Cute Blonde?

Yesterday, I think it was, I started to hear about an 11-year-old girl who had been abducted in Florida.

"Cute blonde?" I asked myself.

FNC is now running a photo of Carlie Brucia, and she does appear to be, indeed, a cute blonde.

Now, I didn't ask (and implicitly answer) the question to inquire about who had been abducted, or about why, but to speculate about why we're hearing about her and the abduction.

See also Dru Sjodin.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 10:16:30 PM
Categorized as Media.

"The Alternative to War Was Simple: Defeat"

The Inimitable One writes at The Telegraph, yesterday:

.... If the Gulf war was a cautionary tale in the defects of unbounded multilateralism, the Iraq war is a lesson in the defects of even the most circumscribed coalition. The Americans settled on WMD as the preferred casus belli because it was the one Blair could go along with: as one of his Cabinet ministers told me, they were advised that a simple policy of regime change - the Clinton/Bush line - would have been illegal. So they plumped for WMD. American and British intelligence were convinced Saddam had 'em, as were the French and Germans. Saddam thought he had 'em. So did his generals. It's believed that they were ordered to be used against the Americans as they galloped up to Baghdad from Kuwait. But when Saddam got there, the cupboard was bare. Strange, but apparently true. Anyone who's really fearless in his search for the truth can read David Kay's conclusions: it's a much more interesting story than "Blair lied!"

So Saddam didn't have WMD. Conversely, Colonel Gaddafi did. And hands up anyone who knew he did until he announced he was chucking it in. The only way you can be absolutely certain your intelligence about a dictator's weapons is accurate is when you look out the window and see a big mushroom cloud over Birmingham. More to the point, it's in alliances of convenience between the dictatorships and freelance groups that the true horrors lie - and for that you don't need big stockpiles, just a vial or two of this or that. You can try and stop it day by day at the gate at Heathrow, but, even if you succeed, you'll bankrupt the world's airlines.

The Left is remarkably nonchalant about these new terrors. When nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, the Left was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute, and the handful of us who survived would be walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now anyone with a few thousand bucks and an unlisted number in Islamabad in his Rolodex can get a nuke, and the Left couldn't care less.

The Right should know better. If he wants, Mr Howard can have some sport with Mr Blair. But, if he aids the perception that Blair took Britain to war under false pretences, the Tories will do the country a grave disservice. One day Mr Howard might be prime minister and, chances are, in the murky world that lies ahead, he'll have to commit British forces on far less hard evidence than existed vis à vis Saddam. Conservatives shouldn't assist the Western world's self-loathing fringe in imposing a burden of proof that can never be met. The alternative to pre-emption is defeat. If you want a real "underlying issue", that's it.

(Thanks, Charles.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 09:38:42 PM
Categorized as International.

Clinton Lied

Why is a Republican Congress and president helping?

"When Will the Era of Big Government REALLY Be Over?"

A speech by Congressman Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), Jan. 24:

The title of my speech is an allusion to the famous passage in President Clinton's 1996 State of the Union address.

We all remember that he said — right on the heels of his wife's attempt to have the federal government take over responsibility for 1/6 of the nation's economy: "The era of big government is over."

That line recalls similar sentiments expressed by such earlier conservative presidents as Ronald Reagan, Calvin Coolidge, and Abraham Lincoln — with the difference being that the latter three actually meant it....

To be fair, the only president to preside over an actual decrease in real domestic discretionary spending during the entire course of his presidency was Ronald Reagan. And he's a pretty hard act to follow.

And it is, of course, true that our current lack of conservative housekeeping comes after an eight-year binge of no presidential restraint of ANY sort. I guess, after that, people don't notice so much the mess around the house that an elephant makes.

But it's high time we get back to pruning back the waste of government. It can be done. We did it in 1995, the first year of the Republican House majority. And here's how I propose we do it now:

First, we get specific about the goal. We go back to using the right words: limited government. We don't just want fiscal restraint for the sake of itself; we want its result: smaller government.

Next, we confirm our judges. We commit to taking seriously the constraints on federal power that the Framers placed in the Constitution to protect our liberties. Nothing is more important to that objective than ensuring the integrity of the third branch of government, our judiciary.

