Air America Radio Network

Like many 24-year-olds, Matthew Slutsky keeps his iPod close at hand. He listens to it going to work, doing errands, walking down the street -- whenever he is "on the go," he says. But some of the most listened-to names in Slutsky's iPod are not today's hottest bands; they're politicians and political pundits. Every morning, he downloads the latest "AfterNote," a politics newscast from ABC, and listens to it on his way to his job at a political consulting firm.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln is one of the most endangered Democrats on the political landscape this year. The two-term Arkansas moderate is getting only 38% or 39% against any of her little-known Republican opponents, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. Politico is putting her "at the top of the list of vulnerable Democrats." And providing President Obama with his 60th vote for healthcare reform in the Senate isn't helping in a state where public opinion is running strongly against it. To stretch a metaphor, she's more endangered than that infamous snail darter that delayed Tennessee's Tellico Dam. Now, the League of Conservation Voters is going after Lincoln for her opposition to a climate change bill.

Air America went out of business last week and I'm ready to accept the significance of the radio network's demise -- the inevitable marginalization of those who support big government, illegal immigration and the homosexual agenda. Yet the Drudge Report has been dropping further behind the Huffington Post, the conservative aggregator attracting well under half the liberal website's audience. Even a dummy can see what that means -- that this country has no appetite for gun rights, private property, the value of the unborn or the sanctity of the American flag.

One of the fall season's best series will run for only six episodes on a cable network of whose existence you are quite possibly not aware. Trio is the channel in question, and its day is filled with reruns and movies, framed in such a way as to give them thematic cohesion or currency -- Trio's slogan is "Pop. Culture. TV." But as with any cable net, original programming is always the goal. That's what sells the brand.

NEAL PRESTON returned to his Hollywood Hills home after a short Las Vegas visit recently and was dismayed at what he found.

As it has for nearly three years, hip-hop station "Power 106" finished ahead of all competitors in the Southland radio ratings, but looming in KPWR's rearview mirror are talk station KFI-AM (640) and pop station KIIS-FM (102.7), both of which have closed the gap on the front-runner, according to the winter Arbitron figures released Monday. According to the survey of listeners from Jan. 6 to March 30, KPWR-FM (105.9) attracted an average of 4.