Do I think they ought to fire the controller that fell asleep at Reagan National?
I know where it happened, Sturdley.
It didn't happen at two or three places.
It happened at Reagan National.
They fire the air traffic controller.
I don't know.
That would require executive kinetic action.
They've suspended the guy.
He was asleep on the job on Tuesday night.
It's a shame that they don't have such power over the presidency.
But I don't know.
Fire the air traffic controller.
Reagan National fell asleep.
I don't know.
Depends on what they had in the coffee that night.
I mean, the knee-jerk reaction is, yeah, fire the guy.
But I don't think that way.
So you can say, well, what would Reagan do?
He'd fire the whole bunch of them.
Anyway, greetings and welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's wonderful to have you with us.
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A Hillsborough County, Florida judge under withering attack for saying that he will use Islamic law to decide if an arbitration award was correct wants to explain himself.
Circuit Judge Richard Nielsen took the unusual step of issuing an opinion Tuesday, even though the Second District Court of Appeals has stayed proceedings.
This is a lawsuit against the Islamic Education Center of Tampa filed by four ousted trustees.
The opinion does not add anything that isn't already in the court file, nor does it make any finding of law.
But Nielsen appears to take great pains to explain the reasoning behind his controversial decision.
The issue involves whether an arbitration award in the case by an Islamic scholar was proper.
The Alim ruled December 28 that the mosque's ex-trustees were ousted improperly, a decision that, if sticks, might wrest control of $2.2 million from the center's current leaders.
The mosque got the money from the state after it used some of the mosque's land for a road project.
From the outset of learning of the purported arbitration award, the court's concern has been whether there was ecclesiastical principles for dispute resolution involved that would compel the court to adopt the arbitration decision without considering state law.
The court has concluded that as to the question of enforceability of the arbitrator's award, the case should proceed under ecclesiastical Islamic law, because that's the basis on which it was agreed to.
Now, some people say that what the judge did here was just purely rule on a contract that was signed between two consenting parties.
The contract that they signed had specified that disputes would be resolved according to Sharia law.
They agreed to this.
Both parties agreed that that's how disputes would be resolved.
So the case is essentially about enforcing a contract.
You could say that nothing to do with Islam, although that's not totally correct.
Sharia law is Islam.
The reason that this went back before the judge is that one of the parties was unhappy with how the arbitration worked out for him, which happens a lot in arbitration.
I saw it last night on a good wife.
Arbitration doesn't always work out, and you have to kill somebody.
That's what happened on a good wife last night.
Now, well, I watched it last night.
It actually happened on Tuesday night.
I love that show.
You ever seen it?
It's one of these rare TV shows that has depth.
It's actually got plot depth.
It's just not mindless twaddle with a D. At any rate, this was a, this was a, people can agree to be ruled by the Wizard of Oz in arbitration if they want to.
These people agreed to be ruled by Sharia law.
This was a disagreement between the trustees of a mosque about how to divvy up a windfall from the state for a road.
What's funny to me about this is how they scammed.
They got a mosque.
They needed 2.2.
Oh, we'll build a road.
Government says, here's your money, essentially.
A lot of different people from different faiths decide to accept arbitration based on their own religious laws all the time.
In this case, what's happening is that the loser is saying he didn't really agree to arbitration in the first place, and now he wants to get a do-over in front of a judge with Florida law.
This happens all the time.
And this is why the judge wants to make clear his ruling and why the two people agreed.
In other words, the judge is not sanctioning Islamic law as a basis for absolving disputes here among all people.
These are two people or two groups of people that agreed to mediation, arbitration.
They wanted to do it under Sharia law.
That was their contract.
The judge said, fine, everybody's having a cow, or a lot of people had a cow.
So he's coming out and explaining here, I am not enforcing Sharia law on anybody.
I'm not trying to tell everybody Sharia law is going to be the law of the land here in my county.
Just these two people or groups agreed that Sharia law would be how we are going to adjudicate this.
But it's still, I can see why a lot of people would be concerned by it, particularly about how headlines get written and a number of other things.
And you can't deny that, okay, here we got some people in Hillsborough County and they want Sharia law as the determining factor in how their disputes are going to be resolved.
That can't be denied, and that's going to cause a lot of red flags with a lot of people.
Understandably so.
