Are The Demands Of Tribal Loyalty-- Even Over Sanity-- Destroying American Governance?

Over the course of the presidential election many non-Wisconsinites got to know conservative Milwaukee talk show host, Charlie Sykes because of all the national media attention he got for his powerful analysis of the Trump phenomenon from the right. His radio broadcasts opposing Trump are widely credited with Trump's notable primary loss in Wisconsin. Trump only won 6 of the state's 42 delegates, all the rest going to Sykes' favorite candidate, Ted Cruz, who beat Trump 531,129 (48.2%) to 386,370 (35.1%) with 155,200 votes (14.1%) going to Kasich. In fact, Trump did even worse in the half dozen counties where Sykes' radio show is most listened to:

• Milwaukee- 26.1%
• Ozaukee- 20.5%
• Waukesha- 22.1%
• Racine- 32.1%
• Washington- 23.5%
• Sheboygan- 25.1%

In an OpEd in the NY Times a few days ago, he wrote that "In April, after Mr. Trump decisively lost the Wisconsin Republican primary, I had hoped that we here in the Midwest would turn out to be a firewall of rationality. Our political culture was distinctly inhospitable to Mr. Trump’s divisive, pugilistic style; the conservatives who had been successful here had tended to be serious, reform-oriented and able to express their ideas in more than 140 characters. But in November, Wisconsin lined up with the rest of the Rust Belt to give the presidency to Mr. Trump. How on earth did that happen?" In fact, many Americans are still incredulous that Trump won Wisconsin. Did Putin steal it for him? Was Clinton really the worst candidate to ever come down the pike?

The general election was incredibly close in Wisconsin. Clinton was sure she had it in the bag and was virtually ignoring the state-- as dictated by Ada and disputed by Bill Clinton. Trump took 1,405,284 votes (47.2%) to Clinton's 1,382,536 (46.5%)-- a 22,748 vote difference (in a state where 188,330 people voted for third party candidates). Clinton managed to alienate enough of Obama's 2012 Wisconsin 1,613,950 vote majority to give Trump his narrow margin of victory. What happened to those 231,414 Obama voters who opted to not cast their ballots for Clinton last month? Or maybe Putin and Comey did it.

Sykes, an anti-union/pro-charter school nut, has aggressively backed some of the worst walking garbage piles in American politics-- Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Ron Johnson-- but he just doesn't see Trump as a conservative. "I was under the impression that conservatives actually believed things about free trade, balanced budgets, character and respect for constitutional rights. Then along came this campaign." Yes, along came a psychotic narcissist embraced by nearly every conservative in the country.

On the surface, the explanations for Mr. Trump’s improbable win in Wisconsin are simple enough: He won big margins in rural, blue-collar counties and won the pivotal Green Bay area by double digits. But he underperformed Mitt Romney in the vote-rich Milwaukee suburbs and ended up getting fewer votes in victory than Mr. Romney received in his 2012 defeat. Hillary Clinton, however, got about 39,000 fewer votes in heavily Democratic Milwaukee County than President Obama did four years earlier. Democrats simply stayed home, though that is obviously not the whole story.

That is what I saw, and this is what it might mean for the future of conservatism. When I wrote in August 2015 that Mr. Trump was a cartoon version of every left-wing media stereotype of the reactionary, nativist, misogynist right, I thought that I was well within the mainstream of conservative thought-- only to find conservative Trump critics denounced for apostasy by a right that decided that it was comfortable with embracing Trumpism. But in Wisconsin, conservative voters seemed to reject what Mr. Trump was selling, at least until after the convention.

To be sure, some of my callers embraced Mr. Trump’s suggestion for a ban on Muslims entering the country and voiced support for a proposal to deport all Muslims-- even citizens. One caller compared American Muslims to rabid dogs. But right to the end, relatively few of my listeners bought into the crude nativism Mr. Trump was selling at his rallies.

What they did buy into was the argument that this was a “binary choice.” No matter how bad Mr. Trump was, my listeners argued, he could not possibly be as bad as Mrs. Clinton. You simply cannot overstate this as a factor in the final outcome. As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas, to parties, to tribes, to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.

In this binary tribal world, where everything is at stake, everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth, or principles. If everything-- the Supreme Court, the fate of Western civilization, the survival of the planet-- depends on tribal victory, then neither individuals nor ideas can be determinative. I watched this play out in real time, as conservatives who fully understood the threat that Mr. Trump posed succumbed to the argument about the Supreme Court. As even Mr. Ryan discovered, neutrality was not acceptable; if you were not for Mr. Trump, then you were for Mrs. Clinton.

The state of our politics also explains why none of the revelations, outrages or gaffes seemed to dent Mr. Trump’s popularity.

In this political universe, voters accept that they must tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other side is always worse; the stakes are such that no qualms can get in the way of the greater cause.

For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll: Listeners whom I knew to be decent, thoughtful individuals began forwarding stories with conspiracy theories about President Obama and Mrs. Clinton-- that he was a secret Muslim, that she ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. When I tried to point out that such stories were demonstrably false, they generally refused to accept evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.

And this is where it became painful. Even among Republicans who had no illusions about Mr. Trump’s character or judgment, the demands of that tribal loyalty took precedence. To resist was an act of betrayal.

When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show. One prominent G.O.P. activist sent out an email blast calling me a “Judas goat,” and calling for postelection retribution. As the summer turned to fall, I knew that I was losing listeners and said so publicly.

And then, there was social media. Unless you have experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics. In my timelines, I found myself called a “cuckservative,” a favorite gibe of white nationalists; and someone Photoshopped my face into a gas chamber. Under the withering fire of the trolls, one conservative commentator and Republican political leader after another fell in line.

How had we gotten here?

One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the bias of the mainstream media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But as we learned this year, we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether-- all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.

That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored.

We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.

This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.

I’m only glad I’m not going to be a part of it anymore.

Meanwhile, as Richard Greene noted at HuffPo yesterday, Trump's fragile mental health is becoming a subject of great concern among mental health professionals. Three psychiatrists just wrote President Obama a letter strongly implying that he will be endangering the country by turning the White House over to Trump. "[H]is widely reported symptoms of mental instability-- including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality-- lead us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office," they wrote. "We strongly recommend that, in preparation for assuming these responsibilities, he receive a full medical and neuropsychiatric evaluation by an impartial team of investigators." Yeah... and when's he turning over this tax returns? And as for the concept "decent" Republicans, maybe that whole idea needs to be reexamined now. No? OK, wait until after the Trumpy damage is done.

Know Anyone Who's Been Brainwashed By Hate Talk Radio And Fox News-- A Trumpist, Perhaps?

