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March 2, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
March 2, 2007, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yahoo, ladies and gentlemen.
It's time for yet another excursion into broadcast excellence.
The award-winning multiple times.
Thrill-packed, ever-exciting, increasingly popular, more important than ever before.
Rush Limbaugh program on Friday.
Let's hit it.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Oh, I want to assure you today, ladies and gentlemen, we will have time for phone calls.
Even though I am loaded, I've got a global warming stack that's almost as big as the regular news stack.
And there's some really great news in here about Al Gore.
A blogger has uncovered that the carbon credits, the carbon offsets that Al Gore buys are actually from a company that he owns.
And they don't sell credits to anyone other than him.
You can't buy them off their website.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's even better than that.
I just want to warn you, all this, at the end of the program, I made this point, the carbon offset stuff, these carbon credits, they just lay in the groundwork for a future tax increase, perhaps international or global tax increase on everybody for all of this.
Hey, great to have you with us as we kick off another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence.
Open line Friday means that when we go to the phones, the show is yours.
You can talk about whatever you want.
I don't have to care about it, which is a cardinal rule on Monday through Thursday.
If I don't care about it, we don't talk about it.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, and the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
I have a Sea Turtle update.
Sea Turtle light update.
I'm sorry to keep bugging you people about, but I have to.
I can't keep this in.
I had some friends over for dinner last night.
There's a bunch of golf buddies.
The Honda Classic is in town here this week up at PGA National.
Had some people over, and the sun goes down here about 6.25 this time of year.
By the way, we got a new date for daylight savings time this year, March the 11th.
So in less than two weeks, it'll be 7.25 here, 7th when the sun goes down.
So I was out.
I wanted to see, because I got my outdoor lights on, a timer.
And as you know, beginning in March 1st, even though the turtles don't arrive here until May, we have to turn out the backyard lights, particularly any lights that light the ocean or the beach.
I don't have any of those, but I light some of the palm trees and some of the other landscaping in the back.
And it is said that that can distract these poor little hatchlings and they can be attracted to the lights instead of going to the ocean where they're supposed to go.
So since I had bleated and moaned and whined about all of this yesterday on the program, I suspected that there would be numerous spies out on the beach, environmentalist wackos roaming the beach looking for violators of this serious ordinance.
So I wanted to make sure that the auto timer worked and that at sundown and the lights come on automatically, the lights in the back were not on.
And they were.
So we had to make a mad dash and go back to the equipment room and get all the appropriate lights turned off.
It took about 15 minutes after sundown to get this done.
And then lo and behold, after dinner last night, we're leaving the dining room and making our way back to the library.
We walk through one of the living rooms and through the sliders you can see all the way out to the beach in the ocean.
And damn, if there wasn't a bulldozer on the beach at night with all kinds of lights on it.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, what is happening is that we live on the north end of the island here.
We live near what's called a Lake Worth Inlet.
And they have to dredge the inlet every year to get the sand out of there so the cargo ships and cruise ships can get in there to the port without any problem.
And they ditch the sand on our beach, which is great.
I mean, that's fine.
A bulldozer is out there leveling the sand that's being deposited on the beach.
Now, here it is, the first day of lights out of turtle season.
There are bulldozers on the beach.
Bulldozers walking.
I mean, it is just the whole thing is just beyond my ability to comprehend, other than to chalk it up to the power of the environmentalist wackos over a little town council here.
They are allowing construction on the beach until April 30th, and they got bulldozers on the beach now at night.
And that's going to be the case for the next month.
It takes a month to dredge the inlet.
They're going to be bulldozers on the beach.
But I got to turn my lights off.
And I wanted them on last night because I wanted to show my guests what the landscaping lighting looks like in the back.
I had to turn them off.
And there's a bulldozer running around out there.
What if some turtles showed up?
They're going to get run over by the, of course, the turtles don't show up this time of year.
It's just this is one of the reasons why I am a conservative, ladies and gentlemen.
This is just typical government bureaucracy that in many cases, ordinances and laws are passed for literally no reason that makes any sense.
And I saw that bulldozer out there, and I pointed it out to my guests.
Look at that.
I told them what was going on.
The bulldozer has been out there for a couple weeks and is going to be out there for another month.
And they got pipes on the beach and all that to distribute the sand as it's pumped out of the out of the inlet.
What are the turtles going to do when they don't show up until May?
All right.
I had to get it off my chest.
