If you're going to be an a-hole, might as well be a rich and famous one.

That's what I'm talkin' about!

Thank you.

Quite welcome!

I watched five minutes of Larry King. Why the hell does anyone take Sharpton seriously? And letting Bo Dietle defend Imus didn't do anyone justice. I forgot what a buttkiss Larry was.

I think Bo got half his business from Imus referrals.

BTW, now I'm really PO'd that Imus has been run off radio too.

I'm sure he'll do well on satellite radio if he chooses, but I'm not a subscriber.

Not exactly; as per usual, you leave out the most important parts of the story to support your misinformation.

She spoke of the 3 or 4 who were being used by the media to support their (the liberal media's) point!

Maybe it's something of a mob mentality. The chance to visually express anguish must offer some reward of kinship...to enjoy camaraderie of suffering the latest woe.

3 or 4 is not a group?

As to their being, "used," that is your contention (with no evidence, as usual). They certinly didn't think so.

You are full of bluster and little else. My comment was spot on, and your complaint is the misleading BS of the morning.

THE IMUS SCANDAL: POLITICAL IMPACT

Democratic politicians lose a soapbox with Imus

His show gave many of them a way to reach a national audience of white males -- a crucial voting bloc.

By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer

April 13, 2007

WASHINGTON — They came by the hundreds that hot August day in tiny Johnson City, Tenn., gathering on an asphalt parking lot to meet Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. It was not just that he might become the state's first black senator. More than that, even in Republican eastern Tennessee, the Democratic congressman was a celebrity — a regular guest on Don Imus' radio show.

And today, with Imus' career in tatters, the fate of the controversial shock jock is stirring quiet but heartfelt concern in an unlikely quarter: among Democratic politicians.

That's because, over the years, Democrats such as Ford came to count on Imus for the kind of sympathetic treatment that Republicans got from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

Equally important, Imus gave Democrats a pipeline to a crucial voting bloc that was perennially hard for them to reach: politically independent white men.

With Imus' show canceled indefinitely because of his remarks about the Rutgers University women's basketball team, some Democratic strategists are worried about how to fill the void. For a national radio audience of white men, Democrats see few if any alternatives.

"This is a real bind for Democrats," said Dan Gerstein, an advisor to one of Imus' favorite regulars, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). "Talk radio has become primarily the province of the right, and the blogosphere is largely the province of the left. If Imus loses his microphone, there aren't many other venues like it around."

Jim Farrell, a former aide to 2000 presidential candidate and Imus regular Bill Bradley, said the firing "creates a vacuum."

This week, when Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) was asked by CNN why he picked Imus' show to announce his presidential candidacy, Dodd explained: "He's got a huge audience; he gives you enough time to talk, not a 30-second sound bite, a chance to explain your views; … and a chance to reach the audience who doesn't always watch the Sunday morning talk shows."

Though Imus was a regular destination for the likes of Dodd, Ford, Lieberman, 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry and others — as well as such GOP figures as Sen. John McCain of Arizona — his influence has long been debated.

Talkers Magazine ranks him far below Limbaugh*** and liberal Ed Schultz in terms of power. His audience is dwarfed by many others, and he is not heard in some major markets [though his show was simulcast on cable TV]. One senior Democratic strategist, requesting anonymity to avoid insulting some of his party's power players, said the show was no more than a "locker room for middle-age politicians."

Not all high-level Democrats were drawn to the self-styled "I-Man." Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), a party presidential front-runner and a frequent target of Imus' jokes, said she never had the desire to appear.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the other current front-runner, appeared once — but he was the first presidential candidate to call this week for Imus' ouster.

Ford strategists believe his relationship with Imus was central to earning credibility in the eyes of white voters in conservative regions of Tennessee. "That's how I got to know Harold, seeing him on Imus," said Ben Scharfstein, owner of the One Stop convenience store in Johnson City, who turned over his parking lot that August day for the campaign event.

But even Scharfstein said he had now had it with Imus. "I'm going to have to turn Don off now," he said. "His ego has gotten ahead of himself, and that's not worth watching."

And Ford was hardly leaping to the defense of his radio ally despite repeated on-air pleas from Imus to appear in his defense. Ford on Thursday called Imus' statements "reprehensible," though he added that Imus was a friend and a "decent man."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
peter.wallsten@latimes.com


***that may not be true in the NYC and NE area but I doubt that can be said of the whole country -but I agree, the audience is just not there in TV simulcasting or his radio stations.

