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Aug. 26, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
August 26, 2011, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Rush is back on Monday, and all will be right with the world.
Well, actually, plenty will be wrong with the world, but at least he'll be back to talk about it.
I'm Mark Davis.
Hi.
Wrapping up the week, I join you from Rick Perry's, Texas.
George W. Bush's Texas.
LBJ's Texas, I guess, if you want to be bipartisan about it.
I join you from the enormity of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in the studios of WBAP, proud Limbaugh affiliate since the early 90s.
So, hi, Mark Davis.
How are you?
We had a good time yesterday.
Let's see if we can raise that bar today.
I tell you one thing that makes it extra festive.
Hey, it's Open Line Friday.
Live from New York City.
It's Open Line Friday.
And the more persnickety among you will say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I mean, aren't you in Texas?
And, you know, obviously Rush is doing a lot of those shows from Florida these days because he's blessed enough to live there.
So what's the New York thing?
Well, the New York thing, every Rush Limbaugh show ultimately comes to you, if not from New York, through New York, because that's where the technology is and probably some big satellite tower of some kind.
And that's where engineer Mike Mamone and guiding guru Bo Snerdley and in training screener Greg Chapin are strapped in and ready to handle the onslaught of your calls.
It is a room that I have been in.
I was up in New York last year, year before, something like that.
And I think the first time I sat in here was, gosh, March of a couple of years ago, I want to say.
And I was in the neighborhood.
So I popped in and saw the little operations room where when Rush is in New York, or if any guest host is in New York, the room they occupy, and there's the leather chair with an EIB logo, sort of the adjunct studio there for when people are doing the show from New York, where, of course, Rush did the show, where Rush did the show forever.
And it's funny, just a dumb little anecdote, if I can, because it's the weekend.
We're loosey-goosey.
The first time I sort of walked into Rush's world, I'd come here to work at WBAP in Dallas-Fort Worth in 1994.
And this was either that year or by the time we get to 95 or 96, Rush was doing the TV show.
And we all very fondly remember the TV show, the half-hour syndicated TV show.
He would do the radio show and then go and do a tape, I guess, in the early evening, I guess, of the syndicated TV show.
And what we did is we took some listeners from Houston and some listeners from Dallas-Fort Worth, and we put ourselves on a charter plane, flew up to New York, trolled around Manhattan for two or three days, and attended a taping of Rush's TV show.
I still did my show back here to Dallas-Fort Worth and did it from what was and still is, our sister station, the Mighty 77 WABC in New York City.
They're at 2 Penn Plaza, the big office building that rises high over Madison Square Garden.
So I'm in there doing my show, having a great time.
And at that time, just as at this time, my show was on our station right before Rush.
So I didn't want to bother him.
It's like, who's this guy?
I'm down the hall.
I mean, he was doing the show from the actual facilities of WABC, now, of course, and forever, the New York Rush Limbaugh affiliate.
And people always ask me, and that's one of the reasons I'm really telling this story.
What's Rush really like?
What's Rush really like?
Well, let me tell you something.
I know a lot of people in our industry, and we're not all really affable, agreeable people, some particularly not.
There's a reason why some people who do this for a living enjoy being in really closed, secluded studios and not really getting out and seeing a lot of real human beings.
And I just want to tell you about the graciousness and the decency.
And listen, everybody's decent and kind for 30 seconds, like, you know, how soon can I get out of here?
He came by, sat in on my show, talked to me for what must have been a couple of segments, just back to the Dallas-Fort Worth audience.
And this is 16 years ago now.
And in the few times that he's come to town to do events for us, or I've been up and just actually had a chance to be around him.
This sounds like total shill talk or total you-know-what kissing, but you know what?
And it's also abundantly true.
Every bit the prince of a man you would expect him to be, every bit.
And so I really go on that little rant just to express gratitude for the ability to be here.
And I know Brother Stein and Brother Belling feel the same way, and we've had a great time this week filling in.
Okay, time to shut up and move on to actual topics.
Let's do it.
1-800-282-2882, 1-800-282-2882.
All right.
I've been the day before yesterday.
I heard Bo prodding Mark Belling into going into some detail about his Hot Ron Paul opinions.
Before the show even begins today, Bo and I are tossing around hot topics.
