It's For The Children. Don't Argue.

Wrong again, Keith.  It's hard to believe that ESPN host Keith Olbermann (photo way below from Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images) was dead wrong in getting into a Twitter scuffle with a few Penn State students- and wrong in his apology. Quite a trick.

It started when one Penn State alumnus (with two Nittany Lion alumni) sent to Olbermann a link to a charity event held annually at the college. She accompanied it with a tweet reading "We are!"  (as in We are... Penn State). Olberman responded ".... Pitiful."

Short and to the point, albeit overly general and with a capital "P" where a small "P" would have been more appropriate, the tweet should have been the last one from the Cornell University graduate.

But oh, no.   What followed was a series of tweets between Olbermann and one or another Penn State apologists- uh, er, students, including Olbermann's "Dont make shit up, Sonny. You'll wind up running Penn State."

Both funny and well off point, it suggests the problem with Penn State University is not its students but the current Administration. However, you may recall in November, 2011That was both funny and well off point because- as Olbermann well understands- the problem with Penn State University is not its current Administration but many of its current (or very recent) students.   You may remember in November, 2011


After top Penn State officials announced that they had fired Joe Paterno on Wednesday night, thousands of students stormed the downtown area to display their anger and frustration, chanting the former coach’s name, tearing down light poles and overturning a television news van parked along College Avenue.

The demonstrators congregated outside Penn State’s administration building before stampeding into the tight grid of downtown streets. They turned their ire on a news van, a symbolic gesture that expressed a view held by many: that the news media had exaggerated Mr. Paterno’s role in the scandal surrounding accusations that a former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, sexually assaulted young boys.

“I think the point people are trying to make is the media is responsible for JoePa going down,” said a freshman, Mike Clark, 18, adding that he believed that Mr. Paterno had met his legal and moral responsibilities by telling university authorities about an accusation that Mr. Sandusky assaulted a boy in a university shower in 2002.

Demonstrators tore down two lampposts, one falling into a crowd. They also threw rocks and fireworks at the police, who responded with pepper spray. The crowd undulated like an accordion, with the students crowding the police and the officers pushing them back.

An orderly crowd first filled the lawn in front of Old Main when news of Mr. Paterno’s firing came via students’ cellphones. When the crowd took to the downtown streets, its anger and intensity swelled. Students shouted, “We are Penn State.”

But of course, they are- or, in most cases, were- not Penn State, only symbolic of the reaction of the student body.  The view in "Happy Valley" (that's what they call it, I swear) seems to have changed little in the intervening 3+ years. Nonetheless, Olbermann still was painting with an overly broad brush.

While real, the apology he delivered was way off-mark. "I apologize," the big guy tweeted, "for the PSU tweets. I was stupid and childish and way less mature than the students there who did such a great fundraising job."

How about this instead: "I was stupid and childish and way less mature than most of the students at Penn State and the vast majority of young people."   He does not know about the students who did the fundraising. Nor is it likely he knows much about where the money goes and to what use it's applied. That is the way it generally is about charity- very few people ask questions. If you say "charity," you've blocked most questions. If you say "for children," you've completely eliminated them and can await a "thank you for your service."

Don't take it from me, but by someone much younger and closer to the college who positively nailed the controversy  (the article with the tweets she includes, here; the full twitter conversation, here):


What kind of jerk criticizes students who raise money for kids with cancer?

Keith Olbermann makes no secret of the disgust he harbors for Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal; in January, he declared the NCAA and PSU “the worst in sports.” His well-documented disdain for the institution is probably what inspired a Penn Stater to mention him Sunday in a proud tweet about the 2015 Penn State Dance Marathon, an annual fundraiser (known on campus as THON) that raises money for children with cancer.

“We Are!” refers to the Nittany Lion chant “We are … Penn State.” And Four Diamonds—an organization that helps families pay for cancer treatment, funds research, and more—is the recipient of the THON money.

Olbermann responded to the “We are” tweet with one word: “…Pitiful.”

Soon Penn State students and others were attacking him, and he was hitting right back.

The pompous, elitist tirade earned him a suspension from ESPN. (Olbermann, if you’re wondering, went to Cornell—ever heard of it?) As a Penn State alumna who knows the difference between your and you’re, I’m pleased to see him get spanked on this one. But I also think that he wasn’t entirely wrong to roll his eyes at attempts to use THON to deflect criticism about the university.

THON is billed as “the largest student-run philanthropy in the world.” Groups and organizers spend the fall semester and first month of the spring semester preparing for it. On designated “canning” weekends, clubs, Greek organizations, and other clusters of students fan out from State College, Pa., to stand at street corners and collect money. At the main event, held this past weekend, more than 700 students serve as “dancers” who go 46 hours without sitting or sleeping. The idea, as I understand it, is to give the dancers a taste of the pain that kids with cancer endure.

It’s a noble goal. But when I was on campus, as THON got closer each year, the scent of self-congratulations grew stronger. The THON slogan is FTK—“for the kids.” In my more cynical moments, I sometimes thought that it should be “FTT”—“for the T-shirt.”

