Air America Spiraling In

Brian Anderson in today’s LA Times:

Wait a second, you say, didn’t I read that Air America has expanded to more than 50 markets? That’s true, but let’s put things in perspective: Conservative pundit and former Reagan official William J. Bennett’s morning talk show, launched at the same time as Air America, reaches nearly 124 markets, including 18 of the top 20, joining the growing ranks of successful right-of-center talk programs (Limbaugh is still the ratings leader, drawing more than 15 million listeners a week).

And look at Air America’s ratings: They’re pitifully weak, even in places where you would think they’d be strong. WLIB, its flagship in New York City, has sunk to 24th in the metro area Arbitron ratings — worse than the all-Caribbean format it replaced, notes the Radio Blogger. In the liberal meccas of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Air America is doing lousier still.

As I’ve been saying, gang, this thing is crashing.
Now, when it does, we’ll be told about how places like Clear Channel kept them at bay… forgetting of course that it was Clear Channel who put them in about half their markets, including here in Rochester. The left will then claim ‘well what did you expect when we’re limited to the weaker, ‘rimshot’ stations, forgetting that’s where Limbaugh started, and saw rating on those rimshotters that were blowing up the big hitters in every market Limbaugh gt anywhere near.

Anderson says the left is already admitting they’re losing.

Unable to prosper in the medium, liberals have taken to denouncing talk radio as a threat to democracy. Liberal political columnist Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker, is typically venomous. Conservative talk radio represents “vicious, untreated political sewage” and “niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive,” Hertzberg sneers.

And having declared defeat on the open market, we’ll see calls from those leftists for a renewal of the only way the left can generate any litenership at all; force of law, in this case the ‘fairness doctrine’ which in reality was nothing of the sort.

Here’s the deal with that, Gang…. the left can’t sell their goods to the people without the force of law behind it.

And the forthcoming crash of Err America is the result.

Right Wing Balance has a top-notch article up today you want to read about the CBC. Not unlike our own PBS/NPR, the CBC operates as a government paid for leftist cheering section.

Jeffrey Bell, in next Monday’s issue of the WEEKLY STANDARD makes the case for Tom DeLay;

DeLay is the most important of a small but growing group of conservative leaders who are willing and able to operate without permission or praise from Blue State media. The fact that Hastert, DeLay, and their allies have maintained unbroken operational control of the House, never losing a significant floor vote in the four-plus years since Bush became president, has (to put it mildly) opened the door for other ambitious leaders to consider doing the same, either on selected issues or across the board.

If DeLay goes down because of overseas trips and/or fundraising practices that have never caused the slightest political problem for anyone else, the lesson to other Red State leaders will be clear. The four-year House winning streak, so widely taken for granted among conservatives, will not long survive DeLay. That is why Democrats and Blue State media (despite some half-hearted efforts to depict DeLay as a GOP albatross) so fervently desire his career to end as soon as possible.

Bingo. We are clearly at a divide, here. We can no longer ask the Democrats for permission to do the right thing.
As the first Preident Bush found out; Being nice to the Democrats and giving them what they want…(In Bush Sr’s case, the Democrat-demanded tax hikes) will only serve to get you a cut throat. Delay figured out that equation, and it’s why he’s as effective as he is.

Which is what makes him a target the Democrats spend so much effort on.

Power Line today has an article up called The soul of Juan Cole… which while not directly saying so argues correctly to the idea that Ive long held; He has none.

Well, I don’t know as I fully agree withthis chap, but he does make for an interesting read.

Bob Livingston says the reason Delay is under attack is because he’s effective.

Yes, folks… sometimes it really is that simple.

WorldNetDaily makes note of Ann Coulter on Time’s cover, and wonders what’s up with the weird proportions in that picture….

I dunno as I’m so worried about it, but here’s a speculation; Remember a similar picture of Bill Clinton on the cover of Esquire, casuing some degree of controversy?

(Funny thing; I can’t seem to find that one online, today)

Michelle Malkin points out that today, well… 230 years ago tonight, actually, Paul Revere took a little ride in the moonlight.

All around liberal stooge Kinsley in the WaPo this morning has apparently come to the conclusion (of nesessity, from his POV) that a Neoconservative is defined only as someone whom liberals such as himself disagree with.

But there are small points which Kinsley misses. For example, he tries to tie our current actions in the middle east to the actions of Jimme Carter during his misadministration.

Kirkpatrick’s article, “Dictatorship and Double Standards,” was a ferocious attack on President Jimmy Carter for trying to “impose liberalization and democratization” on other countries. She mocked “the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances.” Democracy, she said, depends “on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions.” It takes “decades, if not centuries.”

What Kinsley apparently doesn’t want to see, since he certainly has missed it, is that Kirkpatrick and her critics, (such as, at that time, Kinsley, himself) excluded the possibility of military action to accomplish a head start in the goal of those complex social, cultural, and economic changes.  Where Carter sat on his hands insofar as military options went, Mr. Bush is willing to use the option to gain the prize.

Kinsley’s real complaint here, of course, is that what Mr. Bush did actually WORKED, and what Carter did only made the situation worse. That’s something he will never get over.

It’s interesting that Kensley wails about NeoConservatives not being able to admit error… since Kinsley has never yet been able to admit error on the part of his patron saint… Jimmy Carter.

Funny thing; Every time he opens his mouth, my original perception of him is reinforced.

The independant is busy this fine morning, crowing over a supposedly major breakthrough in the ability to read acient documents which were unreadable previously. They go on to holler:

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye – decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a “second Renaissance”.

Ummmm…. Guys?