Number two: half-hour news hour, second episode, Sunday night, 10 p.m., the Fox News Channel.
Last week was a rerun.
Last Sunday night was the Oscar telecast.
A half-hour news hour in a rerun was the highest-rated show on cable in the cable news universe Sunday night.
So we got a brand new episode coming Sunday at 10 p.m.
I, of course, am in both episodes.
Therefore, I have seen both episodes.
I think this one's even funnier, particularly the opening skit with me as president and Coulter as vice president.
This is a little fireside chat without the fire.
And I was told yesterday that they had posted a clip of the fireside chat on YouTube, but I can't find it.
So I forget who it was that was going to upload it, but if it's there, I can't find it in a normal search fashion looking under half-hour news hour.
Well, I keep reminding you during the course of the program and some computer wizards that are maybe a little bit more competent than I. We'll see if we can find that clip that supposedly went up yesterday afternoon.
All right.
House Judiciary Subcommittee approved today the first in what is expected to be an avalanche of subpoenas to Bush administration officials.
I've been wondering where this was, but it's now beginning.
They will explore corruption and mismanagement allegations on everything from pre-war Iraq intelligence to the mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina, which is going to be interesting because look at all the devastation from the tornadoes.
Is anybody asking where's Katrina?
Is anybody asking where's Bush?
Is anybody saying Bush sent those tornadoes in there?
Remember all of the idiocy and the lunacy we heard about Hurricane Katrina.
But here come the subpoenas, and this is the primary purpose of this, just to hassle the Bush administration, subpoena a bunch of officials, get them up there under oath, and basically try to isolate the president politically from being able to accomplish anything.
The first round of subpoenas concerned the recent controversial firings by the Bush administration of seven U.S. attorneys, some of whom were pursuing public corruption cases against Republican members of Congress.
Now, I haven't talked about this.
I have been meaning to, but it hasn't risen to the top of any stack.
It's sort of not been on the radar.
But, you know, this is much a do-about-nothing.
U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President of the United States.
People have forgotten when Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993, one of the first things he did was to fire every U.S. attorney and replace them with his own.
And you won't find that in any of these news stories.
Now you're going to try to find stories, or you will find stories, where they're trying to come up with some corruption case here, the Bush administration getting rid of these U.S. attorneys because they're trying to cover corruption and make sure these attorneys...
The cases will go forward with the new U.S. attorney.
The cases don't die when the attorneys go away.
U.S. attorneys change all the time.
Bill Clinton got rid of every U.S. attorney that was in office.
George Bush did not.
George Bush left a lot of Clinton's U.S. attorneys, just like he left a lot of Clinton plants in the CIA, Clinton plants at state, Clinton plants at the Pentagon.
It was all part of the new tone, I guess.
Trying to promote unity and good vibes and can't we all get along and this sort of stuff.
I mean, the number of U.S. attorneys that Bush has gotten rid of pale in comparison to what Bill Clinton did.
What is this?
This is 2007.
2006, there was a Democrat U.S. attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, which is one of the largest U.S. attorney offices in the country.
And Bush left a protégé of Chuck Schumer in that office until a guy named Mike Garcia was appointed to replace him after five or six years of the Bush administration.
And nobody said anything about that when it happened.
But now they're trying to raise hell over these seven or eight U.S. attorneys, and that's what the subpoenas are for the first round.
So keep a sharp eye.
Lots to do on the busy broadcast today.
We find out that census records and genealogical records indicate that forbears of Obama Osama Obama.
Let me start this again.
Basically, there's a history of slavery in Obama's family on his mother's side.
We have this.
It's in the Chicago Tribune.
We also have a, yes.
I said Obama's mother had slaves.
Forbears, relatives of Obama's mother had slaves.
And it's in the Chicago Tribune.
Many people know that Barack Obama's father was from Kenya, his mother from Kansas, but an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now.
It appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to a genealogical research in census records.
The records, which had never been addressed publicly by the Illinois senator or his relatives, were first noted in an ancestry report compiled by William Adams Wrightweisner, who works at the Library of Congress and practices genealogy in his spare time.
That would mean it's his hobby for those of you in Rio Linda.
The report on Wright Weisner's website carries a disclaimer that it's a first draft, one likely to be examined more closely if Obama is nominated.
Not only that, We also have found out that Wright Weisner's research identifies two other presidential candidates, John McCain of Arizona and John Edwards of North Carolina, as descendants of slave owners.
