Isn’t this…

Here’s the one thing that would solve most of our government’s problems: We must stop hoping for change and start demanding it.

…what got us into the mess we’re in?

I’m envisioning the publishers at the Washington Post in a meeting:

GILES THROCKMORTON: “Muffy, put a bump on this cognac?  Thank you, dear.  OK, everyone.  We’re getting are ah-sses handed to us.  Ideas?

BENTLY FITZWILLIS: “NPR and Romanesko all say we’ve been swinging to the center…”

SADAH COHEN: “THAT’S the problem!”

THROCKMORTON: “I concur.  What do we do?”

DEREK MICAH DU FRESNE: “I don’t know; we’re laying people off as it is…”

THROCKMORTON: “Damn finances; we need a stronger liberal presence!”

(The previous conversation was fictional.  All celebrity voices were impersonated – badly)

Far fetched? Maybe.  But I’m trying to figure out a better reason that the WaPo would hire Ezra Klein, currently with the Prospect and formerly one of the interchangeable giggly fratboybloggers from Pandagon.

Is there method to the madness? Perhaps:

The benefits to Klein are clear. He gets a potenitally larger audience and one would assume paycheck for the move.

Is there madness to the method?

As for the Post the benefits are less clear as they add to their overhead which they have been chopping at the print edition and their is no guarantee that Klein will attract enough readers to increase the web site’s revenues which is what I assume they are striving for.

And the real question:

After all the paper and web site already lean left so do they really need to add to that side of the ledger?

Having observed the behavior of the Twin Cities media in the past few weeks, I wonder if anyone in the media even recognizes the concept of “leaning left?”

Example: A journalist generally regarded as  credible writing at a local “progressive” publication, covering the Tea Parties, used the term “Teabaggers” in his headline.  Didn’t seem to have a clue anyone would see a sign of bias or slant in it.

If you question a typical journalist, he or she will deny any personal bias (possible), and usually any on the part of the media as a whole – which either means a massive conspiracy to brainwash reporters (implausible) or a persepctive utterly foreign ot most of us.

I don’t care for Glenn Beck. Never have.

I’ve never quite put my finger on it, really; the fact that while there’s a lot to be upset and motivated about these days, his ire and militancy seems at times to be almost as manufactured as lefties claim the whole medium is?  His voice?  The fact that he has a seven-figure gig while I’m plugging away on weekends at WWTC?

I don’t know – or didn’t until Allahpundit at Hot Air broke it down in discussing one of Beck’s “Tom Paine” segments:

I don’t like is this guy’s habit of lapsing into rhetoric about a second revolution, legislators ignoring the people “at your peril,” and, per the letter from a Marine that he reads near the end here, the idea that “our country is under attack from an enemy within” — which isn’t the first time he’s used language about enemies and attacks to describe policy disagreements. I get that the character he’s playing obliges him to use a certain amount of revolutionary parlance, just like I get that I’ll take plenty of heat in the comments for being a squish who’s afraid to fight nutroots fire with fire, etc, but what can I tell you. That sort of rhetoric leaves me cold, and I can’t be the only one.

Theatrics are fine and dandy – every pundit uses ’em to some degree or another. But it seems like it’s the only trick Beck has.

What?  You’re trying to tell me that “The Daily Show” and Jon Stewart lies via misleading editing, especially in re the Tea Parties?

Pfft.  Next you’ll be saying that Colbert isn’t a real smug clueless blowhard conservative pundit.

Over the years, I’ve given the Minnesoros…er, Minnesota Independent a lot of crap.

Of course, they’ve deserved much of it; from their early, fingers-crossed insistence that nosirreebob there was no link between their parent groups (The Center for “Independent” Media) and the various tentacles of George Soros’ propaganda machine (it turned out, by golly, there were) to plagiarism, comical reporting and, finally, the shocking revelation that the whole enterprise was a propaganda tool (“Shut up!“), the publication has been at times a carnival of errors.

Which doesn’t mean they haven’t had good writers on board; Andy Birkey, Paul Demko and Paul Schmelzer are all perfectly capable journalists on their respective beats.

Chris Steller,on the other hand, needs some work:

Here’s evidence that Minnesota’s post-election battle for U.S. Senate has permeated pop culture. Al Franken and Norm Coleman were cited this week by contestants in another competition that attracted millions of partisans: the race between movie actor Ashton Kutcher and news juggernaut CNN to be first to gain one million followers on Twitter, the social-media phenomenon.

Ah.  Well, now we know we’re into vital news territory.  It’s good to kinow we have seasoned (citizen) journalists covering that crucial King/Kutcher beat.

Two leading players in the new-media stunt known as the ”Twitter War“ compared themselves to Minnesota’s Senate rivals. Kutcher tweeted “now I know how Al Franken must have felt” when the race looked tight on Thursday. After the actor bested the network today, CNN host Larry King said, “I’m not a sore loser. I’m not gonna pull a Norm Coleman and take this to the courts.”

Well, by all means, Minnesota, let’s let Larry King serve as our rudder in difficult times. Let the bland, mushy-left, softball-tossing star-hugging King, the emptiest of all the talking heads, steer the ship of state!

It’ll make things so much easier.

Time has been standing still as the world wonders – will Michele Tafoya take the noon-3PM slot at WCCO-AM?  Or will she not?

David Brauer captures the breathless anticipation:

Thursday, I wrote that Michele Tafoya was “likely” to be named WCCO-AM’s noon-3 p.m. host next week. Today, C.J. casts some doubt on the hiring, noting the Good Neighbor’s announcement had been delayed amid “insider” speculation that money and Tafoya’s Monday Night Football committment are the snags.

That might be right — I’m relying on insiders, too, which is not definitive. However, I have a couple of additional data points that could explain the hold-up.

OK – I lied.  The only people who care are local media wonks.

Among the rest of us, the only real question is this: given that Michele Tafoya is a TV personality (and that TV personalities make almost universally terrible talk radio hosts) who is doing yet another mushy general interest show on a mushy general interest station that has in a generation fallen from market dominance to weak also-ran status, is Tafoya’s show going to:

1. Smell, and get tubed at the end of Tafoya’s contract.
2. Reek to high heaven, and get blitzed for trumped-up cause within a year.
3. Suck chunks through a straw and cause the once-great Good Neighbor to “go dark” (which is, for the benefit of all of you leftybloggers, a broadcasting term for “shut off its transmitter for good”, not a racist jape).

Discuss.

Greg Gutfeld catalogues the racism, hatred and rage [links to video] at the Tea Parties.

Garafolo, Napolitano and Coopero are onto something here.

I finally got a chance to listen to KSTP-AM’s new mid-morning show, “Przebyl (sp) and Murphy”, this morning. These guys are putatively Bob Davis’ replacement on the mid-morning slot.

Not, I suspect, for long.

