Posts Tagged ‘media’

Fundraiser Day 4 .11% Sullivan, why you should kick in: A source

Posted: June 4, 2010 by datechguy in media, personal
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As you can see the relative Sullivan number has gone up due to contributions yesterday by a fellow in the press (thank you very much). This highlights a reason why if you are a reporter or a news organization you should considering kicking into the Am I worth have a much as Andrew Sullivan fund.

I’m a source.

If you are a reporter of a local, national or even an international news service you know that you can’t get everywhere or be everywhere. There are times when you have to have a source on the ground.

When you link to and build relationships with a blog or a blogger you have an additional source for first hand information. From Watertown, to Washington, from Danvers to DoraVille I have been present for first hand events.

Kicking in that $50 to help preserve a potential source would seem like a cheap investment to me. If you agree I’d ask you and others in your organization to hit DaTipJar and keep that potential source available.

It’s a lot cheaper than a bureau isn’t it?

Update: Today’s events in Fitchburg are a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Wouldn’t it be easier to kick in to keep me full time and just give a call for some stringer work rather than having to send a full time person out here to sit and wait for hours?

Plus Who can argue with such blogger luminaries as Little Miss Attila and Cynthia Yockey? That’s what I call references!

It’s still all about the narative/ An Incident in Lithonia

Posted: May 27, 2010 by datechguy in blogger for hire, internet/free speech, media, opinion/news, tea parties
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One of the problems I have with liberalism is the idea that I see over and over again the narrative trumps all, while I’ve been here there have been several stories that have pushed that point:

Item: A CNN reporter who happened to be the next door neighbor of a Banker whose house was swarmed by the SEIU is now being attacked for daring to report what she saw. Strangely enough like the Ken Gladney (the black man assaulted and called a nigger by white SEIU members in Missouri last year) “potential” bad behavior of some groups are worse than actual bad behavior of others and if you question said behavior you are a traitor!

Item Via Glenn the Volokh conspiracy reports on what might be considered good news and a sign of progress but somehow turns into bad news:

The percentage of blacks marrying whites has risen by 3 times since 1980. Asians are just as likely to marry whites as they were in 1980 (40%), even though there is a much larger Asian population to choose from, and Hispanics are significantly more likely to marry whites than in 1980 (38% compared to 30%), even though there is a much larger Hispanic population to choose from. The sheer number of interracial marriages has risen 20% since 2000.

This is good news, right? Not the way the Washington Post Associate Press spins it, complete with a commentary by Cornell Prof. Daniel Lichter that is completely at odds with the data, but supports left-wing shibboleths about 9/11 and the recent Arizona illegal immigrant law:

If your best weapon is to shout Racist then good news on relations can’t be allowed to stand.

Item: When I was in Mrs. Mahoney’s class in 7th grade we learned a poem by Countee Cullen that stuck with me. I’ll repeat it here:

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Balimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember

For some reason that poem always stuck with me for 35 years and today I had the displeasure of living it.

I was at a local eatery this morning in my three piece suit having breakfast and talking to voters. The first people were very gregarious and I talked with a few and got some insights as I was eating. I stayed after I finished eating to try to talk to more folks as they came through. After a while a 60 something black woman with a cane came in with two other women say 3-5 years older than me. A few minutes later while doing her rounds a person who worked there said people were asking what I was doing there? I thought it an odd question since I had been approaching people right along so I turned to the ladies who just came in and said I was there to report on the Ga-4 district and the race. I was then asked by the ladies what party I was, I said I was a conservative, and was then asked if I was a tea party member and I said yes.

It was if a switch was suddenly turned on with ice in her voice I was told: “I have no comment”. For the rest of.

Warning! Dressed in the uniform of a dangerous tea party racist!

the time I was there I was stared at with contempt as if I was something lower than low. My race had not been an issue nor the Crucifix being Catholic in a very protestant state, but once it was known I supported the tea party it was as if I was wearing a Klan outfit. I heard the ladies talking among themselves saying you could tell I was a tea party man just by my appearance. When I left glares followed me out.

