It was an onslaught of savvy PR tactics yesterday that brought the Susan G. Komen Foundation to its knees, apparently prompting the organization’s retreat today from its initial decision to cut its funding to Planned Parenthood.  As Politico reported this morning:

On a day when the breast cancer charity’s top official made the rounds with the national media, insisting the organization’s decision to stop giving grants to Planned Parenthood wasn’t political, the firestorm only got worse. Top Democrats piled on; the head of the Komen chapter in Los Angeles quit; and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is giving a $250,000 matching gift to Planned Parenthood.

The Atlantic Wire reports that the Susan G. Komen foundation’s website was even hacked, for some period displaying a banner that had been changed from “help us get 26.2 or 13.1 miles closer to a world without breast cancer“  to read, “help us run over poor women on our way to the bank.”  And the long repeated myth that the current Komen CEO takes home a half a million dollar salary was brought back to life yesterday – even though the truth is that Komen’s current CEO, Nancy Brinker, takes home $0 in annual salary.

But hey, breast cancer isn’t supposed to be political, right?

Officials with the Susan G. Komen foundation had insisted the initial decision was never political, that it was about providing more direct mammography screening services for women, according to Nancy Brinker, the charity’s founder and CEO.  From Politico:

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If you’re a Twitter user, you might start getting notifications just like this from Twitter in the very near future if you tweet something that some foreign governments don’t like.

On Thursday, the social media company announced on its blog that, effective immediately, it has implemented the ability to withhold specific content from certain geographical regions in order to respond to government censoring without affecting its entire base of users.

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page, http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.

According to PC Magazine, Twitter will determine which content to withhold in much the same way it does DMCA notices, albeit proactively. (more…)

Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere were on fire yesterday, with the news that Homeland Security Is Monitoring The Drudge Report, The New York Times, and other various websites.  The headline sparked burning blog posts all across the web, some bordering on hysterics. Type “Homeland Security” and “Drudge” into Google and perform a search within the last twenty four hours, and you’ll find 56,700 results at this writing.

The story was borne out of an upcoming privacy compliance review from the Department of Homeland Security regarding one of the agency’s initiatives that entails monitoring “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards.”  There’s just one important detail missing here:  the program was actually implemented in January of 2010.

The Volokh Conspiracy, a well-known group blog of law professors, puts the hype in check:

Matt Drudge and The Atlantic are hyperventilating, and Mark Hosenball of Reuters is bragging, about what The Atlantic calls an “exclusive” report that DHS “routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report.”

There are just two problems with this exclusive news report.

It isn’t news and it isn’t exclusive.

Readers of this blog could have learned exactly the same thing in one of my posts from, uh, February of 2010.

Here’s what I said two years ago:

With his usual nudge-and-wink, Matt Drudge invites us to be dismayed that “BIG SIS” — his moniker for Janet Napolitano — is “Monitoring Web Sites for Terror and Disaster Info.” Drudge links to a story saying that DHS will be monitoring social media like Twitter, as well as websites like Drudge, to keep abreast of events during the Winter Olympics. The source of the story is a twelve-page “Privacy Impact Assessment” issued by DHS.

This isn’t the first Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on DHS’s use of social media. A few weeks earlier, DHS wrote a similar assessment of using social media during Haitian rescue operations.

I am indeed dismayed, but not for Drudge’s reasons.  True, it’s disappointing that neither the Volokh Conspiracy nor www.skatingonstilts.com is deemed worthy of government monitoring.  But what’s really dismaying is that DHS and its Privacy Office felt obliged to labor over two separate and painfully obvious privacy assessments just to do things that you and I would do by simply firing up our browsers.

That’s it.  The story is that people at DHS are, gasp, browsing the Internet. As I said then, there’s no scandal, other than the electrons wasted by DHS agonizing over the privacy implications of browsing public Internet sources to find out what’s happening in the world.

The program is referred to as the Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative (pdf), and it was first implemented to monitor activity and news during events like those mentioned above.

Some seem especially concerned about the portion of the initiative that pertains to actually retaining personally identifiable information.

The DHS Privacy Office (PRIV) and OPS/NOC decided to further broaden the program’s capability to collect additional information, including limited instances of personally identifiable information (PII). As such, a Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) Update5 and new DHS/OPS-004 – Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative System of Records Notice (SORN)6 were issued on January 6, 2011 and February 1, 2011 respectively and are the basis for this Privacy Compliance Review (PCR).

