Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
I know you people on DittoCam are panicking because all you saw was bars.
I forgot to turn it on, but it's on now.
So a hearty welcome to all of you, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, watching on the DittoCam at rushlimbaugh.com.
And it amazes me.
Life is show prep.
I do show prep for a living.
I live show prep.
And there are some days it just amazes me, and it shouldn't, it just amazes me that things keep happening in a way that make them just irresistible as topic discussion.
It's Friday.
Let's go show you what I mean.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
By that, I mean there are certain days, folks, as a highly talented and highly trained broadcast specialist.
Like everything in life, there are better days than other days.
Now, here, every day is excellent, but some days are super excellent.
And you wonder when those days are over, gosh, can't we top this tomorrow?
Are we going to be able to?
And lo and behold, show prep never fails.
If you look hard enough, it's out there.
In some places, you don't even have to look hard.
All right.
You know the rules on Open Line Friday.
Basically, when we go to the phones, the show is all yours.
Whatever you want to talk about is what we talk about.
You don't have to be reacting to what I'm talking about.
You don't have to restrict yourself to things that only I care about.
I mean, go to the phones, it's your show, essentially.
You can ask anything, make a comment.
800-282-2882, the email address rush at EIBnet.com.
You know, have you seen Howard Dean and this immigration rant that he's on?
Well, now, don't discount this, because if you go through all of the things the Democrats have tried to make a big deal of, the Dean rant on border patrol and border control is in itself a liberal entitlement.
But the lesson to learn here is what do the real polls, the inside polls, say about illegal immigration?
And you don't have to spend a lot of money to find this out now.
All you got to do is listen to Howard Dean.
The answer can be found at Democratic National Committee.
Howard Dean yesterday called border security his party's top immigration priority for November.
Not top priority, not the environment.
He called it the top priority.
Not the environment.
It's border security.
Not education.
It's border security.
It's not the starving children in America.
It's border security.
It's not even health care anymore.
It's border security.
Now, one of the things that I do as a highly trained broadcast specialist is read the tea leaves.
Read the stitches on the fastball.
And as a professional reader of tea leaves and the stitches on a fastball, the border security poll numbers must border on what?
For Dean to trash his whole agenda.
I know he had a caveat in there.
His party's top immigration priority is border security.
But there must, they have to have some internal polling data at the Democratic Party that indicates this is a much bigger issue than they thought it was.
And of course, there are Republicans today, conservatives, after having heard Dean's rant on this, that are, I warned them.
I warned them that if they didn't get out in front of this issue as a party, that this was going to happen.
You know, I don't know what it is that influenced Dean beside these poll numbers, but there has to have been something.
Now, we've got other stories in the stack of stuff that we'll add to this, and we'll detail things as we peel back the hands of time today on the program.
Now, get this.
This is the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals.
Public schools in California can bar clothing with slogans that are hurtful.
The Ninth Circus ruled this yesterday.
This is in a case of a student who wore a t-shirt saying homosexuality is shameful.
The two-to-one decision by a three-judge panel back to San Diego Area High School's argument that it was entitled to tell a student to remove a t-shirt with that message.
The officials were concerned the slogan could raise tension at the scrule, where there had been conflict between gay and straight students.
The student sued, claiming the school's dress code violated his free speech, his religious freedom, and due process rights.
Writing for the panel's majority, the Judge Stephen Reinhart, and this guy, folks, this guy is way, way out there to the left.
His wife is Ramona Ripston, who apparently, she's been on TV a number of times.
She's an ACLU chick.
You know, can you imagine life in these two people's house?
I think of these liberals.
I just think of them living their private lives and what they must do behind closed doors.
And you know, it isn't fun.
You know, they're just sitting there wringing their hands and worried about the fate of communism and what we do to re-energize it and so forth.
I do.
I share these innermost thoughts with you.
I think of these libs behind closed doors, and I just, the last thing I see him doing is enjoying life.
I see him fretting all the time.
Anyway, Reinhardt affirmed the lower court's decision against an injunction against the scruple, said scruels may bar slogans believed to be hurtful.
