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Dec. 14, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:00
December 14, 2005, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Hang on, I got to get something out of this printer that looks like it's about to devour me, I'm told.
Okay, welcome back, folks.
Nice to have your broadcast excellence rolls on.
It's the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am America's anchor man, play-by-playman of the news, and news commentator, a general all-round good guy, all combined as one harmless, lovable little fuzzball, El Rushball, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
And a phone number, excuse me, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-2882.
The email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
Interesting little story here.
This is, where's this from?
Look at Madison, Wisconsin.
Apparently, Howard Feynman went up there and made a speech.
Howard Feynman of that schlub publication known as Newsweek.
And yeah, Drew University Lecture Series.
Monday night, first program of a Drew University lecture series.
Howard Feynman, Newsweek's chief political correspondent, said that Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward had become a court stenographer for the Bush administration.
I just love this.
I just love it.
When the reporters start attacking themselves, it was only a matter of time before this is going to happen.
Remember when ABC wanted to do a piece on Fox and American Idol for 2020 or whatever it is?
It's coming, folks.
You're going to see more and more of this cannibalization.
Standing before a crowd of nearly 300.
Howard, I could get a crowd of 300 to watch me go to the bathroom.
300.
Yip, on a university campus.
300 people show up to hear Howard Feynman.
He said that Woodward went from being an outsider burning the beltway with his investigative work from Watergate to being an official court stenographer of the Bush administration.
He's a great reporter, Feynman said, but he's become a great reporter of official history.
See, what this is all about is that Woodward endeavors to tell the truth about what's going on with the Bush administration.
Of course, Newsweek has this silly piece about how Bush lives in a bubble and he's devoid reality because he doesn't talk to people like Howard Feynman.
So Howard Feynman can tell him what's really going on out there.
There's no Howard Feynman's in touch with America.
If Howard Feynman wanted to go to Texas, somebody'd have to give him a map and show him what country it's in.
Howard, we're sending you to Texas to do a story on barbecue.
Texas, is my passport ready?
And yet these guys claim Bush living in a bubble.
So here's Woodward.
This all goes back to Woodward not revealing whatever he knew at the time about the source that was divulging the name of Valerie Plame and all this stuff.
And now Viveka Novak, she's in the dock.
Is she suspended without pay?
Well, she took a leave of absence.
She's not a leave of absence.
I don't know if she's been suspended, but she's on a leave of absence because she went and testified the grand jury before telling her editor about it.
I'm telling you, this whole thing is going to ensnare the media before it's all said and done.
But Feynman said these days the balance of power has shifted in favor of the government.
Feynman said the audience ranged and the audience ranged over a variety of topics, but the first question an audience member asked him was what is perhaps on the forefront of many minds today, the war in Iraq.
Answering a question about why a particular story about the war was not picked up by more news outlets, Feynman said that many American editors tend to think Americans care little about foreign news.
I think they're underestimating the American public.
You know, no, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense.
I thought journalists didn't care what the American people thought.
I thought journalists were going to force feed the American people what they needed to know because Americans are idiots.
Americans are basically just average Joes who don't know what's good for them.
But now all of a sudden, no, the good news on Iraq is not being reported because editors just don't think the American people care about foreign news.
Don't care about foreign news.
The news is full of stories about how we're a bunch of heathens, about how we're nothing but tortures, about how we're nothing but barbarians.
There's plenty of foreign news, and it's about us and about how rotten to the core we are.
But anyway, folks, they're starting to eat each other alive in the news media business.
And we look forward to more of it and will chronicle it as it happened or happens.
This is a story from the Carolina Journal.
And the headline is fascinating.
Dialogue sought on higher education.
18-member panel, which includes Jim Hunt, will report next year.
The U.S. Department of Education has appointed a commission that will engage in what U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling termed a national dialogue about the role of higher education in the 21st century.
The 18-member commission on the future of higher education, includes professors, university presidents, business leaders, and government officials, will release a report next year.
I don't think they've got the right group of people to come up with the truth on this.
