ABC and NBC won’t air an ad critical of Obamacare Kennedycare:

The refusal by ABC and NBC to run a national ad critical of President Obama’s health care reform plan is raising questions from the group behind the spot — particularly in light of ABC’s health care special aired in prime time last June and hosted at the White House.

The 33-second ad by the League of American Voters, which features a neurosurgeon who warns that a government-run health care system will lead to the rationing of procedures and medicine, began airing two weeks ago on local affiliates of ABC, NBC, FOX and CBS. On a national level, however, ABC and NBC have refused to run the spot in its present form.

Of course, nothing new there; as their ad revenues have plummeted over the past few decades, they have been resolute in refusing ads from the National Rifle Association.

I’ve been blogging for seven and a half years; I was a couple of years ahead of the “fad” curve, for once in my life.

And when it comes to political blogs, I think the various blog cultures reflect their owners.  Liberals, being primarily herd creatures, are very hierarchical in their blogging; if you follow a lot of leftyblogs (and I do), you can almost see the memes starting with Kos and Atrios and the Huffpo, and work their way down through the ranks (and I use the term “ranks” intentionally).  Conservatives, being basically decentralized (one could almost say “rudderless”, at times in the past half-decade) have approach blogging in a much less organized way – but the underlying current among conservative blogs has been less to serve as a political engine than as a form of “samizdat” alternative media to outflank what conservatives perceive (correctly) to be the bias and in-the-bag nature of the mainstream media.  That is, of course, a much more scattered approach.

And for people who make their living at this, it’s a distinction that matters.

Of course, the mainstream media is the last group of people that can really understand that, but when organizations like CNN try to write about the subject:

“While it is obvious the progressive blogosphere is superior, we are being out-organized on Twitter,” said Gina Cooper, a blogger who helped organize Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of online liberal activists that met last week in Pittsburgh. “There is some catching up to do on the progressive side.”

It took me a moment push  my skull back into my head when I read that – but once I did, it made sense, in context (where “context” means “with the parameters of the discussion shoved into a nearly meaningless corner”).  Liberal bloggins is superior, as a medium for delivering votes to Democrats.  Until the likes of the Center for “Independent” Media and other “Progressive” groups started pouring money into leftyblogging, either directly or via providing cushy full-time blogging jobs for leading leftybloggers, the lefty blogosphere was a morass of banal, unfocused, Bush-deranged rage.  With money and leadership, the leftysphere became a tightly focused array of banal, Bush-deranged rage aimed at raising money and turning out voters.

Of course, in the leftyphere focuses on opinion and organization, not on serious analysis or reporting.  There is no leftyblog analog to, say, Powerline’s shredding of Dan Rather’s hit piece on President Bush’s Air National Guard record.

But viewed purely as organizing?  The piece has a point.  For conservatives, the blogosphere is largely a replacement for the morning newspaper. Most of us are not fundemantally politcal people – we want government out of our lives, not at the center.  So keeping our “organizing” down to 140 characters or less makes perfectly good sense.

Of course, being CNN, there has to be a certain aspect of “they have now idea what they’re talking about” endemic in the piece: 

“Twitter is a news funnel,” she said. “Conservatives are very tightly knit and getting their message out very well.”

“Conservatives are tightly knit?”  That, of course, is madness.  At this juncture in American history, “conservative” is about as meaningful as, say, “caucasian”; just as any descriptor that covers everything from Icelandic people to Berbers, from Slavs to Spaniards is basically so broad as to be meaningless, so “conservative” is today.  Any label that covers the fiscal moderate but evangelical pro-life Mike Huckabee and the tax and immigration hawk Tom Tancredo, or the fiscal conservative but socially pragrmatic Tim Pawlenty, lacks a certain degree of focus.

But the piece has a point; whatever conservatives lack these days in terms of ideological congruency, we are (finally) making up, after two slack cycles, in paying attention and waking up and smelling the coffee and getting out and into politics again, not because of but in spite of the leadership we’ve had – or lacked – in the past six years or so.

And – hopefully – realizing that no matter what your key issue, having any conservative in office, even a conservative that is imperfect on your pet issue, is going to be a better bet than having even the “best ” (hypothetical) Democrat.

The conservative twittersphere is more than adequate – as the article notes – in saying “show up” and “send money”.  As to the “why?”

Well, for that we still have the long-form blog.  And at that, the CNN piece notwithstanding, the conservative blogosphere still excels alone.

I’ve been grappling with a theological conundrum.  Perhaps you can help me.

Is God so omnipotent that he could invent a phrase so stupid that even Fast Eddie Schultz wouldn’t say it?

Liberal radio talk show host says right-wing talkers and conservatives want to see Obama “get shot.”

I’m a person of faith, but if God’s limits could possibly be tested, this is it.

Because if “Stupid” were a church and a theology, Schultz would be its doctinally-infallible pope.

Last year, when the Strib went through its big show of cost-cutting in the Columnist Corner at Strib Tower, some of us dared to hope that with Nick Coleman being eased out (maybe), things might change.  That the “city columnist” slot might turn into something other than a relentless shill space for the DFL.

But then they brought in Jon Tevlin.  In other words, same old thing.

How little have things changed?  Read yesteday’s piece.  Everything we grew to know and “love” about Coleman? The selective omission of context?  The bending of facts to fit a poltical agenda?  The “say something outrageous, secure in the knowledge that I know stuff and the peasants daren’t gainsay me!” school of opinion writing?

It’s all still there.

Oh, it starts out benignly enough:

Why do our children always disappoint us? We spend 18 years carefully teaching and molding our kids, hoping they avoid the mistakes we made, praying they become upstanding, hard-working adults…Still, we lecture: Join the Army, don’t join the Army. Become a doctor, not a teacher. And for heaven’s sake, don’t go into journalism.I heard that one, and like many kids, ignored the wisdom of my parents.

Because newspaper journalism has always been the career equivalent of wearing a nose ring?I digress; Tevlin is writing about the decision by Harrison Bachmann – son of Representative Michele Bachmann, CD6 congresswoman and target of the left’s most unseemly permanent rage – to join “Teach for America”, an affiliate of “Americorps”.

