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Sept. 25, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:19
September 25, 2007, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Ha!
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
Rush Limbaugh on a roll, undeterred, unstoppable, a bulwark of conservatism.
Heading on down the tracks, we are here at the EIB's Southern Command, the prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies behind the golden EIB microphone.
We're looking forward to talking to you 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the email address, rush at EIBNet.com.
Well, the customary annual physical checkup at the doctor's office may not be worth the time or the money, researchers said yesterday.
Somebody quick, call a Brett girl.
His health care plan mandates that we do this.
About 63 million U.S. adults visit a doctor annually for a routine medical or gynecological checkup at a total cost of $7.8 billion, according to a study intended to help answer questions about the value of this trip to the doctor's orifice.
More than 80% of preventive care provided by doctors does not take place during the annual checkup, the study showed.
That's right.
More than 80% of preventive care provided by doctors does not take place during this annual checkup.
More than $350 million worth of potentially unnecessary medical tests are performed, the researchers said.
Dr. Ativ Mehrotra of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Rand Corporation who led the study said we need to question encouraging everybody to come in for their annual physical.
There's a lot of money, a lot of visits.
A lot of adults go on to see their doctor for annual physical exams with a real unclear benefit.
It's the number one reason adults see their doctor, and yet we don't know whether it's helpful or not.
The study appears in the archives of internal medicine.
Mehrotra said that no major North American clinical organization advises people to get an annual medical checkup, but most adults think they should get one, and most doctors recommend them.
I'm not saying that preventive care in itself is not helpful, he said.
It's clearly helpful.
Mammograms, PAP smears, cholesterol screening, colon cancer, all that.
Patients ought to get those, but does it need to happen at this special visit, or can we get it some other way?
Large studies in the 60s and 70s failed to show that these checkups provide a significant medical benefit to the patient, and there has been a debate about their value ever since.
What shit, Sam?
Say what?
Who is it, ladies and gentlemen, that has been suggesting that way too many of us go way too often to the doctor because, A, we think we can pay it.
It's free.
It's covered by insurance or whatever.
Secondly, we have been inundated with the notion that we should.
Well, that's true.
I didn't know there was a debate about it until now, other than on this show.
But I didn't know they were doing actual research into it.
Here's another health threat to lose sleep over.
Too much sleep can kill you, but too little sleep can kill you too, according to a British study released yesterday.
A classic example of fear-mongering, crisis, and angst-ridden news.
The real eye-opening news, the traditional eight-hours-a-night model, may be out the window.
In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is optimal for health, said Dr. Francesco Capuccio, the professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Warwick, the annual conference of the British Sleep Society.
After poring over the sleep habits and health outcomes of more than 10,000 British workers during two five-year periods, Dr. Capuccio and a research team found that chronic lack of sleep can more than double the risk of death from cardiovascular disease.
They also found that those who sleep more than eight hours a night can more than double the risk of death from a variety of causes.
Do you believe this?
You've got to love this, folks.
Still, Americans seem to fall right into the new sleep ideal.
The group also reports Americans average between 6.9 and 7.5 hours weeknights for 6.9, 7.5 hours on weekends.
Before Thomas Edison invented a light bulb, by the way, people slept 10 hours a night.
So the light bulb might be saving lives because sleeping that much kills us, they said.
So that's right.
That's what I was going to say.
The life expectancy has expanded with the invention of the light bulb and people getting less sleep.
The Bush administration said in a new report yesterday, Social Security facing a $13.6 trillion annual budgets.
What, three?
The whole budget for the country is $3 trillion?
Social Security facing a $13.6 trillion shortfall, and that delaying needed changes was not fair to younger workers.
Well, you know, there's a strike going on at General Motors over just this concept.
Do you know that the retired workers at General Motors being paid their health benefits and pensions, which they GM agreed to?
I mean, I'm just giving you the numbers here.
The number of retired people General Motors is paying outnumbers the employed people seven to one.
And so there's a strike because General Motors says, look, this can't go on.
It just can't go on.
And in the rank and file, I'm not sure how widespread this is, but you've got some younger workers and you've got the older workers.
The older workers are like the older voters.
I don't care about the future because there's not much left for them.
So they want to get as much as they can right now.
They let the young people deal with it later.
The younger workers in general say, hey, wait a minute here.
Our future's on the line here.
We're not sure we want to go on this strike here.
