Topics for the Mar. 8th Radio Show

This week’s show is broadcasting early due to scheduling conflicts.  It can be heard live on Friday March 8^th at 10:00 AM Central right here and this week we are going to a full two hour long program.  As always you can check out our archives here and if you have any feedback, comments, questions, suggestions, or if you just want to tell us that we suck, we’d love to hear from you. 

Big Story of the Week –

Topic:  Death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

Related Stories: 

• Hugo Chavez, influential leader with mixed record, dies at 58
• Venezuelans Mourns Late President Hugo Chavez
• Hugo Chavez, passionate but polarizing Venezuelan president, dead at 58
• Venezuela's Chavez: An Outsized Personality, A Domineering Figure
• Chavez's hand-picked successor takes command in Venezuela; election to be called within 30 days
• ‘KINDNESS, BRAVERY….DEDICATION’: HERE’S HOW SOME NOT-SO-SURPRISING PEOPLE ARE MOURNING HUGO CHAVEZ’S DEATH
• Sean Penn on Hugo Chavez's Death: 'I Lost a Friend'
• RIP Commandante Hugo Chavez
• Analyst estimates Chávez’s family fortune at around $2 billion
• Ex-Pats: Chavez's Death Liberates Venezuelans
• The Ghost of Hugo Chávez: How his economically disastrous, politically effective ideology will haunt the country he ruined.

Feedback—

Topic:  Trillion-dollar coin

Issue:  During our second episode, Wobbles brought up the proposed trillion-dollar coin attributing the idea to President Obama.  Listener Donald wrote in to tell us that the idea for the coin wasn’t Obama’s idea and shared an article about the White House denying the call for the expensive piece of pocket change. 

Wobbles’ Selections –

Headline:  Chicago Passes Sex-Ed for Kindergartners

Opening Paragraph:  While most U.S. public schools start sex education in the fifth grade, sex education will be coming to Chicago kindergartners within two years as part of an overhaul of the Chicago public schools sexual health program.

  

Issue:  Use of Drones on American Citizens and Soil

Related Stories: 

• Martial Law: Tucson City Council Hands Authority Over to Military
• Targeted Killing in the U.S.A.
• Cruz Gets Holder To Admit That Killing Americans On U.S. Soil Is Unconstitutional
• Sen. Rand Paul's Epic Filibuster: 12 Hours, 52 Minutes

  

Headline:  Cranked-Up Earbuds Next On Mayor Bloomberg’s Health Hit List

Opening Paragraphs:  NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — After launching campaigns against the Big Gulp, “big” salt and “big” junk food, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is embarking on a new target.

He wants to stop New Yorkers from going deaf, so he’s put in motion an attack on ear buds, CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer reported Wednesday.

Now hear this … there’s a new enemy of the nanny state: people who choose to listen to loud music on their favorite devices.

Bloomberg, who apparently has never met a health crusade he didn’t think worthy of embarking on, is launching a campaign to warn people about the risks of losing their hearing from blasting music on their headphones.

Issue:  Sequester and Budget

• Kerry: US releasing millions in aid to Egypt, but with promise of reform
• Email tells feds to make sequester as painful as promised

Wobbles’ Benghazi Story of the Week:  GOP Reps: We’re Barred From Talking to Benghazi Survivors

Opening Paragraphs:  Republican lawmakers are blasting the White House for not allowing access to the survivors of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya — many of whom are still recovering at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington.

“We want to talk to the survivors — they won’t do that,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah told Fox News on Wednesday. “And then the president has the gall to go on television and say ‘Oh, we’re providing all the access’? Baloney. Bull-crap. That is not happening.”

Nubs’ Selections –

Headline:  Argument against gay marriage in California hinges on accidental pregnancies

Opening Paragraphs:  In a brief filed with the Supreme Court last week, the Obama administration slammed the unusual legal argument now key in the movement against gay marriage: that gay couples cannot become accidentally pregnant and thus do not need access to marriage.

The argument has become the centerpiece of two major cases addressing gay marriage that the Supreme Court will consider at the end of March, Hollingsworth v. Perry, a challenge to California’s gay marriage ban, and United States v. Windsor, which seeks to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

"Only a man and a woman can beget a child together without advance planning, which means that opposite-sex couples have a unique tendency to produce unplanned and unintended offspring," wrote Paul Clement, a prominent attorney representing congressional Republicans in the DOMA case.

Clement added in his brief to the Supreme Court arguing to uphold that law that the government has a legitimate interest in solely recognizing marriages between men and women because it encourages them to form stable family units.

"Because same-sex relationships cannot naturally produce offspring, they do not implicate the State’s interest in responsible procreation and childrearing in the same way that opposite-sex relationships do," attorneys who are seeking to uphold Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California in 2008, argued in their brief. The opponents to gay marriage also argue it's possible the public perception of marriage would change if gay couples were allowed to wed, discouraging straight people from marrying.

Headline:  Answering The Call: The Lives Of 911 Dispatchers

Opening Paragraphs:  An elderly woman at a California retirement home died in February after a staff person refused to perform CPR, despite the pleas of a 911 dispatcher. The nurse says she was following company policy. This incident raised many questions about the role of dispatchers in medical emergencies.

Headline:  TSA Will Permit Knives, Golf Clubs on U.S. Planes

Opening Paragraphs:  The U.S. Transportation Security Administration will let people carry small pocketknives onto passenger planes for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, along with golf clubs, hockey sticks and plastic Wiffle Ball-style bats.

The agency will permit knives with retractable blades shorter than 6 centimeters (2.36 inches) and narrower than 1/2 inch, TSA Administrator John Pistole said today at an aviation security conference in Brooklyn. The change, to conform with international rules, takes effect April 25.

Passengers will also be allowed to board flights with some other items that are currently prohibited, including sticks used to play lacrosse, billiards and hockey, ski poles and as many as two golf clubs, Pistole said.

Headline:  Why Americans are not going to church

Issue:  Bill O’Reilly’s Tip of the Day deals with the need to take time for spirituality. 

Nubs’ Neat Story of the Week:  First Documented Case of Child Cured of HIV

Opening Paragraphs:  Mar. 3, 2013 — Researchers today described the first documented case of a child being cured of HIV. The landmark findings were announced at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta, GA.

Dr. Deborah Persaud, of Johns Hopkins University and an amfAR grantee, detailed the case of a two-year-old child in Mississippi diagnosed with HIV at birth and immediately put on antiretroviral therapy. At 18 months, the child ceased taking antiretrovirals and was lost to follow-up. When brought back into care at 23 months, despite being off treatment for five months, the child was found to have an undetectable viral load. A battery of subsequent highly sensitive tests confirmed the absence of HIV.

Nubs’ Politically Philosophical Topic of the Week:  Conservative authoritarians and libertarian sheep

Summary:  Recently conservative author and polemic extraordinaire Ann Coulter got herself into some hot water for basically calling libertarians female genitalia.  While discussing this issue on his radio show, Glenn Beck brought up the sheep-like mentality of many libertarians (especially Ron Paul supports).