As we’ve noted in the past, once KSTP-AM lost Limbaugh, it drank the then-vogue-y consultant Kool-Aid that “conservative talk is dead”.  Over the past three years, it’s ditched all semblance of “out” political talk (Davis, Dave Thompson) as well as anything off-puttingly edgy (Tom Mischke).

I remember hearing the grumblings from some of KSTP’s staff even back in 2003 when the place was a cash cow (and heavily, overtly conservative, with Limbaugh, Jason Lewis and Bob Davis, on top of Joe Soucheray’s not-so-much-conservative-as-curmudgeonly schtick); boss Ginny Morris would complain to all and sundry that “we have to live in this town”, and audibly pine for the station to edge more towards the middle of the road.  To be all things to all people.  To be more like…

I was going to say WCCO, but that’s only half true. I think she wants KSTP to be the station her grandfather built, back in the 1930’s; the station WCCO copied throughout the thirties and forties, and passed in the fifties and sixties.

Make no mistake; Morris’ grandfather Stanley Hubbard the First was a true pioneer, a genius, one of the great figures in American broadcasting.  While he ran KSTP-AM in the thirties and forties, he pioneered things like spot news (he had the a car outfitted with a short-wave transmitter, capable of reporting back to KSTP from anywhere in the country, the predecessor of the satellite trucks we see at news events today), entertainment radio (he broadcast adapted vaudeville shows from the Minneapolis Orpheum, where among many others Jack Benny got his start) and many other things we all take for granted.

This was back when the Twin Cities had maybe a dozen radio stations.  This was back when people were acclimated to town that had 3-4 newspapers, eventually three TV stations, and that was it.  This was back when media became community.

This was another era.  It’s gone forever – except in a very narrowcast sense.  Joe Sourcheray is to curmudgeons what Boone and Erickson were to Minnesota parents and lunchpails forty years ago.  Rush Limbaugh is to tax-paying working stiffs what Steve Cannon was to afternoon commuters thirty years back.

Listening to Przebyl and Murphy is just like listening to a time capsule of pre-1987 talk radio, maybe preserved on tape at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting; lots of chatter about local stories without any particular slant or bias or, truth be told, reason to stay tuned in.

And that’s just the overall theme.  I don’t know much about the two guys, but they can’t have a lot of radio background; it’s hard to say who stammers worse on the air.  They need to take a deep breath and relax and try to have fun with material that, I have to say, really isn’t very.  At least not at first listen.

Disclosure: I worked for KSTP-AM from 1985-87.  I also came in second place for the Program Director job there in 1991, behind…current PD and former KDWB colleague Steve Konrad.  I do a weekend show at a competing station. I declare that I’m utterly clinical about the radio business, but feel free to filter accordingly.

To: Anderson Cooper

From: Mitch Berg

Re: Your 4/15 cablecast

Mr. Cooper,

Sitting back, I can think of many times, chatting away with my project-mates in the bullpen, where I’d unwrap a bag of Earl Grey or Rooibos and dunk it in hot water, without interrupting my verbal train of thought.

I’ve also wondered about the cognitive logistics of that more metaphorical, historical tea-related moment, the Boston Tea Party – and not only do I believe that hauling bales of tea leaves would not pose a cognitive obstacle to speech, but having worked a few heavy manual labor jobs, I’ll tell you that talking, even yelling, are perfectly normal while hauling heavy things.  One might reasonably suppose that dropping or throwing lighter amounts – say, individual bags through boxes – would present even less of an obstacle.

There is, of course, another definition of “teabagging”, well known to anyone who has been in fourth grade – utterly unrelated to the previous two examples, but which would, perforce, make talking difficult.

Now, on your April 15 broadcast, you quipped “it’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging“.

As I demonstrated above, that’s only true with one meaning of the term.

So Mr. Cooper, question one: it’d logically seem that you’re referring to the latter definition of the term; in addition, you said your quip with such an air of first-person authority; how indeed do you know it’s “hard to talk” while “teabagging?”

And on second thought, given the inevitable, if somewhat distateful and/or juvenile answer to the first question, the second question (“how did someone with no demonstrable talent or experience for the job other than perfect silver-gray politics and hair to match ever get a job as a CNN talk show host?”) is rendered, it seems, moot.

Thanks. Sorry for the imposition.

That is all.

NOTE: To be fair to Cooper, he’s better than Matt Taibbi, “policial correspondent” for bleeding-edge magazine Rolling Stone.

Declare all dissent “crazy”.

Focus on the few protesters that confirm the thesis.

Do a hit piece, and run like hell.

Of course the CNN reporter did was she was told; depict Tea Party protesters as crazies,and then cut away.

But she got more than she bargained for.

It’ll be a great day when these hacks are chased from the streets for good.

…and, in this case, the indisputable truth.

Yesterday and Tuesday, we noted that the left, locally and nationally, is engaging in class-action slander, based around getting people to believe that:

Conservative dissent equals murder.

It’s not an isolated trend.

It’s not new.

And it’s not an accident.

———-

“The dangerous right” is a well-worn trope in American political/media history.  It is also – to invoke Orwell’s aphorism about dictators needing enemies – entirely predictable.

Three weeks ago Philip Jenkins wrote an excellent history about the “Dangerous Right” media meme in American Conservative.  It’s an oldie, all right (emphasis added):

From 1938 through 1941, the media regularly presented stories suggesting that the U.S. was about to be overwhelmed by ultra-Right fifth columnists, millions strong, intimately allied with the Axis powers. (Actual numbers of serious militants were in the low thousands at most.) Reportedly, the militant Right was armed to the teeth and plotting countless domestic terror attacks—bombings in New York and Washington, assassinations and pogroms, the wrecking of trains and munitions plants. Plotters were rumored to have high-placed allies in the military, raising the specter of a putsch. The ensuing panic was orchestrated by newspapers and radio and reinforced by films, newsreels, and comic books. Historians characterize these years as the Brown Scare.

In other words, standing in the way of FDR, the New Deal and the dawn of enlightened “liberalism” and Hope and Change itself was a shadowy, secret army – why, one might almost call it a “vast, right-wing conspiracy”!

And when liberals come to office with big, sweeping, “transformative” plans?  Well, the “enemy among us” needs to be trotted out as well:

After JFK’s election in 1960, the devoutly anti-Communist Minutemen took first place in liberals’ demonology. As in the 1930s, the far Right was supposed to be closely tied to out-of-control military officers. Remember fictional treatments of the time like “Dr. Strangelove” and “Seven Days in May”? Once more, too, the supposed threat from far-Right extremism surfaced in mainstream politics, especially during the 1964 elections…As in the 1930s, the extremists existed, and some hotheads contemplated violence. But once again, a yawning gulf separated the reality of the threat from the public perception.

