Don Imus

Don Imus refused to speak to the press at Christie’s auction house in Rockefeller Plaza last night, where a fund-raiser for the children’s charity S.K.I.P. was being held, but the jock-who-shocked-too-much was happy to show his eight-year-old red-headed son, Wyatt, how to flip the bird.

But before extending his extremely long middle finger before the young boy’s amused face, Mr. Imus was wandering around the art-filled galleries wearing his signature lonesome cowboy outfit: brown ten-gallon, mammoth belt buckle, holey jeans and weathered boots. A few feet behind his family, a bodyguard held vigil over their every move.

Mr. Imus, 67, whose radio program on WFAN was infamously cancelled last spring after he employed highly insensitive language to describe some of the players on the Rutgers women’s basketball team, is expected to again return to the airwaves (he was fired from radio once before, in 1977). This, he didn’t want to discuss, but his wife Deirdre was willing to tell the Daily Transom about her love for fine art.

“Oh, god yes! I love the Impressionistic period, the Western art—you know, Frederic Remington, Charlie Russell—and then, again, I like artists like Mark Rothko, things like that too.”

So is Ms. Imus excited about her husband’s possible return to radio?

“You’d have to ask him about that. I don’t want to comment on that.”

Matthew Drudge is reporting that Don Imus has finished an eight-figure, multimillion-dollar deal to return to the airwaves on WABC.

According to Mr. Drudge, Mr. Imus starts broadcasting Dec. 3.

 

• drudgereport.com

Dan Abrams will stay in the MSNBC anchor chair in the 9 p.m. slot, instead of managing the cable network's news report, The New York Times reports; that means that Joe Scarborough will remain in the morning position previously occupied by Don Imus.

 

 

MSNBC said today that Dan Abrams, who has been the host of a 9 p.m. news hour called “Live with Dan Abrams” temporarily since July, will stay in the job permanently, leaving behind the managerial position he had occupied for a little over a year.

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In a move akin to firing Bobby Knight and replacing him with Woody Hayes, CBS Radio has at last settled on Don Imus's successor: Craig Carton.  read more »

That's what Matt Drudge is reporting, citing a source close to ... Don Imus!

We'll wait till we hear it sourced to CBS Radio, which chucked Imus' top-rated morning show after he referred to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed 'hos," before deleting the question-mark.

 

 

 

 

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Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui mailed out a disturbing video to NBC News in which he says things like, "You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience."

Reactions to the late-term-partial-birth abortion ban from the 2008 candidates was quick and broke along party lines.

Hillary Clinton's favorable ratings sunk in a USA Today/Gallup survey.

John Edwards may be having lunch with Mario Cuomo today.  read more »

For eight years, Philip Nobile has led the anti-Imus charge: "I feel vindicated."  read more »

On top of the New York City Council's to-do list today: denouncing Don Imus.

Tish James of Brooklyn said she would introduce a resolution for him to be fired immediately.

Leroy Comrie of Queens said that Imus's radio station should set up a scholarship fund for female athletes, since he disparaged them.

And Larry Seabrook of the Bronx said he applauded the companies who "became friends of the struggle" when they pulled their advertising from Imus' show.

Mathieu Eugene and Harry Schiffman are the only candidates on the ballot for the April 24 special election in Brooklyn, a Board of Elections spokeswoman told me.

The AP has more on that national Eliot Spitzer PAC I reported on earlier.

A parent leader responds to being called a "special interest" by Mayor Bloomberg.

Bloomberg, who's been on a tear against the media, threatened to take away press parking.

Liz, on her first full day blogging at the Daily News, has Al Sharpton's letter about Don Imus.

Hillary said Imus' remarks were "small-minded bigotry."

Michael Cooper follows Citigroup's response to Eliot Spitzer's plan to close some corporate tax loopholes.

Ben has Barack Obama mail.

Hillary is winning the online primary, in at least one respect.

The Manhattan Institute has a spreadsheet of Albany's pork projects.

Fred Thompson has lymphoma, but it's in remission.

TNR decides that Democrats should avoid Fox News.

Rapper DMX failed to show up to court today.

