Friday, October 13, 2006

Hah!
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. violated Pennsylvania labor laws by forcing hourly employees to work through breaks and beyond their shifts without overtime pay, a jury decided yesterday.

Lawyers for the employees said the decision could result in $62 million or more in damages.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Howard Kurtz tries hard to give some legitimacy to the bogus assertion that Democrats are responsible for providing the Foley e-mails and IM's to ABC as a political move in the weeks leading up to the November election. And that they held on to the e-mails and IM's, leaving teenage pages at risk in the meantime, for the same political reasons.

Kurtz also provides just enough muddle to the story to legitimize any reaction of "look! Dems too!", which presumably gets him a gold sticker with a Broder smiley face on it from his editors.

He gives over 20% of his column today to the inside-baseball story that Harper's magazine received the Foley communications from a "Democratic operative," as opposed to the Republican sources who gave the story to ABC.

However. That "Democratic operative" gave the story to Harper's in May. After trying to give the story to the Florida papers in the fall of 2005. And acting on his own, out of concern for the pages. And amazed that none of these media outlets were picking up the story.

Anyone claiming that adds up to an "October surprise" by the Dems is a crackpot or a liar.

But let's take a look at Kurtz's phrasing.
Well, the first evidence has surfaced that at least one Democratic activist was trying to peddle the Foley scandal...

[...]

That ought to give the blame-the-Democrats crowd plenty to chew on.

Good of you to oblige that crowd, Howie. I guess you've done your job there.

Look. The charge coming from the no-shame Republicans is that the Foley story was held by the Democratic Party and released in time to affect the November elections. That is a far cry from what Harper's has revealed.

Here is how Harper's Silverstein put it, and yes, you should notice that Kurtz did not choose this paragraph for his excerpts:
The Republican leadership is lying when they claim that Democrats have engineered an “October Surprise”; there was never a plan undermine the G.O.P. or to destroy Hastert personally, as the speaker has vaingloriously suggested. I know this with absolute certainty because Harper’s was offered the story almost five months ago and decided, after much debate, not to run it here on Washington Babylon.

So why is Kurtz offering this up as if it's validation for the bogus charges coming from the Republicans? Why is Kurtz muddying the waters?