Rush Limbaugh

Dropping Dobbs

As you may be aware yesterday we joined a broad coalition of groups in launching a campaign to get CNN to drop Lou Dobbs from their thoughtful and respected airwaves.   The site can be found at dropdobbs.com.  Check it out, watch the video if you have a few minutes and add your name to the petition in the take action section asking CNN and Dobb's advertisers to take a stand.

This kind of campaign is not the usual thing NDN does.  But the decline in civil discourse that we've seen this year (what I call the rising "politics of intolerance") and Dobbs' increasingly wild and irresponsible performance on the air of late convinced me - and the whole NDN team - that it was time to take a stand.  Lou Dobbs is free to say whatever he wants on his own website, in his books, on his own radio show.  I am all for free speech.  But he should not be given a daily platform on the globally respected CNN, or on a brand owned by the well-regarded and innovative Time Warner.  It is time for them to drop Lou Dobbs.

There is a precedent for something like this - what Disney/ABC did when Rush Limbaugh was bounced from Monday Night Football for racially offensive remarks.   Mainstream, respectable network bouncing a hate talker off their air because it simply didn't fit their brand, their values, their vision for America.  Every day CNN and Time Warner keep Dobbs on their air they are telling us a great deal about their values - that they care more about making money than they do about creating a civil and just America; that they are willing to tolerate divisive, ignorant talk to make a few extra bucks here and there.  I'm not sure about you but that is not how I see CNN or Time Warner.  Dobbs is antithetical to their brands, and it is time for them to make clear that they believe this is so.  Leave all that crazy talk to News Corp, am radio, blogs and the angry, intolerant right.  But please my friends take Lou Dobbs off CNN.  Your brands, and the country, will be better for it.

I offered up some thoughts, and some video, on all this Dobbs and Beck stuff a few weeks ago.  For me this new campaign is about taking a stand against the rising politics of intolerance we've seen spread across the country in recent months.  As a nation we are better than the screamers, and it is time that those of us who believe that to do more, to take a stand - and in this case lets start by getting Lou Dobbs off CNN.

Beck Loses Advertisers, Dobbs Should be Worried

UPDATE 8/18/09 - More advertisers drop Beck.

The Times has this encouraging report this morning:

ABOUT a dozen companies have withdrawn their commercials from “Glenn Beck,” the Fox News Channel program, after Glenn Beck, the person, said late last month that President Obama was a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

The companies that have moved their ads elsewhere in recent days included ConAgra, Geico, Procter & Gamble and the insurance company Progressive. In a statement that echoed the comments of other companies, ConAgra said on Thursday that “we are firmly committed to diversity, and we would like to prevent the potential perception that advertising during this program was an endorsement of the viewpoints shared.”

The campaign against Mr. Beck is rooted in an advocacy group’s objection to the commentator’s remarks on July 28. Given the number of advertisers that have pledged to remove their spots, it appears to have been unusually successful.

At Netroots Nation yesterday I was on a panel with James Rucker, head of the advocacy group mentioned above, Color of Change, where we discussed all this.  The success of this effort reinforces what I said yesterday - the center-left has the power to get wild, irresponsible demagogues like Beck and Lou Dobbs off mainstream news outlets.  It will require intense focus, patience and a broad based campaign.  But it is possible.  And it is not for their conservatism, or even their opposition to the Democrats.  It is that their consistently articulated understanding of race, of immigrants, of people not like them, of who we are as a people is offensive, anachronistic, and has no place in this age of greater racial understanding offered by our new President. 

We cannot forget that several years ago a Dobbs and Beck fellow traveler, Rush Limbaugh, was given a shot to go mainstream, joining the booth of the Monday Night Football.  Within just a few games he was fired for making racially insensitive remarks.  As a veteran of a network news division, I am very much for freedom of speech, and believe that folks like Limbaugh, Dobbs and Beck are entitled to make their case, grow their shows, do their thing.  But not on a network owned by Disney, or Time Warner.  One of the main reasons I have switched my cable news allegiance from CNN to MSNBC in recent months has been CNN's unwillingness to get rid of Dobbs, who really has no place on CNN, and whose views are wildly out of sync with the CNN brand. I for one will not start watching CNN again until they get Dobbs off their network.

At a forum two weeks I talked about Dobbs and Beck.  A conservative news site, CNS, covered it this way. Their video is included below.

Congrats to James Rucker, Media Matters and those who have worked so hard to hold these awful demagogues to account.  There is much more we can and need to be doing to be building on their success.  More on that soon.

GOP Economic Policy as an Exercise in Grief Management: Denial, Anger & Rush Limbaugh

The leaders of the Republican Party, reeling from their painful string of defeats, seem stuck in two of the classic stages of grief, denial and anger. This week, Rush Limbaugh replaced Bobby Jindal as the leading and most colorful example. Limbaugh may seem like too easy a target, since talk radio always tends toward hyperbole. Nonetheless, the essence of the message from the presumptively addled Mr. Limbaugh is that Americans would be better off if the President’s economy program failed. Even if their homes slip into foreclosure and their kids have to drop out of college, American families would at least escape the degradations of “socialism” or, as another popular conservative pundit put it, “left fascism” (that’s from the hard-right blogger and historian, Ron Radosh).

The rhetorical excesses of talk radio and the Web would hardly be noteworthy, if the same strain of non-thinking didn’t also dominate the Republican Party’s current economic positions. Let’s set the stage: of the three natural sources of demand in a market economy, consumers have stopped spending, businesses have stopped investing, and exports have fallen off the proverbial cliff. That leaves government stimulus as the only possible source of new demand to at least slow the accelerating downward momentum of the economy and most of the people in it. Perhaps the best explanation, then, for why every Republican in the House and all but three GOP senators voted “no!” on the President’s stimulus is, well, denial and anger.