The media tried to portray the three or four as all the widows connected with the terrorist attack and that is not the case at all as it later came out on the quality discussions on TV and radio when other widows came out to state that the "three or four" being "used" by the media were not speaking for the those affected.

BTW, Do you ever discuss anything without getting vulgar, i.e., being deficient in taste, delicacy, or refinement?

a bushlover complaining aboutn vulgarity. Thats rich.

The Imus lynch party

Posted: April 13, 2007

1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In the end, it was not about Imus. It was about us.

Are we really a better country because, after he was publicly whipped for 10 days as the worst kind of racist, with whom no decent person could associate, he was thrown off the air?

Cards on the table.

This writer works for MSNBC, has been on the Imus show scores of times, watches Imus every morning, and likes the show, the music and the guys: the I-Man, Bernie, Charles and Tom Bowman.

And Imus is among the best interviewers in our business. Not only does he read and follow the news closely, he listens and probes as well as any interviewer in America. Because he is a comic, people mistake how good a questioner he is.

Is "Imus in the Morning" outrageous? Over the top at times? Are things said every week, if not every day, where you say, "He's going too far"? Yeah. But outrageousness is part of the show, whether the skits are of "Teddy Kennedy," "Reverend Falwell," "Mayor Nagin" or "The Cardinal."

And when Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "tattooed ... nappy-headed hos," he went over the top. The women deserved an apology. There was no cause, no call to use those terms. As Ann Coulter said, they were not fair game.

But Imus did apologize, again and again and again.

And lest we forget, these are athletes in their prime, the same age as young women in Iraq. They are not 5-year-old girls, and they are capable of brushing off an ignorant comment by a talk-show host who does not know them, or anything about them.

Who, after all, believed the slur was true? No one.

Compare, if you will, what was done to them – a single nasty insult – to the savage slanders for weeks on end of the Duke lacrosse team and the three players accused by a lying stripper of having gang-raped her at a frat party.

Duke faculty and talking heads took that occasion to vent their venom toward all white "jocks" on college campuses. Where are the demands for apologies from the talk-show hosts, guests, Duke faculty members and smear artists, all of whom bought into the lies about those Duke kids – because the lies comported with their hateful view of America?

And hate is what this is all about.

While the remarks of Imus and Bernie about the Rutgers women were indefensible, they were more unthinking and stupid than vicious and malicious. But malice is the right word to describe the howls for their show to be canceled and them to be driven from the airwaves – by phonies who endlessly prattle about the First Amendment.

The hypocrisy here was too thick to cut with a chainsaw.

What was the term the I-Man used? It was "hos," slang for whores, a term employed ad infinitum et ad nauseam by rap and hip-hop "artists." It is a term out of the African-American community. Yet, if any of a hundred rap singers has lost his contract or been driven from the airwaves for using it, maybe someone can tell me about it.

If the word "hos" is a filthy insult to decent black women, and it is, why are hip-hop artists and rap singers who use it incessantly not pariahs in the black community? Why would black politicians hobnob with them? Why are there no boycotts of the advertisers of the radio stations that play their degrading music?

Answer: The issue here is not the word Imus used. The issue is who Imus is – a white man, who used a term about black women only black folks are permitted to use with impunity and immunity.

Whatever Imus' sins, no one deserves to have Al Sharpton – hero of the Tawana Brawley hoax, resolute defender of the fake rape charge against half a dozen innocent guys, which ruined lives – sit in moral judgment upon them.

"It is our feeling that this is only the beginning. We must have a broad discussion on what is permitted and not permitted in terms of the airwaves," says Sharpton. It says something about America that someone with Al's track record can claim the role of national censor.

Who is next? And why do we take it?

I did a bad thing, but I am not a bad person, says Imus. Indeed, whoever used his microphone to do more good for more people – be they the cancer kids of Imus Ranch, the families of Iraq war dead now more justly compensated because of the I-Man or the cause of a cure for autism?

"We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality," said Lord Macaulay. Unfortunately, Macaulay never saw the likes of the Revs. Sharpton and Jackson.

Imus threw himself on the mercy of the court of elite opinion – and that court, pandering to the mob, lynched him. Yet, for all his sins, he was a better man than the lot of them rejoicing at the foot of the cottonwood tree.

