I started posting on HowieinSeattle in 11/04, following progressive American politics in the spirit of Howard Dean's effort to "Take Our Country Back." I decided to follow my heart and posted on seattleforbarackobama from 2/07 to 11/08.--"Howie Martin is the Abe Linkin' of progressive Seattle."--Michael Hood.
Showing posts with label shirley sherrod. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shirley sherrod. Show all posts
Former Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod has recorded a get-out-the-vote PSA for the NAACP, expected to air on American Urban Radio Networks and some of its 300 AURN affiliates.
"The outcome is critical for our community," Sherrod says in the ad, which makes no reference to her firing by the Obama administration, which later apologized.
The ad is part of a turnout push by the organization that also includes a PSA from the actor Blair Underwood and a new portal for making GOTV phone calls.
"The upcoming midterm elections will determine the course of our nation just as much as the 2008 elections did," said NAACP president and CEO Benjamin Jealous in a statement.
> Today on MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthewstried to debateSalon’s Joan Walsh and former Gov. Howard Dean that Andrew Breitbart’s version of the controversial Shirley Sherrod speech was completely unedited. Considering there were about 35 minutes missing from that tape, this was wrong for obvious reasons. But if you caught the 7PM rerun, you wouldn’t have seen that, because Hardball retaped the segment, this time with Matthews admitting the Breitbart version was incomplete. MORE..with the video in question.
* Is "race" the problem? The emerging media consensus this morning on the Shirley Sherrod mess is that it proves race remains a "stumbling block" for Obama. Few, however, seem willing to explain why this is the case, or who it is that's trying to ensure that race continues to trip up the president.
But Eugene Robinson cuts through the B.S. and spells out what's really going on here, arguing that the Sherrod tale "has fully exposed the right-wing campaign to use racial fear to destroy Obama's presidency."
"A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites," Robinson writes.
(SNIP)
* Is "partisan media" the problem? Also: You'll be hearing a lot of people blaming "partisan" media on both sides for the current state of affairs. Here, for instance, is Politico's Jim VandeHei:
"It speaks to a much broader problem in the media-activist industrial complex, if you will, and I think it's a problem that's going to get worse: There's been this proliferation of partisan media -- whether it's MSNBC and Fox at night, or it's Breitbart on the right or Huffington Post on the left -- there's just a huge incentive for people to engage in real tough combat, and to overreact."
This strikes me as a false equivalence. I think it's fair to ask folks wringing their hands about "partisan media" to take a stand on whether MSNBC and HuffPo are even remotely comparable to Breitbart and Fox in their willingness to cook the facts and engage in full blown political crusades. The problem is not "partisan media." It's Breitbart and Fox. Period. MORE...
In my interview coming up on "GMA," Shirley Sherrod says that she’s not ready to accept Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s job offer. She wants to hear more from the Secretary and his boss – President Obama.
“I can’t say that the President is fully behind me,” Sherrod told me. “I would hope that he is…I would love to talk to him.”
Sherrod wants to be convinced that the President and his whole team are fully committed to fighting discrimination against African American farmers.
Fox News has run with a few different stories this year that they really pushed all on their own. They weren't mainstream news stories -- they weren't even news, really. They were Fox agenda items, all following a very, very similar narrative. There was the Van Jones controversy, with Fox morphing the president's renewable-energy policy expert into an ex-con who served time after the Rodney King race riots -- not true. The other great Fox News crusade of the past year was against ACORN, an almost all-minority community organizing group which Fox characterized as stealing taxpayer money and an election. More recently, Fox News has crusaded against the New Black Panther Party, after video surfaced of two wackjob blacks at a polling station during the 2008 election. The Bush Justice Department investigated and found that the wackjobs hadn't intimidated voters that day, and Fox News has continued running the same footage over and over and over again.
The message? They're coming for you, white people. They're coming for you. Black people are coming for you, to take what's yours. MORE...
“It's always been a bit of a conundrum reconciling Obama the campaigner and Obama the president,” said liberal blogger John Aravosis. “The former was a maverick, the latter tries far too hard not to rock the boat.”
“The administration has enabled the Republicans, and all their political opponents, including conservative Democrats. far too often. They didn't pass a big enough stimulus because the Republicans objected. They didn't push for the public option because the Republicans, and conservative Democrats, objected. They didn't go for a full repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell because Republican appointee Secretary [Robert] Gates objected.”
Added Aravosis: “In politics, yes, sometimes you have to cut your losses and dismiss employees who get involved in too-high-profile a scandal, regardless of the merits. But far too often, President Obama seems to cut his losses, on personnel and policy, whenever the Republicans say boo. I have no idea why he doesn't show more backbone, but a lot of Obama supporters, myself included, wish he would.” MORE...
Just amazing. The NAACP, in its statement just now, says it has reviewed the full tape and admits that they were "snookered" by Breitbart and Fox News into believing that Sherrod had withheld help from the white farmer for racial reasons. MORE...
Howie P.S.: Full video and commentary from TPMMuckraker of Sherrod talking to the Coffee County NAACP here.
Ben Smith, with audio (00:31):
