How is that "good news"?
Posted on 07/30/2010 4:05:05 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Had Andrew Breitbart dutifully written a column detailing how an obscure USDA official, Shirley Sherrod, and her husband, Charles Sherrod, had scammed the government out of millions, the story would have had the range and lifespan of a fruit fly.
Instead, as the world knows, Breitbart released an edited version of Shirley Sherrod's speech before the NAACP that provoked national headlines and caused the NAACP to denounce her and a panicky Obama administration to fire her from her position as the Georgia Director of Rural Development for the USDA.
Then, of course, when the full version of the speech emerged -- which showed Sherrod as a recovering racist, not as a practicing one -- the Obama White House fell all over itself apologizing, and the media turned their guns on Breitbart.
Breitbart, however, had put a potentially huge story into play the only way he could -- through sheer provocation. As he knew, and as we are learning, the story goes well beyond Sherrod's long-ago racist mischief-making with a poor white farmer.
This past Sunday, in his weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle, "Willie's World," veteran black politico Willie Brown confirmed that "there is more to the story than just [Sherrod's] remarks."
"As an old pro," Brown acknowledged, "I know that you don't fire someone without at least hearing their side of the story unless you want them gone in the first place." Brown observed that Sherrod had been a thorn in the USDA's side for years, that many had objected to her hiring, and that she had been "operating a community activist organization not unlike ACORN." Although Brown does not go into detail, he alludes to a class action lawsuit against the USDA in which she participated some years ago.
In the way of background, in 1997, a black farmer named Timothy Pigford, joined by four hundred other black farmers, filed a lawsuit against Bill Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, claiming that the USDA treated black farmers unfairly in all manner of ways, from price support loans to disaster payments to operating loans. Worse, they charged that the USDA had failed to process any complaints about racial discrimination.
The notion that the Clinton Ag Department had spent four years consciously denying black farmers their due defies everything we know about Clinton's use of race and should have made the media suspicious about Pigford's claims dating back to 1983.
Flush with revenue in 1999 and eager to appease this bedrock constituency, the administration settled with the farmers -- more realistically, their attorneys -- for fifty grand apiece, plus various other perks like tax offsets and loan forgiveness. If any of the presumably racist USDA offenders were punished, that news escaped the media.
After the consent decree was announced, the USDA opened the door to other claimants who had been similarly discriminated against. They expected 2,000 additional claims. They got 22,000 more, roughly 60 percent of whom were approved for this taxpayer-funded Lotto.
Despite having a year and a half to apply, some 70,000 more alleged claimants argued that they not only had been discriminated against, but also had been denied notice of the likely windfall that awaited them.
In 2008, for reasons unknown, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa lobbied to give the alleged 70,000 "another bite at the apple." Co-sponsoring the bill was none other than U.S. Senator Barack Obama. In February of 2010, the Obama administration settled with the aggrieved 70,000 for $1.25 billion that the government did not have to give. This money, by the way, was finessed out of a defense appropriation bill.
At the time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the agreement would close a "sordid chapter" in the department's history, a chapter in which no one seems to have been so much as reprimanded.
The major media reported the settlement as though it were the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For the last forty years, as the civil rights industry has manufactured more and more absurd grievances -- most notably the Tea Party smear that incited Breitbart's reprisal -- the media have reported on them with increasingly wide-eyed innocence.
In the various stories on the settlement, not one reporter that I could identify stopped to do the math. Pajamas Media did in a detailed article by "Zombie" titled appropriately, "Pigford v. Glickman: 86,000 claims from 39,697 total farmers?"
Although 86,000 black farmers are alleged to have received payments, at no time in the last three decades have there been more than 40,000 black farmers. Nor is there much turnover in the farming business. No entrepreneurial activity involves more long-term investment.
Realistically, of the 40,000 or 86,000, how many could have applied for a USDA loan and been rejected while white farmers in comparable circumstances were getting loans? If there were hundreds, let alone thousands, the heads of loan officers should have been rolling around the USDA floors, but I know of no such purge.
