Amidst billowing clouds of fragrant aromatic first and secondhand premium cigar smoke.
I am Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network, the Limbaugh Institute.
For advanced conservative studies, no graduates, no degrees, because the learning never stops.
Thirty-four-year-old female attorney has been abducted in Birmingham, Alabama at gunpoint.
No details yet.
No further details on that.
The cops obviously investigating.
Telephone number again, 800 282-2882, if you'd like to be on the program.
A couple stories here from the from the New York Post today.
First off is an exclusive, a double amputee, Iraq war veteran suing Michael Moore for $85 million, claiming that the Portly Peace Nick recycled an old interview and used it out of context to make the Iraq war vet appear anti-war in Fahrenheit 911.
Sergeant Peter Damon, 33, who strongly supports America's invasion of Iraq, said he never agreed to be in Moore's movie, which trashes President Bush.
In a 2003 interview, which he did at Walter Reed Army Hospital for NBC News, he discussed only a new painkiller the military was using on wounded vets.
They took that video clip because it was a gunt-wrenching scene, Sergeant Damon said yesterday.
They sandwiched it in Moore's movie.
Moore was using me as ammunition.
Damon seems to voice complaint about the war effort in Moore's movie according to his lawsuit.
But what the father of two from Middleboro, Massachusetts, was really talking about was the excruciating pain he felt after he lost both arms when a Blackhawk helicopter exploded in front of him.
He wasn't expressing any opinion about the war, the suit charges, but rather he was extolling the drug.
I just want everybody to know what kind of guy Michael Moore is and what kind of film this is, said Damon.
Uh Michael Moore hates America and Farron Hype 911.
In uh in Moore's movie, the bandaged Sergeant Damon is shown laying on a gurney, complaining that he feels like he's being crushed into vice.
But the the painkiller drugs that the Army is doing do a lot to help it, and they take a lot of the edge off.
His image appears seconds after Baghdad Jim McDermott says, you know they say they're not leaving any veterans behind, but they're leaving all kinds of veterans behind.
Damon, dad of an eight-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, doesn't come close to feeling that way.
He couldn't have picked the worst guy to say that about.
I'm the most fortunate disabled guy.
I've even had a house built for me by a non-profit group, Home for Our Troops.
Particularly outrageous to Sergeant Damon is the fact that Moore never interviewed him or even asked his permission to use that old clip from NBC.
I was complaining about the pain I would have been having if it weren't for the painkiller.
NBC is also named in the suit, which was filed in Suffolk County, Massachusetts on Friday, along with Harvey and Robert Weinstein, Miramax Corp.
Lionsgate Films, and other production companies involved in the picture.
In fact, in the NBC clip, um that was uh used on NBC by Brian Williams, Williams says about Sergeant Damon, these men with catastrophic wounds are completely behind the war effort.
And yet Michael Moore took one snippet when the soldier wasn't even talking about the war and put it in the and I'm uh you know, this kind of thing happened frequently in in uh in that movie.
This guy's got guts for standing up.
He's a double amputee.
The post story on the website has his picture.
Uh Sergeant Peter Damon, 33, strongly supports our invasion of Iraq, angry at being portrayed opposite, and suing Michael Moore for 85 million.
Now listen to this.
Also in New York, state tax officials threatened to arrest a Brooklyn auto repair shop owner and closed down his business so they could use it for an undercover operation.
One official, Thomas Stanton, told the owner that if he didn't abandon his own shop, quote, we'll take your equipment, we'll sell your assets, and we'll put you in jail, according to a bombshell report by the State of New York Inspector General.
The inspector general opened a probe after the business Owner complained that he was being harassed.
The investigation found that Stanton and another senior tax official, Paul Rossi, acknowledged that they got a landlord to try to buy the unidentified shop owner out of his lease in April of 2004.
But after discussing the owner's failure to report sales tax receipts, they decided to squeeze him out, as Stanton put it.
At the end of June 2004, after two months of negotiations, the landlord suddenly told the shop owner he had to vacate the building he'd rented for eight years.
At about the same time, Rossi, another agent wearing his gun and a police type badge, and another tax official visited the shop.
They said they would need to see the owner's sales tax records in two weeks.
The owner is a Turkish immigrant, father of four, uh, said Rossi returned on July 7th with Stanton, who said he would have to close his shop and move.
And if he complied, the tax men wouldn't bother him anymore.
When the owner asked if he could resolve the matter any other way, Stanton replied, You can't, it's too late.
