You may have already heard that "Clerks" director Kevin Smith was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight yesterday for being too fat - after he was buckled in.

So take the mistreatment of a geek cult hero, add his Twitter feed with over a million and half followers (ThatKevinSmith), and you have a well-deserved public relations nightmare. In a stunning display of the power of new media vs. old, Kevin (who's famous for his colorful language on Twitter) is not holding back on this one. He's got up a podcast, too:

Director Kevin Smith was ejected from a plane after being deemed "too fat to fly," he says on his Twitter account.

After delivering a speech in San Francisco, he boarded a Southwest Airlines flight to Burbank and was seated on the plane but then was thrown off the flight Saturday evening. The director of Clerks and other movies, who is also known for playing the movie character Silent Bob in many films, fired off a round of Twitter messages aimed at Southwest. Among them, "Fair warning folks: If you look like me, you may be ejected from Southwest Air." A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines wrote an apology on the company's Twitter account. The message, from an unnamed representative, says "Hey Kevin! I'm so sorry for your experience tonight! Hopefully we can make things right."

Have any of you ever had a similar experience?

Satirical group "Billionaires for Wealthcare" mingle with conservative protesters at a recent town hall rally.

Via Greg Sargent, the news that the right wing "wealthcare" group Americans for Prosperity is kicking into high gear to get Ben Nelson to stymie healthcare reform:

The calls, which were confirmed to me by AFP’s spokesperson, are being conducted by live operators reading from a script. But the effect is the same as a robocall; recipients receive the calls whether they want to or not.

“Senator Ben Nelson is playing an important role in this debate,” the call says, according to a script provided to me by AFP after I was tipped off to the call. “Would you be willing to call Senator Ben Nelson and tell him to vote for the filibuster and kill the health care bill?”

If the caller responds affirmatively, the operator recites a number for one of Nelson’s district offices. “Please tell Senator Ben Nelson to vote for the Filibuster and kill the health care bill,” the call continues. “Can I confirm that you will make this call within the hour?”

Nelson has refused to rule out joining GOP filibusters on major legislation, though he’s also suggested he probably won’t filibuster on health care. The call is a sign that anti-reform forces still view Nelson, who has refused to back a public option, as a potential ally with Republicans in the quest to “kill” reform.

The boycott of Glenn Beck's show,led by the group Color of Change, has resulted in some 20 advertisers dropping sponsorship of his "show" on the Fox News Channel. Fox is feeling the heat and it now appears that Beck's vacation this week wasn't voluntary:

First on TVNewser: Tipsters inside Fox News tell us Glenn Beck's vacation this week from his Fox News show was not planned. We hear Beck was told to take this week off to let some of the heat surrounding him die down. That heat began July 28 on "Fox & Friends" when Beck said he thought Pres. Obama has "a deep-seated hatred for white people," adding, "This guy is, I believe, a racist."

A Fox News spokesperson denied our accounts and simply told us, "Glenn Beck will back on Monday." But several sources inside FNC confirm that this is a forced vacation.

Fox is denying Beck was forced to take the week off to let things cool down, but TV Newser is sticking to its story:

Update: Sources close to Beck have contacted TVNewser denying that this was a forced vacation. Beck's personal publicist Matthew Hiltzik forwarded us an email dated July 14th sent by Christopher Balfe, President & COO of Mercury Radio Arts and General Manager of Beck's radio show, addressed to Mercury Radio employees reading:

Glenn will be off of radio & TV the week of August 17th, returning to air August 24th.

Contrary to that, our tipsters tell us it was Beck himself who was telling Fox staffers last week that he was "forced to take the week off." Read on...

If the powers that be at Fox think that hiding Glenn Beck for a week is going to slow down the boycott against him, they are sorely mistaken. We'll be right here when Glenn gets back on Monday.

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(John Amato: I was involved in breaking the Specter story and asked him at the time if Grassley should be kicked out of the negotiating process because of his egregious statements. He said that if all Senators were kicked out of things because they made wrong statements there would be no Senators.

