Rush Limbaugh Program - June 20, 2008, Friday, Hour #3

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June 20, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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June 20, 2008, Friday, Hour #3

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	You know, I've been having this vertigo problem, been telling Kit and Mike about recently.
	They always inquire, how's your vertigo?
	Well, after a couple of beers, it's okay.
	But other than that, I've been struggling with this thing.
	Kind of an inner ear disequilibrium, if you will.
	So finally, I got a little concerned.
	I went to the doctor, had an MRI done of the inside of my skull, and the doctors assured me when they looked inside my skull, they said they found absolutely nothing.
	I thought, you know, you didn't really have to put it that way.
	The perseverance, the fatigue, it's all here.
	Jason Lewis back.
	Third hour now up and running on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	Rush.
	We'll be back on Monday.
	In the meantime, check out RushLimbaugh.com.
	It's great to be here in the Northern Command behind the Golden EIB mic in the People's Republic of Minnesota.
	We've still got kind of a mini version of the Attila the Hun chair.
	We've got the Northern Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
	And I can still greet conversationalists all across the fruited plane.
	And when I say fruited plane, I'm talking about twice the chance of a date on Saturday night, if you know what I'm saying.
	1-800-282-2882, Rush may be gone, but it is Friday, and that still means only one thing.
	That's right.
	Your chance to converse, discuss, debates.
	Rank amateurs get to usually question the king.
	I am here, so we will have two rank amateurs talking to one another, not unlike the CBS newsroom.
	Hmm.
	I've been talking a little bit about a lot of things as always, environmentalism and the oil and ethanol and all of that, economics, Fannie Mae scandals.
	I just love these Democrat scandals.
	I mean, these guys getting sweetheart deals from countrywide financial and then blaming the mortgage industry for predatory lending.
	It's just quite remarkable, the chutzpah here, and now they're getting their comeuppance, and we shall see.
	You know, folks don't realize that the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so undercapitalized that if they had bank requirements, they would have to raise their capital, what, five, six, seven-fold, something along those lines.
	And what it means is if they go under, if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are holding all these damaged mortgages or if interest rates go up and they have a big paper loss, you and I might have to bail them out.
	And yet these are the people, these are the people that were buying the secondary mortgages or in the secondary market from countrywide and now giving sweetheart deals to people in the levers of power, one former CEO of Fannie Mae, who happened to work for Barack Obama.
	Now, that's what I call a campaign of change.
	It is a scandal that if it were a Republican scandal, it would be the equivalent of Enron 24-7 on the cable news channels.
	But because it's Barack, it's Chris Dodd, it's Kent Conrad, it's Fannie Mae, it's the usual inside the Beltway crowd.
	And we'll try to get to it towards the end of our news hour tonight if we can.
	You start to see the double standards.
	The war in Iraq, I got to say something.
	The president here apparently will sign this supplemental war funding bill.
	And he even said he was happy that Congress today, the president on the Oval Office patio, said Congress moved forward on a war funding bill that provides the vital resources to our men and women on the front lines in the war on terror.
	Now, if you remember the last time this was done, the Democrats divided it up into a couple of different pieces, add-on unemployment benefits, or there was some other bailout involved.
	So they could vote on that.
	And then they would rely on the Republicans to vote for the war funding.
	And they could go back home and say they didn't vote to increase the war funds in Iraq.
	That's not going to happen this time because even though, frankly, I don't like the bill, I'll be honest with you, the bill, the bill does, what's the total amount here?
	I don't have it right in front of me.
	But the bill essentially, the bipartisan deal cut this week, essentially will fund $163 billion for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through the president's term.
	He doesn't have to worry about that.
	But in order to get it done, we had to add 13 weeks to unemployment benefits.
	We had to have the Jim Webb light version of the GI bill, which contrary to what some say may still induce some military men and women to quit to take up this benefit.
	And the Democrats were not going to support this without it.
	And the president just decided, look, I'm going to have to live with this.
	And he took it.
	He wanted the funding more than anything else.
	But it is reminiscent of kind of the liberal left's view on war and on the military.
	They love to fund the troops as long as they're not fighting.
	You ever get that impression?
	You got Jim Webb running around saying we need a gold-plated GI bill.
	You got Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota running around saying, I'm going to support the troops.
