• Show live from WCPT, Chicago.
• "Brunch with Bernie" with Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont.
• President Bush's address to the Knesset. Appeasement. Negotiation.
• 'Anything Goes' friday.
• Mystic books.

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

Friday 16 May '08 show

• Show live from WCPT, Chicago.
• "Brunch with Bernie" with Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont. His web site. He sent out an email about gas prices, now received over 800 replies. It's just taken some people over the edge. Gas price $4:25 in Chicago. He spoke of an email from a woman who works at a hospital. Cancer patients from rural areas attending an outpatient clinic can't afford to travel to the doctor or for radiation treatment. We need to break our dependence on foreign, fossil fuel, and change national priorities. The oil reserve bill will pass. Look at the oil futures market, he spoke to an expert who thought the price of oil was double what it should be. Yesterday agriculture bill, Enron loophole. Transparency. We need short term relief for working families. Appropriation $1m for LIHEAP. Disapproval of decision to further deregulate media.

  From the chat room: mugwump: "IN Chicago yet he can't enjoy a pizza or Chicago dog. Man, being a vegetablearian who can't eat wheat. That's gotta suck! Like going to my vegan sister's house. Nothing in the fridge but roots and twigs". Thom is finding gluten free pizza.

  Gas tax holiday. We're making the perfect the enemy of the good. Don't be so quick to dismiss it, people are hurting. McCain is irresponsible taking it from infrastructure fund. Independent truckers cannot survive any more, losing everything through no fault of their own, can't get job because of bad credit due to high gas prices. Nothing is isolated from anything else. If someone gets sick it is hard to go to the doctor, then hard to work. No fault of their own.

  Bush Knesset speech. Take over oil distribution from businessmen? Bush will go down as the worst president, Republicans in droves are running away from him. He was particularly embarrassing in Israel. There should be a windfall profits tax. The military who were in Iraq in 2007 are not eligible for the stimulus check because they did not pay taxes? Jim Webb GI bill, he thinks it will win.

  Any particular senate races we should watch to alleviate the filibuster problem? Thom had a candidate on yesterday, Rick Noriega who's taking on John Cornyn. Democrat success in Mississippi last week. They think the Democrats will gain 5, 6, 7 more seats in the Senate plus a number in the House. They will be lucky to get 60. Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina, there's a long shot chance in Texas, Tom Allen in Maine, Al Franken in Minnesota. There are web sites out there saying which seats are in play. Hemp for fuel. Oil, speculators. Yesterday's agriculture bill has language to remove the "Enron loophole". We need to go much further. Drilling in ANWR and off the Florida coast. According to the government's own statistics, ANWR would reduce gas prices by 1p per gallon only in 20 years. Panel hearing on solar energy, pay for it by doing away with fossil fuel subsidies. Oil, prices, OPEC profits. price controls. Gas tax cut. Economists said it would have side effects, Nixon tried it and had shortages.

• Upcoming Event: today, Darien, Chicago, Il. 7pm. Talk and book signing at Frugal Muse bookstore.
• Upcoming Event: tomorrow, Chicago, Il. Chicago Green Festival. He'll be at the WCPT booth from 11am - 1pm and speaks to the crowd at 1pm. He'll sign his new book directly after.
• Bumper Music: Move Along, The All-American Rejects (video).
• Bumper Music: Two Paper Town Scott B. Bomar.
• Bumper Music: If Everyone Cared, Nickelback.
• Clip:
  "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
  President Bush Addresses Members of the Knesset, May 15, 2008.
• The difference between appeasement and negotiation. Bush Knesset speech; he didn't know what he was talking about. Obvious demagoguery, 'no politics beyond the waters edge' became the Truman doctrine. Gaddafi, Pan Am, Lockerbie, he has oil so we ignore what he does - that is appeasement, and Bush did it. Overview of the history of \Hitler's advance Austria, Anschluss, Sudetenland..., Chamberlain, Treaty of Versailles). Bush is negotiating now with North Korea. Reagan did with Gorbachev, JFK with Khrushchev. Statecraft.
• Clip: What did Neville Chamberlain do?’ Kevin James on Hardball with Chris Matthews didn't know, but he knew it was appeasement. Chris Matthews said of the exchange:
  ""Look, I'm a student of history, especially of the late 1930s when the world didn't stand up to Hitler and my hero Winston Churchill saw all the hell coming and couldn't stop it. The catastrophe of the 1930s was thinking that Hitler would be satisfied with the gift of bite-sized countries. The evidence suggests he wanted war to avenge World War I and to dominate Europe. He also had his heart set on extermination of the Jewish people. The horror of appeasement was not in talking to him and letting him yammer. It was giving him countries - like Czechoslovakia in 1938.

