The President spoke last night from his newly refurnished Oval Office, declaring that combat operations have ended in Iraq.  Didn’t we hear that somewhere before?

OK, he didn’t say “Mission Accomplished”  but he did say that combat operation in Iraq had ended. He also praised the guy that got us into that bloody mess in the first place. Seriously?!

Tonight on the show, we’ll listen to some of President Obama’s speech, and dissect it with Jason Leopold, deputy managing editor at Truthout and editor-at-large at The Public Record.  We’ll do that in hour two of the show.

We’ll kick things off tonight with journalist Dahr Jamail.

I first spoke with Dahr Jamail in 1997 when his first book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq was published … It chronicled the nine months he spent in Iraq as one of only a few independent US journalists reporting on the realities of the war for the Iraqi people and US soldiers.  He’s also reported extensively on veterans’ resistance against the war. His reports have been featured on Democracy Now, the BBC, NPR and lots of other outlets worldwide, plus his site at DahrJamailIraq.com.

Dahr has lately been writing a lot for Truthout.org, focusing on the BP disaster and the mess in the Gulf.  His latest piece, “Despite ‘All Clear,’ Mississippi Sound Tests Positive for Oil” got me to invite him back on the show…

Yesterday, I posted a video made by Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll at the Glenn Beck rally on Saturday. (Scroll down to yesterday’s blog to watch it.)  They call themselves New Left Media.  I first spoke with them almost a year ago, after I found their first video production, complete with interviews of people who attended the Beck-promoted “9/12″ rally.  They’ll join me on the show again tonight to talk about how their work has progressed in the past year, and what they saw in DC on Saturday.

Tomorrow, I’ll be guest hosting The Randi Rhodes Show… so I hope you’ll join me there from 3-6pm ET.  Kenny Pick and his crew will be filling in for me tomorrow night.  I’ll also be taking Monday off for Labor Day, so I’ll talk with you again on Tuesday!

It’s a busy Tuesday at Radio or Not.

Today is the first Tuesday of our regular Gotta Laff segment.  Sure, we’ll share some laughs, but Gotta Laff (aka Laffy) joins the show every Tuesday for a look at some of the best stuff she’s shared on her amazing blog, The Political Carnival, over the past week.  Of course that means she and I will share our thoughts and opinions on everything happening in the news.  You’re welcome to chime in too — either in the Ustream chat room or by phone at 800-795-1159.  That’s in hour two (7pm ET).

We’ll start the show with a look at HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program), through the eyes of FireDogLake’s David Dayen.  Today, he posted part 6 of he series, “Portrait of HAMP Failure.”  Today’s installment is “Losing Homes on a Technicality.”

For millions of Americans who are “underwater” in our homes, HAMP should have provided hope.  As Dayen’s series shows, it’s quite the opposite.  Read the rest of the series at these links:

• Portrait of HAMP Failure: Destroying Credit Ratings August 24, 2010
• Portrait of HAMP Failure: Banks Rule, Borrowers Pay the Price August 25, 2010
• Portrait of HAMP Failure: “It Makes Your Financial Situation Worse” August 23, 2010
• Portrait of HAMP Failure: Like A Lottery Ticket, With Servicers August 27, 2010
• Portrait of HAMP Failure: Strangled by the Bureaucracy August 26, 2010

From losing our homes, we’ll move on to losing our jobs.

Monday is Labor Day but, this year, many Americans will not be enjoying the day off  as they have every day off, involuntarily!  The unemployment rate stands at 9.6% (though it reality it’s likely much higher).  While President Obama will address the nation from the Oval Office tonight on the subject of Iraq, our minds will be how to get back to work.

Barr McClellan is an attorney, entrepreneur and best-selling author.  His new book is called “Made in the U.S.A.: Global Greed, Bad Tax Laws and The Exportation of America’s Future  (Economic Insights from some of the World’s Leading Economists and Trade Strategists).”

McClellan, who served as a personal attorney to Lyndon Baines Johnson and is also the father of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, believes much of the damage was done by corporate outsourcing of American jobs and that turning it around will depend on buying products that were made in America.

We’ll also check in for the latest news from Victoria Jones at the Talk Radio News Service.

One last thing, kudos to Chase & Eric of NewLeftMedia for this great video from Glenn Beck’s Whitestock rally on Saturday…

I’m still waiting for the miracle we were promised, but all I saw was a guy preaching Jesus.  Sorry, but that’s no miracle in my book.

