Someone Who Actually Should Have Hillary's Seat

The New York Times blog picked up our attempt to have a real representative replace Hillary rather than more ruling class celebrity carpet-baggers.

http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/heres-someone-gov-paterson-may-not-have-thought-of-for-hillarys-senate-seat/

New York Times (like you've NEVER seen before)

This beautiful issue of the NY Times says it all to those who voted Obama and chose to "believe" that he will be markedly different than the death merchants from the other side of the aisle.

http://www.nytimes-se.com/

A million copies of this paper were printed and handed out on the streets of New York. It is believed to be the work of the Yes Men (from RPI, the people behind WhirlMart and some great pranks and hoaxes on mainstream media).

Warning: Reading this might make some people wish that instead of a visit to the "Church" of Obama to practice their faith, they had instead made a trip to the "Library" of Ralph Nader or Ron Paul in an attempt to practice their analytical skills!

The New York Times Rears Its Ugly Pro-War Head (Yet Again)

I can only hope that we will all eventually learn that corporate media mechanisms (even those revered by the perceived left) are inherently evil and incapable of simply reporting the truth as they are tasked to do. What they ignore is waht REALLY matters. If they aren't covering it, it's REALLY important. Always!

Here, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) shares with us the answer handed to them by the "mighty" New York Times as to why they completely ignored the"Winter Soldier" hearings, a series of testimonies given by combat vets who have returned from Iraq and are willing to share their stories with the media and the public.

I asked the Post-Star on their forums (and every single message is throughly read before it is posted) why they weren't covering WinterSoldier about a week before it happened. They never responded. They also receive AP stories on the wire and there were several about Winter Soldier they could have lazily buried on page 7 but .... they CHOSE to completely ignore these young veterans. I guess I have to give them a small amount of credit for correctly posting our showing of the original documentary of "Winter Soldier" (1972) at my cafe. I was at the vigil at City Park to honor those murdered in the 5 year occupation of Iraq and Mark Mulholland was there from

WNYT-13. He is their News Director. I told him about Winter Soldier. WNYT totally ignored it and did nothing to cover it.

If this does not prove once and for all that ALL corporate media sucks, I really can't imagine what would constitute evidence! Corporate media is rife with agenda. Its pro-war and anti-
soldier and ALL OF IT IS, not just "right wing media". If its owned by a big corporation, we can't
trust it at all to tell the truth. It's lying and manipulating the public by diverting focus away from things that truly matter.


http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3340

New York Times Explains Winter Soldier Blackout - Public editor responds to concerns raised by FAIR 4/8/08

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has offered a response to media activists who wrote to the paper about its non-coverage of last month's Winter Soldier hearings. Hoyt's explanation is that reporters at the Times had "not been aware of the group or its meeting," but likely wouldn't have covered it if they had been aware of the event.

The idea that the Times was unaware of Winter Soldier is remarkable; the paper's D.C. reporters were repeatedly sent press releases about the events, the same ones that other media outlets received that did manage to cover the event, ranging from Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! to the New York Times' corporate sibling the Boston Globe.

Hoyt's letter in full:

***
Dear Reader,

Thank you for writing about the Winter Soldier event in Maryland last month and its lack of coverage by the Times.

My assistant checked with various editors at the Times to see if there was any discussion about covering the Winter Soldier meeting. The editor in the Washington bureau who oversees national security coverage said he had not been aware of the group or its meeting. The Times normally has three Pentagon reporters. The meeting fell within their area of coverage, and one of them probably would have been assigned had editors chosen to staff the event. But one is on book leave, one was traveling with the secretary of defense, and one was in Iraq covering the war. The Times also did not cover an announcement the following day by Vets for Freedom, a group supporting the war and claiming more than 13 times the membership of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the group which organized Winter Soldier.

One group was emphasizing what it charged were war crimes, war profiteering and war mismanagement. The other group was protesting what it charged was the failure of the media to report more fully on signs of progress in Iraq, such as rebuilt schools and infrastructure.

News organizations like the Times, with its own substantial investment in independent reporting from Iraq tend to prefer their own on-scene accounts of the war, rather than relying on charges and counter-charges at home by organizations with strongly held political viewpoints about the war.

Sincerely,
Clark Hoyt
****

The Times’ D.C. bureau editor’s claim to have not heard of the hearings is remarkable, given that the AP newswire carried a story on the hearings, and IVAW has confirmed to FAIR that the D.C. bureau had been sent three separate rounds of different IVAW press releases. In addition, at least 150 Times staffers were sent press releases about Winter Soldier by the Institute for Public Accuracy, a group that encourages inclusion of overlooked facts and progressive perspectives in media coverage. Given that media organizations operating on a small fraction of the Times' budget were aware of and able to find the resources to cover these hearings, the Times’ D.C. bureau’s plea to ignorance about the hearings is all the more disappointing.

Meanwhile, Hoyt’s justification of the Times failure to cover Winter Soldier on the grounds that they also did not cover “an announcement the following day by Vets for Freedom, a group supporting the war and claiming more than 13 times the membership of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the group which organized Winter Soldier,” draws a far-fetched parallel between a group presenting eyewitness testimony about atrocities in Iraq and a group releasing a press release about media bias. (As a group that often puts out press releases about media bias that don't get covered by the Times, the comparison strikes us as rather absurd.) Further, the size of IVAW and Vets for Freedom are not directly comparable, as IVAW is a group of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, whereas anyone can sign up on the Vets for Freedom website, which stipulates that “non-veterans can also be members of Vets for Freedom.”