Let's do this.
Let's do that.
What do you think about this?
What do you think about that?
And I had a little something in my head.
It's like the big story of today, obviously, is something that at first blush seems completely apolitical and, of course, largely is, and that is Hurricane Irene.
And the first thing that needs to be said about that, some might argue the only thing that needs to be said about that, is to reach out to those listening along the Atlantic coast, Rush Limbaugh stations in North Carolina, Virginia, and Northward, where it could be a pretty wild weekend and pretty wild beginning of next week.
And of course, the first human sentiment that I want to offer is: God bless you, folks, batting down the hatches when the authorities say get out, get out.
Don't fire up a blender of margaritas and go, oh, this will be fun, eh?
Don't do that.
Don't die.
Okay, do me a favor.
Don't die.
And in all seriousness, let's let us, I'd like this whole thing to fizzle right now and become a non-story.
Looks like that's probably not going to happen.
Will it be category two or three or whatever by the time it hits North Carolina?
What category will it be by the time it blows up Fifth Avenue?
As was suggested in one of the computer models.
So again, the first thing and the overall abiding, overarching thing is if you're in that path, just be safe.
And I hope that everything from human to structural toll is minimal.
Let's have every good thought and every prayer directed toward everyone that is in Hurricane Irene's path.
Okay?
Are we good?
All right.
Now let's have the conversation that not many shows will have.
And here's what I mean.
I have said this a few times in my career, and I've had a lot of people agree with me.
And let's see if you do.
And what we need to do is to tell everybody from affiliates in North Carolina to affiliates in Maine, we love you, and everything I just said was sincere.
That having been said, let me share a couple of things and see if it resonates with you and see if we can ask why it is, what we think's going on, and what all the media ought to do about it.
There is nothing that is as kind of crazy to me as approaching hurricane coverage.
It's like they are hiring new reporters so that they can have people block by block in every town and every stretch of seacoast from Nagshead to Newfoundland so that every channel, every network.
I mean, I stumbled across Diane Sawyer yesterday, and they've got, is it Dan Harris, I guess, was the one walking around sunny New York City saying the models say this thing's going to come right up Fifth Avenue.
What's it going to do?
Shop?
And then there's somebody else who's in Philadelphia.
Well, you know, it's not always sunny in Philadelphia, as the show title says, but it was this day.
Like, we have it a couple of days from now.
You know, and why exactly is that?
Because here are the facts, facts of approaching hurricane stories.
God, I'm going to get eaten alive for this.
Address your emails to Bo because I wanted to keep there's a long list of things that every host believes and doesn't quite know if he wants to float out.
So not only am I going to float this out, I'm going to do it on the Limbaugh show.
This will either work out really well or not.
The Irene story affects a small percentage of America.
Are you sitting out there in California?
Are you sitting in Montana?
Are you sitting in Arizona?
Are you sitting in Missouri going, okay, I get it?
A hurricane's coming.
My prayer is that it not eat up thousands of buildings or hurt or kill anybody.
But let me know when it happens.
I don't need team coverage with 47 people and entire hours of the Today Show eaten up with this before the thing even hits.
Or are you sitting here with me in Texas, where we had a whole lot of our state on fire and couldn't get a federal emergency declaration?
Whoops, the story just became political.
Well, everything's political at some point to some degree.
And I got a lot of emails on the local show this morning here in Dallas-Fort Worth saying, hey, Mark, you think this is there a possibility that this could be another Katrina?
Well, the answer to that is no, no, and no for the following reasons.
Number one, it seems that the Atlantic Coast communities have their act together a little better than New Orleans and Louisiana did.
It seems that we have somewhat more talented elected leadership along these states than Louisiana and New Orleans did.
It seems that even the Atlantic coast of the United States is not below sea level as New Orleans was where they chose to build a city anyway.
And I love New Orleans.
God bless New Orleans.
Hope you all are doing well.
But the real reason this is not going to be another Katrina is you could have every single element of Katrina.
You know it's coming, but tons of people don't leave.
Local officials really mess it up.
State officials really mess it up.
And yes, federal officials really mess stuff up.
So you got every element of Katrina.
It's Katrina 2.0.
Yeah, except for one thing: Bush isn't president.
