Well, this takes the well-founded belief that the left only cares about blacks because of their votes to a new level.

At the Washington Post's "Monkey Cage" blog yesterday (seriously, that's it's name), Dean Robinson, an "associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst" who is apparently not a regular contributor, explores "the political consequences of excess mortality among blacks." The item's headline leaves no doubt that Robinson and the Post know in whose pocket the black vote resides. Robinson and apparently the underlying study's authors utterly fail to recognize that, as of 2010, the mortality problem they identify was barely half as important as it was in 1993, and that if current trends continue, the problem won't exist fewer than 20 years from now.

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.

The American Prospect’s Waldman sympathizes with conservatives who are “unfairly accused of racism,” but says that overall he doesn’t feel too sorry for them given that right-wingers routinely condone actual bigotry from their leaders. Addressing his conservative readers, Waldman admits that sometimes “liberals are too quick to see racist intent in a comment that may be innocuous or at worst unintentionally provocative. But you make heroes out of people like [Rudy] Giuliani, [Rush] Limbaugh, and [Erick] Erickson…and when other people occasionally notice the caustic hairballs of bile they spit onto waiting microphones, the most you can say is, ‘Well, I wouldn't go that far.’ So you have nothing to complain about.”

Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh believes that because the center-right media and blogosphere pushed back against the vaccine vendetta campaign against Republicans and conservatives, the establishment press is sharply backing away from trying to capitalize on it, especially because both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been shown to have played to the anti-vaxxer crowd during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign.

Additionally, the New York Times, which smelled blood and ran a hit piece ("Measles Outbreak Proves Delicate Issue to G.O.P. Field") on Page A1 in its Tuesday print edition, had to issue a major three-point correction to it the very next day. That correction to the story by reporters Jeremy Peters and Richard Pérez-Peña, and Rush's reaction to it, follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post; paragraph breaks added by me):

Equipped with two liberal journalists and moderate Republican Michael Steele, MSNBC's Chris Matthews set about on his January 8 Hardball program to bash Sen. Lindsey Graham (R), former Amb. John Bolton, and talk-show host Rush Limbaugh for their criticism of President Obama's handling of the war on terrorism in light of the deadly terroristic shooting spree at the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo yesterday.