Rightie Radio Lumbers Toward the Tar Pits

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Ninety-eight major advertisers are pulling all of their ads from “controversial” talk radio programs. John Avlon writes at Daily Beast:

Premiere Networks, which distributes Limbaugh as well as a host of other right-wing talkers, sent an email out to its affiliates early Friday listing 98 large corporations that have requested their ads appear only on “programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).”

This is big. According to the radio-industry website Radio-Info.com, which first posted excerpts of the Premiere memo, among the 98 companies that have decided to no longer sponsor these programs are “carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm), and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway).” Together, these talk-radio advertising staples represent millions of dollars in revenue.

Avlon suggests there’s a little more going on here than just disgust with what Rushbo said about Sandra Fluke. This is significant:

…this latest controversy comes at a particularly difficult time for right-wing talk radio. They are playing to a (sometimes literally) dying demographic. Rush & Co. rate best among old, white males. They have been steadily losing women and young listeners, who are alienated by the angry, negative, obsessive approach to political conservations. Add to that the fact that women ages 24–55 are the prize advertising demographic, and you have a perfect storm emerging after Limbaugh’s Sandra Fluke comments.

One suspects that if these advertisers believed they were getting a good bang for their advertising buck on talk radio, they’d ignore the controversy. The way this episode has played out makes me think at least some of these companies were already losing interest in advertising on talk radio before Rushbo went overboard slut-shaming Sandra Fluke.

Avlon goes on to say that in the end, market forces made rightie talk radio viable, and now it’s possible market forces will kill it. Rush’s recent antics just hurried the process along a bit.

Update: See also Digby.

Update: See also Clarence Page. Like Page, I am skeptical we’re seeing the Twilight of Rushbo. If nothing else, Wingnut Welfare will kick in somehow and see to it he stays on the air. However, I wouldn’t have anticipated that so many major advertisers would suddenly decide to pull out of rightie talk radio.

Also as Page says, Limbaugh’s antics are hurting the Republican Party more than helping it. So maybe it’s OK if he stays around awhile longer.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

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Recently there’s been a substantial swing of women voters toward the Democratic Party. Gee, I wonder why that happened?

In other entertainment news, I see that comedian Louis C.K. was invited and then dis-invited to appear at the Radio and TV Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner, because a couple of years ago he tweeted some naughty things about Sarah Palin.

Now, this is no where in the same ball park as what Rushbo did to Sarah Sandra Fluke. But I’m not sorry some rightie “correspondents” like Greta Van Susteren complained about Louis C.K. It really is not OK to use sexual “jokes” to slam any woman, no matter how much you don’t like her. It’s as bad as using the “n” word to insult, say, Michael Steele. Sexually aggressive language puts down all women, because it suggests there is something substandard about being a women. And truly, Palin’s gender is probably the least objectionable thing about her.

So call Palin a twit, but not a tw*t, please.

Update: Some newspapers pulling next week’s Doonesbury.

Update: A Louis C.K. video that’s kind of on topic.

Carnival of Stupid

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Krugman’s column today is on the Right’s hostility to education. Do also read “Mitt: Pay for Your Own Damn College” by Jonathan Chait.

Whenever I hear some wingnut go off on education, I think of Mao Zedong. Chairman Mao seems to have hated education also. He crushed the Chinese education system and sent intellectuals and teachers to do manual labor on farms. As a result, 20 years after the Cultural Revolution China had a massive illiteracy problem. China re-built and expanded its education system after Mao died, because the less radical leaders who succeeded Mao understood a nation of illiterate peasants cannot be a great power.

So why don’t our Republicans know that?

Dictators can’t stand an independent education system. If you look at dictatorial regimes over the past century or so, you find that the despots either destroyed education or took over the school system to use for indoctrination and propaganda (as in Germany during the Third Reich).

I postulate that hostility toward education is a hallmark of political radicalism and totalitarianism, left or right. Knowledge is power, etc.

And then there’s Stupid. In this video poor Soledad O’Brien confronts a concentration of highly distilled Stupid. Indeed, the Breitbartachik she must interview, Joel Pollack, is so Stupid he is to intelligence what a black hole is to matter, and any intelligence in his vicinity is sucked in and destroyed.

You’ve probably heard about the “hidden” Barack Obama/Derrick Bell video the Breitbart minions rolled out recently, the one that’s been online at PBS since 2008. Buzzfeed released a version of the video that cuts out Obama and Bell shaking hands and embracing at the end. When O’Brien pressed Pollack to explain why leaving out the embrace is somehow significant, he said, “Additionally, if the President’s embrace of Bell was unimportant, why did Buzzfeed choose not to pay the hundred bucks to license those seconds? If it wasn’t a big deal, why cut it?”

Simon Maloy: “‘If it wasn’t a big deal, why cut it?’ There should be a word for someone who fails to recognize their own accidental logic. Maybe the Germans have one.”

