"If this has worked, it's the easiest prank call we've ever made. Your accent sucked, by the way."

Here's the full audio of the prank call that led the person who was fooled by the call to commit suicide:



It's a completely ridiculous Queen imitation, and they obviously expected to be laughed at immediately. They were entirely unprepared for success. And they make it very funny.

How much outrage/blame/consequences should come down on these 2 djs, Mel Greig and Michael Christian?

The London nurse whose shocking death followed a cruel radio prank will be laid to rest in her native India was found dead after she was globally humiliated by two Australian deejays posing as Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles.

What was "cruel" about it? It's only cruel retrospectively because the woman — Jacintha Saldanha — killed herself, presumably out of humiliation for being so incredibly stupid and careless.

Should pranking end? Howard Stern has been doing calls like this for many years. And what about the prankster who claimed to be David Koch and got through to Governor Scott Walker? Many people found that hilarious. And I'll bet there are people who think it would be hilarious to say: It would have been even more hilarious if Scott Walker had reacted by committing suicide.

Pranking is what it is. Stupid, but potentially hilarious. It has a special role to play in puncturing pomposity, and if you listen through the Greig and Christian call, you'll hear the satire of royalty. Royalty deserves that! I don't know what all went through the suicide's head, but I suspect she took royalty very very seriously. Should we have more seriousness, more deference toward our superiors?

Which way lies suicide? I say more pranking, more satire, more laughs and unseriousness.

And by the way, the suicide, with her heavy respect for royalty, has laid a horrible burden on the very person she presumably intended to show respect for: Kate Middleton. But you know, it's possible the suicide intended to express hostility and to hurt the royal family, which she did, in fact, wound terribly. It should be a time of great joy for Kate and the rest of the bunch, but now everyone is talking about and sympathizing with this previously unknown nurse. There's much more to the story. How was Saldanha treated by her coworkers and supervisors? Isn't that the location of the cruelty?

"A hospital nurse caring for the Duchess of Cambridge, who was duped by two DJs pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles..."

"... is understood to have committed suicide."

The DJs... apologized for the hoax — sheepishly noting that they were surprised that the call was put through and that their Australian accents were not detected.

"For Your Love."

The other day I heard the old Yardbirds song "For Your Love" on the satellite radio in the car. This was a 1965 song that I bought as a single before the Yardbirds first album came out. I was an early adopter when it comes to The Yardbirds. (I was — and am — particularly attached to "Having a Rave Up with The Yardbirds," which is not their first album and does not contain "For Your Love." )

For some reason, the satellite radio causes me to notice song lyrics, and the lyrics to "For Your Love" are embarrassing:

For your love, I'd give you everything and more and that's for sure
I'd bring you diamond rings and things right to your door
To thrill you with delight, I'd give you diamonds bright

So... diamonds, things, and more diamonds. He needs to work harder on that list of presents. And I don't have to pay so much attention to lyrics, but something about driving does that to me. Home again, I went to YouTube and searched for "For Your Love." Nice. But what really amused me was that the search brought up "Munchies For Your Love" by Bootsy Collins, a 1977 recording that I don't remember ever hearing before. (Here's the album: "Ahh the Name is Bootsy Baby.") I enjoyed that, and the singing style and the guitar (not the lyrics) reminded me of some of my son John's music. I sent him the link and he IM'd:

I can see why you'd say that, but I wouldn't do that kind of bass.
Also, it's very repetitious and amorphous, which I avoid.
I like music with more structure and drama.
The whole thing is just 2 chords, back and forth, over and over.

I hadn't noticed any of that, which just goes to show how different individual experience is, even when everyone's paying attention. I tend to get absorbed in lyrics, and the fact that it was just 2 chords over and over would have eternally escaped me. John did notice the song's title though, as he later IM'd "The word 'munchies' always makes me think of...."

"So if you were to pick one up, you'd be like, 'Oh! This is a homemade Mounds bar.' "

"Basically it's coconut and sugar dipped in chocolate"... but it's not, because it's got potatoes, and it's a needham, the food from Maine that you haven't heard of... or have you?

The origin of needhams is hazy, but lore centers around the late 1800s and a Rev. Needham....

