Bloggasm

While listening to the audio, one finds it difficult to discern the identity of the person asking the questions, or the venue where the questions are being asked, but the person answering the questions is almost certainly Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

The anonymous questioner asks what can be done “about Obama and the birth certificate thing?” to which Cuccinelli responds, “It will get tested in my view when someone… when he signs a law, and someone is convicted of violating it and one of their defenses will be it is not a law because someone qualified to be President didn’t sign it.” He then claims that “as Attorney General,” he can challenge the birth certificate “only if there is a conflict where we are suing the federal government for a law they’ve passed.”

The questioner then asks how it can be proved Obama’s birth certificate is a fake.

“Well… that’s a good question,” Cuccinelli says. “Not one I’ve thought a lot about because it hasn’t been part of my campaign. Someone is going to have to come forward with nailed down testimony that he was born in place B, wherever that is. You know, the speculation is Kenya. And that doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.”

This is the same Ken Cuccinelli who recently came under fire for encouraging Virginia universities to rescind their anti-gay discrimination policies, a move that several groups have condemned as rooted in homophobia and bigotry.

The audio in question was released today by Ben Tribbett, a Virginian political blogger who is often credited with breaking the George Allen “macaca” video. The blogger uploaded the video onto YouTube with a still image of Cuccinelli as a visual.

I spoke to Tribbett, a former colleague, on the phone about the story. In order to protect his source he wouldn’t tell me where and when the audio takes place, or when he first learned of it; he would only say that it took place “at an event Ken was at.”

“I think it shows a shocking lack of judgment for an Attorney General to be having this kind of blunt conversation with a conspiracy theorist,” Tribbett said. “I think his lawsuit against the EPA, his letter on anti-discrimination policies and this audio shows that he is turning the Attorney General’s office into a circus freak show.”

Tribbett said the lack of details about the where and when of the audio wouldn’t make it harder to pin this on Cuccinelli, and that he reached out to the attorney general via email over the weekend with no response. He said that he’ll run any reaction from Cuccinelli if he offers one.

The video is below:

Follow me on twitter

News broke today that Facebook is considering suing the Daily Mail over false claims that an author created a fake profile of a young girl and was approached by dozens of older men wanting to meet for sex. The problem? The author, Mark Williams-Thomas, didn’t actually use Facebook, but some other social network.

Before this news broke I had read the article in question and was immediately suspicious. I tracked down Williams-Thomas and asked him point blank in an email if he had created the fake profile on Facebook, and whether he had proof of doing so. This was his response:

Hi Simon

You are correct it is not Facebook- the article was ghosted by the Mail and my corrections were not made to the published article.

The Mail have since corrected this serious error.

The fact that it did not take place on Facebook then answers all your other questions.

All the best

Mark Williams-Thomas MA (Criminology)
WT Associates Ltd

So not only did the author not create a fake profile on Facebook, he didn’t even write the piece.

Follow me on Twitter

Not long ago, Quentin Kidd, a faculty adviser for the student government association at Christopher Newport University, located in Newport News, Virginia, spoke with two politically active students at the school. Nicolaus Usry and Shannon Rhoten, heads of campus Republican and Democrat organizations, had come to him disturbed by a recent letter sent to several schools by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. According to the Washington Post, the letter “urged the state’s public colleges and universities to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” arguing that “their boards of visitors had no legal authority to adopt such statements.”

Usry and Rhoten, along with hundreds of other students and faculty, strongly disagreed with this notion and wanted to quickly organize some kind of response.

“So Shannon created this Facebook page, as it was kind of a natural way to communicate,” Kidd told me in a recent phone conversation. “I didn’t actually realize that they would put me on as an administrator of the group, but they did. And I think their goal initially was to raise awareness, and they saw this as the most expedient way to do so.”

In less than 48 hours, the group has amassed over 600 members and is among several others that have sprouted up across the state, almost all of which are organized by students vehemently opposed to campuses rescinding policies relating to discrimination against gays.

Kidd said the students are already organizing an on-campus rally, and the Facebook group has acted as an effective way to disseminate news.

“I’m not even sure that they would bother with the traditional method of posting fliers around campus,” he explained. “In their minds I think it would be a Facebook-generated event; they’ve already got 600 people in 48 hours that have joined this group. They can create an event as part of that group and immediately speak to 600 people and then encourage those 600 people to speak to anyone who doesn’t already know about it. So in this way, virtual organizing is simply the only way they’re going to do it.”

My brother PJ is a junior at CNU and one of those who joined the Facebook group. “Everyone seems to be really upset, even some of my conservative friends,” he told me. “Several of my friends who are in the Young Republicans club are involved with the organizing of opposition. Students fought really hard a few years ago to get the discrimination wording added to CNU’s discrimination policy….. many of those students who fought for it are now seniors, and they are really upset.”

Kidd, who has been a faculty member for 13 years and taught at Texas Tech before that, said that social media has created a new form of campus activism that is reminiscent of the Vietnam protests that swept across American college campuses decades ago. “As I was going through college and graduate school, campus activism was sort of on the wane. I was probably at the heart of the post-Vietnam wane in campus activism, but it’s really picked up a lot in the past eight years.”

The faculty member stressed that this current example of social media activism isn’t directed toward campus administrators, but instead is targeted at Cuccinelli and, to a lesser extent, Virginia Governor McDonnell. To his knowledge, no campus faculty or administrators have given any indication that they plan to rescind the anti-discrimination rules.

“My sense is that there’s a level of frustration and anxiety demonstrated within the last two days — with 600 people joining in 48 hours — that’s just right under the surface,” he explained.

Facebook, therefore, is simply a way for this surface tension to break out into the open and, these organizers hope, send Cuccinelli a message, one that relays that his anti-gay rhetoric will not go unchallenged.

Follow me on Twitter

Near the beginning of the Oscars ceremony, movie critic Roger Ebert was about 1,000 shy of 100,000 followers

Soon, Twitter users began an organized campaign to propel him over the 100,000 count:

And in the middle of a tribute to Precious, he crossed the finish line:

Follow me on Twitter

An email I received out of the blue from Jon Swift one day:

Happy New Year and Congratulations Anyway

Dear Mr. Owens:
I want to wish you a very happy new year and congratulate you on your Weblog Award nomination despite your misgivings. You’ve done great work this year and you deserve acknowledgment for it, so there. When I was just starting out and not getting a lot of traffic, I got nominated for a Weblog Award and it brought me a lot of new readers and put me in touch with a lot of new bloggers. So whatever its flaws, I think the Weblog Awards help blogs reach people they might not ordinarily reach and that’s a good thing.

And thank you again for your contribution to my end-of-the-year roundup. I hope that, too, helps your work reach more readers.

I hope your 2009 is a good one.
Take care,
Jon Swift

Al Weisel, the real person behind the pseudonym of satirical blogger Jon Swift, has sadly passed away. I’ve exchanged many emails with Jon over the years and have collaborated with him on several projects. I’ve always wondered who he really was, but I’m sad to find out this way.

Here are some Bloggasm posts that have featured Swift:

Interview with Jon Swift

Where in the world is blogger Jon Swift? UPDATE: Possibly found?

The downside of the Googlebomb

Why doesn’t blogger Jon Swift support WGA writers?

Blogger’s pseudonym gets deleted from Facebook