Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2731

Quote For The Day

"No way in the world. No way. No way. I don't even want to talk about it. It don't make sense. She was just so nice to us as - she didn't - there wasn't no - there wasn't no racism attitude at all in it. Heck no. … They don't know what they're talking about," - Roger Spooner, the white farmer at the center of the USDA scandal, asked if he thought Shirley Sherrod was racist in any way.



United States Department of Agriculture - Racism - Shirley Sherrod - Tom Vilsack - Business
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Could Breitbart Be Prosecuted?

I don't think he should. But Breitbart says he never saw the full video, never edited it, and disseminated the two minutes anyway. Isn't that called reckless indifference to the truth? An apology would be in order, but the far right cannot apologize for anything because they are never wrong about anything.

But what's truly school-yard about this is Breitbart's nyah-nyah rationale for the whole thing:

The Sherrod video is, he said, "way more evidence of racism than anything that the...

Palin vs Israel's Security

The danger this uninformed bigot poses is laid out in a must-read post from Jeffrey Goldberg:

Palin has positioned herself as a territory maximalist, arguing for the righteousness of continued Jewish settlement of the West Bank, including those parts of the West Bank, presumably, beyond the security fence. This line of argument places her well to the right of the position taken, late in his career, of Ariel Sharon. As I have pointed out on innumerable occasions, this position, seemingly...

Quote For The Day

"The moral ugliness of what's just happened is glaring, and it's hard for
me to see how the media can justify continuing to treat Breitbart as
simply a roguish provocateur. He's something much darker," - Josh Green.

It seems completely obvious to me that the USDA needs to re-hire Sherrod just as CNN needs to rehire Octavia Nasr. Both were canned based on knee-jerk reactions to distorted fragments of speech, which, when viewed in their entirety, are completely within the realm of fair - and ...

Police State Watch

Ray Sanchez reports on the growing number of people arrested simply for videotaping cops. Money quote:

"They're just regular citizens with a cell-phone camera who happen to
come upon a situation," [Carlos:] Miller said. "If cops are doing their jobs,
they shouldn't worry."

Miller rounds up more reporting at his blog, "Photography Is Not a Crime." Bruce Schneier picked up on this trend awhile ago.

Police - Mobile phone - Bruce Schneier - Science and Technology - Cell Phones
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What A Home Is Worth

Christopher Papagianis and Reihan Salam pick apart our housing policy:

From 1994 to 2005, the homeownership rate reached record highs, thanks largely to innovations in the mortgage-finance market that reduced down payments and minimized equity ...One effect was to reduce the social benefits of homeownership, because the benefits are a product of equity and not of the mere fact that a contract has been signed and a mortgage taken out. The relationship between homeownership and social goods...

Top Secret America, Ctd

Scott Horton reviews the series:

There are two critical questions I hope that the Priest andArkin series will help us answer. The first is simple: does thisenormous state security apparatus actually make the country any safer?Again, it's not generally true that bigger is better. On this point,the historical example of the former Soviet Union and its allies isinformative. Good literature already exists about the German DemocraticRepublic, in many ways the "model state" for the Soviet Empire...

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew sized up the congressional elections, glanced at the Angle-Reid race, shook his head at Journo-list's latest scandal, and cautioned against Breitbart's scoop on supposed racism in the USDA. (That caution proved prescient.) Some troubling rhetoric emerged from Netanyahu. Rahm watch here.

In Palin coverage, her political clout grew ever-stronger, the AP corrected her facts, Ambinder parsed her press strategy, readers pushed back against her bigotry on the Ground Zero...

The Full Video

It's below – all 43 minutes of it. The edited remarks start around 17 minutes in:

Doug Mataconis:

After watching Sherrod's remarks in their full context, and in light of all the other information that has come out,
it seems fairly clear that she was the victim of a horrible
misrepresentation on the part of Breitbart, and a fairly cowardly
abandonment by the powers-that-be in the Obama Administration.

Ambinder:

Given the set of facts, it was the right call: here was a USDA employeeinsinuating...

The Power Of Political Vocabularies

Timothy Lee returns to the liberaltarian debate:

What libertarians and conservatives share isn't a shared commitment to freedom so much as a common way of talking about freedom. Conservatives and Republicans like to invoke the Founding Fathers, talk about free markets and limited government, quote Hayek, and so forth. But political rhetoric is a lagging indicator of ideological commitments. A lot of fusionist slogans have become so shopworn that they're what Orwell called dead metaphors. The...