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7:14

Megan - I just want to say that there are few other human beings in the world that I would get up at 7 am for.

7:17

Moe Tkacik - Haha, there are few I'd donate free labor to Nick Denton for.

7:18

Moe Tkacik - And yeah, I am going to just let that participle keep dangling.

7:18

Megan - I just chugged a Diet Coke to be semi-functional, so I didn't notice the participle. Please ignore the belching.

7:24

Megan - Anyway, in your honor, I'm doing this slightly hungover, so I'm having trouble manufacturing outrage over another conservative radio host saying something offensive. If exploding Palestinian children is all this asshole's got, he needs to step up his game or just let Michael Savage ravage the airways on his own.

7:30

Moe Tkacik - So anyway, I am waking up early because I am "working" again,"at Clusterstock, in case anyone in the audience still gives a shit about AIG or the administration's mortgage modification efforts. (Which, if you have an adjustable rate mortgage, I guess would include you.) Good grief, who is that guy? I guess we all know now. Which reminds me I still haven't read that New Yorker piece about Savage, namely because I haatte their online reader or for that matter, everything online, and don't even ask me about the print ediiton the postal system doesn't recognize my existence.

7:34

Megan - The mailman tried that at my address, since we didn't put our name on the mailbox (despite the fact that there are 4 apartments and only one unlabeled mailbox), but then Hustler decided to release a bunch more parody porns and send them to me to review and now he's quite happy to buzz me and have me retrieve my porn that supposedly doesn't fit into my mailbox.

By the way, there's some asshole advertising on Limbaugh here in New York advocating that the government offer everyone a 1-year mortgage holiday. You know, for The Economy.

7:41

Moe Tkacik - OH, ha, what? I saw you were listening to Limbaugh. I will ask for the three sentence version of that in a minute. I'm still trying to get caught up on all the non-TARP involving news I have missed over the past nine months. In the meantime I will share with you the humbling story of how I was just at Starbucks, where I realized for the first time that the Black Crowes' song "Hot to Handle" was an Otis Redding song. (I was in China when that song came out "my generation," and it was still communist then and I was stuck with my existing Janet Jackson and Gloria Estefan cassettes and local hits like "The East Is Red," that is my excuse.) Okay, and I liked the Black Crowes, especially the Sofia Coppola video, but white people covering black music really got so embarrasing after the Animals and the Rascals. Of course, most of their efforts are considerably less embarassing than Cantonese covers of black music, so like, I guess there is a "value chain" at play here like everything else.

7:46

Megan - I found out last weekend that "Red Red Wine," which in my mind is always a reggae song, was actually penned and originally sung by Neil Diamond, because it came on the radio and my mom, the Neil Diamond Superfan, lectured me about how terrible it was that Neil never really got credit for it. Money, though, he presumably got.

I listened to Rush Limbaugh for six full hours and successfully managed not to try to scoop out my eardrums.

7:51

Moe Tkacik - Rush always gets credit for being actually smart for liberals who somehow didn't expect some AM radio yakker's jokes to be quite as sophisticated as, you know, rhyming Tiller with Killer, but I think, actually, it is because not enough liberals went through adolescence in a Real American household such as mine, and conservative hate talk is a weird secret catharsis to them. Because I never did understand the appeal, nor did my dad as I recall, who now gets all his news from the Daily Show.

7:55

Megan - Do you know the secret to why people think Limbaugh is smart? Because at least 4 times an hour, he reminds his listeners how smart they are.

It wasn't even that hateful, it was mostly inanely repetitive, distortion-filled, bereft of any knowledge of the legislative process and his jokes, as you noted, are quite stupid (HAHA Bill Clinton likes to fuck women! Hillary Clinton's a girl!).

My dad would probably quite enjoy Jon Stewart, too, but my mom won't let him have cable.

8:02

Moe Tkacik - "Red red wine" is a fucking abysmal song, but the Neil Diamond version has some great parts. It's funny your mom liked Neil, I think there was not a single performing artist my mom loathed more. Well, she used to completely despise CCR, which she always liked to enunciate really precisely, "Creedence Clear Water ReVIVE-al," like anyone who liked Creedence must also have really prominent mudflaps and be proficient at speaking in tongues, or something. Anyway, yes, all of which is to say, popular music, like Crappy Hour, used to be a helpful lens through which to understand the news of the day, but somewhere along the line the news just got too weird and yet predictable, too unexplainable and yet inevitable seeming, too thick with allegory, too depressing, too much hyperbole.

8:04

Moe Tkacik - Like, six months ago I was writing this essay that never appeared anywhere on how John Fitzgerald Page was sort of the Bernie Goetz of the chaotic era of "romantic deregulation"…

8:04

Moe Tkacik - And well, as it turned out no, there would be an actual killer of people to serve that role.

8:05

Moe Tkacik - Oh Jim DeMint on CNBC my favorite!

8:05

Megan - I mean, when the biggest news of the day is just a bunch of right-wing assholes ginned up by conservative think tanks to yell at Congressman about killing old people and a group of fringers claiming an elaborate conspiracy around Barack Obama's birth, is there any such thing as satire anymore? It's like, imagine the most inane shit ever, and in 4 months something wilder will happen.

8:06

Megan - By the way, it's turns out that I'm tangentially connected to the coal industry's fake letters to Congress! I used to work for the consulting firm (Hawthorn Group) that hired the firm (Bonner & Associates) that employed the fake-letter writers!

8:07

Megan - And here people thought I wasn't a "real" lobbyist when I first started writing.

8:16

Moe Tkacik - Yeah, I mean, this phenomenon was driving Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth completely insane BEFORE the fucking internet, and now I am reading quotes like, "The market of Internet addiction treatment in China is in a total mess due to lack of diagnostic standards and treatment guidelines," from Tao Ran, who directs China's first Internet addiction clinic at Beijing's Military General Hospital, in Drudge stories about how a Chinese kid died at the hands of abusive trainers at an internet rehab camp, and you're like, wait, there is a person in China who is outraged over the nation's lacking diagnostic standards…for internet addiction…and military-style rehab camps killing emotionally fragile teenagers…and meanwhile, they are using the same military-style tactics over in Xinjiang, and we can't say shit about it for the next 69 Treasury auctions, but like, the first point which never quite sunk in is that there are rehabilitation camps for internet addiction, which this guy says is the "biggest youth problem in China," and are our nation's pharmaceutical companies even aware of this?

8:18

Megan - They are, but anything they'd sell to combat it would just be reverse engineered, sold as generic and then counterfeited with non-active or poisonous ingredients and resold under their badly-Photoshopped logo, so they don't bother. Sort of like anti-malarials. Or, you know, not at all like that.

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