Having discovered that Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas ZÚÑIGA (MAMZ) a.k.a. "Kos" of DailyKos) has a long history of activism for the Republican Party and, furthermore, he trained and worked with the US CIA between 2001 and 2003, research has revealed and established the following, and therefore justice and history now bring this thirty-one count Indictment.
I couldn't care less about that which the CIA-connected whiteosphere calls "credibility". Whiteosphere "credibility" is when people believe what you say even if it isn't true, because they believe in YOU. YOU are their truth and therefore facts and citations are irrelevant to them. If you say it, they believe it, just as did the followers of Adolph Hitler. I don't want that kind of "credibility" and I wouldn't want anyone to read my blog and believe what I say simply because Francis L. Holland says it. If I don't show you where I got the information, then I apologize; challenge me to produce the proof!
If I say something in a particularly compelling way, then I love to be quoted for it and for others to join me in describing facts in a particularly powerful way. The Root, which is the Black-focused blog started by Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for the Washington Post, says:
Another blog, Tasered While Black, keeps a running log of black Americans killed or abused in what it calls "police pre-trial electrocution."
That's my way and now our way (and now our way) of giving the proper gravitas to the act of police shocking a "subject" to death when they often have no reason to arrest the "subject" in the first place. Please quote me because I'm eloquent or funny or insane, but not because what I say is "inherently true" simply because it comes out of my mouth. That's sycophancy. It's Hitlerian and I want no part of it.
Since I'm a trained and practiced attorney, I've learned that judges in court are not interested in my opinion about jurisprudence in a particular area, unless I can back up my assertions with compelling citations to statutes and case law. I'm not offended by their insistence that I prove my assertions, because I know that I cannot inform my readers and the public until I have informed myself. When I go through the process of researching an issue, I make the sources of the facts clear, and I also make and publish screen-shots of sources that I think might subsequently be taken down or otherwise disappear from websites.
I hear that CIA-trained Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ)was on Meet the Press recently. Hmmm. Adolph Hitler's Germany hosted the 1936 Olympic Games, but the added fame Germany won there didn't make the Fuhrer any less dangerous. In fact, it only encouraged Germany and helped him position that nation for what was come. So, keep an eye on Markos Moulitsas. (SourceWatch.Org) Eventually, he will be revealed to be just as positive for American leftists as the Fuhrer was for German Jews.
I predicted in 2006 that the 2008 Presidential Election would focus on ending the "43-term white male monopoly of the presidency". I predicted that Hillary and Barack would be the strongest candidates and the race would be decided between them. This was five months or so before either of them announced that they would run for the presidency. (See "Contrarians Should Stop Bashing Barack and Hillary" (Diaries, All Topics), posted by francislholland on 07/01/2006 04:32:56 PST, 43 comments.)
I've also gathered the facts about Markos Moulitsas, which have been cited over a million times at Google. Those facts point toward a massive train-wreck between his self-serving misinformation campaign about his own history, and his posturing, on the one hand, and reality on the other hand. Because the lies cannot told indefinitely when the truth is so close at hand, I predict that there will be a public confrontation between Markos Moulitsas' lies about himself and the reality, and at some point in the not-too-distant future. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party and its progressives will be at least spectators and, at least to some degree, participants in that train-wreck. Don't say I didn't warn you!
The Truth About Kos has been reluctant to contradict Markos C. Alberto Zúñiga's (M.A.M.Z. "Kos" of DailyKos') recollections of the Salvadoran Civil War of the 1980's because people generally remember that period based not on specific facts but rather based on their ideological attitudes and whether they supported the Reagan Administration or not. As such, it seems a bit of a waste of time to revisit an historical period about which many people's opinions are already formed. Washington Monthly says, "The family moved back to El Salvador when Moulitsas was four and was on the right-wing side of the Cold War proxy fight there," and that assessment of their political perspective seems to comport with the facts.
