Colorado Springs, Col., March 9 – Michelle Malkin, owner and founder of new Internet start-up TWITCHY.COM, issued the following statement:
“As a small business owner, defender of capitalism, and advocate of free speech, I am putting my money where my conservative, free-market principles are. TWITCHY.COM is proud to join companies across the country that advertise with talk show giant Rush Limbaugh and his Excellence In Broadcasting network. Today, we will begin running ads on the RushLimbaugh.com website.
“Double standards and feigned outrage about Rush’s comments fit a decades-old pattern of liberal attempts to shut down his show and silence his voice. President Obama himself explicitly attacked Rush in 2009 at the very start of his presidency. But Limbaugh not only has survived countless protests, boycotts, media smears and political attempts to kick him off the airwaves. He has emerged each time with a higher profile, greater influence, and a strengthened hand.
“Our business is fledgling and the ad revenue we generate may be small, but we are grateful for the opportunity to reach Rush’s massive audience – and to show our support for his work.”
Flashback- The year is 2006 and Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem become two of the founders for feminist talk radio network Greenstone Media, which had ties to Air America as documented by Radio Equilizer at the time.....Jane Fonda was being interviewed by Rita Cosby on PMSNBC about the new women's talk radio network. By the way, we have the stations that that network will appear on. They've got four stations: WNAG, WCRY, WFEM and WPMS. They're working on a fifth affiliate, WBI-ITCH, but they're having to get FCC approval on those call letters because it's too long. You're allowed three or four, and they can't figure out how to put WBI-ITCH in the call letters (actually three after the W). But nevertheless Rita Cosby is talking about male talk show hosts and just asks her specifically -- we've got the audio of this coming up; Cookie is working on it now -- "What do you think of Rush Limbaugh?"
She got this sour look on her face and she turned away from the camera and just was so pained, and said, "Oh, toxic! Toxic! Are you kidding? I worry about the future of my country. I worry about my children and my grandchildren." This from the woman who sat atop a tank over in North Vietnam! Yeah, Hanoi Jane Fonda is worried about the future of the country because of me. You know what the smart answer would be? -- and, folks, this is not ego speaking. You know what the smart answer would be? Here are these babes trying to start a talk radio network, right? She gets a question about me or anybody else, say, "You know, it's amazing the success that they've had, and we hope to duplicate it." Just say something like that and be done with it.
If Clear Channel won't clean up its airways, then surely it's time for the public to ask the FCC a basic question: Are the stations carrying Limbaugh's show in fact using their licenses "in the public interest?"
Spectrum is a scarce government resource. Radio broadcasters are obligated to act in the public interest and serve their respective communities of license. In keeping with this obligation, individual radio listeners may complain to the FCC that Limbaugh's radio station (and those syndicating his show) are not acting in the public interest or serving their respective communities of license by permitting such dehumanizing speech.
Rush Limbaugh has rejected an advertiser’s apparent attempt to reunite with his show after the company initially dropped its ads from the program following his remarks about contraception advocate Sandra Fluke.The company, Sleep Train, calls itself “the No. 1 Bedding Specialist on the West Coast, and most recognized mattress retailer in the region.”
In an email to Sleep Train President Dale Carlsen (obtained by The Blaze), a representative of the show says that Limbaugh personally considered the company’s request, but denied it considering its public comments following the controversy.
“Thank you for your requests last week and this week to restart your voiced endorsement in local markets of The Rush Limbaugh Show,” the email begins. “Rush received your requests personally.”
“Unfortunately, your public comments were not well received by our audience, and did not accurately portray either Rush Limbaugh’s character or the intent of his remarks. Thus, we regret to inform you that Rush will be unable to endorse Sleep Train in the future.
“Rush appreciates your long friendship and your past support, and we wish you good luck in the future.”
"But they say you know a man by the companies he keeps."
Happily it is a member of the left that said that because Breitbart.com has also begun the Barack Obama vetting process and has pointed to another Obama association, a radical named Derrick Bell Jr., which has members of the mainstream media jumping to Obama's defense vehemently.Antoin Rezko: “Tony” Rezko is a businessman who has helped raise campaign money for Mr. Obama and many other Illinois politicians. He was convicted Wednesday on 16 of 24 counts involving mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and aiding and abetting bribery.
The charges have no connection to Mr. Obama, but Rezko is tied to the Illinois senator in other ways.
Rezko and his family donated at least $21,457 to Mr. Obama and helped raise over $200,000 more, though not for his presidential bid. He also advised Mr. Obama on the purchase of a new Chicago home and, in his wife’s name, purchased a vacant lot next door to the new Obama home when the seller wanted to dispose of both properties at the same time. Rezko then sold a slice of the property to Mr. Obama.
Mr. Obama has donated Rezko’s contributions to charity and says it was a mistake to work with Rezko on buying the house.
William Ayers: Today, Mr. Ayers is a university professor and a member of Chicago’s intellectual establishment. Forty years ago he was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical group that claimed responsibility for a series of bombings, including at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.
