Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh and Afghanistan
Ongoing travel will make writing difficult today, so I'll post several television segments I did this morning and last night. First is a debate over Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy with former Bush official and standard neocon Dan Senor, on Dylan Ratigan's MSNBC program from this morning:
Secondly, here is the segment I did last night with Rachel Maddow on the personal benefits received from large health care and pharmaceutical corporations by Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh as a result of their servitude to those industries; my participation begins at roughly the 5:00 mark of the clip:
Finally, here is a segment I did this morning on Ratigan's show with Eliot Spitzer regarding the ongoing Wall Street abuses and the government's ever-expanding acquiescence to them:
Judging from the few times I've appeared on that program, Ratigan seems to be making a conscious effort to expand the scope of political debates that take typically place on cable news shows -- debates which are, with rare exception, painfully constricted and formulaic (see his monologue from a couple of weeks ago on Goldman Sachs as an example of the type of content one does not usually hear on such programs). Having substantive discussions in formats like this is inherently difficult -- that, paradoxically, is one of the values of the format, for reasons Noam Chomsky best explained here -- but I think, without knowing for certain, that Ratigan is attempting to conduct less constrained and conventional discussions. I don't want to overstate the case -- it's more just a general and preliminary impression -- but I think it's worth watching for.
Currently in Glenn Greenwald's Blog
- Greg Craig and Obama's worsening civil liberties record
- A new Time account of the fall of Obama's White House counsel sheds much light on rule of law issues.
- Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009 13:25 EST
- The extreme secrecy of the federal courts
- Judges are not only permitted, but required, to conceal anything the government declares to be secret.
- Monday, Nov 23, 2009 14:24 EST
- Rule-of-law extremism engulfs primitive Eastern Europe
- Why would the new President of Lithuania demand investigations of CIA black sites in her country?
- Saturday, Nov 21, 2009 13:22 EST
- The Washington establishment suffers a serious defeat
- Approval of the Paul/Grayson bill to audit the Fed is both rare and important in several ways
- Friday, Nov 20, 2009 15:21 EST



