Failed mayoral candidate KRIS PHILLIPS' 5000 watt radio station blares RUSH LIMBAUGH, whose latest right-wing paranoid drivel is about climate change denial, claiming that liberals and the media are exaggerating the power of Hurricane Irma to sell supplies and garner support for action to prepare for global climate change. This twisted sister got less than 40% of the vote, even after developers, Reichwing Sheriff DAVID SHOAR and his henchman, WILLIAM BARRY HARRISS, dumped a money bomb on Mayor Nancy Shaver, with a dozen different unhinged "postcards from the edge" attacking Mayor Shver.
From The Hill
Al Roker shames Limbaugh for dismissal of Hurricane Irma 'panic'
BY JOE CONCHA - 09/06/17 04:09 PM EDT 207
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NBC meteorologist Al Roker clashed with Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday after the conservative radio host suggested warnings about Hurricane Irma were driven by political agendas around climate change.
The longtime "Today" personality took to Twitter to slam Limbaugh in two tweets while using a #ShameOnRush hashtag in a message to his 1.7 million followers.
"Do not listen to @rushlimbaugh when he says #Irma is not a dangerous #storm and is hype. He is putting people's lives at risk," wrote the 63-year-old Roker.
"To have @rushlimbaugh suggest the warnings about #Irma are #fake or about profit and to ignore them borders on criminal. #ShameOnRush," he wrote in subsequent tweet.
Limbaugh fired back at Roker on his radio show Wednesday, insisting he never called Hurricane Irma, currently a Category 5 storm, "fake."
"I don't think any of these people actually listen. They probably got an out-of-context, erroneous report of things I didn't say yesterday and tweeted that I'm a hurricane denier," said Limbaugh. "Which, by the way, does that prove that these people are using the storm to advance the climate change agenda?"
Roker's criticism appeared to be in response to Limbaugh's Tuesday commentary on the storm, during which he suggested the warnings serve to advance climate change agendas and local businesses that profit off of customers stocking up on supplies.
The 66-year-old Palm Beach, Fla., resident said while he's "not a meteorologist," and nothing he says "should be considered to be a forecast or a prediction," creating panic around hurricanes helps advance an agenda around climate change.
"There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it. You can accomplish a lot just by creating fear and panic," Limbaugh said Tuesday. "You don’t need a hurricane to hit anywhere. All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced."
"Now, how do you do this? Well, any number of ways," he continued. "Let’s take south Florida television, for example. There is a symbiotic relationship between retailers and local media, and it’s related to money. It revolves around money. You have major, major industries and businesses which prosper during times of crisis and panic, such as a hurricane, which could destroy or greatly damage people’s homes, and it could interrupt the flow of water and electricity. So what happens?"
"Well, the TV stations begin reporting this and the panic begins to increase," he added. "And then people end up going to various stores to stock up on water and whatever they might need for home repairs and batteries and all this that they’re advised to get, and a vicious circle is created. You have these various retail outlets who spend a lot of advertising dollars with the local media."
Limbaugh and Roker have butt heads before. In 2014 after Limbaugh said that meteorologists pointing to a polar vortex as a driver behind record-low temperatures recorded at the time were part of a "liberal media conspiracy" to keep climate change agendas alive.
"We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country," Limbaugh said on Jan. 8, 2014.
"And right on schedule, the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it's completely unprecedented. Because they've got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have. It's called the 'polar vortex.' The dreaded polar vortex."
"The hoax continues," he added.
Roker responded on Twitter with a photo from the American Meteorological Society showing the [1959] definition of a polar vortex.
From The Washington Post:
The Fix
Analysis
Rush Limbaugh’s dangerous suggestion that Hurricane Irma is fake news
By Callum Borchers
September 6 at 10:23 AM
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. (Ron Edmonds/AP)
Rush Limbaugh didn't say the magic words, but on Tuesday he basically accused the media of creating fake news about Hurricane Irma, which is threatening Florida after hitting Barbuda and Antigua. The storm's 185-mile-per-hour winds tied the record high for any Atlantic hurricane making landfall.
