Month: October 2005

From mediagirl.org:

Ask a dozen progressives what progressive means, and you’ll probably get a dozen answers. But odds are that they’ll all touch on the same core values: human and civil rights, effective government, improving the social safety net, including healthcare, anti-poverty programs and unemployment programs. Individuals will have their priorities within these areas, but this is the terrain. The priorities of individual progressives are not mutually exclusive. It’s a progressive coalition based on values.

Today, in one of his more weakly-reasoned posts in a year of some real doozies, Markos attempts to toss progressivism out the window and claim for himself leader of “the new progressives.” True progressivism apparently is a real problem for progressives, but most of us just don’t realize it.

The basis of this claim?

Wait for it….

The generation gap. (Oh, if I could buy the world a Coke!)

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Because of all the Plame investigation developments, I am seeing a lot of questions about how people get security clearances and what they mean in terms of what you can know and disclose.  I had a very serious security clearance 15 years ago, and I may be able to provide some helpful information.

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According to what Miller says Libby told her.

Well, I finally read Judy Miller’s account of her testimony. The following three paragraphs struck me as odd when she is referring to her July 8, 2003 breakfast meeting with Libby:

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Since the New York Times published its official article, The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal, about the paper’s handling of Judith Miller’s role in the Plame Affair, criticism of the paper of record has been fast, furious and flummoxed. Critics are aghast at the internal machinations undertaken in an attempt to cover for their star reporter, Judith Miller.

The NYT, already suffering from public suspicion due to Miller’s hawkish reporting echoing the Bush administration’s false claims of the presence of WMDs in Iraq, along with the ramifications of the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003, may have just sunk its credibility and integrity forever in the minds of many readers in its telling of the Miller story. In the process, it may also have taken down other media along with it.

A country in which most citizens no longer trust their government or their media to tell them the truth is a country that sits on very shaky ground. Perceptions that media organizations are biased to one political persuasion or another due to their editorial stances result in a mistrust of the reporting contained in the supposedly factual front page stories as it is. But, when it is revealed that a newspaper timidly holds back the reporting of one of the most important stories of the day in order to protect one staff journalist and allows its reporters to intentionally mislabel sources*, any remaining trust is completely shattered.

more…

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Unlike the response to Hurricane Katrina, the first great scandal of the century remains mostly unknown. This was the disenfranchisement of more than 50,000 African-American voters in Florida’s 2000 presidential election. These were not potential votes struck from the rolls as felons or prevented from reaching the polls. These were voters who actually turned up at the polls and fully expected their ballots to be counted in the election.

George W. Bush will be president of the United States for eight years because the votes counted in
Florida’s 2000 election did not come close to matching the ballots cast by the state’s voters. The result in Florida was not decided by hanging chads, recounts, or intervention by the Supreme Court. As the analyst for the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights I found that George Bush won Florida and the presidency because officials tossed into the trashcan as invalid one out of every nine to ten ballots cast by African-Americans throughout the state.  In some counties, nearly 25 percent of ballots cast by blacks were set aside as invalid. In contrast, officials rejected less than one out of every fifty ballots cast by whites statewide.

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