Trump's campaign was driven by the media since the beginning. I remember counting 5-6 articles about Trump every day! It became clear very soon that the media, the overwhelming preponderance of which is owned by a very few old, rich, white men, has been treating Trump exactly like any other product on the market today. Drugs, breakfast cereal, new cars, you name it: Trump is being old to the same idiots who slurp down all the other sugar-coated poisons, then beg for cheap chemo. Perhaps a large percentage of Americans really are insecure bigots who yearn for a sense of order, but you got the causal relationship all wrong. Media is not pandering to the masses as much as the media is SELLING Trump to the masses, for the very reasons you mention.

Was listening to your show last night (Tiny Hands) and when you mentioned Marty Kaplan, that got my attention. He has long been someone that I have admired. As a part of the Norman Lear Center at USC, he is also the Chief Investigator at Hollywood Health and Society, where my daughter is the Senior Research Associate. When she went to work there and I heard he was the guiding force behind it, that brought a smile to my face. I knew she would be in a good place, given the good works with which he has been involved for many years. Glad you pointed him out to your audience.

Barnacles on our Ship of State

{... a rhyme ...}

He examined the pols such as Reagan, the Ronald

and Cruz, O’Connell and the Trumpian Donald, …

… and said of them acidly

that they are flat-assedly

among the worst in any of history’s chronicles

of ships-of-state destroyed by {barnacles} bahnacles

who have hung tenaciously

and have eaten predaciously

at the souls of distraughtly disoriented nations, -

- while nitwit supporters gave them standing ovations.

=============================================

I was the caller at around 1 Hour into the program who brought up the popular vote. What I was getting at came from this chart, which has been used to show the running popular vote of the Democratic Primary on all the major media outlets: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/democratic_vote_count.html. The problem with it is for the states that hold caucuses instead of primaries, the numbers displayed are not, in fact, the number of voters - they are the number of "state congressional delegates" that each candidate earned.

In Washington, for example, the total number of caucus goers was listed at 230K on the Washington Democrats homepage: http://www.wa-democrats.org/page/2016-democratic-caucuses. But when looking at the totals on the RCP Popular Vote, it appears as if there were only a little over 26K votes between the two candidates combined.

Why is this important? Because Bernie has had the vast majority of his victories in caucus states - the very states whose raw vote count doesn't contribute toward the running "Popular Vote" that is being shown to future voters in other states. The 8.9 million (Hillary) and 6.3 million (Bernie) numbers listed on RCP make it appear that Hillary has had way more supporters show up to caucus or vote for her, when in fact those numbers are both completely wrong, and the data suggests that Bernie has had a far greater percentage of support.

I realize, to Thom's point, that this is a small issue in the process of nominating a candidate and that all that matters is the delegate count, but the process should be transparent. I feel that taking those 26K state delegates and calling them "popular vote" is bad data collection. And the fact that MSNBC and CNN are going to show the RCP numbers as a true "popular vote" without anyone checking what those numbers actually refer to is just lazy journalism.

I applaud Instant-Runoff's comments. Nuclear power is the best source of baseload power. A combination of solar, wind, and nuclear is the ideal way to generate electricity. And nuclear power eventually uses up uranium, raises its price, and makes buring nuclear weapons very desirable economically.

I am sure the media will continue to lie, and focus on superdelegates, which need to be outlawed.

There is not much chance anything will be done about this climate crisis, except for possibly China & India. At least not until something really frightening happens, like the Gulf Stream shuts down or the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf breaks free and slips into the sea.

The problem is fossil is all added up a ~$200T industry. There is so much inertia and wealth there. It goes far beyond just Big Oil companies, you have rail, half their loads are coal, Auto almost all based on Oil fuel, big OPEC nations like Saudi, which buys our politicians like they were hogs put up for auction, other non-OPEC nations like Canada, Norway & Russia that are defacto petro-states. Big utilities are almost entirely based on fossil, the big money is in gas, high profits on Enron style grid shenanigans. Once illegal, now standard operations.

And one of the biggest influences is the financial industry, the big banks which thrive on speculation in the highly fluctuating commodities oil, gas, coal and market electricity prices again tied to largely unreliable gas availability. And then they invented another scam which is carbon trading to make even more giant profits on speculation.

And huge profits & power reside in the inevitable currency exchanges that must go with Oil - the #1 portion of international trade. Petrodollars that are created out of thin air by private banks. Petroleum importing nations must borrow those petrodollars with interest from private, mostly big Wall St Banks, in order to import their life-giving, economy-sustaining crude oil. If they can't make the interest payments for those petrodollars that these banks created out of nothing, then they will become like Greece and have to give away their national resources, infrastructure and national sovereignty to the Big Banks, becoming little more than indentured serfs. As the Bankster favorite stooge Henry Kissinger stated:

" If you control the energy you control the country; if you control food, you control the population..".