Once before in my life I had felt hatred from others so strong that I could physically feel it. It’s a horrible feeling that I would not wish on anyone else. This is the second time in my life I have had that experience. It was an example of sheer bigotry, but I don’t blame the ladies, I blame the media that has lied to them and played a narrative for their own ends to create that bigotry among people who believe them. The media and their narrative are responsible and if they aren’t ashamed they ought to be.

The sad thing about this is I’ve been treated so well by everyone I had met to this point, (including the people who had been in the restaurant prior to them) People who I disagreed with politically and I hit it off very well and I’ve really liked the people here. I will do my best to not emulate the protagonist in the poem above and forget it, but it would be a lie and deception not to note it.

As for the ladies, I’ll include them in my regular prayers and ask you to do so as well.

Update: Maybe this story put them in a bad mood

A spokeswoman for Gwinnett County schools told the AJC that Stephanie Hunte, an 8th-grade social studies teacher at Sweetwater Middle School in Lawrenceville, allowed her students to wear KKK robes as part of a re-enactment last Thursday. Another teacher saw the students preparing for the re-enactment and told an administrator.

Somebody buy these teachers a clue.
:

Joe Scarborough asks a basic question about China?

Posted: May 18, 2010 by datechguy in media, opinion/news
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“Is there another regime in existence now that has a worse human rights record over the course of it’s existence?”

Buchanan says no:

Sam Stein Laughs, Woodward laughs, hints that the apology story isn’t true until Mika corrects him, other than Pat nobody will comment on China’s human rights record.

60+ million murdered and Stein & Woodward laugh, and sadly I’m not amazed.

What was the title of my post on the subject? “If you start from the idea they are all Marxists it makes perfect sense”.

Apparently you could say that about the panel today.

“Just an average neighborhood”

Posted: May 13, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
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The neighborhood had changed over the years.

Decades ago it was an Italian neighborhood. Everybody knew everyone else. Neighbors knew each other and their families. A lady talked to me about the house at 39 Waverly ave. Her sister in law had once owned it and decades ago she had babysat in the house for family.

Today it was a neighborhood of absentee landlords. A mixed neighborhood of many different ethnic types. People pretty much kept to themselves. In the Elderly public housing the employees came and went never taking any note of the house next door. Nor did the tenants who lived in the 162 units inside. People came and went without a hello or even a nod to acknowledge the other.

It was much the same as it was in many neighborhoods all across the state and country. People remaining in their houses, children spending their time on the video games. It was not unusual, in fact even as it changed it remained just an average neighborhood.

Just another house

As for the house as 39 Waverly Ave; as time passed the people inside became less and less known till finally the various people living inside where not known

And so it went for years people came in and out of the house at 39 Waverly and over the course of time people noticed families no longer there, simply a moving van showing up on occasion and young men coming in and out.

Up to the very last day people took no notice at all while things of a secret nature took place. It was as one resident put it the perfect place to hide. Nobody noticed anything. At least almost nobody.

There was a woman living in the projects who had a son in government service, as she walked though the neighborhood she noticed things, little things that she saw in her son, things that nobody else noticed and she realized that soon the neighborhood would shortly become not just another part of town.

On Thursday morning they came out in the open, the agents, the choppers, the weapons. They poured into the house and 39 Waverly Ave to find both their target and information that would hopefully help them to honor their oaths to protect the people that they served.

And at that point, the people in the neighborhood, people all around the blocks who had not known or talked much to their neighbors came out. They watched the agents enter and leave the house over and over. They watched the local police control the traffic that poured by, they saw the media, the local networks, the national networks and even a plump blogger in a fedora descend upon them armed with microphone, camera and notebook. Some faces that they had seen on their television a thousand times, others they had never seen before in their lives.

They asked questions over and over again, they took reams of films, they set themselves up all over the neighborhood and struck their poses before their camera as the authorities continued their task.

More than all of this, the agents, and the reporters, the people came out and saw each other. They stood together and talked. They spoke of how they heard the choppers, they talked of the reporters that hung on their every word, and they talked of how the city and the neighborhood had changed in all the years they had been there.

They did all those things that neighbors do, all those things that were once done in a neighborhood where everybody knew everyone else. As the commotion died down and the press started to leave, it only remains to be seen if the unity and community created by their common experience would carry on beyond the Thursday when the War on Terror came to Waverly Street.

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