Three of McCain's great-great-grandfathers in Mississippi owned slaves, including one who owned 52 slaves in 1860.
Two ancestors of John Edwards owned one slave each in Georgia in 1860.
And now we know that Al Sharpton's relatives were owned by relatives of Strom Thurmond's family out there.
So I guess we could say that if, since Obama has his, on his mother's side, the forebears of his mother had slaves, could we not say that if Obama wins the Democratic nomination and then wins the presidency, he will own Al Sharpton.
Real question is, you know, when we end up having to pay reparations for slavery, where's the money for Obama's family going to go?
To him?
He may be interested.
Let me see if I can find something very quick.
I don't know if I put it at the top of the stack, but there's this whole thing here.
Ah, yes.
Here it is.
There's a big march in Selma, Alabama coming up.
And as you know, as I have mentioned to you, Hillary is losing, in polling data at least, significant portions of the black vote to Barack Obama.
So it turns out now that Bill Clinton has rushed in to save Hillary with black voters.
Der Schlik will join Senator Clinton at a commemoration of the 1965 march in Selma on Sunday, bringing his star power and popularity as the first black president in America to a weekend of events that had been shaping up as a showcase for the candidacy of Barack Obama.
It'll be the former president's first major public appearance with his wife since she launched her campaign.
Late yesterday, after organizers initially said that the former president had not committed to attend, the Clinton campaign announced that he indeed would be making the trip after all.
Arthur Davis, or Arthur Davis, Democrat Alabama congressman who has endorsed Obama and whose district includes Selma, said, I think the Clinton camp's sending a signal they will aggressively contest Barack Obama for the African-American vote.
Whoa, what do we contest Obama for the African-American vote?
It used to be hers.
What is this contest business?
How the joint Clinton trip came about was a subject of some debate.
Clinton's advisors, her advisors, dismissed the suggestion that Bill is rushing in at the last minute to help her standing among black voters, but they admitted that the decision was made yesterday, more than a week after Hillary Clinton made her plans to go to Selma.
So it'll be pandering on parade.
Representatives of a party that has done more to destroy the black family and break up whatever economic opportunities minorities in this country have had are going to go pander to these people as though they are their savior and their last hope, which is, you know, a croc.
And now it looks like Hillary needs Bill to save the day down there because Barack, despite the slave ownership and his mother's history, is looking strong.
Guess he's getting blacker out there because we had a bunch of stories last week.
He's not black enough.
Obviously, something has changed out there because he's being perceived as being blacker by enough African-American voters.
I'm wondering, I haven't checked today because frankly, I didn't have the time to spend on it.
But I wonder if there is serious, serious, serious mental instability and perhaps potential suicides awaiting to occur at the Kuk fringe left.
George Soros has purchased recently 2 million shares of Halliburton.
Halliburton shares reportedly went for an average purchase price of $31.30 a share.
That puts Soros' total investment in Halliburton at around $62.6 million, or about 2% of his total portfolio.
Now, what's interesting is that, you know, Soros out there, $24 million in the last presidential cycle to fund all these 527s and to heap all kinds of criticism on Halliburton.
Cheney used to run Halliburton.
Soros supported campaign finance reform for years only to then say that defeating Bush was the central focus of his life, and that's when he sunk the $24 million of his own soft money into the campaign.
You have to wonder what the little nerds at MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress and John Podesta's group, what are they doing today?
They're going to have to manufacture stories that Soros is taking over Halliburton to make sure that it doesn't do what it was doing when Cheney ran the joint.
They've got to be beside themselves.
Halliburton has become one of the, it's just a buzzword for corruption and lying and deceit as far as the left is concerned.
And here's their guru now buying 2 million shares of Halliburton.
And it just doesn't get any better than this.
And we've barely scratched the surface here.
We got a peace update.
As I said, a huge global warming stack.
The Democrats are becoming hilarious here with this back and forth in their ideas on what to do about Iraq.
All that coming up.
Let's grab a phone call quickly.
Let's go to the phones.
We're going to start Philadelphia with Al.
Next up, you are.
Welcome to the program, sir.
Thank you, Russ.
I'm glad to talk to you again.
Rush, the man from your home state of Missouri, John Ashcroft, do we have any conservative more Reagan-esque than him?
It's interesting you bring this up.
James Gilmore went to CPEC, former governor of Virginia, I think he went to CPEC, a conservative political action conference.
