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Dec. 24, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:14
December 24, 2008, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
I don't know about you.
I'm not speaking for everybody, but all I want for Christmas is what everybody else is getting.
You know, a federal bailout.
Yeah, how'd that work out?
Hi, everybody, and Merry Christmas 2008 from the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's anchorman, filling in for the big guy, America's anchorman.
El Rushbo taking a few well-deserved days off over the holidays.
A veritable calvicade of substitute hosts coming in.
Walter Williams returns next week.
I can hardly wait for that.
I've got Mark Stein.
I'll be in a few days next week.
So we'll hold the fort down.
We'll play Santa for a while until the big guy returns come 2009.
You know, this Carolyn Kennedy thing is starting to get very, very interesting.
Why, I read in the New York Times.
Oh, I'm the one.
I'm not saying their subscription list is going down, but when you say you read in the New York Times these days, it may just be a couple of you.
Apparently, Caroline is getting some blowback from some longtime Democrats in New York about taking Hillary Clinton's Senate seat.
Her ties to Mayor Bloomberg are of concern.
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm a little confused by this.
Hasn't Mayor Bloomberg been a longtime Democrat?
He certainly governed like one.
What's the problem here, gang?
Sheldon Silver, an assembly speaker, the Assembly Speaker up in Albany, became the most senior elected official, according to the Times, in New York to say that Mr. Patterson, the governor, should not select Caroline Kennedy to the Senate seat.
Politics is getting kind of weird here.
You know, you think you've got Barack Obama, the president-elect, Caroline Kennedy could be a senator, and Al Franken now ahead in Minnesota.
The Democrats do have a nice mantra here.
Think about it for a moment.
Obama, Kennedy, Franken, don't waste nine months of experience.
If you just put it in those terms, I don't want to ever hear another Democrat ever talk about experience because now we know that politics is not rocket science.
You don't have to have any experience.
A couple of years in the Illinois State House, a couple of Tate meetings with the governor.
No, no, that was the chief of staff.
More on that in a second.
A couple of years in the Illinois State House, a celebrity as Caroline Kennedy is.
And of course, Al Franken.
I'm still trying to figure out what he's done.
Let's see.
That'll come to mind.
These guys, I'm just telling you, a lot of skeptics of career politicians have long said, look, it's not rocket science.
We've got too many career politicians.
This ought to be public service.
We need businessmen.
We need real-life folks in there.
It is not, you know, you don't have to be Einstein to be a member of Congress.
In fact, you've got to believe that Al Franken's mom told him at one point, you know, anybody can grow up to be senator.
And certainly he believes that now because he just may be.
Politics is getting ugly.
You want to know what the next few years is going to be like with liberal Democrat hegemony influence all over this country?
Take a look at Chicago.
Take a look at Minnesota.
This is the, and you can take a look at, quite frankly, The incoming administration and some of the lapses that they've already had.
This is going to get very, very ugly.
It already is in Chicago.
How odd is it that we wait to get Gregory Craig's report?
By the way, the White House counsel for Barack Obama, does that name sound familiar, Gregory B. Craig?
Can you say impeachment?
The White House counsels, kind of the retread Clinton team, once again, as everybody knows by now, waited until December 23rd, late in the afternoon, or certainly in the afternoon, you know, the Christmas holiday season started, to release this report that says, well, you know, I guess we did have a few meetings with Governor Blagojevich of Illinois, of vis-a-vis who's going to fill the Senate seat in that great state.
In fact, how many did now the reports say that Rah Emmanuel had?
Yeah, I think he had five?
Five meetings or something like that.
I'll get to the bottom of this.
Why was it released December 23rd?
Well, the Barack Obama transition team said, well, it was released because that's what the prosecutor wanted us to do.
They wanted us to wait.
Really?
This is the same prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, that went after Scooter Libby, even though he knew the real leaker was over in state.
This is the same prosecutor that many are saying cut short his investigation so Bloigovich could be the sacrificial lamb.
Let's be honest about this.
In the days after Barack Obama's election as president, Rah Emmanuel, the top advisor and now incoming White House chief of staff, never let a crisis go to waste, suggested to the governor that Obama's Senate seat should be filled by the Obama confidant, Valerie Jarrett.
Oh, really?
I got the impression from all those Obama press conferences that really there was nothing to this.
