News-Record.com

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings breaks the story: The media are in league with al-Qaeda!

If you wonder just how we got to the point at which a Supreme Court ruling affirming that torture is bad is cause for celebration instead of a very routine matter, you should read this article about David Addington, longtime confidant of Vice President Cheney and now his chief of staff. In an administration whose senior members are nonlawyers almost to a man and woman, Addington and his proteges (e.g., William J. Haynes, Defense Department general counsel) and their, shall we say, creative legal viewpoints have carried disproportionate weight, which they have wielded like clubs:

Rear Admiral Donald Guter, who was the Navy’s chief JAG [Judge Advocate General, or military lawyer] until June, 2002, said that he and the other JAGs, who were experts in the laws of war, tried unsuccessfully to amend parts of the military-commission plan when they learned of it, days before the order was formally signed by the President. "But we were marginalized," he said. "We were warning them that we had this long tradition of military justice, and we didn’t want to tarnish it. The treatment of detainees was a huge issue. They didn’t want to hear it." In a 2004 report in the [New York] Times, Guter said that when he and the other JAGs told Haynes that they needed more information, Haynes replied, "No, you don’t."

OK, got that? "Experts in the laws of war" were blown off by a political appointee with no active-duty military experience who couldn't be bothered with facts and was condescending as all hell besides. There's a recipe for success.

Convicted swindler Ken Lay has died. In addition to feeling sorry for his nonswindling family and friends -- even he had some, I'm sure -- I also wish he could've spent another 30 years or so on this earth working to make whole the many thousands of investors who lost their money because of his criminality at Enron.

Does the Air Force really think terrorists blog?

What's this really about?

UPDATE: Social-networking expert Valdis Krebs thinks he has the answer.

I was asked last night: Aren't most of the groups represented at the ongoing convention of truth groups in Greensboro dealing with long-term problems rather than the kind of single incident that Greensboro experienced on Nov. 3, 1979?

The short answer is yes, most of them are, but there are exceptions.

The representatives of the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee focus on the unsolved July 25, 1946, killings of four young African Americans by a group of 12 to 15 unmasked white men. The victims, one of whom had returned just months before from military service in the Pacific, were shot hundreds of times. The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot also was a one-time event that took place within a fairly compressed time frame. And one could argue that the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were one-time, rather than systemic, abuses.

But to make that argument is to presume that these events took place in a vacuum. They did not -- not even the Greensboro shootings, as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report makes clear.

Each event took place within a system of antidemocratic repression. Now, the drivers of that repression vary from one instance to the next in terms of their relative levels of influence, but the repression is a constant. By definition, then, class issues are also a constant -- one is either a repressor or a repressee, and money tends to be the demarcator. And in the U.S., class issues and racial issues, particularly in the South, often have been very difficult to tease apart, a fact that has contributed in many instances to the longevity of the repression by dividing the opposition to the oppressors.

(UPDATE: By chance I just stumbled across this book, which, though I have not read it, appears as though it may examine the motives and mechanisms of societal repression. Perhaps you will find it useful in thinking about this issue.)

Doria Johnson of the Anthony P. Crawford Remembered Memorial Committee, which honors an ancestor of hers who was lynched after organizing a school for African American children in Abbeville, S.C., labeled the common thread of repression "colonialism" during Thursday's Q&A session with news media, and literally or metaphorically, there's some truth to that claim. But what is unequivocal is the common thread of violence as a tool of repression: "The culture of violence is systemic," participant Kathy Sanchez observed.

At least one other thread unites the many sad stories that have brought these people to Greensboro this week: In almost every case, "official" leadership has been very late to the table, lagging behind the oppressed themselves, or their survivors, who in most cases have been the drivers behind the various truth efforts represented here. "The evidence of grassroots effort is where we find the real leadership," said Gail Glapion of the African American Leadership Project in New Orleans, a strategic-planning network for that city whose work since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has refocused on organizing an effective response to the crises left by the storm.

Organizers said 35 delegates took part in Thursday's discussions, with some unable to attend because storms across the eastern U.S. disrupted their travel plans. An additional five participants were expected to take part today. News conferences are scheduled for 12:30 and 4 p.m.

