Should Rush Limbaugh be losing sponsors for the things he said?

[HeyYou]

See, that's the funniest part. THE PEOPLE can see what the main problem is. Big money in politics. I am sure the people elected to office realize it as well, but, they remain VERY quiet about it, as they make millions of dollars from it. If you removed the big money from politics, via campaign finance reform, outlawing PAID lobbyists, reversing citizens united ( I will believe a corporation has the same right to free speech as an individual about the time Texas executes one.)..... That would go a long way toward getting government back in the hands of the people, and out of the pockets of big money. Trouble is, it will never happen, as the people that would have to affect such a change, are the very people that benefit from NOT changing a thing. So, look forward to more of the same until our country is bankrupt, the rich have ALL the money, the middle class is gone, and the only jobs around, are minimum wage "would you like fries with that" jobs......

[SubjectProphet]

Yeah, that was uncalled for. He should lose more than just sponsors. I sure as hell don't like him.

[Aurielius]

Sigh..don't like him..then turn the dial to something else. He isn't my cup of tea but his fan base makes him somewhat bullet proof of censure.

[grannywils]

Well, if I understood the OP, the question was "should" he be losing sponsors. I'm not sure that we can rightfully say that he "should" be losing them; but I can surely say that were I a sponsor (would never happen, btw) he would lose my sponsorship. Sponsors have the right to choose to leave, and I believe that these remarks were inflammatory enough that the sponsors who made the choice to leave made the correct choice.

 

As far as listening to his program, I agree with Aurielius, if you don't like him, as I certainly don't, change the station.

[Arthmoor]

So Moveing, you state you wouldn't pay for women's pleasure. Fair enough. What about the ED drugs I mentioned? Those are for men's pleasure. If that's a different story, there's a word here I won't use, even though it isn't a vulgar or profane word, because I don't want to get a strike. So I'll just leave it there.

Well I don't know about him, but I don't think we should be paying for anyone's penis pills either. You want that stuff, pay for it out of your own pocket.

 

With the exception on both sides being that if the doctor thinks it's medically necessary to treat some legitimate condition then that should be ok. Using birth control pills for the sole function of avoiding pregnancy is just plain irresponsible. Using penis pills just to be able to stay hard longer is equally stupid.

 

Beck was canceled since advertisers quit sponsoring him.

Not true, and I'm sure you know that. The boycott had no impact on him. I watched his show for 2 years and saw no change in his advertisers the entire time.

 

He hasn't commented on it since leaving that I'm aware of, but he has an eye condition that's going to cause him to go blind and that was the main driving force behind him leaving Fox and he talked about it all the time.

 

However, in the spirit of trying to reach some more common ground, I would say that there's probably a broad right- and left-wing consensus over many of the most pressing issues of the day. What I mean is that both of us could probably agree with HeyYou in the post after yours, the one where he states that neither of the parties really care much for their constituents; rather, they care far more about simply being re-elected and defending their Washington prerogatives.

I'd agree more or less with his first paragraph. That both parties have reached a point where neither one gives a crap about the people. I happen to think the Republicans can still be salvaged, but perhaps not for much longer if the conservative elements of the party can't bring them back to where they belong. We may be in for a 3rd party in the US if this keeps up.

 

Where he lost me though was the tin-foil hat stuff about the military industrial complex. That's fringe conspiracy theory garbage I can't give any credence to.

 

And one wonders why our representatives have no problems passing yet more tax cuts for the rich while having no compunction passing regressive taxes that disproportionately impact the middle class and the poor.

This kind of false rhetoric is why I dismiss out of hand anything the left says, because they always come back to this and utterly ignore the fact that EVERYONE'S taxes went down under Bush. My own paychecks at the time reflected this, and I specifically remember even getting the stimulus payment back in 2003 or so. Yet somehow it was always "only for the rich". I'm not rich, never have been, probably never will be. Neither are any of my friends and relatives who ALL benefited under the Bush tax cuts.

 

No such thing is going to happen as long as Obama remains president and the Dems still have control of the Senate. The Republicans having control of the House isn't enough to push back against the administration's suicidal economics.

 

The country has actual problems to solve, and we get a rehashed 1950's debate over birth control?

