National, Regional and Local News

[Ti-Amie]

Time columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria was suspended for a month on Friday after admitting to lifting parts of a story from the New Yorker.

Conservative media watchdog Newsbusters was the first to spot the similarities between a Zakaria piece on gun control and an article by Jill Lepore that appeared in the New Yorker in April.

From Lepore's piece:

As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, "Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America," firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man."

From Zakaria's:

Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the "mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man."

Robert VerBruggen, a writer for National Review, noticed other portions of Zakaria's article that hewed closely to Lepore's as well.

The Atlantic Wire posted a statement from Zakaria on Friday afternoon, taking full responsibility for the incident:

"Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers."

Later, Time announced Zakaria's suspension:

Time accepts Fareed's apology, but what he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well. As a result, we are suspending Fareed's column for a month, pending further review.

This is not the first time Zakaria has come under ethical fire. Columnist Jeffrey Goldberg accused him of lifting quotes without attribution in 2009. He also caused controversy for his series of off-the-record conversations with President Obama, though he said they were no different than those the president held with any other journalist.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1764954.html

[JTContinental]

Not really. I saw it right away.

I did too. Seems unintentional, but also unfortunate.

[jadesa]

I did too. Seems unintentional, but also unfortunate.

Same and I hadn't heard about the controversy.

[jadesa]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1764954.html

This is unfortunate to read. I don't really understand people who do this. You can source someone in your writing. Plus, even college students can do a better job of making that paragraph read more uniquely if he didn't want to quote the entire thing. Did he even try? The states are even in the same order.

[craighickman]

It's not just the smattering of dark dots. It's also the underneath. At first glance (and to those who suggest you have to look hard to find the problem, I beg to differ), the track looks like a long slice of watermelon with the rind and peel included.

A picture is worth a thousand words, no?

[dryrunguy]

This is unfortunate to read. I don't really understand people who do this. You can source someone in your writing. Plus, even college students can do a better job of making that paragraph read more uniquely if he didn't want to quote the entire thing. Did he even try? The states are even in the same order.

I never really know for sure that people write what they said they wrote. When I was junior government folk, I wrote lots of stuff that went out under the byline of more senior government folks. I had no problem with it. I got my paycheck. In the current, shrinking news environment, it wouldn't surprise me at all if folks like him are relying on junior staff/interns to write stuff that is eventually published under his name after his blessing. We never really know for sure who actually writes the text we like.

And it makes some sense given how it all went down. What's he going to say? "I don't really write any of the stuff I publish? It's really done by junior staff or an intern?"

Or maybe he really did it. But that would surprise me. I think he's just covering for the fact that he doesn't generate his own material. And if he signed off, then he's responsible, too.

[owendonovan]

Tracks are red, the lines are white, the grass is green in most stadiums, how else would a track be represented? Only after the spots were pointed out to me did I (and many others)see what people could perceive as watermelon. I doubt it was intentional, but in this age of over the top political correctness, election year politics and a lot of people itching for a fight, this is a great vehicle to satisfy all that angst. America is full of racists, bigots, homophobes, islamaphobes, immigrantphobes etc. It sucks this is being seen this way and people are offended, but also just because someone says it's racist doesn't mean it is or that it's intent was. I find it subtle at best.

[craighickman]

Tracks are red, the lines are white, the grass is green in most stadiums, how else would a track be represented? Only after the spots were pointed out to me did I (and many others)see what people could perceive as watermelon. I doubt it was intentional, but in this age of over the top political correctness, election year politics and a lot of people itching for a fight, this is a great vehicle to satisfy all that angst. America is full of racists, bigots, homophobes, islamaphobes, immigrantphobes etc. It sucks this is being seen this way and people are offended, but also just because someone says it's racist doesn't mean it is or that it's intent was. I find it subtle at best.

I, for one, haven't said that the image is racist. I've only said that I see a long slice of watermelon in it.

Inadvertent or not, election year or not, you can't blame political correctness for my eyesight.

More often than not, subtle is actually right out in the open.

[owendonovan]

I, for one, haven't said that the image is racist. I've only said that I see a long slice of watermelon in it.

