O’Keefe wasn’t happy about spending his Memorial Day turning rocks into pebbles to pay his debt to society, but what really bothered him were the terms of his probation. He couldn’t leave New Jersey, his home state, without court approval, and the court in New Orleans, where he was sentenced, had turned down a travel request. At first O’Keefe feared revealing this bit of information — “my enemies will use it against me,” he said darkly — but indignation overcame caution. “I have to get government permission to accept speaking dates, which is how I make my living. I can’t travel to work on new projects. And I can’t leave to train others.”WAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!
“I’m not comparing my situation to the gulag,” he said. “But I speak truth to power. You’d think liberal baby boomers would support me. Isn’t that what the ’60s were all about? Do we really want political prisoners in America?”Oh, that’s hilarious (with O’Keefe actually comparing himself to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for good measure).
There’s all kinds of ridiculous attempts here to whitewash O’Keefe’s garbage, working in concert with Hannah Giles, Andrew Breitbart and the rest of that foul ilk. That includes quotes from Brooke Kroeger, director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, calling what O’Keefe does “undercover journalism.” It also includes someone named Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri’s school of journalism, who actually equates O’Keefe with Michael Moore.
Oh, and speaking of the director of “Roger and Me” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” (mentioned at the end here)…
O’Keefe grew up in Westwood, N.J., and still lives with his parents. His father is an engineer, his mother a physical therapist. In high school he was a theater guy, but Rutgers radicalized him. He was incensed by what he considered the political correctness on campus. Soon he began writing biting columns in the college newspaper, The Daily Targum, which caught the eye of Morton Blackwell, the head of the Leadership Institute in Arlington, Va., which he founded 32 years ago. The institute trains young conservative activists and budding journalists (including Ainsley Earhardt and Adam Housley of Fox News). In all, Blackwell says that there are some 90 institute graduates working in local and network news around the country. The institute has also helped establish more than 100 conservative alternative campus newspapers and magazines, and it gave O’Keefe seed money for The Centurion. O’Keefe’s last editorial, “I Have a Dream,” set forth a vision of a college where, among other things, conservative views were respected, Christian tradition was honored and people realized that “guns are no more responsible for Columbine than spoons are responsible for Michael Moore’s obesity.”Note to O’Keefe – nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green and Federal Judge John Roll were killed by a nut with an assault rifle containing a 30-round clip; Jared Loughner didn’t carry out these crimes with a gallon container of Haagen-Dazs (to say nothing of critically wounding Gabby Giffords also).
There’s all kinds of ripe stuff in this mess from Zev Chafets, who apparently is angling for a book deal with another right-wing icon, but I’ll focus on this item for now (as noted here)…
…Chafets leads the reader to conclude that the core controversy is whether it's ever okay for a journalist to mislead his subject. But the mortal sin that O'Keefe commits in the ACORN videos is misleading the audience. His videos are presented to the public in less than honest ways that go far beyond normal "selectivity." Instead of quoting a former Times public editor (who wrote two columns about the ACORN controversy) as his expert source, Chafets should've consulted the report from the California Attorney General's Office. The staffers who wrote it interviewed everyone involved, saw all the raw video footage, and issued a lengthy accounting with detailed descriptions of the misleading edits O'Keefe made.Here is more on this from Eric Boehlert of Media Matters.
Readers are never alerted to that report, or its most damning section: the story of Juan Carlos Vera. He was an employee at ACORN's San Diego office. O'Keefe and Giles came in, pretended to be a pimp and prostitute, and asked for help smuggling underage girls across the Mexican border.
In the ACORN videos, it appears that Vera is willing to be an accomplice in the made up smuggling plot. O'Keefe may well have thought so at the time. According to the California Attorney General's investigation, however, Vera didn't know what to make of the pair at first, tried to elicit as much information as possible from them so that he could contact law enforcement, and called his cousin, a police officer, as soon as they left. Phone records confirm the call to his cousin, and Vera was soon directed to a San Diego police officer who specializes in human smuggling. He spoke to that police officer too. As Vera was cooperating with police, the ACORN sting videos began to appear, portraying him as a willing child smuggler. He was fired from ACORN during the PR fallout, and has since filed a lawsuit against O'Keefe and Giles.
Chafets mentions none of this, but it's relevant for three reasons. First, it highlights one of the reasons that it is ethically questionable to take hidden video and air it without ever confronting the subject with its contents first. Second, you'd think that after phone records confirming that Vera called the police were made public -- and after an investigation by a state attorney general suggested his probable innocence -- O'Keefe would apologize, or at least correct his original story. But he didn't. Finally, if a magazine story is setting forth a controversy about a journalistic story, isn't it relevant to include the fact that one of the subjects filed a lawsuit against the reporter?
