Sunday, January 30, 2011

Obama's Malady: CHRONIC CAPITULATION SYNDROME

"That seems to be the problem for a group in Washington called Obama and the Plunkers. They don't know how to handle the tough pieces of political music. Not that they lack the talent, but they lack the courage, the drive, and (let's admit it) the audacity. Rather than stretching the limits and reaching for greatness, they stick with conventional, middle-of-the-road stuff that has a nice beat, but fails to excite, much less satisfy.
"After two years of watching Obama in action, we can now see him for who he is: Bill Clinton. Yet another corporate Democrat who refuses to rock the boat. Obama is willing to push big issues onto the national table, and that's a major positive. But then he immediately removes from the table the big solutions needed to deal with those issues: Medicare for all? We can't even consider that. Restructure and decentralize Wall Street? No, no, we'll just write new regulations for the big banks. And so forth.
"Granted he is faced with a gang of congressional Republicans who are nothing but disgusting political saboteurs. They've gone all out to kill even his most modest reforms. But at some point (months ago), he needed to stop extending his hand to these political thugs, clench it into an FDR-sized fist, and pop them right in the snout. Unfortunately, it appears that Obama suffers from a debilitating governing malady: CHRONIC CAPITULATION SYNDROME." -
Jim Hightower from "The Hightower Lowdown"

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Tribute to Keith

Okay, I admit it. It's only been two days, and I'm already Jonesing for Keith. Big time. No knock on any of the rest of the MSNBC lineup, but there is simply no one like Keith, and there isn't going to be either. Whatever he winds up doing, he will not have another five-days a week show like "Countdown."
Of all people, a right wing pundit described the uniqueness of Keith perfectly by comparing "The Last Word" with "Countdown":
Lawrence O'Donnell can be every bit as acerbic as Keith, and their politics are pretty similar, but there is one major difference between the two shows: In addition to being informative and extremely cathartic, Keith's show was enormously entertaining and magnificently produced.
I absolutely loved "Worst Persons." But, more importantly, try as I might, I can't think of a single policy statement that Keith ever made with which I disagreed.
When he became emotional while describing some injustice (read: The Jan Brewer death panels), I became every bit as angry as he obviously was.
Which reminds me: With Keith gone, who is going to have guests like the Arizonans who will soon die because Brewer won't release readily available funds for lifesaving transplant surgeries? Or that child who was facing a very premature death because his parents' insurance company found a loophole to avoid paying for the medical care that he so desperately needed? Who will give families like these a voice now that Keith is gone?
And then, of course, there were Keith's "Special Comments." I remember thinking on more than one occasion that, if everyone shared Keith's beliefs and values, we would be living in damn close to a perfect world. I've read criticisms of Keith going "over the top" during some of those “Special Comments.” I never thought he did. If he eviscerated somebody, it was invariably an individual who richly deserved it.
Having lost one parent over a cruelly prolonged period of time, for the life of me, I cannot fathom how Keith handled the loss of both of his parents within such a short time of each other with such elegance and grace.
But he did a hell of a lot more than that. By broadcasting on some of his days off from the sidewalk outside the hospital where his Dad was living out his last weeks, and then days, Keith actually made us feel like we were part of his family. And his constant exposition about how he couldn't even imagine going through what he was experiencing with his Dad if he didn't have the financial resources to pay for the best health care available provided daily reminders of the inequities that so many American suffer because of the incomprehensible refusal of our government to heed the life and death necessity of providing universal health care to all Americans.
I know, Keith was supposed to be "difficult to work with." He also had a reputation for being arrogant and condescending, a reputation that he himself acknowledged and poked fun at during a bit in which he "interviewed" himself on adjoining screens.
But, for a guy who supposedly was so difficult to work with, you get the distinct impression that all of his colleagues on MSNBC loved him. (With the exception of Joe Scarborough, I imagine.)
I also know that Keith remains extremely close to Dan Patrick, with whom he shared the mike on Sports Center for years. So, you sort of get the impression that, while Keith might well have been difficult for his superiors to deal with (most probably when they tried to control and/or confine him), when it came to his colleagues, I never heard a single complaint or detected so much as a tinge of animosity toward him.
MSNBC is what it is today strictly because of Keith. He personally brought Rachel and Lawrence on board which turned the station into a liberal network and thereby paved the way for Ed and Cenk to join the party. And, having watched "Hardball" judiciously for ten years, I can say without equivocation that Chris has moved WAY to the left of where he was before Keith arrived on the scene.
Finally, without Keith, who in the world is going to police the Fox Propaganda Channel and their Republican minions? Every time one of Fox's "commentators" told one of their prodigious amount of bald faced lies, i.e. every day, Keith was there at the ready, video in hand, showing the world a clip of the right wing mendacity purveyor directly contradicting himself on camera a few months earlier.
I'm sure we'll see Keith once in awhile; he seems ready made for Hollywood at this stage of his career. But the entertainment we were guaranteed at 5:00 p.m. every day (Pacific Time) is gone forever. However, that's the least of our concerns.
What bothers me most is that, without Keith, who will give"ordinary" Americans a voice on the national stage when they are literally being killed by Republican/Corporate greed, selfishness, and disinterest? And where will our toughest cop be the next time Sean Hannity trots out his latest canard or Glenn Beck escapes from the asylum again?
Keith will be perfectly fine wherever he goes and whatever he does. But each of the rest of us will be somewhat diminished because of his absence. And this country as a whole will be even more mean spirited, unfair, and unkind than it otherwise has been since the election of Ronald Reagan.
Will MSNBC still be the voice of liberalism on basic cable? Of course it will, and the remaining hosts and hostess are all quality commentators with hearts of gold. But, without Keith ... well, let me put it like this:
The 1961 Yankees won an incredible number of baseball games (109). They had a terrific lineup from top to bottom. Players like Roger Maris, Bobby Richardson, Tony Kubek, Elston Howard, Yogi Berra, Moose Skowron, and many others.
But how would they have done without Mickey Mantle hitting cleanup? If you subtract Mantle from the equation, those Yankees would still have had a hell of a lineup and a hell of a team.
But would they have won 109 games or anywhere close to that number?
Not a chance.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Chris Matthews Describes Michele Bachmann as a "Balloon Head" and Observes That "She Just Doesn't Know Anything."

