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.

“Rush Limbaugh, who married a blonde bombshell half his age, is a model Sugar Daddy,” the company announced. “The moniker of a Sugar Daddy is that of an older, successful, wealthy man romantically involved with a younger, beautiful woman, much like the relationship Rush shares with his much younger wife, Lauryn Rogers.”

“Rush Limbaugh is one of the greatest examples of the modern day Sugar Daddy,” Wade said in a press release. “We wouldn’t feel right if we didn’t come forward and support him in his time of need.”

The site now boasts a million site users, has been featured on a full episode of “The Dr. Phil Show.” CNN legal expert “Sunny” Hostin called its “Sugar Baby” members “prostitutes.”  Last year, the site published a list of the Top 20 Universities with the most Sugar Babies, and British GQ Magazine has called SeekingArrangement.com “the future of online dating.”

Wade sees no shame in the Mercantile Theory of Human Relations.

No one is calling Newt Gingrich a slut when he asks his Billionaire Sugar Daddy, Sheldon Adelson, to inject cash to keep his presidential campaign afloat. But, when a woman seeks out a Sugar Daddy to help pay for college, many in mainstream media have no problem likening her to being a prostitute. Such is the hypocrisy of the society we live in.

Wade said he would buy ad spots to support “free speech,” and because Limbaugh’s show “appeals to the largest Sugar Daddy demographic.”

In an August interview with the Wall Street Journal, Wade, who has degrees from MIT, said financially based relationships are actually better than the other sort. “The fact that people are brutally honest up front makes these relationships healthier than others where people beat around the bush. If you know going into a relationship that a person is going to use you and you are going to use them, then it’s healthier because there is a mutually agreed exchange of expectations.”

Wade told the Journal he started the website in 2006 out of personal need.

“I had graduated from MIT and was making six figures, but it was very poor pickings for me. I would write emails [to prospective dates] and get a 1 to 2% response rate. My mom had told me that if you studied hard and were successful the women would line up. I help out girlfriends financially as well as with mentoring. I took those characteristics from my own dating and built a website around that.”

In the cross hairs: Planned Parenthood, the 91-year-old organization that provides birth control, cancer screening, STD testing and abortions to 3 million women a year, from 750 clinics in 49 states. In  the last month, Planned Parenthood was again in the headlines when the Susan G. Komen Foundation announced it wouldn’t fund Planned Parenthood anymore, then reversed itself.

Salon sat down with Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, to talk about how American politics reached the point where access to not just abortion, but to birth control, suddenly became a priority in the national political debate.

Women’s reproductive health issues seem to be defining issues this election year. Did you see this coming?

No. Somehow the Republican primary has become this race to the bottom on women’s issues. They have been trying to outdo themselves. And they are going to wake up in November and realize that the majority of voters are women.

Why do you think this is happening?

After the 2010 elections we saw this total realignment of  Congress and legislatures, based on reproductive issues.  People had been elected on the basis of anger about this enormous economic dislocation. But what we saw was that the House of Representatives was then two-thirds anti-choice. This was not a topic at all in the election. Yet, as soon as they were sworn in, they didn’t focus on jobs, the economy or foreclosures, but the first legislation they introduced was about abortion and healthcare. One of the first bills the House passed was to completely eliminate Planned Parenthood funding.

As a former Democratic strategist, what do you make of this phenomenon?

I think the other issues really take some thought and energy to solve. And it’s a cheap shot to go after women. We are seeing this enormous overreach that the government should be in every part of women’s lives. And we are seeing people across the country saying, “OK, enough is enough. How do you put politics in front of breast cancer screening?”

Did the Komen funding controversy change the way you do business?

The great news for us is that millions of people now know we are a major provider of preventive care including breast and cervical cancer screenings for 700,000 women a year. We heard from men and women across the country, that they they couldn’t believe groups were putting politics ahead of healthcare. We were very pleased to get support from Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong, for example.

Do you expect to get more Komen funding going forward?

That happens at the local level. We are very pleased to be working with them again. Their money goes to our local doctors and screeners. I am quite encouraged. It opens some doors.

Since the 2010 elections lawmakers have introduced more than 1,000 reproductive health bills. Why? And what is Planned Parenthood doing?

I think there was a feeling that women would never object, that we would just take what was dished out. Unfortunately, women are not represented equally in these legislatures.

