Tag: Rethuglicans

Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy

Seth Anderson0 comment

Clear Channel is in a bit of financial trouble, and apparently so are their cohorts in “Republican-slanted news is the only news people want” category, Sinclair Broadcasting. Good, I hope they both become nothing more than a footnote to future histories of the George Bush administration.

Lonely Zenith

you’ll remember Sinclair Broadcast Group as the TV group that carried the anti-Kerry smear documentary in prime time, just before the November 2004 election. You may also remember them for the infamous “The Point” editorial segments during their stations’ newscasts — featuring the right wing rantings of corporate management.

Perhaps you even recall their experiment in “central casting” — firing most of the news departments at their local stations, and instead running “local” newscasts from all over the country out of a central studio in Baltimore.

Well, it now appears that Sinclair is on the verge of bankruptcy

…

Five years ago, Sinclair was also the darling of the right for running that anti-Kerry documentary on all 58 of their stations, and for conservative editorials on all of those stations as well. Those who saw ever greater consolidation as the road to maximizing corporate profits were enamored of Sinclair’s experiment with producing “local” newscasts for their stations from a central studio at corporate headquarters in Baltimore.

Unfortunately for Sinclair, viewers were unimpressed by “local” newscasts that were produced hundreds or even thousands of miles from home — and tuned out in droves. And the right wing editorials created negative publicity for Sinclair’s stations. Ultimately. the central studio for producing newscasts was shut down, and the right wing editorials were cancelled. And the group has, by and large, floundered in mediocrity ever since. So far as I’m aware, none of Sinclair’s 58 stations is a market leader, and few are even in the top three — when you run a group on the cheap and attempt to push a national agenda onto your local stations, the result is predictable: poor ratings and a weak identity in your local markets.

As a result, Sinclair was poorly positioned for dealing with the advertising downturn of the past 18 months.

[Click to continue reading Daily Kos: Sinclair Broadcast Group nearing bankruptcy]

Bwa-ha-ha! Couldn’t happen to nicer corporations1

Footnotes:
  1. and by nicer I mean of course the opposite. Sinclair Broadcasting is just scum, plain and simple. [↩]

Reading Around on July 2nd

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading July 2nd from 13:49 to 19:05:

  • Travel With Your Mind: Sky Saxon Remembered – Sky Saxon, lead singer with 60s garage punk legends the Seeds, died on the morning of June 25, 2009 (or as his official web site put it, he “passed over to be with YaHoWha”); as it happened, he died the same day as both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, ensuring that the entertainment press, who might have been expected to treat his passing like a one-line filler item, didn’t even give it that much attention. But Saxon hadn’t been a celebrity in the traditional sense for a very long time. Sky may have been a rock star for about two years on the strength of the singles “Pushin’ Too Hard” and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine,” but after those twenty-four months as a bargain-basement Mick Jagger, he evolved into Flower Power’s Last Man Standing, a guy who let his freak flag fly with a wild-eyed sincerity that made most of his peers from the Sunset Strip scene look like weekenders, and transformed his story into something far more interesting than the typical two-hit wonder and cult hero.
  • The Perfect Burger and All Its Parts – NYTimes.com – While some chefs have groused quietly about the insatiable demand for burgers, most are philosophical. “All chefs can be frustrated by the buying public sometimes,” said Clark Frasier, a chef with restaurants in Massachusetts and Maine. “In this economy I’m happy to sell anything they want to eat.”

    All this high-powered attention has produced some new ways of thinking about and cooking burgers. Interviews with 30 chefs provided dozens of lessons for the home cook that aren’t terribly difficult and don’t cost much money. And it all yielded the ideal burger.

  • Daily Kos: How a Kos diarist helped spark McCain-Palin infighting – Schmidt put the matter to rest with an breathtaking reply to Palin:

    "Secession," he wrote. "It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

Reading Around on June 17th through June 18th

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A few interesting links collected June 17th through June 18th:

  • Raw Story » Bachmann rebels, refuses to fill out next year’s census – The Minnesota Republican said she would only fill out the basic census information about the number of people living in the household, but would not fill out the rest of the form, the Washington Times reports.

