In my youth, video killed the radio star.  Now, Nate Silver suggests, conservative talk radio has killed conservatism.   John Ziegler, of whom I’ve never heard, is apparently an imbecile. QED.

This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don’t win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism’s strengths). Rather, the key lies in the second passage that I highlighted. There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

Talk radio is about entertainment and drama, not persuasion.  Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage aren’t running latter-day Firing Lines; rather, they’re Howard Stern and Don Imus with a political bent.

For a variety of reasons, liberals have not done well in the talk radio genre.  But they’ve got every bit the talent for single mindedness as their counterparts on the right — as seen in a large chunk of the blogosphere.  It’s easier to build an audience by serving up healthy chunks of red meat, generating faux outrage, and flaming the passions of a single minded audience than to persuade people towards your point of view.  And the Netroots are much better at that than their conservative counterparts.  (It’s also true, I think, that most of the best analytical blogs are on the center-left; that’s a subject for another post, possibly later today.)

It’s worth mentioning, as an aside, that conservatism is far from dead.  It’s main electoral instrument, the Republican Party, has seen better days.   But that’s a cyclical thing in American politics.  Many had written the Democrats off for dead in 1991 and again in 2000.  There’s nothing like losing to motivate reform.

UPDATE: Stacy McCain thinks Silver is unfair to Ziegler.   The problem, though, is that Ziegler goes into attack mode when challenged rather than adducing evidence.  It’s an entertaining way to deal with a hostile caller to a radio show but an odd tactic for an interviewee.

John McCain is getting some guff for his assertion on the Don Imus show that Sarah Palin is “the most qualified of anyone recently who has run for vice president to tell you the truth.”  And, no, not for the syntax but the point itself.

Steve Benen is incredulous:

Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Al Gore, Lloyd Bentsen, and George H.W. Bush? No, Sarah Palin is “the most qualified.”

Wow.

Actually, though, this is easy.  Aside from Bush, none of them had … wait for it … executive experience.  And even Bush had, in 1980, less of it than Palin.   She was a city mayor for eight years and governor for two years, making her a perfect 10.

As noted here numerous times, Americans seem to count only three offices as meaningful “experience” when voting for president:  State Governor, Vice President, and President.  No one without one of those lines on his resume has been elected president since John Kennedy did it in 1960.  Obviously, that’ll change in less than two weeks, since two U.S. Senators are the only viable candidates (some would argue, only one is).   So, while I don’t personally buy it, one could argue that Palin is indeed “the most qualified.”

The foregoing, of couse, is an odd argument to make if you’ve been in the Senate since the Reagan administration.

Randi Rhodes is no longer employed by Air America.

The company’s official statement

Last week Air America suspended Randi Rhodes for abusive, obscene language at a recent public appearance in San Francisco which was sponsored by an Air America affiliate station.

Air America Media was informed last night by Ms. Rhodes that she has chosen to terminate her employment with the company.

We wish her well and thank her for past services to Air America. We will soon announce exciting new talent and programming that will accelerate Air America’s growth in the future.

Joe Gandelman, who speculates that Rhodes may have been pushed rather than jumping, has more thoughts.

What’s most notable about this incident is that it shows that there is a line that can’t be crossed — particularly in a divisive election year.

Vigorous, even controversial discussions or characterizations could spark denunciations but aren’t on the same level as name-calling swearing (even if, as some argued, it was done to be funny or even satirical).

One presumes that there’s a sliding scale, depending on how much revenue one is bringing in. Rhodes was, therefore, on a shorter leash than, say, Rush Limbaugh would be. But, yes, there appear to be limits. Ask Don Imus, who has had a much more successful career than Rhodes.

UPDATE: HuffPo’s Danny Shea reports, “Randi Rhodes quit Air America after being asked by the network to apologize for her inflammatory remarks against Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro.”

A source at Air America, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “Many people screw up and then apologize and move on. Like Imus. Like David Shuster. Like Jay Rockefeller on McCain. Like Obama on Rezko. Like Hillary on Bosnia. Randi Rhodes refused to apologize for her obscene comments and has chosen instead to terminate her relationship with Air America.”

The source also said that there is no love lost between Rhodes and her colleagues at the network. “No one is upset. She made the move but there’s relief and joy.”

