When you've been in the newspaper business for nearly three decades, things that once would have been a huge thrill, like writing a front-page article, aren't quite as exciting as they used to be. However, I do still get jacked up every few years when they take my suggestion for a front-page headline....as they did with "Domonation."
Of course, you could quibble whether a rookie getting two hits in his first game is exactly, um, domonation, but we're a tabloid. We're supposed to be over the top!
It wasn't my idea to have Domonic Brown gawking at a Sexy Single, though.
I spent several days in the Phoenix area back in March, reporting for my fairly-soon-to-be published book "The Backlash." One place where I spent some time was on East Thomas Road, which is in the heart of the most-immigrant-laden area of East Phoenix, a nexus of the day laborers -- most of them undocumented -- who work construction and other types of physical labor for cash. The number of these day laborers in front of the Wal-Mart on East Thomas Road had dwindled considerably, in part because of harassment by nativist protestors but also because the housing market in Phoenix had collapsed. East Thomas Road was a hardscrabble place, to be sure, with lots of pawn shops and 79 cents taco drive-thru places, but I didn't feel like I was in some kind of nuclear fallout zone or anything. The local papers had a story about a controversial bill that appeared (at the time) to be stalled in the state legislature -- known officially as SB 1070.
That was only four months ago. This is East Thomas Road today:
(Photo by Nicholas Riccardi/Los Angeles Times)
Every time a customer buys some of the large fabric tote bags from the Dollar Store at 43rd Avenue and Thomas Road, Najmuddin Katchi sees another piece of his business vanish.
The purchase of the briefcase-sized shoulder bags means that another one of Katchi's customers, mostly Latino immigrants, is packing to leave the state before what is touted as the nation's toughest law against illegal immigrants takes effect July 29.
Katchi's store isn't the only business suffering. The vast shopping center that holds his small shop is almost empty. The Food City supermarket closed this spring. Then the furniture shop. Then the pizzeria.
All the news today has been about the last-minute legal jockeying over the racial-profiling immigration law that is slated to take effect tomorrow. A federal judge struck down the meat of the bill today -- liberals cheered, conservatives went after the judge as some kind of lefty loon, even though her job was by recommendation of conservative GOP Sen. Jon Kyl, and the case will probably go all the way to the Roberts Court (which might strike it down, because remember that big business doesn't like immigration crackdowns, and the Roberts Court simply adores big business.)
It's all a big sideshow. The goal of SB 1070 has already been mostly accomplished -- creating a climate of fear and loathing to drive away Mexicans, and not just those that are here without documents. This law hurts everybody -- it also harms non-Mexican residents of Arizona by blowing a huge whole in their already reeling economy. And it has greatly harmed all of America, and our reputation as the kind of nation that would never codify such ugliness in our laws. And it's too late for the damage to be undone.
(h/t Atrios)
In other words, Americans increasingly see the Internet as an important source of information, despite the fact that they view much of that information as unreliable. Depending on how you feel about Internet users in general, that’s either a baffling example of contradictory behavior, or a sign of healthy skepticism about online media.
Discuss.
What a week -- first we learn that BP's Tony Hayward was "demonised" (as they spell it across the pond) and now the Phillies are "Domonized"!
The Shirley Sherrod case wasn't a one-off, not by any means. A lot of conservative misinformation -- often generated though wishful thinking or other dubious non-reporting techniques -- starts with blogs, often more obscure than Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, but then churns quickly to the top of the right-wing media and sometimes, like the Sherrod story, even bubbles over to the mainstream. There's been a lot of play over the last two days over a purported "confirmed" list of journalists involved in the controversial (more on that later) email list and discussion known as JournoList. The list has been published on the widely read conservative site Free Republic and linked to by right-wing A-listers like Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds.
You'll be shocked, shocked to learn that this virally spreading list is about as real as a $3 bill. since he found himself on the right-win "confirmed" list despite having nothing to do with it. I saw his article and -- based on the increasingly unhinged comments I've been getting on the JournoList lately -- thought I should check to see if I had been erroneously placed there as well. Of course, I was. It's 100 percent wrong. I was never on the now-defunct JournoList at any time during its history, nor was I ever asked to be on it. In fact, I was only vaguely aware of the JournoList -- thanks to one article I read about it, a while back.
