Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 Podcast.
So last night I'm minding my own business, uh, bothering literally no one, because no one was around to bother.
And all of a sudden I get flashed on one of these uh instant message things.
The person says to me, you know, we have a we have a really lot to learn in our health care system.
We could learn a lot from Cuba in terms of preventative medicine.
You know, and I said, Well, I what I'm just sitting here minding my own business, and somebody's taunting me with this.
Yeah, the way Cuba makes sure people don't get sick is they kill them before they get sick.
Greetings and uh welcome, uh ladies and gentlemen, Rush Limbaugh here at the EIB Southern Command, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
I am your host for life.
I am going nowhere until every American agrees with me.
Uh some say it's an impossible objective.
I think we're making headway.
Uh telephone number if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-288-2.
The email address is Rush at EIBNet.com.
Global warming stories all over the place because it's 100 degrees in a lot of places out there.
It's August.
It was 100 degrees in August when I was growing up.
It was 100 degrees in August for 10 straight days in Kansas City back in the uh in the late 70s.
Uh MSNBC, and who else?
Was it MSNBC or was?
Yeah, CBS Evening News and MSNBC found the guy from the Democrat debate who worked with LTV Steel and can't afford health care for his wife and so forth.
They're a big profile of guy, profiling courage.
We have audio sound bites on that.
We also have, and I've got a I've got a story here from Reuters that's embargoed until two o'clock, and I don't know that I'm I'm tempted to break the embargo.
Uh, but I probably won't because I play by the rules.
But the the basic uh uh theory or the the story, and I'm gonna I'm gonna give you the details of this as the program unfolds.
One of the central tenets of the global warming hoaxers today is that 1998 was the hottest year in history on record, and that uh five of the top ten hottest years have been in the 90s in the last ten years, five of the the hottest years have been in the last ten.
It turns out that the statistics, uh, the temperature data that Nat NASA used to compile the uh temperatures in 1998 is wrong.
1998 was not the hottest year on record.
1934 was.
And in fact, five of the top ten, I believe I'm gonna have to check this.
Uh, five of the top ten highest uh or hottest, warmest years on record are in the 30s.
Uh during the dust ball era and so forth.
There's some others uh, but it it's no it 1998 is not that blows up so much.
Uh and in fact, this this this uh this Reuters story talks about how global warming is gonna be off the chart starting in 2009, and they in this story they actually say that the uh uh global warming scientists are really frightened now because uh uh 2009 is gonna just blow 1998 out of the water.
It just did as far in terms of uh breaking records.
And 1998 is is is now been shown to be not true.
And I guess uh a blogger discovered this.
Uh uh I'll give you the details as the program unfolds today.
Uh in in a more uh shall I say systematic way.
The thing to remember now is that the whole point is 1998 was not the warmest year on record, and it forms one of the central thesis or theses, uh, with a TH, if you will, about the the current global warming hoax.
All right, you gotta hear this audio.
It is uh presidential candidate Mike Gravell, and uh, you know, from Alaska.
He's up at a gay pride event in New Hampshire recently.
Reporter says to him, you know, Senator Gravel, every election uh always the gay issue that comes up, it seems.
You know, first it was Clinton, don't ask, don't tell.
They used that against him.
Now it's a gay marriage thing.
What do you think about all that?
You know something.
Clinton was dead wrong.
Dead wrong on that issue.
It's ridiculous.
He was trying to be mousey and in the middle.
When Clinton got to be president, well, the first thing he's doing is standing on to-waffling back and forth.
Oh, don't tell us you're gay.
What are you talking about?
If you had any knowledge of history, ancient History in Sparta, they encouraged homosexuality because they fight for the people they love.
And if it's your partner and you love them, you're prepared to die for them.
And that's the same ethic you see in the military today.
It's not the country.
It's my partner.
Go see the movies on war, and it's always the person next to me who's in my boxhole with me.
Well, I gotta tell you, extend that a little further, and you'll see why the Spartans trained their people to be homosexuals because they were better fighters.
They trained them to be Victor Davis Hanson, where are you on this?
He's a noted Greek scholar.
The Spartans of all the things they did.
We learned now they trained people to be homosexual.
How do you?
I don't know.