In the Deadspin comments, another alum put it nicely:

THON had great results, but to me it always seemed to serve as a vessel for fraternities, sororities, and those that crave attention to pat themselves on the back. There are a lot of people who participate selflessly, but the most vocal element are those that want the attention for “doing a great thing.” To boot, most of the fundraising doubles as a social/ pledge event for a lot of the greeks. TL; DR - great results, questionable means.

The results are great, and many of the participants are entirely sincere. But still, some students, especially Greeks, use it to excuse a lot of things: You can’t criticize fraternities—we raise money for kids with cancer!

It’s unfair for Olbermann to condemn the entire university because of the child sex abuse scandal (or because a few students on Twitter made grammatical mistakes that are widely accepted on the platform). Though the campus culture went too far in worshipping football, the ones to blame for the abuse are Jerry Sandusky and the handful of men who shielded him—including, yes, Joe Paterno. I railed about my alma mater’s moral hypocrisy after the scandal broke, and I remain furious about it. But it’s also illogical and disingenuous for Penn Staters to use THON as a shield against criticism. What did the original tweeter expect from Olbermann? I can’t imagine that she genuinely thought he would say, “You’re right. I’ve been unjust all along.”

Despite his presumably ESPN-mandated apologetic tweet, I doubt that Olbermann will emerge from his suspension with a greater respect for the school. And he’s right not to change his mind based on a fundraiser.


The net benefits, usually overstated, of charity events need to considered on their own. They are not valid excuses for the behavior of Jerry Sandusky, and the wink and a nod given it by the late, but then all-powerful, coach Joe Paterno.  Most people- probably even most PSU students- understand that. There still are many students there who do not, and despite his hostility to the university, Keith Olbermann may not, either.

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Remains To Be Seen

Responding to the "Rally to Restore Sanity" two days earlier in Washington, Keith Olbermann suspended on November 1 his daily "Worst Person in the World" segment. Although Olbermann argued "It is not for ratings and it is not 'get angry first and find a reason later,'" he concluded

It's just that today, given the serious stuff we have to start covering tomorrow, we think it's the right time to do it short-term and then we'll see what happens. And we'll also see if anybody else on TV or radio will do something similar.

Not surprisingly (and as KO probably suspected), there has been no similar attempt at lowering the volume of partisan discourse at the GOP's house organ, FOX News.

Politico had discovered in a federal election commission filing that Olbermann had made a campaign contribution to a U.S. Senate candidate (who was defeated) and to two U.S. House candidates (who were re-elected). Simmi Aujla writes

MSNBC President Phil Griffin said in a statement Friday: “I became aware of Keith's political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay."

Olbermann made campaign contributions to two Arizona members of Congress and failed Kentucky Senate candidate Jack Conway ahead of Tuesday’s election.

Olbermann, who acknowledged the contributions in a statement to POLITICO, made the maximum legal donations of $2,400 apiece to Conway and to Arizona Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords. He donated to the Arizona pair on Oct. 28 — the same day that Grijalva appeared as a guest on Olbermann’s “Countdown” show.

Grijalva, a prominent liberal who was just declared a winner in his race Thursday night, was in a tight contest against tea-party-backed candidate Ruth McClung when he appeared on "Countdown" — one of several appearances he made on the show.

NBC has a rule against employees contributing to political campaigns, and a wide range of news organizations prohibit political contributions — considering it a breach of journalistic independence to contribute to the candidates they cover.

Olbermann is not alone in his generosity. As Justin Elliot wrote for salon.com on September 23

Fox News host Sean Hannity gave $5,000 to the political action committee of conservative hero Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., in August, and his wife, Jill, gave another $5,000, Federal Election Commission records show.

The donations were given on Aug. 31 to MICHELEPAC (that's an acronym for Many Individual Conservatives Helping Elect Leaders Everywhere).

Besides being a conservative radio and TV host, Hannity's ties to the Republican Party are well known. Earlier this year he was the keynote speaker at the annual fundraising dinner of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

We've reached out to Fox for comment on this, and we'll update this post if we hear back.

Elliot blogged at 9:53 this morning that no comment yet had been received from Fox, which appears to be a part of the GOP's fundraising apparatus. As Media Matters noted in September, Sharron

Angle has been fairly consistent in touting Fox News as part of her national fundraising push. On September 10, Angle wrote that she would appear on Fox News' Hannity as "part of our push" to raise $1 million online; she previously told Fox News reporter Carl Cameron that she needed the press to be her "friend" and allow her to give out the address of her website; and in July, Angle suggested that she frequently appeared on Fox News -- the home of softball Angle interviews -- because they allow her to make fundraising appeals to viewers.

But it's not only Angle. The Washington Post reported in August that Fox News' parent, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., made a $1 million contribution to the Republican Governors Association. In October it made a $250,000 donation to the RGA. Between those two contributions, Newscorp gave $1 million to- wait for it- the United States Chamber of Commerce. That would be the same Chamber which solicited money from foreign- and state- owned companies to run attack ads against candidates, most of them Democrats, who have worked to discourage offshoring of American jobs.

