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Dec. 21, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
December 21, 2005, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Oh, this is just great.
This is just great.
I've I've uh I lit up the 12 noon cigar now film on the verge of hiccups.
I mean what timing?
So uh stand by up there on the cough switch.
Delete button.
Well, I could eat a bunch of cross and Boston cream puffs today, I tell you.
It's a it it's it's more mind-boggling every day.
Greetings, folks.
Welcome.
Uh great to have you with us.
L. Rushbow, America's anchor man, America's truth detector, America's Doctor of Democracy, all rolled into one harmless, lovable little fuzzball bundle here at Christmas time on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Turn up my volume here just a bit.
Telephone number 800-282.
Let me turn the volume down just a bit of it.
Uh 2882.
That's 800-282-2882.
You see, Saddam today.
Saddam's claiming he was beaten and tortured.
Ha ha ha.
Did I not tell you?
Did I not tell you this is exactly what Saddam was going to say?
He would slowly but surely adopt the entire strategy of the Democratic Party in mounting his defense.
So he says he was beaten and tortured and says he's got all kinds of marks on his body to uh to prove it.
And frankly, I'm not interested in seeing any of them if they're if they uh are indeed there, and I don't believe it for a moment.
Uh he showed back up at his trial today, and he was very quiet for a while, and he had an outburst saying he was tortured.
This was in the midst of testimony where some victim was testifying how Saddam's thugs had tortured him.
So it just it's humorous to watch all this.
Sometimes, you know, I say that we're sitting here living in a twilight zone.
Uh and I re we really are in two worlds uh at the moment, at least politically.
We are in two worlds.
We have this bogus New York Times story from Friday from that about the National Security Agency and spying on people without warrants.
And we've spent the past two or three days here.
Um, and this will be this will be actually the well, this will be the fourth because we started on this on Friday.
We said this will be the fourth day that we have documented, I mean, for every which way possible that the New York Times story was bogus, that there was no spying without a warrant that was illegal.
That has been done by previous presidents.
But I'll be damned if you can find that anywhere else in the mainstream media.
It is there is censorship going on.
There is genuine censorship going on in the media, ladies and gentlemen.
They're actually censoring news now in order to publish propaganda.
It has never been more obvious to me that we are now living in two different worlds.
The left and the right have two different worldviews.
There are but and that's always been the case, but I mean there's a there is a reality that out there, and the left simply chooses to ignore it.
Now there's this big story out there today about this judge.
This judge quit.
He is this the the uh federal judge is resigned.
This is uh Washington Post today.
Federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program.
This according to two sources.
The judge, U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the Super Secret FISA court, foreign intelligence surveillance court, sent a letter to the Chief Justice John Roberts late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.
However, two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work.
So we this is this is a partisan judge.
It's a liberal judge, and the first thing I want to say is I don't care that he quit.
I think more liberal judges ought to quit.
Why is everybody upset the guy quit?
He only quit Pfizer.
I know he only quit Pfizer.
Get him the hell out of there.
This is serious stuff.
If he wants to quit, let him quit.
I know he he kept his district judgeship, but he wants to quit, let him quit.
It wants to be a spoiled sport.
More liberal judges ought to quit.
More you liberals doing everything ought to quit.
More liberal journalists ought to quit.
Hell yes, and then but this guy wants accolades.
This guy's doing a great public service.
Why?
This man is heroic.
Would you like me to tell you who this man is?
One year ago, basically one year ago, on the um this was the 8th of November of last year.
This was after last year's elections.
Story in USA Today ran.
The U.S. government's plan to try suspected terrorists and military tribunals is unlawful because the Bush administration wrongly declared that those captured in Afghanistan were not entitled to prisoner of war protections.
A federal judge ruled.
The decision brought an abrupt halt to a tribunal at Club Gitmo for an alleged Al-Qaeda member.
In a major blow to the administration's war on terrorism.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson stopped the tribunal for Salem Ochmed Hamdan, a Yemeni, who allegedly was a chauffeur for Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Robertson rejected the administration's position.
And because Hamdan and hundreds of other detainees at Club Gitmo are enemy combatants, they are not entitled to protections that prisoners of war are given under international law.