With Obama as president, his reputational bodyguards in the media will see to it that this would not be another Katrina, even if it were another Katrina.
All right.
So as we begin, look, I've got all kinds of stuff.
There's a Peggy Noonan, whom I love, has written a thing where she thinks Rick Perry just pops off at the mouth too much, which is A, probably true, and B, part of his charm.
Jonah Goldberg, whom I love in National Review, also says he has a Rick Perry problem.
Well, we'll see if you do.
And I'm not going to bury you in Rick Perry talk.
I mean, here I am in Texas, obviously, but I'd be doing it anyway because he is a total frontrunner now.
Got this big old lead over Mitt Romney.
Oh, did you hear Romney with this lady in New Hampshire?
Not New Hampshire.
I don't know where he was yesterday.
Maybe it was New Hampshire.
Anyways, at a town hall meeting of some type, and this lady asks him a really long question.
I mean, torturously long.
And he sought to answer her.
Well, she just kept talking.
I mean, it was just ridiculous rudeness.
And if you're a presidential candidate, what do you do?
You want to be civil.
You want to be measured.
You don't want to try to shout something.
You don't want to shout somebody down.
But by the same token, you don't want to be steamrolled by somebody who just won't shut up.
So what you have is audio of Mitt Romney for like 30 seconds going, man, man, man, man, ma'am, please let me finish.
You had your time.
I'm going to answer your question.
You asked your question.
Now I'm going to answer it.
Ma'am, listen, listen, let me finish.
It gets really uncomfortable.
Now, I'm going to tell you something.
Mitt Romney will never be my favorite candidate for the GOP nomination.
He's just not conservative enough on a few things.
If he is the nominee, I'll crawl on broken glass to vote for him to prevent a second Obama term.
But if we're still in the process here and we've got a whole lot of people to pick from, Governor Romney, who's a thoroughly decent guy, and I like him a lot on a lot of things, he will never be my favorite GOP candidate.
But I will tell you this.
Good for him.
Good for him.
I mean, because if you've got somebody at a town hall meeting who's just going off, sometimes you just got to say, look, hey, now you'll never say what would occur to me.
Could you shut up for 60 seconds and let me answer the question that you took three minutes to ask me, please?
No candidate will ever do that.
At least I hope, or maybe I hope they would.
But I think he handled it very nicely.
Good for him.
Good for Mitt.
But we've got a lot of political news, so let's do this.
I'm about to hit the first break.
And as you folks hop in to call us at 1-800-282-2882, let us simply make as one of the things that we talk about today, if you wish, again, and I'll probably have to say this 14 times during the show.
Every bit of it wrapped in our prayers, good wishes, and positive feelings about everybody in the hurricane corridor in its path.
All right.
That's first and foremost.
That goes without saying, even though I'll need to say it a lot of times, to insulate me and perhaps you from making some interesting observations, if you choose to make them, about hurricane coverage and how nuts the media go and how wildly overplayed it seems to be.
I mean, if this thing eats Virginia, tell me that that happened.
But it's just wildly sensational as we begin and an excuse to put reporters in windbreakers out there doing things.
And I'll tell you this, I will tell you this.
If I seem to scoff at this, I'm not really because it probably works.
I mean, at least it works in the very populous portion of the Northeast where all this is happening.
I'm guessing viewership is through the roof.
But if you're in some other pretty big market, so I don't know, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas, Fort Worth, Chicago, are you kind of looking at this and going, oh, for crying out loud, okay with the hurricane coverage?
All right.
If so, I want you to have the courage to bring that voice to this show.
And we'll talk about it if you want to, because it's just an interest every once in a while.
I mean, some things are very political.
Some things are maybe just cultural or media behavior related.
I'm intrigued at how and why things get covered and to the degree that they are.
So that's just one of the things that we can do.
Plenty of political red meat.
I got all kinds of good stuff for you.
Ready to rock.
Mark Davis, in for rush, and let's start going to your calls immediately, shall we?
1-800-282-2882.
Be right back.
It is Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Got a lot of political stuff in front of me, and I'm about to dive into it.
I'm Mark Davis, joining in here from Fill In Land.
Rush is back on Monday.