In our lifetimes – so far – the worst fell during the Clinton years:

Between 1995 and 2001, America suffered the Great Militia Panic, when exposés of ultra-Right violence became a media staple. For liberal press outlets, America was facing a clear and present danger from the militias, from Nazis and skinheads, and even from dissident elements within U.S. Special Forces. Liberals accused the anti-Clinton Right of providing extremists with ideological aid and comfort. An impressive outpouring of books—peaking in 1996—warned of an imminent terrorist disaster. Typical titles raised the shadow of America’s Militia Threat, Terrorists Among Us, or The Birth of Paramilitary Terrorism in the Heartland. One book warned of the Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City is Only the Beginning.

I always found it ironic how lefties accused conservatives of “wetting their pants in terror” about islamic terrorism after 9/11, after living through the waves of “mommy, there’s a militiaman under my bed!” that swept the nation during the Clinton years

The news media was open to the most improbable charges of right-wing atrocities. In 1996, television news shows discovered a (wholly spurious) wave of arson attacks in which white extremists were allegedly wiping out the nation’s black churches.

As recently as a decade ago, “terrorism” in the American public consciousness meant, almost entirely, domestic right-wing activism…by far the worst consequence of the Militia Panic was the massive underplaying of Islamic terrorism in U.S. public discourse and the disproportionate focus on the domestic far Right. Liberal columnists scoffed knowingly at terrorism experts who warned about foreign militants like al-Qaeda, when every informed observer knew that the real menace was internal.

I remember lefty pundits on about 9/13 furrowing their brows and warning us that right-wing domestic terror was still the “real danger”, as the Twin Towers still burned.  They were – it is hard to remember – that deluded.

By the way – does any of this sound familiar (emphasis again added)?  Elements of this phenomenon anticpate blogging itself by about sixty years:

If the more bizarre accusations sound like the common currency of the show trials in Stalin’s Russia in these very years, that is no coincidence. The main exposés of fascist conspiracy emanated from Communist Party journalists like Albert Kahn and John Spivak. (Spivak himself was an operative for the Soviet NKVD.) Charges circulated through Kahn’s newssheet The Hour before being picked up in the liberal press. The Red agenda was straightforward in that the Brown Scare allowed the Left to discredit any opponent of radical New Deal policies. Scratch the surface of any enemy of the Left, they claimed, and you would find a fascist spy, a lyncher, a storm trooper.

Or a member of a “vast, right-wing” and now “eliminationist” “conspiracy”.
The conclusion is near the beginning, and it is damning (emphasis added):

Based on the record of past Democratic administrations, in the near future terrorism will almost certainly be coming home. This does not necessarily mean more attacks on American soil. Rather, public perceptions of terrorism will shift away from external enemies like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and focus on domestic movements on the Right. We will hear a great deal about threats from racist groups and right-wing paramilitaries, and such a perceived wave of terrorism will have real and pernicious effects on mainstream politics. If history is any guide, the more loudly an administration denounces enemies on the far Right, the easier it is to stigmatize its respectable and nonviolent critics.

Like me.

Like Representative Bachmann.

Like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Bernie Goldberg.

Like you, you bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freak, you.

———-

When I’d heard that the DNC had hired linguist George Lakoff, I openly worried that the left was embarking on a campaign of violence – violence against the language. It would be a campaign to control how the language itself imparts perceptions about politics.  It’s a battle the Democrats have been winning for decades, if only because they’re the only ones that show up.

The parallels with Orwell’s 1984, where language was being systematically engineered to reflect first political orthodoxy and, eventually, nothing at all, are impossible to miss.

In Mike Judge’s overlooked classic movie Idiocracy, society falls because idiots outbreed smart people.  Despots and demigogues have long known that the best way to take over a society is to win over the thugs and the dolts; the pen is, at least in the short term, not mightier than the sword or, in this case, the truncheon. Noriega had his Dignity Battalions; Mugabe, the Gukurahundi; Hitler and Mao and Stalin, the Sturmabteilung and Hitlerjugend, the Red Guards, the Komsomol, the legions of dedicated true believers who didn’t have to think, just do; to smear the Jew, the Bourgeois, the Wreckers today, and to beat, imprison and kill them tomorrow.  For society’s own good.

And the Big Left today has, on a rhetorical plane, the same basic thing; the legions of the ingenuous, the dedicated but not-excessively-bright, the people who are willing to suspend the rules of civility and decency in service of…

…what?  The meme that “Some of your fellow citizens’ beliefs will lead to mass murder!”?

I’d like to think that continuing to take the high road is the right response to this class-action slander.  I’m less confident in this all the time. Indeed, as I noted yesterday, DHS Secretary Napolitano has tipped the left’s hand.

Let’s try to roll it all together tomorrow.

Reading Minnesota Progressive Project is like going to a Joaquin Phoenix concert; you don’t really care for the stuff, and you don’t want to go for the event’s own sake, but you just know  you’re going to see a train wreck.  (Sort of like Al Franken’s first press conference, if heaven forfend he gets seated in the Senate).

And so I occasionally gulp down a glass of water (on an empty stomach only) and pop open their container in GoogleReader, and see what wonders the new day brings.

Ah.  Yesterday it was Grace “9/11 was an inside job!” Kelly, in a piece that started – mirabile dictu – fairly innocuously, discussing (very briefly) the large number of refugees who’ve come to the Twin Cities over the decades (discussing Somalis and Tibetans but missing the Vietnamese and H’mong, who fled the oppression of the far left to get here – but no matter. I wouldn’t expect Kelly to get  sense of history anytime soon; let it go).

But then:

I think we have to rethink our “terrorism” label. Certainly the American Revolution would have been considered a criminal violent insurgency against the established order of English rule of the colonies. Gasp – the American Revolution advocated violence! Gasp – a criminal violent insurgency today would be called “terrorism”.

I could feel my jaw dropping in dazed wonder. It’s the old “The founding fathers were terrorists” bit.  There are still lefties who use that old bit of self-pleasuring historical illiteracy.

Onward:

So when can people advocate violence and not be labeled terrorists?

For some of us, that’s fairly simple: when terror isn’t the primary, or only, means of achieving a social or political goal.  Saying “this land is ours, go away”, and taking up arms and fighting those who try to take the land back, is not terrorism.  Kidnapping your occupiers and sending body parts back to their families with notes demanding independence is terrorism.

Publishing a declaration of independence,and defending that independence, is not terrorism.  Setting off nail bombs in Boston or New York [*] to indiscriminately kill soldiers, Tories and innocent bystandards and cow the British into leaving – that would have been terrorism.

Is it just a case of my violence is good, your violence is bad? Is the US making the moral violence judgments for whole rest of the world? I would say “yes”. My, how imperialistic of us, particularly in light of principles of American revolution.

One wonders if Grace “9/11 was an inside job” Kelly knows what the “principles of the American Revolution” were.