We weren't involved at all on this.
Certainly I didn't talk to him, as the president-elect said, and there's no evidence in this report or elsewhere that Obama talked to anybody.
But the impression you got was that the campaign and the whole Obama team had distanced themselves from the beleaguered governor.
O contrary, Emmanuel has had as many as six conversations, not five, but six with the governor's office about the Senate vacancy.
Now, while Obama had none, you don't think Rahm and Barack were talking just a tad?
This is very, very strange.
The Valerie Jarrett, this is a longtime friend of Obama, who now is going to the White House as senior advisor, also met apparently three days after the election.
Again, this is liberal.
You know, power corrupts politics.
Get ready for it, gang.
Also met with the sainted Service Employees International Union.
Andy Stern must be proud.
The Illinois chapter of the Service Employees International Union met with Valerie Jarrett, and they were talking about the Senate seat and the governor's ambitions to serve in the Obama administration as Secretary of HHS.
Blagojevich, as you know, was captured on tape telling an unnamed advisor he was willing to trade the appointment for a cabinet post.
Now, put all of this together.
You know, what Gregory Craig is saying is, well, Mrs. Jarrett or Ms. Jarrett did not understand the conversation to suggest that the governor wanted the cabinet seat as a quid pro quo for selecting any specific candidate to be the president-elect's replacement.
So you've got Rah Emmanuel, Valerie Jarrett, about as close to Barack Obama as you can get, meeting with the governor, meeting with the Service Employees International Union, deciding who's going to be the HHS secretary, apparently, and who's going to fill the Senate seat.
But trust me, this was on the up and up.
This is the way we do things in Chicago, the way we do things in Illinois, you know, straight, clean, honest politics.
You've got to be kidding me.
No wonder this thing wasn't released till December 23rd.
Now, the New York Times in their infinite buffoonery said, well, there's really nothing illegal here in their editorial, but don't worry, go do your shopping.
We'll keep an eye on things so you don't have to.
That's comforting.
That's just what I need this Christmas.
Now, reporters have been frustrated that very little information has been coming out of the Obama camp.
And now I think we can see why.
But it all comes back to this suspicion, quite frankly, and we talked about this the last time I was filling in for El Rushbo, that something smells to high heaven here.
That Blagojevich, while certainly no saint and certainly culpable, may have been a sacrificial lamb.
I mean, it reminds me of the whole Watergate thing.
No one can condone, I shouldn't put it that way.
Nixon clearly has actually put up with David Frost.
I gave him the sword and they stuck it in with relish.
He clearly gave his enemies enough ammunition.
Well, there was never any evidence that Nixon knew about the break-in, never any evidence that he coordinated the break-in.
In fact, some evidence to the contrary.
But sometimes the cover-up, as they say, is worse than the crime.
But to argue, and this is something I've never been able to get over in my adult life, that Richard Nixon was somehow much worse, integrity-wise, than Lyndon Baines Johnson defies incredulity.
I mean, this is a stretch.
Anybody remember the Bobby Baker scandal?
Anybody remember the Gulf of Tonkin talking about getting this into a war that Congress did not debate?
I mean, Johnson and pressuring broadcasters, you name it, but Nixon was the corrupt president.
Well, this is a little bit of a parallel here.
Blagojevich is no saint, but why did Fitzgerald cut short the investigation and get this out into the public domain pronto?
Why did Barack's transition team say, well, we got to wait until the prosecutor, the prosecutor asked us to wait until December 23rd to release this information?
Had to wait.
It was his request.
You didn't have to wait.
They could have released it day one if they wanted to, but they were working with the prosecutor, the U.S. Attorney, Mr. Fitzgerald.
You know, there are a number of criminal defense attorneys that say the Blagojevich case is not a slam dunk.
That the FBI edited portions of the conversations don't necessarily add up to criminal behavior.
Every politician keeps accounts.
They horse trade.
And typically, prosecutors wait to obtain a grand jury indictment before making an arrest.
Now, Fitzgerald and company say they moved in part to thwart Governor Blagojevich from completing the crimes.
Oh, really?
With whom?
Cutting an actual deal with someone in a high position or soon-to-be high position?
Why didn't you wait?
Keep the tapes rolling.
Let's see if money changes hands.
And the latest suspicious development is federal prosecutors are telling the impeachment panel in the Illinois legislature to hold off on their impeachment case because they don't want to reveal any information that could be damaging to the criminal case.
So we're going to thwart the impeachment because it might reveal other tentacles, perhaps.
We're not going to release this transition report until the day before Christmas Eve.
The prosecutor cuts short the investigation to get it out there in the public early.
I wonder why people are suspicious of the whole Chicago machine and, quite frankly, of this U.S. attorney who went after Scooter Libby, who deserves, quite frankly, a pardon from the President of the United States.
Now, in Minnesota, real quick here, Al Franken is now in the league.
If you want something scary for next Halloween, just say the words, Senator Franken.
He now has been projected to lead by about 47, 48 votes, I believe.
But you've got to take a look at the shenanigans going on up in the North Star state.
Almost every decision has accrued to Franken.
You know, how is it that this is going to be the most historic turnaround in Minnesota recount history, more than likely?
Coleman wins, the Republican incumbent.
He wins on November 4th by 725 votes.
That is steadily whittled down when ballots are miraculously discovered a couple of days after the election, all redounding to Al Franken.
Now, what is the statistical probability of finding ballots, most of whom are for Franken?
There was a precinct over in Maplewood, which is a suburb of the Twin Cities, that found ballots where Franken was picking up a larger percentage of the newfound votes after the election than he got on Election Day in that precinct.
This is the fundamental suspicion in Minnesota.
And it's quite simply this.
The statistical probability of what is happening here is very, very odd indeed.
And there have been some very questionable calls by the state's canvassing board made up of four judges, two Supreme Court members, and Uber Acorn ally, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.
For instance, there's a case of counting duplicate ballots that now is going to court because the Coleman campaign says, look, if somebody shows up and they've got a defective ballot and it won't run through the machine, you mark that thing defective, you give them a new ballot, mark that duplicate, run that through, and then the original, which is defective, goes in a pile.
Well, what happened is, according to the Coleman campaign with some great evidence, is the original ballot that was defective was not marked the original duplicate.
And so when the recount occurred after November 4th, the ballots, obviously, that went through the machine were counted.
And now they discovered new votes for Al Franken, except they were the original ballot of the duplicate ballot.
That's called double counting.
Double counting.
And the canvassing board's just saying, well, you know, you just got to count what you got to count.
So the Coleman campaign went to the Supreme Court yesterday and said, we can't count this stuff.
This thing's going to end up in court.
There's not going to be a second senator from Minnesota on January 6th.
And there may be a showdown between the Minnesota governor, who ostensibly has vacancy appointment powers, although the governor is backing off now and saying, well, that's only for a permanent vacancy.
And Harry Reid, who has said, if the governor appoints a senator from Minnesota, you know, Minnesotans running their own state, Harry Reid will overrule that and seat their own liberal.
Politics, as I say, getting awfully ugly for a new, more open, transparent group of individuals coming to power, i.e. liberal Democrats.
We told you.
1-800-282-2882 on this Christmas Eve special of the Russian Baugh Program with me, Jason Lewis on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
We are back this Christmas Eve special on the Russian Limbaugh Program.
Greetings, Conversationalists, across the fruited plain.
I am Jason Lewis, Talon on loan from Rush.
Today, we'll have a Calvocade of fill-ins the next week and a half while Rush takes a well-deserved break.
So stay tuned right here to the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, 1-800-282-2882.
Now, just to get you up to date once more on what's going on in Minnesota, we've gone over the Chicago shenanigans.
The machinations in Minnesota are apparently getting just as bad.
There's kind of a competition, I guess.
You've got to understand what's happened here.
Most recounts, certainly in this state, and most recounts in most places, don't end up with an altered result.
Most recounts end up one way or another confirming what has happened.
That's why this is such an anomaly.
That's why eyebrows are raised here.
In almost every ruling in almost every precinct where new votes have been found, the benefit has gone to Franken.
Now, I'm not going to sit here and allege that there was deliberate voter fraud going on.
There's no evidence of that.
I'm not going to allege that the canvassing board are a bunch of Franken partisans, although certainly the Secretary of State is just to the left of Ted Kennedy.
But there have been suspicious rulings, and that is fair game, quite frankly.
And it revolves around a number of issues.
Primarily, the DFLer, that's the Democrat Farm Labor Party in Minnesota.
Couldn't make it simple up here.