	Of course, after they get home, we're going to have more VA hospitals.
	We're going to have better benefits, better GI bill.
	We're going to give them better mortgages.
	We're going to do everything.
	But I still want a timetable and I don't want to fund the war in Iraq.
	So they're more than happy to support the troops as long as the troops aren't fighting.
	And that's really the difference, if you think about this.
	I mean, if you think about the entire war on terrorism here, I mean, there really does seem to be a couple of different thresholds or objectives.
	I mean, we're not going to eliminate terrorism forever.
	There will always be people with grievances, no matter whether the president is Democrat, Republican.
	We can certainly eliminate or do our best to eliminate the conduits to terrorism, the funding, the people who enable it.
	And that will cut down on it drastically.
	So that's obviously an objective in the war on terror.
	But the president, and I've been somewhat ambivalent.
	I think some reasonable people can disagree about the president's strategy with regard to Iraq.
	I'm not afraid to admit that.
	I mean, the late William F. Buckley had concerns.
	George Will, I think, has expressed some concerns.
	A lot of good conservatives have.
	Now, that doesn't include liberals, however, who are all for going into Bosnia-Herzegovina or the Balkans without congressional approval, without UN approval.
	No problem there.
	Haiti, Somalia, no problem there.
	But all of a sudden, all of a sudden, they discovered the War Powers Act when President Bush gets in there in a much more serious effort.
	I don't think their criticisms, quite frankly, are valid.
	I think they are the pacifist party.
	They are the party of a Jimmy Carter foreign policy of weakness and vacillation.
	And if you weren't around in the 1970s, I can tell you the Soviets were on the march in Angola, Afghanistan, Central America, because they did not believe the guy in the White House was serious, didn't have the will to do something.
	But having said that, I think the president said, look, my goal in the war on terror is to shore up domestic security.
	I want to get to that and talk about how the Supreme Court has decided to undercut domestic security and to adopt a geopolitical strategy in the Middle East where we can transform perhaps a country that used to be our enemy, Iraq would be the natural one for a number of reasons, into a pro-Western Arab democracy.
	You know, just this week, Iraq has decided to let Western oil and natural gas companies come in and help them with infrastructure.
	They're not going into drill.
	They're going to help them with infrastructure, but that's a good sign.
	And the president's strategy, overall strategy, was simply this.
	My goal, I'm paraphrasing, I can't get inside the man's head, but I'm looking from afar as a commentator.
	My goal is to make certain the United States of America is not hit again, at least not under my watch.
	Now, by that standard, by that standard, he has been a success.
	By that standard, seven years hence, who would have thought not another major terrorist attack, not another terrorist attack in the United States.
	How else would you measure success?
	Now, the Democrat standard or the critic standard, the not sincere critics, we'll call them the insincere critics, their standard appears to be, yes, but we haven't had another major attack, but we've lost 4,000 troops.
	We've had casualties.
	And that is true.
	Which kind of betrays a standard that I don't understand.
	They seem to be saying their objective in the war on terror, their goals in the war on terror, is no further troop deaths.
	Our goal is to get the troops home and out of harm's way so we can have no more casualties, no more troop deaths.
	Well, that's a goal.
	You never send troops to begin with, which many of them are saying they wouldn't, certainly Barack Obama.
	Now, that's kind of an odd goal in the war on terror.
	If your goal is no more troop deaths, then I think you can safely vote for Barack.
	If your goal is to prevent further U.S. attacks, then I think you need to look elsewhere.
	Now, what do you think should be the goal?
	No more troop deaths or no further attacks.
	Well, as a commander-in-chief, his goal is to keep America safe.
	And it's been seven tumultuous years.
	Now, I think the other prong on this particular approach has been domestic security.
	And as you may have heard, apparently they have agreed on, White House negotiators and congressional negotiators have agreed on this surveillance bill.
	Let's just call this what it is, surveillance.
	It's spying.
	It's spying.
	And since the time of the founding of the country, since the time, I mean, for heaven's sakes, I believe it was George Washington who caught an accomplice of Alexander Hamilton and promptly hanged him.
	We've had military tribunals.
	We've had spying on our enemies in a time of war since day one.
	Only now has the Supreme Court of the United States discovered that thou shalt not spy in war and thou shalt not detain in war.
	This is bizarre to me.