Yet Dave from Queens and many others are interested in M.A.M.Z.'s statements about this time, and what they say about a central falsehood that MAMZ perpetually tells the media: that he comes from a humble and uninfluential family and he had "no money" when he started DailyKos. The story of El Salvador's 1980's civil war has been told elsewhere with great detail, however M.A.M.Z.'s family's participation has only been broached with original research and citations to Salvadoran Government government documents and corporate websites at The Truth About Kos.
The non-government organizations within the human rights community have thoroughly documented Salvadoran government and death squad atrocities, while conservatives in the United States and El Salvador have denied them or attempted to justify them in the context of alleged anti-communism. MAMZ is a child of this historical period of civil war, and yet his recollections are heavily distorted by his family's participation in the Salvadoran oligarchy, whom anti-government revolutionary groups were trying to overthrow.
Rather than take issue with Markos Moulitsas political leanings, this blog has sought to show demonstrable and intentional distortions of facts made by M.A.M.Z. about his family, himself, and their role in politics, then and now. It is one thing for M.A.M.Z to be part of a wealthy right-wing family, with opinions consistent with that socio-economic strata, while it is quite another thing to consistently misrepresent matters of fact about himself and his oligarchy family.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media has written about Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) ("Kos" of DailyKos) based entirely upon his own claims about himself and his life, without a stitch of independent research or corroboration. Or they have published his autobiographic articles uncritically, even when they are internally contradictory and the articles include various assertions that are mutually exclusive.
For example, none of the hundreds of articles written about MAMZ bothers to mention anything he wrote in stories for the Northern Star, when he was a student writer and editor of the newspaper at Northern Illinois University. Instead, they have been content to accept MAMZ's representations about what these stories hold, rather than confirm the peculiar content of these articles for themselves.
As a result, these media outlets have helped MAMZ to disseminate a web of half-truths and outright lies without ever being challenged about them in the mainstream media. This attitude of endless credulity toward MAMZ, even in the light of directly contradictory statements in MAMZ own writings, leaves the inquiring public wondering whether these publications are dispassionately describing a media phenomenon or intentionally participating in creating one.
In the January/February issue of Washington Monthly MAMZ tells journalist Benjamin Wallace Wells that he supported President Reagan because president Reagan supported the Government of El Salvador. In just a two-paragraph excerpt from this article, we have highlighted in red the contradictions, inaccuracies and inconsistencies which are legion, comparing them to verifiable facts, with citations to original documents and M.A.M.Z.'s own written and published previous statements contradicting what is reported in two paragarphs of the Washington Monthly article, as follows:
After high school, Moulitsas, then a Reagan Republican thanks largely to the White House's support of the Salvadorean government, spent four years as an army artillery scout, mainly in Germany. He had begun to gravitate leftwards while in the military--its diversity had incubated in him a kind of nascent identity politics liberalism--and when he was discharged and enrolled at Northern Illinois University, he became active in campus politics, writing a column for the school paper and helping to lead the college's Hispanic student group. After he graduated, he took another degree, from Boston University's law school, and then, in 1998, moved out to San Francisco to try his luck in Silicon Valley.
A couple of years later, now married, he moved again, to Berkeley, exasperated at the realization that he wasn't going to make a fortune in the high-tech boom. "Maybe at some time, Silicon Valley really was this democratic ideal where the guy with the best idea made a billion dollars, but by the time I got there at least, it was just like anything else--a bunch of rich kids who knew each other running around and it all depended on who you knew," Moulitsas told me. Unemployed, Moulitsas, started posting comments on a site called MyDD.com, the most insidery of the emerging liberal blogs. During late 2001 and early 2002, he developed a following, for the strength and clarity of his denunciations of the Bush administration. Moulitsas started his own blog, and, in the summer of 2002, Daily Kos opened for business.
It is certainly odd that MAMZ says he was motivated by Ronald Reagan's foreign policy toward Latin American when MAMZ himself wrote in his college student newspaper in 1993 that his attitude toward Blacks and Latinos was "detached selfishness". So it is difficult now to believe anything he says about his motives with respect to El Salvador in the early 1990's.