It's all about the Geneva Conventions.
You had a federal judge here saying that there's no such thing as the military tribunal, even though they've been used.
He said they're illegal.
You can't do them.
These men are foreign combatants, they're soldiers, and you are denying them their rights under the Geneva Convention.
That begot a debate on are they qualified under the Geneva Convention?
And they are not.
Well, the bottom line of this, the way it ended up, guess what?
His decision was overturned.
And do you know by whom?
Chief Justice John Roberts.
Grave error illustration I could not give you as to why it is so crucial.
This judge is a Clinton appointee.
He is a far left-wing radical ACLU type extremist judge.
And he was attempting to usurp constitutional power vested in the executive.
He doesn't have that power.
A federal judge cannot take on the duties of commander-in-chief.
This man did.
He is an ultra-left-wing radical liberal appointed to the bench by uh uh Bill Clinton.
Back in 19 it was I know it's Clinton back, I think I'm trying to think of the year, back in 1994.
Our buddies at Newsmax today have done some research.
The press is breathlessly.
They sound like a bunch of little yapping dogs out there at everybody's ankles.
The press breathlessly reporting that U.S. District Judge James Robertson has resigned from the FISA court in a fit of conscience.
Over news that President Bush was using the National Security Agency to monitor the telephone conversations of terrorists.
If the reports are correct, Judge Robertson's conscience has evolved considerably since the days when he was dismissing one criminal case after another against cronies of Bill Clinton.
Old Arkansas media hand Paul Greenberg has long had Robertson's number.
In a 1999 column for Jewish World Review, Greenberg described the honorable judge as one of the more prejudiced Clinton's on the bench.
As accuracy in media noted in 2000, Judge Robertson's conscience wasn't particularly troubled by the crimes committed by one time Clinton Deputy Attorney General Webster Hubble.
In two cases involving Hubble.
Judge James Robertson threw out a tax charge and another for lying to federal investigators.
Appellate courts overruled in both cases, and Hubble then pled guilty to felonies in each case.
His conscience, Judge Robertson's conscience, also seemed to go AWOL when it came to the case of Archie Schaefer, an executive with Tyson Chicken, the company that had showered Mr. Clinton with campaign contributions and helped steer Mrs. Clinton to that cattle futures bonanza that she had.
Critics said that Judge Robertson was merely returning the favor on behalf of the man who appointed him as CN reported in 1998.
He quote, threw out the jury conviction of Tyson Foods executive Archie Schaefer for providing gifts to former agriculture secretary Mike Espy.
Robertson had granted a motion to Schaefer by Schaefer to uh overturn the verdict, which found him guilty of giving SB tickets to Clinton's first inaugural dinner and gift to the birthday party uh for the firm's chief executive, Don Tyson.
So uh here you have this judge quitting.
Great, great news.
Great news when a liberal judge quits anything, when a liberal anything quits, But he's being hailed now as a man of great conscience, and it's nothing more than an orchestrated move designed to play right into the hands of the media.
As I say, folks, we're in two different worlds here.
And we've got propaganda is uh is the order of the day on the part of the left wing, the Democrats and the media.
They are now censoring news.
I I'm gonna go through it rhetoric quickly today because I spent the whole show on this yesterday.
What?
What, Mr. Cern?
Well, okay.
Uh I'll go through as much as it takes to document how none of what has happened is a crime.
And there is a column in the Chicago Tribune today by no less than the number three man in the Clinton Justice Department saying so, that Bill Clinton did the same thing.
We have got the executive orders from Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter saying the same thing.
We told you about the Clinton and Carter executive orders yesterday, authorizing the exact same thing that has been used.
Here's folks here's how you have to understand this.
This is this is real simple one of the reasons I'm kind of vacillating on going through all the legalese of this is because that's not what this is about.
It really isn't.
The only way the left can win on this with the with the tact they're taking, because the facts are on our side.
The facts are totally on the side of the president, the facts are totally in this on his side in history.
Every allegation that you have seen in the New York Times or anybody that's calling for impeachment, any lawyer that's gone on television who has said Bush has committed a crime is either lying or doesn't know the law, and you should discount it because they are telling you things which aren't true.
