NBC and the Zimmerman tape

The New Neo Posted on by

A few days ago, NBC apologized for its truncated edit of the Zimmerman tape—inadequately and with weasel words:

During our investigation it became evident that there was an error made in the production process that we deeply regret. We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to our viewers.

Let’s see:

(1) “there was an error made”: passive voice, no actor identified. An attempt to make it sound accidental. Yes, of course; somehow it just happened that this:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy ”” is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

…got edited down, just by chance, to this:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

(2) “We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future”: like what? Firing somebody?

(3) “and apologize to our viewers”: but not, of course, to George Zimmerman.

And now there’s this story about who the culprit in the tape edit might have been:

An internal NBC News probe has determined a “seasoned” producer was to blame for a misleading clip of a 911 call that the network broadcast during its coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, according to two sources at the network.

But there’s that error thing again:

The sources described the producer’s actions as a very bad mistake, but not deliberate.

Yeah, right—by accident the quotes just happened to have been edited in the perfect spot to indicate that Zimmerman was a racist focusing on Martin’s color.

More:

The Today show’s editorial control policies – which include a script editor, senior producer oversight, and in most cases legal and standards department reviews of material to be broadcast – missed the selective editing of the call, said the NBC executive.

Executives have vowed to take rigorous steps to formalize editorial safeguards in the news division following the incident, one of the sources said.

Now, that’s interesting. As a lowly blogger, one of the things I always try to do if possible is to check quotes to see if they’ve been truncated, and if so whether the cuts materially change the message the person quoted was trying to give. I would have thought (silly me) that NBC had similar fact-checking policies. I wonder whether they will be included in their new “formal editorial safeguards.”

Others in the news business claim puzzlement:

Television news veterans in New York said they were baffled over how the error came to be broadcast given the intense vetting such a sensitive story would normally get at a major network such as NBC.

I’m not nearly so baffled.

March jobs report?

The New Neo Posted on by

Not the greatest.

Ben Bernacke mused:

…that the sharp decline in joblessness ”” the unemployment rate has dropped from a recent high of 9.1 percent in August ”” was not supported by underlying economic growth. The decline has been “somewhat out of sync” with the rather modest pace of economic growth, Bernanke said this month.

Mitt Romney blamed Obama. And Obamites sang the usual tune about the worst this and that:

…[T]oday’s employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” said Alan B. Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. “It is critical that we continue to make smart investments that strengthen our economy and lay a foundation for long-term middle-class job growth so we can continue to dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the severe recession that began at the end of 2007.

Krueger neglected to add “when Bush was president,” but you get the idea.

And meanwhile, these trends continued:

The extremely high jobless rates that African Americans and Hispanics have endured for years continued last month, with black unemployment at 14 percent and Hispanic joblessness at 10.3 percent, the government reported.

The jobs report also showed little change in the plight of workers who have been out of work for six months or more. The number of long-term unemployed was essentially unchanged at 5.3 million, and they account for 42.5 percent of the overall nation’s jobless population, the report said.

Celebrate freedom: Passover and beyond

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. The sentiments still seem to me to be highly, highly appropriate. Maybe even more so, if anything.]

It’s the holiday season, and one of those rare years when Passover and Easter come close together, as they did during the original Easter. So I get a twofer when I wish my readers “Happy Holidays!”

In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder, I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars such as that in Iraq only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it; and what we’ve observed there in recent years has been the hard, long, and dangerous task of attempting to secure it in a place with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.

History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have–the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”

Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined (appropriately enough for the approaching Easter holiday) a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread (just ask the Ukrainians).

Is freedom a “basic need, then? Ask, also, the Vietnamese “boat people.” And then ask them what they think of John Kerry’s assertion, during his 1971 Senate testimony, that they didn’t care what sort of government they had as long as their other “basic needs” were met:

How important is freedom? We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart…

So that when we in fact state, let us say, that we will have a ceasefire or have a coalition government, most of the 2 million men you often hear quoted under arms, most of whom are regional popular reconnaissance forces, which is to say militia, and a very poor militia at that, will simply lay down their arms, if they haven’t done so already, and not fight. And I think you will find they will respond to whatever government evolves which answers their needs, and those needs quite simply are to be fed, to bury their dead in plots where their ancestors lived, to be allowed to extend their culture, to try and exist as human beings. And I think that is what will happen…

I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.

I beg to differ. I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover, and Happy Easter! And that was no non sequitor.