Even if we accept arguendo that MAMZ supported Republican Ronald Reagan because of Reagan's support for the government of El Salvador, Human Rights Watch says this support encouraged a lawless government in the unbridled slaughter of civilians:
Despite a decade of promises by government officials to bring to justice those responsible for gross violations of human rights in El Salvador, the impunity of military officers and death squads members remains intact. Although thousands of cases of political killings, torture, and disappearances of civilians at the hands of government forces have been documented, to date, no officer has been convicted of a politically motivated human rights abuse in El Salvador. Human Rights Watch
This is consistent with the discovery that the "manager" (see hotel advertisement) of MAMZ's family hotel in El Salvador, who shares MAMZ's last name, Zúñiga, is also a prominent member of what the US CIA has called a Salvadoran right-wing "pressure group", the National Association Private Enterprise.
During the 1980's and 90's, MAMZ, in fact, supported US President Ronald Reagan while Reagan was providing billions of dollars of financial assistance to a corrupt Salvadoran Government that participated in the slaughter of civilians as well as contributing to the environment in which Catholic Archbishop Arnulfo Romero was assassinated during mass.
Meanwhile, I have read every single article in the archives of the Northern Illinois University campus newspaper, "Northern Star," and I cannot find a single article in which MAMZ is shown leading or participating in Hispanic activities on campus. Again, he specifically disavowed any such concern when he said that his response to "racism" on campus was to retreat into "detached selfishness" because, while minorities "could not escape who they were," MAMZ, as a white man, was able to "easily" and completely disassociate himself from any Salvadoran roots:
I was terribly happy to escape the ugliness of a racist world for the safety of my every day-to-day life. Sure, I could always talk against racism, fight ignorance and prejudice wherever I ran into it, yet I would always be looking in from another room and I could always close the door. My life, in my world, in my own detached selfishness. Northern Star, Sept. 2, 1993.
Those hardly seem like the words of an Hispanic activist. They seem more like Justice Clarence Thomas approach to his own brown skin: forget about it.
The Washington Monthly article says that MAMZ married "a couple of years after 1998. MAMZ has said that he was "unemployed, underemployed" during this period, and that he started DailyKos in 2002 with one hundred dollars. Somehow, in spite of being "unemployed, underemployed," during this period, to the extent of seeking employment with the Central Intelligence Agency, and having "no money," he nonetheless was able to travel to El Salvador with his new wife and hold his honeymoon celebrations at the Jaltepeque Suites Hotel on the beaches of El Salvador, where the nightly room rate is $140.00.
MAMZ refers to the Jaltepeque Suites Hotel as a "family business", and one from which he obviously was able to live a lifestyle substantially above that of Salvadorans who have "no money".
In the Washington Monthly article, MAMZ deprecates those in Silicon Valley whom he says appear to be "a bunch of rich kids." And yet the inevitable result of superficial look at MAMZ's family hotel, and the honeymoon he held there, is that MAMZ, too, was a "rich kid", in spite of his relentless efforts to present himself otherwise. Indeed to say that one is poor while holding a honeymoon such as one saw in MAMZ's honeymoon website leaves the inevitable impression that MAMZ is divorced from the truth or determined to misrepresent it.
As a matter of simple logic, it is difficult to understand how a man who had "no money" would nonetheless be able to spend two years at the expensive Washington, DC, area, training at the CIA, unless he was being compensated for his work at the CIA or was depending on other (e.g. wealthy family assets) to support himself and his new wife during this period.
How does a man with "no money" afford the expenses of living and feeding himself and a new wife in Washington, DC for two years? It stands to reason that either he was depending upon income from the CIA, or help from his wealthy family, or some other source of income which he specifically denies having had.
The Washington Monthly article says that,
During late 2001 and early 2002, he developed a following, for the strength and clarity of his denunciations of the Bush administration
Did MAMZ mislead this developing following when he failed to inform them that he was simultaneously simultaneously in "training" to become a "secret agent" with the Central Intelligence Agency, which was tasked with carrying out the orders and policy of the Bush Administration, including building the false case for war with Iraq? Could MAMZ have gained the same credibility had he acknowledged his involvement with the CIA? If not, did he intentionally mislead those who were gathering around him?