    Under current statutes, that means Bachmann plans to break the law and could face a $5,000 fine.

    The claim that ACORN will be “in charge” of the census is the latest allegation by a politician who has developed a reputation for disseminating right-wing conspiracy theories. Most recently, Bachmann declared that President Obama is running a “gangster government” because of the GM bailout.

  • Health insurers refuse to limit rescission of coverage – Los Angeles Times – Late in the hearing, Stupak, the committee chairman, put the executives on the spot. Stupak asked each of them whether he would at least commit his company to immediately stop rescissions except where they could show “intentional fraud.”

    The answer from all three executives:

    “No.”

    Assholes

  • Blago at Second City: The Bizarre Happenings of Illinois’ #1 Criminal : The Core Junction – “In a truly bizarre moment, Rod Blagojevich made a guest appearance at The Second City, Chicago’s famed comedy club, on Saturday Night. After being prepped backstage, Blagojevich surprised the audience and started the show by entering the stage with his hands in a crucifix-like pose.”

    photo credit: swanksalot

Blagojevich Country

Newt Gingrich Calls Reagan Speech “Intellectual Nonsense and Stunningly Dangerous”

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Ooops, Newty meant to address his remarks at Obama, but since research and The Google are not part of Republican speechwriter’s toolbox, he just looks like a misinformed fool, again.

Who Is This Slimy Creature? It's Newt!

Ronald Reagan, addressing U.N. on June 19, 1982:

I speak today as both a citizen of the United States and of the world. … My people have sent me here today to speak for them as citizens of the world, which they truly are, for we Americans are drawn from every nationality represented in this chamber today.

Newt Gingrich addressing GOP on June 8, 2009:

Let me be clear. I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.

[From Daily Kos: Newt Gingrich Calls Reagan Concept “Intellectual Nonsense and Stunningly Dangerous”]

I thought the self-styled Reaganites like Gingrich made love to the corpse of Reagan at every opportunity?

Reading Around on June 3rd through June 6th

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A few interesting links collected June 3rd through June 6th:

  • Paying For Coffee by digby This post… – Those coffees and the Lincoln Bedroom were among the stupidest of the Clinton scandals — The DOJ said that the two events were unrelated, but that’s very hard to believe. If you were around during that time, we were in the grip of an hysteria not sen since the Salem Witch Trials. As far as the Village was concerned those coffees were worse than Watergate. I don’t believe for a minute that that the withdrawal of Tiller’s protective service was related. The prevailing narrative was that anyone who contributed to Clinton and attended those coffees had no legitimate claim to government services. It was automatically corrupt.

    You can’t blame Tiller’s assassination on this, of course. It was over ten years ago. But it underscores the fact that the culture wars are inherently political and that you can’t separate the conservative movement from the fringe. It’s a seamless system.

  • MenuPages Blog :: Chicago: Kevin Pang And The Infinite List Of Dick Jokes – [Pictured: Not the penis pho at Tank Noodle; rather #47; swanksalot / Flickr]

  • Pho - Number 47 and Rice Number 125

  • Thomas lawyer: court must ban all MediaSentry evidence – Ars Technica – “MediaSentry found Jammie by (1) using KaZaA to request a file transfer from Jammie’s computer to a MediaSentry computer; (2) using a separate program or programs to intercept the Internet packets being sent from Jammie’s computer to the MediaSentry computer as a result of this request; (3) reading the IP address of Jammie’s computer from these packets; and (4) tracing this IP address back to Jammie. This kind of investigation of network traffic is lawful only after certain procedures are followed: when there is prior approval by a court and when the person conducting the investigation is properly licensed. When these procedures are not followed, such investigation constitutes criminal wiretapping and the illegal collection of evidence by an unlicensed private investigator.”

