So I'm driving along. going from Boston to NYC Tuesday, desperately looking for ANYTHING on the radio that can alleviate the boredom of U.S. highway travel, and as I get into AM radio range of NYC, here's this sports yob talk show host who identifies himself as "Normally, I'm a pretty conservative Republican kinda guy, but THIS!!! This is like NAZI stuff!!!" And then he goes on to tear a strip off of Rep.Tom Davis (R. Natch) for suggesting that if the criminally liberal George Soros were to be allowed to buy the Washington Nationals baseball team, Major League Baseball could lose its antitrust exemption. This sports host went on about Davis for at LEAST 10 minutes. Maybe longer. (I got bored...) Maybe many times during the broadcast... maybe many OTHER shows as well.
And it occurred to me...do you want to REALLY reach the voters?
The undecideds?
Don't call Air America and agree agree agree.
You're just preaching to the choir..
Don't call Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity trying to punch their little buttons.
No one is listening to THEM except the RIVAL choir.
CALL THE SPORTS STATIONS!!!
(More below.)
Talk to THEM about political aspects of the SPORTS world.
The corporatization of major league sports and college level so-called "amateur" (read "slave labor") hiring and recruiting practices.
Big Pharma as the REAL reason for steroid use.
Big government interfering with sports.
The big-time civic hustle of publicly funding arenas and stadiums that are turned to immense private profit by their corporate owners.
These stations have a HUGE audience.
And it is an audience of primarily "undecideds". They may lean toward the right, but it is an uninformed, hypnotized-by-the-sheer-mass-of-propaganda lean. And it is a WEAK lean. Let THEM know that BushCo is fucking EVERYTHING up.
Including their beloved sports.
Say the 2004 vote was honest. Legal. (I know...it's a stretch...but bear with me here.) Say the vote WAS about 51%-49% pro BushCo.
Sway only 10% of THESE guys...and their families, because they are pretty much the last remnant of real paternalistic familial systems left in America, for better or for worse...and the percentages shift.
Dramatically.
Try it.
Just sitting around the house, wondering what to do with all the free time you have now that you are on
???????
Call up the yob stations and have a FRIENDLY LITTLE CHAT.
It'll be FUN!!!
I'm going to.
When you get to the screening guy...the filter who is there weed out anything real or possibly disturbing...say you want to talk about whatever the current topics on the show might be at the time.
Say the violent outbursts of spoiled rich athletes. A FAVE...
Or the current scam in place (after the Ratpubs lost their bid to turn lower Manhattan into a sports and real estatec ash cow with a completely unnecessary and mind-bogglingly expensive stadium.) to tear down both Yankee Stadium AND Shea Stadium...neither of which is falling down, by ANY means...and constructing NEW stadiums that have more rrom for "sky boxes". Big money boxes leased by BushCo and its big money allies to wine and dine prospective marks...errr, assholes...errr, business contacts.
Same scam in every OTHER city.
Call `em up and point this out.
Talk about the racist Marge Schott, about Steinbrenner's felony conviction for laundering Nixon campaign money.
Point up the anti-labor practices of the owners.
Their DECIDEDLY pro-BushCo slant.
Use the word.
BushCo.
Most of these guys have never heard it.
Tell them who Soros is, and who the OTHER major prospects to buy the Senators are.
(From the NY Times.)
---
A group led by a major Republican donor, Fred Malek, a former aide to President Richard M. Nixon who runs Thayer Capital Partners, a private equity investment firm. A group that includes include Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state, and Peter Fitzgerald, a former Republican senator.
"This is K Street run amok," complained Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, referring to the Republican "K Street Project," an effort to encourage businesses and trade associations to hire Republican lobbyists. "The message they're sending to baseball here is no different than the message they send to corporations: unless you play ball with us and our people, forget access to the halls of our democracy."
---
CALL `em.
TELL `em.
It'll work.
Later...
AG
P.S. You don't know what
is?
Please go here, here, here, here and especially here to read several recent diaries and many comments on this NEWSTRIKE!!! concept.
An idea whose time has come.