The Liberadio(!) Tea Party

On February 28, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

I haven’t been on “This Week with Bob Mueller“ (or “Mulleropoulos,” as we like to call it) in a while (darn that Representative Gilmore!), but the last time I was on, Steve Gill and I were poking at each other (and not in the friendly Facebook way) over big government vs. small government. Gill, while accusing all “liberals” of being for big government, said he was for making government small enough to drown in a bathtub. I told Steve that it wasn’t about big or small government, it was about smart government.

Fast forward a few months to a new president, a continuing economic downward spiral, and the same old accusations from Republicans. On steroids. “The era of big government is back,” said Congressman Marsha Blackburn. “The era of big government is back,” said John Boehner. “The era of big government is back,” said Lamar Alexander. ” “The era of big government is back,” said Steve Holland of Reuters (As Southern Beale says, “Thank you, Liberal Media!!!”)

Which makes one wonder (at the risk of channeling my inner Carrie Bradshaw) where were the snappy fiscal talking points when President Bush was “spending like a drunken sailor?” And where were the rallies?

I got my answer to these and other burning questions when I went to the faux Tea Party (there wasn’t any tea) the TNGOP threw on the steps of the Capitol on Friday to protest President Obama’s economic policy. All the people I spoke to were big enough to admit that President Bush overspent…too. However, not one had been to an organized rally in the last 8 years. Huh. Go figure.

But it was good to see that even post-election, President Obama continues to motivate people to get involved when in the past they *ahem* didn’t have the time…or something:

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At the end of the long afternoon filled with hyperbolic signs and shouts of “send Congress to Gitmo!,” I was left to wonder (at the risk of channeling that pesky inner Bradshaw again) if, as progressives and Obama supporters, we should organize a rally to protest eight years of near-total Republican government control and the fiscal policies they produced that resulted in one of the most unstable U.S. economies since the Great Depression? Then I remembered that we already had one. It was last November. And 69 million people showed up. Aw, snap!

More hypocrisy watch coverage of the Tennessee event Braisted at Nashville 21, Dru’s Vues, a Kleinheider Joint, and WPLN.

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Buy This Bumper Sticker and Then Drive By Rep. Stacey Campfield’s House

On February 27, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Buy Now

Buy this sticker now

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Liberadio(!) Friday Night Dance Party a Go!

On February 27, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

4pm – 6 pm on WRVU 91.1 FM or WRVU.org.

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Honk if I’m Having Trouble Paying My Bills

On February 26, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
WTF?

WTF?

I just don’t get this bumper sticker the Tennessee Republican Party is selling. If someone puts it on their car, doesn’t it mean they are struggling with paying, or have defaulted on, a home loan? Or, couldn’t it also mean that they don’t really need help but are somehow gaming the system? And if they do need help or are gaming the system, why would they advertise it on their car? I must be missing the smackdown through all the nuance.

Sean Braisted over at Nashville21.com finds the hypocrisy in it and Southern Beale and friends have some better ideas:

• “Honk if you took a big bonus just before the government bailed out your worthless company.”–Hecate

• “Honk if you paid for your bankers’ cocaine” — MasterD, damn yankee

• “Honk if you’re sorry the Republicans didn’t get to put your social security into the stock market.” — rootless-e

• “Honk you’re driving on a taxpayer funded highway.”– Libby

• “Honk If You Think my Uterus Belongs to You”–Culture of Truth

• “Have your driver honk if I’ve been paying your taxes for you.”–minusp

• “Honk if you want Bush back.”–(anti-noise-pollution sticker)–Dirk Gently

And the winner is …. (drum roll, please!):

“Honk if you’re going to the job fair.” –Duane V

I have one too:

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Can We Throw the TNGOP Off the Boat with the Tea?

On February 26, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Can we throw the Tennessee Republican Party off the boat with the tea? Because this “protest” they’re organizing tomorrow is simply laughable. Not a peep out of these people about White House economic policy for the last eight years and now they find their voices?

