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Apr. 30, 2005 A recent column jumped on the Right-wing bandwagon and repeated the silly notion that a male host of an Air America radio show supported the assassination of someone; it went on to suggest that the outfit is doing poorly. Randi Rhodes is female - she can be a bit of a liberal shock-trooper at times, but she's much tamer than her opposites - just look at Ann Coulter to see what I mean. Air America did have a bout of trouble early on, a legal issue about a contract if I remember right, which caused the station to lose some major markets, including Chicago and LA. Naturally, this embarrassment slapped them financially. At launch, I believe it had 11 stations. Now, it has over 50, including two satellite channels. You can find them on the web at http://www.airamericaradio.com. Air America is biased to the left, of course. They differ from FOX “News” in that Air America admits their bias and their shows don't claim to be news. It's quite fun to get the opposite side of the coin - a dose of Rush Limbaugh, to those that listen to a variety of news sources, is often intolerable (for those that get their news only from Fox and Rush, I humbly suggest you diversify). Al Franken has been called “dull” on his radio show. Don't listen to the show expecting to hear Saturday Night Live-style comedy, listen to the show to hear O'Reilly, Rush, Hannity, the non-opinion “News” segments on Fox and the like, rebuffed and shown factually wrong. That gives you the the kind of smile that stays with you all day (at least for nerds like me), and is anything but dull. If you want side-splitting comedy mixed with politics, I would recommend, “Realtime with Bill Maher” on HBO. Al has all kinds of big-name guests from both sides of the isle. Regular segments such as talking to a ditto-head (avid Limbaugh zombie) and the “Right-wing non-lie of the day” are very entertaining. Air America filled a niche that needed filling, and I thank them for it. Personally, I would have thought that a few prominent liberal-esque talk shows on existing talk radio stations might have been more prudent, but it seems as if they are pulling it off in any case. A final note about the Air America article – Rush Limbaugh may not have called for anyone's assassination or compared Clinton to Stalin (though I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had – I just haven't looked it up), but he did often famously compare feminists to Nazis. He also called the torture at Abu Ghraib harmless steam-letting akin to college fraternity pranks. Ironically, he's also repeatedly called for jail-time for anyone using drugs illegally. He went out of his way to suggest that whites should go to jail for drugs too, when the other side fired back by showing that drug-sentencing laws are rather one sided and serve in many cases to lock up minorities (purposely or otherwise). But the irony of ironies is that the ACLU defended a related [to his illegal drug use] legal issue – it seems that some of his records may have been seized illegally. Here is a Fox “News” story about the incident: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,108140,00.html If I was a bit higher in the IQ department, I could merge “Rush Limbaugh” with “hypocrite” and make somethin' kinda' funny - “Rush Hypobaugh?” That doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it? Maybe, “Rush Limbocrite”? I'll keep working at it... ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. Email: dahlek65@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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