Today Rush Limbaugh was referring to “Imam Barack Obama.” And he was bragging about having upset MSNBC on Monday by saying that Obama was our first “anti-American” president.
Is there any depth to which he will not sink?
Oh, never mind. We already know the answer to that question, don’t we?
Spotted at Rocky Mountain College: “A morning without coffee is like sleep.”
I suggested in the post below that Aaron Flint may have taken a shot at me during last Thursday’s “Voices of Montana.” Wulfgar notes in comments that Flint may actually have had him in mind, although he is not from Billings, because of this exchange. Wulfgar could be right, but reading that exchange actually makes me think it even more likely that Flint had me in mind. Flint definitely takes a couple of shots at me in Wulfgar’s comments: He says that all I do is “sit back and whine,” never joining a conservation, and that I never mention the left-wing callers to his show. Those comments seem consistent with Flint’s dull-witted assertion that I (or some Billings blogger) have called for politically balanced calls to his show.
Flint’s second assertion is a lie. I have mentioned left-wing callers to his show on multiple occasions, even agreeing that one of the regular lefty callers can be an “obnoxious jerk.”
His first assertion is just nonsense. I have been in journalism for 30 years. I run the oldest and longest-running blog by a Montana journalist. I publish a widely circulated weekly newspaper, which regularly contains multiple points of view and for which I also write when I have time to do it. I occasionally comment on other Montana blogs, when I have something to say. I have interviewed nearly all of Montana’s leading politicians. I teach journalism classes and have given numerous talks to many audiences, including TV and radio audiences, on media and political topics. I appeared a number of times, during the Berg era, on “Voices of Montana.” I have never turned down an invitation to appear, and I even hosted the show once.
Aaron, if you think I am afraid of you or your show, then you are a deluded young man. I will take you on any time, on any topic, in any forum, written or spoken. I have zero fear of you. But don’t expect me to waste my time making pointless telephone calls to your show. My time is more valuable than that.
Aaron Flint had on an economist from the Heritage Foundation who mostly recited Republican talking points, which isn’t surprising considering that the Heritage Foundation seems to write most of the Republican talking points. When a caller complained about the ideological narrowness, Flint got defensive, which he often does on that point.
He said, as he has said before, that he had trouble getting liberals — or at least liberal economists and politicians — to come on his show. As I have said before, this strikes me as a dubious claim, although I can’t imagine why Flint would lie about it, and he doesn’t strike me as a fundamentally dishonest person. If it’s a real problem, Flint might want to consider whether the way he treats his callers is part of the explanation.
In defending his fairness, Flint took a shot at an unnamed blogger in Billings, who he said wants calls to the show equally balanced between left and right. I don’t know whether he had me in mind, and I don’t believe I have ever said anything like that, but I’m having trouble thinking of any other Billings blogger he might have meant.
If he was aiming at me, he was probably referring to this exchange from March, which was followed by this exchange. Readers can judge for themselves whether I called for equal time to both left and right. My hope was to discourage Flint from going down the path of partisan hackery that is so typical of talk radio. In general, I will acknowledge, he has avoided that. But I certainly intend to point it out when he heads the wrong direction.
As for the Heritage Foundation economist, his main point seemed to be that the economic recovery is stalling out because business owners, especially small business owners, are full of uncertainty about tax hikes and health care. I don’t presume that I know more about how small business owners think than he does just because I am a small business owner and he isn’t. Owning a small business is such an obsessive and consuming occupation that it’s easy to get out of touch with what’s going on in the rest of the world.
But it seems to me that owners of small businesses, especially tiny businesses like mine, are much more responsive to what goes on in their micro economic environments than they are to the larger world. My decisions about whether to hire a new employee or expand this business depend an awful lot on how ad sales are going and who is available for hiring and very little on the national economic outlook.
Which isn’t to say that the national picture doesn’t have some effect. For instance, we have been able to hire some exceptionally good people recently who perhaps would not have been available if the job market were better. And the credit crunch brought on by the near financial collapse had a definite effect; we lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 in available credit solely because of the national crunch rather than anything we did to reduce our credit worthiness. Obviously, that makes us more cautious.
