We’re at the beginning of a new week… The space shuttle just launched with Gaby Giffords’ husband aboard, and the Sunday talk shows had an 8:1 ratio of Republicans to Democrats yesterday.
Of course, we’ll talk with Nicole Belle about those Sunday shows in hour two… more on that in a bit.
Thursday was May 12, and the On May 12 coalition had their big day of action, but you’d never know it if you looked for coverage of the huge numbers of people who marched on Wall Street. Thank goodness for Allison Kilkenny -journalist and co-host of Citizen Radio, who covered the march for The Nation.
Comedian Matthew Filipowicz will join in the fun.
And Nicole Belle brings us these stories for our Fools on the Hill segment this morning:
Each week, I try generally to come up with over-arching themes to the Sunday shows if only to make sense of them in my own mind. This week, I’ve decided that the theme all boils down to “privilege”. If you look at the Sunday show line up, you would think that we live in an overwhelmingly conservative country because the ratio of Republicans to Democrats was 8 to 1, a slight improvement over the 9 to 0 line up we got last week.
And there’s no one who exemplifies privilege better than Newt Gingrich. Here’s a man who resigned as the Speaker of the House in disgrace, who, by all rights, has no place on the national stage after a lifetime of hypocrisy and baggage that have felled lesser politicians. But Newt has a grand strategy for dealing with this: “Sure I was a bad boy then, but look at me now!”
Newt also doubled down on his earlier statement that Obama is a “food stamp president” by clutching pearls and declaring that it wasn’t racist at all to be concerned that Obama was turning the country into “Detroit”. I will only say that privileged white men don’t get to decide what is or is not racist.
Paul Krugman is tired of the right wing taking the country hostage and said that maybe what we need to do is let them not extend the debt ceiling if it means agreeing to draconian cuts to the social safety network to get it passed. While I think this is too high a price to pay to make a point, I do think that it’s important that the Democrats get on the horn and make sure Americans know which party could care less about the welfare of the country.
Speaking of which, Candy Crowley gave the Randian It Boy of the moment, Paul Ryan, some nice uninterrupted time to offer up a fact-free defense of the GOP’s hostage taking of the debt ceiling.
And Ron Paul echoes his son Rand and compares Social Security and Medicare to slavery. Again, the privileged white male resents having to think about anyone other than himself.
And then, mostly because it’s so laughable, Huckabee—who God told not to run this time around—told Fox News that Trump would be better for America than Obama. With that kind of logic, I hope God tells him NEVER to run.