Voice of Freedom’s Weblog

Reporting on a New Orleans campaign event at which Sen. John McCain was interrupted by a voter’s question about Pastor John Hagee,” CNN’s Dana Bash aired a clip of Hagee — who has endorsed McCain — saying of Hurricane Katrina, “What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God.” But Bash did not air the portion of Hagee’s comments in which he reaffirmed his previous assertion that Hurricane Katrina was at least in part the result of “sin” that Hagee identified as “a massive homosexual rally.” CNN’s John Roberts and Kyra Phillips similarly noted that Hagee said that “Katrina was God’s punishment for sinful behavior in New Orleans” .

September 18, 2006, edition of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air

HAGEE: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

(If it’s God doing this, I think we should send a gay pride parade to those very dry area’s in Africa so some FOOD will grow there again!   Think of it, God and the Gay Pride Parade save the starving children in Africa!  What say you Hagee?  You can still say its God sending the flooding, but this time it will be a good thing!)

Okay, God was punishing New Orleans for planning to have a gay pride parade, what on earth did Illinois do last week to deserve that 5.2 earthquake? I read…According to Anagram Commodity Research Crude oil rebounded due to concern that a 5.2-magnitude earthquake in Illinois affected refinery operations. So, I guess God is in favor of oil and “BIG OIL” being sold “sky” high and all us little sinners getting the short end of a dry “dipstick”…har, funny man that God.

How about Virginia what did they do to have God sling down three tornadoes, punishing over 200 with injuries and leaving many more homeless? (not really a hurricane, but since God controls the heavens…)

The governor has declared Bremer, Blackhawk and Louisa Counties in eastern Iowa state disaster areas due to flooding this week. What horrible sins did Iowa commit? (flooding? doesn’t that come from rain from the heavens…)

(I think I know………..those areas are conservative strongholds, lol.  Keep your eyes on the skys Repubs!)

Well Mr Hagee…Mr. McCain, who welcomes the endorsement of Mr. Hagee, what say you both?

Natural disasters or God’s wrath? Don’t be coy, tell us what you really think!

Consider the following pronouncements by Hagee, the man who McCain has proudly introduced as an ally and who has endorsed McCain.

On Jews:

It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day.

And:

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for his chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings he had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come.

On gays:

All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

Hagee, of course, is also a virulent anti-Catholic, who has suggested that the pope is the anti-Christ, and that Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism was the result of being educated at a Catholic school.

But last week, once McCain assured reporters that, just because Hagee was endorsing him, it didn’t mean he agreed with everything Hagee said, the mainstream media essentially let the matter drop.

No? Really? Wonder why? They sure didn’t drop it in Obama’s case did they?

McCain has not rejected the support of Hagee, and has said nothing about Hagee’s claims that American foreign policy towards Palestine is causing God to attack the United States with terrorists.

Hagee called the Catholic religion ‘The Great Whore,’ the ‘apostate church,’ the ‘anti-Christ’ and a ‘false cult system’? McCain cannot ignore Hagee’s lies any more than he can tolerate his bigotry.

Of course, being a former Baptist, I understand where ole Hagee is coming from.  Hellfire and brimstone, and the Apocalypse are what people like Hagee long for and lust after.

I’m certain though, that people that believe as Hagee does…hell in fact if they believe even a little of what Hagee does….I don’t want them running our country.

Do you McCain?  Do you Believe in Hagee?

Reuters reports that China is considering a food safety law that provides for penalties of up to life imprisonment for people responsible for the production of substandard food. Lesser violations of the law could incur fines, confiscation of income from sales of substandard products, or revocation of licenses. See full article - China food safety law to allow for life in jail.

Now if we did that here, just think of what the corporate world would do to improve the safety of the food they sold the public!!!

