Mancow on Olbermann. Below, waterboard denier Sean Hannity. Photo by Douglas C. Pizac / AP.
Mancow: Hannity called me after I was waterboarded and said, ‘It’s still not Torture’
By Satyam Khanna / May 27, 2009
With Keith Olbermann Video.
Last month, Fox News’s Sean Hannity claimed he would agree to be waterboarded “for charity…for the troops’s families.” Since then, multiple pundits have challenged Hannity to undergo the torture tactic, yet he has been unusually silent on the subject of waterboarding since. Last week, right-wing radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller stepped up to the plate and had himself waterboarded to prove that it isn’t torture. Immediately afterwards, Mancow admitted that it was “absolutely torture” and was “way worse” than he expected.
Yesterday, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann interviewed Mancow about his experience under the bucket. “I would have said anything to make it stop,” Mancow said, further confirming that torture does not produce reliable intelligence. “I don’t think drowning is harsh enough. … This is worse. This isn’t gulping for air. This is your brain is shut off.” Mancow said that despite the “horrific” event, Hannity called him afterwards to insist that waterboarding still isn’t torture:
MANCOW: First of all, Sean Hannity called me and said, “It’s still not torture.” I said, “Sean” — he is a friend of mine — “it is torture.” All right. But, look, you are giving 10,000 dollars to the Veterans of Valor.org. So I think you are stand-up guy for doing that.
“I felt the effects for two days. I had chest pains. I told my wife — I have two little kids. We prayed. I said, dear God, help me. I had chest pains. I was so stressed out by this,” Mancow said. Watch it:
Time and again, those who have dared to undergo waterboarding have said it is torture. Mancow, who initially scoffed at the tactic, explained to Olbermann: “Look, I see the video…the sprinkling of the water, big deal. … I was laughing at it. I was willing to prove and ready to prove that this was a joke. And I was wrong.”
Mancow laughed at waterboarding until he tried it himself. Hannity’s fact-free claim that waterboarding is “not torture” might carry more weight if he displayed the courage of Mancow.
Keith Olbermann, Special Comment, Countdown, April 16, 2009
U.S. future depends on torture accountability
We cannot let mistakes of the past haunt our future.
By Keith Olbermann / April 16, 2009
[The following was delivered as a "Special Comment" by commentator Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown, April 16, 2009.]
As promised, a Special Comment now on the president's revelation of the remainder of this nightmare of Bush Administration torture memos. This President has gone where few before him, dared. The dirty laundry — illegal, un-American, self-defeating, self-destroying — is out for all to see.
Mr. Obama deserves our praise and our thanks for that. And yet he has gone but half-way. And, in this case, in far too many respects, half the distance is worse than standing still. Today, Mr. President, in acknowledging these science-fiction-like documents, you said that: "This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke."
"We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.
"But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.
Mr. President, you are wrong. What you describe would be not "spent energy" but catharsis.
Not "blame laid," but responsibility ascribed. You continued:
"Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future."
Indeed we must, Mr. President. And the forces of which you speak are the ones lingering — with pervasive stench — from the previous administration. Far more than a criminal stench, Sir. An immoral one. One we cannot let be re-created.
One, President Obama, it is your responsibility to make sure cannot be re-created. Forgive me for quoting from a Comment I offered the night before the inauguration. But this goes to the core of the President's commendable, but wholly naive, intention. This country has never "moved forward with confidence".without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past.
In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive and often to strengthen it. We "moved forward" with slavery in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And four score and nine years later, we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers, in a Civil War.
After that war's ending, we "moved forward" without the social restructuring — and protection of the rights of minorities — in the south. And a century later, we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in our southern cities.
We "moved forward" with Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War.
Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials then. And 19 years later, there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.
We "moved forward" with the trusts of the early 1900s. And today, we are at the mercy of corporations too big to fail. We "moved forward" with the Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism.
And we "moved forward" with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We "moved forward" with Watergate and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk.
They grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But, Mr. President, when you say we must "come together on behalf of our common future" you are entirely correct. We must focus on getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.
That means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush administration's torture of prisoners, even if the results are nominal punishments, or merely new laws. Your only other option is to let this set and fester indefinitely. Because, Sir, some day there will be another Republican president, or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country's moral force. And he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush. Or what you did not do.
And he will see precedent. Or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time. Prosecute, Mr. President. Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn. Merely by acting, you will deny a further wrong — that this construction will enter the history books: Torture was legal. It worked. It saved the country.
The end. This must not be. "It is our intention," you said today, "to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution." Mr. President, you are making history's easiest, most often made, most dangerous mistake — you are accepting the defense that somebody was "just following orders." At the end of his first year in office, Mr. Lincoln tried to contextualize the Civil War for those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession and slavery. "The struggle of today," Lincoln wrote, "is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also."
Mr. president, you have now been handed the beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again — by showing them that those who did this, were neither unfairly scapegoated nor absolved. It is good to say "we won't do it again." It is not, however...enough.
Class struggle lives on cable TV By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / October 2, 2008
See ‘A Surge on One Channel, a Tight Race on Another,’ by Jim Rutenberg; and a comment by The Rag Blog’s Thorne Dreyer, Below.
Remember the first few years after nine eleven until we invaded Iraq? The US network TV media was loyal Republican back then. But now we have Olbermann and Hannity duking it out for ratings with partisan politicians, with progressive Olbermann winning. Its exactly what you would expect where there is relative freedom of the press combined with hard times. The public is dimly aware of Roosevelt and how a presidential swing to the left seemed to help deal with the great depression, which elected FDR the same as this one will elect Obama.
The TV advertising pie is shrinking, partly due to the internet. The internet increasingly sets the standard for media freedom, making it safer for other media to permit free expression.
Taking partisan positions that reflect shifting opinion toward a big need for basic governmental reforms can get a network more viewers as public opinion shifts. Be glad that some strong elements of democracy survived the Bush era. And be prepared to defend them from corporate counterattack as polarization of the media increases.
A Surge on One Channel, a Tight Race on Another By Jim Rutenberg / November 2, 2008
WASHINGTON — It was a lousy day to be Senator John McCain, Keith Olbermann informed his viewers on MSNBC on Thursday.
Senator Barack Obama’s surge in the polls was so strong he was competitive in Mr. McCain’s home state, Arizona. The everyman hero of Mr. McCain’s campaign, “Joe the Plumber,” failed to make an expected appearance at a morning rally in Defiance, Ohio, and the senator’s efforts to highlight Mr. Obama’s association with a professor tied to the P.L.O. were amounting to nothing.
Wait a minute ... not so fast. Click
Things were looking up for Mr. McCain, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren told their viewers on Fox News Channel on Thursday. He got a boost at an afternoon rally in Sandusky, Ohio, from none other than Joe the Plumber, who announced his intention to vote for “a real American, John McCain”; he was gaining new ground in ever-tightening polls, despite the overwhelming bias against him in the mainstream news media; and Mr. Obama’s association with a professor sympathetic to the P.L.O. was now at “the center of the election.”
On any given night, there are two distinctly, even extremely, different views of the presidential campaign offered on two of the three big cable news networks, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, a dual reality that is reflected on the Internet as well.
On one, polls that are “tightening” are emphasized over those that are not, and the rest of the news media is portrayed as papering over questions about Mr. Obama’s past associations with people who have purportedly anti-American tendencies that he has not answered. (“I feel like we are talking to the Germans after Hitler comes to power, saying, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t know,’ ” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, told Mr. Hannity on Thursday.)
On the other, polls that show tightening are largely ignored, and the race is cast as one between an angry and erratic Mr. McCain, whose desperate, misleading campaign has as low as a 4 percent chance of beating a cool, confident and deserving Democratic nominee in Mr. Obama. (“He’s been a good father, a good citizen, he’s paid attention to his country,” Chris Matthews, the MSNBC host, said Wednesday night in addressing those who might be leaning against Mr. Obama based on race. “Give the guy a break and think about voting for him.”)
