UPDATE:  So sad.  Somebody's used the same domain name to spoof Talon News.  Did a damn fine job of it too. :)  Thanks for the tip, commenters.

For those who may have missed it, Talon News is back on the air, apparently since May 10 (or at least they have archives back to that point.)

But with the imminent arrival of his tell-not-very-much book I took a quick cruise through the site, and found the amazing headline "Gannon Threatens TALONNEWS" which I just had to read (Note: all comment-type punctuation is original:

August 26, 2007
NEW YORK: Former journalist(?) for Talon News and (former?) gay prostitute Jim Gannon is now trying to spread self-serving rumors that he used to work for the publishers of this web site.

Talon News is disavowing that Gannon/Guckert ever worked for them???  Rest of the article after the jump...

Major media should stop looking at blogs as competitors or collections of rabid political zealots, and instead view them as potential new tools which can help mainstream reporters and editors do their jobs better.

I outlined my thoughts in a letter to the Times online editors' forum tonight and welcome comments from Kos readers on the concept.  The letter follows below the fold

Last week - on her birthday - Noreen Gosch found a package on her doorstep containing two photographs [can be seen here at Noreen's website]. They show a bound and gagged Johnny along with two other young boys, apparently taken right after the kidnapping.

See, all that time we were pursuing Mr. Jeff Gannon, ace White House reporter (yes, I jest) and his Talon News connections, we were tracking down the wrong TALON. Newsweek (via Raw Story) clears it all up for us in their January 30th piece The Other Big Brother.

How could we have been so mistaken?

2003 was just the year of the talon, so it seems. This TALON is a product of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.  

In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON -- short for Threat and Local Observation Notice -- that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents."  The data would be fed to CIFA [Counterintelligence Field Activity] to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.

Okay, I know it's probably just coincidence that Jeff Gannon's news outfit was anointed TALON on March 29th, 2003, a bare month before Wolfowitz's version.

But odd coincidence... and intriguing.

There is one platform point I would like to make.  In another news group, tx.politics, someone wrote about the inclusion in the platform of the desire to teach "creation science" in the public schools.  I am personally against this idea.  All Christian religions that I know of have very well organized religious education classes (Sunday school, etc.) in which they teach how God created the world in six days.  Unless they want to start teaching evolution and the big-bang theory, I believe the two should remain separate.  It should the school's focus to graduate students who can read, write, and have the skills which are essential to compete in today's society.

Answer in Extended...

Juanita of The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, reporting from Sugar Land, has the scoop:

Here is part of the post from Gannon's blog:

And that's not all Gannon writes about. He doesn't have the kindest words for MSNBC or Cindy Sheehan,
Complete story here.

Maybe someone should call up Rush and ask him what he thinks of Talon News now?

As the Valerie Plame outing once again enters the spotlight, former GOPUSA/Talon News Washington Bureau Chief Jeff Gannon's June 30, 2005, column re-characterizes the incident as a covert CIA effort to discredit the Bush administration. Dismissing the potentially felonious leak of a CIA agent's identity, Gannon once again offers a new version of the details of his own involvement in exposing a key memo in the investigation.

Jeff Gannon, as depicted in the June 2005 Vanity Fair (shown unattributed at Gannon's Web site)

The Thrust of Gannon's Argument

Gannon concludes, "No crime has been committed in the Valerie Plame case." He asserts that Plame, the alleged victim of the leak, "had an obligation to protect her identity, which it is clear she did not fulfill." As evidence of Plame's failure, Gannon asserts:

In order to evaluate this topic, I've laid out some key articles written by Talon News staff in a timeline.  Part 1 covers the articles from June 16, 2003 through April 9, 2004.  In Part 2 we explore Talon News articles written from May 21, 2004 (chronologically the next article in our timeline) through September 29, 2004.

(I swear, by the time this story ends, the quote key on my laptop is going to be broken.)

But like everything else with this group's public face, it's malarkey. There are no "officers" or "directors" of GOPUSA other than Robert R. Eberle, at least on file with the Texas Secretary of State as of February 19, 2005. But apparently Mr. G was so esteemed by his former employer just four short months ago that his already pumped-up biography as "reporter" was turbo-charged with more sass and pizzazz by gracing him with yet another phony title (or two ... it's hard to tell).

And people, please, when visiting this page, take note of the sweet irony of the George W. Bush quote sailing above Mr. G's head: "What people can dream, people can do."

Talon News registers its domain name March 29, 2003. The site goes live April 1, 2003, and on April 3, 2003, the pseudonomic "Jeff Gannon," with no journalism experience and with a $50, two-day seminar at a right-wing  propaganda institute under his belt, is seated four rows away from where the most powerful - and most guarded - person on the planet makes his pronouncements.

Heady times indeed. Not to mention the fastest background check in the history of labyrinthine bureaucracy. Perhaps the speed of that background accounts for the fact that our hero doesn't have to use his real name and seems to have sprung up as a glorious, immaculately conceived creation of the right wing less than a year before.

Of course, it was Ari Fleischer answering questions that fateful first day and not President Bush, which surely must have been disappointing to such a rising star. We all must live with such disappointments, even the most gifted - and dare I say ... planted? - among us.