Things that didn't meet the Huffington Post standards.

"$100,000 For Glenn Beck's Sex Tape" gets attention via Memeorandum,  but HuffPo has deleted it.

Newsbusters calls attention to the writer's bio:

Beau Friedlander is a writer living in Brooklyn. He was the editor-in-chief of Air America until it closed in 2010...

And yet people wonder why Air America didn't cut it.

Air America crashes to the ground.

Suddenly, today.

“The fact of the matter was, it was always a very challenging business proposition, and it never had the right management,” said Sam Seder, who hosted programs on Air America until last year.

The headwinds were enormous, he said, adding, “Radio is a dying industry.”

Well, that's got to find its way into Rush Limbaugh's "stack of stuff" for tomorrow.

"The cover photo of the TIMES Sunday magazine depicts Limbaugh 'dark and sinister' in a theme of THE GODFATHER."

Ha ha. Well, the Times is expressing its own entirely appropriate feeling of intimidation — for the man who likes to call himself "a harmless little fuzzball." And the hot news is that Limbaugh has signed a deal for $400 million to do his show through 2016.

UPDATE: The NYT has now made the whole article available. (It's from the Sunday Magazine.) I'll read it and write something more in a few minutes.

MORE: The article, by Zev Chafets, describes his entry into Rush's Palm Beach studio:

... I was met by Bo Snerdly — a very large man in a Huey Newton beret — who glared at me. “Are you the guy who’s here to do the hit job on us?” he demanded in a deep voice.

“Absolutely,” I said.

Snerdly, whose real name is James Golden, held my eyes for a long moment before bursting into emphatic laughter.

Chafets describes watching the show.

Unlike Howard Stern or Don Imus, he has no sidekicks with him in the room. He does, however, keep up a running conversation with an unheard voice. I always assumed that this was just imaginary radio shtick. Now I saw that the voice was attached to a human interlocutor, Snerdly, who banters with and occasionally badgers Limbaugh via an internal talk-back circuit.

Yes, you can tell when you listen to the show that someone is talking to him (or perhaps writing to him). Occasionally, it's like a Bob Newhart telephone routine where you have to imagine what is being said on the other end of the line, and that's part of why it's funny.

From the interview:

“I’ve never even met [John McCain], never spoken to him,” Limbaugh said. “I’m sure there are things about him I’d like if we meet. This isn’t personal.” He then delivered a litany of the presumptive nominee’s personal failings — too old, too intense, too opportunistic, too liberal. But, he assured me, he would be with McCain in the fall. “It’s like the Super Bowl,” he told me. “If your team isn’t in it, you root for the team you hate less. That’s McCain.”

It already seemed, when I made my visit, that McCain’s opponent might well be Senator Obama, and I was curious to know how Limbaugh planned to take on America’s first African-American major-party nominee. “I’ll approach Obama with fearless honesty,” said Limbaugh, who speaks of himself in heroic terms on air and off. “He’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.”

I asked if he had any specific tactics in mind.

“I haven’t yet figured that out exactly,” he said. “You know, I’ve had a problem with substance abuse. I don’t deal with the future anymore. I take things one day at a time.”

That last line is self-deprecating and (I think) humorous, but I think he knows that doing things day-by-day keeps the show alive and makes it work. It's what works in blogging too. If you have a whole planned agenda and you just crank out the propaganda, people will get sick of you. It's when you are talking/writing to figure out what you think, to find out what you want to say, that you are interesting. (They didn't do that on Air America.)

More to come... I have to shut down this computer so I can unplug it. A thunderstorm is rolling it, and I want to survive.

MORE: Chafets shows some admiration for Rush:

But Operation Chaos was a triumph of interactive political performance art....

Such massive and consistent popularity makes Limbaugh a singular political force....

“Rush is just an amazing radio performer,” says Ira Glass, a star of the younger generation of public-radio personalities. “Years ago, I used to listen in the car on my way to reporting gigs, and I’d notice that I disagreed with everything he was saying, yet I not only wanted to keep listening, I actually liked him. That is some chops. You can count on two hands the number of public figures in America who can pull that trick off.”

Glass compares Limbaugh to another exceptional free-form radio monologist, Howard Stern. “A lot of people dismiss them both as pandering and proselytizing and playing to the lowest common denominator, but I think that misses everything important about their shows,” he says. “They both think through their ideas in real time on the air, they both have a lot more warmth than they’re generally given credit for, they both created an entire radio aesthetic.”