My story on the gathering for Saturday's paper will say, among other things, that many of the convention attendees consider Greensboro's process a model. For space reasons it doesn't go into a whole lot of detail about why, so I thought I'd fill that gap in here.

Former Greensboro Mayor Carolyn Allen, who's a co-leader of the local task force for the Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project, the group whose work gave rise to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation, described some of the nuts and bolts of Greensboro's process that she thinks contributed to its success and should be applied elsewhere.

First, she said, project members wrote a declaration that served as a clearly defined road map for where the project intended to go. She didn't mention this, but the project also created a list of very specific goals.

Second, once the project decided to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it created a selection process that 1) made the commission truly independent of the project and 2) opened commission membership up to the broadest possible spectrum of the community.

Finally, Allen said, the project's local task force and National Advisory Committee wrote out a mandate explaining exactly what it was asking the commission to do and -- being a journalist, I liked this -- exactly how much time its members had to do it.

Angela Lawrence, a member of the now-defunct Greensboro truth commission, added that the diversity of the commission's seven members -- a condition modeled after South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- contributed to the group's ability to do its job.

Today's story mentioned that the various truth efforts represented at the convention have noted a number of common experiences and observations, despite their differences of geography and language and the varying distances back in time of the respective events they are investigating.

But the most important, the one that most makes truth-and-reconciliation projects necessary, is the fact that in every culture there are two communities -- them that has, and them that don't -- and the first group invariably is willing to use violence to keep the second group in its place.

There are arguments from a number of religious and philosophical backgrounds that seek to justify that arrangement -- Ayn Rand's Objectivism is a big one out here in the blogosphere, for example -- but sooner or later they run up against both religious and secular notions that we share a common humanity and that to a certain, significant extent, the problems of one portion of the community are the responsibility of us all.

The Rev. Nelson Johnson, a survivor of the 1979 shootings that gave rise to Greensboro's truth process, noted other, related commonalities. For one thing, communities of whatever size that have something like this in their pasts tend to be in denial about it. (A good example cited this afternoon was that Atlanta, whose slogan is "The City Too Busy to Hate," was the site of a race riot in 1906.)

Another commonality is the use of violence. That might sound exaggerated, but a look at the U.S. labor movement alone should dispel that notion.

Another is the demonization of the truth process by those involved in the oppression, or their successors/descendants. Here in Greensboro, there's at least a small group of people -- I've heard from some personally in my short time covering this process -- who seem categorically unwilling to accept even the possibility that those involved in this process are sincere or that any good can possibly come from what they're doing.

Given the obstacles to truth-and-rec work, why do people do it? To judge from some of the comments of attendees, they, like Martin Luther, can do no other.

"When you take our humanness from us, we spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim that," said Yasmin Sooka, a former member of truth commissions in South Africa and Sierra Leone.

It's not about revenge -- in many, if not most, cases, the perps are dead or nearly so. Rich Rusk, whose Moore's Ford group seeks to memorialize four victims of a brutal 1946 slaying, said he supposed it's possible a couple of the 12 to 15 men who did the shooting might still be alive. A more achievable and better goal, he said, is restorative justice, the kind of improvement in understanding and relations that makes other such events not just unlikely but unthinkable.

I'm not sure I buy the notion that retributive justice is pointless -- I think some people, like former dictator Augusto Pinochet, ought to rot in prison for the rest of their lives no matter how decrepit they are now, just to serve as examples for others at any level of government who might be prone to sanction state violence or other state-sanctioned human-rights violations. But seeking only retributive justice, I'll grant you, won't make future episodes less likely, and it does little or nothing to address the problem of making one community out of two groups, oppressors and oppressed.

What are oppressors fighting so hard to keep oppressed from getting? This is a subject that I regret I didn't have time to get into with convention attendees; perhaps some will read this blog post, as I suggested, and answer in the comments. I realize that money and power are two obvious candidates, and that dynamic has led some local folks to suggest that Greensboro's entire T&R process is nothing but a smoke screen for the victims of Nov. 3 to seek more money from the city. Convention attendees both local and out-of-town roundly disparaged that notion this afternoon. I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case, at least up to now; certainly, it doesn't look like the kind of work one goes into to get rich.