Smearing Izzy Continued

Seth Anderson0 comment


“The Best of I.F. Stone” (I. F. Stone)

I.F. Stone was before my time, obviously, but as a student of history, I’ve read a lot of his reporting. Eric Alterman defends Izzy Stone, again:

the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square puts me in mind of the death of I.F. Stone, which happened right around the same time. It was one of Izzy’s charms that it is entirely believable that, while in a hospital in Boston where he would finally give out, he awoke briefly from a lengthy period of unconsciousness to ask his doctors about the fate of the young protesters there. (His opposition to Chinese Communist oppression was of a piece with his brilliant exposes of the abuses of Soviet psychiatry at the end of his six days career. These do not of course “make up” for the mistakes he made defending Stalin half a century earlier, but they do provide context for those who would paint his politics as monochromatic.)
This is yet another column about the attempts to smear Izzy’s reputation. I’ve written about him quite a lot during the past twenty or so years beginning with a profile in Mother Jones back in June, 1988, which you can find here. I’ve also done some first-hand investigation of the nature of the charges against him, which I described here and here I was a close friend of Stone’s during the final decade of his life and so I was pleased when Tina Brown asked me to take a look at charges on the day that they appeared for her website, The Daily Beast. I was amazed at the disconnect between the inflammatory language employed by the authors and the skimpiness of their evidence. That is here.

[Click to continue reading ‘Smearing Izzy Continued,’ Continued…]

The Tighty-Righties have never allowed facts to get in the way of their jeremiads, the reputation of I.F. Stone as a Stalinist among conservatives is just but one small example of this tendency.

And so it was odd that both the Wilson Center and the CWIP agreed to provide a forum for the series of wild allegations leveled by their authors. Radosh was actually invited to chair a panel. And panelist Max Holland speculated that Stone had received KGB funding both for the publication of I.F. Stone’s Weekly and his book on the Korean War, again with absolutely nothing in the way of evidence. Other panels, including one on the Hiss-Chambers controversy and one that dealt with Robert Oppenheimer were similarly stacked. (Martin Sherwin, who co-authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on Oppenheimer with Kai Bird, was not invited to be a panelist even though he lives right there in Washington.)

Vulgar Pig Boy Takes Down another Corporation

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Rush Limbaugh is nearly singlehandedly destroying another corporation. Too bad for him it’s the one paying his exorbitant salary.

Latinos Meat

I wonder about Limbaugh and the thousands of his laid-off Clear Channel colleagues, because the dichotomy is striking: Last July, just months before the radio economy went into free-fall, Limbaugh’s bosses at Clear Channel, who enjoy deep ties to Texas Republicans and who have been at the forefront of promoting right-wing radio, rewarded the turbo-talker with the biggest contract in terrestrial radio history. The contract included an eye-popping 40 percent raise over his already gargantuan pay, despite the fact it’s doubtful any other radio competitors could have even matched Limbaugh’s old pay scale.

The astronomical worth of Limbaugh’s eight-year pact: $400 million. The amount of money Clear Channel execs have been trying to scrimp and save this year as they lay off thousands from the struggling company: $400 million. Ironic, don’t you think?

The simple truth is that Limbaugh lives in the lap of Clear Channel-backed luxury, while Clear Channel employees are being axed with abandon. And those who are lucky enough to keep their jobs are told to do the work of three or four employees.

[Click to continue reading Limbaugh’s living large while radio boss Clear Channel implodes | Media Matters for America]

Boarding Stable

Can’t really bemoan the fact that Clear Channel is in trouble: they have long been an opponent of both liberals, and music lovers. I’d be happy to see them fade into bankruptcy court, and oblivion.

Reading Around on April 16th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading April 16th from 17:21 to 20:40:

  • Chicago Reader | The Works | Ben Javorsky for Mayor! Responses to your responses to our story about Chicago’s parking meter lease deal By Ben Joravsky – I heard Daley on the radio say, “You have to monetize your assets or else they become liabilities.” What an idiot. Never took an economics or accounting class at the U. of C., that’s for sure. Vote the idiot out. —South Looper

    Now, now, don’t harsh on Mayor Daley. He didn’t have time for economics or accounting—he was too busy studying for that bar exam for the third time.