Glass — who is one of the public figures in America who should be counted on those 2 hands — is absolutely right about Limbaugh and Stern. That explains very well why I listen to all 3 men. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Rush, Howard, and I have the same birthday.)

There's some interesting material about his expensive lifestyle:

There are five homes — all of them his — on the property. The big house is 24,000 square feet. Limbaugh lives there with a cat. He’s been married three times but has no children.

Perhaps he'll leave a fortune to his cat.

A life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo, as he often calls himself on the air, hangs on the wall of the main staircase.

Remember, today's blog themes are: wealth, pets, and grotesque.

Unlike many right-wing talk-show hosts, Limbaugh does not view France with hostility. On the contrary, he is a Francophile. His salon, he told me, is meant to suggest Versailles. His main guest suite, which I did not personally inspect, was designed as an exact replica of the presidential suite of the George V Hotel in Paris.

Hmmm... Chafets should have listened to a few more shows! Liking the artwork isn't the same as liking the politics.

His staff lights fragrant candles throughout the house to greet his arrival from work each day.

So he wasn't lying when he was going on and on about jumbo-sized, gardenia-scented candles the other day.

There's some good stuff about Rush's father:

To this day, Limbaugh calls his father “the smartest man I’ve ever met.”

Certainly he was one of the most opinionated and autocratic. “On Friday nights my friends would come over to the house just to listen to my dad rant about politics,” Limbaugh recalls. “He was doing the same thing as I do today, without the humor or the satire. He didn’t approve of making fun of presidents. He didn’t think that sort of thing was funny.”

It's funny how his father's behavior became the idea for the show. Imagine taking your father's cranky rants, making them funny and getting the whole country for your equivalent of the living room. Think about it. Think about ways you can emulate and one-up Dad. Are you replaying your father's routine in your daily work? My father used to trap me into discussions of all the big issues and drove me to tears by applying the Socratic method — he called it the Socratic method. He was all about requiring that I define my terms, recognize that my answers were "semantics," and explain how I was going to get "from point A to point B." And now here I am, a law professor. These things happen.

Dick Adams, Rush’s boyhood friend and high-school debate partner, told me: “Mr. Limbaugh didn’t suffer fools lightly, let’s just put it like that. Many times I was over there when he called down Rush or David in harsh tones. There was usually a string of expletives attached.”

Yikes. Later:

He is less like his angry father than his mature role models, Buckley and Reagan, for whom sociability and fun were integral to their conservative world view.

This is interesting:

Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at The National Review, watched Limbaugh’s tutelage under Buckley, and he takes Limbaugh seriously as a polemicist and public intellectual. “I hired a lot of people over the years, fancy kids from elite schools, and I always asked, ‘How did you become a conservative?’ Many of them said, ‘Listening to Rush Limbaugh.’ And often they’d add, ‘Behind my parents’ back.’ ”

This too:

Limbaugh works extemporaneously. He has no writers or script, just notes and a producer on the line from New York with occasional bits of information. That day, and every day, he produced 10,000 words of fluent, often clever political talk.

I thought he was reading off a script prepared by others much of the time. But he wants you to think this is just what bursts out of his head. It's damned impressive if it really does.

On Limbaugh's drug problem:

Being Limbaugh, he said he believes that most of these shortcomings stemmed from his inability to love himself sufficiently. “I felt everyone who criticized me was right and I was wrong,” he confided. But, he says, he left his insecurities behind in Arizona. “It’s not possible to offend me now,” he said. “I won’t give people the power to do it anymore. My problem was born of immaturity and my childhood desire for acceptance. I learned in drug rehab that this was stunting and unrealistic. I was seeking acceptance from the wrong people.”

How is that "being Limbaugh"? Isn't the need to love yourself stock advice in recovery programs? And doesn't Limbaugh usually ridicule the self-esteem movement?

On Bill O'Reilly:

He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted [his opinion] on the record. But on second thought, “somebody’s got to say it,” he told me. “The man is Ted Baxter.”

He likes Ann Coulter, Camille Paglia, Thomas Sowell, and Christopher Hitchens.

Nice article. A very positive, admiring picture of the man — not at all in keeping with the ominous cover photograph. There's some critique in there, but basically, it's obvious that the reporter had a great time hanging out with Rush Limbaugh.

