Motley Moose – Archive

It’s ironic, given that US corporate interests (including one R Murdoch) are complaining about SOPA and how tomorrow/today’s internet blackout is an ‘abuse of power’, that it’s just emerged through the ongoing Leveson Enquiry, that the world’s third largest media conglomerate, News Corp, through one of its prestigious titles, The Times of London, hacked the identity of a prize winning blogger and – apparently without revealing this to the courts – fought a privacy case against him to out his real identity and silence his blog.

The blogger in question was Nightjack, a police officer who blogged so brilliantly about the realities of police work that he won the prestigious Orwell Prize in 2009. A few months later, the anonymous blogger was outed by the Times as Richard Horton. As a result he was reprimanded by his police employers, and his blog was deleted. (The copy above has been retrieved by someone else).

The case caused an outcry in 2009, not only because a valuable voice was lost, by it caused a landmark ruling in the British High Court that a blogger had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

At the time the Times had argued it had deduced Horton’s identity from the material.  But in his written statement today at the Leveson inquiry, the Times Editor James Harding admitted.

“There was an incident where the newsroom was concerned that a reporter had gained unauthorised access to an email account. When it was brought to my attention, the journalist faced disciplinary action. The reporter believed he was seeking to gain information in the public interest but we took the view he had fallen short of what was expected of a Times journalist. He was issued with a formal written warning for professional misconduct.”

However, he failed to mention that the article – written by media correspondent Patrick Foster – was still published, and Horton’s privacy case fought successfully by the Times through the courts.

Not only does this connect the hacking scandal beyond the now closed News of the World and The Sun to Murdoch’s broadsheet titles, it is also yet another example of egregious corporate double standards. While in the witness box today Harding  had the temerity to complain that any kind or regulation would chill ‘free speech’.

“We don’t want a country in which the government, the state, regulates the papers … we don’t want to be in a position where the prime minister decides what goes in newspapers,” he said.

He added that if the outcome of the inquiry was a “Leveson act”, even one just offering a statutory backstop to an independent press regulator, it would be unworkable.

“The concern is that a Leveson act would give a mechanism to politicians to loom over future coverage,” of politics, Harding said, and start introducing amendments to this legislation “and that would have a chilling effect on the press”.

This from an editor who was responsible outing a celebrated blogger through hacking and then hounding him to the point of silence

This is a timely reminder that the threats to free speech don’t just come from governments but from corporations too, something I’ve begun to explore in  the first chapter of my book (illustrated by Kossack Eric Lewis) Bad Press: Fall of the House of Murdoch (warning – long quote below the fold but I’m only abusing my own copyright)

Or at least I do.  Pointing and laughing at the current parade of horribles in the GOP nominating marathon is sort of like sniggering about the tree branch sticking out of the mouth of the elephant that’s charging your Land Rover, after all.  Suffering and injustice continue their longstanding engagement worldwide.  That neighbor’s dog still won’t stop barking.

So here are some things that made me crack a laugh loud enough to scare the cat off my lap this morning.  I hope they’ll do the same for you, even if you have to borrow a cat.

Treat it as an open thread, share whatever else brings a smile to your face in the depths of this weary winter.

(This diary was cross-posted by author from the Daily Kos and was rated as the number #1 diary on January 14th 2012 as indicated at the link below.)

(Written by an American Expat living in the E.U.)

That’s when I knew the America I grew up in was gone for good.  

For me leaving home, family and friends was easier for me to live with than watching the America that I grew up in die!

In order for me to stay human! I couldn’t allow myself to become desensitized and assimilated to the hunger, fear and suffering. I knew for me to not be assimilated and stay human I was going have to leave America for good. I had to leave America! It was just too painful to stay and watch the America I grew up in die!

There’s something deeply medieval about neo feudal America as 132 million Americans who can’t eat normal food because they can’t properly chew anything because they have no dental insurance. While some people like to wake to music from their clock radios, these Americans can’t really appreciate the rendition that you and I hear fully, because they have ringing in the ears, that’s what dental pain does, and too many of them millions, many of them children live that way everyday in the richest country in the world which doesn’t really give a shit about them!

As an American expat people tell me I’m a brave soul to have left America, home, family and friends, that people like me are a brand of the new American pioneer, who no longer just go West but every direction of the compass now. I realize I had to leave America when I saw I could no longer go to the fair. The America that I was raised in, county fairs were a big event. They had rodeo’s and clowns. The future farmers of America had events where they could win prizes. The fairways were busy with people and eating wonderful things like cotton candy in big reddish orange plumes, and laughing and going on bumpy rides to the cheers and screams of delight echoing through the fairgrounds.

Now the fairgrounds of America from sea to shining sea are regularly turned into what some are calling the nightwalkers’ waiting room, who stand in long lines sometimes all night to get urgently needed dental care. They don’t mind staying up and standing out in the cold, in the dark often times with their family members, because they and the people around them live in chronic pain, probably almost everyday. These people are desperate and they are too afraid to go to sleep, because they know that with first come, first serve, people will be getting turned away before daybreak. Some have been quoted as saying that farm animals are treated better than they are.

In the America I grew up in we used to care about each other.

What the Hell happened to us? Where did America lose its way?

The left has abdicated the discourse of freedom.  Or, at least, unsuccessfully contested it.  Recently, someone I know in another context began to argue the Beckian line (if Glenn merits an “-ian”) with me that there has been a century long degradation of freedom in the U.S.  Plenty of progressive commentators have pointed out that the right in this country no longer wants to return to some mythically blissful fantasy of 1950s America, but to the 1890s…when we were more free?  Really?

