Right-Wing Blogger Who Outed Page Lives on Food Stamps

William Kerr, the right-wing blogger who goes by the name of Wild Bill and who outed a page who may be one of the Foley victims, is a 32-year-old man living in Moore, Oklahoma, according to an article in Friday's Oklahoman newspaper. Kerr was able to track down the identity of the former congressional page using unredacted IM chat logs that were posted inadvertently on ABC's web site.

Using the AOL screen name from those logs and a few other bits of information garnered from the chat, Kerr and an unidentified fellow blogger known only as "Ms. Underestimated" tracked down the page's identity on MySpace after 3 days of work. By a strange twist of fate, the former page was actually working in Oklahoma on Ernest Istook's gubernatorial campaign, according to the Oklahoman. He has since left the state.

Kerr, a high-school graduate who was discharged from the military for a personality disorder, has a police record that includes a 1994 burglary charge and a charge of marijuana possession.

The Oklahoman continues:

Kerr calls himself a conservative, and the posts on his blog reflect his ideology. He began working for an Internet radio station this summer. It doesn’t pay the bills, though.

Kerr is a stay-at-home dad. He hates the idea of putting his kids in day care. So he and his wife try to make ends meet on less than $20,000 a year.

“We might go broke,” Kerr said as he wiped tears from his eyes. “We’re on food stamps. If we go broke, we go broke. But my kids aren’t going to day care.”

And now we know the rest of story, which seems, in some strange way, a parable for our times in these hateful and divisive Bush years.