I haven't heard Limbaugh in years. The last time was maybe 1995, and at that time, he offered genuine analysis of the issues, with a humorous spin. I listened to him a lot back in the days when he came on KLBJ right after Kathy Cronkite (an arch-liberal), which made for a pretty good balance. At that time, Limbaugh was often insightful, sometimes dead wrong, but never nasty, especially to callers. In those days, if a caller wanted to take issue with him, he'd practically roll out the red carpet, and talk to them for 20 or 30 minutes if they had enough to say.

What he said the other day sounds more like Michael Savage. Maybe he's gotten cranky in his old age, maybe not. I'd have to listen to him again to know. But people were saying about him then the same things they say about him now.

If you don't listen to him either, what exactly do you want to be rid of?

As far as Maher goes, Kirsten Powers at The Daily Beast just did all my work for me. All the things I was thinking of, and more, she mentioned in her column yesterday.

Rush Limbaugh Isn’t the Only Media Misogynist


This is a great article. Few have got the courage to hit their own side as hard as she does here. Most people can excuse anything when their own side does it. The same rationale explains why we elect the people we do. People think something like "Well, Romney may not be great... Or good... or maybe even tolerable, but at least he's not as bad as the other guy, so let's just ignore all his faults."


She gets it. She actually gets it:



That's exactly what it is, and always has been. But she wants more than that. I'm impressed.

Not to butt in on Petro's post I just want to put in one quick post on two videos I just watched. Fox News a few years ago when GWB was in power and gas prices were at an all-time high. They had commenters and news crews talking about how gas prices were not, and could not, be controlled by the president, and how more drilling in the U.S. would not bring down prices.

Fast forward to this past month and Fox New saying Obama isn't doing enough to control gas prices, is blaming him for the prices, and that more drilling in the U.S. is needed to bring prices down (although drilling is now higher than during GWB).

Complete 180 and done without a trace of irony or knowledge of what they said just a few years ago. Actually, as usual, done without a trace of an actual brain at work either. Add this to the list of major issues Fox gets wrong.

Incidentally, I would love to run an alternate scenario where U.S. didn't invade overseas and then compare gas prices in that alternate universe. Same, lower, higher??

An odd one, this. A government encouraging violence against itself:


Sen. Barbara Mikulski Calls On Women To Start A ‘New American Revolution’

I thought I'd do a little crossover with the Facebook Thread, and start posting samples from there to kind of show what what kind of rhetoric the man in the street used.

I have to warn you though, that I seem to have a lot more Leftist friends on Facebook than right wing ones, and the right wing ones I do have mostly post pictures of their family outings, rather than talking politics, so this won't be anywhere near equal. If you want to see more hateful Right Wing rhetoric, maybe someone else can post some from their own Facebook wall, to sort of bring balance to the Force, as it were.

Why are we starting more threads that have nothing to do with chess? Just asking...

This in reply to a link someone spammed to an article about Antonin Scalia.



Got one Like so far.

(Rethinking the whole idea of whether I really want to start tracking these...)

Sorry, I thought this was a new thread. I apologize for my comment, but still think it odd that we write more about other subjects than about chess.

Especially when there are such good looking players to write about - both sexes.

We don't write much about anything these days. I am talking chess. I started threads about the oldest draw, and computer analysis of Tal's games, plenty of talk about the Mitzavah-Two Sheds match, Fred Reinfeld, two Yugoslav sisters, who love playing the exact same game with each other over and over again, the Topster losing to his second, trying to find a good database to lump all my pgn files into, et cetera. I'm talking plenty of chess, come to think of it. But Off Topic has always been for Off Topic stuff.