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Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007
It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.
To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.
Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.
Steve meant so much to us.
We will miss him terribly.
Gavin M: "Booty Drop"
Labels: max boot, wingnuttery
A big thanks to Gavin M. for this great post AND the cool GILLYART! - THANKS G!
A few weeks ago, Matt Yglesias picked up on an attempt to scrub the Wikipedia entry of the self-serious young wingnut-welfare grantee, Max Boot:
Above: Max Boot[A]s you can read here on Altercation, what this is about is the fact that Boot is involved in some scandalously corrupt backstory. Before he was a prestigious military policy writer, Boot was simply a generic rightwing hack at The Wall Street Journal's hack-laden editorial page. While there he, among other things, wrote an editorial attacking public health officials that was edited by tobacco lobbyist Steven Milloy.
The only reason we know anything about this is that it happens to have come up in tobacco-related litigation. It's possible, in principle, that when Boot was writing rightwing regulatory policy journalism for the Journal he just so happened to let one of his pieces be edited by a lobbyist and that that piece just so happened to have come up in a lawsuit. Much more likely, however, is that he did this on various occasions and there just so happens to have been a lawsuit that uncovered this.
Welp, things have really been heating up over there. A user called Lynnchu re-scrubbed
the so-called 'malicious, false, and misleading information' that appeared in those official court documents. Then, in stepped John Quiggin of Crooked Timber, reverting
Lynnchu's 'attempted censorship and excessive hyperlinking.'
One waits for Lynnchu to strike again. But one might wonder: Who is this 'Lynnchu,' a Wikipedia editor who only edits articles pertaining to Max Boot?
Funnily enough, she's Vice-President of the conservative literary agency, Writer's Representatives -- a firm which counts among its clients one Max Boot.
As Yglesias concluded:I wonder why he's bothering. In case Boot hasn't noticed, he's a conservative. The rules of the media game are clear -- no jobs for the left, no accountability for the right. Corrupt or not, Boot seems like a smart, perceptive guy . . . surely he's picked up on this.
No kidding. But fate has its ways, and anyone who's been watching Boot with bemused fascination over the past few years knows that there's another, unspoken issue that promises to catch up to him far faster than the forces of accountability.
Above: Some guys just don't have a good head shape for it
- posted by Gavin M