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May 23, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
May 23, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Okay, we're going to spend the entire hour this hour discussing whether or not Taylor Hicks or Catherine McPhee should win the American Idol tonight.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm not going to do I just want to terrorize the staff every now and then.
We're not going to do that.
By the way, any ideas as to who is going to win, Taylor Hicks or Catherine McVee?
You don't know, you don't know.
How come nobody I know watches this show yet it gets these huge monstrous ratings?
Actually, my uh the producer of my program in Milwaukee does watch the show, but blames that on his family.
It's kind of not a guy thing to kind of to admit that you watch it, but some people are watching it.
I've seen it once, I saw it a couple of years ago when somebody was up there against uh somebody else.
Uh I'm guessing that uh the guy is the favorite, but the woman will probably win because she's pretty hot looking, but I have no expertise beyond that.
I do care who's going to win the NBA championship, two great game sevens last night.
Phoenix putting away the Clippers and Dirk Nowitzki almost single-handedly bringing Dallas home ending Sannington.
Now that's something we could spend the what about that?
Spend an entire hour on the NBA?
No, can't do that either.
Well, how about spending an entire hour of me saying I told you so?
Can I do that?
Yeah, I know.
Rush does that all the time.
I rarely get to do it because I'm not here enough to tell you enough things that I can later come back and say I told you so.
I won't spend the whole hour on it, but I am going to say I told you so on something.
Several years ago, when I was making one of my first appearances sitting in for Rush, it was when we were debating whether or not to cut income taxes.
And I said, if you do it, we are going to have a tremendous economic recovery.
If you do it, the sky is falling in crowd will be proven once again to have been wrong.
If you do it, you will not have the kind of impact on the budget deficit that many are fearing.
Then, lo and behold, they went and did it.
They passed a fairly significant tax bill that cut income tax rates and cut other taxes, the capital gains tax pretty substantially.
And I came on this program and I said, you wait.
The economy will recover.
It probably won't happen until 2004 that you'll begin to see it.
2005 it'll be stronger.
2006, there'll be a there will be a boom.
That happened.
In the intervening months, as the economy started to recover, Democrats argued, yeah.
But to give the rich their big tax break, look what we've done to the deficit.
And I came on this program and I said the deficit numbers will not be as bad as people think.
In fact, they'll begin to turn around.
The latest government statistics for April are in 13.5% increase in federal tax receipts, primarily coming from taxes on investment and other sources of income from the wealthy.
This according to Saturday's Wall Street Journal.
A huge increase in revenue, most of it coming from the rich.
Why?
Because the rich indeed are seeing a windfall from the tax cuts.
To those of you who are liberal, I realize that those two things don't seem to compute.
They seem to be contradictory.
Yes, indeed, those whose taxes were cut are kicking a fortune into the federal government.
But those whose taxes are cut are doing substantially better than they were before.
We had the tax cut.
This indeed has been something of a windfall for the so-called rich.
And the biggest winners are everybody else who's part of the government in this country.
Because when you reduce tax rates, you encourage economic activity that results in people making a lot more money.
They lowered the capital gains tax rate, and what happened?
Capital gains taxes went up because people who were sitting on all sorts of gains, decided to take them.
They cashed in their investments because they now had the opportunity to keep more of their gain.
By cashing in the investment that otherwise would not have been cashed in, they are paying taxes to the federal government.
And we're seeing a windfall.
The budget deficit is narrowing.
The economy is booming.
And all of it is happening at exactly the same timetable that I told you it would occur.
So I get to say I told you so.
It would be nice, since this happens again and again and again and again.
Every time we cut taxes in this country, the economy takes off.
It usually takes a year to 18 months, but it always happens.
Revenues to the government always increase rather than decrease.
Instead of costing the government money, the term that liberals love to use, these tax cuts were going to cost us billions.
It doesn't cost us anything.
It actually generates money for the economy.
The reason we have a deficit is not because tax receipts have slowed down.
Tax receipts are booming once we lower taxes.
It's because we're spending so much money.
Yet, the next time tax cuts are proposed, such as right now, Democrats will argue that it's a tax break for the rich, that it's going to blow the deficit through the roof, even though it never works out that way.
The big increase in tax revenues right now is coming primarily from the rich because indeed they got a significant portion of the tax cut.
