Even the Good is Bad

Two short gripes for NPR's weekend coverage:

1. PEACE:

On Weakened Edition Saturday Michele Kelemen covers the pushed aside role that the US is enjoying in the Middle East. It's a story worth covering as Helena Cobban and Tony Karon have done more ably than NPR could hope to (Kelemen has to turn to "Richard Murphy who was the assistant Secretary of State for the Near East in the Reagan(!!!) years for her severest critic of the Bushist approach to the region.) But even in a critical piece Kelemen opens it with this winner:

"For a Secretary of State who has made Middle East peace a priority this year, Condoleezza Rice is sounding a bit more like an observer than a negotiator..."

Holy crap, if I had a dollar for every time NPR links the name of Bush or Rice to the search for "peace" I'd be as rich as...hmm, I don't know...Kevin Klose ($500,000+).


2. VOTING:

Ari Shapiro talks to Jacob Soboroff about the Florida election tragedy of 2000. Soboroff actually seems like a nice enough guy with his heart in the right place ( I mean the guy wants elections to be run fairly, and for turnout to be high, etc.) But the focus in this piece is all on the butterfly ballots and hanging chads of the Florida fiasco. There is nothing in this piece - or on Soboroff's Why Tuesday web site for that matter - about the real theft of democracy by the Republican-right that Florida was: the nasty story of removing African American voters, the collusion of Diebold and Choicepoint, and the Republican mob suppression of the recount, the fact that Al Gore actually would have won a statewide recount, etc., etc., etc. Ah, but that is so pre-2001 isn't it?

More Florida, More Fraud

Sometimes I'll see the headline of a story on NPR's website and think, "Oh man, they really are going to cover an issue I thought they'd never cover." I missed hearing most of Saturday's ATC and looking at the list of stories saw the commentary/feature "A History of Disenfranchised Florida Voters."

I was stunned. Was NPR going to turn away from its usual complicity in covering up documented fraud and disenfranchisement in the 2000 and 2004 elections? Would it turn away form its previous Orwellian praise of orchestrated Republican vote fraud?

No such luck. NPR dips back into its shallow bucket of shallow commentators - Diane Roberts again. Yes, the same Diane Roberts who found the Republican scam of Florida's 2000 election to be such a rich source of humor. This time she's interested in bringing up a bit of interesting 19th century history, while thoroughly distorting more recent events (I'd say that qualifies her to air on NPR). She lumps the 2000 Republican election fraud in Florida with general "electoral screw-ups" and describes the 2000 election problems as being "dangling chads, the missing ballots, and the all-too-present lawyers." She has the gall to claim that "rent-mobs from both parties protested outside our courthouses" when in fact only the Republicans brought in a mob that actually forced the end of the hand-counting of votes - counting that would have proved that Bush lost the Florida vote.

Ah but that was sooooo long ago.

Florida Fluff

Man, stealing a national election is soooo funny! NPR picks up the commentary of Florida writer Diane Roberts who takes a humorous view of the elections in Scotland being described as Florida-esque. What NPR doesn't understand, is that it's really unseemly for a news organization to do a humorous piece on a national tragedy when they've done virtually NO serious coverage of the event in the first place. Don't believe me? Do a little search on "felon list" + Florida on NPR and you get nothing on their major news shows. It's odd that a lone reporter named Greg Palast can find a substantive story on the Florida felon purge, and he can get his story on the BBC. In digging and digging I could find only one decent report on NPR, a piece from April 2002 by Juan Williams which looked at the loss of huge numbers of African American votes in my hometown, Jacksonville, Florida.

Really the offense of calling the Scots election Floridaesque is that it belittles the accomplishment of the Bushists in Florida. Scotland was a bungle, a snafu - Florida was a democracide.

Big White Lie

Yesterday afternoon NPR's Michelle Norris reported on Florida s latest moves to rescind parts of its laws stripping felons of their voting rights. This report was remarkable for what went unsaid. First, no mention was ever given to the role that felon disenfranchisement played in the Jim Crow south. Secondly, and perhaps even more shocking, is that there was not one reference made to the pivotal role of fraudulent felon disenfranchisement carried out in Florida (as noted in The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon.com, and the AP) during the stolen election of 2000 which put George Bush in the White House. It's a stunning omission. It would be like reporting on Army Corps of Engineers flood projects without mentioning the debacle of the levee failures in New Orleans.

I thought perhaps that I was being a bit hard on NPR and that maybe they had given coverage to the fraud of the Florida "scrub lists" in the election of 2000, but if you search "DBT" (the company that carried out the scam) on NPR's website you get NOTHING! If you search "Database Technology" (the full name of the company) you do get ONE decent report by Phillip Martin from December 2000--but there is nothing else, no follow up whatsoever.

Do THE Math

A few days ago Karl Rove told Robert Siegel that whatever polls Siegel was looking at didn't matter because he - Karl Rove - had "THE Math." And then today on Morning Edition Mara Liasson and a guest commentator were discussing the poll numbers that continue to indicate that Republicans will lose (at least) the House in November voting. Liasson, commenting on Republican optimism, wondered "if they know things we don’t know," and was quick to remind listeners that "polls are not predictions." These sorts of statements really are maddening! NPR should be doing the work of discussing and investigating the kinds of voting manipulations and fraud that were so fruitful to Republicans in 2000 and 2004 (see previous post).

Given the incredibly dismal state of affairs in Iraq/Afghanistan and the pathetic growth of the middle income wages, and the Foley scandal, etc... it really is hard to imagine the Republicans holding on to power in both houses of Congress. November's voting will be an interesting test of whether the Republican machine can pull off a really big steal (surely, ripping off so many unexpectedly challenged seats will be harder than targeting a few key states such as Florida and Ohio in 2000 and 2004 to only[!] steal the presidency.)

If NPR was at least reporting on the facts that are known about cage lists, challenging voters, uncounted votes, and Republican-connected Diebold junk voting machines, then people might not be so complacent when election results fly in the face of reality.

I'm very hopeful about the November vote, but I also have a nagging sense of dread that I'll wake up Wednesday, November 8th, to hear how Republicans have pulled off a stunning upset by "defying the experts" and have kept both houses of Congress. And instead of angry citizens taking to the streets to as in Mexico, it will be quiet and secure in the Homeland as Mara Liasson reminds us (as she did today) that Republicans succeeded because they have the "advantages in turning out their vote and money," and they are better than Democrats at "finding and targeting voters" -- I'll say!

Throw Out the Vote

Yesterday on ATC, Mara Liasson ran a story that presents an unfounded assertion--if not an outright lie--as if it were fact. She stated that in 2004 the Republicans had "a highly centralized and very effective program to identify and turnout voters; in 2004 it helped them win even in the face of strong national antiRepublican sentiment." This might fly if not for Greg Palast and the BBC. You see, Greg Palast doesn't just assert that the Republican's cheated to win in 2004, he provides loads of evidence--purge lists, emails, cage lists etc. If you like you can do the math yourself: First note the US Census Burea's Official number of actual voters in 2004 (125,736,000), then subtract the House Clerk's official vote tally from 2004 (122,349,480) and what do you get--3,386,520! That's right, over THREE MILLION THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND votes disappeared--"poof." I bet you'll never hear those numbers investigated on NPR. And if you think these magical disappearing votes affect Republicans and Democrats equally guess again--the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University has statistics that show otherwise.

So what NPR and Liasson should have emphasized was not that the GOP has a great get-out-the-vote strategy, but that they have an even better Throw-Out-the-Vote strategy--one that worked extremely well in 2000, 2004, and will probably prevail again in a) 2006, b) 2008, c) 2010, or d) all of the above.