Defending The Indefensible

Kyle Mantyla, RightWingWatch - here's a quick look and a clip from a radio talk show in Alabama:

Extremist anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ activist Flip Benham was among the Religious Right activists who gathered in Alabama last week to defend Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore amid multiple reports that Moore had pursued sexual relationships with teenage girls when he was in his 30s. Yesterday, Benham was interviewed by Alabama radio hosts Matt Murphy and Andrea Lindenberg on their “Matt & Aunie” show about the press conference and the allegations against Moore, and to say that the interview was a debacle would be an understatement.


These radio poodles are not exactly raving lefty loonies. So there's (apparently) some real resistance to this Roy Moore clown. And it'll be interesting to see how the exit polls shake out.

Somebody Please

...this guy is an abscess that's been allowed to fester on the ass of humankind for way too long. Could we just get it drained and disinfected already?

Big Twitter thing today was the Voter ID crap got smooshed in North Carolina.

Federal appellate judges on Friday struck down a 2013 law limiting voting options and requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls, declaring in an unsparing opinion that the restrictions “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the law was adopted with “discriminatory intent” despite lawmakers’ claims that the ID provision and other changes were designed to prevent voter fraud.

The ruling – which could have implications for voting laws in other states and possibly for the outcome of close races in the swing state of North Carolina – sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder, who in April issued a 485-page decision dismissing all claims in the legal challenge.

“In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with discriminatory intent, the court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees,” the ruling states. “This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.”

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article92593512.html#storylink=cpy

A Tiny Glimmer

Rush Limbaugh got dumped from the line up at a CBS Radio affiliate in Philly recently, replaced by Michael Smerconish.

I haven't heard much of the usual indignantly outraged tantrums from the Wingnuts yet tho'.  Eerily quiet.  But it turns out the AM station dropped him, and he got picked up by an FM outfit, so this doesn't exactly sound like much of a big story, but hey - there it is.

Maybe the real point is that if Limbaugh continues to fade from the AM side, and even if he keeps getting picked up by the FM stations, his reach continues to diminish because FM gets out to a much narrower audience.

Anyway, from Addicting Info:

Limbaugh will no longer be heard on the CBS station in Philadelphia that has allowed him to spew his venom for the past twenty years. He has been replaced by Michael Smerconish with the intro “forget the anger, reason is back”
Score one for reason and morality.

Everything Comes From Somewhere Else

The first 40 seconds of this clip will forever be in my mind whenever I ponder how a leech like Rush Limbaugh came to be.



Is it really that much of stretch to think this is where he got the idea?

The Right To Free Speech

You have the right to speak freely.  You have no right to demand a paycheck for it.

Speak your mind at the bar or at church or on the street corner, and you have a reasonable expectation to be left alone to say whatever you wanna say (within certain limits).

When you're being paid to speak, you have an obligation to stay within guidelines that your employer gets to draw.  Stick to your script - get paid.  Go off on your own, and you're on your own.  And we wish you the very best of luck in all your future endeavors.

I'm not crazy about boycotts because they tend to hurt local business people (ie: neighbors) while leaving the big dogs more or less untouched.  That said, I still think it's a really good idea for consumers to vote with their feet if they feel the need, and with their emails whenever they get a chance.  Smart companies know they have to listen to their customers.  They spend many millions every year trying to convince us they're in line with the trends they spend other millions trying to get us to tell them about.  When we take a few minutes to sign a petition or send an email thru their websites or leave critical comments on their facebook pages, they notice.

So when Rush Limbaugh gets slapped around (finally) for being - for having been for a very long time - a complete punk-ass rent-a-con, what we may be seeing is a kind of self-correction; the immune system of the body politic at work.

I dunno, of course, but it looks a lot like cause and effect to me.  Pay a guy to do something and that's what he does.  Stop payin' him to do it and he's likely to stop doin' it.

(hat tip and inspiration = driftglass)