The Fox News employee hired by Gawker to write about his experience inside the network has revealed himself as an associate producer on “The O’Reilly Factor.” Joe Muto, who joined Fox News in 2004, says he has been suspended, with pay and was escorted out of Fox News headquarters today by “two nice gentlemen from security.”

At 8:42pm tonight, Muto wrote on Gawker:

Two hours ago I was called into a meeting with Dianne Brandi, the Fox News Executive Vice President of Legal and Business Affairs and suspended indefinitely… with pay, oddly enough. They nailed me.

I am a weasel, a traitor, a sell-out and every bad word you can throw at me… but as of today, I am free, and I am ready to tell my story, which I wasn’t able to fully do for the previous 36 hours.

Muto signs off, “Stay tuned for much, much more tomorrow.”

> Update: A Fox News spokesperson released this statement tonight: “Joe Muto is fired effective April 12. Once the network determined that Mr. Muto was the main culprit in less than 24 hours, he was suspended late today while we pursued concurrent avenues. We are continuing to explore legal recourse against Mr. Muto and possibly others.”

Source: Media Bistro.

Critics say it proves Senator wasn’t being detained

Security video of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s run in with the TSA earlier this week has been leaked to a newspaper, and critics say it proves that Paul was not detained by the federal agency.

The footage, obtained by The Tennessean shows the Senator seated in a chair within a glass walled cubicle in the security area of Nashville airport after refusing to undergo a pat down.

As Paul talks on the phone, presumably to his office as he had stated in interviews, three TSA officials stand guard, along with police officers standing outside the cubicle.

The video then shows Paul later being escorted through the airport by an official. The footage represents about one minute of the incident which Paul said lasted over an hour.

The Senator is partially obscured by a column blocking part of the cubicle for some portions of the video. When asked why the camera would be set up only to be obscured by a column, airport spokeswoman Emily Richard told The Tennessean that cameras are “placed for the widest view possible, not a specific area.”

The airport authority and the TSA have declined to comment on the footage.

Watch the video below:

Although the report in The Tennessean points out that the footage contradicts a police report that claimed Paul was “irate”, critics jumped on the footage to suggest Paul over reacted and exaggerated the incident.

Max Read of blog site Gawker said he believes the video proves the Republican was “totally full of sh-t” when he called his spokesperson.

“I got a lot of mail, some of it syntactically and orthographically correct, disputing my account of Rand Paul’s full-of-sh-tness by referring to the dictionary definition of the word ‘detained.’” Read wrote.

“Here is my feeling: when your argument centers around ‘the dictionary definition’ of anything and involves the adverb ‘technically,’ you are full of sh-t. When you tell someone you are being ‘detained by the TSA,’ you don’t mean ‘sitting in a chair while they decide what to do.’”

Another blogger suggested that “the way Paul was treated (not a finger laid on him) doesn’t quite illustrate the harshness that word [detainment'] usually suggests.”

In response Paul supporters pointed out that just because Paul wasn’t shackled and pushed around doesn’t mean he wasn’t being detained by the TSA.

“‘Detained’ is a legal term that very much applies to this situation. It does not matter that he is not in handcuffs or behind bars; when a peace officer restricts your freedom to vacate an area through verbal instruction (the consequence of disobedience being immediate arrest for disorderly conduct), you are detained.” one commenter noted.

Following the incident Monday, Rand Paul told reporters “I tried to leave the cubicle to speak to one of the TSA people and I was barked at: ‘Do not leave the cubicle! So, that, to me sounds like I’m being asked not to leave the cubicle. It sounds a little bit like I’m being detained.”

——————————————————————

Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, andPrisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

Source: Prison Planet.

Homeland Security surveillance plane helped Jamaican police carry out atrocity.

If you thought that the use of a Predator drone to target a family in rural North Dakota was overkill, wait until you hear what happened in Jamaica. The Department of Homeland Security aided Jamaican authorities in massacring 73 civilians as part of a botched drug raid conducted with the help of a DHS surveillance aircraft – before attempting to cover up the atrocity by refusing to release the footage.

“At the DEA’s insistence, Jamaican authorities reluctantly raided Tivoli Gardens, the West Kingston slum (Christopher) Coke ran as a de facto governor, two years ago. Coke didn’t turn up, but Jamaican police officers killed 73 civilians, many of them allegedly in cold blood. A Department of Homeland Security surveillance plane was overhead the whole time,” reports Gawker.

Writing for the New Yorker, Mattathias Schwartz reveals how most of Coke’s gunmen disappeared almost instantly, before police proceeded to go door to door carrying out summary executions of innocent villagers.