In Oklahoma, this is a story by Robert Spencer at jihadwatch.org.
70% of Oklahomans voted to ban Sharia last November, but an ignorant leftist judge, and I'm just reading from the blog here, an ignorant leftist judge, Vicki Miles Lagrange, bought Hamas-linked Kerr's deceptive line that Sharia was just private religious law and ruled against the will of the people.
Now, the obvious problem with her ruling is that no one cares if Muslims choose to practice Islam.
The only difficulty arises when they infringe upon the rights of others in that practice.
See, in Tampa or Hillsborough County, that was not at play.
It was strictly within the two parties to the dispute.
But the new law in Oklahoma is more pointed, doesn't mention Sharia, but accomplishes the same purpose.
So heightened sensitivities to this, understandably, in some cases, properly so.
Now, if back to this Hillsboro County thing, if it goes before the Tampa judge, he has said he will decide based on Florida law.
That's where this all has ended up.
And I wanted to take the occasion, if you were reasonable, civil, the leading talk show host, explain this to you.
By the way, Fox News, where is it?
Fox News is reporting that just one month before attacking Libya, Obama asked Congress to increase American aid for Gaddafi's military to $1.7 million.
Now, that's chump change, but just a month before attacking Libya, Obama, the regime, asked Congress to increase American aid for Gaddafi's military to $1.7 million.
One of the things that has to be burning Obama here, I just have to tell you, Gaddafi cowered before Reagan and Bush.
Bush goes into a rock and cowie, Gaddafi starts waving a white flag, and he promises to get rid of his nukes.
He promises to lay down his arms.
He starts talking about wonderful Bushes.
He lays down.
He totally lays down.
Did the same thing after Bush, after Reagan went in.
With Obama in office, what does Gaddafi do?
Gaddafi says, this guy?
And launches his action.
That as much as anything has to tick Obama off, that they're not afraid of him.
But he still didn't know what to do.
He still dithered and dathered and other things.
As to the $1.7 million, the State Department figures the money was earmarked to train Libyan military officers, improve its Air Force, which we claim to have destroyed, secure its borders, and to counterterrorist.
So we gave Libya $1.7 million to, in part, secure their borders.
Hello, Arizona.
You're being sued.
Sorry, it's not funny.
But it is the truth.
Okay, back to the phones where we go.
It's Greenville, New York.
This is Ed.
Welcome, sir.
Nice to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Good afternoon, Rush.
Unfortunately, I think the conclusion that the Democrats drew from the 2008 election of Obama is that the majority of the American people are stupid.
And that's why they feel that they can get away with calling our military involvement in Libya something no more than a kinetic endeavor.
Well, yeah, I don't disagree that they think people are stupid.
They think everybody's stupid except them.
Everybody around the world is.
Clearly, they are elitists and superiorists.
There's no question that they have an arrogant, condescending view toward everybody.
It's unfortunate because, I mean, to me, the election was really nothing more than Americans showing that they're gullible and naive and believing someone at face value when they say what they say, as opposed to, you know, really looking into it and questioning what this person's actual motives are.
It wasn't just about Obama.
Don't forget there had been seven years of Bush sucks.
There had been seven years of Bush is an idiot.
There had been seven years of Bush is murdering and destroying America's image in the world.
Seven years of Bush can't talk.
Seven years of we're on the verge of a recession.
Seven years of on the verge of an economic collapse.
Seven years of the country being laughed at around the country and around the world.
And so all they had to do was to put forth somebody who could speak.
That's all they had to do.
And they took care of the rest.
They manufactured the image of competence.
They manufactured the Messiah image, the media.
They manufactured all of this.
But he did not win in a landslide.
And it took them, it took the media and the Democrat Party seven years to bring this about.
They also had some assistance.
The Republicans themselves did not offer a lot of help.
I mean, you had wild spending.
You had a new entitlement created by Republicans.
You had McCain fine gold, which kind of blew up the First Amendment.
The Republicans were behind and supported.
You had over-the-top spending.
So there was a confluence of events here.
And Obama, as untested, unknown, was a canvas, empty canvas, and you could make him whatever you wanted him to be.
And if you wanted anything opposite what had happened or other than what was happening, that's the role.
People, I think, were not specifically voting.
I mean, you had a group of people who got caught up in all of this messianic stuff.