The facts are totally on the president's side.
Now, the Democrats have chosen to try to change the debate from the facts.
So we sit here, we argue the facts.
We're not arguing what they are doing.
This is nothing more than the latest chapter in Bush Lied.
What the Democrats are going to do if they are ever confronted with the facts, and I imagine this is being set up as we speak for the Sunday shows or whenever there's some next uh uh prominent interviews, Leahy, Reed, whoever, Jay Rockefeller, if they are confronted with the Carter and the Clinton executive orders that did the same thing Bush did.
Their only answer can be and will be, well, Carter had a legitimate purpose.
The Iran hostage crisis, and Clinton had a legitimate purpose.
White supremacy and the Oklahoma City bombing.
Bush lied.
There were no weapons of mass destruction.
He lied about pre-war intelligence.
There was no reason to go to Iraq.
Bush lied, Bush spies.
Bush lied, people died, people and Bush spies.
And that's what they will have to because everything that they are arguing today hinges on their ability to convince the American people that 9-11 didn't happen or that if it did, it's just an outgrowth of something odd and kooky and is uh is is so rare it won't happen again, and that Iraq is not necessary.
Iraq was just fine under Saddam.
We have totally, totally made a mistake because this president lied, concocted false intelligence.
That's the only way this current argument on Bush spying on people can play out and succeed if they are successful in convincing the American people of that.
So we can sit here, we can argue the legality all day long.
We can sit here and say, nope, Bush is right, Democrats and the media are wrong.
But the Democrats are not arguing facts.
They're arguing feelings and emotion.
They're trying to frighten, they're using fear, they're trying to make Myrtle think that when she goes to the library, that the Playboy magazine she checks out's gonna be reported to George W. Bush.
They're trying to make people think that their medical records are gonna end up with John Ashcroft, or worse, Alberto Gonzalez, even though Ashcroft's required retired.
They're trying to make people think that average Americans are being spied on, their phone calls are being monitored daily, and the government has no right, and all this is a violation of the law without any context, no mention of and oh, that's lies too, but but that doesn't matter.
If they can gin up fear, they've been lying all my life.
They've been telling senior citizens that every Republican president's gonna cut and eliminate Social Security.
I don't expect to get away with it.
Don't misunderstand here.
I think this is more desperation implosion.
I'll tell you what else this is.
This is a plot hatched by Jay Rockefeller, that memo indicates it, that memo dictates this strategy.
They were gonna try to pull this all off prior to the elections of 2004, but the New York Times wouldn't run the story then.
The New York Times held that story for a year.
If the Times had run that story, then this plan would have gone into action.
First stages of the plan already are in action.
They have politicized the one committee in the Senate that usually never has been, and that's the Intelligence Committee.
They've now, they've now driven a partisan wedge at the Intelligence Committee, and they have, for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, politicized intelligence gathering.
And this is all the doing of Jay Rock.
Guess who released another letter?
Yes, secret letters to it.
Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi, yep, she put PR newswire.
She put her letter.
Oh, so Rockefeller had a secret letter.
Pelosi had a secret letter.
This is a scam.
It is a scheme.
It was hatched in 2002.
They thought they could play it out before the 4004 elections, but it didn't happen.
They're playing it out now for the 06 and the 08 elections.
And as Rockefeller's memo said, we can only do this one time, and they're doing it now.
And this, you have to understand the context in which all this is taking place.
Because they are censoring news from the mainstream media so that the facts will not get out to everybody.
I gotta run a little long here, back with more after this.
Do you think let me just ask you a quick question?
Do you think that the Democrats are the media will go ask Bill Clinton if uh hey, you did you remember authorizing warrantless searches and wiretamps after the Oklahoma says, do you remember any of this?
Jamie Garelli testified.
You think they'll ask him that?
They may not be able to find him.
He's over there at Elton John's funeral or uh cut some sort of a video for Elton John.
No, I know he got married, it's a funeral if you ask me.
Uh uh but but of course they're not gonna go ask him, but we don't have to wait for Bill Clinton to be asked.
