Reuters columnist Jack Shafer has a very interesting piece on the AP leak investigation, taking a position that’s rather contrary to the rest of the media:

The AP story that has so infuriated the government described the breakup of an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula plot to place an underwear bomber on board a U.S.-bound airliner. Published on the afternoon of May 7, 2012, the story patted itself on the back for having heeded the White House and CIA requests to not publish the previous week, when the AP first learned of the operation. The AP states in the article that it published only after being told by “officials” that the original “concerns were allayed.” In a chronology published in today’s Washington Post, we’re told that the CIA was no longer resisting publication of the AP story on the day it hit the wire (Monday) and that the White House was planning to “announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.”

That may be the case, but the government was still incensed by the leak. In fact, it appears that officials were livid. As my Reuters colleagues Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria reported last night, the government found the leak so threatening that it opened a leak investigation before the AP ran its story.

Now, what would make the Obama administration so furious? My guess is it wasn’t the substance of the AP story that has exasperated the government but that the AP found a source or sources that spilled information about an ongoing intelligence operation and that even grander leaks might surge into the press corps’ rain barrels.

At the risk of making the Department of Justice’s argument for it, a leak once sprung can turn into a gusher as the original leakers keep talking and new ones join them, or as the government attempts to explain itself, or as others in the government begin to speak out of turn. From what I can tell, all of the above happened after the AP story appeared.

Read the whole thing…

Here’s a look back over this week’s numerous fake scandals and right wing wild goose chases — and this is not an exhaustive list by any means:

Whoa! Obama’s Twitter Account Includes a ‘Fallen Eagle’

Heritage Immigration Study Co-Author: ‘I Do Not Apologize’

National Review Defends White Nationalist-Linked Heritage Immigration Expert

Pat Buchanan Calls for ‘Southern Strategy’ Against Latinos, Immigrants

White House Email Contradicts Weekly Standard/ABC Benghazi Leaks

WaPo Fact-Checker Says Obama ‘Got Away With’ Stating a Fact

Republicans Oddly Silent Over DOJ Raid on AP Records

Stephen Colbert on the Heritage Foundation Immigration Study

Pickering and Mullen Don’t Trust Darrell Issa - and They Shouldn’t

GOHMERT!

Glenn Beck’s Crazy Crypto-Racist Rant of the Day: Whites Lynched by KKK Would Be Tea Partiers Today

CBS Evening News: Republican Sources Caught Doctoring Emails

Umbrellagate! Daily Caller Cooks Up Another Stupid Scandal, Commenters Spew Vile Racism

Colbert Report: Why Does Eric Holder Hate Louie Gohmert’s Asparagus?

Glenn Beck: AP and IRS Scandals Are Just Cover-Ups for the Benghazi Cover-Up

ABC’s Jonathan Karl: Yes, the Story Was False but It ‘Entirely Stands’

ABC’s Jon Karl Posts to Twitter, Still Refuses to Retract False Story

Drudge Report Falsely Attributes Quote to President Obama: ‘I’m a Black Man’

And now, Drudge Report is getting into the false quotation game.

This morning, President Obama gave the commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically African-American university; it was an inspiring speech calling on members of the African-American community to be good role models and strive to do what’s right.

So naturally, the right wing media are completely losing their shit again. This is Drudge’s take on it, and notice that he went frame by frame through the video until he found what he obviously thought was the most unflattering image possible:

Here’s a transcript of the prepared speech — the words “I’m a black man,” which Drudge put in quotation marks, do not appear in the speech. The link for Drudge’s headline goes to a Washington Post article, and the words “I’m a black man” do not appear in that article either. Drudge simply made it up.

Pure-D race-baiting dishonesty from the right wing. In other words, business as usual.

Breitbart hack Matthew Boyle is fake outraged:

Sorry to break it to you Mr. President, but your race is IRRELEVANT to all the problems and scandals facing the country right now.

— Matthew Boyle (@mboyle1) May 19, 2013

Posted a little while ago on Twitter by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl:

In case you missed it, I sincerely regret the error I made describing an email from Ben Rhodes. 1/2

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) May 19, 2013

I should have stated, as I did elsewhere, the reporting was based on a summary provided by a source. I apologize for the mistake. 2/2

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) May 19, 2013

The facts are:

• Karl stated in no uncertain terms that he had “obtained” the emails. This was FALSE.
• Karl’s story also claimed that ABC News had “reviewed” the emails. This was FALSE.
• Karl’s story put the made-up email in quotation marks, when it was NOT A QUOTE.

Jonathan Karl clearly does not intend to retract his story, even though he lied outright about the circumstances and passed on false information from a Republican source. And just as clearly, he does not intend to reveal who gave him this false information.

It’s impossible to see this as anything other than a complete lack of journalistic ethics. Not to mention simple decency. What a disgrace.

