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Rush Limbaugh Sends DMCA Takedown to Silence Critics

We’ve seen some ridiculous DMCA takedowns over the years, but we might have a new champion. On Monday, radio host Rush Limbaugh — who over a three-day period beginning in late February attacked Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke on air for the apparently unforgivable sin of testifying before Congress to advocate for legislation she supported (a bill mandating health insurance coverage for contraception) — turned to copyright law to go after one of his most vocal critics, the left-leaning political site Daily Kos. The site’s offense? Publishing a damning montage of Limbaugh’s controversial comments about Ms. Fluke.

Limbaugh’s curiously thin-skinned decision to resort to the quiet, low-cost censorship offered by copyright law doesn’t exactly break new ground. Limbaugh joins a dubious club that includes:

• Famed spoon-bending “paranormalist” Uri Gellar who sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube demanding that a decades-old NOVA documentary that exposed the secrets of Gellar’s “psychic” abilities on the basis that it purportedly included three seconds of copyrighted material.
• Fashion giant Ralph Lauren who sent a DMCA takedown notice to several sites, including BoingBoing, for their posting of a creepy over-photoshopped Ralph Lauren ad that made the unfortunate model look almost as absurd as the company’s lawyers.
• Universal Music Group — who by now should have its own wing in EFF’s Takedown Hall of Shame — who used the DMCA to temporarily silence conservative commentator Michelle Malkin. Malkin posted a video blog criticizing Universal artist Akon for his misogynistic lyrics and on-stage antics with a 15-year-old girl at a Trinidad concert, prompting Universal to lazily plead “copyright” and fire off the censorship request.
• NBC News and CBS News who, in the waning months of the 2008 presidential campaign, sent DMCA takedown notices to YouTube to shut down ads of the Obama and McCain campaigns respectively, ads that made clear fair uses of news footage to criticize their opponents.

While initiating frivolous legal processes to intimidate and silence critics is hardly new, Limbaugh actually seems to be taking a specific page out of the playbook of Michael Savage, his on-again/off-again compatriot and fellow conservative talk radio fixture.

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Right-Wing Media Still In Denial About Limbaugh Debacle And Contraception Battle

Rush Limbaugh’s trademark misogyny continues to haunt the Republican Party, but conservative pundits refuse to acknowledge that unpleasant truth. Instead, many Obama critics insist the recent political battle over contraception, in tandem with Rush Limbaugh’s three-day verbal assault on Sandra Fluke, hasn’t really hurt the GOP. In fact, it might have even helped.

What are partisans conveniently ignoring? The recent avalanche of good-news polling for Democrats, specifically the mounting evidence that the gender gap is accelerating at an alarming rate for Republicans.  

That’s Limbaugh legacy so far this year. But his fans don’t dare admit it. 

It was the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan who was out front last week leading the GOP’s denial brigade. Obama’s supposed political woes, she announced, began in January when the White House announced its (popular) decision to require church-affiliated organizations to provide health insurance plans that cover contraceptives for women. (In February, Noonan suggested Obama may have lost his re-election bid based solely on his handling of the issue.)

In her recent column, Noonan was sure she heard the “public reaction” to Obama’s handling of the initiative:

“You’re kidding me. That’s not just bad judgment and a lack of civic tact, it’s not even constitutional!”

Note those quotation marks are basically air quotes. Meaning, Noonan simply made up the quote, which reflected her own reaction to the contraception question, and suggested it mirrored a broader feeling about how Obama’s contraception policy left a “sour taste” with Americans, and Catholics in particular.

Public polling released last month suggests otherwise:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans favor President Barack Obama’s policy requiring birth control coverage for female employees, including clear majorities of Roman Catholic, Protestant evangelical and independent voters, a poll showed on Thursday.

…

Senate Republicans have staked their fate on a religious liberty argument calculated to resonate with conservative Catholics and like-minded voters in important political swing states, including Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But the data suggest an uphill struggle, with 60 percent of Catholics and 57 percent of Evangelicals favoring Obama’s policy.

And that’s not even a new finding. A similar poll from 2009 revealed 63 percent of American Catholics already supported health care coverage for birth control. 

Over at the stridently anti-Obama website Power Line, a blogger announced Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” and “prostitute” contraception controversy had been “trumped up” by liberals and had actually boomeranged, contributing to Obama’s “terrible” and “very bad” month of March. That assessment differed dramatically from the majority of Americans who thought Limbaugh should have been fired for his extended, sexist smear on Fluke.