I’ve been holding back on saying this for a little while, but no longer – though it still provides interesting content on occasion, the Sunday New York Times has fallen off a cliff since Frank Rich has left (and Joe Nocera has tried ably to fill in for Bob Herbert, including today, but Nocera’s niche is more business than political commentary). Basically, the “common-sense-reality” point of view is disappearing. And it’s being replaced by more and more fawning cult-of-personality “coverage” such as the type Chafets provided here.
And that is truly sad.
ASPEN, Colo. — President Obama’s top adviser on Pakistan said Friday that the United States had six months to deliver “a knockout blow” to Al Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan while the group was still in turmoil after the killing of Osama bin Laden.As noted here, Lute said in August 2005 that "Everything in a counterinsurgency has to do with the political outcome, not the military outcome." He also said we need an “information war” to fight “bin Ladenism” and the enemy was “Islamic extremism.” And he was right.
The adviser, Douglas E. Lute, a deputy national security adviser, said the United States needed to increase covert action in Pakistan to take advantage of the disarray within Al Qaeda’s senior ranks.
Lute also said, however, that the Iraqi “leadership” would “step up,” there was no "hard factual evidence" of a "clear link" between Afghanistan's drug profits and "extremists," and the Iraqi insurgency was “90 percent home grown.” And he was wrong.
Wonder if Lute will return after another “F.U.” for a progress report?
LOS ANGELES — In a major victory for Marvel Entertainment and its parent, the Walt Disney Company, a federal judge in New York granted them summary judgment in their legal dispute with the heirs to the comic book artist Jack Kirby, while denying the Kirbys request for judgment against Disney and Marvel.And as noted here…
The ruling, by Judge Colleen McMahon of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, declares comics and characters created by Mr. Kirby — who helped give birth to the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk and the X-Men, all of which now underlie valuable movie series — were works for hire under the Copyright Act of 1909, and cannot be reclaimed by the Kirby family.
In 2009, Mr. Kirby’s heirs sent Marvel and Disney 45 notices of a plan to reclaim copyrights in a series of Marvel comics that were published from 1958 to 1963. The comics included issues of “The Amazing Spider-Man,” “The Avengers,” “Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos,” and others. In her ruling on Thursday, however, Judge McMahon said the notices “did not operate to convey any federally protected copyrights.”
Marc Toberoff, the Los Angeles lawyer who represents the Kirbys, said, “We knew when we took this on that it would not be an easy fight given the arcane and contradictory state of ‘work for hire’ ” case law under the 1909 Copyright Act. “We respectfully disagree with the court’s ruling and intend to appeal this matter to the Second Circuit. Sometimes you have to lose to win.”
“My favorite thing about Kirby’s artwork was his storytelling,” Lee said. “He was really a film director doing comics.”As someone who was weaned on Marvel Comics from an early age, I think it’s sad that the estate of Jack Kirby has to scrape for crumbs by comparison to what Stan Lee has earned through the movies, TV shows and other promotion and merchandizing of Marvel’s characters and stories. Yes, Lee deserves his reward also, but he’s a member of perhaps the most successful duo in comic book history, not a solo act (and the over-hundred-year-old copyright law be damned – Lee should find a way to make good with the Kirby heirs without getting the “suits” involved).
In that, Kirby was certainly ahead of his time. Comics are a huge part of Hollywood now, thanks to the modern era of computer-generated special effects that, finally, can match the galactic visions and super-powered mayhem that Kirby put to paper in the 1960s. Kirby’s influence is nothing less than massive on several generations of artists and filmmakers.
“There was power in the work of Jack Kirby that changed the way I looked at things,” said Guillermo del Toro, writer-director of “Pan’s Labyrinth.” “There was no one else like him and there never will be.”
Nevertheless, Kirby remains a distant second to Lee in name recognition, which Lisa Kirby said rankles. “A lot more people know the name Stan Lee than the name Jack Kirby,” she said. “I’m not putting down Stan Lee’s talents but it’s difficult for us to see that he does dominate the credit. That doesn’t reflect the work or the reality. To see Jack Kirby in small letters and Stan Lee in big letters, that’s hard for us.”
What a shame that the spirit of heroism and self-sacrifice exemplified by Marvel’s most iconic characters is apparently nowhere to be found from one of its founding fathers.
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