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'I Must Warn You That The Women In This Town Have Loose Morals'

Tuesday, Feb 14, 2006, 7:15 am. I drive to my first Breakfast Club (an offshoot of David Horowitz's Wednesday Morning Club) at the Lux (14671 Sunset Blvd).

I fear the traffic will be bad and the free parking impossible to find. Instead I arrive within 15-minutes and have no problem finding a landing pad a quarter-mile from the hotel. It's not easy to walk there however. I run across four lanes of busy Sunset Blvd traffic, then across the grass and up the boulevard (there aren't sidewalks) until I arrive at 7:35. For the next 15-minutes, I read The Worry Cure: Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You by Dr. Robert L. Leahy.

CSPC (Horowitz's Center for Study of Popular Culture) employees Michael Finch and Elizabeth walk up. I get a name tag. I get a hot cup of lemon herbal tea. I get a muffin. I get grapes. I get watermelon. I get chamomile tea.

I meet our speaker -- Brian C. Anderson, the author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt against Liberal Media Bias.

The babes flow in. Yes, they're all over 50 but that doesn't bother me. That's how I like 'em. They have so much more wisdom about life. What's an extra 40 pounds?

I can think of no more romantic way to spend Valentine's Day than at the Breakfast club.

Brian has never been to the West Coast. Aside from his radio interviews, he's going to have a few free hours today before flying home to New York Wednesday morning. He solicits sight-seeing advice. Sunset Blvd is mentioned.

My concerns are lofty. "I must warn you that the women in this town have loose morals," I intone.

I receive these simultaneous responses:

"I'm not worried about that," he says. "I'm happily married."

"I take offense to that," says a mother of two college kids. She walks off.

Brian (who has a PhD in political philosophy from a Canadian university) is low-key and easy to talk to. I can't wind him up like a crank. He says his two most hostile interviews were by Al Franken and Michael Signorile. He got a couple of negative reviews on his book in the conservative press (New York Sun) but two positive ones in The Wall Street Journal.

He has not seen Brokeback Mountain but he did see Curious George with his kids.

By 8:35 am, the crowd of about 30 is seated.

Brian reads his speech (most of it was published in the Winter 2006 issue of City Journal). His voice often trails off at the end of a sentence and becomes inaudible. That and the wild screaming from the fevered crowd (OK, I made up that screaming stuff).

He says:

Dan Rather's retirement a year early signalled the decline of Old Media...

On New York's WLIB, Air America's ratings were below the all-Caribbean music that replaced it.

Air America doesn't even show up in the Arbitrons [radio ratings] for Washington D.C.

Liberals tend to be deadly earnest on the radio. They are taken over by Political Correctness.

FOX News was the first alternatives news organization to the mainstream elite. FOX broke the UN's oil-bribery scandal.

FOX predicted in its last poll before the election that Kerry would beat Bush by several percentage points.

On Brit Hume's FOX show, liberal and conservative thinktanks are quoted equally. On CBS, liberal thinktanks are cited 4-1 over conservatives.

Al Franken's a weird guy. Narcissistic. He mainly wanted to talk about himself and how I had not portrayed him fairly. I didn't lose my temper.

He has some weird psycho-drama going on. He's a terrible radio host. He has these long silences.

Instead of fighting back with ideas, liberals are illiberally trying to strangle new media.

The Left has lost its media monopoly and has trouble competing in the marketplace of ideas.

The Left likes campaign finance reform because it leaves exempt its two bastions -- the news media and academia.

All you need to do is tell people where the money comes from and let them make up their own minds.

Talk radio gets underestimated by conservative intellectuals. One-quarter of Americans listen to talk radio.

Both the Daily Show and South Park puncture the pieties of the Left. South Park is more popular than the Daily Show.

I can't stand Bill Mahr. I prefer Jon Stewart.

Dennis Miller would've flourished on latenight TV. He had that kind of personality.

CNN is reflexively liberal. I've been inside CNN. Everybody there is a liberal.

Canadian bloggers were not allowed to write about the election for 24 (or 48) hours before the election.

I ask him if he's debated David Brock. He says no. He doesn't think much of Brock and his organization Media Matters.