Defining what liberty was, and how the individual related to government in a free society?  Recognizing inalienable rights?  Establishing a democratic republic? Enshrining free press, worship, assembly, speech, jury trials, due process and enumerated powers?
I’m guessing that’s not what she has ever thought was thinking of.

PRE-POST NOTE: I actually wrote this series last week, when the “annoying trickle” of pointless,mindless, baseless slander of conservatives was pretty much background noise.

Of course, since I wrote the first three parts of the series, Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security – which would seem to have become completely politicized in the past three months – has essentially declared all conservative thought and dissent (not to mention military service) as probable cause for government suspicion.

My friend and radio colleague John Hinderaker at Power Line, shreds this report in one of the essential fiskings in recent blog history; I’m sure it’s just the beginning.

But the extent of the defamation of all conservative thought in this country goes way beyond a witless bureaucrat and her minions, and won’t end in the unlikely event Napolitano is fired in the disgrace she deserves.

My timing, sadly, could not be better.  Or worse, depending on your point of view.

———-
As I noted yesterday – the usual annoying trickle of leftybloggers and “alternative” media types grasping onto examples of bad behavior by conservatives or (more usually) inflating off-handed remarks into “evidence” and outright mangling of context has turned into a babbling runoff-swollen brook of cultural defamation.

Few brooks babble more than local leftyblog icon Mark Gisleson, who wrote last week:

On Sunday’s The UpTake live news show [no archive available], host Tom Elko’s conservative blogger guest Mitch Berg turned to the camera and implored his 2nd Amendment buddies to not get crazy. No clue if JammieWearingFool listens to Mitch’s radio show or reads his blog.

Now, haven’t seen the video of the Uptake appearance – if there’s anything I hate more than listening to my voice, it’s seeing myself on TV – but I’m pretty sure the subject was the nutcase in Pittsburgh who shot the three cops, due to (he and the media claimed) his fear of Obama’s anti-gun proposals.  Now, despite that fact that most of us Second Amendment/Human Rights activists deal with this by joining the NRA (and  you’ll note that there have not been four million of these incidents), I was urging fellow human rights activists to not panic; we’ve beaten back worse than this, and done it not only by civil means, but means we can be proud of a civil Americans.

It’s hilarious, of course – this is the same Mark Gisleson who five years ago earned undying infamy for pining for armed revolution, in the Twin Cities’ Reader’s late, unlamented “Babelogue” (whose archives have perhaps mercifully gurgled down the memory hole):

In my heart, I still believe in revolution. In my heart, I still think I have the ‘nads to put my life on the line for a cause. In my gut I think this is the only way we’ll ever achieve our goals of economic and social justice. But in my head, I want to win the next election so we don’t have to have a revolution.

…and who’s boasted about a purported past as a “labor goon”, has suddenly gotten the vapors over the odd bit of (let’s take him at his word, by which I mean “humor the delusion”) borderline-militant rhetoric.

Vapor-y enough to refer us to…:

And TBogg has more on the eliminationist Right.

Ah. TBogg.  Well, if TBogg says it, it’s…

…well, it’s someone else’s talking point, only lobotomized.  TBogg is the ultimate metastasization of the anonymous leftyblogger; intellectually vacuous, given to broad sweeps of cultural group slander (while shielded from accountability by his precious anonymity) and waves of nasty, petulant, juvenile snarkiness, and…

…well, pretty much everything that the local anonymous leftyblog community aspires to.

But is the right “eliminationist?” Wow.  That’s a word you don’t see every day; Daniel Goldhagen used the term “eliminationist anti-semitism” to describe the German people before and during WWII – but he took a whole book to do it, in which me laid out a case that German society had in it a long tradition of a desire to, y’know, kill Jews.

So since it’s such a big word, curiousity triumphed over experience. I read “TBogg”, wondering as to the “evidence” of the “eliminationist right” that apparently lurks outside the gates of our civilization.

Read it if you feel compelled to do so; it tries to link the story of James Adkisson, the deranged Knoxville man who, let it be known, really really did hate liberals (WARNING! PDF FILE! GIVE UP ALL HOPE OF USABILITY OR PERFORMANCE!), and followed up on that hatred by killing two people at a Unitarian Universalist church.

Mr. Bogg (and the various leftybloggers who are his only real sources) ties Adkisson to Timothy McVeigh, which is trite and facile but not uttelry inaccurate, and thence to “Right-wing hate radio”, the diabolical cabal of Limbaugh/Hannity/Bernard Goldberg (?), who we are assured are really behind it all.

And there, in the bleatings of a gutless anonymous blogger and his dotzy fanboy in Saint Paul and of a thousand similar intellectual copulations, is the nucleus of the real story; the left wants you, and the population at large, to make the following leap:

Conservative dissent leads to murder.

More tomorrow.

EPILOGUE:  Again – I wrote the above late last Friday.  I’ll write more about Secretary Napolitano’s slander on Friday.

Last week, Iowahawk did a hilarious send-up of JournoList, the hush-hush list-serve for liberal “deep thinkers”:

JOSH MARSHALL: How about we do something about how wingnut bloggers live in an echo chamber

JESSE SINGAL: sweeet!!!! gmta

MICHAEL COHEN: ya its like those f*****z are in a echo chamber or something

CHRIS HAYES: gmta

JONATHAN CHAIT: ya total echo chamber

BRAD DELONG: echo-o-o-o-o-o-o cha-a-a-a-mber-er-er-er

ISAAC CHOTINER: lols

EZRA KLEIN: ok,,, we agree. Yglesias its your turn to write it

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: cant, I have h/w assignment due for rahm emanuel

OK, that’s a spoof – but I have a hunch I know what one of the recent topics must have been. There’s been such a wide-spread synchronicity of – for lack of a better word – “thought” among so many regional and national leftybloggers, I can’t help but think it’s not only no coincidence, but in fact a symptom of the most caustic initiative on the part of the American left.
———-

Before we get to the story, let’s talk aphorisms.  Aphorisms can be taken way too far – but they can be useful memes for categorizing things like human behavior.
One of my favorites I get from watching the odd episode of House.  In and among all the glib causticness, House trips upon the odd ingenious bit of human nature.

Many of those bits tie back to his main rule – his Prime Directive, if you will – for human nature; everybody lies.  It’s true, really; at some point or another, everyone finds it in their self-interest or sense of emotional self-preservation to bend the truth.

I’m positing that this rule as a corollary when it comes to the left-leaning “alternative” media.  Indeed, let’s call this “Berg’s Second Law of Leftyblogging”:  whenever liberals toss out defamatory generalizations about conservatives, they are projecting. (Classic example comes about 1:04 into this video).

You can pretty much name your slur; the party that yaps about “fatcats” is the party that owes its soul to plutocrats.  The party that whinged about Bush’s record on civil liberties has always been the party that actually did crush civil liberties (see the ’94 Crime Bill, the ’96 Counterterrorism Act, and the various Dem plans on the “Fairness” Doctrine, bank takeovers and the ). The party that complains about violence, corruption, wastrelcy and incompetence is violent, corrupt, spendthrift and incompetent.