Because I am holding in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers of peace here in the Chicago Tribune by John Schmidt.
An opinion piece.
John Schmidt served under President Clinton from 94 to 97 as the associate attorney general of the U.S. He's now a partner in the Chicago-based law firm of Mayor Brown Rowe and Maul You.
Maul, I'm sorry, Maw, M.A.W. And that means he's the number three guy at the Justice Department under Gorelic, over Gorelic, around Gorilla, wherever, however it worked over there.
But this is an interesting piece.
He writes this way, starts it out.
President Bush's post-September 11th, 2001 authorization to the NSA to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and emails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents.
Period.
End of story.
But no, it is the end of the story.
That little paragraph sums all of this up.
Everything you are hearing about this is nothing but lying stinking propaganda.
Censorship of the news.
You watch how this guy's going to be ignored.
This the first Clintonista to be ignored by the mainstream press.
He continues.
And by may I stop and say something?
A lot of you people, and I'm really worried about this.
I think some of you people out there are going to be uh coerced into believing you're being spied on.
Because that's what they're trying to make it out.
There's no reasons.
The Iraq's not serious.
Iraq is not really even worthwhile.
Bush created terrorism.
He lied about pre-war intelligence.
He lied about weapons of mass destruction, lied, lied, lied, Bush's Hitler, all this stuff.
That's that's the foundation on which the whole Democrat argument of this NSA stuff is being built.
But it has been, I learned this in Showpripped.
It's amazing what you can learn when you take the time.
Do you know why electronic surveillance is not considered a true infring infringement of privacy?
Now there's a great piece.
I think it's a Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post.
So somewhere has some guy has written a piece today about it.
Richard Posner.
Richard Posner, who is in a former judge or a current appellate judge, a judge, I'll find it.
I think it's the Washington Post.
Essentially he says, computers picking stuff out of the air and off the Ethernet are not sentient beings.
They are not human beings.
They have to be programmed and told what to look for.
They have to be told to look for certain phone numbers, certain keywords, certain this or that.
This is how echelon works, by the way, which was established during the Clinton administration, too.
And as such, a computer sitting there going through incalculable amounts of data cannot possibly be accused of spying.
It's it it what's the word for it?
It is, it is uh it's it's simply synthesizing, it's examining and it's comparing and cross-referencing.
Then that stuff that the computer having been programmed to look for after it's downloaded all that stuff and a lot of it ends up being phony and junk goes to a human being and then this stuff is analyzed according to what they're looking for.
The notion that every American is being spied on is an absolute abomination.
It isn't possible.
Data can be collected not denying that to suggest here that every American is actively being spied on in violation of the law that's not true either.
That's what they're trying to convince as many people of as possible.
Merry Christmas everybody we're having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have here on the EIB network.
The uh the judge is Richard Posner.
Richard Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
He's a senior lecturer uh in law at the University of Chicago.
He begins his piece in the Washington Post this way.
And his overall point is that technical data collection does not and cannot invade privacy in a general sense.
We've learned that the Defense Department's deeply involved in domestic intelligence.
The Department's NSA has been conducting outside the framework of the FISA Act electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens within the U.S. Other Pentagon agencies, notably the one known as counterintelligence field activity, CIFA, have as described in recent articles in the Post been conducting domestic intelligence on a large scale.
These programs are criticized as grave threats to civil liberties, but they are not their significance is in flagging the existence of gaps in our defenses against terrorism.
The Defense Department is rushing to fill those gaps, though there may be better ways.
The collection mainly through electronic means of vast amounts of personal data is said to invade privacy.
But machine collection and processing of data cannot as such invade privacy because of their volume the data are first sifted by computers which search for names, addresses, phone numbers, etc that may have intelligence value.
This initial sifting far from invading privacy a computer is not a sentient being keeps most private data from being read by any intelligence officer.
The data that make the cut are those that contain clues to possible threats to national security ground for forbidding human inspection of such data is fear that they might be used to blackmail or otherwise intimidate the administration's political enemies that danger is more remote than at any previous period of U.S. history now because of increased political partisanship,
advances in communications technology and more numerous and competitive media, American government has become a sieve no secrets concerning matters that would interest the public can be kept for long.
