…I gotta cop to the fact that I’ve sorta let my leftyblog reading lapse a bit.

I mean, wouldn’t you?

But after one of my periodic sashays through the regional leftybloggery, I have to add that while he’s been wrong about pretty much every political question in eight years, I look forward to many more years of shaking my head and fisking a living, healthy Jeff Fecke, and wish him the best of luck in his treatment.

Bob Collins at MPR notes a crime that few others did:

In Colorado, a gunman walked into a school and started shooting kids, until a hero teacher tackled him.

I checked the story, from a Denver TV station:

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said the suspected shooter has been arrested. A well-placed source told CALL7 Investigators the suspect is Bruco Eastwood, 32. It’s unclear if Eastwood has any affiliation with the school. He likely will face two counts of attempted murder.

Witnesses said the gunman was tackled by math teacher David Benke as he apparently attempted to reload his high-powered rifle.

Wanna bet Keith Olberman or Rachel Maddow jump on this bit here?

A parent who saw the incident told 7NEWS that the gunman kept mumbling to himself, “I’m fighting for freedom. I’m fighting for freedom,” as he was being taken down.

But Collins had a bigger question:

That’s not the story. This is the story: These stories are no longer considered newsworthy enough for the front page of the country’s major newspapers.

Collins wonders why.  I think there are a couple of intertwining possibilities:

1. Nobody died.  Thank God.  Two wounded victims may be below-the-fold in Denver; it’s not even page 10 in Chicago.
2. Obama is President.  There’s no need for the media to keep showing that the wheels are coming off society.  And so the media will not.
3. The big media is starting to twig to the fact that these stories reinforce the right’s take on the Second Amendment.  The middle-school was a “Gun Free Zone” – and yet, mirabile dictu, the gunman had a, er, gun.

Am I too cynical?  Am I cynical enough?

Salem Communications – which owns both Townhall.com, America’s leading online conservative clearinghouse and Salem Radio, which in turns owns the radio station on which my radio program airs – has apparently purchased leading conservative site Hot Air, owned by Michelle Malkin and which employs my radio colleague Ed Morrissey, and its million daily pageviews.

Someone notify the media! The barbarians are at the gates!

I started out my “adult” life, at least to about halfway through college, as a liberal.

But starting in high school, I had doubts; the Dems were a disaster on national security; the economy was falling apart; I started to have doubts that “giving everything to everyone” was anything more than a good campaign promise to people who didn’t think all that hard in the first place.

Those doubts culminated in looking furtively about the polling station in November of 1984 and pulling the lever for Ronald Reagan.  And then lying to my parents about it.  For the time being, anyway; I obviously stayed conservative; within two years, I was hosting a conservative talk show in the Twin Cities.

So here’s a question: was my political evolution, which was a  considered result of a whole lot of reading and thinking and discussion, a sign of growing up and finding myself when it came to my political worldview?

Or a sign that I was just incoherent?

The latter, claims Jacob Weisberg in a Newsweek article called “Why the Public Is to Blame for the Political Mess”

In trying to explain our political paralysis, analysts cite President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for important legislation. These are large factors to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit of all: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

That’s a fairly big thought, there.  We’ll come back to that.

Anybody who says you can’t have it both ways hasn’t been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the economic stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but polls reflect something more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, and other problems.

They neglect one other things; polls don’t exist in a vacuum.

A year ago, “the public” was wracked with Bush fatigue.  With the full connivance of a media that was completely in the bag for Barack Obama (painting him as a centrist, for crying out loud), they had a brief fling with radical liberalism.  Then they saw the price tag, and the rot that would set in if Obama’s agenda passed, and changed their minds.

They may be demanding action – but not the action that Reid, Pelosi and Obama want to bring them.

Weisberg is half right. The public had a moment of immature incoherence.  It lasted through all of 2008.

We’ll see if people grow up by 2012.

KSTP-AM pulled the plug on its thirty-year, once-wildly-successful experiment with talk radio this week.

General Manager Ginny Morris, from the station’s website:

Radio is an ever-changing landscape and throughout its 87-year history, KSTP-AM has been known for many things. In the very earliest days, when my grandfather was programming the station, we covered a lot of news and carried the NBC radio network, we aired soap operas and played many different types of music. Later, when my dad ran the station, he played Jazz and classical music, and then evolved into playing rock music, which at times dismayed his dad.

On Monday, February 15, we evolve again, and you will know us as AM1500 The SportsTalk Station.

Joe Soucheray and Patrick Reusse invented SportsTalk in this town – arguably in the country – and we look forward to featuring them together every afternoon. They are wonderfully talented entertainers and storytellers, as individuals and as a team, and they will anchor our new line-up that we think you will enjoy.

Well, we could hardly enjoy it any less than the one the station’s had for the past year or two.

I more or less predicted this a little over a year ago.  KSTP’s been drifting toward…something for a long time, now.

A little background:  After almost sixty years as one of the leading radio stations in the country (in the ’30s and ’40s), and then one of the top music stations in the metro (60s and early 70s), KSTP-AM switched to talk radio in about 1980; music radio had pretty well died on AM radio by that point.  And in the days of the “Fairness Doctrine”, it nearly died again; Hubbard Broadcasting was actively seeking a buyer for its once-flagship station, amid rumors that the FCC would soon decommission the entire AM band.  It even stuck the AM operation in the old transmitter shack, on Highway 61, to make it easier to move.  It’s asking price in 1986? A ludicrous $5 million (or so said the rumor among the staff at the time, of which I was one).

And then, in 1987, Ronald Reagan killed the “Fairness” Doctrine, opening up the radio market to untrammelled political talk of all kinds.

A consultant pitched this new host – Rush Limbaugh – to KSTP’s management, saying that sure, Limbaugh was political, but his schtick was much more about his irreverence and humor.  So Hubbard took a chance.

And it paid off handsomely; in 1986, the AM station was the poor cousin of the Hubbard family.  By 2003, with Limbaugh, Jason Lewis, Bob Davis and the newly-“conservative” Joe Soucheray dominating their time slots, the AM station was rolling in money, and financially carrying the rest of the Hubbard slate (“Chick-Talk 107”, KS95, and Channels 5 and 45), making so much money they were able to experiment way outside the format with hosts like Tom Mischke.

But the rumors were always there; Hubbard didn’t like being “conservative”.  Ginny Morris pined for the days when her grandfather’s KSTP, like its hereditary nemesis WCCO, was all things to all people, offended nobody, and was the broadcast pillar of the community (back when the community had three newspapers, three TV stations, a couple dozen radio stations – and that was it).

And so when Jason Lewis, and then Rush Limbaugh, left KSTP – buoyed by a 2005 meme among consultants that “conservative talk is dead” –  the station replaced them with middle-of-the-road milquetoast, and sports.  The station landed the Minnesota Twins in 2007.

