Mandy: Great blog!
Mark: Thanks to all the contributors on this blog. When I want to get information on the events that really matter, I come here.
Penny: I'm glad I found your blog (from a comment on Think Progress), it's comprehensive and very insightful.
Eric: Nice site....I enjoyed it and will be back.
nora kelly: I enjoy your site. Keep it up! I particularly like your insights on Latin America.
Alison: Loquacious as ever with a touch of elegance -- & right on target as usual!
"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
Keith on the insanity of our guns and violence-obsessed society
our nation needs to face the fact that a dedication to endless war, fueled by fear-mongering and the bottomless greed of super-rich elites who are totally committed to manipulating us by any means at their disposal, can expect this kind of horror... we must also remember that our nation is perpetrating this same kind of horror elsewhere in the world and that what goes around, comes around...
More things that make me crazy - perversions of journalism
a keith olbermann special comment... worth watching not so much for his take on the shirley sherrod debacletempest-in-a-teapotfarce non-news news but because of his insight on how we're all being conned by our so-called "news" media...
ordinarily i choose not to post on the manufactured distractions that pass for news in my country, but what this sad episode points out to me above all else is the vapidity, deceit and manipulation that passes for news in the united states... given all the incredibly, desperately important issues that we should be tackling in our national dialogue, it appalls me beyond words that the past four days has seen our media almost wholly devoted to a fabricated smear deliberately calculated to stoke the never-far-from-the-surface racism that, sadly, still underlies the american state of mind...
Democratic strategist Chris Lehane ... : "Politics in D.C. have become Seinfeldesque. Fights about nothing."
If you read and write about politics full-time and are thus forced to subject yourself to the political media -- as I am -- what's most striking aren't the outrages and corruptions, but the overwhelming, suffocating, numbing stream of stupidity and triviality that floods the brain. One has to battle the temptation to just turn away and ignore it all. Every day, day after day, is consumed by some totally irrelevant though distracting melodrama: what Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page, some "outrageous" snippet of a comment made by John Boehner or Harry Reid, some "crazy," attention-attracting statement from some fringe idiot-figure or TV blowhard that is exploited for superficial partisan gain or distraction value (hey, look over there: I think Michelle Bachmann just said something outrageous!!!!).
there's so much that needs our undivided attention and when i see all of our collective energy being squandered on such idiocy, it makes me C.R.A.Z.Y...!
Keith Olbermann Special Comment: Prosecute Bush For Torture
of all the keith olbermann special comments, most of which have been critical statements of truth, fact and relevance, this is perhaps the most important one of all... we simply cannot allow wholesale flouting of the rule of law, the concerted undermining of our country's constitution, and the violation of every human value known to man to pass without demanding public accountability and due process... the u.s. and the world simply cannot afford to let criminals of this magnitude render such flagrant disservice to our ideals and values and then pass quietly into history unchallenged...
Submitted this of all evenings, from this of all places, with the respect and hope due any President-Elect on the eve of his or her inauguration (but particularly this one), I am agreeing with Mr. Obama when he told George Stephanopoulos: "What we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."
That perspective, looking ahead and not back, makes more imperative still the prosecution of those who tortured -- and those who authorized torture -- in your name, in my name, in Barack Obama's name.
As the spontaneous chants of "Yes We Can" waft in to the cramped MSNBC trailer on the Mall (just morphing now into "Yes We Did") we have a metaphor for what the President-Elect needs to accomplish in this vital area.
I also defer to the President-Elect when he shows, as he did today and will likely express in his address tomorrow, that while we celebrate our liberation this week, we must simultaneously continue to work -- to work right now -- for what is right. The prosecution of torture might not have to be the first priority; it might not have to be a sweeping event consuming the nation, but we must have a catharsis.
Most importantly, the great and tragic events of our history have proven that the failure to achieve such a catharsis, the failure to atone, has its own tragic, long-range consequences.
From tonight's piece:
In point of fact, every effort to merely 'draw a line in the sand' and declare the past dead, has only served to keep the past alive -- and often to strengthen it.
We compromised with slavery in the Declaration of Independence --and four score and nine years later we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers in a Civil War.
After that War's ending, we compromised with the social restructuring and protection of the rights of minorities in the South. And a century later, we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in the cities of the South.
We compromised with Germany and the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War -- nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted War Crimes trials, and 19 years later there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.
We compromised with the Trusts of the early 1900's, and today we have corporations too big to let fail.
We compromised with The Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism, and we compromised with McCarthyism and got Watergate, and we compromised with Watergate and the junior members of the Ford Administration realized how little was ultimately at risk, and grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
We cannot compromise again.
And of paramount importance, whether the outcome of torture prosecutions is imprisonment or just an asterisk to history, their pursuit alone is the difference between this nation saying "no, our elected leaders were wrong," and it deferring to George W. Bush's vision that torture was legal, and effective, and saved the country.
Olbermann really lets it fly... He's clearly as pissed as I am...
i'm sitting here in kabul, afghanistan, watching these youtube clips of the latest keith olbermann special comment as we are under a lockdown due to multiple threats of suicide bombing, and i'm thinking, fercripesake, how the hell did we let the united states come to such a pass...? how did we manage to re-elect the unbelievable fool that claims to be our president...?
i've been calling for bush and cheney and the entire cabinet to resign since i sat in front of my television set in buenos aires, in tears, watching the katrina disaster unfold... i never thought they would last this long, but, now it's time... they need to go...
Keith Olbermann will deliver a Special Comment tonight on the "compromise" struck between the Democratic leadership and the White House over the latest troop funding bill...
Here's a preview...
"The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.
You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions - Stop The War - have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans."
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