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If your email inbox is full of frantic pitches for money today from politicians approaching the quarterly FEC filing deadline, consider Harold Camping. He’s found an even more compelling deadline. The rapture, followed by the end of the world.

Camping’s “Family Radio” network owns at least 50 radio stations, many of them commercial outlets with considerable ability to serve the public, backed up with at least a hundred smaller “translator” stations. He’s using those stations to claim that the rapture is scheduled for May 21, 2011, with the end of the world to follow later that year on October 21. Perhaps Camping is right this time (I say “this time” because he tried this once before, predicting a world’s end in September, 1994.)

Our country licenses broadcast stations to folks who will operate them in the public interest, convenience and necessity. While we’ve never found an ironclad definition for that, the repeated prediction of an end of the world that scares the hell out of people and then doesn’t materialize doesn’t fit the definition.

So I respectfully suggest that on May 22, 2011, providing that the devout Christians haven’t been called heavenward leaving us ground-dwelling heathens scratching our heads, the Federal Communications Commission start accepting license applications for Family Radio’s frequencies. On October 22nd, the FCC reassigns them to people who will operate local stations in the local markets and not import a pack of lies via satellite.

If Camping is right, he won’t be needing his stations. If Camping is wrong again, I don’t think we’ll be needing him broadcasting on them.

When Sarah Palin posted a map of “red” congressional districts whose incumbent congresscritters voted for the health care reform act, she used gunsight crosshair icons to designate them. Perhaps she was intentionally feeding into a political climate marked by some recent right wing calls for violence or maybe she was just trying to be cute. Either way, she’s given us one more reason to fear her.

It’s possible she is so completely out of touch with the acrimony of last week’s Health Care protests that she doesn’t understand how this kind of imagery makes her look like a demagogue. Or maybe she’s just a demagogue.

I’m picking the latter, because when even folks like Elizabeth Hasselbeck called her out for it, she chose to counter it with a tortured piece of writing on her Facebook page that tried to claim it was all just one big metaphor, which could just as easily be hoops talk.

While Palin gets props for trying to walk back the rhetoric by claiming its just taken out of context, the whole misdirection attempt has the “dog ate my homework” feel of a 10th grader.

Most 10th graders grow up, and if their thoughts wander back to their immature lies and deceptions, they’re embarrassed. That hasn’t happened yet to Ms. Palin, so we’ll have to collectively be embarrassed for her.

It would be like me trying to argue that my headline is a reference to Ms. Palin doing her hair. Even if I could convince you that was my intent, it would leave you wondering why I chose something so meaningless when I could have found a thousand better ways to make my point.

The public relations debacle that started with the Human Rights Campaign’s Comedy Rally for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell starring Kathy Griffin and ended with highly-paid HRC Director Joe Solmonese being named one of Washington’s best dressed may have claimed its first victim: Brad Luna.

At close of business, Friday, HRC’s Director of Communications left for good. “The position was eliminated,” says John Green, HRC’s director of human resources, who is unclear who will be performing Luna’s duties. “We will determine what positions will come out of that.”

For the last week, Luna had been ducking questions about what Lt. Choi was told about the nature of the rally, and HRC’s plans regarding Choi, while buzzing up a flurry of sudden activity criticizing Choi’s action and trying to raise funds to fight Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Today, HRC’s deputy communications director acting in Luna’s place has taken the direct approach. HRC simply will not answer questions about it. They will neither confirm nor deny that GetEqual‘s Robin McGehee was told Choi couldn’t speak because he hadn’t signed a release that would give Griffin’s production company intellectual property rights to his speech. They’ll say nothing further about any support they’ll offer Choi, pointing to a statement on their blog which attendees at the rally report is “utterly untrue.”

Its been 41 years since the civil disobedience of the Stonewall Riot started the modern gay movement. HRC came along 11 years later. In their 30 years, they’ve been able to redefine Stonewall to be nothing more than a verb.

From 1945 to 1989, KFAC brought classical music to Southern California. During its glory years, its announcing staff was second to none. Most of its program hosts, like chief announcer Carl Princi, were sought-after narrators for television,  documentary and industrial films. Among the station’s best was Tom Dixon, who passed away last Saturday at age 95.

Tom Dixon was also present when political history was made. In the early campaigns of Richard Nixon (the “pink right down to her underwear” campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, for instance), he was Nixon’s announcer.

It wasn’t that he had a political affinity for Nixon (unlike Adolphe Menjou and others), he was chosen by the man who would later become the 37th president because he liked the sound of, “I’m Tom Dixon for Richard Nixon.”

I had the pleasure to talk with Mr. Dixon on the phone several years ago about that period. He shared that he came to dislike Nixon because of the way Nixon treated his wife, Pat. One time in a radio studio after a broadcast speech, he launched into a tirade humiliating her for no reason. Dixon traveled California with the campaign. He told me many stories with great wit and charm.

We’ve lost not only an important man in LA radio history, but a part of political history as well.

Filling the 60 minutes of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List is no easy task. For each episode, you need a story, access to interesting people, and a few staged events where you can acquire tasty video able to overcome the short attention span of viewers who move along a 200-channel universe with a touch of the remote.

This week, the Griffin show is acquiring raw video for an episode featuring Griffin as “lobbyist for a day.” She’s lobbying to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT). But if there ever was an example of “I just play one on TV,” it’s Kathy Griffin as lobbyist.

Enter Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the DC LGBT organization that claims to be “a grassroots force of over 750,000 members and supporters nationwide.” As hearings take place in the Senate, HRC planned a rally at Freedom Plaza. As they describe it on their “HRC Back Story” webpage: “This week, Kathy Griffin is traveling to Washington to add her voice, by lobbying Members of Congress, meeting with veterans and mobilizing support.”

But there’s a backstory to the backstory, and that’s where the backchannel gets involved. The “rally” was little more than a staged event to provide tasty video for Michael Levitt Productions to sell to Bravo. Ordinarily, that little tidbit would do little more than sicken the attending activists sharp enough to see they were again being used. But Lt. Dan Choi, for reasons only he knows (but I suspect have to do with him being among the sharp ones), took some direct action.

Dan Choi and Kathy Griffin at HRC/Bravo Rally

He asked to speak. What he was told depends upon whom you believe. The HRC claims their president Joe Solmonese told Choi that it “wasn’t his sole decision to make on the spot.” Reports from the scene on the backchannel say Choi was told, “This is Bravo’s Show.” Choi cannot tell us, because he’s in jail tonight, and reports indicate he is not being allowed a phone call.

Griffin ultimately decided to ask Choi to the podium to speak, but I doubt she, her co-producers, or HRC are very happy with what he said. He told the truth about Barney Frank’s inside information that DADT wouldn’t be repealed this year. He pointed out that the White House was where the protest should be, and he asked people to march there with him. Griffin said she would.

Lt. Choi and Capt James Pietrangelo marched to the White House and handcuffed themselves to the fence with the help of Robin McGehee of GetEqual.org. About a hundred true activists went with them, but Solmonese of HRC wasn’t among them. The HRC’s excuse? He stayed behind because he “felt it was important to stay and engage those at the rally in ways they can continue building the pressure needed for repeal.”

Immediate repeal would help neither HRC nor Griffin. Though they’d both take credit for it, HRC would lose a reason to fundraise and provide free extras for video shoots that self-promote, and Griffin would have a stale show. Make no mistake, for Griffin, its about the show. Though she said she’d march with Choi, she stayed at the video shoot, tweeting a fawning misdirection when the backchannel called her on it. After all, Kathy Griffin isn’t really an activist. She just plays one on TV.