Dear Arianna I have pretty much given up on blogging for you. I know this is not on your radar screen but maybe it should be.

The last straw was the failure to publish this piece on Afghanistan. It languished in my queue for weeks and finally was so out of date that it made no sense to leave it there. I tried to delete it but could not. I have given up reminding your blogteam that a piece of mine has been languishing for weeks.

I think there is something wrong with the mechanics but I have never been able to unearth someone to check.

It is the height of egotism to believe that one’s thoughts are too original for HuffPo and are being singled out for censure. I do not believe that. What I do believe is that my pieces stack up with the thoughts of others who seem to have no trouble getting heard.

I offer you a large archive of failed attempts to get recent pieces posted. I won’t hold my breath.

Is there a living wage for journalists?  What should it be?  Arianna Huffington says a “living wage” for her journalists is still being worked out.  My opinion  –  and I may be wrong or just completely biased  –  is that journalism doesn’t pay a living wage.  You do it for the love.  I think in the long-term, I will make my money doing other things.  Can one make a good living in journalism today?

Senator Joe Lieberman has pushed the health care debate to a level of absurdity that can’t be ignored, Arianna argued on Tuesday evening. During her appearance on The Ed Show with Ed Schultz, Arianna took issue with the power bestowed upon the Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut and she blamed the White House and others for caving and empowering Lieberman.

“The White House is kind of arguing that they didn’t pressure Sen. Reid to cave into Lieberman, that everyone was in agreement. But the bottom line is that everyone caved in, and that’s not the sort of change that we believe in.”

Read more at Huffington Post

Bill Taylor

* * *
What better way for business thinkers to celebrate the holiday season than with the gift of great ideas? As the year 2009 — as difficult, divisive, worrisome, and hopeful a year since, well, 2008 — draws to a close, my friend Seth Godin, the innovator, writer, and blogger extraordinaire, has persuaded 70 other innovators, writers, and bloggers to participate in a project he calls What Matters Now.

The idea is simple: Each of us suggests one word — literally one word — that all of us should think about in 2010, and then takes one page to explain why and how that word matters.

The result is an intriguing, inspiring, and at times downright moving collection of unconventional wisdom that is available free to everyone as of this morning. I urge you to download the PDF, process its diverse ideas, messages, and calls to action, and then share it with as many friends, associates, and colleagues as possible. Think of it as an intellectual yule log meant to brighten your spirits and light a fire for the future.

[Note: If you wish to receive the What Matters Now pdf, please contact me at interllect@mindspring.com.

What struck me about the ideas in What Matters Now is that they arrange themselves into a few distinct (but related) categories. (The collection itself does not impose these categories, this is my interpretation.) A bunch of the words involve the stuff of human emotion and motivation — what makes us tick. Seth begins the PDF with a riff on generosity. “When the economy tanks it’s natural to think of yourself first,” he writes. “You have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business. It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money, but most important generous with our art.”

Hugh MacLeod, a blogger and cartoonist with a truly distinctive voice, offers a take on meaning: “The best way to get approval is not to need it,” he writes. “Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.”

Happy Holidays!

* * *

Taylor is an agenda-setting writer, speaker, and entrepreneur. His new project, Practically Radical, chronicles the radical shifts transforming business and the practical steps that will determine who wins. His most recent book, Mavericks at Work, has been a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller. As co-founder of Fast Company, he launched a magazine that earned a passionate following around the world. He is an adjunct lecturer at Babson College and a former associate editor of Harvard Business Review.

* * *

To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

Again, if you wish to receive the What Matters Now pdf, please contact me at interllect@mindspring.com.

One of the cool features of my new WordPress blogs is a snazzy little feature, called “clicks”. You find it under your overall blog stats and what it does is allow you to see which links people have clicked in your post. I am usually reluctant to reinvent the wheel when I am writing and so, rather than writing massive posts, will attempt to link my reader into further information or substantiating information about what I am writing about. The links aren’t meant to be exhaustive, rather jumping off points to more info or fill in the blanks – like how did I get from point A —> Conclusion B. My links hopefully show my trail of thought, much the way Hansel and Gretel relied on breadcrumbs.

