Monday Open Thread

Welcome to your Monday open thread. I won’t be around much, if at all, the next three weeks. I have important work meetings going on all week and then I’m going on vacation to Europe. So I hope you will behave yourselves in my absence (at least start).

Ron and Rand Paul are the current media facsination, so just to remind you about Libertarianism, I am reprinting this definition from the blog From Pine View Farm:

Libertarian, n:

A Republican unwilling to admit to polite company (or to himself) that he is a Republican. Frequently seen with a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution of the United States of America, which he will volunteer to misinterpret at the drop of an opinion.

Ron Paul was on FOX this Sunday telling Chris Wallace that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional — giving a textbook demonstration of this definition:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzc1Dx530uc[/youtube]

John Avlon at the Daily Beast writes about the Right-Wing Talk Radio Flameout:

Rush is a giant in his field, reaching more listeners than anyone in political talk, but even he has seen erosion in his numbers. Analysis of industry data shows that in market after market, Rush’s ranking has declined decisively over the past five years among advertisers’ coveted 25-54 age group. For example, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Rush fell from sixth to 12th between 2005 and 2010. In Portland, Oregon, he fell from fourth to eighth. In San Francisco, he’s seen a similar decline. Among listeners 65 and older, Rush remains No. 1. He can sell bedpans and resentment forever. But the demographic trend is not his friend.
It’s not that “the angry white guy conservative political talk format”—as consultant and former Clear Channel talk radio programming director Gabe Hobbs calls it—is over. It’s just got little room to grow, going forward.
“Rush has been around for 23 years. They’re not necessarily making new Ditto-heads. You have to fish where the fish are,” says Hobbs, who helped launch the radio career of Glenn Beck, among others. “We’re singing to this choir, that’s great, they’re worth a lot of money and they do a lot of wonderful things, but boy, there’s a lot over here we could do.”
“This civil and smart approach—like [John] Batchelor and Michael Smerconish and some other shows—to me is kind of a ‘duh,’ ” adds Hobbs, indicating that it should have been obvious long ago. “The numbers that NPR is drawing clearly portends to something. I’ve seen it myself in research. It’s the tone; it’s the approach. Some people don’t want to be engaged at that loud, angry level—that hard right or left ideological approach where it’s my way or the highway.”

This is interesting and folks have been writing about this for a few years — that the audience for this kind of resentment and self-pity is dying off and these hosts aren’t doing anything to replace their listeners. This is a good thing. Except that the author of this piece sees John Batchelor and Michael Smerconish as the new centrists that will save the day. Centrists? Really? Batchelor has been a major node for the Bill Ayers BS that was being pushed during the campaign and he is a fan for more war on Muslims and doesn’t much have time for Climate Change arguments. This doesn’t sound like centrism as most folks would recognize it, it sounds like a puff piece trying to recast some of the usual wingnuttery as *centrism* for those folks who no longer want to claim they are conservatives, but don’t want to drop the wingnuttery.