Amidst the massacre, a Homeland Security surveillance plane circled overhead, providing Jamaican authorities withy real-time intelligence and surveillance footage.

After the Jamaican government claimed the DHS played no role in the atrocity, Schwartz filed a Freedom of Information Act Request which revealed that the U.S. had played a role, forcing the Jamaican government to retract the claim.

“PRIME MINISTER and Minister of Defence, Andrew Holness, has revealed that the United States Government provided surveillance assistance to the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) through the presence of an aircraft over Tivoli Gardens during the May 24, 2010 operations in the West Kingston community to serve a warrant on convicted drug lord Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke,” reported the Jamaica Gleaner.

A DHS U.S. Customs and Border Protection letter confirms that video records of the massacre were made “from a Department of Homeland Security P-3 Orion aircraft that was flying over Kingston that day” which ensured that, “all scenes were continuously recorded.”

However, despite the fact that the video made by the plane could contain evidence of atrocities committed by Jamaican police, the DHS has refused to release the footage.

Should we be concerned that the same technology now being used to spy on American citizens is also being used in foreign countries to aid in the slaughter of innocent people?

As part of the accelerating program to target American citizens as terrorists, military hardware used in places like Afghanistan to hunt down insurgents is now becoming a routine tool of law enforcement.

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times reported on how a Predator B drone was called in to conduct surveillance over a family farm in North Dakota as part of a SWAT raid on the Brossart family, who were suspects in the egregious crime of stealing six missing cows. Local police in this one area have already used the drone on two dozen occasions since June.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

Source: Prison Planet.

*Taken from io9.

Jonathan Lethem — Just who are these weird people that you see when you put on the mysterious sunglasses in They Live? What do they want? More importantly, what do they mean? Novelist Jonathan Lethem investigates, in three excerpts from his new book analyzing They Live.

Top image via Shannon Hubbell.

Lethem’s They Live book is part of Soft Skull Press’ new Deep Focus series, “A Novel Approach To Cinema.” Here are three sections that deal with the movie’s Ghouls:

A Countenance:

(34:32)

“As the night deepened, so deepened to me the interest of the scene; for not only did the general character of the crowd materially alter (its gentler features retiring in the gradual withdrawal of the more orderly portion of the people, and its harsher ones coming out in bolder relief, as the late hour brought forth every species of infamy from its den,) but the rays of the gas-lamps, feeble at first in their struggle with the dying day, had now at last gained ascendancy, and threw over everything a fitful and garish lustre… With my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age,) – a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.”
– Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd”

They’re appalling, that’s what they are. Walking disasters. Flayed, scalded, piebald, grimacing, corrupted, robotic, evoking syphilis-victim scare-photos from teenage health-ed nightmares, yet somehow accusatory, defiant inside their disguises, the ghouls present no limit of affront to a healthy construction-worker’s eye. They looked burnt, yet gooey. They’re also – how to say this? – affrontingly cheapo (eventually we’ll even notice in their ghoul-hands what looks like the wrinkling of rubber dishwashing gloves, and so this may be another reason for the black-and-white, better to mask low-budget inadequacies). This fact frees a certain relieving hilarity yet also synthesizes with our revulsion: Something this skeezy is ruling my world? Something this ludicrous is freaking me out? (The virtuosity of Carpenter’s mise-en-scène ensures it is.) The first to turn to the camera and say, more or less, ‘Fuck you lookin’ at? is this silver-haired, foxy older gentleman of obvious privilege referred to in the credits as “Well-Dressed Customer”; his sustained, withering ghoul-glare as he purchases his magazine (with dollars that confess THIS IS YOUR GOD) is one of They Live’s icons, an instant that punches a spooky hole in time. Nada hasn’t located his voice yet, so we’re left undistracted, or unconsoled, by any cheese-dip-Brazilian-plastic-surgery-perfume-on-a-pig one-liners. What’s brilliantly guaranteed is how totally we’d loathe this guy anyway; you may not be going home in your BMW and Rolex to soak in your Jacuzzi, but he certainly is. So, already brewing within our terror is a lavish contempt, one that finds satisfaction at the rotten-corpse visage before us. Any rich guy who’s every glowered at us like we didn’t belong somewhere – an outdoor magazine rack, for chrissakes! – really ought to look as sick on the outside as we’re certain he is in his soul. I’m fucking looking at you, man! Nada’s not quite there, but he’s just a step away.

Also, ghouls wear wigs. For some reason their masterful illusion-generator can’t do hair. Don’t think about this too hard.

