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This 90% meme is vital. Keep saying it, and saying it and saying it, Thom.
The hope is that at some point some bloviating blowhard on MSNBC will ask a guest, "What about this thing that's going around saying that we need a 90% tax rate? Is that INSANE, or what?" Then by the next day, six more conservatives will be trumpeting, "OBAMA WANTS A 90% TAX RATE!" Then somebody like Olbermann or Stewart will feel the need to debunk and defend it, and hopefully they'll do so by saying, "No, Obama never said that, but if you look back, it is true that we had a 90% tax rate for 20 years, and steady growth the whole time ..." And THEN the real discussion can start.
There are tens of millions of middle-aged and younger Americans who have only known the top tax rate to be around 35%. 39% even seems outrageous. They don't even know that it can be higher -- much less that it was around 70% or above for the majority of the 20th century. If you say "raise it to 40%," they'll absolutely freak and talk it down to 36%. We can't do that. Start the debate at 90% and settle for 68% or 55%.
The so-called religious job of a Hindu deity, is to periodically return to Earth, (sometimes in disguise), and save everybody! Strangely, Mahayana Buddhism has put a rather illogical 'spin' on their visiting dieties. Their Bodi Satras, as they are termed, consider reasonable adult arguments as useless, as 'water through a seive'? So how does that type of attitude 'win' in American politics, especially with conservatives? Answer: the water is like our commons, and the seive is like the MSM!?! The problem with Medved's argument in the debate about the commons (on route to his spectacular loss!) was that to turn our backs upon our commons is as DISASTEROUS as leaving a child at home, alone!!
Just to follow up on a full accounting of historic Trans-North America migration, from the historic crossing what is now the Bering Straite, to meso-American Mayan Civilization, Aztek depredation, and even the Inca Empire! What strikes me as fascinating, are the several Proto-Native American Languages, spoken throughout North America! Proto languages may be mutualy understood by other neighboring tribes, whereas each tribe retains a special core lexicon from its own region! (Ex. Proto-Iroquoian was understood by People of The Great Hill, People of The Great Swamp, People of The Hills, People of The Great Flint, and The Shirt-Wearing Peoples of the Northeastern North American region!!)
Paid blogger wrap up:
In earlier post (2nd from the top of this page) I said that I thought that two recent callers to the show were prolific posters on Thom's message boards and I wondered if they there being being paid to post here. Well, I can't prove whether they're being paid or not. However, here are some new numbers on their posting activities today.
The guy who had called earlier this week about Thom "endorsing" Arlen Specter, has at this moment 97 posts since the new message board started. 5 of those posts were made within the last 5 hours.
The guy who had called and challenged Bernie Sanders (last Friday, I think) has a 39 posts since the new board started. Amazingly, 19 of his posts were made in the last 4 hours. In addition, he called in to challenge Thom about the proposal to tax the $165 million in bonuses given to people at AIG.
I REPORT, YOU DECIDE!
B Roll, CSI
As I am listening to your show I have come up with a concept..we all came here from lands that made rules that worked against us(or our past family and the founding fathers)..somehow this distaste for rules and regulations are still with us..so we elect others like us and they do in these laws that are meant to protect us..we used to drive many miles faster and we adjusted them..we now us seatbelts..as we can no longer use cell phones..these are adjustments of the primary rules of safe driving..the same goes for medical care..but when it comes to our economic well being we are not interested..you have a wonderful opportunity to educate the American people with these facts..
thank you
saul bernstein
For anyone that missed the names of the Supreme Court cases Thom mentioned, they were Buckley v. Valeo & First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti.
OK... OK... this is my 3rd post of the morning, but I guarantee it's strictly "pro bono".
My suspicion was that the softness of John King's interview of Cheney may have been influenced by Seymour Hersh's recent revelation of Cheney's executive assassination squad.
About the fealty that highly-paid newscasters pay to the GOP: It's not _only_ that the reporters need access to power in order to keep their jobs. That would apply equally to Democratic & Republican politicians. The other factor is, again, money: once you are making $millions, your self-interests are naturally more closely aligned with low-tax, conservative Republicans. This might explain Geraldo Rivera's devolution from consumer advocate to purveyor of weird and anti-average-guy stories (can't think of anything else).
Thom,
Has is ever occurred to you that with your policy of taking calls from people who disagree with you first, you may be padding the paychecks of the people who are paid to call in to your show?
I just heard a caller who went to the front of the line because he disagreed with a point you made. I didn't catch where he was from, but his name was the same as one of the two I referred to in my post above. If he's the same guy, you're freeing him to make more posts on your message boards, while at the same time sincere callers have to wait for long periods of time and sometimes not even get on.
