They're Throwing Journalists Into Jail Right Here In The USA

You need to get off the substances, twitchy. Your sensorium is clouded.

Oh I don't know...was it the 60's/70's when Vietnam & Watergate were breaking large?...journalists were investigative and dedicated to exposing crap, no matter what the source. They were different than the rest of us then, They risked their lives and careers to bring us news we would never otherwise see. Before Bush & Co bought the media outlets, back when the was actually a free media (now known as the liberal media), people watched and read the news for news not just photo ops and propaganda.

That is why there is a tradition of maintaining the confidentiality of journalists' sources. To give them the freedom and opportunity to ferret out information that might not otherwise get out to the public. Maybe now that 55+ million of us are now the underdogs, we can get behind the old ideal of journalism as NEWS, and stick up for these folks willing to risk imprisonment to bring us the unfiltered truth.

--Saerlaith

No one's confidentiality privileges are absolute--not even mine. Journalists are not above the law. They never have been. Susan McDougal is a good example of someone who defied the court and paid the price. At least, she had the courage to take her medicine without complaint.

Hmmm, lets see, guy reveals CIA Agent, nothing, guy exposes corrupt judge, goes to jail. Oh wait, the CIA agent didn't worship Bush, no wonder Novak not in trouble. I swear, when will the so called "liberal"(as liberal as well, it isn't) media get back on track and stop giving hand jobs to Bush&Co? I like how the media is so "liberal" with Fox News. Their version of balanced is ten people on the right side of the see saw and one in the middle. Real balanced.

Let's see some right-wingers/conservatives/whatever you call 'em start defending the freakin constitution, billof rights, declaration of independence!! Sure those documents have problems, they were written in the dark ages, but they are what this country is founded on, and set up to provide checks and balances. Just because the patriot acts are new and shiny and remove the leash from the pitbush (I mean pitbulls) of tyranny and oppression, doesn't mean they are what americans should fight and die for.

As for taking one's medicine "without complaint", how is that admirable? If we don't put up a fight and raise a ruckuss when evil is being done, what kind of americans are we? Certainly not the same folk who got tired of British taxes and complained some tea into the drink, and went on to complain their way into a new country.

I'm a whiny lefty liberal feminist and still know that America without it's founding documents = amerika land of Bush & Co.

--Saerlaith

The issue at hand has nothing to do with the Bush administration or the Patriot Act. I would dare say that I have done far more to preserve the Constitution than most here. And the Constitution was not written in the Dark Ages.

Originally posted by GradyPhilpott
The issue at hand has nothing to do with the Bush administration or the Patriot Act. I would dare say that I have done far more to preserve the Constitution than most here. And the Constitution was not written in the Dark Ages.

Perhaps I'm imagining that the patriot acts are written to override many of the guarantees and provisions of the founding documents. And that Bush & Co were the ones who drew up and implemented the patriot acts. And that the current "the terrorists are falling" mentality contributes to the infringement of rights & freedoms of those who disagree with the current US regime. Anyone fact check me on this one? Free speech zones? Guantanamo prison? Quaint Geneva convention?

I'm thinkin it's a pretty dark age when the only people counted as participatory citizens were white males, usually literate and propertied. Founding documents written in an enlightened age might have started out with "All humans are equal under the law as it pertains to rights, freedoms and responsibilities of citizenship...". I'm thinkin only a bigot would think reserving rights to only a part of the population as less than dark.

--Saerlaith

you have the RIGHT to remain silent.

protect THAT. our 'sensorium' is our sovereign soil.
it seems the guilty have more 'rights' than the innocent, these days.
judges, grady, are supposedly bound to the law, also.
apparently, not.

Originally posted by Saerlaith
I'm thinkin only a bigot would think reserving rights to only a part of the population as less than dark.

I'm thinking that anyone who doesn't know when the Dark Ages were and doesn't appreciate the advances in human thought and philosophy that gave rise to the splendid document we call the Constitution of the United States of America is not very well educated.

Originally posted by GradyPhilpott

Originally posted by Saerlaith
I'm thinkin only a bigot would think reserving rights to only a part of the population as less than dark.

I'm thinking that anyone who doesn't know when the Dark Ages were and doesn't appreciate the advances in human thought and philosophy that gave rise to the splendid document we call the Constitution of the United States of America is not very well educated.

Stretch your mind! That's right, just give it a little tug around the edges. Good

For starters, I do medieval reenactment, so I've probably read more books on the time period than you have brain cells. Let's try to unbend that literal-mindedness for just a teeny bit.

Obviously, the founding documents of this country were not literally written in the dark ages. And while there have been many "advances in human thought and philosophy", not to mention science, advances in social practice have not been as forthcoming.

AGAIN - How enlightened can a country/government be that restricts rights to a select few that it calls citizens?

And those utopian governments (Greece & Rome) that inspired the founding fathers - white men all - in sorting out the government of this country, did the exact same thing. Owned slaves and denied citizenship and rights to women and non-whites.

Now there's progress!!