There needs to be some parents that are paying for these educations in this group, need to be some students who are being propagandized.
Spelling said that she hopes the commission will not only find ways to improve higher education, but also ways for higher education to meet the needs of an increasingly global economy.
The commission expected to release its recommendations to the public in August.
Make a note on a calendar.
Just put the whole month of August.
Wait for a report on higher education so we can know and be ready for this so we'll remember this story when it happened.
Unlike K through 12 education, the education secretary said, few studies exist about the quality of higher education.
She also said that many people don't pay attention to how taxpayer money is being spent at colleges and universities.
What do you want to bet that they miss the real issue?
What do you want to bet?
I'll tell you what the real issue they're going to miss is that universities are an incestuous bed of liberalism.
They don't live in the real world.
Universities live in a bubble.
That they are not accountable to anybody.
Money means nothing because there is an endless supply.
Normal business accounting doesn't apply to them.
The same liberals who get upset about the cost of gasoline, the same liberals who want to destroy Walmart, will not say a word about the continually rising tuition costs at institutions of higher learning.
They will not talk about the quality of education that comes out of these places.
They will not talk about it because they own these institutions and whatever the liberals are in charge of, well, that's all exempt from criticism.
If Walmart's bad because their prices are too low, and they are, that's why they're bad.
If Walmart's bad because their wages are not high.
And by the way, there's a funny thing.
George Will has this in his Newsweek column.
This is, this is hilarious.
In a Las Vegas suburb, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union hired temporary workers at $6 an hour to picket a non-union Walmart.
The wages at the Walmart start at $6.75 an hour.
So the union goes out and pays people six bucks to picket Walmart when they're paying them $6.75 to work inside the Walmart.
But Walmart's bad.
Halliburton's bad.
ExxonMobil is bad.
Gas prices, gouging, all these things.
When universities do it, we never hear one word about it.
Quick time out.
We'll be back and roll right on right after this.
Ha!
Welcome back, El Rushbaugh, America's Truth Detector.
Utilizing talent on loan from God.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
I'm getting a lot of emails from people who say they're confused by the media reporting on the latest ruling in my case.
And I was going to wait to comment on it if I got a phone call.
We haven't got any phone calls about that.
So let me use the emails as the peg, if you will, around which to try to explain this to you.
It is not nearly as complicated as the reporting has made this out to be.
You have to understand, as I have learned, my case is a story, just like a rock is a story, and just like anything else is a story.
And for the media, particularly the local media here in South Florida, there's an action line.
And that action line is anything bad for me moves the story forward.
Anything that happens favorable to me is not considered news because it doesn't move the story forward or it doesn't move the action line.
The action line is that I'm wrong, they're right, and anything that they can twist and turn to fit that template, they will do.
Now, on Monday, Judge Crowe ruled, and in a way, sort of split the baby.
The subject that was being argued in court was the prosecutors went in and they wanted the judge essentially to let them talk to my doctors.
Now, this is after two years of claiming that they needed my medical record.
Remember, two years ago, they're out there saying that they had 10, they already had evidence of 10 counts of felony doctor shopping.
They already had that.
They leaked that to the media.
It was all over the place.
Everybody assumes that, well, if they've got that, well, it's looking really bad.
Then they demanded to see the medical records, and they said during the appeals process that until they saw the records, they wouldn't know what, if anything, to charge.
Well, what about those 10 felonies they already had?
Well, they didn't have anything because there aren't any.
So the appeals process goes on and on and on.
They finally get the records.
They got the records within the dates of the search warrants that they secured them.
And there's nothing in those records to show doctor shopping.
So they go back to court and say, we need to talk to Limbaugh's doctors.
Well, there's a problem.
Florida statute says that there is confidentiality between a doctor and a patient.
It's called the doctor-patient privilege.
It's like any other privilege that exists, a lawyer, client, what have you.
And the prosecutors went in and they basically said to the judge, judge, look, this is silly.
We're investigating a serious crime here, and we can't talk to the doctors.
So we don't have any element of one crime.
