Context watch (Florida voting rolls edition). Jeb Bush feels your pain. That's apparently the message Abby Goodnough wants us to get from her A1 article yesterday about the disenfranchisement of felons in Florida, and the process by which some get their voting rights back ("Disenfranchised Florida Felons Struggle to Regain Their Rights"). That's how she begins the piece:

Gov. Jeb Bush looked out over a roomful of felons appealing to him for something they had lost, and tried to reassure them.

"Don't be nervous; we're not mean people," the governor said as some fidgeted, prayed, hushed children or polished their handwritten statements. "You can just speak from the heart."

And they did: convicted robbers, drunken drivers, drug traffickers and others, all finished with their sentences, standing up one by one in a basement room at the State Capitol and asking Mr. Bush to restore their civil rights. Their files before him, Mr. Bush asked one man about his drinking, another about his temper, and so on.

And that's how she winds it up:

Things turned out better for Cecil Taylor, who had been convicted of driving drunk and whose college art teacher came to speak of his potential. After the board asked Mr. Taylor if he had drunk alcohol since his conviction, and Mr. Taylor said he had not, Mr. Bush restored his rights — with a caveat.

"I'm praying that you're not going to start drinking again," Mr. Bush told him. "When we make these decisions, sometimes it puts us in a little bit of a precarious position in that you could let us down."

Great-souled Jeb! How fatherly your concern for your wayward children!

Of course, there is the little matter of that fracas they had in Jeb's state back in 2000. Abby trots past it as quickly and as decorously as she can:

In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons. At the same time, some counties mistakenly allowed actual felons to vote or turned away legitimate voters as suspected felons. A lawsuit filed in January 2001 sought to prevent similar errors, while another, filed just before the 2000 election, charged that the ban on felons voting discriminated against blacks and should be overturned.

Yes, that is a puzzle, isn't it, that illegal disenfranchisement of legitimate voters? Glad to know it's just a matter of (by implication, innocent) "mistakes" and "errors," though. And that (again, by rhetorical implication) the fact of felons mistakenly being allowed to vote more or less cancels out the fact of legitimate voters (mistakenly, remember!) getting turned away from the polls. And clearly, since it's the whole burden of the piece, we should all be much more interested in the process of re-enfranchising felons than in a minor, four-year-old disenfranchisement incident, shouldn't we?

And yet ... that "lingering puzzle" that Abby briefly, half-interestedly scratches her head over? "A company working for the state" that for some reason remains nameless here, in its only mention? It's as if Ms. Goodnough actually doesn't want her readers to know one or two salient facts that might dim the Ward Cleaver-ish glow that she surrounds Jeb Bush with—as if her "lingering puzzle" charade were just that, a scrim placed disingenuously in front of the actual story. See, I know the name of that unnamed company, and if I know it then odds are so does Ms. Goodnough. In fact, the company is named ChoicePoint, it's a big, nasty, Republican-hive data-gathering and profiling company, and it's been much talked about—at least among those of us who've been paying attention—since that maliciously botched purge job it did for Jeb before the 2000 election. No mystery, no lingering puzzle—not even any genuinely disputable facts in the matter.

As a service, let me point Ms. Goodnough to Greg Palast's site: Greg's the investigative reporter who broke the Florida disenfranchisement story back in December 2000 for Salon. (Do a site search on "ChoicePoint," Abby—it's just that easy!) I'll go ahead and quote a couple of relevant paragraphs from a 2001 WaPo article reprinted at Palast's site, just to give you a feel for how little "puzzle" there is about motives and numbers (emphasis added):

Researchers from Salon.com who investigated the lists in 13 Florida counties found that at least 15 percent of the names should not have been there. ChoicePoint spokesmen subsequently told me they don't dispute that figure, and they consider it a reasonable rate of error.

However, the company also defends its scrub list as "accurate" -- because its standard is that the list accurately records all names found in accordance with the specifications devised by the state officials who supervised the work.

And that's the problem.

The reason so many wrong names ended up on the scrub list is that Florida ordered ChoicePoint to input questionably broad matching criteria into its sophisticated computer programs. ...

If Salon's 15 percent error figure is right -- and data like Leon County's indicates it is much higher -- almost 9,000 of the 58,000 names on the scrub list belonged to rightful voters. (Furthermore, 2,883 other names belonged to people convicted of felonies in states that restore voting privileges after a sentence is served. These people were also purged -- even though they should not have lost their civil rights merely by moving to Florida.)

Color me unpuzzled, anyway. About ChoicePoint, about the Florida voting purge, about Jeb ... About most of it, in fact, except for this question: Why does Abby Goodnough think she can abuse her readers' trust like this and get away with it?

posted by michael  5:01:55 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Salon's War Room helpfully suggests a few questions about Karen Hughes that the press corps might want to address, now that Hughes is embarking on a PR blitz for her new White House "memoir." Liz Bumiller and Richard Stevenson didn't manage to offer any of them in their kissy-face profile of Hughes yesterday. (Hughes "declined to be interviewed" for the piece—but Bumiller and Stevenson certainly did their best to persuade her to return their calls next time around.) Seems the Heroic Mother had a part of some kind to play in the less-than-heroic outing of Valerie Plame:

Karen Hughes and her actions have fallen under the scrutiny of the prosecutor. The Plame grand jury has subpoenaed records created by the White House Iraq Group in July 2003, the same month Plame was outed in the Novak column. Hughes was a member of the White House Iraq Group, an internal body that coordinated strategy for, among other things, selling the war here at home. Other members of the group were Karl Rove, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio and policy advisers including Condoleezza Rice, her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, and I. Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

A USA Today story from July 2003 also describes how Hughes was among a small group of strategists who devised the strategy to counter Wilson's Niger story. ...

On her media tour, there are many relevant questions Hughes might be asked: Were Plame or Wilson's names ever mentioned at the meetings of the White House Iraq Group? By whom? What is the relation of that group to any damage control group involving Plame and Wilson? Since Hughes wasn't officially on the White House payroll, did the order by the White House counsel not to destroy records in the Plame case apply to her? Has Hughes retained counsel in this matter? Has she testified before the grand jury or been interviewed by the FBI? Has she discussed Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson with anyone in the White House Iraq Group -- or any other White House officials -- at any time, before or after the publication of the Novak column? With whom has she ever discussed Plame or Wilson? Rove? "Scooter" Libby? Cheney? The President?

Think Liz (or anybody at the Times) will go back to follow up on Hughes, now that Salon has done the spadework? Let's all hold our breaths ...

posted by michael  1:04:24 PM  
tell me about it []