The above quote just jumped off of the page of this most excellent article. Obama's insufficiency in this area has become abundantly evident. Also evident is his choice to treat the democratic wing of the Democratic Party as a mere buzzing nuisance with no political clout.

And this is another mistake he has made.

People here often ask Glenn, "What can we do?" With our system of checks and balances broken, it seems that an active citizenry is one of the few avenues left for change and justice. Yet people despair that they see so few ways for ordinary people to become active agents of change.

But even though it is difficult to trace the many and varied paths taken when change is initiated from the bottom up, we see evidence that it happens all the time. The truth (if not always, at least often) will out, and there is no predicting what the consequences might be once it is revealed. The current friction we see between the traditional media outlets and and bloggers, web sites, etc., is just one example of Power trying to put a stop to this process.

So don't despair. Look at this bottom-up citizen's struggle as a permanent state of being. Make a lot of noise. Write to your congresspeople and the president. Keep a file of the contact info for all of those representing you. Write to corporations to express your displeasure at their wrongdoing. They wouldn't spend fortunes on PR if they weren't worried about public opinion. Start a reading group; there are, for example, The Nation reading groups across the country. Start a Glenn Greenwald reading group. Keep informed by getting on the mailing lists of the ACLU. They and other public interest groups are happy to email you and to make it easy for you to write letters about particular legislation and causes. Be knowledgeable--you can persuade people. Organize talks at your local church basement or community center or library. Invite a local political science professor. Or give a talk yourself. You can give a book review, of, say, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. Use the internet. Use your imagination and make connections.

Just don't put your faith in politicians to take care of everything.

Silly lad, the small three-prong fork used for the oysters appetizer is angled into the soup spoon at the right of the plate. This is the one exception to the rule of placing forks to the left of the plate.

For a Banquet of Fools, however, a formal service is not required. A recent one of note featured sticky fingers, excessive glassware for booze, and Steven Colbert as featured speaker.

I think that this is where we all erred.

"Change" meant that Obama was going to do things differently from what he said he was going to do in the primaries and election, not that he was going to do things differently from what the previous administration was doing. He's a sly one!

I am guessing that it is probably better to shine a light on the WSJ's lies, to say j'accuse! loudly and strongly, to expose hypocrisy, to chip away at the WSJ's Authority, to punish mendacity, to spread the word about the sickness at the heart of our political culture, to closely examine the dangerous relationship between the press and those in power, to offer specific truths to counter outrageous falsehoods, to provide a real alternative to the blather of the MSM, to use the internet to correct the public record, to offer the space of a letter section for a meaningful discussion of the issue, to publicly shame the writers of such untruths, who will then know that they will be called out for future idiocies.... *fetches breath*....

than it is to smugly sit back and say, "well, that's the way it is--why are you surprised?"

You may be interested to learn that Entertainment Weekly asked the academy to do a revote for the major oscar categories from four or five different years chosen from a span of twenty (2003, 1998, 1993, 1988--if I remember correctly, those were some of the years). Their objective was to find out if the wins were able to stand the test of time. GOOP girl was up against the brilliant Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth during the year of her win, and the GOOPster lost resoundingly to Blanchett in the revote. It was one of the biggest slapdowns of all categories and years. So, yay.

the rear end of a racoon, as my redtick coonhound, who has an ass of her own, will tell you. You are all making demeaning comments about the animals, and I won't have it.

For someone who spends so much time supposedly taking the pulse of American politics, her political views are remarkably reductive and simplistic. The fact that she thinks she is offering some kind of cinema verite experience, and that merely refraining from challenging the misinformation of her subjects makes her perfectly objective, is absurd. I am shocked that someone who is the daughter of a high-level political official can be so stupid.

And I agree that her comment about the blogs is one of the dumbest parts of the whole interview. Oh sure, now that regular people can discuss politics in open and far-reaching forums has got to be the reason the political climate has gone so bad. Because democracy means a small self-perpetuating elite governs and controls all the discourse, right?