Red Eye Blogging

Change-of-pace early morning edition, with Greg Gutfeld:

It's true. Maintain your dignity at "Flying Pasties."

More Red Eye blogging at Washington Rebel.

Obama Talking Crap

Pure gold, from Andrew Klavan:

I Wanna Push You Down, Well I Will, Well I Will...

Our radical feminist friend Olga wasn't too hip on Charged GBH, so how about something a little bit more contemporary. Enjoy Matchbox Twenty, "Push":

she said I don't know why you ever would lie to me
like I'm a little untrusting when I think that the truth is gonna hurt ya
and I don't know why you couldn't just stay with me
you couldn't stand to be near me
when my face don't seem to want to shine
cuz it's a little bit dirty, well

don't just stand there, say nice things to me
cause I've been cheated, I've been wronged, but you
you don't know me, yeah, well I can't change
Well, I won't do anything at all

I wanna push you around, well I will, well I will
I wanna push you down, well I will, well I will
I wanna take you for granted, yeah I wanna take you for granted
Yeah, yeah, well I will ...

I'll just add that this is something right out of the American Nihilist playbook: "I can hardly imagine how tough it must be to pretend to be a legitimate political science professor while slut shaming, opposing accessible birth control, and completely misrepresenting the blogs of people who oppose you."

General Stanley McChrystal's Retirement

At ABC NEWS, "McChrystal: Service Did Not End Like I'd Imagined":

"This has the potential to be awkward," General Stanley McChrystal said tonight at his retirement ceremony -- his first public comments since he was fired by President Obama as the commander of troops in Afghanistan.

His 34-year-old Army career ended abruptly on a sweltering parade field at Fort McNair in Washington, DC just one month after he and his aides were quoted in a Rolling Stone article bashing senior members of the administration's leadership, including the president himself.

Though tonight's ceremony contained the usual pomp and circumstance reserved for a four-star general, it marked the unceremonious end for a military leader hailed as a visionary savior of the war in Afghanistan just months ago when President Obama rolled out a new war strategy based in large part on McChrystal's recommendations.

"My service did not end as I'd imagined," he conceded, addressing his inglorious termination directly.

Also at NYT (FWIW), "McChrystal Ends Service With Regret and a Laugh."

And if you missed it somehow, at Rolling Stone, "The Runaway General."

America's Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

From Angelo Codevilla, at American Spectator (a little on the paleocon-ish side for me on the foreign policy side, otherwise, a phenomenal essay):

The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class's self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.

Since marriage is the family's fertile seed, government at all levels, along with "mainstream" academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of "the family" -- meaning married parents raising children -- but rather of "families," meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage -- except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize "child care" for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration's secretary of defense and the Republican Senate's majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military's practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is "contrary to societal norms." Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party's most faithful voters.

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents' consent, the people who run America's schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents' knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents' right to homeschool their children against the ruling class's desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: "to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible."

At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.

While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is "science" only in the "right" hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.

RTWT.

Bell City Government Falls Amid Salary Scandal

I reported on this previously, when LAT first broke the news.

At KABC-TV Los Angeles, "Bell Leaders Resign":

Plus, at ABC News New York/Washington, "Bell City Manager Paid Twice President Obama's Salary Resigns: Robert Rizzo Earns Nearly $800,000, Will Become Highest-Paid Public Pensioner in Calif."

BONUS: "Must Read Column at the Daily Caller: Left Coast Rebel Rings a Bell and Pages Chris Christie."

Shirley Sherrod: 'Andrew Breitbart Would Like to Get Us Stuck Back in the Times of Slavery'

I've seen so many of Shirley Sherrod's interviews that they've sorta blended together, but his sticks out, from Dan Riehl (via Memeorandum):

SHIRLEY SHERROD: I know I've gotten past black versus white. He's probably the person who's never gotten past it and never attempted to get past it.

I think he would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That's where I think he would like to see all black people end up again.

COOPER: You think -- you think he's racist?

SHERROD: ... I think he's so vicious. Yes, I do.

And I think that's why he's so vicious against a black president, you know. He would go after me. I don't think it was even the NAACP he was totally after. I think he was after a black president.

