Michael Vick is getting 100 million, but I think 40 million is guaranteed.
I think 40 million is guaranteed.
Oh, yeah, a lot of people in the Eagles are getting paid.
The Eagles are in great shape salary cap-wise.
A lot of the Eagle players are getting paid.
The Eagles have got a great salary cap guy, Howie Roseman, I think is his name.
Why did you bring this up?
Because here I'm ready to keep talking about Clarence Thomas because that's important.
And I'm not going to let you distract me here with this Vic business.
Look at it.
If you want to, it's 100 million.
It's 100 million over six years.
Michael Vick, the quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles.
Now, Snerdley, look, nobody knows how much is guaranteed.
The whole 100 million isn't guaranteed.
Don't give me this from Dogs to Riches line.
Don't say that to me.
They're taking advantage of the fact that I didn't get any sleep last night.
Here's the thing.
This is what's interesting about the Michael Vick business.
This is what everybody's doing.
I mean, look, I'm just going to tell you what everybody's going to be looking at now.
People, there's some people.
I am not even in the realm of where I care.
Okay, so don't even associate me with this.
The Eagles, I'm a Steelers fan, but the jury is still out on whether Vic has really changed or whether all this since he got out of prison has been an act.
And so, and I just, this is not, actually, my opinion, I read this somewhere today.
I read a lot of sports stuff too in a show prep.
I forget who said this, but it's a sports blog somewhere that people now, might have been the New York Post.
I don't know.
Now that he's made the money back, now that he's back to where he was before this happened, the dogfighting business before was all discovered.
Now people are going to find out if he's really changed or if all of this was just an act to get to this point.
Because people are saying that there's no language in the contract above and beyond the standard boilerplate in terms of conduct.
Off field, there are no special clauses for Vic any more than any other player on the Eagles has.
So, but yeah, he's 40 million guaranteed.
That's what they say, 100 million deal, 100 million over six years for the Eagles.
So he has put it back together.
He has gotten back to where he was before all of this stuff happened.
Then there are second chances.
But I guarantee you, though, there are people with knives.
Figuratively speaking, long knives are there.
People hoping this guy bombs and fails.
It's just the nature of human beings, human nature and so forth.
But this is one of the beauties of sports.
In the end, it really doesn't matter.
But you can invest total passion in it anyway.
That's the great thing about sports.
You can invest total passion without consequence.
The only thing that's going to happen is your team's going to lose.
Now, as far as Snerdly, would you drop Vic?
I don't have a dog in this fight.
I don't.
Jeez.
You know, I ought to stop doing this show when I don't get any sleep the night before.
I just, Here I plan to start this hour talking about this Clarence Thomas story I'm telling you is when I said before the break at the top of the hour this this story that Jeffrey Toobin has written is important because it's true.
What has been done to Clarence Thomas from the moment he was nominated by George H.W. Bush is as close to libel slander, criminal as you can get.
And the reason that Clarence Thomas has been targeted the way he has is two reasons, black conservative, the Civil Rights Coalition in this country, meaning the Jesse Jacksons People FOR THE American WAY, all these civil rights groups.
They sit at the at the table of power, the Democrat Party, and they have to earn their seat.
And the way Jesse Jackson earns it is voter turnout, shakedowns of various corporations, same thing with Al Sharpton.
They all have their responsibilities.
Clarence Thomas was criminally assaulted during his confirmation hearings because the left knew that he would become the most powerful black man in America.
If he's confirmed, here is a plus, he was taking the seat that was forever to be Thurgood Marshalls, who was huge liberal.
So he gets confirmed.
The effort to discredit and destroy continues to portray him as an idiot.
As a basis step and fetch it.
He's nothing more than a clone of Scalia, doesn't have a brain, doesn't say anything in oral arguments.
An absolute idiot.
He's a nothing more than affirmative action upon.