The owner who became a U.S. citizen in 2001 said he filed returns and made sales tax payments twice in the next nine days.
Meanwhile, the owner's lawyer, John Badar, was told twice by Stanton the owner would be charged with grand larceny.
The inspector's general office, uh, Inspector General's office said it learned from interviews with Stanton and Rossi that they wanted the shop's premises for an undercover operation with the state attorney general's organized crime task force.
That would be one Elliot Spitzer, who is uh is on a just a a it's hard to describe uh the the action who wants to be governor, and he is he's gone after HR Block.
He's got it goes it goes after practically anything.
Come after me now.
What's that?
What?
Yeah, I he's going yeah, he's going after uh uh friend of mine on Wall Street.
I'm I'm not gonna discuss that one because I'm but uh it's it's it's incredible.
Almost literally at the point of a gun this happened.
So they they're not going to investigate this outrage, but uh uh the the guy who was threatened by the tax authorities is now out of business.
Uh what else could be expected from people who work for New York's soon-to-be governor hopeful uh Elliot Spitzer.
Just amazing.
And a couple of global warming stories.
Folks, I have to tell you, uh I mentioned at the top of the program, but I am in a highly irritable mood today and don't really know why.
I'm in one of these foul humors.
Uh don't know why.
I just I was in a foul humor before I got up.
I was in a foul humor when I was asleep.
Uh, I didn't want to kick punkin or anything, but I was just I was just in a and I still am, and I don't, and I and I don't know why.
It is global warming stuff.
I know you're probably hearing about it, but it just ticks me off.
All of these asinine, anti-capitalist socialists, trying to tell us that they actually care about the planet from gore on up.
I don't put gore up and let's say on down for you.
Gores at the gutter looking up.
Call Bush a right wing extremist if only Bush was.
Um at any rate.
These people have only one interest, and that is doing harm to the economy of the United States.
It is patently ridiculous to believe that we are have any profound impact on the climate of this planet.
If we do have uh uh that profound an impact, then obviously we can reverse it.
But the global warming experts say we've gone too far now, it's too far gone, we can't, but yet they still want us to make all these drastic changes in our lifestyle.
Scientists have found uh this is from new uh no, this is uh uh live science, I'm not sure.
Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation spot.
Smack in the middle of the Arctic.
First of its kind core samples, dug up for the uh deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor, show that fifty-five million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise.
According to three new studies.
This is this is just All of this hype on global warming is refuted with simple common sense.
We've had ice ages, and they and we don't have them anymore.
We had ice ages and we got rid of the ice and the glaciers retreated all before there was us.
All before there was CO2 and carbon and all this supposed stuff that's destroying the planet.
It's just it's just it's patently absurd.
You know, we posted a bunch of great speeches by Michael Crichton, though we've linked to them on his website.
He has done more to decimate the global warming movement with his research and intellect.
It's just incredible.
Try this one.
I mean, I've told you earlier about these wackos in Maryland who having a two-day protest against Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center, because it is a refusal to acknowledge that global warming is causing all these massive new superpowerful hurricanes.
They're idiots.
They're just mental midgets, and they are a menace as well.
This is in USA today.
If you're among the estimated 86 million people who will visit a U.S. beach this summer, the impact of climate change on sports and recreation is becoming very apparent.
Hurricanes are increasing in number and strength.
That's God.
They are not.
They have been stronger hurricanes than we had last year.
I'm a maintain my composure here.
Hurricanes are increasing in number and strength.
Beach erosion is wiping out dunes.
Waves are becoming too big for surfing and sport fishing, some climate experts say.
Well, they're dumbasses.
They are totally wrong.
The beach, the beach erodes every year.
I live on a beach.
Can I tell you what happens every year?
I live near an inlet where cargo ships and passenger ships have to go to dock.
So a dredger, we get a dredger from New Orleans, comes in here, dredges the inlet.
What does it do with the sand?
It puts it back in a beach because the beach has been eroded from the previous year.
You actually believe that a beach that was here a million years ago is going to be untouched unless man comes and lives on it for crying out loud.
This is patently absurd.
There's beach erosion every year.
It's quite common.
It is quite normal.
And we find ways to replace it.
It's called dredging.
And by and the surf?
I mean don't tell me about it.
There's surfers out there practically every time the waves come up and they're not too big to surf.
And I know everybody goes out sport fishing, and I haven't heard one complaint.
I know this is anecdotal, but this is this is just ridiculous.