Maybe it’s the Lord’s way of keeping the world upright?…So it has to sting right now for Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Here’s what Bachmann said about President Obama’s plan to expand AmeriCorps, a program that puts young adults to work making the world a better place by teaching disadvantaged kids and helping the poor:

“[It’s] under the guise of quote, volunteerism, but it’s not volunteers at all,” she said on the Sue Jeffers radio show in April. “It’s paying people to do work on behalf of government. There are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people get trained in the philosophy the government puts forward and then they have to go work in these politically correct forums.

“As a parent, I would have a very, very diffiult time seeing my children do this.”

In other words, Tevlin sees this as Harrison sticking a thumb in Mom’s eye.  Why?  Because it fits the template; Jon Tevlin and everyone he knows hates Michele Bachmann and everything she stands for; therefore, everyone must hate her, and everything Rep. Bachmann does must be suffused with perfidy.
Really.  Everything.  Including the workings of her family life – because we all know that the family of every family-values-flogging Christian Conservative, especially the women, look more like an episode of Moral Orel than anything like the rest of our lives!  Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant!  Larry Craig – wide stance wide stance wide stance hahahahahahah!  And Harrison Bachmann has signed up with something Michele criticized!:

The last application deadline was in February, and successful candidates were notified within two months, according to Kerci Marcello Stroud, national communications director of TFA.So when Bachmann issued her screed, her son might have already been accepted, and certainly would have applied. Ouch.

<>“Ouch”.  Because of course any decision Harrison makes just has to be a political dagger aimed at his mother’s heart.  Just like young Jon mortified his parents by becoming a newspaper reporter.  It all fits!Except that it doesn’t.  Listen to the Jeffers broadcast.  I transcribed the relevant part – badly, but it should give you the right idea:

The original language of the bill was “Mandatory service” for government. right now, the language is voluntary, but just last week a Democrat colleague introduced language to make it mandatory. I believe when it’s all said and done that there’s a very real chance that young people could be put into mandatory service, and there’s a real concern that there are provisiions for what I’d call “re-education camps” for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosphy that the govenrment puts forward, and then they have to go and work in some of these politically correct forums…it appears there’s a political agenda behind all of this, and if young poeple are mandated to go into this, I’d have a very, very difficult time watching my children do this. Again, it’s a huge power grab, and at a cost of billions of dollars.

Listened to in context, it’s fairly clear that it’s not “volunteerism”, much less the volunteers or the jobs they do, that Bachmann is attacking; it’s the politicization of the program.  She would hate to see her, or anyone’s, children used as raw material in a politicized compulsory service scheme.

Which the Democrats want to make it.

In the future.

Thank you, Harrison, for your service. Here’s hoping you inspire kids to dream, and get inspired in the process.

Who knows, maybe you’ll even have an opportunity for a teaching moment with some political leaders, but I doubt it.

And who knows, Harrison; maybe you can teach a high school journalism class.  Where you can teach young kids to get their facts straight and refrain from superimposing their mindsets onto other people, in order to skew and caricature them.  But I…

…no, that would be a cheap shot, wouldn’t it?

To:  Tarryl Clark, DFL Candidate for MNCD6 nomination

From: Mitch Berg, un-American dissenter.

Re:  Public Image? Limited!

Dear Ms. Clark,

You’re running for Congress in the Sixth Congressional District.  It’s a fairly conservative district with some fairly liberal enclaves.  It’s obviously a district in major contention – but Michele Bachmann, the most unrepentant conservative in Minnesota politics, squeedged out a three point margin against not only Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg, but against a full court press from the mainstream media, the liberal cableocracy, and the nutroots.

Which says to me – though I am, I’ll grant, merely a simple peasant – that the Sixth is probably not a mother lode for nutroots campaigning.

So please, Ms. Clark; please please please keep campaigning away on Daily Kos.  I sincerely beg of you.

Someone emailed me this job posting:

The Minnesota Independent is seeking freelance reporter/bloggers to help cover politics at the state, county and local levels.
We’re looking for people from across Minnesota with reporting experience; a clear understanding of policy, legislation and the workings of state politics; and familiarity with recent developments in online news. A key criterion in measuring success will be the delivery of “impact stories” that inspire public debate and advance the common good.

This must be good news for Republicans; in the wake of the Obama onslaught, the “Independent” laid off most of its staff and whacked its freelance budget, causing former editor Steve Perry to be shocked, shocked that the whole operation was a propaganda operation.

If the Mindy’s usualy cast of donors feel the need to crank up the propaganda war, we must be drawing rhetorical blood…

Here’s the funny part (emphasis added):

The Minnesota Independent is part of a growing online network sponsored by the non-profit and non-partisan Center for Independent Media,

Non-partisan?

This quote from Britt Robson, after he got laid off in the CIM’s “Mission Accomplished” celebration:

Robson — who writes about arts for MinnPost and sports for The Rake — was caustic in his view [of] MnIndy’s Capitol overlords. He says CIM’s national staff was less interested in the organization’s professed mission — “a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that operates an independent online news network in the public interest” — than boosting the party of Barack Obama.

“I was working with them fairly closely during the Republican convention and privy to interoffice emails,” Robson explains. “The type of things non-local editors were into were very party-race stories, particularly stories that embarrassed Republicans and promoted Democrats.”

Paul Schmelzer – you’re a good writer.  You’re a reporter with some integrity.  Why on earth are you maintaining the fiction of non-partisanship?

which adheres to the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ) code of ethics…

Obvious jokes redacted for excessive obviousness.

Hey, maybe Perry can come back now!

In my years of fisking Nick Coleman, it’s easy to pick his worst work.  It’s his hackery immediately after the 35W bridge collapse.

But if I could say anything for the guy over the years, it was this; he may have been a hack who was in bed with the local establishment, but at least he was his own hack.

Nowadays?  Ew.

His latest “column” at the Strib lacks the one thing that distinguished Coleman; he’s apparently turned to slathering his own brand of incoherent, un-fact-checked, prejudicial, and almost-always wrong bilge onto other peoples’ press releases.