[Category 5 Hurricane Irma slams Lesser Antilles, and is targeting Florida]
“These storms, once they actually hit, are never as strong as they're reported,” Limbaugh claimed on his syndicated radio show. He added that “the graphics have been created to make it look like the ocean's having an exorcism, just getting rid of the devil here in the form of this hurricane, this bright red stuff.”
Why would the media exaggerate the threat of a hurricane? Here's Limbaugh's theory:
There is symbiotic relationship between retailers and local media, and it’s related to money. It revolves around money. You have major, major industries and businesses which prosper during times of crisis and panic, such as a hurricane, which could destroy or greatly damage people’s homes, and it could interrupt the flow of water and electricity. So what happens?
Well, the TV stations begin reporting this and the panic begins to increase. And then people end up going to various stores to stock up on water and whatever they might need for home repairs and batteries and all this that they’re advised to get, and a vicious circle is created. You have these various retail outlets who spend a lot of advertising dollars with the local media.
The local media, in turn, reports in such a way as to create the panic way far out, which sends people into these stores to fill up with water and to fill up with batteries, and it becomes a never-ending repeated cycle. And the two coexist. So the media benefits with the panic with increased eyeballs, and the retailers benefit from the panic with increased sales, and the TV companies benefit because they’re getting advertising dollars from the businesses that are seeing all this attention from customers.
To state the obvious, these are potentially dangerous comments from Limbaugh, who is based in Palm Beach, Fla. He is encouraging listeners who might be in Irma's path not to take seriously the official guidance disseminated through the media.
“I wish that not everything that involved news had become corrupted and politicized, but it just has,” he said.
More broadly, Limbaugh's bad advice reveals the metastasizing nature of “fake news” attacks on the press, which have been led by President Trump. How did we get from Trump's claim that he has “never seen more dishonest media than, frankly, the political media” to the idea that weather reports are phony, too?
Alex Jones might have something to do with it. The Infowars founder — who has an “amazing” reputation, according to Trump — has for years promoted the notion that the U.S. government possesses the power to conjure and control weather events. Just last week, as Hurricane Harvey battered Texas, Jones devoted part of his show to questioning why the government didn't “use the technologies to kill [the storm] out in the gulf.”
“It is weird how these storms go,” he said, suggesting Harvey might have been manufactured or manipulated. “They just sit over a city.”
Jones's contention is that the government — or, more precisely, the “deep state,” now that Trump is president — uses its “weather weapon” to stoke fear of climate change and promote a liberal agenda.
Jones might be a fringe figure, but he increasingly bleeds into the mainstream, thanks in part to Trump's validation. Witness Limbaugh's monologue about Irma, which echoed some of Jones's conspiracy theory.
Limbaugh, a fellow Trump booster, didn't say the deep state causes storms, but he did say “you have people in all of these government areas who believe man is causing climate change, and they’re hellbent on proving it, they’re hellbent on demonstrating it, they’re hellbent on persuading people of it.”
Limbaugh didn't say the deep state directs storms toward major cities, but he did say “hurricanes are always forecast to hit major population centers because, after all, major population centers is where the major damage will take place and where we can demonstrate that these things are getting bigger and they’re getting more frequent and they’re getting worse — all because of climate change.”
Thus we have two of the president's biggest promoters in the media telling people that news about a storm — or perhaps even the storm itself — is fake. There could be serious consequences to Trump's ceaseless effort to lower trust in institutions such as the government and the press — consequences that the president and his team might not have fully considered.
On the morning before Harvey hit Texas, CNN's Jim Acosta tweeted that a moment when “millions will be relying on national and local news outlets to stay safe during hurricane” is “not a good time to take shots at 'fake news.'”
Brad Parscale, the digital media director of Trump's campaign, scoffed at Acosta's warning, tweeting that “nobody said the weather is fake.”
Actually, whether Parscale and Trump realize it or not, somebody does say the weather is fake.
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