[GCFL-discuss] FW: Thought you would find this ARTICLE interesting

Tue Nov 4 19:26:08 CST 2008

Ender's Game is a classic.

I'm listening to Robert Jordan's books on tape (mp3 actually).  Also pretty
good stuff I think.

jp

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 13:12, Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List <
gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net> wrote:

> Orson Scott Card writes some very good books. Enders Game being probably
> his most famous. And then He did a saga about humans returning to earth.
> ~Lance
>
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:42 AM, Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List
> <gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net> wrote:
>
>>  for evaluation.
>>
>>
>>
>> **
>>
>> greenBubble
>> *Subject:* Fw: Thought you would find this ARTICLE interesting
>>
>>  Too little, too late, and no newspaper would have printed this anyway.
>>
>> http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-10-05-1.html
>>
>> Sent: Thu 10/30/2008 1:50 PM
>> Subject: ARTICLE
>>
>>
>>
>> Snopes confirms that the article is legitimate-------JM
>>
>> The author exists and wrote the article, and the paper, Rhinoceros Times
>> in Greensboro, NC is real.  gB
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>> Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
>> By Orson Scott Card
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper
>> in America:
>> 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.
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> What is a risky loan?  It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be
>> able to repay.
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.)
>>
>> 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?
>> 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.'
>>
>> 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.
>> 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.'
>> 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.
>>
>> 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!
>> What?  It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?
>> Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is
>> the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.
>>
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>> 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.)
>>
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all?  Do you even know what
>> honesty means?
>> Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will
>> throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?
>> 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.
>> That's where you are right now.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>> 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.
>>
>>
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