My Groups
-
KCRW's Good Food Updated: 3 hours ago
-
Music News from KCRW.com Updated: Yesterday
-
The Global Gig Guide on KCRW Updated: Dec 24, 2009
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
Comments
Pardon my inclination, but the program requires greater balance. Most shows take on the appearance of Tony being cornered by the liberal foxes. Matt is nowhere near the center, Bob is gleefully left, and Adrianna is off the map. Listening to the applause during the live show suggests, at least in Santa Monica, a large left-leaning audience, so I can understand a tendency to play to your audience.
One of the things the failing newpapers and broadcast new shows make clear, playing to one extreme or another provides a small extremely loyal audience, but assuming a more balance approach garners a much larger one. Think how interesting the program would be with a radical right persona to counter Adrianna.
I agree with you 110%. The hour show delivers on the promise of Left, Right and Center in a way the shorter version just can't. I think the balance of power on the show is just fine. Remember, we're still winding down a bit from the heated partisan rhetoric. As the Obama administration gets started, it will seem less and less like everyone's gaining up on Tony.
Because there's no way to please the Left because of the nature of their issues. And the Right is hostile to anyone who is not "one of them."
Matt is definitely a Center person. I don't see how you could call Matt a liberal or a rightwinger. If anything he's Clintonian, which is often irritating but not necessarily Liberal. And now that the Palin thing is behind him, I'm sure he'll begin to launch into Robert's excesses more and more as time goes on.
(Like when he attacked Colin Powell (that was bizzare))
I don't know what Adriana is, politically. But I do believe she's an honest broker of the truth. That's not to say she's always right. But she doesn't seem to be a partison or idealogue.
I like the show just the way it is. But making it 45 minutes, at least, would bring it even closer to perfection.
I love this show, although it would more honestly be entitled Loony Left, Far Left, Left and Center-Right, but that doesn't flow trippingly off the tongue. (Scheer, Huffington, Miller and Blankley, respectively, if you're keeping score at home.
Scheer's loony contribution in this episode is in his call for a three-year moratorium on home foreclosures. Hm... what would that do to the tendecy of people to stay current on their mortgage payments? One could live "rent"-free for three years, then walk away from the property. Foreclosures can be limited by adjusting existing market forces -- taking advantage of the fact that banks would much rather take a haircut on mortgage balances than foreclose. But if there's no such thing as foreclosure... that way lies chaos.
I was in denial about Arianna and Matt piling on. I thought if I ignored it now I could pretend it didn't happend later.
I don't know what else they expect Powell to do? Perhaps there's a Mount somewhere he can carry a cross up for them?
That's why I suggested 45 minutes instead of an hour. I thought everyone's points were pretty reasonable until then and that Tony was sounding ever the rightwing flack until then. They opened up a hole and allowed Tony to sound like the "center-right" person you believe him to be. He's actually very rightwing in his rhetoric.
So I'd go along with "Far Left, Left, Center and Far Right" for Scheer, Huffington, Miller and Blankley. But that is still balanced because the left find it hard to agree on anything and the Far Right always stays on message even in the face of reason.
Again, I love this show. I just wished Sarah loved me.
I'll give you "Right" instead of "Center-Right" for Tony. But you can't possibly think he's as far to the right as Scheer is to the left. A right-wing analog of Scheer might be... I dunno... Michelle Malkin maybe. I'd say Ann Coulter, but she has morphed herself into a cartoon character.
Ann Coulter is just a unprincipled opportunist who shouldn't be taken seriously.
Tony is one of the intellectuals of the extreme far right wing. He tries to stay out of the knife fights when he can. He's more of an Arms Dealer in the war against reason.
Why he sounds center-right in the show sometimes is because he sits like kind of a verbal vulture, waiting for Robert Scheer to say something really left-wing (and occassionally looney), then Tony swoops in and says something reasonable, thus giving the illusion he is a reasonable person.
Listen to him the last few months before the election and you will hear the real deal. It's fair to say he's more in the "let them eat cake" wing of the rightwing as opposed to the "run the witch out of town" wing or the Republican Party.
"Because there's no way to please the Left because of the nature of their issues." What is the nature of their issues? As opposed to other peoples' issues.
Many believe Powell bears heavy responsibility for the war because he had so much credibility that people believed the things he said at the UN. That was his job of course. People think that if he had refused and resigned it might have generated enough of a break of administration momentum to stop the war. No one knows. It was interesting that he endorsed Obama.
