Lawrence Ferlinghetti—Poet, Publisher, and Activist—Dies in His Beloved San Francisco at Age 101 (from Common Dreams)

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was photographed in 1977 in the venerable City Lights Bookstore he founded in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood in 1953. (Photo: Janet Fries/Getty Images) 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti—acclaimed poet, playwright, novelist, artist, independent publisher, activist, first Poet Laureate of San Francisco, and co-founder of the iconic City Lights Bookstore—died Monday at the age of 101. 

"Poetry should be dissident and subversive and an agent for change."
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The San Francisco Chronicle reports Ferlinghetti died of a degenerative lung condition in the apartment where he lived for 40 years in the city's North Beach neighborhood. That's where he founded City Lights on Columbus Avenue in 1953 with professor Peter D. Martin. 

After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II and earning a master's degree in English literature at Columbia University, Ferlinghetti—a native of Yonkers, New York and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—moved to San Francisco and opened his bookstore and publishing house. 

"It was still the last frontier when I arrived in 1951," he recalled on his 96th birthday. "It was a wide-open city. You could come here and just start anything you wanted, because, in New York City, it would have been impossible to start a bookstore unless you had lots of money." 

City Lights—which published the works of Beat giants including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg—was the lodestar in the firmament of a burgeoning San Francisco-based counterculture that over the course of two tumultuous decades would transform the world. Ferlinghetti's publication of Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956) would establish City Lights as the Beat generation's most venerable literary institution and hangout. 

It also hung a target on the Beats' backs, as Howl—which referenced illicit drugs and sex acts—resulted in the 1957 arrests of Ferlinghetti and City Lights manager Shig Murao and a subsequent obscenity trial. The judge in the case ruled that Howl was not obscene due to its "redeeming social significance." 

"Lawrence Ferlinghetti kicked open the door to free up publishing in this country," San Francisco novelist Herbert Gold told the Chronicle. "He risked a great deal for a lot of books that are now considered classics."

Although he did not consider himself a Beat poet, Ferlinghetti was nonetheless a giant of the Beat scene, publishing his first poetry collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, in 1958. The book contains some of Ferlinghetti's most renowned works, including "I Am Waiting" and "Junkman's Obbligato," which were recited with jazz accompaniment. 

In one work from the book, "In Goya's Greatest Scenes We Seem to See," Ferlinghetti compares the suffering depicted in Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War)—the Spanish romantic painter's depiction of the Napoleonic Wars—to post-World War II America: 

they are the same people/ only further from home/ on freeways fifty lanes wide/ on a concrete continent/ spaced with bland billboards/ illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

Ferlinghetti's belief that "art should be accessible to all people, not just a handful of highly educated intellectuals," was evident in his work, which often painted pictures of everyday people doing everyday things. From "In Golden Gate Park That Day" (1958): 

In Golden Gate Park that day/ a man and his wife were coming along/ thru the enormous meadow/ which was the meadow of the world/ He was wearing green suspenders/ and carrying an old beat-up flute in one hand/ while his wife had a bunch of grapes/ which she kept handing out individually/ to various squirrels as if each were a little joke 

A self-described philosophical anarchist, Ferlinghetti was a leading figure in the anti-war movement of the 1960s and beyond. In 1967—the year of San Francisco's famous "Summer of Love"—he was a featured presenter at the Human Be-In, and the following year he was a key signatory of the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge against the Vietnam War. In January 1968 Ferlinghetti was sentenced to 17 days in the Alameda County Jail for protesting outside an Oakland military induction center. 

Ferlinghetti's activism did not fade away like that psychedelic summer of '67; it lived on in his words and deeds. One of his final poems, "Trump's Trojan Horse" (2017), began: 

Homer didn't live long enough/ To tell of Trump's White House/ Which is his Trojan Horse/ From which all the President's men/ Burst out to destroy democracy 

"Poetry should be dissident and subversive and an agent for change," wrote Ferlinghetti in his final book, Poetry as Insurgent Art (2007). "Question everything and everyone, including Socrates, who questioned everything. Strive to change the world in such a way that there is no further need to be dissident. A natural-born nonviolent enemy of the state."

Although he never lost his love for his adopted city, Ferlinghetti did lament the transformational changes it underwent beginning in the first dot-com boom and bust, blasting Silicon Valley millionaires who flooded San Francisco with "bags full of cash and no manners" and priced his fellow artists out of town. From "The Poetic City That Was" (2001): 

Fifty years later/ he awoke one fine morning/ looking for anywhere he could live and work/ The new owners of his old flat now wanted $4,500 a month/ And many of his friends were also evicted

On Tuesday, tributes poured in from Ferlinghetti's friends and fans.

