It takes a special kind of unexamined existence to sit through this segment and not have your head explode.

How many people have heard of the Milgram experiments?

The Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" In other words, "Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?" Milgram's testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.

It--along with Jane Elliott's famous "blue eye/brown eye" experiment--were seminal in showing just how easily people could be persuaded to hate and hurt others. I remember seeing a school film on these experiments by a teacher concerned by the "Bomb bomb bomb, Iran" chants students yelled during the Iranian hostage crisis. It has stayed with me how susceptible people could be to suggestions of hate and fear, which may be why I object so much to the fear-mongering of the Republicans in the last ten years.

This week, French documentarians decided to update the Milgram experiment for the 21st century: in the guise of a TV game show, contestants were encouraged to administer what appeared to be near-lethal electrical shocks to rival contestants.

Although unaware that the contestants were actors and there was no electrical current, 82% of participants in the Game of Death agreed to pull the lever.

Programme makers say they wanted to expose the dangers of reality TV shows.

They say the documentary shows how many participants in the setting of a TV show will agree to act against their own principles or moral codes when ordered to do something extreme.

I think there are more parallels to be drawn beside the dangers of reality shows, although I'd be thrilled to see fewer of those on TV too. What was amazing was just how horrified Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer were at the thought of people cheering for the torture of another individual. Glennzilla:

Speaking as employees of the corporation that produced the highly influential, torture-glorifying 24, and on the channel that has churned out years worth of pro-torture "news" advocacy, the anchors were particularly astonished that television could play such a powerful role in influencing people's views and getting them to acquiesce to such heinous acts. Ultimately, they speculated that perhaps it was something unique about the character and psychology of the French that made them so susceptible to external influences and so willing to submit to amoral authority, just like many of them submitted to and even supported the Nazis, they explained.

Yeah, those Frenchies...they're all weak-minded and easily-led sheep, willing to compromise their ethical and moral codes by authority figures. Go figure. Again, that the cognitive dissonance doesn't cause their heads to explode is simply stunning.

(T)he connection just never occurred to them. They just prattled away -- shocked, horrified and blissfully un-self-aware -- about the evils of torture and mindless submission to authority and the role television plays in all of that.

[Excerpted from Driftglass.]

Joe Klein's latest tome points to a sudden shift from Sad Clown mode to Angry Clown mode, which might have been just another death erection spasm of Left-hating, left over from getting his sack spanked off with a folding chair by Glenn Greenwald, but I tend to think not.

I tend to think that that maybe old Joe had been waiting by the phone for his New Year's Eve Prom Night Big Media call for a long time.

Waiting for days. Weeks.

And still they did not call.

Every now and then he picked the receiver up -- just to check the dial tone -- and then immediately slapped it back down again in terror that that was The Exact Moment when the Big Media people had been calling to ask him -- beg him, really -- to shove his face in front of a camera and burble out some mildewy Centrist drivel for the umptee-umpth time.

Sometimes he had to pee, but did it fountain-like, leaning backwards out the bathroom door limbo-style it with one ear cocked for the brrrring...and never flushed or washed his furry little paws for fear the white noise of running water would drown out the sound of Opportunity Calling...which is also why he hadn't done laundry for a month, and why his sink was piled with sticky, old dishes.

And so, as he sat in his stink, panic closing slowly over him as a tiny voice whispered to him that The Call wasn't coming -- that he was finally facing a long-overdue oblivion which would have engulfed him 20 years before in a Better Universe -- Jokeline decided to take matters into his own hands, and do the one thing GUARANTEED according to the ancient and sacred rules of his lodge to earn him the approbation of the douchebag gatekeepers standing between him and the warm, healing light of the teevee cameras.

Punching some imaginary hippies for nonexistent crimes.

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Rachel Maddow talks to Glenn Greenwald about Joe Lieberman's threat to filibuster the health care bill if it contains a public option, Evan Bayh quickly following suit and the financial gain being made by both men and their spouses for doing so.

Maddow: Sen. Lieberman has made it very clear that he plans to oppose health reform that includes a public option. He’ll filibuster it in fact which would be historic. What do you think is motivating him?

Greenwald: Well I think you have to look first of all at a Research 2000 Daily KOS poll that was taken last month that shows that a margin of 68 to 21% of Connecticut voters, the people who he’s essentially representing, favor a public option. That’s a 47 point margin which is almost impossible to find on almost any other issue. So when you ask why he’s doing this, it’s clearly not because the people he’s supposed to be representing favor it.

I think clearly what it’s about is primarily that fact that the industry that he’s serving by doing this—by preventing competition with the public option—is an industry from which he receives very substantial benefits. He’s drowning in campaign contributions from the insurance industry, the health care industry, the pharmaceutical industry—more than $2.5 million.

