Randy "Duke" Cunningham sentenced to eight years, four months in prison. I can't help having a smidgen of sympathy for anyone who is most likely going to die in prison, but I thought it was pathetic the way his supporters, including, oddly enough, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, called for leniency because of his charitable works. If I stole millions of dollars, I could afford to give money to a folk singer's charitable work, too. In any event, it's nice to see that my congressman remains his strongest supporter. The problem wasn't that Duke wrote a menu of bribes on congressional letterhead, the problem was that prosecutors released a copy to the press. Thanks for the clarification, Duncan.

I had to go to school for a midterm, while waiting for the sentence to come down, and was trying to find something on the radio, but all I could find were nationally-syndicated talk radio shows. When I got out of school (don't think I did particularly well on the exam), I did catch the tail-end of a report that Cunningham had received a harsh sentence, but then moved on to discussing some punk kid who ratted out his teacher for talking politics in the classroom (I never understand why the students claim they're too cowed by their teacher to argue with him in class, but have no problem discussing it in great detail on talk radio). I didn't find out the details until I got home. I often see the CEO of Clear Channel Radio on financial shows, talking about how Clear Channel is going to compete with satellite radio with their quality local content, which always strikes me as absurd, as the entire philosophy of Clear Channel was always destroying local content and offering up canned talk. I'm sorry, but local traffic reports aren't enough to save radio.