"It was my good fortune to have worked closely with him for more than 50 years," City Lights co-owner and former executive director Nancy Peters told the Chronicle. "We've lost a great poet and visionary. Lawrence—never Larry—was a legend in his time and a great San Franciscan." 

How to really fix COVID-19 vaccine appointment scheduling (The Conversation)

 

If you’ve tried to get a COVID-19 vaccine appointment, you know how frustrating the process can be. People are spending hours obsessively refreshing websites, hoping an appointment will open up somewhere. They scan Facebook groups for tips and insider information. One writer compared it to Soviet-style queues for cabbage.

The competition for slots will only worsen when the COVID-19 vaccination priority list opens to the broader public.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Much of this misery comes from poorly designed vaccine sign-up websites, but the problem is more fundamental.

As an expert in health care operations and vaccine supply chains, I have closely followed the difficulties in connecting COVID-19 vaccine doses with people. I believe the best solution to vaccine appointment scheduling lies in building a trustworthy one-stop preregistration system. The U.S. has now surpassed half a million deaths from COVID-19, and new fast-spreading variants of the coronavirus are adding to the urgency. As states scramble to speed up vaccinations and try to prevent their limited doses going to waste, a handful of them are testing this approach.

Why did the traditional model go so wrong?

Without a clear scheduling system, people have waited in line at vaccination sites only to discover that they couldn’t get the vaccine yet. David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

The traditional vaccine sign-up model does not work when the demand for vaccines far exceeds supply.

Under that model, the only way to get vaccinated is to reserve an appointment slot. Naturally, the fear of being left out drives people to attempt to sign up as soon as appointment slots become available. This leads to a rush of people endlessly refreshing the same websites for the few appointments available.

Even if all states had one-stop appointment websites that did not crash under high volume, the limited vaccine supply would mean most appointment slots would quickly be taken. That could make it even harder for people who aren’t tech-savvy to get the vaccine.

To fix the broken vaccine scheduling system, we need to break this cycle.

Most people have fairly realistic expectations about when they will be vaccinated. Their anxiety comes from the fear of being left out. To address this anxiety, the system must be designed to reassure people that they will receive vaccines within a reasonable time frame.

In Israel, which leads the world in COVID-19 vaccination, citizens do not need to actively sign up for vaccine appointments. Rather, they are notified when they become eligible via text messages and can then make an appointment.

States can echo this “push” system by creating a one-stop preregistration portal where everyone registers once and is notified to schedule appointments when their turn arrives. The preregistration step helps avoid waves of people trying to get appointments at the same time, which can crash computer systems, as Massachusetts experienced on Feb. 18.

A good system will make it easy for people to check their position in the vaccine queue at any time, provide an estimated time to vaccination based on frequently updated supply information and then send notifications when their date is getting close. Underlying the system, vaccine doses can be allocated among eligible users on the registry using a lottery system.

A well-designed preregistration system can also help avoid vaccine doses going to waste because of no-shows. With an active waitlist, vaccine planners can match supply with demand in an agile manner and offer appointments to people a few days in advance rather than scheduling appointments weeks out when the supply isn’t certain. Research in appointment scheduling has shown that no-shows are more likely under long lead times.

West Virginia uses a statewide preregistration system and has so far been more successful at vaccinating its population than almost every other state. It controls the process from preregistration to appointment. To get the vaccine, almost all residents, with a few exceptions, are required to use the state system, with options to register either online or by phone.

Minnesota just launched a similar system. “We still have a frustratingly limited vaccine supply from the federal government, but every Minnesotan should know their chance to get a vaccine will come. Today, we are connecting them directly to that process,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said in announcing the preregistration system on Feb. 18.

More states should follow their lead as more of the general population becomes eligible for the vaccine in the coming months.

In Massachusetts, where a vaccine sign-up website crashed shortly after launching, nearly every member of the state’s congressional delegation has urged Gov. Charlie Baker to launch a preregistration system. A few other states already have limited preregistration systems that could be expanded.

Preregistration can still create confusion if the process isn’t coordinated and users don’t know what to expect.