Keep in mind also that most other nations like Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Israel many with longer histories of fighting terrorism than we have a domestic intelligence agency that is separate from its national police force.
In other words other nations do flat out spy on their citizens and we don't Richard Posner in the Washington Post today the judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
I wanted to cite that rather than just have to paraphrase what I remembered reading.
And I want to also now go back to John Schmidt, the number three man in the attorney in the uh in the Justice Department uh for the Clinton administration, his piece in the Chicago Tribune today every president since FIS's passage has asserted that he retained inherent power to go beyond the terms of the FISA Act.
Every end of story this is it that's it no more to this everything else is a manufactured lie.
We are living in two different worlds the mainstream media now knows that they have lost any hope of capturing the vast American public in mass they realize there is an alternative media they have shrunk to appeal to their audience now.
They are and which is largely themselves time rights for the readers are the writers at Newsweek the writers at Newsweek write to impress the people at time the people at the New York Times right to make sure everybody else writes and and broadcasts what they say.
It's an incestuous little bunch the mainstream media, particularly the New York, Washington, and Boston Axis corridor.
They're writing for each other.
They then report what they report.
They go ask the president what they are reporting.
They are manufacturing news.
They are censoring news and manufacturing it at the same time in the sole purpose of presenting and fostering propaganda.
It's a total lie.
I don't care if you have seen Jonathan Turley.
Jonathan Turley is wrong.
I don't care if you have seen David Rodham Gurgen on TV, talking about this as something unconscionable, unprecedented, David Rodham Gergen is wrong.
These people are simply ignoring what's right in front of their faces.
So I I don't know what what more do we need here?
We got Richard Posner, we've got John Schmidt, we got Carter, we've got Clinton, we've got Reagan.
I have copies of the executive orders that they issued.
And don't fall for the notion that what this is about.
Some people think that this is just a and well it's it it is this to a certain extent.
There is a battle for power between the legislative and the executive branch.
There's no question about that you have these members of Congress asserting that they ought to be allowed to participate in this these wiretaps and these things done without court orders why you've got to include well they were included and look what's happened.
The whole thing's now broadcast all over but whatever security was involved this program is blown to smithereens which is going to happen every time you include those numbskulls in Congress when you're talking about something as important as a war, particularly a war on this kind of an enemy.
And I still maintain there's an ongoing effort to sabotage our efforts, this nation's efforts to to wage war against this enemy it's okay in other words I'll tell you you know it when it boils down to this you know why Clinton won't be uh uh uh uh held up to account for that because he was going after some white supremacist and we gotta rid the world of those we gotta rid the world of the Timothy McVeigh's we can't handle those oh no no no but somehow this enemy we we just we're not gonna wage war
on this enemy because Bush lied it's not really it's it's it's it's all it's all been manufactured they believe or they want you to believe but by continually lying about the facts here that it's domestic spying in a criminal like manner and that's that's that's the crux of this they're trying to make you think this has nothing to do with the war on terror.
They're trying to make you think we've got a power mad president who is using the war on terror to spy on you.
What they are ultimately trying to do is restrict presidential power that's not covered by the Fourth Amendment.
This is how they claim that Bush authorized illegal, warrantless searches without seeking judicial authority.
The bottom line is there is no judicial or congressional authority in this for that matter.
They don't have any.
And that's what they're trying to assert, along with the political propaganda they're trying to advance.
They don't have the power.
The president does.
He is the commander-in-chief.
Just to understand this, we talked about Lincoln yesterday, a little history lesson on Lincoln.
keep thinking Lincoln and and think of the think of the opposition to Abraham Lincoln trying to put him in a dock and impeach him for intercepting telegraph communications from the Confederacy leadership during the Civil War now do you think that would be absurd?
That would be Lincoln did not go to court to do that.
He didn't go to court he didn't have to make probable cause arguments in support of court issued warrants to intercept enemy communications that would have been nuts as it is today.
