Back a couple of decades, the CBS affiliate in Minneapolis/St. Paul, WCCO AM, a 100,000 watt, clear channel (no other North American radio broadcast on that 830 khz AM frequency), moderate-to-liberal station with, at that time, the largest audience share of any major market radio station in the United States, was bought up by CBS itself to "improve" it. Having grown up listening to the station my entire life, I attributed the misguided changes they rapidly made to choices made by exec's from the coast who had a tin ear for the down home style that was the hallmark of the station long known as the "good neighbor to the northwest."

They retired or fired the familiar talent, most of whom were home grown and had been there for years, but were still funny and fresh, and shifted from a news, entertainment and information format with strong, good-natured, humorous personalities in every time slot, to a talk radio format, with confrontational hosts and a much more conservative perspective. Even though their audience share dropped immediately and continued to drop, they made no effort to bring any of the old talent back nor change direction to match their audience. I'm convinced their profits dropped as well.

None of it made any sense, except that, now, looking back, I believe the CBS executives were trying to shut down WCCO as a dominant, moderate-to-liberal voice in Minnesota. It's also clear that this, together with other Twin Cities radio stations that were also shifted to conservative talk radio formats has had what I take to be the desired effect. Politics in the entire state has shifted in a more conservative direction to the benefit of those at the top of the economic ladder: massive income tax cuts for those at the top and massive property tax cuts for business, as well as reductions in the corporate income tax.

At the same time, the average person is now paying much higher property taxes coupled with increases across the board in fees for government services including tuition for state college and university students, our public school systems (once among the most successful in the nation) are being cut to ribbons, roads don't get plowed as often in our winter snow storms, road surfaces across the state are crumbling and our highway bridges fall into the rivers they're supposed to carry us safely across.

Still, it doesn't matter what the ill effects, after many years of nothing but "conservative" attitudes exhibited in the media, many of my friends and neighbors now regard "taxes" as a filthy four-letter word, even when increases are proposed for those at the very top of the income scale who pay, on the average far less total state taxes and fees as a percentage of their income (8%) than those with lower incomes pay (12%).

What Glenn describes of the mainstream media is not just an accidental result of chasing after web hits or monetary profits. It's a concerted, calculated effort at thought control that has largely been successful. The idea that they're just giving us what they want us to hear is and always has been BS. What they're really trying to do is keep us from realizing what's really going on by keeping us focused on meaningless garbage.

Our MSM has been taken over by a cabal of wealthy, conservative individuals who are, quite successfully trying to reshape the thinking of our entire society and our national attitudes regarding economics in ways that benefit themselves massively, but keep us sufficiently focused in other directions (the evils of foreign terrorists and illegal immigrants, for example) that we don't notice how they're raiding the national treasury, exempting themselves from paying ANY taxes, using union busting and "free market" global economics to lower our salaries and, in a thousand different ways in almost every one of our day to day financial transactions, taking an unearned, undeserved cut of each of our financial resources.

If they succeed in carrying out this project, America as we have known it will no longer exist. Then, once they've destroyed our nation, they'll simply take advantage of the "global economy" they've created for themselves to move offshore to somewhere more attractive for them to live.