I would say how do you train somebody to be homosexual?
How do how how do you train them to and then and then nobody's fighting for their country?
They're fighting for the guy they love in the foxhole that's uh that's sitting in there with them.
Mike Gravell, uh, one of the bottom tier candidates of the Democratic presidential primary.
Ladies and gentlemen, before I announce uh how many uh sorry, uh how few uh watched the Democrat debate uh on uh on Tuesday night, I need to get some numbers.
I have to find out how many employees MSNBC has, because they must have watched.
And I uh uh how many work for the overall NBC newsroom?
Because I think they probably watched as well.
And then how many pundits and columnists and liberal bloggers and socialists out there that there are, because they uh must have watched as well.
Uh so if we could find the number of people that uh work at MSNBC, the number of people in the NBC newsroom, the total number of pundits, socialists, columnists, and liberal bloggers that watch this thing, we subtract that number from the least watched debate so far.
Uh then we will find out how few really watched it.
Oh, and by the way, we also do how many how many uh union members are there out there?
If it it ladies and gentlemen, the number is like 900 and some odd thought.
It's entirely possible that not one real American saw the debate.
By the time you add up the MSNBC employees, the NBC employees, the Washington punditry, and the bloggers, and the union members in this country, there might not have been one real American that watched the debate.
I'm not saying union people aren't uh real Americans, but I mean this is the smallest audience for a debate.
Yet it was less than um than one million.
One million people watch.
Less than one million.
I mean, that that's that's just that's just we gave them, we gave this debate, think about this is so good.
We gave that debate more coverage yesterday and reached more people with the true perspective and reaction to it than the audience who watched it.
Uh we generated 20 million people here, and uh they had less than one million watching their debate.
So the 20 million of this show heard our analysis of that.
And uh uh so whatever impact the debate itself had, we more than canceled it out.
I'd say yesterday was a hell of a day.
Pretty damn good day.
Washington, Wall Street Journal, employers warned of labor shortages, particularly in agriculture during the fall harvest, as the Bush administration appeared ready to implement new rules that would press employers to fire workers who appear to be in the country illegally.
With no expectation there's a fallback workforce, you'll put employers in the position of either firing workers or losing their crops, said Craig Reggelbrug of the American Nursery and Landscape Association, which is a trade group.
Um, you know, this this is if you read the whole story, you find a threatening high prices again.
If we have to get rid of this cheap labor and the government makes us turn these illegals in, oh, I can't promise you that you'll be able to eat after the fall harvest.
The prices are gonna go sky high.
Prices of food are already rising due to the dumb idiot idea of uh of ethanol.
I mean, for crying out loud, there's a steak shortage.
There there is there's now a prime beef shortage in New York steakhouses.
This is unacceptable.
And it's because of all the corn that's being siphoned off for ethanol, the price is rising on corn, so it costs more for ranchers to feed their stock, and it uh it's it's upping the price, and so one of my favorite places, Ben Benson's, they had to put buffalo beef on the stay on the menu because sometimes they don't have USDA Prime.
And if they do have it, the prices have gone up and people are a little stunned by them.
So now we got this story.
Um we've got that there where hell the agriculture workers are going to be uh fired because we employers have to turn them in and so forth.
Your prices are going to go sky high.
I thought China was making all of our food anyway, so what's the big deal?
By the way, tainted tires are the latest out of China.
What is it?
250.
Where's the number?
Well, I'll find it during the break.
250,000.
There it is.
250,000 Chinese-made tires have been recalled.
Chicom tires, that's all we need.
Squ a Swedish grandmother hospitalized after beaver attack.
Swedish grandmother hospitalized after beaver attack.
A grandmother taking a leisurely swim in a Swedish river ended up in a hospital after a beaver attacked her with its tail.
Thought sharks are the only reason that to go in the water.
Yeah, tell you I hate those beaver attacks.
You just never know.
Ha, welcome back.
El Rush Bowl and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I'm going to go ahead and get into this global warming thing.
We got a couple sound bites also from President Bush's press conference this morning, uh, which uh are excellent.
The uh the credit for the information I'm gonna pass on to you uh is is owed to Steve McIntyre.
He's a blogger.
Uh climate audit is his uh site.
