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Dec. 27, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:27
December 27, 2005, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Thank you.
In the first hour of the program today, we talked about democratic objections and for that matter, news media objections to President Bush's domestic spying program, limited as it is and used against individuals here in the United States communicating with Al Qaeda operatives overseas.
There is a parallel issue out there that raises the same issues, and I think again draws attention to how the Democratic Party in this country is playing games, political games with the national security at stake.
The Patriot Act.
After 9-11, the Congress authorized the change changes in several laws to make it easier for the law enforcement community and the intelligence community to protect the United States against acts of terror.
Guess it's worked since there haven't been any major acts of terror committed against the United States since then.
Yet that bill had many provisions that were due to expire in four years.
Four years is now, the end of this year, December 31st.
Democrats in Congress, even though they didn't have a majority to kill the Patriot Act, did have enough to continue a filibuster to stop an immediate vote on passage of the Patriot Act.
So what happened was last week, the Senate decided to extend the Patriot Act for six more months.
The problem came when over in the House, one member of the United States House of Representatives, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, stood up and said no.
And he insisted on a much shorter extension of only one month.
The reason Congressman Sensenbrenner did this was because he doesn't want the next six months to be the Patriot Act sitting up there and be batted around by the Democratic Party to keep this issue alive for certain Democratic presidential candidates and others who want to criticize the administration.
So what happened is the Patriot Act is being extended only for one month, meaning the Congress is going to have to deal with this issue.
We're joined right now by the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Sensenbrenner.
Congressman, first of all, I think we need to point out that your one-month extension was not because you oppose the Patriot Act, but because you support it and you want to force the Senate to have to act on it by then, correct?
You're absolutely right, Mark.
And the thing is that the House has passed a compromise extension of the Patriot Act overwhelmingly, with 44 Democrats joining most Republicans and voting fa in favor of it.
The compromise extension, which the Senate can't seem to get around to deal with, is much more sympathetic to civil liberties than extending the z existing law.
so those who are filibustering this compromise uh...
in the senator trying to have it both ways now they're trying to say that they're against the patriot act but they are filibustering a bill that will improve the patriot act and protect the civil liberties of americans everywhere I think that that's a very important point to make because I think it exposes the hypocrisy that's out there.
If Senator Feingold and Senator Boxer and some of the others who are opposed to the Patriot Act are correct in their belief that this is impinging upon civil liberties of Americans, what they are doing by extending this thing with these resolutions is keeping in place a stronger and more restrictive version of the Patriot Act than the one that would be approved if they just vote on the measure that is out there.
I think that proves they don't really care about the civil liberties.
They don't care about prote improving the Patriot Act in the mean in the areas that they want it improved.
They simply want this issue to stay out there just so they can bat George Bush around.
What the filibusters are doing, Mark, is playing politics with the security of the American people.
the patriot act has worked uh...
there have been eight domestic al-qaeda cells broken up there have been over two hundred people who've been convicted of terrorism related offenses as a result of evidence collected by the patriot act Luckily, we have not had another 9-11 type attack.
Now, if the Patriot Act fails.
The wall that prevents the CIA and FBI from exchanging intelligence information goes right back up.
And the 9-11 Commission and everybody who has looked at why 9-11 happened has said the single most important reason why 9-11 happened is because the FBI and the CIA could not talk to each other so that the government could try to connect the dots to see who was plotting to kill us.
I think most people were not aware that that wall existed in the first place.
If the CIA uncovered information internationally, it by law was not allowed to tell the FBI, which is in charge of domestic law enforcement, and the National Security Agency was likewise left out of the loop.
We now have a situation in which the enemy is both overseas and here.
They have to be able to talk to one another.
And you're right, if this act isn't extended, we go right back to the right back to the old days of the policy that made no sense and put our country at peril.
Now, I don't think the Democrats want to see the Patriot Act die.
I don't know if you agree with me on that.
I think they don't want to be the party that is responsible for killing this law and then only to see a terrorist attack happen here.
I just think they want to keep this thing alive so they can criticize President Bush.
This all started with your fellow Wisconsinite, uh, Senator Feingold, who is running for president.
It's given him an issue that he's gotten a lot of headlines off of, but I don't think he or the Democrats really want the Patriot Act to die.
I think they want to mess around with this and make things difficult for the President.
Do you agree with that?
I agree with that, but I want to make this clear.
Of the sixteen areas where law enforcement authority was extended by the Patriot Act, not one has been declared unconstitutional by a federal court anywhere in four years.