Well, Arlen Specter said he'd call Grassley about his "pulling the plug on Grandma" remark, and he certainly tried. Maybe he even got through!

Via Greg Sargent, something the corporate media has virtually ignored:

This passed unnoticed, but it’s a big deal: Over the weekend, and very quietly, Senator Chuck Grassley completely retracted his widely-reported claim last week that people have “every reason to fear” that the House health care proposal would create a “government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”

The retraction was buried deep in this Washington Post article on Grassley’s role, with a spokesperson admitting Grassley doesn’t really believe what he said about “grandma”:

Grassley says he opposes that counseling as written in the House version of the bill, but a spokesman said the senator does not think the House provision would in fact give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die. The House bill allows patients to decide for themselves if they would like such counseling.

Let’s be clear: By clarifying that Grassley doesn’t think the House bill would “give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die,” his spokesperson completely repudiated his widely discussed claim. This goes much farther than Grassley did in a statement released Friday clarifying he’d never used the words “death panel” and was merely worried about “unintended consequences.”

So, either Grassley made his claim about “grandma” to a crowd in his home state last week and didn’t believe it; or he changed his mind since then.

Grassley’s retraction will get nowhere near the coverage his initial statement did. False or outlandish claims are “controversial,” so they get rewarded with media attention; their subsequent retractions tend to pass unnoticed, because the press has moved on to the next false or outlandish claim. The big news orgs blared Grassley’s initial assertion at the electorate for days, but almost no one will ever learn that Grassley didn’t really mean it.

Although we didn't get rid of Lou Dobbs, it looks like the stink we raised is having an impact. From today's Mediabistro.com:

Exclusive: TVNewser has learned, and a CNN spokesperson confirms, that in his morning editorial meeting today, CNN/U.S. president Jon Klein asked his show producers to avoid booking talk radio hosts. "Complex issues require world class reporting," Klein is quoted as saying, adding that talk radio hosts too often add to the noise, and that what they say is "all too predictable."

One of CNN's longtime show hosts, Lou Dobbs, hosts a daily radio show. A few political contributors also host radio shows including Bill Bennett and Roland Martin. They are presumably not affected by this.

But this means other talk radio hosts who appear regularly on CNN, probably won't in the near future including names like Stephanie Miller, Michael Medved, and Ben Ferguson.

Free speech ain't free, and Glenn Beck is learning that lesson the hard way:

Three companies who had run ads during Glenn Beck's Fox News show have distanced themselves from Beck, including LexisNexis-owned Lawyers.com, Procter & Gamble and Progressive Insurance. We're told a P&G spot inadvertently aired during a weekend Beck broadcast, but that the company never had a regular buy for the show.

The group ColorofChange.org called on their members to pressure advertisers to pull ads from Beck's show after he called Pres. Obama a "racist" who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people."

A Fox News spokesperson told TVNewser that the advertisers simply moved their spots from Beck to other programs on the network, "so there has been no revenue lost."

Okay, so the advertisers took money from crazy Peter to pay crazy Paul, but this is a good first step. Perhaps with the right motivation and enough racist, crazy controversies, these, and other companies will pull their money from Fox News altogether.

Nicole posted about these casting choices back in May for Oliver Stone's new movie, W. The Stray Cat Bar in Shreveport, Louisiana was the site of a massive bar fight early Saturday morning which led to the arrest of two actors portraying President George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Josh Brolin, 40, who portrays President Bush and Jeffrey Wright, 42, who depicts Colin Powell in Oliver Stone's upcoming film, "W," were taken into custody along with five others around 2 am. Apparently in casting Brolin as Bush, director Oliver Stone liked what he saw. In 2004, Brolin was arrested and charged with spousal battery for hitting his wife, award-winning actress Diane Lane. Brolin was later released after posting $20,000 bail. "There was a misunderstanding at their home," explained the couple's spokesperson Kelly Bush.

You can't make this stuff up folks.

