Monday, March 30, 2009

Lunchtime reading: Turning America into France Edition

atrios: Walking Away
Banks are apparently starting to walk away from foreclosed properties, though often not before people move out thinking they've lost their homes only to discover that their now vandalized and worthless properties are still theirs.

The free market is a remarkable thing.

TPM:

GOP Angling To Keep Minnesota Recount Battle Going For 'Years'

Sen. John Cornyn tells Politico a federal challenge in the Minnesota election dispute could take "years" to resolve -- and that's just fine with him.



Aravosis: Obama FIRED the head of GM
I don't think Chris' earlier story has quite sunk in. Obama basically just fired the head of GM.

And good for him.

This is the kind of leadership on the economy that people have been demanding. And considering the public's ire over the AIG bonuses, I think Obama will get big props for this one from the American people.

Of course, the Dow just dropped 200 points as a result of Obama's actions. Why? Because Wall Street is now scared to death that President Barack Obama will actually hold them responsible for their actions. I doubt the public will lose a wink of sleep over that one.

But the Republicans? Just wait for the cries of "socialism!" to come screaming from GOP leaders Limbaugh and Palin and Bachmann and Beck. How dare a US president fire the head of a PRIVATE company?! Of course, Obama didn't really "fire" the GM exec - he simply told him that in order to get more bailout money, he needs to go. Same diff.

But do watch the Republicans closely on this one. They dusted off their faux populism during the AIG bonus debate, when only months before their leaders (e.g., McConnell and Cantor) were irate over the notion that the government might try to rein in executive compensation. So get ready for the GOP to attack the notion that the federal government is telling a private business what to do, when just two weeks ago the GOP argued that the federal government should tell a private business what to do.

Obama 1
America 1
GOP 0
  • Glastris: MADNESS IN DETROIT...
    The big news today is that the Obama administration is taking a heavier and more direct role in the restructuring of the auto industry--including demanding the resignation of GM chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner. The markets may not like this more hands-on approach by government, and it's not hard to understand the concern. But as Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation explains in the new issue of the Washington Monthly, there is a bright shining example from not so long ago of government bureaucrats engineering the revival of an industry easily as troubled as today's automakers and, if anything, more central to the economy.

    In 1976 Washington took over Penn Central and five other bankrupt railroads and folded them into a government-sponsored entity, Conrail. New management was recruited, federal dollars pumped in, major structural reforms instituted. A decade later, a thriving Conrail was sold off in what was, at the time, the largest IPO in U.S. history. A fluke? Hardly. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson put the entire railroad industry under government control, and later placed it back in private hands in much better shape than when he got it.

    While the parallels with yesterday's railroads and today's auto industry are not exact, they are close enough to provide many useful lessons. The most important is this: as the automakers return to Washington for a second round of assistance, the greatest danger may well be not that government will intervene too much, but that it won't intervene enough.

    Read Longman's article, "Washington's Turnaround Artists," here.
    • dday adds:
      obviously, bailouts of any kind are unpopular at this point, and must be met with major concessions. However, one must be struck by the dichotomy of the President and bank CEOs making nice-nice on Friday, and forcing Wagoner out today. As Atrios put it, "apparently the real economy is less important than the paper one." Josh Marshall digs a bit deeper:
      Citi does not have the same CEO it did at the start of the crisis. And the government installed a new CEO at AIG after the initial bailout. Another rejoinder might be that the automakers' plight is of a much more longstanding vintage than that of the finance barons, though I suspect, as we learn more, we'll be revisiting those assumptions. And even after getting substantial government aid, I think Wagoner's the first auto industry CEO to get the boot. So perhaps we should be asking why it is that something like this hasn't happened sooner.

      All that said, though, after that meeting of the major bank CEOs at the White House last week, it's hard for me not to think that, for all that has happened, their clout in Washington is just on a scale where they are accepted as peers of the realm. And simply immune to certain sorts of treatment.

      The White House may believe that anger over the initial auto bailout, and bailouts in general, force them to be tough. And certainly the government should not throw good money after bad if there's no hope of viability. But with millions of jobs at stake, certainly a good bit of people are going to notice that the auto industry is being forced into concessions that practically no bank has had to make.

      ...President Obama will announce the government's plan later this morning.


Blue Texan: Mitch McConnell: Obama is Turning America into France

It's not Glenn Beck saying this. It's the Senate Minority Leader.