I mean, every criticism that they could mount to dehumanize Clarence Thomas was made, and folks, for the same reason that they do it to Sarah Palin.
They were scared to death of him.
They will always tell us who they fear.
So here we are.
What was the Thomas confirmation hearings, early 90s.
Here we are, 2011.
So what are we?
1918 15 whatever, I forget the exact year, whatever the number of years, 15 years later, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, comes a story in the NEW Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin.
Well, let me just read you the quote again.
In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Clarence Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court.
When it comes to the free speech, rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners and potentially, the powers of the federal government, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more rarely has a Supreme Court justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
Now this has been true for 15 years.
What they have told you and written about Clarence Thomas for 15 years has been the lie.
What has been true is he's always been an intellectual giant.
He has always been an intellectual leader.
He's always been an independent thinker.
He's always been eminently qualified.
He has always been a giant on the court.
Now all of a sudden, they write the truth.
Let me give you a quote from Walter Russell Mead reviewing the Tubin Peace in the New Yorker.
What we didn't know and what the world at large didn't know until very recently was that the New Deal Constitution was not as permanent or unalterable as it looked.
Intellectually, its foundations were shaky, and after two decades of a Clarence Thomas-led assault, the constitutional doctrines that permitted the rise of the powerful federal government could be close to collapse.
For the number of years that Clarence Thomas has been rendering opinions, he has been undoing the New Deal Constitution, door jam by door jam, taking the mansion apart, if you would.
To borrow a phrase from Justice Sculia, if I might.
Now this story that Toobin has is essentially how Clarence Thomas and his intellectual leadership could, along with his wife and the work that she has been doing, be the intellectual force behind the repeal of Obamacare when the case gets to the Supreme Court.
And that answers the question, why now?
And why the truth?
This Tubin piece is a giant red flag being waved to everybody on the left.
And the message is, stop with the caricatures.
We have to get Thomas somehow recused or disqualified because of the work his wife has been.
It's going to get vicious, as vicious as it was during his confirmation hearings.
Only this time, it's not going to be because he's supposedly not qualified.
It's going to be because he is an intellectual giant who could accomplish what the left fears most.
The Walter Russell Meade review is fascinating because basically says there are two amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, that if you went to the right Ivy League schools, you were taught may as well not have even been there.
Number two and number 10.
Number two is basically right to bear arms.
Before Clarence Thomas, the Second Amendment, everybody agreed.
All it meant was that the states can have a militia.
It didn't mean individuals were empowered the right to own guns.
Now, after 15, 20 years of Clarence Thomas, the left has given up the gun control fight.
They don't even want to go there.
Now the 10th Amendment is next.
Now the 10th Amendment, paraphrasing, basically says any power not specifically enumerated in the Constitution for the federal government goes to the states.
Now, this is important, ladies and gentlemen, because the commerce clause in the Fourth Amendment has been the vehicle for the new dealization of the U.S. Constitution.
The Commerce Clause and by the Commerce Clause, as you know, is the route to Obamacare, forcing people to buy health insurance.
The Commerce Clause is where the federal government has grown.
The Commerce Clause of the Constitution is where the federal government has grown.
Now, the Clarence Thomas and others led effort to take power away from the federal government, give it back to the states, is Amendment 10.
Now, in all these Ivy League law schools and other colleges, years ago, the Second Amendment, the 10th Amendment, they were like an appendix.
They were there, but they were not used.
They were not necessary.
Now, the 10th Amendment is being used and focused on as a way to dismantle much of federal power.
And all of a sudden, people who now realize what happened to them on the left in the Second Amendment, uh-oh, now Justice Thomas is aiming at number 10.
And it's not just Justice Thomas alone.
I don't want to mischaracterize this, but on the court, it is Justice Thomas who is leading people.
And it is at the court, as you know, where changes will be made.
Another factor of Clarence Thomas, by the way, that really bugs people is he's not afraid to get rid of precedent.
Now, to the left, precedent is holy.