This all got started uh with the announcement recently, within the past year or two, I don't remember what it was, that uh 1998 was the hottest year on record in the United States of America.
Now there's a there's a blog out there also called the Norcal Blogs, uh, and a little subdivision of it called What's Up With That.
It's a blog that deals with puzzling things in life, nature, science, and so forth.
And uh these guys that run this blog got very curious about the uh methods for taking official temperatures in this country.
For example, where are the thermometers put?
And so they've got guys, just citizens running around state after state, all over the state, taking every taking pictures and looking at every official temperature monitoring station.
And they published a picture of a monitoring station in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.
It's outside a radio station, and the uh the official thermometer is it's it's in a back of this radio station in a in a little wood hut, right next to two air conditioning compressors outside.
If you know that those things just put out gobs and oodles of hot air.
So it was assumed that the temperature spike in 1998, uh, or actually, yeah, 1999 actually, uh what was due to uh in this instance the air conditioner.
And so they made a big deal out of this, and those of us that follow this stuff thought, aha, how can we ever rely on the accuracy of anything regarding temperature when they have monitoring and reporting stations like this?
Turns out that the uh others in the blogosphere said, wait a minute, that that that that's that's it's that's ridiculous.
They raised holy hell about the explanation being the air conditioning compressors.
And so the guys that do this, okay.
Well, if if if it's not the air conditioning compressors, then what did cause the temperature jump at the time?
Because it spiked.
They've got a chart here that shows 1998, 1998 temperatures spiking all over the the official Detroit Lakes reporting station.
So Steve McIntyre, who lives in Toronto, began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and what he discovered was amazing.
NASA doesn't fully publish the computer source code and formula that are used to calculate the trends in the graph that I have here, nor the correction used to arrive at the corrected data.
So we had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed data.
And the the bottom line is that 1998 is no longer if you can say NASA made A reporting error?
Or did they make a reporting error?
Did they do this on purpose?
And how long have they known it was erroneous and haven't corrected it?
But the bottom line of this is that 1998 is no longer the hottest year on record.
Four of the top ten hottest years on record are from the 30s.
1934, 1931, 1938, and 1939, while only three of the top ten warmest years on record are from the last ten years.
98, 2006, and 1999.
You might say, well, so what?
What does this matter, Russ?
So 1998 wasn't.
Well, when 1934 is the hottest year on record, and NASA may know about it and doesn't correct the data.
And when there's a guy named James Hansen involved in all this who's a political activist, then you've got to figure that there's a reason why they want 1998 to continue to be reported as the warmest year on record, and voila.
From a soon-to-be released Reuters story, global warming forecast is set in with a vengeance after 2009, with at least half of the five following years expected to be hotter than 1998.
The warmest year on record, scientists reported Thursday.
So, ladies and gentlemen, what do we have here?
We have proof of man-made global warming.
The man-made global warming is inside NASA.
The man-made global warming is in the scientific community with false data.
This is the this is the kind of this is irresponsible.
This is supposedly scientific data.
It is uh unchallengeable, it is inarguable.
And it's it's it's bogus.
And I don't know how long they've known it, and I don't know how long that they and if they tend to correct it or not.
I doubt you'll hear anything about this.
Other than on this program, drive by media, this is not going to interest them.
Ah, Russia, just that's irrelevant.
Footnote, everybody knows that global warming's happening out there.
All right, well, you see how this works.
I I did a little test here.
I sent this news out to some people this morning, and and uh so what?
It's a NASA reporting error.
Who cares?
1998's not the hottest year on record, 34 is.
Well, that alone to me is pretty interesting.
Because global warming has been a big deal the past 20 years, man-made, it's ever getting hotter and hotter and hotter, and we're nowhere near as hot as we've been 75, 71 years ago.
Nowhere near as hot.
That alone.
But then, when I tell them, guess what?
New global warming forecast from scientists set in with a vengeance after 2009, with at least half of the five following years expected to be hotter than 1998.
You see how this stuff works.
So it's just, it's just more evidence, uh, ladies and gentlemen, that this whole global warming thing is a scientific hoax.
Newsweek has even gotten Newsweek has this story, current issue that is the most irresponsible, one-sided, no science in it, where they go after the global warming deniers.
