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Jan. 4, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:53
January 4, 2010, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Happy New Year, America.
January 4th, 2010.
This was supposed to be Rush's first day back after his Christmas break.
But as pretty much the whole world knows, he wound up spending a couple of days in hospital in Honolulu.
Don't worry, he's fine.
Everything's working.
He's passed inspection.
And America's anchorman will be back behind the golden EIB microphone live on Wednesday.
Until then, this is your undocumented anchor man, Mark Stein, sitting in and happy to be here.
I flew in this morning in the crotch of a Yemeni jihadist, just landed at Newark.
I'm still blinking and adjusting to the daylight, but I am glad to be here.
Now, I know many, many, many of you want to send your good wishes to Rush, but we're going to stick with the ditto system instituted by Walter Williams last week because the system worked.
As Janet in Competano would say, the system worked.
So we'll take your dittos as best wishes to Rush and your mega dittos as best wishes plus a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates.
Because that way you can all get your best wishes in, but it won't cut into peripheral matters such as the United States government plunge of this country into ongoing sclerosis and the collapse of global civilization, which we want to have time to get to in the last few minutes of the program.
By the way, the best comment, I thought the best comment of all the comments out there on the internet about Rush's little health blip last week.
When he came out of hospital on, I think it was Saturday he came out of hospital.
He came out of hospital.
Kathy Schadel, who is a great Canadian blogger, she posted in the little bar at the top of the page that says the name of the website, she just posted the two-word expression when Rush came out of hospital, ditto's God.
Absolutely.
Dittos, mega-dittos, God.
Lots of ill health around.
Senator John Kerry is going in for hip replacement surgery.
Hey, wait a minute.
Isn't that what the Democrats did?
In 2004, they ran John Kerry for president, and then they thought, boy, he needs a hip replacement.
So they got Barack Obama.
But anyway, he's apparently going in for another one.
Rush has said the, quote, the treatment I received here was the best that the world has to offer, Limbaugh said.
Based on what happened here to me, I don't think there's one thing wrong with the American healthcare system.
It's working just fine, just dandy, unquote.
Limbaugh said that despite his celebrity, he received the same treatment as anyone else who would have called 911 and been taken to the hospital in his condition.
Quote, I got no special treatment, he said, adding that the care he received was nonetheless confidence inspiring.
I just feel very grateful and thankful to be an American and have this happen to be, he said.
And people have been critical of Rush for this point.
They've said that he doesn't understand what it's like to be a regular guy and just call 911 and go to hospital and all the rest of it.
And then some other people, mean-spirited types, one might say, suggested that what a pity it wasn't the case that Obamacare was already in place and then they might find a reason to deny treatment to him.
And that seems like a cute joke if you just want to get at Rush.
But in fact, it gets to the heart of what is the problem of government healthcare systems, which is that bureaucrats can deny you treatment on the basis of all kinds of business that is unrelated, essentially, to your health needs.
And then there are the systemic things.
I only just want to mention this briefly.
Rush, as you know, he had an angiogram.
He had chest pains and he went into hospital.
And I don't want to get into details of Rush's condition and all the rest of it, because it's one of the embarrassing things when you're famous and you go to hospital is that the world expects to have the right to know every little bit of you that's been prodded and poked and examined and to have live pictures screened from the examining room.
And so I don't want to get into any of the details.
But Rush, as I understand it, had an angiogram.
Now, if you have an angiogram in Windsor, Ontario, and they determine that you need an angioplasty, they then drive you to Detroit, Michigan for that.
If you are in Windsor, Ontario, which is a big city, they make a lot of the so-called American automobiles that appear under the GM banner and the Ford banner and all the rest of it.
They're just across the river from Detroit.
You require heart treatment in that city, they ship you to Detroit.
And that sounds great.
This lady came up.
Do you remember that lady who was on the Air HR when I was here a few weeks ago?
The big liberal lady who complained that Rush's plane had been buzzing her in her backyard.
I don't know what that was about.
She was sunbathing topless and Rush's jet was flying back and forth over her backyard or something.
I don't know what she was.