It just got to be the Democrats.
The Democrats, Mr. Franken, is picking up a larger percentage of found new votes after Election Day than the percentage he won in that precinct on November 4th.
And that gets to the statistical improbabilities that people like Dr. John Lott have been running on this.
They're finding it very statistically odd that this could happen.
In fact, the changes for Franken in the Senate race, in many cases, are larger than the changes in all the other races combined.
You're finding precincts where the only mistake, the only typo that was made, or the only ballots that were found after the fact, oh, they were just for the Senate race, Al Franken.
You mean there weren't any mistakes?
If you've got a mistake-prone precinct for Barack Obama getting more votes or less?
No, no, it just happened to be Al Franken.
He won 100 up in the Iron Range, more than 100 up in the Iron Range, a couple of hundred up on the Iron Range, which is the 8th congressional district.
It makes Moscow look liberated.
The potentate of pork, James Oberstar, the House Transportation Chairman, represents that district, and it is about as left-wing, reliably left-wing.
Republicans are an endangered species in the Iron Range, and that's where a lot of the votes are coming from.
That's one issue.
I'll give you another issue.
In a Minneapolis precinct, they came up 133 votes short in the recount.
So they cast 133 votes on November 4th.
When they're recounting the physical ballots, that's what recounts do, an administrative recount, you have to find the physical ballot.
Otherwise, what went through the machine?
Well, they couldn't find them.
So the machine tallied 133 votes extra.
When they do the recount, they don't find 133 ballots.
They're 133 short.
Well, naturally, you ought to say, well, that's the purpose of a recount.
If we're short on those ballots, we're going to count the recount vote.
Oh, no.
But what's happening here is they're getting ready to count the machine vote, even though they can't find the original ballots.
That particular decision is going for Franken.
You've got the situation of the duplicate ballots I just explained that's headed for court up here, where you've got a defective ballot.
It might be an absentee.
It could even be a vote on November 4th, but more than likely an absentee.
It comes folded.
It's defective.
So they make up a duplicate ballot.
Well, you don't want to vote, you know, count the votes twice.
So the duplicate ballot, which is clean, runs through the machine.
The other one, which is set aside but kept, needs to be marked original duplicate.
If it isn't marked, then it's counted in the recount and added to the duplicate ballot in the machine.
And believe it or not, Coleman cannot get, cannot get the canvassing board or just about anybody to do the obvious and say, well, no, those aren't going to count.
And then, of course, you've got the absentee ballots, which Franken won on with the canvassing board, where absentees traditionally, the legal precedent here is if you want to challenge absentees that were rejected because they came in late, you file a lawsuit.
Not so this time.
The canvassing board is directing those folks to count them by January 5th.
Well, that's not going to happen.
And we're not going to have a second senator from Minnesota.
Back behind the Golden EIB Mike on this Christmas Eve, I am Jason Lewis with Talent on Loan from El Rush Bow, wishing all of you a very Merry Christmas 2008.
1-800-282-2882.
Without further delay to the phones we go.
First up in St. Cloud, Minnesota, let's go to Mike.
You are on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi, Mike.
How are you?
Good.
How are you doing, Jason?
Fine.
All right.
Merry Christmas.
I was wondering if ...
I heard on the tapes of Blagovich there, and he had mentioned that the Barack Obama campaign would give him nothing for the seat but appreciation.
And how would he know that if they had never discussed this before?
Yes, that's exactly right.
Something a number of us have raised in the past.
It's a great point.
Why is he calling them dropping the F-bomb every other sentence to describe the president-elect and his team if they haven't been meeting?
Well, they had been meeting.
Rahm Emmanuel met six times with them.
Are you telling me that Ram Emmanuel, the incoming chief of staff, meets with Blagojevich and doesn't talk to Barack Obama about it?
Exactly.
So this lends to the suspicion that, okay, let's play this thing out.
Let's get a grand jury indictment.
Let's wait for the evidence.
Let's wait for something actually changing hands, whether it's Jesse Jackson Jr., remember, candidate five, which, you know, purportedly was Jesse Jackson Jr., according to Blagojevich, was ready to pay up, pay to play.
Well, why don't you wait until the money changes hands?
Why don't you wait with further conversations with the transition team?
What's the rush to judgment here?
You follow my drift?
Exactly.
Yeah, that's what I was wondering.
