Kemstone's Journal

Listening to these Republican candidates talk about Obama, I often wish we actually had the kind of president they’re attacking. The paint him as some kind of progressive lion, zealously going after the super-rich on behalf of the working class, steadfastly holding to an ideology of civil liberties even if it compromises America’s safety, and systematically dismantling our empire abroad, all the while apologizing to the world for our previous transgressions. I don’t know who this person is that they keep railing against, but it’s not the Obama I know.

The fact is that the Republicans are banking on the majority of their base having a completely distorted view of the president thanks to conservative news sources like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. These media outlets have made a calculated decision to create their own narrative about who Obama is and what he wants to do, to emphasize every tiny little thing that supports that narrative and de-emphasize, ignore, or even outright lie about anything that doesn’t.

The Obama you see on Fox News is not a real person but actually a fictional character based on the stereotype of liberals that conservatives have in their minds. He wants to raise taxes, impose strict regulations on business, cut defense, eliminate gun rights, encourage more abortions and gay marriages, read terrorists their rights, and purge all religion from the public sphere. When the Republican presidential candidates talk to their debate audiences and the crowds at their campaign rallies about Obama, they’re talking about this guy, a radically liberal president who—unfortunately for them—doesn’t actually exist.

The real Obama hasn’t raised taxes. He’s far too timid to take the political risk. He’s cut taxes across the board and agreed to extend the Bush tax-cuts for two years. He says he’ll fight to let them expire next time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

As for the idea that he’s imposing crippling regulations on businesses, that is simply absurd. Barack Obama is the Goldman Sachs president. His entire financial team and his last two chiefs of staff have been Wall Street insiders, and according to internal memos it would appear that they dictate his every move in that area. The “historic financial reform” legislation that passed last year is widely acknowledged by bankers to be a complete joke. Not one of the people who caused the financial crisis of 2008 has been prosecuted for committing fraud, and Wall Street continues to thrive thanks to taxpayer bailouts (which Obama supported) while the rest of the country struggles.

I hear over and over again that Obama has drastically cut defense spending. Simply not true. Defense spending has increased every year since Obama took office, it’s just that the rate of increase has gone slightly down thanks to the cutting of a few strategically unnecessary projects like stealth-fighters designed to fight the Cold War. Some might say that it’s merely stretching the truth to refer to a slower rate of increase as a “cut”, but I call it lying.

And as for the whole general idea that Obama is weak on defense, consider his doubling-down in Afghanistan and the recent foray into Libya. He withdrew troops from Iraq but only because he was forced to under a treaty signed by the Bush administration which he tried and failed to renegotiate.

On gun rights, Obama has not lifted a finger to do anything about it, other than quietly write an op-ed on the issue after the Gabby Giffords shooting, in which he did not endorse a single reform that didn’t enjoy at least a 60% approval in polls. And afterwards he did absolutely nothing to attempt to initiate those reforms.

On social issues, one can point to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and pretend that Obama is the “fierce advocate” of gay rights that he claimed to be, but he dragged his feet on that issue for quite some time and he still refuses to publicly come out in support of gay marriage. And on abortion, what has Obama done? Nothing. He won’t even touch that issue with a ten-foot pole, so afraid is he of the potential criticism. But he will make it harder for young women to obtain birth control.

When it comes to the idea that Obama would rather read terrorists their rights than keep America safe, this is where the distance between the real Obama and the fictional Obama is at its widest. Not only has Obama continued the civil liberties abuses that began under the Bush administration, but he’s actually expanded them, to the point where now it’s written into the law that the president has the power to throw American citizens into prison without a trial purely on suspicion of ties to terrorism. He appeared to make a genuine effort to close down Guantanamo as soon as he took office, but when that failed he never brought the issue up again, and the prison remains open and could conceivably remain so for generations. He doesn’t do waterboarding anymore but he hasn’t prosecuted anyone responsible for that war crime, all the while bringing the hammer down on whistleblowers like Bradley Manning who dared to make the abuses of our military public. Finally, if you really want to know whether or not Obama is soft on terror, you can ask Osama bin Laden.

And lastly, there’s the matter of religion. Newt Gingrich told a crowd of supporters that as soon as he takes office, he’ll repeal every single anti-religious act passed by the Obama administration. That shouldn’t take long, as no such acts have been passed by the real Obama. The fictional Obama is the one carrying out this “war on religion” we keep hearing about. After all, that guy is secretly Muslim and born in Kenya, and obviously on a crusade to undermine America’s Christian moral foundation.

Running against a fictional character may work for the Republican candidates in the primary, but it’s going to blow up in their faces if they try that in the general election, which is exactly what Obama is counting on. If Mitt Romney accuses Obama in a debate of raising taxes, Obama will be poised and ready with the facts to prove that he has not. The same goes for the accusation that he’s cut defense, gone after gun rights, and so on. The major political advantage Obama has garnered for himself by going against his liberal base time and again on nearly every single issue is that the Republicans can’t make a fact-based attack on him for doing any of the things that liberal presidents are normally criticized for doing. The best they can do is say that he talked about doing such things in the 2008 campaign.

If they’re forced to run against the real Obama, there are plenty of things to criticize him for, but they are guilty of those same things themselves. Romney could expose every last way in which Obama has been a puppet of Wall Street, but he knows quite well that he’s running to be the next puppet of the very same interests.

But the truly funny thing is that aside from his ties to the financial industry, most conservatives would like the real Obama if they knew who he was. If you just changed the D in front of his name to an R and read off a list of the actions he’s taken since his term began, they’d understand him to be a moderate who is slightly left-of-center on some issues but right-of-center on most.

The real Obama governs like a moderate Republican of former days, before the party drifted off to its right-wing fringe. The real Obama would win a national election against any of these clowns the Republicans have put forward in this primary, and they know it. That’s why they have no choice but to run against a fictional character instead, and it’s why they’re going to lose the general election when the curtain is pulled back and independent voters get a good look at who Obama actually is.

The Iowa caucuses were last night, and after months and months of exciting horse-race politics in which nearly every single Republican candidate surged to front-runner status and then fell back again, the winner was the guy everybody originally thought would win.

Mitt Romney came in first place ahead of Rick Santorum by just 8 votes. The narrow margin made the night as dramatic as the rest of the race has been so far, but like the entire presidential electoral process in general, it was mostly inconsequential. Santorum only did so well because his popularity happened to peak at just the right time, but like every other alternative-to-Romney candidate in the field, his numbers will plummet once people start paying more attention to him.

