Showing posts with label civil rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civil rights. Show all posts

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Black Panthers, as covered by the American Prospect

Adam Serwer is a blogger on the American Prospect website. As someone who blogs about Civil Rights, Adam decided to throw himself headfirst into the whole Black Panther controversy.

Of course, instead of focusing on the Civil Rights case, the one that the Obama administration won and subsequently decided to reduce the charges on, Adam instead decided to focus on the criminal charges:
This means that the case was downgraded to a civil case 11 days before Obama was inaugurated, 26 days before Eric Holder became attorney general, and about nine months before Thomas Perez was confirmed as head of the Civil Rights Division

Go read the article. Then read the update:
So, I just wanted to clear something up: I wrote my post yesterday about the Justice Department's decision not to pursue criminal charges against the NBPP during the Bush administration because I had seen conservatives arguing that it was made by the Obama administration. It wasn't. I did not mean to suggest that the civil case, which the DoJ dropped in May of last year after receiving a preliminary injunction against the only NBPP member in Philadelphia who was walking around with a baton, was dismissed during the Bush administration. I apologize if any of my writing has been unclear on this point or any confusion has resulted because I misstated the accusation of who wanted the criminal case dismissed.

I haven't seen one conservative arguing about the criminal complaints, so I followed the links above to the Media Matter's article. Media Matters has O'Reilly talking to two legal analysts who both complain that they have no idea why criminal complaints were not pursued.

But the bulk of the story is why the civil suit was dropped after they won.

Getting back to Adam;
The comments pretty much say it all, but Adam had to 'update' his blog several times. It finally got to the point where he had to issue this blog.
Now I have to give Adam partial credit. In his original post, he does talk about the civil case.
However, its clear to me that he was trying to muddy the waters by talking about the criminal case. As I mentioned before, O'Reilly was the only one I heard talking about the criminal case, and only in that clip that Media Matters focused on.

The tagline of the American Prospect is "Liberal Intelligence". Skipping past the obvious oxymoron, I wish that the Prospect and Adam would adhere to their tagline.