Yes, America's Anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented anchorman.
Honored to be with you direct from far northern New Hampshire in the mountain vastness of the great North Woods.
If you're one of these Hollywood celebrities fleeing the country, do swing by and say hello, you can't miss us.
We've got a big sign on the highway saying last rush guest host before the board.
Always happy to see you.
Rush is taking a few days well-deserved vacation.
Buck Sexton is going to be in tomorrow for Open Line Friday.
It's non-open line Thursday today, but we're taking your calls on the state of the world.
1-800-282-2882 is the number if you'd like to be part of the program.
This correction I'm about to read is the mother of all corrections, as Saddam Hussein would say.
It came to my attention via Stephen Haywood at Powerline.
You may remember, because they always get a lot of publicity, these surveys in which people attempt to associate different traits with conservatism.
It's not enough that you have a simple difference of political philosophy or policy.
The left also has to establish, as they used to do in the old Soviet Union, that you are somehow also a mental defective of some kind.
So they do all these studies that they do it in the climate change thing, too.
The people you think would be better off measuring ice cores in Antarctica are instead doing surveys on how a skepticism about climate change correlates with people who believe that the moon landing was faked in the Nevada desert.
There's all kinds of things like this.
And they always get a lot of play in the respectable press.
And this made a big, big splash at the time because it came out in 2012.
And it was a paper in the American Journal of Political Science by Brad Verhulst, postdoctoral fellow, Lyndon J. Eaves, Distinguished Professor, and Peter K. Hatemi, Associate Professor of Political Science and Microbiology.
I can't seem to say which.
Oh, at Virginia, what is this place called?
Virginia Commonwealth University.
And they investigated whether personality traits and politics correlate in any way, and whether a person's political philosophy is not because they've considered the alternative positions out there.
They've surveyed the scene from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz and found a position on the spectrum that they think makes the most sense.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's not like that at all.
It's all to do with personality traits that are inherent.
And I'll give you just one excerpt from the kind of, from what this study was meant to do.
In line with our expectations, P for psychoticism is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes.
You got that?
They did this big research paper finding that psychoticism is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes, whereas those higher in social desirability are also more likely to express socially liberal attitudes.
Social desirability is a social science term that means someone who wants to get along with people.
So if you're someone who wants to get along with people, you're more likely to express socially liberal attitudes.
But if you've got that big scarlet P for psychoticism pinned on your chest, then you're more likely to be a social conservative and have conservative military attitudes.
Now, this paper appeared in the American Journal of Political Science in 2012, and it was taken up by all the media, all the left-wing media.
They all fell for it.
They wrote about it.
They gave it big coverage.
Now, the latest issue of the American Journal of Political Science contains a very long correction.
The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of correlation, not causation, the relationship between personality traits and political ideologies.
The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed.
Got that?
Got that?
They've used a lot of the jargon and the babble, but here's the words.
The last two words are the ones to pay attention to.
The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed.
In other words, everything that the paper said, the correlation between particular personality traits and your political views was exactly reversed.
So in other words, that P for psychoticism doesn't correlate with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes.
It in fact correlates with social liberalism.
And social desirability, that translates into wanting to get along, actually correlates with socially conservative attitudes.
So they got the whole thing back to front.
So four years ago, the big news story, hey, psychoticism correlates with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes.
Now four years later, they say, oh, terribly sorry.
We were holding all the research upside down.
In fact, the P for psychoticism correlates with social liberalism.
Do you think all the newspapers and magazines and websites that covered this thing four years ago, when the old P for psychoticism was tainting social conservatives, are going to give it as much coverage now that it's the big scarlet P for psychoticism is for the social liberals.
That's the mother of all corrections.
And it should know what's going on with these.
So everyone says, oh, you know, it's science.
The science is settled.
Everyone knows that.
The P for psychoticism is for the social conservatives.
It's exactly like the hockey stick.
There's nothing wrong with the guy who created the Global Warby hockey stick is suing me.
And it's been going on for, yeah, I mentioned it briefly earlier.
That's the only reason I had to make a cat album of you.
I mean, it's a great cat album, don't get me wrong.
I'm very proud of my cat album.
But when you're in a five-year legal battle, you've got to figure out a way to keep your end of the case going.
But the guy who came up with the hockey stick showing that global temperatures were going to be rocketing up at the top corner of the graph and through the ceiling roundabout now.
And in fact, it hasn't happened like that.
This is what happens when you politicize science.
