The intense campaign to cut advertising to “The Rush Limbaugh Show” took another turn Thursday when one of the first companies to pull its ads reportedly asked to return to the radio show — only to be told by Team Limbaugh that the conservative host no longer would give his endorsement.

A Limbaugh spokesman said that California mattress company Sleep Train asked to restart a “voiced endorsement” from Limbaugh that it had publicly cut off last week. The company said at the time that it “does not condone such negative comments toward any person.”

Several activist groups have called for companies to drop their ads after Limbaugh called a Georgetown law school student a “slut” and a “prostitute” for her support of a proposal to mandate birth control in standard healthcare coverage.

Sleep Train’s departure from the program had been billed by some observers as particularly significant because the mattress retailer had been with Limbaugh show for 25 years. Yet the tone of Sleep Train’s withdrawal statement last Friday hinted it might not be pulling out for the long run.

“As a diverse company, Sleep Train does not condone such negative comments directed toward any person,” Sleep Train said at the time. “We have currently pulled our ads with Rush Limbaugh.”

Still, Washington Post blogger Erik Wemple called Sleep Train’s decision “an act worth crediting,” saying that lost ads would have more of an effect on Limbaugh than “well-crafted expressions of outrage from the usual organs.”

Limbaugh spokesman Brian Glicklich on Thursday forwarded a copy of an email that he said had been sent to Sleep Train Chief Executive Dale Carlsen. In it, Glicklich wrote that Limbaugh had personally received the company’s requests to resume advertising on his show.

“Unfortunately,” Glicklich wrote, “your public comments were not well received by our audience, and did not accurately portray either Rush Limbaugh’s character or the intent of his remarks. Thus, we regret to inform you that Rush will be unable to endorse Sleep Train in the future.”

Read the rest here.

Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed discovered this little gem of a video, in which then-law student Barack Obama spoke at a protest in favor of Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell.

Kaczynski explains what the protest was all about.

Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of “critical race theory,” which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard’s denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school’s professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — “until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty,” and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.

Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as “the first black president.” He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.

Probably the most amazing thing about it is the fact that Obama’s speech-giving style is so little changed since his days at Harvard. Obama has the same soaring cadence, dramatic pauses, and light-hearted jokes that you find in almost every one of his speeches. ”

Watch Obama here

“I’ll always be a Colt”

DALLAS COWBOYS STAR SUED You Can’t HIDE from Your $2 Million Debt!!

What a loser statement to make…..

By Jeff Poor

On Saturday, Carbonite CEO David Friend released a statement on his company’s website declaring that Carbonite had decided to “withdraw” advertising from Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in the wake of his controversial remarks involving Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke because it will “ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse”:

Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.

However, it hasn’t done much to contribute to his company’s stock price. Since the market opened on Monday through its close today, Carbonite stock (NASDAQ:CARB) has plummeted nearly 12 percent, outpacing the drop of the NASDAQ index in that same time period by nine-and-a-half points. It was also one of the biggest decliners on the NASDAQ on Tuesday.

“Former Porsche SE (PAH3) Chief Financial Officer Holger Haerter is one of the people charged with fraud in Germany over statements made when refinancing a 10 billion- euro ($13.2 billion) loan, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Three men are accused of understating Porsche’s liquidity needs by 1.4 billion euros if all purchase options the company held on Volkswagen AG (VOW) (VOW3) shares had been exercised, Stuttgart prosecutors said in an e-mailed statement today, without identifying the suspects or the bank by name. The managers also withheld some information about put options tied to VW shares that Porsche sold, prosecutors said….”

Read more

“A Morgan Stanley managing director was arrested and charged with a hate crime for allegedly threatening and stabbing a taxi driver of Middle Eastern descent back in December over a cab fare dispute from the city to his multi-million dollar Connecticut home, the Connecticut Post reports.

From the CTPost:

Darien police charged William Bryan Jennings, 47, of Knollwood Lane, with second-degree assault, theft of services and second-degree intimidation based on race or bigotry. He was released after posting $9,500 bond and was to appear at court March 7. Jennings denied the allegations and through his attorney, Eugene Riccio, said he is the victim in the case.

Police say Jennings, who is currently the co-head of fixed income capital markets at Morgan Stanley, refused to pay a $200 cab fair and then threatened the driver and used racial slurs, according to the CTPost….”