And so as early as January 5, with only one primary contest finished and ten months to go before the general election, I can boldly pronounce who the winner of the 2012 election will be: Wall Street, and the rest of Corporate America.

It’s all over, folks. The corporate plutocracy that owns the media and our politicians now has this one in the bag. They already own Barack Obama, and they’ve owned Mitt Romney for quite some time. Both of these guys have demonstrated that they will do whatever the big corporations want them to do, with a few minor exceptions Obama has to make for political reasons (e.g. the consumer financial protection bureau).

The choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is a choice between two different brands of the same product. It’s like being offered Pepsi or Coke when what you really want is orange juice. (Or more accurately, it’s like a choice between Coca-Cola and Royal Crown Cola, both of which are owned by the same company.)

The powerful financial interests which make up the establishment would call the shots no matter who gets elected, be it Obama, Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, or almost any of the others. There are only three candidates in the entire race who would not be beholden to them: 1- Rocky Anderson, who is a third-party candidate and therefore has no chance, 2- Buddy Roemer (a.k.a. “who is that?”) and 3- Ron Paul.

Yes, the last best chance for real change in 2012 was a Ron Paul victory in Iowa. He was the only real threat to the establishment, but they were able to snuff it out in Iowa. Unfortunately, he was too easy of a target.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s a lot to dislike about Ron Paul. Those racist newsletters are a disastrous reflection on his character and his obvious lies to pretend he knew nothing about them made it clear that he’s not quite as honest as he seems. His die-hard libertarianism, if fully implemented, would be a disaster of epic proportions.

But he’s not running for dictator. He’s running for president, and the president does not have nearly the kind of power it would require for him to implement his entire agenda. He would try to eliminate the department of commerce, of education, of energy, the EPA, and so on, but Congress wouldn’t let him. There would be bipartisan opposition to all extremist legislation he proposes, and while a few Republicans would take his side in some fights, the vast majority are owned by the establishment and the establishment would make defeating him their top priority.

On the other hand, there are certain things the president has the power to do all on his own without approval from Congress. He could and would stand against the military industrial complex and get our troops out of Afghanistan immediately, saving billions of dollars of the national budget currently being wasted. He could end the war on drugs, freeing up law enforcement to focus on more serious crimes and deal a death-blow to the cartels. Finally, he could aggressively go after and prosecute every single one of those Wall Street bankers who committed the fraud that crashed the economy and then walked away with millions in taxpayer-funded bonuses.

But this is all a fantasy. Ron Paul would never win the Republican nomination, though I think he’d probably stand the best chance of beating Barack Obama because unlike any other Republican he actually appeals to liberals for the reasons stated above. No progressive is going to vote for Romney, but plenty would be tempted to vote for Ron Paul.

At the very least, a Ron Paul nomination would turn the establishment media on its head. The mainstream media, owned by the same corporations that own the government, would throw everything they have at Paul including, possibly, rational arguments over policy! There would be a real debate over things like the proper extent of the role of government in people’s lives, and conservatives would look at his extreme views and be forced to acknowledge that it should at least play some role. There would be a real discussion over the efficacy of the war on drugs, and if enough people look at the statistics it might finally tip the scales against prohibition, an obviously failed and counter-productive policy. Finally, we’d have a real debate over the wars, and with the Democratic candidate in favor of them and the Republican candidate against, people would have to consider their own opinion instead of just accepting the default position of their team.

But the best thing about the imaginary Paul vs. Obama scenario is that Fox News and the rest of the conservative corporate media would take Obama’s side. After all, he’s a part of the establishment and Paul is not. It serves their purposes to be against Obama now because they are still hoping for a more corporate-friendly president, but if Paul were to be the Republican nominee all that nonsense about Obama being a socialist left-wing radical would go straight out the window and the likes of O’Reilly and Hannity would be talking night after night about how Obama has actually been governing pretty much like a moderate Republican.

Sadly, none of that will happen now, so the establishment can rest easy. There will be no real change this year. The middle-class continues to be squeezed and squeezed but the tipping point has not yet been reached and that slowly roasting kettle will not boil over. In 2011 many people finally took to the streets in a genuine rebellion against the establishment, but that political energy will be absorbed by the election as people eventually accept a candidate and line up behind them. Instead of fighting for real change, most of these people will be fighting to re-elect Obama for the sole reason that they believe Romney will be far worse. But in reality, it will make almost no difference.

The American presidential electoral process used to have the potential to bring about change, but ever since the government has been completely absorbed by the corporations and all of the candidates bought by the same interests, it’s become little more than a sideshow—a useful distraction for the politically-active to direct their energy away from actually fighting for real issues. It’s only January, but the election is already over. The 1% win. The rest of us lose.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” –Gandhi

It feels like a lifetime since I’ve posted a political blog entry, but I just can’t resist adding my voice to the chants going out from Wall Street and all across America these days. About two months ago I moved to Japan and since then my focus on politics has taken a back-seat to the major life-changes I’ve been going through. It wasn’t long after I look my leave-of-absence from the political world that thousands of my fellow citizens found themselves diving in head-first and igniting a movement that has the potential to completely change the American political landscape for a generation. This post intends to serve the dual purposes of A) spreading some of my optimism about the potential of the Occupy Wall Street movement to bring about significant political change and B) keeping with the primary purpose of my political writing which has always been to provide like-minded people with arguments to potentially sway conservative-leaning yet open-minded citizens to our point of view.

First and foremost, you should tell your conservative friends that if they like the Tea Party, they should love the Occupiers. After all, this is a grassroots movement of citizens disillusioned with the broken system standing up and demanding change. I seem to recall the pundits on Fox News and other cable channels lauding the Tea Party for that very reason—regardless of their specific views, they were participating in the political process in the full spirit of the American tradition of Free Speech and the right to organize. You’d think that even if they disagree with the message of the Occupiers, they should at least acknowledge that their zeal for peaceful demonstration is as American as it gets, and intrinsically no more or less valuable than that of the Tea Party.

Of course, we know that there is in fact a world of difference between what lies at the core of the Tea Party and what drives the Occupiers. While it’s true that most of the average citizens who go to Tea Party rallies are well-intentioned people who honestly believe in the message they’re sending, their movement is “grassroots” in name only—it is in fact a collection of various political organizations funded by right-wing think-tanks like Americans for Prosperity which are themselves funded by the wealthiest Americans and corporations, the very people who are responsible for the economic conditions the Tea Partiers’ anger is a product of. Their anger is justified and their willingness to protest is admirable, but they’ve been misled and misdirected into serving the enemies of the very kinds of change they really need.