I don't taste the potato, but [some guy in Maine] says that's the idea.

"It's less about tasting potato," he says, "and more about that it's just not really gummy and cloyingly sweet."

This is one article in a series over at NPR — "Americandy: Sweet Land Of Liberty'We're taking a cross-country tour of candies from around the U.S., sampling hometown sweets that deliver a nostalgic sugar rush." I was just looking at the NPR home page and said out loud: "Whatever happened to NPR? It's pretty much irrelevant politically, and all the news seems to be soft news about nice things that feel good to people who don't want to hear about politics. Maybe it's something about what works on the radio." And the next thing you know, I was swept into an article about using Maine potatoes to concoct some Mounds-like candy that not so gummy and sweet, and then on to a whole series of articles about local candy: Buffalo Sponge, Chukar Cherries, Valomilks, etc. etc.

"Composite?"/"Compost heap's more like it."

We were watching "A Face in the Crowd" last night. TMC was making a night of Andy Griffith films, and I settled in to watch the Elia Kazan movie that I'd heard about but never seen. I've only watched the first half, partly because I usually watch movies in 2 parts — I have a 1-hour attention span — and partly because it started annoying me — too many absurd leaps forward in the story as our forgotten man "Lonesome" Rhodes becomes a media sensation by cutting through the bullshit and sexing up the ladies. That is, he rejects the bullshit of the sexless men who surround him and spins out his own sort of bullshit, e.g., promoting the inert pill "Vitajex" as some proto-Viagra.

Anyway, I wrote down something that reminded me of Obama. No, not his special appeal for women. It was this passage of dialogue:

Marcia Jeffries: You always drink like that?
Lonesome Rhodes: Not always. Back in Riddle they was pretty strict. Didn't allow us to touch hard liquor till we was 10 or 11.
Marcia Jeffries: Now is there really a town called Riddle?
Lonesome Rhodes: Well, tell you the flat truth, it's just a sort of a whatchacallit, a...
Marcia Jeffries: ... Composite?
Lonesome Rhodes: Compost heap's more like it. 

Composite!  Marcia Jeffries, the woman who discovers him for her radio show called "A Face in the Crowd" offers him the word "composite" to dignify his bullshit, and he does a little word play that rejects euphemism.

Obama's use of "composites" is well-discussed in the David Maraniss biography:

In his introduction [to Dreams from My Father] Obama states, “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” There is more to it than that. The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also substantive. The themes of the book control character and chronology. Time and again the narrative accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles in his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white. Sometimes the composites are even more complex; there are a few instances where black figures in the book have characteristics and histories that Obama took from white friends. The racial scene in his family history that is most familiar to the public, the time when he overheard his grandparents in Hawaii argue because his grandmother was afraid of a black man at the bus stop, also happens to be among those he pulled out of its real chronology and fit into a place where it might have more literary resonance. Like many other riffs in the book, it explored the parameters and frustrations of his blackness....

For a few years, in ninth and tenth grade, he shared his frustrations with a student two grades ahead of him named Keith Kakugawa. 178 In his memoir, he reinvented Kakugawa as a character called Ray who served a literary function as a symbol of young blackness, a mix of hot anger and cool detachment, the provocateur of hip, vulgar, get-real dialogues. In fact, Kakugawa was another hapa student, with a black and Native American mother and a Japanese father. Somewhere between pseudonymous and fictitious, Ray was the first of several distorted or composite characters employed in Dreams from My Father for similar purposes. Kakugawa was never in Barry’s closest gang of friends, but they did hang out now and then for those two years, and Barry felt freer to let down his guard around him, enjoying “his warmth and brash humor.” In the memoir Barry and Ray could be heard complaining about how rich white haole girls would never date them. In fact, neither had much trouble in that regard; Kakugawa dated an admiral’s daughter from the officers’ housing near Pearl Harbor and had the keys to her car, which he often drove around with “the Kid,” as he called Barry. In the book, Ray complained about “white folks this or white folks that,” a phrase that Barry found “uncomfortable” in his mouth because he unavoidably thought of his mother’s smile. But the Kid could grouse about his mother nonetheless. “If anyone heard a word from him when he was upset, I did,” Kakugawa recalled. “If I was mad at something he was mad at something. What was upsetting him— that his mother took off again. Seems like she never has time for him anymore— that kind of thing.”