I had some more organized thoughts on this subject, but that was an hour ago and it's late. Perhaps I can flesh this out tomorrow or next week. G'night.

UPDATE: Bruce Burch at Mental Floss blogs here on the Saturday (i.e., public) portion of the conference. (I didn't attend that session, but my colleague Michelle Jarboe did; her account is here.) Bruce says he'll be blogging more about this, so you might pay him a visit.

Chris Anderson's book "The Long Tail," which began as an October 2004 Wired magazine article and a blog that has informed a great deal of the N&R's thinking as we continue the Town Square experiment, is officially published today.

Perhaps you recall Defense Department counsel William J. Haynes II, whom I mentioned here in quoting from an uncomplimentary New Yorker article on vice-presidential chief of staff David Addington. I did not realize this, but Haynes has been nominated to a seat on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Some people are not happy about this because Haynes has been involved in the Pentagon's use of torture (details here).

And if I'm right, I knew William J. Haynes II as Jim Haynes, one of my freshman hall's two counselors at Davidson, although I haven't seen him since he graduated in 1980.

Davidson was a pretty conservative place when I was there. (That was part of the reason I went there.) But I'm having a helluva time reconciling the Jim Haynes I knew with the stuff I'm reading about ... stuff I'm pretty sure the alumni magazine will, understandably, be in no hurry to write about.

UPDATE: More here, and it's not good.

Currently I'm seeking to contact the 70-odd groups and individuals who agreed to act as "receivers" for the report and foster group discussions of it. (For the purposes of this story, I'm not going to include groups such as the Beloved Community Center with close ties to the truth-commission process.)

I'm planning a story on what those discussions have involved to date, and I'm also hoping to sit in on one or two (and perhaps record audio for our Web site) before writing. I've already gotten one invitation but had to decline because it conflicted with a previously scheduled interview.

If you're on the list, I'll be getting to you at some point, or trying to, but if you want to get to me first, you can call me at 373-7088 or e-mail me.

Thanks!

Then click here ... and see how, and why, we might soon never click again.

... because apparently the government has nothing more important to do:

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) -- In its continuing crackdown on on-air profanity, the FCC has requested numerous tapes from broadcasters that might include vulgar remarks from unruly spectators, coaches and athletes at live sporting events, industry sources said.

Tapes requested by the commission include live broadcasts of football games and NASCAR races where the participants or the crowds let loose with an expletive. While commission officials refused to talk about its requests, one broadcast company executive said the commission had asked for 30 tapes of live sports and news programs.

"It looks like they want to end live broadcast TV," said one executive, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. "We already know that they aren't afraid to go after news."

NO SLIPS ALLOWED

While live programming always has been problematic for broadcasters, it has become even more difficult under tougher commission rules approved in 2004. The new rules found that virtually any use of certain expletives will be considered profane and indecent, even if it is a slip of the tongue. In a March decision, the FCC found that the CBS news program "The Early Show" violated its indecency rules because of a profane slip-up but did not issue a fine because the incident occurred before the new rules were instituted.

Live sports -- amateur, college and professional -- have long been a broadcast programming staple. Broadcasters have spent enormous amounts of money and energy to come up with ways to give audiences a better feel for the action. As broadcasters vie for viewers, technical advances that include such things as on-field microphones and in-car cameras have become as important as the announcers.

"I don't know how they are going to rule, but they asked us for tapes with a specific emphasis on crowd noise," said another TV executive, who also requested anonymity. "If some bozo in the crowd calls the ref an [expletive], the commission is asking for a copy of the tape."

As a former broadcaster, I'm pretty sure there is no problem so great in this case that it couldn't be solved with a 7-second delay. So why is the FCC making such a big deal out of this?

I don't know. And it's funny, but when I read the headline, I had the same thought as the quoted anonymous executive: It looks like they want to end live broadcast TV.

Perhaps we're being alarmist. Why would anyone want to do that?

Since the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling, there's been a fair bit of discussion on legal blogs about the ramifications for not only the programs at direct issue (military tribunals for detainees) but also for such programs as the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic wiretapping program. I have no idea whether the blogs I reviewed were a representative sample. I suspect not.

