April 02, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

REPUBLICANS OFFER NOTHING

One of the patterns emerging in the U. S. Attorneys firings is the effort by the Bush administration to suppress poor and minority voters. This has been a consistent Republican tactic, of course, but Republicans now have even more of an incentive. They offer absolutely nothing for working class and middle class voters. The Republican party is even more ostentatiously the party of big business and the rich than it ever was. Now they are also the party of eternal war. This article by Paul Krugman is at www.welcometopottersville.com:

But today’s Republicans can’t respond in any meaningful way to rising inequality, because their activists won’t let them. You could see the dilemma just this past Friday and Saturday, when almost all the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls traveled to Palm Beach to make obeisance to the Club for Growth, a supply-side pressure group dedicated to tax cuts and privatization.

The Republican Party’s adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big problems. It can’t offer domestic policies that respond to the public’s real needs. So how can it win elections?

The answer, for a while, was a combination of distraction and disenfranchisement.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were themselves a massive, providential distraction; until then the public, realizing that Mr. Bush wasn’t the moderate he played in the 2000 election, was growing increasingly unhappy with his administration. And they offered many opportunities for further distractions. Rather than debating Democrats on the issues, the G.O.P. could denounce them as soft on terror. And do you remember the terror alert, based on old and questionable information, that was declared right after the 2004 Democratic National Convention?

BEHIND ENEMY LINES

I guess today our progressive talk radio station, KFPT, began a format switch to sports. I turned on the car radio this morning, wondering if I'd hear Stephanie Miller, and I heard something like dogs barking to Christmas music. I checked later on and weird sound effects continued. I have to wonder about the intelligence of the new owners. If you were going to play nonsense like this, why not keep Air America and other progressive programming on the air? I hope the new format really crashes because that will be karmic justice. I also hope that some astute radio programmer in Fresno will recognize the core audience built by KFPT since July, 2005, and put progressive talk radio back on the air in Fresno.