Students who may be injured by verbal assaults on the basis of a core identifying characteristic such as race, religion, or sexual orientation, have a right to be free from such attacks while on scruel campi, Reinhardt wrote.
The demeaning of young gay and lesbian students in a scruple environment is detrimental not only to their psychological health and well-being, but also to their educational development.
In his dissent, the judge Alex Kaczynski said the majority would gag campus deceit or dissent, rather, I'm trying to read too fast here, to the high school's policies.
It would gag campus dissent to their policies.
The types of speech that could be banned by the school authorities under the school hate policy are practically without limit, Kaczynski said.
Any speech code that has at its heart avoiding offense to others gives anyone with a thin skin a heckler's veto, something the Supreme Court has not approved of in the past.
This is exactly right.
Now, you people wonder why we're spending so much time on this, right?
I've dealt with this my entire broadcast career.
You know, I've and I'm not advocating this particular t-shirt here, homosexuality shape.
That's not the point.
The point is, like, Mr. Sterdley, why we're talking about this story today.
He said, well, who gets to sit there and decide what's hurtful?
And I said, the hurt.
So we're going to have a new group.
We already have the offended.
If you go back to the archives of this program, I have told you who the offender is.
There's a professional business.
The offended are political correctness aficionados and they shut things up that they don't want to hear by claiming that it offends them.
And this is the way the minority reaches out and gags the majority.
Judge Kaczynski is exactly right here.
You know, you, my theory on being offended, nobody has the power to make me feel offended.
It's up to me.
You know, I'm sitting around and people do that.
I don't get offended.
I really don't get offended.
I have not only a thick skin, but I'm not going to let somebody have that kind of power.
Can you imagine being such an emotional vegetable that you go through life and you're just scared to hear anything because it might offend you?
What kind of life is that?
It's like when you have a recession, don't play.
Now, speaking of that, you see this Fox News opinion dynamic poll?
The economy is roaring, but people don't think it is.
They admit that they don't think it is, and there are a number of reasons for it.
One of the reasons is, well, a war in Iraq.
I mean, who wants to have a perpetual war in our future and so forth?
Then you've got other people in the poll, and it's really striking.
I mean, it's something like 75%, if I saw it correctly, who agree that the economy is doing well, but they don't think so, and it doesn't feel right, and so forth.
And then a companion story, conservatives and Republicans just can't get any credit for the great employment news and the great economy that's going on, and they're frustrated over it.
Well, I wonder why they can't get any credit for it.
Let me give you, there's an easy as hell explanation for this.
Everybody knows that for eons, backpocket issues, i.e. the economy, have been factor numero uno in determining election results.
Well, here we are in election year, and we have an undeniably great economy.
Now, what else do we have?
We've got Democrats who've been talking it down for five years.
We've got Democrats talking about it being a soupline economy, that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, the middle class is evaporating, there's no chance for success in America, the American dream is dead.
They've been doing this for five years.
And this cacophony, this never-ending doom and gloom, after that many years, even with the end of the monopoly of the DriveMy Media, there's no question it has an impact and has had an impact.
The Democrats simply cannot allow for the economy to be perceived as good news, particularly when they're going to go screw it up.
If you listen to Hillary Clinton make speeches, she's going to raise taxes on the rich and she's going to expand government, she's going to do national health care, all these things that have been demonstrated to fail worldwide, she's going to do.
And as I said yesterday on immigration, one of the big reasons the Democrats are all for illegals is they need victims.
The economy is doing so well that we're producing fewer and fewer native victims.
The Democrats need victims as voters, need victims as the recipients of their entitlement programs.
Democrats need victims so that they can basically have their sense of power.
And so the ongoing effort to talk down the economy and to suggest that it, like, we're on the verge of a housing bubble every day.
We're on the verge of a stock market bubble every day.
We're on the verge of a collapse every day.
That gold price, the oil price, the gasoline price, how in the world can we survive another day, Mabel, has been the general theme.
So there's no question that the impact has been what it is.
It's still somewhat frustrating, but the doom and gloom will ultimately not play well because while there may be a lot of doom and gloom, people are not going to vote for it when it gets down to the nitty-gritty.
