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).

Blond, Caucasian female terrorist “Jihad Jane” indicted this week in a plot to kill Swedish cartoonist. “Jihad Jaimie” another possible terrorist, was detained, and just recently released.

President Obama postpones family vacation in order to get his healthcare bill through.

It appears as if moving student loans to the government is going to be a part of the healthcare reconciliation bill. If it does not work there, look for it to be tacked onto some other unrelated but popular bill.

Representative Massa claims that Rahm Emanuel pestered him for his healthcare vote while both men were naked at the Congressional gym.

The generally liberal Ninth Circuit Court rules that the Pledge of Allegiance and the motto in God we trust are both still legal.

Dana Perino, “You can only vote against your constituents so many times before they vote against you.”

Bernie Goldberg: “I think that Howell Raines [former NY Times editor] and my pal Dan Rather would like to put the genie back in the bottle...they want to go to a time before FoxNews. They want to go to a make-believe, mythical time when, in their crazy view, there were no biases, reporters were just reporters without agendas, but what they really want is...they want to go back to a time when nobody challenged them.”

Steven Hayes explains why healthcare needs to be done before the Congressional recess: "I think the thing that Democrats need to avoid most is letting this bleed into the holiday recess. They do not want these wavering Democrats back in their districts where they get an earful from any number of constituents. They will lose if that happens"

“When it comes to a choice between conspiracy in Washington or incompetence, it is always incompetence,” said Charles Krauthammer.

And Krauthammer on Rahm Emanuel: "I think he has been revived by Eric Massa. Any guy who does an Easter promise like a steam room knockdown of another congressman in the full Monty deserves respect, and I think he will get it now."

Representative Eric Massa: "They will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill," he said of Democratic leaders. "Now they have gotten rid of me, and it will pass."

Chief Justice John Roberts, “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court - according the requirements of protocol - has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling. To the extent the State of the Union has degenerated into a political pep rally, I'm not sure why we're there.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez described Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as follows: "To me, she's like Condoleezza Rice ... a blond Condoleezza."

And, of course, Dan Rather’s comment of the week: “The Republicans will make a case and a lot of independents will buy this argument. ‘Listen he just hasn't been, look at the health care bill. It was his number one priority. It took him forever to get it through and he had to compromise it to death.’ And a version of, ‘Listen he's a nice person, he's very articulate,’ this is what's been used against him, ‘but he couldn't sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.’ ”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: "[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

Speaker Pelosi adds another reason why we ought to have free healthcare: “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or, eh, a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance, or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk but not [be] job-locked because a child has asthma or someone in the family is bipolar. You name it. Any condition is job-blocking.”

AFL-CIO union president Richard Trumka said health insurers are "the dark titans of greed who have ruined our health care system with their unquenchable thirst for profit over people."

Sean Penn on his friend Hugo Chavez: “[E]very day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should - truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.” I hope you read that carefully to get Sean’s gist.

E’s Chelsea Handler: “I'm like yeah but it's, I mean there's a lot of really, really stupid people out there that might buy this book [Karl Rove’s book]. Look what happened to Sarah Palin. She's really stupid.” I mean like, you know.

Bart Stupak, one of the Democratic holdouts who does not want federal funding for abortions: “What are Democratic leaders saying? ‘If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That's one of the arguments I've been hearing.’ ”

The most recent Chinese report on human rights violations: "The United States not only has a terrible domestic human rights record, it is also the main source of many human rights disasters worldwide."

“We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn't work, we try the persuasion of power.” writes Andy Stern, SEIU.

“Today, 70 people will die from lack of health insurance,” says Dick Durbin, who favors a healthcare bill with almost no benefits kicking in for 3–4 years.

FoxNews ran specials on the Texas Textbook Wars this past week. Whatever Texas adopts by way of textbooks are adopted by 47 other states (If I have my facts right here). This is a taste of what FoxNews did:

Hannity did a waste #102, covering some of the waste found in the Stimulus bill (I realize you may not like Hannity, but government waste is always instructive):

I often recommend one or two Glenn Beck shows. He interviewed Eric Massa for an hour, after stepping down as one of NY’s Democratic Congressmen. He had said some interesting things, and it appeared that he was about to lay out all of the corruption that he had been exposed to. However, he had very little important to say, and Glenn Beck, during the last 5 or so minutes of the program, apologized to his viewers, saying something like, “I thought this would be more substantive than it was.”

Glenn Beck looks back on the past year and the 9/12 project along with the TEA party movement. Although this is not a great show, it is quite fascinating as to what some people have done in this past year:

Also, this is not a moving show, by any means, but Glenn presents some history of the United State that I was unaware of, including huge gatherings of the American Nazi party in 1939:

Political commercials have entered into a whole new dimension, with this anti-Barbara Boxer ad:

The fraud of “free” energy (one of the things that this gal said shocked me; how did that get by the censors?). In any case, it is hard to argue with this film.

“Companies in Kansas and Colorado have charging more for ambulance rides for patients who weigh over 500 lbs. Well, no wonder Michael Moore wants free healthcare.” from Jodi Miller.

1) You may have seen the Patrick Kennedy meltdown over the war and the lack of coverage. Actually, what has happened is—and I predicted this—coverage was quite negative when George Bush was president, and now that Obama is president, the coverage is much more positive. If anything, the coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan has become more fair and balanced on almost all networks and by most news services.

2) Did you ever have that teacher who told you that your project would be due in exactly 2 weeks, but, when that time came, he would change his mind and give you a few more days, and then, after that, give you a few more days? That seems to be our president. He keep setting this dates by which healthcare will be completed, and these dates seem to be meaningless.

3) I mentioned last week about Eric Holder hiring 9 lawyers who represented Gitmo terrorists. Throughout Gitmo’s history, there have been 400–500 guests, most of whom had some sort of legal representation. The number of lawyers who have represented them make up a very small portion of lawyers overall. Furthermore, these would have been pro-bono cases, so that these lawyers would have probably sought out the chance to represent these terrorists. Of course, all people in our courts have the right to an attorney; however, that does not mean that a disproportionate number of justice appointees ought to be terrorist representatives. The fact that there are 9 simply indicates the way this administration leans.

4) The Wall Street Journal report made the astute observation that, California schools are increasing their tuition because of how much they are spending on salaries and pensions for state employees. Students who are protesting outside their own school are misguided.

5) What the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) does not and cannot score is the change in human behavior. Some of us make more money because we work more hours. Most of my life, I worked 50+ hours/week. Now, if my taxes increased considerably as I made more money, I would simply cut the number of hours I worked. Why should I work more hours to pay for someone who works part time.

6) Why on earth do we have any say (as a country) as to where Israel can build houses, apartments and stores?

7) One of the business block shows pointed out how, on the one hand, we have begun to tax sodas and fattening food more; but, on the other hand, subsidize corn producers, and, therefore, the production of corn syrup, which is used in most sodas and fattening foods.

8) The figure given, that 70 people die each day without healthcare insurance is phony. At the very least, a person can receive healthcare in any hospital emergency room. So, even though the conditions are not ideal, healthcare is available to all. Furthermore, this number is based on a study where the error amount is greater than those who die without healthcare insurance, meaning that this death rate could actually be lower than those with healthcare insurance. How many people die each day with healthcare insurance? Does this mean that healthcare insurance causes people to die? Not only is this a phony number, but the Democrat healthcare bill will not kick into gear for 3–4 years, and it will not insure all of the uninsured; so despite the dire emergency warnings, even if Obamacare passes tomorrow, there will be 3 or 4 years of people supposedly dying from lack of healthcare by design.

In Spain, 2.2 jobs are lost in the private sector for every green job created in the public sector.

800 windmills equivalent to a small nuclear reactor in energy output (when the wind is blowing). These windmills would cover 17,600 acres (about half the size of the city of SF), as opposed to less than an acre for a nuclear plant. To power San Francisco, an area about 1.5X the size of S.F. would have to be devoted to windmills, along with a backup source of energy capable of powering the entire city. Nuclear reactors to power the city could fit within a few city blocks.

57 solar plants, e.g. the size of Nevada’s Solar One Solar Energy plant, would be needed to power San Francisco, which would take up a space equal to about ¾^ths the size of San Francisco, and would not work too well at night or on cloudy days.

The federal government spent about $33,932/household in Obama’s 2009 budget (this is without Obamacare).

The fiscal 2009 year ended with a deficit 3.4X the 2008 deficit; up nearly $1 trillion.

The Department of Agriculture alone spends $800 each year per household in the U.S. They spend $30 billion a year on farm subsidies.

These figures include just 20% who Strongly Favor the plan and 41% who are Strongly Opposed.

54% of voters believe passage of the proposed health care legislation will lead to higher health care costs.

51% fear the federal government more than they fear private insurance companies.

48%, now believe the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997

CNN refers to the TEA Party movement as an "anti-government" group of "recession-raging conservatives" and "wimpy, whiny, weasels who don't love their country." The movement has a "dark undercurrent" and a "racial tinge" and is occasionally lumped in with domestic terrorists and neo-Nazis.

Here is what CNN writes about the so-called Coffee Party Movement: Meet these members of the Coffee Party Movement, an organically grown, freshly brewed push that's marking its official kickoff Saturday. Across the country, even around the globe, they and other Americans in at least several hundred communities are expected to gather in coffeehouses to raise their mugs of java to something new.

Nancy Pelosi provided a plethora of sound bites that could have been woven into a bit (see the quotes above). Instead, SNL did a pretty lousy skit on Eric Massa.

We have Dem on Dem political chess going on in Congress. As it stands now, the House must pass the Senate Bill, which they do not like. Essentially, they can trust that the Senate will go back and make changes in the Senate bill, using parliamentary procedures to allow for a 50+1 vote. No matter what assurances are given, once the Senate bill is signed, Obama will sign it and it will become law. Will the Senate then go back and change the very bill which they passed? Unlikely.

Obama’s idea of paying bounty hunters a percentage of the fraud they expose sounds like a good idea.

Your said that you would focus on jobs and the economy. Is that taken care of now? Can we assume there will be no additional stimulus or jobs bills to come? If you still plan to do more, ill you put off education and immigration reform until the economy is fixed? Will you claim that the key to our economy is education and immigration reform?

He is the teacher who sets a deadline and no one keeps to that deadline, so he sets another deadline. These deadlines are meaningless.

If Republicans get into office, will the public allow time for them to pay for all of the Obama excesses? Even more important, will Republicans cut back on government spending?

Candidate Obama had a few good ideas. Open, on camera negotiation of the healthcare bill was a good idea, even though it would be a difficult thing to do. Initial discussion on any major legislation ought to be discussed on the floor with the CSPAN cameras running.

The second idea that candidate Obama proposed was putting major legislation online first before voting on it. There ought to be a corollary proposition: there needs to be an English translation posted as well.

There ought to be hyperlinks as well. When President Obama went out with his talking points, they would have been far more convincing if he was able to point to sections of the healthcare bill which were in agreement with his talking points. If a particular bill has 10 basic provisions, then these provisions ought to be listed up front, along with links to the portion of the bill which support these provisions.

The Congressional members need to regulate and limit themselves. There needs to be some clear guidelines about, for instance, their procedures, and this needs to constrain Congress. According to Beck, before President Wilson, any Senator could stand up and filibuster a bill, and, as a result, a lot less got done in Congress, which is a good thing. Since that rule was relaxed (and continues to be relaxed), Congress is doing more and more.

Republican Congressional candidates should vow to take a more incremental approach to legislation, as opposed to passing huge, 2000 page bills which no one can read and understand. If there are ideas and policies which resonate with the public, these ought to be put into legislation, and not as a part of a huge bill. The result of an incremental approach would be, a conservative Congress would be passing popular conservative legislation and a liberal Congress would be passing mostly popular liberal legislation. The makeup of the Congress would determine the emphasis.

Let me give you an example: immigration reform. Almost everyone agrees that we should reduce the number of illegal aliens coming into our country and that we need to deal with illegal aliens who are criminals. Now, when it comes to Pablo the gardener or some child brought here at age 3, and now he’s 25 and he owns a home; well, we are going to have a lot more disagreement there. So we worry about reducing the influx of illegals and we worry about illegals who are criminals, and pass legislation which focuses on those issues, where the public can come to some agreement. The other things, we put off until the public is convinced one way or the other.