Clarence Thomas, precedent, if it's bad law, it doesn't matter.
And he's an originalist, and he's dead set on finding out exactly what the founders meant when they wrote this constitution by going back and defining words as they were defined in that era, not as they are defined today.
That is what he has done.
And so this piece, and we will link to it at rushlinbaugh.com, and we're going to also link to the Walter Russell Mead review because they're both really fascinating.
Mixed emotions.
Almost cry when I read these great compliments now of Clarence Thomas.
At the same time, I just get livid over the lies that have been told about the man for the same number of years.
But the reason now, okay, now it's time for the truth.
Now it's time for the left to tell their idiot troops, okay, you know, this guy is not the lightweight we've been telling you.
This guy is not who we've been telling you.
This guy is the guy we got to be afraid of.
Clarence Thomas is the person we need to be afraid of.
This is the guy that can do us in.
And that's the message Toobin has.
And it's all oriented toward making sure that he's not there legally when Obamacare is decided at the U.S. Supreme Court.
That's the battle line now.
Got to take a brief time out.
Be patient.
We'll come back and continue right after this.
Don't go away.
Here's another quote from Walter Russell Meade on the Jeffrey Toobin piece.
Jeffrey Toobin is announcing that a liberal world of Clarence Thomas has morphed from a comic figure of fun to a determined supervillain who might reverse 70 years of liberal dominance of the federal bench and turn the clock back to 1930, if not 1789.
Supervillain is the operative term in that quote.
It's an amazing vindication.
It is an amazing reversal.
The thing is, it's always been true.
Clarence Thomas has always been as they write about him today.
What's been lies is what they've said about him from the day his nomination was announced until this article came out, or his appointment was announced.
Okay, I got to go to the phone.
Spokane, Washington.
Al, I'm glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the program.
Maximum Dittos from Spokane.
Thank you, sir.
I want to go ahead and touch a little bit on Governor Perry and him being called dumb, which kind of follows on your Clarence Thomas segment.
You know, if you want to call Air Force pilots, Army pilots, Marine pilots, dumb, then that's fine.
But what they're really attacking, the illiberal media, is they're attacking all of us who have served our country honorably that are not dumb, stupid idiots, but we believe in America.
And this goes even back to his Boy Scout days.
This man really epitomizes what America is about from his very beginnings.
You know, Politico has never, I saw this on Fox, Politico has never referred to any presidential candidate as dumb before they did refer to Rick Perry that way.
And they're doing it simply on the basis of the way he speaks.
Nothing else.
Well, you know, that doesn't always make the man.
Well, of course not.
And as we look at our current president, his verbiage isn't always, I would say, the best of what I learned in school.
But, you know, as they attack really the basis of America, it shows what they feel about America.
And I think that's important to bring out in this.
And it's the same thing with Clarence.
Well, and I'll tell you, Al, there's something that goes along with that, and that's called a backlash.
You know, you don't run around and you call Rick Perry dumb.
In the old monopoly days, they could get away with, they could convince 20 years ago people at Rick Perry was dumb.
Today they do that, and they create a backlash against themselves.
Hey, guess what?
The head of the ATF is gone.
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Guy's name is Kenneth Melson, the Bureau's acting director.
On Wednesday, we'll move to the Office of Legal Policy where he'll be a senior advisor on forensic science.
So he's not gone.
They're just moving him, and they're keeping him on the payroll.
This is the guy ostensibly behind the Fast and Furious operation called Getting Him Out of the Way Before the Election.
It's taking care of the fall guy.
They're making him the fall guy, but they're taking care of him.
Basically, we all know what this was.
This is a backdoor attempt to get gun control back in this country, precisely because they've lost it legally at the Second Amendment level.
Now, here, let me read to you A portion of a Clarence Thomas opinion on the Commerce Clause.