There is so much wealth tied up in fossil, vested interests launch mega-disaster wars, like the Iraq Oil war in efforts to make vast profits. And the Afghan pipeline war. There are incredible gas reserves north of Afghanistan that the big banks & oil companies want to export to the largest new market which is India. Pump conventional NG out of the ground in Turkmenistan for $0.50/mmbtu and sell it in India for $15/mmbtu. Massive profits in that. The Taliban were offered a deal before 9/11 by Bush & Cheney, sign on to the American pipeline deal and get "a carpet of gold" refuse and get "a carpet of bombs". They refused, the rest is history. Human life is incidental in this greed-crazed rampage. Notice Oh-Bomb-Ya has fully embraced this imperialism, signing on to an endless war in Afghanistan until the US gets its secure pipeline corridor, the war will never end.

Problem for India & China is all they really have for fossil, which is the fundamental backbone for their surging economies, is dirty, filthy coal. Which is poisoning their atmosphere, causing millions of deaths, ten's of thousands of coal mining deaths, polluted cities, lakes and rivers which is disrupting agricultural production. They have no choice but to go Nuclear. India embarking on their own indigenous Thorium Nuclear Reactor program, using Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (CANDU clones) & Fast Breeder Reactors. China is cloning western reactors and developing their own Pebble Bed reactors as well as LFTR - thorium molten salt reactors. Renewables, almost entirely wind & solar, remain a pipe dream, to delude the gullible, pretending they will substitute for fossil. They won't, not even close, don't be dupes.

The hope is that China & India will move far enough and fast enough with their indigenous nuclear programs, and start exporting to developing nations, as China has begun. Then western nations which have become so totally corrupted by fossil vested interests will look like such pathetic, useless, snivelling little arseholes, that they will be embarrassed into restarting their nuclear power programs.

That's the only way the spectre of runaway climate change will be averted. I'm not hopeful.

Thom:

Thanks for all the great work you are doing regarding climate change. While you address CO2 pollution from transportation a lot, I have seen no references yet from you regarding a source of ozone damaging gases (methane and nitrous oxides) much more significant than all global transportation: Animal Agriculture.

For a reference point, please see the new film "Cowspiracy" - a devastating indictment of the economic blind eye that humans and organizations (like the 350.org and the Sierra Club) are turning to one of the most important planetary health solutions.

http://www.cowspiracy.com 

Humans need to move to a whole foods plant-based lifestyle in large numbers if we ever hope to stay within the 2 degree centigrade limitation set by climate scientists. We can't do it by reducing fossil fuel consumption alone.

This plant-based move will also have the concurrent benefit of preventing about 80% of current chronic diseases afflicting humans and also promote animal welfare.

Thanks for listening.

Once again, all this talk about climate change. When will mankind allow mother nature to regain control? Geoengineering is the real threat here. It includes weather manipulation, cloud seeding and aerosol spraying. Chemicals and toxins are being sprayed onto the masses like bugs, and NOBODY in the media is looking into it. There has been a gag order placed on all local and national weathermen, and again, NOBODY thinks that's a red flag? Aluminum, barium, strontium, lithium, and nano particles, among many other chemicals are adversely affecting all life, and apparently NOBODY cares. Aluminum has been linked to autism, Alzheimer's, dimentia, and the bee die off. What will it take to wake people up to this insidious program?

Do your homework at www.geoengineeringwatch.org or at any of dozens of other sites to research the truth. The longer humanity stays asleep, the less time this planet will sustain any form of life! It is time to wake up people!

History is littered with scientific findings that were believed by contemporaries to be lies, attempts at self-aggrandizement, politically motivated or just plain quackery. Then the truth of those findings came out with, up to this point, amazement, amusement, delight and sometimes negative responses. This one will bring horror with it.

I'm sorry, but the Clinton's and OBAMA are the new Moderate Republican Party!

When Obama placed Social Security on the Table, that did it for me, all while giving WALL STREET CEO'S all they wanted, and THEN SOME!

NO WAY SHOULD THE CLINTON'S EVER GET IN OUR WHITE HOUSE EVER AGAIN! They should RETIRE, like the Bush's! Get out of Politic's, for they've done GREAT DAMAGE to our Country and the American Economy and WORK FORCE!

SCREW THE CLINTON'S BIG TIME! For the Bush Administration could NOT DO, what they did without Bill Clinton's NAFTA, GLASS STEAGALL, and his destructive 1996 Telecomminications Bill, to PURCHASE UP OUR MEDIA by the 1/10th of the 1%!

Both right answers actually, we need a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote.