FNC is expanding the Lineup tonight to two hours from 9-11pm ET to cover the news of the boys found yesterday in Missouri and other stories that have been breaking (I would guess Nifong). Accordingly the overnight schedule is as follows…

11 Joural Editorial Report
1130. Beltway Boys
12-2 Lineup
2-3 Heartland
3-4 Fox Report
4-6 Lineup

Will you watch one of the presidential primary debates coming up in April? Or is it really too soon to be paying attention?

This story came to life a few days ago, via Wonkette, but I ignored it. ICN’s policy is that it doesn’t get into the private lives/off hours activities of talent when it’s not of an official nature (as in a profile or interview), particularly when it gets into the realm of “he said/she said” or in this case “he said/he said” and you don’t know for sure where the truth lies. And this is not the first time Carlson has been the subject of a blog entry which escalated to another level. ICN was tipped almost a year ago to another incident which I chose not to blog about for the same reason.

However, because Korin Miller in The Washington Post’s Name & Faces has interviewed Carlson about the incident, the situation has changed and I will now blog about it because Carlson chose to go on the record.

Williamson said he agreed to remove the blog post and did so later that night: “All I remember thinking was I was worried about what this guy was going to do.” He consulted a lawyer friend and was told he had probably not broken any laws. “What I said was pretty juvenile, I’ll admit,” he said.

In a phone interview Thursday, Carlson acknowledged that he approached Williamson in the store and said he was “very aggressive” because he wanted the post removed: “I don’t like to call the police or call his boss. . . . I’m a libertarian. I’m not into that.”

On Monday, Williamson said, his Potomac Video manager called and fired him. Williamson said he was told the company was threatened with legal action “and the owner doesn’t like that.” He re-posted the original Carlson item later that day. Williamson said he later learned that a man who identified himself as a lawyer for Carlson had been in the store and asked Potomac Video employees questions about him.

Carlson told us that he was concerned for the safety of his family, but did not threaten legal action against the company or push to have Williamson, who still has his office-manager day job, fired.

The Sun-Sentinel’s Tom Jicha has a profile of Glenn Beck…

His bosses have taken notice. His nightly Headline News show now runs three times (7 p.m., 9 p.m. and midnight), he’ll do at least three more specials in the coming year, he’s recently been tapped to become a regular contributor to Paula Zahn’s program on the CNN mothership, and he shared top billing with Larry King during Turner Broadcasting’s portion of the midseason press tour.

Those outside the Turner fold have taken notice, too. Diane Sawyer personally talked him into making occasional appearances on Good Morning America, even though neither is quite sure what he’ll do. Beck is beside himself that Sawyer even knows who he is.

“Diane Sawyer asked me out to lunch,” he said in an incredulous tone. “It’s Diane Sawyer. Yes, please.”

It got better. “She said to me, `It’s nice to watch someone you think you’re going to disagree with … but at least there’s some common sense behind it.’”

Jacob Heilbrunn in the New York Times reviews Marvin Kitman’s “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up”…

O’Reilly’s career was rescued by a new father figure: Roger Ailes. The ruthless head of Fox News, Ailes made him into a star by giving him carte blanche to reinvent cable news on “The O’Reilly Factor,” which he did by dispensing with any pretense of objectivity, and verbally assaulting everyone from Bill and Hillary Clinton to the F.B.I. O’Reilly functions as a kind of secular priest, alternately exhorting and berating his vast congregation, holding up impenitent sinners for minute inspection. Kitman, however, wants to turn him into a towering figure in some ways reminiscent of Edward R. Murrow, whose legend, we are told, was built on the “opinionated positions he took in his news reports.”

This is unconvincing. O’Reilly’s “Culture Warrior,” which reproduces the deed to his parents’ home to prove that he really grew up in a blue-collar town, offers the trademark bluff and bombast that make up his pronouncements. Railing against the “secular-progressive movement,” he writes that a culture war “desperately needs to be fought, because today the stakes are as high as they get. Especially when dealing with a far more brutal conflict: the war on terror.” But even O’Reilly, an expert at making mountains out of molehills, strains to point to domestic threats, dredging up one of his old standbys, the war that secular-progressives, to use his favorite term, are supposedly waging on Christmas. His other targets are no less predictable: the American Civil Liberties Union, Hollywood and that favorite bugaboo of the right, the nutty professor Ward Churchill. In truth, the culture war, equal parts reality and fiction, is petering out now that the Democratic Party has tempered its stands on a variety of issues, ranging from gun control to abortion.