Giant Judges
The Dallas Morning News featured the retirements of Judges Barefoot Sanders and Jerry Buchmeyer. The News rightly "views these judges as giants." Between them, they struck down Dallas' segregationist housing, schools and city council over the objections of Dallas' segregationist white voting majority. Dallas Blog's Tom Pauken is upset that Sanders or Buchmeyer get any favorable recognition at all. In his view, Dallas would have been better off with a proposed system of "at large" city council seats that African-American plaintiffs successfully argued diluted minority voting strength. In Pauken's view, Dallas would have been better off continuing with the segregated school system in place in 1970, in which the children of plaintiff Sam Tasby had to walk past white schools to attend a segregrated black school in west Dallas. In Pauken's view, Dallas would have been better off siding against Deborah Walker and six poor black women who objected to the city illegally segregating tenants in public housing. In Pauken's view, Dallas would have been better off if the white voting majority had been able to impose its segregationist will on the community as a whole.
Tom Pauken has never reconciled himself to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. For him, racial integration and civil rights amount to "social policy views imposed on our [white] city and our [white] citizens." Pauken doesn't so much as mention the Constitution in his rant against Sanders and Buchmeyer. Most of his diatribe consists of painting these judges as "liberal". Most liberals will probably agree with Pauken's equation of liberalism and support for Constitutional civil liberties. Pauken's defense of segregation rests on the trash heap of history, where it rightfully belongs.
Death of Dailies
Unfair Park's Jim Schutze announced his new blog, DeathOfDailies.com, focused on the decline of newspapers in America. The blog is skeletal and its direction uncertain. Schutze says, "This may develop as a true blog or more of a forum. Can't tell yet. Flog? Blorum? Time will tell...Maybe later this site will be more sophisticated. Maybe not."
Here's hoping for maybe yes. Here's also hoping that his blog title, Death of Dailies, isn't a foretelling that the last must-read investigative journalist still working in Dallas isn't long for the beat.
Death of the Salafi Movement in America
The Dallas Morning News' Rod Dreher, with the self important headline "The future of religion reporting," tells us about the death of the Salafi movement in America has been neglected by the American press, which fails to understand the importance of religion in world events. He doesn't tell us much, just that one shouldn't expect to read about it the American press, presumably including his own The Dallas Morning News.
Dreher immediately follows that blog post with an asinine criticism of Michelle Obama for saying "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country." She was speaking about the renewal of hope that Barack Obama's campaign brings with it. Rather than share her joy, Dreher chooses to smear Michelle Obama by interpreting the comment as being equivalent to saying that she thinks America was "a dishonorable place until it began to embrace her husband." A more accurate interpretion is understood when the context is included. "I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction [of hope] and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I've seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it's made me proud." Maybe Dreher is on the side of frustration and disappointment and against hope. Others are rightfully "really" proud that this year's candidates, all of them, stand for change.
Maybe Dreher thinks that's not a fair characterization of what he meant. If so, my apologies. Michelle Obama is likewise due an apology. Dreher demonstrates how the press chooses cheap shots over substantive intellectual discussions about subjects like, for example, the death of the Salafi movement in America.
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