And I'm not saying these guys did politicize science, but it's the perfect encapsulation of what has gone wrong with science.
That the big scarlet P for psychoticism that they pinned to social conservative chests in 2012, now they're saying, oh, terrible, awfully sorry.
Our research, our paper is absolutely accurate in every respect, as long as you go back through it.
And where it says conservative, just white out that word conservative and put in liberal.
And everywhere it says liberal, just white out that word and put in conservative.
And other than that, everything we said in this survey was correct.
So it turns out that the big scarlet P for psychoticism correlates with social liberalism and that social conservatives are the ones who like to get along with folks.
Mark Stein in for Rush, the Trump situation, the people backing off Trump, people who were tentatively getting on the Trump train, they're now getting off the Trump train.
Some people who were kind of half-heartedly hanging off the caboose of the Trump train are now saying, well, I'm going to just like have one finger and be dragged along the back of the Trump back of the Trump train, but I'm not really ready to get up on the caboose and move off into the club car and have a gin and tonic in the front of the Trump train yet.
All this kind of stuff is all making the news.
There's people talking about what does Trump have to do to persuade Paul Ryan to disendorse him and all the rest of it.
This has actually had a hit on some of the polls.
The polls, as you know, were showing Trump ahead.
A lot of the state polls show Trump ahead in crucial states.
Pennsylvania, for example, Clinton 44, Trump 44.
Florida, Trump 45, Clinton 44.
So a lot of those states, the states still show a tie.
But the two new general election polls out today, Clinton 42, Trump 38 from Rasmussen, and then from Reuters, Clinton, 42, Trump 34.
There's two ways of looking at this.
One is that that's bad news.
The other is that this is amazing resilience for a guy who's just being, this is the first time there's been a candidate who gets clobbered by the left and right whenever you switch on the television or whenever you pick up a newspaper.
All the big newspaper columnists, conservative newspaper columnists, whether it's the New York Times, Washington Post, the Charles Krauthammer, George Will, David Brooks, they're all against Trump.
And it's taken, evidently, had some effect on the numbers, at least according to this Rasmussen poll.
It's 42 Clinton, Trump 38, and in the Reuters poll, 4234.
Trump, here's a development I didn't expect.
Paul Ryan, this is like great high, great headlines from the fantasy universe from Politico, breaking just now.
Ryan, Trump has even-handed temperament.
He says he disagrees with Donald Trump on lots of things, but he gives unexpected props to the presumptive nominee for an attribute that doesn't typically draw praise, Trump's temperament.
I think his stage presence is something different than, say, what I would do, the House Speaker told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell.
But in my personal interactions, I find him to have a very even-handed temperament.
So anyone expecting Paul Ryan to climb off the Trump train anytime soon, he's still on there.
He's still ready to jump from the caboose if things go wrong, but he likes Trump's, quote, even-handed temperament.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
We'll take your calls straight ahead.
Hillary Clinton, the first person to identify as a woman to win a major presidential nomination, has tweeted, honored to have you with me, POTUS.
I'm fired up and ready to go.
The president is about to endorse Hillary Clinton for president, about to endorse her as his successor, which will make James Comey's decision on indicting on whether or not to recommend an indictment of Hillary a little more complicated for him.
Let's go to John in Columbus, Georgia.
John, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hey, Mark, good to be with you.
First of all, I got a few things to say, but the first thing I want to say is I'm 76 years old and I've been a Republican since eighth grade.
And that came about by a little convenience store in a textile mill village.
I grew up here, and this guy had an I like Ike sticker, a little round sticker in his front window.
Of course, my parents didn't like it.
I asked him about it.
He said, Republicans are better for small business than big business.
And so as I've grown up, I've seen that to be true.
I drove down to a Trump rally down in Pensacola, Florida at the rally.
I was really impressed.
He was roundly applauded when he said he was going to build a wall.
But the thing I got to say about the wall is the wall's been under construction for 25, 30, 40 years.
It's just some presidents have went ahead and put the money in it and they haven't enforced it.
So I hope Donald will complete the wall.
You know, and another thing I want to say is about these conservatives is a lot of these talk shows host conservatives who think they're more principled than anybody else.
Where did these crystal clear conservatives come from and where have they been all these years?
And give me a break.
Donald Trump is the nominee.
Some people say he's not religious enough because he don't know much about the Bible.
Well, he probably fits in about 98% of the other people in the United States.
As the guy from Liberty University said, we're not electing a Pope and we're not electing a national preacher.
We're electing a businessman who hopefully can take this country and turn around a little bit.
