Cdn-Firearms Digest Saturday, October 24 2009 Volume 13 : Number 503 In this issue: Lorne Gunter Column: Buying us off with our own money National Post Column: How to catch a thief in Toronto Gun registry nears crucial vote Secret ATF Firearms Tracing And Registration System Exposed Re: Citizens Arrest and perverse justice When you take away rights. . Re: News Durham - Teens charged after guns, ammo stolen Re: scrap the firearms act NY TIMES: Hunters and Anglers Rally for Climate Bill RE: News Durham - Teens charged after guns, ammo stolen The Atlantic: The Story Behind the Story ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, October 23, 2009 9:07 am From: "Dennis & Hazel Young" Subject: Lorne Gunter Column: Buying us off with our own money THE CALGARY HERALD - OCTOBER 23, 2009 Buying us off with our own money BY LORNE GUNTER http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Buying+with+money/2134528/story.html There are two things particularly galling about the pasting of big Conservative party logos on big government cheques giving out big amounts of tax-dollar subsidies for local infrastructure. The first is, the practice is crass and stupid. Who does not see right through it? Which recipient of these giant, photo op devices does not know they are being used as pawns in a bid by the local MP to enhance his or her re-election chances? Who does not realize the funds are being provided by the hardworking people of Canada through their too-high taxes rather than via free-will donations to the party? The answer is no one. No one is dumb enough to be bamboozled by this glaringly tactless tactic. So in addition to being crass, the strategy is stupid, because it is unlikely to make either the recipients or the general public more likely to vote Conservative. It's doubly stupid because there was never a chance the gluing of CPC logos onto dummy cheques was going to go undiscovered. Some reporter or opposition politician somewhere was going to notice. The story was going to go national and when it did, it was going to do more harm than good. I don't think Canadians resent enough the brazen way in which our politicians polish up their own selfish interests with our money. Not their own money. Not money freely extracted from the members of their own party or people who agree with their goals and policies. But money each of us has no choice but to hand over through our taxes. I was incensed when the Liberals did it and I am equally incensed now that the Conservatives are doing it. They both, obviously, think little of your intelligence or of mine, because both try to do the same thing when they are in power, namely stay in power by taking credit personally and as parties for the wonderful projects they have won for us, the folks back home. Members of Parliament-- Tories as much as Liberals--have contempt for the intelligence of the recipients of public funds and for ordinary citizens. They must believe we won't see through their shenanigans. How else could they justify the attempt to pull the wool over our eyes? If they thought we were smart, they would never try a stunt like the big logos on big cheques. In making a complaint to the ethics commissioner, the Liberals produced photographs, taken largely from local newspapers, showing nearly 200 incidents in which Tory MPs had shown up at cheque-presentation ceremonies brandishing blown-up copies of government cheques with Tory party logos printed on them. It's repulsive. That's the first thing wrong with it. The second problem is easier to understand if you go first to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation's debt clock website: www.debtclock.ca.There you will see a running total for the national debt--and I do mean running. The numbers scroll by in a blur. In the few short hours between my typing these words and your reading them, the total has gone up by millions and millions. Your share of the national debt--the share of each Canadian man, woman or child--is nearly $15,000. That is a sum that retards private economic growth, because just to pay the interest on the nearly half a trillion dollars every year, Ottawa must tax away $40 billion or more from profitable companies and productive individuals. That money is wasted, gone for good. It pays for no public service or new building or national defence. It goes strictly to paying off those who loaned us the money for past spending. Now back to the phoney cheques with big Conservative logos on them. As Ottawa racks up debt --at a rate of more than $1,500 a second, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation--government MPs are fanning out far and wide across the country to get their grinning faces in every local paper and on every local television station, passing out cheques with their party's symbol on them, hoping we won't notice their vulgar effort to gain politically while spending our money and hoping we won't make the