But Scott Ott, Scrapple Face, had a great line that this GM strike, if it goes on, will hit Democrat presidential candidates the hardest because the union members won't have any dues to cough up for the union thugs to donate to Hillary or so forth.
So anyway, really, what we should do, if you follow the General Motors plan, expand Social Security.
The reform is to expand it and then raise taxes on the rich and cover illegal aliens.
And then we can make the United States just like what's happened to General Motors.
Where for every one person working, there'd be seven people not working depending on that one person to provide their benefits.
It's where we are headed, ladies and gentlemen.
Now, here's an interesting little story.
This is the Chicago Tribune.
Headline pretty much says it all.
School discipline tougher on African Americans.
In the average New Jersey public school, African American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions.
Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments.
Research studies have found.
Some impoverished black children grow up in troubled neighborhoods.
They come from broken families, leaving them less equipped to conf.
Well, whose fault is that?
Conveniently omitted from the story.
It's the fault of federal government programs instituted by the late FDR, part of the Raw Deal, expanded on by Democrats ever since to create dependency.
They destroyed the families of the poor.
But look, let's go back to the original premise.
Almost 60 times as likely, African American students, almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions.
Now, how and why does a monopoly, public school system, dominated and run by Democrats and liberals, allow this to happen?
How can this happen?
Like, how can New Orleans have been what it was?
Well, it was been run by liberal Democrats for I don't know how many years.
New Orleans prior to Katrina and afterwards.
You want to know what liberalism looks like unchecked?
Check out New Orleans.
You want to know what liberalism looks like unchecked?
Check the New Jersey public schools.
What did we read?
What?
They spent something like $14,000 per student in the New Jersey public schools.
You know, that kind of money, you could have a limo take every kid to school, take them over across the George Washington Bridge to 21 for lunch, limo them back to school, limo them home, and still have money left over.
So where's the money going?
But despite that, 60 times as likely African American students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions in a monopoly run by liberals and Democrats.
How does this happen?
Second question: How does a monopoly dominated and run by Democrats and liberals get this kind of press?
This is not good press.
This is the norm.
Normally, this kind of stuff would be suppressed.
I mean, it's a Democrat state.
Democrat governor, by the way, Corzine, you know, the SHIPS program, the S-CHIP, they're calling it, because some people are not popping the P when they say SHIP program.
So now calling it S-CHIP.
As a highly trained broadcast specialist, I have no problem popping the P when I need to pop the P.
So I am perfectly comfortable saying the SHIP program.
But Corzine is saying, screw it, I don't care what the Fed say.
I'm going to keep enrolling people as I see fit.
Law doesn't matter to him.
The Democrat-run state.
So how does the story about the squalor of the New Jersey public school system end up in the Chicago Tribune?
I'm just fascinated.
This is normally the kind of thing that the drive-bys would surpass.
Yes.
Well, Mr. Snirdley, the official program observer, wants to know why the union hasn't fixed the problem.
The problem of the disciplinary being so out of whack, disciplinary action, 60% of African Americans, why hasn't the union fixed the problem?
Meaning the teachers?
Women that teach?
I don't think they ever thought they would have to.
But the Chicago Tribs blowing the whistle on them now.
They may have to deal with it now.
Rushlinbaugh, once again fighting fatigue, up late last night playing with new computer software until 3.30 a.m.
I get lost in this stuff.
Time flies, I forget just what's going to have some music on and playing around with it and look up 1.15.
Okay, just another 10 more minutes.
And get back into it, look up, it's 1.45.
50 more, 2 o'clock.
I'm going to call it off.
And kept learning new things with it.
So it wasn't until 3.30 that I packed it in.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, back now to the audio soundbites, the one and only Mahmoud Ahmadinezad.
But first, I mentioned to you the propaganda reasons we should not have invited Mahmoud.
Nobody should have invited him to speak in this country because it just provides propaganda for his use back home in his controlled society.
Now, here's an Associated Press writer in Tehran.
Maybe it's a terrorist, for all I know.
An AP terrorist writing in Tehran.
Headline, Iranians criticize Columbia University's combative introduction for Ahmadinezad.
Iranians on Tuesday called the combative introduction of President Mahmoud Ahmadinezad by the head of Columbia University shameful.
Said the harsh words only added to their image of the United States as a bully in a region where the tradition of hospitality outweighs personal opinions about people.
