Life After Rush

 

I mourn the loss of Rush Limbaugh.  He died before his time.  

But I am surprised at my own naivete.  

I did not think about the fact that Rush had the better part of a year to prepare for what was to happen to his show and his audience after he died.  He was a genius, so of course he prepared.  He had recorded thousands of hours of timeless wisdom.  And he left behind him substitute hosts who were prepared to carry on using those thousands of hours of audio.  

I listen to his show at the regular time and I am as interested in his show today as I was while he was alive.

To quote Obo-Wan: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”  The truth is that after his death, Limbaugh lives on for his faithful listeners and to inspire a new generation of followers. 

Green ‘drivel’ The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria.

From the Toronto Sun: 

Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change.

To summarize: 

• “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.”
• unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.
•  Lovelock has now come out in favour of natural gas fracking (which environmentalists also oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.
• Lovelock blasted greens for treating global warming like a religion.  {using guilt as a drving force]
• Lovelock mocks the idea modern economies can be powered by wind turbines.As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel …
• “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything.

Read the whole thing.

It looks like the godfather of global warming is saying "Rush was right."

Foundation Donors to Media Matters

I think everyone should send those foundations a polite email or a phone call to ensure they are aware that they are funding an organziation whose purpose in life is to use strongarm thug tactics to silence and censor speech. Do they really want to be associated with an organization that enbraces tyrannical, totalitarian values?

FOUNDATION DONORS TO MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA (TOTALS)
compiled by The Daily Caller
February 17, 2012
$28,825,415 TOTAL TRACKED
$4,384,702 Tides Foundation
$2,325,000 Bohemian Foundation
$2,225,000 Stephen M Silberstein Foundation
$2,150,000 Dyson Foundation
$1,160,000 Gill Foundation
$1,075,000 Foundation to Promote Open Society
$966,466 Ford Foundation
$700,000 Bauman Family Foundation
$600,000 Leland Fikes Foundation, Inc.
$600,000 Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, Inc.
$587,000 Silicon Valley Community Foundation
$570,000 Marisla Foundation
$510,000 Gruber Family Foundation
$490,500 Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund
$400,912 Glaser Progress Foundation
$400,000 Pritzker Family Foundation
$400,000 Sandler Foundation
$370,000 Lotus Foundation
$362,500 Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, Inc.
$334,717 Schooner Foundation
$325,000 Mai Family Foundation
$300,000 Boston Foundation, Inc.
$300,000 Lewis B & Dorothy Cullman Foundation, Inc.
$300,000 Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation
$275,000 Bernard & Audre Rapoport Foundation
$275,000 The New York Community Trust
$250,000 Jeht Foundation
$250,000 Joseph H and Barbara I Ellis Foundation
$250,000 The Dallas Foundation
$215,000 Baytree Fund
$210,000 Wallace Global Fund II
$200,000 The PBL Fund
$190,000 David Berger Foundation
$187,500 David Bohnett Foundation
$160,000 H Van Ameringen Foundation
$150,000 ARCA Foundation
$150,000 Community Foundation of the United Jewish Federation of San Diego
$150,000 Edlis‐Neeson Foundation
$150,000 Max Simon Charitable Foundation
$150,000 The Goatie Foundation
$150,000 Unbound Philanthropy
$150,000 Wasserman Foundation
$145,000 Chorus, Inc.
$125,000 Dwoskin Family Foundation

Carbonite Competitors

I have given thought to using Carbonite. This event helped me make up my mind. Thanks to this controversy I have learned that Carbonite is losing money and has never made money since going public. They also have a number of competitors. Two are Sugar Sync and IDrive, both of which provide 5 GB of storage for free. This is more than most people have on their computer hard drives. I believe that a lot of Carbonite’s customers are Rush listeners because of the size of his audience. I think they will lose a lot of them over this; it could cause a very bad cash crunch for a company that has negative cash flow.

I also sent an e-mail to Pro-Flowers who I have used a few times to remove me from their mailing list.

What Would Breitbart Do?

I suspect that Sandra Fluke is a liar. 

The saga of Sandra Fluke (now being painted as some sort of hero to women) is a perfect example of why we needed Andrew.

Her testimony before Congress appears to have been very dishonest. Fluke’s story about her friend who was denied birth control pills despite a medical need unrelated to contraception seems unlikely to be true, and should be investigated — it seems implausible that reimbursement for a product that might be used for birth control would, or legally could, be denied someone with a medical need for it. And the claim students need $1000 per year for contraception is just flat-out untrue; birth control is generally around $20/month, and anyone can buy condoms for a dollar each, in the unlikely event a college student is unable to find free condoms, which cost nothing. And it’s not clear who misrepresented her age as 23 rather than 31, but it certainly gives the appearance of having been done to elicit sympathy.

