Condemned as "Not a Real Person" By Rush Limbaugh, a Small Businesswoman Speaks Out

Saying something idiotic is a daily occupation for Rush Limbaugh, as I note in my book about him, but today he outdid himself. Limbaugh spouted a particularly bizarre conspiracy theory, claiming that the Obama Administration had created a fake twitter account in order to pretend that people supported a cut in the payroll tax. The only problem was that the twitter account is a real small businesswoman, and Limbaugh's reasoning for why it must be fake (that self-employed people don't get a payroll tax cut) was completely wrong.

Limbaugh's parade of error began this morning when the Obama Administration urged people to tweet messages about what a $40 payroll tax cut would mean to them. One reply was from a twitter account named Scarebaby: "$40 a month means I can pay my Internet bill and keep my tiny small business alive."

Limbaugh seized upon this statement as proof of a fraud:

it's BS. Nobody actually sent that. That's a White House-generated response. And do you know how I know?...ScareBaby cannot possibly have a small business and get this payroll tax cut. The self-employed don't get it. If you are self-employed, you know it. This doesn't even apply to you. There is no payroll tax cut for the self-employed.

The only problem with Limbaugh's conspiracy theory is that it's based a completely false presumption. As Money Magazine points out, “The extension also applies to self-employed individuals.” Self-employed people pay both the employee and the employer payroll taxes, so naturally they would receive the Obama tax cut for employees.

Yet Limbaugh declared, “this is obviously not a real person. This is somebody in the White House getting this Tweet ball rolling.”

Scarebaby had a message for Rush, and she tweeted, “rushlimbaugh do your homework before you accuse someone of not existing. A simple google search would find that I am a real businessperson.” Scarebaby, who does T-shirt designs (including pro-Obama designs), is indeed very real. Yet Limbaugh returned to her again later in the show, repeating his lie that Scarebaby was the secret identity of a White House employee and claiming falsely once again about the payroll tax cut, “No self-employed person gets the payroll tax cut. You gotta be an employee.”

One tweeted, “We all know you are a White House plant.” Another responded, “a WH plant has more brains than this moron of a fraud.” A third tweeted, “Hey @scarebaby, try not making an idiot of yourself. Rush speaks truth, never slime.” Another wrote, “Like #Rush said she wudn't qualify 4 PR cuts as biz owner. And Obama followers r stupid anyway.” Another tweeted, “No Scarebaby, you have been outed. Marxist scumbag/useful idiot. How much does the dictator pay you to post such drivel?”

I emailed the contact email for Scarebaby on her website. She responded and identified herself as Holly Hertzel:

Yes, I am a real person. I live in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. I own a number of shops on the internet, including one called Scarebaby Design (www.scarebaby.com). These shops are my only source of income. I am not, and never have been, a White House employee, an Obama employee, nor an employee of any organization that works for the Democratic Party.

I asked her if she had anything she wanted to say to Limbaugh. She responded,

I would appreciate a public apology and retraction from him, as his comments have not only caused me personal anguish (being called a fraud, a liar and worse, on Twitter), but may have been injurious to my business and livelihood. I understand that he's just an entertainer, but his followers who spread his falsehoods seem not to know the difference between entertainment and fact.

Of course, Rush Limbaugh isn't just an entertainer. He's one of the leading sources of information for conservatives, with an audience of gullible millions. When a man with that much influence on the right is repeatedly willing to falsely smear a small businesswoman in order to promote a crazy conspiracy theory, it shows just how moronic the conservative movement has become.

Crossposted at DailyKos.

Rush Limbaugh, Reading from a Script

On today's show, Rush Limbaugh declared, “we have learned now that Media Matters for America was writing the primetime scripts for MSNBC,” with his website linking to a Daily Caller story. But it appears that Limbaugh didn't actually read the Daily Caller story about Media Matters. Instead, it seems Limbaugh simply took the word of Carol Platt Liebau (her script, if you will) who inaccurately summarized the story on her townhall.com blog: “Media Matters was pretty much writing the script for MSNBC's primetime.” Limbaugh's attack on MSNBC is almost word-for-word what Liebau wrote, but it bears no resemblance to the Daily Caller story.

The Daily Caller, apparently in an attempt to undermine the impact of a new book by Media Matters revealing close links between Fox News and the Republican Party, launched an attack on Media Matters based on personal smears and rumor-mongering. As part of the attacks, the Daily Caller's sole anonymous source (supposedly a former Media Matters employee) said about MSNBC, “They were using our research to write their stories.”