And, perhaps unsurprisingly, each campaign is often at war against its television antagonist, just as the networks are at war with each other.
It is a political division of news that harks back to the way American journalism was through the first half of the 20th century, when newspapers had more open political affiliations. But it has never been so apparent in such a clear-cut way on television, a result of market forces and partisan sensibilities that are further chipping away at the post-Watergate pre-eminence of a more dispassionate approach.
The more objective approach came as the corporate owners of the networks pushed for higher profits and the newspaper industry consolidated and sought broader audiences. “To sell as many copies as you could to as many people as you could, you became what we considered objective,” said Richard Wald, a professor of media and society at Columbia University School of Journalism and a former senior vice president at ABC News.
Fox News Channel was founded 12 years ago with an argument that the mainstream news media were biased toward liberals and that nonliberals were starved for a “Fair and Balanced” television antidote by day and openly conservative-leaning opinion by night. But it was only in the last couple of years that MSNBC, long struggling for an identity and lagging, established itself as a liberal alternative to Fox News Channel in prime time, finding improved ratings in the mistrust of the mainstream media that had grown among on the left during the Bush years and the Iraq war.
The presidential campaign, and the partisan and ideological intensity surrounding it, has been the perfect subject for both sides, providing endless fodder to play to the persuasions of their audience and mock the views expressed on the rival network.
The result is a return to a “great tradition of American journalism,” Mr. Wald said. “Basically you chose your news outlet if it made you happy, if it reinforced all your views.”
Indeed, voters who primarily get their news from Web sites like The Huffington Post by day and MSNBC by night, and those who primarily get theirs from The Drudge Report by day and Fox News Channel by night would have entirely different views of the candidates and the news driving the campaign year. (At second place in the ratings, behind Fox News Channel, CNN is maintaining a far more traditional approach to news this year.)
When Politico.com reported on Oct. 21 that the Republican National Committee had spent $150,000 on clothing for Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, Mr. Olbermann interrupted his 8 p.m. program on MSNBC to promote the story and discuss it, as did Rachel Maddow, whose program follows.
Fox News Channel reported it first the next morning, on “Fox & Friends,” in a segment in which the report was described as sexist and unfair, and Bill O’Reilly and Ms. Van Susteren later criticized the news media on their programs for giving it as much attention as they had.
“It was ridiculous,” said Mr. O’Reilly, singling out The New York Times in particular for covering the purchase.
That was a role reversal from spring 2007, when news broke that former Senator John Edwards had paid $400 for a haircut out of his Democratic presidential campaign account.
Mr. Olbermann named Mr. Hannity the “Worst Person in the World,” a running feature on his program, for making fun of Mr. Edwards’s haircut and showing video of him styling his hair before an interview.
Mr. O’Reilly had said of Mr. Edwards at the time: “He runs around telling Americans the system is rigged, while paying $400 for a haircut. This guy is a one-man sitcom.”
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center, said, “To some extent, they are reverse images of each other.”
The group has studied the tone and content of the election-year coverage and found that Mr. McCain has been the subject of more negative reports in general than has Mr. Obama on issues that include assessments of their performances in polls, the debates and running their campaigns.
But within that universe, the study found, the share of positive reports on Mr. McCain at Fox News was above the average of the news media at large, and the share of negative reports about Mr. Obama was higher, too. (The study found that the mix of positive and negative was roughly equal for them on Fox.)
And the study found that MSNBC featured a higher percentage of negative reports about Mr. McCain than the rest of the news media and a higher share of positive reports about Mr. Obama. CNN was more generally in line with the average.
Mr. Rosenstiel said Fox News Channel and MSNBC showed ideological differences, “obviously more so at night.” And executives at those networks said that opinion was kept to their prime-time lineups and away from their news reporting.