And he said he's going to go out and say McCain's not conservative.
Romney's not conservative.
Giuliani's not conservative.
Gilmore's going to say that he is Reagan-esque conservative.
As to Ashcroft, pretty down-the-line conservative, but he's not going to run for president.
He did put himself in that position about eight years ago.
He was considering it.
Yeah, but I haven't seen any indication that...
Not since he lost the Senate race to the governor's wife.
But he has all the prerequisites.
He's twice-time elected governor and attorney general of Missouri.
And, of course, he was the National Attorney General.
I understand, but we can't go out and chase pipe dreams.
I mean, it'd be great if we could somehow clone Reagan, but that didn't happen.
We've got to deal with what's out there and what exists.
I haven't seen any evidence that John Ashcroft is interested in elective office at all.
That's right.
A man of legend, living legend, way of life, doctor of democracy, truth detector, utilizing talent on loan from God.
All right, this is Hilarion.
So let's take a look at the latest in the escapades of the Democrats and what they want to get done with the war in Iraq.
AP story.
Democrats are considering cutting President Bush's $142 billion request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year by $20 billion.
Said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad yesterday.
Conrad said a final decision has not been made whether to impose the $20 billion cut.
It was just a few hours later another story crossed the wires.
Democrats Nick's idea of military budget cuts.
Just hours after floating the idea of cutting $20 billion from President Bush's $142 billion request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad was overruled by fellow Democrats on Thursday.
It's nothing any of us are considering, said Senate Majority Leader Dingy Harry Reid.
Now, here we have it's less than three months since they won the election.
And they out there, like I said yesterday, they claimed that that election gave a mandate.
Get us out of Iraq.
Cut the funding.
The American people want to bring them home.
Obviously, that's not the data.
And folks, this came up at dinner last night, too, that this discussion, and I can't tell you how many people at the dinner table think that the vast majority of the American people want us out of Iraq.
And the polling data on this cannot possibly be accurate.
It can't possibly be true.
Otherwise, the Democrats and Republicans, as feeble as they are, would have been joining with them to get them out of there and cut the funding.
The Democrats don't even have the guts to do it themselves, even though they claim a mandate from last year's election.
See, the bottom line is that the American people don't want us to lose.
They don't want soldiers defunded in the middle of battle.
They don't want soldiers denied reinforcements.
And they certainly don't want soldiers told that there will not be updates in equipment.
This is Mirtha's slow bleed.
The Democrats are just, they're flailing away here.
They can't get anything done on this.
And yet, you would think that it would be a snap, crackle, and pop if the polling data about the attitudes of the American people on this were accurate.
A Wall Street Journal headline, House Democrats set to retreat from effort to cap troop levels.
If I were writing headlines today, the headline would read, House Democrats cut and run from Mirtha.
Murtha's the guy that can't get anybody to go along with his idea.
The New York Post also talks about the Democrats blocking a $20 billion war cut.
That's the headline.
What they don't say in the headline is that the $20 billion cut in funds was proposed by a Democrat.
So Democrats block a cut proposed by a Democrat.
This is Kent Conrad.
New York Times, Senate Democrats vow to confront Bush on Iraq, but are still working out the details.
Senate Democrats are getting testy with their inabilities to pass anything comes up.
A quagmire, the Democrat quagmire, and that's what we have, continues.
My gosh, it's time to pull the Democrats out of the Senate, folks.
They can't get anything done.
We're just marking time.
They're shooting themselves.
It's a circular firing squad.
In order to save them from each other, we need to get them out of the Senate, use their same policy and plans for the war in Iraq.
These people are sitting ducks.
Their bodies all over the place in the Senate.
They make a proposal.
Other Democrats shoot it down.
Senate Democrats somewhat defensive about their internal divisions, which have left them open to criticism that unlike the House, they have yet to weigh in with a strong vote on the war, even though public dissatisfaction contributed to their election gains in November.
I continue to just refute that, that that is not what last year's election meant.
And if it did, none of this would be happening.
A little common sense here, folks.
It's all you need to apply.
Patty Murray, senator from Washington, said, Well, hey, we've only been in the majority for six weeks.
Cut us some slack.
Getting a little testy here when their inabilities to pass anything comes up.
So the Democrat quagmire continues.
And get this.
Senior Democrat advisor said yesterday he's disappointed and dismayed by the efforts of House and Senate Democrats to change administration policies in Iraq.
