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Broadcasting live here & simulcast on:

• Roots Up Radio
• Jerva Westerort Local Community Radio: 91.1 Stockholm, Sweden
• Premier Radio syndication with The Randi Rhodes Show

Welcome Randi Rhodes Fans!

We’re joined today by our friends to share in the fun of filling-in for Randi during Thursday & Friday this week:

Hour 0.5: Jason Leopold

Jason Leopold is former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron’s downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron President Jeffrey Skilling following Enron’s bankruptcy filing in December 2001.

• Conyers May Call Rove, Miers to Testify Publicly About Attorney Firings
• Feinstein: CIA Assassination Program Went ‘Beyond the Simple Planning Stage’
• Revealed: Docs Describe in Extraordinary Detail Process of ‘Rendition,’ Torture
• GOP Senators: US Faces Terrorist Attack if Holder Probes Bush’s Torture Program
• Top CIA Officials Ordered Detainee Tortured Even Though He Cooperated
• Ex-CIA IG ‘Disappointed’ Obama Admin. Redacted Crucial Part of His Torture Report
• Holder Appoints Special Counsel to ‘Review’ Torture Cases

“I love this book. When other U.S. reporters were licking Ken Lay’s loafers, Leopold went for Enron’s thieving throat. Leopold is a journalist who insists on real investigative reporting–inside documents, inside sources, hard knife-in-the-gut evidence–detective-style reporting that is just about illegal in the U.S.A. Bravo and my personal Pulitzer to Jason Leopold. Every journalist in America should read this, then quit or riot.” — Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
“Jason Leopold’s News Junkie, an autobiographical look at Leopold’s accidental entrance into journalism, is a powerful piece that delves into one man’s misery and success.” — Boston Herald
“Investigative superstar Jason Leopold spares no one, least of all himself, in this devastatingly accurate first-hand exposé. News Junkie provides the best account so far of how, and why, current American journalism has become so pharisaical, spineless, and detached from the truth.” — T.D. Allman, journalist and author of Rogue State, Unmanifest Destiny, and Finding Florida

Leopold’s work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other national and international publications. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country. Leopold currently writes about foreign and domestic policy online for the publications Truthout, CounterPunch, Raw Story, and Z Magazine.

Hour 2: Joe Bageant

Appreciating Joe’s inimitable style & penetrating analysis, we’re not surprised to know that latest book has been published in 11 countries: Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War

“Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder.” – Mother Jones
‘The single most insightful book about America available — written in fluid, hilarious prose by one of the great American writers of his generation.’ – Charles Firth
‘To understand why dirt-poor white American earning $9 an hour, no health insurance and no job security, are fiercely patriotic, hate unions and proudly vote Republican, read this book … Brilliant.’ – Frank Walker, Sun Herald
‘Joe Bageant must be one of only a handful of people who can provide an understanding of what America’s redneck underclass is thinking. The mix of storytelling and political commentary is superb.‘ – Tim Jamieson, Daily Telegraph

• Obama’s Fight for Reform – Lay off the footwork and throw a punch!
• How much freedom can one man stand? – Not much more, dear hearts, not much more
• The Entertainment Value of Snuffing Grandma – A nation of children roots for the Mafia
• Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings – Cognitive capitalism — just when we thought there were no new ways to get screwed
• America’s White Underclass – When seeing ain’t believing, somebody’s blind
• The Bastards Never Die – A short history of why we eat oil, can’t smoke pot, and why assault weapons are so expensive in our hour of need

Hour 2.5: Father Roy Bourgeois

Father Roy is the founder of School of the Americas Watch & joins us today to speak on Gender Equality & his possible excommunication from the Catholic Church. Father Roy & the amazing collective activism resulting from his work are the subject of the PBS documentary, Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins. Over the last decade, the Fort Benning School of the Americas Watch protests have become legendary in the ethical activist community.

• Fr. Roy Bourgeois Publicly Rejects the Magisterium; Excommunication Looms
  By Deacon Keith Fournier, Catholic Online
  Fr. Roy Bourgeois is a Maryknoll Priest, ordained to the priesthood in 1972. From the beginning of his priestly ministry he has worked with the poor and the oppressed. He has taken public and sometimes controversial stands against Latin American leaders who have not respected human dignity or demonstrated concern for the oppressed or the poor.

  He founded the “School of the America’s Watch” in 1990 to call attention to what he has long maintained was American complicity in some of the very unjust activities he had dedicated his life and ministry to expose, oppose and change.

