Sisyphus, from the putatively-conservative, City Pages (R)-endorsed blog Nihilist in Golf Pants, has posited – he says – a separated at birth:

Local MOBster Mitch “Boss” Berg and Tammanay Hall’s William “Boss” Tweed.

Clearly, there’s some alternative agenda at work here.

Maybe Sisyphus – or the entire Nihilist crew – are working for Paul Demko?

Or – worse – the Minnesota Monitor?

Real answer here.

I’ll be on BlogTalkRadio at 6:30 AM…

…talking about Nick Coleman and education. Join me at 646 652 2923.
If you’re a reader of Twin Cities conservative blogs, Coleman is a regular kicktoy. If you’re from out of state, you’re in for a treat.

We’re ten hours into this season’s 24, and it’s time to check out the predictions:

Who will Morris – Chloe’s sleazy squeeze – end up working for?  Whomever the real conspirators are.  See “4″, below.

Whoah – he’s working for AA!

Who will be the mole(s) in CTU?  I’m thinking Milo.

Could still be – and Morris isn’t technically a “mole”, just someone who broke.  More on this below.

Who will be the mole(s)/turncoat(s) in the Chris Rock Wayne Palmer administration? I’m going to guess the National Security Advisor, Mrs. Buchanan.

The more I think about this, the more I like it. 

How many levels above Fayed will the real conspiracy lie? There will be at least two cutoffs, that’ll lead CTU two levels above Fayed, and I’m guessing the path will run through Chechnya.

So far, so good.  Gradenko is one – there’s gotta be another.

Which CTU members are going to buy it?   I dunno (see below), but I’d pay money to make it Milo.

So close, but yet so far.

The only job more dangerous than a red-shirt on Star Trek is a member of the tactical team on 24 – and the  only job more dangerous than that is CTU/Los Angeles Leader.  So what’s going to happen to Nadia?  I think that O’Riley Firewall or wtf Chloe was talking about last night is going to come back to bite her, and maybe take a few other CTU operators out with her.

Nadia’s snug as a bug so far.  Morris, not so much.  Curtis, of course…well, y’know.

Maybe they’ll kill Kim off…

Bauer sort of raised the bar for taking out a perp in Episode 1 (I won’t spoil it).  Where can he go from there, carnage-wise?  I think it’ll involve a badger.  And Diederich Bader.

Well, Hour Four aside, we’re still waiting, right?

Discuss…

The MN House of Representatives is taking an online poll about HF 305, the proposed statewide smoking ban.

Much as I hate cigarette smoke, it’s a stupid bill and it needs to be stopped.

Of course, the power-grabbers have packed the polls. 

That’s where you come in.  Go here and vote.  Vote your conscience, naturally; I know I did.

In an open thread at Clots Nation Kool Aid Report, Sisyphus – the Paul McCartney to the Nihilist’s John Lennon at putatively-conservative, City Pages-endorsed “Nihilist in Golf Pants”, left a chilling portent:

Mitch Berg better watch his step, because I’ve found the perfect Separated At Birth for him and I’m just waiting for the perfect moment to unleash it.

Pre-emptive action is in order.

I’ve been given a number of “Separated at Births” in my life.

In high school – when I was a tad thinner and hairier, of course – I got compared with this guy quite a bit:

That’d be James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders, and a couple of people back then noticed a resemblance – a similitude which, unfortunately, extended to looking like I had the same drug habit as did the Pretenders’ guitarist.  (For the record, no, I didn’t.  I’ve never used an illegal drug in my life.  I just looked I was shooting up).  On the upside, at least I didn’t look like Pete Farndon.

A little later?  Well, let’s stay among guitar players.  I was told, a little more recently, that I resembled this guy:

The guy on the left, I mean – Dan Kramer of Soul Asylum.  That’s the good news.  The bad news – that’s more or less how I looked in college, 20-odd years ago, while that’s a pretty recent picture of Kramer.  (The black guy, second from right, has appeared in this blog before, too).