The mixture performed terribly.  KSTP’s ratings are a shade over half of what they were seven years ago.  More importantly, the station’s revenues are doing about the same; scuttlebutt around the market says that KSTP’s revenues are off 40%.   Some of that is the economy, of course – but it’s worth noting that revenues at “AM1280 The Patriot”, where I do a show, dropped by a tiny fraction of the losses at KSTP (expressed as percentage of overall revenues).  By way of discussion, KTLK-FM, which started with the same “dog’s breakfast of ideas” format to which KSTP has aspired, saw its revenues drop by 30% – and decided to switch to more or less all conservative talk to get back in the saddle.  Because conservative talk is the only mass format in radio that’s paying its freight these days.

Except, perhaps, sports.

Amy Carlson Gustafson at the PiPress covers the carnage:

As of Thursday, the station had gotten rid of weekday on-air folks including Bob Berglund, Jay Kolls, mid-morning show hosts Shawn Prebil and Chris Murphy, late-night host Al Malmberg and midday host Kelly Webb.

Most of whom – Berglund excepted – should never have been on the air in the majors anyway.

KSTP’s management rationalizes:

“In a talk radio marketplace that’s gotten pretty [crowded], we’ve found that it’s tough to succeed if you don’t own a position,” [Hubbard exec Dan] Seeman said. “KSTP-AM was the original talk station and for a long time that meant something — you could do some talk, some opinion, some sports. Well, then, all of a sudden you have specialized formats in conservative talk, liberal talk, sports talk, pop culture talk. We really decided we needed to settle on a position.

This is tush-covering.  KSTP-AM had a position.  It was in fact a very dominant one, ten years ago; Limbaugh, Lewis and Soucheray were as potent a ratings punch as this market has seen.  KSTP squandered that position.

And our strengths are Joe, Pat and Twins baseball. Sports, sports, sports.”

Well, no.  Those are the only strong hosts the station left itself with.

The station is eventually going to switch to ESPN’s morning show, which would normally be considered a bit of a black eye for a station with KSTP’s history and size; most big stations in major metro areas have their own local morning show.  But KSTP’s morning lineup has been utterly hapless since 1980, and the gabbling bobbleheads on ESPN will likely be an improvement. Or at least cost less.

As a way of making a rayon purse out of a sow’s ear, it’s not a bad move; it’ll support the Twins broadcasts better, it’ll draw a defined audience for the first time since the station ditched political talk, and it’ll give the station the first chance it’s had at an actual identity – “position” – in a long, long time. Maybe, if they’re lucky, it’ll be a “position” that management actually gets behind as well.

Which would have helped the station a lot over the past 5-10 years or so.

In my comment section, Jeff Kouba pointed me to a recent “book review” by the Strib’s Kristin Tillotson.

At least, it became a book review, of sorts.  But in the first graf, it was hard to tell (emphasis added):

Wells Tower is a serious wiseacre, the kind who gets away with it not because of his cleverness, but because he cuts to hard truths.

As a clever wiseacre with a thing for hard truths, I sat up and took notice!

 Written with startlingly original voice, careening imagination and an abiding fondness for what Teabaggers would call “the non-elites,” his stories are set in a surreal America we know, but aren’t sure we want to.

I’m trying to wrap my brain around a thought process that prods Ms. Tillotson to swerve that far outside any rational connection to her theme to take a passive-aggressive, blovious swipe at what may have once been half of her newspaper’s audience.

And I’m still trying.

So I sent this email to Ms. Tillotson:

Ms. Tillotson,

I’m trying to figure out the point of the “Teabagger” slur in your review of Wells Tower’s short story collection.  It seems – labored? 

I’d suggest a couple of possibilities, but I’d hate to get written off as one of those with “pursed lips, bloviating and passive-aggression“, so I figured I’d let you put it all in your own words.

Mitch Berg

I don’t expect anyone from the Strib to respond to mere peasants, of course.  And if they do, it’ll be something…well, pursed, blovious and passive-aggressive, usually. 

But I’ll keep you posted.

The dumbest rationalization?  “O’Keefe didn’t wear his [fanciful and exaggerated] pimp outfit into the actual neighborhoods where the ACORN offices were located”.  Gosh, d’ya think?  I’m told that Steven Colbert isn’t a real blowhard conservative pundit, either.  And it’s just possible that “Gunga” Dan Rather didn’t do a great job of passing as a Muj, either:

Slightly less dumb:  “O’Keefe edited his footage”.  Well, doy.  Everyone edits their footage.  Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric edited their interviews with Sarah Palin – allegedly to present her in the least flattering light possible (we won’t know until ABC and CBS release the raw footage of their interviews – which, of course, they will not, although they’ve rarely been shy about doing so to buttress whatever credibility they may actually have).  Did O’Keefe’s edits mislead anyone?  Well, ACORN seemed confident enough in the credibility of the footage, edited or not, to fire pretty much everyone busted in the sting. 

A little dumber:  “O’Keefe’s footage only showed the ones that got caught!”  Well, again, doyy.  The media doesn’t care about “dog bites man” stories; its when the man bites the dog that ears perk up.  How many ACORN officials fell for the sting?  Half a dozen?  If half a dozen GOP state chairpeople agreed with a cretinous proposal to spend taxpayer money on, say, polo ponies, do you think the mainstream media would dowse up a “climate of corruption” story or two?

The jury is still out on this next bit; is O’Keefe’s sting better or worse than this bit here, where Luke Hellier at Minnesota Democrats Exposed busted an Uptake “reporter” not only deliberately editing footage from the Capitol to create a story where none existed, actively misleading the public about the nature of an exchage between Rep. Mack and ..:

Click to view full size

…but giggled about her ability to do it on Twitter?

Now, I’ve gone around a bit with the Uptake.  On the one hand, most of the people involved in leading the group strive to present a clear and accurate, if not unbiased, representation of the news.   On the other hand, they are committed to a “citizen journalism” model where virtually anyone can contribute, leading to some fairly ethically decrepit “reporting” (which the Uptake management, to their credit, have endeavored to fix).

The rationalization came from Charlie Quimby, who on the one hand writes/wrote for one lefty think tank or another and thus gets/has gotten some liveihood out of rationalizing the left’s behavior, but on the other hand is usually a fairly rational guy:

Kid needs supervision, like some other young videographers I could name

Now, I am not a news reporter – but I tried my hand at it, and never (allow me to brag a bit) lost a gig for breaching whatever passes for “ethics” in the business.  Someone tell me again – did O’Keefe’s editing actually put words in peoples’ mouths they did not say?  Did it imbue them with thoughts they did not think?  Did it present a misleading impression of the ACORN employees’ malfeasance (that would have made firing them, as ACORN did, a mistake?)

Because it’d seem Ms. Maye did.

Where’s the equivalence?