It’s a theory, but I’ll stand by it. Indeed, you’ll see why as this piece continues.

There’s one more aphorism.  It’s George Orwell’s note that dictators always need enemies to keep the people occupied.

They don’t even need to be dictators!

———-

It’s a running joke among conservatives; if you order a pizza, and a lefty hears about it, it’s an example of extremism.  Pushing to liberalize charter-school laws and vacant-housing ordinances? Activism for the Second or Tenth Amendments?  Extremism.  To paraphrase the old drill sergeant aphorism, “everything you do can get you labelled an extremist, and everything you don’t do can get you labelled an extremist”.

I started seeing little trickles and dribbles around the regional Sorosphere a couple of weeks ago: references to “right-wing extremism” (this in reference to a quip by Michele Bachmann that uses some kind of guerrilla warfare reference to refer to conservatives in Minnesota), usually with more-than-muted warnings about “militancy” and “violence”.

It’s tempting (and in the case of the link above, accurate) to write it all off as examples of intellectual laziness, of the febrile thrashings of inferior minds.  Indeed, both of these play into the larger point.

But there is a larger point. The leftybloggers involved in these casual, petty, paranoid defamations are unwitting tools in a long-running campaign to control the English language, if necessary by devaluing it to uselessness.

More tomorrow.

Let’s interrupt the local leftyblogosphere’s giddy tittering over Rachel “Kirk Cameron” Maddow’s referring to the Tea Party protests as “teabagging”. If they weren’t a bunch of giggly arrested adolescents in the first place, they’d be conservatives, and the Sorosphere is largely so devoid of wit that this is what passes for clever in those quarters.

No, let’s look past the juvenilia and into the beef of the tax-mania that Maddow so dumbly short-changes for her gullible (and tiny) audience.  Jamie Delton breaks it down well:

Does she realize during the campaign the $250K figure originally claimed was gradually modified by Obama and Biden to $133K?

Is she confusing this “tax cut” with Obama’s deception of quadrupling the deficit and then saying he is cutting the (quadrupled) deficit in half? Does she not realize tax payers will be forced to pay the needless debt being incurred now by the democrats in the budget and stimulus bills through the ultimate tax authority of the federal government and the Federal Reserve’s inflated printed money, which is the same as a tax? When does a Democrat stop cheerleading taxes and begin to turn their attention to responsible government?

What?  Ask Rachel Maddow questions?

Well, goodness knows the Sorosphere won’t.  On Marty Owings’ internet talk show a few weeks back, I took a dig at some of Maddow’s assertions.  One of the liberal panelists’ responses – well, it boiled down to “how dare you question her.  She was a Rhodes scholar!”

Cecil Rhodes should demand his money back.

The Daily Kos – with a seven-digit budget and a staff of nine – is among the leftybloggers whining about not being on the liberal gravy train:

Some of the leading liberal bloggers are privately furious with the major progressive groups — and in some cases, the Democratic Party committees — for failing to spend money advertising on their sites, even as these groups constantly ask the bloggers for free assistance in driving their message.It’s a development that’s creating tensions on the left and raises questions about the future role of the blogosphere at a time when a Dem is in the White House and liberalism could be headed for a period of sustained ascendancy.

Those crazies don’t come cheap!  Just ask Minnesota Progressive Project.

Wanna bet they’re in line for some “stimulus” money?

Tom Mischke  Steve Cannon:

I think about the day he was diagnosed with cancer. I knew he hadn’t been feeling well. The last time we had gotten together he hadn’t had much of an appetite. Still, the news was a blunt-force strike to the heart, made more difficult by the matter-of-fact way he addressed what was so awful about his situation.

“There’s still things I want to see,” he said. “These are such interesting times, aren’t they? There’s so much going on. I want to find out how this Obama does, I want to see what changes are going to happen in this country. I want to see the new Twins stadium and the Gopher stadium.”

He was 81, but he might as well have been 21. The world around him was endlessly fascinating to Cannon. He kept up with everything. His mind was sharp, and his biting wit alive and devastating.

It was hard to pick an actual clip from Mischke’s Strib elegy.  Just go and read the whole thing.  It’s the kind of thing you just don’t see in the mass media.

Last week, KSTP-AM fired longtime utility infielder Dave Thompson.

And yesterday, we’re told, was Bob Davis’ last broadcast on the Evil Talk Empire.
This email made the rounds among KSTP-AM fans yesterday:

Hi [Fan, redacted],

Below is an e-mail just distributed to AM1500 Staff regarding Bob Davis:

I come to you today with news that Bob Davis is no longer with AM1500
KSTP.

His last show was today, April 7.

Bob’s contributions over the last eight years are appreciated and we
wish him well. His effervescent demeanor, his always-ready belly laugh and
his iconic head of hair leave a lasting impression on all who meet him.

Starting Thursday morning at 9am, we will have a brand new radio program
for the Twin Cities. I could tell you their names (yes, a two-person
show), but you have not heard of them. They are new to Twin Cities radio, but not new to upper Midwest radio and both guys have personal ties to the Twin Cities metro.

Any bets on this one?

I, for one, haven’t the faintest clue, other than they’ll be innocuous, politically “neutral”, a neutered nod to the “glory days” of WCCO (in an era where nobody’s asking for any suc thing); I wouldn’t bet against a couple of sports guys, probably from one of the Twin Cities dailies.  That’s just a hunch, worth exactly what you’re paying for it, and I’m certainly not betting my mortgage on any part of it…

…except that’s not going to take the world by storm.

Expect an e-mail from me Thursday morning about 8am with further
details.

I am excited about this addition to AM1500 KSTP and I encourage you to
share your view of them after you give them a few listens.

As for Dave Thompson, I think you may be interested in the headline of a
news release that was issued earlier this afternoon:

Dave Thompson Announces Candidacy to become next State Chair of the
Minnesota Republican Party

Now, that is interesting news.

Thank you for your continued support of AM1500 KSTP as we further

dedicate our focus on serving the Twin Cities.

Steve Konrad
Program Director

This stinks, of course; both Davis and Thompson are longtime friends of the MOB, and deserve a whole lot better than the misbegotten pile that KSTP-AM has become.
Will KSTP-AM’s last listeners please lock up on your way out?

I try to be civil.  Really, I do.  Even across party lines.  Some of my best friends are liberals.  I talk with liberals; I’m the guy who works overtime to invite liberals to MOB parties; heck, even Uptake invited me on their show to talk last weekend.  I got interviewed in the friggin’ Utne Reader, for crying out loud!

Not saying I try to cozy up to the other side.  But I am not one to suspend the Golden Rule just because I differ with someone’ politics. I prize civility.

But I have my limits.