In early 2005 his wife was hired by a large P.R. firm, Hill & Knowlton, in the pharmaceutical division, which at the time was representing the health care giant Glaxo in major legislation before the Senate. And several months later Joe Lieberman was on the floor of the Senate offering legislation that would directly steer huge amounts of incentives to that company in order to develop vaccines.

So I think what you’re seeing here is the kind of legalized corruption, legalized bribery that runs the United States Senate; only in this case it’s particularly sleazy and transparent because Lieberman is ready to gut the major initiative of the Democratic Party.

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Richard Wolffe returned to Countdown this week, absent from MSNBC airwaves for only a month after Glenn Greenwald pointed out that his full time employer was no longer Newsweek, but a lobbying firm:

Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program -- or serving as an almost daily "political analyst" -- is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist. Wolffe's role in life is to advance the P.R. interests of the corporations that pay him, including corporations with substantial interests in virtually every political issue that MSNBC and Countdown cover. Yet MSNBC is putting him on as a guest-host and "political analyst" on one of its prime-time political shows. What makes that even more appalling is that, as Ana Marie Cox first noted, neither MSNBC nor Wolffe even disclose any of this.

This is a conflict so severe that it's incurable by disclosure: who wouldn't realize that you can't present paid corporate hacks as objective political commentators? But the fact that they don't even bother to disclose that just serves to illustrate how non-existent is the line between corporate interests and "news reporting" in the United States. Then again, Wolffe himself -- when it was previously revealed that he was exploiting his position as a Newsweek reporter covering the Obama campaign to leverage access to Obama in order to write a glowing book about him -- said this:

And [Wolffe] suggested he’s not that different from other reporters in an era in which the business and the profession of journalism have gotten closer and closer.

"The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate activities is not really in touch with what's going on. Every conversation with journalists is about business models and advertisers," he said, recalling that, on the day after the 2008 election, Newsweek sent him to Detroit to deliver a speech to advertisers.

"You tell me where the line is between business and journalism," he said.

And yet, he's back...with nary a word about his absence, still as an MSNBC political analyst.

Don't get me wrong, I like Richard Wolffe in general, and appreciated his appearances on Countdown in the past, but to name him as a "Senior Strategist at Public Strategies" is truly the sparest way to describe him as a lobbyist and really blurs the lines between journalism and promotion/propaganda beyond what should be acceptable. How can we ever know if Wolffe's analysis is truly what he believes or if it's what he's been paid to promote by a client?

And frankly, I'm tired of the insular nature of these broadcasts, when the same predictable people show up day after day after day. To be fair to Keith, Olbermann is not the only news anchor with a retinue of guests they stick with over and over. They all do it. Even Rachel Maddow brings on "Uncle Pat" Buchanan, whose views are generally factually wrong or so far outside the mainstream, you can't but wonder why he's still on television. Wolffe isn't like that. But as I've documented before on media balance and biases, so much critical information is withheld from we viewers already that we generally don't get a fair view of the issues of the day, I really do have to ask if there are no other voices that Olbermann can turn to that he has to bring back a DC lobbyist?

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I missed this one, but went back for it after reading this Tweet from my friend John Amato to Glenn Greenwald.

Matthews: Well let me make it simple Jay, and I know you're a straight reporter. I'll go to Chris on this for opinion. I'll go and try to get some opinion. You know why. Because if the head of this network said lead with O.J. tonight, I'd lead with O.J. tonight. If he said said lead with Michael Jackson, I'd lead with Michael Jackson. But I wouldn't get in trouble for it because he told me to.

If the Vice President of the United States says we're going to the dark side. We're going to do whatever's necessary to get the information. We're going to use all those subterranean roots or methods that are perhaps not pleasant. If he told us to do that, and I did it, how could I get prosecuted for it?

Uhhhh...because your boss telling you what to cover for your "news" show doesn't violate the Geneva Conventions. Just a guess.

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It appears Chuck Todd didn't take too kindly to Jeremy Scahill's drubbing he received on Real Time the other night. From Glenn Greenwald:

According to Scahill (via email), Todd approached him after the Maher show and the following occurred:

Right as we walked off stage, he said to me "that was a cheap shot." I said "what are you talking about?" and he said "you know it." I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: "that's not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV."

Media stars are so unaccustomed to being held accountable for the impact of their behavior -- especially when they're on television -- that they consider it a grievous assault on their entitlement when it happens.

Check out the entire post where Glenn's got much more on some similar events going on lately besides just his own dust up with Chuck Todd. Joe Klein got into it with Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog who happens to be I.F. Stone's granddaughter. Glenn and Marcy Wheeler had an ongoing feud with Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic. And now we've got Scahill and Todd's back and forth on Real Time.