Furthermore, the act itself requires the Inspector General of the Justice Department to report to Congress every six months whether there were any civil liberties violations in the Patriot Act.
We've gotten those reports from the IG and a timely manner, and there have been no civil liberties violations uncovered by the Patriot Act.
There was one case of a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, who was jailed unjustifiably for terrorist-related offenses, not because of the Patriot Act, but because of a misidentification of fingerprints by the FBI laboratory.
Now, if you use the argument of the Democrats that are trying to filibuster the Patriot Act, we ought to do away with the FBI laboratory on fingerprints because they made a mistake and somebody was unjustifiably jailed.
I want to ask you a political question.
This Patriot Act was passed by the House, the original version was passed by the House of Representatives overwhelmingly and passed by the United States Senate 99 to 1.
Senator Feingold was the only no vote.
You now have better than 40 Senators, almost all of whom are Democrats, filibustering this very act that was pro that was, you know, approved so overwhelmingly.
Since there have been no stated abuses of the Patriot Act, what's changed?
We've got a presidential election coming up, and the memory of the horrors of September 11th have faded in the minds of the American people.
well the horrors of nine eleven might have faded in the minds of the american people but those who pulled nine eleven off would like to do it again and again and again and if our job is government officials republicans and democrats senators representatives and executive branch officials to protect the american people but best way we can against another terrorist attack because the first obligation if any government is to keep the people and
property within that country safe the patriot act has done that i want to ask you briefly and we're talking to host judiciary committee chairman jim sensiburner of wisconsin The comment that Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader made after the uh votes were not there to stop the filibuster of the Patriot Act.
He said, quote, we killed the Patriot Act.
What's your reaction to the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate bragging about that?
Shame on him.
He voted for the Patriot Act when it passed, that Patriot Act was much less sympathetic to civil liberties than the compromise that the House and Senate conference have worked out.
I think that that shows very clearly that Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, representing Las Vegas, which is a prime terrorist target because of the huge numbers of people that go in and out of there, wants to play politics over the security of all America, but most particularly his constituents.
Thanks for joining us, Congressman.
Thank you, Mark.
That's Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Now I may sound a little harsh in my condemnation of Democratic political leaders on this, and I've been talking about it on the program here for better than an hour.
Chuck Schumer, Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, Senator from New York, both took part in this filibuster, both blocking the attempts to bring the Patriot Act to a vote.
Their own state was hit.
We're talking here about a real threat.
These aren't phony made up issues.
This isn't the Republicans trying to rape the Constitution.
This is an attempt to bring our laws into line with the realities of today.
We don't don't live in a world anymore where the FBI can just investigate crime in our country and the CIA can be involved in foreign intelligence.
Those things are now linked.
As for the argument that the government is going to be running around going through everybody's library records, and the government is going to be running around butting into everybody's private lives.
If those things were happening, we've had the Patriot Act now for four years, and President Bush and his administration have been running the country all of those four years.
If those things were happening, don't you think the ACLU would find just one, just one of those cases and start crumpeting and say, say, see these are the abuses that occur under the Patriot Act.
They can't find even a one.
There is no reason not to approve this right now, other than politics.
Senator Feingold's running for president.
He wants to prove to the lefties that he's a true lefty.
He wants to offer himself up as an alternative to Senator Clinton.
Senator Clinton, who has masqueraded as a moderate for two years now in her bid to become president, doesn't want to stand up to Feingold in her own party because she doesn't want to alienate the left all that much.
What we need are some Democrats in this country who are willing to say that I'm going to put politics aside on this one issue of the national security of this country.
Many of you will argue that if a Democrat was president, guys like me would be on the other side.
You'd never trust Hillary Clinton with these powers.
Hopefully that hypothetical is never going to be tested.
But I believe most conservatives would rally around a Democratic president when it comes to the single issue of protecting the people of the United States.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
The telephone number at EIB is 1-800-282-2882.
To the phones we go in San Diego.
Scott, Scott, you're on Rush's program with Mark Belling.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm great, thanks.
Hey, I had a question.
If Congress passed that bill in 2001, giving the power to do by any means what it took to capture and track terrorists, Why is it then necessary for the Patriot Act and additional provi provisions about wiretapping?
Well, with that right?
With regard to the Patriot Act, much of it expired after four years.
That's how many protections are built into this, including the new version that's out there.
The Patriot Act does expire after four years, and that's why it has to be reauthorized.
What about that thing in 2001, saying that they already had the right by any means to do what it took to capture and track terrorism?
