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Jan. 18, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:11
January 18, 2013, Friday, Hour #3
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Wow, look at this.
Breaking news here from the Associated Press.
Ex-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagan indicted.
Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagan been indicted on 21 federal corruption charges, including wire fraud, bribery, and money laundering.
The charges are the outgrowth of a city hall corruption investigation that already has resulted in guilty pleas by two former city officials and two businessmen.
Nowhere in the article is his party affiliation mentioned.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's open line Friday.
So for those of you who don't know, Ray Nagan is a Democrat.
Nicknamed School Bus.
It was Ray Nagan who left a bunch of yellow school buses unmanned and parked during Hurricane Katrina.
They ended up being flooded.
They weren't used to evacuate Democrats from, well, Republicans either from the city.
So finally, 21 federal corruption charges.
Not one mention in the AP story that Ray Nagan is a Democrat.
It's the William Jefferson treatment.
William Jefferson Democrat Louisiana.
He wasn't mentioned as a Democrat either.
That's why we did every time we mentioned his name.
Happy to have you with us, folks.
Open Line Friday.
Rush Limbos serving humanity at talent on loan from God.
A telephone number for our final hour, 800-282-2882 at the email address LRushbo at EIBnet.com.
HR, who's going to be here on Monday?
Mark Stein is guest hosting on Monday.
They didn't slip a Martin Luther King Day past me this year.
Normally, Monday, Martin Luther King Day comes and I show up here and I realize that it's a holiday for everybody else.
And I've always tried to assuage myself by saying, well, the really important people show up and that's why I'm here.
I decided this year to actually practice solidarity with the low-information portion of the population.
I am not going to the inauguration.
I was not invited to go.
Well, take that back.
You know, I was invited to the inauguration.
You think I should tell them?
I was invited.
I can't go.
I was invited to sit with all of the Republican wives, wives of House Republican members.
I was invited to sit with them at the inauguration.
And I already had plans, so I could not accept.
So, but that would have been cool to have me surrounded by Republican wives and women during the war on women, of course, during the immaculation ceremonies for Obama.
And it's too bad.
You know, I'm going to miss Beyonce.
I'm going to miss Alicia Keys.
Have you seen the list of performers?
Who is it?
Stevie Wonder.
Yeah, Stevie Wonder's going to be there.
Alicia Keys, Beyonce.
If Beyonce is going to be there, means Jay-Z is going to be lurking around.
And I mean, Blue Ivy will be there.
And I'm going to miss that.
That's just the way it goes.
I saw that.
I saw Michelle's new hair to 49th birthday.
She's showing some bangs out there covering the forehead.
Did you see the picture?
You didn't see, oh, you thought you were going to stump me with Michelle's new hairdo, right?
I saw it.
I saw it.
I made a note.
I've got it here in the low information stack.
We do.
We have a low information voter stack now every day.
In fact, here's the first item: Manta Teo.
Yeah, I lied, but I had to.
No, that's not Lance Armstrong.
This is Mantai Teo.
This is TMZ.
I'm telling you, TMZ is becoming the new AP.
Exclusive to TMZ.
Mantai Teo is telling friends he knew the truth about Lene Kakua in early December, but he continued the lie for 20 days for the sake of his team.
Sources connected to Mantai Teo say that it's true what the Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said on Wednesday night that Mantai realized he had been hoaxed on December 6th when he got a phone call from Lenae months after she had died.
It wasn't until then that he knew he was talking to a woman who didn't exist.
He talked to a woman who didn't exist for a whole year, but it wasn't until after she died and he got a phone call from her from beyond the grave that he thought something was up.
Sources tell TMZ, and Mantai Teo didn't tell his coaches about the hoax until the day after Christmas because he thought it would be a huge distraction while a team prepared to face Alabama in the BCS championship game during the 20 days where he knowingly participated in the hoax.
TMZ was told that Mantai Teo struggled over how to handle the situation, but that he eventually felt compelled to come clean to his coaches.
Mantai Teo, currently in training for the NFL Combine, TMZ says that he's getting a lot of support from the guys he's been training with.
So he lied for the team.
Must have a great PR person.
You got it.
Republicans need to get hold of this guy.
Let's go to the audio soundbites.
This is December 8th in New York before the Heisman Trophy ceremony.
I don't like cancer at all.
I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend in cancer.
That was Mantai Teo before the Heisman Trophy ceremony.
I don't like cancer at all.
I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer.
Now let's see.
Let's see.
Hang on, hang on.
What's the date?
What's the date?
Mantaiteo, 20 days.
He knew he realized.
Okay, listen to this now, folks.
According to TMZ, Mantai Teo realized he'd been hoaxed on December the 6th.
