Here’s an open thread as we gaze upon the Superb Owl…

Hands down, the year’s most provocative and interesting Super Bowl commercial, from Clint Eastwood.

This year for the first time, you can watch the Super Bowl online at NBC Sports. It requires Microsoft Silverlight, and has a neat picture-in-picture feature that lets you switch between different camera views, including an aerial view of the field.

The game starts at 6pm ET, so in the meantime here’s the Volkswagen Super Bowl ad…

OK, I give in. Here’s a thread for Super Bowl 45, with one of the best ads.

At the Daily Beast, Conor Friedersdorf makes an excellent point about the well-documented racially charged comments of a certain right wing deity talk show host: Rush the Race-Baiter.

I share a powerful distaste for characters like Al Sharpton, who deliberately play on the racial anxieties of Americans. As one of the most powerful slurs in American life, “racist” is an accusation that ought to be made rarely, after careful deliberation, with incontrovertible evidence, and never merely to score points at the expense of a political adversary. So I join Mr. Hinderaker and Mr. McCarthy in asserting that Mr. Limbaugh has never been proved a racist, and that race-baiting is an awful feature of American public discourse. It damages reputations and undermines our ability to target actual racism. Those who engage in it deserve our ire.

But even a cursory review of Limbaugh’s radio archives reveal the talk radio host to be a frequent race-baiter, one of the guys who obsessively trades on race.

In fact, based entirely on statements made by Mr. Limbaugh in 2009, one begins to wonder whether he’s been a bigger racial demagogue than even Al Sharpton during that period.

As the apologists all over the right wing blogs continue to focus on one or two disputed quotes, here’s a lengthy collection of racist and/or race-baiting quotes from Saint Rush Limbaugh — all of them verified, cited and attributed: Limbaugh: My racial views? You mean, my belief in a colorblind society?

On the Nobel Peace Prize: “I think Obama’s the second Kenyan to win.”

“We are being told that we have to hope [Obama] succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles … because his father was black.”

“I do believe” Obama is an “angry black guy.”

“[I]n Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”

“Obama’s entire economic program is reparations.”

Obama is “more African in his roots than he is American” and is “behaving like an African colonial despot.”

Obama is “Halfrican-American.”

“Obama has disowned his white half … he’s decided he’s got to go all in on the black side.”

Sotomayor “a reverse racist” appointed by Obama, “the greatest living example of a reverse racist.”

Obama “wants us to have the same health care and plan that he had in Kenya” and “wants to be the black FDR.”

Latching onto LA Times op-ed, Limbaugh sings “Barack, The Magic Negro.”

“God does not have a birth certificate. Neither does Obama”; Obama “has yet to prove he’s a citizen.”

Limbaugh on Gates controversy: “Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman.”

Limbaugh suggests Obama would not have acted on Somali pirates if he’d known they were “actually young, black Muslim teenagers.”

Limbaugh suggests Democrats, media believe “you can’t criticize the little black man-child.”

“The government’s been taking care of [young blacks] their whole lives.”

“The days of [minorities] not having any power are over, and they are angry.”

“[M]inorities never do anything for which they have to apologize.”

Limbaugh: “The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well.”

Limbaugh says “NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips.”

Limbaugh declares basketball “the favorite sport of gangs.”

Limbaugh invented “racial component” to Hackett’s decision to withdraw from Ohio primary race.

Limbaugh on Survivor series: “African-American tribe” worst swimmers, Hispanics “will do things other people won’t do.”

Limbaugh suggested Colin Powell only supported Obama because of race.

Limbaugh: Gates is an “angry racist.”

Limbaugh called illegal immigrants an “invasive species.”

Limbaugh repeatedly calls Native Americans “Injuns.”

Limbaugh says Democrats’ interest in Darfur is securing black “voting bloc.”

Limbaugh says that if “feminazis” had remembered to oppose “affirmative action for black guys … they wouldn’t face the situation they face today.”

Here’s Rush Limbaugh in the Wall Street Journal, attempting to divert attention away from his numerous documented racist and race-baiting remarks: Rush Limbaugh: The Race Card, Football and Me.

For some reason, he thinks a good way to defend himself is to attack Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Jackson and Sharpton are demagogues, to be sure, who have both made their own controversial statements, but it’s no excuse at all to say, “They did it too.”