You are referring to the uh resolution that was passed by Congress that dealt with the uh president's dealing with Al Qaeda, which the administration has used to defend the uh domestic spying program.
Yes, it's still there and it still has the force of law.
Why would they need the rights for wiretapping provisions in the Patriot Act?
Isn't that suppressing our Fourth Amendment and privacy uh rights?
Well, I think you're Talking about two separate issues.
The wiretapping that the President has been doing is separate from the Patriot Act question.
The Patriot Act deals with all sorts of different law enforcement issues that are out there, including allowing the CIA and the FBI and the National Security Agency, and for that matter the military, to be able to communicate with one another.
Thank you for the call.
I appreciate it.
To uh Louisiana and Stanley.
Stanley, you're on Russia's program.
Hi, how are you doing?
I'm great, thanks.
Great to hear you, Mark.
Uh, my question is if the uh if the Democrats are so convinced about the righteousness of their discontent, rather than just posturing, why don't they take some legislative action to curtail what President Bush is doing?
Well, in fact, the Patriot Act language that passed the House with about 45 uh Democratic votes does modify the Patriot Act somewhat.
The Senate has more than fifty votes to pass it, but it's the same thing as the uh with in the Senate as we face with regard to so many of President Bush's judicial nominees, they simply are trying to use the filibuster tactic to prevent it from c from coming to a vote.
They can try to introduce whatever legislative restrictions they want, but they're very, very insincere here.
I don't think they object to the Patriot Act, and I don't think that they have a real problem with President Bush monitoring the activities of individuals in our country that are talking to Al Qaeda.
I just believe that this is all about finding issues for which they can criticize the president, because the alternative is that they'd have to give him credit for the success in the war on terror.
It's why they're trying to pretend that the successes in Iraq aren't happening.
Because if we acknowledge that Iraq is a success, that means Bush gets credit.
If we acknowledge that there hasn't been an act of terror in the United States since 9-11, that means Bush has to be credited.
They don't want to do that.
So they're running around and creating these issues.
Also understand that you've got several Democrats that are running for president that are looking for ways to get publicity.
If you've got a Russ Feingold, who is the guy that started this filibuster, he's trying to grab headlines to distract attention from Hillary Clinton.
So you've got all these motivations that are out there, but not one of them has anything to do with keeping the American people safe, and that's the job of the leaders of our government.
I know President Bush is doing that job.
The Democrats in Congress can't say the same.
In fact, they are trying to obstruct and hamstring the president as he tries to keep us safe.
That's blunt, but it's true.
So if they actually did something, such as propose legislation to stop the wiretaps, then that would expose them for what they really were, and then they would not have the uh political advantage that they think they have.
Well, you're right.
They don't want to propose legislation to stop President Bush from doing any wiretapping because they don't want to go on record.
Would you like to be a Democratic Congressman running for re-election saying I tried to stop President Bush from spying on Al-Qaeda operatives here in the United States?
They don't want to do that.
They don't even want to change the policy at all.
They just want to say that Bush broke the law.
Bush ought to be impeached.
Bush has done this, Bush has done that.
But they don't offer up any policy questions as to how we should conduct the war on terror because they're not interested in that.
I just and the reason I'm using so much time on the program here is I'm calling them out to suggest that there are actually cases where politics ought to be trumped by patriotism.
And this is one of them.
If they can't provide support for the president when it comes to protecting the American people here in our own country and our own homes, when will they ever put politics aside or are they so obsessed with bashing Bush, which is what they live for, that they just can't bring themselves to do that?
Another question then.
Sure.
How can someone like you be in the from the same state as someone like Feingold who has absolutely no common sense?
How can you be from the same state?
I don't understand it.
Don't blame me for him.
Don't blame me for him.
I'm trying to think of a scoundrel from Louisiana.
Can I blame you for Mary Landrow then?
I I I have uh I've known Russ Feingold for twenty years, and I've done everything in my power to try to obstruct his presidential ambitions from the beginning.
But on that stand uh Stanley, I have to tell you, uh, I have failed.
Thanks for the call.
I'm now bl you think that's bad.
Imagine if he actually gets elected president.
Russ Feingold becomes president of the United States.
I'm never going to be invited back to do the program, and I'm going to have that as my burden.
You should have been able to do something to stop Feingold from being elected.
By the way, Congressman Sensenwinner, who is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee who we had on the program, is also from Wisconsin.
So if you're going to criticize if you're going to criticize us for producing uh uh for producing fine gold, we deserve at least some credit for uh producing uh Congressman Sensenbrenner.
