Considerettes

Spring Break means a break from the blog as well. Starting tomorrow through April 10th, this space will be rather quiet. Enjoy the weather, and see you then!

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Brian Maloney notes the deflation of Air America:

Air America now lists 51 mostly tiny affiliates, which is not very impressive after a full year of media attention, industry affection and trade publication hype. Many smaller conservative radio networks can boast twice that number and still not be taken very seriously by radio professionals.

There are dozens of syndicated talk program providers for conservative programming, sports and specialty shows. Many hundreds are available for stations to take and you never read about them in newspapers. Yet lots of them are carried on more stations than Air America.

Brian then gives us the hard numbers.

And it isn’t too new to measure, especially not in New York City, where WLIB’s just-released numbers show, in the broadest audience measurement of adults 12+, that Air America’s flagship station has declined to a tiny 1.1 share of the audience. There’s a full year of data to look at now and the picture isn’t pretty for lib talk.

This is below where the station stood a year ago with its previous Caribbean specialty format and a drop from a 1.2 share last month. In the Fall 2004 Arbitron survey, WLIB had a 1.4 share of the radio listening audience, so it is safe to say it’s actually shrinking in popularity.

Liberal talk radio is less popular than Caribbean music. But money just keeps getting pumped into it from liberal big money interests to keep it afloat. If it had to survive on its own, it probably wouldn’t still be around.

Here’s some other numbers from around the country.

New ratings, just released, show that in Boston, Air America outlet WKOX shows no growth from last month with a tiny 0.6 share of the audience. Its simulcast partner is a no-show.

In San Diego, the much-hyped liberal talk station KLSD continues its ratings collapse, from a 2.3 to a 1.9 to a 1.6 audience share in brand new figures.

In Philadelphia, Air America affiliate WHAT-AM drops from a tiny 0.8 to a miniscule 0.6 overall audience share.

In Detroit, lib talker WTDW-AM is a no-show again. Even Canadian talk radio (Ontario’s CKLW-AM) is doing better than Air America in Detroit!

March 31 update: Air America in deep trouble in San Francisco: a flat 1.0 share, tied for 25th place overall, no audience gain from last month and a small fraction of the audience KQKE’s predecessor had on the same frequency, playing adult standards.

In Washington, DC: liberal outlet WWRC is not present in the latest figures with any measurable audience.

This data overall paints a very bleak picture of liberal talk radio’s future. There wasn’t one sign of growth, not a fraction of ratings point in any city and many were down from already anemic levels. It’s time to start confronting the liberal talk radio hype machine head-on with the facts. I can’t wait to see what their excuses are this time for this miserable performance.

All hype, little results.

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This just in…

Harried commuters, file this bombshell away to stun your neighbors: Metro Atlanta’s counties have some of the worst commuting times among the nation’s major metropolitan areas.

Locally, Gwinnett County leads the pack, with an average one-way commute of nearly 31 minutes, tying with Riverside County, Calif., and Cook County, Ill. Gwinnett ranks 18th out of 233 counties listed.

Read the figures, compiled in 2003 and released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau, and weep. Or perhaps you’d feel better pounding the steering wheel.

According to the bureau’s yearly American Community Survey, Americans spend more than 100 hours commuting each year. That’s at least 20 hours longer than the average 80 hours of vacation that most working stiffs take annually, the bureau noted.

The survey looked at commuting times in every state, plus every city and county with 250,000 or more residents.

I live this statistic, and yes, it’s certainly not news. But perhaps it give me a sick sort of bragging rights.

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“Stroll Down Memory Lane” Department - Ted Koppel is leaving Nightline.

NEW YORK - Ted Koppel, who has anchored ABC News’ “Nightline” since its inception a quarter-century ago, said Thursday he will leave the network when contract expires at the end of the year.

The precursor to Nightline was the nightly summary of the Iranian embassy hostage situation that occurred during the Carter administration, and Frank Reynolds would host it. “The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage: Day 187″, and each day the number went up and up. When it started, I had just started college, and when I came home on Christmas break, my Dad and I would watch it every night. Five months later, Ted Koppel became the regular anchor and the show was renamed Nightline. I watched it a bit as it got going, but as the reports about the hostage crisis took a back seat, I lost interest in staying up that late.

Anyway, that goes way back, and it’s interesting to see it changing. (And interesting to note that he stayed the anchor for so long.)

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Another action by folks at the UN that suggest a cover-up.

KOFI ANNAN faced growing pressure to stand down as UN Secretary-General yesterday when an independent inquiry into the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal found that UN documents were shredded in a possible cover-up.

The investigation found that Iqbal Riza, Mr Annan’s chief of staff, ordered the shredding the day after the Security Council approved the inquiry last April, and the shredding continued until the week of December 7.

The documents covered the crucial period from 1997 to 1999, when the Swiss company that employed Mr Annan’s son, Kojo, as a consultant was awarded a lucrative UN border-inspection contract in Iraq.