Interestingly, what I have come to see is that not many people click the links. I’ve been asking around and other bloggers tell me the same. Even when they provide clear and accessible supporting or developing information via links, a considerable number of people fundamentally disregard them and fail to click.

This is important news to me, another example of just because I click my way through the world, doesn’t mean that others do. It goes to show you can never assume anything and you might have to do a little work if you want other people to try things in a different way. I have been thinking lately about the ‘new media’ as it relates to my own writing endeavors and had written a bit about it in an earlier post, Can’t Stop Progress, which was really a bit of commentary about Arianna Huffington’s post, Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better Journalism. One of the things she speaks about is ‘old media’ and the uneasy (antagonistic?) relationship it has with new media such as aggregated news, link economy, excerpts and expansions, citizen journalists and the way people have begin to directly interact with the news/media. As Arianna Huffington says in her post;

“News is no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news and share news. It’s become something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now — expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.”

These are exciting times. We are becoming increasingly aware of the way that information and news is constructed and that we can change the way that news is approached or understood by simply clicking a link, Googling (or whatever other search engines float your boat) for more information or a different perspective. We comment, we share, we expand and develop information simply by the way we interact with it. We don’t have to wait for someone to spoon us their version of the news, we can go out and hunt and gather until we have built our own news.This is cool stuff if you are up with the approach.

Seems a fair few people are not yet turned on to this way of moving through their reading. They may still be used to and comfortable with passive exchanges of ‘news’ and information. Turn on the tv and channel 7 tells you what is happening (or at least what they think is happening or want you to think is happening). Have the paper delivered, or turn on your favorite radio station – same thing. We sit, listen or watch and have information ‘done to us’. Certainly this passive consumption of information can be less work and less challenging. We can listen, watch or read, call ourselves informed and be done with it. It is certainly less time consuming!

When I am out reading in cyber-land, it seems so easy to see the difference between people who are ‘old media’, vs ‘new media’. People’s comments invariably reflect whether they are curious, seekers and inter-actors of information or whether they are passive recipients of information and that bit of information often tells me whether it is worth my time to interact and communicate with them, or simply move on. I’ve come to this place after one too many ‘conversations’ with people who have very entrenched ideas about something, and will not extend themselves, even a bit, to find out more information, consider new information – or just generally inform themselves before stubbornly persisting in a position. They refuse to … click .. the …link.  Harsh perhaps, but true.

Of course, if old media approaches to information and news are your preferred choice – that’s cool. There’s plenty of that out there and I think there is a place for it. I ‘do’ the broad news in this way and it works just fine.  However,  this is my chance to send a little cyber-wave to the kindred people who are already merrily clicking along the new media ‘Information Exchange’ and make a heartfelt plug to encourage those readers who are not yet on the road, to boldly go forth into “New Media” land, click links, and interact with your reading!  You’re gonna see me adding a little reminder to *please click the links and interact with your reading,  in my blogs because I hope you will consider what I write as a jumping off point, rather than an end point. I sure do. And if you should find different information, or go down another path with the information I am linking, please do share your thoughts, and links – I’d love to click them!

Health Care Reform: Sifting Through the Suboptimal Solutions*

Referring to such previous topic mentions –  e.g. in August  -  I agree with you, Arianna, that it will be a suboptimal solution worth supporting those elements you described if the final bill did contain them. Yes, indeed, the U.S. broken system got to be fixed.  

The aim “we can get back to being a country able to produce optimal responses to our biggest problems” may then be achieved. 

haplif – Frank Kalder (HuffPost profile/comments)

Supplementary: Global Haplifnet – vanguard topics

- – -

*) by Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Huffington Post

As an intern, I basically get to cover all the things that no one else wants. Or things close to 5:00. My time out of class is dedicated to pressers and head-shots but every now and then I get a presser with someone worth photographing.

