For 4 years I've driven one hour each way to Bozeman, Montana to do a weekly liberal labor talk radio show on a Clear Channel AM station.  This is what we were all told to do in 2004.  We were supposed to take our country back.  We were supposed to, as John Edwards asked "step up, not step back".  Howard Dean told us to join the party and make a difference.  Well, my co hosts and I have been slogging through right wing callers and Ron Paul conspiracy theorists each week in an effort to try and figure out how to talk to each other.   How can we get a liberal message out while respecting our neighbors differing opinions?  Our station hosts 63 hours of conservative talk and our 3 hours of liberal. 

We have had on great national guests like Dean Baker, Glen Ford of blackagendareport.com, Francis Moore Lappe, Melvin Goodman, Stephen Zunes, Charlie Derber, Ari Berman, and many others.  But our reach was only one county in Montana.  We could podcast, but that was it.  This week we add another Montana station so we will reach two counties.  And we will begin live streaming on the internet. 

The show's name is "Democracy's Edge" named for Francis Moore Lappe's book of hope for democracy at the far reaches of our country.  "Democracy is not something you have, it's something you do."  We are the Feral Cats of Freedom coughing up fur balls of truth from the baloney that we've digested throughout the week from the Fat Cat News and Bloviators of Blather. 

Tomorrow will be the last time that we Border Collies of Sanity will round up the strays that got away from the Fat Cat News.  We will round them up and vacinate them for Bushollocis for the last time. 

Then in the 2nd hour (at 3PM MST) we will be interviewing Rick Perlstein.  Perlstein, as most of you know here, won the LA Times Book Prize for "Before the Storm:  Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus".  And now he has another winner, "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America".
"Nixonland" is my kind of history book.  After reading Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States", it is difficult for me to pick up a "great man" biography.  I want to know about the people of the era.  And this is where Rick really delivers.  Stories of the ruptures between hard hats and war protesters break your heart as they scare the heck out of you.  The incidents of hippies being shot at random and little children shot on the streets makes you shake your head in disbelief
 
Rick also has a blog over at ourfuture.org called The Big Con.  We should support that site. http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009010316/bushs-legacy-failure-conservatism

Join us and call in every Saturday from 2-5PM Mountain Time.  406-522-TALK
http://new.kmmsam.com/onair_page.php?id=14

We have got to take back the media and get people to start thinking for themselves again.

Yet again, with his now famous scowl and earnest delivery, Tom Friedman brandished his latest metaphor on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday, January 11.

"One of the things lost in this discussion is the fact of where this crisis started.  It started in the banks.  The banks are the heart of our system.  They pump blood to the industrial muscles."

He then went on to give us the conventional wisdom that money has to begin to flow to America's entrepreneurs in order to unclog those arteries.  But in James Galbraith's "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too", Galbraith argues that the heart of our system lies elsewhere. It is the social contracts that government made with its people in social institutions created by the New Deal and The Great Society and even some institutions created by Richard Nixon. But these were attacked by the Free Market fundamentalists starting in 1981.   And what happened is that the social contract  is coming undone to the point where our system is now on life support.

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