We will be taking callers during this show.

SHOW AUDIO:

Houston Mayor Annise Parker [L] with Mike (Dec. 14, 2015)

Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 9-10 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My engineer is Bob Gartner.

Listen live on the radio or on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.)

For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

POSSIBLE TOPICS:

SIGNOFF QUOTE:  “It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.” ~ Barack Obama, (Labor Day, ca. Sept. 6, 2010) as reported on Friday, September 17, 2010: Obama: ‘The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label’, By The Building Tradesman

• TEXAS: REGISTER TO VOTE FOR THE GENERAL ELECTION
  • To vote in November 8th’s presidential elections, you have to be registered by October 8th. It will be here before you know it, so make sure YOU are registered! HarrisVotes.com or VoteTexas.gov.
    • CONSIDER: The young voters today only remember 2 presidents: GW Bush and Obama

• The White House Correspondents Dinner
  • Obama Roasts Trump, Drops Mic at Last White House Correspondents’ Dinner (NBCNews)
  • Obama may have a great future career in standup comedy.
  • Larry Wilmore’s monologue went over badly in the room. Many say it wasn’t written for the room.
  • What did you think of Wilmore’s monologue?
• Trump: The choice of white supremacists.
  • It’s the Racism, Stupid: The GOP establishment can’t freak out about Trump now. It’s been playing his game for decades, just more artfully. By Gary Younge | February 12, 2016 (BillMoyers.com)
    • [Trump’s] blatant xenophobia emerges from the GOP’s half-century of race-baiting since Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy was first conceived. The initial idea was to woo Southern whites, who were angry about the advances of the civil-rights movement, with coded racial messaging that wouldn’t alienate the party’s Northern supporters. “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Nixon once explained to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes that while not appearing to.” This method was once very effective. Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from where three civil-rights activists had been murdered in 1964, by talking about states’ rights. George H.W. Bush had his infamous Willie Horton ad in 1988, while Bush Jr. spoke at Bob Jones University in 2000, where interracial dating was banned at the time.
• Moving Labor Day to May 1^st
  • The Labor Movement’s May Day Promise: Some cast the labor movement as dying or even dead, but even amid attacks on collective bargaining workers are finding innovative ways to organize.
• Medicaid, Food stamps are subsidies for low wages.
  • We must also consider subsidized housing and the earned income tax credit.
• In the category of, “You get the government you pay for:
  • Dole Knew About Listeria Problem at Salad Plant, F.D.A. Report Says, By STEPHANIE STROM, April 29, 2016 (NY Times)
    • The Dole Food Company, one of the largest processors of fresh produce, knew it had a listeria problem in one of its salad plants more than a year before it closed in January, according to a Food and Drug Administration
    • Four people have died after becoming ill so far in the outbreak, and 33 more across the United States and Canada have become so sick they have spent time in a hospital. Dole said the Justice Department was investigating.
    • a spokesman for Dole, said in an email that the company had corrected the issues at the plant, which recently reopened.
    • “We understand these recent news reports may raise questions among our consumers and customers,” Mr. Goldfield said. “They should be assured, however, that we have worked in conjunction with the F.D.A. to address those observations and ensure that Dole products are safe.”
    • Lauren Sucher, a spokeswoman at the F.D.A. … said, not all strains of listeria cause disease. “When listeria is found in the manufacturing environment, rather than on the food itself, it is not uncommon for a company to immediately take corrective action rather than test further to see if the strain of listeria poses a threat,”
    • Blue Bell Creameries knew it had a listeria problem in one of its plants about two years before it moved to close it, and never said anything. Ten people got sick, and three died from eating contaminated ice cream before the factory was closed.
    • Chipotle Mexican Grill was aware of a norovirus outbreak among people who had eaten in one of its restaurants in Simi Valley, Calif., but did not tell public health officials there until after it had closed and cleaned the restaurant. More than 200 people got sick from eating there.
    • The Justice Department also has criminal investigations in those cases.
  • In other news:
  • NATO considering thousands of troops near Russia’s border, By Thomas Gibbons-Neff May 2 at 7:26 PM
    • Some aspects of the possible deployment were first reported in the Wall Street Journal on Friday. According to the report, the contingent could comprise four battalions of roughly 1,000 troops apiece. Western officials told the Journal that two of the battalions would come from the United States and the other two from Germany and Britain. But the officials said the numbers and contributions have not been finalized.
    • The new NATO presence would be in addition to the recently formed Very High Readiness Joint Task Force. The task force, created last year, is composed of 5,000 troops from various NATO countries and is designed to act as a quick response unit for the alliance.
    • “There are a number of bilateral initiatives that the U.S. has put forward to increase security and defense in Europe, but there are also a number of efforts going on under a NATO context to increase deterrence and defense,” said a senior U.S. defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about military planning.
    • A significant addition of troops was discussed and agreed upon in principle during a NATO meeting in February, but many of the details had yet to be ironed out.
• Congress looks at re-starting the F-22 Raptor program, By Thom Patterson, [CNN] Updated 3:01 PM ET, Thu April 21, 2016
  • A week after Russian military aircraft buzzed dangerously close to U.S. Navy ships and Air Force spy planes, Congress is considering bringing back production of stealthy F-22 Raptor air-to-air fighter jets.
  • Lawmakers have tacked a provision onto a defense bill that will determine how much it would cost and how difficult it would be to ramp up production of the Air Force’s fifth generation dogfighter. They also want to know about possible options for exporting F-22s to allies. Currently, exporting Raptors is illegal.
  • American military rivals China and Russia are already moving forward, developing their own new fighters. And the Air Force has already started a fighter jet program designated “F-X”. It’s possible that Pentagon war planners may push back if Congress chooses to go retro and bring back the Raptor.
  • Skeptics say the F-22’s stealth technology and its other major systems are too old for it to be revived as a truly valuable weapons system.