Play that soundbite again.
This is two days later, December the 8th, two days after Mantai Teo says he realized he'd been hoaxed.
I don't like cancer at all.
I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend in cancer.
There he is perpetuating the hoax two days after he admits to learning it was a hoax because he got a girlfriend call after she died.
That was the first red flag.
And that would kind of shake you up.
Your girlfriend dies and she calls you.
You might think something was weird.
And that was the first warning sign for Manta Teo.
January 8th, now a month later, ESPN Radio, Manta Teo being interviewed during a discussion about grandmother and girlfriend, and the host and Manta Teo have this exchange.
Manta, you mentioned the tragedy.
You lose your girlfriend and your grandmother in the same week, right?
I want to make sure I got that correct.
Correct.
Okay.
Say, same day.
Same day.
So what do you think both of those ladies would say to you being a Heisman Trophy finalist?
I hope that my grandma and my girlfriend say that they're proud.
Not only that I'm here, but the way that I conducted myself and just always to remain humble.
Wait a minute now.
Wait a minute.
What would you say to you being a Heisman Trophy finalist?
I guess that could be the January.
He didn't win it.
So this is 32 days after learning about the hoax.
And he said, what would your girlfriend and your grandmother say?
What would you hope to tell my grandmom and my girlfriend would say that they're proud that I'm here, but the way that I conducted myself, just folks, I tell you, this is Strange City.
Now, this piece is related to this.
This whole story, remember now, the drive-bys were on this story every day, inside out, the college sports media, a lot of the professional sports media, because the guys got prospects.
And they're covering this and they're making it.
They're ballyhooing it.
They are promoting it.
This see, it fits a narrative.
Great athlete off the field.
What a guy.
What a story.
Just amazing.
His grandmother and his girlfriend that he said he's never met forever die on the same day.
And he's doing everything in his life for them.
And so whether it's true or not, the drive-bys weren't even interested in that.
And that's the point of the Dead Spin guys column, which is entitled, Won't Get Fooled Again.
Let me just give you a couple of excerpts, a couple of quotes.
Will Leach is this guy's name.
He says, This is what happens when you report on sports as if they are some sort of metaphor for life, or that athletes are somehow more inspirational than regular people.
This is what happens when you think sports are more than sports.
He said, This has always been a problem with the sports media.
It is, to be frank, the primary reason that Dead Spin was invented in the first place.
But it has worsened in an age where media is fractured, niche, and struggling, where the primary goal is to get on the Today Show or the front page of Yahoo, to get the clicks, to get the exposure that everybody now is so desperate for.
So whether the story is true doesn't matter.
Having Al Roker talk about it after he admits pooping his pants in the White House or Mount Wauer talk about it or having him be on the front page of Yahoo, that's what it's all about.
For the journalist and his treatment of the story and the belief that it could be true because a great athlete's involved here and they're special people.
Mr. Leach writes, everybody, and by the way, I'm probably destroying this poor guy Leach's reputation by quoting him.
And Mr. Leach, I apologize.
I am writing here and signaling your piece, offering praise, and it's going to get you in big trouble with your buddies.
I know this.
So I apologize here in advance.
Another excerpt.
Everybody who wrote Manta Teo's tragic journey stories got pats on the back for it because those stories went huge.
That they weren't true is not just something nobody checked.
It's something nobody even thought to check.
And he's right.
Now, expand this to the news media's coverage of Obama or lack of.
The tentacles of this story reach deep, I think, into the media, the overall news media's coverage of Obama and other Democrats.
But it's, I think, there's a lot of similarity.
Or maybe, he writes, they didn't have the staff to check.
Doesn't matter.
You have a hit story.
It's don't rock the boat.
Times are tough enough as it is.
If you got a story going like the Manti Teo story, you just keep at it, try to dig up more, come up with more heart-tugging stuff, more tear-jerking stuff put in that story, make sure it gets read.
You get clicks.
Doesn't matter if it's true or not.
It's just, it's great journalism.
Another pool quote: it's sort of like the steroid story in baseball, in microcosm.
A complicit press corps misses the story that's right in front of their face if they just thought to look for it, either willfully or just because of laziness, ineptitude, inertia.
And then when the truth does come out, they scramble to overcompensate.
They have to go find a villain to explain how they got hoaxed.
When they get taken by a story, or when their laziness permits them to be taken in by a hoax or a total lie of a story, when the truth finally comes out and they look like fools, somebody has to pay the price.
And that's when mainstream journalists kick into high gear on character assassination.
My words, not Mr. Leach's.
He writes, you're going to be seeing this in the coming days.
