Your Opinion: Listening in on talk radio

Dear Editor:

On my drive to and from St. Louis last weekend, I decided to annoy my brain by listening only to the Sirius Radio leftist talk channel. It was a synapse-shattering experience. Missed my exit by 20 miles. In five hours of listening three facts were presented:

• 3,000 people got sick last year due to contaminated foods at open air markets. So the Department of Agriculture is about to release new regulations for open-air markets. (I have no idea about the veracity of this, but this department has indeed, like other departments, become a regulation breeder).

• An economist noted that the Keystone Oil Pipeline was no big deal: it would create a few thousand temporary construction jobs, but after that it would only create about 20 full-time jobs because after all, pipes are pipes, they don't really need much attention.

• With a national debt of 16 trillion dollars and annual deficits of a trillion dollars for the next 10 years; now is a good time to invest in gold - this was a commercial.

And I heard a lot of remarkable things. Several callers wanted the Nobel committee to take back Obama's Nobel prize because he really hasn't done much. One individual wanted a general national strike until Obama gets on the ball. Media Matters reported on their signature-campaign (60,000 so far) and educational efforts to convince TV producers to inform the public about global warming. It also expressed satisfaction that the New York Times and AP will no longer be using the terms "illegal aliens" or "Muslim terrorists". These terms are not sensitive to the individual and hinder the public discourse.

I learned that progressive-liberal-democrat is one word.

The rest of the callers were commiserating and emoting that they had not gotten their fair share of utopia: whether it was housing, or medical care, or problems with the school, or enough money to live on. Nobody seemed to have a job, participate in, or be interested in the private sector. Other than that wonderful commercial selling gold, nobody mentioned the state of the economy, the state of our republic, or any acknowledgment of the real problems that haunt us.

But one item really troubled me: the radio host that said: "now that we have broken the back of the religious right, we win the House next year we'll be on our way."

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