But at one point, she said, she was talking about how she was all in favor of socialized health care.
And I pointed out that if you required an angioplasty in Windsor, Ontario, they had to ship you to Detroit, Michigan.
And she said her response was that, well, maybe it's just a cultural thing.
You know, it's like a clitorectomy in the Sudan.
It's just the great place.
The Sudan, it's a great place to get a clitorectomy, but probably not an angioplasty.
And these are cultural variations we have to take into account.
The Canadians, they just have a cultural revulsion against angioplasties.
So if you need one, it's understandable that you'd have to go to Detroit, Michigan, because it's not part of Ontario's culture to give you an angioplasty.
But there's all kinds of complications.
If you did what Rush did the other day and you just call 911, they determine you've got heart problems.
A guy called, he was a big shot union guy with the auto workers in Windsor, Ontario.
He was 49 years old.
He had a heart attack.
They put him in the hospital in Windsor to take him to Detroit, Michigan, to Henry Ford Hospital.
And as he's crossing the border, the ambulance with its lights flashing is pulled over for secondary screening.
The ambulance lights are flashing and the Homeland Security guys, ever vigilant, pull in the ambulance driver to make him go into the shed and produce some paperwork.
And they open up the doors of the hospital, of the ambulance, and require this big union guy, Rick Laporte, to identify himself.
He's lying there having a heart attack.
When you have heart problems, by the way, the absolute most important thing is time, time, time, the time you get to the hospital, because otherwise, every minute that's wasted, your heart muscle deteriorates, damages, dies.
This guy's heart had already stopped twice.
He'd been brought back from the dead twice.
But Homeland Security pulled his ambulance over for secondary screening and demand as he's lying there under oxygen masks that he produces some form of identity.
So there are worse places to have chest pains than Honolulu, Hawaii.
And if you're in the situation that this big auto worker guy, Rick Laporte, was, and you find yourself, you have a heart attack, and The system allows for the intersection of an incompetent, a bureaucratic and Canadian healthcare system meets an incompetent American homeland security system.
You're going to die.
So this guy, this guy, the ambulance is pulled because we all know, yeah, an ambulance with a police escort.
That fits the terrorist profile.
A Yemeni.
A Yemeni with a barely detectable bulge in his underwear, that's nothing to worry about.
But an ambulance with a police escort, we should certainly pull them over for secondary screening.
So things could have gone a lot worse.
When you have chest pains, things could have gone a lot worse for Rush.
But he'll be here on Wednesday.
He's resting up.
He's raring to go.
And I'm sure he regrets as much as you do that he's not here to kick off another year of live shows from the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
And you've got to have a little bit of substitute host-level excellence in broadcasting for a couple more days.
But he is fit.
He is fine.
He is ready to go.
There's lots of things that have been happening over the weekend that we're going to talk about.
1-800-282-2882.
There's kind of good news and bad news.
The good news is that the TSA has actually started profiling.
They're not calling it profiling, obviously, but they're subjecting persons from 14 countries of interest to secondary screening now.
They're not just doing it to ambulances with patients having heart attacks coming in from Ontario anymore.
They're also doing it with lively young men who have connections with Yemen, with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan and various other countries.
14 nations.
Actually, quite an interesting list of 14 nations.
We'll get into that in a bit.
That's the good news.
The bad news is this lockdown at Newark that they had last night.
I don't know whether you saw this, but basically, you know that little bit, there's the secure area.
As you leave a plane, you come through the secure area.
There's a door that says you're leaving the secure area.
You can't get back into this now.
And then you go pick up your bag and leave the airport.
This time around, a guy went up the ramp through the exit from the security area, secure area, and got into the secure area.
Now, they've been looking for this guy ever since this happened yesterday evening.
So they've been looking for him now for getting on for 18 hours.
And they still don't know who he is or where he is.
He got through there.
They got him on the videotape.
They've no idea where he went or what he did.
But they responded as the Transport Security Administration always does.
They locked down the airport.
They pulled thousands of people off planes.
They made them go through screening again.
They did that thing that the Department of Homeland Security does so well.