Coleman attacks charter schools.  Or, should we say, his masters at his current gig would seem to have told him to attack charter schools.  We may never know.

But that’s what he’s doing – and as usual with a Nick Coleman column, he’s full of it.

Back-to-school supplies are on sale and the annual report on schools that are not making adequate progress is due out any day (expect another rise in falling performance), so this is a good time to look at the performance of Minnesota’s charter school movement, which was going to lead us all into a bright 21st century for better, smarter public education.

Oops. Not doing so great there, either.

Charter schools give parents a choice – and in the city, it’s a choice we’re taking by the thousands.

Which is, after all, the only reason private-school graduate Coleman cares.

Improving learning outcomes for students of color? Nope.

Well, actually, yep.

Outperforming traditional public schools on achievement tests? Nope.

Actually, when you compare apples and apples, yes.  Remember – charter schools…:

1. …don’t have an Alternative Learning Center system to get all the “problem” kids off the books
2. …have disproportionately high numbers of poor kids, non-native english speakers, and the kids that the traditional school system is failing in droves. Which is why we’re leaving the public system in droves.
3. …actually give parents who don’t have the money to go to a private or suburban public school  – or who live on one the Indian reservations, where the public schools are an even bigger disgrace than the urban public systems – a choice. And some hope.

But other than that…?

It would be easy to argue that the charter school movement has fallen flat, and I have said as much before.

And we all know how reliable Coleman’s predictions have been.

But the charter school crusade has grown too large and expensive to dismiss.

Which is just absurd.  Charter schools cost less per student than the public schools.

Coleman is, of course, reading note-for-note for the MN2020 report on charter schools – which a slew of charter school supporters pretty roundly debunked two months ago.  In other words, he’s using out of date and inaccurate information in pursuit of an agenda. That’s bad enough.

Next he swerves into just making things up:

It is eating into severely limited funding for education and has blurred the lines between church and state (and not just at one Muslim school, but among many charters loosely basing their educational approaches on religious values whose adherents think they should get public tax dollars to inculcate them).

Coleman is referring to Bill Cooper’s “Friends of Education” schools, which borrow many aspects of Catholic education without actually teaching Catholicism.  Their results are, by the way, uniformly excellent; each and every one of the Friends of Education schools outperforms any public school district in the state (go here and look up schools run by “Friends of Education”).

In the meantime, they’ve been in operation for years.  If there had been any violations of the Establishment Clause at any of them, in a state full of intrepid gumshoe reporters teachers union monkeys like Nick Coleman, I suspect we’d have heard about it.

Nothing.

But Coleman surely probably knows that. Why would he attack Friends of Education with nothing but a scabrous innuendo?

Personal history, perhaps?

More than that, charter schools have created a huge tax-supported playpen where entrepreneurial start-up schools have been loosely supervised and unscrutinized by education officials who are accountable to the approval or rejection of taxpayers.

Leave aside Coleman’s clumsy shot at being a D-list Studs Terkel knockoff.  Leave aside the blatant misinformation (charter schools are supervised by the same body that supervises public schools).  Let me just ask Coleman, my fellow Saint Paul taxpayer; what “accountability” do you think the Saint Paul district has to you and I?   And if you say “the school board”, then you are obviously more comfortable with untrammeled, partisan, one-party systems than I am.

Minnesota was the first state to allow charter schools (in 1991), which were designed to overcome the limitations of an education system that had become a sacred cow. Today, you can’t find a holier cow than the charter school movement. Any questions can get you branded as a stooge for unionized teachers, big gummint and mandatory euthanasia for free thinkers. Guilty, guilty, hmmm … maybe!

If only there were a website where I could just link to instant descriptions of some of Nick Coleman’s lazier flights of rhetorical fancy.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Minnesota’s charter schools (almost 150 of them now, with 28,000 students) are as much a part of our educational problem as they were supposed to be a solution. Many charters have been beset by management problems, undertrained staffs and a lack of adequate financial controls. The furor over TiZA, the troubled Muslim charter school in Inver Grove Heights, is only one example of a much broader mess: Too many charter schools do not get adequate oversight, especially from one system that works — elected school boards that answer to voters.

And here, Coleman assumes that you either are completely unaware of reality, or is trying to make sure you stay that way.

What are the graduation rates at the Minneapolis and Saint Paul public school systems?  Less than half.  How about for minority students?  Less than that. What do they cost?  Vastly more than the state averages per student, and getting worse, and they’re both still constantly on the brink of financial catastrophe and begging voters to pass supplemental levies (which charter schools never, ever get).

And who controls those systems?  DFL and Teachers-Union-dominated elected school boards.  The elected school boards have utterly failed, and still fail to provide any faint shred of accountability, much less rectifying the disaster in any way.

After nearly two decades of “experimenting,” charter schools need to be held to stricter financial controls, educational performance standards and public accountability. It is also past time to put a cap on the number of charter schools, and the present 150 is more than enough. The urgent need now is not for more charter schools, but better ones. And that requires shutting down the bad ones.

Excelent, Mr. Coleman.

Can we hold public schools to the same standard?

More than 80 percent of charter schools were found to have serious financial or management problems during 2007, according to a review of state records done by the liberal think tank Minnesota 2020. That group’s executive director, John Van Hecke, finds it ironic that charter schools, built on a promise to make education more responsive, have avoided the scrutiny traditional public schools must face.

Quoting John Van Hecke?

Oh, please.  Go ahead.  Make my day.

“When they were launched, the battle cry was, ‘We’ll be better than traditional public schools,'” he said. “Now it’s, ‘Don’t hold us to the same standards as traditional schools.’ But the public clearly is demanding more and more accountability over how its money is spent. And the answer is more and more oversight, from the Education Department and the Legislature.”

No, Nick and John.  The public is asking for more charter schools – and, more to the point, more school choice.  1/8 of Saint Paul parents have left the SPPS; even more have left the Minneapolis system.  They’ve decamped for suburban districts using the state’s open enrollment system, to private and parochial schools, and for charter schools.

So  look for MN2020 and Nick Coleman to propose repealing open enrollment any time here.