“I’m not sure that’s what people voted for. I mean they were angry with President Bush. They were not happy with the economy…. Whether they intended to see America kind of turned into a Western European country as a result of an explosion of spending and debt and regulation is another matter.

Since 64% of the country currently approves of President Obama, I would say that either (a) two-thirds of the country equates the Economic Recovery bill and increasing the upper tax margin by 4% to socialism; or (b) Mitch McConnell is an idiot who shouldn't be taken seriously about anything.

“Republicans are very much in favor of dealing with [the country’s economic crisis],” McConnell said. “What we're not in favor of is going on this spending spree over the next five to 10 years and sending the bill to our grandchildren.”

That's true. They were only willing to do so under George W. Bush.

  • Joe Sudbay (DC) adds: Mitch McConnell is as insincere and duplicitous as they come. When Obama reached out to the Republicans, the Republicans shut him down. So, Obama is moving ahead to pass the agenda of change, which is what the American people want. ... Seems like Obama is governing from where the American people want him to be. His approval rating is a lot higher than the Republicans in Congress. ... Keep in mind, in 2006, there were 55 Republicans Senators. Now, there are 41. The Republicans have lost 25% of their membership. That's because they're out-of-touch and have had nothing to offer the American people.
  • Dougj: Memewatch: it’s all unconstitutional!
    The new Republican line against Obama is that everything he’s doing to prop up the economy is unconstitutional. Michelle Bachmann last week:
    Sir, in the Constitution? What in the Constitution could you point to to give authority to the Treasury extraordinary actions that they take?

    George Will today:

    It is high time Americans heard an argument that might turn a vague national uneasiness into a vivid awareness of something going very wrong. The argument is that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) is unconstitutional.

    Sully finds Will’s rantings fascinating. Publius has a good take-down of the article.

    A reader in today’s WaPo chat:

    Arlington, Va.: Isn’t “President fires CEO” as troubling as “Pope fires missile”?

    Free market capitalism, despite it’s obvious flaws, has lifted more people from poverty than anything in history. When the president can hire and fire CEOs from corporations, we’re no longer a free market capitalist society. GM is clearly a disaster, but it’s up to their board and shareholders to make those decisions. Obama is clearly just helping his union buddies, but he’s destroying the foundation of our economy as he does it.

    Is there anything the Supreme Court can do about it? Isn’t this clearly beyond his constitutional duties? Or, because they’re saying he “resigned”, is Obama safe (and the rest of us doomed)?

    [....]

    it seems from what I read that Wagoner is officially stepping aside, not being fired by the president.: That is also the official line Russia and Venezuela, etc., use when removing CEOs from businesses they dislike. This is a very scary precedent Mr. Obama is setting. Very scary.

    Expect to see a lot of this one over the next few months.


dday
: A NEW DAY ON CLIMATE CHANGE....
Juliet Eilperin reports on the sweeping changes being made by the Obama Administration on environmental policy:
After the United States voiced support for the idea of a new, binding mercury treaty, the world community embraced it in Nairobi.

The rapid policy reversal is just one of more than a dozen environmental initiatives the new administration has undertaken in its first two months. In nearly every case, the decisions were based on extensive analysis and documentation that rank-and-file employees had prepared over the past couple of years, often in the face of contrary-minded Bush administration officials.

After years of chafing under political appointees who viewed stricter environmental regulation with skepticism, long-serving federal officials are seeing work that had been gathering dust for years translate quickly into action.

Some of these proposals include the creation of a national greenhouse gas registry, to put real numbers on emissions so industry can account for them; a halt to plans for mountaintop removal; real resources for prosecuting coal-fired power plants under the Clean Air Act for violations; a fresh look at granting a waiver to California and other states to regulate their own tailpipe emissions; and study of whether the EPA will regulate greenhouse gas emissions on their own. For all of this, the EPA is drawing on the work of career officials they were unable to put forward in the eight long years of the Bush Administration. Finally, employees of the EPA are allowed to write the rules again.

And the President has followed this up by announcing a series of global meetings over the next few months to discuss climate change and renewable energy issues, leading into the negotiations for a new global treaty in Copenhagen in December. While the Bush Administration also set up meetings, there was a sense by stakeholders that the plan was to talk the issue to death. Just looking at the work of the EPA, the Obama Administration is primed for action.


