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<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2><SPAN class=794065915-04112008>for
evaluation.</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
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class=794065915-04112008></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
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<P dir=ltr><B><SPAN lang=en-us><FONT face="Brush Script MT" color=#0000ff
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<P dir=ltr align=left><FONT size=5><FONT face=Script><FONT color=#0000ff><SPAN
lang=en-us>greenBubble</SPAN> </FONT></FONT></FONT></P></FONT></SPAN></B>
<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Tahoma
size=2><B>Subject:</B> Fw: Thought you would find this ARTICLE
interesting<BR></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<P>Too little, too late, and no newspaper would have printed this
anyway.</P>
<P><A
href="http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-10-05-1.html">http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-10-05-1.html</A><BR><BR><TT><FONT
size=2>Sent: Thu 10/30/2008 1:50 PM<BR>Subject: ARTICLE<BR><BR><BR><BR>Snopes
confirms that the article is legitimate-------JM<SPAN
class=794065915-04112008><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff> </FONT></SPAN></FONT></TT></P>
<P><TT><FONT size=2><FONT color=#0000ff><SPAN class=794065915-04112008><FONT
face=Arial>The author exists and wrote the article, and the paper, <FONT
face="Courier New">Rhinoceros Times in Greensboro, NC is real.
gB</FONT></FONT></SPAN><BR><BR></FONT>The following article written on October
5th by a writer for the Rhinoceros Times in Greensboro, NC by the name of Orson
Scott Card. Card is a liberal leaning writer, but he has always been first and
foremost a journalist. <BR></P></FONT></TT>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 0px; BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid">
<P><TT><FONT size=2><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff></FONT><BR>Would the Last
Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? <BR>By Orson Scott
Card<BR><BR>Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper
columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the
current state of journalism. <BR><BR>An open letter to the local daily
paper — almost every local daily paper in America:<BR>I remember reading All
the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it
takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public
has a right to know. <BR><BR><BR>This housing crisis didn't come out of
nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late
1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more
accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to
approve risky loans.<BR><BR>What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the
recipient is likely not to be able to repay. <BR>The goal of this rule
change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority
groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they
can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the
payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating. They end
up worse off than before. <BR><BR>This was completely foreseeable and in
fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in
the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The
other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
<BR><BR>Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political
contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make
irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to
do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to
the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)
<BR><BR>Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that
you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a
position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700
billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which
politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage
lending? <BR>I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the
Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be
treating it as a vast scandal. 'Housing-gate,' no doubt. Or
'Fannie-gate.' <BR><BR>Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and
Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any
problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory
agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing
for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans
almost up to the minute they failed. <BR>As Thomas Sowell points out in
a TownHall.com essay entitled 'Do Facts Matter?' (
http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com <http://snipurl.com/457to> ] ): 'Alan
Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council
of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the
Treasury.'<BR>These are facts. This financial crisis was completely
preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ...
the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the
Republican Party. <BR><BR>Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush
administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the
press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized
Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!
<BR>What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to
blame? <BR>Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential
candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from
Fannie Mae. <BR><BR>And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who
made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his
incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for
advice on housing. If that presidential candidate had been John McCain,
you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in
your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was. <BR>But
instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story,
and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an 'adviser' to the Obama
campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let
Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines
wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.<BR>You would never
tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican. <BR><BR>If you who
produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be
pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk
by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt
actions of leading Democrats, including Obama. <BR><BR>If you who produce our
local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let
the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this
crisis. <BR>There are precedents. Even though President Bush and
his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you
could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you
pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way,
you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that
there was a connection.) <BR>If you had any principles, then surely
right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John
McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to
approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be
laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.<BR>Your job, as
journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when
you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper. <BR>But
right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that
the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the
Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything
bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught
them to. <BR>If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor
would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election
chances of your favorite candidate. <BR>Because that's what honorable
people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the
probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how
trust is earned. <BR>Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a
very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time
— and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
<BR>Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin,
reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter —
while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.
<BR>So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you
even know what honesty means? <BR>Is getting people to vote for Barack
Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is
supposed to stand for? <BR>You might want to remember the way the
National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill
Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless
women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing;
they have no principles. <BR>That's where you are right now.
<BR>It's not too late. You know that if the situation were
reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be
moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there. <BR>If you want
to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories
you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae,
McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain
who had voted against tightening its lending practices. <BR>Then you
will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the
finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's
prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a
fair share of the blame at Obama's door.<BR>You will also tell the truth about
John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this
crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his
administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a
responsible way. <BR>This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during
the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and
blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion. <BR>If you
at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as
if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are
joining in that lie.<BR>If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats —
including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the
miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any
standard.<BR>You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party,
and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we
can actually have a news paper in our
city.<BR><BR><BR></P></FONT></TT></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>
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