Those are not contradictory facts, they go hand in hand.
Do I have to talk about Al Gore?
No.
What if I want to?
Here's the dilemma.
Imagine a friend of you says, We're going to go to the movies tonight, I'm going to take you.
Your choices are the new Al Gore documentary on global warming or the Da Vinci Code.
What do you do?
What do you do?
More in the Da Vinci Code, maybe later on in the program.
Al Gore's got the new movie out.
It's a dem it's a documentary called An Inconvenient Truth.
It debuted, I believe, in Conn over the weekend.
And it's opening across the United States now.
First of all, let's not even wait.
Let's just send him the Oscar right now.
He's going to win the Oscar for best documentary.
The Hollywood type crowd is not going to be able to resist itself, so let's just mail it to him now so we don't have to put up with him giving the speech next spring, in which he gets up there and rails away.
The documentary comes on the heels of a new Al Gore book, cover stories in Time and Newsweek on global warming.
It has gotten to the point that anyone who tries to raise any questions or say, wait a minute here, is portrayed as an idiot.
There's almost a scientific inquisition going on.
It's just now a given.
The planet is warming up, man is causing it, man has to reform his evil ways, or we're going to burn the planet into oblivion.
And that is the premise of the Al Gore movie, which, based on the reviews that I've read includes features Al going through his slides and droning on and on and showing terribly horrifying pictures of what our world is going to be like if we don't listen to him and stop this evil warming of the planet.
My position.
Global warming may indeed be going on.
May.
I didn't say it is.
It may indeed be going on.
And it may indeed be going on over a short period of time.
There seems to be some sort of increase in global temperatures.
I'm not denying that.
But before we go too far with that, do understand that it was only recently that we got pretty good at being able to determine what global temperatures were.
100 years ago we didn't have monitoring of the temperatures of the oceans.
We didn't have weather stations all over the planet.
These things are still relatively new.
We do know that over this very short period of time, the last 100 to 120 years, The average global temperature seems to be increasing.
That's all we know.
We don't know what this is in comparison to what the global temperature was 300 years ago or 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago.
We do not know.
Everything else is simply hypothesis.
We know that over a short term period of time, there appears to be some warming going on.
The problem here is that we then make this huge giant leap and presume that what is going on is going on because of man.
And there is absolutely nothing to base this on other than speculation.
The planet has always undergone significant, even radical changes in climate, without regard to whether or not you are a creationist or someone who thinks the planet has been around billions of years.
We do know that the planet has evolved radically with regard to temperature.
There was once an ice age, right?
The glaciers eventually receded and created the land masses that we had today.
Why did the ice age end?
When did that occur?
Billion years ago?
Why did it end?
What resulted in the warming that ended the ice age?
Man wasn't around to do that.
Why did the ice age occur in the first place?
Why did the planet get cold?
Man.
Hundreds of millions of years ago.
To presume that every change occurs because of activities created by man is absurd when you understand that the planet has always changed, including when man was not here.
How do we know that this isn't simply another phase that the planet itself is generating for reasons that we have nothing to do with?
There is no answer to that because people here want to believe.
They want to believe that man is omnipotent.
They want to believe that man has control over the planet, and they want to believe that economic activity generated by man is to blame for everything.
That is in science, it's religion.
What Al Gore is suggesting is that we make radical changes in our economy, radical changes in our way of life, when there is no reason to believe that they will have anything to do with the climate on the planet.
And I would like to further develop that thesis when I return.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Time magazine last month cover story.
Quote, the time the climate is crashing and global warming is to blame.
They just state this is a given.
Anyone who tries to debunk it is ridiculed.
But the questions raised by the debunkers to me make sense and they ought to be raised.
Let's start with this.
The industrial revolution began in the late 1800s.
We went from no fossil fuel emissions at all anywhere on the planet to for the first time seeing fairly significant fossil fuel emissions.
We didn't have catalytic converters on anything in 1890.
Why didn't the planet immediately experience changing climate then?
If fossil fuels and the so-called greenhouse effect are responsible for global warming, why didn't it start happening when the Industrial Revolution began?
Why didn't it start happening in 1910?
How about 1920?
How about 1930?
Manufacturing, the burning of fossil fuels, emissions all increase during that period of time.
Yet the so-called global warming appears to be a relatively recent and recent phenomenon.
