Rush Limbaugh’s new deal with Clear Channel, as flashed by Drudge (also covered or addressed here and here at NewsBusters; here at the New York Times; and here in a very long New York Times magazine article), is north of $400 million for the next eight years.

Good tax planning too: Maharushie will get his reported nine-figure signing bonus this year before a possible President Obama does his hundreds of billions in damage. Limbaugh’s tax savings, if the bonus is $100 million and Obama gets everything he wants, would be a hair under $17 mil (12.4% Social Security on all but $148,000, plus the 4.6% planned increase in the top rate).

One conclusion you can reach, based on what newspaper industry watcher Newsosaur told us earlier this week, is that Old Media covering the Limbaugh story is like zombies covering the living (link in excerpt was in original):

Newspaper shares slid $23B in 6 months

The value of 11 newspaper companies traded on the public market since 2005 dove a combined $23.7 billion in the first half of this year, falling almost as much in six months as they had in the three prior years put together.

Wall Street’s intensifying repudiation of the industry means that the companies in the group have lost a cumulative $49.7 billion in market capitalization in 3½ years, vaporizing 51% of shareholder value since Dec. 31. 2004.

To date, the decline in newspaper shares has not had a commensurate impact on the compensation (details here) enjoyed by the chief executives of several of the affected companies.

….. Journal Register Co. and the Sun-Times Media Group (nee Hollinger) suffered the worst losses in the 3½-year period, respectively shedding 99.1% and 96.9% of their value.

You really must go to Newsosaur’s link to see the “Newspaper Rout” table he has created, but here are a few other lowlights:

• The McClatchy Company and Lee Enterprises are both down over 90% since the end of 2004.
• Gannett Co., Inc. owner of many metro papers as well as USA Today, which is one of the few papers not losing circulation, is down 73% in the same time period.
• The New York Times Company, down “only” 60.4% in that same time frame, is the fourth-BEST performer on the list.

Limbaugh got to where he is by being entertaining, informative, and 98%-plus accurate. He also famously didn’t jump on to the Internet until it could be proven that he would at least break even.

How many publishers can say that? Therein lie the reasons why Limbaugh and the newspaper business are heading in opposite directions.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE: If I had been trolling the Internet last night shortly after midnight, I would have realized that Brian Maloney at Radio Equalizer scooped Drudge on this by nine hours. Nice job, guy.

UPDATE 2: The NYT Magazine’s text treatment of Limbaugh is very good, but the pictures, assuming the ones at the site are the ones going into the mag, are horribly, and without doubt deliberately, awful. All black and white, with a sinister tinge. They should have been all green — with envy.

UPDATE 3: While we’re on the subject, assuming he’s listened quite a bit, which appears to be the case, how out-of-it does NYT Mag author Zev Chafets have to be to NOT realize the following? –

(Limbaugh) does, however, keep up a running conversation with an unheard voice. I always assumed that this was just imaginary radio shtick. Now I saw that the voice was attached to a human interlocutor, (Bo) Snerdly, who banters with and occasionally badgers Limbaugh via an internal talk-back circuit.

UPDATE 4: With the LA Times, San Jose Mercury News, and other industry layoffs, maybe the numbers in tomorrow’s Employment Situation Report should be expressed in two ways — with and without print media.

Here’s the summary:

Nonfarm private employment decreased 79,000 from May to June 2008 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment Report®. The estimated change in employment from April to May was revised down from an increase of 40,000 to an increase of 25,000.

This month’s decrease in employment was broad based across industrial sectors and suggests continued weakness in employment.

Well, the conventional wisdom is that it’s a further harbinger of a really weak report from Uncle Sam tomorrow. Pre-ADP, the CW was a seasonally adjusted job loss of 60,000, according to Bloomberg, which repeated the same mistake the business press routinely makes when reporting on these numbers:

The biggest housing recession in a quarter century and record oil prices are prompting an increase in firings as companies brace for falling demand. The government tomorrow may report that total private and government payrolls fell in June for a sixth decline this year, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.

