Ring of Fire Blog

Bobby and Pap have been dominating the media this week, with Mike appearing on both Fox & Friends and Cavuto, while Bobby is gearing up for an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman Friday night.

Click here to watch Pap on Cavuto, talking about Hillary's next move - will she quit and lose all her money, or will she stay in the race and continue to damage the Democratic Party?

Click here to watch Pap on Fox & Friends, talking about the University of Colorado's plan to bring in a conservative profressor to "even things up." Make sure to watch co-host Steve Doocy's reactions. They are priceless! (I've never seen a "professional" reporter respond with a "pffffffft" before.)

RFK, Jr. will be on Letterman tonight to promote the Riverkeeper's 19th Annual Shad Festival this Sunday, May 18th. The video of this will be posted on GoLeft.tv early next week.

This week’s Ring of Fire, hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio:

Saturdays at 3 o’clock Eastern, rebroadcasts Sunday nights at 8 pm Eastern

Economist and author Jeffrey Sachs will be here to tell us about his plan to wipe out global poverty. Jeffrey is the author of the new book “Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.”

Congressman and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Bart Stupak (D – MI) will be talking with us about the deceptive advertising being conducted by America’s pharmaceutical industry.

When George Bush finally admitted that radical climate change is taking place and that man-made carbon dioxide is responsible, it was an embarrassment to the extreme fringe of the GOP. It had to be especially uncomfortable for all those letter-to-the-editor writers who used newspapers to tell us that global warming was a hoax. For years, we were overwhelmed by talking points borrowed from all their favorite conservative political radio talkers. Those letters tended to look alike because they were the product of a prepackaged political agenda.  But we can learn from those letters we’ve endured for the last seven years. We can learn to appreciate the dangers of being too committed to every policy and agenda that is handed down to us from the political party of our choice. 

Go back and look and you will see there is no difference in the science of climate change today and the science that existed seven years ago. Put another way, we have wasted seven years in our effort to solve the problem because a purely political agenda became more relevant than the well being of future generations. The concept of the global warming hoax made its way from leadership to the foot solider, unfiltered and unquestioned. It became a party line issue – an inflexible political ideology.  

EPA Official Ousted For Offending Dow Chemical

At the request of Dow Chemical, the Bush administration forced out one of its own hand-picked EPA regulators on May 1st because she naively attempted to do her job by enforcing the law against Dow. EPA officials told Mary Gade, the federal agency's top Midwest regulator to step down from her post or be fired by June 1. Bush appointed Gade in 2006, but Gade ran afoul of the White House when she pressured Dow Chemical to clean up dioxin pollution extending 50 miles downstream from the company's Michigan headquarters. Dow asked EPA headquarters to intervene. In response EPA chief Stephen Johnson's top deputies repeatedly grilled Gade about the case. When she refused to lay off Dow, they stripped her of her authority and told her to quit or be fired. "There is no question this is about Dow," Gade said. "I stand behind what I did and what my staff did. I'm proud of what we did."

Gade was formerly a loyal George W. Bush supporter and adviser. In 2000, she praised then-governor and candidate Bush for his "fresh approach" and "strong leadership." But her loyalty couldn't shield her from an administration bent on insulating its chemical industry cronies from public health laws.

Bush's Misleading Claims About the Arctic Refuge Denied by Federal Officials

This week’s Ring of Fire, hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio:

Saturdays at 3 o’clock Eastern, rebroadcasts Sunday nights at 8 pm Eastern

Former political advisor to Richard Nixon, and now an economic populist, Kevin Philips will join us to talk about how corporate America’s greed has helped pushed this country into a recession.

Congressman and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chris Van Hollen will be here to talk about the Taxpayer Assistance and Simplification Act, which will close corporate tax loopholes.

By Mike Papantonio

Last year, 13 people were killed in Minneapolis when a bridge collapsed because our government couldn’t spend the money on critical repairs. Two years before, New Orleans was destroyed and 1,500 people were killed because there was so little money to go around to fix the levees.

The system of maintaining America’s infrastructure in the last eight years has been referred to as “patch and pray.” The no-regulation, no-tax approach to government was unleashed on all of us in 2000. It was as if a giant clown car pulled up to a curb somewhere in our nation’s capital and unloaded a gaggle of politicos who had no real understanding about why tax revenues matter. They called themselves fiscal conservatives.

America’s infrastructure is crumbling because no-tax demagogues have some Americans believing that they can have quality bridges, roads, police and fire departments, schools, libraries and national parks without ever making a sacrifice. The math is not complicated. We can’t maintain bridges and roads while we have a debt of $9 trillion.

When we’re spending $12 billion a month on a desert war that 60 percent of Americans want behind us, it’s pretty tough to build new airports, or replace decrepit, leaking pipes that deliver our nation’s drinking water.