Also — as I understand it, Critical Race Theory is a means of analyzing how racist attitudes are embedded in the legal system, not a call for blacks to go out and overthrow white people. But that doesn’t stop the Breitbarters into being scandalized by the fact that Barack Obama, in 1994, assigned Derrick Bell’s Race, Racism, and American Law as required reading for a course he was teaching at the University of Chicago called “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.”

This inspired Jesse Taylor to write the wingnut definition of “radicalism”: Radicalism (n.): remembering that all of American history through 1964 happened.

See also David Graham, “Breitbart.com’s Massive Barack Obama-Derrick Bell Video Fail” and Ta-Nehisi Coates, “There Is No Whitey Tape.”

Rape and Reason

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Yesterday some pundits/media personalities — I’m not sure what else to call them — came out in defense of Rush. Steve M already took apart Michael Kinsley; see also this comment at Balloon Juice. I want instead to address something Andrew Sullivan wrote:

I am not saying that boycotts are somehow illegal or always disturbing. It simply remains a guiding principle of mine that you argue your case, you counter and expose arguments that don’t work, or lies that can be debunked, or smears that are disgusting. But I don’t like the desire to silence someone through economic pressure. It comes from an illiberal place.

So we’re supposed to simply “debunk” what Rush says and discuss the flaws in his arguments? Um, do you not understand that people have been doing that for years, and Rush is impervious to it?

IMO Rush is a sociopath. His public persona surely is a sociopath, and I doubt very much he is play-acting. His “radio program” is not so much speech as it is a manifestation of his sociopathy. And his spewing of lies and venom has infected others and thereby contributed to the poisoning of our political discourse and the increasing dysfunction of our nation.

If you’ve ever had to deal with a sociopath or psychopath on a regular basis, you know that the usual rules of human interaction do not apply. This includes using reason and appealing to their genuine best interests. If you’ve never had to deal with a sociopath, then you have no idea how impossible it is. Just refer to the scorpion and frog story. No amount of debunking, fact checking or counter-arguing will ever so much as put a dent in Rush.

One of the best things I’ve read about the whole shoddy Limbaugh-Fluke episode is by Gene Weingarten —
“Chatological Humor: Why ‘fair comment’ is not a defense for Rush Limbaugh.” Do read the whole piece, but for now I just want to point to the last part —

In short — though Limbaugh doesn’t address this in his mealy-mouthed, backhanded “apology” — Limbaugh just made it all up, then went hog-wild, oinker-frenzy-wild, elaborating on it so he could call her names. Calling people names is bad, but calling people names based on your own invented calumny is the textbook definition of slander. The First Amendment does not protect you from that, nor should it. Even on an issue of public debate, and even if the victim is a public figure, as Ms. Fluke was here, “fair comment” is not a defense if you made up the central fact, and the central fact is wrong and is damaging and if your intent was to injure.

The rightie blogosphere is pretending Rush is being punished just for calling Fluke a bad name. And as I believe I already said, if that’s all he did we wouldn’t be talking about this now, because that’s par for Rush’s course. What Rush did this time was much, much worse.

Listen, Sullivan, can you honestly say this rampage can be adequately answered with a little fact checking and some reasoned rhetoric? This is as close as you can come to sexual assault without physical touching:

And his “apology” is “I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke”? This is like John Wilkes Booth saying “I didn’t mean to assassinate President Lincoln.” Yeah, right.

Again, this is a form of sexual assault, and its purpose is dominance and control. This is not expressing an opinion or offering an argument. It’s closer to being rape. It’s using sexual assault as a tool of war, or as a means of intimidation.

And most women recognize this, because most of us — well, most of us over the age of 40 or so, anyway; I can’t speak for younger women — have experienced this in our personal lives — men using language to intimidate us and keep us in our place. It’s too familiar.

As others have pointed out, Rush’s diatribe was ill-considered even from the Republican point of view. They’ve been trying to pretend the pushback against the contraception mandate was about religious freedom, not contraception. But I don’t believe Rush said squat about religion; he’s making it about contraception. Obviously something about Fluke pushed Rush’s misogyny button, big time, and he could not control his compulsion to assault her.

I very much hope that Fluke brings suit against Rush and takes him to the cleaners. But that’s going to take some time. Meanwhile, a sexual predator is loose in the streets, and if it takes a citizen posse to stop him — or at least, put him on notice that there are consequences to his actions — so be it.

Also, too — the original Toolie gets another Toolie!

Update: One other point I had intended to make and forgot — Sully wrote, “No one is involuntarily exposed to his poison.” In other words, if you find Rush offensive, just don’t listen to him. In other words, if you find sexual assault offensive, just don’t watch it.

Nope; doesn’t work for me.

The Morning After

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Noteworthy items:

Right-wing whackjob and former maha-neighbor “Mean Jean” Schmidt lost her seat in the House in a landslide to her primary opponent, Brad Wenstrup. Unfortunately, from what I’ve read Wenstrup also is a right-wing whackjob, and he’s expected to win in the general election.

