I knew that headline would get your attention.  Seriously, I’ve always loved Dick Van Dyke.  When I was a kid, The Dick Van Dyke Show (with Mary Tyler Moore) was my absolute favorite.

Well, I had a blast from the past today when I got an email from an old friend in Los Angeles who I hadn’t heard from in quite a few years.  I thought he was calling because he heard me on the Stephanie Miller Show with guest host John Fugelsang this morning.  But that wasn’t the case.  He was writing because he heard my name mentioned on the Mark & Brian Show on KLOS.

I was M&B’s producer from 1990-94, during the years that they owned the morning airwaves in LA.  Each year, I’d put together ridiculously outrageous birthday shows for the guys.  Brian was also a huge Dick fan.  So, one year, we had him show up at Brian’s birthday show.

Here’s what my friend Tom wrote to me today:

Stumbled upon your website after hearing your name mentioned on Mark & Brian this morning…

You’ll be happy to hear Dick Van Dyke (still) has the ‘hots’ for you!  He was a ‘phone-in’ guest on M&B this morning and recalled being in the radio studio MANY years ago…and instantly recalled your name…without M&B prompting…apparently you made an impression!!

Hope all is well…

Take care,

Tom

Of course, wanting to know what really happened (as listeners tend to hear things wrong), I emailed Mark Thompson and asked him.  His response:

Yeah, we were talking to Dick this morning and Brian asked if he remembered coming to Brian’s birthday show. Not only did he remember coming he remembered the place and said, “And your producers name is Nicole.” Dude must be 80 but sounds 30.

Obviously it doesn’t take much to get me excited these days…. Anyway, on to the show.

Last week, my boyfriend David sent me an article to read.  This one really touched a nerve.  It was written by David Michael Green, an associate professor of Political Science at Hofstra University, and entitled “Our Long National Nightmare Isn’t Over, It’s Just Beginning.”

In case you need a few excerpts to entice you into reading the whole thing, here goes…

The Republican Party was once a moderately conservative, pro-business outfit, until it was highjacked by the oligarchy and turned into a full-on predatory machine, hiding behind the facade of hate mobilizing issues like bogus overseas threats and uppity brown people and demanding women at home. Basically, any way that middle class white males could be distracted from their sinking economic status – through the diversion of a sense of superiority over others, or the supposed threat to that superior status – was employed to cover for a party whose true agenda was to quietly produce the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history.

Having succeeded dramatically, they are back at it again. It is now transparent, for anyone who cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement in America is an invention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey and their sick ilk, once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are angry, but too stupid to know quite why. This explains their endless rhetoric about the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous desire to keep their Social Security and Medicare benies. It also explains their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction. If they succeed, they fail. If they get their champions elected, they lose their government-provided (Shhhh!) goodies. Brilliant.

In any case, the takeover of the GOP by Serious Money is now well into its second stage. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it is. Seriously, what is the next step after this one fails to provide any long-term solutions to what ails America, as most assuredly will be the case? For a decade or three now, regressives in America have been showing that they are capable of anything. Which more or less answers that question, doesn’t it?

He doesn’t reserve all his criticism for the GOP. The Dems get a good dose of it too, as does President Obama:

The worst, though, is what is to come. Obama and the Democrats will get slaughtered in November. This will happen not so much because of the socialist crimes they are alleged by the right to have committed – which are of course utter nonsense – but simply because of what they have not done, which is to solve the country’s problems. Yet, because of the socialist, big-spending, freedom-crushing narrative that regressives have successfully fomented and that the administration (including – Hello! – paging COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR DAN PFEIFFER!!) has been completely inept about countering, and because the other post-election option of actually getting it right would appear to be (and would be vociferously made to appear to be, by Republicans) an act of spiteful spitting in the public’s eye, the administration will have no option after the election but to tack yet further to the right in the ensuing two years.

That will be disastrous for Obama, for Democrats and for the country. (I could care less about the first two, who deserve it, and frankly I’m leaning that same way for number three on the list as well.) Like Clinton before him, Obama will try to placate voters and Republican monsters with their sponsoring oligarchy by moving to the right. Of course, there is absolutely nothing there except tax cuts for the wealthy (he is already proposing tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent). The Republicans have no other solutions for the economy (or anything else, for that matter), though these dam-busting boondoggles for the fiscally obese are, of course, no solution either. And, like Clinton before him, Obama will be relentlessly hounded by congressional investigations into every manner of bogus scandal that the fevered minds of the closeted perverts on the right can dream up to keep the administration reeling.

Unlike Clinton, however, there will be one big difference. I often said, back in the day, that the only thing that kept the American public from immolating Wild Bill, and the only thing that kept the Senate from convicting him in his impeachment trial, was that the economy was jumping at the time and Americans were therefore fat, dumb and happy. Today, however, they’re merely fat and dumb, and even the fat part isn’t a good thing in this case. The public could not possibly be more surly – apart that is, from how surly they’ll be in a year or two. Obama has been as idiotic a president as could be created if you sat down with the intention of making one, and they will be happy to watch him get savaged him when they have a chance. By bringing timidity and compromise with criminals to bear against multiple severe crises, and by refusing to fight for anything, he has launched a vicious cycle that is sucking him inexorably down, and us with him: He fails to solve the problems, the public gets angry and frustrated, his party loses elections, the right accuses him of everything from being a socialist to a fascist, he says nothing in response, the public gets angrier and more frustrated, his party loses more elections, they are then even more unable to govern than before, the public is about to explode in anger and frustration, he moves to the right and thereby offers even less of a solution to these crises than the non-solutions already on display, and … so on. And so on, again. Rinse and repeat.

See why I want to have him on the show?  It should be a lively conversation.

In the second hour, I’ll be joined again by GottaLaff of The Political Carnival to talk about the crazy world of politics.  Among tonight’s topics, the moron preacher in Gainesville FL who’s planning to burn Korans on 9/11, President Obama’s speech today in Cleveland and, believe it or not, Andy Griffith.  I may have to pull out my Dick…