Greg Sargent: Poll: More Now Think Obama Is “Partisan Dem” — And His Approval Rating Is Up!

Not that you needed it, but here’s yet another possible sign that the public doesn’t tend to want our politicians to engage in “bipartisanship” for its own sake.

A new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 50% now think President Obama is “governing as a partisan Democrat,” up seven points from last month and up 11 points from two months ago.

So has that shift hurt his approval rating? Nope. If anything, it’s the opposite.

Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll finds that Obama’s approval rating is up, at 58%. It finds that the number who “strongly approve” of his performance is also up, to 37%.

These changes come as Republicans have turned up the heat on Obama and as the White House and its allies have dug in and gone after Republicans equally hard. So is there a connection between Obama’s rising approval numbers and the rising perception of him as a “partisan Democrat”?

Hard to say — but it does seem clear that this growing view of Obama hasn’t done anything to tarnish his “brand.” And yet we keep hearing that this brand is supposedly rooted in his willingness to be “bipartisan” or “post-partisan.” These numbers suggest that people don’t automatically equate “partisan” with “bad,” and that the success of the Obama brand is rooted in the perception that he’s acting for the good of the country, rather than his party, even when he appears partisan.


Sudbay: Gallup: Catholics "are actually more liberal than the non-Catholic population on a number of moral issues"
Catholics share the same views as non-Catholics on the choice and stem cell issues. This isn't a surprise to most mainstream Catholics.

The leaders of the Catholic Church are hypocrites. They always welcomed the war-mongering, death penalty supporting George Bush with open arms. But, some are giving Notre Dame a hard time for inviting Obama. But, Obama shares the views of mainstream Catholics, not the same leaders who protected pedophiles for decades.

From Gallup:
The argument of those who protest the extension of the invitation to Obama is that Catholics have a distinctly conservative position on these moral issues. That is certainly the case as far as official church doctrine is concerned, but not when it comes to average American Catholics. The new Gallup analysis, based on aggregated data from Gallup's 2006-2008 Values and Beliefs surveys, indicates that Catholics in the United States today are actually more liberal than the non-Catholic population on a number of moral issues, and on others, Catholics have generally the same attitudes.

The accompanying chart shows the percentage of Catholics and non-Catholics who find each of nine moral issues morally acceptable. Catholics are at least slightly more liberal than non-Catholics on the issues of gambling (an issue to which the Catholic church is not totally opposed), sex between an unmarried man and woman, homosexual relations, and having a baby out of wedlock. Catholics are essentially tied with non-Catholics on the moral acceptability of abortion, divorce, and stem-cell research using human embryos. Only on the death penalty are Catholics slightly less likely than non-Catholics to find the issue morally acceptable.

This also means the traditional media should never book that bloviating imbecile Bill Donohue, also a homophobe and racist, to speak for Catholics. He doesn't. He's the one out of the mainstream.


Yglesias: Obama Fights the Logic of Escalation in Afghanistan

I think there’s a good case to be made for something resembling the Obama administration’s approach to Afghanistan. The problem, however, is that it might not work. And I worry that if we run into problems, the administration will find itself caught up in the logic of escalation, which holds that if the initial effort to pour more resources in failed, then we need to pour even more resources in. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s smart to make an effort to put the kind of resources into Afghanistan that we should have sent in years ago. But if 12-18 months from now it’s not working, we need to scale back our goals not further escalate. That’s why I was glad to see Obama talking about benchmarks on Friday, and very glad to read this from Amanda Terkel:

Today in an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer, Obama underscored this point. He pointed out that the reason he has increased troops in Afghanistan is because levels there are “greatly underresourced.” However, he is not going to “simply assume that more troops always result in an improved situation.”

Watch the clip:

He says specifically that “just because we needed to ramp up from the greatly underresourced levels that we had doesn’t automatically mean that, if this strategy doesn’t work, that what’s needed is even more troops.” I think that’s exactly right. There’s reason to believe that this will work, but if it doesn’t work we don’t want to keep trying the same thing. This is very heartening stuff. I still wonder if this kind of clear thinking will hold up once we’re deeper into the situation, but for now the thinking is clear and that’s important.

Yglesias: Sons of Iraq Unraveling?

