Jeff Gannon

A Gay Porn Star is Honored at CPAC

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:00:18 -0500

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070307/cm_thenation/45172362

A Gay Porn Star is Honored at CPAC

Wed Mar 7, 5:28 AM ET

The Nation -- A former gay porn star and male escort was awarded the Jeanne
Kirkpatrick Freedom award at last weekend's CPAC. He is Cpl. Matt Sanchez, a
Marine, campus culture warrior and Fox News favorite who David Horowitz
introduced me to at CPAC.

Tom Bacchus has a full run-down of the Sanchez saga, along with photos which
you should absolutely NOT view if you are in the presence of minors or in a
crowded workplace. On my blog, I describe my meeting with Sanchez, discuss
his psychological similarities to Ann Coulter, and explain how personally
conflicted figures like him are drawn to the right.

http://tombacchus.blogspot.com/2007/03/dirty-sanchez.html

What to make of Matt Sanchez, the 36 year old Marine who's begun to make the
rightwing gab show circuit by complaining that (what a shocker) fellow
students at Columbia University don't like having a military presence at
their school, a Manhattan university.

Bush Wired Again; Is Bret Baier the New "Jeff Gannon"?

Bob Fertik — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:31:02 -0400

Once again George Bush went before the Corporate Media and repeated answers fed into his earpiece by Karl Rove. And once again the Corporate Media pretended the answers were coming out of Bush's alcoholism-impaired brain. When will the Corporate Media acknowledge what everyone in the world can see with their own eyes - that Bush is always wired?

And here's another question: is Fox News' White House correspondent Bret Baier spending his nights at the White House - like former White House correspondent "Jeff Gannon"?

The reason I ask is because Bush repeatedly smiled and winked at Baier - which was especially weird and disturbing because the topics being discussed were the death and destruction across the Middle East resulting from Bush's utterly failed policies.

Baier is Bush's type, both physically (built like "Jeff Gannon") and career-wise (never served in the military but spent a lot of time "sucking up" to military men).

Calling all Gannon watchers - what do you think?

What Happened to Johnny Gosch?

Ted Kahl — Sat, 28 May 2005 14:17:08 -0400

Some weeks ago, there were stories asking if Jeff Gannon is really kidnapped paper boy Johnny Gosch. At the time, I really didn't take these seriously, especially since these articles were at sites which I considered less than credible. But believe it or not, this is actually being reported by Iowa's KWWL News:

New Leads In The Johnny Gosch Case

A cold case is heating up. Iowa paperboy Johnny Gosch vanished without a trace in 1982. But, now, after KWWL's story last month on Johnny's disappearance, there is new information on the case.

A private investigator working Johnny's disappearance believe his kidnapping was part of a government conspiracy. The investigator shared new evidence with KWWL and it could be the break needed to solve this case. That evidence includes a recorded phone call that has never been heard publicly, until now.

During the early morning of Septmeber 5, 1982, Johnny Gosch was kidnapped from a West Des Moines neighborhood while delivering newspapers. It was silent, quick and professional. "This man has told us that at the end of their investigation that there were 834 kids involved that were kidnapped," says James Rothstein. He's talking about a former CIA agent who must remain anonymous.

Rothstein is a former New York City police detective, now a private investigator working the case for Johnny's mother, Noreen. And within the last couple weeks, Rothstein has uncovered new evidence linking Johnny's kidnapping to child prostitution. "It basically came down to one thing and one thing only. You know, it was money. These kids were being grabbed to satisfy the malignant, twisted, you know, evil depravity of very powerful individuals who have the money," he says.

Rothstein is talking about individuals who would spend as much as $10,000 to have sex with young boys and girls. And this new evidence points to the involvement of U.S. government officials. "They were using kids to compromise people. And what better way to compromise somebody than get a young boy with a politician or some powerful person that may be in the military or whatever and then you can compromise them and get what ever you want."

Last month, people on the internet and investigators like Rothstein began to believe a man who passed himself off as a White House reporter and known male prostitute Jeff Gannon could be Johnny Gosch. And while Gannon's true idenity still can't be confirmed, Rothstein says the more clues he uncovers, the possibility Gannon may be Gosch increases, "When you look into the whole abduction of Johnny, what happened, the cover-up that took place, the way the kidnapping was done, this was a professional job and it fits the profile that I have seen over the years as a professional investigator."

Rothstein now believes the CIA was involved and tried cover it up. "They were assigned to find out if there was an agency connection to it and I am quite sure that if they found one, to make sure it was covered," he says.

