Sarah Palin says ‘Refudiate’ then compares herself to Shakespeare

Obviously, Sarah Palin is no Shakespeare. Perhaps a comparison to George W. Bush would be more in line with reality. He often used non-sensical words as well.

Obviously she was trying to tell so-called “peaceful Muslims” to “repudiate” a plan to build a mosque near the site of ground zero in New York, even though the plan is to try to build better relations with the Arab world — so perhaps we don’t have to continue fighting this religious war between the bin Laden’s and the Bushes for the rest of our lives.

But of course that does not serve the political interests of conservative Republicans running for higher office. They need an enemy to get elected. Rather than simply correcting her mistake and saying she meant to say “repudiate,” Palin made matters worse for herself by putting a tweet on Twitter as seen in the video above.

Playing around on Facebook myself the other day, I posted the line from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, a comedy.

In the interest of helping readers to understand such things, here’s the full passage, followed by some interpretation.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Memoriam
Birders United

Theodore Cross, a bird photographer, author, publisher, and founder of Birders United, died in Sanibel, Florida, on Sunday, February 28. He was 86.

“All of us at Birders United are extremely saddened by the passing of our leader and dear friend,” the group said in a statement. “He will be deeply missed.”

Cross published two critically acclaimed books of his bird photography: Birds of the Sea Shore and Tundra and Waterbirds, which was published just a few months back.

The esteemed Harvard University biologist Edward O. Wilson said of Waterbirds, “It’s a masterpiece. I do not exaggerate when I say that the back-jacket photo of Great Blue Herons is a candidate for the most beautiful illustration of birds in existence, photo or painting.”

Read the rest of this entry »

by Joan Brunwasser

Welcome back for the second half of my interview with The Locust Fork News-Journal‘s editor and publisher, Glynn Wilson. So, Glynn, if, according to you, it takes a huge investment of time and energy to understand a story, that explains why the mainstream press has not done its job on many important stories. You, on the other hand, are eminently qualified to discuss the Siegelman/DoJ case. So, if Rip Van Winkle approached you and said, “Ever since I woke up, I keep hearing the name Siegelman. What’s up with this guy?” could you walk him through it so he would grasp why the Siegelman case is so significant?

Hmmm. Well, as you know from researching the case yourself, it is a complicated deal. It’s hard to boil it down to a sound bite for TV, but this is what I can say.

Like any politician, Don Siegelman is certainly no perfect human being. This may be hard for people who live in so-called blue states to grasp, but just identifying yourself as a Democrat in a red state like Alabama invites irrational attacks from the right. And in what I like to call “the Bush years,” they really didn’t care about the Constitution or the abstract concept called “the rule of law.”

People who believe the Bible fundamentally and get their news from Fox and Rush Limbaugh and conservative Big Mule rags like The Birmingham News don’t care about facts or the truth. Many of them still believe George Bush was “the man.” They didn’t get the OpEdNews memo.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind.

When Bob Riley stole the election from Siegelman in 2002 in the closest race in Alabama political history, (according to whistle-blower Jill Simpson, a Republican operative with close ties to the Rileys at the time) the Rileys threatened to use the legal system to investigate Siegelman if he ever ran again. So when he announced in 2004 that he would run again in 2006, the Karl Rove-Bill Canary political machine kicked into high gear to go after him. Canary’s wife, Laura Canary, the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, then launched the investigation of Siegelman.

Even though the career prosecutors in the Department of Justice could not really find enough evidence to bring charges, and told attorney Doug Jones nothing was likely to result from the case, a “top down” review of the case was ordered from Washington after Rove, Bush’s political adviser, had communications with people in the DoJ. That we know, even though the Birmingham News editorial page editors continue to deny it.

I have been asked numerous times by average people not on the hard right or left how it could be possible that the courts could be so corrupted in a case like Siegelman’s that politics would trump truth and justice. It is perhaps hard to fathom, but just ask Paul Minor in Mississippi or any of the U.S. attorneys who were fired on orders from the White House for not being politically loyal enough. Rove was a student of Machiavelli, who wrote and told King Henry VIII that kings either rule by love or fear. Bush was not the kind of man who inspired love, so he had to rule by fear by demanding absolute loyalty.

