To The Pennsylvanians

The great English poet William Wordsworth in response to a certain U.S. commonwealth shamelessly defaulting on its debt in 1837 wrote this:

To The Pennsylvanians

Days undefiled by luxury or sloth,
Firm self-denial, manners grave and staid,
Rights equal, laws with cheerfulness obeyed,
Words that require no sanction from an oath,
And simple honesty a common growth–
This high repute, with bounteous Nature’s
aid,
Won confidence, now ruthlessly betrayed
At will, your power the measure of your
troth!–
All who revere the memory of Penn
Grieve for the land on whose wild woods his
name
Was fondly grafted with a virtuous aim,
Renounced, abandoned by degenerate Men
For state-dishonour black as ever came
To upper air from Mammon’s loathsome den.

Does Pennsylvania need another Wordsworth today? Why? The words from 1837 don’t need any changing.

JournoList Scandal Has Columnist’s Panties Bunched

JournoList Scandal Has Columnist’s Panties Bunched — Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will “He-ever-get-his-panties-out-of-a” Bunch threw a hissy fit a few days ago about being included on a list of propagandists pretending to be journalist that sought, with success, to influence the 2008 presidential election in the Democrat Party’s favor.

” . . .based on the increasingly unhinged comments I’ve been getting on the JournoList lately — thought I should check to see if I had been erroneously placed there as well. Of course, I was. It’s 100 percent wrong. I was never on the now-defunct JournoList at any time during its history, nor was I ever asked to be on it, ” he wrote.

Bunch speculates he is being tied to the scandal because he allowed his name to be attached to an open letter objecting to the questions posed by moderators George Stephanapoulos and Charlie Gibson to Barack Obama during an April primary debate with Hillary Clinton.

He says his objections were only driven by concerns of journalistic integrity. Why would Stephanapoulos — that communications director for the, apparently in Bunch’s view, right-wing Clinton administration — think it of relevance to ask about a possible president’s connections to bigots like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and radicals like Bill Ayers?

Bunch downplays that how to keep Wright and Ayers from being a topic of the election was a major discussion on the list, and apparently feels it isn’t strange that these connections never were discussed much by the old media despite its willingness to report Sarah Palin’s religious views and such things as claims that she sought a library book ban, despite the claims being political and overblown .

Bunch feels it important to note that working journalists did not make up most of the 400 or so posters who he describes “as working for publications like the Nation with an openly liberalorientation, as well as academics and a few advocates.” He did not feel obliged, however, to point out that the list was founded by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein and that some of those working journalists included Ryan Donmoyer who was covering the campaign for Bloomberg News and Ben Adler who was then writing for Politico and is now an editor at Newsweek.

Here is a link to the list about which Bunch is objecting.

Bunch, btw, is someone who hides his bias in plain sight.

And Will, unless you think that blacks are somehow inherently different than whites — a distinct possibility since you are a leftist — the handling of the voter intimidation incident by New Black Panther Party thugs   is a serious scandal.

JournoList Scandal Has Columnist’s Panties Bunched

JournoList Scandal Has Columnist's Panties Bunched