It's about friggin' time

Those who are long-time readers of this blog know of our long-standing wistful feeling of bereftness, even after lo these five-and-a-half years, that we will never again be able to turn on the radio at six minutes past six AM and hear the opening bars of that bumper music from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, followed by "It's six past the hour and this...is Morning Sedition!" And we at Casa la Brilliant are not alone. There's Melina and Seanie and Vernon and PJ and Krista and many, many more, for whom a radio show that ran for not even two years created a special kind of community. And at the forefront of some of the most brilliant radio comedy ever recorded was Marc Maron, who started out as a neurotic basket case, but who learned in that short time how to do radio. Because Maron might be a really funny comedian, but he's a GREAT radio host and interviewer. And in the last year, with his increasingly successful (and important in the industry) podcast, he's begun to be able to finally hone his craft without a bunch of inept suits being scared to death of what he brings to the table.

And now, at least on some NPR affiliates, Marc Maron is going to be back on terrestrial radio -- not live, not daily, but in a special version of WTF put together specifically for public radio.

Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America announced the good news a few days ago:

For about six months now, Sound of Young America editor Nick White and I have been working on a secret project. Now, the secret can be revealed... please welcome WTF with Marc Maron, the public radio series!

We've taken the hundreds of episodes of the WTF podcast and boiled them down to what we think is ten hours of exceptionally compelling radio. We've chosen the best stories and the best guests and made a ten-episode public radio series, produced by Marc, Nick and me.

Thanks to the kind support of Torey Malatia and Ira Glass, our first station commitment came from WBEZ and Chicago Public Media. We've got lots of other stations on tap, but feel free to let your station know it's available on PRX and that you love it. We hope that stations will air it this summer and early fall all over the country. (It was Torey and Ira's insistence, by the way, that led us to keep the name "WTF".)

If you want to hear the show, you can check it out, share it and review it on PRX. Our goal was to capture what makes WTF special and communicate it to folks who aren't comedy nerds - or even necessarily comedy fans. I think they sound wonderful.

So far only a few affiliates have picked up the show, and it looks like it will be a 10-episode run at first. But hey...you've got to start somewhere, and after a five year absence, it will be nice to have Marc Maron back where he belongs.

Thursday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: Rep. Anthony Weiner, for reaching across the aisle and giving kudos to the Republicans for at long last voting to free us from Tom and Ray Magliozzi:

Because after all, isn't that the most important thing that Americans care about?

I'll go Weiner one better. I'll congratulate the Republicans for their efforts to free us from these people:

And this guy:

And oh yeah...this dirty fucking hippie too:

...who plays dirty fucking hippie music like this:

Because in a country where companies refuse to hire the already-laid-off, where people over 50 are told they have to work till they're 70 in jobs that don't exist and young people out of college can't find jobs either; where states are requiring that religious dogma be taught as science and that everyone must have a gun and that 11-year-olds who were gang raped were asking for it, and where the thing that precipitated today's vote to defund NPR was demonstrated to be a fake by a site owned by none other than Glenn Fucking Beck, the most important thing in the world, what Americans went to the polls for in 2010 and voted for these clowns to do, was to get rid of NPR.

Honorable mention: The Great Driftglass, who pointed me to Weiner's awesome video.

Money quote:

Debate and reason do not work, because Conservatism is no longer operationally a political philosophy, and the GOP is no longer a political party. They are cults, and no self-respecting cult junior assistant copy-boy who is gunning for a promotion to the Cult Home Office ever made it into cult middle management by saying, "Whoopsie! Looks like we got this one wrong! Maybe the infidels are right this time and we need to rethink the Glorious and Infallible words of our Foundational Dogma."

Doesn't change the fact that NPR's CEO turned tail and fled

This is what happens when you think that "appeasing" psychopaths like James O'Keefe is the way to get him to stop:

Of course, the real story is never what it seems with O'Keefe. From the selectively edited Acorn videos to his abortive efforts to "take down" Senator Mary Landrieu (Democrat, Lousiana), which resulted in criminal charges, to his sophomoric attempts to get a CNN reporter in a room with him and a variety of sex toys, the mainstream media has had plenty of warning about his love of "truthiness" and disregard for actual facts. And, as with most of O'Keefe's videos to date, releasing selectively edited, embed-friendly clips got him exactly the coverage (and notches on his Flipcam) that he wanted – even as the full footage showed that almost everything he claimed to have discovered was untrue.

In the end, though, it wasn't the "liberal" media that jumped to NPR's defence, or even the mainstream media that O'Keefe and his followers decry as biased. It was Glenn Beck's conservative site, the Blaze, that thoroughly debunked the videos long after the mainstream media had breathlessly and largely uncritically reported their existence with the exact framing O'Keefe intended: NPR caught on tape defaming conservatives! Given the maelstrom of the 24-hour cable and internet news cycle, and in the midst of a pitched battle over Republican budget cuts, NPR's board waved the white flag and offered up its sacrificial CEO to the outstretched claws of the partisan attack machine.

Of course, after the videos have been debunked, NPR remembered to do the due diligence it should have done before and decided the videos were "inappropriately edited". Unlike former agriculture department employee Shirley Sherrod, who was fired in haste by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and later got an apology after her misleadingly edited video was debunked, there's not likely to be much absolution for either of the hastily-booted NPR executives. Despite some navel-gazing by reporters who shouldn't have swallowed anything from O'Keefe without a massive grain of salt to accompany it, the sad truth is that O'Keefe's reputation hardly had further to fall when they bought his story once again.

So, for all the evidence that should lead to the contrary, the great likelihood is that O'Keefe's headline-baiting videos will continue to claim victims. And reporters and editors will vow to learn, and then be unable to resist a good, truthy story – even if it's not the actual, you know, truth. After all, they can always run a correction – without losing their jobs.

And this is what happens when we run from a fight where we know we are right. Wingnuts are more married to their ideology than they are to their spouses -- and nothing, not even actual truth right in front of their eyes, will sway them. The media have become lazy cost-cutters doing whatever they have to in order to emulate Fox News (*cough* HuffPo *cough*). Facts don't matter. "Balance" means giving the same credence to demonstrable fact on the one hand, and utter horseshit pulled out of someone's ass on the other. It's disgraceful that it was a web site owned by Glenn Beck, of all people, to shed light on James O'Keefe's NPR shenanigans. Because NPR was too fucking lazy, or too fucking genteel, to do its own due diligence.

Ask President John Kerry what happens when you let lies go unanswered. Or President Al Gore.