TGIF Morning Open Thread [VERY Hot Update]
By Bronwyn's Harbor on November 5, 2010 at 10:00 AM in Current Affairs
HOT UPDATE: “Keith Olbermann SUSPENDED From MSNBC Indefinitely Without Pay (at end of this post)
MORE BELOW: The NYT posts a great interactive map of Tuesday’s GOP wins (this map ROCKS!) … YouTube finally bans the rantings of Anwar al-Awlaki (or should it?) … The president of Wesleyan University offers thoughts on Tuesday’s results, and gives Obama suggestions … George Will believes Tuesday night was a recoil against liberalism. But first, WE CELEBRATE THE OPENING OF “FAIR GAME”!
“FAIR GAME” OPENS TODAY in theaters across this great land. HERE ARE NEW VIDEOS we haven’t seen before, straight from the movie:
“Fair Game – I Don´t Know Where You Go”
“A HISTORIC SHIFT,” an interactive map from the NY Times:
Just how tolerant of “free speech” should we be? Well, it does have its limits, doesn’t it. Especially when it comes to inciting widespread violence. From the Seattle Times’s story, “YouTube removes video sermons by radical cleric“:
YouTube has removed from its site videos featuring calls to holy war by an al-Qaida-linked Muslim cleric after pressure from British and U.S. officials.
The New York Times reported on its website Wednesday that YouTube spokeswoman Victoria Grand said the videos by Anwar al-Awlaki violated the site’s guidelines prohibiting “incitement to commit violent acts.”
The newspaper says YouTube made the move after a British official urged the videos be removed.
Democratic New York Rep. Anthony Weiner (WEE’-nur) also sent letters to the Google-owned company listing hundreds of videos featuring the U.S.-born Yemeni cleric. Weiner says the company took his request more seriously after last week’s attempted mail bombings from Yemen. …
Interesting that it took the attempted mail bombings to make YouTube take down those videos.
I once worked for an Internet company whose belief in free speech was so strong that they didn’t believe we should block discussion groups devoted to child pornography. Well, when I was at work, I made it my business to block those sites, no matter what the owners thought about the ideals of free speech. Good lord.
Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, begins his essay for Huffington Post, “We Need to Create Trust,” with a great recap of the past two years, but fails in the following text since he thinks that Obama is able to fix his big problems, and most of us know that that’s unlikely:
One of the striking things that this week’s elections forcefully represents is the dramatic erosion of trust in President Obama. Two years ago he hadn’t yet earned our confidence, but he did inspire deep trust. Our frustration with his leadership has not just been disappointment with specific policies that haven’t worked. The frustration and the anger seem also to come from a feeling of betrayal — feeling that we trusted the wrong guy. The elections don’t really show any movement to “the right guys.” They just demonstrate a vacuum of trust — the triumph of suspicion.
This can be fixed. Here are three things Obama can do that would help.
1. Show you understand. …. [Ummmm.]
2. Show you are competent. [More ummmmms.]
3. Show you have the grit to get the job done no matter how much work is required. [More ummmms, with a reminder that for Obama, his golf game always comes first.]
I give Dr. Roth an A for his first paragraph. But, bless his heart, his ideas just won’t work. He hasn’t realized that those three suggestions cannot be fulfilled by the narcissistic, inexperienced, and not hard-working Obama. Perhaps the next two years will teach him that.
Gosh, I haven’t read a George Will column in a long while. But this one has some well-expressed thoughts on the Tuesday night election results aka the blowout repudiation of Obama-land. In “A recoil against liberalism, Mr. Will writes:
Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012. Trying to preemptively drain the election of its dangerous (to Democrats) meaning, all autumn Democrats described the electorate as suffering a brain cramp, an apoplexy of fear, rage, paranoia, cupidity – something. Any explanation would suffice as long as it cast what voters were about to say as perhaps contemptible and certainly too trivial to be taken seriously by the serious.
