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Happy Saturday night, folks! It's Blue Gal from The Professional Left Podcast, bringing you this week's podcast round up. Be aware that these podcasts are also available on i-Tunes, and may not be safe for work.

Tomcast from Tom Dispatch: Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the acclaimed Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, talks about her latest project to fund investigative journalism focused on poverty in the United States and the financial reality of being part of our nation's working poor.

The Dinner Party: Satirist Christopher Buckley on international (etiquette) relations.

Lee Camp (video): 15 Crucial Facts Never Heard on the Mainstream Media.

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During his Fox Business special, Bad Speech which reaired on their sister network, Fox News this Saturday, John Stossel highlighted several incidences which he called "assaults on speech," the first of which was the firing of Pat Buchanan from MSNBC.

Apparently both Buchanan and Stossel are terribly upset with Van Jones' organization, Color of Change, for exercising their own free speech in protesting the kind of hatred Pat Buchanan had been peddling for ages now. Here's their petition which Stossel read part of to Buchanan:

Below is the message we'll send to MSNBC President Phil Griffin and NBC News President Steve Capus on your behalf. You can add a personal message using the box on the right.

I'm writing to demand that you fire Pat Buchanan immediately. Buchanan has a long and consistent history of peddling white supremacist ideology as legitimate political commentary, on your network and elsewhere.

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enlargeThis story came to me Saturday night, via Love Infinitely, on Twitter.

These two sisters, age 24 and 27, are victims. Keep that in mind. Love Infinitely has the details:

At the neighborhood park where the girls had just come from their walk, two groups of men had gotten into an argument on the basketball court. One group decided to leave the argument and headed toward their car. Once in their car, the other group went after them on foot and drew a gun.

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Thank you for letting me part of your morning. I'm looking forward to sharing links with you again.

Plutocrap reminds us of a world gone by.

Juanita Jean's Dangerous Beauty Salon wants South Carolina to give the trophy back to Arizona.

Darkblack reminds us that what is old is sometimes old and not new again.

Bonus Track: The Reaction speculates about the endorsement conversation between Dubya and Mitt.

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Jeremy Rivkin and the evolution of empathy

Ah...empathy. I think a highly developed sense of empathy is what defines us as liberals. I do not need to be a minority, or on food stamps or elderly to empathize with the struggles they have. I can empathize with all sorts of people. But there appears to be an empathy gene missing from Republicans.

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Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital is one of the few quantifiable ways voters can see how he intends to approach employment issues and corporations, and the Obama campaign has done a terrific job of pointing out the "vulture capitalist" Romney so desperately tries to hide. In fact, they launched a new website this week highlighting the swath of devastation Romney left behind. It gives details about the different companies they stripped of all assets in order to maximize profit to investors.

Also this week, Joe Biden gave a speech where he was on fire -- as on fire as I've ever heard him -- about the differences between the middle class and the 1 percent and why Romney's Bain Capital profit model was guaranteed to benefit only the rich while further destroying the middle class and leaving them farther behind. It was a speech for the ages. It also had Republicans on the run, scurrying to counter the message in the Wall Street Journal and wherever else they could spread the word.

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I was fairly sure that wingnut Rep. Steve King would say something completely ridiculous or untrue as soon as I saw his name on the list of guests on C-SPAN's Washington Journal earlier this week. The crew over at Think Progress proved me right when they flagged this portion of King's interview that morning:

Steve King Claims Obamacare Will Grow The Number Of Uninsured, Calls For Personal Responsibility:

During an appearance on CSPANs Washington Journal Thursday morning, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) claimed that the Affordable Care Act would increase the number of Americans without health insurance, dismissing analysis showing that 30 million people would gain coverage under the law.

Everybody in America has access to health care, and we even have many many organizations that make sure they fill those holes, King explained. The effort was to increase the number of insured in America and that number does not look like it will increase under Obamacare:

KING: Were actually going to get more people uninsured under Obamacare and this creates the foundation for a one-size-fits-all federally-run socialized medicine system.

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I'm not sure how the Republican party came to be known as the party of "compassionate conservatism," unless it was simply because they used to at least pretend to care about the problems of the middle and low-income class people. In this 2007 video of Republican Mitt Romney's exchange with a wheelchair bound man suffering from a rare and deadly form of muscular dystrophy, Romney's compassionate conservatism takes an icy cold form, as he turns his back on the ill young man, Clayton Holton, and walks away without answering his question.