Back during the high tide of the “is the surge working?” debate, I was among those who kept worrying that the policy of funding Sunni “Sons of Iraq” militias who hadn’t by any means reconciled themselves (or vice-versa) to the idea of a Shiite-led Iraqi state seemed like something likely to blow up at the end of the day. Then it kept not happening, and attention sort of shifted to other grounds. But now as DDay observes, we’re seeing some blowups as Sunnis are not getting paid money they were promised, the government arrested a Sons of Iraq leader, and now some SOI folks have staged an armed uprising.

Perhaps this will boil over, more likely some way will be found to put a lid on things. But either way, fundamental questions about the nature of the Iraqi state continue to be unresolved. Part of the issue over “residual forces” is whether or not we think it’s smart to have the US military perpetually playing referee in these kind of disputes. Doing so will give us continued “influence” in the country and the region, but the costs will be high and the concrete benefits to American citizens are hard to see.

Yglesias: Elliot Abrams Thinks Iranians Will Welcome Us As Liberators If We Launch Unprovoked Airstrikes on Their Country

Given that Elliot Abrams was a high-ranking Bush administration official and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, I think we can conclude that neither substantive policy failure nor a record of illegally lying to congress is going to derail his career. He is all-but-certain to return to office more powerful than ever. Thus, I’m going to hope for the sake of the country that this argument he made during a debate on whether or not we should bomb Iran represents dishonesty rather than stupidity:

We are not talking about the Americans killing civilians, bombing cities, destroying mosques, hospitals, schools. No, no, no – weʹre talking about nuclear facilities which most Iranians know very little about, have not seen, will not see, some quite well hidden.

So they wake up in the morning and find out that the United States if attacking those facilities and, presumably with some good messaging about why weʹre doing it and why we are not against the people of Iran.

Itʹs not clear to me that the reaction letʹs go to war with the Americans, but rather, perhaps, how did we get into this mess? Why did those guys, the very unpopular ayatollahs in a country 70 percent of whose population is under the age of 30, why did those old guys get us into this mess.

Throughout the decades-long history of air power, arguments of this form have been made time and again by people who overestimate its strategic efficacy, and it’s never been true. Nor does it seem at all likely to me that it would be possible for the United States to engage in a thorough demolition of Iranian nuclear facilities without killing some civilians. But even if casualties were limited to Iranian military and intelligence personnel and to scientists and technicians working on the nuclear project, I don’t really see why we’d expect the Iranian population to regard that with equanimity. If Iranian agents were to blow up an American military base, I don’t think the American public would just say “well, fair enough”; we’d be pissed. And it’s in the United States—not Iran—where powerful elements of the national security establishment muse openly about launching unprovoked unilateral military attacks on other countries.

This all comes to me via Justin Logan who observes that it’s likely neither stupidity nor dishonesty but rather the toxic blend of the two known as self-deception, “If you’re interested in these type of arguments, I’d encourage you to pick up a copy of Jack Snyder’s Myths of Empire. These sorts of arguments are literally straight from the pages of Myths, a book where Snyder attempts to generalize the “myths” that empires endorse as they overexpand.”

  • joe from Lowell Says:

    Polling Data

    Do you support the government’s determination to continue uranium enrichment, or do you support the suspension of uranium enrichment?

    Continue uranium enrichment

    77.7%

    Suspend uranium enrichment

    22.3%

    Source: Fars News Agency
    Methodology: Interviews to 8,000 Iranian adults in 60 Iranian cities, conducted in July 2007. No margin of error was provided.



Daily Kos' DemfromCT: Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Monday, and let's look at what the pundits are saying now.

Paul Krugman:

I don’t believe that even America’s economic efforts are adequate, but they’re far more than most other wealthy countries have been willing to undertake. And by rights this week’s G-20 summit ought to be an occasion for Mr. Obama to chide and chivy European leaders, in particular, into pulling their weight.

But these days foreign leaders are in no mood to be lectured by American officials, even when — as in this case — the Americans are right.

The financial crisis has had many costs. And one of those costs is the damage to America’s reputation, an asset we’ve lost just when we, and the world, need it most.

More on Krugman

Evan Thomas (2009): He's brilliant, but prefers the gadfly role to the insider.

....

Jonathan Alter:

Caught in the Act Of Thinking

Love that headline. Should happen more often to a government near you.

