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Podcast 509

Final Primary In South Dakota. A gonzo talk podcast from the driveway aboard Mobile Podcast Command as we load in and run through the checklists before final departure to the Mount Rushmore State. Why South Dakota? First it’s been awhile since a road trip. Second, coverage of the Presidential Preference Primaries and Caucuses began with Wisconsin Governor Walker’s candidacy announcement last summer, continued into Iowa in February, onto South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, on through to Texas and back home in the first couple of weeks of March. So it is a fitting end that one of the states with the latest primaries, as opposed to the earliest, is South Dakota. While all eyes are focused on the June 7th primary in California, because Bernie Sanders is giving Hillary Clinton fits there, do you think anyone is going to cover voting in South Dakota? That’s why I am going. Aside from the fact that South Dakota is awesome, from the Sturgis celebration to Deadwood, Mount Rushmore, Rapid City and more. Even with the contest between Sanders and Clinton in the Golden State, the media still seems to be focused on finding some negative way to define ‘presumptive’ republican nominee Donald Trump and by extension, the Republican Party. First it was Trump the authoritarian. Then it was Trump the fascist with his incitements to violence – which as an aside seems to be on the other side, with ‘anti-trump protesters’ spitting at passive Trump supporters and my sense is this gets the New York Developer more votes and may just put him in the White House but I digress. Suddenly Trump is Zachary Taylor, 12th president of the United States, and the Republican Party is the Whig Party. Is this an apt comparison? Maybe, even with the scare quotes to describe Taylor and Whigs, but then again, kind of not really. Politics feels like heavy metal, the energy is so low and the results so negative. It’s gonna be good to get out on the road. Sponsored by Brush Studio and Hydrus.

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Podcast 506

Future Shock. As the 24 hour news media and talk radio fixate on gorillas and high school election antics, its hard to get a conversation going about the future. Is the future potential leaders want the future we should have? Is it the future we want? There are developments almost everyday now with autonomous cars, robotics, materials, aviation, and communications; the building blocks of a future wave that will leave nothing untouched and unchanged. A series of stories from today’s headlines shedding a light on one potential future and a question; Planners and government officials are  diverting resources to bring about a vision of the city of tomorrow, which is really the city of the early 1900’s. Is this what you want? Will the driverless car, autonomous software and machines, robotics, and other developments make trains, buses and the standard bureaucracy heavy city, state and federal government ‘obsolete’? If so, why is so much time, effort and authority expended to see that we plan for and create a urban spaces, and that suburban villages and towns conform to a vision of a city that probably never existed and never will. Driverless cars will render the amount of space needed for freeways and parking ramps obsolete. Remote technology, robotics and other technologies may mean that people will not have to travel to large office complexes for their work, with increasing freelance employment. What are our so called leaders talking about? Minimum wages, government controlled health insurance and trains. Trains. Why are we planning for 1940’s Chicago when reality could be closer to Jefferson’s vision than Robert Moses? The old world is being torn down and a new one is being built that will be very different from what we know. Do our leaders understand this? Future Shock. Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul and X Government Cars.

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Podcast 504

Choices. A companion to the ‘slipping into summer’ podcast for the political junkies. Choices. The Choices we make, politically, As the primary season draws to a close, Memorial Day Weekend is a good place to take stock of what has happened in this tumultuous and unpredictable 2016 Presidential Preference Primary and Caucus season. In Podcast 503 there was some discussion of an uneasy feeling seeing FB posts from politicos about the weekend’s conventions and promotions of party unity. This gets explored a lot more deeply in Podcast 504; Choices. Republican presidential preference primary and caucus voters have settled on Donald J. Trump as their choice for nominee of the republican party. While it remains to be seen whether Trump actually gets to the RNC with enough delegates to clinch the nomination, or whether some other fate befalls the New York Developer and Realty Television Star, it’s significant that republican and so called ‘conservative’ voters have settled on three major pools of thought. The ‘Trumpist’ pool which seems to be about winning the argument, the evangelist and self-described ‘constitutionalist’ pool represented by the Cruz supporters and the establishment pool, which is about the status quo. There’s one other pool, but it’s really a puddle; The Libertarian pool which is the only group that actually wants to reduce the size, scope and power of government. On the democrat side, is an establishment political operator who can only be described as a Statist (with a capital S) and a self described Democratic Socialist, really a socialist and also a STATIST. So, voters have settled on a political insider who is also a statist, a socialist and a populist statist, with second choices that include politicians who claim to be ‘conservative’ but are also going to make sure ‘The Government’ operates more efficiently. Sigh. What are the takeaways? These are the people the voters – who have been exhorted to get involved – have chosen. Of these three or four, one will be President of The United States. In November the voters will choose a president, a congress and a third of the US Senate, as well as a slew of statewide and state legislative and local officers across the country. What will it mean? What will happen? The media keeps trying to tell us, but we cannot know the future. We’re just going to have to wait and see. Takeaways for political junkies on Memorial Day Weekend. Sponsored by Brush Studio, in the West End, Saint Louis Park.

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