And this will tell you why the Toobin piece has been written, and this will tell you why the left is peeing in their pants, basically, over Clarence Thomas and Obamacare.
This is from United States Petitioner versus Alfonso Lopez Jr., 1995, a commerce clause.
Clarence Thomas.
If we wish to be true to a constitution that does not cede a police power to the federal government, our commerce clauses boundaries simply cannot be defined as being commensurate with national needs or self-consciously intended to let the federal government defend itself against economic forces that Congress decrees inimical or destructive of the national economy.
In other words, Clarence Thomas saying we cannot let the federal government use the Commerce Clause as an excuse to do anything.
Otherwise, we're going to lose the country.
Federal power will know no bounds.
Now, the Commerce Clause, as you know, is a key fight in one element of Obamacare.
And in fact, it's not just a key element.
The Commerce Clause portion of Obamacare is requiring all of us to buy health insurance.
That, by the way, is where the funding comes from to get the CBO score.
If ultimately the Supreme Court says the federal government cannot require us to buy health insurance, the whole law crumbles because there will be no money for it.
That's why all of a sudden Clarence Thomas has become a genius who must be disqualified from sitting in judgment of the final case.
Literally fascinating.
Commerce Clause simply can't be used to say you have to buy insurance.
That's policing.
And it's Clarence Thomas has led intellectually the assault on this.
This is not to slight any of the other justices, by the way.
Don't misunderstand.
Britt in Thomasville, North Carolina.
I'm glad you waited.
I appreciate your patience.
You're next.
Hello, sir.
Hi, Rush.
How are you?
Very well.
Ah, it's a female.
I'm sorry.
That's all right.
Listen, Rush, in the first hour, you were talking about the dollar in unemployment benefits takes a dollar out of the private sector.
And I just want to disagree with that.
It takes far more than that to administer unemployment benefits.
There are government employees who get benefits, who process these claims and administer these benefits.
They all have offices.
Their offices cost money.
Their offices have to be maintained by other employees of the government who also get benefits.
They have to pay for communications, paper.
All this processing requires far more than $1 out of the private sector to manage and to administer.
Well, I must admit that you're right.
Yeah.
So we really need to be thinking about how much it costs to administer all these things.
Every government program, you know, it's not just a dollar taken by the private sector and given to, you know, whatever person needs it.
It's way more than that.
You know, the best description I heard to explain what you mean was sometime back in the mid-90s.
It's an actual government statistic.
The administrative cost on every dollar, you remember the story?
The administrative cost, this in the mid-90s, of every dollar of welfare was 72 cents.
In other words, every dollar of welfare that was apportioned, 28 cents got to a recipient, 72 cents stayed within the government bureaucracy to administer it.
So you're absolutely right.
Yeah, somebody needs to tell Pelosi about these stimulus.
Well, these people are just lying through their teeth.
They're trying to make it sound like the federal government spending money stimulates the economy.
The point is, federal government doesn't have any money until it takes it from somebody first.
Exactly.
The only thing that's stimulating is more government.
Exactly.
You're exactly right.
Well, I'm glad you called.
I'm happy.
I'm happy to admit that I wasn't quite right in that regard because I didn't quite go far enough.
Well done.
Pat in Elkhart, Indiana.
You're next.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Oh, it's a privilege and an honor to speak to you, Rush.
Thank you, sir.
Question I have for you about climate change.
If someone truly believes in climate change the way the president and Al Gore do, how can you justify a long-term investment in something like renewable energy or a home?
I mean, aren't these things something you invest in because you believe the climate is going to be stable?
I mean, why would I take out a 30-year mortgage if I thought my home would be under 10 feet of sand when I'm ready to sell it?
So what are you basically saying that they really don't believe what they're claiming to believe?
Or, I don't know, is it a message, don't make a long-term investment?
I don't know.
Well, see, the trick is, and I have mastered the trick, is understanding liberals.
And to understand liberals in the global warming case, you have to understand global warming is not about global warming.