If Jon Stewart is right, all of "cable TV" has the same policy and standards and head(s) will roll at Fox News. If not, we will, finally, understand that there is one liberal cable network and one which is little more than an arm of the Republican Party.

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The Way It's Done, In Arizona And Elsewhere

Most Tea Party supporters are not racists, do not believe in stomping on the head of a woman, and actually love their country, albeit in a rather strange manner. But before this destructive movement guided by corporate lobbyists began, author Thomas Frank described the phenomenon often and accurately. And on Hardball Thursday evening, Ron Reagan nailed it:

MATTHEWS: This is great conundrum, Ron, and here‘s the conundrum of all times. The business community hates his guts. The Republican Party calls him a socialist, even if they—sometimes, they call him, American, but usually, a socialist American at least, at least the moderate ones. They think he‘s been absolutely socialist, absolutely left wing. And yet, the left, the progressive people out there say he‘s been timid.

What he done wrong when he has both sides—

REAGAN: The Republicans don‘t think—really think he‘s been a socialist. Not the people who are, you know, in office and know better. That‘s just rhetoric to get the crowd geeked up so they‘ll start stomping on people‘s heads, you know? They don‘t really believe that.

There is no better example than SB 1070, the law which practically all of the country misunderstood- still misunderstands- as an immigrant-control measure. To the right, most of the center, and virtually all of the mainstream media, SB 1070 is an anti-illegal immigration measure. Most of the left also misunderstands it, believing it to be an anti-immigrant act and possibly racist, though liberals were not responsible for this law, so they almost deserve a pass.

Writing on npr.org on October 28 about an ostensibly anti-immigration act crafted by State Swenator Russell Pearce, Laura Sullivan explained

The law is being challenged in the courts. But if it's upheld, it requires police to lock up anyone they stop who cannot show proof they entered the country legally.

When it was passed in April, it ignited a fire storm. Protesters chanted about racial profiling. Businesses threatened to boycott the state.

Supporters were equally passionate, calling it a bold positive step to curb illegal immigration.

But while the debate raged, few people were aware of how the law came about.

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.

The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them....

It was last December at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. Inside, there was a meeting of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Insiders call it ALEC.

It's a membership organization of state legislators and powerful corporations and associations, such as the tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., ExxonMobil and the National Rifle Association. Another member is the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America — the largest private prison company in the country.

It was there that Pearce's idea took shape.

"I did a presentation," Pearce said. "I went through the facts. I went through the impacts and they said, 'Yeah.'"

The 50 or so people in the room included officials of the Corrections Corporation of America, according to two sources who were there.

Pearce and the Corrections Corporation of America have been coming to these meetings for years. Both have seats on one of several of ALEC's boards.

And this bill was an important one for the company. According to Corrections Corporation of America reports reviewed by NPR, executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market. Last year, they wrote that they expect to bring in "a significant portion of our revenues" from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that detains illegal immigrants.

In the conference room, the group decided they would turn the immigration idea into a model bill. They discussed and debated language. Then, they voted on it.

In September, Think Progress pulled together the evidence that SB 1070 would be better described as the "Private Prison Welfare Act" and noted

In April of this year, Pearce then introduced ALEC’s template as the infamous SB1070 law. Notably, the ALEC task force which helped Pearce devise his racial profiling law included Laurie Shanblum, a lobbyist from the mega-private prison corporation Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) which previously played a role in privatizing many of Texas’ prisons. An investigation from Arizona’s KPHO-TV found more ties between SB1070 and the private prison industry: Paul Senseman, Gov. Janet Brewer’s (R-AZ) deputy chief of staff was a former lobbyist for CCA (his wife is still a lobbyist for CCA) and Chuck Coughlin, Brewer’s campaign chairman, runs the lobbying firm in Arizona that represents CCA. In These Times reporter Beau Hodai, who also reported much of SB1070′s connections to the private prison industry, has a chart to explain the relationship.

(For more on development of the legislation, see "Corporate Con Game" in In These Times, June 21, 2010.)

On the same day as the NPR report, Keith Olbermann summarized (video below) the story behind SB 1070 and interviewed a fervent opponent, Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ). The understated Grijalva is seen remarking "This is not just about immigration policy; this is not just about border security." Congressman, leave out the "just;" it is simply not about immigration or border security. It is about accumulating profits for the private prison industry. If, in the process, innocent people are incarcerated because the beds need to be filled for the funds to roll in, that can be passed off as collateral damage.

There are two scandals, or should-be scandals here. One involves the private prison industry, popping up throughout the country, and the other politically expedient misdirection. In Arizona, it's selling the base and the media anti-immigrant animus as an integral part of the GOP shell game but, as Digby describes, the strategy is widely applicable (emphasis mine):

I really want another villager to lecture me about how this avalanche of secret money pouring into elections doesn't really mean anything:

In the bitter U.S. Senate race in Kentucky, a local millionaire has helped launch a barrage of ads attacking the Democratic candidate a candidate who, as the state's attorney general, is prosecuting the businessman's nursing home for allegedly covering up sexual abuse, records show.

