Professional Slime Mike McCurry stabs Milano in the back

That's it. Burn DC to the ground. I got to my inbox yesterday and found yet another example of dishonest hackery from Mike McCurry's group on net neutrality and internet freedom. This time it's a negative hit piece, backed by a massive blogad campaign. The telcos, so you know, are spending millions of dollars a week on this fight. This ad is an example of it, repeating the lie that the government had no role in the internet's success and that bloggers are a bunch of irresponsible rabble.
First, the childish and nasty tone of the McCurry ad (located at http://www.dontregulate.org) is ridiculous. The snapshot to left is from their flash ad and is supposed to represent the Save the Internet Coalition. Look at it closely. You see the sign 'I love Alyssa'? That's meant to showcase the group as immature college hippies who don't know what we're talking about. Members of the Savetheinternet.com coalition like Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Lessig, Vint Cerf, and the American Library Association are experts in how knowledge flows and how the internet works. They know this issue cold. Tim is actually an architect of a key piece of the internet, that whole 'www' thing. But I'm sure he's in this fight because he loves Alyssa and protesting, right?

The above is from Matt Stoller's "Mike McCurry: More on Us Being Internet Rabble" (MyDD). For The Common Ills community, Carl's done a great job providing the facts and steering you on where to go to prevent the corporate takeover of the internet (and the demise of it as a public common) in the gina & krista round-robin. He may grab this as well and, if so, great.

Dallas found it as Dona sent out the call for short pieces. We think Stoller gets across (in the excerpt above) that the ad is misleading and vile. He makes other points as well if you use the link. We're going to focus on something else for this short entry.

Mark McCurry is a professional mouthpiece and nothing more. A gas bag who doesn't have the goods to cut it on the televised chat & chews. (And when you consider how low the likes of Robert Novak have set that bar, that's really saying something.)

We agree with Stoller that the "I love Alyssa" sign is meant to ridicule. We agree that it's ridiculing the people carrying the sign. We also argue it's ridiculing Alyssa and since two know Alyssa (guess who) we're going to focus on that for this quick entry.

Who the hell does Mark McCurry think he is making fun of Alyssa Milano? Suggesting that her base would carry "I LOVE ALYSSA!" signs to a rally to save the internet?

(McCurry, did you get your jollies looking at nude photos of her online? Did it do it for you? Did it provide a little excitement in your otherwise dull and non-productive life? Aren't you the good Methodist?)

Now she's an actress and most people know that. But do most people realize how much time she spent campaigning for John Kerry? Are they aware of her trips, for instance, to speak to college students? Does Mark McCurry think she had nothing better to do then, for instance, go to Corvallis, Oregon and speak to a college student body (not an insult to colleges, student bodies or Corvallis) when she could have been doing something else?

Is this how Mark McCurry and his co-horts think you repay people who do their part and then some? We'd love to see McCurry have the guts to ever be the one calling Milano and asking her to do a favor for the Democratic Party.

And we think it's pretty disgusting that the Democratic Party isn't conveying to him how rude his sign was. They can take the attitude (wrong) that it's a fringe group opposed to a corporate takeover of the net and that the fringe doesn't really include any of their base. But leadership damn well knows Alyssa Milano stood up. They're not showing any appreciation for that by allowing the piece of pond scum to mock her in ad.

Let's be really clear: that shit won't play.


This isn't just the Party officially standing down on an issue (somethng we've all grown to expect from the Democratic Party of today), this is them sliming someone they needed and it's not cute. and it's not funny. And it won't go unnoticed.