  • Daily Kos: Why yesterday's protests were stupid – What was the message? Too much taxes? I didn't see many bank executives and Wall Street types out on the streets. And coming on the heels of the biggest tax cut in American history, almost entirely directed at the middle class, this message didn't have much salience. Furthermore, the theme of these protests "taxation without representation", was pretty silly considering that these people did have representation. It's just that they lost the elections, which sort of happens in a democracy. "Representation" doesn't mean you always get your way, it means that you have a vote. So it was an indefensible frame to base the protests around.

    That's probably why the crowds didn't easily rally around it, deciding to freelance it instead. So there was talk about pork barrel spending! And bail outs! And wanting to stick a knife in Obama's eye! And secession! And Obama's birth certificate! And Obama taking away their guns! The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens! Obama is Hitler!

  • GO TO 2040 Blog -Edible Change is Enticing at 4th Annual Food Policy Summit – "In its fourth year the summit Edible Change! Building Networks for Policy Action, hosted by the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council (CFPAC) reached full capacity bringing together over 250 people from the Chicago area and around the region with amazing diversity of geography, ethnicity, and age to talk, learn, and share stories about food. "

    photo of produce by me

Reading Around on April 15th through April 16th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected April 15th through April 16th:

  • The White House – Blog Post – A Vision for High Speed Rail – "The report formalizes the identification of ten high-speed rail corridors as potential recipients of federal funding. Those lines are: California, Pacific Northwest, South Central, Gulf Coast, Chicago Hub Network, Florida, Southeast, Keystone, Empire and Northern New England. Also, opportunities exist for the Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston to compete for funds to improve the nation’s only existing high-speed rail service:"

    Sign me up!

  • Broward Palm Beach – The Juice – Fort Lauderdale, You Have Tea On Your Face – "And I'm a reporter, I took an (imaginary) oath to comfort the afflicted.

    "What freedoms have you had taken from you?"

    She looked confused. I thought, perhaps in the places Jane gets her news (cough cough Fox News cough) reporters don't worry about those pesky follow-up questions. There was a long pause.

    "Uh…uh…the freedom to choose…the…uh…" Awkward moment"

    idiots – protesting without any clue what they are even protesting.

  • honoria in ciberspazio – Proposal for Live Art Blogging Interactive Austin 2009 – "Problem: After a stimulating conference, attendees' notes lay black and white and sometimes unreadable on the page while vital insights are bright, yet fading in participants' memories.

    Solution: Honoria Starbuck creates live colorful abstract artworks that zing with the high energy in the conference room. Honoria's drawings highlight epiphanies and explore expanding new directions with dynamic aesthetic gusto. These abstract drawings keep the open nature of inquiry buzzing in the wake of the conference."

Reading Around on March 6th through March 9th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected March 6th through March 9th:

  • It Didn’t Take Dem “Plotting” to Make Limbaugh GOP Leader – Eyes On Obama – “The bottom line is that Rush Limbaugh is unequivocally the most simultaneously loved, respected, revered, and feared man on the right. According to Machiavelli, that makes him the leader.Democrats didn’t concoct some false connection between Limbaugh and the Republican Party. It’s always been there, and as Rush has grown more popular, he’s grown more powerful in his ability to deflect criticism, to the point that his very presence downright deters it. Republicans know if they cross Rush (or speak against him publicly in even the smallest way), the firestorm he unleashes may be enough to end their careers. And so he speaks daily to an audience of millions, unchecked by his fellow conservatives.”

  • cocaine and the swinging 1970s

  • Media Matters – Media Matters: The media’s tax fraud – When is a tax cut for 98 percent of taxpayers portrayed as a tax increase? When some of the small handful of people whose taxes will go up happen to control the nation’s news media.

    Last week, President Obama unveiled a budget outline that extends the Bush tax cuts for all but the top two percent of taxpayers and makes permanent a tax credit of up to $800 for low- and middle-income workers that was included in the recent stimulus package, among other tax cuts.

