Daniel Hannan, Guido and the American Right

Guido is terribly proud that Daniel Hannan’s speech, straight out of the Guido playbook of diagnosing Gordon Brown’s “pathologies” and wrapping himself in libertarian bollocks, has become something of an internet sensation. Noting that the clip has attracted the attention of such illustrious organs as the Drudge Report, he declares:

Cometh the hour, cometh the man – we are all ditto-heads now; Rushies and the Co-Conspirators.

He slightly surprises me with his eagerness to take up the mantle of “dittohead“, but it fits like a charm. After all, doesn’t Guido’s blog have exactly the same right-wing echo chamber effect as Rush and Fox News do for the US? Isn’t his comments thread full of the same brand of half-sentient hate-spewing twats that call Rush? Guido seems to be embracing the comparison before any of his regular critics really articulated it properly, just to block off that particular line of attack.

Anyway, on to the clip itself. Since it was released on Tuesday, it has become remarkably well exposed; yesterday it was the most watched clip on YouTube. So is it all that remarkable? Well, to be fair, it’s well crafted, to the point, snappy, and clearly expresses Hannan’s position. What’s more surprising is that it achieved this without much exposure at all from the MSM in the UK. Interestingly, Hannan has become something of a hero to the US right, with Rush Limbaugh (de facto leader of the Republicans) endorsing his words, Fox News cheerleader for the markets Neil Cavuto interviewing him, and well known crazy person Glen Beck inviting him on his show too.

Why, then, are the UK Conservatives not more proud of him? Hannan seems to be viewed by his own party as a slightly loose cannon, being one of the more headbanging eurosceptics in the party, a cheerleader for joining the loony fringe of Europe, and in fact he’s already been expelled from the EPP himself.

In many ways, the interviews with the US media are rather more revealing than the speech itself. In the Cavuto interview, he pretty much takes ownership of being the”do nothing” party (look at about 3 mins in), and answers “yes” in response to the question “in the same situation [of the US banking crisis], would you have said “Let ‘em rip”?”.

I have to say, watching those videos is quite entertaining in at least one respect: the right wings of both our countries are currently maintaining that their particular screamingly socialist government is taking their country to much lower depths than are to be found anywhere else in the world. The result, when you bring the two together, is a pissing contest. Witness much claiming to have it worst from both sides of the pond.

The most amusing bit, though, is this big stompy red quote from Guido: “It is the speech that many Republicans wish they had someone to deliver to Obama“. Um, no. The Republicans have plenty of populist ranters who could deliver a little mini-speech like this. Trouble is, none of them could say it with a straight face, because unlike Gordon Brown, Barack Obama hasn’t been in the driving seat for the last ten years. He’s been there for three months. If the Republicans tried to pull this, they would rightly be derided, because it was George Bush who turned a surplus inherited from Clinton into a deficit.

Daniel Hannan is said to be somewhat perplexed at the traction he has achieved in the US. Let me help you out, Daniel: It’s a distraction. Like so much that the Republican noise machine does, it’s a talking point to try to prove a point from a country with different circumstances to those of the US, and then import the “take home message” to the US, without people noticing the bait and switch they’ve just been offered whereby something that reflects badly on the Republicans becomes the fault of “socialists” over there in Yerp. There’s a reason they’d rather talk about the backstory in someone else’s country: it’s because they’ve only been the opposition for three months, and most of that backstory in the US is their backstory.

It’s Not Over Yet

As Kos’s map shows, the senate results are not yet in.

There is a post explaining what’s going on with these races that are yet to be called here. The presidential result is already determined, so the electoral college predictions are largely academic (give or take an LDV mug).

But the Senate races are important. The Democrats had hoped that they might come out of this process with a filibuster proof senate. If they are to achieve this, the four yet to be called races all have to go that way. That’s a tough call on the face of it. But lets just look at those a bit closer (from the Kos posting linked above):

We’re currently at 56 seats with Sanders and Lieberman. We need a clean sweep in Alaska, Georgia, Minnesota and Oregon to win.

Alaska: With 99% of precincts reported, Ted Stevens (R) leads Mark Begich (D) by 3500 votes.

There are reportedly over 60,000 absentee ballots filed, so no one has called it yet.

Georgia: Saxby Chambliss (R) leads Jim Martin (D) 50-46. However, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that over 600,000 early votes have not been counted. Martin led handily in early voting, so it’s highly likely that Chambliss will end up below 50% and this will go to a runoff.

