If you receive this and you hate it and you don’t want to ever read it no matter what...that is fine; email me back and you will be deleted from my list (which is almost at the maximum anyway).

I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 2 or 3 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).

I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.

I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.

And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, always remember: We do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).

Moderate Muslims march against terrorism near the court where the underwear bomber was arraigned.

It turns out that some officials did figure out that the underpants bomber was on a flight for Detroit, but saw no reason to contact the pilots of that plane to inform them of this situation.

In a related story, Michael Yon, former Green Beret and current war correspondent was arrested at Seattle Airport for refusing to divulge his salary when asked by a SeaTac official. File this under, even when the system works, it doesn’t work.

Weatherproof Coats has used President Obama’s image and PETA has used Michelle Obama’s image in respective ads—without permission.

New York City spends $32,000 to write and print up a pamphlet How to Shoot Heroin.

The White House has decided to temporarily suspend the notion of sending more Yemenis from Gitmo back to Yemen.

And from the, I missed this one file: The Obama administration chose Christmas Eve to announce that it would lift the bailout caps for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I know that many of you do not know what the secondary mortgage market is, or how and why government is involved, but suffice it to say that the money involved here makes Enron look like a lemonade stand.

President Obama on the failure to detect the underpants bomber before he got on a plane bound for the United States, “This was a screw-up.”

Bob Beckel, Democratic strategist said, this week, “The system worked remarkably well.”

David Gergen, an analyst on CNN, said: "Regardless of whether you like what he is doing, Roger Ailes [the ehead of FoxNews] is one of the most creative talents of his generation. He has built a media empire that is capable of driving the conversation, and, at times, the political process."

House Republican Mike Pence said the Republican Party “lost its way when we started worrying more about winning elections than standing on conservative principles...Principled differences of opinion are always welcome, but simply offering what the Democrats are offering minus 10 percent is a prescription for a permanent Republican minority."

Ben Stein, “Someone in the government might wake up and say, ‘It’s colder and not hotter [based on empirical evidence].’ ”

Recounting the conversation later to a friend, Ted Kennedy fumed that Bill Clinton had said, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

Rich Lowry, conservative columnist: “Michael Steele [GOP party head] is indicative of nothing other than whatever stray thought enters into his mind.”

After the lady panelist explained Peter Orszag’s appeal to women, by commenting, “Brains don’t fade like looks do,” Neil Cavuto remarked, “Ladies, look no further than the host of this show; built for comfort.”

Keith Olbermann on Brit Hume suggesting that Tiger Woods believe in Jesus Christ: “But isn’t this the classic thing that your mother also pointed out to you about never discussing religion in public; I mean you can discuss it in public...but this crosses that principle of keep religious advocacy out of public life since the worst examples of this are, you know, Jihadists.”

Concerning the possible removal of the garlic plants in California’s Lawndale, City Councilman Jim Ramsey said, “The only reason why we had garlic put in was so we could keep the vampires out of town.” Perhaps there was more to the “fictional” town Sunnydale of Buffy the Vampire fame than creator Joss Weydon let on.

Question: What was the most shocking, stunning thing that you found out of the review? And, Secretary, to you, as well.

SECRETARY NAPOLITANO: I think, following up on that, not just the determination of al Qaeda and al Qaeda Arabian Peninsula, but the tactic of using an individual to foment an attack, as opposed to a large conspiracy or a multi-person conspiracy such as we saw in 9/11, that is something that affects intelligence. It really emphasizes now the renewed importance on how different intelligence is integrated and analyzed, and threat streams are followed through. And, again, it will impact how we continue to review the need to improve airport security around the world.

Nobody gets fired even though the underpants bomber got on a plane destined for Detroit.

You might not like Sean Hannity, and I get that. However, when he gets a studio full of people and Frank Luntz, he puts on a great show. Besides, I am a sucker for shows where the audience says more than the pundits do. This is a 6-part show (about 7 minutes for each part). After 2 minutes, you will know if you want to see the rest of this show or not.

The Journal Editorial Report (one of the best shows on television) interviews Michael Mukasey; it may not sound interesting to you, but this is an excellent interview:

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Ray Stevens, who sang Ahab the Arab; apparently he is still singing; this is We the People:

Keith Olbermann tells both of his viewers terrible Brit Hume was to give the gospel of Jesus Christ to Tiger Woods. His guest will say that Christianity has been hijacked by the loons, and names Brit Hume as one of these loons.

Publically-supported NPR published a cartoon “How to Speak Tea Bag” (apparently seeing no problem with associating the TEA party movement with a derogatory homosexual term):

At least 8 times, candidate Obama promised to broadcast healthcare negotiations on CSPAN. Now, even though he certainly cannot keep that promise, since he seems to be on television almost every day, he could call upon Congress to open up its negotiations to CSPAN.

Steve Crowder’s latest video (you ought to at least enjoy his version of a rustic standing in front of his trailer):

Jodi Miller: “We are only a week into the new year, and Time Magazine has already name Barrack Obama as the man of the decade.”

1) According to one story I read, Fox News is believed to make more money than CNN, MSNBC and the evening newscasts of NBC, ABC and CBS combined. The division is on track to achieve $700 million in operating profit this year. I periodically watch the other newscasts, and always turn back to FoxNews. If you do not want right-wing news, then watch Shepherd Smith’s Fox Report or the first 40 minutes of Bret Baird’s Special Report. Both are straight evening news casts (there is some overlap on the reports on these two shows). Give it a week, if you like the news, and you won’t want your news anywhere else. It will be obvious why the other news stations are losing their audiences and their credibility.

2) Bill O’Reilly astutely pointed out a contradiction in Obama policy: he kills dozens of people in drone attacks (where there is undoubtedly going to be collateral damage), and yet believes that terrorists from other countries ought to be afforded all United States citizen rights in a criminal trial.

3) When it comes to releasing Gitmo detainees to a variety of countries, including Yemen, I have heard at least 2 different liberal apologists argue, well Bush did it. Very few conservatives believe that Bush should have let any Gitmo detainees go; however, if you recall, there was a hew and cry throughout the liberal media at that time that Gitmo was filled with innocent men being deprived of all of their rights, and that they needed to be let out of there. Now, this does not mean that Bush should have authorized the release of anyone, but recall, the release of thse men did not occur in a vacuum.

4) Brit Hume suggests that one of the reasons that the underwear bomber is being tried in a civilian court is, Obama does not want to sent anyone new to the prison at Guantanamo Bay; that is just one more person that he needs to figure out what to do with. In the President’s mind, apparently, shutting down Club Gitmo is the big picture, and he needs to remove all obstacles in the way of that goal.

5) Freedom versus equality: true freedom means that there will be a variety of outcomes, which automatically insures inequality. Economic justice, which is, in reality, state-enforced equality, never works, never produces equality, and slows an economy to a grinding halt. You must choose somewhere on this continuum between freedom and equality. Where you stand on freedom versus equality of outcome is where you stand between conservatism and liberalism.

6) Fred Thompson showed up with a beard on some FoxNews show. It looked good; just as El Diablo’s beard did (Bill Richardson).

7) Many of you can probably even recall the several chimp images which were compared to President Bush; there are now dog images which are compared to Sarah Palin (they aren’t nearly as good). Apparently, some have compared Michelle Obama to a monkey by distorting her image, but those images are almost impossible to find on the internet. However, what is easy to find is absolute outrage expressed by those on the left for such images existing anywhere.

8) So there is no confusion, conservatives do not blame Obama 100% for the underwear bomber (although Napolitano is non-serious choice to head Homeland Security). However, treating him like a common criminal and giving him the rights of all Americans is very problematic in the eyes of us on the right.

President Obama says the green grants of $2.3 billion will create 17,000 clean-tech jobs. That is $135,294 per job.

Experts from Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tallied homegrown terror cases since the Sept. 11 attacks and found 139 American Muslims had been publicly accused of planning or carrying out violence motivated by extremism...the largest number of homegrown terror cases occurred last year [2009], with a total of 41 suspects. Do you recall that one of Obama’s selling points was, he could reach out to the Muslim population and heal the wounds between the United States and radical Muslims. It’s not working.

According to the numbers given at Recovery.gov, take the number of jobs the government claims have created and divide it into the amount of stimulus money spent, and that gives you $400.000/job. Do you really need more arguments to convince you that the government is inept when it comes to job creation?

58% of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day.

"How much influence do you believe each of the following has on the direction of the Republican Party?"

First they ran a story saying that Rush is urging his listeners to cause harm to the president, and then they present their readers with a poll:

26% say that Rush Limbaugh should be thrown in Jail, tried, sentenced to death as required by the US Constitution

10% say that banning bacon and cheese will be a far better punishment for Limbaugh

(Obviously this is not a scientific poll, but this helps us to get into the minds of those who read postings on the Daily Kos website; statistics as of noon 1/10/10)

Corrupt Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon will resign this month as a part of a plea deal which involved embezzlement and perjury. She will keep her $83,000/year retirement. The fact that she is a Democrat is left out of the Baltimore Sun story and the Washington Post (a fact often left out or put in the 2^nd to the last paragraph when Democrats are shown to be corrupt).

On the other hand, former Bush lawyer John Michael Ferrin tries to kill wife, and in the headline are the words Ex-Bush Lawyer.

Maybe they should do, more booklets to be printed on the taxpayer dime in New York City; e.g., How to Take Ecstasy; Where to Score Marijuana, Heroin, Crack or Ecstasy; How to Find a Reasonably-Priced Whore in New York City, How to Rob a Bank; How to Kidnap an Heiress, etc.

Obama is using the civilian trial in order to keep the underpants bomber out of Gitmo, as he would end up being just one more problem for Obama to contend with when it comes to shutting Gitmo down.