And if the Uptake hires people (Ms. May was, according to Hellier’s copy and paste of Uptake’s posting on Ms. May, at the capitol more or less full-time), has the Uptake’s commitment to covering the news fairly and honestly passed its “sell by” date?

I’ve spent much of the life of this blog – eight years, now – railing against the evils of smearing by association. 

It’s a particularly slimy tactic in the hands of the not-very-bright, on all sides of the putative political aisle.  Being a conservative, I bag on particularly egregiously stupid examples from the left (like this, that, the other thing, this, and of course this), but of course it’s not limited to a party.  Much.

Still, there are those from whom we expect better.  Or like to think we do.

Erik Black at the MinnPost – the dean of Minnesota political reporters (or, I guess, one of a classroom full of deans, once you add in Pat Kessler, Mary LaHammer and Bill Salisbury), makes noises about also rejecting the whole stupid game in this piece about the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which Governor Pawlenty will be attending:

In February, Gov. Tim Pawlenty will take his undeclared campaign for the Republican presidential nomination back to Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC, as it is always called, is a  major annual gathering of conservatives and an opportunity for Repub candidates and might-be candidates to strut their stuff before various elements of the party base (although CPAC, which is put on by the American Conservative Union, is technically non-partisan).

Among the co-sponsors of the conference one finds a name one hasn’t heard much since the mid-20th century — the John Birch Society. As a refugee from that century, I can tell you that when your mom and I were kids the “Birchers” (I use the term I grew up using and mean no offense by it) were a leading symbol of right-wing extremism.

Of course, “right wing extremism” is a term that’s more or less lost all meaning, largely because of the efforts of the news media of which Eric Black has been a part for his entire working life.  I joke about it; “if a fiscal-conservative socially-libertarian constitutional originalist orders a pizza in the woods and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an extremist?”, I ask, constantly, when people refer on the left and in the media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) to everyone from Tom Tancredo to (this makes me mildly dizzy) Tim Pawlenty as “extremists”. 

But Black, being all responsible, rejects the whole stupid game.

Or…does he?

So this is an obvious set-up to play the always popular “dissociate yourself” card. Under the rules of that card game, everyone involved in CPAC (including Pawlenty, as a speaker) has to repudiate the Birchers or be tainted by association with the most extreme thing the group ever said or did. It’s fun and easy to play (see Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright) but also stupid and demeaning (ibid). A letter-writer to the Strib played the card early this week, asserting that Pawlenty’s attendance would amount to an endorsement of Bircher views.

Well, so far, so good – although I think it’s fair to observe that the MinnPost is no better than the rest of the left-leaning mainstream media at focusing attention on the right’s fringe players; the nutcase with the racist sign at the Tea Party, the stars-‘n-bars-flying redneck at the Second Amendment rally, the Tenth Amendment’s long-dead associations with slave-owners-rights.

But Black is better than that.  Isn’t he?

I actually did inquire of the spokester for Pawlenty’s undeclared campaign whether the governor might want to comment on whether his willingness to speak at an event co-sponsored by the John Birch Society implied any association between his views and theirs, but the calls and emails (over several days) received no reply.

And why would that be?  Because Black works for an organization that is pretty up-front about working for the “enemy?”  Or merely because the very question is, to quote Black himself in the context of this very issue, “stupid and demeaning?”

Still, I cannot bring myself to play the card.

Am I overly cynical, or do I detect a silent, implied “when did the Governor stop beating his wife?” in Black’s repudiation of the whole “stupid, demeaning” issue?

Because if there is no story there – if there is no evidence throughout Pawlenty’s career of any sympathy, overt or otherwise, for the Birchers – then why write about it at all?

I was surprised and interested to learn that the John Birch Society was still in business. But, as this recent NYTimes where-are-they-now feature indicates, they are still kicking, based in Grand Chute, Wis., (near Appleton, Oshkosh, Green Bay), still believing in what its leaders call a satanic conspiracy to take over the world.

Right.

So what?

Black gives a brief lesson on the history of the Birchers – they’re anti-UN, anti-Communist, and have espoused some pretty wacky things over the decades – and then cuts to what passes for his chase:

So, back to the present. If Tim Pawlenty wants to be president, he certainly must say what he thinks the U.S. relationship to the U.N. should be, but he doesn’t have to start from any particular that he agrees with the long-standing JBS position just because he spoke at a conference co-sponsored by the JBS.

Right.  Especially since “sponsorship” is a come-one, come-all thing, as opposed to an implication that a “sponsor” has any special ideological traction:

Of course, Pawlenty is no more implicated in JBS’s beliefs than any of the many other speakers, which includes other leading undeclared presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Mike Huckabee was scheduled but has canceled. Sarah Palin was invited but has declined. The current list of speakers, co-sponsors and exhibitors is available here.

Right.

So – the story is…what?  That no candidate needs to apologize for being at an event sponsored (in tiny measure) by a splinter group that nobody’s taken seriously since the Johnson Administration?

Why, that’d be like saying that one needn’t discount the opinion of Mark Dayton, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, Steve Kelley, John Marty and Taryll Clark even though none of them have renounced the activities of International ANSWR (who are involved in much left-wing agitation), since none of them have expressly shown sympathy for America’s last Stalinist fringe group.  It’d be another “why did you stop beating your wife” moment.

Pawlenty needs to improve on that showing more than he needs to repudiate the John Birch Society, but he really needs to return my calls anyway.

To answer a question that Black himself considered “stupid and demaning?”

Just curious.

The Gawker – which serves as a model and poster-child for the dumbing down of the alternative media  – notes that Fox News sandbagged Jon Stewart.

And how do they know this?

Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart’s case: A lot!

News flash; opinion shows edit things to reinforce their dominant opinion.

But here’s the interesting question – and perhaps the Gawker, whilst still in full dudgeon over the abuses heaped on Stewart, can be inveigled to ask this one:  since Fox made the raw footage available, when will ABC and CBS make the full footage of the Gibson and Couric interviews with Sarah Palin available?

If “Faux” can actually do the right thing, while ABC and CBS cling to the fiction of their institutional detachment on the one hand while stonewalling the truth on allegations that they did to Palin pretty much what O’Reilly seems to have done with Stewart, what does that say about the mainstream media?

(Other than “nothing that hasn’t been amply proven before”, I mean).

Hunch:  If I asked a reporter, perhaps one of those talking media heads on “On The Media”, I’d expect some laborious treatise on how the “serious” media need to keep their footage secret to uphold the standards of the “profession”.  Or something equally ripe.

When I read Max Blumenthal’s smear piece on James O’Keefe yesterday, something about it didn’t pass the stink test.  Part of it is that it was, well, written by Max Blumenthal, son of Sid “Dirty Liar” Blumenthal, who is one of the Dems’ big smear merchants.  Part of it, as I noted yesterday, is that a lot of the piece looked like assumptions based on assumed guilt by association.

