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Feb. 10, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
February 10, 2006, Friday, Hour #1
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Time Text
Oh, yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the program.
I am back.
I am here, guiding you through the light of truth from right behind the.
Boy, I sound a lot better, don't I, with this golden EIB microphone.
It just makes everything all so wonderful.
Rush is out swinging the golf clubs at the ATT, the Pebble Beach, whatever you want to call it.
Yes, the ATT tournament.
And if you want to check out what Rush is doing, because he looks like he's having a pretty good time, you can go to rushlimbaugh.com, and there's the photos of round one and all of the performance that he had yesterday.
Also, they still had that, and they're leaving it up, the interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox the other day that was a great, great interview by Cavuto with Rush.
So RushLimbaugh.com for all of that.
But meantime, on a happy Friday and kind of an open line Friday, there's a lot going on today, and we're getting a lot of news coming in from Washington.
In fact, as we're speaking, as you're listening and I'm speaking, we've got the big hearings going on about the fact that Katrina, that the government did a lousy job in responding to Katrina.
And I'm going, really?
What are they doing?
What are they doing?
They're all sitting around looking all very serious, and they're talking to Michael Brown, and they're talking to a PR guy from FEMA.
And is there anybody in this country that is surprised that the government was not, shall we say, the most efficient organization back when Katrina hit down into the Gulf states?
And as much for those of you that live in the Gulf states, this is not to belittle or take away from all the need and everything else that you folks have.
But there's a big, you know, we get natural disasters hitting us all the time.
We had one in California.
Remember, even the most tragic event probably to hit America in a long time, the Rose Parade, was actually washed out.
They held it, but it was raining.
Well, there were mudslides and there were floods, and people got flooded in low areas around various cities in California.
That was back on January 1st.
And the president just a couple of days ago, earlier this week, declared that this was a federal disaster area and people can get some help.
And so that's six weeks later.
And I'm wondering, why aren't the people in California getting hearings about why it took six weeks for there to be declared a natural disaster area?
And this weekend, all of you in the Northeast, you know what's coming.
You know what's coming.
I mean, it's going to be a biggie.
A big nor'easter is heading and 50 mile per hour winds and heavy, heavy, heavy snow.
And so all of you in the northeast part of the country are going to get hammered.
And I'm just curious if FEMA has already circled New York City.
Have they got the FEMA people all ready to go to come in and help all you people in New York that are going to be looking?
I'm serious.
We get hit with weather.
We get hit with horrible weather.
Katrina was the biggest disaster to hit this country ever, I guess, is what they're saying.
But I just, for the life of me, think, what is a hearing in Washington?
Do you really believe that that is going to change anything for the next time we need to have some sort of response?
And this goes way back.
I've lived in areas around the country where we've had some sort of natural disaster where FEMA has been dispatched.
And they do a lot of good later.
But I have never wanted nor thought that the government should be efficient and that the government should be there as some sort of first responder.
The first responders, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, are your police and fire in your local communities.
And FEMA is good at coming in later and trying to make sure that we get things taken care of and help people, but they're not the first responders, so they're holding these big hearings and having these talks in Washington today.
And I'm just holding my head going, what a waste of time.
And more than a waste of time is, what if some of you people are actually thinking this will reinforce the fact that you think that the government is going to be there to help you instantaneously?
And all you've got to do is sit back on your big pink pillow and the government will come along and fix everything for you.
And that's not the way it works.
It's not the way it works.
It never has worked that way.
All right.
So we got the Katrina hearings going, and Michael Brown is there.
And they had a big discussion.
I was trying to get ready for the show, so I wasn't able to listen to Walla.
They had a big discussion about the fact that, well, you know, he did work for the executive branch.
And is there any executive privilege here?
And he says, I'm not declaring executive privilege.
And besides, I'm just a citizen.
I can't do that.
And the members of Congress were saying, well, does the White House want executive privilege?
And they said, no, they don't want executive privilege.
Well, what are we going to do about executive privilege?
Well, nobody's asking for an executive privilege.
It's nuts-o.
It's just nutso Washington on parade today as they're holding these hearings.
Speaking of Washington, uh-oh.
Oh, the latest pollout is showing that we are more supportive of this good old eavesdropping program than ever before.
And, yeah, that apparently, according to the Associated Press, that the president is particularly successful at making his case and support for this whole eavesdropping on the bad guys has picked up 10 percentage points in the last month.