Systemic failure means if the press does not ride me too hard on this, I won’t fire anyone.

Unprecedented [economic difficulties] means I have no real idea how to fix this; I just want my healthcare and cap and trade bills.

Pivot to the economy means I can’t seem to convince the American people that they ought to support my vision for healthcare, so let me pretend that I am doing something about jobs while I spend a buttload more of your money.

If you think the Senate and/or House healthcare plan will improve healthcare for America.

Most economies, when coming out of a recession, come out with a roar, sometimes with tremendous growth. Ours will not recover in this way. With the nationalizing of so many institutions and the repressive laws and regulations which the Obama administration has put forth, our economy will move forward, generally, with fits and starts. We will lose jobs, then gain them; lose them then gain them. The stock market will crash again, and the housing market in many states will crash again, along with commercial real estate. I do not see this as a depression as wide and as deep as FDR’s, as Obama will not be reelected (unless there is a 3^rd party candidate thrown into the mix). FDR had 13 years to spend on messing up the economy with socialistic economic theories; Obama will not have that kind of time, nor that kind of power past his second year.

Unless the balance of power is shifted, Obama and the Democrats will continue to have federal spending programs which they will call stimulus and jobs programs, most of which are simply paybacks and imaginative ways of spending money.

In any case, look for the Dems to spend gobs of money during the first few months, and then taper off on their spending spree. During the latter 3/4^ths of 2010, you will hear many a Democrat talk about fiscal responsibility, invoking the name of Clinton and his balanced budget over and over again.

This ought to be repeated: if the Gitmo detainees are brought to the United States, there will be a veritable crap-storm of legal activity which will take place, including suits filed on their behalf for everything you can imagine (their living conditions, their imprisonment, their lack of religious liberty in jail). Leave them in Gitmo and this becomes too much trouble for most lawyers.

Bill O’Reilly says, the next Jihad attack against the U.S., if on our soil and if it is successful, will doom Obama. As I have predicted before, I think there will be an organized, coordinated effort within the United States. There may not be anything which is singly big, but it will be several dozen simultaneous incidents, each of which will involve the killing of a half-dozen Americans in random places.

Rumor is, Rahm Emanuel will leave his job as chief-of-staff for President Obama.

For those who listen to TalkRadio, one of the topics is going to be should the TEA party movement be a 3^rd party movement? There will be seminal callers from the left who tell about how Republicans have not been conservative in the past, and therefore, TEA party candidates ought to remain pure and separate from the Republican party. The idea is, they want the vote to be split between TEA party candidates, Republicans and Democrats, giving Dems the edge.

Michael Jackson’s death is ruled a homicide; I said this the week it occurred.

Like most people, I have endured the airport screening, and have often scheduled my flights early so that I would deal with the least amount of it. However, I am becoming more on more convinced, after listening to a variety of talking heads, that this is more of a jobs program than it is about safety. It is my understanding that there are dogs out there who can sniff out various contraband, including the explosive material carried by the underwear bomber. We also have this thing called a computer which can deal with huge data bases of names with ease. There are programs which can deal with various permutations of names; and a visa can be easily revoked or flagged in such a database.

Along these same lines, it was my understanding (and maybe I got this wrong?) that Homeland Security was supposed to facilitate all of the various intelligence agencies talking to one another. However, one of the very first things that this Homeland Security chief put out was a booklet warning of right-wing radicals and terrorists and how the United States was in danger of recently returned vets being proselytized by dangerous right-wing groups. Heads at Homeland Security need to roll, if for nothing else than, not having a clue.

In the private sector, apart from unions and governmental regulations and lawsuits, one can be fired for not doing their job. Why does this not seem to be an option for governmental agencies? Various employees had pieces of information on the underwear bomber that should have flagged him. Why did they (excuse the expression) sit on this information? There are people and agencies in charge of the no-fly database and whatever other databases we have (like the terrorist watch list); why is there no integration and no movement of information across agencies? If the information was supposed to go from point A to point B, and someone did not do this, that person needs to be fired. If the system was not set up to allow this sort of information to flow (which I thought had been fixed since 9/11), then those policies need to be changed.

There were over a half-dozen red flags set off by the underwear bomber before he set foot on the plane. If the government cannot handle this, how can they handle healthcare, which is far more complex and has many more moving parts?

The American people are tired of political correctness when it comes to national security (whether we are speaking of the underwear bomber or the Fort Hood killer). Many blame, in part, political correctness for these incidents (as several recent polls have shown).

It is my understanding the Israeli flight security look people in the eyes and ask them questions. What is the one thing American security never does? They never look you in the eyes and they never ask you any real questions. Mark Steyn, this past week, talked about how carefully his driver’s license was inspected by a security person, who never spent any time looking Steyn in the face.

Surprisingly enough, what will Obama do to solve this problem? He will throw more money at the problem. Here is a problem which is clearly identifiable; and Obama’s solution: create more federal agencies, hire more federal employees and spend more money; because more federal employees and more federal agencies spending more tax dollars will solve any problem.

In any case, do not lose heart; the system sometimes works. Michael Yon, former Green Beret and current war correspondent, was arrested at the Seattle Airport for failing to divulge his salary to a SeaTac official. Another dangerous right-wing radical caught by the system. So, I guess this means, the system works? Another possible right-wing terrorist disaster averted.

Last week, I gave the link to the vid where Brit Hume (in less than a minute) suggests that Tiger Woods turn to Jesus Christ for forgiveness.

Someone mentioned Christianity on television recently and liberals reacted with their usual howls of rage and blinking incomprehension.

On a Fox News panel discussing Tiger Woods, Brit Hume said, perfectly accurately:

"The extent to which he can recover, it seems to me, depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger would be, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

Hume's words, being 100 percent factually correct, sent liberals into a tizzy of sputtering rage, once again illustrating liberals' copious ignorance of Christianity. (Also illustrating the words of the Bible: "How is it you do not understand me when I speak? It is because you cannot bear to listen to my words." John 8:43.)

In The Washington Post, Tom Shales demanded that Hume apologize, saying he had "dissed about half a billion Buddhists on the planet."

Is Buddhism about forgiveness? Because, if so, Buddhists had better start demanding corrections from every book, magazine article and blog posting ever written on the subject, which claims Buddhists don't believe in God, but try to become their own gods.

I can't imagine that anyone thinks Tiger's problem was that he didn't sufficiently think of himself as a god, especially after that final putt in the Arnold Palmer Invitational last year.

In light of Shales' warning Hume about "what people are saying" about him, I hope Hume's a Christian, but that's not apparent from his inarguable description of Christianity. Of course, given the reaction to his remarks, apparently one has to be a regular New Testament scholar to have so much as a passing familiarity with the basic concept of Christianity.

On MSNBC, David Shuster invoked the "separation of church and television" (a phrase that also doesn't appear in the Constitution), bitterly complaining that Hume had brought up Christianity "out-of-the-blue" on "a political talk show."

Why on earth would Hume mention religion while discussing a public figure who had fallen from grace and was in need of redemption and forgiveness? Boy, talk about coming out of left field!

What religion -- what topic -- induces this sort of babbling idiocy? (If liberals really want to keep people from hearing about God, they should give Him his own show on MSNBC.)

Most perplexing was columnist Dan Savage's indignant accusation that Hume was claiming that Christianity "offers the best deal -- it gives you the get-out-of-adultery-free card that other religions just can't."

In fact, that's exactly what Christianity does. It's the best deal in the universe. (I know it seems strange that a self-described atheist and "radical sex advice columnist f*****" like Savage would miss the central point of Christianity, but there it is.)

God sent his only son to get the crap beaten out of him, die for our sins and rise from the dead. If you believe that, you're in. Your sins are washed away from you -- sins even worse than adultery! -- because of the cross.

"He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross." Colossians 2:14.

Surely you remember the cross, liberals -- the symbol banned by ACLU lawsuits from public property throughout the land?

Christianity is simultaneously the easiest religion in the world and the hardest religion in the world.

In the no-frills, economy-class version, you don't need a church, a teacher, candles, incense, special food or clothing; you don't need to pass a test or prove yourself in any way. All you'll need is a Bible (in order to grasp the amazing deal you're getting) and probably a water baptism, though even that's disputed.

You can be washing the dishes or walking your dog or just sitting there minding your business hating Susan Sarandon and accept that God sent his only son to die for your sins and rise from the dead ... and you're in!

"Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Romans 10:9.

If you do that, every rotten, sinful thing you've ever done is gone from you. You're every bit as much a Christian as the pope or Billy Graham.

No fine print, no "your mileage may vary," no blackout dates. God ought to do a TV spot: "I'm God Almighty, and if you can find a better deal than the one I'm offering, take it."

The Gospel makes this point approximately 1,000 times. Here are a few examples at random:

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16.

"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God." Ephesians 2:8.

"For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 6:23.

In a boiling rage, liberals constantly accuse Christians of being "judgmental." No, we're relieved.

Christianity is also the hardest religion in the world because, if you believe Christ died for your sins and rose from the dead, you have no choice but to give your life entirely over to Him. No more sexual promiscuity, no lying, no cheating, no stealing, no killing inconvenient old people or unborn babies -- no doing what all the other kids do.

And no more caring what the world thinks of you -- because, as Jesus warned in a prophecy constantly fulfilled by liberals: The world will hate you.

With Christianity, your sins are forgiven, the slate is wiped clean and your eternal life is guaranteed through nothing you did yourself, even though you don't deserve it. It's the best deal in the universe.

I believe that we are a nation under the judgment of God. As I look around me and see all that is happening in this once great nation, I cannot help but feel that God is trying to wake this nation up and make her see how far she has fallen in His sight.