And the use of the term deniers, global warming is on purpose, Holocaust deniers and so forth.
Uh it is it has gotten so bad here.
Uh and I tell you, I tell you what the Newsweek thing means.
It means we're winning the debate.
I said that uh I think we're gonna beat this back.
I I think in four or five years we're gonna have a majority of people understanding exactly how phony and fraudulent this is, that it's a religion, it's being advanced as a reason to raise your taxes, control more of your life, reduce your lifestyle, uh, all coming from the United Nations and allies of the United Nations and the scientific community and and elsewhere.
But this Newsweek piece, uh, Paul Chessert, the American Spectator uh dissected it.
Uh brilliantly so.
He says now even the partisan resistant public must acknowledge what conservatives have known for a long time at Newsweek is driven by a leftist agenda, even if they won't acknowledge it themselves.
That can't be illustrated more clearly than by the magazine's cover story this week titled Global Warming Deniers a Well Funded Machine.
The uh writer, Sharon Begley blames the well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free market think tanks, and industry for creating a paralyzing fog of doubt about climate change.
In other words, those of you still with reservations have been duped.
What else could be the explanation since Begley claims rock solid resources that uncontrovertibly nailed down the left's climate change dogma?
Well, what was the report?
Who were the Scientists.
Nobody has any idea.
Apparently, all that matters are the number of experts, the number of countries, and the word unequivocal, and of course the word consensus.
And what do you think were the philosophical leanings of governments, academia, green groups, and unidentified businesses?
consensus indeed.
It's gotten so bad that Al Gore is on the warpath now.
He says that global warming research is under attack.
He's accusing big oil Trying to influence opinion is critical of the effort.
But isn't that exactly what he's trying to do?
What's the difference in big oil trying to influence it as opposed to a bunch of bought and paid for scientist hacks?
What's the difference?
The double standard here is a crock of you know what?
Ask the questions.
Does Al Gore use ethanol or alternative fuels?
Would Al Gore bet his fortune that his predictions will come true?
I have offered this.
You know, you can go on these online bed sites and wager on anything.
Will all these global warming supporters bet everything they've got on their predictions coming true?
Of course not.
They have they they wouldn't dare.
Brief timeout here, ladies and gentlemen, as we roll on on the EIB network.
Stay with us.
Mm-hmm.
Right on.
Right on.
You know it, and I know it.
Welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh serving humanity simply by showing up.
All right.
Uh Putnam County in New York has decided to stop handing out free donuts at seasoned cent uh seasoned citizen centers because of health worries.
However, the elderly patrons say they're old enough to make their own decisions.
The county north of New York City has decided to stop serving donuts at their five nutrition centers.
The Office of the Aging has been getting free day old donuts from local donut shops, delies, and stores, and passing them out to the uh to the seniors at the centers.
Nutritionists have questioned if the donuts are good for the over 65 set, which is susceptible to high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes.
Now I keep telling you that these are a bunch of nannies that want to control every part of your life that you haven't got the smarts to make the right decisions, and it's creeping up on all of us.
This little this this control.
Now you think this is ridiculous, and it is.
It's not, it's it's not the Department of Aging's business.
But I'm gonna get some calls, some libs.
Yes, it is, yes, it is, because if they're eating things because our health care costs to go up, then we all have an interest in digging do they eat healthy so that so that we don't that's none of your business.
None of your business, and it's the idea that liberals want to make what people eat their business.
I mean, it ought to send some red flags up.
Also, you know something for you remember when uh when when the uh going in Iraq was really, really tough.
There was a clamor inside the nation's capital to get rid of Donald Rumsfeld.
Get rid of Rummy, get rid of Rummy.
Where is the similar call to get rid of dingy Harry Reed?
You know, we had an audio soundbite for you yesterday in which uh uh Senator Dick Durbin in Iraq uh went on C and Surge is working here.
It's a political process, of course, is falling apart, not doing well, but yeah, the surge is working, and John Roberts, the anchor at CNF said, Wait a minute, are you I I understand all the rest of what you're saying here about the political process, but uh the position of the Democratic Party is that this has already failed.
Of course, Durban had nothing to say, and that AP's now on the case a day later.
