That journalism as a profession is falling by the wayside, and that there are so few jobs available, might be the reason why young journalists essentially censor themselves. But I have to say, I've seen this throughout my career. I've always been puzzled by the reporters who sucked up to sources but simply refused to report what was actually happening, right in front of them. Did they think it would hurt their careers? I don't think so. I think they were ill-suited for journalism because they were conflict-adverse. The best reporters I knew just let politicians rant on while they went ahead and did their jobs:

Andrea Seabrook left NPR [ed. note: Known to blog readers as Nice Polite Republicans] this summer to start her own venture, DecodeDC, and she’s letting fly about what it’s like to “collude” with politicians as a daily news reporter.

As Seabrook explained to Politico: “I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say. ... And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real. … I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.”

Peter Hart of FAIR put it this way on Twitter, “Ex NPR reporter says politicians lied to her every day. That would have been a great thing to, I dunno, report.”

This reminds of several years ago, when a group of Philadelphia bloggers were invited to do a panel before local journalists. They were quite belligerent toward us, and were mostly interested in how you could possibly make money by blogging. The part that really bugged them? "Who do you answer to?" Our readers, we told them. But they didn't understand. "What about fact checking?" one foreign correspondent huffed.

"Who did Judy Miller's fact checking?" I responded.

"Oh, Judy Miller! Everyone knew not to take her seriously!" she replied.

And I thought, gee, I wonder how many lives could have been spared if someone shared that with their readers. The only reason I didn't say it out loud was just that afternoon, they found out their papers were up for sale and I didn't want to kick them when they were down.

I should have done it. Oh well. Time for another bloggers ethics conference!

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This weekend, Fox News' Julie Banderas featured a segment discussing the way Republicans are gearing up to get nasty and nativist on immigration this coming year -- particularly in state legislatures where a batch of anti-14th Amendment "anchor baby" laws are about to come bubbling up. She invited on Bob Dane, spokesman for the nativist hate group FAIR, and Frank Sharry of America's Voice, who pointed out that Republicans are slitting their own throats politically by taking this route.

Banderas: Bob, what do you make of that? Frank just pointed out that the Republican, they have leaned right -- very hard to the right, in fact, on the illegal immigration issue -- is this going to drive Hispanics into the hands of the Democrats?

Dane: No. You know, look, one of the things the Republicans are going to have to keep in mind, now that they've got the responsibility of the leadership mantle in the House, is they've got to demonstrate to the American public on the immigration issue that they 'get it'. That Americans have had it with the cost and impact of illegal immigration. And Republicans are going to have to be careful that they do not revert to the soft-on-enforcement and teasing-around-with-amnesty policies of '06 and '08 that led to their own demise.

Hmmmm. Maybe Dane has different sets of election results than I do. But the numbers don't lie: In 2008, Latinos provided Barack Obama with the bulk of his electoral muscle. In 2010, they turned back the Tea Party tide in the Senate. And indeed, in the ensuing months since those elections, Republicans continue to do their damnedest to push Latinos into voting Democratic for the foreseeable future.

But Dane made it clear -- especially in declaring that "amnesty is off the table" -- that the right-wing nativist faction now controlling the Republican is only interested in deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants. They have no interest in working out a system under which they can get right with the law. Which means that absolutely NOTHING will get done in terms of addressing immigration reform -- including the ongoing reality that the American economy generates hundreds of thousands of unskilled-labor jobs every year and yet only provides 5,000 green cards to cover them.

President Obama should take note too: Even though his administration has been objectively tougher about enforcing immigration laws than any preceding, the right-wing nativists will ALWAYS claim that he has been lax on enforcement. Maybe he should just give that particular malfunctioning strategy a break -- and put his shoulder to the wheel in getting real reform done. It may never pass this House, but Democrats still control the Senate and can set the stage for an immigration debate there. Obama could and should become a real leader in that debate -- because Americans really do want something done. And deportation isn't it.

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We've been pointing out for a long time the powerful connection between right-wing hate talk directed at illegal immigrants -- generated by the whole spectrum of media pundits and nativist anti-immigration organizations -- and the predictable and powerful explosion of hate crimes directed toward Latinos in recent years.

Indeed, the now-infamous case of Luis Ramirez in upstate Pennsylvania is not just a classic illustration of the problem, but equally a demonstration of the real need for a federal bias-crime statute.