Well fellow citizens we don’t have much time left for this election and these bozo’s in the media once again could not commit even one lousy minute to a real issue, like the cost of gas, or Iraq, Afaganistan, or Iran, or our economy. Instead they pondered over lapel pins, and the candidates associations with other people among other NON ISSUES. These are not the things that Americans want to know about, we need to know what these candidates think and will do about Americas real issues.

Im disgusted with the media, if you are too write to ABC and let them know how you feel!

Journalists Slam ABC Debate Tactics

by _NONE

[posted online on April 18, 2008]

In an open letter to ABC, journalists and media analysts condemn the network’s poor handling of the April 16 Democratic presidential debate.

We, the undersigned, deplore the conduct of ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson at the Democratic Presidential debate on April 16. The debate was a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world. This is not the first Democratic or Republican presidential debate to emphasize gotcha questions over real discussion. However, it is, so far, the worst.

For 53 minutes, we heard no question about public policy from either moderator. ABC seemed less interested in provoking serious discussion than in trying to generate cheap shot sound-bites for later rebroadcast. The questions asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos and Mr. Gibson were a disgrace, and the subsequent attempts to justify them by claiming that they reflect citizens’ interest are an insult to the intelligence of those citizens and ABC’s viewers. Many thousands of those viewers have already written to ABC to express their outrage.

The moderators’ occasional later forays into substance were nearly as bad. Mr. Gibson’s claim that the government can raise revenues by cutting capital gains tax is grossly at odds with what taxation experts believe. Both candidates tried, repeatedly, to bring debate back to the real problems faced by ordinary Americans. Neither moderator allowed them to do this.

We’re at a crucial moment in our country’s history, facing war, a terrorism threat, recession, and a range of big domestic challenges. Large majorities of our fellow Americans tell pollsters they’re deeply worried about the country’s direction. In such a context, journalists moderating a debate–who are, after all, entrusted with free public airwaves–have a particular responsibility to push and engage the candidates in serious debate about these matters. Tough, probing questions on these issues clearly serve the public interest. Demands that candidates make pledges about a future no one can predict or excessive emphasis on tangential “character” issues do not. This applies to candidates of both parties.

Neither Mr. Gibson nor Mr. Stephanopoulos lived up to these responsibilities. In the words of Tom Shales of the Washington Post, Mr. Gibson and Mr. Stephanopoulos turned in “shoddy, despicable performances.” As Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher describes it, the debate was a “travesty.” We hope that the public uproar over ABC’s miserable showing will encourage a return to serious journalism in debates between the Democratic and Republican nominees this fall. Anything less would be a betrayal of the basic responsibilities that journalists owe to their public.

Spencer Ackerman, The Washington Independent
Eric Alterman, City University of New York
Dean Baker, The American Prospect Online
Steven Benen, The Carpetbagger Report
Julie Bergman Sender, Balcony Films
Ari Berman, The Nation
Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium
Michael Berube, Crooked Timber, the University of Pennsylvania
Joel Bleifuss, In These Times
Sam Boyd, The American Prospect
Lakshmi Chaudry, In These Times
Joe Conason, Journalist and Author
Brad DeLong, Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal and UC Berkeley
Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly
Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber, George Washington University
James Galbraith, University of Texas at Austin
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University, TPM Cafe
Merrill Goozner (formerly Chicago Tribune)
Ilan Goldenberg, The National Security Network
Robert Greenwald, Brave New Films
Christopher Hayes, The Nation
Don Hazen, Alternet
Michael Kazin, Georgetown University
Ed Kilgore, The Democratic Strategist
Richard Kim, The Nation
Ezra Klein, The American Prospect
Mark Kleiman, UCLA/The Reality Based Community
Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed
Ari Melber, The Nation
Rick Perlstein, Campaign for America’s Future
Katha Pollitt, The Nation
David Roberts, Grist
Thomas Schaller, Columnist, The Baltimore Sun
Mark Schmitt, The New America Foundation
Adele Stan, The Media Consortium
Jonathan Stein, Mother Jones Magazine
Mark Thoma, The Economist’s View
Michael Tomasky, The Guardian
Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks
Tracy Van Slyke, The Media Consortium
Kai Wright, The Root

All Muck is Local: Sex and Lots and Lots of Videotape

For days, Bruce Barclay’s political career hung in the balance. The Republican commissioner of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, had been accused of rape — by a man, no less — and the police were bearing down. Barclay’s lawyer issued a strong denial (”This accusation of rape is ludicrous It will be defended forever and is wrong.”). But it was clear things were looking pretty dicey. Until… vindication! Well, sort of.