Conversely, the Occupiers are a true grassroots movement, not funded by any billionaires but started “from the ground up” in the most literal sense of the term. Just a few hundred citizens decided to direct their anger at the very people responsible for their financial hardship and they took to the streets and kept at it—not just organizing a single protest for a day and then going home having been completely ignored by the media, but sticking to it until people finally started paying attention and more powerful allies began to join their fight.

The right-wing propaganda machine wants us to dismiss them as a bunch of left-wing hippies who don’t understand how the world really works, and this has worked so far and will continue to work on the Fox News audience for a long time to come, but they should be reminded as often as possible that just as the Tea Party was not quite the neo-Klan rally gathering of racists and bigots that the “liberal” media sometimes portrayed them as, neither can the Occupiers be characterized with such a broad brush. Fox News has constantly reminded us that there are Independents and Democrats among the Tea Party crowd, and we should all be reminded that there are indeed some Tea Partiers among the Occupier crowd as well.

The movement to restore fairness to the American economic system should not be considered either right-wing or left-wing and we should resist as much as we can the efforts of the corporate media to drive a wedge between the Occupiers and conservative-leaning citizens who would share their sentiments if only they were given an objective look.

I won’t waste time going into the justifications of the Occupy Wall Street movement itself, as anyone interested in understanding their message could read any of a thousand other blog posts, check out this website, or simply watch the movie Inside Job. The central fact—and it is a fact—behind this movement is that Wall Street traders, aided by their bought-and-paid-for tools in Washington (on both sides of the aisle) who’ve been deregulating their industry since the 1990s in exchange for campaign donations, inflated a financial bubble that dealt a crippling blow to the middle class when it burst. Moreover, those responsible for this fiasco have continued to thrive thanks to a giant taxpayer bailout, even awarding themselves record bonuses as if to spit in the faces of all the people they’d screwed over once they were through screwing us.

I’ll say it again: if you like the Tea Party you should love the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Tea Party movement was so popular (among those who failed to follow the money) due to the perception that it was a struggle of the Little Guy against the Big Guy, a reaction to the financial crisis and the ensuing bailout that enraged everybody regardless of political affiliation. Yet somewhere along the way the anger was diverted from Wall Street and directed at the handful of people in Washington who were actually trying to fix the system. The Occupiers have brought the anger back to where it started and where it belongs, and if the success of the Tea Party is any indication it will soon be a force to be reckoned with.

Just look at what the billionaires and the corporate establishment have managed to accomplish by harnessing the momentum that the Tea Party provided them with. They were nearly able to derail health care reform entirely, and while a bill was ultimately passed it was so watered-down and establishment-friendly that its main element is actually a mandate to buy insurance from the same profit-driven companies that were the reason the American health-care system was in such need of reform in the first place. They’ve prevented anything whatsoever from getting done on climate change, deflated any pressure there might have been to restore the civil liberties demolished by the Bush administration, allowed state and local governments to slash funding for education and public services while handing out corporate tax-cuts, secured at least a two-year extension of the Bush tax-rates, and in the biggest irony of all made last years’ Wall Street Reform Act so ineffective as to ensure that if nothing else is done by the time the next bubble bursts, the entire financial-collapse and subsequent taxpayer-bailout is guaranteed to happen all over again.

Much has been made by the mainstream media about the lack of “concrete demands” from the Occupier movement. The lack of specific demands never stopped the Tea Party from having such a major influence in Washington. And if the Tea Party can be said to have made any demands at all, it was always to prevent something from getting done (e.g. “Kill the Bill!”). The spirit of the Occupier movement is to get those in power to actually do something to fix the broken system. The specifics of what that is can be debated by policymakers, but without that pressure from the ground there will never even be a debate.

One of the best suggestions is this one put forward by Alex Pareene at Salon to demand that Wall Street forgive the debts of the 99% who bailed them out. It’s got both moral and practical justifications: they’d be bankrupt if not for our help so why shouldn’t they save us from bankruptcy? Not only that, but imagine the stimulative effect on the economy if all of a sudden the middle class had all that capital freed up to spend on consumer goods rather than debt payments to banks. If the Occupiers take up this idea as a rallying cry, it might just become a real issue in the 2012 election.

The timing of this movement could hardly be more perfect, as right now the Obama White House is suffering from a complete lack of momentum and yet it still has time to change course. When he came to office Obama had a movement of energized citizens behind him but his failure to harness that energy and lead the country in a different direction caused it to fizzle out in a matter of months. If he wanted to ensure his re-election there’s a new movement full of energy just waiting to be harnessed, if he just had the political courage to stand up, take the mantle, and run with it.

Among the Occupiers’ demands, I believe the immediate firing of Tim Geithner, (referred to by insiders as “Wall Street’s man in Washington”) should be near the top of the list, along with the rest of Obama’s disastrous economic team to be replaced by people actually willing to fight the bankers and hand out indictments where appropriate. Obama has done so much to appease the Wall Street crowd and yet they still aren’t satisfied, so his best chance at redeeming his administration is to give up on their support entirely, take a cue from Franklin Roosevelt, and welcome their hatred. As the Occupy movement grows it should become increasingly clear to him that making an enemy of the most hated institution in the country is not, as the establishment-insiders in their beltway-bubble would have him believe, political suicide. He won’t need their campaign cash with such strong wind at his back.

At the very least, the Occupy movement can play the same role as the Tea Party movement in providing strong and vocal support for policies to bring about more economic fairness for the middle class, throwing its support behind any politician willing to fight for their popular and just cause and fighting tooth-and-nail against all those Wall Street puppets who stand against them.

Finally, as the number one argument that will get thrown back in your face by conservatives when you insist that the rich should pay their fair share is that “the top 1% pay 40% of all federal taxes and the bottom 51% pay no taxes at all”, I just want to offer you a couple of links that will allow you to quickly shoot down that talking-point. Here it explains that between 1987 and 2008, the top 1%’s share of the national income increased at five times the rate of their share of taxes. Here you’ll find that while the top 1% do pay 40% of all federal income taxes, when you factor in other kinds of taxes including payroll tax and sales tax their actual share is actually between 22 and 28%, right in line with the 25% of the national income they control. And here you’ll find that when you don’t just cherry pick the federal income tax, the bottom 51% do indeed pay a decent chunk of their income in taxes. You can cite these facts, or you could simply remind them that when a family making less than $30,000 a year pays 13% in taxes, they have to use everything left over to pay for food, heating, car insurance, and all the other bills, while when someone making millions of dollars a year pays 34% in taxes, they’ve still got millions left over.