And he predicted they'll either lead to further division and stalemate in Congress on the war.
If you stand back, the whole debate's been pretty frustrating.
The bigger problem is that Democrat leaders' proposals are not going anywhere, such as some revised authority for the war.
You know who said this?
Panetta.
Leon Panetta, former Clinton chief of staff, sitting out there in California at the Panetta Institute in Carmel, which is a gorgeous place.
If I had an institute outside the EIB building, I'd go there too.
But I mean, he's sitting out, he can't believe the ineffectiveness of the Democrats, and they are in the majority.
Problem in the Senate, as I have told you, is that the Democrats are pretty much powerless.
It's Mitch McConnell that runs that place.
In the House, the Republicans have no power whatsoever.
It's just the way the House is structured.
Nothing uncommon about it.
When you lose the majority, you have no power to the Senate, though.
You need 60 votes, and if all you've got's 50, plus Lieberman teetering, you got zilch zero nada.
The Republicans can stop anything the Democrats do, but McConnell hasn't even had to step in on this.
Conrad got shot down by Reed.
Anyway, Panetta said, these efforts are doomed.
Either they're going to be blocked in Congress or they're going to be vetoed by the president.
The end result is that it'll make us more divided and impotent on war policy.
I don't know if he's talking about the Democrats.
I suspect he is, or just the country at large.
But he's just frustrated.
Their proposals aren't going anywhere.
It'll be impotent.
And they've promised their left-wing kook fringe base.
They promised them we're going to get them out of Iraq.
We're going to get them out.
We heard you.
And they can't even agree amongst themselves on how to do it.
And a Democrat advisor at the Brookings Institute, Michael O'Hanlon, a senior foreign policy analyst there who advises Democrats on national security issues, said, you know, a lot of the Democrats' efforts have been pointless.
Just as I predicted, I told you they were not going to be able to get anything done.
The American people are not behind them on this, despite what they say the 2006 election returns meant.
Here's Dan in Springport, Michigan.
Welcome, sir, to Open Line Friday on the EIB network.
Hi, Rush.
Thank you.
You back.
In the past, you've played a speech from Charlton Heston in which he speaks about how impossible it is for humans to destroy the earth.
And with all the talk of global warming, I was hoping sometime you could play that again.
Yeah, we, you, excuse me.
Your call's been on board for a while.
We had a chance to find it.
What it actually is, I think, is a forward or an intro in an early chapter in a Michael Crichton book.
I think about Jurassic Park.
I think it's from Jurassic Park.
And Charlton Heston called here one day and asked to read it on the air.
And, you know, when Moses calls you and is really passionate about something and wants to read the tablets to you, you get out of the way and do it.
We've got it.
We've kept it.
It's in our archives.
This is, and thanks, Dan, for the call and the reminder about that.
We have so many things in our archives, impossible for all of us to remember everything that's there, but this really is powerful and it goes great today with all of this hysteria on global warming and destroying the planet.
Here is Charlton Heston from the opening chapters of Jurassic Park as written by Michael Crichton.
You think man can destroy the planet?
What intoxicating vanity.
Let me tell you about our planet.
Earth is four and a half billion years old.
There's been life on it for nearly that long.
3.8 billion years.
Bacteria first, later the first melticellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land, then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years.
Great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away.
All this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval.
Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving in endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years.
Earth has survived everything in its time.
It will certainly survive us.
If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the Earth was clicking hot for 100,000 years, life would survive somewhere under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice.
Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again.
The evolutionary process would begin again.
It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety.
Of course, it would be very different from what it is now.
But the Earth would survive our folly.
Only we would not.
If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the Earth.
So what?
Ultraviolet radiation is good for life.
It's powerful energy.
It promotes mutation, change.
Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation.
Many others will die out.
You think this is the first time that's happened?
Think about oxygen.
Necessary for life now.
But oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive gas, like fluorine.
When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on Earth.
Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas.
Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life.
Nevertheless, life on Earth took care of itself.
In the thinking of the human being, 100 years is a long time.
100 years ago, we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers, or vaccines.
It was a whole different world.
But to the Earth, 100 years is nothing.
A million years is nothing.
This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale.
We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try.
We've been residents here for the blink of an eye.
If we're gone tomorrow, the Earth will not miss us.
That's the key.
We haven't the humility.
This is the whole, this wraps up this whole global warming argument.