connection between all that spending and the whirling debt clock at www.debtclock.ca. Lately, a lot of long time Tory members have been complaining that their party's government is acting as the Liberals do when they are in power. The cheques-with-logos is the best proof of that I can think of. lgunter@shaw.ca ------------------------------ Date: Fri, October 23, 2009 9:18 am From: "Dennis & Hazel Young" Subject: National Post Column: How to catch a thief in Toronto NATIONAL POST - OCTOBER 23, 2009 Lorne Gunter: How to catch a thief in Toronto http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/10/23/lorne-gunter-how-to-catch-a-thief-in-toronto.aspx There are so many things wrong in the case of David Chen, it's hard to know where to begin. Mr. Chen is the Toronto grocer who back in May performed a citizen's arrest on a serial thief, but now faces charges of assault, kidnapping and forcible confinement for his actions. Let's start, though, with the aspect of this case that grinds my nerves the most: Crown prosecutors made a plea bargain with Anthony Bennett, the thief, in return for his testimony against Mr. Chen. Crown prosecutors always signal who they want most by making deals with the other accused in a case for their testimony against the most-desired target. Mr. Bennett, who has a criminal record for drugs and theft going back 33 years, got a lighter sentence (30 days, plus 15 days time served) in return for acting as a government witness against Mr. Chen. Prosecutors cannot see the distortion of justice inherent in letting go a habitual criminal -- a man who for years has harassed and stolen from shopkeepers in Mr. Chen's Toronto neighbourhood -- just so they can win a conviction against a law-abiding citizen who grew tired of police and court inaction and decided to exercise his ancient rights to self-defence and citizen's arrest. The message this sends is that the Crown is more determined to discourage citizens from getting involved in local justice than it is in stopping thefts. It is more interested in the rights of criminals than the safety of ordinary Canadians and their property. The members of the justice system no longer see themselves as the servants of you and me and David Chen, at least not directly. While they may accept that the system exists to protect the public, they are suspicious of the public's input. Police chiefs and prosecutors, judges and wardens may believe, in theory, that the system exists to dispense justice on our behalf, but for all practical purposes, the system has its own priorities now, usually established by "experts" in sociology, rights theory and psychology. We, the people, just get in the way. Indeed, in some ways, David Chen is seen as a greater irritant than Anthony Bennett. Bennett, at least, knows his role in the system and plays it well. The Anthony Bennetts perform their drug deals, shopliftings, break-and-enters, assaults and so on. Police arrest them. Prosecutors prosecute them. Judges listen to their tales of woeful childhoods, impoverished upbringings and addictions, pat them on the head and set them back on the streets in short order to be arrested, prosecuted and tried all over again. Occasionally, some Anthony Bennett does something so heinous he has to be put behind bars. But almost always this is done with reluctance. It is the goal of most federal and provincial prosecutors to send fewer than half of those convicted of crimes to prison. It is the policy of most governments, rather, to have the guilty serve conditional sentences or do community service. To some extent, the justice system is correct to step in between the public and the criminals, to serve as a buffer against the public's desire for revenge. One of the reasons we institutionalized justice as a civilization was to take the bloodlust out of the process. But criminal justice now has become over-institutionalized. It has too many agendas of its own, separate from the public's. And when the public no longer sees its ends being met through the institutionalized justice system, they are going to be more likely to take matters into their own hands. That does not mean that when the system is operating as it should, the citizenry cedes its right to self-defence and citizen's arrest. Those rights predate an organized police force and even an institutionalized court system. Indeed, they supersede it. We, each of us, have never conceded the right, not to be vigilantes and go looking for trouble, but to protect ourselves, our families, our property and our communities. The state has no monopoly on the preservation of the peace. True, those of us not trained in guarding the peace are wise to let professional police maintain it when they are available. But David Chen did nothing more than he was entitled to do to protect himself, his staff, his shop and his neighbourhood. National Post lgunter@shaw.ca ------------------------------ Date: Fri, October 23, 2009 9:25 am From: "Dennis & Hazel Young" Subject: Gun registry nears crucial vote RED RIVER VALLEY ECHO - OCTOBER 23, 2009 Gun registry nears crucial vote By Greg Vandermeulen http://www.altonaecho.