Tag: Rush Limbaugh

Republicans’ New Front in Their War on Women – Women Whose Insurance Covers Contraception Are Prostitutes

Jon Ponder

At the same time that Republican governors and state lawmakers are pushing controversial legislation that would mandate state-enforced ultrasounds tests for women seeking abortions, Rush Limbaugh, the top Republican Party boss and message-meister, opened a new front in the GOP’s war on women by labeling anyone who uses contraceptives that are covered by health insurance as prostitutes.

“If we [men] are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch.”
– Republican boss Rush Limbaugh

As of Thursday night, none of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates and no elected party officials had dared to object to Limbaugh’s new assault on women, despite the fact that further alienating women voters, who make up more than half of the electorate, will likely produce disastrous results for them in this year’s election.

Limbaugh launched his new anti-women campaign on his top-rated radio show this week, by effectively encouraging his followers, who are predominantly elderly, white male Republicans whom he derides as mindless “Dittoheads,” to ramp up their smearing and objectifying of women:

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GOP Grand Wizard Limbaugh: NASCAR Racists Booed First Lady Because She Is ‘Uppity’

Jon Ponder

The NASCAR crowd doesn’t quite understand why, when the husband and the wife are going the same place, the first lady has to take her own Boeing 757 with family and kids and hangers-on four hours earlier than her husband, who will be on his 747. NASCAR people understand that’s a little bit of a waste. They understand it is a little bit of uppity-ism.

– Rush Limbaugh, thought leader of the white supremacist Republican Party, applauding the actions of racist NASCAR fans who booed the First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama at veterans’ event at a race last weekend because she is African-American.

Rush Limbaugh’s Show Is Underwritten by the Right-Wing Think Tank Responsible for the Individual Mandate and Romneycare

Jon Ponder

logo-heritageProduct placement has become such a subtle art form these days that it’s hard to tell the difference between advertising and the editorial or entertainment content. Case in point, right-leaning Politico.com a reports that the tea party astroturfers, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, and the Heritage Foundation, a Reaganite intellectual boneyard, are quietly underwriting the Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck radio shows, at a cost of several millions dollars:

POLITICO: In search of donations and influence, the three prominent conservative groups are paying hefty sponsorship fees to the popular talk show hosts. Those fees buy them a variety of promotional tie-ins, as well as regular on-air plugs – praising or sometimes defending the groups, while urging listeners to donate – often woven seamlessly into programming in ways that do not seem like paid advertising.

Those fees buy them a variety of promotional tie-ins, as well as regular on-air plugs — praising or sometimes defending the groups, while urging listeners to donate — often woven seamlessly into programming in ways that do not seem like paid advertising…

The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million to sponsor Limbaugh’s show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity’s…

Those millions also buy lies. […]

Limbaugh Annihilated for Lying, Cluelessness, Being Un-American by an Unusual Source: Motor Trend Magazine

Jon Ponder

photo-voltWhen you consider that Republicans in the Senate are set to kill the START treaty — which would, among other things, enable tracking down and securing of loose nukes and thus make the world a safer place — not on principle but solely for the partisan political purpose of denying a diplomatic success for Pres. Obama, it is not surprising that Rush Limbaugh went to great lengths to try to undercut an honor recently given GM’s new Chevrolet Volt.

What sticks in the craw of Republicans like Limbaugh is the fact that the Obama administration’s bailout of GM has been a resounding success. They can’t stand the fact that just this month, GM — which Limbaugh and his ilk sneered at as “Government Motors” after the bailout was announced — marketed its first IPO since the federal government saved it from extinction.

(And it must kill them to know that at least one of their party’s foreign funders couldn’t resist buying into the IPO. Muslim Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who owns a $2.3 billion stake in News Corp., the parent company of the GOP Fox channel, invested $500 million in GM to buy a 1 percent share of its stock, according to the Wall St. Journal, which he and News Corp. also own.)

But what really has Limbaugh freaking out is the fact that the Volt has been named Motor Trend’s 2011 Car of the Year, a prestigious award from a reputable, nonpartisan and unassailable authority. In Limbaugh’s dark world, nothing that reflects well on the president can be permitted to stand. Even if the honor otherwise celebrates American ingenuity and know-how, if it benefits Barack Obama, no matter how indirectly, it can not be allowed to go untarnished.

So it is not a surprise that upon learning about the Motortrend award, Limbaugh rushed to his microphone and unleashed a particularly vile screed, smearing GM, the Volt, energy conservation, Motor Trend and, of course, the president with lies, disinformation and Republican propaganda.

What is surprising is how vigorously and aggressively Motor Trend has responded to Limbaugh’s lies and spin. Here’s a perhaps too-lengthy excerpt from the column by Todd Lassa titled, Rush to Judgment:

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Tea Baggers Exposed Gaming the Digg System

Trish

digg

Here’s a story we doubt you’ll see reported on FOX News. AlterNet recently completed a year-long investigation into so-called “gaming the system” at the content aggregator, Digg. A Yahoo group calling itself the Digg Patriots (whose site has since been taken down) figured out how to rig Digg’s voting. If you don’t know, at Digg and many similar sites, you can vote for the stories you want to see featured prominently, or in this case, those you want “buried.” As AlterNet reported:

It’s easier to tell you what the group is against than what it’s for: Obama, progressives, diplomacy, health care reform, immigrants, science, the separation of church and state, acknowledgment of human-induced climate change, the government, pro-choice protections, public schools, and higher education. They also claim to believe Obama is a Muslim and a socialist, and that he was born in Kenya.

Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content).

