I thought that as soon as you called up and pledged to public radio (like the annoying man told me to), the irritating pledge drive was supposed to end *immediately* (ok, well maybe not thought that, but wished it). Since that’s not how it works, I have been forced to expand my range of commute hour talk radio (until the pledge drives *do* actually end).

I generally listen to NPR because it produces intelligent (mostly) unbiased commentary and the people who call in aren’t total neanderthal morons. In comparison, most of the other talk radio that is broadcast is generally unimpressive. Making the rounds this is what I found:

• I have always found Rush’s rantings entertaining in small doses, but I am not sure if he is no longer on the air because I can’t seem to find him
• Howard Stern is entertaining in *very* small doses but is generally infantile and gets old quickly
• Sarah and No Name spend all of their time talking about stupid useless bullshit
• Michael Savage remains a xenophobic, racist, Nazi that I can’t deal with for even a second
• Armstrong and Getty are mildly entertaining but have no real staying value
• The biggest gem that I have found was Bill O’Reily’s show

What really won me over, in the first 15 minutes that I listened to O’Reilly, he said something that was actually intelligent. This was the first time on a non-public radio station that I had ever seen someone take a point, weigh the pros and cons and make a reasoned argument – I didn’t agree with his point, but that made me appreciate the way at which he went around going there all the more.

Unfortunately the moments of intelligence are few and far between and scattered among self-pitying whines about how he was cancelled from something or another or desperate self-praising pleads on how "only the Toledo times was intelligent enough to realize how great my show is while everyone just else ignored me" and there was a fair amount of other just general nonsense. However, compared to some of the tripe that is on the radio, it is not horrible.

While I am on the topic of political commentary, I think my buddy Kyong has some excellent comments on the Republican National Convention, although his "Girls of the right wing" commentary, gallery and survey are quite possibly the scariest thing that I have seen on the internet in the last month.