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2141961 The first hour of debate has passed and the second hour is scheduled for Oct. 28 on Portage-Lisgar MP Candice Hoeppner's private members bill that seeks to eliminate the long gun registry for rifles and shotguns. The first vote on the issue could be as soon as Nov. 4. Hoeppner said support seems to be high, adding if party leaders allow a free vote, the long gun registry requirement for businesses and individuals could be gone. "That's what we're hoping for," she said. "Now is not the time for partisan games. I am calling on members of the house from both the government side and opposition to work with me in passing Bill C-391." "I am urging the leaders of the opposition to not whip the vote, but rather permit their members to vote freely and represent the wishes of their constituents," she added. "Only then will we end the wasteful long-gun registry." Support from the Saskatoon Police Association and the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers has given Hoeppner a boost as she promotes her private members bill. "This demonstration of support speaks to how important my bill is to Canadians that so many people including front line police officers and police associations are voicing their support to end the long-gun registry," said Hoeppner. The SFPO represents over 1,100 men and women working for six municipal police agencies in Saskatchewan. Hoeppner noted that the expressions of support by Canadian police officers indicate that efforts to end the long-gun registry are far greater than the president of the Canadian Police Association and the president of the Canadian Chiefs of Police Association would have the public believe. NDP support Police associations are not the only ones speaking out. Bill C-391 has garnered support from New Democratic Party members Bruce Hyer and John Rafferty, who last spring issued a joint press release expressing their support for the legislation. "I am encouraged that my bill has the support not only of my Conservative colleagues but also members of the opposition," stated Hoeppner. "Working together with all members of parliament, police associations, and the people of Canada, we can put an end to the wasteful long-gun registry." The bill will repeal the requirement to register non-restricted long-guns. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, October 23, 2009 9:26 am From: "Dennis & Hazel Young" Subject: Secret ATF Firearms Tracing And Registration System Exposed Secret ATF Firearms Tracing And Registration System Exposed Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 11:07 am Possible Secret ATF Firearms Tracing And Registration System Exposed Is the BATFE using your tax payer dollars and violating of federal law to create database of all US Gun owners? Washington, DC --(AmmoLand.com)-We at Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership recently received the document that is copied below for your convenience. We would respectfully ask the BATFE to either validate these assertions or refute them in detail. http://www.ammoland.com/2009/10/23/secret-atf-firearms-registration-system-exposed/ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:13:37 -0400 From: "mred" Subject: Re: Citizens Arrest and perverse justice and this poor SOB doesnt even own a gun~!! ed/on - ----------------------------------------- - ----- Original Message ----- From: "TONY KATZ" To: Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 11:15 AM Subject: Citizens Arrest and perverse justice > Matthew Coutts National Post > Published: Friday October 23 2009 > > David Chen wore a patiently strained smile as he sat in the back of a > Toronto courthouse yesterday morning, shifting only slightly while he > waited to face charges for the alleged assault and kidnapping of a > shoplifter outside of his Chinatown produce store. >SNIP > Mr. Chen was arrested in May and charged with the alleged assault and > kidnapping of a suspected shoplifter, Anthony Bennett. > Mr. Chen was charged with assault, kidnapping, > forcible confinement and concealment of a weapon, a box cutter he kept on > his belt. Mr. Bennett was charged with two counts of shoplifting, one > relating to a King Street flower shop. But after agreeing to testify as a > Crown witness against Mr. Chen, he pleaded guilty and his sentence was > significantly reduced. >SNIP > "What today's events say about our justice system is that up is down and > left is right and everything is perverse," he said on the steps of the > courthouse. Dropping the kidnapping charge, an indictable offence, was > still being considered by the Crown. By facing an indictable offence, Mr. > Chen would be guaranteed a jury trial. >SNIP ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:38:18 -0700 From: Len Miller Subject: When you take away rights. . Cc: Toronto , Lorne Gunter When our laws, and the prosecution of those laws were enacted, the term Social Contract was implied . They teach this in lawyer school . . Then you take away, that which we were promised . . you betray us . . Which, as I was told by a LAWYER that to enjoy a free and democratic society, WE ( the collective 'we') would give up ( mafia justice, Bhindi Johal justice, the United Nations gang justice ) and cede it all to the courts . . otherwise known as the 'criminal justice system.