BlatherWatch

Xmas trees, Rabbi Lapin. sock puppetry, flackery, feigned rage, airport intrique, blazing sound bites, and no trivialities like Iraq, North Korea, Darfur, Africa, and Iran

The Xmas trees are going back up in the airport, but not without a blaze of self-promotional breast-beating from our old friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin!

He's been laying low, at least locally, since the Senate Finance Committee allegations named him a bagman and a sock puppet for Jack Abramoff in June.

But always a soldier in the culture wars- the rabbi jumped up like Frankenstein with blazing sound bites and stern press releases and did his best to become the point-rabbi on the airport Xmas tree holocaust.

Tuesday oddems: the taters, the tina, meddy vedder, the balter, the mike!™ shrambo, danny rabbit, and the bad lieutenant gets the girls

~ The Taters start today (KVI m-f, 9a-12p) with John Carlson and his dad, Ken Schram arguing like the Jesuit schoolboys they are and now taking callers! This is a victory for liberals on talk radio- we've forced Fisher to water down Carlson's partisan Republican message with the contrarian, libertarian and loudly shouted views of Schram. (the preceding sentence is total crap- we have forced them to do nothing). If you heard Carlson's last PM shows last week, you heard more than one of the KVI choir tell him that they wouldn't be listening because of Schram. Not sure how may of them will hold out- but there's plenty of other right-wing talk for them to toddle to- not the least of whom is Big Pants on KTTH- or even liberal cume magnets like KIRO's Dave Ross, and KPTK's Thom Hartmann. KUOW's Weekday with Steve Scher gets many listeners from across the spectrum, especially in the election crunch months ahead or when the topic is something as universally riveting as waste water treatment.

~ Medvedspeak (KTTH m-f, 12-3p) has always driven us nuts. The Litter Picking Neocon has his own way of pronouncing certain words that is so annoying they've caused, on occasion, his ratings to tank. Meddy Vedder (as he's known in Issa-KWUH, as he'd say) never changes, despite years of our dogging him about some of these verbal outrages. Last week he managed to blart out 3 of the his most egregious- all in one segment: hair-a-cane, (for hurricane) Narlins (New Orleans) and boo-fay (for buffet). When the Kookie Kultural Krusader reported a stalker a few years ago, the police caught the guy and found he was armed with a Funk & Wagnalls and duct tape. He'd planned to tape Medved to a recycling bin and read him the English dictionary until he renounced his eccentric enunciations.

~ The tiny KIRO ball-sack shrunk back a little further into the 20th century a couple of months ago when management pulled the plug on the employees blogs on their otherwise fairly hip web site. The blogs (you can still see them here) were where we got to know some of the back of the house folks, many of whom are considerably more fascinating than the ones at the microphones. Tina Noles, who produces KIRO's Dave Ross and Ron Reagan (m-f, 12-1p) has started her own site, Dogs, Blogs, Politics and the Personal, where she opines, and stores her blog entries from the era when KIRO radio was almost getting it.

Rabbi lapin: mel gibson gave us money

In a post on his website Tuesday, Rabbi Daniel Lapin (KSF0 Sundays, 1-4p) admitted Mel Gibson "has provided some financial support to Toward Tradition"

(Toward Tradition is Lapin's non-profit that says it fosters the marriage of the Judeo to the Christian, empowering the two to skip through their lives together spawning conservative Republican strategy values and raising healthy sums children. Founder and former board member: disgraced Republican Washington flim-flam man, Jack Abramoff).

Lapin adds, astonishingly: "A balanced and reasonable view would be that if indeed he really does hate Jews, then he deserves respect for his self control when not drunk." (emphasis added)

Very Christian of you, Rabbi. That's like saying, "Thank-you sir for not making a lampshade out of me, despite that we know you'd love to."

Lapin addressed his friend Mel Gibson's recent drunken Jew-baiting behavior after BlatherWatch, in a post Sunday, called upon him to do so.

Mel gibson's drunken jew-baiting: now what do you say, michael medved, rabbi lapin?

In an national atmosphere of heightened anti-Semitism tragically and violently portrayed here in Seattle, Friday, Mel Gibson added to the fire by spewing profane and anti-Jewish language at cops arresting him in Malibu for drunk driving.

There's a local talk radio connection- both Seattle-based syndicated talker Michael Medved and fellow Mercer Island resident, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, radio host at San Francisco's KSFO were leading national apologists and ran the right-wing Jewish offense for Gibson through the controversies around the launch of his harsh, bloody, Jew-baiting Christian screed-flick, The Passion of The Christ in 2004.

Marketing genius broke attendance records by enticing fundamentalist Christian churches to buy tickets in blocks; rent out entire theaters, and fill them up with evangelicals who usually reject the offerings of Hollywood, especially movies rated R, which this one was because of the gratuitous and bloody torture scenes.

