Radio is a sound salvation
Radio is cleaning up the nation
They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don’t give you any choice
’cause they think that it’s treason.
So you had better do as you are told.
You better listen to the radio.

I wanna bite the hand that feeds me.
I wanna bite that hand so badly.
I want to make them wish they’d never seen me.

Some of my friends sit around every evening
and they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
and the promise of an early bed
You either shut up or get cut up;
they don’t wanna hear about it.
It’s only inches on the reel-to-reel.
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
tryin’ to anesthetize the way that you feel

— Elvis Costello ©1978

Here we go again! Last Thursday, Politico‘s Ken Vogel published a story, “The tea party radio network”, clarifying what we’ve long known: right wing hate talk radio is funded and its content dictated by right wing and tea party groups.

Rick Ungar, the token lefty at Forbes, asked “Has Rush Limbaugh Finally Reached the End of the Road?”

It’s about time that everyone else realized what we’ve known for years – right wing hate radio is subsidized by the same big money interests that are using everything they’ve got to buy elected office for their puppets. They figure it’s money well spent to control the airwaves and influence the millions of radio listeners who don’t understand that opinions are like assholes, and that it’s their duty to check everything that an influence peddler says.

We know that Rush Limbaugh is an obscenely paid circus performer who is now nothing more than a caricature of himself. And Clear Channel has fired thousands of former employees and destroyed hundreds of its radio stations (and radio in general) so it can continue paying his obscenely exorbitant salary.

On Wednesday of last week, the industry trades had yet another story about another round of mass-firings courtesy of Clear Channel. Since they’d already gutted the programming side of their radio business, this time they hit the sales force!  The latest casualty in the kill-all-other-lifeforms-so-we-can-keep-paying-Rush Clear Channel scorched earth policy was announced Friday. They’re killing the The Randi Rhodes Show, and saying it was her choice!

If you’re reading this post on Radio or Not, you probably already know that the majority of my income these days come from being Randi’s primary guest host. That’ll now end. Randi’s executive producer and associate producer, technical director and the others who work on her show will soon be unemployed. But Rush Limpballs will continue to collect his salary from Clear Channel, which amounts to around $730,000 a week! 

The 38 million dollar yearly salary is mentioned in this unbelievable interview of Rush Limbaugh by Barbara Walters. There was also a hundred million dollar bonus.

This morning on my show, I replayed the interview I did on Friday with Politico’s Ken Vogel about where the money that supports right wing hate talk radio comes from. This morning, I also chatted with Angelo Carusone, former @StopBeck tweeter now Executive VP at Media Matters, who talked about how he fought back against the hate talk on our (so-called) public airwaves – and the sorry state we are in today.

This afternoon, Randi will weigh in on what really happened. But be forewarned, when I was fired from WINZ/Miami in 2008, I was warned that my severance would be cut off if I said anything critical of Clear Channel. Keep silent, and I’d be paid for six months. That’s how they roll…

Finally, today marked Nicole Belle’s last appearance on the show with “Fools on the Hill”. She has an opportunity to do something that sounds meaningful and promising in the education of kids, and for that, I applaud her. We’ll have her back on any time she wants to share information with us. In the meantime, her last Sunday spend in bondage watching the propaganda-filled Sunday shows brought us this bit of wisdom:

Can I just say that Sigmund Freud would have a field day with the modern conservative movement?

How else can you explain David Brooks saying that President Obama has a “manhood” problem in the Middle East?

Or David Gregory and Bob Corker basically making foreign policy nothing more than a dick swinging contest?

Or Cardinal Dolan dismissing the need for women to control their reproductive lives by saying that birth control is available at the local 7-11?

Or Sharyl Attkisson, the recently departed CBS reporter who accused CBS of having a liberal bias, that there might be some shadowy person or organization paying Media Matters to target her instead of her own erroneous, biased reporting.

[1:15 to 2:16 of the video]

Or Fox Media “Analyst” Lauren Ashburn who wonders if Hillary “planned” Chelsea’s pregnancy to coincide with her 2016 run because people have been saying that she’s old.  No, really.