The Facts Were These… Chris Spangle's Blog

Today was an emotional day at the Entercom Indianapolis cluster. Abdul-Hakim Shabazz signed off as the morning show host of Newstalk 1430 AM’s Abdul in the Morning. Abdul was hired in September of 2004 after a stint in Springfield, IL radio.

Today was Abdul’s last show. You can download and listen to it here. 

WXNT had been started on December 15, 2001. Mickey Maurer and the station’s then-parent company MyStar Communications felt that the city needed a second talk radio station in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. Entercom bought the station a couple years later.

I was brought on as an intern in December of 2004. Both Abdul and our Program Director and boss, Andrew Lee, were new to the area. Being involved in politics for a couple years, I was able to explain Hoosier culture and politics to both Andrew and Abdul. It wasn’t long before his knowledge of the inner workings of local politics dwarfed mine.

Abdul is the Craig Ferguson of talk radio. He should be cloning the successful giants of old (Rush), but decided to an intensely local show. There are very few talk radio shows like Abdul’s. Indianapolis was blessed to have two: Amos in the afternoons and Abdul in the morning. While Amos’s show is targeted at a clear demographic, Abdul tried to make community radio broad and commercial. His show should never have lasted more than 2 or 3 years because of this.

Andrew left in April of 2007 to move to the Tuscon market. After working as the producer for weekend programming and the morning show fill in, I was elevated to the morning show. I had an intense passion for my radio station. Anyone that works with me in the Libertarian Party knows how passionate I am about my work, and that passion was there to grow WXNT into a grassroots radio station. That passion quickly grew to frustration. Because WXNT’s signal was weak and its ratings lower as a result, the corporate bosses at Entercom clearly wanted no time, effort, or money spent on WXNT. It was a struggle to get simple remotes or basic advertising at times. (I am not trying to be a disgruntled former employee. Looking back, it was a business decision.) This lack of attention and effort is a death sentence for most talk radio show hosts, and Abdul should have been gone after two or three years.

But Abdul hustled. For seven years, if you were a politician in central Indiana, that WXNT mic flag was firmly fixed in front of your mug. Abdul MUST ask the first question. The few times I filled in for him at a press conference while he was teaching, the ENTIRE press corps goes silent waiting for his question. I guess that’s a metaphor for his entire stay there. Abdul was his own producer, reporter, and boss. His hours were insane, and he wasn’t getting paid overtime. He just has a passion for his work. Most hosts would have burned out after, you guessed it, two or three years.

In October of 2008, I made a very tough personal decision. I had dreamed of working in radio my entire life, and I had a good starting point. But I was frustrated by the lack of shared passion for WXNT’s growth and struggling financially. Radio eats its young, and it does it through pay. I also hated getting up at 4 AM. I’m not the type to complain about my working conditions. If one of the two parties aren’t happy, they should voluntarily separate.

As a libertarian, I was frustrated that the local Libertarian Party wasn’t working at it’s potential. I decided to pursue a new path.

Abdul has kept plugging away at WXNT. The clients had grown, and loyal listeners and advertisers seemed happy. The station, from what I hear, was making money… But not enough. Brian Moore was let go, along with Abdul to maximize profit, and they’ll be replaced by the Wall Street Journal. I am sure that some programmer in Pennsylvania has decided that this fits well with the station’s identity.

I hate to break it to them, but that identity left the station at 9 AM. It was an emotional morning for everyone. For me, it was probably the last time I’ll have the chance to visit a place that has meant a lot to me personally. I met Samantha because of my time there, I found a new career that I am passionate about because of my connections, and I made more close friends than any one person deserves in a lifetime. I include Abdul in this. He’s like my big brother. The picture above is Abdul and I at my wedding, where he served as a groomsman.

I know WXNT is special to Abdul for those three specific reasons as well… But this isn’t goodbye for him. Abdul’s phone has been ringing off the hook, and I give him one week before he’s asking the first question at some politician’s press conference.

AbdulFinal [ 1:54:15 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

• We have lowered our long-term sovereign credit rating on the United States of America to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’ and affirmed the ‘A-1+’ short-term rating.
• We have also removed both the short- and long-term ratings from CreditWatch negative.
• The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.
• More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.
• Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government’s debt dynamics any time soon.
• The outlook on the long-term rating is negative. We could lower the long-term rating to ‘AA’ within the next two years if we see that less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures during the period result in a higher general government debt trajectory than we currently assume in our base case. [More]

For most libertarians, their first stumbling block to the philosophy was how those in need will receive assistance. Even those that count themselves as party founders still probably get a little hot flash of anger when someone calls them “heartless” or “selfish.”

