Jay Nordlinger prints an email he got in his column on National Review Online

Jay,

Why is it that everything has to be racialized? Here’s the headline over an Associated Press story: “Texas Black Woman Scheduled for Execution.” “Texas Black Woman”? Why not just “Texas Woman”? She murdered her family. What does her race have to do with it?

I’m afraid Jay gets a little carried away with this color-blind thing. While Justice should be color-blind, crime reporting needn’t be. The NAACP certainly claims they see a link between race and the death penalty.

But reporters not only “racialize” capital punishment, for political effect, they “de-racialize” crime.

Frances Newton killed her husband and her two small children for the insurance money in 1987.

I was able to track down the 1987-88 headlines about the murder in the Houston Chronicle’s archive and none of them said anything like “Black Woman Kills Her Whole Family.” They said nothing about here race at all.

They said as follows

• Woman charged in shooting deaths of husband, 2 children
• Mom stood to benefit, says agent/Murder trial lists insurance policies
• Wife admits hiding gun, denies killing mate, two children
• Woman convicted in killing husband, her two children
• Jury finds woman guilty in deaths of husband, kids
• Jury gives Newton death in slayings of her family

So, you see, the press can avoid racializing things: it just depends on the outcome they’re trying to achieve.

Southern California-based journalist Dan Sheehy sent me the following item.

Sheehy is the author of “Fighting Immigration Anarchy: American Patriots Battle to Save the Nation.”

“The Los Angeles Times today announced that leftist Michael Kinsley is being replaced by super leftist and Mexican sympathizer Andres Martinez to head the paper’s editorial page. Martinez is a native of Mexico. He has a bachelor’s degree from Yale, a master’s in Russian history, and a law degree from Columbia. Martinez said his appointment means the newspaper would continue to support “free trade in Central America.”

He said he plans to partner with the Downtown Public Library in a series of public forums called Zocalo.

I’ve visited the Zocalo in Mexico City. It’s a giant square filled with impoverished people, just like the millions flooding into our country. I remember watching pitiful-looking women sitting on the sidewalk in front of the cathedral, openly breast-feeding their babies and begging for money. Go here for information on the Zocalo

Interestingly, the L.A. Times, which is owned by the Tribune Company in Chicago, no longer publishes its number of subscribers, probably because tens of thousands of Americans have dropped their subscription, many of which have left Mexifornia. With a Mexican in charge of the editorial page and Americans continuing to escape Mexifornia, how much longer before the paper becomes a Spanish-language paper, I wonder? Los Angeles already has a Mexican mayor, and millions of Mexicans live in the Los Angeles region, so why shouldn’t the L.A. Times become a Spanish paper sometime down the road?

And isn’t it also interesting that this paper, just like all the rest of the corporate media in America, still haven’t reported that on March 23 of this year President Bush met with Mexico’s Fox and Canada’s Martin in Texas, where they quietly agreed to the merger of the three countries and agreed to let the Council on Foreign Relations work out the details. That’s when Bush publicly called the Minutemen “vigilantes.” Bush agreed to the merger two weeks after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in Mexico City with Foreign Secretary Ernesto Derbez to discuss the “integration” of the U.S. with other nations in the Western Hemisphere. Can anyone spell T-R-E-A-S-O-N?

For more, see the two links below:
“Kinsley leaves the Times”
“Martinez sets sail on unpredictable course”

“President Bush characteristically issued an executive order effectively lowering the wages of reconstruction workers — and hiking the profits of their companies. He wiped out the requirement to pay prevailing wages in the disaster region, apparently thinking that $9 an hour for construction workers was too high a price to pay. The government can save money, no doubt, by exploiting illegal immigrant labor.”

Hurricane Looting Not Over Yet by Jesse Jackson

As a former construction worker, I really do appreciate the thought here. I also appreciate Jackson’s son’s record in opposing H-1b expansion. However as Barbara Jordan pointed out, it will take a lot more to handle the issue of illegal immigration.