11/11/2004 05:50:20 PM|||Toni|||Of course if you hear Peter Jennings, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, etal there is no Media Bias.

From: OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today - November 10, 2004

Party Like It's 1864The other day Carole Simpson of ABC News appeared on a post election panel, which was televised on C-Span. Rush Limbaugh has a partial transcript of Simpson's comments, and blogger Napoleon Cole has video of one particularly inflammatory comment:

I got a little map here of pre-Civil War free versus slave states. I wish you could see it in color and large. But if you look at it, the red states are all done in the South, and you have the Nebraska territories, the New Mexico territories and the Kansas territories, but the Pacific Northwest and California were not slave states. The Northeast was not. It looks like the map of 2004, and when you say, "Let's let the states decide," I remember what the states decided when they had slavery. I think they're going quickly after social programs, despite what he says. I think we're going to get a rollback on all kind of things. Affirmative action is a bad word; liberal is a bad word; gay is a bad word, diversity. All these words that are perfectly fine words now are these touchstones, these trigger points, and that frightens me.

Perhaps Simpson hasn't heard the news that slavery was abolished nationwide by the 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865--139 years ago. New York, which John Kerry carried by a margin of more than 17%, had abolished slavery just 38 years earlier, in 1827. That's less time than has now passed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made good on the promise of full legal equality for black Americans. That law, by the way was pushed through Congress by a president from Texas.
|||110018500638443794|||Comments from an unbiased Reporter from ABC News?