We don't have the elements of one crime here until we talk to the doctors.
The judge said, well, the statute says you can't.
There's a privilege.
And the prosecutor said, well, come on, judge.
Common sense is that, I mean, we can't go anywhere unless we talk to the doctors.
So that was the argument.
We made the argument that the privilege stands no matter what, and they can't compromise it.
So the judge in his ruling on Monday said, well, we'll let you issue subpoenas because the judge said, I can't stop you from issuing subpoenas.
There was a two-pronged ruling.
You can subpoena the doctors.
Now, they wanted to subpoena the doctors under what's called ex parte, which means investigative, which means there's no case.
They want to issue subpoenas to talk to the doctors to go fishing to see if they can find evidence of a crime.
The judge said, you can't do that.
You can't talk to the doctors about Mr. Limbaugh's condition unless he waives that privilege, which, of course, I haven't and won't.
They said, well, we want you to waive it for us, judge, because we can't move our investigation forward.
So we all waited on the ruling.
The ruling came Monday.
The judge said, you can go ahead and subpoena the doctors, but you cannot ask them one thing about Limbaugh's medical condition.
You cannot ask them one thing about what they said to him or what Limbaugh said to the doctors.
So the press goes to the state attorney's office and their spokesman says, we got what we wanted.
We can subpoena the doctors.
That's why you saw reports that the prosecution won.
They said we got what we wanted.
We can subpoena the doctors.
Now, they can subpoena the doctors all day, but they can't talk to the doctors about anything they need to talk about, talk to them about.
They just can't.
Unless they cheat, unless there's nobody in there to ride a herd on them, unless there's nobody getting a transcript.
They can't do it.
Now, they can drink the doctors in, and I have no doubt they'll try to intimidate them and frighten them into saying something.
But they can't do it.
So they didn't win anything, but it was reported to the press as a win because subpoena of the doctors moved the action line forward.
It advanced the story along the lines that the media, the local media is interested in being advanced.
But the true definition of this is it was two parts.
I can't stop you from subpoenaing the judges, the doctors, the judge said, but nothing's changed.
That statute is the statute, and I can't change it.
And you can't get any personal information from Limbaugh or his doctors without them waiving the privilege, which hasn't been waived.
So the bottom line of this is, if you want to know the truth, after such a ruling, most prosecutors would realize they're blocked.
They have nowhere to go.
This prosecutor has said in open court, we have not one element of any crime.
He has said, we don't know what, if anything, to charge until we see the records.
They got the records.
They've had the records since May.
They can't find any crime.
Now they want to talk to the doctors.
It's a clear phishing expedition.
They can't talk to the doctor.
They can subpoena.
They can bring them in.
They can ask about the time of day.
They can ask the doctors how they conduct their office procedures.
They can't talk a thing about me.
They can't ask them.
And the doctors don't have to answer.
So the upshot of this is that this is a loss for these people.
It's a loss.
After such a ruling, most prosecutors would realize that the investigation's blocked at this point and fold tent or blame the judge or what have you.
But in this case, since this is not really a legal proceeding anymore, they're going to go, I don't know this, but I would bet you they're going to try to bring in a doctor too and try to intimidate them and see what they can make out.
And they'll report that.
The media will move the story forward and so forth.
And people be waiting with bated breath.
Much of the confusion on this has come from the spokesman for the state attorney's office.
And much of the confusion, most of it's been on the TV side.
Because here is what TV has widely reported.
And this is wholly inaccurate.
The TV has reported this.
Florida prosecutors are claiming a small victory in the Rush Limbaugh case.
A judge has ruled that prosecutors can subpoena Limbaugh's doctors if the discussion is relevant to the prosecution of a crime, but they won't be able to look at Limbaugh's medical records.
Well, the state has based its whole case on the medical records.
So if they can't look at the medical records, and there's nothing in them anyway that gives them a crime and they've admitted this in open court, then they're blocked.
There's no way to go.
But the press, all they heard was, we can subpoena the doctors and we can talk to them.
