The Daily Howler discusses how the idea that Al Gore is becoming a billionaire from clean energy entered the debate (and no, he isn’t). Mostly courtesy of a congressional aide who gets funding from an business group that opposes environmental regulation. This was then picked up and parrotted by that supposedly liberal media of ours.
Read on.
Welcome
The Destin Log is the twice-weekly newspaper devoted to covering the crown jewel of the Emerald Coast.
Archive for the 'Journalism' Category
Al Gore, carbon billionaire
November 5th, 2009, 11:27 am by fshermanRon Hart, wrong on multiple points
October 30th, 2009, 2:26 pm by fshermanFrom his column (I think it’s only in the Sun this time):
“the voters will not get those facts if Obama has his way and undermines the free press—a.k.a. Fox News and talk radio. His administration has declared war on Fox News, the only organization left on TV which will take Obama to task and report the truth. ”
How exactly is saying Fox News is biased and not giving them interviews a war on the free press? The Bush administration and its dutiful pundits screamed about how everyone was biased all through W’s White House tenure (and still do); they’ve also cut journalists out of the loop for not taking the appropriate position.
Yes, I know, Fox is a Republican organ and as a loyal Republican, Hart is obligated to take its side. But it’s still nonsense.
“Not until his henchmen, or -women, who do his daily dirty work while he smiles and strokes people just like they wrote it for him on his teleprompter, come after you do you realize how dangerous they are. ”
Like say, the military accidentally shooting journalists in Iraq? Or holding them without trial or charges? Funny, don’t remember a peep out of Hart about that.
Hart: “Emanuel revealed himself early by saying that Democrats “should never let a good crisis go to waste.” Translation: take any advantage you can to push your spending bills and agenda, and never mind that they are not related to the “crisis.” And if there is one thing that politicians produce well, it is a crisis. ”
As opposed to say, Bush, who said in 1999 that if he got into a war, he was going to milk it for political capital to push his domestic agenda?
“Obama’s administration even told federal law enforcement not to go after California’s marijuana sales. I guess his new motto is “Yes we cannabis.” It will be easier to pass their agenda if the country is stoned. ”
And Hart thinks this is a bad thing? We will have to disagree on that.
“In another assault on free enterprise, Obama overreached and cut salaries of some executives 90 percent (no word on cutting his own administration’s salaries based on performance). This came after passing a bill that purchased more personal jet aircraft for the government. To be sure, our elected officials should fly in style since they are now auto executives and bank presidents. ”
Let’s be clear: He cut the salaries of executives in companies taking bail-out money. They had the option to refuse the government money and be true to their free-market principles; when they didn’t, they accepted the government yoke.
Come on, if the automakers had announced they were using their bail out funds to give huge bonuses to all the union workers, Hart would have a complete meltdown; so what’s the difference? Especially given that many of these executives are the same ones who led their company into the gutter of red ink.
As usual, Mr. Hart is a world of FAIL.
Daily News letters again
October 30th, 2009, 2:12 pm by fshermanFirst we have Sam Patti, die-hard Republican asserting that “52 of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were orthodox … Bible carrying Christians. The three others all believed in the Bible as the Divine Truth.”
I’m inclined to suspect he’s full of it since Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration and he spent a lot of effort editing the Bible (out with miracles and other stuff he felt religion had added to the truth) to create one of his own. So he was hardly orthodox, and hardly accepted the Bible as “divine truth” in the way it’s usually meant today.
Even if so—so what? The Founders of this country wrote a secular Constitution that didn’t mention God except to say there would be no religious tests for office (something seen as scandalously anti-Christian at the time). They may all have been Christians (although much of what I read seems otherwise) but they didn’t create a Christian nation as anyone at the time (or today) would think of it.
Then Patti asserts that “since the 1960s, God has not been welcome in America.” So God was more welcome back in the days of Jim Crow segregation? Back when it was legal to hire and fire based on religion and gender and gays were banned from federal service?
I think Patti’s God and mine have different perspectives.
Then we have Eileen Zunich of Miramar Beach who asserts that Obama’s stance on Fox News is “beyond what any previous administration has done” regarding “controlling all news coverage.”
Yes, criticizing Fox and not giving them interviews is sooo much greater control than say, Bush administration’s record:
•Paying columnists to write favorable pieces
•Ignoring Helen Thomas, a veteran white house reporter, when she kept asking unwanted questions
•The Pentagon’s program for providing the media with military “experts” who had agreed to support the administration’s war plans, while discouraging the use of talking heads who didn’t.