It's flattering, in a strange way, that so many right-wingers assumed I was on the JournoList. Ironically, the reasons that in the real world I would be an unlikely candidate for the JournoList are pretty much related to the reasons that I did start writing this blog more than five years ago. I had a lot I wanted to say, but I also knew that I was well out of the main loop, thanks to being based here in
I do think I know why I've been mistakenly included as a "confirmed" member of the JournoList. It relates to something that happened in April 2008. I was here at the newspaper live-blogging an ABC News Democratic primary debate that was taking place right here in
Then the debate ended, I stayed in the newsroom past 1 a.m. and wrote an angry, emotional screed of an open letter to Gibson and Stephanopoulos. My complaints were not partisan -- I believed that Clinton and Obama should have been asked tough or novel questions, which I personally tried to do when each appeared at the Daily News during the campaign. Notice that I wrote: "Question his policies, or question his leadership. because that is your job as a journalist. But don't insult our intelligence by questioning his patriotism.." Apparently, I was not alone in my disgust at ABC News. To this date, the letter remains by far the most widely read piece I have written over the five years of Attytood, and I received hundreds of emails as well, most in support.
A few days later -- it was 4:05 p.m. on April 18, 2005, to be exact, as I still have it -- I received an email from someone I've traded a few emails with over the years, a
Anyway, Todd asked me if I'd sign an open letter from journalists expressing outrage to ABC News. I said yes, because a) frankly, the letter was tamer than what I'd already written in the blog and b) I believe that committed journalists have an obligation to fight like hell every day for a better news media, and I felt it was important for ABC to know that other professionals -- and not just regular folks -- were among those angry over that performance. It was only last week that I learned that the letter that Todd forwarded to me arose from discussions on this JournoList that I did not even know existed in April 2008. But this is probably why I've been linked to the pseudo-scandal, while conservatives have used the open letter episode as an excuse to condemn media ethics.
Really? To this date, the only unethical conduct that can truthfully be linked back to that debate is on the part of...ABC News. For one thing, the moderators ran a video of a seeming average
Yet now,. in some quarters, it is this JournoList, where reporters -- most, but not all, working for publications like the Nation with an openly liberal orientation, as well as academics and a few advocates -- discussed and debated issues and occasionally traded information, that has become at least in some quarters the major journalism scandal of the 21st Century. That's total baloney. I wasn't asked to be on JournoList, and generally I think list-servs can be something of a big time-waster, but I have no problem with JournoList and I would not have been ashamed or regretful if I had taken part of it.
This may come across as shocking, but there's a place right now where journalists and even some activists trade ideas right now, and I do take part in it. It's called Twitter, and for God sakes don't tell Tucker Carlson before he shuts that down, too. And here's the real irony -- long before there was a JournoList, there was a place where journalists got together and intentionally or not, conspired to create little political narratives, that Gary Hart was a bit of a phony or George W. Bush could relate to regular guys, and those places were the hotel bars of New Hampshire and Iowa. I'm not defending that, necessarily ...but journalists are human, and they communicate with each other. The only difference is there wasn't a creep in the Des Moines Holiday Inn with a mini-recorder sending cassettes of private comments back to Rush Limbaugh.
Were there things that some indivdiduals said on JournoList that were stupid or in a few cases hateful? Yes, but from what I've read the dumbest comments were either ignored or pushed back -- as you might expect. It was just free speech -- sometimes brilliant, sometimes dumb, often messy -- and the worst example of partisanship related to JournoList is what's happening now on the right, as some conservatives are twisting words and the facts to try and yet again bully the mainstream media into covering bogus scandals of the right, like the New Black Panther Party, or just to be afraid of actual tough journalism.
Because this is not an isolated incident. The totally contrived JournoList scandal is the latest in a very alarming trend -- one that reminds me of what we've seen happen in parts of the Middle East in recent decades, that rather than deal with the difficulties of modernity -- in the case of journalism, that would be the Internet and the rise of a class of smart, edgy and passionate young writers -- there has been a disturbing plunge into a warped brand of radical fundamentalism. Inside the mosques of that old-time journalist religion -- the Washington Post springs to mind -- there is a kind of Taliban in charge this days, encouraging journalists to wear opinion burqas and a follow a kind of newsroom Sharia law in which reporters must be pure in their words, their opinions and even their associations, and there is an angry mob of right-wingers in the city square, urging on this unholy purity crusade and the ritual stoning of any infidels.