But upon close inspection of “personally identifiable information,” the activity is really no different from what you or I might do to gather our own news interests.

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Keith Olbermann is making waves. Again.

The former MSNBC host has pulled out the big guns, bringing in Hollywood (and gaming) superlawyer Patricia Glaser “to ‘determine his rights’ in his five-year contract,” after his public spat with Current TV bosses, a source tells The Wrap.

Meanwhile, executives at Current TV said that relations – especially those with Current CEO Joel Hyatt – were at a breaking point after deteriorating over the past several months.

“I hope Keith is part of our future, but it’s up to Keith,” an executive with Current who declined to be identified told TheWrap. “Keith set us in the right direction and we’re on that path now … and as I’ve learned over the years, everybody is replaceable.”

Olbermann was conspicuously absent from special election coverage of the Iowa Caucuses at Current TV, where the notably cantankerous host has held the title of Chief News Officer since his abrupt departure from MSNBC last summer. After his “Countdown” program, which was migrated from MSNBC to Current TV, was pre-empted Tuesday night by the GOP primary coverage, sans Olbermann, details of a breaking point began unfolding to the public.

It initially appeared that the programming change came as a surprise to Olbermann. On Tuesday, he tweeted what implied the return of Countdown following its holiday hiatus, only to later tweet a correction, directing his 360,000+ followers to defer questions to his bosses.

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Recently, the U.S Census Bureau released a report that creates a new designation of “low income” in order to “better reflect the distribution of poverty in the US.”  The Associated Press ran with a headline, “Census shows 1 in 2 people are poor or low-income,” and scores of other media outlets followed suit with equally dire ledes.  In NJ, one outlet reported, “Census: Nearly half of Americans live in poverty,” while Russia Today reported that “Half of America is officially poor“:

“While it’s no surprise that nearly 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, new statistics from the US Census show that almost 100 million others are counted as low-income citizens, making half of the population of America officially poor.”

But analysts at the U.S. Census Bureau district office in Los Angeles are reporting today that perhaps journalists misunderstood. and over 300 online news reports simply got the story wrong.

KNBC / NBC in Los Angeles reports:

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On July 26th, 2011, Adbusters posted a page on its website that asked the following question:  “Is America Ripe for a Tahrir Moment?”  Only days later, Al Gore appeared on CurrentTV’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann program to discuss what everyday, ordinary, non-astroturf Americans who happen to be angry can do to get involved.

Surprise!  Guess what Al just so happened to suggest?

Here’s the transcript:

KEITH OLBERMANN:

“Obviously the first suggestion relevant to this would be to exercise every vote that one has available to one in the next sets of elections. What else besides that do you recommend to those of us who are angry, and who have been angry throughout this whole process?”

AL GORE:

“Well, I enjoyed your special comment last night, Keith, and I want to focus on one particular suggestion you had about using the wonderful tools that are newly available for the reinvigoration of democracy.  Now, they’ve been around for a while and more and more people have been  getting involved.”

“We need to have an American spring. You know, the Arab Spring — the nonviolent part of it isn’t finished yet — but we need to have an American Spring, a kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change, where people from the grassroots get involved again.”

“Not in the Tea Party style. There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party, I understand that, but that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch brothers, and promoted on Fox News and turned into a stalking horse for this right-wing agenda that a lot of people have been trying to push on this country for a long time. What’s sacrosanct for them is to have absolutely no tax increases on the wealthiest Americans — they are at a low level now — and to try to shrink down government so they can get it out of the way of powerful corporations and special interests, so that they can have free rein. And the Supreme Court has, of course, has now declared that they’re persons and make these secret contributions.”
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When news broke of alleged voter intimidation involving the New Black Panthers Party in the 2008 election, Media Matters for America (MMfA) launched a relentless push back against the charges, resulting in almost 8,000 MMfA site specific Google hits in which MMfA attacked virtually anyone who attempted to report on the controversy, while elevating any reporting that minimized it, or the Department of Justice’s decision to drop the case.

Meanwhile, a former MMfA Director of External Affairs, Xochitl Hinojosa, who had actually joined the Department of Justice in July of 2009 as a Public Affairs Specialist, took an active role in pushing back against the story from witin DOJ.

