Various news outlets have started running “polls” asking if Rush Limbaugh should be fired – what “The Media” don’t seem to understand is that Rush Limbaugh cannot be fired. Rush is employed by his own production company, the same arrangement as Glenn Beck. He has an iron clad contract with Premiere as his syndicator through 2016 that was written to not allow the contract to be terminated for anything Rush does on the air.
Rush Limbaugh is no Don Imus. He has complete control over his product. His producers and staff all work for Rush, not for Premiere or Clear Channel. Rush signs their paychecks – Rush learned a long time ago that he needed to be the boss of the people involved in producing his show so he didn’t wind up with FM dope smoking union thugs doing his call screening and sabotaging his program.
Let’s say just for the sake of argument that Bob Pittman at Clear Channel thought it was in the best interest of his company to part ways with Rush (he probably does, given his own political leanings) Premiere would have to come up with probably $200 million to pay out the rest of Rush’s contract – but even that is probably not possible – my memory is the size of the check Premiere cuts to Rush is partly Rush getting a percentage of the national advertising revenue, which would make a very costly court case for Clear Channel, with lawyers speculating over what Rush could have made if the contract hadn’t been abrogated. Rush had the clout in 2008 and the smart lawyers that would not allow the contract to have a non-compete requirement in the event the contract is terminated by Clear Channel and “paid off” – I haven’t seen the contract, but I would be shocked if that was in there.
The next problem for former AOL head Bob Pittman would be the loss of revenue to his company. While Clear Channel carries the show on its own stations, in many markets other radio owners are paying Premiere just to have the rights to the show. That money would go away instantly. Hannity only has an audience because of the Rush leadin, and that audience has been dissipating over the last decade. Hannity doesn’t have the clout of Rush, and he doesn’t own his own production company. Dr Laura and Dean Edell are already gone. Glenn Beck has one foot out the door already with GBTV.
One option might be for Clear Channel to drop Rush from their stations, but Premiere to keep syndicating his show – but that would just mean all the radio stations who have been waiting in line for 20 years to carry Rush would step forward and fill the vacuum. If Premiere refused to sell the program to new affiliates, Rush again would have a winning lawsuit for Premiere failing to carry out the terms of their contract.
Even in the worst case – if Clear Channel’s lawyers found a way to escape the contract (bankruptcy of Premiere?) without incurring huge financial damages, Rush has a long standing internet based subscription service that wold allow him to continue to survive if he was completely cut off from radio. Several of my “polls” over the past few years have been asking if people would be willing to pay to listen to Rush if he was no longer on radio. That question is becoming less and less theoretical.
The biggest problem / mistake for Rush is that Premiere owns the domain RushLimbaugh.com – Glenn Beck’s production company owns glennbeck.com, so if Rush and Premiere broke off their contract, Premiere still owns the RushLimbaugh.com web site. I don’t know if Rush owns the archives of his programs or if that is also owned by Premiere.
Rush has been down this road before, the most memorable one being his “making fun” of Michael J Fox’s deliberate display of his Parkinson’s in front of Congress – in that case, Rush escaped a lot of the heat because he turned out to be right. Michael J Fox had deliberately not taken his medication in order to put on a show for the TV cameras.
This time, Rush may have crossed a line too far. With no evidence, he has concluded that any woman who is taking birth control pills must be sexually active and promiscuous, neither of which are “known facts” about the woman in question. Despite his experience with taking pills, Rush doesn’t know the first thing about birth control pills. During his rant, he made the implication that she was taking them “once in a while” whenever she had sex, suggesting the more sex she had, the more birth control pills she needed.
Birth Control pills have to be taking one a day in a 28 day cycle. Each pill contains a different mix of estrogen and progestine and have to be taken in sequence – has Rush never seen birth control pills? If a woman doesn’t regularly take the correct pill each day, there is a very good chance she will become pregnant if she is sexually active. Birth Control pills are entirely different than “morning after” pills.