Officials at the Obama and McCain campaigns said in interviews last week that they believed they were treated fairly by the reporters assigned to them at the two networks, including Major Garrett and Carl Cameron at Fox News Channel and Kelly O’Donnell and Lee Cowan at NBC News. (NBC pools some political newsgathering efforts with The New York Times.) And advisers to both campaigns show up for interviews on both networks.
Mr. Obama’s campaign aides said they were pleased when Shepard Smith, the Fox News Channel anchor, this week dressed down Joe the Plumber, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, for agreeing with a voter who called a vote for Mr. Obama “a vote for the death of Israel.”
Reporting that Mr. Obama supported Israel, Mr. Smith added with exasperation, “It just gets frightening sometimes.”
And Ms. Maddow has expressed skepticism about Mr. Obama’s call for more troops in Afghanistan.
But officials at both campaigns also said there had been plenty of instances when they have perceived bias in regular news coverage. On Fox News Channel, for instance, Gregg Jarrett, referring to Mr. Obama, asked a guest, “Do economists say that in fact his policies could drive a recession into a depression?” (The guest, Donald Lambro of The Washington Times, responded, “Well, I haven’t read that, no.”)
Raising a report about Obama campaign suspicions that Mr. McCain got an unfair peek at questions to be asked of him at a joint forum at the Saddleback Church, Mr. McCain’s campaign wrote to NBC News in August, “We are concerned that your news division is following MSNBC’s lead in abandoning nonpartisan coverage of the presidential race.”
And sometimes the approaches have been noticeable simply through what the networks cover. After NPR reported late last week that a McCain supporter, former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, questioned whether Ms. Palin was “prepared to take the reins of the presidency,” MSNBC repeated it roughly 20 times over the course of the day, CNN mentioned it four times, a review of programming on the monitoring service ShadowTV found. And Fox News Channel did one segment, in which it interviewed Mr. Eagleburger, who apologized and said Ms. Palin was “a quick study.”
Fox News Channel executives would not comment for this article. Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, agreed that at night his network gave a decidedly opinionated viewpoint.
“All of our material is based on fact — our guys work really hard on it, and the point-of-view shows make their conclusions,” Mr. Griffin said. “In this modern era, you’ve got a variety of places that look at the day’s events. Some you respect more than others, others you recognize as having a point of view, some you see as factual in a different way, and it all blends together into how you make your decision for what’s going on.
This Times article is useful and interesting. However, it indulges in the traditional “He says,” “He says,” technique of “balanced” reporting.
Though there is no argument that both Fox and MSNBC are seriously opinionated in their reporting and commentary, there is a vast gap between the two when it comes to accuracy and credibility. Misinformation on Fox is frequent and well-documented. They have displayed photo-shopped images of New York Times reporters to make them appear sleazy, have run with highly controversial attack stories long before any substantial documentation has existed, have uttered on-air racial slurs with minimal apology and have given voice to sources with extreme right wing and anti-semitic backgrounds.
Keith Olbermann may be bombastic and at times over-the-top but he is extremely smart and his facts virtually always stand up. Bill O’Reilly, on the other hand, though a delightful blowhard (if you like that sort of thing) is legendary for his distortions and hate spiels.
Both networks are biased in their story choices and approaches. MSNBC, though often strident, retains independence and speaks more from philosophy than partisanship. Fox News is frequently little more than a spin machine for neo-con orthodoxy.
Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog
Lets Let FOX and MSNBC Be Partisan
Let's be clear. There is nothing wrong with having a liberal or conservative leaning news station. The problem is when popular stations (FOX receives way more viewers than MSNBC) pretend to be fair and balanced. One of FOX News' mottos is actually "fair and balanced." At this point, it seems like FOX is barely trying to hide the fact that it is part of a vast propaganda machine for the Republican party. Dems have blogs, the GOP has tv and think tanks.