Apparently, the Justice Department is going by George Orwell’s famous Animal Farm ending:

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” “We can only take action where we have legal authority,” wrote DOJ spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa in a December 2010 e-mail to The Washington Times Water Cooler. She continues: “As stated in the website below, we are statutorily authorized to initiate suits under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, and under Title III of the American with Disabilities Act.

It’s not unusual for D.C. professionals to move in and out of government positions. Yet given MMfA’s acute focus on the Panthers/DOJ story, Hinojosa’s involvement with and ties to MMfA invite speculation as to what extent MMfA and DOJ might have cooperated in pushing back against a potentially explosive story for the Obama administration.

Indeed, today, MMfA is already attacking J. Christian Adams and his forthcoming book on Obama’s beleaguered Department of Justice, which has shown itself, in the Panthers case and in others, as one of the most politicized DOJ’s in modern history. (For more on new evidence linking Obama directly to the New Black Panthers, see this exclusive at Big Government today: Shock Photos: Candidate Obama Appeared And Marched With New Black Panther Party in 2007.)

Hinojosa has at times been quoted by Media Matters on a variety of stories that pertain to the DOJ.  Yet the organization does not mention that she used to work for it, nor is that information available on MMfA’s current website. This 2009 cached snapshot of the Media Matters website confirms her tenure there:

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There has been a good deal of discussion of late about whether or not the IRS should launch an investigation into Media Matters’ tax-exempt status. In today’s part two of a three part series from FOX Business’ Elizabeth MacDonald, details of the civilian complaint filed by C. Boyden Gray demonstrate why the former White House counsel to President George W. Bush believes that Media Matters should have its tax-exempt status yanked.

Citing a pattern of “unlawful conduct,” Gray writes in his petition, which FOX Business has obtained, that the nonprofit has “executed a partisan strategy” in violation of U.S. tax law as it exists “no longer to educate the public but, rather, to declare ‘war on FOX,’” Gray says, quoting from an interview its founder, David Brock, gave to the website Politico.

Also unlawful, Gray says, is the nonprofit’s reported goal to “disrupt” the commercial interests of News Corp. (News Corp. is the parent of FOX News and FOX Business.)

Read the whole article, Former White House Counsel to IRS: Pull Media Matters’ Tax-Exempt Status.

Among the activity noted in the complaint: (more…)

As the Weinergate story leaves behind many unanswered questions, the Twitterverse is not likely to get many truthful answers – not as long as Joan Walsh has anything to do about it.  The Salon.com editor had some harsh words for reporters who tried to cover the story from an angle that didn’t suit her own anti-Breitbart bias.

Over Memorial Day weekend, the Weinergate story developed in the wee hours of the night on Friday evening and early Saturday morning, when a lewd photo purported to be from Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account surfaced on Twitter.  Given that the story was literally unfolding on Twitter, where thousands of other users were witnessing the now infamous tweet in real time, it wasn’t exactly a “sit and wait” situation.  In the age of social media, stories make themselves – good or bad, one tweet can erupt into a firestorm in the blink of instant.  This presents both a challenge and an opportunity.  On one hand, media can wait and verify every fact, but at Twitter speed, the story will move far more quickly than standard fact finding and requests for comments can possibly occur.  On the other hand, new media journalism can fill that void and get ahead of such a story before the firestorm gets out of hand.

And this is exactly what the Big sites did when Weinergate erupted.  BigGovernment.com ran with a post just before 12:30am on Saturday, headlined “Weinergate: Congressman Claims ‘Facebook Hacked’ as Lewd Photo Hits Twitter.”  Given that the story was in its infancy but was moving so quickly online, editors merely presented the facts as they were known at the time, indicating that it was a developing story.  They also decided to publish the tweet and photo, but took caution by redacting all of the personal information of the young woman for whom the tweet was supposedly intended. (more…)

Hitler represents of one of the most atrocious periods in the history of the entire world.  His twelve year reign had a profound impact on the lives of many.  Throughout the years of 1933 and 1945, Hitler invaded ten countries , including Poland, where one side of my stepfather’s family lived until 1940, when they were forcefully removed and put into concentration camps.  The first husband of his mother was a Polish officer, and shortly after Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi Soviet Non-Aggression pact, he and other Polish officers were taken from their families, brought into the Katyn Forest, and summarily executed – simply for being Polish officers.