There needs to be a popular way to remove a Congressman from office. We ran into a problem with the super-majority in the Senate; the Congress stopped listening to all the public, and just kept moving left. The public needs a way to simply remove a sitting Senator (or Congressman).

There are, of course, a lot of conservative approaches which would be front and center for Republicans: (1) keep Gitmo open; (2) Use military tribunals for all enemy combatants; (3) increasing funding to the military, (4) begin to reduce all governmental budgets by 10%/year until the budget is balanced. (5) before adding any additional entitlements, entitlement fundnig needs to be updated (which will involve increased taxes for those benefits from All Americans), and these funds need to be put into the proverbial lockbox. (6) Federal salaries and benefits must be reduced immediately so that their average is 80% of similar private sector work. All federal benefits must be fully funded by those working for the federal government. (7) Support all measures which will reduce abortions. (8) Support all legislation which places more responsibility and freedom in the hands of the citizenry.

Whatever the Republicans do, it needs to be clear, reasonably simple, and consistent.

The U.S. Census Bureau in 2005 has determined that there are 37 million "poor" Americans. Here is what the poor in the United States have:

■ 43% of all poor households actu-ally own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Cen-sus Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

■ 80% of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36% of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

■ Only 6% of poor households are over-crowded; two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

■ The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, Lon-don, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the averagecitizens in foreign countries, not to those classi-fied as poor.)

■ Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31% own two or more cars.

■ 97% of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

■ 89% own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrig-erator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.

Of course, the living conditions of the average poor American should not be taken as representing all of the nation's poor: There is a wide range of liv-ing conditions among the poor. A third of "poor" households have both cell and landline telephones. A third also have telephone answering machines. At the other extreme, approximately one-tenth of fam-ilies in poverty have no telephone at all. Similarly, while the majority of poor households do not experience significant material problems, roughly a third do experience at least one problem such as over-crowding, temporary hunger, or difficulty getting medical care.

Much poverty that does exist in the United States can be reduced, particularly among children. There are two main reasons that American children are poor: Their parents don't work much, and their fathers are absent from the home.

In both good and bad economic environments, the typical American poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year-the equivalent of 16 hours of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year-the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the year-nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.

As noted above, father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, nearly three-quarters of the nation's impoverished youth would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

Yet, although work and marriage are reliable lad-ders out of poverty, the welfare system perversely remains hostile to both. Major programs such as food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid continue to reward idleness and penalize marriage. If welfare could be turned around to encourage work and marriage, the nation's remaining poverty could be reduced.

While renewed welfare reform can help to reduce poverty, such efforts will be partially offset by the poverty-boosting impact of the nation's immigration system. Each year, the U.S. imports, through both legal and illegal immigration, hundreds of thousands of additional poor persons from abroad. As a result, one-quarter of all poor persons in the U.S. are now first-generation immigrants or the minor children of those immigrants. Roughly one in ten of the persons counted among the poor by the Census Bureau is either an illegal immigrant or the minor child of an illegal. As long as the present steady flow of poverty-prone persons from foreign countries continues, efforts to reduce the total number of poor in the U.S. will be far more dif-ficult. A sound anti-poverty strategy must seek to increase work and marriage, reduce illegal immigra-tion, and increase the skill level of future legal immigrants.

Robert Rector is Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Why is this story now important? President Obama is about to change the definition of what it means to be poor. Although there are no specifics yet, it appears as if poverty will be a relative status rather than an absolute status; and that there will be more who are defined as poor.

This week, the Obama administration announced it will create a new poverty-measurement system that will eventually displace the current poverty measure. This new measure, which has little or nothing to do with actual poverty, will serve as the propaganda tool in Obama's endless quest to "spread the wealth."

Under the new measure, a family will be judged "poor" if its income falls below a certain specified income threshold. Nothing new there, but, unlike the current poverty standards, the new income thresholds will have a built-in escalator clause: They will rise automatically in direct proportion to any rise in the living standards of the average American.

The current poverty measure counts absolute purchasing power - how much steak and potatoes you can buy. The new measure will count comparative purchasing power - how much steak and potatoes you can buy relative to other people. As the nation becomes wealthier, the poverty standards will increase in proportion. In other words, Obama will employ a statistical trick to ensure that "the poor will always be with you," no matter how much better off they get in absolute terms.

The Left has promoted this idea of an ever-rising poverty measure for a long time. It was floated at the beginning of the War on Poverty and flatly rejected by Pres. Lyndon Johnson. Not so President Obama, who consistently seeks to expand the far-left horizons of U.S. politics.

The weird new poverty measure will produce very odd results. For example, if the real income of every single American were to magically triple over night, the new poverty measure would show there had been no drop in "poverty," because the poverty income threshold would also triple. Under the Obama system, poverty can be reduced only if the incomes of the "poor" are rising faster than the incomes of everyone else.

Another paradox of the new poverty measure is that countries such as Bangladesh and Albania will have lower poverty rates than the United States, even though the actual living conditions in those countries are extremely bad. Haiti would probably have a very low poverty rate when measured by the Obama system because the earthquake reduced much of the population to a uniform penniless squalor.

According to Obama's measure, economic growth per se has no impact on poverty. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the incomes of nearly all Americans have increased sevenfold, after adjusting for inflation. However, from Obama's perspective, this increase in real incomes had no impact on poverty, because the wages of those at the bottom of the income distribution did not rise faster than the incomes of those in the middle.

What has the Obama measure to do with actual poverty? Not much. For most Americans, the word "poverty" suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter. But only a small number of the 40 million per-sons classified as poor under the government's current poverty definition fit that description. Most of America's poor live in material conditions that would have been judged comfortable, or even well-off, two generations ago.

The government's own data show that the typical American defined as poor (according to the traditional, pre-Obama poverty measure) has two color televisions, cable or satellite service, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He also has a car, air conditioning, a refrig-erator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had suf-ficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is far from the stark images conveyed by the mainstream media and liberal politicians.

Clearly, "poverty" as currently defined by the government has little connection with "poverty" as the average American understands it. The new Obama poverty measure will stretch this semantic gap, artificially swelling the number of "poor" Americans, and severing any link between the government's concept of poverty and even modest deprivation.

In honest English, the new system will measure income inequality, not poverty. Why not just call it an "inequality" index? Answer: because the American voter is unwilling to support massive welfare increases, soaring deficits, and tax increases to equalize incomes. However, if the goal of income leveling is camouflaged as a desperate struggle against poverty, hunger, and dire deprivation, then the political prospects improve. The new measure is a public-relations Trojan horse, smuggling in a "spread the wealth" agenda under the ruse of fighting real material privation - a condition that is rare in our society.

True, the new Obama measure will not, at present, alter benefits or expand eligibility for welfare programs. But the new measure does establish a new philosophy of poverty. For the first time, the government is planning to define poverty as a problem that can never be solved by the American dream: a general rise of incomes of all Americans across society over time. By definition, poverty can now be solved only by the dream of the Left: massive taxes on the upper and middle classes and redistribution to the less affluent. In effect, the Obama poverty measure sets a new national goal of class warfare and income redistribution.

Of course, massive "wealth spreading" is already under way. This year, government will spend some $900 billion on means-tested aid for the poor and low-income persons, around $9,000 for each American in the low-income third of the population. According to the Left, that's not nearly enough. The new poverty measure will use deception to promote a much larger welfare state. Taxpayers, beware.

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform."

Fox repeats this as gospel. But as a matter of historical context, usually in short supply on Fox News, this assertion ranks somewhere between debatable and untrue.

The American people and many of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The elections of 1948, 1960, 1964, 2000 and 2008 confirm the point, with majorities voting for candidates supporting such change. Yet congressional Republicans have managed effective campaigns against health-care changes favored variously by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. Now Fox News has given the party of Lincoln a free ride with its repetition of the unexamined claim that today's Republican leadership really does want to overhaul health care -- if only the effort could conform to Mitch McConnell's ideas on portability and tort reform.

It is true that, after 14 months of Fox's relentless pounding of President Obama's idea of sweeping reform, the latest Gallup poll shows opinion running 48 to 45 percent against the current legislation. Fox invariably stresses such recent dips in support for the legislation, disregarding the majorities in favor of various individual aspects of the reform effort. Along the way, the network has sold a falsified image of the professional standards that developed in American newsrooms and university journalism departments in the last half of the 20th century.

Whatever its shortcomings, journalism under those standards aspired to produce an honest account of social, economic and political events. It bore witness to a world of dynamic change, as opposed to the world of Foxian reality, whose actors are brought on camera to illustrate a preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality. Now, it is precisely our long-held norms that cripple our ability to confront Fox's journalism of perpetual assault. I'm confident that many old-schoolers are too principled to appear on the network, choosing silence over being used; when Fox does trot out a house liberal as a punching bag, the result is a parody of reasoned news formats.

My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox's financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes's proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him. (Remember his ridiculing of one early anchor, Paula Zahn, as inferior to a "dead raccoon" in ratings potential when she dared defect to CNN?) It's as if we have surrendered the sword of verifiable reportage and bought the idea that only "elites" are interested in information free of partisan poppycock.

Why has our profession, through its general silence -- or only spasmodic protest -- helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt? The standard answer is economics, as represented by the collapse of print newspapers and of audience share at CBS, NBC and ABC. Some prominent print journalists are now cheering Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp. (which owns the Fox network) for his alleged commitment to print, as evidenced by his willingness to lose money on the New York Post and gamble the overall profitability of his company on the survival of the Wall Street Journal. This is like congratulating museums for preserving antique masterpieces while ignoring their predatory methods of collecting.

Why can't American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team? His importation of the loose rules of British tabloid journalism, including blatant political alliances, started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher's political career, with the expectation that she would open the nation's airwaves to Murdoch's cable channels. Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post.

As for Fox's campaign against the Obama administration, perhaps the only traditional network star to put Ailes on the spot, at least a little, has been his friend, the venerable Barbara Walters, who was hosting This Week, ABC's Sunday morning talk show. More accurately, she allowed another guest, Arianna Huffington, to belabor Ailes recently about his biased coverage of Obama. Ailes countered that he should be judged as a producer of ratings rather than a journalist -- audience is his only yardstick. While true as far as it goes, this hair-splitting defense purports to absolve Ailes of responsibility for creating a news department whose raison d'etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation's political discourse.

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party. And let no one be misled by occasional spurts of criticism of the GOP on Fox. In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation.

Under the pretense of correcting a Democratic bias in news reporting, Fox has accomplished something that seemed impossible before Ailes imported to the news studio the tricks he learned in Richard Nixon's campaign think tank: He and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions -- whether on health-care reform or other issues -- they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting. I try not to believe that this kid-gloves handling amounts to self-censorship, but it's hard to ignore the evidence. News Corp., with 64,000 employees worldwide, receives the tender treatment accorded a future employer.

In defending Glenn Beck on ABC, Ailes described him as something like Fox's political id, rather than its whole personality. It is somehow fitting, then, that Sigmund Freud's great-grandson, Matthew Freud, might help put mainstream American journalism back in touch with its collective superego.

This year, Freud, a public relations executive in London and Murdoch's son-in-law, condemned Ailes in an interview with the New York Times, saying he was "ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard" of proper journalistic standards. Meanwhile, Gabriel Sherman, writing in New York magazine, suggests that Freud and other Murdoch relatives think Ailes has outlived his usefulness -- despite the fact that Fox, with its $700 million annual profit, finances News Corp.'s ability to keep its troubled newspapers and their skeleton staffs on life support. I know some observers of journalistic economics who believe that such insider comments mean Rupert already has Roger on the skids.

It is true that any executive's tenure in the House of Murdoch is situational. But grieve not for Roger Ailes. His new contract signals that when the winds of televised demagoguery abate, he will waft down on a golden parachute. By News Corp. standards, he deserves it. After all, Ailes helped make Murdoch the most powerful media executive in the United States.

As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.