Time choogled on.  And the one separated at birth I’ve gotten lately – from cow-orkers, friends, even my own daughter – would be this guy:

That’s Jim Kramer, of CNBC’s “Mad Money”, and yes, that’s a spitting image, for better or worse. I could almost use his face on the online personals and not be guilty of any fraud, quite frankly. 

So which of us is this?

I’ll never tell.

So what does Sisyphus have in mind for an SAB? 

Does it matter? 

I think not.

Light the lights!  Pop the popcorn! 

Nick Coleman is writing dreck again!

Last Saturday’s column attacks Minneapolis Fifth Ward alderman Don Samuels for his remarks – they should “Burn North High School Down”, says Don – and tries to connect Samuels with a big, bad, Republican (natch) movement that is trying, apparently, to light our kids on fire. 

Or something.

Coleman:

Don Samuels has apologized for his words, but not his views. And he isn’t likely to. For the Fifth Ward City Council member from Minneapolis who suggested burning down North High School is not just one man with an opinion.

He is a stalking horse for a movement that wants to torch public schools. It has gotten frighteningly close to its goal.

Let’s use Coleman’s “arson” metaphor for a moment.  Indeed, let’s take it to its logical conclusion. 

Arsonists usually light fires for a reason.  Some, true, do it for the sheer jollies of watching something burn.  But much arson – especially the burning of things of value, has a more, er, pragmatic motive; insurance fraud, revenge, something, some reason for lighting that thing on fire.

Coleman can’t possibly assume that Samuels, and the movement of big, bad, cigar-chomping whiteys for whom he is a “stalking horse”, want to “torch” the school just for kicks.  Can he?

The Center of the American Experiment, a local conservative think tank, is renewing the push for school vouchers, and it tapped Samuels to endorse its position paper. In his foreword to the recent publication, Samuels again displays a flair for the dramatic, writing that he wonders “how many future murderers are in the first grade classes of the four elementary schools within a mile of my home?”

Officer, arrest those first-graders!

All well and good for Coleman – a child of immense power and privilege, who lives in St. Paul’s tony, Wellstone-worshipping Mac-Groveland enclave, the son of a powerful poltician, brother of St. Paul’s mayor, stepson of a high-power newspaper publisher – to yip at the observation of Samuels, a man who lives in the neighborhood and sees firsthand the failure of the public school system, not just to prevent those first graders about whom Coleman giggles from murdering, but indeed to teach them anything of value at all. 

But if you take Samuels seriously, it is not just his language that is lousy. It is his policies.

Samuels has become the darling of a coalition of mostly conservative, mostly suburban groups involved in a coordinated assault on “government monopoly schools.” These groups are pushing hard in Minnesota for expanded tax-credit or tuition vouchers to allow public dollars to be spent on private schools. It isn’t just people in the North High neighborhood who should worry about that.

This paragraph is notable not just for what it has wrong, but for the questions it completely begs.  “Mostly conservative?”  You mean some liberals are breaking ranks?  “Mostly suburban?”  What, you mean urban people are starting to turn on their beloved schools?  (Stay tuned). 

And again, what possible motivation could there be for this “coordinated assault?”  The sheer joy of coordinating assaults?

Some groups pushing for vouchers have fought to outlaw gay marriage or to keep children from receiving sex education or learning about evolution. They have a right to send their kids to religious schools. They don’t have a right — Article XIII of the State Constitution bars public funding for “sectarian” schools — to subsidize such schools with tax dollars.

Fortunately for Coleman, the State Constitution allows strawmen in arguments.  I, however, do not.  It matters not an iota if “some” groups don’t believe in evolution or gay marriage or sex education; “some” groups that fought in the American Revolution owned slaves; “some” groups that defeated the Nazis were murderous Communists; “some” groups that buy the Strib are Republicans.  Do any of those facts invalidated the rightness of  America, World War II or the Strib, in and of themselves?