•Staged mock press conferences with FEMA employees pretending to be reporters.
Then, today, we have a letter from Rodger Woltjer of Niceville who’s very upset that because of animal rights groups the circus is no longer “a celebrated event shared by young and old alike” and that by protesting animal cruely they have joined “the ranks of the Anti-Christ crowd.” Because Jesus really loved animal cruelty?
Double standards
October 22nd, 2009, 2:23 pm by fshermanIt’s probably not news to anyone that Rush Limbaugh has been in high dudgeon—deservedly—over being slammed as a racist with some false quotes (though there are certainly valid ones from over the years).
However, as Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting points out, he’s no qualms in falsely quoting others: “On April 27, 1995, Limbaugh read examples of “liberal hate speech” by Pacifica radio host Julianne Malveaux and CBS reporter Eric Engberg from the right-wing Media Research Center’s newsletter, unaware that he was reading fake quotes from the April Fool’s edition published almost a month earlier. The next day (4/28/95), Limbaugh admitted the quotes were false, but he heroically refused to apologize to the journalists he had falsely smeared: “Given some of the things liberals actually do say, it’s not too tough to believe they would say the things Bozell makes up.”"
Ranking pathways.
October 5th, 2009, 6:33 pm by fshermanFactors for prioritizing from 44 possible improvements to the network.
•Does ti connect two separate pathways?
•Does it make it easier to reach a particluar destination?
•Does the public request it?
•Does it reduce trip length?
•Does it make pedestrians safer?
And several more.
Scores ranged from 0 to 15 for the different 44. RPG then organized them by the total point score, from the top down to the bottom 44. Even though some of them are (of course) below average, that doesn’t mean they’re unnecessary or bad.
No specific improvements listed, but I’ll get that for my story.
And Scott turns it to the council for questions.
Seevers: Any public comment?
None.
Council’s turn.
Jim Wood: You took public input at one meeting: How many people?
Scott: We had 18 people fill out surveys, maybe two dozen people actually attending.
Wood: So your priorities are based on what they told you. Scott: No, they were a part–not all of it. Wood: How much weight did you give them?
Swearengen: We looked at what would most help the system: Gaps in the system are a big problem so we gave fixing it a high point score. Destination links are important so it can be used for more than recreation.
Wood suggests there’s a lot of subjectivity. Greg Kisela (City Manager): You can’t really avoid that, but they’ve done it best to set it to a clear, understandable grid.
Wood: How do schools fit in?
Swearengen: DES is included as one of the destinations in that category. We debated how to look at DMS; we finally decided that since it’s in the county and not a multi-modal destination—”It’s accessible pretty much by bus.”—and wasn’t listed by the public as an important multi-modal destination–we decided not to use it.
Wood: What about Commons Drive? That’s rated high, but it’s a county street. “I’d sure like to see Destin tax dollars go to things in Destin.”
Scott: “That’s a great point. We had a lot of discussion about that … Commons Drive, while it is part of the county jurisdiction, is a very important roadway for multimodal transportation. Identifying it in the plan is a good thing, it allows the city to hold that plan up” if there’s a problem because of something the county’s doing.
Kisela: It does help a lot to have documents like this in these discussions.
Wood: It might help at Transportation Planning Organizations too.
Councilor Sandy Trammell: In the 2000 plan, getting an east-west corridor for bikers was a top priority. Have we addressed that or even identified a site? She can’t make out the details of the maps to tell.
“I see red line, I see blue lines, I don’t see anything that says proposed east-west corridor for bikers.”
Bagby finds it on Map C. Much discussion of what it shows follows as they try to figure it out. And it’s Map F if you’re looking at bicycles.
I may scream
August 21st, 2009, 2:43 pm by fshermanIt’s 2009, and I just saw an online article about a poll of who’s currently the top 2012 opponent for Obama.
There IS no top opponent, people, because we don’t even have a race yet! Get a grip! And by people, I mean my cohorts in the journalism world who churn this stuff out.