But, I think we are seeing a real backlash against these efforts against women’s health. We saw the U.S. Senate reject the House’s efforts to end funding for Planned Parenthood. And we gained more than a million new supporters during those months.

Then you see in Mississippi, the most conservative state in the country by practically any measure, that this Personhood measure, which every major Republican presidential candidate has endorsed, was overwhelmingly rejected. People in this country don’t want government intruding into personal and family decisions.

How many of the 1,000 anti-choice measures are becoming law? 

A lot of them. I was just in my home state of Texas. The Legislature had just ended family planning and basic preventive care for 300,000 women in Texas. And Gov. Perry was out bragging that he closed 11 Planned Parenthood centers. These were  all along the Rio Grande and they only provided preventive care, no abortions at all. Here he is out bragging and women in the state are paying the price.

Do you have Republicans on your board or supporting Planned Parenthood?

We have tons of  Republicans. The great irony is a lot of our Planned Parenthoods were started by Republicans. Mrs. Barry Goldwater in Arizona. Richard Nixon signed the first family planning law into effect: the one that Mr. Romney has pledged to eradicate, the one that serves 5 million American women a year. That was signed into law by Nixon. Among Republicans, there is a history of support for access to healthcare and rejection of the intrusive laws being passed by the more extreme members of the party now. The sad thing is, traditional Republicans are being threatened and bullied by the folks in their own party.

You just handed me a Planned Parenthood candidate questionnaire that Mitt Romney signed in 2002, answering “yes” to the questions of whether he supported Roe v. Wade and access for poor women to abortion. What has happened to him?

It’s very tough to be a moderate Republican and stay in office. Ten years ago Mitt Romney was trying to get the Planned Parenthood endorsement. Today, as a leading candidate for president, he has pledged to completely eliminate Planned Parenthood, to end the family planning program, and he has endorsed the Personhood amendment. He is unrecognizable from when he was governor. That is a very good example of how extreme the Republican primary system has gotten. The thought we would have a major candidate running for president in America that wants to end family planning is just extraordinary.

Romney is the moderate. Santorum leans a bit farther over the edge.  

It is extraordinary that someone wants to be president of the United States who has absolutely no regard for women and women’s ability to make any decisions about personal healthcare. What’s disheartening is every time he moves to the right, Mitt Romney moves with him. What’s really of concern for women is that these guys can’t be trusted.

What did you make of Darrell Issa’s all-male panel on contraceptives and the Affordable Care Act, saying the issue is about liberty, not women.   

Well, I don’t think Mr. Issa has ever taken birth control. Where they are totally missing the boat is that women in America don’t see birth control as a social issue. It’s a health care issue.  The average American woman spends five years getting pregnant and having kids and then she spends an average of 30 years trying not to get pregnant. So trying to prevent an unintended pregnancy is a lifelong pursuit for women. Birth control is a basic healthcare issue and it’s an economic issue. Many women will save $600 a year from this [Affordable Care] benefit alone. I can’t say it enough: 99 percent of women in America, if they have ever been sexually active, use birth control. And 98 percent of Catholic women use birth control. This is  just not a controversial topic!

Did you predict that they would go after this benefit?

We worked for the passage because we knew it would be good for women. But I have been stunned to see that the Republican Party has taken up as the issue they want to be working on in Congress:  ending birth control. I look around me and see all the things this country needs. And the thought that they make that their priority is astounding,. This is why people have so little regard for Congress now. People ask: What are they doing to help me in my daily life? And for women who don’t have time for politics, who are raising their kids, trying to put dinner on the table, working two jobs, that’s money I can use for groceries? And now, men are talking to other men about how they can get rid of this benefit for women.

Are we living in regressive times for women in the U.S. right now?

I do think in the last 12 months it is literally a tale of two cities. On one hand, there are enormous opportunities for women, getting preventive care covered. On the other hand, there are political forces trying to take us back to the 1950s.

 When you arrived in 2006 , you said, “I feel like we need to go into the 21st century. Clearly, we are going to get there kicking and screaming.” Still, 87 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider.  That’s not progress, is it?