Dismissing claims that Rhodes was just doing stand-up comedy in San Francisco when she made the remarks, the source confirmed that Air America paid her way to California, that she was advertised as “Air America’s Randi Rhodes,” and that the Air America website urged people to go for “an evening of politics and pop culture.” The source said, “Air America pays people to be talk show hosts, not stand-up comics, or else we’d hire Chris Rock.”

It remains unclear who will substitute for Rhodes’ time slot in both the short- and long-term, but the source said the network is looking at Rhodes’ departure as an opportunity to rebuild. “Sometimes it’s for the best that the leading player leaves so you can rebuild with better talent.”

Ouch.

John McCain recently “declared that ‘there’s strong evidence’ that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S.” Jake Tapper reports.

Megan McArdle terms the assertion “nonsense on stilts” and observes that there is now robust scientific evidence to the contrary. Pondering why McCain would say such a thing, she offers two alternative explanations. The more plausible:

The vast expansion of the state means that we expect our representatives to have opinions on everything from missile defense to flame-retardant pajamas. No one could possibly learn about every subject we expect them to know, even if he were not spending sixteen hours a day doing the grip-and-grin with voters, lobbyists, donors, and other politicians.

That’s without doubt true. In this particular case, I would cite the fact that Don Imus has spent years hammering home the mercury-autism link on his program. Given that McCain was (perhaps still is?) a frequent guest on the show, it wouldn’t surprise me if he got a lot of disinformation on this issue from listening to Imus’ rantings on the matter. Given that this isn’t among the top hundred or so issues around which the battle for the Republican nomination is centered, one suspects it’s not something that he’s reading about in his briefing books.

On the McLaughlin scale, where 1 is a minuscule difference that one can detect only with a very powerful microscope and 10 is of such monumental impact that it will derail the campaign, I’d rate this a 2.

Joe Carter, in an interesting reflection on his 30 days working for the Huckabee campaign, makes this observation:

The Ron Paul Phenomenon is Not About Ron Paul — It will take a more astute political mind than I possess to comprehend this Ron Paul phenomenon. All I know is that it has less to do with the candidate than about people’s desire for something different. When Rod Dreher, Andrew Sullivan, Vox Day, John Derbyshire, and the 9/11 Truthers all agree on a candidate its safe to say that they aren’t all seeing the same thing.

On last night’s episode of OTB Radio, I likened it to the Ross Perot phenomenon in 1992, which was also more about “Something Different” than about Perot. There, though, there was also a minor cult of personality going on; Paul can’t be accused of that.

The bottom line is that there are a huge number of people simply fed up with the major parties, a trend that has been visible at least since George Wallace’s 1968 campaign when he famously asserted that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between the national Democrat and Republican parties. While that feeling is, in my view, exaggerated it’s certainly true that there’s far less choice in American politics than in most Western democracies. Both of our parties would fit comfortably within the British Conservative Party, for example.

Both Micah Sifry and Matt Yglesias point to this political polarization network visualization which shows that books by Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs occupy the center in American political thought, not the extreme fringe that they do in terms of elected officials.

Matt gets it just right:

[I]nsofar as there’s some kind of excluded middle in our current political situation it’s not the brand of Bloomberg-style “centrism” that the bemoaners of partisanship tend to favor. Instead, it’s something akin to Dobbs-style populist nationalism. It’s not a point of view I favor, but unlike Bloombergism it is a point of view that has a lot of support and only a little representation.

A lot of those folks are gravitating to Paul, not because he’s necessarily one of them, but because he’s as close as they’re likely to find in a respectable candidate. Given that the presidential nominating processes of both parties favor the activist Right/Left base, though, there’s virtually no chance that a Paul (or Buchanan) would get the nomination.

Frank Rich notes that established candidates in both parties are struggling against comparative upstarts.

We can only imagine what is going on inside John McCain’s head when he contemplates Mike Huckabee. It can’t be pretty. No presidential candidate in either party has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator, and yet in a wartime election he is being outpaced by a guy who has zero experience and is proud of it.

“I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy,” Mr. Huckabee joked to Don Imus, “but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.” So much for the gravitas points earned during a five-and-a-half year stay at the Hanoi Hilton.

As it happens, I asked McCain this very question on a conference call Wednesday afternoon, albeit somewhat more colorfully phrased. McCain laughed appreciatively and gave his standard answer: “Life isn’t fair.”

His serious answer, though, was actually quite elegant. We’ve had a good number of debates and opportunities for the candidates to shine and Huckabee has shined on those appearances. He comes across as a decent, personable guy and people like him. He’s answering tough questions in a way that gives a lot of people confidence.

