Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (374126)	7/21/2010 11:41:55 AM
From: longnshort	5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News By Jonathan Strong - The Daily Caller \| Published: 12:01 AM 07/21/2010 \| Updated: 11:04 AM 07/21/2010 FILE - In this Jan. 22, 2009 file photo, President Barack Obama, center, stands near Fox News' Major Garrett, left, in the kitchen of the Brady press briefing room at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would. But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio (update: Spitz was a producer for NPR affiliate KCRW for the show Left, Right & Center), that isn’t what you’d do at all. In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment. In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.” Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow. In the summer of 2009, agitated citizens from across the country flocked to town hall meetings to berate lawmakers who had declared support for President Obama’s health care bill. For most people, the protests seemed like an exercise in participatory democracy, rowdy as some of them became. On Journolist, the question was whether the protestors were garden-variety fascists or actual Nazis. “You know, at the risk of violating Godwin’s law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts?” asked Bloomberg’s Ryan Donmoyer. “Esp. Now that it’s getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s.” Richard Yeselson, a researcher for an organized labor group who also writes for liberal magazines, agreed. “They want a deficit driven militarist/heterosexist/herrenvolk state,” Yeselson wrote. “This is core of the Bush/Cheney base transmorgrified into an even more explicitly racialized/anti-cosmopolitan constituency. Why? Um, because the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. But it’s all the same old nuts in the same old bins with some new labels: the gun nuts, the anti tax nuts, the religious nuts, the homophobes, the anti-feminists, the anti-abortion lunatics, the racist/confederate crackpots, the anti-immigration whackos (who feel Bush betrayed them) the pathological government haters (which subsumes some of the othercategories, like the gun nuts and the anti-tax nuts).” “I’m not saying these guys are capital F-fascists,” added blogger Lindsay Beyerstein, “but they don’t want limited government. Their desired end looks more like a corporate state than a rugged individualist paradise. The rank and file wants a state that will reach into the intimate of citizens when it comes to sex, reproductive freedom, censorship, and rampant incarceration in the name of law and order.” On Journolist, there was rarely such thing as an honorable political disagreement between the left and right, though there were many disagreements on the left. In the view of many who’ve posted to the list-serv, conservatives aren’t simply wrong, they are evil. And while journalists are trained never to presume motive, Journolist members tend to assume that the other side is acting out of the darkest and most dishonorable motives. Read more: dailycaller.com

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (374126)	7/21/2010 11:55:28 AM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Respond to of 793964