Let me begin by stating that America has always been a God-fearing country. We were founded as a God-fearing nation. Regardless of the atheists and agnostics, the majority of the American people has claimed a belief and trust in God. Over the years we have allowed various practices into this nation that I believe is causing God to frown upon us.

The Great Awakening of American History took place in the 1730's thru the 1750's. It was a precursor to our American revolution. The Great Awakening came about because Puritan New England started to Compromise the teachings of God. This led to judgment on them. Crop failures. Earthquakes as in New England in 1727. In fact, a minister from New England stated " Alas, as though nothing but the most amazing thunders and lightnings, and the most terrible earthquakes could awaken us, we are at this time fallen into as dead a sleep as ever." The church in New England though alive, was dead in the Spirit.

A revival took place and America had a Spiritual Awakening. Thousands of people were saved and the groundwork for Liberty was laid. At the time that religious freedom was growing in America, it automatically started a movement toward more political freedom. So out of the groundwork for spiritual revival came the birth of the great nation known as the United States of America.

Not all of our Founding Fathers were Christians. But they all had at least a passing acquaintance with Biblical Christianity. And because of that, two of the greatest documents ever written by man came about: The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

When I was growing up I could play out in the streets even after the sun went down. I could watch TV and not be offended. My mother could take me to the movies, and though I may not have totally understood the story line, there was nothing allowed in the movies that could offend us. In fact, watching some of the older movies you can always see a moral bent to the film. Be good. Be fair. Be honest. Honesty pays. Etc. And the children were safe and it seemed that America, as a whole was a nicer nation.

Then prayer was taken out of school. No more Bible reading. And then movies were allowed to have "just a little bit of nudity". And everything went downhill from there. It was not 15 years after prayer was taken out of school that Roe v. Wade came into being. And then pornography (which was a secret sin) was allowed to come out into the open. And then Homosexuality (which was also a secret sin.) And before I get jumped, I am not homophobic. Two people in my life that I really care for are lesbians. Let me remind you.. It was God who condemned homosexuality and called it sin.

And then children were not safe anymore. Not safe in the womb. Not safe on the streets. And now, children do not only have to fear sexual predators being strangers, they now have to fear their own family. Never a day goes by where you do not read some horrible story of a child being sexually assaulted or physically harmed by their parents. Their very own parents. Those who should be protecting and nurturing the child. This is tragic.

I am not stating that things like this did not occur when I was growing up. But they sure occurred a lot less. And people were shunned and sent to jail for their crimes. Now, when some of them stand before activist judges, they get a slap on the wrist and maybe probation. And then they are released to practice those crimes again. And where is the outrage from the American people. Oh, some of us speak up, but it seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Then the education system failed us and we allowed professors and teachers to re-write history and teach children things that children ought not to be taught. At least not while they are so terribly young and easily molded. Instead of teaching them the three R's we teach them sex education and socialism and "green" activism. They cannot add 2 + 2 but they can tell you all about global warming.

And that sets us up for the judgment of God. There is no way that God can lie. Either His word (the Bible is true) or it is a bunch of made up stories. Personally, I believe every word written in the Bible. I may not always be able to explain an obscure passage, but I believe that God is and He is the creator of this universe. As creator, He does not want His children falling into sin. And when they do, He gets their attention.

Loss of Freedom. When the Israelites sinned, and failed to repent, God sent them into Babylonian slavery.

Everyday we are losing our freedoms. Everyday more mandates come down from our government dictating what we are to eat, drink, drive, etc. I have exaggerated here a little. It has not come to that yet, but you can see how we are no longer as free as, let's say our grandparents. And especially our great-grandparents. They built this nation. They were not taxed to death. They made their own wealth. Us. Well, we are paying well over 50% of our income in taxes. And soon to pay more. With taxation comes the loss of freedom.

Another judgment is danger. We are no longer safe in this nation. We are beset on all sides by our enemies. 9/11, Fort Hood, the Christmas Day almost-nightmare. We are no longer safe. "Our necks are under persecution: we labor and have no rest. We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians to be satisfied with bread. Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have born their iniquities. Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand. We eat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness." Lamentations 5:5-9

And finally, famine. The past year of 2009 here in central Arkansas was very cold and damp. Lots of gardens did not come good because of the lack of sunshine and excessive moisture. As I am writing this, we are expecting lows this weekend of 5 degrees. We are being punished with an Arctic blast. This is not normal weather for the mid-south. And this has been continuing since late October (on and off). I plant a fall garden. This year it is failing because of the cold. All of my crops can handle cold weather. This is more than cold. This is the killing kind of cold.

And it is not just here. The cold is seeping way into the Deep South. The south that grows so many fruits and vegetables for the nation during the winter. The kind of cold that kills the crops.

Also, many people were late in getting their gardens out last year because of the cold. And then came the rains and the below normal temperatures and the lack of sunshine. And so, their gardens failed.

Famine is one of the judgments that God uses to get peoples attention. If these growing conditions continue, that is what we in this country will be experiencing. Famine. "And I will send the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, among them, till they be consumed from off the land that I gave unto them and to their fathers". Jeremiah 24:10

Do I feel that things are hopeless? No. I do not. But I do believe that if this nation is to remain free and blessed by God we are going to have to turn back to Him and not just with words, but also with deeds. Simply meant, we have to mean that we are turning back to him. If we do not, I fear God will judge us very harshly.

"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." II Chronicles 7:14

As it was in New England in the early 1700's, the churches of today, though alive, are dead in the Spirit. If we were to have another Great Awakening and Spiritual Revival, I truly believe that God would once again bless this nation.

It is up to us now. Do we want God's judgment or His Blessings? It is our choice.

The president's job is not detecting bombs at the airport but neutralizing terrorists before they get there.

There was much to celebrate in the providential combination of an incompetent terrorist and surpassingly brave passengers and crew who saved 288 people aboard Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day. There is a lot less to applaud in the official reaction.

Well-deserved mockery has already been heaped on the move-along-folks-nothing-to-see-here tone of the administration's initial pronouncements-from Janet Napolitano's "the system worked," to President Obama's statement that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an "isolated extremist." This week brought little improvement.

The president acknowledged that the plot had been hatched in Yemen, but not without adding the misleading statement that Yemen faces "crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies." That Yemenis have to cope with "crushing poverty" is irrelevant here. Abdulmutallab is the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker. Other jihadists, including the physician who blew himself up and killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan last week, and indeed the millionaire Osama bin Laden, prove that poverty does not beget terrorists. "Deadly insurgencies" is a half-truth, which omits the fact that the Yemeni government itself has supported al Qaeda and continues to harbor at least two people-Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi and Fahad Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso-involved in the bombing of the USS Cole.

Then, too, there was the unfortunate metaphor chosen by a senior intelligence adviser to account for why a conspiracy helped along by at least two Guantanamo alumni had not been discovered before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane. There was, he said, "no smoking gun"-a clue one would expect to find after disaster strikes, not before. There were, as it happens, many smokeless but redolent clues lying about before the plane took off. These included Abdulmutallab's father's warning to the State Department that his son was being radicalized and had gone to Yemen; the one-way ticket purchased for cash; no luggage; and intercepted communication referring to a plot involving "the Nigerian" in Yemen.

But it is not so much these gaffes as what they appear to reflect that gives serious cause for concern. Even as the initial spin was in progress, Abdulmutallab was chattering like a magpie to his FBI captors about having been trained by al Qaeda and about there being more where he came from.

Braggadocio aside, he was certainly aware of who had prepared the potentially deadly mix that was sewn in his underwear, who had trained him, where the training had taken place, whether there was in fact a South Asian man described by two other passengers who helped him talk his way on to the plane, and a good deal more. Such facts are valuable but evanescent intelligence. The location of people-and with it our ability to find and neutralize them-is subject to rapid change.

Had Abdulmutallab been turned over immediately to interrogators intent on gathering intelligence, valuable facts could have been gathered and perhaps acted upon. Indeed, a White House spokesman has confirmed that Abdulmutallab did disclose some actionable intelligence before he fell silent on advice of counsel. Nor is it any comfort to be told, as we were, by the senior intelligence adviser referred to above-he of the "no smoking gun"-that we can learn facts from Abdulmutallab as part of a plea bargaining process in connection with his prosecution.

Whatever that official thinks he knows about the plea bargaining process, he certainly should know that the kind of facts that Abdulmutallab might be expected to know have a shelf life that is a lot shorter than the plea bargaining process, assuming such a process ever gets started.

Holding Abdulmutallab for a time in military custody, regardless of where he is ultimately to be charged, would have been entirely lawful-even in the view of the current administration, which has taken the position that it needs no further legislative authority to hold dangerous detainees even for a lengthy period in the United States. Then we could decide at relative leisure where to charge him-whether before a military commission or before a civilian court. In Abdulmutallab's case, it would hardly make a difference, given the nature of most of the evidence against him. (Although potential disclosure of the body of intercepted communications that included reference to "the Nigerian" could prove problematic if the prosecution were to be brought in a civilian court.)

Those considerations, however, are entirely academic because Abdulmutallab was proceeded against-if that is the correct description-in a civilian tribunal where the first step was to get him a lawyer who promptly put an end to his disclosures. The point is less where Abdulmutallab will eventually be prosecuted than what use could have been made of him as an intelligence source. No consideration whatsoever appears to have been given to where Abdulmutallab fits in the foreign contingency operation (formerly known as the global war on terror) in which we are engaged.

Most recently we have had the promise of more rigorous searches at the airport, along with a White House summit meeting that featured a furrowed brow, an earnest injunction to "do better" at "connecting dots," an oddly benign reference to al Qaeda as our "agile adversary," and a promise to suspend the transfer of prisoners to Yemen because of the "unsettled" situation in that country, accompanied by an emphatic recommitment to closing Guantanamo.

