You’ve got to love it when the public gets involved in the Democratic process.
Thousands of Websites and who knows how many tens of thousands of people who get their news through the Internet took a day off Wednesday to protest two bills making their way through Congress without enough reasoned debate or time and effort to educate the public.
According to The Hill newspaper, a source for news we trust and use on a regular basis, it was “an unprecedented display of political muscle,” a day when thousands of Websites “went dark” to protest two Internet piracy bills, the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect IP Act.
The protests got the attention of Web users, and could get a real debate going on in this country on how we use this new technology to educate the public.
Here’s how a definition gone wrong can lead to a debilitating public controversy. But hey, controversy drives traffic, so what the heck, right?
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
It’s been a long time, but the New York Times is back in the business of pumping up the traffic to its Website with news about itself.
Predictably, once again, it is doing the news organization’s reputation more harm than good in the long run. Will they ever learn from their own history? The documents are right there under their noses.
The problem is, it might cost them a massive amount of corporate advertising to tell the truth, and they would lose a few Republican readers in the process.
An explanation is in order. You came to the right place for this one.
A federal appeals court has balked at deciding a controversial legal case pitting the Alabama Education Association and its ability to raise membership dues against the new Republican administration dead set on weakening public employee unions and suppressing votes for Democrats.
According to a court filing that just popped up online from the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, the federal appeals court panel tossed the state’s appeal in the case back to the all Republican Alabama Supreme Court. The professional organization for teachers won a victory in a lower court and obtained a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of a law passed by the new so-called “Super Majority” of Republicans in the state Legislature, a law written to prohibit payroll deductions to groups that use some of the money for “political activity.”
The appeals court panel indicated it would be “constitutional” for the Legislature to block the payroll deduction if the organization is guilty of “electioneering.”
Earlier Monday nearly 20 protesters were arrested in the atrium of the World Financial Centre following a protest against Goldman Sachs. This video shows a credentialed photographer attempting to photograph the arrests of protesters, being pushed back with a baton by one NYPD officer. Another officer continues to block his line of sight.
Free-lance photographer Robert Stolarik, who was working for the New York Times, was one of the few media able to remain in Zuccotti Park during the November 14 raid. His photos of Monday’s action appear with the article.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Someone once said that practicing journalism is like capturing “history on the run.”
Sometimes when you are a fly on the wall at important events you think you are witnessing a historical moment. But it is sometimes hard to tell for sure. Like they say, only time will tell.
Did any of the reporters covering George Wallace’s inaugural address in 1963 have any idea what a seminal moment that would be in American political history?
Could anyone have anticipated that the groundswell of rage embodied in Wallace’s fiery rhetoric would lead to such a transformative movement for full-scale civil rights in the United States? Or that Wallace’s message and style would result in such a rising tide of so-called “conservatism” in American politics, a tide that has not yet fully dissipated over the country — or Wallace’s homeland of Alabama?
Woke up this mornin’
there was frost on the ground.
Opened up Facebook,
and there was hot air all around.
I’ve got the bad news blues,
the bad news blues, baby.
What you gonna do…
The bad news is, the Republicans are still in charge of all three branches of government in my home state.
The good news is, more and more people are waking up on the Web and finding out that is a bad thing.
In the interest of keeping you abreast of what is in store for you in year-two of the Republican so-called “super majority” in the Alabama legislature, check out this article from the Dekalb County Times-Journal.
Conservative Senator Shadrack McGill, who replaced long-serving Democrat Lowell Barron, gives some indications of what is in store next year. In addition to “tweaking” the much criticized anti-immigration law, getting rid of the state retirement system for public workers and destroying teacher tenure, McGill indicates he will be doing everything he can to get rid of the Forever Wild program for preserving some of the state’s most valuable and environmentally sensitive areas for future generations.
The people of Alabama have barely had time to digest their Thanksgiving turkey and do a little Christmas shopping for their families before the radical Republicans in the Legislature and their corporate media mouthpieces start talking about doing more damage to the state after the first of the year.
Could it be that House Speaker Mike Hubbard of Auburn is so pissed off at his favorite football team for losing to Alabama on Saturday that he just had to call up the Army Corps of the Associated Press to drop another bombshell on the people on Cyber Monday?
I mean, can’t we just sleep late every now and then on a rainy Monday before the forces of darkness spoil everything with more gloom and doom?
Former Alabama Congressman Artur Davis is a sore loser with questionable judgment, according to former state Supreme Court Justice Mark Kennedy, now head of the Alabama Democratic Party.
Davis, who held the congressional seat covering much of Birmingham, Tuscaloosa and the Black Belt as a Democrat for eight years before jumping into a losing run for governor, is now making the rounds of conservative blogs bashing the Democratic Party and making all kinds of wild accusations. Apparently this is an attempt to make himself famous and switch to the Republican Party to run for office again, perhaps the U.S. Senate seat held by Richard Shelby of Tuscaloosa.
“It calls into question his judgment,” Kennedy said in an exclusive interview. “Only after being soundly defeated and repudiated by his constituent base does he now come out and continuously attack the system that he was actively a participant in.”
Kennedy said he wishes Artur would have been as proactive in advocating for working families and the poor while he was in Congress “as he is now being proactive in attempting to grab headlines.”
“I don’t understand what his deal is,” Kennedy said. “He’s now going to be remembered, by many of us, as a man who has repudiated his party. He continues to make these allegations but refuses to provide proof, I guess all because he’s a sore loser.”
For a man who desired to be the first African-American governor of Alabama, which would have been a historic event, to make a campaign contribution to the Republican nominee for governor in Mississippi who was running against a qualified African-American Democrat, he said, “Just crosses the line with me.”
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