And Rothstein's CIA informant says this: "We were specifically ordered to clear our name. This would make the American agency look pretty s****y, like we're all a bunch of f***ing child molesters."

We requested information from the CIA on three kidnappings, Rothstein and his CIA informant believes to be connected. The first, Johnny Gosch, the second, Eugene Martin, kidnapped on August 12th, 1984 while delivering newspapers in Des Moines.

And, Jacob Wetterling, who was kidnapped from his Minnesota neighborhood on October 22, 1989. The CIA responded to our request with this letter, denying the agency investigated any of the kidnapping cases. But, Rothstein's source says, it happened often and for big bucks, "You could order one of these kids, it was $2,500 to $3,000 up front then you had the balance of another $3,000 to $3,500 or $4,000 upon completion. In some cases, you know depending on the circumstances you can probably get them at the bargain basement price of $1,500, but most I think that we ever saw was for the bondage and the freaky s**t and that was an even $10,000 and people...these people would hand that money out like it was candy."

That's what it cost to hire a kidnapper to steal a child like Johnny off the street. And with new details like this coming to light, catching Johnny's kidnappers might actually happen. "Any police agency that would get involved in this case to this date can solve that case. The case is more solvable now, than it has even been. And that case should have been solved hours after it happened. The witnesses are out there. You yourself have found some," Rothstein says.

Those witnesses include a Black Hawk County woman who wishes to remain anonymous. She sent Rothstein this packet of information. "Johnny Gosch is mentioned in it involving something that was going on years ago in the Waterloo, Iowa area," Rothstein says.

And while Rothstein hasn't determined the significance of the possible Waterloo connection, he says it's just as important as the phone conversation he had with a CIA agent. "That's solid information with names. That's where you start investigating and that should have been done years ago," he says.

And because it wasn't, Rothstein continues to make phone calls, and work leads, hoping his next big break is the one that solves the mystery behind the disapperance of Johnny Gosch.

For the past month, Rothstein has been tracking the activities of two suspects he believes could be responsible for kidnapping Johnny Gosch. We couldn't name them in our report because it hurt the investigation. We agreed to keep their identities secret so we could tell you this story.

National Press Club Panel To Include Jeff Gannon!

Ted Kahl — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 16:07:12 -0500

From AmericaBlog:

It's the National Press Club itself that is hosting Jeff Gannon and Wonkette as either mainstream journalists or serious political bloggers (as we had reported earlier today).

Gannon, of course, is neither, and the same goes for Wonkette. He's a male prostitute who parroted GOP press releases, and she writes a humor blog about sex in politics that focuses mainly on [anal sex] jokes. Neither of them is a serious political journalist (and I don't believe Wonkette, whose site I love, even claims to be), and most certainly neither of them is your first choice for a panel about how serious MSM journalism differs from serious BLOG journalism.

Oh, but it gets better.

Gannon screwed military service

stinger — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 13:05:42 -0500

http://americablog.org/

DailyKos: NO Military Service for Gannon/Guckert by Joe in DC - 3/24/2005 12:39:00 PM

A lot of comments remind us not to forget about the Jeff/James Gannon/Guckert scandal. Believe me, we haven't...even though the MSM seems to have. DailyKos has another new development involving Jeff/James. Looks like our boy may have made up the whole military record thing too: Fake name. Fake reporter. Fake news agency.

And now this ... Fake Marine. First, we went to the Military Personnel Records of the National Personnel Records Center at St. Louis, Missouri, the supposed repository of all military records. No record showed, but the official letter hemmed and hawed and scraped its military-booted feet so much, kinda sorta explaining that they're often ... well ... ummm ... screwed up ... and that we should check directly with the United States Marine Corps at Quantico. You know, just to ... ummm ... make sure. Love the Kossacks. We still need to know a lot more about the Gannon/Guckert story. A lot.

Expose the Gannon 21!

Bob Fertik — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 11:20:56 -0500

Here's a cool campaign from Agitprops.org - let's join in the fun!

On March 16, 2005, a group of 21 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee moved to block a Congressional investigation into how male escort Jeff "Bulldog" Gannon gained daily access to the White House for two years under a false name.

Why did they suppress evidence that would show who helped a gay prostitute evade Secret Service background checks and gain compromising access to the President of the United States? Why are these 21 Republicans so desperate to keep "Bulldog's" secrets? Shouldn't they be answering some questions about why they don't want any questions asked?

Click on a mugshot for a page-sized poster on each of Gannon's VIP clients that people can download and print. Forward the jpegs widely -- post links to listgroups and blogs. Print them out at the color printer at work and stick them on cars in the parking lot.