Third, we need to stop looking for 218 conservative votes in the House and 60 conservative votes in the Senate. That's a cop-out. We have conservatives in the Leadership of the House, the Senate, and the White House. We need to start following a veto strategy that requires only one-third of the Congress, and the President, working together to control spending. If we know what we want, and stick to our guns, we have the power to succeed.

To this end, I am organizing 145 of my colleagues — one-third plus one of the House — to sign a pledge to President Bush that we will vote to sustain any veto he casts to control spending. He will know he has our support and backing.

Fourth, we need to amend the Constitution to control spending. The Spending Control Amendment that I will soon introduce is modeled on California's constitutional spending limit — approved with a 75%-25% popular vote in 1979. (The 1990 repeal of the California limit led to runaway spending and, ultimately, the Davis recall.)

Colorado’s similar 1992 constitutional spending limit (which caps tax revenue at the prior year’s level, adjusted for inflation and population growth, and refunds surpluses) is a huge success; recent polling shows 75% support.

The Spending Control Amendment will limit spending increases to the prior year’s level, plus inflation and population growth. Following the model of the Balanced Budget Amendment, additional spending would require a 3/5 vote in Congress.

Fifth, even before we complete the process of amending the Constitution, we need to enact legislation to put enforcement teeth in our budget process. The budget should be an enforceable law, not a non-binding resolution. To enforce budget limits, a 3/5 supermajority would be needed to exceed budget caps. And the president would be given authority for line item reduction, to cut back spending to levels enacted in the budget.

And if Congress and the President can’t agree on spending within the legal timeframe, an Automatic Continuing Resolution would freeze spending at current levels for the next year.

Sixth and finally, we need to institute an annual CPAC Survivor competition. Once a year, right about this time, you get to vote and throw one lawmaker off the island.

That should get things started....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 09:14:38 PM
Categorized as Political.

E. J. Dionne's Highly Amusing Snit

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CLXV

At WaPo yesterday.

Can't supporters of the Bush administration think of something more original than issuing fatwas against "Massachusetts Liberals"? Does this President Bush honestly think that if he ends up facing John Kerry this fall he can just rerun his dad's campaign of 16 years ago against Michael Dukakis?

As John Edwards likes to say about almost everything, this is personal for me. My blue-collar hometown of Fall River, Mass., was solidly Democratic, but as conservative in its values as you could imagine -- family, church, neighborhood, hard work and patriotism were the drill. I'm grateful I grew up in such a pro-family environment. That's why the parody of Massachusetts as an exotic, left-wing place infuriates me.

My state is full of cities and towns such as Fall River — Lawrence and Pittsfield, Fitchburg and Greenfield, Worcester and New Bedford. I'm sorry, but people who think Massachusetts is a culturally or politically demented place have never been to Massachusetts.

This is about more than John Kerry, who can defend himself. It's about how certain forms of cheap bigotry don't even get challenged. The right wing's attack on Massachusetts is a sign of intellectual laziness. It's easier to parody a people and a place than to defend a set of ideas.

Why not trash Ted Kennedy and Michael Dukakis when the alternative is to explain why, un-conservatively, a Republican administration has run up such a huge deficit? It's sure easier to natter on about the "Harvard boutique" than to defend that budget President Bush released yesterday. And why would they want to deal with the fact that Dukakis was a fiscal conservative who, back in the 1970s, bailed the state out of a budget mess left by a Republican governor? Dukakis took a lot of grief from liberals when he did that -- a bit of history that gets in the way of the election-year propaganda now being peddled.

The demonization of Massachusetts is really about the southernization of the Republican Party. From 1860 to 1924, Massachusetts was a loyal Republican state, voting Democratic only once, when the Republican vote split in 1912. It was a Lincoln Republican state back when the South was still voting for Democrats in opposition to Lincoln, the War Between the States and Reconstruction. As a Massachusetts person, I'm well aware of my home state's problems with racism in the 1960s and '70s. But I'm still proud that Massachusetts was the first state since Reconstruction to elect an African American, Republican Edward W. Brooke, to the United States Senate back in 1966.