I regret that Dennis Kucinich was redistricted out of his House seat. Even though his self-promoting grandstanding sometimes worked against progress rather than for it, his perspective is needed in Washington.

Republicans stripped an 86-year-old World War II veteran of his right to vote. But did they really intend to keep elderly white men from voting? I thought that was their strongest constituency?

Of Mitt Romney’s tepid showing, Dan Balz writes,

Nomination battles often strengthen the winner, but some take a toll. Rarely is there a straight line between March and November that predicts the outcome of a general election. Still, Romney is in worse shape at this point in the campaign than virtually all recent previous nominees.

Demographically, his image among independent voters, the most critical swing group, is more negative now than it was when the primary battle began. He could be hurt among women. He is in trouble with Latinos, a growing part of the electorate that is tilting even more Democratic than it was four years ago. He is not as strong as he needs to be among working-class white voters, among whom President Obama has been consistently weak.

Any other thoughts?

Kochs vs. Cato

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Something else that’s been going on while we’ve been making merry over Rushbo (who is down nine advertisers now) — the Koch Brothers have gone to court to gain control of Cato Institute. The Kochs have lavished big bucks on Cato over the years, and now they want to collect. Jane Mayer writes,

Clearly, many libertarians who have long been funded by the Kochs genuinely believe that their cause is about promoting individual liberty and peace by reducing the role of the government—in other words, lofty, laudable goals, not just some hackish partisan political agenda. Suddenly, however, they are confronted with the news that the Koch brothers, who control half the seats on Cato’s board, have, as the Cato Chairman Bob Levy told the Washington Post, been choosing “Koch operatives,” their goal being to align the institute more closely with the Republican Party.

Indeed, several eye-opening insider accounts appeared over the weekend, suggesting that what Charles Koch, the C.E.O. of Koch Industries, essentially wants is to transform Cato into an “ammo” shop, manufacturing whatever ordnance it takes stop President Obama from getting re-elected next November.

Alex Pareene:

The Kochs have sued for the right to buy the shares in Cato held by the widow of co-founder William Niskanen. Their aim is basically to make Cato into another arm of their explicitly partisan messaging machine, along with Americans for Prosperity. To that end, they have already attempted to install some ridiculous Republican Party hacks on Cato’s board of directors — hacks like John “Hind Rocket” Hinderacker, the attorney and “Powerline” blogger with no history of support for “liberty” to speak of. Current Cato peopleAle are upset. Some have preemptively resigned, even. (Well, announced an intention to resign upon the completion of the Koch takeover, anyway.)

Regarding the original Toolie award winner — see Paul Krugman.

Alex Pareene argues that we should care about this development, because in the past Cato has sometimes broken with the Republican Party line on some issues. That may be, but they are also the institution that is still hosting a policy paper on insurance insurance. And Krugman remembers,

Cato is, among other things, a place that had something called the Project on Social Security Privatization, which it renamed the Project on Social Security Choice when it turned out that “privatization” polled badly — and tried to purge its records, to make it look as if they had never used the word privatization.

I say let ’em take over Cato, and Reason magazine as well, and any other “libertarian” institution they’ve been keeping afloat with their money all these years. Go ahead and strip away the veneer of “independence” that was a sham, anyway. Libertarianism has been little but a mouthpiece for the plutocracy for years. It’s time to flush them out in the open and reveal them to be the tools that they are.

Meanwhile, the Republicans Are Still Looking for a Candidate

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We’ve been having so much fun I’ve been forgetting about the presidential primaries. So today is Super Tuesday. Nate Silver has Mittens winning Massachusetts and Virginia for sure and probably Ohio also, with Frothy a close second. Newt will pick up Georgia, and Frothy likely will take Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin. Mittens should end up with at least half of the delegates he needs to clinch the nomination.

Meanwhile, a few Republicans are beginning to suspect that the GOP brand is perhaps being compromised by extremism (ya think?) and have suggested that a good bottoming out, à la Barry Goldwater in 1964, might not be a bad thing. But they don’t think it will happen this year, because if Mittens is the nominee and loses, the whackjobs will see it as proof that they should have found a certifiable screaming lunatic real conservative to run.

Via Annie Laurie, Doghouse Riley:

THE 2012 Republican Presidential primaries will be remembered, if at all, for having taught us any number of things we already knew.

Rush Limbaugh is a human cloud of flatulence. Rick Santorum is a 10th century religious lunatic. Newt Gingrich is to serious politics what Newt Gingrich is to academic history.

Nobody likes Mitt Romney.

Of course the preeminent truth is that the whole goddam party is insane, and that the Press, having ignored the over-abundance of evidence of this for a generation, now finds itself incapable of dealing with this. Aside from the customary writing of scripts designed to encompass all such facts as aren’t truly inconvenient. Those, as always, get ignored.

The thing is, everyone on the planet whose head is screwed on all the way can see plainly that the GOP has driven itself into a ditch in the clown car. The only ones who can’t see it are most Republicans, and that’s because they are demented. So I don’t see them learning any lessons, no matter watch.