  Anyway, perhaps it's little surprise that our Big Number tonight is the number of times my guest - demanding we not repeat the appeasement of the 1930s - failed to tell me what that appeasement actually was. 'What did Neville Chamberlain do?' I kept asking to no avail. The number? 24! 24 times I tried to get an answer out of our guest!

  Anyway, we do like Kevin James and hope he’ll be back on Hardball again."

  "
• Who should be the vice president pick if Obama is nominee? If Hillary, her negatives are second to Bush, but could be healed and fixed.
• Bumper Music: Anything Goes, Harpers Bizarre.
• The problems with big solar. Urban power, parking lots - shade them with solar panels, and in the north protect them from snow. The wind is higher above skyscrapers. Depending on how you make hydrogen, it can take oxygen. Hemp is suitable for food, fuel and clothing, much better. We need simple solutions, not elaborate. One person blowing the pipeline up would lose us ANWR oil, or a rifle or a truck.
• Bumper Music: What is Truth, Johnny Cash.
• Quote:
  "It's astonishing the President of the United States would launch an attack on a presidential candidate from a podium in a foreign country. The character of the attack is astounding. ... George Bush himself negotiated with Kadafi's Libya in order to get them to give up their nuclear program, and Kadafi was behind Pan Am 103. Kadafi was a terrorist"
  Pat Buchanan, MSNBC, 15 May 2008.
• Caller Dan described the differences in growing methods for hemp and marijuana that would make it easy for the police distinguish between the two, and how mixing the two ruins the marijuana crop - the police should grow hemp. George Washington grew hemp.
• Al Franken's opponent in the primary.
• Bumper Music: If George Only Had a Brain, Bill Jacobs.
• Clip:
  [Jamie Rubin, "The Huffington Post"]: "Do you think American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past in working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

  [Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)]: "They're the government, and sooner or later, we're going to have to deal with them in one way or another. And I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas is because of their dedication to violence and the things they not only espouse, but practice. So -- but it's a new reality in the Middle East. And I think the lesson is, people want security and a decent life and a decent future, then they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."
  Rubin's 2004 interview with McCain for Sky News' World News Tonight.

• Hamas should be following Ghandi's advice. A one state solution ain't going to happen.
• Chuck Hagel for vice president? He is more of a renegade than McCain, but has his history of being head of ES&S.
• Thom not sure if an Obama/Hillary ticket is the optimal thing, there are points for and against it.
• The aggregate profit from a barrel of oil, they get lots more than just gas from it.
• Clip:
  "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate."
  John F. Kennedy January 20, 1961, Inaugural Address.
• Book: "The Little Flowers Of Saint Francis Of Assisi", Brother Ugolino.
• Saint Francis of Assisi met the sultan during the crusades, risking his life, recognized him as another human being, listened to him, realized he was not a monster. Saint Francis repented the crusades, they were not according to the gospels. Marchers on Selma. Martin Luther King. Gandhi. Jesus. Read "Little Flowers of St. Francis". Bush's objectification of the other is so destructive.
• Bumper Music: From The End Of The World, ELO.
• Article: Conservatives Dismiss CA Gay Marriage Decision By Falsely Attacking ‘Unelected Judges’. Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL).
• theyrule.net lets you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004.
• Book: "Interior Castle or The Mansions", St. Teresa of Avila.
• Book: "Dark Night of the Soul", Saint John of the Cross.
• Books that changed Thom's view on life. Books by Thomas Merton, and the sayings of Meister Eckhart.
• Bumper Music: What a Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong. Thanks.