Minnesota: Norm Coleman leads by less than 600 votes now. All outstanding ballots will matter, and there’s the possibility of a recount as well.

Oregon: Gordon Smith (R) leads Jeff Merkley (D) by 15,000 votes with 75% of precincts reporting. Not looking good.

So Oregon looks like a write-off, which is a shame. But even so, there is every chance of 59 Democratic caucusing Senators by the end of all this.

Minnesota could get nasty, with lawyers piling in on both sides. Al Franken is talking up his chances of changing the result:

The Associated Press uncalled the Senate race at about 9 a.m., saying they had prematurely declared Coleman the winner.

Franken said this morning that he intends to exercise his right to a recount.

He also said his campaign is investigating alleged voting irregularities at some polling places in Minneapolis, and that “a recount could change the outcome significantly.”

“Let me be clear: Our goal is to ensure that every vote is properly counted,” he said.

It will be some time before we know what happens there, with the recount not expected for some weeks.

Alaska looks, initially, bizarre. They seem to be about to re-elect a convicted felon, but as Kos point out, there are absentee ballots to be added. More importantly, even if Stevens wins, he is likely to be forced out of the Senate if his appeal fails, and that will trigger another election to fill his seat.

If Georgia fails to give Saxby Chambliss an overall majority (which looks likely), then that too will trigger another election, a runoff between the two highest voted candidates (the Rep and the Dem).

So in Alaska and Georgia, there is a significant chance for what remains of the Obama war chest to be put to good use trying to win a couple of extra senators, not to mention spending it on lawyers to help Al Franken’s efforts to inch it in Minnesota.

We may not know for some time exactly what the Democrats’ Senate position is going to look like. The only thing we can be sure of is that they seem likely to fall short of that all important 60 seats. Oh well.

US Election Night

Sofa and TV: Check

Several tabs in Firefox on laptop displaying various websites:
- LDV’s liveblog when it arrives: Check
- Maron v Seder: Check
- 538.com to see how their predictions went: Check
- CNN Results page: Check
- Political Betting: Check

Popcorn with which to enjoy the looks on the inhabitants of Fox News’s faces: Check

…yup, all set!

Final Presidential Debate: Liveblog

If you’re up for the debate tonight, join me below.

Obama’s Ground War Looking Good

It’s been known for some time that the Obama campaign’s strategy in the US Presidential Election is rather different from the McCain campaign’s. The former is fighting what we Lib Dems might find a rather familiar concept: the ground war. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is fighting the air war, winning news cycles by feeding the national media new stories and “events” as often as they can. when national overall polls started, after the nomination of Sarah Palin, to show a McCain lead, some Democrats started to feel a little nervous about this strategy. Those with a stronger constitution urged them to hold firm: not only was the ground war a sound strategy, but Palin’s initial popularity would burn out fast, they predicted. Both factors are now beginning to play out, it seems, with Palin’s shielding from the media and inadequacy when she does appear becoming ever more obvious to journalists, and Obama’s target states strategy (in states which weren’t what you might call obvious blue states) now beginning to look like it will pay off. Particularly interesting is this report from Rasmussen, a polling organisation:

Barack Obama has a two-point advantage over John McCain in the traditionally Republican state of North Carolina.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the Tar Heel State shows Obama attracting 49% of the vote while McCain earns 47%. A week ago, McCain held a three-point edge. This is the first time in eight Rasmussen Reports polls that Obama has held any kind of a lead in North Carolina, though the candidates were tied once as well.

This is pretty extraordinary. In 2004, North Carolina voted solidly for Bush, with a +12.4% margin. A quick look at this summary of state-by-state polling data tells an interesting story: not one 2004 Kerry state is currently leaning McCain-wards, but 5 2004 Bush states are now looking as if they could well go to Obama.

Random Comedy Video Clip of the Week

from Maria Bamford, whose Edinburgh Fringe show I saw in 2006. It was good.

Some Great US Election Analysis

The Real News has posted some great stuff on the US primaries, including a glut of post-Super Tuesday stuff the other day. Amongst the best of it is the following:

Two part interview giving a rather pessimistic outlook for the Democrats:

Trying to make sense of the votes:

Two part interview on the specifics of the latino vote:

Clinton: A National Candidate?