In general, the bloggers felt that the majority opinion in Hamdan effectively kicked the legs out from under the two main defenses the administration has offered for its program:

• That the Authorization for the Use of Military Force enacted shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks implicitly allowed the president to do what otherwise would have been a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
• That the war-making powers assigned to the president in Article II of the Constitution trumped FISA.

Some examples:

• Jack Balkin
• David Barron
• Orin Kerr

Even Andrew McCarthy, a very pro-administration legal writer at National Review Online, now concedes that any legal challenge to the program almost certainly will succeed:

I have spent a great deal of time and energy studying and trying to explain what I understand to be the legal basis for the NSA program. (For those interested, see this lengthy white paper for the Federalist Society that I compiled with brothers Rivkin and Casey). Throughout the Hamdan majority opinion, and especially in the Kennedy concurrence (particularly where he discusses Justice Jackson’s Steel Seizure concurrence), one immersed in these issues perceives resonances of the letter submitted to Congress by fourteen scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. That letter, available here, posits that the NSA program is illegal. Even though the letter is not cited in Hamdan, its influence is palpable. It was that letter, and a similar ABA report, that prompted David, Lee and I to do our study.

My own rule of thumb is to try to fight hard but fight fair, and admit when I've lost. I’ve lost.

So, when a case involving the program ever gets to the Supreme Court, the high court, at least as currently constituted, probably will strike it down. One such case is before a federal district judge in Detroit, who heard government arguments Monday that the entire case should be thrown out because to hear it in open court would be a national security risk. Such an exemption exists in the law, but it is typically applied much more narrowly -- to individual documents or witnesses, say -- rather than to entire cases. The judge hasn't said when she will rule, and I'd bet a dollar whichever side loses will appeal anyway.

Liberal blogger Chris Bowers at MyDD speculates on how and why the MSM cover liberal political blogs and suggests that liberals are better at using blogs to advance their political agenda than conservatives. Oddly enough, another liberal, Steve at No More Mr. Nice Blog, thinks Chris has it exactly backwards, that conservatives have figured out that blogs aren't useful for what Chris thinks and have chosen to use their blogs in other ways.

I'm slightly more inclined toward Steve's take than Chris's, but that's just my impression, not any kind of empirical observation. At any rate, they both raise some good questions about the uses and effectiveness of political blogs.

*Hat tip to the late, great Replacements

I can't tell if this was a real court order or not, but if it wasn't, it should have been.

More than one would-be commenter has e-mailed today to say that they're not being allowed to post comments. I'm not sure what's up with that, and I've got a deadline to meet today for print so I doubt I'll have time to run it down.

What I will do, however, is post comments for you if you e-mail them to me. In addition to the comment you want to post and the thread you want to post it on and whether or not it's OK to link to your e-mail address and/or Web site, please describe as specifically as possible what you were doing, where on the blog you were doing it (which post, I mean) and exactly what the error message you got said. That'll aid me in running down the problem later.

Thanks, and I'm sorry this is happening.

I'm back from vacation. What'd I miss?

Some folks, primarily Sam Spagnola, raised some questions in this thread at JR's place about my approach to covering Greensboro's truth-and-reconciliation process, and about my work blog in general. JR asked me to address them. I've done so, but my response ran kind of long, so rather than posting it on his blog as a comment, I'm posting it here as a separate thread and will link to this from JR's blog comments when I've done so.

First, if you're here you probably already know that one of the things the News & Record is trying to do with its Town Square project is to explain more about how and why we do the things we do (which is what we mean by "transparency"), via our blogs as well as by other means. That's key to understanding this whole discussion. If by some chance you are NOT familiar with what we're trying to do, please read my original report on the subject for some essential background.

Next, if you want to follow along at home, understand that the post from my blog from which Sam Spagnola has pulled most of the quotes in his comment at JR's place was intended to supplement the stories I wrote for the print edition about the gathering here in Greensboro of truth-and-reconciliation groups from across the U.S. and from four other countries. As are many blog posts, this one is a hybrid of reporting and analysis, along with some thinking-out-loud-type questions about what I've seen and heard. There are even a few personal opinions in there, albeit not as many as Sam thinks and certainly none that I think impair my ability to report fairly and accurately on the TRC.

