Most working people in America don’t have the time to pay close attention to the daily ins and outs of politics. What they know of the political system they hear from quick blurbs in passing on television news while they are busy providing dinner for their families, or what they hear on the radio in the car on their commute to and from work. More educated liberal Democrats tend to get more of this news from public radio, but for the average Southerner, this tends to come from talk radio.
More and more people are getting their news from social networking tweets on Twitter and Facebook, but unless they take the time to delve into the details of the story links, they will still only obtain a superficial outlook on public policy debates.
For those who take the time to find an independent journalist to follow closely, they will over time end up with a better understanding of how democracy works, the so-called “sausage factory” that is government.
One thing that I think tends to sometimes escape the understanding of the average American, who now tends to believe there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, is the extent to which the party in power gets to set the daily agenda for what issues are brought up in public debates in Congress and state Legislatures. This is one of the most powerful tools any political party has to control what we all talk about on a daily basis, whether people fully grasp this or not.
At Occupy protest encampments across the country this week, the controversy that was all the rage had to do with the defense budget bill just passed by Congress. The paranoia was palpable, and for good reason, considering how the issue was covered by the mainstream, corporate news media — and the implications for protesters worried about being arrested and detained indefinitely without due process as they carry their protests into an election year in 2012.
While much of the debate over the policy on detaining suspected terrorists on domestic soil was probably lost on much of the country now in a shopping frenzy with only a week to go before Christmas, even at the Occupy Birmingham encampment downtown activists were not happy with President Barack Obama. One even suggested he was taking a look at voting for Mitt Romney, the Mormon from Massachusetts, “because at least he represents a minority.”
President Obama and the First Lady Speak to Troops at Fort Bragg
by Glynn Wilson
Bush’s illegal and ill-fated war in Iraq is finally over. All of the U.S. troops are coming home after eight long years.
It was the longest war in American history, although the news media is not covering the war’s end as much as it did the “Shock and Awe” campaign that started it all on March 20, 2003.
President Barack Obama marked the occasion in a low-key, solemn fashion, by saluting the troops upon their return at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but with “little fanfare,” according to the AP headline.
The wire service did report that Obama never tried to declare victory in this war, as Bush did with a “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Although it is doubtful that story made the front page of many newspapers or the top 10 minutes of many local news broadcasts in this country. It is a war we wish would just go away quietly, and for good reasons. It was started under faulty pretenses based on bad intelligence about a non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction program on the part of Saddam Hussein.
“It was a war that (Obama) opposed from the start, inherited as president and is now bringing to a close, leaving behind an Iraq still struggling,” the wire service reported.
Jack Abramoff may be the most notorious and crooked lobbyist of our time, according to CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
He was at the center of a massive scandal of brazen corruption and influence peddling.
As a Republican lobbyist starting in the mid 1990s, he became a master at showering gifts on lawmakers in return for their votes on legislation and tax breaks favorable to his clients. He was so good at it, he took home $20 million a year.
A Lesson in New Web Journalism and Political Activism
Editor’s Note: In December, 2002, I was on the payroll of The New York Times National Desk operating from my duplex on Plum Street, two blocks from the Carrollton Avenue street car line in New Orleans, Uptown, when the Trent Lott story broke, bringing to an end to the rise in national politics of one of the South’s most prominent, conservative Republican Senators. Much has been made of this case study in the power of the new Web Press to influence both the traditional, national news media — and the direction of politics itself. This is my original contribution to this important story in the history of Web publishing, as well as the academic field of media influence on politics and public opinion. I publish it today because it is time.
“I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”
— Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, Dec. 5, 2002
“On December 20, 2002, after significant controversy following comments regarding Strom Thurmond’s presidential candidacy, Lott resigned as Senate Minority Leader. In December 2007, he resigned from the Senate and became a Washington-based lobbyist.”
– Wikipedia
by Glynn Wilson
On December 5, 2002, about the time Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was making the remarks that would bring him down at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party in Washington, D.C., I was in New Orleans sending an e-mail message to the brand new New York Times correspondent in Atlanta, David Halbfinger, pitching a story on the Alabama Ride to Freedom bus tour planned for January, according to my old Outlook Express e-mail archive. It goes back all the way to the 1990s, and is still on occasion a useful and reliable research tool.
Halbfinger and I never got to do that bus ride story together. But for the next few months, we would work on a number of stories. I also worked with the other more experienced Times correspondent in the South at the time, Jeffrey Gettleman, as well as Rick Bragg and a number of others. If either one of those guys had known what I knew about the history of Civil Rights struggles in the South, perhaps we could have done that bus ride story justice, especially since I was working a lot with photographer Spider Martin at the time. He was sitting on one of the most important collections of photographs from that era at his place atop the mountain in Blount County, Alabama, where I often stayed while working on stories in my home state for the Times and the Christian Science Monitor.
When the Lott story broke, it may not have caused a firestorm of publicity right away. But within only 15 days, Lott was gone and his rising political ambitions went stone cold dead.
Because of my academic research experience as well as the fact that I was one of the reporters who worked the story for the Times — in fact doing critical investigative work that was as important as anything done by the bloggers or television news in the battle — I have my own unique perspective on what went down and what it all means. But in part because I was a free-lance reporter for the Times and was never properly credited for my work on that story, along with many others, the academics in New York who used this story to make a name for themselves ignored my attempts to comment and provide some perspective for their research.
To me, it is an important lesson for bloggers trying to influence the mass media and public affairs — and for activists who are trying to change the country and the state for the better.
There’s no turning back the hands of time, except in pictures
by Cliff Griggs
Ten years, heinous acts by madmen, and thousands of lives ruined by war and hatred, have gone by, and it still isn’t over. Even though we are trying to extricate our country from Iraq and Afghanistan, that leaving is still years away.
As for the costs, best estimates are that we have spent, or obligated our country to $2.6 trillion that we didn’t have, to pay for two large wars, and now a host of smaller ones that we will be involved in for years to come.
It would be easy to dismiss this as religious in nature, similar to disputes in Ireland, Catholics against Protestants, here Islam against Christianity. But I don’t see it that way.
I see it as a result of the petulance of a rich kid, used to a lot of attention when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, who suddenly was ignored after they left. So he went out like a stupid kid who only gets attention when he does something really bad.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is lying in his new book and in media appearances promoting it. Watch this video for a fact check on Cheney’s public statements.
The very fate of our human species, yes, and your state too — as well as this country and the earth — may well depend on a compromise between science and religion.
Yes, you read that correctly. Not that I ever wanted to admit it before.
This will be a precarious journey with no guarantee of success like the fate of all life itself, from the beginning into the infinite future.
A top American scientist from Alabama writes that religion and science “are the two most powerful forces in the world today, including especially the United States.” That is from Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, which he wrote to Southern Baptist preachers who hold sway over millions of votes that could have a positive, or negative, impact on all kinds of government policies.
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.