But if the public wasn't gambling last fall (John McCain was arguably the riskier choice), the president is now. Obama is tripling down, wagering not just that his recovery plan will work but that he can simultaneously dent three huge problems (not fix, dent) that keep getting worse. He's telling the people exactly what to expect from him for the duration of his presidency. He's insisting that repairing the nation's "foundation" begins right now, in this year's budget. And he's set himself up for failure if he doesn't bring big changes in our new policy trinity of Health, Energy and Education, or what I lamely think of as HEE-HEE (constant repetition being necessary for the priorities to sink in).

Norm Orenstein:

I have watched with interest the reactions to the president's proposal in his budget to reduce to 28 percent the deduction for charitable contributions for those in the top tax bracket. Much of the opposition has come from the charitable community, but there have been several op/eds and other reports from conservative economists and others suggesting that it would result in a serious hit to charities. Which has raised for me a question: if President Obama had instead suggested tax reform that would reduce the top marginal tax rate to 28 percent, how many think that there would be comparable conservative objections because of the havoc that would wreak on charitable institutions? Go ahead, raise your hands. Anybody?


I am greatly conflicted about the following piece. It ends with: "He added later: “I say on the air all time, ‘if you take what I say as gospel, you’re an idiot.’ ” But that is what Limbaugh has always said. And there are vast numbers of idiots out there who take what Limbaugh says as gospel. And many of them, if not all, have guns. To diminish the real threat posed by Beck and Limbaugh and crowd with: His comments have prompted several bloggers to speculate recently that the TV host may have been promoting an armed revolt. Yeah, and you know those crazy bloggers. Ha ha.

NYT's
Fox News’s Mad, Apocalyptic, Tearful Rising Star

“You are not alone,” Glenn Beck likes to say. For the disaffected and aggrieved Americans of the Obama era, he could not have picked a better rallying cry.

Mr. Beck, an early-evening host on the Fox News Channel, is suddenly one of the most powerful media voices for the nation’s conservative populist anger. Barely two months into his job at Fox, his program is a phenomenon: it typically draws about 2.3 million viewers, more than any other cable news host except Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, despite being on at 5 p.m., a slow shift for cable news.

With a mix of moral lessons, outrage and an apocalyptic view of the future, Mr. Beck, a longtime radio host who jumped to Fox from CNN’s Headline News channel this year, is capturing the feelings of an alienated class of Americans.

In an interview, Mr. Beck, who recently rewatched the 1976 film “Network,” said he identified with the character of Howard Beale, the unhinged TV news anchorman who declares on the air that he is “mad as hell.”

“I think that’s the way people feel,” Mr. Beck said. “That’s the way I feel.” In part because of Mr. Beck, Fox News — long identified as the favored channel for conservatives and Republican leaders — is enjoying a resurgence just two months into Mr. Obama’s term. While always top-rated among cable news channels, Fox’s ratings slipped during the long Democratic primary season last year. Now it is back on firm footing as the presumptive network of the opposition, with more than 1.2 million viewers watching at any given time, about twice as many as CNN or MSNBC.

While Mr. O’Reilly, the 8 p.m. host, paints himself as the outsider and Mr. Hannity, at 9, is more consistently ideological, Mr. Beck presents himself as a revivalist in a troubled land.

He preaches against politicians, hosts regular segments titled “Constitution Under Attack” and “Economic Apocalypse,” and occasionally breaks into tears.

Michael Smerconish, a fellow syndicated talk show host, said that Mr. Beck “has a gift for touching the passion nerve.”

Tapping into fear about the future, Mr. Beck also lingers over doomsday situations; in a series called “The War Room” last month he talked to experts about the possibility of global financial panic and widespread outbreaks of violence. He challenged viewers to “think the unthinkable” so that they would be prepared in case of emergency.

“The truth is — that you are the defender of liberty,” he said. “It’s not the government. It’s not an army or anybody else. It’s you. This is your country.”

And always, Mr. Beck’s emotions are never far from the surface. “That’s good dramatic television,” said Phil Griffin, the president of a Fox rival, MSNBC. “That’s who Glenn Beck is.”

Mr. Beck says he believes every word he says on his TV show, and the radio show that he still hosts from 9 a.m. to noon each weekday.

He says that America is “on the road to socialism” and that “God and religion are under attack in the U.S.” He recently wondered aloud whether FEMA was setting up concentration camps, calling it a rumor that he was unable to debunk.

