Another one gone....

NEW YORK — Rosie O'Donnell has fought her last fight at "The View."

ABC said Friday she asked for, and received, an early exit from her contract at the daytime chatfest following her angry confrontation with co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Wednesday. She was due to leave in mid-June.

It ended a colorful eight-month tenure for O'Donnell that lifted the show's ratings but no doubt caused heartburn for show creator Barbara Walters. O'Donnell feuded with Donald Trump and frequently had snippy exchanges with the more conservative Hasselbeck.

O'Donnell said last month she would be leaving because she could not agree to a new contract with ABC executives.

"Rosie contributed to one of our most exciting and successful years at `The View,'" Walters said. "I am most appreciative. Our close and affectionate relationship will not change."

In a statement, O'Donnell said that "it's been an amazing year and I love all three women."

No one was feeling the love on Wednesday, when the argument with Hasselbeck began over O'Donnell's statement last week about the war: "655,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Who are the terrorists?"

Talk show critics accused O'Donnell of calling U.S. troops terrorists. She called Hasselbeck "cowardly" for not saying anything in response to the critics.

"Do not call me a coward, because No. 1, I sit here every single day, open my heart and tell people what I believe," Hasselbeck retorted, and their riveting exchange continued despite failed attempts by their co-hosts to cut to a commercial.

According to a New York Post report, O'Donnell's chief writer, Janette Barber, was allegedly led out of the building on Wednesday after she was caught drawing mustaches on photographs of Hasselbeck in "The View" studios. ABC executives didn't return repeated calls for questions on the incident Friday.

On Thursday O'Donnell had asked for a day off to celebrate her partner's birthday. "The View" aired a taped show on Friday.

On her Web site, O'Donnell posted a scrapbooklike video on Friday with pictures and news clippings of her tenure at "The View." Cyndi Lauper's "Sisters of Babylon" played in the background.

A day earlier, she posted messages on her Web site indicating she might not be back.

"When painting there is a point u must step away from the canvas as the work is done," she wrote. "Any more would take away."

This means that Rosie joins Don Imus, and a long list of other very vocal opponents of the unHoly War in the Middle East and the horrific treatment of our veterans. On television, only MSNBC's Keith Olbermann remains.

As I have said since I started the Imus Update, this is not simply about Imus being gone. It is about a systematic silencing of voices contrary to the PNAC Cabal that runs the White House and control George Bush.

If we lose sight of that one fact, we may gain a sympbolic victory in the short run, but lose the great battle....the battle for what is left of this country

The Friday I-Post 5/18/07

Report: Don Imus Angling to Get Back on the Airwaves

According to the New York Post, sources say Don Imus' lawyer, Martin Garbus, is using the yet-to-be filed breach of contract suit as leverage for reinstatement with CBS Radio. But apparently, CBS is not budging and already has a countersuit waiting in the wings if Imus moves ahead with his rumored $120 million suit.

If filed, the suit is expected to claim that the network expected him to be controversial and irreverent under the terms of his contract -- and since Imus's show was on a 5-second delay the network could have censored him if they wanted. The Imus legal team also believes that it can take advantage of a clause in Imus' contract stipulating that he must be warned before being fired for making offensive remarks.

According to Post sources close to CBS's legal division, the countersuit notes that there are at least four provisions in his contract that would allow CBS to terminate him without notice. The countersuit also notes that there are indemnity provisions that make him liable for damages to the company if its program, station or business is harmed by his actions. (05-18-07)

http://news.radio-online.com/cgi-bin/$rol.exe/headline_id=n16575

Ex-Imus Sidekick to Audition in Boston
The Associated PressFriday, May 18, 2007; 3:23 PM

BOSTON -- A radio station plans to audition Don Imus' ex-sidekick to co-host a fallen politician's morning talk show, which is suffering from sagging ratings.
Bernard McGuirk will audition live on WRKO-AM's "Finneran's Forum" next Wednesday through Friday, station officials said. He is the "Imus in the Morning" producer and on-air jester who took part in the exchange of racist banter that led to his and Imus' dismissal last month.
He will be teaming up with former state House Speaker Tom Finneran, who was the most powerful lawmaker in Massachusetts until he resigned from the Legislature in 2004 amid a federal investigation.

Finneran began his news and politics talk show in February, a few weeks after he pleaded guilty to obstructing justice for lying about his role in a redistricting plan that diluted the clout of minority voters. He was fined and put on 18 months' probation.
Finneran said he was looking forward to working with McGuirk.

"I'm determined to make sure the show is entertaining, and Bernard's record is pretty clear.

He's a talented guy," Finneran said.

Offensive language will be off limits, Finneran said.

