Hi Jack, just reading your site and figured I would say "Long time no see"! Glad to hear you and family are doing well. See Gary every now and then, but less since I retired. Police Captain with Newark with 27 years employed. Time to go moe!!

Love the stories about the shore especially.

Well it is the first of July, I am getting ready to head down to Bradley Beach to meet my wife and two dughters (21 & 22), I hope they took appropriate bathing suits with them. Get ready for the fun as they bloom Jack (Get a gun collection, it helps with keeping the lads in line). Whenever you are in area I would love to meet up for some libation and memories.

Take care and remember the Ironbound (you see, I recently visited the Alamo). Yuck, Yuck, Yuck.

goldenja@yahoo.com is e-mail.

Each of these zealots has announced their availability to fill the pumps of Justice O'Connor - Meanwhile "W" salivates over the development and which zealot he will name in addition (of course) to his AG. I think the question "How much lower can we sink" - looms transparent. Peace-out!

Heard O'Reilly on his show a week ago mentioning he'd be back in Portland in October. Bet they're announcing another Hot-Air fest at the Rose Garden.

I was thinking maybe they were going to do a week from Iraq. But yeah, the Rose Garden seems right. It's another tragic quagmire in which teenagers are sent into battle without the proper tools and strategy. 8c)

Without picking on Geno; it seems to me that any time someone has views that are different from the anti-Bush liberals, they're a "zealot" (a "fanatically committed person"). So the 53% of the people that voted for Bush are zealots. What are the 47% that hate him with every ounce of their being?

Your brush stroke is far too vast when you paint your view of my comment to extend beyond the individuals to which I refer. They each have established themselves as zealots. My concern is that it will be a zealot and not a fair minded conservative jurist (of which there are many)in our Commander-in-Chief's sights to fill that opening.

Sorry for the misspelling in my last post, I meant: "Commander-in-Chafe"

Against the unlikely example of mass emails pre-signaling such a thing, I still suppose it could be the day the three rightwingers' support threads are snipped -- fly or fall -- and the station changes format.
I could like Paul Allen for so distancing his media property from the despots on Independence Day.

No doubt the jackboot lickers would all erupt in chorus: "Why would he cut them off? It was going so well? Everybody loved them?"

In fact, in that stark law of capital concentration the wannabe consecrateds salivatingly bark, ('profit uber alles'), the three stooges' audience ratings are in the crapper with them. Ergo: flush. Flush twice. Flush thrice. And wash hands before returning to work.

For the hatetalk addicts who have been getting their daily fix from KXL: Remember the older-than-Adam-Smith, natural law in the bazaar: Caveat emptor. Maybe you bought a blind horse -- how would you tell? (Hint: It trots into deadends.)

Actually, I like Lars. He was really at the top of his game when he was paired with Jim Hyde, doing the Northwest Reports show for channel 12. But that was back in the day when local media existed, and covered local stories.

Lars saw the writing on the wall, jumped ship to talk radio, and paralyed that into an impressive statewide radio network - then developed a nationally sydicated show on top of that.

I often listen to the first 20 minutes of his show, just to see what he's talking up and who he's grilling. I seldom stick around much longer than that; I have a short attention span when it comes to talk radio.

But while I may not agree with his take on things, I do credit him for success built through hard work.

Bingo !! "...credit him for success built through hard work" (his own, presumably).

It ain't so, in Liars' case or any other's, that the individual's life is all their own results whether those results are so-called 'success' or so-called 'failure.' The thing that IS so, and the thing that's at work here, is a long-running general process that runs in stages of our lives. 'Turning point' moments seem to stop and start us in between one stage and the next. Just saying that, what IS needs to be talked about in general terms, as a concept.

We don't share 'concept' by shoving examples at each other. "What about what so-and-so is doing!" Oh YEAH, well what about what your so-and-so guy is dong !!" Even so, I'm going to use some examples. But they are the ones only you can see the point of. Do you think that Bush got 'success' built through his own hard work? And that punk with piercings in the downtown Square -- you know the one? -- do you think he is out on the street building 'failure' by lack of his own hard work when he can't go home to an abusive household, where maybe his parents are fighting, or where he is thrown out by a single parent who cannot afford to feed the hungry punk? Shouldn't he get a home base to work hard from? One 'success,' one 'failure,' end of examples. Probably only you get it.

In life, The Destiny (in a general term) is set for the people, to the people, be-damned the people. And not by the people. A person cannot DO their own destiny, their own outcome, their own success or failure. Well, they can, but the bigger force is combinations of i.) their birth 'Class' (which a lot of people define a lot of ways), ii.) their birth Culture, and iii.) their birth Times or Era. And these general terms have different meanings for folks, and the words may overlap ('Era' and 'Culture,' e.g.), but the general point is there are forces on a life much stronger than a person's ability or inability "through hard work." There, but for the Grace of the stronger forces, go I. Or you, and probably only you get that. (What the heck is 'Grace' and how come it gets capitalized, too?)

This is common knowledge pretty much everyone knows. It seems like it shouldn't take so many words to refer to it. But we get used to not remembering it when all our media communication and thoughts pounds on the 'self made through hard work' smaller part of our personal life. In America, very thickly, being born white is 'success' and being born off-white is 'failure.' And then there are a few, a minority, of exceptions -- whites who made a failure of themself and off-whites who made a success of themself. Pounding away at the examples gets off of thinking in general terms, such as how we feel pushed by 'the economy' or 'the family' or 'the cause we wage,' and how we feel these things are bigger than ourself. We forget that that feeling is important to keep hold of, because it is valid in counterweight to our isolation in media between us that calls each other's self-making as being too much or too little "through hard work."

