A post by Matthew Slutsky

Clinton Gets Key Endorsement

Not a huge surprise but significant nonetheless…

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for President.

From the LA Times:

A popular figure in the nation’s second-largest city, analysts expect Villaraigosa to have a promising future in national politics or in statewide office in California. He is widely popular among Hispanic voters, who make up an increasingly large percentage of Democratic voters in California and many other states. In 2004, 21 percent of California voters were Hispanic, according to exit polls there.

Villaraigosa’s endorsement of Clinton is not unexpected; he lavished praise on the New York senator at a campaign event in Los Angeles in March, calling her campaign “fighting for a brighter and cleaner future for all our children.” And last month, his top political consultant, Ace Smith, joined the Clinton campaign as its California director.

What do you think…could be a very interesting choice for VP for HRC? Thoughts on this?

A post by Joshua Skaroff

BushCo Radio Sliding and The Roots

Is it too much to imagine that DoubleSpeak had anything to do with this? Perhaps…

The Arbitrends radio rankings for Los Angeles came out today and things don’t go so well for the BushCo radio minions. Right wing talk radio ratings are down across the board:

Limbaugh drew a 4.1 last month. This month he dropped to a 3.3.
Sean Hannity was at a 2.7 last month. He’s now at a 1.8.
Laura Ingraham: 1.1 to 0.8.
Dennis Prager/Michael Medved: 1.2 to a 0.7.
Hugh Hewitt: 1.3 to 0.7.

Air America managed a 0.5 to 0.9 rise, which apparently is decent considering the poor quality of their transmission signal.

We imagine most of our listeners are of a similar political persuasion and as such, don’t spend much time listening to right wing radio. What we don’t realize is that right wing talk is pervasive on this nation’s AM dials, and with the top-down control of Karl Rove, is monolithic in its message. And the local emphasis of much talk radio makes it particularly intimate and effective. They’ve decided that the warrantless NSA spying is just fine.

Over at Firedoglake among others, they’ve started a Roots Project to use local talk radio and other media outlets such as newspaper editorials in a coordinated way to pressure local Republican lawmakers who are in a delicate spot politically right now. By exerting coordinated local effort combined with the collaborative abilities of the blogosphere, we can push some GOP members who might otherwise toe the Bush line towards accountability. They’re looking for help in Kansas, Pennsylvania, Maine, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Ohio. Jane wrote:

What we’d like to do is organize people from these states who know the media outlets in their areas the best (as well as local blogs, as both Kos and Atrios noted this morning) and work with them to put pressure on these people over specific issues since blogs like FDL, Crooks & Liars, Glenn Greenwald and others can drive traffic and make these efforts more impactful.

If you live in any of these states and would like to help organize these efforts, or simply take part in them, please either email me or leave word in the comments section. We’ll start to put together a network of local media that can be quickly and effectively targeted within these markets, putting in place an infrastructure to work with Glenn Greenwald to apply selective pressure on critical Senators as the investigations into the illegal NSA wiretap investigations go forward.

Think you might be interested?