“This is not about political parties or partisanship,” said TN GOP spokesperson Bill Hobbs, winner of the 2008 Liberadio(!) Jive Turkey Award. Not about partisanship? Really? So where was your organized protest when:

  • President George W. Bush was spending like a drunken sailor?
  • When our government’s discretionary spending – fueled by President Bush’s refusal to veto a spending bill, any spending bill – was increasing in 2001-2007 at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent?
  • When President Bush lied about his nasty little discretionary spending habits?
  • When a Republican-controlled congress enacted, and George Bush signed, a 2002 farm bill that caused agriculture spending to double its 1990s levels
  • When the same congress and president rammed through a $295 billion “porkulus” 2005 highway bill?
  • When Peggy Noonan wrote, “George W Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?”
  • When we found out about the pallets of cash?
  • When we found we were about to cross that “bridge to nowhere?”
  • When it became clear that Governor Bush’s campaign promise that income tax cuts would be “especially focused on low and moderate income families,” actually played out like this: the wealthiest Americans received an average tax cut of $123,000, the bottom one-fifth of households received an average tax cut of $27, the one-fifth of households received an average tax cut of $647.
  • When President Bush said he was “pleased with” the $170 billion economic stimulus package that he signed into law on February of 2008.
  • When we realized that George Bush’s “war, wealth, and oil” spending was, at its core, a crony capitalist’s redistribution of wealth?

So the question to Hobbs, Robin Smith, and the TNGOP is, wasn’t it “our money” from 2001-2008, too? Didn’t the government have their “hands in our pockets” when George W. Bush was president?

Excuse me, dude, but your partisan hackery is showing.

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Hey, Fairness Doctrine, Are You Still Here?!?

On February 24, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

On the heels of the Tennessean’s full page spread (link is to Ginny Welsch’s take, links to other opinions are found to the right of her article) on the validity of the Fairness Doctrine, Free Press – one of the largest nonpartisan media reform organizations in the United States – releases a policy brief, The Fairness Doctrine Distraction [pdf].

Highlights include:

  • We encourage the Congress and the administration to leave the debate over the Fairness Doctrine in the past and pursue policies that have sound legal, economic, and public interest footing.
  • It is true that a small handful of Democratic legislators have publicly entertained the idea of bringing back the Doctrine. However, no legislation has been introduced to do so since the party retook the majority in congress. Furthermore, President Barack Obama has stated unequivocally — and repeatedly — that he does not support restoring the Fairness Doctrine. Acting FCC chairman Michael Copps has made clear his opposition to the Doctrine as well.
  • The Fairness Doctrine, while originally well-intentioned, is not wise public policy.
  • Underlying the calls to bring back the Fairness Doctrine is a false assumption that its repeal in 1987 was the main cause of the rise of right-wing talk radio.

The rise of right-wing radio was spearheaded by a then-much-more entertaining Rush Limbaugh’s capitalization of the need for nationally syndicated content, which was brought on by the “unprecedented consolidation” in the radio industry in the 1990’s, “an explosion of mergers” following the relaxation of ownership caps in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and an increase in the number of broadcast licenses issued during that time by the FCC. As I wrote a few weeks ago, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine will not fix the imbalance on the airwaves. Attention paid to whether or not the consolidated companies who are licensed to broadcast over the public airwaves are serving the needs of their communities, will.

More highlights:

  • The Fairness Doctrine is not, as Mr. Limbaugh wants you to believe, responsible for regulating broadcast requirements for “local content,” “diversity of ownership,” and “public interest” rules…The categorical opposition to all FCC policies that can
    imaginatively be lumped together with the Fairness Doctrine should draw deep skepticism.
  • The very FCC that eliminated the Fairness Doctrine maintained that serving the local public remained a key obligation: “even as the commission deregulated many behavioral rules for broadcasters in the 1980s, it did not deviate from the notion that they must serve their local communities.”
  • Media ownership rules are also not censorial. There is nothing partisan about increasing the number and diversity of media owners. Indeed, both William Safire and the National Rifle Association, along with the ACLU and the National Organization for Women, have argued in favor of media ownership limits.
  • Broadcast rules are almost uniformly “public interest” rules.

More info at FreePress.net.

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Coop Invites Teh Young People to Tonight’s Not-So-State of the Union

On February 24, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

From Coop’s peeps: Nashville native Catherine Lovett has won U.S. Congressman Jim Cooper’s drawing to attend the first Congressional address by President Barack Obama. Lovett, 23, will sit in the House Gallery for tonight’s speech to a joint session of Congress as a special guest of Cooper.

Catherine Lovett & Congressman Jim Cooper (D-TN, The Fghtin' 5th!)

Catherine Lovett & Congressman Jim Cooper (D-TN, The Fghtin' 5th!)

Lovett, a graduate of Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School and Spelman College, currently serves as program assistant for the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit that does education policy and advocacy work for students, particularly low-income students, in the south. Her parents are both educators.

“This is beyond a dream for me,” said Lovett, who recently attended a Women in Public Policy seminar in Washington and is currently applying to graduate school. “I really enjoyed the seminar, and it kind of motivated me to get more involved in policy work…. This opportunity is the icing on the cake.”