Tell you what, we do have some takers on my opening premise, my desire to take an entire national audience and see what everybody is thinking about the Irene coverage, about the enormity of it, the scope of it, the size of it.
And I'll tell you what, and ultimately it just becomes the redundancy of it.
How many times can a meteorologist sit there and show us a computer model?
How many times can we have somebody in some apartment saying, get away from the glass?
How many times?
And in a way, I understand this because this is coverage that could be maybe even potentially life-saving to some folks.
And anytime you have something of that important nature, there's a rule in all of media, radio, TV, whatever, that as soon as you're saying something or running something for the 500th time, someone is seeing or hearing it for the first time.
So there, I guess, is the logic for just the constant drumbeat of here comes the Irene coverage.
So, and I get it.
And we, of course, all totally care about our brothers and sisters along that path.
Well, let's head right into what might be that path of the big WPHD in Philadelphia.
Frank is listening.
Frank, Mark Davis in Frush.
How are you?
And I hope you're well.
And I hope this is largely uneventful for you as the weekend goes on.
I appreciate that, Mark.
Yes, I've been listening to the program, and I enjoy it and typically agree with you as a conservative.
But I think you're a little bit off base here with your opinion as far as the coverage.
Let's face it, all coverage is over the top and sensationalistic, and I understand all that.
But to say that other parts of the country really don't care about this storm coming up the East Coast, I mean, I'm curious with you being in Texas, were you concerned when Katrina was coming in?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I never said that.
Never said that no one.
Never said.
Yeah, I absolutely do.
In the day, it's kind of funny because before Katrina came, no one knew what a story it would become.
As it became a story, a story of an extremely powerful hurricane, more powerful than this, and a horrendously ill-prepared city and state who knew how inept Mayor Nagan and the governor would be.
It became the power of the Katrina story unfolded after it actually hit.
In the days leading out 30, 30 seconds, I'm Mitt Romney now at a town hall meeting.
30 seconds, I'll give it right back to you.
As a hurricane approaches, I do wonder about the enormity of coverage and the 90% of people totally unaffected by any hurricane as it approaches and whether most people say, okay, let me know about this.
Put it in the newscast somewhere.
I definitely care about my fellow Americans.
I want to know if it gets really bad and all that.
But I guess it's just a matter of degree.
Full hours of shows, the beginning of every newscast is like, man.
At this point, they're showing this to be bearing down all along the coast.
And you're talking about potential loss of life.
You're talking about potentially billions of dollars in damage.
Americans, we all care about our fellow Americans.
No doubt about it.
No doubt about it.
You know, it's kind of funny.
Some things in this show and my own show, I come on with like a big agenda.
This is how I feel, agree or disagree with me.
This one, I'm kind of just asking.
And that's kind of funny.
I'd love to know if you'd have the same opinion if you were not in Philadelphia.
So more in a moment.
Mark Davis in for Rush.
It's a big day for us here in Texas because high school football starts the religion of high school football.
And there may be a lot of prayer along the sidelines and on the fields because if some of these games are starting at like seven tonight when the sun is still up, I promise you we will have kickoff temperatures in some parts of our state, easily 105 degrees, if not more.
Pretty crazy.
Hope things are cool and comfortable where you are as summer winds down.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Davis in for rush.
Let's see, let's knock out some this has caught fire, so let's do this.
I got Peggy Noonan on Perry's sort of campaign demeanor, a couple of other things.
Charles Krauthammer has a fascinating thing in the Washington Post about the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial that has opened.
And so we've got all that coming up, but folks have really glommed onto this about sort of noticing how we as a nation consume approaching hurricane coverage and approaching hurricane issues.
And honestly, maybe the answer to this question is Katrina changed everything with what ultimately happened in Katrina.
Maybe that's why we have enormously heightened attention to this because it's like, good heavens, will the coastal areas of Carolina and Virginia and Maryland and Delaware and on northward, you know, will they be prepared?
Will they be all set?
And here's the interesting thing.
There's one thing that did strike me as a pretty good fresh angle other than just an excuse to have a reporter in a windbreaker somewhere.
And that was the guy that I think ABC spoke with in New York who said, if we've got to evacuate, if we've got to evacuate 13 million people from a portion of Manhattan, that ain't going to happen.
