Tag: talk radio

Scott Walker compares women working and earning a salary to welfare

AUTHOR’S NOTE: While the blog post references the Republicans’ misleading attacks against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over the salaries that her U.S. Senate staffers made, the author of the blog post is a Bernie Sanders supporter, and both Hillary and Bernie support equal pay for equal work.

Republican Wisconsin Governor and likely presidential candidate Scott Walker has, once again, made downright offensive remarks about women. This time, he went onto a right-wing talk radio show hosted by Adriana Cohen and effectively claimed that giving women equal pay takes away from men and compared women working and earning a salary to collecting welfare benefits:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has gone on the offensive against women again, despite the backlash against his previous ugly remarks about rape victims seeking abortion. As reported by Right Wing Watch, Boston Herald Radio host Adriana Cohen asked him about the issue of equal pay for women, using largely discredited numbers to accuse Hillary Clinton as a hypocrite who pays her staff unequally. Walker could have scored the easy point on hypocrisy and left it at that. Instead he doubled down on why he finds it so offensive to be for equal pay in the first place.

“But I think even a bigger issue than that,” he said, “and this is sadly something that would make her consistent with the president, and that is I believe that the president and now Hillary Clinton tend to think that politically they do better if they pit one group of Americans versus another.”

Walker added that Democrats’ “measure of success in government is how many people are dependent on the government, how many people are dependent, on whether it’s Medicaid or food stamps or health care or other things out there.”

If you’re willing to listen to Scott Walker, you can listen to Walker’s remarks here. You can also view the Right Wing Watch piece that Slate columnist Amanda Marcotte referenced here.

Women earning a salary equal to their male co-workers for the same type of work is not a form of welfare or being dependent on the government; it’s being treated fairly. Full-time working women earn 77 cents for every dollar that a full-time working man makes in this country. Furthermore, working women earning the same amount of pay as working men helps men, especially married men in households where their wives work at a job that pays a salary or wage, because equal pay for women means a higher household income, and, therefore, more money for entire families to spend on goods and services.

To me, it sounds like Scott Walker apparently believes that women shouldn’t earn a salary for their participation in the workforce, and he also apparently believes that women earning more pay somehow threatens men. The former is absolutely absurd, and the latter is absolutely false.

Advertisement

Wisconsin right-wing shock jock Charlie Sykes publicly made a death threat against Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll

Charlie Sykes, who hosts a right-wing talk radio show on WTMJ-AM in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, publicly called for the lynching (i.e., public execution of a person by a mob, usually by hanging) of Pete Carroll, the head coach of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, either during or immediately after Super Bowl XLIX, in which the Seahawks lost to the New England Patriots by a score of 28-24:

Sykes’s tweet is still online, so, in case Sykes decides to delete his vile tweet, Wisconsin progressive blogger Chris “Capper” Liebenthal posted a screengrab of the tweet here.

Charlie Sykes’s remarks about wanting Pete Carroll, who is white, to be lynched is disgusting, and WTMJ-AM should pull Sykes off the air immediately. Furthermore, police should investigate Sykes in order to determine whether or not there is an actual plot to kill Carroll, and, if there is such a plot, Sykes and any co-conspirators should be arrested and tried in a court of law for plotting murder. If Sykes’s remarks were merely hyperbole and not an actual death threat against Carroll, then Sykes may be able to avoid a prison sentence, depending on the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court case that involves online death threats.

Additionally, Charlie Sykes is one of two right-wing talk radio hosts in Milwaukee, the other being WISN-AM right-wing talker Mark Belling, that have long supported Scott Walker, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, and Walker has frequently appeared on Sykes’s radio show. The fact that Walker would associate himself with someone like Sykes is disgusting, and all political figures in Wisconsin should condemn Sykes’s death threat against Pete Carroll.

While I’m very excited about the New England Patriots winning this year’s Super Bowl, the fact that Charlie Sykes publicly called for the lynching of the losing team’s head coach is highly unacceptable.

Penn State Professor Sophia McClennen delivers brilliant response to Rush Limbaugh smear attack

Sophia McClennen, a professor at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), wrote this piece for Salon magazine, in which Professor McClennen talked about how Steven Colbert’s style of comedy during his tenure as host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report brilliantly mocked conservatives who (figuratively) wrap themselves in the American flag by constantly talking about their patriotism.