On today’s show, we’ll look at what Glenn Beck delivered, and what he didn’t, with a guy who’s been studying the would-be messiah and his ilk for a while now.  Will Bunch, a senior write at the Philadelphia Daily News (also the man behind their Attytood blog), and a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, has spent the last couple of years visiting the strongholds of the RWNJs in America, trying to figure out what they’re all about.

The outcome is in his new book, “The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama.”  And yes, he did attend Saturday’s gathering of Whitestock.  We’ll have lots to talk about.

To get it all started, here’s Will talking about his new book:

In our second hour, Victoria Jones will give us the latest news courtesy of the Talk Radio News Service.  I’m sure we’ll have time to talk about her latest piece for Huffington Post, “I Have a Nightmare: Glenn Beck as Phony Messiah (Politics and Religion Don’t Mix)”

And we’ll wrap it up with our regular Monday night “Fools on the Hill” segment with Crooks & Liars‘ Nicole Belle, recapping the Sunday talking head shows.  Here’s what Nicole wrote:

It was a fairly mixed bag for the Sunday shows.  Fox News obviously focused on the Beckapalooza event in DC over the weekend, but Meet the Press (sans David Gregory) looked at the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and This Week opted to take themselves out of the news memes altogether to look at education in the US.

One of the things that I think was notable from the Sunday discussions is how many of our politicos—Democrats too—get locked into the same old thinking, even when that thinking has not helped us up to that point.  It’s discouraging to see them not look towards more progressive solutions but to ape Republican memes.

First up in the “old school solutions” is Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/rebuilding-nola-contrast-between-new- (our video person recording MTP had a problem with the recording so it’s the MSNBC embeds)

Before Landrieu appeared, Brian Williams talked to Brad Pitt, who has a foundation that builds safe, sustainable and green homes for lower-income people.  Think about that—homes that invest in a green economy, that supersede building standards so that Ninth Ward residents aren’t left homeless again, and whose energy bills will be significantly lowered, thereby giving residents more disposable income to reinvest into the economy.  That’s a smart, forward thinking holistic approach to the issue.  And then comes Mary Landrieu.

Landrieu appeared with her brother, who is now the mayor of New Orleans, and one of the things that she advocated for is the lifting of the drilling moratorium—not for the oil companies, but for the “little guys” like “Big Al’s Sandwich Shop”.  Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just crap.  The Gulf Coast is not yet recovered from the Deep Horizon spill and certainly couldn’t cope with another one—and there is little indication that the issues that led to the disaster (strong federal oversight, safety precautions, redundancies, etc.) have been resolved and she leaves out that it isn’t little “mom and pop” energy companies that can afford deep water drilling.   Plus, despite the way Landrieu characterizes it, there is no guarantee that oil BP was getting would go to the US at all, but instead be sold on the open market to the highest bidder.  Landrieu’s whole pitch sounded like nothing more than the obscene greenwashing ads by the American Petroleum Institute saying that now is not the time to raise taxes on energy companies, because “people” are struggling.

As I see it, New Orleans is at a do-over moment.  They can go back to the old way of doing business and cross their fingers that they can weather the next storm, or they can charge to the front of the green economy: bring green manufacturing to the Gulf Coast.  Invest in rebuilding using this technology and employ people of the Gulf Coast.  Training people to manufacture, install and maintain technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, etc. brings jobs that can only be done in the US to the Gulf Coast and all those support businesses will still have industry to support.    The Gulf Coast could be the model for the rest of the country to divest themselves from a petroleum-based economy.   But Landrieu, heavily dependent on campaign donations from Big Oil, is still advocating for the same wrong answers.

And then on This Week, we had Education Secretary Arne Duncan, American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten and DC public school Chancellor Michelle Rhee discussing the state of education in the US.

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/week-arne-duncan-pushes-teachers-perf

Here’s the thing: there’s no arguing that things need to be fixed.  In comparison to other countries, the US is abysmal in education.  We are matriculating barely literate kids who have little ability to think critically.  But the frustration lies in the same Republican framing where we focus on the teachers and discuss merit-based pay.