For example, Madame Speaker.
Prince Albert II of Monaco. Three tries to guess where he was.
And Co-editor of the Huffington Post Arianna Huffington and CEO of News Corp Rupert Murdoch were at a workshop on the future of journalism online. Personally, the workshop was really interesting and not surprisingly the two had very different views on the subject.

Then there was Saturday. Sarah Palin came to Fairfax, VA on her book tour. Of course the area welcomed her with our first snow of the season. Someone actually asked me if I was going to go in the case it was canceled. The DC area panics with more than an inch of snow on the ground (which was great in grade school) but I think it would take a lot more than 4 inches to scare the former Alaskan Governor away. The two gentlemen in the pair of photos (2nd) camped out overnight to have their books signed and see her for all of 1 minute (which is about how much time I got to photograph her).

By Benét J. Wilson, DJTF co-chair,

Online Managing Editor-Business Aviation, Aviation Week Group

The second day of the Federal Trade Commission’s 2-day workshop to explore how the Internet has affected journalism featured  keynote speaker  was Arianna Huffington, founder and editor of the Huffington Post blog.   Many old-school journalists blame people like Huffington as one of the reasons for what they see as the demise of the old advertising-based model for the industry.

Huffington was kind enough to offer up her thoughts about the future of journalism.   “Ever since we decided to launch the Huffington Post, I’ve talked about how the future of journalism will be a hybrid future where traditional media players embrace the ways of new media (including transparency, interactivity, and immediacy) and new media companies adopt the best practices of old media (including fairness, accuracy, and high-impact investigative journalism),” she wrote.

In summary, she’s saying don’t hate the player — hate the game.  What Huffington Post and other services, such as the Daily Beast, are fully embracing the hybrid future, while old school media, like News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, try desperately to cling to the old ways.  I think there’s room for both, and we’re seeing great examples of what can be done, as cited by Huffington and blogged about by me at Musings of a New Media Maven: TechDirt, ProPublica, Baltimore Brew, Maryland Reporter, Texas Tribune, and Voice of San Diego.

You can read National Association of Black Journalists President Kathy Times’ testimony here.  Check out this running Wiki of the workshop coverage here.  And last, but not least, you can get a summary of the top Tweets from the 2-day event from the Media Shift blog, here.

The Wall Street Journal has reported the head of the Federal Trade Commission will study whether government should aid struggling news organizations, which are suffering from a collapse in advertising revenues as the internet upends their centuries-old business model.

News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said at the FTC workshop that media companies need to do a better job of convincing consumers that high-quality journalism isn’t free. Mr. Murdoch created a buzz last month by saying that News Corp. may block Google Inc. from searching its news sites. He didn’t mention the company by name Tuesday, but criticized Internet sites that profit from reusing news articles published by others without bearing the costs.

Unfortunately for him, Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, followed Mr. Murdoch and blasted his criticism of Internet sites like hers that collect and link to news content from other providers. Ms. Huffington said her popular Web site drives a great deal of online traffic to The Wall Street Journal.

Federal and state officials this year have explored how the government might play a role in helping ease the financial travails of news organizations. Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D., Md.) this spring proposed a bill that would allow newspapers to operate as tax-exempt institutions. Congress has held several hearings about the financial challenges facing the industry.

Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post spoke at a journalism conference in Washington DC. Her plan of action? Dispel Rupert Murdoch’s claims that old and new media cannot synergize, mainly because it’s already taking place, even within his umbrella of operations. Take that Murdoch!

I’ve heard arguments for the death of journalism and against. Huffington’s is one of the most sensible I’ve read. What is often forgotten is journalism and newspapers are separate entities. Fearing the death of the newspaper does NOT mean journalism is going down with it, although Huffington believes newspapers aren’t goners either.

She also discusses the value of the consumer and of citizen journalism in revolutionizing the way we interact with news.

To Arianna, the journalism industry is a melting pot of media, technology and consumers. To deny the relationship between these parts is to halt progress in the industry.

