..did you have to put a 6:33 YT of Bush on? It's the longest I've forced myself to listen to that mendacious, whiny, smug little sh*t since 2002. Yeesh.

Some time I would like to read a news story that begins with "a Republican operative called me this morning and suggested I write this story." Or the reporter names the operative and describes the process of thinking it over and digging up some information independently. OK, don't name the operative but at least do the work. I think that's called the whole truth.

I thought that the internets were influencing the mainstream media. Mostly negatively, since the internet can be used to make any ridiculous assertion seem worth considering.

However, as to why Joe Lunchables doesn't sit down and read the New York Times on line or a Baghdadi blog, I often ask myself that same question. My personal feeling is that people want quick, biteable and entertaining news--they like the stuff that pops up on their Yahoo or AOL home page--kidnappings, murders, dumb criminals. If those same people go to a real news website, they are going to encounter an entire world of policy and countries, terms, histories and people they don't know exist. And I assume that's a turn off for the person using the internets as an entertainment device. Or you could just ask my sister--she doesn't even know how to find her email home page.

It’s ironical and sad that Power who has championed the horrors of war and genocide in her two books A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, and Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World was apparently fired for political and media ineptness at a time when her counsel is so needed. When we don’t humanize war, we get more war, suffering and death.

We need a new kind of advisor like Power for our politicians and not the Serious kind that have brought us all this devistation. Obama sought her counsel on Darfur and other serious matters and she tried to learn how to function in the Beltway insanity. Maybe she is better off leaving the madness before it infects her integrity, but Obama and our country will not be better off because she became a political casualty.

I think much of Keith Olbermann's problem right now is that, over time, it gets harder to keep getting juice out of the Bush Outrage lemon. When Olbermann first started gaining salience and strongly positive reactions from TV audiences, it was at a time before Bush had fully become the mocked and almost tragic figure that he is today. It has, in some ways, become too facile to go after Bush anymore. Also, Bush is now well into lame duck status - the lamest of ducks being one holding office while much more dynamic people are actively campaigning for his job.

Olbermann has also drifted into much more of a Bill O'Reilly-centric media critic, which I think is more a distraction than a boon. While he often picks up stories and narratives previously known only on blogs, I sometimes question his choices of which stories deserve precious airtime. Sometimes, I feel like I'm just watching the political equivalent of Entertainment Tonight.

I think the best thing for Olbermann is not to suddenly become "objective" in any way, but to focus more of his attention on the hypocrisy of John McCain, as a counterweight to the overwhelming, blatant adulation that candidate receives in the media. Hillary never benefited from positive press bias, and now that the media has been scared into sniping at Obama more regularly, a person with as much clout and visibility as Olbermann needs to challenge the Saint McCain narrative much more aggressively if we are to see anything even resembling fair campaign coverage going forward.

There's plenty of material to work with. McCain leaves an extensive record of prevarication, contradiction, temperamental outbursts, and other behavior that directly belies his carefully groomed media image.

"Post-prandial pillow talk"! Do you eat first, because "post-prandial" means "after eating". Throwing in a few Latinisms may go down well in Doheny & Nesbits pub and in all those ritzy Washington places but you don't fool me. I'm very much afraid that you're a pillock who thinks that a smattering of Latin combined with some Anglo-Saxon profanity (for street cred,naturally) makes you a force to be reckoned with but my geiger-counter for someone who excels in Taurean turds, as you do, is clicking furiously. Get lost!

It is obvious to all of us here, and as Glenn has so well documented in his blogs about John "JD" Roberts, and the inestimably obsequious John "I love you George" King, et al, that the MSM is a bought and paid for, cowed, pusillanimous band of doubleplusgood duckspeakers for the oligarchy. So my question is, as in my title, why does the Internet have so little influence on the popular discourse?

Most Americans have an internet connection, most Americans can still read, and the internet as we here know so well, is still a place where the facts, if not the Truth, can be found, and it's all just a Google away.

I read the NYT and WaPo the way to Russian people used to read Pravda (Truth). In Soviet Russia if Pravda talked about "record grain harvests" in the Ukraine, it was pretty certain that a lot of serfs were going to die of starvation. The cure though is quite obvious, read Glenn, goto Raw Story, Democratic Underground, Juan Cole's blog, and even Prison Planet and Rense, to get the other side of the story, the antidote for the lies, the spin and the "journalistically" enabled propaganda.

Yet, it seems that most Americans still get their "news" from FOX, and the rest of the swine that pass for reporters in the corporate press. You would think that after the lies told in the NYT by Miller and her ilk about the WMD in Iraq would be enough to drive more people to the internet, but this has not happened. Is this because there is some stigma, some distrust of those who like Glenn are "not real journalists"?

I really don't know. I get virtually all my information from the web, I can read the Scotsman, I can listen to CBC or Mike Malloy at Nova M, I can read Pravda, I can read a blog by a woman who actually lives in Baghdad, it is so much better here. Where are the people? What is the problem and how can we correct it?

Any thoughts?