 SOURCES WHICH MAY BE RELEVANT TO OTHER DISCUSSION:

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• The Next Step in Animal Welfare? Breed a Better Chicken, by Maryn McKenna, (nationalgeographic.com) March 24, 2016
  • A … program … announced last week by the Global Animal Partnership, a nonprofit that works with farmers and retailers to improve animal welfare, asks chicken farmers to change the breeds of the birds they are raising to a more hardy, slower-growing breed. …
  • So what the new GAP standard asks producers and retailers to do is to switch to broilers that have been bred to grow more slowly and in a more balanced manner: gaining no more than 50 grams of weight per day, which translates to a bird that lives 56-62 days instead of 35-42.
  • To investigate whether the change was feasible, GAP commissioned a working group of major chicken producers… , and involved Whole Foods, which evaluates all its meat purchases using the 5-step GAP scale. “All of our suppliers were interested…’” [said] Theo Weening, Whole Foods’ global meat buyer… “Some of them had long histories in the chicken industry, and they remembered when chickens were slower-growing and had more flavor. So when GAP came up with the standard, I went back to the suppliers, and they said, let’s work together, instead of having one guy make it to the finish line first.”
• What Are Cats Trying to Tell Us? Science Will Explain, By Carrie Arnold [National Geographic] PUBLISHED March 28, 2016
  • Nearly all New York State pet owners talk to their pets like they’re fellow humans, according to a recent poll.  Many believe their dogs and cats can respond with barks or meows that communicate hunger, fear, or simply the need to pee.  But do the animals tawk back in a Brooklyn accent? That’s the sort of thing Swedish cat lover and phonetics researcher Suzanne Schötz is working to find out. After executing this strategy on every government program except the military and corporate welfare, is it now the turn of the Supreme Court?
• The Science of Meow: Study to Look at How Cats Talk: A new project is underway to decode kitty communication—and figure out if cats really like all that baby talk.
  • What Are Cats Trying to Tell Us? Science Will Explain
    [National Geographic Society]:

• The dos and don’ts of open carry, By Robert Arnold – Investigative Reporter (click2houston.com) Posted: 9:37 AM, December 31, 2015 Updated: 10:04 AM, December 31, 2015
• TERMINOLOGIES: Words Matter
  • The term “Conservative” is so inaccurate as currently used by the Media, the Media and all of us really need to rethink their classifications and terminology.
  • There are Liberals/Progressives and there are Conservatives. Both of those are fine and serve a useful purpose in civil opposition to each other.
  • Today’s “Conservatives” are conservative in name only

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