The Occupy Wall Street movement deserves as much support as we can give it. It’s about time we’re seeing the pent-up rage of the middle class spilling out onto the streets, and if the history of class-struggles in the United States is any guide, there’s reason to believe that they might actually succeed.

I haven’t written about Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks in awhile, but last night he told a story on his show that blew me away.  Hearing Cenk’s account of how MSNBC dumped him as a host in spite of his excellent ratings, then how he turned down their offer to make almost twice as much money as a contributor so long as he toned it down and kept his mouth shut about the inner workings of the network made me prouder than ever to be a TYT soldier. I think it calls for some over-the-top gushing, which I shall engage in presently in the hopes that it might get a few more people to watch the online show.

It took me far too long to discover the online news-and-commentary show The Young Turks, but once I did I couldn’t remember how I’d ever managed to digest the news without it. There are so many ways to get informed about politics these days, and while many people still believe there’s such a thing as “objective” newsmedia and that this alone is the proper way to obtain information, I’ve long since been of the opinion that there is no such thing as true objectivity, and if you’re going to listen to a news anchor or cable host every night, you might as well know exactly where they’re coming from and through what kind of lens your information is being filtered.

What made The Young Turks so perfect is that the lens through which its host Cenk Uygur views politics is almost identical to mine, and to all freethinking progressives. While most of the media still insists on framing the issues in terms of conservative Republicans vs. liberal Democrats, Cenk understands that the real power-struggle going on is between the Washington establishment (which includes Wall Street banks, oil companies, defense contractors, and every other giant corporation that buys influence in D.C.) and the masses of average American people. He’s not afraid to point out that the Democrats are not nearly as liberal as they’d have us believe, and in many cases (military spending, drug policy, and so on) the Republicans aren’t actually ‘conservative’ in the true sense of the word.

But it wasn’t until President Obama started revealing his true colors as more of a Washington-insider than the People’s Champion he ran as that I started tuning into TYT every day and became a paying member. While almost every other figure in the liberal media insisted on not only giving the president the benefit of the doubt on his compromises with Republicans but singing the praises of his hollow victories like health-care reform (massive gift to insurance companies) and so-called ‘historic’ financial reform (massive gift to investment bankers), Cenk Uygur was not the least bit shy about delving into the details of these policies and loudly trumpeting his opinion—one which I and apparently hundreds of thousands of others share—that this is not the kind of ‘change’ we were promised, that Obama’s ‘accomplishments’ are little more than window-dressing, tinkering around with a few cogs in a machine that’s on the verge of a complete breakdown.

Cenk is the only one who consistently and loudly calls attention to the core problem at the heart of the American political system: the politicians do not work for the people they represent—they work for the people who pay them. As long as politicians take money from private health insurance corporations and pharmaceutical companies, we’ll never get real health care reform. As long as politicians take money from defense contractors, we’ll never stop wasting money on unnecessary wars. As long as politicians take money from Wall Street, our financial system will never be secure enough to prevent future collapses from happening.

This is a truth so obvious that you’d think Americans from all political backgrounds would be able to understand it, but most people are still trapped in the Left vs. Right narrative fed to them by the mainstream media, and that’s why it was such a treat to see Cenk bring this message right into the heart of the beast when he began guest-hosting some of the cable news shows on MSNBC and eventually took over as the regular host at 6 p.m.

Cenk understood that the problem with the mainstream media is essentially the same as the problem with government: the journalists work for the people who pay them, and the people who pay them work for giant corporations which themselves collect their revenue from other giant corporations. Cable-news hosts understand that certain narratives are perfectly acceptable to present, while others shouldn’t be touched with a ten-foot pole. They may not be explicitly ordered by the higher-ups to stay away from these themes, but it’s somewhat of an unspoken etiquette that you can be as fierce as you want towards a particular politician or political party, but the Establishment itself should always be respected.

And so it was both fascinating and delightful to watch Cenk enter the lion’s den and trample all over this etiquette, take on the talking-heads and make those heads explode. When a Republican would make a disingenuous argument, Cenk would rip them to shreds and smile while doing so, but he’d even go after so-called progressive Democrats who talked about the need for compromises such as raising the Social Security Retirement age, his incredulous reaction to their unnecessary capitulations a sweet cathartic release of my own frustration at being so casually tossed under the bus by my so-called ‘representatives’ in government.

Cenk spoke truth to power within a machine that essentially runs on deference to that power. The most iconic moment was probably the time Cenk asserted in front of an entire panel of conventional-wisdom peddlers like Jonathan Alter that over 90% of the politicians in both parties in Washington were bought-and-paid-for, and the pundits acted as though he’d just accused Mother Teresa of being a child-molester. Cenk asked them to name a few politicians that weren’t bought, and the best Alter could come up with was “Chuck Schumer”, one of Wall Street’s biggest helpers on the hill.

During Cenk’s run at MSNBC, he lent the network a certain degree of credibility that it had never had before, as it seemed that if they were going to let someone go after the establishment as forcefully as Cenk went after them, they must not be completely in the pockets of the corporate plutocracy.

But alas, it turns out that it was only a fluke. Like Howard Beale in the iconic film Network, Cenk Uygur could only “meddle with the primal forces of nature” for a short while before being taken into a back-room and told how the world really works.

According to Cenk, he was told by one of the producers there that there are ‘two audiences’: the average people to whom he appealed, and the management. And while he was having incredible success with the average people—his ratings were even higher than Ed Schultz’s had been in the same time-slot, he was crushing Wolf Blitzer on a consistent basis, and even beating Fox News among the younger demographic—the management, however, wasn’t happy. They didn’t like his ‘tone’ and felt that he wasn’t ‘playing ball’. Some ‘people in Washington’ weren’t happy with him, and as such he was under warning to tone it down a bit and show some more deference to the politicians who came on his show.

A normal person would have probably nodded his head and accepted this direction, grateful just to be given a second chance, but that’s not Cenk’s style. He promised his TYT viewers when he took the job that he would never become a tool of the establishment, and instead of backing off he doubled-down, and from April through June came down even harder on the crooked politicians, on the disingenuous Republicans, and most of all on the increasingly right-leaning Obama administration. Cenk went unscripted and spoke out forcefully, calling on progressives to stand up and fight, to stop waiting for our leaders in Washington to change things for us and to step up and demand change for ourselves.