Do you know anyone supporting Trump? If I do, they haven't admitted it. But I hear of friends of friends who who support him.I assume my brother-in-law in Staten Island does but I didn't ask my sister. He fits Bob Cesca's description of ye olde Trumpf supporter at Salon: "Generally speaking, Trump supporters are non-college-educated white men, ranging from younger “bros” to, more typically, white male baby-boomer retirees with plenty of spare time to be relentlessly irradiated by Fox News and AM talk radio." He's one of the relentlessly irradiated ones. Cesca refines the definition slightly: "older white male retirees with massive chips on their shoulders... While the lack of a college diploma binds most Trump supporters together, there are more obvious tells-- ones that we can plainly see but that can’t be fully measured by pollsters. Specifically, it’s not easy to quantify the growing resentment of white males who believe they’re slowly losing their millennia-long grip on societal power. Likewise, it’s difficult to measure the brainwashing of Trump’s loyalists by the Fox News and talk radio echo-chamber. Yet we see it on display every day."

Today

Many of them look like normal people, even balanced and wise grandfathers, not like deranged wild men screaming and cursing at cheap-entertainment Trump rallies, fullyrevealing their "vulnerability to the suggestions of a charismatic would-be dictator." For the last year, I've been uncharitably referring to them as "life's losers." I can't help myself. Cesca says "not so fast."

When discussing Trump’s base, sympathetic words are often tossed into the mix due to the common wisdom indicating how they’re frustrated with the allegedly awful economy, struggling to make ends meet. Therefore their anger is somehow justified. While there are surely stories of Americans who are suffering financial hardships due, perhaps, to the continued shockwaves of the Great Recession, a new study by Gallup shows that economic issues aren’t necessarily driving Trump’s base.

According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.

The study was careful to underscore how its conclusions are based on averages; therefore, and to repeat, there are certainly Trump fans who are having a hard time. Gallup went on to suggest that other factors could be contributing to the discontent among white working-class Americans, but the economy and immigration don’t appear to be fully animating the mania that’s so prevalent among Trump’s people.

Trump isn’t necessarily responsible for the behavior of his most activated loyalists, but he’s certainly tapped into an existing cache of psychosis and he’s exploiting it for political gain. Trump’s base has been pre-tenderized by what David Frum calls the “conservative entertainment complex.” Since at least the Clinton administration, white men have been slowly indoctrinated and, in too many cases, brainwashed by conservative media and its rather loose grip on reality. A recently released documentary by Jen Senko, titled The Brainwashing of My Dad, covered this particular phenomenon: the poisoning of otherwise decent older white men by interminable doses of conservative entertainment agitprop. The film follows the life of Senko’s father, who was once a Kennedy Democrat and, through daily assaults by right-wing radio and television, transformed into a racist conservative zealot. Similarly, it’s not difficult to diagnose the Kissimmee man and his cohorts as having been similarly brainwashed by the extremist rhetoric of both conservative entertainment and the Republican Party itself, with its “Don’t retreat, reload” bumper sticker slogans and backed with the revolutionary predictions of conspiracy-theory profiteers like Alex Jones, himself a Trump supporter.



If you convince enough men that alleged outsiders (women, minorities, immigrants) are stripping them of their long-held power, as Fox News and others have done, there’s going to eventually be a fight, especially when one of those so-called outsiders is a black president with the middle name “Hussein.” Older white men don’t intend to hand over power quietly, and they’ve been given the green light by irresponsibly influential leaders to bury their humility, their decency and their sense of reality. But based on recent video footage, I wonder if they’re even aware of how ridiculously deranged they appear, alone or most often in large groups. My hunch is they won’t fully realize it until they’re lying in battered heaps in the shrubs directly under the awnings of their houses, their homemade superhero capes strewn awkwardly across their broken bodies.

The Anti-Trump Conspiracy Outgrows 3-Ring Circus Status

Most normal people don't know who Mark Levin is, But in some ways he's even more of a GOP propaganda tool these days than Limbaugh is, especially as one moves closer to the fringes. He has the 4th most-listened to Hate Talk Radio show in the country-- tied with Glenn Beck. Levin has some credibility with Republicans because he was chief of staff for Edwin Meese, Reagan's Attorney General and is editor of the Conservative Review and president of the far right Landmark Legal Foundation, although he has a tendency to call anyone who isn't a neo-fascist a "moron" or a "puke." He hasn't referred to Trump as a puke yet but that's going to be coming any day now.

A few days ago Levin, who has endorsed Cruz, was calling the #NeverTrump cult "asinine frauds" and cursed them out. He reacted badly to Roger Stone calling him a sell-out and he refers to Stone as a "thug" and a "sleaze-ball," apt descriptions, and made sure his audience knows that Stone is a "hatchet-man" for Trump. In the video above Levin also gratuitously throws in that Coulter is a pathetic sleaze-ball as well. He also went on to say that "As a result of what the Trump supporters have attempted here [pointing out that he's an establishment sell-out], particularly Roger Stone, I am not voting for Donald Trump period!" And he means not ever, not even if Trump is the nominee against Bernie or the establishment Democrat. He predicted that Stone's "bully, dirty tricks, Nixonian tactics" would backfire, "Count me as #NeverTrump... I will not be voting for Donald Trump and he can thank Roger Stone. And if they piss me off one more time, I'm going to urge millions and millions of you, should he get the nomination, not to vote for him either. I'm very serious about this; very serious about this." Does this sound like some kind of right-wing parlor game? Does anyone doubt where this year's Republican fringe candidates got their ideas about what appropriate campaign behavior is?

So what got Levin so worked up and hysterical? Apparently this Roger Stone post at the Daily Caller web site:

The next time you hear Mark Levin on the radio, or watch Glenn Beck on TV, or read Erick Erickson, RedState.com on the Internet, you might just ask yourself who is paying for the message?  And why is it so stridently anti-Trump?

Don’t fool yourself. They’re doing it for the money.

As the spearhead of the “Dump Trump” movement, the same GOP establishment big-dollar donors and PACS that are pushing House Speaker Paul Ryan as a dark-horse presidential candidate, despite the big-government omnibus-budget deals Ryan reached last year with President Obama, are funding Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, and Glenn Beck, to promote Sen. Ted Cruz.

The Conservative Tree House blog exposed the financial nexus supporting prominent “conservative” pundits to promote in their media outlets Ted Cruz as the last, best hope to block Trump in Wisconsin, a state considered by the Washington-based GOP establishment as perhaps the last establishment firewall to block Trump from the GOP presidential nomination.

“These financial/media relationships have largely and historically, remained hidden,” a blogger identified simply as “sundance” noted in an article posted on TheConservativeTreeHouse.com on Wednesday. “They have sure never been publicly, clearly, and regularly stated so the consuming audience would know the presentation was fraught with financial conflict.”

“The Senate Conservatives Fund (PAC) purchasing massive quantities ($400,000) of Mark Levin’s books in exchange for favorable candidacy political opinion. Conveniently hidden by the radio host who avoids mentioning the financial conflict created,” the blog pointed out.

On Jan. 13, Ben Jacobs in an article published by the Daily Beast headlined “Pay to Play?” noted that Politico, in an article that now appears to have been scrubbed from Politico’s website, reported on how the GOP establishment seeks to buy Levin.

The Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF), a “conservative” fund founded by former Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina that backed Cruz in his Senate fight against Obamacare, spent $427,000 to buy copies of radio talk show host Mark Levin’s four-year-old book Liberty or Tyranny” to distribute to donors-- a purchase that should have earned Levin approximately $1 million in royalties.

Despite his many diatribes against Trump broadcast to his national radio audience, Levin hid the fact the son of his fiancé is a full-time staffer for Cruz.

GOP establishment political operative David Barton not only runs “Keep the Promise” one of the most prominent pro-Cruz Super-PACs, he also serves as the chairman of Glen Beck’s “Mercury One” charity.

So, the next time you see Glenn Beck on his knees proclaiming that Ted Cruz is the “anointed one,” deemed by God to be president of the United States, you might ask yourself if God also deemed Barton to put at Beck’s disposal the millions in Super-PAC money he can funnel to Beck, so long as Beck continues to sing Ted Cruz’s tune.

Yet even these political whores do not top “conservative” Erick Erickson, founder of RedState.com, who funds his media venture The Resurgent with Super-PAC money from the Ricketts family of Wisconsin, big backers of Gov. Scott Walker (who incidentally endorsed Cruz).

ConservativeTreeHouse.com documented that the Ricketts family funded Our Principles PAC to the tune of $3 million in February alone. We should not be surprised when FEC filings show money from Our Principles PAC flowing to Resurgent Media, with the box “Oppose Trump” checked off as the Erickson media group’s purpose.

“In addition to all of those in the Salem Media Communications network, along with Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, Erick Erickson and anyone who is hosted upon the various media enterprises they front for…. all paid shrills dependent upon political graft,” the ConservativeTreeHouse.com article concludes.

“Interesting indeed how the intersection of financial dependency drives the political ideology of these modern “conservative voices”. However, this does increasingly explain how those same voices will stand and cheer for Mr. No-Budget/Omnibus, House Speaker Paul Ryan.

” What’s the point, the ConservatieTreeHouse.com asks? Smaller government? Yeah, sure.

Who Thinks The GOP Has Halted Their War On Women? Let's Visit Southeast Minnesota

Angie Craig should be a shoo-in for Congress

Hate Talk Radio host Jason Lewis, is the leading contender for the Republican nomination to replace retiring GOP reactionary, John Kline in the suburbs and exurbs south of St. Paul (MN-02). It's a swing district that Obama won-- albeit narrowly-- both times, and with a vaguely competent DCCC it would be in Democratic hands today. The Democratic candidate this year is Angie Craig a former health care industry executive and journalist who, when elected, will be the first openly gay member of Congress from Minnesota and the first woman ever elected from Minnesota's Second District.

Keith Ellison, the leader of Minnesota progressives, has enthusiastically endorsed Angie Craig and has been working hard to help elect her and to introduce her to other progressives around the country. This morning he told us that "Jason Lewis' comments on women are not only offensive, they perpetuate a shockingly out of touch world view. I'm proud to support Angie Craig because I know she will fight tirelessly in Congress for all Americans, regardless of their age or gender." Lewis' reputation as a dangerous crackpot comes from his comments on the radio where he delighted sharing his own ugly bigotry with his listeners. Have you ever heard of a congressional candidate saying "You’ve got a vast majority of young single women who couldn’t explain to you what GDP means. You know what they care about?... They care about The View. They are non-thinking." Really? The vast majority? Did he take a survey? Young women are more unaware than young men are about GDP?

I'm surprised the Minnesota Republican Party hasn't officially asked him to withdraw from the race. Well, not that surprised. After all, former crooked congresswoman and extremist nut Michele Bachmann has endorsed Lewis. Despite Bachmann's enthusiasm for Lewis, though, Chris Fields, Deputy Chair of the state GOP and an African-American, was horrified by reports of Lewis' racism. Lewis said the "white population" has been "committing political suicide" and "cultural suicide" by not reproducing at higher levels, and in belittling calls for more income inequality he said that "the median income for blacks in America would make them rich in most African nations, not most-- all." In a crazy screed he calls an audio book, Power Divided is Power Checked: The Argument for States' Rights, he questioned the role of the federal government in outlawing slavery, claimed that President Abraham Lincoln "exploited the issue" of slavery, adding the Civil War-- which he calls "War Between the States"-- had "more to do with secession" than slavery. How would you feel about someone who put this into a "book" being your congressman?

In fact, if you really want to be quite frank about it, how does somebody else owning a slave affect me? It doesn’t. If I don’t think it is right, I won’t own one, and people always say ‘well if you don’t want to marry somebody of the same sex, you don’t have to, but why tell somebody else they can’t.  Uh, you know if you don’t want to own a slave, don’t. But don’t tell other people they can’t.

Angie and her wife live in Eagan with their 4 teenage sons. I kind of feel badly for her since she is enthusiastic about making the election a discussion of serious issues impacting the real lives of working families, and will now be forced to confront this crackpot who wants to relitigate slavery and marriage equality. Brian McClung, Tim Pawlenty's former spokesman seemed aghast at Lewis' attempts to paint himself as a junior Donald Trump just angry about political correctness. (Lewis insists that "liberal reporters and typical politicians may not like the bluntness of the way I’ve framed some issues in my career.") McClung, who is still active in Minnesota GOP politics pointed out that "defending the institution of slavery in any manner is abhorrent and out-of-bounds" and that "this also highlights the fact that Lewis' outrageous and often indefensible statements are a treasure trove of opposition research that would be used by Democrats to destroy him in a general election fight in a closely divided swing district." Really? You think Minnesota women might be upset that Lewis claims they are "simply ignorant of the important issues in life?"

Lewis has said over and over that he stands by his hate-filled comments about blacks and women. Only 3.6% of the district's population is black but, over half the voters are women-- and they vote. In fact, MN-02 is one of the highest-turn-out districts in the country, 79% of eligible voters going to the polls in 2012. (For the sake of comparison the turn out of the state of California was 54.8%, for Texas it was 48.4%, for Idaho it was 58.4%, for Nebraska 59.9% and for neighboring Wisconsin 71.9%.) I bet when women hear this kind of thing even more will vote:

Is There A Correlation Between Trumpf Fans And Ted Nugent Fans? I'll Guess Yes, A Strong One

Last night I was invited to be a guest on WBZ's NightSide with Dan Rea, to talk about why so many people are urging President Obama to replace Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chair of the DNC. I've been doing these Wasserman Schultz interviews on TV and radio for the past two weeks and they're kind of routine for me now. Tuesday wasn't. I was unaware that I was going on a right-wing radio show. Now, as it turns out, Rea is a knowledgeable guy and a gentleman, and a genial host. I had just been reading Glenn Greenwald's report at The Intercept that asserts, quite correctly, that "Wasserman Schultz is the living, breathing embodiment of everything rotted and corrupt about the Democratic Party: a corporatist who overwhelmingly relies on corporate money to keep her job, a hawk who supports the most bellicose aspects of U.S. foreign policy, a key member of the 'centrist' and 'moderate' pro-growth New Democrat coalition, a co-sponsor of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was 'heavily backed by D.C. favorites including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the music and motion picture industries' and which, if enacted, would have allowed extreme government and corporate control over the internet." So I was all fired up and ready to go-- even if I was hooked up to an IV tube pumping antibiotics into me for the entire hour-long interview.

