An annoying lefty Congressman calls a press conference in which he is abjectly humiliated for his recent lies. But just beforehand, Andrew Breitbart commandeers the press conference, lectures the media, and demands an apology from the Congressman for slandering him.

Which he gets.

Am I dreaming? As one of Weiner’s young admirers asked: is my life for real?

Full version here.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Supposedly this link will allow you to listen live on the internet, but it is not working for me.

Update: Liberty Chick informs me that it is impossible to listen live.  But you can go there to listen to it tomorrow.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Lee Stranahan]

I’ve been gathering materials for a quick turnaround Weinergate Documentary…and if I can raise the funds needed in the next 10 days, I’ll be able to get it out by July. (I have two other docs I’m finishing, so I need to knock this one out quickly)

The focus is Weinergate as seen as a media event – the triumph of the right-wing bloggers and the total crash and burn of the left wing. I’m calling it Weinergate: The Impotence of Liberal Journalism.

Click here for more info and please consider donating. There are some cool rewards, including credits, special edition DVDs. It’s on Kickstarter, a service for funding project – if I don’t get the total funding I need to do the project, you don’t pay.

Email me – Lee@Stranahan.com -  if you have any questions, too.

– Lee Stranahan

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

I haven’t even watched it yet, but this appears to be pretty thorough.  I will try to hunt down the Breitbart pregame show later.

Commentary will surely follow, too.  Look for any updates to this story in this thread (until and unless we start a new thread…).

Update: Reason has “the screencap no representative (or their significant other) wants to see”

Update (II): A lot of people are being very nasty to Lee today. Let me say this. You do not judge a person by 20/20 hindsight. You judge them by what was reasonable at the time. The unfair left says that somehow Bush should have figured out Saddam didn’t have (many) WMDs, even though Tenet told him the case was a slam dunk and even though fifteen nations agreed that Saddam had WMD’s in UN Resolution 1441. Reasonable people, though, recognize that a person can only use the information at hand.

The fact was that it was suspicious that Dan Wolfe caught the tweet within, by his own description, five seconds. But it turned out the the answer is simply this: Dan Wolfe was obsessed with Weiner, for whatever reason, and thus he was so attentive of Weiner’s account that the second he made a mistake he was there to catch it.

But there is a crucial difference between being wrong, and being unreasonable given the facts known at the time. It is by that standard that Lee should be judged, as you would want to be judged if you should ever make a mistake in a situation with incomplete information. And if Lee is a bad guy for entertaining theories that Weiner’s account might have been hacked, and that Dan Wolfe was perhaps a woman wronged in some other way, then I am a bad guy, too. I entertained the same theories and I would have written more on it, but for the fact that I felt that the story was Lee’s own, and I wanted him full credit and glory if it panned out. But if you want to chide him because it didn’t pan out, then chide me too.

Sorry to vent, but I have seen a lot of people, especially on Twitter, attacking him today.

Update (III): Mike Stack says a few words in defense of Lee, too.

Update (IV): Do not miss this parody of DailyKos on DailyKos. Best line:

I know Anthony Weiner would never do anything like this is because, you see, we’ve never met. But we share many political views.

Seriously read it (and let me know if it goes down. I saved the text.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

BIG UPDATE: He’s admitting it!!! More coverage as we go forward. I am not sure it is a full mea culpa, but we’ll find out as we go. So apparently he decided to follow something close to my advice. Btw, how does Mike Stack get his reputation back?

And Mediaite speculates that the Clintons are giving them marital advice. I am sure Hillary can teach Huma how to brave humiliation with the promise of political power…

Update: I can’t watch it, but I am hearing many reports that somehow Breitbart has managed to take over Weiner’s conference. As in, he is at the podium, talking.

So how about we discuss predictions, dirty jokes, etc. in this thread?

The New York Post Proclaims it will carry it live.  I haven’t tracked down a link for it, yet. Update: here’s a link that might work.

Update (II): This link definitely works.

Update (III): Live blogging of it, here.

Update (IV): And we get more explicit sexting from him.

Place your bets: will he deny it and fight, or resign to sulk away in shame spend more time with his family?

Update: How’s this for carrying water?  MSNBC on the Breitbart photos:

For the second time this year, the internet is abuzz with photos of what appears to be a shirtless, married congressman from New York.

Appear to be?  Yeah, that is putting it mildly:

I mean seriously, I would find that line excusable if they included the pictures themselves, but instead they give us a lecture about how untrustworthy Breitbart supposedly is:

Breitbart’s tactics are generally eyed with some suspicion by objective news sources. His exposure of a speech by Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod led to a media brouhaha over her perceived racist statements before a full screening of the edited video revealed manipulation of her words; he was also involved in the 2009 controversy around a heavily edited video by James O’Keefe that contributed to the demise of ACORN.

See how they make it sound like Sherrod wasn’t really racist?  Oh, except she was, she just later, stopped being so racist.  And indeed Chris Matthews even defended Brietbart…

Before that was memory holed.  And yes, the Acorn videos were heavily edited.  Because guess what?  You expect people to sit through hours and hours of video.  But regardless they released the unedited videos and they were just as bad as they seemed.