With regard to the Democrats, though, I mean, you're talking almost every single uh Democratic member of the United States Senate who has been taking part in this filibuster to stop the Patriot Act from coming to a vote.
They do need to hear from their constituents that what they're doing here is wrong.
This is not an issue about which they ought to be playing political games.
I'm Mark Belling in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Rich Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review Magazine and also a syndicated columnist, has a column that appears in a number of newspapers today, including the uh uh the New York Post.
The headline on that column is Congress is new low unreal debate on Patriot Act.
I agree with him.
I think the American people can tolerate but not like obstructionism when it comes to the federal budget.
Obstructionism when it comes to passing tax cuts.
They can even handle obstructionism when it comes to President Bush's nominees for the federal courts to use that tactic here on protecting the American people, and that's what the wiretapping is, and that's what the Patriot Act is, is over the top.
It's the one area where I think the American people want their leaders to act together, particularly since there hasn't been a single abuse of the Patriot Act.
They keep talking about Section 215 of it, which empowers the government to conduct certain searches into the personal lives of individuals who are suspected of being involved in attacking the United States.
They keep talking about Section 215 and they bring up the provision which might allow government agencies to search the library records of Americans.
They want to go through your library records.
Do you know how many times that authority has been used?
Not once.
Not once.
Why is it in there?
Because presumably there might be an instance where it would be of some use.
Until they can make the case that this authority is being abused.
What point are they making here?
Other than that they simply want to give the president a hard time.
Find an issue right now.
In front of the Congress, the Democrats aren't trying to block Bush on.
A single issue.
In which they are cooperating with him.
Not a single one.
So therefore, the Patriot Act, the wiretapping, it's all part of the same political campaign being run by the Democrats to simply try to obstruct President Bush on everything.
We couldn't win the election.
We couldn't win Congress, but we do have certain leverage that we can use to try to block the president from doing what he wants to do.
Fine.
That's their tactic that the party now that offers no ideas, no solutions, no proposals on anything.
Fine.
We know that that's who they are.
We know that's what they stand for, which is nothing.
To use that tactic here is wrong, and it can't be defended.
And it's why you see so few Democrats actually standing up and defending it on its merits.
I mentioned the senators from New York, Schumer and Hillary Clinton.
They say that they are using the filibuster because they don't like how funds are being distributed under the Patriot Act.
Well, we think more law enforcement money and more resources ought to come to the state of New York.
They don't want to come out and say that we think that this act ought not be in place.
So they come up with all of these excuses to use to try to justify the actions that they're taking.
But they don't want to engage on the issues here.
What are they going to say?
The 10 million Americans are having their rights trampled on by the Patriot Act?
No.
They can't find a single American who's been abused under the Patriot Act.
So what they want to do is obstruct without actually confronting these issues at all.
To Corpus Christi, Texas and Bob, Bob, you're on Russia's program, I'm Mark Belling.
How are you doing there, Mark?
I'm great, Bob, thanks.
Uh I think it's quite obvious what the Democrats are trying to do in this situation.
Uh they have a uh rather uh nice track record along this line.
They're trying to force uh President Bush into uh breaking the law.
They wanna they want to either make the Patriot Act illegal or they're going to continue what they've been doing with this FIF uh FISA court, uh this uh they up but up until now before Bush, they had only uh uh modified requests for wiretaps two times in the entire history of FISA court.
Now, since Bush has been president and we're at war, they've modified one hundred and seventy-nine of his requests and flat out denied one.
Now, getting further into this, this track record, the Democrats did this with Ronald Reagan with the Boland Amendment.
They made it illegal for him to defend the American hemisphere to to stop the communist invasion of Honduras, to make it illegal for him to defend us, and they knew he would defend us, and they were going to attempt to catch him, and that was what that huge.
Well, you're you're right.
If whether that's their goal or not, it is their impact.
What they're trying to do is tie the hands of the president.
Yet you and I both know that if there isn't a successful campaign of terror or even another single terror hit here on the United States, and there is any evidence, any evidence at all that our administration or any of our agents, be it the military, CIA, FBI, whomever, knew anything about it at all.
You're going to see the same people who are running around trying to disempower the president, demand to know why we didn't stop it.
They are demanding absolute perfection from the administration and from the military when it comes to stopping these things from happening, but they are then trying to take away any power that they might have to do so.
It's just plain political hypocrisy.
Absolutely.
And they're and they continue with this nonsense of putting people like Jamie Gorelic on the 911 Commission.