Higher ocean water temperatures are causing coral bleaching and the death of reefs that are the homes of many living creatures as well as popular sites for divers.
For ocean activist, David Hellvarg, the time for alarm has come.
Where you been the last 20 years when they've been sounding the alarm bells, Mr. Hellvarg.
Hurricane destruction in 2004, 2005 was no exception, says Hell Varg.
We need to change Earth Day into ocean day.
About 95% of planets leaving creatures are in a water.
The rising temperatures in our seas can have major consequences for all of us.
As ocean temperatures change, Hellvarg says, Extreme weather events proliferate.
That puts much of the nation's prime recreational real estate, everything from the famous and picturesque greens at Pebble Beach in California to the pipeline surfing waves at Oahu's North Shore in danger.
Okay.
Um, can I give you people an alternate way of looking at this?
Uh if there wasn't an 18th hole and there wasn't an 18th green at Pebble Beach right there on Carmel Bay, it wouldn't be destroyed.
Or it wouldn't be damaged.
It happens frequently.
They've had to redo the fairway and part of the grain for years, folks, not just in the last two or three.
Uh but yeah, re-recreation areas, everything in the world says, and it's been this way since time immemorial.
Don't live where we live.
If you're gonna do it, understand the risks, and then when when something happens, understand it's your fault.
It's your responsibility.
You chose to put yourself in an area where you know potential harm can come.
Because of various anomalies of uh actually not phenomena, Various average normal occurrences in weather.
Oh, the it just it just is people don't give you need to ask it, why are you trying to sell this so hard?
What really are you trying to accomplish?
We want to save the planet.
Really?
You want to save the planet?
Why who's destroying it?
Well, we are human beings.
Well, name the human beings.
What well, America.
You won't get them to go much beyond that.
Uh, but it's it's just silly, the whole idea that we have this power just by living our lives using the resources that are on the planet.
We're not importing anything foreign here.
We only use what was already here.
Uh, and to say that it is resulting in the destruction of the planet, it just it just burns me.
And by the way, I think our earlier topic of the program, the feminization of news and the emotion and the scare ta.
Oh, no!
We're destroying this, we're destroying that.
There's a reason why news is done that way.
It's to create this panic and to create and facilitate people's natural tendency to believe doom and gloom and then blame themselves because everybody wants to feel guilty for something so they can then do something to absolve themselves of their guilt so they feel better.
It's crazy.
Okay, moving on to Hillary Clinton.
Uh uh, ladies and gentlemen, it is amazing to see what is happening.
Told you yesterday the there were two or three pieces yesterday about how she can't win.
Uh people in the drive-by media taking swipes at her.
You remember you remember this guy, Ed Klein, who came out with this book?
It's out in paperback books.
But Ed Klein, who um uh forget his big claim to fame, and he'd written book on Kennedy's anyway.
He came out, he wrote this book on Hillary.
Remember, every conservative just went nuts saying they tried to distance themselves from the book.
No way, but it was about how she can't win.
I forget the exact title of his book.
Let me let me got it written down here somewhere.
Uh-huh, blah, blah, blah.
The truth about Hillary was Ed Klein's book.
It's out in paperback now.
And it was all about how, you know, she can't win.
Here's some things that she's done.
And the Republicans and conservatives were the first of the microphones trying to distance themselves from this book.
Uh uh claiming that this kind of politics was beneath them, and it was all based on fear.
They didn't want the Democrats in the drive-by media saying that the conservatives were jumping on board with Klein because they were afraid of being called extremists or kooks or whatever.
Racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes.
Uh uh whatever.
And and I remember saying when the book came out that the press was not curious about what Klein is saying.
The drive-by media was circling the wagons trying to defend Hillary.
Well, something's changed because they're not doing that now.
They are not circling the wagons.
If anything, if the if they're circling the wagons, they're also pointing the guns at her.
This is from Knight Ritter newspapers.
Some Democrats criticize Clinton's cautious approach to politics.
Remember yesterday, LA Times editorial.
Hillary, don't run.
It's more important to Bill become Secretary General of the U.N. Just to just don't run.
And there was I forget what the other one was yesterday, but it was just as just as damning as she kicks off her campaign Wednesday for a second term, Senator Clinton of New York carries the image of a leader of her party and the expectation she'll be the front runner for the 08 nomination.
Yet many Democrats and analysts think that she has failed to lead at a pivotal time for her party and the nation, explaining she's been overly cautious and timid in her first term.
