Welcome to Left Out, reality-based independent radio on WRCT 88.3FM, and on the worldwide web at leftout.info. Left Out discusses the news from a perspective left out of the mainstream media. Left Out is co-hosted by Bob Harper and Danny Sleator. Today's program is produced by Matt Hornyak. Listeners are invited to call the program at (412) 268-WRCT (9728), or to send email to bob@leftout.info.
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The Senate is this week in the markup phase of considering a broad new telecommunications bill that threatens to eliminate network neutrality, allowing corporations to bias access to internet sources. Up-to-date information is available on Save the Internet.
David Sirota is a writer and political strategist whose work has appeared in, among others, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the LA Times, The Nation and In These Times. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, the Colbert Report and NPR.
David is founder and co-chair of the Progressive Legislation Action Network (PLAN), an organization to support progressive legislators. David was formerly a fundraiser for Congressman Joe Hoeffel, who unsuccessfully opposed Arlen Specter in the 2004 elections, and was formerly press secretary for Vermont Representative Bernie Sanders.
He has written published a new book, called Hostile Takeover, which documents the corporate takeover of our government under the aegis of the Republican Party.
That's the title of an article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, which appeared in Rolling Stone. The caption is:
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
The article deftly summarizes a plethora of schemes used by the republicans to give Bush an advantage in Ohio. This article should be required reading, and talk of this article should be cramming the mainstream media, but it's gotten almost no attention.
An important press release from the Whiskey Bar.
Let us not forget this from April 9 of this year.
Hume's Ghost, a blogger on Glenn Greenwald's indispensable Unclaimed Territory web site reports on the increasingly widespread use of VNR's (video news releases) prepared by companies that are presented without attribution, and often with deliberate concealment, by local television stations as straight news. The extent of the abuse is well-documented by a report produced by the Center for Media and Democracy.
Greenwald provides a brilliant summary of the Bush administration's attack on the free press, in which not even the utterly compliant and complicit New York Times is docile enough for them.
Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth is a compelling presentation on the threat of global warming that is currently playing in Pittsburgh cinemas. NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen's review of three recent books on the subject, including Gore's, is equally compelling. Left Out listeners will recall that Jim Hansen's work was distorted and suppressed by Philip Cooney, a two-bit political operative and admitted fraud installed by the Bush administration.