Most foreclosure moratorium proposals suggest that people pay some reasonable percentage of whatever their income is toward their payments. The big issue now seems to be whether industry will and can fix bad mortgages so that people can stay in them permanently, or if they just want to delay the bad stuff like rate adjustments for a while, (like Paulson and the industry's "Hope Now" does) and maybe wait out the credit crunch, so that eventually people are coerced into refinancing again and the whole cycle starts over.
I don't see how Powell is any more culpable than anyone else. Not only was he doing his job, he was relying on the same intelligence reports that your hero Hillary Clinton was when she voted to authorize the war. If you're suggesting he really knew what he was saying was false, then your privy to information that I'm not. We could go on all day with this type of logic. When is Hillary going to pay for her sins in supporting the war? When is George Bush? When are the Clinton finance people going to pay for the 700 billion bailout?
Tell me exactly. Exactly. What it is the Powell needs to do to please the Left?
He went against his own party and his longtime friend to support Obama. At a critical time I might mention. He has spent a lot of his time working on public issues since he left office. He is probably about as welcome in Republican circles right now as George Bush's former press secretary.
How easily we forget. You guys need to get over your bloodlust. Leave Powell and Liebermann alone and start worrying about some real issues. I for one would want those guys on my side if I were trying to really get something accomplished.
We presume that Powell knew more insider information than Senators like Clinton did. The bigger problem was the way, in the post 9/11 anxiety, hysteria and patriotic fervor, the administration not only intimidated the intelligence services to tell them what they wanted to hear, but played chicken with the Congress about the war. We also know that neoconservatives had advocated for some time that Iraq should be invaded and Saddam overthrown. In the culture of the Bush White House, questions that should have been asked, like what if they don't want us there and fight, weren't asked. They kept saying that there was a Saddam-Osama connection and dared the Congress to vote againt them and bet their re-election that some guy from the Iraqi security forces didn't talk to some guy from al Qaeda somewhere. Saddam, like any macho man, wasn't going to let on how little military capacity and WMDs he really had. But Bush wasn't going to stop his invasion whatever Saddam did.
At that point no one in Congress who was serious about influence, was going to vote against the war.
The political fallout for Bush of course, was that even if the war went bad, everyone in the Congress that would run against him would have voted for the war too.
How did Dalton get Hillary to be my hero?
I'm not sure what anyone needs to do to please the left. I know that Powell has been criticized for being highly career oriented, and by endorsing Obama he increased his chances for a prominent role in Obama's administration. I also remember hearing a local conservative talk show host berate a caller for suggesting the war might not be a good idea. "Colin Powell said we need to go to war. Colin Powell is a national hero. I would walk through hell if Colin Powell told me to. Who are you to argue with Colin Powell." That's the kind of credibility he engendered. Powell was seen as the most sound judgment person in the administration, which is why they sent him to the UN in the first place. Someone like Wolfowitz wouldn't have had the same effect. So if he had credibility as a person of integrity people expected him to have the same integrity. Sometimes people are used and taken advantage of, sometimes they allow themselves to be used, particularly if they are in a job working for a boss who was elected president.
Of course no one knew for sure if Saddam Hussein had these weapons. Of course he would want as many weapons as he could get, as do most leaders who have invested in their military. He was a brutal power figure like many others in the world. He was not particularly an ally of al qaeda and bin Ladin considered him an enemy. But politics makes strage bedfellows. Saddam did tweak the US much as Iran's Ahmadinijad does now. A likely dynamic is that the US felt more insecure about this difficult former ally (don't forget he invaded Iran for us killing millions on both sides.) or may have just felt the need to whack someone to show that despite 9/11 we were the strongest power in the world. Saddam was the easiest target given the Gulf War history and the commitment of neocons to overthrowing him. Plus he had all that oil.
Certainly there was anxiety and uncertainty at that time. However the Administration overlooked how easy it is to misread other countries particularly ones we aren't that familiar with, how easily unexpected consequences happen, how violence generates more violence, how costly war is, and how little people like to be invaded and occupied. Also it is much easier to start a war than stop one, since once soldiers start getting killed, people want victory to show for it.
Anyway he ended up endorsing Obama and saying a lot of things that no doubt other Republicans felt about Palin and the McCain campaign. Did that mean he endorsed Obama's view of the war as one that should not have been started? Hard to say. But he is likely to be on Obama's side in the future. Lieberman, who I'm not sure was mentioned on the blog or the show, will have to figure out which party he wants to be in.