More pointedly, perhaps, the case of Shawna Forde and her gang of Aryan Minutemen -- who killed a 9-year-old girl in cold blood in a botched home-invasion robbery in Arizona -- makes abundantly clear how the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric being stirred up on the Right by "respectable" nativists like the Federation for Immigration reform is whipping extremists into their usually violent courses of action.

The Washington Post yesterday reported on the connection between the nativist immigrant-bashing that has been endemic to the immigration debate and these kinds of hate crimes:

U.S. civil rights leaders said yesterday that an increase in hate crimes committed in recent years against Hispanics and people perceived to be immigrants "correlates closely" to the nation's increasingly contentious debate over immigration.

Hate crimes targeting Hispanic Americans rose 40 percent from 2003 to 2007, the most recent year for which FBI statistics are available, from 426 to 595 incidents, marking the fourth consecutive year of increases.

As the report explains, the crimes are being whipped up by a combination of grotesquely irresponsible media figures like Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, and "respectable" nativist organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies.

All of these folks have adamantly denied they have anything to do with these crimes. Dobbs and O'Reilly have been patently disingenuous in running away from their culpability. Meanwhile, FAIR, CIS, and the rest of the John Tanton Network have done likewise.

And as Eric Ward observes, they're doing likewise in trying to flee their connection to Shawna Forde. Their press release responding to reports of the connection mostly continued to attack the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of their most persistent critics.

Well, as we reported, it's not entirely clear how Forde came to be identified as a "spokesperson for FAIR" at a 2006 immigration forum in Yakima. But what's more than abundantly clear is that the Minuteman Project organization which originally empowered Forde and with which she has extensive connections was heavily promoted by FAIR.

Forde has a particularly extensive background of connections to Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project. She appeared onstage with Gilchrist in 2007 in Everett, Wash., at an "Immigration Summit" organized by local right-wingers.

Michael Hood wrote up a riveting account of this affair for The Stranger:

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Those upstanding nativists and xenophobes employed by the John Tanton Network -- and particularly the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which was designated a hate group by the SPLC awhile back -- have been complaining vigorously about how unfairly they are being treated. Why, they have nothing to do with the manifest racism swirling around the immigration debate -- so they claim.

But the recent arrest of Minuteman offshoot leader Shawna Forde for the murder of an Arizona man and his 9-year-old daughter -- part of a broader plan to rob drug dealers and use the money to finance their Minuteman operations -- has ripped the veneer off the fake walls these nativists use to pretend that they have nothing to do with the racists who seem to swell their ranks as though they belonged there naturally. (Funny thing, that.)

Back in 2006, you see, Forde appeared at a public "town hall" forum on immigration in Yakima, Wash., a central-Washington city whose main economy is agricultural, particularly apple orchards. As Jackie Mahendra at America's Voice notes, she was presented as a "spokesperson for FAIR" as well as the Minutemen.

As you can see from the video above, Forde was outrageously incendiary, accusing immigrants of bringing crime and disease to the state and costing taxpayers in health-care costs, particularly for their "anchor babies."

At one point, host Enrique Cerna asked Forde:

Cerna: Shawna, let me ask you about the issue of economics. You've heard constraints from growers, you know, that the apple harvest is very important in this state, particularly in this region. What do you say to the growers?

Forde: We've got a prison system. Let's utilize it.

She later wrapped up with this:

Forde: I'd like to see two things on there. Not just about the people who came here legally, and are here legally, but how about the Americans who have been affected and died because of the illegal invasion in our country? How about our sovereignty?

And securing our borders and protecting our nation is extremely important. And I know the Minutemen and many organizations will not stop -- we will start at the local level and work our way up -- we will not stop until we get the results that we need to have.

However, it was unclear to me if Forde really was a FAIR representative or whether she had just lied about that, as seems to be her pattern in many instances.

But in untangling the puzzle, what emerged was a clear portrait of FAIR officials commingling freely with Minutemen and the many seedy characters who occupy their ranks -- so much so that what they become is a "respectable" front organization for a ragtag bunch of thuggish nativists.

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McCain/Palin in "My Fair Lady" is at Zaius Nation.

Open Thread below...

Oh noes! Fournier gets Malkinized!

