"MOTION SICKNESS
CAUSED BY MEDIA SPIN"
A Diva Rant, Inspired
By The BBBR Mailbag
Posted June 10, 2001
SCOTT WRITES IN FROM THE ISLANDS
From: "Scott F"
To: < thediva@coup2k.com >
Sent: Saturday,
June 09, 2001 12:16 AM
Subject: Dear
Diva...
"One of The Greatest Rants In
The History of The Web." Thank you Diva, where ever you are.
I too am a Diva -
albeit an aging Diva - living on the North Shore of O'ahu, Hawai'i (as you
know, Divas ain't stupid).
Regards
-Scott F
From: "The
Diva (Tammy)" < thediva@coup2k.com
>
To: "Scott F"
Sent: Monday, June
11, 2001 4:08 AM
Subject: Your
E-Mail Inspires Today's Diva
Rant
Dear Scott:
Thanks! It is a rare pleasure indeed to get to rant
directly at my target. Unfortunately,
my sortie was unsuccessful. Mr. Von
Drehle is still convinced that his book's title is accurate.
I really should
have known that talking "language" with a mainstream journalist would
get me nowhere.
I've found that
journalists are either ignorant of the language (giving them the benefit of the
doubt, here), or are subtly propagandizing the people, or are outright liars.
Take, for
instance, the tardy
reporting of the felon purge in The Los Angeles Times, my local
newspaper...
Your e-mail
inspired me to write the rant that article deserves.
I thank you for
that.
You can read it HERE:
MOTION SICKNESS CAUSED BY MEDIA SPIN
The Offending Spin:
Florida Net Too Wide in Purge of Voter
Rolls
Politics: Thousands were wrongfully
called felons.
Errors may have affected presidential
election.
By LISA GETTER, Times Staff Writer
Monday, May 21, 2001
See? I can't even get past the title without
getting angry... Look at what they are
saying here: "ERRORS MAY have
affected the presidential election."
First off, "errors" means "mistakes":
er·ror [érr
r
] (plural er·rors) noun
1. (plural errors) mistake: something unintentionally done wrong,
for example, as a result of poor judgment or lack of
care
The report blames the crash on human error.
No journalist in
his right mind, before or after the perpetrator was caught, would look at the
crime scene in Oklahoma City after the bombing, and say, "Error may have
caused death of 168 in Oklahoma City Federal Building."
By titling their
"expose" in this manner, they have already told the reader that any
innocent people purged from the voting rolls for being felons had their voting
rights suspended UNINTENTIONALLY.
How, pray tell,
does The LA Times know this? Is Lisa
Getter psychic? Has she been channeling
Katherine Harris and Clayton Roberts?
And doesn't The LA
Times realize the disrespect their title visits on the victims of the
crime? Basically, The LA Times is
saying, "you got screwed ON ACCIDENT.
You're not a crime victim. This
was just 'one of those things'."
MIAMI--Harry Sawyer, election supervisor in Key West, was stunned when
Florida officials sent him a list of 150 convicted felons to cut from county
voter rolls in mid-1999.
Among those named: an election employee, another worker's husband--and
Sawyer's own father. None was a felon. "It was just a mess," Sawyer
said.
More mess was to come. Indeed, a little-known program aimed at curbing
voter fraud in Florida was so badly designed and run that it wrongly targeted
thousands of legitimate voters during the 2000 presidential election.
Now I'm angry
again. "Badly designed"? How does The LA Times KNOW this? How do they KNOW that the problem was
incompetence and not malice or willful intent?
The payload of the
Ryder truck in Oklahoma City was not "badly designed". It did what it was supposed to do -- IT BLEW
UP. What evidence does The LA Times have,
that it isn't sharing with us, that leads them to conclude that this was all
just a horrendous goof-up?
Even worse, state officials in Tallahassee ignored clear warnings about
the mounting mistakes and actually loosened criteria for matching voters' names
with those of felons, putting more innocent people at risk of losing their
right to vote.
And still
angrier... There is that word again,
"mistakes". Is The LA Times staff
so vocabulary-challenged that they couldn't come up with a better
sentence? Say, maybe, "...state
officials in Tallahassee ignored clear warnings about the ongoing improper
identifications and actually loosened criteria for matching voters' names
with those of felons, putting more innocent people at risk of losing their
right to vote."
The so-called felon purge drew little attention during the bitter 36-day
recount battle between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore
last fall.
Umm.... Bullsh*t!
Mother Jones wrote about this very subject THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTION!:
"Thousands of Florida residents were struck from the
voter lists because they were mistakenly identified as ex-felons, just months
before what has become the closest election in US history. With Bush apparently
leading Gore by only hundreds of votes, in a state with hundreds of thousands
of disenfranchised voters, could similar errors be tipping the race?"
