Conservative radio host Rusty Humphries asked Palin whether she'd "make the birth certificate an issue" if she runs for president in 2012. Oh no, she wouldn't have to "bother to make it an issue," because the valiant tea partiers of America are doing it for her—and "rightfully" so!

We've come to expect no better from Le Rogue, but for old time's sake, let's parse the levels of insanity:

• 1. Prima facie: She is encouraging birthers. This is a low even Palin has avoided stooping to until now.
• 
  
• 2. She is encouraging birthers, despite knowing that they are wrong. Listen to the way Palin stalls and diverts, starting with a protracted "Umm... I think..." She is careful to point to the public's fascination with the story, and to note that she herself couldn't care less, but supports their efforts. She sounds like an adult child placating her senile mother: Of course you get can your driver's license back, even though you crashed into a tree. Many people get their driver's licenses back, and I will certainly help you try. She knows the birthers are wrong, yet she congratulates their efforts and calls Obama's nationality "fair game." This is pandering in its barest, most transparent form, and the fact that Sarah thinks she can get away with it testifies to how stupid, directionless, and desperate she knows her followers are.
• 
  
• 3. If she were capable of higher levels of thinking—like extrapolation or synthesis or this very complicated intellectual maneuver known as if/then logic—she'd recognize that if it was a "weird conspiracy freak thing" to demand Trig's birth certificate, then it is a "weird conspiracy freak thing" to demand Obama's, too. (I can't believe I'm even typing this out. This must be the phenomenon known as "stupefying.") So either Palin is stuck at the bottom level of the below brain-use pyramid, or she and her followers are "weird conspiracy freaks."
• 
  

  4. Just because a bunch of loons went "grassy knoll" on Trig doesn't give her the right to use their frightful logic to impugn Obama. In fact, Obama stood up for Sarah and her family and told everyone to back off the birth-related gossip.

  In conclusion, I blame the entire fiasco that is Sarah Palin on the Miss Alaska pageant. If they'd just let her win all those years ago, maybe she could have used it to earn the fame and fortune she so desperately craves, and she'd never have felt compelled to go into politics, and wouldn't be terrorizing America to the tune of "Sarah, Queen of the Wild Frontier" (which Humphries opened the segment with) right now.

Turner's trial started yesterday. His crime, according to the NYT: When some judges in Chicago upheld a handgun ban last summer, he put their pictures and contact info on his website and said they should be killed. Specifically, he wrote "If they are allowed to get away with this by surviving, other judges will act the same way." Which, let's admit, is kind of funny, because do you really "get away" with something just by surviving? Strict standards, Mr. Turner!

Hal was an avowed "white nationalist" and a more avowed attention hound. His show's website proclaimed, "Hal Turner is so far to the right he makes Rush Limbaugh look like a liberal and Sean Hannity seem like a girlie-man!" He enjoyed writing things like, "Today could be the day I get to serve on a Jury. Imagine the justice I can dish-out against a Savage Negro Beast, a greasy Spic, a degenerate sodomite or, my favorite, a filty, hook-nosed KIKE."

Furthermore, Hal Turner, supernationalist racist right-wing bomb-thrower, was an FBI snitch, for years. And Turner's lawyers are now arguing that it was all an act. He was just trying to get in good with the crazies, to snitch on them! The FBI fired him as a snitch, though, because he couldn't follow orders.

Get a hobby, loser.

Media Matters found Rush reading this item on air today and agreeing with it, somehow. We're thrilled to hear we're on the same page in terms of made-up economic theories, Rush. Do you want to go bowling some time? Email us.

In Limbaugh's WSJ piece, entitled "The Race Card, Football and Me" he writes: "My racial views? You mean, my belief in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race? Where football players should earn as much as they can and keep as much as they can, regardless of race? Those controversial racial views?"

What are his racial views exactly? Media Matters documented 28 separate occasions where Limbaugh used racially charged language. They didn't go the Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Michael Wilbon route, picking quotes out of thin air, they did the research and the results are pretty damning.