That certainly sounds true. Media Matters produces a lot of very accurate research. But there's a big difference between “using research” and “writing scripts,” which is what Limbaugh alleged. This isn't an exaggeration; it's a lie. So Limbaugh simply read, without attribution, an inaccurate summary by Liebau, carefully omitting the words “pretty much” to create the illusion that MSNBC simply accepted material written by any advocacy group and read these “scripts” on the air. Perhaps Limbaugh found this lie about reading scripts so believable because it describes exactly what Limbaugh does.

Crossposted at DailyKos.

Revenge of the Electric Car

"Revenge of the Electric Car" is the critically acclaimed documentary and follow up to "Who Killed The Electric Car?" The DVD of “Revenge of the Electric Car” was released today. I interviewed producer Stefano Durdic via email about the movie.

Because Rush Limbaugh is so committed to hating the electric car, I asked Durdic the following question. For the full interview, go to DailyKos.


John K. Wilson: Rush Limbaugh has argued, “there are a lot of sheep out there that think buying the electric car can save the planet. It's gonna be a fashion accessory. Driving around in one of these things says I'm better than you, I care more than you do. It just illustrates the absolute idiocy of liberals and how terribly drastically dreadfully wrong they are about things.” According to Rush, “If there were something better than the internal combustion engine, it would be there. If there was something better, more economical, cleaner, it would be there. It's not. Markets work; attempts to manipulate them do not.”
How do you respond to that argument?

Stefano Durdic: Short answer: Any fool can condemn, criticize, and complain - and most do.

Long answer: It’s amazing to me that discussions about electric cars often turn political. Liberals tend to like electric cars for their environmental appeal. Conservatives tend to dislike electric cars because liberals like them.

I agree that markets work. I know how markets work better than most. I retired from options trading at the ripe age of 40. I thrived in one of the last bastions of pure capitalism in the United States - the trading pits. The problem with Mr. Limbaugh's argument is that the market he is describing is already manipulated in favor of internal combustion. The tax incentives on trucks and SUVs (including the Hummer) passed by the Bush administration in 2004 dwarf the tax incentives offered to today's electric car buyers. It's estimated that the US government spends anywhere from $10 billion to $40 billion per year in fossil fuel subsidies. This doesn’t take into consideration the military spending--much of which is used to defend oil interests. Nor does it take into account the environmental and human costs. How does the cost of cleanup in Alaska or the Gulf region figure into the price of a barrel of oil? How do we price the human costs of our service men and women into the price we pay at the pump? If the true cost of fossil fuels and internal combustion was factored into the equation, the market cost of electrics versus internal combustion would be significantly cheaper.

What's unfortunate is that if conservatives like Mr. Limbaugh actually looked at the electric car from a political perspective, they would see that it has a lot of conservative appeal. Look at a company like Tesla Motors: It was founded by American entrepreneurs. It's headquartered in Silicon Valley and is creating high tech jobs employing home grown engineers. Their Model S sedan will be manufactured in the USA. It is the first American car company to go public since Ford. Wall Street has embraced the company--driving its stock price up to twice its IPO price. Foreign car manufacturers Toyota and Daimler-Benz have invested in Tesla, as has Panasonic. All of the energy used to propel their cars is made in the USA. It’s a shame that in their quest to oppose anything embraced by the liberals that the conservatives are forgetting their own ideals. Tesla Motors and GM personify American capitalism and appeal to the American spirit that the Republican Party once spoke to. Nissan Motors plans on building 200,000 electric car battery packs per year at its facility in Smyrna, Tennessee. The electric car industry has the potential to revive American manufacturing and create jobs, yet all Mr. Limbaugh wants to talk about is sheep.

Over 99% of the cars on the road today are propelled by internal combustion of fossil fuels. These fossil fuels are predominantly controlled by hostile governments and extremely profitable corporate giants. The support of this fossil fuel infrastructure costs the world untold billions in subsidies, and further untold billions in environmental, health, and human costs. It seems to me that the people that pump their cars full of gas on their daily commutes to and from work look and act more like sheep than the pioneers that are trying to overcome engineering and public acceptance obstacles to find a better way to propel our cars. They seem more like shepherds to me. Perhaps Mr. Limbaugh should follow the advice of his beloved Ronald Reagan: "If you're afraid of the future, then get out of the way, stand aside. The people of this country are ready to move again. "

Limbaugh Endorses Prison Camps for Union Organizers

Following a fawning interview with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, on his radio show today Rush Limbaugh expressed support for putting union organizers in prison camps:

You tried to unionize in China? If you try to pull off in China what they're doing in Wisconsin, it's the union that goes to jail, prison camp, reeducation, hard labor, what have you.

