Bush press pal quits over gay prostitute link

February 9, 2005
by Helen Kennedy
New York Daily News

WASHINGTON - A conservative ringer who was given a press pass to the White House and lobbed softball questions at President Bush quit yesterday after left-leaning Internet bloggers discovered possible ties to gay prostitution.

"The voice goes silent," Jeff Gannon wrote on his Web site. "In consideration of the welfare of me and my family, I have decided to return to private life."

Gannon began covering the White House two years ago for an obscure Republican Web site (Talon-News.com). He was known for his friendly questions, including asking Bush at last month's news conference how he could work with Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."

Gannon was also given a classified CIA memo that named agent Valerie Plame, leading to his grilling by the grand jury investigating her outing.

He came under lefty scrutiny after revelations that the administration was paying conservative pundits to talk up Bush's proposals. By examining Internet records, online sleuths at DailyKos.com figured out that his real name was Jim Guckert and he owned various Web sites, including HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscorts.com and MilitaryEscortsM4M.com.

"The issue here is whether someone with connections to male prostitution was given unfettered access to the White House and copies of internal CIA documents. For a family values administration, that's pretty creepy," said John Aravosis, one of the bloggers chasing the story.

The White House didn't return a call asking how someone using an alias was given daily clearance to enter the White House.

On his TalonNews Web site, Gannon had written that liberals were out to get him because he's a white conservative man who owns a gun, drives a sport-utility vehicle and is a born-again Christian.

Yesterday, however, he abruptly quit, and all of the stories he wrote were erased from the Web site. A great many were on gay issues, including one detailing John Kerry's "pro-homosexual platform" that was headlined mockingly, "Kerry Could Become First Gay President."

Voice of the White House

October 15, 2004: “ The last material I sent you, about a pending war, is causing pandemonium inside the Monkey Palace. They have been looking for the leaks for months now and we have the Secret Service, the FBI and Homeland Security all involved at one level or another. Phones are being watched, laptops searched physically, in some cases we have seen staff taking lie detector tests and over all of this, threats of arrest and imprisonment for violating National Security! I will have more for you tomorrow on the possibility/probability of military action against Iran but in the meantime, here is a juicy bit for you. For the present, no names but they will follow. Seems a former White House aide, (Reagan White House) was caught running a male prostitution service and got fired from the Monkey Palace, and later from the RNC for supplying muscular boy toys to some top Beltway gays. Well, after being fired, our bozo got together with a Muslim druggie and set up operations at the Kennedy-Warren, a landmark DC apartment/business complex. They ran a male escort service supplying young studs to older Beltway citizens. Among these citizens were: Federal judges, top political figures, mostly Republican, very senior military people and certainly members of Congress. The head of this service, that utilized credit cards for payment, supplied young men, mostly young servicemen, between 18 to 25 for sex. They kept very complete records, including names and address of the johns as well as credit card receipts. And later there was blackmail and now, I have learned from the inside, this joker has sold the lists to: Iranians( through his partner’s Arab connections)  and a gay group in DC. Sold the lists twice and got twice the money. I have seen a partial list and it reads like the DC social register, believe me! This enterprising young man is very liable to end up at the bottom of the Potomac River just like ex-CIA chief Bill Colby who was terminated by his former employees because he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut about certain things. I won’t have old Bill’s problem because I am not a Princeton man and even you don’t know who I am. You had the intestinal fortitude to print the material about the planned Iranian attack and maybe you will do the same with this one. I know a number of people inside the Beltway read your site…and loathe you…and if they read this and are closet queens, the sale of dignity pants will soar in the next few weeks. My, my, such lovely names! The Washington Times did a front page story on this joker some time back, by the way, but no one dared to touch him because of what, and whom, he knew…and serviced…”

TAB Agency

Todd Blodgett  Advertising Director

3133 Connecticut Ave, Suite 32

Washington, District Of Columbia 20008-5147

(202) 265-8588

(202) 319-9867 (FAX)

Hitler's choir: rock and roll fascism

by David Lethbridge,
The Bethune Institute for Anti-Fascist Studies,
Canada

In 1991, at the age of 21, George Burdi became the Canadian leader of the Church of the Creator, an ultra-violent neo-fascist organisation with connections to Canada's Heritage Front and to the National Alliance, the leading Nazi organisation in the USA. Burdi was the son of wealthy parents and attended private schools in the Toronto area. While still a youngster, he became associated with Nazi propagandist Ernst Zundel, and far-right activist Paul Fromm.

Burdi was also the lead singer for RaHoWa (Racial Holy War), a white power racist rock group. Burdi's songs were openly fascist, as the lyrics from Third Reich demonstrate:

"Kill all the niggers and gas all the Jews,
"Kill a gypsy and a coloured too,
"You just killed a kike, Don't it feel right,
"Goodness gracious, darn right."

In 1993, Burdi, along with Jason Snow and Joseph Talic, formed Resistance Records, an organisation that sold white racist music from bands across North America and Europe, published a magazine, and hosted an Internet website.

What made Resistance Records particularly dangerous was the high quality of their products. Their music CDs were the equal of any mainstream label; their magazine was a full-colour, glossy-paper periodical easily available in all the major urban centres.

Their Internet site allowed visitors to listen to selected tracks of music, and to purchase the CDs virtually instantaneously by simply clicking on the Visa and MasterCard logos that were prominently displayed on the webpage.

Burdi ran Resistance Records from across the border in Detroit to avoid possible conviction under Canadian hate crime legislation. But by 1997, it looked as though Resistance Records had come to an end.