-- Azi Paybarah

New York City's buildings produce too much carbon dioxide, according to a new report from Mayor Bloomberg.

City water rates are expected to rise.

Former Newark mayor Sharpe James is leaving politics.

The teachers union may try to grade mayoral control.

The head of the UFT has an op-ed in support of a whistleblower bill being heard in the City Council.

Errol Louis says that said Don Imus' remarks were "sneering contempt for black achievement, playing out the worst fear of many black professionals."

Rudy Giuliani said he forgives Imus, and would reappear on his show.

Bill Hammond thinks Eliot Spitzer could learn a thing or two from Andrew Cuomo.

Part of the pressure on Spitzer to negotiate a budget by the April 1 deadline was the fact that more money was coming into the state coffers, which would have made it harder to cut state spending.

Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi went to the Mets game in an official county car.

"The problem with Obama's reformist message is that it prevents him from singling out Bush and the GOP in a way that's very satisfying," wrote Naom Scheiber in TNR [subscription].

And there's now a "real-time display of the catastrophic accidents, violent weather and epidemic outbreaks unfolding across the globe." -- Azi Paybarah

I hung out with my parents this weekend and whenever I do I think about how assimilated I am.

I grew up in a very Jewish family, now I'm like what we used to call a Waspy Jew. I can laugh at this with my non-Jewish wife around my parents, but I don't think they're entirely amused. It probably hurts my mother a little. Though it's also true that back in '68 her best friend Golda moved with her family to Israel partly out of the fear that her kids would marry Christians if they grew up in the States. My parents didn't want their kids marrying Christians but they didn't want to give up on America either. And they raised their kids to be pretty open, notwithstanding the tribal messages. Of their six kids, half married Jews. But I'm the most assimilated, don't think of myself as very Jewish at all.

It's not hard for me to stand up for my choices, I'm proud of them, I wouldn't make them differently—but sometimes I feel that I should hold the torch for assimilation. I can't really, everyone has got to make their own choices in this regard, and should be able to. But where it gets more dicey is around the anti-intermarriage rules of the Jewish religious organizations. I don't think you can have major power in America and say, Guess what, other people can't marry our kids. When Lieberman was running for VP I wrote a piece in the Observer challenging him on this score, making it an issue, and when Lieberman went on the Don Imus show, Imus asked him about intermarriage and he specifically denied that there was anything in his conservative faith's rules against intermarriage. This was a lie. But it underscores my point. You can't aspire to major power in America and say, You can't marry our kids. It's indefensible for a presidential candidate. And it's problematic if you're an important segment of the establishment. Like: Yes, I will run the university, or the think tank, or the political party, but you can't marry my kids.

My reasons for marrying "out" and assimilating generally are of an emotional character, I am sure. I felt stifled by tribal constraints. But I can rationalize my decisions politically as well. Jews (or the more secular and reformed segment of the tribe) wanted to stop being outsiders in my generation and America said, OK, you can be insiders. To me, it's hard to be insiders in American society and maintain a sense of otherness. It will happen to any tribe, and it's happened to mine. The Jewish sense of otherness is, We're smarter and we're distinct and persecuted. I grew up with all that but now incredble success has brought a lot of pressure on that identity. O.K. maybe you are smarter, but you're not persecuted, and hey, can my daughter marry your son. I want her to marry a smart boy!

I know, there's a ton of religious claptrap surrounding these issues, and a lot of piety, but that seems to me the sociological reality.

Wonkette has this exchange between Don Imus and Rick Santorum:

Santorum: Tom's a very good leader. I don't think anyone can question that...

Imus: He's a weird little dude.

Santorum: He's not a weird dude. He's a good guy.  read more »

Imus: He just looks to me like a guy that has some kind of weird, kinky, sexual thing going on.

Santorum: I don't think it's appropriate to talk about the majority leader of the House of Representatives that way.

Morning-radio czar Don Imus has just put his eight-room duplex penthouse co-op at 75 Central Park We  read more »

The late outpouring of love for Saul Bellow has an aftertaste-the realization that the days of the G  read more »

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the WeekMultiple-Academy Award-winning director Leo McCarey, the man wh  read more »