Here's a personal experience: I've called into your show a few times, but haven't in quite a while. Several times, I waited for over an hour and didn't get on. The one time I did get on, I forgot a key word that you used that I found objectionable. When I got on, we went at it, but in the end we agreed to disagree. If I would have remembered that word, you probably would have agreed with me, because you started the next day's show by apologizing for what you had said (that I had objected to). You said that a listener had emailed you about your comment and mentioned the word that I'd forgotten.
It seems to me that the practice of taking dissenting calls first is an opening which can be exploited by the paid propagandists at the detriment of sincere callers.
Great show.
Quibble, on oil drilling and replacing it with water: water is heavier, not lighter, than oil. That's why we have oil slicks.
Other than a gap of 2 years--from 1863 to 1865, when there were 10 seats--the Supreme Court has had 9 members since 1837, when the 8th and 9th seats were added. The 7th was added in 1807, and the 6th was added in 1790, only a year after the first 5 seat were created.
Thom, I can't call in right now (at work) but I would love to hear your thoughts on the Obama's plan to start gardening at the white house.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/dining/19garden-web.html
people need to start taking back the genes of our world from big ag, and the more people garden the more people will be informed about the damage that GMO's, pesticides, and chemical farming are doing (organic was the original "conventional method"). I hope you would point the listeners to check out two sites. The first www.urbanhomestead.com/journal is the blog from a family in pasedena who grows the majority of their diet on 1/10th of an acre, among other sustainable/low impact practices.
the second site freedomgarden.org is the facebook so to speak of the sustainable gardening demographic. Its a meeting place of people sharing info on gardening, composting, food preservation, seed saving, and a great positive place for people who want to "be the change."
Thanks and keep up the good work.
Thom,
It's interesting that you raised the issue of paid bloggers today. I've been thinking about it in relationship to your show this week.
You may be aware of this already, but in the last few weeks two of the more prolific conservative members of your message board have called in to your show.
I won't mention their names (unless you want me to), but one called on a Friday to challenge Bernie Sanders about H1B visas. The other one called a few days ago feigning dismay that you urged listeners to contact Arlen Specter to urge him to switch from Republican to Democrat. The source of his feigned dismay was the fact that you'd been critical of Specter for his role on the Warren Commission.
When I noticed the fact they had called in within days of each other, I wondered if your show has been targeted for special attention since you were designated the most influential progressive talker. I also wondered if they had earned enough troll points to graduate from strictly blog posts to phone calls (or maybe it was their auditions).
I had wondered if these guys because of their prolificacy and the transparency of their arguments. In the case of one of these guys, after reading one of his posts, I had hoped that he was doing it for money rather than he actually believed it.
Just for reference, I checked on the numbers of posts of these two blogger/callers. Both of these guys were all over your old message board, and in the few weeks your new board has been up, the guy who called about Arlen Specter has posted 97 times (several this morning with the last one being within the last 5 minutes) and the one who called about work visas posted 33 times (with around 5-6 this morning and the most recent also within the last 5 minutes).
Medved vs. Reality
Here are some thoughts from The Great Debate last night.
Blame the recession on Obama. / The recession started earlier than it was supposed to .
Corporate media has a liberal bias. / Reality has a liberal bias. Corporate media often reports on reality.
Bush/Cheney kept us safe since 9/11. / Bush/Cheney did a lousy job keeping us safe since 9/10.
We would not have gone to war with Iraq if not for 9/11. / The only connection between Iraq and 9/11 is you can start a war with Iraq if you lie about a connection with 9/11.
Decent union wages are bad for business and economic recovery. / Decent wages will empower you the audience to become customers and customers of customers. The only way to economic recovery is to empower your customers.
A large proportion of the audience is happy with their healthcare. / The audience consists of people with enough disposable income to go see a political debate. The growing population of desperate struggling Americans is not represented here.
No able bodied person should be paid by the government for sitting around doing nothing if they’re poor. / So we should create an environment to get that person employed and not poor. And we should undo the conservative shift of the tax burden onto working Americans and off of investment income. Lost tax revenues on the upper percent of income is the worst way for the government to pay able bodied people for sitting around doing.
Why is progressive talk such a failure? I thought it was fat-cat corporate sponsors and station owners with an anti-American worker agenda.
MathBoy: Along side a 'cloture' rule, it may be helpful to think about the entire body of forty-three Standing Rules of the Senate, too? Because these Senate parlimentary rules all modify the constitutionally required 'simple majority', for votes in both houses of Congress. Together, these rules add a parlimentary level of complexity. Besides, at the direction of the chair of the Senate (and sometimes, the clerk?) a 'unanimous consent' motion, a.k.a. 'general consent' motion, can end debate when there are no objections present! The general consent motion ignores the subject of what has been debated, or even how intense it may get! Practically, 'general consent' in the Senate, is a parlimentary tool that is used often, or informally, and saves time, and does that civililly!