The businessman's name is Terry Forcht. And like many super-wealthy conservative donors who are quietly stoking the GOP's mid-term election surge around the nation, the extent of his investment in the 2010 campaign is both vast and, for now at least, largely unknown.

In addition to donating personally to Republican Rand Paul's upstart campaign, Forcht is the banker handling funds for American Crossroads. The conservative group was founded by Republican strategist Karl Rove and has, through its non-profit arm, American Crossroads GPS, channeled millions into this year's campaigns without identifying its donors.

American Crossroads GPS and other outside groups that shield the identity of their donors have emerged as a fixture of the 2010 campaign season, thanks to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that loosened restrictions on political giving. The case of Forcht's opaque role in the Kentucky contest offers a glimpse at why some election reform groups believe anonymous donations are so problematic.

This is just a crude example of what's going on, of course. Every last one of these wealthy donors are basically buying themselves a get out of jail free card from all politicians of either party. They are outright buying the Republicans (who are selling themselves like street corner hookers)and threatening the Dems with more where this came from if they fail to cooperate. Sure, there are some down and dirty sleazebags like this guy who's punishing the Attorney General, but all of them --- every last one of them --- are doing this to ensure that their interests, whether legal or economic, are taken care of above all else. If there's time and energy left over they will let the rubes play with women's uteruses and punish some immigrants and minorities. But job one is making damned sure that nobody touches their ill gotten gains and nobody even thinks of holding them responsible for their crimes.

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Palin No Idiot

The video played on Countdown last night had Sarah Palin contending (transcript, here)

To reduce deficit spending and our enormous debt, you rein in spending. You cut the budget. You don‘t take more from the private sector and grow government with it. And that‘s exactly what Obama has in mind with this expiration of Bush tax cuts, proposal of his.

To that, Keith Olberman responded

This expiration of Bush tax cuts proposal of his.
That woman is an idiot.

The temptation to dismiss The Quitter is nearly irresisible, but wrong.
At one time, as late as the presidential campaign, then-Governor Palin probably was somewhat uninformed, manifested in an inability to name one newspaper she normally read. Now, very likely, the GOP's former V.P. nominee is not unlike Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who dishonestly claimed

There's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.

Bob Somerby observes

People! Mitch McConnell does not believe that Bush’s tax cuts increased revenues! The chance that McConnell thinks any such thing is vanishingly small. We know he doesn’t believe this dumbest idea for a perfectly obvious reason: McConnell isn’t “economically illiterate.” Neither are the other big players in his party’s caucus.

McConnell was there all through Campaign 2000, as Candidate Bush repeatedly said that his tax cuts would reduce future revenue (by $1.3 trillion over ten years). He understands where that number came from. He doesn’t think that a miracle then occurred—that Bush’s definitive statement about his own tax plan turned out to be crazily wrong.

No. He doesn’t believe that.

Republican pols almost never state the world’s dumbest idea; they leave that task to Hannity. And yes, McConnell’s recent claim is the dumbest idea in the world. When we lower tax rates, we get higher revenues? No major politician thinks that.

And neither does Palin believe "this expiration of Bush tax cuts" is a "proposal of his" (Obama). Ezra Klein (who coincidentally was Olberman's next guest and who, Somerby observed, in an earlier post naively assumed McConnell was sincere) explains

Budget reconciliation had never been used to increase the deficit. In fact, it specifically existed to decrease the deficit. That's why one of its rules was that you couldn't use it to increase the deficit outside the budget window. Republicans realized they could take that very literally: The budget window was 10 years. So if the tax cuts expired after 10 years, they wouldn't increase the deficit outside the budget window. They'd also have the added benefit of appearing less costly in the Congressional Budget Office's estimates, as the CBO duly scored them as expiring after 10 years, which kept the long-range budget picture from exploding.

But the plan was never to have the tax cuts expire. Instead, the idea was that people would get used to the new tax rates, and no future Congress would want to allow a big tax increase, so when the time came, either Republicans in office would extend the cuts or Republicans in the minority would hammer Democrats until they extended them. And that's where we are now: Democrats control the government, so Republicans are screaming about tax increases as a way to get Democrats to extend tax cuts.

Palin is no "idiot," unaware that a GOP-controlled government worked the system by establishing tax cuts which, due to expire in 10 years, made it appear that it was fiscally responsible. Most of her supporters don't know this and if they did, most of them wouldn't care. That is in part what makes them Palin supporters.

Backfire- it's part and parcel of the conservative Republican mind. They have their preconceptions, which fit their values. They are often misinformed but, even when given accurate information, aren't likely to change their minds. It is fertile ground to plow for a demagogue like Sarah Palin.