And if it's relevant to the pursuit of crime, why we can talk.
Bamo, that fits the action line and moves the story forward.
Now, this records argument is what the state attorney's office made in court, but they essentially lost that.
They were given the records, but then they were told after that, you can't talk to the doctors about what's in the records.
This was, you don't know all this because I haven't given you these.
Well, it is, actually, all this is on the website if you want to follow the progression of events here.
But it's, I understand the confusion, and the confusion is simply the way it's been reported.
My attorney, Roy Black, put out a statement, and we put it on the PR Newswire on my website, and it spells this out in crystal clear fashion.
But one of the things that happened, we put out a statement, and the state attorney's office had a live voice talking.
And as far as the media is concerned, a live voice talking carries more weight than a printed statement.
And that live voice from the state attorney said, we got what we want.
We can subpoena the doctors, period.
And so that moves the action line forward that advances the story along the lines local media wants it to be advanced, which is they're going to get limbo.
And of course, I have no idea what's going to happen next.
It's been over, it's 26 months now.
26 months and two or three times the prosecutor's gone into open court and said, I don't have evidence of a crime.
We don't know what, if anything, to charge until we see the records.
Then they saw the records.
Now that's not enough.
Now they want to talk to the doctors, but they can't talk to the doctors about me or my condition or what I said, yet it's all been portrayed as a victory for the prosecutors.
I mean, you go figure it out.
It's no different than the way the Iraq War is being reported.
It's no different than the way half the other news in the country is reported.
The amazing thing is there's nothing we can do about it.
We can play the process out and keep responding to these people as they take their aggressive action.
But it's what the legal process has become.
People trying to criminalize political enemies.
And it's taken on a life of its own.
But I go back, I came out of the rehabilitation center in November two years ago.
And the first week I'm greeted with this news that they've got 10 counts already.
Before they'd even seen the medical records, they've got 10 counts of felony doctors.
I know that this is BS, but of course, it's in the media.
Everybody believes prosecutors never lie.
Why would they go to the trouble?
Everybody, it's just human.
Everybody does.
Everybody believes prosecutors tell the truth.
Well, what happened to those 10 counts if they go to court all these time?
We don't have any evidence of a crime.
We need to talk to the doctors.
We don't know what, if anything, to charge, blah, And now this ruling on Monday, yeah, you can subpoena the doctors, the judge says, because I can't stop you from issuing subpoenas, but you can't talk to them about what you want to talk to them about.
You cannot ask them what you want to ask them about.
And yet it gets reported in the press as a big victory.
That's the source of the confusion.
Quick timeout.
Got to go.
Back with more right after this.
Stay with us.
Okay, back to the phones we go.
At 800-282-2882, Rick in Phoenix, Arizona.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Rush, make a year-round golf player and bidder from Sunny Phoenix.
Thank you, sir.
Nice to have you with us.
I just wanted to know.
The media said they could sit there and believe, and the libs can believe that Clinton, it was in 98, sent eight cruise missiles over to Baghdad and took out the WMD facilities.
But in the same hand, they can't believe that maybe Saddam hid them somewhere before we got there.
Which doesn't make any sense to me.
Yeah, of course it doesn't make any sense.
You're talking about a bunch of liberal propagandists.
If you haven't heard this, folks, the latest is that the reason why there are no weapons of mass destruction is because our former brave and courageous commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton, had the guts to finally do something about it.
He launched eight cruise missiles into Baghdad.
And those eight cruise missiles took out the weapons of mass destruction, and that's why they're not there.
Now, this is grasping.
Coming from people who don't want victory in Iraq, coming from people who do not appreciate what the U.S. military can do and does, now want to claim that their military-lathing president, Bill Clinton, actually did the job.
It is an attempt at elevating Clinton's stature.
It is an attempt to overcome the image problem Clinton has when it comes to the military.
It's a never-ending addition to the attempt to give Clinton a legacy.
And it's probably sponsored by Clinton himself.
Clinton's probably calling all these media people.
Hey, you know what?