In a less visceral and more lighthearted intellectual fashion, Barry also shared some of his inner thoughts with Tony Peterson, a graduating senior during Barry’s freshman year. 179 Peterson, who came from a military family at Schofield Barracks, was the only black student in his 1976 class and one of a handful at Punahou, counting the hapa students like Kakugawa, Obama, and Rik Smith, whose mother was Indian. (Joella Edwards, who was in Barry’s class, left Punahou in ninth grade.) When Peterson first heard that the black Ray in Obama’s memoir was Kakugawa, he was surprised. “When I think of the black kids at Punahou, I don’t think of Keith because he was half Japanese,” he said later. By his real name or any other, Peterson did not make Obama’s book, although some characteristics of a composite character in the college section fit him. He first met Barry on the basketball court before school, and soon started a regular session with him and Rik Smith that they jokingly called Ethnic Corner....

In his memoir Obama would tell a different story about one of the key moments in his gradual transformation from Barry to Barack. He wrote that he was talking to friends named Marcus and Regina. Marcus, portrayed as Afrocentric, had ridiculed him for reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Obama had defended himself by saying that he was reading it to understand “just what it is that makes white people so afraid.” After Marcus left, Regina— rendered in the memoir as astute and comfortable in her black identity— asked Obama what Marcus had called him, some African name. Barack, he told her. She said she thought his name was Barry. Barack was his given name, he explained. His father’s name. His father was Kenyan. Barack meant “blessed” in Arabic. His grandfather was Muslim. “It’s beautiful,” Regina responded, according to the memoir. “Mind if I call you Barack?” Not as long as she pronounced it right, he said.

Eric Moore was not in Dreams from My Father, nor could he recognize precisely who Marcus and Regina were. Hasan Chandoo, who was portrayed in the book (and, in a rare instance, was given his real name), was not sure either. He himself was accurately depicted, but to him the other composites, he said good-naturedly, seemed like “mumbo-jumbo.” At some places in the memoir, the characters were taken from real life but given pseudonyms. At other times they were composites. Marcus and Regina were composites, inspired in part by two upperclassmen, Earl Chew and Sarah Etta-Harris, but displaying characteristics from many other people as well as from the searching, divided soul of Obama himself. Like Regina in the book, Etta-Harris had studied abroad, winning a Thomas Watson fellowship to spend a year in Andalusia in Spain. But in his memoir Obama gave Regina a family history in Chicago, and that did not fit her. Rather, that aspect of Regina was an early iteration of someone Obama had not met at Oxy and would not know for another ten years, Michelle Robinson, to whom he was married by the time he wrote the memoir in the early 1990s. It was not precisely Michelle’s story, but close in many respects, as Obama had Regina telling him about her South Side memories: people so hot in the summer they went out by Lake Michigan to sleep; a vibrant community of taverns, pool halls, churches, kitchen nights with cousins, uncles, grandparents. “A vision,” he wrote, “that filled me with longing— a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history.” When he told Regina that he envied her, she scoffed. “For what?” she asked. “Memories,” he said. That response, Obama wrote, made her laugh and say she wished she had grown up in Hawaii.

This was one of the more telling paragraphs in the book, revealing what Obama thought he had missed out on in his young life and what he so dearly longed for. Though he was writing it in retrospect, long after his Oxy days and after he had finally made his way to Chicago, the early Regina, who existed mostly in his mind, helped trace what would become the arc of his life toward family and home.