Hi Thom and all,
I was listening to your show today and your comment about Carter begin the first to deregulate reminded me that actually Gerald Ford started that ball rolling. Here's a clip from UTexas:
"Beside abolishing many controls on petroleum prices, Ford proposed economic deregulation of the railroad, aviation, and trucking industries, and created a regulatory reform task force to identify other areas in which deregulation would be economically and socially desirable. Only railroad deregulation had been achieved by the time Ford left office, but the groundwork had been laid for other regulatory reforms later carried out under Carter."
http://www.ford.utexas.edu/library/education/Reichley.htm
I have read other references to Ford being the "deregulation president".
It's good to put this back onto Republican shoulders.
Eliot Spitzer:
The Real AIG ScandalIt's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.
Thom you need to get a interview with the President. I was just listening to Ed Shultz (who is ok but can't really hang with you) He had a interview with the President. He asked some good questions but for the most part it was just a lot of Softballs. I wanted to hear a little tougher questions. I don't want people thinking that Liberals can't ask Tough Questions to Dems. I know you would have done a better Job. And what is with Ed Shultz feeling in for David S. on MSNBC. You need to get in on that. I'm just sayin. Tom on T.V. is what America Needs!!!
I think the caller's idea that the whole AIG fiasco is quite simply another Enron scam is not far fetched. Also Thom's saying that the bonuses are a reletively insignificant part of a bigger picture is right on. However, saying that going after the White House conspirators is where we should be focused is also small beans compared to an even bigger picture.
We have a situation likened to the Titanic sinking as far as sustatinability of our population versus the available resources of our planet. Those at the top are basically grabbing the few available lifeboats and lining the nest with the ship's provisions.
Starting a passenger revolt to prosecute the guilty crewmembers does not change the inevitable, foreseeable crash.
The sources that fuel our energy wasting American Dream are running out..
Without an unlimited supply of undergound fossil fuels we can no longer supply the raw materials to meet the needs of an ever growing population.
We turn to our Government and Industries and ask them to implement changes for our future. However, the powers that be are overrun with special interests run by dinosaur industries.
The Solutions are readily available, and many are in fact public domain. Since you can't patent ideas that are already freely available, it is not in the interest of industries to develop them.
The Heliostat you referred to in New Mexico is no more.
There were several experimental Heliostats built at Los Alamos, but that program has been discontinued. There aren't any large scale Heliostats in America to the best of my knowledge. I know India built one recently.
Obama talks about developing "Solar Panels": one of the least effective methods of extracting solar energy from the sun. A large scale Heliostat is one of the most efficient methods, next to biomass.
The Los Alamos Heliostats generated electricity via steam turbines. You could build a Heliostat large enough to melt down glass and aluminum and make mirrors and structural parts to manufacture more of them. With a self perpetuating system, you could soon have enough Heliostats in place to provide all of our energy needs for free.
With unlimited free energy, the powerful energy companies become obsolete and fade from existence from our government and our industries.
There are many more readily available technolgies which could make us not just energy independent, but with an energy surplus.
We are wasting too much time focusing on patching the problems instead of exploring Solutions.
I told myself before the election that if Obama was elected I would try to stop griping and complaining about the government and try to be more constructive for a change. After some dissapointment, I slipped right back into full gripe mode. It's hard to sit down and only write down constructive changes insead of just saying how this is wrong and that is wrong after some 20 odd years of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, etc.
to RickinSF
There are a bunch of links to the right of Thom's picture near the top of the homepage. The first link is Home and the last is Links. Click on the word Community. That will take you to a page that has the link for the chat room, message boards and more.
When/if you want to Log-out of the site, you have to click on "my home" where you'll find a Log-out button. It's a bit awkward.
The site is ridiculously difficult to navigate. There should be a link, front and center on the home page, to comment on the show that is currently being aired!
That said, why do you give so much airtime to Neanderthals like Bill? This "my taxes pay for lazy slobs to eat steak and lobster" meme doesn't merit a response - he is so hopelessly ego-centric that facts and logic will mean nothing to him. Also, I'd like to see you call people more often on anecdotal "evidence" - it may be an anecdote, but it ain't evidence.
All that said, I love your show and all that you do. Sorry for the gripe-fest.
I've been away a while, is there no longer a chat room?
What is happening with the stream today. It's breaking up all over the place; both the silverstream and the MP3. can't even listen to it.
Servicemonkey: My tickets are regular and they say 5:30 as well. I am trying to find the Chat site.
Thom
Here is the bonus solution. Give them their bonuses, all they have to do is pick up the check in person from The GM plant that have been laying people off, or maybe downtown Fallujah or Afghanistan. They have a month to pick them up or they lose them. A simple solution.