As my friend and Salem Radio colleague Dennis Prager says, I strive for clarity more than agreement.  Being clear is a genuine virtue, especially in political blogging – a trade built to a great extent on obfuscation and spin.

So when “Tom Angelo” at Minnesota Progressive Project writes:

Mitch “Thank God for Tom Delay” Berg likes to pick on us here at MN Progressive Project…

Let’s do try to be clear: I don’t like to “pick on” the MPP.

I like to reply to little bon mots like this, in about the same way I like to shoot rubber bands when I’m bored:

Here is an excerpt from a post on Mitch’s site yesterday:

The stock market does well for a president – Clinton – who, to be fair, was forced to do a decent, hands-off job on economic policy by a conservative congress, and to be even more fair was benefitting from the “Peace Dividend” Ronald Reagan gave him: “The President is responsible for the strong market!”

The stock market starts correcting into a mild recession as overvalued tech stocks correct at the very end of his term in office: “The President is not responsible for the market!”

The already-ailing market tumbles after 9/11: “The President is responsible for the weak market!”

Leaving aside the historical errors in the post, you can see what he’s doing, making the case that the performance of the markets is assigned to the president on a partisan basis. When there is a Democrat in office and the market is doing well than it’s because of the President. When a Republican is in office and the market is doing well it’s not because of the president.

But do you notice what is missing from Mitch’s post?

Proof.

That’s right, “Mr. Angelo”.  Because it’s a qualitative observation.  There is no quantitative measurement for impressions of bias (which is why people like, say, everyone on the MPP can get away with saying the mainstream media is conservative).  There is no “proof”, per se, short of piling up dozens of quotes from drooling leftybloggers and cable-TV shills saying…exactly what I said.

But let’s continue. I like to mock the Minnesota Progressive Project for their mindless hyperdramatics.

I like to make sure the world knows that some of your “writers” are shrieking ninnies who are groaningly incurious and are, let’s be honest, almost too obvious to parody.

 I want to make sure that we’re clear on the fact that the Minnesota Progressive Project posted a “diary” by an anonymous hitblogger who turns out to be a sad, risible little fellow from New York who is motivated by a curious vendetta; the piece had not a single word of of truth in it (except for the bits that are either standard industry practices or things the NARN has been joking about for years).  It used a manufactured source that has gone public and disavowed the use of his information in the context that Fred Gates (“Jimmy Olson” to the MPP) presented it.  It was, in short, a lie.  Pure and simple. And the MPP ran it without question.

Hit the link.  It’s got the proof.

Oh, yeah – and that if you want to find out things about Mitch Berg, you should do what a “journalist” would do and ask, rather than send giggling, dippy chuzzlewits like Grace Kelly calling around town looking for dirt on me. (Yes, Grace, you gutless hack, you are busted!)

And when you pile all that together, I guess I don’t so much like to say “if brains, talent and integrity were gasoline, the entire staff of the Minnesota Progressive Project couldn’t drive a moped around the inside of a Cheerio” so much as I merely find the statement accurate enough to run with.

Glad we’re clear on that.

I’m on my way to The Uptake’s undisclosed location in Saint Paul for a taping.

On the one hand, I’ve been told to be careful; “Uptake’s a bunch of hard-lefties; watch for the ambush”.  I’ve certainly encountered the group’s seamy side before.
On the other hand, I’m always up for an adventure. Things seem – before the fact – to be on the up-and-up.

We’ll see!

“Ollie Ox” at “A Bluestem Prairie” – what is it with leftybloggers and anonymity? – has apparently realized that liberalism is a vapid mind-suck, and that her fellow liberal bloggers range from talentless ninniesm comically depraved hacks, and wannabee Frank Riches, and has decided to shutter her blog:

After posting at this blog for 2 years, 8 months, we’re feeling the need to spruce up the joint. Bluestem will be shuttered after today until June 1, when the blog will return as a venue for nonfiction essays about rural topics.Thanks for reading

OK, I made up the rationale. It seems to be in vogue.

Oh, all kidding aside, I’ve mixed it up with Bluestem Prairie in the past, but “Ollie” was one of very few anonymous leftybloggers who seemed not to abuse her anonymity as a cover for gutless, abusive hackery.  Why, it’s almost like she wrote stuff a normal person could attach a name to.

Hm. Radical concept.

Anyway, all the best.

(Two years and eight months?  Sheesh.  I can do that standing on my head).

The executive editor at the NYTimes says the paper will “survive the deluge”:

Times executive editor Bill Keller also said at Stanford:
* Readers have offered to donate money to keep the Times alive. (“Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.”)

Having seen the onslaught of charity the regional left poured forth for Kathleen Soliah ten years ago, I don’t doubt it one bit.  I also don’t doubt that any Darfuri refugee would do a better job of keeping the Administration honest than the Times will.

* “If you’re inclined to trust Google as your source for news — Google yourself.”

On the one hand, Google has been fairly accused of bowdlerizing conservative thought every bit as flagrantly as the NYTimes.

On the other hand, I have little doubt that if Google was circling the drain, we wouldn’t be subjected to the cultural sturm und drang the newspapers are trying to inflict on us.

When you’re a conservative blogger, especially in Minnesota, you get used to being actively insulted and derided by the state’s dominant political/media class.

But ignored?

Bear in mind, Minnesota’s center-right blogging community is, if not the most active and vital political blogging community in the nation, easily among the very short list at the top of the heap.  From the bigs like my friends at Powerline and Hot Air, to erudite generalists like TvM and FreedomDogs, to acerbic, focused niche-bloggers like Nihilist in Golf Pants, Speed Gibson and True North and many, many more (see the MOBroll, leave out the non-conservatives and you get the idea), Minnesota’s center-right blogging underground is big, passionate, and disporportionally influential. 

So when Chris Cilizza at the WaPo started a list of the “Best State Political Blogs”, state-by-state, nationwide, it was reasonable to figure that while it’d probably overrepresent leftybloggers (packs of dogs will sniff each others’ butts, no doubt about it) – but you’d think they’d have some fodder with which to impart balance.

Trusting the MSM, of course, is always a long walk to a short splash.  Behold, “Baghdad Chris” Cilizza’s “Best Minnesota Political Blogs”. 

Ahem:

* MN Publius
* Minnesota Campaign Report
* MN Blue
* Politics in Minnesota
* Polinaut

Polinaut is an institutional MPR production; it’s good and useful, to be sure, but not exactly an organic part of the local blog scene.  Politics in Minnesota is a great aggregator of regional political thought; their daily run-downs of the “best of Minnesota blogs” has treated Shot In The Dark and True North very well; they also routinely run four leftyblog links for every overt conservative blog link.  Que sera sera; it’s a game effort…

…compared to the rest of Chris Cilizza’s risible list.

MNPublius is OK; they’re a DFL flakblog; they’re like Minnesota Democrats Exposed, only without the regular game-changing scoops.  Minnesota Campaign Report is earnest but comical. 