(CJS) YOU HAVE JUST LOST . . any sense of safety under English Common Law . . Well, Trudeau # has seen to that , with his repatriation of the constitution, the separation of accountability from your ELECTED representative and handed it, with NO provisions to Bora Laskin and his gang of seven. the Supreme Court . . And what have THEY done with it? HE # may be dead, but his finger remains . . Gradually, and inexorably like a glacier, the CJS has, like a glacier having done all its damage, melted away, leaving nothing with which to deal. It leaves a trail of wreckage . . Just like our CJS, and with like result . . took something with it . It took the Social Contract, it took JUSTICE, leaving the rubble . . a pernicious CRIMINAL SYSTEM . . one, our digest has captured it nicely . IT'S ALL ABOUT CONTROL . . ( Thanks Todd ) Luke 11 vs 52 . . Beware ye, lawyers for ye have taken away the key of knowledge YE ENTERED NOT IN YOURSELVES . . and them that were entering in . . ye hindered . . - ---------------------- Tony posted: Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:15:52 -0400 From: TONY KATZ Subject: Citizens Arrest and perverse justice Matthew Coutts National Post Published: Friday October 23 2009 - ---- Nicely said . . Tony . . Len Miller Vancouver ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:39:45 -0500 From: "Live to Ride" Subject: Re: News Durham - Teens charged after guns, ammo stolen > You know, it seems to me that there aren't very many people, with the > possible exception of military and/or police officers, who are allowed > to legally possess hollow-point ammunition.... I have to say something here. I have owned and used hollow point ammunition for the last years. I have purchased both factory made ammo and I have made thousands of rounds of the same for my 9mm and .270 Savage rifle. They shoot so nicely in both types of firearms. I picked the hollow point for my Savage because when I go to "Turkey Shoots" it does a fine job and usually makes me proud. I don't use the hollow point for hunting although I have looked over the regulations and there is nothing that says it can't be. Only stipulation is that military full metal jackets are not to be used. If my old memory servers me right I have heard that the "cop killer" ammo is not legal for the average gun owner. These rounds where made by Winchester, had a nickel plated case and were black in color. There is another name for them as well but it won't come to me right now. (I know there is someone out there that will let me know ASAP ) Oh yes Black Talon. I used to purchase the tips and make my own but I can't find it in any mail order stores any more. A friend of mine went to US not long ago and bought 3 or 4 boxes of 9 mm Black Talon and had them confiscated at the border. My 2 cents worth. Scottie ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:42:44 -0500 From: "Live to Ride" Subject: Re: scrap the firearms act > I use Red Ink. I was assured by a Special Investigator ( Police ) > SCRAP THE FIREARMS ACT OVER 2 BILLION $ WASTED You guys must have alot of cash to stamp! Must be nice to be rich! hahaha . ------------------------------ Date: Fri, October 23, 2009 9:51 pm From: "Dennis & Hazel Young" Subject: NY TIMES: Hunters and Anglers Rally for Climate Bill NEW YORK TIMES - OCTOBER 23, 2009 October 22, 2009, 2:38 pm Hunters and Anglers Rally for Climate Bill By John Collins Rudolf http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/hunters-and-anglers-rally-for-climate-bill/ More than 13,000 hunters and anglers from across the country joined a "virtual town hall" teleconference on Tuesday to hear a discussion of the impact of climate change on fish and wildlife populations, and to voice their support for federal action to limit carbon emissions. The call was hosted by the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund, American Hunters and Shooters, and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. "It's very important in my opinion that we do pass the climate change bill," said Ted Roosevelt IV, a prominent conservationist and the great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, during the phone call. The virtual meeting is part of a recent wave of climate activism by national hunting and fishing groups, whose conservative-leaning