The point of prosecuting Siegelman was not about the law. It was about politics from the start.

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: In case you missed it at OpEdNews.com, here’s part one of the interview…

by Joan Brunwasser

Glynn Wilson is editor and publisher of The Locust Fork News-Journal. Readers trying to get to the bottom of the Siegelman case, the politicization of the DoJ, the story of whistleblower Dana Jill Simpson, and other steamy tales will fare better with the Locust Fork News-Journal than with virtually any of the mainstream press. Glynn is an old-school newspaperman, in the best sense, with decades more experience than I have. So, I’m going to mostly pass him the ball, and get out of the way while he runs with it.

Welcome to OpEdNews, Glynn. Where are you based, who are your readers and how come you’re so on top of these important, but much ignored, stories?

The Locust Fork News-Journal is an alternative, independent news website ranging the diverse landscape of the American South, covering politics and science, nature and media stories from New Orleans to Washington, D.C. We’ve even filed Mojo assaults on New York a time or two.

As editor and publisher and chief investigator, news feature writer and columnist, I now reside on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, very near the Jefferson-Blount County line and just a few minutes from the Locust Fork River, a fork in the Black Warrior River. When it was launched four and a half years ago, the site was designed as an innovative merger between a blog and a news page. (I was not new to web publishing, having been the editor and publisher of The Southerner magazine, southerner.net, the first magazine published online back in the 1990s.)

Just as other news websites with more of a “reality-based” as opposed to a “faith-based” intellectual view of the world, our readers tend to be more educated on average and computer savvy, as well as more liberal, progressive and also independently-minded than your average conservative talk radio listener or Fox News viewer. We do have a fair amount of libertarians and independents that also use the site, however, and judging by the number of sustained attacks from the right-wing attack machine, we have a lot of conservative readers, too.

While we have a large base in Alabama, we also have fans in New York, Washington, D.C., New Orleans and other southern states, as well as the West Coast and the Great Northwest. As you probably find with OpEdNews, many people in California and Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington tend to use us. There are many ex-patriot Southerners out there on the other coast. We also get a fair amount of international traffic, I guess mostly from search engine hits as well as locals abroad.

Why I was on the Siegelman story and the Jill Simpson story and have a better handle on the politicization of the DoJ – and have the largest archive on it – is a long story. But let’s see if I can boil it down for your readers.

I have been a reporter and writer for about 30 years, an academic for nine of those, and covered a lot of Siegelman’s campaigns for office in Alabama all the way back to the 1980s. For context, I wrote the definitive story on his inauguration in 1999, when he was heralded as Alabama’s first “New South” governor. The New South Rises, Again: Alabama Gets Its First ‘New South’ Governor.

During Siegelman’s term as governor, I was not in my home state of Alabama, since I had moved first to Georgia, and then to Tennessee, and eventually New Orleans chasing an academic career teaching journalism, as well as free-lancing. I wrote for The Dallas Morning News, the Christian Science Monitor and then The New York Times out of New Orleans.

During the 2004 election, I broke a big piece of the Bush AWOL story and moved to DC for awhile, but then in 2005, I found myself back in Birmingham with a family situation – when The New York Times called and wanted me to help them cover the first trial of HealthSouth’s Richard Scrushy, Siegelman’s co-defendant in their second trial.

It was during that trial, and after I completed the free-lance work for The Times on the case, that I decided to start LocustFork.Net.

Read the rest of this entry »

Malcolm Gladwell and the limits of New York liberalism

In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Finch (played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version) sought to expose Jim Crow to the world, not change it overnight.

by Glynn Wilson

Just when I thought the South and race had been reduced to comedy and thus removed from literary thought out of New York for the final time, one of my favorite science writers recently decided to step out of his expertise in sociology to take a stab at history. The result, as usual, reveals more about the opinions of New Yorkers about the South than it does about the problem of race relations and what to do about it.

Regular readers will remember that I have praised Malcolm Gladwell before, most recently for his book Outliers: The Story of Success. But his most recent piece in The New Yorker on Big Jim Folsom and Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism cries out for criticism.