I know, I know that the media is pushing the generic ballot.
The Democrats have a 10-point lead in the generic ballot in the upcoming congressional races.
That means they go out and they talk to registered voters and say, you're going to vote Democrat or Republican.
They don't throw a name in there.
The Democrats always score better in these generic ballots.
That's time honored.
Of course, nobody's pointing, oh, wow, look at that.
The Democrats are a generic ballot, 10-point increase.
If you do an actual analysis of the seats that are competitive, you find that the generic ballot doesn't mean diddly squat.
It's going to be very difficult for the Democrats to win the House.
It's not the piece of cake they're suggesting.
That's not the point.
The point is, no matter who wins the House, what difference is it going to make?
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
That doesn't make sense.
The cab driver, I heard about the cab driver.
The cab driver said the two guys got in the car and they acted like nothing had happened.
They were just having a good time.
Oh, he came back.
The cab driver picked up two more, and those two more said they were acting like things had gone on.
Okay.
We're talking about the Duke rape case here.
Snerdley and I in a heated dispute here during the break.
The second Duke stripper did not see the alleged rape.
This is an AP exclusive.
She's changing her story.
At first, a stripper who performed at a Duke University of the Cross Team Party doubted the story of a colleague who told the cops that she was dragged into a bathroom and raped.
But now Kim Roberts isn't so sure.
She said, I was not in the bathroom when it happened, so I can't say a rape occurred, and I never will.
But after watching defense attorneys release photos of the accuser and upset by the leaking of both dancers' criminal past, she said she has to wonder about their character.
In all honesty, I think they're guilty, she said.
And I can't say which ones are guilty, but somebody did something besides underage drinking.
That's my honest to God impression.
Now, this babe has also tried to hire a New York PR.
Well, I don't know if she's hired him or just wants some free advice.
She emailed a New York public relations firm asking in her letter for advice on how to spin this to my advantage, quote unquote.
She said, cannot let an opportunity like this pass without maximizing it.
This is ridiculous.
This whole thing has now become a circus.
Do you know there was a murder in Durham this week on Tuesday night?
There was a murder.
There's a lot of violent crime.
Nobody's talking about that case because this case has been so splattered all over the media in a context that is irrelevant to the facts.
What you have here, basically, ladies and gentlemen, is the typical media template of a clash of races.
And you've got it, it's even better than that because then you've got these so-called rich white kids, spoiled, people of privilege, used to getting away with whatever they want, versus the two struggling, starving minority exotic dancers, just doing whatever they can to put their kids through school.
Oh, it's just such a horrible.
Made the order for the meeting.
Then you've got a you've got a just an absolute hack DA who who is getting ready to run for re-election and he's out there trying the case in public and doing so for his own personal interests.
Today, one of his opponents actually went out and made a statement and Fox carried it.
Her name is Freda Black.
And she said, this is appalling the way Nyphon, the DAs handle this case.
It's appalling.
Durham's a joke.
All kinds of rules, ethical rules for prosecutors have been violated here.
And she's right about that.
He's absolutely right.
I thought she made actually a pretty good statement.
It was obviously a campaign appearance.
And she was asked about that in the QA period.
Well, no, it's not a campaign appearance.
I'm speaking out because I'm worried about what's going on here in Durham, North Carolina.
At some point, all of you are going to leave.
And when you leave, we're still going to have the same problems we had before you got here.
She's talking to the media.
And I'm the one to fix these problems.
A typical, typical campaign speech.
But this is getting absurd now.
Stern and I were talking about the cab driver who has basically, with his testimony, and there's no testimony yet, but his eyewitness account has given quite a lot of support to the alibi of Reed Seeligman.
Oh, yeah, picked them up.
They were in fine shape.
Didn't act like anything special going on in there.
Tipped me great.
Went to ATM machine.
Didn't complain about the fees at the ATM.
Then we went to the fast food joint and I took him back to the dorm.
Now, you're telling me that the cab driver now says that there's two more guys call for a ride, and they were...