I think it's probably like, a lot of people love to hear.
I took out those weapons of mass structures, my missiles that did that.
I mean, I may not have intended to do it, but hell, unintended consequences.
Sometimes it's a great thing.
It happens.
And nobody's putting that idea out there.
If you put that idea out of it, I guarantee you, people talk about it.
I can send my sycophants out there and they'll promote it.
People might believe in it.
And that's what it is.
Nobody is giving this any credence other than these sycophants, these Clinton sycophants who want it to actually be possible.
It's, folks, it's absurd.
It's absolutely absurd.
At any rate, Mark in Hancock, Massachusetts, welcome, sir.
Nice to have you on the program.
Mega Ghetto's Rush.
Excuse me, I'm a little bit nervous talking to you.
Longtime listener.
First of all, thank you.
Well, you don't sound nervous at all.
Oh, okay.
I have a kook update for you.
Massachusetts state legislature is statewide considering having soccer players wear helmets from peewee on up to college.
I see this.
I have this news story.
And when you say kook, I know you're talking about the activist group, Keep Our Own Kids Safe.
Yes.
In fact, I'm glad you brought this up because it's so buried in the stack I might not have been able to get to it today.
Mike, could you grab any one of those Keep Our Own Kids Safe PSAs?
All right.
Let me know when you get one because I'll set it up.
What's the date on these?
How long ago does this campaign actually start?
This is in the 90s sometime, wasn't it?
Or 2000?
Yeah, eight or ten years ago.
As I say, we're always on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
And I was, you know, I pointed out that a lot of parents were deciding not to send their kids out to play football because it's too dangerous.
And I pointed out that, you know, you're missing a sitting out and play soccer.
So soccer is just as dangerous.
It just doesn't get reported that way.
There's a soccer lobby, big soccer, and it's out there portraying the notion that soccer's safe.
And your kids don't have to go out and get their heads beat in.
They have to go to all these injuries and stuff.
And the girls can play.
And it's just a lot cleaner and a lot better, a lot safer.
Well, I ran across all kinds of data and information that said the contrary.
That soccer was dangerous.
We started a campaign here, the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign, try to get the truth about soccer out.
Well, here it is, eight to 10 years later, and the people of Massachusetts have finally led the way in demanding helmets for kids all the way up to college students playing soccer.
Now, we have, it's been a long time since we played these PSAs on the program.
We play them down the line during the break.
People watching the podcasts and listening to the streaming audio on our site hear these, but those of you listening on the radio don't.
So to refresh your memory, here's just one.
We may have time for a couple of these, but here's one of the PSAs that we ran trying.
We're doing our best to raise consciousness about the evils and the dangers, the inherent dangers involved in playing soccer.
And now a word from the national Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign about the danger of soccer.
If they have a competitive player on the field that they can't beat, they're coached to hurt them and take them out of the game.
Keep Our Own Kids Safe National Celebrity Spokesman Rush Limbaugh.
At what age is that taught?
Fairly young.
That is the entirely different picture from what I have always thought soccer was.
I thought soccer was a refuge from violence.
I thought that's one of the drawing cards of soccer.
Parents were sending their kids out there so they wouldn't get involved in those kinds of activities.
Well, that's exactly why we had our boys play soccer.
This same son went to college on a soccer scholarship and he thought he would get away from this being attacked.
In a tournament game, he again won the ball and the kid he won it from ran wide open at him, lunged at him with his knee up and got him in the groin and shattered a testicle.
See?
He left him laying on the side of the field during that game and he went into shock.
This is a genuine horror story that I'm sure it pains you to tell.
I think it's important to point out that the soccer moms obviously didn't know and don't know.
It's not that they were irresponsible or are irresponsible like Jane here.
They were just uninformed.
This is why our education campaign is so important.
Join Rush Limbaugh and help support the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign.
Look for the Keep Our Own Kids Safe chapter near you.
You'll find them everywhere.
Yeah, here's, listen to one more because these were, these were state-of-the-art, cutting edge, ahead of the curve, as we always are here.