Personally, I think this focus is part and parcel of the Republican desire to union bust, including the teachers’ union.    Here in California, we’ve got the 8^th or 9^th largest economy in the world, and almost half of our state budget goes to education.  Yet I’m here to tell you that very, very little actually gets down to the classroom.  I had over $200 for each kid in basic supplies I had to purchase this year.  There is some bloated bureaucracy above the teachers that I do think needs to be focused on, but making this about teacher pay ignores the problem.

And if all other things were equal, perhaps merit-based evaluations would make sense.  But how do you tell the teacher who is in an inner-city school with kids whose parents aren’t involved or are too busy with multiple jobs to survive, whose students often come to school with an empty stomach (in many impoverished areas, the free school lunch is the only meal these kids regularly get), who live in dangerous neighborhoods (or may even be homeless) that he or she deserves less pay because the students don’t score as well on tests?  How do make allowances for that?  How do you give children whose circumstance of birth is not their choice an equal opportunity?

And sadly, there’s no push back on this.  There’s no discussion about how to get more parental involvement (which every teacher will tell you is critical for student success).  There’s no discussion about valuing education (something we almost sneer at here now; being smart is “elitist”) or giving teachers more free reign, rather that forcing them to “teach to the test”.   So once again, Democrats adopt Republican framing and ignore the big picture solutions.

But with all the sadly blind stuff from Republicans being co-opted by Democrats, that means Republicans need to go even more crazy right to distinguish themselves from the Democrats.  Which brings us to Joe Miller, Republican/Tea Party senate candidate from Alaska.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/joe-miller-social-security-and-medicare-are-

Joe tells Bob Schieffer that he thinks that Social Security and Medicare are un-Constitutional.

Oy.  What do you say to this level of idiocy?  Actually, my hope is that no one says anything to him and he keeps saying stupid stuff like this all the way to the election.  The majority of self-identified tea party members are over 50 years old.  Go ahead and tell them they shouldn’t have Medicare and Social Security and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and take care of their own retirement and health care costs.  Go ahead.  Let’s see how many votes he gets with that.

And then my personal bugaboo, the thing that gets my teeth on edge every time:  the willful misunderstanding of the First Amendment.  SE Cupp appeared on Fox to defend those protesting the Cordoba House by saying the “liberal media thought police” (who?) are telling people they can’t have certain opinions.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/se-cupp-liberal-thought-police-are-out-ful

And this goes for Sarah Palin, Dr. Laura and all these other right wing whiners who invoke the First Amendment:  the First Amendment guarantees that the GOVERNMENT will not shut you up.  It does not guarantee that other citizens won’t criticize you for your words.  It also does not guarantee you a national platform from which to speak.  And frankly, I think if you are so thin-skinned as to not be able to stand someone criticizing your words, maybe you should consider how wise your words are.  If you don’t like being called a racist, then look at what you’ve said that would make them call you that.  It’s not the liberal “thought police” telling you to do that, it’s living in polite society.  If you don’t want to be called a sexist, don’t refer to women as “bitches” , if you don’t want to sound intolerant of others, don’t act as if all Muslims are America-hating terrorists.  And if you don’t want to modify your manner of speaking, don’t get upset if people call you on it.  That’s just them exercising their First Amendment rights.

Check back after the show for the podcast link!

Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The devastation to New Orleans could have been avoided, yet apparently not much has been done to make sure there’s not a repeat.

On Saturday, some of the nation’s most ignorant and intolerant will gather in Washington DC to desecrate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the place he delivered, and on the 47th anniversary of his “I Have A Dream” speech.

Glenn Beck is a fear monger of the worst kind.  Like a televangelist who preys on the weak and the elderly, Beck rewrites history and gets the lemmings how follow him to believe his manic lies.  He says of his “Restoring Honor” rally, “it will be a “historic” day that will mark a “turning point in America” that your “children will remember.”

Yes, two disasters converging in one weekend.

We dealt with the disaster that is Glenn Beck on yesterday’s show, with Eric Boehlert of Media Matters. (Scroll down to yesterday’s entry to hear that interview.)

Today, we’ll talk about Katrina and New Orleans five years later with Mother Jones‘ Mac McClelland, who’s back where she was when the hurricane hit.  Today, she’s already posted two stories that we’ll discuss:  “Sticking a Happy Face on Katrina” and “Found: BP’s Missing Oil.”