membership has expressed growing concern with the impacts of climate change on wildlife. With their pastime bringing them close to the landscape, hunters and anglers are encountering changes in nature associated with the onset of climate change, from alteration in the seasons and the migratory patterns of animals, to increasingly intense wildfires across broad the West. "We're already seeing the effects from climate change," said George Cooper, the president of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. John Warner, a former Republican senator from Virginia who co-sponsored an unsuccessful carbon cap-and-trade bill with Senator Joseph Lieberman in 2007, recounted his own personal encounter with the impacts of climate change during the call. Mr. Warner, a lifelong hunter and fisherman, described working for the Forest Service in the Idaho panhandle in the 1940s, in "pristine forests" where streams teemed with fish. When he returned to Idaho several years ago, he said, he found the same forests decimated by the invasion of the pine beetle, whose spread has been linked in part to rising temperatures in winter. "It was one of the saddest trips of my life," said Mr. Warner. Responding to a question from a hunter in Michigan about the prospects for Republican support for climate change legislation recently introduced in the Senate, Mr. Warner said he was hopeful the bill would receive bipartisan support, which may be crucial to its passage. "I think we're going to see Republican participation," he said. "It would be a tragic situation for a bill to move through strictly on a partisan basis." One goal of hunting and fishing groups is to secure dedicated funding for state wildlife agencies for "adaptive management" practices, which aim to reduce the impact of climate change on wildlife and wilderness areas. The Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill contains provisions establishing a National Adaptation Council and National Climate Change Adaptation Program. Funding would come from a portion of proceeds from the sale of emission permits. Chris Wood, the chief operating officer of Trout Unlimited, a sport fishing group with more than 140,000 members in 400 chapters across the country, said most members support the group's lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill in support of climate legislation - though he has received a few angry letters. "In a couple of cases it's been vocal," he said. "It's been incidental to the support that we've been getting from the vast majority of members who are concerned about this." A recent poll by the National Wildlife Federation, which counts more than 420,000 members across 42 states, found that 66 percent of hunters and anglers surveyed believed that global warming was already occurring. A Gallup poll in March 2009 found that only 53 percent of the general population shared the same view. The growing concern about climate change represented a major shift in opinion among sportsmen over the last decade, said Mr. Wood. "I think 10 years ago, a lot of sportsmen around the country rolled their eyes when you talked about climate change," he said. "That has begun to change." National Wildlife Federation Action Fund http://online.nwf.org/site/PageServer?pagename=NWA_Homepage American Hunters and Shooters Association http://www.huntersandshooters.com/ Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. http://www.trcp.org/ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:44:25 -0700 From: Bob Subject: RE: News Durham - Teens charged after guns, ammo stolen On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:00:49 -0600 (CST), you wrote: |> |>Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:29:35 +0000 |>From: Trigger Mortis |>Subject: RE: News Durham - Teens charged after guns, ammo stolen |> |>TR was possibly the best ever US President. He was a great man. |> He and his back room boys with the geneva convention standards, created pearl harbor on Dec/7th/1941 by starving out the Japanese Industrial Oil needs, just like Bush created the WTC bombings on 9/11...they forgot to put windows in those military cargo planes with the circular logo... You can't goto war w/o a valid escape, and that usually means creating one. |>SI VIS PACEM PARA BELLUM bOB - -- Triad Productions-Fantalla®~EZine~ParaNovel National Association of Assault Research (http://tarbitch.balder.prohosting.com/htmlconc. html) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:39:21 -0700 (PDT) From: Bruce Mills Subject: The Atlantic: The Story Behind the Story http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/media With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward = t With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition. A case-study of our post-journalistic age. by Mark Bowden The Story Behind the Story Image credit: Stephen Webster/Wonderful Machine If you happened to be watching a television