Meanwhile, contrary to the far-right claim from Noonan and others, there’s no indication the fight over contraception has hurt Obama or Democrats. There is however, ample evidence it has helped them this year.

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As soon as it drops off of the headlines: Clear Channel boss ‘delighted’ to have Rush Limbaugh

LOS ANGELES — Advertisers and some radio stations may have abandoned Rush Limbaugh for calling a Georgetown law student a “slut.” But the CEO of the radio company that distributes Limbaugh’s show, Clear Channel, says he’s sticking with the conservative talk show host, calling him the “king” of radio.

Bob Pittman told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday that the outrage over Limbaugh’s comments last month was “part of the normal day-to-day of talk radio.” He also noted that Limbaugh apologized for the first time in 30 years.

Speaking publicly for the first time since the controversy erupted late last month, Pittman said that advertisers leaving the program did not have a major impact on the company and there has not been a major move among stations to drop Limbaugh.

Until now, media inquiries about the show had been directed to Clear Channel’s talk show syndication subsidiary, Premiere Radio Networks.

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Terrorists Are Attacking Rush Limbaugh, Says Guy On Fox.

“It’s not a boycott! It’s a terrorist action!” said Mark Stevens to Stuart Varney on Fox Business. We know this because Rush, after not paying attention to his television, turned up the volume and recorded rest of that show.

To paraphrase him : Local radio stations are being bombarded with complaints made to look like they are coming from angry consumers. That’s not so. They’re democrat terrorist agitators. There’s no boycott. There’s no secondary boycott. It involves harassment of advertisers. They try to make themselves look like angry listeners. They’re not.

Ignoring the fact that there is bi-partisan outrage about what he called Sandra Fluke, and did for three days. Obviously, he has a problem with the free market responding as it should in situations like this. People want to know who is paying him to spew hate on the air. They are finding out. Making choices. And those choices are ultimately affecting him.

Worse for him, in many cases, companies are simply choosing not to support him. A choice they made freely, without public involvement.

Should you be wondering if it’s working. Your proof came today.

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Why Rush Limbaugh’s New Twitter Account Is Cause for Celebration

Rush Limbaugh started a Twitter account Thursday. As I write this post, he has sent out two tweets, has more than 112,000 followers, and has sent traffic to items at Legal Insurrection and The Daily Caller. Critics of his work might be tempted to lament his emergence on another platform. Despite thinking he is deliberately offensive and frequently inaccurate or misleading in his assertions, I’m glad to see him in my TweetDeck, to which I’ve already added his musings. 

Why?

One flaw of talk radio as a medium is the ease with which a host can exist in a bubble. He sits alone in a studio. The few audience members who reach him are filtered through a call screener. Another flaw is the difficulty with which the host is held accountable for the words he broadcasts. Until recently they just drifted off into the ether. The Sandra Fluke controversy wouldn’t have played out as it did but for the easy access to audio and video clips of his remarks.  

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PARTISAN RECESSIONS

arewepayingattention:

If you look at this chart carefully, it shows how Congress responds differently to recessions when Republicans or Democrats are in the White House.

Reagan got most of the stimulus spending he wanted even when Democrats controlled Congress.

Obama got less of the stimulus spending he wanted even when Democrats controlled the Congress (because the Republican minority used serial filibusters to  thwart him) and even less when Republicans controlled the House.

The difference?  Democrats believe in government and will vote to make it work even when a Republican is president.

Republicans do not believe in government — they believe only in winning power — and they will do all they can to sabotage a Democratic president, even during a recession.

Think about the GOP, FOX News and folks like Limbaugh announcing even before Obama was inaugurated that they would work to make sure he failed.  Then look at the chart.  And ask yourself: why in God’s name do Republicans get to retain the public image of being patriotic, especially when the nation is in hard times?

Rush Limbaugh claims he was set up by Obama to call Fluke a slut

For a guy who’s supposedly sorry for his unfortunate word choice—for three hours a day, for three days straight—not to mention a man who claims to be “huge on personal responsibility and accountability,” Rush Limbaugh can’t seem to stop finding new people to blame for his slut crusade against Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke.