Why don’t we hear about black on black violence?

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a spate of columns on the right since the Trayvon Martin killing asking the question this one asks: why do we ignore the murders of blacks by other blacks? And why do we hear so much about the killing of a black man by a white man (whether it’s self-defense or murder), such as in the Martin case?

Let’s take the last question first. Not only do those sort of cases fit the liberal narrative, but they make a story that more people are likely to read. If black-on-black killing is so ubiquitous and white-on-black killing relatively rare, it stands to reason the latter is a better story in the “man bites dog” sense.

What’s more, the Martin killing featured a victim who was unarmed and shot by a man who was acting as a quasi-official on security patrol. That’s news, as much as a police officer killing an unarmed teenager would be.

As for the first question, violence in the black communities did get quite a bit of press when gang warfare was escalating a couple of decades ago, at least it seemed that way in my recollection. And there were a lot of efforts to stem that violence, both within the black community and from outside of it.

I would imagine these outreach programs still exist. The trouble is that the whole thing is no longer news and it’s no longer new. It should be, but it’s not. And of course, it’s not PC to talk about it, because it dares to say that black people are not only victims at the hands of whites.

Here’s a guy who’s been fighting the good fight for many, many years: Bill Cosby, daring to say all that and more. But even that is old news, although it shouldn’t be. Here’s how Cosby put it in one of his appearances in 2008:

He amused the invitation-only crowd of about 600, which included teenagers identified as “at-risk” by juvenile authorities, with a lament about nonchalant reactions to common problems.

“Well, the mother’s on crack cocaine. Pass the salt.”

“That girl’s baby has no father. Pass the salt.”

“Oh, he shot him in the head? Pass the salt.”

Cosby, dressed casually in sneakers and a Morehouse College T-shirt, said there are examples of success, and there are examples of failure.

“We look at failure and we’re like, pass the salt.”

He dismissed critics of his approach who have said that he is airing dirty laundry in the black community.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “There are black people who have to walk around this dirty laundry.”

Cream cake and biscuit tortoni

The New Neo Posted on by

Whole Foods has an especially delectable cake that I find completely irresistible. Fortunately for me, my wallet, and my waistline, I don’t live down the street from a Whole Foods, although I’m within striking distance if the desire is strong enough. Also fortunately, Whole Foods sells this cake by the piece, so there’s no excuse for me to buy a whole one if the spirit moves.

But my guess is that even that one little piece has about a thousand calories in it. So if I buy one I exercise the exquisite self-control of having a few bites a day till it’s gone. But those few bites—ambrosial!

What is this marvelous cake, you might ask? They call it almond cream cake—which is not tiramisu, I might add, although it partakes of a few of its qualities. This is a creamy moist thing topped with toasted almonds and just the right amount of cake and…well, it’s love, pure and simple.

It also is a familiar type of love. Something in the taste sparked a distant memory from my youth (all memories from my youth are pretty distant at this point, although no less intense for that). And then it came to me: biscuit tortoni! Ah!! Growing up in an Italian neighborhood in New York meant that Italian foods were standard, and in my childhood biscuit tortoni was as ubiquitous as (and far more interesting than) vanilla ice cream.

Spumoni was around too, but it was weird. Who wanted something with citron-y stuff in it? Ugh! But biscuit tortoni was a child’s dream: it came in a little accordion paper cupcake-like cup that you could pull apart into a big circle when you were finished, and with the wonderful toasted almond stuff on the top it was the sort of dessert that even a voracious sweet-lover like me would try to slow down to eat, the better to enjoy its delights.

Alas, I haven’t seen the stuff around anywhere any more. Or maybe that’s a good thing.

[NOTE: This claims to be a recipe for the tortoni, as does this. But I’m not so sure you should try it at home.]

I don’t know what’s worse

The New Neo Posted on by

Is it that the author of this piece, David Dow, is actually a professor of law?

Or that he actually might believe what he’s saying?

Or that perhaps he doesn’t, but is just saying it to stir up ye olde masses?

Whatever it is, it’s very clear that Professor Dow has no idea—I mean absolutely no idea—what federalism or the 10th Amendment are. Or perhaps he has a very good idea and yet thinks none of his readers do, so he can get away with ignoring all that silly stuff.

But I should cut him some slack, because after all he’s only a law professor. A real law professor, like with tenure and everything, at the University of Houston Law Center since 1988, and with a J.D. from Yale Law School.