Again, Coleman fails to note these groups’ motivations (although he gets close, painfully close, without probably knowing it).  But he does revert to the “the law says so, and the law is always right” argument, which is the last refuge the the befuddled.

But we’re going to close in and deal with those motivations.  Oh, yes we are.

Nevertheless, the crusade is on. And Samuels is its hero.

Other black leaders are being lobbied to convert to the vouchers cause. One, NAACP President Duane Reed, says he recently refused requests to testify on behalf of a vouchers/tax credit bill in the Legislature. He says the request came from a group affiliated with the Libertarian Party, whose platform praises tax credits and charter schools as “interim measures” that will help kill the public schools.

“This is not about Don Samuels,” Reed said at Thursday night’s public meeting at North High with Samuels. “This is about … tax credits. Which is just a code word for vouchers. This is just teeing up a sensational issue.”How many black leaders support vouchers?” he said to me later, proceeding to tick off a long list of black groups, starting with the NAACP, that oppose them. “Now Don Samuels all of a sudden is an expert, and he is going to speak for us? I don’t think so.”

The old “I know stuff” argument; an oldie but a goodie for Coleman. 

The simple fact is, this is one area where every  parent, every taxpayer, every citizen is an expert.  We all know what is best for our children.  We don’t need a school adminstrator, a superintendant, a teacher to tell us, much less a “community leader” who is more beholden to parties and special interests than to you and I, whatever our race.

Pretty radical notion, huh?

Slowly but surely, we’re going to back into the motivation for this “arson” that Coleman keeps bargling about.  He won’t know it, but he’ll do it. 

Just watch.

Charter schools, funded with public funds, were supposed to help produce new teaching methodologies and education strategies. Other states limit their number. New York has a limit of 100. Iowa has a limit of 10. Minnesota has no limit. Today, we have 131 charter schools, with 23,600 students. At least 19 more charter schools are on the way.

How much is too much?

How much water is too much? 

It depends, doesn’t it?  How thirsty are you?  How much do you have?  What is the rationale for any limits?

Because in New York and Iowa, the “rationale” for the limits has nothing to do with education, but is rather that “the establishment wants them”.  Charter schools – despite some well-publicized failures – have been a huge success in Minnesota.  They have been the first step, for many poor parents (the ones that can’t afford the private schools that Coleman grew up in), in getting control of their kids’ education, getting the respect that the public system denies parents.  For many of them – myself included –  it’s been a Godsend. 

And why would the establishment care?

Well, that’d speak to that “motivation for arson” thing we were talking about above.

No, we’re not there yet.  But we will get there.

First, we have the boogymen:

The largest sponsor of charter schools, Friends of Ascension, has ties to former state Republican chairman Bill Cooper, who has served on the group’s board of directors. Friends of Ascension has 16 schools with 2,800 students (12 percent of charter school enrollment). Nor is Cooper the only former Republican Party chair to have found a keen interest in the inner city.

Cooper has “found a keen interest” in the inner city, which presumably is manifested in him driving vans around North Minneapolis, kidnapping kids, and enrolling them in the FOA schools?

Former GOP chairman Ron Eibensteiner and his wife are the founders of KidsFirst Scholarships, which award privately funded vouchers [emphasis mine] to children (650 this year) to attend private schools. Those scholarships are funded by grants from right-wing billionaires such as Ted Forstmann and the late John Walton of the Walton Family Foundation.

A “privately funded voucher” is the same as a “chaste pregnancy”.  Nick!  It’s called a scholarship, numbnuts!

But it’s OK – because in reporting Eibensteiner’s serial breakins around North Minneapolis to force families to accept their “private vouchers”, we are almost there – the motivation for these men’s attempt to torch “our” schools!

Critics such as the liberal People for the American Way point out an obvious motivation: By handing out private vouchers in the inner city, conservatives hope to create political momentum for state vouchers that will damage public schools.