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ah-ha. Ah-ha. Mm-hmm. Ah-ha.
Okay.
Oh, okay.
The cab driver says, and I picked up two other guys, and they were talking about the stripper.
And one said to the other, eh, she's just a stripper.
Don't worry about it.
Now, that's throwing gasoline on the fire, too.
But, folks, can we really cut to the chase on this?
And I'm not the first to arrive at this theory, so don't misunderstand.
But no, no, no, Dawn, Dawn's warning me, try to not say it.
A typical woman, you don't even know what I'm going to say, and you don't want me to say it.
She has no clue what I'm going to say.
She already knows I'm wrong, right?
She already knows I'm in trouble.
Now, look, Phil Mushnick, my buddy at the New York Post, I'm sorry for calling him buddy.
That's going to give him problems.
He's a sports writer.
He wrote a piece today, and he said, You know, the problem here is not the clash of races.
The problem is you've got young men drinking, and you've got a stripper, and it's midnight.
What do you expect?
The biggest problem here that nobody's commenting on is what the hell was going on in that house in the first place.
Nobody's got any problem with the whole concept of what was going on.
If there hadn't been a rape, well, everybody had a good time and everybody would have been hooky-dory or no allegation of a rape.
And Mushnik's point is: what the hell?
We just got to stand by and look askance at the specifics of this.
Well, you've got underage drinking going on.
That's not legal, and nobody wants to do anything about it, obviously.
And then you've got these guys hiring strippers.
Now, if you're going to be consuming adult beverages at midnight and you hire a stripper, what do you think the odds are that something is going to go wrong?
Here you've got these guys.
I don't care what their race is, and I don't care what the race of the dancers are.
Am I wrong so far, Dawn?
See?
Shocked you.
You've got the ingredients here for trouble.
What do you think is going to happen when you've got underage guys, don't care their race, consuming adult beverages, hiring a couple of women to come over and basically undress in front of them?
And everybody's looking past that as the root cause of this circumstance, and they're going to the age-old it's a clash of races, and it's not about that at all.
It's about the fact that nobody's got any sense when it comes to these kinds of circumstances, and this kind of trouble is to be expected, therefore.
A man, a legend, a way of life it's open line Friday, an old rush ball having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
FDA says there's no zilch zero nada, not a shred of medicinal value to the evilweed marijuana.
Now, this is a this is going to be a setback to the long-haired maggot-infested dope-smoking crowd.
What are we going to do about states like Oregon?
I think Oregon has legalized medical marijuana, have they not?
The FDA says there is no medical benefit to it.
Who wins in this?
By the way, we now know that hurtful speech has been banned by the Ninth Circuit.
You can't hurt anybody when you say anything.
And that really, folks, do you understand how that's going to shut everybody up if this spreads?
I mean, it's going to shut everybody.
You can't say that and offend me.
You hurt my feelings.
You may not even be talking to somebody and they hear you say, you can't say that.
Shut up.
You know, people too weak and too spineless to not even be able to overlook it.
I mean, you want to let somebody have that kind of power over you to offend you?
You go right ahead.
But in the meantime, I don't know if you knew this or not, the California Supreme Court, this is not the Ninth Circus, California Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that writers have the right to talk dirty and make lewd comments and therefore hurt people's feelings and offend them if they are creating a television situation comedy.
They don't have to worry about being sued.
The court said that writers of the hit TV series Friends did not create a hostile work environment or sexually harass a woman who worked for them by transcribing their raucous work sessions creating programs.
A case was closely watched in Hollywood where several leading writers and civil liberties lawyers said the suit threatened to undermine freedom of speech and the creative process.
A spokesman for Warner Brothers TV, named as a defendant, hailed the ruling, saying, now we can continue doing what we do best.
Writing, producing hit TV shows, cussing, making all kinds of despicable, deceitful remarks.
I don't care who hears them, and nobody can do anything to us about it.
The unanimous ruling by the, who's safe, HR?
Well, yeah, we're safe because we're doing, see, you people can't come after me for hurtful speech because I am creating in the process.
The difference here, sex talk, offensive talk.