In Virginia, for example, counties created their own preregistration systems, but when the pharmacy chain CVS announced it was taking appointments, users didn’t know what to do. Most Virginia counties are now shifting to a statewide preregistration system. In Santa Cruz County, California, residents have struggled with a preregistration portal that doesn’t provide confirmation or an estimated time to vaccination.

“Efficiency-equity trade-off” has become a buzzword in discussing COVID-19 vaccination. With limited vaccine supply, the traditional sign-up model has proven to be both inefficient and inequitable. Moving away from that model and establishing one-stop preregistration systems is one key to resolving the painful vaccine scheduling process.

-Tinglong Dai, Associate Professor of Operations Management & Business Analytics, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing

Re: The Illinois Teachers Retirement System (by Bob Lyons)

“I taught for thirty-two years and took advantage the last year the state offered the five plus five option to retire early. That was in June of 1994; this year, I will have been retired for twenty-seven years.

“In that period covering a year short of sixty years, I have never met anyone who claimed they went into teaching for the pension. While it was just something that happened at the end of our teaching, it has proved to be an outstanding benefit to cap a rewarding career. The only drawback is that our pension system was not drawn up with the aid of normal accounting standards and the help of an actuary.   

“Instead, it was created by politicians and their time horizon was quite different compared to actuarial science. Instead of a goal to achieve full funding in the near future, the politicians from the start were only willing to provide sums small enough to allow them to take advantage of existing revenue for more ‘popular’ projects sure to gain votes. 

“When told that insufficient spending would cost the state more money in the long run, the legislators basically showed they really only cared about the next election. Of course, the lack of money spent early has cost the state much more money later. Now the State of Illinois is painfully learning why credit card companies are so happy to accept only minimum payments from their card holders as the state now finds itself making payments to the fund in the billions to make up for ‘saving’ thousands of dollars earlier. 

“The Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS) ended its fiscal year on June 30, 2020 with $51.6 billion and was 40.5% funded. In comparison, the State Employees Retirement System (SERS) was 38.7% funded; the State University Retirement System (SURS) was 42.2% funded; the Judicial Retirement System was 39.3% funded, and the General Assembly Retirement Systems (GERS) is only 17.1% funded. The total unfunded liability for the state as of June of last year was $144.3 billion.

“Governor Pritzker’s FY 2022 budget announced last week calls for a total pension contribution from the general revenue fund of $9.4 billion, plus $1.1 billion from other state funds, and $264.8 million specifically earmarked for the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund. The state’s payment to TRS alone is $5,693,707,000. Moreover, in the governor’s budget is the full state contribution to TRIP and to our medical insurance of $143,369,000.

“This is significant because in his first two budgets Pritzker had zeroed out that contribution to make it appear that he was ‘saving money.’ Since the General Assembly put it back in when they passed the budget the last two years, the governor has simply accepted reality this year. The Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund is separate from TRS and, as you may know, is paid for by the city of Chicago. 

“At one time, CTPF was 100 percent funded. The city asked the state if they could skip payments and was given that permission. Between no new payments for a number of years, plus losing money in both the Dot com bust and the Great Recession of 2008, CTFP is now down to a funding of 47.4%. The city is now making its payments plus the state—and out of guilt I would think—also makes a contribution. 

“I have given you this information before, but it is well worth repeating. 

Where Does Your Pension Come From?

Proceeds from Investments 40.30% 

Contribution from Active Teachers 15.75% 

Required payments from School Districts 2.34% 

Contribution from State of Illinois 41.57% 

(Composite of sources of revenue from FY 2001 to FY 2020).

“If we were fully funded, or anywhere close to it, the money from investments would be a much larger percentage and the other three sources would be much smaller. TRS makes money with our investments, but every year it is now required to sell funds that are making a profit in order to provide our pensions. TRS has, on average, made 7.7% annually for the last 30 years and 9.17% annually for the last 40 years.”

-Bob Lyons, former TRS Trustee

Trump's DC hotel restaurant had a seven-step process for serving Trump Diet Cokes

 

“When former President Donald Trump ventured outside of the White House to the BLT Prime restaurant inside the Trump International Hotel, his penchant for Diet Cokes came with him. In a Washingtonian magazine report, employees revealed how the restaurant had an intricate, seven-step process for serving the soda to Trump. Employees were instructed to follow a ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ handbook, which Washingtonian obtained, whenever Trump was dining at BLT Prime. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the first step involved a waiter ‘discreetly’ offering a small bottle of Purell hand sanitizer for the former president, a self-described germaphobe.