Glenn summed all of this up much better than I could ever hope to:

Todd's condescending responses illustrate the same point as the above episodes with Klein and Ambinder: in the eyes of Beltway mavens, those who warned about and worked against the radicalism and lawbreaking of the Bush administration are the fringe, crazed, out-of-touch radicals. While Todd was fiddling around with pretty colored maps and fun polling games, Scahill was courageously investigating one of the most corrupt, dangerous and lethal private corporations in the world, yet it's Todd who understands and must solemnly explain the hardened realities of politics to Scahill, the confused and silly Leftist.

There's little question that when people look back at this period in American history, it will be difficult to comprehend what happened in the Bush era -- and especially how we blithely started a devastating war over complete fiction, while simultaneously instituting a criminal torture regime and breaking whatever laws we wanted. But far more remarkable still will be the fact that, other than a handful of low-level sacrificial lambs, those responsible -- both in politics and the establishment media -- not only suffered no consequences, but continued to wield exactly the same power, with exactly the same level of pompous self-regard, as they did before all of that happened. Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one's culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?

In fairness to Chuck Todd, he was not one of the ones out there cheerleading for the war and I really liked him when I'd see him on C-SPAN's Washington Journal about every morning when he was working for The Hotline. He's a numbers guy. He was one of the best in the business at reading and sorting through the numbers on how our elections were going to turn out. I don't think coming to MSNBC however, has been good for Chuck Todd.

And now he's on there with the rest of them repeating the narrative of how terrible for the Democrats it would be if any investigations are allowed to happen, and if anyone from the Bush administration is held accountable. It's all politics to Chuck.

Here are my thoughts on that. One of the reasons it would be turned into a game of politics is because Chuck Todd and the rest of the beltway media would report it as such, instead of a legal matter. What Chuck Todd is relaying is what the Republican Party would like to see happen if the Democrats or this Department of Justice goes after the law breaking. It would be the choice of those in the media to validate the Republicans' sniping, which would inevitably follow (and already has for that matter), or to dismiss them as playing partisan politics in order to cover up law breaking for political gain.

Of course since the media was part and parcel in allowing the atrocities of the last eight or nine years, that's never going to happen.

Dusty Trice: Bringin' the wacko daily...Michele Bachman predicting Nazis. "Current administration more in line with the Weimar Republic." And this store-bought stooge can't even lie right!

Stinque: Pennsylvania GOP leadership turns to robbing funeral home burial accounts

No More Mister Nice Blog: No, wait...I know this one. The answer to " who does Joe Klein think is the Crazy Left?" Glenn Greenwald for fifty points

Prometheus 6: They're running out of black conservatives

Where’s the Outrage?: Interview with McJoan of the Daily Kos

HOLY CRAP: Warriors for Christ...God Calling...Texas bible scholars...Ayatollah Kit Bond...The kindness of God...Repent...Diseases caused by sin...Liberal Jesus...Are you there, God?...Idaho says no...Lutherans to allow gay pastors...Holy-War Fever...

Looks like Glenn Greenwald caught Stephen's attention as well. From The Colbert Report:

Investigating prisoner abuse will be a political food fight, and that is messier than torture.

While I was away for almost two weeks, the ACLU and many of my blogger pals took to their keyboards and wrote about the many brutal deaths that occurred at the hands of people engaging in torture for the US. The torture issue is horrifying and the longer we get away from the Bush years, the more information the ACLU is able to gather. These documents are, in a word, vile.

The ACLU writes:

Tortured to Death

Today, several prominent bloggers are writing about detainees who died in U.S. custody, using documents released through the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. We’re not talking suicide, or death by "natural causes." No, this is death as a result of torture and abuse while in custody. This effort comes on the eve of the release — we hope — of the CIA Inspector General’s report on waterboarding. (You might’ve heard last Friday that the release was delayed.)

At Salon, Glenn Greenwald writes:

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody — at least. While some of those deaths were the result of "rogue" interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that’s one reason we’ve always considered those tactics to be "torture" when used by others — because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people. Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions — that we Look to the Future, not the Past — are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.

Marcy Wheeler focuses on the case of detainee 04-309:

Now I’m no doctor–and I definitely can’t make sense of the cardiac findings. But it sounds like "stress positions," "sleep deprivation," "walling," and "water dousing" are all leading candidates to have caused the death of 04-309.

Drational at Daily Kos zeroes in on one detainee, known as Habibullah, and the circumstances of his death.

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Glenn Greenwald on Obama's support for the new Graham-Lieberman Secrecy Act:

It was one thing when President Obama reversed himself last month by announcing that he would appeal the Second Circuit's ruling that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) compelled disclosure of various photographs of detainee abuse sought by the ACLU. Agree or disagree with Obama's decision, at least the basic legal framework of transparency was being respected, since Obama's actions amounted to nothing more than a request that the Supreme Court review whether the mandates of FOIA actually required disclosure in this case. But now -- obviously anticipating that the Government is likely to lose in court again (.pdf) -- Obama wants Congress to change FOIA by retroactively narrowing its disclosure requirements, prevent a legal ruling by the courts, and vest himself with brand new secrecy powers under the law which, just as a factual matter, not even George Bush sought for himself.