Under the Nazi regime, it is estimated that as many as between 11 million and 17 million civilians were killed – nearly 6 million of those exterminated solely for being Jewish.  It’s been only 78 years since Hitler and the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and their reign remains an open wound  – in the context of history, this is still a very recent occurrence.  Survivors of this period are still with us today, as are first and second generation family members , many of whom are right here in the United States.

That’s why on May 18^{th ,} when I saw a post in the Guardian titled Andrew Breitbart’s ‘Electronic Brownshirts’, my hair stood on end.  Who could write such a title?  The author turned out to be none other than Amy Goodman, who hosts the famously popular daily progressive news program “Democracy Now“, and is also frequently referred to as a respected “progressive journalist“, investigative reporter and peace advocate.  It was a post in defense of the controversial labor studies course that was the recent focus of a BigGovernment expose.

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By now, you’ve all seen it.  Gawker has reported on it, as has Huffington Post and Jake Tapper, among others.

It was tweeted this afternoon from the official Secret Service Twitter account and subsequently deleted by its author.  But Twitter has no mercy … delete can only delete if no eyes ever saw it in the first place.  Unfortunately for one Secret Service employee, eyes saw it.

I called the Secret Service Office of Public Affairs to ask for a comment.  I asked the question and almost immediately after identifying myself, was transferred to the voice mail of spokesman Robert Novy.  Luckily, Jake Tapper had already reached the office and received an official statement:

“An employee with access to the Secret Service’s Twitter account, who mistakenly believed they were on their personal account, posted an unapproved and inappropriate tweet,” Special Agent in Charge Edwin M. Donovan said in a statement to ABC News. “The tweet did not reflect the views of the U.S. Secret Service and it was immediately removed. We apologize for this mistake, and the user no longer has access to our official account. “

My first question was, ‘why is the Secret Service monitoring FOX News in the first place’?  But then I realized that such agencies monitor news outlets all the time – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t know which person in Congress just said something stupid that might prompt a foreign entity, or perhaps terrorists, to get really pissed at us.  And for other generally harmless reasons, too, of course.  It’s their public affairs staff doing the monitoring.  And besides, it’s Twitter.  We all know, Twitter is a public sandbox – you get in and play, and anyone can see you, and play with you.

I will admit however, I was slightly irked when I saw this in Jake Tapper’s report:

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There’s been quite the kerfuffle of late over AOL/Huffington Post’s decision to permanently yank Andrew Breitbart from the cushy high exposure of its front page.  Liberals voiced immediate discontent in HuffPo’s decision to include Breitbart as a contributor in the first place.  Even after Color of Change, the online (un)civil rights organization founded by Van Jones and James Rucker, launched an online letter writing campaign in protest, HuffPo stood by its decision, citing its desire to broaden the site’s political viewpoints and encourage civil debate, something it says was accomplished in Breitbart’s first two pieces.

Strangely, it wasn’t anything Breitbart wrote in either of those first two posts that got him the heave-ho – it was comments he’d made in a phone interview to another site, The Daily Caller, for which HuffPo saw fit to admonish as an ad-hominem attack that violated its editorial policy.

I think we all fully recognize that HuffPo is its own entity, it can do as it pleases.  As a libertarian minded individual, I embrace self-regulation.  But there are instances where certain actions defy all logic, and in my view, this is one of them.  The concept of an ex post facto “no ad hominem attacks” rule is not only ludicrous, it leaves the door wide open to show just how arbitrary and desperate this decision really was.  We’ll all be pouring through HuffPo’s list of bloggers and pointing out instances where they’ve committed the atrocity of ad-hominem attacks on other websites, radio or television.  In fact, my colleague Alex Marlow has thoroughly busted Van Jones for this violation already.

All this left me wondering what else is driving such arbitrary decision making over at HuffPo.  Hearkening back to the anti-Glenn Beck campaign  that Color of Change and its partner CREDO have been running, my attention was diverted to Color of Change’s other co-founder, James Rucker.

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You may remember President Obama’s recent call for civil discourse this past January.  Well, it appears that the Left is still very much struggling with the #newtone online.  Unless, of course, you consider a persistent stream of steady death threats against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker a display of etiquette straight from the Emily Post Etipedia of manners.