This is what led liberal blogs like Daily Kos, MYDD and TPM to staunchly oppose the Democratic Primary Debate on FOX news last fall. Allowing this debate to take place would have amounted to the Democratic Party's tacit approval of the conservative station which masquerades as an exercise in journalistic ethics.
Keith Olbermann offered a "Special Comment" tonight on his show Countdown, criticizing the McCain campaign and other Republicans, like Michele Bachmann, for their use of divisive politics during the campaign. The full text follows.
'A Special Comment tonight about the last five days of the divisive, ugly, paranoid bleatings of this Presidential race.' By Keith Olbermann / October 20, 2008
I have frequently insisted I would never turn the platform of the Special Comment into a regular feature.
But as these last two weeks of this extraordinary, and extraordinarily disturbing, presidential campaign project out in front of us, I fear I may have to temporarily amend that presumption. I hope it will be otherwise, but I suspect this will be the first of nightly pieces, most shorter than this... until further notice.
And thus culminating in the sliming of Colin Powell for his endorsement of Senator Obama.
There was once a very prominent sportswriter named Dick Young whose work, with ever-increasing frequency, became peppered with references to "my America."
"I can't believe this is happening in My America"... -- "we do not tolerate these people in My America" -- "this man does not belong in my America".
His America gradually revealed itself.
Insular. Isolationist. Backwards-looking. Mindlessly flag-waving. Racist. No second chances. A million rules, but only for the other guy.
Dick Young died in 1987, but he has been re-born in the presidential campaign as it has unfolded since last Thursday night.
In that time, Governor Sarah Palin, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, McCain spokesperson Nancy Pfotenhauer, and Rush Limbaugh, have revealed that there is a measurable portion of this country that is not interested in that which the vast majority view as democracy or equality or opportunity.
They want only... control -- and they want the rest of us, symbolically, perhaps physically... out.
Governor Palin:
"We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington D.C.," you told a fund-raiser in North Carolina last Thursday, to kick off this orgy of condescending elitism.
"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."
Governor, your prejudice is overwhelming.
It is not just "pockets" of this country that are "pro-America" Governor.
America... is "pro-America."
And the "Real America" of yours, Governor, is where people at your rallies shout threats of violence, against other Americans, and you say nothing about them or to them.
What you are seeing is not patriotism, Governor.
What has surrounded you since your nomination, has been the echoing shout of mob rule.
Indeed, that shout has echoed to Minnesota, where the next day an unstable Congresswoman named Michele Bachmann added to the ugly cry.
"I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America, or anti-America. I think people would love to see an expose' like that."
For nearly two years, Ms. Bachmann, who made her first political bones by keeping the movie "Aladdin" from being shown at a Minnesota Charter School because she thought it promoted paganism and witchcraft, has had a seat in the government of this nation, a seat from which she has spewed the most implausible, hateful, narrow-minded garbage imaginable.
Well, Congresswoman, you have gotten that "expose'" you wanted, have you not?
Though not perhaps in the way you imagined.
Since giving voice to your remarkable delusion that there are members of Congress who are "anti-America," and the extraordinary tap-dance of sleaze and innuendo about Senator Obama which followed...
...the challenger for your house Seat, Elwyn Tinklenberg, has been inundated by donations -- 700 thousand dollars in the three days after you spoke.
Because the America you perceive, Congresswoman -- with its goblins and ghosts and vast unseen hordes of traitors and fellow travelers and Senators who won't ban "Aladdin" -- exists only in your head, and in the heads of the others who must rationalize the failures in their own lives and of their own policies as somebody else's fault -- as a conspiracy to deny them an America of exclusionism and religious orthodoxy and prejudice, about which they must accuse, and murmur, and shout threats, and cleave the nation into pro-America and anti-America."
And back it comes to the McCain campaign.
And Senator McCain's talking head, Ms. Pfotenhauer, who on this very network Saturday, and seemingly without the slightest idea that dismissive prejudice dripped from every word, analyzed the race in Virginia.
