a person's sexual history? Is that what we're going to do to reporters now? Is there some kind of litmus test for reporters? Is it right to hold someone's sexuality against them?" JimJeff, when you advertise your sexuality on the internet, you can't complain later about people paying attention to it. Gannon says he was questioned by the FBI in the Valerie Plame leak investigation after referring to a classified CIA document when he interviewed the outed CIA operative's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. But he said yesterday: "I didn't have the document. I never saw the document. It was written about in the Wall Street Journal a week before. I had no special access to classified information." I was going to write a post saying as much, but now that JimJeff has admitted it, I guess there's no need. But hey, I have the material, so let's review it. So, here's JimJeff's question to Joe Wilson An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that? And here's part of the Wall Street Journal piece from the previous week(emphesis added): An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo. The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger. Ms. Plame, a member of the agency's clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband, Africa expert and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports, according to current and former government officials familiar with the meeting at the CIA's Virginia headquarters. . So, it seems obvious (in retrospect) that JimJeff just cut and pasted the WSJ info to come up with his question.  What threw people off is his lack of qualifiers, like "alleged" or "reportedly" when discussing the document.  Well, that and his crowing that, "For something that is supposed to be classified, it seems that this document is easily accessible" -- plus, his self-aggrandizing talk about having to protect his sources. (Yes, if only he hadn't pretended to be a big shot reporter, maybe nobody would have bothered to look up his naughty web photos.) But anyway, it sounds like somebody told him he'd better knock off the posturing and confess that his only source (besides GOP and White House press releases) is the Wall Street Journal -- because otherswise, he could be sleeping with the fishes.  But back to JimJeff's heart-to-heart with Howie: Despite the battering he has taken, Gannon hasn't abandoned plans to work in journalism and hopes to generate sympathy by speaking out. "People criticize me for being a Christian and having some of these questionable things in my past," he said. "I believe in a God of forgiveness." Translation: "Hey, if citing God's forgiveness allowed George Bush to enter the White House despite all the stuff HE did, why can't my fellow conservatives accept me back into the fold and give me a job at the Heritage Foundation? ... Oh, the gay thing."   Next, let's take a brief look at some snippets from Editor and Publisher's transcript of JimJeff's interview by CNN's Anderson Cooper: COOPER: Let me give you a chance just to respond to what you want to respond to. You had previously stated that you had registered a number of pornographic Web sites for a private client. That's what you had said publicly. You said the sites were never activated. A man now has talked to "The Washington Post," who said that you had essentially paid him to create some Web sites for an escort service, and you are yourself offering yourself as an escort. GANNON: Well, like I said, there's a lot of things being said about me out there. A lot of things that have nothing to do with the reporting I have done for the last two years. Translation: "Sure, I lied before, and then I got busted, but the story shouldn't be about my lack of veracity now, it should be about my lack of veracity over the last two years when I called myself a reporter." Then Cooper does a good job of grilling Jeff about how come he was attending WH press conferences even before Talon News existed.  (Remember when Jeff told E&P,"I write a news story, I post it, and anything having to do with GOPUSA, I don't know about"?  Well, you'll be shocked, SHOCKED to know that he wasn't being exactly truthful, in that he actually got his first WH press passes by telling the press office that he was a reporter for the famed news organization GOPUSA): COOPER: So I guess the questions that are being raised why were you at -- allowed to go to a White House briefing if you are working for GOPUSA, which is a clearly partisan organization? GANNON: There are many, many organizations, many people that are allowed to attend the White House briefings. I don't know the criteria they use. Translation: "If the White House wants to givea  press pass to somebody from a website "news organization" on the same level as Young Conservatives Online or The Rant, that's their problem."  There's more good stuff there, but let's move on to Scottie McClellan telling E&P just why the White House would give a press pass to somebody from GOPUSA:  McClellan said White House Press Office staffers considered the openly partisan site to be a legitimate news organization when they gave Guckert, a.k.a. Jeff Gannon, the first of numerous day passes in February 2003. "He faxed a letter in on his [GOPUSA] letterhead, they checked that it was a conservative news Web site he worked for," McClellan explained, referring to his staffers who handled such credentialing at the time. "There was a check to make sure it was a news organization and a news Web site. There was a determination made at that point [that it was legitimate]." So, Scottie's staffers considered GOPUSA to be a legit news agency because (a) it was able to fax; (b) it had letterhead; (c) it existed on the web, just like JimJeff claimed; and (d) with a name like GOPUSA, it HAS to be good. I'll be applying for my press pass first thing Monday. McClellan, who was deputy press secretary under Ari Fleischer when the initial Guckert approvals were given, became press secretary in July 2003. He said he currently has a staff of 12, only one of whom handles the 20 to 25 daily press passes issued each day. He said he had spoken with the staffer who approved Guckert's initial credential, but would not identify the person or comment on how he or she could consider GOPUSA -- which is run by Texas Republican activist Bobby Eberle -- to be a legitimate news organization. Sadly, that staffer who approved JimJeff's credentials died in a tragic accident tomorrow, and so can't answer any questions as to why JimJeff was admitted to the briefings.  And Scottie, who was only the Deputy Press Secretary then, certainly can't be blamed for anything that occured back then, because after Ari believed Bobby when he said that the site was non-partisan, Scottie did too.  And as for anything that happened since he became Secretary, well, the past is the past, and Scottie believes in a God of forgiveness. "Our staff assistants do a good job," he said. "The staff assistant went to verify that the news organization existed." Hey, The Onion: America's Finest News Source™ exists, and it's even America's finest news source (it wouldn't lie about something like that), so I'm sure Scottie's fine staff assistants have accredited all of its employees, who will be asking questions of the President any day now.  Oh, and while JimJeff confided to Howie that, "I have no friendships with anyone there [the White House]," Media Matters wants to know how JimJeff got invited to the 2003 and 2004 White House pressChristmas parties, which are apparently exclusive events that not every Tom, Dick, and Guckert is asked to attend.  Oh, and you won't be too surprised to learn that, at least for the last party, it was the Press Secretary's office that came up with the guest list.  Was JimJeff invited in appreciation for his great questions, or to be somebody's date?  I guess we'll never know.  But it does seem that his attendance at these events means that JimJeff wasn't just an obscure nut, like some would have you believe, but a member of Washington's power elite. As for the significance of the Christmas party, Chicago Tribune columnist Michael Killian observed on December 31, 2003, that receiving an invitation is a sign that "one may consider oneself a member in good standing of the fabled Washington establishment." But that was December.  Now, nobody claims to knows JimJeff or Bobby Eberle.  It's sad, really, except that they brought this on themselves by being willing to do somebody's (the GOP's?  Karl Rove's? Satan's?) dirty work. In any case, we wish JimJeff well, and look forward to his next media appearance, possibly as the star of the XXX updated version of The Story of G.I. Joe.  (Hey, while JimJeff's wasn't a war correspondent -- at least, not yet -- he does know soldiers, and that's what counts: Here's one of his questions to Scottie McClellan which I think could be used as the basis of the screenplay: Q Scott, I frequently communicate with soldiers stationed in Iraq. And many of them ask me why only the bad news about Iraq is reported in the American media. More than one has told me how demoralizing it is to hear so much about the Abu Ghraib pictures, and so little about the murder and annihilation of American contractors and the beheading of Nicholas Berg. Can I get you to comment on the negative impact our reporting is having on morale of our troops?  I bet those soldiers in Iraq with whom JimJeff communicates will be REALLY demoralized when they learn of the traitorous media coverage of JimJeff's recent travails. 1:37:43 AM