We've had another great music loss today. Delaney Bramlett, age 69, died today of complications following gall bladder surgery.

As Susie Madrak says, he sang like an angel. Crooks and Liars has more.

You can sign his guestbook here.

In his ode to the television series Cops, Ken Tucker asks:

I do like it when some bad guy makes a violent move and a billyclub must be applied with quick force. Does this make me a bad person?

Maybe not, but the guilty pleasure of seeing the bad guy get smacked depends on the belief that the smackee deserves it. The footage shot for the Cops series is heavily edited to make the police look good (police departments wouldn't cooperate with the filming if that were not the case), depriving viewers of a realistic basis for deciding whether the violence was necessary or contrived for the camera. A better question would have been:

Has television, with hundreds of thousands of highly dramatic pictures in reports celebrating the use of force by police officers, helped create a mindset among police officers and others that excessive force is okay?

Glamorizing police violence might make for good ratings, but how many viewers understand that the worst scenes of unnecessary or excessive violence rarely make it to their TV screens?

Did anyone else spend the holiday watching movies? I did -- but on my blue ray player, not in theaters. Among those I'd recommend:

• For "thrillers": TransSiberian (the most intense movie I've seen this year) and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, about WWII and Shanghai.
• For comedy: Outsourced
• Indies: Broken English

I also saw Mama Mia, but I must not have been in the mood as my mind wandered and it was way too energetic and cheerful. Meryl Streep was great though. I also was very lukewarm on Burn After Reading.

What did you watch this holiday? Did anyone see Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Doubt or Valkyrie? [More...]

I have been ridiculed and ribbed for the use of "speaking for me only" on my posts. But this little incident proves the correctness of my use.

When a mild mannered blogger like Yglesias has his rather innocuous post stir up trouble, imagine what my incendiary pieces might do?

As we all knew, logrolling is not limited to writers and Hollywood - it is a DC pasttime as well. But I do laugh at those folks who think it does not happen at their place. There may not be an official policy, but there are hierarchies and sacred cows throughout the blogosphere too.

And yes, I am speaking for me only.

I read this piece by Andrew Sullivan (Full Disclosure - I have a great distaste for Sullivan from the days that he was engaged in the New McCarthyism (calling war opposers "Fifth Columnists") while he cheerleaded the Iraq War and his days championing racist and sexist pseudo science like "The Bell Curve") and I am not sure what he is trying to say. In it he says some things that make no sense to me. Let me parse it on the flip.

I do not know if they are ingenues or are merely playing ingenue, but Glenn Greenwald's piece ridiculing the basic and blatant illogic of Ruth Marcus' embarrassing (for her) column arguing against holding the Bush Administration accountable for its crimes tell us all that is wrong with the Beltway - they are either fools or knaves. Ms. Marcus would have us either believe she was an idiot or malevolently dishonest.

Read Glenn's piece for the main retort - which, I feel Glenn would admit, is so blatantly obvious that it is humiliating to Ms. Marcus that it need be done. One point Glenn does not make is that the Reagan pardon of two lawbreakers came AFTER they were prosecuted and convicted. To wit, her argument is for clemency from a pardoning power - not for not prosecuting the lawbreakers.

More . . .

Happy Birthday, Keith. Here's a great photo tribute, set to "Sister Morphine."

And a more fun one, set to Johnny B. Goode:

How about Keith and Willie Nelson and Ryan Adams singing Dead Flowers? Or, since it's his birthday, here's Keith and Sheryl Crow singing Happy. Or, since it's almost Christmas, how about Run, Rudolph, Run?

NBC announces:

NBC News announced today that Political Director Chuck Todd has been named chief White House correspondent. Joining him on the beat will be Savannah Guthrie, who has been named White House correspondent. The announcements were made today by NBC News President Steve Capus, and are effective immediately.

Chuck has been a friend of TalkLeft and we have long respected his political reporting work. But clearly this is a new path for him - which will require policy focus. He is plenty bright so he can definitely handle the job and I offer my heartfelt congratulations to him. I consider this to be a major upgrade in the reporting we will get from the White House than we have gotten in the past.

Speaking for me only

As Glenn Greenwald has documented, the Media simply cannot tell the truth about John Brennan and why many of us strongly opposed consideration of him for CIA Director. The Associated Press' Pamela Hess provides yet another example of the Media's inability to tell the truth about John Brennan:

The search for a new CIA chief has been stalled since November, when John Brennan, Obama's transition intelligence adviser, abruptly withdrew his name from consideration. Brennan said his potential nomination had sparked outrage among human and civil rights groups, who believed Brennan was not outspoken enough in his condemnation of Bush policies.

(Emphasis supplied.) Excuse me Ms. Hess, but if you do not know by now that Mr. Brennan not only was not "outspoken enough" agianst rendition and enhanced interrogation, that in fact Mr. Brennan was quite outspoken in defense of these criminal practices, then you should stop writing about the subject.

Speaking for me only

Maricopa County (Phoenix, AZ) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who instituted such ridiculous shaming punishments as forcing male inmates to wear pink underwear, making juveniles serve on chain gangs and bury the dead, and requiring inmates to sleep in tents, and who is the subject of a class action suit by the ACLU for racial profiling of latinos in an effort to enforce federal immigration laws, is being given his own tv show on the Fox Reality Channel.

The show is called "Smile, You're Under Arrest". [More...]

MSNBC's David Shuster will get his own show at 6:00 pm ET, now that David Gregroy has Meet the Press.

Like Jane at Firedoglake, I like Shuster and think he's a good reporter. He was terrific during the Scooter Libby trial.

Congrats, David. And thank you MSNBC for providing a non-conservative evening lineup. With David, Keith and Rachel, we've now got a real choice.

Jamison Foser writes:

To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation's leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar.

I lived through the feeding frenzy against Hillary Clinton in the Dem primary (that one was cheered in certain Left circles), the frenzy against Al Gore in the 2000 election, through the Media feeding frenzies of the Iraq Debacle, and the various and sundry other Media feeding frenzies of the last 8 years. In my view, Obama has gotten nothing compared to that over Blagojevich. Indeed, the attempts to start the frenzy have been nonstarters for the most part.

Don't get me wrong - I admire the vigilance of Foser, Media Matters and others on the Left against the Media. We must always stand vigilant. But that vigilance was sorely lacking in the last year when the subject of the attacks was Hillary Clinton. The good news is that, by and large, President-Elect Obama remains a Media Darling and will be difficult to touch in the next year. More worrisome to me frankly is the likelihood that legitimate progressive criticism of Obama will be shouted down. We must be vigilant against that as well.

Speaking for me only