By PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Four explosions ripped through Baghdad on Friday, killing at least 28 people and injuring dozens on the eve of Shiite Islam's most important holiday, officials said. It was the deadliest day since Iraq's landmark elections last month. Suicide bombers attacked two Shiite mosques as Friday prayers were ending, another explosion occurred near a Shiite religious procession and a third suicide bomber blew himself up at an Iraqi police and National Guard checkpoint in a Sunni neighborhood.

via Buzzmachine

In her column yesterday, Maureen Dowd said that even Nixon didn't do what Bush is doing with fake news:

Even the Nixon White House didn't do anything this creepy. It's worse than hating the press. It's an attempt to reinvent it.

Ah, well, actually, Nixon did it, too... I have a story to tell I don't think I've told here before...

When I finished my freshman year at Claremont in California and before transferring to Northwestern to go into journalism, I was told that someone was hiring young reporters to cover the presidential campaign. Spending the summer in California covering an election -- who could pass that up? So I went on the interview.

It turned out that it was the Committee to ReElect the President, aka CREEP, that was trying to hire young "reporters" carrying credentials for a made-up news agency to get press access to all of the other side's campaign appearances; they were to record the speeches and events and report back to the Nixon campaign.

Of course, I said no.

by Joe Conason

Before he was buttering up Bush at White House press conferences, "Jeff Gannon" was doing the GOP's dirty work in attacking Tom Daschle.

Long before "Jeff Gannon" became a household pseudonym in the nation's capital, he had earned considerable recognition among the political elites of South Dakota. During that state's closely contested Senate race last year, the Talon News writer -- whose real name is now known to be James Dale Guckert -- dug his claws deep into Tom Daschle, the former Senate minority leader narrowly defeated by Republican John Thune.

In 2004 Republican leaders placed no higher price on any head, besides John Kerry's, than on the Senate Democratic leader's. For years, conservative organizations had attacked Daschle with campaigns that included notorious ads that paired the Army veteran with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The smear efforts damaged Daschle's standing with the state's voters, and as the election grew nearer, Republican blogs and Web sites took up the dirty work. In what has now been exposed as a blatant Republican strategy, the seemingly independent bloggers had in fact been paid by the Thune campaign. read on

The saga deepens.

Gannon in the White House before Talon News

Via Americablog

According to Editor & Publisher (who btw has really been on top of this issue), Ari had concerns about Gannon but those were assuaged by the Texas Republican who ran GOPUSA and Talon:

"I found out that he worked for a GOP site, and I didn't think it was my place to call on him because he worked for something that was related to the party," Fleischer said in a phone interview. "He had the editor call me and made the case that they were not related to the Republican Party. He said they used the GOP name for marketing purposes only."

Video

Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher

Mitchell: Well it is starting to look like he was in there before there even was a Talon news...

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Click here for WMP

NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams ran a segment tonight. They have the same questions as a lot of us do.

Williams: ...he wasn't really a journalist and wasn't using his real name. And there's more to his past that is making a lot of people wonder what he was doing in the White House in the first place.

Now the Gannon Story is off cable and on Network T.V. Will CBS, ABC, and FOX pick it up?

PS(there's a train crash at the end that I left on the clip that's pretty wild)

I just heard High Hewitt call himself a fine, objective journalist.

would be greatly appreciated.

Kato costs GOP the Greatest Generation

Check out this post from Bob Brigham

via Oliver Willis

Ezra's looking at his "book", if you can call it that.

...the most distasteful piece of waste I've handled since maturation imbued me with the good sense to stop handling garbage. I think I was three years old, then. Why is Hugh so bad? Well, aside from the towering egotism and the blistering partisanship, the guy is constantly lying.

He was full of it when he was on MSNBC yesterday with Jeralyn, and so was he when he made appearances on Fox & Friends and The Chris Matthews Show.

Hewitt is a third-tier talk show host, nationally syndicated but doomed to always be below the Limbaughs, Hannitys, and Ingrahams on the right wing chat show circuit, so he's latched on to blogs as his thing and made himself the self-appointed spokesperson (there's a lot of that going around) for blogging. Except, he's fraudulent.

We found another proud member of the "Hewitt- blogger- fantasy- escapade!"

via World O' Crap

Today we will try to unravel the the enigma wrapped in a fake name covered only with dog tags and a watch known as JimJeff GukertGannon (whom we will refer to as "Jeff Gannon" for the rest of the article, because it's easier to remember and pronounce -- you know, like the name "Kirk Douglas').

Just how did a guy whose only journalism background was working as a male escort get called on regularly by the White House Press Secretary, and even get to question the President of the United States?

While there are a lot of theories floating around, let's start by reviewing some of the evidence (which I have gathered, or appropriated, from many of the diaries at Daily Kos, from the ground-breaking info at AMERICAblog, recent news stories, and my own use of Google). and see what makes sense. read on..it's a long post