Not to mention the teaching of evolutionary science.

But those inner-city parents, beholden to the DFL as they are (because Minneapolis, especially the North Side, are DFL territory like no other place in the state), and committed to their childrens’ education, are resisting Big Bad Bill Cooper’s entreaties, and tearing up Ron Eibensteiner’s checks and throwing them in his face.

Right?

Wrong:

The fire has been set. Public schools have lost thousands of students to charter schools and open enrollment

DING DING DING DING DING!

Public schools have lost thousands of students – enough to force the Minneapolis Public Schools to consider closing branches, enough to set the district into a frenzy of “reform”…

…well, no.  No reforms are in on the way.  No increased focus on reading, match, science and history.  No reassessment of an education model that is an untrammelled failure that can not be solved with more money, any more than money can slow your fall from an airplane, of a system that devalues parents, assaults their values (and not just about gay marriage, evolution and sex ed, although public education’s attack on families’ faith is real and constant), marginalizes them at every turn (lip service aside).

No.  They don’t want to deal with “root causes” – a failed model, a sclerotic system, a dysfunctional bureaucracy that starts in each and every school and extends to Washington.  They just want more money.  Oh, yeah – and to find a way to shut off the escape valve that so many parents are using.

This is not just an intramural squabble in the black community. All supporters of public education should be worried. It is not just North High that is under assault; it is the very idea of public education.

Public education has only itself to blame for the “assault” – the only “assault” in history, by the way, entirely effected by retreat, and carried out by people fleeing the fight.  The system is huge, arrogant, and does something that is utterly incongruous with human nature; tries to pound every shape of peg into a square, institutional, one-size-fits-all hole. 

As an inner-city politician with friends in high places, Samuels didn’t set the schools ablaze. He just fanned the flames. But his friends are dancing around the bonfire.

No.  They are reacting pragmatically.  And inner city parents are taking them up on it, in droves – political alignments not only aside, but rendered irrelevant by a higher cause, the children themselves.

And if Nick Coleman, sitting in his snug, smug Mac-Groveland house things those inner-city parents are “dancing” rather than coldly pragmatic and acting in their childrens’ interest (and preservation), then it doesn’t take a high school graduate – literate or not – to see who the vacuous patrician is.

Join me on BlogTalkRadio at 6AM CT on Wednesday.

I’ll be ripping on Nick Coleman, and the stupid assumptions about the inner-city school crisis that he mindlessly parrots.

Call me at 646 652 2923.

UPDATE:  Unless I have one of my two oversleeps a year.  Blah.

Tomorrow for sure.

I say let the states decide about abortion.

But let them know the facts, too.

A premature baby that doctors say spent less time in the womb than any other surviving infant is to be released from a Florida hospital Tuesday.

Amillia Sonja Taylor was just 9 1/2 inches long and weighed less than 10 ounces when she was born Oct. 24. She was delivered 21 weeks and six days after conception. Full-term births come after 37 to 40 weeks.

“We werent too optimistic,” Dr. William Smalling said Monday. “But she proved us all wrong.”

The “What is Viable” threshold has always been a fuzzy, indistinct one; I always figure a “fetus” isn’t viable until it can get a job and rent an apartment.

But 22 weeks?

How anyone can support abortion based on “nonviability” after the fourth month just astounds me.

Rew writes about the same flap I did last week, where Vox Day beat Jeff Fecke like a baby seal (or as the AV Club kids are saying these days, “pwn3d” him, whatever the ph{}ck that means).

She’s found the bit that bugs her about Vox:

Its that he is an obsessive compulsive googler.

I thought it might be true when he quickly found my post about him last month. His response to Fecke yesterday just proved it.

Good to see George Soros’ money all that non-Soros-connected, utterly clean money, yepper, you betcha is paying for such technically-savvy, resourceful bloggers (I kid, I kid.  Rew is a fine human being).