He was in the middle of a war don't have time to go to FISA don't have time to go before Judge X bottom don't have time to go before Judge Blowhard and he's not spying on enemy on the American citizens you just think Lincoln and and Lincoln did Lincoln intercepted telegraph communications from the Confederacy during the Civil War by the way this happens in every war everybody we tried we broke the Japanese code after Pearl Harbor this constantly goes on.
Imagine putting FDR in the dock what did FDR speak violation of civil liberties 1100 Japanese in turn Imagine trying to impeach FDR for trying to break the Japanese code.
Oh, this is great.
The Democrats, along with five Republicans, is it five?
Is it five I'll bet you it is.
Well, what the Democrats in mass and five Republicans have just voted to filibuster the defense authorization bill because Ann War is in it.
Now, let me explain this.
The torture bill from John McCain, another asinine, silly and worthless piece of legislation.
You talk about a message that we send to the world, all this talk about, well, rush, you know, we can't do torture because look at the message it sends the way our image is worse than it's ever been.
You want to talk about our image with this stupid ass torture bill?
Our image with this torture bill is that we are the laughing stock in the evil capitals of the world.
We are now displaying for one and all to see our weakness.
The way that McCain did this, he attached the torture bill to the defense authorization bill.
And the president said, Well, I I I I I can't veto this.
I need money to fund the troops.
So McCain said, gotcha.
Gotcha, big guy.
Payback.
Payback.
18 1980.
80.
2000.
Sorry, sorry.
I should have been president twenty years ago.
So Ted Stevens saw what McCain did.
Ted Stevens, well, go, this is cool.
I'm going to attach my my uh little amendment here to let us drill for oil and war, which is, by the way, uh for a later time.
I'll describe and war to you.
You wouldn't be caught, you wouldn't be caught dead there in the summertime, folks.
It's not a paradise of anything.
Anyway.
So Ted Stevens attaches his little bill to drill an annual war to the defense appropriations bill.
And the Democrats just voted to filibuster it along with uh some Republicans.
They killed off in this bill, in the process, funding for Gulf States Hurricane Katrina rebuilding and home heating assistance for the elderly.
Because those were amendments that were also attached to the defense authorization bill.
By filibustering this, they're trying to get the an-war amendment of Ted Stevens removed from it.
So by filibustering this, they have also killed off funding for Gulf States Hurricane Katrina rebuilding and uh home heating assistance for the elderly somewhere all over the country, primarily the Northeast.
And they went to the McCain camp, went to Senator McCain.
Senator, what do you what do you think of Senator Stevens here attaching the uh and war bill to defense authorization, which is exactly what McCain did with his torture bill.
McCain acted offended, but Stevens who put him in this kind of dilemma.
I can't believe that this would happen.
I I ought to really think about this.
So they wouldn't want to filibuster the torture bill because they want the torture bill because McCain acts up being a useful idiot for these people on the left.
But now they filibuster the defense authorization bill because of drilling for oil in An your modern Democratic Party in action, folks, with five Republicans who ought to just call themselves Democrats and move over to that side of the aisle for all that they're worth.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
Well, the uh New York transit strike in its second day, which you really have to say what it is.
It's an attack on capitalism.
Times specifically to do the most economic damage possible.
Uh and the these are liberals that run this thing.
This is how they think they're going to gain favor with the average American.
They think everybody is a union worker, everybody's in a soup line, nobody has enough money, nobody can make ends meet.
The union is crusading for all the downtrodden of America.
No.
They are enraging a city and costing it 400 what million dollars a day in commerce alone.
400 million dollars a day in commerce.
Okay, the vote here on this uh on the filibustering of the Defense Appropriations Bill.
Uh they had three Democrats that voted with the Republicans on this, Senator In No Way from Hawaii.
Mary Landrew from Louisiana is voting her interest there.
The Defense Appropriations Bill has an amendment to speed up Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
And Senator Bill Nelson, Florida, he voted with Republicans.
He's uh Ben Nelson, Nebraska, sorry.
Ben Nelson, I thought it couldn't have been Ben Alonso to Florida, but Ben Nelson, Nebraska, up for re-election, by the way, in a red state.
Two Republicans voted against uh the uh voted with the Democrats on this.
That would be Chafee and Michael DeWine.