What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as "war" and "Islamist terrorism," and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us. That's too bad, because the Constitution vests "the executive power"-not some of it, all of it-in the president. He, and those acting at his direction, are responsible for protecting us.

There is much to worry about if they think that the principal challenge of the day is detecting bombs at the airport rather than actively searching out, finding and neutralizing terrorists before they get there.

Mukasey was interviewed yesterday on the Journal Report, and I link to that interview in the Must-Watch Media section.

Harry Reid, king demagoguer, let his hypocritical mask slip a bit. Mark Arminder reports the following revelation found in the soon-to-be released book Game Change:

On page 37, a remark, said "privately" by Sen. Harry Reid, about Barack Obama's racial appeal. Though Reid would later say that he was neutral in the presidential race, the truth, the authors write, was that his "encouragement of Obama was unequivocal. He was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama - a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," as he said privately. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama's race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.

While what Harry Reid said is offensive and, in fact, truly racist (as opposed to the race card-y Racist ? ) it shouldn't surprise us. I'm just surprised he wasn't chosen as the Vice President! Joe Biden must be patting himself on the back for going even further and calling Obama surprisingly "clean and articulate." Silly me; I didn't realize that Post-Racial actually meant making absolutely everything about one's race. I really need to study my Newspeak Dictionary! Hey, at least Reid never attended one of those racist Tea Parties, huh? He's not Racist-Racist since he promotes that sweet, sweet liberal policy and isn't that all that matters?

To the Left, yes, and it honestly shouldn't be shocking; he's not the first on the Left whose true colors have been shown. ?He has apologized, of course, for "misspeaking". But, he didn't misspeak; it's what he truly believes. You see, once again, the people constantly hurling the "Racist!" slur at others are in actuality the people whom only see color. In addition to Harry Reid's and Vice President Joe Biden's comments, further proof has been proffered time and time again. Maureen Dowd, not long ago,?heard the non-existent word "boy" at the end of Joe Wilson's "You Lie." Project much, Maureen? (if that was your own thought and you didn't plagiarize that as well)

I'm really tired of trying to explain to the Left that they are the ones who see color everywhere, and in everything, and that they are diminishing true acts of real racism with their willy-nilly tossing about of the Racist card; they are diminishing and demeaning the entire Civil Rights movement by incessantly hurling the race card in arguable instances, all the while betraying their thin-veneered cloak with these constant, blatant "misspeaks."

It's important for the left to keep reminding us that democrat politicians are members of some great intelligentsia that know better than us. Granted, perhaps I've never held the title of Community Organizer, but I live outside of an Ivory Tower, amongst people who have actually accomplished things and done things for others, not just talked and spouted feel good-y theories and rhetoric whilst holding a figurative gun in hand to force others to sacrifice and walk in lockstep with their prejudiced ideas of what one should believe. So, perhaps my observations about race might have some merit.

See, we don't see color. Unlike ya'll we don't live in places where everyone is exactly like we are. We don't see people as skin colors; we see them as our neighbors, our friends, our kids' teachers, our local shop owners. But the Smarter-Than-Us Left doesn't believe in Post-Racial anything. Their bread and butter is identity politics. They must, in order to maintain power, put everyone in victim boxes and pit people against one and another.

They are not post-racial in the slightest; quite the opposite. They demand that everyone in one of their little boxed up "groups" think the same in order to make sense of their policies; this is the schematic for Race Politics. They praise Martin Luther King, Jr, yet they never heed his words. They always judge first by the color of someone’s skin. When they hurl the Racist slur at us for daring to disagree with President Obama, they fully understand that they're denying us the right to the moral imperative to judge a person by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. To me, this is among the worst examples of actual racism and it is truly hateful, as it's insidious.

With all the crying about what the left has inherited from Bush, there is one thing I do wish y'all had "inherited". A desire to get rid of the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations." Instead, you foment it. You exclaim in amazement "Oh, look! He sure does talk purty! For a black guy and all." How vile. It also means that your race card is no longer accepted. Having you attempt to use a race card would be like Al Gore attempting to use a bitter, old tool card; utterly laughable.

It's perhaps harsh to say, but often the truth is harsh: ?in?the minds of some on the left, Obama is a "token." I'd feel horribly sad for him, if he didn't?almost embrace that notion himself.

The Democratic Party was shaken to its core on Tuesday when Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Gov. Bill Ritter (D-CO) announced they would not run for re-election in 2010, all on the same day. The source of these Democrats' fears in facing the American people at the polls is no secret: the American people believe the state of the economy is poor and getting worse. Responding to this dismal environment, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) told the Fremont Tribune on Tuesday: "I think it was a mistake to take health care on as opposed to continuing to spend the time on the economy." While we agree with Nelson that President Barack Obama's health care priorities have been grossly misplaced, we shudder to think what more "time on the economy" would have meant from this White House.

Just last month in a speech to The Brookings Institution, President Obama outlined his proposal for a third round of stimulus funding on top of the $787 billion stimulus he signed into law last February. Third stimulus you say? Yes, third stimulus. Any fair accounting of government deficit spending in response to this recession must also include President George Bush's failed 2008 $168 billion economic stimulus bill. Why did these first two economic stimuli fail? For the same reason any third stimulus will also fail: government spending does not inject any new money into the economy. Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Brian Riedl explains:

“Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It is merely redistributed from one group of people to another.

Yes, government spending can put under-utilized factories and individuals to work-but only by idling other resources in whatever part of the economy supplied the funds. If adding $1 billion would create 40,000 jobs in one depressed part of the economy, then losing $1 billion will cost roughly the same number of jobs in whatever part of the economy supplied Washington with the funds. It is a zero-sum transfer regardless of whether the unemployment rate is 5 percent or 50 percent.

The fact that the money for government spending does not just fall from the sky is no secret. As Senior Research Fellow Ronald Utt has detailed, multiple government entities acknowledge this fact, including the General Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service, who concluded:

Like government spending, the wrong kind of tax cuts can also be worthless in spurring economic growth. Riedl explains:

Permanent cuts to marginal to high marginal tax rates can encourage more business investment and economic growth. But Bush's 2008 tax cuts and Obama's 2009 tax cuts were both just tax rebates which, especially when they are given to people with no tax liability to begin with, are economically indistinguishable from government spending.

The economy's own self-correcting mechanisms have already begun to move the economy out of recession. Now is no time to stall the recovery before it gets going with another round of deficit spending on top of our existing $1.4 trillion deficit.

* After seven Senators sent a letter to the White House demanding to know what the Obama administration knew about Transportation Security Administration nominee Erroll Southers' misleading statements to Congress about his improper personal use of FBI databases (and when they knew it), the White House admitted they did not know about Southers' misstatements until this November.

* Democrat Mayor Sheila Dixon of Baltimore, who was convicted of embezzlement last month, said she will resign from office in early February.

* In his State of the State address on Wednesday night, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the Senate health care bill was filled with "bribes, deals and loopholes" and added: "California's congressional delegation should either vote against this bill that is a disaster for California or get in there and fight for the same sweetheart deal Senator Nelson of Nebraska got for the Cornhusker State. He got the corn; we got the husk."

* For the second day in a row, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs continued to dodge questions about President Barack Obama's broken promise to the American people to have health care negotiations on C-SPAN.

* New York City projects that the Obama administration's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other suspects in civilian court will cost them more than $400 million.

The Daily Kos claims that Rush Limbaugh advocates a violent overthrow over the United States government.

RUSH: I want to know, ladies and gentlemen, where does the buck stop with jobs? We were told yesterday in an attempt to sound like Harry Truman that the buck stops with Obama, when he really means Bush, on all these terrorist snafus. But where does the buck stop on jobs? I think the Associated Press writes their stories just to amuse me and to get me to mention them. And now they're putting this in the headline: "Economy Sheds More Jobs Than Expected." Who the hell would expect jobs to increase with what's going on here? Who are these experts they run every month? Jobs are either up more than expected or they're down more than expected. "The economy lost more jobs than expected in December while the unemployment rate held steady at 10 percent, as a sluggish economic recovery has yet to revive hiring among the nation's employers." That's not what we read yesterday and the day before. They kept telling us, various websites and news organizations, that there's a sign of uptick here in the economic recovery and that people are hiring.

Here's the weirdest damn headline. This is AP: "UPS Cutting 1,800 Jobs in US, Raising Outlook." This is a story of optimism! "UPS said Friday it will cut 1,800 management --" Oh. That's why. They're cutting evil management people. Not the precious, beloved union workers. Yeah. "UPS said Friday it will cut 1,800 management and administrative positions to streamline its U.S. small package segment. ... About 1,100 employees will be offered a voluntary separation package as part of the work force reduction." They talk about this as positive news for the stock price, and yet the economy lost more jobs than expected in December, while the unemployment rate held steady at 10%. "A sharp drop in the labor force, a sign more of the jobless are giving up on their search for work, kept the unemployment rate at the same rate as in November. Once people stop looking for jobs, they are no longer counted among the unemployed."

Now, here's Reuters: "Employers Unexpectedly Cut Jobs in December -- U.S. employers unexpectedly cut 85,000 jobs in December, cooling optimism on the labour market's recovery and keeping pressure on President Barack Obama to find ways to spur job growth." Good Lord, do you people not understand in the media that Obama is responsible for all of these job losses? There is no stimulus. Stimulus is not possible. Government stimulus mathematically, economically, is not possible. You can't stimulate an economy by taking 50 million out of it and then putting the 50 million back in. You can't stimulate an economy by borrowing 50 million and then throwing it into the private sector, 'cause it's all coming from the private sector. The private sector is being depleted on purpose. Unexpectedly cut jobs? "'The economy continues to take three steps forward and two steps back. I wouldn't read too much into it beyond the fact that this will be a slow employment recovery. Directionally, the economy is on a mend,' said David Katz, chief investment officer at Matrix Asset Advisors in New York."

