Host Posts

This week’s Ring of Fire, hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio:

Saturdays at 3 o’clock Eastern, rebroadcasts Sunday nights at 8 pm Eastern

Economist and author Jeffrey Sachs will be here to tell us about his plan to wipe out global poverty. Jeffrey is the author of the new book “Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.”

Congressman and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Bart Stupak (D – MI) will be talking with us about the deceptive advertising being conducted by America’s pharmaceutical industry.

Rachel interviews Laura Dern on her new movie, ‘Recount.’

Ron Reagan is back for yet another day as guest host on Air America’s American Afternoon.  John Edwards has thrown his hat into the Obama ring with his endorsement yesterday.  Richard Wolffe, who is a senior White House correspondent for Newsweek Magazine and a contributor on MSNBC will join Ron in HOUR ONE to talk about what this means to the Obama camp.  Wolffe has also been following the Obama campaign every step of the way during his campaign and will shed some light on whether Obama is thinking about taking Hillary Clinton on as his VP running mate.

In HOUR TWO, Ron will be joined by Ted Nordhaus. Ted is an author, researcher, and political strategist. He is co-author of Break Through and "The Death of Environmentalism." Over the last twenty years, Ted has run major campaigns and initiatives for a large assortment of environmental and progressive political causes including the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, and Clean Water Action. He also served as the Campaign Director for Share the Water, a coalition of environmentalists, fishermen, farmers, and urban water agencies advocating reform of federal water policies in California, Executive Director of the Headwaters Sanctuary Project, and as a partner and political strategist with Next Generation and Evans/McDonough strategy and research firms serving political campaigns and environmental organizations. Ted holds a B.A. in history from the University of California.

Plus your calls throughout the show today on American Afternoon with Ron Reagan.

First there was the overly generous reaction of the bush white house where he offered Myanmar a lofty $250,000 for aid after that cyclone killed over 100,000 people….when the outrage rained down upon him he upped it to – a cool $3 million. Ooooohhhh. So, just to let you know that they are serial stooges in the Bush administration…after the 7.9 earthquake hit China and caused extraordinary damage, death and destruction…just in case you thought they learned their lesson on Myanmar. Well, they didn't. Guess how much they offered in aid to china to help the victims of the huge earthquake. $500,000. Whoa! Big time! A cool half a mil!! They spend $12 billion a month in their godforsaken disaster in the desert and they turn around and offer the Chinese 20 minutes of money. They're disgraceful, and in offering such an insulting and paltry amount, they insult all Americans.

When George Bush finally admitted that radical climate change is taking place and that man-made carbon dioxide is responsible, it was an embarrassment to the extreme fringe of the GOP. It had to be especially uncomfortable for all those letter-to-the-editor writers who used newspapers to tell us that global warming was a hoax. For years, we were overwhelmed by talking points borrowed from all their favorite conservative political radio talkers. Those letters tended to look alike because they were the product of a prepackaged political agenda.  But we can learn from those letters we’ve endured for the last seven years. We can learn to appreciate the dangers of being too committed to every policy and agenda that is handed down to us from the political party of our choice. 

Go back and look and you will see there is no difference in the science of climate change today and the science that existed seven years ago. Put another way, we have wasted seven years in our effort to solve the problem because a purely political agenda became more relevant than the well being of future generations. The concept of the global warming hoax made its way from leadership to the foot solider, unfiltered and unquestioned. It became a party line issue – an inflexible political ideology.