--Saerlaith

Originally posted by Saerlaith
How enlightened can a country/government be that restricts rights to a select few that it calls citizens?

When you consider how rare liberty was at the time and how revolutionary the Constitution was at the time and how durable it has been over the course of two and a quarter centuries, I'd say they were very enlightened. And you can save your patronizing tone for your thespian buddies.

Just reminding everyone to play nice now.

Dont make me come there

Sometimes laws contradict other laws; sometimes they contradict principles of fair play; sometimes they contradict commonsense.

Laws are not absolute; they are subject to confusion, political correctness and changing times.

If reporters are not free to tell the truth, what we get is a dictatorship in which nobody is free to tell the truth; in which whistleblowers have no sense of safety who work to expose corruption and dishonesty.

All who rationalize the over-use of power to compel this and compel that; why don't you go live somewhere else--go find yourselves a gulag and populate it?

The fact is: since Law has become simply the purview of the most predatory and cleverest Federalist and it is no longer tied to principles we used to call JUST--

"that a good person doing a harmless act should get a good outcome;

and that a person of harmful intent should be stopped; corrected and rehabilitated into doing GOOD"--

since this simple paradigm has been abandoned for Machiavellian and Straussian relative ethics--

the US has become a violent, corrupted, filthy, influence-peddling, war-mongering nation--

hardly a credit to anything but Satan's ability to sidetrack the Truth.

Horrifying--corralling and imprisoning the very people who need to be able to tell us the truth about ourselves.

I think the ReTHUGlicans are well nick-named.

[If this is too harsh for delicate ears, let me know and I will tame it down.]

I don't know where people got the idea that journalists are so exalted as to be above the law or that journalism is not capable of rendering its own brand of tyranny, but there is no place in a free society for those who feel that they have liberties the rest of us don't enjoy.

Obey the court order or go to jail. That's the way it works for me and that's the way it should work for journalists.

Let them rot.

If the court is gagging people who are successfully exposing wrong-doing, maybe it's the court that needs fixing and not the reporters.

Eh?

Originally posted by GradyPhilpott
You need to get off the substances, twitchy. Your sensorium is clouded.

I don't usually reply to crap like this grady but in your case I'll make an exception...
Excuse me? That's an awful high horse your prancing around on there grady. You don't have a clue who you are talking to, and it is apparent you don't have a clue what your talking about either. Learn some respect, or get on some xannax for that angry little kid you let do your typing.
If your logic holds a drop of legitimacy, then what the hell do you think they have organizations like the federal witness protection program for? It's safety and anonymity that enables folks to bring information forward. You start forcing journalists to reveal their sources, you start loosing sources. Your telling me it's ok for members of our government to conceal evidence in criminal investigations in the name of protecting national security, but it's not ok to protect sources of incriminating evidence against officials? How willing would you be to bring incriminating information forward if you knew your name was going to be spelled out in the court dockets o9r printed in public media? Maybe you should familarize yourself with law regarding journalism before you tell me what substances I am on, Cohen v. Cowles Media for example. Fact is they don't have to reveal crap about their sources if they have reached a prior agreement with those sources. Your entitled to your uneducated opinions as well as anybody but the US Supreme court and hundreds of years of journalistic ethics seem to find protecting their sources, not only reasonable, but nessescary. Reporter source agreements are inviolable except in the most extreme circumstances, for damn good reasons.

Originally posted by twitchy
Excuse me? That's an awful high horse your prancing around on there grady. You don't have a clue who you are talking to, and it is apparent you don't have a clue what your talking about either. Learn some respect

Re: Your Avatar

Excuse me? That's an awful high horse your prancing around on there.... You don't have a clue who you are talking to, and it is apparent you don't have a clue what your talking about either. Learn some respect....

[edit on 04/11/12 by GradyPhilpott]

Originally posted by GradyPhilpott

Originally posted by Saerlaith
I'm thinkin only a bigot would think reserving rights to only a part of the population as less than dark.

I'm thinking that anyone who doesn't know when the Dark Ages were and doesn't appreciate the advances in human thought and philosophy that gave rise to the splendid document we call the Constitution of the United States of America is not very well educated.

Man Grady you truly showed yourself on that one the roots of our Democracy were forged in Ancient Greece by the minds like Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato.

Originally posted by James the Lesser
Wow, well, no big surprise, everything done under the Bush&Co has been to destroy the first ten amendments. Why do you think the people who are arressted nowadays are not allowed lawyers if the government calls them terrorists for not bowing done before King George?

Lol, Its just like the Salem Witch Trials all over again. One would think that our government and people would learn from there mistakes.

Originally posted by Polar Bear
Man Grady you truly showed yourself on that one... the roots of our Democracy were forged in Ancient Greece by the minds like Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato.

Yes, I know that, but such ideas lay dormant for a long time and needed resurrection provided during the Renaissance. While the idea of democracy did come from the ancient Greeks, the American model is still quite different and heavily influence by philosophers of the time.

The democracy of the ancient Greeks was highly exclusionary, much more so than ours was in 1776.