And probably for attribution purposes, I should include a link to Breitbart’s post. Bluntly, Breitbart deserves all the attention he is getting.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

For the past three years we have seen the hyper-racialization of our politics, where for instance not wanting to support an unconstitutional government takeover of health care is just because Obama is black.  I mean never mind that we actually defeated a similar plan put forth by a white President, but no, no clearly we were all just racist for opposing it. And we were continually told that this issue or that one was really a dog whistle for racism.

Well, if you want a dog whistle, it’s really kind of hard to beat this one:

Yes, that is for real.  That is how Newsweek depicts Mitt Romney.  Apparently it is a riff off of The Book of Mormon a play by the creators of South Park.  Knowing those guys, I suspect the play is something quite brilliant, but that grants Newsweek zero immunity for depicting Romney as a stereotypical Mormon (would we tolerate Lieberman being depicted as a character from Fiddler on the Roof–or Obama as a slave in Roots?).  Indeed they picked  a stereotype associated with a  particularly annoying subset of the Mormon faith: the guys who knock on your door and try to convert you.  Seriously, Mormons, what is the story with that?  Did you notice that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been cutting back and decided that was a niche that needed to be fulfilled?

Joking aside, I see Mormonism basically pretty much the way the South Park guys see it:

I tell people it’s the craziest religion* that…  nonetheless as a rule produces really nice people.  I mean there are exceptions…**

…but there are many more that fit the rule…

And if you are a good person that is really all I care about, not my assessment of the reasonableness of your religion. Seriously, what Newsweek has done is just tawdry.  No wonder the Daily Beast (allegedly) bought it for a dollar.  It is the most religiously bigoted thing I have seen in politics since…  well… this:

(more…)

{Guest post by Lee Stranahan]

Nobody can accuse them of not covering the #WeinerGate story. They have a piece that shows new photos AND phone sex in the Congressman’s office. They ARE covering it! Look at the front page of HuffPost.

But Don’t Worry – It’s Covered More On Their Politics Page.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

BIG UPDATE: Radar online alleges that another woman came forward and said she received, ahem… a Weinerpic.  No more from Breitbart as of this hour.  I don’t know how trustworthy they are as a source, so apply appropriate skepticism.  Just because it says something that I was personally expecting to happen, doesn’t mean it is true.

BIG UPDATE: And the next one drops.  There are several pics of his torso and but I think they are burying the lede:

Later that same day, apparently after receiving several images from the young woman, Rep. Weiner allegedly sent another photograph to her from the same Yahoo! email address.

That photograph (attached to the email as “ready.JPG”) is extremely graphic, and leaves nothing to the imagination.

So, that is like naked and ready to go, right?  That’s what he is saying, right?

Original post follows…

—————————————-

Because double entendres are fun.  My loose plan is to use this post to announce breaking news on #Weinergate.  Ah, I guess my brilliant plan on how to crack the scandal open will be for nothing.

Update: So far the posts from Breitbart have come at almost exactly 3 a.m., 5 a.m., 7 a.m.  That seems to be California time.  So logically we should expect the next one at 9 a.m., or noon, Eastern time.

Update (II): And apparently he is very late for the next revelation…

Anyway, the first double entendre refers to the latest drip in the water-torture Andrew Breitbart is performing right now on Weiner is this pic which Weiner captioned as “me and my pussys.”  Because you know, there are cats in the picture.  What did you think he meant?

Which is slightly dirty but truly harmless…  so far.  But I ain’t exactly going on a limb to say I bet they are just getting started.

And for a slight diversion, here’s a man putting a Weiner in his mouth.

And that is from a double-entendre filled article about a sausage vender having waaaaay too much fun with all of this.  But then again, he got the free advertising that comes with being in the paper.  So you have to admire the savvy involved in that.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Lee Stranahan]

Have neither + or – take on @patriotusa76. Until ID affirmed (protected) by reputable source (ally) no reason to accept incorroborable data – AndrewBreitbart

I’ve had more time than most people to consider the implications of  how more Anthony Weiner photos might effect various aspects of this story – so as the photos drip out over the next week (according to Breitbart) let’s think about what this all means.

With the new bombshells released by Breitbart by morning – as I write this, here and  here and here – this gives more reasons that Patriot needs to come forward and explain who they are, not less. The story is no longer about whether one underwear photo sent to one woman was hacked or sent accidentally or something else. It’s now about clear confirmation that there’s a lot more going on here.

Patriot predicted weeks ago that a scandal was coming. Patriot had Mike Stack do the tweet about it, which would throw people off Patriot as the source of the rumor. And since then, Patriot has given various and changing explanations about where they supposedly heard about the ‘rumor’ – a rumor that is actually likely that they themselves started.  So – what did Patriot know and when did they know it? And do they know more?

The revelation that there are more photos has implications on the great Patterico piece yesterday. We now know for a fact that Weiner had sent photos to other women – so, it’s time for Mediaite and reporter Tommy Christopher to reexamine their reporting, especially in light of the obvious problems with the timeline they presented.

I don’t know how many pieces critical of Rep. Weiner I need to write before some people stop pretending I want to take the focus off of Weiner’s own conduct. Of course, it goes without saying that Weiner himself has a lot of explaining to do – clearly, the most. Nothing I’ve said takes ANY focus off of Rep. Weiner – quite the opposite.

– Lee Stranahan