My Mom...

I love my parents... more than I could ever express. All that I have, or even am, I owe to them and their efforts to raise me to be a good and productive person. I don't know how well they succeeded, but I haven't done too badly and I'm not in jail.

My mother is a Democrat of the old school... much inclined to view conservative political figures as representing robber-barons and magnates of industry at the expense of the "common man". I sometimes think her views of Republicans are shaped in the political fires that raged during and after the Depression (even though she is a Baby-Boomer)... the GOP fights for profits and earnings and doesn't care a lick about the sufferings of America's poor and down-trodden.

I was speaking to her recently... about the weather, of all things... and somehow we got on the subject of colleges. In discussing the merits of some MS colleges, Ole Miss came up, and I mentioned that it was a great school, but very expensive and a bit on the exclusive side. Lots of law degrees and MDs come from Ole Miss... like Haley Barbour.

This prompted the poor woman to make a remark about Barbour's ethical education... which she felt was lacking. She didn't feel Ole Miss gave much of an education in ethics, if he needed to extract a promise of a kidney to commute the sentences of two black women who had served more than 16 years for a robbery charge. I am sure all here know what I am referring to... it was all over the papers and airwaves just a few weeks before the AZ shooting.

I don't like arguing with my Mom... but I simply couldn't let this go. I like Barbour... not because he is Southern, or white, or "old guard GOP"... but because he delivered on ALL of his election promises when he became Governor, and led MS through the worst natural disaster to hit the US since the San Fransisco Earthquake of 1906 without any of the drama and pain that the equally devastated LA seemed to go through at the same time.

So, I pointed out that these two women, charged with an aggravated robbery charge in 1996, first had their sentences appealed to the Governor's office (claiming it was excessive and racially biased) back in Feb of 2000. These appeals were repeated every year since. Barbour granted the clemency request when one of the two women was known to be suffering from a kidney disease, and the other was known to be a viable donor. The prognosis for both enjoying long lives after the surgery are excellent (and the State will still be footing the bill, since neither has any sort of health care coverage). What I assumed my mother did NOT know was that the Governor of Mississippi prior to Barbour, a Mr. Ronnie Musgrove (D) did not grant any sort of clemency or commute their sentences as unjust or excessive either, even though he heard the same appeals as Barbour did for his first four years.

Mother was so ready to condemn Barbour for the barbarous demand of a kidney for a release from prison, rather than seeing the unjust and racially-motivated penalty the women received all those years ago... but knew nothing about the Democrat that ALSO left the two women wallowing in their cells due to injustice and racism. This is the sort of one-sided view that I feel the DNC and its supporters in the media are giving to the mainstream American household. There is no balance in the media if this sort of fact can't be established from the beginning... rather than be presented as a rebuttal weeks and months after the story is buried under the next national scandal or tragedy.

I'm not presenting my mother as a dummy, mind you... she's one of the smartest people I know. She is NOT internet-savy, though, and gets all her news and national insight from mainstream broadcast and cable outlets. I think she is a classic example of just how one-sided "mainstream" media really is. Her idea of radio talk is NPR, and her news sources are the cable and broadcast networks evening reports.

It shouldn't be her job to hunt the airwaves looking for both sides of a story... that should be presented from all media outlets that call themselves News and Information Providers. Anything else should be Opinion and Editorial... just like the old, traditional newsprint and newspaper sections we remember as kids (because even major newspapers are giving opinion and editorial comment as frontline news, now).

THIS is the world our children are coming into... sad, huh?