Uh is that is that what you mean with that the they guess so Frit Frist voted no so he could bring it back up later, just like he had to vote no on the uh uh uh filibuster uh yesterday of the Patriot Act.
So that's uh those are the recalcitr Republicans in this case, Chafee and DeWine against in no way Landrew and uh Ben Nelson of Nebraska uh voting with Republicans on this.
Uh let's see what George in uh Canton, Ohio.
I'm glad you called.
Let's go to the phone so we can mix it up here.
Welcome, sir.
Nice to have you with us.
Thanks, Rush.
I appreciate it, and I appreciate the work you do.
Thank you, sir.
I'm a criminal defense attorney here in Canton, Ohio, and I have to say, and I I practice primarily in state court.
But I have to say, in the time that the Patriot Act has been in effect.
The hundreds of lawyers that I see, talk to, hear from the cases we deal with, I haven't once heard any case that's been affected by the Patriot Act.
I'm more concerned about my clients, and so are the other attorneys who are criminal defense attorneys, more concerned about the rights of our clients as it relates to how the states and the local authorities impose themselves on our clients than we are about the Patriot Act.
Now, there are that hey, here.
I hear that.
You are speaking my language today, George.
Because what you're what you're saying is it's the state and local guys that are running roughshod over people like you.
But when it comes to the Patriot Act, you you are not aware of a client or of an American citizen saying, Hey, I've been falsely accused, I didn't do any of this.
I'm being treated as a terrorist because of the Patriot Act.
That's what you're saying, right?
Absolutely.
Never, not once.
And I don't I can't stand it.
This is getting rid it's ridiculous.
It's out of control.
Leave the Patriot Act in in place and and work with the feds, the feds know what they're doing with drug cases, with all these things.
They come in, if they're coming into our cases, they've got enough evidence and they've established themselves well enough in an investigation that they've got a good case.
They're professionals, they're good at it.
I respect those guys.
It's incredible what we don't hear with the Patriot Act at our level that we normally would hear with with similar items of drug cases and other cases that the feds routinely jump in on on safe cases.
I I have to tell you, I I think you go ask Michael Jackson, who's given him more trouble, the feds or uh or or the state.
Go go ask go ask any number of criminal defendants who they really think running roughshod and have no controls over them, and it isn't the feds.
Like the feds have some pretty qualified people, not a bunch of hacks that can't get better paying jobs anywhere else.
But one I I need I need to ask you one one question here.
Sir just to get your just to get you, I want your opinion, is I'm calling for your opinion here.
I'm gonna lead the witness.
I heard John Senunu, who's one of the Republicans voting against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act until he gets some changes, saying, why don't why what's everybody opposed to just extending it for three months?
Oh, my question to you is if it's so horrible and if it's so outrageous, and if it's so dangerous, how can anybody advocating extending it for three months?
Well, these guys say it's okay to extend it three months, but they vote to kill it yesterday.
What's the difference?
Right.
Yeah, if it's if it's no good, get rid of it completely.
And like I said, I can't see any evidence from my at least from my perspective.
Again, I'm I'm all I'm I only practice in state court, and I have occasionally cases where cases blend over in the federal, but if it's that bad, get rid of it.
I don't see it.
Well, I've I've been looking too.
I can't I can't find anybody.
I I I can't find a case.
That's not saying there isn't one in this vast country.
I can't find an example of an innocent American citizen who has been brought up, charged, subpoenaed, indicted, whatever, under provisions of the Patriot Act.
I think we would have found them by now if we've been looking for this, and so would the Democrats who are trying to stop this.
They would have gone out and rounded up as many of these people as possible and paraded them before us during hearings in the Senate, as the Democrats are wont to do.
I can't find it.
No, no, the closest you could say might be Jose Padilla, but the guy has changed his name to uh a terrorist name, and he was uh part of a terrorist cell, so I don't even think that comes close.
But George, I appreciate the call.
I got to run here, folks, be back though in a mere moment.
Diane Feinstein said it in um October 2003, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
I've never had a single abuse to the Patriot Act reported to me.
She was using the ACLU as her source.
See what I'm talking about, folks.
Sit tight, stay glued.
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