“The waiter then greeted Trump and asked if he preferred his Diet Coke with or without ice. The third step involved the waiter presenting a polished tray with chilled bottles and glasses to be used for either of Trump's preferences. The waiter would then open the bottle of Diet Coke within sight of Trump. Next, the waiter would hold a bottle opener "by the lower third" and the Diet Coke in the same position while popping the bottle open. Once poured, the drink was then placed to the right of Trump on the dining table. The final step? The waiter had to repeat the process until the former president left the restaurant.

“While dining, Trump reportedly ate the same meal with his Diet Coke, which included popovers, shrimp cocktail, and a well-done steak. Favored dessert options, which Trump didn't always indulge in, included an apple pie or chocolate cake. In the Oval Office, Trump reportedly consumed a dozen Diet Cokes a day, using a red button on the Resolute desk to request the sodas” (Business Insider).

 

Texas Gets Lay’d: How the Bush Family turned off the lights by Greg Palast

• I get that, but it’s not their fault, a least not the victims burning family heirlooms to stave off frostbite.

  “What happened was entirely predictable,” power distribution expert attorney Beth Emory said of the blackouts. She told me this twenty years ago, after the first blackouts in Texas and California, following the cruel experiment called “deregulation” of the power industry.

  Until 1992, the USA had just about the lowest electricity prices in the world and the most reliable system.

  For a century, power companies had been limited by law to recovering their provable costs plus a “reasonable,” i.e. small, profit. But in 1992, George H. W. Bush, in the last gasps of his failed presidency, began to deregulate the industry.

  “Deregulate” is a misnomer. “De-criminalize” describes it best. With the “free market” supposedly setting the price of power, Texas-based Enron was freed to use such techniques as “Ricochet,” “Get Shorty,” and “Death Star” to blow prices through the roof when weather shut down power plants. (This week was not the first game of Texas Gouge’m.)

  Enron was not the only Lone Star power pirate. Houston Power & Light was “ramping” plants up and down at odd hours which whistleblowers said was deliberate.

  Bush’s son “Shrub,” Texas Gov. George W. Bush, signed a law in 1999 forcing the state’s hapless customers to accept any price the “free” market dictated. Enron’s CEO Ken Lay showed his appreciation by becoming Baby Bush’s number one donor for Dubya’s presidential ambitions.

  This week, wholesale electric prices in Texas, normally $50 per megawatt-hour, busted over $9,000/MWHR. Again. It happens with every cold snap and heat wave. One shop owner, Akilah Scott-Amos, showed the Daily Beast her electric bills which blew up from $34 per month to $450 for a single day.

  

  On Saturday, February 13, 2021 Griddy customer Akilah Scott-Amos was charged $456.78 for a single day’s power. By Monday, her bill had increased by another $2,500. Last year, she paid $33.93 for the entire month of February.

  CUTTING THE POWER LINES TO TEXAS

  Every state in America interconnects their power lines to provide back-up in case of emergencies. Except Texas. To prevent federal regulation, Texas deliberately has refused to connect its lines to other states.

  The federal government, which has restored a modicum of protection, can only police utilities that are connected to the national grid. So, Texas literally cut itself of from the rest of the USA’s electric system.

  Texas Governor Greg Abbott blames windmills for this week’s deadly disaster — some wind farms froze.

  But California is sitting on massive excess power capacity. With 80,000 megawatts of capacity, the Golden State often gives away power free to other states. This week, the sun is shining here in LA — and our solar, wind and hydro generators could easily un-thaw Texas if the Lone Star hadn’t been Lay’d by the Bushes.

  Of course, the rulers of Texas, the beneficiaries of freezer-burn pricing, know this. This week, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Trump’s first Energy Secretary, said, “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”

  Well, Rick and Ted can tan in Cancun while oxygen machines in Loredo shut down.

  THE SOLUTION: DEMOCRACY

  I didn’t need a crystal ball in 1998 when I predicted that California, Texas, Oregon and Rio de Janeiro would go dark and cold if they de-regulated their power markets.

  In a series of lectures at Cambridge University, the London School of Economics and the University of Sao Paolo [yes, I had a life before journalism], I said, in academic terms, the screamingly obvious: There is no such thing as a “free” market in electricity. Electricity isn’t a bagel. You can’t skip it in the morning when the price goes berserk nor shop at another electricity store.

  The alternative to blackouts and price gouging is Democracy. Regulation is merely the enforcement of publicly voted rules to protect the public from economic overlords.