And while we’re on the topic of BP, we’ll make it a Mother Jones double-header today, as Kate Sheppard will also join in to talk about her latest piece in the Sept/Oct issue, “BP’s Bad Breakup: How Toxic is Corexit?” and, if time permits, I’ll ask about “What Does the Alaska Senaet Race Mean for Climate?” too.

As always, we’ll check in for a report from the Talk Radio News Service at the top of hour two.

And we’ll close out the week with a visit from comedian John Fugelsang.  There’s no shortage of stuff to talk about today, as this week has given us Ken Mehlman coming out, the Beck disaster mentioned above, Alan Simpson’s “310 million tits” comment, the primary elections that gave us Rick Scott,Ben Quayle, John McCain (again) and probably Joe Miller as candidates, and so much more….

On the Senate side, my predictions came true.  Marco Rubio is the teabagger Republican candidate, Kendrick Meek the Democrat, and Charlie Crist will likely be our next US Senator from Florida.

There were a few more surprises in the hot & cold primaries of yesterday, and we’ll run them down with Cliff Schecter,  president and founder of the PR firm Libertas LLC, author of the 2008 bestseller “The Real McCain,” and contributor to Huffington Post and The Guardian.

And Jeanne Devon (aka AKMuckraker) of The Mudflats will fill us in on what happened in Alaska, where incumbent Lisa Murkowski seems to have gone down to defeat at the hands of teabagger Joe Miller. And what about the Democratic candidate Scott McAdams?  Her account of what happened is in Huffington Post today too.

But we’ll start the show with a visit across the pond…to Sweden, the home of wikileaks!  Yes, Julian Assange & co posted another document today.  This time, a  CIA Red Cell Memorandum on United States “exporting terrorism”, 2 Feb 2010.

Although it was classified as “secret,” it was deemed by most to be inconsequential.  But wikileaks is also sitting on many more documents that are likely more ominous.  Perhaps that’s the reason Assange was charged with rape earlier this week?  And then, of course, those charges were dropped.

Tonight, we’ll start the show with a call to Anna Troberg, the Deputy Party Leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, who are housing wikileaks’ new servers.

According to Germany’s DW-World,

At a pub in downtown Stockholm last weekend, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge signed an agreement under which the Swedish political party would now host Wikileaks’ servers under party protection. The two groups announced the partnership online Tuesday.

The Pirate Party of Sweden, according to its website, stands for reform of copyright law, abolishing the patent system and the right to privacy.

In recent weeks, the website Wikileaks has come under fire from governments around the world, most notably the United States, after publishing thousands of leaked government and military documents to its website. But given that the organization’s servers are physically distributed amongst a number of countries, shutting the site down has proven to be nearly impossible.

“[Wikileaks] will place these servers together with the Pirate Party’s servers,” said Anna Troberg, the Swedish Pirate Party’s deputy party leader, “And the Pirate Party’s IT technicians will maintain and take care of these servers and we will make sure that they are always connected to the Internet.”

She added that she expected the party to begin hosting Wikileaks “within a few days.

I’ll also speak with Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert about Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally taking place Saturday near the Lincoln Memorial, on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

Heinous.

If you’re like me, you thought the egg couldn’t be bad.  Of course the yolk is full of fat, but the egg whites? The perfect protein!  Or not.

It seems that the rise of the factory farm, which has grossed us out on every meat imaginable, has now also destroyed the previously incredible, edible egg.

We’ll delve into the disgusting places our food comes from with Jill Richardson, the woman behind La Vida Locavore and author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.

Today is also primary day in a couple of hot states (Florida & Arizona) and a couple of cold ones (Alaska & Vermont)… We’ll check in with Tim Carpenter of Progressive Democrats of America and find out what they’re up to.

After a news report from Talk Radio News, we’ll hang with Gotta Laff from The Political Carnival and talk about all the crazy shit in the news.  And we’ll delve into her latest Blunt webisode.  You can see it for yourself here too…

One of her subjects is World History.  I look forward to reading the text book to see how it’s presented.  In this political climate, I worry about how our kids are taught, and a whole lot more…

This blog will be short today, as I waited at home until she arrived home from school to see how it went (Fine Mom).  And then rushed to the studio.  And I’ll rush home to spend some time with her before her bedtime… all 15 minutes.

On today’s show, I’ll speak with Howie Klein of Down With Tyranny and the Blue America PAC… they endorsed just one Florida candidate in tomorrow’s primary: Doug Tudor, who will also join me this evening.

