Orcinus
Spyhopping the Right.



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David Neiwert is a freelance journalist based in Seattle. He is the author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (PoliPoint Press, May 2009), as well as Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, June 2005), Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America, (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2004), and In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest (1999, WSU Press). His reportage for MSNBC.com on domestic terrorism won the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000. Neiwert is also the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. He can be contacted at dneiwert@hotmail.com.




Liberal Fascism: Two responses:
A: Review and Debate
B: "If conservatives really, really hate being called fascists ..." Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6


Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.

Sara's recent series:

Kauffman's Rules: Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4

Cracks in the Wall: Parts I, II, and III.

Tunnels and Bridges: Parts I, II, III, and IV, plus a Short Detour.

Dave's recent series:

"Eliminationism in America": Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX and X, and Appendix.
The March of the Minutemen
Intro: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Unhinged: Unhonest
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
___
Other books by Dave:



[limited availability]:





"The Rise of Pseudo Fascism": An essay
Available in Adobe PDF format here



Original posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

______


Choice essays:
____

"The Political and the Personal"

____

"Bush, the Nazis and America":
Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

_______

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis
[PDF file]
[In HTML: Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X,, XI, XII, XIII, XIV and XV. See explanatory note.]

[Also available in HTML, and with art, at Cursor.]




_______

Orcinus Principium No. 1
Orcinus Principium No. 2

Why Orcinus?


 
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Orcinus
 
Lou Dobbs' ethics
Wednesday, May 30, 2007  
-- by Dave

Mainstream journalists like to complain that bloggers frequently promulgate bad information and then fail to own up to it when exposed. It's one of the reasons that blogs are supposedly unreliable sources of information.

But they really haven't a lot of room to make this accusation as long as they continue to ignore the continuing antics of Lou Dobbs, who as Media Matters observes, still hasn't corrected his nakedly false reportage on the rates of leprosy infection associated with illegal immigration. Indeed, he's been dodging the issue by claiming that his figures were correct all along.

At least the New York Times' David Leonhardt is raising the issue:
I have been somewhat taken aback about how shameless he has been during the whole dispute, so I spent some time reading transcripts from old episodes of "Lou Dobbs Tonight." The way he handled leprosy, it turns out, is not all that unusual.

For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That's wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.

Second, Mr. Dobbs really does give airtime to white supremacy sympathizers. Ms. Cosman, who is now deceased, was a lawyer and Renaissance studies scholar, never a medical doctor or a leprosy expert. She gave speeches in which she said that Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children. Back in their home villages, she would explain, rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a list of other such guests from "Lou Dobbs Tonight."

Perhaps more to the point, Dobbs has a history of citing these white supremacists as credible, while failing to explain to the audience their background. Among such Dobbs guests is Glenn Spencer, the head of the racist American Patrol, whose theories on immigration -- including a conspiracy theory about a Mexican "invasion" and a plot to return the Southwest to an "Aztlan" -- Dobbs has reported on as credible.

Perhaps the most notorious of these instances involved Dobbs running a map of "Aztlan" taken from the Web site of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens. Dobbs apologized for using the CofCC as a source -- but never retracted or corrected the substance of the story itself, which was not just factually bogus but outrageously inflammatory as well.

As a longtime working journalist, this utter lack of accountability among powerful figures in the mainstream media -- a trend dating back to the 1990s, when the New York Times itself was able to simply ignore the damning exposure of Jeff Gerth's shoddy Whitewater reportage by Gene Lyons in Fools for Scandal -- is both infuriating and disheartening, because it does in fact damage the credibility of us all. It is the primary reason, I believe, for the existence of the blogosphere, particularly the media critique that has existed on the left side of the aisle.

As Leonhardt goes on to explain:
The most common complaint about him, at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing. But I think this misses the point. Americans, as a rule, are smart enough to handle a program that mixes opinion and facts. The problem with Mr. Dobbs is that he mixes opinion and untruths. He is the heir to the nativist tradition that has long used fiction and conspiracy theories as a weapon against the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Jews and, now, the Mexicans.

There is no denying that this country's immigration system is broken. But it defies belief -- and a whole lot of economic research -- to suggest that the problems of the middle class stem from illegal immigrants. Those immigrants, remember, are largely non-English speakers without a high school diploma. They have probably hurt the wages of native-born high school dropouts and made everyone else better off.

More to the point, if Mr. Dobbs's arguments were really so good, don't you think he would be able to stick to the facts? And if CNN were serious about being "the most trusted name in news," as it claims to be, don't you think it would be big enough to issue an actual correction?

Note that when Leonhardt began to corner Dobbs on these points -- particularly the racial and ethnic cast of the reportage -- Dobbs responded simply by shutting down: "You've raised this to a level that frankly I find offensive." This was the same defensive posture he raised with Laura Flanders.

The favorite whine of Dobbs and his nativist cohort is that "it's not fair that you can't discuss illegal immigration without being accused of being racist." But as we explained before, the problem isn't discussing illegal immigration. Indeed, I think everyone involved would love to have a discussion on immigration without racism rearing its ugly head.

But racism is rearing its ugly head when Dobbs and Malkin and the whole pack of "immigration reformers" treat white-supremacist propaganda as reliable information and parrot talking points from those white supremacists as well.

Pointing out that they're doing it isn't the problem. Pretending that they're not is.

9:41 AM Spotlight




 
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