In an example of corporate bullying and one of the more frivolous threats filed by a corporation, Texas energy giant TXU is threatening an environmental group, Downwinders at Risk, alleging trademark dilution.

According to Public Citizen, an organization with a strong history of protecting the First Amendment:

TXU objected to the group Downwinders at Risk's use of the TXU logo, along with the logos of other pollution-causing corporations, on a float depicting Gov. Rick Perry kissing a dirty smokestack. The float was part of a protest to represent the close political and financial relationship between the governor's office and the energy industry. TXU threatened to sue the organization for trademark infringement and dilution unless it removes the logo from its float and any published materials.

David Poole, TXU’s executive VP and general counsel, ignoring the first lesson over-zealous inside counsels are apt to miss, drew national and international attention to TXU’s polluting history by warning that TXU would “have no choice but to protect its trademark from infringement and pursue all available legal remedies.”

Public Citizen’s Paul Levy reiterated in a press release similar objections to TXU’s actions as he did in a letter to TXU’s Poole:

TXU's claim that this grassroots group must ask the company for permission to depict and criticize it is patently absurd. The company's real motive is to use the threat of costly and intimidating lawsuits to stifle the political participation and free speech of citizens who are legitimately concerned about the effects of TXU-caused pollution.

In a predictably idiotic comment, TXU spokeswoman Kim Morgan told The Dallas Morning News TXU was “very hopeful they will simply stop using our logo.” As hopeful perhaps, as Downwinders at Risk is that TXU will refrain from building new coal-fired power plants.

My gut feeling is that TXU, David Poole and Kim Morgan have already done more than enough damage to TXU’s brand and they’ll slink away with their smoky tail between their legs rather than continue on this ridiculous path.

Surely their money would be better spent on Rick Perry’s campaign than fighting a small environmental group, bringing all this attention to their bullying, frivolous campaign to silence their critics, and creating a whole new breed of critics in the process. (Cough, cough…)

Additional materials:

To read TXU's demand letter, visit
http://www.citizen.org/documents/txudemandletter.pdf.
To read Downwinders' response, visit
http://www.citizen.org/documents/darlettertotxu.pdf, and to view Public
Citizen's response, visit
http://www.citizen.org/documents/responsetotxu.pdf.

When Fox News Channels delusional Bill O’Reilly's show, The O'Reilly Factor, incorrectly identified disgraced Republican congressman, Mark Foley, as a Democrat, it was almost immediately lampooned by Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, who suggested that when the facts don’t work in your favor, simply alter the reality.

According to Editor & Publisher:

"Once it came to our attention, we removed the incorrect chyron immediately," said David Tabacoff, executive producer of the Fox News Channel show hosted by Bill O'Reilly, who also does a newspaper column distributed by Creators Syndicate. "We didn't run a correction per se."

Well what did you do, per se? Actually they scrubbed the label entirely, rather than correcting the label, per se. If Foley was a Democrat, this would be newsworthy for Fox, but not that he was a Republican?

According to Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog, Associated Press did the same thing, but at least had the decency to both correct the problem by changing the "D" to "R" and noting the original "error" at the bottom of the report in a journalistically appropriate way when they did so.

Correction: This story originally referenced Rep. Mark Foley as a Democrat. He is a Republican. The AP ran a similar correction 3 hours after it first moved on the wire.

The First Amendment has been under attack of late, from the jailing of Judith Miller, sentencing of Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, to the jailing of Josh Wolf, to mention but a few.

Although legal rulings have tended to support the notion that an intrepid freelance journalist with a blog is no less deserving of First Amendment protections than a well funded media organization, you still hear that annoying label “legitimate” when it comes to media, and press access is granted accordingly.

If media outlets like Fox News are willing to compromise their remaining crumbs of journalistic integrity and willingly and deliberately broadcast falsehoods to pursue a partisan agenda, they cease to deserve the few privileges afforded the press, and should be shut out accordingly.

When you make a mistake, you correct it. Or in Fox’s case, when you get caught lying, you hide the evidence. O'Reilly? Oh, really.

Keeping Eyes on the Balls

By CLINTON FEIN
October 8, 2006
Annoy.com

The Mark Foley IM sex scandal, (which revelation after revelation confirms the scandal itself has been anything but instant) is shining a spotlight on all things creepy about congress and the special interest groups to whom they pander.

