Romney debates Obama tonight at 6: we’ll get ready for the debate at 4:00 with RICK PERLSTEIN: will the candidates say anything they haven’t said a thousand times already?  Will the pundits declare Romney the winner because he didn’t make another terrible “gaffe”?  Rick is the author of the classic Nixonland; he wrote about the Republican National Convention for The Nation.
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Also: with BOB DYLAN’s new album “Tempest,” we’re back in the old, weird America: SEAN WILENTZ will comment; he’s the official historian-in-residence at the official BobDylan.com website, and author of Bob Dylan in America, our featured thank-you gift in the KPFK fun drive today (along with the beautiful vinyl version of “Tempest.”)   Please call and pledge during the show: 818-985-5735, or online at kpfk.org.

BOB DYLAN’s new album “TEMPEST”: GREIL MARCUS comments on Dylan’s  return to “the old weird America” of murder songs, ballads and tall tales.   Greil’s  decades of writing about Dylan are collected in the volume Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010.
Playlist: “Scarlet Town”;  “Long and wasted”;  “Tempest”: “The watchman he lay dreaming/ Of all the things that can be/ He dreamed the Titanic was sinking/ Into the deep blue sea.”
Listen HERE

LISTEN online HERE — SUBSCRIBE to iTunes podcast HERE
What happens when Americans find out what Romney tells his big contributors about the 47% who support Obama?  We’ll have analysis from JOHN NICHOLS, Washington correspondent for The Nation, and from RICK PERLSTEIN, author of Nixonland, who talks about Romney since Tampa.  WATCH Rick Perlstein video on the Republicans HERE;  READ Rick Perlstein on the  Chicago Teachers’ Strike HERE.
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Also: BOB DYLAN’s new album “TEMPEST”: GREIL MARCUS comments: his  decades of writing about Dylan are collected in the volume Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010.
Playlist: “Long and wasted”; “Scarlet Town”; “Tempest”: “The watchman he lay dreaming/ Of all the things that can be/ He dreamed the Titanic was sinking/ Into the deep blue sea.”

LISTEN online HERE — SUBSCRIBE to iTunes podcast HERE
The rise of a new American security state: Pulitzer-Prize winner DANA PRIEST of the Washington Post reports on a world so vast no one knows how many people it employs, how much money taxpayers spend on it, or whether “counterterrorism” and “homeland security” accomplish anything worthwhile.  Dana is co-author of  Top Secret America–it’s out now in paperback.  (originally broadcast 8/11)

Also: RUSSELL BANKS is one of our best writers – in his novel, Lost Memory of Skin, his protagonist, “The Kid,” is a registered sex offender forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of a school or park – and thus forced to join a homeless camp under a Florida freeway bridge.  The book is out now in paperback.  (originally broadcast 8/11)

plus: The US effort to “Rebuild Iraq”: how about this: a plant producing frozen chicken — in a country with no electricity for refrigeration? PETER VAN BUREN worked for the State Department during the “surge,” and recounts the way billions of dollars were lost to waste and fraud.  His book is “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People”–it’s out now in paperback.  (Watch chicken plant  PR video HERE.)  (originally broadcast 8/11)

LISTEN online HERE — SUBSCRIBE to iTunes podcast HERE
Today we have a special Democratic National Convention broadcast: TOM FRANK says that, even though Obama continued Bush’s TARP, Bush’s secrecy policies, and Bush’s drone program, and adopted Romney’s health care proposals, the Republicans have denounced him as a “socialist.”  Tom writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s.

Plus: HAROLD MEYERSON says 100 years ago the political challenge to the power of great wealth was more significant than it is today — look at Teddy Roosevelt in 1912: he fought for a federal minimum wage, an end to child labor and federal insurance that covered “the hazards of sickness, accident, invalidism, involuntary unemployment and old age.”   Also:  a legal right for workers to unionize.  Harold writes for the Washington Post op-ed page and The American Prospect.

Also:  The Real Romney – SCOTT HELMAN of the Boston Globe may know more about Mitt Romney than anybody else in journalism – he’ll talk about the things Romney himself won’t: Romney and Bain Capital, Romney in Massachusetts politics, and Romney as a Mormon.  He’s co-author of  The Real Romney, out now in paperback.

LISTEN online HERE — SUBSCRIBE to iTunes podcast HERE
The roots, the spirit, and the promise of Occupy Wall Street: TODD GITLIN explains the most dynamic phenomenon in left politics in more than forty years.  “We are the 99 per cent!”  Todd is professor journalism and sociology at Columbia; his new book is OCCUPY NATION.

Plus: the new documentary film “We Women Warriors” follows three native women who are caught in the crossfire of Colombia’s warfare and who use nonviolent resistance to defend their people’s survival.  Filmmaker NICOLE KARSIN explains — the film is screening on LA August 24-30 at DocuWeeks at the Laemmle NoHo7.  WATCH the trailer HERE.

Also: Boom and bust in the new old west: RUBÉN MARTÍNEZ fled to the desert to escape his urban addictions.  What he found there was a world of devastating poverty and outrageous wealth, sublime beauty and ecological ruin.   His brutally honest new book is DESERT AMERICA.  “No book that I’ve read in the last 20 years has inspired so much genuine hope for the future of the West” -Mike Davis.

The man who killed six at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin was a prominent white-supremacist: JOHN NICHOLS explains.

Also: Gore Vidal on politics:  our conversation in September 2000, which covered Ronald Reagan as actor and politician, JFK as failed president, Gene McCarthy as truth-teller, and the 2000 Shadow Convention in LA, which the LAPD shut down Gore Vidal’s speech — the full 70-minute tape is our featured premium in the KPFK Fund Drive today.