"I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia," she said. "But the rest of the state, 'real Virginia,' if you will, I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain's message."
Again, a toxic message...
The parts of the country that agree with Nancy Pfotenhauer... are real -- the others, not.
Ms. Pfotenhauer, why not go the distance on this one?
It was Senator McCain's own brother who called that part of Virginia nearest Washington "communist country."
Cut to the chase, Madam.
No matter the intended comic hyperbole of Joe McCain...
This is the point -- isn't it?
Leave out the real meaning of "Communism," Madam -- Joe McCain reduced it to a buzz-word; it has no more true definition right now than does "Socialism," or the phrase "a man who sees America like you and I see America."
It's about us... and them.
The pro-... and the anti.
Never mind, Madam, that the bi-secting of this country you would happily inspire, means taking a tiny crack in a dam and not repairing it but burrowing into it.
It is not enough that Senator McCain and Senator Obama might differ.
One must be real and the other false.
One must be pro-America and the other anti.
Go back and -- as your boss Rick Davis said today -- "re-think," Mr. McCain's insistence not to drag the sorry bones of Jeremiah Wright into this campaign.
And whatever you do, Ms. Pfotenhauer, allow no one enough time to think... about the widening crack in the dam.
And now all of this comes together to attack Colin Powell.
"Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race," writes Rush Limbaugh... the grand wizard of this school of reactionary non-thought.
"OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I'll let you know what I come up with."
It is not conceivable that Powell might reject McCain for the politics of hate and character assassination, or just for policy.
In the closed, sweaty world of the blind allegiances of Limbaugh -- one of "us" who endorses one of "them," must be doing so for some other blind allegiance, like the color of skin.
The answer to this primordial muck, must be addressed to one man only.
Senator McCain -- where are you?
I disagree with you on virtually every major point of policy and practice.
And yet I do not think you "anti-America." I would not hesitate to join you in time of crisis in defense of this country.
Fortunately you did not echo this chorus of base hatred.
But neither have you repudiated it.
What is "pro-America", Senator?
Is it pro-America to call a man a racist because he endorses a different candidate?
Senator, you have based your campaign on many premises, but the foremost (and the most nearly admirable) of all of them, have been the pitches about "reaching across the aisle," and putting, as your ubiquitous banners reed, "country first."
So when Colin Powell endorses your opponent, you say nothing as your supporters and proxies paint him in this "Anti-America" frame and place him in Governor Palin's un-real America.
Senator McCain -- did not General Powell just "reach across the aisle?" Did he not, in his own mind at least, "put country first?"
Is it not your responsibility, Senator, to, if not applaud, then at least quiet those in your half of our fractured political equation?
Is it not your responsibility, Senator, to say "enough" to Republican smears without end?
Is it not your responsibility, Senator, to insist that, win or lose, you will not be party to a campaign that devolves into hatred and prejudice and divisiveness?
And Senator McCain, if it is not your responsibility... whose is it?
The Rag Blog is a reader-supported newsmagazine produced by activist journalists committed to progressive social change. The Rag Blog is published by the New Journalism Project, a 501(c)(3) Texas non-profit.
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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Matt Hern Writes With Bravado That Sports Do Matter by Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog. Engagingly written, Matt Hern's "One Game at a Time" is motivated by the belief that sports do matter as much as sports fans think they do. Hern, like leftist sportswriter Dave Zirin, "walks into the terrain where sports and politics mesh."
Lamar W. Hankins : Right-Wing Rants and the Abominable Straw Man by Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog. The Internet is a marvelous tool when used honestly and correctly, and with recognition of its limitations. But it is also home to angry rants, often from the far right, that make ridiculous claims -- like the one (that actually originated on a satirical site) saying that the Obama administration was setting up gasoline stations to provide free gas to low-income [read: black] people.
HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 12, Section 1, 1947-1948 by Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog. More in Bob's series on the continuing movement to democratize Egypt, this time covering the period from 1947-48 when an anti-imperialist left made experienced growth -- and the Muslim Brotherhood collaborated with the Egyptian regime.
