I’m a pretty avid reader of Bob Sullivan, who writes the Red Tape Chronicles blog over at MSNBC, so when I got an unsolicited phone call last week offering me $1,500 if I’d just answer a few online questions, I thought about his online diary of Internet scams, frauds and free lunch offers. I was able to record most of the scam call in a way it could be shared, I shared it with Sullivan, and he shared it with his readers.

On the surface, the recording is just two people lying to each other. I literally made up a CV as I went along, taking the middle and last names of the turn-of-the-century booze-bashing evangelist Billy Sunday as my own. On the other end of the line, a parade of South Asian accents trying to convince me that $1,500 in free money was “not for everybody” but was certainly within my grasp. I suspect it was lost on them that when one of them chose “Jack Daniels,” as a supervisor’s name, it meant that Jack Daniels was still tempting Billy Sunday.

Beneath the surface is the complicated multiple threads of communication that make this scam possible. From the strength of the scammer’s accents, I suspect the boiler-room is in South Asia, the call transported as voice-over-IP and dumped on the US switched network through a portal in Seattle, WA. The victim is urged to upload the sensitive financial data to a website on a Denver-based Internet provider, which the scammers have access to.

To the Internet-challenged, the scammers spin a tale that the website and boiler-room aren’t connected; I bet some of their victims never fully understand the exact method of their victimization, and even if they do, the modern ability to connect nearly everything with nearly everything else on a worldwide scale makes it almost impossible to track down and prosecute the people responsible.

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Helen Thomas was writing for UPI when newspapers still used linotypes and when teletypes delivered her stories nationwide at speeds we would no longer accept for devices we carry in our pockets. It was this explosion of connectivity that ultimately ended her career: an intemperate remark made into a pocket video camera, amplified by the international reach of the worldwide web.

Helen Thomas

She was a veteran of the gatekeeper days of media; when JFK could philander in the White House and the press corps would give him a free pass. People could say intemperate things as asides and expect to do so with impunity; the gatekeepers would keep the snarky one-liners on background. As media became more prolific, and connectivity became ubiquitous, everyone suddenly became a press photographer merely by owning a phone with a camera; everyone with a camcorder and a website is their own TV news operation.

I had a vested interest in seeing Helen Thomas in the emeritus seat at press conferences. I think all of us who are refugees from dying or dead media took comfort in her longevity and perseverance; she provided at least a tenuous link with our shared journalistic past.

Just as she has outlived most of the ink-stained wretches from newspaper’s late golden age, she outlived the old media she once wrote for. She resigned from UPI when it became the mouthpiece of Sun Myung Moon; finally ending her career as a columnist for Hearst, which today sees its newspapers as only a small part of a diversified media company buying its way into the digital age.

It is symbolic that Helen Thomas ended her career in a way being mirrored by the institutions she spent her life working for; she didn’t see the subtle changes in the way information permeates society until it was too late to change. Public figures are always tempted to say intemperate things and in another day, the gatekeepers would laugh then suppress the direct quote. Now that we’re all journalists, that’s a courtesy that died with the linotype and the slow news ticker.

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Kendrick Meek delivered a stump speech and answered questions in Delray Beach, FL, Friday to a standing-room-only crowd. He’s the only legitimate Democratic candidate for the Senate seat vacated by Mel Martinez, so he has my support. His heart is in the right place, but his rhetoric isn’t. He’ll have to improve that dramatically to have a shot at winning the general election.

He should ace the primary;  two of  his opponents are wildly underfunded and the third is self-funded candidate Jeff Greene, a billionaire who cleaned up betting against the housing market through credit default swaps. If that’s not enough, he’s a former Republican who ran for a San Fernando Valley, California congressional seat in the 1980s.

Kendrick Meek in Delray

Meek’s chances were never good; though Florida went for Obama in 2008, it was an uphill battle helped by a tanking economy that beat this red state blue. But things got a whole lot better when Republican hopeful and current Governor Charlie Crist turned independent, unable to out-teaparty his Republican challenger Marco Rubio. So its a three-way race.

Kendrick had good logic for his campaign plans. He’ll tar Crist with all the nutjob stuff he said when trying to out-conservative Rubio and then finish him off by calling him out as a affiliation-changing opportunist. His lack of name-recognition will be solved by non-stop campaigning and some aggressive advertising. With all the self-funded candidates, the tea-party independents, and the three way race, it should be a good year for Florida TV stations.