I'm going to address each of the passages Sam quotes individually, then conclude with some more context. Bold passages are quotes from my original blog posts; italic passages are Sam's comments on the passages. My response to Sam follows in regular type.

But the most important, the one that most makes truth-and-reconciliation projects necessary, is the fact that in every culture there are two communities -- them that has, and them that don't -- and the first group invariably is willing to use violence to keep the second group in its place.

This is clearly an opinion about not only the value of the commission but a political statement about class.

No, it isn't: It's reporting what the seminar participants were saying, which fact becomes clearer if you read the paragraph immediately preceding the graf Sam quotes: "Today's story mentioned that the various truth efforts represented at the convention have noted a number of common experiences and observations, despite their differences of geography and language and the varying distances back in time of the respective events they are investigating."

***To those participants***, that fact was the most important. I have no idea what the most important fact is. I'll grant for the purposes of discussion that their statement was a political statement about class, but it was theirs, not mine.

"There are arguments from a number of religious and philosophical backgrounds that seek to justify that arrangement -- Ayn Rand's Objectivism is a big one out here in the blogosphere, for example -- but sooner or later they run up against both religious and secular notions that we share a common humanity and that to a certain, significant extent, the problems of one portion of the community are the responsibility of us all."

Ditto on the opinionation. This goes beyond context into political philosophy.

This isn't opinion so much as a simple, factual observation, recognizable by anyone who spends a lot of time in the political blogosphere. I'm not arguing that one school of thought or the other is right or wrong; I'm simply pointing out that both schools exist and are often used in blogging, and that they conflict. Sam is welcome to offer any evidence he might have opposing that assertion.

I included that observation because, in my professional opinion, based on firsthand observation, the statement is a bit of context essential for understanding some -- not all, but some -- of where the vehement disagreement about the nature and value of Greensboro's truth-and-reconciliation process is coming from.

"Another is the demonization of the truth process by those involved in the oppression, or their successors/descendants. Here in Greensboro, there's at least a small group of people -- I've heard from some personally in my short time covering this process -- who seem categorically unwilling to accept even the possibility that those involved in this process are sincere or that any good can possibly come from what they're doing."

"Demonization" is not a characterization? "...of those involved in the OPPRESSION..." Believing there is "oppression" is not an opinion? It certainly seems like he is lockstep with the T&R Commission on that. How can he be trusted to write objectively if he has already drank the proverbial "Kool-Aid"?

The first sentence Sam quotes is a general observation about the historical events that led to the creation of the groups that sent representatives to the Greensboro gathering. It is not about Greensboro specifically. Moreover, it is an observation made by ***convention participants***, not me. I'm simply relaying it -- reporting it -- in this blog post. And certainly, oppression has been documented beyond a reasonable doubt in South Africa and Wilmington, to name just two examples off the top of my head.

The rest of the passage is a related point: Irrespective of the facts, some people in Greensboro have gotten in touch with me to say what I've described them as saying. These people's communications suggest they neither know nor care what the facts are. "Demonization" might strike readers as a subjective description of what they have said to me regarding the truth-and-rec process. But in my professional opinion, it's also a fair and accurate description.

"I think some people, like former dictator Augusto Pinochet, ought to rot in prison for the rest of their lives no matter how decrepit they are now, just to serve as examples for others at any level of government who might be prone to sanction state violence or other state-sanctioned human-rights violations. But seeking only retributive justice, I'll grant you, won't make future episodes less likely, and it does little or nothing to address the problem of making one community out of two groups, oppressors and oppressed."

Note how that paragraph started with "I think..."

It did indeed. The first sentence is pure opinion, undiluted. And I stand by it, as I have done previously many times on both this blog and my personal blog. Heck, I'll repeat it here: TORTURE IS BAD. But for Sam to meet the burden of proof required for his criticism to be relevant to my coverage of the truth-and-rec process, he must explain in what way expressing this opinion make me a less capable journalist in general and/or less effective in covering the truth-and-rec process in particular.