One might surmise, by this point, that Coleman knows nothing about the subject that he’s not told by others – that he’s reading off of MN2020 talking points. That Mr. “I Know Stuff” might be just vamping it, like a marionette being twirled about by a giggly master; like a monkey.

And you’d be right:

In addition to millions spent on per-pupil aid for charter schools, up to $1,200 per pupil is spent in state assistance to help buy or rent charter school space (this at a time when public enrollment is shrinking and surplus education buildings stand vacant). These “lease aid” payments will balloon by 23 percent this biennium, to a whopping $85 million, and much of that total is going into a muddled mess where payments continue even after buildings are paid for and tax-paid real estate winds up owned not by the public but by the charter schools themselves.

Really?

The property is “owned by the charter schools themselves?”

Interesting.

Because charter schools are not allowed to own property.

They can not own their buildings.

Wow.  I guess he doens’t “know stuff” after all.

Nick Coleman is a senior fellow at the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University. He can be reached at nickcoleman@gmail.com.

I’d love to see the crap their “junior fellows” put out.

UPDATE:  I’ve been corrected – charters can own buildings, they just can’t buy ’em with public funds.  Which was what Coleman was talking about, so it doesn’t impact my point in any way.

…especially any of you that have ever used the term “teabagger” to refer to a conservative exercising his/her free speech, and/or written any conservative grass-roots action off to “astroturfing”:

1. So I take it you’ll be ignoring all of the “research” and “data” coming from Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota from now on.  Right?  Because y’all seem to take them pretty seriously today, even though the “group” is essentially one woman, Dr. Rebecca Thoman (who is an OBGYN, not an emergency room trauma surgeon, by the way), and her majordomo, Heather Martens.  If they go to a demonstration, and they call on their “friends” at “Million Mom March”, they may draw half a dozen people, mostly out-of-work professional activists.  Indeed, various second-amendment activist friends relate stories of going to C”S”M meetings where shooter “ringers” outnumbered the anti-gun activists by several to one – where “one” is an absolute number, not a ratio.
2. Let’s accept, for the moment, that all of the conservative response at Town Hall meetings, and all of the Tea Parties, are in fact being coordinated by some cabal of right-leaning “astroturf” groups.  OK – so what?  Do you think that just because someone sets a meeting and says “let’s protest”, that it’ll draw a crowd?  Especially a crowd of conseratives – people who never come out to picket, wave signs or chant slogans?  With Democrats, of course, it’s ture – to paraphrase Fred THompson in The Hunt for Red October, Democrats don’t take a restroom break without some gropu gtelling them where to go or what to do.  But conservatives?  Election day is the biggest “demonstration” most conservatives ever make it to, ever, their lives.  So even if  there were some shadowy cabal out there, what makes you think people would come to the town halls and tea parties if the anger wasn’t very , very genuine?  You can start an astroturf group – but that doesn’t mean people will come, and bring the passion that the anti-Obamacare dissidents bring.  Just watch a “Million Mom” or “Code Pink” or ACORN demonstration for proof.

Of course, you do know that’s the truth – which is why the campaigns to mock, dismiss and intimidate these outbursts are being coordinated from the White House itself.
But since “astroturf” is newly “un-american”, I figured I’d give all you stalwarts in the lefty alt-media a chance to show your consistency.

Go to it!

About a week ago, the left was all-atwitter at the thought that Sarah and Todd Palin – evangelical fundamentalist “Family Values” conservatives – were getting divorced.  These were largely the same people who found it delightfully ironic that the Palins – being pro-lifers – would have a daughter who’d get pregnant while 17.

Of course, there’s dead silence now that Dan Riehl and Stacy McCain blew the lid completely off the entire fabricated hatchet-job story:

Just in case anyone has arrived late at this news, here are links to major items, arranged in chronological order, in the development of the “Gryphen”/Griffin story:

• Aug. 1: “Palin Divorce Gossip ‘Completely False'” — American Spectator
• Aug. 1: “Quote From Sarah Palin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 1: “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check It Out” — American Spectator
• Aug. 2: ‘Mommy, Why Does My Kindergarten Teacher Lie About Sarah Palin?’ — The Other McCain
• Aug. 2: “Is This Sarah Palin’s Gryphen?” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 3: “Don’t Threaten Dan, Griffin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 4: “E-Mail to Jesse Griffin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 4: “Jesse Griffin: Troubling Revelations” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin’s Been Lying to His Friends, Too?” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin Explained” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin Just Keeps Lying” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Give Jesse Enough Rope” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin: Latest Developments” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Real Facts, Riehl Theory” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 6: “Exit, Lying: School’s Out for Anti-Palin Blogger Jesse Griffin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 6: “Of Moonbats and ‘Minions'” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 6: “What Is Jesse Griffin Telling Us?” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 7: “Why Did Jesse Quit the Kindergarten?” — Riehl World View

Of course, when it comes to media attacks on conservatives, truth isn’t realy a requisite.
Any of you “Yaaay, the HIPPOCRETS are getting divorced!” folks out there have a comment?

Robert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp might be losing it.

Chairman Rupert Murdoch said Wednesday that the company intends to charge for all of its news Web sites. “Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting,” Murdoch said.

First off, it’s a long time since I’ve heard anyone say “quality” and “journalism” in the same sentence with a straight face. Second, News Corp doesn’t “give” anything away. Murdoch has built an empire by attracting viewers to content tailored for a target demo, and selling their attention to advertisers.

It’s a decades-old formula premised on the fact that you can’t possibly charge viewers, readers or surfers enough to pay for the content and make a profit.

Unless Murdoch is able to effect some sort of collusion among media conglomerates to form a near monopoly, I don’t see how he can decommoditize news content.

Then again, News Corp owns half the media industry on their own:

All the “Fox” Channels including Fox Sports, FX, Fox Business Network, Fox Movie Channel, Fox News Channel, Fox College Sports, etc.

Print Media and Publishing including The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Barons, The Sun, Dow Jones, and Harper Collins.

Entertainment and Web properties including American Idol, AskMen, hulu.com, MySpace, Rotten Tomatoes and 20th Century Fox.