That, I think, is better than Rich’s conclusion. Noting that Bill Clinton is working hard to hammer home Barack Obama’s relative inexperience without success, Rich believes a lack of experience may be seen as a virtue in today’s “youth-obsessed culture.”

For this, of course, Rich blames Bush.

The rabid hunger for change, it turns out, has made the very idea of experience as toxic as every other attribute of the Bush White House. The once-heralded notion of a C.E.O. presidency, overstocked with “tested” Washington and Fortune 500 executives like Cheney and Rumsfeld, is now in the toilet with Larry Craig. You couldn’t push the pendulum further in the other direction than by supporting a candidate like Mr. Huckabee, who is blatantly unprepared to be president and whose most impressive battle has been with his weight. In a Rasmussen poll in Florida, Mr. Huckabee even did well among foreign-policy-minded Republicans whose most important issue is Iraq.

The irony here, of course, is that Bush himself was quite inexperienced by presidential standards. Yes, he surrounded himself with a hyper-experienced staff. But perhaps having little choice but to defer to their wisdom is problematic?

Rich ends his column on a more insightful note: Experience provides the opportunity to make mistakes. Too many of those on one’s résumé isn’t necessarily a good thing, especially if they’re recent and one hasn’t demonstrated having learned from them.

Ultimately, I don’t believe either Huckabee or Obama will get their parties’ nominations and a lack of experience, especially on the foreign policy front, will be a large part of the reason. But that’s going to require the more established candidates to do more than simply proclaim their experience; they must show what they’ve learned and why that’s going to be important in leading the country.

McCain’s time as prisoner of war three and a half decades ago doesn’t qualify him to be president. Plenty of men endured that hell and few of them have the qualities necessary to be commander-in-chief. The leadership he showed during his struggles, though, and the way in which they shaped his life, should be a huge advantage if he can express how they’ve prepared him to lead the country.

To the surprise of perhaps no one but Matt Drudge, Don Imus is getting another shot at talk radio.

In a dramatic and dazzling career rebound, controversial radio host Don Imus has secured a deal returning him to the airwaves on December 3 — this time on the nation’s most listened to talk station, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned!

“Imus In The Morning” will make a high-impact resurrection on WABC in New York City, top sources reveal. “We’ll have him on a standard 40-second delay,” a studio source explains. “Don is rested, humbled, and ready for war!”

Specific terms of the deal will not be released, but the host, who was fired by CBS and MSNBC after making disparaging comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, has inked a eight-figure, multiyear contract with WABC parent company, CITADEL BROADCASTING.

But who will his GUESTS be? Will senators come on? Presidential candidates? Tim Russert? Anna Quindlen? Who’s the guest now? WILL THE ELITES TURN THEIR BACK ON HIM?

My guess is that, while they’ll be timid at first, THE ELITES WILL BE BACK. People who liked Imus before the Rutgers incident will CONTINUE TO LIKE HIM, which means he’ll have a HUGE AUDIENCE again. Politicians aren’t going to turn down an opportunity to talk to millions of the most politically active voters over a comedy bit gone wrong.

Bill O’Reilly made some, um, interesting comments on his radio show Wednesday that have sparked some controversy in the blogosphere after being highlighted by Media Matters. Here, in context, is what he said. All emphases from the Media Matters transcript:

O”REILLY: Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they’ve had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don’t think there’s a black American who hasn’t had a personal insult that they’ve had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don’t think there’s one in the country. So you’ve got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] “You call me that, I’m gonna be more successful.” OK, it depends on the personality.

So it’s there. It’s there, and I think it’s getting better. I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They’re getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They’re just trying to figure it out: “Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.”

You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on The Factor a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he’s made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia’s, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.

And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that’s really what this society’s all about now here in the U.S.A. There’s no difference. There’s no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment — people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you’re gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody’s skin.

[...]

O’REILLY: No, no, I mean, I like that soul food. I had the meatloaf special. I had coconut shrimp. I had the iced tea. It was great.

WILLIAMS: Well, let me just tell you, the one thing I would say is this. And we’re talking about the kids who still like this gangsta rap, this vile poison that I think is absolutely, you know, literally a corruption of culture. I think that what you’ve got to take into account that it’s still a majority white audience — young, white people who think they’re into rebelling against their parents who buy this stuff and think it’s just a kick. You know, it’s just a way of expressing their anti-authoritarianism.