And now a word from the national Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign about the danger of soccer.
I see soccer as not a violent sport.
It's a symptom of violence, not really a cause of violence.
Keep Our Own Kids Safe, National Celebrity Spokesman Rush Limbaugh.
Are you a paid member of the soccer lobby?
There have been people in other endeavors of human activity who have known of inherent risks and have lied about them.
If anything, your words will serve only to embolden people's efforts to spread the sport of soccer, and I hope that doesn't incorporate an increased number of injuries and so on and so forth.
Well, me too.
I can only bring the information to the people.
If anger at me, if anger at me causes others to get more people into this game, I can't be held accountable for that.
I love the game, and I play a little bit of football as well.
But I tell you, I would never take my chances on the football field.
And you took chances that you didn't even know you were taking on the soccer field, and that's my point.
You didn't even know because they hid the data from us.
Last time I checked, I didn't have any brain damage.
Well, oftentimes victims are the last to know.
You should ask your family members if there have been any changes.
Join Rush Limbaugh and help support the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign.
Look for the Keep Our Own Kids Safe chapter near you.
You'll find them everywhere.
All right, so there we were trying to do our best trying to help people correct an illusion that existed out there.
And here now, we think it's 10 years ago, eight to ten years, here's this story that Mark from Hancock, Massachusetts is talking about in the Boston Globe today.
Measure calls for soccer helmets.
Value of headgear much debated.
Like football and hockey players, soccer players would have to don helmets on the field to protect their heads under a new legislative proposal.
The measure, scheduled for a hearing today on Beacon Hill, would cover peewee leagues to college teams.
No other states appear to have passed a similar law, Massachusetts lawmakers and doctors said.
The proposal marks the first time this debate, which is long arroyal, the youth soccer world, has spilled into the state's political arena.
With strong evidence of long-term neurological damage among a portion of veteran soccer players, some soccer officials, parents, and doctors around the nation have recently been pushing for more safety measures for young players, including an outright ban on heading the ball, which is an integral part of the world's most popular sport.
Some soccer coaches and trainers and parents say that the Massachusetts measure and other efforts are misguided and unnecessary meddling by politicians.
Well, regardless, the well, in fact, here's this: Children's Hospital in Boston said long-term studies of soccer players have shown a decreased, decreased level of cognitive function.
But it's not clear it's from headers or concussions from collisions.
That's the $64,000 quote.
Who cares?
It's happening playing soccer.
Whether it's heading the ball or, you know, knocking your head up against the ground or somebody else, it's still happening.
10 years ago, folks, we were ahead of the curve, cutting edge.
And here's Massachusetts.
Not surprising, getting involved legislatively in soccer.
A brief, brief timeout.
When we come back, there's a new plan for tourism in New Orleans.
I'll tell you about it after this.
Ah, little Mannheim Steamroller, Christmastime.
Here, the EIB Network.
A couple stories here.
News out of New Orleans.
Visitors to New Orleans who once toured the graceful mansions of the Garden District or learned the history of the Mississippi River plantations have a new attraction, the Hurricane Katrina Disaster Tour.
Grayline New Orleans will begin on January 4th, a Hurricane Katrina tour, America's worst catastrophe, to show the ruin that befell the city when the storm hit on August 29th, Breaching a faulty levee, system of rivi system of river levees and flooding 80% of its neighborhood.
Somewhere buried in my stack is a story that there are people that just won't let go of the fact.
The levees are blown up anyway.
Grayline NEW Orleans normally organizes trips through the city's historic districts as well as the swamps and the spooky cemeteries, but its business has been severely curtailed by the hurricane.
Companies said the Katrina tour was born of frustration over the government's slow response and rebuilding.
About 10% of the $35 ticket price for the three-hour tour will be donated to Katrina relief groups.
Now, speaking strictly as a capitalist here, if if I were Grayline NEW Orleans and if I were going to embark on a new tour here called the Hurricane Katrina disaster tour, the last thing I would want is for them to clean it up.
