Ouch.

Adam Serwer 

writes in a blog entry in The Washington Post:

The role black Republicans play has nothing to do with winning over black voters Rather, it’s all about reassuring white Republicans that there’s nothing wrong with the party’s approach to racial issues.

     It got me thinking about black Republicans in Alabama. Tuskegee's Johnny Ford used to be a Republican, but I think he returned to his Democrat roots.  

     Others? If not, why not? The state GOP has tried over the years to attract more black members and candidates, with little success. 

[UPDATE: GOP makes big gains in poor, young, white males. Especially since President obama's election.] 

MMMM # 154 NON-Profit media bias

      The Pew Center is out this morning with an interesting study of news generated by non-profit news organizations (though almost all would seem to qualify for that status these days), and concluded that there can still be a bias, despite their non-profit status.

     Also of note,  a column in Sunday's Washington Post about the diminishing importance of the Washington Press Corps.



(The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.)

Big Fish

     The movie of that name was filmed in the Montgomery area in 2003 and the story centered on, well, the story of a Big Fish.

     Today's Washington Post includes a real Big Fish story...143 pounds worth of Blue Catfish...and it's not a Father's mythical story to his son.

     As for myself, my Dad tried to get me interested in fishing...and I played at it a bit during summer camp...but mostly it was too slow of an activity for me to enjoy.

     Maybe it was because the bait-worthy fish in this picture was about the only thing I managed to catch?



*At one point in the Big Fish  movie, the zip code I live in is displayed on a document, and according to the IMDB listing linked above, the photos of "old bankers" on the wall of the bank are actually the founders of Bishop-Parker, a local furniture store.

    

MMMM # 151* Media Elitism and The Constible On Patrol

     What Alabama TV station had a fully marked vehicle stopped and given a ticket for windows tinted too darkly?

     It IS against the law...in fact it was 15 years ago that the legislature passed the law, so perhaps the officer was giving a 15th anniversary ticket?

     I wonder how many tickets of that nature have been given out in those fifteen years? And how many to brightly marked NEWS VEHICLES?

    I believe reporters should be treated exactly the same as everyone else...which is why I don't like seeing news vehicles parked illegally at the scene of routine news stories like The Alabama Statehouse. They never are ticketed.

     But windows tinted too dark? It is close to the end of the month, so perhaps the good officer was low on his quota? Or maybe he just didn't like a story that station had reported.



[PLUS: a Washington Post column calls out the media on it's failure to report the "rigging" of the 2012 elections by states (including Alabama)  that have passed laws that benefit the GOP.

"...the rank partisanship of these measures is discouraging the media from reporting plainly on what’s going on. Voter suppression so clearly benefits the Republicans that the media typically report this through a partisan lens, knowing that accounts making clear whom these laws disenfranchise would be labeled as biased by the right. But the media should not fear telling the truth or standing up for the rights of the poor or the young.")

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]

[*this would have been MMMM #150, but I used that number for a special MMMM about the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War....just in case anyone is keeping track. And by the way, my 2000th post on this blog was yesterday. ]

The Epitome Of Ultimate Superlative Hyperbole

(By Zandar)

No subject in American politics in 2011 brings out the flammable straw men being engulfed in the fires of rhetoric, the over-the-top references to doom and destruction, the cries of helpless victimization and the utter nonsense of warnings of evil quite like the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.  Combine Obama Derangement Syndrome with this subject and the odiously mendacious Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, and you have a recipe for one of the all-time classics of truly terrible "journalism" as the President addressed the annual AIPAC conference this weekend, elaborating on what he meant by "1967 borders" for Israel, and Rubin wastes no time in letting the blood fly.

Obama must be very certain that liberal Jews will enthusiastically support him no matter what. And there is evidence he is right. Josh Block, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former AIPAC spokesman, e-mailed: “It [the speech] was a strong reaffirmation of the US-Israel relationship, and was an important and positive change from his remarks on Thursday. It reflected an important continuity of US policy going back to President Johnson.”

This is the sort of spin that pro-Israel Democrats use to justify voting for Obama. But there is a reality that can’t be avoided. This president once again has proved an apt negotiator on behalf of the Palestinians and a thorn in Israel’s side. Now is a time of choosing for the American Jewish community, for Israel and for Congress. And if Obama should be reelected in 2012 one can only imagine how hostile he will become toward the Jewish state.

So not only does Rubin stop about a micron short of accusing first African-American president of being an anti-Semite and an enemy of Israel, she stops maybe two microns short of accusing anyone of Jewish faith in America who supports Obama of being the same, calling on the American Jewish community to choose between their faith and Obama.

That's outrageous, the kind of spittle-flecked invective one expects to find from Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post.  But the insinuation here is that the biggest single threat to the Jewish homeland is not the intransigence of Israel's righteous indignation, nor the continued justifications for the treatment of the Palestinians, nor the international community becoming bone-weary of a country that has flouted international law time and time again, but that the American President is saying these things in public. This alone makes him an enemy of all Judaism in the eyes of some.

Oh, and by no means are the Palestinians angels in this bloody idiocy.  They have killed with suicide bombers and gone after civilians for the sheer shock value and fired rockets indiscriminately and taken pound after pound of flesh from their neighbors.  They too are part of the problem, not the solution.