I'm no stranger to Boston radio. Back in the day I had been a guest at WBCN many times and once or twice on WFNX, as well as a couple of the local college stations. I love the Boston accent and I always feel at home with Bostonians. What I was less prepared for, though, were the crackpot callers. I had forgotten about callers. I though Dan would ask me questions and we would have a discussion about how bad Wasserman Schultz is. And we did-- until he opened the phone lines. And then came the deluge; you can see why Herr Trumpf has a following. These self-referential, deluded sad-sacks were all certain Hillary Clinton would soon be in prison for e-mails and servers. And they really believe it-- 100%. One guy, who ostensibly wanted to ask me a question about Wasserman Schultz, kept calling Hillary a "witch," until I interrupted and explained that I wasn't going to pay any attention to his ad hominem name-calling and that he had to stop. He seemed stunned. Apparently, calling Hillary Clinton a witch on right wing radio is nothing out of the ordinary.

Hate Talk Radio may take a certain "bad boy" perverse joy in snubbing political correctness but it has coarsened and brutalized American politics and is turning off people entirely from politics. Today on his Facebook page, third rate former rock musician and right-wing crazy person (and Trumpf supporter) Ted Nugent was spreading the manure around, in a "review" of a widely panned film GOP fantasy film about Benghazi, for his poor deluded fans: "Our unholy rotten soulless criminal America destroying government killed 4 Americans in Banghazi. Period! What sort of chimpass punk would deny security, turn down 61 requests for security, then tell US forces to STAND DOWN when they were ready to kickass on the allapukes & save American lives! Obama & Clinton, thats who. They should be tried for treason & hung. Our entire fkdup gvt must be cleansed asap." Will be get a visit from the Secret Service? I hope so. Calling for the lynching of presidents and presidential candidates is a no-no even most Republicans haven't been crossing, at least not publicly.

I guess the country is strong enough to survive this onslaught of willful ignorance and stupidity. I hope so. I will say, though, that when I went to work for Warner Brothers I did all I could to get Nugent's excruciatingly bad band dropped from the label. His was the only band in my life I was happy to see crash and burn and fail miserably.

Technically, Trumpf Is Still Ahead But Cruz Is Surging And Will Soon Overtake Him

Herr Trumpf doesn't like seeing himself as a loser, but he will soon have no choice. Even Republican voters are waking up to his obvious shortcomings and are starting to coalesce around an even worse candidate, Ted Cruz. A Quinnipiac poll of national Republicans and 3 state polls of GOP voters-- Florida, South Carolina and New Hampshire-- all seem to predict what has already happened in Iowa-- the end of Dr. Ben's campaign (now little more than a campaign donation mop-up operation) and a gradual end to Trumpf dominance as Cruz becomes the consensus candidate of the angry, inchoate masses on the right of the political spectrum.

OK, first the polling data, so you can see what I'm talking about:

1- Iowa- The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Cruz over Trumpf 30.2 to 26.2% and, even worse, the most recent Iowa GOP polling, from CBS News, shows Cruz surging to 40% while Trumpf settles back down to 31%. Cruz's crucial evangelical-fueled field operation in Iowa would probably result in Cruz beating Trumpf even if the numbers were reversed but with Cruz's momentum and the kind of lead he's developed over Trumpf, Iowa is all over for the potty-mouthed New York billionaire.

2- New Quinnipiac national poll has Trump and Cruz in a statistical dead heat, but... 50% of American voters say they would be embarrassed to have Trump as president, 28% of Republicans claim they will never vote for Trump no matter what, and both Bernie and Hillary lead Trumpf in national head-to-head match-ups, Hillary 47-40% and Bernie, the more electable Democrat, 51-38%. American voters in general see that Trumpf is neither honest nor trustworthy (58-36%), and by a 61-34% margin, most say Trumpf does not share their values. In terms of the GOP horse race, Trumpf is still ahead with 28% but Cruz has surged into a clear second place with 24%, while Rubio is a weak third with 12%.

3- New Hampshire- Cruz, who hasn't prioritized New Hampshire has moved into second place with 16%, behind Herr Trumpf's 24%, but Cruz's 65-19% favorable rating augurs well for him against Trumpf's 48-45%. Among GOP contenders, only poor Jeb is more disliked by New Hampshire Republicans (48%).

4- South Carolina- Cruz has prioriitized South Carolina and he is now exactly tied with Trumpf, 27-27%, Cruz surging, Trumpf going in the opposite direction. Their favorle/Unfavorable contrast is pronounced. Cruz-- 71-17% but Trumpf is much more divisive even among South Carolina Republicans: 56-37%.

5- Florida- Cruz is surging and Trumpf is gently declining. Trumpf is still ahead with 29% but he's down 4 points. Cruz is the obvious candidate with momentum, up a startling 15 points at 18% and both are way ahead of Floridians Rubio (17%) and poor Jeb (10%). Again, Cruz has a much better image among Florida Republicans than Trumpf. Cruz's favorables are 70% and his unfavorables 18%., while Trumpf has a 61% favorable rating and a 34% unfavorable, worse than anyone's bust Jeb (36% unfavorable).

Trumpf may never lose the crackpot, fringe hate groups that back him, but he is starting to lose the Hate Talk Radio hosts who gave GOP voters permission to support him. Beck has already announced he won't even vote for Herr Trumpf if he's the GOP nominee against Hillary. Those are strong words for a Hate Talk Radio celebrity. Trumpf angered Limbaugh by calling attention to the fact that Cruz is a maniac-- and Trumpf immediately backed down and went and sit in the corner to pout. But hasn't uttered another anti-Cruz word since. Limbaugh: "A genuine conservative, even in the Republican field, would not go after Cruz this way. So that just raised a red flag for me, made me somewhat curious." Hannity was equally angered by Trumpf going after Cruz that way.

[W]hile Trump seems happy to slash and burn his way through much of the press, he can’t afford to do the same with influential conservative talkers... In many ways, Trump's campaign has resembled a traveling conservative talk show. Like a good host, he gives voice to their frustrations; it's one of the reasons why he has been embraced so quickly as a card-carrying conservative, despite what the National Review has referred to as his "progressive past."

If the real hosts turn on him-- a move that gets easier and easier to make as Cruz strengthens in Iowa and looks like a real top contender-- Trump risks losing that card and triggering the exodus that many pundits have always believed is inevitable.

Yesterday, GOP establishment publicist David Frum took a look who backs Trumpf and Cruz and why. "The angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how white male became an accusation rather than a description... White Middle Americans express heavy mistrust of every institution in American society: not only government, but corporations, unions, even the political party they typically vote for--the Republican Party of Romney, Ryan, and McConnell, which they despise as a sad crew of weaklings and sellouts. They are pissed off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, 'That’s my guy.'" It's the harbinger of social anomie and the breakdown of societal cohesion, stoked by Frum's political party for their own greed-driven partisan agenda. The part of their base that has embraced the propt-fascism of candidates like Trumpf, Carson and Cruz are, simply put, life's losers, people unable to cope with any kind of social or technological progress, people who want to turn back the hands of time.