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Probing Motive In Arizona

Interviewing a skeptical Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill) on Monday night about the new Arizona anti-immigration law, Keith Olbermann asked

You just brought up a major point, Congressman, that I think has not been emphasized here. Ultimately, what do you think the point is of this law? Is it really just about immigration and a porous border? Or is there something in here about wearing out Latinos who want to live there, particularly those who want to go vote there?

Unfortunately, Gutierrez, an adamant critic of the legislation who nonetheless apparently was born yesterday, responded in part:

You know, I think they understand that the Latino community isn‘t going anywhere....

Kudos go to Olbermann, who at least briefly abandoned his Everyone Who Doesn't Agree With Me Is A Racist theme to raise the likely primary motivating factor for the law. Greg Palast, in an article very much worth reading, explains

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

Captives of Sheriff Joe's prison, Maricopa County, Arizona. So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."

(That prosecutor was the famous David Iglesias, then fired by George W. Bush and President Rove.)

There is, moreover, a template for this. In September, 2007, New York Times reporters Ken Belson and Jill P. Capuzzo showed how good intentions (if, like me, you supported the ordinance) or bad intentions (if, like most liberals/progressives, you didn't) can go awry. After Riverside, NJ enacted legislation "penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant"
the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget.... last week, the town rescinded the ordinance.

The legislation proved counter-productive for Riverside as many of its (mostly Brazilian) immigrants left town, taking with them much of the economic vitality of the small, working-class town.

But if, as is likely, there will be a similar exodus from Arizona, that would be a boon to Arizona's ruling party, the GOP. Its politicians hardly could be oblivious to the probable impact upon the electorate of the anti-immigrant law they have enacted, nor of what transpired in one municipality in New Jersey. As Palast noted, the media was deluded, having attributed the recent legislation to "a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans." Probably, it was not primarily anti-immigrant, or anti-illegal immigrant, sentiment, but a classic Republican power grab.

They're Criticizing Lou Dobbs

On Tuesday's Countdown, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was, understandably, a little proud of himself when he identified John Stossel as one of his "Best Persons In The World"

for his best responsible comment from a guy I bash now, John Stossel, now Fox News. He says he won‘t vote Republican if “conservative means stop all immigration and some other things that conservatives say. If it means the Lou Dobbs kind of rants about immigrants wrecking America, I don‘t subscribe to that. I think immigrants, by and large, do good things for America.”

I don‘t think Mr. Stossel cares what I think. But I think he deserves applause for that.

Olbermann ‘s applause was echoed by thinkprogress.org, the blog of the Center for American Progress , albeit primarily by way of an attack on Dobbs. Welcoming Stossel to GOP TV, Glenn Beck on his radio show on Wednesday discussed (audio below) immigration with him:

STOSSEL: But if it means the Lou Dobbs kind of rants about immigrants wrecking America, I don't subscribe to that. I think immigrants by and large do good things for America.

GLENN: I think immigrants I think we need more immigrants, ones that want to be Americans because those immigrants are the only ones that are reminding us that we better get off our ass, we've got liberty here and we forget about it all the time.

STOSSEL: That's very true. When they were passing all these antismoking rules and I wanted to make the argument that, gee, don't we have freedom of association? Can't the guy who smokes who owns a bar have smoking in his bar? Can't the smokers have some bars? And I went on the street and I asked smoker after smoker, what do you think? Oh, okay, I guess we're just going to have to stand outside. Nobody was outraged except the immigrants. And they would say, I thought America was the land of the free. So you make a good point there.

If we are to believe Stossel, immigrants are good for the U.S.A. because they’re the only people who support unrestricted smoking in public. It skillfully combines two bad arguments: uninhibited smoking, anywhere and everywhere, is really good policy; and immigrants are good because they understand this.

It’s unsurprising that the former ABC correspondent would advance this spurious argument for supporting immigration, apparently of both the legal and illegal variety. It would be a little more jarring to hear the conservative libertarian Stossel ‘fess up: “I support increased immigration because it expands the labor pool and exerts downward pressure on wages and benefits.”

Such candor would not be very sophisticated. But harboring little respect for the American worker fits neatly into the worldview of someone with little respect also for American schoolchildren. And it would hardly disturb corporate interests, which always have been paramount in Stossel’s thinking and commentary, disguised as reporting.

Dobbs has been wrong frequently the past year (especially on ACORN), owing partly to his avid distaste for Barack Obama. Still, on the matter of legal/illegal immigration, his signature issue, he has been largely correct, as when he told an interviewer at his network in 2007

we bring in more than two million immigrants into this country lawfully each and every year? Has anybody on this broadcast, any news organization in the country, said, wait a minute, why in the world are we worrying about illegal immigration into this country and their -- and their situation, before we're worrying about how long it takes to become a lawful immigrant in to this country and what we're doing with people who are playing by the rules? This is upside down. It's wrongheaded.

Often blasted as anti-immigrant and even racist, Dobbs here is urging greater attention to effecting the citizenship of legal immigrants, shortening the time between entrance to the country and full status as Americans. This remains one of the best ways to ensure full rights and privileges for all individuals here legally, advantaging both those who have decided to do it the right way and America.