“I’m pleased to be able to welcome a Middle Tennessean to Washington for President Obama’s first speech to Congress,” said Cooper. “I can’t think of a more appropriate person to join me tonight. Catherine is a hard worker who’s already devoting her career to make the world a better place. I hope President Obama inspires her to keep pursuing those dreams.”

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Proposing a Constitutional Amendment to Infringe on Women’s Reproductive Health is Not A Solution

On February 23, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini
Keeping that Pesky Stork at Bay

Keeping that Pesky Stork at Bay

Freddie and I had a conversation on this morning’s show called, “Don’t they have anything better to do?,” in which we tried to figure out why Republicans, who are in complete control of both the Tennessee House and Senate for the first time since Reconstruction, have nothing better to do than introduce legislation that infringes on the reproductive health of women. Is that what Tennesseans voted them in to do, we asked? Or did we want something to be done about our bottom-of-the-barrel health, safety, and public service statistics?

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You know what we mean. Every time a study is released that statistically ranks the states, Tennessee is always in the bottom half and most likely in the bottom third. For instance, Tennessee is 37th in Child Abuse Fatalities, 39th in Children in Poverty, 40th in High School Graduation, 48th in infant mortality, and 49th in violent crime

Well, we didn’t have to wait too long or look too far for answers. Colby Sledge gave us the skinny in today’s Tennessean – Rep. Mumpower and his wobbly majority have a culture war agenda and they’re not afraid to use it.

And so, tomorrow it begins. Resolutions HJR61 and HJR66 – proposed amendments that would constitutionally take away the right to abortion in Tennessee – will be heard at 4:00 p.m. in the House Public Health and Family Assistance Subcommittee.

So why are there two resolutions? Well, even though both begin with “Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion,” HJR61 by Rep. Henry Fincher (D-Cookeville), calls for exceptions for rape, incest, and the heath of the mother and HJR66 by Rep. Debra Maggart (R-Hendersonville), does not. The Democrats call their bill “compromise legislation that they hope brings hot-button topics closer to the political center.” The Republicans say theirs is “not to lay the groundwork to ban abortion altogether, but rather to begin efforts to restore regulations rendered null and void” by a 2000 ruling by the Tennessee Supreme Court affirming a woman’s right to private health care decisions.

Since 2001, this kind of resolution, which has passed 4 times in the Senate, has failed in the House subcommittee. But Democrats no longer control the committee – it’s now split 4-4 – and newly-crowned Speaker of the House and legislative committee tie-breaker Kent Williams (R-Elizabethton) has said he would swing his mighty gavel and vote to pass the anti-abortion resolution – without the exceptions.

A pox on you Speaker Williams.

And a double-pox on you Rep. Maggart. “No exceptions?” How did you even conceive of “no exceptions?” I must request verification that you are, indeed, a woman because sponsoring legislation like this as a woman can get you kicked out of “the club.” And while we’re at it, I’d like to see your birth certificate, too.

More disturbing still is that both the Democrats and Republicans know that a Constitutional amendment – with or without exceptions – will do nothing to reduce the number of abortions performed in Tennessee. Which begs the question, are they really looking to do that?

Did you know that although Tennessee is ranked 20th in providing family planning public funding (publicly supported contraceptive services and supplies), we’re ranked 42nd in family planning laws and policies (whether laws and policies are likely to facilitate access to contraceptive services and information), 30th in family planning service availability (how well states meet existing need for subsidized contraceptive services and supplies), and 40th in births to teen mothers ages 15-19.

Disconnect, much? If the members of the Tennessee legislature wanted real solutions, they would do two things. First, they’d be honest and admit that there are already a number of Tennessee laws which regulate abortion – including parental consent, a ban on late-term abortions and patient informed consent. Then, they would focus on researching and providing the most effective education and resources that would actually, you know, reduce the number of unintended pregnancies.

Between now and 4:00 PM tomorrow, please members of the House Public Health and Family Assistance Subcommittee as well as your state representatives, and ask them to put their valuable time and energy into real solutions for Tennessee’s problems.

Tell’em the newly enlightened Sarah Palin and her daughter, Bristol, sent you.

UPDATE: Today’s meeting of the subcommittee has been postponed. They will reschedule to hear all bills pertaining to reproductive health rights at one time. I will keep you posted.

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Liberadio(!) Podcast: February 23, 2009 with Alan Coverstone and Heather Boushey

On February 23, 2009, in Podcasts, by Mary Mancini

Summary: Guests include Alan Coverstone, Metro Nashville School Board Representative, District 9, and Dr. Heather Boushey, senior economist for the Center for American Progress.