For quite a while, the debate over blogs in the Defense Department was over whether U.S. troops should be allowed to have them at all. On the one hand, some officials were concerned about security breaches, with troops inadvertently sharing compromising information online. On the other, some saw blogs as a morale-boosting outlet for the troops.

But as Noah Shachtman explained in an interesting report, a study was written for U.S. Special Operations Command that took an entirely different approach to online communication, which included the suggestion of possibly “clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers.”

“Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” write the report’s co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.... Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, “I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don’t know if it led to anything.”

The report introduces the military audience to the “blogging phenomenon,” and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces — specifically, the military’s public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units — might use the sites to their advantage.

The Kinniburgh/Denning report was quite provocative, suggesting paying prominent bloggers to address “entrenched inequalities,” presumably in the media. The study did, however, note the downsides of such a plan: “People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.” You don't say.

Now, it’s worth emphasizing that there’s no apparent evidence that the Pentagon actually put any prominent bloggers on the payroll. A spokesperson for U.S. Special Operations Command told Shachtman that the Kinniburgh/Denning report was merely an academic exercise: “The comments are not ‘actionable’, merely thought provoking.”

As far as I know, prominent bloggers who toe the administration’s line on Iraq policy are doing so for misguided ideological reasons, not unethical financial ones.

Friday's White House Press Briefing included two economic advisers to discuss the volatile economic situation here in the US, though they were careful to not paint to dire a picture. Obviously, with crude oil trading at record levels and OPEC releasing a statement blaming the price on the weakness of the American dollar, the media might be expected to ask a question or two. However, White House Spokesperson Dana Perino was not having any of it.

Q I'd like to follow up on their refusal to talk about the dollar, if I could. I mean, we're in a kind of a bad situation here, when OPEC says the reason for $105 or $106 a barrel of oil is the falling value of the dollar -- and you won't address that issue. Where do we go to find out who is right?

MS. PERINO: Well, as he just said, the Treasury Secretary is where you go to talk about the dollar. It's a longstanding policy that predates this administration, and I'm not going to change it today. But Treasury can talk about it.

Q I don't expect you to change it, but I do expect you to be able to say whether OPEC is completely wrong about this, or whether there is at least something to their claim that the dollar is responsible for the high price of oil right now.

MS. PERINO: Wendell, I'm under strict instructions, and have been from the beginning, to not talk about the dollar, and I'm not going to get fired to satisfy your question.

Nearly two weeks later, the right's smear of 12-year-old Graeme Frost and his family is long over, but the problems for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ken.) remain. His office was, as we now know, directly involved in pushing the attacks on the Frosts, but just as importantly, McConnell appears to have been caught lying about it.

By now, we've all heard the play-by-play. Right-wing activists went after the Frost family, and McConnell's spokesperson contacted political reporters, urging them to pick up on the story. Later, after learning that the conservative hatchet men were wrong, an embarrassed McConnell aide backpedaled and discouraged his media contacts from pursuing the bogus story.

The aide, Don Stewart, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that he briefed his boss on all of this last Thursday. As it turns out, that's the problem.

Mitch McConnell can't have it both ways. He can't luxuriate in a reputation for personal caution and political control, yet claim he knew nothing about the role his office tried to play in sliming a Baltimore boy and his family when they came forward in support of the SCHIP health care expansion.

Mr. Stewart told The Courier-Journal he explained all that to his boss on Thursday. So Sen. McConnell was deliberately untruthful the next day, when he told WHAS-TV's Mark Hebert, "There was no involvement whatsoever." The senator will object to any suggestion of lying, but what else is it when you knowingly misrepresent facts?

It's clear what Mitch McConnell knew and when he knew it. It's clear he deceived the public when he answered Mr. Hebert as he did about the e-mail sent by his press agent.

Mr. McConnell is so used to Washington-style gamesmanship and inside-the-beltway rules that he has forgotten what constituents back in Kentucky want: the simple truth.

Greg Sargent wonders what the media's interest would be if this had happened to a Dem.