Thank you for that last one. I needed one final bolstering event to have all your comments deleted. You just gave it to me. -- GlennGreenwald

Woe be it for me to say Thanks but you are indeed due a hearty cheer IMHO.

I know you are loath to delete posts and ban users from posting here, and I am of mixed emotions myself as a grizzled old veteran of Usenet from back in the day. But enough is enough! At least with Art there was a sense of literary value many times in his free flowing and seemingly drug-induced postings, but Klytus, well, not so much.

They say imitation is a form of flattery and K was certainly trying to duplicate the vibe of Mr. James' posts. Unfortunately he missed by a huge margin.

Anyway, thanks for saving my mouse from its brutal scrolling routines as I flew past K's too many posts ...

Sincerely

Thank you Glenn. The crazy posts were all way overdone, and there were just so damn many of them all the time.

As a treat for being such a good fella:

A quote from the 1963 short story What the Dead Men Say by Phillip K. Dick:

"Do you think Gam has a chance this time?" Kathy asked.

"No, not really. But miracles in politics do happen; look at Richard Nixon's incredible comeback in 1968."

Someday perhaps you will make such a great prediction.

(not me, politics always suprises me somehow) :-)

I still long to know what you two discussed on your broken conversation. But maybe this topic could be the next reason for a call????

with sugar on top....

Part II of the Chomsky Interview on this maybe?

That's a great idea. Sadly, though, his wife of 60 years (who shares your first name and had a huge career in her own right as a linguist) just died -- about a week ago -- after a long and horrible bout with cancer. He pretty much took total care of her every day for the last year or so. If I had to guess, he's going to deal with it by throwing himself into work, but I want to wait at least another week before asking him to do anything.

Sex isn't politics. I find it amusing this is the best example of "grilling" a democrat you could think of. Shows where your priorities are. Only your side would find peoples sex lives more important then actual problems that affect people's lives.

DC Law:

I know there are decent columns there by third-party contributors, and that the site affords these people a unique opportunity to be read by a large audience, but "HuffPo" definitely seems to be more and more rapidly circling the drain of infotainment stupidity.

I wholeheartedly agree. When HuffPost first came out, it was pretty interesting and a great idea. She had lots of "celebrity" bloggers, but the site was newsy, it was a venue for progressive writing, and it had smart writing.

Now, it's mostly gossip. It's like a left-wing Drudge on steroids.

I still look at it every day, but I don't read as much of it anymore for the very reasons you state.

@ Oomoex - I'm not an expert on physical geography, but I did study it a little, so I'll defer to your personal experience in Israel. I still maintain that the land is not worth what it has cost in blood over the centuries.

That's an odd way of looking at it. I'm assuming that wherever you live is no god's gift to tourism, but should an army occupy your community, and try to control every aspect of the lives of you and your friends and family, you might think you were defending your humanity, not the land. I'm not convinced you would be up for moving at a minutes notice; and even if you were, I doubt you'd accept that your parents and children should have to move from their against their will or live under the boot heel of another country.

When HuffPost first came out, it was pretty interesting and a great idea. She had lots of "celebrity" bloggers, but the site was newsy, it was a venue for progressive writing, and it had smart writing.

Now, it's mostly gossip. It's like a left-wing Drudge on steroids.

I also find the site's generally unquestioning loyalty to Obama and everything he utters or does very cloying and stultifying.

Except his hat fashion. On this topic they definitely ask the tough questions.

(For the uninitiated: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/29/obamas-backwards-hat-love_n_154013.html)

A person's blog is their palace where we exist as their guests, no matter the rights of free expression implied upon its comments section. Push thee not this idea too far, lest ye feel the sting of deletion. :0

There really never was a time when American popular media was all that great. It's sucked more in some eras than in others, but it has never been quite the forward marching dogged investigative outfit that all your hardboiled novels and movies tell you it used to be.

It has almost always been up to the alternative, the literary, the academic and the "elite" media to engage in the kinds of deep probing we all want the popular media to do, but as has been demonstrated consistently, popular media is obsessed with worshipping power first, trivia, gossip, breathless narratives, and scooping one another the rest of the time. It has ever been thus.

The "remembered greatness" -- Watergate, Walter Cronkite reporting from Vietnam, etc -- were essentially anomalies. There were reasons for them specific to the time and to the people involved.

Teevee news used to consist of three network half-hour or hour broadcasts, presenting what were almost entirely predigested "official" narratives. There were more newspapers, but their news mostly came from the same wire services, and apart from a focus or a slant here and there, and of course apart from partisan editorial opinions, they reported the same things.

If anything, popular media and news in those days was even more managed than it is today. Propaganda was pervasive and universal -- and it was widely believed, even more sincerely than it is now. It was harder for people to discover the "truth"; the publications doing the real digging, having the real insight, telling the real story were not easily obtainable and sometimes were banned outright. Most of it was not written for or intended for a popular audience anyway.

Bad as contemporary popular media is, and it is very bad in this country most of the time, it has rarely been much better, and access to alternatives was far more restricted in the past than it is now. Ask Timberman. He was there. (Hey, WT!)

As for David Gregory, he's a gushing suckup party boy. Perfect!