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Here’s something for Memorial Day: Dance at the Jefferson Memorial and get arrested!
This happened last week. Did you know you can’t dance in a public place? Can’t kiss your girlfriend either.
Welcome to America.
I don’t usually give such coverage to Libertarians… but this is something that really bothers me. I don’t care if there are demonstrators doing what we really saw as demonstrating in the 60s and 70s… public spaces like National Monuments should be open for such demonstrations as long as there is no violence, no interference with others getting to go to or pass through the area, and no profanity or pornography, etc. This little police action… plus the shutting off of a Press camera (freedom of the press should extend to public places)… is more than irritating. It is frightening.
Adam Kokesh is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and former US Congressional candidate from New Mexico. Adam has testified before Congress and has been interviewed on CNN, Fox, and ABC. As a Marine, Adam was sent to Fallujah in 2004 and received the Combat Action Ribbon and Navy Commendation medal as a sergeant. Kokesh attended graduate studies in political management at George Washington University and holds a B.A. degree in psychology from Claremont McKenna College.
Juan Cole, too! Most of the best bloggers on the web have made support statements for Olbermann…
…and many, me included, are just not going to turn MSNBC back on unless Olbermann is restored.
Here’s part of Juan Cole‘s LONG piece… get all of it HERE:
That Olbermann is being treated unfairly is obvious. Joe Scarborough has also donated to a political campaign while at MSNBC. And Sean Hannity at Fox has given far more money to candidates than Olbermann ever did. In fact, Hannity donated to Michele Bachmann, which suggests he is better suited to playing a bit part in a remake of the Night of the Living Dead than to anchoring a major ‘news’ show.
Hell, most of the main Republican candidates for president are working for Fox Cable News! So it goes beyond giving some campaign a couple thousand dollars, nowadays!
Fox argues that Hannity is not a news anchor but the equivalent of an op-ed columnist, a purveyor of opinions, and so may also be a political actor.
But MSNBC has already marked Olbermann also as an opinion person, not a hard news anchor, when it took him off election coverage in 2008. So MSNBC has put Olbermann in the same category as Fox has put Hannity. But one is on the air and the other is not.
MSNBC has a long history of throwing liberals under the bus, despite its recent strategy of trying to use them to counter-program against Fox.
In the build-up to the Iraq War, MSNBC had Phil Donahue, whose evening magazine show was the highest-rated thing on the network. As the momentum for war built, the top corporate management became very nervous about having a show starring an anti-war liberal, so they fired Donahue Rick Ellis wrote at the time that General Electric-owned NBC had commissioned a study of its public image, and that the consultants produced a report in which they wrote, that Donahue was a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war……He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report worried that the war fever would benefit rival, pro-war, pro-Bush networks and implied that Donahue might succeed in branding NBC in a way that caused viewership and therefore advertising revenues to plummet.
MSNBC replaced Donahue with far right wing shock jock Michael Savage, Dick Armey and Republican Joe Scarborough (who went on to donate to a Republican politician while on the air).
Related Articles
- You: Olbermann suspension ignites debate (latimes.com)
- MSNBC: Un-Suspend Keith Olbermann. Bring him back (rupeenews.com)
Picked this up at The Political Carnival – Wikileaks is at it again…
Here’s part of it… video available at original site:
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Related Articles
- Wikileaks Dumps Documents: Secret Iraq War Death Toll Set at 285K (abcnews.go.com)
- Pentagon Ready for WikiLeaks Release of Iraq War Documents (blogs.abcnews.com)
- Daniel Ellsberg on WikiLeaks on the Verge of Largest Intel Leak in US History (alternet.org)
- NATO chief warns against WikiLeaks Iraq release (topinews.com)
- WikiLeaks plans ‘major’ release of secret U.S. war documents (theglobeandmail.com)
Last “Full Combat” Brigade out of Iraq
I watched on Olbermann as the last “full combat” brigade (440 soldiers) pulled out of Iraq and rode their Strykers into Kuwait last night (I have no idea how long it takes them to actually get out of the country) leaving 50,000 “non-combat” troops who are to serve as trainers and are not to get into any combat incidents… not to break up fights between Sh’ias and Sunnis, or anything like that.
The American Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, was interviewed and said that this was the keeping of Obama’s promise to get combatants out. The Iraq war is, therefore, ending… but we still have a commitment there. We’ve gone from 140,000 troops to 50,000 and it appears to be a positive mood. The Ambassador’s biggest worry is that there is still not an effective coalition government in Iraq and they are going to have to do it pretty much by themselves.
It is now up to the Iraqis… at least that’s what we’re saying.
I’m also wondering if these troops are going to end up in Pakistan or Afghanistan.