Images of Birth Control pills and explanation of how they work
Many women take birth control pills for reasons other than preventing pregnancy.
http://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/features/other-reasons-to-take-the-pill
The most common reasons are to reduce painful menstruation and problems with endometriosis. Ms Flute told a story about “a friend” who had lost an ovary due to polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, implying that not taking the pill would have prevented the loss of the ovary, which is not true. The pill only mitigates the symptoms of the disease, not the progression. The Progressive talkers of the world have already lost track of the fact that Ms Flute was not talking about herself, but a hypothetical “friend”. She’s in law school at Georgetown to become an advocate on women’s issues. She knows exactly what she is doing and so does the White House. They are not stupid people.
It was Miss Fluke who introduced sexuality into the discussion by saying that she was having so much sex, she was going broke buying contraception, and wants us to pay for it. (She attended Georgetown, a very expensive school, knowing full well their plan didn’t cover this. She intended to be an agitator.)
Insurance companies don’t give things away – they recoup the cost by raising the cost for all the rest of us. (I’d hate to think I couldn’t get cancer treatment paid for because they’ve spent their money on birth control for people who CAN afford it.)
That she wants us to pay – so she can have sex – is a true statement. Calling her a slut was simply hyperbole.
If the people criticizing Rush really cared about what is said about women, they would be all over Bill Maher. But they don’t. And they’re not really “offended” over this. They’ve been trying to silence Rush now into a 3rd decade. This is just a means to an end.
You’re just 100% wrong.
Here is the complete transcript of what she actually said to Congress:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/boxofficebuz/transcript-of-testimony-by-sandra-fluke-48z2
She didn’t say a single thing about her own sexual activity. She did throw in the little additional detail that her “friend” who needed the birth control pills to treat polycystic ovarian syndrome is *GAY*. Last time I checked, it isn’t possible for 2 lesbians to create an unwanted pregnancy.
Rush has issued an apoogy.
I have been a regular Rush listener since 1992. He’s actually toned down quite a bit from those early years. I think he went too far with Sandra Fluke, but when you are trying to push the boundries with extemporaneous talk 15 hours a week, it’s bound to happen occasionally. I would agree with you Art that the fact that Ms. Fluke uses birth control does not make her a slut. I think that was an attempt to show how ridiculous the rest of her testimony was. As others have found, Walmart and Target sell birth control pills for $9/month. Planned parenthood offers an exam and birth control pills for $270/year. There is no way in the world Sandra should be paying $3000 for birth control in four years and using that expense as her arguement for why her employer must cover the expense. I also find it ridiculous that she choses to attend a Catholic institution and attack its core beliefs, arguing that a Catholic institution should be facilitating premarital sex for its students, and do so using methods that also violate its teachings. All that being said, it appearz that she is actually a 30-year old activist persuing an agenda against the Catholic church, so I don’t know that we can take anything she said at face value. This is what passes today as expert testimony in congress.
yeah, rush screwed the conservative movement. He talked too much about “a pro abortion activist” and then stepped in it. He hurt the conservatives. When he started calling names, he left the argument on principles and made all conservatives look bad. Everyone who supports Obama and Pelosi agreed with this woman on needing taxpayers to pay for her birth control. Rush would never sway any of those Obama supporters, no matter how strong the argument and how right it is.
So say a couple sentences , say how crazy the hearing was, how its based on insanity, and then MOVE ON ! Its not worth harping on, he set back the conservative movement and their argument while alienating women again. My wife rolls her eyes when she here’s his name, and she is conservative. He wasted two days on that stupidity. Heck, John Galt FLA wasted a whole show on it. I had to quit listening to him that evening cause he ran it into the ground too.
All they had to do is say, make sure you contact your Congressman and senator if your against the obama (small o) agenda.
God, where is Mark Steyn when you need him.
Parrott
Anybody that can afford Georgetown can afford their own contraception preventitave. Fluke and the rest of them. And the ones that support Obama and Pelosi are the clowns that think we (the taxpayer’s) should pay for student sexual activity. My take on this is fornicate thyself , use spit or plastic.
The media will harp on this as long as it takes to take the focus off of what is crucial right now, and what is happening and has happened under Obama’s watch. Yes, Rush stepped in it by giving them exactly what they needed to do this. Meanwhile, the country sinks further and further down as gas prices, unemployment, debt and Obama’s unrelenting determination to work against the military by apologizing to religious fanatics and the media doesn’t want to talk about that. Or about the issue at hand, which is impeding religious freedom, and that contraceptives are widely available at little and sometimes no cost depending on your income. This woman clearly knows this if she’s intelligent enough to be attending Georgetown. I assume she knows how to conduct simple research.
