[Guest post by DRJ]
Lesson #1 in That Teachable Moment is brought to you by Jesse Washington, the AP’s “Race and Ethnicity” reporter (emphasis supplied):
“Mostly, racial conflicts fade out without any consultation, let alone resolution. Imagine the widow of Sean Bell meeting with the New York police officers who shot her husband, or the black teens in Jena, La., talking to the white schoolmate they attacked.
That made the White House meeting even more remarkable — “revolutionary and potentially healing, a peace pipe for modern times,” wrote the right-leaning columnist Kathleen Parker.
“When future archaeologists excavate our history, they will doubtless marvel at the symbolism of that simple gesture,” she wrote.
It probably never would have happened had Obama not criticized Crowley, a mistake that demanded damage control.“
To some in the media, even Obama’s mistakes turn to gold. The reporter seems to view Obama bringing people together as the best path to racial healing, but I give more credit to this afterthought:
“Earlier, Crowley and Gates talked after they crossed paths while separately touring the White House with their relatives.
They continued their tour as one large group.”
– DRJ
[Guest post by DRJ]
These internet tubes can be confusing for politicians. Take, for example, the case of the Minnesota Democrats who linked to a video of a cursing Chinese woman instead of Tim Pawlenty:
“The party on Thursday recalled a statement criticizing Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty because it mistakenly linked to a profane YouTube video of an elderly Chinese woman repeating obscenities.
Andrew O’Leary, executive director of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Democratic Party is known in Minnesota, says the link was provided by an outside researcher.”
There’s also Kay Bailey Hutchison, a candidate against Rick Perry in the Texas Governor GOP primary, who has cut ties with an outside firm that placed over 2,200 “hidden phrases” on her campaign website:
“On Thursday, after the American-Statesman asked about the phrases, viewable only by unearthing the site’s source code, Hutchison’s campaign removed one phrase—”rick perry gay”— which had appeared twice.
Aides said all the phrases were computer-generated based on terms that computer users searched for who also searched under Rick Perry, Kay Bailey Hutchison or Texas or a combination of the phrases. They said the many phrases were appropriately intended to help target online banner advertising for Hutchison.
Several Internet experts said the placement of hidden text amounted to black-hat tactics generally looked down upon and in violation of Google’s quality guidelines for sites.”
The article reports that Google and Yahoo blocked Hutchison’s website, www.standbykay.com, because the hidden phrases are considered webspam.
– DRJ
[Guest post by DRJ]
A don’t-miss article by Andrew McCarthy on why Obama’s birth certificate matters (it’s not because he was born in Kenya), in which McCarthy concludes:
“There’s speculation out there from the former CIA officer Larry Johnson — who is no right-winger and is convinced the president was born in Hawaii — that the full state records would probably show Obama was adopted by the Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro and became formally known as “Barry Soetoro.” Obama may have wanted that suppressed for a host of reasons: issues about his citizenship, questions about his name (it’s been claimed that Obama represented in his application to the Illinois bar that he had never been known by any name other than Barack Obama), and the undermining of his (false) claim of remoteness from Islam. Is that true? I don’t know and neither do you.
But we should know. The point has little to do with whether Obama was born in Hawaii. I’m quite confident that he was. The issue is: What is the true personal history of the man who has been sold to us based on nothing but his personal history? On that issue, Obama has demonstrated himself to be an unreliable source and, sadly, we can’t trust the media to get to the bottom of it. What’s wrong with saying, to a president who promised unprecedented “transparency”: Give us all the raw data and we’ll figure it out for ourselves?”
He also discusses how the media views its job as covering for Obama instead of covering Obama.
– DRJ
UPDATE BY PATTERICO: I don’t think I’d cite Scary Larry Johnson for anything.
Sometime last night, this blog passed 10,000,000 visits since SiteMeter started measuring the count back in December 2003.
If you’re having deja vu, that’s because we reached 10 million page views last July. Every time a page is accessed or refreshed, that’s a page view. A visit (as I understand the term) is when a user accesses one or more pages during the course of a single half hour. If you visit 12 times over one hour, that’s 12 page views and 2 visits.
Anyway, it’s a neat little milestone. As always, thanks for reading.
We’re going out to dinner tonight. My response to Radley Balko’s latest mendacious attack on me will have to wait until tomorrow. For now, suffice it to say that his commitment to accuracy is now more in doubt than ever.
[Guest post by DRJ]
Just a day after the one-week-old Cash-for-Clunkers program was suspended, the House approved $2 billion more in funding to be paid from economic stimulus monies approved earlier this year. In order to gain the support of House Republicans, the Democrats reportedly agreed to “provisions for government auditors to make sure the money was being spent as intended.”
Everything needs to be done yesterday with this Congress and the Obama Administration. Even the better programs seem to be managed in an impulsive, haphazard and chaotic fashion. Worst of all, every solution involves spending millions, billions or trillions of taxpayers’ current (and future) dollars.
UPDATE: More on this government-created chaos.
– DRJ