And didn't they put out an order as recently as yesterday that if you are, this struck me as an odd dichotomy.
If you're a senior citizen in a low-lying area, so apparently it's age and elevation related.
If you're 34 living on higher ground, you're fine.
But if you're a senior citizen in Battery Park, got to go.
Time to evacuate is now.
And the other interesting thing, and maybe this is governmental nature, human nature, smart or not smart, I guess I would rather be overprepared than underprepared because we've seen underprepared and it's not pretty.
So maybe the proclivity is for everybody to just freak out.
I'd rather evacuate a bunch of people and say, whew, we didn't have to do that, than not evacuate a lot of people and say, wow, I wish we had.
That makes sense?
All right.
Let us head to Barrington, Illinois.
Peter, Mark Davis in for rush.
How are you?
Fine.
Thank you, Mark, for taking my phone call.
I'd been trying to compose myself because I agree with you 100%.
All due respect to the hurricane coming up.
There are other news, more important, as important, equally important.
And this news media is like selective journalism.
They are insulting the American people of their selection of what news to cover and what not to cover.
And as a comment, I will give you an example that several weeks ago, the government accounting office released a report of an audit from the Federal Reserve Board that indicated it was a low-interest loan, they selected to lend out $16 trillion, yes, $16 trillion to the major banks of the world.
And now with a banking crisis that's going on every other day with the stock market, the banks are saying they're out of money.
Where did that money go?
Isn't this newsworthy?
No, of course it is.
And the fact that you knew it, pardon me, meant that you saw it somewhere.
Peter, I understand.
Let me reply, and I got to try to get, we've got a bunch of people.
I kind of want to get this fairly compactified so we can get on some other stuff.
But as long as you all want to ride this train, I'll ride it.
Shoot, I brought it up.
There's enough time and enough channels and enough websites and enough stations where there's room absolutely for everything.
I mean, there totally is.
And I don't look at this as an opportunity to look at hurricane coverage and find something that happened somewhere that you or I didn't think got enough coverage and go, well, but for the hurricane coverage, they could have told us this big story about the Fed.
And I was like, okay, whatever.
And pardon me, I don't mean to sound that that dismissively, because what you brought up is important.
And also, in defense, I guess, of the size and scope of hurricane coverage, it's not as though, is there any such thing as a slow news day anymore?
No.
But it's not as though there is some enormous, seething, attention-grabbing, oxygen-scarfing story that's not getting covered so that we can have long hours of here comes the hurricane stories.
Especially in the era of modern media, if you're not digging, you know, Good Morning America doing an hour of hurricane coverage, change the channel.
Of course, today's show is probably doing an hour of hurricane coverage too.
But there's always other stuff you can go get.
Just intrigued by the psychology of it and the marketplace decision-making of it.
We are in, let's drop down to Cookville, Tennessee.
Mike, hey, Mark Davis in for Rush, how are you?
Thanks, Mark, for taking my call.
Sure.
I just wanted to let you know, I grew up in Eastern North Carolina, right in a little town called Oriental.
That's right in the bullseye where Irene's going.
And I'm worried.
It's been 20-some years since they've had a major hurricane.
And I went through Hazel down there, and water was 10 to 12 foot deep in the streets.
And the builders have come for the last 20 years and have built a tremendous amount of vacation homes down there on slabs.
And people don't realize what's coming.
And they won't leave because they won't leave their possessions because they can't get back in after the hurricane.
And I'm worried.
You do not, you don't sound, well, you sound like you're about 40.
Wasn't Hurricane Hazel like in the 50s?
No, I'm 65.
Okay, well, yeah, because I remember it's because I grew up in the sort of the Maryland suburbs of D.C.
And we would go out, and I love the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Nagshead and Kill Devil Hills and Mantio and all.
It's fantastic.
And I fear for that area now.
And what you've described, I think, are extremely valid things to pay attention to.
Are they ready?
What's going to happen?
What could happen?
And to that extent, I totally, totally get it.
In fact, while you were talking about Hazel, let me confirm.
Yep, that was the deadliest and costliest hurricane of the 1954 Atlantic hurricane season.
Mike, thank you.
My best, everybody, in Cookville, Tennessee.