Reaction To Palin-Letterman

Evolution? First Amendment? U.S. military women and men? Who would have thought Sarah Palin is an advocate of all three?

The Alaskan Governor's response on June 16 was chock full of non sequiturs:

Of course it's accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve," the statement read.

"Letterman certainly has the right to 'joke' about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the right to express our reaction. And this is all thanks to our U.S. military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's right to free speech -- in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect.

When Governor Palin expressed her support for teaching both evolution and creationism to public school students, the assumption set in that, a firm opponent of abortion rights and skeptic of gay rights, she was a flat-out creationist. Such assumption appears invalid, with Palin now suggesting that men of offensive humor "will soon evolve."

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann rhetorically asked "Governor, how many times do we have to go through this? The first amendment does not apply to stuff people say on television." One would have thought the governor of a state (let alone a former vice-presidential nominee) would realize the First Amendment guarantees only that the federal government (and the state government,via the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment) does not abridge the right to free speech. (And even with that, there are limits.)

Palin also was criticized by Ed Schultz, who in turn was blasted by the conservative Repub website newsbusters.org, which then was condemned by Schultz.

With little sense of irony, Governor Palin uses the term "evolve;" demonstrates little or no concept of the First Amendment; and tries to manipulate the patriotism of the American people by conflating her conflict with a talk-show host with the "U.S. military women and men putting their lives on the line for us." There is little, presumably short of violence or brazen illegality, that she will not do to keep herself in the news. And Mrs. Palin does so by using the symbolism of the American soldier for relatively trivial purposes as a prop in her pursuit of political influence.

O'Reilly And The Murder

The great liberal blog, crooksandliars.com, holding the host of The O'Reilly Factor partially responsible for the recent murder of the Kansas doctor who performed late term abortions, commented sarcastically

And never mind that Dr. Tiller was made into a national cause celebre, accused of "executing babies" by none other than Bill O'Reilly and the crew of far-right transmitters at Fox News.

No connection there, folks! Move along, move along.

Keith Olbermann, unsurprisingly continuing his anti-O'Reilly campaign, observed

For four years, on at least 28 occasions, that‘s what was said on Fox News Channel. Nazism, al Qaeda, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Stalin, baby killing pedophilia, Tiller the baby killer, again and again and again.

From the objectivity corner, the folks at PolitiFact.com found that going back to 2005, O'Reilly mentioned Dr. Tiller 42 times and on 24 times referred to him as a "baby killer."

And thanks to dailykostv, we have O'Reilly's campaign against Dr. Tiller on video:





If- if- anyone but Scott Roeder is responsible for the murder of Dr. Tiller, it is Bill O'Reilly.

But no one (assuming the accuracy of what we now know, that only one individual took part in the crime) but Scott Roeder is responsible for this offense. Oh, Bill O'Reilly and a portion of the fanatical wing of the pro-life movement contributed to the atmosphere which was a precondition of the murder. But the principal of individual responsibility should hold sway, and no one but the actual assailant should be held accountable for the slaying.

But that doesn't let the Fox News host off the hook. It seemed only reasonable, almost inevitable, as Gabriel Winant wrote on salon.com on May 31, that

When his show airs tomorrow, Bill O'Reilly will most certainly decry the death of Kansas doctor George Tiller, who was killed Sunday while attending church services with his wife. Tiller, O'Reilly will say, was a man who was guilty of barbaric acts, but a civilized society does not resort to lawless murder, even against its worst members. And O'Reilly, we can assume, will genuinely mean this.

Surprise! It didn't happen. After a perfunctory condemnation of the murder, O'Reilly on June 1, with a notable lack of humility or discretion, declared

no back pedaling here. I report honesty. Everything we said about Tiller was true and my analysis was based on those facts. It is clear that the far left is exploiting the death of the doctor. Those vicious individuals want to stifle any criticism of people like Tiller. That and hating Fox News is the real agenda here. If these people were so compassionate, so very compassionate, so concerned for the rights and welfare of others, maybe they might have written something on things about the 60,000 fetuses who will never become American citizens.

Now suppose you have a neighbor whose son tragically died a couple of days earlier of a drug overdose. You go next door, maybe with a homemade cake or one from a mix, to join others in grieving with the family. Another neighbor is there and uses the occasion to decry the epidemic of drug use in America; identify drug addicts as "leeches" on the taxpayers; maintain that addicts are responsible for most serious crime in society; and complain about "lenient" judges without the backbone to do more than slap the wrists of these offenders. You, and everyone else at the family's home, would be aghast and appalled- and perhaps contemplate, as O'Reilly once did for Tiller, "a special place in hell for this guy." Not the right time or place for expression of these resentments (however valid or sincerely held), everyone would agree. And perhaps wonder: is this guy emulating Bill O'Reilly?



