Is it not clear that Bush and his neo-fascist enablers could care less what the Patriot Act, the US Court of Appeals, or Glenn Greenwald have to say about their criminal acts? They will simply file an appeal to the appeal, launch a smear attack against the judges, and move on to their next victim. Many will stand up and say they shouldn't do these things, but no one will actually stand in their way.

We may be skeptical and informed enough to see through the puerile, terror-mongering propaganda used to justify this kind of despotism, but we've been completely suckered into our designated role of mouse-potato letter writers. We're standing on the sidelines furiously quoting the rulebook to the referees, while the thugs are smearing blood all over the playing field.

The part of the Hollywood myth we hold dear is the notion that since we're the ones wearing the white hats, there must be some dramatic plot twist at the end that will enable us to vanquish the evil-doers. And of course, it will be played strictly by the rules, require no morally ambiguous acts, and involve a few modest, self-effacing moments of heroism. The last things it should require are any sort of personal sacrifice, legal jeopardy, or jail time.

The reality is that it will take the sacrifice of people who are willing to put themselves on the line to block and disrupt the lawless actions of a corrupt and criminal government. It will require many acts of defiant conscience and civil disobediance before the deadly enterprise of war profiteering can no longer proceed with business as usual. It's either that, or resigned and bitter complacency.

We've been up against this wall before, and the words that need to be spoken have been said over and over again. The ones that I recall most vividly are those of Mario Savio from 1964:

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

Golden Boy said: Consider: 2.3 million Muslims in America, according to the poll. About half would be under 30, so that's 1.15 million. A quarter of these refuse to condemn bin Laden, or actively support him.

Muslims aren't the only ones who refuse to condemn bin Laden for 9/11. Neither the FBI nor the US Dept. of Justice has seen fit to accuse bin Laden of any crime in association with the 9/11 attacks.

According to the following article, FBI sources explain that "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20060610&articleId=2623

Like Michael Harold on page 2 of this comment stream, I made a post to Alter's comment section that was not printed by Huffington Post. At the time I made the post, there was just a single comment visible under the article. When I checked the article an hour later, there were several more comments, and I noticed something unusual. The lone comment I had seen before was no longer the first comment, it was preceded by a comment referring to Glenn's criticism of Broder here on this blog. Clearly, this post had been held back for a time while the site editor considered whether to publish it or not.

I think it's also quite clear that Huffington Post exerts editorial control over their comment sections.

L.W.M. - "Some forms of signal processing: attenuation, modulation, amplification, limiting, gating, distortion, compression, even echo and reverb, etc..."

Let's not omit one of the most important forms of signal processing: filtering. A background process used by the MSM to suppress parts of the signal they have no interest in reporting.

What's stunning is reading through the hundreds of comments posted under Klein's article. His readers are virtually unanimous in rejecting his obtuse straw man arguments. I could not find a single comment that supported Klein's viewpoint; the only positive responses he received were acknowledgments of respect for his responding publicly to Glenn's criticism. Faint praise indeed.

I'd be interested to hear how other posters of my generation would compare MSM coverage of the Viet Nam war to that of Iraq. I recall having the same feelings of contempt for the bland recitation of government propaganda, the same disgust at the servile deference paid to lying politicians, the same revulsion at the persistent pimping of war-mongering demagogues. One difference now is that back then, it was only us dirty hippies who'd dare use terms like "propaganda" and "lies" to characterize the news media.

One memorable bellwether, however, was the slow and steady awakening of skepticism in the voice of Walter Cronkite, in his nightly recap of the evening news. From the Tet Offensive, to the Chicago Democratic Convention police riots, to the Watergate scandal, Cronkite's dawning awareness of government duplicity fractured the glaze of conventional wisdom. Through his somber eyes, many ordinary Americans began to see through the veil.

It seemed like there was a brief flashback of visceral understanding in the minds of some of the reporters covering the Katrina disaster. Shocking events taking place right before their eyes, outpacing the bureaucratic spin they were accustomed to regurgitating. It wasn't really a radicalizing experience, though, more like a brief glimpse out the door in the back of the sound stage, into the dark alley behind the network studios.