I deplore this post.

I was just checking Memeorandum to see what people are blogging about right now, and suddenly everything seems to be at a taste level below the standards of this blog. For your protection, I am collecting these items in one post.

1. "Jon Stewart Awards Obama 'Dick Move of the Week.'"

2. "Randi Rhodes Quits Air America Rather Than Apologize For Hillary Clinton 'F*cking Whore.' Remark."

3. Obama says: "I don’t want you to think I’m getting fresh or anything."

4. "Is that really a naked woman in Dick Cheney's sunglasses?"

There now. I'm terribly sorry.

Air America suspends Randi Rhodes for using nasty language not on her show, but in a comedy performance.

How incredibly pathetic. It's a comedy routine, using exaggerated language, insulting Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro in a style similar to the way Kathy Griffin insults Hollywood celebrities. Doesn't Air America know anything about comedy? (oh wait....)

Here's the offending routine (NSFW). I'm not saying this routine is very good, but it's obviously in a comedy genre that is quite common, and comedians need some room to breathe.



Here's the official response from Air America, which notes that Rhodes was appearing "on behalf of Air America" at an event "sponsored by an Air America affiliate station." Good luck inspiring comedy from your on-air personalities after this... not that you were getting much of it before.

Yesterday's Madison peace activities.

While I was up at the Capitol end of State Street yesterday, watching the St. Patrick's Day parade, Uncle Jimbo was monitoring the situation at the University end of the street, where I'd only seen the gestational phase of the anti-war activities. The parade I saw was really beautiful, with sunlight, the glistening white Capitol, a huge happy crowd, lots of kids running after candy thrown into the street, and our beloved Bucky Badger. It was so beautiful that when I started thinking about how beautiful it was, I had to struggle not to break down and cry -- and tears come to my eyes as I type this. I mean, look at this:



You're dissolving into maudlin tears now, aren't you? Or are you a staunch anti-war type, firming up your belief that Althouse is soft in the head and waiting to see just how badly she's going to slam the activists down at the other end of the street? I'm just going to leave it to Uncle Jimbo:

We start off with a quick chat with Lee Rayburn, deposed local Air America host, and victim of Clear Channel’s corporate savagery. This was cut short by the cowbelling of the orchestra. Next we have young Atticus intoning the words of his savior John Lennon. He actually does a creditable job and tries to stir some life into the scene; he is hamstrung by the pacing of the song and the anti-depressant medications of much of the crowd.

More at the link, including the part with the puppets ("an evil W flushes our sons, daughters, civil liberties, and future down a giant toilet"). Here's his video (in which you will hear the f-word):

The end of "Air America" in Madison.

I'd say: if they can't make it here, they can't make it anywhere.

Mike Malloy reading long passages from Orwell's "1984" was not mentioned by anyone as something they'll miss should Air America programming be dropped from WXXM/FM 92.1 "The Mic."

The station is set to switch to sports programming on Jan. 1. We asked readers what they will miss about The Mic if the switch is a done deal, and quite a few responded. Some responses were edited for space and clarity:

• Karl Marx observed, accurately, I believe, that in every age the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling classes. It follows that any other ideas will be dismissed by, for example, the owners of the broadcast media as "unpopular," whether or not they are shared by two persons or by 200 million.

For all its flaws, a progressive radio format such as the one that WXXM/FM will abandon on New Year's Day demonstrates the powerfully subversive fact that ideas about getting out of Iraq now, creating a single-payer health care system, adopting instant runoff voting, etc., are not at all unpopular. I will miss Madison's part in creating that progressive national sensibility and that the soon-to-be absent voices do it so entertainingly. (Alan Bickley, Madison)....

So... sort of like... it's unpopular because it's popular? Or is it the other way around? Maybe if I read more Marx (and less Orwell) that would make more sense to me.

Moving on:

• With the loss of 92.1, the progressive voice in Madison will again be silenced (well, except for WHA, WERN, WORT, WTDY, the Progressive, Isthmus, the editorial page of The Capital Times and most of the editorial page of the Wisconsin State Journal, but you know what I mean).

I listen because nowhere else can you find such raw, spittle-flecked emotionalism combined with such robust disinterest in facts. (Dale Aldridge, Madison)

Okay. I'm going to stop while I'm amused. More opinion from the locals at the link.

"They were not a broadcasting concern to begin with. ... They went into business to affect elections."

