“Daily Show” anchor Jon Stewart discusses commentator Keith Olbermann’s return to MSNBC following a brief suspension for making unapproved political contributions.

There. I said it.

I could write paragraphs about how I sway a little left or a touch right, depending on the issue, but I would have to qualify each and every sentence with words like “usually” and “often,” and phrases such as “in my experience.” I have no loyalties to liberalism or conservatism, and so in the end, my stances on various topics come out sounding a bit wishy-washy.

It’s the plight of living in the aisle that so many politicians struggle to “reach across.”

Following last month’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” in Washington, D.C., some of my more liberal friends expressed great disdain at moderate “Daily Show” anchor Jon Stewart for acknowledging that left-wing commentators like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann can be just as damaging to truth and public knowledge as his right-wing contemporaries: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and so forth.

Indeed, here’s a clip from a January episode in which Stewart calls Olbermann out for attacking Senator Scott Brown (R-Mass.) as an “irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

Olbermann says that Scott Brown supports violence against women because, shortly after a Brown supporter screamed at a political rally that someone should “shove a curling iron up [opponent Martha Coakley's] butt,” Brown smiled and said “we can do this.”

I admit the timing doesn’t exactly work in Brown’s favor (see the following video), but it’s a long stretch to say that the statement was in any way related to the Coakley comment. More likely, since Brown was about to leave the platform, his smile and “we can do this” words of encouragement were just his closing gestures to his audience.

That said, there is no way to misinterpret Olbermann’s own words, where he likens Michelle Malkin (also not one of my favorite talking heads) to a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” Olbermann’s rant begins at 1:03.

To a moderate, Olbermann sometimes just goes to far, as does Malkin, as does Limbaugh, as do Bill O’Reilly and the whole crew. The most detestable talking heads on the left and right twist language to make opinions sound like facts. They make a living demonizing the opposition. But, as the late Democrat senator (New York) and United Nations ambassador to India, Pat Moynihan, once said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.”

This twisting of language is the root cause for why so many lefties can say that “at least Olbermann is telling the truth” while many righties, by the same token, say the exact same of Rush Limaugh. Point out any misleading, corrupted statements from either-or, and supporters will claim hyperbole or that their favorite talking head was “just being facetious” (I’ve heard that one before). Point out similar misleading, corrupted statements from the other side, and those same audiences will spout angrily about “lies” and “deception.”

Here’s the thing about moderates. We see both sides to every coin. We can’t help it.

There was a great piece in yesterday’s Washington Post from one of my favorite living journalists, Ted Koppel, in which he lamented about “Olbermann, O’Reilly and the death of real news.”

Koppel writes:

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly—individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement.

…

Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for years: Esquire magazine recently found that men’s jeans from a variety of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their labels insist.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that we are being flattered into believing what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts—along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.

Unfortunately, as Koppel goes on to say: “The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible.”

And there you have it. We as a nation, as a planet, have turned our one source of truth and information into something tailored just for us and our sensibilities—into some ridiculous venti, skinny, half-caf, caramel-mocha latte-on-ice version of news.

We don’t have to hear about how the people we support aren’t necessarily the “good guys” today because all of that air time is now taken up with filler, hyperbole, conjecture, and brutal verbal attacks on the opposition that aren’t quite as clever as we (the Maddows and the Malkins) seem to think they are.

The worst part is, there’s nothing left to stop us.

I poked around online yesterday looking for the proper N400 form, and I ended up perusing some study materials and sample questions for the citizenship test.

I find this sort of thing pretty interesting, so I thought I’d share.

The spelling is of course quite easy for a native English speaker such as myself. And if any of you born-and-raised Americans can’t ace the civics portion, I worry about you.

The sad truth–or shall I say, the sad speculation and educated guess–is that a lot of Americans wouldn’t do well on this test on the first try. How many is “a lot”? Well, that depends. Now that the questions asked are more open-ended than they used to be–with queries like “What does the Constitution do?” replacing old ones like “What is the Constitution?”–lots of news organizations are digging around to see how well various samplings of U.S. citizens perform. (Examples: Fox News; CNN–you can even try your hand at a few questions at MSNBC.)

Out of simple curiosity, I’d love to see all Americans taking the 2010 census also try their hands at the citizenship test. How well do you think our citizenry would perform on average? How well will you do if you take the MSNBC sample test?

Fair is fair: I got a 95% thanks to the question regarding which listed state was not part of the original 13 colonies.

NOTE: This MSNBC test is arguably easier than the actual U.S. citizenship test because candidates for naturalization are given questions in short-answer format as opposed to multiple choice. As such, I recommend you check out the official study materials and sample questions from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Web site.

