For mid-week in August, with the President and Congress on vacation, it’s a pretty damned busy news day.

Yesterday, during the lull between my show here at Radio or Not, and my fill-in stint for Randi Rhodes, an earthquake hit, centered in Virginia and felt in 22 states – quite strongly in Washington DC and New York City!

Having lived in Los Angeles for 14 years, I’m an earthquake veteran. Having lived through the big ’94 Northridge quake, I can talk earthquakes with the best of them!

I’m also a hurricane survivor.  Although I was living in LA at the time, I was visiting my father in August of 1992.  My dad had just gotten home from the hospital after an accident that left him quadriplegic.  At that time, I was visiting for a weekend just about every month.

When I got to Miami, we saw that a hurricane was approaching.  It turned out to be Andrew – a category five, truly devastating storm.  We couldn’t move my dad, so we hunkered down and rode it out.  Luckily, Andrew veered south just before making landfall so we didn’t get hit with the worst of it .  But it was an experience I hope never to repeat.

Lucky for us in South Florida, we’ll be spared by Irene.  But the people whose nerves were frazzled yesterday by a rare east coast earthquake may be further freaked out later this week by an unusual northeastern hurricane too.

Oh yeah, the rebels took Khadaffy’s compound in Tripoli yesterday.  Almost a footnote in the news, after the strange natural disasters…

This morning on the show, I spoke with Rebecca Miranda, a woman who describes herself as “an original 99er.”  She emailed me yesterday:

In April of this year(almost 3 years to theday I was laid-off), I was hired back into the field I love. I am an employment recruiter once more.  One of my life’s many missions now, is to help put our people back to work.

If possible, I would like to speak with you

[to help] get the word out that I am seeking currently unemployed workers  (as well as diverse candidates) to interview and possibly place into the
working force once more.   Please help me help those who need it the most.

So I invited her on today’s show to get the word out.  If you’d like to apply for any of the jobs, you can email Miranda here, or just visit the website.  You can also check out the website for the parent recruitment firm, as they recruit for many other companies.

In the second hour, Howie Klein joined in to talk about progressive candidates running for Congress.  Howie, who blogs at DownWithTyranny and runs the Blue America PAC along with Digby and C&L‘s John Amato, is a frequent guest on the program – and always brings information and clarity about the need for true progressives in government.

The Randi Rhodes Show

Today’s the last day of the week that I’ll be pulling double duty.  On the Randi Rhodes Show this afternoon I’ll speak with David Cobb, the 2004 Green Party presidential candidate who’s touring the country speaking on behalf of Move To Amend – a coalition of groups working to change the constitution in the area of campaign financing, and specifically overturning the Citizens United ruling.

Jeff Sharlet – who we know from his explosive books  The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy – has a brand new book out, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between.  Less about the religious crazies infiltrating our government, and more about interesting people, most of whom have some religious aspect to them that adds to their appeal (or non-appeal).

Jeff was on my show last week, the day the book came out.  He’s always such a fascinating interview, I invited him to join me on Randi’s show today.

And did you know that Friday is Women’s Equality Day?  As we still don’t have an Equal Rights Amendment to our constitution, I don’t quite get what the day is about… But Amy Simon will fill us in.  Amy is a mother, actress, playwright, improviser, published writer, producer, and self-proclaimed Cultural Herstorian; She’s the founder, visionary and president of  She’s History! The Most Dangerous Women In America, Then and Now