All right, fine.
The greenhouse effect is real.
It is causing global warming.
Even if you buy that, which I don't.
What does Al Gore want us to do?
If we banned SUVs in this country right now, and we required every utility company to reduce the emissions from its Power plants by 50%.
What good would that do?
Look at the United States and a globe and realize how insignificant we are.
Now take a look at what's going on economically around the world.
The Chinese economy is booming.
China is going from a nation of no automobiles where everybody was riding around on bicycles to a country in which they're building highways all over the nation.
There are going to be cars all over China.
Africa.
A nation that had very little economic development until recently.
Manufacturing is moving to Africa.
African economies are improving.
Automobiles are going to start showing up over there.
You can do all you want here in the United States.
How are you going to control the rest of the world?
All you'll end up doing is put on a bunch of regulations that will drain money out of the American economy, give Americans cars they don't want to drive, hamper American industries that are trying to compete in a global economy while doing absolutely nothing about the greenhouse effect, which probably doesn't have anything to do with global warming anyway.
What we are up against on this is people who want to believe something because they have an agenda.
The agenda is anti-car and anti-American industry.
It not only is an unrealistic agenda, it's one that doesn't have anything to do with the problem that they're trying to sell us on.
Let's go to the phones and Craig at Colorado, Robert, you're on EIB.
Hello, Robert.
I've been wanting to talk about global warming for a long time.
Well, you've got your chance right now because I'm talking about it.
Well, you know, greenhouse gases don't cause global warming.
And if they did, the number one greenhouse gas is water vapor.
And water vapor, um, we don't cause the water vapor.
And if you look at the CO emissions on the pie chart, it's a tiny sliver.
Um, the largest greenhouse gas is water vapor.
Um I've never heard a scientist address that, but it is true.
Well, the reason they don't want to address any of this stuff is because these conclusions are being drawn for not scientific reasons, but for political reasons.
I my own personal belief is that man can't affect the global climate, that anything that man does is going to generate an a contrary reaction from the planet that becomes corrective.
That's why the planet has been around all of these years, despite radical changes in the climate.
Look at all of the things that have happened in the climate of the world.
Whatever we do is going to be corrected by the planet.
We can't even make it rain.
If you take an area of severe drought, we can't try as we might get it to rain for even 15 minutes.
We can't do that.
You're telling me we have the ability to cook the planet to the point that the glaciers are going to melt, that we're going to have flooding all over the world as Al Gore is trying to sell us on?
That doesn't make any sense.
If we can have such a dramatic impact on overall world climate, why have we shown no ability whatsoever to have even the slightest effect on short-term weather?
He talks about global warming.
You try right now to do something to make temperatures in a small region go up by five degrees.
You can't do it.
We haven't figured out how to do it.
They've tried seeding clouds, they've tried all sorts of things.
We've gotten nowhere here.
Yet you want to see do see something that will have an impact on the climate?
How about have a volcanic eruption?
Remember when Mount St. Helens popped?
There was a cloud cover over the entire Western hemisphere for months and months and months.
That produced a change.
It had nothing to do with man.
What we're dealing with here is absolute junk science developed by a bunch of lefty politicians who have an agenda.
We are not talking about anything that has any reason to be taken seriously.
Thank you for the call to Salisbury, Maryland.
Sam, Sam, it's your turn on EIB.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm great, thank you.
Uh, just want to tell you exactly what's happening.
You may believe it, you may not believe it.
But what's happening right now we're in a 40,000 year cycle.
Uh the sun's putting putting off a lot of electromagnetical energy, and it's heating up the interior of the earth.
I mean, it sounds like an off-the-wall, but it's heating up the interior of the earth, and that's what's causing the problem.
Well, how do you know that?
Pardon?
How do you know that?
The scientists know it too.
Why do you think the NASA and everybody in in the scientific field is checking electromagnetical energy?
Well, well, my my response to that is I don't think I don't think the scientists do know.
What you are seeing though is a lot of scientists positing theories and they're passing them along as fact.
We know that sunspot activity has significant impact on the environment all over the world.
We're not sure how much, but we know that it has an effect.
What's happening here though is we are taking short-term changes, extrapolating them into the long term and term, and then demanding major changes in public policy, which are not for the best.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm in for Rush.
My name is Mark Belling.