Many here in Tehran.
I'm on a puke.
In a region, you're talking about Iran here.
In a region where the tradition of hospitality outweighs personal opinions about people?
Many in Tehran thought Columbia University President Lee Bollinger's aggressive tone, including telling Ahmadinezad that he exhibited the signs of a petty and cruel dictator, was over the top.
The surprising point of the last night meeting is the behavior of the university president said state-run radio, describing Bollinger's introduction as full of insult, which was mostly Zionists' propaganda against Iran.
The chancellors of seven Iranian universities issued a letter on Tuesday to Bollinger saying his statements were deeply shameful, and they invited him to Iran to see the truth.
So not too many people talking about Bollinger, but this AP terrorist, a reporter in Tehran, certainly is following the Iranian party line, is he not?
I think it's a he, who can tell?
What's his name?
Yeah, Nasser Karimi.
You never know with some of these names, but it sounds like it's a guy.
Let's go to the audio tape here, the audio soundbites.
Mahmoud Ahmadinezad responding to these quote-unquote insults leveled at him by Lee Bollinger.
I want to complain about the person who read this political statement against me in Iran.
Tradition requires that when we demand a person to invite a speaker, we actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgment.
And we don't think it's necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of claims.
It's all about Fed students applauding the terrorist in their midst.
Mahmoud Ahmadinezad.
This is fabulous.
Now, I've talked to several people, and I'm a little bit surprised to tell you that some people think Mahmoud has a point.
This is not polite.
You invite somebody to sort of like if somebody said it was no different Russian if you get invited on a TV show and they do a 30-minute setup, what a rotten SLB you are and make you come out after that.
I mean, you wouldn't like that.
I said, I wouldn't mind if they were telling the truth.
Bollinger was telling the truth about Ol Mahmood, but some people say, still, it was a little impolite to do this.
So the question, why'd Bollinger do it?
Well, clearly.
There are a lot of reasons.
One of them is money, obviously.
I mean, the guy was threatened with funding from alumni and boosters and others.
Plus, there was incredible criticism from the right.
I think what happened is this little guy, Bollinger, just wanted some attention for his school.
But wow, this will really set me up well with the liberal community being open and tolerant of this little terrorist coming in here because everybody knows that he hates Bush and we hate Bush, and so we'll have a little love fest.
And he didn't expect the reaction he got, so it was a CYA thing to go out there.
But who cares?
You know, who cares the motivation?
The bottom line is what Bollinger said, and it pulled the lid off of the jar that is housing the phoniness of the Democrat Party's belief about the war on terror.
Still, to me, that was the major import of what happened.
You screw what Ahmedinizad said.
What Bollinger said about him and about the Middle East and the United States position, that to me was profound.
This is a major university president.
He is one of the leading liberal leaders of academe.
And he just, he sold him out.
I bet he's getting some grief privately, you know, probably being applauded on the one hand.
What was the cocktail party like last night for him?
You know, drive-bys ran the tape and they missed the story.
They ran the tape and they missed the story of it.
It's, well, yeah, they may have genuinely missed it or they may have purposely ignored it.
Here is a question.
An unidentified student says, Iranian women are now denied basic human rights and your government has imposed draconian punishments, including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals.
Why are you doing these things?
In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country.
We don't have that in our country.
In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon.
I don't know who's told you that we have it.
And the students, who had previously applauded him, started laughing at him.
Little Mahmoud became a laughing stock at Columbia University.
You see, without Democrat talking points to follow, he really doesn't know what to say in this country.
He knows what to say about Hurricane Katrina.
He knows what to say about Abu Ghraib.
He knows what to say about secret European prisons.
He knows what to say about Club Gitmo because all he has to do is listen to Democrats say it.
But this question came out of the blue because the Democrats in this country, of course, never rip homosexuals.
So he was flying blind.
Now he had to do, yeah, well, I don't have that problem.
We don't have that phenomenon.
So he was off message.
He had no talking points furnished for him on that subject.
Thank you.
And I know.
Demo that each and every day here behind the golden EIB microphone.
All right.
Now the Mahmoud comment on gays.
The media is somewhat stymied.
And Matthews last night on Hardball attempted to explain what Mahmoud meant.
You know what he meant.
We all know what he meant.
There's no, you know, there's no province town.
There's no place you can go if you're openly gay and enjoy freedom.
There's no locals.
I mean, I was two years in Africa.