Limbaugh also displayed his incredible ignorance of how elections work (“if Mickey Mouse and Adolf Hitler can sign a recall petition, there's no doubt in my mind they can also vote”). Of course, anybody can sign a recall petition with any name, and organizers are obligated to turn in all of the names. But fake names aren't counted, nor can they vote.

Still, the strangest and most disturbing comment by Limbaugh today had nothing to do smearing unions, but instead was about smearing shoe polish. Fondly recalled his days shining shoes in a barbershop, Limbaugh declared: “I loved making shoes shine....it was a fetish.”

Crossposted at DailyKos.

Limbaugh's Class Warfare Vs. College Presidents

Rush Limbaugh normally hates class warfare. So it was a bit unusual today when he came out and denounced millionaires. Of course, Limbaugh only hates one particular kind of millionaire: college presidents.

Limbaugh declared,

the bottom line here is 36 college presidents make a million dollars a year or more. Where is Occupy Wall Street? Has somebody told them about this? The tuition keeps going up. We keep pointing it out here. The tuition keeps going up. Nobody ever talks about the greed of Big Education, 'cause that's where Obama's buddies are.

Actually, that's where one of Limbaugh's buddies is. He specifically exempted from his criticism Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College (which spends vast sums of money advertising on Limbaugh's show). Arnn earned $608,615 in compensation in 2009, making him the second highest paid college president in the state of Michigan despite running a tiny and not very prestigious college.

Limbaugh added,

So Big Education keeps raising prices. Tuition keeps going up. As we know, the Occupy crowd and a lot of students all over the country are unhappy with the student loan situation. And never once do we hear about the greed of Big Education. Never once do we hear about the millionaires that are the college presidents.

In reality, lots of progressives on campus criticize the excessive salaries of college presidents and other administrators. I'd love to see colleges adopt a practice of never paying college presidents more than twice the median professor's salary. Colleges would have much better presidents if they stopped paying them so much money.

Limbaugh concluded,

I'm really struck by the fact that nobody ever talks about the greed in Big Education, and the students, the children, the future are going into hock. Student debt, loan debt, all of this, and what's the solution? It's never to be critical of the institutions of higher learning for charging too much.

Actually, there's an enormous amount of criticism of high tuition at colleges. Many Occupy protests on campus are devoted to opposing tuition hikes. In fact, just today on Truthout, Henry Giroux writes about students “protesting the ways in which universities now resemble corporations.” As Giroux notes,

higher education has been increasingly corporatized and militarized and subject to market-driven values and managerial relations that treat faculty and students as entrepreneurs and clients, while reducing knowledge to the dictates of an audit culture, and pedagogy to a destructive and reductive instrumental rationality.

Rush Limbaugh was inaccurate, as usual, to attack the Occupy movement for ignoring the institutions of higher education. But he was right to question the high salaries for college presidents. It's too bad that Limbaugh only questions excessive salaries when he dislikes the institution someone works at. We need to question the misguided priorities of Big Education, even while we denounce the cynical attacks of Rush Limbaugh who want to destroy higher education because of crazed conspiracy theories that “most citadels of higher learning are the incubators of Marxism, liberalism, socialism, that's where the indoctrination takes place.”

Crossposted at DailyKos and AcademeBlog.

Rush Limbaugh Admits Conservative Bias of Media

A few minutes ago on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh finally came out and admitted the conservative bias of the mainstream media in America. It came when Rush was complaining about the difficulty in finding liberal soundbites to play and ridicule on his show. Rush declared, “If it weren't for MSNBC, there wouldn't be any liberal soundbites.”

Limbaugh said that he hates MSNBC and wanted to tell his employees to ban clips from the network on his show. But he realized that he couldn't do that because MSNBC was the only media outlet where he could get liberal soundbites. (He admitted that “Al Gore's network” has them, too, but apparently Rush doesn't want Current TV to get any attention.)

Furthermore, Limbaugh admitted that most of MSNBC's programming didn't reflect any liberal viewpoint: “MSNBC's it....And it's two shows, three shows.” Interestingly, among these few shows with liberal viewpoints allowed that Limbaugh identified was Morning Joe, the show named for host (and former Republican Congressman) Joe Scarborough.