And the story goes that the White House has relented and is now providing some new details to the House and Senate intelligence committees about the program.
Here again, this is, I'm just talking common sense here, folks.
I think all of us know that there are too many members of the House and the Senate that are too greedy for themselves and their political careers to trust them with a secret that they won't run out and immediately hold a news conference and leak it.
We know of people that are current members of Congress that are leaking national security secrets.
We have always had national security secrets.
We always have.
We always will.
And the other thing that keeps going unreported is that the administration, and I forget what they said, if it's every month or every 90 days or every 60 days, but it's something like that, that they have met with eight people that are designated by the rules to get a complete debriefing on this national security wiretap business, and they have been told every whatever it is, month or two months, about what it is that they've been doing.
It is the head of the Senate and the minority leader in the Senate and the majority leader.
The same over in the House, the Speaker and the minority leader.
The top Democrat and Republican in the Senate Intelligence Committee and the top Democrat and Republican in the House Intelligence Committee.
They've told them.
They've given them the information.
So I'm going, what do you mean the White House relented?
The White House has been giving that information.
And the people of this country are very, very, very much in support of this.
And the support is growing.
And not only that, but they talk about that this isn't even getting in where the public is even concerned about all this detail.
But when you get down to, for example, FISA, the FISA court, the FISA court, and the reason why there's a big debate, you'll get some lawyers and some law professors who say the president was doing things legally and others that say he was not.
This will probably wind up in some court someplace to be decided.
But remember, the 9-11 Commission even wrote about the fact this FISA court thing isn't working.
It's too bureaucratic.
It takes too long to get stuff through.
And the Democrats were jumping up and down about the 9-11 Commission and how they are so great and how the president should be able to get on the stake and get this 9-11 Commission report going.
And yet the 9-11 Commission report, if you read it, says that the FISA court is a bureaucratic, bumbling, backlogged place.
It isn't working.
And then you get into this whole business about the fact, well, it's got to be a wiretap of a phone call from somewhere outside the country to somewhere here or from somewhere here to somewhere over there.
And I still, I mean, I know every one of us, we don't want our government running amok and wiretapping because I'm not thinking of just President Bush.
I'm thinking of President X, Y, and Z down the road, the future of this country.
I don't want them to be going out and doing things in some big government system of tapping people's phones for whatever they feel like.
But what is wrong with, what if we, and everybody says we've got al-Qaeda cells in this country.
So what if Al-Qaeda cell in Los Angeles is calling the Al-Qaeda cell in New York?
Wouldn't you like to know what they're talking about?
So we've got, anyway, we've got support picking up on that NSA business.
We've got Scooter Libby back in the news, and there's a report coming out that says that trying to imply that he's going to squeal on his boss.
Well, he's only got one boss, and that's the Vice President, Dick Cheney.
We've got Jack Abramoff and Harry Reed connected at the hip, and some more reports coming out this morning.
And we've got this, all of a sudden, you should see the changes.
The Patriot Act all of a sudden is okay with the people that were opposed to the Patriot Act extension, and yet the changes are so cosmetic that you got to wonder: are they getting nervous?
Are they getting, the people that oppose this, are they getting nervous about the fact that, hmm, the public seems to like the idea of security for our nation.
So maybe I shouldn't be out there blabbing too loud about the Patriot Act and how much I don't like it.
So anyway, we've got a lot to go over.
Again, check out what Rush is doing at rushlimbaugh.com.
And you want to join the program today, the phone number to join the program is 1-800-282-2882.
That's 800-282-2882.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Welcome back, Tom Sullivan sitting in for Rush.
Rush is at the ATT at Pebble Beach, Monterey, California, having a good time.
Weather is beautiful on the West Coast today.
And, well, this big conference going on, and again, Washington, the big hearing going on back there right now.
And I saw this report from the Associated Press this morning, documents.
White House knew about levies.
Well, yes.
Gosh, I can't remember how many years ago, 20 years ago, something like that, at least 20 years ago.
I worked for a big international CPA firm at the time.
And so we would have our in-house conference, our in-house training session.
It was about two weeks every summer in which we would get together as a firm.
I remember meeting these colleagues of mine that worked in our New Orleans office.
And I remember 20 years ago, these people, we were all a bunch of young kids at the time working in the accounting profession, and we just came out of college.
And they were telling me about, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah.
New Orleans is below the sea level.
Oh, everybody's worried.
Everybody always worries about New Orleans because we're under the sea level.
If a big storm comes along, boy, it'll flood the whole darn city.