The incredibly successful (more than $611 million gross) cinematic depiction of Christ's last days was widely criticized by many mainline rabbis as anti-Semitic. The portrayal of Jews as manipulative, hook-nosed thugs was considered by many Jews as a suspicious bit of editorializing by Gibson.

Although he's told the media that he regards The Passion as having actually been directed by the Holy Ghost, he otherwise had total artistic control of the production.

Lapin and Medved were among the right-wing Jews shown the film before it was released. When non right-wing Jews such as New York Times critic Frank Rich asked to view it, they were turned away, "thus allowing Mr. Gibson's defenders, in a perfect orchestration of Catch-22," wrote Rich at the time, "to say we were attacking or trying to censor a film we 'haven't seen.'''

(Let us inject here what Gibson (fine Christian gentleman that he is) wants for Frank Rich. Presumably sober at the time, he told the The New Yorker in 2003:  ''I want to kill him, I want his intestines on a stick... I want to kill his dog.'')

Lapin, who Rich has described as the "show rabbi of the religious right," called the gruesome, Christian-proselytizing film, "wholesome entertainment that depicts Christianity in a positive light," and castigated other rabbis' protests. "The very public nature of their attack on Gibson," he said, "exposed their real purpose- fundraising."

Seattle Babble-on: bitchy, bitchy parentheticals about Republican "celebrities"

We really tried to wake up and listen to Sytman & Boze's (KTTH m-f, 5-9a) Big Week. Dave Boze has been off getting married or divorced or liposuctioned or bearing his love child or something equally sneaky and repressed.

The show, on the nearly moribund KTTH, had a well-publicized (well, BlatherWatch covered it) 2 weeks of "celebrity" co-hosts with Dan Sytman, the oldest Young Republican since Ralph Munro. (We kid Dan Sytman).

Truth is, BlatherWatch burns the midnight oil pretty much every night, and could (would) only wake sort-of-up to listen at the desperately early hour this show comes on. We haven't been up that early since we milked cows in the Nooksack Valley back in the day or greeted grubby college dawns bright-eyed, and bushy tailed with a hot steaming cuppa crack.

In otherwords, we missed most of the good stuff, so you wouldn't have to.

The first week's co-host was political entrepreneur and renowned horse's ass, Tim Eyman. Despite some good laughs we've had over his latest bout of colorful woppers and assorted recent embarrassments, we have to admit, he proved the best talk host with his steady flow of bullshit. The essentially caller-free KTTH morning show really needs that steady verbal effluence; and Eyman, inspired by the very idea of himself, lept into the breech. That, we guess, is no surprise; and that he never succeeded in failing to not guide the conversation back to his own self, fulfilled another of our insightful predictions. (The preceding sentence is an example of why we blog- no editor with a watt in her pretty little head woulda let that one go by; but we found it a pristine yet obliquely brilliant communication- the kind of pretentious clarity only a triple negative can bring to the page).

The second week, which we dubbed The Wing Nut Bowl, was a slumgullion of local Republican "celebrities," who broke through our defensive quilting of slumber only fitfully.

("Local Republican celebrity" is a meaningless phrase and we use it ironically. The title of The Washington State Republican Who's Who was changed a few years ago simply to Who?)

Monday's appetizer was "Stefan Sharkansky," the pseudonym of Sound Politics' Eric Earling, who self-describes as an "outside-the-box conservative" (which simply means he's another right-winger who's not getting laid). We were roused up into REM layers only once during Earling/Sharkansky's endless time on the Snide Hour. It was when he admitted that after 3 (three!) years living in Seattle- HE'S NEVER BEEN TO THE PIKE PLACE MARKET! Which leads us to conclude that, not only is Earling not getting laid, he's not getting any decent cheese, either.

Boze gone missing, week II: wing nut bowl

Tim Eyman isn't working out so well replacing the vacationing Dave Boze on the morning drive, Sytman & Boze (KTTH m-f, 5-9a). It was a little embarrassing, maybe, for such a starchy conservative as Dan Sytman when Eyman said Wed., he wished the City of Seattle would just leave the poor strippers- and the men who love them- alone.

We're not used to hearing that kind of licentiousness, or defense of the sporting life on KTTH, and neither is Sytman. For us, it was welcome yet off-putting. We were reminded that despite Eyman's recent opportunistic forays onto the stark landscape of the Christian right (as in the anti-gay rights referendum he recently blew up), at heart, he's really a fraternity brother whose development was arrested somewhere between here and WASU, 1985 and he still hasn't made bail.

Another time he opined that "The sad reality is that most people are fat and ugly." That, we're sure, endeared him to many, but he went on that he just wished those people could all be more like Christie Brinkley.