I was, od course, right.  David Weigel writes for the Washington “Independent”, a site that’s under the same “Center for Independent Media” umbrella as the Minnesoros “Independent”.  But while Weigel is a pretty committed lefty, he’s also a reporter with enough integrity that I usually pay attention when he writes.

And he’s un-thrilled by some things in Blumenthal’s piece, and the blog post that led to it.

Read the whole thing – which takes down, point by point, pretty much everything in the Blumenthal piece, from the left. on a pure fact-checking basis.  The guilt-by-association that Blumenthal laboriously-yet-lazily declared, based on second-hand sourcing that putatively traced back to Weigel, would seem to be largely debunked.

One of many samples:

In my original post, I wrote that “O’Keefe’s position at the Leadership Institute gave him some ownership of the event, but in general the crowd consisted of conservatives and libertarians who wanted to see some controversy.” What I meant was that unlike the reporters in the room or the college students watching the spectacle, O’Keefe was Epstein’s co-worker. He didn’t wander in off the street — he knew his colleague was planning an event, knew it was so controversial it was moved out of the building, and he tagged along. But to some readers, that sentence suggested that O’Keefe was, indeed, a planner of the event. He absolutely wasn’t.

There’s some sloppy reporting on the left:

I’m really not used to being part of a story like this. In one week, James O’Keefe — who I’ve been writing about for months — has been linked to an organization that gave me a fellowship (the Collegiate Network) and an event I happened to be at in 2006. So I apologize for giving the impression that I confirmed all the details of the OPP and Salon stories, and I’m glad that The Village Voice has clarified its own reporting using my research.

Which isn’t to say that Weigel’s not going to close ranks with the rest of his crowd…:

As for my original point that there’s a conservative subculture that indulges in extremist politics with the expectation that no one will find out and care — well, I stand by that, and I think this episode has gone some way toward changing that.

…because he’s right; in and among the ranks of conservatives, there are some nutcases.  It’s in my interest as a mainstream center-rigtht conservative to note that it’s a vanishingly tiny minority (which is the truth, although it never quite vanishes; they get slavish drive-by coverage whenever there’s a Tea Party, for example); it’s in the left’s to create the impression that it’s the majority.

Which is why Blumenthal wrote the piece, omitting all exculpatory context and torturing Weigel’s statements out of all resemblence to reality to begin with.

Dana Milbank sniffs down his patrician nose that Scott Brown, a Republican, is voting with his party:

The self-styled “independent” senator spent the rest of the session repeating GOP talking points about tax cuts for all, going “back to the drawing board” on health-care reform, and being “the 41st vote” to sustain filibusters.

I’m wondering; did Dana Milbank wax similarly pithy when Al Franken finally made it to Washington and promptly handed his leash to Harry Reid?

Brian Lambert shows why KTLK-FM had such a rocky start in the Twin Cities, in a piece that purports to be about Air America tanking; along the way, it also shows why liberalism is starting to gasp for air in the age of Obama.

Lambert starts with the genesis of his short-lived radio show:

I was summoned to a meeting with Clear Channel Communications “talk radio guru”/consultant, Gabe Hobbs, after only a couple weeks on the job. Having just spent a chunk of the previous 15 years covering radio consultants, or more accurately, the inanity and chaos they left behind, I was prepared to sit across from a complete cartoon.  (OK, not every radio consultant I had met or interviewed was a “complete” cartoon. But that’s a little like saying “some cigarettes are good for you”, to which you reply, “yeah, the ones you don’t smoke.”)

Lambo got that one right.  But I digress.  But so did he.

In their wisdom the local Clear Channel group had decided that “a WCCO for the 21st century” was the way to go for the FM talk experiment they were starting up.

Which was how I put it at the time; for whatever reason, a generation of consultants decided that conservative talk was dead (based largely on wishful thinking after the 2004 election), and tried floating the “all things to all people” format all over the country, including KTLK and KSTP-AM.

After saying that he wasn’t sure what to make of the idea of dogs and cats playing together, Hobbs conceded he was intrigued by the righty-gal vs. the lefty-guy dynamic. And then he got to the nut of modern (conservative) talk radio.

(I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but I swear the essentials are accurate.)

And he’s right about the consultant’s opinion being accurate – an awful lot of “talk radio gurus” deeply hate conservative talk; some of them are ideological liberals, but most of them are just dying to come up with a take on a format that clicks, somewhere, and makes them millions of dollars in consulting fees.  It’s not going all that well, by the way, after almost 20 years of trying.

One of the problems is the contempt these people have for “the talk radio audience”.  Mr. Hobbs would seem to have shared his with Mr. Lambert:

“Try to keep in mind,” said Hobbs, “that the average listener for a show like yours is a 42 year-old guy who doesn’t follow the news all that close but is listening because he doesn’t want to be left out of the discussion. What he wants from you is something he can bring to conversations at work and at home. Something that makes it appear he’s in touch with what’s going on. You’re not here to educate him so much as you are to give him a few ideas he can throw out to feel like he’s part of the conversation.”

Well, it must work; Pew shows that Limbaugh’s audience is better-informed on news and current events than the average American, testing about the same as the famously-smug NPR audience in terms of overall knowledge.

Which is – even Lambert might admit – at odds with what the consultant had to say about ’em.

Well, maybe Lambert wouldn’t admit it:

Since this image so thoroughly gelled with the image I’d had for years of the Limbaugh Dittoheads…

The point being that talk radio doesn’t square well with having contempt for one’s audience.  Consultant Gabe Hobbs’ advice famously splattered; KTLK-FM’s first incarnation, the “WCCO for the 21st Century” famously cratered on impact.  (Does anyone remember their first lineup?  Colton and Guest in the morning?  Pat Kessler? Sarah and Brian?  Dan Conry?  They wanted to be all things to all people so badly they practically adopted Norwegian accents).  Part of it was the concept; part of it was some of the talent wasn’t that talented.  But mostly, it’s that whether people really are as stupid as Gabe Hobbs thinks they are (and that image “gells” with that of Lambert, who is lest we forget one of the Twin Cities foremost media columnists) or not, they can tell in this day and age when they’re being condescended to.  When the whole concept for your format is based on the kind of cynicism that Lambert and Hobbs shared, you think it doesn’t show?

It did!

No, really:

A radio audience of middle-aged guys who, for whatever the reason — distraction, indifference, laziness and/or stupidity — haven’t done their own homework on the big events of the day but want to pretend they have among their workmates, pals and spouses, by staying up to date with the bumper sticker slogan du jour. Hmmm, and I guessed “Make Love Not War” wasn’t exactly what these guys wanted to repeat down at the office, across forklifts in the warehouse, or over dinner, to impress the wife and kids with how tough it is out in there in a real man’s world.