A number of my Facebook “friends” have shared this story around, so I know many people have read it. If you have not already, I recommend it. Hit the link and read it. Then come back and see why I think it has shortcomings.

At first scan, the story makes sense. The point being that when Big Jim Folsom was trying to influence the hearts and minds of the people of Alabama in the 1950s, he did so by example, knowing it would take a lifetime. He did not advocate immediate change through protests and law. If he had, he would never have been elected in the first place, and so he would never have been able to bring about any change at all.

Anybody who knows anything about politics knows you can’t do anything unless you get elected.

It is not clear whether Gladwell is even aware of it, although it’s hard to imagine he’s not. But when he uses George Orwell’s criticism of Charles Dickens to take on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, he becomes Orwell in his own story.

Read the rest of this entry »

William Greider, on Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS, wants Americans to start shaking things up

His new book, COME HOME AMERICA: THE RISE AND FALL (AND REDEEMING PROMISE) OF OUR COUNTRY, doesn’t mince words from the very first sentence: “I have some hard things to say about our country.” And he does.

After outlining many of the systemic problems he feels the United States faces, Greider lays out the case for a fundamental restructuring of America’s economy and society. He compares the moment — a decline in American power exarcerbated by the financial collapse — to World War II, not literally, but as a moment of economic transformation.

“Just as World War II presented a chance to thoroughly reorder American life,” he writes, “this generation of Americans has the opportunity — the obligation — to envision a country very different from the one we have known for more than half a century.”

In the Washington Post this past Sunday, he wrote:

The president is getting what he asked for, but perhaps not what he had in mind. During the campaign, Barack Obama beckoned Americans to put aside their cynicism about politics and re-engage as active citizens. They are now doing so with red-hot anger. They are outraged by events and forcing their way into congressional affairs and behind closed doors where policy wonks discuss issues with cerebral civility. The president is now trapped between these two realms — the governing elites who decide things and the people who are governed. Which side is he on? If he does not choose wisely, the anger could devour his presidency.

The immediate impetus is the latest outrage from the financial sector.

Obama Told Us To Speak Out, But Is He Listening?

Interesting but troubling stuff. Any thoughts activists?

AP

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer shown at a lecture entitled ‘The 20th Century on Trial’ at the New York Public Library on June 27, 2007.

by Glynn Wilson

It is hard to believe Norman Mailer is dead.

I just met him in September on a subway ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and I had planned on writing him a long letter after studying the Harper’s magazine article that became the Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction novel The Armies of the Night.

The article, The Steps of the Pentagon, and the book, deals with a protest march on the Pentagon in Washington Mailer was sent to cover as a journalist for Harper’s, edited at that time by Willie Morris of Mississippi, the youngest editor in the storied magazine’s history.

While other practitioners of “New Journalism” such as George Plimpton, Truman Capote (an Alabama native), Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese (who attended the University of Alabama) were pioneering the non-fiction novel, also referred to as “creative non-fiction” or “literary journalism,” Mailer uses the occasion of the protest march and his arrest and night spent in jail to do his own version of self-portrait, taking off on the Vietnam War. But since Morris had his doubts about the use of first person in the magazine, Mailer wrote the piece in the third person, referring to himself as the protagonist.

Now anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper or a magazine knows that there are few editors who will allow a writer to use first person to place himself in the story, since that flies in the face of the economic definition of objectivity used by American news organizations. But using the third person is even more rare, although Mailer, being the combative, controversial and outspoken character that he was, not only got away with it. He won a Pulitzer Prize as a result and has been praised for it by the likes of the New York Times, which says in the lead to his feature obituary today that Mailer “loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”

NYT: Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84

The Associated Press is also leading it’s AP A wire this morning with Mailer’s obit.

AP: Norman Mailer Dead at Age 84

And you can learn more from this free online encyclopedia entry on Mailer.

Wikipedia: Norman Mailer

Here’s my story on meeting him, which I never ran before now because I was not positively sure it was him. Now that I see the AP photo of him from earlier this year, however, there’s no doubt it was him.