Climate change is not about climate change.
It's about something totally different.
It's about growing government.
It is about taking liberty and freedom away from individuals.
Simply a mechanism.
It's the result of study.
These people have gotten together and they've said, okay, how can we advance our big government?
They may not talk this way, but how can we advance our big government agenda and take freedom away from the people?
Okay, we've got to guilt them.
We have to make them feel guilty about something so they will willingly pay to make amends for the sins that they have committed.
And what are the sins they've committed?
Well, they've driven cars that are too big.
They have had thermostats that they've had either too cool or too warm.
And now it's time to pay the price.
And we make them think that they have unwittingly, they have been victimized by evil corporations.
They have participated in destroying the environment.
But it's not too late.
They can save it.
So you invest these people with the power to redeem themselves.
And what you basically do is get them to agree to pay higher prices and higher taxes.
Grant the government more power.
What they get in return is feeling good about themselves.
They are saving polar bears.
They are saving ice flows.
They are saving the planet.
It's not about global warming.
It's not about climate change.
It's about socialism.
It's about communism.
Every liberal agenda item is not about, the war on poverty is not about the war on poverty.
Medicare is not about Medicare.
Social Security is not about providing a retirement for people.
Medicaid is not about medical care for the poor.
Obamacare is not about affordable health care for every American.
There's not one liberal agenda item that is truly about its title.
Everything in liberalism is a trick to get you to willingly vote for or to sign on to socialism.
The enrichment and the empowerment of your betters, the elites, who will run your life.
So when you ask me, how do Gore and Obama, how do they justify their belief in global warming with renewable energy?
They're not even thinking about global warming or renewable energy.
Green jobs are not about green jobs.
Renewable energy is not about renewable energy.
Jobs programs are not about jobs if they're proposed by liberals.
All they are are tools to expand the size of government and thus their own power.
Folks, it really is easy to understand liberalism.
It's easy to understand it.
It's challenging to admit it.
It's challenging to admit that there are Americans who want to do what Obama is doing.
But it's easy to understand how they do it.
People ask me, and I don't say this in a braggadocious way, please don't misunderstand me here.
People ask, how do you know all this?
Like William Shatner asked, how do you know?
Because I know liberals.
I know socialism.
I know liberalism and I know the people who believe it.
And I know how they want to get where they want to go.
Once you know that, and you can understand it with an IQ of 75, you don't need an IQ of 150.
I'm not kidding.
I'm not trying to be funny.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, a brief but important obscene profit timeout.
Back with more in a moment.
Okay, at rushlimbaugh.com, we have the Jeffrey Toobin story of New Yorker on Clarence Thomas.
We have the Walter Russell Meade review.
We have the transcript and the audio of my interview with Vice President Cheney, perfect for being misquoted by the drive-by media.
And also a couple pictures of the latest edition of the family Cambridge Adams Limbaugh, the Noodle Little Sheepdog.
You guys, you guys missed it.
Catherine brought her by here this morning.
You were here, Snirdly, but I didn't know you were here because when I got here, you weren't here.
And no, I got here on time and you weren't here and our security cameras weren't functioning.
So I didn't see your car out there, even though it hadn't driven up.
So today would have been a perfect day to be robbed.
I wouldn't have known anybody was out there because the security camera wasn't working.
I didn't think you were here.
Otherwise, I would have taken a dog back and shown it to you.
By the way, that doesn't happen, but maybe once every two years, folks, when our security camera does this, don't get any ideas.
But anyway, the little puppy is up there.
Cute little thing.
What do you mean anything on Michael Vick?
Oh, I didn't even think of Michael Vick talking about my dog.
El Rushbone, a big dog.
A big voice on the right.
Fox just had that economics professor who wants affirmative action for the ugly.
We told you about it yesterday, and he was on with Megan Kelly.
Now, in that twosome, you'd have to say he was the one getting affirmative action equal time.