That is, of course, the conceit that drives the entire mainstream media; you, the people, are bunch of mindless cattle that need your news, your entertainment and everything short of your food carefully pre-digested for you, lest you choke from trying to think about something too big. Information is too precious a gift to get in too big chunk – at least for all of you lumpen peasants.

No.  Again, really:

Beyond Hobbs’ carefully parsed point, is this: The “pretense” of thoughtful consideration, at least in terms of a commercially successful narrative delivered via mass media, requires much … much … heavier doses of simplicity and indignant finger-pointing than scholarly nuance.

Lambert mentions “simplicity” – as opposed to condescenscion – like it’s a bad thing.  As if making complex ideas “simple”, or simpler, isn’t among the most important missions for all of journalism, from Edward R. Murrow through NPR down to the Highland Villager.

This is all a lot of set-up for a couple thoughts on the little-lamented demise of Air America, the “liberal alternative” to the monolithic presence of conservative-radio. There are roughly 12,500 radio stations in the U.S., 22% fall under “news/talk” and “religious”. The former describes a few, like WCCO, and WBBM in Chicago, but mostly its conservative talk,  and the vast majority of the “religious” are conservative-driven. Moreover, a significant of those conservative stations are full-power licenses, broadcasting across the entirety of  all of the biggest metro areas in the country. By … stark … contrast, from its inception in 2004 Air America was confined to much lower-power AM stations that only barely blanketed the entirety of the few  metro markets they could buy in to.

Lambert, the media columnist who chided [his mental caricature of] the conservative talk radio audience’s “simplicity”, apparently needs to oversimplify the issue himself.  Radio stations aren’t sinecures; every format has to prove itself at every station, every time the ratings “book” comes out.  Big conservative talk – Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck – settled on big AM stations because it pays the bills.

And the fact that Air America had to “buy in” to metro markets shows what an awful concept it was.  Becuase nobody pays to get Limbaugh.  The Rush Limbaugh show (and Hannity, and Beck, and Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Dennis Miller and every other conservative show that matters) is free to the stations that carry it, provided they agree to carry the network’s commercials, 5-8 minutes worth per hour.  That’s it.

If there were any organic demand for Air America, they’d have been able to do the same.  But there was not.  So in New York, Chicago and LA, they had to pay radio stations to carry the programming.

And even that didn’t work.

It’s not as simple as saying “conservtives got all the big stations!”, but it’s in fact the truth.

But the bigger problem — by far — is the mindset of your average liberal, who, in my unscientific survey is a somewhat different animal than Gabe Hobbs’ mythical under-informed 42 year-old male.  For one thing, if the gender breakout of national delegates is any indication, the average liberal is more likely to be a woman than a man. But, in my experience, there’s also the very familiar liberal quality of believing you already are the smartest guy/gal in the room, which means you hardly need some cartoonish radio bloviator spoon-feeding you your “fact of the day”. More likely — if you’re a liberal in the media — the liberal audience with whom you think you are simpatico will rear up and quarrel with every interpretation of statistics, trends and historical reference you dare make. They know better and if just given the chance could do better.

Which is an interesting view which, I suspect, has more to do with Brian Lambert’s view of himself than the NPR/MSNBC/Air America audience’s actual merits.

Where conservative media audiences display a startling affinity for what I’ve called “The Big Daddy Guru Complex”, pompous-to-preposterous all-knowing father figures, liberals, more often than not, maintain the attitude that “big daddy” is a bit of a ponce, and needs to be brought down a peg.

Dunno, Lambo.  I sat in front of a room full of Air America fans with Matt Entenza, Michael Medved and Fast Eddie Schultz a while ago.  And the AA fans were a lot more prone to chanting pre-approved slogans and hissing on command than the people to stage and ideological right, if you catch my drift.

The idea is a trend in search of evidence; the closest they come to “evidence” is the fact that, yes, people listen to Rush Limbaugh.

But it’s a fact of human nature that any mass group of people gets pushed, or pulled, by someone, and that the best way to pull is not through the mind, but through the heart; Someone who captures the group’s fancy on some level; Martin Luther King, Richard Simmons, Rush Limbaugh, Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton, Lech Walesa, John Lennon, Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan all led people in improbable directions by simplifying complex ideas into forms their followers could feel as much as think.

Lambert quotes a few talking heads re the “problem” liberalism under Obama faces, and concludes:

The takeaway is this: The Conservative narrative dominates this country because it is simple, asks (and requires) nothing of its audience other than that they accept it and express a kind of rote indignation … at others.

Leaving aside the poison-pen fuming about the audience’s motivations – Lambert’s wrong, but then he’s supposed to be wrong about conservatives.  Simplicity in a narrative is a good thing.

And at the end of the say, it’s not all that simple.  Conservatism itself takes a lot more mental energy to wrap ones mind around than liberalism; the ideas of abstemiousness, enlightened self-interest, and rejection of instant gratification both personally and culturally are tough ones for modern people to choke down.

As opposed to leaden cop-outs:

Given the lack of 2000-plus radio stations to amplify a counter-narrative,

Which is balderdash; the liberals have four broadcast networks, NPR, and practically every newspaper in the country.

It’s just that their narrative, at the moment, isn’t selling, and certainly isn’t up to the competition it’s getting in the marketplace.

I actually let this post sit for a couple of days as I tried to figure out how to respond to this next line:

as well as liberal resistance to paternalistic “guru-ism”,

Remembering the masses of liberals who “rejected guru-ism” by chanting in unison waiting for Obama to appear, I’m going to have to keep thinking about it.

Obama and the few bona fide liberals in D.C. are at a profound disadvantage when it comes to a very real battle of relentless accusation and sloganized consensus-building , which, sadly, is what works quite effectively on largely apolitical 42 year-olds who just want to sound like they know what they’re talking about.

And just like Gabe Hobbs, Brian Lambert leads with the contempt.  We’ll see how it works.

And he says about the Chicago politican…:

Bottom line: The burden to deliver such a message of constant attack — utterly justified in the case of how this economic disaster started — falls to a guy, Obama, who finds shamelessly demagogic rhetoric and divisive-ness-baiting beneath him and his idealistic standards of statesmanship.

Speaking of simplification.

Fearless – and, as it happens, inevitable – prediction:  now that Joe Repya has not only left the MN GOP, but is running for the Independence Party nod for Governor, he will become the Twin Cities’ media’s leading voice for conservative Republicans who are, let us never forget, inevitably disaffected by the rise of “extreme” (read: all) conservatism.

Now, I’m n0t going to bag on Joe Repya; a retired Army colonel who served in three wars, including one as an infantry platoon leader, which is just about the most dangerous job there is, he’s also been a leading voice among grassroots conservatives in Minnesota for the past seven or eight years.   He left the MNGOP last year because of differences with the new regime on Park Street, Tony Sutton and Micheal Brodkorb.  I’m not sure what the differences were – although I inadvertently caught some shrapnel from the firefight last year – but they’re the kind of thing vex a lot of us who care deeply about politics and government, but not so much about parties except as a means to affect, well, politics and goverment.