We’ve made a lot of progress. We are really seeing change in the coming generation. I hear from a lot of people saying, oh we fought so hard in the 1960s and young people don’t appreciate how far we have come. But I think in the last year we have seen young people engage in a way they never have before. When the House voted to end our funding,  we saw young people, including young men, all across the country on college campuses, get involved. We signed up more than a million new activists and supporters. During the Komen thing, we had literally 1.3 million tweets — an explosion!  These are young people.  And we are seeing young men take these issues on, they are not just women’s issues. They can’t imagine going back to a time when birth control was an issue.

But PP will always be a target for the pro-lifers.

Yes. They want to end all access to safe and legal abortion. Planned Parenthood does more to prevent unintended pregnancy than any organization. It’s unconscionable that the U.S. has the highest rate of unintended and teen pregnancy in the industrial world. There is so much we can do in this country to prevent that. I have been so disturbed to read the things that Mr Romney is saying, because I feel surely he must know better, this is a country where there is a lot we can do to improve people’s lives, instead of making women’s healthcare a political issue.

Do you foresee a time when women won’t be fighting to protect basic reproductive rights?

I think there is always going to be a part of society that is trying to keep women back, but I think we are making progress. Ninety-five years ago Margaret Sanger was arrested for handing out not birth control, but information about birth control. Last year we saw 30 million people online looking for information about birth control. We are making progress.

Read Gleick’s statement on Hufffington Post.

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication

He concluded: “I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.”

Heartland Institute president Joseph L. Bast promised legal action in a statement: ”A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage.”

In 2009, someone hacked into the emails of climate scientists arguing the finer points of the science. The Heartland and other pro-energy groups used those emails to claim that the science of man-caused climate change is inconclusive. That hacker has never been outed.

Some people don’t want to hear it. Supporters of industries that profit from the fossil-fuel status quo routinely challenge those facts, and treat them as political talking points. This week, a dirty trick played on one of the chief industry front groups, the Heartland Institute of Chicago, a major source of “climate denialism,” as the fact-based scientists like to call it, revealed just how politicized the issue has become.

On Tuesday, an individual claiming to be a Heartland donor persuaded the group to email him or her the group’s annual budget, its fundraising plan and a 2012 strategy paper, outlining the organization’s intent to insert contrarian views of climate change into the nation’s elementary schools.

The dirty email trick was reminiscent of a similar ploy in 2009, when someone hacked into emails of a British science consortium that advises the U.N. on climate change and released them publicly, revealing an argument between scientists on some of the evidence. At the time, Heartland touted the private emails as proof that scientists do not in fact agree on the causes of global warming, a development they call the “Climategate” scandal.

After reviewing the new Heartland documents, Gavin Schmidt, a scientist with NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who models and studies climate change, told Salon:

This is exactly the kind of thing we see people doing, and we know they have been actively promoting the fringe voices, trying to influence teaching curricula, trying to lobby legislators, trying to undermine the conclusions of bodies. But it is good to know who is actually funding them.

Heartland, which bills itself as anti-regulatory and libertarian, annually produces climate change “denier” conferences and pays expenses for elected officials to attend. For example, the budget shows that Heartland allocated $304,704 for scientists supporting its contrarian views in 2012.

One of these scientists is Fred S. Singer, a physicist and National Weather Bureau satellite center founder, who is said to receive $5,000 a month. The same day as the document leak, a science watchdog named John Mashey released a detailed investigation into Singer and his Science and Environmental Policy Project, indicating that he failed to properly fill out income forms for the foundation. Singer has previously worked with Heartland arguing that secondhand smoke is harmless. One of Heartland’s funders, according to the documents, is Phillip Morris.

Other scientists, researchers and pseudo-scientists on the Heartland payroll include a former California TV weatherman, Anthony Watts, who runs an anti-climate change science blog called WUWT (Watts Up With That). Heartland budgeted him $90,000 for a “special project.”

On his blog yesterday, Watts admitted taking an unspecified sum:

Heartland simply helped me find a donor for funding a special project having to do with presenting some new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form, something NOAA themselves is not doing, but should be. I approached them in the fall of 2011 asking for help, on this project not the other way around.