When you're creating art.
Writing a TV.
It doesn't matter who you offend.
Andres Serrano knows this.
And so does the person who put elephant dung on the Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum.
being creative which of course we are here on the eib network so you know i'm immune but if you put on it yeah you're safe and controlled because you all are part of the creative process and Absolutely right.
Everybody working on this program is safe.
That means I can't be sued for sexual harassment.
I can't be sued for anything based on this ruling in California.
Now, I know this ruling, California is California, but it's precedent out there.
So all of us in the creative process, we have free reign to make you mad, to hurt your feelings, and to offend you to you die.
And you can't do anything about it.
But if you're just an average schmull running around in school someplace wearing a harmless little t-shirt, you're in trouble, according to the U.S. Ninth Circus.
All right, to the phones, Joe, in Dearborn Heights, Michigan.
I'm glad you called, sir.
You're up first today.
Separify Rush, it does matter who wins the House in 2006.
I've seen several impeached bush lines on.
That's absolutely right.
I was being a little flippant there in terms of...
I think you're a bit facetious a little bit.
Yeah, facetious, because in terms of policy, what's it going to matter?
Right, you're correct.
Look, of course it matters, tax cuts and being made permanent.
It desperately matters in a lot of ways.
I'm worried they'll tie his hands as far as the war on terror and tax cuts.
Yeah, absolutely.
Definitely.
Well, tie his hands, try to kick him out of office.
Exactly.
That tie his hands would be the first thing the whole process would create.
No, you're absolutely right.
You caught me there.
I was trying to be too facetious, too clever by half.
We're trying to get rid of Debbie Stabenow and Governor Grantholm here in Michigan.
We'll try real hard.
That's interesting you bring that up.
Governor Grantholm, remember when she was first elected?
Yes, she was Attorney General.
Well, the nation was swooning.
George Willard wrote a column.
Got to get rid of this stupid constitutional requirement that says you have to be born in this country to be president.
Jennifer Granholm, Rising Star, she's not that popular anymore, is she?
No, she's not.
No, she's not.
Yeah.
The economy here in Michigan really sucks, partially due to the auto industry, but her spending and stuff is really attacking us.
I just don't know.
It's horrible here.
That's right.
When the Democrats start talking about their saviors, it's Obama Barack.
I'm sorry, Barack Obama.
I don't hear her name mentioned much anyway, but boy, but her name was mentioned shortly after he elected and gave her inaugural speech.
The reason is, folks, it's not that often that you have an attractive female Democrat win office, and she is one, at least by comparative standards.
I know, I just mentioned that.
And yeah, they want George Will wrote a piece that needed to change the Constitution so she's born in Canada, so that people not born here can actually run for president.
And some people said that about Schwarzman.
By the way, Schwarzenegger is pulling ahead in the polling data out in California for course you think he's done because you're reading the wrong things.
Jeff in St. Louis, I'm glad you called.
Welcome to Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hi, Rex.
Mega Missouri Dittos.
Thank you, sir.
Just wanted to let you know I was perusing the opposition media today and found on CNN.com a funny video clip titled Reagan Knew How to Hush Hecklers.
And it then shows the Chinese heckler who, you know, with Bush and Hugh.
And then it shows a couple clips of Clinton.
Wait a second.
Wait a minute.
Wait, hold it just a minute.
We got to get our terms right.
That wasn't a heckler.
That's a Chinese freedom fighter.
Thank you for that.
She is.
That's exactly who she was.
The media is not treating her that way.
The media is treating her as an absolute reprobate and human debris.
They ought to be treating her like they treat Cindy Sheehan for crying out loud.
Oh, no, no, no, you don't diss a communist in the United States, not to the big media.
What was your point?
Well, the point was it shows this video clip, and it shows Reagan how Reagan would hush hecklers and showed just a quick clip.
And his clip or his comment was just to shut up to the heckler.
And I thought that was pretty funny.
Well, it is.
Reagan was great.
He also had another tactic, and that is he pretended he couldn't hear him.
And he couldn't.
He did have a hearing problem.