So I’m not writing to bag on Repya.

But if the media wants to convince Minnesotans that ideas like this…

Joe Repya, a longtime Republican now running for governor as an Independent, says he has an answer for the long-running battle over whether the Vikes should get a new stadium funded by taxpayer dollars: Yes, as long as the the state gets a controlling stake in the organization.

On his homepage, he writes:

As your next governor, I would agree to public financing of a new Viking stadium only if Ziggy Wilf and the NFL agree to sell a 51% equity of the Vikings to the State of Minnesota with a never to relocate iron clad clause. Ziggy could run the team as long as he wishes and without state interference. We will increase state revenues by allowing Minnesotans to purchase one share of non-voting, non transferable interests (like the Green Bay Packers “stock” program”) in the Minnesota Vikings. If Green Bay can own the Packers, Minnesota can own the Vikings.

…are the kinds of things that sends disaffected conservatvives to protest at the Capitol, they’ve got a rude surprise coming. State-owned football teams make no more sense than state-owned light rail lines or factories.

The holes in the idea aren’t only ideological, of course; and they’re obvious enough that even the City Pages gets it:

Two small points of order:

First, Green Bay doesn’t actually own the Packers; fans and investors own the Packers. The team has been publicly owned since 1923, when it was registered as a Wisconsin nonprofit corporation.

And when even the City Pages points out that forking over for a football team makes no sense in a year when the state budget is looking ghastlier than Tara Reid’s resume, you know there’s a problem.

So sorry, Twin Cities media.  I’ll give a shout to Repya for all he’s done for this country and for conservatism in Minnesota.

But nobody’s elected him “the voice of the disaffected” just yet.  There’s a whole lot of us out there who haven’t picked a leader yet, but it’s for sure we’re not going to let you do it.

Here’s a story that’ll make the media wonks on NPR’s On The Media knit their brows with academic exasperation:  Fox News is the most trusted news net:

A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.

Thirty-seven percent said they didn’t trust Fox, also the lowest level of distrust that any of the networks recorded.

I could jump up and down and invoke Berg’s Seventh Law (when liberals defame conservatives, it’s pretty much always pre-emptive projection), but this story actually brings up a much more interesting question.

The numbers hint at that question, being split among ideological lines:

There was a strong partisan split among those who said they trusted Fox — with 74 percent of Republicans saying they trusted the network, while only 30 percent of Democrats said they did.

CNN was the second-most-trusted network, getting the trust of 39 percent of those polled. Forty-one percent said they didn’t trust CNN.

Each of the three major networks was trusted by less than 40 percent of those surveyed, with NBC ranking highest at 35 percent. Forty-four percent said they did not trust NBC, which was combined with its sister cable station MSNBC.

Thirty-two percent of respondents said they trusted CBS, while 31 percent trusted ABC. Both CBS and ABC were not trusted by 46 percent of those polled.

Of course, the wonk class – hanging out at the cocktail parties as they do with their pet media figures – are “deeply concerned”, and chalk it up to some form of defect among the hoi polloi:

“A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” said PPP President Dean Debnam in his analysis of the poll.

Which, neither he nor apologists for the American media will tell you, is actually an anomaly worldwide.  In most of the world’s nations, press outlets have an overlying political orientation; The Times and The Frankfurter Allgemeine are center-right, Die Zeit and Le Monde are center-left, The Guardian is neo-socialist.  Like Fox, they report the news basically straight – but they are honest about their papers’ political worldviews.

The purported American media tradition says, on the other hand, that reporters and news outlets are to be not only completely detached – which violates several laws of human nature.  And this detachment – some of them persist in calling it “objectivity” – is enforced by nothing more than their more-or-less earnest say-so.

There’s a longer discussion about the nature of the “objective” American media, and how it’s not necessarily a huge conspiracy that they trend left-of-center while strenuously denying any bias.

But the main point is this; the European system works – provided that one believes that the news consumer is well-informed enough to account for his/her news outlets’ institutional biases.

The real question is “why does the American media and wonk establishment find this idea – that the people can do their own filtering without needing to trust to the dubious “objectivity” of “gatekeepers” to do it for them – so threatening?

Debnam:

“But the media landscape has really changed, and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.”

Debnam echoes the line that regional media wonks – and institutional media “criticism” shows like NPR’s On The Media (which is more of a labored weekly apologetic for the media’s excesses and liberal slant than anything) – will likely use in discussing the news; that bias about which the media is forthcoming is worse than unstated, denied bias is not only a bad thing, but a symptom of some deeper pathology among the simpletons who bypass the elites’ gatekeepers.

It’s a line that sounds, more and more, like “the peasants are revolting”.

(Disclosure: I haven’t watched a network newscast from any network, barring the odd emergency special report, in years and years).

Gallup has Obama’s approve/disapprove numbers dead even.

Oh, that Gallup.  They must be working for Karl Rove, too.

Question, Democrats:  As more and more polls show Obama in freefall, will they all be in bed with Fox, too?

And since Zogby has predicted a Democrat victory in every race since 1984, would it be safe to say that a) he’s in bed with MSNBC, and b) you lefties’ snarking about Rasmussen’s supposed Fox-friendliness is an example of Berg’s Seventh Law?

I was listening to NPR’s reliably center-left “Marketplace” last night.  And I almost pulled my car over from shock.

They did a piece on a union health plan.  The union – a hospitality workers union in Los Angeles – does things the old fashioned way; it collects its dues, and essentially runs its own private clinic where members essentially get unlimited healthcare for, basically, almost nothing out of pocket.  The report focused on the dental clinic, where workers pay $3 for a filling, $20 for a root canal, and $6 for an office visit.

The actual fees are paid out of a trust fund paid for by the employers, who pay a little over $4/hour into the union workers’ health plans.

It adds up to over $50 million a year, which for some 7,000 union workers and their dependents, means all-inclusive medical benefits, plus dental, which brings us back to [dentist working at the union clinic] Roger Fieldman. There’s a downside to providing good care at cheap prices.

FIELDMAN: We have a high no-show rate. Because essentially their dentistry is almost free.

The clinic’s no-show rate — that’s patients who miss appointments and didn’t call to cancel — is 20-25 percent. In his old private practice it was 5 percent.

FIELDMAN: We might have a two-hour appointment for some complex surgery, some dental implants, and then they just don’t show up! And for two hours of doctor and assistant time, what is the value of that? $1,000? More? The patient’s paying $6.

$6 being the fee for no-shows.

[Plan administrator] THROCKMORTON: When it’s only $6, there’s very little incentive, if it’s not convenient, for them to keep the appointment.

In other words, there’s no incentive to not waste all of that care.