As she concludes:

“And the sooner we all embrace that world, the sooner we’ll be able to stop the name calling, put aside the increasingly desperate metaphors and increasingly desperate revenue models, and focus on what really matters: ensuring that in the future, journalism will not only survive, but be strengthened and thrive.”

Good news bad news, eh? I did the bad news in my last post. The good news for me today was Arianna Huffington’s article, Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better Journalism and the added bonus of the “Shift Happens” video, Did You Know 4.0.  I read the article with hubby this afternoon and we had some lively discussion about the parallels between the state of journalism, the state of the games industry and the state of the world in general. I say for about the 5th time today (all unrelated) the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm; what is happening with print media, is happening with music, games, movies, writing in general, photography etc etc.

So I read Arianna’s very provocative article and sucked in all the information about the role the internet currently plays (and is projected to play) in respect to journalism and print media – and marveled again at how difficult it is for some folks to accommodate change; yes I’m pointing at you ‘old media’ but I could easily be pointing any number of other directions…. like emmm … my own sector at work ….

Curioser and curioser, I popped the link to above article and video and mailed it around the office and was a bit gobsmacked by some of the responses. I read the article and watched the video and came away with my ‘communication cup’ spilleth-ing over with possibilities; for my personal passions of writing and photography, of community building and connection but also,  professionally – oh yes, I can see possibilities for how we can put these amazing communication advances to work for the child protection sector, particularly at the Peak Body/non government level.

Other people at work saw the ‘communication cup’ as having being turned over, with all the good stuff seeping away. I was the Positivity Gal, which is an interesting turn of events, for little Ms Reality (moi), who really cannot abide trumped up positivity. But there we go, I feel incredibly positive about the progress of social networking, community building and the variety of social media platforms. I also feel more than a little bemused by all those who wish to halt progress and regress to a time and a place I really don’t believe ever existed.  Who will be the casualties in the wake of the swift and unstoppable force of change?  I dare say, it will be those people who refuse to progress or, as Arianna so beautifully metaphored, those intent on “merging into traffic riding a horse and buggy“.

Anyhoo, read and watch, see what you think… is the exponential growth of online-ness a ‘good thing’ or a ticking time bomb getting ready to blow the status quo to smithereens?

Simply Arianna Huffington has once more shot several vultures with only one shot. Congratulations Arianna! This time she has spelled out the ridiculous arguments from Murdoch News Corp. and some of the NYT arguments as well in a terrific post today in the Huffington Post.

Arianna Huffington

I understand the NYT out of desperation is trying everything, all mad magic potions in order to keep its grandeur of last century. It’s a pool of professionals which deserve all my respects.

But as Arianna has brilliantly exposed in her post today, Murdoch calls everybody “thieves” while he and his companies practice it severely without any shame or apologies: citing the article of Techdirt.com, the post shows that “The Wall Street Journal has a tech section that’s nothing more than a parasite — uh, I mean, aggregator — of outside content. FoxNews.com has a Politics Buzztracker that bloodsucks — uh, I mean aggregates and links to — stories from a variety of different sources, including the NY Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others.
AllThingsD has a section called Voices that not only aggregates headlines, but also takes a nice chunk of text — and puts the links out at the bottom of the story.
And Murdoch’s News Corp. also owns IGN, which has a variety of web properties, including the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregation site — which is entirely made up of movie reviews pulled together from other places. Did someone say “stealing”?

When “people” of the kind of Murdoch decide to do something against a given situation we can predict all sort of dirty, scummy and filthiness coming along the way. Those kinds of “people” simply don’t know the concept of fairness. The only understand of the world they have is their OWN POWER which, all things considered, will not remain as it is nowadays for much longer.