Ten days before the shredding, Mr Riza had sent the heads of nine UN-related agencies a directive asking them to “take all necessary steps to collect, preserve and secure all files, records and documents . . . relating to the Oil-for-Food programme”.

Paul Volcker, who led the inquiry, said: “Whether that material contained any evidence that we did not otherwise get from UN files more generally is, of course, not known.”

And it may be the only reason we can’t say for sure Kofi Annan was involved. We simply cannot trust this guy. There’s way too much surrounding him to allow him to claim complete innocence. If he comes out of this unscathed, we owe Ken Lay an apology.

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Slip…slip…slip…

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) - The Dutch government, the first to legalize euthanasia for some terminally ill people, will tackle an even thornier ethical dilemma: what to do when doctors say it is best to end the lives of infants, the mentally handicapped or the demented.

Euthanasia opponents view the idea with horror, but The Royal Dutch Medical Association believes guidelines and a panel of experts should be created to vet such cases.

Health Secretary Clemence Ross, who has opposed expanding the current euthanasia rules, will send an opinion to Parliament in three or four weeks, said her spokesman, Richard Lancee.

If Ross approves, doctors acting with the families’ permission would not be punished for administering lethal sedatives to “people with no free will,” in cases that pass review.

Under current law, euthanasia is restricted to terminal patients suffering unbearable pain with no hope of improvement, and who request to die when they are of sound mind. Each case is reviewed by a panel of medical experts.

The new proposal calls for a similar panel for patients who cannot express themselves, with the addition of a judge or court official, giving a legal veneer to a practice that technically would remain illegal.

For advocates, the issue is one of transparency: Past studies have shown that doctors already carry out a handful of such euthanasia cases each year.

In the best known example, the Groningen Medical Center announced last year it euthanized four severely ill newborns in 2004, under guidelines known as “the Groningen Protocol” - a list of standards for performing and reporting euthanasia of newborns with serious, incurable deformities.

Examples include extremely premature births, where children suffer brain damage from bleeding and convulsions, and diseases where a child could only survive on life support for the rest of its life, such as severe cases of spina bifida.

Euthanasia opponents say formalizing such practice would be another step in the Netherlands’ slide down an ethical slope. Bert P. Dorenbos, director of Cry for Life, said the move would be a preliminary step to legalizing involuntary euthanasia.

“This is the most important moment, when we can still fight it,” he said.

Each step seems reasonable, until you look back and see how far you’ve really gone down the slope. “We’ve already gone this far, nothing wrong with going just a little farther. But we’d never go farther.” And yet, we do.

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A potential First Amendment issue:

The Secret Service is investigating the claims of three people who say they were removed from President Bush’s town hall meeting on Social Security last week because of a bumper sticker on their car that read: “No More Blood for Oil.”

The three said they had obtained tickets to the event through the office of Rep. Bob Beauprez, R-Colo., had passed through security and were preparing to take their seats when they were approached by what they thought was a Secret Service agent who asked them to leave.

Alex Young, 25, who was among the three removed, said officials told them the next day they were identified as belonging to the “No Blood for Oil” group.

Lon Garner, the agent in charge of the Secret Service office in Denver, said the Secret Service had nothing to do with the three being asked to leave. Garner declined to release further details, citing an ongoing investigation.

“We are very sensitive to the First Amendment and general assembly rights as protected by the Constitution,” Garner said.

Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for Americans United, called the removal of the three people an egregious violation of their First Amendment rights.

“They’re screening the people who are allowed to come and then they’re profiling them in the parking lot,” he said. “It’s quite extraordinary, and disappointing.”

If they were “disinvited” because of their views, I’d have to agree that their removal was wrong, if there were no other reasons to suspect a security problem.

They may have been simply foolish. Think about it: If the war was all about oil, why are we paying $2+ a gallon for it now? And do you think the Iraqi people, who will be able to start reaping the benefits of the oil profits in their country, are glad to have the control of it taken away from Hussein? Is blood for security or freedom worth it? Why no bumper stickers that say, “No Blood for Liberation”? I’m glad these folks weren’t in America in the late 1700s.

Security risk? Probably not. Foolish? Oh, you bet.

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Somebody keep George Felos, Michael Schiavo’s attorney, away from Rome.

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope John Paul II is getting nutrition from a tube in his nose, the Vatican said Wednesday, shortly after the frail pontiff appeared at his window in St. Peter’s Square and managed only a rasp when he tried to speak.

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Today’s Odd “Considerettes” Search Phrase (they’re coming in fast and furious lately) - where can i find flatbed trucks in Ga. [#5 in MSN Search]

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Today’s Even Odder “Considerettes” Search Phrase - turkeys swallowing humans whole. [#44 on Google]

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Today’s Odd “Considerettes” Search Phrase - do not disturb signs for napping. [#3 on Yahoo! Search]

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Read this:

Kofi Annan, the beleaguered United Nations secretary general, is expected to sacrifice his son’s reputation today as he fights to save his own position after a damaging report into a family conflict of interest.

