I love podcasts. Without them I would weight about 305 because the only way I can spend an hour on a treadmill, elliptical or recombinant bike is to have my i-pod feeding me something either enlightening or entertaining. One of my staples is This American Life produced by Chicago Public Media. You may know the show – it’s pretty popular. Each week they take a single topic and explore it in some depth. The subjects are usually political or cultural, but sometimes go into other quirky areas. Lasts week’s program, “This Party Sucks” was political -- not a commentary on Friday night’s wine and cheese offering. There were two segments. The first focused on a small group of Tea Party activists in Petoskey, Michigan and their internal battles over both strategy and philosophy. Most coverage I’ve seen on the tea-baggers, whether it was positive or negative was very one-dimensional. TAL did a great job of humanizing real people who are doing something about their political frustrations. My politics are a long way from theirs but I couldn’t help admiring their passion and willingness to do something.
In the second segment, a writer with the unlikely name Jack Hitt, found himself unbearably frustrated with the way the Obama political team went from being world-class communicators during the Presidential campaign, to completely inept communicators once they took office, so he went to Washington to try to find out why all they are so intent on “lame-assery” as a strategy. I’ve had similar frustrations, voiced on the DB a number of times, and his insights were both funny and frightening. It’s worth listening to just to hear how Paul Begala thought the Dems should have responded to Palin’s “death panel” shtick.
You can listen to the show online here; you don’t need to download anything, and if you only want to listen to the second segment (which is only 16 minutes long) it starts at the 39 minute mark.
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12 comments:
The Michigan Tea baggers were certainly passionate. I wish there were such a thing as a passionate moderate but I think that's, by definition, an oxymoron.
I heard the word Liberty mentioned quite a bit from these people and I've heard it a lot from the right over the past two years. Somehow their liberties and "freedoms" seem to be in mortal danger. For the life of me I can't figure out what they are talking about. What freedoms do they have (I assume I have them too) do they think are in danger of being taken away. I've never heard this articulated. Just asking.
They seem to be deeply worried about losing the right to have no health care.
Nigel offers the following observation:
Did you know that, the words "race car" spelled backwards still spells "race car"?
And that "eat" is the only word that, if you take the first letter and move it to the last, spells its own past tense, "ate"?
And if you rearrange the letters in "Tea Party Republicans," and add just a few more letters, it spells: "Shut the f*** up you free-loading, progress-blocking, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, violent hypocrites, and deal with the fact that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush and that our president is black, so try and get over it."
Isn't that interesting?
Wow! That is amazing. Good catch Nigel. BTW have you ever seen a bigger douchebag than Dick Armey in that cowboy hat? What a tool.
I didn't know they made cowboy hats that small. hey, is there an echo in here? where is everybody?
We are still reading the Bill Moyer post.
You've been pretty feisty lately Woodrow. Hankster and Birdman told me they were taking you off their Christmas and Hanuka card lists.
As William Hurt said in The Big Chill- "just trying to keep things lively".
you gave me a couple laughs.
Hard to believe, some of us try to avoid working for a living! I've been hard at work, very busy goofing off. No excuse here for not doing my homework on this blog entry. But must interject on behalf of the NRA, and not the National Recovery Act. Woody had mentioned unintended consequences. Their hand tying of legislators has been a boon to the Mexican drug cartels. Big business in border states is sale of fire arms to our bad brothers to the south. Power buys more power, both legislatively and in fire power.
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