Rush Limbaugh will be on the air for at least eight more years, and he’ll get paid a fortune for it: more than $400 million, including a $100 million signing bonus, according to a new deal he signed this week. After nearly 20 years in national syndication, Limbaugh still attracts a huge audience - nearly 20 million weekly listeners.
The New York Times magazine has a long profile of Limbaugh. It notes how he is an American icon, but that his fans and critics don’t agree on what he is iconic for. The article reports: “Serious people have called him a serial liar and a moral philosopher, a partisan hack and a public intellectual, nothing more than a radio windbag and nothing less than the heart of the Republican Party.”
The U.S. economy lost more than 60,000 jobs last month, mostly from manufacturing and construction companies. It was the sixth consecutive month the economy has shed jobs, for a total of about 438,000 jobs since the first of the year.
Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former deputy assistant to President Bush, is puzzled and put off by the criticism of Barack Obama by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson (in photo). Most of the basis for the criticism was Obama’s address at a “Call to Renewal” conference two years ago. But Wehner described key points of the address as “respectful and authentic” and “reasonable,” and said that Dobson’s attacks fell “terribly short” of a fair and honest critique. “If Christian conservatives want to be taken seriously, they need to make serious arguments and speak with intellectual integrity,” Wehner wrote. “In this instance, Dobson didn’t. He has set back his cause and made some of us who are evangelicals and conservatives wince.”
From a New York Times article today: “The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of ‘coercive management techniques’ for possible use on prisoners, including ‘sleep deprivation,’ ‘prolonged constraint,’ and ‘exposure.’
“What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
“The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
In another blow to the credibility of the Bush administration’s detention of suspected terrorists, a federal appeals court ruled that the military didn’t have credible evidence to show that a Chinese detainee who has been held for more than six years at Guantanamo Bay is an “enemy combatant.”
“I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November - whether things get better there or worse. I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue,” wrote columnist Thomas Friedman. “It’s the state of America now that is the most gripping source of anxiety for Americans, not al-Qaida or Iraq. Anyone who thinks they are going to win this election playing the Iraq or the terrorism card - one way or another - is, in my view, seriously deluded.”
Friedman’s advice to voters: “We need nation-building at home, and we cannot wait another year to get started. Vote for the candidate who you think will do that best. Nothing else matters.”
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark wasn’t wrong in noting how John McCain’s military service does not automatically qualify him to be commander in chief, but he sounded disrespectful of that service in saying on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he doesn’t think “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.” A spokesman for Barack Obama said Monday that Obama “honors and respects Sen. McCain’s service, and of course, he rejects yesterday’s statement by Gen. Clark.”
In a speech Monday in Missouri, Obama paid tribute to McCain, who he said “endured physical torment in service to our country.” Obama also vowed not to question the patriotism of others during the presidential campaign but said that he would “not stand idly by when I hear others question mine.”
“The cheap populism is really rich coming from Karl Rove,” columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about Rove’s attempt to label Barack Obama as a “coolly arrogant” elitist. She added: “The absurd spectacle of rich white conservatives trying to paint Obama as a watercress sandwich with the crust cut off seems ugly and fake. Obama can be aloof and dismissive at times, and he’s certainly self-regarding, carrying the aura of the Ivy faculty club. But isn’t that better than the aura of the country clubs that tried to keep out blacks?”
“Here is the difference between McCain and Obama — and Obama had better pay attention,” columnist Richard Cohen wrote. “McCain is a known commodity. It’s not just that he’s been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It’s also — and more important — that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This — not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express — is what commends him to so many journalists.
“Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don’t know what they are. Nothing so far in his life approaches McCain’s decision to refuse repatriation as a POW so as to deny his jailers a propaganda coup. In fact, there is scant evidence the Illinois senator takes positions that challenge his base or otherwise threaten him politically.”
“Bush is a stubborn man,” columnist David Brooks wrote. “Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.
“Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence, he never would have overruled his generals.