Still, each property has a direct and equally viable competitor.

Assuming each News Corp property carries News Corp news content (with some exceptions, for example the movie studios), charging for the content will put each at a disadvantage as most consumers of news content don’t care so much about the quality and/or have long since discounted the media as a source of truth or truly useful information.

Case in point: ever noticed traffic and weather reports are never accurate or useful?

People won’t pay for what is essentially a diversion from the rigors of daily life. Shaving in silence is out of fashion. People read the news on their Blackberry because they can. Quantity of information trumps quality.

If News Corp starts charging a fee, clients will find what they need elsewhere. That cat’s been out of the bag a long time.

What say you?

This…:

…is deft satire, but this…

…is a racist attack and call to murder?

When your opponents act like Jamie Gertz’ character on Square Pegs, if she’d been doing meth, rather than engage your point.

While nobody’s issued an official explanation for why KTLK-FM – the Twin Cities’ Clear Channel talk station – decided to tube all their weekend talk shows in favor of an endless stream of music that sounded like the “Classic Rock” playlist on someone’s IPod, I think I know why.

The Northern Alliance beat them.

While the 100,000 watt FM juggernaut sports Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Jason Lewis during the week, even they were not enough to put KTLK-FM over the top against the 5,000-watt AM1280 The Patriot on the all-important weekend time slot.  Against lavish expenditures on talent, salaries and promotions, AM1280 not only continued to clobber KTLK on the bellwether weekend time slots, but expanded their lead.

AM1280’s lineup – led by the Northern Alliance Radio Network (NARN) – continues to clobber the ratings of the much larger stations in head-to-head competition.  KTLK’s retreat is only the latest confirmation.

From this point, the question isn’t so much “why did KTLK put their 100,000 watt tail between their legs and scurry from the weekend talk market”.  It’s “how long will WCCO and KSTP-AM take to do more or less the same?”   WCCO’s 50,000 watts lumber along, and KSTP would do better running “Soucheray and Reusse Sportstalk” reruns than whatever it is they’re doing now.

Yes.  Yes, it is good to be king. 

(more…)

Chavez, shown here with some of his friends.

More than a dozen of 34 radio stations ordered shut by the Venezuelan government went off the air on Saturday, part of President Hugo Chavez’s drive to extend his socialist revolution to the media.

Chavez defended the closures, calling them part of the government’s effort to democratize the airwaves.

President Obama’s reaction, or lack thereof will be quite telling over the next few days.

Last week, the conservative punditry lit up, discussed a brief series of rumors that popped up saying that Sarah Palin might be considering a run at the Talk Radio business.

There are some ups and downs to the idea (which, let’s be clear, is still only a rumor; further rumors claim that Clear Channel, which broadcasts Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity, has taken a pass on a syndicated Palin show). 

I think there are ten better plans out there for Sarah Palin (and am discussing them right now, 1:15PM Central Time, on the Northern Alliance Radio Network): 

10. Run for Senator from Alaska.  This is a bit of a gamble, in that it would traditionally imply that she’s giving up on 2012.  It’d be especially important for Palin; she’s already left one office early.  2012 is going to be a challenging time to run as a Republican – but as with all challenges, there are opportunities.  Does Palin run against an incumbent whose numbers are down now, but who could well bounce back big by 2012 (remember Reagan’s polling, which was dismal in 1982 but bounced back to landslide levels in 1984?), or wait until the nation is really ready for a change?  It’s a tough call.  That’s why it’s #10.

9. Start a blog.  She should be doing this anyway; if there’s a conservative pol out there who has the capacity to outflank the media the way Reagan did, it’s Sarah Palin.  If blogs had existed in 1980, I suspect Reagan would have had a great one.

8. Do a collection of frank, to the point Youtubes.  The model for this would be Milton Friedman’s classic 1979 PBS series “Free To Choose”, which sold conservatism and economic liberty to many of the unconverted (which means PBS will never ever let that happen again – hence Youtube).  Cover the big Palin issues – growth, liberty, prosperity – on her own terms, in her own way, playing to her strengths.  Quit relying on the mainstream media to do anything other than be in the bag for her opposition.

7. Talk Radio – Oh, what the heck.  But she should not do a three-hour-a-day show, like Limbaugh or Beck.  She should shoot for a one-hour daily show, or maybe a two hour weekend show.   Making fifteen compelling hours of radio a week  – easy as the good ones make it sound – is a lot of hard work.  It takes commitment – and Palin needs to commit to a higher calling than earning ratings.  But a one-hour daily, or two-hour weekend show is ideal for getting specific, focused messages out there, and taking just the right amount of positive and negative feedback from callers.  Each hour could be a major event in its own right.  And doing an hour of radio, especially with a solid support staff, is not that difficult.  Especially if Palin had a good sidekick.  Especially a sidekick with impeccable conservative credentials and lots of experience working with radio neophytes.  Ahem.

6. Get that book done.  Make sure it’s a doozy – as in, “less autobiography, more challenge to today’s status quo“.  Of course, some autobio

5. Big honkin’ speaking tour.  She showed during the campaign that she can work a room as well as anyone, and better than most.  She also showed, I think, that she needed to top the marquee; speaking in support of John McCain was like bailing in support of the Titanic, especially given the number of Mac’s staff that were actively sabotaging her.  Let her do the tour as the A-list, and let her – no, make her fail or, ideally, succeed on her own terms.

4.  Do what Reagan did; hundreds and hundreds of small speaking and commentary engagements.  Reagan’s gig as General Electric’s PR face was not only great exposure, but great training 

3. Sunday morning talk show.  Talk with Fox; nobody’ll be surprised that it’s a bald-faced showcase (because that’s what it needs to be), and one hour a week of mixing it up with the punditry can only be great training.

2. “The Opportunity Tour”.  Yes, it’s a takeoff on Robert Kennedy’s “Poverty Tour” (and Paul Wellstone’s cheap 1999 copy) – but the opposite way.  Where RFK (and PW’s) versions were tours of American failure, Sarah Palin’s tour would be a parade of seeming failures that are actual opportunities for the free market, for liberty, for the American way, by way of contrasting Palin (and conservatism) with the dismal reality of Obama’s lumpen socialism-lite.