If you’ve been following the story of the Benghazi “talking points” emails, you know that it’s now been confirmed beyond any doubt that Republican sources fed false information to the media, especially to ABC News’s Jonathan Karl. Karl claimed that he had “obtained” these emails, and we now know that this was completely untrue — he was quoting the words of his anonymous source, who lied to him. He did not “obtain” or even see the actual email in question.

The ethical thing to do at this point would be to correct and retract the story, and reveal the name of his dishonest source. But that’s not the path Karl is choosing:

On the Sunday, May 19 edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, host Howard Kurtz read a statement from Jonathan Karl, chief White House Correspondent for ABC News in response to his reporting on altered emails related to the Sunday talk show talking points following the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya in September 2012. Karl now expresses regret about his original reporting on May 10th on the Benghazi emails. The statement reads:

“Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands. I should have been clearer about the attribution. We updated our story immediately.”

-Jonathan Karl, ABC News Chief White House Correspondent

Amazing. ABC News should be ashamed of this kind of egotistical ass-covering. Their credibility is at stake, and they’re letting their anonymous right wing sources get away with lying to them.

Via: ABC News’ Jonathan Karl Addresses Criticism on Reporting of the Benghazi Talking Points Controversy - CNN Press Room Blogs

Also see:
Jon Karl got played by a confidential source and now ABC News has a big Benghazi problem » Pressthink
What do Jonathan Karl and James O’Keefe have in common?

NASA scientists recorded the biggest explosion from a meteorite impact seen on the moon in eight years of monitoring.

The lunar burst was caused by a 40-kilogram boulder-sized rock slamming into the surface at about 90,000 kph. It generated a flash 10 times brighter than anything seen before, which came from the thermal glow of molten rock at the point of impact.

More: Watch the Biggest Explosion Ever Seen on the Moon

Fred is a personal stop motion short. It got finished thanks to many friends, bank loans, and credit cards. I devoted spare time between jobs, moving the sets and puppets from one city to the next zig-zagging the west coast from LA to Seattle.

I know, right? Another one, just a day later? But this one actually will make it possible for me to update the types of auto-embed content the LGF Pages bookmarklet can identify — without making you re-install the bookmarklet to take advantage of the new features.

When you open this new version of the bookmarklet, it “phones home” to littlegreenfootballs.com no matter which site you’re on, and gets a file with the information it needs to find embedded video and audio in the current page. The cool thing about doing it this way is that it lets me add new embed types to the file on our server, and the bookmarklet automatically starts using them the next time you open it — no reinstallation necessary any more!

To get the new extensible version of the bookmarklet, reinstall it one more time by first deleting the old one (either by dragging it off the bookmark bar or by right-clicking and choosing “Delete”), then dragging the button labeled “Create a Page” (at the top of the right sidebar) to your bookmark bar in its place.

A trouble-shooting tip: if you click the bookmarklet and no window (or tab) opens, it’s probably because popups have been blocked by the browser. Most browsers have popup blocking on by default. The easiest way to handle this is to turn popup blocking off entirely; you can also allow popups on specific sites in the browser’s Preferences, but for posting purposes it’s a nuisance to do this for every site you might want to post something about.

The technical details

This new bookmarklet is actually calling our brand spanking new API (version 0.1, a one-day old baby), using the JSONP technique to get around the Javascript same-origin policy that would normally prevent this kind of cross-site access.

This happens in the jQuery.ajax() method beginning at line 27. It makes a call to the API at:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/api/0.1/postRegex

jQuery handles all the details of the JSONP call (with its necessary callback function), parses the JSON response, and returns the data in the object lgf — in this case it consists of two regular expression definitions that are used on lines 34 and 36.

Stop the presses! Wouldn’t you know that as soon as I post this new version, I discover an even better way to get this done? Instead of JSONP, the bookmarklet now uses the new hotness, CORS, to do away with the callback function and the other JSONP kludges, and use pure unsullied JSON as Crockford intended.

I’ve updated the code below; the API now goes to version 0.2, so I can still support the JSONP method as well.

(function() {
	var j = '1.9.1', d = document;
	if (window.jQuery === undefined || window.jQuery.fn.jquery < j) {
		var done = false, s = d.createElement('script');
		s.src = '//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/' + j + '/jquery.min.js';
		s.onload = s.onreadystatechange = function(){
			if (!done && (!this.readyState || this.readyState == 'loaded' || this.readyState == 'complete')) {
				done = true;
				jQuery.noConflict();
				lgfPost();
			}
		};
		d.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
	} else {
		lgfPost();
	}
	function esc(s) {
		return escape(s).replace(/\+/ig, '%252B');
	}
	function lgfPost() {
		(window.postPage = function() {
			jQuery.ajax('http://littlegreenfootballs.com/api/0.2/postRegex').done(function(lgf) {
				var f = q = w = '',
					u = esc(location.href),
					d = document,
					t = esc(d.title),
					s = esc((d.selection) ? d.selection.createRange().text : d.getSelection()),
					ob = jQuery('iframe').filter(function() {
						return this.src.match(RegExp(lgf.regex.embed, 'i'));
					});
				if (ob.length && !u.match(RegExp(lgf.regex.sites, 'i'))) {
					f = esc(ob.eq(0).attr('src'));
				}
				q = (
					'u=' + u +
					'&t=' + t +
					'&f=' + f +
					'&s=' + s
				);
				w = (
					'width=670,' +
					'height=820,' +
					'scrollbars=1,' +
					'status=1,' +
					'menubar=1,' +
					'location=1,' +
					'resizable=1'
				);
				window.open('http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/lgf-postpage.php?' + q, '_blank', w);
			});
		})();
	}
})();