Why cut it off short?
I mean, that's, you know, I mean, there's so many things you could have got out of it later and found out, and then they cut it short.
And not only that, you've got Valerie Jarrett.
This was supposedly the choice of many in the Obama team to be the Senate selection.
She is meeting with the Service Employees International Union, and they're talking about getting Blagojevich as Secretary of Health and Human Services in a quid pro quo for some sort of favor for somebody else.
This was, I think, had to do with the nonprofit pay-to-play or something.
But regardless, the point is you've got this trifecta going on where Jarrett and the Service Employees International Union and somebody from the governor's office are all meeting, literally divvying up.
This is like Yalta when they're divvying up Eastern Europe for crying out loud.
They're divvying up the politics of Illinois and the country.
It really is quite amazing, and there's a lot of suspicion out there over this as well.
There should.
Thanks for checking in.
In San Diego, John, you are on the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hello, Jason.
How are you doing?
Could not be better.
Merry Christmas to you.
You're doing a great job.
Merry Christmas to you also.
I got to tell you, you have to be making some of this stuff up on the recount deal.
I am from the People's Republic of California.
That's not getting any better.
It's actually gotten worse under Arnold.
But if the canvasing board is being this blatant, particularly I think.
You know, by the way, your governor has a wonderful recipe to resurrect the GOP.
Have you heard that?
No, what is it?
Oh, yeah.
Arnold Schwarzenegger just says, here's all we have to do to resurrect the GOP to be a hit at the box office.
All you have to do is get every conservative in the country to give up every principle they've ever held and the party can succeed again.
Jason, I was in a meeting with Arnold.
I belong to an association when we went up to talk to Arnold about the diesel emissions issues that we're having.
When we laid out how wrong California Air Resource Board is, what's called the CARB Group, we laid out how wrong they are.
Arnold's chief of staff looked at us and said, the environmentalists scream louder than you guys do, and if we don't do something, they'll sue us.
Well, it's funny you should mention that.
I had Senator Inhoff on the program not long ago, the real courageous anti-global warming fighter in Washington from Oklahoma.
And basically, that's what he said.
Remember your congressman out there, what was his name, Richard Pombo?
Yeah.
He literally was targeted by environmentalists, and he was defeated.
And that's what's driving these politicians.
They're cowards.
They're afraid of the environmental lobby because they've been able to raise millions based on scaring fifth graders about global warming.
And so you get this outlandish, ridiculous California Air Resources Board literally pulling a Kyoto for your state.
It's going to bankrupt Detroit because Detroit can't make cars just for California and then others for Virginia for crying out loud.
And get this, if you want, getting back full circle to Minnesota.
If you want to know how crazy Minnesota is, my friend, there was legislation in the last session to literally defer our greenhouse gas policy to whatever the California Air Resources Board did.
I am not making that up.
They were going to link the two so your Air Resources Board would govern Minnesota's CO2 emissions.
The California Air Resources Board is out of their mind.
We've been in meetings with them.
They have made up statistics where we've asked them to back up for them, and they just said, well, that's how it is.
We said, well, let's see the statistics because Caterpillar, the Indian manufacturers, are telling us, ex, you guys think you know more than Caterpillar.
Show us your numbers.
They refuse to show us.
But get back to the point on the recount, though.
Yeah, get back to the point on the recount.
What is going to happen if they are this blatant on cheating for Al Franken?
What's the end game here?
Well, the end game is this is in the middle of an administrative recount.
Now, there are a number of challenge ballots that have been withdrawn.
So what happens during the recount, John, is when they're going through the recount and a campaign says, I'm going to challenge that ballot, they set the ballot aside, and it's not counted in the recount.
Then now you've got a number of challenge ballots that have been adjudicated, but a number that were withdrawn.
Okay, the campaign said, okay, I'll withdraw that challenge.
Those have to be added back in yet.
So to be fair, the final tally is not in yet.
But there are a number of analysts who are projecting if things hold with the current trend, Franken may very well pull this out with 47, 48 votes, gumming back 800 votes, which would be an astonishing comeback in Minnesota.
Usually recounts don't end up changing much of anything.
That's why there's suspicion.
So then what happens after the administrative recount, if you think you've been treated unfairly, and I think Coleman's got a case here, you would literally contest the election in court.