	Regardless of your view on the war in Iraq, you may be the most vociferous Iraq critic out there.
	But this is about who shall fight in a time of war.
	This is about separation of powers.
	This is about Article III trumping Article II.
	I thought we had co-equal branches of government.
	And in a time of war, I will tell you, my friends, the president is the commander-in-chief.
	The Supreme Court does not go to war.
	Judges can't possibly go to war.
	We turn that over to the commander-in-chief, which is the main reason we have a federal government, to keep us safe from external threats.
	And yet the Supreme Court is saying no.
	The commander-in-chief's powers are somehow less than our powers in Article III, even though from Montesquieu to Hamilton, they said the judiciary would be the least influential in our lives.
	It's now the most influential.
	You know, before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, thank you, Mr. Carter.
	Do you know what we did in order to spy on the enemy in a war?
	We went out and got a wiretap.
	That's right.
	We need to spy on somebody?
	We got a wiretap.
	Why?
	Because if it was a national security measure, we're not assuming evidence, not collecting evidence for a criminal prosecution.
	If it's a national security measure, Article II, the president takes over.
	The Attorney General authorizes a wiretap and we spy.
	In order to believe that that is somehow wrong, and now we've got to go to a FISA court, even under this deal, we've got to go pleading to judges and asking them if we can have a wiretap on al-Qaeda communications.
	To assume that has got to be the law of the land assumes that for the first 230 years of our country, the first 200 years of our country anyway, we were behaving unconstitutionally.
	Or to assume we cannot detain unlawful enemy combatants captured on foreign soil is to assume that Abraham Lincoln was the greatest violator of the United States Constitution in this nation's history.
	I heard one vacuous commentator on, well, you know who he is.
	Well, maybe you don't.
	But his pap smear came back negative.
	And he was talking about why, if we don't have the writ of habeas corpus to these enemy combatants in Guantanamo, why the government can capture anybody, even citizens, and hold them indefinitely.
	Yeah.
	Can you say Confederate prisoners of war who were held indefinitely by Abraham Lincoln?
	Can you say the writ of habeas corpus suspended by Abraham Lincoln?
	Can you say the thousands of German prisoners housed in the U.S. during World War II?
	Can you say ex parte Kieran when the Supreme Court of the United States said, of course, you can detain saboteurs who are spies or enemy combatants in a time of war until hostilities are over?
	Folks, there is a difference between a crime and a war.
	And that is the fundamental dichotomy here.
	The liberal left wants to give these people due process rights.
	They want to give them a taxpayer-funded attorney.
	They want to give them discovery.
	They want to try them with the jury of their peers.
	That should be interesting.
	And the president says we're at war.
	And Congress passed the Military Authorization Act.
	Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act.
	Congress passed the Military Tribunal Act.
	The legislative and executive branch has done their constitutional duty.
	Supreme Court is now hell-bent on usurping it.
	1-800-282-2882, I'm Jason Lewis, and you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	Oh, Mike, this is kind of mellow.
	I'm getting kind of my groove on, my Rush groove.
	Excuse me, wrong number.
	1-800-282-2882, Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh Rush.
	We'll be back on Monday.
	In the meantime, Open Line Friday continues with Brandon in Memphis.
	You're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
	Hi.
	Hi, Jason.
	Thanks for working hard for us while Rush takes a little breather.
	You bet.
	Glad to do it.
	I hope everything's okay on Beale Street down on Mudd Island as well.
	I don't know if you're too familiar with the political climate here, but that's a whole other story.
	But on the national landscape, what are liberals' sick infatuation with fighting with one hand tied behind their back, and they want to put it on everybody?
	It's a, I mean, we can't be independently independent on our oil because they don't want to drill here, so that handicaps us.
	And now with this new Supreme Court legislation on detainees, I mean, once again, it's just handicapping our freedoms and our potentials for deterring the terrorist attacks.
	I really believe this is part of a cultural phenomenon that is a byproduct, if you will, of the 1960s.
	And that is because the Supreme Court, in order to come down with this decision that we could not suspend the great writ of habeas corpus for non-citizen enemy combatants captured on a foreign land, had to overturn themselves, going back to Eisentraeker versus Johnson, I believe it was, as recently as 1950.
	So you've seen this cultural evolution where the Blame America first crowd, as Gene Kirkpatrick used to say, has searched for a way to make certain American hegemony or American influence could not become too persuasive because we're the bad guys.