They herded thousands of people who've got nothing to do with terrorism into a room and they treated them like garbage.
So you had the system, the system worked because we made newborn mothers sit in a room where they had no access to water or food for their babies.
The babies are getting far worse treatment than all these people who complain about Rush getting special treatment in hospital.
Why don't you worry about the poor little baby who gets yanked off the plane at Newark Airport because the Transport Security Administration screws up.
They subjected thousands and thousands of people to a nightmare for no reason.
And this is something that the TSA just can't get beyond, just can't get beyond.
These bone-crushingly stupid, Braindead lockdown procedures it inflicts on thousands and thousands of innocent people.
And too many of you, by the way, too many of you put up with it.
You seem to think, well, if they're treating me lousily, they must be treating the Yabadi jihadists lousily.
No, it doesn't work like that because every minute they're screwing you around is a minute that they're not devoting to the guy with the fully loaded underpants getting on the plane.
This idea that by, oh, you know, they treat millions of people, it's so fair.
It's the American way.
We treat millions of people equally lousily.
No, no, no.
No system that does what it did at Newark Airport last night.
And by the way, it's called Liberty International.
That's a joke name for a start, Liberty International.
You have no liberty.
A government bureaucrat determines by law that you have to stay in a room for hours on end.
You can't use the bathroom.
You can't get any food.
You can't get any milk for your baby.
You can't do anything.
Where's the liberty in that?
There's a joke name, Liberty International.
Liberty, it's an affront to liberty, the name of that airport.
We'll get into that.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for arresting Rush on the EIB network.
Rush will be back here live on Wednesday.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Don't forget, if you go to rushlimbaugh.com, you can see the video of Rush's press conference when he got out of the, what's it called?
The Queen's Hospital in Honolulu.
That's what it's called.
God, it's like, they've even got, for some reason, they've got Canadian hospital names in Hawaii.
I don't know why that, I don't know why that is, but it's the Queen's Hospital.
I take it.
No, I know.
I know.
It's that Hawaiian queen, the one who, the one who was the big shot queen before the Americans took it over.
Queen, what's her name?
Queen Rana Valona.
No.
No, hang on, that's the Queen of Madagascar who was the insane sex fiend.
I can't remember the name, whichever Hawaiian queen it is.
But anyway, the Queen's Hospital in Honolulu.
If you go to rushlimbaugh.com, you can see the press conference on video of Rush as he left hospital.
And you can also read his message to listeners of the Rush Limbaugh show.
And Rush himself will be back here on Wednesday.
I saw this story, by the way.
I love this.
This is from Rome, Reuters.
A Sicilian man stole candy and a packet of chewing gum so he could get arrested and spend New Year's Eve in a jail cell rather than be with his wife and relatives.
The 35-year-old Sicilian first showed up at a police station on Thursday asking to be arrested because he preferred spending the night in prison rather than with his family.
But he was rebuffed because he had not committed a crime.
The man immediately went to a tobacco shop next door where he threatened the owner with a box cutter as he grabbed some candy and a packet of gum.
He then waited until police arrived to arrest him for robbery.
I was talking about this with Mr. Snerdley the other day.
I was saying that if you these European Christmases where you get Christmas Day off, Boxing Day off, Christmas bank holiday, Tuesday off, New Year's Eve off, New Year's Day off, the day after Hogman A off, all the, it's like today, today is what, January the 4th?
This is a public holiday in Scotland.
These three-week Christmases they have over there.
And I said the last time I'd spent a Christmas in Britain, it was the nearest I hoped ever to ever get to experiencing my own personal hostage crisis.
It's like seasonal Stockholm syndrome when you're stuck there in this Christmas hell, hold up with your relatives for weeks on end.
So I'm very sympathetic.
And Snerdley didn't like the sound of it either when he put it like that.
So I'm very sympathetic to this poor old Sicilian fellow who didn't want to spend New Year with his family, so he committed a crime to get himself thrown in jail.
We're talking about these new health, these new security proposals that they've just introduced, profiling people from different countries.
This is absolutely critical.