The Heartland budget allocates more than half a million dollars for “government relations” and another $800,000 for communications. Besides the big-budget annual climate conference, another $25,920 was budgeted for eight “Heartland Capital Events” identified as “events in state capitals for elected officials,” at $3,240 each.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Heartland is legally barred from using its tax-free income of $7.7 million to lobby for or against legislation. The fact that the group appears to be intending to do just that could transform the group’s ongoing public relations disaster into a legal problem. Heartland’s activities are no surprise to environmentalist watchdogs, but actual proof of moneys spent on lobbying activities might affect their legal status, if the IRS bothers to investigate.

Besides trying to influence public (and lawmaker) opinion on fossil fuels and climate change, Heartland works on other overtly political projects that have nothing to do with climate change.  The group gave $612,000 for something called “Operation Angry Badger,” aimed at the nonscientific goal of supporting Wisconsin’s anti-union Gov. Scott Walker, who is targeted for recall by progressives.

Worried that liberal (and, in their view, overpaid) public schoolteachers are turning young minds green with impunity, Heartland planned to pay a coal industry consultant named David Wojick about $25,000 per quarter, to create a curriculum to counter global warming education in schools.

“Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn’t alarmist or overtly political,” the document states. “Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success.”

Heartland is not alone in attacking the issue through the schools. Three states (Louisiana, Texas and South Dakota) have passed so-called Environmental Literacy Improvement Act bills — written by energy industry shills — that require schools to teach climate change “denial” along with conventional climate science. Other states are considering such measures.

“The big issue is that they are using charitable status to lobby,” Schmidt asked. “They are not an educational outfit. They are doing this to influence legislators. To what extent is it appropriate for them to be filing nonprofit status?”

A strategy paper indicated that Heartland has targeted Forbes and the New York Times as outlets for its message. Forbes has “begun to allow high-profile climate scientists … to post warmist science essays that counter our own,” the documents says. “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate change and it is important to keep opposing voices out.”

The paper recommended cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences, “such as Revkin at DotEarth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW communicators.”

“Mugging of a private organization”

Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely, reached by Salon on Wednesday, declined to comment on whether Heartland engages in lobbying. He insisted that at least one of the leaked documents  (the “strategy” paper) is a “fake” and therefore he wouldn’t concede the authenticity of any of the others, although he didn’t deny it either. The organization did publicly apologize to donors whose names were revealed, indicating that at least some of the information is accurate.

Was there poetic justice in an email trickster obtaining internal documents from Heartland, just as Heartland used hacked emails of climate scientists arguing over details to promote the alleged “Climategate” scandal.

Lakely rejected the notion:

There are profound differences between this online mugging of a private organization that is not receiving public funds, and what happens to organizations where taxpayer dollars and international funds are involved. There is a level of accountability that the public is entitled to and that is not remotely parallel to ambushing a private organization’s private documents. I expect [progressives and environmentalists] to make those comparisons, but we are not a public entity.

Lakely also denied that Heartland’s efforts have helped turn a scientific debate into a circus of political claims, counterclaims and dirty tricks. “What the Heartland Institute has been encouraging for a long time is a scientific discussion,” he said.  “We invite people who even hate the Heartland Institute to engage in civil open and public debate about what the science says is happening to the planet.”

Among the listed donors were big pharmaceutical companies and insurers (financing the Heartland’s “Choose Your Medicine” project aimed at fighting what it calls “Obamacare”). The Charles Koch Foundation kicked in $200,000 to the healthcare effort. Energy companies and trusts affiliated with them were behind financing for the climate projects.

After the documents leaked, some of the listed donors distanced themselves from Heartland. Microsoft told the New YorkTimes that its $59,908 donation was not in cash, but in software that it routinely provides nonprofits. A Glaxo Smith Kline spokeswoman confirmed the company’s $50,000 donation but added, “We absolutely don’t endorse their views on the environment.”

The document leak inspired much glee among enviro-bloggers like DeSmogBlog and Think Progress Green, but NASA’s Schmidt said tainted science is a serious problem that exists beyond Heartland’s lobbying efforts.

“I don’t think Heartland is either powerful or particularly well-funded,” he said. “They do channel money to these small number of skeptics who make a living being skeptics. But those people would exist without them. The politicization of this topic has come about because people perceive there are political consequences to this problem. What is surprising is that scientists who are just doing their job get pulled up and investigated just because somebody doesn’t want to agree with their results. And that has been driven to a large part by groups like Heartland. “

Bernie is for all intents and purposes OWS’s man in the Senate — whether they want one or not. Not one but two online campaigns have been launched to draft him for a presidential run. His epic eight and a half hour filibuster against President Obama’s extension of the Bush tax cuts last December has been published by Nationbooks under the title “The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class. ”

“Enough is enough!” he cried out at one point “How many homes can you own?” (The answer, if you are Oracle co-founder and third richest American Larry Ellison, is close to infinite.)

