I'm a regular on Internet Movie Database.  I visit various boards.  I even troll a bit also.  But I need your help.

It's an early morning here at my desk, as I've just finished editing several of my team's articles. They are a team of student journalists, rising high school juniors and seniors, responsible, bright students of color. The children are the future, and many of these students will eventually make their impressions and contributions, with their pens in hand, and their ears tuned in to Hip-Hop music.

Tuesday, the rap legend NaS released his "Nigger" album, I haven't bought it yet, but my (blue, pink, green, red) friends who got it say it rocks, and I will buy it because NaS is my favorite rapper. I ask high schoolers what they think about the title and it doesn't really offend anybody. They don't want a white person calling them by that name, but most of these students call each other that. This is so passe.

It almost seems picture perfect that Reverend Jackson, who has so denounced the use of the so-called "nN" word, would be shown using it himself. And this latest shoe to drop reveals what we young ones have known all along - that objections to the word are more about politics than pain.

Jesse Jackson is not without his problems, but he's been a Lion of the Civil Rights movement, a pain in the Right's Rear End, and a far more tasteful dresser than Al Sharpton, so I've always liked him.  When O'Reilly broke the tape, that didn't change.  Instead, what caught my attention was the way Fox News was presenting the material.  It was out of context and obviously edited to remove a section tape.  Why?

O'Reilly's explanation was that the edited section was immaterial to the discussion of intergenerational conflict within the African-American community.  A topic on which he has reported with so much passion in the past.  He said:

"We're not out to get Jesse Jackson.  We're not out to embarrass him...if we were, we would have used what we have"
[emphasis mine]

It was at that moment that I knew he was out to get Jesse Jackson.  

At he beginning of the show Studio B with Shepard Smith today, with the chyron of "WHAT ELSE JESSE JACKSON SAID ON THAT FNC TAPE" Smith began with "Jesse Jacksons other remark's about Barack Obama, what you have heard so far is just the beginning."

I have been coming to dailykos for seven or eight months now.  Essentially, I flipped to foxnews while msnbc was in a commercial and heard Bill O talking about the leftist socialist wackos at dailykos and other "liberal" sites and decided I need to see what all the fuss was about.

My take... after the jump.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

The Guns of Billo Are Silent

One year ago this week, Bill O'Reilly unleashed a load of diaper pudding against DailyKos, our upcoming convention in Chicago, and a convention sponsor.

Ever the pillar of journalistic integrity, O'Reilly cherry-picked a few Kossack comments that hadn’t quite been troll-rated out of existence yet, and then took a six-month-old diary completely out of context to brand Daily Kos "a vicious far-left Web site," "one of the worst examples of hatred America has to offer," and all of us as "hate mongers." (Never mind that billoreilly.com contained hateful smear comments like this and this and this and this that were allowed to fester on his un-moderated site.  Some comments were so threatening that a writer at Huffington Post called in the Secret Service to investigate.

O'Reilly ended his July 16 Talking Points Memo with, "This isn't an ideological issue. If the company was sponsoring a David Duke convention, we'd do the same story. Hate is hate, no matter where it comes from."

Moments later he issued the coup de grace, telling guest Diane Brady of Business Week:

"This is hate of the worst order. It's like the Ku Klux Klan. It's like the Nazi party. There's no difference here!"

Bill O'Reilly had, out of the blue, declared war on us. It was like Christmas, Easter, Hannukah, Halloween, July 4th and our collective birthdays all rolled into one and smothered in gravy.

His tirades continued for two weeks to our great amusement (and thanks for the bump in traffic, Bill).  Then on Friday, July 27---six days before the convention, O'Reilly promised to drive "the final nail" into our coffin, "...but it is disturbing so be forewarned." The following Monday he revealed a "shocking" photo that caused even his hard-core viewers to bust a gut. This was his attempt to get the presidential candidates to drop out of attending Yearly Kos '07 and destroy the Great Orange Satan once and for all:

"I'm now going to show you a picture that was posted on the Kos website for almost a year. The picture is very offensive and you might want to change the channel right now. I'm only going to show this picture once, but it is necessary to demonstrate what kind of haters these Kos people are and why no politician should ever legitimize them." ...

[Click here if you dare]

"Finally, a word to the Democrats, who will speak at the Kos convention. That is a huge mistake. ... Associating with haters is not going to bring you credibility, and voters will not forget. And that's the 'Memo.'"

Immediately following what appeared to be his first brush with Photoshop, O'Reilly tried to pin down convention-goer Senator Chris Dodd...and got the tar kicked out of him.

Later, after our convention had proven to be a huge success, Stephen Colbert stepped into the fray to put it all in perspective:

Bill O'Reilly clip: [Daily Kos is] like the Ku Klux Klan. It's like the Nazi party.
Stephen Colbert: Exactly! The Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis were both notorious for allowing people to express unpopular views in an open and free forum.

Markos appeared on the show as Colbert demonstrated how comments work in bloggerland:

Colbert: Nation, I recently went undercover as a Daily Kos blogger, registering under the discreet name of "notstephencolbert". Now I’m going to log onto my account right now and expose just how hateful this website truly is. [Colbert types into his laptop] Hungarians are dirty ghoulies who wash in peanut oil. Heil health care!

And...post!

Now let’s see what’s on Daily Kos today ... Oh my God! Hungarians are dirty ghoulies! I can't read this on the air! This is unforgivable! Let’s get this straight to this---what do you have against the Hungarian people?