Of course it never was about Shirley Sherrod (or even Obama, in the first instance), but the NAACP, as Breitbart said from the beginning. Thus, as Dan Riehl notes:

Sorry, friends. But when I look below the headlines at the real Shirley Sherrod, as opposed to the fast spun media myth - I think I see her for what she really is. And it's a very clear portrait painted in sharp contrasts between black and white. Far from bringing the races together in America, the Shirley Sherrods of the world accomplish nothing but maintaining any distance, if not actually driving them apart. It's amazing how the conditions for having sainthood bestowed upon oneself have changed over the years.

Daily Beast's Brian Ries Wallows in Sarah Palin Facebook Attack

I'm a little late on this story but it's worth posting considering the continued fallout from the JournoList scandal.

It turns out that Brian Ries of The Daily Beast launched a coordinated attack on Sarah Palin's Facebook account this week that temporarily succeeded in deleting Palin's note on New York's Ground Zero Mosque. Here's a report from yesterday, "Palin Facebook Post on Ground Zero Mosque Deleted: Users complain about post, call it "racist/hate speech." And Pamela Geller fingers Ries at Atlas Shrugs: "The Beast Behind Facebook Fascism: Censoring Palin."

Ries is bragging about it on Twitter and Tumblr:

And at The Daily Beast, "My Facebook War With Palin":

When a Facebook post by the ex-governor slamming the "Ground Zero Mosque" disappeared, Brian Ries realized the reach of his effort to confront her on hate speech—and the wrath of her supporters.

Sometime Thursday morning I realized Sarah Palin's controversial Facebook note about the "Ground Zero Mosque" had vanished. In its place was an error message that explained the network "could not find the note you requested." It had "either been deleted” or had never existed in the first place.

In fact, the post had been removed by Facebook's automated systems, according to a spokesman, the result of a grassroots campaign by Tumblr users to report the former governor's post as a "hate speech." It was an idea introduced by a Tumblr blogger the media has identified as "moneyries." Hello everyone, that's me. And soon I was inundated with messages from her fervent fans.

Those of us following Palin's comments in the media throughout the past week or so would know that the former governor of Alaska had issued a screed on Facebook, her preferred form of communication these days, outlining the reasons she opposed the construction of an Islamic community center just a few blocks from Ground Zero.

The original note, titled "An Intolerable Mistake on Hallowed Ground," was a response to comments made by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in which he argued it's un-American to "keep people from building a building," especially in a city that stands for "tolerance and openness." It made me wonder where Facebook, a government unto itself with a user base larger than the U.S. population, would outline the lines of offensive material under their Terms of Service when one's simply preaching "common moral sense," as Palin would call it. Or, if its own laws on censorship and free speech could rely on its users to characterize user content as intolerant, or in this case, “hate speech,” themselves.

The truth is, many Internet communities lack any real transparency when it comes to governing the words of its users. Facebook's free speech policies are largely undefined, and it took the coordinated actions of a community a fraction of its size to prove it.

That all began when I decided to conduct a little experiment.

Read the rest here.

No one should be surprised at this.

Still, I'm somewhat dumbstruck at the genuinely brazen use of "hate speech" allegations to attack and destroy political opponents on social networking sites (a new frontier, I guess, but censorship nevertheless). What's also interesting is that there's little evidence that Ries' attack was fundamentally a protest about erecting an Islamist victory mosque above the recovery zone at Ground Zero. This is more an attack on Sarah Palin personally, driven by pure partisan extremism, ideological hatred, and misogynistic demonism.

And what's this with "hate speech" as the weapon of choice? There's no such thing as "hate speech" in the United States (except in college campus PC codes), but the left is picking up on totalitarian neo-communist campaigns around the world that have increasingly worked in suppressing the speech of those battling existential jihad.

This episode, while essentially a small blip in the larger political battles, is nevertheless immensely indicative of the shape of the enduring conflict. This attack on Palin is grounded in evil, and Ries is wallowing in it like a dying animal in the mud. It's sickening.

BONUS: Here's a leftist basically arguing "free speech for me, but not for thee": "Blogger Gets Palin’s Facebook Post Yanked and Palinistas Throw a Hissy Fit."