news channel on May 26, the day President Obama nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, you might have been struck, as I was, by what seemed like a nifty investigative report. First came the happy announcement ceremony at the White House, with Sotomayor sweetly saluting her elderly mother, who as a single parent had raised the prospective justice and her brother in a Bronx housing project. Obama had chosen a woman whose life journey mirrored his own: an obscure, disadvantaged beginning followed by blazing academic excellence, an Ivy League law degree, and a swift rise to power. It was a moving TV moment, well-orchestrated and in perfect harmony with the central narrative of the new Obama presidency. But then, just minutes later, journalism rose to perform its time-honored pie-throwing role. Having been placed by the president on a pedestal, Sotomayor was now a clear target. I happened to be watching Fox News. I was slated to appear that night on one of its programs, Hannity, to serve as a willing foil to the show’s cheerfully pugnacious host, Sean Hannity, a man who can deliver a deeply held conservative conviction on any topic faster than the speed of thought. Since the host knew what the subject matter of that night’s show would be and I did not, I’d thought it best to check in and see what Fox was preoccupied with that afternoon. With Sotomayor, of course—and the network’s producers seemed amazingly well prepared. They showed a clip from remarks she had made on an obscure panel at Duke University in 2005, and then, reaching back still farther, they showed snippets from a speech she had made at Berkeley Law School in 2001. Here was this purportedly moderate Latina judge, appointed to the federal bench by a Republican president and now tapped for the Supreme Court by a Democratic one, unmasked as a Race Woman with an agenda. In one clip she announced herself as someone who believed her identity as a “Latina woman” (a redundancy, but that’s what she said) made her judgment superior to that of a “white male,” and in the other she all but unmasked herself as a card-carrying member of the Left Wing Conspiracy to use America’s courts not just to apply and interpret the law but, in her own words, to make policy, to perform an end run around the other two branches of government and impose liberal social policies by fiat on an unsuspecting American public. In the Duke clip, she not only stated that appellate judges make policy, she did so in a disdainful mock disavowal before a chuckling audience of apparently like-minded conspirators. “I know this is on tape and I should never say that, because we don’t make law, I know,” she said before being interrupted by laughter. “Okay, I know. I’m not promoting it, I’m not advocating it, I’m … you know,” flipping her hands dismissively. More laughter. Holy cow! I’m an old reporter, and I know legwork when I see it. Those crack journalists at Fox, better known for coloring and commenting endlessly on the news than for actually breaking it, had unearthed not one but two explosive gems, and had been primed to expose Sotomayor’s darker purpose within minutes of her nomination! Leaving aside for the moment any question about the context of these seemingly damaging remarks—none was offered—I was impressed. In my newspaper years, I prepared my share of advance profiles of public figures, and I know the scut work that goes into sifting through a decades-long career. In the old days it meant digging through packets of yellowed clippings in the morgue, interviewing widely, searching for those moments of controversy or surprise that revealed something interesting about the subject. How many rulings, opinions, articles, legal arguments, panel discussions, and speeches had there been in the judge’s long years of service? What bloodhound producer at Fox News had waded into this haystack to find these two choice needles? Then I flipped to MSNBC, and lo!… they had the exact same two clips. I flipped to CNN… same clips. CBS… same clips. ABC… same clips. Parsing Sotomayor’s 30 years of public legal work, somehow every TV network had come up with precisely the same moments! None bothered to say who had dug them up; none offered a smidgen of context. They all just accepted the apparent import of the clips, the substance of which was sure to trouble any fair-minded viewer. By the end of the day just about every American with a TV set had heard the “make policy” and “Latina woman” comments. By the end of the nightly news summaries, millions who had never heard of Sonia Sotomayor knew her not only as Obama’s pick, but as a judge who felt superior by reason of her gender and ethnicity, and as a liberal activist determined to “make policy” from the federal bench. And wasn’t it an extraordinary coincidence that all these great news organizations, functioning independently—because this, after all, is the advantage of having multiple