Well, it’s the day after Super Tuesday, and I feel like crap. Mostly to do with the Super Tuesday drinking game that I and a few friends concocted, and being awake until the first signs of California going Clinton came in this morning. On the plus side, my copy of The Time Meddler turned up today, and it looks bloody good (it’s open in a window next to the one I’m typing this in). But enough of this tot. It occurred to me this afternoon to look for a map of US states according to which way they voted. I found one here, on the Washington Post‘s site. And what it shows is quite interesting.

To me, it looks like three islands of Hillary in a sea of Obama:

1. Her current seat, New York, and surrounding area.
2. Bill’s old seat of Arkansas and surrounding area.
3. Areas with high hispanic populations, mainly around California, but also Florida. (New Mexico doesn’t make much sense in this context, but is was pretty close).

There was some talk on Air America‘s generally pretty good coverage last night about Obama’s campaign putting into practice what Howard Dean aspired to last time round: a 50 state strategy. Looking at that map, I can see what they mean.

If that’s right, I suppose the question is, can Obama shift the hispanic vote before Texas, and more generally, are Hillary’s islands big enough?

New Hampshire: Not Over Yet?

I haven’t seen much discussion of this in the British press (or indeed in the mainstream US press), but it’s an interesting story.

In the aftermath of New Hampshire, the press and the pollsters were falling over themselves to announce that the people of the state had managed to flummox them. It was women! It was veiled racism! It was the large proportion of swing voters who only made their minds up in the booth! (That one, by the way, seems especially dubious since the exit polls showed the same supposed lead for Obama.) It was Hillary’s crying!

A few people, however, had a different thought. Exit polls showing a vote one way, the count going the other. Rings a bell. Might it be worth investigating further? After all, 81% of New Hampshire’s ballots were counted using Diebold’s dodgy optical scan counting machines, not by hand. Of course, nobody has any evidence of any wrongdoing, but still, looks interesting, no?

Well certainly Dennis Kucinich (everyone’s favourite Genuine Lefty Democrat) thought so, and he has requested a recount, together with an unheard of Republican candidate, Albert Howard. Many sources in the MSM are busy snorting derision at Kucinich; the Telegraph’s coverage of this issue has stretched as far as this item in their campaign diary:

Eternal optimist

The anti-war Democrat Dennis Kucinich’s less than emphatic 1.4 per cent return in the New Hampshire primary did not stop him demanding a recount, citing “serious and credible reports, allegations, and rumours” about voting irregularities. However, Kucinich needs a miracle, not a recount.

As Kucinich has made clear, he doesn’t expect to change his position much from this – after all, the exit polls predicted more or less perfectly the results for all the candidates apart from Clinton and Obama. His press release said:

Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich … has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.”

“I am not making this request in the expectation that a recount will significantly affect the number of votes that were cast on my behalf,” Kucinich stressed … but, “Serious and credible reports, allegations, and rumors have surfaced in the past few days…It is imperative that these questions be addressed in the interest of public confidence in the integrity of the election process and the election machinery – not just in New Hampshire, but in every other state that conducts a primary election.”

…

He added, “Ever since the 2000 election – and even before – the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted. This recount isn’t about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It’s about establishing whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them.”

I think he’s absolutely right. Whether the machines are actually at fault or not, a lot of the US establishment seems pretty keen to have them rolled out ever more extensively, and it’s not at all clear why. Is there anything seriously at fault with paper ballots counted by hand?

Anyway, his request has now been granted, (since at least there is a paper trail in this case – touchscreen voting machines, being introduced elsewhere, would have left no meaningful backup option) and the count will be going ahead, albeit after a frustrating delay; according to Huffington Post:

The recounts will begin on January 16, at a time and location to be announced after the state has completed an estimate of the cost and received payment based on that estimate.

The Huffington Post article is a good one, actually, although they take a rather cooler line on the whole thing, pointing out that the kind of discrepancy between hand-counted and machine-counted areas seen in the 2008 vote has also been seen in the previous primaries to have used machine counting. And that may well be the case, and it may simply reflect the demographics of the areas. But the point is that machines which have been shown to be very open to tampering are always going to leave a trail of questions, and hence erode trust in results that could well be perfectly valid. They need to go.

