To samosamo:

I appreciate your comments, and wholly agree that the so-called MSM bear a large measure of responsibility for the benighted way much of the American public views things.  I stopped watching network news years ago; they failed America and abandoned their historical obligation to report the truth.  They’ve grown so miserably superficial (and, yes, in their pseudo-centrist way, conservative) that their reportage, if often innocuous, can only be considered a monstrous lie.  On the other hand, I am deeply grateful for MSNBC (owned by the most influential MSM network, namely NBC).  This station has brought truth and an impassioned commitment to reason back to television, at least for a few hours in evening prime time.  Are they to be considered MSM, too?  I don’t agree that the MSM do what they do out of concern for their shareholders, for their businesses are slowly failing.  They are in the grip of an ideological fixation (which, if not itself right wing, is, in the name of “centrism,” a primary enabler of the right) that has cost them viewers in the tens of millions over the past 40 years.  The alienation of news consumers has begun to take its most visible toll on American newspapers.  But the television media are next—UNLESS the news business gets back some of its sense of connection to the public good.  The public has been slow to respond to this long-term trend, but the 2006 and 2008 elections are a sign that they are beginning to see through the sham and superficiality of conventional news reporting.  It’s an awareness that might not last long.  People are responding and clamoring for change because they have felt the effects of recent history in their own lives.  But it’s hard to know how the public will think if and when their lives return to a certain equilibrium.  This is all the more reason why we have to learn from history.

By jrosenb1, April 15 at 1:12 am

I hope, just as you, that obama will get this quagmire, left by the conservative administration, straighten out, but I feel really discouraged that a lot of what he does is just a continuation of that previous administration.
The hardest thing that will have to be done is ‘straighten out, corporate america and in my opinion and others is that the media needs to be fixed before all else. Why else do people not know?Or are tricked into believing that some of the same people responsible for this disaster are the right people for the job of fixing it. That ‘moving ahead’ means that the past is history and everything done the brought this disaster on the country and the world should NOT be investigated and prosecuted.
The media is a focal point of problems that continue because the 4 or 5 owners of all the mainstream media are beholding to themselves and their investors and they will decide what information the people get, if any, when they turn on their tv, radio or read their newpapers(what is left of those) and magazines. There is a site for people to email the president about what should be the most pressing issues but if that site is taking millions of emails, how are they being sorted and handled? The information system really needs some serious overhaul to spread those broadbands amoungest a lot of different people and groups with different views instead of this conservative controlled crap being dished out. If obama got serious he should have already handled this as it is a constitutional right for the people to be informed of the truth and not the garbage razzle dazzle provided for them from the MSM.

Re: your problem of commenting in the ‘Cartoons’ section. I have found that when I try to preview my comments in the Cartoons that the window goes blank and just sits their. I have to back up and hit submit ot get a comment to post. Don’t know why this is but it is aggravating.

[A previous version of these comments may have been sent prematurely by accident before I had a chance to finish them.  If so, here is the full and corrected version:]

I find this cartoon ill-considered and offensive.  I have my own reservations about the bank recovery plan, and take seriously the notion that it may privilege the banks at the expense of the taxpayer.  But this cartoon makes it seem as if Obama is striving for a malevolent soaking of the public, precisely at a time when he is striving to restore to government for the first time in ages some sense of the public good.  Come on, people.  Have you no historical memory?  Who was just in office for eight years?  Have we not just lived through the worst presidential administration in American history?  We had, to our great misfortune, a leader with his back to the American public for every day of those eight years.  We owe a debt of gratitude for ANY change of tone in Washington, and Obama has supplied that aplenty.  You’re not going to agree with everything he does, but don’t feed the same old tired cynicism that has left our country paralyzed and dispirited.  Give the man a chance, and recognize that change takes time and often involves compromise.  Yes, I’d like to see Obama fire Geithner and Sommers and replace them with Krugman and Stieglitz (for example).  But let’s cut the man some slack and rein in some of the resentment that has been building since way long before Obama.  Count your blessings, among which is the current president.

Kudos mr fish, you’re on a roll. My courtesy is running thin waiting to see them changes so advocately propounded during the compaign. But now I am beginning to think he was difinitely the ‘elite’s’ choice for president to futher their criminal agnenda but I’m still waiting for them changes.

What blackmail, Ed.  It’s not blackmain if you agree to do it beforehand.  The ruling class helped make Obama president to carry out its policies.  Which he is doing knowingly.  As soon as Americans realize they have been conned and protest, he will use the military and police to deter the American population.  And he does this knowingly and willingly to be president.  What’s blackmain about that?

antispin:(I like your name.)  I also heard Chomsky say that people (a lot of Americans) do better when the Democrats are in power and a small amount, the rich, do better when Republicans are in power, but he does generalize that it’s the “corporate” two parties. I think he is including economic aspects.  I am not comfortable using the phrase “culture wars”.

With Chomsky, I always have to read the transcript,too.

The fact is, sometimes when you’re being blackmailed, you can’t admit it.

They are blackmailing Obama and America, but how do you call them on it? They have a knife to our throats, and they want our money; when someone has a knife to your throat, are you going to say, “No, I won’t give you my money, because that’s just not right”?

In Obama’s case, it’s not only, “Give me all of the country’s money, or you’re dead”, but it’s also, “You’re also dead if you even let on that you’re doing this only because we’re threatening you. You have to sing the song just right, with feeling.”

He’s a media star, not a president. Remember - he won an award from U.S. ad agencies for how he ran his campaign. All smoke and mirrors.

But people still LOVE him and his sweet little family and his sweet little puppy. Let’s just forget all about the illegal presidential powers he’s not only not overturning, but extending, or the fact that he’s closing Guantánamo but moving it to Bagram, Let forget about the move to allow him to shut down the internet, COMPLETELY, in the case of an “emergency”.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Cybersecurity_Act_seeks_broad_powers_0413.html

As Jonathan Turley said, said on Countdown:  “It doesn‘t matter if you are a good person doing bad things. You are doing bad things.”

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/13/obama/index.html

Right on the money.

Bullseye.

My take-away from Chomsky today is that the good guys won significant battles in the culture wars, but the bad imperial warmonger corporations have a strangle hold on the economy and could easily make “us” fearful enough to want a fascist state to protect us.

Look at the double speak of Roger Ailes ventriloquating through the sorry puppet, Glen Beck.  Those performances have become a surreal theater of the absurd.

Almost paraphrases Noam Chomsky, part 2, interview with Amy Goodman, aired on DemocracyNow today.  Both parts were recorded last week. http://www.democracynow.org