Mr. Ayers was a fugitive for years with his wife, fellow radical Bernadine Dohrn. But after surrendering in 1980, the charges against Mr. Ayers were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers served together on the board of a Chicago charity and were co-panelists on at least two academic panel discussions and an academic testimonial — two of them at the University of Chicago. In the mid-1990s, when Mr. Obama first ran for office, Mr. Ayers hosted a meet-the-candidate session for Mr. Obama at his home.
Emil Jones Jr.: Mr. Jones, the president of the Illinois Senate, amounts to Mr. Obama’s political godfather and was an important part of his longshot victory for U.S. Senate in 2004. He helped the little-known politician meet the right people, and he picked Mr. Obama to handle high-profile legislation during the two years leading up to the election.
Mr. Jones is known for steering state money to a few favored institutions, including some that employ his relatives. Several of his relatives have gotten state jobs, and his wife’s government salary jumped 60 percent after he became Senate president. He has played an important role in blocking ethics legislation in Illinois.
Rashid Khalidi: Mr. Khalidi is a Palestinian scholar and author on Middle Eastern affairs who has called Israel a racist state bent on creating “an apartheid system.” He’s also a friend of Mr. Obama.
They met while both were teaching at the University of Chicago and living in the same neighborhood. Mr. Obama and his wife sometimes had dinner with Mr. Khalidi and his wife, Mona. The Khalidis hosted a political fundraiser for Mr. Obama in 2000, and the Woods Fund charity gave money to the Arab-American Action Network, run by Mrs. Khalidi, while Mr. Obama served on the charity’s board.
Mr. Obama has said they hold very different opinions on Israeli issues, though Mr. Khalidi praised Mr. Obama as “the only candidate who has expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause” and for his willingness to hold talks with Iran, which has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”
The Rev. Michael Pfleger: Father Pfleger, the white, longtime pastor of a mostly black Catholic parish in Chicago, has been protesting everything from gun shops to Jerry Springer. Mr. Obama has referred to him as a spiritual adviser and used him as a political supporter.
Last month, he visited Trinity United Church of Christ, Mr. Obama’s church at the time, and preached a sermon in which he mocked Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as expecting to win the presidential nomination because she was white. Mr. Obama, who condemned the remarks and resigned from the church, was not nearly as close to Father Pfleger as he was to Mr. Wright.
BEGIN TRANSCRIPTRUSH: I want to ask if you will indulge me for just a brief few minutes for some inside baseball stuff before we move on to our review of the issues of the day, politics and so forth, Super Tuesday, the results, and where we are. The reason for this is, once again, so much misinformation about this program and advertisers is in the mainstream media. People are reporting things that, A, are not true, and B, I don't even think the people reporting it have the slightest idea what they're talking about, nor do they have the ability to understand it.
But I know that many of you are spending a lot of time -- God bless you -- on the Web doing what you can to express your support for the program. And judging from the reaction of my own brother, who sends me a note last night, "You really lost 28 sponsors?" No, we have not lost 28 sponsors. "Well, how can they say it?" Because they lie and because they don't understand how it works, and that's what I want to try and explain. In fact, folks, we have three brand-new sponsors that will be starting in the next two weeks. Now, obviously, I'm not gonna tell you who they are today, but we've got three brand-new, full-fledged sponsors starting in the next two weeks.
Two of the sponsors who have canceled have asked to return. We are being very careful about that. Not gonna give you any names here. One of them is practically begging to come back. Everything is fine on the business side. Everything's cool. There is not a thing to worry about. What you're seeing on television about this program and sponsors and advertisers is just incorrect. And let me try to explain how this works. Let's take the claim that we've lost 28 sponsors. Sponsors on this program are both local and national. We deal with the national sponsors on this program. We have 600-plus stations. They sell their own commercials. We don't have anything to do with those sponsors. We don't get paid by those sponsors. We have no idea who those sponsors are.
Let's make up a company, ABC Widget Company. And let's say that ABC Widget Company says, "We are no longer going to appear on the Rush Limbaugh Show." Well, ABC Widget Company isn't on the Rush Limbaugh Show. What happens is, advertising agencies order advertising buys on a series of local stations from market to market to market. A controversy like this erupts. They put out a notice to the stations, "By the way, for the time being we don't want our commercials run when Limbaugh is on." But they are not canceling their advertising on the station. They're just saying they don't want it running on my program during the local affiliate's commercial time, not ours.
So this 28 or 32 -- and I don't even know if that number's accurate, numbers are coming from Media Matters. There's no way anybody could know this, but I'm gonna put it in further perspective in just a second. What it means is there have been -- let's use the number 28 -- 28 advertisers who none of us are aware are even advertising on our local stations who had sent out orders that their commercials are not to run on my program. But that is not revenue to us. They are not our sponsors. They are not even canceling their advertising on the local station. They're just saying for the time being they don't want it run from noon to three. And let me tell you, this happens every day. It's been happening for 23-plus years. And it's not just to me. There are clients, advertisers, that tell stations, "I don't want this to run in Beck's show. I don't want it to run in Hannity's. I don't want it to run in Howard Stern's." It's all part of the business.
