Oh this makes my blood boil

[redpaint]

Who the hell is Michael Savage and where did he get his medical degree from? ALso just how many chilern with Autism has he rasied? I deal with one ever day. NO this child is not babied. Its hard enough fighting the school systemn to get the help he needs and to educate Teachers ever year about autism and what they will be dealing with when they have my Grandson. Then comes along some ignorant jack ass that use his raio show to give out flas infromion on Autism.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/b...em&ex=1216785600&en=6a0685e7bf991820&ei=5087

Savage Stands by Autism Remarks

By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: July 22, 2008
Michael Savage, the incendiary radio host who last week characterized nearly every child with autism as “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” said in a telephone interview on Monday that he stood by his remarks and had no intention of apologizing to those advocates and parents who have called for his firing over the matter.

Skip to next paragraph “My main point remains true,” Mr. Savage, whose radio audience ranks in size behind only those of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, said in the interview. “It is an overdiagnosed medical condition. In my readings, there is no definitive medical diagnosis for autism.”

On the July 16 installment of his program, which is broadcast every weekday, Mr. Savage suggested that “99 percent of the cases” of autism were a result of lax parenting. He told his audience: “They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life.’ ” Among the other admonitions he felt children with autism should be hearing, he said, were: “ ‘Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ ”

Asked Monday if he actually believed that 99 out of every 100 cases of autism were misdiagnosed, Mr. Savage conceded that figure was “a little high.” He added, “It was hyperbole.”

But he said he was proud to have prodded discussion on the subject, and planned to give over his entire show on Monday — broadcast live from Northern California from 3 to 6 p.m., Pacific time — to parents and other callers who wished to disagree with him and to educate him.

While Mr. Savage’s program is heard on more than 350 stations nationally, his comments on autism were widely disseminated via e-mail on Friday by Media Matters for America, an advocacy group that dedicates itself, at least in part, to “correcting conservative misinformation in the media.”

Some critics were not inclined to wait until Monday’s edition of Mr. Savage’s show, “The Savage Nation,” to register their disagreement with him. In New York City, Autism United, a coalition of organizations that advocate on behalf of children with autism and provide services to them, staged a protest Monday outside the studios of WOR (710 AM), which carries Mr. Savage’s program weeknights from 6 to 9 p.m., Eastern time.

“He characterizes children with autism who are very, very ill — disabled children — as essentially bad kids; the only thing wrong with them is they have parents who don’t discipline them,” said John Gilmore, executive director of Autism United and the father of an 8-year-old with a diagnosis of autism. “That completely misrepresents what is going on with children with autism.”

“Basically, what he’s doing is parroting what used to be said about autism 40 years ago, back in the heyday of Freudian analysis,” Mr. Gilmore added. “It was blamed on bad parenting. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to support that.”

Paul Siebold, a spokesman for WOR, said in an e-mail statement: “The views expressed by Michael Savage are his views and are not those of WOR Radio. We regret any consternation that his remarks may have caused to our listeners.”

Mark Masters, the chief executive of Talk Radio Network, which syndicates Mr. Savage’s program and which extended his contract in February, did not respond to several messages left at his office Monday morning.

Catherine Lord, an expert on autism who is a visiting professor in the child study center at New York University, said that beneath Mr. Savage’s overheated rhetoric was a kernel of truth: that some children are saddled with an autism diagnosis by default, when they seem to fit in no other category. But far more often, she said, children who have autism are given a misdiagnosis of having something else. And she said she feared that Mr. Savage’s ill-informed comments could wind up being harmful.

“Any tendency to blame the children or to think they’re just being bratty if they misbehave perpetuates the myth that autism isn’t a learning disability,” she said. “It’s a neurobiological condition, just like epilepsy or another medical condition like diabetes or a heart condition. It would be like blaming the child with a heart condition for not being able to exercise.”

 

[Stella_Omega]

I fucking hate that kind of "a little high, maybe hyperbole" routine. It's such a lame excuse.

I wonder if he's done an autism show today, like he's promised?

 

[sethp]

He's a prick.

 

[3113]

I think parents should break down the doors, bring in their kids and force him to prove he's right by handing their kids over to him to "teach."

This is symptomatic of a larger problem with all the U.S. For the last eight years at least, we've wanted nothing but simple answers and followed like sheep after anyone and everyone who says such things. Who says, "There is no such thing as this problem! It's all a lie by scientists and liberals. Just yell at it, and it will go away!"

So much bullshit. But it's attractive bullshit to the assholes who are too cowardly and stupid to want to deal with the real world. They want to yell and magically make the world the place they wish it would be.