Gloats Rush Limbaugh, as Air America files for bankruptcy. The implication is that his show is "a broadcasting concern," but you've got to wonder: How is his show less about affecting elections than "Air America"?

I like the idea that listeners can tell what the radio guy is up to. We're sensitive to the voice. We can tell when what the speaker wants is to tell you to get in line politically. (I feel the same way about blogging.)

I'm not a big listener of either Limbaugh or Al Franken, but, driving in my car, I've spent some time with both of them.

I think Limbaugh clearly and constantly is trying to get you to agree with his opinions, but he's got a joy in the moment that captures the listener. You know, I am the same age as Limbaugh -- we were actually born on the same day -- and I get the distinct sense that he was influenced by the two great, great radio guys that I listened to every day back in the 60s: Jean Shepherd and Cousin Brucie. These were not political broadcasters as all, just extremely entertaining radio voices.

Al Franken, being a comedian, ought to bring entertainment value to his radio show, but I never got the feeling that he was into the moment, that he had a sense of what it means to be a voice on the radio. He always sounds exasperated, like he's dragged himself to the studio and it's a tough job but somebody's got to do it. Why, oh, why, don't people get it yet? How many times do I have to tell you...

Franken at the Barrymore.

Al Franken was in town to do a live broadcast of his Air America radio show, here on State Street, at the Barrymore Theatre. I hadn't noticed that this was happening, or I might have felt I head out into the cold yesterday so I could tell you about it. But The Isthmus has a good report, with a bloggish set of pictures:

The show was on stage from 11 am through 1 pm, with Franken speaking to a parade of local lefty pundits and Democratic politicians, such as Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, State Rep. Mark Pocan, and Gov. Jim Doyle (via phone). The theater was standing-room only, with nearly one thousand officially ticketed attendees. "I think we packed the place," says Brian Turaney, who is the program director for The MIC.

The live-broadcast was well-received by the politically-liberal crowd. "It's a great event whenever Al comes to town," Turaney explains. "It's great, especially on a cold winter day, to get together and see how many people are like-minded. It's great to see how many people came out and how happy everybody was."

Yeah, it was really cold. Drawing a big crowd for a 3-hour radio show is pretty impressive. But this is Madison! We're not sissies about the cold, and we love the rousing lefty politics.

The crowd is very enthusiastic, applauding regularly and excitedly at Franken's punchlines and rhetorical flourishes made by the political guests.

That's what ever comedian wants to hear: how loud the crowd ... clapped.

The age range of the crowd is diverse, ranging from the myspace Generation to the Greatest Generation. It is also overwhelmingly white and middle class (at least in superficial appearance), certainly reflective of the radio station's listenership. This makes sense, given the need for many audience members to take (at least) several hours out of their work day to attend. In terms of general appearance, conservative naysayers envisioning "hippies" or whatever the fantasy du jour is (as is often the case among those negatively commenting on liberal gatherings of this type) have little to work with.

Is that what you conservative naysayers envision? Well, at least we know that (liberal?) journalists envision conservative naysayers envisioning Franken's audience as somehow rotten-looking.

It sounds as though most of the show was trotting out the local politicians. Franken is a radio genius if he made that interesting. I remember how Bruce Springsteen -- that denizen of Franken's iPod -- reacted when he had to share the stage with Governor Doyle: "I think this will be the governor's last experience as my opening act."

UPDATE: I'm mixing up the Barrymore and the Orpheum! Sorry. The Barrymore is way over on the East Side and would have required a car ride.

On the radio.

For some reason, driving from Cleveland to Ithaca today, I felt like listening to talk radio, and I just kept switching back and forth between America Right and Air America -- occasionally mixing in The Power.

America Right was, understandably, fixated on the Newsweek story, but there was very little about it on Air America. Disturbingly, the only attempt at humor I heard from Al Franken in the hour or so I spent with him today was a joke that Donald Rumsfeld had ordered that a Bible and a Talmud be flushed down the toilet, along with an Encyclopedia Britannica "for the reality-based" people.

Franken's show was nearly humor free -- entirely humor free if you don't count bad jokes. It was grim indeed. Some of the things he said were truly awful. Within the space of perhaps half an hour, he said that George Bush could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if he had "paid attention" -- it's in the 9/11 report! -- and that Iraq would be better off if Saddam were still in power -- not merely that on balance, the improvement of having him out is not worth the cost, but that the Iraqis were better off with Saddam.