The storm killed as many as 1,000 people in Haiti before striking the United States right near that North Carolina-South Carolina border.
And it hit as a category four and then caused another 95 fatalities in the U.S.
And then Hazel went all the way up to Canada and remained, caused 81 deaths in Canada.
And it's funny because those of you in, like, say, say, WMAL or anywhere along the path of Irene now, the sort of signature hurricane of my youth was Camille in 1969.
And I'm living in Prince George's County right outside Washington, D.C.
And all I can remember is just I'd never seen rain like that.
And it was right about this time of year, too.
It was the middle of August or toward the end of the middle of August.
And it was a cat five.
Category five.
So, you know what?
Maybe the point's kind of being proven because here we are turning approaching hurricanes into parlor talk.
Reminiscences of Camille and Hazel and obviously reminiscences of Katrina.
People wondering, is everybody ready?
And is everybody going to be okay?
It's funny.
The mystery to me has never been the interest and the compelling nature of approaching hurricane stories.
I guess it's just the degree of it.
In fact, just one final segment, this one final call of this segment.
This is kind of what I'm talking about.
Are you living somewhere where stuff has happened, really bad stuff has happened, and it just didn't much get covered?
Walters, Oklahoma, Patricia.
Hey, Mark Davis, in for Rush.
How are you?
Hello, neighbor.
Hey, Patricia.
Hey, I'm getting aggravated at this hurricane coverage because Oklahoma has been in a drought since early spring.
If they could come down to Oklahoma and see that our rivers, our lakes, our creeks are drying up.
There are no more fish in the ponds and the creeks.
They've all died off.
Farmers are losing their cattle.
People are dying in the heat stroke.
We're on water restrictions.
And this has gone on since March and April.
And you never on the weather channel or any of the big news channels say anything about how this drought is devastating.
It will devastate this country because cattle prices are going to go up.
Corn prices, we've lost all of our cotton here.
We've lost all of our wheat.
There's no winter cotton.
There won't be any wheat this winter that'll be planted.
There is nothing here.
And to me, that is a bigger story that affects our entire country than this hurricane ever will.
Patricia, thank you.
Oh, this is great.
Internecon regional squabbles.
Portions of America throw down.
We've been hurt worse than you ever will.
Okay.
We all know the answer to what Patricia's talking about, right?
What's part of the reason why all this happens?
Because hurricanes are cool.
Because you got the big map there 700 miles wide of a big spiral thing and it's going to eat the eastern seaboard as opposed to a drought.
What are the visuals of a drought?
Let's go down and get some more windswept crops that aren't there anymore.
Yeah, this is good.
Exactly right.
So, you know, it's what is more compelling?
What is more visually compelling?
Listen, that's pure human nature in terms of the media bringing it to us and the degree to which we consume it.
I mean, if they tell you, hey, coming up tonight, Nightline, takes a look at Oklahoma drought.
Yeah, that's an opportunity to hit your Ti-Vo probably and see what movies you still have.
But if it's here comes the hurricane that's going to eat America, everybody's in.
But apparently not everybody, as we're hearing on some of our phone lines.
I'll tell you what, let's do.
Let's do like another segment of this, and I'm going to bolt into some of the week interview political stuff of the day.
But this has been interesting.
I've enjoyed it.
Mark Davis in for Rush on the EIB Network.
It is open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis filling in from Texas, a state largely unaffected by Hurricane Irene, as are most states, but we are inundated before the hurricane, inundated with coverage, which is fine, which I get.
But we're sort of talking about the amount of coverage and how that's striking people and the nature of it and the tone of it.
And I just sort of wanted to see how that would go.
Well, I guess I know now.
So let's do a final segment on this and then move on to various other events from the week as we continue.
Now, here's what gets kind of interesting.
Let's talk about people, in fact, talk to people in the hurricane's path who think there's too much coverage.
We're in Moorhead, North Carolina, and here's Libby to say, I'm tired of hearing about it.
Libby, I'm intrigued by you.
Hi, how are you?
I'm fine, Mark.
How are you?
Very well.
Thank you.
Good.
I think the media gives way too much coverage, not just to this hurricane, but any.
And what's funny to us is that they'll have someone standing on a beach that barely has a white cap, and it'll be three days before the storm is hitting, you know, reporting from there.