The Salvadoran Government that Republican President Ronald Reagan and MAMZ supported was carrying out a counter-insurgency effort in which many union leaders, popular leaders, religous workers and peasants were killed. Human Rights Watch says in a preface to a article about El Salvador during the period when President Ronald Reagan was supporting the Government in El Salvador,
Theology Today puts the Salvadoran political moment of the 1980's into context:
Twenty years ago Archbishop Oscar Romero was celebrating mass when he was killed. Just as he had finished his homily and was about to turn to the liturgy of the eucharist, a single shot pierced his chest, and he bled to death within a matter of minutes. His bloodsoaked vestments are now on display in San Salvador for pilgrims and tourists to see. His killer has remained free.
( . . . )
[Archbishop Oscar] Romero's own path to martyrdom was illuminated by the martyrdom of his close friend Fr. Rutilio Grande. Grande was gunned down, along with a boy and an elderly man, on his way to celebrate mass in El Paisnal, less than three weeks after Romero's installation as archbishop. As Jon Sobrino, one of Grande's fellow Jesuits in El Salvador, tells it, Rutilio Grande's death played the central role in converting Romero from cautious bureaucrat to prophetic voice of the voiceless. Though personally fond of Grande, Romero had regarded with suspicion the work Grande was doing with the peasants of Aguilares, teaching them to apply the lessons of the Bible to their own lives and denouncing the unjust distribution of land.
( . . . )
The eucharist, in other words, creates a body of people who by definition stand in the line of fire. In El Salvador, this process took many forms, none more terrible than the strategy of "disappearance." Many of those arrested were simply never heard from again; their bodies would "disappear," most buried around El Salvador in shallow graves. Torture was also commonly used to instill fear, most often with the use of electricity and other techniques that leave no distinguishing marks on the victim's body.6 Finally, the state-controlled media referred to people killed, not as martyrs, but as subversives, communists, terrorists, criminals, and delinquents. The intent of these strategies was to inflict suffering and death on those who would challenge the status quo while simultaneously preventing the revelatory nature of that suffering from coming to light.Dying for the Eucharist or being killed by it? Romero's challenge to first-world Christiansm
Ironically, MAMZ has claimed that "heroes are Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero . . .", however the "manager" of his "family hotel," participated in a political "pressure group" that was campaigning against Romero when Romero was shot dead during a mass.
Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) must believe he's the only bilingual person in the United States who can compare what's in Spanish-language papers with what MAMZ tells us in the USA. Does he think Americans are illiterate, does he believe we're all stupid, or both? I don't know if MAMZ can read Spanish, but I know that he knows that I can.
If you look at the article from El Salvador's La Prensa Gráfica online newspaper(see screenshots above and below) from Google's "way back machine"), you will see four blatant lies that Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ or "Kos" of DailyKos), told to the Spanish-language online newspaper, La Prensa Gráfica.
In this conversation with writer Jesús Henríquez, who is quoting MAMZ, MAMZ says (see underlined in red in the screenshot above):
When MAMZ says in his wedding album that his festivities were held at his "family hotel", either he is using the word "family" very loosely or he thinks that being part of a family that charges $140.00 US Dollars per night in Central America qualifies as not having "any money," even though that amount of money is roughly one tenth the family income of most Salvadoran families for a year!
In any case, MAMZ either had sufficient money or sufficient free use of the "family" hotel to host his entire wedding party there and take boat trips.
That's lie number one: "I don't have any money", (but my family owns beachfront land and charges $140.00 USD per night for a hotel room.
Anyone who is listed in the Europa World Book is "famous", particularly if he is also owner of a Central American salt distributorship with operations on five continents and president of a nation's tourism and hotel business groups. The inevitable conclusion is that MAMZ lied with respect to whether he came from a "famous family."