1. Anything but announce her candidacy!

Dan Rather proposes the media should not only be in the pocket of the Obama administration but should now be digging into the pockets of the American taxpayer.

As if the relationship between the Obama Administration and the news media weren’t cozy enough already, former “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather is calling on President Obama to “make recommendations” for the media on how to survive the economic downturn.

The media outlets that are failing financially are failing to be relevant.

According to the story, Rather said “corporate and political influence” on newsrooms had damaged the industry and was cause for concern.

…and a government bailout from the government will have no strings attached, right Dan?

PS Since when did Dan Rather get his credibility back?

A year ago, Obama was being hailed as a “light worker”, the salvor of our nation’s soul; a man, but not just a man.

Today, of course, his poll numbers are gratifyingly human:

The nation is close to evenly split in its assessment of the president’s policies to date, and there is great intensity on both sides of the debate with dwindling numbers in the middle.Those are the chief findings of the latest NPR poll of 850 registered voters conducted nationwide Wednesday through Sunday by a bipartisan team. The pollsters found 53 percent approving of the president’s handling of his job, while 42 percent disapproved — the narrowest gap of the Obama presidency to date. Most of the approving group said they approved strongly, and an even greater majority of the disapproving group said they disapproved strongly.

Poll respondents liked a Democratic statement on solving health care problems better than a Republican statement (51 percent to 42 percent). However, when asked about the plan now moving through Congress, a plurality of 47 percent was opposed and 42 percent said they were in favor, based on what they had heard about the plan so far.

Presidential poll numbers are the most fungible transient asset in American politics, of course; Ronald Reagan’s numbers were abysmal in 1982, but jumped enough to give him re-election in 1984 and a Republican house of Congress in 1986.  So don’t start writing Obama’s political epitaph yet.

Because poll numbers aren’t forever.

I’m not so much saying this to the Republican and Conservative readers, though.  It’s not them I’m worried about.

No, it’s the readers on the left that concerned me.  Because while poll numbers change with the breeze, hatred just smolders on; Eric Kleefeld is finding racists under rocks.

He addresses the “racism” between the lines (it must be between the lines) from, in this case, Rush Limbaugh (with commentary inset):

So let’s take a look at some of those recent racially-charged attacks that have circulated against Obama, both right before and after the Gates incident.

• Above all others, the real celebrity here has been Rush Limbaugh. He’s done this kind of thing before — remember the “Barack, The Magic Negro” song? [which, while un-PC, was a takeoff on a line by a liberal commentator; certainly not a commentary on Limbaugh’s approach to race – Ed.] But in the wake of the Gates incident, he’s managed to become even more hard-edged about it. “Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman,” Limbaugh declared this past Friday. [which would have been pretty below-the-belt, had it not been for the fact that that’s exactly how Gates played it – as a racial issue- Ed.] Yesterday, he shared a dream he’s had about the dangers to capitalism: “I had a dream that I was a slave building a sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama.” [Remember when dissent was the highest virtue?  Now, it’s apparently “racist”- Ed.] And he joked that food-safety advocates will go after all the unhealthy foods people like to eat, one by one — but they’ll have to wait until Obama is out of office to ban Oreos. [I suppose it would have been safer to say “Starbucks” or “Volvo” or “Patagonia”…- Ed.]

How much intellectual seed corn is the left willing to burn to prop up The One?  Poll numbers come and go,  but assaults on the integrity of half of ones’ fellow countrymen – defamatory, specious, intellectually vacuous attacks, of course – are gifts that just keep on giving.

I’ve ripped on talk radio’s “Cult of Personality” – the belief, against all rational evidence, that “celebrities” make good talk radio hosts – for years. 

It’s been a cancer on the business for a decade and a half, both locally (for years, KSTP-AM has figured that newspaper columnists and TV reporters are perfectly  suited to host talk shows, despite a decade and a half of foisting flops like Pat Milan, Jesse Ventura, Katherine Lanpher, Nick Coleman, Jim Souhan and others on their poor audience; KTLK-FM briefly partook in the same madness with Brian Lambert and Pat Kessler) and nationally.  For everyone who’s forged meat ‘n potatoes success at talk radio after coming to the business as a celeb – Dennis Miller, Bill Bennett, Michael Medved – there are piles of Al Frankens, Mario Cuomos, Joe Scarboroughs, Marc Marons, Chuck Ds, Janeane Garofalos, Mika Brzezinskis, Monica Crowleys and Jim Hightowers buried head-down in the cement on radio’s Cadillac Ranch. 

Radio management seems to miss the key lesson of this past twenty years; the real successes in talk radio are radio people (Limbaugh, Laura Schlesinger, Hannity, Beck), or people who learn (or hire the learning) to do radio (Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage) as entertainment, rather than either preaching or extensions of their own celebrity.

All that being said, I’m genuinely of two minds about this dispatch from the radio rumor mill:

While not exactly shopping the GOP’s 2008 vice presidential candidate, sources say Palin representatives have been quietly testing the waters to see how much interest radio syndicators have for her.

Sources say Palin hasn’t committed to radio either, but rather it could be a possible next step for her. 

On the one hand, I think she could be dynamite, especially with the right sidekick (airchecks available to syndication execs on request).

On the other?  It’s not many people who can do radio really, really well as a sideline to other ambitions.

I don’t know that I see it happening, but it’ll be an interesting couple of months.

A US Navy officer has M filed a sexual harassment complaint against a Miami Herald reporter.   Former Strib editor Gyllenhall is the Herald’s Executive Editor.

FishbowlDC obtained a copy of the July 22, 2009 letter addressed to Miami Herald Senior VP and Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal. In the complaint, Gordon calls for a “thorough investigation” to put an end to [Herald reporter Carol] Rosenberg’s “appalling behavior” that includes comments about the Commander’s sexual orientation.

The complaint outlines examples of Rosenberg’s alleged “abusive and degrading, comments of an explicitly sexual nature.”