Americans United for Life Presents "The Con"

But by all means, let’s keep pretending that there is a “contraception crisis” looming before us — not the actual “constitutional crisis”.

Let’s keep making believe that entities besides Democrats, Democrat operatives and the Mainstream Media are talking about banning contraception.

Let’s keep promulgating the utter lie — and that’s all it is, a big, fat lie — that some mean, out-of-touch bishops are trying to take women’s birth control away from them! You know, the birth control that the CDC reports (pdf) 99% of American women call readily available and affordable.

Let’s keep talking about a 30-year old student/activist (who attends one of the priciest schools in the country) whining to congress that her birth control should be free, and pretending that this is a real issue.

Let’s keep pretending — along with the phonies who act out cases of the vapors when they think it’s politically expedient to do so, that a radio talk show host who used vulgarisms about her is somehow more misogynistic and more vulgar than the cable-tv hosts who have called conservative women c***s, or the cable-news guys who call them “sluts” or “bags of meat with lipstick”. Etc. Etc.

"We have a society where it’s open to debate whether Catholics have a right to live their faith"

Georgetown University rightly condemned Limbaugh’s words. But it did more than that: It described them as uncivil, and contrasted them with the “civility” implicit in attempts to conscript Catholics and Catholic institutions to violate their consciences. It described the question of whether Catholics should be conscripted as “a legitimate question of public policy.” An insistence on conscription was deemed “respectful.”

That was consistent with the response from the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics. JME published an article arguing for the permissibility of infanticide, re-styled helpfully as ‘after birth abortion.’ The editor complained about the response:

“What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.”

We have a society where it’s open to debate whether Catholics have a right to live their faith, and open to debate whether infants have a right to life. And yet we continue to pretend that civility and even liberal society survive.

It is high time that insurance policies cover red wine

The audacity of this Fluke person and her testimony has had me thinking. We all know that the medical community has recognized the benefits of red wine for the human heart. Resveratrol is found in the tannins apparently. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Therefore I think it is high time that insurance policies cover red wine. Does the Obama administration have any idea what a good bottle of cabernet sauvignon costs? I spend at least $3000 a year on red wine a year and it’s breaking the bank. So please Kathleen Sebelius, include free red wine in the HHS mandate. Let’s eradicate heart disease once and for all!

"...a federal mandate for contraception coverage renders women’s personal sexual choices a matter for public debate. "

The outrage against Rush is highly selective. He considers himself an entertainer, and routinely says outrageous and/or un-PC things in the service of being provocative (in both the good and bad senses of that word). By rights, anything he says should be judged against the standard of liberal political entertainers like Bill Maher, Janine Garafalo, or if you like, Keith Olbermann.

Rush Limbaugh Returns To Radio, Discusses Wedding

Via Real Clear Politics.

Better that Patterico fails

An eerie - but long -post (comments included) in which Frey does not deign to address Jeff Goldstein directly.

Frey loses.

OUTLAW!

Virginian Pilot Celebrates "Gotcha" Moments and Negative Campaigning

Pravda was a beacon of journalistic truth and technical prowess compared to the Virginian Pilot.

Isn’t it the Drive-by-media that is always opining that we should “stick to the issues?”

That “negative campaigning” (defined as telling the truth about Democrats) is taking the low road?

Why, yes it is!

So what’s the headline news in today’s Virginian Pilot?

Senate candidates' staffers look for that 'macaca' moment.

And why is that, boys and girls? The writer, Austin Wright, explains:

Two years ago, former U.S. Sen. George Allen looked into a video camera and doomed his re-election bid. This year, the campaigns for Jim Gilmore and Mark Warner are tracking each other, ready for any slip-ups.

Actually, Austin Wright is being – as they say – disingenuous. That’s the term polite use when they don’t want to say that someone is lying. You see, it wasn’t Allen’s use of a term that no one had ever heard of and that no one with any sense believed was a racial slur that doomed Allen’s campaign. It was the fact that the Virginian Pilot, the Washington Post and the rest of the Drive-by-media used the term to brand Allen as a racist. Dozens of stories followed to cement that image in the public’s mind.

The Drive-by-media was in the tank for James Webb and decided that “negative campaigning” was perfectly fine as a way of torpedoing George Allen and they led the charge with gusto. All of the things that we are not allowed to talk about with Messiah Obama were trotted out with the good offices of the Drive-by-media to destroy the reputation of George Allen.