Liars has 'good pipes' for the biz, he was born that way, if he was born that way a hundred years ago before there was radio he would be farming dirt just like everyone else. If someone is born 7 feet tall, genes through no hard work of their own, they are a 'success' after basketball was invented but a hundred years before they would have been a freak 'failure,' if they lived.

The credit or blame on our 'self-made' situation is ridiculous, really. Just another Myth we are told these days, like the Santa Claus Myth, (propounding 'consumerism'). And I wrote all this to set up this link to last week's opinion column, which has references in it to current newspaper series. So all this general discuasion is fresh and there's still time for you to interact with it and shape it with your thoughts.

Class Consciousness Matters
What's missing from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal
By David Moberg
The myth of the self-made man is American culture's own special heart of darkness,...

(That's the source reference and next is a second link where it got copied. Only different.)

Class Matters
By David Moberg, In These Times. Posted June 30, 2005.
---
Belief in the myth of the self-made man has made many ordinary people suckers for the right-wing pitch.
---

The myth of the self-made man is American culture's own special heart of darkness, helping to explain both its infectious optimism and ruthless greed.

The idea holds enough truth and seductiveness to make it easy to forget its delusional dangers. To reprise Marx's famous formulation, individuals, like humankind, do make their own personal history, but not under conditions they choose. But in America, we choose to ignore the caveat about conditions at our peril.

The myth, or belief, that people are solely what they make of themselves is useful to keep in mind while reading two ongoing series: the New York Times' on class and the Wall Street Journal's on social mobility. Both focus attention on a truth about American society that runs counter to most people's deep-seated beliefs: There is less social mobility in the United States now than in the '80s (and less then than in the '70s) and less mobility than in many other industrial countries, including Canada, Finland, Sweden and Germany. Yet 40 percent of respondents to a Times poll said that there was a greater chance to move up from one class to another now than ...

Durable and universal 'knowledge' in us are two signs of it being inborn, in every cup of the human gene pool. And that's my closing reference -- I don't know where it is on the internet, I got the book at Powell's: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, [Viking Penguin, 2002]. The moral of the story is human life 'success' or 'failure' is 9 parts our born brain, blood and bones, situation and circumstances -- 'Class,' if you will, and 1 part anything we do or don't do.

Like a car is 9 parts metal and 1 part gasoline go-juice. Even if the metal is not broken and the tank is full of gas, when it is born on rock bottom it ain't going nowhere with no "hard work." When it is born on a mountain top, getting going is all downhill and not "through hard work."

Go ahead and listen to Liars if you like. But he isn't sharing anything that helps us and we can't help him. Because he stays isolated and tells us to, too. Your testimonial might echo stronger on another blog, PDX Media Watch.

Jack:

There are "tighty righty wingnuts" and "hefty lefty wingnuts" but otherwise intelligent people like you and Bill Clinton are obviously going by secondary sources rather than listening to the man in calling O'reilly a "tighty righty".

O'reilly is a registered Independent and says the "rightys" are committed to seeing no flaws in the way Bush is managing the war on terror and the "leftys" are committed to giving no credit to Bush for anything he may have done right in that war.

Tenskwatawa:

The way Lars and others get over the top in talk radio is public relations, public appearances and substantial rollodexes of friends and contacts they have touched through the years. Lars and Tina spend a lot of time each year participating in various public events throughout the Northwest and now nationally.

Few get "handed" anything unless they are spouses of politicians who get their spouses jobs to hold down the alimony.

Tenskwatawa,

What a long-winded way to say "I disagree"!

As I said, before you tried to turn this into a discussion of "pipes", radio, and the poor downtrodden was this: Lars was at the top of his game when he was working with Jim Hyde and doing Northwest Reports on television.

He jumped that ship when it started to flounder, and bootstrapped his way into a position of prominence. I never said that he didn't have help and connections along the way; merely that he put a lot of personal effort into getting where he is.

If you want to rant, you have that right. And rather than suggesting another blog to vent into as you (so helpfully) did, I suggest you start your own.

Oh, sorry. That might require some work on your part. And I think you've made abundantly clear your position on the subject of that particular four-letter word.

I was thinking maybe they were going to do a week from Iraq. But yeah, the Rose Garden seems right. It's another tragic quagmire in which teenagers are sent into battle without the proper tools and strategy. 8c) SAYETH THE BOG!

Hey Jack, why don't you walk up in front of a Marine in full dress "Blues" and call it a QUAGMIRE?

Where is that balanced post you full blown libs say you do and not us?

When my kid was there...they were short of bottled water for 8 days.. did they die of thirst? You would have thought so depending on a CNN REPORT you watched ,NO lib breath, they took it out of the river, purified it(like we drank from the rice paddies)an kicked some more ass.

You people just make me ill, Just like Nam you say, BS if it is! What is the same is the PC crap is preventing fencing off 50 city blocks and calling out for women and kids too leave and carpet bombing the rest. A STATEMENT???you bet!

It will be a mess ..if we don't win it, but hell Jack, That would mess your plans for 08.

Got a huge idea. You know the format of the "talkfest' deal...3R's VS 3D's?

Will email Lars right now and suggest you Mr.TOUGH GUY, along with "B!X,( who needs work) take on the headliners.

Hey Jack, here's your big chance to really show that verbal side of your talent. You should invite the "mouth" Randy Leonard, but he'd just pout when Bill "O" knocked his block off.

There would be fistfights for tickets to this gig!