O’REILLY: But it’s a different — it’s a different dynamic, though.

WILLIAMS: Exactly right –

O’REILLY: Because the young, white kids don’t have to struggle out of the ghetto.

WILLIAMS: Right, and also, I think they can have that as one phase of their lives.

O’REILLY: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: I think too many of the black kids take it as, “Oh, that’s what it means to be authentically black. That’s how you make money. That’s how you become rich and famous and get on TV and get music videos.” And you either get the boys or the girls. The girls think they have to, you know, be half-naked and spinning around like they’re on meth in order to get any attention. It really corrupts people, and I think it adds, Bill, to some serious sociological problems, like the high out-of-wedlock birth rate because of this hypersexual imagery that then the kids adapt to some kind of reality. I mean, it’s inauthentic. It’s not in keeping with great black traditions of struggle and excellence, from Willie Mays to Aretha Franklin, but even in terms of academics, you know, going back to people like Charles Drew or Ben Carson here, the neurosurgeon at [Johns] Hopkins [University]. That stuff, all of a sudden, is pushed aside. That’s treated as, “You’re a nerd, you’re acting white,” if you try to be excellent and black.

O’REILLY: You know, and I went to the concert by Anita Baker at Radio City Music Hall, and the crowd was 50/50, black/white, and the blacks were well-dressed. And she came out — Anita Baker came out on the stage and said, “Look, this is a show for the family. We’re not gonna have any profanity here. We’re not gonna do any rapping here.” The band was excellent, but they were dressed in tuxedoes, and this is what white America doesn’t know, particularly people who don’t have a lot of interaction with black Americans. They think that the culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris, and Snoop Dogg.

WILLIAMS: Oh, and it’s just so awful. It’s just so awful because, I mean, it’s literally the sewer come to the surface, and now people take it that the sewer is the whole story –

O’REILLY: That’s right. That’s right. There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, “M-Fer, I want more iced tea.”

WILLIAMS: Please –

O’REILLY: You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.

Hilzoy wonders, “If it was wrong for Don Imus to refer to the Rutgers basketball team as ‘nappy-headed hos’, and it was, and if MSNBC rightly decided that they had to drop him, then why on earth does Bill O’Reilly still have a job?”

Barbara O’Brien terms O’Reilly’s comments “racist” and “unreal” and remarks, “This would have been bad enough if O’Reilly were some teenage yahoo fresh from all-white Snipe Hunt, Kentucky. But O’Reilly is even older than I am, and grew up on Long Island, for pity’s sake. Did his parents keep him in a box?”

It’s apparently fine for educated middle aged people to buy in to negative stereotypes about the rural South but confessing to being pleasantly surprised that the stereotypes of black urban culture are overblown makes you a racist? And FOX ought to fire its highest rated host for saying things no worse than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden have said?*

I’m no fan of O’Reilly, who I find to be pompous, phony, and just generally annoying. But what he’s expressing here isn’t racism but 1970s style white liberal guilt.

It’s noteworthy that the WILLIAMS in the dialog above is Juan Williams, a black man and chronicler of the civil rights movement who authored Eyes on The Prize, Thurgood Marshall—American Revolutionary, and The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do about It.

Like Williams, O’Reilly is frustrated with the worst elements of hip hop culture. He’s a very wealthy and successful man, which means the blacks in his community and workplace are people like Williams or Barack Obama or Colin Powell. His sense of black inner city culture, then, is shaped by the entertainment industry, which in fact depicts urban black men as loud, vulgar thugs. It’s been a staple of mainstream black standup comedians for decades that black men holler at the screen in the movie theater and are otherwise rather obnoxious when among their own kind. So, he’s pleasantly surprised to go into a restaurant in Harlem — the epitome of what we used to call ghetto culture — and find it indistinguishable from a little Italian joint in his own neighborhood. And he can’t wait to share that news with his mostly white audience.

O’Reilly’s real thesis — interestingly, not in bold text above — is this:

It was the same, and that’s really what this society’s all about now here in the U.S.A. There’s no difference. There’s no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment — people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you’re gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody’s skin.

It wasn’t all that long ago that a white man saying that would have been looked at as an ultra-liberal. Now, he’s a bigot?

Note that Williams didn’t seem the least bit offended or put off by O’Reilly’s remarks. My guess is that he’s had variations of this conversation before with O’Reilly and other white friends. It’s a very worthwhile one to have, in my view, and the more public the better.