The second sentence is opinion, but it is opinion based on two decades of reporting and wide reading and research. As to the first part, that retributive justice alone won't make future episodes less likely, that's a prediction based on history: Governments have done bad things in part because they don't think they'll ever face retributive justice even where mechanisms for it exist (and in many places they exist only on paper). The second part of the sentence is plain fact: Retributive justice isn't intended to bring about reconciliation and it contains none of the elements known to contribute to reconciliation. It doesn't rule reconciliation out, of course, but any reconciliation that results from it is happy accident.

"What are oppressors fighting so hard to keep oppressed from getting?"

(No specific comment from Sam other than to label this opinion.)

As the context (particularly the sentences immediately following) makes clear, this is a follow-up question I would like to have asked the attendees who posited the whole notion of oppressors and oppressed, but didn't get the chance to ask. It's not my opinion.

"I realize that money and power are two obvious candidates, and that dynamic has led some local folks to suggest that Greensboro's entire T&R process is nothing but a smoke screen for the victims of Nov. 3 to seek more money from the city. Convention attendees both local and out-of-town roundly disparaged that notion this afternoon. I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case, at least up to now; certainly, it doesn't look like the kind of work one goes into to get rich."

(No specific comment from Sam other than to label this opinion.)

The first phrase makes clear that I'm guessing but don't know the answer. I don't see anything particularly wrong with doing that in a blog post as long as I'm not trying to disguise my guesses as facts. Other people have made the same guesses, a fact borne out by the suggestions I've heard that the shooting survivors are just in it for the money. I mentioned that fact during my Q&A with convention attendees, and they did indeed roundly disparage it, mainly along the lines of, "If I were in this for the money, then why would I [engage in various activities that hardly look like clear moneymakers and in fact are COSTING me time and money]?" Finally, I report what I have observed (or, technically, haven't observed), with the disclaimer "at least up to now," meaning I haven't ruled out the possibility that such evidence exists.

"Would you not agree, for example, that regardless of your feelings about Klansmen and Communists, the people of Morningside Homes deserved more protection on Nov. 3 than they got?"

(No specific comment from Sam other than to label this opinion.)

First, a little note on blog culture for those following along at home: Sam is now quoting from the comments below the post, rather than the post itself. Dialogue and discussion in blog comments tend to be a little less formal and more freewheeling than do the original blog post on which the commenters are commenting. Now, moving on:

This quote, the question, "Does that make it [the report] completely wrong?" responds to an assertion from Sam in the comments below the post that there was nothing in the report that hadn't been predicted by critics from the outset. He seemed, although I might be overinferring here, to be saying that because the report had been so predictable (to him, anyway), it was worthless. I questioned what I understood him to be saying. In fact I do think that the people of Morningside Homes deserved more protection on Nov. 3 than they got. Indeed, as a longtime resident and taxpayer, I think it is only reasonable for any resident of any neighborhood in Greensboro to expect better protection, under the circumstances, than Morningside Homes got, based on the reported facts. But one would not have to hold that position to raise the questions I did with Sam in the way that I raised them. And again, I think the burden is on Sam to demonstrate how my expressing this particular opinion damages in any way my ability to do my job.

One other observation about this opinion: So far, to judge from local conversations and blog posts, it appears to be the only conclusion in the report around which any kind of community consensus is emerging. So, yeah, it's my opinion, but it's very widely shared. That doesn't prove I'm right. But it does suggest that the same set of facts is leading a lot of people who disagree about a lot of things about the truth-and-rec process to agree on at least this one point, for whatever that might be worth.

"Would you not agree that the long line of questionable decisions and missed opportunities by Greensboro police in the weeks leading up to Nov. 3 constituted a problem?"

Sam: "opinion disguised as rhetorical question."

Well, first, it's not a rhetorical question at all, Sam: Do you agree or disagree? If you disagree, why? Is the behavior of the GPD as documented in the report consistent with your idea of the behavior of a professional, competent, prudent law-enforcement organization?

Second, law enforcement gets warnings all the time about impending violence, whether it's from informants trying to head off a murder or spouses who've been abused before and know they'll be abused again. Yet, as I am sure Sam would agree, most of those warnings don't result in five homicides and ten other felonious assaults in the space of less than two minutes. There are numerous reasons for that, but one is that in my observations over years of reporting, police tend to take certain steps in response to such warnings that they simply did not take before and on Nov. 3, 1979.