Michigan tax agents seized its assets for failure to pay state sales tax. And in the same year, Burdi was sentenced to a year in jail for criminal  assault during a previous 1993 racist rally.

But the Resistance Records organisation was too valuable a tool for recruiting youth for the fascists to let it die, and so Todd Blodgett to paid off the Michigan taxes and took control of Resistance Records.

Blodgett was a White House staff assistant in the Reagan administration, a Republican Party strategist, an advisor to George Bush's election committee, and a friend of a wide circle of neo-Nazis, and eventually Resistance Records passed to Blodgett.

By March, 1999, Blodgett had sold Resistance to William Pierce, leader of the openly Nazi National Alliance, for US$250,000.

Blodgett met with Pierce and two Nazi Skinheads at the very exclusive University Club, in Washington, to finalise the arrangements.

Pierce was jubilant. "As Resistance Records regains strength, that acquisition should add an increasing number of younger members in the 18 to 25 age range to our ranks", he wrote.

Blodgett was to continue as the operations manager of Resistance Records, which was now relocated to Washington. But in October 1999, Pierce, aggravated by delays in Blodgett's management, moved Resistance to National Alliance headquarters in West Virginia.

The Resistance magazine is now on the store shelves, at least in the USA. The Resistance website is in full operation.

On its home page, Resistance Records bills itself as: "The largest producers of White Power music in the world. Our online catalog is the biggest and badest ever! Order the best releases by your favourite bands and the most bad-ass new music from around the world."

SEX AND THE CAPITAL

by Karlyn Barker
Washington Post
July 24, 1990:

The alleged leader of what authorities have called the largest male prostitution operation in the Washington area surrendered to federal agents yesterday and pleaded not guilty to racketeering charges that have been filed against him and three alleged accomplices. Henry W. Vinson, 29, of Williamson, W.Va., a coal miner's son accused of setting up the homosexual escort service, was arraigned in U.S. District Court here yesterday afternoon after turning himself in to Secret Service agents . . . At a news conference after the arraignment, [U.S. Attorney Jay] Stephens said the investigation into the alleged prostitution ring "is concluded" and that the indictment, which was unsealed yesterday, focused on those who allegedly set up the ring rather than on clients who reportedly patronized it. Asked about earlier reports that some of those clients included high-level officials in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Stephens said the investigation had not revealed "additional conduct which suggests criminal conduct on behalf of other people." . . . The Vinson case provoked additional notice after The Washington Times published reports last summer suggesting that the alleged prostitution ring had been patronized by government officials. The Times named as clients several low-level government employees and Craig J. Spence, a Washington lobbyist and party-giver who, the paper said, took friends and prostitutes on late-night tours of the White House. Spence was found dead in a Boston hotel room last fall, and authorities ruled his death a suicide . . . To date, however, investigators have disclosed no evidence linking any high-level government official to the escort service.

·                     "'CALL-BOY' SERVICE PROSPERS USING HIGH FINANCE, HIGH TECH," Paul M. Rodriguez and George Archibald , The Washington Times, June 20, 1989

·                     "POWER BROKER SERVED DRUGS, SEX AT PARTIES BUGGED FOR BLACKMAIL," Michael Hedges and Jerry Seper, The Washington Times, June 30, 1989

·                     "RNC CALLS SCANDAL A 'TRAGIC SITUATION,'" George Archibald and Paul M. Rodriguez, The Washington Times, Friday, June 30, 1989

·                    “SECRET SERVICE FURLOUGS THIRD WHITE HOUSE GUARD,” The Washington Times, July 26, 1989

We've got Reid's back; "Gannon" story spreads

by kos
Feb 10th, 2005
From Howie Kurtz's not horrible piece on the Gannon mess:

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), welcomed the news. In his question at the presidential news conference, Gannon had said that in an effort to disparage the U.S. economy "Harry Reid was talking about soup lines," which is not accurate and which Gannon later acknowledged was a characterization he picked up from Rush Limbaugh. "New media or old media, the fact is the question he asked was based on a lie, and that's unacceptable," Manley said. "Fundamentally, what he was reporting was not truthful."

So we take a bite out of small part of the Right Wing Noise Machine, expose yet another pillar of the White House propaganda operation, and -- as a bonus -- we take down a man who used the White House press room to repeat outright lies about the Minority Leader.

Daschle's people are also clapping. From subscription-only Roll Call:

Former aides to ex-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) were among those cheering Wednesday's abrupt resignation of reporter Jeff Gannon from Talon News, a Web site affiliated with the conservative-activist site GOPUSA [...]

Daschle aides are elated because Gannon wrote extensively about the South Dakota Senate race, and former Daschle aides claim that the writer was essentially carrying water for Sen. John Thune's (R-S.D.) successful campaign. Gannon fired away at everything linked to Daschle's campaign, even writing a spate of articles attacking the dean of the state's political writers, Sioux Falls Argus-Leader columnist Dave Kranz, for allegedly shilling for Daschle.

He and Thune's campaign worked hand in hand," said one former Daschle aide. "This guy became a dumping ground for opposition research."

Salon and the NY Daily News have stories that do a much better of discussing core issues than Kurtz. CNN's effort focuses on the propaganda angle, using Slaughter's letter as a hook (showing the importance of getting elected officials to show leadership on these sorts of issues).

A New York congresswoman asked the White House to explain Wednesday why a man who worked for a news Web site owned by  GOP activist was able to obtain White House press credentials under an assumed name.