FDR: fireside demagoguery—“saving the Court from itself”

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Last night I wrote a draft of a post on how Barack Obama’s latest remarks on SCOTUS precedent are an attempt to emulate Franklin Roosevelt in the 30s. I was going to polish it up and submit it to PJ, but I see that Ron Radosh has beaten me to it with this article, which covers much the same territory as mine did. I still may work on mine and publish it somewhere; we’ll see. But in the meantime, read his—and this, which complements it.]

When I was a little kid, I heard that there were some people who didn’t like FDR and thought he’d led the country in the wrong direction.

I couldn’t understand why they’d believe something like that; how could they? After all, my parents had admired him so greatly—and even loved him—for saving the country from the Depression and steering the ship of state during the war. And what curmudgeonly souls could fail to be drawn to that wonderful voice, that energetic sense of positive energy, that jaunty grin?

Later, in school, I learned about FDR’s court-packing escapade. It was shocking, as though one heard that a favorite uncle had embezzled money or tortured kittens. Even then I realized the attempt had been a bad thing—a very bad thing. But for a long time I didn’t integrate it into my knowledge of the Roosevelt I knew about, the wartime leader of my parents’ young adulthood. Nor did I know anything about the theory that many of FDR’s economic policies had lengthened the Depression rather than shortening it.

I’d never read the words of this fireside chat of FDR’s, either—not till now, anyway. I’m sure you know what prompted my little bit of research; I was wondering about the details of FDR’s criticism of the Court.

Well, on reading FDR’s little heart-to-heart talk to the people about SCOTUS, I have to say that compared to Roosevelt Obama’s a piker, a model of restraint. Not only that, but note what a master of propaganda with a folksy touch FDR was, in comparison to Obama. In that respect—getting the tone right to get his message across—FDR was more like Reagan.

It’s worth reading the whole thing to get the flavor of what he’s doing—how he brings the listener in as a co-conspirator in the task of rebuilding America, and how he heightens the sense of urgency and impending catastrophe if he doesn’t get what he wants—but I’ll just post lengthy excerpts for you to read [all emphases mine]:

…I am reminded of that evening in March, four years ago, when I made my first radio report to you. We were then in the midst of the great banking crisis.

Soon after, with the authority of the Congress, we asked the Nation to turn over all of its privately held gold, dollar for dollar, to the Government of the United States.

Today’s recovery proves how right that policy was.

But when, almost two years later, it came before the Supreme Court its constitutionality was upheld only by a five-to-four vote. The change of one vote would have thrown all the affairs of this great Nation back into hopeless chaos. In effect, four Justices ruled that the right under a private contract to exact a pound of flesh [quite a reference, no?] was more sacred than the main objectives of the Constitution to establish an enduring Nation.

…It will take time – and plenty of time – to work out our remedies administratively even after legislation is passed. To complete our program of protection in time, therefore, we cannot delay one moment in making certain that our National Government has power to carry through.

The American people have learned from the depression. For in the last three national elections an overwhelming majority of them voted a mandate that the Congress and the President begin the task of providing that protection – not after long years of debate, but now.

The Courts, however, have cast doubts on the ability of the elected Congress to protect us against catastrophe by meeting squarely our modern social and economic conditions.

…I want to talk with you very simply about the need for present action in this crisis – the need to meet the unanswered challenge of one-third of a Nation ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed.

Last Thursday I described the American form of Government as a three horse team provided by the Constitution to the American people so that their field might be plowed. The three horses are, of course, the three branches of government – the Congress, the Executive and the Courts. Two of the horses are pulling in unison today; the third is not. Those who have intimated that the President of the United States is trying to drive that team, overlook the simple fact that the President, as Chief Executive, is himself one of the three horses.

It is the American people themselves who are in the driver’s seat.

It is the American people themselves who want the furrow plowed.

It is the American people themselves who expect the third horse to pull in unison with the other two.

I hope that you have re-read the Constitution of the United States in these past few weeks. Like the Bible, it ought to be read again and again.

…Having in mind that in succeeding generations many other problems then undreamed of would become national problems, [the framers] gave to the Congress the ample broad powers “to levy taxes … and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.”

That, my friends, is what I honestly believe to have been the clear and underlying purpose of the patriots who wrote a Federal Constitution to create a National Government with national power, intended as they said, “to form a more perfect union … for ourselves and our posterity.”