The entire quote is: "I think that nobody wants to play chicken with our troops on the ground." Why would FOX leave out the first four words? Or why not at least include "nobody"?

http://galleries.desktopdownload.org/faux.html

because filthy repuslickans never tell the truth about anything.

I only listen a few minutes a month. Radio has too many commercials. I run it late at night and early AM, and I wake up for a little bit when the host is on, but fall asleep during the commercials.




Now that the Dems have declared Fox off limits they might as well be as biased as CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS.

(I'd like to see the whole piece, not just one screen)

He said, trying desperately to maintain a 'straight' face . . .

They spoke for the majority of 9/11 victim survivors. Of course your ilk found one or two that could be bought, and tried to exploit them. Pity it didn't work.


I apologize. I am only trying to communicate at your lowbrow cracker level. I tend to get vulgar when vulgarity is the only and lowest form used to communicate.

It is rather difficult for me, but apparently you only tend to respond to your own type of vulgarity--as you are rather vulgar in your outrageous bigotey.

It's easy to mantain a straight face when talking about media bias. I know you figure everything to the right of Trotsky is reactionary...

That's not really the point, though, is it? I will grant you that the other shows are biased against the conservative religious right. But, come on, FOX has not, from the get-go, all-along, been biased, and blatantly so?

Come on, now.

Same as everyone else, just in a different direction. If six networks slant left, and one slants right, which way does the general media slant?

just report the damn news

Democrats have given up on white men. A coalition of women and minorities is enough to win it all now.

cnn msnbc cbs abc nyt and the WP would all go out of business if they stopped the liberal hysteria every time some one sneezes in the booosh administration.

Which news?




They did the same to Clinton. It just took six or seven years.

CNN is like hillary. A poll following fair weather friend. When the AWOL and crew were in their heyday and everyone was buying their bullsh_t CNN was second only to fux for kissing filthy repuslickan ass.

Pardon me if I don't take it on your say so. I'm sure from your perspective anything less than openly endorsing Kerry makes CNN a Bushlover network.

Did they? All I see is a possible screen shot.

Makes Obama look pretty good.

Of course none of you people watched as the happily spouted all the BS propaganda the AWOL cult was spewing leading up to Iraq. None of you watched them cheerlead and lob softballs at all the lying repuslickans back then either. hawk blitzer was particularly adept at reading his questions off a script direct from the rnc.

Of course none of you that cry about it the most ever watched it so how would you know?

Wolf put you off with all that macho BS? Offend your tender, peace-loving sensibilities?

Yeah an ass kiss always offends my tender sensibilities. And there is nothing macho about whipping yer drawers down and bending and spreading every time a "freedom fries" spewer comes on yer show.

He's da man.

I think Mizilus might be sweet on him. Unless Innocent has dibs.

Mizzie is a sensitive kinda person.

Firing of Imus removes leader of sorry band

Miami Herald, by LEONARD PITTS JR.

4/14/2007 8:55:50 AM

Obviously, someone has put crack in the nation's drinking water. What else can one think after the spasms of bigotry to which Mel Gibson, Isaiah Washington, Tim Hardaway and Michael Richards have treated us over the last nine months?/snip/Yet none of that was enough to keep him out of radio's Hall of Fame, nor to keep such VIPs as Tom Brokaw, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, John Kerry and John McCain off his show.

Liberals in Pajamas

New York Sun, , by R.Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

4/14/2007 6:43:39 AM

We all have our favorite sages. Official Washington has Don Imus. Or at least that surly vulgarian was the commentariat's*** favorite sage until those two gifted hucksters, Sharpton & Jackson, saw in Mr. Imus's bleak humor another opportunity to engaud their resumes. Now he is a whimpering bundle of apologies, his First Amendment rights having been jettisoned almost instantaneously along with his he-man demeanor.


***commentariat noun. Pundits, experts, analysts, and other commentators.

Example Citation:
"The polls showed that people did not trust [Clinton], even more than they did not trust him the week before; but they still supported him. It could only be a matter of time, official Washington was deciding, before the proletariat caught up with the Commentariat."
—Andrew Marshall, "Fourteen Days That...Shook the President," The Independent (London)

bush approval ratings
http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm

Your VideoTruth:
A black sports writer
jumps off the bench
and a star is born

Check out Jason Whitlock - he's the MAN!



http://thebiglead.com/?p=2111

Cowards kick away another piece of America's soul

NYPost, by Kinky Friedman


4/15/2007 11:53:28 AM

I MET Imus on the gangplank of Noah's Ark. He was then and remains today a truth-seeking missile with the best bull-meter in the business. Far from being a bully, he was a spiritual chop-buster never afraid to go after the big guys with nothing but the slingshot of ragged integrity.