Is it possible to square all of the interlocking directorates for tourism with MAMZ statement that his family is neither famous nor powerful? In fact, the assertion that MAMZ's family is not powerful, which was a quote made to La Prensa Gráfica, is a gratuitous bold-faced lie, unless there is an underlying reason to disregard the truth in such a blatant and public manner. There is simply no way whatsoever to square MAMZ's lie with the Internet-documented truth.
Lie number four: MAMZ says, "I was an immigrant in the United States," (see underlined in red in screenshot above) but even MAMZ's own DailyKos biography and his Wikipedia page say that he was born on September 11, 1971, in Chicago, Illinois. However, the article he wrote for the American Prospect mentions Chicago, but does not mention that he was born there. It only says that he had a "funny accent", intentionally leaving the impression that he was born somewhere else. Is it possible for MAMZ to write truthfully that he is "an immigrant in the United States" AND that he was born in Chicago, IL? MAMZ says it is possible, however, the US Code disagrees with him:
I simply don't understand why Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) tells so many lies about himself and his family that are so easily disproved. Although he has never provided this identity information, with respect to the names of his parents, to a United States newspaper to the best of my knowledge, La Prensa Gráfica states as fact that, "Markos Moulitsas es hijo de María Teresa Zúniga de Funes, salvadoreña, y de Markos Moulitsas, griego."
Is it possible that MAMZ says, "I don't have any money" because he doesn't want to pay his income taxes? Or is it because being a poor and humble immigrant from Central America is part of his CIA cover story, which he learned (but not very well), during his self-acknowledged two-year training period, from 2001 until 2003, during the time when he started his DailyKos blog.
Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga is a self-made man, an immigrant born in Chicago who doesn't have any money, although his family owns Baja Salt Group, Proturo C.A. de S.V., the Jaltepeque Suites Hotel, and the Club Jewel of the Pacific, a hotel and condominium conglomerate. In a word, MAMZ is a perennial liar.
I know what MAMZ has said about his military service, but I also know that there is ambiguity (two contradictory stories) in news reports, whether he served in the Gulf War, as he told the Washington Post, or in Lawton, Oklahoma and Bamberg Germany, as he said in an article at Cato Unbound? When there are two conflicting stories all based on statements from the same two-year CIA trainee, which, if any, can you believe? When you have two absolutely contradictory and mutually exclusive sets of "facts" out there, it's hard to know what, if anything, to believe.
What we can say with certainty is that we really don't know. That's why the Newsbusters' article concerns me. It starts with a paragraph that misinforms the public on the political right as well as the political left:
The liberal blogosphere is cheering one of its heroes for insulting a former Republican member of Congress on national television who as a result walked off an MSNBC set in disgust Newsbusters
The inevitable conclusion that comes from comparing MAMZ's statements to what is available on the Internet is that Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga is a compulsive (or highly-paid government) liar, and nothing he says can be taken at face value. That's why there are 648,000 hits for "Moulitsas" + "gay" at Google.
At least one reader of The Truth About Kos blog has resorted to Google and found his/her way here to discover where Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) served in the military. He does claim that he served in the military, and subsequently wrote a very curious and confessional letter to his college newspaper opposing ALL gay service in the US military, regardless of whether they were "out" or "in the closet."
Immediately after high school, at the age of 17, Moulitsas enrolled in the U.S. Army, and served in Lawton, Oklahoma and Bamberg, Germany. He was a 13P — an MLRS/Lance Fire Direction Specialist (artillery), and served between 1989-92.
The problem with this information is that it obviously came directly from MAMZ himself, without corroboration, and should therefore be considered suspect. On many occasions MAMZ has provided false information about himself and his family.
So, why did MAMZ say both that he was at the CIA for only for only six months and that he was there from 2001 until 2003? Was he trying to exaggerate or minimize his relationship with the CIA, or both, and why? Or has he simply forgotten how long his CIA "secret agent" training lasted? In any case, his rendition of the facts cannot be trusted because his story is internally contradictory and his statements of fact are mutually exclusive.
Is it possible that, after providing two contradictory stories about the length of his training at the CIA, that he might also misrepresent or invent details of his military service? I do see that possibility, particularly because MAMZ has misrepresented and contradicted himself with respect to other aspects of his life.
