Doesn’t some of the blame lie with the American media who enables this fraud? Doesn’t some of the blame — I would say a majority of the blame does not lie with the nitwit that shot him, other than the fact that he’s a nitwit and a guy who should have been in prison in my opinion, who shot him. But to me, this is the — this is an example of how, by enabling people and trying to push this false reality, leads to horrible crimes like this…

He added, “I believe the media and the rest of the enablers out there, they have this guy’s blood on their hands because they create this false sense of reality and they enable people who need serious psychological counseling.”

Andy Birkey of Eleventh Avenue South (and our former colleague here at MnIndy) writes, “Baker’s ignorance of the realities of trans people is telling. Psychological counseling is most often the bedrock of a transition from the born gender to the target gender. A person’s transition is never something that is done lightly as it comes with great obstacles in virtually every facet of that person’s life.”

Birkey reports that Soulforce Q, a young-adults group “dedicated to confronting spiritual violence against the LGBT community through nonviolent civil disobedience,” has gotten tentative permission to have a representative appear on Baker’s show to discuss the issues.

As we’ve said before, McCain = Bush is sure to be a recurring equation used by Democrats and their supporters in the run-up to November, but a new radio campaign by Americans United for Change’s Bush Legacy Project is painting Norm Coleman — and five other members of Congress — with the Bush brush.

Airing today through next week on Duluth talk radio stations, the spot seems to take its cue from new surveys like the one that shows 70 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Bush is handling the economy and another that found 89 percent of Americans see the war as a drain on the economy (the average American family has kicked in $16,500 for the war since 2003). The ad takes Coleman to task for siding with Bush and supporting “Bush’s trickle down economics that got us into this mess — like tax giveaways for the wealthy and big oil companies” and the $12 billion/month war. “Bush and Coleman,” the spot concludes, “two peas in a pod.”

Listen: Americans United for Change, “Peas in a Pod,” :60

But a new billboard, pointed out by Minnesota Lawyer Blog, suggests the station perhaps wasn’t so contrite in its apology. In addition to its vaguely racist billboard announcing “We insult you in English” (a reference to the morning show’s past jabs at Somali and Hmong immigrants?), this one seems to boast about the station’s legal bills.

The gag, I guess, is that they need high listenership (and the ad revenue that comes with it) to afford their harried lawyers. But as the Disney-owned station is loaded, my guess is their motives are more cynical. The ad is a bid for more attention from the vocally anti-intellectual, those who tune in just to hear rudeness that, we’re to believe, is quasi-libelous. KQ, in short, wants to keep cashing in on the decline (or sustained bottoming-out) of civility in America. Yee-ha.

Shock jocks invented hot air, and time will tell if the escape of said gas is what we mistook for an apology from KQRS. When we hear an on-air mea culpa, Clyde Bellecourt yukking it up with Tom Barnard some morning, and an announcement about its new roster of native American interns — or a billboard advertising all three — that’ll be the first step toward trusting the station’s sincerity.

More testimony from Ridder hearing: Editor & Publisher offers more verbatim testimony from Star Tribune publisher Par Ridder’s hearing in June over noncompete agreements. In this excerpt, Avista Capital Partners’ founding partner OhSang Kwan says Ridder asked him on March 2, 2007, if he should shred the noncompete document he had with his old employer, the Pioneer Press. “Obviously I can’t tell you to shred the documents and I’m telling you you can’t shred them,” he recalled saying. Ridder had asked his secretary to destroy the documents, but later retrieved them before she could. Kwan also admits that “it was probably a mistake” for Ridder to take data, which included the identities of the paper’s customers, from Pioneer Press computers.

Who Owns What v.2:The Columbia Journalism Review’s “Who Owns What” website has long been an invaluable tool for keeping tabs on media ownership, like, for instance, which local radio stations are owned by Disney (KQRS and six others) and which by Clear Channel (Cities 97, KFAN and five others). But in times when Google is acquiring companies faster than you can say Rupert Murdoch — including FeedBurner, Doubleclick, YouTube and Blogger in recent years — perhaps version 2.0 of the list is in order. Voila!

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Meanwhile, John McQuaid at NewAssignment.net, writes that axing James Lileks’ column is “so self-evidently dumb, an Umbridge-worthy example of the bureaucratic mentality run amok, that you have to wonder if newspapers