Tucker Carlson on JournoList: 'Liberal Journalists Decided to Subvert the News'

On Hannity's:

And check all the coverage at The Daily Caller.

New Report: U.S. Vulnerable to a Nuclear Attack

See, "Report by the Joint Defense Science Board and the Threat Reduction Advisory Committee Task Force." And the related discussion thread here:

The United States is now woefully unprepared for any kind of nuclear attack ...

and the Obama administration has taken steps to further reduce the nation's nuclear arsenal.

The problem and the cause ...

Revving Up Weekend Rule 5

Blazing Cat Fur reminds me that its time for some weekend Rule 5. (See, "Because it's Friday.. and it's Catherine Deneuve.") It seems that Linkmaster Smith's been a little more quiet around these parts than usual, although I believe he's still on a Hawaiian holiday, so that's okay. I do expect he'll get work wonders for his normal Sunday entry, so stay tuned for that.

Our lovely lady at lef is courtesy of Guns and Bikinis.

And expect from tasteful feminine Rule 5 from Opus #6 at MAinfo.

**********

And be sure to visit some of the other friends of American Power:

* Another Black Conservative.

* Astute Bloggers (Honorary).

* Blazing Cat Fur.

* Bob Belvedere.

* Classical Liberal.

* Daley Gator.

* Left Coast Rebel.

* Mind Numbed Robot.

* Not a Sheep.

* Paco Enterprises.

* Panhandle Perspective.

* POWIP.

* The Other McCain.

* Reaganite Republican (Honorary).

* Right Klik (Honorary).

* Saberpoint (Honorary).

* Serr8d (Honorary).

* Snooper's Report (Honorary).

* Stormbringer.

* Theo Spark.

* TrogloPundit.

* Washington Rebel.

* WyBlog.

BONUS: Don't forget Instapundit.

And drop your link in the comments to be added to the weekly roundups!

Rachel Maddow's Manufactured Outrage

I've seen various clips of Rachel Maddow's coverage of the Shirley Sherrod racism scandal, but one segment the other night really went off on Fox News in a way that's pure psychological projection. ("It's not news," blah, blah ... and that's coming from radical leftist Maddow of the neo-communist fake news channel MSNBC, where Keith Olbermann is a former Daily Kos contributor. Don't need JournoList to figure that stuff out.)

That said, I wasn't planning on commenting, but iOWNTHEWORLD's put up a doozy of a Rachel Maddow smackdown, so let's let it rip, "This Dunce Is Supposed To Be A Rhodes Scholar?":

She is unwilling to concede that the Obama Administration acted stupidly and that they rushed to judgment. She is simply lost. Fox didn’t fire Sharrod. The left fired Sharrod. Fox can’t fire anyone unless they work for FOX. There is no equivalence between a news agency running a clip that didn’t tell the entire story (which they had no knowledge of) and a government seeing that story and dismissing, not the tape, but the woman on the tape. Besides, I thought Obama already declared Fox not to be a legitimate news agency? Why was he so quick to act on their reporting?

I am sure that if the entire tables were reversed, and it was Maddow who ran a clip that made a Bush appointee sound like a racist (because the end of the clip was cut) and Bush fired the guy, that Maddow would be apologizing to Bush for making him look like he had an itchy trigger finger.

No, the story would be that Bush is so incompetent he could be fooled by an edited tape.

Obama isn’t incompetent, he’s a victim.

RTWT.

Ezra Klein: 'This is My Final Finally-ish Final Word on JournoList!!'

"I actually expect this to be my final public comment on the subject."

Famous last words, from JournoList head-henchman Ezra Klein.

Now the Boy Wonder's got another post up attacking --- wait for it!! --- Tucker Carlson for "smearing" JournoList with omissions and misleading statements and --- Oh, the humanity!!