 

[glynndah]

As the mother of an autistic son, I really should start listening to that show. I need to know which sponsors' products to boycott.

 

[sethp]

I used to teach quite a few autistic children. It's heartbreaking when this guy, who influences millions of listeners, is doing so much harm!

 

[Stella_Omega]

yeah, I just read his wikipedia entry-- he's truly a blot on society.

 

[Xelebes]

Michael Savage is a shockjock, nothing more. Some of the stuff he puts on the air makes Howard Stern blush.

Video: How he got fired from MSNBC.

 

[rgraham666]

To Mr. Savage and his ilk children are something to be broken, like a horse. Unfortunately they usually end up breaking the child like a piece of china.

Not that they care. A child that breaks 'isn't strong enough' and so not good for anything.

Bastards.

 

[cantdog]

I hope I never have ilk. It always means you've really hit a personal low when you find you suddenly have ilk.

He gets to say these things because he's just a comedian.

 

[Elianna]

I hope I never have ilk. It always means you've really hit a personal low when you find you suddenly have ilk.

He gets to say these things because he's just a comedian.

Maybe he should listen to his own advice:

"Shut the fuck up and act like a man."

 

[sethp]

I hope I never have ilk. It always means you've really hit a personal low when you find you suddenly have ilk.

He gets to say these things because he's just a comedian.

That's a good point --but there's a line he's crossed where people take his advice and opinion to heart and believe everything he says.

 

[cantdog]

That's a good point --but there's a line he's crossed where people take his advice and opinion to heart and believe everything he says.

I agree. But I can't be sure I am not agreeing simply because he's a right wing prick and his opinions and attitude are unsympathetic to my own. I dug Lenny, and I could get behind George Carlin. But that might have been because they were saying what I already believed to be true. You know, and this dick is speaking from a place I hope I never inhabit in this life.

But I defend his right to say outrageous shit I don't agree with. Autism, though, is no myth. He has hold of the wrong end of the stick, on this one. There are actually cold facts, facts which make him not just not very funny anymore, but factually wrong. So I am looking forward with glee to the spectacle, dude, of yet another right wing prick having to settle out of court for hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars.

Like O'Reilly has done, at least twice.

God bless the lawyers.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

This guy's an absolute schmuck and total inverted asshole. My brother-in-law's autistic and I can vouch for the fact that autism is a biological and physiological condition, not behavioral. Savage wouldn't know an autistic if he slept with him.

Like all these rube-radio ass-wipes he doesn't know shit about what he's talking about but doesn't let that stop him. He'll say anything for ratings, pandering to listeners with the intelligence of a steel-belted radial tire. And watch his ratings soar after this.

And you want to know why we can't elect a decent president?

 

[3113]

He'll say anything for ratings, pandering to listeners with the intelligence of a steel-belted radial tire. And watch his ratings soar after this.

I dunno, Dr. M, this might backfire on him. I mean, it's easy to get listeners and ratings when you rant about an ethnicity or religion that your listeners all agree to hate. When, in short, you create a scapegoatthat your audience can agree on and happily blame said goat for all the world's ills. But any one of his listeners might have an autistic child; and the one thing you never want to do is tell a parent that their kid is "ugly" or that they're a bad parent.

It's not just liberals, gays, Jews, etc. (i.e. the usual he rants and raves against) who have autistic children. Like ending up in a wheelchair, it can happen to anyone. And the idiot who cheers him on when he's denouncing gays may stop and say, "Hey wait!" if he's denouncing that listener as a parent and that listener's autistic kid. The kid that listener has worked and sacrificed for in order to make sure said kid can be as happy and normal as possible.

Even if listeners don't leave him in droves, his sponsors might.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Michael Savage is a ding-dong but autism is over-diagnosed. I know plenty of kids with the diagnosis who outgrow it, because their problem is really a developmental delay. Autism is the magic word to get federal money for the school and access to special ed classes & a disability check for mom.

REMEMBER! You cant get what Medicaid or insurance wont pay for. If your MD cant bill for it, you cant get it.

 

[Guest]

I dunno, Dr. M, this might backfire on him. I mean, it's easy to get listeners and ratings when you rant about an ethnicity or religion that your listeners all agree to hate. When, in short, you create a scapegoatthat your audience can agree on and happily blame said goat for all the world's ills. But any one of his listeners might have an autistic child; and the one thing you never want to do is tell a parent that their kid is "ugly" or that they're a bad parent.