Markos: It’s called an open forum, it’s called democracy, and sometimes some idiots get on there and write things on Hungarians.

Alas, things are different this year. As we prepare for the Netroots Nation convention in Austin, Bill O'Reilly's mighty guns are silent. Apparently fighting a gaggle of bloggers who possess the combined evil of the Nazis and the KKK and the Hungarian ghoulies and even Al Capone and Benito Mussolini was too much for the most-watched host on cable news, his millions of followers, and the bottomless resources of his giant national TV network.

But I have to admit: Billo's tush looks kinda sexy when he's running away.

Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

As I sit here in Iraq I find that I have become totally disgusted with the media as well as many of our elected officials. Of course there are rules that we as soldiers are supposed to follow pertaining to speaking out against the actions of elected officials......but enough is enough!!!!!!!

For some reason -- maybe because it's summer in Arizona; maybe because I'm having a mini-midlife crisis -- I'm re-reading a lot of books I liked in high school and freshman college. This includes the novels of Ayn Rand and Kurt Vonnegut, an odd couple by any yardstick.  

Ooh, the juicy details. It seems that within the Jesse Jackson nonstory, an interesting mini story has developed about Bill O'Reilly.  I was just reading the LA Times #1 viewed story, about how the media "almost" missed being able to cover the Jesse Jackson nonstory, because his comments were ignored until a fox news transcriber-technician happened across them.  

The comments went unnoticed in the control room, Bill Shine, Fox News' senior vice president for programming, said Thursday.

The scathing remarks first came to the attention of an employee working the overnight shift Sunday, who transcribed the tape as part of training for the network's ongoing digital conversion. Otherwise, "it potentially would have not been discovered," Shine said.

But it was the next sentence in the LA Times piece that made me lol for a solid few minutes.

Politics in the Age of Information is markedly different from past eras. There is almost no expectation of privacy, and practically nothing can be said in confidence. What's more, everything, no matter how astute or embarrassing, is preserved in perpetuity. Just ask former Senator George "Macaca" Allen, or President George "major-league asshole" Bush, or now, Jesse Jackson. Jackson was unknowingly recorded making disparaging remarks about Barack Obama to another guest while waiting to be interviewed for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Brought to you by...
News Corpse
The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.

Is Fox News really going to hype the story that Jesse Jackson criticized Obama backstage?

Really?

I'm looking forward to seeing this run over the next 48 hours, providing millions of Republicans and swing voters with a great reason to like Obama:  because Jesse Jackson dissed him.

All of those folks who cannot stand Jackson are going to be looking at Obama in a new light.

I don't know how to say this.

Bill O'Reilly has a heart. Really.

In case you missed it, the Obamas did an interview with Access Hollywood that aired earlier today. I think there's another part tomorrow. Anyway, the Obama girls are LOVELY and they are all such a beautiful family.

How beautiful? That even Bill O'reilly was touched! He actually took some time out of his Obama-bashing to say something nice about Malia.

I couldn't figure out how to embed the videos but here is a link.

I almost fell out of my seat! Seriously, though, it's a testament to the cuteness of that kid!

I have a few links to clips to the interview below the fold. If anyone knows how to embed non-Youtube videos, pretty please let me know.

I stumbled across this television writer -- Aaron Barnhart -- when the whole Porter Berry is a Bill O'Reilly tool episode hit.  So I've bookmarked the guy and this popped up.  What started as a pretty bleeping hilarious link to a Bill O'Reilly You Tube video, led to an interesting writeup on copyright standards.

In what should come as a bit of a surprise (I personally thought FOX was taking the 'we shall never speak of this again' approach) Bill O'Reilly intentionally made a reference to FOX News' now infamous photoshopping of New York Times writers.

Bill O'Reilly said that people who reacted unfavorably to a News Network deliberately altering photographs to suit their partisan purposes are involved in "perhaps the most hypocritical situation we have ever seen". Whats his argument? O'Reilly says the New York Times was guilty of the same thing when they used cartoon images of O'Reilly in a book review segment of 'Culture Warrior'. Here is the image O'Reilly is referencing:

Occasionally I'll wander over to Redstate to see what sorts of asshattery they're up to over on the right side of the blogosphere.  Usually it's just a bunch of BS, hatemongering, fearmongering, and various other types of mongering.  But today, there's actually a diary up on their front page bashing that great Fair and Balanced hero, Bill O'Reilly.  Snippets below the fold.

David Carr of the New York Times seems to finally have noticed what has been obvious for years to any objective news analyst. Fox News has a long-standing scorched Earth policy when reacting to other media who dare to report on Fox News.

In his column titled, "When Fox News Is the Story," Carr confesses that just the thought of having to deal with Fox News as a subject in a story makes him and his peers nervous:

"Once the public relations apparatus at Fox News is engaged, there will be the calls to my editors, keening (and sometimes threatening) e-mail messages, and my requests for interviews will quickly turn into depositions about my intent or who else I am talking to."

The key tactic in Fox's PR strategy is to intimidate reporters and editors, and by Carr's own admission, it's working.

Brought to you by...
News Corpse, The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.

For anybody who says that rap music these days is all about money, bitches and drugs, take a moment to listen to a devastating indictment of Fox News, brought to us courtesy of Mr. Nasir Jones, otherwise known to the public as NAS.

Emphasis below is mine.

Can this writer who has spent years revealing the absurdities and damage done to real debate get a better gift?