An old time friend of mine, in Germany, used to say “beer should not be sold but rented; anyway almost always you leave it in the bar you got it from”. And of course I couldn’t stop laughing when I read Arianna relating a discourse she had to hear in Monaco from a German tycoon named Mathias Döpfner, CEO of of the German publisher Axel Springer and creator of the German’s tabloid BILD (controlling 25% of the European Market in 32 countries and more than 150 newspapers and magazines) saying: “If it’s your business decision to offer beer cans for free, fine,” he said. “But don’t take our beer and offer it for free.“

That caused a certain shock to our dear Arianna: “it struck me as a really bizarre metaphor. Information is hardly the same thing as a product that can only be consumed once by a single person. If you consume a news story, you might be one of millions. If you consume a beer, no one else can consume it.”

Well, well, there are “people” with bizarre habits who maybe “recycle” their own beer in order to not share it with the germs of the toilets in the bars. Love for their “products”, maybe.

Today and tomorrow the Federal Trade Commission is conducting its very own “Future of Journalism” extravaganza with all the usual suspects, and from the live Tweeting I’ve seen they’re not saying anything all that new, as important as the topic may be.

Spicing up the festivities, however, was Queen Arianna’s clash with Rupert Murdoch this morning:

“Having Glenn Beck not searchable on Google is a really good thing for democracy, but as a business move, it is not a smart move.”

Oh, how we love Huffington so! Especially since she echoed her frequent refrain that the only news people will pay for is “specialized financial content and weird porn.” In one of Rupert’s most vociferous precincts, Queen Arianna is being accused of emphasizing a whole lotta flesh in building her own media empire. There’s too much irony here to go on this way.

If these folks are on the vanguard of the future of journalism, then we’ve all got real trouble, in addition to the usual litany of concerns embodied in the following links that have caught my attention via Delicious, Google Reader and Twitter:

• Douglas Rushkoff has kick-started an old debate about paying for the news by taking sides with Murdoch. Naturally, that has Jay Rosen all stirred up. So has this, from one of Uncle Rupert’s top Leftenants, which takes straight aim at the digital utopians. They don’t like that very much.

• Once a frequent whipping boy of the online news sages, David Carr of the New York Times apparently has been handed a key to the club after predicting a happy ending to the present gloomy media scenario, because the children are our future. Alan Mutter may have to turn in his membership card for arguing just the reverse, because the children don’t have much of a future. The Newsosaur is about as dour as I’ve read him, and that’s saying something. I think there’s some truth to both of these takes, as contrary as they are to one another.

• Recent layoffs of multimedia staff at the Washington Post are a troublesome sign that the print overlords at a news organization that seemed to get the Web just don’t value the work of digital journalists. Regina McCombs, one of my multimedia instructors from a Poynter Institute workshop I attended last year, writes that online producers and editors she hears from are feeling this way all around the country. (This also factored into my decision last year to accept a buyout.) I’ve argued this before and I’ll repeat it here: It’s time for the geeks to start running newsrooms. Old media managerial hands just keep fumbling the Web, but they’re unlikely to loosen their grip during these increasingly desperate times.

• At least the newly renamed PBS NewsHour is embracing the Web, even if Jim Lehrer isn’t interested in Twitter. It’s going to be a messy transition, but it sounds more promising than what’s happening in another D.C. newsroom.

• How easy is it for a small-town journalist to start a one-person news operation? As easy as this? I’m finding out that while the fundamentals laid out here are solid, there’s no guarantee for success. Journalists who have some money saved up, time to work out their concept and can rely on support from friends, family and others stand the best chance of making something work. But these experiments have only just begun, and will continue to proliferate. As will the chaos.

The federal government is wading into deliberations over the future of journalism. With the media business in distress, the Federal Trade Commission is holding a two-day workshop Tuesday and Wednesday to examine the challenges facing the industry and to explore ways the government might help it survive. While media executives hope to find new business models, government officials say they want to discuss ways to preserve a free press as a pillar of democracy. Among the panelists at the FTC event are News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iW1Qyhetchunikdb3cyV7Sj2UJLwD9CAA6J00

We are happy to welcome back our Liaison, Jami Caruso and our Recruitment Director, Ginny Torok from the 2009 PRSSA National Conference in San Diego. Ginny and Jami kept our Chapter up-to-date on Conference highlights via the Chapter twitter account @SEUPRSSA and the hashtag #prssanc. They look forward to sharing their experience with our Chapter.  Below are some pictures of their adventure. Don’t forget to check out slides and presentation notes  from the Conference on the PRSSA website.

