Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Where the views expressed by the host make more sense than anything.
Anybody else out there happens to be saying, A, because I'm me.
B, because we're engaged here in a relentless and unstoppable pursuit of the truth, and we find it.
And when we find it, we irritate the left.
And we have fun irritating the left.
Great to have you along.
Telephone number 800-282-2882.
Email address, L. Rushbaugh at EIBnet.com.
And I have consulted with some legal experts that I know to try to explain what happened here in Wisconsin.
Here's the best guess.
In the form of analysis right now, this judge, Judge Sumey, a county judge, issued a temporary restraining order against the Wisconsin law.
The purported justification is to consider whether the procedure by which it was passed violated the state's open meetings law.
So the judge said, there's a question as to whether or not this happened legally, so we're going to stop the law.
We're going to put a temporary stay on this law while we look and see whether or not it happened legally.
Now, the governor, Scott Walker thinks this is all BS.
Turns out that they got procedural advice from the state senate's chief clerk, who is said not to be a partisan guy.
He's worked for both parties.
And the state senate, Wisconsin State Senate's chief clerk, laid out the rules for passage of the law, which, after laying out those rules, the Republican senators complied with.
Now, to us, acts of a legislature are presumptively valid.
I haven't read the Wisconsin Constitution, which is why I raised the specter of separation of powers.
And I don't know if they have anything quirky on that score.
But generally speaking, courts do not exist to be a supervisor of the legislature.
We've been through this countless time.
The courts are only supposed to get involved if someone's rights have been violated.
And until that is proved to have happened, they are supposed to assume the legislature and the governor who signed the law acted properly.
That's the assumption under which they are supposed to proceed.
Imagine, look at it another way.
Imagine the hell to pay there would be if presidents or governors routinely disregarded court decisions rather than assuming the judges acted properly.
We sort of have that happening, do we?
Imagine the hell to pay if presidents or governors disregarded court decisions rather than assuming the judges acted properly.
Imagine if a governor said to the legislature, screw you.
You know, I don't like the way you did this.
I'm not signing it.
I'm not even vetoing it.
What you did here is not even valid because I don't like the way that you did it.
Assuming that peer branches acted properly unless and until it's proved otherwise is the deference each branch of government owes to the others.
Until there's proof that it didn't happen, you don't change anything.
Now, there's a situation where the rules are different.
If you want to get into a lot of minutiae about this, a litigant has to show that, A, he is almost certain to win on his claim that a law is invalid.
B, if the law is allowed to operate until a final judicial determination on his claim that the law is invalid, he will be irreparably harmed.
That is, if this goes on and you know it's going to get blown up, but you don't stop it and this guy suffers irreparable harm in the process, then you're not entitled to have the judge issue a temporary restraining order.
You get to sue like everybody else.
So, for the purposes here, look, it looks instead like what this judge did.
This judge treated this circumstance as a standard situation.
That is, instead of assuming the legislature acted validly, she has assumed the legislature acted invalidly and has halted operation of the law for no better reason than somebody filed a lawsuit.
Does McDonald's have to stop selling coffee when an old woman claims that she spilled some and burned her arm?
No.
Does the state of Wisconsin have to temporarily suspend this law because somebody has told this judge, you know what, the open meeting law was violated?
No.
But the judge has taken it upon herself to assume, just based on the lawsuit alone, that the way the law was passed makes it invalid, this is judicial activism on parade.
Now, let's pretend, just for the sake of this discussion, let's pretend that the law really is invalid.
Just pretend.
I think that's BS.
I think what we've got here is unadulterated, pure liberal activism.
The left-wing, checked them at the top of the art, the left-wing blogs are ecstatic.
They are celebrating this as a triumph of the rule of law.
It is the exact opposite of that.
But let's say the law is invalid.
What's the harm of letting it operate until there is a final legal determination of that?
The worst thing that can happen is that any deals bargained in that time could be struck down.
Everybody would go back to the bargaining table.
No irreparable harm in that.
Now, this is the funny part.
Contrast this with Obamacare.