Along with Etta-Harris and Michelle Robinson, the Regina character also incorporated a third real-life model. Some of Obama’s scenes of Regina reflected incidents that involved Caroline Boss, who was white. The name Regina itself likely came out of Obama’s discussions with Boss. Regina was the name of her Swiss grandmother, who came up in their discussions about class, race, and gender. Boss was a formidable figure at Oxy, queen of the Cooler rats, star pupil of the school’s noted political science professor, Roger Boesche. As leader of the Democratic Socialist Alliance on campus, she viewed politics from a class-conscious socialist perspective. Boss told Obama that her grandmother Regina spent her life scrubbing floors and doing laundry for the banking community in the small Swiss town of Interlaken. “So when we talked about race and class,” Boss said of her discussions with Obama, “I of course took the position that class was a significant feature.… The class thing really affects the entire population, regardless of race and gender.” Obama incorporated this idea into his memoir. His Regina was black, not white, yet he wrote about “Regina’s grandmother somewhere, her back bent, the flesh of her arms shaking as she scrubbed an endless floor. Slowly, the old woman lifted her head to look straight at me, and in her sagging face I saw that what bound us together went beyond anger or despair or pity.” He went on to link Regina’s grandmother to all women who struggle against the power structure, from the Mexican maids who cleaned up the mess created by the boys at the Haines Hall Annex to his own grandmother, Tut, who rose before dawn every morning to ride the bus to work. “My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there,” he wrote.

Composite/compost heap?

"By laughing out loud on the radio, they gave permission for you at home to laugh too."

The "Car Talk" guys are retiring. Did you like them or did they annoy you? If you liked/didn't like them, was their constant laughing part of the reason why?

Pete Fornatale "was at the forefront of the FM revolution, along with WNEW-FM colleagues..."

"... like Scott Muni, Rosko, Vin Scelsa, Dennis Elsas, Jonathan Schwartz and Alison Steele (who called herself “the Nightbird”). They played long versions of songs, and sometimes entire albums, and talked to their audiences in a conversational tone very different from the hard-sell approach of their AM counterparts."

That meant so much. Maybe you had to be there back then to understand how this mattered, but I'm sad to say goodbye to Pete Fornatale, who died of a stroke yesterday, at the age of 66.

As a sophomore at Fordham University in 1964, he persuaded the school’s Jesuit leaders to let him do a free-form rock show on what was officially an educational station....

Mr. Fornatale came on board in 1969 and quickly moved to the center of New York’s music scene. He gave early exposure to country-rock bands like Buffalo Springfield and Poco. He did one of the first American interviews with Elton John, and got a rousing ovation when he brought a rented surfboard to Carnegie Hall for a Beach Boys show. He introduced Curtis Mayfield to Bob Dylan at a Muhammad Ali fight....

One of Mr. Fornatale’s signatures was playing songs that followed a theme. It might be colors, with a playlist including the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.” Or it might be great inventions, as when he celebrated the 214th anniversary of the United States Patent Office. Or the theme might simply be radio....

Radio.

Roger Ailes answers critics who say the women he puts on Fox News are mostly blonde.

"When women get into television, they dye their hair blonde."

Something about TV and blondness, apparently. But what?

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, and there were no women newsreaders on TV or radio, a high school teacher explained to the class that women could not be hired for these positions because their high-pitched voices simply did not work properly in broadcasting. A male voice was — to use a contemporary employment law term — a bona fide occupational qualification. He said it with utmost seriousness and authority, like it was science, and though it made me feel angry and rebellious, I believed him. Something about the technical equipment, which is another thing only the males can handle.

"Thank you for your requests last week and this week to restart your voiced endorsement in local markets of The Rush Limbaugh Show..."

"... Unfortunately, your public comments were not well received by our audience, and did not accurately portray either Rush Limbaugh’s character or the intent of his remarks. Thus, we regret to inform you that Rush will be unable to endorse Sleep Train in the future."

The "voiced endorsement" is an intimate relationship between advertiser and radio personality. These endorsements put a deep impression into the listener's brain. Whenever I see Gold Bond Powder — usually on a low shelf in the drug store — I still hear the voice of Barry Farber, coming to me from 50 years ago, personally explaining this product I would never have noticed otherwise. I mean, I think I pick it out among all the other products because Barry Farber created and nurtured that consumer-product bond — that Gold Bond — all those many decades ago. I Googled to see if I could find an old Barry Farber Gold Bond endorsement, and what came up at the top of my results is my old blog post from last year, relating Rush Limbaugh to Barry Farber. In the comments, I write:

It's the kind of radio ad where the host starts talking about the product, and you might be fooled at first about whether it's an ad or not. It's like what Barry Farber used to do with Gold Bond Powder. Rush used to do it with mattresses and hot water heaters. It's a long-time traditional style of radio ad.

