How bad are things in the Republican Party? In a new USA Today poll, 52 percent of respondents, when asked to name “the main person” who speaks for the GOP, couldn’t come up with an answer. For those who could answer, Rush Limbaugh was the first choice with 13 percent, followed by Dick Cheney, John McCain, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush. Does that mean a Limbaugh-Cheney ticket in 2012?
Posts Tagged ‘Rush Limbaugh
10
Jun
09
The GOP’s Empty Throne
02
Mar
09
Repubs love porn! Duh!
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.
A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.
“When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” Edelman says.
Political Divide
Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.
That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.
After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman says.
Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Old-Fashioned Values
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”
“One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you’re told you can’t have this, then you want it more,” Edelman says.
11
Feb
09
TWITTER US!!!!
TheBlockFM on Twitter!!! LOOK IT UP!
On Friday, when President Obama met with congressional leaders from both parties to discuss his economic recovery and reinvestment program, he told GOP leaders, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.” Asked for a response by National Review yesterday, Limbaugh said that Obama’s “plan is to isolate elected Republicans from their voters.” He added that passage of the stimulus bill would hurt Republicans electorally:
Obama’s plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party, in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule, and it would also simultaneously seriously damage any hope of future tax cuts. It would allow a majority of American voters to guarantee no taxes for themselves going forward. It would burden the private sector and put the public sector in permanent and firm control of the economy. Put simply, I believe his stimulus is aimed at re-establishing “eternal” power for the Democrat Party rather than stimulating the economy because anyone with a brain knows this is NOT how you stimulate the economy.
Limbaugh’s argument echoes former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s recent claim that Obama’s stimulus plan “could create a major electoral advantage for Democrats at taxpayer expense.” “Creating 600,000 new jobs might help cement Virginia in the Democrat column, making it harder for Republicans to retake the White House,” said Blackwell.
From John Soltz at the Huffington Post…
Last week’s Republican convention sure made every superficial effort to come off as pro-Troop and pro-Veteran. And, of course, the media ate it up, not challenging a single thing. But to those of us who did serve, it was offense after offense after offense. Let’s count the ways:
McCain Didn’t Mention Veterans’ Care: Maybe because it’s because he has a terrible record, but not once in John McCain’s speech did he talk about taking care of those who served their nation in the military. With exploding rates of PTSD, suicide, homelessness among veterans. With ridiculous wait times for veterans seeking care, and a VA that every major vets group says is woefully underfunded. With administrators dumping vets out of the veterans care system by diagnosing them with a lesser mental injury than they have. Not. A. Single. Word. And, with the shame of…
Walter Reed: What a slap in the face. The first photo that John McCain stood in front of was Walter Reed. Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California. Chalk it up to someone in the campaign not knowing the difference between the two, but what I find even more offensive is this: At some point John McCain asked his campaign what was going to be on the screen behind him. And someone told him the first picture would be Walter Reed Army Medical Center. John McCain didn’t object – even though he voted against closing tax loopholes to help fund military hospitals like Walter Reed. But that wasn’t the only bit of fake imagery….
“Phony Soldiers”: For the amount that Rush Limbaugh likes to rant on “phony soldiers,” there was a big silence and others from the mainstream media on the fact that the McCain campaign used stock footage of actors pretending to be soldiers in a video, intended to show how pro-military McCain is. It’s actually kind of fitting – phony soldiers to promote a phony record on military and veterans’ issues.
Speaking of phony: Remember that faux-outrage from the McCain campaign when General Wesley Clark dared to point out that being a POW isn’t a qualification for being Commander in Chief? Boy, the McCain campaign wouldn’t let up on that. Where were they when Fred Thompson said the same exact thing?
Real outrage: But, there were some things to be angry about. First, Sarah Palin repeatedly saying that her son was deploying for Iraq on September 11. First, not only is this not exactly true, but if she sincerely believed it to be true, she would be knowingly violating Operational Security (OPSEC), which says you should never tell the enemy when people and units are going to be landing in Iraq. Thankfully, Palin was fudging the truth, and not endangering the troops. So, she either knew she wasn’t telling the truth, or she thought she was and thought violating OPSEC was worth the political points. That, however, hasn’t kept the media from finding someone willing to leak all the movements of Track and his unit, and publishing them, violating OPSEC. Second, there’s the fact that right after the Republican convention, the party produced a bunch of flags that they stole from the Democratic convention in Denver, in an attempt to “prove” the Democrats were throwing out the flag. In fact, workers in Denver were collecting all the flags left at Invesco Field, to send to community events around the country, where other patriotic Americans might want to wave the flag. So, to promote a complete fabrication, Republicans stole flags that some five-year old kid might have wanted to wave on Main Street. Stay classy…
It’s things like this that caused those troops deployed to donate to Obama by a 6-1 ratio.
Though many in the media may lap up the lies, the distortions, and fake representations, troops certainly don’t. We know the difference between fantasy and reality.
And that brings me to the last point. Speaker after speaker told the convention that the “surge worked” and we were on our way to “victory.”
Except not so much. Bob Woodward, in his new book, explains what those of us in the military always knew – commanders on the ground were against the surge, and knew it would not work strategically. And, in fact, it hasn’t worked in stabilizing Iraq’s internal political problems, hasn’t aided our global strategy, or helped strengthen our military.
But, as the President explained to General Abizaid, and others, success wasn’t the point of the surge – the APPEARANCE of success was the purpose. Quoting Woodward’s finding, “A surge would “also help here at home, since for many the measure of success is reduction in violence,” Bush said [to Abizaid].”
In short, Bush knew that since less than one-percent of America had served in the wars, and most commentators were ignorant about what constitutes true military and strategic success, a reduction of violence could be sold as “success,” even if it was not.
And that, perhaps, was the biggest insult to those of us in the military, out of many, coming from the Republican National Convention.