So, yes, Massachusetts is a liberal place if liberal refers to its status as the heartland of anti-slavery feeling in Lincoln's day, or the home of John F. Kennedy in the civil rights era. That is when so much of the Southern white vote shifted Republican because a Democrat named Lyndon B. Johnson signed the civil rights bill after Kennedy's assassination.

Parodying Massachusetts is a way to keep old resentments alive without getting into any of the inconvenient details. It also allows a pro-business, Yale-educated president with an MBA from Harvard to cast himself as anti-elitist by implying (as his Yale-educated father did in 1988 with that line about the "Harvard boutique") that Massachusetts people are a bunch of snobs. The people selling this stuff should know that in my hometown, folks get punched out for being snobs.

I can hear my Republican friends now: Oh no, no, no. This isn't about anything nefarious. This is about George McGovern. Wasn't Massachusetts the only state in 1972 to support that left-wing antiwar agitator?

Indeed, Massachusetts voted for McGovern over Richard Nixon -- not so much because of the Harvard boutique but because the old factory towns such as the one where I grew up remained loyal to the party of Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. In any case, why, in light of history, is voting against Nixon so dishonorable?

And here's the clincher: If we Massachusetts people are so weirdly liberal, then why are we the only state with a major league sports team called the New England Patriots? Could there be a better moment in our history to be a fan of a football squad whose colors are red, white and blue?

The Patriots, it should be noted, believe in teamwork. They don't brag a lot, they work hard and they always come through in the final seconds. Come to think of it, maybe that's why all these guys are so down on my home state. The truth is, they're worried about us. And they should be.

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

Does this President Bush honestly think that if he ends up facing John Kerry this fall he can just rerun his dad's campaign of 16 years ago against Michael Dukakis? I rather think not, E. J. But, seeing how that one turned out, I can understand why you'd be so upset at the prospect.

Just imagine how much fun we're going to have, Faithful Reader, if/when John "F" Kennedy Kerry actually gets nominated.

P.S. Does anybody remember the attack ads the Democrats ran in 2000? From them, one could gather that Texas was a living hell hole of racists who somehow managed to stay alive though their water and air had become so polluted as to be poisonous when George W. Bush was governor.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 05:44:05 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Media.

"A Snapshot in Time"

An article by Republican pollster Robert Moran at NRO, today, which has much wider applicability than any current theoretical Kerry-Bush match-up:

When reviewing the recent Bush-Kerry polling it's important to keep in mind that surveys are only a snapshot of the electorate's opinions at one point in time.

A CNN/Gallup/USA Today/Democratic National Committee (kidding on that last part... maybe) survey of 1,001 American adults January 29-February 1, 2004 showed John Kerry defeating President Bush 53 percent to 46 percent.

A Newsweek survey of 1,022 registered voters taken at the same time showed Kerry defeating Bush 48 percent to 46 percent.

Are the results worrisome? Sure.

Are the results predictable? Yes. Most incumbents have a rough patch when their challenger is introduced, and the Bush team has warned all along that this is likely.

Are they predictive of the electoral result this November? No, and there are four (4) reasons why these numbers may have no bearing at all on reality in November 2004....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 05:36:20 PM
Categorized as Media.

"U.S. Newspaper Can be Sued in Canada"

It's a small world, after all.

An article in today's Globe and Mail:

A former senior official at the United Nations has won the right to sue The Washington Post for libel in a Toronto court even though the lawsuit has nothing to do with Canada.

The case involves Cheickh Bangoura, who headed a UN agency in Africa from 1994 to 1997. Mr. Bangoura's contract was not renewed after a series of articles appeared in The Washington Post which accused him of sexual harassment, financial improprieties and nepotism.

Two United Nations' panels later cleared him of any wrongdoing and ordered the organization to pay him compensation....

The Washington Post moved to have the lawsuit dismissed and argued Ontario was not a proper venue. But in a recent ruling, Mr. Justice Romain Pitt said the case can go ahead because the newspaper made the articles available on its website.

"Those who publish via the Internet are aware of the global reach of their publications, and must consider the legal consequences in the jurisdiction of the subjects of their articles," the judge wrote....

You think all that's a little scary? Here's the really scary part:

.... A day after the Post articles appeared, Fred Eckhard, a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Annan, announced that Mr. Bangoura's contract would not be renewed because of the allegations in the articles.