I'm sitting in for Rush.
I don't believe man is responsible for global warming.
I don't believe man has the ability to alter the climate of the planet.
I do acknowledge that the planet's climate is changing because the planet's climate is always changing.
Nothing stays the same with regard to climate.
It gets warmer, it gets colder.
Precipitation increases, precipitation decreases.
The planet is a is in a constant state of flux.
But let's suppose I indulge the Al Gore crowd.
And all of you who want to believe somehow that we have total control over the planet and we can change the climate.
How does changes in the United States do anything about it?
You'd have to make every nation in the world reduce its emissions.
How are we gonna do that?
Most of them don't listen to us about anything.
What are we gonna do?
Call up the French and tell them they have to reduce their emissions?
They can say they're going to comply with things, but they won't.
They aren't going to listen to us.
Are we going to tell the Chinese that they've got to shut down the their manufacturing economy?
They won't.
Are we going to tell the developing nations of Africa that are finally beginning to see some development?
Well, okay, it's great that you're getting out of poverty here, but you can't drive any cars and your power plants.
They're going to have to run on solar power.
You're going to have to shut down your industries.
There's no way to enforce any of this stuff.
What Al Gore and his crowd want us to do is have the United States lower our standard of living, change our emissions policies to make it very hard for companies to do business in this country profitably without having anything to do about reducing global emissions at all, because anything that you do to reduce them here is really going to result in higher emissions somewhere else.
And that's even if you accept this premise, dubious as it is, that man has anything to do with what's going on with the planet.
To Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Cheryl.
Cheryl, it's your turn on EIB.
Oh, hi, Mark.
Nice to speak with you.
Hey Mark, I question the courage of Al Google Gore's convictions.
If he really believes what he's claiming, you know that the water's gonna come up on all coastlines all over the earth.
Well, why isn't he calling for all coastline states to vacate immediately?
Yeah, since they're going to be flooded off.
Well, he isn't he calling for that.
If if this is really happening, and we can't be sure it's humans, but he's sure it's happening.
Well, he is he is sure it's happening, and there's this th th there's this absolute acceptance from people that it is happening.
We don't even know if it's all bad.
We know that growing seasons obviously would improve.
We know that parts of the world that aren't very habitable would be more so if there was some warming going on.
We don't even we don't even know that it's happening.
I would love I was going to say I would love to have Al Gore on this show, but in thinking about that I'm not sure that Rush would approve.
I would love to have Al Gore tell me what the average temperature was in the Indian Ocean in the year eleven hundred AD.
I would love to have him tell me that.
He has no idea, nor does any scientist.
They work off of computer models which tell them that they think certain things were the case at certain time, but they don't know.
So even this short-term phase that we are in, which is a tiny blip in overall world history, may only be a tiny blip.
It may only be the shortest of phases, it may rever start reversing itself next year.
We have no way of knowing.
And they don't have any answers for that.
As for your point, why doesn't Al Gore move?
I don't know that Al Gore takes this all this seriously.
This is a vehicle for him to make himself legitimate and put himself back on the American stage so he can be considered by Democrats to run for president in 2008.
What I do know is the people that are accepting all of this stuff, hook, line and sinker, have never given it, given serious thought to the notion that there might be other causes for the warming that is going on, even if it is going on.
Thank you for the call.
Let's go to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Joe.
Joe, what's your turn on Russia's show?
Hi, Mark.
Thanks for taking my call.
I got a question.
I hope you can explain something to me, a simple-minded Republican.
On one hand, the Dems and Al and Kennedy say that man uh can't feed himself, can't clothe himself, we need social programs because we're irresponsible and we need a lending hand.
On the other hand, however, when it comes to global warming, man is so powerful and so in control of themselves and the world that we can control the weather.
And I and maybe I'm simple, I can't understand how they can uh flip-flop on that issue or explain why the man is so uh incompetent in caring for himself, but so powerful that he can affect the well, because it's convenient for them to do so.
You know, the title of Gore's movie is an inconvenient truth.
In fact, what he is doing is very, very convenient.
He's changing his philosophy to fit to you know to fit whatever it is that he's arguing for.
I since man can't control weather, weather is short term, weather is what happens today, weather is what happens next week.
If man can't control short-term weather, how can man affect long-term climate?