In the April 4 on-air exchange, McGuirk first called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "hard-core hos." In response, Imus called the women "nappy-headed hos." Both were eventually fired from the nationally syndicated show, which combined political discussion and comic banter and was also televised on MSNBC.

Jason Wolfe, WRKO's vice president of AM programming and operations, called McGuirk "entertaining, very witty. That, in combination with the intelligence-slash-wit of Finneran, could be interesting."

"The past's the past. It's over. It does not take away from the fact that he's extremely talented," Wolfe said Friday. "He's going to be presenting himself in a very different way than he was on the other show, because on the other show his role was different."
McGuirk could not be reached for comment; no phone listing for him could be found in the New York area.

WRKO, owned by Entercom Communications Corp., has dropped to ninth overall in the critical drive-time ratings for the January-March time slot this year, down from seventh last year, according to Arbitron. In November, host John DePetro and his engineer were fired after DePetro referred to a former Green/Rainbow gubernatorial candidate as "a fat lesbian."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/18/AR2007051800670.html?hpid=entnews

Don Imus is vulgar. So what?
Mr. Eyebrows is fired for an outburst you can hear at Bud's Lounge any night of the week, yet the man who has done lasting damage to this country is still in office.
By Garrison Keillor

May. 16, 2007 Gorgeous green spring came suddenly to Minnesota this year after weeks of tedious budding and blooming, a great burgeoning of foliage, and Bleak Street became the Via Paradiso, and we pale stoics took out pen and paper and wrote, "O love love love you are the best who ever was" or words to that effect, and we sat outdoors in the evening and thought of various reforms we mean to institute. More joyfulness, kindness to strangers, a general quickening of spirit, etc.

I once knew a man, a true iconoclast, who drank bourbon for breakfast and chain-smoked Pall Malls and held severe views about women, the church, American lit and society in general, a sort of post-beatnik, and every spring he vowed to reform and clean up his house, which had holes in the ceiling where he had poked his broom handle at the squirrels who ran around in the attic. It dawned on him what a mess he'd made of his life, but he fought off reform with Jim Beam, and the last time I saw him, he had just purchased a pistol, and I said goodbye. I had no interest at all in being shot by a drunk.

I thought of him when Don Eyebrows got fired by CBS and MSNBC in that outbreak of righteousness during which people lined up to be reprehended by what the man had said on his radio show, even if they hadn't heard him say it, though it seemed to be the sort of stuff CBS and MSNBC had paid him so handsomely to say.

The bad boys of radio, he and Howard and Johnny J and the Big Honk, are not shocking to anyone who has spent a few hours in a bar where people drink liquor and speak English. They're loud and vulgar, and so what? There's an audience for that. Plenty of young men feel so squashed by life, they are thrilled to hear other men rasping and hollering about wimmen and the gummint and the danged liberals, and what harm does it do me if the Honk does his act for the poor schlumps stuck in rush hour? No harm at all. The Honk is exercising freedom, bless his heart, just like the snake handler at the carnival or the man who eats flies. If you don't like it, don't look.

When you think of how Mr. Eyebrows had to sit in sackcloth and ashes and apologize, all for an outburst you can hear in a back booth at Bud's Lounge, and then you think of the lasting damage the Current Occupant has done to this country, a man who lends new richness to the word "malfeasance" and who is deaf on top of it and relaxed and pleasant in the face of fresh revelations, you see what a crazy country this is, but then we knew that a long time ago.
The French have a new president, the British will soon have a new P.M., and we envy them as we endure the endless wait for this small dim man to go back to Texas and resume his life. His party is coming to see that it must figure out how to tell the truth about him if it is to compete in 2008, but so far nobody has stepped forward and wound up to throw the pie. Their clock is stuck in the fall of 2001. They are sleepwalking toward the precipice.

Meanwhile, it is spring, glorious spring. An 80-year-old woman I know, who never had literary aspirations that I was aware of, has written a beautiful memoir. The son of a violist who plays in an orchestra with my wife has gone off to serve in Iraq, a boy brought up in a liberal household dead set against toy guns and violent TV shows. A tall sweetheart of a man who has done exceedingly well in the digital biz has sent an upbeat letter saying he has liver cancer and asking for prayers. My little sandy-haired gap-toothed daughter shoots baskets in the driveway, and when she hits a swisher she pumps her fist ("Yes!"). My mother has turned 92, still in her own home.

Everyday reality of life in America and neither the Big Honk nor the Current Occupant seem clued in to it. They both serve the same dwindling clientele of angry privileged white people; meantime the trees are in bloom and the beloved country looks at the calendar and waits for leadership that is worthy of it.

(Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.)
© 2007 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/05/16/keillor/print.html

Counterpunch: The Real Imus Lesson

(Slowly but surely, some people are getting it. Here is a piece from Counterpunch)

By DIANE WACHTELL
One lesson we should not take away from the Imus
debacle is how great it was that CBS pulled the plug on Imus once General
Motors, American Express, Sprint Nextel, GlaxoSmithKline, TD Ameritrade, and
Ditech.com threatened to yank their corporate sponsorships. Although the
corporate cards may have been played in the public's favor in this case, the
recent dance of the corporate initials, in which GM pulls the strings and CBS
jumps, is nothing to celebrate.

For each rare instance when media conglomerates swat down a bigot,
there are dozens and dozens of examples when a different kind of censorship
occurs. At The New Press, an independent not-for-profit book publisher, we were
contacted a few years back by a whistleblower at a cigarette manufacturer about
a box of internal memos indicating that cigarette manufacturers had long been
aware of the detrimental health implications of smoking. We were ultimately
unable to publish these "cigarette papers," because we were advised that the
litigation sure to ensue from the cigarette companies would probably have
exceeded the maximum payout of our libel policy.

Just last month, a college in the Northeast notified The New Press that
our book Literature
from the "Axis of Evil" had been selected by a committee of professors and
deans as a required book for all 750 incoming members of its Freshmen class next
year, as part of a Freedom of Expression initiative. We ordered a new printing,
only to learn two weeks later that the college president had vetoed the
committee's choice. He apparently was worried that the title of the book, which
is an anthology of literature from Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, might put off
potential funders of the university.

And next month we'll be publishing a book that examines a race-based
miscarriage of justice in Columbus, Georgia. The book, which impugns the
reputations of some stalwarts of the Columbus legal and social establishment,
was scheduled to be launched at a reception at a major Columbus cultural
institution. Then, some stalwarts of the Columbus legal and social establishment
threatened to pull funding from the local cultural institution, and the event
was abruptly cancelled.

The point is that the First Amendment too often exists at the pleasure
of monied and politically powerful interests, from corporations to university
fundraisers. (In fact, other efforts to enjoin New Press books from publication
have come from sources as disparate as the US Treasury Department, the US
Supreme Court, and Alan Dershowitz.)

To celebrate the demise of Don Imus is to endorse a selective approach
to free speech in which the advertisers become "the deciders" and get to run the
editorial department. Modern forms of censorship are insidious and often obscure
to the public, a public who naively rejoice when "the marketplace" rejects an
Imus. We may be pleased not to have Imus in the morning, but what happens to
that report on GlaxoSmithKline's payments to doctors in the afternoon?

Diane Wachtell is the Executive Director of The New Press,
a public interest, not-for-profit book publisher based in New York
City.

AP: Romney rejects ‘bigoted’ comment from Sharpton

Republican presidential hopeful former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney speaks during a caucus coffee, Wednesday, in Clear Lake.

CLEAR LAKE — Presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Wednesday denounced the Rev. Al Sharpton’s reference to his Mormon faith as ‘‘a bigoted comment’’ that doesn’t mesh with what he hears on the campaign trail as he seeks the Republican nomination. ‘‘It shows that bigotry still exists in some corners,’’ said Romney, meeting with reporters after a campaign event. ‘‘I thought it was a most unfortunate comment to make.’’ Romney’s campaign staff is sensitive to any references to his religion, and he was quick to react to Sharpton’s comments, made Monday during a debate in New York.

In the debate with atheist author Christopher Hitchens, Sharpton said, ‘‘As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyway, so don’t worry about that; that’s a temporary situation.’’ Sharpton has denied any religious bigotry, but Romney said he found the comment offensive. ‘‘Reverend Sharpton’s comment was terribly misguided,’’ said Romney. Asked if he considered the civil rights leader a bigot, Romney demurred. ‘‘I don’t know Reverend Sharpton,’’ Romney said. ‘‘I doubt he is personally such a thing, but the comment was a comment which could be described as a bigoted comment.’’ Romney added that he was willing to believe Sharpton didn’t mean to be offensive. ‘‘Perhaps he didn’t mean it that way, but the way it came out was inappropriate and wrong,’’ said Romney.

(Don sez: now WHO's the bigot........bigot?)

As he campaigns for the GOP nomination, Romney said he hears little criticism about his religious faith. ‘‘Overwhelmingly, the people I talk to believe that we elect a person to lead the nation not based on what church they go to, but based on their values and their vision,’’ said Romney. ‘‘I receive very little comment of the nature coming from Reverend Sharpton.’’

God Bless You DL Hughley!

A little explanation....and I do not know how long this will last. Our very first post was a classic bit of stuff by DL Hughley. That included a riff on the I-Man.

Then DL had to go there.

And NBC got nervous.

Here is the OFFICIAL NBC release......it IS pretty funny she-ott....but you WILL notice a slight edit.....

Well, here is the part they cut out!!!

If anyone can fit into those Stetsons, its DL!