UPDATE: Juan Williams has responded angrily to these smears against O’Reilly, calling them “rank dishonesty.” Here’s the video:

Stephen Spruiell and Johnny Dollar have more.

__________

*I’ve defended both the Clinton and Biden remarks; I merely use them here to illustrate that it’s not just conservatives who say awkward things about racial matters and yet aren’t “racist” in any meaningful sense.

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight at 7 Eastern.

I’ll be joined by Alex Knapp and Bill Dyer of BeldarBlog. It’s a good thing they’re both attorneys, as there are a lot of legal issues in the news. We’ll be talking about the felony murder rule (including the cases of Texas death row inmate Kenneth Foster and the possible murder charges in the Phoenix news helicopter crash), the Don Imus defamation suit, the suit by a crazy prisoner against Michael Vick, and time permitting, Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy platform.

Steve Verdon will be joining us, too, making his OTB Radio debut!

We’ll also be taking your calls at (646) 716-7030.

UPDATE: Apart from some odd technical glitch that had me calling into my own show via a cellphone because I could hear but not speak a few minutes into the show, it was a good episode. We had a fruitful discussion, talking about the topics above minus Giuliani. We’ll likely get to that on a future show.

If you missed it live (or, for some odd reason, want to hear it again) you can click the link above. Alternatively, the embedded media player below will play the show for you.

Kia Vaughn, one of the Rutgers basketball players shock jock Don Imus referred to as a “nappy headed ho,” is suing him for defamation.

Don Imus is facing his first lawsuit from a player on the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team for derogatory comments that cost him his job as a radio host in April, ABC News has learned. Kia Vaughn, star center for the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team, has filed a lawsuit against Imus for libel, slander and defamation — the first civil suit to be filed against the former radio host. Vaughn is asking for monetary damages of an unspecified amount. “This is a lawsuit in order to restore the good name and reputation of my client, Kia Vaughn,” said her attorney, Richard Ancowitz, in an exclusive interview with the ABC News Law & Justice Unit.

The suit names Imus individually, but it is also waged against MSNBC, NBC Universal, CBS Radio, CBS Corp., Viacom Inc., Westwood One Radio and Imus producer Bernard McGuirk.

Today’s suit refers to terms used by Imus April 4 — including referring to women on the team as “nappy headed” — as “debasing, demeaning, humiliating, and denigrating” to Vaughn and her fellow players. “There’s no way these bigoted remarks should have seen the light of day,” Ancowitz told ABC News. “Don Imus referred to my client as an unchaste woman. That was and is a lie.”

This suit would appear absurd on its face. First, Imus never mentioned the woman by name. Second, and more importantly, his remarks were rather clearly a bad joke rather than an assertion about the women’s sex lives. No reasonable person would have taken away, in the context of Imus’ remarks, that those he called “nappy headed hos” were actually prostitutes.

The word “ho” became part of the vernacular via rap music, black comedians, and the like but has become so mainstream that it has lost it’s original meaning. Apparently, though, the law has not caught up to that fact.

Robert Baker, a civil trial lawyer in California, says the high visibility of Imus’ comments would help Vaughn in court. “Everyone knows how unwarranted those comments were. It makes it easier for them to win their case,” Baker told ABC News. “She has a slander per se case — the word itself was something derogatory. She doesn’t even have to prove that she was damaged.”

The fact that Imus has settled with CBS over his firing and is now free to pursue a return to the airwaves factored in to the decision as well. Ancowitz said, “”He’s come out smelling like quite the rose. But what about these young women? How does Imus’ victory affect their self-esteem? Where do they go to get their reputations back?”

Please. Nobody had ever heard of these women. Thanks to Imus’ loutish comments and the ensuing publicity swarm, they became minor celebrities. The coverage was overwhelmingly positive, pointing out how articulate and nice they were. However hurt they may have been by the comments made by some old white guy on a show they likely never heard of, their reputations were enhanced, not damaged, by the controversy.

UPDATE: Comments arguing that Imus’ original comments were somehow accurate will be summarily deleted.

The top candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination appeared last night at a gay rights forum sponsored by LOGO, a “lifestyle cable channel aimed at gay and lesbian viewers.” CQ’s Sara Lubbes, Josh Stager and Jesse Stanchak describe the setup:

Unlike several candidate debates held earlier this year, the Democrats never appeared on stage together, but took questions at 15-minute intervals from Carlson and a panel made up of Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese, singer Melissa Etheridge and Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart. Candidates were questioned in the order in which they agreed to commit to the forum, with chief rivals Obama and Clinton book-ending the discussion as first and last, respectively.

