Unreported

Hear Monday’s Citizen Radio by subscribing to the free podcast. Non-iTunes users can subscribe to the feed at wearecitizenradio.com.

Today, Jamie offers a shout-out to the Bay area, and a not-so-enthusiastic shout-out to a whole lot of pissed off white people.

Next, Citizen Radio discusses the stupid decision to suspend Keith Olbermann for *gasp!* being liberal, and also revisits the Rally For Sanity.

BART Officer Johannes Mehserle received two years in prison for murdering Oscar Grant. Allison and Jamie talk about the importance of the story, and why it should be receiving more attention from the establishment media.

It’s time for more of your Listener Mail! Your questions/comments this week concern finding a Progressive support group and another listener goes vegetarian!

Subscribe to hear all of this week’s episodes, including Citizen Radio Live! with guests Reggie Watts, Todd Barry, and Melissa Harris-Perry, a special BONUS midterm elections episode, how alcohol is the most dangerous drug, and New Corp’s journalmalism. Plus, Allison and Jamie answer a shitload of your Listener Mail!

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Citizen Radio is a political-comedy internet radio show hosted by Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein that airs every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Subscribe to the show at wearecitizenradio.com.

“Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny have created an important political radio show that balances humor and unreported news. At a time when media conglomerates dominate the airwaves, independent media like Citizen Radio is vital to national discourse.” – NOAM CHOMSKY

If only Twain had instead indulged in post-modern, funny-sign-making, we’re-too-cool-to-actually-protest wankery.

Commenter MikeBoyScout writes:

I’m pretty sure all the Very Serious People in 1860 knew we’d always need and have slaves, and that racism was based upon fact.

I just went to an exhibition about Mark Twain yesterday and was struck by how much he sounded like a shrill modern leftie. He accepted evolution as established science, made fun of the idea of the Noah’s ark, wrote with bitter irony about the treatment of indigenous peoples in Australia (a lot of the exhibition was about his writing about his travels to Australia). The tone he took and some of the things he said would be eerily familiar to residents of the contemporary left blogosphere. (I’m sure he wrote all kinds of crazy, racist backwards stuff too, I’m not saying he was a saint.)

I realize this is an unabashedly wankerish, unanswerable question, but is public discourse now at all different from what it was back then? Or are things, at root, pretty much exactly the same?

Things are exactly the same. Passionate, principled people speak up for what they believe is right. That’s a good thing. Those encouraging apathy or a detached ennui (See: Rally 4 Sanity) in response to enormous social injustice are doing more harm than good.

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Update: All I can say is, ‘Oy.’

Jason Jones and the Daily Show go to Wasilla, AK to see what “small-town America” means.