Salon.com > Rep. John Lewis

Tucker Carlson, you’re no Andrew Breitbart!

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:45:00 +0000

Strangely, the night before the latest humiliation of the Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson -- by a Washington Post report that the Caller’s key source for its “scoop” that Sen. Robert Menendez patronized prostitutes now says the website paid him to find women who would lie about it -- I watched the documentary “Hating Breitbart,” a hagiographic 90 minutes of the late Andrew Breitbart ranting, vamping and raging for the admiring camera of his friend Andrew Marcus.

I wasn’t going to write about it, not because I hate Breitbart – I didn’t, and don’t – but because, sadly, it’s kind of slight. It doesn’t do justice to its outsize subject, however much it worships him. But the Carlson news juxtaposed with the documentary reminded me how much more talented Breitbart was than the pale imitators he left behind – as well as how much his rage-fueled, by-any-means-necessary character assassination posing as journalism lives on, albeit ineptly.

The man behind the voter fraud myth

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:03:00 +0000

This week's New Yorker features a blistering investigation by Jane Mayer into Hans von Spakovsky, a leading propagator of voter fraud myths. His work has led to a flurry of legislation and voting restrictions pushed by Republicans.

Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer who worked in the Bush administration and is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is a key supporter of True the Vote, the Houston-based group that has been pushing for these new laws. "Although the group has a spontaneous grassroots aura," Mayer writes, "it was founded by a local Tea Party activist, Catherine Engelbrecht, and from the start it has received guidance from intensely partisan election lawyers and political operatives, who have spent years stoking fear about election fraud."

Here are the five most scathing parts of the article:

John Lewis, D-Ga., an activist during the civil rights era, on von Spakovsky:

Georgia’s immigration law targets universities

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:30:00 +0000

When the state of Arizona enacted a draconian anti-immigrant law -- which gave the police wide powers to detain individuals they believed to be undocumented immigrants -- nearly two years ago, the national media took notice. Activists campaigned against the law and tried to shame the state into submission, with Rage Against the Machine's Zack de la Rocha even getting dozens of musicians to sign on to a boycott of performances in the state.

Yet soon after Arizona's law passed, similar anti-immigrant legislation began appearing in legislatures across the nation. Partially coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative advocacy group funded in part by private prisons, states from coast to coast initiated their own crackdowns.

John Lewis: I support OWS protesters

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:02:00 +0000

A YouTube video made its way around Twitter Saturday, showing the Atlanta offshoot of Occupy Wall Street in the middle of a General Assembly meeting, debating whether to ask Rep. John Lewis speak to the group. The answer was no, and the reaction on Twitter was almost unanimously negative: How could these people insult a civil rights hero that way?

I had the same reaction – until I understood what exactly occurred. It turns out Lewis came by, on his own, during a General Assembly meeting, to observe the group, and didn't ask to speak. One of the activists suggested that he be invited to say a few words, and most of the assembly seemed fine with that – until one of them, a guy identified as Joe, stood up and disagreed. While expressing respect for Lewis's work, he said the movement was "not about one individual" and it supported "no hierarchy." Because the group was in a planning session, someone suggested that Lewis speak at the end of their agenda, but the congressman had another event and couldn't stay.