The Hotline staff quips,

You can’t say they don’t know their audience. Prepping the crowd of tonight’s HRC/LOGO debate, an organizer told attendees to feel free to applause/boo the WH Dems. “This is a little like being at a Broadway show,” he explained.

Note that “HRC” stands, in this case, for “Human Rights Campaign” rather than “Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

Substantively, not a whole lot of news comes from the forum/debate. Perhaps the most significant exchange was CQ’s Most Uncomfortable Moment:

Etheridge grilled Richardson for using the Spanish word for the anti-gay epithet “faggot” on the Don Imus radio show in March 2006, then asked Richardson pointedly if he believes being gay is a personal choice or an inherent biological trait. Richardson voiced the most conservative view among the candidates. “It is a choice,” he said quickly, looking down. Etheridge repeated her question in a friendly tone, wondering aloud if Richardson did not understand her the first time. “I’m not a scientist,” he answered. “I don’t see this as an issue of science or definition. I see gays and lesbians as people…I don’t like to answer definitions like that that are grounded in science or something else that I don’t understand.”

Otherwise, with the exception of Dennis Kucinich, the candidates all oppose gay marriage and support civil unions:

“The country isn’t there yet,” said Richardson of his opposition to gay marriage. “Civil unions with full marriage rights is achievable.”

Clinton described her opposition as “a personal position,” adding that marriage laws should be determined by state legislatures.

Obama, who served in the Illinois Senate for eight years prior to his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate, would not say if he would have voted for a bill to legalize gay marriage. “It depends on how the bill would’ve come up,” he said.

In one of the most direct moments of the night, Edwards backtracked on recent comments that his personal faith influenced his opposition to gay marriage. “I shouldn’t have said that,” Edwards said, adding, “My position on same-sex marriage has not changed. I believe strongly in civil unions.” [...] “We desperately need to get rid of DOMA,” Edwards said. Edwards has said he would not have voted for the bill if he had been in the Senate in 1996.

Live blogs: Gay Patriot, Ryan Sager, Pam Spaulding, here, here, and here.

We may be witnessing the death of rap, Tim Shipman reports for the Sunday Telegraph. He notes that sales are “down 33 per cent, double the decline of the CD album market overall.” After years of pop culture ubiquity, “The bad boys of rap are now trailing the cowboys of country and the headbangers of heavy metal.”

The main explanation cited is that the public is finally tired of the genre’s excesses:

Rap has been deserted by many white fans and middle-class blacks, apparently tiring of the “gangsta” attitude to women, racism, violence and bling – the gold rings and medallions that have made hip-hop a byword for vulgarity.

Renewed attention after the Don Imus “nappy headed hos” scandal brought denunciations from the likes of Ebony magazine, rap impresario Russell Simmons, Barack Obama, and even Al Sharpton.

While I’d like to think moral outrage is the main cause of declining sales, I’m skeptical. Former record industry talent evaluator Tom Vickers observes that, “Rap has gradually degenerated from an art form into a ring tone. That’s why we’re seeing this backlash. There’s only so much bling the public can take.”

Shipman uses that to buttress the backlash thesis. My sense, though, is that Vickers is bemoaning the over-saturation and mainstreaming of hip hop culture. When shopping malls and television commercials play rap — and they have been, for years — it loses its shock value as a rebellious teenage refuge. And, indeed, rap has been commercial long enough that the parents of today’s young teens likely listened to it themselves. That doesn’t exactly lend cool points.

David Grant reports for the Collegiate Times that nationally syndicated talk show host Neal Boortz’ show may be pulled from Pulaski, Virginia’s WFNR AM for some controversial remarks he made in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Boortz echoed a theme expressed by many that the victims were “standing in terror waiting for (their) turn to be executed.” Station manager Scott Stevens was appalled, as were some Democratic members of the Virginia legislature. Delegate Stephen Shannon stated, “I feel (Virginia radio stations) have a sense of public responsibility in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy to exercise some restraint. What they did was let this broadcaster peel off outrageous assertions that somehow it was the fault of the students and the faculty members who were killed or injured…There’s simply no place for this out-of-state radio host to make such claims on Virginia’s airwaves immediately after this tragedy has taken place.”