There’s no poll in 2009 that could tell us beans about 2012. Three years from now, Obama could have been caught worshipping Satan (unlikely) or have brought about utopia (ditto); Mike Huckabee (the challenger in the story) could be exposed as a cannibal or single-handedly saved a busload of elementary-school children from al-Qaida (again, both are rather low on the probability chart but you get my drift). We have no idea, yet, who else might throw their hat in the ring.
Horse-race stories are easy: They don’t require any deep research; they’re about polls and odds, so they can’t really be proven wrong; they save journalists the trouble of actually looking at policy (deciding whether a bill helps or hurts a candidate doesn’t require any knowledge of what it actually says); and as Digby at Hullabaloo has pointed out many times, they give journalists a chance to show off their insider knowledge—what’s really going on, how the game is played, etc.
And it drives me nuts. Am I alone in that?
And Rush Limbaugh supports a military coup
July 7th, 2009, 9:49 am by fshermanBorrowed from Orcinus :
“It began on Monday, after the military coup in Honduras. Limbaugh went on the air and said this:
Limbaugh: So we’ve got hell breaking loose in Honduras. You know what we learned about Honduras? We learned the Obama administration tried to stop the coup. Now what was — the coup was what many of you wish would happen here, without the military.
The next day, describing Obama talking to troops about the withdrawal from Iraq, he described the president thus:
“This is a guy who sought their defeat.”
And then Wednesday, he expanded on these thoughts even further:
This is Barack Obama, who led from the United States Senate his party into doing everything he could to ensure the defeat of the U.S. military. … This party was doing everything it could to impugn and dishonor the military.
On Thursday Limbaugh added to the litany in a much more explicit fashion:
“Limbaugh: And if we had any good luck, Honduras would send some people here and help us get our government back.”
I’m pretty sure this is what Limbaugh would have called treason back when his party was in power. Just as Republicans would have denounced any leftwinger who’d said an attack on America would be a good thing. Or the endless talk of secession on shows like Hannity’s or Beck’s. Or if Michelle Obama had been actively involved in a secessionist party the way Todd Palin was for years.
I have no idea if Limbaugh, Beck, etc. genuinely delude themselves into thinking that switching from Government Is Your Enemy to Anyone Who Questions Our Leaders Is Your Enemy actually represents some sort of coherent position, or if they’re simply telling their audience what they want to hear.
They’re full of crap either way.
In defense of Rumsfeld
May 20th, 2009, 11:56 am by fshermanNot a sentence I use very often, but www.dailyhowler.com has a post today about the recent claims Rumsfeld had Pentagon briefings printed up with Bible verses on the cover. Closely reading the article (which Daily Howler is very good at), the blog finds reason to question the details.
The liberal media
May 20th, 2009, 6:29 am by fshermanAs noted in yesterday’s posts, they’ve been kvetching, not for the first time, about how Obama must reject the left and stand up to the left and have a “Sister Souljah” moment.
If they’re as liberal as they’re supposed to be, why are they pushing Obama away from the left instead of encouraging him to move further that way?
For that matter, why do Republicans never get this treatment? When the Religious Right pushes Bush (or whoever) to deliver, the press will acknowledge that Bush is doing what he has to to pay off his debt to the base. No suggestion that he needs to stand up to them, or prove his independence; it’s taken as a given that’s not going to happen.
Some liberals.
Andrew Sullivan on Sabieri
May 15th, 2009, 11:40 am by fshermanSullivan: ” We appear to be nearing a happy ending in the case of Roxana Saberi, the American journalist detained by Iran and accused of being a spy. But ask yourself this hypothetical and distressing question.
If Saberi had confessed on Iranian television that she was a spy, and if the New York Times discovered that prior to this confession, she had been kept in solitary confinement in freezing temperatures, had been slammed against a wall twenty times in a row, and had then been shackled from the ceiling for days in such a way that the pain was excruciating, and had been blasted in her cell with extremely loud noises to keep her from sleeping for a week …
… do you think the New York Times would report that she had been “tortured”? Or would they adhere to their current practice and say she had been subject to “harsh interrogation”?
If the leaders of Iran publicly stated that they had succeeded in proving that she was indeed a spy and her confession showed it, would Dick Cheney believe them? And would Bill O’Reilly proudly argue that the Saberi case proves that “harsh interrogation” “works”?”
Silly Andrew. Imagine thinking that we should be judged by the same standards as the rest of the world.
Speaking of which, Greenwald has an excellent recent post pointing out our own government’s willingness to lock up and detain reporters without a trial.