So those are my comments.
And if about that wall, it's been around for years.
Well, I just want to pick up on something.
Well, you're right.
But it's one of those things where people say, oh, we're going to fund the wall.
And then they fund the wall and nothing happens.
And it just sits right.
Meanwhile, by the way, at the northern border, they're wrecking in some of the cross-border communities a little north of here between New Hampshire and Quebec and Maine and Quebec.
They're absolutely wrecking life because there's a street little ways north of here, Rue Canusa in Quebec, which is Canada Street in Vermont.
And the north side is Canada, and the southern side is America.
And if you cross the street to visit your neighbor and you don't check in, take the trouble of checking in at a border post first, you get a $5,000 fine and up to two years in jail.
So they're happy to play hardball on the northern border and let everybody walk in across the southern border.
But just to go back to what you were saying about principles, John, about principles, there's nothing very principled in what the Republican Party has been doing for the last, for this century, basically, where it's been promising to get tough on debt and it doesn't, where it's been promising to seriously wage wars to win, and it doesn't, where it's been promising to crack down on illegal immigration for the purposes of getting elected.
There's nothing principled.
There's actually nothing principled about telling one people one thing in election years and then screwing them over in the off years.
And that's what's there's been too much of that.
And there's nothing very principled.
What's the point of sticking to your principles when Donald Trump comes along when you don't stick to your principles?
When you vote for things like a corrupt IRS, when you vote to give a corrupt IRS that targets your supporters, that consciously targets your supporters and stonewalls producing any information for Congress.
And you vote to give the IRS the power to confiscate people's passports.
That's what the principles of a lot of these never Trump guys are.
And I'm sorry, but the word principle has to have some real word meaning.
It's not an abstraction.
You're not a monk in a monastery who's taken a vow of silence and is living with his principles on a mountaintop in Tibet somewhere.
You're someone who is supposed to be living to those principles.
And the sense of betrayal, the sense of betrayal that large numbers of people feel over watching the debt spiral up, spiral up, thanks to both Democrats and Republicans, to watch Republicans sign on to some of these absolutely vile bills.
You have a corrupt revenue agency, and the corrupt revenue agency targets, is basically the hardcore punishers of the Democrat one-party state, and it's the Republican Congress that votes to give that corrupt revenue agency the power to take people's passports away from them.
And there's been too much of this stuff.
And John is absolutely right.
There's nothing principled.
These people have sort of gone along with that, gone along with all of this stuff.
And then they suddenly get an attack of the principles, an attack of the principles.
Sorry, I pass.
And we will come back to this, John.
But you're absolutely right to say that the only reason that Trump has to promise to build a wall is because for a couple of decades now, that wall is supposed to be built.
And the fact that it hasn't been built gets to what's most offensive about all this, that they play us for saps.
They say, oh, yeah, we voted to build a wall.
We voted to fund the wall.
But no, we're not actually doing it.
We're not actually doing it.
The bureaucracy has decided it's got other priorities.
You can vote to build as many walls as you want.
You can vote to fund as many walls as you want.
But in the end, nothing happens.
And eventually you bring the whole system into disrepute.
And that's how you end up with this election season.
Hey, great to be with you on America's number one radio show.
America's anchor man is away for a few days.
Russia's taken a well-deserved break, but he will return as we move toward the searing climax of this wild roller coaster of an election season.
Buck Sexton is going to be in tomorrow for Open Line Friday, and I'll be back here on Monday and very much looking forward to it.
The President of the United States has endorsed Hillary Clinton as his successor, saying, quote, I don't think there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office, unquote.
And this is unusual because she is the first person to be nominated for president while under criminal investigation by the FBI, Which reports to the Attorney General of the United States, who reports to the President, who ultimately is the Chief Law Officer of the United States.
And the decision.
So here we have an interesting situation.
We have someone who has been accused of breaking not State Department rules, but actually federal law.
And for example, Hillary herself fired the United States ambassador to Kenya for occasionally using his private email address for government business.
He was over in Nairobi and he had a State Department email address, but he also had a Gmail address or whatever it was.
And he occasionally received emails and sent emails on his Gmail address.
And Hillary Clinton's State Department fired him for it, fired him for it.
And that guy lost his job.
And now he had a State Department address.
Hillary Clinton never had a State Department address, email address, never did.
So that's a breach of the law.
She set up her own server, which the Kenyan ambassador never did.
So she set up the own server deliberately to ensure that she didn't do business on the government email address.
