VERY GOOD NEWS...

karoli at Crooks & Liars took the time to look into Rush Limbaugh's station ratings in the top 25 markets and it's clear that Limbaugh's star has faded.  The format for the numbers is the local rating for the station carrying Limbaugh/the total number of local radio stations.

Here are Limbaugh's channel ratings in the top 25 markets for September, and they're not pretty:

1. New York, NY: WOR-AM is 21st/37 (flagship station for the NY Mets), owned by iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel)
2. Los Angeles, CA: KEIB-AM is 37th/45, owned by iHeartMedia
3. Chicago WLS-AM is 23rd/45, owned by Cumulus Media
4. San Francisco, CA: KNEW-AM is 29th/34, owned by iHeartMedia (Limbaugh being moved from iHeartMedia’s KNEW to Cumulus’s KSFO-AM. Darryl Parks’s post on this in the list of links, above)
5. Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX: WBAP-AM is 18th/30 Cumulus
6. Houston, TX: KTRH-AM is 16th/30, owned by iHeartMedia
7. Washington, D.C.: WMAL-FM is 13th/29, owned by Cumulus
8. Philadelphia, PA: WPHT-AM is 18th/31, owned by CBS Radio
9. Atlanta, GA: WSB-AM is 3rd/29, owned by Cox Media
10. Boston, MA: WRKO-AM is 15th/25, owned by Entercom Communications
11. Miami, FL: WIOD-AM is 24th/33, owned by iHeartMedia
12. Detroit, MI: WJR-AM is 9th/29, owned by Cumulus, and broadcasts Michigan State football games
13. Seattle, WA: KTTH-AM is 22nd/33, owned by Bonneville Int’l., subsidiary of Deseret Industries, for profit arm of the Mormon Church: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_International
14. Phoenix, AZ: KFYI-AM is 6th/33, owned by iHeartMedia
15. Puerto Rico: Was broadcast on WOSO, dumped in 2009, still hasn’t returned to their schedule as shown on website.
16. Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN: KTLK-AM is 16th/26, owned by iHeartMedia
17. San Diego, CA: KOGO-AM is 22nd/30, owned by iHeartMedia
18. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL: WFLA-AM is 15th/29, owned by iHeartMedia
19. Denver, CO: KOA-AM is 13th/33, owned by iHeartMedia
20. Nassau-Suffolk, NY (Long Island): WOR-AM is 17th/38, owned by iHeartMedia (WOR-AM also covers New York City, largest market)
21. Baltimore, MD: WCBM-AM is 15th/31, owned by WCBM Maryland
22. St. Louis, MO: KMOX-AM is 1st/22, owned by CBS Radio
23. Portland, OR: KEX-AM is 18th/27, owned by iHeartMedia
24. Charlotte, NC: WBT-AM is 16th/24, owned by Greater Media
25. Pittsburgh, PA: WJAS-AM wasn’t included in list of 15 stations. Limbaugh was moved there 8/7/14, and his old station flipped to a country format

MEASURING THE FOX NEWS EFFECT

I was reading a short description of new research on opinion formation and in addition to finding a new concept - "bounded confidence" - I also was led to this 2006 NBER paper:

The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting
Stefano DellaVigna, Ethan Kaplan

NBER Working Paper No. 12169
Issued in April 2006
NBER Program(s): POL

Does media bias affect voting? We address this question by looking at the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20 percent of US towns. Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely idiosyncratic. Using a data set of voting data for 9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gain 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns which broadcast Fox News. The results are robust to town-level controls, district and county fixed effects, and alternative specifications. We also find a significant effect of Fox News on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican. We interpret the results in light of a simple model of voter learning about media bias and about politician quality. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for voters subject to non-rational persuasion.

PLEASE CONTINUE...

I used to call people like Palin "invincibly stupid."

Sarah Palin’s top lines at Values Voter Summit
By KATIE GLUECK | 9/26/14 4:57 PM EDT
POLITICO

2. Truth is “an endangered species at 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue.” (The White House is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.)

UPDATE: ABC News also reported this gaffe.

I'M NOT AT ALL SURPRISED

The Fed is basically on the side of the banksters:

It's an extraordinary document. There is not space here to do it justice, but the gist is this: The Fed failed to regulate the banks because it did not encourage its employees to ask questions, to speak their minds or to point out problems.

Just the opposite: The Fed encourages its employees to keep their heads down, to obey their managers and to appease the banks. That is, bank regulators failed to do their jobs properly not because they lacked the tools but because they were discouraged from using them

And it gets worse:

In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.

That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.

Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.

“They wanted me to falsify my findings,” Segarra said in a recent interview, “and when I wouldn’t, they fired me.”