So, what better way to respond than to attack Tucker Carlson ad hominem? See, "When Tucker Carlson asked to join Journolist." And the best thing is that our boy Ezra confirms what everyone knows of JournoList: It was designed as an inside left-wing conspiracy and there was no way any conservatives would be allowed to join the discussion group. Even better is Boy Wonder's admission that the "evil" Michelle Malkin would never --- NEVER!! --- be allowed to join the list. Hmm, afraid something untoward might actually get out, like, um, wishing people like Rush Limbaugh were dead AND not getting a hint of backlash among JournoListers to those views? Face it, Ezra, you people are evil and oh so un-journalist-like. Best thing is to just leave a beefy quotation for posterity:

If this series [at The Daily Caller] now rests on Tucker's credibility, then let's talk about something else he doesn't mention: I tried to add him to the list. I tried to give him access to the archives. Voluntarily. Because though I believed it was important for the conversation to be off-the-record, I didn't believe there was anything to hide.

The e-mail came on May 25th. Tucker didn't ask that it be off-the-record, so I'm not breaking a confidence by publishing it. Here it is, in full:

Dear Ezra,

I keep hearing about how smart the policy conversations on JournoList are, and am starting to feel like I'm missing out by not reading them. Could I join?

I realize you and I don't share the same politics, but I can promise you I have no interest in flaming anyone or even debating (I get enough of that). I'm just interested in knowing what smart progressives are saying. It strikes me that's the one thing I'm missing in my daily reading.

Please tell me what you think. If it makes you uncomfortable, ask around. I'm pretty sure we know a lot of the same people.

All best,

Tucker Carlson.

At the time, I didn't know Carlson was working on a story about Journolist. And I'd long thought that the membership rules that had made sense in the beginning had begun to feed conspiracy theories on the right and cramp conversation inside the list. I wrote him back about 30 minutes later.

We definitely have friends in common, and I'd have no worries about you joining. The problem is I need to have clear rules, as i don't want to be in the position of forcing fine-grained membership tests based on opaque criteria. Thus far, it's been center to left, just because that was how people wanted it at the beginning in order to feel comfortable talking freely. I've been meaning for some time to ask the list about revisiting that, so I'll take this opportunity and get back to you.

I then wrote this e-mail to Journolist:

As folks know, there are a couple of rules for J List membership. One is that you can't be working for the government. Another is that you're center to left of center, as that was something various people wanted back in the day. I've gotten a couple of recent requests from conservatives who want to be added (and who are people I think this list might benefit from), however, and so it seems worth asking people whether they'd like to see the list opened up. Back in the day, I'd probably have let this lie, but given that Journolist now leaks like a sieve, it seems worth revisiting some of the decisions made when it was meant to be a more protected space.

As I see it, the pro of this is that it could make for more fun conversations. The con of it is that it becomes hard to decide who to add and who to leave off (I don't want to have to make subjective judgments, but I'm also not going to let Michelle Malkin hop onto the list), and it also could create even more possible leaks -- and now, they'd be leaks with more of an agenda, which could be much more destructive to trust on the list.

I want to be very clear about what I was suggesting: Adding someone to the list meant giving them access to the entirety of the archives. That didn't bother me very much. Sure, you could comb through tens of thousands of e-mails and pull intemperate moments and inartful wording out of context to embarrass people, but so long as you weren't there with an eye towards malice, you'd recognize it for what it was: A wonkish, fun, political yelling match. If it had been an international media conspiracy, I'd have never considered opening it up.

The idea was voted down. People worried about opening the archives to individuals who could help their careers by ripping e-mails out of context, misrepresenting the nature of the ongoing conversation, and bringing the world an exclusive look into The Great Journolist Conspiracy, as opposed to the daily life of Journolist, which even Carlson describes as "actually pretty banal."

Voted down?

Well, of course. Really bad goings-on were going on there, and the more Ezra Klein talks about it the more we know that all the moral condemnation is entirely justified and wondrously gratifying.

Perhaps Boy Wonder should take his own advice and now just STFU before somebody slams him through some damned JournoListic plate-glass window.

HAT TIP: AoSHQ, "Ezra Wails: "I didn't believe there was anything to hide."

JournoList's Open Conspiracy

From Jonah Goldberg:

Many conservatives think JournoList is the smoking gun that proves not just liberal media bias (already well-established) but something far more elusive as well: the Sasquatch known as the Liberal Media Conspiracy.