I've heard that from the time I was a young guy just out of college.
I've heard that from, I mean, and I live in an area.
Sacramento, California is also next to New Orleans, the most exposed major city in this country that lives, we're not below sea level, but we've got levees protecting us all over the place.
And guess what?
Levees break.
Levees get old.
Levees don't always hold up.
And so you get leaks and you get things that happen.
And if there's a big storm, you can flood a major city.
And so I'm sitting here going, what is new about all this stuff?
What is so new about the fact that they knew that there were documents about the fact that the levees could actually fail?
Well, anybody with a half a brain, you don't need to be an engineer to understand that the big storm levees could fail.
So I don't know what the trumped-up stuff is, but it seems like they're trying to trump up stuff that has much to do about nothing, not the storm.
I mean, the damage is huge.
The human suffering is huge.
But the fact that people did not know about the fact that the water could come into New Orleans and flood it, which brings up the whole question about rebuilding New Orleans anyway.
A lot of questions about that.
All right, let me keep going here because I've got this Patriot Act, and all of a sudden everybody's real happy with the Patriot Act.
Dick Durbin, even he came along and he said, you know, I'd like some further clarifications on this business about the libraries.
But he said, I do believe on balance that this is a better version of the Patriot Act.
And I'm going, Durbin, I mean, I don't agree with you, Mr. Durbin, but I got to tell you something.
This is not a major change.
It's not substantial.
Diane Feinstein said that the bill had been substantially improved, and now she's going to vote for it.
I'm telling you, it's not about substantial improvement.
It's about the fact that it's election year, and they're all of a sudden figuring out that we Americans want our country secure.
Let me tell you what the big substantial improvements were in the Patriot Act.
The changes, which guess who put this together?
Harriet Myers.
Harriet Myers worked out these changes in the Patriot Act, and now all of a sudden you've got all these people that were against it, including four Republicans, that are now for it.
And they're going to pass this darn thing.
They're going to get this thing through.
The first one, there's one, two, there's three changes, three changes.
The first one is that if you receive a court-approved subpoena for information regarding a terrorist investigation, you would now have the right to challenge a requirement that says you can't tell anybody.
Now you can challenge it before you can, and you still can't go out and tell people.
In other words, the point is, is that if you are part of a terrorist investigation, you can't call up all the people they're investigating and saying, hey, the FBI just called and asked all kinds of questions about you.
They don't want you to do that, which makes sense.
And so now the chain says, well, you do have a right to challenge that before a judge before you can go out and tell the other people that are involved in the investigation.
Not much of a change, in my opinion.
The second change says it removes a requirement that if you requirement was that you had to provide the FBI with the name of an attorney that you consulted if you got one of these national security letters, which was a demand for records, your records.
And it said before that you had to tell them also about any attorney that you called to tell about all of this.
And now they're saying, no, you don't need to give them the name of the attorney that you called.
And the third one is, is it clarifies that most libraries are not subject to the letters for demand of information about suspected terrorists?
This whole business about libraries, it doesn't remove it.
It says most libraries are not subject to it.
The whole thing about libraries is not libraries.
What this section of the Patriot Act says, if somebody would read it, people are talking about this Patriot Act and haven't read the darn thing.
It's not that long, it's not that hard.
But what it does say is about business records, business records.
And remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber?
The way they got him was through the fact that he was quoting from a book.
They found out that it was a very limited supply book.
It was only in a few libraries.
They went to the libraries to find out who was taking out this book, and that's how they got Ted Kaczynski with the help of his family.
But that tied the whole thing together.
So there are business records that they do need, and they do it all the time.
Police do it all the time.
They will go in and get your telephone records.
They'll go in and get your bank records of who you wrote checks to and when you made deposits.
There's nothing new about these changes.
But all of a sudden, everybody's for it except for a good old Senator Russ Feingold.
And kudos to him.
As much as I disagree with him, at least he says, ah, these aren't meaningful changes.
I'm still going to fight it.
I'm still going to fight this thing.
Well, at least he's consistent.
At least he has principles.
But all of a sudden, Diane Feinstein and Dick Durbin and who else?
Chuck Hagel and Lisa Murkowski, and the list goes on of the people that said that they were all opposed to it before, all of a sudden they're thinking, well, maybe this isn't so bad.
So they're hiding under the cover of the fact that Harriet Myers gave them three little itty-bitty changes in words that are meaningless, not substantial for them to hide behind in order to say they're all for the Patriot Act now.