"I have said before that Michele Bachmann has zombie-like qualities. I thought that she was under hypnosis or something, but it turns out that she just doesn't know anything.
This weekend, she said that basically we did not have slavery after the days of the Founding Fathers because they were so great, they managed somehow that we didn't notice to get rid of slavery. That's an incredible statement.
The American people lost 600,000 lives in the civil war, the worst catastrophe in our history, because of slavery continuing well past the mid part of the 19th century, and this person - and you have to use the word, 'balloon-head' - said that slavery was eradicated in the days of the Founding Fathers?
People like this should not be in politics. They didn't go to first grade in history. What is this person doing on the national stage? Go back to grade school. Start around the 3rd grade, and you might be able to catch up with the class.
Anyway, she is going out tonight as the spokesperson for the Tea Parties. They must be really desperate." - Chris Matthews 1/25/2011

Sunday, January 23, 2011

The "Ominous" Disappearance of Keith Olbermann

By Robert Parry
January 22, 2011

Keith Olbermann’s abrupt departure from MSNBC should be another wake-up call to American progressives about the fragile foothold that liberal-oriented fare now has for only a few hours on one corporate cable network.

Though Olbermann hosted MSNBC’s top-rated news show, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” he disappeared from the network with only the briefest of good-byes. Certainly, the callous treatment of Olbermann by the MSNBC brass would never be replicated by Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing Fox News toward its media stars.

At Fox News, the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have far greater leeway to pitch right-wing ideas and even to organize pro-Republican political events. Last November, Olbermann was suspended for two days for making donations to three Democratic candidates, including Arizona’s Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was wounded in the Jan. 8 shooting in Tucson.

Now, with Olbermann’s permanent departure on Friday, the remainder of MSNBC’s liberal evening line-up, which also includes Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell (who will fill Olbermann’s 8 p.m. slot), must face the reality that any sustained friction with management could mean the bum’s rush for them, too.

The liberal hosts also must remember that MSNBC experimented with liberal-oriented programming only after all other programming strategies, including trying to out-Fox Fox, had failed – and only after it became clear that President George W. Bush’s popularity was slipping.

In nearly eight years at “Countdown,” Olbermann was the brave soul who charted the course for other mainstream media types to be even mildly critical of Bush. Olbermann modeled his style after legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow, who stood up to excesses by communist-hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, even borrowing Murrow’s close: “Good night, good luck.”

But MSNBC’s parent company, General Electric, never seemed comfortable with Olbermann’s role as critic of the Bush administration, nor with the sniping between Olbermann and his Fox News rival, O’Reilly, who retaliated by attacking corporate GE on his widely watched show.

In 2009, the New York Times reported that GE responded to this pressure by having GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt strike a deal with Murdoch that sought to muzzle Olbermann’s criticism of O’Reilly, in exchange for O’Reilly muting his attacks on GE.

