Sunday, August 31, 2008

Today, I endorse another radio station.

You'll likely find this fascinating.

Live Gustav coverage from New Orleans heritage 50,000 watt WWL AM-870. Click Here.

I spent several years in New Orleans at the top rated B-97 (which is simulcasting this same WWL broadcast.) The coverage of what's happening there is unlike anything you'll hear anywhere else. Local callers will tell a story the networks don't take the time to tell.

You will have to register with the website to hear the broadcast, but it takes just a moment. This is a must listen for News Radio junkies - you won't be able to turn it off.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Barack Obama. He "completes" us.

The 4 year old kid that looks like Barack Obama.

A Palm Springs mother says her four-year-old son looks like Barack Obama.

Patricia Smith says when she's out in public, people comment that her son Rafael looks like Obama. "They call him the Obama kid because he looks like Obama, that's what they say. When Obama started to run during the primaries, people started to comment and how I should send the pictures to the news."


Smith says she thinks it's funny, considering she is an Obama supporter.


Anyone have a kid that looks like Senator John McCain?

Thursday, August 28, 2008

The Obama $3 Bill.

The head of the Snohomish County Republican Party apologized Tuesday after the organization's booth at the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe sold "$3 bills" depicting Barack Obama wearing Arab headgear and featuring a camel.


Geri Modrell, the Snohomish County Republican chairwoman, said a volunteer had brought the bills to the fair thinking they were funny.
"I don't think it's funny," said Modrell, who said she ordered the bills removed as soon as she learned about them. "They were offensive. The volunteers are being told very clearly they must not do these sorts of things."

The $3 bills, which are sold on a conservative Web site, feature signatures from "Teddy Kennedy" as chief socialism adviser and Al Sharpton as new spiritual adviser. Obama's face, in the traditional Arab headgear, is pictured above the words "Da man."

The head of the Snohomish County Republican Party apologized Tuesday after the organization's booth at the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe sold "$3 bills" depicting Barack Obama wearing Arab headgear and featuring a camel.

Geri Modrell, the Snohomish County Republican chairwoman, said a volunteer had brought the bills to the fair thinking they were funny.

"I don't think it's funny," said Modrell, who said she ordered the bills removed as soon as she learned about them. "They were offensive. The volunteers are being told very clearly they must not do these sorts of things."

The $3 bills, which are sold on a conservative Web site, feature signatures from "Teddy Kennedy" as chief socialism adviser and Al Sharpton as new spiritual adviser. Obama's face, in the traditional Arab headgear, is pictured above the words "Da man."

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Lobbyists Gone Wild as Obama Remains Silent

Despite a campaign that attacked corporate and special interest lobbyists as evil and banned their money and participation, Sen. Barack Obama has done little, if anything, about their pervasive, free-spending presence at the Democratic convention in Denver

A spokesman for the Obama campaign, Ben LaBolt, said the Senator could not "make changes to this year's convention" because of the "very late end to the primary season."


As a result, lobbyists are once again spending millions of dollars here on gourmet food, top-shelf liquor and private lavish parties for Democratic elected officials who seem more than happy to play the role of world-class freeloaders.


According to Denver's top chefs and caterers, no expense is being spared. Kevin Taylor, of the Denver restaurant Palette, who says he is the only four-star chef in Denver, says he is booked to prepare delicacies for more than 100 "high end, hush-hush events." "The demand is over the top, you've never seen anything like this," said chef Taylor, especially for his signature King Crab terrine appetizer with white champagne caviar.


At the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where rooms for Democratic VIP's are now going for $2,000 a night, the executive chef, Andre Jimenez, says even the room welcome gifts need to be elaborate for the 35 top donors and celebrities, including "the rarest peaches in America."


"It's only for the best of the best that we host here," the chef told ABC News. "We're seeing lobbyists gone wild."