Yes, Blue America also endorsed Alan Grayson, who participated in an online chat today at Crooks & Liars, but he’s not being challenged in the primary.  He is, however, being targeted in the general election!

***Update*** Congressman Grayson called into the show too.  He told us about the crazy cadre of Republicans who are vying to challenge him for his seat in November.  Unfortunately, the DCCC is not helping him out, so it’s up to us to make sure he has enough in his campaign coffers to stay in Congress.  He has a moneybomb going on today at www.congressmanwithguts.com.  Go and throw in a few bucks if you’re in the position to do so.

Victoria Jones checked in with a news report from the Talk Radio News Service.  Her latest piece for Huffington Post is “Hey First Amendment This — Cruel Entitles Dr. Laura and Narcissistic Saint Sarah.”

And in hour two, Nicole Belle of Crooks & Liars returns for our weekly Fools on the Hill segment, discussing the Sunday talking head shows.  Here’s her take on the Sunday shows:

So I think today’s theme is cluelessness:

Chris Matthews asks his panel if the Tea Party will have veto power over the 2012 GOP nominee.  First and foremost, they are using Sarah Palin as some benchmark of influence, which is ludicrous.  Her endorsement is by no means a shoo-in for any candidate right now, and there’s nothing that says her influence will strengthen in the intervening years.  If anything, if she opts to pursue a national candidacy herself, I suspect that the media scrutiny will result in her having even less credibility.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/39178

It also gives the tea party itself far more credit than they deserve.  I think we’ve seen middling electoral success from them in primary races, but they have yet to show themselves successful in full elections and given the polls for Angle, Paul and others, I don’t think they should crow just yet.

Which segues nicely into Howard Dean.  He points out to Candy Crowley that although the conventional wisdom is that the party in power suffers electorally in mid-terms, when your alternative is the Party of No, conventional wisdom may be wrong.

http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/howard-dean-name-one-thing-republican

And then we have Dick Armey, the corporate head of the Tea Party, spouting off some truly unbelievable stuff:

http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/dick-armey-medicare-trashes-constitution

He says that Medicare trashes the Constitution.  Huh?   What does he think those lazy, entitled senior citizens should do?  Work to pay for their Alzheimer’s treatment?  For proof, he brings up the example of “the” Christian Scientist, whom we apparently should feel bad is being forced to sign up for a doctor to get Social Security.  Of course, no one says he has to GO to the doctors, just sign up for Medicare.   But again, David Gregory falls down on the job of calling out this crap, and lets Armey filibuster through the segment and not allow Granholm to respond.

And then, in light of the protests on the Cordoba House in NYC over the weekend, Fareed Zakaria wants to remind Americans that we are not in a war with Islam and that al Qaeda hates factions of Islam as bad as they hate us.

http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/fareed-zakaria-gps-al-qaeda-vs-islam

By the way, a commenter made this video of the NYC protests when the haters went after a passerby, who happened to be a construction worker at Ground Zero and not a Muslim.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwaNRWMN-F4&feature=player_embedded

George Will thinks that the Mideast peace process is the biggest obstacle to Mideast peace.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/39185

Amazingly, I actually agree with him if only for this story:

http://crooksandliars.com/ian-welsh/israeli-pm-natanyahu-america-easily-move

I think if we really want to see Mideast peace, then the US needs to come to grips with the dichotomy between what Israel officially tells us and what they say behind closed doors.

And then Fox chooses to use Judith Miller of all people to discuss the study that American people have lost faith in broadcast news

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/39175

Really, what can you say about them using the person the Bush White House used to feed propaganda about invading Iraq to?

Greene is a former Republican (I think), and a fairly recent Florida resident who made his fortune by betting against its homeowners.  While the values of our homes fell, he got filthy rich.  Heidi Fleiss was a long-term house guest of his, and Mike Tyson was his maid of honor.

Yes, welcome to FloriDUH, the home of the hanging chad, no recounts, Marco Rubio and Jeff Greene.  But we have more electoral lunacy.  Joy-Ann Reid (of The Reid Report) will join me in the first half-hour of the show to talk about politics in this strange state which will be voting in the primary elections on Tuesday.