But Meek is not fast on his feet on the stump, especially in the Q and A. Obama raised the bar. The first three sentences after a question should be a direct answer, and that’s what Meek should be emulating. Asked a question about Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Meek meandered and never directly answered the question, when he easily could have. His mother (who represented his district before he did) voted against DOMA. He could have said, “We tried to stop this before it started, and the next best thing to do is repeal it.”

Instead, Meek emulated Joe Biden. He just talked, until his words led him into the canned “I’m a supporter of gay people” predigested spiel. That isn’t going to fly against a seasoned campaigner like newly-independent Crist, who helped Meek greatly when he went independent, but helped himself far more.

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Liberty Counsel, the right wing religious legal group famous for amicus briefs in “10 commandments in the courtroom” cases, says they’ll back George Rekers should he decide to sue, reports today’s Washington Times. The article quotes Matthew Staver, dean of Falwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Since Mr. Staver’s private practice took place primarily in Orlando, Florida there is a distinct possibility should there be an action, he’d be involved.

I’m not an attorney, just an old news guy fascinated by communication law, but I see two problems here.

First, there is a strong possibility that George Rekers is a public figure. Since New York Times v. Sullivan, public figures have had a tough time suing for defamation. The theory is that robust public debate trumps the rights of an individual who is an actor in that public debate.

“Sullivan” was the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama and though he wasn’t even explicitly named, he believed he was held up to ridicule because of an advertisement in the NYT Times that attempted to raise funds to defend Dr. Martin Luther King against a trumped up Alabama perjury indictment.

Rekers was a founder and member of the board of a high profile organization that took an extreme position in an area of great controversy. Much of his income came from expert testimony in widely publicized cases that were extensively written about in the press. In two of these cases he was excoriated for testimony that was worthless and biased. This too was widely reported in the press.

When his activity, most of which he does not deny, became public knowledge, he was further elevated to prominence as the subject of the opening monologues on nearly every late night show, from Colbert to Craig Ferguson.

Should he file a case, that too will be newsworthy, and will have the additional protection that, because it’s litigation, it can be publicly discussed with impunity.

Second, we are now starting to see “he called me queer” cases being thrown out of court on the grounds that an imputation of homosexuality is not defamatory.

So once again, “poor” Mr. Rekers finds himself in the damnedest position. If he sues, the very defense in the case is going to highlight the struggle of a minority to even find a level playing field to argue its oppression against the person fueling that oppression. Rekers will find himself compared with the police commissioner of racist Montgomery, Alabama in the day of MLK.

In claiming he’s injured by being called gay, he will unwittingly call his own life’s work into question, because the very injury he’s claiming is one he has spent his professional life fostering.

He’ll serve himself up on a platter for every op-ed writer in the country that needs to fill 14 paragraphs with topical edginess, and they’ll be able to do it under the doctrine of qualified privilege.

Wouldn’t surprise me if he does sue. It’s the worst possible thing a man in his position can do, and he’s never failed to take the worst option before.

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The week-long party that ensued in the LGBT community after the lead expert witness against Florida gay adoption was caught in a compromising situation has ended. The cleanup has begun, and so have the thoughtful blog and video pieces that are pointing out the fall of George Alan Rekers was different than all the others.

Right wing and/or religious leaders whose anti-gay rhetoric belie their own bisexuality has become a meme. Craig Ferguson based a bit on it in his opening monologue Wednesday: “If you’re really, really anti-gay…you’re probably gay.” The unfunny Jay Leno even got a laugh out of it. Jimmy Kimmel piled on. Stephen Colbert gave Rekers his Alpha Dog of the Week award, Jon Stewart mocked him using a piece from CNN.

But now that the laughing is dying down, we’re starting to explain how this scandal is different, and why it represents a turning point in the struggle for gay equality. The affair of Ted Haggard was most like that of Rekers; a pay for sex/companionship arrangement that went bad when the sexworker exposed him.

It differed because the escort initiated the expose, and because Haggard had steered clear of anti-gay rhetoric except for a sermon which was his karmic moment: If you don’t want to be caught doing something, he preached, you shouldn’t do it.

But the media and much of the public, LGBT and otherwise, turned on Haggard’s accuser too, and a plea to not repeat that mistake this time: “Let’s Not Chew This One Up and Spit Him Out” by Dan Savage is one of the best thoughtful overviews. As is Rachael Maddow’s piece on Friday, on why the Rekers story is newsworthy beyond the titillating.