We have wasted eight years profiling things, profiling things instead of profiling people.
To the absurdity, as I related last week, I get my snow globe that I buy in New Zealand confiscated because you can't fly with snow globes.
And now you're not going to be able to fly with underwear.
We had all that stuff since the Panty Bomber came along.
They're going to have to check you to see whether your underwear has been modified.
And actually, given the types of underwear some people wear these days, who can tell whether it's been modified?
There's all kinds of pouches and openings and things that people have in their underwear these days just for personal ease.
Who knows what it's about?
And finally, the TSA has wised up and has decreed that now they accept that somebody flying in with a snow globe from New Zealand may not necessarily be as critical to homeland security as, say, a guy from Sudan who mysteriously takes frequent trips to Yemen.
They've finally begun to wise up.
We're still not quite there yet.
There's a story, I think it's in the Toronto Star today, in which an Israeli security guy explains what we're doing wrong in North America.
We do everything but look at the people.
He says the most important thing they do at security at Ben-Gurion Airport in Israel is look people in the eye.
Look people in the eye.
And if you notice, when you're standing in these stupid lines at Newark or anywhere else, that's the one thing they don't do.
I flew down from Vermont to do the show today.
And at the airport in Vermont, as you enter, you hand over your ID and I handed over my driver's license.
And the guy gets out this little thing.
It makes him look like a sort of jeweler looking to see whether it's a real diamond or whatever there.
He's examining my driver's license to see, I suppose, whether it's an authentic New Hampshire driver's license.
That's a complete waste of time.
What terrorists struck because he faked a driver's license?
What terrorist ever struck for that?
The guys who boarded the planes on 9-11 had genuine American paperwork.
That's the disgrace.
They didn't have faked Virginia driver's licenses.
They boarded the plane with real Virginia's driver's licenses.
The shoe bomber had a real passport.
This isn't anything even post-9-11.
Ahmed Rassam at the Washington state border got into this country with a real Canadian passport.
But we have this stupid thing now.
The guy's looking at my driver's license to see if it's a genuine New Hampshire driver's license.
And in the course of doing all that, he doesn't once look me in the eye and make a human judgment about who I am.
That's the problem.
Great to be with you.
Don't forget, Rush is back live Wednesday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Let's go to David in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.
David, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, Mark.
How are you?
Thanks for having me.
I'm doing good.
Which part of Massachusetts is Hopkinton?
Hopkinton is the, it's 26 miles west of Boston, start of the Boston Marathon.
Oh, right.
Okay.
That's good to know.
So you're near.
You're far south from you.
Yeah, you're near Logan Airport.
26 miles west.
And what's it like when you try to fly in today's American?
After 9-11, my name, which is kind of a common Middle Eastern name, showed up on the watch list.
One of 550,000 or so, I guess, is the number on there now.
Right.
And so at first, you know, when you first start going through all the post-9-11 issues of greater security, it's not that big of a deal.
You know, you figure it's okay.
And, you know, basically what they said at the counter was that there were two known terrorists with the same name or very similar name to my common Middle Eastern name.
Now, this is your surname.
That's correct, yeah.
I was born in Massachusetts.
I've never lived outside of Massachusetts.
Right.
Both of my parents were born here.
My grandparents came over from Lebanon about 120 years ago.
That's my connection to the Middle East.
Right, right.
And which is not uncommon in New England.
I mean, the last Senate race in New Hampshire, for example, pitted two Lebanese immigrants against people of Lebanese descent against each other, John Sununu versus Gene Shaheen.
They're both Lebanese surnames, and that's not uncommon in the United States.
So I can't go to Providence Airport or Manchester or Logan.
I can't print a boarding pass ahead of time.
I have to go through, whether I've got check-on bags or not.
I have to go through security, or excuse me, go through a line and check in, and they have to check my ID.
They get a supervisor over, clear my name through some sort of a CSA system.
Just let me understand this.
You've been going through a supervisor, basically, for whatever it is now, eight and a half years.
Correct.
Correct.
So I talked to them.
They said, listen, just talk to, you know, contact TSA.