More to the point, out of about $1 billion paid out so far in settlements, the largest amount has gone to the Sherrods' New Communities Incorporated, which received some $13 million. As Time Magazine approvingly reported this week, $330,000 was "awarded to Shirley and Charles Sherrod for mental suffering alone."
Unwittingly, Charles Sherrod shed light on the how and why of the settlement in a speech he gave in January 2010. As he explained, New Communities farmed its 6,000 acres successfully for seventeen years before running into five straight years of drought. Then, according to Sherrod, New Communities engaged in a three-year fight with the USDA to get the appropriate loans to deal with drought.
Said Sherrod, "They were saying that since we're a corporation, we're not an individual, we're not a farmer." Nevertheless, the Sherrods prevailed, but the late payments "caused us to lose this land." In other words, the bureaucratic delay over taxpayer-funded corporate welfare payments cost them their business.
Then, thanks to their "good lawyers," said a gleeful Sherrod, who seems to have fully recovered from his mental suffering, the Sherrods successfully sued the government for "a large sum of money -- a large sum of money." While saying this, he made hand gestures suggesting $15 million. The land itself was admittedly worth no more than $9 million.
Sherrod gave this talk to announce that the FCC had awarded New Communities a radio station in Albany, Georgia, still another race-based corporate welfare boondoggle. Before the award of this station, he added, the Sherrods "had no means of communicating with our people."
The "our people" in question, of course, are black people. With this new voice, the Sherrods will help "stop the white man and his Uncle Toms from stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black."
Yes, indeed -- these are just the people we want spending the money we don't have.
HOW MUCH DID THE SHERRODS GET FROM US, the TAXPAYERS??
In the common idiom of our time, you "excerpt" something when you pull a contiguous, unaltered piece from a larger piece. It is a specific type of edit, but that specificity is important and relevant to this case.
The more general term "edit" implies much more than simple excerpting, and is being used with ominous and disingenuous overtones in this case.
It is being used that way with intent.
THe example I cited was NOT about an exerpt.
It was a tv interview in which I was asked questions and gave answers.The interview ran from its beinning to its end — but two sentences of a five sentence paragraph of what I said was deliberately edited out to make it look as though a satement that I was condemning was actually my statement. What was shown was an edited version of the interview, not an exerpt of the interview. An exerpt of the interview would have contained the first three minutes, unedited, or the middle three minutes, unedited, or the last part, undedited. Kind of like all of chapter one. or all of chapter two — not chapter one with, say, all the references to nudity edited out.
Edit in film and video has a specific meaning in contemporary media. It means to deliberately alter content that IS SHOWN, not to extract a piece. Think of it that if
the musical numbers from a movie were experpted — that would mean that you didn’t see the movie, just the musical numbers. Then imagine that someone didn’t like the lead actress for some reason, so in the movie her reaction shots and close-ups were cut out, to cut down her part and minimize her importance in the story. That’s editing.
86,000 black “farmers” were awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars each yet there have never been more than 40,000 black farmers in the entire US for the past 40 years. Not only was it reparations, it was flat out FRAUD.
Editing by means of excerpting, right?
Those angels must be the one dancing over at the “On the Pin Club.”
It really doesn’t matter if the extracted product is one part of a whole or multiple parts. It also doesn’t matter if the parts are resequenced.
Even a perfectly whole and of reasonably-high fidelity audio-visual recording is only a piece of of the whole truth. It starts and stops somewhere, the interval it recorded is someone’s choice, a subjective choice. The lighting, the framing, the location of the recording devices — all color and filter the reality as it occurred.
The best we can do in using such recordings is what? Most accepted way of dealing with recordings is (1) to insist on a chain of custody within the reliable hands able to testify honestly under penalty of perjury, (2) insist on a whole unaltered original or a copy of 100% fidelity. Anything less is “edited”, altered, modified.