Inadvertent or not, election year or not, you can't blame political correctness for my eyesight.

More often than not, subtle is actually right out in the open.

I wasn't directing that at you, Craig. A lot of people have seen what you've seen. I didn't until it was pointed out to me, and I actually was seeing the runner as east Indian. I also doubt a company as large as google would be actively promoting racism. I get the sensitivity over racism, considering the subtle and not so subtle treatment of the President. I think there are bigger racist fish to fry than this.

[Miles]

It's not just the smattering of dark dots. It's also the underneath. At first glance (and to those who suggest you have to look hard to find the problem, I beg to differ), the track looks like a long slice of watermelon with the rind and peel included.

A picture is worth a thousand words, no?

[craighickman]

I wasn't directing that at you, Craig. A lot of people have seen what you've seen. I didn't until it was pointed out to me, and I actually was seeing the runner as east Indian. I also doubt a company as large as google would be actively promoting racism. I get the sensitivity over racism, considering the subtle and not so subtle treatment of the President. I think there are bigger racist fish to fry than this.

I didn't take it personally. Simply responding to the content of your last post.

As for big fish to fry, Google is Google. It doesn't get much bigger than that. The image, powerful enough to beget this conversation, is problematic, whether or not one wants to call it racist.

[mmmm8]

I think they should replace the track ground everywhere with blue clay and then we won't have a problem

[owendonovan]

I think they should replace the track ground everywhere with blue clay and then we won't have a problem

Nadal will have a problem with that.

[Moose]

(I wonder how much national play this story might get - especially given that the ruling in the PA Voter ID case is likely to be issued today or tomorrow)

How the GOP Plans to Block the Black Vote
by Michael Tomasky Aug 13, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

It happens every election: mysterious fliers, robocalls, malfunctioning machines that deny blacks the right to vote. Now the Republican Party has explicitly embraced the strategy.

I can’t identify too many threads that connect every single election I’ve ever covered. But one feature has been a constant through every election I’ve seen up close, from New York City Council elections to mayor to governor to senator to president: efforts to suppress the black vote, and, often enough, the Latino vote. I’ve seen the fliers, heard the robocalls, been at the polling places with the mysterious malfunctioning machines. No one ever knows exactly who does these things, and yet everyone generally knows. Republicans. And now we may be getting some proof. Former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer said for the first time on national television Thursday—to Al Sharpton, no less!—that his party is up to its neck in denying citizens the right to vote.

Greer—and I should say up front he’s under indictment; more on that later—was deposed by lawyers for the state GOP in late May for a civil case that will likely be heard after his criminal trial. He was specific. At a December 2009 meeting, “the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting.” They also discussed—and this is lovely—how “minority-outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party.” But with Sharpton, he really cut loose: “There’s no doubt that what the Republican-led legislature in Florida and Governor Scott are trying to do is make sure the Republican Party has an advantage in this upcoming election by reducing early voting and putting roadblocks up for potential voters, Latinos, African-Americans to register and then to exercise their right to vote. There’s no doubt. I was in the room. It’s part of the strategy.”

He also shot down the rationale for the new Florida law, this ginned-up “voter fraud” business: “In three and a half years as chairman in Florida, I never had one meeting where voter fraud was discussed as a real issue effecting elections. Never one time...It’s a marketing tool. That’s clearly what it is. There’s no validity to it. We never had issues with it. The main purpose behind it is to make sure that what happened in 2008 never happens again.”

The party’s current leaders, whom for good measure he called “whack-a-doo, right-wing crazies,” say he’s lying, and naturally they note that his credibility is open to question. He’s accused of funneling party money to himself, about $125,000. He’ll stand trial sometime this fall. Obviously, we don’t know whether he’s guilty of that. But we do know that in every single election in this country where the black vote matters, these mysterious things happen in African-American neighborhoods in the run-up to the election and on Election Day itself. We never know exactly who does it, but it’s pretty self-evident that it isn’t Democrats.