Lo and behold, after a few months of this Cenk was called into the office again and told that he would no longer be the host at 6 p.m. They wanted him in a ‘different role’—that of a paid contributor, making the occasional appearance on some of MSNBC’s other shows, just another drop in the ocean of talking-heads at the network’s disposal. Of course, they’d be willing to pay him even more than he was making as a host. Less work, more money? Okay…what’s the catch?

The only catch, it seems, was that Cenk couldn’t talk about what had gone on behind the scenes at MSNBC. He’d basically just discovered from personal experience why the picture of Washington we get from the media is so skewed, but he couldn’t share that insight with his TYT audience if he took the deal. They told him, “Outsiders are cool, everybody would love to be an outsider…but we’re not outsiders. We’re insiders. We’re the establishment.”

Such an incredibly revealing piece of insight would be invaluable to share with The Young Turks audience, to give us a better understanding of the way the media world operates. All he had to do to remain at MSNBC as a contributor was to keep this story to himself.

And so came the Moment of Truth. Cenk had to decide which was his higher priority—his television career or his online audience. He chose us.

On behalf of all TYT members and fans, I want to express our sincerest “Thank You” to Cenk for doing the right thing. We won’t get to see him on TV anymore letting loose on the pundits and bringing the frustration of progressives out into the spotlight for the entire Washington establishment to see, but now we’ll have him all to ourselves again as he can turn all his focus and attention back to the show he created and within which he’s not bound by any strings.

I hope this is the dawn of a new era for TYT. Cenk has now been inside the beast—it swallowed him up, he didn’t sit right in its stomach, and it spit him back out—and now he knows a bit more about its inner workings. And now that he’s got nothing left to lose in terms of the establishment media, he can feel even freer to speak his mind even more forcefully than before.

Thanks to Cenk, we now have a better understanding of how the media machine works and why it’s so pathetically ill-suited to make democracy function properly: it’s not that there’s a secret cabal of powerful men in a back-room somewhere calling all the shots—it’s simply that the people in charge of the media world are closely connected to the people in charge in the political world, and as such they won’t allow their friends in the political world to be challenged too strongly. If you only watch Old Media, you will never get an untainted view of politics.

The New Media is the future of journalism, and with the unprecedented success of The Young Turks, Cenk is leading the way. His stint at MSNBC will probably be spun as a failure in the rest of the media, but to us it should be seen as a triumph. Those of us who’ve chosen to get most of our political commentary from Cenk Uygur can now be sure we picked the right guy. The story of how Cenk refused to be gobbled up by the establishment should be told far and wide, and it should help to get more people watching the show. Let’s keep spreading the word, keep recruiting new soldiers, and keep building the movement. One day it might be big enough to accomplish something, even without the help of the mainstream media.

Long live TYT!!!

I know. This whole “the media ignores important substantive issues and focuses only on trivial nonsense”-theme is old and tired, but sometimes the contrast between what ought to be getting attention and what’s getting all the attention is so overwhelmingly stark that it begs to be commented on.

Elected officials have been doing terrible, despicable things throughout history. Even if we focus on just the last ten years, we can point to politicians who have done things as awful as secretly torturing prisoners, stripping citizens of their rights and civil liberties, collaborating with health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to kill legislation that would save lives, taking food off the table of poor families in order to give tax-cuts to corporations, deliberately obstructing an economic recovery just to hurt a president’s chances of re-election, encouraging foreign leaders to enact violently anti-gay policies, starting unnecessary wars to make private contractors richer, and on and on. Every single day, hundreds if not thousands of politicians at various levels of government across the country do horrible, downright evil things.

But one guy sends some dirty pictures to women who aren’t his wife, and that is unacceptable. Torture whoever you like, start as many wars based on phony justifications as you want, take as much money from corporations in exchange for hurting the poor as your heart desires, but flirt with girls on Twitter and you are done, sir!

This week, the whole absurd fiasco over Congressman Weiner’s wiener (much of which I admit he brought on himself by handling it so poorly) completely overshadowed a story involving not just a faaaar more egregious crime than being a bit of a pervert, but also something far more important with far more real-life consequences for the American people.

Politico reported that our old friends the Koch brothers (oil-industry billionaires), through their Tea Party front-group Americans for Prosperity, is launching a nation-wide campaign to blame high gas prices on President Obama. It’s his excessive zeal for environmental protection, they say, his draconian over-regulation of the oil industry, that’s responsible for the high prices at the pump. The only solution? Drill for more oil, obviously.

Never mind that Obama’s record on environmental protection is virtually non-existent. He not only did agree to open up more territory for oil drilling, but even after imposing a perfectly sensible moratorium on drilling after the BP disaster, he’s recently begun handing out new drilling permits in spite of the fact that the problems which caused that disaster haven’t been fixed. Obama’s refusal to “drill baby drill”, as any sane observer would be able to tell, is not the reason for high gas prices.

What is the reason? Who are the real culprits? Ironically, the Koch Brothers themselves might bear the most responsibility.

Most people who know anything about the issue know that that it’s speculation in the oil markets rather than actual worldwide supply of oil that drives gas prices. Not only do corporations like Koch Industries drive up the price of oil by betting on derivatives (much like the betting in the housing market that led to the 2008 financial crisis), but they use their own resources to artificially manipulate the price in order to boost their profits. Back in April, Think Progress explained how this game works:

In 2008, Koch called attention to itself for “contango” oil market manipulation. A commodity market is said to be in contango when future prices are expected to rise, that is, when demand is expected to outstrip supply. Big banks and companies like Koch employ a contango strategy by buying up oil and storing it in massive containers both on land and offshore to lock in the oil for sale later at a set price. In December of 2008, Koch leased “four supertankers to hold oil in the U.S. Gulf Coast to take advantage of rising prices in the months ahead.” Writing about Koch’s contango efforts to artificially drive down supply, Fortune magazine writer Jon Birger noted they could be raising “gasoline prices by anywhere from 20 to 40 cents a gallon” at the time.

This week, Think Progress posted a special report detailing exactly how Koch Industries rose to become the most powerful force in the oil market, from inventing oil derivatives in the first place (there was no such thing before 1986) to aggressively lobbying to deregulate the trading of these derivatives and thus allowing them to basically do to the price of oil whatever they please.

For most people, myself included, this is a complex issue and it’s hard to wrap our heads around it. But it certainly sounds as though the Koch brothers are deliberately keeping gas prices high—deliberately making life more difficult for middle class Americans whose livelihoods depend on their ability to drive to and from work—so that they can then turn around and lie to those people and get them to blame the president so that someone more friendly to their industry can take his place in 2013. That’s almost as despicable as taking a picture of yourself in your underwear…

I could be completely wrong about all this. I’m no financial expert and I know almost nothing about the oil industry, and the leftist sources I get this information from could very well be skewing it to fit their ideology.

