luv lub jub: October 2008

As a last and desperate attempt to put off doing homework I decided to go to the gym. I had a wonderful work out, by the way. I was more motivated than I have been in a long while. Possibly because I had to justify whatever reasons I was not studying.
I was on my way home when I saw this.
A car with one blinking headlight. No, not one blinking turn signal, one blinking headlight. After waking up a little I realized the head light was not blinking, but there were people in front of it. They must be changing a flat tire. Sucks for them.
But when I got closer I saw what these people were actually doing.
They were swinging at something.
They were holding large blunt objects and swinging at something towards the ground.
I got closer and started going a little slower. I'm sure you can imagine how my heart started racing, my foot got a little heavier on the gas pedal, and any amount of fatigue that I was feeling before quickly disappeared when I realized they were swinging a pipe at a person on the ground.
I still can't believe it. These horrible, horrible sociopaths were beating someone.
They saw me. They looked right at my inconspicuous bright orange car shaped like a jelly bean with half the bumper missing. I wasn't too far from home either. They were less than 100 yards away from the entrance of my neighborhood.
After racing out of there at about 60 mph in a 35 mph zone I pulled into the next brightly lit gas station. Which was much further than I was to my house. But they were right outside my neighborhood. They saw my car, and if they drove by my house they would have easily been able to pick it out.
Maybe I was just being paranoid. But I know if I were a low-life scumbag like that, there would be no witnesses...
So after stopping my car and ducking down I called 911 like any good citizen would.
I was bawling.
I mean, I shouldn't have been. I had only seen something bad happening. It wasn't so bad. Well it was for whoever it was happening to, and I wasn't a part of it or a victim of it. And for going into the medical field this should be an occurrence that would prompt me to run to the victim and say "everybody back - I know first aid" rather than run the other way. Wait, never mind. No matter how much emergency training I receive, I will never, ever ever ever, run into a group of dangerous men (well, I would like to say these people were boys, real men would never do such a thing) wearing black trench coats and using oblong objects as weapons.
So after hearing a very lovely, calm voice say "911, what's your emergency?" I blurted out what happened in about .2 of a second. She had to ask me to repeat what I said two times.
After talking to the dispatcher and explaining what happened, I sat in my car for about 15 seconds.
Curiosity is my biggest downfall and I have no doubt it will get me killed someday, but I had to see if these less-than-human people were caught. I started my car, drove around my block so I would approach them from the same direction I was going before. My logic was that they had seen my car before, if they saw me coming again from the opposite way I would look suspicious. By the time I got around the block there were 4 police cars and an ambulance there. The car with the blinking headlight was there also and there were 4 people that the police had apprehended. Also with them was a blond girl, probably about my age, sitting on the curb and staring at the ground with a hardened look on her face.
At least the police were there. Maybe I was seeing things. I definitely saw them swinging large, heavy objects at something on the ground. But one thing I learned in Psych 1010 is that the brain hates inconsistencies and will fill in the blanks with what it wants to think. No, they were positively swinging at a body. Maybe it was a mannequin? I don't know why I doubt what I saw, other than I cannot believe anyone would be inhuman enough to do something so violent.
But this leaves me to my curious nature. I wonder what actually happened. Were they actually beating someone? What did the victim do that made the perpetrators think it was okay to physically hurt another human being? How hurt was he? Would there be enough evidence to lock these guys away? How can people do such horrible things? Were they abused as children? Did their daddies leave when they were babies? Did their moms do meth when they were pregnant with them? I can't find any news articles about this so it must not have been as bad as I thought. It was still scary, nonetheless.

Some of you may know, some of you may not know, that I am a journalistic snob. Journalism was my first choice as a career, and I developed a love for documenting the truth after studying my great uncle Jack Anderson (seriously, read about him, you'll be impressed) since I was a youngin'. He felt it was important to report the truth no matter what the political affiliation of the person in question.
Bottom line: The amount of bias I have seen in recent journalism has made me sick.
Someone forwarded this rant by Orson Scott Card to me and it sums up my feelings towards the coverage this election has received almost perfectly.

By Orson Scott Card October 5, 2008

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

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? "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 weaselly 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 daily newspaper in our city.