Howell Raines is a former executive editor of the New York Times and the author of "The One That Got Away: A Memoir."

The entire response is even more interesting, which includes Bernie Goldberg’s comments:

In "The March of Folly," Barbara Tuchman asked, "Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests?" Her assessment of self-deception -- "acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts" -- captures the conditions that are gripping President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership as they renew their efforts to enact health-care reform.

Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November. In the wake of the stinging loss in Massachusetts, there was a moment when the president and the Democratic leadership seemed to realize the reality of the health-care situation. Yet like some seductive siren of Greek mythology, the lure of health-care reform has arisen again.

As pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, respectively, we feel compelled to challenge the myths that seem to be prevailing in the political discourse and to once again urge a change in course before it is too late. At stake is the kind of mainstream, common-sense Democratic Party that we believe is crucial to the success of the American enterprise.

First, the battle for public opinion has been lost. Comprehensive health care has been lost. If it fails, as appears possible, Democrats will face the brunt of the electorate's reaction. If it passes, however, Democrats will face a far greater calamitous reaction at the polls. Wishing, praying or pretending will not change these outcomes.

Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats' current health-care plan. Yes, most Americans believe, as we do, that real health-care reform is needed. And yes, certain proposals in the plan are supported by the public.

However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data.

The White House document released Thursday arguing that reform is becoming more popular is in large part fighting the last war. This isn't 1994; it's 2010. And the bottom line is that the American public is overwhelmingly against this bill in its totality even if they like some of its parts.

The notion that once enactment is forced, the public will suddenly embrace health-care reform could not be further from the truth -- and is likely to become a rallying cry for disaffected Republicans, independents and, yes, Democrats.

Second, the country is moving away from big government, with distrust growing more generally toward the role of government in our lives. Scott Rasmussen asked last month whose decisions people feared more in health care: that of the federal government or of insurance companies. By 51 percent to 39 percent, respondents feared the decisions of federal government more. This is astounding given the generally negative perception of insurance companies.

CNN found last month that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government has become so powerful it constitutes an immediate threat to the freedom and rights of citizens. When only 21 percent of Americans say that Washington operates with the consent of the governed, as was also reported last month, we face an alarming crisis.

Health care is no longer a debate about the merits of specific initiatives. Since the spectacle of Christmas dealmaking to ensure passage of the Senate bill, the issue, in voters' minds, has become less about health care than about the government and a political majority that will neither hear nor heed the will of the people.

Voters are hardly enthralled with the GOP, but the Democrats are pursuing policies that are out of step with the way ordinary Americans think and feel about politics and government. Barring some change of approach, they will be punished severely at the polls.

Now, we vigorously opposed Republican efforts in the Bush administration to employ the "nuclear option" in judicial confirmations. We are similarly concerned by Democrats' efforts to manipulate passage of a health-care bill. Doing so in the face of constant majority opposition invites a backlash against the party at every level -- and at a time when it already faces the prospect of losing 30 or more House seats and eight or more Senate seats.

For Democrats to begin turning around their political fortunes there has to be a frank acknowledgement that the comprehensive health-care initiative is a failure, regardless of whether it passes. There are enough Republican and Democratic proposals -- such as purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage, initiatives to hold down costs, covering preexisting conditions and ensuring portability -- that can win bipartisan support. It is not a question of starting over but of taking the best of both parties and presenting that as representative of what we need to do to achieve meaningful reform. Such a proposal could even become a template for the central agenda items for the American people: jobs and economic development.

Unless the Democrats fundamentally change their approach, they will produce not just a march of folly but also run the risk of unmitigated disaster in November.

CNN.com has an article on its website extolling the virtues of the Coffee Party. The glowing language the piece uses to describe the movement stands in stark contrast to the cable network's treatment of Tea Party groups over the past year.

It is plain now that CNN harbors no such ill will towards the Coffee Party, which reporter Jessica Ravitch described as just a bunch of everyday Americans gathering to express their dissatisfaction with the political status quo (gee, that sounds a lot like the Tea Party movement, but I digress).

Eric at Vocal Minority notes that CNN's political slant was evident just in the pictures they decided to use:

Unlike CNN footage of the Tea Parties, which featured red-faced angry yelling white people carrying signs that "provoked violence" and even caused people to worry about President Hope&Change's physical safety [example], the photos of the Coffee Party members are all rosy and smiley. Message: These people may not be greedy corporate CEO's, or gun- and Bible-clingers who are pissed off there's a black man in the White House. They're just simple Americans and they caaaare.

Please, please stop with the coffee metaphors. It's was cute in the headline, but CNN has succeeded, in only the second paragraph, in turning "Coffee Party" in into an overwrought cliche.

But at least the CNN pun machine stopped short of sexual innuendo. The Tea Party was not so lucky.

Of course anyone who has ever been to a Tea Party is now yelling at his or her computer screen. As they surely know, Tea Parties are chock-full of frustrated conservative activists and disheartened liberals, and protesters of all demographics. The vast majoity have never been as active politically as they are now.

Born on Facebook just six weeks ago, the group boasts more than 110,000 fans, as of Friday morning. The Coffee Party is billed by many as an answer to the Tea Party (more than 1,000 fewer fans), a year-old protest movement that's steeped in fiscal conservatism and boiling-hot, anti-tax rhetoric.

Really? Facebook fans? Since when is that a measure of a (non-digital) group's popularity? CNN didn't see fit to mention here that Tea Party groups have staged rallies with hundreds of thousands of attendees, influenced the outcomes of major elections, and hosted prominent public figures at their events. Might that be a more meaningful indicator of the group's prominence than the number of people who have clicked "Like" on a Facebook page?

And of course the rhetoric is "boiling hot," since, you know, boiling water is bad. It can burn you. The language Tea Partyers use is not "spirited" or "determined" or "enthusiastic". Those terms would all imply that they are civilized people with meaningful objections, and of course CNN wouldn't want to give readers that impression.

This new group calls for civility, objects to obstructionism and demands that politicians be held accountable to the people who put them in office.

At this point in the article, readers are probably wondering which White House press release the author plagiarized.

Then come the profiles of the Coffee Party organizers. They are pretty much what you'd expect, complete with attempts to link the Coffee Party to the civil rights movement and to distress with evil Wall Street banks.

But more telling than the people that are mentioned is one person who is not: Annabel Park, the founder of the Coffee Party movement (I really hate calling it a movement since so far all it is is a Facebook group). Park is a former United for Obama organizer and operative.

This isn't the first time that CNN has ignored the liberal Democratic roots of the Coffee Party "movement." Doing so allows CNN to trumpet the group around as a non-partisan, non-ideological answer to the evil, racist Tea Partyers.

But at least last time CNN mentioned Park. In the most recent piece on the Coffee Party, she is completely absent.

Last Friday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its analysis of the president's 2011 budget submission to Congress. This report hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves.

When the administration released its budget in early February, the news seemed bad enough. By its own reckoning, the Obama administration's budget plan would result in massive deficits and borrowing if adopted in full. According to the administration's estimates, the president's budget plan would produce deficits totaling $10.1 trillion over the period 2010 to 2020, and by 2020 federal debt would reach $18.6 trillion.

According to CBO, the Obama budget plan would run up much larger budget deficits and pile up even more debt than the administration reported in February.

Over the period 2010 to 2020, CBO expects the Obama budget would run a cumulative deficit of $11.3 trillion - $1.2 trillion more than the administration predicted. By 2020, total federal debt would reach an astonishing $20.3 trillion - up from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008.

The president likes to say he inherited a mess. He did in fact enter office during a deep recession that sent deficits soaring on a temporary basis. But his policies have unquestionably made an already difficult medium- and long-term budget outlook much, much worse. The problem is that President Obama is a world-class spender. He wants to pile massive new commitments on top of a bloated and unreformed government. He is willing to raise taxes to pay for some of his wish list, but far from all of it. For the rest, he plans to run up the nation's debt with reckless abandon.

Over the next ten years, CBO says the Obama budget would increase federal spending by $2.3 trillion, including $0.8 trillion in net interest costs on the additional borrowing that would be required.

Bad as that is, it's a lowball estimate. The president's budget assumes that war-fighting funds will plummet from $130 billion in 2010 to just $50 billion in 2012 and every year thereafter. No one believes this will happen. More realistic assumptions would add $500 billion or more to the president's defense funding request over a ten-year period.

The biggest problem in the federal budget is runaway entitlement spending. And so what would the Obama budget do? Increase entitlement spending, of course. By $1.9 trillion over ten years, according to CBO. In 2020, federal entitlement spending would reach $3.3 trillion, up from $2.1 trillion in 2009.

The administration has been touting a supposed three-year spending "freeze" as evidence of its determination to cut the budget back. But only a very small portion of the budget would be frozen, and only after the administration had spent two years stuffing in more funding. CBO expects that discretionary spending under the Obama budget, excluding war funds and Pell Grants (which would become an entitlement), will increase by $0.5 trillion over ten years.

Two years ago, CBO expected total federal spending to reach $4.3 trillion in 2018. Now, if the president's budget plan were adopted, CBO projects spending would exceed $5.0 trillion in 2018.

Between 2010 and 2030, the population age 65 and older is expected to rise from 41 million to 71 million people. CBO projects spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in 2030 will reach 14.4 percent of GDP, up from 9.8 percent today. That will be like adding a whole new Social Security program to the budget without any additional revenue to pay for it.

The federal government is drowning in unaffordable entitlement commitments. President Obama's response is to spend, entitle, and borrow even more, while he can. And then, with an even bigger government locked into the "baseline," he plans to pivot and use the prospect of a debt crisis he made much more probable to push for a massive tax increase.

Unfortunately for the president, the public is already onto this game. And they want no part of it.

Step 1 occurs when the economy is prospering and tax revenues are growing faster than forecast.

Step 2 is when politicians use the additional money to increase government spending.

Step 3 is that politicians do not treat the extra tax revenue like a temporary windfall and budget accordingly.Instead, they adopt policies - more entitlements, more bureaucrats - that permanently expand the burden of the public sector.

Step 4 occurs when the economy stumbles (in part because more resources are being diverted from the productive sector to the government) and tax revenues stagnate. If the resulting fiscal gap is large enough, as it is in places such as Greece and California, a crisis atmosphere is created.

Step 5 takes place when politicians solemnly proclaim that "tough measures" are necessary, but very rarely does that mean a reversal of the policies that caused the mess. Instead, the result in higher taxes.

1. Additional federal spending transfers resources from the more productive private sector to the less productive public sector of the economy. The bulk of federal spending goes toward subsidies and benefit payments, which generally do not enhance economic productivity. With lower productivity, average American incomes will fall.

2. As federal spending rises, it creates pressure to raise taxes now and in the future. Higher taxes reduce incentives for productive activities such as working, saving, investing, and starting businesses. Higher taxes also increase incentives to engage in unproductive activities such as tax avoidance.

3. Much federal spending is wasteful and many federal programs are mismanaged. Cost overruns, fraud and abuse, and other bureaucratic failures are endemic in many agencies. It's true that failures also occur in the private sector, but they are weeded out by competition, bankruptcy, and other market forces. We need to similarly weed out government failures.

4. Federal programs often benefit special interest groups while harming the broader interests of the general public. How is that possible in a democracy? The answer is that logrolling or horse-trading in Congress allows programs to be enacted even though they are only favored by minorities of legislators and voters. One solution is to impose a legal or constitutional cap on the overall federal budget to force politicians to make spending trade-offs.

5. Many federal programs cause active damage to society, in addition to the damage caused by the higher taxes needed to fund them. Programs usually distort markets and they sometimes cause social and environmental damage. Some examples are housing subsidies that helped to cause the financial crises, welfare programs that have created dependency, and farm subsidies that have harmed the environment.

6. The expansion of the federal government in recent decades runs counter to the American tradition of federalism. Federal functions should be "few and defined" in James Madison's words, with most government activities left to the states. The explosion in federal aid to the states since the 1960s has strangled diversity and innovation in state governments because aid has been accompanied by a mass of one-size-fits-all regulations.

