This post discusses plot points from the February 7 episode of Parks and Recreation.

When you’re single, the most irritating person on the planet can be the dear friend who wants you to know that you’re so spectacular that of course everything’s going to turn out fine for you. That friend means well, but their encouragement only serves to highlight the gap in between what’s actually happening for you and what they insist should be happening, raising the possibility that a) you’re doing something wrong, b) there is a fatal flaw, c) the Gods have a sick sense of humor. And on last night’s episode of Parks and Recreation, that person was Leslie Knope.

On finding out that Ann is not just dating herself as a way to have new experiences and thinking about what she wants in life, but is considering having a baby with a sperm donor, Leslie declared “You’re definitely going to find a wonderful man who loves you, and respects you, and fills your home with multi-ethnic genius babies.” It’s a nice vision, but it was even nicer to see Ann put paid to Leslie’s relentless optimism for her best friend. “Maybe,” Ann told Leslie. “Or maybe not.” Either way, Leslie’s dream for her best friend is beside the point. Ann doesn’t want to wait anymore, she isn’t being diverted into a different path from Leslie’s, she’s just choosing it.

That’s both an exciting development for a character who can be passive and malleable with regard to her personal life, and as it turns out, a nice choice for the show’s larger universe. I’d been idly wishing for Crazy Ira and the Douche to Parks and Recreation, spurred in part by the debut of the Kroll Show on Comedy Central, so I was delighted to see Howard’s return to the show last night, as one of the candidates to donate sperm to Ann. And the show had a great joke for him: it turns out, to Leslie’s irritation, that he’s a relatively decent guy. “I majored in semiotics, wrote a thesis on narrative forms in the digital world,” Howard explained to Ann when she asked about his education. Leslie, still skeptical, wanted to know “Then you became a shock jock and created the sport taintball?” He shrugged it off, explaining “I know it’s a silly thing to do, but it pays the bills.” And later, he hit all of Leslie’s buttons when she tracked him down in the parking garage. “I’ve thought a lot about having kids. It’s the next big step in this grand adventure we call life,” Howard explained. “You know, if we had a little girl, I’d name her Elizabeth, after my grandmother. She was this strong, amazing woman.”
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Poor Rush Limbaugh, who really has no one else to blame for the fact that his comments about Sandra Fluke lost him advertisers and made Mike Huckabee a viable competitor, seems to be feeling sorry for himself lately. In a recent interview with The New Republic, President Obama said, truthfully, that “If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.” Now, Limbaugh appears to believe that this means President Obama is pulling some kind of mysterious strings—and to be denying his own influence. As The Hollywood Reporter explains:

Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience Monday that President Obama is promoting a “secondary boycott” against those he disagrees with and that the mainstream media is on board with the strategy.

“I would love to take credit for this,” Limbaugh said Monday. “I’d love to say that I find myself here because of a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed strategy, but one of the reasons that Fox News and I stand out like sore thumbs here is because the rest of the media is gone. The rest of the media is in the tank. The rest of the media has long ago ceased doing their job. They’re not reporting, they’re not curious, they’re not holding Obama accountable. They are on board. They are part of the agenda-advancement team.”

I’m awfully curious about this kind of thinking. Does Limbaugh believe himself to be influential, or not? If he doesn’t believe himself to have any particular influence over lawmakers, does that mean advertisers can’t decide if they do or don’t want to be associated with him, which is, after all, how pure media organizations have always set up that part of their revenue equation? How does President Obama saying that legislators care what Limbaugh thinks translate into him organizing a boycott against Limbaugh? What kind of free time does Limbaugh think President Obama has? It’s always entertaining seeing what it’s like down the rabbit hole, but I have less amused tolerance than usual when the subject is Limbaugh’s hurt feelings.

Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke have provided an embarrassment and a revenue sink for his employer, Clear Channel, which has had to contend with increasing numbers of advertisers who have pulled out of advertising on Limbaugh’s show. And as Limbaugh has continued to magnify his own woes, first with an anemic apology about his word choice, and then with an incoherent Twitter campaign against his critics, the signs are clear that Limbaugh’s position as an icon of the right might no longer be secure. In Limbaugh’s self-inflicted wounds lie the opportunity for a conservative rival to emerge—and for a rival network to Clear Channel to scoop up an enormous amount of money.

That rival talker is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and the rival network is Cumulus Media. “The Mike Huckabee Show” launches on April 9, and Cumulus is eager to sign up radio stations to carry it. The opportunity for them is two-fold: if stations decide to drop Limbaugh, there’s an obvious opening for them to carry Huckabee’s show instead. But even if they don’t, most of the local station contracts with Limbaugh are exclusive: another station in the same market can’t carry him. In the past, that meant the station had snagged itself a prize. In the future, it might look more like they’re saddled with a cigar-smoking albatross.

Cumulus Media’s seized that opportunity, telling stations that don’t have Limbaugh now and that might choose not to reup their contracts to carry him in the future, that in Huckabee, they’ve got a better alternative. The company’s distributed a list of 31 advertisers who have asked that their spots not be affiliated with any Limbaugh-related programming. And they’re pitching Huckabee’s show by telling stations it’ll offer “more conversation, less confrontation.”