As more and more aspects of this story are revealed, we all find out just who we can blame for this.
There's going to have to be somebody to burn at the stake, somebody to serve as the stand-in for the story everybody missed.
We were all duped before, and now we're going to make up for it.
We will not be duped again.
He says the next phase of this is to see who the drive-by sports media people finger to blame as the culprit for making them look bad as their escape mechanism.
And he's right on the money.
Folks, do you remember during the campaign 2008?
You remember all of the stories that Obama told about people dying because they didn't have health insurance?
It turned out not to be true.
How about the story about his own mother?
He told a flat-out falsehood about his own mother being ripped off by a health insurance company or a hospital or something.
Turned out not to be true.
It's the same thing.
It's the same in the sense that if you're the right guy, if the media has total love and adoration or approval of you for whatever reason, they're not going to question you.
They want it to be true.
They want people to be dying because of health care because they support Obama.
And they'll gladly report that Obama's mother got the shaft.
If it isn't true, it doesn't matter.
If it helps move the chains, that's all that matters.
And the Manta Teo situation, it was such a great story.
And of course, we would love for this to be true.
Wow.
What a great story.
And what a great indication of where we're going culturally.
Men and women now having affairs on the phone.
Manta Teo said he slept with this woman on the phone.
He went to bed with her on the phone.
How cool that?
Well, it's just, it's the societal evolution, Snerdly.
It's how the progressives are ahead of all of us backwards, boring clods.
That's really happening out there.
Oh, it's a great story.
That's a great story.
Don't question it.
Now, Tebow starts talking about this stuff, and not a syllable of it goes by without it being investigated.
And if they can find it, Tebow's lying about somebody.
Can you imagine Tebow trying to run this hoax?
Oh, folks, I don't even want to think about that.
Man, oh, man, that Mariah Carey thinks she got trouble with that cookie menage, babe.
Boy, can you imagine what that would do to her?
Here's here, John, in Edgewater, New Jersey.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
You bet.
You sound just like Piers Morgan.
I should be so lucky.
Yeah.
I just wanted to let you know that I have a, I had at one time an intimate relationship with Lance as far as his cycling career went.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
In a minute.
You had an intimate relationship with Lance Armstrong, as far as cycling is concerned.
As far as cycling is concerned, that's correct.
Do you mean in the biblical sense here?
No, definitely.
No, no.
We were just, I was the manager, and he was the rider on the teams.
Really?
I've never seen that position.
Well, each team, each cycling team has a manager, especially when we go to the World Championships.
Each team has a manager and a coach.
And in 1992, when the United States Cycling Federation was split in two, the U.S. Pro was the cycling organization that handled pro-cyclists at that particular time before they became united, between when both federations united after 92.
And what happened was in 92, after the Lance rode in Barcelona, he returned to the United States.
He immediately turned pro, and me being the team manager, had him, he signed up to turn pro, and we turned around and we brought him right back to Spain again for the World Championships that year.
As a pro.
As a pro.
This was his first major race.
It's kind of like Tiger at the Masters in 97.
First time as a pro, right?
That's correct.
That's correct.
And we went back to Spain, and, you know, he was riding pretty good.
He didn't get the results he wanted in Barcelona, but we figured he might be doing a lot better once he turned pro, and he fit pretty well.
Well, so what is it?
You're the guy that put Lance Armstrong on the World Championship scene.
Is that the point here?
I was a member of the team that selected the riders for the World Championships.
Was there doping then?
Is that why you're calling?
No, no.
The reason why I'm calling was that since it's become worldwide, known, worldly known, and everything has come about, there was one rider in the United States that never, ever failed to recognize Lance's overachievement, so to speak.
I've got to take a break here, John.
I'm still not sure where we're going, so we'll continue this when we get back.
Don't go away.
I don't know, Sterdley.
I have no clue whether Cheryl Crowe knew anything.
She was just out trying to have a good time.
But Lance was supposedly the ringleader here.
The sponsor of his team is the United States Postal Service, and they're getting all this, they're using FedEx and occasionally UPS.
I mean, they're really, if you read some of the stories about this, the things that they had to do, this was a really intricately involved, logistically challenged, coordinated thing to have the transfused blood flown to the right location to be kept fresh, be ready for the transfusion after a race,
make sure that none of the old bags were thrown away that had traces of blood in them.
I mean, it was a massive operation.
The blood doping was, because that was transfusions.
When you're riding up the Pyrenees, I don't think people know the Tour de France, pedaling uphill in the Pyrenees and in the Alps.
What these guys were doing was replacing their blood as often as possible to keep it highly oxygenated for energy.
The pace at which these guys are riding uphill is inhuman.