Voted Yes on Stupak, Voted No on Health Care, Currently Undecided on Next Health Care Takeover Vote

Voted Yes on Stupak, Voted Yes on Health Care, Currently Undecided on Next Health Care Takeover Vote

Voted Yes on Stupak, Voted No on Health Care, Currently Undecided on Next Health Care Takeover Vote

The Impact of Government Spending on Economic Growth

This is an excellent article. There must be some government, otherwise, how would laws and contracts be enforced? However, at what point does government become so large that it reduces private sector function? This is a long article, but it is well worth examining.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2005/03/The-Impact-of-Government-Spending-on-Economic-Growth

Is Greece our future? At what point is government debt, high taxes, and entitlements at dangerous levels?

Some of the things which were introduced into history books included portraying the violent nature of the Black Panthers as well as Martin Luther King’s non-violent approach. There is also included the fact that civil rights legislation was supported by Republicans.

The unintended consequences of the Great Society will be included, as well as the fact that American Italians and Germans were interred in U.S. camps during WWII.

Also, even though McCarthy is still railed against today, it turns out that there were Communists throughout our government, and that has been confirmed by the Soviet Venona papers.

In 2009 Democrats scrapped oil and gas leases in Utah, permanently banned drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), and nixed offshore drilling.

A sculptor in San Francisco sculpted at George Bush urinal (more love, acceptance and no-judgment from the left):

`Anti-Lobbyist' Obama Administration Recruited Left-Wing Lobbyists to Sell Bogus `Green Jobs'

2 or 3 weeks ago, I suggested that this stuff about Toyota could be hype. Mary Katherine Hamm blogs about this (with a few more facts):

RUSH: The Democrats and yet another sob story. Pulling out another page from the playbook, yesterday on Capitol Hill at a press conference they held a meeting with an 11-year-old boy, Marcelas Owens, to rally support for an end to insurance industry abuses. Here's a portion of Dingy Harry's remarks.

REID: Our health care delivery system, such as it is today, is designed to cover the oldest and the youngest, most say. But for everyone in between, that's most of the people in this country, it's beyond broken. And it can certainly be illustrated by what's happened to a woman by the name of Tifanny Owens. This is her son Marcelas. His birthday was yesterday and he decided he would like to spend it in Washington, telling us and anyone that will listen about his mom.

RUSH: Okay. So, this 11-year-old boy Marcelas Owens said to somebody, "I want to go to Washington. I want to tell Harry Reid about my mother." And somehow this 11-year-old kid found his way into the Capitol, found his way to Harry Reid's office, and they were so impressed by what the kid said, "Hey, let's go get some cameras and microphones." And so here is Marcelas Owens telling his story.

OWENS: My mom was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension in 2006. She missed so much work that she lost her job, and along with her job she lost her health care. And losing her health care ended up causing her her life. And I wanted to finish her fight for health care so I don't want any other kid to go through the pain that our family has gone through. I want Barack Obama and Congress and everybody to come together and help the health care bill pass.

RUSH: Now, this is unseemly, exploitative, an 11-year-old kid being forced to tell this story all over just to benefit the Democrat Party and Barack Obama. The essence of using a young child, and get the next sound bite. This is from Senator Durbin.

DURBIN: Today, 70 Americans will die for lack of health insurance, 70. And when the Republicans tell us, "Go slow, start over, take your time," we've got to add it up. It's 70 a day. How much time can we take?

RUSH: Seventy Americans. No, his number is off. It's 124, because the number is 45,000 a year, 365 days. That's the number we had earlier this week, 100 some odd. Something happened to cut that number in half. Do we even believe this? Seventy people a day die because they don't have health insurance? You know how this number was arrived at? We had the guy call us. Some survey company went out there and if somebody did not have health insurance, what year was it? 85? Everybody that's died since 1985 is assumed not to have had health insurance if they didn't have it in 1985. That's the extent of the scientific nature of the survey. But here's the dirty little secret, Senator Durbin. And I would also say this to Marcelas Owens. Well, your mom would have still died, because Obamacare doesn't kick in until 2014 if they sign it this year. And Senator Durbin, that means that 70 Americans are going to die every day for the next four years until the actual so-called benefits of which there are none kick in. So why this mad dash on this? It doesn't kick in for four years. We've been through this over and over. You're getting blue in the face hearing me. Here's Chuck-U Schumer following Dick Durbin.

SCHUMER: We're asking for an up-or-down vote. And that sounds abstract. It's about Marcelas's mom. An up-or-down vote is about people's lives.

RUSH: I want to puke. I literally want to puke. They do the same stuff over and over again. Senior citizens, now some kid, they bring up a bunch of people in wheelchairs or whatever. It's all about how this country is so rotten, people are dying and nobody cares, the country with the best damn health care in the world. And they get up and tell lies and have other people tell lies and exploit these people. All the tug on people's heart strings to make them feel guilty, make them feel the only way we're going to save lives is through Obama. But we're not going to start saving lives for four years. Here now, ladies and gentlemen, the capper on this outrage, from Senator Patty Murray.

MURRAY: It happened to Marcelas; it happens to a lot of people. The system we have in place today doesn't provide options for people when they are just at the edge. Marcelas's mom was doing all the right things, a single mom raising three little kids. She was working hard. She lost her health care because she lost her job. Marcelas stood up and he came up to a United States senator and he's gone up to the 29th floor of the federal building and he's flown all the way across the country to face this big crew of press people, because he has the courage that his mother left him to remind all of us what this debate is about.

RUSH: I guess I was right, this 11-year-old kid just stood up, he went to Washington somehow, flew there, then approached a US senator, then went up to the 29th floor of the federal building. He flew all the way across the country and had the guts to face the media, with all these Democrats standing beside him. Meanwhile, earlier today, yes, wait for it, here it is again. It's Nancy Pelosi from last night on television.

PELOSI: Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or, eh, a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance, or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk but not [be] job-locked because a child has asthma or someone in the family is bipolar. You name it. Any condition is job-blocking.

RUSH: Okay, so if you're tied up in a job you hate and you don't want to work there, quit. And sit around in your underwear and paint or take pictures and start writing a bunch of gibberish and claim you're an artist, and you'll be fine. You'll be fine because you're going to have health care. Health care paid for by all the rest of the people who don't check out, who don't let go of their own responsibilities. You can go ahead and just chuck your responsibilities out the window. Pelosi will give you health care. Now, you're going to have to find a way to get food and water until she figures out how to throw that in. And, by the way, if you happen to get knocked up while you're out there writing or taking pictures, don't sweat it, because we are also going to pay for your abortion while you get your health care, because it will be part of it. And then once we get amnesty, then we're going to have 25 million Americans also on the health care rolls who currently aren't. They'll have insurance from the government, paid for by all the other people who don't abolish their own responsibilities. You go ahead and check it out. Pelosi says we don't care, be an entrepreneur, sit on your ass and write and paint and we'll give you health care. Well, we won't. The other Americans who decide to keep working will.

RUSH: Folks, I... Ahhhh. I'm going to go ahead and say it. I'm going to go ahead and say it. We just played these sound bites. (interruption) You don't think I should say it? You don't know what I'm going to say yet. The staff's going, "Oh, no." They're all putting their heads in their hands. We just played a sound bite of a little 11-year-old kid who miraculously flew to Washington, found a senator, and wanted to tell the world about his single mother who died because she didn't have health care. He wanted to tell the world about it so that we would pass Obama's health care plan, right? Now, one thing that we can deduce from it is that all that sickening audio -- and it's not just from the kid. It's from Dingy Harry to Patty Murray to Chuck Schumer to Dick Durbin. What it means is they don't have the votes. They don't have the votes. That's one thing it means. We also ran the numbers on what's his face, Durbin.

"Seventy people die because of no health insurance every day in this country," he said. But we're not going to get to single-payer for four years, until 2014. We ran the numbers: 180,000 people will die because of no health insurance, from the time Obama signs the bill until it is implemented in 2014. 180,000! Now, the thing that I... I am really am just going to say it. One of the biggest cultural and economic problems we have in this country is single mothers, households without fathers, and the Democrat Party here is... (sigh) Why do we have Medicaid? Why didn't this woman go get Medicaid? Where is the father of these kids? Where is the virtue in this? We're being told there's virtue in all of this suffering brought on by who? Who made this woman? Who made any woman a single mother? I'm not talking about a divorced mother. Who made her a single mother? And where's the guy? How come we all have to move in and be the guy? And it's rampant out there. You talk about an obstacle for kids to overcome? It's being part of families like this, and all the evidence shows it. Look, it's sad, and don't misunderstand, but we don't need to be making a virtue out of this, and that's what these schlub Democrats are doing with these kinds of sob stories. They're making a virtue out of this unfortunate circumstance that is not helpful to anyone. I don't know why in the hell... We've got Medicaid for some of these kind of situations.

RUSH: All right. We've done a little research out there on this boy and his mother, his family -- and wait until you hear it. Wait until you hear it.

But, first, I got a note from my friend. This is really clever. "Rush, my wife and I are enjoying your company as we drive around in north Florida. I just heard you report what 'Dirt' Durbin said that 70 people a day die because of no health insurance. Does that mean that everybody else who dies has health insurance? If so, does that mean that health insurance is a big killer?" Now, that is a great way to look at this. (laughing) Health insurance a big killer! Seventy people who don't have it die every day, but look at the number of people who had health insurance died. How many people died today because they couldn't get care from Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP or the Veterans Administration? Don't forget, folks: The largest insurance company in this country is the US government, and they do not grant everybody treatment. They have denials left and right. They deny more claims than private sector insurance companies do.

Here's the story from the Seattle Times, March 8th. "Local Boy Who Lost Mom Takes Health Care Story to DC -- His mother, Tiffanny Owens, was working as an assistant manager at Jack in the Box when she began suffering from mysterious vomiting and diarrhea in September 2006. By October that year, she had missed so much work that she lost her job -- and her insurance. Two months later, Owens sought emergency care at Swedish Medical Center's Central Area campus, where a doctor diagnosed her with pulmonary hypertension, a serious type of high blood pressure involving the arteries in the lungs. In January, she again went to Swedish's emergency room and was hospitalized for eight days." All this without insurance. She was treated. Repeat: She was treated, and she had no health insurance.

"Owens' mother, Gina Owens, said her daughter, who didn't qualify for Medicaid," don't know why "avoided regular visits to a doctor despite frequently throwing up blood." She just wouldn't go. "In June 2007, Tiffanny Owens was hospitalized yet again, this time at University of Washington Medical Center. After a week of unconsciousness, she died at age 27, leaving Marcelas and his two younger sisters. Gina Owens has custody of the three children." Now, the woman's mother (this Gina Owens who has now has custody) worked for the "Washington Community Action Network," an ACORN offshoot, "the state's largest consumer-advocacy group. Her death made the family's cause personal." So not ACORN. SEIU. She worked for the Service Employees International Union, the mother of the woman who died, again from the Seattle Times. And also from the Seattle Times story: "Health Care for America Now" which is George Soros, Obama and SEIU, "paid to take the boy and his grandmother to DC." So the whole thing was orchestrated by the SEIU. The boy's aunt, grandmother, whatever it is, Gina, works for the SEIU. The SEIU... In other words, a woman who got treatment at two different hospitals without health insurance, her illness and death are being exploited by the union that her mother works for -- and now the kid's trip was paid for by the union. SEIU and all of this, that's Obama.

RUSH: A little more research on the Washington Community Action Network. Technically, these people are not SEIU but they are involved with them. It's close. I want to be accurate here. They're not SEIU, but they're very much involved. And here is their basic stated mission: "to achieve economic fairness in order to establish a Democratic society characterized by racial and social justice --" which just means redistribution of wealth, that's what social justice means, "-- with respect to diversity and a decent quality of life for those who reside in Washington State." They got 50,000 members. That's who the mother of the woman who died works for, still the woman died. And then the woman's death is exploited by these people, along with the 11-year-old kid.

This woman who died without healthcare insurance was hospitalized for several days, and when she went in the last time, she died in the hospital, after staying there for several days.