I’m not so sure. In the 1930s, the New York Times deliberately whitewashed Stalin’s murders. In 1964, CBS reported that Barry Goldwater was tied up with German Nazis. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times polled 2,700 journalists at 621 newspapers and found that journalists identified themselves as liberal by a factor of 3 to 1. Their actual views on issues were far more liberal than even that would suggest. Just for the record, Ezra Klein was born in 1984.

In other words, JournoList is a symptom, not the disease. And the disease is not a secret conspiracy but something more like the “open conspiracy” H. G. Wells fantasized about, where the smartest, best people at every institution make their progressive vision for the world their top priority.

As James DeLong, a fellow at the Digital Society, correctly noted on the Enterprise Blog, “The real problem with JournoList is that much of it consisted of exchanges among people who worked for institutions about how to best hijack their employers for the cause of Progressivism.”

For a liberal activist, that’s forgivable, I guess. But academics? Reporters? Editors? Even liberal opinion writers aren’t supposed to “coordinate” their messages with the mother ship.

The conservative movement at least admits it is a movement (even though conservatives outnumber liberals 2-1 in this country). Establishment liberalism, not just in the press but also in the White House, academia, and Hollywood, holds power by refusing to make the same concession. “This isn’t about ideology. . . . We just call them like we see them. . . . We don’t have an agenda.”

The open conspiracy that perpetuates that lie is far more pernicious than any chat room.

Racism Roundup — July 23, 2010

Continuing our daily racism roundups, a nice compilation at The Atlantic, "What Sherrod Scandal Reveals About U.S. Race Relations."

Cartoon Credit: Theo Spark.

JournoList Just Might Save America, You Wingnut Scum

At People's Cube:

I simply cannot believe my eyes when I see all of this faux outrage being hurled at the participants of the online progressive chat-forum formerly known as JournoList. I cannot believe the attention this non-story is receiving by the wingnut contingent that makes up the American media, nor can I believe that Ezra Klein -- an astounding young man -- was compelled to shut down such an intellectual venture.

Big deal, a couple hundred journalist and academics openly supported the first African-American presidential candidate who had an actual shot at the presidency and an even more shot at possessing the political capital needed to fix a thing or two wrong in our country. What I simply cannot fathom now is how venomous the right is in this McCarthyite witch hunt of theirs which is manifestly turning into an angry racist lynch mob.

Scores of angry, hate-filled white male fascist are swarming upon the noble, gentle Ezra Klein in their frothing desperate effort to ruin his career, livelihood and even his existence. All the while, mind you, Tucker Carlson sits in his giant Southern plantation house like that jackbooted racist that he and his co-conspirators really claim not to be. You aren't fooling us, Tucker -- that bowtie of racism might be gone, but we know all too well your necktie is just as racist if not super racist, you racist! I am really fed up with these racist NASCAR retards and their retarded hatred for the first African-American president (because we all know it is about the first African-American president and his skin color. All these people do is dwell on skin color. That darkish color. The color of the skin of the first black president. Those racist.)

Some of my moderate friends -- who I suspect are closet racist and close to becoming de-friended on Facebook -- would argue that some comments on JournoList, like the Limbaugh death fantasies, went a little bit too far. Pish posh, you closet racist! Rush Limbaugh is solely responsible for single mothers on welfare continuing their dependence on welfare. How would you feel if Rush Limbaugh talked about your struggle being single, a mother, and on welfare? Why, you would feel demoralized and would stay on that welfare! I know I would, I love me some welfare -- well, I love it to the extent that I am forced to love it when Limbaugh & Co. (including Tucker Carlson) berate me to the point that I feel obligated on asking for continual government assistance.

These same moderate friends, who I think are racist, go on to lambaste JournoList participants for suggesting that the government should revoke Fox News' broadcasting license. I see no controversy in this matter and would go further to say it is a nontroversy (my word) and a matter that should be explored. I mean, honestly, hate-speech is hate-speech and Fox News is the premier trafficker in all things hate. They even hate the first African-American president solely because of his color. These people at Fox News are obsessed with skin color and race and the fact the first African-American president is African-American and Glenn Beck and O'Reilly and Greta all just focus intently and rant on and on they rant about his skin color, and race, and his wife and her color and how they feel about color just racist and, and, I'm losing track just thinking about color and how Fox News thinks of color all day, every day, twenty-four seven. Racist. These people are racist and we need to discredit them as such -- for political purposes, the children, and the like, of course.