There's a system you can go through to get your name off the list.
You should not be on the list any longer.
And did the system work, as Janet and Competano would say?
Well, here's the thing.
So I contacted Homeland Security, and they said, well, there's a redress form.
It's called the TRIP program, T-R-I-P.
It's a redress program that they have.
You fill out this form.
They ask you a series of questions, and then they take that application and they'll review it.
So months and months later, I followed up with a phone call, and they said, well, the problem is this.
You said that you felt that you were being discriminated against or that you were being profiled, which I am.
I mean, that's the thing.
They're using my name only.
And so they take my name.
It's similar to some Middle Eastern names that may or may not be on an actual terror list.
And that's the only reason why.
So what they've done is they said, okay, well, he can't just fly without being checked, either tighter security or whatever it's going to be.
So I go through the process of the redress, and six months later I call them.
They said, because you said you're being discriminated against, you're being investigated by six, six federal agencies.
I said, what six federal agencies?
They said, we can't tell you.
I said, so I put in the request for redress.
You're investigating me because of the answers they provide to you, which were certainly just simply that I feel like I'm being discriminated because of my name.
And so that triggered an investigation by six federal agencies.
You can't tell me who it is.
Well, David, you may mock, but I feel safer already.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, most countries would just have one government agency investigating you.
But in this country, we've got six investigating you.
We go the extra mile.
Right.
So now I got a letter just about a month ago from Homeland Security.
I've got it here saying basically they give you a redress control number.
Take a redress control number.
Right.
So now what I'm saying is that you're in a travel arrangement.
I'm supposed to give the travel agent my redress number, and that's supposed to make it simpler for me.
So my point is this.
Here we've got a half a million people like me that are on this list.
And I joke about it with all my friends.
They all give me a hard time, and it's funny.
But the point is, here's the federal government.
They've got six agencies investigating a guy.
I've lived in the state my entire time.
I've used the same American Express card for 25 years to book a flight.
If I'm traveling with my kids to Disney, I can't do anything but go through the long line of people like everybody else, even if I've got bags or not.
But if you're traveling in from Yemen, you can get on a plane without a problem.
Yeah, yeah.
But I can't, so they're going to spend all these resources investigating and tracking people like me.
Well, you know what's impressive about this, David, is that you've been complaining about this basically since the fall of 2001?
I started complaining about it about two and a half or three years ago.
Three years.
I said, okay, it's time.
Yeah, you put up with it for like the first five or six years.
Right.
So they've been, you've now been trying to get, because you're not a terrorist.
I try not to be.
You were born in Massachusetts.
You have a common surname.
You have a clear track record.
You don't have any suspicious stamps from Yemen in your passport or anything like that.
And you have been unable to get off this terrorist watch list for three years.
Correct.
Right.
That's great, isn't it?
So the Department of Homeland Security and the six guys, the six agencies who are investigating you.
Right.
And if any of the guys investigating you are out there, I'd love you to call in, 1-800-282-2882, because I'd just love to know when you think this investigation will be complete.
Like, will David be like 78, 87, 112?
And you'll decide that, well, he isn't a terrorist after all, and you can get him off the watch list then.
That's the problem right there.
Six federal bureaucracies can't get you off the stupid list after three years.
That is an amazing story, David.
Do you fly less than you used to?
I don't fly that often.
Maybe half a dozen, ten times a year.
You know, not that much.
So, you know, but the thing is, again, it's always traveling out of the same airports.
You know, it's mostly domestic stuff.
Very rarely do I go anywhere out of the country at all.
So it's just simple.
Well, that's your problem right there.
If you were to fly to, if you were to make, say, six trips a year to Yemen, you'd just breeze through security.
That would be my recommendation.
That would be probably the quickest way of clearing your name would be to make more trips to Yemen and Somalia.
David, that is an astonishing story.
And it testifies, actually, I think, to the sclerosis that has infected this bureaucracy.
That it cannot.
It's one thing to wind up on these lists by accident.
But, you know, the fact that they can't get you off it after three years, we need a lifelock type thing.