And we had a lousy candidate who was, you know, I mean, our lousy candidate was tied with Obama until September when this financial meltdown began.
So it wasn't just that the people of this country just abandoned all sanity and invested in a slate full of lies.
That was a carefully orchestrated, manufactured seven years.
It took a long time.
And let's throw into the mix that the administration of Bush never defended themselves.
Karl Rove has now said that that's one of the mistakes that he now admits they made.
Wish they could have a do-over on that.
So, but regardless, everybody thinks that people are stupid.
I mean, I guarantee you, I have people in the audience out there, Ed, who are just cheering you on.
Yeah, America is a stupid rush.
You have too much faith in the people who write America.
People are stupid.
A lot of people think this.
And you really can't blame them in a lot of regards, given what we're faced with here.
Let's go to audio soundbites.
Ed, give me soundbite 2122 here.
This is stenographer Jonathan Alter, who was on Andrea Mitchell this afternoon on MSNBC.
And Jonathan Alter is fretting that Libya presents problems for Obama.
Here is her question.
The intelligence community is expressing concerns that Gaddafi will not be forced out that easily.
If he remains, doesn't that weaken the United States in terms of the eyes of the world and then the rest of the West?
This whole situation, Andrea, is fraught with political peril for the president, at least in the short term.
We don't know where it's going, as Bob Gates just said.
It could be that we get lucky that somebody in the Qaddafi government puts a bullet in his head and everything comes out fine.
More likely, we're going to have a bloody stalemate that's going to go on for a while.
They will do what the Reagan administration talked about when they bombed Libya in 1986, try to put Saddam back in his box.
That was the formulation that was used in the 1980s to basic, excuse me, Saddam Gaddafi back in his box so that he cannot threaten people.
Right.
So the same people, the same people who want to give like Kalamid Sheikh or Kohat, whatever, the sheikh here, a fair trial.
Bin Laden a fair trial.
Hoping somebody shoots Gaddafi to save Obama from political embarrassment.
Hopefully somebody will put a bullet in his head and save Obama from political embarrassment.
But we're going to make sure that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gets his fair trial in New York.
And here's one more Jonathan Walter still fretting, ladies and gentlemen.
Yes, he's a lunatic.
So that's one of the imponderables that you're dealing with.
It's very hard to make policy when you're dealing with somebody who's an irrational terrorist on the other side.
So this is the problem with war.
It's easy to get into and a lot harder to get out of.
And I think that the president understood this.
He was a reluctant warrior.
He made the decision only at the last minute.
We still don't know all the details of how he came to his decision.
But moving forward, it's very unclear how this is going to play out and whether it's the American people, international markets, our allies, the administration itself.
Uncertainty really sets people's teeth on edge.
Oh, he's a reluctant warrior.
He made the decision only at the last minute.
We don't know all the details.
Would somebody please shoot Gaddafi and save Obama?
They're not crying any tears in Harlem.
Bill Clinton is leaving, and they're not crying up there.
New York Daily News.
Harlem residents are not crying over former President Bill Clinton's offices moving out of their neighborhood.
The William J. Clinton Foundation, which moved on West 125th Street nearly 10 years ago, plans to move the orifices to Water Street in the financial district.
When he said he was here, what did he do for us?
Nothing.
Lifelong Harlem resident Clinton supporter Susan Chaplin said.
She stood on Lenox Avenue, not far from Clinton's office and said, he never did anything while he was here.
What difference does it make?
He never came out to say hi.
The only thing that happened here was the rent went up.
That's all that happened here.
Maybe now that he's leaving, the rent will go down.
Him being in the community doesn't affect it.
All he did was raise the rent.
Drugs are still being sold.
People still being killed.
It won't be no tears.
No thank you.
Goodbye.
The New York Daily News chronicling the departure of Bill Clinton from Harlem to the financial district.
And from, what is this?
I need a magnifying glass to read this.
It's Bloomberg.
Purchases of new U.S. homes unexpectedly.
Why would this be unexpected?
Purchases of new U.S. homes unexpectedly declined in February to the slowest pace on record.
Prices dropped to the lowest level since December of 2003, I think.
Adding to evidence, the industry is floundering.
Sales decreased almost 17% to a 250,000 annual pace.
250,000 new homes?
What?
A year?
That can't be.