Ghoul Motivation:

“Look at the front pages of our daily newspapers. Every title, especially when it pretends just to inform us, contains an implicit injunction. So when you are asked to choose between liberal democracy and fundamentalism, it is not only that one term is obviously preferred; what is more important, the true injunction is to see this as the true choice, to ignore third options. So, again, naïve as it may seem, the film’s staging of ideology is nonetheless more complex than it may appear. Once you put the glasses on and see it, it no longer determines you. Which means that before you see it through the glasses, you also saw it, but you were not aware of it.”
– Slavoj Zizek, “They Live! Hollywood As An Ideological Machine”

What’s odd in retrospect about the ghoul at the newsstand is that he wants to read the newspapers. This appears far more than a show of interest on his part; he even takes one home, pausing to scowl at some headline before getting into his car. Similarly, the ghoul at the bar at the end of the film sits watching television as absorbedly as any of the other patrons. How can we account for this? Which do the ghouls’ robotic orbs register as they scan (presumably like a supermarket laser run over a bar-code) the dummy media with which they’ve overpainted our world: exhortations like CONFORM and OBEY, or the illusory articles and photographs, or both? Maybe they’re seeing some third-level media, something we’d have to call “Real Ghoul News,” which is being broadcast on a wavelength perceptible only to their eyes. Huh. I wish I could say the film’s given me some help here, but I’m flying solo.

But this, another of They Live’s zones of lively incoherence, really raises the matter of ghoul motivation in general terms. Throw out my third-level-media theory: it’s likely the ghoul cares about the delusional broadcast that rules the human world because of his investment in the mass-consensual fiction that’s resulted (at both levels of the word investment). After all, these entities have troubled to turn up here on Earth, to seek out hard-to-maintain bespoke suits and clumpy wigs, to tool around in our fancier cars when they could simply teleport, and to shop for blue-corn tortillas – in most regards they’ve bought the same ticket they’re selling. So, this gentleman’s probably checking his stock prices (even with the fix in, you can never be too sure the ghoul down the street’s not getting ahead of you), but also perusing the Real Estate and Fashion sections, and Arts too, to see what recordings the hip ghouls are listening to these days. Maybe he’s a sports fan, too. The only part of the paper surely of no interest whatsoever would be the news per se – whether international or domestic, all such conflicts would seem to be tempests-in-teapots now, bogus distractions definitively trumped by the larger fact of alien invasion and control. Finally, it might just be that buying a newspaper to read while stopped at red lights helps this succubus feel important and real. The way he wants to feel. Human.

Tracing the film’s outward logic – “we’re livestock!” – suggests the ghouls are something along the lines of farmers who want to dress up as cows. At the very least, they’re like borderline cool kids in high school, just trying to fit in, to get over.

A Recent Scourge As Old As Mankind Itself:

“An elite is inevitable.” – Jenny Holzer, Truisms

“I’m not saying things were better before, I’m just saying they’re worse now.” – Michael Seidenberg (in conversation)

“Maybe they’ve always been with us.” This uncertainty, this “maybe,” is a sort of undertow sucking at the toes of They Live. Our ostensible satire of the Reagan Yuppie Generation, specific in time and place, keeps gesturing toward corruptions of the human spirit and species as ancient as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, or some other force even more fundamentally Gnostic. As far as specific dates go, the film is noncommittal, though it wouldn’t seem necessary for alien invaders who’d been with us for more than a few decades to spend much time bragging about their recent growth curve, as these ghouls do. At deeper layers, here the film’s employed a Keatsian “negative capability”: that profitable anxiety set resonating in us at the levels at which we register the confusion. If “our own cold fucking hearts” are the matter here, then who needs alien invaders? (Like most of the best science fiction, the literal devices threaten at some point to resolve into ‘mere’ metaphor.) And if the nightmare’s intrinsic to human history, why such emphasis on present regimes of consumer greed, dry-look hairstyles, and blue corn-tortillas?

Paging Slavoj Zizek! The Slovenian philosopher’s conflation of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist politics equips a viewer to consider the notion that human consciousness, forged in familial psychodrama, yearns innately toward totalitarian ideological control (the most recent incarnation of which, according to Zizek and Carpenter, is the inverted totalitarianism of late capitalism, with its injunctions to consume and enjoy). In other words, maybe Bad Daddy and Big Brother are more or less all one problem. Poor Nada’s got an inkling; though outfitted only for rampage, his fury’s more revolutionary (in Zizekian terms), not less so, for having bundled outrage at the ghouls together with recollection of both Judeo-Christian paternalism and his own father’s monstrousness.

My Two Cents: Man, Gawker likes filth, especially when directing it at the conservative sect of the Beltway. In any event, peeps just be hatin’ on homie ’cause he got mad game! Chris Lee is a P.I.M.P. doin’ his thang! Some say that the pic is photoshopped, others claim it is a smear campaign. It’s only a smear campaign if he actually tapped that, pulled out and wiped it off on a towel. End Two Cents.

