Towards the end of a March 17, 2012 speech at the Left Forum at New York City’s Pace University, Michael Moore made the interesting assertion that, unlike in the United States, Sweden’s newspapers were not only surviving, but thriving. The reason he gave for this was that Swedish newspapers depended more on circulation than advertising for their revenue.

I couldn’t help being intrigued by this, so I decided to do a little digging.

The three men picked up in Somalia are wanted for fighting in a group that the US has designated as a “terrorist organization” against forces backed by the US. There is no evidence of the time that they plotted any attacks or were coming to America with al-Shabaab fighters intent on carrying out some kind of nefarious plot. This means a court is going to try and prosecute these men essentially for being on what the US government considers to be the wrong side of a conflict in Somalia.

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief who was granted asylum earlier on August 16, delivered a speech from the balcony of the Ecuador embassy in London, where he has been holed up for two months. The speech was an opportunity for Assange to show gratitude toward his supporters while also reminding the world of what he sees the United States doing to not only go after whistleblowers but also target dissent.

Most liberals in the United States seem to prefer ignoring what is happening with WikiLeaks, particularly its founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange. Either they are totally repulsed by Assange as an individual, they do not consider WikiLeaks to have provided a valuable service by releasing previously classified documents, the way the United States government is pursuing WikiLeaks founders, owners, managers, staffers and others connected doesn’t bother them or the story at this point is so complicated that they do not have the patience to sort out all the details to figure out the truth.

These various viewpoints inevitably lead to a contention that the era of WikiLeaks is over and, perhaps, the organization never really mattered that much at all.

How do supporters of WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange make the leap that he is more likely to be extradited to the United States from Sweden than the United Kingdom? That is a common question and, certainly, a key question for anyone who remains skeptical of whether Assange should have been granted asylum by Ecuador.

I challenge you, dear reader, to go over this NYT hit piece on Julian Assange and see if any mention is made of the following key and pertinent facts.

Police surround the Ecuadorian embassy in London, preparing, or at least trying, to arrest Julian Assange on violation of his bail, as he has not checked in with the court in over a month. But of course if he left the embassy to check in, he’d be nabbed and extradited to Sweden to deal with accusations of rape, and possibly then extradited to the U.S. where he’d be up against far more serious charge–like life and death charges–of espionage over WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been in the Ecuadorian embassy in London awaiting a decision from Ecuador on his asylum request for over a month now. Recent headlines suggest Ecuador is going through all the motions a country would need to go through before it granted asylum to someone who had made such a request. They also have announced that they will not be making any decision on the Assange’s request while the Olympic games in London are taking place.

The Supreme Court in the United Kingdom issued a much anticipated decision today, ruling Sweden’s request for WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange’s extradition was “lawfully made.” By a majority of 5-to-2, the court found the Swedish public prosecutor in the case was in fact a “judicial authority” and held that the European arrest warrant [...]

I find this memo from Third Way (PDF) to be comically poorly timed. No surprise they mine any and all data points to claim the need for Democrats to move to the right, but they also claim the path to victory this November is not rallying the liberal base, but winning over the moderates–despite the fact that Democrats have already won over moderates.