The Trumpf he describes is the polar opposite of GOP patron saint Ronald Reagan. "When Trump first erupted into the Republican race in June," asserts Frum, "he did so with a message of grim pessimism. 'We got $18 trillion in debt. We got nothing but problems… We’re dying. We’re dying. We need money … We have losers. We have people that don’t have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain … The American dream is dead.' Life's-losers found their voice. "Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP," he wrote, "had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation... Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000... What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism."

A majority of Republicans worry that corporations and the wealthy exert too much power. Their party leaders work to ensure that these same groups can exert even more. Mainstream Republicans were quite at ease with tax increases on households earning more than $250,000 in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the subsequent stimulus. Their congressional representatives had the opposite priorities. In 2008, many Republican primary voters had agreed with former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who wanted “their next president to remind them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off.” But those Republicans did not count for much once the primaries ended, and normal politics resumed between the multicultural Democrats and a plutocratic GOP.

...A substantial minority of Republicans-- almost 30 percent-- said they would welcome “heavy” taxes on the wealthy, according to Gallup. Within the party that made Paul Ryan’s entitlement-slashing budget plan a centerpiece of policy, only 21 percent favored cuts in Medicare and only 17 percent wanted to see spending on Social Security reduced, according to Pew. Less than a third of ordinary Republicans supported a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants (again according to Pew); a majority, by contrast, favored stepped-up deportation.

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.

...Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”

He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told the Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”

He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

He promised above all to protect their wages from being undercut by Republican [and Democratic establishment] immigration policy.

...Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.

Anti-Hispanic Racism And The Death Of The Republican Party

Ken Calvert and Will Hurd are just 2 of dozens of Republicans who could lose their seats because of the party's embrace of overt anti-Latino racism

Wednesday we saw how easy it was easy to trace modern GOP racism back to Ronald Reagan. Then yesterday the editorial board of the New York Times decried how Trump is forcing the Republicans into a kind of ugly anti-Hispanic racism they wanted to avoid-- a kind of racism that may thrive in some parts of the country but that will preclude winning the White House and will kill some of their candidates in Senate and House races.

Before Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidates could deflect tough questions on immigration with vague promises to secure the border and oppose all “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

Not anymore. Mr. Trump has offered a plan to “take back our country” from what he calls the rapist-murderer-job stealers being exported from Mexico. He is full of ideas. He would expel 11 million immigrants, and their families, and let only “the good ones” back in. He would restrict legal immigration, and impose a national job-verification system so that everyone, citizens too, would need federal permission to work. He would build a 2,000-mile border wall and force Mexicans to pay for it. He would replace the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship by birth with citizenship by bloodline and pedigree, leaving it to politicians and bureaucrats to decide what to do with millions of stateless children. He would flood the country with immigration agents and-- it almost goes without saying-- dismantle the economy and shred America’s standing as an immigrant-welcoming nation.

You could say the front-running Mr. Trump has put his opponents in a bind. Or you could say he has given them a gift: the opportunity to be specific in return about what they would do to fix the immigration mess. And to be forthright in rejecting his despicable proposals. Because his plan is so naked-- in its scapegoating of immigrants, its barely subtextual racism, its immense cruelty in seeking to reduce millions of people to poverty and hopelessness-- it gives his opponents the chance for a very clear moral decision. They can stand up for better values, and against the collective punishment of millions of innocent Americans-in-waiting.

But as Mr. Trump swells in the polls, his diminished opponents are following in his wake, like remoras on a shark. Several have shuffled onto the anti-birthright-citizenship bus, including Rick Santorum, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ben Carson and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Even Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who once fought for smart bipartisan immigration reform, wants to repeal birthright citizenship. As does Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a birthright citizen himself. As for Mr. Trump’s other restrictionist proposals, several are firmly lodged again in the playbook of a Republican Party that briefly tried to reform itself after the Mitt Romney debacle. Some candidates are even willing to try to trump Mr. Trump in xenophobia: Mr. Carson is talking about using armed military drones at the border. That’s right-- bombing Arizona.

Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida understand immigration issues deeply and presumably want the Latino vote and are well aware of the dangers of having their party hijacked by far-right ideas. They should be opposing Mr. Trump at every turn. But in the face of Mr. Trump’s success, their objections are mild, and oddly muted. The danger is that when the campaign is over, no matter what becomes of Mr. Trump’s candidacy, he will have further poisoned the debate with his noxious positions, normalized an extremism whose toxicity is dulled by familiarity and is validated by a feckless party. He has emboldened the fringe lawmakers whose “hell no” on any positive immigration legislation has stymied reform for years.

The solutions are well known. Americans strongly support an earned path to citizenship for immigrants, strengthening families and industries and giving strivers the chance to pay this country back. Even as reform festers at the federal level, forward-thinking cities like New York and states like California have taken assertive steps, offering official documents like driver’s licenses and identity cards, and tuition breaks and other means of inclusion, to offer immigrants opportunities, all for the common good.

Ideas like these are realistic, practical and have the added benefit of being morally defensible. It has long been a hard job to keep the highly combustible immigration debate on the right side of sanity and reality. That progress is now being undone before our eyes in the presidential campaign, courtesy of the faux-populist billionaire who says immigrants are the reason this country is weak and frightened and going to hell.

There are a few Republicans in House seats where their party going to war against Latinos endangers their careers-- and that number is growing. The Republican Party's share of the California congressional delegation has shrunk precipitously as more and more Latinos have registered to vote. Last year, for example, racist slob Gary Miller was forced to retire when his heavily Hispanic district prepared to defeat him at the polls. Those same demographics are catching up with 7 other Republicans in California. All that stands between these 7 galoots and the disgrace of new jobs as K Street lobbyists is the grotesque incompetence of the DCCC:

• David Valadao- 72.1%
• Devin Nunes- 45.9%
• Jeff Denham- 34.9%
• Steve Knight- 37.9%
• Kevin McCarthy- 35.4%
• Ed Royce- 34.6%
• Ken Calvert 33.2%

This cycle it looks like even the incompetence of the DCCC won't save Steve Knight in the Santa Clarita Valley, the Antelope Valley and Simi Valley (CA-25), where progressive Lou Vince is a good bet to beat him. And if Michael Eggman steers clear of the DCCC and their failed strategies and tactics, he'll beat Jeff Denham in a stretch of the Central Valley from Turlock, through Modesto to Manteca and Tracy (CA-10).

Three Republicans in South Florida are in overwhelmingly Hispanic districts-- Ileana Ros Lehtinen (72.7%), Mario Diaz-Balart (70.4%) and Carlos Curbelo (69.5%). Luckily for Ros Lehtinen and Diaz-Balart, most of the Hispanics in their districts are Cubans and, in both cases, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz works assiduously to protect their seats. Curbelo, on the other hand, has a lot of non-Cuban Hispanics in his district and is a weak candidate who only won in 2014 because the Democratic incumbent, Joe Garcia, was a corrupt, reactionary New Dem who voted with Republicans far too often, thereby discouraging Democratic midterm turnout. In 2016, Curbelo will face a much stronger Democrat likely to beat him, Annette Taddeo.