"We will not take another dime from Washington lobbyists," Obama said in a speech June 5, repeating a theme he has main a key to his campaign. "They will not fund my party."
"So Barack Obama, who says that he doesn't want to have any lobbyist money in his campaign, is having a lobbyist bundle money from large corporations, many of which are clients, for the convention that's going to nominate Obama," said Steve Weisman of the Campaign Finance Institute, affiliated with George Washington University.


"Barack Obama is committed to reforming our political system and getting the special interests out of politics," he said, as the first of hundreds of lobbyist-paid parties were getting underway in Denver.

ABCNEWS.COM

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Barack Obama's 'lost' brother found

The Italian edition of Vanity Fair said that it had found George Hussein Onyango Obama living in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Mr Obama, 26, the youngest of the presidential candidate's half-brothers, spoke for the first time about his life, which could not be more different than that of the Democratic contender.

"No-one knows who I am," he told the magazine, before claiming: "I live here on less than a dollar a month."

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Oprah's ratings down for six straight months. Why?

Has she jumped the shark?
Oprah's gotten too serious. She's just not a lot of fun. The topics are too ponderous, like Dr. Oz scaring us about health issues, or experts talking about hoarding and clutter, or some other psychological ailment that's equally bizarre. Then there was all the stuff about the school in South Africa and the book club author who was a liar. Sorry, it was all a downer. Then, a jump the shark moment, Oprah presented the pregnant man.

The urge to surf
If you've spent a sick day or two at home in the afternoon, you know that there's a lot more stuff to watch these days than there used to be. The cable revolution has resulted in choice galore. When Oprah's show comes on, whatever the time slot, Food Network has cooking shows, ESPN has sports, CNN has news, Bravo has repeats of Project Runway or one of their other primetime shows, Biography has biographies, and on and on.

The New Age angle
One theory put forth about Oprah's decline is that she's embraced too much New Age/personal power/the spirit within me/the secret philosophy -- to the extent that she's coming off as anti-Christian.

Time's up
Maybe Oprah has overstayed her welcome. She's been on the air for 22 years. That's a very long time. Oprah has made noises about giving up the show and concentrating on other endeavors, but she's still at it. There's a lot to be said about knowing when to leave. In show business parlance, it's known as leaving them wanting more. If Oprah had ended her show after 20 years, she wouldn't be in this situation now. She could have ended the show on a high.

Politics
Okay, maybe her endorsement of Obama has made a difference. It probably wasn't Barack himself, but the fact that Oprah has been non-political for years, or at least very discreet. This was the first time she injected herself into a political race and that might have turned some people off.

Too much commercialism
Her My Favorite Things shows are huge, for sure. Free stuff for the folks in the studio audience, big commercials for the products. But in the days and weeks after the show airs we keep hearing and reading about those products online, on-air and in print. It just wreaked of commercialism. The same thing with the free car giveaway. They weren't free; it was an hour long commercial for Pontiac.

*TV blog TV Squad

Friday, August 15, 2008

Government-Mandated 'Balance' In Media

Nearly half of Americans (47%) believe the government should require all radio and TV outlets to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary, while 39% say they don't want the government mandating political "balance" in broadcast media. At the same time, 71% say it is already possible for just about any political view to be heard in today's media, according to a Rasmussen Reports survey.

57% say the government should not require web sites and blog sites that offer political commentary to present opposing viewpoints. But 31% believe the web sites should be forced to balance their commentary. In a July, 2007 survey, Americans were evenly divided on whether or not the government should require political balance.

Democrats are more supportive of government involvement in the airwaves than Republicans and unaffiliated voters. 54% of Democrats favor it, and only 26% are opposed. Republicans and unaffiliated voters are fairly evenly divided. 45% of Americans say they are following recent news stories about the Fairness Doctrine somewhat closely, while 15% say they are not following the story at all.

The survey also found that 42% believe there are more conservative radio talk shows because they get better ratings, but 28% believe it is because stations owners are biased. 17% attribute it to an unspecified other reason, and 13% are unsure. Most Republicans (61%) believe conservative talk radio has flourished because of the ratings, with only 11% saying it is due to bias. Democrats, on the other hand, see bias as the reason over ratings by a 42% to 28% margin.