The Obama administration is continuing to enforce the law, even though a court has made a final determination that it is invalid.
Judge Vinson has said this law is unconstitutional.
He vacated it.
He gave them seven days, and they spat on that.
He gave them seven days to write it.
There is no indication that the law is invalid here.
Obamacare has been said by a judge to be invalid.
The judge in Wisconsin has not said the law is invalid.
She has just responded to some complaint from a liberal that the open meetings law was violated.
Somebody just filed a lawsuit.
And yet the judge has ordered a halt to the operation of the law.
That is patently ridiculous.
This is not how it happens unless you've got judicial activism to the extreme or to the max going on.
And there's little, if any, doubt that that is what's happening here.
So, As I say, it's a teachable moment in a series of never-ending teachable moments.
The left does not stop with the law.
The left doesn't care.
They will do whatever.
They will get these teachers, these people they want us to think of as the kind of people we've seen in Norman Rockwell painting.
And they'll bring the little students up to the Capitol building and say, hey, hey, ho, ho, Scott Walker's got to go.
Hey, hey, ho, ho, Scott Walker's got to go.
So the left is showing us once again who they are and what is it they're trying to preserve.
What are they trying to preserve?
Stirdly, what are they?
They are trying to preserve the union money laundering operation.
That is what's going on here.
Never forget that that's what the public sector unions are.
They are money laundering operations.
They are doing their best, and they're pulling out all the stops to make sure this is all about union dues.
It's all about union dues, which end up as campaign donations to the Democrat Party in Wisconsin, in Washington, where have you.
That's what's at stake.
Secondarily, and make no mistake, it's a close second.
I know people don't like this word.
It fits for the perception I wish to create.
And that is the freeloaders don't want to give up the gravy train.
So you've got freeloaders who don't want to give up the gravy train.
Who do you mean, Mr. Lumbaugh, when you talk about the freeloader?
I'm talking about the teachers, all right?
Let's make it put it right out there.
The freeloaders don't want to give up the gravy train, and the unions and the Democrats don't want to give up the money laundering operation.
What do you mean, Mr. Lumbaugh?
They don't want to give up the gravy train.
I'll answer this as often as it's asked, even if it is asked by me.
This is not about what the teachers are willing to take from the taxpayers in terms of salary and benefits.
It's not about that.
It is about what the taxpayers are able to pay.
Wisconsin cannot afford.
Wisconsin's taxpayers cannot afford what they are paying for a lot of things.
Federal taxpayers can no longer afford what they are paying.
Now, when it comes to public sector union members, we all know that when you combine the salaries and benefit packages and the pensions and the health care until you die, their total package is on average twice what the people who pay them are making.
So it doesn't matter when the public sector union, whoever it is, employs, I'd be willing to take a little less.
I'll take, you know, I'm willing to take this.
It's not about what you're willing to take.
It's about what taxpayers are able to pay.
Again, I, El Rushbow, live in literalville, Realville.
I don't know.
This is a bugaboo of mine.
And I know that it's not going to create a whole lot of friends for me.
I know this.
I just, I don't have it in me to know that somebody making a hundred thousand dollars a year is paying me two hundred thousand.
I just, and I certainly would not be belligerent in demanding it and I wouldn't have the guts to run around and act like i'm owed it.
But that's just me, it's just me.
I also don't think things can can sustain themselves this way.
I just well, I know they can't.
Anyway, let me take a brief time out here, as we have approached that moment in time and each hour we must take the first commercial break.
We call them EIB Profit Center timeouts.
We'll do that.
Be right back and get back to your calls here.
Calls here on open line friday.
Okay, one more thing about what's going on in Wisconsin and it is very simple.
This judge, judge Sumi, Liberal Activist Judge, is wrong.
From the rules of the Wisconsin Senate, Senate Rule 93, special, extended, or extraordinary sessions, unless otherwise provided by the Senate for a specific special, extended, or extraordinary session, the rules of the Senate adopted for the regular session shall, with the following modifications, apply to each special session called by the governor, blah, blah, blah, no notice of hearing before a committee shall be required,
and no bulletin of...
committee shall be published if the Senate is in special session.