Even some critics of President Bush's Iraq war policies are conceding that there is evidence of recent improvements from a military standpoint.
But Bush supporters and critics alike agree that these have not been matched by any noticeable progress on the political front.
This is Tom Roman the AP.
So damn predictable.
You people in the drive-by, but you know, all we have to know to know what you're gonna say about a story, what you're gonna write about a story is listen to any Democrat.
All we have to do, and we will know exactly what your take is going to be, right there in the lead.
Oh, yeah, bunch of people that never thought we had a chance now say it's working.
But they also say the political process is falling apart, and of course, Tom Rom comes through for the associated press with the Democrat line.
Despite U.S. pressure, Iraq's Parliament went on vacation for a month after fa see the story headline Iraq critics concede military process the progress in the first two or three paragraphs is about the failing political process.
Uh but they they they do get around to uh naming the critics that are over there, but uh Bob Casey, Pennsylvania, and uh Dick Durbin, who admit that it's going well.
So my point is, uh, these are Democrats contradict the statements of the uh of their of their leading general in the Senate, Dingy Harry, who has already waved the white flag.
Dingy Harry said we've already lost the war.
What are these Democrats doing undercutting Dingy Harry?
This is this is the Democrat Party message here is uh is splintering, folks.
Why do you think this is?
You know, we've got the Petraeus report coming up in September, I think the 15th.
What would cause Durban to go over there and say that he could just as easily ignore it or say, well, I really haven't seen what uh other people have seen.
Uh we hope for the best here, but the political mess, that's something that I don't think is surmountable.
Could have said that.
He came out and said, and others are doing it too, like these two guys from the Brookings Institution that wrote in the New York Times, yeah, it's working.
We got them on the run over.
Well, why would Durban do that?
I mean, he's part of Dingy Harry's leadership team.
Uh I'll tell you what I think it is.
I I think that there are, I mentioned this to you a couple months ago, there have to be some grown-ups in that party who understand that they have gone off the cliff on this, that they are McGovernizing themselves, that they are setting themselves up to not win the presidency in 08.
That they have they have readopted the same image.
They've they've claimed it all over again.
They never really lost it, but they've really made stake the big claim here that they can't be trusted on national security, that they can't be trusted on defending the country, period.
They want to shut down the surveillance programs, they want to they want to tie everybody's hands and trying to find out where the next attack is.
They want to let all of the enemy combatants out of uh Club Gitm.
Oh, by the way, I never got around to this yesterday.
Uh I had a fascinating interview yesterday afternoon with Norman Pedoritz of Commentary Magazine.
He's got a great book coming out on September 11th.
He calls the war against Islamo fascism uh World War IV.
And I uh he told me he was he read the most astounding op-ed in the New York Times yesterday by Wesley Clark.
And Wesley Clark uh and some other guy, I forget who it was, uh uh, but they actually uh claim in the op-ed that we we we are going about dealing with these terrorists in the wrong way.
To call them enemy combatants is to give them dignity and standing that they don't deserve.
What we need to do is treat them as criminals, like the Clinton administration did, and go after them legally as criminals.
They are not soldiers.
They are not enemy combat.
It w it's the most absurd thing you can believe.
And it's not, folks, the danger here is not just that the uh uh these guys, Clark and the rest of the libs want these people in the U.S. legal system.
Uh it's not just it, it's it's the way they think about this, the way they do not recognize the threat the country faces from uh radical Islam, the Islamofascists.
They have just a bunch of seventh-century little nomads running around, got some bombs now and then they're criminals.
Uh and as these Democrats write these op-eds and as they make these statements, uh, and as Dingy Harry waves the white flag, uh, yes, some law professor at UCLA was the co-author of Wesley Clark, uh Ashley Wilkes, we call him here, uh New York Times op-ed.
Uh as they continue to write these things and say these things, believe me, they are making an impression on the American people that they have McGoverners McGovernized themselves, they can't be trusted, they don't take the problem seriously.
Uh and and it's it's I'm telling you, it's going to lead down the road to another embarrassing landslide loss for these people.
We had the Rasmussen poll that came out this week, too.
You know, everybody's assuming a Democrats are a slam dunk because everybody hates the Republicans and hates Bush.
