This is not the real Anthony Weiner.

Somebody hacked him and this is an avatar named, Tony…uh….Tony….Whiner.

It’s a subtle difference in name, but makes all the difference in the world when it comes to what is going on here. Once you know what really happened, it will all fall right into place.

Anthony Weiner was a guy who attacked Republicans and made them cry when he went after them. This clearly was not that guy at the seven-minute news conference where he answered zero questions. He wasn’t asked what his name was, so since the media didn’t ask, we still can’t be sure who that was.

Even libs in the media are confused with who this new guy was who showed up at a news conference to talk about how Karl Rove, or somebody named Karl Rove, must’ve been looking over his shoulder while doing secret surveillance thanks to the Patriot Act and found his password (which BTW was “ImNotMarkFoley”) and hacked his Twitter account. (more…)

You know you’re having a bad day, Joan Walsh, when it’s just you and Max Blumenthal alone in a foxhole while you’re being overwhelmed by the truth. Because David Weigel, one of your sources for Blumenthal’s story and Max’s own blog posts that James O’Keefe once helped organize a “racist conference,”  has now “clarified” his remarks and guess what?  Your story just fell apart.  Read it and weep:

Clarification — and Mea Culpa — on James O’Keefe and ‘Race and Conservatism’

On Wednesday, I wrote a post reacting to Max Blumenthal’s story “James O’Keefe’s Race Problem” and was too quick with a description of the August 30, 2006 Robert Taft Club event on “race and conservatism.” Specifically, I wrote this:

“A zoomed-in headshot of James O’Keefe (after the jump), then working for the Leadership Institute, survived, although it cropped out the table he was sitting at, covered in controversial literature.”

In a later post, I walked this back: While I’d been at the event, it was Isis, a photographer/investigator for the One People’s Project, who told me that her photo was actually a picture of O’Keefe at a table of controversial literature. But several e-mailers and commenters have pointed out that my first post appeared to endorse Blumenthal’s whole story. I want to quickly walk through that story and point out the parts that, based on my experience at the event and interviews with Isis and event organizer Marcus Epstein, were not true.

There follows five points of material error in Blumenthal’s story and in the original post at the “anti-racist” website, One People’ s Project (whose site is adorned with the old Soviet Union colors of red and gold, and features a Soviet-style logo).   Among the revelations: (more…)