Shirley Sherrod is offered a new job
It's terrible what they put this decent woman through. Rachael Maddow did a great expose on how Fox News started this mess (O'Reilly immediately demanded her resignation).
She showed how on the next day when the truth came out about what she really was trying to say, Fox News criticized the White House for acting so rash, while not accepting any responsibility for the damage that Fox News and all their pundits had done to this innocent woman.
Fired Ag worker mulls job offer after WH apology
By MARY CLARE JALONICK and BEN EVANS, Associated Press Writers Mary Clare Jalonick And Ben Evans, Associated Press Writers
– Wed Jul 21, 7:37 pm ET
WASHINGTON – The White House did a sudden about-face Wednesday and begged for forgiveness from the black Agriculture Department employee whose ouster ignited an embarrassing political firestorm over race. She was offered a "unique opportunity" for a new job and said she was thinking it over.
With lightning speed, the controversy moved from Monday's forced resignation of a minor U.S. Ag official in Georgia to Tuesday's urgent discussions at the White House amid a rising public outcry and then to Wednesday's repeated apologies and pleas for Shirley Sherrod to come back.
Sherrod said she resigned under White House pressure after the airing of a video of racial remarks she made at an NAACP gathering. But Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said repeatedly on Wednesday that the decision had been his alone.
"I asked for Shirley's forgiveness and she was gracious enough to extend it to me," he said after reaching her by telephone.
Sherrod, in a phone interview with The Associated Press, said, "They did make an offer. I just told him I need to think about it."
The controversy threatened to grow into more than a three-day distraction for Obama's administration, with important midterm congressional elections nearing and partisan feelings already running high. President Barack Obama said nothing publicly about the developments while administration officials tried to simultaneously show his concern and to distance him from the original ousting.
It all began with the airing of a video on a conservative website of Sherrod's remarks about not doing all she could to help a white farmer two decades ago. After she was told to resign — with the NAACP declaring its approval — the situation grew more complicated when the rest of the edited video was released by the NAACP and Sherrod insisted her remarks were about reconciliation, not the stoking of racism.
By Wednesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was apologizing to Sherrod "for the entire administration" and saying that officials did not know all the facts when she was fired. He said he didn't know if the president would talk to Sherrod himself.
read more...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100721/...sm_resignation
GOP House leader criticizes decision to air partial video of Shirley Sherrod
House Minority Leader John Boehner on Wednesday criticized the decision by conservative media personality Andrew Breitbart to air only a small portion of the video showing USDA official Shirley Sherrod making racially charged remarks earlier this year, which led to her firing.
“It’s unfortunate that whoever laid this out there didn’t lay out the whole story, as opposed to a part of it,” said Boehner, an Ohio Republican, at a lunch with journalists in Washington.
“They only put a little piece of the story out there and people make judgments and they rush and they make bad decisions. They make rash decisions. I don’t want to say bad because I haven’t seen all of this,” he said.
Boehner did not mention Breitbart by name, and Breitbart did not immediately return a call to his cell phone. But the founder of BigGovernment.com has said in TV interviews with CNN and Fox News that he was sent only the two small portions of the video by someone in Georgia, where the remarks were made. He told CNN he did subsequently receive the full portion of the tape and would post it online “if I get the OK from the people who have the rights to the video.”
The White House, interestingly, focused its public comments on the response to the videos rather than on the purveyor.
“Members of this administration, members of the media, members of different political factions on both sides of this, have all made determinations and judgments without a full set of facts,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/21/go...#ixzz0uPSgI81i