But the Rasmussen poll found the Democrats have no edge on Iraq, on the economy or anything else in his surveys that he's taken up to now.
In other words, it's n it's still wide open, as of course it's wide open.
The campaigns really haven't even heated up.
And for the Democrats to be running around thinking that uh inevitability is theirs, is giving them a plan plus, you couple that with the puff pieces that the drive by's write about them all the time, and they are, I think, uh, as a group, unaware of the impact they are making on people.
Uh in the in the general population.
But there there are some adults in the Democrat Party who know.
I don't know who they are.
Uh old guys, you know, like Bob Strauss back from the the Johnson days, and Jack Valletti was one of those wise men in the Democrat Party that kept them from going off the cliff.
Though there's got to be at least one somebody there, because this is a whole bunch of stories out there.
Attitudes changing on Iraq, more Americans linking Iraq to global war on terror and so forth.
Uh and I think they probably see these polls too.
They have failed to convince the American people with their allies in the media that the Iraq war is a separate entity from the overall war on terror.
More and more Americans are starting to understand that it's just a different front uh in the uh in the same war.
Uh well, maybe, maybe, maybe I should rephrase this.
Maybe it's not that the Democrats have failed, uh, and the media have failed in order to persuade the American people that uh we've gone to hell in a handbasket already over there.
Maybe it is that I have succeeded in blunting their effort.
That's the way I'm gonna look at it.
Rush Limbaugh meeting and surpassing all audience expectations on a daily basis.
Your phone calls coming right up, but first, Selinda Lake uh works with Ed Goaz.
Solinda Lake is uh part of the Democrat part of the battleground poll, which is a highly respected uh bipartisan poll.
And uh she has this quote uh just been brought to my attention.
The administration is aggressively engaged in shifting public attitudes, and our side, the Democrats, have been less aggressive than uh we need to meet.
The uh administration's been making inroads in their Iraqi argument, particularly linking it to terrorism.
Uh that goes along with all these stories that say that the American people starting to uh agree with this.
But here is here's the thing.
This little quote from Celinda Lake illustrates precisely, and I like her, but it illustrates precisely the Democrat mindset, their side versus our side in a war about U.S. national security.
Our side is getting the word out.
The president, the white, our side, who is our side?
Our side is the U.S. military.
Our side's U.S. military trying to make inroads in Iraq, trying to create stability, trying to make a haven for democracy.
Our side isn't the Bush administration and a GOP.
But their side is the Democrats.
I mean, she's speaking the truth when she says that the Democrats are engaged in one war only, and it's the political one against Bush.
You know, you have to ask yourself, how can you win the bigger war?
How can we win the bigger war when literally every Democrat's been called into battle against the commander-in-chief?
And I don't know whether they're all homosexuals out there fighting this battle.
You know, Mike Ravel said the Spartans trained to their warriors to be homosexual because they fought better.
I don't know if the Democrats are doing that, but they are lined up in battle against George W. Bush, who, by the way, can do nothing right, as every success will be looked at not as a good thing for the U.S., but as a political disaster.
Uh you know, I the the this this is here's Durbin, by the way.
We found Durbin.
We got Durbin out of our archives.
This from yesterday on CNN's American morning.
He's over there in Iraq, and the uh anchor, John Roberts asks him, you see any progress that everybody's talking about over there.
There's another side to this story that the Brookings institution shouldn't miss.
As we are seeing military progress, the political scene is very discouraging.
We have seen this Al-Maliki government, which was once branded a government of national unity, coming apart.
But hold on, let me back you up there.
You said you did see military progress.
Well, what we find is that the surge has troops going into areas where for four and a half years we have not seen our military in action.
And naturally, they are routing out the al-Qaeda in those areas.
That's a good thing.
But there is no evidence of the government of Iraq in these areas.
There are no Iraqi policemen, no Iraqi soldiers.
I understand all of that, but Senator Durbin, uh everybody in the Democratic Party is saying that the surge has failed.
Yes, they are.
Everybody, it's already failed.
Dingy Harry waving the white flag.
So something's going on.
There may not be any wise men in the Democrat Party.
It may be a wise person or two in the drive-by that are advising them here.
I you know, I uh when I say there has to be some adults, have to be some adults Democrat Party.