Mattresses. You've got millions of people associating your mattresses with Rush Limbaugh — yes, what an image! but it's indelible — and then you kick him out of bed. All those people you met through your mattress-mate, they don't want to be your friends anymore. And you find out you didn't really have other friends, and then Rush won't take you back. It's a lonely life! An empty mattress!

***

Here's the Wikipedia article on Barry Farber, who is still alive, 80 years old.

After nearly failing Latin in the ninth grade, that summer Farber started reading a Mandarin Chinese language-learning book. A trip to Miami Beach, Florida to see his grandparents coincidentally put him in the midst of a large number of Chinese navy sailors in training there. His Chinese rapidly improved. Back in Greensboro, he took up Italian, Spanish, and French on his own before summer vacation was over. He started taking French and Spanish classes in his sophomore year and also learned Norwegian on his own while in high school....

Barry Farber has knowledge of more than 25 languages... He has published a book titled How to Learn Any Language that details his method for self-study. It is based around a multi-track study of the language, the use of memory aids for vocabulary, and the utilization of "hidden moments" throughout the day.

Have you ever studied a foreign language on your own, because you were interested in it and liked studying language? I have! I didn't make Farberesque progress, however. Some people enjoy memorizing things, and uploading foreign language vocabulary into your brain is an engaging project.

The misguided attack on Sandra Fluke continues, displaying irritating ignorance about women law students.

Robert Stacy McCain, I'm looking at you. Rush Limbaugh has apologized, but McCain bullies on:

Rather belatedly, we are becoming aware that this supposedly typical Georgetown coed is not very typical at all...

McCain links to a blog post from The College Politico, which begins:

Sandra Fluke is being sold by the left as something she’s not. Namely a random co-ed from Georgetown law who found herself mixed up in the latest front of the culture war who was simply looking to make sure needy women had access to birth control. That, of course, is not the case.

As many have already uncovered Sandra Fluke she is, in reality, a 30 year old long time liberal activist who enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students’ birth control. She has been pushing for mandated coverage of contraceptives at Georgetown for at least three years...

Random co-ed?! She's a law student! I've been in law schools since 1978, and I've never heard female law students called "co-eds." What the hell is a co-ed? Even as a word for female undergraduates, it's like you're from 1931. Here's the original teenage heartthrob, Rudy Vallée, singing his great old college song, "Betty Co-ed":

Betty Co-ed has lips of red for Harvard,
Betty Co-ed has eyes of Yale's deep blue,
Betty Co-ed's a golden head for Princeton,
Her dress I guess is black for old Purdue!

I first learned the names of famous universities hearing that song on an LP of college songs that my parents had. The cover photo had rows of pretty girls each holding up a pennant with the name of a college on it.

Betty Co-ed's a smile for Pennsylvania,
Her heart is Dartmouth's treasure, so 'tis said,
Betty Co-ed is loved by every college boy,
But I'm the one who's loved by Betty Co-ed!

Here's the 1931 Max Fleischer film, featuring a Betty Boop prototype and Rudy Vallée saying "hi ho!" and starting a bouncing-ball singalong:



Now, Betty has a lot of boyfriends. Some may even call her a "slut." That was back in the day when a girl on campus caused quite a hubbub. Did Betty put out? What birth-control did Betty use? How much did it cost? Who paid? I don't know, but how many voters of today remember what college was like back when Rudy Vallée was making women swoon?

Now, Vallée's a fascinating character in the history of pop culture:

Vallée... was perhaps the first complete example of the 20th century mass media pop star. Flappers mobbed him wherever he went. His live appearances were usually sold out, and even if his singing could hardly be heard in those venues not yet equipped with the new electronic microphones, his screaming female fans went home happy if they had caught sight of his lips through the opening of the trademark megaphone he sang through.

Vallee had a gentle voice:

Vallée became the most prominent and, arguably, the first of a new style of popular singer, the crooner. Previously, popular singers needed strong projecting voices to fill theaters in the days before the electric microphone. Crooners had soft voices that were well suited to the intimacy of the new medium of the radio.