Small wonder Imus was one of the very few to push Kinky's career in politics. Imus was no great fountain of truth, just a guy making a buck in radio.

Chimps are ahead of humans in the great evolutionary race

London Times (UK), by Mark Henderson


4/16/2007 6:57:05 PM

Chimpanzees have evolved more extensively than humans since the two species split from their common ancestor, according to research that challenges the conventional wisdom that Homo sapiens has been favoured by natural selection. A comparison of the genomes of the two close cousins has revealed that many more chimp genes than human ones have been the subject of positive evolutionary selection.


The Headlines I would certainly like to visit some of the hospitals and research laboratories they have built for the benefit of life.

I hate every chimp I see

From Chimpan A

To Chimapanzee

PBS vs. "Islam vs. Islamist"

By Bill Steigerwald

FrontPageMagazine.com | April 17, 2007

Canadian novelist and veteran documentary filmmaker Martyn Burke is not someone you'd expect to get into an ugly ideological spitting match with the folks who run PBS.

Burke, who lives and works in the heart of the Hollywood creative community, considers himself neither conservative nor liberal. But "Islam vs. Islamist," the documentary he made about how moderate Muslims are being silenced and intimidated by Islamist extremists, will not be part of "America at a Crossroads," PBS's new 11-part, six-night series about post-9/11 America that begins Sunday night at 9.

Executives at WETA in Washington, D.C., the public station overseeing the series for PBS, say the documentary was cut from the "Crossroads" lineup because it wasn't completed in time and because it was “alarmist” and not objective.

PBS says it may run it at a later date. Burke, however, says his documentary, made with $700,000 in Corporation for Public Broadcasting money, was interfered with and then dropped because he refused to fire his two co-producers, Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev, who run the Center for Security Policy think tank.

Burke says he is telling his side of the story because "of a long litany of unbelievably unprofessional things" that have happened and because PBS series producers violated "the basic tenets of journalism." I talked to Burke by telephone on Thursday, April12, from his home in Santa Monica, California:

Q: Is this what you get for taking $700,000 from the taxpayers to make a documentary?
A: Probably. I think I’m paying for my sins of working on the public purse right now. But, no, we took this on because we just wanted to ask one simple question after 9/11: Where are the moderate Muslims and why aren’t they speaking out? We took this for a very serious purpose. We thought it was a question that needed answering and the answer we found was that the moderate Muslims have been generally intimidated, in many cases, through coercion, ostracism or sometimes outright fear of physical violence. That is what we wanted to show.

Q: That’s what “Islam vs. Islamists” is about?
A: Yes. We portrayed a number of moderate Muslims in Denmark, in France, in Canada and in the United States -- the U.S. being one community in Flint, Mich., and one in Phoenix. We chose moderate Muslims. We hired a team of journalists, some of the best we could get our hands on, who are reporters from major newspapers in France, Denmark and Toronto. We had a Pulitzer Prize nominee and a woman profiled in the New York Times for the excellence of her team. We were just about making a documentary on this topic but we found ourselves enmeshed in politics unlike I have never seen before.

Q: A lot of people don’t realize that documentaries are not meant to be balanced and neutral -- they always have a point of view. So what is the slant or agenda of “Islam vs. Islamists”?
A: One of the absolutely growing elements of hysteria from WETA within PBS was that we have a point of view. We said, “Of course we have a point of view.” Our point of view -- based on the research, based on the reporting and the discussions with all these world-class reporters that we had engaged on this topic -- was that there is a large community of moderates within the Muslim world who are afraid to speak up and we’re showing why. It’s because of the attacks of the Islamists.

What PBS/WETA attacked us on was they wanted us, in our opinion, to become virtually apologists for the Islamists, those who are the fundamentalists in this world.

Basically, the attitude of this one small group -- and again I have to say within WETA -- was that the Muslims we were portraying as the moderates were in some way, in their view, not true Muslims because they were Westernized; they believed in democracy, which by the way the Islamists do not and will openly say that.