  This alternative to free market mania was first applied by the man who electrified America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Listen to FDR:

  To the people of the country I have but one answer on this subject. Judge me by the enemies I have made. Judge me by the selfish purposes of these utility leaders who have talked of radicalism while they were selling watered stock to the people and using our schools to deceive the coming generation. My friends, my policy is as radical as the Constitution of the United States. I promise you this: Never shall the Federal Government part with its sovereignty or with its control of its power resources while I’m President of the United States.

  To make his point, the Roosevelt Justice Department arrested the nation’s top utility executive and busted up his holding companies.

  Democratizing the electric system also produced another alternative to Ken-Lay-ism: socialism. In the 1930s, much of America had no electric service. Roosevelt launched the massive rural electric cooperatives, Tennessee Valley and Bonneville Power Administrations, and other publicly-owned systems that provide cheap, reliable non-profit power to one fifth of America.

  DARKNESS AT NOON IN PORTLAND

  The reason Portland, Oregon, went dark this week goes back to July 20, 2005, when the Governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, vetoed a bill that would have allowed the city’s residents to take ownership of the Enron-owned power system.

  According to my professors, Milton Friedman and George Stigler, the problem with the formerly regulated and publicly-owned systems is that they were too reliable. Utilities, which could only charge what they spent, supposedly “gold plating” the system – i.e. invested too much into making sure it works.

  The privateers of Portland and of Houston can now pocket the savings from letting their systems decay. And they have.

  So, the solution to the deadly darkness is obvious: More Roosevelt, less Bush.

  My treatise on the utility industry, co-authored with Jerrold Oppenheim and Theo MacGregor, was published by the United Nations International Labor Organization as Democracy and Regulation: A Guide to the Control of Privatized Public Services [Pluto Press 2003].

On February 18, Perseverance Rover landed safely on Mars – a lead scientist explains the tech and goals

 

Editor’s note: On Feb. 18, NASA’s Mars 2020 mission arrived at the red planet and successfully landed the Perseverance Rover on the surface. Jim Bell is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and has worked on a number of Mars missions. He is the primary investigator leading a team in charge of one of the camera systems on Perseverance. We spoke with him in late January for The Conversation’s new podcast, The Conversation Weekly.

What’s the goal of this mission?

What we’re looking for is evidence of past life, either direct chemical or organic signs in the composition and the chemistry of rocks, or textural evidence in the rock record. The environment of Mars is extremely harsh compared to the Earth, so we’re not really looking for evidence of current life. Unless something actually gets up and walks in front of the cameras, we’re really not going to find that.

This color–enhanced photo shows the ancient river delta in the Jezero Crater where Perseverance will look for signs of life. NASA/JPL/JHU-APL/MSSS/Brown University

Where is the Perseverance Rover landing to look for ancient life?

There was a three- or four-year process that involved the entire global community of Mars and planetary science researchers to figure out where to send this rover. We chose a crater called Jezero. Jezero has a beautiful river delta in it, preserved from an ancient river that flowed down into that crater and deposited sediments. This is kind of like the delta at the end of the Mississippi River in Louisiana which is depositing sediments very gently into the Gulf of Mexico.

On Earth, this shallow water is a very gentle environment where organic molecules and fossils can actually be gently buried and preserved in very fine-grained mudstones. If a Martian delta operates the same way, then it’s a great environment for preserving evidence of things that were flowing in that water that came from the ancient highlands above the crater.

There’s lots of things we don’t know, but there was liquid water there. There were heat sources – there were active volcanoes 2, 3, 4 billion years ago on Mars – and there are impact craters from asteroids and comets dumping lots of heat into the ground as well as organic molecules. It’s a very short list of places in the solar system that meet those constraints, and Jezero is one of those places. It’s one of the best places that we think to go to do this search for life.

The Perseverance Rover is 90% spare parts from the Curiosity Rover but has a few new tools on board. NASA/JPL-Caltech

What scientific tools is Perseverance carrying?

The Perseverance Rover looks a lot like Curiosity on the outside because it’s made from something like 90% spare parts from Curiosity – that’s how NASA could afford this mission. Curiosity has a pair of cameras – one wide angle, one telephoto.

The Mastcam-Z includes two cameras with zoom lenses allowing researchers to create three-dimensional images of the Martian landscape. MSSS/ASU

In Perseverance, we’re sending similar cameras, but with zoom technology so we can zoom from wide angle to telephoto with both cameras – the “Z” in Mastcam-Z stands for zoom. This allows us to get great stereo images. Just like our left eye and our right eye build a three-dimensional image in our brain, the zoom cameras on Perserverance are a left eye and a right eye. With this, we can build a three-dimensional image back on Earth when we get those images.

