Our famous linkfest taking readers to intriguing reading at weblogs representing various opinions from all over the blogo-you-know-what. Linked posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Moderate Voice or its writers.
MUST READ POST OF THE DAY: Thoughts on having a stroke — five years after. READ IT NOW. FOOTNOTE: A lot of relatives in my family from the pre-Best Generation years had strokes. My father Richard Gandelman battled his whole life making sure he wouldn’t get one and had various heart operations. He feared he was destined for one by the time he was 80. And he escaped his relatives’ fates with modern medicine (although he did pass away three weeks ago at age 88 from lung cancer — which is a different ailment and a different story).
A Debate About Talk Radio Can Be One Sided: Ed Schultz THOUGHT he was getting an invitation to be on Hannity and Colmes to debate Sean Hannity about talk radio’s rightwards advantage. But it turned out Hannity wasn’t going to be on after all and Ed let his feelings be known on the air (and declined to appear on Hannity’s show). LISTEN TO IT HERE.
Schultz makes a valid point. It’s a fact that there are more conservative talk shows and that this is NOT totally market driven. There are indeed broadcast companies that only want to present one kind of talk radio. You realize this when you drive as much as I do. On a 10 hour drive you can go from market to market and the dial is filled with conservative talk show hosts. One station has Rush saying “Hillary Hillary Hillary” and it fades out and you get another with Rush saying “Hillary Hillary Hillary.” It’s a bit easier now to listen to some variety on a drive and listen to Schultz or the-one-liner-queen, Stephanie Miller. But it is not easy. And most of the stations that run conservative talk will only run conservative talk.
NOTE: This is not coming from someone who is enamored with all progressive talk. I was on a progressive talk show about a year ago where the host only wanted to suggest that a)there are no moderates b)anyone who says he’s a moderate must be a closet Republican. The host and his co-host would ask me a question, then talk over me and mock me when I answered. The set up was: you’re either with us or you’re against us (sort of like the philsophy of someone in the White House who these guys don’t like).
Meanwhile, Centrist Blogger AubreyJ Had A Heart Attack Monday but he lived to write about it HERE.
Do Business Writers Know Their Business? Or are they biased or ignorant?
More Thoughts About Bloomberg at Oxblog.
There’s A New Crime At A Middle School: Hugging.
John Edwards Is About To Stress His Populist Theme and Ezra Klein has the details.
More On That Branch Of Government Known As Dick Cheney: We did our post below on the news that Vice President Dick Cheney has in effect declared himself a separate branch of the government. Make sure you read Firedoglake’s post HERE that contains the priceless comments of Democrat Rahm Emanuel (we agree with RE). Now the question becomes: who will be assigned the task of re-doing all the school civics, history and government books so that students now know there are five branches of goverment? Prediction: This story is NOT OVER. If George Bush has used up his political capital, Dick Cheney is now in Chapter 13.
The Release Of CIA Material Shows Bobby Kennedy Ordered Wiretaps On Journalists: Captain Ed looks at this info and finds a few things that are curious..
Are Space Shuttles Glorified Death Traps? Some think so.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.