Read more:

Full article

Greenberg still looking for $25 billion…show him the cheddar.

via TMZ.com

The bomb squad is currently sweeping through Rush Limbaugh‘s Palm Beach home after a suspicious package was discovered on scene.

According to local reports, Limbaugh’s security team discovered the package and notified authorities.

Story developing …

This story never dies……

SOURCE

A prominent U.S. college football coach has been accused of malfeasance at his second job as a hedge fund owner.

Tommy Tuberville, the head football coach at Texas Tech University, his partner and his hedge fund were sued by several investors—whom Tuberville said were also employees—who allege that they were misled and that Tuberville and his partner, John David Stroud, used TS Capital Partners as something of a personal piggy bank.

According to the lawsuit, Tuberville and Stroud gave clients false information, while lying by omission at other times. It also accuses the two men of commingling their own assets with those of the hedge fund, and of failing to register the fund with regulators.

Tuberville denied the allegations.

Tuberville “has never even met or spoken with most of the plaintiffs and he is acquainted minimally with the few other plaintiffs only because they were employees at TS Capital Partners, LLC,” his lawyer said in a statement. “Coach Tuberville absolutely never solicited any investment from any of these or other individuals. It is important to note that Coach Tuberville himself invested significant funds and has never received any return from his own investment. Accordingly, he is hopeful the plaintiffs, who were employees, can help to provide answers as to what transpired. Coach Tuberville has cooperated with every regulatory inquiry and not a single one has asserted that he was involved in any wrongdoing. He intends to vigorously defend the allegations made against him and is confident he will be exonerated.”

Stroud backed his partner up.

“Given Coach Tuberville’s lack of involvement with the day-to-day operations of the company, as well as the fact that he did not solicit the plaintiffs, Mr. Stroud can only surmise that he was named in this lawsuit to garner unwarranted media attention, which has apparently succeeded,” Stroud’s lawyer said in a statement.

The lawsuit, filed in Alabama federal court—TS is based in Auburn, where Tuberville coached for Auburn University for 10 years—indicates that the plaintiffs are afraid they’ll lose all of the $1.76 million they invested from 2008 until last year, noting they have no “credible information regarding the current location and amounts of their invested funds.”

“REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — The first time Michele arrived at the Maple Street homeless shelter three years ago, she was still driving her BMW 325xi, the final remnant of her Silicon Valley affluence.

Her paper wealth of more than $2 million had evaporated a decade earlier, she says, via a stock options fiasco. She had used the options to buy stock in her high-flying software startup, netting a seven-figure profit by the government’s reckoning, but then held the shares until they were nearly worthless. That left her with no cash and a $200,000 tax bill. She had sold nearly everything to cover it: her house, her remaining stocks, her art collection.

Periods of joblessness, punctuated by depression and bouts with alcoholism filled out the ensuing years, with cause and effect blurring into a cohesive whole — one life, unraveling.

She had used the shelter as a way station, finding a new job at another software company within two months and then moving into a rented apartment. But by last November, just before Thanksgiving, she was out of work again, broke again, and back at the shelter, again. This time, she arrived on foot, carrying a backpack that contained all she had left in the world: some clothes, about ten dollars in cash, her laptop computer and her mother’s Omega watch.

She had spent the past four nights inside a Happy Donut, using free Wi-fi to watch “Top Chef” reruns on her laptop. Exhausted, dirty and devoid of a plan, she took refuge at the shelter for single adults, a low-slung building on a dead-end road in an industrial area, across the street from a tire recycling center and next to a prison.

Back when she was traveling regularly for business, she had favored suites at Four Seasons hotels. Now, she checked in to the Maple Street women’s dorm, a brown-carpeted room jammed with five bunk beds. She slipped into a top bunk and absorbed the reality that it had come to this.

Her resume, with a degree in electrical engineering from Duke University and stints in senior positions at software companies, including a post in Paris, had once made her an exemplar of Silicon Valley success. A combination of personal troubles, long-term unemployment and bleak economic times had since turned her into an example of something else: the new suburban poor proliferating in nearly every American metropolitan area — even here, within miles of the shimmering campuses of Google, Apple and other wellsprings of unfathomable wealth….”

Full article

This country is getting crazier by the minute….

Why are so many presidents or hopefuls pictured as J.C. ? I have seen this image repeated with at least 4 or 5 presidents….

LOL.

Full Article

a meatballey tweet

via TMZ–Cops Investigating Murder at Rapper’s Florida Pad

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Mark Zuckerberg gives a second interview to 60 minutes yesterday….