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As a 30 year plus broadcaster, the fact that Government intervention into what "views" are expressed, and to what degree - is even being discussed - disturbs me.

As to the proliferation of Conservative talk radio, I assure you it's ratings, and ratings alone. Anyone who thinks it's "bias" isn't looking at the books. There are just a handfull of Liberal radio shows, most local - not national. If listeners would embrace these shows, there would be many. Fact is, most of these shows languish and fold up quickly. Air America is the best example of a valiant attempt at Liberal Talk Radio. It's a "mess" at best.

The only national Liberal talk show I hear often is Alan Colmes. He has a sweet timeslot here in Wichita. 3-6am. I listen in as I shower and prepare to do the KFDI radio show - that here has 25 times the audience.


Sunday, August 10, 2008

I want a Hillbilly Hotdog.

If you want to die of meat, get to HillBilly Hotdogs in West Virginia and try the 3.5 pound "Homewrecker" dog. If you can eat it in four minutes or less, it's free. The Hillbilly Hotdogs employees start with a deep-fried 15-inch, 1-pound dog and top it with peppers, onions, nacho cheese, chili sauce, jalapenos, mustard, ketchup, coleslaw, tomatoes, lettuce, and shredded cheese. All for $14.99.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Liberal Blogs More Profane

Are liberals more profane than conservatives? Online, the answer seems to be yes. Profanity, those taboo words banned from the broadcast airwaves, is a feature of many people's daily lives. It's much less so in the establishment media world. TV and radio broadcasts are legally prohibited from using it, most newspapers (including this one) have traditionally refrained from its usage.

That's not the case with the Web, where bloggers and readers face no such restrictions. That likely comes as no surprise; what may be surprising, however, is to what degree profanity seems to be a feature more common on one side of the political blogosphere than the other.

Which side is that? For answers, I turned to the search engine Google to see how common swearing is in the right and left blog universes by looking up the late stand-up comic George Carlin's "seven dirty words" in the most popular blog communities.

The results showed that online liberals tend to use profanity a lot more than online conservatives.

Searching for Mr. Carlin's seven words and some popular variants at the top 10 conservative Web communities yields about 70,000 results. That is dwarfed in comparison to the 1.9 million instances of profanity on liberal sites.

Things aren't quite that clear-cut, however, since some Web sites have more pages than others. According to Google, the top 10 conservative sites have about 6 million pages, while the top 10 liberal sites have about 13 million.

Dividing the number of instances of profanity by the number of pages of the sites on which they appear, then multiplying the result by 100 yields what might be called a "profanity quotient."

The top 10 liberal sites (Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Democratic Underground, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress, Atrios, Greenwald, MyDD and Firedoglake) have a profanity quotient of 14.6.

The top 10 conservative sites (Free Republic, Hot Air, Little Green Footballs, Townhall, NewsBusters, Lucianne.com, Wizbang, Ace of Spades, Red State and Volokh Conspiracy) have a quotient of 1.17.

That's quite a disparity. Liberals are more than 12 times likely to use profanity than conservatives on the Web.

The interesting question, of course, is whether this is merely a superficial matter of style, or whether it's a question of fundamental character.

The kind of vulgarity used on leftist blogs betrays a fundamental contempt for the sensibilities of others. That's because those "others" are thought to be morally and intellectually inferior, and therefore fair game.

Matthew Sheffield: Washington Times

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Brangelina baby pix. See for yourself.





These are just some of the pix the tabloids pid millions for. The Brangelina babies. By the way, part of the negotiations included in exchange for the pix, the mags agreed never to use the term "Brangelina" again.

Monday, August 04, 2008

I never wanna go swimming in China















This is simply a pic of a public pool in China on a 96 degree day. Can you imagine, even for a second, how gross that water might be? You're lookin' at a "Human Soup", that's cookin' up nice because of the heat. Remind me to never move to China. I thought my local pool was crowded. Also, the Chinese appear to love their "floaties."