He also made Dan nervous running in and out of the studio during the show like Mike Webb in a Twinky fugue.

So KTTH Programming Director Tom Clendening decided on a "mixed nuts" approach for next week's fill-ins.

Here's the skedge as announced by Entercom Wednesday:

Monday: Stefan "The Shark" Sharkansky of SoundPolitics.com is a GOP activist and rumored to be on the party payroll. We kid Stefan, but his on-air countenance crackles with a vibrant energy that's conducted obviously from his day job in finance- it has the sizzle of fresh office supplies. His humor-free cooperative site is the state GOP's only real stake in the blogosphere (OK Jim, OrbusMax is important, but it isn't a blog). Stefan got tons of media attention and Party accolades after he tried to obstruct the victory of Governor Gregoire. Stefan is a moderate urban Republican, whose nastiness counters delightfully his alleged moderation. Remember the shark Gilligan had to jump to save the plot? For the R's, Stefan is that shark. He does a admirable job of acting as if everything he says is true.

Tuesday: Rabbi Daniel Lapin is by far the most famous on the list. He's gotten national renown with his impressive Rolodex which has been made very public of late by such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Seattle Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and the Justice Dep't. We're hoping Dan and the listening audience will get rebbe to share the rich and famous experiences he's had with his rich and famous friends. What's it really like plotting with Jack Abramoff? What does Tom Delay take in his coffee? When you hang with Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, do you ever just talk about chicks? How does it make you feel being questioned by Federal investigators?

Wednesday: Rev. Ken Hutcherson, we hope, can be stopped from talking about Jesus- a topic well-known in talk radio as a real cume killer. Better to get the anti-gay, anti-sex, mega-churched, mega-mouthed evangelical to talk about the things he knows about- like raising Rottweilers, breeding thoroughbred quarter horses; or pushing fags out the door of the Kingdom of Heaven. Or national issues like 'Who would Jesus torture?' Or 'During The Rapture, will Dick Cheney be ready to take the wheel, or will he need to?' or 'Can Rush Limbaugh win redemption?' or 'Have you ever killed anybody?'

Thursday: Republican Party Chair Diane Tebelius, known on the blogs as "Diane Tubeless," is as stiff as concrete meringue, and in way over her head. She has deep roots and some support from the theocratic wing of the Party (she worked for born-again loser and failed Senate candidate, Linda Smith) but they don't trust her much since she became Chairman and had to attempt some consensus building. She can be mean and relentless, a side she's shown only in her various unsuccessful runs at office, but unfortunately for KIRO, you won't hear it on the radio. You will hear platitudes; lip service paid to compassion; but not much about George Bush and few of what the rest of us would call jokes.
She did not, by the way, need a sex change to become Chairman.

Friday: Attorney General Rob McKenna is a wonk, a lawyer and a technocrat, dry as dust on the radio, but he's one of the very few Republican statewide officeholders which makes him a member of a tiny, elite corps. Mainstreamers and moderates such as Sec. of State Sam Reed, Lands Commish Doug Sutherlund, and McKenna, are pretty drab; but they're the only Republicans that can get elected state wide because the short hairs are still held by rural social conservatives and evangelicals who can't come up with candidates who don't scare the horses. No coincidence, Sam Reed won't be on the show- he's still on the shit-list of many party hardies who haven't forgiven him for bravely doing his legal job counting the legal votes during the frivolous Republican 2004 post-election.

Frankly, this line-up won't start any fires, nor scare-up any more callers of listeners than Boze or Eyman usually do.   

Rabbi daniel lapin in the san francisco bay guardian

Fundamentalist Mercer Island talk host, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, our proud Seattle connection to the Abramoff/Delay lobbying scandal is highlighted in the new issue of San Francisco's venerable Bay Guardian ("Rabid Rabbi") in a brilliant, yet dreary piece by BlatherWatch's Michael Hood.

(It's brilliant because we wrote it; dreary because the hard right is such a soul-sucking topic.)

It's introducing home-boy and "show rabbi of the Christian right" to the Bay Area, where he recently moved his talk franchise to San Francisco's mighty conservative talker, KSFO, on Sundays 1-4p. (

We thought they should know him as we all do.

Lapin folded up his Sunday talk show in Seattle in February. He'd been filling in for KSFO hosts and began broadcasting his own Bay Area show in April from a Seattle studio.