And now that was one of the reasons why all the suspicion about doping, because they were doing things that don't look possible, that you just couldn't do with proper nutrition and working out and sleeping right and so forth.
There had to be something else going on to enable this, this practically superhuman stuff.
I mean, there are stages of the Tour de France that are over 80% uphill the whole route.
We're talking multiple miles, multiple kilometers here.
And to have all of that blood, their own blood, taken during rest, highly oxygenated, flown ahead of them so it was there to be transfused or whatever in private.
There was no way to keep the secret.
There had to be, everybody in the world knew this.
That's why when Lance is out there denying it all and then attacking everybody and suing them when they were simply telling the truth, that's what got everybody so really curious about this.
It wasn't just he was denying.
I mean, he really did do the Clinton technique.
After the denial, he just went out and attacked everybody making allegations about him, including suing them.
And it was right out of the Bill Clinton playbook and the way they did with Ken Starr.
Here's John back in Edgewater, New Jersey.
I think I know where you're going here.
You've got, you want to tell us about one guy who was clean, a legitimate champion, right?
Yes, that's correct, Rush.
There was one writer in the United States that knew from the get-go when he started to see Lance's performance that he was suspect and he stayed and he fought against Armstrong all those years.
And that was the great American champion, Greg Lamond, and who still happens to be the only true American to win the Tour de France.
Greg went head-to-head with Lance and Lance fought him tooth and nail.
And I think now that Greg and his wife, Kathy, are exceptionally satisfied with what has now taken place.
You know, are you still in touch with Lamond?
Oh, yes, yes.
Now, he lived in Sacramento for a time, and it coincided with the same years I was there.
And I think, I'm not sure, I think I met him once, very casually.
Does he still live in Sacramento?
No, no, he's now located in the Midwest now.
Okay.
Well, he was, he was, I remember there was a reporter at an InfoBabe for KCRA Channel 3.
Her name was Beth something.
And she was almost the Greg Lamond expert.
Profiles constantly of Lamond and his training, riding up the Sierra Nevada Range, Highway 50, up to Reno and Tahoe and so forth.
I'll never forget those.
And he was portrayed as the way everybody thought of Lamps Armstrong, actually.
He was portrayed as a genuine hero, clean and pure as the wind-driven snow and so forth.
I'll never forget.
And I do think I met him once.
But anyway, John, I appreciate the call.
Thanks so much.
I knew he was heading.
I knew he was going somewhere to name somebody.
And I had a feeling it was Lamond.
You know, we got that tightened down during the break.
Joe, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
It's your shot now.
Open Line Friday.
Go for it.
Well, it's a real privilege to speak to the mayor of Rioville.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Going to gun control.
Say you have a victim of a violent crime and they suffer traumatic brain injury.
Would that person be allowed to possess guns in their home?
And knowing the extent of their injuries, what is their doctor's liability as far as presenting that to government officials?
Now, wait.
A victim of violent crime, they suffer traumatic brain injury.
Would that person be allowed to possess guns in their home?
Yes.
You mean now or with future legislation?
Well, right now.
That is the law.
Oh, right now they can.
You're saying they can, you're not asking?
Well, they can right now.
Will they be allowed to keep those guns in the future?
Well, I don't see any moves being made against the mentally disabled.
I mean, they're almost untouchable here.
But that is a mental health issue, is it or?
It is.
Oh, it most certainly is.
The Sandy Hook Elementary thing is clearly a mental health issue.
And that poor mother apparently was unable to do anything, was unable to get her child institutionalized.
There are a lot of people who have kids like that that worry their kid could be the next Sandy Hook shooter.
And they're writing and they're telling stories about how difficult it is because of the steps have been taken to make sure that the mentally ill have every right that anybody else has.
Okay, without sounding totally heartless, where would, say, a James Brady or a Gabby Giffords fit into this scenario?
In terms of being permitted to own a gun?
Correct.
You're asking the wrong guy.
I don't know that anything would stand in the way of it.
That is a real problem, then.
Well, you're focusing on the mental health aspect.
I know what you're trying to get people focused on, even with what you think is a cold, heartless, cruel, and sensitive question.
You're trying to get people focused on what the real problem here is.
And it's who has access to and is grabbing guns.
And once we learn who they are, why can't we do anything about it?
It's a legitimate question.
You may have an impolitic way of asking it, but that just tells us that you're a conservative and a mean-spirited extremist.
But it doesn't mean.
No, I'm just kidding.
It is one of the focal points of all this that's not being looked at, of course, in any sensible way at all.
Brief time out.
Open line Friday rolls on.
We'll be back and continue.
I think we're doing pretty well today taking calls.
