Archive for the ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ Category

Covid incompetence

Posted: May 26, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf is my nominee for the covid incompetence award.

Although other state leaders have gotten more publicity for their ill-conceived plans, Wolf has been playing nanny to millions of Pennsylvanians, including me.

He and his bureaucrats created an amazingly complicated plan for reopening the state based on red, yellow, and green designations. The unscientific basis is that a county can plan to open or go to yellow status if its covid cases remain at 50 per day for two weeks. If the county still has less than 50 cases, it can reopen. If a country has more than 50 cases, it is red and cannot open.

Wolf couldn’t even remember where the plan came from.

The governor also condemned local officials and businesses as “cowardly” if they move to reopen businesses without state authorization and threatened to withhold federal relief for counties that violate his stay-at-home order.

Moreover, Wolf has told Pennsylvania residents to remain in their shelters and not go to the open beaches in nearby New Jersey. “There are people there who aren’t wearing masks, and you’re putting yourself at risk. I wouldn’t do that, I haven’t done that, and I’m not sure why the governors of Maryland and New Jersey have opened their beaches, but they have,” he said.

But there’s more. Statewide, 3,234 coronavirus deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities, according to the health department. Those deaths represent 66 percent of the state’s coronavirus fatalities.

That means that Wolf has locked down all of Pennsylvania when he needed to do a better job of keeping the older population of the state safe.

Wolf and Health Secretary Rachel Levine, a transsexual pediatrician, decided to get to the bottom of the issue. They forced all such institutions to provide data on what happened. The state got the data all messed up, including naming one evildoer with more than 100 cases. The facility had only seven patients.

Moreover, Levine wasn’t taking any chances with her mother, moving her to a hotel rather than staying in a long-term care facility. Republicans have called for Levine’s resignation.

The GOP has made Wolf the center of its campaign strategy to battle Democrats in the upcoming national election. Even some Democrats—as President Trump did—have called for Wolf to open up the state more quickly. One Democratic lawmaker from suburban Philadelphia wrote a letter saying residents in her district “have not yet seen evidence that your administration recognizes and sympathizes with the added physical, emotional, and financial suffering they are facing as a result of our prolonged stay-at-home conditions.”

I realize that others may find their governor thoroughly lacking in the ability to run a state. But my guy, Tom Wolf, has got to be near the bottom of the class in the country.

Jackson’s Party Trumps His Faith

Posted: May 23, 2020 by julietteochieng in Always look at the bright side of Trump, Uncomfortable Truths
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Old News

by baldilocks

24 And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works:

25 Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.

— Hebrews 10:24-25

The Reverend [sic] Jesse Jackson has other ideas.

Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. is calling on people, especially religious leaders, not to follow through on President Donald Trump’s demand [sic] for churches and houses of worship to start reopening over Memorial Day weekend.

“To go to church or Sunday mass is an act of defiance, not an act of worship,” Jackson told WTOP’s Ken Duffy.

Trump on Friday asked governors to allow the reopening of places of worship, calling them “essential” and to “open them right now.”

The president also threatened state leaders that if they don’t follow through on his demand, he will “override the governors.”

Jackson, founder of the civil rights nonprofit Rainbow/PUSH coalition, believes that attendees who want to go out and worship should stay home until the threat of COVID-19 is over.

Jackson called on religious leaders and worshippers to “lead the way” and continue to obey coronavirus restrictions and social distancing measures.

“The virus does not have religion,” Jackson said. “It has no regard for your situation.”

First of all, the president isn’t giving orders to houses of worship. He is demanding that governors cease from standing in the way of corporate worship and that they come into alignment with the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

And, as mentioned in the Book of Hebrews, part of the free exercise of Christianity involves the assembling together of the faithful. This is simple.

Some questions I would ask Jackson if I thought he had a brain cell in his head that wasn’t devoted to enriching himself.

Do you believe that the God of the Bible is all powerful?
Do you believe that He is a healer and a protector if we ask it of him?
Do you believe the God rewards obedience to His Word?
Do you believe that God is more powerful than viruses?
What makes defiance and worship mutually exclusive?
If your governor outlawed Christianity, would you stop being a Christian?

I could go on, but my point is that Jackson is not a man of the Christian cloth and hasn’t been for a very long time – if he ever was one.