Democrats, who have long been smarting over the Republican's unwelcome intrusion into Bill Clinton's office peccadilloes, are gloating over the prospect of pointing a moral finger at the conservative Republican power players (hoping to even steal some of their Evangelical base).

Despite the inability of Democrats to successfully counter that it wasn't Bill Clinton's innovative use of Cuban cigars that distracted America from focusing on Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, but Henry Hyde, Kenneth Starr and the predatory Republican sharks that sought to punish him for it, they seem determined to make the same mistakes as their Republican counterparts.

Revenge is sweet, and there is nothing more satisfying seeing a hypocritical pig at the pinnacle of his power taken down by the very laws he, as chairman of the missing and exploited children's caucus of the House of Representatives, crafted. But the desire to savor his downfall appears to be trumping the most basic common sense.

First and foremost, is the question of legality. Did Mark Foley's conduct violate any laws, federal or otherwise, and under what jurisdiction is his conduct examined? If he sent IMs from Washington DC, where the age of consent is sixteen, or West Palm Beach, Florida, do those locations have jurisdiction, or do the locations of the page rather, determine where the law might have been violated, or both?

Foley, alas appropriately but seemingly unintentionally, operates with the aplomb and finesse of a fifteen year old that keeps making the same desperate mistakes, oblivious to the uncomfortable cues that his younger, more mature targets offer in response. But is cybersex (or failed attempts) actually sex?

Creepy, socially retarded and sexually immature as Foley's online persona is, is there really anything that wrong with fantasizing about getting it on with an anatomically developed teen brimming with sexual curiosity?

Why is there such a demand for videos titled, "Barely Legal," in which adults over the age of eighteen, but who look anywhere from fourteen to sixteen? Does the underage appearance of half the college girls in Girls Gone Wild undermine its massive success? Yeah, right.

The double standards are mind blowing (no pun intended). Why not the same revulsion over the twenty-four age difference between Don and Deirdre Imus or the thirty-three year age difference between Jack Nicholson and Lara Flynn Boyle? The misogynistic patriarchy that is America had a more difficult time with the fifteen year age difference between Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, but doesn't flinch at the notion of Deirdre Imus working on Don Imus' Viagra-dependent shriveled old penis.

Any member of the House of Representatives, male or female, gay or straight, faced with the option of the presence of anatomically mature pages, male or female in tight white pants as eye candy, (as Foley is alleged to have enjoyed), or Dennis Hastert sweating, waddling and wheezing about the chamber, should think twice before terminating the page program. There's nothing wrong with aesthetics. After all, Dennis Hastert himself seems to have enjoyed gawking at young men in spandex wrapping their thighs around one another's heads. Why else would you become a wrestling coach?

While many minors are indeed ill-equipped to deal with predators, equally many sexually active seventeen year olds are probably not that put out by telling an obviously desperate older guy that they prefer fucking people their own age and to take a hike. Especially virtually.

What makes Foley's actions reprehensibly different, and the facts on this are yet to be determined, is his position as a member of congress and his association with the page program itself. If his liaisons, online or real-time, were with former pages over the age of consent, there is no foul and no story here.

By all appearances, and despite breathless headlines in the Los Angeles Times to unapologetically liberal online amateurs like RawStory, the fact that Mark Foley had sex with a former page who was no longer associated with the page program and who was over twenty one is not only not news, it's nobody's fucking business. Even if the former page was male, and even if the former congressman was closeted.

Predictably on cue, the gay haters rose to the surface like flies to fresh shit. Pat Buchannan, the MSNBC firebrand, who hates gays only more than he hates Jews, appearing on the show of MSNBC's equally hate-filled former congressman, Joe Scarborough (he of dead interns in his office), referred to Foley as a "flamer" and incorrectly accused Democratic House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, of marching with NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association), a group of pedophiles intent on changing age-of consent laws, and are about as helpful to gays as Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kansas is to Christians.

Tony Perkins of the ironically named Family Research Council, who spends more time than most gays and Mark Foley combined thinking about gay sex in every variation, blamed Foley's predatory conduct on his sexual orientation. When the conservative Republican, Daniel Crane of Illinois actually fucked, not just IM'd, a 17 year-old female page (for which he apologized to the House in 1980), if it wasn't his heterosexuality, as Perkins would have us believe, it must have been his religion or his Republicanism.