	And they found the courts would be a nice vehicle to do this.
	Let me read you something from that Supreme Court decision as recently as 1950 in Johnson v. Eisentrager.
	Quote, we are cited to no instance where a court in this or any other country where the writ of habeas corpus is known has issued it on behalf of an alien enemy who, at no relevant time and in no stage of his captivity, has been within its jurisdictional or the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.
	Nothing in the text of the Constitution extends such a right, nor does anything in our statutes, close quotes.
	So much for starry decisis.
	They overturned themselves in the name of handicapping America.
	And that's what the point you're getting to.
	Why are we doing this?
	I mean, when it comes to spying, the same precedent is true.
	Even more so, Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton both signed executive orders authorizing warrantless wiretaps or surveillance measures without any imprimatur from Congress.
	And this president had an imprimatur from Congress.
	It was the War Authorization Act.
	Think about this.
	Jamie Gorlick, the righteous one of 9-11 Commission fame, testified in 1994, quote, the case law supports that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes, close quote.
	So everybody, including Attorney General Griffin Bell from Jimmy Carter, when FISA was put into place, said, well, this doesn't take away the presidential prerogative of spying or warrantless wiretaps for national security reasons, the difference between a crime and a war.
	Now, I'm a civil libertarian.
	I don't want these people gathering evidence in a criminal prosecution without a warrant.
	But this isn't a criminal prosecution.
	So why is the court going through these contortions, overturning themselves?
	Why are politicians contradicting their predecessors?
	I believe it's a cultural phenomenon that says, look, we're the bad guys.
	And that's the bottom line.
	We are what's wrong with the world.
	And therefore, the goal of the left in America is to limit the United States militarily, legally, the commander-in-chief powers.
	You know, when I come back, I want to get to some more calls, but I've got a stunning, stunning quote from this monumental Supreme Court case in 1942 called Ex Parte Kieran, where we caught some German saboteurs on our shores, one of whom was a citizen.
	And I'll tell you what Roosevelt did when we come back.
	Hey, that's Minnesota's Mr. Wright to you.
	Ah, I don't care.
	Mr. Wright's just fine.
	1-800-282-2882.
	Back to the phones we go in beautiful Sioux Falls, Dallas.
	Thanks for waiting.
	You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	Hi.
	Hey, Jesse Four Decaf Dittos, Jason.
	I'm a lifetime conservative.
	However, I'm not totally dead set against habeas corpus promises for Gitmo detainees.
	You know what I've been drinking for the last four years, or almost four years?
	What?
	Decaf.
	Decaf.
	So we disagree on everything.
	Well, about 98.9% of the time will agree.
	There is an instance in which I do that.
	I, as an American citizen, have the promise of habeas corpus.
	I also have the premise of paying taxes on everything I earn, own, buy, or sell.
	So if we take all these detainees, find out what they bought, sold, earned, and in their lifetime, and apply IRS penalties, late fees, and taxes, then I'd be fine with them having habeas corpus if they have any money left.
	Yeah, I was going to say that chance there.
	We'll give them a taxpayer-funded attorney sooner than we'll do that.
	Yeah.
	But that would be one way to knock out the deficit, wouldn't it?
	Well, in all seriousness, it depends on your view of the Constitution's reach, to be perfectly honest.
	There are some, usually on the left, but not always.
	Some who believe that the Constitution applies to anybody in the world who deals with the United States government.
	And others believe it's primarily there to protect United States citizens.
	I happen to skew towards the latter.
	I mean, you get into the debate about immigration, too, on this.
	Do immigrants have constitutional rights?
	Well, they have some, but clearly they don't have all because you don't deport citizens, but you can deport an immigrant, illegal immigrant.
	So I think you raise an interesting question.
	I would simply say, whom do you think the Constitution entrusts to fight a war?
	The Supreme Court or the legislature and the executive?
	And even if they're in fear of executive power, the imperial presidency, you've got to remember that twice the Congress with the Detainee Treatment Act in December of 2005 stating that no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear a writ of habeas corpus filed on behalf of an alien detained by the DOT at Guantanamo Bay and the Military Tribunal Commission Act of 2006.
	In both of those, the legislature and the president said, this is how we're going to do it.