Here's even worse news. "The report showed there were 929,000 'discouraged workers' who had given up looking for a job, up from 642,000 a year earlier. Chris Rupkey, an economist with Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, called the rise in discouraged workers 'a simply astonishing number that borders on the frightening. If they were still looking for work and counted as the unemployed, the unemployment rate would have been 10.5 percent. This clearly isn't your father's recession. It is looking more like your great-grandfathers. Brother, can you spare a dime?'" So the way to calculate the people who have given up as unemployed, you know, once you quit looking they don't count you as unemployed. The unemployment rate would be ten-and-a-half percent.

Now, this leads me to a couple other things here: "State Tax Collections See Third Consecutive Double-Digit Drop in 3Q 2009, the third consecutive double-digit drop in tax collections." Now, for those of you who think that there might be job growth on the horizon, be sure to factor in the coming layoffs in state, county, and city jobs. Now, the only reason those layoffs haven't happened is Obama's slush fund, which he calls the stimulus package. Because thanks to Obama's stimulus bill, his slush fund, the states have not had to suffer mass layoffs needed to put their budgets in balance with true revenues, revenues not supplemented by payoffs from slush funds. So states all over the country are grappling with huge deficits thanks in part to a 10% unemployment rate or ten-and-a-half or 17. In some of these states it's even higher than that.

The tax base has been decimated. This next year look for higher levels of job cuts in state, county, and city jobs. You can see with tax collections now falling for the third consecutive quarter, double-dip. When they run through this stimulus money that they got -- you didn't get it, the states did -- to shore up their deficits, to shore up state employment -- when they run through that and they're going to run through it like a hot knife through butter then they're going to have no choice than to start laying off people and the unions are going to howl and it's going to be a big, big mess. Cities all over the country don't have enough money in their budgets to clear snow from the streets, and when the snow is not cleared people can't get to work much less the store. Vital city service can't be provided in some places now. This has been caused now thanks to the failed economic policies of the buck-stops-here President Obama. The buck ought to stop with the private sector. But it doesn't. Obama has made it his private sector, and he has failed, as has every other central planner who's tried to micromanage a giant economy, or any kind of small economy.

Now, the reason Obama failed is because he embraces failed policies, failed political philosophies, knowingly. He took responsibility for job creation when tax cuts for the private sector were in order. And then there was this upside down comment about who was responsible for keeping the country safe. "This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist." That was Obama December 28th, 2009. When it comes to national security the buck stops with the president. When it comes to job creation, the buck stops with an alert and courageous citizenry who are far more resilient than an isolated central planner is, who really doesn't care. He's now almost a single payer in the student loan program. So there's no improvement month to month in the employment picture. It is worsening. It's going to worsen even further with state and city and county layoffs that are sure to come at some point in this new year. And then there's going to be inflation with all this printing and borrowing of money, and they're talking about a double-dip in the housing market now or commercial real estate.

I don't mean to be a downer here. What's frustrating is that once again this government's governing against its own citizens. This president and his party are governing against us. We are at war with our own president. We are at war with our own government. They are the ones standing in the way of the private sector rebounding. They're the ones standing in the way of job creation, purposely. And it's just frustrating, and it's something that I think people have to know. They're now talking about a second stimulus. Christine Romer, "Oh, yeah, we're starting to see some positives. It may be time for a second --" that would be disaster. Utter disaster. Besides, at last I saw they've only spent 30% of this stimulus because it's a slush fund, and the majority of it was reserved for being spent in this year, which happens to be a reelection year and that's what matters to the Democrats and to Obama.

CALLER: Hey, great to talk to you, Rush. On the unemployment stuff, I've been driving trucks since 1974, so we've always been able to kind of see the trends in the economy because of the lack of freight. And right now there's a huge lack of freight. There's a lot of companies closing, a lot of owner/operators losing their trucks, going out of business, and one of the things that the statistics don't count is the owner/operators that have gone out of business. So every month you can probably throw anywhere from five to 7,000 more people into the mix.

RUSH: Right. He's referring to a story we had earlier today that UPS is laying off 1,100 workers and this is bright news, Reuters says it's good news, it's bright news for the stock price. Well, I know, the stock price, they're thinning the herd. Of course investors like it. But it's 1,100 more jobs lost, and you factor in the people that have given up looking, and a lot of these truckers you're talking about own the trucks, right?

RUSH: They don't get unemployment compensation. If you own your own business you don't get a check.

CALLER: No, not at all. And Wednesday night before Christmas a company called Arrow Trucking out of Tulsa, 1,300 drivers lost their jobs and ended up stranded pretty well around the United States when they closed their doors. And that's pretty scary. You don't hear those stories.

CALLER: Yep. Yep. Told the guys to take their trucks to the nearest dealership or terminal and they'd give them a bus ticket home and some of those guys had been buying trucks through the company and got kinda left holding the bag.

RUSH: Well, I know. This is a disaster. This is a man-made disaster out there, and I said at the top of the program, where does the buck stop with jobs? I want to tell you something, folks, when people realize that this has been on purpose for the express desire Obama has to set up his massive redistribution, which is what the health care thing is all about. I was talking earlier about how Pelosi loves to run around and say that we're going to reduce costs. There's no way. But costs and price are a different thing. And the use of the word "cost" is, therefore, intentional, as opposed to price. The price of health care is not going to come down because of this bill. The price that people pay isn't going to come down, but costs to some people will. Because some people, I think it's a family of four earning less than 80K and a single family earning less than 42K, it's somewhere in those two ranges, will be exempted from having to buy insurance. They're going to be subsidized by the government, which is us. Everybody not being subsidized is going to have to pay for this. Our costs will go up. The prices are going to go up. There are tax increases on people who have supposed Cadillac health plans.

Now, you can look at the subsidy in this thing as simple redistribution. There are a lot of families that make a under $80,000 a year, there are a lot of families of four that make under 80. They're going to be totally subsidized. This is redistribution. Everybody else is going to be paying for those people not to pay. And we already have the S-CHIP program, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and you're a child in that program up to age 29, I think. And you're paid for. Already being subsidized. So that's transfer of wealth. When people figure out, when enough people figure out that all of this pillaging of the private sector, which is what it is, this bankrupting of the country, when they figure out it's been on purpose and when they see the majority of the slush fund called the stimulus plan, which most of it hadn't been spent, it was supposed to kick in this year, remember, that's what they started saying toward the early fall into the late fall, I think it was Christina Romer, it wasn't supposed to kick in until 2010, and then she said, well, we've probably gotten our bang for the buck out of this, we may have to do a second one. And at that time they'd only spent 20% of it. It's a slush fund for Democrats' reelection efforts. That's what it is. And that's what TARP was. That was a slush fund for Goldman Sachs. But that's a longer story.

Now, "One in five working-age American men does not have a job, according to the latest federal employment numbers, an all-time high." Twenty percent of working-age men do not have jobs. It "illustrates the extraordinary toll this recession has taken on male-dominated professions in particular. Men are more likely to work in sectors like manufacturing and construction," I'm thinking of trucking here with our most recent call, and these are areas "that are more sensitive to economic downturns. But this downturn has been particularly brutal on those industries, leading some observers to call it a 'mancession.' Only 80.3 percent of men age 25-54 had jobs in December -- the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting that data in 1948."

Now, I want to put this in perspective. Only 80% of men 25-54 had jobs in December, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting data in 1948, the lowest. This is after a $1 trillion stimulus plan that the Obama administration said was going to keep unemployment at 8%. This is after bailing out the banks and some financial institutions and Goldman Sachs. This is after Obama's best stab at this. But of course no stimulus can ever work. There is not a pile of money that's not being used that the government can infuse into the private sector. In order to put a trillion dollars into the private sector they gotta take it out first, or, in this case, borrow it, which just runs up debt. There's no stimulus. It's not possible. And it's proof because it hasn't happened.

RUSH: Lynette in Charlotte, Michigan. It's great to have you here on the program.

CALLER: We are sending enormous amounts of money to Washington for three years. Now, this part may be an oxymoron: What trustworthy individual in Washington is keeping track of this money and not spending it?

RUSH: What she is referring to, for those of you in Port St. Lucie and Rio Linda is the health care bill. The new taxes will start (snaps fingers) immediately. There are 14 tax increases alone in the Senate bill and pretty much the same in the House. Those taxes start immediately. But the so-called benefits, the actual reform to the health care system, will not start until 2014, maybe 2013. The reason for this is they needed to play a budget gimmick. They needed to have a ten-year number that shows up under a trillion dollars because the war in Iraq cost a trillion dollars, they say, and so health care reform had to come in under a trillion dollars. So you got three years of tax increases or four, and then six years of spending. If you did ten years of spending, ten years of taxes, the total cost is $2.5 trillion. And what Lynette here is asking is: Are three years of taxes going to be put aside to pay for all the spending and the health care three years down the line? Of course not, Lynette. There is no way that that is going to happen. No way in hell it's going to happen, just like it long ago stopped happening in Social Security.

RUSH: There's a very important special election coming up in Massachusetts on the 19th of January. This is for Ted Kennedy's seat, and a lot of people are shocked by how close this is. Scott Brown (41 years old and a very attractive candidate in a number of ways) is inching ever closer to the favored Democrat Martha Coakley. She didn't even campaign in December it was so thought to be in the bag. She's now started running ads. He's running ads accusing her of raising taxes and so forth. She says it's a dirty personal attack. I don't know how every time you tell the truth about Democrats it somehow is a dirty personal attack. But Scott Brown is right.