Libertarians are usually driven to the philosophy of non-intervention because they’ve witnessed first-hand how a government program, policy, or regulation is negatively affecting their community and they want to make a change.

Matt Zwolinski has written a great article at the Daily Caller entitled, “How libertarianism Helps the Poor.”

When I tell people that I work for the Libertarian Party, I often hear:

“Everybody knows that libertarians are greedy capitalists who favor the maximization of profit above all else. “Taxation is theft!” they cry, but the exploitation of the working classes fails to elicit any similar moral outrage. Libertarians, everybody knows, care about the rich to the utter neglect of the poor and vulnerable.”

Zwolinski’s article gives 3 fantastic rebuttals to this notion.

1. “The first mistake is to believe the government when it claims that its policies are intended to help the poor. They almost never are.”

2. “The second mistake is to confuse intentions with results. Even if government policies were intended to benefit the poor, we would have good reason to expect them to fail”

3. “The last mistake is to think that a concern with regulation and taxation is the sole defining feature of libertarianism. Libertarianism is about individual liberty, and while economic liberty is a part of that, it is not the whole. “

Cross Posted at LPIN.Org

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I noticed yesterday that the website RethinkingRedistricting.com was removed. I do not know what happened to it, and I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to compare the maps released by the Statehouse Republicans couldn’t be compared to the Rokita-drawn maps. Maybe removing the plan was the point, then?

Rethinking Redistricting was a plan put together by Secretary of State Todd Rokita (now the Congressman in the 4th District.) The plan put together districts based solely on census data. No other political data, aspirations, or considerations were used.

The Rethinking Redistricting plan were the maps the LPIN pushed to have adopted. So they wouldn’t be lost, I scanned in some old documents I had archived so you can view the details of the plan, including very high resolution photos of the districts.

View it here:

Here is a PDF available for download.

You can get high resolution maps of the plan here: Congressional, Senate, and House.

Here are the maps proposed by the Senate and House GOP: Congressional, Senate, and House.

Only 30 more IQ points, and he and I will be even… I hope he can make them up… :)

Ok… I am a little jealous of this kid’s gift.

It’s often said that WWII was the reason the Great Depression ended. Larry Summers recently proposed that the Japan tragedy would be beneficial to the world economy. (The truth is that oil dropped because they will be using less and many are predicting that the world’s 3rd largest economy will never recover. After any great tragedy that destroys personal property some economist says that we shouldn’t be gloomy because it’s actually good for the economy.

The truth is that war, economic stimulus, and natural disasters are bad for the economy. Watch this short video to learn why:

The broken window fallacy was first introduced by a French philosopher named Frederic Bastiat. He wrote a short book titled “The Law.” It’s surprisingly easy to read, and it will really enlighten you. Pick it up here.

This is pretty awesome:

My heart sank when I heard that the original was pulled from YouTube, but apparently it’s “all good.” It was just a hacked account.

As if we need more evidence that most US Senators are disingenuous, Chuck Schumer accidentally gave marching orders to fellow Democrats while reporters were listening:

And it worked.

I heard about Jacob Barnett recently on a national radio show, but forgot to Google him. Luckily, Yahoo! News ran an article on him today. He has an IQ of 170, and is a gifted kid that is working on disproving the big bang theory at twelve:

Hopefully parents that have children diagnosed with Autism or Asperger’s syndrome will take him as a source of inspiration.

It’s incredible that he’s local! I happened to be looking at the IUPUI Wikipedia page today, and saw that he’s a notable student there. Very Cool. Maybe I can get him to do my basic algebra homework for me so I can finish my IUPUI degree. :)

I am no fan of banks. I think most libertarians aren’t. I think institutions like the Federal Reserve (a banking cartel), the World Bank, and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) are organizations to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich with the blessing of most governments in the world. They help cause human suffering, especially in the third world, and I think they should be abolished.

Our nation, and global, economic security is tied to large banking institutions at the moment, for better or worse. So it’s a frightening proposition when a public labor union like SEIU is caught on tape trying to bring down one of these institutions. JP Morgan Chase Bank is one of, if not the, strongest organizations in the world. It was leaned on heavily in 2008. It’s my bank, and probably yours.

The sad part is that most people will not pay attention because it was first put forth by Glenn Beck. We have to open our minds, examine evidence, and try to clear the wheat and chaff. (I posted Rachael Maddow last week because she was right!) Be a thinking person. Listen to the audio, and then make a decision. Then share this on social networks if you find this to be a credible threat to spread the word.

Read and listen to Beck here.

Here is the raw video:

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