• ¡Presente! – Fr. Roy Bourgeois threatened with excommunication

Roy Bourgeois was raised in a small town in Louisiana. When his quest to “make it rich” in the oil fields was cut short by the Vietnam war, Bourgeois enlisted in the Navy and was awarded the Purple Heart after he was wounded in a bombing raid that killed several of his friends. After being discharged, he “decided to put the life of a warrior behind” him, and entered the seminary of the Maryknoll Missionary order and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1972, while continuing to support the war in Vietnam. However, after four years in the seminary, he joined with a group of veterans opposing the war, eventually turning in his Purple Heart in Washington D.C.
After receiving death threats for speaking out against human rights abuses in Bolivia-where he worked with the poor for five years-Father Roy returned to the U.S. and became increasingly aware of the atrocities in El Salvador and their link to the School of the Americas.
Leading hunger strikes, entering Fort Benning illegally, holding peaceful vigils, demonstrating on the steps of the Capitol, and traveling the country to talk to anyone who would listen, Father Roy has helped to educate the public and Congress about the rippling implications of U.S. military policy in Latin America. He asks the public to consider that if soldiers at Fort Benning are being trained to engage in counter-insurgency warfare, who are these “insurgents” who speak out against non-democratically-elected governments? He says they are the poor, the reformers, the landless peasants, the healthcare workers, the human rights organizers. And just who are the esteemed graduates of the School? The roster includes Bolivian dictator General Hugo Banzer; former Panamanian “strong man” Manuel Noriega (now serving 40 years in a U.S. prison); and the leader of El Salvador’s infamous death squads, Roberto d’Aubuisson.
While few of the School’s murderous alumni have been brought to justice, Father Roy has served over three and a half years in jail for his non-violent protests. On January 21, 1998, he was sentenced to serve six months in prison and fined $3,000, joining 21 “repeat offenders” (having been previously barred from the military base), the majority of whom are over 60 years of age.

Hour 3: Pepe Escobar

The intrepid Pepe returns!

“Journalist Pepe Escobar is one of those remarkable Brazilians like the film director Fernando Meirelles or the photographer Sebastiao Salgado, rich in both human and professional qualities. In fact, all three of them are related to Sao Paulo. The first two were born in that city and Salgado studied economics at the university there.
Escobar was one of the first journalists to reach Kabul after the Taliban’s retreat, and more recently he has explored and reported from Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, US and China.
He currently writes a column called The Roving Eye for Asia Times Online and is a correspondent and news analyst for The Real News Network.
Escobar is the author of two books, Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge (Nimble Books, 2007).
On August 30, 2001, less than two weeks before September 11, he wrote a prophetic column for Asia Times Online entitled: “Get Osama! Now! Or Else…“. Take a look at these videos of Escobar´s work as a news analyst for The Real News Network. I think you’ll find a new depth and fresh insights into every subject Escobar touches upon. For me it’s like having a curtain drawn back before my eyes. It makes me realize just how timid and limited is the reporting done on the same subjects by the mainstream media.” – Who is Pepe Escobar, anyway? – Mike Booth, The Gringo Chronicles

• NEW GREAT GAME REVISITED:
  • Iran and Russia, scorpions in a bottle
    A nuclear Iran would inevitably turbo-charge a new, emerging multipolar world – one that does not rely on the United States to subjugate the bulk of oil in the Arab Middle East. But the Iranian nuclear dossier cannot be solved without Russia, leaving Moscow with a key moderating role between Iran and the West. No matter how nasty the overtones, the Iran-Russia dynamic is the pacemaker for the heart of the New Great Game.
    This is the first article in a two-part report.
  • Iran, China and the New Silk Road
    China’s denial of Iran into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization last year might signal that a Beijing-Tehran axis doesn’t exist, yet a strategic alliance between the pair is essential to counter Western influence in their domain.
    For China, Iran is all about Pipelineistan, the Asian Energy Security Grid and the New Silk Road. Can you say Gwadar?
    This article concludes a two-part report.
• The Afghan pipe dream
  Washington says success in Afghanistan involves “diplomacy, development and good governance” - but all that the world sees is the 96,500 – and counting – coalition troops now on the ground to “fight the Taliban”. As for the election, who cares who’s the winner – President Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah or anyone else?
  Afghanistan will be ruled by Barack Hussein Obama anyway.
• Globalistan: An Antidote to the World Is Flat
  Empire classic or empire lite? – Obama foreign policy does not question basic assumptions of the past
• The mother of all cockfights
  What President Barack Obama won’t do – and the Pentagon won’t allow – is to do a full Vietnam and go down as the president who lost the American empire of bases and the dream of prevailing in the New Great Game in Eurasia.
  Meanwhile, it will be Predator hell from above raining over angry Pashtun tribals in Pakistan. Make no mistake: there will be blood – a lot of blood.
• Globocop versus the TermiNATO: “Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?”
• Pipelineistan goes Af-Pak
  From the “Las Vegas of Central Asia” to the backlands of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan to Beijing, Moscow and Washington, the politics of “blue gold” (natural gas) and great-power politics are playing out in a lethal liquid war.
• Slouching towards balkanization
• Pipelineistan goes Iran-Pak