I didn't see any gay hangouts.
Yeah, you won't see gay hangouts anywhere in the world of Islam.
That's one of the reasons.
You ought to consider them a huge enemy out there, Chris.
A lot of them couldn't go to locales if there were locales because they're killed.
You know, they live in the shadows there.
And, well, Mr. Snerdley wants to know why does Matthews assume to know what he meant?
Well, this is, you know, it's a famous rhetorical trick.
If you start an answer to a question, well, as we all know, or as everybody knows, that's a very clever rhetorical trick.
Madeleine Albright uses it.
A lot of lib Democrats use it when answering policy, well, as everybody knows, it's decided.
Everybody doesn't know what he meant.
He might have actually meant, we don't have any here, because if we find them, we do something about it.
We don't tolerate it.
We don't have that phenomenon.
There's a tendency here to soft-sell this guy and not be honest about just the kind of regime he runs and the kind of terrorists that he is.
Here's an even better example.
Christian Amanpour was on last night with Anderson Cooper on CNN.
And they're wondering, why does he say these things?
Why does Mahmoud say these things?
For him today, to point blank say that they don't have homosexuals in Iran is just bizarre.
Why does he do this?
Why does he want to come here, make these kind of speeches, make these remarks about the Holocaust?
What is the audience he is trying to reach?
His own hardline audience, the ideologues who are still the fundamentalist, hardline adherents to the revolution of 28 years ago.
He believes that those who are angry with the United States because of the Iraq war conversely admire him because he stands up to the United States.
So here they are figuring out, why would he say these things?
Why would he come here and do this?
They had such high hopes that Mahmoud would come and give a stem winder, a barn burner, ripping George W. Bush to shreds.
And instead, he embarrassed liberals by saying they don't have any homosexuals in Iran.
Having homosexuals amongst you is the surest sign of enlightenment.
But not the Mahmoud.
Why would he come say that?
Why would he damage his case?
That's what they're wondering.
Not the first time this has happened on CNN.
We'll go back to August 1st of 2006, Anderson Cooper 360s in Northern Ireland, or Northern Israel, rather.
He's on the Israel-Lebanon border interviewing New Yorker magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg.
See if you remember this.
I think what's been lost in a lot of this coverage is just how anti-Semitic Hezbollah is in their rhetoric.
It's absolutely fascinating, Anderson.
The anti-Semitism, there's two things that are fascinating about it.
One is how embedded in the core of Hezbollah ideology anti-Semitism is.
And I don't mean anti-Israel thinking or anti-Zionism.
I mean frank anti-Semitism.
The other thing that's so interesting about it is how blunt they are and how frank they are about their anti-Semitism.
They don't hide it.
They don't try to mask it in any way.
They state very openly to you when you ask their exact feelings about Jews, which are quite extreme.
This guy is stunned that an Islamist terrorist group would A, be anti-Semitic and then be so open about it when they speak.
Why would they do this?
It's really interesting, Anderson.
Of course, so there's a precedent here for CNN to be curious about why totalitarians, terrorists and thugs, admit how mean they are and how bigoted and prejudiced they are.
Like, why would Mahmood say that there are no homosexuals in Iran?
I'll tell you why I think he said it.
I'm going to be flat out dead straight honest with you, folks.
You know it's not permitted in Islam.
It is not permitted.
That's the worst thing you can be, second only to being a woman in Islam.
With these guys' version of it anyway.
When he got that question, remember, I think even after Bollinger's introduction, he thought he would be able to control the event.
You have to understand the mindset.
This guy's coming here thinking he's a hero.
The Democrats won the election in 06.
His party, Bin Laden's party, this guy on 60 Minutes talks about how America sucks because of Katrina, because Abu Ghraib, because of Club Gitmo, because of secret European prisons.
He parrots what he hears from American Democrats.
He thinks he's on safe ground.
He does not have to come here and rip this country to shreds because the Democrat Party is doing it for him.
All he's got to do is echo what they say.
So he comes here.
The media is fawning all over his arrival.
You saw the motorcade that brought him in from JFK.
I mean, this little guy is getting all kinds of attention in this infidel country.
And he thinks he's got us wrapped around his little finger.
And part and parcel of that is the media fawning all over the guy.
Wherever he goes, there's thousands of them outside, hours in advance of his arrival.
And he's sitting there thinking, man, I got this one licked.