On A Personal Encounter With Norman Mailer

After following Jill Simpson to Washington, D.C. to be there for her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in the political prosecution of Don Siegelman, I decided to make the four hour trek to New York and spend a few days there on my extended fall trip this year.

(You can read more about that trip from the September archives.)

The plan was to run into a former protégé of mine from my time in the master’s program at the University of Alabama in the mid-1990s who lives in Brooklyn. And the plan was to meet in person with Scott Horton of Harper’s magazine blog fame and Joe Conason at The Nation Institute to further cement my relationship with them on covering big stories out of the American South.

I crossed into Manhattan after sundown on Monday, Sept. 17, and got into Brooklyn in time for some food, beer (and a special Coney Island refreshment) before crashing for the night in a basement apartment in an old Jewish neighborhood not far from where Mailer was born and raised.

The next day, I called up Scott Horton and arranged to meet him at the Union Station Oyster Bar for an appetizer and a few glasses of wine. We talked about the Siegelman case, Jill Simpson and the funny state of Alabama, and then I got back on the subway for the 30 to 40 minute ride back to Brooklyn.

As I sat in the back of a subway car and looked out the window over the East River at the Statue of Liberty off in the distance, I noticed four old men just a few seats in front of me laughing and talking and having a good time. One of them looked exactly like the photograph on this page, and I began to study his face. Could it really be Norman Mailer?

I had started up a conversation with an attractive, exotic young woman and hated to interrupt it, but I just had to know for sure if I was riding the subway with Norman Mailer. So I asked her: “Do you think that could possibly be him?”

She had no idea who I was talking about, so I got out of my seat, approached the man, and asked: “Are you Norman Mailer?”

I immediately felt a little guilty, since I hate it when I see and hear stories about tourists approaching famous people and bugging them in public. He did not answer right away, but smiled and looked at his compatriots. I looked at them too and mouthed the words: “Is this him?” The one who made the most eye contact with me glanced at Mailer to make sure he was not looking and gave me a little wink and a nod in the affirmative.

I tried to get a conversation started by telling them that I was a visiting writer from Alabama who was a big fan of Mailer and Willie Morris, thinking that might get him to open up and talk to me.

In fact, I mentioned that I had recently taken a trip to Oxford, Mississippi where David Rae Morris had a show in a gallery there with many pictures of his dad Willie Morris.

(You can read my column on that trip here: Escaping Shadows: The South as a Backdrop for Art).

Instead of engaging me, Mailer started speaking Yiddish and making a joke with his buddies, probably about my Southern accent and knowing I would not be able to understand a word they were saying. I was still not 100 percent sure it was him, sitting there holding a walking cane and a folding chair.

I just stood there holding onto the silver pole in the subway car listening to them cut up, but when their jibberish slowed down and then took a long pause, I asked the man I thought was Mailer what he did.

“What do I do?” he said with a New York accent, looking right at my face good for the first time, almost angrily.

Then, looking down at the chair he was clutching in his old, wrinkled hands, then back up at me with a smile and a remarkable twinkle in his old blue eyes, he said, “Mostly I sit.”

“Sit?” I asked, joining in the fun. “Where do you like to sit? And what do you do while you are sitting?”

“I sit down on Broadway and watch the girls walk by,” he said, cracking up his friends.

It had been a beautiful fall day for sitting outside and watching people, so it made perfect sense.

The men kept on speaking in Yiddish and joking around and I figured I had interrupted their fun enough, so I said good night and went back to my seat in the back of the car by the exotic young woman.

When I got back to Alabama, I looked up Mailer in Wikipedia and in the Harper’s magazine archives and read “The Steps of the Pentagon.” It was then that I realized what Mailer had accomplished writing about himself in the third person.

Like Truman Capote or Hunter S. Thompson, I am more comfortable writing in first person, but the style of journalism is often the same. A writer who places himself in the action of the story goes beyond mere objective journalism and is able to construct a more readable and complete narrative coverage of events. And that is what this Web site is often dedicated to doing.

Le׳hitra׳ot, Norman Mailer. You were a great American character. You will be missed.