She should she should be the one who's being grilled, not who's uh running around with a pooper scooper cleaning everything up and hiding all the evidence against the President.
She was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.
You're right about that.
Thanks for the call, Bob.
Appreciate it.
Let's go now to Columbia, South Carolina.
Will Will, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, Mark.
I I hate to change gears a little bit, but I wanted to talk about a report that was in Time magazine last week about Nancy Pelosi.
And I think it's uh it probably has some illustrative effect as far as liberalism is just purely idealism apart from reality.
Nancy Pelosi is being reported that she is tired of writing in a gas-guzzling black Chevy suburban, and she wants a hybrid.
And the way time reports this story is that the Capitol police have yet to find her sufficiently up armored hybrid.
Now, a hybrid is a wonderful vehicle.
It's a a miraculous engineering feat, but one of the things that's so great about it is it's low weight, weighs three thousand pounds.
What time doesn't mention is you can't up armor a hybrid, fifteen hundred, twenty five hundred additional pounds of weight to something that's whole existence is based on its low weight.
But it makes her look like she's this great environmentalist and she's so forward-thinking when in fact what she's saying is just sheer insanity.
Well, you're you're right, and she of course also wants to have that protection that she should have as a leader of the uh as a leader of the United States.
The thing that just seems so deplorable about this to me is that we've got to remember where the fourth 911 jet was headed.
It was headed for the Capitol building.
Al Qaeda was trying to kill those Democratic senators, those Democratic House members, and their staffs.
They weren't just targeting the Republican administration, they wanted to wipe out our government.
If they can't understand the reality of that and what it is that we are dealing with here, they're literally hopeless.
Now, what I think has happened so far on this issue is we have had several years of bashing of the Patriot Act.
It started with Howard Dean during the Democratic primaries in 2004.
And they've pounded on the issue and pounded on the issue and pounded On the issue.
I don't think most Americans even know what's in it.
I think that they would be beside themselves that they thought that the Democratic Party wanted to return us to the days in which the set the FBI and the CIA were not allowed to talk to one another.
So you've had all this bashing going on without most Americans know what's actually in it.
What needs to happen is more people need to become aware of this so that their government officials become pressured to go ahead and be responsible and to renew this act and to support the president in the war on terror.
Absolutely.
Thanks for the call, Will.
I appreciate it.
Lafayette, Louisiana, Bob, Bob, it's your turn.
I'm Mark Belling.
Happy New Year, Mark.
Thank you.
Mark, for thirty-eight years I've held a secret and it's finally been declassified.
The Democrats and the liberal press are arrogantly ignorant.
They make fun of the FBI and accuse them of invading uh rights of privacy by going past mosques and other areas uh with radiation detectors.
I protected for 38 years in my army career.
Nuclear weapons with the 101st Airborne 7th Infantry Division in Korea.
These weapons were called Davy Crockett Missile.
DAVY Crockett Missile.
Any of our liberal friends can look this up on the computer and find out exactly what these missiles were and what they were capable of.
They also might want to look up EMP, electromagnetic pulse on their computers.
And then maybe they can be brought up to date and not be so arrogant and opposed to the Patriot Act.
It's imperative that we pass this Patriot Act as it is.
These weapons that I was protecting weighed 51 pounds.
They were equivalent to an 18,000 kilotons of TNT.
They would travel 1,000 to 30,000 feet.
We knew that when we used these weapons that we were going to be destroyed ourselves, but that was that was the way it was.
The Russians produced somewhere around 3,000 of a similar type atomic weapon.
And your point is that a terror organization would love to get its hands on them.
Exactly.
The Russians are missing one to 200 of these type nuclear devices.
if someone with enough money would approach the Russian mafia, they could buy one and bring it here.
Or whomever has them.
Some of them may have gone to some of the old Soviet provinces.
Now the point that you're making, prior to 9/11, most liberals that I know would have rolled their eyes and said, "Oh yeah, right." Who's going to do that?
That's the attitude that they took all the way through the Cold War.
The Russians will never attack us because we could attack them.
But 9-11 occurred.
Can anyone argue that if Al Qaeda or a sympathetic group got its hands on one of the weapons that you describe, that they would use it, they were aiming at the Capitol building for heaven's sakes.
They hit the side of the Pentagon.
They brought they brought down the World Trade Center.
If Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants could get their hands on that weapon, they would use it.
Not to mention all of the other potential that they have with germ warfare, dirty bombs, and all the other things that are out there.
This isn't pretend anymore.