He has said that because he served in the military during the Gulf War, he is therefore a "Gulf War veteran." And yet, in the Cato Unbound biography, he stated with great specificity that he "served in Lawton, Oklahoma and Bamberg, Germany." I think most Gulf War veterans would disagree that the specific service he cites qualifies him as a Gulf War veteran.
after my three-year stint, while I was stationed in Germany and missed deploying to the Gulf War by a hair (Emphasis added.)
It is this sort of embellishment that makes facts seem maleable and leaves it difficult to believe anything that MAMZ says about himself. He admittedly did not serve in the Gulf War, and yet he mentions both the Gulf War and a rhetorical "near miss" at every opportunity, clearly trying to associate himself with something (war service) of which he admittedly saw none whatsoever. And, as voluable as MAMZ is on other topics, he fails to correct others when the draw the conclusion that he served in the Gulf War.
Perhaps the three greatest lies that MAMZ has told about his family background were that:
In the same interview with El Salvador's online newspaper "La Prensa Gráfica", which is apparently no longer available at its old web address, MAMZ told the interviewer, "“I don’t have money. I don’t come from a famous or powerful family." The mere fact that the manager of his "family hotel", who shares MAMZ's last name, also owns a five-continent salt distribution conglomerate in El Salvador was the recipient of a one million dollar loan guarantee from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) should demonstrate that the two above statements were no less than bold faced lies. Opic lists:
Baja Salt
A $1 million project, supported by a $700,000 OPIC loan, involving acquisition of high-quality salt from Mexico for distribution into Central America, and the establishment of salt processing facilities and construction of warehouses in El Salvador and Guatemala. The project is expected to eventually create 39 permanent local jobs.
Baja Salt's owner, Lic. Carlos Alberto Delgado Zuniga, is the same man listed in Salvadoran Government documents as the manager of MAMZ's family hotel, and who shares MAMZ's last name as well as participation in the "family hotel".
Plus, a New online book says the same family member is president of the Association of Salvadoran Hotels and president of the Salvadoran National Tourism Board. Moulitsas lied when he said his family is not wealthy or influential.
So, there you go: The only information about MAMZ's military service comes from MAMZ himself, so far, and MAMZ has shown a proclivity for lying about his biography, even to the extent of lying about the country in which he was born. If you draw the conclusion, based on his statements, that he served in the first Gulf War, MAMZ has no problem with that, although he has told others that he "served in Lawton, Oklahoma and Bamberg, Germany."
Will MAMZ clarify any of these blatant contradictions and apparent lies? If you were trained by the CIA to be a secret agent, would you clarify contradictions about your own past?
"Sure, I could always talk against racism, fight ignorance and prejudice wherever I ran into it, yet I would always be looking in from another room and I could always close the door. My life, in my world, in my own detached selfishness. And as I left the ugly reality of racism behind, it struck me that what was such an easy and trivial exercise for me would be impossible for anyone whose skin color or religious persuassion (sic) made them the target of bigotry and discrimination. THEY would never be able to escape who THEY were." (Emphasis added.)
Aren't Latinos (and women) targets of bigotry, or is MAMZ not Latino?
In Audiotape (Below) MAMZ Confesses 2-YRS CIA "Clandestine Services" Training
"A candidate's religion continues to play a key role in shaping vote choice. Nearly four-in-ten (39%) say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who is Christian. Moreover, 63% say they would be less inclined to support a presidential candidate who does not believe in God – the most negative trait tested."
New online book says Kos family member is president of the Association of Salvadoran Hotels and president of the Salvadoran National Tourism Board. Moulitsas lied when he said his family is not wealthy or influential.
If a link doesn't work, be patient. Look for an updated link in the articles below, use the search function in the top left, and/or look to this list of all but one of the articles written by Markos C. A. Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) when he was at Northern Illinois University (NIU), writing extreme right-wing letters to the editor. Interestingly, the one known missing article still is not in the archives although it was faxed to me by Northern Star staff and republished here.
