Professional Left Podcast Episode 1014: The New Red Scare

“You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.”  ― Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1012: A Convo With Matthew Sheffield

“There I was, surrounded by ninjas."  -- Junior Dude.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1011: Not Sending Their Best

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy."  -- Albert Camus.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1010: WHCD WTF?

“What is dead may never die."  -- the Drowned God.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1009: The Wall

“What benefits the enemy, harms you; and what benefits you, harm the enemy."  -- Niccolo Machiavelli 

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1008: Reality Remains Undefeated

“Study the past, if you would divine the future."  -- Confucius

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1007: Happy Birthday Blue Gal Retrospective, Part I

“The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were."  -- Kurt Vonnegut

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1006: Pump Up The Venom

“You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up? You know that feeling that the whole country is like, one inch away from saying, 'That's it! Forget it!'."  -- Mark Hunter, Pump Up The Volume 

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1005: Meanwhile, In Local News...

“Tonight Illinois has set a tone for the nation, that we won't stand idle hoping that our economy improves. This is a brand new day for the Illinois Republican Party. Tonight we send a message to our party that here in Illinois, there will be a new generation of Republican leaders..."  -- then-rising Tea Party Republican Adam Kinzinger after he won a congressional seat in 2012 

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1004: The MAGA Merry-Go-Round

“Never give a sucker an even break.”  -- William Claude Dukenfield

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"We"? Who The Fuck is "We"?

Once again, it is breathtaking but not at all surprising to see former Republicans, who were already deeply wired into the legacy media, building a massive media conglomerate by just copy/pasting what Liberal bloggers were writing about the Right more than 20 years ago.

Everyone out here in what's left of the Liberal blogosphere knew who they were, and not one of us were letting anyone off the hook.  If the Bulwark crew want's to get a good look at who was letting them off the hook back when they might have been stopped, I'd suggest at their next staff meeting they should take a good, hard look around the table because the culprits are in your house.  

All of this would sting a little less if it weren't for the fact that those Liberal voices who were, in fact, right all along, are the same Liberal voices they mocked and castigated as crackpot alarmists back when they worked for Team Evil.

And it would sting a lot less if they stopped using their new media conglomerate to continue pretending those Liberal voices never existed.

But of course, you know the rule...

No Fair Remembering Stuff

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1002: It’s Still the Republican Party

“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”  -- Ron Swanson

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1001: 119 Billion Kilometers and Counting

“My characters hope for better lives.”  -- Octavia Butler

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1000: For Your Consideration

“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech”  -- Mark Twain

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 999: The Patron Saint of Corruption

“Chicago ain't ready for reform yet!”  -- -- Chicago 43rd Ward Alderman Mathias "Paddy" Bauler, 1955

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 998: Who's This Jagoff?

“ Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”  -- George Carlin.

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I Took This More Than 20 Years Ago...

...with my Canon PowerShot A95 digital camera.

The signs went up shortly after Salem Communications acquired the station in 2004 and flipped it from Spanish-language programming to all-conservative/all the time, talk radio. 

Salem was on a buying spree at the time. Between 2000 and 2008, its all-conservative programming footprint grew by roughly twenty net stations, though the gross number of acquisitions was higher because Salem frequently sold, swapped, and consolidated signals during the same period.

The result was that, at almost any time, anywhere in the contiguous 48 United States, you could find an AM powerhouse station slandering the Left, 24/7.  Depending on the time of day, you'd hear degenerate gambler and author of the "Book of Virtues" Bill Bennett,  Laura "Eva Braun-Nose" Ingraham,  Dennis "Prager U" Prager, Michael "Irrelevant Jabbering Mustache" Medved, Michael "The Savage Weiner" Savage or Hugh "Cyborg Sent From the Future to Destroy America" Hewitt. 

That means Salem's portfolio grew by about 20 stations net between late 2000 and late 2008. However, the actual number purchased was higher because Salem also sold, swapped, and consolidated some stations during that period.

And mind you, Salem wasn't even the most prominent dispenser of wingnut poison across this Land of the Free.  Tired of Michael Medved running his mouth but still need your fix of Libtard hating? Spin the dial just a little and you'll find the Premier Networks ready to fill your skull with incandescent rage against imaginary enemies.  

At the time, the Premier Networks was syndicated to around 650 stations from coast to coast and it's main lineup was (surprise!) Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and, later, Glenn Beck.

We're your tastes a little more boutique and regional?  ABC/Citadel had you covered.  They didn't own stations, but they syndicated their conservative programs to several hundred stations and featured the likes of Charlie Sykes, Mark Levin, Larry Elder and Mike Gallagher.

And if that wasn't enough to slake your thirst for hatin' on the Left, there was the feisty,  independent Talk Radio Network.

Against that absolute blitzkrieg of well-financed, nationwide saturation Conservative programming (and Fox News, and all the well-funded conservative magazines and rapidly multiplying websites) the Left had this pea-shooter: the financially unstable, multiply bankrupted and incompetently managed Air America.  Which, at its peak, could be found on a mere 50–70 affiliate stations.

It had terrific on-air talent -- no doubt about that -- and when I lived in Chicago I was an Air America listener, but it was a tricky business.  Frequently I had to walk my radio around my condo until I found a spot where I could pick up the signal.    It had the staticky intermittence of a French underground pirate radio sending German troop movement intel across the channel -- hardly a match for the million megawatt megaphone the Right had built for itself.  

Anyway, that was the state of play more than 20 years ago here in the Home of the Brave.  So the next time someone tells you the Republican base went suddenly and inexplicably berserk with rage, racism, and grievance after Donald Trump showed up and put the whammy on them, spit in their eye and show them this post.    

Nothing about this was sudden. It was financed, distributed, syndicated, and broadcast -- everywhere, day after day -- for decades.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 997: What Do Democrats Want?

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”  -- American author and teacher Verna Hills, 1937,  later adapted by teachers and parents to the melody of the traditional English folk song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush"... which itself probably originated with female inmates at England's HMP Wakefield, who exercised around a courtyard mulberry tree with their children.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 996: The Maine Event

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”  -- Sun Tzu

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 995: The Politics of Pronouns

“ Time moves in one direction, memory in another.“  -- William Gibson, writer

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