SATURDAY MORNING TUNE IN LIVE FROM LAS VEGAS and LOS ANGELES to our show BASHAM AND CORNELL PROGRESSIVE TALK
from 9 - 10 a.m. We broadcast live -- or go to our website and click on the link to hear the entire show in the archives.
On Saturday June 9th, award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast will be the guest on the Basham and Cornell Radio Show at 9 am PST on AM 1230 KLAV in Las Vegas.
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Armed Madhouse” (Penguin Paperback 2007). When Palast, an investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering, turned his skills to journalism, he was quickly recognized as, “The most important investigative reporter of our time” [Tribune Magazine] in Britain, where his first reports appeared on BBC television and in the Guardian newspapers.
Author of another New York Times bestseller, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,” Palast is best known in his native USA as the journalist who, for the Observer (UK), broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George.
His reports on the theft of election 2004, the spike of the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq’s oil fields have won him a record six “Project Censored” awards for reporting the news American media doesn’t want you to hear. “The top investigative journalist in the United States is persona non grata in his own country’s media.” He returned to America to report for Harper’s Magazine.
Palast’s Sam Spade style television and print exposes about elections manipulations, War on Terror and globalization, have been seen on BBC ’s Newsnight.
Of Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said “Greg Palast is one of my heroes. The last investigative reporter in America. In Armed Madhouse he has the best inside story of the war inside the White House over the war in Iraq, the battle between the neo-cons and Big Oil.” The Baltimore Chronicle said “Greg Palast is investigative journalism at its best. No one has exposed more truth about the Bush Cartel and lived to tell the story.”
U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin, right hand man to Karl Rove, resigned Thursday after BBC Television reported that Congressman John Conyers requested the network’s evidence on Griffin’s involvement in ‘caging voters.’ Griffin, a former protege of Karl Rove, was formerly research director of the Republican National Committee. In 2004, BBC News published a report showing that Griffin led a “caging” scheme to suppress the votes of African-American service members in Florida. Over 70,000 black soldiers were on the list.
Read the full story in Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales from a White House Gone Wild. check out www.gregpalast.com
We hope to have Palast on the Basham and Cornell Progressive Talk Show this Saturday at 9:00 AM PST. Just click on to the show page at Basham & Cornell Progressive Talk
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BOOB GATE
Pink's new video is seductive but scary. I feel so sorry for young girls these days. I just watched the top 20 music videos on VH-1 where the message is, "It’s important to always look like a thin slut with big tits." No wonder ten-year-old girls are increasingly suffering from depression, eating disorders and suicide! Valued for nothing more than how "hot" they look, and how many pornographic poses they can strike, women today can't win.
Let me just get this out of the way: I’m in withdrawal from cleavage; it’s hard to quit cold turkey. I’m not spiritually evolved enough to stop dressing like a hooker, but at least I tried on a turtleneck the other day. Somehow wearing death-defying cleavage is supposed to make women more employable or marriageable. It’s hard to keep calm when you know there’s a government plot to keep us thin and insecure. Since the only valuable women in our society are teenage, wombless, buttless, mutants, you can’t get a job in Hollywood without “lap-dancer” on your resume. And I’m talking about the writers, nevermind the actors. So when the religious conservative movement wiped Howard Stern off the public airwaves, I was cheering.
I want to be a woman of substance — a deep intellectual like Ann Coulter — but I don't want to wear that black cocktail dress she always wears. But I might keep the cleavage awhile longer since the bigger the boobs look, the smaller the butt looks in proportion. Unless you’re completely buttless like Terry Hatcher.
Anyway, sex is sort of losing its appeal, don’t you think? I mean death is becoming sexier than sex lately. Not to be perverse, but there are a lot of things worse than death: — like performing standup comedy and forgetting all your jokes.
This is the hardest time for women. We’re supposed to casually accept multitudes of unfathomably gorgeous women everywhere, making out with each other, half-naked on TV and Yahoo and in magazines —and not feel inadequate. Women in a bikini lineup on a reality show smile as if nothing bothers them. If you leave them alone without the cameras on them, catfights would break out, men hope. What boggles the mind is the way women are letting themselves be depicted as money-grubbing gold diggers and shallow, slutty bitches. If I were one of preteen sons today, I’d run for the hills. I believe it’s a plot to distract us and dumb us down. Without trash-TV and porn, whom would religious right-wingers have to fight against? Nothing except liberal values like education, equal rights and health care. By the way, corporations are the ones who profit from all this soft-core mainstream porn. Not liberal intellectuals and environmentalists.