	We passed the law.
	We enacted laws by the will of the people.
	Now, who says Article 3 that the judiciary can come in there and trump the other two constitutional provisions?
	I mean, that is my biggest concern here.
	Now, the usual argument, and I think it's a bit facile, is, well, then, does that mean they could detain you, Dallas, if they think you're an enemy spy?
	And the answer, quite frankly, is if we're at a time of war, and let us all remember that Congress had already authorized the president to, quote, use all necessary and appropriate force in the war on terror against those who plan these attacks.
	Yes.
	Now, what's to happen?
	We're going to lock up our own people.
	Again, I would mention FDR.
	I'd mention Abraham Lincoln.
	I'd mention a few other presidents.
	But the point is, what happens if you're unjustly detained?
	The argument that you'll never have a day in court is not true.
	This case that came down last week, mandating the writ, had a day in court.
	Anybody can bring an action.
	Whether the court will hear it is another thing.
	But somebody brought an action in the name of these detainees.
	So the idea that you wouldn't have a day in court if the government was allowed to detain people until the end of hostilities simply isn't true.
	But more importantly than that, the final analysis, whether we should fight a war, resides with the executive and the legislative branch.
	And if you don't like it, the ballot box.
	That ought to determine it more than the court.
	Kurt in Kennewick, Washington, you are next.
	Hi.
	Hi, how are you doing, Jason?
	Fine, sir.
	Hey, I'm calling here from the great city of Eastern Washington.
	And I'm calling about the compact fluorescent issue you were discussing earlier.
	I work in the lighting industry, have for the last seven years now.
	And, you know, these compact fluorescents that keep pushing on us, in the amount of money that it takes you to outfit your house with these things, you are not saving that much money over the long term on your power bill.
	Your power bill each month of that, maybe 5% of it is your actual lighting bill.
	The bulk of your power is your refrigerator, your range, your water heater, the extra fridge or freezer in your garage, things like that.
	When you take and outfit your house with these things, you're spending $50 or so to outfit these things in your house.
	And if you pay $100 in power each month, you're saving maybe half of that of the 5% in your lighting.
	So you're saving, what, $2.50 a month, maybe $5 on a big house for electrical.
	And you're paying 10 times more for those bulbs than you are standard bulb.
	I sell bulbs in my lighting showroom, two for 60 cents.
	This is the classic alternative energy source con game, whether it's a hybrid or whether it's solar with a subsidy.
	The upfront costs, I don't care what you save on energy conservation members or energy efficiency, it will take you so long to amortize that that it's hardly worth it.
	Exactly.
	And what's happening here in our area is our local PUD is offering the local construction industry big benefits back if they will convert their homes, new construction to at least half of the energy efficiency.
	And so what's happening in the great state of California is California is saying that, okay, they're the ones that started all this.
	So if you're going to sell these fixtures in our state, you've got to put these in.
	Well, now they realize that when I buy a house like that, I can take out that ugly compact fluorescent and put in whatever bulb I want.
	Now they're making it so that that same fixture that I used to buy for $100 now has to come with ballasts in it for each fixture so that it will only take compact fluorescent fixtures.
	So a fixture that I used to be able to buy from the manufacturer, say, for $100, now I'm going to spend $175 or $200 for.
	And it's the exact same fixture, the exact same look for the customer, but it's jacking the price up.
	And who's getting the rebate is the builder.
	They're not passing those on to their buyers.
	Call it California elitism.
	I mean, this is the same state that basically put a moratorium on power plants and then wondered why they had to rely on the energy markets to buy all their power and got in trouble over that.
	This is the same state that says, no drilling here, but by God, we want the oil.
	We're going to consume it.
	We just want other people to go get it.
	We don't want to be bothered.
	I mean, this is really kind of a California elitism.
	Not really California, the good folks out there, but certainly their government, one of the most elite.
	Look, your overall premise is absolutely correct.
	If these things were the best deal since sliced bread, you wouldn't need the government to mandate them, would you?
	Exactly.
	And because what's happening now is it used to be when they first came out, you know, good companies made them, GE, Sylvania.
	They were good quality bulbs, and you did pay a premium for them.
	But now what's happening is they're being knocked off by every Chinese factory in the world or overseas market.
	And those things don't last.
	As I understand it, they do not do well at all during cold weather, and they've got to warm up.