The immensity of the impact is commensurate with the reach of Digg. Again, according to Alternet:

It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site…Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”

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Limbaugh Vents Racism at Oprah – Attributes Her Success Solely to White Guilt

Jon Ponder

See minute 04:00 for Limbaugh’s quote on Oprah

ESPN Fired Limbaugh in 2003 Because of Similar Racist Comments

Nastiness spews out of Rush Limbaugh like oil gushing out of the hole in the bottom of the Gulf:

[Rush] Limbaugh suggested Tuesday that Winfrey and other African-Americans owe their success to their skin color.

“If Obama weren’t black, he’d be a tour guide in Honolulu or he’d be teaching Saul Alinsky Constitutional law or lecturing on it in Chicago,” Limbaugh announced.

“He wouldn’t have been voted president if he weren’t black. Somebody asked me over the — oh, I need to remember. Somebody asked me over the weekend, why does somebody earn a lot of money, have a lot of money. I said it`s because he’s black,” he continued.

Limbaugh then went on to attack Winfrey. “It was Oprah. No, it can’t be. Yes, it is. There’s a lot of guilt out there. To show we’re not racist, we’ll make this person wealthy and big and famous and so forth,” said Limbaugh.

The paradox here is that, by every metric imaginable, Oprah Winfrey is more talented and successful than Rush Limbaugh will ever be.

Unlike Oprah, who earned her success by having a broad appeal and the substance to back it up, Limbaugh has a very limited appeal. As was noted here last year, “the average age of right-wing radio listeners is 67. It’s also truly not shocking that this demographic is also predominantly male. According to a Pew study in February, 72 percent of Limbaugh’s elderly listeners are men…”

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Help Send Rush to Costa Rica

Trish

rush copyNobody would accuse Rush Limbaugh of being an honorable man of his word, but a web site we wish we’d thought of is trying to help convert him. ATicketForRush.com is collecting $1 donations to send the big guy packing for Costa Rica, where he said he would go when lobbying against health care reform on his radio show.

Even though he now denies it, Rush promised that if the health care bill made it out of Congress, he would leave the country. He even said he’d go to Costa Rica, which, as Jon pointed out, has universal health care. Rush let his mouth run away with his judgment, as usual, but the passage of the bill puts the ball back in his court.

As you can imagine, this has made a number of people very excited. We are among that number. We want to make sure that Rush is able to make good on his promise, and so we’ve made this website.

So who’s behind the microsite?

We are Mike and Patrick. We are two dudes living in Brooklyn. We don’t have health insurance.

But, they continue, they have set up a PayPal account to accept the $1 donations through April 30, all of which will be donated to Planned Parenthood if Rush turns it down. Mike and Patrick plan to videotape themselves offering the plane fare to Rush and post it. There’s a PayPal donation button right on the site, so take a minute now and support a great cause: a ticket for Rush.

Median Age of Fox News Viewers is 65 – Average Dittohead Is a 67 Year Old Man

Jon Ponder

About two-thirds of the way into media writer Michael Woolf’s Vanity Fair column, “The Man Who Ate the G.O.P.,” on the conundrum of Rush Limbaugh’s dual role as GOP party boss and hate radio megastar, this demographic nugget about the conservative media audience caught my eye:

“Among ad-supported cable nets, the news nets … sport the most gray, with Fox News Channel’s daytime and primetime skeds the absolute oldest, clocking in with a median age above 65.”
– Variety

Arguably no message apparatus like [Limbaugh’s show] exists in the nation, except, perhaps, at the White House (or in Oprah — whose position with American women is curiously analogous to Rush’s position with American conservatives). It is concentrated and extraordinary power.

Except that this power ought to be ending. It ought to all be on the wane. It is not just the Obama victory and the magnitude of his approval ratings. It is not just that the gravity of the economic crisis, with historic unemployment rates, means it’s a lot harder to get people excited about Reagan-and-Rush-esque hands-off government.

It is, rather, a crueler demographic point. The dirty little secret of conservative talk radio is that the average age of listeners is 67 and rising, according to [Jon Sinton, founding president of Air America] — the Fox News audience, likewise, is in its mid-60s: “What sort of continuing power do you have as your audience strokes out?”

Only dinosaurs listen to radio these days, and it’s doubtful many people under 50 even know AM radio exists, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the average age of right-wing radio listeners is 67. It’s also truly not shocking that this demographic is also predominantly male. According to a Pew study in February, 72 percent of Limbaugh’s elderly listeners are men and thus are statistically likely to “stroke out” sometime in Pres. Obama’s second term, assuming he wins one.

However, television viewership trounces radio audiences in every demographic, so the fact that the average age of FNC viewers is, well, retired could have huge ramifications on the political playing field over the next decade.

It took some googling but I found a reliable source that confirms that during the 2007-2008 television season, the most recent season for which figures are available, the average age of Fox News viewers was 65:

According to a study released by Magna Global’s Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets’ average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That’s the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago — and the first time the nets’ median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo…

Among ad-supported cable nets, the news nets (along with older-skewing Hallmark Channel, Golf Channel and GSN’s daytime sked) sport the most gray, with Fox News Channel’s daytime and primetime skeds the absolute oldest, clocking in with a median age above 65. (Emphasis added.)

By the way, MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” does the best in cable news primetime among the most desirable younger demographic, but according to numbers from last season, the average “Countdown” viewer is 59 years old, and 55 percent of its audience is male.

Update: Hollywood Reporter, August 10, 2010:

In a survey released by analyst Steve Sternberg, Fox News has the oldest audience among fully distributed cable networks. The network’s average viewer last season was 65 years old, according to Nielsen. Heck, it’s viewers are even older than viewers of Hallmark Channel, Military Channel and Golf Channel.

(Note Hollywood Reporter is owned by Nielsen.)