Now, if this guy Brown happens to win... It's nine points right now -- and in Massachusetts, where there are a million plus more Democrats than Republicans, for any Republican to be within nine points here of Ted Kennedy's seat! I mean, they've even trotted out Ted Kennedy's widow to endorse Martha Coakley. Well, Charlie Cook says here: "A GOP upset -- or even a close loss by Scott Brown -- could likely trigger a new wave of Democratic retirements. Likewise, a smashing victory by Martha Coakley might slow the bleeding." And people on the Democrat side are watching that race like hawks.

RUSH: Here's the prediction that I made on this program yesterday about the president.

RUSH ARCHIVE: When Obama's in the White House, oh, it's understandable that we've got intel that may not be quite up to snuff. Oh, it's so sad. We're so sorry. (crying) they're so overworked and they have such a vast bureaucracy, and there's an overwhelming flow of information, and they're just under utter pressure. They're hampered. People ask me, "Why is Obama being so blunt here? Why is he saying it's a second strike and there aren't going to be three strikes, and why is he saying that this is a screw up?" Look, here's your answer. 'Cause he can once again dump on Bush, and the Drive-By State-Controlled World Media is helping right along. (imitating media) "President Obama has now discovered that he has inherited an intelligence community which is bloated, bureaucratic, and even with the best of intentions has become so large. It's very hard to put together the pieces."

RUSH: And, true to form, the State-Controlled Media pushes the idea this was Bush's fault, Obama saddled with a bureaucracy left over from Bush. This is a montage of a bunch of them.

DEFAZIO: We set up the terrorist information center to overcome the failures of the Bush/Cheney administration.

COOPER: The problems that existed now which are, the president says he's trying to fix today, did they exist years ago and we just didn't know about them?

GERGEN: We've been hearing from the government that they're going to close these gaps now for over eight years.

OLBERMANN: Bush's reforms of the intelligence system might not have changed things for the better.

SHUSTER: The Bush administration let guys go from Guantanamo. These were the guys who helped Abdulmutallab in Yemen.

PAGE: Certainly things that the Bush administration did are affecting what's happening now.

MCMAHON: Let's not lay this at the feet of a guy who's been there for 10 months and not at the feet of the people who built this security apparatus. It was Bush bureaucrats.

TUCKER: We saw a lot of belligerence from Dick Cheney. We saw a lot of swagger from George Bush. Where did that get us?

RUSH: Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I want to go back to one line here, David Shuster, one of the hapless, genuinely ignorant schlubs over at MSNBC. He said, "The Bush administration let guys go from Guantanamo. These were the guys who helped Abdulmutallab in Yemen." Yeah, I can't deny Bush let 'em go. But, Mr. Shuster, do you know why? People like you were demanding it! The ACLU and a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of people in Congress, because was it not fair to hold these people who hadn't done anything. You're the ones who wanted them released from the damn place. You're the ones who want to close the place down and you turn around now and blame Bush? It's just breathtaking to behold all of this. But we're on the case here, folks, and they no longer, ever again get away with this combination of ignorance, bias, prejudice, propaganda, and destruction.

RUSH: Look, I don't want to hear "Bush did it" from you liberals. I don't want to hear the first thing about it. George Bush was dragged kicking and screaming into creating a brand-new bureaucracy: Homeland Security. We already had a Homeland Security department: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House. That's where Homeland Security is. Bush got dragged kicking and screaming. He didn't want to release anybody from Guantanamo Bay. For crying out loud, you people, Barack Obama wants to investigate the CIA over how they interrogated the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks! He wants them prosecuted. Barack Obama and Eric Holder want Bush and Cheney to face war crimes charges by international courts. That's what the public trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is all about.

They want this country ripped to shreds. They're investigating the CIA. They're going to prosecute CIA agents and name their names over how they interrogated. But yet he doesn't want to investigate the CIA or anybody else for lapses with the underwear bomber or any of the other lapses of late? "Oh, no, no, no. It was a systemic failure. The buck stops with me. It's never going to happen again," blah, blah, blah. By the way, how's that investigation going on the CIA agents who waterboarded KSM? How is that going? I want those guys named and I want them behind bars.

RUSH: A couple more things here on this brave speech yesterday by the president. The media is twisting and turning, doing exactly as I predicted: Blaming everything here on Bush, systems that Bush and Cheney put into place. "It can't be our new young president. He's only been there ten months!" Remember, though, Bush had been there ten months and they tried to blame him for 9/11. At any rate, there's a story here at Politico.com from yesterday: "White House Security Report was Further Redacted Before Release." Yeah, it was. "He [an administration official] said it was further redacted over concerns that any information divulged not reveal sources and methods. 'One has to be extremely careful what is made public. It can provide knowledge to your enemies.'" Now, I don't think they care about that. You know why? There's a very simple reason why they don't care about that.

It's this upcoming show trial in New York City of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his henchmen, that's budgeted $206 million a year. New York wants the feds to pay them $206 million a year for security for that trial. A year! How long does that tell you it's going to go on? If we are really worried about not making public information that will give knowledge to our enemies then why in the name of hell are we going to conduct a public show trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and give him a forum to rip up and beat up this country and make speeches? By the way, discovery? He's going to be able to see all the evidence that we've collected? It's an absolute disaster. And if we're so concerned about not divulging sources and methods, then why the hell did the State Department announce that they screwed up identifying Abdul Mutallab because his name was misspelled in their database and so he didn't show up as a terrorist?

By admitting that all we gotta do now is tell terrorists to add a couple vowels to their names when they register and then use their real names when they show up and they won't show up on the list. So I don't believe this for a moment: "One has to be extremely careful what's made public. It can provide knowledge to your enemies." Something in that report was going to be "shocking" and nothing was. Whatever it was was redacted and it was redacted I think not because it was shocking, but because it was going to be harmful to somebody, and I think that's why it was redacted. Now, let's listen to the Drive-Bys in the State-Controlled Media last night. This is a montage of Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos, David "Rodham" Gergen, Bob Shrum and Pat Buchanan all talking about Obama and his remarks on the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber.

SAWYER: "The buck stops here." It's an echo of another young president at another time.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ...John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. The president took responsibility.

GERGEN: ...take personal responsibility for this just as John F. Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs.

SHRUM: Presidents who are willing to do this -- JFK! -- presidents who are willing to say this sort of thing when something bad happens, the country tends to respond.

RUSH: Just amazing. (chuckling) They all say the same thing, and they all compare him to JFK when it was Harry Truman who said it! But they don't want to compare him to Truman because Truman nuked the Japanese. And why compare him to JFK? The Bay of Pigs was an absolute disaster. It was a flop. By the way, speaking of the Bay of Pigs and Cuba, I have a story down in the stack here. Do you know that doctors are defecting from Cuba? Doctors are defecting from the best health care system in the world, folks. That's what the American left tells us, and that's what Hollywood tells you. "Oh, yeah, the health care down there is better than anybody else's." They never send their kids down there, they never go for health treatment themselves, but it's the best health care in the world because it doesn't cost anybody anything. Ahem! So doctors are defecting from the best health care system in the world. Last night on the Situation Room Wolf Blitzer spoke with the former Clinton advisor David "Rodham" Gergen who... David "Rodham" Gergen personifies conventional wisdom in Washington. If you want to know what everybody else is thinking, you listen to David Gergen. If you want to know what everybody's similar take is on anything that happens in that town, you listen to David "Rodham" Gergen. So Blitzer asked David "Rodham" Gergen about Obama and his remarks on the attempted Christmas Day attacks. David Gergen served four presidents. "What do you think, David? What do you think of what he said?"

GERGEN: It's going to take a while to, uh, digest this one, Wolf. It was, uh, complex. I think the president taking personal responsibility, "the buck stops here," was, uh, forthright and good. Welcome. I think it was harder to understand the intelligence failures, and General Jones spoke that we would have a certain shock about what went wrong. I thought what he described about what -- what happened and what went wrong in intelligence was sort of -- had sort of a bureaucratic language to it that was hard to penetrate what he is really saying here about what went wrong and therefore it's a little hard to understand what he's doing that's gonna correct it, especially on the intelligence side. I thought it was clearer about the screening.

RUSH: Unlike JFK, it sounds like David "Rodham" Gergen had no idea what Obama was saying. And this is his initial response. This is initial response before he threw in the JFK reference. Somebody sent the memo out "It's JFK! JFK! JFK!" and all the Drive-Bys got it. They all started repeating it, "JFK! JFK! JFK!" But he made this comment before the JFK memo went out, and his initial response tells you all you need to know. He has no idea what Obama is talking about. "It was complex." It's complex. Of course everything intellectuals say is complex and we're not meant to really understand what they say. We're supposed to just be in awe. It's not what they say; it's how they say it. Because, you know, they're so much smarter than we are. They have to speak this way. In other words, if we really know what they were saying we couldn't handle it anyway. I mean, the shock and awe to our own brains about how insignificant we are would send us into suicidal notions.

We shouldn't even try to understand. We're not capable of it, see? That's the way it goes. Now, yesterday afternoon on this show... You know, Cookie, I'm actually seriously thinking here of no more sound bites from MSNBC. I mean it's not even worth it. It's not worth giving these people the time, and it's not even funny anymore, unless it's genuinely funny. But this is the height of irresponsibility and journalistic malpractice. The latest example here is Norah O'Donnell and David Shuster. This is a guy who blamed Bush for letting people out of Guantanamo Bay to go to Yemen and come back and commit terrorist acts. (snorts) After David Shuster and his crowd demanding the place be closed and that those poor terrorists be released, "Because nobody has charged them with anything and they're probably innocent young children. Bush and Cheney, they just put them in there to be mean. They don't have any evidence so we gotta let them go. This is trashing America's values and making the world hate us," blah, blah, blah, blah. Now you turn around and blame Bush for letting people out of there? Anyway, David Shuster says to Norah O'Donnell, "Norah, as far as the politics of the policy of Obama's speech, what's your reaction?"