Hoyt's claim that “news organizations like the Times, with its own substantial investment in independent reporting from Iraq, tend to prefer their own on-scene accounts of the war” is akin to asserting that reporters on the police beat prefer to write about crimes they have seen themselves rather than talking to eyewitnesses. Given that Times reporters, like all Western journalists in Iraq, have great difficulty travelling freely outside the Green Zone, it is hard to imagine that they could provide a full and accurate picture of the war without interviewing people who have participated in it. And of course the paper does often interview U.S. military personnel about what they've seen, though when they are whistleblowers trying to call attention to what they describe as "the human consequences of failed policy," the Times suddenly has much less interest in what they have to say.

The New York Times’ decision to assign one of its two available correspondents to tour with the Secretary of Defense instead of hearing the first-hand accounts of the Winter Soldiers demonstrates a very strange notion of “independent reporting.”

Supreme Court, Inc * must read *

This piece addresses the absolutely terrifying changes and restrictions applied to the workers' remedy (litigation) over the past twenty-five years. It explains who is mostly responsible for removing vital layers of protection from the working and middle classes, protection that was once provided by a Supreme Court that may have actually represented a broad spectrum of American viewpoints. Today's court is basically like our two-party system, a fake left and a fake right and behind which are nine very pro-corporate justices. This extremely well-written and researched piece explains how that has come to pass and who the key players are. Anyone who invests the time to read this will be awfully glad that they did.

Supreme Court, Inc.

By JEFFREY ROSEN

New York Times Magazine

March 16, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/magazine/16supreme-t.html?th&emc=th

Another "Hurricane" ....

Op-Ed Columnist
A Death in Destrehan
By BOB HERBERT

Destrehan, La.
On the afternoon of Oct. 7, 1974, a mob of 200 enraged whites, many of them students, closed in on a bus filled with black students that was trying to pull away from the local high school. The people in the mob were in a high-pitched frenzy. They screamed racial epithets and bombarded the bus with rocks and bottles. The students on the bus were terrified.
When a shot was heard, the kids on the bus dived for cover. But it was a 13-year-old white boy standing near the bus, not far from his mother, who toppled to the ground with a bullet wound in his head. The boy, a freshman named Timothy Weber, died a few hours later.
That single shot in this rural town about 25 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans set in motion a tale of appalling injustice that has lasted to the present day.
Destrehan was in turmoil in 1974 over school integration. The Supreme Court’s historic desegregation ruling was already 20 years old — time enough, the courts said, for Destrehan and the surrounding area to comply. But the Ku Klux Klan was still welcome in Destrehan in those days, and David Duke, its one-time imperial wizard, was an admired figure. White families in the region wanted no part of integration.
When black students were admitted to Destrehan High, they were greeted with taunts, various forms of humiliation and violence. Some of the black students fought back, and in the period leading up to the shooting there had been racial fights at a football game and inside the school.
While the Weber boy was being taken to a hospital, authorities ordered the black students off the bus and searched each one. The bus was also thoroughly searched. No weapon was found, and there was no evidence to indicate that the shot had come from the bus. The bus driver insisted it had not come from the bus, but from someone firing at the bus.
One of the black youngsters, a 16-year-old named Gary Tyler, was arrested for disturbing the peace after he talked back to a sheriff’s deputy — one of the few deputies in St. Charles Parish who was black. It may have been young Tyler’s impudence that doomed him. He was branded on the spot as the designated killer.
(Later, at a trial, the deputy, Nelson Coleman, was asked whose peace had been disturbed by Mr. Tyler’s comments. “Mine,” he replied.)
Matters moved amazingly fast after the shooting. Racial tension gave way to racial hysteria. A white boy had been killed and some black had to pay. Mr. Tyler, as good a black as any, was taken to a sheriff’s substation where he was beaten unmercifully amid shouted commands that he confess. He would not.
It didn’t matter. In just a little over a year he would be tried, convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death by electrocution.
The efficiency of the process was chilling. Evidence began to miraculously appear. Investigators “found” a .45-caliber pistol. Never mind that there were no fingerprints on it and it turned out to have been stolen from a firing range used by the sheriff’s deputies. (Or that it subsequently disappeared as conveniently as it was found.) The authorities said they found the gun on the bus, despite the fact that the initial search had turned up nothing.
The authorities found witnesses who said that Mr. Tyler had been the gunman. Never mind that the main witness, a former girlfriend of Mr. Tyler’s, was a troubled youngster who had been under the care of a psychiatrist and had a history of reporting phony crimes to the police, including a false report of a kidnapping. She and every other witness who fingered Mr. Tyler would later recant, charging that they had been terrorized into testifying falsely by the police.
A sworn affidavit from Larry Dabney, who was seated by Mr. Tyler on the bus, was typical. He said his treatment by the police was the “scariest thing” he’d ever experienced. “They didn’t even ask me what I saw,” he said. “They told me flat out that I was going to be their key witness. ... They told me I was going to testify that I saw Gary with a gun right after I heard the shot and that a few minutes later I had seen him hide it in a slit in the seat. That was not true. I didn’t see Gary or anybody else in that bus with a gun.”
Mr. Tyler was spared electrocution when the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s death penalty unconstitutional. But in many ways he has in fact paid with his life. He’ll turn 50 this year in the state penitentiary at Angola, where he is serving out his sentence of life without parole for the murder of Timothy Weber.

A REAL Candidate!

Just in case anyone out there is unsatisfied with constantly voting for the lesser evil candidate, ..... You can now vote for a great candidate! Unfortunately, its just for Time Magazine's Person of the Year and not for president, but enjoy voting anyway. Vote now at the link below. Hugo Chavez is currently leading with 33%. Let's give him some comfort room, hey? Lets get him the ten million votes he asked for! ;-)

Viva La Revolucion!

http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2006/walkup/