Paper ballots which people write their vote on are the most straightforward way of doing it, they have happened for hundreds of years, and if anyone feels there might be grounds for a recount, then one can be conducte easily. I know they’re not perfect, but at least the process is transparent. At the end of the day, what’s wrong with this is not any specific allegation of wrongdoing – none has been made. What’s wrong is that elections are being left in the hands of a company whose CEO, in August 2003, announced that he had been a top fund-raiser for President George W. Bush and had sent a get-out-the-funds letter to Ohio Republicans saying he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

As Bill Maher (a lesser-known-in-the-UK talkshow host) points out…

… “only [Diebold] know for certain what went on in that primary”.

ps. Note also, in that clip, Tony Snow’s immediate attempt to cover for Diebold and move the conversation onto something entirely different, voter fraud – an obvious Republican cause, since it will be mostly poor voters likely not to have voter ID organised on the day.

More on concerns about voting machines from Dan Rather’s rather good programme, available in its entirety here.

What a Lovely Story

Somewhat slow off the mark here, but this account from Josh Tyler over at Cinema Blend of going to see Michael Moore’s recent film Sicko makes for interesting reading. A quick extract:

As I sat down, right behind me entered an obligatory, cowboy hat wearing redneck in his 50s. He announced his presence by shouting across the theater in a thick Texas drawl to his already seated wife “you owe me fer seein this!”

Sicko started; the stereotypical Texas guy sat down behind me and never stopped talking. He talked through the entire movie… and I listened. The first ten to twenty minutes of the film he spent badmouthing Moore to his wife and snorting in disgust whenever MM went into one of his trademark monologues. But as the movie wore on his protestations became quieter, less enthusiastic. Somewhere along the way, maybe at the half way point, right before my ears, Sicko changed this man’s mind. By the forty-five minute mark, he, along with the rest of the audience were breaking into spontaneous applause. He stopped pooh-poohing the movie and started shouting out “hell yeah!” at the screen. It was as if the whole world had been flipped upside down.

It’s worth going and reading the whole thing, it only gets more extraordinary from there.

Hat-tip to Mike Malloy for alerting me to this article.

It’s a shame the film didn’t get a UK distributor. I know it wouldn’t have attracted a huge audience, since we don’t have to deal with the US’s healthcare system, but all the same, it’s nice to have a reminder that, whatever the faults of the NHS, it could be much worse. As it is, your best option is to torrent it, or something.

We’re not the only ones whose government has something to hide

As the dreary sight of our elected politicians covering up for BAE systems continues, it is perhaps mildly interesting to note that we aren’t the only country where our politicians seem to have something to hide, and make increasingly bizarre arguments to avoid their coming out.

Specifically, I was amused today to see the Daily Show putting out a rather good piece on Dick Cheney’s argument that his office is not part of the executive branch of the goverment of the US. The video is called “non-executive decision” on their recent videos, and is much the most amusing way to further your knowledge of the issue, for as long as it remains up on their website.

If you should wish to do things the old fashioned way and “read” about it, then you could point yourselves in the following directions. The headlines also, in and of themselves, paint a lovely concise story of their own.

LA Times: White House Defends Cheney’s Refusal of Oversight

Boston Globe: Cheney asserts he’s part of the legislative branch

Raw Story: Democrats plan to cut Cheney out of executive funding bill

"Irritating Review in The Observer" shock!

Yes, I know, this is the internet, and I’m blogging about something that happened, ooh, weeks ago. By most standards, I might as well give up now.

Never mind. What I wanted to do was discuss the review that the Observer printed of Chomsky’s new book “Failed States”. Also of interest might be the preemptive strike that the reviewer then launches on anyone who disagrees with him, and the response which, sure enough, did then emerge from Media Lens. The response is full of a lot of waffle and I don’t agree with all of it.

Nonetheless, as far as I’m concerned, what Peter Beaumont is offering in his review is nothing much more sophisticated than a hatchet job. Of course, I don’t claim to have Beaumont’s experience of foreign affairs, but then I don’t need to. My objection to his review is quite simply that he spends most of it reviewing a book that seems to exist largely in his head.

Clearly, whenever they met, Chomsky didn’t exactly make a new friend in Beaumont. This leads Beaumont to describe Chomsky in some fairly subjective and unpleasant terms (for a book review; it’s not exactly going to set the world alight): “nagging, bullying, wheedling”. Now, this is the sort of thing that he can get away with, since the vast majority of his readers are never going to know any different. But anyone who’s seen, say, the film Manufacturing Consent, will know that Chomsky is pretty softly spoken, and certainly couldn’t be described as in any way bullying. Most of the debate footage of him I’ve ever seen, he’s been much more bullied than bullying. If Beaumont felt bullied, I’d argue it was likely by the weight of argument he might have been presented with, perhaps?