I don't see any evidence of it.
I'm just assuming maybe it's some of the drive-by's that are uh advising them.
You know, you guys, you really have gone off the cliff on this.
Uh and it's a you better throw the lifeline out pretty soon, or you're gonna be in deep doo-doo.
Let's go to phones.
Twin City, Minnesota.
Uh and Tim, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Yeah.
Rush.
Yeah.
Hi.
Hi.
Say, I don't know if you're aware of it, but the media here in the paper are saying that the uh reason that the uh inspections were not done properly on the 35W bridge is because of pigeon crap, spider web, and people yelling at the end of the year.
Yeah, I saw that.
We talked about that yesterday.
Well, I want to know why in a multimillion dollar billion dollar budget, they can't remove the pigeon crap and spider web and do a decent inspection.
And isn't that a fad?
Well, they can, but they don't want to.
They don't want to go.
Who wants to mess around in pigeon crap?
Guano, we say on this, but pigeon guano and then the spider.
So These are good liberals up there doing this.
You don't expect them to do that.
Plus, motorists are driving by and throwing things at them and shouting at them when they have to close a lane to do the inspection.
It's just too hard.
Too hard.
So we can expect all over the nation, wherever there's pigeon crap and spider webs and people yelling, then uh all over the nation there won't be decent bridge inspections done.
Is that correct?
I don't think I don't think pigeon iguano and uh spider webs are a problem in bridges, except in Minnesota.
I've never heard of it happening anywhere else.
So there's no other pigeons other than Minnesota that crap under bridges and I've I've not heard of pigeon crap on other bridges.
It may happen.
Really?
Yeah, I'm sure it does, but I've never heard about it.
This is the first time I've heard that that they couldn't do an inspection because of pigeon guano.
Please, guano.
Uh their children listening.
This is this is summertime.
Okay, pigeon guano, then let's stick with that then.
So we can expect that in the future in Minnesota, because of the pigeon guano, we will not be able to do bridge inspections, so we can expect them to fail all over the Minnesota because of the pigeon guano.
And I think the lack of funds to wash away the pigeon guano or spider web.
Well, the investigation needs to find out what it is about the bridges up there.
It's attracting the pigeons.
Oh, I see.
So as long as we can keep the pigeons away, the bridges won't fail.
That's right.
Now, no, no.
Uh let me be serious here.
This is uh he's right.
Everything he said is true.
They are the the inspectors they got hassled and they all this stuff.
Uh when when the uh close a lane and the motorists go by shouting at them, and they they the story said they cut their work short.
And they did encounter the spider webs look like like cracks.
It was uh they made it really tough.
And they plus had to hang over the side of the bridge.
The stuff is underneath the roadway where the pigeon guano is.
But the New York Times has a story, uh potential flaw found in design of uh fallen bridge.
Investigators have found what may be a design flaw in the steel parts that connect girders raising safety concerns for other bridges around the country.
The highways uh federal highway administration swiftly responded by urging all states to take extra care with how much weight they place on bridges when sending construction crews to work on them.
That's another thing there were apparently there's a lot of weight on that bridge with repair materials, but how else you're gonna get it on the bridge if you don't take it on the bridge.
You gotta use the materials to repair the bridge, you've got to take it out where the repairs need to be done.
So there's a potential uh design flaw.
Now, another story.
Bunch of stories yesterday, another one today.
Frederick Fromer, AP higher gas tax proposed to fix bridges.
The chairman of House Transportation Committee proposed a five cent increase in the federal gas tax.
The president was asked about this today.
He shot it out of the of the White House, blew it out of the water.
We'll let you hear the answer coming up.
But they also took a poll in Minnesota.
KSTP took a poll.
Fifty-seven percent of Minnesotans oppose an increase in the gasoline tax.
Way to go, citizens of Minnesota.
This is not the solution to the problem, and they know it.
Fifty-seven percent oppose a gas tax increase.
Back after this, they were Rush Limbaugh, the most accurate man in the media.
Serving humanity, the EIB network.
Uh, by the way, programming note, ladies and gentlemen, I will be here tomorrow.
I will work tomorrow, which is Friday, open line Friday, which means I will be working a full week.