It was in special session.
No notice was required right there in Wisconsin senate rule number 93.
So, in layman's terms, senate rule 93, state of Wisconsin, clearly state, no notice has to be given during a special or extraordinary committee hearing.
Even so, the Democrats were emailed about the hearing.
It was posted on the Senate bulletin board.
They were advised as I. As I mentioned to you the uh uh the the, the chief clerk, the State Senate chief clerk, who's not a partisan guy, worked for both parties laid out the rules for passage to the governor case.
Here's what you got to do.
Here's a special session.
Uh this this, this and this, and that's what they did.
They did this, this.
They followed the law.
They followed Senate rules, rule 93 Wisconsin Senate clearly states no notice has to be given during a special or extraordinary committee hearing.
The Democrats were emailed about the hearing.
It was posted, posted on the bulletin board.
It can and not.
Essentially, this judge is saying the open meeting law was violated.
It wasn't.
No rule was broken.
So once, once again, i'm going to hear, it's put a boulder in the road, But it's still, the rule is clear.
State law is clear.
A judge has interceded.
And given the way things are with liberals on courts, we don't know how this is going to end up, even though we know full well this all is bogus.
Everything about this suit, everything about the temporary restraining order, it is 100% bogus.
Let's go and resume our action on the phones.
Open line Friday.
Audrey and Little Rock, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Excuse me.
I'm sorry.
It is an honor to talk to you.
And Ditto's from a conservative Christian woman in Arkansas.
Thank you very much, madam.
You were kind of getting to my point right before the break a little bit, I think, in that I'm frustrated because I don't understand what makes all of these union workers think that they have the right to dictate to their employers how much they're going to make.
The way I see it, if you're lucky enough in this economy to have someone offer you a job and they offer to pay you a wage and you agree to work for that, that's your choice.
Well, now all of this, this cuts so many ways.
In the case of a union where you have so-called collective bargaining, that means there aren't any individuals being negotiated with.
It's a unit.
And it all depends on the leverage that you can get.
Yes, sir.
I understand that, but I mean, if you don't like what you're being paid, you need to find another job.
Well, yeah.
I mean, those are your choices.
You either work for what your employer is going to pay you or pay you what you want.
Audrey.
Yes, sir.
This is how most people do it.
If you're working someplace and you want more pay, you go in and say, okay, look, I deserve a raise.
If they tell you to pound sand, you go someplace else and you try to.
Exactly.
It's that simple.
You're quite right.
Your sensibility is offended here by somebody.
Well, look, I demand you pay me with it.
That's the nature of unions.
I think that a lot of it boils down to is that people no longer live on what they're able to make.
They try to make what they want to live on.
Well, yeah, there's all, I mean, look, there's a lot of factors that go into it.
In this case, I'm really, you cannot, you cannot discount union dues.
You just, you cannot discount that in terms of the importance and the relevance of union dues to what all is going on here.
The National Education Association spent $8 million in 2008 on politics, but they did not accurately report it to the IRS.
This is important.
Unions are tax exempt, but the money they take in dues and use on partisan political activity is not tax exempt with some exceptions.
Now, the NEA spent $8 million in 2008, and they did not pay a cent in taxes on that money, and they did not report exactly what they were doing with the money.
Now, this was all discovered by the Landmark Legal Foundation.
And the Landmark Legal Foundation took action and got a favorable ruling here.
You remember we had the audio tape, this NEA general counsel who retired and made those infamous statements about the NEA job being gaining power.
He said, we're effective, not because we care about the kids.
We're effective not because we've done this.
We're not effective.
Our effectiveness comes from our power.
And the guy went on to attack the Landmark Legal Foundation by name, and that's because they'd filed a whole bunch of past complaints resulting in audits and fines of the NEA by IRS and others.
So it's a money laundering operation.
And All of these Democrat members of the public sector unions know full well what their objective is, what their purpose is.