Painful. Just painful.

"Left of the Dial."

Last night, I watched that new HBO documentary about Air America called "Left of the Dial." That is, I watched a lot of it, fell asleep, and woke up during the closing credits. I don't think I fell asleep solely because it was boring, but it was awfully boring. The various radio characters who were the subject of the film never lost their awareness of the camera, so there were no revealing moments. I got really tired of seeing them rushing through hallways and essentially saying "ooh, I'm so nervous" over and over again. Maybe the end segment that I missed was better, and I'll finish watching the movie very soon and do an update. My favorite movies are documentaries -- check my profile -- but HBO does a lot of documentaries that are slapped together from scant footage, with no attention to artistic technique, as if what the movie is about is all that matters.

UPDATE: I tried to finish watching this, but couldn't. More rushing around. Is this going to work? I'm supposed to care because, what, these people are feisty underdogs? It seems to me that they are very successful comedians, yet they never say anything funny in the movie. People launching a business and hot to succeed are not fun to watch, unless there's something quirkily charming about them. I'd rather watch these guys.

"What am I going to do, just ramble on and on"?

So said the panicked Janeane Garafolo in the struggling early days of Air America, according to Drudge's account of the HBO documentary, which is scheduled to air on March 31st. I can't wait to see it.

UPDATE: Sorry, that quote was from Marc Maron. Janeane Garofalo just "looks suicidal in nearly ever scene which she appears." I like the quote, by the way, because it expresses what I imagine probably every radio show host thinks.

Air Madison.

Al Franken's Air America broadcast live from the Great Hall of the UW Memorial Union yesterday. With him on stage were "Gov. Jim Doyle, The Capital Times Associate Editor John Nichols and Alta Charo, a UW-Madison professor of law and bioethics. U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D- Madison, and U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Middleton, joined the show by telephone from Washington, D.C." (Note the Wisconsin lawprof in the group.) He had this to say in an interview:

"We do a different kind of show. I'm not the mirror image of Rush Limbaugh. I do a totally different kind of show. I don't bloviate for three hours and pull stuff out of my butt and mislead and lie. We're very scrupulous about our facts. I'm proud of that."

He did go for three hours though. I didn't attend (or listen on the radio). If you did and you have any information on whether he did in fact bloviate or anything else bloggable, email me.

Not funny.

I'm actually a big fan of Dennis Miller's, but the jokes he told last night about the Abu Graib photographs are just awful. In case you missed the show, here they are:

In preparation for today's hearings, senators spent this morning viewing more pictures of naked, bound Iraqi men--or, as Richard Simmons calls them, screen savers. ...

According to Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Congress will see even more cruel and sadistic photos and videos from Abu Graib prison. Here's an example. Brace yourselves. [Image on screen: a marquee reading "Abu Ghraib Prison/Now Appearing/Tonite/Carrot Top" with an image of the comedian Carrot Top.] That's how bad it's gotten. ...

By the way, am I the only one who's having recurring dreams of a short-haired woman with a cigarette hanging from her lips, holding me by a leash? [Image on screen: the famous picture of Lynndie England.]

The first two are especially bad, because they are the sort of stock jokes that rely mostly on invoking the name of celebrity whose name alone is supposed to trigger scoffing laughter. The third joke is offensive, but at least it's daring and in a distinctive style.

Later, interviewing Jim Lehrer, Miller asks "How's the PSB crowd digesting these photos from the prison? What's the word?" Lehrer reports shock and disbelief, followed by the thought that the behavior is part of human nature, given certain conditions. Miller then says:

Yeah, I had trouble digesting it at first, and then, over the weekend, as I ruminated about it, I ... am I imagining this or have things settled down a little in the Iraqi war theater? Is there less RPG fire? Is there less roadside bombings? I'm wondering if it's some odd way ... like in War of the Worlds, when they stumble onto the fact that it's our oxygen that killed the people from another planet or in Day of the Triffids when we found out it's salt water, in some weird way you could not threaten these people with death over there, but it seems to be that the one thing that might quell some of them is embarrassment. Is that an odd take on it, or could it be true? ... I'm thinking that maybe we should start sending over these guys who've hazed in fraternities. You know, you just ... this is how we deal with you: you take one of those planes we combat forest fires with, fill it with bacon grease and start dropping it on Fallujah. There you go! We gotta think outside the box.