Something tells us that face won't look so smug in 2010.

The NYT reports that two new polls showed that President Obama’s approval rating had dipped below 50 percent for the first time.

Polls by Gallup and Quinnipiac University at the end of last week showed that Mr. Obama’s job approval rating had dropped below 50 percent, though not by much: it was 49 percent in the Gallup poll and 48 percent in the Quinnipiac poll.

Mr. Obama’s poll numbers reflect an array of challenges that have combined to create a sour climate for him. The unemployment rate has jumped above 10 percent and shows no sign of declining. At this point, even if Mr. Obama cannot be blamed for causing the economic decline, Americans seem increasingly impatient with him to fix it.

In fact, many of his biggest supporters are now writing scathing editorials against him. Arianna Huffington raises the question: will unemployment be Barack Obama’s Katrina?

Just as Katrina exposed critical weaknesses in the priorities and competence of the Bush administration, the unfolding unemployment disaster is threatening to do the same for the Obama White House.

Though to be fair, she lays it financial advisors Geithner and Summers as well.

Even 10.2 percent, the highest level in 26 years, after 22 straight months of job losses, doesn’t seem to have quickened the pulse of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. [...]But even if it hasn’t hit home for them, it should be clear that unemployment is going to be the singular issue of 2010. [...] At this point you have to wonder what Obama’s attachment to Summers and Geithner is. We know if you become a target of Glenn Beck and cause five seconds of embarrassment to the administration you need to start updating your resume (ask Van Jones, Greg Craig, and Anita Dunn), but if you slowly bring down the administration, and the party, and the country, that’s apparently fine.

But besides the millions of unemployed, there will be another victim: the Democratic Party.

As Adam Nagourney writes in the Times: “For the past 50 years, almost without exception, the party loses seats in November when its president’s average approval rating in September and October drops below 50 percent.”

You’d think that Keith Olbermann–a guy who spent years agitating against his own country’s war effort by repeating enemy propaganda in order to discourage Americans for pure partisan advantage—and Arianna Huffington– the doyenne of a website whose comment sections are famous for particularly venomous hate speech– would tend to be First Amendment absolutists.

After all, there actually have been times in American history when wartime powers granted to the government allowed for jailing people who engaged in such things.  Woodrow Wilson, for instance, jailed a man in a small town about 15 miles from where I live for speaking out against War Bonds.

But Friday night, the media’s biggest hater, who spews invective on a nightly basis in barely controlled rage, and the media’s oddest figure, who has argued from every side of the political fence, got together and decided that Glenn Beck is a clear and present danger to the survival of our democracy, and that he meets the “exception” to the First Amendment.

And it’s “paranoid” for Beck to say the Left in this country has totalitarian tendencies?

Keith set the stage, by hilariously pretending that political rage is all on the Right, and basically all happened in the last year or so…

OLBERMANN:  The ugly environment was not fostered overnight, but town hall opposition to health care reform and all those tea bagger rallies gave comfort to racism and even intonations of violence.  The Birther movement was nothing more than extreme and desperate attempt to delegitimize a new president.  And Congressman Joe Wilson‘s “you lie,” though a first should not have been a surprise.

Our third story on COUNTDOWN, a sweeping new report on anti-government rage in America not only connects the dots it refuses to let off the hook the most irresponsible voice in the mainstream media, the man it describes as the fearmonger-in-chief, Glenn Beck.  Simply stated Beck creates an intersection between the mainstream and the extreme, according to the report by the Anti-Defamation League.  It calls Beck, “The most important mainstream media figure who has repeatedly helped to stoke fires of anti-government anger…”

Wait a minute.  Isn’t the ADL supposed to combat anti-Semitism? I don’t remember it’s purpose being to keep people from “defaming” the government.  Did they have a problem with “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?  Did they have a problem with Keith Olbermann calling Dick Cheney a war criminal?