But the issue is that the Palestinians aren't getting billions in military equipment, training, and cutting-edge technology from the United States, and that they aren't rounding up Israelis and putting them in armed camps, either.  Jewish right-wing neo-cons say that they could never understand supporting Obama.  I say given the tragic history of the Jewish people in the last century, I can't fathom anyone of the Jewish faith wanting to inter any group of people to single them out for collective punishment.

Imagine if the 12% of the nation's population that is African-American took over an American state, or if the nation's Native American population gathered together to do the same, or the nation's Latino or Japanese-American or any group took over an area of the country, declared it their new ancestral homeland, and then herded the people not of that ethnicity into separated, armed camps.  The new state created demanded its own independence and UN recognition, while the basic civil rights of those who were not of the proper background were curtailed severely in the name of public safety.  Trade of basic foodstuffs, livestock, building supplies, even information, would be arbitrarily monitored and controlled by the ethnic group in charge.  Bad movie plots and "Second Amendment remedies" aside, this is the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" right now, it's pretty one-sided.

But to even mention this unfortunate truth at AIPAC, well apparently this makes Obama and anyone who supports him an enemy of Israel and the Jewish people.  And yet people like Jennifer Rubin wonder why no progress has been made on this front.

I can't imagine why.

(Cross-posted at Zandar Versus The Stupid)

Zombie Cassettes!

     Just when you though it was safe to get rid of your old cassette player, they're coming back. Kinda. That's a link to a Washington Post article, but last month there was an earlier story on an audiophile web site.

     I have a box filled with cassettes, mostly air-checks from all those years in radio. I spent some time two years ago going through them and creating a general kind of index. I also remember standing in Rockefeller Plaza as a teenager "interviewing" passersby for a school radio project....on a cassette, of course. Lots of us bought our first "albums" in cassette format, mostly I guess in the 70's and 80's. It was Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band for me, which came out in 1967.



     I've commented on the end of the cassette several times on this blog. Here ...and Here too.

    Looks like the obits were premature. Again.

Fire-Waterproof-Ants

     Just in case you were watching the Spring rains and saying "well, at least this should kill those darn fire ants in the back 40"...not likley that you were thinking that, but just in case..no such luck.

     This morning's Washington Post includes a charming story about how those painful stinging critters work together in a flood to save themselves (Unlike us! We say every man for himself!).

Friendlier Crowd

     Can you blame President Obama for visiting Brazil? Sure, he has legitimate business to conduct there, just as he has in virtually every country in the world, but when The Washington Post uses the word "swoon" in a headline to describe his welcome, and quotes people like one woman...

"He is a president the whole world likes, a black president,” she said. “I would give him a hug. I would tell him he is a good president.”

     Back home he's under constant, unrelenting criticism from the GOP and birthers and the tea party and the left of his own party....heck, he should consider establishing a (Really) Southern White House in Rio!

Bad News, Bad News

     Depending on how you look at it, the list in The Washington Post story is either bad news for Alabama, or bad news for Alabama.

      It's a list of pork...the Top Ten States to which pork flows from Washington.

      Here 'ya go:

Top 10 states, per capita earmarks



Hawaii, $318

North Dakota, $234

West Virginia, $174

Vermont, $161

Mississippi, $142

Alaska, $140

Montana, $125

South Dakota, $112

Rhode Island, $79

Nevada, $79



Source: Taxpayers for Common Sense, fiscal 2010



     What? NO ALABAMA??? How many times have we been told what a great job our Congressional Delegation has been doing bringing dollars back from Washington? Where's Tom Bevill when we need him?

     On the other hand, since so many Alabama voters rail against pork and want a smaller Federal budget, perhaps we should be happy that our fine House and Senate members have wisely not brought home too much bacon?

And by the way, this is one instance in which I think using a per capita figure to compare states distorts the results. Raw numbers might be better here, no? And they  might show Alabama for the pork magnet she really is.



(Thanks to reader GJB in the absolute Pork Capitol, West Virginia, for pointing out this WP story to me!)

MMMM #120 The Not So Diplomatic Service

    

 The New York Times uses almost 900 words in a note to readers to explain its decision to publish some of the diplomatic messages obtained originally by Wikileaks.com.

     Decisions like these date back to the earliest days of mass communications, though perhaps publication of The Pentagon Papers is still the hallmark event.

    The lamest excuse The Times uses to justify the publication this time around is a kind of "all the kids are doing it" comment:

For The Times to ignore this material would be to deny its own readers the careful reporting and thoughtful analysis they expect when this kind of information becomes public.

     There little or no danger that the story will be ignored, by the Times of anyone else. Either the Times has made the right decison or it has not. To say even if we don't do it, other will is, again, lame. If this were a NY Time exclusive would they hold off publishing it?

     The Washington Post is running a Bloomberg story based on the cables that has Arabian countries, including Saudi Arabia, siding with Israel against Iran!

     The Times makes it clear that they have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect information that deserves to be protected...informing the Obama Administration what it intended to publish and letting them argue for redaction. In some cases, the Times agreed. In others, not.

 

     The media question here is this: does the government have the right to keep anything secret? The quick answer is, of course.

     Even the staunchest advocate of freedom of information woudn't seriously argue that the names of espionage agents should be public (Valorie Plame might have some comment about that.)



     The media lesson here is that the hated MSM is alive and well....sorting through the quarter million cables and crafting stories based on their journalism ability. Even though Wikileaks got the material first, there's no question that it is via the MSM that virtually everyone will find out what's in there, and what it means.



[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]