Rew:  It’s called Technorati.  You can find out who’s writing about Vox, or me, or even you.  It’s how dolts like “Jesus General” find that people have been writing about them, so they can dispatch their hordes of drooling anonytards to pollute  your comment section without having to survey every blog on the ‘net.
Technology; now, it does your vanity-googling FOR  you.

As it happens, I’ve worked in a number of fields where women tend to earn more than men.

I spent five years as a technical writer – a field that had been dominated by women (since it started as a “promotion” from secretarial work, back in the 1940’s). Traditionally, women out-earned and out-ranked men in the field, because individually, they’d been doing it longer. Eventually, I – individually – earned more than many individual female technical writers. And sooner than later I moved out, because let’s face it, technical writing bored me stiff. Sheesh.

I’m reminded of this when I see stories like this one, about “women’s groups” pushing for “equal pay” at the capitol:

Equal pay laws that apply to state and local governments would be extended to private contractors doing business with the state, under a proposal outlined Monday by leaders of womens advocacy groups.

After years of efforts under gender equity laws, or “comparable worth” initiatives, women in state and local government now earn 97 cents for every dollar men make, said Patty Tanji, president of the Pay Equity Coalition of Minnesota.

Meanwhile, in the overall workforce, the gender gap lags behind at about 75 cents for women, Tanji said. While the proposal would apply to only the 1,800 companies that do business with the state, “its a step in the right direction,” she said.

It absolutely infuriates me that the press still repeats that soggy old statistic verbatim, when commanded to, by whatever special interest wants to wave it around. Women at large make less money, because they traditionally tend to get less education, go into lower-paying fields (the standard gender cliches would be social work versus engineering), and – the big clinker – tend to take years off from their careers to have and raise children. This slows promotions and raises – and, according at least to Warren Farrell, lengthens their lives, but we digress.

Who should get more money for a job in a fair world, all other things being equal – someone who’s been on the job for ten years without a break, or someone who took a couple of years off in the middle of those ten years to have and raise kids?

Note that I was gender-neutral, there; what if the woman worked for ten years straight, and the guy stayed home for two years? Is there any rational reason the guy should earn the same money as the woman?

Why?

A spokesman for the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce said pay equity mandates are unnecessary. Tom Hesse said studies have shown that the gender gap in pay is due mostly to factors not related to discrimination.

“When you take into consideration the difference in occupations that men and women choose, and length of time on the job, there really is no wage gap,” he said.

Which is, in fact, the truth.

Which makes sense when you realize that this really isn’t about equal pay for anyone.

The pay equity proposal was one of more than a dozen being supported by leaders of womens groups at the State Capitol on Monday.

Dubbing their effort “Presidents on Presidents Day,” the presidents or top officials of more than 22 womens groups said they are coalescing at the Legislature [while I’ve said a lot of bad things about politicians, even I don’t believe  they’ve done anything to deserve that – Ed.] to push for: increasing womens pay and workforce flexibility, providing health insurance to an estimated 343,000 uncovered Minnesotans, reducing violence against women, and providing improved health care and more affordable birth control and family planning services.

It’s about feminizing poverty and collecting a lot of markers from the DFL.

The State Senate Senate begins to legalize scalping:

Ticket scalping has been a crime in Minnesota since 1963, but a bill to legalize it sailed through the state Senate on Monday.

The burgeoning cybermarket in sports and entertainment admissions has already eclipsed most scalping laws, said Sen. Chris Gerlach, R-Apple Valley.

On the one hand, is this really a legislative priority?

On the other – scalping laws are dumb, and should be repealed.

I’ll give  it a “C”.

I’m on the air right now with my radio pal Ed Morrissey, talking about the run to the right:

Call 646 652 2923.

One of my new years’ plans is to get, at long last, into some sort of shape (other than blob). 

To that end, and with the generous assistance of one of my company’s benefit features, I signed my family up in the YMCA last month.  I’ve been hitting the gym every other day for the past four weeks. 

