Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
I listened to a bit of the debut of Air America yesterday.
The segments I heard of Majority Report, segments with Atrios and Dave Chappelle, were excellent. While this program had nowhere near the level of reporting of Democracy Now and wasn't even close to being as intellectually interesting as Doug Henwood's show, it was entertaining and that is probably what will sell.
The 30 or so minutes of Randi Rhodes' show that reached my ears were something quite different, however. If Rhodes had slightly different politics she could be just another Rush Limbaugh clone. Her "interview" with Ralph Nader was pathetic. After saying Nader had founded the Green Party and that the GP no longer wanted anything to do with Nader, Rhodes had the audacity to criticize Nader for not realizing that Rhodes is a very popular and powerful broadcaster, or some other implication that exists primarily in her head.
Rhodes' primary point was *surprise, surprise* that Nader had cost Al Gore the election in 2000 and might cost John Kerry the same this year. If it wasn't for Air America, this sort of thing would never be said, of course.
Rhodes did say that she agreed with Nader on a lot of things and said that if Gore had been elected in 2000 that now might be the time for Nader to run, which is just bullshit because then it would be necessary to make it 16 years of the Dems in the White House. As hard as this may be for some people to understand, unless there is a dramatic change in the politics of the United States, every four years there is going to be a chance that a Republican will be elected president. And, although they would never admit it and probably don't realize it, Democrats mostly like it this way as it allows them to use the GOP as a reference point. They don't have to believe or advocate anything. They just have to be different from the Republicans. (Republicans have the same relationship to Democrats, FWIW.) That's why they don't ever engage Nader on the issues and instead just accuse him of being a "spoiler." He is messing up their neat little sporting contest, and the Democrats don't like it. posted by micah holmquist at 4/01/2004 07:44:00 AM