Now make Saddam Hussein the subject, change the dateline to a few years ago, and see how it reads. Sounds like it could’ve been true, eh?

What a guy. It continues.

The long-awaited report by the commission set up to investigate the scandal-hit oil-for-food programme for Iraq, will criticise the UN leader for a series of management failings.

Such as?

The Wall Street Journal said the report would say that Kojo Annan received nearly $400,000 from Cotecna, more than twice the money previously acknowledged.

It will also focus on four previously undisclosed meetings between Mr Annan and Cotecna starting in 1992, five years before he became secretary general.

Mr Annan has denied any impropriety but his many critics in Washington say that, by failing to disclose the meetings before, he has given the impression of a cover-up.

Liberals in Washington have had less to go on to accuse Cheney & Haliburton with “impropriety” in the past. Let’s see how fast they are to connect the dots here.

Liberal Media Alert:

Republican Right-wingers in Congress who are baying for his blood will seize on the report to press home their argument that he is too discredited to keep his job.

“Right-wingers” is capitalized, fer goodness sake! Loaded language combined with what amounts to an official title of “Right-winger”, with a dash of colorful, violent metaphor. That’s what passes for “objectivity” at the London Telegraph, apparently.

And how far is Kofi going to run from his son?

Mr Annan has said that he was “disappointed and surprised” when he learned that Kojo continued to be paid by Cotecna after 1998 when the firm was awarded a contract to monitor the oil-for-food programme.

But in his response to the report he is expected to go much further in distancing himself from his son. UN officials are privately briefing that he has never had a close relationship with his son and that he is exasperated by his behaviour.

Sound like a conveniently timed family issue. It could actually be the first time he’s wanted to mention this in public, but add that to the first time he’s wanted to mention those meetings in public and either there’s a lot of stuff coming out all of a sudden, creating an impression of impropriety, or it’s actual evidence of it. Given his track record, it could very well be evidence.

And speaking of track records, just as a reminder…

The UN is on the back foot over a range of issues, including a sex scandal in its peacekeeping operation in the Congo, and the first Volcker report last month that savaged the record of Benon Sevan, the former head of the oil-for-food programme.

It has since emerged that up to the publication of the first Volker report the funds for Mr Sevan’s legal defence came from the remains of the oil-for-food project.

How are we to believe anything coming from the UN?

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Surprise, surprise; colleges and universities, allegedly bastions of “tolerance” and “diversity”, don’t tolerate intellectual diversity all that well.

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

“What’s most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field,” said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. “There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It’s a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you’d expect to be dominated by liberals.”

Seems that this huge disparity should prompt some action. Or not.

Rothman sees the findings as evidence of “possible discrimination” against conservatives in hiring and promotion. Even after factoring in levels of achievement, as measured by published work and organization memberships, “the most likely conclusion” is that “being conservative counts against you,” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve observed it happening.” The study, however, describes this finding as “preliminary.”

If this disparity were as big in the gender category, then you’d see some quick action. Or not.

On the gender front, 72 percent of the full-time faculty are male and 28 percent female.

And how do these liberals see themselves?

In contrast with the finding that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are liberal, a Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33 percent describe themselves as conservative and 18 percent as liberal.

Most likely, they consider themselves “independent”, which is to say that they’re tone-deaf to their own biases. These birds of a feather think they’re the only flock in town.

“In general,” says Lichter, who also heads the nonprofit Center for Media and Public Affairs, “even broad-minded people gravitate toward other people like themselves. That’s why you need diversity, not just of race and gender but also, maybe especially, of ideas and perspective.”

Hopefully, some of those liberals are listening, but hold not thy breath.

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Georgia Same-Sex Marriage Amendment Update: A ruling from the State Supreme Court seems imminent.

The state Supreme Court has refused to let lawmakers go to court to defend Georgia’s constitutional amendment banning gay marriage _ potentially signaling that a decision in the case challenging it is near.

The court on Friday declined to consider an appeal by former state Sen. Mike Crotts and other lawmakers who wanted to argue in favor of the ban, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman and curbs the legal recognition of same-sex civil unions.

In January, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Constance Russell said she would rule in the case against the state soon after that issue was settled.

“Both sides have presented all their information for her, and we are hopeful that she will issue her ruling very soon,” said Jack Senterfitt, attorney for Lambda Legal Defense, a pro-gay rights group.

Senterfitt said he expects a ruling in the next 10 days.

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“Striking a Deceased Equine” Department: Dean Esmay notes that the Plame affair has essentially flamed out. As much as the Left and the MSM tried to make this a news story, it’s finally come to the point that even the MSM had to admit that a crime was probably not committed. And they only got to that point because they were getting pressure to reveal sources. Without that, it might still be “big news”.

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