Cedric and I've been exchanging e-mails today and he's very involved in his church so Wednesday blogging is pretty much impossible for him. (Tonight he's visiting his friends at the nursing home so I wouldn't expect a post from him tonight.) So since he's not able to blog most Wednesdays, I said I'd grab that day. I'm not going to be doing a blog every day. But I can grab Wednesday and make sure he doesn't have to feel bad about not having time for that day.
So barring an emergency, I will always blog on Wednesdays.
Federal Government Attempts to Block Press Access To New Orleans (Democracy Now!)
In New Orleans the federal government is being accused of trying to censor the images coming out of the devastated city. The Reuters news agency is reporting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is now rejecting requests by journalists to accompany rescue boats searching for storm victims. In addition journalists are being asked not to photograph any dead bodies in the region. Critics of FEMA's request compared the policy to the Pentagon's policy that bars reporters from taking photographs of the caskets of soldiers killed in Iraq. NBC News Anchor Brian Williams is reporting that police officers have been seen aiming their weapons at members of the media. And a blogger named Bob Brigham has written a widely read dispatch that the National Guard in Jefferson County are under orders to turn all journalists away. Brigham writes QUOTE "Bush is now censoring all reporting from New Orleans Louisiana. The First Amendment sank with the city."
You know, if the press wanted to fight, this story would have made the front page of today's New York Times. But they didn't cover it. They didn't front page it. They don't seem to care about publicizing the deaths and attacks on reporters in Iraq.
NBC News, NBC NEWS!, is reporting the way the police are treating the media and yet on the same day we have a valentine to the same group from a lefty blogger (Clintonista) praising the police and slamming African-Americans. I think the damage of the Bully Boy is far greater than any of us realize.
FEMA Filled With Political Appointees, Not Disaster Experts (Democracy Now!)
Questions are also being raised as to why the Bush administration chose to appoint a number of other top officials at FEMA who had no experience handling disasters. FEMA's deputy director and chief of staff Patrick Rhode, was an advance man for the Bush-Cheney campaign and the White House. The agency's third-highest ranking official, Scott Morris, was a public relations expert who worked for a Texas company that produced TV and radio spots for the Bush-Cheney campaign.
The other night, Monday, C.I. quoted Ava and myself from a roundtable that never made it up to The Third Estate Sunday Review. Here's how C.I. concluded about the press and John Roberts, Jr.:
The press hasn't probed, they haven't wanted to. The Times has done their "memo summaries" with the excuses usually in the text of the articles that "this just got dumped." While the memo dumps do warrent coverage, the press isn't supposed to wait to be fed stories, they're supposed to hunt them down. In the case of Roberts, they haven't wanted to.Why?
Like Ken Starr, he's a product of D.C. Therefore, hands off. They're too close to what they cover and the sources of yester year become nominees of today. My opinion.
So a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land is treated as though they're trying to figure out who to crown for a summer festival. When the same press (I'm referring to daily papers here and not just the Times, by the way) wants to editorialize on down the line against one of his votes, hopefully readers will toss back in their faces that they failed to do their jobs when he was just a nominee.
This is the perfect example of them abandoning their oversight role. Bully Boy appointed them, but the press was silent. Reap what you sew.
Mike's going to do the same two items so be sure to check him out.
"Peace Quotes" (Peace Center)
When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.
Hannah Arendt, 20th-century German political philosopher and author