Reading Around on January 28th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading January 28th from 14:57 to 16:32:

  • DownWithTyranny!: Outrage Continues To Build As Limbaugh’s Hateful Remarks Repulse Most Americans But Seem To Inspire More GOP Members Of Congress – Ahh, the vulgar pig boy, back in the news… ” Alan Grayson, the outspoken member from Orlando, as usual, wasn’t mincing words: “Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1% of what he wanted us to do, then we’d all need pain killers.””

  • Bisphenol A – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – “There are seven classes of plastics used in packaging applications. Type 7 is the catch-all “other” class, and some type 7 plastics, such as polycarbonate (sometimes identified with the letters “PC” near the recycling symbol) and epoxy resins, are made from bisphenol A monomer.[4] When such plastics are exposed to hot liquids, bisphenol A leaches out 55 times faster than it does under normal conditions, at up to 32 ng/hour.[81] Type 3 (PVC) can also contain bisphenol A as antioxidant in plasticizers.[4] Types 1 (PET), 2 (HDPE), 4 (LDPE), 5 (polypropylene), and 6 (polystyrene) do not use bisphenol A during polymerization or package forming”

And in case you didn’t see this elsewhere, or previously, Amazon has several hundred full length free MP3 files. Some good stuff here, actually, and for the record, much easier to purchase albums from artists who are not antagonistic to downloading options…

Free MP3s from Amazon

Medicare and Totalitarianism

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sarah Palin1 voiced an odd statement2 about freedom being one generation from extinction. Turns out she was quoting that nutjob Ronald Reagan when he was fulminating about Medicare in the 1960s. Yeah, Medicare really ruined the country, didn’t it?

Rockefeller and Reagan

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

When did he say this? It was on a recording he made for Operation Coffee Cup — a campaign organized by the American Medical Association to block the passage of Medicare. Doctors’ wives were supposed to organize coffee klatches for patients, where they would play the Reagan recording, which declared that Medicare would lead us to totalitarianism.

[From Raising the white flag of surrender to Medicare – Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog]

Funny, if it wasn’t so sad3

Footnotes:
  1. or her note-card writers [↩]
  2. well, one of many [↩]
  3. which could be said about most of the McCain-Palin campaign [↩]

Coburn Hates Trains

Seth Anderson0 comment

Senator Tom (“Global Warming is a lot of crap“) Coburn hates trains in general, hates Amtrak in particular, and especially hates passengers on Amtrak and similar commuter trains. Coburn would be much happier if everyone drove Hummers to and from their jobs instead of taking the communistic commuter rail.

Waiting for You is Lonely

Legislation that would mandate collision-avoidance systems for trains is being blocked by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who objects to a provision that would provide a major funding boost for Amtrak that was bundled together with the safety measures this week.

In a phone interview, Mr. Coburn said that in addition to the specific reservations he has over the increased spending in the rail package, which has an estimated cost of about $14 billion over five years, the $700 billion federal rescue plan makes fiscal discipline in other areas even more imperative.

“We’re on a short financial leash for at least the next couple of quarters,” Mr. Coburn said. “We have to start doing things now … that will make a difference for the future.”

Transportation leaders in Congress reached an agreement Wednesday on a long-pending package of bills related to rail safety and service. Supporters of increased funding for Amtrak’s passenger rail service hoped to overcome Mr. Coburn’s opposition by combining that measure with legislation that would attack railway safety problems highlighted by the Sept. 12 train crash in California that killed 25 people. The safety measures include increasing the number of federal railroad inspectors and limiting the consecutive hours train crews can work.

…

Mr. Coburn also opposes a provision that would steer $1.5 billion to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, saying passengers and local authorities should fund mass-transit operations in the nation’s capital.

[From Senator Holds Up Bill on Train Safety Device – WSJ.com]

Money for Wall Street, but not a dime for safety measures for ordinary citizens. Lovely man, indeed. Too bad he’s in office until 2010 (unless of course some hinted-at scandals become public)

Twin Towers

swanksalot0 comment

Frank Rich covers the twin towers of Republican vote-winning orthodoxy: terrorism and gays, but questions how effective these issues will really be. Karl Rove is no evil genius, or the Rethuglicans would have won in 2006 as well.