And so did all her closest aides.
Essentially, the entire state, the government of the United States effectively contracted out, privatized the upper echelons of its foreign policy establishment to Clinton Inc.
in Chappaqua for the period of her tenure as Secretary of State.
And that's unusual.
And so the FBI is now investigating, and everybody understands now that there were repeated attempts to hack into Clinton email, and that some of these attempts were successful.
And if you watch the film 13 Hours, for example, the Benghazi film, the striking aspect of that whole story as you watch it in real time unfold is how the bad guys in Benghazi seem to know where everyone who matters on the American side is going to be at any hour.
And the question arises, how did that happen?
Well, maybe it happened because an awful lot more people were looking at Hillary Clinton's emails on her private server than ever would have seen them had she been using a State Department email address.
But now we're in the situation where the FBI recommends criminal prosecution to the Attorney General.
The Attorney General goes to see the President of the United States.
The President of the United States has just endorsed Hillary while she is under investigation.
We've just had a Supreme Court decision this morning for some 30, some guy, he was in 1984, some schlub in Pennsylvania murders a guy, he's 18, that's 34 years ago, he's convicted and he's sentenced to die, and here we are, he's 52 and he hasn't fried yet, and he hasn't fried yet because he's been through the appeals process, and the Supreme Court has just ruled,
the Supreme Court of the United States has just ruled that the DA who prosecuted him and subsequently became the Supreme Court Chief Justice in Pennsylvania, that you can't have a guy who's also the prosecutor on the case, also being the judge on the case.
That's a conflict of interest.
That's a basic conflict of interest.
Well, ultimately, ultimately, here we have a situation where the guy who makes the call on whether Hillary Clinton is prosecuted, the guy who is, in effect, the chief law, ultimate chief law officer of the United States, Barack Obama, has just endorsed someone under criminal investigation.
You can't have a guy who's the principal supporter, most prominent endorser of Hillary Clinton, also being the guy who then pulls the lever on the prosecution thing.
He should have recused himself.
He should have accused himself.
On the very morning that the Supreme Court says you can't be both a judge and a prosecutor.
You can't be both the equivalent of a district attorney and somebody who's saying, yay, Hillary, go win.
You're the most qualified person to be president.
He should have accused himself.
There's something malodorous and dysfunctional about not observing the niceties.
He didn't have to endorse her.
We're five months out.
She hasn't been nominated.
Her opponent hasn't stepped out of the race.
He's doing this to say to James Comey, nice little federal bureau of investigation you got here.
It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it.
Because if what's Comey going to do now?
He can recommend to Loretta Lynch, go ahead, and I think we should indict her.
And then what's going to happen?
Loretta Lynch will say no.
Someone will, at the FBI, will say, here's the evidence, and they will come down on him like a ton of bricks.
And this is a terribly inappropriate thing to do, what the president has done today.
He didn't have to do it.
He didn't have to do it at this hour.
He could have waited till the convention.
He could have waited till Bernie Sanders withdrew from the race.
He could have waited until she's officially anointed and proclaimed the nominee at the convention.
But instead, he did it this way.
And that's the way it's going to go.
And this is the way the game is played.
This is the way the game is played.
If a Republican Secretary of State had done, well, you know, George W. Bush wouldn't even pardon Scooter Libby, whose prosecution was an absolute disgrace.
The most he would do was commute it.
Scooter Libby's life was dragged through the mill over a total phony baloney nothing for supposedly revealing the name of a clandestine CIA operative.
He wasn't actually that clandestine at all.
Hillary Clinton has compromised any number of intelligence agents and intelligence assets of the United States.
And she has exposed them all to grave peril.
And nobody and she's that doesn't disqualify her from the presidency.
Au contraire, the president of the United States says, I don't think there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.
And this is the way the game is played: the different rules for the Republicans and Democrats.
Jonathan Turley, who is a liberal, Jonathan Turley is a liberal, but we've been talking about principles a lot on this show.
He's a principled liberal, and he's a constitutionalist, and he likes the Constitution, and he supports the Republic as it is constituted.
And he points out at his website, jonathanturley.org.
As I said, big-time liberal, big-time Democrat, agrees with Democrats on all the policy issues.
But he thinks that what's going on is not right.
For example, he compares the fuss over Trump University to the fact that Bill Clinton also heads a university, so-called.
It's called Laureate International Universities.
And if you're wondering where that is, well, it isn't anywhere.
It's some kind of online diploma mill that pays Bill Clinton $16 million as so-called chancellor for this so-called university.