Sorry guys, it’s not an “increase in firings,” it’s “less-than-hoped-for hirings,” as the not seasonally-adjusted numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics clearly show (select the top Not Seasonally Adjusted report at this BLS link):

My guess is that June’s actual net hirings will be in the neighborhood of the 500,000 seen in the previous 2 years. I don’t think that increase will be enough to prevent a reported seasonally adjusted job loss, but it’s one that I think will be slightly smaller than predicted.

The first of two wild cards is this: It could be that, if ADP is reflecting the reality out there better than BLS (last month’s discussion as to why that might be the case is here), then BLS will start catching up to the net job gains ADP has shown so far this year:

The chart doesn’t include ADP’s prior-month downward revision of May by 15,000 in its report today. After deducting that, there’s still an ADP v. BLS private-sector job difference of 539,000 (554-15) through May. If the BLS starts catching up to ADP, there will be an upside surprise for June, perhaps even a barely positive number.

The second wild card is that ISM’s Non-Manufacturing Index (NMI) isn’t coming out before BLS’s Employment Situation report. I’d feel better about my guess if I knew that it will stay at or improve on where it was last month (51.7). The Arrogant Pessimists at the Associated Press have a consensus estimate of 50.7 from the Wall Street economists it surveyed. This link predicts 51.0. But ISM’s readings have been coming in higher than predicted for the past few months. If the “experts” are underestimating non-manufacturing strength, they’re probably underestimating employment strength too.

All of that said, if ADP has been more right than BLS has been so far this year, the employment situation may really be starting to deteriorate in states other than known economy-draggers California and Michigan. That, unfortunately, makes intuitive sense to me. Employers, and investors too (as seen by how awful June was in the stock market, where the discounted cash-flow calculations that form the basis for market prices are surely diving), are getting used to the idea that $4 gas isn’t a blip, and that the congressional majority in Washington could care less about doing anything tangible about it — short-term or long-term. In fact, Obama-Pelosi-Reid alliance seems almost happy about it, especially Obama, whose only qualifier is that he wishes that prices hadn’t gone up so quickly.

In fact, I’m inches away from calling their steadfast refusal to expand drilling an election-year, country-be-damned ploy. For now, I think it will be fair to characterize most of anything bad that happens to the economy from this spring on forward as being part of the Pelosi Plunge, perhaps leading to the Pelosi-Obama-Reid Recession.

Wow, the negative reax to Wesley “World War III” Clark’s attack on the presidential candidate I refer to as JS3M3 (John Sidney the Mad Maverick McCain III) has legs.

In case you missed it, Clark, described here as “a key military adviser” to the candidate I refer to as Mr. BOOHOO-OUCH (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama – Objectively Unfit Coddler of Haters), said the following, among a lot of other really dumb things, on Sunday (vid is at Hot Air; you have to see the whole thing to fully appreciate its awfulness):

Well I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

CBS’s Bob Schieffer was clearly astonished at what he was hearing.

I thought Hot Air’s Captain Ed was seeing too much when he wrote this on Monday morning:

Not only can every argument Clark made get applied more to Obama than to McCain, he has now made it clear that the Obama strategy is to demean and belittle McCain’s military service — and by extension, military service in general.

But Ed’s instincts sure look dead on. Now I see that Clark won’t back down, and that Obama thinks it’s no big deal (HT Politico):

I guess my question is why, given all the vast numbers of things that we’ve got to work on, that that would be a top priority of mine?

Obama even used that word (”inartful”) that isn’t a word again. That would be the same word he used when he tried to pretend that he really didn’t want to ban handguns in November when he told the Chicago Tribune (last few sentences at link) that he thought the DC gun ban was constitutional (but of course he really does want your guns). The fact that the nutroots think that going after McCain’s service is as great idea should be scant consolation (or is shaking the nutroots’ money tree yet another time that important?).

