Many discussions scheduled this morning on the upcoming State of the Union address, and also the new Congress. Christopher Hitchens sits down for an hour with Brian Lamb (Q&A), and Cliff Schecter and Culture of Truth are Virtually Speaking.

Teddy Partridge hosts Tracy Baim for a discussion about Obama and the Gays at FDL’s Book Salon. And Movie Night Monday does Dragnet.

Twolf1′s picture of this handsome American Bald Eagle was taken at Lake Ontelaunee in eastern PA, remember twolf1′s Ontelaunee Sunrise?

Hokey Wolf and Ding A Ling — Too Much To Bear. This Hanna-Barbera Studios cartoon aired as a segment on The Huckleberry Hound Show on December 4, 1960. Grab your popcorn, put your feet up on the coffee table, and try to keep the spitballs off the screen please. This is Late Late Night FireDogLake, where off topic is the topic … so dive in. What’s on your mind?

So Olbermann is out. I’m not an Olbermann fan, especially, but can we be blunt? Nobody is allowed to know why Olbermann is out, and Olbermann himself is not allowed to explain it. Who knows. Maybe though this is relevant: Network execs were well aware that Comcast wanted Keith gone because he was “a loose [...]

With the State of the Union address just around the corner where President Obama will give America a choice between the forced imposition of sharia law or ending the BCS (win-win America, choose wisely!), Republicans have chosen doe-eyed, painfully sincere math-nerd Paul Ryan to give the response, probably sitting in a big comfy chair and wearing a cardigan while explaining to America that our economic problems can be only solved by making some hard choices like, say, oh, I don’t know, maybe killing all the poors and letting the middle class take their place and get pissed on by the rich.

Talks aimed at a resolution between Iran and the West over their nuclear program collapsedtoday, with no progress and no timetable for future talks. Overall the negotiations sounded like a huge waste of time.

Dick Armey basically jumped on the Tea Party bandwagon when he saw how Republicans could ride them to a return to the majority. But Dick Armey doesn’t really give a damn about whatever counts as core Tea Party “issues.” He just seeks raw power and the ability to engage in some profit-taking for his rich contributor friends. When the Tea Partiers actually start asking for follow-through on the issues they care about, that’s where Armey draws the line.

When Jeff Stein reported that Mullah Omar was rushed to a hospital for heart treatment, I was pretty sure the real story was about Dewey Clarridge’s Eclipse group, which the NYT had suggested before might be involved in a privatized PsyOp network.

Mark Hertsgaard is one of America’s veteran environmental journalists, a forceful voice for two decades. His important book, Earth Odyssey, was an early attempt to help Americans understand the underlying dynamics that would give rise to, say, the Chinese economic explosion, with its attendant environmental implications. His work in the Nation and elsewhere has been an essential part of the dialogue about climate change, the most pressing of our environmental issues.

As a July 1, 2009 WikiLeaks cable released by Norway’s Aftenposten makes clear, the U.S. and Switzerland included the acceptance of three Gitmo detainees and a settlement in a suit accusing UBS of harboring tax cheats — along with an effort to shut down a Swedish company’s business with Iran — in negotiations “resolving all issues between our countries.” Favors involved in this deal may go deeply both ways: among those reportedly involved in the UBS scandal were American politicians.

The incredible degree to which many “liberal” writers have gone all-out to defend the previously conservative idea of an individual mandate requiring people to give a private corporation their money is bizarre. That latest attempt seems to be a dishonest interpretation of a 1798 law that created a payroll tax to pay for federal socialized medicine.