journalists-from-los-angeles

"In the days following the presidential election (of 2000), there were so many stories of African Americans erased from voter rolls you might think they were targeted by some kind of racial computer program. They were. I have a copy of it: two silvery CD-ROM disks right out of the office computers of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Once decoded and flowed into a database, they make for interesting, if chilling, reading. They tell us how our president (George W. Bush) was elected – and it wasn’t by the voters."

"Palast, an American who writes for The Guardian and The Observer of London, has the uncanny knack of turning up at the wrong place at the right time. His showcase essay has to do with the 2000 US presidential election in Florida, and how Governor Jeb Bush and his team shamelessly contrived the removal of thousands of voters’ names from the election rolls; voters who were in large measure black (read Democratic voters). The result was nothing less than the placing in the White House of Jeb’s brother George. This is by now a well-known story, thanks to Palast, who adds a lot of details to it in the book."

"It’s enough to make one cynical. American elections are manipulated, British parliamentarians are bribed, scientific research is financed by companies who are interested parties, energy crises are rigged, and a score of other varieties of modern-day sleaze... The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, (2002) is composed of dozens of essays – many of which are actually summaries of Palast’s investigative journalism escapades – on the myriad ways those of power and wealth have stolen and/or perverted cherished ideas and institutions of the United States and the United Kingdom."

"It isn't done by some guy pressing a lever and changing the vote from blue to red. Rigging an election is usually done by blocking people from casting ballots or not counting the ballots they cast."

"The nasty secret of American democracy is that we don't count all the votes and we do not let all people vote. In the past two years, according to the federal government, 17 million Americans have been stripped of their right to vote. Some of it is quite legitimate... But about half of that number, 9 million or so people, were removed from the voter rolls on a false premise. These potential voters are overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. Young people are the new target. There is a massive purge of voters in America and few people are talking about it."

"On 28 January China said it would welcome international help as it struggled to contain coronavirus. No substantial help has come. Instead of solidarity and defying WHO, the US, Australia, Britain seek to isolate China, returning it to a state of siege and the dangers of the past. (Twitter post 5 Feb 2020)"

"That was May 2001, days before President Bush issued his proposals to end the energy crisis in California. The Golden State was suffering rolling blackouts. The state’s monthly electricity bill shot up by 1,000 percent. But as soon as I got a whiff of the president’s proposals, I knew his plan had nothing to do with helping out the Gore-voting surfers on the Left Coast. Bush put Vice President Dick Cheney in charge of the committee to save California consumers. Recommendation number one: Build some nuclear plants. Not much of an offer to earthquake-prone California, but a darn good deal for the biggest builder of nuclear plants based in Texas, the Brown and Root subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation. Recent CEO of Halliburton: Dick the Veep."

"Who owns America? How much did it cost? Was the transaction cash, check or credit card? Was it a donation to my son who’s running for president? Or a consulting contract to my wife’s former law partner to comfort him on his way to the federal penitentiary? And what do you give a billionaire who has everything? Immunity from prosecution? Then there’s the practical difficulty of gift wrapping the U.S. Congress. George W. Bush may have lost at the ballot box but he won where it counts, at the piggy bank. The Fortunate Son rode right into the White House on a snorting porker stuffed with nearly half a billion dollars: My calculation of the suffocating plurality of cash from Corporate America (“hard” money, “soft” money, “parallel” spending and other forms of easy squeezy) that smothered Al Gore runs to $447 million. They called it an election but it looked more like an auction."

"Secretary of State Harris declared George W. Bush winner of Florida, and thereby president, by a plurality of 537 votes over Al Gore... Over 50,000 voters wrongly targeted by the purge, mostly Blacks. My BBC researchers reported that Gore lost at least 22,000 votes as a result of this smart little black-box operation. The first reports of this extraordinary discovery ran, as you’d expect, on page one of the country’s leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the USA, it ran on page zero – the story was simply not covered in American newspapers. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also grabbed big television coverage. But again, it was the wrong continent: on BBC Television, broadcasting from London worldwide – everywhere, that is, but the USA. Was this some off-the-wall story that the British press misreported? Hardly. The chief lawyer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise Florida’s Black voters. So why was this story investigated, reported and broadcast only in Europe, for God’s sake?"

"There was a time when I drew a distinction between Benjamin Netanyahu's policies and this country I have loved so long. No more. Every single day we wake to yet another outrage."

"My daughter is an unarmed . That should matter. It should matter, in particular, to who believe, and justly so, that the inalienable rights of human beings, children in particular, take clear precedence over the s of and the appetites of nationalism."

""Death to Israel" means death to Israelis. It means death to the members of my family. Like many in Israel, a family which has long worked hard and consistently and intensively for the rights of Palestinians, Muslims and Christians alike, to live in safety and sovereignty in a country of their own. What we want for ourselves is no less just. It is, in fact, the very same: freedom to live in safety and sovereignty."