Obviously, Rush Limbaugh, a right-wing misogynistic talk radio shock jock who is best-known for his infamous remarks in which he called attorney and women’s rights advocate Sandra Fluke a “slut” on his nationally-syndicated radio program The Rush Limbaugh Show, was not happy after reading Professor McClennen’s column, so he called her a “professorette” on his radio program and whined about how he couldn’t “escape these professors and these lies and all this crap that’s in the media about everything that’s so-called wrong with America”.

Professor McClennen wrote a pair of responses to Limbaugh’s sexist smear attack against her at Salon magazine and at the progressive website DailyKos. In her DailyKos diary, Professor McClennen called out Limbaugh for claiming to love America but hate a majority of American citizens:

This leads to another persistent flaw in Limbaugh logic: How can you claim to love your country, yet hate so many of its citizens? It turns out that people of color, women and folks who vote with the “Democrat Party” are all part of the very same nation that Limbaugh professes to love. And yet, he seems to have a never-ending ability to spit bile at his fellow citizens, constantly hurling invectives at those with whom he disagrees. Professorette? (His term for me.) Infobabe? Feminazi? And we can’t forget Limbaugh’s treatment of Sandra Fluke. […]

I want to make three points about this.

First, Professor McClennen’s piece about Colbert’s character on The Colbert Report is certainly not a pack of lies and crap about everything that’s wrong with America. It’s a factual and very informative piece about how Colbert parodied right-wing talking heads like Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and others in the corporate media in order to gain a large following among the left in this country and how Colbert fought to redefine what patriotism means in this country.

Second, for Limbaugh to publicly call Professor McClennen a “professorette” is flagrantly sexist. “Professor” is a gender-neutral term, and for Limbaugh to use the term “professorette” to describe a female college professor implies that female college professors are somehow inferior to male college professors, which, at least in my experience, is certainly not the case. I attended a small junior college in the east central part of Illinois on a part-time basis for a few years before dropping out, and, even though my college experience was horrible (mostly because I wasn’t interested in attending college at all), every professor who taught one or more courses I took, regardless of whether it was taught by a man or a woman, taught their courses exceptionally well.

Third, as someone who is a left-wing nationalist and damn proud of both America and my progressive political views, I believe in a different kind of patriotism than right-wing talking heads like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, and so on do. Right-wingers in this country believe in the “wrap-self-in-the-flag” kind of patriotism, in which they talk about how great America is while they support policies that are turning America into a third-world country, such as free trade agreements like NAFTA, deregulation of the banking industry, and cuts in government spending on things like education and social safety net programs. On the other hand, I believe in a kind of patriotism simply known as making America exceptional. I believe in raising taxes on the wealthy, protecting and expanding the social safety net, providing affordable health care to the American people, providing a better public education system for future generations, repealing free trade agreements, protecting the American economy, protecting and enacting regulations to protect workers, consumers, and the environment, raising the minimum wage, granting equal rights to all Americans, ensuring that all American citizens who are of age are able to vote in free and fair elections, and protecting the civil liberties of the American people, among other things. I don’t believe in all of that because I hate America, I believe in that because I love America and want to make this country an exceptional place to live!

Rush Limbaugh publicly supports rape

Right-wing talk radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh has a long track record of showing complete disrespect for women on his nationally-syndicated radio program.

This time, however, Limbaugh said something so vile on his radio program, it’s even worse than his blatantly sexist tirade in which he called Sandra Fluke, now a Democratic candidate for a seat in the California State Senate, a “slut”. Limbaugh publicly supported sexual assault by saying that “no means yes if you know how to spot it”:

“How many of you guys in your own experience with women have learned that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it?” he asked on “The Rush Limbaugh Show” Monday. “It used to be used as a cliché.”

[…]

Limbaugh then read off Ohio State University’s definition of consent, which outlines how two people should behave once they have decided to engage in a sexual relationship. It states that you and your partner must agree to engage in the activity every step of the way, including agreeing on “why” you are doing so. But that just sucks all the fun out of it, Limbaugh said.

Cumulus Media, which Limbaugh signed a contract with, and Premiere Networks, which syndicates The Rush Limbaugh Show, should fire Limbaugh and cancel the program immediately. When Limbaugh said “no means yes” and then claimed that getting consent from someone to have sex “sucks all the fun” out of having sex, he publicly supported sexual assault. It’s highly unacceptable for anyone, especially someone who hosts a talk radio program syndicated across the entire country, to publicly support a horrific criminal act.

When someone says “NO”, he or she means “NO”. There is nothing fun whatsoever about raping someone.