That's what the MSM does. Shower you with BS. Glenn Beck always said to pay attention to the other guys NOT getting press coverage when something like this is in the news. The MSM knows it's a red herring issue with no relevance.

 

We get Sheriff Arpiao still screaming about The Birth Certificate.

And he needs to knock that crap off. It serves no one. It made Donald Trump look like a fool when he pulled it, but the end result was that the issue DID get settled. Sheriff Arpiao has plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to be angry at Obama. The birth certificate isn't one of them.

 

We get a Republican Congress shamelessly abusing the filibuster and debating the Blunt Amendment in the House.

Nope. We get Democrats blocking it in the Senate. Not the Republicans. This is the kind of thing that seriously peeves me off about left wing news reporting is that somewhere, someone reports it as being Republican obstructionism when that wasn't the case at all. Nobody bothers to look it up. Took me 3 seconds on Google, first hit was that. There was no filibuster since a 51-48 vote would not have been enough to break one.

 

Dems worked with Bush, as they worked with Reagan.

How so? Last I remembered they obstructed him at every possible opportunity. Nancy Pelosi hated the man's guts and her House tried to have him impeached on several occasions, only avoided by the saner members of both parties putting those votes out of their misery.

 

Reagan would probably be kicked out (or resign like Olympia Snowe) of the Republican Party for lack of ideological purity, despite the cult of personality surrounding him now.

I hardly think Regan would have been kicked out or resign. He's actually held as a model of ideological purity for conservatism, not this fake brand of whatever it is the Republicans are serving up now. Olympia Snow certainly isn't a conservative by any stretch of the definition.

 

Your chart has a defect. There's only one line for Republicans, but 3 for Democrats? There's something obviously missing there. That said, the chart is telling me that Democrats are becoming more "ideologically pure" since even the previously moderate ones are swinging hard into the socialist side of things.

 

BTW, the real abuse of things like the Blunt Amendment is that they keep tacking stuff like that onto other completely unrelated bills. This practice of attaching riders needs to stop. Or the president needs to be granted line item veto power.

Edited March 10, 2012 by Arthmoor

[SubjectProphet]

So Moveing, you state you wouldn't pay for women's pleasure. Fair enough. What about the ED drugs I mentioned? Those are for men's pleasure. If that's a different story, there's a word here I won't use, even though it isn't a vulgar or profane word, because I don't want to get a strike. So I'll just leave it there.

Well I don't know about him, but I don't think we should be paying for anyone's penis pills either. You want that stuff, pay for it out of your own pocket.

 

With the exception on both sides being that if the doctor thinks it's medically necessary to treat some legitimate condition then that should be ok. Using birth control pills for the sole function of avoiding pregnancy is just plain irresponsible. Using penis pills just to be able to stay hard longer is equally stupid.

 

Beck was canceled since advertisers quit sponsoring him.

Not true, and I'm sure you know that. The boycott had no impact on him. I watched his show for 2 years and saw no change in his advertisers the entire time.

 

He hasn't commented on it since leaving that I'm aware of, but he has an eye condition that's going to cause him to go blind and that was the main driving force behind him leaving Fox and he talked about it all the time.

 

However, in the spirit of trying to reach some more common ground, I would say that there's probably a broad right- and left-wing consensus over many of the most pressing issues of the day. What I mean is that both of us could probably agree with HeyYou in the post after yours, the one where he states that neither of the parties really care much for their constituents; rather, they care far more about simply being re-elected and defending their Washington prerogatives.

I'd agree more or less with his first paragraph. That both parties have reached a point where neither one gives a crap about the people. I happen to think the Republicans can still be salvaged, but perhaps not for much longer if the conservative elements of the party can't bring them back to where they belong. We may be in for a 3rd party in the US if this keeps up.

 

Where he lost me though was the tin-foil hat stuff about the military industrial complex. That's fringe conspiracy theory garbage I can't give any credence to.

 

And one wonders why our representatives have no problems passing yet more tax cuts for the rich while having no compunction passing regressive taxes that disproportionately impact the middle class and the poor.

