Summary: Elections, Budgets, and Guns...Oh My! {play}archive/TalkingLeft4-14-13.mp3{/play} Right click on this line, "save file as" to download the MP3 to your computer. On this episode of talking left, we tried to cover all the major news of the week... and throw in a few of our own ideas in between! First, we spoke with Brad Freidman of The Brad Blog about the on-going election fraud prosecutions - that nobody seems to know about - from the 2012 election, and the on-going election rigging efforts of the Republican Party. As usual, Brad's investigative journalism uncovered information that everyone should be talking about, yet never seems to get the attention it deserves. It's only our democracy at stake! Thankfully, even though the mainstream media is asleep on the job - again - Brad Friedman is hard at work trying to preserve our democratic process. Up next, we invited Talk Radio News Service's Geoff Holtzman to join us for Talking Left's first debate. Our discussion focused on what government's role should be in promoting responsible gun ownership, and whether requiring insurance on firearms would be an effective solution. Geoff is a great friend, and unsurprisingly, we found we had plenty to agree on. Not sure it was technically a debate, but we had a great time speaking with Geoff! Then, we tried to squeeze in our Trust Buster's segment of the week between all our great guests. This week's topic was the potential merger of American Airlines and US Airways. If this merger goes through, the new company would control up to 98% of the market in some areas of our country. The Senate just held a hearing to consider allowing the merger, and we should all be contacting our senators to demand they say "no" to the soon-to-be Monopoly Airlines! It wouldn't have been a show this week without talking about the Obama Administration's recent budget. As it's such an important issue, we had not one, but two, great guests to help us sort it out. First, we spoke with Joshua Holland, editor-at-large of Alternetand author of The 15 Biggest Lies About Our Economy. Joshua helped us understand the actual economic effects of the so-called Chained CPI, and why it's a bad idea to be cutting spending at all in a struggling economy. We have learned a ton from Joshua every time we've spoken with him, and today was no exception! Last, but absolutely-certainly-positively far from least, was our lovely friend Nicole Belle of Crooks and Liars. Nicole wrote an incredible post this week about why she's fed up with the media considering cuts to our social safety net "reasonable." As she said, until we've considered raising (or removing) the FICA cap, lowering the retirement age, or allowing Medicare negotiate with drug companies - it is certainly not reasonable to ask the poor and elderly to bear the burden of more spending cuts. It's far from reasonable...and we should not accept it. Thanks to Rocky Mountain Mike for writing and producing our incredible theme music! Please check out his amazing Sound Cloud! Thanks to We Act Radio - 1480AM WPWC, Radio or Not, Progressive Blend Radio, and SoFlo Radio - for helping to ensure all listeners have corporate-free, independent radio! And, of course, thanks to you, our listeners, friends, and family - for supporting us through all of our crazy shows, dreams, and political addictions!! You can also follow all of the news about upcoming topics and guests on our Facebook page and on Twitter @TalkingLeft. And you can subscribe to Talking Left free on iTunes and to our awesome new YouTube Channel! As always, thanks for listening!