And Ms. Gordon would allegedly make a bunch of longshoremen blanche:

Gordon writes:

To me, in front of another journalist with reference to why 9/11 co-defendant Mustafa Al Hawsawi was seated on a pillow in court:“Have you ever had a red hot poker shoved up your a**? Have you ever had a broomstick shoved up your a**? Have you ever had anything in your a**? How would you know how it feels if it never happened to you? Admit it, you liked it? No wonder why you like to stay in South Beach on your Miami visits.”

She could write for a Twin Cities’ leftyblog!

Rosenberg, to CNN’s Jamie McIntyre in front of roughly 15 journalists in the Guantanamo Commission’s press center:

To Jamie – “Aren’t you in the BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters)? I didn’t think you were in tent city because these people (military public affairs escorts) are so far up your ass that I figured you must be in the BOQ.”

Good thing we have gatekeepers.

Gordon, who also serves as the Pentagon Spokesman for Western Hemisphere and Guantanamo issues also accuses Rosenberg of “bullying” reporters from various outlets including New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, CBC, Der Siegel [sic] and Al Jazeera. He claims that over the years, Rosenberg has labeled her peers in the press and Gordon’s colleagues “bitches,” “stupid,” “lazy,” “incompetent,” “Nazis,” and “Saddam Hussein-like.”

Here’s my real question: How much do you wanna bet that “journalistic ethics” commentators will find some way to justify the whole thing under “journalistic ethics”, which seem more and more to be a framework by which journalists can justify anything they do?

There are a few lessons Republicans, Conservatives, and women who opt not to vote Democrat can learn from the past year in Sarah Palin’s life:

1. No matter how scrupulously you stick to your constitutional role on policy matters, if you are conservative and Christian, your opponents will call you a fundy theocrat.
2. No matter how accomplished you are,  people will insist you’re not very bright.
3. If you are a woman who attempts a life in public service without an Ivy League degree, no matter what you’ve done in the intervening twenty years, the tittering nabobs will call you the kinds of things they’d be excoriated for saying about a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader or a Hooters waitress.
4. If, only other hand, you are a conservative woman who did get an Ivy League degree and went on to huge accomplishments, you’ll be called a bitch who boffed up.
5. If you are a conservative of either gender, no matter how closely your views are tied to those of most mainstream Americans, you will be called “crazy”.
6. If you are a conservative of either gender, the media will consider you guilty until proven innocent of any ethics charges  brought against you.  Note the double-standard; a liberal lothario is linked with exploiting interns on company time and lying about it by a stained blue dress, and we were urged to “Move On”; Crazee McJackal from Otter Giblet Alaska says Sarah Palin took hush money from Venusians, and it’s treated with solemn urgency.

So there you go, conservative women.  Those are the ground rules.

You can thank all those “feminists” on the left for all they’ve done for women.

…if Bush’s administration had suggested this – federal control over content on the Internet. White House advisor Cass Sunstein is talking about the White House – the Feds, anyway – taking a huge role in censoring the Internet.
And the insurgents – whatever their party?  They’d have been right:

Perhaps most disturbing is Mr. Sunstein’s vision for the future of web content, as he argues for a so-called “notice and take down” law. Under this provision, those who operate websites – – The Washington Post, radio stations, private bloggers, and perhaps even you, yourself -we would all be required “take down falsehoods upon notice” from the U.S. government.

And not only would the original content of websites be scrutinized by the government for “falsehoods,” website operators would also be held responsible for the content of “posts” created by the website’s visitors and readers. At first blush it may seem that, for a web operator to be held accountable for content generated by “posters,” is completely untenable. But that may very well be Mr. Sunstein’s goal – – to create an “untenable situation” for website operators – given his assertion that “a ‘chilling effect’ on those who would spread destructive falsehoods can be an excellent idea..”

Well, we all want “the truth” to prevail, don’t we?

But who shall determine what, exactly, is “true” and “false?” Mr. Sunstein laments the supposed “lie” that emerged during last year’s presidential race, that “Barack Obama pals around with terrorists.” Despite that fact that a friendship between Obama and known domestic terrorist William Ayers was something that both men acknowledged, Sunstein alludes to the notion that this was one of those “destructive falsehoods” of the sort that needs to be policed.

As I was recently talking about this matter on-air at Arizona’s NewsTalk 92-3 KTAR radio, a caller to the show observed that “there’s no way this could be legal, or constitutional..” Thoughtful Americans of all sorts will immediately view this situation through the lenses of constitutionally guaranteed rights.

But issues of “legality” don’t seem to matter, at times, with the Obama Administration. In March of this year, there was nothing illegal about executives of the AIG Corporation being paid bonuses that they earned from their employer, but they were harassed and publicly belittled, nonetheless. President Obama himself demonized them, while dozens of Obama supporters “demonstrated” in front of the private residences of the executives, alleging that it was “unfair” for those executives to be making “so much money.”

Remember when the lefties told us we were paranoid for thinking Obama would re-institute the Fairness Doctrine?

They may have had a point.  This makes the Fairness Doctrine look like a piker.

In a similar way, it appears that the Obama Administration may be ushering-in an era of harassment for website operators. Regardless of what U.S. courts may or may not say about this in the future, a “notice and take down” letter from the White House could have quite a “chilling effect” for today.

‘ For my part?  Consider this post a “Notice And Take Down” letter for this entire wretched administration.

I used to joke, before the election, that Obama would be the worst President of my lifetime by sometime on inauguration day.  I was joking.  At the time, anyway.

I don’t know if I was the last generation to grow up believing that the media had a sense of collective integrity – that the media really did observe the whole myth of “objectivity”, that the mainstream media (the only kind we had at the time) was honest and detached and really had integrity.  But there can’t have been too many after me who honestly believed, growing up and getting to learn how the world works, that the media could be trusted to just tell you the story, without larding it up with all kinds of agendas.  People who could be “believe in” someone like a Walter Cronkite.

Walter Cronkite, who (perhaps you heard)  passed away last week.

Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. with his family by his side at his Manhattan home after a long illness, CBS vice president Linda Mason said. Marlene Adler, Cronkite’s chief of staff, said Cronkite died of cerebrovascular disease.

Cronkite was both the last person in the American media to be imbued with that legend of integrity, and the first – to my own admittedly incomplete memory, anyway – to be accused of flouting it. He was the poster boy for “the media”; in a way, he still is:

Morley Safer, a longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent, called Cronkite “the father of television news.”

Let’s run with that “Father” metaphor for a bit.

How many kids have you know who were the children of boundless privilege, who oozed that boundless sense of entitlement that the overprivileged have?  Who never had to do what their forebears had to do to earn the privileges that the kids took for granted?

If you’re talking the children of dentists flitting around in BMWs and abusing waiters, that’s one thing.

If you’re talking an industry and institution that grew up over two generations believing that people owed them  – the likes of Anderson Cooper and Lori Sturdevant and Dan Rather and Nick Coleman – respect and a presumption of detachment and integrity because, for whatever reason, the media had gotten that reputation a generation or two earlier?

Cronkite should have disowned the brats.

The best thing about being 46 and Republican?

I don’t have Scarlett Johannsen sticking her tongue down my throat all the time, demanding sex at all hours of the day and night.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking; “That never happens anyway!”

Well, clearly you don’t have a career at the Minnesoros “Independent”: the mere fact that I mention the possibility, at least in reporter Chris Steller’s world, makes it a fact!

Down, Scarlett!

Being out of office has its privileges. One consolation for Norm Coleman after finally conceding defeat to Al Franken: seeing ethics complaints and investigations in his rearview mirror.

In other words,  being out of office – for Coleman as for Sarah Palin – means not being hounded to distraction by spurious “complaints” (“Rentgate”, the most-debunked piece of yellow hackery I’ve ever seen, which Steller reports as if it were still a serious story) – which are inevitably stated as proven facts by their various accusers, and reported with wide-eyed credulity by an in-the-bag media that seems to clam up when reporting that there was no there, there.

By the way, Chris Steller – Scarlett and I would love to meet you at the White Castle on Lexington.  I’ll buy you a slider…

…Whoah!  Steller was offered a bribe!  ETHICS COMPLAINT!

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Joe Soucheray has been for over 20 years one of my favorite columnists in the Twin Cities, first as a sports writer, then as a general columnist.

And I certainly like the idea of a talk show that’s focused on “conservative” principles like common sense and deflating the puffery of some of the more cliched, insufferable parts of Minnesota liberal society, while upholding the obverse.  Soucheray is sort of a curmudgeonly centerish-right retort to “Lake Wobegone”, in a way.  This is good.

And one can not argue with success; while Soucheray’s original rise to prominence probably had something to do with having Rush Limbaugh as a lead-in (at a time when talk radio was exploding from moribundity to prominence), there’s no arguing that he’s built a talk radio juggernaut.  At KSTP’s peak, Soucheray was one of an unstoppable ratings 1-2-3 piledriver punch; Limbaugh, Souch, Jason Lewis.

Today – after five years of KSTP-AM listening to consultants who assure management “Conservative talk is dead!  Really!  Honest!  Any day now!”, and having shed Limbaugh, Lewis, Bob Davis, Dave Thompson and the rest of the leftovers from the station’s glory days – Soucheray is carrying the station pretty much singlehandedly.

That ain’t chicken feed.

And Soucheray’s on-air foil and sidekick, The Rookie, has done what precious few people in the radio industry get to do anymore; developed from an annoying backslapping yahoo into one of the wryest, funniest, most talented sidekicks in the business.  Anywhere. 

So what’s the problem?

Part of it is that it feels Soucheray has been repeating the same show for over a decade now, with the same components plugged in over and over and over and over.  When the Northern Alliance got started, I tired to kick off a parody of GL’s endless, ongoing bit where guys call in from their garages, and turn on and rev engines on the air.  I wanted to have it go something like this:

CALLER: “Hey, Joe…:

MITCH:  “It’s actually Mitch, but go ahead…”

CALLER: “I got an engine from a 1974 Charger for ya…”

MITCH: “er…OK, start ‘er up?”

[Caller starts a small chainsaw: “REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”]

MITCH: “Er, thanks, caller…”

(TWENTY MINUTES ELAPSE)

———-

MITCH: “You’re on the air…”

CALLER:”Hey, Joe, yeah, I got Don Garlits’ original 451 hemi top-fuel rail rod, there!”

MITCH: “Um, it’s still Mitch, but OK – kick it…”

[Caller starts a small chainsaw: “REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”]

(TWENTY MORE MINUTES ELAPSE)

———-

MITCH: “You’re on the air…”

CALLER:”Yeah, Joe, I got me a 1952 MIG-15 jet fighter”

MITCH: “Er, I’m…ah, who cares.  A MIG-15?  Cool.  Go ahead, rev ‘er up”

[Caller starts a small chainsaw: “REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”]

And so on.  Note to Joe: all engines sound the same over the phone.

And the bit about ‘Foghorning” kids’ names that, apparently, aren’t what you’d find in a Catholic Parish in 1955?  Yeah, Joe, try insulting kids’ names to their parents’ faces, m’kay?

But the worst – and by worst, I mean “most objectionable to a conservative” – part of Garage Logic is the constant invocation of “The Mystery”.

Sit down for a minute, Garage Logicians.

If someone were to present to you an overweight, shrieking single mother of five wearing a “Wellstone Action” button, who were to say “I and my people are being disempowered and kept in poverty by racism that wants to keep us down!”, what would you say?

“Take some personal responsibility”, right?

So replace a few words. 

Change the sentence to “I and my people  common sense and traditional values are being disempowered and kept in poverty  marginalized by racism a huge impersonable, undefinable but inescapable “mystery” that wants to keep us down!”, then what’s your response?

That the comparison has escaped “Garage Logicians” for almost two decades amazes me.

I’ll be cross-posting at Hot Air’s “Green Room” when the occasion warrants.  My maiden effort was yesterday.

A zillion thanks to my radio colleague Ed Morrissey for the opportunity to reach a whole new audience!