To be sure, economic ideology almost certainly plays a role here, too, on top of their denial (about the consequences) and anger (about no longer calling the shots). This came through vividly at a conference I attended earlier this week for the National Chamber Foundation. My panel was asked to talk about whether the Administration’s plans foreshadowed a permanent change in the relationship between the public and private sectors. Set aside the fact that the leaders of the central private institutions in this drama, big finance, have begged Washington to amend that relationship long enough to preserve their jobs and the assets of their bond holders. 

At the panel, a well-turned-out executive from a major private equity company (and former Bush Treasury official) laid out what once could have been the reasonable conservative position -- stimulus weighted to tax cuts, a banking rescue that avoids taking over anybody (or dictating anybody’s compensation), and tax-based measures to reduce foreclosures. As a matter of economics, he got his targets right, even if his approaches are weaker than those favored by the Administration. But at least his response suggested that he wants the economy to recover, regardless of who gets the credit. 

Not so from the other member of the panel, Brian Westbury, who on top of being an economist with a Midwestern financial advisory is also the economics editor of the American Spectator and a frequent writer for the Wall Street Journal. He provided an economic-cum-ideological gloss for the denial and anger expressed by the flamboyantly-frustrated Mr. Limbaugh. Westbury’s prescription was no stimulus, no banking rescue and no program for foreclosures. The only constructive government action he could imagine was to jettison current “mark-to-market” rules. Those rules say that the balance sheets of banks and public companies have to reflect the actual market value of their assets and liabilities. So, for example, when a mortgage-backed security goes bust, you have to write down its value while preserving the liability of the money borrowed to purchase it and still owed. 

In this view, none of what seems so important to the rest of us -- collapsing demand, investment and trade, huge job losses, rising bankruptcies -- matters for government policy.  The only thing Washington should do here is to change how the financial losses from these events are reported. This isn’t economics; it’s a prescription that follows from a hard-edged ideological view that government can do nothing of value for an economy, regardless of conditions.   

Unhappily, this cramped understanding isn’t limited to the pages of the American Spectator and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Bobby Jindal put the Republican Party on record for much the same view in his awkward response to the President’s address to Congress. He even cited the colossal inadequacies of the Bush Administration’s response to Katrina as proof that the private sector is always the best answer to any problem or catastrophe -- even if it’s under water at the time.

I honestly can’t believe that they’re really so dull-witted. A better explanation for Jindal and Limbaugh, along with commentators like Westbury and Radosh, is that they’re still grappling with the grief of losing the support of the American people -- and the power that came with it. They’re stuck in denial and anger. And that’s a very bad position from which to consider the best policies for a nation and world economy in crisis.   

Amidst Having No Identity and No Agenda, the GOP Attacks Immigrants Again in Economic Stimulus Debate


This image was the headline on the Huffington Post website, until our post on "The Star Spanglish Banner" took its place for most of the day, and it goes very well with a piece in the Washington Post today by  Manuel Roig-Franzia.  As Republicans have a national meeting this week, they search for their misshapen identity.  In the meantime, since they have nothing else to propose and know nothing other than the exploitation of racial fear and hate, they decided to issue a statement claiming that the stimulus bill would help undocumented immigrants:

The $800 billion-plus economic stimulus measure making its way through Congress could steer government checks to illegal immigrants......The legislation, which would send tax credits of $500 per worker and $1,000 per couple, expressly disqualifies nonresident aliens, but it would allow people who do not have Social Security numbers to be eligible for the checks.

What this statement does not say, is that the stimulus steers checks to TAXPAYERS, it's not aimed at "illegal immigrants." In fact, the measure indicates that Social Security numbers are needed to claim tax credits of $500 per worker and $1,000 per couple. It also expressly disqualifies nonresident aliens.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid clarified, "This legislation is directed toward people who are legal in our country.  It is about time the Republicans got a different piece of reading material and get off this illegal immigrant stuff." said Sen. Reid, D-Nev. "This bill has nothing to do with anything illegal as far as immigration. It creates jobs for people who are lawfully in this country."  Not just U.S. citizens pay taxes - many legal immigrants under Temporary Protected Status or other programs file taxes, purchase homes, and get credit, so they would be eligible for a return.

Instead of trying to create a new "boogieman", the GOP should be thinking about how to be more inclusive - and inclusive does not mean having one member of one minority in a prominent position in your Party.  Some Members of Congress still - for reasons that I will probably never understand - think it is somehow out of line to repudiate racist/divisive attacks like Rush Limbaugh's.  At least Phil Gingrey took one step in the right direction by not shying away from repudiating some of the latest offensive attacks, namely by Limbaugh against our President:

"I think that our leadership, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, are taking the right approach," Gingrey said. "I mean, it's easy if you're Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don't have to try to do what's best for your people and your party. You know you're just on these talk shows and you're living well and plus you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base and that sort of that thing. But when it comes to true leadership, not that these people couldn't be or wouldn't be good leaders, they're not in that position..."


Lastly, and more importantly, aside from whatever Republicans do or don't do, this statement tying the immigration debate into the stimulus debate exemplifies a greater trend that Simon and NDN have predicted will occur with the entire domestic agenda until immigration reform is passed:

"That the debate.....has immediately become a debate about immigration should be a clear warning to the Administration and Congress that progress on many important domestic priorities this year may get caught up in the debate on how to best fix our broken immigration system. It is our belief that rather than having a series of tough and contentious proxy fights [with Republicans and with Democrats] on immigration, our leaders should recognize that passing comprehensive immigration reform this year will not only help fix our badly broken immigration system - a priority of many Americans - but may also be the key to unlocking bipartisan progress on a whole range of other domestic and security related issues." 

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