“The fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. The Iraqi military has been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to merely a fragile one, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it.
“The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others.”
“Laws and rules have been adopted to prevent the hijacking of the Justice Department to advance a partisan or ideological cause. But that’s exactly what the Bush administration did,†columnist Jay Bookman wrote, noting how “the campaign to turn the Justice Department into an enforcement arm of the Republican Party extended even to its hiring of legal interns.â€
Bookman wrote: “According to a new report by the Justice Department’s inspector general — a Republican, by the way — the Bush approach ‘constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.’
“In other words, those appointed to enforce the law instead knowingly violated it to advance partisan interests.â€
Per a New York Times article: “According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been ‘massively scaled back this year.’ Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007.”
A pro/con on Wednesday’s Opinion pages debated why this is happening. Cal Thomas blamed the decline in coverage on the liberal media not wanting to report good news. But Frank Rich noted that there isn’t much reporting on the bad news either, and he argued that the public has made up its mind on Iraq and is more interested in “Cindy versus Michelle, not Shiites versus Sunnis.”
In addition to offshore drilling, another energy issue that John McCain and Barack Obama differ sharply on is ethanol. McCain wants to eliminate the multibillion-dollar government subsidies that the ethanol industry receives, and he wants to remove the tariff imposed on imported ethanol made from sugarcane. But Obama supports the subsidies and the tariff. Obama says that ethanol production “helps our national security.†It also helps Archer Daniels Midland, the nation’s largest ethanol producer, which is based in Obama’s home state of Illinois.
Don’t waste time trying to reimburse Sedgwick County’s general fund for any bit of time someone on the county payroll spent related to the downtown arena, as County Commissioner Kelly Parks wants. Of course county employees — including commissioners — are involved in the massive project. Who expected otherwise? But the time is not excessive and is not worth haggling over. As Commissioner Tim Norton noted, regardless of which budget is charged, it’s all taxpayer money.
The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board did good work identifying the causes of the explosion last year at the Barton Solvents chemical storage unit in Valley Center and in making safety recommendations to the industry and government regulators. The board determined that the explosion resulted from a buildup of flammable vapor-air mixture inside a storage tank that was ignited by a spark from a measuring float inside the tank. The tank explosion then set off a chain reaction of explosions in other tanks, which likely could have been prevented if the tanks hadn’t been so close together and had been better ventilated.
Though this explosion was large and required widespread evacuations, it was fortunate that no one died and that the chemical plume went straight up instead of spreading out over the town, lead investigator Randy McClure told The Eagle editorial board. Here’s hoping that the lessons learned in this accident can help prevent other explosions and the loss of life in the future.
The debate about whether gun ownership really is a right protected by the U.S. Constitution was finally settled today. The Supreme Court overturned a 32-year-old ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., and in doing so judged that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own guns that isn’t tied to “a well-regulated militia.
“The decision is big, though how far-reaching is still unclear. The National Rifle Association plans to challenge gun control laws in other cities. Some people are concerned that the ruling could lead to the removal of other gun restrictions, though Justice Antonin Scalia said the ruling shouldn’t “cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”
“If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a ‘tamer of men’ and had a ‘man-eating’ past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she’d had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on ‘The View’ to sweeten her image,” columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Yet Sarkozy’s third wife is charming not only the French public and world leaders such as President Bush, but also helping raise Sarkozy’s low approval ratings. Said one political observer: “He has stopped behaving like a twit since the marriage.”
How low is world public opinion of President Bush? Former Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao are more trusted than Bush to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,†according to an international survey coordinated by the Project on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. Not that authoritarian leaders Putin and Hu rated high in trustworthiness; they just scored better than Bush.
Rush Limbaugh will be on the air for at least eight more years, and he’ll get paid a fortune for it: more than $400 million, including a $100 million signing bonus, according to a new deal he signed this week. After nearly 20 years in national syndication, Limbaugh still attracts a huge audience - nearly 20 million weekly listeners.
