Rush Limbaugh reacts to President Obama's Honey Boo Boo joke.

At that Al Smith dinner Obama told this joke: "And we're getting to that time when folks are making up their minds.  Just the other day Honey Boo Boo endorsed me. So that's a big relief." Okay, that's slightly funny. But what I found hilarious was Rush Limbaugh, on his show yesterday, trying to understand it:

Okay.  There you have it.  There's one.  Didn't edit anything there.  Honey Boo Boo is a new cartoon or doll or stuffed toy --

(interruption)

Reality show, that's what it is, it's a reality show. But what is Honey Boo Boo?  Honey Boo Boo is a little bear?  It's a little girl, Honey Boo Boo is a little girl?  A human girl or an animal girl?

(interruption)

You gotta be kidding me.  Honey Boo Boo is a little girl with a trailer park-like mother?  What network is this show on?  I'll find out.  Okay, so that's your target audience, the endorsement of Honey Boo Boo.  I'll guarantee you the guys in white tie and tails at the Alfred E. Smith dinner probably didn't know who Honey Boo Boo is, either. 

"Self-described Mich. ‘hillbilly’ claims $337M Powerball prize, vows to still eat at McDonald’s."

Donald Lawson says "I called her and said, ‘I got a surprise for you. I won $200,000 in the Powerball.’ She goes: ‘Oh my god. Yay!’ I said, ‘All right. Are you ready, Ma? Well, the truth is, I won $337 million and $4 in the Powerball. Ha, ha.”

Cool quote, but I want the quote where he calls himself a "hillbilly." I searched Google News for "hillbilly" and didn't find it, but I ended up with other hillbilly news. I found: "Here Comes the Hillbilly, Again: What Honey Boo Boo really says about American culture."

As Anthony Harkins observes in Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, one of the hillbilly’s signature moves is to peak, popularity-wise, just when Americans sense that things in general are headed south....

And such ridicule has always been politically coded: The hillbilly figure allows middle-class white people to offload the venality and sin of the nation onto some other constituency, people who live somewhere—anywhere—else. The hillbilly’s backwardness highlights the progress more upstanding Americans in the cities or the suburbs have made. These fools haven’t crawled out of the muck, the story goes, because they don’t want to.

This idea that the hillbilly’s poverty is a choice allows more upscale Americans to feel comfortable while laughing at the antics before them. It also pushes some people to embrace the stereotype as a badge of honor. “Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music / It’s the only thing that keeps me hangin’ on,” Dwight Yoakam once sang. For more contemporary examples of re-appropriation, you can attend any number of Tea Party rallies. The classist term “redneck,” originally coined to indicate those who worked so hard and so long in the sun that they sported sunburns in the designated anatomical location, likewise has been adopted in the name of all that’s good and holy.....

ADDED: Here's a different lottery story in the news today about a man who hadn't noticed he'd won $52 million. The money had gone unclaimed for a month, and the state circulated surveillance camera video of the winner buying the ticket:

A friend spotted the footage on the news and told Agnite, 'That's you!'