So a retired Air Force man has to fess up that he was “Paula Brooks,” editor of the blog LEZ GET REAL. More critically, Bill Graber, 58, of Ohio, was a shill for fellow hoaxer Thomas MacMaster aka the Gay Girl In Demascus, whose wife Britta Froelicher has yet to be implicated directly, though she’s a Syria scholar at a Neocon leaning institution, and as supposed activists, their talking points are concern trollishly generic. With Graber unmasked, LezGetReal is being handed off to alternating erstwhile shill “Linda Carbonell”, who says she doesn’t use her married name La Victoire lest she jeopardize her husband‘s job with the government. “Victory?” Hello? Commenters are all LOL because LezGetReal still won’t get a real lesbian for an editor, and tittering because Graber and MacMaster flirted online, unknowingly middle-aged-man-on-man. Heehee, yeah, I don’t think so. MSM interviewers ponder that no one appeared to intend harm, but aren’t they missing a wooded Virginia campus for the trees? If psy ops programs were indeed coordinating trolls, what do you think the motley crew would look like? No doubt you’ve encountered your share already, a drearily uncreative bunch, frequently on the fringe of the military, with their fingers in many pies, the gay issue being not so distantly DoD-related.
“Paula Brooks” was one of the smelly loose ends of the Tom MacMaster Amina Arraf hoax, so I’m glad that someone smoked Graber out. But on the other hand I’m not.
I intended, with the title of this post, to lampoon the now repeated twist of lesbian bloggers turning out to be straight men. To get attention now, you’d have to be a straight blogger who is discovered to really be a lesbian. But then no one meant to bring this kind of attention to themselves, you’d think.
Maybe you’d be wrong. The worst element of this fraudulent blogger meme, is the seed of mistrust which increasingly poisons the internet. The only edge the established media had on the blogosphere was an inherent credibility, the indoctrination that if something is in print, it must be true. Though MSM journalism has been losing ground to the superior investigative output of the internet, hoaxes such as this work in their favor.
Although it’s been fun to unmask these frauds, and seek credit for the collar, the more attention paid to the story, the more eroded becomes the public trust. Yes, we’ve proven that the net will find you out, or more precisely CAN find you out. But what’s our success rate? It feels like 100%, but that counts only the identities we question. There’s no telling how many frauds remain undetected.
And worse, internet sleuths are slashing away at the very anonymity they cherish. To be a credible voice now, you have to be completely out, you have to show your papers basically. Who celebrates that?
We may think we’ve embarrassed MacMaster and Graber and Froelicher and La Victoire, but if they are indeed intelligence spoilers, they can go right back underground and on to the next alias.
Should we discount a Hasbara hand in this? Critics seem to be condemning MacMaster and Froelicher as anti-Israel, bolstering their Palestinian advocacy identities, but really without ground. In a video interview available online, Froelicher speaks about her gig with the AFSC and outlines her strategy for helping the Palestinians: make it so they have something to lose, she explains, so they’ll be less prone to violence and radicalism. Yeah. And MacMaster writing as Gay Girl Amina once posted her dream to learn Hebrew and live in the superior democracy Israel, just like your typical Syrian girl.
And if they are spoilers, then to be unmasked, to be the embodiment of fraudsters, fleshes out exactly what their handlers want, voices to distrust, to destabilize our common supply of information.
You thought ours was an oversexed culture obsessed with youth, but the recent furor over a 
DENVER- Blog wonks filled the courtroom today to witness the closing arguments of Freedom of Speech on trial. The twin Rocky Mountain News fiends were on hand, as were plenty of their blogosphere stringers. Can you help us put names to some of these faces? Confidential emails to 
After lunch the strange woman kept to the media circles. I’d noticed a lanyard about her neck, but whatever ID hung upon it she’d stuffed into a front pocket, perhaps to conceal an identity, perhaps to pretend it was a press pass. Later in the courtroom I noticed her again, this time beyond the audience area, across the banister, chatting with two courtroom workers.
DENVER- There’s an interesting sideshow at the Churchill v CU case having to do with a cadre of unsavory Ward Churchill online critics. What they are writing is hardly interesting but their unceasing doggedness, repeating only ad hominem attacks, leads one to wonder who they are and what horse do they have, in not only this race, but in Churchill’s ongoing activism. These are the same voices which heckled the DNC organizers, AIM, and the contra-Columbus actions.
Well, engaging the Israeli Internet Megaphone was an interesting experiment, although the popular consensus interjected the qualifier “hardly.” Now smeared across the NMT comment record is the indelible impression of what an industrial strength, defense department white-wash program can do to an open blog forum. It’s particularly distinct at NMT because we don’t have the red-neck yahoos which usually camouflage the disinformation agents. Well, we’ve documented the propaganda mechanism, it’s provided the scat samples, now it’s time to close the study.
Does the DAILY KOS strike you as a little too big for their britches? But that’s not a new observation. Maybe it’s voiced out of envy, maybe the criticism is just frustration with Markos Moulitsas’ eagerness to play gatekeeper. I’ll only assert it’s the iPeter Principle. So, aren’t you just too curious about what’s inside KOS: Taking On the System. The subtitle?! Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era.
Want to make some adjustments to your WordPress blog? I always have trouble unearthing the variable names to plug into the code. To the WordPress developers’ credit, WP variables are usually self-explanatory, but that still requires an explanation. Here are some tweaks we’ve added to our Tallgrass theme:
In the alter-universe of the blogosphere, it’s being surmised that George W. was blotto at the Beijing Olympics. Here’s one of the pics floating that thesis.
I find there’s some confusion as to what it means to take to the streets. It’s not just protest, it’s not just calling attention to oneself. The efficacy of street protest is not to be judged by how it influences lawmakers, or how well it mobilizes support. Taking to the streets is about establishing a beach head.