/b

Twitter Updates

What People Say:
"I never thought I'd read the phrase Crazy Politico's Rantings in the NYT. I'll bet they never thought they'd print anything like that phrase either." TLB

Blogroll Me!

My Blog Rolls

American Flag Bloggers

American Flags

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Omissions in the Post?

As I was reading two stories in the Post over my morning cup of coffee and granola bar, I started wondering why a few facts weren't in the stories.

The first involves tribal political contributions. This is of course big news on a national scale because of the Abramoff scandal. While that is an interesting angle, I wonder why the Post, and other major dailies haven't given much coverage to the role that the tribes play in State politics.

Wisconsin, New York, California, Alabama, and others have had issues over the past few years with huge amounts of tribal money being used to influence elections in those states. We aren't talking about a few thosand here and there, like with Abramoff, either.

In Wisconsin there were hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign funds of the current Governor during the last election. Jim Doyle assures us that the never ending gaming compacts he signed, with very lucrative expansions of gambling for the tribes had nothing to do with that money.

I believe the major papers that get national attention don't want to touch this because it would show that tribal gaming money actually has no party affiliation. Whoever can give the tribe the most in return gets the dollars on the state level, who cares what party they are in.

The other article that the Post left a very relevant fact out of concerns the Texas redistricting plan that was the brain child of Tom DeLay. When Texas gained two seats in the House in the 2000 census, DeLay and others came up with a redistictricting plan that ended up giving the GOP five more seats in Congress.

The White House has filed a brief with the Supreme Court that says the redistricting does comply with the voting rights Act of 1965, which is the oppositions major problem with the plan. Some in the Justice Department did have some reservations about the plan, but let it go forward after a 3 judge panel of the District Court said it was legal.

Reading the article there is much bluster about the supposed dilution of minority voting rights in the new Texas plan. What the article fails to mention is that under the new plan there were more minorities elected to congress than in the old districts. They did mention that point in a December article, but evidently it's not relevant anymore.

They also only use the words "Opponents of the plan" to identify who actually took this case to courts, which is the Democratic Party of Texas.

Technorati Tags: , , and

0Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home