After issuing his non-apology, in which he basically said he was sorry for calling Sandra Fluke a slut, but if she weren’t such a slut, he wouldn’t have had to call her a slut, he then explained his non-apology by saying Barack Obama’s “socialist agenda” made him do it and that he “became like them” and “descended to their level” by attacking Ms. Fluke for the better part of a week.

But that was a perfectly sane and reasonable argument compared with Rush’s latest excuse for himself…

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How We’re All Paying for Rush Limbaugh to Take Viagra (And Why it Costs a Lot More Than Contraception)

No taxpayer money may ever cover the costs of a woman’s contraception. But it may pay for Rush’s Viagra.

Our existing healthcare today is a massive subsidy from the uninsured to the insured. The U.S. does not have a state-sponsored healthcare system partly because of a historical accident. The earliest forms of health insurance were modestly sized, physician-sponsored Blues programs. But it took U. S. government-imposed price controls during World War II to really grow the concept.

In the 1940s, private employers started to offer healthcare benefits to compete for new employees during a tight labor market. Employers deducted the cost of the programs as a business expense, but employees did not have to report the benefits as income on their tax returns. The result is a huge tax subsidy for healthcare benefits. The more money an employee makes – and the higher the marginal tax rate on the employee’s income – the more the employee might prefer additional income in the form of an untaxed medical benefit. So the best employer-provided healthcare plans, the so-called “Cadillac plans,” often go to the most highly compensated employees. CEOs love them. Mitt Romney as head of Bain Capital, highly sought-after commentators like Limbaugh, and some of the most generous union plans tend to have the most extensive coverage. While the Affordable Health Care Act proposes higher taxes on these plans, the changes won’t take place for years. And, in the meantime, the more extensive the employer-provided plan and the higher the marginal tax rate of the recipient, the greater is the effective taxpayer subsidy.

The fact that high-end medical insurance plans cover a drug like Viagra also affects what new products come to market. Researchers are more likely to invest in the development of medical innovations with a guaranteed market (and the ability to charge a high markup) than in medical care that depends on individual ability to pay. So not only do taxpayers subsidize Rush’s Viagra along with a host of other medical treatments, but the existence of healthcare plans that more heavily subsidize the wealthy and the employed increases the odds that less subsidized medical treatments will be less effective or more expensive.

In contrast, you as a taxpayer or an insurance buyer pay more if contraception is not included in healthcare plans like those at Georgetown. The administration mandate required that private employers provide contraception as part of preventive care because it is less expensive than the health costs of the delivery and birth of the unwanted child. Healthcare premiums for private insurance plans, such as those provided by Georgetown University, vary with the overall costs of coverage.

Since the Obama administration decision was based on a calculation that this would result in lower healthcare costs overall, it would not raise the premiumspaid to insurance companies by private employers, employees, or university students. Moreover, students like Sandra Fluke receive no taxpayer subsidies. The savings, however, should be even greater for publicly funded programs such as Medicaid, which now pays for 40 percent of U.S. births. It is infinitely less expensive to fund contraceptive services than to pay for pregnancy and childbirth — or avoidable hysterectomies.

Rush is wrong not only about how the birth control works, but how the insurance mandate works. We may all be paying for Rush’s Viagra. But we would not pay a dime for Georgetown’s proprietary health insurance program to extend its healthcare coverage to offer the full range of preventive services to Sandra Fluke and her classmates. We are, however, paying a very high price, as taxpayers, citizens and health insurance customers, for the cost of unwanted pregnancies.

In fact, before the new administration mandate, private insurance coverage of contraception – as well as Viagra – had been expanding. Twenty-eight states already mandate coverage, with varying exceptions for religiously based institutions.

Subsidizing the well-off and dismantling the infrastructure that helps poorer families is class warfare and it has had a devastating toll on American families.

read the full article at AlterNet

It’s not just Rush: 98 Advertisers now fleeing from all right wing radio shows

Rush Limbaugh gave the right wing talk radio industry juice, and he just might be the cause of its demise. 98 advertisers so far have jumped ship from Rush Limbaugh’s show and other right wing stations due to the fallout from his 4 day long misogynistic attack on a Georgetown coed.

Daily Beast reports, “There are already tangible signs that the three dozen national and local advertisers that have pulled their ads from The Rush Limbaugh Show are having a financial impact.”

Premiere Networks distributes Limbaugh as well as a host of other right-wing talkers — they quickly sent an email out to its affiliates early Friday.

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