And I've got to take another brief time out.
We'll be back and continue after this.
On the cutting edge, El Rush Motalon on loan from God.
Once again, here are the usual standards to get a temporary restraining order.
To get one, the plaintiffs must prove four elements.
One, you want to shut down a law, you have to prove likelihood that you'll have success on the merits.
Number two, you have to prove irreparable harm.
Number three, you have to prove that less harm will result to the defendant if the temporary restraining order issues than to the plaintiffs that the TRO does not issue.
And four, you have to prove the public interest, if any, weighs in favor.
Those are the four requirements to get a temporary restraining order.
Well, obviously, the likelihood of success in the merits cannot be proven here.
Irreparable harm cannot be proven.
The complaint was filed by a guy named Peter Barca, who is a Democrat hack.
He's not a Wisconsin state senator.
He served in the Wisconsin House, recently reelected, now back in the House, but he's not a senator.
He's the guy who, so he's the hack that's come along.
He can't.
He can't prove any irreparable harm here.
So you just have a coordinated attack, and you've got a liberal judge, county judge, who claims now to supersede the Wisconsin legislature.
But beyond all that, nothing that was done was illegal according to the rules of the Wisconsin Senate.
Nothing.
Zip Zero Nada.
I tell you, folks, some days I just detest these SOBs.
I just detest them.
Who's next?
Openline for White Fish Montana.
Doug, welcome to the EIB Network.
Great to have you on the program.
Hey, Rush, it's a pleasure.
How are you, sir?
Very well, sir.
Now, in a great mood, actually.
Good to hear that.
Hey, as you say, world's on fire while Obama fiddles.
And everyone kind of has been sitting around and wondering what is he doing and why is he so complacent?
I actually think there is a method to his madness.
If you look at the countries in which he has intervened, most recently in Egypt, and the countries in which he refuses to intervene, markedly Iran, you start to see a pattern there, do you not?
You tell me.
Well, for instance, Egypt was, although considered our friends, they were fairly secular in nature.
I do believe that the Islamic Brotherhood was behind it or absolutely took the opportunity of the discord.
Therefore, Barack Obama and company were behind it.
Now, if you look at Iran, where people have been protesting and not much is coming through on that.
So basically what you're saying is Obama's hands off in Iran.
He's supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
So what are you saying?
Well, I'm saying that Iran is already a fundamentalist theocracy.
Therefore, we do nothing.
Right.
Where in Egypt, it is not.
It's more of a secular state.
Right.
Therefore, we wish to sow discord.
Look what happened in Iran way back when the Shah was there.
We destabilize it.
Now, although it took years, we now have a fundamentalist theocracy, which many say is funding terrorism across the globe.
Okay.
So we have a fundamentalist theocracy that Obama doesn't want to displace.
Now we have discord.
That's what you're saying.
That's what you're saying.
We're going to leave Iran alone.
When we have a chance to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which they're certainly closer to their allies in Iran than they are in Egypt, and Obama's, oh, yeah, yeah, let's get rid of Mubarak and let's put our Muslim Brotherhood buddies into.
So you're saying that Obama has sympathies here to the Iranian mullahs.
That's my belief.
That's what it looks like to you.
He believes that he is a Muslim.
Yet, if you look at how strongly we support Palestine and how we turn our backs any time that Israel is attacked, like most recently when Palestinians went in and literally cut the throats of Israeli settlers, very little is being made of that.
Okay, so you believe that Obama, you fear that Obama wants an Iranian caliphate?
I believe that it is that caliphate is resurgent across the world.
Now we have Yemen, we have Bahrain.
So yes, I do believe that he took me a while to drag it out of you.
Okay, so it sounds crazy.
Is there any evidence against it?
Well, we actually have organizations here in the U.S. which support that.
After 9-11, we actually had commissions that investigated it.
The Holy Land Foundation, Infocom, and all of those people are found to be complicit in funneling money there.
I find this incredible.
You're in Whitefish, Montana.
Yes, sir.