I noticed that this Daily News column complaining about the level of humor on Air America got some play today--I saw it linked on Drudge Report--but these examples of Miller's humor (which strongly supports the Bush Administration) are much worse.

Howard Dean will have his own talk show. (Cheap humor: scream show.) I'll believe it when I see it--where's Clinton's talk show we heard so much about?--but here's my advice: don't do it! When has someone prominent successfully started a talk show with full attention focused on him from the first day? You need to work your way into a good talk show, building an audience, while honing your style and making a lot of mistakes. If everyone tunes in to see if you're really any good, at a point when you won't be that good, the show will crash early and embarrassingly. You'll be taunted about your inadequacies from day one.

Anyway, the news of the possible new show appears here in Variety (via Drudge). At first, I didn't notice it was Variety and I was cringing and saying to myself "Who wrote this?" Why is a reporter calling a talkshow not just a "gabfest" but a "skein"? Yesterday, I looked up something about Air America--how's it doing lately, after its big, conspicuous launch, with critcs ready to pounce? I turned up an article (in NEXIS) with the headline: "Two Air America execs ankle." What? Oh, that's Variety, where people can't just leave, they have to "ankle."

But how would a Dean do on a talk show? I have to admit, watching Kerry the other day, I was thinking I miss Dean. Don't you? Wouldn't things be so much more exciting if he were the nominee? Sorry, "presumptive nominee." Oh, I know it's not about excitement. I'm happy to have a boring competent person disappear into the White Hours and do the right things. (Just get to the point, Senator Kerry, and convince me you're competent, so I can stop wasting time listening to you. Feel free to submit it in writing.)

According to "ex-Big Ticket TV topper Larry Lyttle," who seems to be putting the Dean deal together, Dean will be perfect on TV because: "He's a little bit of Howard Beale, a little Dr. Phil and a little Donahue all rolled into one..." The Howard Dean/Beale similarity has been widely noted. So, great--if he'll freak out on camera periodically, we'll tune in, like people used to tune in to Jack Paar, to see if tonight was a night when he'd break down and cry.

According to Lyttle, "The last thing we're going to talk about is politics... [Dean will] look at things like, What happens if you lose a sibling? What about when you're victimized by not having health care?" Oh, yeah, no way that'll verge into politics. We'll steer way clear of that.

UPDATE: A reader--Tracey Berry, a former student--alerts me to a typo up there:

I know that this is a typo: "...disappear into the White Hours..." ... but I could not help but think it sounds very Wasteland-esque -- just the sort of thing that Kerry himself might want to misquote.

"Disappear into the White Hours"--yes, that is (not) going to be the name of my first volume of poetry. I like it as a name for an alter-ego anonymous blog. Or possibly the title of the sort of prestige movie that would star Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore and that I'd kick myself afterwards for thinking I would like.

Alternate response: somehow when I'm thinking about Kerry speaking, the word "hours" lodges itself in my brain.

Funny Air America response to Drudge. (Via Instapundit.) Do I recognize the authorial voice that once gave life to The Yellow Press here in Madison, Wisconsin? I think I do!

This Liu-ser was ripping off our boss Evan Cohen big time (he can’t do that, that’s our job). Evan found out about it and he stopped payment on a check to keep Liu-cifer from ripping him off even more. You can touch Evan for the occasional meal or drinks but a million bucks is crossing the line. And if we ever get low on cash, we can always call Barbra Streisand. Or any of the Baldwins. Except Stephen.

So we got screwed, Liu’d, and tattooed. How Liu can you get? In Liu of payment. Liu’d and lascivious behavior. These write themselves. What we’re getting at is that we hate him.

Is it clever to call your show "Morning Sedition"? Well, the play on Morning Edition has been used before. I'll just note that I started by misreading it as "Morning Sedation," thinking they were making fun of the tediousness of (some of) Morning Edition and then thinking "Sedation" isn't a good term to repeat to people when they are trying to get up in the morning. You don't want to pick a name that makes it easy to make a joke at your expense ("Morning Sedition"? More like Morning Sedation! ... ha ha....) And considering that a big theme of Air America is that liberals are patriots too, isn't sedition--"[c]onduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state"--the wrong word? Quite aside from that, isn't the liberal self-image "I'm a revolutionary" a bit tired? I mean like 30-years-out-of-date tired?