People in this country are speaking and speaking clearly.
We want our constitutional protection.
We don't want big government snooping into our records.
But when it comes to investigating terrorism and to make our country secure, we want the government to be able to have some powers to be able to go out and get these things.
We've got that.
We've got the scooter Libby.
We've got Harry Reed being involved with Jack Abramoff, connections there.
So stick around.
We'll be back.
Tom Sullivan sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Wow.
Just looking, welcome back.
Tom Sullivan sitting in for Rush.
I'm just wowing about blizzard predicted from Northeast up to 12 inches in New York City wind gusts 50 miles an hour.
We're going to get to some of the things about the economy because that's really kind of my background is the investments and money.
And this talk show business is kind of a hobby of mine.
So we'll get into some things about taxes and about the economy.
But the snow business brings up, do you see where the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is now offering, You can now get a financial contract based upon the amount of snow that falls at Boston's Logan Airport and how much snow falls at Central Park in New York.
Just in time for the Northeastern.
And I was just in time.
Now, this goes from October through April, but boy, I'll tell you, you can bet the value of those things are going way up as this big Nor'easter is moving in.
And so anyway, the whole idea, apparently, is that there's a bunch of people out there that want to hedge themselves.
Cities that takes a ton of money to dig themselves out.
And so this way, if they buy some of these, apparently the value goes up the more the snow comes down.
They then sell them theoretically for a profit, and that offsets the cost of removing all the snow.
But if it doesn't snow as much as they thought it would, then they're out money.
So it's just, it's an odd financial contract that's just being offered by the Chicago Merc.
And speaking of odd, the kids under the dome in Washington are just being odd.
I guess they think we're just dense out here, but you've got to look at this stuff and think, why are they holding hearings on New Orleans?
And why are they, I don't know.
I don't understand.
And the Patriot Act, all of a sudden, everybody is just jumping in online on that one.
Let's go to the phones.
The phone number again, 800-282-2882.
Kevin in Ohio.
Hello, Kevin.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
Thank you very much, sir.
I think you're doing a good job.
The question I have is: who starts the hearings?
We own the House, the Senate, and the White House.
Who starts these hearings?
I don't get how we investigating ourselves or the moderates that are doing this.
Oh, you know, you might have just hit the nail on the head.
You just may have hit the nail on the head because you're right.
I mean, if they, they're supposed to be.
I've had a long complaint, and up until recently, I've had a real serious complaint about the fact that the Republicans don't know how to run the Congress.
They just don't seem to be, I don't know, they've had control of it now for, what, 11 years, going on 12?
And yeah, why are they holding these hearings?
I'm not quite sure why.
Is there anything that surprises you about the fact that New Orleans flooded when a big hurricane came blowing through right over the top of their town?
No, I'm about as surprised as you were.
I thought everybody pretty much knew they were under sea level.
Yeah, and they taken billions of dollars to fix it all these years, and they haven't fixed it.
I thought we all knew this, but this is they're going to report it as something new.
I was shocked to see it on the internet as headlines flying up.
The White House knew about the levees.
It's like, yeah.
I don't know what natural disaster happens in your neighborhood, Kevin, but I would imagine that whatever it is, it's probably happened a few times and will happen again in the future.
And I know where I live in Sacramento, we have these levees with all these big rivers that go all around the city of Sacramento.
And you know what they're doing?
They're talking about it.
They're wringing their hands about it.
They're having committee meetings about it.
They're bringing in people to study it.
And you know what's going to happen?
There's going to be some big flood someday, and everybody's going to say, well, why didn't somebody do something?
But they're not doing, they don't do the real work that needs to be done to get it done, which is, you know, the Mississippi River goes over its banks every couple of years.
It's fascinating to me.
Jeff in Madison, Wisconsin.
Hi, Jeff.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, thank you for taking my call, and thanks for filling in for Rush.
You bet.
My question is, I wanted to get back to the terrorist surveillance program, if I could, for a second.
Yeah.
A lot of people on the left seem to say that George Bush ordered this spying program, and he went against going against the law.
And I heard General Hayden, he had a press conference about a week ago, and he was told, or he told us, that George Bush, after reading the 9-11 report and whatever, he said, tell me what I can do to connect the dots.
And they got the Justice Department and all his lawyers together, and they came up with this program, and George Bush ran with that program that they said he could do.
Am I correct on that?