These people, what a bunch of dupes they are.
And he walks into Columbia yesterday, all confident as he can be.
Then here comes Bollinger's little broadside.
I get unnerved him a bit.
Well, once that was over, I think, and especially when he gets the applause in his opening remarks, ripping Bollinger for being impolite and rude, thinking, all right, these people love me.
And the Democrats won the election, and I'm just saying what they say.
So I'm thinking, and I'm in a liberal enclave here.
I mean, I'm at a university.
I'm at Columbia University.
They invited me.
He's got to be, he's on top of the world, folks.
Feeling his oats.
This is a high.
This is a huge rush, no pun intended.
And then all of a sudden out of blue comes this question on homosexuality.
And that's not in the talking points.
He hadn't heard the Democrats talk about that.
He doesn't quite know what to say.
So he comes out and he says, well, we don't have that problem.
We don't have that phenomenon.
There are no homosexuals.
What he was saying was, it isn't permitted.
He didn't say, when we discover them, we execute them.
He was just saying it isn't permitted.
Even when the audience laughed through his answer, he kept on with that line because I think one of the few times in the address yesterday, he was off script.
He kept talking about how women are God's greatest creatures.
We love women and we love this and we love that and we hate war and all these sorts of things.
And everybody here is eating it up.
Everything he says, everybody's just eating it up.
So he gets this question.
It's not on the talking points.
He hasn't prepped for it.
And so he's left to think, okay, they love me.
Tell them the truth.
We don't have that phenomenon in this country because they don't permit it.
And he gets laughed at and so forth and kept on with it.
I don't think it's any great mystery what he meant.
I don't think it's any mystery that he was off his talking points.
Look, I'm not exaggerating about this.
I am confident that Mahmoud Ahmadineizad goes to all these public appearances.
Now, the UN will be different because that's going to be an audience of his peers in there.
So he can launch in there.
But when he's talking to American citizens, he thinks he's talking to people that also hate George W. Bush and love Democrats that love him because that's all he's been saying, the same things that they're saying.
And he knows that his comments about wiping Israel off the map don't get reported widely here.
He knows that his comments about attacking the United States and denying the Holocaust don't get widely reported here.
He knows the American media is on his side.
So I don't think it's controversial at all to try to detect what he meant, nor is it a mystery why he said it.
He's proud of the fact they don't permit homosexuals in Iran.
He's proud of it, and that's what allowed him to continue on undaunted through the laughter of the students.
We will be back.
By the way, in none of the Iranian media that I've seen, I haven't seen by any means all of it, but that whole exchange has not been reported, either by this AP terrorist or the Iranian state-run news service.
There's no reference to what he said about homosexuals at all.
And they have a closed society over there, so you don't know how much of the actual presentation the Iranian people have actually seen.
Because I'm sure whatever they've seen has been carved up and edited with a fine-tooth cult.
Be right back and continue.
We just have three more sound bites on the Mahmoud Ahmadinezad story, two from him and one from Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington.
But first, people have been waiting patiently on the phones.
Let's grab one or two here.
John in Libertyville, Illinois.
Nice to have you, sir.
Welcome.
Hi, thanks for taking my call.
I think you have this exactly wrong.
I mean, I think that yesterday you spent the whole day telling us how liberals were sympathetic to Ahmadinejad.
And what you say is true.
He walks into this liberal institution.
Here's Bollinger, a big liberal, and all these liberal students, and they rake the guy over the coals.
You were totally wrong.
And I got to say, I think Mr. Bollinger did something that was so brave.
And at the risk of offending you, I think to engage somebody directly that you take political issue with and tell them just what you think takes a lot more courage than sitting in a radio studio calling people you take political issue with names, but never engaging them directly.
And I think Bollinger's a hero.
Really?
I think that what's really been revealed here is just how wrong you were yesterday.
It's always about me.
By the way, I never apologize.
But what I did say.
I know that.
What I said yesterday, I might have gotten pretty close.
I'd have to go back and listen.
Did I apologize yesterday?
I did.
I did say I was wrong about it.
I said I was pleasantly surprised.
And I gave this guy the biggest ad-a-boy yesterday afternoon, John, you have ever heard.
Are you still there, John?
Yeah, sure.
I did.
I gave this guy the biggest attaboy, and I was totally taken aback by then.
You know, started, okay, what might have caused this?