But I’m mostly encouraged by the steps the Obama administration has taken. TARP funding helped ease the credit crisis. Health insurance for Outpost employees, an ever-receding dream before healthcare reform, now seems at least marginally more possible. Stimulus funds seem to have headed off even worse economic results. If the only thing I had to worry about was the possibility that my taxes would go up by a few percentage points next year on all the income I make over $250,000, I would be a pretty happy dude.
When my Republican friends (and enemies) say that cutting taxes raises revenues, I occasionally ask at what point that stops making sense. After all, a zero tax rate doesn’t produce infinite tax revenues, so at some point lower tax rates must mean fewer tax dollars collected. Nobody ever seems to know where that point is, but Dylan Matthews makes a good stab at figuring it out. The comments also are worth reading.
Bottom line: Economics is complicated, and some politicians who are trying to pretend it’s simple are simply cowards.
Comments were down at the Outpost site for a while, but they are back up now, and Jim Larson’s fine story last week on problems at the Mental Health Center is drawing lots of comments.
There also has been a fair amount of talk show gloating over a vote in Missouri over “Obamacare.” The vote was a wholesale rejection of healthcare reforms passed by Congress, the pundits said.
The actual wording on the ballot said this:
“Shall the Missouri Statutes be amended to:
● Deny the government authority to penalize citizens for refusing to purchase private health insurance or infringe upon the right to offer or accept direct payment for lawful healthcare services?
● Modify laws regarding the liquidation of certain domestic insurance companies?”
Even a healthcare socialist like me has a hard time objecting to that language. But I wonder what would have happened if the proposition had been posed differently. Suppose the Missouri Legislature had asked:
1. Should the government refuse to penalize citizens for failing to buy health insurance if that refusal means that citizens with pre-existing medical conditions cannot obtain health insurance?
2. Who should bear the cost of medical care for citizens who can afford but fail to purchase private insurance and whose medical costs exceed their ability to pay? Should the costs be passed along, as they are now, to insured citizens and to taxpayers?
3. Should citizens without insurance be denied medical care they cannot afford to pay for? Should their children?
Wonder what the answers to those questions would have been?
No sooner do I post about the importance of posting about talk radio than I skip two straight weeks of posting about talk radio. I must be a very sick man.
But two weeks ago, the talk was all about Shirley Sherrod, and I wanted to write a column rather than a post about it. So I held off on the post and then never got around to the column either. Sigh.
Then last week it was all about the Arizona immigration ruling, and I wanted to hold off posting about that until I had a better notion of what the ruling actually said — which is information not easily obtainable on talk radio. You could hear hours and hours of commentary about how bad the ruling was, but if you wanted to know what it actually said, you had to seek out a different source. And I never got around to do doing that, so I’m still not too sure.
This week it was all about the California ruling on same-sex marriage. I haven’t gotten around to reading that ruling either, but this is one case where actual facts aren’t that critical. It’s the long-term implications that matter here, not California law.
Limbaugh was extremely bitter about the whole thing: activist, liberal, left-wing judge, etc. He said of the ruling, “Marriage has been codified as homophobia.” That would have been the weirdest thing I heard all week, except I heard somebody later on “Hardball” arguing that a ban on same-sex marriage was needed to prevent discrimination against straight couples. Matthews didn’t ask what seemed to me to be the obvious follow-up: So you believe it is necessary to discriminate against homosexuals in order to prevent discrimination against heterosexuals? Isn’t it possible to discriminate against neither?
Hannity was so excited about beating Democrats in November that he didn’t talk much about the ruling, at least not while I was listening. Lars Larson had on a lawyer from the Cato Institute who actually defended the ruling in large part. Libertarians are too ideologically committed, in my view, to be allowed to run the country, but you do have to admire their intellectual consistency. When they say they don’t want the government mucking around in people’s private lives, they really mean it. Good for them.
Sometimes, despite their best efforts, the talk show moguls allow a dissenting point of view to slip in.
Finally, just to round things out with a little Sunday TV show update, David Gregory tried pretty hard on “Meet the Press” to get John Boehner to answer a pretty basic question: Do tax cuts always lead to increases in tax revenues? It’s a popular Republican claim, and it’s a pretty fundamental question if you are going to have a serious discussion about cutting the deficit. But Boehner wouldn’t touch it. He ran like a rabbit.