I have to tell you that I’m very close to pulling the plug on this web site (not because of anything anyone here did….)
I really can’t defend any of the crap on the conservative talk radio today. Rush apparently has lost 7 sponsors as of early today. His “friends” (or maybe competitors) have been defending him by digging the hole deeper.
While I fully understand that Ms Fluke is an activist and her goal is to get the government to pay for contraception (and maybe abortion eventually), that’s not what she testified to Congress about
The highlights of the “crap” go something like this:
“She wants us to pay for her condoms so she can have lots of sex”
– She pays for her own health insurance. “We” are not paying for anything unless “we” are a student enrolled in Georgetown and enrolled in their group health care policy
– We have no knowledge of her personal sexual activity. She was talking about health insurance policy as an advocate. If she was advocating that health care should cover rehab for drug addiction, that doesn’t mean she shoots heroin
– She wants coverage for birth control pills for women with medical problems unrelated to sexual activity or pregnancy.
– At no point did she suggest health care insurance should pay for condoms. While there are female condoms available, generally condoms are bought by the man unless he wants to be writing checks to her for the next 20 years
– Her “friend” who needed contraceptives for her ovary cysts is a lesbian. Medications that stop monthly menstruation means she doesn’t have debilitating pain as often or to the same degree.
The White House’s plan is working right on target. “Conservatives” are pushing women back into the waiting arms of the Democrats. Catholics generally don’t vote Republican – and for Mr Santorum, “contraception” is back in play. Pretty soon we’re all be talking about Connecticut vs Griswold and whether states should have the right to make telling a women about condoms a criminal offense and send doctors to jail.
Disclosure: I haven’t listened to ANY of the talk shows on this issue (the only radio coverage I have heard was a couple of brief reports on NPR — they are certainly not a fan club of Limbaugh).
You might appreciate this blog post on the Georgetown issue by Karl Denninger. Denninger is a libertarian and writes primarily about financial matters.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=202968
All I see is the same pointless crap.
He leads with “she’s 30 years old” as his best point.
She’s going to law school, not an undergraduate. There is totally nothing out of the ordinary about a 30 year old student in law school. She didn’t say she was spending $3000 over 3 years. Rather than ranting that she is not telling the truth, how about just asking her for source of that statistic? Her lesbian “friend” was denied birth control pills for her treatment of Ovarian Cystitis, which causes intense pain during menstruation. Some might say that it’s a made up symptom just to get the insurance company to pay for something that wouldn’t otherwise be covered. Let’s talk to her “friend” and see if she is a hypothetical or a real person.
If he’s really a Libertarian, then he missed the real point, which I already made. She and Georgetown are only in this fight because Georgetown requires students to enroll in their health insurance program administered by United Health Care (with close ties to the Obama administration)
Why did Georgetown do that? My suspicion (not having done any research yet) is that there is some hook now in Federal Student Aid Funding (or the lead up to implementation of Obamacare) that requires universities to force students to buy health insurance (which few of them really need – but universal coverage requires coercing the low risk people to pool their money with the chronically ill that are uninsurable).
Georgetown could like Hillsdale and accept no federal funding or student loans, and don’t require your students to buy health insurance through the school – problem solved. You take the money from Uncle Sam, they own you.
Catholic Social Services is deep in bed with Medicare funding. Return to being charity hospitals that don’t take government money and you can make your own rules.
Art, I don’t blame you. I am extremely dissatisfied with conservative talk radio as well as the current batch of Republican hopefuls in the three-ring circus called primaries. To me this is the case of “snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory”. I am afraid we will end up choosing another designated loser and Obama will have his net four years to reshape our country into the Socialist Paradise he envisions. What is worst might be coming, just as Hugo Chavez managed to bypass the presidential terms and become El Presidente for Life, Obama might try the same. Be scared, really scared.
I agree with you that the mere fact of using birth control does not make one a slut.
