By a sweeping 13–2 vote earlier this week, the L.A. City Council passed a resolution that Clear Channel, home to Limbaugh along with Kobylt and Chiampou's "John and Ken Show," "ensure that their on-air hosts do not use and promote racist and sexist slurs over public airwaves in the city of Los Angeles." The resolution also noted that "derogatory language … has no place on public airwaves in the city of Los Angeles or anywhere in America" and urged Clear Channel to reflect diversity with a workforce that includes more "women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians." Clear Channel's L.A. station KFI employs only one woman on-air personality and no African-Americans.

Continue Reading...

I'm not exactly scrawling "slut" on my forehead, but suddenly, reclaiming the word seems potentially exciting. I'm not the only one recognizing a shift in the conversation about reclamation. Megan Gibson of Time wrote, "While the motivation [for SlutWalk] was inarguably sound ... the protest caused controversy, in part because many were wary to associate themselves with the word slut." She continues, "Remarkably, thanks to Limbaugh’s ignorant vitriol, we're seeing a marked change in that wariness."

That said, in identifying with Sandra Fluke, the target of Limbaugh's rant, some women have instead chosen to distance themselves from the term, which perfectly illustrates how complicated reclamation can be.

Continue Reading...

But even weirder was Limbaugh’s proposition: If “Miss Fluke and the rest of you Feminazis” expect us to pay you to have sex, “we want something for it,” Limbaugh said last week. “We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” (Those words were later erased from Limbaugh’s official transcript of the show; Atlantic Wire preserved them.)

Continue Reading...

Writing about the way advertisers have been dumping Limbaugh's show like it's toxic waste – exactly like it's toxic waste, really – Petri had reported that among his new sponsors, "So far, he's picked up AshleyMadison.com, the site where you go to cheat on your wife, and another web site that is explicitly for sugar-daddy matchmaking." Except that Limbaugh had done no such thing. Why, it's as if Petri thought Limbaugh had no integrity or something.

Continue Reading...

The answer to all those queries is yes -- but none of those factors is the genuine news of the matter. Instead, what makes Limbaugh's apology so important is its context. Capping off other similar brouhahas from across the mediasphere, Limbaugh's mea culpa -- however insincere -- is significant because it is proof that America may be both setting some basic standards for political discourse and rejecting the right-wing shrieks about "censorship" and "political correctness."

Continue Reading...

After admitting that he does "Hate to defend #RushLimbaugh," Bill Maher went on to tweet Tuesday, about the radio host: "he apologized, liberals looking bad not accepting. Also hate intimidation by sponsor pullout." Wait, who looks bad here? My sides, they're splitting!

Maher, of course, is a professional provocateur, a guy who views himself as an equal opportunity fly in everyone's ointment. But he's also the man who recently gave a cool million dollars to Obama's super PAC and once suggested "don't ask, don't tell" be overturned purely "because it will make Rush Limbaugh explode like a bag full of meat dropped from a helicopter." As such, he no doubt felt uniquely qualified to appeal to the left's sense of justice. And no doubt there are plenty of talking heads – the ones who erroneously keep insisting that liberals and feminists have no problem with Maher's track record of offensive remarks – who'd go along with him.

Continue Reading...

But, the formerly oxycontin-addicted, thrice-married broadcaster is only now finding his true friends.  One businessman eager to replace those who cut and run is Brandon Wade, the founder of a website called SeekingArrangements.com that pairs college girls needing money (Sugar Babies) with older men (Sugar Daddies) needing, well,  “an arrangement.”

Yesterday, the dating site offered to start buying 30- and 60-second spots on Rush’s show. If approved, the ads will run next month.

In a plot twist Stephen Colbert’s writers might have dreamed up on a slow news day, Wade hailed the doughy bellower as a model for guys who like ‘em young, hot and financially needy.

Continue Reading...