Harry Targ : My Nelson Mandela by Harry Targ / The Rag Blog. An irony of 21st century historical discourse is how real historic figures -- like the late Nelson Mandela -- get lionized, sanitized, and redefined as defenders of the ongoing order rather than activists who committed their lives to revolutionary change.
Michael James : Back to Uptown, 1965-1966 by Michael James / The Rag Blog. Mike continues his remarkable memoir, accompanied -- and inspired by -- photos from his upcoming book. His adventures -- and the making of an activist -- continue as he heads back to Uptown Chicago, "progressing along my path with another left turn and a big step into America."
Alice Embree : Chile and the Politics of Memory by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog. Chileans went to the polls Sunday and appear to be reelecting Socialist president Michelle Bachelet on the 40th anniversary of the bloody U.S.-supported coup against Socialist president Salvador Allende. Alice writes about the dramatic contradictions in Chilean politics and history.
Paul Krassner : A Tale of Two Alternative Media Conferences by Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog. Paul remembers the original Alternative Media Conference in June 1970 at Goddard College in Vermont -- and it was a wild and wooly affair headlined by the likes of Ram Dass, Harvey Kurtzman, and Art Spiegelman -- as the college hosts another conference keynoted by progressive radio host Thom Hartmann.
Harry Targ : STEM and the Tyranny of the Meme by Harry Targ / The Rag Blog. From the fear of "falling behind the Soviets" to the missile gap and, more recently the wars on drugs and terrorism, the fear of falling behind some fictional adversaries is an ongoing "meme" used by economic, political, and military elites. The latest? Now it's the "STEM crisis" and the fear that we're falling behind other nations in science and technology .
Alice Embree : Anne Lewis' New Website Brings Austin Movement History to Life by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog. Noted documentary filmmaker Anne Lewis has created a website called Austin Beloved Community that uses audio, film, photos, maps, and personal recollections to create a "digital collage" about the struggle for social and economic justice in Austin from the 1880s to the present. Alice interviews Lewis about the unique project.
BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Marc Myers Tells Us 'Why Jazz Happened' by Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog. Ron reviews a new book on America's own music in which Marc Myers "provides the reader with a deep, rich, and broad perspective on the confluence of jazz and U.S. history in the decades following World War Two."
INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Novelist Beverly Gologorsky Was Shaped by Sixties, Feminism, and The Bronx by Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog. Another unique interview from Jonah with novelist Beverly Gologorsky, whose latest book, "Stop Here," "the title of which nearly shouts its presence. Gologorsky, "a novelist shaped by the New Left," edited anti-war publications Viet-Report and Leviathan in the '60s and '70s.
Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 11, Section 2 by Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog. The latest in Feldman's series on the "movement to democratize Egypt" covers the period of 1945-6 when Egyptian communist and labor grew and faced government retaliation.
David McReynolds : We Are All Wounded Veterans by David McReynolds / The Rag Blog. Long-time pacifist writer and activist McReynolds says there's something "infinitely sad" about the recent celebration of Veterans Day. "In the bad wars -- which are the only wars we have fought for some time now -- there is the terrible knowledge that the enemy was never really the enemy," he says.
Michael James : Going Off Campus, 1965 by Michael James / The Rag Blog. Mike continues to share experiences and images from his rich history as an activist and adventurer -- that will be published in an upcoming book, "Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul." Here Mike reports on the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, community organizing in Oakland, and his travels across the country in a 1957 Plymouth station wagon "drive-away."
Alan Waldman: 'Keeping Up Appearances' Tops Second Tier of My Favorite Britcoms by Alan Waldman / The Rag Blog. Waldman has been reviewing vintage, mostly-British television series now available on DVD, Netflix, and YouTube. "Keeping Up Appearances" "is a very funny sitcom with a brilliant cast," starring Patricia Routledge as social-climbing snob Hyacinth Bucket.