Olbermann later disputed that there ever was a truce and the back-and-forth soon resumed. But it was a reminder that GE, a charter member of the military-industrial complex and a major international conglomerate, had bigger corporate interests at play than the ratings for MSNBC’s evening programming.

So, too, will Comcast, the cable giant that is assuming a majority stake in NBC Universal, which controls MSNBC. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that sources at MSNBC quashed speculation that Olbermann’s departure was connected to the Comcast takeover, which was approved by federal regulators this week.

Media Orphans

The troubling message to progressives is that they remain essentially orphans when it comes to having their political interests addressed by any corporate news outlet. While the Right has built its own vast media infrastructure – reaching from newspapers, magazines and books to radio, TV and the Internet – the Left generally has treated media as a low priority.

Though some on the Left saw hope in the MSNBC evening line-up, the larger reality was that even inside the world of NBC News, the other content ranged from the pro-Establishment centrism of anchor Brian Williams to the center-right views of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to CNBC’s mix of free-market extremism and corporate boosterism.

While gratified to be given a few hours each night on MSNBC, the Left surely had nothing to compare with Murdoch’s News Corporation and its longstanding commitment to a right-wing perspective on Fox News and News Corp.'s many other print and electronic outlets.

As I wrote in an article last November, “Olbermann and the other liberal hosts are essentially on borrowed time, much the way Phil Donahue was before getting axed in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, when MSNBC wanted to position itself as a ‘patriotic’ war booster.

“Unlike News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who stands solidly behind the right-wing propaganda on Fox News, the corporate owners of MSNBC have no similar commitment to the work of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz.

"For the suits at headquarters, it’s just a balancing act between the ratings that those shows get and the trouble they cause as Republicans reclaim control of Washington.”

Those corporate priorities also were underscored in the pre-Iraq invasion days when MSNBC dumped Donahue, then the network’s biggest draw. But Donahue had allowed on some guests critical of Bush’s planned war.

After the invasion in March 2003, MSNBC’s coverage was barely discernable from that of Fox News, with both networks superimposing American flags on scenes from Iraq and producing pro-war promotional segments showing heroic images of U.S. soldiers being welcomed by happy Iraqis (with no scenes of the war’s carnage). [See Consortiumnews.com's "America's Matrix."]

The ongoing significance of America’s media imbalance is that it gives the Right enormous capabilities to control the national debate, not only during election campaigns but year-round. Republicans can deploy what intelligence operatives call “agit-propaganda,” stirring controversies that rile up the public and redound to the GOP’s advantage.

These techniques have proved so effective that not even gifted political speakers, whether the savvy Bill Clinton or the eloquent Barack Obama, have had any consistent success in countering the angry cacophony that the Right can orchestrate.

One week, the Right's theme is “Obamacare’s death panels”; another week, it’s “the “Ground Zero Mosque.” The Democrats are left scrambling to respond – and their responses, in turn, become fodder for critical commentary, as too wimpy or too defensive or too something.

The mainstream media and progressives often join in this criticism, wondering why Obama let himself get blind-sided or why he wasn’t tougher or why he can’t control the message. For the Right and the Republicans, it’s a win-win-win, as the right-wing base is energized, more public doubts are raised about the President, and the Left is further demoralized.

Like Clinton before him, Obama has reacted to this political/media landscape by shifting rightward toward the “center,” further alienating his liberal base. Many on the Left respond by denouncing Obama as a sell-out and deciding to either sit out elections or vote for a third party.

This dynamic has been instrumental to the Right’s political victories over the past three decades even as those policies – from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush – have worsened the lives of middle- and working-class Americans.

The sudden disappearance of Keith Olbermann from television is another ominous omen that this dynamic will continue.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

A Song for Sarah

Rita Coolidge sings a beautiful song dedicated to Sarah Palin's most recent unfavorability rating ...


The Vote on Repealing Health Care Reform

Anthony Weiner at his sardonic best shortly before the vote on repealing Health Care Reform today:
"For those of you who play that drinking game where you down a shot each time a Republican [tells a lie], better call now and make arrangements for a designated driver because it's going to be a loooong afternoon!"

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The Problem of Our Mentally Ill

The tragedy in Arizona has prompted a great deal of discussion about the woefully inadequate resources we have to deal with the mentally ill in this country. I think the idea that FoxNews has been implementing is the best solution of all to the problem of our mentally ill: Hire them, and put them on the air. (Oh, and, if they ask, go ahead and let them have a chalk board.)

Thursday, January 13, 2011

The President's Speech in Arizona

"The President never seems so presidential to the right as when he's agreeing with them." -
Adam Serwer, The American Prospect