-
VOTELESS IN
FLORIDA by
Sasha Abramsky Nov. 8, 2000
I hate that The LA
Times acts as though THEY weren't the ones who gave the felon purge
"little attention," as if THE MAINSTREAM AMERICAN MEDIA weren't the
ones who blew that story off for damn-near FIVE MONTHS.
...But a review by The Times of
thousands of pages of records, reports and e-mail messages suggests the botched
effort to stop felons from voting could have affected the ultimate outcome.
"Botched
effort to stop felons from voting"?
botch [boch
] transitive verb
(past botched, past participle botched,
present participle botch·ing,
3rd person present singular botch·es)
do something badly: to do something very badly
out of clumsiness or lack of care
managed to botch a simple repair job botched the piano concerto up
Here it is again
-- the subtle language of propaganda, the subtle implication that no crime
occurred, no willful act of wrong, just a screw-up. The LA Times is saying that, at worst, what happened to the disenfranchised
voters in Florida happened because of incompetence or negligence, AND WAS NOT
AN INTENTIONAL WRONG.
And yet, they give
absolutely NO EVIDENCE to support this assertion.
I am not asking The
LA Times to accuse anyone. I am asking
them to report what is known. And what
is known is that perfectly legal voters were removed from the voting rolls and
prevented from exercising their franchise.
That we know. That is not a hard
message to convey. Words like
"error," "mistakes," and "botched" all carry the
implication -- the connotation -- that no crime was perpetrated. In the absence of conclusive evidence to
back up that spin, I'd prefer they tell the story STRAIGHT, sans spin.
The reason: Those on the list were disproportionately African American.
Blacks made up 66% of those named as felons in Miami-Dade, the state's largest
county, for example, and 54% in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa.
Those individuals' politics are unknown, but African Americans voted more
than 9 to 1 for Gore across the state. And Bush ultimately won Florida by only
537 votes of nearly 6 million cast.
No evidence has emerged to indicate that anyone illegally conspired to
keep African Americans from voting in November. Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's
brother, has denied that state officials tried to disenfranchise anyone.
But many Democrats, especially minorities, charge that the felon purge
is proof enough.
The felon purge is
proof that a wrong has occurred, just like the scarred Murrah Federal Building
in Oklahoma City was proof that a wrong had occurred. What is beyond my meager understanding is how -- knowing that
Florida election officials continued to demand a wider and WIDER purge, even
AFTER they had been informed that the NARROWER purge was wrongly denying the
innocent their right to vote -- the media can continue to both overtly and
subtly assert that the improper purges were unintentional.
"I don't feel like it was an honest mistake," said Sandylynn Williams,
a black Tampa resident and Gore supporter who wasn't allowed to vote because
she was wrongly identified as a felon. "I felt like they knew most of the
minorities was going to vote against Bush."
Williams, 34, said she had voted in every election since she was 18 and
had passed a government background check for a job with a military contractor.
County officials finally restored her right to vote 10 days after the election.
"They sent me a letter of apology," she said. "That meant
nothing to me. I felt like I was cheated."
And this... Well,
this just breaks my heart. "I felt
like I was cheated," she says.
This woman was wronged, but since the media have endlessly spun the
public with messages of "sore losers," and "move on," and
"get over it," and "peaceful transition of power," this
woman, like so many of us, doesn't say, "I got screwed, and someone should
have to pay for screwing me. I have
rights, and they were infringed."
Why doesn't she say it? Because
the media tells us what to believe, and what to believe about ourselves, and
they have been telling us from the get-go that we have NOTHING TO BE OUTRAGED
ABOUT.
Don't believe the
hype. We have PLENTY of reasons to be
outraged. They are legion.
The felon lists were compiled by Database Technologies Inc. (DBT), now
part of ChoicePoint Inc., an Atlanta-based company. In 1998, DBT won a
$4-million contract from the Florida secretary of state's office to cross-check
the 8.6 million names registered to vote in the state with law enforcement and
other records.
Over the next two years, DBT built a database that was used to identify--and
all too often misidentify--about 100,000 felons and dead people still
registered to vote.
DBT officials blame state officials for casting too wide a net in their
search for illegal voters. "It defied logic," company spokesman James
Lee said.
"It defies
logic"? Not for me. Logically, if I tell you, "Hey, if you keep
feeding your kid Drain-o, then the kid is gonna die," and you say, "I
know! I'll add arsenic to the Drano!" Well, you aren't being illogical. You are showing INTENT. Once the Florida elections officials were
informed about the disenfranchisement being wrought by their instructions to
DBT, they had the knowledge to form the requisite intent to establish WILFULL
CONDUCT. They knew the outcome of their
actions. At that point, they could no
longer claim ignorance.