If there’s anyone in Washington who actually links Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park into the stream of American politics, it is Sanders. In mid-October he tweeted: “People might want to think about going to your local community bank and withdrawing funds from these large institutions. #ows.” It’s an idea Move your Money has been pushing for a while. Now Occupy Wall Street is talking up Nov. 5 as a National Bank Transfer day when people will withdraw funds from the big banks and deposit it in community banks and credit unions.

In an interview with Salon.com last week, Sanders said he didn’t know about the Nov. 5 action when he made his proposal but he says he thinks the idea will catch on.  The single most important thing Americans can do to save the economy, he said,  is break up the biggest banks.

“I think there is a whole lot of anger and mistrust of large financial institutions and Wall Street that caused the terrible, terrible recession. And at the end of the day, after causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs and homes, CEOs are making more than they ever did and on top of that the banks are now charging $5 on debit cards.

“The country’s six largest financial institutions [Bank of America, CitiGroup, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs] now have amassed assets equal to more than 60 percent of our gross domestic product. That is $9 trillion.”

Sanders said that the OWS effect on American politics is providing a vent for previously unfocused anger. “Polls are pretty clear about this. The people of America are concerned not only about the greed and recklessness of Wall Street but also, as the OWS folks have pointed out, about the growing inequality of wealth in America. You’ve got the top 400 Americans owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. Most folks do not think that is right. You are seeing a growing anger and an understanding that the middle class is collapsing, poverty is increasing, and those elected officials willing to speak to those issues are going to touch a nerve.”

Since 2008, Sanders has been focusing on conflicts of interest and the role of the Federal Reserve in aiding and abetting the banks that ran amok.

“The Fed put 16 trillion into the big banks during the financial crisis,” he said. “The Fed during that period lent out $16 trillion to every major financial institution in this country and wealthy individuals and central banks all over the world. We are saying to the Fed, if you can bail out central banks in the Middle East and Africa, you may want to help small businesses in this country so they can expand and create jobs.”

Last week, he released his summary of a GAO report he’d requested on conflicts of interest at the Fed. In ordinary times, such a report would have landed in the heaps of white paper that get bundled and shredded without reporters beyond the most obscure business journals paying any attention at all.

Bloggers jumped on the report, which found numerous problems at the Fed that create “an appearance of a conflict of interest,” including the policy of the Fed to give banking industry members the power to both elect and serve on the Fed, and the fact that 18 current or former Fed members had received emergency loans during the financial crisis.

Among those named in the report are:

• Former chairman of the New York Fed Stephen Friedman, who simultaneously sat on the board of directors at Goldman Sachs and owned stock in Goldman, which was actually prohibited under the Fed’s own rules;
• General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who was a Fed board director when  the Fed provided $16 billion in financing to GE;
• Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP MorganChase, who was a sitting Fed board director when the Fed provided his bank with $29 billion in financing to buy Bear Stearns, and also gave the institution an 18-month exemption from risk-based leverage and capital requirements.

“We have to go beyond shining a light,” Sanders said. “We have to say Wall Street caused this recession. We have been trying to come up with a program.”

The concentration of wealth in the top six banks is “a very dangerous situation for this country,” not least because of the way they can buy political power. Sanders says the same banks and their allies spent $5 billion over 10 years in Washington to deregulate Wall Street. That’s a lot of steak and golf.

On Vermont Public TV last week,  Sanders was again talking about the “greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on the part of Wall Street.” He conceded it feels good to have company.  “Yeah I do!” he responded to a question about whether he felt vindicated by the occupation movement.  “It is nice to hear all over this country in hundreds and hundreds of cities people talking about these issues.”

But he said he had no plans to go down to Occupy Wall Street in New York, D.C. or any other city at the moment.

“I’ve been asked. But they are trying not to get involved with elected officials. They want to maintain their grass roots. I think it’s the right thing. And at this point I’m not going down there.”