If we had the ability to seriously affect climate, wouldn't you think we'd be able to have the ability to affect weather?
Yet we can't do that.
Look at the droughts that we're seeing in portions of the world.
What's causing that?
Is it man?
Probably not.
If it rains tomorrow, is it because of anything that man does?
Evidently not.
Yet we're to believe that we can completely alter the balance of the entire planet.
Every planet in our solar system has weather and has climate, and all of them change.
Is Al Gore going to pin the blame on climactic change in Jupiter on man?
He doesn't answer that question because that doesn't fit the set of facts that he's trying to put forward here.
He's saying we are seeing increases in global temperatures.
Man has increased emissions at the same time, therefore the two have to be related.
That's a giant leap, and it's not backed up by anything other than a desire to believe that man is responsible.
As for which man will pay, well, that will be American man, because there is going to be no way to whether you go to the back to the Coyota Protocol or any other agreement that can be reached, there is no way to enforce this on any other nation, and we're going to be the only country that complies with anything, which means that nothing's going to happen with regard to global emissions, but we in the United States will suffer and make ourselves less competitive in the economic environment in which we're already losing manufacturing jobs to other countries.
Now put in a bunch of new regulations that make it impossible to make a buck because we're trying to stop global warming.
That doesn't make sense.
To Tampa and Jeff, Jeff, it's your turn on Russia's show with Mark Belling.
How are you doing today?
I'm great, thank you.
Excellent.
Uh, there's a man in Wisconsin named Keith Rhodes that has written a couple of books.
One of them is an engineering look at Earth history.
He was a um he was uh you've got to forgive me, I'm nervous.
Um he was a professor of thermodynamics out in either Iowa or Montana, one of the two.
Right.
And he has some extremely interesting theories that are backed with hard scientific fact, not scientific wish.
One of the one of the points that's made is if you take all the all the carbon dioxide man is responsible for, even by the most liberal estimates, it's not even one-fifth the amount that that was given off at uh the Mount St. Helens eruption.
Well, and Mount Mount St. Helens, I think is very, very interesting because Mount St. Helens did result in changes in weather all over the world.
There were changes here.
And I I wonder if those changes weren't simply part of the planet's corrective mechanism to deal with other things that were occurring.
We do know that the planet has survived through volcanoes, through earthquakes, through an ice age, through a melting.
It's lived through all of those things, and you're telling me because somebody's firing up an SUV or some company has a power plant that we're changing this balance.
I don't believe that it's possible to do that.
As for carbon dioxide, he's talking about reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Carbon dioxide is emitted naturally as it is in the world.
It's all part of a balance here.
There's one other Rob very important point.
Do you know where the institute is that measures atmospheric carbon dioxide levels?
No.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
Thank you for the call to Louisiana and Paul.
Paul, you're on Russia's show with Mark Belling.
Well, sir, I don't know.
I just live in Louisiana.
Mayor Lee Megan got re-elected.
They're gonna rebuild New Orleans for what?
The whole place will be fifty feet underwater.
Yeah, according to Al Gore, we're all going to be flooded out.
You're exactly right about that.
Thank you for the call, Paul.
My name is Mark Gulling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Now to that terrible, terrible spy, President Bush, who is invading our privacy.
I want to compliment Morton Kondraki, who is a national commentator.
He is America's last remaining moderate.
He's kind of a hawk on foreign policy.
His current column, which is in a number of American newspapers today, lambasts all of those who are ankle biting the president's legitimate attempts to keep us safe.
And I want to share with you a few paragraphs here.
He writes enough already.
It's harmful enough that ideological conflict and partisan politics are preventing this country from solving its long-term challenges on health care, fiscal policy, and energy.
Now it's threatening our national survival.
I do not exaggerate.
Bush hatred has reached such intensity that CIA officers and other bureaucrats are leaking major secrets about anti-terrorism policy and communications intelligence that undermine our ability to fight Islamic extremism.
Would newspapers in the midst of World War II have printed the fact that the United States had broken German and Japanese codes, enabling the enemy to secure its communications, or revealed how and where Nazi spies were being interrogated.
Nowadays, newspapers win Pulitzer prizes for such disclosures.
In Congress and in much of the media, the immediate reaction to news that the National Security Agency was intercepting international terrorist communications was not to say good work, and how can we help?