And I’ve been doing some comparing and contrasting.  Like White Castles and Taco Bells, YMCAs in the suburbs and the city are very, very different.

(more…)

When Flash deploys the keg, it’s time to hit the beach:

Spring Arrived . . .
. . . at approximately 8:25 PM this evening. That is when I tapped to the first keg.

Let the thaw begin

Save me a glass!

I’m not a huge sports buff.  In my schedule, something‘s gotta give.

But to the extent that I am, I hasten to point out that the moment for which I put up with overhyped football, dreary repetitive NBA hoops and pointless NHL hockey is finally here, as Atomizer reports.

Pitchers and catchers are down in Florida right now warming up.

Alleluiah.

i’m tempted to tune in for this interview with Amanda Marcotte and Melissa MacEwan, scheduled for 10AM central this morning.

My hunch; comfortable among what they assume is the friendly confines of a sympathetic medium (BlogTalkRadio is largely a left-of-center stronghold), they’ll be, um, candid.

I’ll download it later…

North Dakota reclaims its rightful place as Snow Angel Capitol of the World:

More than 8,900 people flapped their arms and legs on the state Capitol grounds Saturday in an attempt to reclaim the record, which was snatched away about a year ago in Michigan.

The Guinness Book of Records still must confirm the number. The snow angel category was created in 2002 when 1,791 people made snow angels on the Capitol grounds in North Dakota.

Marilyn Snyder, curator of education for the State Historical Society of North Dakota, said 8,910 people registered for Saturday’s attempt to break the record of 3,784 snow angels set by students at Michigan Technological University in Houghton.

“That’s more than 5,000 more people than what Michigan had,” Snyder said. “It’s going to be tough to top.”

Stay out of this, Hewitt…

(Via Red)

Let’s be clear on this – I’d love my job, which I started in early December, no matter what.  It’s an amazing opportunity.

One more thing I love – that I didn’t know about until this past Thursday?  We get Presidents’ Day off.

I haven’t had this day off since high school.  Pretty cool!

Women, in general, have an insurmountable advantage in custody trials, especially if the kids involved are younger than four years old. It’s almost impossible for a woman to lose under those circumstances, barring crack addiction (maybe) and gross moral turpitude. Especially if the fathers are famously moronic.

And yet…

But [Britney Spears] stayed less than 24 hours before returning to California, where she briefly visited her sons in Malibu before shaving off her hair, getting tattooed and dashing to a hospital in the early hours and asking for help.

K-Fed? If it’s legal vindication you want, you married and divorced the right chick.

Maybe.

I’ll be on the “air” at 7AM Central with my first attempt a regular morning BlogTalkRadio show.

Click here…:

…to listen, and call (646) 652-2923 to join me.

Thinking about talking about the City Pages’ take on Governor Pawlenty, and relating that to things that matter to the national audience – but that could change…

Join me!

UPDATE: Well, that was fun! I think I’ll do the show in the morning for a while, just to see how it goes…

The Strib can’t even hear the sound of a putatively conservative administration going out of its way to act like a DFL administration!

In this morning’s editorial, they arf and gargle about a federal education budget that differs from a liberal budget only in terms of the people on the “Sponsor” line:

To hear Bush administration officials tell it, their $56 billion proposed education budget for 2008 makes bold investments that “strategically” meet student needs.On what planet? Details of Bushs education package show that it takes baby steps forward while continuing a much larger slide in the other direction.

Where “forward” means “spending”, and where “slide” means…well, not exactly “not spending”, merely “not increasing the increase as fast as the other areas”.

Constructively, the president finally recognizes the need to increase funding for college Pell Grants, his signature No Child Left Behind NCLB and Title I programs for disadvantaged kids. But even those advances come at the cost of decreases in other areas.

Also, they are virtually worthless at the little business of educating children.