The White House is actively supporting a new bill jointly sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman -- called The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 -- that literally has no purpose other than to allow the government to suppress any "photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States." As long as the Defense Secretary certifies -- with no review possible -- that disclosure would "endanger" American citizens or our troops, then the photographs can be suppressed even if FOIA requires disclosure. The certification lasts 3 years and can be renewed indefinitely. The Senate passed the bill as an amendment last week.

Just imagine if any other country did this. Imagine if a foreign government were accused of systematically torturing and otherwise brutally abusing detainees in its custody for years, and there was ample photographic evidence proving the extent and brutality of the abuse. Further imagine that the country's judiciary -- applying decades-old transparency laws -- ruled that the government was legally required to make that evidence public. But in response, that country's President demanded that those transparency laws be retroactively changed for no reason other than to explicitly empower him to keep the photographic evidence suppressed, and a compliant Congress then immediately passed a new law empowering the President to suppress that evidence. What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people? Read the language of the bill; it doesn't even hide the fact that its only objective is to empower the President to conceal evidence of war crimes.

That this exact scenario is now happening in the U.S. is all the more remarkable given that the President who is demanding these new suppression powers is the same one who repeatedly vowed "to make his administration the most open and transparent in history." After noting the tentative steps Obama has taken to increase transparency, the generally pro-Obama Washington Post Editorial Page today observed: "what makes the administration's support for the photographic records act so regrettable" is that "Mr. Obama runs the risk of taking two steps back in his quest for more open government."

It didn't take long for The New Republic's Jeffrey Rosen to attack Sonia Sotomayor by using anonymous sources throughout his piece. And don't you just love how the whole tone of the piece is about what a crazy, hot-tempered Latina she is? Nothing like trading in racial stereotypes to smear someone. (That's the subtext of the Morning Joe segment above, too.)

Of course, it's not just Rosen: Think Progress reports it's coming from all the good Villagers.

Glenn Greenwald does a thorough debunking of the smears and also includes his own personal experiences with Sonia to add some real context to the type of person she is.

Jeffrey Rosen's New Republic smear of Sonia Sotomayor's intellect and character -- based almost exclusively on anonymous, gossiping "sources" -- is such a model of shoddy, irresponsible, and (ironically enough) intellectually shallow "journalism" that it ought to be studied carefully. Standing alone, it reveals quite a bit about anonymity-dependent "reporting" generally, The New Republic specifically, and how much of our political discourse is conducted. Most of the gaping flaws in Rosen's piece have been fully highlighted by others.

While most of those criticisms have focused on Rosen's horrendous use of anonymous sources -- one of the most apt reactions to Rosen's piece comes, appropriately enough, in the form of well-earned derision from Wonkette -- I highly recommend this post from Law Professor Darren Hutchinson...

read on...

It's really quite sad when Rosen ends his own piece like this:

I haven’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths. It’s possible that the former clerks and former prosecutors I talked to have an incomplete picture of her abilities.

Why didn't he just start his piece with this part and then say he'd get back to us? You know, it would be helpful if he was going to preview Sonya Sotomayor to have a more "complete picture," don't you think? Yeah, it's so much easier to smear her character by hanging out at the water cooler than actually do some research.

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From Bill Moyers Journal:

Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald are the first recipients of the Park Center for Independent Media Izzy Award (named for I.F. Stone) — named "Pillars of independent media, chosen for the award, because of their journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom and official deception."

"I think the way the media works is they show the spectrum of opinion between the Democrats and the Republicans in Washington. Often that is very narrow. But the fact is, the majority of Americans fall outside of that opinion." -Amy Goodman

"It's not even some sort of Machiavellian or conspiratorial effort, sometimes, to exclude certain opinions. It's actually the fact that reporters — and media stars — and corporate and establishment journalists are so embedded into the establishment...That they're so completely insular and out of touch from what public opinion actually is. And polls show that huge numbers of issues and positions that are held by large numbers of Americans are ones that are virtually never heard in our media discussions." - Glenn Greenwald

Transcript below the fold.

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Part 1

From Washington Journal April 3, 2009.

Parts 2-4 below the fold.

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From Bill Moyers Journal:

President Obama's message of change resounded deeply with Americans tired of "business as usual" in Washington, but most people, the President included, have admitted that change does not come easily to Washington. As the President's agenda meets its first resistance in the Capitol, two guests on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL argue that the establishment has a surprising army of defenders — the political press.

Full transcript to follow.

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Glenn Greenwald on Cheney's fear mongering interview he gave to his new BFF's over at Politico. I believe Glenn is right and that Cheney is trying to lay the ground work for the media to attack President Obama and blame him if we are attacked again.