So let me get this straight, an unapologetic racist who openly tittered about creating fake credentials to cause chaos at the Democratic Convention in Denver thinks that mean little progressive bloggers aren't playing fair with Fournier? What a WATB.

Doesn't that then mean that he thinks that Malkin's tactics are wrong? Let's remind him of that next time she pulls it, shall we?

War and Piece: G-Dub to close Gitmo?

William K. Wolfrum: Christopher Hitchens lets Vanity Fair blow off his legs, kill his entire family, destroy his home; he writes about it

MediaBloodhound: PBS and NBC's symbiotic sins of omission, and Fox's thirteeen-year-olds.

TalkLeft: Is the government tracking you? At least one Federal Judge still believes warrantless spying is illegal.

David E's Fablog: The newspaper of record's fawning profile of professional liar Limbaugh made me sick. Imagine how David E. felt when he noticed his name in the article!

Angry Bear: Republicans warn that Democrats will cause a difference

skippy the bush kangaroo: The impertinent skippy had the gall to write to three journalists, questioning them on why the press corps insisted on framing Obama as "arrogant" in the presidential seal story when McCain's own senatorial campaign committee did the same thing. Two ignored him, and another reacted the way royalty always does.

The Brad Blog: 10 things to know about Charlie Black

the age: Why are Americans so scared of women? (h/t swimgirl)

Truthdig: Scott Ritter on "The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was."

naked capitalism: The End of Exceptionalism? IMF to examine US financial system

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Real journalists don't make $5 million a year...Customs agents seizing reporter's laptops and cameras without cause...Media & Govt. torture coverup continues...Broder and Woodward's lame alibis...Beatblogging...A fair & balanced Russert obit...Fox does a story about voter fraud, cites NO voter fraud...Dowdy...Tweety...Lara Logan being smeared for her criticism of Iraq war coverage...McClatchy and the downsizing of journalism...Glen Beck wouldn't detain terror suspects, he'd ‘Shoot Them All In The Head'...NOW's Media Hall of Shame...How to pretend you give a sh*t about the election

I'm a little behind this story, but yes, the AP acted like goons when they threatened the Drudge Retort with a lawsuit over fair use. I would imagine it was some of their lawyers hunting around the Internets to see if any websites were copying their material. Unfortunately, they got a little trigger happy and attacked a blogger for nothing.

The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.
On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was "heavy-handed" and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers. The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet

Jamie emailed this story over when it first hit on Slashdot, but I didn't have a chance to post this yet. I've always been treated fairly by the AP so it was surprising to see them act like this, but give someone a new internet tool to play with and you wind up with idiotic threats. As KOS said earlier they now are backtracking a little bit:

The AP is going to lecture bloggers about what the "spirit of the internet" is all about? Laughable. And the AP certainly doesn't have free reign to rewrite copyright law on its own. Fair use provisions.

Hahahaha, OK, sure. Good luck with that, AP, I think it's really about trying to save face on their part at this time, but they walked right into a buzz saw. Look what they got themselves into.

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Let me say for the record that I am not particularly enamored of this line of questioning, because I fail to see how it materially affects one's job performance as POTUS. There are several of our finest presidents who would not have held up to that scrutiny. However, since the Republicans crossed this threshold during the Clinton administration, making it an issue worth millions of taxpayer dollars to investigate and prosecute, it is only fair to hold them to the same standards.
Cliff Schecter:

(F)rom a town hall meeting in Nashville, Tennessee Monday, mixed in with platitudes about gay marriage, we get a nice little comment from this questioner on the sanctity of marriage in McCain's life--or more to the point, sanctimony. Here is a rough transcript of her question to The Morally Righteous One, which comes at the beginning of the video (it includes McCain's answer to this question and a previous on on Hillary Clinton):

My second and final question, you talk a lot about the character issue...and...like you, um, I was opposed to gay marriage, I was in always in favor of civil unions but the basic definition of marriage....but, then I get to thinking, that is based on what we consider to be the sanctity of marriage. There is nothing....you see long-term couples splitting up, it's, it's just crazy...I know that you, your own situation, you're going to have to address that in the campaign. Infidelity is just a terrible cancer on this country....and I think if we're going to talk about...gay marriage, it has to be in the context of the preservation of marriage...which I just don't see it, I think we need to make it more difficult for people to get married, or whatever we need to do..if that's...if we're going to be consistent.

McCain ignored that part of the question, of course.