Obama Doesn't Want You To See This

We don't have advertisers to threaten. For now, Obama is not president and we can still embrace free speech on the web. Obama doesn't want you to see this video.



Obama is trying to silence this video. He may disagree with his critics, but he will fight for their right to say it. Scratch that. He may disagree with his critics, but he will fight to keep their voices silent. That's right.

Obama not only aired a response ad to the spot linking him to William Ayers, but he sought to block stations the commercial by warning station managers and asking the Justice Department to intervene. The campaign also planned to compel advertisers to pressure stations that continue to air the anti-Obama commercial.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama supporters have inundated stations that are airing the ad, many of them owned by Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails. He called the ad false, despicable and outrageous. "Other stations that follow Sinclair's lead should expect a similar response from people who don't want the political discourse cheapened with these false, negative attacks," Vietor said. Sinclair offices were closed late Monday and officials there could not be immediately contacted. I

n a letter to station managers, Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer wrote: "Your station is committed to operating in the public interest, an objective that cannot be satisfied by accepting for compensation material of such malicious falsity." Bauer also wrote to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Keeney, noting that the ad is a "knowing and willful attempt to evade the strictures of federal election law."

The American Issues Project is a 501(c)4 nonprofit corporation. It is permitted by law to air a political ad provided that the majority of its spending is nonpolitical. It cannot accept money from corporations and it must identify the donors that finance its ads in reports to the Federal Election Commission.

Stanley Kurtz: Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown? A cover-up in the making?

Bill Minor's Math

"But this time, Katrina has thrown a monkey wrench into the perennial Gulf Coast growth area of Harrison, Jackson and Hancock counties, displacing a still-unknown number of their residents to other counties or even out of state." - Bill Minor 08/21/2008

"About 97% of the population has returned to Hancock, Harrison and Jackson counties, the three areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, according to a report by the Gulf Coast Business Council, a non-profit group of businesses formed in 2006 to promote recovery." - USA Today (08/20/2008)

Better Late Than Never?

Late

The New York Times has published a correction 48 years late.

The paper's regular corrections column reported today: "A listing of credits on April 28, 1960, with a theater review of 'West Side Story; on its return to the Winter Garden theater, misstated the surname of the actor who played Action. He is George Liker, not Johnson. (Mr. Liker, who hopes to audition for a role in a Broadway revival of the show planned for February, brought the error to The Times’s attention last month.)"

Also today, The Times came clean on having referred to Senator McCain as a Vietnam-era "fighter pilot" when in fact he was shot down while at the controls of an A-4 Skyhawk - technically an attack aircraft rather than a fighter.

Never

Still no correction for the praise of mass murderer Joseph Stalin.

In the annals of 20th-century journalism, few names are more ignominious than Walter Duranty. The New York Times’ Moscow correspondent during the 1920s and 1930s, Duranty was by all accounts a liar, a recycler of propaganda and a willful apologist for one of history’s bloodiest tyrants, Joseph Stalin.

Back in 1932, however, he was the toast of Western elites, having won a Pulitzer Prize for 13 articles filed from Russia the previous year. According to the selection committee, his dispatches were “excellent examples of the best type of foreign correspondence.”

Duranty’s prize has long been the subject of intense controversy. Last spring the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA) initiated a campaign to urge its revocation by the Pulitzer Prize Board. After six months of consideration, the board decided on Nov. 21 not to rescind the prize. It concluded that the pieces in question, while they fell well below “today’s standards for foreign reporting,” showed “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”

The board tacitly acknowledged that Duranty covered up the widespread Soviet famine of 1932-33, which claimed the lives of several million in Ukraine alone. But it isolated Duranty’s famine-denying articles from his Pulitzer articles on Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. “A Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author’s body of work or for the author’s character,” the board explained, “but for the specific pieces entered in the competition.”

Yet by any conceivable measure, Duranty’s reporting in 1931 was an utter failure. “It reads like Pravda and Izvestiya in English,” historian Mark von Hagen tells me, citing two of the leading Kremlin press organs of the time. Von Hagen, Professor of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian History at Columbia, was commissioned by the Times this summer to conduct an independent study of Duranty’s 1931 coverage of the Soviet Union.