O'DONNELL: The president said, "This is not a time for partisanship, this is a time for citizenship," and this baloney, essentially, he said about this finger pointing and saying we're not at war is not appropriate when the enemy is who it is and is trying to, uh, kill Americans. I think that was a very strong message and I think it was implicitly a very strong push-back, uh, to the former vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been the most vociferous critic of this president.

RUSH: Ohhhh, that's why she's squealing with delight! Norah O'Donnell is squealing with delight as though Bill Clinton had walked in the room and undressed. "Oh, he blamed Cheney!" She's so excited, it was near orgasmic on MSNBC. She blamed Cheney. He obviously was blaming Cheney. "Not a time for partisanship, a time for citizenship." No. It's a time for stepping up and accepting the constitutional role of commander-in-chief and protecting and defending the people of this country and the Constitution, none of which is happening right now.

RUSH: Up first today from Sierra Vista, Arizona, Rich, nice to have you here, sir. Welcome to Open Line Friday.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Dittos from the desert and quite an honor being first up today.

CALLER: Hey, I'm supposed to sarcastically thank you a little bit for ruining a little bit of our Hawaii vacation also. We were there at the same time.

CALLER: We thought it was going to be Obama trashing our travel plans, but as soon as the word got out that you were in the hospital, I kind of glued to the Internet and the television trying to figure out what was going on, so --

CALLER: Yeah. Well, I'll get over it. Hey, I'll tell you what, there was one thing I was shocked about with hearing Obama speak yesterday. I didn't hear any will in his words whatsoever. I was listening to how he was speaking, and I heard somebody that was beating on his chest and somebody that was maybe a little bit desperate because he's probably heard some of the initial reactions from the press on his additional reactions to this thing and he realized that he already has two strikes with Fort Hood and the panty bomber.

RUSH: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's three. There's the Army recruiter in Arkansas. There's the near-disaster at Fort Dix. New York just arrested a couple of guys today. I think that may be the FBI arrested a couple of guys today that they've been surveilling for six months, that could be on orders from the White House to show tougheness here.

CALLER: Sure but I'm speaking specifically since he took office. You know, we had 9/11 with Bush and that started the whole thing but nothing happened here in the states after that. This has all happened in the one year since he's actually taken office. And I think he sees the writing on the wall that he's either gotta do something to prove to the people that he can be the commander-in-chief or else the people are going to rise up against him and say, hey, screw you, we've had enough of this. Your primary job is to protect us, not to take care of us, you know, out of your pocket.

RUSH: There was a masterful plot from Great Britain, Al-Qaeda terrorists were gonna blow up a bunch of airplanes en route from the UK to the United States. That plot was hatched, it was caught and observed and stopped by British authorities during the Bush administration, working with I think the FBI and probably the CIA. There were attempts made during the Bush administration. We don't know how many because you don't ever advertise the things you stop. Only your failures get noticed. But that one was a big one. Your point is well taken. This kind of stuff did not happen in eight years with George W. Bush. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, say whatever you want, kept the people of this country safe. Great call. Great to hear from you, Rich.

This is Jen in Detroit. Nice to have you on the EIB Network. Open Line Friday. Hi.

CALLER: Well, it's just nice to talk to you, and my point is that, well, you know, I don't even listen to this person's speeches. I listen to him vicariously through the sound bites because I can't stand him, okay, I'm talking about Obama.

CALLER: Anyway, you know, this thing that he did yesterday, it was just more of his own garbage again, because I'm bringing up the point you were saying about he finally said we were at war with Al-Qaeda. Well, you know what, he doesn't believe that because if he did, we would not be trying all these terrorists in the regular courts. We would be using the military courts.

RUSH: Exactly right. Exactly right, especially the show trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed --

RUSH: -- and his three henchmen. I mean, if we're really concerned about not divulging our intelligence methods and secrets and so forth, then there's no way we'd be doing this trial. This trial is going to expose everything, and it is going to be the largest anti-American rant ever to take place on American soil in a courtroom for the longest sustained time. It's going to go on for years. And these people have to know that. They claim theory out for a conviction, and even if they don't get a conviction -- by the way, in New York, after all this time has passed, you get a jury from the Upper West Side and down in the Village, and I can see finding two or three people who think the US made this happen. Look at how many idiots believed that there was a conspiracy theory that Bush knew and was involved in blowing up the twin towers! And a lot of people are in New York. You're not going to have trouble finding a

jury that thinks these guys are the victims of an evil, imperialistic United States. At least a hung jury, anything's possible. That's why they said, "Even if that happens they're not being released." So what are you putting them on trial for? This is an utter disaster. I cannot escape the conclusion that it's purposeful.

MSNBC suggest that the intelligence failure may be an internal attack against President Obama:

RUSH: Brian Lamb, by the way, he was on a radio program yesterday. Brian Lamb just blasts Obama on this C-SPAN promise. He promised eight different times to have health care deliberations televised so that people could see what choices were available. And there's I think one hour total of health care debate that has been televised in the Senate. Here's Brian Lamb yesterday.

LAMB: We are an independent journalistic institution, and the president -- or when he was a candidate, had no right to assume that we would cover anything. We were used as kind of a political football during the campaign. We obviously would cover these negotiations. The only time we've been allowed to cover the White House part of it is one hour inside the East Room, which was kind of a -- just a show horse type of thing. The American people pay for all this that goes on in this town. If we pay for something, and it's the public's business, we ought to be able to see how it's done.

RUSH: And Brian Lamb is not the only one. Jack Cafferty on CNN unloaded on Obama. I guess it was yesterday. I watched the video clip on YouTube. I'm going to have to send it up to Cookie and have her prepare it here for us. It's just the latest lie from the Obama administration. You would think that Cafferty is talking about George W. Bush. There are a lot of people on the Democrat side of things here who do not dig this. Remember, now, all politicians lie. All politicians break their promises. But Obama was different! Obama was something like which we'd never seen before, Obama was postpartisan, Obama

was postracial, Obama was postaccomplishment, by the way. He hadn't accomplished anything. He was post-everything. We were going to have a new guy unlike anything we'd ever had before. His promises were believed and he's breaking them left and right, and he doesn't even seem to care, he doesn't even seem to acknowledge, he doesn't seem to be concerned with it in any way, shape, manner, or form.

RUSH: One of the things Democrats are mad at President Obama about is he is urging an excise tax on high cost insurance. Even Pelosi is upset about this. She doesn't want there to be any tax increase on the middle class, like Obama promised, but there are tax increases on everybody, including the middle class, throughout the Senate health care bill. "The White House has long expressed a preference for the excise tax on high-cost plans." What the House Democrats want is an increase in the income tax. Obama and the Senate want an excise tax to the Cadillac plans. "The Senate proposal would impose a 40 percent excise tax on the cost of individual insurance policies above $8,500 and on family policies above $23,000, with higher thresholds for retirees and employees in high-risk fields like police officers." Forty percent excise tax.

And the Washington Post says: "Health-Care Reform Bill's Proposed Tax on High-Cost Plans Raises Questions." The plans being taxed are not all Cadillacs in terms of lavish benefits. Some are going to be taxed because of the state they're in, the type of business that they're in, and the age of their workers, all that drives up cost. So another campaign promise being broken, and it's no big deal when a politician breaks a campaign promise, but with Obama the rumblings are small but they're starting to happen on the left now, on the Democrat side of things. Gitmo, for example, has not been closed. And this mess with counterterrorism, the counterterrorism chief, he was on the ski slope somewhere when he was told about the Christmas Day bomber. He stayed on the ski slopes. He did not come back to town to the Counterterrorism Center. You can have the greatest system, quote, unquote, in the world, if you don't have good people running it, the great system is worthless, and we do not have great people running any of these systems.

CAFFERTY: How dare they? President Obama, Democratic leaders have decided to bypass a formal House and Senate conference committee in order to reconcile those two health care bills. Instead, White House and Democratic leaders will hold "informal" -- that's another word for "secret" -- negotiations, meant to shut Republicans and the public out of the process. What a far cry from the election when then-candidate Obama pledged to, quote, "broadcast health care negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are," unquote. President Obama hasn't even made a token effort to keep his campaign promises of more openness and transparency in government. It was all just another lie that was told in order to get elected. Here's hoping the voters remember some of this crap when the midterm elections roll around later this year.

RUSH: Oh, baby! "[J]ust another lie that was told in order to get elected." Now, this is the way that Cafferty sputtered and spewed about George Bush every day -- practically every day -- during Bush's administration. This is categorizing Obama as no different than anybody else -- and that, my friends, is the realization that a lot of these people that drank the Kool-Aid are now beginning to have. Speaking of Obama's tax increase on health care, let's go back. Here's a presidential candidate ad that Obama ran. It's entitled, "One Word." This was in 2008. He ran this ad against Senator McCain.

ANNOUNCER: On health care, John McCain promises a tax credit, but here's what he won't tell you. McCain would impose a new tax on health benefits, taxing your health care for the first time ever. It's a multitrillion-dollar tax hike, the largest middle class tax increase in history. You won't find one word about it on his website, but the McCain tax could cost your family thousands. Can you afford it?

RUSH: Yeah, I know. I know. It's politics as usual, but I'm still going to point this out. McCain was being accused of lying, and here's Obama doing exactly what he accused McCain of wanting to do, and that is raise your taxes by thousands. I was communicating with a buddy of mine this morning, and there's story in the New York Times about Michigan congressman Bart Stupak. Bart Stupak is a pro-life Democrat, which makes him a dinosaur (except he's not extinct but he's close) and he is actively fighting the health care bill in the House of Representatives. A Democrat! My buddy and I started realizing that a Democrat is saying more in opposition to the health care bill than elected Republicans are.

