Ongoing travel will make writing difficult today, so I'll post several television segments I did this morning and last night. First is a debate over Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy with former Bush official and standard neocon Dan Senor, on Dylan Ratigan's MSNBC program from this morning:
Secondly, here is the segment I did last night with Rachel Maddow on the personal benefits received from large health care and pharmaceutical corporations by Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh as a result of their servitude to those industries; my participation begins at roughly the 5:00 mark of the clip:
Finally, here is a segment I did this morning on Ratigan's show with Eliot Spitzer regarding the ongoing Wall Street abuses and the government's ever-expanding acquiescence to them:
Judging from the few times I've appeared on that program, Ratigan seems to be making a conscious effort to expand the scope of political debates that take typically place on cable news shows -- debates which are, with rare exception, painfully constricted and formulaic (see his monologue from a couple of weeks ago on Goldman Sachs as an example of the type of content one does not usually hear on such programs). Having substantive discussions in formats like this is inherently difficult -- that, paradoxically, is one of the values of the format, for reasons Noam Chomsky best explained here -- but I think, without knowing for certain, that Ratigan is attempting to conduct less constrained and conventional discussions. I don't want to overstate the case -- it's more just a general and preliminary impression -- but I think it's worth watching for.
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