I am not making this up. NPR's Morning Edition:

Beck, a recovering alcoholic, says he needed to bottom out before he could recover. He says the conservative movement might need to do the same thing...

"Let [Democrat] Barack Obama get in, let them put these policies in. It will either work, or it will be a disaster."

Such a scenario would be good for the conservative movement, Beck says: "Jimmy Carter gave us Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton gave us Newt Gingrich. Every time there is this swing to extreme, the other side comes back with real conservative values, and you start to move forward again."

Beck says the conservative he admires most these days is former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), who was defeated for re-election in 2006. "I think this guy really has it. I think he really understands the world we live in right now."

NPR, are you having fun yet? Morning Edition is running a "Conservatives Hate McCain" festival all week. Yesterday, they faked us out with an interview with the director of the Conservative Union. Today they had "noted conservative" Glenn Beck. And tomorrow they interview...wait for it...Grover Norquist.

I promise you, NPR, if you have Katherine Harris on by Friday I'll pledge for another tote bag. Honest.

NPR's All Things Considered:

In his State of the Union address, President Bush asserted "a solemn duty to prevent the terrorists carrying out their plans." And that, he said, meant liability protection for companies that have cooperated with the eavesdropping program. Well, I can imagine Mr. Bush, if nothing else avails, issuing a blanket pardon for phone companies that may have broken the law. I can see these backstage battles spinning on for the rest of the President's term. Listen...

Download | play (h/t Scarce)

Ahh....the benefits of being a Bushie: you never have to apologize for your lack of knowledge.

Dana Perino appeared on NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and admitted that she RECENTLY had to ask her (British) husband if the "Cuban Missile Crisis" and the "Bay of Pigs" were the same thing.

Keep that in mind the next time she says, "let's take a historical perspective on this..."

Lord, save us from the idiots that are still unsure about this.  I have an idea: how about any person that hasn't yet figured this out line up to experience it?  I'm pretty sure once you've got up close and personal with a near-drowning, it won't be too hard to come down one way or the other on the issue.

MediaBloodhound: 

A recent segment on WNYC, New York's flagship National Public Radio (NPR) station, underscored not only the level to which public broadcasting standards have degraded during the Bush years, increasingly adopting the same intellectually dishonest frames and "fair and balanced" debate as those aired on commercial media networks, but also how, simultaneously, public broadcasting deceptively benefits from, and is protected by, its vaunted and entrenched reputation for providing quality information.

WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show hosted the segment "Is Waterboarding Torture?" preceding Judge Michael Mukasey's controversial confirmation for U.S. Attorney General. On its face, of course, this frame is straight out of the worst of network news and commercial talk radio.

"Lots of questions abound. Just what is waterboarding? Does it work? Is it torture? And waterboarding figures heavily in today's news....Do you agree that there are degrees of waterboarding? And so, you know, again in Mukasey's defense, he may not know to what degree this technique is actually used, how close to drowning somebody in the drowning experience, in actually filling their lungs with water, as our previous guest was describing, they actually go. Which also makes it difficult for him to take a position on whether the administration is using a torture technique." -- host Brian Lehrer

You know, I expect this kind of stuff from the Fox Networks, but man, how can you not grieve for NPR?

NPR:

The Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau has never been to Iraq or Afghanistan. But for years, his strip has chronicled the wars in those countries, with the stories of characters like Ray Hightower and B.D. - the football coach and Vietnam vet who went to Iraq with the National Guard.

Trudeau's latest project involves real-life soldiers. Doonesbury.com's The Sandbox is a compilation of writings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan that were posted on a blog at Doonesbury.com.

Trudeau tells Michele Norris that his goal was to provide a general audience the "flavor" of what life is like for troops overseas.

He asked soldiers to provide writing that "spoke to the texture of quotidian, day-to-day activities of [their lives]" and that were not rants about the war or the politics of the war.

You can hear Garry Trudeau's interview here as well as entries from 1t Sgt. Troy Steward and Sgt. Owen Powell of their experiences.

Well, one can hope. Garry Wills and I are both believing Christians, though certain fundamentalists would argue that, since Wills is Catholic and I'm Quaker, we don't count. His interview on Fresh Air (NPR) Thursday was the strongest and most lucid argument FOR the separation of Church and State I've ever heard: separation of Church and State ENCOURAGES religious practice among individuals, rather than stymies it.

In a new book about the constitutional separation of church and state, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills insists that that separation was meant as "the great protector of religion, not its enemy."

The entire interview is about twenty-five minutes long and well worth the listen.