Talk about intrepid reporting: I'd like to seen an embedded war journalist knowingly step into this.

The biggest stories to come out of talk radio this election cycle have been found on the right side of the dial, as it were.

First there was Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and co.'s aggressive campaign against Sen. John McCain. More recently, we've seen Rush spearhead an apparently effective gambit to prop up Hillary Clinton with backhanded Republican support.

What I'm wondering is, with excitement on the left more intense than it's been since, well, 2006, and with Democratic turnout so sky-high, why hasn't there been a boost in listenership for Air America Radio or other liberal talk-radio outlets?

Ratings reports aren't current enough to bear out my hunch — and lefties will charge the game is rigged against them — but I'd be surprised if liberal talk has seen a significant uptick this year.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this might have something to do with it: National Public Radio's audience is bigger than it's ever been.

Playwright-author-screenwriter David Mamet has a piece (in the Village Voice, of all places) describing his gradual realization that '60s utopian-leftist idealism just doesn't square with reality.

The nutgraph, buried deep in a wonderfully discursive piece:

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

Annie Leibovitz, Robert Johnson playing the background, and Keith being ... Keith: Yes, he remains the coolest dude on earth.

Dovetailing with my recent piece contrasting "Little" Steven Van Zandt's reactionary opinion of new rock with Bruce Springsteen's small-c catholic listening habits, check out what's on the latter's iPod.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear this trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's forthcoming "The Happening" was a parody of a really bad M. Night Shyamalan movie, put together by some band of guerrilla short-film makers. That, or an SNL skit starring Mark Wahlberg.

Nope. It's a genuine really bad M. Night Shyamalan movie.

Times are tough for print publications as it is. Just imagine how tenuous is the business model of a small, niche-driven magazine that covers the music industry.

Such, at any rate, is the sad, double-whammied fate of No Depression, the alt-country magazine that will shutter its dead-tree operations after 13 years of publication. R.I.P.

Reminds me of these halcyon days.

Hmm.

Perhaps this is a question better suited for a self-described ethicist, for I am hopelessly undecided.

A friend asks whether it's appropriate to open and download for oneself a CD bought as a gift for a loved one.

Generally, I think the removal of plastic packaging constitutes a breach of gift-giving etiquette. The benefit, too, of personal consumption that accrues to oneself via the download is another ethical red flag.

Then again, music in this day and age is such an amorphous commodity; who, really, can claim ownership of it at all? And at a time when you can get almost any new release for free, giving someone a hard copy is itself an effort that constitutes a gift of a kind.

I guess, ultimately, it depends on the loved one.

What do you, wise readers, think?

In what has to be one of the most egregious wastes of inch-count ever in the "Paper of Record," novelist Dave Eggers laments Hillary Clinton's victory (in raw popular vote, at least) over Barack Obama in the California Democratic primary.

Given Obama's triumphs in states like Kansas and Idaho and Virginia, this outcome, Eggers suggests, is ironic. California, you see, is supposed to be more "progressive" than Kansas and Idaho and Virgina. And Barack Obama, as every sentient person knows, is the most "progressive" candidate in the race. Therefore California has been, in Eggers terminology, "out-progressived" by the normally benighted peoples of the South and Midwest.

"It was hard not to detect, at least here in the Bay Area, the sense of disappointment in our state after the subsequent primary results. To be out-progressived by Alabama, Maryland and North Dakota? Painful," Eggers writes.

"Syllogistic" is what I think they call this kind of reasoning.

Something tells me that if one were to shake Dave Eggers by the lapels and say, "It's more complicated than that" — there are demographic factors, such as race and class and education levels, at work here — he would just tune me out. Barack Obama's emergence as the "change agent" (or should we just come right out and call him a prophet?) is nearly complete.

Much as I find Obama personally charming and decent, this is what fatally turns me off about the Obama candidacy — namely, the condescension that is at the core of his overeducated elite supporters.

To oppose Obama — for Clintonites, as well as Republicans — is to stand in the way of The Way.

Gag.

As a corrective on my piece today on the Hollywood writers' strike, in which I notice that the media's sympathies seem clearly on the side of the writers, Rob Long, the TV writer and producer and National Review contributor, says, Hold on a minute:

The real player here, aside from all of the nonsense celebrity coverage, is Variety, which relies on studio advertising, but is also the last word around here for news and analysis. So it matters to the writers if Variety seems to be tilting to the studios.

The truth is, Variety seems generally pessimistic about the chance that the writers have to make a good deal. They're skeptical of the guild's claims to have a lot of leverage, and a lot of writers don't like to read that. Even if it's true.

Long might be onto something, as my take was, well, decidedly pessimistic.

And given some of the coverage of the Directors Guild of America's recent compromise with the studios — the common reaction seems to go something like, "Now that wasn't so hard, was it?!" — it appears the media is generally growing exhausted with the strike. Typical.