Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting posts a mini-critique of a few items covered (or not covered) by the media in the preceding week. Here is the latest edition:
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—:
Ten years ago today, the world changed. At the time, we just didn't know it yet.
Ten years ago today, in a baffling and overtly political 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court decided that the only way to protect the equal voting rights of the people of Florida was to stop counting their votes--but only in this particular instance and no other, because they only wanted the votes to stop being counted when George W Bush was ahead.
The Bush legacy is one written in the red ink of debt, greed and death. An occupation of the nation hosting that did attack us, botched from an overweening desire to wage a preemptive war against a country that did not. Thousands of American lives and potentially hundreds of thousands of native lives lost in the process. Torture prisons in the name of national security. Warrantless wiretapping and other forms of surveillance and entrapment against United States citizens and nonviolent peace groups.
Not that the nation was just morally bankrupt: George W Bush did a number on our nation's fiscal health as well, with massive transfers of its wealth into the hands of those who needed the least help, and permission for private entities to loot the land and natural resources of this nation with no return to its taxpayers. And ten years later, virtually nobody has paid the price.
Many progressives--myself included—felt that the Bush years should have been a national nightmare that we would just wake up from. That the immoral, absurd and illegal practices of those times were just a mere interregnum permitted by the ascension of a Manichean president operating during a time of national crisis, and that once he was out of office, we would instinctively revert to the comparative sanity we had under Bill Clinton. But we haven't yet, and it's likely that without systemic structural change, we never will.
Tweet of the Day
.@KeaneBhatt @JohnCassidy A radical is a liberal who's been mugged by Jamie Dimon.
— @billmon1
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: CRapnibus procedure explained. Is Elizabeth Warren just doing what Ted Cruz did? The argument that allowing bigger donations to parties is a good thing. Allowing Native Americans to grow & sell marijuana on reservations. Torture accountability is for those who didn't do it. Turns out the more wolves ranchers kill, the more livestock they lose. A member of the Open Carry Tarrant County gang allegedly flipped her switch and killed her family. Catching up on the state of filibuster reform thinking among Senate Republicans.
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