ROCK AGAINST BUSH Vol. 2 a vote for Bush is a vote against yourself...
Got the new "Rock Against Bush" comp. at the station...The music is good but doesn't do a whole lot for me. The companion DVD is awesome, though. There are six political shorts, one of which features my new heroine Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. I'm not sure if what's included on the DVD is her "Independent Media In A Time Of War" in its entirety or if it's truncated, but what's there is awesome. There is a transcript of it here. Just to give you an idea of its brilliance, here's an excerpt from the transcript about Iraq war coverage:

AMY GOODMAN: You have not only Fox, but MSNBC and NBC, yes owned by General Electric, one of the major nuclear weapons manufacturers in the world. MSNBC and NBC as well as Fox titling their coverage taking the name of what the pentagon calls the invasion of Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom. So that's what the pentagon does and you expect that, they research the most effective propagandistic name to call their operation. But for the media to name their coverage what the
pentagon calls it. Everyday seeing Operation Iraqi Freedom you have to ask, if
this were state media how would it be any different?

Wow...one more for good measure...

AMY GOODMAN: For awhile in talks before the invasion, I've been saying as we see the full page pictures of the target on Saddam Hussein's forehead that it would
be more accurate to show the target on the forehead of a little Iraqi girl
because that's who dies in war. The overwhelming majority of people who die are innocent civilians. And then what happens on the first night of the invasion?
Missile strikes a residential area in Baghdad. They say they think they've taken
out Saddam Hussein. Independent reporter May Ying Welsh who stayed their as the
bombs fell, who you heard on Democracy Now! on a regular basis, went to the
hospital right after that first attack and there was a four-year-old girl
critically injured from that missile attack and her mother critically injured
and her mother's sister. That's who dies, that's who gets injured in war. Ghandi asking, you know when he was asked what do you think of Western civilization? He said I think it would be a good idea.

The Greg Palast and Robert Greenwald film excerpts on the 2000 election are very good (in one of them, Vincent Bugliosi describes the five majority justices in Bush v. Gore as "criminals in every sense of the word" who should be behind bars). Patton Oswalt's apocalyptic comedy routine is obscenely hilarious.

The Revolution Starts...

Played "F The CC" from the new Steve Earle album "The Revolution Starts Now" on my program today. A listener called and expressed her dissatisfaction that our station would play such a song. Now to be fair, the song does say "fuck" about twenty times. But in the edited version I played, the word is very carefully and totally bleeped out. The listener said "Your station is better than that. That's why I listen to you and not to other stations that play that kind of stuff all the time." I thanked her for her comment...

But for Pete's sake, when did adults get so damn sensitive? I mean, "fuck" is just a word. It only has as much power over a person as that person lets it have. How do people with such delicate sensibilities expect to get through life? You're going to hear someone swear at some point--are you gonna shrivel up and wither away upon hearing it or are you gonna be tough? I mean, come on...

Not only that, but whatever one thinks of him, Steve Earle is a critically-acclaimed, challenging, straightforward artist and his music deserves to be played on the radio. No other station in this godforsaken town is going to play it, so that's why we will. Granted, we don't have to play that particular song, but I feel that our listeners want to hear such things because they've probably read about it and want to experience it for themselves.