What ever happened to Jeff Gannon?

TheROUS — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 20:35:06 -0500

It seems to me that just about everyone has forgotten about Jeff Gannon. This is a case where someone was given a white house press pass so he could ask soft ball questions, and no one seems to think this is important. This is a chance to show the Bush administration for what it really is: a highly corrupt regime that lies and cheats when ever it wants to. We need to do some thing to remind people of this. We can't let this slip through our fingers.

Any thoughts?

Gonzo Gone, Rather Going, Watergate Still Here. new york times

RHONDA4646 — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:15:06 -0500

Gonzo Gone, Rather Going, Watergate Still Here. new york times -->-->-->-->

TWO weeks ago Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide. Next week Dan Rather commits ritual suicide, leaving the anchor chair at CBS prematurely as penance for his toxic National Guard story. The two journalists shared little but an abiding distaste - make that hatred in Thompson's case - for the Great Satan of 20th-century American politics, Richard Nixon. The best work of both was long behind them. Yet memories of that best work - not to mention the coincidental timing of their departures - only accentuate the vacuum in that cultural category we stubbornly insist on calling News.

What's missing from News is the news. On ABC, Peter Jennings devotes two hours of prime time to playing peek-a-boo with U.F.O. fanatics, a whorish stunt crafted to deliver ratings, not information. On NBC, Brian Williams is busy as all get-out, as every promo reminds us, "Reporting America's Story." That story just happens to be the relentless branding of Brian Williams as America's anchorman - a guy just too in love with Folks Like Us to waste his time looking closely at, say, anything happening in Washington.

In this environment, it's hard to know whom to root for. After the "60 Minutes" fiasco, Mr. Williams's boss, the NBC president Jeff Zucker, piously derided CBS for its screw-up, bragging of the reforms NBC News instituted after a producer staged a truck explosion for a "Dateline NBC" segment in 1992. "Nothing like that could have gotten through, at any level," Mr. Zucker said of the CBS National Guard story, "because of the safeguards we instituted more than a decade ago." Good for him, but it's not as if a lot else has gotten through either. When was the last time Stone Phillips delivered a scoop, with real or even fake documents, on "Dateline"? Or that NBC News pulled off an investigative coup as stunning as the "60 Minutes II" report on Abu Ghraib? That, poignantly enough, was Mr. Rather's last hurrah before he, too, and through every fault of his own, became a neutered newsman.

Hunter Thompson did not do investigative reporting, but he would have had a savage take on our news-free world - not least because it resembles his own during the Nixon era, before he had calcified into the self-parodistic pop culture cartoon immortalized by Garry Trudeau, Bill Murray, Johnny Depp and most of his eulogists. Read "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" - the chronicle of his Rolling Stone election coverage - and you find that his diagnosis of journalistic dysfunction hasn't aged a day: "The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists." He cites as a classic example the breathless but belated revelations of the mental history of George McGovern's putative running mate, the Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton - a story that had long been known by "half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps." This same clubby pack would be even tardier on Watergate, a distasteful assignment left to a pair of lowly police-beat hacks at The Washington Post.

Thompson was out to break the mainstream media's rules. His unruly mix of fact, opinion and masturbatory self-regard may have made him a blogger before there was an Internet, but he was a blogger who had the zeal to leave home and report firsthand and who could write great sentences that made you want to savor what he found out rather than just scroll quickly through screen after screen of minutiae and rant. When almost all "the Wizards, Gurus and Gentlemen Journalists in Washington" were predicting an unimpeded victory march for Edmund Muskie to the Democratic presidential nomination, it was Thompson who sniffed out the Muskie campaign's "smell of death" and made it stick. The purported front-runner, he wrote, "talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's crop."

But even Thompson might have been shocked by what's going on now. "The death of Thompson represents the passing from the Age of Gonzo to the Age of Gannon," wrote Russell Cobb in a column in The Daily Texan at the University of Texas. As he argues, today's White House press corps is less likely to be invaded by maverick talents like a drug-addled reporter from a renegade start-up magazine than by a paid propagandist like Jeff Gannon, a fake reporter for a fake news organization (Talon News) run by a bona fide Texas Republican operative who was a delegate to the 2000 Bush convention.

Though a few remain on the case - Eric Boehlert of Salon, mediamatters.org, Joe Strupp of Editor and Publisher - the Gannon story is fast receding. In some major news venues, including ABC and CBS, it never surfaced at all. Yet even as Mr. Gannon has quit his "job" as a reporter and his "news organization" has closed up shop, the plot thickens. His own Web site - which only recently shut down with the self-martyring message "The voice goes silent" - has now restarted as a blog with Gonzo pretensions. The title alone of his first entry, "Fear and Loathing in the Press Room," would send Thompson spinning in his grave had he not asked that his remains be shot out of a cannon.