*Taken from Gawker.

Republican congressman serving the 26th District of New York. But when he trolls Craigslist’s “Women Seeking Men” forum, he’s Christopher Lee, “divorced” “lobbyist” and “fit fun classy guy.” One object of his flirtation told us her story.

On the morning of Friday, January 14, a single 34-year-old woman put an ad in the “Women for Men” section of Craigslist personals. “Will someone prove to me not all CL men look like toads?” she asked, inviting “financially & emotionally secure” men to reply.

That afternoon, a man named Christopher Lee replied. He used a Gmail account that Rep. Christopher Lee has since confirmed to be his own. (It’s the same Gmail account that was associated with Lee’s personal Facebook account, which the Congressman deleted when we started asking questions.)

By email, Lee identified himself as a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist and sent a PG picture to the woman from the ad. (In fact, Lee is married and has one son with his wife. He’s also 46.)

To: [redacted]@yahoo.com
From: Christopher Lee
Date: Friday, January 14, 2011, 2:41 PM
Subject: Will Someone Prove To Me Not All CL Men Look Like Toads – 34 (DMV)

Hi,

Hope I’m not a toad. i’m a very fit fun classy guy. Live in Cap Hill area. 6ft 190lbs blond/blue. 39.. Lobbyist. I promise not to disappoint.

Lee’s Craigslist correspondent—a government employee from Maryland who asked not to be identified—liked what she saw. She replied flirtatiously. He replied with a PG-13 muscle picture.

To: Christopher Lee
From: [redacted]@yahoo.com
Date: Friday, January 14, 2011 9:57PM

Are you sure that’s not a photo from a Jcpenney ad?

By modern day standards, the conversation was relatively banal: No prostitutes, escorts, or madams were involved. Just good old fashioned lying and an apparent willingness to cheat on one’s wife:

The woman says she cut off contact when she searched for Lee online and concluded he’d lied about his age, occupation, and marital status. Then she forwarded us the correspondence.

A spokesman for the Congressman confirmed that the email address belonged to Lee, and that he had deleted his Facebook account because our initial inquiry had him fretting about “privacy.” (A screenshot of his account before it vanished is at right.)

So did the married Republican prowl Craiglist looking for hook ups? After first telling us that he couldn’t comment until we forwarded every single email in question, a request we refused—shouldn’t Lee know if he’s corresponded with women on Craigslist?—Lee’s spokesman eventually announced that the Congressman believed he’d been hacked, and provided an email he claims Lee sent to his staff about the security breach on January 21.

“The Congressman is happily married,” said Lee’s spokesman when pressed for answers to our questions. “The only time he or his wife posted something online was to sell old furniture when they changed the apartment they keep in DC.”

Update: Craigslist Congressman Resigns

*Taken from Politico.

Christine O’Donnell’s campaign late Thursday night responded to an anonymous Gawker post claiming a drunken encounter with Delaware’s Republican Senate nominee, calling it “sexism and slander.”

“This story is just another example of the sexism and slander that female candidates are forced to deal with — from Secretary [Hillary] Clinton to Gov. [Sarah] Palin to soon-to-be Gov. [Nikki] Haley. Christine’s political opponents have been willing to engage in appalling and baseless attacks — all with the aim of distracting the press from covering the real issues in this race,” O’Donnell Communications Director Doug Sachtleben wrote in a post on Facebook.

The gossip website Gawker on Thursday posted an anonymous account of a man who said he had had a one-night stand with O’Donnell three years ago on Halloween.

Gawker reportedly paid the man in the “low four figures” for the account and pictures of O’Donnell dressed up like a ladybug.

The site has been widely criticized by media outlets for posting the item and was denounced Thursday by the National Organization for Women.

“NOW repudiates Gawker’s decision to run this piece,” the organization said in a statement. “It operates as public sexual harassment. And like all sexual harassment, it targets not only O’Donnell but all women contemplating stepping into the public sphere.”

O’Donnell trails Democrat Chris Coons by 21 percentage points, according to a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll released Thursday.

Coons did not respond for comment on the Gawker post to POLITICO, and the Republican’s Facebook post attempts to link the post to the Coons camp.

“Even the National Organization for Women gets it, but Christine’s opponent disturbingly does not,” Sachtleben wrote. “Classless Coons goons have proven yet again to have no sense of common decency or common sense with their desperate attacks to get another rubber stamp for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda. Such attacks are truly shameful, but they will not distract us from making our case to Delaware voters — and keeping the focus on Chris Coons’s record of higher taxes, increased spending and, as he has done again here, breaking his promises to the voters.”