But because there's a focal point on this in trying to dispirit you and trying to present a picture of this program that doesn't exist and that's untrue, they're trying to make it sound like this is unprecedented -- that it's never happened before, it's at an all-time high -- and it simply isn't the case. We have not lost 28 national sponsors. There are not 28 advertisers who were paying us who aren't anymore. They are local commercial buys. Many of them may not even be running in my show to begin with. The advertisers are just saying, "If they are, pull 'em. We don't want 'em in there for now," but they're staying on the local stations. These advertisers are not abandoning EIB affiliates.
Nobody is losing money here, including us, in all this. And that is key for you to understand. They are not canceling the business on our stations. They're just saying they don't want their spots to appear in my show. We don't get any revenue from 'em anyway. The whole effort is to dispirit you. It's to make you think the left is being successful in its campaign when it isn't. In fact, the left is so fed up, they can't see straight. They thought they had me. They thought I would be off the air by now. They can't understand why I still am on the air. There is also another rumor going around that I am going to be suspended for a week. It is utter BS.
I would have to suspend myself!
Now, let me put this in further perspective for you, this number of 28 or 32, and then we're gonna move on to other things. Sponsors of our program are both nationwide companies, like Two If By Tea (my tea company), and local companies, like "Mike's Auto Body Repair" or a local bank. If we added up all of our affiliates (let's choose the number 600) and we assumed that each of those affiliates had 30 such sponsors in the course of our three-hour program, there might be -- all across this country -- as many as 18,000 different sponsors of this program. Let me put it another way: There might be 18,000 different people buying advertising within this program alone.
That is a conservative number: 600 stations, 18 commercial minutes an hour. We take whatever we take to sell ourselves and the local station keeps the rest. They have local advertisers. You add up all those over the course of 600 stations, over three hours a day, five days a week, and we're talking 18,000 different sponsors, okay? ABC News, who understands how this works and are purposely misrepresenting it, is out there ballyhooing that we have lost 28 sponsors. Twenty-eight sponsors out of 18,000! That's like losing a couple of french fries in the container when it's delivered to you at the drive-thru. You don't even notice it. If we lose 28 of those sponsors, the majority of them being in one city or another out of 18 thousand, it's a sad occurrence.
But, folks, I would venture to say that this happens every day anyway in the course of doing business. Advertisers come and go. New businesses start up; they start advertising. Some businesses go under, they stop their advertising. None of what's happening is out of the ordinary. It's just part of an onslaught to try to convince you that this show's history and our days are numbered. And I'm happy to tell you nothing could be further from the truth. The point is we have tens of thousands of companies who advertise in this program. We're appreciative of all of them. The vast majority, we don't even know. They are local sponsors.
As I say, we're going to be debuting three (and maybe more) new sponsors in the coming days and weeks. And I'm sure that our affiliate stations are going to be replacing advertisers with new ones. It's the cycle. Nothing stays the same. It's all dynamic; nothing is static. All you need to know is there are no losses. There is only growth. There are only gains; we're moving forward. There is good in everything that happens. You look for it, you find it, you build on it, and you expand it. They have not taken this program out. They have not taken me out. They're the ones who are frustrated. They're the ones who are angry. They're the ones who are gonna be blowing gaskets in the next couple of weeks. I hope I've made this clear.
It's such inside baseball stuff, but 28 sponsors -- 32, whatever number they're using -- that have been lost, are not direct advertisers here. And they may not even be advertising within my three hours on the stations they're running. It's impossible to know. Now, you might say, "Well, whatever it is, these people are putting out statements." Yes, they're putting out statements because they're hoping to make political gains -- and it's gonna backfire. You can look at the stock price of some of these companies. I'm not gonna say any more, but it's going to backfire. So you have a bank say (pompously), "We are announcing today that none of our commercials will ever again run on the Rush Limbaugh Show." They're not a sponsor of ours, folks. They may buy sponsorships on 10 or 15 of our affiliates around country, but they're not sure they're being inserted in my three hours; they want to make sure they're not. They'll run elsewhere on the station.
END TRANSCRIPT
Hate to defend #RushLimbaugh but he apologized, liberals looking bad not accepting. Also hate intimidation by sponsor pullout
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) March 7, 2012
Carbonite led the advertiser exodus from Rush Limbaugh’s show. The Democrat-owned company continues to advertise on Ed Schultz’s show, despite the fact the Schultz is guilty of a thought crime nearly identical to Rush’s: Schultz called Laura Ingraham a “slut” on the air, and later apologized for it. As I argued on America’s Radio News on Monday, the only real difference between what Rush did and what Schultz did is the politics, since both Ingraham and Sandra Fluke are public figures. Schultz hit from the left, Rush hit from the right, but Carbonite has only canceled on Rush. Why?
For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.
I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line? If this is accepted as the norm, what will follow? Will we be debating if taxpayers should pay for new sneakers for all students that are interested in running to keep fit?In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone's bedroom nor do I think it is a topic that should reach a Presidential level.
My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.
Less than a year ago, in March of 2011, Maher called Palin a “dumb tw*t,” as reported here by the Daily Caller. On March 29, 2011, the Caller also reported that Maher called Palin the “C-word.”