As a blogger, Mr. Gannon's new tactic is to encourage fellow right-wing bloggers to portray him as the victim of a homophobic left-wing witch hunt that destroyed his privacy. Given that it was Mr. Gannon himself who voluntarily exhibited his own private life by appearing on Web sites advertising his services as a $200-per-hour escort, that's a hard case to make. But it is a clever way to deflect attention from an actual sexual witch hunt conducted by his own fake news organization in early 2004. It was none other than Talon News that advanced the fictional story that a young woman "taped an interview with one of the major television networks" substantiating a rumor on the Drudge Report that John F. Kerry had had an extramarital affair with an intern. (Mr. Kerry had to publicly deny the story just as his campaign came out of the gate.) This is the kind of dirty trick only G. Gordon Liddy could dream up. Or maybe did. Mr. Gannon's Texan boss, Bobby Eberle, posted effusive thanks (for "their assistance, guidance and friendship") to both Mr. Liddy and Karl Rove on Talon News's sister site, GOPUSA, last Christmas.

Mr. Gannon, a self-promoting airhead, may well be a pawn of larger forces as the vainglorious Mr. Liddy once was. But to what end? That Kerry "intern" wasn't the only "news" Mr. Gannon helped stuff in the pipeline during an election year. A close reading of the transcripts of televised White House press conferences reveals that at uncannily crucial moments he was called on by the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, to stanch tough questioning on such topics as Abu Ghraib and Mr. Rove's possible involvement in the outing of the C.I.A. spy Valerie Plame. We still don't know how this Zelig, using a false name, was given a daily White House pass every day for two years. Last weekend, Jim Pinkerton, a former official in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses, said on "Fox News Watch," no less, that such a feat "takes an incredible amount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House," that it had to be "conscious" and that "some investigation should proceed and they should find that out."

Given an all-Republican government, the only investigation possible will have to come from the press. Which takes us back to 1972, the year of Thompson's fear and loathing on the campaign trail. That was no golden age for news either. As Thompson's Rolling Stone colleague, Timothy Crouse, wrote in his own chronicle of that year, "The Boys on the Bus," months of stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein failed to "sink in" and only 48 percent of those polled by Gallup had heard of Watergate by Election Day.

Some news organizations had simply ignored The Post's scoops "out of petty rivalry," wrote Mr. Crouse. Others did so because they "feared the administration or favored Nixon in the presidential race." Others didn't initially recognize the story's importance. (The New York Times played the Watergate break-in on page 30.) The White House's pathological secrecy and penchant for threatening to use the Federal Communications Commission as a battering ram on its broadcast critics took care of the rest. According to a superb new history of the Washington press corps, "Reporting from Washington," by Donald A. Ritchie, even Mr. Rather, then CBS's combative man in the Nixon White House, "left the Watergate story alone at first, sure that it would fade like 'a puff of talcum powder.' "

For similar if not identical reasons, journalistic investigations into the current administration rarely "sink in" either. Early stories in The Boston Globe and Washington Post on what Jeff Gannon himself (on his blog) now calls "Gannongate" faded like that puff of powder. So did Eric Lichtblau's recent Times report on the White House's suppression of the 9/11 commission finding that federal aviation officials ignored dozens of advance warnings of Al Qaeda airline hijackings and suicide missions. But we've now entered a new twilight zone: in 1972, at least, the press may have been stacked with jokers but not with counterfeit newsmen.

Today you can't tell the phonies without a scorecard. Besides the six "journalists" we know to have been paid by the administration or its backers, bloggers were on the campaign payrolls of both a Republican office-seeker (South Dakota's Senator John Thune) and a Democrat (Howard Dean) during last year's campaign. This week The Los Angeles Times reported that Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration, "taking a cue from President Bush's administration," had distributed fake news videos starring a former TV reporter to extol the governor's slant on a legislative proposal. Back in Washington, the Social Security Administration is refusing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests for information about its use of public relations firms - such as those that funneled taxpayers' money to the likes of Armstrong Williams. Don't expect news organizations dedicated to easy-listening news to get to the bottom of it.