Conservative pundits like to whine from time to time about how blacks “reflexively” or “unthinkingly” pull the Democratic lever. Well, what exactly do they expect? Yes, yes, some Republicans in Congress supported the civil-rights and voting-rights acts. Fine. But those Republicans don’t exist anymore. The racists left the Democrats and joined the GOP, and that’s when—in the late 1960s—these voter-suppression efforts began.

The more you wrap your mind around it, the more astonishing the moral deficiency becomes. Think about it. Every election come the warnings that if you haven’t paid your telephone bill yet or what have you, you won’t be permitted to vote. Something that like, which I saw all the time in New York City, can be pulled off by a handful of ne’er-do-wells, and the party leaders themselves can maintain plausible deniability.

But what’s going on around the country this year requires the assent of officialdom. This is a conspiracy of thousands of people, Republican Party operatives in every state in the country (except those where the black vote is small enough not to matter), all of them agreeing that denying the most fundamental civic right to a group of citizens because they vote the wrong way is a good idea—and knowing that they can get away with it because, after all, it’s “just” “those people.” Imagine that Democrats had decided to proceed along these lines in America’s rural precincts. Something tells me that the country’s great law-enforcement agencies and media institutions would have managed to get to the bottom of it then—and that the Democratic Party would have ended up all but destroyed.

Just lately, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky have been promoting their new book claiming to document vast treachery at the polls. The meme has developed on the right in the last few days that felons elected Al Franken to the Senate. Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Attorney Mike Freeman rebutted their charges this week. I can’t swear that Freeman is correct, but look—that was the most contested and pored-over election recount in the modern history of this country. It took nine months to determine the winner. Does it really seem likely that if massive fraud existed, state election officials (representing both major parties, by the way) weren’t able to ferret it out in nine months?

It’s a sick and sickening situation, and it delegitimizes everything else about the Republican Party. I can understand how someone believes in limited government or low taxes. I can understand how someone could oppose affirmative action. I cannot understand how any individual can be anything other than abjectly ashamed to be associated with a political party so thuggish as to try to rig elections like this and then at its conventions have the gall to invoke Abraham Lincoln and hire lots of black people to sing and dance and smile, to make up for their absence among the attendees. A black mark indeed.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...lack-vote.html

[Ti-Amie]

I can’t identify too many threads that connect every single election I’ve ever covered. But one feature has been a constant through every election I’ve seen up close, from New York City Council elections to mayor to governor to senator to president: efforts to suppress the black vote, and, often enough, the Latino vote. I’ve seen the fliers, heard the robocalls, been at the polling places with the mysterious malfunctioning machines. No one ever knows exactly who does these things, and yet everyone generally knows. Republicans. And now we may be getting some proof. Former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer said for the first time on national television Thursday—to Al Sharpton, no less!—that his party is up to its neck in denying citizens the right to vote.

Conservative pundits like to whine from time to time about how blacks “reflexively” or “unthinkingly” pull the Democratic lever. Well, what exactly do they expect? Yes, yes, some Republicans in Congress supported the civil-rights and voting-rights acts. Fine. But those Republicans don’t exist anymore. The racists left the Democrats and joined the GOP, and that’s when—in the late 1960s—these voter-suppression efforts began.

Conservative pundits like to whine from time to time about how blacks “reflexively” or “unthinkingly” pull the Democratic lever. Well, what exactly do they expect? Yes, yes, some Republicans in Congress supported the civil-rights and voting-rights acts. Fine. But those Republicans don’t exist anymore. The racists left the Democrats and joined the GOP, and that’s when—in the late 1960s—these voter-suppression efforts began.

But what’s going on around the country this year requires the assent of officialdom. This is a conspiracy of thousands of people, Republican Party operatives in every state in the country (except those where the black vote is small enough not to matter), all of them agreeing that denying the most fundamental civic right to a group of citizens because they vote the wrong way is a good idea—and knowing that they can get away with it because, after all, it’s “just” “those people.” Imagine that Democrats had decided to proceed along these lines in America’s rural precincts. Something tells me that the country’s great law-enforcement agencies and media institutions would have managed to get to the bottom of it then—and that the Democratic Party would have ended up all but destroyed.

This.