Intravenous Caffeine

Totally Unfair and Completely Unbalanced

Couldn’t Have Happened To A Nicer Guy

The GOP is sure all this slut business will blow over by November

Headdesk, headdesk, headdesk...

Much as I normally hate to do a subject two weeks in a row, the swift financial retribution against Rush Limbaugh is worthy of an exception. Seems Rush has lost about 90% of his sponsors over the controversy caused by his deliberate slander of an innocent bystander, at least temporarily. As you will remember, Rush called Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute for the horrendous crime of wanting to testify to the all-male committee fulminating over contraception about her friend who was denied contraceptives when she needed them for hormone therapy. Rush leapt to judgment on the girl, in an ass-brained show of ignorance of how contraceptives work, saying she was having so much sex she needed government assistance to pay for her pills. The rightwing ditto heads have repeated these charges ad nauseam and no amount of facts can ever dissuade them from the opinions given them by the Pope of Clear Channel.

This is the way free speech works in the free market. Rush Limbaugh was, is and will be free to make any ass-brained statement he wants to make. The question is whether or not anyone has to pay to allow those statements to be broadcast to the nation and world at large. With sponsors, he can shout it loud and clear to the entire radio audience. Without sponsors, he’s still free to shout them–but unless he or Clear Channel pay for it themselves, his soapbox might be … a soapbox. Seems Clear Channel has had to run Public Service Announcements on many of the commercial spots during Rush’s show this week. Dum da dum dum!

Bill Maher has weighed in on the proceedings and has tried to argue that Rush ought not be censored by the free market. Piffle. Bill is still smarting because HIS former TV show Politically Incorrect got dumped when he expressed an unforgivable truth: that the perpetrators of the cowardly attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center were not themselves cowards. This was in the middle of US war-drum fever. Come on Bill, Americans won’t be ready for that kind of nuance before 2102, the year AFTER the 9/11 centennial. We still have people who said the Japanese deserved the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown tragedy because of PEARL HARBOR! And besides, what you said was true, just unpopular. That’s a fair distance from maliciously maligning someone by misrepresenting what they’d said or done.

Free speech doesn’t mean we have to subsidize hate speech. As long as someone’s willing to pay for the plug in the socket, Rush will have a platform. But, if no one wants to pay to have a person with that much bile representing their company, screw it. Let him try to get a gig on NPR 🙂

And speaking of Japan, this weekend marked the anniversary of that horrible series of misfortunes. Compounding the tragedy was that although Japan is one of the most prepared nations against earthquakes, the government had let down its guard on tsunami preparedness and had dropped the ball on nuclear safety measures AND spent more time CYAing and following procedures instead of reacting swiftly enough to contain the nuclear danger. But the Japanese people have shown incredible resilience and courage in their recovery. Last year, I did a short video to Yoko Kanno’s song for the survivors and I’d like to post its URL here againhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na60p1P22rg. Links are there for several organizations that were involved in the recovery effort at the time. I’m sure they will accept more donations.

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Here a Mosque, There a Mosque, Everywhere a Mosque Mosque

Obama plays Hamlet, the man who could not make up his mind...about anything!

Speak the speech, I pray you, tripping over your tongue...

So a moderate Moslem cleric wants to build a mosque and Islamic center. Where? Two blocks from “Ground Zero.” Why? Was this meant as some sort of insult to the victims of 9-11? No, he got a good deal on the property. He’ll be happy to build it someplace else, if a deal can be made.

The problem is that this has given all the yahoos something to scream about in a month when people should be hiding from the heat. Once again, it has become obvious that the so-called “War on Terror” was understood by all and sundry as some 21st century Crusade redux. Our enemy wasn’t al-Qaeda, the guys who actually carried out the deed, but all of Islam, which is why we attacked Afghanistan, letting al-Qaeda move a couple of miles into Pakistan, and then attacked Iraq, which had nothing to do with anything except we didn’t like Saddam Hussein’s moustache. And we’re still in both places, with Americans fronting the bill for two quagmires that have done nothing but drain our economy and are as much a reason for the Great Recession as the thieving banks were.

The banks aren’t terrorists. Unless you’ve gotten behind in your mortgage payments, or haven’t opted into overdraft insurance, at which point, you can’t answer your phone in the daylight hours without being attacked by some customer service rep. But all of Islam is, because we are bound and determined to hold a billion people guilty for the work of a handful of crazies. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, those paragons of bravery while someone else does the fighting, have been leading the charge. No Mosques at Ground Zero.

Our fearless leader, of course, has taken a principled stance. Anyone has the constitutional right to build anything anywhere in the United States–he said at a Ramadan dinner with an Islamic group. Then when he heard the howls from the hinterlands–you know, the people who were convinced that Saddam Hussein was going to nuke their local mall on 9-12–President Obama turned around and said he didn’t necessarily think it was a good idea. Despite Fox News having said he’d done the right thing and defended the Constitution. I guess if Fox News says you did something right, it’s best to assume you pulled the biggest boner in creation.

Well, I happen to believe both statements are right, but, for crying out loud, Barry, can’t you take a stance on anything that doesn’t have a picket fence poking a hole in your ass? I mean, you could’ve said both things at the same time, but no, first you had to play to one audience and then turn around and play to the opinion polls. Leaders lead, they aren’t lead. Not everything has a golden mean of compromise to be found.

I swear, one day, I’m gonna wake up to read the headline that Barry brokered a deal between God and Satan where Satan accepted a 50% cap on souls he reaped. With a proviso that the terms will not take effect until after 2016.

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