This kind of false rhetoric is why I dismiss out of hand anything the left says, because they always come back to this and utterly ignore the fact that EVERYONE'S taxes went down under Bush. My own paychecks at the time reflected this, and I specifically remember even getting the stimulus payment back in 2003 or so. Yet somehow it was always "only for the rich". I'm not rich, never have been, probably never will be. Neither are any of my friends and relatives who ALL benefited under the Bush tax cuts.

 

No such thing is going to happen as long as Obama remains president and the Dems still have control of the Senate. The Republicans having control of the House isn't enough to push back against the administration's suicidal economics.

 

The country has actual problems to solve, and we get a rehashed 1950's debate over birth control?

That's what the MSM does. Shower you with BS. Glenn Beck always said to pay attention to the other guys NOT getting press coverage when something like this is in the news. The MSM knows it's a red herring issue with no relevance.

 

We get Sheriff Arpiao still screaming about The Birth Certificate.

And he needs to knock that crap off. It serves no one. It made Donald Trump look like a fool when he pulled it, but the end result was that the issue DID get settled. Sheriff Arpiao has plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to be angry at Obama. The birth certificate isn't one of them.

 

We get a Republican Congress shamelessly abusing the filibuster and debating the Blunt Amendment in the House.

Nope. We get Democrats blocking it in the Senate. Not the Republicans. This is the kind of thing that seriously peeves me off about left wing news reporting is that somewhere, someone reports it as being Republican obstructionism when that wasn't the case at all. Nobody bothers to look it up. Took me 3 seconds on Google, first hit was that. There was no filibuster since a 51-48 vote would not have been enough to break one.

 

Dems worked with Bush, as they worked with Reagan.

How so? Last I remembered they obstructed him at every possible opportunity. Nancy Pelosi hated the man's guts and her House tried to have him impeached on several occasions, only avoided by the saner members of both parties putting those votes out of their misery.

 

Reagan would probably be kicked out (or resign like Olympia Snowe) of the Republican Party for lack of ideological purity, despite the cult of personality surrounding him now.

I hardly think Regan would have been kicked out or resign. He's actually held as a model of ideological purity for conservatism, not this fake brand of whatever it is the Republicans are serving up now. Olympia Snow certainly isn't a conservative by any stretch of the definition.

 

Your chart has a defect. There's only one line for Republicans, but 3 for Democrats? There's something obviously missing there. That said, the chart is telling me that Democrats are becoming more "ideologically pure" since even the previously moderate ones are swinging hard into the socialist side of things.

 

Obama is a democrat, and he is president, which means that party favours the USA. Politics suck here. Reagan would be kicked out of the republican party, but if he was a democrat? No.

 

That's why I will ALWAYS be independent, the way America SHOULD be.

[AlexxEG]

Using birth control pills for the sole function of avoiding pregnancy is just plain irresponsible.

 

How so? Isn't it just the opposite?

[sukeban]

First off, I would totally agree with you about the desirability of a third--and a fourth, and maybe even a fifth--party. There is just too much political variation present in America (or most any nation) to warrant only having two viable parties. It also reinforces the knuckle-headed "blue team" vs. "red team" mentality that has been ascendent for quite some time, which is probably why we continue to get next-to-nothing useful ever being done in Washington.

 

The major problem, of course, would be that our election laws would probably have to be completely re-written and we'd have to adopt a more parliamentary-style of Congress (which I'm all for) based on representation percentage rather than "first-past-the-post," 50.1%-takes-home-all-the-marbles schematic that we're using now. Otherwise, said third (or fourth) party would just eat into one of the major party's natural constituencies and make them impossibly marginalized as a potential governing bloc. It would be a long road to hoe, but if a more right-wing party did split off from the Republicans, I would image that it wouldn't be long before a left-wing party did the same with the Dems (and maybe a Centrist party, too!)... and we'd probably all be better off for it.

 

Second, the military industrial complex is real, but it's more like how I described in my last post (revolving door of legislative favors --> working in defense after retirement --> lobbying your old colleagues for more favors) and not really anything sinister/something worth wearing a tin-foil hat over. No, it's just a glorified pork-barrel system, but instead of building bridges to nowhere... it's building useless weapons systems and deploying them to the middle of nowhere. So I guess that is pretty sinister, though not in the Roswell or Grassy Knoll trope of conspiratorially so.

