Sunday, August 06, 2006

From Dittohead to Democrat

For more than a decade Jim Derych was a diehard Rush Limbaugh fan - a dittohead. But over time, the thirty-something financial planner realized that the real world wasn't much like the one Limbaugh paints for us on his syndicated national radio program. Finally, after 13 years of listening to the "chubby, drug-addled, matrimonially-challenged elephant" Derych decided Limbaugh was full of crap and changed his allegiance to the Democratic Party. In a new interview ("Left Turn"), Derych speaks out about why he deserted the Republican Party, and decided to write "Confessions of a Former Dittohead."

Thursday, August 03, 2006

ExxonMobil Smears Gore Through Intermediaries

Currently available on YouTube.com: "Al Gore's Penguin Army," a two-minute anti-Gore video that presents the former vice-president in a decidedly negative light and seeks to marginalize the message of his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." The video was ostensibly made by a 29-year-old amateur, but according to an article in today's Wall Street Journal, the video appears to have come from a computer at DCI Group, a Washington D.C. Republican lobby and public relations firm whose clients include - surprise - ExxonMobil. The future of Republican smear campaigns has arrived: High-priced right-wing PR firms and "think tanks" secretly producing expertly-crafted smear videos, then trying to pass them off as the work of your average twenty-something. In this case, the deep-pocketed DCI Group went so far as to purchase sponsored links [like the ones appearing above this post] for search terms "Al Gore" and "Global Warming" that pointed Web surfers directly to the video.

Next time you fill up your gas tank think about how much of that $3-plus a gallon is going to pay for political/anti-global warming propaganda.