Showing posts with label OLBERMANN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OLBERMANN. Show all posts
Sunday, May 14, 2017
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Those Pesky Lines Between News and Commentary
Photo (Source) http://www.myfitv.com/videos/496639 By Roger Aronoff
November 19, 2010
November 19, 2010
Limiting those choices, if we are to remain a free society, is not an option.
The reality of news today is that there are many, many sources of it available.
I, too, bemoan the loss of more newsmen covering foreign affairs. But the reality is that it forces people who care about it to dig out sources, usually on the Internet, that over time they come to trust. Others prefer to follow the meanderings of Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton, or fantasy football, or stay plugged in to their IPads, IPhones, or IPods, listening to who knows what. These are choices every individual has to make for him or herself. Limiting those choices, if we are to remain a free society, is not an option. At least it’s not an option for the government to choose. Parents, peer pressure, national leaders, sports heroes, all may have some influence. The bottom line is that we are living in the Wild West of news, talk, entertainment, sports and game info, and there is no turning back.
The answer is for people to become responsible consumers of news and other information relevant to their lives. But the idea of Sen. Jay Rockefeller having the FCC overstep its authority and go after the content of cable news networks because their existence makes it harder to pass certain legislation he would like to see is dangerous. Rockefeller, like the rest of us, wants to see quality news. But he goes way too far: “I hunger for quality news. I’m tired of the right and the left. There’s a little bug inside of me which wants the FCC to say to Fox and to MSNBC, ‘Out. Off. End. Good-bye.’ It’d 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.”
Read more
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Wednesday, September 05, 2007
BUSH PLAYING WITH 'TROOP WITHDRAWAL'
Bush just playing us with 'troop withdrawal'
'Revelation' contradicts every other rationale offered in the last 500 days
 | MSNBC video |
 |
Special comment on Bush’s surprise Iraq visit Sept. 4: In this special comment on President Bush’s surprise visit to Iraq “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann says President Bush is “playing us” on the state of the war in Iraq and when the troops will come home. Countdown |
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
MSNBC
Updated: 9:20 p.m. ET Sept 4, 2007
And so he is back from his annual surprise gratuitous photo-op in Iraq, and what a sorry spectacle it was. But it was nothing compared to the spectacle of one unfiltered, unguarded, horrifying quotation in the new biography to which Mr. Bush has consented.
As he deceived the troops at Al-Asad Air Base yesterday with the tantalizing prospect that some of them might not have to risk being killed and might get to go home, Mr. Bush probably did not know that, with his own words, he had already proved that he had been lying, is lying and will be lying about Iraq.
He presumably did not know that there had already appeared those damning excerpts from Robert Draper's book “Dead Certain."
“I'm playing for October-November," Mr. Bush said to Draper. That, evidently, is the time during which, he thinks he can sell us the real plan, which is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence."
Comfortable, that is, with saying about Iraq, again quoting the President, “stay... longer."
And there it is. We've caught you. Your goal is not to bring some troops home, maybe, if we let you have your way now. Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal. You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.
Everything you said about Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal: perpetuating this war indefinitely.
War today, war tomorrow, war forever!
And you are playing at it! Playing!
A man with any self respect, having inadvertently revealed such an evil secret, would have already resigned and fled the country! You have no remaining credibility about Iraq.
And yet, yesterday at Al-Asad, Mr. Bush kept playing, and this time, using the second of his two faces.
The president told reporters, “They (General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker) tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces."
And so, Mr. Bush got his fraudulent headlines today. “Bush May Bring Some Troops Home."
While the reality is, we know from what he told Draper, that the president's true hope is that they will not come home; but that they will stay there, because he is keeping them there now, in hope that those from his political party fighting to succeed him will prolong this unendurable disaster into the next decade.
But, to a country dying of thirst, the president seemed to vaguely promise a drink from a full canteen -- a promise predicated on the assumption that he is not lying.
Yet you are lying, Mr. Bush. Again. But now, we know why.
You gave away more of yourself than you knew in the Draper book. And you gave away more still, on the arduous trip back out of Iraq hours in the air, without so much as a single vacation.
“If you look at my comments over the past eight months," you told reporters, “it's gone from a security situation in the sense that we're either going to get out and there will be chaos, or, more troops. Now, the situation has changed, where I'm able to speculate on the hypothetical."
Mr. Bush, the only "hypothetical" here is that you are not now holding our troops hostage. You have no intention of withdrawing them. But that doesn't mean you can't pretend you're thinking about it, does it?
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20593445/
Saturday, December 02, 2006
THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR AMERICA
Olbermann Addresses the Military Commissions Act in a Special Comment
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC
Countdown
Wednesday 18 October 2006
We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived as people in fear.
And now - our rights and our freedoms in peril - we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:
A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before - and we have been here before led here - by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.
We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen - he is still a Japanese."
American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States to the citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been only human.
We have let Roosevelt's "fear of fear itself" overtake us.
We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass."
We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.
Or substitute the Japanese.
Or the Germans.
Or the Socialists.
Or the Anarchists.
Or the Immigrants.
Or the British.
Or the Aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always wrong.
"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"
Wise words.
And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.
Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.
You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.
Sadly - of course - the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.
We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But even within this history we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And - again, Mr. Bush - all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "unlawful enemy combatants" and ship them somewhere - anywhere - but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "unlawful enemy combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.