In this clip Rush calls Obama an "angry black guy"

Here he says "[I]n Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering"

There are 26 other clips that don't exactly portray Rush as someone who does not see race. Quite the contrary. Rush seems obsessed with race. Turns out his critics weren't exactly off the mark, they just choose the wrong quotes.

Slate's Jack Shafer points out that a book published in 1995 by Gwenyth L. Jackaway, Media at War: Radio's Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924-1939, offers some fascinating insights into the striking parallels between the print vs. radio war of the 20s and 30s and the print vs. internet war going on today.

Like today's Web, radio harmed newspapers commercially by disrupting the institutional identity they had carved out, Jackaway writes. The upstart media forced journalists and readers to ask, "[W]ho is a journalist? What is news? How should the news be delivered? What are the rules regarding the form and content of an acceptable news message?" Radio also fractured the existing institutional structure that partnered newspapers and wire services to deliver national and regional news. Radio could easily bypass newspapers and funnel news directly from the wire services to audiences. And, last, radio battered the institutional function of newspapers with live broadcasts of everything from sporting events to political conventions, allowing listeners to hear the news as it happened instead of reading about it 24 hours later.

Newspapers had every right to carve out just and enforceable intellectual-property rights for their copy, but their crusade against radio often lapsed into full scale disparagement of the new media. Some print journalists and industry leaders claimed that radio content was inaccurate, skimpy, sensationalist, and trivial and that its practitioners were amateurs. When radio news was accurate, they asserted, it was either a bunch of headlines from a newspaper or a story directly pilfered from one. Does any of this sound familiar?

Shafer goes to note that the print media establishment claimed that their writings were "sacred rhetoric" and that the rogue gallery of thieves and buffoons in radio who were leeching off of them threatened to bring our sacred democracy to its knees. The print folk also did everything in their power to block radio journalist's ability to secure press credentials in order to gain access to the nation's power brokers.

To answer the "Does any of this sound familiar?" question posed by Shafer in the excerpt above, the answer is yes, it most certainly does. Obviously.

Party time: Magna, a unit of huge advertising conglomerate Interpublic, is forecasting that the recession-induced ad slump is over! Magna projects that ad spending will fall nearly 15% this year, but will start increasing again in...2011. So, almost over. Party time!

The New York Times Co. is selling WQXR, New York's only major classical music radio station, to Univision and public radio station WNYC for $45 million. All of the station's employees will have to re-apply for their jobs, and WQXR's signal is getting significantly weaker, and it's changing stations, and it now needs you to give, give, give to public radio, if you enjoy the classical music and such.

ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff returned to Iraq for the first time since he was nearly killed by a bomb there in 2006. Last night he was all set to do his triumphal report from there, but it had to be canceled, because of mighty sandstorms. God?

Carmen Saldana, the 23 year-old FIT student found murdered in her family's apartment in Queens last weekend, was working part time as an intern at Complex Magazine. Complex's Sherry Bitting tells us:

Carmen came to Complex in January as a fashion intern and made an immediate
and indelible mark on our team. She was a level-headed, balanced,
compassionate, and energetic young woman who was positive and professional
at all times. Even when focused on work, Carmen always had a smile for
anyone she spoke to.

We are deeply saddened by the news and send our sincere condolences to her
loved ones and family. She will be remembered fondly and missed terribly by
all of us.

According to WNYC's most recent tax returns, Walker, who has been running WNYC for a decade, made $486,688 in annual compensation and benefits as of June 2007. By way of comparison, that's $222,000 more than the next highest-paid person at the station.

Half a million dollars isn't an absurd amount of money to be paying someone to run a huge major market radio station. But it's $60,000 more than Kenneth Stern, the CEO and highest-paid employee of National Public Radio—the far larger radio network that supplies WNYC with much of its content—made in 2007, according to NPR's most recent tax return. Stern, who left NPR last year, was responsible for 656 employees making more than $50,000 a year. [Note: This has been corrected to reflect the fact that Stern is no longer the CEO of NPR.] Walker is responsible for 95. She makes twice the salary of the highest-paid staffer at Public Radio International, NPR's main competitor.