	So if you've got a burglar in your house, don't count on this baby to come right on.
	Exactly.
	They do take a long time to warm up and to get to the color that you want.
	And they just look horrible.
	So that's an aesthetic issue.
	This is about choice.
	This is about choice, Kurt.
	I mean, that's all this is about.
	Do we live in a country that allows us, for heaven's sakes, think of where we are in 2008.
	We now had the federal behemoth, the federal government of the United States dictating under the name of environmental zealotry what kind of light bulbs I can put in my house.
	Does that sound like a free country to you?
	Oh, absolutely not.
	And then you had the president pass this bill last year, whatever it was, the Energy Act where they're going to ban the incandescent light bulbs by, what is it, 2012 or something?
	Oh, that's what we're talking about.
	That's exactly what we're talking about.
	That was the energy bill of 2007.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And they've already gone so far as in a ceiling fan now.
	You can't use anything with more than a candelabra base, which is I'm telling you.
	And the proponents, which are the manufacturers primarily, and the environmentalists, are saying, oh, don't worry about the mercury.
	Well, then, drop it in their house.
	Drop it in their business.
	Drop it in the halls of Congress.
	Drop it in the newsroom and watch the people scatter and watch the hazmet team come out.
	There's no problem with these.
	You won't need to follow the EPA requirements or the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
	You ought to see what it takes to clean these up, as I mentioned earlier.
	Kurt, great call.
	I'm glad you did.
	We'll take a short pause, come back with more Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
	Open Line Friday continues.
	We're wrapping things up.
	One more segment or two to go here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	Rush will be back on Monday.
	Jason Lewis, Minnesota's Mr. Wright.
	The great opportunity to fill in for him.
	Thanks to Mike and Kit back in New York, Jess and Brendan here in the Twin Cities for helping us out today.
	As always, one more time to the phones.
	Let's try Lincoln, Nebraska.
	June, thanks for waiting on the EIB.
	Hi, Jason.
	You're okay, and I'm okay.
	I'd like to know the status of the Michelle Bachman light bulb freedom of choice bill that you mentioned in early April.
	How is the status?
	And why did the president sign?
	Oh, that's a different question.
	Forget that.
	How is that bill doing?
	You are an observant listener.
	If that's possible, it's kind of a contradiction, isn't it?
	The Bachmann Freedom of Choice Bill has been effectively stifled by the Dems.
	We're going to need leadership on this.
	Leadership on this.
	I mean, I'm not saying it will never see the light of day, but I think, pardon the pun, it won't see the light of day.
	I think you're going to need a stunt, as I mentioned earlier.
	I think you're going to need some leadership at the top.
	I really think, as you do, June, forget about the real dangers of mercury.
	The symbolism here, you're either for a free country or you're not.
	And I think the symbolism of the federal government, no less, reaching down into Lincoln, Nebraska, and telling you what kind of light bulbs you have to use is a pretty good contrast between those who believe in liberty and those who don't.
	But we'll keep our fingers crossed.
	Would it do any good to call up Ms. Bachman?
	Call up the president, maybe?
	Yes.
	Call up any politician at the federal level you can and say you can't believe they're doing this.
	You know, you want to talk about a black market.
	There's going to be a black market for incandescent bulbs if 2012 comes around and they're banned because I'm not going to put these things in my house.
	Which is not to say, June, I'm not going to put them in the garage or use them in the long tubes, maybe underneath a bar cabinet or whatever.
	But out of principle, I'm not going to be dictated what to do.
	And I don't want the rest of them as regular bulbs on a table lamp, period.
	And what about refrigerator lights and the TV set?
	Yeah.
	Does that have anything to do with this bill?
	Well, I'm sure the bill has rules carved out for it or exceptions carved out for it, but the law of unintended consequences will apply there too.
	But again, I just think that we now have the federal government in the name of the environment telling us we've got to import mercury into our homes.
	This is the insanity of it all.
	June, thanks for calling.
	Have a great day in Lincoln, Miami, Florida.
	Rod, you are next on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
	Hey, Jason, good to talk to you.
	I'm one of them crazy moderates that kind of falls in between the conservatives and liberals.
	And I just got a few ideas on big oil and kind of what's going on with our country with that.
	I don't think either side has it right.