So what is the Virginian Pilot celebrating? Why, the use of video cameras to as a way of creating cutting edge negative campaign fodder. And why is the Pilot doing it? Because thanks to the Pilot and the Drive-by-media, we have proof that it works.

Except when it’s applied to Messiah Obama because the Drive-by-media tells us what we are allowed to criticize and what we are not … otherwise we’re racist running dogs of capitalism.

Rush Limbaugh has a list, and it keeps growing.

RUSH: With Obama we started out, we couldn't talk about his big ears 'cause that made him nervous. We've gone from that to this: Not only can we not mention his ears...

We can't talk about his mother.

We can't talk about his father.

We can't talk about his grandmother unless he does, brings her up as a "typical white person."

We can't talk about his wife, can't talk about his preacher, can't talk about his terrorist friends, can't talk about his voting record, can't talk about his religion.

We can't talk about appeasement.

We can't talk about color; we can't talk about lack of color.

We can't talk about race. We can't talk about bombers and mobsters who are his friends. We can't talk about schooling. We can't talk about his name, "Hussein."

We can't talk about his lack of experience. Can't talk about his income. Can't talk about his flag pin.

This started out we can't call him a liberal.

It started out we just couldn't talk about his ears.

Now we can't say anything about him.

So negative campaigning is a bad thing, dragging up the past, what your handlers do and who financed your rise in the political world is not to be discussed, except when it’s aided and abetted by the Drive-by-media. Then it’s a free press at work.

Whoremongers

Mark Steyn at NRO:

Over in the Geraghtistan province of the National Review ummah, Jim asks:

How did we reach the point where Air America calls Hillary a 'whore'?

Indeed. Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything - abortion, health care, climate change, you name. Yet the first is "a f***ing whore" and the second is "David Duke in drag" merely because they disagree which Democratic senator would make the best president. The people applying these deranged epithets to the Clintons are in large part the very same people who spent the Nineties applying equally deranged epithets to anyone who disagreed with the Clintons.

There's something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who've been on the receiving end of the left's vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you're all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs. The left's Discoursometer is like one of those shower units where the slightest nudge turns it to scalding.

At Ed Driscoll:

...the GOP "may be the stupid party, but they're also the decent party." His comments remind me of the contrast in tone that Steven Den Beste highlighted immediately after the 2006 midterms:

2000, Democrats: "We wuz robbed!"
2002, Democrats: "We wuz robbed again!"
2004, Democrats: "We wuz robbed yet again!"
2006, Republicans: "Bummer. Oh, well, we'll do better next time."

Oh, and the Randi Rhodes explosion?


You know the secret of Rush Limbaugh's success? Simple: he's funny. He laughs. He jokes. He has "more fun than a human being should be allowed to have." Listen to any runner-up talk show host, none are as entertaining; none are having as much fun as Rush evidently is having.

Lilly has a point ... but she won't like it.

Rich Tucker writes "Mea Culpa" at Townhall.com.

he has decided to be a kindler, gentler conservative. Among the responses was one by "Lilly"

My response was too long to go in the comments box at Rich's column, so I though I would comment here.

There are a lot of people who are simmering from the some of the events and trends of the last 50 years. Oh yeah! But they were isolated and believed they were alone in their views. They were not quoted in the Drive-By-Media (or if they were, they were dismissed as kooks). That has changed, thanks to Rush Limbaugh’s revolution of AM radio and the development of the Internet as an alternative mass media.

An analogy would be the reaction of the people in Eastern Europe who were freed from Communism after the USSR fell. There were a lot of pissed off people who were now finally free to make their opinions known. In some cases they imprisoned or even hung their oppressors.

Here is what Lilly mentioned that – thanks to the alternative media – we now have a chance to debate:

During World War II hardly a family was untouched by the war. People hung little star flags in their windows to show how many living members they had at the front, and how many dead. But even then, we did not see the kind of hysteria that now goes with "Support the Troops!"

You see, that sort of BS is what passes for reality in “Lilly World.” During World War 2 “we” did not see people saying they supported the troops, but not the war. “We” did not have a party that told us the war was lost. “We” did not put Nazi saboteurs in cushy jails, we shot them. “We” moved hundreds of thousands of ethnic Japanese into internment camps and kept them there. “We” gave the military a free hand to bomb cities and when thousands of civilians were killed in the process, that was war, not a cause for legal action. If anyone had said any of the hateful things that are regularly said about our troops today by the Left, they would have been lynched. “Support the troops?” Hell yes; that was not even a question.