At the same time, though, he says he is an entertainer. “I’m a rodeo clown,” he said in an interview, adding with a coy smile, “It takes great skill.”

And like a rodeo clown, Mr. Beck incites critics to attack by dancing in front of them.

“There are absolutely historical precedents for what is happening with Beck,” said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “There was a lot of radio evangelism during the Depression. People were frustrated and frightened. There are a lot of scary parallels now.”

The conservative writer David Frum said Mr. Beck’s success “is a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility.”

“It’s a show for people who feel they belong to an embattled minority that is disenfranchised and cut off,” he said.

Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president for development at Fox News, said he thought Mr. Beck’s audience was a “somewhat disenfranchised” one. And, he added, “it’s a huge audience.”

Mr. Beck has used phrases like “we surround them,” invoked while speaking vaguely about people who do not share his discomfort with the “direction America is being taken in.”

His comments have prompted several bloggers to speculate recently that the TV host may have been promoting an armed revolt.

Jeffrey Jones, a professor of media and politics at Old Dominion University and author of the book “Entertaining Politics,” said that Mr. Beck engages in “inciting rhetoric. People hear their values are under attack and they get worried. It becomes an opportunity for them to stand up and do something.”

Sitting in his corner office overlooking Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, Mr. Beck rejected such charges but acknowledged that some people see sinister meanings in his commentaries. He said the people “who are spreading the garbage that I’m stirring up a revolution haven’t watched the show.”

To answer his critics, Mr. Beck delivered a 17-minute commentary — remarkably long by cable standards — last Monday, answering criticisms, including one from Bill Maher that he was producing “the same kind of talking” that led Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

“Let me be clear,” Mr. Beck said. “If someone tries to harm another person in the name of the Constitution or the ‘truth’ behind 9/11 or anything else, they are just as dangerous and crazy as those we don’t seem to recognize anymore, who kill in the name of Allah.”

Born in Mount Vernon, Wash., in 1964, Mr. Beck has long been a performer. His roots are in comedy — he spent years as a morning radio disc jockey — and continues to perform comedy on stages across the country.

He got into the radio business to “share my opinion in a humorous way,” but the times “are so serious now that I find myself sometimes being the guy I don’t want to be — the guy saying things that are sometimes pretty scary, but nobody else is willing to say them.”

In 2006, he joined Headline News. There, his show was taped, denying viewers some of the what-will-he-say-next quality of his live program on Fox.

On March 12 Mr. Beck introduced the 9/12 Project, an initiative to reclaim the values and principles that he said were evident the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. On a special broadcast he asked: “What ever happened to the country that loved the underdog and stood up for the little guy?”

When it was suggested in an interview that he sometimes sounds like a preacher, he responded, “No. You’ve never met a more flawed guy than me.”

He added later: “I say on the air all time, ‘if you take what I say as gospel, you’re an idiot.’ ”




DougJ: Listening to Limbaugh

The LA Times can’t go bankrupt fast enough to suit my tastes. Some nut named Andrew Klavan has a a column today about how liberals are afraid to listen to Rush:

If you are reading this newspaper, the likelihood is that you agree with the Obama administration’s recent attacks on conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh. That’s the likelihood; here’s the certainty: You’ve never listened to Rush Limbaugh.

Oh no, you haven’t.

[....]

Which leads to a question: Why not? I mean, come on, the guy’s one of the figures of the age. Aren’t you even curious? I listen to all your guys: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, The Times, the New York Times, the New Yorker—I check out the whole left-wing hallelujah chorus. Why are you afraid to spend a couple of hours listening to Limbaugh’s show and seriously considering if and why you disagree with him?

[....]

I listen to Limbaugh every chance I get, and I have never heard the man utter a single racist, hateful or stupid word

I’ve listened to Limbaugh a million times and the truth is that most of it is dumber and more incoherent than the excerpts that you see when he says something controversial. That said, it’s approximately a thousand times smarter than Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Let’s face it—talk radio, liberal talk radio included—is a dumb medium. If you ever catch me blabbering about how brilliant anyone on Air America is, I want you to shoot me.

And never a stupid, hateful word? Rush had a segment about AIDS where he played the song “I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again”.

All right, I know this is an easy target but for God’s sake, why would the LAT publish something this dumb?





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