RUSH: This is from AOL News: "Has Toyota Coverage Driven Public a Bit Crazy? -- Once lauded for leading the industry in vehicle safety and reliability, Toyota has undergone a stark reversal of fortune in the past five months. The company has recalled at least 10 million vehicles worldwide since November 2009 due to" a variety of things. "Yet recently a number of writers have come to the defense of the embattled Japanese automaker, suggesting that sensationalist media coverage and trumped-up congressional outrage have grossly exaggerated the number and extent of mechanical or electrical problems in Toyota cars, fueling public hysteria." Bingo! Bingo. It's a classic definition of "Drive-By Media." Now, here's the companion story to this. I wish I would have voiced my suspicions the day this happened.

I wish I would have followed my instincts so I could do a "See, I Told You So." I wish when that guy claimed his accelerator got stuck in his Prius at 94 miles-an-hour and a cop stopped him, I would have said, "Something smells here." Fox News: "Man at Wheel of 'Out-of-Control' Prius Has Troubled Financial Past." We're looking at Bubble Boy 2 here or Balloon Boy 2 here. "The man who became the face of the Toyota gas pedal scandal this week has a troubled financial past that is leading some to question whether he was wholly truthful in his story. On Monday, James Sikes called 911 to report that he was behind the wheel of an out-of-control Toyota Prius going 94 mph on a freeway near San Diego. Twenty-three minutes later, a California Highway Patrol officer helped guide him to a stop, a rescue that was captured on videotape.

"Since then, it's been learned that: - Sikes filed for bankruptcy in San Diego in 2008. According to documents, he was more than $700,000 in debt and roughly five months behind in payments on his Prius; - In 2001, Sikes filed a police report with the Merced County Sheriff's Department for $58,000 in stolen property, including jewelry, a digital video camera and equipment and $24,000 in cash; - Sikes has hired a law firm, though it has indicated he has no plans to sue Toyota; - Sikes won $55,000 on television's 'The Big Spin' in 2006, Fox40.com reports, and the real estate agent has boasted of celebrity clients such as Constance Ramos of 'Extreme Home Makeover.' While authorities say they don't doubt Sikes' account, several bloggers and a man who bought a home from Sikes in 2007 question whether the 61-year-old entrepreneur may have concocted the incident for publicity or for monetary gain."

Well, he had $55,000 from being on The Big Spin in 2006. At least the possibility that this is not all together truthful has opened up, and what it is, it's this culture of ours. People have this insatiable desire to be known, insatiable desire for fame. Well, it's Facebook, MySpace, Space Butt whatever it is. People are vomiting every bit of information whatever it is about themselves, having no clue what it means to lose their privacy and their identity and anonymity. They all want to be on American Idol, on The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. What made me suspicious was the timing of it is the fact that the guy was able to go 94 miles-an-hour for so long without an injury or an accident to give time for video crews to get there and capture the whole thing while the cops stopped him.

All of this hysteria that's been raised about Toyota would help somebody pull off a hoax like this, because people would be more inclined to

believe it, what with all the news about all these accelerators sticking and so forth. I don't know. My suspicions were something about this was wrong, primarily because every bit of it was on TV. We saw every bit of it, and then we heard the 911 call. (interruption) I don't know. I just... I can't get any deeper than that, Snerdley. Just my instincts. I'm not doing a "See, I Told You So." I wish I voiced my sentiments. The reason I didn't because it was just a wild opinion, and nothing other than that. People would say "rumor," and I didn't want to be responsible for starting that. But apparently other people began to look into it because they had similar doubts, questions or what have you.

RUSH: Pelosi was talking about how artists and photographers will now be able to quit their jobs if we pass health care. (laughing) This is what they're fighting for.

RUSH: So this is what the Democrats are fighting for. They're fighting for you not to have a job and still have health care so you can pursue your entrepreneurial risk of writing, painting, taking pictures. It's just such a pain in the rear end to have to have a job. It's so damn mean of this country to require people to have a job. It stifles people. It stifles creativity and economic growth to require people to have a job, to have health care. What a country. Man, are we horribly rotten mean to people. So Pelosi says go ahead, health care will allow people to quit their jobs and write, take pictures and paint while the rest of us work to pay for it. While the rest of us work to pay for these... never mind.

RUSH: Now, I want to play this sound bite again from Nancy Pelosi. This is what Democrats are fighting for. Nancy Pelosi, this idiot Pelosi, thinks this country is Woodstock or Moscow or something. Listen to this.

RUSH: So they're fighting for people to be able to quit work while the rest of us pay for their health care while they go out and be artists and photographers and tend to bipolar kids with asthma or what have you, and we're going to pay for this. This idiot thinks this is Woodstock. I mean, it's right out of the San Francisco mentality. It's just breathtaking here.

RUSH: At least one of Pelosi's 25 kids or however many she has is a documentary filmmaker. One of her kids is a documentary filmmaker. I forget her name. (interruption) Yeah, it's the one that hassled and tailed Bush around during the 2000 campaign. (laughing) She really... I mean, she thinks of the country as Woodstock or as San Francisco.

RUSH: Folks, we can time travel. Remember how I opened this program. In Greece, austerity cutbacks coming to a state near you, by the way. The media walked off the job to join the protest. Even uniformed police walked off the job to join the protest in uniform. Now, if you live in five or six states, probably more, you're not going to get your income tax refund this year for many, many months. All the while, you have to watch Washington pass health care reform, which is going to add to your taxes like you can't believe. They're going to be taking more money from you, denying you your overpayment, your refund at the state level, and guess what? Another reason why we will not hear the words health care reform after if Obama signs it is because what's up next? Immigration, amnesty and what does that mean? That means adding 25 million illegals to the health care rolls paid for by all of us, except for those who want to quit their jobs to become artists and filmmakers while the rest of us pay for their health care benefits. Why don't we just give them food and water, too, in addition to health care, if they're going to quit their jobs to follow their dream.

Back in the Depression in Hollywood do you remember the movie Holiday starring Cary Grant? Old, old movie. During the Depression they made movie after movie all about dropping out of the capitalist system to find yourself. Yes, you can look it up. All kinds of movies. Just drop out during the Depression, see what capitalism has done for you, just drop out and find yourself. So history repeats, cycles repeat, and it's all out there. So the question now, if this thing passes, Obama signs it and nobody wants it, what happens? Let's go to Greece. What happens? And then who joins who? I, for one, am going to be fascinated to watch.

RUSH: Listen to Pelosi again. Oh! I got a note from my buddy Vince Flynn when he heard this. Let me find it. I want to print it out real quick. Vince has an interesting story about this. Here's Pelosi. This is from last night on MessNBC.

RUSH: I get angrier each time I hear it. So quit work. Indulge your fantasies. Become an artist or documentarian, photographer, what have you -- and let the rest of us pay for your health care bill. And, by the way, while you're out there finding yourself, if you happen to get pregnant and want to have an abortion, no worries! We'll pay for that, too. But I want to focus on something here. "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance." Now, one of the things that Obama has promised is that you will not lose your coverage. If you like it, you'll be able to keep it. Here is Pelosi admitting: If you're able to quit your job and have "free," quote-unquote, health coverage, who is hell is providing it for you? Government.

Pelosi inasmuch as confirmed single-payer, public option, universal health care in this quote, while she's attempting to establish solidarity with the nation's freeloaders! She's encouraging the freeloaders to freeload. Isn't it such a shame that this country requires people to work to have health care? How inhumane is that? So we're going to enable you to quit! If you want to dabble sitting there writing things, taking pictures or painting garbage that nobody will ever be able to understand, go for it! And we'll give you your health care. And, by the way, when the 25 million illegals get amnesty? Hey, they're going to join you! We'll be paying their health care too. All the while the states are withholding your income tax refunds. All of this is your money. It's mind-boggling.

In Detroit, they're going to level the place just like Mao did. They're going to level blighted areas and turn it into farms, and they're going to tell people where they have to move. It's amazing. Vince Flynn sent me a note. "You know, Rush, when I was writing my first novel a friend told me I should apply for a grant from the government that was offered to support starving artists. I can't tell you how much this deeply offended me. I told her in very clear language..." and I know what Vince Flynn clear language is. "I told her in very clear language that I thought it was ridiculous to think that other Americans ought to pay for me to chase my dream. Anybody who understands pride and self-determination gets this. So I bartended at night, I wrote during the day, and I paid for my own damn insurance. I didn't expect anybody else to pick it up for me, and now we've got the Speaker of the House encouraging people to just check out!"

Just move to Haight-Ashbury. Just be done with it. Move out there and start painting murals or whatever you want to do, and all of your neighbors will come up and pay for your health care for you.

RUSH: Oliver in Wichita. Great to have you on the program. Nice to have you here.

CALLER: Thank you very much. Thank you for doing the work, and I think you're more of a journalist than anybody else out there.

CALLER: Well, I know. I know you always say you're an entertainer, but I think you're more of a journalist because what you're saying I believe to be the truth.

CALLER: Well, here are the facts. I'm 27 years old. I've been on the taxpaying workforce for ten years. I've been living on my own for nine years. Everything I've ever bought I've earned, even health care. I mean, I've paid myself with cash. The only debt I have alone is my car. My point is, I'm an artist. I trained for three years at the Actor's Lab here in Wichita, Kansas, with Tracy Sloat to be an actor. I wanted to be an actor since I was five, and I paid for that tuition with my own money. I would love to move to New York and I would love to pursue my craft full time, but I'm not going to do so until I can save up the money making an honest living to do that -- and even when I move there, I will even get a job to supplement my income because savings, like a stimulus, does not last forever. I don't know why Pelosi would even say something like that. I mean, I wish she would stop to pursue art.

CALLER: You know, it would be terrible for the art community, but it would be great for our country.

RUSH: You're great! How old are you? How old are you, Oliver? Right, you're twenty-seven. When you tell people that you have paid your own way on all these things, are they proud or do they think you're "out of touch" and you don't know what life is really like in this country anymore?

CALLER: They think I'm proud, and they actually say, "I don't know anybody like you." (laughing)

CALLER: They're usually adults. Actually, a son that works for the owners of the company I work for, he recently just got on unemployment. He quit the job to get unemployment to get about $460 a week, and he doesn't know why everybody doesn't get on unemployment so they can go to school or hang out. He wants to go, like, on a vacation every single month. He's in Cancun right now. He doesn't get why people don't do that. I'm like, "Well, because some people understand what this country was made and founded on."

RUSH: Oliver, have you ever said to this guy, "Zeke," or whatever his name is, "Zeke, have you ever stopped to think that it's people like me paying you to do nothing like this? Have you ever stopped to think that maybe you are stealing from everybody? You're capable of getting a job and you refuse to do it. You're going on vacation. Does it ever occur to you that it's people like me who are making it possible for you, and you don't even say 'thanks'?"

CALLER: Yeah. I've said that to other people. I didn't say it to him because things are tenuous at my job right now. He's the owner's son. And to be honest I was just in the position to lose my job and collect unemployment.

CALLER: He's the owner's son, and he has quit every job there, like every department, to go to another one because he complained about it. He doesn't like it. He didn't like what it was about and everything. But he complained and everything. And they gave him another job, another job, another job to be here. Now he just quit to take unemployment because he wasn't making enough money.

RUSH: He doesn't even have the courage to sponge off his own father! He's got to sponge off the rest of us. This really offends me. The owner's kid quits every job and then signs up for unemployment. He ought to be sponging off his own dad! I know you can't say that; your job's tenuous. This guy really has no character. Zilch, zero. Nada.

CALLER: I just wanted to say that I think Pelousy is speaking to the lowest common denominator of our society. And I loved the e-mail from Vince Flynn. I think he speaks for more of us than Pelosi in our pride in our country, and I completely agree with you that the outrage over this healthcare bill will not wait until November. The Tea Party Express is already on the road, and by April 15th it's going to make last year's protests with over a million people --

RUSH: The tea Parties are having rallies all over the country, one in Georgia, one over in Tampa on April 15th, tax day. They're going to have tens of thousands of people at these things. So, Snerdley, if you want to send in a report on how the Democrat Party has totally destroyed the black family as a human rights violation, do it. And if you want to send in a report that the Democrat Party is lining up seasoned citizens to have their health circumstances reviewed by death panels, feel free. Go right ahead. Just sign it Bo Snerdley when you send it in there, because citizens can do this.