Limbaugh denies making two of the comments attributed to him, but blithely leaps past the many comments he has indisputably made. It’s a classic defense lawyers’ technique — get people to focus on one or two problematic points, and hope they don’t notice the mountain of evidence that is documented and proven.

Limbaugh concludes his op-ed by painting himself as a victim, if you can believe it.

There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson. “Racism” is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don’t share the left’s agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us.

The team of investors dropped Rush Limbaugh for one reason and one reason only: his history of race-baiting comments had turned him from a rich asset to a rich liability. It was a business decision, nothing more, and for Limbaugh to play the victimhood card is pathetic. He made this bed for himself with years of ugly comments (anyone remember his vile smears of Michael J. Fox?) and now he has to lie in it — fleas and all.

I’ve finally made it.

I’m an “offender” in this Rush Limbaugh idolizing article at the far right Media Research Center.

My life is complete.

UPDATE at 10/17/09 8:04:45 am:

Racist and race-baiting quotes from Rush Limbaugh that are sourced and verified:

“Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”

“Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”

Rush Limbaugh acknowledged making these statements in a 1990 Newsday article (although the latter, at least, occurred not on Limbaugh’s now-familiar talk and political commentary radio program, but at the beginning of his broadcast career back in the early 1970s when he was hosting a Top 40 music show under the name “Jeff Christie” on either WIXZ or KQV in Pittsburgh).

“Right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them. You stand behind Nelson Mandela — who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to Ethiopia. You do the same thing.”

Media Matters for America documents this statement (with an audio clip) as one made by Rush Limbaugh in the course of his radio program on 21 August 2007.

“Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.”

Media Matters documents this statement as one made by Rush Limbaugh in the course of his radio program on 19 January 2007.

“I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They’re interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. I think there’s a little hope invested in McNabb and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn’t deserve.”

Rush Limbaugh made this statement about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb during a September 2003 broadcast of ESPN television’s Sunday NFL Countdown program. The controversy generated by the remark prompted Limbaugh’s resignation from his position as a commentator on that show.

And this statement from last month:

“Obama’s America: white kids getting beat up on school buses. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama’s America, white kids now get beat up, with the black kids cheering, ‘Yeah! Right on! Right on!’”

UPDATE at 10/17/09 8:18:47 am:

This is what Snopes says about the two quotes Limbaugh is disputing; they are both listed in the book 101 People Who Are Really Screwing America, by Jack Huberman:

“I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”

The only source we’ve turned up so far that putatively documents this quote is the 2006 book “101 People Who Are Really Screwing America,” which attributes it to Rush Limbaugh but itself cites no source. On his program of 12 October 2009, Limbaugh disclaimed this quote as a fabricated one:

There’s a quote out there that I first saw it in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last week that I somehow, some time ago, defended slavery and started cracking jokes about it. And, you know, you say a lot of things in the course of 15 hours a week, over the course of 21 years. We’ve gone back, we have looked at everything we have. There is not even an inkling that any words in this quote are accurate. It’s outrageous, but it’s totally predictable.

It’s being repeated by people who have never listened to this program, they certainly didn’t hear it said themselves because it was never said.

“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.”

Likewise, this statement is attributed (without sourcing) to Limbaugh in “101 People Who Are Really Screwing America.” Although it is often cited as something he said on his radio program on 23 April 1998, we haven’t turned up any references to this quote from earlier than 2005.

Today’s jaw-dropping, insanely over the top exercise in Rush Limbaugh idolization is from RedState.com: Tonight … We Are All Rush Limbaugh.

Includes the ubiquitous Martin Niemöller quote (no right wing rant is complete without it) because as we all know, dropping a super-rich race-baiting far right radio host from a team of investors is exactly like the Holocaust.

Earlier this evening, as most of you now know, one of our own, Rush Hudson Limbaugh, while taking withering fire, crashed and burned.

Tonight, Rush is no longer ‘just’ a radio personality.

Tonight, Rush is no longer ‘just’ a NFL owner denied

Tonight, Rush is us. And we are him.

Tonight Rush became the metaphor for all of us … every man woman and child in this great nation of ours.