This exchange, and others like it, will no doubt keep cropping up to haunt Romney throughout his campaign. His complete inability to relate to, or show anything resembling empathy towards mainstream Americans is stunningly on display here. If his position on medical marijuana was due to something he believes is a greater good, as a contender for president of the United States, he should certainly be able to articulate that.However this is likely due to the fact that Romney has no real solutions for real people's problems.

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Mayor Bloomberg seems to have a short memory for the logical outcome of class war, so I thought I'd remind him what happened the last time the aristocracy got out of hand.

If I were the queen of the universe, every time a member of the one percent opened his or her piehole to defend exploiting workers, they would be sentenced to work six months at a minimum wage job, find an affordable apartment, apply for Medicaid and food stamps and be monitored closely by a social worker. Because when Mayor Mikey says crap like this, I can only think of a Yiddish word that rhymes with "nuts":

To a few hundred New York workers laboring for $8 or $9 an hour, a living wage bill recently passed by the city council means a raise, a few dollars more a week to help feed their families.

To billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg, it's a wedge to open the door to communism. That's right -- the mayor told a local radio program that requiring businesses that get taxpayer subsidies to pay their workers a little bit more is just like a centrally planned economy. The last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR, and that didnt work out so well, Bloomberg said.

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Live broadcast by Ustream

Tim Pool's livestream is catching the situation live in Chicago. Follow him @Timcast on Twitter, as well as #NoNATO for more updates. Reports on Twitter that either the US Military or National Guard are in the area on standby. National Guard seems more likely. Twitter reports of an ABC reporter caught in the crowd screaming for help. Paramedics reportedly (Twitter) not being allowed in to attend to the injured.

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This Week with George Stephanopoulos notes the passings of six service members in Afghanistan:

US Army 1LT Alejo R Thompson, 30, Yuma, AZ US Marines Sgt Wade D Wilson, 22, Normangee, TX US Army SPC Alex Hernandez III, 21, Round Rock, TX US Army SGT Brian L Walker, 25, Lucerne Valley, CA US Army PFC Richard L McNulty III, 22, Rolla, MO US Army SSG Israel P Nuanes, 38, Las Cruces, NM

According to iCasualties, the total number of allied service members killed in Afghanistan is now 3,006.

The following notable names lost their lives this week as well: author Jean Craighead George, architect Mary Richardson Kennedy, baseball player Kevin Hickey, bluegrass musician/actor Doug Dillard, "Godfather of Go-go" Chuck Brown, former Senator of North Dakota James Abdnor, musician Donna Summer, comedian Ron Shock, journalist Derek Round, actor Paul O'Sullivan, drummer Peter Jones, hockey player Paul Cyr convicted Pan Am 103 terrorist Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and singer/songwriter Robin Gibb.

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We don't even pretend to be America anymore. I mean, what does America mean to these people - some kind of stage set that only gets rolled out for political commercials? Governments lie; most of us already know that. But inherent in the idea of our democratic republic is that when it happens, it will be done sparingly, and for a very good reason. That is not what this sounds like:

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would strike the current ban on domestic dissemination of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee's official website.

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House Budget Commitee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) says that his plan to slash government spending on programs for the poor while increasing defense spending and giving tax cuts to the wealthy would actually "prevent austerity."

NBC's David Gregory on Sunday pointed out that the debate over whether slashing budgets would grow the economy was not just happening in Europe, but in the U.S. as well.

"This question of austerity in Europe, they had failing economies, nearly depressed economies," Gregory told Ryan. "The answer throughout the region was to slash their budgets.

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House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Sunday dismissed financial regulations that could have stemmed $3 billion or more in losses on derivatives by JPMorgan Chase & Co. because the company "should be help accountable by the market."

"Theres no law against stupidity, no law against stupid trades," Boehner told ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

"And as long as the positives, money wasnt at risk, and as long as theres no risk of a taxpayer bailout they should be held accountable by the market and their shareholders -- and they are," the Speaker insisted.

Boehner also shrugged off the notion that implementation of the Dodd-Frank bank reform law could have prevented the losses.

"I dont believe theres anything in Dodd-Frank that wouldve prevented this activity at JPMorgan," he explained.

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