It is amazing the ingenuity Democrats invest in concocting explanations of voter behavior that erase what voters always care about, and this year more than ever – ideas. This election was a nationwide recoil against Barack Obama’s idea of unlimited government.
The more he denounced Republicans as the party of “no,” the better Republicans did. His denunciations enabled people to support Republicans without embracing them as anything other than impediments to him.
He had defined himself as a world-class whiner even before Rahm Emanuel, a world-class flatterer, declared that Obama had dealt masterfully with “the toughest times any president has ever faced” – quite a claim, considering that before the first president from Illinois was even inaugurated, seven of the then-34 states had seceded. Today’s president from Illinois, a chronic campaigner and incontinent complainer who is uninhibited by considerations of presidential dignity, has blamed his difficulties on:
George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Supreme Court, a Cincinnati congressman (John Boehner), Karl Rove, Americans for Prosperity and other “groups with harmless-sounding names” (Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” redux), “shadowy third-party groups” (they are as shadowy as steam calliopes), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and, finally, the American people. They have deeply disappointed him by being impervious to “facts and science and argument.” …
Well, I encourage you to read it all. It is quite a polemic against Mr. Obama et al.
And how are all of you this fine Friday morning? Had your coffee yet? Need more? Here is some JUST FOR YOU!
YUM!
HOLY MOTHER! Keith Olbermann has finally crossed a line so far that NBC has been compelled to suspend him — without pay — indefinitely! Here’s the breaking news story from HuffingtonPost:
MSNBC has suspended star anchor Keith Olbermann following the news that he had donated to three Democratic candidates this election cycle.
“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,” MSNBC president Phil Griffin said in a statement.
Politico reported Friday that Olbermann had donated $2,400 each to Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, and to Kentucky Senate contender Jack Conway. While NBC News policy does not prohibit employees from donating to political candidates, it requires them to obtain prior approval from NBC News executives before doing so.
In a statement earlier Friday, Olbermann defended his donation, saying, “I did not privately or publicly encourage anyone else to donate to these campaigns nor to any others in this election or any previous ones, nor have I previously donated to any political campaign at any level.”
Griffin’s statement underscores that it was Olbermann’s failure to obtain approval, and not the actual political donations, that prompted the suspension. …
Memeorandum.com links to several more stories on Olbermann’s abrupt suspension. The story appears to have been unearthed by Politico. Many blogs are weighing in. Here’s a sample from Hot Air:
Would it shock anyone to know that Keith Olbermann donated thousands of dollars to three Democrats in the midterms? Two House incumbents from Arizona and Jack Conway, the Senatorial candidate fro Kentucky who lost after running the notorious “Aqua Buddha” attack ad, received the maximum donation from Olbermann in the final days of the general election season, a fact discovered by Politico when reviewing FEC filings. The donations violate NBC’s stated ethics code for its journalists, and it may apply even more since one of the recipients appeared on Countdown at the same time Olbermann made the donation: [...]
The question then becomes whether Steve Capus approved of Olbermann’s contributions, or whether he was asked at all about it. The rule does allow NBC to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to enforce the ethics code or not. If Capus gave the green light, then one has to wonder whether he has ever been asked about donating to Republicans in House and Senate races and whether he allowed those contributions or not. If waivers only come for Democrats, then that speaks to NBC’s approach to politics in general, and not just MSNBC.
However, let’s not pretend that this somehow proves Olbermann’s bias. Despite NBC’s insistence on calling Olbermann a news anchor, he’s one of the most obvious opinionaters in the cable news industry. The disastrous election coverage at MSNBC helmed by Olbermann proved that beyond doubt for those few who ever doubted it. And to be fair, Olbermann himself doesn’t seem terribly concerned about pretenses of objectivity or fairness.
That doesn’t mean that Olbermann and his network haven’t been hypocritical on this issue, however: … Read all.
How delicious is this?!?!?!? What a fool he was … arrogant to boot … just like someone else …
by Ronald Scott
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