And four other Republican incumbents could be easily defeated if the DCCC would stop recruiting conservative DINOs to run against them-- Will Hurd, who represents a huge stretch of South Texas from the suburbs of San Antonio through smuggling mecca Eagle Pass to El Paso (70.8%); Steve Pearce (southern New Mexico), 52.1%; Blake Farenthold (Corpus Christi and Victoria), 50.8%; and John Culbertson in west Houston, 31.5%.

How do you think Hispanic voters-- not to mention non-Republican voters-- like hearing about the two Boston racist brothers who beat up a 58-year-old Hispanic man and then said they were inspired by Trump's racist pronouncements? When asked about what his followers had done, Trump said, "People who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate."

After a Hispanic man was beaten Wednesday by two Boston men, one of whom told the police that he was inspired by Donald J. Trump’s anti-immigrant message, Mr. Trump told reporters that his supporters were “passionate.”

Two brothers from South Boston were arrested and charged with beating the 58-year-old man, who is homeless, with a metal pole, breaking his nose and battering his chest and arms, The Boston Globe reported.

“Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” the police said one of the brothers, Scott Leader, 38, told them. His brother, Steve Leader, 30, was also charged in the beating, the police said. The Globe reported that the brothers have extensive criminal records.

On Chris Hayes' MSNBC show the other night, Republican consultant Linda Chavez pointed out that if the GOP keeps following Trump down the racist rabbit hole, the party will go the way of the Whigs, extinction. Too late for Jan Mickelson, a Republican Hate Talk Radio host on WHO, a subsidiary of iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel) in Des Moines who happily took it to the next level. The station, which is also home to bigots like Rush Limbaugh and Steve Deace, the neo-fascist who just endorsed Ted Cruz, refuses to fire Mickelson, who was apparently also feeling empowered by Trump and the rest of the GOP field enough to start publicly espousing a reinstitution of slavery, which he politely refers to as "compelled labor." Listen:

As CT ex-Gov. Rowland heads back to the slammer, his replacement as radio host isn't another right-wing talker

Former CT Gov. John Rowland was beset by reporters as he left U.S. District Court last month after being sentence to another 30 months in prison for consultant-fee scamming. What's interesting is how he's being replaced as an afternoon radio talk host.

by Ken

More news from our radio guru Jack, who has been intrigued by the situation at Hartford (CT) station WTIC, where former Gov. John Rowland, who has already done time for corruption, has now become a two-time loser for repeat felonizing -- at the same time that he was doing an afternoon drive-time show for WTIC -- in connection with attempted laundering of off-the-books political consulting fees (which he seems to have been trying like mad to line up, with not a lot of takers, for reasons that may not be entirely mysterious) through nonpolitical companies.

Now there's nothing new about the station of a right-wing radio host running into trouble of one sort or another with their right-wing on-air talent -- if it's not a money scandal, it's a sex scandal. (Hey, didn't right-wingers used to be stern law-'n'-order types?) It's not even new waving bye-bye to Governor Rowland on his way to the pokey.

Here's the March 19 Tom Taylor Now report Jack passed on detailing the former governor's -- and the radio station's -- awkward situation:

Ex-WTIC Hartford (1080) host John Rowland is blasted by a judge for “shameless use of his radio talk show.”
In passing sentence, Judge Janet Bond Arterton said she’s unsure why the former Connecticut governor – convicted a decade ago on earlier corruption charges – did it this time. She speculated it might be “lust for influence” in the state he once governed. The trial brought out not one but two attempts by Rowland to work for political candidates and have his off-the-books fees laundered through an unrelated business. The first time was in 2010, when Rowland asked for more than $500,000 in consulting fees to be run through a non-profit animal shelter managed by the candidate. The candidate declined, but in 2012, Rowland found a taker. She agreed to route Rowland’s fees through a nursing home chain she owns with her husband. That’s the deal that blew up, while Rowland was hosting afternoons on CBS-owned news/talk WTIC. His former co-host Reverend Will Marotti was one of the people who spoke up for Rowland at the sentencing hearing. The Hartford Courant says Rowland got a sentence of 30 months in prison, but plans to appeal. There’s more bad press for WTIC in a Courant editorial, where the paper says Rowland “used his talk show to promote [the 2012 client’s] candidacy and disparage her chief opponent.” It’s been a year of bad P.R. for WTIC radio, the state’s longtime news/talk leader.

Apparently the ex-governor, who note is still planning an appeal, isn't going to be able to do his show from the slammer, or maybe WTIC isn't eager to wait and see. Which brings us to the new development, which is almost more interesting than yet another right-wing hate-talker doing the walk of shame. It has to do with how WTIC is filling the vacated time slot, with something completely different. From Tom Taylor Now today:

How do you replace a disgraced and jailed ex-governor as your afternoon drive talk show?
If you’re CBS Radio’s news/talk WTIC Hartford (1080), you start all over and introduce an all-sports show for the 3-7pm daypart. As Dom Amore says at the Hartford Courant, “The show, obviously, will feature plenty of Red Sox-Yankees banter, with Hartford along the line that unofficially divides the territories of the ancient baseball rivals.” WTIC will represent both sides of the partisan line with Andy Gresh (most recently of CBS sister “Sports Hub 98.5” WBZ-FM Boston) and Joe D’Ambrosio. Joe’s been part of WTIC for 23 years and has worked the basketball and football games of the UConn Huskies, among other chores. He gets to hold up the New York-centric part of the argument – as former WTIC afternoon host John Rowland prepares to serve his second stretch in prison, on corruption charges. A federal judge sentenced Rowland to 30 months behind bars and blasted the “shameless use of his radio talk show” on WTIC (March 19 NOW Newsletter).

Say what? Right-wing talk being replaced by sports talk? This is interesting, no?

One of the points I've made in response to the braying of the Dump Rushers every time their guy, whose day undoubtedly seems to be fading, suffers another lineup setback is that even if the airwaves could be purged of him, that doesn't mean there won't be a grasping Rush wannabe waiting in the wings. But maybe developments like this one in Hartford really suggest that hate talk is becoming not such good business. That is something.

I don't think there's any less right-wing hate out there. But if it becomes less profitable, the Right-Wing Noise Machine may have to scramble a bit to keep its captive zombies, er, "informed."

#

Rush on the run? Swell! It just doesn't mean what it once would have

"If WLS really does offload Limbaugh, this will look like a Major League Baseball or NBA team trading away a player with a really large contract."

-- from an item on Tom Taylor's website

by Ken

It's reasonably well known that Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, the designers of NYC's Central Park, Prospect Park, and so many other public spaces, hated statues, and wanted very badly to keep them the hell out of their parks. However, even when they were around to complain, their wishes weren't always heeded, and of course it's been a long time since they were around.