And what that means is he basically lends them his name and pitches for it.
And there's actually even been a class action lawsuit against this university, just like the Trump University was.
But you Google, you can go and Google Laureate International Universities and Clinton and compare the hits you get when you Google Trump University.
One's a story, the other isn't a story.
And it is this, this is corruption, it's corruption of the republic, it's corruption of the integrity of institutions of which a free press is an important part, and yet it is just the way it is.
And now we have the first major party nominee to be under criminal investigation while she's running for president, and the ultimate chief law officer of the United States, the guy who will ultimately make the decision on whether she be prosecuted or not, has endorsed the person under criminal investigation.
Mark Stein for Rush will take your call straight ahead.
Hey, Mark Stein, in Farush on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I love this story.
A couple of armed guys try to hold up a McDonald's in Bess Ancon in France.
Unfortunately for them, it didn't work out as planned.
Two guys in their 20s, they bust into this McDonald's, they fire a warning shot, and they demand the guys clean out the registers, and they get about 2,000 euros, which is a little over $2,000.
But there were 40 diners in the restaurant at the time in this McDonald's, including 11 off-duty members of the French Special Forces team that specializes in hostage situations.
Members of it's something called GAN, which is Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, which is this elite French special forces.
11 of them are sitting there, which actually I find odd just in itself, that 11 elite members of French Special Forces, when they get off shift, they decide to go and have a royale with cheese at the local McDonald's.
But they're sitting there and they play it cool.
They don't do anything as these guys are just cleaning out the registers.
And then they make their move.
And one guy trips as he's trying to run out the door, and half the special forces guys nab him.
And then the other guy refuses to drop his weapon when ordered to do so.
And one of these special forces teams shot him in the stomach.
And that's bad.
You occasionally hear stories here of like guys holding up a Dunkin' Donuts, and there'll be three cops sitting around in there having a Boston cream doughnut or whatever.
But that's really bad luck.
But something to bear in mind if you want to hold up a French McDonald's.
If you're wondering where the French Special Forces are, they're not battling ISIS in Raqqa.
They're not in Hellman Province in Afghanistan.
They're apparently in the Bessan Son branch of McDonald's.
So if you're going there and hoping to put your hand behind the counter and snaffle a couple of extra egg McMuffins with sausage or whatever, you're taking your chances because these 11 special forces guys, that's basically over a quarter of the diners in a French restaurant are members of French special forces at McDonald's.
So that's the feel-good story of the day.
They're never there.
They're never there when the Ramadan guys bust into the restaurant and punch the poor waitress for being an infidel whore serving alcohol.
But if you try to get away with the proceeds of a Big Mac and a quarter pounder with cheese, they will take you down at the French McDonald's in Bessançon.
Let's go to Janine in Santa Barbara, California.
Janine, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Great to have you with us.
Hi, Mark.
Hi, Janine.
I just wanted to refer to what President Obama said today.
It was a soundbite from one of the many shows that he goes on.
And he said that being president is very serious.
Right.
And that the TV reality star, blah, blah, blah, obviously referring to.
And I'm thinking to myself, let me see now.
What were you?
Okay, you were a community organizer.
And then you were in the Senate for a minute.
And all you did was vote president on almost everything that came before you.
And I don't know what kind of a professor he was.
I'm sure it wasn't much.
No, he didn't do a lot of teaching.
Pardon me?
He didn't do a lot of teaching.
You're right.
You're right.
No, he didn't.
So I just thought, what hubris, what arrogance, what, you know, so, so I was so offended, so offended that he can demean Donald Trump, who has done so much for the hotel business, the real estate business.
And my husband, who is also a builder, I'm thinking, or he has said many times, you know, to be a builder, especially in New York, you have to know your way around because it isn't any easy task.
You're absolutely right, Janine.
This gets to the heart of the difference, is that people who are living in the real world, like your husband, like Donald Trump, people say, no, no, no, the real world experience doesn't matter.
There's this little closed group of professions that qualify you as a serious person, including, most stupidly of all, the activity in which Barack Obama spent the better part of his life, a community organizer.
Was he a good community organizer?
No.
Nobody wants to live in a community organized by a community organizer, including Barack Obama.
He doesn't want to live in any community he's organized.
And yet we think that's a qualification for president, that it's a separate little club, and he's a member of the club, and guys like Trump and your husband are.
Thanks for your call.
We'll close it out in a moment.
Mark Stein, I've had a great time on the show today.