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 4 or 5 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).

Identity of failed Times Square bomber determined. He is not an irate TEA party attendee mad about Obamacare, but a radicalized Muslim.

British Petroleum’s oil well is still gushing up oil in the gulf of Mexico. So far, nothing has worked to stop it.

Republican strategists have developed a number of new Republican organizations, modeled after the Democratic approach of the past few years.

FHLMC needs another $10 billion from the taxpayers. So far, FNMA and FHLMC have not paid back any of their previous loans.

Unemployment increases from 9.7% to 9.9%; both White House and alphabet media present this as a good thing.

So-called `Edgy' Comedy Central, after censoring a show involving Muhammad, will introduce a show which satirizes Jesus Christ.

Students sent home from school for wearing American flag apparel on Cinco de Mayo

Michael Bloomberg openly speculated that the bomber might be “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something.”

MSNBC's Contessa Brewer gave her opinion, upon finding out to the would be New York City bomber was an Islamic terrorist: “I get frustrated...There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country....There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.”

ABC news story on Faisal Shahzad: “Even his signature on the documents, with a heart dotting the "i" in Faisal, seem to suggest some optimism.” (I am not making this up)

File this under what was not said: a number of stories about Faisal Shahzad and his attempted bombing of Times Square do not have the words Muslim, Islam, or Islamic terrorist (terrorism).

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar twice said,"Our job is basically to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum." Since Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that this terminology had the White House seal of approval, that may tell us a lot about how this administration views itself.

President Obama at the White House Correspondents Association dinner: “The Jonas Brothers are here. (Applause.) They're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But, boys, don't get any ideas. I have two words for you -- predator drones. You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking.” (I laughed; I thought this was funny; apparently many left wing bloggers did not think that it was).

Not as funny, was this quote from the President: "Already we are seeing a health care system that holds insurance companies more accountable and gives consumers more control." Yes, Obamacare is working.

And even less funny: President Obama said today, at Hampton University, Virginia, "You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation...some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you, it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy." Free speech is a problem for the Obama White House.

“Our enemy is capitalism and imperialism” said an L.A. teacher at a May 1^st rally.

Headline banner on MSNBC: regarding new AZ law "Law Makes It A Crime To Be Illegal Immigrant"

Speaking of oddball political headlines, the Politico website (which is usually pretty fair) ran this headline Karl Rove, Republican Party plot vast network to reclaim power. The story exposes that their idea is to recapture the White House and Congress. Such a devious plot! You just know that Rove was going to be behind it all!

Joan Rivers, concerning the time that she war barred from boarding a flight from Costa Rica to New York (her passport has AKA on it): “I find it ludicrous and pathetic that somebody can come in at the last minute, buy a ticket with cash, and slip through all of this, and they worry about me...and they wouldn't let me on a f*****g plane. Somewhere, there's a big disconnect. A 76-year-old Jewish woman alone...'oh no...not gonna let her on.' ”

Same interview, Joan Rivers about the redistribution of wealth: “I worked all my life...and no one has given me a penny. I have paid every tax. The whole thing, and I pay my way. I don't want to give my money to a third-generation welfare family...sorry. Go out and go to work.”

New York Times columnist Charles "Minstrel Show" Blow was at it again Saturday accusing Tea Partiers of being racists. Noel Shepherd comments: “I guess for Blow, a day without calling some conservative a racist is like a day without sunshine.”

Rush Limbaugh concerning an interview which President Obama gave where he mentioned Rush and Glenn Beck: "For Barack Obama to run around and say that this show and Beck and all of talk radio is filled with vitriol? Barack Obama sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years and never once complained about the tone of Jeremiah Wright's bigoted, anti-American, racist rants."

When it became known that President Obama referred to TEA party attendees as tea baggers, Grover Norquist commented: "This remark is the equivalent of using the 'n' word. It shows contempt for middle America, expressed knowingly, contemptuously, on purpose, and with a smirk. It is indefensible to use this word. The president knows what it means, and his people know what it means. The public thought we reached a new low of incivility during the Clinton administration. Well, the Obama administration has just outdone them," To be accurate, this is actually euphemistically calling someone who disagrees with you a c___s_____.

Ann Coulter sums up the media's reaction to finding out the identity of the Times Square bomber: "They're working through their grief of the car bomber not being a Tea Partier."