 

Third, taxes :) While it might be true that everybody's taxes did go down under the Bush cuts... they didn't go down in anything close to equal amounts, which is where I think the beef with them lies. That and, oh--that they recklessly exploded what had been a balanced budget (insert Iraq war here as well):

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/39/Impact_of_Bush_Tax_Cut_Extension.png/800px-Impact_of_Bush_Tax_Cut_Extension.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e3/CBO_Budget_Deficit_Assuming_Continuation_of_Policies.png/800px-CBO_Budget_Deficit_Assuming_Continuation_of_Policies.png

 

And for... what? So I could get a 3% cut in my taxes, saving me something like 300 dollars? Fact is, 3% to me =/= 3% to somebody making 10 million dollars or somebody making 100 million dollars, the later folks are benefiting way more than I am. Then again, I doubt many people actually make 100 million dollars in income; but that's opening up the "WTF why do we tax capital gains at 15% and income at 10-35%, isn't work supposed to actually pay?!" debate.

 

So while we've all "benefited" from the Bush era tax cuts, the rich have benefited the most. Were they hurting to begin with? Did they need more? Why did they need an additional tax cut, when the estate tax was also reduced under Bush and when capital gains (by and large how the rich make their septims) is a paltry 15%. Personally, I would rather the government keep my 300 dollars and balance the budget... without pulling asinine pranks like de-funding NPR in order to save a couple million dollars in a trillion-dollar-plus deficit.

 

I think we would all favor a balanced budget, as well as cuts to some programs. However, do you remember this:

 

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/hands.jpg

 

"Raise your hand if you would reject 10 dollars in cuts for every dollar in new revenue."

 

Because I sure do. And it is insane.

 

It was Bush, after all, that passed Medicare Part D, started two wars (though few disagree with Afghanistan, myself included), and expanded the National Security State--and yet refused to pay for it. Worse yet, he gave us tax cuts at the precise moment that he was busy ramping up the debt and deficit. WTF. In what economic universe does that make sense? That's the straight Bermuda Triangle of voodoo economics.... the profane intersection where the Laffer Curve meets Keynes. But it was all okay because Cheney declared that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." And, speaking of Reagan--

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/USDebt.png/514px-USDebt.png

 

Note the surge in Debt-to-GDP beginning in 1980 with Reagan and continuing under Bush 41. Notice it declining under Clinton before spiking back up again under Bush 43 (before Financial Crisis) and Obama. All I mean is that people make Reagan out to be something that he was not. He was the original budget buster, yet he is remembered as being a paragon of fiscal conservatism. Ditto for Republicans writ large. Neither party is particularly careful with the public's money, but certainly Republicans have been equally--if not more so--culpable in the setting of the stage for the present debt avalanche. Yet they are never blamed. Why is this? Is it because the MSM has a liberal bias? In which case... what?

 

TL;DR -- We need higher taxes and spending cuts. Yet I seem to remember all but 10 Republican members of Congress (out of 289) signing a certain pledge that makes this impossible.

Edited March 10, 2012 by sukeban

[BlackBaron2]

Arthmoor, you really don't know the functions of the Pill or Depo-Provera, or Implanon, do you? Those do more for womb-having people than you think. They can be used to prevent irregular bleeding, cramps, mood swings, bad skin and other hormonal problems. Also, you don't take one birth control pill every time you have sex. You take one every day. Depo-Provera shots are every three months and a person can have Implanon (the contraceptive implant) replaced every three years. These things are used whether or not the person is planning on having sex, so they are not remotely equivalent to viagra. Now, if all the womb-having people wanted to take some sort of energy pills so they could "perform" for longer, and those energy pills had to be taken every time one was planning to have sex, that would be equivalent to viagra.

 

TL;DR: False equivalency!

 

That aside, saying people who want to have sex without having babies are bad and nobody should support their choice to be babyless, is kind of ridiculous. People who don't think sex is only for babies should not be shamed for that belief or for having sex. Treat your neighbour how you want to be treated, you know? It's not that bloody difficult.

[Deleted472477User]

Guys, could we get back on topic before the mods close the thread? Please calm down: I don't want to see anyone banned as a result of my topic.