heidi | Politics aside...

1. This is extremely funny and extremely scary. You can't find me on here, since we haven't given more than $100 to any candidate yet, but you can find a bunch of other people. Including their addresses, which is a little ick. I hope some people have given "work" addresses.

2. I got a phone call last night from ELECTION RESEARCH who do a lot of pollstering for Republican candidates & projects. Among the questions were whether I was voting for Bush (no!), whether I supported the "war" in Iraq (which I found weird, as didn't Bush say the "war" was over like six months ago; anyhow I replied that I supported the troops), whether I described myself as pro-life (no!), whether I supported a constitutional amendment that a marriage is between one man and one woman (no!) and whether I had, in the past year, given money to a philanthropic organization or a church (Christianocentric question, isn't it, but I said yes I'd given to philanthropies). There was also a question about whether I wanted my taxes to go up (yes!) but I really wanted the word-for-word from that one again.

So I called them today after googling them, and asked them to send me a copy of the poll. If I get it, I'm sharing it with a friend who used to work for the Democratic side of the House Justice Committee, and I'll post some of the questions here, too.

3. From today's Salon Magazine:
Jack Kelly, former star reporter at USA Today (also home to last week's really inaccurate article about PoA), has admitted to fabricating extensive sections of many of his articles, including the Jewish settler who riddled a Palestinian taxi with bullets and an Arab youth who wanted to blow up the Sears Tower.

And what makes him emerge as a more dangerously misguided figure than his tarnished peers -- Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass among them -- is how influential those tales became.

On Sept. 30, 2001, for example, Tim Russert ran the Sears Tower kid anecdote past Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on "Meet the Press."

"I want to read that to you and our audience," Russert said, "give you a chance to think about it and talk about it ... How do we change their mindset?" (The secretary's reply: "There isn't a big 'they.'")

The kid -- whose classmate completes the picture of evil in the story by telling Americans, "I will get your children, I will get their playgrounds" -- became a mascot of the dangerous new world post-9/11. The week he spoke to Rumsfeld, Russert also asked former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman to consider the report. Kelley's fiction inspired a Oct. 13, 2001, column by syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams, a conservative voice picked up in more than 75 newspapers. As readers passed his story around, the kid showed up in the letters section of Stars and Stripes, and in an Oct. 18 letter to the Syracuse, N.Y., Post-Standard. Shawn Harmon, a 35-year-old reservist, dared pacifists and "the whole UC Berkeley Crowd" to turn the other cheek, in the light of Jack Kelley's article -- proof, he said, that we have to "rid the world of this virus."

As for Kelley's murderous Avi Shapiro: The piece, wrote Arab Coalition for Media Equality spokesman Al Kadri in a Sept. 10 letter to the Canadian Windsor Star, was one that "everyone should read." According to Kelley himself, almost everyone did.

"Last August," he recalled in a 2002 CNN Reliable Sources round-table discussion of fairness in Middle East reporting, "I wrote one cover story on Jewish vigilantes in the West Bank and how they fired on a taxi carrying Palestinian women and children -- received 3,000 e-mails per day, for 10 straight days. After that, we had to switch my e-mail address. Got seven death threats and got a bouquet of white funeral flowers sent to our building." Washington Post media critic (and Reliable Sources host) Howard Kurtz mentioned the anecdote in his column, and Slate referred to the story a "long disturbing look at Jewish extremists" by a reporter who was "on-a-roll."

Plenty of people did question the story, calling it absurd from the first sentence (they laughed at the idea that Orthodox Jews would "put on their religious skullcaps" for a vigilante outing, reasoning they would have them on all day).

But that didn't stop Avi Shapiro from becoming a favorite among Israel critics, and also extremists -- in particular, Nazi sympathizers. As a torrent of e-mails complained about USA Today's depiction of Jews, an infamous Holocaust denier leapt to his defense.

Kelley was recently listed on the faculty of the World Journalism Institute, which trains Christians to be journalists. Its purpose: "The need to be faithful to the Christian example of accurately reporting (e.g., being reliable eyewitnesses) the work of God in today's world." And he's said of his work: "I feel God's pleasure when I write and report. It isn't because of the glory, but because God has called me to proclaim truth, and to worship him and serve through other people."

But because the memes of his stories have become so ingraned in the US hive mind, and to a large extent the world-mind as well, how will we ever be able to completely separate his lies out from what it is that we think or think we know about the way the world is?