Klaven explains what is being done in Washington about financial reform (this is a good vid to forward to your friends):

Chemical attack against Israel are planned? Just in the past few weeks, Israel has issued gas masks and other things to protect its citizens in case of a gas attack. You will not see this information anywhere else.

L.A. teacher calls for a Mexican Revolt inside the U.S. (Do you recall the article Useful Idiots?):

Ann Coulter interview by O’Reilly (vid and text) with regards to the media and the Times Square bomber:

Jodi Miller: “President Obama says we should set our sights on going to the planet Mars; there’s a shocker: Obama wants us to go to the red planet.”

The Swagger Wagon (SUV Rap) (this is apparently a Toyota commercial, although that is not apparent until you check out the similar links):

Same parents, Meet the Parents (and the Toyota logo is in the corner, but it is still a well-done and reasonably funny vid):

1) I have been talking about miniature nuclear reactors for some time now. In the March 2010 issue of National Geographic, there was a very short piece on 2 examples. Each reactor was about the size of one windmill, except that they are buried into the ground. Whereas the number of windmills needed to power a neighborhood

has a footprint of roughly twice the size of that neighborhood, one of these little reactors (which do not require a backup system as wind power does), electrifies about 8,000 homes with almost a negligible footprint. So why are we subsidizing and building thousands of windmills?

2) The IMF (International Monetary Fund) is talking about bailing out Greece, but part of the agreement is supposed to include privatizing all or part of their healthcare system.

3) Beck made this point about the enforcement of the Arizona immigration law: Arizonians trust their police to carry guns and to use deadly force when necessary, but a significant number of Arizonians don’t think they can be trusted to determine when it is appropriate to ask, “Can I see proof of your residency?”

4) Although many demonstrators and news reporters are decrying the inhumanity of the Arizona Immigration Law, Karl Rove points out that, federal law makes illegal immigration a felony, when it is only a misdemeanor by the AZ law. Also, a federal law enforcement official needs less reason and has fewer constraints when it comes to asking someone for their papers.

5) I forgot who pointed this out: Gandhi was successful (more or less) in his peaceful attempt to un-colonialize India, only because of the character and empathy of the British. Had India been ruled by Russia, China or by some Muslim nation, Gandhi would have found himself dead or in prison.

Some good numbers for once: 290,000 jobs created in March (231,000 were created in the private sector). Individual worker production is up 6.3%.

FHLMC needs another $10 billion from the taxpayers. So far, they have not paid back any of their previous loans. They took $111 billion in loans back in 2008, and have received bailouts since then. At one time, FNMA and FHLMC held or guaranteed about 50% of the nation’s mortgages; now it is up to 96%. Their executives make millions. Franklin Raines, a former director, exited with $90 million, even though he had some questionable bookkeeping practices which made FNMA seem solvent when it was not. These are the 2 organizations which sent the US economy into a tailspin and are continuing with the same practices under Obama as before. These institutions are not even mentioned in the new financial regulatory bill.

I should mention, just in case there is any confusion at this point, these are real, scientific polls, not online voting polls, which are virtually worthless.

51% of Democrats would treat the Times Square bomber like a criminal defendant (remember, he is a naturalized American citizen);

51% of Republicans and 52% of independents would treat him like an enemy combatant.

66% of voters think President Obama should start taking responsibility for the state of things

21% think it's right to continue to blame the Bush administration for the way things are going today

46% of voters think President Obama is keeping most of the promises he made during the campaign

58% of voters believe offshore oil drilling should be allowed (which is down 14 points from 72% a few months ago)

55% think the country is currently in a recession (which is essentially unchanged from two years ago when 54% percent thought so).

29% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president.

41% Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -12 (this is a daily tracking poll, and far from Obama’s worst numbers)

68% of voters not affiliated with either major political party continue to think the nation is heading down the wrong track

From April 23 to May 3, the top three television networks offered viewers 50 stories on the Arizona Immigration law. 37 stories were negative about this new law, 10 were neutral, and only 3 were positive toward the Arizona law's passage. Various polls have Americans and Arizonians in favor of this law at around 2 to 1 or more.

Obama gathers his cabinet and tells them how they have kind of ignored this oil thing in the gulf and how they need to get out there and use the words since day one over and over again. And then you do a montage, some real, some phoney, of various talking heads saying, since day one in a variety of different ways.