So what's wrong with statues? Well, statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Columbus are one thing -- and goodness knows we've got plenty of them. (Does anyone think we need more?) But when you start to look at the ranks of once-instantly-recognizable titans of yesteryear and consider how many of the subjects time has rendered largely or completely unknown to us, you realize that even glazing glory fades.

This may be an odd way to start a post about the evolution of Rush Limbaugh, but I'm not sure it isn't the only way.

We're so used to having Rush to kick around that we may not have caught up with the reality that it just doesn't matter the way it once did.

Howie and I count on our radio guru Jack to keep us up to date on developments in radioland, and just lately he has passed along these items from the "Tom Taylor Now" website:

Cumulus tangos again with Rush Limbaugh, this time in Chicago.
The breaking story that began early yesterday morning with Robert Feder’s report headlined “WLS ready to drop Rush Limbaugh” has the feel of a blockbuster baseball or basketball trade that was picked up by a sharp sportswriter, in the moments just before it was to be finalized. Cumulus later said about the story “This is not at all accurate.” But there’s wiggle-room, and perhaps this fits in - DailyKos picked up a most un-Rush-like Facebook musing from Limbaugh this week – “Now that I've outgrown the 25-54 demographic, I'm no longer confident I see the world as everybody else does.” And demos matter, certainly to Cumulus at Chicago’s talk WLS (890). Yearly revenue at WLS dropped from $13 million to “less than $9.5 million in 2014,” says Feder, and that was “a contributing factor in a change in top management.” That’s where Cumulus brought in former CBS-Chicago exec Peter Bowen from L.A., to succeed newly-promoted Midwest regional exec Donna Baker.

By coincidence, Cumulus just signed Jonathon Brandmeier…
If Limbaugh leaves the schedule at talk WLS (890), that would let it carry the full three hours of “Johnny B.,” in the market where he’s best-known, Chicago. He’d air 9am to noon, instead of the originally-announced 9am-11am. That would leave WLS with a hole from noon-2pm. One scenario has Cumulus and Premiere negotiating to transfer Rush to Salem’s conservative talk WIND (560). After all, Premiere’s parent iHeart set some precedents by moving Rush off his longtime L.A. affiliate (talk KFI/640) to a sister station, the new avowedly-conservative “Patriot 1150” KEIB. But – Salem has previously displayed little interest in Rush, and this would break that pattern. There was friction between Cumulus and Rush a couple of years ago, when CEO Lew Dickey mentioned a revenue issue at some talk stations. He didn’t name-check Limbaugh, but Rush took it personally. The backdrop here is the three-year-old advertising boycott against Limbaugh whose match was lit by Media Matters, then kept alive by watchdog sites like StopRush.net (February 5, 2014 NOW). What's next? If WLS really does offload Limbaugh, this will look like a Major League Baseball or NBA team trading away a player with a really large contract. Sure sounds like something’s up. Follow Robert Feder’s posts on his website here.

Now this is perfectly consistent with the rumblings I've been hearing out of radioland over the last year or more: that political talk radio doesn't appeal to advertisers the way it once did. In part we can thank the good work of the various individuals and groups who have made a mission of talking back to the hate talkers, and helped deliver a message to those advertisers. While controversy can sometimes be a good thing, radio-station owners (and their consultants) apparently find that getting caught up in these kinds of controversies doesn't help them sell stuff. And certainly the Rush Resistance movement has helped discourage advertisers.

But if you look at the Facebook posting up top, note that the Rush We Love to Hate seems himself to have grasped that Time Marches On. And so my takeaway here isn't quite the same as, say, that of Leslie Salzillo, the author of the above-referenced Daily Kos post, "Rush Limbaugh Admits Defeat On Facebook - 'Talk' Of Being Dropped In Chicago Circulates."

First, note that it isn't just Rush who's lost his glittery-gold luster. Though goodness knows htere's still plenty of Hate Talk Radio clogging the airwaves, it's a seriously declining format. At least as important, and very likely more important in the case of the Rush We Love to Hate, celebrities are perishable commodities. Maybe not like a quart of milk or a loaf of bread, but they have a shelf life.

There's no doubt that Rush himself at the height of his power was a force for evil. That that's no longer so much so, and there doesn't seem any single person exercising comparable influence -- this is all to the good. But getting hung up on him personally doesn't change the reality of where a broad swath of the country is, politically and, er, informationally.

I can't tell you exactly what Rush means when he says that "there are younger people, generationally younger, who have an entirely different view, an entirely different experience." A different experience, sure. But I sure don't see evidence of "an entirely different view." Just because right-wing delusion and obfuscation may not be as salable to radio advertisers as they once were, that doesn't seem to mean at all that their grip on the country has lessened. When I look around, it seems to me in fact quite a bit stronger.

Maybe more than anything it's that the country has become so addle-pated politically that it no longer needs a Rush to make them stupid. So please forgive me if I'm not doing a dance of celebration over his humbling.

#

Will Hate Talk Radio Last Out The Decade?

WBT, Charlotte's News Talk 1110, broadcasts mostly local talk (plus Rush Limbaugh) and is the ratings leader in the market. Their signal is so big they can be picked up anywhere on the East Coast of the United States. Last week they announced they were firing popular comic hosts, Brad Krantz and Britt Whitmire.

At WBT, Brad and Britt” had aired in afternoon drive-time for the first year, then moved to early evenings.

The show had good ratings, Krantz said, but station management stopped supporting them after apparently receiving a few complaint calls from legacy listeners.

"We are entertaining. We are funny," Krantz said. "But we are not right-wing, and in the insane world of radio, if you are not a right-winger, then you are a Socialist, Marxist Commie.

"Right now, talk radio is a right-wing sewer. We refuse to swim in the sewer, therefore we pay the price."

Krantz had a regular character, Lil' Rush who spoofed Limbaugh right after Limbaugh's own show on the station. When they were originally hired, the station management had said it wanted to get away from all the politics and they chose Brad and Britt because they are "a lot more fun" with a lighter fair that had a wider audience appeal than staple Hate Talk Radio. Hate Talk Radio fans in Charlotte would go bonkers whenever Krantz made fun of Limbaugh's drug addiction-- which was often. And they never stopped complaining about it. When they signed off last week, there was some bitterness displayed.

“We’d just like to thank WBT management for their complete lack of support for us from the day we came on the air.”

That would be July 2, 2012, when Krantz and Whitmire had their first day under a two-year, “no cut” contract, a fairly rare thing in broadcasting these days. It meant that if the station wanted to get rid of the show before summer 2014, they’d have to pay the pair through that time.

“They were too cheap to fire us,” says Krantz, his trademark sarcasm revving into high gear, “and put something on ‘good,’ so they decided to punish the audience with this ‘horrible’ show rather than do the right thing. … For them to have taken off the cancer of ‘Brad and Britt,’ they would have had to pay out the contract. You’d think if they cared about the audience, they would do that. You know why we were still on? Because we weren’t bad. Really, we were good.”