Here’s but a small sampling from the #caring Tweeters:
(NOTE:  I prefer to view the video with music like this as accompaniment…)

Initially, I’d written a summary here of some of the details around Gov. Walker’s proposal, including some of the positive highlights, like granting employees the right to choose whether or not to contribute dues to a labor union.  But then I decided, “nahhhh….why bother?”  Agree or disagree with some, all or none of the Governor’s proposal, everyone has something to contribute to the conversation.  But death threats are NOT an acceptable part of ANY conversation.

I’d thought we’d learned that by now, after documenting the same exact behavior in January.  With all the Big-Brother Twitter monitoring the Soros flunkies are doing out there, you’d think they would have posted and condemned this by now.

So much for that #newtone.

Video h/t Joe Haas and Kim Hedum.

Think Progress, a project of John Podesta’s Center for American Progress Action Fund, has been fiercely pushing a story about leaked emails that suggest the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was aware of espionage work being performed against American citizens by one of its private security firms.  The story first launched a few days ago as an exclusive on the progressive blog, when it reported that hacked emails obtained from the pro-WikiLeaks group “Anonymous” reveal that the US Chamber conspired to sabotage opposition progressive activist groups including ThinkProgress, Change to Win, SEIU, BradBlog and StopTheChamber, among others.  By this morning, the story was all over the lefty blogosphere, on sites such as AlterNet, Huffington Post, Raw Story, and in a press release from Kevin Zeese, our fan from IndictBreitbart.org.

But the reports are noticeably silent on one crucial component of the story.

The primary focus of the Chamber’s investigation was actually none other than the organization known as Velvet Revolution, and one of its co-founders, Brett Kimberlin.

Recognize that name?  That’s because we told you all about this convicted domestic terrorist, known as the Speedway Bomber, who in 1981 was finally convicted of a week-long bombing spree in Indianapolis, IN in which eight separate bombs caused extensive property damage, destroyed a police cruiser, and severely maimed a man, eventually leading to that man’s suicide.  In short, a community was terrorized for a week, and a potentially indirectly related murder remains unsolved today.  Indiana certainly remembers Brett Kimberlin.

As it turns out, despite the months of deafening silence on the left in response to questions about the ally they’ve so warmly embraced, some bigger characters apparently had taken notice.

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As the protests in Egypt have raged on now for more than a week, President Obama and members of his administration continue to practice restraint in their communications and careful selection of the words that are spoken.  Hillary Clinton has cautioned against anything that could increase chaos.  U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told television networks that the “complex, very difficult situation in Egypt requires careful progress toward a peaceful transition to democracy rather than any sudden or violent change that could undermine the aspirations of the protesters.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs echoed the sentiments that while Egypt needs to change, it’s not the place of the United States to publicly support or oppose the removal of Mubarak.  Likewise, most Republicans are also on the same page as the Obama administration, speaking out in support of democratic reforms in Egypt, yet taking great care not to back or oppose Mubarak either way – at least not publicly.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “I don’t have any criticism of President [Barack] Obama or Secretary [Hillary] Clinton at this point.  It’s important for U.S. officials “to speak as one voice during this crisis.”  As many have noted, Egypt is perhaps one of the only issues that’s rendered an overwhelmingly bi-partisan response.

But one man in particular is not exactly in agreement with that bi-partisan response:  George Soros.  And he’s warning us to toe the line – his line, that is.

The leftist billionaire who made his fortune on the back of US capitalism is taking aim at all the “rigid and ideological supporters of Israel” and “the religious right” for standing in the way of democracy for Egypt.

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Last week, I was enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee while perusing my local New Jersey newspapers online.  That moment of serenity promptly evaporated when I was jolted by a headline that read, “Stop the Vitriol of the Right? A Lesson From the ACORN Tragedy.”

What?  This wasn’t the Huffington Post or Media Matters, it was my local NJ online news site.  After reading it, I initially dismissed the post, shrugging it off as an asinine tirade by the author, John Atlas, who also lives here in NJ and is a very active supporter of ACORN and hostile to any views that aren’t on the far left.  While I almost expected the lecture about promoting civility in the wake of the Tucson tragedy, it was the ugliness of his rant against the right and the stretch he made to connect it all to ACORN that befuddled me.  Nearly a week later, that post was still on my mind.