On March 31st, police, investigating the allegation of rape by the 20-year old Marshall McCurdy, obtained a warrant to search Barclay’s home. They didn’t find evidence of rape. But they did find videotapes of hundreds of sexual encounters with men that Barclay had filmed on high-tech surveillance cameras. The cameras were hidden inside AM/FM radios, motion detectors and intercom speaker systems, among other places. There was also one at his business office.

The rest of the story.

Thanks to a reader for the update too, who found the clip of a third grader in the class that was interviewed on Good Morning America.

The clip does not make clear that the girl interviewed is also the girl in the original account who was the center of the plot in the first place, she was the girl that allegedly stood on her chair and was disciplined.

Apparently the other girls involved in the plot then decided to er….discipline the teacher!

I’m of the opinion also, if they were going to “throw pies” then there was no need for handcuffs, tape, and a knife!

=====

Dr. Joseph Barrow Jr., Superintendent of the Ware County Schools said today, “To say that we are disappointed in the actions of these students would be an understatement. We could talk about the range of individual opinions from the kids playing “make believe” all the way to the serious plan to do harm. The fact is no one can truly “know” what was in the hearts and minds of these 8, 9, and 10 year olds. However, this is what we do know: Students contrived a plan and brought items (a broken steak knife, a set of toy handcuffs, a long ribbon, two types of tape (black electrical and clear packing) and a crystal paper weight to school. These items, plus the plan outlined by the students, gives us enough reason to suspend seven of the students for the remainder of the school year. Two of the students were suspended for a lesser amount of time due to minimal involvement.

Third-Graders Charged in Plot to Kill Teacher (more…)

Phil Meyer, raising the ante again
SHOWCASE | March 28, 2008 Following is the text of Meyer’s talk on the occasion of a two-day symposium celebrating his retirement as holder of the Knight chair at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

By Philip Meyer
pmeyer@email.unc.edu

Perhaps the most quoted line in Precision Journalism, is this: “They are raising the ante on what it takes to become a journalist.”

I used it to open the third edition, published in 1991. And now I have a confession to make. At the time I wrote it, I could not be certain that it was true.

It was time to raise the ante, sure enough. But the mainstream media were being painfully slow to keep up with the need for better and more skillful journalism. I guess I thought that if I announced that standards were rising, perhaps that might nudge the process along a bit.

An “ante,” of course is what you pay to buy into each hand of a poker game. It ensures that you have a stake, some commitment, before you see your cards. Putting time and money on the table for journalism education is the way that most people in newspapers and broadcasting make their commitment. And now, 17 years after I made that rash claim, the ante really is being raised. This time, I am certain. And technology is the cause. While we were worrying about other things, learning to do journalism got harder.

And it’s going to get harder still. The hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Citizens can do their own hunting and gathering on the Internet. What they need is somebody to add value to that information by processing it – digesting it, organizing it, making it usable.

This is why we still need newspapers – or something like them. Ronald Coase, the British economist, once asked why we need business firms. Why can’t all their activities be coordinated by individuals contracting with one another instead of working in a bureaucratic, command-and-control environment? The answer, he said, is transaction costs. If a manager had to negotiate with a free-lancer for every task, the cost in time would be unbearably high.

Searching for information on the Internet involves something like transaction costs because we have so many varied sources to evaluate. We need somebody we trust to organize them for us. That can be the task of the new journalism.

