Who will Glenn blames when not much of anything changes under President Obama?

Mystical Jewish mind/banking/media control black magic?

I believe, without being certain, that Salon is going -- once again -- to ban anonymous commenters and require that a name be used. Spittle like this is why I have become convinced that this is a good idea.

"But he's a fringe, loser freak who can't be heard from. Our geniuses instead are Tim Russert, Charles Krauthammer and Brian Williams. What else does one need to know?"

When you put it that way, it does sound pretty crazy.

If I remember correctly, in the movie "Manufacturing Consent", Chomsky talks about why he eventually stopped agreeing to appear on mainstream media programs. Something along the lines of real analysis of the issues being impossible to fit into the sound bite structure. He would always sound like he was from Mars, he said.

In a way, he did it to himself. But obviously, he's right--in a tv world where most pundits don't even know that the US supported the dictatorial Shah in Iran just twenty odd years ago, Chomsky would indeed sound like a lunatic.

I think I remember Prof. Chomsky saying once in an interview that I either saw, or perhaps read in ZNet, that being on television was problematic for him because typically he'd have time to say no more than the equivalent of a couple of paragraphs worth of single sentences, which would be a waste of his time. He also made the point that what he had to say would make no sense anyway when arbitrarily condensed. I don't remember his exact words, but it was something like that.

It's a good point. Unless we had real talk shows, of the kind Monty Python used to mock the BBC for, or American shows like the book reviews on C-SPAN, how much of Chomsky's reasoning could you actually hear on the air, and what would sound-bite Chomsky be like, I wonder? It's hard to imagine.

More to the point, if Chomsky on TV were formatted like the C-SPAN book reviews, how many more Americans would watch it than read his books and articles now?

I'd like to see more of him, but I wonder if Tim Russert's audience would?

I believe, without being certain, that Salon is going -- once again -- to ban anonymous commenters and require that a name be used. Spittle like this is why I have become convinced that this is a good idea.

I'm very pleased to hear it.

You beat me to it. Respect is due.

The Hamas Happy Rabbit television show today announced "We will kill the Danes." in response to Danish claims they will republish the famous Mohammed cartoons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBhdFYRR5tI&eurl=http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/125392

Seems reasonable to me. Produce children's TV programming that tells people to mass murder total strangers. If only they would advocate mass murder of Salon readers.

Today they launched 50 rockets into Sderot, a town. Average flight time is a bit under 15 seconds. Today they reiterated their basic stance they would never ever talk to 'the eeevul zionist entity' ever. So who would Israel talk to? Bloggers? Ink stained dilettantes? And what would they talk about?

During Oslo, the Labor party doubled settlement population, and cantonized the West Bank using Israeli only access roads, non-autonomous regions and checkpoints. The injustices from Labor's stewardship of the so-called peace process led to the Intifada, and the first year or so of Israel's inhuman response to mostly unarmed demonstrations was managed by the Labor party. Likud, is certainly more reactionary in rhetoric, but there are few real political differences towards Palestine.

omooex

Omooex, I hate to jump on this, I really do agree with a lot of what you say, even if I jump on you, okay?

This is only technically true, no? Labor was in power during the Oslo negotiations, but the Housing minister was none other than Ariel Sharon, the settlements' prime architect and biggest promoter, and the guy that started the second intifada. That was due to power sharing to form a government, as I recall (you can correct me, but that's why I believe he was in the Labor government). So it's kind of a stretch to say that Labor was the driving force behind the settlement statistics you cite.

To the other commenter that made a point about the Palestinians never negotiating during the 1970's -- too much perspective is not a good thing always. This thing has been going on for a very long time now ("you're old enough to kill, but not for votin', and even the Jordan River's got bodies floatin' but you tell me..."), and all the parties involved have changed over time, it isn't correct to behave as if they haven't. The PLO switched from a consensus basis to a majority vote basis in the late 1980's or early 1990's (I remember Edward Said talking about this during the announcement of the Oslo Accords). So the dissent of a single radical could no longer table a proposal for negotiating with Israel. Previous to that it could, giving hardliners undue power to maintain a radical stance.

To carry the whole thing with a very general view of ticking off past events without the underlying causes paints a picture of hopelessness that stands in the way of real negotiations, in this case.

The classic example of "chutzpah" is the man who kills his parents and then asks the court for lenience on the ground that he is an orphan. A modern example might be flinging rockets at the people who supply your electricity, then angrily demanding to know who turned out the lights.

A question for those who decry the "collective punishments" imposed by Israel: Has Israel any right at all to respond to attacks on it from within Gaza or the West Bank, and, if so, what response would be acceptable to you?

So lets just kill them. It wouldn't be mass murder because they started it. Isn't that how the logic works?

Urging children to hate is pretty reprehensible, but if your going to condemn it, you might as well condemn ALL INSTANCES of it.

Somehow I don't think that's quite what's happening.