Regardless of whether the federal government could have done anything about the gulf oil gusher or not, they spent a lot of time ignoring this (as they have ignored the flooding in Tennessee). However, they counter with sending several talking heads out to the Sunday talk shows to say the phrase from day one.

Vigilant means, since we treat terrorism as a law enforcement matter, you need to keep your eyes peeled for suspicious things or behavior.

There will be additional terrorist threats, and because of Obama’s law enforcement approach to terrorism, some of their bombs will explode.

One of the predictions which I have made is government becoming more involved in media. Although I do not yet view this as nefarious, it could become that:

One of the keys will be combining news sources, and a prediction I have made earlier (not yet come to pass), is that the government may sponsor certain news sources (like Reuters):

The primary function of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is to both define and limit the power of the federal government. I can see absolutely no restraints upon Congress, and that whatever they vote for seems to incrementally increase the power of the federal government.

Even if the Republicans exercise some self-restraint if and when they take Congress, at some point, the Congress will confer upon itself more power and more responsibilities.

The only possible constraint I can see in the future is limitations put upon Congress by the Supreme Court, by not allowing them to use the commerce clause in order to pass whatever legislation suits their fancy.

Obviously, 4 members of the court understand the Constitution in this way; is there a 5^th?

Millions of Americans are depending upon your court to reinstate historical constitutional constraints upon the Congress.

I remember watching the movie Roots, and my grandmother's stern admonition, "Don't you ever forget where we came from." At the time, I had not, in my humble elementary school-aged opinion, come from very far. It would be several years later that I took a deliberate look at where "we" had come from, are at present, and the direction "we" were headed that made me realize an unfounded political love affair. As I searched out these roots, I recognized two familiar sthreads running through the cultural development of African-Americans: the powerful role of Christianity and the crippling role of Democrats from slavery to date.

Though it is not popular, it is true that history reveals that the Republican Party has a far more impressive track record in the advancement of Blacks than Democrats. The Republican Party was founded on nine planks - six of which focused on ending slavery. For 150 years, blacks were victims of terrorist attacks by Democrats and Klan supporters- attacks including lynching, beatings, rapes, and mutilations. On the issue of slavery, while Democrats gave all to expand it, Republicans gave their lives to end it. In Congress, Republicans sponsored and passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments - sacred to black Americans. These Amendments abolished slavery, granted citizenship and gave Blacks the right to vote. The NAACP was founded and financed by three white persons who opposed the Democrats racist practices and lynchings. In Arkansas, it was Democrat Governor Orval Faubus who blocked nine students from entering Central High opening the door for Republican President Eisenhower to send troops to enforce desegregation.

It was Republican Governor Win Rockefeller in the 1960s who began appointing blacks to key positions. Some of our key traditional Black colleges are named after white Republicans who funded and supported them while Democrats tried to destroy them. It was the Republicans who championed Civil Rights for Blacks -from the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 proposed by Dwight Eisenhower. The Republicans had fought hard and long to achieve Civil Rights, but were no match for the racist Democrat machine until JFK picked up the legislation and was able to help Republicans finally get the minimum bi-partisan support to pass it. Less than a half century old, this history is long forgotten by many.

However, African-Americans are looking at the deteriorating condition of our communities over the past 40 years of loyalty to one party, realizing the detrimental effect and coming to the conclusion that being on one side of the boat has caused us to nearly capsize. Take a look at where we are after 40 years of liberal policy: poor inner-city schools, welfare dependency, alarming out-of-wedlock poverty, one out of every two black babies aborted, a platform for increased crime, lower standards and widening gaps in education, increasing illiteracy and drop-out rates. We must conserve our future and a most critical key is to conserve the traditional two-parent family (not popular amongst liberals) which is the biggest deterrent to poverty and many other problems.

Perhaps the biggest reason some African-Americans are returning to their Republican roots is the crucial difference between the ideology of the Republican Party and the Democrat Party which can be summed up in the old adage: "If you GIVE a man a fish, he will eat for a day, but if you TEACH a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime". It's that independence -not entitlement- that empowers us to not only take care of ourselves, but teach generations to come to do it just as our forefathers did in the face of tremendous adversity.

Thomas WoodsNo Gravatar May 1st, 2010 4:36 pm :

This is a great article and the discussion that has followed in the comments section are more than insightful.