3D images allow us to do a whole range of things scientifically. We want to understand the topography of Mars in much more detail than we’ve been able to in the past. We want to put the pieces of the delta geology story together not just with two-dimensional, spatial information, but with height as well as texture. And we want to make 3D maps of the landing site.

Our engineering and driving colleagues really need that information too. These 3D images will help them decide where to drive by helping to identify obstacles and slopes and trenches and rocks and stuff like that, allowing them to drive the rover much deeper into places than they would have been able to otherwise.

And finally, we’re going to make really cool 3D views of our landing site to share with the public, including movies and flyovers.

The sample tubes are specially built to store the rock and soil cores for future pickup. NASA/JPL-Caltech

What else is different about this mission?

Perseverance is intended to be the first part of a robotic sample return mission from Mars. So instead of just drilling into the surface like the Curiosity Rover does, Perseverance will drill and core into the surface and cache those little cores into tubes about the size of a dry-erase marker. It will then put those tubes onto the surface for a future mission later this decade to pick up and then bring back to the Earth.

Perseverance won’t come back to the Earth, but the plan is to bring the samples that we collect back.

In the meantime, we’ll be doing all of the science that any great rover mission would do. We are going to characterize the site, explore the geology and measure the atmospheric and weather properties.

How will you get those samples back to Earth?

This is where it gets a little less certain, because these are all ideas and missions in the works. NASA and the European Space Agency are collaborating on a concept to build and launch a lander that will send a little fetch rover that goes and gets the little tubes, picks them up and brings them back to the lander. Waiting on the lander would be a small rocket called a Mars Ascent Vehicle, or MAV. Once the samples are loaded into the MAV, it launches them into Mars orbit.

Then you’ve got this grapefruit- to soccer-ball-sized canister up there, and NASA and the Europeans are collaborating on an orbiter that will search for that canister, capture it and then rocket it back to the Earth, where it will land in the Utah desert. What could possibly go wrong?

If successful, that’ll be the first time we’ve done that from Mars. The scientific tools on the rovers are good, but nothing like the labs back on Earth. Bringing those samples back is going to be absolutely critical to getting the most out of the samples.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb. 4. The editor’s note was updated to reflect the successful landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars.

(The Conversation)

"Rush Limbaugh: the infamous conservative radio host known for his messages of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and bigotry"

 

• He began airing “Barack, the Magic Negro,” a racist parody song about then-Sen. Barack Obama’s popularity with many white voters, in 2007.
• In John K. Wilson's book, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh's Assault on Reason, the host was quoted as saying this homophobic statement: "When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it's an invitation." 
• In his "Undeniable Truths," written as part of an article for the Sacramento Union in 1988, Limbaugh wrote, "Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society."
• In a later updated version, he wrote:
• "The Earth's eco-system is not fragile."
• "Women should not be allowed on juries where the accused is a stud."
• "The Los Angeles riots were not caused by the Rodney King verdict. The Los Angeles riots were caused by rioters."
• On The Rush Limbaugh Show in 2004, he said, "I think it's time to get rid of this whole National Basketball Association. Call it the TBA, the Thug Basketball Association, and stop calling them teams. Call 'em gangs."
• As a young broadcaster in the 1970s, Limbaugh once told a Black caller: “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back,” according to Fair.
• During The Rush Limbaugh Show in 2013, he said, "If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it's Caucasians. The white race has probably had fewer slaves and for a briefer period of time than any other in the history of the world."
• During The Rush Limbaugh Show in 2017, regarding LGBTQ+ politicians being elected to office, he said, "I guarantee there'd be some people in the Republican establishment who will now think, yeah, we need to do this. We need to provide a home, we need to provide a comforting atmosphere for the tranny community and the gay community. But those people are voting Democrat anyway."
• " 'Ching cha. Ching chang cho chow. Cha Chow. Ching Cho. Chi ba ba ba. Kwo kwa kwa kee. Cha ga ga. Ching chee chay. Ching zha bo ba. Chang cha. Chang cho chi che. Cha dee. Ooooh chee bada ba. Jee jee cho ba.' Nobody was translating, but that's the closest I can get," he said on his radio show while "translating" Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2011.
• Limbaugh called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” after she publicly advocated for universal contraception coverage, NPR reported in 2012...