The new Taliban ignores the unalienable fact that journalists should largely judged in one simple way, by the character of their content. A writer can hold strong opinions or even make an occasional intemperate remark and still be a great journalist whose work is hard-hitting, fair and, dare I say it, accurate. In recent weeks, we've seen successful careers ended over one comment, like Octavia Nasr of CNN, and a journalism icon like Helen Thomas destroyed by one (admittedly pretty dumb) remark, and a promising young journalist like Dave Weigel leaving the Washington Post not because of his work -- which is outstanding -- but because of a few comments he tossed out on Twitter and the dreaded JournoList (Weigel was hired today by Slate, a glimmer of hope). Now, JournoList is becoming the place where the Taliban discovers the joys of McCarthyism.
If you want to judge journalists, it's not hard to do. Don't look at whether they're on some obscure list. Just look at what they write.
Yep, this is the guy I voted for:
“While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said to reporters in the Rose Garden.
"These documents" basically show that at key times in Afghanistan we're not sure who our friends or enemies are -- except of course for the thousands of new enemies that have been created by the accidential killings of innocent civilians. In other words, nothing to stop Obama from rushing to get $33 billion more that we don't currently have for the war, and those lock-step Republicans who seem to think every other governmental function is not in the Constitution but that fighting a war that doesn't really seem to be in America's interest 11,000 miles away is a perfectly legitimate and good way to boost the debt.
Meanwhile, from Rep. Raul Grijalva (who's fast becoming my favorite congressman) and 17 colleagues:
Once again, war is being paid for with a credit card while investments in our children’s future are tossed aside. These investments – $10 billion for teacher jobs, $1 billion for summer youth employment, $5 billion for Pell grants, $701 million for border security – were cut from the war funding bill coming to the House floor despite being fully paid for and not adding to the budget deficit. They have been jettisoned in favor of further borrowed war spending. Today’s bill doesn’t include anything to maintain first responder, police or firefighter positions despite the dramatic need for those jobs in every community in America. We believe this is fiscal insanity and a moral tragedy.
As the late great Edwin Starr once said...good God, y'all!
I know that when you say an event is "non-political," the first thing that would pop into your head is...the National Rifle Association!. Other than the fact that the NRA is frequently named as the most influential lobbyist outfit on Capitol Hill and has its hands not just on all things gun-related but also everything else from campaign-finance reform to health care, this icon of the gun lobby doesn't have a political bone in its body, right?
Well, at least we'll see if they can keep it non-politically real, since the NRA is the latest group to come out full force behind the charity-funded-but-Glenn-Beck-organized "Restoring Honor" rally that is slated to be held near the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the foot of the D.C. monument.
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence first reported today that the newest copy of its news magazine called "America's 1st Freedom" arrives wrapped in an ad for the rally with large photos of Palin and (a weirdly grey and haggard-looking) Beck and stating: "Support our Special Ops Warriors with Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and the NRA!"
The Brady folks were quick to point out a certain irony in the NRA taking center stage near the monument to Abraham Lincoln, and on such a special date in the life of Martin Luther King, since both men were felled by the bullets of assassins. Wrote Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Campaign:
Most jarring is the sad irony of all of these people at the podium, with their supporters spread across our National Mall, celebrating, in part, their worship of guns, while invoking, quite blatantly, the legacies of two great Americans whose magnificent lives were cruelly cut short by bullets.
And as you hold that image in your mind, consider the words of Dr. King, who, while mourning with all Americans the loss of President John F. Kennedy to gun violence, suggested: "While the question 'Who killed President Kennedy?' is important, the question 'What killed him?' is more important. Our late President was assassinated by a morally inclement climate. It is a climate filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred and raging storms of violence. It is climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder."
Helmke brings up some good points, but his disclosure that the NRA is more involved in the 8/28 rally than previously known raises some other new questions about Beck's use of a well-regarded charity, the Special Operations Warrior Fund, as a vehicle to pick up a tab for the event, which the Fox News Channel host has estimated at roughly $2 million.
He has claimed the tab will be paid by a $1 million personal donation, and $1 million in citizen donations that will be passed though SOWF (although, interestingly, any checks are to be mailed to the address of Beck's company, Mercury Radio Arts). Above that, any donations will go to the worthy cause that SOWF was actually created for, scholarships for children of soldiers injured or killed in combat. Federal tax laws require that an event funded through such a charity be non-political, which may be a challenge given the involvement of Beck -- the darling of the Tea Party movement, Palin -- who may be running for president in 2012 -- and others like right-wing rocker Ted Nugent, a loose cannon who could say anything up there.
A recent article by Politico's right-wing beat reporter Ken Vogel suggested that -- even if the likes of Beck, Palin, Nugent or any NRA reps manage to make it through the three-hour event uttering nary a political word, as their lawyers have no doubt advised them -- the "Restoring Honor" is merely the bait for a long weekend that will be devoted to electing conservatives in November.