THE COMMENTARY ON ERIC HOLDER REMINDED OF THE ONLY POEM...

by Wallace Stevens that I understand, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, because of the variance in descriptions:

POLITICO: For someone who has been such a punching bag while in office,

Fox Host: Holder Ran The DOJ 'Much Like The Black Panthers Would

Eric Holder’s Legacy: Duplicity, Incompetence, and Obliviousness

Why Holder Quit: The backstory of how Obama lost his ‘heat shield.’

With Eric Holder's Exit, Obama Loses a Key Ally

Eric Holder was the black leader Obama could never be

Republican Lawmakers Mock Eric Holder on His Way Out

Eric Holder Will Leave a Legacy of Civil Rights Activism

Good Riddance, Eric Holder

Eric Holder Finally Throws In the Towel

Obama announces Eric Holder's "bittersweet" departure

Eric Holder didn't send a single banker to jail for the mortgage crisis. Is that justice?

Eric Holder: A legacy of highs and lows as attorney general

HERE'S JUST ONE OF MY PROBLEMS...

I act Dutch but live in America:

Everyone’s a Critic, But Delivery Still Counts
1:36 pm ET
Sep 24, 2014
ByFrancesca Donner
WSJ

According to Erin Meyer, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, it depends who’s doing the criticizing.

If you’re Dutch, on the other hand, you’re much more likely to come out and say it like it is. The sheer directness might be enough to sever ties with that person altogether—unless the person receiving the feedback is also from the Netherlands. In the Netherlands you can give it straight as an arrow to just about anyone, even when that person is your boss. As long as you are calm and matter of fact with a friendly smile, that’s just being professional.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Sometimes I'm flabbergasted by US foreign policy and this is one of those times:

It was also a sign the Saudis might take on a greater security role in the region, something the U.S. has long pressed for.

NOTHING I've read about the Saudi regime leads me to believe this is a good idea.

PETTINESS AND "REAGAN DEMOCRATS"

One guy who lives in my apartment building has been bothered by the fact that he can't polish his (1993 Camaro) car rims back to their original shiny state because they are made of an alloy that simply can't be polished back to a shine.  He's been complaining about this for a week and I consider the wingnut outrage about Pres. Obama not properly saluting is at the same level of pettiness and will last about as long.

A TINY BIT MORE ABOUT THE KHORASAN TERRORIST GROUP

First of all, Khorasan is a province in Iran:

Second, there is an Islamic myth about the province:

As in the case of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the Caucasian mujahideen in Dagestan base their struggle on a hadith saying that the end-of-the-world Imam Mehdi will fight at the head of an army of Islam coming from Khorasan - a historical region containing Afghanistan, Central Asia and Pakistan - referred to by Muslim radicals as Black Flags from Khorasan. The Taliban in Pakistan have formed a Lashkar-e-Khorasan to hunt down "American spies" who facilitate drone attacks. In Dagestan, Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists call themselves Black Flags of Khorasan.

There is some evidence that Tamerlan made references to the Army of Khorasan. There is also likelihood that he had access to the internet instructions about bomb-making radiating from the Al Qaeda indoctrinators of Yemen. Also detected is a likely link of Tamerlan to an on-line English-language magazine, "Inspire". (The Yemen-based persuader Al-Awlaki and the Pakistani-born editor of "Inspire" Samir Khan were both killed by a drone in 2012.)
SOURCE:
Sunday Times (Islamabad)
April 28, 2013 Sunday
Boston bombing and Pakistan
LENGTH: 914 words
DATELINE: Karachi

I WASN'T GOING TO READ THIS POLITICO ARTICLE

Mostly because the Lois Lerner "scandal" is as unreal as the Benghazi "scandal" but Mark Levin just mentioned (he comes on at 9 PM Tucson time) that Lerner had some thoughts about his audience which I find to be truthful. From page 2 of the POLITICO article:

Republicans, who earlier this year held her in contempt of Congress, accuse Lerner of using her position to push for audits and denial of tax-exempt status to Karl Rove’s Crossroads and other GOP groups.

They’ve released partial emails, including one after President Barack Obama’s reelection in which she and Miles bemoan far-right conservative talk radio, calling them “crazies” and “a—holes.”

The couple said the exchange was taken entirely out of context. Miles wrote the email after listening to callers on the “Mark Levin Show” rant about stockpiling food and guns to fight because Obama was going to run the country into the ground. Lerner, then in London, responded from her work email about hearing chatter about the U.S. being a broken system for its fiscal brinkmanship over the debt ceiling.

IT'S NOT NEWS THAT THE "DUMBEST MAN ON THE INTERNET"...

(Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit) is in a snit over nothing but it is news that ABC News decided to run with this nothing-burger:

President Obama Gesture to Marines Dubbed ‘Latte Salute’
By Devin Dwyer

Sep 23, 2014 2:19pm
ABC NEWS - THE NOTE

Some are calling it the “latte salute.”

When President Obama stepped off Marine One at the Wall Street landing zone in New York City, en route the United Nations, he saluted two Marines at the bottom of the stairs as he held a coffee cup in the same hand.

IT CAN'T BE PUTIN 'CAUSE HE HUNTS BEARS W/O A SHIRT...

I found a few pics like this on Facebook -

link

link
and then I got halfway through this article about our problems with Russia and found this crap:

We embark on this road to confrontation without sure, seasoned hands at the wheel in the White House; in modern history, no U.S. administration has proved more inept at dealing with Russia. This ineptitude, combined with the relative weakness of Russia’s conventional armed forces, a still-lethal nuclear arsenal, a military doctrine that foresees the use of battlefield nuclear weapons to de-escalate conflicts, to say nothing of a wounded psyche, make this a perilous moment in history

CLIMATE CHANGE NEWS

First, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for using anti-apartheid tactics all over the world to fight for action on climate change.  Second, GOOGLE chairman Eric Schmidt has publicly stated that ALEC is "just literally lying" about climate change.

NICE BUT WHY NOT MAKE THIS RETROACTIVE?

Sec. of the Treasury Jack Lew announced some crackdowns on inversions:

Along with the IRS, the Treasury issued a formal notice that the government said would prevent U.S. companies from accessing a foreign subsidiary's earnings while deferring U.S. taxes through what it called "hopscotch" loans. 

The notice would also prevent inverted companies from restructuring a foreign subsidiary in order to access the subsidiary's earnings tax-free, the Treasury said. 

The move would also block inverted companies from transferring cash or property from what's known as a "controlled foreign corporation" to the new parent company to completely avoid U.S. tax.

And finally, the Treasury said the notice would make it "more difficult" for U.S. entities to invert by strengthening the requirement that the former owners of the U.S. entity own less than 80 percent of the new combined entity.

Unfortunately, currently existing inversions are NOT affected:

The measures, a senior Treasury official said, will take effect for any deal that is not closed by Monday.

FILE UPLOADS

I just heard Dr. Ben Carson babble with Hannity and they announced that for the next 24 hours, Hannity listeners could get a free copy of Carson's book "One Nation" by clicking on the link on Hannity's site. I went there and there wasn't a link so I found a free copy and put it on my Google Drive. This is the link.

I also put the EXCEL 2013 file I made to analyze appearances in the Sunday shows here.

OUR BEST ALLY????

That's how some conservatives describe Israel despite plenty of contrary evidence:

Russia's Ukrainian Adventure May Have Crippled Its Drone Program

By Rich Smith | More Articles
September 21, 2014 | Comments (4)
The Motley Fool

Aided by Israel, Russia is building a $9 billion drone air force. Or rather, Russia was building a $9 billion air force.

Six years ago, Russian ground forces, who were invading the sovereign state of Georgia on their southern border, found themselves flummoxed by Georgia's collection of unmanned aerial vehicles -- commonly referred to as "drones."

Within a year of the war's end, Russia had inked a $53 million deal to purchase two Bird Eye-400, eight I-View Mk150, and two Searcher Mk.2 drones from Israel Aerospace Industries.

A year later, Russia upped its purchase order by an additional $400 million worth of drones.

SUNDAY SHOW FOLLOW-UP

I posted below about the ideological bias on the Sunday Talk Shows and wrote that I would do a little analysis on the guests who were not identified by party or ideology.  There were 150 guests I classified as either liberal or not conservative and they had a total of 1069 appearances.  Lumping in the "non-conservatives" with liberals does give the liberals a higher number even though some of these are definitely not liberal.  There were 90 I classified as conservative and they had a total of 552 appearances.

Here's the summary of guests who had 5 or more appearances broken down by number of guests in each category and total number of appearances.

KNOWN	CONSERVATIVE	182	1,568
	LIBERAL	28	265
ASSIGNED	CONSERVATIVE	90	552
	LIBERAL	150	1069
CONSERVATIVE	272	2120
LIBERAL	178	1334

Media Matters provides a summary of a NY Times analysis here.

THE #1 WACKED-OUT ISIS STATEMENT

This woman is a waste of bandwidth:

Fox’s Judge Jeanine: ISIS is ‘Single Biggest Threat’ in American History

by Andrew Desiderio | 12:19 am, September 21st, 2014