Our Lapin files:
Daniel Lapin: The Right's favorite Rabbi by Bill Berkowitz, Media Transparency
Meet the Lapin Brothers  by Rick Anderson, The Seattle Weekly

BlatherWatch posts
More embarrassment for rabbi daniel lapin
Seattle times: rabbi daniel lapin abramoff connections
Rabbi Daniel Lapin: show rabbi of the racists
Rabbi Daniel Lapin: "The Man Who Stands By His Scandal-Ridden Friends"
Rabbi Daniel Lapin: More National Embarrassment
Rabbi daniel lapin, a long look backward

More abramoff embarrassment for rabbi daniel lapin

Once again, erstwhile Seattle talk host, Rabbi Daniel Lapin made national news after newly released documents in the Jack Abramoff scandal show how the disgraced lobbyist secretly routed funds through tax-exempt organizations with the "acquiescence of those in charge." in Sunday's Washington Post.

(Lapin has been all over the right-wing dial in Seattle- on KVI, KKOL, and most recently, KTTH. In April, he moved his weekly talk show to San Francisco's right-wing talker, KSFO Sundays, 1-4p.)

Those in charge and acquiescing, it turns out, are such values community leaders as conservative anti-tax guru, Grover Norquist; former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph "Boyo" Reed; and, once again, Mercer Island's anti-gay activist and anti-recycling fundamentalist, rabbi Daniel Lapin.

E-mails show that Abramoff also moved client money through a conservative Jewish foundation called Toward Tradition, run by longtime Abramoff friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin. In January 2000, when Reed sent Abramoff an $867,000 invoice to be billed to a Choctaw official, Abramoff responded: "Ok, thanks. Please get me the groups we are using, since I want to give this to her all at once." Reed responded: "Amy, Grover, Lapin and one other I will get you."
...
Abramoff tapped the same cluster of tax-exempt groups in 2000 to help defeat legislation to ban gambling on the Internet. Abramoff's client, an online gambling services company called eLottery, donated money to ATR, the policy research center and Toward Tradition.

In May 2000, just before a key vote on the anti-gambling bill, the research center paid for the Scotland trip for then-House Majority Whip DeLay. Toward Tradition hired the wife of DeLay aide Tony C. Rudy, who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to corrupt public officials, saying his wife was paid in exchange for his official actions. Lapin has said his hiring of Lisa Rudy was not connected to any eLottery donations.

"It's not a tax-exempt activity to act as a bag man for Jack Abramoff," Marcus S. Owens, a former Internal Revenue Service official told the Washington Post.

We'll be mighty interested to see if the Bush Justice Department or the IRS will be doing any prosecuting these of these "charities" for their "acquiescence" to Abramoff laundering.

We've reported that Toward Tradition has fallen on hard times since all this has unfolded- the organization has vacated its leased north Mercer Island offices, laid off most of the staff, and is being run- mostly by the good rebbe- and from home.

This isn't the first time his non-profit has been mentioned as a laundromat for the former fat-cat lobbyist. Here's some more reading about the rabid rabbi:
Seattle times: rabbi daniel lapin abramoff connections
Rabbi Daniel Lapin: show rabbi of the racists
Rabbi Daniel Lapin: "The Man Who Stands By His Scandal-Ridden Friends"
Rabbi Daniel Lapin: More National Embarrassment
Rabbi daniel lapin, a long look backward

TALKERS MAGAZINE Heavy 100 weighs heavily on its own credibility

Talkers Magazine, the self-proclaimed "Bible of Talk Radio and the New Talk Media," ranks the "100 most important hosts" in the business every year in its "Heavy Hundred."

It's an honor flaunted up by those who make it and pooed upon by those who don't. It's an annual ritual.

The list is dominated by conservatives, naturally.

The Heaviest Five are, not surprisingly: Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and Dr. Laura. Randi Rhodes at 10th beat out O' Reilly, (the bastard) who's at 11th; the nasty scold, Laura Ingraham, 7th; Progressive Ed Shultz came in at 13th; while Air America's Al Franken was 18th; and Hannity's bitch, Alan Colmes, 16th.

Local honors: Seattle talkers John Carlson, (no.76) Michael Medved (no.29) were ushered in this year, Medved for the second time. This is a big deal for Carlson who is not nationally syndicated, and hasn't even been doing that well in the ratings. These rankings aren't about ratings (we'll get to what they are about later).

Rabbi daniel lapin falls on hard times...

Fundamentalist Rabbi Daniel Lapin's non-profit Toward Tradition, named as a laundering conduit in the Jack Abramoff influence peddling scandal is having financial difficulties.

The former KTTH talk host's organization has vacated its leased north Mercer Island offices, laid off most of the staff, and is being run- mostly by the good rebbe- and from home.

Don't feel too sorry for him, though, his new work environment isn't exactly Spartan. His manse zestimated at a little over $1 million is in a luxurious neighborhood on the plush south end of the island near Pioneer Park with its old growth, hiking trails and horse paths.

His friend, talk host Michael Medved (KTTH m-f, 12-3p) lives a few blocks away in a comfy cottage valued at some $1.2 million.