He’s just following orders dispensed from his Organized Left Puppet Masters.

Me in 2015:

Martin Luther King, Jr. was the prototype for the Black Leader concept, though not an epitome of it; other actual black leaders like Harriet Tubman or Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X were leaders organic to black populations/communities.

MLK certainly had rhetorical and financial support from outside of his community, but he didn’t start out that way.

(snip)

[T]he two nationally most well-known Black LeadersTM in this country are the Reverends [sic] Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and I contend that both are created personae, totally supported and publicized by the Organized Left.

A better label for the two? Community Organizers. You’ve heard of those before, have you not?

Also me a year earlier:

Sharpton has been a hilariously awful commentator for MSNBC for a bit. But even before that, MSNBC, CNN and even Fox News had been sticking microphones under him and other “civil rights leaders” as the go-to guys–and sometimes girls–as if they were the go-betweens for “the black community” and the rest of America.

“Civil rights leaders” almost never just spontaneously come to the fore anymore; they are created. The rise in the fortunes — literally and figuratively — of Sharpton should be proof of this. (And, as it turns out, Sharpton has always hidden backers.)

Even the concept of a civil rights leader is a created one. But, ‘agitator’ is better because it is more descriptive. The word makes me think of that part inside your washing machine — the constant spinning and the noise-making. And that’s where the comparison ends.

No one will be made clean by these men.

There have always been fake pastors, but Jackson is the modern American forerunner — and Sharpton is his “son” — selling fear instead of faith. But he’s old now and irrelevant.

Beware of the fear-pastors who are not so old.

Go to church/synagogue/mosque. Or don’t. But it is not your governor’s place to keep you from it. Don’t forget that.

Get some free exercise.

(Thanks to “Carlos Osweda.”)

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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The golden age of journalism wasn’t so golden

Posted: May 19, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

As it has become increasingly apparent that the media have become political partisans, I started to wonder how neutral the press was during the more than two decades I worked as a reporter.

The more I thought about it, the more I discovered that the media back in the good old days might not have been as overtly political as today, but slanted stories and opinions often made it into the news.

From 1974 to 1995, I worked at the Associated Press, Newsweek, and ABC News in Chicago, Washington, Beirut, Cairo, Rome, and New York. I worked with Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings, Hugh Downs, and many other well-known journalists. I competed against others, including Thomas Friedman, E.J. Dionne, David Ignatius, and many others.

Here’s what I recall about politics in the news back then. During my time in Washington, I watched as the nation’s press eviscerated Jimmy Carter and his team. Carter came from outside the swamp and didn’t fit into Washington culture. Neither did his top aides.

I don’t think Carter was a particularly good president, but the media took him to task on almost everything he tried. I can count on one hand, however, the number of former colleagues who voted for a Republican in the past 40 years.

Almost every reporter during the Iran hostage crisis thought Ayatollah Khomeini had to be better than the shah. How wrong we were!

In Beirut, almost every journalist backed the Palestinians, including me. Jennings had spent much of his early years in the Middle East and had a distinctly Arab tilt. Ignatius did some good work in the Middle East but has since gone off the rails with his analyses.

In Cairo, many journalists supported the peace efforts of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. I wasn’t one of them, but Sadat had an incredibly positive press in the United States. The opposite was true in many Arab states and Europe. Friedman had no understanding of the assassination of Sadat when he covered the story in 1981.

In Rome, I saw Dionne completely botch the story behind the plot to kill Pope John Paul II.

Just as I arrived in the United States in 1986 to work with ABC’s 20/20, Roone Arledge, a legend in television circles, had killed for the program on the sexual exploits of JFK when he was in the White House. Arledge didn’t want to upset the Kennedy clan and one of his top aides who worked with the family.

At 20/20, it was clear that Walters had a distinctly liberal bent, but she didn’t stand in the way of opposing viewpoints. Downs was just an incredibly decent human being.

Not too long after I arrived at the program, I included an interview with Pat Buchanan. I was accosted by a fellow producer who threatened that she would make sure people wouldn’t work with me if I ever had another conservative on the program.