That's what, you know, in the real definition of a contested election is when you file a lawsuit.
Now, here is the real conspiratorial theory here.
Are you ready for this?
The canvassing board, which is adjudicating this right now, ruling over the recount, is made up of four judges and the Secretary of State who has ACORN ties, worked with Acorn.
They honored him, that sort of thing.
Again, I'm not alleging anybody has deliberately cheated or there's deliberate voter fraud.
There's discretion in this recount, and the discretion is going in Al Franken's favor.
That's what I'm alleging.
But get this.
Two of those judges on the canvassing board whose rulings would be challenged in court are members of the Minnesota State Supreme Court.
So if it goes to court, John, those two members of the Minnesota State Supreme Court would likely recuse themselves.
Otherwise, they would be ruling on the rulings they made on the canvassing board.
Now, the real conspiracy theorists here say, well, gee, they put those two members of the canvassing board, or of the Supreme Court, I should say, on the canvassing board because they were most likely to be amenable to listening to Coleman.
And then the only Supreme Court members left when it goes there would be, shall we say, a bit more to the left?
It's been out there.
Now, again, I don't know about the evidence, but there are a number of strange rulings going on, the latest of which happened this week, by the way.
We have a Florida-style law here that says when the race is this close, that voter intent shall be determined in challenged ballots, the challenged ballots I was telling you about.
And the rulings on the voter intent, divining voter intent, as though this canvassing board is omniscient and they can somehow read the minds of voters, they get to, just like hanging shads.
We've got ovals that are either filled in or not filled in or have an X through them.
Well, get this.
The trend or the tradition, I should say, is that the canvassing board presumes that if someone fills in the oval next to Coleman or Franken, but then draws an X through it, it's interpreted as the voter changing their mind.
An overvote, if you will.
The problem is that this has happened so far disproportionately only to Coleman.
That is, when those ovals were filled in for Franken and an X was drawn through them, in a number of cases, and Coleman challenged 16 this week, those were decided to go ahead and count as Franken votes, which is lending some people to criticize the canvassing board up here.
So it is going to end up in court.
There is no way this thing is going to be finished by January 6th when Congress reconvenes.
Harry Reid will pull a power play and seat somebody.
The state of Minnesota will literally be handing over their future to the partisan majority leader.
And that's the way it's going to be until the court case is done, in my humble opinion.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for El Rushbo.
Don't go away.
Your call's coming right up on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
1-800-282-2882.
The contact line remains the same.
El Rushbo taking a few days off.
Jason Lewis trying to fill the big shoes on this Christmas Eve, 2008.
To the phones we go once again.
Springfield, Illinois, the epicenter of the scandal.
Fritz, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Well, Merry Christmas, Jason, from the capital of Illinois.
Yes.
Folks believe it is Chicago, like Belagojevich, but it is Springfield.
And I wanted to clarify a statement you made earlier in the program that Fitzpatrick had asked the legislature to stop their proceedings, impeachment proceedings.
Yes.
That's not the case.
The case is that he refused to provide the names of co-conspirator A or caller B or whatever that was.
He didn't want any of those people called as witnesses that could jeopardize his criminal trial.
Well, is that not a distinction without a meaning?
I mean, the federal federal prosecutors are saying, go ahead, you can do what you want.
You're just not going to get any of the evidence.
You're not going to get any of the evidence on the criminal trial, but we have other grounds for which to proceed with the impeachment proceeding.
An impeachable offense is not defined in the Illinois Constitution, believe it or not.
But they've got Bogoevich on other items such as he wanted to expand health care.
Well, it was voted down.
So what he did was he used his mandatory veto and vetoed all member initiatives, which are Illinois' earmarks, took those away from everybody, and then took $473 million through executive order and expanded the health care program anyway.
A number of business associations got together, fought it in court, and won.
And now Bogojevich has been asked to come up with how many people were enrolled, how much money was spent, where's the money at, and he can't provide any of the documentation.
So you've got a great separation of powers case there where he is trampling on the legislative's prerogative to not give him the power to do what he wanted to do.
And you're quite right about impeachment in most cases.
As we remember, during the Clinton era, there's a great debate on what a high crime is.
It is not technically, legally a crime.
Correct.
And I think that is reflected in most state constitutions as well.
Well, are you suggesting then that they are going to go forward with this, and it might prove to be a bit embarrassing to a number of people?