	The Democrats definitely don't have it right because if you start raising taxes on the oil companies, all that's going to do is raise the prices because they're going to want to make up the difference.
	But by the same rationale, if we let them drill, that does nothing to wean us from oil at all.
	I think now is a great time to start doing those alternative energies.
	Maybe ethanol is not the greatest one.
	I don't agree with ethanol.
	I don't even agree with hydrogen, but I don't see what's so wrong with solar, wind, and, heck, electric cars.
	We had electric cars back in 1999 to 2000.
	Where are you going to get the power?
	Where are you going to get the power for electric cars?
	We are sitting on the largest coal reserve in the world.
	Okay, so you're forcing the Saudis of coal.
	All right, fair enough.
	This is the right thing.
	The extreme liberals are wrong.
	Oh, we can't do this.
	It can't have it one way or the other.
	We have to find a middle ground.
	Well, I think you're right, and I think you're wrong.
	I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said, but I think your fundamental premise that we've got to wean ourselves from carbon, from fossil fuels, is fundamentally flawed.
	The market will get for us the most efficient fuel available.
	Now, if in fact the peak oil concept, which I don't adhere to, but comes to fruition and we're running, we're truly running out.
	I mean, we've got more oil and gas in the United States in the area we control than we do probably in the Middle East.
	So we're not running out.
	But if that day happened, the market would find alternatives.
	I mean, why is it we have to subsidize or mandate the alternatives?
	There's a reason for that, Rod.
	The reason is the market is not going to develop them because they're cost inefficient.
	And that's all I'm saying on this particular.
	I mean, if, in fact, these things are a good idea, they will come to the marketplace.
	And I'm not against them.
	I am against taxing oil to subsidize something that clearly consumers don't want.
	And by the way, none of these has worked.
	Ethanol, we've been subsidizing solar and wind for decades.
	None of that has brought the price of energy down.
	It's been a failed, demonstrably failed experiment.
	Rod, to FairPoints, though, I'm glad you called, buddy.
	Have a great day down there in Torrance, California.
	Jim, let's get you in before the next break.
	Go ahead, sir.
	Okay, how you doing?
	Fine.
	God bless you guys.
	I want to tell you guys that about two weeks ago, I filled up my car, cost me about $72.
	And on my way home, I heard a Democrat saying they wanted to raise the taxes on gasoline because they wanted to cut down CO2 emissions.
	So I came home and started investigating it.
	And what I found out is that in the air today of the earth, nitrogen is 78.08%.
	Oxygen is 20.95%.
	Aragon is 0.93%.
	And here's carbon dioxide at 0.36%.
	It's 36 one-hundredths of 1%.
	So what's the problem?
	That's why they say even if the levels keep going up, they've lost their force by now.
	There's simply not enough there.
	It's not exponential.
	So any of the impacts are weaning, which is why most people, you know, privately and certainly we publicly state we haven't warmed in 10 years.
	The last couple of years, we've actually cooled.
	That's right.
	The Roma has cooled by two-tenths of a degree in the last 10 years.
	Got to go.
	Thanks for the call.
	We'll come back and wrap it up on the Rush Limbaugh program right after this.
	All right, wrapping things up on the Rush Limbaugh program for this Open Line Friday, Rush returns on Monday.
	Hallelujah.
	I'm Jason Lewis.
	As promised, here's the decision, 1942, ex parte Kieran, United States Supreme Court on the writ of habeas corpus for captured combatants.
	The court holds that the charges preferred against petitioners on which they are being tried by a military commission appointed by the order of the presidents allege an offense or offenses which the president is authorized to order tried before a military commission.
	The petitioners are held in lawful custody.
	The commission was lawfully constituted for trial before the military commission.
	They have not showed cause for being discharged by writ of habeas corpus.
	The motions for leave to file petitions for the writs of habeas corpus are therefore denied.
	Denied.
	That was 1942 when the Supreme Court of the United States said, look, the president signed an order for military commissions.
	That order is lawful.
	He is then holding these petitioners.
	They were German saboteurs, one of whom I believe was a citizen in Florida and up in New York, holding them against their will, detaining them.
	And the Supreme Court said the president, as commander-in-chief, may detain them for violations of the law of war, sabotage, terrorism in World War II in a time of war.
	My, how we have changed, and not necessarily for the good.

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