An alternate title for this post might be, “The Recursive Conspiracy Theories of a Raving Freakazoid,” as our favorite right wing nut sandwich just continues to chase his own paranoid tail. Here he is opining that the AP and IRS “scandals” are really just attempts to cover up the Benghazi cover-up, because “that is literally where the bodies are buried.”

Via: Right Wing Watch.

I’m about to sling some code at you here, so watch out. There’s a new improved version of the LGF Pages bookmarklet, and if you have an LGF account you can install it by deleting the old one (if you already installed it) from your browser’s bookmarks bar, then dragging the “Create a Page” button to the bookmarks bar in its place.

The new version extends our exclusive auto-embed feature to add Scribd.com and SoundCloud to the auto-detected embed types. If you open the bookmarklet on any page containing an embedded Scribd document or SoundCloud audio file, it will be automatically added to your Page. If you want to test it out, here’s a page at Right Wing Watch with an embedded SoundCloud file: Radio Host Frequented by Gun Activists Calls for Shooting of Bush Family & Obama, Sexual Violence Against Hillary Clinton | Right Wing Watch.

Here’s the source code for the bookmarklet, in the interest of full disclosure. (Also because I want to test the latest version of our source code formatter.)

There are a couple of interesting tricks in this one; notice the method of loading jQuery by injecting a script tag into the page. I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the nerds amongst us.

The bookmarklet source code:

(function() {
	var j = '1.9.1', d = document;
	if (window.jQuery === undefined || window.jQuery.fn.jquery < j) {
		var done = false, s = d.createElement('script');
		s.src = '//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/' + j + '/jquery.min.js';
		s.onload = s.onreadystatechange = function(){
			if (!done && (!this.readyState || this.readyState == 'loaded' || this.readyState == 'complete')) {
				done = true;
				jQuery.noConflict();
				init();
			}
		};
		d.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
	} else {
		init();
	}
	function esc(s) {
		return escape(s).replace(/\+/ig, '%252B');
	}
	function init() {
		(window.LGF_post = function() {
			var f = q = w = '',
				u = esc(location.href),
				d = document,
				t = esc(d.title),
				s = esc((d.selection) ? d.selection.createRange().text : d.getSelection()),
				ob = jQuery('iframe').filter(function() {
					return this.src.match(/https?:\/\/(www\.youtube|player\.vimeo\.|w\.soundcloud\.com\/player|www\.scribd\.com\/embeds\/)/i);
				});
			if (ob.length && !u.match(/www\.youtube\.com\/|vimeo\.com\/|soundcloud\.com|www\.scribd\.com/i)) {
				f = esc(ob.eq(0).attr('src'));
			}
			q = (
				'u=' + u +
				'&t=' + t +
				'&f=' + f +
				'&s=' + s
			);
			w = (
				'width=670,' +
				'height=820,' +
				'scrollbars=1,' +
				'status=1,' +
				'menubar=1,' +
				'location=1,' +
				'resizable=1'
			);
			window.open('http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/lgf-postpage.php?' + q, '_blank', w);
		})();
	}
})();

And here’s the minified version created with Google Closure Compiler:

(function(){function b(b){return escape(b).replace(/\+/ig,"%252B")}function d(){(window.LGF_post=function(){var a=q=w="",d=b(location.href),c=document,f=b(c.title),c=b(c.selection?c.selection.createRange().text:c.getSelection()),e=jQuery("iframe").filter(function(){return this.src.match(/https?:\/\/(www\.youtube|player\.vimeo\.|w\.soundcloud\.com\/player|www\.scribd\.com\/embeds\/)/i)});e.length&&!d.match(/www\.youtube\.com\/|vimeo\.com\/|soundcloud\.com|www\.scribd\.com/i)&&(a=b(e.eq(0).attr("src"))); q="u="+d+"&t="+f+"&f="+a+"&s="+c;w="width=670,height=820,scrollbars=1,status=1,menubar=1,location=1,resizable=1";window.open("http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/lgf-postpage.php?"+q,"_blank",w)})()}var f=document;if(void 0===window.jQuery||"1.9.1">window.jQuery.fn.jquery){var e=!1,a=f.createElement("script");a.src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js";a.onload=a.onreadystatechange=function(){if(!e&&(!this.readyState||"loaded"==this.readyState||"complete"==this.readyState))e= !0,jQuery.noConflict(),d()};f.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(a)}else d()})();