Stupidity for the day

Jonathan Weisman has a blog in The New York Times about politics, such as it is:

The election-year fight over the administration’s birth control policy escalated recently, with two unlikely figures— a Georgetown University law student and the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh— taking center stage in the politically charged conflict and pulling much of official Washington into the fray.
One day after Senate Democrats beat back a Republican challenge to the new policy, President Obama called Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown student who had come under incendiary attack from Limbaugh, to thank her for publicly backing his regulations mandating contraception coverage.
The call by Obama to Fluke, an activist on the issue who had been barred by Republicans from testifying at a House hearing last month, provided new fuel to a dispute that has already spilled over into Congress and onto the campaign trail and was becoming a major source of contention between the two parties. Republicans have tried to use the issue to rally conservatives and Catholic voters who see the contraceptive mandate as an infringement on religious liberty.
But in Fluke, and the scorn she has drawn from conservative commentators, Democrats may have found a symbol for what they have called a Republican “war on women” that could spell more difficulty for a Republican Party already showing signs of trouble with female voters.
The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said the president told Fluke that he stood by her in the face of personal attacks on right-wing radio. Obama believes, Carney said, that Limbaugh’s comments about Fluke were “unfortunate attacks”, and Carney called them “reprehensible”.
Fluke, 30, also drew support from the president of Georgetown University, who has differed with her in the past over the university’s refusal to provide insurance coverage for contraception. The university president, John J. DeGioia, said in a statement: “One need not agree with her substantive position to support her right to respectful free expression. And yet, some of those who disagreed with her position— including Rush Limbaugh and commentators throughout the blogosphere and in various other media channels— responded with behavior that can only be described as misogynistic, vitriolic, and a misrepresentation of the position of our student.”
Obama phoned her just before she was to appear on MSNBC. “He encouraged me and supported me and thanked me for speaking out about the concerns of American women,” she told the program’s host, Andrea Mitchell. “And what was really personal for me was that he said to tell my parents that they should be proud. And that meant a lot, because Rush Limbaugh questioned whether or not my family would be proud of me.”
The tempest began after Fluke took public her campaign for contraceptive coverage at Georgetown, a Jesuit university in Washington, as Republicans and Catholic Church leaders were denouncing the Obama administration’s contraception mandate. Limbaugh subsequently called her a “slut” and a “prostitute”, drawing condemnation from Democrats.
On Friday, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, called the Limbaugh comments “inappropriate.” Rick Santorum, the former senator whose run for the Republican presidential nomination has thrust social conservatism into the spotlight, told CNN that Limbaugh was “being absurd”. But, he added, “an entertainer can be absurd.”
In his radio show, Limbaugh said Fluke was being used as a political pawn by Democrats for fund-raising and other purposes. “The Democrats are desperate,” Limbaugh said. “This is all they’ve got, to go out and try to discredit their critics, to impugn and discredit the people who disagree with them.”
Democratic groups were trying to capitalize on the fight, circulating calls for support for Fluke tied to fund-raising appeals. “Personal attacks on a student— and all women— simply can’t be ignored,” said one appeal from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Stand with us, and denounce Rush Limbaugh’s vile attacks.”
Fluke, a third-year law student, was no neophyte to the cause. She served as president and secretary of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice, as vice president of the Women’s Legal Alliance, and as an editor on The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law. In those capacities, Fluke, a Cornell graduate, had other run-ins with the university over contraception access.
A week after she was shut out of the House hearing, House Democrats gave her a platform at an informal Democratic event, where she testified that fellow students at her Jesuit university pay as much as a thousand dollars a year for contraceptives not covered by student health plans.
On his show, Limbaugh said: “What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.” Those remarks and others whipped up a frenzy of denunciations, but  Limbaugh held his ground, declaring: “If we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”
Boehner condemned those comments, but also denounced Democratic fund-raising efforts stemming from the latest Limbaugh imbroglio. “The speaker obviously believes the use of those words was inappropriate, as is trying to raise money off the situation,” said a Boehner spokesman, Michael Steel.
Some advertisers also expressed concern. As complaints about Limbaugh’s comments mounted, a handful of companies said that they had halted their advertising on The Rush Limbaugh Show, at least temporarily. One of the companies, Quicken Loans, wrote on Twitter, “Due to continued inflammatory comments— along with valuable feedback from clients and team members— Quicken Loans has suspended ads on the Rush Limbaugh program.”
On Thursday, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said in a fund-raising appeal that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “women’s health rapid response fund” had raised $1.1 million and was nearing a half million signatures “on our petition against Republicans’ disgraceful assault on women’s rights”.
By Friday afternoon, the campaign committee had raised $1.6 million since 24 February, the day after Representative Darrell Issa’s hearings on the issue. Two petition drives had netted six hundred thousand signatures; a hundred and fifty thousand signed the Democratic petition on Thursday alone.
Republicans condemned such efforts, but the National Republican Congressional Committee launched its own fund-raising campaign against what it called “the Obama administration’s decision to trample on the religious liberty of Christian charities— forcing them to provide free birth control.”

Aww, forcing them to do things they don't believe in... Bummer.
But Limbaugh? No perfection there:

Limbaugh has been married four times and has no children. He was first married, at the age of 26, to Roxy Maxine McNeely, a sales secretary at radio station WHB in Kansas City, Missouri. They were married at the Centenary United Methodist Church in Limbaugh's hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri on 24 September 1977. McNeely filed for divorce in March of 1980, citing "incompatibility." They were formally divorced on 10 July 1980.
In 1983, Limbaugh married Michelle Sixta, a college student and usherette at the Kansas City Royals Stadium Club. They were divorced in 1990, and she remarried the following year.
On 27 May 1994, Limbaugh married Marta Fitzgerald, a 35-year-old aerobics instructor whom he met on the online service CompuServe in 1990. They were married at the house of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who officiated. They were separated on 11 June 2004. Limbaugh announced on the air: "Marta has consented to my request for a divorce, and we have mutually agreed to seek an amicable separation." The divorce was finalized in December of 2004. In September of 2004, Limbaugh became romantically involved with then-television personality Daryn Kagan, and they broke up in February of 2006.
He dated Kathryn Rogers, a party planner from Florida, for three years before he married her on 5 June 2010. During the wedding reception after the ceremony, Elton John entertained the wedding guests for a reported one million dollar fee; however, Limbaugh himself denied that the figure was accurate on his 7 September 2010 radio show.