Still, such conditions rarely accrue. Instead we get reduced fidelity images, cropping in images, extracts in text, audio and video, and even resequencing, old-school air-brushing, modern photoshopping or advanced video editing — products of more filtering beyond the filtering of reality that the original recording was.
This is where human character, personal integrity — the concept of an honest witness — comes into play. Is the prepared product a faithful representation of reality? That’s really the question to ask.
Breitbart, in my current view, presented a faithful representation of the reality of Mrs. Sherrod’s views on race with his edited video. I can say that because the take of people based on the tape — that she is racist, imo — is consistent with her recent actions, and the reports of her activities regarding the lawsuit against the Ag Dept.
“Although 86,000 black farmers are alleged to have received payments, at no time in the last three decades have there been more than 40,000 black farmers.”
Let’s get that factoid into the Fox News cycle...
Liars and cheats...
If you went into the editing room of a film or tv show or news story being worked on, and the producer/director/boss said to the editor, “have you done the edits? Is the piece finished yet?” No editor would then give the boss an experpt from the show as proof that it was finished in its final edit. Because an experpt is something different.
You pretty much echoed what I have read.
LLS
BTTT!
Ping to self
As if they haven't already.
“which showed Sherrod as a recovering racist, not as a practicing one”
freeking laughable.
I’m not sure whether your question is rhetorical, with the video as the answer; I’m sure Shirley and her husband consider these people “Uncle Toms.” The more that comes out in discovery,the more Breitbart’s point is proven , that she is “someone that hasn’t gotten beyond race.”
Yes let's. See the below excerpt from your post.
Usage Note:
Traditionally, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter," but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex-based categories, as in phrases such as gender gap and the politics of gender. This usage is supported by the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories. According to this rule, one would say The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient, but In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined.
Based on the usage note it is more proper to use 'persons of opposite gender' when referring to marriage as a social contract.
Hope that enlightens you!
Now remember back to what the main point of my posting was..... WORDS HAVE MEANING. If we let the liberals define the words they will win the discussion. We have to maintain control of the terms of debate.
You have provided me an excellent example of losing control of the language.
Prior to redefining "gender" to apply to people, there was no possible way to advance homosexual marriage. Marriage was one man and one woman. "Sex" is genetically determined and immutable. Once a man, always a man.
Gender however can change with the wind. Some of us (not me obviously) allowed "gender" to be applied to people and those who have allowed this have lost control of the discussion. How can you block perverts from marrying if you cannot restrict marriage to a union between the opposite sexes. You cannot.
We lost control of the terms and are losing the debate (Because in the greater public's mind "gender" can now be applied to people.)
So we are back to WORDS HAVE MEANING. Notice that as I excerpted your post I did not edit it. I changed nothing.
Excerpt is not edit. Edit is not excerpt.
Excerpting is a form of editing, both old-school and new PC-correct dictionaries agree on that point.
That's what I missed, discovery.
My apologies. I, too, hope she does sue Breitbart so he can mop the floor with her.
"Eager to appease black voters and prospective jurors in the District of Columbia, which is where any criminal charges brought by Special Prosecutor Ken Starr against President Clinton would have to be tried, ....."
Would be the real reason.
It was also the reason Clinton took his "I'm sorry for America" political safari to (laughing and pointing) Africa, the safari "advanced" by political point-man Joe Wilson.
In 1999, after his impeachment trial, sucking up to black DC voters was what Slick Willie was all about.
Oh, come on, Ann..... Willie's as crooked (if not moreso) than any of them. Back when he was speaker of the California House, earning a grand total of $30K/year in honest salary, the man had a closet stuffed with Armani suits.
Think he bought all those back when he was a trial lawyer repping for pimps and pushers in Gay Bay?
Come on.
The only thing I want to hear from Willie Brown is "Adios, I'm going to try my luck in Botswana/Bermuda/Malaysia."
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