In a few weeks, we’ll start to see if that strategy works. And even if it does, Huckabee’s tone may be different from Limbaugh’s, but that doesn’t mean his positions—with a few exceptions like childhood obesity and arts education—will vary much from the man he has a chance to dethrone. But as radio stations reassess their budgets, they might want to reconsider whether Limbaugh’s once-vaunted brand will continue to be worth it to them at the end of the next contract they sign. More than 140 advertisers have already made that assessment and decided to move on.

Earlier this year, This American Life broadcast its most popular episode ever, an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, about labor conditions in Apple’s supply-chain factories. Today, in a letter posted on the website of Chicago Public Media, which produces the show, host Ira Glass announced that TAL was retracting the story, citing numerous fabrications in Daisey’s account, and the breakdown of the program’s fact-checking process which allowed the episode to make it to the air. While there will be numerous debates about what happened at This American Life and the nature of non-fiction writing, there’s another significant question at stake: did Daisey’s report actually do what he’d claimed was his goal and move people to action?

It’s not that the misdeeds of managers at FoxConn were a secret before Daisey’s story aired. Fantastic reporting on the subject has been done prior by Wired, which chronicled a rash of suicides at a factory run by Foxconn, a key member of Apple’s supply chain, and by the New York Times since, chronicling abuses at a number of Apple suppliers. But Daisey’s monologue stirred up a particular debate. A petition inspired by the broadcast attracted 250,000 online signatures in a matter of days; Daisey became a cable news regular, and the story hot talking-head fodder; and as the wave of stories crested, Apple itself invited independent auditors onto its assembly lines and pressured its primary manufacturer to increase wages in response to growing public outrage. For activists who have been trying for years to pressure technology companies into embracing stricter labor standards in much the same way they did the garment industry, this felt like a moment.

But for all of the attention that Apple’s toxic partnership with FoxConn received in the last few months, Apple’s stock climbed above $600 a share this week. Their latest product is expected to break more sales records. And by some measures Apple is now the world’s largest corporation. Consumers may have been moved to sign petitions, but not, apparently, to change their purchasing decisions. Daisey claims he was motivated to fabrication by a desire to speak for vulnerable Chinese workers, and to connect deeply with American listeners. But the effect of his work may not have been as deep as he believed it to be. What we need is honest accounts of what Apple does to the workers it its supply chain. Stories that are true, rather than simply moving, are the only possible starting place for a campaign to hold Apple—and ourselves—truly accountable for the conditions that the company and we as consumers benefit from.

America’s shock radio hosts are not particularly know for their respect for and decent treatment of women. It’s hard to think of a week in American politics where that tendency has been more on display. When Rush Limbaugh gets so disgusting in his smearing of a monogamous woman who’s testifying in support of the administration’s birth control policy that President Obama is moved to intervene, it’s a clear sign—as if we needed yet another one—that we’re harboring something disturbing in our public discourse. So there’s something very odd about the pop culture effort in recent years to rehabilitate shock jocks—or at least to persuade what are clearly America’s ridiculous uptight feminists to get over themselves.

First, there was The Ugly Truth. In that movie, Katherine Heigel is a television producer who’s forced to work with a gross, lowest-common denominator shock jock played by Gerard Butler. He’s the kind of guy who we’re supposed to think is clever because he boosts ratings with jello wrestling, and who, when he spends a dinner torturing Heigel’s character with a pair of vibrating panties (literally), it’s supposed to be hilarious rather than at minimum sexual harassment. But instead of interpreting him as a crass creep, the whole point of The Ugly Truth is that he’s actually a nice guy, who is good to his nephew, brings his coworkers closer together, and is actually what Heigel’s uptight, narrow-minded control freak needs in her life, sexually and otherwise. The reckoning isn’t really about the gap between his public behavior and his private self—it’s Heigel’s character being forced to realize he’s right about everything, and to stop giving him trouble about behavior that is ugly but commercially successful.

Now, we’re going to be forced to go through this all over again in a show that’s not just meant to sell us on the idea that shock jocks are cool but that will also be about trying to get us to like Dane Cook. NBC, in what seems to be proof that the network that gave us Community can go lowest-common-denominator with the worst of them, is going to have Cook play a shock jock who’s paired with a feminist radio host. His character is supposed to be a “disheveled, unshaven, hung-over and purposely detached magnetic grouch who doesn’t like that his co-host is a woman.” The formula’s so obvious it’s painful: Cook will get over his objection to his co-host being a woman because they’ll evolve into a will-they-or-won’t-they pairing. But it’l be the co-host who starts making compromises on her feminism on discovering that Cook’s character has some sort of painful past. In other words, utter nonsense that requires the man involved to accept approximately zero responsibility for being sexist and awful.

But in real life, slut-shaming women in an effort to terrorize them out of speaking publicly, sexually harassing them on the airwaves, and treating them like objects aren’t excusable because your’e a wounded man-child. They’re not acts that have no impact in the world and can be made up for with dinner, or good sex. And feminists of both genders and women in general aren’t the people in this dynamic whose attitudes need to change.