Hey Glenn,

I suggest you do some reading into the FBI's surveillance operations against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador in the 1980s:

www.southendpress.org/2004/items/Breakins

www.publiceye.org/huntred/Hunt_For_Red_Menace-12.html

It's very similar to what could possibly be going on today.

I'm sure Calabresi, just like Klein, doesn't have the time or the expertise to look up and interpret polling results.

I always assumed Time Magazine to be simpering apologists for the establishment, but never checked into it myself. Good to see them exposed methodically like this.

You can now see the contours of Western Civilization, how it was built on a house of sand. Media, corporations, government, all betrayals of humanity, or maybe we DESERVE IT.

Anyway.

WE NEED 100 GLENNS, or maybe Glenn can work 900 hour weeks?

I'll confess though, I was hoping to see Joe Klein get torn a new one for his self-congratulatory post on the *two* paragraphs he wrote five years ago that weren't terrible.

What a disgrace Time mag is.

Bill Kristol again proves himself to be a journalistic hack.

http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/kristol_bungles_key_fact_in_an.php

Glenn, the Time article is a perfect example of the overt, propagandistic, dis-informational non-journalism that has been foisted upon the general public with such consistent intensity for the past 7+ years. Are there any documentaries on the order of "Iraq for Sale" that document and investigate this phenomenon? This is such an insidious process that has far-reaching consequences, that it needs to be exposed in a detailed, rational manner fit for mass consumption so our citizenry can put into perspective the toll we're paying as a country and see how severely we're being misled. I hope that someone takes up this cause, because the reality of the damage it has caused this nation will make movies like "Farenheit 911" look like a comedy.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/09/sm.11.html

In one of the more pointed moments of the evening, Calabresi suggested the world outside Yale is full of people with a “very low level of analytical skill.”

Following his initial remarks, Calabresi fielded questions from audience members, addressing the role of the media today, its accountability to the public and the future of print journalism.

“There is an underlying sense of crisis in all print media,” Calabresi said....

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/21695

His father is a Guido Calebresi, the legal scholar and appeals court judge for the 2nd circuit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_Calabresi

Great job to lay out the MSM's blind support of Bush administration. The influence of the Bush administration's ideology continues to fall and most recently with the potential collapse of the whole financial system.

Will the MSM (main stream media) start doing their job which is to inform the public? Or will they just be good corporate citizens as part of the media empire which is what they take their job to be.

I have heard that the journalism schools at Columbia and Harvard are working on restoring the failed profession of journalism. They will also have to overcome the media owners with their goal to keep the public dumb and to be savy consumers.

Perhaps the implication at Time is that real Americans don't care about the abuses of spying powers and real Americans support domestic spying without a warrant.

Because, of course, all real Americans know that this country was founded on ideals of unchecked executive powers.

I didn't read your article yet, Glenn, because first I followed your link to the Time article. It's rubbish, of course. I wanted to email the reporter, but clicking on his name led to a Letter to the Editor link, which I settled for:

What an irresponsible piece of editorial opinion disguised as "journalism." Why are no specific polls cited? Why no references to the public-led pushback against amnesty for telecoms? And if the reporter can document indifference, why no connecting the dots between public apathy and the mainstream media's (and Time's) role in keeping the populace uninformed? YOU are part of the problem!

Keep up the excellent work.

You'd thing Russ Feingold's "censure" would play into the media's prose? Stinkers.

Calabresi name rings a bad reminder of a Greek tragedy performed by high school actors.

Bad actor Quacks?

War-backers and spys need to listen to real ducks quacking. A crow outside just made a quack quack. Quack, quack.

It's so sad to hear sold-out people

~

' swanking about playing into ' the dirty spy and filth ~ lies.

~

What a inner washing they need...

They blow smoke and are bad "jokes"... Lies kill.

The mentality expressed is a perpetual vacation.

The prop-up and Protecting of these creeps? It's a Shame.

The broader the absurd generalization, the easier it is to contradict it.

For instance, not directly about espionage powers, but certainly providing a scandalous example of the White House abusing the Patriot Act powers:

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002635

[...] Of George W. Bush’s cohort of U.S. Attorneys, one of the most highly regarded—perhaps even the most highly regarded—was John McKay, who headed the office in Seattle. He was included in the December 7 massacre. McKay has now authored a law review article that examines the history of the scandal, reviews the legal issues that it raises, and provides some observations on the trajectory the matter is likely to take going forward. It’s called “Train Wreck at the Justice Department,” and it was published in volume 31 of Seattle University Law Review. Here are some key elements of the article, which really merits being read in its entirety. [...]

After a flurry of phone calls among the U.S. Attorneys who had been ordered to resign, many of those former U.S. Attorneys concluded that the Attorney General was lying to the Senate about the intent of the Justice Department to seek Senate confirmation of their prospective replacements. In Seattle, for example, no known efforts had been underway by either the White House or the Justice Department to recruit or interview candidates for my replacement. In spite of my frequent requests for guidance, Justice officials had not revealed their plans, and no internal candidates had been contacted by the Justice Department or the White House. With only a few days remaining before our departures, it was clear the Justice Department planned to name their own interim U.S. Attorneys under the new powers granted them in the amendments to the USA PATRIOT Act. Other fired U.S. Attorneys confirmed similar patterns in San Francisco and San Diego, and we also knew that an interim U.S. Attorney had been serving in Kansas City for many months.