We need like watch lock or something that would get you off, that will fix your problems if you happen to wind up on one of these terrorist watch lists.
Well, you would do anything for me?
Well, I wish I had some.
Look, I'm an undocumented alien myself.
It's all I could do.
I mean, I'm on the express lane because when I fly in, I travel in Yemeni underwear.
So obviously I'm fast-tracked through security.
Other than giving you the name of some guy in Yemen and getting you to crouch in his pouch for the whole of the flight, I really can't.
I'm afraid I don't.
I'll try.
I'll mention it to, I'll raise it with people in the administration.
But oddly enough, they're not taking my calls.
Thank you very much for your call, David.
That is a horrifying story.
And you know, HR was telling me that his four-year-old kid got wound up on the terrorist watch list, which is good, you know, because I think the real trick here is to identify individuals and get them before they're radicalized by being part of jihadist networks.
So I think profiling these four-year-olds is an excellent start.
But so every time HR went to the airport with his four-year-old, they would call out the guy's name.
There would be like a big sort of paddock at the airport, and then all the important people from the airline would circle around them and say, which one of you, can we name your, yeah, they'd go, which one of you is Jesse?
Because I don't want to get him back on the watch list.
Because they might have thought, hey, this guy, we had him, he was under surveillance by six federal agency, but he slipped out of sight.
So I don't want to get him back on the watch list.
But so they'd say, which one of you is Jesse?
And then they'd all circle around and they'd the HR would say, well, he's the four-year-old.
And then they would require him to go through secondary screening and to sign the forms and to do the full background check.
And, of course, you know, it makes a, yeah, exactly.
I mean, there's a guy.
You can pretty much rely that his underwear will be loaded at that age.
Oh, no, that's unfair.
He's a four-year-old.
should be but if he'd like being the two-year-old if they'd had him on the two-year-old he's got a how many did jesse been made a lot of trips back to yemen I don't know.
Yeah, no, no credit history.
And he appeared nervous when questioned.
But HR, I don't know what HR did, but he pulled some strings and he got the four-year-old off the terror watch list by the time he was 28 or whatever.
So the system worked.
The system worked, as Janet and Competano would say.
This is crazy.
We have got thousands and thousands and thousands of people like this on lists, on stupid lists that they can't get off.
And in the meantime, people who have huge, great, long track records, like the Panty Bomber, they can't stop him.
If they can't stop the Panty Bomber, this guy, this pathetic guy, John Brennan, did you see him?
The guy who was on Meet the Press?
He said there was no smoking gun.
No.
You know why?
Because usually the gun is only smoking after it's gone off and everybody's dead.
And if you're in the intelligence business, you're supposed to stop the people before they fire the gun and it starts smoking.
And if they can't connect these dots, if they can't connect a guy who is already banned in countries of our allies, whose father, whose father, I don't know, maybe there's 500,000 names in this.
I didn't particularly get on with my father when I was a young man, but to the best of my knowledge, he never turned me into the CIA.
I would imagine that's a relatively small demographic group.
Young men whose fathers turn them into the CIA.
He didn't just go along to the United States embassy in Lagos and take a number.
What did David call it?
A redress number.
He didn't just take a redress number and get in the six-month line.
He actually went to the embassy in Lagos and asked to speak to the CIA guy.
And the CIA guy sat down and had a conversation with him.
And they're now saying, well, you know, the CIA guy wasn't that senior.
That's why it didn't get fast-tracked up the line.
I mean, this is an important thing to remember if you're in some basket case third world capital and you decide to seek out the CIA.
Don't allow yourself to be sloughed off with some minor no-name CIA janitor.
Ask to speak to the head guy in there because otherwise they're not going to pay any attention.
So this guy, his father, his father goes to see the CIA, sits down with the CIA.
How many people Are fingered to the CIA by their own dads.
How many people then go to Yemen and have training in Yemen?
How many people then, their name is on a watch list, but we're now told, oh, it's not really the watch list.
It's like, you know, it's like if you're trying to make a good table at Le Cirque and you don't really know anyone.
I mean, the exclusive list, you can't really get on.