MNBlue (Note, Mr. Cilizza; they’re called “Minnesota Progressive Project” these days)?  Well, when they’re not letting Grace Kelly regurgitate her tingly-fingered Obama worship or her addledpated 9/11 conspiracy theories, they’re broadcasting risibly-obvious lies from anonymous hacks with curious axes to grind. In other words, they are the single dumbest blog in all of Minnesota.  Bar none.

In the meantime, you’ll look in vain for Minnesota’s real influential political blogs; Powerline and Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, homegrown productions that are among the most powerful blogs in the world; for MDE, which made headlines in the NYTimes and was perhaps more responsible than anyone for erasing Barack Obama’s coattails for Al Franken; for the scads of center-right bloggers that get better traffic and more credibility than at least two of Cilizza’s choices.

It’s a polling thing, of course; liberals read the WaPo, and if you read leftyblogs from Kos and Atrios on down to Minnesota Progressive Report, it’s pretty obvious the typical leftyblog commenter does nothing but sit in his mom’s basement and crank out dyspeptic screeds eighteen hours a day; stacking the votes in a poll like Cilizza’s is child’s play for that pack of loonies.

But otherwise-savvy commentators are passing Cilizza’s story on as if it’s a legitimate commentary on Minnesota’s blog scene.

Not half the story?  Try “not a tenth”. 

(By the way – Rachel Stassen-Berger?  Why does “Political Animal” not take comments or post an email address?)

To lefties, conservative talk radio just can’t be an organic success.  There just can’t be a demand for it.  There just has to be some shadowy conspiracy – a “Scaifenet” – slipping envelopes full of Jacksons to inveigle radio stations to run the stuff.

In the most risible bit of “investigation” since Joe Bodell went all Chloe O’Brien on True North a few years back, “Jimmy Olson” from Minnesota  Progressive  Project is – shhhhhhh! – onto something:

I’ve been doing a bit of digging after getting an anonymous tip that NARN may be paying for their radio time (and not disclosing it), or that townhall.com pays for it.

Now, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention for the past eighty years or so, let me give you a quick remedial course on Radio Programming; let’s call the course “Radio Programming For The Utterly Ignorant”.

There are four types of programming in commercial radio:

1. Programs The Station Owns – Think programs like Joe Soucheray.  They provide programming for the station; the station pays them as long as the ratings justify it (or, in the case of Tom Mischke, sometimes when they don’t).  It’s a traditional employer-employee relationship, only (I say this from a career’s worth of experience) more mercurial.
2. Network Programs – These are provided by a third-party production company, and provide their programming to stations; sometimes they charge the stations for the right to play the show (this is National Public Radio’s model); others provide the show for free, but get advertising slots for their networks on the affiliates’ stations during the shows.  The most famous example of this is Rush Limbaugh – who is free to all of his affiliates, in exchange for eight minutes of ad time per hour, which is sold to national advertisers (for amazing prices, because Limbaugh dominates the industry and gets spectacular ratings).  Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, Dennis Miller, Fast Eddie Schultz, Jason Lewis, Art Bell – they all use the same model. They draw their salaries from the networks – as long as they draw the ratings, systemwide.
3. “Brokered” Talk – In this example, a broadcaster “rents” airtime from a station (or several stations), either because they believe that strongly in getting their message out, or because they think they can turn around and sell enough ad time to recoup the investment (not always financially, or (often, in talk radio) some combination of the above.  The Taxpayers’ League Live was an example of this. So was “Talk Education”, which I used to co-host on KYCR.  Auto Talk on KSTP?  Ask the Veterinarian on Air America Minnesota?  Most of your “Ask the Lawyer” and “Ask the Financial Planner” shows?  All pretty much the same thing.  Sometimes the goal is to just get a show some time, which might not otherwise get picked up by a station (see #1, above).  Note that the entire Air American lineup, for the network’s first several years, was “brokered” in New York, Chicago and LA (until the checks started bouncing).
4. Commercials – These can be short-form commercials – :30 to :60 second “spots” dropped into commercial breaks during any of the types of shows above.  They can also be “infomercials” – entire half-hours, hours, or longer.  They can be distinguised from regular programming by the observation that they’re trying to sell you something, and the station is getting paid good money to broadcast it at all.

Now, “Jimmy Olson’s” opening graf might make you ask: which is the Northern Alliance Radio Network?

It’s simple.  We are #1 – only without the money.  And when I say “without the money”, I mean yeah, we get a few bucks here and there; when I do a commercial for someone, we’re getting a little money – called a “talent fee”, believe it or not.  You can tell when this is happening, because the voice of Mitch Berg (or Ed Morrissey, or King, or whomever) is trying to sell you a product or service, as opposed to talking about politics.  But we get no salary from Salem, from WWTC Radio (AM, from Townhall.com, or from anyone else.  We never have.
We’ve also never paid for airtime at WWTC.  The “Sponsors” we announce every week – Thompson, Keegans, whomever?  They pay to put ads on our show, which is the only money that the station makes directly off of us.
Now, what if “Jimmy” is right – that I write a check every month to WWTC, or Townhall did?  Well, we’d be under no more obligation to disclose it than Stephanie Miller is to tell you her salary.
If we were paying for our airtime – like, say, Health Insights, heard on Air America Minnesota, not that anyone cares since more people will learn about it via this post than will listen to it in a given week – we’d also be under no more obligation to tell anyone about it, since it’s a program, and there’s no real business requirement to tell people that you’re paying for your time.

Now, if you’re paid to give plugs for medical products, or for political candidates, and a few other things, there are ethical rules involved.  We’ll come back to that.

The bad news is, nobody – with a few exceptions – is required  to say “Somone is paying for this airtime”.

The good news is, anyone who can pony up a few hundred or thousand bucks – and convince a station that you won’t scare off the rest of their audience – can rent the time to host a talk show!

Which brings us to the part of “Jimmy Olson’s” investigation that really cuts to the chase:

Here’s (with redactions to protect identities) a letter I got back from Salem Communications re my queries about buying airtime:

———————————-
Good Morning ********,

My name is ********** and I am an Account Executive here at Salem Comm, Twin Cities and ********** asked me to follow up and get you any information you need. We do sell programming on our stations both on the National and Local level.

Here’s something you may be very interested in…..  Effective Monday, March 30, we are transitioning our KYCR AM1570 station to an all-business format.

Hey, that’s right – tune in to AM1570’s new BizRadio lineup, starting today!

And yep; some of the time will be “brokered” (see #3, above).

This next bit, though, Jimmy?

Also, If you could have your friend who is up here in Minnesota call me, I can get them any information they need as well..

So you lied about who you were?

I took the additional step of calling this contact, identifying myself as a journalist,…

Another lie about who you are! Dude – I’ll call you a journalist.  But you gotta call me “Admiral” first.

and asking if he’d “go on record” to confirm the tip.

