Category Archives: essays

I’m not shy about my love for the weekly radio show Left, Right & Center. It’s the Gilligan’s Island of talk radio — that is — there’s a token member of each level of society or in this case, each political persuasion (sort of). There’s the optimistic, if not denialistic (is that a word?) Tom Hanks-look-alike from the political center, Matt Miller. Then there’s your affable, conservative Brit — a combination that never fully sets in the first time you hear it. Then there’s the on-again off-again Arianna Huffington, from the “independent progressive blogosphere,” whatever that means.

Last but not least is Robert Scheer, the outspoken, banks-must-die advocate for the left. Despite the fact that three of those four could be considered on the left (it is California after all…), I appreciate the intellectual rigor present in their conversations.

Then again, maybe the real reason I like the show is the way the other three seem to set it up so perfectly for Scheer in almost every episode. His rant from last weeks’ show is a good example of any of what I’m talking about, and makes such an awesome point about the hypocrisy coming from the media/right/left about the Occupy movement.

Scheer, wrapping up a soliloquy about the police presence in L.A. as Occupiers set up camp near Bank of America, next to the headquarters of Wells Fargo:

I think that the Constitutional guarantee of the right of people to assemble and demand a redress of grievances — if you can’t do that over this kind of issue, it makes the Constitution hollow, it mocks it. And for our government to have celebrated demonstrations that are certainly more disorderly than these, more of an inconvenience to people, in places like Cairo, in China… we said “no, so what if they disrupt traffic in these places, they have the right to assemble,” and now here people are talking about keeping the sidewalks clean, let’s not inconvenience people, I think it’s nonsense.

Nonsense indeed. From last weeks’ episode, Occupied by Occupy {kcrw}.