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Tea Party GOP has embraced a kamikaze-like politics in which they are willing to destroy the proverbial village in order to liberate it. This appetite for destruction has reached a fever pitch during the last few weeks. Rick Santorum and the Republican Party have called for limiting women’s reproductive rights under the guise of defending “religion” from the “tyranny” of the Obama administration. A federal judge was caught forwarding an email to his friends suggesting that Barack Obama’s conception was the product of drunken sex between his mother Ann Dunham and a dog. And Rush Limbaugh launched a viciously misogynistic attack on Sandra Fluke, a private citizen, who dared to testify before Congress in defense of a woman’s right to have equal access to birth control.

On the surface, these incidents appear to be unrelated. They are simply the desperate graspings and mouth utterances of an increasingly fringe and desperate Republican Party which is determined to defeat Barack Obama by any means necessary. However, these events are all symptoms of a bigger problem. In the Age of Obama, white manhood — and a particular type of conservative white masculinity — is frightened, unsettled and terrified of its obsolescence. White (conservative) masculinity finds itself in an existential crisis.

Read more on Chauncey DeVega's Open Salon blog.

Continue Reading...

Not everyone was surprised. The activists who have for years protested online, in person or in the courts – when women were attacked with fierce misogyny simply for existing in public, when women’s healthcare was stigmatized and subject to punishing double standards, or, for that matter, when seven states passed mandatory ultrasound laws – had another sign to represent them: "I cannot believe I still have to protest this shit." But this time, they weren't drowned out, they were joined with fierce, spontaneous energy. As my colleague Mary Elizabeth Williams put it, though she worries about her daughters facing a "harder and meaner" world for women than the one she grew up in, “I haven't felt this strong a sense of ‘We are not helpless and this is not OK’ in a long time."

Continue Reading...

One of Rush's biggest enablers has so far escaped attention: the American Forces Network. For years, Limbaugh's show has been beamed around the globe to service members, military support staff and families. Other attempts have been made to remove him from that network and have failed.

This is the time.

In his more customized attacks on Fluke, it's easy to overlook the fact that Limbaugh has a two-decade-long track record of classifying women as inferior goods. This is the man who coined the term "Feminazi," who once stated that "feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream." In Rush World, most women are either babes, sluts or whores. They're cunning and manipulative or whiny and weak. There's not much middle ground.

Read the whole post on Open Salon.

Continue Reading...

Fluke tried to testify on behalf of President Obama's contraception coverage requirements at Rep. Darrell Issa's Inquisition; excuse me, his hearing on the regulations, which featured an all-male panel to lead off. But she was denied permission, on the grounds that Issa was interested in threats to religious liberty, not women's lives. That was bad enough. After the GOP congressman shut her down, she told her story to House Democrats as well as journalists. Limbaugh called her a "slut" and a "prostitute," and promised to buy Fluke and Georgetown women "as much aspirin to put between their knees as they want. We are paying her for having sex. We are getting screwed. So Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal: If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is: We want you to post the videos online, so we can all watch."

Continue Reading...

With new poll data showing that President Obama is quickly gaining ground among women voters, at least partly due to Republican extremism on contraception, Limbaugh told his listeners Thursday that the GOP would win the election if it's decided on culture-war terms.

“Something tells me, that if the upcoming election could be decided on social issues, the Republicans could win that in a landslide, because we are on the right side of the culture war,” he said. “The problem is, we’re scared to death of it. The Republican establishment wants no part of it.”

Smart Republicans are indeed afraid of the culture wars – because they know they're on the losing side. Sadly, there aren't very many smart Republicans anymore; or at least there aren't very many who will stand up to extremists in their base and say enough is enough on their jihad against birth control.

Continue Reading...

This is a hot topic for fundamentalists. “Is Rush a real Christian?” is the most frequently Googled question about the controversial radio personality.

So I decided to do a little research of my own, which I hoped might shed some light on the impending holiday season. Do Rush Limbaugh and the Prince of Peace really see eye to eye? Often the answer is no.

Continue Reading...

In fact, "Machine Gun Preacher" is the improbable but true story of Sam Childers (played by the improbable but true Gerard Butler, the shiny, muscle-bound Spartan king of "300" fame). After a misbegotten life as a violent biker/drug dealer/ex-con, Childers had a come-to-Jesus epiphany and became a born-again Christian with his own congregation in rural Pennsylvania. But it was when he heard a missionary speak about church work in East Africa that he found his true calling. He went on to build an orphanage in the Sudan and protect the kids there by becoming a vigilante fighting alongside the ill-equipped and undermanned local militia. That’s where the machine gun part comes in.