Ah, the radio! You can't sound too harsh on the radio, especially when you're pouring your sounds into the ears of women. I know one older woman who, finding Rush too harsh, has moved on Bill Bennett, who seems caring.

But back to my point: co-ed.  This is an old-fashioned label to stick on a woman, and it shouldn't be used anymore even to apply to undergraduates. But you just sound ignorant to call a female law student a "co-ed." And that ignorance continues with this talk of Sandra Fluke not being "a random co-ed." None of the students at an elite law school like Georgetown are "random." There's an elaborate, multi-factored admissions process, and it specifically looks for applicants who aren't coming straight from college but have taken time and shown engagement with social and political issues.

A "30 year old long time liberal activist" sounds exactly like the kind of person who would apply to law school and get accepted with enthusiasm, because the schools want students who will contribute to the classroom discussions about the things we talk about in law school, like sex discrimination. This is what classroom diversity means. And we want students who will take their law school education and use it different ways, especially in political activism. So what if Fluke "enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students’ birth control"? I have no idea if that's why she selected Georgetown, but it's not a bad thing, it's not something law schools don't like, and it's not an unusual orientation for a law student to have.

McCain also tells us that Fluke has argued that it's sex discrimination for insurance not to cover "gender-reassignment" surgery. Sorry, this is typical law-journal material. Of course, an advocate in the category she belongs to would make arguments like this. Argue with these arguments all you want. But it doesn't make Sandra Fluke some nefarious pseudo law student. She sounds like a typical excellent law student at an elite law school.

Which is to say: the personal put-downs sound old-fashioned and sexist.

The right wing stepped in it with Fluke. Having stepped in it, they keep smushing around in it.

As a woman, as a law professor, as a woman law professor, I don't want to be seen anywhere near these guys. Could you start acting normal about women participating in public debate?

Now let's have a serious debate about insurance. Yeah. It's not much fun at all. But you've got to quit having your fun with women and sex — in this context! — or you are going to alienate more and more women voters — and men voters — every day. Good lord! It's super Tuesday. We should be talking about Mitt Romney, not Sandra Fluke. Yeah: Mitt Romney and insurance. Boring. Too bad.

The Rush Limbaugh show is on in a few minutes. I'm live-blogging it.

11:06 CT: "I knew it was getting bad..." He got a busy signal trying to call himself to cancel his own advertising for his Two If By Tea product. He begins with a joke. Then gets serious. He's going to explain what the apology really means. And people haven't understood it. His error was "becoming like" his critics by using "those 2 words." He tries to "maintain a very high level of integrity," and those 2 words were "uncalled for... and I, again, sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke." He never thought she was "either of those 2 words." He never uses those words, he asserts, and by using those words "I descended to their level." If you descend to the level of your opponent, he says, "They win." "There was no ulterior motive... no speaking in code... That's why I apologized."

11:10: At this point, Limbaugh details the the time line of the controversy, beginning with Issa's hearing. "Democrats tried to play a game" with that hearing. The hearing was originally not about contraception, but because Obama has a problem with women voters, Democrats decided to make the hearing about contraception and therefore to replace their male witness with the female Sandra Fluke (in violation of the committee's rules), Limbaugh said. This led to the spectacle of Fluke's exclusion, and then the Democrats' subcommittee staged testimony with Fluke, which, Rush asserts, showed her not to be the kind of expert who belonged on Issa's panel. Fluke "gave vague examples based on unnamed friends."

11:18: Georgetown is a Catholic University, Limbaugh says. Fluke didn't need to choose to attend that institution. "Why are you really there? Actually, they know what they're doing. They intentionally" choose institutions like this in order to work within them, trying to change them, he says. And Obama is trying to force these institutions to pay for birth control, over their moral objections. And the Democrats used Fluke to advance their agenda, he says. He wishes he'd said that last week. He focused on the idea of her having frequent sex because he's trying to be entertaining and it was relatively easy to do. That was the wrong focus. "I acted too much like the leftists who despise me.... It's way beneath me. It was wrong. I apologize — because I succumbed."

11:27: "The left... the media... giddy that some advertisers are leaving the program." But these advertisers have "done very well" through using his show to reach his audience. "They've decided they don't want you.... This show is about you, not the advertisers." He knows he's successful because of the listeners.