Now McCain has the clear upper hand in demanding that Obama throw Clark under the bus. If Obama does that, the nutroots go nuts in the wrong way. If he doesn’t, McCain has 120 days or so to hammer Obama’s popular vote percentage into the 30s. As usual, it’s not the action, it’s the reaction.

Anyway, as to the story having legs — I was in a place the Food Police say I shouldn’t be this morning, ordering stuff the Food Police say I shouldn’t eat, watching a TV channel I shouldn’t watch (because watching that TV channel is more dangerous to my health than eating the stuff the Food Police say I shouldn’t eat), watching replays of Wesley Clark “not backing down,” saying the same things he shouldn’t have said the first time in only a slightly different way, while the TV channel I shouldn’t be watching is showing old war footage of John McCain over and over again right next to Clark’s smug mug — footage it probably doesn’t want to show, but it has to because what Clark is saying is so awful that they’re hoping that viewers will watch the footage and stop listening to Clark — but it’s not working, because Clark is stepping in it so deeply that I’m thinking that some really nasty stuff that is even worse for me than the stuff the Food Police says I shouldn’t eat at the place the Food Police say I shouldn’t be in will start flying out of the TV.

And this is on a channel that until now has been notoriously friendly to the point of absurdity towards Obama.

This has legs.

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UPDATE, 5 PM: Oh brother, Jim Webb’s giving it four legs.

UPDATE 2, 5:15 p.m.: An Instapundit blast from the past (early 2004, when Clark was in the midst of his pitiful primary campaign for the Dem presidential nomination) notes that “Clark was urged to retire (from his command in the Balkans) so that they would not need to take the drastic step of formally relieving him.” To Clark this supposedly means that he wasn’t “relieved of his command.” That’s like saying a baseball manager or football coach, told to resign or else be fired, wasn’t really “relieved of his job.” Give me a break.

UPDATE 3, 5:20 p.m.: I like this McCain campaign spokesperson’s quote –

If this kind of wink-and-nod game is how Barack Obama wants to run his campaign, then fine. But spare us the empty talk of ‘new politics’ and raising the dialogue in this country.

UPDATE 4: Great comment at Ann Althouse’s place– “Do they really want people, going into the 4th of July holiday, to be concentrating on the service and sacrifices of John McCain? Really?” They’ve got it, like it or not.

UPDATE 5: This baby may be growing centipede legs — Powerline has a partial transcript where Clark insists that John Kerry was more qualified than McCain, because Kerry had “the moral courage to stand up for himself and oppose the conflict in Vietnam.” Powerline’s John adds, “…. and falsely accused his fellow servicemen of being war criminals.” By all means, let’s continue to compare.

From Bristol, Connecticut (HT Fox News):

Boy Jumps Into Action As Sister Hangs By Neck 

BRISTOL, Conn. — Trevor Caron didn’t waste any time when he saw his younger sister hanging with beads around her neck.

“I thought Hannah would die in three more seconds,” he said. “But then that’s when I got off my bed and ran to Hannah and saved Hannah’s life.”

With his grandmother in the other room, Trevor said he was watching television when he heard his 2-year-old sister choking. He said he turned around and saw her dangling above the floor, her face turning white.

Nancy Caron, Trevor and Hannah’s mom, was at work when she got the call about what happened. She said she didn’t even know how serious it was until she came home, saw the mark on Hannah’s neck and took her to the doctor.

“Her doctor looked at her and said my son saved her life,” she said. “It was very close. She was seconds away from passing out.”

The Caron family used to keep the beads tucked away so the youngsters couldn’t get to them, Nancy said. They still don’t know how Hannah was able to get them down, she said.

Nancy said she had no idea these beads could be so dangerous and that her daughter would think they were a necklace. She said she’s even more amazed her 5-year-old son knew what to do. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.