[In 1990] the Times placed a disclaimer next to Duranty’s framed picture in its Pulitzer hallway, noting: “Other writers in The Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage.” Executive editor Bill Keller recently told the Washington Post that the 1931 articles were “awful,” “a parroting of propaganda” and “clearly not prizeworthy.”

Even still, in an interview with his own newspaper Keller expressed unease at the idea of Duranty’s Pulitzer being revoked.

Bottom line: Duranty’s is an extraordinary case of second-hand propaganda masquerading as real journalism. Rarely, if ever, has a Western reporter so consistently trumpeted the party line of a brutal dictatorship. It is perhaps too much to hope that the Times would voluntarily “return” Duranty’s prize, as the Washington Post returned Janet Cooke’s prize in 1981. And yes, no Pulitzer has ever been outright revoked. But it’s hard to fathom another instance where the Pulitzer Board has made, or will make, such an egregious, indisputable error in judgment.

By passing up a chance to right a seven-decade-old wrong, the board tarnishes its image. As Canadian academic Lubomyr Luciuk, the UCCLA’s research director, tells me, its members have effectively “become apologists for Stalin’s apologist.”

Ronnie Musgrove: A Lesson In Hypocrisy

Satire - or - "tasteless and offensive"

I love satire. Barack Obama, apparently, does not.

When The New Yorker ran its now infamous picture of Obama and wife, the Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton responded, "The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."



Now, USA Today reports the great satirist Randy Newman will perform "his Louisiana 1927 at this month's Democratic National Convention in Denver."

Does the Obama campaign think, as I do, that Randy Newman's lyrics in his song Rednecks "is a satirical lampoon," or do they think they are "tasteless and offensive"?

Rednecks by Randy Newman

Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show
With some smart-ass New York Jew
And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox
And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too
Well, he may be a fool but he's our fool
If they think they're better than him they're wrong
So I went to the park and I took some paper along
And that's where I made this song

We talk real funny down here
We drink too much and we laugh too loud
We're too dumb to make it in no Northern town
Keepin' the niggers down

We got no-necked oilmen from Texas
And good ol' boys from Tennessee
And colleges men from LSU
Went in dumb - come out dumb too
Hustlin' 'round Atlanta in their alligator shoes
Gettin' drunk every weekend at the barbecues
Keepin' the niggers down

We're rednecks, we're rednecks
We don't know our ass from a hole in the ground
We're rednecks, we're rednecks
We're keeping the niggers down

Now your northern nigger's a Negro
You see he's got his dignity
Down here we're too ignorant to realize
That the North has set the nigger free

Yes he's free to be put in a cage
In Harlem in New York City
And he's free to be put in a cage
in the South-Side of Chicago, the
West-Side
And he's free to be put in a cage in Hough in Cleveland
And he's free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis
And he's free to be put in a cage in
Fillmore in San Francisco
And he's free to be put in a cage in Roxbury in Boston
They're gatherin' 'em up from miles around
Keepin' the niggers down

We're rednecks, rednecks
And we don't know our ass from a hole in the ground
We're rednecks, we're rednecks
We're keeping the niggers down

We are keeping the niggers down

Obama's abuse of Clinton delegates

The Natchez Blog, the official Mississippi blog of the Democratic National Convention, tells the sordid tale of the Obama Campaign's corralling of Clinton delegates. They must not speak to the press before getting clearance from the Obama Campaign. This includes their hometown newspaper. They speak of Clinton delegates in the past tense as if they have already joined Obama. The best is Obama's Big Brother questionnaire. As Casey Ann says on her blog:

The message then goes on to tell them to fill out a Delegate survey at the Obama campaign website. Delegates have already filled out a survey for the Democratic National Committee and the Mississippi Democratic Party, but this is a different one. It's a pretty intrusive survey, asking what you do for a living, what your ethnicity is, how old you are, what union you belong to, whether you're gay, and what your religion is. What business does the Obama campaign have asking all this information about a Clinton delegate?

Aljazeera on Tchula

But we don't cut off people's hands for stealing and we don't exercise the death penalty for things like, say, how women dress. Granted, there are some fashion crimes going on, but that is the price of freedom.