Addendum: I’ve received several messages and comments from people regarding why they think many Americans would fail the citizenship test on the first go. In summary, they point out that most of the voting public is well beyond the days of elementary and high school civics and therefore shouldn’t be expected to retain historical facts and dates that do not affect them on a daily basis.

While I don’t personally think every American needs to know the number of amendments to the Constitution off the top of his or her heard, I do think other questions on the test are very important: Which branch of government declares war? Who is one of the U.S. senators from your state? Who selects new justices for the U.S. Supreme Court and what powers does the court have?

I think that every single American registered to vote should be able to answer these questions correctly–no excuses.

What is an Obamicon, you ask? Well, it’s a four-color visual representation of any image designed to resemble Shepard Fairey‘s famous poster (below) depicting President Barack Obama and the word “hope,” a key term from the leader’s 2008 campaign.

Thanks to Paste Magazine and their Web site project, Obamicon.me, users from around the world can easily upload an image of their choosing and caption it with any word or short phrase. As you can see, the end results aren’t perfect, but they are pretty close.

They’re so close, in fact, that users worldwide have generated more than 150,000 icons since the site launched two weeks ago.

While this internet meme might never see the massive success of I Can Has Cheezburger‘s famed Lolcats or even Rickrolling‘s accidental star, ’80s pop artist Rick Astley, don’t be surprised if you start finding Obamicons in unexpected places. Not only are users setting their icons as profile images on sites like Facebook and MySpace, but some are also using Obamicon to borrow from the famous “fail” meme. (You can see other fail meme examples here.)

All in all, I think Obamicon makes for a pretty fun site. Below are a few of my favorite images that others have created. You can see more on the Obamicon site.

I can has memes?

I’d vote for him.

Damn it, House! It’s never lupus!

Regardless of whether you (my readers) support President-elect Barack Obama’s ideas and goals, I suspect you all understand their significance.

You see, my generation never had a Jack Kennedy. We barely had a Ronald Reagan. By the time we came of age, Bill Clinton’s philandering was old news, and any respect for the office of President ceased to exist when journalists started vying for book deals. As for patriotism, we were too young to appreciate the nationalistic effects of the Cold War. Sure, we’ve got textbooks, archived footage and even the Rocky movies to show us how things used to be–for better or worse–but it’s not the same. Even the American solidarity we saw following the September 2001 terrorist attacks quickly faltered as we focused our hatred onto the Middle East, almost as if the entire region swarmed with enemy combatants.

Growing up in the early ’90s, bands like Nirvana told us to be apathetic. As the decade continued, television and films said that we should be sarcastic and condescending toward anyone with a positive outlook on life. The naught years told us to be excessive–to party hard, revive the yuppie spirit, and to first and foremost look out for ourselves.

I didn’t buy into it, and neither did my friends. And now it seems the tides might turn in our favor. “Hope” is no longer an idea that inspires childish snickering. People seem to have regained their optimism.

Perhaps it’s a pipe dream, but maybe tomorrow will mark the day when Americans started looking out for each other again. It’ll be a long road… but do you think we can do it?

The artist Will I Am created the above video and song from Barack Obama’s speech at the New Hampshire primary. You can watch the speech here. If you’d rather read the entire transcript, click here.

I saw this video earlier today, and I still can’t decide who to be upset with. Please watch it and then read my comments below.

I never liked Governor Sarah Palin all that much when it came to politics. She really only seemed to speak to Senator John McCain’s base, yet to a might-as-well-be-independent like me, Palin seemed a little out-of-touch and more than a little arrogant in her assumptions about all Americans. My husband isn’t a Joe Six-Pack. He’s a Steve One-Beer, if anything, or perhaps a Steve Doesn’t-Define-Himself-By-What-He-Imbibes. As for me, I don’t define myself by my trade, and I don’t think that I’m in any particular demographic that would have benefited from McCain’s tax plan more than President-elect Obama’s. I don’t feel squelched by liberal policies (I like both gays and religious freedom) and further, I don’t believe Palin was at all a victim of “Gotcha journalism.” Finally, I never found Sarah Palin particularly qualified even though she had served as governor of one of our great states.

But even with all of this in mind, Palin is not the one I’m upset with.

John McCain and his people led us to believe that Sarah Palin was the woman for the job. They told us she was brilliant, that she was qualified, and that she would be a woman to serve all Americans. So either McCain and his camp lied to us from the very beginning and almost saddled us with this now seemingly unqualified woman as the second in command in leadership of the free world, as they say… or, McCain’s campaign folks and Fox News (all big Palin people) are now totally passing the buck.

Who can be so dedicated to a cause one minute and then just abandon ship the second things go badly?

I don’t know about you, but I’d like some answers.