From "The Fall of Conservatism: Have the Republicans run out of ideas?" by George Packer. The New Yorker. 26 May 2008.

The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.

“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.” Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group—men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, “burned the paint off the walls.” As they left the hotel, Nixon said, “This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.”

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David Cay Johnston, investigative reporter from the New York Times, says that America's tax system is incredibly unfair and needs to be changed quickly before the rich-poor gap widens even more. His new book is Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill).

From WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show

There are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in history. E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, tells us who and where these slaves are, and whether anything can be done to end slavery worldwide once and for all.

From WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show

Human rights monitoring may not necessarily stop torture— it simply causes torturers to use techniques that leave no physical scars. Government interrogation expert Darius Rejali's new exhaustive study of torture techniques is Torture and Democracy.

From WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show

Not Nader's finest moment, but I still support him.

Source: ComedyCentral

So, I guess I will be voting in the upcoming election.

I know, I know… This story is soooo old. However, the "KJR Jam" played on my iTunes at work today and my boss was curious as to what it was.

An online media prank has changed the programming of a major market Clear Channel FM radio station.

Seattle's KJR-FM, a Clear Channel radio affiliate, quickly and quietly altered its playlist, following an amusing online tirade accusing the station and its Program Director of "false advertising."

Negativland, known for their media-critiquing music collage and culture jamming hoaxes and pranks, outed KJR-FM on charges that it played at least 114 different songs from the early to mid-1980's, despite marketing themselves as being a "Just the Greatest Hits of the '60s and '70s" radio station. Negativland members noticed that it was virtually impossible to listen for even a short period of time without hearing hits from such quintessential 80s artists as Huey Lewis and the News, Air Supply, Men at Work, Cyndi Lauper, and many others. KJR recently pushed the envelope further by adding "Kokomo," a 1988 hit by The Beach Boys.

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