We asked WNYC's spokeswoman why Walker's salary is so high, and so out of whack with the rest of the station's salary structure, at a time when the nonprofit is shedding jobs and staffers. We also asked her if Walker had taken a pay cut since June 2007. She said she needed time to find an answer.

Along with the cuts revealed yesterday, WNYC also announced an across-the-board 5% salary reduction for senior staffers, which would bring down Walker's compensation to roughly $462,000. But given the huge spread between her salary and that of the rest of the senior staff, one would hope that she took a bigger hit.

Just remember where the money is going the next time WNYC begs you to support the important work that they're doing.

"We went into this thinking it was going to be a joke," Muller said very quickly when we called him. "But it was not a joke—it was horrible. 'Hoax' is probably not the right word, but we did think it was going to be a joke."

According to e-mails from Muller's publicist obtained by Cajun Boy, on the day before the heavily promoted stunt was supposed to happen, Muller was frantically looking for anybody to perform the waterboarding:

It is going to have to look "real" but of course would be simulated with Mancow acting like he is drowning. It will be a hoax but have to look real. Would be great if they could dress in fatigues and bring whatever is needed. We will supply the water.

"It was a marine who did it," Muller said. "I don't know his training. Is he a professional interrogator? I don't think so. But he knew what to do. If I wanted to fake it, it would have lasted for six minutes—I lasted six seconds. I'm on the air, bud, I'm on the air." Then he hung up.

So we called Klay South, the marine Mancow found at the last minute to perform the waterboarding. He says he had no idea what he was doing! To wit:

I know nothing about waterboarding. I had never done it before, I have no formal training in it, and I've never had it done to me. The only thing I knew was what I saw on the internet. I went to waterboarding.org and looked it up. I just did what I was told—poured the water on his face and that was it. I'm probably the last person they should have had do it. I didn't know what I was doing.

That settles it for us! South is the founder of Veterans of Valor, a nonprofit that helps out wounded vets, and he said he agreed to the gig just to gain a donation and publicity for the organization, a noble enough reason.

According to South's main resource, waterboarding.org, waterboarders should "restrain the interrogation subject on a board" and "incline the board about 15-20 degrees so that the feet are above the head." South says Muller's feet were bound, but his arms were not. And although his feet were elevated, he was laying on a flat surface.

We asked South if it seemed like Muller was faking it: "I don't know. I couldn't tell you if he was in distress or not."

UPDATE: Mancow called us back to say that even though his waterboarder didn't know what he was doing, and his publicist called the whole thing a "hoax," it wasn't supposed to be a REALLY real waterboarding to begin with. Just the radio stunt kind! "Of course I wasn't a radical terrorist," he said. "Of course it was simulated. To compare what I went through to what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed went through—of course it was not the same. I'm sure it was worse for them."

Undoubtedly it was. But isn't the whole point of these exercises to let people know exactly what we talk about when we talk about waterboarding? We've learned that Mancow can't take six seconds of having water poured on his face—we guess he doesn't take showers?—but we've learned absolutely nothing about the mechanics or ethics of what goes on at CIA black sites. If anything, a bullshit stunt like this one gives ammunition to torture proponents, who can poke holes in Muller's grand conversion by pointing out that it's a bullshit stunt. Keith Olbermann and other righteous anti-torture advocates are holding up Muller's experience as evidence—someone who was inclined to support waterboarding and deny that it's torture has actually experienced it, which Sean Hannity and his ilk lack the courage to do, and the facts have changed his mind. Only he hasn't actually experienced it, or anything remotely approaching what actual torture victims experienced. None of it is real.

On last night's show, Olbermann brought up Muller during an interview with Jesse Ventura:

Mancow went into this knowing that—being a swimmer as a kid and in fact having been drowned and resuscitated—he knew what this was really like and he knew this couldn't possibly be that. He lasted six seconds and he said, not only is it torture, not only is it drowning—it's death! It's being undersold.