Throughout the scandal, the blog Joe My God has provided the best overall coverage linking blogs and news sites that carried all facets of the story. He also did one of the best interviews with the escort, even though CNN had better access but did a poorer job.

Now, the morning after the week long party, there is a sadness expressed on twitter and in the comments on the hundreds of blog pieces that covered this. The more one studies the Rekers/escort relationship and Rekers testimony, the more profound the sadness becomes.

When a 20-year old boy explains that his john appears to not understand his own sexuality, and when that john bases his “expert” testimony in a gay-adoption case on the higher levels of suicide, substance abuse, depression and affective disorder in the LGBT community, the closed loop becomes obvious.

George Alan Rekers is a victim of the very belief system he perpetuates through the self-fulfilling prophesy of using statistics that demonstrate oppression to justify continued oppression. That is why the specific facts of this scandal have lasting value when those before it do not. It shows the so-called “experts” of the anti-gay right have far less understanding of the psychology of LGBT people than the escorts who carry their luggage.

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Professional anti-gay psychologist George Alan Rekers was photographed at Miami International Airport with a 20-year-old boy by New Times Contributor Brandon K. Thorp. Result: yet another fall from grace by a paid propagandist for right wing causes. This time, the fallen is the expert witness used to derail gay adoption.

Rekers was a co-founder of the Family Research Council, though it has developed a sudden case of selective amnesia. The New Times story reported that the 20-year-old was an escort whom Rekers hired off the sexworker/bodyworker site rentboy.com. It appears the reporters were able to do so, because the escort, whom they called “Lucien” confirmed it in exchange for not being identified in the story.

But while the right wing organizations that used to tout Dr. Rekers on their websites have been busy scrubbing their sites*of any mention of his name, another story has been developing: several gay news sites have been seeking the identity of “Lucien,” and it appears they’ve been successful.

There’s been a pretty hearty debate on blogs and in the comments on stories about “Lucien” (whom the Advocate identifies as Jo-vanni Roman) over whether he has any expectation of privacy and whether specifics about him should or should not be revealed.

But there’s another question here: does “Lucien” have a professional responsibility, one like journalists or priests or doctors, to protect the specific details of his relationship with his john? This is not about Rekers: he’s a hypocrite of the worst order, its all about the rentboy. We saw this question raised with Mike Jones, who outed Ted Haggard, and its probably the next question in the very public deconstruction of the Rekers/Lucien relationship.

What he’s done so far doesn’t really breach any confidentiality. He confirmed who he was and why he was there and he hasn’t yet taken the bait to give blow-by-blow descriptions, with a not-too-artful hint that he might have done so if it could somehow have been off-the-record. Though Reker deserves to be called out for his lame attempts at denial, the world’s oldest profession deserves something too. It deserves professionals as practitioners.

UPDATE: Jo-vanni Roman takes Unzipped’s bait.

UPDATE II: Roman takes the bait with the hook, and goes all the way with New Times.

UPDATE III: University of South Carolina Medical School joins the “scrub away the gay” party and removes Dr. Rekers. Box Turtle Bulletin has the legacy screencapture.

* Ex-Gay Watch reports the changes to the Family Research Council were made before the Rekers trip, possibly as far back as 2007.

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We first licensed AM radio stations in the 1920s, we were always mindful of a top tier of stations, the I-A clear frequencies with either one station holding a national monopoly on that frequency, or having a clear dominance against other stations that were very distant and usually daytime only. While this concept is gone, its legacy remains in high powered stations like KFI, Los Angeles and  WGN, Chicago.

The idea behind the nationally cleared channels was that the small rural communities would have a wide range of program choices, particularly at night which was prime time for radio during its first golden age. But we’ve moved so far away from that, that maybe our next policy should be to license a huge number of extremely small stations to encourage localism down to the city block level.

It would be a shame to shut down a service that has such a huge installed base of receivers, but it doesn’t look like the future for AM is very bright under the old model. Amplitude modulation (or AM) radio is the simplest most direct way to send a radio signal; its so simple that everything from car alternators to microwave ovens create unwanted static that is almost impossible to discern from the desired signal.

Stations were originally licensed to serve cities that now include hundreds of square miles of suburbs, so the noise problem got greater as the areas they need to serve got larger. This week, broadcast consultant Richard Arsenault floated a trial balloon: he wants to let AM stations increase their powers 4 to 10-fold. That’s just nuts. When you have too many people shouting in a room, the answer isn’t for them to all shout louder.