Although the recollections here are merely anecdotal, they underline the powerful, albeit subtle, ways in which the media set an agenda back in the golden years. The political bias may not have been so apparent and so constant, but it was there. I am the first to admit that my biases probably made their way into my stories.

After I left the mainstream media, I wrote a column for The Washington Times for nearly three years until 2015. My former colleagues berated the conservative tone of the columns, including one who described me as “dumb as a boulder.” I was prevented from sharing my columns on a Facebook page for former ABC employees.

Today, I find that nearly all of my former colleagues have a decidedly liberal or leftist viewpoint.

In fact, a large group of ABC News retirees publicly criticized Trump over his attacks on the press. An Obama organizer and former ABC News producer started the petition. See  https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/25/trump-inciting-violence-nearly-retired-journalists-condemn-presidents-un-american-attacks-press/

I wonder if these points of view crept into their news coverage back in the day. I think they probably did.

Fear, loathing, and Hunter Thompson

Posted: May 12, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

Fifty years ago, Hunter S. Thompson became the father of Gonzo journalism, an irreverent brand of reporting that influenced many young writers, including me. 

Thompson and artist Ralph Steadman “covered” the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s, a small, progressive magazine.

Thompson, who grew up in Louisville and hated it, described the focus of the story as “the vicious-drunk Southern bourbon horse-shit mentality that surrounds the Derby than in the Derby itself.”

In an excellent article in Quillette, author David Wills described Thompson’s approach of Gonzo, a reference to a song he played regularly on the 1968 campaign trail:

“He tended to insert himself into the prose as observer and participant, embark on weird and irrelevant digressions, recount conversations and events that probably never happened, discard any pretense of objectivity, lurch erratically in and out of hyperbole and paranoia, and dust his prose with a litany of stylistic quirks and a peculiar lexis that included words like ‘atavistic,’ ‘swine,’ ‘savage,’ and ‘doomed.’ It was a subjective, chaotic, and messy approach to journalism.”

Wills captured the essence of the Derby article:

“The first half recounts Thompson’s arrival in Kentucky, a prank played on a gullible racist at the airport, and then his meeting with Steadman. The second half is a disjointed but somehow intensely personal account of a day spent staggering around the Derby in an inebriated state, terrifying attendees, and spraying a restaurant full of patrons with mace. Thompson and Steadman didn’t bother to actually watch the race they had been sent to cover…. It was a highly unusual piece of writing that trashed the conventions of traditional reporting in favor of a freewheeling rock ‘n’ roll antagonism. It was funny but aggressive, satirical and cruel, and only loosely factual. It was neither exactly journalism nor exactly fiction.” See https://quillette.com/2020/05/02/decadence-and-depravity-in-louisville-kentucky/

As a young journalist, I loved that Thompson did everything I was told NOT to do. His articles were like the Playboy and pack of Old Gold cigarettes you kept hidden from your parents as a teenager. I first read Thompson in Rolling Stone, where he offered some of his most famous prose, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1971 and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1972. 

In Las Vegas, Thompson was investigating the killing of journalist Ruben Salazar, who died covering an antiwar protest in Los Angeles. On a side trip, Thompson and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta arrived in Sin City, where they indulged in psychedelics, an activity they repeated when they returned a month later to cover a conference on the nation’s drug problem. Eventually, Thompson wrote about drugs in the United States, which became an epitaph for the 1960s. 

Heavily inspired by J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, it offers a wild and funny story of sports journalist Raoul Duke, Thompson alter-ego, and his attorney running amok in Las Vegas.

Although many people think the 1972 campaign book is his best—and it was quite good at the time—Vegas was Thompson’s masterpiece. 

From the mid-seventies onward, however, his output became progressively weaker as Thompson turned to cocaine. As Wills put it: “The one-man literary genre was soon washed up, sold out, and left to reflect upon chances missed. Thompson had earned his place in the literary canon with staggering innovations in form, but he burned out and stopped pushing…. [W]hen a great writer can no longer write, and when even the possibility of turning out another great book no longer exists, there is little else to do.”

Thompson committed suicide in 2005. He was 67, a year younger than I am now. Per his wishes, Thompson’s ashes were fired out of a cannon in a ceremony funded by his friend Johnny Depp and attended by friends, including then-Senator John Kerry and Jack Nicholson. 

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