Compare that to South, the waterboarder, who couldn't even answer whether Muller was actually in any kind of distress. We have know idea if Muller was deliberately faking the whole episode for publicity, or if he ginned up a fake waterboarding as a gag and then was surprised to find himself actually terrified by it. But either way, Olbermann is a disingenuous ideologue who hurts his own cause—and ours—when he takes this fakery at face value and promotes it as evidence of his own rectitude on the torture debate.

Astonishingly, MSNBC is standing by its flackery for Muller's hoax. An MSNBC spokeswoman acknowledged that Olbermann's producers had been made aware prior to airing the Muller interview that his publicist had described it as a hoax, saying, "We asked the publicist and were assured by her that she just used a poor choice of words." But when asked if MSNBC still believes that publicist, in light of the fact that Muller's waterboarder had no idea what he was doing, she declined to comment.

She also confirmed that the network made no effort to reach South prior to airing the interview [UPDATE: Olbermann said on his show Friday night that his producers "left messages" for him but didn't talk to him]. Mancow Muller is a shock jock. He calls himself Mancow! He's been making ludicrous, insane comments for a living and pranking people for years. He's claimed that Obama is a Muslim and that Hillary Clinton was sitting on a secret tape of Michelle Obama making a racist tirade. Nothing he says should be taken at face value. For Olbermann to do so sort of undercuts the self-righteous, sanctimonious, posturing that has made him an icon in his own mind and motivates him to hurl insults at doo-doo-covered blogs.

After England's home secretary Jacqui Smith barred Savage from entry for "seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred," Savage went crying to Hillary Clinton for help. He's also preparing a defamation suit in England against Smith, and he apparently expects all overweight conservatives to endorse an invasion of England over the outrage. Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly apparently haven't been amenable, so yesterday he lashed out:

Amongst all of them, [Limbaugh] is the biggest fraud. Rush Limbaugh is a fraud. When he was accused of the drug usage, I supported him. But that man is a one-way street. It's all about him. He's in it for nobody but himself.

Limbaugh wasn't exactly "accused" of drug usage—he copped to it on his radio show and submitted to random drug testing to avoid prosecution. Still, we feel for Savage. Who could have imagined that Limbaugh is so self-involved and uncaring?

Shitty newspaper news roundup: Layoffs at the Baltimore Sun, the NYT's union agrees to its inevitable pay cut, and Berkeley can't seem to get its shit together enough to hire a J-school dean even though, let's face it, that is a sweet sweet gig.


And don't forget the radio industry! Clear Channel is laying off almost 600 people. Hopefully, the people who pick the music played by Clear Channel stations.


One college reporter in Wisconsin triumphs over the school's football coach (every college reporter's dream), but then here is another story out of Wisconsin titled "Students flock to journalism school despite tanking news industry," so who knows whether Wisconsin journalism students are in their right minds or not?


Why just yesterday we saw that the dead NY Sun was putting content on its website again, and here comes Michael Calderone with the SCOOP straight from the mouth of the horse (former NY Sun ed. Seth Lipsky): "a business plan for the site is still in formation," he added, "these are just some very, very early bulbs of spring (or late winter)." There you have it: they're just bloggers.

We kind of felt for the Fox News anchorlady who got hoaxed by someone pretending to call from the scene in Binghamton. We didn't get the "Baba Booey" thing, either. But notice how she doesn't even pause at the mention of the formerly important shock jock's name. Has Howard Stern become a complete nonentity after leaving regular radio for satellite?

Emails, we get emails! Hearst is slashing costs by 20 percent in its supertroubled newspaper division. But the Web future's so bright, its reporters need to wear shades, one Hearsty tells us! "As the newspaper industry experiments with digital-only versions of the traditional newspaper, the piece gives a glimpse that investigative journalism and breaking stories are still indeed possible without the backup of a print product," writes Zoe Stagg, multimedia producer for Hearst digital bigwig Phil Bronstein, the former Mr. Sharon Stone. She's talking about an amazing scoop that the now online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer got about some soccer player named Fredy Montero (left) allegedly stalking some woman. Neato! Except that the scoop apparently consisted of getting a tip from the police. Here's an example of Seattlepi.com's amazing reporting: "Efforts to locate Montero's contact information were unsuccessful, and he could not be reached." Journalism has not been saved yet, dammit.