He wore hearing aids.
That was his trick with Sam Donaldson.
Yeah, he got a question he didn't want to answer.
Sorry, I didn't quite hear that.
And Donaldson shouted even louder and Reagan act like he couldn't hear it.
But the problem yesterday was that it was who that was being heckled.
And, you know, who was reading a speech off a teleprompter, who can't sit there.
He's not going to even react other than to stop.
I'm sure he was stunned.
We got some audio soundbites on this.
I predicted this yesterday, folks.
I basically said that the Chinese, they murder, they kill 8,000 political prisoners a year in China.
And the media is not interested at all in who this woman is and what her cause is and why she would show up and say something like that.
They are just obsessed with the fact that she has destroyed this visit because the Chinese are so interested in saving face.
And for this woman to be allowed in, how could Bush allow this?
I predicted it.
We have a montage of the drive-by media in an uproar.
Here it is.
The Chinese are very, very concerned about appearances and protocol.
And you've heard the term faith.
The fact that the Bush administration would enable this thing to happen is a huge loss of faith to the president of China.
The Chinese are saying, wait a minute, George Bush and his campaign people were able to control the crowd at every event.
How come they couldn't do it for our guy?
It's all about faith.
You need national leaders in the countries you're trying to change.
You need national leaders to be able to make the changes you want them to make without losing face.
The Chinese obviously worry about face.
Okay, here we go.
So the drive-by media has got the talking point.
The wizard behind the curtain.
Saving face is the mantra.
Now, in a political sense, this poor woman did, her cause backfired.
This is the wrong way to do this because this is going to, it's just like the media demanding that Bush fire Rumsfeld or that Rumsfeld quit.
This woman showing up.
Your days are numbered.
Communist Party rules numbered.
Free the Fulong Gong.
Probably what's going to happen is they're going to start rounding up even more of them over there and torturing them.
And as a result of what?
What?
Oh, yeah.
Activists in the Fulong Gong in the country and the U.S. have been beaten as well, too.
But the bottom line is that, you know, it's an interesting dichotomy because here comes Wu.
And he's in the United States.
And who gets to see what happens in the United States?
He gets to see what happened in a free society.
Well, that's the last thing who wants.
He's a really hardline communist, folks, despite the love and adoration.
And these guys, they can put on a suit and tie and look normal like everybody else.
You let them go back home, put on their Mao suits, and they get into character and they're who they are.
They run around looking like Deng Xiaoping, who is also portrayed as a cute, cuddly little guy.
Isn't it funny the way he holds his cigarette?
He likes cowboy hats.
He has dung like cowboy hats.
D-E-N-G, by the way, that's his actual name for those of you in Rio Linda.
But these guys are really hardliners, and so he got a dose of what Bush was talking about.
You need to open up your society.
Well, this guy's no way going to open up his society and open himself up to this kind of thing.
So it's a shame.
But the other side of this is, where is the media trying to find out who this woman is and what her cause is?
This man who is, as the leader of the country, is responsible for more political prisoners and murders and deaths every year.
I mean, to even put George Bush in the same category is absurd, but Cindy Sheehan has.
George Bush a terrorist, George Bush the murderer.
And of course, Cindy Sheehan celebrated.
Cindy Sheehan's cause was amplified.
She was made a great hero and said she should even run for Congress as a Democrat.
The left totally adopted her.
George Bush is a saint compared to any Chinese leader.
And yet the media scoff at this woman.
The media get mad at this woman.
They get mad at Bush.
How dare this?
They're not interested in her cause at all.
And these are liberals, and they supposedly care about human rights, and they care about murder and torture, Abu Grab, Club Gitmo.
They couldn't care less about it, folks.
The bottom line is they don't care about any of that.
They just want you to think they've got giant big hearts.
Fact is, it's all a tool to go out and get Bush.
If they were consistent, if they were honest, this woman would be the subject of investigative reports from now to the end of next week on who she is, how she dared get in there, why did she do it?
What kind of courage must she have to have done this?
We'd get stories like that about Cindy Sheehan.
We'd find out about, does this woman have any children?