(For a perspective on Roeder as a domestic terrorist, check out this from The Young Turks)

Liz Cheney, Feigning Ignorance

Crooksandliars.com, with attribution, printed a transcript of the argument between Liz Cheney of the famous Dick Cheney family and Lawrence O'Donnell on the May 22, 2009 episode of ABC's Good Morning America. The most telling remark from the former vice-president's daughter came halfway through when she actually said

Lawrence, are you going to let me answer here? Waterboarding is not torture. And you ought- I would refer to you Attorney General Holder's testimony-

Miss Cheney, meet conservative radio talk show host Eric "Mancow" Muller :



Muller, to his credit, had the courage to test his belief that waterboarding is not torture, and now acknowledges that it is. Not so Sean Hannity, who (to my surprise) never did take up Keith Olbermann's challenge (video below) on Countdown to undergo this "enhanced interrogation technique," even though Olbermann offered to give to charity $1,000-$2,000 for each second Hannity would last. (Olbermann announced last Thursday that he had rescinded the offer and instead would donate $10,000 to charity in recognition of Muller's act.)

O'Donnell is wrong, I think, when he tells the MSNBC host that Dick Cheney and Hannity "think torture works because it works on them." Hannity chose not to accept Olbermann's offer in part because he knows it is torture and that he could not withstand more than a few seconds of it. Cheney & Cheney, similarly, know that waterboarding is torture and usually does not work. It doesn't matter. Truth is irrelevant to some people.

Hannity's Bluff Called

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here."

-Claude Rains' Captain Renault to Humphrey Bogart's Rick in Casablanca, 1942

So Wanda Sykes does stand-up (video below) at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner and people are shocked, shocked that she delivered tasteless jokes. Washington, meet Hollywood: the mores are a little different out there. On Limbaugh:

Rush Limbaugh, one of your big critics, boy, Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails. So, you're saying "I hope America fails," it's like, I don't care about people losing their homes, or their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq. He just wants the country to fail. To me, that's treason. He's not saying anything differently than what Osama bin Laden is saying. You know, you might want to look into this, Sir, because I think maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker, but he was just so strung out on oxycontin he missed his flight.
Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how 'bout that? Needs a little waterboarding, that's what he needs.

There was something to offend everyone: equating Rush Limbaugh with hijackers; reminding the public Rush was a drug addict; wishing death upon Limbaugh; and in the case of Keith Olbermann and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, simply referring to September 11 in a joke not about September 11.

Bad taste aside, don't get caught up in the shell game: watching the Limbaugh stuff and ignoring the Hannity reference. (To his credit, and unsurprisingly, Olbermann had it right: criticize Sykes, then go on to the Hannity issue.)

It now has been 21 days since Charles Grodin bluffed (video way below) Sean Hannity, on the latter's GOP TV program, into agreeing to be waterboarded for "the troops' families." It now has been 20 days since Keith Olbermann, rightly scolding Hannity for "trivializing" torture for a "stunt," on MSNBC's Countdown upped the ante by offering (video way, way, below) to donate $1,000 for each second that Hannity would endure the waterboarding (and to double that if Sean then would admit that he feared for his life and that waterboarding is torture).

And now it has been four days Sykes joked:

Sean Hannity, Sean Hannity said he's going to get waterboarded for charity, for our armed forces. He hasn't done it yet, I see. You know, talking about how he can take a waterboarding. Please. Okay, he can take a waterboarding by someone you know and trust, but let somebody from Pakistan waterboard, or Keith Olbermann. Let Keith Olbermann waterboard him. He can't take a waterboarding. I can break Sean Hannity just by giving him a middle seat in coach.

The Olbermann line was funny, though Keith shouldn't, couldn't, and wouldn't be the one doing the torture. It would be done under controlled conditions, in front of news cameras by someone trained in the technique, and probably particularly careful about not applying excessive force or pain. And for charity, apparently one of Repub Hannity's choosing. And yet, Sean Hannity, like (probably) you and like me, apparently won't do it, even though he is exposed as an all talk, no action kind of guy the longer he avoids it.

But this even is instructive not only for what it tells us of the Republican right's darlings, the talk show host with the third largest audience in the nation. A lot of torture's defenders, such as Republican party head Rush Limbaugh, still won't admit waterboarding is torture. The dishonesty and fright of some of the nation's leading Republicans on this issue is fascinating, and nowhere clearer than in the case of syndicated columnist, Charles Krauthammer, who admits here that waterboarding is torture, then tells Dennis Miller he never believed it is torture.

Obviously, the main argument of the right, figuring that an appeal to fear is more compelling than reason, is that torture is the only thing standing between the U.S.A. and a terrorist attack. And Sean Hannity, unwittingly, has done his bit to demonstrate that perhaps the most notorious of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" is not the laughing matter he wants the public to believe it is.

Leadership On Display

There has been far less comment about the firing, on May 1, of the Director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, than there was over the $328,835 photo shoot taken under Caldera's auspices.