The Pacifica Foundation has changed the locks on New York radio station WBAI's transmitter, which has got the indy station's management all aflutter.

FishbowlNY reports that layoffs of six at Woman's Day included two pregnant staffers. What about the children?

New York Times editor Bill Keller tried to explain his NYT-is-bigger-cause-than-Darfur gaffe: "I think it's pretty obviously a reflection of my mild astonishment at the earnest fervor with which some people have suddenly embraced the cause of saving newspapers." He was being ironical, people! We think Keller should start his own blog so he can be this funny all the time.

Speaking of blogging, Andrew Sullivan writes 300-plus blog posts a week for The Atlantic. Then again, he has two assistants. Hunky, hairy, muscular assistants, we hope.

The teen's name isn't being released, but cops tracked him down via Weber's email and cell phone records, and he reportedly confessed to the crime early this morning. Weber had placed a Craigslist ad looking for rough sex:

"He saw the victim's ad looking for violent sex and said "I can smother somebody for $60" but it got out of hand," a source said.

The teen admitted he stabbed Weber, but couldn't remember how many times because he "blanked out" during the violent, drug-fuelled assault.

Details are still sketchy, but uniformly horrifying; the Post says that "The suspect told police that Weber pulled a knife on him, he took it and stabbed the former radio newscaster." Weber apparently fought back and wounded his killer, but ended up stabbed dozens of times, with his ankles bound with duct tape. [NYDN]

Being murdered is bad enough all by itself. But the circumstances of Weber's death — a male "companion" he met over the Internet, as the Daily News puts it, is the prime suspect — are unfortunate mostly because it gives the Post the excuse to run a headline featuring the words "Sex Slay." Not what one would imagine you would want your legacy to be immediately after your untimely death.

Cops are investigating the murder as a gay slaying, police sources said.

Investigators said gay-porn pictures were scattered around his ransacked home, but it was unclear if anything was missing.

There was no evidence of forced entry and investigators believe Weber may have known his attacker.

Cops are trying to identify several men who posed in various pictures with the victim, according to investigators. The photos were found in Weber's home.

Police are still investigating.

"The day you find out is fine," Imus said. "But the next morning when you get up, your knees are shaking. I didn't think I could make it to work."

He speculated that the cancer could be a result of stress.

Sad. Wait, they let Don Imus back on the air? When did that happen? [NYP]

Except for a brief break in 2001 when he had a virus that caused a weakened vocal cord, Harvey worked up until his death. He worked at ABC for 50 years, where his show "The Rest of the Story," was broadcast. Classic Harvey phrases included: "Stand by for news!" and was credited with coining "Reaganomics."

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2005.

The President of ABC Radio, Jim Robinson released as statement praising Harvey:

"Paul Harvey was one of the most gifted and beloved broadcasters in our nation's history. As he delivered the news each day with his own unique style and commentary, his voice became a trusted friend in American households."

For you young ‘uns: To get a taste of Harvey's unique, strangely peppy delivery, click here. Paul Harvey, may you R.I.P..

AMC was briefly forced to beg for donors to support her journalism after her Radar gig collapsed (along with the entire magazine). No matter!

Air America Media (www.airamerica.com) has hired Ana Marie Cox as its first Washington, D.C.-based national correspondent, travelling the country to profile people and stories illustrating life in America. She will contribute text, video and audio content to airamerica.com, as well as to a weekly program to air on Air America’s radio network.

Ana is going to the home of American darling Rachel Maddow. Who has Ana on her MSNBC show frequently now. And they're obviously pals—in the clip below, Maddow even offered her a ride home! Did Rachel Maddow give her the hookup for her new gig? We have no idea, but it's an angle. Congrats to Ana for finding a media job, America's most precious natural resource.