Have they been subjugated?
Have they been tortured?
We're not going to learn any of that from the drive-by media because they hate her and they hate Bush for allowing it to happen because the Chinese lost face.
I now want to offer you evidence that there are some of the drive-by media who see no difference in the policies of the Chikoms and George W. Bush.
Here's Jack Cafferty, the curmudgeon pundit, commentator on the situation room with Wolf Blitzer on CNN last night.
Wolf, how hypocritical can you get?
There's President Bush lecturing the President of China about human rights.
Now, granted, China has a very long way to go in granting freedom to its citizens.
But who's President Bush to lecture anybody about human rights?
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, prisoners being sent to other countries for interrogation, allegations of torture, enemy combatants being held indefinitely without being charged and being given access to a lawyer, wiretapping Americans' telephones without a warrant, in clear violation of the law that says you have to have one.
What's that old line from the Bible?
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
All right.
So much of that is just factually incorrect.
Call the Patriot Act a human rights violation.
You better go get the Democrats who voted for it and round them up too, Jack.
And Jack, just go to China, try to say what you just said.
Just go there and try to say what you just said about the Chinese government, Jack, and the screen will go black and they'll come to their studio and nobody will ever see you again.
Now, as to this business of prisoners being sent to other countries for interrogation, I have a story from the New York Times from yesterday.
I have it here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
The European Union's anti-terrorism chief told a hearing on Thursday that he had not been able to prove that secret CIA prisons existed in Europe.
There's no proof.
We've heard all kinds of allegations, but it doesn't appear to be proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
This guy's name is G. De Vry.
Mr. De Vries came under criticism from some legislators who called the hearing a whitewash.
One of the women, Kathleen Bwittenweg, a Dutch member of parliament from the Green Party, said, I'm a paul.
We keep calling to uphold human rights while pretending that these rendition centers don't exist and doing nothing about it.
Nope, there's no proof that they exist.
Yep, Jack Cafferty says, there's no question they exist.
And we're torturing people in these things.
Wiretapping Americans' phones without a warrant.
This is a perpetuation of a contemptible lie.
Former FISA judges have even said that the policy is totally legal and that Bush has done nothing different than the previous president.
But that's beside the point.
The point is, note how easy it is for Jack Cafferty and a lot of others in the drive-by media.
By the way, I think this no proof of secret CIA prisons belongs in the drive-by media morgue.
We've established a drive-by media morgue at rushlimbaugh.com.
We're going to keep adding to it as the drive-by media keeps driving by, ripping things to shreds all for naught, all falsely, countless examples.
The idea that you could, in the same breath, draw a comparison between George W. Bush and a communist regime is patently absurd.
But there are those who hold the view because it's rooted and founded in some sort of inexplicable rage and hatred.
Bretton, Atlanta, I'm glad you waited.
You're on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Thanks, Rush.
You know, there's been a lot of talk about the obscene amounts of money associated with ExxonMobil.
And one of the things that no one's really talked about, and that I'm really bothered about, is the obscene amounts of money that ExxonMobil has paid to the government in $23 billion worth of taxes.
That's just way too much money anyone should ever have to pay to the government.
What was their profit?
Their profit, well, their net income was $36 billion.
Which their total revenue was $340 billion, so their profit margin was 10%.
But I don't care how much money, how much revenue they have.
No one should ever have to pay that much money to the government.
Well, they don't.
You do.
The price is added to your gasoline at the pump.
That's the dirty little secret.
Corporations don't pay taxes.
They may send some money to the government, but all of us are paying.
It's just more evidence.
If you're really, really mad at the cost of gasoline, do not exempt the government because they are the number one gougers.
It's like Lee Raymond said the other day.
Somebody asked him, What about your $400 million retirement?
What about?
He says, You know, I remember back in the 80s, oil price was $10 a barrel.
I don't remember anybody Washington calling me up and saying, hey, can we help you through this rough spot?
Back after this.
Our friend Scott Ott at Scrapple Face has answered the question.
Well, a spokesman for the U.S. oil industry has answered the question of why gasoline is so expensive.