We are so lack in humility, and it's a contradiction, too, because on the one hand, the environmentalist wackos consider us irrelevant.
We're no more important than the average rat or dog or insect.
And in the other moment, we are so powerful.
And we're so negative and we're so destructive that we, humans, are destroying the planet.
And don't get confused.
Global warming, they're not worried about what it'll do to humanity.
That's not the way they pitch it.
They pitch it the world.
The fragility of our climate is in crisis.
And of course, Charlton Heston, there, reading from Michael Crichton in Jurassic Park, puts this in a great perspective.
In fact, that passage is one of the things that helped formed my whole thinking on the concept of the complexity of all of this, that is our planet, and the impotence that we really have to do anything about it.
And the idea that we do, by improving our standards of living, that those characteristics of our existence will destroy this is, frankly, it is just absurd.
And I contend you cannot believe in God and believe what the global warming crowd believes.
You can't.
The two do not go hand in hand.
You have to actively not believe in God and believe in something else as a replacement in order to hold this catastrophic climate crisis view that they all have.
They are panicking out there in the drive-by media and on the left over a possible third George W. Bush Supreme Court nomination.
I am holding here in my formerly nicotine stained fingers.
A story from ABC News in their blogs.
It's by Jan Crawford Greenberg.
She's their legal correspondent, babe.
And she writes about today's arguments in the lawsuit over President Bush's faith-based grant initiatives and how it went at a dizzying pace.
And she says, as intense as the arguments were and as fun as it was seeing John Roberts in action, the real drama of the day occurred at the end of the argument.
Typically, the justices rise to the bench.
They turn around, leave the courtroom for their chambers in very short order.
Usually, spectators wait no more than a few seconds before the last justice disappears behind the red curtains.
Then the court officers allow all the reporters of the gallery to file out of other exits at the front and sides of the courtroom.
But today, we all were held in place for nearly a half minute more, an eternity to a TV reporter.
As Justice Ruth Buzzy Ginsburg slowly collected her things and carefully left the courtroom, Justice Souter lingered behind in his chair, waiting to walk alongside her, almost as if he wanted to see if she needed assistance.
It was strikingly odd.
I was standing next to Jim Vinceni of Reuters.
We looked at each other with some alarm.
No one could recall seeing Ginsburg in such slow motion.
And it immediately begged the question of her health, which, of course, begs the question of whether any of the justices are going to be leaving the court anytime soon and give George W. Bush his third nomination.
Oh, no!
I've predicted with confidence that no one else will leave by design, and I've flatly rejected any suggestions that Justice Ginsburg was not at the top of her game physically.
She'll be 74 next month.
She's active in social, said to be recovered from her bout with cancer, but we were concerned.
The court's public information office said this afternoon that Ginsburg's absolutely fine.
She did ask several of the questions during the argument.
She was focused and involved.
So perhaps the twist, she twisted an ankle during her workout.
She does exercise regularly.
But it still made me guessing that it was a twisted ankle that made her exit slowly.
Still made me think I'd better start pulling those possible retirement files together.
As Justice O'Connor showed us all in 2005, big surprises can happen.
There is panic.
There is panting.
In the drive-by media and the American left.
Oh, no, Bush might get a third nomination.
How can this possibly be?
Here is the Bill in Cincinnati Bill.
Welcome.
We have about a minute here, but I wanted to squeeze you in.
Sure, retired firefighter Dittos, Rudge.
Thank you.
Love talking to you.
Hey, talking about the media panting, you joked in your opening how Bush hadn't been blamed for the tornadoes yet yesterday, but essentially MSNBC did just that last night about 7.30, as early as 7.30 by way of blaming FEMA.
They had a FEMA rep on and were really questioning him about their preparation for these tornadoes.
And then they turned around and asked Senator Richard Shelby if he thought FEMA had done enough yet on these tornadoes that just happened.
Well, what did Shelby say, I ask with bated breath?
Well, he kind of was surprised at the question, believe it or not, and then said, ask me tomorrow.
Well, look at, this is history repeating itself.
I missed it because I don't watch whatever network you mentioned.
I can't but watch the cable news channel.
I can't tell you how long.
I can't tell you how much happier I am.
It's a total waste of time.
I applaud you for having the courage to do it out there, Bill.
I can't.
Got to go back to the archives.
We have a piece update to lead off the monologue segment of the next hour, followed by a global warming update.
A huge stack we have today.
It's all coming up straight ahead.
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