It's angered or frustrated some Democrats who want more from her.
It's contributed to the buzz within the party for former vice president Al Gore as a more forceful champion heading into the 2008 campaign.
And this just now off the presses from our old buddy Howard Feynman at Newsweek.
Headline, if Hillary can't win, then who?
My gosh, folks, the drive-by, if Hillary can't win, then who?
It's all about Chris Dodd.
Maybe Senator Chris Dot of Connecticut has no chance to win the presidency.
Maybe he does.
In any case, the mere fact that he called me the other day to remind me that he is running tells me something.
That most of the Democratic Party's saviest veterans, elected officials in their Capitol Hill suites, Hollywood uh matchers tooling around the Santa Monica freeway in their Priuses, the New York soft money crowd eating their egg white omelets at the Regency In Manhattan are convinced that Hillary cannot win.
Noel Shepherd today at the AmericanTinker.com is one of our favorite blogs, has a piece called Hillary Clinton, Dead Candidate Walking, and it reviews all these attacks on her and says it's starting to resemble what people did to Howard Dean during his 2004 presidential run.
And then have you seen them all touting Obama?
Barack Obama on the strength of one speech.
So something's afoot out there where Hillary Clinton is concerned in the Democratic Party.
And it cannot be pleasing to her or her sometime husband.
So you may be wondering, what do you mean, Rush?
Starting to resemble uh what Democrats did to Howard Dean in 2004.
All right.
For those of you who have forgotten, I'm not allowed that privilege.
As your host, I have to remember.
Howard Dean was riding high on the polls in the winter of 2004.
Everybody thought he'd revolutionized campaigning with the Internet.
He had the Dyniacs out there, and hey, they were just ecstatic.
I mean, the Democrats revitalized and happy, but not very many high-ranking Democrats believed that he could beat President Bush.
So it didn't take long.
On January 12th, uh, 2004, both Time and Newsweek ran cover stories questioning Dean's electability beyond the primaries.
Eric Bollard and uh Salon on January 13th.
A former Vermont governor remains the front runner, but he's gotten increasingly caustic treatment from the media, which has dwelled on three big themes.
Dean's angry, gaff-prone, and probably not electable, while giving comparatively far less ink to the doctor's policy and political prescriptions that have catapulted him ahead of the Democratic field.
And remember, he Dean assisted himself with the rage scream or what have you.
So the minefield had been laid, and they were there were, you know, people say John Kerry, who's he?
But then he stepped on his own IED in Iowa, as uh Noel Shepherd writes at AmericanThinker.com.
Having just lost the Hawkeye Cawkeye with video cameras rolling, Dean performed his now infamous I Have a Scream speech.
With the successful assassination of the Dean candidacy behind them, the media quickly jumped on the John Kerry bandwagon.
Newsweek did a cover story on Kerry, February 2nd, 2004, entitled Bring It On.
Time was even more resolute in its February 9th cover story, What kind of president would John Kerry make?
And Time did capitalize Kerry in their headline on the cover of the magazine.
Now here we are, we're more than two years later.
The left and their drive-by media minions appear to again be throwing one well-polling presidential candidate who they believe is unelectable over for another.
Yet this time they're not waiting until ten months before election day.
Instead, it seems that Democrat insiders want Hillary out of the way more expeditiously to allow her challenger ample time to mount an effective campaign.
Let's look at some of the facts.
The prememorial day week began poorly for the Clintons.
One of their major media cheerleaders, Chris Matthews, started the May 21 Sunday installment of his show, uh, saying, first up, Tan rested and ready after narrowly losing the presidency.
He goes on to talk about Gore.
And as you know, everybody is hyping Gore now on the Democrat side.
Matthews posed this question to his panel.
The backdrop seems to have changed.
The war's turned very unpopular.
A majority of the people now clearly say it was a mistake to go.
Hillary Clinton's still in the pro-war camp vaguely, somewhere over there.
Does this create an opportunity on the left of Hillary in the Democratic Party could end up being the explosive winner of the nomination?
David Gregory, a huge Clinton supporter and apologist, chimed in.
I do think there's some f uh frustration in among Democrats that Hillary Clinton is running kind of a general election campaign already before she's gotten the nomination.
And Al Gore's got the credibility, foreign policy experience, he's been opposed to the war for a long time, connected with the so-called net roots of the internet and all of that.
Joe Klein, another Clinton cheerleader, end of the show.
Hillary Clinton may be running for president, but she also may not be.