Now, at the moment I am in fact reading my way through the book myself. Barely 50 pages in, already several aspects of the review stuck out to me as distortions if not outright dishonesty about Chomsky’s book. For instance, Beaumont writes:

While Chomsky was righteously indignant over suggestions in a recent Guardian interview that he defended Srebrenica, he does portray a certain sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic. Kosovo, in his reading, began in 1999 with Nato bombers, not in 1998 with Serbian police actions that cleared villages, towns and valleys of their populations. (I know this, Mr Chomsky, because I saw them do it.)

Firstly, this is not what Chomsky believes, as far as I can make out. Secondly, his main discussion of Kosovo is to be found elsewhere, in “Hegemony or Survival” amongst others. It is only really mentioned in passing here. Nonetheless, Chomsky finds the space in this book to mention precisely the clearing of populations that Beaumont tries to make out he denies. It’s on page 46 of the hardback, if you’re interested.

At other times, he elides rumour with quotes taken out of context, for example where he refers to: ‘A Jordanian journalist [who] was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border after US and UK forces took over that radioactive materials were detected in one of every eight trucks crossing into Jordan destination unknown. “Stuff happens,” in Rumsfeld’s words.’

That’s all pretty puzzling – as four pages earlier, Chomsky gives the impression that the weapons of mass destruction thing was all a deception.

This is plain distortion (deliberate or otherwise). Chomsky’s argument is pretty straightforward, and the Media Lens article I linked to at the top of this post is pretty good on this:

Does Beaumont really believe Chomsky is all but alone on the planet in believing Iraq had nuclear WMD capacity in 2002-2003? A notion dismissed out of hand by UN weapons inspectors who confirm that Iraq’s nuclear programme had been 100% eliminated by 1998. Even Bush, Blair, Powell and Straw shied away from making such a preposterous claim.

On the other hand, there were many media reports in 2003 of yellow cake – a radioactive compound derived from uranium ore – being emptied on the ground from containers that were then taken for domestic use, and of radioactive sources being stolen and removed from their shielding. In response, Mohamed El Baradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said:

“I am deeply concerned by the almost daily reports of looting and destruction at nuclear sites, and about the potential radiological safety and security implications of nuclear and radiological materials that may no longer be under control. We have a moral responsibility to establish the facts without delay and take urgent remedial action.” (UN News Service, ‘IAEA urges return of experts to Iraq to address possible radiological emergency,’ May 19, 2003)

No one, least of all Chomsky, has claimed that these “radiological materials” constituted weapons of mass destruction.

Back to the Beaumont review:

It is not only that his desire to wallop the US at any cost has allowed inconsistencies to creep in; there is also plain sloppiness. Between pages 60 and 62, for instance, he cannot decide whether an alleged bribe paid to UN official is $150,000 or $160,000. Maybe it’s a typo. Maybe not.

True or not, a pretty cheap shot at any rate, one might think. Once again, Media Lens provide a pretty good response:

A little research might have clarified the issue. Chomsky begins by mentioning “fevered tales” surrounding an alleged £160,000 bribe – the figure cited in the interim report of the Volcker commission and widely reported in US press coverage when the story broke in February 2005. Chomsky then cites press coverage of the $147,000 figure taken from the +final+ report of the Volcker commission in August 2005. This final figure was often rounded up to $150,000 in press reporting.

Beaumont then lets up for a moment:

If all this sounds entirely negative, I do concede that there are areas where Chomsky lands some crunching punches. His analysis of US double standards on issues from the promotion of democracy abroad, to the World Court, Kyoto, US support for Israel, nuclear proliferation and trade is spot-on – but far from novel areas of concern, and Chomsky doesn’t like to settle on them.

Really, that’s interesting. He doesn’t like to dwell on them? On the contrary: to me, they make up the core of most of his arguments about US foreign policy, and certainly those are the areas in which he suggests changes would be most likely to bring about improvements. The fact that they are not “novel areas of concern” seems to me to be largely irrelevant. Perhaps what Beaumont means is that Chomsky has written extensively about them before? And yet in other areas Beaumont shows a startling lack of knowledge of Chomsky’s arguments:

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky’s argument is his desire to create a moral – or rather immoral – equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history.

A quick reference to an interview with Jeremy Paxman when Chomsky was doing the rounds for his last book:

CHOMSKY: The term moral equivalence is an interesting one, it was invented I think by Jeane Kirkpatrick as a method of trying to prevent criticism of foreign policy and state decisions. It is a meaningless notion, there is no moral equivalence what so ever.