Part 1 – Oh, Sean Penn…Really? – Oscar recap, Liberadio(!) dance party, to do List, a preview of Tuesday night’s State of the Union that isn’t a State of the Union, and take it from one commie, homo-lovin’, son-of-gun to another, Sean Penn’s acceptance speech will not move the dialogue on marriage equality in a good direction. [29.3 MB 18:16 download MP3]

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Independence Day – Martina McBride
Cannonball – The Breeders
Jai Ho! – A.R. Rahman, Sukhvinder Singh, Tanvi Shah & Mahalaxmi Iyer (Slumdog Millionaire Soundtrack)
Lovely Day – Bill Withers

Part 2 – Interview with Alan Coverstone – Alan represents District 9 on the Metro Nashville Public School Board of Education. Generally, we ask him why our public schools aren’t yet palaces. More specifically, we ask about school choice, expanded options, the most recent (and controversial) student assignment plan, the new Director of Schools, tension within the system and pressure from outside sources, and what we can do to engage in the process of constantly improving our public schools. [39.8 MB 24:48 download MP3]

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Pure – Lightening Seeds
Step On – Happy Mondays

Part 3 – Don’t They Have Anything Better to Do? Do you mean to tell us that Tennessee’s General Assembly is completely in the hands of Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction and they have nothing better to do than introduce legislation that infringes on the reproductive health of women? Is that what Tennesseans voted for? Or did we want something to be done about our bottom-of-the-barrel health statistics? And if reducing the number of abortions is really a goal instead of political calculus, we all know there is a smarter way to go about it than their dog-and-pony show constitutional amendments. Let’s start by figuring out why we’re 20th in family planning public funding but 40th in births to teen mothers (ages 15-19). Seriously, do we need to have Sarah Palin come and talk to you people? [21 MB 13:05 download MP3]

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Brimful of Asha (Norman Cook Original Radio Edit Remix) – Cornershop (Norman Cook Mix)

Part 4 – Interview with Heather Boushey – Dr. Boushey doesn’t have a beard but she is a high-profile economist, which can only mean one thing – she’s a good-looking woman with a keen sense of history! She’s also a senior economist for Center for American Progress and she joins us to assess what it would mean for a red state like Tennessee to reject the economic stimulus cash, what Americans can expect from this bill, President Obama’s policy package designed to address America’s mortgage and foreclosure crisis, what’s expected in the budget, the coming $1 trillion deficit, and what the average American should do in this time of economic woe. [23.4MB 14:35 download MP3]

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Drivin’ Me Wild – Common w/ Lily Allen (Album: Finding Forever)

Part 5 – The Gang That Couldn’t Govern Straight – What does a U.S. Senator have in common with “The Rep” from Knoxville, Tennessee and Rep. Mike Turner’s BFF, Rep. Glen “Hollywood” Casada? Their ideas are so old and useless (Tax cuts? Really?) that all they have left is to demand that each one personally verify the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. And no, it doesn’t matter that it’s been verified and authenticated by several sources already – they’ll wait their turn. Plus, a delightfully cynical and myopic listener joins us to say that while she hates “both Democrats and Republicans” equally, we’re really pissing her off. [46MB 28:41 download MP3]

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See a Little Light – Bob Mould (Album: Workbook)

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Bill Freeman Donated to Minnesota Candidate With Really Goofy Name

On February 23, 2009, in Liberate Your Radio from The Right, by Mary Mancini

Everyone – and by everyone I mean all the internets trolls over at Post Politics – are in a tizzy over the campaign contribution history of the new treasurer of the Tennessee Democratic Party, William Freeman.

I have just two words for them: Elwyn Tinklenberg.

Mr. Tinklenberg was the opponent of Minnesota Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachman, who, during the election, all but called for an official investigation into the “unamerican activities” of her Democratic colleagues in the house and senate. On Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bachman said she was “very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views,” and didn’t know what was stopping the news media from launching a “penetrating expose” on “the views of the people in Congress” to find out if they are “pro-America or anti-America?”


Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

More recently, Ms. Bachman, who won re-election in November, brought the crazy again by appearing on a Minnesota talk radio show and saying “We’re Running Out of Rich People in this Country,” and repeating the “ACORN is getting 5 million dollars from the stimulus package” lie.

In response to her outrageous McCarthyesque remarks last fall, Mr. Tinklenberg received donations from all over the country, including $250.00 from the TNDP’s newly appointed treasurer, from Americans hoping that she’d get a one-way out of Congress.

Some of Mr. Freeman’s money in years past may have gone to Republican candidates, but by donating to Mr. Tinklenberg’s campaign he has shown Tennessee Democrats where his passion is.

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