Several times a minute is more like it. She truly is one of the most loathesome people in the American media landscape.
She’s not really a shrink, by the way. She has no credentials in mental health or counselling whatsoever. Her doctorate is in Physiology. Her schtick isn’t really relationship counselling, so much as heavy-handed, right wing social morality harrangues (living out of wedlock is evil, mothers who work are evil), specializing in particularly virulent homophobia. She’s one of the most specatularly repulsive human beings to ever pollute the American airwaves. She makes Glenn Beck look sane and tolerant.
I don’t agree with this characterization of the case. The CA Supreme Court held that a private mall owner infringed the free speech rights under the CA Constitution. The Supreme Court held that such a positive right does not exist under the 1st Amendment, although it also held that CA’s free speech rights didn’t violate the US Constitution. So, I think it’s fair to say that you need government action to potentially have a violation of the US Constitution’s 1st Amendment. You may not need government action under the California Constitution (but since the CA courts have substantially curtailed Pruneyard anyway, I don’t know that there is a coherent reason to allow Pruneyard reasoning to stand in CA).
A shock jock Schlessinger had an affair with while she was married to her first husband. She let him take naked pictures of her, and he later (after she became famous as a moral scold) sold the pictures to an internet site. She tried to sue to get the pictures removed, but lost.
She also apparently didn’t know how the internet works.
Wow. That was much worse than I expected it to be. She wasn’t even responding to the caller at all. It’s like she invented some other dialog to respond to.
The worst part about it is I read the script, but due to a childhood with parents who listened to her show, I couldn’t read the words without hearing her ridiculous shrill, smug, self-satisfied voice inside my head.
Seriously, I used to have to hear her harpy voice every day when I was a kid. I haven’t heard of her in years and I’m actually surprised she still has a show.
Brightnshiney is correct. The California Constitution required the Pruneyard ruling, not the US Constitution. The feds ruled that the Cal Cons did not infringe on federal property rights.
And I was expecting a lot worse. Sure, she got off on a tangent about how so many people think things are racist when they are not, and brought up that even the most racist word “nigger” is only racist if said by white people.
And then the caller treated her like she actually used the word as a cuss word, so she called them on it.
Was she saying the word for shock value? Of course. But she didn’t use it as a cuss word. Should I now be kicked off the Dope because I used the word above? Or should you, like intelligent people, care more about how I’m using it, instead of what word is being said?
The Don Imus quote was a lot worse–it actually was intended as a slam against someone.
This is false. She has a post-doctoral certification in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling from the University of Southern California. where she was also a faculty member. Get your facts right next time.
As Sarah Palin knows well, there is little that the right likes more in its women than the ability to play the victim card. I’m thinking this is little more than a publicity ploy for either her later return to radio or moving on to the lucrative book/speech giving market.
I live in the SE Indiana/Louisville, KY radio market. We have several right-wing talk radio stations in the area. If Dr. Laura is on anywhere on the airwaves around here, I have no idea. She’s been a has-been AFAIK for years.
I actually have more respect for Don Imus in this case. At least he managed to fess up to his mistake, apologized to the team (in person no less) and at no point played the victim card. I’m not defending what he did, but he did handle the situation pretty much as well as anyone in his position could have (and still got fired for it).
Here’s the problem, though: her point was based on stupid generalizations. It was also useless to the caller and the whole thing was an excuse for a very trite rant but I don’t think we need to pretend to be surprised about that.
People sometimes claim that black people are allowed to say “nigger” all they want and nobody has a problem with it. Usually the people making that claim are white people with a persecution complex. But it’s not that simple. Not all black people call each other nigger/nigga all the time, and not all black people think it’s fine to use the word that way. (You might remember Jesse Jackson had a “funeral” for the word a few years ago. But I’ve seen people on this board and elsewhere make the same point.) Among the much more limited group of black comedians on TV, you can find some who use the word and some who don’t. But that’s not representative of much of anything. Comedians say a lot of other stuff people don’t generally say in conversation. If you were at a high powered corporate board meeting and two black executives started calling each other nigga after closing a deal, I think both black and white onlookers would be uncomfortable with that and find it inappropriate.
I will say that it’s a bad idea to judge someone’s intent based on their wording alone rather than the full meaning of what they said. I don’t think the rant was racist although it does caricature black people somewhat; mostly it’s just very very stupid. It does If Dr. Laura ever delivers an insight that matches something Richard Pryor might’ve said any day of the week, then maybe I’ll reconsider my view of her.
I don’t really listen to Dr. Laura. Her show is on a station that I listen to in the morning (Bob and Tom rule), so I sometimes get a few minutes of her dopey program (most common advice: just fuck your husband and everything will be fine, but whatever you do don’t let your kids out of your sight for a second … which I must say, probably causes all sorts of problems in the bedroom … but I digress).
So the other day, I’m off to lunch and the first thing I hear is Dr. Laura’s apology speech. And at first I thought … what the hell are you apologizing for? I agree with you. Just uttering the word “nigger” if not so terrible is one is using it to make a point, ala, “I don’t like it when racists use the word ‘nigger.’” Then I got back to the internet and found out that her utterence of the word was used in conjunction with the advice that if a black women couldn’t take racial epithets, she shouldn’t have married a white man.
Ah. The world is back to normal. Dr. Laura is still a raving lunatic.
And now she’s on fucking Larry King complaining that she’s being censored. Are we on the same page here? She’s on Larry King. Not AM970 in Duluth after the farm report – Larry King. Cry me a friggin’ river, lady.
She’s taking her Palin-esque umbrage national and now she’ll become another Tea Bagger darling, write another retarded book, and retire to Hilton Head where she can get to complaining that she pays too much in taxes or something.
For me it’s not about her use of the word, it’s about how completely batshit insane she sounded responding to a woman’s concerns about (probably) real racism with a non-sequitur rant about Obama and interracial marriage and a bunch of other stupid shit that had no relevance to the conversation. She didn’t ask the lady what had happened, she assumed she was being oversensitive, completely railroaded her every response and chalked it all up to ‘‘black think.’’ I mean that lady literally got maybe three meaningful words out of her mouth before Dr. Laura spewed all over her. We have no idea what that woman’s true situation is because she never got a chance to explain it. Dr. Laura wasn’t interested in addressing it, Dr. Laura was interested in expressing her beliefs about how oversensitive black people are. And when the woman said that she found Dr. Laura’s use of the word ‘‘shocking,’’ she persisted in using the word, which is a flat-out asshole thing to do.
Dr. Laura’s conduct, taken as a whole, suggests a complete lack of compassion, something I know you and I both value. There is no defense for it.
Giving up your soapbox gets your first amendment rights back. Staying on as governor of Alaska is like being a dead fish. Can’t argue with the logic of those Ladies Of The Right.
This is an absolutely meaningless, made up, bullshit credential. The “post-doctoral” part doesn’t mean anything except that she bought it after she had her doctorate. Anybody else can buy one too. It means nothing. She is completely uncredentialed and her “advice” is completely at odds with everything in the legitimate mental health. She’s a fraud, and if she actually did have any clinical credentials, should would have had them stripped by now.