While reporting on the devastating Chilean earthquake and the subsequent tsunami headed toward Hawaii this Saturday, CNN's own Rick Sanchez offered up an impromptu cartography lesson to worried viewers. Unfortunately, Sanchez's grasp of basic American geography is apparently woefully inadquate.
Despite claiming in this clip to be pointing at Hawaii, the cluster of tiny land masses to which Sanchez and his co-host are referring is actually the Galapagos Islands.
You probably already know this, but don't ever trust your television.
In a huge victory for groups that were part of the Basta Dobbs campaign, news broke yesterday that Lou Dobbs was airing his last program for CNN. The coalition, which includes Latino and netroots organizations, asked CNN to fire Dobbs for his xenophobic and offensive comments relating to immigrants.
Campus Progress has covered Dobbs in our "Know Your Right-Wing Ideologues" section recently:
Feeding Dobbs’s xenophobic flames are his guests, who often have troublesome connections. Twice in 2004, Dobbs hosted guest Glenn Spencer, who has close ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group that has described African-Americans as “a retrograde species of humanity.”
In 2008, Dobbs broadcast from the “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” conference in Washington, D.C. This conference was organized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a controversial anti-immigration organization whose founder, John Tanton, has made comments comparing immigrants to bacteria. Dobbs has frequently invited members of FAIR on his show, billing them as experts and citing them as reliable and objective sources. In fact, FAIR, along with two other leading anti-immigration groups, Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA, were all founded by Tanton.
Between 1982 and 1994, FAIR received $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a “not-for-profit foundation established in 1937 to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences.” According to documents obtained by Paul Lombardo of The Albany Law Review through Truman State University, the Pioneer Fund’s founding president, eugenicist Harry Laughlin, declared that “‘the great mass of defectiveness’ swelled by immigrants, the feebleminded, and children of racial intermixture would swamp America.” Laughlin has also argued for the legal definition of the “American Race.”
CNN has an interesting story by a CNNU correspondent at Brigham Young University. It’s an intriguing profile on students in Utah, the only state where it’s legal for licensed students and professors to carry a weapon on public campuses.
A sampling:
“Nick, who asked not to be fully identified so his fellow students wouldn't know he carried a gun, says he has had a concealed weapons permit for more than three years. But it was Seung-Hui Cho's murderous campus rampage that made him take a gun to class.
‘Last year, after Virginia Tech, I thought “I'm not going to be a victim,”’ Nick said.
‘My first thought was “how tragic.” But then I couldn't help but think it could've been different if they'd allowed the students the right to protect themselves.’”
The article serves as substantive debate between gun control and the right to bear arms. What do you think?
The biggest scandal from last night’s Democratic presidential debate has nothing to do with driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, universal healthcare or Pakistan.
Instead, everybody’s talking about Maria Luisa, the student who used the debate’s precious final question to ask Hillary Clinton if she prefers pearls or diamonds:
This is obviously a ridiculous question—but turns out it wasn’t the one Maria wanted to ask. Several of the questions she submitted to CNN were approved, and she was going to ask Clinton about the Yucca Mountain Repository, but CNN employees chose the diamonds/pearls question and pressured her to ask it to close the debate.
So even though she submitted the dumb question, at least Maria had her priorities in order until CNN got its claws in her. And I have to say, her self-defense message on MySpace is a pretty bad-ass takedown of CNN:
See, the media chose what they wanted, not what the people or audience really wanted. That's politics; that's reality. So, if you want to read about real issues important to America--and the whole world, I suggest you pick up a copy of the Economist or the New York Times or some other independent source. If you want me to explain to you how the media works, I am more than happy to do so. But do not judge me or my integrity based on that question.
Nothing on Iraq anywhere on the page. Probably because there are no rich bachelors getting eaten by alligators as they attempt to commit robberies there.
Today MySpace and MTV announced the details of the presidential candidate forums they will hold this fall. Hosted on college campuses across the country, broadcast on MTV and streamed live on MySpace, the forums seek to foster “candid, unfiltered” discussions between young voters and the major Republican and Democratic candidates.
As I write in an identical blog post at HuffPo, the blogosphere seems abuzz with optimism about the forums, the latest evidence that 2008 won’t be your mother and father’s election. “MTV and MySpace have hit up an interactive format with the potential to pioneer a whole new way of doing candidate debates/forums,” writes Michael Connery, co-founder of Future Majority, a prominent blog with well-done reporting on progressive youth politics. (Yes, that Mike Connery who came at Campus Progress back in June.)
The last time Dick Cheney went on Larry King Live he proclaimed the insurgency in Iraq was in “last throes,” so when I heard the veep would be back for another interview tonight, I got my popcorn out and prepared for some entertaining lies and high-quality misleading of the public.
Please remember that Campus Progress' terms of use do not allow promoting or endorsing any particular political party or candidate for office. Posts or comments that do this will be deleted.
Posts
!