Then came the left’s latest meme against free speech, and this bizarre charade of hoisting Frances Fox Piven as their newest martyr.  Ah, now it made sense.

To start with, Atlas’ post was certainly interestingly timed. Just last month, he was making the rounds promoting his new book, “Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group.” In this interview below, he ends by saying,

“We need organizations that are going to give voice to the poor so that our democratic system works better, and that is the biggest tragedy. And to the extent that Breitbart and his gang undermine that effort, I think that’s a disaster.”

(Part 1 of the video is here.  Take notice of who’s conducting the interview, by the way.  That would be IndictBreitbart.org, the campaign run by Velvet Revolution. We wrote about them and their co-founders, one of whom is a convicted domestic terrorist.  The irony speaks for itself.)

Then of course, there is Tucson.

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Ever since Saturday’s terrible tragedy in Tucson, Arizona, conservatives have endured, to use my colleague Dana Loesch’s words, a massive orchestration of defamation against them.  And of all the vitriol that has been hurled around the internet, no other target has sustained more of it than Sarah Palin.

Within minutes of the shooting Saturday, the onslaught of inflamed rhetoric was immediate.  And by the time Sheriff Clarence Dupnik made his now infamous accusations against right-wing radio and TV, which he’s since confirmed are nothing more than opinion, he’d stoked up the hate level online to a boiling point.  I watched as so many on the left took to Twitter to join the herd.  It eerily reminded me of my college days – it was like our Greek initiation rituals, when hopeful fraternity pledges take to public places to perform acts of stupidity as proof of loyalty to their organization.  I was stunned by the hundreds and hundreds of brazenly stupid threats of death against a woman whom most of these people had never even met.

Others were just as shocked.  In fact, a couple of conservatives on Twitter – @coyotered9 and @JoeKenHa – were so disgusted that they decided to collect just a sampling of these public tweets and compile them into a slide show of sorts.

The result was this video, Twitter Users Wish Death on Sarah Palin, originally posted at YouTube.  It’s since been cross-posted on Vimeo because of a takedown notice they received from YouTube in response to a privacy complaint.  That’s right, one of the haters who was brave enough to publicly tweet her yearning for the death of a former Governor and Vice Presidential candidate is now suddenly concerned for her Twitter privacy.

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The blogosphere is all abuzz over yesterday’s comments from Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, in which he opined about the annoyance of today’s cable news television programming.  Apparently cable news gets in the way of his desire for American citizens to do nothing but worship our government, rather than challenge it.

We need new catalysts for quality news and entertainment programming.  I hunger for quality news.  I’m tired of the right and the left.  There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: Out. Off. End. Goodbye. It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future.

Many are making this solely about the issue of the Fairness Doctrine or of Net Neutrality.  And to some extent, this is true.  But there really is a much larger picture at play here – a transition period to government-run media.

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Bush Derangement Syndrome is rampant this week, triggered by the release of former President George W. Bush’s book Decision Points.  I’m almost waiting for George Soros to jump back onto CNN and compare the former President with the Nazi regime again.

Big Journalism editor Dana Loesch points out the comical hypocrisy going on over at the Huffington Post.  While several of the tabloid-like site’s contributors have been criticizing one thing or another about the book, one in particular is prattling on about what he dubs as plagiarism in Decision Points.  Let’s just say, if you’re going to snitch, at least make sure your own crib’s in order.  Dana reminds readers that Arianna Huffington is herself no stranger to plagiarism.

Besides, a closer look at the post reveals more about the post’s author, Ryan Grim, than it does anything else.  Grim seems barely able to temper his disdain for the former President as he inventories a barrage of so-called “for instances”, like this one. [emphasis Grim's]

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This morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, Lawrence O’Donnell proudly declared the obvious:  he’s a socialist.

After hearing the news today about the suspension of Keith Olbermann from the same network, I can’t say anyone’s all that surprised.

O’Donnell’s proclamation was made when “The Last Word” anchor got into a lively exchange with Salon.com contributor Glenn Greenwald.

“Unlike you, I am not a progressive.  I am not a liberal who’s so afraid of the word that I had to change my name to progressive.  Liberals amuse me.  I am a Socialist.  I live to the extreme left -  the extreme left – of you mere liberals.”

You have to give the guy credit for standing behind his views, and doing so openly.  You have to respect him for that, at least.

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