Saturday, March 17, 2012

Waving the red flag

Ken Hedler's coverage of the briefing by ACLU lobbyist Anjeli Abraham is accurate given the amount of space he had to work with, and I like that he made the calls to get reactions from our local party leaders. The quote from Mal Barrett was particularly illuminating, showing that not all Rs share the extremist social agenda currently fascinating the Legislature, and some understand its risks
    It's no surprise that the knives are coming out in the comments, the self-appointed vigilantes against fairness for everyone spouting every wacko idea they ever heard about the ACLU and every cracked argument against support for civil rights.
    For those who missed the briefing, I did an interview with Ms Abraham for The People's Business, in which we talk about what the organization is doing and why, as well as why it's so reviled on the right. It's obvious to me that it's a lot more about the "values" of the reactionary right than the actions of the ACLU. (Airing on Sunday (Mar 18, 2pm) and Saturday (Mar 24, 2pm), listen on 90.1 FM in Prescott, 89.5 in the rest of NorAZ, or the KJZA live stream here.)
    The sad part of this dynamic is that it makes reasonable Republicans hesitant, even afraid, to say anything supportive of the ACLU or its perfectly reasonable legal positions. To that extent it puts Republicans in the position of having to at least neglect and often attack our civil liberties even as they believe they are the primary defenders of the Constitution.

When editors don't edit, vol. 398

So I'm looking at the feel-good story about current former mayors raising money for charity, and I find Rowle Simmons' name misspelled as "Rollie." In both references. Then I notice that the caption on the photo has the names in the wrong order. Eyes roll, forehead meets desktop.
   I'm guessing (charitably) that what's happened here is the fundraisers wrote up a press release without professional help, sent it in with a photo, and the editors dumped it into the paper without looking at it. Someone's in a hurry or just doesn't care, and we wind up reading egregious errors that live up to the paper's reputation for amateurishness. This kind of thing embarrasses the profession, in largest part because it's so easy to fix -- just look at what you're doing. You want to charge for this thing, right?

Update, 11pm: The spelling and caption errors have been corrected online, and my comment pointing them out deleted, without a correction notice.