-- The political group Tea Parry Patriots is not only promoting the Beck-led rally but will be providing 400 volunteers, as required in order to gain a permit from the National Parks Service. It will be asking the Beck attendees to stick around to for a rally aimed at repealing heath care reform on the next day, Aug. 29.
-- FreedomWorks, a big-business-funded political lobby that supports the Tea Party and has become a major sponsor of the Glenn Beck Program in recent months, is holding both a fundraiser as well as a get-out-the-vote training session the night before the rally.
-- Two GOP members of Congress -- Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Sen. Orrin Hatch -- joined Beck recently in Utah to raise money for SOWF and its sponsorship of the Beck rally.
Now the NRA support seems to be the icing on the cake -- a gooey cake of politics wrapped around a non-political core, in a fundraising scheme that is raising new questions every day.
This is too ironic not to note. The failure to take any substantive action on climate change is spearheaded, here in the United States anyway by the Gang of 41 in the Senate and their assorted right-wing allies in the Tea Party and elsewhere. And one of the consequences of their global warming denialism?
A surge in immigration from Mexico!
"Climate change refugees" -- people who will want to move or who will have to move in response to climate change -- have been a large concern of nations and others looking how how the world will be altered in coming decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that perhaps millions of people planet-wide will be forced from low-lying communities inundated by rising seas, or from farming communities that are subject to desertification or other similar scenarios.
Now, Michael Oppenheimer of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and colleagues are predicting that up to 6.7 million Mexican adults may emigrate to the U.S. by 2080 as a result of loss of agricultural productivity.
Of course, if climate change real is bunk, then none of this will happen. But I think it's more likely that we'll see a surge in pink underwear production as future Sheriff Joe Arpaio III labors to send millions of Mexicans back to their parched, "Max Max"-styled 115-degree desert wasteland.
Kinda of glad I won't be around to see that.
I'm glad to see that someone has finally taken on the burden of assembling "Everything Incorrect That You Didn't Need to Know About the Constitution You Learned from the Tea Party." That would be the Constitutional Accountability Project, which has begun an effort called "Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party."
In today's version, you'll learn that the Founders -- once the U.S. of A. was up and running -- weren't as big on "2nd Amendment remedies" as Sharron "90-Degree Right" Angle is today. They thought that armed rebellions and overthrowing the government and what not were generally bad things, as long as the new nation continued to hold democratic elections and there was nothing on the order of a military coup. Notes the project's Doug Kendell:
After ratification of the Constitution, the powers of the new federal government were quickly tested in the early 1790s with the Whiskey Rebellion. Like the Tea Partiers, the whiskey rebels of the late 18th Century believed the federal government had overreached and had unfairly imposed taxes upon them. As recounted in Ron Chernow's brilliant biography of Alexander Hamilton, President George Washington determined the rebellion must be crushed, stating that if "a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government." Then, the 62-year-old Father of our Country joined Alexander Hamilton and the federal army on a westward journey that put the rebellion to rest.
As Washington's actions and statements support, in the American republic, we express our disagreement about policy through speeches, petitions, assemblies, and elections, not by taking up arms against our government, other than in the unlikely instance of a coup d'etat by the national military.
Note the importance of grammar and punctuation -- because "if a minority is to dictate to the majority," that actually IS "Republican government" these days, with a capital "R."
Yahoo! is trying to be a little more edgy these days (you can't party like it's 1999 forever) but still I was surprised when I went to their homepage for main thing I still go there for -- the baseball scores -- and saw this was the main headline:
Why the middle class is radically shrinking
The U.S. is in serious danger of losing its once prosperous middle class.
The relatively short article seems to blame free trade (a pet peeve for some breeds of liberals) and over-regulation of small business (a mostly conservative bete noir) and the disparity between low-wage labor overseas and U.S. production costs (not really an ideological problem...nor one that anyone has proposed a feasible way to solve). It enumerates 22 signs of the apocalypse, including:
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.
I don't want to speculate, but the impact of these conditions lasting for a few more years...can't be good. It's funny -- I have vague recollections from way back in grade school that it was believed that people might stop making things as early as the 21st Century (although it would because of robots, not Chinese people) but no one seemed to think it would be a problem -- that would we just be flying around with our jet packs and eating meals-in-a-pill and chasing our robot dogs on a treadmill.
People weren't supposed to be angry. Weird.
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
E-mail Will by clicking here.
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