Rush Limbaugh posted an interesting pair of questions at his web site yesterday: "How can CNN still be on the air with no audience? How can MSNBC have been on the air with no audience? In the old days, they're gone, kaput. Something else is tried. But they stay. And they double down on what they're doing that's losing audience."

A large part of the answer, as I noted on March 30, is that those two networks apparently have suffered very little financially as they have lost audience. That's because, as is apparently the case with most of the major cable channels, their primary source of revenue comes from "subscriptions," also referred to as "carriage fees" or "license fee revenues." In plain English, cable channels get paid a great deal of money even if nobody watches them, and don't benefit as much as would be expected when their audience grows.

Journalists' and leftists' (but I repeat myself) misguided love for Cuba goes back decades. Y'know, free healthcare (cough), yada-yada.

Now that President Obama is unilaterally changing the relationship between the two nations, and as usual getting nothing in return, you'd think that they'd be happy. Heck no. It started several months ago when Fox News's Shepard Smith fretted about how a thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations might "ruin the place," and has been echoed in many quarters since then. Early today, CNN International went over the top, essentially communicating in one picture their concern that the changed situation will "ruin" what has already been ruined:

So Harry Reid knew he was lying about Mitt Romney not paying taxes for ten years when he made the claim in 2012 from the lawsuit-free zone known as the floor of the U.S. Senate, but didn't care.

That's what one must conclude from Reid's response to CNN's Dana Bash about that statement. Asked on the network's New Day program if he regrets what he said, Reid responded: "Romney didn't win, did he?" Rather than question Reid's outrageously cynical "end justifies the means" mentality, Bash's edited interview moved on to another topic.

It’s fair to say most conservatives aren’t big fans of Jon Stewart, but according to TV critic Sonia Saraiya, Trevor Noah, Stewart’s successor as host of The Daily Show, is in for an even nastier response from the right, much of it having to do with his skin color.

Apropos of Comedy Central’s Monday announcement that Noah, a biracial South African comedian, will take over for Stewart sometime this year, Saraiya remarked that “this country spent years embroiled in a debate over whether an American citizen who became the president was ‘really’ American; what are we going to do to Trevor Noah? Conservative critics have a practiced, doublespeaking method of piling on the heat on figures who stand out because of their race or gender or sexuality, while protesting that they are doing no such thing.”

Employing a variant of the old surgeon's joke — "The operation was a success, but the patient died" — White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, on friendly ground on MSNBC this morning, essentially told viewers that the administration still considers Yemen a success, even as its government is on the fast track to being forced into indefinite exile.

Earnest told the "Morning Joe" show's Mika Brzezinski and the assembled panel that "U.S. policy should not be graded against the success or the stability of the Yemeni government" — although, just for starters, Yemen's President has fled, while the Los Angeles Times is reporting that, because of the Yemeni government's instability, Iran has obtained a treasure trove of U.S. intelligence. Video and a transcript follow the jump (HT Real Clear Politics):