It's not just liberals, gays, Jews, etc. (i.e. the usual he rants and raves against) who have autistic children. Like ending up in a wheelchair, it can happen to anyone. And the idiot who cheers him on when he's denouncing gays may stop and say, "Hey wait!" if he's denouncing that listener as a parent and that listener's autistic kid. The kid that listener has worked and sacrificed for in order to make sure said kid can be as happy and normal as possible.

Even if listeners don't leave him in droves, his sponsors might.

And that has begun already, thank goodness.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/b...em&ex=1216872000&en=e345d55276b40910&ei=5087


<snip>

While Mr. Savage’s program is heard on more than 350 stations nationally, his comments on autism were widely disseminated via e-mail on Friday by Media Matters for America, an advocacy group that dedicates itself, at least in part, to “correcting conservative misinformation in the media.”

Some critics were not inclined to wait until Monday’s edition of Mr. Savage’s show, “The Savage Nation,” to register their disagreement with him.

Late Monday afternoon, Aflac, the insurance company, announced it was withdrawing all advertising from Mr. Savage's show. "We understand that radio hosts pick on any number of targets," Laura Kane, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement, before adding that Aflac considered "his recent comments about autistic children to be both inappropriate and insensitive.”

In New York City, Autism United, a coalition of organizations that advocate on behalf of children with autism and provide services to them, staged a protest Monday outside the studios of WOR (710 AM), which carries Mr. Savage’s program weeknights from 6 to 9 p.m., Eastern time.

“He characterizes children with autism who are very, very ill — disabled children — as essentially bad kids; the only thing wrong with them is they have parents who don’t discipline them,” said John Gilmore, executive director of Autism United and the father of an 8-year-old with a diagnosis of autism. “That completely misrepresents what is going on with children with autism.”

“Basically, what he’s doing is parroting what used to be said about autism 40 years ago, back in the heyday of Freudian analysis,” Mr. Gilmore added. “It was blamed on bad parenting. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to support that.”

<snip>

 

[redpaint]

I could not have siad this any better than what Jim Watkins of CW11 News at Ten New York Siad in respons to this.


You may want to go to the link there are some video links at the bottom that are worth watching.
http://weblogs.cw11.com/news/jimwatkins/2008/07/my_response_to_michael_savages.html

My response to Michael Savage's remarks on autism
As many viewers of the CW11 News at Ten know, my oldest son, Liam, has autism. When I was reading the news headlines this morning and saw what radio host Michael Savage had said about autism, that it’s a “fraud, a racket..” and that “In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out”… my first reaction was to simply consider the source. Michael Savage is a professional jerk, who puts his extreme ignorance on display for fun and profit; substantial profits, apparently, since he’s purported to be the third most popular radio host in America. What he said about autism is so patently ridiculous, I didn’t think it needed to be dignified with a response.



But as the day went on, and responses WERE coming in from autism organizations and parents of autistic children, I knew I couldn’t sit this one out. So, Mr. Savage, here are some of my thoughts about your foolish and cruel diatribe.

You said: “They (autistic children) don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron… Straighten up. Act like a man.”

My son, Liam, DOES have a father, Mr. Savage. That would be me. Liam is ten years old, and, boy, would I love to say things to him about his condition. One problem: Liam has no vocabulary. He can’t talk, Mr. Savage. He has a brain condition that has no known cause, and no known cure, and one of the ways the condition manifests itself in Liam is that he has no speech, and very little receptive language. That means he can barely understand anything that’s said to him.

“You’ll get nowhere in life,” you said we should tell our autistic children. Well, in some regards, for severely autistic children like mine, that’s partially true. Liam has no skills. It’s doubtful he’ll ever be able to have even a simple, repetitive job, and all signs indicate he’ll need 24/7 care for the rest of his life. But I suppose it comes down to what you mean by “nowhere.” Liam will never measure up to what you apparently see as the hidden potential of these “brats.” But he is a kind and gentle soul, who loves his family and caretakers in whatever way he’s capable of loving. He always does his best, and when he smiles, it’s enough to make the sun come out from behind the clouds. Liam is definitely “somewhere” in life, Mr. Savage, but it’s a place I’m afraid you don’t have the capacity to understand or relate to.

Every autistic child is different. Many, like my son, can’t speak or brush their teeth, and need years to learn to go to the bathroom by themselves. Others can go to college, but are burdened with compulsions and social difficulties and the need for repetitive behaviors that makes it difficult for them to fit in. But even with these higher functioning autistics, your “method” of dealing with them is absurdly harsh and wrong-headed. Do you think people with autism WANT to be that way? Do you think their parents haven’t broken their bank accounts, their hearts, and usually their marriages because they haven’t tried everything under the sun to have their child live as normal a life as possible? You think calling them putzes, morons, idiots, is the way to “snap them out of it?” Your ignorance is breathtaking, Mr. Savage. Read more after the jump.