Rather it was to scream about a domestic spying scandal, as though Richard Nixon were back in the White House and tapping the telephone of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
And the reaction has been much the same to USA Today's story last week that the NSA, quote, has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans in a program that reaches into the homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans.
Newsweek's cover this week Blair's spying on your calls.
No question mark used, and implied that the Bush White House could be tapping everyone's telephones.
In fact, what seems to be happening, though the details are secret, is that most long distance companies have given the NSA their billing records, identifying what numbers are calling what other numbers, when and for how long?
Names are not even included.
And the NSA, not for the heck of it, but to protect us from attack, is using the records to track terrorist networks and calling patterns.
If a known terrorist in Pakistan calls a number in Los Angeles, I want the government to know what number that person calls.
Don't you?
Certainly the government will find out the names of people in a terrorist calling chain.
If it wants to tap a domestic phone, it needs a warrant.
And unless officials are lying through their teeth, it is asking for them.
The NSA call logs also apparently are being mined to establish patterns of terrorist related communication.
The use of payphones, duration of calls, Times of communication, etc.
The phone companies that are cooperating with the government ought to be congratulated for participating in the war on terrorism as they would have been during World War II.
Instead, they are being hauled before the Senate Judiciary Committee as though they were criminals.
And trial lawyers are circling like vultures to make them pay zillions for alleged privacy violations.
Democrats now want to destroy Bush so badly that they are willing to undercut national security.
Everyone in Congress and the CIA should see the movie United 93 as a reminder of what we are up against.
Muslim fanatics will not only try to destroy the Capitol, but also explode a nuclear bomb if they can.
Osama bin Laden and other would-be Hitlers consider the United States an effete, degenerate, pampered enemy incapable of real resistance.
It's part of the pattern that we fight among ourselves as much as against our enemies.
This is more than serious, it's dire.
It's Morton Kondrack Economist and big shot with Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper.
As somebody who isn't a Republican, I admire him for writing that.
We have turned into many scandals, legitimate attempts by the government to protect us and keep us safe.
What in the world is wrong with the government having a database of who is calling who?
They're not running that database to find out who you're calling.
They have that database available if they come upon a suspected terrorist.
They'd like to find out who that person is talking to on the telephone.
That is hardly spying on Americans.
It is hardly an abuse of governmental privilege.
First of all, it was classified information and ought to have remained classified.
Secondly, it's the kind of thing I want my government to do.
9-11 happened.
It wasn't a fantasy, it wasn't a movie, it happened.
We were attacked.
Thousands of Americans were killed.
We also know that there is a global terror network that is striking again and again and again and again.
Just ask the Israelis about that.
There are people out there who want to kill Americans en masse.
9-11 now was nearly five years ago.
We haven't had an attack since.
I don't think that that is disconnected from the fact that we have an administration that is trying very hard to prevent an attack from occurring.
Instead of this constant criticism of the administration for its legitimate attempts to monitor the activities of people who want to kill us, Maybe we ought to step back and say that this is a job that is being well done.
We know that the CIA is still stuck saddled with a bunch of warmed over Clinton leftovers.
CIA employees who are leaking this material are betraying their country.
But from a larger standpoint, the rest of us as Americans ought to be appreciative of the fact that we have an administration that is trying to keep us safe.
That's the highest priority of this government.
This does not mean that they can cart blanch gun run roughshod over everyone's rights.
They're not.
First, we see objections from Democrats about telephone calls that are made by terrorists into the United States, as if we shouldn't be following those things.
Now they're upset that they're accepting essentially the phone bills of all Americans, throwing them into a computer to see if they may be needed.
These are small prices to be paid for keeping us safe.
Do we want another 9-11?
If not, we ought to be supporting those government officials that are trying to keep us safe.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I am very, very cynical about these attacks on the administration for supposedly abusing the privacy rights of Americans.
If the NSA did not have a database of telephone calls...
This is the story that I expect would have occurred would have been appeared in USA Today instead.
Five years after 9-11, the government is still making no effort To collect a database of telephone calls, even though such a step might be able to be used to track communications occurring with terrorists here in the United States.
The administration has the technology and the ability to do so, but hasn't used it.
And the same people who are criticizing the administration for having done it would then be turning around and criticizing them for not doing it.
It's all about bashing Bush.
They're using security and our rights as subterfuge.
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