"I've heard that argument, and although it makes sense on the surface, I'm not sure I buy it anymore."

Sam: " - opinion. If it was purely news, why should it matter whether he "buys it" or not?"

That's not an opinion. That's saying I don't know what to think. It's literally the opposite of an opinion.

"But to make that argument is to presume that these events took place in a vacuum. They did not -- not even the Greensboro shootings, as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report makes clear."

Sam: -argumentative opinion.

First, for those following at home, this passage is from a separate post from the post and comments we've been discussing up to this point.

Second, Sam calls that statement opinion. To me, it's a logical inference based on the information provided by convention organizers about each of the events that led groups to send convention participants to Greensboro.

"Each event took place within a system of antidemocratic repression. Now, the drivers of that repression vary from one instance to the next in terms of their relative levels of influence, but the repression is a constant. By definition, then, class issues are also a constant -- one is either a repressor or a repressee, and money tends to be the demarcator. And in the U.S., class issues and racial issues, particularly in the South, often have been very difficult to tease apart, a fact that has contributed in many instances to the longevity of the repression by dividing the opposition to the oppressors."

Sam: - opinion.

The first sentence factually characterizes the events that led other groups to Greensboro, with the possible exception of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The second sentence again factually characterizes the descriptions of those events. The third sentence is, I believe, factual. Sam is welcome to point to any instances of institutionalized repression in which class was not involved, in which money was not a major demarcator between repressor and repressee, if not THE demarcator.

And the last sentence is an observation of a phenomenon that has played out in Southern politics, at least, for decades. I've been aware of it since I was a 10-year-old in Charlotte listening to the public debate over school busing for integration. Its apotheosis was probably the "hands" TV ad created for Sen. Jesse Helms' 1990 re-election campaign against Harvey Gantt.

Now, at long last, the conclusion and context I promised.

As I noted above, blog posts, unlike newspaper articles, often are a mixture of reporting, analysis, questioning (sometimes for clarification, sometimes in a devil's-advocate role), pondering "out loud," and opinion. I understand that this mixture is disconcerting, at the least, to people who have long been used to the idea that newspaper reporters deal in documentable fact only. And even for those of us who've been reading and writing blogs for years, the idea that some lines that aren't crossed in print can and, in some cases, must be crossed online is a little hard to take and harder still to negotiate.

For better or worse, though, blogging has adopted the ethos advocated by sports-talk-radio host Jim Rome: Have a take and don't suck. In other words, advocate a position and do it well. There are some positions journalists can't, and shouldn't, advocate. But as I try to help the N&R navigate the new world of blogging and interactive media, I figured out a long time ago that "Have no takes at all" wasn't going to get the audience involved with us. The trick is to have takes that don't compromise your ability to report fairly on whatever it is you're covering AND are interesting to readers. How do we do that? We're still figuring that part out, and as with any long-term series of experiments, sometimes we will fail.

And for all our reputation as a national leader in newspaper blogging, we are still experimenting. Still. When I wrote the Town Square report to which I linked above, I wasn't doing any reporting -- I wasn't involved at all in the daily news flow, in fact -- so I had the luxury of hypothesizing about how blogging by a reporter could work without the immediate necessity of making sure it did. Now we're into the lab work, so to speak: I'm trying out on my blog some of the things I thought could work. Sam has expressed some concern about the mix. He didn't make clear exactly why, but I infer -- please correct me if I'm wrong, Sam -- that part of it is that he's simply used to the convention of print reporters dealing strictly in documentable fact and that part of it is that he's also having some trouble telling some of the various ingredients of a blog post apart. That's a legitimate problem, one I take seriously. (For what it's worth, which might be nothing, commenter "bystander" elsewhere at my place says he/she doesn't have much trouble with this approach.)

