Smart Talk on Health Care Reform and Its Opponents

 

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This is a great piece of interviewing. Watching this Countdown segment gave me a strange fantasy concerning the upcoming 2012 election:

Rachel Maddow
Progressive Party Candidate for President of the United States

And while I'd love to see Huffington as VP, I think there are Constitutional barriers to that. Still, Arianna could be a valuable cabinet member instead so its all good.

Maddow is the most intelligent person on U.S. television today.

Congress-Critters Actually Insane!

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What the fuck more can be said here? These asshats don't know what they support - or is it merely an issue of when they supported it? It's pretty hard not to imagine, as Olbermann suggests, that these fuck-wits subsequently get calls from their corporate puppet-masters and told what to do after they fuck up by actually trying to do their jobs and serve their constituents.

Health Insurance Industry Lobbyist: "I gave you money - you will suck my dick! Do a retraction, a 180, whatever...!"

And than there's Arianna Huffington...

Huffington is the consummate opportunist, no doubt. But that's no reason to reject her astute opinions on issues of the day. In this Olbermann segment she skewers Obama's namby pamby political bullshit.

Obama can't get shit done because the position he negotiates from is ruinously centrist from the start. He has no room for compromise, so he just loses ground every fucking time!

Obama: Drunk With Power

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And here's Glenn Greenwald on the same stuff with the same video content:

Keith Olbermann's scathing criticism of Obama's secrecy/immunity claims
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/08/criticism/

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Olbermann reports on how Obama is now performing and defending the same actions for which he criticized Bush Jr. It's an appalling about face to the peace movement to see how the secrecy and the warmongering continues with a Prez who rode in on a mandate to end the secrecy and the wars of the previous resident of the oral office.

Obama is breaking promises and we must take him to task for it.

I don't quite believe that we have ended the torture, we've just moved it out of sight of public scrutiny and denunciation. Why the careful legal moves otherwise? Power for the sake of power, or power because it has motives? You choose. It stinks either way...

End the wars! End the secrecy and hidden torture!

Bring back the light! Bring back our civil liberties!

I stand firm on my right to privacy.

Fuck you, Obama!

Olbermann: Prosecute Bush's War Crimes

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Exactly. Something must be done to repudiate the Bush years and its legacy of torture and running roughshod over the rule of law. Forgetting it by laying it aside is not enough - something must be done.

We are a nation of laws.

How can we assume, or resume, our status as the first nation of the world with such a blemish on our record?

Olbermann On the Bush Legacy

This might be useful as a reminder going forward. What will the spin machine devise to combat the truth?

Olbermann: A Message of Love

Comment:

I don't understand how people's minds can be so small as to deny anyone else their own private happiness. The private happiness is de facto - you can't change it. At stake is the individual right to have those kinds of relationships legally recognized regardless of race, creed, etc.

I am optimistic that Prop 8 will be shot down as being unconstitutional - not because of some mere technicality of the legal process but because it is fundamentally discriminatory in its nature and therefore cannot stand according to the Constitution of the State of California.

And that's how minority rights stand up to the tyranny of the majority - because we've already written it into our system of governance.

Shame on those that force the system to correct the offenses of the benighted majority.

No Question: It *IS* Torture and Torture is a War Crime

"Countdown: War Crimes Prosecutions Possible" [VIDEO]
http://youtube.com/watch?v=M3PvIFx-WDE

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"Top Bush aides pushed for Guantánamo torture"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/19/guantanamo.usa

He added: "Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."

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"Worries About War Crimes Heat up in the White House"
http://www.alternet.org/rights/91340/?page=entire

On those larger issues, the evidence is in, merely awaiting adjudication. Mr. Bush's 2005 proclamation that "we do not torture" was long ago revealed as a lie. Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated detainee abuse for the Army, concluded that "there is no longer any doubt" that "war crimes were committed." Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

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The thugs in the White House don't seem to get it: waterboarding *IS* torture and torture is a war crime. All that's left now is to see if this or any congress we shall see soon has the balls to make a prosecution stick.

The White House administration has done its best to create confusion on the supposed question of whether waterboarding is torture: if it is not torture, then it's not illegal nor a war crime; if it is torture, then it's illegal and war crime - we'll ask our attorneys! There is no question of law to be decided here, there is no doubt that waterboarding is torture and a war crime. Ask the Red Cross, they might know.

The only people asking those idiotic questions and doing all of the hemming and hawing over this bullshit are our own elected officials in D.C. Apparently, they can't do their jobs and defend the U.S. Constitution nor defend us before the international community from being thought of as the people that suborned torture.

Congress's failure to act makes us all into war criminals!

Olbermann on Obama's FISA Fuckup

"Olbermann Scolds Obama Over FISA, but Offers the Senator Ways to Redeem Himself"
Video:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/90151/

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I like most of the opinions held and given voice by Olbermann. The guy says some really great stuff from time to time. If he has a political opinion with which I would disagree I haven't heard it yet, but there is this one thing...

He seems to think that if the Democrats win a landslide election that everything will somehow "auto-magically" get better for the USA. As if the Dems weren't up to their eyeballs in corporate funding and favors that must be paid back. As if Obama wasn't basically just politics as usual. Etc.

Olbermann is certainly anti-GOP and I can't disagree with that at all. But I am far more lukewarm on the Dems than is Olbermann. Olbermann comes across as fairly enthusiastic about the Dems while simultaneously kicking them in the balls anyway.

Personally, I just don't trust any political party really. And that's the point Olbermann was making by referencing George Washington.

So why the enthusiasm, Keith? Just kick them in the balls and be done with it.