And dentistry is relatively cheap.  But the waste goes into much bigger-ticket services as well:

Throckmorton says if there’s one thing he’s learned after balancing the books and the union’s trust fund all these decades it’s this: That when money is not a factor, people do not think much about waste.

Take, for example, the emergency room.

THROCKMORTON: We have no emergency room charge.

Some members will use the emergency room at any sign of sickness.

Sound familiar?

THROCKMORTON: If there’s any doubt about it, they go.

Or just because it’s convenient. Because there’s no co-pay.

THROCKMORTON: Now they can’t evaluate them and tell ’em, you’ve just got a cold, you don’t belong in emergency care. The hospital is obligated by law to see them in the emergency room. The cost is a minimum of $700.

Which the fund, of course, pays for.

Of course it sounds familiar.  The State of Minnesota’s employees were griping about similar services when they struck a few years back; they were horrified, horrified, at the thought that they might have to pay copays (which were still a fraction of what all the rest of us private-sector proles pay).

We’ll come back to that.

Now, for years the union didn’t make a big deal about how much health care people used. They wanted to give their members the most access to care. Until the recession slammed the hospitality industry.

THROCKMORTON: It was just almost like driving off a cliff.

Union workers’ hours fell 20 percent. Employer contributions, of course, dropped. The fund was spending more than what was coming in.

The story goes on to tell us that the union is raising some modest copays for some of the services, including $50 to hopefully prod customers into trying services other than the emergency room.

I finally did pull the car over (because I was, like, home from the store) and listened to the end of the story (which you should either listen to or read, at the link above); and then I yelled “OK?  It’s that it?  Close the circle!”

The story, interesting though it was, squibbed on two huge connections.

First: Hello?  This is a big reason healthcare is so expensive!  Most of America’s insured population gets insurance paid for by third parties, and are insulated from the true cost.  Third parties (with the union plan in the story being a fairly extreme example) not only hide the real cost, especially the real cost of waste, from the consumer, but also pump money into the system for the limited supply of care; it’s economics 101 that this is a recipe for immense price inflation.

Second: This is exactly how “single-payer” healthcare works, on the care side of things; when people don’t have to think about what they are somebody is paying for their care, they become casual about using it.  Which stretches the resources that are available.  Which means someone needs to react – either by introducing a bit of market discipline (adding copays, as the union in the story did) or rationing the care that the members get (as the UK, Canada, France, the Netherlands and Japan do). 

But then I suppose if you can’t count on NPR to cover for the big left, you can’t count on anything.

Air America is ceasing live broadcast operations today:

In a statement to employees of the New York-based network, Air America’s chairman, Charlie Kireker, wrote: “It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

Air America gets its last ratings book

To be fair, I figured it would have been out of business by 2006 at the latest.  Apparently there were enough liberals with deep pockets and shallow understandings of the broadcast market to flog the corpse for another four years.

“The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally . . .

Generally?  Sure!

But there’s one specific exception to that very broad generality; one niche within the larger format of political talk radio that was, is, and is slated to remain profitable – indeed, is prospering on an epic scale. 

That’d be the conservative talk radio that Air America set out to try to knock off, way back in March of 2004 – indeed, the very month that the Northern Alliance Radio Network got started.

Victors

Air America launched in March, 2004, and styled itself as a liberal alternative to conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. Although at one point its programming was heard on as many as 100 stations nationwide, it ran into financial trouble early. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October, 2006, and was sold to new investors for $4.25 million in early 2007.

It was never as close as even those numbers make it look.  Most of Air America’s “as many as” 100 stations were small, low-power operations on the fringes of their markets; when the network launched, it paid for its air time on its three most important affiliates (New York, LA and Chicago), and quickly ran out of money to do even that.  Indeed, the vast majority of its distribution came from Clear Channel, which also distributes Air America’s putative enemies Limbaugh, Hannity and Glenn Beck.  Air America programming was only really competitive in one market on one station (KFI in Portland Oregon) and then only for about a year.  Indeed, the only liberal talk that is remotely successful is Fast Eddie Schultz (who really is as dumb as liberals think conservative talk is), and Stephanie Miller, who basically does Laura Ingraham’s show with a lefty slant.

So goodbye, Air America.  You were good for a few laughs, back when we even cared about your existence (and that ended pretty much back in ’05). 

Stop by and say hi.  We’re the ones that are still on the air.

Ed Schulz – who actually is as dumb as the lefty caricature of conservative talk radio – on the importance of fair elections and working together to build a better, more civil society:

“I, uh, I, uh, I, uh, I dunno – if I lived in Massachusetts, I’d trah to vote ten tahms.  I dunno if they’d let me, but I’d chee-yut to keep those bastahds out.  Because that’s exactly what they are”.

No, Ed.  You might have to cheat to win a debate with a lobotomy patient, but I’m afraid it’s possible even Massachusetts Democrats might be more ethical than you.

And Ed?  You are living, breathing proof of Berg’s Seventh Law.

And there’s evidence even you know it:

A stopped clock is right twice a day – and Schultz may see some advantage in looking like the first libtalker to be seen to publicly spit up the koolaid.

Jon Stewart, fake newscaster, sets the barometer of the American media:

For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, “What would [Walter Cronkite] think?” Nowadays, it’s not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it’s more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.

Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host “has gone from optional to indispensable” in just a few short years.

I’ve managed to dispense with it. 

And Williams tells NPR’s Guy Raz that on occasion, when he feels his broadcast tap-dancing toward the precipice — tossing around a story idea for “what I call Margaret Mead journalism — where we ‘discover Twitter,’ ” for instance, or entertaining some other unfortunate editorial possibility — “I will, and have, said that, ‘You know, maybe we can just give a heads-up to Jon to set aside some time for that tonight.’

“I should quickly add, we have another set of standards we put our stories through,” Williams cautions. “But Jon’s always in the back of my mind. … When you make The Daily Show, it’s usually not for a laurel, it’s for a dart.”

But don’t worry:

None of this, the NBC anchor says, is to claim that Stewart and his crew have had some wholesale transformative effect on the news media.

Well, Stewart’s the symptom. 

When Cronkite ruled the airwaves, the media were the High Priests of Information; people trusted them (wrongly). 

Stewart is merely a high-concept extension of the same mass of skepticism that blogs, talk radio and the rest of the alt-media traffic.  It’s fashionably left-of-center enough for establishment liberal media figures like Brian Williams and NPR to recognize and ackknowledge.

Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh throws the mother of all political curveballs.  Or did he?