But I've been blogging for years now, and in that time I've also heard from some people who have chosen to attack my journalistic bona fides not because I've actually done anything wrong but because I've raised questions they didn't want raised, or reported facts they'd rather not have heard (and CERTAINLY didn't want anyone else hearing). I also heard from such people before I started blogging. And I give blog commenters every opportunity to prove they don't fall into this category. One or two have failed the test, but most either show up front that they're serious about constructive criticism or, when challenged, begin offering it.

When I blog about what I'm covering for the paper, I'm trying to give you, the reader, the benefit of everything I can bring to the table on a subject, and to transcend the length limitations and conventions of print, while also doing my best to make clear that some things I bring are more reliable than others, that some are merely grounds for additional reporting, that some are informed opinion and that some are wild-haired guesses. To the extent that someone like Sam, who clearly isn't dumb, can have trouble telling some of the pieces apart, I need to do a better job of delineating them -- and I promise to try to do so.

But if there are questions or issues I think need to be raised and discussed as part of my reporting, then I'm going to do it no matter what aspersions commenters might cast on my intellect, politics, morality, competence or status as a carbon-based life form as a result. That's what JR pays me to do, and I hope readers expect no less.

And where I don't know what the answers are, I'm going to say so. God knows I don't know everything. But maybe you know what I'm wondering about at that particular time, or someone else reading the paper or this blog does. That's when interactive media works the way we all hope and expect that it can. And in my current job, I'd be nuts -- and negligent -- not to give it every possible chance to do that.

As The Weather Channel is owned by the same company that owns the News & Record, I'm a tad bit leery of criticism of "weather porn" ... but only a tad. Here, Jerry Petree reports on the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Alberto.

(Hat tip to frequent commenter Fred Gregory.)

No one knows for sure, but you can look in Saturday's News & Record to learn more.

Full disclosure: I lived from 1992 to 2000 about a block and a half north of the Mr. Morris quoted in the article, but as far as I can recall he and I have never met.

Barring important breaking news, I'll be out at the Coliseum Sunday evening chatting with people who are coming to the American Idols concert, for a story for Monday's paper. (Not writing about the show itself.) If you're going to be doing anything particularly noteworthy -- camping out in the parking lot, dressing up as a 10-foot Chris Daughtry, whatever -- e-mail me and let me know.

UPDATE: Well, it ran Sunday instead of Saturday, but here's the critter story.

I'll have a short story in tomorrow's paper about some fans who came to the "American Idol" concert tour's sold-out Greensboro stop. Nice folks all. My colleague Lynn Hey also got what appear to be (I can't see them at full size on my monitor) some good photos.

We did not take any photos of the show itself. That's because the "Idol" tour organizers made such ridiculous demands of us in exchange for the right to shoot photos that we just laughed at them. Seriously: Everyone in the newsroom who I saw actually read their letter laughed out loud. I've worked here for 19 years, and I worked in various facets of the music bidness for years before that, and even I had never seen anything so ridiculous.

I don't have the letter in front of me so I'm going from memory here, but they demanded pretty much everything but our cameras. I think they wanted all the original work, plus contact sheets, plus one-time-only use on our part (not an unusual request in and of itself), plus a whole bunch of other stuff, for which they were either paying us $1 or $0, I forget which. I don't think there was anything in there about first-born children, but as I say, I'm going from memory.

I wonder sometimes whether the goal of the music business isn't to ensure that there are no mourners at its funeral. Behavior like this makes me think most of us will still be around to find out.

Jellyfish are often a problem for swimmers at Carolinas beaches this time of year, but apparently it is particularly bad down around Wrightsville and Carolina beaches.

I recent spent a week at Ocean Isle and saw nary a one -- a little to my surprise, given the heat. But it's a big deal: Even a small jellyfish sting will make you miserable for a couple of hours. (I speak from sad experience here.) A jellyfish once wrapped itself around my brother Frank's thigh, and as I recall, if he could walk for at least a day afterward, he darned well didn't want to. Even a moderate-size jellyfish might well send you to the ER.

First aid? A 5-percent acetic acid solution, more commonly known as white vinegar, is your best bet. Meat tenderizer and sodium bicarbonate also will help in a pinch. If you do use meat tenderizer, it needs to come off within 15 minutes, and rinse it off with SALT water, not fresh. (More first-aid info here.)

Enjoy the beach.