Wouldn’t it be helpful if we had some kind of institution in this country that investigated these issues, obtained all the facts, and objectively presented them to the American people with clear explanations so that we’d all have a better understanding of how our system works?

Instead we have a bonanza of talking heads chattering about whether we’ll get to see more embarrassing pictures of a congressman’s junk. But at least most of them preface their comments by saying, “I wish we were talking about something else.”

That says it all, doesn’t it? Even the people caught up in this circus can see how woefully pathetic it is. That’s what happens when “news” is no longer treated as a valuable, essential element of democratic society, but as just another form of entertainment from which to earn a profit.

Of the three main focuses of this blog post—the Koch brothers, the media, and Anthony Weiner—the one who has done the least harm to this country by far is Anthony Weiner.

I know I’m rather late posting this, but I went to Rome a couple of weeks ago and my head remained there long after my body returned. Even now I’m still not in much of a political mood but this story is too big not to comment on.

When I write about President Obama in my blog it’s usually to criticize him, but one thing he clearly deserves credit for is authorizing the operation that finally brought Osama Bin Laden—murderer of thousands of innocent men, women, and children—to justice. It was Obama’s national security policies that allowed us to piece together the information which led to Bin Laden’s location, it was Obama’s foreign policy that made capturing Bin Laden a top priority, and it was Barack Obama himself who ultimately made the decision to perform a surgical strike on the compound where Bin Laden was believed to be hiding rather than blow the whole place to smithereens.

It’s for this last part that I offer President Obama complete and un-tempered praise. The politically safer move would have been to send drones in to blow the whole place up, as doing so would have prevented any risk of harm to American soldiers. Had the ground operation gone wrong, Republicans would have wasted no time in spinning it as Obama’s own personal Bay of Pigs. But the president took the risk, and not only did we get confirmation of Bin Laden’s death as a result—something we could never have gotten with an air-strike—but we also spared the lives of all of the women and children Bin Laden had living at the compound with him. This is how the “war on terror” should have been fought all along—by going after the individuals guilty of terrorism and only those individuals. I am firmly in favor of any approach that enhances our national security without killing children.

The correctness of Obama’s actions in this case was in fact so abundantly clear that at first Republicans didn’t know what to do with it. It’s been their modus operandi for the last two years to simply criticize Obama for every single thing he does no matter what: blame him for not fixing the economy even though your party is obstructing all his efforts to do so, blame him for the health-care mandate even though it was originally your proposal, blame him for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even though your president started them, and on and on. How could they possibly spin this to make Obama look bad?

It wasn’t long before some Republicans discovered a neat way around it. Since they couldn’t blame Obama for doing something they were all in favor of (although some actually did start to argue that perhaps killing Bin Laden was the wrong move), they decided instead to simply put most of the credit elsewhere—namely with the Bush administration, and specifically with regards to torture.

Now giving Bush credit for capturing Bin Laden seems, on the surface, rather laughable. This is the guy who famously said in a press briefing that he was “truly not that concerned” about Bin Laden and that he honestly didn’t “spend much time on him”. Bush argued that Bin Laden was just “one person”, and the war on terror was much bigger than that. It’s exactly this vision that’s brought America to the disastrous point we’re at now. Rather than go after the individuals responsible for 9/11, Bush played right into the terrorists’ hands by spreading our retaliation across the Middle East in the form of two massive ground wars that have not only drained our economy to the point of bankruptcy (as Bin Laden himself explained was his exact objective), but destroyed our international reputation for at least a generation.

And part of what destroyed our international reputation is the use of torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques” as the Bush apologists like to call it. Regardless of what euphemisms they used, things like water-boarding are banned by the Geneva conventions and have been prosecuted as war crimes in the past. People outside the American bubble, not subject to Fox News and talk-radio propaganda, clearly see it for what it is and those already predisposed to hate the United States were provided with more than enough justification for their hatred. It’s not only been testified to by many actual intelligence officials such as Matthew Alexander, but it’s just plain common sense that the use of torture has created far more terrorists than it’s eliminated.

And yet many right-wingers are still so hell-bent on justifying their support for torture that they now trumpet the claim that Bin Laden would not have been captured had it not been for the use of torture. They make this claim not after examining the evidence but before they know anything about it—then grasping at whatever straws they can to justify their claims such as the testimony of former CIA head Jose Rodriguez in TIME magazine that some of the information gained by water-boarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed ultimately led to Bin Laden’s whereabouts. The White House rejects this claim and points out that it took years and many various pieces of information to find Bin Laden. You don’t have to trust the White House to recognize that logic—if torturing KSM in 2003 really led us directly to Bin Laden, why wasn’t he caught until 2011?

Not only that, but we know that KSM was water-boarded 183 times, and multiples sources report that he continuously gave out false or misleading information time after time. He apparently knew of the courier who ultimately led us to Bin Laden but even after being subjected to the water-board one hundred and eighty-three times, he didn’t give him up.

Conservatives act as though the only reason anyone could possibly be opposed to the use of torture is if we’re pacifists, hippies, or terrorist-sympathizers. As though our only objection to torture is that it’s painful for the terrorists and inflicting pain is wrong. Personally, I don’t have any qualms whatsoever about men who murder children getting tortured, and in fact I wouldn’t mind if we used actual forms of torture and cut off their fingers one by one.

The reason I’m opposed to torture is that it doesn’t work and that it’s counter-productive. It sends our intelligence officials off on wild-goose-chases, and when the fact that we torture people leaks out it damages our international reputation and provokes more violence against us. This is so obvious that it hurts, yet the media still treats this like it’s an actual debate and the war-criminals in the Bush administration have a legitimate point of view.

I understand why people like the idea of terrorists getting tortured, but because they don’t want to believe their support is rooted in pure vindictiveness they desperately cling to the claim that torture works—which simply isn’t true and won’t be true no matter how often they insist that it is.

It’s a shame that so many are so blinded by ideology and identity politics that they are incapable of giving credit to political enemies or accepting blame for those on their side. I am not a fan of Barack Obama by any stretch of the imagination but for succeeding where his predecessor failed in the effort to catch Bin Laden—and by preventing the deaths of innocent civilians in the process—he deserves as much praise as I can give him.