If you think TV’s influence over our politics and sensibilities just turned sour with the rise of Faux News, you might be surprised to hear what my second guest has to say.  Anna McCarthy, an associate professor in the department of Cinema Studies at NYU, is author of “The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America.”

After a report from the Talk Radio News Service, comedian John Fuglesang will check in with us from San Francisco (where he’s performing tonight), and weigh in on the religious intolerance in our nation, “Dr.” Laura’s announcement that she’s leaving her radio show, the “end of combat operations in Iraq” and whatever else he feels like talking about!

Seriously, my studio is in my home in Miami.  We pay a fortune to Florida Power & Light for the privilege of having electricity.  But as happens all-too-often, especially in the summer when the mercury tops 96 degrees (like today), the power just goes poof.

I was in the studio, reading and getting ready for the show, and *pop*… off it went.  When I called FPL, I was told that 155 households were affected — a main line was down, and the power would be back on by 6:30.

Yeah, right…  It’s 6pm now and I got a robo call from FPL a few minutes ago saying they had a technician on the scene determining the cause, and would keep me posted until 10pm.

So, thanks to Kenny Pick and company for filling in for me tonight, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow!

As the hateful rhetoric escalates toward the Islamic Cultural/Community Center planned for a few blocks away from the site of  “Ground Zero,” we’ll take a look at the man behind the idea.  In today’s Huffington Post, Sam Stein writes:

In March 2003, federal officials were being criticized for disrespecting the rights of Arab-Americans in their efforts to crack down on domestic security threats in the post-9/11 environment. Hoping to calm the growing tempers, FBI officials in New York hosted a forum on ways to deal with Muslim and Arab-Americans without exacerbating social tensions. The bureau wanted to provide agents with “a clear picture,” said Kevin Donovan, director of the FBI’s New York office.

Brought in to speak that morning — at the office building located just blocks from Ground Zero — was one of the city’s most respected Muslim voices: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The imam offered what was for him a familiar sermon to those in attendance. “Islamic extremism for the majority of Muslims is an oxymoron,” he said. “It is a fundamental contradiction in terms.”

And then continues:

Flash forward six-and-a-half years, and Feisal Abdul Rauf occupies a far different place in the political consciousness. The imam behind a controversial proposal to build an Islamic cultural center near those same FBI offices has been called “a radical Muslim,” a “militant Islamist” and, simply, the “enemy” by conservative critics. His Cordoba House project, meanwhile, has been framed as a conduit for Hamas to funnel money to domestic terrorist operations.

For those who actually know or have worked with the imam, the descriptions are frighteningly — indeed, depressingly — unhinged from reality. The Feisal Abdul Rauf they know, spent the past decade fighting against the very same cultural divisiveness and religious-based paranoia that currently surrounds him.

Sam Stein will join me at the top of the show to talk about the reality vs the fear mongering in this “nontroversy.”

It is election season, and today we’ll meet David Segal,who’s running to fill the Congressional seat being vacated by Patrick Kennedy from Rhode Island.    In their endorsement, the Blue America PAC wrote about Segal:

Sometimes you settle on a candidate who you know is going to vote right all the time– someone who has the best interests of working families in their mind. We could do a lot worse than that, especially in a Congress filled with sleazy, corrupt self-servers looking out for the interests of wealthy campaign contributors and Big Business. David Segal is far more than just someone who will vote the right way. If his record as a Rhode Island legislator is any indication of what kind of a congressman he’s likely to be, we could be looking at another member on a caliber of Alan Grayson or Donna Edwards, a real leader for progressive values and ideas.

You can help Segal with a donation by clicking here.

Next, we turn our attention toward BP, who’s still at it… but with the help of our government.  The Daily Beast’s Rick Outzen today writes “BP Oil Spill Coverup,” and will join us to talk about his story that says while the officials claim most of the oil has disappeared, fisherman hired by BP are still finding tar balls– and being instructed to hide their discoveries.

In hour two, we’ll get our regular report from the Talk Radio News Service.

And then we’ll lighten up a bit with comedian Paul Provenza — the man behind (as in producer/director/editor) one of the filthiest movies ever (sort of) The Aristocrats, Showtime’s newest funny show, The Green Room with Paul Provenza, and author of the book, “Satiristas: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs and Vulgarians“  By the way, if you’d like to encourage the powers that be to bring back “The Green Room,” you can send a note to greenroom.showtime@gmail.com.