It was, however, worth waiting for the comment from Bloomberg News' Margaret Carlson, who told Keith Olbermann on Countdown on May 8 (video below):

What‘s interesting, if we were still in the Bush administration, there would have been no firing. It would have been, “Louis, what a heck of a job.” Instead, there is responsibility at the top. He did something really horrendous. There‘s no excuse, and he was let go.

And that is the amazing difference. I hope this continues, the difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration....

....you know, Obama took the ultimate responsibility. People never want to let go of the people that they‘ve hired or that are in charge. They don‘t like to do it. And he did it. That‘s the best way to do it.

Keith evidently had a problem with the failure of Caldera to take full responsibility for the public relations disaster. But as Carlson explained

And no one in Washington ever says, “I‘m—

I apologize.” They say, “If you were offended,” or, “if you determine I did anything wrong.” In other words, “If you‘re so sensitive and such a wussy person that you found this wrong, then I‘m going to say to you, you sensitive person, I‘m sorry.”

Of course, few really care about Louis Caldera, who was appointed to the office in early December by the President-elect. The real issue is the Chief Executive, the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces (when they are called into actual service). And Barack Obama, fewer than four months into his presidency, has done what George W. Bush could not muster the backbone to do in eight years: fire someone of significance for cause.

Eight years of failure domestically, internationally, and economically, and rarely did anyone ever accept responsibility for anything. Oh, sure, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned under pressure: after playing a prominent role in a disastrous war effort- and then only after public revulsion at conduct of the Iraq war played a major role in rejection of the GOP in the mid-term elections.

This recent incident pales in significance next to the extraordinary challenges facing our current president after the dismal failure of the last. Still, given the media and public furor over the flyover- which Obama soon after the incident said would not be repeated- accountability had to be assumed, responsibility assigned. And President Obama stepped up and displayed the leadership lacking in the Oval Office the last several years.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Beware establishment figures with a vested interest in maintaining a convenient fiction without revealing their motive.

Consider the February 18, 2008 episode of MSNBC's Countdown. Keith Olberman was interviewing Gary Mack, the curator of the 6th Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas about the release of a transcript (among other documents) of a purported conversation between Lee Harvey Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby, approximately seven weeks before the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The documents were kept inside a courthouse safe under the supervision of then-Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, who prosecuted Ruby and, according to one document, had signed a movie deal in 1967.

The Chicago Tribune reported the conversation as following:

"There is a way to get rid of him without killing him," Oswald says.

"How's that?" Ruby responds.

"I can shoot his brother," Oswald says.

After a discussion of the logistics of shooting the president, Ruby says the money for the operation's coming from the Mafia.

"Are you with the Mafia?" Oswald asked.

"You're asking too many questions," Ruby responds.

Later, Ruby gives a lengthy warning that Oswald must not get caught or say anything, noting that "if you do talk, then the boys will make me follow you, wherever you go, and kill you."

The papers, such as they are, describe a plot by La Cosa Nostra to assassinate the President, which would result in the Presidency being assumed by Lyndon Johnson, enemy to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a nemesis of organized crime.

Many people, including Mack, have cast doubt on the veracity of the conversation. The curator contended "virtually all the hard evidence leads directly to Lee Harvey Oswald and no one else, at least so far. The problem is that most people just are not convinced of the official story."

One problem, Gary. Although you may be enamored of the Warren Commission report, there is no one "offical story," despite what some experts imply. Perhaps you missed the conclusions of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which in the late 1970's investigated the assassinations of J.F.K. and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Committee concluded in part that: there were two gunmen, one on the grassy knoll, and the other Lee Harvey Oswald (who may have had ties with Jack Ruby, who fired three of four shots; both Oswald and Ruby had ties to La Cosa Nostra; the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had misled, and withheld information from, the Warren Commission; and the Warren Commission did not investigate the possibility of conspiracy.

So whatever one may think about the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John F. Kennedy, clearly there is not one "official" version of the assassination- a fact of which the "experts" are very much aware.

Quote of the Week

"I took a city that was known for pornography and licked it to a large extent."

-Rudolph Giuliani, as quoted by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown on October 24, 2007

Quote(s) Of The Week:

both from MSNBC's coverage following President Bush's Iraq speech tonight-

by Keith Olbermann, to Patrick Buchanan, regarding Mr. Bush's plan for a U.S. presence in Iraq well beyond January, 2009:

"Did we all know that this was not a date, but a wedding, five years ago?"


by Rachel Maddow of Air America:

"There's almost nothing really weirder than hearing George Bush, of all people, warn ominously about people who want to topple Iraq's government."

The Republican Media- No. 4

One evening last week, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown named Ann Coulter his "Worst Person in the World." She recently had written "Fox News ought to buy a copy of Monday's Democratic debate on CNN to play over and over during the general election campaign.... because it was so filled with liberal conspiracy theories that would frighten normal Americans." Olbermann asks whether Coulter really meant that the Republican Party should play the tape repeatedly- unless, of course, Fox News really is the "advertising arm of the Republican Party," as he so cogently put it.