Krantz says he believes that one key reason the show failed to resonate in Charlotte was because WBT has spent a decade aiming at arch-conservatives rather than a broader audience. Although the show was a departure from the politically focused fare that had filled the time slot over the years, Krantz says he thinks that many listeners thought he and Whitmire were too liberal for the airwaves, especially when it aired in the afternoon following Rush Limbaugh.

“We were hired to break the WBT noon-to-6 p.m. right-wing sewer that had been led by Jeff Katz, Tara Servatius and Vince Coakley,” Krantz says, listing the parade of talent WBT had in the afternoons following the 2006 departure of Jason Lewis. He was the most successful host for the time slot in at least a decade until leaving for a job in Minneapolis. “We did that, got high ratings but got no support from management,” Krantz says.

“Their core audience at WBT is like NASCAR and the Republican Party-- it’s too old and too white and you can’t sell commercials to it anymore. It’s the AM talk-radio curse. They’ve done it to themselves by building the station around Limbaugh…

“Tell this (exclamation that can’t be printed here) city of Charlotte, North Carolina, to (verb that can’t be printed here) off because they can’t handle anything but hate-Obama radio.”

"Sunny John" Boehner doesn't deserve to be made fun of by Alexandra Petri

If Alexandra Petri and I are both having a spot of trouble with misbehaving words, it's in the great tradition of Saturday Night Live's perpetually angry scourge, Emily Litella (Gilda Radner), who (for example) couldn't understand what all the fuss was about "violins in schools."

"The American people said they wanted change, but really what they wanted was just a little bit off the top because anything else would frighten their spouses. . . .

"The president thought that when we said we wanted jobs and changes, we wanted jobs and changes. He will learn. Even then, he used fewer executive orders than his predecessors, but -- hey, it's not the scale, but how you use them, that counts."

-- Alexandra Petri, in her washingtonpost.com "ComPost"
column, "Why not sue the president, Speaker Boehner?"

by Ken

First off, I should try to correct possible misimpressions arising from the above post title, by which I don't mean to say that Sunny John is, you know, such an august personage that he shouldn't be nattered by a journalistic gnat doodling an online column called "ComPost." No, on the contrary, anyone who is aware of my substantial esteem for Ms. Petri, not to mention my feelings about our one and only U.S. House speaker, who for me has roughly the stature of an inexplicably-as-yet-unsquooshed bug, will surely understand that I mean Sunny John is literally not worthy of such esteemed spoofing skills.

Fortunately, I think Ms. Petri will be inclined to be kind, since (a) she is, I believe, recently back from vacation, and anyone who has been on vacation owes, if nothing else, the tiniest modicum of kindly indulgence toward those of us who haven't been, and (b) she got bogged down in a linguistic bog of her own at the start of her attempt to mediate the brewing legal brouhaha developing between Sunny John and the White House:

When I first heard that Speaker Boehner was trying to force an unwanted suit on President Obama, I must confess I felt a certain sympathy for President Obama. Once a co-worker attempted to force some unwanted dresses on me, and let me tell you, it was tense around the office for a while after I realized that I either had to pay her for them or admit that I did not want them. They hung in my cubicle for weeks, looming ominously, like the dresses of Damocles.

Fortunately, Alexandra gets the confusion sorted out fairly quickly, and proceeds to disagree with such authorities as White House press secretary Josh Earnest, who attempted to dismiss Sunny John's threatened lawsuit against the president -- for some imagined diabolical (one might call them "Bush-like," except that those were real) executive usurpations of authority -- as "a taxpayer-funded lawsuit against the president of the United States for doing his job" and "the kind of step that most Americans wouldn't support."


ALEXANDRA THINKS WE'D SUPPORT SUNNY JOHN'S STUNT SUIT

For the record, Alexandra is not one of those people who believes Sunny John's threatened lawsuit is "a flagrant partisan stunt."

That is nonsense. A flagrant partisan stunt would be much more fun: Say, a man in a bright red suit shouting, “OBAMA’s not MY president!” before jumping a motorcycle over a long row of flaming trucks — which actually happens in some parts of the country, come to think of it.

On the contrary, says Alexandra. She's convinced that we Americans would support the speaker's lawsuit.

If there is one thing that I, as an American, feel certain of, it is that you can make good money by suing people. Especially when those people are just doing their jobs. We just need to play our cards right. Maybe we’ll actually get some remuneration out of this whole arrangement, which we can pool and put into our collapsing roads and bridges. Frivolous lawsuits and apple pie! That’s what this country was built on.

And in case Sunny John hasn't got the case entirely worked out yet, Alexandra explains for him. "Where are the jobs?" the speaker apparently wants to know." You or I might answer that they were taken away by the people who paid to put and keep an unsquooshed bug like Sunny John in power. But no, says Alexandra. Where are the jobs? "Simple: The president is hiding them."

It is well known that once you are elected president, they lead you to a big room just inside the Oval Office where there is a big lever labeled “JOBS.” All you have to do is press this lever, and it will produce all the jobs you could ever want. And some you don’t want, like the job of the guy who has to alter the numbers on the population signs outside small towns whenever Old Father Cartwright dies.

And yet President Obama contumaciously persists in refusing to push it. Never mind the jobs numbers and reports. That’s the executive branch, and they are known for their trickery. I don’t know what he’s waiting for! A third term? That is just what a “king or monarch” (Boehner again) like him would want!

"I BELIEVE EVERYTHING I HEAR ON TALK RADIO"

This "king or monarch" business really rings a bell for Alexandra, who believes the president "has been acting far too much like a 'king or monarch' and for far too long."

He is acting so much like a monarch that he showed up at a state dinner clad entirely in ermine robes and the dashed hopes of peasants, carrying a large scepter, and causing several portraits of George Washington that were hanging on the wall at the time to get up and walk pointedly out of their frames in disgust. At least this is what I heard on talk radio. (I believe everything I hear on talk radio because everyone seems so upset. Why would you get so upset about something that was not actually happening? Unless it were the Star Wars prequels, or any time someone dies on Game of Thrones, or a Kardashian relationship, or — or – well, I still think it’s a good rule.) Also, I hear he walks around these days entirely surrounded by corgis.

Contrary to what the president seems to believe, Alexandra says, we Americans didn't really want "change." This is easy enough to demonstrate.

If we wanted bills and things to pass to maybe create those jobs we have heard so much about, we would not have voted so that the House and Senate would be composed of the people they are composed of, with the majorities and filibusters and occasional flutters of committee-ing that this entails.

Sunny John is not one to be fooled by executive protestations of some dire need to do something.

No, I’m sorry, he says: “When there are conflicts like this — between the legislative branch and the executive branch — it is my view that it is our responsibility to stand up for this institution in which we serve, and for the Constitution.”

Also the President spilled coffee on him one time and did not warn Speaker Boehner that it was going to be hot, and he thinks we can probably get a lot out of him for that. Or was that McDonald’s? No, I think that might have been McDonald’s. I’m sorry. Go on with the regular suit. If anything, I’m worried that it isn’t frivolous enough.

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