It will go forward.
It will be embarrassing to a number of people, but it's time that it happens.
They have him on a couple of other counts, but I believe that they're going a little bit more slowly and judiciously because Senate President Emil Jones has been the major Bogojevich enabler.
He has not called for votes in the Senate.
For example, when Bogojevich pulled his veto pen out on this particular case, he wouldn't even allow a vote on it because it would have been overturned.
How about he's retiring, and so on January the 6th, he'll be done and we'll be bringing in a new Senate president, Cullerton.
And then I believe we'll have a fair trial.
Well, how different challenge me then on the statement I also made.
And again, this is a layperson's opinion, observing from afar, but that when you take a look at the history of Chicago and Illinois politics and the machinations therein, is Blagojevich being set up?
If we can have everybody who may be implicated down the road turn state's evidence on the governor, he can take the fall for a whole lot of people.
Absolutely, he can, and I agree with you wholeheartedly.
I can't believe that Fitzpatrick came in so soon.
He should have waited and burned all the culprits involved in this pay-for-play, excuse me, yeah, play-for-pay scheme that goes on regularly in Illinois.
You got it.
But the impeachment proceedings will go forward.
Bogojevich will take the fall, and he's not going to give up because his only key to power right now to cut a deal is holding on.
No, he's not going to give up.
Hey, and by the way, criminally, I think he's got a case not to give in, to be honest with you.
Whether it comes to impeachment, whether he can survive, as you suggest, that may not be so easy.
Fritz, thanks for checking in.
Appreciate the clarification.
Let's try Western Massachusetts.
Herb, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi.
How are you?
Good.
Happy.
Merry Christmas to you.
Happy holidays.
Same to you, my friend.
First one: when I first heard about Bogoyevich, I was thrilled because I cannot believe that Barack Obama is as clean as everybody thinks he is.
So I thought this was the beginning of something.
But at the same time, after looking at the events of the last couple weeks, Patterson in New York, who did not want to even speak of Caroline Kennedy, is now caved on that, which that'll be seated before the first of the year, probably, which means he's sold out to somebody for something.
The second piece is Ted Kennedy, as we all know, is not long for this world, and you can't possibly believe that Duval Patrick in the state of Massachusetts hasn't sold that seat already.
So Bogoyevich, whether he is a bad guy in all of his other dealings in this situation, he's just, he's a pawn in the big game.
These people have figured out about the dumbing down of America, and they figured out the American people aren't smart enough to figure out what they're doing.
It's funny, you should bring this up.
It reminds me of Casablanca.
I am shocked.
I am shocked that there's gambling going on in Rick's cafe.
And this is why Fitzgerald, some critics of Fitzgerald, say, why did you cut the investigation short and why there's suspicion?
Because you are absolutely 100% correct.
This is ontological, absolute fact.
Politicians horse trade every day.
We live in a cesspool of legal corruption.
The National Education Association literally picks candidates, buys them off, and they are puppets for big education.
Happens every time.
Road contractors get gas taxes passed, and then they turn around and give them money.
Now, this could all be settled if we had a limited government.
If we went back to the framers' idea of enumerated powers in the Constitution, and I would add state constitutions as well, if government were not allowed to do anything and everything, there would be no point in trying to buy off politicians because they couldn't do it constitutionally anyway.
But since we have thrown the Jeffersonian chains off the Constitution, and the government literally is one of unlimited powers, which is very, very dangerous when you give the power of force to a group of individuals and then you tell them that power is unlimited, naturally people are going to try to queue up and curry favor.
And therein lies the problem in modern politics today.
I got to break back right after this with your calls.
You know, in Minnesota, and I can't get to Henry.
I'm not going to have time, Henry, but he's talking about why not a runoff in Minnesota as they had in Georgia.
Frankly, if the law could be changed to implement that in Minnesota, and for a lot of these very close elections, I think that is a good idea, although the circumstances are a little different than what happened here versus Georgia.
But that's not what the law states in Minnesota.
The law has way too much discretion allowing the canvassing board in Minnesota to determine voter intent, just like those hanging Chads in Florida in 2000.
And that's got to be tightened up.
If I had my drothers, I'd rely more on the machinery, the optical scanners on November 4th, and a little less on some folks sitting on a board.
And those are the decisions that are being questioned in the great state of Minnesota.
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