Motivation is not all that important, but I was still curious what caused this, funding, and I think the criticism and so forth.
By the way, the students were not universally raking him over the coals.
He got a lot of applause from these.
I mean, Ahmadinezad did.
Well, so did Bollinger during his introduction.
Bollinger was being applauded for the exclusiation that he gave.
Yes, he was.
But are you would you describe yourself as a liberal or a conservative?
You know what?
But I don't describe myself with either one of those labels.
No, I try to think of myself as being more independent than that.
More what?
More independent.
I try to think of myself as being more independent.
Independent than it.
Okay.
But I mean, is that what it's all about with you, is whether or not I'm a liberal or a conservative?
No, no, I was just curious because if you were a liberal, I was going to say it's got to be really tough for you to come here and criticize Ahmedineizad.
No, I don't.
You know what?
I share Mr. Bollinger's criticism of Ahmedinejad.
And I think that most liberals do.
And I think that's why what you said yesterday was exactly wrong.
I think that you didn't expect this.
What you said is true.
He did walk into a liberal institution surrounded by liberals.
And rather than being sympathetic with him, as you've always told us, you told us that they're sympathetic with him.
And rather than be sympathetic with him, they raped him over the call.
So they absolutely did him.
John, I have played soundbite after soundbite after soundbite today of drive-by media members sympathetic to Ahmedinezad.
I have played soundbite after soundbite of elected Democrats sounding just like him in attacking George W. Bush.
But I'm talking about Bollinger.
We have Bollinger's.
Well, facts.
I'm coming to Bollinger.
We haven't heard anything like what Bollinger said for four years from anybody like him anywhere in academe.
We haven't heard it from a professor.
We get Ward Churchill instead insulting us and calling us idiots and so forth for 9-11.
That's what we get out of the academy.
We don't get what Bollinger said yesterday.
Of course I was shocked and stunned.
I was in total disbelief here, almost hyperventilating, couldn't believe it.
Because the mask is off.
We now know that people like Bollinger actually do believe that there's a real threat going on out there and ought to be supporting George W. Bush rather than trying to support him.
And that's the import of what Bollinger said yesterday.
Thank you.
You're still up.
See, folks, another stirring example of when I say something about anything, there's nothing left to be said.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
All right, look, let's get this Bollinger stuff out there on the table once and for all.
The fact is, it was a boneheaded move to invite Ahmedinezad to speak.
It had nothing to do with free speech.
Bollinger was taking tons of heat.
City, state, federal politicians threatening to cut capital funds and loans and all arrests from Columbia University.
We don't know what the donors were telling him or his own board, but he clearly, he stepped in a, you know, you put a bag, pile of manure in front of a liberal and they will step in it.
And he did.
I think Bollinger knows that Ahmedinezad's the enemy and evil.
He knows it.
He knew it when he invited him, but he invited him anyway.
But I don't believe he denounced him because he knows he's the enemy or he would have denounced him all along for the last five years.
I believe his little invitation was backfiring with those he needs, the donors, the board, taxpayers, and so forth, and so voila.
That's what happened yesterday.
Now, everybody's going nuts over this NFL rule.
I've had a lot of people ask me about this.
I hardly ever get football questions of people because they want to stick to the issues.
But the NFL sent out a memo yesterday to all 32 teams with new restrictions on the cheerleaders.
Everybody said, well, what's the big deal?
Well, some home teams are having the cheerleaders work out scantily clad outside or near the visitors' locker room and the route that they had to take to get to the field.
The theory being that home teams were using the cheerleaders to distract the opposing team.
Now, some of you may be laughing.
It's, come on, these guys are wired for the game.
They're not noticing this stuff.
Let me tell you something.
I told you I went out to the Hawaii University home opener.
June Jones is a coach, and they played Northern Colorado, and we had to leave at halftime and a little bit before halftime, actually.
And the route that we took didn't take us anywhere in anybody's locker room, but the cheerleaders for the halftime show were in there working out, stretching, and all this, getting ready for the halftime show.
And I have to tell you, folks, it was a distraction.
And we stopped and we pretended not to be gazing, but we were.
And it was very fortunate that we didn't have to hit a commercial flight because we had the freedom and the luxury to stop.
Now, I can say if you put that outside the visitor's locker room before the game or the route that they take to the field, I mean, it's probably not going to provide much of a distraction for very long, but believe me, if it weren't a problem, the NFL wouldn't be there.
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