I mean, that's later crush.
I think it's important to everybody that's in the path of a hurricane to be inundated with information about it.
But I don't think the whole nation needs to know.
Well, this is an interesting point.
In fact, isn't this sort of the job of local television?
If I ran, as much as I've said about perhaps a bit of a glut of national coverage of this, if I had a local TV station in the path of this hurricane, it's all I'd be doing.
It would be wall to wall, here comes the hurricane.
Right.
And we have a lot of that.
But still, we don't have it 24-7 right now.
Believe me, by tonight, tomorrow morning, it'll probably be 24-7.
But we really don't need that much exposure on something that for across the nation.
I mean, just like the fires in Texas, yes, we want to know about that.
But there's someone standing there, you know, on a five tower making a report.
Before the thing's even on fire.
This could be on fire in three days.
Let me thank you.
My best to everybody in the Tar Heel State.
Thank you.
All right.
One, one, one more.
All just a little bit inland in the fine Commonwealth of Virginia.
We're in Chester v. Chester, V A Ken.
Mark Davis, Infor Rush.
How are you?
Good afternoon, Mark.
Thanks for taking my call.
I agree totally with that last call you just had.
This whole business is just out of control when it comes to the reporting on these natural disasters like the hurricane.
We have hurricanes every year.
They come up the coast.
Sometimes I'm just outside Richmond.
Sometimes we get hit hard.
Sometimes we don't.
But I don't need to listen to this stuff starting four to five days out when it was down in Puerto Rico and then having this constant coverage as it comes on up the coast.
It's kind of like I was thinking, kind of like waiting, kind of like watching paint to dry.
But here's the thing.
So are all these TV stations who are smart people, TV networks and stations and such, they're smart people.
All they do is try to figure out what people want to see.
Have they made a gross miscalculation?
Or are you just in the minority?
Do you think most people are just, is it like OJ coverage?
Everybody said, I'm tired of the OJ coverage, and yet everybody watched the OJ coverage.
I don't even think everybody's really watching it anymore.
As I say, they're sick and tired.
If that thing changes maybe two degrees to the west, I'll be right in the middle of it, right in the eye.
But I know what's going to happen.
There's nothing I can do about it.
I can't stand out there and hold up my hand and say stop.
I just have to take the normal precautions if it does get really bad.
Ken, listen, I got to skew it because I'm up against time.
Thank you very, very much.
And I just want to give myself 30 seconds to make what's essentially a final observation about hurricane coverage, natural disaster coverage, true of networks, true of local stations.
You really want to know why they do it or why they don't give you less of it?
Any network or any station that really reins it in, that sort of follows what Ken seems to want to do.
It's like, God, stop beating me over the head with a hurricane.
If they do it less, they will lose the weather reputation.
And every station and maybe every network wants the weather reputation.
So if ever anything's ever bearing down on you, you remember, oh, channel this or that network gave me 25 straight hours of coverage and now I need it.
So that's where I'm going to go.
They're trying to put money in the bank, reputation in the bank for being the weather station or the weather network.
And I suppose I kind of understand that.
All righty.
Now we'll get some things I don't understand as well.
And I'll explain those to you next and ask for some of your help, give you some topics, looking ahead in the next couple of hours.
Mark Davis in For Rush.
Stick around.
Got a preview in a moment.
When some of my favorite writers hold forth on some things I'm inclined to share, so why don't we do a couple of these things as we work our way into the next hour?
Peggy Noonan wonders about whether Rick Perry pops off too much.
Jonah Goldberg talks about conservatism with an identity politics problem.
And I love Peggy and I love Jonah.
And I love meeting Charles Krauthammer who has some thoughts about the freshly opened Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington.
So I'm just going to share all of those.
And being Open Line Friday, if there are things that have cropped up on the show this week, it's been a fascinating week in 2012 developments.
There are always all kinds of interesting things going on economically, all kinds of things that are happening socially and culturally.
So let's put them all together and just have a delicious experience in the last two hours of the week of the Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'm Mark Davis filling in from WBAP, Dallas, Fort Worth.
Want to follow me on Twitter?
Do it.
Mark Davis, all one word, M-A-R-K-D-A-V-I-S.
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