That's dead.
And they went on to say in a story that adds evidence the housing industry is floundering.
What was their first clue?
But the economy is recovering, folks.
And every quarter, every report they say we're near the bottom.
Be it the employment numbers, unemployment numbers, housing, new and used, existing, whatever.
You're near the bottom, folks.
This is a sure sign we're on the way back.
Here's a story for Diane Sawyer.
Japanese authorities are considering a plan to import bottled water from overseas, a government official said this morning.
Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretary, indicated at a news conference that importing water was among the options under discussion.
This followed the disclosure on Wednesday by the Japanese authorities that radioactive iodine had been detected in Tokyo's water supply, prompting a warning that infants in Tokyo and surrounding areas should not be given tap water to drink.
On Thursday, the authorities began the daunting task of distributing bottled water to the families of an estimated 80,000 infants defined as children under one year old.
Imagine the recycling challenge now.
All of this bottled water.
I smell a future report on ABC's World News Tonight by Diane Sawyer.
When they head back over there with their Geiger counters to track the radioactivity, check on the recycling of these massive numbers of bottles of imported water from Senegal.
As gun, rocket, and mortar battles intensify in Ivory Coast's capital, Abidjan, functionaries in distant capitals have begun selecting more loaded vocabulary to describe the conflict, civil war, ethnic cleansing, nothing here about kinetic action.
And given that more than 400 people have died, nearly 400,000 have fled since the renegade president Laurent Bagagog refused to step aside after losing a November 28th election.
And the Ivory Go, the point of the story is the Ivory Coast is asking, where is our UN intervention?
Where's Obama?
Where are the people who care about us?
They're not there.
Nobody has shown up to help.
Cliff in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Well, thanks.
And big time dittos to you.
You've got a great avenue for free exchange ideas on your program.
Thank you very much, sir.
I'm kind of in favor of actually taking action here, but more along the Bush doctrine.
That is, we can get ahead of the, I don't call it the mob, but the people and sort of lead them toward some ideas of democracy.
Whether they seize it or not, that's for the future to hold.
But more worrisome is if we don't do anything, he's just going to lie more closely, take all his money, and more ally closely with the axis of evil, North Korea, Iran, and Syria.
So not to do nothing is unfortunately worse.
I wish they'd actually just go on there and take care of it and just call it what it is.
Well, to take him out.
Do you think this administration has even one person in it that ponders the possibility of a democratic Libya?
No, I'm not saying that they stayed at times.
No, they're not thinking that at all.
What they're thinking, all you got to do is listen to Jonathan Alter.
What they're all thinking is, would somebody put a bullet in Qaddafi's head so we can say we won and get out of here?
That's all that's on their mind.
Democracy in Libya, these people don't go that far.
Well, not they don't go that difficulty.
Jonathan Alter, we've got the French, everybody dropping missiles.
We've got people firing bullets all over there, and he's asking for somebody to put a bullet in Qaddafi's head.
There are millions of bullets being fired over there.
Could not one of them be aimed at Gaddafi?
That would be nice.
I wish they'd support the people, just explicitly say it.
Well, the problem is we don't know who the people are.
Likely, the rebels are being advised and paid for by al-Qaeda.
Well, it's an opportunity to shape it, shape the debate in Libya.
If we lose, well, it's at least the birth to try.
Well, it's yeah, I know that's what the Bush doctrine is.
And it may well be that the Bush doctrine's playing a role here in some of these outbreaks.
We don't know yet.
Only time will tell.
But I don't think anybody is saying that any of this uprising in Libya is a democracy movement.
They said it in Egypt, and we know that the Iranian uprising is oriented around democracy, but this I don't think is.
This is I'll tell you who the two competing rebels are: Al-Qaeda and Iran.
You get Shiites and Al-Qaeda.
That's what you've got here, trying to get rid of Gaddafi.
There's no question that's what's going on.
And those two are not interested in democracy in any way.
But what happens?
What happens is a bad outcome.
What happens is a bad outcome.
Yeah.
The least bad outcome would be Gaddafi surviving this assassination attempt that Jonathan Walter is hoping for.
But that's not, they're not looking at it that way.
They're looking at they've got a whole different view of this.
They look at Gaddafi as being mean to his people.
Well, we can't put up with that.
Not when people start to complain about it.