"That basically was quite devastating to him because he was a career international civil servant," Ms. Roach said....

He was a career international civil servant: if you're looking for one phrase to sum up the source of many of the world's most intractable problems, I think you need look no further.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 05:24:33 PM
Categorized as International.

"Integrity, Trust, and Respect"

A college commencement speech.

I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us — the 400 of us — and I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said.

This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give. Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3% of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective.

The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade — years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program — so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: "Why, if you're dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?" Well, if you didn't care a lot about it you wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother used to say, "I'll always love you but there are times when I certainly won't like you."

Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education. Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder's parking lot. We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirement. We worked for a pass-fail system. We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision making. And luckily we were in a place where, when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning.

So we have made progress. We have achieved some of the things that initially saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality. Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know. We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here. We questioned about what responsibility we should have both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group.

Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We were lucky in that one of the first things Miss Adams did was to set up a cross-registration with MIT because everyone knows that education just can't have any parochial bounds any more. One of the other things that we did was the Upward Bound program. There are so many other things that we could talk about; so many attempts, at least the way we saw it, to pull ourselves into the world outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will be an Upward Bound program, just for one example, on the campus this summer.

Many of the issues that I've mentioned — those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words — integrity, trust, and respect — in regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive — now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see — but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.

But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity — a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word "consequences" of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

There are two people that I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing that I would like to read:

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To transform the future into the present.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer exist.
Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.

Hillary D. Rodham
President of the Wellesley College Government Association
Wellesley College 91st Commencement
May 31, 1969

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

(Thanks, Kathy.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 07:59:11 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"Left in the Air?"

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CLXIV

Out of the depths of the backlog — an article at the Boston Globe, Jan. 5.

Do you fail to find the compassion in George W. Bush's conservatism? Do you worry that neo-cons have hijacked foreign policy? Do you think Al Gore won the 2000 election? Do you wish someone would say these things on talk radio?

Then Mark Walsh may have good news for you.

Walsh, a Harvard MBA who worked as an AOL executive and a technology adviser to the Democratic National Committee, hopes to break the conservative chokehold on talk radio with a new network of liberal talkers -- led perhaps by comedians Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo -- slated to debut in the spring. While conservatives have long complained that there is a liberal tilt in the mainstream media, many liberals are frustrated with a talk radio culture in which Rush Limbaugh is king and "left" is a four-letter word. "America has for long enough been polluted with conservative right-wing bile," Walsh says.

He plans to buy radio stations in five major American cities, including Boston, and program up to 18 hours of liberal talk a day on them. It's too soon to say whether his concept will work, but there is a growing hunger on the left to do battle on the airwaves.

"There is a very effective right-wing echo chamber," says Ralph Neas, president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, citing such hosts as Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. "It's a very effective way of getting their message out." "I know the Democrats have been stewing about this for a long time," says Ed Schultz, a Democratic talk-show host in Fargo, N.D. "The Democrats, as a party, have underestimated the power of talk radio. It's absolutely a three-hour bashing session against the liberals."

However great the desire to launch a liberal counterattack on talk radio, a number of factors -- ranging from a grim track record to doubts about Walsh's strategy -- make the effort look like a long shot, if not a pipe dream.

"Any kind of a new broadcast endeavor is a difficult business to say the least," says Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine. "So the idea of doing a 24/7 liberal network, a whole constellation of stars, is very difficult."

The radio landscape is littered with the short careers of liberal talkers such as Mario Cuomo and Alan Dershowitz. Still, says former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, who had two stints as a syndicated host in the past decade: "It's absurd to say that liberal, progressive populist radio won't work. It does work. The problem is the networks aren't marketers."

Liberals seem like an endangered species in talk radio. According to Talkers magazine, four of the five biggest audiences in radio belong to conservatives: Limbaugh, Hannity, Michael Savage, and moralizing advice guru Laura Schlessinger. (Shock jock Howard Stern is the one nonconservative interloper.) Tom Athans, who runs Democracy Radio, an organization aimed at finding and syndicating liberal talkers, says 300 of the 340 political shows he surveyed featured conservative hosts; 40 were hosted by liberals. And only two of those liberals -- Schultz and Randi Rhodes in West Palm Beach, Fla. -- are getting what he calls "killer ratings."