Yeah, I thought the general was also very forthcoming in the fact that how careful, and of course he could not go into the operational details, but how very careful they are and how cognizant and aware they are of making sure that they don't misstep and violate the law and that the president was asking, what can I do within the law?
I'm with you.
Jeff, I'm not quite sure I understand this is all about politics.
It's not about national security and starting to backlash against all those people, the Ford Republicans and the Democrats that are involved in fighting the president on this matter.
They're losing in the court of public opinion.
Let me go back to something, though.
I've kept this with me.
Speaking of old testimony and old commentary, there was an article that James Robbins wrote back in December for national review.
And I kept this thing, and I've never seen anything about this subsequent to it.
But the big debate about the fact of this FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
And what Robbins is saying is check out Section 1802.
Section 1802 says electronic surveillance authorization without court order.
And you can do this.
I mean, go on Google and just put in FISA, Section 1802, and you will see it.
And it's very instructive.
And there you will learn that it says, notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year, for periods of up to one year.
And so there are conditions, and surveillance must be under various conditions to do that.
But a terrorist group is a foreign power in the sense that they're trying to kill you and me.
And they define what a foreign power is, and it certainly is a faction of a foreign nation or nations and engaged in international terrorism.
And that certainly qualifies under a foreign power.
You go through, I'll go more through Robbins' commentary, but it really is amazing that it says that the president does have this authority.
And the way it gives him the authority, it says the Attorney General must report to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 30 days prior to the surveillance, except in cases of emergency, when he must report immediately thereafter.
He must furthermore fully inform these committees on a semi-annual basis thereafter.
He must send a copy of the surveillance under authorization under seal to the FISA court, not for a warrant, but to remain under seal unless certification is necessary and so forth.
So I'll go through this law.
So what Robbins is pointing out, and I think what a lot of lawyers are pointing out that are saying the president's legal, is if you read the law, I think you'll come away with a little bit of an understanding that says the president can do this.
Not only this president, but any president within constraints.
And they seem to be.
They seem to be under the constraints.
Joe in New Orleans.
Joe, hello.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
Hey, Tom.
Listen, I've been listening to Rush and you today.
When y'all make comments, you don't know how bad it hurts the people here in New Orleans.
I think y'all are coming from an ignorant standpoint.
You don't know what the cause of the flooding was.
It was a failed flood wall.
This was a federally mandated flood protection system from 1965.
The Corps of Engineers was responsible for the design, the engineering, the implementation, and the maintenance of these levees and flood walls.
And it's being proven by universities around the country, engineering departments, that they didn't put long enough, deep enough sheet pilings.
It was a failure, a man-made disaster.
Katrina certainly exposed the weakness, but had it been done correctly the first time, we would not have flooded.
I live by the 17th Street Canal, and obviously we were devastated.
But when you guys perpetuate the ignorance, and there was a caller earlier that was saying something that we've been giving them millions of dollars for flood protection to maintain the levees, why isn't it working?
Well, they have the Mississippi River Gulf outlet that was a Corps of Engineers designed that connected New Orleans directly to the Gulf of Mexico that caused flooding.
There's 7,000 miles of pipeline canals to service the oil industry that deteriorates and causes and impacts our flood protection.
All of this because the Port of New Orleans is important.
It's the second largest port.
The seafood industry, the oil industry, and everything else.
You need to come and take a look and learn the facts before saying everybody knew it was going to flood.
This did not have to happen.
We would have been back on Wednesday, licking our wounds from the hurricane, just like any East Coast or Gulf.
Hold on, hold on.
Hey, Joe, can you wait through the break?
Sure.
I want to talk to you about this because I do want to get you're there.
I'm not.
But I want to ask you some questions about it.
So if you can stick around, I'd sure appreciate it.
We'll take a short break and come back.
Phone number to join the program, 800-282-2882.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Welcome back.
Tom Sullivan's sitting in for Rush.
Rush is at the ATT.
In fact, you can check out the photos of what he's doing at the ATT tournament in Monterey on RushLimbaugh.com, plus the video of Rush's interview with Neil Cavoto was there on Fox.
Just thinking about this Northeastern heading towards all of you up there, Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston.
You're going to, you know, the Olympics start tonight, and so all of you will be able to sit in your homes with snow piling up outside your house, watching the winter games in Italy that they're having a hard time with trying to get some snow to conduct their games.
Speaking of weather, Joe's on the line from New Orleans.
So, Joe, listen, I mean, I've got to be straightforward with you here.