I I think there's a strong possibility she's so happy, so successful in the Senate that she will not want to take the risk.
There we had three major Clinton devotees downplaying a Hillary presidential run while praising Al Gore in the same half hour.
And it just goes on and on and on.
We've got Frank Rich in the New York Times on Sunday, which was mocking her presidential campaign.
We've had the uh New York magazine which touts her uh beneath uh a much larger picture of uh of Gore himself.
There is something going on out there, and it it is certainly not the kind of thing that you would do as a party to build Hillary Clinton up.
Uh and it appears to be, you know, working in conjunction with the uh the slavish members of the drive-by media.
We have some Hillary sound bites, and this goes to what David Gregory was saying.
It's uh rubbing people a little wrong way.
She's already running for president before she's even locked up her Senate bid.
Today she was in Buffalo.
She began her campaign for re-election to the Senate, some Democratic convention or caucus.
Now we're looking at two bites here, and here she is running for her re-election to the U.S. Senate.
Stand with me against the wrong-headed, short-sighted foreign policies of this administration.
Let's start building alliances instead of alienation around the world.
Let's win back the respect that the people of the world should have for our country.
Stand with our troops who've been doing the difficult and dangerous job of standing up for us.
And remember those who have sacrificed everything for our country.
They deserve our deepest respect and gratitude.
But remember, it's not enough just to put a sticker on the back of our cars saying support our troops.
Let's make sure they have the body armored and the armored vehicles and the other equipment and materials and training that they deserve to have if they're sent into harm's way.
Stand with me as we push the Bush administration to take responsibility for the mistakes and misjudgments that they have made around the world.
All right, now she's running for the Senate here, and it's clear that uh she's running against Bush.
I mean, there's no question.
Um one note about this bite.
Did you note she got all kinds of apologies or applause uh when she said in the middle of her sentences when she's talking about uh the wrong-headed, short-sighted foreign policies of the administration that started building alliances.
The crowd was going nuts during her whole sentence.
When she start asking praise of troops, there was nothing.
There was nothing.
And there was nothing until she started talking about the fact the troops needed body armor and armored vehicles and other equipment and materials, and then they started applauding because that is an anti-Bush statement.
It's not a pro-military statement.
Make no mistake, I understand a code in which these liberals speak to their kook audiences.
And that was just another broadside against Bush.
Here is the second bite we have from this speech.
Stand with me as I fight for our values, New York's values, America's values, and to fight for decisions made on evidence, not ideology.
Facts, not politics.
Let's fight for real solutions.
You know, I've said it repeatedly.
The current administration and the Republican majority are trying to turn Washington into an evidence-free zone.
What?
If they don't think it is part of their agenda, they want it to go away.
What?
They want to turn their backs against reality.
What?
They don't want to hear the real life concerns of people.
What?
It's an environment where it's more important to say mission accomplished than actually accomplished the missions.
Stand with me against the divide between rhetoric and reality when we hear that we need to break our addiction to foreign oil, but the oil companies continue to receive special tax breaks.
Okay, how many of you are inspired?
I can't wait to vote for that woman.
How many of you well, she Well, I don't know if it's the best.
I didn't hear the whole speech.
This is just uh we had a hurry to get these two bites.
So I don't know if uh if this is a you know the pick of the litter, uh so to speak, or not.
I don't know if it's the best we've got.
All I all I know is, you know, Mrs. Clinton, uh, ladies and gentlemen, used to have a uh testicle lockbox.
And a testicle lockbox is how she intimidated journalists and others from asking her hard questions and uh and really delving into serious matters.
Because like Nurse Ratchet there in uh one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
I mean, made everybody feel like an inmate.
But apparently, uh ladies and gentlemen, the testicle lockbox is still out there, but I don't think uh very many people are afraid of it anymore because uh people by name are now coming out and Chris Dodd calling up Feynman's, hey, don't forget about me.
I'm running, and then Barack's name's being touted, and of course Al Gore and uh and Lurch is out there thinking he's got a chance here.
He's still trying to correct the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth campaign.
You have that testicle lockbox uh bit standing by listen to this, folks from the archives.
Hillary Clinton testicle lockbox.
No longer, apparently no longer as intimidating as it uh used to be.
I mean, we created the Hillary Clinton testicle lockbox after watching her get softball after softball after softball question on numerous television appearances.
And uh we just had to figure that uh uh she had the host's testicles in the lockbox during the interview, or was uh threatening to put them there if uh interview went wrong.