Those who refuse to acknowledge that Barack Obama could possibly ever do anything right under any circumstances and instead cling to the belief that torture was the reason we got Bin Laden are living lives of cognitive dissonance where facts don’t matter and beliefs are simply a matter of what feels good to them.

It’s our responsibility to not let these people control the debate, or the next conservative president won’t hesitate to use torture as well. It would have been best if we’d prosecuted the Bush administration war criminals as soon as we’d had the chance, but since that will never happen the best we can do is try to ensure that it never happens again, and that means making judgments based on what the facts tell us is true, rather than merely what we’d like to be true.

We tend to take the conditions of the world during our short life-spans for granted. Unless we live through some kind of earth-shattering, world-changing event, we fall into the trap of believing—if only subconsciously—that things were always more or less the same as they are now.

I love the end of the year, as it’s a time when writers and journalists take a step back and try to put the year in a broader historical context. This year there will undoubtedly be a lot of talk about Obama’s fall from grace, the worsening conditions of the middle class, and the triumph of corporations and financial institutions over the threat of increased regulation. To really understand the significance of these things, one must look back not merely to the beginning of the current administration or even the last decade, but all the way back to the start of the previous century.

I’m about half-way through Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (which ought to be required reading for every high school student in America), and I’m struck by the parallels between the conditions of the working class at the turn of the 20^th century and the direction things are heading in now. Back then, and indeed for the vast majority of American history, there was no ‘middle class’ to speak of. Everything was controlled by a handful of powerful business interests who had more wealth than the bottom 80% of Americans combined, and that bottom 80% worked for slave wages if they were lucky enough to even have a job.

The ‘middle class’ as we know it has really only existed for a brief shining moment following the New Deal and subsequent economic boom resulting from our making it through WWII without a scratch. Nearly everyone alive today has experienced what life in America was like with a relatively equitable distribution of wealth, and it seems unthinkable that the middle class could ever disappear. Our complacency is slowly allowing the same handful of powerful business interests who had a chokehold over the country for most of its history to regain their former position. The middle class is in its death pangs, and unless the people act it won’t be long before we slide back into what seems to be the natural state of affairs in a civilized society: a few enormously wealthy and powerful people at the top, a small class of moderately wealthy bankers, lawyers, and politicians who preserve the status quo, and the masses at the bottom suffering and toiling through their nasty, brutish and short lives.

But aside from the parallels between then and where we’re heading now, there are two important differences:

1- Things were much worse back then. We may think we have it bad now, but at least there is a minimum wage, an 8-hour workday with a 2-day weekend, strict safety regulations for dangerous occupations and legal recourse against negligent employers, and a social safety net for the unemployed (at least those who’ve been unemployed for fewer than 99 weeks). It’s horrifying to read about young women forced to work 16-hour days at a factory for bread-crumbs, only to be burned alive because the owner didn’t want to pay the cost of making the doors open outward. We may lose a handful of workers each year due to negligence (see Massey Energy, BP) but there was once a time when they were dying by the thousands. And while things like out-sourcing may drive our wages down now, at least most of us can still afford to buy things other than food and clothing.

Our taking such things for granted leads to the second major difference between then and now:

2- The people back then were willing to fight for better conditions. Every single major improvement in the lives of the lower classes had to be paid for with strikes, protests, and occasionally even blood. Factory owners didn’t agree to an 8-hour workday out of the goodness of their hearts. They didn’t start paying the extra cost to ensure their workers’ safety out of pure human compassion. Workers had to strike to get just a few of their demands met, and then strike again to get the rest. They had to join forces with workers of other industries and take to the streets to get the ruling class to treat them with basic human dignity. Most of the time, these protests were brutally suppressed and many brave men and women (as well as far too many children) paid the ultimate price for the cause. But gradually, the ruling class was forced to recognize that it could not get away with treating people like cattle, and small victory by small victory our ancestors transformed this country into the one we’ve always known.

It is this country—the country in which just about everyone has an equal shot at a good life, where hard work leads almost invariably to the rewards of a good home and healthy family, where the prosperity of the wealthy is shared with the workers who allow them to generate that wealth—that we were taught to be proud of as children. And it is something to be proud of. Our forefathers fought very hard for it, and many are still struggling to preserve it.

But we have to understand that this America did not always exist and there’s no guarantee that it always will. Things may not be nearly as bad as they were in the year 1900 but there’s nothing to stop us from returning to those conditions other than the sheer force of our combined will.

That means more than just going to the voting booth every 2-4 years. With the exception of FDR, not a single American president has ever used his position to truly fight the upper classes on behalf of the masses, and the current president has demonstrated that he won’t do so either. He is behaving like most presidents, attempting to balance the competing interests of the country’s various powers, his primary concern being the maintenance of the status quo.

Were things not trending so sharply downwards for the middle class, this would be perfectly acceptable. But we’re standing on the precipice of losing the ground that our forefathers fought so hard to gain, and maintaining course now is akin to class suicide.

I worry that current generations are too complacent, that we take our lives of relative comfort and luxury for granted, and that we therefore feel no compulsion to take to the streets the way our forefathers did. We circulate online petitions, call our representatives, make donations to political campaigns and so on, but all of these things are a poor substitute for genuine action.

To be fair, our ancestors did not have 24-hour cable news channels to compete with—entities that either serve to distract the American people from what’s most important, or (in the case of Fox News) actually hoodwink them into siding with the upper classes against their fellow citizens. But we still have the advantage of a free and open internet, at least for the time being.

Our ancestors also had the advantage of necessity. They had no choice—either take to the streets or starve. Demand more consideration from their employers or risk being burned alive.

We’ve heard of pre-emptive war. Can we have a pre-emptive revolution? Can we get enough Americans to recognize the danger of what might lie ahead for us to draw the proper lines in the sand and threaten to put the entire system in jeopardy unless pledges are made to preserve what our ancestors fought for? Hands off the minimum wage! Hands off Social Security! Hands off the inflation of financial bubbles! Hands off affordable housing! Hands off affordable education! Hands off patients’ rights! Hands off workers’ rights!

Perhaps we have to wait until we completely lose these things before the people stand up and fight for them again. Perhaps the pendulum needs to complete a full swing back in the other direction before it can start swinging back. We have the misfortune of living during the back-end of the swing. But we do have the power to stop it and drive it back the other way if we take a lesson from our ancestors and fight now before it’s too late. We have an obligation to them to preserve what they fought for. We have a responsibility to the next generations to prevent them from being worse off than we are.

I just hope we can recognize that before it’s too late.