RUSH: Try this headline. This from the UK Guardian: The ChiCom government "wants to crack down on press freedom and introduce a new training system that requires journalists to train in Marxist and communist theories of news." That's easy. Send them to the University of Missouri journalism school. Send them to Columbia school of journalism in New York. Send them to any university in America that has a J-school. You want to teach Marxist and communist news theory? We got it down pat here. Now, the deputy director of the General Administration of Press and Publication is a guy named Li Dongdong. If Eric Massa ever meets this guy it's going to be fun to watch. There's a tickle fight for you. Eric Massa with Li Dongdong, who heads the General Administration of Press and Publication, the ChiComs training in communist and Marxist news theories. "He told the South China Morning Post that some mainland reporters were giving Chinese journalism a bad name because they were not properly trained." You know what that means. They forgot the template; they're busting out of the mold.

"Under communist theories of journalism, media should support the leadership rather than operate as a watchdog." Well, as I say, we have it down pat here. The State-Controlled Media, the Drive-By Media, the mainstream media, the legacy media, the old guys, there's nothing the ChiComs could teach them. There's nothing that Pravda could teach 'em. So the journalists here in the United States have already taken this training. (interruption) Oh, really? I'm told that the guys at KMOX in St. Louis, our affiliate, say this is the kind of story that I would love? Yeah, KMOX announcer Mark Reardon, said, "If you really want to spread the paranoia you could intro this story: the all knowing --" (laughing) Mark at KMOX wins your bet. It is the first thing I talked about, and I did not know. I just got this note that Mark Reardon predicted it. I wonder what Tom Friedman, by the way, of the New York Times thinks of the enlightened ChiCom leadership now. How do you go against this if you're an American journalist? How do you go against it?

Great news, folks, and, you know, I gotta pat myself on the back here for this one. "Gallup's annual update on Americans' attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence." I mean, folks, I have led the charge on this for well over 20 years. The nation is thanking me. The numbers are pretty big here, more and more people are now figuring out that this thing is, well, not a hoax yet, but over-exaggerated to the point that they don't believe it anymore.

ClimateGate, all the stuff at East Anglia, all the fraud uncovered at the UN has gone virtually unreported in this country because of Marxist journalism theory. So I say, who is responsible for this dramatic turnaround in what Americans think about global warming? I love the headline that goes with the story: "Americans' Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop." So the American people getting the facts on Algore's fraud, his scam, and the big lie. (interruption) Well, we'll have to see. Snerdley wants to know how this news, the Gallup poll, will affect the Sullivan Group's suspended February audit of my opinions that's on hold because they have yet to assess whether or not I was right or wrong in suggesting the House Republicans refuse to attend Obama's summit.

RUSH: Folks, this is big. I've had this bombshell in my hands for quite a while, and I've been intending to use it ever since it hit my hands. But this health care stuff, obviously, took a little precedence.

"E-mail messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered -- by the top climate scientists within NASA itself -- to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU)" which we now know was totally fraudulent. "The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database. These e-mails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data. Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007. The reporter never published it."

Let me translate this: NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies did their own and had their own climate research data, and it was considered by their own scientists to be inferior to the fraudulent stuff we now know that was being put out at the Climate Research Unit at the Hadley Institute, the East Anglia University. We know that NASA scientists and the media knew about bogus climate data three years ago, and they sat on it. A reporter for USA Today sat on it, just like when the first e-mails somehow got out of the confines of the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit, they were sent to a reporter at the BBC, who sat on the information. He didn't use it. We have since learned that the BBC has invested a lot of money in carbon offset programs and other things that are dependent on this hoax being perceived as truth.

So here are two media units, the BBC and USA Today, who at least (in USA Today's case three years ago along with NASA scientists) knew! Now, during this time James Hansen is running around lying through his teeth about everything. He's NASA. Algore was running around lying through his teeth. What we have here is 100% junk science. USA Today! I don't know the name of the reporter, but he knew that the data was "considered to be inferior" to stuff that was fraudulent. Even now, it has not been published. It took an FOIA request to learn this just as it did at East Anglia to get that data. Actually, no! The FOIA was refused. That's why the e-mails had to be leaked by somebody inside because the scientists (Phil Jones and these clowns, Michael Mann over there at Penn State) were doing everything they could to not release the data.

That's why they destroyed the data rather than release it to people who were requesting it through Freedom of Information Act requests. So there are frauds on both sides of the Atlantic now. Media fraud, NASA, East Anglia, the UN. Folks, everybody involved in this knew it was junk. Media on both sides of the Atlantic knew it was junk and didn't report it, and they continue to this day to spread this hoax and this lie. One of our first stories today was that the ChiCom government is upset that their media has forgotten the Marxist theory in reporting news, and I suggested: Send them to any American university with a journalism school, 'cause our guys have it down pat. Our guys have got Marxist news reporting theory down pat. If the ChiComs guys are losing control of their journalists send 'em here, because our guys know exactly how to do it.

RUSH: Okay. I now have in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers the PDF file of e-mail correspondence between the USA Today reporter (whose name is Doyle Rice) and the people at NASA in the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (and there's one in here from Jim Hansen). So Doyle Rice at USA Today is the guy who sat on the data in 2007. This e-mail date range is August 29th of 2007 from about 12:30 in the afternoon through three o'clock in the afternoon. "Dear Doyle..." This is from Reto Ruedy, who is at NASA. "Dear Doyle. My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC's data for the US means and Phil Jones' data for the global means," meaning mean temperatures. "Our method is geared to getting the global mean and large regional means correctly enough to assess our model results. We're basically a modeling group. We're forced into rudimentary analysis of global observed data in the seventies and early eighties since nobody else was doing the job at the time.

"Now we happily combine NCDC's and Hadley Centre's data to get what we need evaluate our model results. For that purpose what we do is more than accurate enough, but we have no intention to compete with either of the two organizations in what they do best." Basically he's saying, "Our data is inferior to theirs. We're not competing with them. They got much better data over there at Hadley," which is East Anglia; and then, "Thank you for sending the clarification. I also received the graphs from Makiko. So it's correct to say that NASA's data is more accurate than NCDC's?" No, no, no, is the response. This is the e-mail that preceded the one I just read you. "No, your statement is NOT correct." It's not more accurate to say that. Our data is not as accurate but we want you to go with ours, and USA Today dutifully did. Then there's a e-mail here to Doyle Rice from Jim Hansen explaining how to go about all this. "Doyle. Since this is a technical question and Dr. Hansen is busy this afternoon, I'll answer it. No, your statement is NOT correct. To get the US means, NCDC's procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate. My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC's data for the US means and Phil Jones' data for..." because their data is better than ours. There you have it.

RUSH: We welcome to the program Karl Rove, who is now the author of a brand-new book just out today: Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, and this book is close to 600 pages. Before we bring Mr. Rove on, there's a lot of talk, ladies and gentlemen, about Obama's health care bill, and I think the extremists on the right and the extremists on the left are trying to destroy what is essentially a very moderate attempt to bring health care coverage to people that do not have it. I think it's a laudable thing and we still here are investigating to come to the exact correct interpretation of this. We're not ideologues here. We do it straight down the middle. Tell me where I'm wrong, Mr. Rove.

KARL ROVE: My God, I can't believe how dreadfully off base you are. This is a disaster.

KARL ROVE: What has gone on? The North Pole is moving to the South Pole as we speak.

KARL ROVE: Day is turning into night, night into day. Dogs and cats sleeping together, oh, my God, what is happening?

RUSH: Fine. I saw Matt Lauer needed a seat belt today on the third installment of your Today interview when you guys got into discussing weapons of mass destruction. And, you know, Karl, the book is replete with examples of all the intelligence agencies all over the world, this is not news, this is what you all said at the time, there was a consensus. You couldn't afford to take a chance that this guy wasn't in Iraq planning to join the attacks on the United States. These guys just have a template belief that all this was made up. How did you deal with it with Lauer today?

KARL ROVE: I wanted to seize on that moment because he brought up the issue about -- he quoted snarky Dana Milbank, who's one of the least credible people writing for the Washington Post, which says a lot, and he, in a throw-away line said, Rove deals with weapons of mass destruction and so, you know, all my columns were wrong. Well, I spent an entire chapter in which I make the point that Democrats who said before the Iraq war resolution vote that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, after looking at the same intelligence that President Bush was looking at, and that President Clinton had looked at when he was in office, they came to the same conclusion as Bush, and yet later had the temerity to say Bush lied and I think -- and I make the point in the book, chapter 21 -- that this was a deliberate and cynical and hypocritical ploy by the Democrats launched on July 15th of 2003, by Ted Kennedy who made a speech, he was then echoed later in the day by Tom Daschle, on the 16th John Kerry and John Edwards both raise the issue, and Jane Harman, who is normally a sane individual, joins in, chimes in, saying Bush misled on intelligence. And I go person by person and talk about how Democrats echoed the president's charge that Saddam had WMD, in some cases went far beyond what George Bush was willing to say, and yet later found themselves, for politics, trying to say that Bush lied.

RUSH: The Democrats were saying the identical things that you all were saying, same warnings back in 1998 --

KARL ROVE: Well, and, look, even at the time of the debate in 2002, Algore makes a speech out in California saying, quote: "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. We know Saddam has stored away secret supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country," end quote. That's what he said at the time of the debate. I mean Ted Kennedy voted against the war resolution and two days later gives a speech in which he says, "Iraq has WMD, I admit it's a danger, but there are ways short of war that we can deal with the situation." A hundred and ten Democrats vote for the war resolution. Sixty-seven of them stand up on the floor of the House or Senate and say, "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." Among them were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Bob Graham, you know, Senator Rockefeller, Congresswoman Harman, and for these people then to stand up, you know, Robert Byrd, Barbara Boxer, Dick Gephardt, Henry Waxman, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, for these people now to stand up and say, "Bush lied," is the height of cynicism and hypocrisy. And of course the mainstream media wouldn't call them on it. I was at a debate last Saturday in Arizona, and Howard Dean in response to a question literally said, "I believe that Bush lied," and I said, "You know, Howard, to be consistent then you've gotta say something about all these Democrats who repeated what Bush said." And you know what he told me? In front of 3,000 people at Arizona State University, he said they did it because Bush told them that they had WMD, they didn't come to their own independent conclusion. He basically said Bush told these guys and they're all duped by Bush.

RUSH: Now, Karl, you admit in this book that one of the tactical errors was not replying to this and other lies, distortions, and even criticism. Why?

KARL ROVE: Why at the time. Well, you know, each one was different. Look, I should have, in the middle of 2003, you know, taken and sounded the warning bell. But I didn't. I was preoccupied with the coming campaign and the pressure of the West Wing and I didn't see how damaging it was. I did raise the issue and we talked about it, but there were a number of reasons for our inaction. One was people would say, "Well, it's beneath the dignity of the president to refute such outlandish charges. If you wrestle with pigs, you get muddy." And then another one was it would look defensive, you know, we don't want to relitigate the past, we need to focus on winning the war, that will resolve it, not on this argument which nobody accepts. And the third one, frankly, was people were just worn down by the Iraq war debate. I mean, the fact that there weren't stockpiles was a blow, and some White House aides simply wanted to avoid the topic and hope that if we didn't say anything it would evaporate, and I should have said at the time, this is my responsibility, I should have said, you know what, this is not going to go away and this is going to be corrosive and this is worthy of the president of the United States responding in a powerful venue and the rest of us all hands on deck need to combat this because this is going to be corrosive. And what was amazing was, I knew, I remembered -- you know, obviously this was in my consciousness when I sat down to write the book about this being damaging. But when I got into it and sort of went back and reconstructed how it happened, you can't have Ted Kennedy, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Jane Harman all within the space of two days say the same thing without there having been some coordination, and I suspect some polling and focus groups to say this is the line of attack that we can use against Bush for political purposes.

