The Tribunal

Lenny Bruce did a routine called “The Tribunal,” where he acknowledged the inequity in a school teacher earning $16,500 a year and Sammy Davis Jr. making $50,000 a week. Bear in mind that is early ‘60’s money. Bruce admitted in the bit that he was not above the lure of the almighty dollar. “If the Fremont Hotel is paying me $50,000 and the Christian Science Reading Room offers me $50,005, I’m in the Reading Room like that (sound of the snap of his fingers). If they’re givin’, I’m grabbin’.” He went on to hypothesize that there was a tribunal he would have to go before to justify the amount of money he made, and said how he had a certain amount set aside for when the time came. The routine is available on iTunes.


I bring this up after looking up how much Rush Limbaugh makes. I will not gild it by saying how much he earns. To my way of thinking he doesn’t earn a dime. He should be paying the broadcasters for letting him into the studio and ranting nonsense for a couple three hours. How he keeps a straight face is beyond me. He’s having way too much fun to be paid. He should be paying for so much fun. At what does he make? Well, his salary is $28 million, which breaks down to 116666 dollars 66 cents a day (according to www.salary-money.com/rush-limbaugh-salary-28000000.php). He’d better have some set aside.

And what exactly does Rush do to make that obscene amount of money? Well, this week he suggested that the ocean would clean itself up after the devastating spill in the Gulf of Mexico that has resulted in a miles-wide oil slick slowly making its way to fisheries and beaches along the coast. According to ABC News, Rush said that “oil in the ocean was a natural phenomenon and as a result the ocean would take care of cleaning itself.

‘You do survive these things. I'm not advocating don't care about it hitting the shore or coast and whatever you can do to keep it out of there is fine and dandy, but the ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and was left out there,’ Limbaugh said. ‘It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is.’

Limbaugh made his comments in a broadcast last Thursday in which he also blamed the oil rig's explosion on an attack by ‘hardcore environmentalist wackos.’

Limbaugh suggested environmentalists attacked the Deepwater Horizon rig, leased by energy giant BP, as way to "head off more oil drilling" and prevent Congress from passing an energy bill that would allow for more off-shore drilling.”

When I wonder how anyone is stupid enough to buy this line of thinking, I remember that Mr. Limbaugh himself refers to his listeners as “Ditto-heads.” By that, I take it he means they don’t process a word he says, they just repeat the words as fact.

Glen Beck actually makes more than Rush (He’s on radio and TV), but at least he freely admits he’s an entertainer… if you call that entertainment.

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But my other favorite overpaid mouth of the Right – Half-Governor Palin – will be called before the tribunal for sure. I have yet to hear a credible argument how a woman who doesn’t read made millions on a book she didn’t write. She went rogue, alright, all the way to El Banco Grande, last year, to the tune of $12 million. Not bad for a woman who has trouble forming sentences and writes reminders on the palm of her hand.

A good reason to miss living in California
While California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican – edging to the left of the president – withdrew his support for offshore drilling, Former Half-Governor Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, urged continued drilling. She said the spill shouldn’t deter drilling. On her Facebook page yesterday, she expressed sympathy over the accident, while saying she still believes in the slogan “drill here, drill now,” a slight improvement over her Stokely Carmichael-inspired, “Drill Baby Drill.” The woman is a sham artist and deserves none of the press time or attention she gets. I’m as much to blame as anyone. We all slow down for wrecks along the highway.