Now, I find Boortz’ insinuations here outrageous because I don’t expect untrained, unarmed teenagers to do anything other than panic when confronted with such an unexpected and horrifying situation. Still, the point was well within the legitimate sphere of public debate, even if the timing was unfortunate.

I have only heard snippets of Boortz’ show, mostly by accident when scanning for something to listen to on road trips, and have no strong opinion of him as a commenter. Presumably, though, he’s interesting enough to draw an audience consistently not just in his hometown Atlanta but in a variety of stations that syndicate him across the land. And the idea that a show broadcast nationally can somehow be tailored to local sensitivities is just bizarre.

As with the Don Imus situation, it’s absolutely within the right of businessmen to decide what programs to air and hosts to employ. If Grant believes taking Boortz off the air and replacing him with another host is the thing to do, it’s his call. But I find firing people who are hired as controversial commentators for making controversial comments troubling.

Radley Balko has a good post on how many of our politicians see themselves as being above the “little laws” that the rest of us peasants have to obey. It notes that the Royal Governor of the Principality of New Jersey managed to get himself hurt by having his motorcade blast down the freeway at 90+ miles per hour (Lord Corzine was late for a meeting with Don Imus and the Rutger’s womens basketball team after all). And now how after the accident Lord Corzine had his motorcade zipping away from the hospital at over 70+ miles per hour (posted speed limit is 55).

Following the links we get this blog post about how a DC motorcade caused a pretty bad accident.

There was a motorcade of some sort coming South on 16th Street NW. As it approached the intersection with V St. NW, the light was red for the motorcade. But it didn’t stop. The Cherokee, which had a green light and was merely going straight onto V St. NW, came into the path of the first of the oncoming police cruisers. It collided with the Cherokee.

After the collision, the police car ricocheted off the Cherokee and directly into the light pole. The Cherokee was hit so hard that it spun 270 degrees before lodging itself beneath the Budget truck.

So, basically, government fucks over yet another of its citizens. Just so that Dick Cheney or whomever could get home thirty seconds faster, this motorcade plowed into a citizen who was, unlike our leaders, law-abiding. We started speculating as to whom would pay the claim. Would the city pay the Cherokee driver’s expenses? Would his insurance have to cover it? Would his rates go up solely as the result of the police motorcade’s mistake?

Fortunately the injuries were minor, and in the case of Lord Corzine the only person he came close to killing was himself. But my guess is that sooner or later one of these Royal Motorcades will kill an innocent person who is obeying the law while one our Royal leaders is breaking the law to get to a dinner party or visit his mistress.

Addendum: Just thought I’d add that in the motorcade/accident linked above, the rest of the motorcade sped off leaving the scene of the accident.

The Silver Bullet Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

(AP Photo/Police Handout)

The Winners:

First: Bithead – I swear there was a naked girl in here a minute ago.

Second: Ator – You can lead a horse to water but it’s the rider that gets drunk at the pub…

Third: Michael – Warning Label: “Operate your Horse only in an open, well ventilated space as fumes can cause serious illness or death. Keep away from open flames or sparks.”

Honorable Mention:

charles austin – Mongo picked the wrong horse to punch this time.

Mark – No sense beating a dead horse man…

Gollum – Horse: “Hay!”

Bithead – Apparently, someone helped Jack off his horse.

Timmer – Once again the rumor that Kevin Aylward and Rodney Dill are the same person ran rampant through the internet.

Rodney’s Bottom of The Barrel

Don Imus’ next chance at a radio show salvaged his career due to his award winning contest — “Horse, Jack-Ass, or John Kerry.”

the new Geico ad — “So Simple Even A Horse Can Do It” — was also a miserable failure

Lessons in marketing — Godiva Savings and Loans found themselves facing financial ruin for only employing one-half of the iconic pair.

Eventually Ned was glad he’d received a Quarter-horse in change instead of five Buffalo nickels.

Unfortunately for the Lone Ranger, Silver had never been trained in the Heimlich Maneuver

DRUDGEBREAKING: Rosie O’Donnell seen leaving ABC after salary negotiations brokedown. Rosie wanted a yet undisclosed amount per appearance on ‘The View.’ ABC stated her value was a load of horse hooey. In her haste to depart Rosie inadvertantly stomped the visiting Donald Trump to death. Developing…

The Monday Contest has already outsourced the job.