RUSH: Exactly. It was totally political, it was totally ideological. My opinion here, but I think they still hadn't gotten over what they thought was an election being stolen in 2000, and I think this was a coordinated effort to discredit. It was the first time in my life, Karl, I'm 59 years old, and I'm not naive enough to think this has never happened before, but in my lifetime it was the first time during Iraq and I think a lot of other things that similar approaches were tried by the Democrats where they actually sought the defeat of the United States militarily for their own political gain. They didn't want to saddle themselves with it, they would have been happy to hang it around your neck and the president's and so forth, but I'd never seen this.

RUSH: I'd always heard politics ends at the water's edge but this was new to me.

KARL ROVE: And look, what amazed me, I think you're absolutely right, and what amazed me about this particular instance was that they were saying, in essence, that the president of the United States knowingly lied the country into war and that he had at the heart of a giant conspiracy to mislead them. And they knew better. I mean Ted Kennedy, who was the first to launch this, God bless his soul, God rest his soul, you know, it was a lie. And for him to stand up there and say as he did that President Bush lied by saying that Iraq had WMD, when he himself had said the same thing, if Bush lied, he lied as well. I devote an entire chapter to this theme, I titled it: "What Bipartisanship?" And in there I sort of pull back the curtain and show some instances that people are completely unaware of, of where the Democrats, you know, as you say, they'd never gotten over the 2000 election and for the next seven or eight years, they acted, many of them, in an inappropriate way 'cause they could never get past the first victory of Bush.

RUSH: Talking to Karl Rove here, folks, his new book is Courage and Consequence, out today, My Life As a Conservative in the Fight. This Ted Kennedy business, God rest his soul, as you say, this was after you had magnanimously, the president had magnanimously brought him in to join you in working on education legislation.

KARL ROVE: Yes. And, look, to me, Ted Kennedy is a very interesting personality because on the one hand he was capable of inspiring great loyalty among his staff and of working tirelessly. You know, look, I didn't like his politics, but I sure did like the challenge of working around him and with him, because if he came to a meeting, you better have done your homework because he would have done his. You know, he was absolutely ready to --

RUSH: Now many of us out here watching all this hear you say this, and, okay, you're trying to work with these guys while we see it as they're trying to destroy you, and us, in the process.

KARL ROVE: Yeah, but, look, a president has got to do some of this, he's gotta put aside some of this stuff in order to sort of move forward. You can't take this personally. A president has gotta say, "Look, I understand they're doing politics but I've gotta try and find a way to move the country forward." You just can't go into permanent open warfare, but I gotta tell you, Ted Kennedy -- and again, I admire the man, but my point is is that I was really surprised when Alito, the second one of our Supreme Court nominations, when Ted Kennedy got up and harangued him for 20 or 25 minutes in the Senate committee, saying he was prejudiced against average Americans, sexist, corrupt, and racist, I was taken aback. You know, what he did to Bob Bork, Judge Bork, a respected and distinguished American, was beyond the pale --

KARL ROVE: -- what he tried to do with Sam Alito, it was sort of hard to connect these two guys, I mean Ted Kennedy, a guy that would be reasonable and rational and try and work with you on one matter and then go out and say things that he had to know in his heart of hearts were fundamentally untrue.

KARL ROVE: Because, look, you know, Bork was -- I read the transcripts last year of the two speeches. The Bork speech is a complete mischaracterization of Bork's political views.

KARL ROVE: The Alito is a complete distortion of Alito's personal history and personal views. I mean he literally calls him all but racist, sexist, corrupt, I mean he explicitly says that he's against average Americans. Bork was bad enough where he took the decisions of Bork and interpreted their consequences for policy outcomes. That was bad. That was despicable. But what he did against Alito was so far worse in many ways because he was making assumptions about the personal beliefs of essentially a very decent and very honorable man who had sacrificed much for our country by serving on the judiciary rather than getting a big paycheck at some law firm, he's working as a federal judge and serving our country with great distinction. And to have his character savaged by a man who, you know, was sitting across the table from him and judging him as sexist, corrupt, and racist and saying he was against average Americans. It did take me aback.

RUSH: We're talking to Karl Rove about his new book. We gotta take a break. We'll be back and continue after this.

RUSH: It's Rush Limbaugh, and we're talking to Karl Rove. His new book is Courage and Consequence: My Life As a Conservative in the Fight. The book is out today. Karl, one of my favorite questions to ask people who get as close to power as you were... I mean, you were there for eight years and many years prior to that with President Bush. What most surprised you about the White House, the operation there, working for the president and the whole process of, quote, unquote, "running the country and the world." How do you go in there and not pinch yourself and say, "Gee, look at where I am," and roll up the sleeves and really take it seriously for what you're doing?

KARL ROVE: Well, it was funny. Andy Card, who was Bush's first chief of staff and former secretary of transportation under Bush 41 and had served in the Reagan White House, made the point when each of the senior members of the White House staff came aboard. He said, "If there's ever a day when you don't feel a special feeling when you come in the gate to work here, then it's time for you to go," and he was right. Because as long as you recognize that it really is an extraordinarily special place -- that you are not it but part of it, that you are not history but your passing through history -- then you can come into the place with a sense of service and obligation and commitment and dedication. And when you lose that feeling, it's time for you to go. And, you know, there was not a day that I worked at the White House where I didn't feel honored to be able to walk in the gate. There was not a day that I wasn't aware of the extraordinary sacrifices that not just my senior staff colleagues made.

I mean, I had a senior staff colleague who literally sat down and figured out -- he had adult children getting ready to go to college or in college and he sat down and figured out -- how long his savings and his lines of credit would allow him to serve and he served 'til that day and then left. You know, I saw Steve Friedman, who came into service the National Economic Council advisor who literally when he came into the White House, the White House ethics lawyer said, "You will have unwind some complicated hedge fund positions literally overnight and you will lose tens of millions of dollars," and he said, "Where do I sign?" And then I saw people like... You know, I was honored to speak at the retirement ceremonies of the chiefs of the White House mess. One of them really deeply moved me. These are guys who served their entire Navy careers feeding other swabs, and they were honored to end their careers as the chiefs of the Navy mess.

And one of them was a Filipino American who joined the Navy as a Filipino and became an American citizen, and the greatest thing in his life was the day that he took the oath as a US citizen. And, you know, you serve around those kind of people: The guys in the uniform division of the Secret Service, the snipers who sit atop the roof at the White House in all kinds of weather scanning the horizon for threats; the White House operators. One of the most moving things to me was I made a friend in the White House who came to the White House as a young usher when John F. Kennedy was president, when Washington was a segregated town and he's an African-American. Can you imagine what it's like for him to have served John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush 41, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush 43, and now to be at the White House and nearing retirement with an African-American as president when this was a man who came to Washington when it was still segregated. People like him weren't expected to vote and participate, and what history he has seen and what service, selfless service he's given to our country.

RUSH: I want to ask about President Bush here. I've mentioned this to you before, and I've also mentioned this to people who have called me on the radio during this program, asking about President Bush's mannerisms on television. You and I both know, and everybody who knows him personally knows, when you're with him personally and there's no TV cameras around, he is a dynamo.

RUSH: And he never stutters and he is confident, almost cocky when talking about things, and he knows a lot about it. Why did we never see that man on TV, or very rarely?

KARL ROVE: You know, I don't know. Because, you're right. I mean, you get him in... I've had this experience a lot in the last year and a half as he's gone out on the speaking tour and I've run into people who said, "Oh, gosh. I saw your old boss," at the whatever meeting in Toronto or he came to the convention of whatever, "and boy, I was blown away. Where was that guy during the last eight years?" And, look, President Bush has a fluency and a familiarity with the issues in a winning manner and an extraordinary recall, and we ill-served him by not putting him out in ways and places where that would shine like it does naturally. As you know he's got a winning personal manner about him, and he remembers every name and every detail, and enjoys being around people, and yet there's just something about the way that we allowed him to be put on television or put in front of the public that too often made him look stilted and restrained and, you know, not as effective as he could be. But in a White House, any president is subject to such public attention that you're not going to get everything right, and even if you identify things that are wrong, you're not going to be able to get everything changed. That was one that I wish we had done a better job of focusing on helping him be himself.

RUSH: I have a couple of minutes here and I know you're not going to be able to explain everything here but I want to go back. You were shocked that Ted Kennedy would go after Alito. None of us really were. Were you shocked when they came after you on the Valerie Plame stuff? I mean, at what point did you realize that this was not just the normal ebb and flow of Democrats and Republicans sharing power, that they were out to destroy you and everybody in the administration?

KARL ROVE: Well, I knew that all along, but what got me was that the media were so spun up when they thought it was me and then they were so unspun up when they figured out it wasn't me. I mean, when they thought that I had outed Valerie Plame and that the prosecutor was looking at me for that, they were spun up. I mean, for months and months and months people surrounding the house on weekends and, you know, film crews out front. I had demonstrators protest in front of the house/ People with bullhorns yelling things to my son -- and, you know, I don't just mean periodically. I mean all the time when they thought it was me, and what was ironic was (and people read this in the book) is right from the get-go, it was clear I had no vulnerability on the question of releasing Valerie Plame's name, because I didn't. I said to Bob Novak when he told me what he had heard from Richard Armitage (though I didn't know it was Richard Armitage at the time). My simple response was to say, "I've heard that, too." So that right from the get-go it was clear from the FBI and then after the appointment of the special prosecutor that I had no vulnerability on this fundamental question. And readers will be shocked to find out in the book what it was after four appearances before the grand jury when Patrick Fitzgerald is on the eve of indicting me and has a meeting with my lawyer --

RUSH: Back with Karl Rove. He has a new book today. It's Courage and Consequence: My Life As a Conservative in the Fight. You made four appearances before the grand jury, Patrick Fitzgerald is on the eve of indicting you, and everybody is breathlessly awaiting that very fact. It didn't happen.

KARL ROVE: It didn't happen, but on October 20th of 2005 my lawyer (Bob Luskin of Patton Boggs) met with Fitzgerald at his office in Chicago and finally, after sort of circling around with it, Fitzgerald laid onto the table the issue that he was concerned about -- which boggles my mind what it was, it was so minor and so out on the fringes of all of this, it was unbelievable -- and when my lawyer gave him the answer to the question that he had, literally Fitzgerald says, "You've rocked my world," and literally a day or two later lets my attorney know that no action would be taken at that point. Six months later -- after having received additional information that was in support of what had been told to him on that day (he lets me dangle for six months) he says, in essence: "This is done and we're over." But people will be shocked to read what all of this was about. It was not about Valerie Plame, it was not about Joe Wilson, it was about something completely else, and if he ever asked me about it during my four appearances in the grand jury -- I ended up making five. In the final one, the fifth appearance before the grand jury in April of 2006, he asked me a couple of questions about this issue, and resolved it, and let me go. But people will be shocked when they read this story.

RUSH: Now, this is interesting. You say it's not about Plame, it's not about Wilson. But all this time he knew that Armitage was the leaker.

KARL ROVE: He knew that Armitage was the leaker --and, look, he'd known right from the get-go what I had said to Bob Novak and apparently he also had confirmation of it from Novak. Right from the beginning, for two years, they said, "Rove is not a target. He's merely a witness," but then two years in they began to develop a weird theory about something far out on the edges of all this -- which people can read about in the book -- and it was really amazing.

KARL ROVE: In August of 2006, it's finally revealed that Richard Armitage was the person who sat down with Bob Novak and said, "Valerie Plame is Joe Wilson's wife. She works at the CIA and she sent him to Africa," and when that happened, the Washington Post ran an exculpatory editorial saying, "Well, I guess this really didn't amount to much because everybody knows Richard Armitage is not a political gunslinger and he didn't do this for any bad reason." I mean, all these reporters who camped out on my front doorstep... There was an NBC reporter who was on with Don Imus when Imus was telling prison rape jokes about me, when they thought I was going to go to jail, and when Richard Armitage was relieved to be the source, I don't remember her, you know, chortling along to any prison rape jokes told about him.

KARL ROVE: I mean, "This is official Washington. Rove is conservative, Rove is defiantly conservative, and Richard Armitage is part of the Washington, DC, establishment. So when we think it's Rove, 'Let's go get that SOB!' and when we find out it's Armitage, 'Oh, never mind. Don't worry about it.'"