You have a genuine fear that the President of the United States has sympathies with militant Islamists.
Well, I would say that the evidence would point to that and suggest that.
Again, I'm just another class bum that just reads as much as I can, searches online.
No, I'm not sure.
I get much help from the left-wing media.
Certainly not supplying a lot of people.
I understand you.
You sound a little bit more informed on the Muslim Brotherhood than does our intelligence director, Mr. Clapper.
You do seem to know more about it than he does.
But, well, I don't know if there are any facts to disprove what he's saying.
I was asking him if he has any facts to disprove because he's obviously studied it greatly, sufficiently informed to call the program and discuss it.
He did lay it out pretty effectively.
I'm going to drag it out of him.
I can tell he's a little afraid of saying so.
It's a strange thing for an American citizen to think.
There's no question about it.
Ned in Plymouth, Indiana, you're next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hello.
Hi, Mr. Lumba.
How are you doing, sir?
Very well, sir.
Thank you.
Hey, the point I had to make might go to ease the statement of the last caller, but mine's with personal experience.
I lived in Saudi Arabia between the years 96 and 99 and again, and 2003 to 2004, in which I was between the ages of 8 and 13, and which.
Wait a minute now.
Were you there with your parents or were you a child slave?
Both.
I was there with my parents.
My dad was a F-15 simulator instructor.
So he was over there working through Boeing, working with the Saudis on the.
Gotcha.
And while I was there, I was obviously.
This caller, ladies and gentlemen, has more experience in world affairs than President Obama.
Anyways, I got a pretty good background on the types of people on the individuals that were my age and a few years older than that.
And I'd say in their teens to the late 20s.
And the Arab culture locally, the community imports their labor.
So the youth and the young adults don't work.
They spend their time going to the malls, going to hanging out, doing whatever.
In which case, their mentality is very much similar to, I'd say, not the urban, but the less, the low-income neighborhoods of, say, here in the United States.
Are they low-income?
They're over there, they're low.
Well, it's not an income.
It's their mentality that they build up because of how their society is structured versus how the community, the local community.
So what you're saying is the Saudis have to import labor because their young people don't work.
They just go to the mall.
Well, right, the Saudis, they import their labor, in which case that causes a culture of the young community to spend their time hanging out, in which case they're just a bunch of, you know, they go out and raise hell and do whatever they want.
And the young men, obviously, you know, the women don't have any rights over there, so they're obviously superior.
And so when we see them on the TV, you know, they're just, you know, sitting there yelling for a cause.
And to go to the point of what the previous caller was saying, is just like the poor people, the single moms, the underdeveloped communities here go to support the Democrat Party.
Okay, let me, let me, what is your point?
My point is, my point is that the Arab community is, they import their labor.
Okay.
Okay, so the people that we see in the streets in the Middle East rising up and raising hell, and we see on the, you know, we see on the TV, oh, they want democracy.
They want freedom.
They're out there risking their lives.
No, they're out there to get on the camera.
Most, many of them.
And mingled in with, I'm sure, the Brotherhood.
But it's not what we're being subjected to here in the United States.
Okay.
All right.
Ned, thanks for the call.
He lives in Plymouth, Indiana, and I appreciate it.
Brief time out here, folks.
We'll be back right after this.
Don't go away.
Okay, what Ned's point was, I think he was trying to get to is that all of the rabble-rousing young Arab men that you see on television, be it in Iraq or, well, not in Iraq, let's say Egypt and maybe Libya, they're just bored young Arab men who got nothing to do.
Saudi Arabia imports their labor.
These guys have nothing to do, and they just hunkered down.
They'd love to get on television.
They'd love to go throw rocks.
They may not be affiliated with anything, is his point, right?
They have no affiliation to anything at all.
They're just trying to get themselves on TV.
So it's hard to, it may not be accurate to say that every big time movement you see on TV is made up of ideologues committed to it.
Could be just a bunch of young guys say, hey, look at me, I'm on TV, which we know exists here.
It's called the Jerry Springer Show and American Idol.