For nearly twenty years there was no conflict between the Congress and the Court. Then Congress passed a statute which, in 1803, the Court said violated an express provision of the Constitution. The Court claimed the power to declare it unconstitutional and did so declare it…

But since the rise of the modern movement for social and economic progress through legislation, the Court has more and more often and more and more boldly asserted a power to veto laws passed by the Congress and State Legislatures in complete disregard of this original limitation.

In the last four years the sound rule of giving statutes the benefit of all reasonable doubt has been cast aside. The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body.

When the Congress has sought to stabilize national agriculture, to improve the conditions of labor, to safeguard business against unfair competition, to protect our national resources, and in many other ways, to serve our clearly national needs, the majority of the Court has been assuming the power to pass on the wisdom of these acts of the Congress – and to approve or disapprove the public policy written into these laws…

In the face of these dissenting opinions [which FDR had just quoted from], there is no basis for the claim made by some members of the Court that something in the Constitution has compelled them regretfully to thwart the will of the people.

In the face of such dissenting opinions, it is perfectly clear that, as Chief Justice Hughes has said, “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.”

The Court in addition to the proper use of its judicial functions has improperly set itself up as a third house of the Congress – a super-legislature, as one of the justices has called it – reading into the Constitution words and implications which are not there, and which were never intended to be there.

We have, therefore, reached the point as a nation where we must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself. We must find a way to take an appeal from the Supreme Court to the Constitution itself. We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution and not over it. In our courts we want a government of laws and not of men.

I want – as all Americans want – an independent judiciary as proposed by the framers of the Constitution. That means a Supreme Court that will enforce the Constitution as written, that will refuse to amend the Constitution by the arbitrary exercise of judicial power – in other words by judicial say-so. It does not mean a judiciary so independent that it can deny the existence of facts which are universally recognized.

…What is my proposal? It is simply this: whenever a Judge or Justice of any Federal Court has reached the age of seventy and does not avail himself of the opportunity to retire on a pension, a new member shall be appointed by the President then in office, with the approval, as required by the Constitution, of the Senate of the United States.

…There is nothing novel or radical about this idea. It seeks to maintain the Federal bench in full vigor.

…Like all lawyers, like all Americans, I regret the necessity of this controversy. But the welfare of the United States, and indeed of the Constitution itself, is what we all must think about first. Our difficulty with the Court today rises not from the Court as an institution but from human beings within it. But we cannot yield our constitutional destiny to the personal judgement of a few men who, being fearful of the future, would deny us the necessary means of dealing with the present.

This plan of mine is no attack on the Court; it seeks to restore the Court to its rightful and historic place in our Constitutional Government and to have it resume its high task of building anew on the Constitution “a system of living law.” The Court itself can best undo what the Court has done.

…During the past half century the balance of power between the three great branches of the Federal Government, has been tipped out of balance by the Courts in direct contradiction of the high purposes of the framers of the Constitution. It is my purpose to restore that balance. You who know me will accept my solemn assurance that in a world in which democracy is under attack, I seek to make American democracy succeed. You and I will do our part.

Sorry for the length of the quote. But the speech was such an organic whole, such a masterpiece of insidious propaganda, that I could hardly bear to cut anything. I still recommend that you read the entire thing, because only then can you see what a genius FDR was at clothing his power grab in the raiments of sanctimonious protection of the checks and balances of the Constitution. Wow.

History is not a set thing, dull and dry, encased in cobwebs. As Twain said, it may not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. And those verses have a lot to tell us.

For all who wonder…

The New Neo Posted on by

…what’s up with all these frigging spambots, it happened last night after the blog suddenly went down and left a completely blank page on the screen. There was a problem at my host that had caused it and took a few hours for them to fix, but when it was resolved (thankfully), I discovered that my spam filter was no longer working. The host doesn’t seem to be able to fix that yet at their end, so I will have to talk to my trusty tech helper (who’s not at my beck and call every minute of the day) to advise me on the best solution.

Till then, I have certain ways I’ve been able to block some of the spambots when I’m away from my computer, and erase a lot of them when I’m at the computer, but some of them will get through anyway. So what you saw this morning was the fruit of their all-night labor. You probably have had no idea (till now, anyway) the rapid rate at which they usually arrive; probably fifty a minute or so, sometimes more. That happens all the time but usually the filter snags them, so all you’re seeing right now are the ones that are getting through.

Fortunately we can assume the problem is very very temporary. I hope to fix it this evening, or at the latest tomorrow evening. Until then, please bear with our unwelcome, boring, repetitive, self-promoting guests.