Hi Chris, Love your show! I almost always agree with you, but I wanted to write about your comments comparing Eichmann and Bin Laden. These are two very different situations because:

1. Germany was a defeated power when Eichmann was tried. They had no credible way of retaliating or fomenting more terrorism.

2. We didn't even have 24-hour television then, let alone Twitter, Facebook, 24/7 cable, etc.

The likelihood of an incendiary trial of bin Laden and the horrific repercussions made President Obama's decision the only one he could make.

Thanks for a great show! Happy New Year!

Lynda McDaniel

A fantastic show as usual. I would like to see a bit more diversity in the guests. You know, people that don't have twitter accounts. Just a thought.

Sorry Lynda, the fact is that the United States Government CHOSE, on behalf of its people, to pursue a form of International jurisprudence after WWII (the last war that was declared in accordance with the Constitution), and yet in the Bush and Obama administrations, the United States Government CHOSE, on behalf of the executive branch, to summarily execute individuals accused of war crimes. In WWII at least we had a physical enemy, in the Bush/Obama era of perpetual war our enemy is a tactic and the users of that tactic, which seems like a formula for guaranteed failure of task, as well as deliberate failure of values. At least when the Soviet Union still existed, there was a counterbalance to Wall Street/Washington lawlessness because you could count on the Soviets to do something even worse. Until the Chinese and Indians get a few more nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, there really isn't any countervailing threat to U.S. Government/Wall Street lawlessness, so get used to more of the same.

Personally, I thought the fact that Obama visibly didn't cave on the tax break was the best moment of his administration. I hope he learned something from it.

Greatest news show on television, Chris, and you're "editorials" are the best part. Skip the panels and give us more! Would appreciate another look at the instructions for tweeting a "clipped" piece of the show? I can't seem to get the hang of it.

Very surprised Bradley Manning and Wikileaks didn't come up when looking back over the past year. Unfortunately this young man will probably end up paying a very steep price for his conviction and courage.

Love your show Chris. I agree with your comments concerning the global unrest taking place. I believe it is part of a bigger picture that speaks to our humanity and not just individual discontent within a country. It will be interesting to see where this journey takes us. Looking forward to your book.

Chris, I believe the first person to self-immolate in the Viet Nam war was a NUN (Buddhist) in the Thich Nhat Hanh group of socially concerned monastics. TNH was very active in the Paris Peace conferences and brought the world a view of the suffering of simple civilians besieged by both sides.

"President Obama Moment of the Year" is a poll topic that can be looked on as 4 distinct questions. Ambiguous poll topics like this combine the results of multiple questions into one result rendering a useless mish mash. My point is that polls aren't "totally, utterly unscientific" as Hayes introduced this segment simply due to a narrow and biased sampling. Obama's political struggle tends to dominate my thinking and so I was thinking the question was #3 below. Hayes I think was thinking in terms of #2 or #4.

So what was the meaning of this poll question?

1. What Obama moment was most important to you?
2. What Obama moment was most important for the nation?
3. What Obama moment was most important for his political future?
4. What moment revealed the most about Obama's nature?

Of course careful control of the framing and language used for the question is not always a good thing. Frank Luntz is often derided as a flim flam man who uses language and cognitive framing to make a poll come out with the "best" answer for a candidate or political point of view. Here is a youtube of Penn and Teller piece with Luntz doing a man in the street interview demonstrating this manipulation. In the second framing, Luntz stacked the deck by using the term "Deny" in the context of the term "Emergency" to produce the answer he wanted.

A slanted question will produce a known effect, but control of language can be used as the servant of empiricism rather than bias. Grumble. Why guys- why not ask a more precisely framed question?

If the question was #4, I might still vote for the Gifford speech but also complain that his "Grand Bargain" was not included in the responses. Things that reveal nature are the unexpected events- for example how the "Double Slit" experiment caused significant debates on the nature of particles. Similarly, there are widely divergent theories of Obama's style of governance. Some liberal critics claim he is predisposed to fall for the fallacy of the golden mean. Others suggest he was not naively being manipulated, but took political risks in order create a situation where the public would view House republicans as either doing the responsible thing (accepting a deal slanted heavily in favor of their right wing positions) or demonstrate that they were irresponsible obstructionists. It is hard to believe the White House did not have Machiavellian voices who cynically were predicting how the House GOP would behave, calculating that this strategy with deficit reduction replayed with the payroll tax cut would result in a strong political position for the President to "run against congress" in 2012. It is hard to believe Obama would be unaware of the defensive value of extracting these consequences from the GOP should they misbehave, but I do think the President sincerely wanted Boehner to succeed in convincing his caucus.

Obama's "Grand Bargain" was an anomaly for many- both critics and supporters. It was the kind of double slit phenomena that tells us that Obama's nature is not well understood by conventional political analysis.

I was not surprised that the OBL Report was chosen. I may be a bit parochial as I am an elder living in a small rural town, but such a report was, for me, the first step of looking at the war on Iraq and the political machinations of the last 11 years honestly. Here's my weird take on why the act and the report were most meaningful in a very basic presidential way:

President Obama did what he said he would do. In this one pivotal thing, the President, unencumbered by Congress and the corporate media was able to be true to his word.

I just wonder what could have been accomplished in the last three years if such a President had been able to rely on the full functionality of a Congress loyal to the American Public and true national security.

Would they have investigated the whole sordid mess and found that a different course of action would have resulted in a quicker or more just solution? We'll never know.

It may have seemed a bigger deal to me as I was employed by them at the time, but I think a big story of this year that escaped mention was the closing of Borders Group, Inc. I think that is a case study in not only our culture's swifter movements away from the print media, but also the big corporations abilities to collapse even with a huge market share in their field due to, in my opinion as an erstwhile part-time barista, serious misreading of the cultural zeitgeist and disconnect between corporate salaries and job performance (one of the first items of business upon attempting to extricate itself from bankruptcy was to request something like $7 million in bonuses for the upper management.) Just worth pondering, I feel.

Maybe there could have been better triage during the death throws of Borders, but was it a misreading of culture, or a misreading of a paradigm shift in their industry?

I'm not sure of the specific difference here, but I certainly have practically no qualifications to state definitively which. I was a part-time barista at a Borders for about a year and within that time, I felt that the people at the top were unwilling or unable to foresee many issues. Just as some examples of how slow they were to catch on to potential profit-makers: for a couple of years earlier in this decade, the URL Borders.com took you to Amazon.com. They introduced an e-reader something like 2-3 years after the Kindle debuted and then they offered too many similar choices so buyers were confused. After bankruptcy, they literally staked the future of the company on selling $20 upgraded memberships. As a person without any sort of business degree or knowledge of economics greater than the basics, I was frequently astonished at how seriously asinine the decisions of people at the top were.

And I think despite any ineptitude on their part, B&N will be able to stick around for much longer now, simply because their primary competition in teh RL is defunct. Also, I don't remember when Tower records were ubiquitous because I'm only 25 and I've lived most of my life in Nebraska. I don't think I've ever even seen a Tower records.

Hey everyone.

Does anyone know the name of the song playing when the panel comes back from commercial break at 18:40? I've been interweb searching for that brief snippet of lyrics to no avail.

Love the show.