Ignoring the impact, perhaps, on the pages themselves, claiming that Democrats have been involved in sex scandals far worse than the Mark Foley scandal, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, told a Greenville, South Carolina crowd gathered for a Republican fundraiser: "What we don't have to do is allow our friends on the left to lecture us on morality...There's a certain stench of hypocrisy." Indeed! The same kind of stench emanating from this habitual divorce who, like Foley, wrote the Defense of Marriage Act whilst in congress, and yet who terminated his relationship with his wife as she lay in bed riddled with cancer. Till death, insensitivity or hypocrisy, do us part.

Republicans, following the misguided cue of one truly familiar with closets, news aggregator Matt Drudge, are attempting to deflect attention from their cover-up by accusing Democrats of having engineered an "October Surprise" just before a mid-term election. Although there is no evidence to support the claim, and plenty to refute it, the tactic itself misses the point entirely. Who cares? If Foley engaged in illegal behavior or ethical misconduct, and Republicans covered it up or failed to act on it, those facts remain. Had they acted appropriately, or investigated further, the Democrats wouldn't have a weapon to brandish, regardless of the timing.

Democrats aided and abetted by the breathless twenty-four-hour news cycle, and left-wing and liberal bloggers foaming at the mouth in a feeding frenzy to unseat Republicans, are playing a dangerous and hypocritical game that feeds straight into the hands of the very lawmakers they are trying to undermine. Instead of adopting the same stance they took when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Democrats are simply switching roles.

If Mark Foley did not engage in illegal conduct, and it may well turn out that he didn't, and if he was a heterosexual, this scandal would have been over already, the focus would be on the sharp spike of deaths on Americans serving in Iraq or the credible and increasingly growing threat of terrorism against America.

The real issue is that Mark Foley may have abused his position of power to intimidate those younger and more vulnerable, and that is what is objectionable, regardless of his age or his sexual orientation. Instead of focusing on that, and clarifying that consensual banter between two individuals over the age of consent is private and legal, and unless evidence emerges to reveal otherwise, perhaps Mark Foley deserves the benefit of innocent until proven guilty, Democrats would rather adopt the hypocritical position of their Republican counterparts.

As my friend Daniel pointed out, it's not that Democrats are challenging the Republican position on homosexuality and questioning the legitimacy of their claims to the guardianship of faux family values, but are simply accusing Republicans of being unable to live up to those standards.

The real lesson here, of course being missed by just about everyone, is that this is exactly what Don't Ask, Don't Tell breeds. The same way as the United States military adopts a incomprehensible policy that forces gay servicemembers to lie about their sexual orientation in violation of every tenet the military teaches in terms of honor and integrity, so too does the antigay agenda of the so-called religious right and the Republican Party demand the closet of the complicit gays that pepper its ranks.

If Mark Foley had the option of being open about who and what he was, rather than living in fear of its disclosure, and could enjoy the possibility of either fucking, dating or settling down with a consenting partner in an environment that supported and nourished his choices as an adult, rather than codemn and judge them, perhaps there would be none of the shame enveloping this incident from every angle, and perhaps Foley wouldn't have felt the need to cowardly race like a frightened rat into rehab, coming out as a gay, a drunk and a victim of molestation by a priest along the way.

For Republicans, the Mark Foley scandal is as much about the embarrassment of having a high ranking homosexual in its party as it is a predator in its fold, for each are equally reprehensible to them. For Democrats, it's more about revenge of the Republicans than it is about questioning their supposed values to begin with. For right-wing fanatics, it's more about equating homosexuality with pedophilia than it is about protecting allegedly vulnerable pages. And for gay activists, it's more about clamoring to defend itself from those very accusations and the likely vilification by Republicans than it is about simply distancing itself from a congressman whose only possible crime is being a predator, not a homosexual, and for whom the issue is no more relevant than it is for Alcoholics Anonymous.

For one or two of us, it's about waiting for investigations to determine if any laws were actually broken or whether Mark Foley is not a criminal, but simply a boozy hypocrite and a creep. As well as be forced to stomach the incredulous reactions that emerge from a commission finding following the next terrorist attack that reveals that while the entire country, Democrat and Republican alike, focused on Mark Foley's irresponsible, possibly illegal behavior, al Qaeda laughed knowingly as they plotted.