“Tip?”

“Jimmy”!  Slapnuts!  It’s a sales pitch!  Salem makes money from brokering out time on all three of its Twin Cities stations (AM1280, AM1570 and AM980).

He declined but used interesting language. He asked if we were attempting to “nail them,” meaning townhall.com.

Wrong!

“He” did not mean Townhall.com!  Salem Twin Cities’ sales staff do not represent Townhall.  Salem Radio owns WWTC/KYCR/KKMS, and they own Townhall; the only place they come together is on the stations’ websites, which are centralized.  And of course the podcasts, which Townhall distributes.  That’s it.

I answered frankly that I just wanted information on disclosure and if that was all it takes to “nail” them then yes, that is what I was doing.

Most informercials start with the disclaimer “the following is paid programming.” As far as I know townhall.com-subsidized shows don’t have a similar intro. They are in multiple markets, not just MN.

The call ended pleasantly and he promised to have others there call me to answer my questions.

I’ll let you know if that happens!

So here is what “Jimmy Olson” brings you:

1. An “anonymous tip” that someone out there is “paying” AM1280 to broadcast the Northern Alliance.   Nope.  Isn’t true.  Has never been true.  Nobody has ever paid AM1280 to air the Northern Alliance, directly or indirectly.  The station and Salem “pay” an opportunity cost, arguably – they could sell those six hours to infomercials; they choose to use that time to market the station locally, broadcasting local, entertaining, successful programming.  And it is succesful; our ratings (Ed and I dominate our time slot against KSTP, WCCO and KTLK; John, Brian, King and the Stroms are all very competitive) make the “investment” more than worth it.  If it didn’t, would the station have invested five years’ worth of valuable air time in us?
2. A email and a conversation with a Salem Account Exec saying that, yes, Salem rents airtime to people.  This is a big scoop.  And if you want to play “journalist” and get that scoop yourself, you can go to the Salem website, email the Sales department, and buy yourself some air-time too – presuming that you’re either conservative (AM1280), Christian (AM980) or know a lot about business (AM1570).  The upside; you’ll be every bit as much a “journalist” as “Jimmy Olson”; the downside – it’s really not that big a rush.

And that’s it.
So let’s go back to the top; Jimmy Olson’s claim that an “anonymous tipsters” told him “NARN may be paying for their radio time (and not disclosing it), or that townhall.com pays for it”.

What has “Jimmy’s” “story” given you?  Other than the impression the “lad” has delusions of grandeur (“Hello! I’m a journalist!”), a sales pitch, and a tip-off that the guy doesn’t know jack about Radio?

Nothing.

Here is the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story; nobody pays for the NARN.  There are exactly two “highly-placed sources”on this story; Salem Twin Cities’ General Manager John Hunt, who lets us use his air time, and yours truly.  Me.  Mitch Berg. The guy who hatched the original idea for the Northern Alliance Radio Network, and pitched it to the station, as well as my good friends John, Scott, Brian, Chad, Atomizer, JB, Ed, King and Michael.

So on the one hand, “Jimmy Olson’s” story is – I think I’m justified in saying this – a crock of bulls**t.

On the other hand, “Jimmy” can now take his place beside Grace “9/11 was an inside job!” Kelly in the pantheon of great Minnesota Progressive Project “journalists”.

UPDATE: Behold, “Jimmy Olson”:

“Igotmyreasons” is a guy named Fred Gates.  He’s from New York, and I don’t know much about him, except that he was a fellow guest on Marty Owings’ now-defunct “Radio Free Nation”; Mom always said if you can’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything at all, so I’ll keep my counsel, except to note that “Jimmy”/Fred was completely unable to carry on a political discussion on RFN without hyperpersonalizing it (with me or anyone else, according to several of the other guests with whom I’ve spoken), and has been carrying on a rather curious little vendetta against me on Twitter and his “blog” and BlogTalkRadio “show” for a while now.

Wooooh!  Scary!

And while everyone involved is more or less anonymous, I will assume (and note the assumption) that “MNProgressive” is Eric “Big E” Pusey, of the MPP. Mr. Pusey is apparently soliciting Mr. Gates’ unsourced, un-true “story” for the Minnesota Progressive Project, without knowing any of Gates’ substantiation for any of his claims (or, obviously, that no such substantiation exists).

And the “anonymous tip” is apparently Fred Gates’ assumption that someone just has to be paying the station to air us.

They just have to!
EPILOGUE:  I’ll cop to it.  I resort to more ridicule than I should when dealing with the MPP.  It’s not the better me speaking.  I tend to work the room I’m in; if I’m dealing with responsible, intelligent, capable liberal commentators, like Marty Owings, Charlie Quimby, Liberal In The Land of Conservative, most of the Uptake crew, or the MNPublius guys (except for Landry), I’m on my best behavior.  Dealing with shrieking ninnies like Grace Kelly, Two-Putt Tommy, Andy Driscoll or Fred Gates?  Well, let’s just say when in Rome, I do what the Romans do, to my occasional chagrin.  I will, and do, try to do better; to taunt less and prove more.

But in this case, the Romans are just plain dumb.  Seriously.

(And thanks to regular commenter Tolowen for the tip!)

EPI-EPILOGUE:  Fred “IGotMyReasons” Gates is apparently the same whackjob troll that Ed Morrissey wound up repeatedly banning from his old BlogTalkRadio show for being a depraved lunatic.

Well, Eric Pusey?  This is what you want “Minnesota Progressive Project” to be?

My comment section is open (which is more than one can say for yours, apparently).

EPI-EPI-EPILOGUE: I missed this the first time I read this:

Gates/”Olson”: Most informercials start with the disclaimer “the following is paid programming.”

That is something the station does to distinguish commercials from programming that is within its format!  It’s so that the audience doesn’t mix up commercial, off-format programming (say, a program on nutrition supplements on a political talk station) with the station’s actual programming.  It is a marketing, not legal or ethical, issue.

As far as I know townhall.com-subsidized shows don’t have a similar intro. They are in multiple markets, not just MN.

Townhall subsidizes absolutely no shows!  Townhall is a fully-owned subsidiary of Salem Communications, which also owns the Salem Radio Network.  Townhall is not in the radio business, and subsidizes no programing.

Fred/”Jimmy”, in addition, continues to claim that he has an “anonymous source” that has all the facts on this story.  Fred/”Jimmy” and his “source” has gotten every single fact in contention wrong (I said “in contention”; yes, you can rent airtime, although nobody’s doing it for the NARN) throughout this story. And now he’s backing and filling to cover his lies.

But here’s the deal; since your story has been debunked, then if you have an “anonymous source” (supposedly an “expert on the industry”), Fred/”Jimmy”, then either reveal “him” (which will be interesting, since “he” doesn’t exist),or corroborate “his” “statement”, or just crawl away.