Since 2002, it’s been a Beltway axiom akin to E=mc2 that Bomb in American City=G.O.P. Landslide.

That equation was the creation of Karl Rove. Among the only durable legacies of the Bush presidency are the twin fears that Mr. Rove relentlessly pushed on his client’s behalf: fear of terrorism and fear of gays. But these pillars are disintegrating too. They’re propped up mainly by political operatives like Mr. Black and their journalistic camp followers — the last Washington insiders who are still in Mr. Rove’s sway and are still refighting the last political war.

That the old Rove mojo still commands any respect is rather amazing given how blindsided he was by 2006. Two weeks before that year’s midterms, he condescendingly lectured an NPR interviewer about how he devoured “68 polls a week” — not a mere 67, mind you — and predicted unequivocally that Election Day would yield “a Republican Senate and a Republican House.” These nights you can still find Mr. Rove hawking his numbers as he peddles similar G.O.P. happy talk to credulous bloviators at Fox News.

But let’s put ourselves in Mr. Black’s shoes and try out the Rove playbook at home — though not in front of the children — by thinking the unthinkable. If a terrorist bomb did detonate in an American city before Election Day, would that automatically be to the Republican ticket’s benefit?

Not necessarily. Some might instead ask why the Bush White House didn’t replace Michael Chertoff as secretary of homeland security after a House report condemned his bungling of Katrina. The man didn’t know what was happening in the New Orleans Convention Center even when it was broadcast on national television.

Next, voters might take a hard look at the antiterrorism warriors of the McCain campaign (and of a potential McCain administration). This is the band of advisers and surrogates that surfaced to attack Mr. Obama two weeks ago for being “naïve” and “delusional” and guilty of a “Sept. 10th mind-set” after he had the gall to agree with the Supreme Court decision on Gitmo detainees. The McCain team’s track record is hardly sterling. It might make America more vulnerable to terrorist attack, not less, were it in power.

[From Op-Ed Columnist – If Terrorists Rock the Vote in 2008 – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

Rich also discusses everyone’s favorite clowns, Rudy Giuliani, James Dobson, as well as a few other lesser clowns. Worth a read.

News Outlets Face Increasing Scrutiny

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Obama and His Baby Mama (sic)-Clip of the video

The slattern’s racist slip even got some coverage in the Wall Street Journal.

For the second time this week, Fox News Channel was driven to respond to criticism over on-air statements about Barack Obama, in this case for screen text that described the Democratic presidential candidate’s wife as “Obama’s baby mama.” The term is often applied pejoratively to unwed mothers.

Television news organizations, facing unprecedented scrutiny, have often expressed contrition for poorly chosen words during this election season.

In a campaign that includes the first viable African-American presidential candidate, the lines of appropriate speech have become fuzzy. News organizations are under pressure from a broad network of self-appointed watchdogs, including organized groups like Media Matters and individuals. These watchdogs are likely to remain vigilant about gaffes, misstatements and potentially biased language through the November vote. Just this week, Gina McCauley, a well-known blogger in Austin, Texas, started michelleobamawatch.com to track the portrayal of Mrs. Obama in the news media.

[From News Outlets Face Increasing Scrutiny in Campaign – WSJ.com]

Things have changed since 1992, indeed. Now there is at least a smidgen of accountability since revealing slips like this one are given a wider audience, quickly.

In a statement Thursday, Fox News’s senior vice president of programming, Bill Shine, said, “A producer on the program exercised poor judgment” in choosing the screen text. The Obama campaign declined to comment.

“I was a little surprised about how quickly it got picked up and turned into a really big thing,” Mr. Koppelman said Thursday. “If it’s not already happening more than it has in previous cycles, I’m sure it will because of technology.”

The phrase baby mama or baby mother is Caribbean in origin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it as “the mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.” It has gained wider currency in recent years through use in hip-hop lyrics and celebrity magazines. A movie called “Baby Mama,” starring Tina Fey, has been in theaters since April. The movie is about a single executive who hires another woman to carry her baby.

Obama\'s Baby Mama on Fox