So far, it seems from my old-guy perspective, new technology has been employed mainly to give us clever new ways to do the hunting, gathering and delivery of information. And I worry that journalism education will spend so much time on the new tools that we’ll short-change our students – and, by extension, society – in the value-added part. Piling up facts and putting them in clever packages isn’t enough. We need to supply the interpretive framework, too.

Traditional journalism goes after events. But behind every event there is a pattern. And behind the pattern there is structure. (This concept is from Peter Senge in his management book, The Fifth Dimension: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.) Citizens, to be enlightened need to know more about public affairs than just the events. They must understand at those higher conceptual levels, the patterns and the structures. Event-centered coverage of public meetings and press conferences won’t do that.

The current Columbia Journalism Review has a good example. Dean Starkman writes that business reporters were so preoccupied with financial performance, strategies, and profiling corporate leaders that they missed, for the most part, the big story of the credit squeeze on the middle class. They saw the events but not the pattern.

In academe, we have a parallel concern. Patterns and structures are what lead us to theory. The social sciences have been chronically short on theory. When I was a first-semester graduate student at this University, I took Alexander Heard’s seminar in the scope and methods of political science. In our conversations, sparked by an amazing list of guest speakers, including Angus Campbell and David Truman, the scarcity of theory was a recurring theme. Without theory, research isn’t cumulative. It just stacks up loosely related facts. Oh yeah, right on point, please go read the entire article!

Personally, I think the ante may have been raised, but someone forgot to notify the journalists!!!

In fact, just check out this news summary of the STATE of the NEWS MEDIA today, it will open your eyes if they are not already open. Following are some excerpts:

Most Covered Topics Across All Media

2007

Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2007

A Limited Domestic Agenda:

In 2007, we learned that many of children’s toys were unsafe as were a dismaying number of food products that needed to be removed from supermarket shelves. A landmark energy bill passed that set new fuel economy standards for the automotive industry for the first time in more than three decades. A heated battle erupted in Congress over a plan to expand health insurance for children.

Yet an examination of the mainstream news agenda in 2007 reveals that a broad range of domestic subjects was given limited attention by the media. And at least in theory, these stories were logistically much easier to report on than the Mideast or North Korea.

The half-dozen broad topic areas that generated the least coverage last year included development and urban sprawl, the legal and court system, religion, transportation, education, and race, gender and sexual identity issues. None of these attracted more than 1% of the coverage over all.

Least Covered Domestic Issues
Percent of Newshole

Topic
Education	1.0%
Transportation	0.8
Religion	0.7
Court/Legal System	0.4
Development/ Sprawl	0.2

These lesser-covered subjects do have something in common. Matters of religion, gender and race relate to the social underpinnings of the culture and the way people feel about their daily lives. Similarly, development, transportation and education relate to institutional underpinnings of daily life. Broadly speaking, they are the bread and butter subjects that most people deal with on a constant basis. Why weren’t these subjects a more significant part of the news diet in 2007?

Topics by Media Sector

Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2007

Top 15 Single-Week Stories, 2007

Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2007

Public Interest vs. Media Coverage.

In my opinion one of the most important charts!

2007

Source: PEJ, A Year in the News, 2007

Date: 29 Mar 2008
Source: The Day [edited]
<http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=1e24fee2-1516-4bd3-a4aa-26ea602b1260>

Disease Deadly To Bats Is Discovered In Connecticut
Officials: White-Nose Syndrome Not Believed to Be Threat To Humans
Brown bats perched inside a cave show the white fungus that seems to
be attacking them and causing a massive die-off. More than 90 percent
of the hibernating bats in 4 caves and mines in New York State have
died since last winter [2006-2007], and wildlife biologists fear a
die-off could occur at sites in Connecticut.
The mysterious disease that’s been killing bats by the thousands in
New York and other states in the Northeast has turned up in
Connecticut, state wildlife officials announced Friday [28 Mar 2008]. (more…)