RUSH: Well, that's the point, but Scooter Libby is the guy that paid the price for this, and Armitage knew all along that Libby hadn't done anything, and so did General Powell. They both knew all along that Libby hadn't done anything here and Libby, of course, was convicted for lying or some such thing.

RUSH: How do you guys have a civil relationship with either Powell or Armitage going forward?

KARL ROVE: Well, you know, it's funny. I talk about it in the book, and Powell has a weird sense of humor at it. At a dinner in 2007, I was walking down the aisle, and there was Powell -- who, you know, sort of gregariously booming -- said, "I got somebody here I want you to meet," and he grabbed my hand and held me fast and turned, and behind him was Richard Armitage, and he made the two of us shake hands, which I was gamely willing to do. Armitage didn't look too comfortable with it. Look, I don't know what Secretary Powell knew and when he knew it, but I do know that in August and September of 2003, while the White House knew of my contact with Robert Novak, they did not know of Richard Armitage's contact until August of 2007. The State Department, whenever they found out about Armitage's contact with Novak, did not tell the White House. In fact, the State Department counsel, Will Taft IV, told the White House they had information regarding the incident but were going to share with Justice Department only and not the White House. This was at a point when the president was saying, "I want to know who told Bob Novak 'Valerie Plame.'"

RUSH: Well, this leads to another subject matter that I want to get into as we move into the present day and that is you're a huge expert on presidential history. I've shared with some friends of mine, occasionally on this program, my overwhelming appreciation and admiration for your knowledge of the presidency. I've sat in Karl's office at the White House for hours listening to the history of the presidency, and William McKinley is one of Karl's favorites. I want to ask you: Aside from the Civil War, and the days of the founding, in the modern era has there ever been a time where things were so partisan as they are today?

KARL ROVE: (sigh) You know, they've been episodically partisan but what gets me about this one is that the president of the United States is so tone deaf and so intent upon conducting himself in a manner in which he basically is disrespecting his political opposition. He's not taking them into account. President Obama has made three fundamental mistakes. The first one is that he ran as a centrist and he's governing as an extreme liberal or a social Democrat. The second is that he went to great pains to paint himself as an advocate of postpartisanship or bipartisanship and he made no attempt to do so. I was shocked. Last March 5th he held a meeting at the White House with Republicans and Democrats to kick off a discussion of health care. His next bipartisan meeting at the White House was February 25th of this year. When John Boehner said that he had not had a substantive meeting at the White House on any subject for months and had not heard from the White House chief of staff in months, it was shocking to me, 'cause it basically said: Obama is outsourcing the writing of legislation and the legislative process to two of the most hyper-partisans in Washington, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And, look, the president of the United States -- regardless of the Congress being Republican or Democrat -- needs to be involved in setting the right tone in Congress. And if what you basically say is, "I don't care what you do up there on the Hill, just let me be able to check off cap and trade and health care and, blah, blah, and, blah, blah. You just get it done," he's giving rise to the worse instincts of the hyper-partisans who run the Democratic caucus in the House and Senate, and that is an abrogation of leadership.

RUSH: Well, I know that bipartisanship is a big thing with people that work inside the Beltway. Those of us outside it with the pitchforks think bipartisanship is a Democrat-designed trick to get us to sacrifice and compromise away our core beliefs and go along with theirs so that there is this appearance of comity and so forth. Will you tell me how bipartisanship, in theory in your world, works?

KARL ROVE: Well, look, it is useful for you to be able to find areas of agreement because there are some things. Look, in the 2005 energy bill, for example -- which passed with huge bipartisan votes -- we removed the obstacles to the expansion of the nuclear power industry in America, which is really important for the future of our country. And when we came into office there are zero applications for nuclear power plants, as there had been for the last nearly 30 years. When we left office there were 22 applications for new power plants at the NRC. We got it by being work to say, "Okay, look, let us find ways. Don't we all agree we need more nuclear power? Don't we all agree that we need to have clear rules and greater ability for the country to drill off of its coasts? Let's find ways to move those things forward," and so there are ways to do it.

Granted if you have a president, that president will dominate that process and bend it more his way rather than the other way. But nonetheless there are things over which we can broadly agree. This guy, though, is so ideological -- this guy is so aloof from the process, this guy is so willing to outsource the writing of legislation to Reid and Pelosi -- that for him "bipartisan" means, "We won the last election. Do everything we want to do and don't bother talking to me and don't expect me to listen," and that's wrong. That's not the way it works. The Founders did not mean the system to work that way. They wanted us to try and find ways, imperfectly, to come together on areas of agreement where we could so that the country could sustain itself in the times when we could not agree. We're not going to get Barney Frank to vote for a tax cut. We're not going to get Bernie Sanders to vote for the Patriot Act. We're not going to get Barbara Lee to be supportive of a strong national defense. We're not going to get Maxine Waters to be supportive of limited government. You can't recognize that.

RUSH: Okay. Right. Right, right, right. SO why do you care about working with those people? Why don't we just go out and defeat 'em?

KARL ROVE: First of all some of them, they come from comfortable districts where they're not going to be defeated, but we ought to find the people with whom we can find common cause. And let me give you an example. There were some very important pension reforms that were written by Ben Cardin and Rob Portman when they were together in the House and serving on the House Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee. These things will have far-ranging ramifications for the ability of private individuals to have a secure retirement that is funded by them and their company, rather than being dependent upon government.

KARL ROVE: Well, that's right. That's right. Well, that's another question. But the point is these two guys got together and said, "Here are some sensible things that we as a Republican, we as a Democrat can find agreement on. They're common sense and good for the country."

RUSH: Karl Rove is with us. We gotta take a brief time-out. Final segment with him coming up right after this. Don't go away.

RUSH: Karl Rove on the radio on the EIB Network, and his new book, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. The big question right now, of course, is the health care bill, the reconciliation and all of this, the House basically passing the Senate bill as is. Frankly, I don't think there's going to be reconciliation; I don't think there's time. I think if the House does pass the Senate bill, Obama's going to sign it before anybody knows what's happened. But is he going to get the votes in the House for it?

KARL ROVE: I'm trying to write my column this Thursday about it in the Wall Street Journal, so I'm spending a lot of time trying to figure it out. I'd have to say at the end of the day I don't think it happens, but we shouldn't underestimate the powers of Nancy Pelosi. She can persuade, she can cajole, she can argue, she can threaten.

KARL ROVE: Yeah. Well, and, look, she's got a lot of things that she can tell people we'll take care of you. But, on the other hand, she has a heavy lift because, at the end of the day, her argument is, if you've got a problem with this bill, we can take care of it in reconciliation. Well, what happens if in the Senate they somehow pass it through the House, they get the pro-lifers to say, you know, I'll vote for a pro-abortion bill; they get the deficit hawks to vote for a bill that is broken and is going to cause huge deficits; they get the liberals who want more of a public option, and they say we'll fix it for you in the Senate reconciliation. And what happens if the Senate Republicans can keep them from fixing things in Senate reconciliation? And so, you know, they don't get the pro-life provision or they don't get all the stinky stuff taken out, or they don't get all of the bribes removed and they don't get, you know, where the taxes and the benefit cuts, you know, equal the cost of the bill for the first ten years, what happens with all this stuff?

RUSH: This is fundamental. I mean this is transforming the country in ways it's never been transformed --

KARL ROVE: Our country will be fundamentally different in dangerous ways if this bill passes.

KARL ROVE: A lot. We actually shared common friends, so when he got elected to the Senate whenever he'd come to the White House we'd sort of hang around and talk to each other and chitchat about our mutual friends. And look, he's got a lot of personal charm, he's very bright, he's incredibly intelligent. He also doesn't think he needs to apply himself. In these White House meetings when the president would go around the table, Senator Obama would be probably the least useful comment in the room, generally something along the lines of, "I'm honored to be here, I've listened with interest to what my colleagues have said, it's an important issue, and I'm going to take what I learned here today home and think about it a lot." I mean that was basically, you know, he'd dress it up as he can, but he was one of the least impressive legislators I saw there.

RUSH: Well, now, Karl, you said that he's very intelligent, and I get caught up in all this and how do we define intelligent, how do we define smart, because in my view and I'm not asking you to concur with this, I think he's wrong about everything, I think he's dangerously wrong, I don't subscribe to this notion he's very smart. I think he's been ill-educated, I think he's been ill-mentored, and I think he poses a great danger, and whether he's smart IQ-wise doesn't matter. I think he's dead wrong on all of this, and a lot of people do. There's a Democracy "Corpse," in his word, poll out today from Greenberg and Carville saying if he's going to have any success with foreign policy he's going to have to cowboy it up like Bush did.

KARL ROVE: Well, look I think he's very intelligent. I don't think he's right. I'm with you, I think his worldview is wrong, I think he is very liberal, I think he plays like he's a centrist, and I thought during the campaign, frankly, that he was being so emphatic about his centrism that we would expect to see more of it, and we haven't. But, look, he is a very bright individual who's capable of making a compelling argument as he did in the 2008 campaign, some of it is artifice, some of it is, frankly, not true. It's well reasoned, some of it is emotional and appealing, but at the heart of it is somebody who is fundamentally trying to portray himself as something that he's not. I talk about this in the book, because in 2007, an aide of mine came in and said, "Do you know that you're in Barack Obama's book?" I said, "Really, Audacity of Hope, I'm in there?" He said, "Yeah, saying quote: 'We are a Christian nation,'" end quote, and he has it in quotes with my name attached to it. Now, look I've never said any such thing. It's one thing to say we're based on the Judeo-Christian ethic or draw from the Judeo-Christian ethic, that we have enshrined the free expression of religion, that we have no state establishment of a state church, but you can't say we're a Christian nation 'cause that leaves out the Jews and the Buddhist and the Sikhs and the nonbelievers, all of whom under our Constitution are as good an American as anybody else. So, you know, but he easily said that about me, and I confronted him about it. And he had no good explanation of why he would attribute to me something that I didn't say. He then went on in his book to accuse me of being a 1960s radical. And as I say in my book, isn't that rich? I don't remember trying to bomb a government office building --

KARL ROVE: -- like his buddy Bill Ayers or saying God damn America like the pastor in whose pews he sat for 20 years or having said I was proud of my country for the first time at the age of 40 like his wife. And for him -- I mean here's a guy who positions himself as the advocate of a new kind of politics and who engages in the worst kind of old-fashioned political slurs, and it's not that, you know, look, I'm used to that kind of stuff, but it really is hypocritical for somebody to say, I am better and newer and --

RUSH: As they said, he's the last surviving Kennedy brother. They're no different, they're all the same, they're all Ted Kennedy.

KARL ROVE: You know, somebody the other day showed me a piece of footage from 2006 in which he said Karl Rove -- he invoked my name in 2007, 2008, several hundred times generally to say we're going to end Karl Rove-style politics.

RUSH: Yeah, but that's because they had drummed up so much hatred for you guys it was a talking point.

KARL ROVE: But that's not who he professed to be, was it? I saw this clip in which he said, quote, "Karl Rove does not believe in government," end quote. This was at the time when I was serving in government. I mean to accuse me of being --

RUSH: -- I gotta go. I'm at one of the hard breaks. It's the only one of the hour that we have. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon.

Virginia is the first state to pass legislation to just say no to Obamacare; 37 other states are pondering similar legislation:

Cities and states likely to slash jobs as federal stimulus money begins to dry up:

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 is a news site which I just discovered; they gave 3 minute coverage to Obama’s healthcare summit and seemed to give a pretty decent overall view of it, without slanting one way or the other:

I have glanced through their website and it seems to be quite professional and reasonable. They have apparently been around since 1942.

This is fantastic; Florida (the Sunshine State) is now putting its state budget online:

Suzanne Somers s supposed to be older than Bill O’Reilly? He interviewed her this week, and she looked, well, hot. She is big into vitamins and human growth hormones.

The National Journal, which is a political journal (which, at first glance, seems to be pretty even-handed):

And I am hoping that most people see this as non-partisan: Citizens Against Government Waste:

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 #118	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	March 14, 2010