licentious radio

Tuesday, January 21, 2003
[4:53:23 PM]

This time it's ripping El Stupido: The keystone of Mr. Bush's statement of intent Thursday, which was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, is this sentence: "At their core" -- incorrect -- "the Michigan policies amount to a quota system" -- they don't -- "that unfairly" -- bunk -- "rewards or penalizes perspective (sic) students, based solely" -- not true -- "on their race." -- Bushes give it the old college lie [gopbi.com].

[1:49:13 PM]

The madness is out of control! Bushistas want to *increase* the subsidy for the most gigantic SUVs.

It's like a microcosm of the Axis of Evil. Subsidize the rich. Subsidize the "high-profit-margin" vehicles. That means less of the total cost of SUVs goes towards *employeeing* people, and more goes into the pockets of Republican Corporate Campaign Contributors. The streets of America become more dangerous. Global warming is enhanced. Our dependence on oil is enhanced. And ever more people have a personal stake in conquering Iraq to ~~keep the price of oil low~~ make sure *our* oil companies are the ones to profit from the increased demand and dwindling supply of oil. Our car and oil industries take all of these subsidies, but get companies like (now defunct) Andersen to get them out of paying any taxes so social services get cut. Then the diversion of cash from consumers to the super-rich depresses the economy, which Republicans use as a justification for giving huge tax breaks to their richest contributors.

[12:30:54 PM]
Some 28% of Gulf War I veterans suffer health problems. While the military obfuscates, the simplest answer is they were given bad vaccines and exposed to incredible doses of insecticides. "He gassed his own people." We gassed our own *soldiers*. We also exploded Iraqi chemical weapons caches while our troops were trying to breathe, and the amount of oil-fire pollution was unprecedented in the history of civilization.

[11:49:01 AM]
The important thing about the peace marches isn't really the numbers, it's the demographics. *Everybody's* there. It's not at all like early on in the Vietnam war where the only people marching were the ones who didn't want to be killed.

The people who turn up at the marches are a representative cross-section of everybody -- except right-wing crank racist war-mongers. 200k people showed up in San Francisco. That means just about everyone in the SF Bay area knows someone who was there.

The Republican Corporate Propaganda Media won't be able to cover this up. Bush's popularity is dropping faster than the stock market, and around the world he's getting the disrespect he deserves.

We repeat that generals should stall the war, and not let the US military be used to slaughter innocents for the sake of Bush's domestic political agenda.

licentious radio hereby puts the nation on orange alert. Bush's need for distraction via a terrorist attack is greater today than at any time since the media was about to release the results of the Florida ballot count that would have showed Bush definitively *lost* the Florida vote count.

Mere warnings don't seem to be enough to prop his popularity up. After Bush's *personal* decision to spread December's false story of five "Arab-looking" men sneaking into the country, it's going to take more than buffoonery to distract Americans and the world.

We should be on the lookout for phony warnings, phony provocations, and real attacks -- like the anthrax assassination attempts on Democratic senators -- by right-wingers designed to suit the right-wing political agenda.

[11:09:08 AM]
GO MWO!

In today's show, they rip a particularly blatant piece of Republican Propaganda in the New York Times, by Whore-of-the-Week, Adam Nagourney.

By the time MWO is done with Nagourney's propaganda, this:

President Bush is riding high as he prepares for his re-election campaign. He is a popular Republican president in an increasingly Republican country, as powerful as any chief executive in recent times, and on the cusp of becoming a wartime president.

has turned into this:

I assert rather illogically that President Bush is riding high as he prepares for his re-election campaign. He is an increasingly unpopular Republican whose approval rates are crashing, in a closely-divided country who has the chance to be the most powerful chief executive in recent times if he doesn't blow it, with a disappointing record as a wartime president.

[10:02:41 AM]

The SF paper wrote another article on the numbers at the SF march. The early police estimate was 50k. Then they changed it to 55k. That was obviously preposterous -- such a bad estimate that it looks like a blatant, malicious lie. SF police estimated the previous march at 40k. There's no way in hell this was less than double the size.

The new estimate by a police spokesperson (according to the SF paper) is between 50k and 100k. "...but later said that 150,000 could be a safe estimate."

I thought ANSWER's 80k estimate for the previous march was probably high. But if the previous march was 60k, I wouldn't argue if someone said there were 200k there this weekend.

The SF police spokesperson said 200k would be a good estimate if Civic Center Plaza and Market street were filled. In fact, I walked the march near the front, then walked back to the beginning. The people at Embarcadero hadn't started moving yet. In other words, the length of the march in terms of people, was at least 1.5 times the size of the route.

The last third of the length of the route (at the Embarcadero end) was far more crowded than the first two-thirds. The whole length of the route was much more crowded than the previous march, which is the main reason we moved so slowly. By the time the end of the march reached Civic Center Plaza, most of the people had long-since gone home.

I conclude that there was never a time when all of the marchers were present, so an estimate of the crowd at any moment during the day would underestimate significantly.

Bottom line, 200k is not at all unreasonable. 55k is utterly preposterous.

[10:00:24 AM]
A world of good news today!

France hints at vetoing any UN resolution to attack Iraq. Do you think the peace marches around the world made that decision a little bit easier?

The San Francisco Hearst paper's editorial has the right conclusion: "It's imperative that war be only a last resort. This drastic step will require damning evidence of an imminent threat and a broad alliance of international support. So far, Washington has produced neither."

The French ambassador to the UN -- obviously riffing on the Dim Dictator's "sick and tired" tantrum -- said "In the world of grown-ups, international affairs require patience and intelligence. Attacking Iraq may be good for Bush's bank account and his popularity polls, but it's the stupidest idea since preventing the FBI from investigating the Bin Laden family's support of terrorism." (Actually, that's a paraphrase, not a direct quote.)

[12:42:51 AM]
What's up with "licentious radio"? Usually too much anger, and often too much red wine. We stick the licentious end of our beliefs on the web because we're tired of polite bastards who excuse racists, greedy corporate thieves, and the rest of the Republican Axis of Evil.

Sometimes we sneak a useful bit of information in. We get a few hits a day from Google for techno tidbits.

In the old days, we were funny, in a pointy way. (That is, we linked to funny web pages.) Alas, things aren't so funny since Cheney ignored the terrorists to focus on energy policy (stealing from California, putting a pipeline through Afghanistan, various last-ditch efforts to save Enron, etc.).

Republican Campaign Contributors may think Bush's "trifecta" was funny, but patriots think The Dimwit is a sick bastard who would be lucky to get the death penalty if Poppy didn't just happen to be so far above the law. Letting 3,000 people get murdered is no laughing matter.

But at least occasionally someone riffs on one of the licentious bits.

And then there are the groupies. We like the groupies.