If people started complaining about Hafez Assad, or no, he's dead.
Basher Assad being mean to his people, and it got big and big and big enough.
Then with the same dithering, oh, the hand ring.
Oh, gosh, what do we do here?
Oh, this kind of swelled out of proportion because it's all part of the Mediterranean region.
Egypt, you got Tunis, Tunisia, you have Bahrain, and now Libya.
So this is, I think the vision here is really narrow and self-serving.
And like I told you early, Snerdley, it's PR-oriented.
The whole, I guarantee you that the end game that they're all contemplating here is how can this end to make Obama look the best in terms of the prism of the 2012 election?
That's it.
Don't doubt me.
Okay, wait a sec.
Wait a second.
If Gaddafi stays, he's Ned, right?
And then he's going to start sponsoring more terrorism, right?
And we don't have a Reagan in the White House anymore.
I think Gaddafi is a lot of his terrorism activities are pretty much stripped.
That may be a legitimate concern, but this is why I said last week, you really need smart people to figure this out before you commit to this kind of action, because once you do, there is going to be an outcome.
In this case, one of two things is going to happen.
Either these rebels, whoever they are, are going to end up running the show, or Gaddafi is going to survive.
We had the caller yesterday talking about contingencies.
Does anybody, the defense secretary says, we don't have one.
We're, what did he call it?
Doing this on the fly.
So whatever's happening is not something we've planned for, yet we're engaged anyway.
This is what happens when unserious people get involved in really meaningful stuff.
And it's one of the reasons why we're being looked at here as a joke and why nobody knows who's running this whole show.
And nobody wants to raise their hand and say, I am, because nobody's really proud of this.
Let's see, now, Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bomber in retaliation for the Reagan missile strikes.
So you would think that he'll find a way to get even here if he survives.
He will find a way to get even.
So you balance that whether you want Gaddafi surviving and finding a way to get even, or do you want these rebels, who may not really know who they are, running Libya and turning it into what have you.
And note that nobody is running around saying this is a democracy uprising and this we must get behind.
You don't hear the same language that you heard vis-a-vis Egypt in this, do you?
This is all about Gaddafi, how rotten he is.
Pure and simple.
Still looking for somebody to put a bullet in Qaddafi's head.
Jonathan Alder has made the request.
Well, he speculated on the pleasant outcome such a result would bring.
I can think of how many people do you know who could be bought to do this?
Show him a picture of Gaddafi, put him on a plane, Tripoli.
There's a new poll out.
It's not good.
17% of Americans only.
This is from Reuters, but it's a Reuters Ipsos poll taken after the United States and its allies began the kinetic military action in Libya.
Only 17% of Americans see Obama as a strong and decisive military leader.
Nearly half of those polled view Obama as a cautious and consultative or consultative commander-in-chief.
More than a third see him as indecisive in military matters.
17% view Obama as a strong and decisive military leader.
The headline of the Reuters story, few Americans see Obama as strong military leader.
But again, the poll is not accurate.
I don't think they need to redo the poll asking how they see Obama as a leader of kinetic military action.
Remember, up until now, this is why I guarantee in the White House, this is why they are discombobulated.
Because up until now, Obama got his best ratings for his foreign affairs.
He had his strongest suit was foreign affairs.
And then this thing comes along.
You know, they've got to be asking them, what happened?
How did we get here?
How in the world did we end up firing Tomahawk missiles at this guy?
I guarantee you there are people.
It is stunning to listen to some of the soundbites we had today.
Wolf Blitzer desperately trying to find out from a national security director, is our mission regime change?
Well, no, Wolf, we're going to...
Well, Obama says Gaddafi's got to go.
Well, that's the military policy.
We were talking about here at the White House.
Wolf went obviously just bending over as far as he could.
Is it regime change or not?
So they're trying to do everything they can because nobody understands.
Nobody on the left understands this.
17% of the American people.
This is not good.
They're going to have to do something about this poll.
What will it be?
Hey, a final thought on Libya, ladies and gentlemen.
Have you noticed that we are not seeing a lot of photos in the news and not a lot of video in the news of dead, innocent civilians bombed by our forces in Libya?
We're not even seeing much footage of the damage done.
Not like it was in Iraq.
I wonder why that is.
Wonder why those photos in that video is not being shown to us.