Thanks to all of the lefty-organizations I get e-mails from, the first piece of news to greet me this morning was that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was suspended without pay for failing to obtain permission to privately donate money to a couple of Democratic candidates he supported.

Politico reported Friday that Olbermann had donated $2,400 each to Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, and to Kentucky Senate contender Jack Conway. While NBC News policy does not prohibit employees from donating to political candidates, it requires them to obtain prior approval from NBC News executives before doing so.

My first reaction was, “Seriously? No…seriously?” The whole rationale behind any type of restrictions on a journalist’s freedom to privately donate to political campaigns is to prevent the appearance of bias on the part of the news organization. If this were the anchor of a prime-time network news broadcast, it would be somewhat understandable. You want the people watching to believe they’re getting an objective presentation of the facts, and if you know the anchor has donated money to one side you’ll know he leans in a certain direction.

But this is Keith fucking Olbermann, for fuck’s sake! Did anyone think he was giving people a purely objective presentation of the facts? Were people somehow missing the opinion-laced questions he asks in every single interview? Did everyone tune out during the frequent special comments segments in which he passionately rants about issues he cares about? Or how about the nightly “Worst Persons in the World” segment? How many times does he have to say, “You, sir, are a disgrace” before the audience realizes the man has an opinion?!

This is utterly absurd. Countdown is MSNBC’s most popular program and to suspend its host for something so trivial is nonsensical. Yes, they are a private company and were within their rights to do so, but they were also well within their rights to let him off with a slap on the wrist.

But that may in fact be the calculation. Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC and the man who made the call, may simply be responding to the sentiment expressed in Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity that MSNBC is the liberal equivalent of Fox News. This notion has been thoroughly debunked all over the blogosphere and by Olbermann himself, but it still persists in much of the minds of the public and Griffin may have figured that this move would do well to push back against it.

So he temporarily suspends Keith, making his network appear to be deeply concerned with journalistic integrity, and then brings him back after a sufficient interval. Keith gets some extra publicity and triumphantly returns with a significant ratings boost. Everybody wins.

But somehow I don’t think this was a calculated move on Griffin’s part. I think it was a knee-jerk, Shirley Sherrod-firing kind of thing, and he’ll be kicking himself for it in a few days if he isn’t already doing so. More than a hundred thousand people have already signed a petition demanding his reinstatement, and the liberal blogosphere is exploding with calls for a temporary boycott of MSNBC. This smells like more of a stupid move than a sly one.

You’ve probably heard the news already:

WASHINGTON — With Republicans hoping to recapture a number of statehouses in November, the media conglomerate headed by Rupert Murdoch is inserting itself into the races in bold fashion with a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association.

Yes, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News as well a few print outlets, has given a million dollars to help republicans get elected. This completely contradicts the whole “Fair and Balanced” façade that Fox News has been trumpeting since its inception to great effect. People who watch Fox News religiously actually believe that it’s not conservative propaganda, that it really provides a balanced political perspective. Repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it.

To keep up the façade, News Corp. needs an excuse:

But News Corporation executives said the political priorities at the Republican Governors Association and its emphasis on low taxes and economic growth dovetailed with the company’s own concerns. “News Corp. has always believed in the power of free markets, and organizations like the R.G.A., which have a pro-business agenda, support our priorities at this most critical time for our economy,” said Jack Horner, a company spokesman.

Right—it’s not that you support one political party over another, it’s that you support one political party’s agenda over the other. Nuance, people.

I can just imagine the Fox News people saying, “Look, we’re perfectly willing to report favorably on democrats, but only if they push for policies we like.” See—fair and balanced.

What Fox News and its audience don’t seem to understand is that to actually be “balanced” you have to give equal treatment to different perspectives, not just different parties. If you give the perspective from the Republican Party and then the perspective from the Democratic Party, that’s not balance—especially because there are so many people to the left of the Democratic Party in this country because that party has moved so close to the center. The same can’t be said for the Republican Party anymore, as Fox News has pushed it to the right-wing fringe.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s a free country and we believe in freedom of speech. If you can make a lot of money by presenting the news through a conservative-tilted lens, then go ahead and have at it.

Just don’t pretend that you’re fair and balanced. Don’t repeat the bullshit “We report, you decide” lie over and over again when you know damned well that you’ve already decided long before you report.

If you get all of your news from Fox News, fine. That’s great. I hope you enjoy it. Just don’t act like you’re well-informed or that you have a balanced perspective. All you’re doing is reinforcing the opinions you already have, and maybe that’s what you’re after. Maybe you have no interest in trying to look at things differently. All I ask is that you admit it, and recognize how that makes your opinion less legitimate than those of us who really do have an open mind.

Let me preface this by saying that I like Keith Olbermann, that I think he often does great work, with Monday’s special comment, “There is no ‘Ground Zero Mosque’” standing as a shining example.

But while I was watching the show last night, he said something that made a few synapses in my brain burst. He brought on Eugene Robinson (whom I also like) to discuss the mosque issue and he opened with this question:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

“What have we not been talking about during these 24-hour news cycles that have been commandeered by the so-called mosque controversy?” he asks.

Robinson responds by listing a few of the more important issues that the media should be talking about, including the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the upcoming mid-term elections.

I felt like shouting, “Well, why don’t you talk about these things? You have a television show! You can talk about whatever you want. You decided to devote the first fifteen minutes of your program to talk about something that you don’t think is worth talking about, and then complain about how this is all the media is talking about!”

In all fairness, Keith Olbermann doesn’t determine the news cycle any more than I do. He just reports and comments on whatever happens to be in the news cycle, and he does do a great job of keeping certain stories like the BP oil catastrophe in the headlines long after the rest of the media has lost interest.

But in the words of Eric Cantor, “Come on.” Seriously—you are obviously aware that this whole controversy is just a strategic political move on the part of the right-wing to divide the country, get the left and right to yell at each other, and distract people from the important issues. So why be a part of it? Why not decide that you’re not going to fall into that trap—that you’ve said your piece on the controversy and now you’re going to focus on more important matters like what the government is or is not doing to help the economy and what we are or are not doing to bring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a responsible end.

Oh, and did you know that Pakistan is quickly turning into the lost city of Atlantis? Yes, millions of Muslims are suffering while America is too stuck in this anti-Muslim tizzy to notice or care.

Even I am somewhat guilty of my own charge here, as I could be writing about Pakistan but instead I’m bitching about the media bitching about itself. My only excuse is that I’m a blogger that nobody reads, so it’s not my responsibility to determine the news cycle. Still…just…come on.