When he’s good, he’s really good.

The Cabbage writes, thus:

… immigration opponents are effectively trying to restrict the flow of conservatives into this country. In survey after survey, immigrants are found to have more traditional ideas about family structure and community than comparable Americans. They have lower incarceration rates. They place higher emphasis on career success. They have stronger work ethics. Immigrants go into poor neighborhoods and infuse them with traditional values.

I infer from this that liberals oppose families and careers and want more people to go to jail. See also David Gelman, “According to David Brooks, staying out of jail is a conservative value.”

Brooks fails to mention that “immigrants” (by which he mostly means “Latinos”) tend to vote for Democrats. It is well documented that increases in the percentage of immigrant populations in a voting district correlates to fewer votes for Republicans.

Even assuming that only immigrants and conservatives love their families and hope to stay out of jail, it may be that immigrants recognize that the Republican Party is less the party of work than the party of moneyed interests trying to establish a corporate encomienda system. The racist dog whistles probably aren’t helping the GOP, either.

This may cheer you up — Rush Limbaugh is costing Cumulus Media millions of dollars.

Cumulus Media today reported a $2.4 million first-quarter decline in revenue related to talk programming, a loss that CEO Lew Dickey attributed, indirectly, to Limbaugh’s controversial remarks about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke.

The earnings call came one day after POLITICO reported that Limbaugh was considering ending his affiliation agreement with Cumulus because he was frustrated with Dickey for blaming him for advertising losses.

Yet when asked about the Limbaugh on today’s earnings call, Dickey again suggested that Limbaugh’s remarks about Fluke played a significant role in the company’s revenue decline.

“We’ve had a tough go of it the last year,” Dickey said. “The facts are indisputable regarding the impact certain things have had on ad dollars.”

Mediaite:

Mediaite’s own sources confirm that the ad troubles in connection with Limbaugh’s show are, indeed, severe. In fact, one source within the radio advertising world with direct knowledge of the ad buys on Limbaugh’s show confirms the extent of the problem: “The vast majority of national advertisers now refuse to air their ads during Rush Limbaugh’s show,” our source tells us.

Radio Ink:

People close to Cumulus tell Radio Ink, “48 of the top 50 network advertisers have “exclude Rush and Hannity” orders. Every major national ad agency has same dictate.”

Enjoy.

I see that the Right is still trying to make an issue out of Benghazi. They’re still struggling to make out just what was done that was so awful, however. Jonathan Bernstein writes,

No, there’s no particular reason that it makes any sense…there’s still no core story that this cover-up was (supposedly) covering up for. But there do appear to be plenty of Usual Suspect conservative movement lawyers and flacks involved. …

…this is another case of how the minimal standards of the GOP-aligned press make Republican politicians lazy. Just chant “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” and you’re sure to generate plenty of positive publicity, so what’s the incentive for actually mastering the substantive issues involved?

And second: there’s a real dogs-not-barking aspect to this; the continued focus on what has appeared for months to be a dry well suggests that there are no real Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton) scandals to investigate.

See also “They’ve Lost Fox And Friends: GOP Claims Of Benghazi ‘Cover Up’ Collapses”

First off, Howard Kurtz has been fired from the Daily Beast. I didn’t know it was possible to be so bad as to be fired from the Daily Beast. How low can you go? Maybe Weekly World News has an opening.

Elsewhere — The Right has seized on a new study that they claim proves that Medicaid doesn’t help anyone and is a big waste of money. As usual, the Right can’t read. Jonathan Cohn and bloggers at the Incidental Economist explain what the study actually says. The Incidental Economist explains,

Let’s review. The good: Medicaid improved rates of diagnosis of depression, increased the use of preventive services, and improved the financial outlook for enrollees. The bad: It did not significantly affect the A1C levels of people with diabetes or levels of hypertension or cholesterol.

This has led many to declare (and we’re not linking to them) that the ACA is now a failed promise, that Medicaid is bad, and that anyone who disagrees is a “Medicaid denier”. How many people saying that are ready to give up insurance for themselves or their family? If they are arguing that Medicaid needs to be reformed in some way, we’re open to that. If they’re arguing that insurance coverage shouldn’t be accessible to poor Americans in any form, we don’t agree. Medicaid may not be perfect, but we don’t think being uninsured is better. This new study supports this view, though certainly not as strongly as it might have.

Cohn makes the point that the purpose of health insurance is not to keep you well, but to pay the medical bills.

That may sound obvious—of course people with insurance are less likely to struggle with medical bills. But it’s also the most under-appreciated accomplishment of health insurance: Whatever its effects on health, it promotes economic security. “The primary purpose of health insurance is to protect you financially in event of a catastrophic medical shock,” Finkelstein told me in an interview, “in the same way that the primary purpose of auto insurance or fire insurance is to provide you money in case you’ve lost something of value.”

And, anyway, the study has been following subjects for only two years. The difference in health care outcomes after five or ten years might be more significant, assuming the study continues.

A day that really has lived in infamy. How could I forget?

Most of the interesting news today was generated by a presidential press conference —

Obama Promises to Try Closing Guantánamo Again

Obama cautions against rush to action in Syria

Permission Structure: Getting deals done with congressional Republicans

Elsewhere: Jonathan Chait has a critique of a David Brooks column. I don’t have the strength to make it through a Brooks column today, but Chait says —

The latest offensive, or counter-offensive, in the passive-aggressive Cold War between David Brooks and Paul Krugman has taken the form of an entire Brooks column not very subtly lambasting Krugman as a tired partisan hack while justifying his own work as thoughtful, elevated, and intellectually independent. It’s unfortunately muddled and self-serving in a way that obscures some pretty important questions about how political commentators ought to do their job.

If Chait’s description is accurate, Brooks may have produced one of the purest samples of distilled bullshit of all time.