Rush’s point was NOT THIS. It was that the entire 3 years of law school can be covered with birth control pills from Wal-mart for under $400, yet this chick claims she’s using $3000 in birth control. So Rush sarcastically says, and I paraphrase, “if she’s going broke like she says, having so much sex she needs THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS worth of birth control, then it can’t be just The Pill–unless she’s taking 16 scrips of it per day. She’s gotta be getting condoms, IUDs, dental dams, spermicide lubes, perfumed foams–the whole contraceptive menu–to add up to three thousand bucks.”
His point was that she’s full of bovine exhaust–that only a slut could find a use for three thousand dollars worth of birth control while supposedly studying law. I listened to the whole schtick, and I thought it was very clumsily done. I think he absolutely needed to be explicit in saying, “if she needs 3 thousand dollars’ worth of birth control, she’s a raging slut,” rather than just saying, “she’s a slut.” In other words, give himself an out.
Then when the outrage chorus revs up, hit ’em with the facts: “I didn’t say she was a slut! I said IF she is using three thousand dollars’ worth of birth control as designed, THEN she’s a slut. It takes serious sluttiness to manage to fornicate your way through three thousand dollars’ worth of contraceptives in three years.”
To me, a longtime listener, Rush’s point seems to be obvious–she’s lying about the 3 thousand bucks that’s putting her in the poorhouse. The whole ‘slut’ thing was designed to show what a liar she is–by giving her the choice between ‘liar’ and ‘slut.’
Or as Rush puts it: illustrating absurdity by being absurd.
If you can’t handle that, you might be happier in China or someplace else where people are afraid to speak their minds for fear of retaliation. The Left has, in recent years, really put their speech-chilling machine into overdrive. They may have been taking lessons from the Muslims, who don’t screw around. Just ask the Van Gogh family or various other people living in hiding for the crime of having spoken their minds about Islam or having drawn a cartoon.
The Left hasn’t sent anybody to gun down Rush–that we know of–but they’re gunning for his job. If they are successful they’ll go for a bigger bite. They want to run the whole show and when that happens it will be the same here as in every other country the Left has taken over. Disagree with them and there will be a midnight knock on your door, and you’ll never be heard from again.
Taking birth control pills requires a prescription from a doctor. They aren’t sold over the counter.
Women have to take the pills regularly for several months to ensure that the pills are in sync with their 28 day menstrual cycle, which is a problem if the woman has erratic menstruation action. That requires followup visits with the doctor (not covered by insurance) and possibly blood work to determine why the pills aren’t working correctly. An average of $1000 a year for the first year a women is on birth control pills doesn’t sound out of line to me.
There are more expensive pills that reduce the frequency of periods from one every 28 days to 4 times year, or not at all. That type of approach would apply to women have extreme PMS, pain, or bleeding issues like associated with endometriosis, which is an abnormal growth of tissue in the uterus.
The birth control pill is not something a woman starts taking because she has a hot date coming up this weekend (unless she WANTS to become pregnant). In many cases it is because she is considering a serious long-term relationship with a man, but they agree they do want to have sex, but not create a pregnancy that has to be aborted or to bring a child into the world in a relationship without marriage. Anyone who thinks a significant number of women in 2012 are going to the marriage altar as virgins is delusional.
Unfortunately, yesterday Chris Plante and several other local hosts are continuing to try to defend Rush’s flawed understanding of female sexuality and human reproduction. Rush is not exactly the poster child for “Family Values”, now on his fourth marriage and the father of no children.
And how much does it cost to not get pregnant?
Zero, if you’re not an idiot.
What about married women?
Her ‘testimony’ at the Nancy Pelosi media circus reminded me of nothing so much as the classic Wilt Chamberlain SNL skit that showed ol’ Wilt’s line o’ chicks coming into his bedroom one and two at a time so he could sleep with 20,000 of them as he said. If he used a condom with each one, and did it over a period of 20 years, The Stilt could have approached Ms. Fluke’s thousand dollars a year for birth control.
Birth Control Pill, huh…? who cares??? I want botox, lasik, and a eye lift, all for FREE just like Fluke. After all it’s all about my (woman) mental health. Oh yea, a weekly massage, cleaning lady, personal shopper etc. (Too much stress in my life) Oh yeah, and my 4wheeler isn’t “safe” anymore so I will need a new one of those too, ALL FOR ME !!!
…..and I will get back to you on the rest.
Every student at Georgetown is playing for their health insurance.
Please don’t bother getting back to me. I really don’t give a shit.