Or indeed this comment from Beaumont:

The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world’s greatest – if flawed and selfish – democracy going to the polls.

Here, we have an attempt to set Chomsky up as some egomaniac convinced, Michael-Moore-like, that he alone can bring down the system. I don’t have any sites to point to, I’m afraid, but anyone who reads/hears much of what Chomsky has to say will soon come across his many assertions that, far from seeing things this way, he has a great deal of respect for the power of the people to bring about changes. Often, in fact, he argues that changes presented as the actions of one individual (eg. The US civil rights movement) were in fact the result of much more action from a whole network of activists (perhaps in a supporting role) that are never heard of.

In short, then, what we have here is a review that persists in burning a series of straw men, wilfully misreading the text in question, and occasionally piping up that Chomsky is right on the vast substance of what he says. Whether or not I believe in Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of the press is a tricky question – at the moment I would say I am skeptical. But it’s articles like this that push me much more over to his side of the fence.

I would urge anyone who was put off the book by this review to actually read the book, and then determine for yourself whether much of Beaumont’s mud sticks.

Now For Something Completely Different

One of my random interests that will probably end up on this blog often is US politics. Anyone with a similar interest is probably aware of Air America Radio. For those who aren’t, there follows a brief introduction. If you are, skip the following few paragraphs.

Air America was founded in April 2004, before the November election. It was intended as an effort to bring some balance to the talk radio arena, which since Reagan’s removal of the fairness doctrine from US broadcasting legislation has been dominated by Republicans. Headed by Rush Limbaugh, the American right had built up quite a stranglehold over the medium. There were, of course, a few efforts by individual hosts who have carved out careers for themselves, some of whom joined up to Air America upon it’s inception.

Randi Rhodes and Mike Malloy (who claims that, in some of his previous radio jobs, his views have forced him to carry a gun for protection at work) spring to mind. But the big news when Air America started up was Al Franken, who had recently written his rather entertaining book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Since then, it has become evident that his forte is not really radio, and his show is only really fun to listen to in the sense that it is kind of warm and gentle (comparitively). At the same time, however, new faces were arriving. Part of the strategy of Air America was to use big names. Franken was one. Another fairly obvious contender was Janeane Garofalo, who had made a name for herself in the relevant circles in the run-up to the Iraq war as a fairly outspoken pundit (against, you’ll be glad to know).

START READING AGAIN NOW!

On Garofalo’s recommendation, they also contacted Marc Maron, a little known standup comic. Interestingly enough for someone with perhaps the least experience of any of their hosts, they stuck him on the breakfast show, Morning Sedition, albeit alongside experienced radio host Mark Riley. The show built from a shaky start into one of the most entertaining things I’ve ever come across. Then, at a time when the show was accumulating listeners and Howard Stern was about to go off the air, the CEO of Air America decided he didn’t like it. He didn’t renew Maron’s contract, despite a big outcry from the fans of the show (which it had accumulated in a way I have rarely seen a radio programme do).

But the good news is, he’s now back on the air, in a programme from Los Angeles in the evenings (or, in the UK, 6-8am!). You can stream it from here. You can also podcast it from here, although it will cost you money. I would recommend it to anyone who would like to hear the comings and goings of US Politics in an entertaining way every weekday.

So why am I writing about Maron? Well, it occurs to me that often, he is in fact one of the few genuinely liberal voices on Air America. We all like to bemoan the misuse of the word to characterise the American left, who are now trying fairly hard to rename themselves “Progressives”, since the right have fairly succesfully made liberal a dirty word. Nonetheless, Maron is accurately describable as a liberal, I would say. On the day after the Oscars, many made jokes about Three 6 Mafia winning an award were made by hosts on Air America. Only Maron, to my knowledge, felt uncomfortable with the racially patronising tone of the jokes, and devoted a segment to bringing up his concern.

He frequently makes reference to his enjoyment of people being “freaks in a good way”, and is socially liberal in areas where others might not feel it helps their cause to be (for instance, his stances on pornography). In a rant about the church his co-host Jim Earl made a point of not denying anyone’s right to free speech where all too often other hosts do. Of course, US economic debate is so warped now that it’s hardly fair to look at his economic opinion on the same terms as we would use in the UK. Nonetheless, as a liberal, I would recommend the Marc Maron Show to anyone. Apart from anything else, it’s frequently very funny.