"Reporting America's Story," NBC's slogan, is what Hunter Thompson actually did before the phrase was downsized into a vacuous marketing strategy. As for Mr. Rather, he gave a valedictory interview to Ken Auletta of The New Yorker in which he said, "The one thing I hope, and I believe, is that even my enemies think that I am authentic." The bar is so low these days that authenticity may well constitute a major journalistic accomplishment in itself. www.newyorktimes.com

Gannon Planned Gay Wedding on White House Lawn

Bob Fertik — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 20:44:15 -0500

Last week, reporter Bill Berkowitz tried to get comments from anti-gay religious leaders about the Gannon Affair. Remarkably, no anti-gay leaders were willing to make a statement, thus proving their opposition to gay rights is just a cynical effort to manipulate their blind followers into voting Republican.

But I wonder if today's breaking news will finally end the silence on the religious right...

Gannon Planned Gay Wedding on White House Lawn

(Satire News) White House reporter James Guckert, who used the alias "Jeff Gannon" in his reports for Talon News, planned to marry his gay lover in a ceremony on the White House lawn, according to his just-discovered diary.

In an entry dated November 3, 2004, Guckert wrote "I was so thrilled about my role in beating Tom Daschle yesterday that I proposed to Chihuahua. I told him I wanted to marry him on the White House lawn in June. When he got over the shock, he gave me a deep kiss and told me he would be mine forever," Guckert wrote.

The identity of "Chihuahua" could not be determined at press time. Guckert used the nickname "bulldog" in his Internet ads, in which he advertised his prostitution services at $200 per hour, with a special weekend rate of $1,200.

In his diary entry, Guckert noted the difficulties he would face in holding a gay marriage ceremony on the lawn of the White House while George Bush was President, given Bush's strenuous opposition to gay marriage.

"I told Chihuahua we'd have to be discrete. I told him I could get him a day pass into the White House as a reporter for Talon News, but we couldn't kiss in front of the cameras. If [Pat] Robertson, [Jerry] Falwell, [James] Dobson, or [Sun Myung] Moon ever saw a photo, we'd end up in Guantanamo," Guckert wrote.

According to Guckert's diaries, he planned to ask GOP chair Ken Mehlman to be his best man. Although Mehlman refuses to discuss his homosexuality, he has been outed by BlogActive.com, which recently outed Rep. Ed Schrock, a conservative Virginia Congressman who retired rather than acknowledge his homosexuality.

When the existence of Guckert's diaries came to light, Rep. Louise Slaughter asked the Special Prosecutor investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame to subpoena Guckert's diaries in case they shed any light on the White House source who leaked Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak.

The day after Slaughter's letter was reported, Guckert's diaries were found in the garbage outside his house by a Bassett hound that detected a strong odor. The odor turned out to be the severed head of a horse, with the initials "KR." Investigators are trying to determine the identity of "KR."

BlogCall 1.0 THIS THURSDAY: Ask John Aravosis About Gannon/Guckert

Bob Fertik — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 13:59:15 -0500

It's the hottest story in the Blogosphere: blogger John Aravosis of AmericaBlog.org is exposing the truth about former White House "reporter" Jim Guckert, a.k.a. "John Gannon."

The basic question underlying this scandal is simple: How on earth did a $200/hour gay male prostitute get past post-9/11 White House security nearly every day for two years to get within spitball distance of George W. Bush?

Is the Secret Service completely incompetent - or does Guckert have "friends" in the highest places? Who specifically waved Guckert into the White House each day, starting when Guckert worked for the rightwing propaganda site GOPUSA.com?

And how "deep" were Guckert's White House connections? Did he actually see the secret CIA memo outing Valerie Plame? Did he actually know Bush was going to declare war against Iraq on TV 4 hours before anyone else knew? How did Guckert's boss Bobby Eberle get a rare and coveted interview with Karl Rove himself?

Finally, who was actually paying Guckert? Was he paid by the White House out of a propaganda slush fund? Was he paid by the GOP to spread lies about Democrats? Did Guckert's lies cost Tom Daschle his Senate seat?

This hot story was literally right under the noses of the White House press corps, who sat side-by-side with Guckert for two years. Yet none of them ever investigated Guckert - and many continue to defend him and criticize Aravosis for pursuing the truth.

Where will this expose lead? How can progressive bloggers help Aravosis get to the bottom of this scandal? How can we persuade the mainstream media to pursue its own investigations?

Join us for BlogCall 1.0 with John Aravosis of AmericaBlog.org THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24, at 1 pm EST / 10 am PT. John will speak for 15 minutes, then take your questions for 20 minutes more.

Note: attendance is limited to the first 100 participants who who RSVP to their personal invitation. To receive an invitation, you must submit your qualifications as an investigative blogger or journalist here: http://democrats.com/contact