More like this please! I thought these two did a really wonderful job and it was too good not to share here at Video Cafe as well, so with the permission of our own Bluegal and part time contributor here at C&L Driftglass, here is the second installment of the Driftglass and Bluegal podcast.
I look forward to the future installments and you guys possibly getting some of your fellow bloggers in on the fun as well. I'd love to see Mr. Amato do something similar here at C&L. A question for anyone who listens -- is it just me, or does Driftie sound like Joe Conason? Anyway, again fine job guys and also this is slightly not safe for work if you don't want your boss to hear some occassional cursing by Mr. Driftglass.
Thom Hartmann debates Dinesh D'Souza about whether we had followed Jimmy Carter's proposed energy policy to get us off of foreign oil in 1977 we'd be in the mess we're in now almost 33 years later. He does actually get D'Souza to admit that we would not be in the Middle East were it not for our dependence on that oil
In his recent news conference, George Bush Jr. suggested that our nation's "problem" with high gasoline prices was caused by the lack of a national energy policy, and tried to blame it all on Bill Clinton. First, Junior said, "This is a problem that's been a long time in coming. We haven't had an energy policy in this country."
This was followed by, "That's exactly what I've been saying to the American people -- 10 years ago if we'd had an energy strategy, we would be able to diversify away from foreign dependence. And -- but we haven't done that. And now we find ourselves in the fix we're in." As is so often the case, Bush was lying.
Consider President Jimmy Carter's April 18, 1977 speech. Since it was given nearly three decades ago, when many of the reporters in Bush's White House were children, it's understandable that they don't remember it. But it's inexcusable that Bush and the mainstream media (which, after all, has the ability to do research) would completely ignore it. It was the speech that established the strategic petroleum reserve, birthed the modern solar power industry, led to the insulation of millions of American homes, and established America's first national energy policy. "With the exception of preventing war," said Jimmy Carter, a man of peace, "this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes."
He added: "It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. "We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.
I love that Hartmann makes these debates with conservatives a daily feature on his radio show. If they'd let Thom anywhere near our television screen and the cable news shows, they would have their collective IQ raised quite a few points immediately, but that's not going to happen any time soon.
Here's a tidbit on Dinesh D'Souza I'd never read before if his Wiki page is accurate:
Prior to his marriage in 1992, D'Souza had relationships with two well-known female conservatives, Laura Ingraham, a nationally syndicated radio commentator to whom he was engaged but never married, and best-selling conservative author and commentator Ann Coulter.
Thom Hartmann talks to the ACLU's Michael German about the knee jerk reaction to the Christmas Underwear Bomber and airport security and whether these scanners that will invade our privacy are not meant to keep anyone safer when flying but make someone money instead.
It was Bill O'Reilly and Jim DeMint's turn to pretend like no one has ever cut a Senator's time on the floor short tonight on the O'Reilly Factor. Bill-O and 'PrayerCast' member Jim DeMint do a little bit of history revision and pretend like Grandpa McCain hasn't done the exact same thing himself. So nice of them to show such concern for Joe Lie-berman while ignoring that McCain himself has acted a whole lot worse. Little wonder that O'Reilly would lash out at Franken since he's been mocking Bill-O since his days at Air America Radio.
Franken's spot where he panned O'Reilly for pretending like he served in battle on his radio show and his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them had to have gotten under O'Reilly's skin. If anyone out there has the recording of that segment on Air America, let the site know. I'd love to post it if I could find it.
As Think Progress noted, McCain was more than happy to cut off a Democratic Senator's time during the Iraq war debate. Now he's got memory lapse. Apparently it's too much to ask O'Reilly or DeMint to tell the truth about that in this segment. Fox News... unfair and unbalanced.
I'm still trying to figure out why the staff at Hardball could find footage of John McCain from back in 2002 cutting off another member of the Senate when the Rachel Maddow Show said they couldn't find it in the C-SPAN archives. Very strange.
UPDATE: My mistake on the Hardball/Rachel Maddow show segments. Matthews showed a different clip and not the one Rachel's staff could not find. At least both of those shows, unlike O'Reilly, bothered to point out that McCain is a huge hypocrite with his feigned outrage towards Franken "picking on" his buddy Lieberman when all Al was doing is following the directions given to him by Harry Reid.
h/t to David who sent on the O'Reilly in combat segment. I had thought this might have been Mike Stark but it wasn't. The one thing this is missing is the Franken show's mockery of it, not that it needs it to be funny as hell. Enjoy.
David also sent on what looks to be some of Franken's show footage and where to find it. I'll check that out as well and thank you for the tip.
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the United States and provided a strong regulatory environment that largely served the nation and its banking sector well. The law separated commercial banks from investment banks by banning commercial banks from underwriting securities, forcing banks to choose between being a lender or an underwriter but not both. The law was finally repealed in 1999 during the Clinton Adminstration after 12 attempts in 25 years had weaken the provisions. [...]
This week five House Democrats - Maurice Hinchey of New York, John Conyers of Michigan, Peter DeFazio of Oregon, Jay Inslee of Washington, and John Tierney of Massachusetts - will introduce an amendment that would give banks one year to choose between being commercial banks or investment banks. I support this amendment and believe it critical to the future success of the country because it will restore a balance within the finance industry letting commercial banks do what they do and investment banks do what they do.
From The Thom Hartman Show Oct. 30, 2009. Thom and Matt Taibbi discuss Matt's latest article at Rolling Stone--Wall Street's Naked Swindle
A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits.
On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.
But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.
At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.
The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bi**h ever or…
Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn't help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "I would hope that you're looking at this," Dodd said. "This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors."
Here's one for the memory banks for anyone that used to listen to Al Franken on Air America Radio and a reminder of why he makes Bill O'Reilly's head explode. From August 2007, Al slams Bill-O for just making stuff up on the air. I miss getting to listen to his show, but I'm glad he's in the Senate now.
The collapse of mainstream media didn't happen overnight. It was the effort of years and years of work by the GOP, which culminated in the 1980's when Ronald Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine and loosened media ownership rules. As Mike Papantonio of Air America's Ring of Fire explains, this paved the way for media consolidation and the decline of the American press.