It feels now as if a lot of elderly conservatives who have been stewing ever since public protest shut down the Vietnam War are now trying to get even for the way they felt then.

There is truth here too. For years since the end of the war in Viet Nam, the simpering simps who cut off all aid to our allies in South Viet Nam have told us how noble they were while the rotting corpses of the millions of people killed after they had their way stank up the place. The MSM were unified in presenting a picture drawn by the Left. A picture of American brutality and futility that they brought to an end. And when that end did not come in reconciliation but in millions of deaths, tropical Gulags and hundreds of thousands of “boat people” taking chances in shark and pirate infested waters to escape the future that the Left had consigned them to, the Left partied on, congratulating themselves on having won their just cause.

For forty years they have been getting madder and madder not just about Vietnam but about gays coming out of the closet and about unmarried couples living together openly and about legalized abortion and most of all about forced racial integration---and now "Support the Troops" has become the kind of code that "Law and Order" used to be. These people seem to want a new order in which their values will control everyone in the United States. And they very much want their knee on the neck of every liberal.

Well, now. The people I know really don’t have a problem with gays coming out of the closet. They do have a problem with being told that they cannot disapprove of the gay lifestyle unless they want to be called “homophobic.” They have a problem with being told that their moral code is evil and their religion is stupid. They have a problem with people, both gay and straight flaunting their sexuality – not in the bedroom – but on Main Street in “gay pride” parades featuring the public display of body parts that were once called “private.” They have a problem with being told that they must rent rooms in their home to people whose morals they find offensive, or face arrest and jail. They have a problem with doctors sucking the brains out of babies who are partially born and being told that this is a procedure that is guaranteed by the constitution. And they are tired of being told that if they object to this, they are interfering with a woman’s body.

And when they object to having these values forced down their throats, they then find themselves told that their values are illegitimate. The only values that can be forced on people are the values espoused by the Left: the ones who take pride in the death camps of South East Asia, take pride in calling our troops Nazis, take pride in denigrating people of faith, and take pride in killing babies.

Well, the Left’s long march through Academia and the MSM is finally meeting some resistance and has finally found its voice in the alternative media. And the Left is very unhappy with that. They are used to being the ones with the megaphone, the ones who owned the mass media. And they are now doing what bullies always do; they are raising their voices and calling names. What we are seeing is the emergence of a REAL dialog, not just one between Left and Far Left. And if that disconcerts anyone, head for the hills because it’s not going to get any quieter for a while.

Media Matters Lies About Rush Limbaugh

John Gibson talks about the Left Wing Lie-Machine funded by George Soros. Today, we have a chance to fight back in places like talk radio, Fox News and the Internet. Two decades ago, lies like these would have become the "official truth."

Here's from Rush Limbaugh's own website. Anatomy of a smear.

And HERE are the real enemies of the troops, in their own words. Scroll down to read what Dick Durbin said, equating our soldiers to

Nazis, Soviets in their Gulags, or some mad regime, Pol Pot or others

...and Tom Lantos as he accuses General Patraeus of lying, saying about his testimony:

"I don't buy it."

...and this from Rush:

How about Jack Murtha blanketly accepting the notion that Marines in Haditha engaged in wanton murder of innocent children and civilians?

Of course, every war has it's stories of atrocities and some are actually true. Mackubin Owens led a Marine company in Viet Nam and comments on some of the atrocity stories that Viet Nam engendered.

And who can forget John Kerry's testimony to congress about our troops in Viet Nam. Before Congress he testified that soldiers

... raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam

And, he said, these were not isolated instances, but deliberate policy.

It's a good thing that John Kerry is a successful gigolo, because he is not successful as a man or a human being.

UPDATE: It now appears that ABC Reported on ‘Phony Heroes' Three Days Before Rush Limbaugh Did
Where was ABC when Media Matters was putting out lies about Rush?

Democrats, the Anti-Free Speech Party

And so we reach the inevitable end of the left’s campaign against the First Amendment. The Democrats in Broward County have officially declared themselves as the anti-free speech party. Commissioner Ritter is to be applauded for her candor, for declaring openly what elected Democrats across the country mutter quietly to themselves: “Rush, Sean and the rest must be silenced!”


I have heard of brass-knuckled politics before, but never anything on the order of denying your political opponents news of approaching hurricanes.


When Katrina struck, some wild-eyed lefties accused President Bush of denying relief efforts to New Orleans because the city was predominantly African-American.


Now we have actual proof of Democrats wanting to keep conservatives in the dark about approaching storms.