But they (the group within WETA) felt that the Islamists … somehow represented a truer strain of Islam. We said that is not the case as we have found it. And it became a sort of battle, with them saying to us, “Well, you control this. It is your film, but” – and it was a huge, capital-letter “But” – “if you do not do what we want, we will throw you out of the series.”

Q: What did they want?
A: They wanted to portray the Islamists in a way that would represent them as being the truer strain of Islam, the truer representatives of Islam. And we said they represent a very virulent, aggressive form of Islam, that is one strain, but the moderates within Islam -- and there are millions of them -- have an equally valid voice within Islam. They did not want that balance.

Q: What are your politics and are they relevant in this?
A: First of all, you have to know that I am a card-carrying Canadian -- a green card-carrying Canadian -- and that my wife is a liberal and a member of the ACLU. I am basically an avid observer of the American political scene. I have been accused as being a "red Tory" up in Canada, which is as close as I can come to my politics. There are parts of both major parties that I would attack, that I would not subscribe to. Basically, I made a huge point of trying to keep politics, as it’s understood in the United States, completely out of this film.

I have socialists, conservatives, liberals amongst the moderate Muslims we are portraying. I didn’t care what the politics of the people we are portraying are -– I couldn’t have cared less. Just as long as they were qualified as a moderate Muslims speaking out against the Islamists within their own religion, that was all that we took as a criteria. Their political beliefs had no place in this, nor did it have a place behind the cameras.

Q: You don’t consider the critiques of your film from the PBS/WETA people -- that you had written an “alarmist” or unfair film -- to be constructive criticism but censorship, is that true?
A: Yeah. What started happening was that we received these increasingly almost hysterical critiques from WETA. ... They demanded that I fire my two partners (Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev), who had brought me into this film, because my partners were conservatives.

I made the point that I had done a documentary about the Blacklist Era in Hollywood, about the Hollywood Ten, and about the liberals and leftists who were blacklisted in those days, and I was not about to be party to a blacklist from the other side. I didn’t care whether it was liberal or conservative, I was not about to blacklist or fire anybody because of their political beliefs.

I was asked a question I never thought I’d hear in America -- “Don’t you check into the politics of the people you work with?” My answer was, “No. I do not. I check into their journalistic integrity. I check into their pursuit of the truth as they understand it -- a truth that can stand up to criticism and scrutiny."

That’s what I check into. I don’t check into "Are you a Democrat? Are you a Republican? Are you a liberal or are you a conservative?” That to me is absolutely abhorrent to a free pursuit of journalism in this country.

Q: Did you know what the politics of Gaffney and Alexiev were?
A: The answer is yes. How I got brought into this was 20 years I was inside Afghanistan with the Afghan rebels who were attacking the Soviets. I went inside and slept in caves and trekked up and down mountains. I was on the border with Alex Alexiev, who was over there at the time researching a lot and he knew more about the Islamic situation and more about the Soviet situation than anyone I ever met. He was an amazing research resource. I didn’t see him for 16 or 17 years and then I got a call from him. He says there is a chance to do a film about moderate Muslims within Islam – a topic I was fascinated about.
I said yes.

Frank Gaffney was a partner on this. I met Frank Gaffney for the first time and my question to myself was, “Am I going to find myself as part of an agenda-driven film, because if so, I was not going to be party to it.” Frank Gaffney and I and Alex Alexiev and I talked, and basically there was no agenda driving this film other than as rigorous an examination of the situation as we could make it. Not once did I feel a political agenda from Frank Gaffney or from Alex Alexiev during this film. The only politics I ever felt came from WETA. Had I had felt there was a political agenda driving this film, from neoconservatives or anything else, I would not have gone into it.

Q: How do you think this squabble will end, versus how you’d like to see it end?
A: I can’t really answer that. We feel like a ship on the sea right now, waiting for dawn to find out where we are. There are tremendous discussions and negotiations going on in Washington. We have told Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the financiers of this film, “Please get PBS to air it or release it.” There was a letter that went out this morning, as a matter of fact, to that effect, to Pat Harrison, the head of Corporation for Public Broadcasting, saying please do exactly that.

Q: One of the WETA execs said your film was dealt with in a “fair and professional manner.” Do you agree?
A: No. I have worked for networks all over the world. I have worked in France, Britain, Canada and the United States. This was the most unprofessional dealing I have ever had and the most politically biased. In some ways, it's just raw politics taking precedence over journalism. It’s that simple.