You can't really get on the main watch list.
You know, you're just on a kind of reservation list.
It's like standby at LaGuardia.
You're on the list to get on the list.
It's like David's.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Paul, yeah, maybe that's where when your dad leaks your name to the CIA, HR thinks the problem may be that Mr. What is Abdel Mutalab?
His name was on the list next to HR's four-year-old, and that's why he slipped through the crack.
He was just in the he was just on the list of pre-kindergarten jihadists.
So it wasn't expected that he would turn up.
We'll have lost straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882, Rushback Wednesday.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Let's go to Mark in Hollywood, Florida, one of the few marks in the lower 48 who is not a designated Rush Limbaugh guest host.
But Mark, it is great to have you with us.
You're live on the air.
Mark, an honor and a pleasure, sir.
My pleasure to have you on.
In lovely Hollywood, Florida.
I take it you don't have to fly too many other places too often.
Yeah, sunny Hollywood, Florida.
Well, it's supposed to be a low of 40 something degrees tonight.
Kind of cold for the natives here.
But coming from New York last night, not too bad.
Oh, right.
You flew down.
You flew down from New York just yesterday then.
Yes, I did.
And actually, that's why I'm calling.
I'm a bit livid, and I'm livid because the terrorists are winning.
And I'm sorry to digress from the watch list that you were discussing.
But I'll tell you a quick story.
Last night, my wife and I, my wife who's pregnant to eight months with our first child, we were checking in at the JetBlue counter to come home from LaGuardia.
And while we're checking in, a gentleman right next to us at the counter, dark complexion, didn't have any checked luggage and was paying with cash, said he wanted a one-way ticket to Florida.
And my wife and I kind of looked at each other and were like, oh man, I hope he's not on our plane.
Anyway.
And was he pulled over for secondary examination or anything?
So we didn't get that far.
We kept an eye on him after he got through security.
It seemed like he did take a little longer to get through security, which kind of gave a relieving feeling to me and my wife.
But we weren't sure what plane he was on.
So we're like, yeah, he's not on our plane.
Don't worry.
Anyway, we get into our seats on the plane.
We're sitting down.
Lo and behold, the guy shows up on our plane, and my wife starts to panic.
She's having a panic attack, and she starts crying and she's sobbing, and I'm trying to console her, and nothing is helping.
And the truth of the matter is, I was trying to play it cool and be the tough guy and be like, listen, they went through a rigorous check in security.
He's okay.
The bottom line is, I was panicking a little bit too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because all these so-called red flags are neutralized according to who the person is who's setting off the red flags.
If you're David in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, you'll trigger all the red flags.
But if you're someone who just turns up at the counter, no luggage, one-way ticket, bought with cash, then they don't want to, and you might appear possibly Yemeni, Sudanese, who knows what else.
They don't want to make a big deal out at that because everybody at the check-in counter knows there'll be a hate crime suit and you'll be in sensitivity training hell for the next six next six months.
And that's the way.
Thanks for your call, Mark.
We got to run.
I just want to say one thing quickly on this.
That's the way, if they'd kept this stupid paperback book prohibition.
You know, when the TSA announced you wouldn't be able to have a paperback book on your lap for the last hour of the flight, I would love to see them confiscate the first Quran from the first Imam who said that he wasn't going to give up his paperback book.
Because any air stewardess who does that from USAI or American Airlines is going to be in sensitivity training hell for the next six months.
These stupid laws are not even enforced equally, and that is why profiling things makes less sense than actually looking for the people who are most likely to turn out to be terrorists.
Lots more straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Happy New Year.
Lots to look forward to in 2010.
This is from Reuters.
A dismal job market, a crippled real estate sector, and hobbled banks will keep a lid on U.S. economic growth over the coming, what, over the coming six months, over the coming year?
No, over the coming decade.
That's what some of the nation's leading economists said on Sunday.
We'll get into that and some of the other prospects for the year and the decade ahead as the Rush Limbaugh Show continues on the EIB network.
Just to keep you up to date with Rush, he's feeling fine.
He's ready to go.
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