Remind me, which side of the political spectrum is behind the war effort against those who have, as a primary concern, the genocidal elimination of Israel?  Which side is arguing for tolerance of those views, and arguing the U.S. and Israel are the aggressors in the Middle East?  Which side commended the New York Times for exposing a surveillance program that designed to stop the most anti-Semetic people on earth from committing violence?

The fact that Keith Olbermann only sees anger on the Right and considers himself reasonable and objective, and having made no contribution to bitter discourse in this nation is just too bizarre to comment on.

Next, Keith argues that ordinary free debate may not be enough to save us from the sinister Glenn Beck.  Judging by Keith’s ratings and Glenn’s ratings, I can see why he might think that.

OLBERMANN:  It would be nice to think of Glenn Beck just as a joke, as fodder for this show and the “Daily Show” and others that point out how stupid some of this stuff is.  But this report, you know, suggests something else, this is—fearmonger-in-chief term is frightening.

HUFFINGTON:  It is frightening.  Well, I would say the fearmonger-in-chief title should still be reserved for Dick Cheney, even in retirement.  But barring that, there is something that we need to really pay attention to with Glenn Beck.  We cannot just dismiss him.  Because the truth of the matter is that there is a good reason why we have an exemption to the free speech protection by the first amendment when we say you cannot shout fire in a crowded theater.

And he‘s doing that every night.  He‘s basically using images of violence to bring together with all that he‘s accusing the Obama administration of, which varies from racism to communism, Nazism and everything else in between.  So,all that has definitely an impact.  I believe words matter, language matters and he‘s using it in incredibly irresponsible ways night after night.

Yeah, like Keith Olbermann didn’t spend the last 8 years screaming that the Gestapo was going to come get you for voting Democrat because of the Patriot Act.  He’s not saying right now that 45,000 Americans die in a “holocaust” each year because of a lack of health insurance.

Try Googling “Keith Olbermann” “war criminal” “Cheney” sometime.  Glenn Beck compares Barack Obama’s economic theories to those of socialist dictators.  Keith Olbermann equates George W. Bush and Dick Cheney with the murderous actions of those dictators.

OLBERMANN:  Some of Beck‘s claims, according to the report from the ADL, let me quote it again, “play an important role in drawing people further out of the mainstream making them more receptive to extreme notions and conspiracy theories.” And without going into Sociology 101, isn‘t the point here that people like Beck enable some of the wildest, most paranoid notions about what the U.S. government is doing and instead of people thinking, as they think these things, for whatever they think them, no, that‘s crazy, he says, no you‘re not crazy, come with me down this path?

You mean like committing “War crimes” and supposedly listening in on the private conversations of ordinary Americans?

OLBERMANN:  Obviously, the new component to this is the race of the president.  And a lot of this rage that we‘re discussing here is rooted in racism, something we certainly knew before the ad put out its analysis.  But Beck tried unsuccessfully to turn that one in the other direction, claiming that Mr. Obama is the racist.  Is that the twist by which he and the other actual racists are rationalizing their own prejudice simply project it on to the other people?

Obviously?  What is obvious is that Keith is losing the argument—and his mind.  Repeating that the opposition to Obama is largely racist without any proof doesn’t make it any more convincing—and most of the mainstream media has backed away from this, leaving MSNBC out on that limb all by itself.

So, Glenn Beck is the dangerous threat to our freedom?  Or to the government’s freedom of action.  Let’s see, whose free speech is Glenn Beck trying to take away?  What limits to the First Amendment is he proposing?

Not only is our side not trying to silence the slanders and venom of crazy Keith, if I were king for a day, I would decree that everyone must watch one episode of Countdown.  THAT would be the way to create Conservative voters, and double the size of the Tea Parties.