From the Christian Science Monitor: The religious right has long promoted criticism of "secular, liberal elites," whom they hold responsible for unbridled individualism and moral decline in schools and society. But there are critics who insist those positions hold dangerous contradictions. For example, while religious conservatives enthusiastically champion free-market capitalism and corporate tax cuts, such critics say, who is it that promotes the Hollywood values and pornography they so vehemently oppose? Not the liberal political leaders, but corporate interests most benefiting from those policies.
I shouldn’t complain; being a woman is wonderful if you’re lucky enough to thrive on humiliation. But it’s pretty hard to win a fight with your husband while he’s reading a Victoria’s Secret catalogue that pretends not to be soft porn! I was hoping we’d go back to covering up our ankles like Victorian piano legs.
Have you noticed more boobs in America lately? And I’m not just talking about our political leaders. But it does seem that the larger the boobs, the more narrow-minded the politicians. The two seem to go hand-in-hand. As the fixation with cartoon-blondes such as Anna Nicole Smith and Pamela Anderson proliferated — so did the number of conservatives in Washington. Could it be a plot to distract us?
I don’t mean to go on and on about this but the economics of the breast rules women today. Okay, so I may be able to give up under-wire bras, but the hardest thing to let go of is high-heels because they make you look taller and thinner. Do you know the historical purpose of high heels? To raise women up for easier insertion! It’s true. It started in the Middle Ages with Catherine de Medici. She was standing on a footstool on her wedding night, and as her husband was approaching her from behind, and she probably looked down and had an epiphany, "Hmm... this footstool would make a nice pair of shoes."
The world seems upside down, doesn’t it? I started dating this guy. We were on the couch kissing and suddenly he gropes my breast. He asks me: “Are your breasts real?”
I said proudly, “Yes.”
He gets this disappointed look on his face and says, “Oh. I like fake ones better, they feel more real.”
The other day I picked up a typical woman’s magazine with the headline: “How to get a smaller butt.” Another one had the title “Six Inspired Moves to a Better Butt.”
Would somebody tell me, whatever happened to the Feminist movement? You don’t see men’s magazines talking about their butts. My friend said to me, No, they’re talking about women’s butts.
No, actually they’re talking about little girl’s butts. Why can’t they fantasize about the butts we were born with?
Oh; those would be babies’ butts. Nevermind.
By the way, very intelligent people run this industry. If you give producers or casting directors an actor’s photograph, a “headshot”¬— and you are smiling in the photo, they usually think you can’t play a serious, dramatic role. If you give them a serious headshot, they think you can’t play comedy! That’s why whenever I go out in public, I wear the expression they are casting for. This makes for a very “other-centered” life.
I was on the set of Baywatch a few years ago. There was a beautiful girl in a bikini standing on the beach, looking out to sea, her back to the camera. She was built like a pencil. I could hear the producer screaming at the girl’s manager: “We can’t hire her unless she has a boob job!”
Then the manager screamed back: “But she’s only nine years old!”
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From the Christian Science Monitor: "There are profoundly important and precious values that liberals stand for that are central to the founding of this country - liberty, human rights, and human dignity."
Any values debate, he says, must involve Americans considering more deeply how values are reflected in the country's actions. "Abu Ghraib is a deep moral crisis. Some 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq - that's a profound moral crisis involving religious values," Wolfe adds. "That this doesn't register with so many Americans is disturbing and difficult to understand."
While Americans greatly differ over which values deserve priority, it's also true that societal values are continually shifting. Despite the overwhelming approval of marriage amendments in the states, 63 percent of Americans now support either civil unions or legalized gay marriage. In a Gallup poll this summer, 58 percent of conservatives said divorce is "morally acceptable." Divorce is as common among Evangelical Christians as among other faith groups.
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In my view, without often knowing it, Liberals actually advocate for all the things Christ cared about: peace, diplomacy, caring for the poor, tolerance for others, creating equitable solutions, caring for the environment. The religious right often talks non-stop about Christian values, but do not act on the values of Christ. - Lydia
Note: In her videos, Pink borrows heavily from the work of well-known New Zealand artist Martin Emond.
The single “U + Ur Hand”, to be released in Europe at the end of August, features Pink wearing clothing and posing as several of Emond’s characters, including BabyRedKnuckles, RockerBikergirl and HardCandy.