E-Entertainment, MTV, you name it.
We have our own vehicles here for people who want to get on television.
Hey, here's a shocker.
It has been announced that a Washington Post reporter is going to join Joe Biden's communications team.
The shock is it's not the plagiarist.
The plagiarist, Sari Horwitz, have been suspended.
She's not joining Biden's team.
It's Shaleg Murray.
Of course, don't question the objectivity of our drive-by media.
First of all, Jay Carney from Time magazine goes to work for Biden.
Now he's at the White House.
I was watching the press conference the other day when Chip Reed, CBS, was trying to get from Jay Carney, well, do you think it's maybe time for you guys to make a decision here on Libya?
What a revolving door.
One reporter asking another reporter a question.
This particular day, this reporter happened to work for the president.
A month ago, this particular reporter worked for the vice president.
The revolving door between Democrat politicians and members of the media.
Shaleg Murray, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, leaving the Washington Post to become Joe Biden's communication.
Well, join the Biden communications team.
Yesterday, I read to you latest updates on the nuclear situation in Japan from the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Today, we have a story here by Brian Preston from The Tackler, which is an update on what's going on at Fukushima from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And it is far less alarming than some of what we've been hearing in the media.
Important things to note, the worst evaluation is now level five, which is equal to Three Mile Island.
The spent fuel pond in reactor four building, the temperature measured again at 84 degrees Celsius or Celsius, which is not boiling.
And the IAEA has not been notified of any radiation sickness, unlike has been reported in the press.
So the international, now, a lot of people think that there's some lying going on to avoid panic.
Other people think that there's hysteria going on in the media.
Probably a little bit of both, given the players involved.
We know the media is oriented toward hysteria, and we know that government agencies tend to lie.
So a combination of things happening here.
However, we do know that the worst evaluation of Fukushima is level five.
And stories now, I had that New York Times story for you yesterday, which I said was the first accurate one I'd seen, that the problem is in old fuel rods, spent fuel rods sitting around in pools of water.
Shouldn't have been there, should have been cleaned up, should have been moved out.
Nothing to do with the current online reactors.
The current online reactors are not a problem.
So the worst evaluation now is level five equal to Three Mile Island.
Could we recall the health effects from Three Mile Island were negligible in the months following the accident?
Although questions were raised about possible adverse effects from radiation on humans, animals, and plant life in the Three Mile Island area, none could be directly correlated to the accident.
So I'll never, for Three Mile Island, everything worked.
The containment worked.
There wasn't any contamination.
There was panic over the failure.
But what happens in a failure?
The fail-safe systems worked.
So we got a level five in Japan.
It's the second day in a row here.
Two different atomic energy agencies are basically suggesting here that there has been a little hysteria.
The spent rods, they are the ones that have been exposed because the pools of water they were in had evaporated or caught fire.
The spent rods were supposed to be moved off-site by the end of this year.
Three Mile Island was a PR disaster.
We had a monopoly media that wanted it.
It's 1987.
There was no alternatives media.
There were no right-wing blogs.
There was no nothing.
That was Good Morning America.
That was ABC, CBS, NBC.
There was a monopoly media back then who wanted that to be a disaster, and it wasn't.
Chernobyl was a disaster.
So basically, we're being told now, well, we got in Japan's the equivalent of a Three Mile Island.
Does that jive with the hysteria you've seen coming out of this?
Now, the destruction from the tsunami, that's a whole different thing.
The destruction of towns from the tsunami and the earthquake, that's a whole different thing.
Nobody's discounting that.
But again, nobody's focusing on that in the media.
They're all focused on this nuclear disaster.
And what's happened in this hysteria?
Japan, I'm sorry, Germany shutting down their reactors.
Bunch of America, yeah, we got to stop nuke.
This is just a made-to-order agenda mover for the American left, and we'll be back.
The NEA Outgoing Counsel, Bob Shannon, we have power because we have 3.2 million dues-paying members.
NEA, not because we have any great concern for the children.
Okay, folks, one exciting hour of Open Line Friday remains.