• Marc Maron guest hosted the show today.


• Guest: Sarah Posner, American Prospect. Author, "God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters".


• The framing of what Barack Obama is saying about his faith-based ideas.


• Do Republicans want Obama to inherit the mess that the country is in rather than McCain?


• Guest: Elizabeth Royte. Author, "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It".


• Guest: "Planet Bush Bureau Chief Lawton Smalls" (Kent Jones).


• Guest: James Wolcott, Vanity Fair. Author, "Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News In a Time of Terror".

Topics, guests, upcoming events, quotes, links to articles, audio clips, books & bumper music.

Wednesday 02 July '08 show

• Marc Maron guest hosted the show today.
  
• The framing of what Barack Obama is saying about his faith-based ideas. Faith and government. Community services. Bush threw out all the rules, played favorites, allowed discrimination.
  
• "Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don't believe this partnership will endanger that idea - so long as we follow a few basic principles. First, if you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them - or against the people you hire - on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we'll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work."
  Obama to Rename Bush's Faith Office.
  
• Do Republicans want Obama to inherit the mess that the country is in rather than McCain? Nationalized Health Care. South Korea is protesting against importing American beef, but many Americans are still in denial of the problems. Credit.
  
• Guest: Sarah Posner, American Prospect. Author, "God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters". Is Barack Obama's faith-based initiative unconstitutional like Bush's, and pandering to the religious? Proselytizing is very hard to police. Even if there is no proselytizing, people of other faiths or none have to go to that church for services. Some suggest that the church should set up a separate 503C to receive the money. Why aren't we talking about fixing the government? Evangelicals comprise 25-30% of the US adult population, and about half of them are conservative, about 10% progressive, the rest centrists who mostly used to vote Republican but who are looking for an alternative. Obama is reaching to them, Latino evangelicals. Gay marriage. Joshua generation project.
  
• Should churches pay taxes? Community is disintegrating, people aren't helping each other, for example woman who died in hospital waiting room, man who died on street after being run over. A CNN reporter covering the recent floods saying you could fish on Main Street, being cute rather than focusing on the trouble people are in.
  
• Marketing, for example bottled water.
  
• Christians don;t own ethics.
  
• Bread and circuses.
  
• "Hell was designed to make stupid people act right". Tom Rhodes.
  
• Brand loyalty requires an almost religious faith.
  
• "We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness". Thich Nhat Hanh.
  
• Source amnesia, where you forget where you learned a piece of information, so you no longer know if it is true or not. This can happen through repetition - you will learn to believe it.
  
• Guest: Elizabeth Royte. Author, "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It". First came Perrier in 1979, but we did not carry their glass bottles around. In 1989 came cheap light plastic bottles. In the 1990s Coke and Pepsi came in on it with their big marketing budget and distribution and told us we needed to drink more water. People have forgotten they can refill bottles, and use spigots in cafes and stores and public drinking water fountains.
  
  The carbon footprint of making and transporting the bottles. The pumping of ground water effects the environment. Coke and Pepsi use municipal water supplies which tend to be surface water. If people abandon municipal supplies, will there be enough support for the protection of watersheds and the infrastructure, meaning it will degrade and all who can afford it will have to drink bottled water? The case of Fryeburg, Maine.
  
  The water supply is finite, the population is going up, the climate is changing. Water is becoming scarcer and therefore more valuable and corporations are owning more and more of the sources. People in the developed world use more water, for example by eating more meat. Some people across the country drink bottled water because their tap water is unfit to drink because of industrial contaminants and there are not the funds for testing and purifying. Toxic soup of pee, poop and pesticides. Kansas City drinks from the Missouri river; they clean it up very well, but it would be better to prevent the contamination in the first place.
  
  Arm yourself with knowledge. Don't just assume your tap water is bad. Get your right-to-have report from your utility or get your well tested. Have your water tested at the tap. It is so much cheaper than buying water, if the tests show your tap water is fit to drink, and so much better for the environment. If your water is distasteful, using a filter is cheaper than bottled water. There are links on her web site.
  
• Article: Auto-replace is not always your friend.

• Movie: What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire. Growth.
  
• Guest: "Planet Bush Bureau Chief Lawton Smalls" (Kent Jones).
  
• Starbucks closing 600 outlets. SUV sales dropped. More people are making their own coffee, travelling less, cooking their own food. Maybe they will realize that they can actually do those things, save money and enjoy themselves.
  
• Apparently the US government learned its torture tricks from a Chinese manual from the 50's which was designed to get false confessions.
  
• Article: Build a bridge, Barack Obama.
  
• Book: "Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News In a Time of Terror", James Wolcott.
  
• Article: Bridge over Troubled Blather, James Wolcott.
  
• Article: Maestro of All He Surveyed, James Wolcott.
  
• Guest: James Wolcott, Vanity Fair. Author, "Attack Poodles". His article on "Build a bridge, Barack Obama". Calls for bipartisanship whenever the Democrats look like winning. His lack of real foreign experience, grasp of economic policy. Nobody anticipated that Huckabee would wreck Romney's chances. It would take anyone more than one term to sort out the mess. They will try to emasculate Obama by telling him to pick moderate Republicans. McCain is on a congressional junket to Colombia, and not getting much coverage. Can the media not afford to send anybody? Barack's faith-based initiative, reaching out to evangelicals.
  
  The language of culture. Infantilization. Interest in and influence of European movies in the past.