11:33: Intro music to this next segment is "Higher Ground." The previous segment began with "She Bop." Rush says he rejects millions of dollars in advertising because he puts the audience above the advertisers. He rejected GM, he says.

11:35: "The advertisers who don't want you — fine, we'll replace them." He criticizes those "on the left" who pressured the advertisers. That's not something he and his people do.

11:37: "I'm not waiting for apologizing from people on the left" who say "despicable" things. He mentions Bill Maher and Sarah Palin. "Don't expect apologies." He's portraying himself as on a higher level — "Higher Ground" — than his critics. He apologizes (for sinking to their level), and they don't apologize (it's their level). And they don't respect you, the people who make up his audience, who mean so much to him.

11:38: He quotes Tocqueville: "It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants." That sets up a more general attack on Obama and the Democrats.

11:52: I won't live-blog all 3 hours of the show, but I'll listen to the rest on podcast later. To sum up:

1. Rush emphasized his high values and his apology for falling from them.

2. He characterized the left as consistently behaving at the level that he unfortunately descended to and as never apologizing for that behavior.

3. He wishes he'd emphasized what really matters, which is how the Democrats played Issa's committee to try to help Obama with his problem appealing to women voters. [ADDED: I note that he helped the Dems win at this game.]

4. He loves his listeners and does the show for them, not the advertisers, of whom he has plenty champing at the bit to get onto the program.

Mic check... old style... with Vicki McKenna...

...and New Media Meade:

New Media Meade... on the radio, for the first time.

Listen!

ADDED: The main subject is what Meade is talking about here: "Where does Brian Solomon go to get his reputation back?"

Rush Limbaugh's crisis of confidence.

This is odd, because you think of him as supremely confident:

... I've been talking about things I really don't care about and I have been worried (particularly for the past month) that I'm boring everybody silly....

I'm asking myself, "Have I reached a career crossroads here?"  This is a new experience for me....  I mean, I've really been agonizing over this in a career sense, and I have been dealing with it as best that I go....

[T]hat's what I've really been worrying about: "Have I lost it?"  Snerdley, I've walked outta here every day the past month thinking, "This has to have been boring as hell to listen to. Just has to be," and I worry about it, 'cause every day this show I do for the audience.  I don't do it for me.  Well, I do do it for me.  That's crazy. But I do it for the audience.  I know what the audience expectations are, and they are high, and the objective here is to meet and surpass them each and every day.  When I think I'm not doing that, I get depressed in terms of letting people down.

Radio alert.

Ed Morissey writes:

Today, Mitch and I will talk with Ann Althouse about the threats she has received since writing about the standoff between the unions and the state legislature. 

Stream the show here. I'll be on at 1:30 CT (2:30 ET).

Radio alert.

I'll be on WMAL talking to Andrew Breitbart about the Wisconsin protests in about 5 minutes. Stream here.

UPDATE: I'm pushed forward to 5:37 CT. Sorry to make you listen to the wrong part!

Cokie Roberts and Renee Montagne talking about Republicans on NPR.

The tone and inflection as they hit key words like "Gingrich" couldn't be more sarcastic and contemptuous. I mean, if they amped it up any more, the regular NPR listeners might start to find it inappropriate.

"Do you want to reload this page?"

Aha! It's the computers that are fomenting violence in America! We always suspected the machines would find a way to destroy us, and suddenly I see their insidious mechanism. Don't retreat... reload!... this page.

We ... have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men...

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate - only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural...

You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let's use that power....

Do you know the source of that warning about the machines? It's this.

ADDED: Here's a plot summary of the movie I'm quoting from. The character you see there does not represent Hitler. I'm only now realizing that I shouldn't assume everyone knows the movie.

Howard Stern excoriates Kathy Lee Gifford for tormenting an autistic boy.

Kathy Lee somehow managed to produce the most unbearably tasteless display I've ever seen on television, and Stern lets her have it. Language alert on the second link, but the first link is much more offensive.

[Second link was wrong before. Fixed.]

The homeless guy with the "golden radio" voice triumphs...

... or so it seems.