- Guests:
- Dan Gainor who says the media decides the issues rather than we the people...
- David Frum, who writes a weekly column for CNN.com. A resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he was special assistant to President Bush in 2001-2. He is the author of six books, including "Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again" and the editor of FrumForum.
- Topics:
- Are Republicans and Teabaggers now a threat to America?
- Do the owners of media have too much influence on politics?
- What advice does a Republican have to stop the right wing crazy train from taking over their party?
- Bumper Music:
- The Boy in the Bubble, Paul Simon.
- Looking East, Jackson Browne.
- Crazy, Gnarls Barkley.
- Are You Ready? Pacific Gas and Electric.
- Irreplaceable, Beyoncé.
- Go Walking Down There, Chris Isaak (video).
- The Twilight Zone, Marius Constant.
- You Can All Join In, Steve Winwood, Traffic.
- Crazy Train, Ozzy Osbourne.
- Grand Canyon, Dmitriy Lukyanov (you need to search for it) (with additional sounds by Jacob).
- Democracy, Leonard Cohen.
- Today's newsletter has details of today's guests and links to the major stories and alerts that Thom covered in the show, plus lots more. If you haven't signed up for the free newsletter yet, please do. If you missed today's newsletter, it is in the archive.
- Quote: "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." -- Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823.
- Article: With cheap food imports, Haiti can't feed itself by Jonathan M. Katz.
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."
- Article: The Moderate Republican: An Endangered Species by Robert Scheer.
Boy, the Republicans know how to make Barack Obama look good. What are they going to do now, threaten to repeal a law that forces insurance companies to cover the sick? Or block the provision that allows you to keep your out-of-work kids on your policy until they are 26? Whatever the failings of the bill—and they are real, especially in the area of cost control—its proponents will clearly have an advantage over those left bemoaning the loss of the untenable status quo. Particularly so during the first years, when its very sensible restraints on the insurance industry go into effect.
The bill that the president signed into law is limited and hardly provocative, but it unquestionably gets us over the first huge hurdle, already surmounted by every other economically advanced nation, to finally regard health coverage as a societal obligation. We already do with the rules governing admittance to hospital emergency rooms, but now that obviously humane assurance carries the majesty of landmark law. For that achievement, Obama and the Democrats who supported him have secured their marker in the nation’s history, and the Republicans, without exception, should be remembered only as wannabe spoilers.
As Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, observed correctly in holding his nose and casting a vote for a bill that is at best a work in need of much progress, it is “castor oil,” which may not do much to improve our health but certainly won’t make it worse. It’s also pro-business; that’s why the stock market boomed Tuesday in a 17-month-high rally led by a 4.1 percent rise in the value of Caterpillar, the company that claimed the bill would hurt business interests.