While Cherie Pierson Yecke was one of my favorite guests in the history of the NARN, and one of the sharpest people in the education bureaucracy, I’ll break with her and my fellow Republicans; No Child Left Behind is a joke, a farce, a disaster whose dimensions we can’t begin to imagine.

Not that the intentions – making schools more “Accountable” for the money we spend on them – aren’t honorable. But the educational-industrial complex is not honorable, it’s an organism programmed to survive and thrive at all costs. So the “Accountability” imperative has mutated, within the organism, into a focus on “teaching the test” that is leaving our kids as one of two things; kids adept at taking and scoring well on tests, who are well-drilled on the subjects of the tests and not much more (sort of like a circus trick dog who knows nothing about fetching birds or leading a blind person around), or kids shunted into “special ed” programs where those who don’t test well aren’t counted as heavily.

Pell Grants? Admirable in concept, dismal in execution. The presence of all that federal money has inflated the cost of a college education far out of reach (barring government aid, either in grants, loans or low-cost government institutions) of all but the wealthiest students. When my grandfather went to college in the thirties, a year at a four-year private school cost about a fifth of an average American’s annual income. When my father attended the same school twenty years later, it had inflated just a bit (as he related it to me, once upon a time), to about $500 a year, in an era when the average American made around $4-5000 a year. At the same college, 25 years later, I spent $4,000 a year (when the average income was in the low twenties). Today, when the average American earns in the low forties, a year at a public university is up around $10K, while most private schools are easily in the mid-teens.

This, as the value of that degree has plummeted.

One thing about BlogTalkRadio – everyone seems to want to do their webcasts in the evening.

Contrarian that I am, I had to ask myself – why?

So, as an experiment, I’m going to try something else; a morning webcast. My current plan is to do something early in the AM, somewhere between 2-5 mornings a week (the time when I’m usually blogging anyway), where people can either tune in and listen live, and/or download and play it on their ‘pods during the day.

Current plan is to start tomorrow morning at 7AM (usually it will be 6AM); I’d like to talk about the City Pages’ hack job on Governor Pawlenty.

Tune in!

I’ve been doing this blog for five years.  And I’m not going to stop any time soon.

But even at the beginning of the blogging phenomenon, I figured that there had to be a way forward – a next big thing in citizen journalism.  For me, the next natural step forward would be to do some sort of audio production.  I’ve had plans for almost a year to do a podcast – but the technical overhead of recording, editing, hosting and posting for subscription was more effort than I wanted to bite off.  Still, I figured that someday the technology would come to make audioblogging as easy, rewarding and productive as blogging the written word.

And for me, someday is now.

Ed, of course, beat me to it:  he’s up and going on BlogTalkRadio – a new service that will do for audioblogging what Blogger.com and Townhall.com did for web blogging; make audioblogging simple, user-friendly and (most importantly of all) ubiquitous.  Best of all, it avoids the one big problem I always had with traditional podcasting; it allows live talk, complete with call-ins; it has all the interactiveness of blogging, but it’s live!.

Yeah, I’m stoked.

I’ll be starting a show shortly, too. 

  I’m doing a test broadcast tomorrow, and then will start a regular show on at BlogTalkRadio.com.  I’ll be rolling out a new site for my own podcasts (along with the space available on BlogTalkRadio), hopefully over the weekend.

Here’s the important part; BlogTalkRadio is, (Ed and I notwithstanding) heavily dominated by left-of-center talent.  Ed and I, of course, are looking to help change that. 

More details as they become available (and by all means, listen to Ed’s show)

(more…)

…but, honestly, I’d wondered in the past week or so. Whatever happened to these people?

Jeff Kouba found out:

The lead singer for Quarterflash, Rindy Ross, and her husband Marv, who was also in Quarterflash, went on to form a traditional and folk music band called The Trail Band.

Well, cool.  It’s always neat to see someone you dug twenty years ago isn’t in treatment or working night stock at a Walmart…

…the long-awaited, long-promised podcast site has nearly come to fruition.

More details next week.