I would find it hard to be very reliant on such material as being the final word on the various subjects by the authors. Interesting, perhaps, and revealing in their way. But not the final word.

Think about it; By even your own description…. These writings by these ancient masters were found in a DUMP…. a LANDFILL.  Somehow, it seems to me that there were later refinements to the original works that those greats wrote, and that what was in the landfill was likely considered… even by their authors…. to be utter crap…. which would explain where you found them!

Guess that one got by you, huh?

I mean, yes, by all means, let’s change our reading of the Gospels because of something we found in a dump…. (Sheesh!)

A little late, but this one took a little more writing than usual; The Newest Bit’sBit is now up. It’s called: Who wants a more liberal Church? Not as many as you’d think

Let me open these comments by saying I’m not a Roman Catholic, being instead a Lutheran.  Still, what the Roman Church does undeniably affects Christiandom as a whole, and therefore seems a valid discussion.

As the Cardinals gather to decide the matter of who will be the next Pope, many are writing to this subject of the future of the church. Peggy Noonan stumbles across something that is an intagable for so many:

You are a cardinal of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, a modern man, and for the past seven days, in private conversations in Rome with cardinals you trust, you’ve been admitting what you would never say in public.

You were shocked at the outpouring for John Paul II. You were shocked at the four million who came to Rome, at the line that stretched across the Tiber, at the tears.

You had no idea.

Not that you didn’t have real affection for the old man. He was probably a saint. All that suffering, dragging his broken body into each day the past five years. That’s a long time on the cross.

But you thought he was yesterday’s news. Everyone had already said goodbye to him at those big audiences in the Paul VI hall. And let’s face it, the church under John Paul was slammed every day as conservative, ossified, reactionary.

Here’s another strange thing. In the polls on churchgoing and belief it’s always Catholics on the street in Europe and America who say they want change and reform. They’d been saying it for years! And yet it was Catholics on the street from Europe and America–real nobodies, not to be impolite but just regular Catholics–who engulfed Rome to weep and yell Santo, Santo!

Dale Franks notes the press and the social left apparently ignoring this outpouring:

Yet, we see the outpouring of litterally millions who poured into Rome, to pay their respect for the main who as one commenter at Q&O said the other day, shattered “the myth that compassion and theological conservatism are diametrically opposed”

We also hear the calls from around the world, for sainthood for the man the left and the press both within the chruch and without, are saying doomed the church to irrelivancy with his conservative angle.

So, what’s happening here? Why the apparent disparity?

Well, I did address part of this a few weeks ago. In that BIT, I linked the names of Pope John Paul, Lech Walessa, Margaret Thatcher, and Solzhenitsyn, as as being on the correct side of the fence between good and evil.

Here’s a concept, and one most of those calling for a more liberal outlook from the church can’t handle; The desire really isn’t there for a more liberal outlook from the church. They don’t want the chruch becoming more freindly to the world, for a simple reason… as Eternity Road remarks this morning:

“A church must, by its very nature, be a conservative institution. The point of a church is the conservation and dissemination of a body of doctrines.”

Within that context, the people have identified what the church stands for is good, and by definition, therefore what seeks to change the church away from that as evil.

That point would seem to be accentuated not only by the current members, but by the number of people who have dropped out of the various branches of the Christian church in recent years, in this way;

While proponants of liberalising the Church would argue that the Chruch must respond to the falling membership numbers by veering left so as to become more ‘relevant’, the fact is, veering left has already been done… to the opposite of the stated desire of bringing more people into Chruch membership. The problem wasn’t that the chruch wasn’t liberal enough, it was already TOO liberal. Rather like the older gent in the Buick stepping on the gas rather than the brake, the results of the error in judgement are the exact opposite of the desired… and are usually catastrophic.

A look at the relationships between church membership in Non-Roman churches, between liberalised doctrine and falling membership reveals a rather startling picture; While there were falling membership numbers during the 60’s, memberships fell even faster in following years, in direct proportion to the rate at which the various branches of Christiandom liberalised their doctrine. Rather than warming to the idea that the chruch was now being “more inclusive” the numbers of filled pews went down like a stone.

Yeah… “Oops”.

It’s true that many within (And more without) the church will not be able to get their mind around those facts,(Usually responding with charges of rampant bigotry within the church) but those ARE the facts.

Now, it should be noted as a practical matter, that the chances of any Pope being elected out of this conclave being significantly more approved of by say, an Andrew Sullivan type… is very small indeed, given that the vast majority of the Cardinals now in Rome deciding this matter are appointees of Pope John Paul II, and so are likely to be following in his footsteps.

What I’m suggesting, here is that we should not look for any major changes in polcy coming from Rome in this next Pope… for two reasons….

* The people within the chruch, really don’t want a liberalised doctrine.

* Nor do the any of the Cardinals now deciding who will next incarnation of Peter will be.

And that, given the facts we see of the last 50 years, would seem to be the best outcome.

Colorado Conservative has a few words Charlie Rangel would do well to heed. I doubt he’s smart enough.

I subscribe to QOTD via Bloglines. This one caught my eye:

This one caught my eye:
when it came up by chance, today;

“If one sticks too rigidly to one’s principles, one would hardly see anybody.”

Ace of Spades HQ points up an article in the LA TIMES wherein Howard Dean talks about Terri Shaivo this way:

‘We’re going to use Terri Schiavo later on,’.
…
“‘This is going to be an issue in 2006, and it’s going to be an issue in 2008,’ Dean told about 200 people at a gay rights group’s breakfast in West Hollywood, ‘because we’re going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, “Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?”‘”

Ummmm. Howard?
You really need to re-examine the many meanings of the word LOVE. What Michial Shaivo did wasn’t covered under any one of them.