That article was the first in a series of five articles about "racism", four of which were assigned tasks and described the "racism" and religious persecution problems on campus based on interviews.
This is MAMZ announcement that he is NOT a Latino, but is a white man, and he underlines this today by insisting that it is improper to address him using his mother's Latino name, "Zúñiga".
"And as I left the ugly reality of racism behind, it struck me that what was such an easy and trivial exercise for me would be impossible for anyone whose skin color or religious persuassion (sic) made them the target of bigotry and discrimination. They would never be able to escape who they were." (Emphasis added.)
"Francis L. Holland, one of the vocal black bloggers, sent e-mails to DNC officials asking that 15 black-operated blogs be added to the State Corps. "There is nothing 'Democratic' about an all-white Democratic National Convention floor blogging corps," he wrote in an e-mail. Holland is also asking for the inclusion of 15 Latino-operated blogs."
"Or, as Obama supporter Francis L. Holland puts it: "So, it shows tremendous courage, foresight and solidarity that Edwards has endorsed Obama after the media declared Hillary's campaign to be as good as dead, right? Oh, well! Better late than never!"
"Of the blogs covering the convention, black blogs will be 7.2% of the blogs present,” says Francis L. Holland of the Afrosphere Action Coalition. According to Holland, many states with a strong black Democratic presence and population are either underrepresented or not represented at all, even though black bloggers from these states did apply. “The state of Tennessee, which often has over 25% blacks among its Democratic primary voters, will not have a single black blogger at the Democratic National Convention, for example. The District of Columbia, which is 60% black, will be left out. Louisiana, which is 32.4% black, will be left out. Illinois, the presidential nominee’s home state, which is 15% black, will be left out.”
"We are tired of Hillary Clinton telling America that we are less than American simply because we refuse to vote for her," said Francis L. Holland, an African American blogger." Ironically, the Clintons embraced us, and even embraced Pastor Jeremiah Wright for support during their impeachment scandal." Holland was speaking of the congressional trial that followed former president Bill Clinton's liaison with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. "She has forfeited the black vote for the foreseeable future with her color aroused appeals."
“November’s voter turnout depends on August’s blogger outreach,” said Mr. Holland of the Afrosphere Action Coalition., a member of a national and international black bloggers’ coalition called “The AfroSpear.” “Blogs address constituencies, and it simply is not possible for blogs that are all-white to effectively reach diverse Democratic constituencies.”
"Of the blogs covering the convention, black blogs will be 7.2% of the blogs present," says Francis L. Holland of the Afrosphere Action Coalition. According to Holland, many states with a strong black Democratic presence and population are either underrepresented or not represented at all, even though black bloggers from these states did apply. “The state of Tennessee, which often has over 25% blacks among its Democratic primary voters, will not have a single black blogger at the Democratic National Convention, for example. The District of Columbia, which is 60% black, will be left out. Louisiana, which is 32.4% black, will be left out. Illinois, the presidential nominee's home state, which is 15% black, will be left out."
"Francis Holland is a blogger from Afrospear, a national group of bloggers that advocates for African-Americans. When he looked at the list of State Bloggers, he saw no black blogs among them. Holland explains that the process the Democratic Convention planners used to choose the State Blogger Corps was bound to lead to this result. And he argues that the Democratic Party can scarcely afford to alienate black voters in this election year." (The original link no longer works, which is becoming a growing documentation problem on the Internet.)
"Electing Edwards to challenge the status quo is like supporting a queen to challenge the monarchy or integrating an all-white club by adding more all-white club members. It is possible that electing yet another white man to the Presidency will end the poverty of the historically disenfranchised, with John Edwards serving as a "pass through" for those who have historically been disincluded legally and by custom. But this is a very convoluted way of achieving what could be achieved much more directly by electing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. ..."
Disclaimer:
Although I am a trained attorney, I am retired and am not an active member of any state Bar. Therefore, I advocate in all matters on my own behalf and not as the legal representative of any person, group or organization.