The harm of false accusations of racism is the object lesson of the Sherrod case. "It hurts me that they didn't even try to attempt to see what is happening here, they didn't care," Sherrod said. "I'm not a racist. ... Anyone who knows me knows that I'm for fairness." Spencer Ackerman - Journolist: "pick someone" and "call them racist" as a distraction. Sherrod not sure she would go back to Ag Dept By MARY CLARE JALONICK and BEN EVANS Associated Press Writers © 2010 The Associated Press July 21, 2010, 7:52AM ADAM ROUNTREE AP FILE - In this Dec. 18, 2006 file photo, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack appears on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" in New York City. The Obama administration is standing by its quick decision to oust a black Agriculture Department employee, Shirley Sherrod, on Tuesday July 20, 2010, over racially tinged remarks at an NAACP banquet in Georgia, despite evidence that her remarks were misconstrued and growing calls for USDA to reconsider. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, not the White House, made the decision to ask Sherrod to resign, said USDA spokeswoman Chris Mather. (AP Photo/Adam Rountree, File) WASHINGTON — The woman at the center of a racially tinged firestorm involving the Obama administration and the NAACP said Wednesday she doesn't know if she'd return to her job at the Agriculture Department, even if asked. "I am just not sure how I would be treated there," Shirley Sherrod said in a nationally broadcast interview. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday he would reconsider the department's decision to oust Sherrod over her comments that she didn't give a white farmer as much help as she could have 24 years ago. The White House called the Agriculture Department Tuesday night after more information about Sherrod's remarks emerged, a White House official said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the call, said the White House and the department agreed that the case should be reviewed based on the new evidence. A conservative website posted video of Sherrod's remarks, causing a furor which led to her condemnation by the NAACP and her ouster by Vilsack. Until Tuesday, she was the Agriculture Department's director of rural development in Georgia. Then, she said, she was pressured by superiors to resign. Sherrod said her remarks, delivered in March at a local NAACP banquet in Georgia, were part of a larger story about learning from her mistakes and racial reconciliation, not racism, and said they were taken out of context by bloggers who posted only part of her speech. Vilsack's statement came after the NAACP posted the full video of Sherrod's comments Tuesday night. "I am of course willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner," Vilsack said. The Obama administration's move to reconsider her employment was an absolute reversal from hours earlier, when the White House official said President Barack Obama had been briefed on Sherrod's resignation after the fact and stood by the Agriculture Department's handling of it. But growing calls for the administration to reconsider the decision put pressure on Vilsack, who stressed that the decision to ask for her resignation was his alone. The NAACP, which initially condemned Sherrod's remarks and supported her ouster, later said she should keep her job. The civil rights group said it and millions of others were duped by the conservative website that posted partial video of her speech on Monday. Appearing in a nationally broadcast interview Wednesday morning, Sherrod said she "couldn't get the people I was working with" to listen to her explanation. She said the tone of her comments posted on the website were misleading because they lacked context. "That's not me. If you look at my life's work, you would know that's not me." "... If they would have looked at the entire tape, I don't see how they could have come away thinking I was a racist," she said. Sherrod said she was "particularly hurt" by the NAACP's condemnation. "All of my life has been about civil rights work and fairness," she said. Asked if she would go back to the department if asked, Sherwood said, "That's one ... I just don't know at this point." The white farming family that was the subject of the story stood by Sherrod and said she should stay. "We probably wouldn't have (our farm) today if it hadn't been for her leading us in the right direction," said Eloise Spooner, the wife of farmer Roger Spooner of Iron City, Ga. "I wish she could get her job back because she was good to us, I tell you." As Sherrod reached out to media to plead her case and more people came to her defense, the administration faced criticism that officials nervous about racial perceptions overreacted to her comments and made her a political sacrifice amid dueling allegations of racism between the NAACP and the tea party movement. In the clip posted on BigGovernment.com, Sherrod described the first time a white farmer came to her for help. It was 1986, and she worked for a nonprofit rural farm aid group. She said the farmer came in acting "superior" to her and she debated how much help to give him. "I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with helping a white person save their land," Sherrod said. Initially, she said, "I didn't give him the full force of what I could do" and only gave him enough help to keep his case progressing. Eventually, she said, his situation "opened my eyes" that whites were struggling just like blacks, and helping farmers wasn't so much about race but was "about the poor versus those who have." The two-minute, 38-second clip posted Monday by BigGovernment.com was presented as evidence that the NAACP was hypocritical in its recent resolution condemning what it calls racist elements of the tea party movement. The website's owner, Andrew Breitbart, said the video shows the civil rights group condoning the same kind of racism it says it wants to erase. Biggovernment.com is the same outfit that gained fame last year after airing video of workers at the community group ACORN counseling actors posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend. In his original statement on the matter Tuesday morning, Vilsack said he had accepted Sherrod's resignation and stressed that the department had "zero tolerance for discrimination." Later in the day, after Sherrod spoke to the media about the intention of her comments, Vilsack sent out a second statement that said the controversy surrounding Sherrod's comments could, rightly or wrongly, cause people to question her decisions as a federal employee and lead to lingering doubts about civil rights at the agency, which has a troubled history of discrimination. Sherrod said officials showed no interest in listening to her explanation when she was asked to resign. She said she was on the road Monday when USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook called her and told her to pull over and submit her resignation on her Blackberry because the White House wanted her out. "It hurts me that they didn't even try to attempt to see what is happening here, they didn't care," Sherrod said. "I'm not a racist. ... Anyone who knows me knows that I'm for fairness." chron.com

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (374126)	7/21/2010 1:51:22 PM
From: ManyMoose	2 Recommendations Respond to of 793964

alter our values such that they cannot be used against us. Take it from an old fur trapper: a skunk will come to rotten meat but a fox sniffs out the trap and steps around it. I don't know about altering values, but we do need to return to values that sustained us and depart from political correctness and doublespeak that has brought us to this point. This Sherrod incident is a perfect microcosm of the malaise that has overtaken our entire political landscape. -Breitbart plays segment of tape that appears to expose racism in a government official. -Said segment was cropped by the supplier to conceal context that shows the woman was using the story to illustrate how she had departed (at least partially) from racist intent. -Cheering and clapping exposed the racism of the NAACP audience. -Obama's henchmen, fearful that Glenn Beck will exploit the story to damage him, go out and force the woman to resign on the spot. -Glenn Beck declines to cover the story, while it is widely shown to illustrate how effectively Obama quashes racism in his administration. -The remainder of the tape is played; the context of the story is revealed; the true motivation of the woman is illuminated. -Glenn Beck ultimately defends the woman, and shows how her story was perverted by nefarious motivations. A skunk will come to rotten meat but a fox sniffs out the trap and steps around it. HAVE WE LEARNED ANYTHING YET??????