For years, as I note in my book, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh's Assault on Reason, Limbaugh and other conservatives have promoted the myth of the liberal media in America. Now, Limbaugh has finally confessed the truth: liberal views are so isolated in the corporate press that the only places he can find liberal views in the mainstream broadcast media are a few shows on one cable news network. It's proof that there isn't a liberal bias in the media.

UPDATE: Here is the full transcript from Rush Limbaugh's website:

if it weren't for MSNBC we wouldn't have any liberal sound bites. I've told Cookie I'm sick of it, ban MSNBC, and we can't, 'cause there's no other place to get liberal sound bites. There isn't any other place. I mean CNN is just insane over there. They emphasize their hosts, they have guests, but just roll tape on 'em and it's so boring. It's not worth putting anything from CNN on the air.

If it weren't for MSNBC there wouldn't be any liberal sound bites. Now, that has to mean something. That has to mean that they're rare, that they're not everywhere. They may be everywhere in print, but, you know, left-wingers on the radio, genuine cuckoo's nest. You wouldn't even want to go there. I wouldn't play that stuff. MSNBC's it, and it's two shows or three shows. It's it is morning thing with Scarborough, it's the Larry O'Donnell show at night, and maybe occasionally something from Reverend Sharpton. (interruption) Well, yeah, sometimes Sergeant Schultz. Sergeant Schultz is out there walking amongst abandoned railroad cars looking for the future of America. I know there's Algore's channel, but that's nothing worth highlighting. It really says something. MSNBC is the only place in the media to get these liberals.

Crossposted at DailyKos.

Rush Limbaugh Attacks Classical Studies

It's difficult to imagine a major more beloved by conservatives than Classical Studies. The one bulwark against all those trendy majors has always been a nice dose of Greek and Latin. So it was strange yesterday to hear Rush Limbaugh denouncing Classical Studies as part of a vast left-wing conspiracy and announcing, “If you go to college, do not do classical studies.” Inspired by an Occupy Wall Street protestor with a sign about how worthless her Classical Studies degree is, Rush denounced her: “somebody shoulda told you that from the moment you declared the major in Classical Studies.”

Rush asked: “Tell me, any of you at random listening all across the fruited plain, what the hell is Classical Studies?” It became painfully, and embarrassingly, obvious that Limbaugh had no clue what Classical Studies is: “And how are the classics studied? Oh, cause you're gonna become an expert in Dickens?” He added, “What if it's classical women's studies? What if it's classical feminism? Who the hell knows what it is? One thing I do know is that she, the brain-dead student, doesn't know what it is, after she's got a major in it.”

Limbaugh declared that Classical Studies was a devious plot within the leftist conspiracy to destroy America:

The socialists that run universities dilute the education, they offer useless majors, and then they lie about the quality of these useless majors. They lie about the happiness and the jobs and the money that awaits you after you get the degree in something like Classical Studies....I think this is part of a strategy that the left has had....They got great degrees like classical (raspberry) studies! They're un-hireable, unemployable, and that's just unfair and unjust -- and ergo, here comes the clamor and the clarion call for socialism, for government to fix it.

This kind of lunatic conspiracy theory (which is not in any way meant jokingly) has become a daily ritual on Limbaugh's show, where he imagines Barack Obama is plotting to intentionally destroy the American economy, among other crackpot assumptions of a Manichean worldview.

During a break, Rush looked up classical studies on the internet and found that it involved the study of ancient Greece and Rome. Incapable of admitting that he was wrong, Rush instead decided to take a McCarthyite tactic of guilt by association, declaring that “Karl Marx was a classical studies scholar.”

Later in the show, Limbaugh announced that “Queer musicology is a degree at UCLA” and “You can get a degree in Star Trek at Georgetown.” There have been classes on queer musicology at UCLA and a class on “Philosophy and Star Trek” taught at Georgetown, but obviously not a degree. Perhaps when Rush denounces “you idiot college students,” he ought to take a long look in a mirror. Limbaugh is so uneducated he doesn't know what Classical Studies are or even the meaning of the word “degree.”

In my book about Rush, I cite about case after case where Limbaugh's views are not merely wrong, but entirely ignorant. The leading conservative voice in America is a monument to stupidity who denounces even the most conservative-friendly major in college. All of us, left and right alike, should be concerned about the state of conservatism in America and the move led by Limbaugh to new heights of anti-intellectualism on the right.

Crossposted at Academe Blog.