More at the link.

Mel Gibson Turns to Britney Spears for Solace

Jeez, Rule 5 hasn't quite been the same without some Britney blogging, but this is real news!

At ABC News, "Mel Gibson Seeking Solace From ... Britney Spears? As Cops Investigate Oksana Grigorieva for Extortion, Mel Gibson Reportedly Turns to Britney Spears":

To get through his latest batch of bad times, Mel Gibson may be seeking comfort from an unlikely source:

Britney Spears.

According to In Touch Weekly, the 28-year-old pop singer has been counseling the 54-year-old Academy Award winner as his custody battle with ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva grows ever more ugly.

"Mel has been talking to her a lot," In Touch quoted a friend of Spears as saying. "They speak on the phone all the time, usually late at night."

Gibson came to Spears' side during her 2008 breakdown, taking her to dinner and reportedly flying her to his estate in Costa Rica. Now she apparently wants to return the favor.

"Mel was one of the only people who reached out to help Britney when she was at her lowest point, and she believes that demonstrates what a loving and wonderful man he is," In Touch quoted the friend saying. "She wants people to give him a second chance -- just like he gave her one when everyone else turned away."

Gibson's publicist declined to comment on the report. A representative for Spears did not immediately respond to ABCNews.com's requests for comment.

'Race Remains a Factor in the Society' — One Year On, President Obama Fails to Heal Racial Rifts

It's been exactly one year since President Obama addressed the nation in a press conference discussing Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates' arrest outside his own home in Cambridge, MA. How are we doing as a nation one year on? Not good, obviously. As one who did not vote for Obama, I nevertheless hoped that for as much as I opposed him, he would indeed provide leadership on race in America, and especially on the question of family disintegration in the black community. He has failed at this miserably, and I resent getting my hopes up for this mountebank agent of racial uplift. He's been a disaster on all counts, and the Democratic Party/Media Industrial Complex has turned race-baiting into a national pastime. I don't emote, but frankly this kind of lost promise is indeed heartbreaking. In any case, at NYT (FWIW), "Persistent Issue of Race Is in the Spotlight, Again" (via Memeorandum):

It was exactly one year ago on Thursday that President Obama plunged into a thicket of racial politics by declaring that a white police officer in Cambridge, Mass., had “acted stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard University professor in his own home. Suddenly, the president whose election suggested the promise of a postracial future was thrust into the wounds of the past.

Not much has changed.

Mr. Obama sought Thursday to tamp down yet another racial uproar, this one over his administration’s mishandling of the case of Shirley Sherrod, a black Agriculture Department official who was dismissed based on a video clip of remarks — taken out of context — that appeared to suggest she had discriminated against white farmers. One day after Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized profusely to Ms. Sherrod and offered her a new job working on race relations for the agency, Mr. Obama offered his own apology.

During a seven-minute telephone call, White House officials said, the president shared some of his own personal experiences, and urged Ms. Sherrod to “continue her hard work on behalf of those in need.”

Later, in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Mr. Obama weighed in publicly for the first time. “He jumped the gun,” the president said, referring to Mr. Vilsack, “partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.”

That, however, is unlikely to be the end of it for Mr. Obama, who has struggled since the beginning of his presidency with whether, when and how to deal with volatile matters of race. No matter how hard his White House tries to keep the issue from defining his presidency, it keeps popping back up, fueled in part by high expectations from the left for the first black president, and in part by tactical opposition politics on the right.

The Sherrod flap spotlighted how Mr. Obama is caught between these competing political forces, and renewed criticism from some of his supporters, especially prominent African-Americans, that he has been too defensive in dealing with matters of race — and too quick to react to criticism from the right.

For many liberals, Ms. Sherrod’s hasty dismissal carried strong echoes of the ouster of Van Jones, an environmental adviser to the president who was forced to resign after Fox News focused attention on some of his past work and statements, and his decision to sign a petition in 2004 questioning whether the Bush administration had allowed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East.