This isn't right wing paranoia.
It is a very, very real threat.
And it's something that ought to be beyond typical democratic childish partisan politics.
Thank you for the call.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I mentioned at the beginning of the program that this is goof off week here in the United States.
What percentage of Americans are on vacation this week?
I would guess 30 to 35%.
Seems like everybody I know isn't working this week.
Rush isn't working.
I don't know exactly where Rush is today, but I do know that last night he was at the Monday Night Football game because I read about that.
Did you guys know that?
I knew where Rush was.
Yeah, I'm now an insider here.
Let's go to Iraq.
Uh the New York Times reporting today on page one that the military in Iraq has very few Sunnis.
The Sunni Muslims, of course, are the minority in Iraq.
The Shiites or the Shia are the majority.
Saddam was a Sunni.
The great concern, of course, is that if the Sunnis are not represented in the new Iraqi government, that you ultimately are going to have a civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis.
But the Shiites will not trust the Sunnis because the Sunnis were responsible for oppression.
The people of Iraq During the Saddam regime, that the Sunnis don't trust the Shiites and aren't going to want to participate in a government in which they're in a minority.
That's been the great fear.
So far, the fears have been largely unfounded.
So now we've got a new report that indicates that very few Sunnis are in the Iraqi military.
They base this on the vote results in the Iraqi parliamentary elections from the Iraqi military, which showed very little support for Sunni-backed candidates.
This story could be turned around.
You could point out that about 7% of the Iraqi military is Sunni, which is rather impressive, but instead it's the old glasses half-empty approach that they take.
In the meantime, we now do see marches going on in Iraq, which is new.
Since the overthrow of the Saddam regime, there has been largely unanimous support of both the American presence and the Iraqi government, at least when it comes to notion of any civil disturbances or marches.
This one was peaceful, but about 10,000 people marched through Baghdad in support of greater inclusion of the Sunnis in the government there.
There are going to be a lot of people who say that this is a bad thing.
See, it's finally cracking up over there.
This beautiful thing that you Republicans were talking about, that President Bush wanted to strike, the notion that the Sunnis and the Shiites can walk hand in hand and lead their government together isn't going to happen.
I see just the opposite in this story.
Do you realize what we had in Iraq today?
You had peaceful protest by citizens with regard to their government.
That's not bad.
It's good.
They weren't throwing rocks, they weren't threatening rebellion.
They were redressing their government for grievances.
Something that never used to happen.
Can you imagine what would have happened if 10,000 people showed up in Iraq five years in Baghdad five years ago to protest the government?
Their heads would have been off before the end of the day.
Furthermore, the beauty of the Iraqi constitution, which we helped draw, requires that for the Shiites to have a governing majority, there is going to need to be Sunni cooperation.
So they're going to have to respond to this.
There's a process in place that's going to deal with all of these concerns.
In the meantime, reports out today indicate that American soldiers have found a mass grave victims of the Saddam regime.
They were found by workers, actually, who were laying down pipes in the city of Karbala, which is in southern Iraq.
A spokesman for the Karbala province saying the skulls of children and women with long hair were found in the grave.
Twenty bodies have so far been recovered and taken to the local hospital for DNA testing.
The people appear to have been victims of Saddam's bloody suppression of a Shiite uprising in 1991.
The grave was uncovered by chance, some 500 meters away from the mausoleum in the center of the Shiite town.
The United States installed provisional authority suggested last year that some 259 mass graves containing some 300,000 people had been discovered in the country since the fall of Saddam.
Now, in the meantime, you've got that hometown of Arnold Schwarzenegger somewhere in Austria, the town of Graz, Graz, Austria.
They're taking Arnold's name off an athletic field in protest of the execution of Tukey Williams, the founder of the Crips gang, appalled that Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't stop that.
This is classic Europe.
Saddam Hussein is executing hundreds and hundreds of innocent people, thousands, tens of thousands, for no good reason.
But here in the United States, one governor allows the execution of the founder of the bloodiest street gang in the history of the United States, and over that the Europeans are upset.
Classic European misprioritization.
My name is Mark Elling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Hope you're enjoying the job I'm doing this afternoon because I have the feeling In the final hour of the program, based on what I plan to talk about, that a lot of you are going to be turning on me, so I'm trying to put that off until the end of the show.
I was mentioning the hypocrisy of Europe.
Imagine that.
European nations being hypocritical.
A new report indicates that 15 European Union signatories to the Kyoto Global Warming Protocol that the United States won't sign are going to miss their 2010 emissions targets.
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