There’s no other way to put it: you are advocating the abuse of handicapped children. If your millions of listeners endorse that thinking, well, you can have them. But all the people I know who have experienced the pain, the difficulty, and, yes, Mr. Savage, the joy, of raising these beautiful children, would never think of treating them the way you apparently would.

You know, the funny thing is, if Liam COULD talk, and if he could understand what you said today, he wouldn’t be angry at you. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, and if he could feel anything toward you, it would only be pity, pity that you speak out of such ignorance, and hate. He’s not a moron, Mr. Savage, and neither are you. You’re just a sad and angry man, who would destroy hope rather than nurture it, in the thousands of families who live with autism.

A final note, if you’re reading this: My wife, Lauren Thierry, made a film called “Autism Every Day,” for the organization Autism Speaks. It shows, very simply and plainly, what life is like for families with children on the same place on the autism spectrum as my son.

 

[sethp]

I could not have siad this any better than what Jim Watkins of CW11 News at Ten New York Siad in respons to this.


You may want to go to the link there are some video links at the bottom that are worth watching.
http://weblogs.cw11.com/news/jimwatkins/2008/07/my_response_to_michael_savages.html

Nice article...thanks for sharing that.

 

[gauchecritic]

I laugh every time I listen to him. He sounds exactly like a stereotypical NY jew and when he pretends to get angry his voice goes falsetto which just makes it funnier. I can well imagine him screaming at his kids when they came home asking what a homosexual was.

But really, the best part is that his real name is Moyshe Weiner and he dropped it as soon as he could.

One of his favourite whipping boys is Jimmy Carter (I think) whom he insists is a jew hater and every single time he uses the epithet he qualifies it with 'people can hate jews if they want but...'

 

[Vermilion]

I have to admit that my experience of autism is limited to my knowledge of a young lad who has Asperger's Syndrome: a condition that is, I believe, a milder form of Autism. This boy is scarily intelligent, very determined, but you have to be careful how you talk to him. He operates in very strict parameters and does exactly what you tell him without reading between the lines and he takes on board everything that goes on around him whilst it looks like he's gazing at a wall. Many of the adults who work in our organisation have mistaken him for a simpleton, especially those older members of staff, but that's just because he doesn't make eye contact and struggles with the social niceties.

I can't even begin to relate what this idiotic man has said to what I know of Autism. It is quite patently obvious that he hasn't a clue what he's talking about, in which case he should keep his mouth shut. What is it about modern society that gives all these brain-dead ignoramii a platform to mouth off from? Used to be that we only let informed and thoughtful people have such an audience. I don;t *get* this 'shock-jock' crap, it's bad enough having to read such tripe on the internet wihtout it being broadcast on the airwaves.


x
V

 

[rgraham666]

What is it about modern society that gives all these brain-dead ignoramii a platform to mouth off from? Used to be that we only let informed and thoughtful people have such an audience. I don;t *get* this 'shock-jock' crap, it's bad enough having to read such tripe on the internet wihtout it being broadcast on the airwaves.


x
V

It makes money, V. It's as simple as that.

 

[cantdog]

I can't even begin to relate what this idiotic man has said to what I know of Autism. It is quite patently obvious that he hasn't a clue what he's talking about, in which case he should keep his mouth shut. What is it about modern society that gives all these brain-dead ignoramii a platform to mouth off from? Used to be that we only let informed and thoughtful people have such an audience. I don;t *get* this 'shock-jock' crap, it's bad enough having to read such tripe on the internet wihtout it being broadcast on the airwaves.


x
V

I'm afraid it's not so very modern. Check out Father Coughlin, the pro-Nazi priest, whose racist and anti-Jew radio addresses were incredibly popular. I truly don't think you can point to a time when the airwaves were free of such malarkey.

 

[SlickTony]

I've never listened to this asshole. Thanks for the warning.

Signed,
The mother of an Asperger kid that I'd say was worth a million of him, except that even though I am no mathematician, I know what you get when you multiply Zero.

 

[Stella_Omega]

It makes money, V. It's as simple as that.

Maybe not making much money right now.
(correction)
AFLAC has dropped their advertising contract from his show, and seven-station Super Talk Mississippi radio network has dropped him.