“I think what you see in this White House is a hypersensitivity about issues of race, that has them often leaning too far to avoid confronting these issues, and in so doing lays the foundation for the very problem they would like to avoid,” said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an advocacy group here.

RTWT.

Staten Island Boy, 14, Slit Sisters' Throats Before Torching Family Home in Gruesome Murder-Suicide Case

Well, I was looking for something a little off the JournoList/Shirley Sherrod trail, but I wasn't expecting this, at New York Times (FWIW): "Boy Said to Slit Throats Before Fire on Staten Island."

As a single mother in a terrible job market, Leisa Jones had been doing everything she could to hold things together, working part time as a department store security guard during the holidays and, more recently, attending beauty school. Her neighbors said she had made the second-floor apartment on Staten Island where she lived with her four children — two boys and two girls — a place where good manners and good behavior mattered.

On Thursday, after firefighters had picked through the ruins of what they initially believed had been an early-morning fire that killed Ms. Jones and all four children, they uncovered evidence that was even more troubling: Ms. Jones’s oldest child, C. J. Jones, 14, had apparently started the blaze after slitting his sisters’ throats.

Then, investigators said, he slit his own.

“It ranks up there in some of the more heinous acts we’ve seen,” said a longtime Fire Department investigator, who insisted on anonymity because the investigation was continuing. “It’s pretty horrific.”

The slash wounds on the three bodies were discovered as investigators worked their way through the charred remains of the house, where four families lived, on Nicholas Avenue in the Port Richmond section, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman.

Investigators found Ms. Jones’s body and the bodies of the two girls — Brittney, 10, and Melonie, 7 — in the living room.

C. J.’s body was close by, slumped over a bed in a back bedroom. A straight razor was under his arm.

This is incredibly sad. (And the rest is here.)

The boy, C.J., had been suspended from school. A woman at the day care where his sisters attended told him he had to behave better. "You're the man of the house." So, my sense is that in trouble, he shouldered the responsibility to "help" his family by putting them all out of their misery. I can't say anything beyond that, except to ask if this would have happened had the real man of the house --- the childrens' father --- been at home providing stability?

'Not All Journalists Are Jerks' — And Then There's JournoList

"Not All Journalists Are Jerks."

So says Jolie O'Dell: "Not All Bloggers Are Journalists":

In fact, I have to apologize on behalf of my entire profession for how you have been treated by a few bloggers, whom I’ll have the tact to not name here. There are bloggers who know and care nothing about real journalism, who see this profession as an opportunity for short-term gain at anyone’s expense, who find no joy in it and who dream only of fame in the now and a lucrative exit thereafter. These people are not journalists; they are self-serving scum. And they’ve royally fucked up how a lot of people see my profession.

Bold is in the original at the quote, but I want to highlight the last two sentences again, with reference to JournoList: "These people are not journalists; they are self-serving scum. And they’ve royally fucked up how a lot of people see my profession."

Checking back over at Ms. O'Dell's page we find: "How to Tell a Journalist from a Blogger," and this gem:

Objectivity is a word oft-repeated in journalistic circles. The journalist strives for this: Neutrality, freedom from bias, absolute truth, facts unsullied by emotion. We cannot settle for “both sides of the story.” We must tell all sides of the story, and we must represent each side fairly regardless of our individual beliefs and views.

Yeah. Right.

I wonder what planet Ms. O'Dell lives on? And this was written yesterday to boot. Maybe this journalist should actually look around and see the utter collapse of "objective" journalism before writing such complete bull. (And I write this not as a "blogger," but as a "political scientist," and by that I mean my professional title that allows me to stand on a freaking pedestal and make a damned fool out of myself as does Ms. O'Dell in her sublime idiocy of journalistic conceit.)

In any case, there's lots more on JournoList today. See, for example, "After JournoList Exposé, No One Better Ever Deny Liberal Media Bias Again." And, "Ousted official Shirley Sherrod blamed Fox, but other outlets ran with story" (via Memeorandum).

IMAGE CREDIT: Verum Serum, "Journolist: Japanese Tentacle PrOn Edition."