... And they sure
as hell can't claim it now.
No one knows how many legitimate voters were on that database or were
stopped from voting. Some county elections officials were so outraged at the
errors that they simply tossed out the lists. Some tried to correct them. And
some knew they were faulty but used them anyway.
"Some knew
they were faulty but used them anyway."
Is there a stronger indication of willful conduct? Of having the knowledge needed to form
requisite intent? How can The LA Times say
this, and say that the purge was an "error," a "mistake," a
"botched" effort?
"We removed a lot of people from the rolls when I know this was not
a truly accurate list," said David Leahy, the Miami-Dade election supervisor.
Is it just me, or
does this sound suspiciously like A CONFESSION?
"I don't doubt at all that there were many names of individuals removed
statewide that were incorrect," said Pam Iorio, the Hillsborough election
supervisor. "Some of those people may not even know to this day that they
have been taken off the rolls."
I say again, is it
just me, or does this sound suspiciously like A CONFESSION?
Florida is one of 12 states that bar felons from voting unless they apply
for and win clemency from a state board, an arduous and expensive process. Most
states, including California, automatically restore a felon's right to vote
after completion of the sentence.
This reminds me of
Texas Governor George W. Bush's policy to so complicate the process of applying
for federally provided-for free medical care for poor children, that parents
would be unable to apply -- to make the process such a pain, that the personal
costs of applying for the program would be prohibitive, and children would go
without.
Records show, however, that more than 2,000 alleged felons from other
states were put on Florida's felon lists last year even though those states had
restored their voting rights.
Among the supposed felons was 19-year-old Michael Jones of Valrico, near
Tampa. Jones made the list when DBT erroneously linked his name to an Ohio
felony conviction. But Ohio restores felons' voting rights after they do their
time.
Even worse, it was the wrong Michael Jones. The Ohio criminal was black;
the Valrico voter was white.
Go back and read
that again.
I'm serious...
Now, if I am
reading this correctly, what The LA Times is saying here, is that Ohio felony
convictions only result in disenfranchisement for the period of time a
convicted person serves IN PRISON. That
being the case, how can someone living and voting in Florida, who has an Ohio
felony conviction in their past, be barred from voting at all? And why did Florida bar them?
After the presidential election, Florida clarified its policy on out-of-state
voters and declared that those whose rights had been restored could cast
ballots in the future. The state Legislature also repealed the statute that
authorized hiring DBT. Members voted instead to provide up to $2 million to
create a reliable statewide voter registration database that will be accessible
from the Internet.
I'd laugh -- really
I would -- if this wasn't so AWFUL.
Talk about the bull being out of the barn. Yes, I guess AFTER the election WOULD be the time to do something
about all these problems, wouldn't it?
Jesus!
It's unclear whether such moves will satisfy the U.S. Justice Department's
Civil Rights Division, which is investigating the felon program, or the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights, which has held hearings on the issue.
The commission is expected to report next month that the felon purge and
other election-related problems had a disproportionate effect on African
Americans and thus violated the Voting Rights Act. That law calls for civil
remedies if a policy or practice unfairly harms a minority voting group, even
if the effect is unintended.
That being the
case, this sounds like an open-and-shut slam-dunk to me... but, what do I know?
Which reminds me
of a judicial ruling that set me back on my heels... Basically, here is the story:
A company hires folks, and tells them that if they work for the company
for "X" amount of years, or reach "X" age, they will be
eligible to collect retirement benefits -- a pension.
Then, the workers
begin to accumulate "X" numbers of years with the company, and reach
"X" age, at which point, the company fires them, so that the company
will not have to pay them the pension and retirement benefits promised.
So, the workers
take the company to court, arguing that this practice is carried out in
"bad faith," and is discriminatory toward the aged.
The court, in its owlish
wisdom, says, "No, it's not. The
company isn't firing you because they DON'T LIKE old people, they are firing
you because they DO LIKE money. There's
nothing wrong with what the company is doing, there is nothing illegal about
it, and there is no remedy for you."
So, I guess if
Katherine and Clayton and all the other coup-conspirators get together and say,
"It isn't that we DON'T LIKE black people, it's that we DO LIKE money, and
George W. promised us that tax cut..."
Details of the felon purge were first reported earlier this year by The
Nation, a liberal magazine based in New York.
Well, cut my legs
off and call me "Shorty"... Does this mean we knew about the felon
purge BEFORE the election? And more
importantly, does this mean The LA Times knew about it BEFORE the
election? And if so, why in the holy
hell is this article dated May 21, 2001?