And we're doing pretty well taking Open Line Friday calls.
We've had our share of nothings.
We've had our share of Doesn't Make Any Sense.
We've had our share of genuine curiosity about things other than politics.
We've had plenty of what the hell are they talking about?
I don't know yet calls.
And we've stuck with it, and it's all working out.
We got football picks coming up.
It's exactly the way it was intended.
Okay.
The NFL championship games are this Sunday.
If I've got this right, and I know I do.
The early game at 3 o'clock is the San Francisco Fortuners and the Atlanta Falcons in the Georgia Dome.
And the late game is the Patriots hosting the Baltimore Ravens.
Now, let's look at the first game first since it comes first.
And in fact, in both these games, the most important factor in both games happens to be two quarterbacks.
In the case of the Fortiners and Falcons, the quarterback in question is Colin Kaepernick, known affectionately to some backwards, old-fashioned dryballs as Tattoo Man.
Colin Kaepernick cannot be planned for.
You know, defensive coordinators love to come up with a game plan.
You look at hours worth of tape of the opposing offense.
You see tendencies.
You see formations.
You see snap counts.
You see plays.
You see when do they pass off that formation?
When do they run off that formation?
When do they fake?
Who goes in motion?
When not.
What does a quarterback do on every play?
The problem for every team playing the 49ers is Kaepernick, the quarterback.
He doesn't know what he's going to do most plays.
I mean, he's got the script, but the guy is a classic sandlot quarterback.
In the last game the Fortiners played, he led the team in rushing as a quarterback.
That doesn't happen in the NFL.
Now, eventually, NFL teams, defensive coordinators, are going to come up with a way.
In fact, this is the role, by the way, I should say that the Jets said they had planned for Tim Thibault.
Never happened.
The Falcons just haven't had enough time here to plan for Kaepernick.
He took the job over halfway through the season, week six, I think, week seven.
And they're really, there's not enough data on him to know when he's going to take off, the run option, when he's going to use it, when he's going to throw it.
And so defenses have to lay back and play soft and can't really plan for what the guy's going to do.
And plus, the 49ers are a great road team.
John Harbaugh, the coach of the Fortiners, has somehow managed, you know, of all the West Coast teams, I remember every Raiders game this year.
If you listen to pregame analysis from the Wizards of Smart on the SPN or anywhere, they would all say the Raiders traveling east, time zone change, one o'clock game, starting a game, 10 o'clock body clock time, don't have a prayer.
And the Raiders never did win in the Eastern time zone at 1 o'clock.
It doesn't affect the 49ers.
It doesn't affect the Seahawks much either.
It's not said to affect the 49ers.
I don't know where the 49ers are practicing.
I think they stayed in San Francisco, but one week they spent in Youngstown, Ohio.
It's where the DeBardolo family is, getting ready for it.
But Harbaugh haven't ready.
That ain't going to matter.
I think the quarterback is the big difference in the game.
He's still a rookie.
Matt Ryan, the quarterback for the Falcons.
This is only his second playoff game, too.
So I think Kaepernick is the guy to watch.
If he has a typically good Kaepernick game, plus that defensive line for the Fordeners, I have to go with the Fordeners in a game.
And the Patriots and the Ravens.
And again, that's a quarterback game, and that's Tom Brady.
And if Tom Brady's on your team, you win.
The odds are, Brady's playoff record at home is astounding.
Now, since Spygate, they've had some troubles going all the way.
Admittedly so.
But if you had to, and I'm just doing this straight up.
I don't even know what the points are.
I'm just doing it straight up.
So I'd have to go with the Super Bowl being the Fordeners and the Patriots.
And many of you are going to be disappointed at this.
Many of you are looking for an all-Harbaugh Super Bowl.
You got John Harbaugh, the coach of the Ravens, Jim Harbaugh, the coach of the Fordeners.
But don't sweat that the coaches don't play.
You know, after all, the hype, brother against brother, they're not playing.
Mind against mind.
How do you watch that in a football game?
So that's the picks.
I could have done, I thought about doing environmentalist wacko picks, but I thought, no, we'll go straight up here.
It's been a while since we did this anyway and treat it seriously.
Until there's other data, if, for example, players on the 49ers, any of them having imaginary relationships with girls that don't exist, if you figure if something that surfaces and comes out, you've got to factor that out.
So far, we don't know that that happens anywhere but Notre Dame.
Again, folks, a reminder, Mark Stein will be here on Monday, Martin Luther King Day.
It's inauguration day, too, right?
Will not be here seeking solidarity in my ongoing effort to remain low-profile and to establish a commonality with the behavior of the low-information segment of the population.
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