"If progressives cannot see Israelis as people, if they - we - cannot summon up the same compassion and concern for unarmed combatants on both sides of a battle front, it's time they checked their ideology for holes."

"It is a country (Israel) in which a clear majority of the population, battered by wars and terrorism and heartbreak and frustration, still wants to see negotiations leading to a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and an end to occupation."

"I used to be one of those people who took issue with the label of apartheid as applied to Israel. I was one of those people who could be counted on to argue that, while the country's settlement and occupation policies were anti-democratic and brutal and slow-dose suicidal, the word apartheid did not apply. I'm not one of those people any more."

"I used to be a person who wanted to believe that there were moral and democratic limits – or, failing that, pragmatic constraints - to how low the prime minister was willing to go, how far he was willing to bend to the proud proponents of apartheid, in order to bolster his power. Not any more. Not after ."

"What does apartheid mean, in Israeli terms? Apartheid means clergy spearheading the deepening of segregation, inequality, , and ."

"Only under a system as warped as apartheid, does a government need to label and treat non-violence as terrorism."

"The election marked the greatest victory and validation for anti-Semitism in America since 1941."

"The renaissance of Jew-hate in America has effectively split the Jewish community between an overwhelmingly liberal majority and the pro-Trump minority. There are now just two kinds of Jews in America. And one of them voted for Trump."

"Before it became a winning slogan for Donald Trump, "America First" was a code. On the eve of the worst war the world has ever known, it was Nazi-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh's code for an America which put White Christian Americans of European ancestry before all else. And which pictured Jews – as Trump did just last week by implication – as enemies of America."

"Trump's kid-gloves coddling of anti-Semites and their vicious works have served him in good stead. Now the haters will be only too happy to return the favor by stepping up their attacks."

"And we, all of us, the Jews, helped them get there."

"You send your kids off to college. They love you. You walk away with a Cornell mom T-shirt. You are walking away going this is great, and come Thanksgiving, your kid tells you that you are an imperialist and a racist and a homophobe. That is not worth $120,000."

"Andrew Breitbart despised racism. He took pride in rejecting racism and fighting it tooth and nail. He saw it as a form of bullying. Nothing devastated him more personally than being maligned as racist."

"I must say, in my non-strategic… ‘cuz I’m under attack all the time, if you see it on Twitter. The [unclear] call me gay, it’s just, they’re vicious, there are death threats, and everything. And so, there are times where I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot.’ Bring it on. Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns. [laughter] I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with. And I have people who come up to me in the military, major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.’ They understand that. These are the unspoken things we know, they know. They know who’s on their side, they’ve got Janeane Garofalo, we are freaked out by that. When push comes to shove, they know who’s on our side. They are the bullies on the playground, and they’re starting to realize, what if we were to fight back, what if we were to slap back?"

"Celebrity is everything in this country. And if these guys don't learn how to play the media the way that Barack Obama played the media last election cycle and the way that Donald Trump is playing the election cycle, we're going to probably get a celebrity candidate."

"One of the things that motivated my old friend Andrew Breitbart was his righteous indignation at being called a racist. That's a running theme in his book, Righteous Indignation... He would also advise conservatives not to be deterred if their opponents on the left unfairly called them racists — something he rightly believed happened all the time. Indeed, one of the things that got him out of bed in the morning was fighting the media-Democratic narrative that conservatives are all a bunch of racists... In one famous episode, members of the Congressional Black Caucus walked through a crowd of tea party protesters seeking a provocation. Subsequently they claimed the attendants screamed the N-word and other epithets at them. The press reported it all as fact. Andrew, noting the sea of cameras and iPhones at the event, offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could provide proof of the CBC's claims. No one came forward. That was the Andrew Breitbart I was proud to call my friend."

"Politics is downstream of culture."

"It’s not about hair, it’s about being you--whether that’s something the industry has seen before and accepts or not."

"My generation isn’t tolerant of what they see as fake or staged. They’re looking for authenticity and honesty. Journalists who want to reach them need to be able to say, ‘I don’t personally have all the answers, but I do have a good idea about where we’ll find them.'"

"This is a competitive business — there are a lot of women who want these jobs, but experience, education, and smarts go a long way. I’m still figuring it out — I learn new things every day. Once you stop learning, you should get out of the business. It’s just really about being hungry for more."

"I’m a vegan. But, no one believes it because when you’re out in the field, most of your meal options involve meat with a side of something fried. I’ve learned how to be creative and improvise and can eat anywhere — even a steak house or a gas station."

"Intelligence is attractive, but so is life experience. You can’t amass it just by reading a ton of books. But you can live a lot of life in a short time. Travel. Talk to everyone. Collect adventures, and use them to understand the world. That’s how you learn to treat people well. And that’s sexy."

"Anchoring four hours a day, solo, you have to know your stuff. But I do. I'm a real geek."

"I didn't know whether to run from my seat...I was in the line of fire. My desk is now a crime scene."