And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" - exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check.
He lied to get it.
He lied as he received it.
Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?
"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, "in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney and can hear all the evidence against them."
"Presumed innocent," Mr. Bush?
The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.
"Access to an attorney," Mr. Bush?
Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.
"Hearing all the evidence," Mr. Bush?
The Military Commissions Act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.
Your words are lies, Sir.
They are lies that imperil us all.
"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," you told us yesterday, "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America."
That terrorist, sir, could only hope.
Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.
Habeas corpus? Gone.
The Geneva Conventions? Optional.
The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be "the beginning of the end of America."
And did it even occur to you once, sir - somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 - that with only a little further shift in this world we now know - just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died -- did it ever occur to you once that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future president and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "unlawful enemy combatant" for - and convene a Military Commission to try - not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, Sir, all of them - as always - wrong.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15321167/
Wednesday 18 October 2006
We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived as people in fear.
And now - our rights and our freedoms in peril - we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:
A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before - and we have been here before led here - by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.
We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen - he is still a Japanese."
American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States to the citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been only human.
We have let Roosevelt's "fear of fear itself" overtake us.
We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass."
We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.
Or substitute the Japanese.
Or the Germans.
Or the Socialists.
Or the Anarchists.
Or the Immigrants.
Or the British.
Or the Aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always wrong.
"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"
Wise words.
And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.
Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.
You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.
Sadly - of course - the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.
We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But even within this history we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And - again, Mr. Bush - all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "unlawful enemy combatants" and ship them somewhere - anywhere - but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "unlawful enemy combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.
And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" - exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check.
He lied to get it.
He lied as he received it.
Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?
"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, "in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney and can hear all the evidence against them."
"Presumed innocent," Mr. Bush?
The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.
"Access to an attorney," Mr. Bush?
Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.
"Hearing all the evidence," Mr. Bush?
The Military Commissions Act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.
Your words are lies, Sir.
They are lies that imperil us all.
"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," you told us yesterday, "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America."
That terrorist, sir, could only hope.
Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.
Habeas corpus? Gone.
The Geneva Conventions? Optional.
The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be "the beginning of the end of America."
And did it even occur to you once, sir - somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 - that with only a little further shift in this world we now know - just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died -- did it ever occur to you once that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future president and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "unlawful enemy combatant" for - and convene a Military Commission to try - not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, Sir, all of them - as always - wrong.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15321167/
Thursday, October 19, 2006
OLBERMANN'S PATRIOT ACT
Mr. Olbermann conducted a true "Patriot Act" when he called the latest losses to our human rights what they are, a beginning of the end of America. It's baffling how no one else in the media has had the intestinal fortitude to call these assaults on our Constitution by their rightful name: aggressions.
When a free nation regresses into medieval times it's time for all the citizens to take note. When someone of prominence speaks up in opposition to the changes, it's a sign to the populace that not everyone HAS CHICKENED-OUT. Since the Congress and the Supreme Court is silent on the drastic changes that Mr. Bush has asked, and received since the infamous day of September 11, 2001; Someone had to break that wall of silence that has pervaded in our midst. Who in spite of the consequences would speak-out in opposition to this "have it your way Mr. President" philosophy that exists nowadays.
Thank you Mr. Olbermann for your bravado. Thanks for confirming to the average (John/Jane Doe) American , that it isn't only them that smell a rat in high places. When Orwellian laws are passed to ensure peace and security;
It makes you wonder what is worse the threat of impending danger, or the havoc and suspicion required to secure peace? When we place these on the balance of consequential thinking we see that the cure is worse than the dis-ease. While promising peace the Prez has eroded the Constitution, piece by piece.
Mr. Olberman you spoke for the New "silent majority". Not the majority that is worried about lame "hot button" issues which divide this nation between red and blue states; But the majority that realizes that no president can usurp the Constitution and its precept without answering to the people. Ours is a nation of laws made for men (and women); Not vice versa.
You really showed your courage like a real "free" man. Thanks for standing in the breach.
When a free nation regresses into medieval times it's time for all the citizens to take note. When someone of prominence speaks up in opposition to the changes, it's a sign to the populace that not everyone HAS CHICKENED-OUT. Since the Congress and the Supreme Court is silent on the drastic changes that Mr. Bush has asked, and received since the infamous day of September 11, 2001; Someone had to break that wall of silence that has pervaded in our midst. Who in spite of the consequences would speak-out in opposition to this "have it your way Mr. President" philosophy that exists nowadays.
Thank you Mr. Olbermann for your bravado. Thanks for confirming to the average (John/Jane Doe) American , that it isn't only them that smell a rat in high places. When Orwellian laws are passed to ensure peace and security;
It makes you wonder what is worse the threat of impending danger, or the havoc and suspicion required to secure peace? When we place these on the balance of consequential thinking we see that the cure is worse than the dis-ease. While promising peace the Prez has eroded the Constitution, piece by piece.
Mr. Olberman you spoke for the New "silent majority". Not the majority that is worried about lame "hot button" issues which divide this nation between red and blue states; But the majority that realizes that no president can usurp the Constitution and its precept without answering to the people. Ours is a nation of laws made for men (and women); Not vice versa.
You really showed your courage like a real "free" man. Thanks for standing in the breach.
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