I would want, if I'm going to sell tickets to this disaster tour and it better be a disaster for me to tour but again, this all revolves around the fact that nobody's doing enough soon enough uh to uh to get this done.
Passengers will not be let off the buses, the GRAY LINE buses, to take photos of the neighborhoods.
They will not be, I guess it's too dangerous.
Still can't do that.
Well, I don't know if the toxic soup is the problem or whatever.
But nevertheless, they're critics of this, and they say that a commercial tour only sensationalizes the suffering there.
With tens of thousands of residents still dispersed across the country, other victims can still be seen on city streets trying to salvage belongings from their wrecked homes.
Corlita Maher, a hurricane victim who works with the Grassroots People's Hurricane Relief Fund, said there ought to be tours, but they should be linked with people who are displaced and coming up with a plan of action.
How do you do that?
How do you link a tour of the disaster in New Orleans with people that are displaced?
Maybe I just don't understand.
One other little item on this.
I don't know if you've seen the story, all the well, yeah, the story about the emails that were released from Governor Blanco's office.
Well, according to the story, these emails are written before, during, and after the hurricane.
Now, the conventional wisdom is that Bush and FEMA were totally to blame for everything related to the storm.
Instead of blaming Bush and FEMA, it looks as though people are finally taking a look at Governor Blanco, though, because of these emails.
13 pages of emails released on Monday show just how concerned her staff was.
But they weren't concerned about the best way to help the situation.
They were concerned about her image.
First, they discussed who was in charge.
According to the Democrats and the media, the federal government was supposed to be doing everything.
According to Blanco's staff, the mayor's in charge of the city, the governor's in charge of the state and the guard and the security.
Then her staff was worried about how it would look when she was out of the state at the same time the president was visiting the state.
They worried it would reinforce the notion that she's not in charge and Louisiana needs to be federalized.
Federalizing the state would have helped, which would have helped the residents of New Orleans faster.
But hey, the Democrats, that's who they are.
And the only thing that matters to them is appearance.
These emails make it clear, the story does, that they're concerned about her image down there.
And I thought they wanted to federalize the state in terms of aid, not going in and taking it over.
But I mean, if you're going to sit there and blame the feds for not doing enough and you want the feds in there, then it's a branch or a degree of federalism.
A press consultant weighed in.
Story says, saying, quote, Governor Blanco might dress down a bit and look like she has rolled up her sleeves.
This is sort of like the Clinton administration polling American people where he ought to go on vacation and what he ought to wear on vacation.
So there was, anyway, what's they did what?
Oh, I know.
That's right.
They did.
They really, they did.
They criticized Mike Brown of FEMA severely because of his supposedly being concerned about his appearance when he went on television and so forth.
So anyway, that's the latest out of New Orleans.
This from the Dallas Morning News.
After months of slippery decline, full-size SUVs appear to have finally hit bottom, maybe bouncing back.
I'm so proud of you people for doing this and for not falling prey to this panic attack out there.
The wholesale value of used SUVs, sometimes an early indicator of overall demand, increased in October, November, what could be an encouraging sign for truck-reliant big three automakers.
So with the gas price coming down, not staying where it was at $350 and so forth, good news for SUV manufacturers.
And this from the Consumer Comfort Index, ABC News, The Washington Post say that consumer confidence rose to its highest level since August.
This was reported yesterday.
ABC News and The Washington Post said their Consumer Comfort Index rose to minus 13 in the week ending December 11 from minus 14 the prior week.
Two of the components of the index inched up in the last week.
The percentage of consumers who had a positive view of the national economy rose to 37%, up from 36.
And other indicators are up as well.
I got a time problem here.
But nevertheless, the news continues to be positive everywhere but in the U.S. media and in the Democratic Party.
We'll be back and continue in a moment.
Okay, folks, that's it for today.
But the first video podcast of tomorrow's morning update will be soon on your computer if you are a 24-7 member and are subscribing to our daily podcast, both of which audio and video are El Fribo.
Have a great day, great afternoon, great night.
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