Letters to the Editor
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re: Um
Chris Sinnard,
"I accounted for the fact that it is a mini-series when I said my example was valid..."
Sorry...my mistake.
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Kerry "won" in 2004 @ LWM
One issue from the 2000 election had been Bush's electoral victory despite losing the popular vote. Yet, if Kerry had won Ohio, he would have won the election but still could have lost the popular vote.
I worked for Kerry in 2004, even tho I had always been a conservative libertarian. BUT I know lots of people who were independents, libertarians, or just fed up, who did not vote at all or did not vote for Kerry because they thought he was weak and basically "more of the same". Had he come out strong against the war, against torture, against swiftboating, against Bush, I think those folks would have swung for him. He didn't and they didn't. He lost because he was weak. Which was Glenn's point, I think.
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This is a little (non-sectarian) prayer for the MSM over the holidays.
My news sources consist of subscriptions to The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The Nation, Harpers, The New Yorker and Mother Jones of which I assume the first two, at least, would be considered MSM. From this you can guess I'm in my sixties, since younger folks don't mess with print anymore. I have become addicted (well, close to addicted) to Mr. Greenwald's column as an old ACLU'er (note the use of "column" and not "blog", another indication I'm over the hill), the Huffington Post and clicking on Google News more often than a sane man should. There are online others I read as often as not which most of you know "as the usual subjects".
I would suggest that my addition of the blogs to my print mix has given me a critical look from a different direction at my own long ingrained MSM reading habits and this I'm finding extremely useful. Joe Klein, for example, I remember from his Rolling Stone days and would normally give him a pass without particularly thinking had I not read about his latest Time columns here. I stopped reading Time itself decades ago, but now, I'm afraid, I may need to re-read Klein's Bob Dylan book to see if he was similarly damaged back when he was writing for Rolling Stone.
One of the questions at least peripherally addressed here consistently is where will an average American get his or her news from a broad range of hopefully insightful perspectives in the future, some of which are free of the narrow biases that have always existed in the MSM? Radical thought, I know, but hope springs eternal during the holidays. We've certainly not had it in the past. In watching people such as Robert Murdoch absorb the WSJ and the FCC charging toward further media consolidation, well, is there really any hope for the future?
I'd say some. Some hope. Yes I'm more of a techie than most at my age, having earned my living in computers, but I'm seeing a new world open with the Internet. I'm scared to death by most of the Republicans I've seen in office since Eisenhower (odd over the years to find yourself remembering Eisenhower more fondly) and, although I'm certainly more comfortable today with the Democrats, I'm still just as upset as we all are over their lack of courage.
So the point of this? More sources of analytical reporting, please, I guess from the web as it doesn't seem to be coming from television or print. More venues with critical thinking and less name calling. The Republicans aren't going away, neither are the Democrats, but I'm guessing (hoping, fantasizing, living in denial) that this web business will give us more information in making decisions, allow candidates to run for office both nationally and locally, who would otherwise never be noticed, and provide the MSM of the future with the fact checking they so richly require. Keep writing, but more critically, please, less of the shouting, if not for your benefit, then mine.
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Okay, okay. We get it
But really, what did people expect? With slim majorities, Bush-enabling Dem "moderates," and people like Feinstein, did anyone expect overnight miracles?
Look at it this way: without a Dem-controlled Congress, we'd still have Rumsfeld and Gonzo. We wouldn't know about scandals like Attorneygate. We'd have wingnuts heading committees, just like in 2005.
And enough about the Christmas resolution. There was a resolution for Ramadan and Muslims, too.
CHANGE WILL NOT OCCUR OVERNIGHT. Democrats will *not* automatically grow spines. There are certainly fighters like Feingold and Waxman, but also Fox News Dems like Feinstein.
How about aiming some of that vitriol at rubber-stamp Republicans, hmmmmm?
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Re HR 847
Just simply, jaw droppingly, ridiculous pandering. This, along with the MoveOn rebuke, and the similar "pantsing" of Pete Stark, makes me wonder if things like these could even get to the floor of either chamber if there was a Democratic majority, with Democrats in leadership positions...
Are they really that afraid of what Bill O'Reilly is going to say about them?
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@Glenn
I don't think a mandatory voting would be Republicans. But I can almost hear the anti-statists screaming now. "State oppression!" Salon, five years ago:
Make voting mandatory!
And another modest proposal to fix our sick democracy.
By Keith Olbermann
(...)
Thus I offer two modest proposals to get head and hair flying.
First: Mandatory voting. You heard me. A democracy where half of the citizens sit back and say, "no, thanks," isn't a democracy at all -- just a really large oligarchy. If we have not already reached it, we are nearing, inevitably, the point at which everyone who votes has a personal stake in the outcome. As the percentage of lever-pullers continues to decline, it's going to eventually be just the candidates' friends, families and people from their secret second lives who even bother to show up. You know -- like park league softball...
http://archive.salon.com/news/sports/col/olbermann/2002/11/05/reform/index.html
I think we may still rank number one in the world as the democracy with the largest percentage of people who seem unwilling to exercise their right to vote.
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@GlennGreenwald
Pelosi admits to having been briefed by the CIA on interrogation methods, and while she claims to be hazy about some of the details, and says that she was told that these methods would be used in the future, there isn't any dispute that she was briefed and didn't object.
Agreed to all of it. But that doesn't mean that the Goss/Hayden version of the event is accurate. Should she have objected sooner? Absolutely. When Jane Harman wrote the letter and she concurred is an absolute date with no dispute about it when both women should have gone public and loudly. It's a clear point in time when they objected, so the question is why they acceded to classification rules when those rules were being applied to the of documentation of illegal acts.
Did she hear everything in the other meeting exactly as Porter Goss described it, and not only not complain to waterboarding, explicitly detailed, but exhibit a thirst for more and harsher? Ummmm....do you believe that about Nancy Pelosi? I'm a transplant to the Bay Area, and maybe she has a ton of skeletons in some closet I don't know about, but thirsting for more and harsher torture doesn't fit any behavior I've seen of hers. It's so out of character I would want to see some non-spook non-loyal Bushie confirm it first. It is, after all, a gang of four, not of one.