Now, where are they? They treat this as just another piece of legislation. They're going to add amendments to it to improve it. The American people don't want any of this! This is such a golden opportunity for the Republican Party, once again, to contrast itself. Folks, there are a number of reasons here why they don't. I think the main reason is that the longer you live in that town the more you become of that town. And these leaders that have been there 25 or 30 years, ten or 15, they are of Washington now. And when you are "of Washington," you are "of government," and you just believe in trading power now and then -- and, you know, constituents are to be mollified every election year but after that, to hell with it.

Then I think there's a residual fear. In addition to, you know, becoming "of Washington," I think there's a residual fear that they're going to be criticized and they're going to be called racists and they're going to be called other things if they start criticizing Obama. Now, everybody is starting criticize Obama now, and it knows no boundary. I mean, the people on both sides of the aisle are criticizing Obama. I bring all of this up because the Gallup poll has reported today that conservatives have finished 2009 as the number one ideological group, and the uptick owes largely to the fact had more independents are now calling themselves conservatives. So the Republicans are scared to death that they're going to anger independents and moderates, at a period of time where independents and moderates are now flooding the Republican Party -- and not because the party has done anything.

If the party leaders would come out and start echoing and validating the criticisms of this health care bill shared by their constituents and the majority of the American people, even more people would flock to them. What they're probably saying is, "Ah, we're going well here by not doing anything." It could be much better. Stop this! It's not too late. Remember, 300 Spartans came close to stopping the Persian Empire at Thermopylae. "Political independents showed increased attachment to the 'conservative' label in 2009, boosting the overall ranks of that group so that it now clearly outnumbers moderates in Gallup's annual averages for the first time since 2004." There is a conservative ascendancy. There is no desire for moderate Republicans. No moderates. Anybody running on the Republican ticket ought to be working like mad to win the conservative vote. If you win the conservative vote, you're going to win the election, pure and simple. It's in the data.

RUSH: Lot of people are saying, "Hey, Rush, how can Obama promise to televise anything in Congress anyway? Separation of powers." That's true. Obama cannot force Congress to televise what they do. In the House it's up to the speaker. So it's a moot point. You know what Gibbs ought to say in response to these questions that the reporters are badgering him with is, "Look, the president wants it to be seen but the Speaker of the House doesn't," because that's the truth of the matter. Pelosi doesn't any more want these hearings or negotiations televised than Obama does. But he could throw it off on her and he'd be constitutionally correct and he'd be being truthful. But to go out there and stonewall this?

Even the media, even liberal journalists are starting to get in the act here of getting really angry about this. I don't know whether the angry is faux anger -- if they're just doing this for ratings or to try to hold onto some credibility and they'll come back and protect him at the end of the day on this -- or if they're genuinely ticked off about it. He made eight different promises to televise all this, but he can't make that promise. He cannot do it. Now, he can ask 'em. He can ask Pelosi to do it, and he may have asked Pelosi to do it. I don't care. She's not gonna do this. I mean, they're not doing a conference committee on purpose. There's really nothing to televise. She's not going to let a camera in her office, and Harry Reid's not going to let one in his, and that's where all this is taking place. So it's actually a moot point.

RUSH: How many of you remember the name Mickey Edwards, Republican-In-Name-Only from Oklahoma, former member of Congress? Yesterday he was in Washington at the George Washington University at the Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars. He's the Aspen Institute vice president now, former representative Mickey Edwards (Republican-Oklahoma). Listen to a portion of what he said.

EDWARDS: I found often that my constituents -- who are busy living their own lives, doing the best they can for their families and their careers -- didn't have all the information that was available to me or to other members of Congress or to the president. Uhhhh, and some of what they got they were getting, uhh, from really deep intellectual sources like Wikipedia or Rush Limbaugh. You have to, on important matters, sometimes you have to say, "I listened to my constituents. I took them seriously. They're just wrong."

RUSH: Now, he is suggesting that members of Congress tell their constituents that they, you, are wrong on health care. I play this sound bite for you because it was mere moments ago -- actually I think in the last hour -- somebody called with another question: "Rush, why aren't the Republicans saying anything? Why aren't they in there fighting for us?" I said there were three reasons. A, they have become of Washington, and Washington is the center of the universe, and you're not in the center of the universe. The second thing is they're frightened. They're afraid to scare off the moderates or to be called racists if they criticize Obama. The third thing -- and this is directly in relation to what Mickey Edwards just said. The third thing is... Now, I know, every Democrat up there is governing against the will of the American people. Every Democrat holds average Americans in contempt. They don't think they're smart enough, sophisticated enough, educated enough, all that.

They're just rubes. They're kooks. They think if you call Washington, you're a kook. You're an idiot. They've talked to you on the phone. You rant and rail and so forth. They think you're kooks! They don't think you represent people that are really real Americans. People that are really working, as he said here, living their lives and doing their best for their families don't have time to harass members of Congress. So they adopt this notion you're just a kook. I don't know to what extent Republicans do, but I do know that sometimes legislators (in state governments as well) will circle the wagons. "Ah, those people outside are just a bunch of wackos! That's not representative of the country," and that's why when to listen to you. Here's Mickey Edwards essentially confirming that theory, that you don't know nearly what he knew when he was in Congress, and you certainly can't know it if what you know comes from me or Wikipedia -- which is a huge insult, to compare me to Wikipedia. But nevertheless, I play the sound bite just so you can see. You're wrong! He wants these people in Congress to run around and tell you that you're wrong.

RUSH: By the way, folks, don't doubt me on this stuff. Look at the disdain for all the people who showed up last August at these town halls hosted by members of Congress. Look at the disdain, shown both by the media and by members of Congress. I mean, you are a problem. You wonder why they don't listen to you? There is a cabal. It's a mind-set of sort of like "us versus them" -- meaning they are the "us," members of Congress, versus all of us -- and it's pervasive, I think. I think it's one of the reasons why now they just shut off the phones. They know... In this case it's the Democrats. They know you don't want this health care bill. They don't care. You are an idiot anyway. You're just a bunch of kooks. You don't know what's good for you -- and even if you did, it doesn't matter. These people now approach in their own minds a status of near royalty and infallibility. They have had a lifelong dream of socializing health care ever since FDR. It's a lifelong dream, and here they are on the precipice of it! In fact, they're going to do this as much as anything not to lose -- not to lose to the conservatives or Republicans -- as much as they are to get it done.

RUSH: Tina Brown of The Daily Beast website, last Thursday -- on New Year's Eve -- on the Today Show. The fill-in cohost, the Street Sweetie, Erin Burnett spoke with Tina Brown about events during the year 2009. And the Street Sweetie, Erin Burnett said, "What do you think was the most important moment of 2009?"

BROWN: Because, you know, you started the year with this huge festival of hope and renewal and everything is going to be so different now, and then like the bad fairy at Sleeping Beauty's christening, Rush Limbaugh utters the words, "I hope he fails."

BROWN: At that moment sort of like the Pandora's Box opened and the rest of the year has been just this big discord and toxic atmosphere in politics and partisan divide and people shouting at each other and the tea parties and death panels and all of the stuff --

BROWN: -- that took us into the year where now -- where we just got the health care bill probably about to be passed with no Republican votes at all.

RUSH: That's actually delusional. That's wandering aimlessly in hope of a thought and not finding one. Blaming me and "I hope he fails" for the partisanship? We were in a huge festival of hope and renewal? What was this, an amusement park we were at last January? A festival of hope and renewal? And everything is going to be so different now? The truth, Ms. Brown, is that you've got a classic -- never, ever anything different than any socialist Democrat has ever been -- in Barack Obama. There's not one thing unique about him. The quirk of fate is how fast he's been able get his agenda done because of so many unelected Democrats in the Senate. That's the real story here. "'I hope he fails,' and from that moment the Pandora's Box opened and the rest of the year has been this big discord." As though if I hadn't said that, why, we would all have free love and free sex! We'd be in communes together and be smoking pipes and having a grand old time. But I had to go out and ruin it by saying I hope Obama fails. I still hope it! The problem is, he succeeds when the country fails. That's the whole point.

RUSH: Okay. So Tina Brown is out there saying Obama ran into trouble because I said I hope he fails. It's my fault. Tina, I know you're going to hear about this, so let me just remind you of something. Long before I said I hope he failed, it was Obama who cut off all debate on his stimulus package by saying, "I won." He brings the Republicans up and says, "I'll listen to any idea anybody has." And the Republicans said, "Tax cuts." Nope, nope, "I won." We're going to do it my way. And, by the way, Tina he also at that same meeting told people not to listen to me. So there's Mr. Festival of hope, Mr. Festival of renewal.

Economist Was Under Contract With the Department of Health and Human Services While Touting Health Reform Bill

Since there are some links you may want to go back to from time-to-time, I am going to begin a list of them here. This will be a list to which I will add links each week.

This website reveals a lot of information about politicians and their relationship to money. You can find out, among other things, how many earmarks that Harry Reid has been responsible for in any given year; or how much an individual Congressman’s wealth has increased or decreased since taking office.

This is an outstanding website which tells the truth about Obama-care and about what the mainstream media is hiding from you:

Politico.com is a fairly neutral site (or, at the very worst, just a little left of center). They have very good informative videos at:

On Obama (if you have not visited this site, you need to check it out). He is selling a DVD on this site as well called Media Malpractice; I have not viewed it yet, except pieces which I have seen played on tv and on the internet. It looks pretty good to me.

Conservative Review
Issue #109	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	January 10, 2010