As a part of our digital conversion of television, we’re now considering paying TV stations to consolidate bandwidth, and do more with less. TV broadcasters generally don’t like it, but its not really their spectrum to start with. I think we should do the same thing with AM radio. Its already unlistenable in many areas; we’ve reached what the late FCC-commissioner James Quello called “one huge buzz.”

Let’s offer to pay AM stations to go dark. Lots of them are in a financial hole they can never emerge from, anyway. Then we license a whole host of small stations: 30-100 watts, with at least 50 miles between them; low-power stations that are the equivalent of the parking-help stations at airports.

The standard broadcast band isn’t worth much when it comes to transmitting data; its bandwidth is terrible, which is why audio broadcast on it sounds like a 25kbps mp3. Arsenault is right, we need a do-over, but not one that just makes the problem worse.

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If your email inbox is full of frantic pitches for money today from politicians approaching the quarterly FEC filing deadline, consider Harold Camping. He’s found an even more compelling deadline. The rapture, followed by the end of the world.

Camping’s “Family Radio” network owns at least 50 radio stations, many of them commercial outlets with considerable ability to serve the public, backed up with at least a hundred smaller “translator” stations. He’s using those stations to claim that the rapture is scheduled for May 21, 2011, with the end of the world to follow later that year on October 21. Perhaps Camping is right this time (I say “this time” because he tried this once before, predicting a world’s end in September, 1994.)

Our country licenses broadcast stations to folks who will operate them in the public interest, convenience and necessity. While we’ve never found an ironclad definition for that, the repeated prediction of an end of the world that scares the hell out of people and then doesn’t materialize doesn’t fit the definition.

So I respectfully suggest that on May 22, 2011, providing that the devout Christians haven’t been called heavenward leaving us ground-dwelling heathens scratching our heads, the Federal Communications Commission start accepting license applications for Family Radio’s frequencies. On October 22nd, the FCC reassigns them to people who will operate local stations in the local markets and not import a pack of lies via satellite.

If Camping is right, he won’t be needing his stations. If Camping is wrong again, I don’t think we’ll be needing him broadcasting on them.

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The public relations debacle that started with the Human Rights Campaign’s Comedy Rally for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell starring Kathy Griffin and ended with highly-paid HRC Director Joe Solmonese being named one of Washington’s best dressed may have claimed its first victim: Brad Luna.

At close of business, Friday, HRC’s Director of Communications left for good. “The position was eliminated,” says John Green, HRC’s director of human resources, who is unclear who will be performing Luna’s duties. “We will determine what positions will come out of that.”

For the last week, Luna had been ducking questions about what Lt. Choi was told about the nature of the rally, and HRC’s plans regarding Choi, while buzzing up a flurry of sudden activity criticizing Choi’s action and trying to raise funds to fight Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Today, HRC’s deputy communications director acting in Luna’s place has taken the direct approach. HRC simply will not answer questions about it. They will neither confirm nor deny that GetEqual‘s Robin McGehee was told Choi couldn’t speak because he hadn’t signed a release that would give Griffin’s production company intellectual property rights to his speech. They’ll say nothing further about any support they’ll offer Choi, pointing to a statement on their blog which attendees at the rally report is “utterly untrue.”

Its been 41 years since the civil disobedience of the Stonewall Riot started the modern gay movement. HRC came along 11 years later. In their 30 years, they’ve been able to redefine Stonewall to be nothing more than a verb.

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From 1945 to 1989, KFAC brought classical music to Southern California. During its glory years, its announcing staff was second to none. Most of its program hosts, like chief announcer Carl Princi, were sought-after narrators for television,  documentary and industrial films. Among the station’s best was Tom Dixon, who passed away last Saturday at age 95.

Tom Dixon was also present when political history was made. In the early campaigns of Richard Nixon (the “pink right down to her underwear” campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, for instance), he was Nixon’s announcer.

It wasn’t that he had a political affinity for Nixon (unlike Adolphe Menjou and others), he was chosen by the man who would later become the 37th president because he liked the sound of, “I’m Tom Dixon for Richard Nixon.”

I had the pleasure to talk with Mr. Dixon on the phone several years ago about that period. He shared that he came to dislike Nixon because of the way Nixon treated his wife, Pat. One time in a radio studio after a broadcast speech, he launched into a tirade humiliating her for no reason. Dixon traveled California with the campaign. He told me many stories with great wit and charm.

We’ve lost not only an important man in LA radio history, but a part of political history as well.

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