Locally, major talk stations WRKO-AM and WTKK-FM offer lopsidedly conservative lineups that include Pat Whitley, Howie Carr, Limbaugh, and Savage on WRKO, and Hannity, O'Reilly, Jay Severin, and Laura Ingraham on WTKK.

Athans, a former congressional staffer who is married to Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, acknowledges: "Rush Limbaugh deserves the credit for stumbling into a market of listeners in America that nobody knew existed. Market forces created the situation as it exists today."

Walsh, the CEO of Progress Media Inc., is trying to create his own market force with a highly publicized -- if largely undisclosed -- plan to create a liberal network. Officials at his Central Air radio network are talking to Franken and Garofalo and have made several executive hires, including "Daily Show" cocreator Lizz Winstead, former CNN producer Shelly Lewis, and ex-Chicago radio executive Dave Logan. One on-air personality officially locked in is Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, who will host a daily hourlong show on media issues. Published reports also indicate that comedian Barry Crimmins is coming aboard to deliver commentaries.

The plan calls for programming a 14-to-18-hour broadcast day on stations that Walsh says Progress is close to buying in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. Walsh insists that "in every case, these are significant or full-service stations that service the entire market," but no purchases have been announced. Walsh wants to deliver a full slate of "live talk, entertainment, and comedy programming" that will emulate the ensemble-style structure of Don Imus's show, using a well-known host, a news provider, and a "more antic-style person. . . . We're not just putting up an Al Franken and Janeane standing there alone in front of the microphone."

But if Walsh is trying an ambitious and expensive network model, Athans is working on the more traditional syndication model, looking for talkers like Schultz. A self-described "middle-of-the-road Democrat who used to be a conservative," Schultz has toiled in the broadcasting business for a quarter-century and hosts a popular morning show on KFGO-AM in Fargo. Athans connected Schultz to a syndicator, and starting today he will begin an afternoon program that has thus far been picked up in about a dozen markets in the upper Midwest. An official at the syndication company, Jones Radio Networks, says Schultz is close to lining up a few major market stations on the East Coast.

Athans says his year-old group is "looking for talent that will translate into something that's commercially viable," and he offers a cautionary note about the Progress Media plan. "The bottom line is these people aren't broadcasters," he says. "From our perspective, the best talent to use are people experienced in broadcasting."

One reason often cited in explaining the failure of liberal talk radio is that programmers have chosen professional liberals rather than professional broadcasters. "First of all, I'm a radio guy," Schultz says. "One of the reasons these types of efforts have failed in the past is they haven't tried the right people."

Another popular theory is that the left is too humorless to succeed in an entertainment medium. "Most attempts at progressive talk radio have been focused on conversion for the audience," Kaplan says, "rather than focused on giving the audience a good time." Walsh is a proponent of the "sandwich theory," which holds that the occasional liberal talker stuck in the middle of a conservative format is doomed to failure.

Talkers magazine's Harrison subscribes to the view that conservative talk dominates because it shrewdly cultivated a niche that liberals ignored. "The conservatives have been working at it for a very long time," he says. "You've had about 15 years of development of this form of political talk that identified a market and super-served that audience."

At least for now, the principals in the liberal talk brigade are saying the right things, keenly aware of Kaplan's admonition that "this is not a presidential campaign or a political party. It's a business." Walsh himself acknowledges that he needs to create "shareholder value."

But some analysts wonder whether an enterprise driven in part by frustration and ideology will have the patience and staying power to survive in a grinding business that rarely bestows overnight stardom. Limbaugh, for example, kicked around for years, starting out in radio during high school, working as a music DJ, and toiling in promotions for the Kansas City Royals organization before finally hitting it big in political talk.

Harrison thinks these liberal entrepreneurs may not understand radio culture. "It's a daily, lonely business with everybody tugging at you," he says. "I don't know anyone who is currently a celebrity who is going to make it in radio. They've got to be radio guys. You put up with day after day after day of not knowing if it's connecting."

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 07:40:12 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Media.

Nader-Dean in 2004!

Or, Dean-Nader in 2004?

Just wondering........

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 02/04/04 07:27:14 AM
Categorized as Political.