Continue Reading...

The past few weeks have felt like something of a turning point in the GOP race, with Chris Christie and Sarah Palin both declining to run, Rick Perry completing his decline from clear front-runner to just another guy on the stage, and Romney finally starting to reel in some of the party's heavy hitters who'd been on the sidelines. The catch is that actual Republican voters are proving stubbornly resistant to Romney, who remains stuck in the low- to mid-20s in national polls, even in the face of Perry's collapse. And to the 75 percent or so of GOP voters who still refuse to back Romney, Limbaugh has delivered an emphatic message these past few days: Keep resisting!

Continue Reading...

Meanwhile, John Boehner, the speaker of the House, gave his five-step "two-step" plan to famous shouty radio guy Rush Limbaugh, before he showed it to his own conference. (Of course, his conference is full of morons and extremists, many of whom wouldn't have known what to think about Boehner's plan until Uncle Rush explained it, so this was more shrewd than disrespectful.)

Continue Reading...

You see, it's all about Obama. It's not about grand bargains or complex efforts to devise a long-term bipartisan plan that will bring down the deficit without further endangering the economy and savaging the safety net. It's not about maintaining the full faith and credit of the United States. It's not about the difficulty of finding grounds for reasonable compromise. It's all about Obama.

And it makes sense. House Republicans were getting some bad press for their reckless willingness to extract huge concessions by holding the debt ceiling and the nation's credit-worthiness hostage. Lots of polling indicates that, outside of the Republican base, most Americans support compromise, and a "balanced" approach to deficit reduction that includes revenue increases as well as spending cuts. But no matter what Obama offered the GOP, Boehner could not agree to it, because any kind of a deal with the president would have the unbearable downside of making Obama look like a presidential problem-solver. And that would be an abomination.

Continue Reading...

Not that I'm complaining. As a native of New Jersey, the Insult State (official motto: "Oh yeah, who says?"), there's no level of invective to which I can't sink. Anybody who writes provocatively shouldn't complain when readers are provoked. Besides, it's less the anger than the sheer, boneheaded illogic that amazes me.

One could compile a textbook on logical fallacies from my email queue. If people used reason in their daily lives as poorly as they do when their political passions are engaged, we'd be in worse shape than we are. Luckily, most don't. Or if they do, civility prevents them from the kind of heedless venting encouraged by Internet anonymity.

A recent blog post by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman set me off. A world-renowned economist by trade, Krugman had posted an item arguing that a Greek bank-debt default might not be a total disaster. He mentioned that Argentina's economy had a strong recovery after it defaulted in 2001 -- stipulating that there are big differences between the two countries.

Continue Reading...

What makes chickenhawkery such a distinctly American phenomenon is our culture's coupling of aggressive militarism with a lack of anything even resembling shared sacrifice. Quite bizarrely, we celebrate those who rhetorically promote wars as "tough" and "strong" without requiring those very warmongers to walk their talk. Shielded from any personal risk of injury or death, the chickenhawk is thus permitted to wrap himself in an American flag and goose step his way through television studios as the alleged personification of patriotic bravery.

Continue Reading...

Yesterday, Politico reported what an educated listener could've guessed: Right-wing radio pundits are paid by conservative organizations to mention them favorably. FreedomWorks pays Glenn Beck to talk about how great FreedomWorks is, Rush Limbaugh wholeheartedly endorses the Heritage Foundation because the Heritage Foundation pays him, and Mark Levin receives a check for telling you that donating to Americans for Prosperity will help defeat Obama.

Glenn Beck is the most obvious and tacky about it, and he has learned that there is essentially no downside to being obvious and tacky about it. He is a very rich man and still inventing ways of getting richer by bleeding his incredibly devoted followers. He is now asking them to directly send him money in order to watch his show, which was formerly included in the cost of people's cable or satellite subscriptions.

Continue Reading...