Thursday 16 April '09 show

• Clip:
  "It's a bloodthirsty religion that's practiced over there by a bunch of throwbacks, and we're to kill 'em." Michael Savage.
• Guest: Ibrahim Hooper, Director of Strategic Communications for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). How can we help Islam purge violence? Their battles with Michael Savage. DHS report on right wing groups - they complain they are being stereotyped, profiled because of the wrong actions of a few, yet that is what they do to Muslims. Last year there was a report on left wing groups. The guest who said convert them all to Christianity. Every time a beheading, etc., is shown, it is a backward step for Islam. The conflicts are not religion, it is just an excuse for other reasons. How can we help Islam reform, move out extremists? Pushing from outside saying it has to change does not help. We need some common sense mutual respect, interest from the main stream, stop defaming Islam.
• Bumper Music: Give a Little Bit, Supertramp.
• Bumper Music: You're the Voice, Heart (video).
• Islam. religions. Culture. Judaism changed because of the change in the culture around it. Let them live in the 11th century?
• Guest: Halima Karsai, Director of Foreign Policy and International Women's Issues, Independent Women's Forum. Afghan woman pelted with stones for protesting rape law. It's great that they are protesting, but it shows the international community how far Afghanistan has to come. Better than troop surge, or focus on rebuilding on civil society, social aspects. Thom said troop surge is injecting more testosterone, and there will be a testosterone blowback. It is not religion, but culture which uses religion. "Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace...One School At A Time", Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Work with the people, including the men. It will take time to change. Religion does not say a man can rape his wife, but Saint Paul said women should submit. Give them general and religious education. How to inform her colleagues to use the liberal solution? Information is just a click away, we should know. We are not helping the people we claim we are trying to help.
• Report: Leftwing Extremists Likely to Increase Use of Cyber Attacks over the Coming Decade, Department of Homeland Security, 26 January 2009.
• Report: Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, Department of Homeland Security, 7 April 2009.
• Article: Homeland Insecurity.
  "On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security distributed a counterterrorism assessment to local law-enforcement types entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." The nine-page paper has many on the right questioning what is going on in Washington.

  The assessment reads like a sophomore's bad political science essay in, for example, noting that right-wing extremism "may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration."

  "This is a very unfortunately named document," Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Sara Kuban told me. No lie. The not-quite-classified-but-also-not-meant-for-public-distribution assessment reads like a rookie mistake penned by political lightweights. But Kuban told me it was written by "career officials" who had been working on the assessment for more than a year. (Read: DHS started working on this when George W. Bush was in charge.) That career officials would write such tripe should scare you.

  Fox News posted a Jan. 26, 2009, assessment entitled "Leftwing Extremists Likely to Increase Use of Cyber-Attacks over the Coming Decade." This would suggest equal-opportunity political targeting.

  "
• Guest: conservative radio host Roger Hedgecock. Why do conservatives want the government to ignore hard right & Nazi terrorists?
• Bumper Music: I'm Looking Through You, Beatles (video).
• Article: Spanish AG says no torture probe of US officials.
• Which of the two reports do the media focus on?
• Quote: "Article 38: In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.

  Article 39: No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

  "
  Magna Carta, 1215.
• Article: Obama Endorses Bush Secrecy On Torture And Rendition, ACLU.
• Many who worked for Obama believed we would see some things rolled back, changed, like extraordinary rendition - now they have said they will not - and people thought that habeas corpus would be restored, two Magna Carta articles, but they are now saying that those in Bagram don't have Habeas Corpus rights. ACLU. Obama had voted for the Patriot Act. Austin Goolsby. The right were silent under Bush, but the left are speaking out to Obama.
• Bumper Music: Join the Club The Waco Brothers.
• Bumper Music: Crazy, Gnarls Barkley.
• Article: Pirates Apologize To Limbaugh: We Failed At Making Obama Fail.
• Clip:
  "Iraq sits on top of 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves, very significant reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia." Vice President Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, September 14, 2003.
• Greg Mortenson will be in Eugene, Oregon at the University, May 7. The military would like to fund him but he turns them down as any hint of it would lose him all the trust he has gained. Do it through UN programmes.
• Opium, Afghanistan, Iraq, oil. Afghan produces over 90% of illegal opium, but other countries provide legal, pharmaceutical opium and derivative products. Afghanistan used to feed themselves and export food.
• Bumper Music: I Summon You, Spoon.
• Bumper Music: The Mail Must Go Through, Larry Groce & The Disneyland Children's Sing Along Chorus (clip).
• Article: Gov. Rick Perry: Texas Could Secede, Leave Union.
• Garrett emailed to say that if Texas secedes, George Bush no longer has sovereign nation protection...
• Article: Obama Hints At Torture Investigation: 'We Are Moving A Process Forward'.
• Article: Is America the new Russia? ("Cutting Back Financial Capitalism Is America's Big Test"), Martin Wolf.
  "Is the US Russia? The question seems provocative, if not outrageous. Yet the person asking it is Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In an article in the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Prof Johnson compares the hold of the “financial oligarchy” over US policy with that of business elites in emerging countries. Do such comparisons make sense? The answer is Yes, but only up to a point.

  “In its depth and suddenness,” argues Prof Johnson, “the US economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets.” The similarity is evident: large inflows of foreign capital; torrid credit growth; excessive leverage; bubbles in asset prices, particularly property; and, finally, asset-price collapses and financial catastrophe.

  "
• Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the U.S. banking bailout, formally known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program. There are three ways to deal with insolvent banks, 1) receivership - temporarily nationalize like Sweden, 2) liquidation, protecting not stockholders or executives but depositors like Bill Siedman's that took over failed S&Ls, UK with Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland, the government to run through bankruptcy like S&Ls, painful in the short term but works in the long term 3) Japan "the Japanese conspiracy" pumped public money into banks, lost decade (15 years) of recession, governments falling. Bush chose option 3. Obama takes on Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, etc. Rant.
• Bumper Music: I Will Buy You A New Life, Everclear.
• Geeky science rocks segment.
• Article: Book Review: Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond. Oxytocin.
• Article: Persistent Positive North Atlantic Oscillation Mode Dominated the Medieval Climate Anomaly.
• Article: New Texas Standards Question Evolution, Fossil Record. Publishers write to Texas standards since the market is so large.
• Bumper Music: Who knows, Avril Lavigne.
• Listeners' experiences at tea parties.
• Bumper Music: Change, Bart Crow.
• Member of the day: Quark gets a copy of "The Edison Gene" for:

  "Thom, your conversation with Halima Karsai (www.iwf.org) was fascinating. There were so many more subjects about which I’d like to hear her thoughts. It would be so enlightening to have someone like her (or the previous guest) on your show regularly to expand our understanding of her/his point of view (recognizing that she is only one person and cannot speak for all.)

  Among other questions, I would like to know why she is affiliated with a conservative group. She sounds open to discussing new ideas…"

• Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News. Diane Feinstein, NSA wiretapping investigation. Bush spying on Democrats? AP: Obama administration telling CIA officials they will not be prosecuted for waterboarding. One talk show host left the CIA because he could not do what they asked. The president announced $9b and %5b, ten areas of hi speed rail. List of areas. Jobless claims down unexpectedly, still 600,000. Housing starts down 10.8% in March. President on his way to Mexico City. Gibbs did not answer about trucking. Black Hawks war supplemental for border security. Renegotiating NAFTA may be discussed. His first trip to South America?