With the speed of Ferdinand Magellan on crack strapped to an Apollo rocket engine, news that actor/liberal activist icon Tim Robbins had contributed thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to conservative Republicans candidates – including Minnesota’s own Michele Bachmann – circumnavigated the blogosphere.  To Robbins’ ideological allies, the news proved more shocking than learning that Susan Sarandon is actually Robbins now former lover, and not mother:

Loyal Dems would undoubtedly be gobsmacked to learn that, if Federal Election Commission records are to be believed, Robbins has not only donated regularly to Democratic candidates over the past 18 years, he also has written checks to conservative Republicans. In the 2006 election cycle, according to public records, the actor gave $5,000 to 10 Republican candidates for the House and Senate—including, most shocking of all, Minnesota’s resident wingnut, Rep. Michele Bachmann. Why such largesse to the enemy? Former GOP congressman J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, who lost in 2006 despite Robbins’ $500 donation, was baffled and surprised when I reached him over the weekend. “Maybe because I covered the Durham Bulls as a sports broadcaster in the late 1970s and early ’80s?

The concept that the former Bob Roberts actor would have willingly contributed to any candidate with an ‘R’ next to their name is admittedly disarming – especially in light of Robbins and Sarandon’s past support for such candidates as Ralph Nader (leading Robbins to pen an op-ed defending his vote in the Nation).  But the FEC doesn’t distinguish between individuals and simply names submitted by a campaign committee from a check.  While a search for Tim Robbins in California produces results as seen below…

ROBBINS, TIM
LOS ANGELES, CA 90064
SELF EMPLOYED/ACTOR

…it also gives other, less entertainment-related results for multiple Tim Robbins living in the Los Angeles/Beverly Hills area.  Considering Robbins lists himself supposedly as anything from self-employed to a producer, or director, or actor and there are at least 7 different Tim Robbins in the industry, the possibility that multiple Robbins have been lumped together is not only feasible but likely.

And perhaps the most likely reality is that Robbins, well, simply goofed.  Almost all of Robbins’ supposed Republican donations took place in 2006, suggesting anything but a longstanding pattern of support to conservative candidates or causes.  

Unless Robbins suddenly starts showing up at Bachmann rallies and publicly endorsing her, I’m chalking this up to error – either on Robbins’ part or on overly zealous writers for The Daily Beast.

…it falls to people like me to pass this kind of thing along.

Y’know, I have always done my best to distinguish the parts of public broadcasting that do make a credible effort at being “public” as opposed to “the pet project of a set of well-heeled constituencies”.

But most of the good news is here in Minnesota.  National Public Radio is a depressing gulag of smug, preening, upper-middle-class, “I can’t believe anyone isn’t like us” liberalism.

Evidence? From National “Public” Radio, ‘Learn To Speak Tea Bag’.

Nope.  No bias here at all.

I’d love to get the point of view of some of my public radio friends on this one.

From Fox – nine stories, each of which harsh the “New Era Of Hope And Change” mellow, which the mainstream media ignored last year.

Our old friend Susan Lenfestey’s holiday cheer has apparently been harshed by President Obama’s first year in office…

…oh, who are we kidding?  Susan Lenfestey has never met a mellow she couldn’t harsh.

Still, even by her dysthemic standards, this blog post was a doozy:

Maya Angelou’s poem, Still I Rise, has been going through my head lately. Some verses:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Catch that?  If Susan Lenfestey’s special little world, Barack Obama – a child of the middle class, who’s benefited not only from the best (or at least highest-rated) education American money can buy but from the American people’s open-mindedness, is no different than a Jim Crow-era sojourner who had to deal with real, genuine, constant oppression!

I’d say “every single one of us who disagrees with the President must be no better in their eyes than some Grand Kleagle”, but I guess we’ve already established that).

Feel like that’s what our president is dealing with, and still, he rises.

Well, no.  He doesn’t.

Below is a reject from the Star Tribune on Obama’s Afghan speech. Yeah, it’s a tad dated, and we’re on to Copenhagen, but Barb is sick of holding up her end of the line without me, so I thought maybe something’s better than nothing. Or maybe not. Sorry for the absence, I lost my mind.

This absence of smart-ass riposte is brought to you by the kinder, gentler Mitch.  Or at least the Mitch that’ll let the occasional hanging curve-ball by out of pity.

While I’ve spent much of the last eight years bagging on former (?) Strib columnist Nick Coleman, it’s not been an unalloyed thing.  When he’s focused on being a city columnist, as opposed to a not-overbright pundit, he writes good stuff; at his best, he’s sort of a “made in Singapore” Studs Terkel. 

Of course, he was rarely at his best; less and less so as the years unwound.  He hit his nadir during the 35W Bridge collapse; he got downsized from the columnist stable shortly thereafter. 

He’s apparently found some sort of work with some sort of think tank.  But I suspect his “downsizing” was more than tad Potemkin; he still appears in the Strib.  Lots.

And it’s just not the same Nick.  I busted him over the summer, parroting MN2020 shrieking points, and not very well at that.  It’s almost like he gets copies of press releases, and just writes in condescending and not very literate insults between the lines.

So what’s Nick up to now?  Well, you be the judge (emphasis added), a week or so ago he turned his keen journalistic senses to what he apparently thought was the key conservative issue of the past few weeks- Obama pre-empting “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving”:

I also heard a “Tea Party” supporter on radio claiming that you can tell Obama hates America just by looking at him. All I can tell by looking at him is that his skin color is different than that of every other president. Maybe that’s what the Tea Party person meant.

Ah.  The old “Wing Nutz Are Teh Racist!, based on the off-handed and ill-considered (at best) remark by one person dragged out of context and immortalized by whomever  controls the edit suite” bit.  I hate to say it, but Coleman is making that whole “parrotting MN2020 without thinking” thing look pretty good in retrospect.  He’s now down to parrotting…Keith Olbermann?  Fast Eddie Schultz?  Rachel Maddow?

I was going to leave it at that.  Because I’ve long since learned that any effort I spend fisking Coleman is effort I could have spent…I dunno, itching my elbow?

But this is rich – where by “rich” I really mean “depressing that someone gets paid for writing the kind of duckspeak that’d get ignored on a fourth-rate leftyblog”.

We’ve heard the socialist slur repeatedly from such brilliant students of history as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann (Minnesota’s Poster Girl for Why We Need High School Civics Classes)

Says the guy who is a case study in how badly our system fails our students at science, logic and empirical reasoning.

and that pinnacle of wit and wisdom, Sean Hannity, who is the kind of Irishman my people used to refer to as “Blueshirts.”

“…my people…”

“Your people”, Mr. Coleman, came to America so that they could at long last leave their squalid anscestral squabbling back in the Old Country.  Like most of “our people”, they came to this country so they could escape, transcend and eventually forget the bigotries, hatreds and jealousies of their caste-ridden, incompetent homelands.

So do “your people” proud, and leave your callow IRA references at Ellis Island; “your people” are now a bunch of plush-bottom yahoos who have been “the man” in this country for generations; Among “his people” his father, the former Speaker of the Minnesota House; his little brother Chris is the King George III of Saint Paul; Nick himself is the very Charles Townsend-esque embodiment of “the status quo” in the Twin Cities media.

Blueshirt this.