First off, when I think about freedom, I think about it’s negative and positive functions.  I value freedom from oppression.  My great-grandfather, as a Jewish orphan, was forcibly conscripted into the Czar’s cavalry.  After 15 years he got out, married, had two children and then figured out he had better get his young family out of Belarus in the Russian Empire.  On the other side of my family, a great uncle who stayed in Berlin likely went up a smokestack in Dachau.  The only thing we know definitively is that I bear an uncanny resemblance to him.  The last solid information we have on him was from when he was in his mid twenties.  Boy am I glad neither side of my family decided to stick around and see how things were going to turn out.  I’ve also been in a position to participate in the impediment of movement and of the flow of resources in an un-free population in my military service in Israel.  We can debate whether the restrictions I helped implement are justified or not, or who is at fault.  But regardless, I understand the desire for negative freedom, the freedom from less than benevolent authorities.  I get that very well.

But I also think about freedom in its positive sense.  There are public school classrooms in Detroit that don’t have reliable heating.  How free is a child to learn when he or she is freezing.  What about the freedom to receive healthcare?  How free is someone if he or she has asthma and no place to turn?  How free is someone who is hungry?  What about freedom and equality of opportunity?  Aren’t these part of the American political project?  Aren’t these freedoms part of what makes us historically significant?

Then there is the fact that I consider my freedom as directly linked to the society in which I live.  I don’t want to be free, I want US to be free.  A feudal lord might have had extensive freedom.  But he was not a member of a free society.  100 years ago in this country, white Protestant men who came from economically established families may indeed have been more free than they are today.  But everyone else, the vast majority of us, were significantly less free, in both negative and positive senses.  

WE have never been more free.  And WE are not yet sufficiently free.  The right has a program to increase our negative freedom in ways that will enhance the positive freedom only of those who already enjoy economic benefits.  The rest of us will be left to overcrowded, under-equipped classrooms and emergency rooms and told to find our own bootstraps.  

No thanks.  We want more freedom than that.  With MLK day approaching, and on this his actual birthday, we need to re-learn King’s insight that freedom isn’t just about who sits where on a bus.  

Unless we have equality of opportunity in this country, we are not free.  If we believe that progressive policies will increase freedom, as I most certainly do, then we must not cede the mantle of “the cause of liberty” and of “the love of freedom” to those whose polices will make us decidedly less free.

Came across this memo in a Bain Capital annual report.

This going to be short and sweet. It probably should be an open thread or a comment, but I hope this post will get  Moose attention.

Something you all should read.

Tim Wise is one of my favorite anti-racists.

In his essay Of Broken Clocks, Presidential Candidates, and the Confusion of Certain White Liberals, Wise not only addresses the current obsession with Paul among certain progressives, he also deals with people like Greenwald too.

Have no clue which paragraphs to quote – I’d wind up citing them all, so better you should just read the while thing.  

Mitt Romney has called his win tonight in almost-hometown New Hampshire an “historic night.” Congratulations on being another Harvard-educated old dude to win the New Hampshire primary. You’re right, it’s historic.

One of the things we like to do here is message and write strategy. Mitt is busy annointing himself as the GOP nominee for a pretty important job–the GOP’s “Chosen One” to defeat a guy a plurality of conservative Republicans believe isn’t an American citizen. Undoubtedly, though, he will actually be forced to go toe-to-toe with the current leader of the free world: President Barack Obama. Forgive the foreshadowing, but if you don’t mind, we’ve scripted a bit of what that might sound like:

This is the first part of three posts analyzing the 2010 South Carolina gubernatorial election, in which Republican Nikki Haley won a closer-than-expected victory over Democrat Vincent Sheheen. The main focus of these posts will be to explore whether a racial effect accounted for Ms. Haley’s unexpected poor performance.

The next post can be found here.

(Note: This is also part of a series of posts analyzing the 2010 midterm elections.)

More below.

Let me share with you a brief moment. I don’t know how many Mooq have followed the story of Stephen Lawrence, the 19 year old student who was randomly and viciously murdered by a  gang 19 years ago, in a famously racist part of South London, waiting at a bus stop, not far from where I used to live, and also close to the fascist  BNP headquarters in Eltham.

For many people, his murder, and the failure to prosecute his killers, was a seminal moment in race relations in the UK – and an acceptance of the double standard Black Britons face when it comes to receiving justice.

But above all, his parents campaigned for justice for their murdered son.

Well, this week, after three abortive trials and the Macpherson Report that concluded that Stephen’s killers were never brought to justice in the UK because of ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police, a cold case investigation found conclusive evidence that linked two of the gang to the murder, and they were sentenced to the maximum sentence (still under review) for juveniles – as they were at the time.

But this is not why I am writing this diary. Our poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who is not only the first woman poet officially appointed by the Queen to talk to the nation, and the first Scot, but also the first openly gay poet in that role, has just written this beautiful and moving tribute. I’ve always wondered how on earth any poet worth their salt could be paid to celebrate official birthdays and jubilees. But Carol Ann Duffy has restored in this brief lyric, the whole idea of the engaged public poet.

I’ve leaving a respectful place below the squiggle for you to enjoy. And grieve. And weep.  

The Republican party is blowing the dog whistle of racism and calls for white superiority again except this time it is as loud as an air raid siren.  Over this past week we have had two major Republican figures reach for the white race card.  I’m really in a blah mood over it and as a member of the NAACP I think I want to yell something else at Newt Gingrich.

Playing on racial hatred is nothing new for the Republican Party.  It has been part of their electoral strategy from the days of Nixon and the early 70’s.  The Republicans adopted racial polarization as an electoral strategy.