news-gathering sources in a democracy—had come up with exactly the same material in advance? They hadn’t, of course. The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men. The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance. This process—political activists supplying material for TV news broadcasts—is not new, of course. It has largely replaced the work of on-the-scene reporters during political campaigns, which have become, in a sense, perpetual. The once-quadrennial clashes between parties over the White House are now simply the way our national business is conducted. In our exhausting 24/7 news cycle, demand for timely information and analysis is greater than ever. With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery. The very smart and capable young men (more on them in a moment) who actually dug up and initially posted the Sotomayor clips both originally described themselves to me as part-time, or aspiring, journalists. The attack that political operatives fashioned from their work was neither unusual nor particularly effective. It succeeded in shaping the national debate over her nomination for weeks, but more serious assessments of her record would demolish the caricature soon enough, and besides, the Democrats have a large majority in the Senate; her nomination was approved by a vote of 68–31. The incident does, however, illustrate one consequence of the collapse of professional journalism. Work formerly done by reporters and producers is now routinely performed by political operatives and amateur ideologues of one stripe or another, whose goal is not to educate the public but to win. This is a trend not likely to change. Writing in 1960, the great press critic A. J. Liebling, noting the squeeze on his profession, fretted about the emergence of the one-newspaper town: The worst of it is that each newspaper disappearing below the horizon carries with it, if not a point of view, at least a potential emplacement for one. A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass. Liebling, who died in 1963, was spared the looming prospect of the no-newspaper town. There is, of course, the Internet, which he could not have imagined. Its enthusiasts rightly point out that digital media are in nearly every way superior to paper and ink, and represent, in essence, an upgrade in technology. But those giant presses and barrels of ink and fleets of delivery trucks were never what made newspapers invaluable. What gave newspapers their value was the mission and promise of journalism—the hope that someone was getting paid to wade into the daily tide of manure, sort through its deliberate lies and cunning half-truths, and tell a story straight. There is a reason why newspaper reporters, despite polls that show consistently low public regard for journalists, are the heroes of so many films. The reporter of lore was not some blue blood or Ivy League egghead, beholden to society’s powerful interests, be they corporate, financial, or political. We liked our newsmen to be Everymen—shoe-leather intellectuals, cynical, suspicious, and streetwise like Humphrey Bogart in Deadline—U.S.A. or Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story or Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men. The Internet is now replacing Everyman with every man. Anyone with a keyboard or cell phone can report, analyze, and pull a chair up to the national debate. If freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, today that is everyone. The city with one eye (glass or no) has been replaced by the city with a million eyes. This is wonderful on many levels, and is why the tyrants of the world are struggling, with only partial success, to control the new medium. But while the Internet may be the ultimate democratic tool, it is also demolishing the business model that long sustained news­papers and TV’s network-news organizations. Unless someone quickly finds a way to make disinterested reporting pay, to compensate the modern equivalent of the ink-stained wretch (the carpal-tunnel curmudgeon?), the Web may yet bury Liebling’s cherished profession. Who, after all, is willing to work for free? ------------------------------ End of Cdn-Firearms Digest V13 #503 *********************************** Submissions: mailto:cdn-firearms-digest@scorpion.bogend.ca Mailing List Commands: mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca Moderator's email: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca List owner: mailto:owner-cdn-firearms@scorpion.bogend.ca FAQ list: http://www.canfirearms/Skeeter/Faq/cfd-faq1.html Web Site: http://www.canfirearms.ca CFDigest Archives: http://www.canfirearms.ca/archives To unsubscribe from _all_ the lists, put the next four lines in a message and mailto:majordomo@scorpion.bogend.ca unsubscribe cdn-firearms-digest unsubscribe cdn-firearms-chat unsubscribe cdn-firearms end (To subscribe, use "subscribe" instead of "unsubscribe".)