Why is it that my friends that I know that have lived in New Orleans their whole life have said it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when?
Well, everyone knew that.
I mean, we knew it as well.
But again, a storm coming of that magnitude is a 100-year storm.
If the levee, the wall, I should say the flood wall hadn't been broken from poor engineering, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I agree with you.
I agree with you.
But my point in bringing this up today is that they've got all these people in Washington sitting around pointing out the obvious, and they're having big hearings about it.
I'll bet you a large lunch at a drive-up window that doesn't do a darn thing to help you in the future.
Oh, you're absolutely right.
It's a waste of time.
It's a show.
I mean, listen, we're sick of that up down here.
We're seeing no action.
We don't like the way Bush talks about having $84 million allocated to this area.
That includes, we haven't seen a fraction of that, but that's flood insurance payouts.
It's not just grants or money given to us.
I'm glad that you're acknowledging reality.
You're a realist.
I can tell that by listening to you, because this isn't you're not, nobody's writing checks out to pay to the order of Joe anytime soon, and they're doing a lot of look at me, see how much I care hearings.
That's what this is about.
No, the problem is they need to take responsibility and ownership of this province.
Again, we shouldn't.
I don't want to debate old news, but everybody knows that there's plenty of blame to go around all the way around.
But the hearings today are.
And again, Joe, Sacramento is not under sea level like you folks are, but we are protected by levees, and levees are.
I hear you loud and clear.
They sit around, like I said, in our neighborhood and talk about and wring their hands and have committee hearings and studies.
I don't think that you can sit back and say, well, therefore, we're protected.
And that's what I don't want people of New Orleans or Sacramento or Des Moines, Iowa, or any other place that's got a big river going by them to get comfortable and say, we're going to be okay.
The government's going to take care of everything.
They should have.
We're willing to take that risk.
I mean, only because we don't think it's going to happen.
I mean, I'm even going back to that neighborhood because I just don't think it's going to happen again if they fix and do the protection correctly.
Even if we had a category five, which we're believing that the storm surge was actually category five because it was a five for days before it came up and got close.
I know, I saw how they redefined, but it was huge.
It was huge.
You guys got hit with the biggest storm ever.
Even if it topped the levees, you're only talking about a couple of feet of water going above the levee, above the surge.
So the city could handle that.
But not when you have a breach of a flood protection wall, that was the federal government's responsibility.
And that's what it boils down to.
And they need to take ownership.
Certainly, there are places in New Orleans that we can't rebuild.
We believe that there's low in the lower Plackamon Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward.
It's very hard to tell people they can't come back, but there's certain realities that have to be dealt with, but there are viable neighborhoods.
There are places all over America like that that there have been natural disasters and people move back in and they should not.
But I've got to tell you, the one thing that I do know about levees is that the federal government writes checks through the Corps of Engineers, and then you wind up with, however, local, we call them reclamation districts.
I don't know what you call them, but those are local boards elected by local people that are in charge of taking care of their local community.
And that is where the frontline first responder, first responsibility goes.
Well, admitted, we understand that.
That's why we're trying to consolidate the levy boards because we felt like they did us a great disservice as well.
But again, the analogy that's been the best so far is that you go off of a showroom floor with an automobile, you're riding down the street, a truck pulls out in front of you, you hit the brakes, and guess what?
The brakes don't work, and you hit the truck.
The idea being that Katrina's the truck, and certainly when you bought the car, you had an expectancy of reliability with the brakes that they would work.
So all the truck did was expose weakness in the car.
The same thing with the storm.
It is not a Katrina problem.
Katrina did not breach this.
Yeah, I understand.
I understand.
I understand.
I got a cut for time.
I'm up against the clock.
Karina, the problem is you had a lousy system protecting your city.
That's why I'm fascinated that you're willing to move back in where you were damaged before.
We've got to take a break.
We'll be right back.
Tom Sullivan on the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Oh, somebody needs to do something.
I love that line.
I love that line.
Why we need to do something?
Well, let's do something.
What is it?
Well, I don't know.
Well, you have any details?
No.
But we need to do something about the fill-in-the-blank.
That is the standard answer coming out of Washington, D.C. We've got, and also, of all these big hearings going on in Washington.
So far, Brownie has, yeah, Michael Brown's testifying, and he says it was their fault.
The Department of Homeland Security.
They're the ones who doomed FEMA to a path of failure.
It was their fault.
I'm telling you, it was their fault.
That's Brownie's comment this morning.
I say we need to do something.
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