LADD – Jackson, Let’s Shoot for the Top … JFP launches new blog too
As I write this Tuesday, I have no idea who will be the Democratic nominee for mayor when you read this. As always happens in Jackson and Mississippi, it’s been a tough campaign that has wallowed in the mud and brought out the worst in many of our neighbors. The Jackson Free Press started reporting the issues of this campaign and interviewing candidates months ago—putting substance before politics.
But the last couple of weeks, we have been trying to clean up mud, and expose who is flinging it. This is what campaigns often devolve into: dirty tricks. Since the JFP started, we’ve watched Republicans play the tired, disgusting Southern Strategy to the hilt to get whites to vote against people they are told won’t help them.
In recent years, we’ve also seen Democrats pretend to be Republicans, and Republicans pretend to be Democrats. We watched a gubernatorial candidate line up against Haley Barbour as a pretend-elephant, presumably so he could throw the dirt at him, instead of the Democratic hopeful. We’ve seen lowdown people drop flyers pushing disgusting rumors about Crisler before the primary, and we’ve heard people we like say that Sen. John Horhn voted against the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. Then just last weekend, we saw Marshand Crisler supporters put out flyers on cars parked outside church accusing Horhn of trying to sell his endorsement.
Go to http://www.jacksontruth.org and lend your ideas on our community blog.
JFP
5/21/9
The false campaigning, flyers, mailers, anonymous posts on blogs, radio appearances and so on in the 2009 city elections in Jackson has encouraged many of us to get together and call for more truth and transparency in local government, campaigns, media and on personal blogs.
So today on Election Day, the JFP is announcing the Jackson Truth and Transparency Initiative as a community project going forward. We invite you to join us, regardless of your political leanings. We want your ideas, your energy and your support for this very important initiative.
Going forward, we hope the project becomes a way to encourage Jacksonians to stop spreading so many falsehoods and to factcheck information before putting it out there. We hope to develop a “best practices” for local blogs to voluntarily sign on to pledge that they will not spread unsubstantiated rumors and operate as breeding grounds for anonymous posters to spread lies for their own personal benefit and vendettas. We want to encourage more people to post on Web sites under their own names wherever possible and avoid anonymity, and the abuses that often accompanies it (much as people already do on Facebook).
JFP Truth blog
One of the political left’s favorite tactics is to assume as settled fact something that has not been proven, demonstrated, or generally agreed upon by knowledgeable observers and then to erect upon this false premise an elaborate scaffolding of rhetoric designed to advance their agenda. Leading examples include the deeply flawed global warming hypothesis and the “fact” that water-boarding (to which our own military subjects members of its special forces in the course of their training) amounts to torture, even leaving aside the problem that Geneva Conventions apply only to uniformed soldiers representing a sovereign nation.
Of particular local interest is the claim that raising the subject of crime is really only a covert way of raising the subject of race in an inflammatory fashion. In fact, the left increasingly identifies any subject it does not want examined as a surrogate for racial animus. Witness the characterizations of the recent “tea parties” protesting outrageous government taxation and spending as really being thinly camouflaged attacks on black people. Our politics apparently has entered the era of paranoid delusion.
North Side Sun
5/21/9
I’ve never seen a publication that smears people, gets its facts consistently wrong, outright lies, and slants its coverage the way that rag does. Then there is her latest habit of ripping off this blog which she seems to have developed in the last few weeks. Donna Ladd is the last person in this town who should be calling for truth and transparency from others. I have a feeling this is more about her trying to control the competition from other blogs that didn’t exist a few years ago. Looks like she did learn a few tricks from Gannett after all.
Jackson Jambalaya
5/21/9
Magnolia Tribune