(A Monday, by the way, which also begs the question, "If The LA
Times knew about this felon purge BEFORE the Mother Jones article of November
8th, then surely they knew about it in time for the SUNDAY EDITION the day
before -- the one paper a week that most people find the time to read? Why did they wait until Monday to publish
it?")
Ironically, the effort to stop Florida's felons from voting came after a
voter fraud scandal in Miami's 1997 mayoral race led to calls for statewide
reform.
Why is that
ironic?
Hired soon after, DBT proposed cross-checking voter lists with an array
of federal, state and county records, from convictions to address changes. The
company also urged searching only for voters with the same exact name as a
felon.
But Florida officials told DBT to include names that were merely similar
or had matching birth dates or Social Security numbers. An 80% match was
sufficient, state officials said.
I see. The experts said to do it one way, and the
partisan elections officials said to do it a different way, and that doesn't
show intent?
Not surprisingly, problems--and warnings--erupted from the start.
You don't say...
In March 1999, for example, Emmet "Bucky" Mitchell, a lawyer
for Florida's Division of Elections, sent an e-mail to Marlene Thorogood, the DBT
project manager, urging her to loosen the criteria as far as possible.
"Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren't matches
and let [county election] supervisors make a final determination rather than
exclude certain matches altogether," Mitchell wrote.
Obviously? Oh, goodie!
An absolutely arbitrary and capricious process for determining who
shall, and who shall not, be permitted to cast a ballot! What a capital idea!
"...rather
than exclude certain matches altogether"?
Here we find the subtle bastardization of language at work --
AGAIN. It wasn't "matches"
that they were seeking to include in the purge, it was FALSE POSITIVES. It was NON-MATCHES. It was NON-FELONS. It was LEGAL VOTERS.
"Unfortunately, programming in this fashion may supply you with false
positives," or misidentifications, Thorogood replied.
Bucky already knew
that, Ms. Thorogood. Isn't it obvious?
Once computers had matched the names, DBT sent the data to Tallahassee.
State officials then passed the lists to the 67 county election supervisors,
with instructions to notify everyone identified.
Official letters soon advised voters across the state that they had 30
days to send their fingerprints to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement
for verification if their names were "confused with that of a felon."
In essence, they had to prove they were innocent.
How many folks out
there would even know how to go about getting fingerprinted, let alone how to
go about proving that they aren't a felon?
What do you do? Get Santa Claus
to write a letter to Katherine Harris, saying you've been NICE and not NAUGHTY?
Even that led to screw-ups. One Madison County voter wrote to the state
police, as instructed. But a clerk there misread it and wrote to Linda Howell,
the county supervisor of elections. The letter said Howell was a felon and
would be cut from the voter rolls.
"Needless to say, I was very upset," Howell said. "It
seemed they were taking their job too lax. You could ruin a person with
something like that."
Not that I'm
trying to make anyone nervous, but POLICE are the people we empower to
investigate crimes... Seems like they
have their act together, don't it?
How reassuring for
all of us.
Norman Weitzel, a Jacksonville resident, also got a letter. The law-abiding
Republican said he was "floored" to be told that he was a felon--and
outraged at the effort required to correct the record. "It started out
like I was guilty and had to prove I wasn't," he said.
The American Way
-- guilty until proven innocent... Oh,
wait! I got that back-ass-wards... Didn't I?
And isn't 'Weitzel'
sometimes a Jewish name? I wonder if
there isn't some enterprising student of genealogy out there, trying to make a
name for herself, that might not want to take a stab at the racial and ethnic
makeup of the wrongly purged and their surnames...
DBT was hardly apologetic.
Checking felony data from other states, it mistakenly used a list of 8,000
Texans who had committed misdemeanors, not felonies. But DBT officials had
little sympathy when some of the transplanted Texans complained of getting
letters warning that they could not vote because they were felons.
"There are just some people that feel when you mess with 'their right
to vote,' you're messing with their life," Thorogood groused in an e-mail.
She also advised other DBT employees on how to deal with county officials
who complained about such errors. Tell them, she wrote, that "this is
THEIR duty to research--not pass the buck to DBT. . . . We were not contracted
for that."
Lee, the DBT spokesman, said the company will never again attempt a project
like Florida's felon purge.
"When it comes to performing work which may impact a person's right
to vote," he said in a recent speech, "we are not confident any of
the methods used today can guarantee legal voters will not be wrongfully denied
the right to vote."
God, I am so glad
this exercise is over. Reading this
gave me a stomach ache... Writing this
gave me a stomach ache...
"Texas..."
I'm from Texas.
"Misdemeanors..."
Like traffic
violations.
In Texas, when you
get a moving violation, they note your race on the ticket.
My stomach hurts.