Laura Curtis

In my Examiner post commenting on the La. 3rd District race, I incorrectly stated that Hunt Downer had supported the Stelly tax. In fact, his campaign just emailed me to let me know I was wrong about that. He voted against it. I’ve asked my editor at the Examiner to update the article with my correction and apology, but in the meantime, let me say here (where I can post the correction immediately myself) that I was wrong.

Hunt Downer voted against the Stelly tax, and a year after its passage, even proposed its repeal.

I am sorry for the error.

The men whose photo launched the invaluable website, HonestReporting.com -

The blatant media bias against Israel is a disgrace, and it’s a full-time job for quite a few people to push back against it. While few people would say Israel is without any fault, the “innocent Palestinian victim” narrative is three lies for the price of one. Is fair, honest reporting really too much to ask?

Another copyright troll is looking to sue you for the offense of quoting from and linking to their websites.

Few except blatant thieves like Michael Moore take the stance that people have the right to unfairly use copyrighted material.  But Righthaven, LLC is suing bloggers who are clearly using material within the bounds of Fair Use.  It’s a bullying tactic – sue for a huge amount, and settle for a few thousand, because that’s cheaper than going to court even if you win.  So far, Righthaven is suing on behalf of the Stephens Media Group and WEHCO Media which own more than 60 newspapers between them.  So if you’ve excerpted and linked to articles from those papers, you could be slapped with a lawsuit.

Clayton Cramer provided a list for use with the Firefox Blocksite plugin that you can use to ensure you don’t accidentally visit – and subsequently link to – any of the Stephens Media Group sites.  I’ve updated the list to include WEHCO, so the complete block list as of 8/31/2010 is in this text file for your convenience:

blocksites.txt

Or make your own text file block list of the following sites so you don’t, as Cramer put it, “unintentionally visit one of the Evil Empire’s websites.”  You might also want to scour your blog’s archives clean of quotes and links to these sites.

[Read more...]

The NYT actually wrote this.  It passed their much-vaunted layers of editors and fact checkers, and evidently no one thought it unusual.  They paid for the ink and paper and the pixels to print it on.  And all I can do is sit here, dumbfounded, and say, Seriously?  Seriously??

But many of Mr. DeLay’s actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.

I cannot imagine what the hell goes on in these people’s minds.  And really, I’m not sure I want to know.  via Volokh.

It was already pretty clear from his body of work that most liberal’s favorite historian, Howard Zinn, was a far leftist, and even a “small c” communist.  Now we can officially uppercase that C – he was a member of the Communist Party. Now imagine if a historian were exposed as, say, a Bircher. (An organization which, while wacky – and I say that as one who was briefly a member, back when they mostly just hated the United Nations – is not responsible for the death of 100 million people, more or less.) How would liberals respond to such a scenario? You think they’d scour college curriculums clean of his work? Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is standard reading for a lot of colleges. His work has been featured on the History Channel and even packaged for the K-12 crowd.

Stacy McCain has more, including screenshots.

Here’s an interesting story about Carl Cameron – he was covering the Nutroots Nation event and while he was there, he allegedly agreed with a Kossack on several tea-party related issues and helped promote the lie that Fox News was responsible for Shirley Sherrod’s firing.

“The Sherrod case is an example of some at Fox News trying to have more influence than it probably should,” Cameron said.

The Daily Beast tries to pass off a lie that the Washington Post, which routinely smears the right, didn’t try to pass off:

But for all the chatter — some of it from Sherrod herself — that she was done in by Fox News, the network didn’t touch the story until her forced resignation was made public Monday evening, with the exception of brief comments by O’Reilly. After a news meeting Monday afternoon, an e-mail directive was sent to the news staff in which Fox Senior Vice President Michael Clemente said: “Let’s take our time and get the facts straight on this story. Can we get confirmation and comments from Sherrod before going on-air. Let’s make sure we do this right.”

But what really happened?  Way down in paragraph nine the Beast accuses Cameron of being a liar when he denied the crux of the story:

Cameron told The Daily Beast Thursday night that this report takes his remarks out of context and that he was actually defending the integrity of Fox’s news division. He insisted this reporter did not hear the entire discussion, even though it began immediately after this reporter’s interview with Daily Kos blogger Atkins had concluded.

So it’s a he said/he said.  Hmmm… whom to trust? Cameron, who gave us reasonably fair election coverage on the only non-leftist network available?  Or The Daily Beast, which includes in this very story several half-truths? (“Heavily edited video” – cropping the end off is hardly “heavily edited,” and inaccurate representation of Sharon Angle’s views.)   Cameron does seem to lean left – though not as far as Shep Smith.  Hot Air commenters provide several examples I’d forgotten about.  But given the hit the leftist press is taking for Journolist, I would not be surprised if Journolist 2.0 includes a few threads on how to “get” some Fox News reporters as payback.  Allegations like this would seem to be a good start on sowing discord IF you believe that all the right wants is an echo chamber instead of fair coverage.  Pure speculation, of course.

Verdict: I’ll need a lot more than the word of some Kossack and the Daily Beast before I believe that Cameron is stupid enough to trash his employer at at leftist convention.  And I’m a lot more concerned with whether Cameron covers stories fairly than I am with his personal beliefs.

This ought to be the last word on Shirley Sherrod:

In both the full video and a 3 minute excerpt I produced, Sherrod labels the entire Republican Party racist, claiming they simply can’t stand to see a black man in the White House. She also characterizes totally legitimate political opposition to ObamaCare from average citizens as mean and ultimately racist in the end. Had some previous Bush appointee called the Democrat Party a bunch of race-baiting hucksters, or poverty pimps – putting black citizens in that camp, too – there is no way said official would be able to keep their position. Yet, that is precisely what Sherrod did, only it was Republicans and her political opponents she so openly smeared.

The standards are ugliness, ignorance and divisiveness. There should be absolutely no doubt that those are the standards to which a Bush appointee would be held. I see no valid reason to not hold Sherrod to the very same standards, as well.

Unfortunately, it won’t be.  The new narrative will be that Breitbart willfully cropped the video (he didn’t, but that’s certainly a tactic the left uses early and often as recently evidenced by the deceptively edited “tea party is racist” video), that conservatives rushed to judgment (some did, but by no means all), and that Sherrod is the innocent victim of the eeevil mean teabaggers (she isn’t.)  And I seriously doubt the right has the will to oppose the new narrative enough to keep it from taking hold.

Added: yep, I’m slow getting through my RSS feeds today, but – right on time… Breitbart is fighting the good fight, though.

President Obama and every New Orleanian’s favorite government agency, the Corps of Engineers, need some remedial Sesame Street on the concepts of inside/outside.  Things Obama does not try to keep out:

• Illegal aliens
• Oil from our shoreline
• Asian carp

Just as in Arizona, states are having to sue the federal government to try to get it to do its job.

“President Obama and the Army Corps of Engineers have failed to fight Asian carp aggressively,” said Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, a Republican candidate for governor. “Asian carp will kill jobs and ruin our way of life. We cannot afford more bureaucratic delays — emergency action must be taken to protect the Great Lakes.”

Oh, and the headline?  Hey, the left cries “racist” all the time.  I just figured I’d try it on and see how it feels.