I agree with iamironman, it's the propaganda machine, otherwise known as the press, media, whatever you want to call the corporate conservative message disseminator we accept as normal.

We live in a country that just elected Barack Obama and gives him enormous approval ratings, at about 70 percent, yet to listen and watch and read most of what's on the corporate airwaves and corporate press you'd never know it. Sure some absolutely fawn over him but the tiny, tiny percentage whose idea of debate is to staple teabags to their head and yell "facscio-socialist!" or whatever it is seem to be a huge part of the discourse, which makes no sense.

The Washington Post is a good case in point. Liberal media, right? The absolute symbol of it. Their columnists include two of the leading Neocon theorists, and I mean the real extremists, the famous ones, the ones whose ideas marched us off to invade Iraq and other sorrows (Kristol and Kagan). It also includes Bush's chief speech writer, still pushing his disgraced, discarded agenda that was scorned to the tune of approval at less than 30 percent. Then presumably in a swing to the left, we have.... Charles Krauthammer? Jackson Deihl? The newly-minted climate change denier and ethically-challenged right wing journalist George Will?

The list actually goes on, "balanced" by supposed equally far left radicals like..... Michael Kinsley. Or Eugene Robinson, surely a non-conservative voice but one would hardly call him a far, far left radical to equal the extremism of those I mention above on the right.

And the comments section there fills with people screaming that it's a liberal rag.

The fact is that most of what's printed, spoken, broadcast, and etc is captive still to the right, which is the best way to explain the situation that's perfectly satirized in the cartoon above.

No, they're not geniuses, yes they're actually pretty much insane, at least the more extreme among them, and yes they still control the debate way beyond what makes sense given their vanishing numbers, down to 20 percent now in the latest polls.

Someone said "Don't pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel". That's the answer: What they are is well-connected. The noise machine amplifies their voice far beyond anything it merits.

I've often said that with all the extreme right wing opinion out there in the so called liberal media (including Salon sometimes) it would take publishing Noam Chomsky on a regular basis to even start to have any sort of balance to it.

Now Salon has.

Good for you. Do it some more.

Chomsky as usual cuts right the through the illusions, on all sides.

wanders to England, fawns over the right wing paper, then returns home to suggest that every one of us tortured US prisoners because, well, just because.

That would presumably include those who actually went to jail protesting Bush's wars, and I mean including in 1992 also.

You didn't hear much about those arrests of course, nor the protests, especially if you were listening to feel-good heartland radio.

Color me not impressed. As long as this sort of person just remained boring, that was one thing. Boring and infuriating is another entirely.

Love them torture letters.... It's it about time to give it a rest and acknowledge that a person doesn't have to agree with your every opinion in order to be interesting?

Was there anything in my comment that made you believe I had ever found Garrison Keillor "interesting" in any way?

I certainly didn't mean to give that impression, I thought the word "boring" was pretty clear.

My girlfriend was arrested for protesting the first Gulf War. They were peacefully protesting and the police told them to keep it contained in one area, which they did... and then were suddenly surrounded and hauled away.

The judge threw every one of the cases out, and you barely ever heard a peep in the news that anything had even happened.

"We're all guilty" was the most arrogant nonsense I've heard in years. To those defending Keillor's column , of course he's entitled to his opinion. If he had written "I don't think we should pursue prosecution" that would have been that. However telling others that they're guilty, just ignorantly assuming that all Americans are alike and did nothing, that's just blowhard condescension at its worst.

and an extension cable is even better, i.e. one with male-female ends so you can plug a cable into it and the other end into your computer.

I stayed at a really nice hotel/resort in Europe for a week and had to be there for medical reasons, and the only way to connect was a one or two-foot cable attached to the little counter where the coffee was, in an otherwise palatial room. There was no WIFI, so sitting perched at the little counter was the only way to be online, not back across the room in bed for instance which was where I spent most of the time that week and it would have been great to have it there.

On the other hand the surgeon made daily house calls to check on me a solid week after leaving the hospital. Take that, myths about Europe vs US health care.