I'm white and grew up in a predominately black neighborhood and, as a result, participated in many activities in the African-American community. I got to see first hand how liberal policies have held down the African-American individual in this country, I just never knew at the time. I saw how some of my friends' family would deliberately put themselves in a bad position to get `government money', which was pretty rampant. i.e. planning what they had to do to qualify for a certain program. In the end you wind up working for the government by working to get the program and by casting your vote for the politician that can't wait to take credit for `helping you'. I also noticed that these families were often times broken - no father usually and didn't have that strong moral foundation that comes from the nuclear family.

These Liberal carrot-and-stick government programs were nothing more than that in the end. Designed to keep the African-American community enslaved. Designed to keep the African-American individual under control and dependent. Designed to give to the African-American individual money that keeps them hovering right at the poverty line. This is why after 40 years of our inner-cities residing in their own welfare states they are no better now than they were before. Only the cost of living keeps going up, making the inner-cities more and more dependent on the system. They are shunned by our government by being told lies and by being told that a vote for me keeps the money flowing. Demonizing the other side for wanting folks to rise up and empower themselves by taking personal responsibility and having strong moral foundations. They know if we have convictions they don't stand a chance so they do everything to remind us everyday of every negative aspect of our lives. Whether it be "racism", or health-care, or unemployment it's always something.

Inside my community I felt quite comfortable talking with my friends about the liberal ideology, because they know I wasn't racist they took my opinion for what it was worth. But I see prominent conservative voices out there making the same observations and the liberal media are quick to pull the race card and make it into a racial issue when it's a political issue. The issue is this. Do we want our system of government to control the masses through manipulation of society or do we as individuals want to make our own decisions how we operate within society.

OK. We New Yorkers got lucky again. Another terrorist plot failed. But once we stop breathing those proverbial sighs of relief and stop congratulating ourselves, let's ask some tough questions:

1. How did an FBI surveillance team tracking suspect Faisal Shahzad in Connecticut manage to lose him before he drove to JFK to make his get-away on an Emirates flight to Dubai? And for how long did it lose him?

2. When law-abiding citizens are having their toothpaste, tweezers, and mouth wash confiscated by over-zealous TSA airport screeners, how did Shahzad manage to board a flight, especially one bound for the Middle East, less than 24 hours after law enforcement had circulated his name and photo as someone being sought in connection with the failed bombing attempt?

3. Why did his name not come up on the TSA's notoriously problematic "no fly" list? Or on any list? And why did neither Emirates nor U.S. security personnel at JFK not double check the name and passport photo of a guy paying cash for a ticket to Dubai 53 hours after Shahzad nearly turned Times Square into what Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, describing his explosives-laden Pathfinder, called "one big Hurt Locker"?

4. Why did the 80-plus surveillance cameras at Times Square catch the image of a 40-something-year-old white guy furtively removing one shirt to reveal an underlying red one, but miss what must have been an obviously nervous Shahzad running away from his illegally parked Pathfinder, the engine still running and its hazard lights on?

5. And why has New York not invested in the sophisticated surveillance system that London uses, which as former police commissioner Bill Bratton noted today, was able to track (albeit after the fact) the movement of the Islamic militants in the deadly July 7, 2005 attack from the trains they took into London to the subways and buses they targeted?

6. On Sunday just after the failed Times Square attack, why did DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano describe the failed terrorist attack as a "one-off"? And what on earth did she mean by that?

7. Why did members of President Obama's national security team - Napolitano, Holder, and Robert Gibbs (who as press secretary seems to be an insider even on national security issues and operating way beyond his pay grade) go out of their way to avoid using the term "terrorism" to describe the failed attack until the obvious could no longer be denied? And why, to this day, has the term "Islamic" never been linked with Shahzad or his plot?

8. If Shahzad really got some terrorist training up in Waziristan, what on earth did they teach him? How to pick a fertilizer for a bomb that could not explode? How to leave your own car and house keys in the ignition of the vehicle you intend to blow up in Times Square? And how can Washington ensure that all aspiring terrorists enroll in such classes?

9. But seriously and most important - when, where, why, and how was Faisal Shahzad radicalized? How did a happy-go-lucky Faceook guy, married with two kids and apparently doing OK in America, go from watching "Everyone Loves Raymond" - listed as one of his favorite TV shows - to Peshawar for terrorist training and back to Times Square to kill his fellow Americans? Was he radicalized during his stay in Pakistan by the steady stream of deadly American drone attacks on Muslim extremists as some newspapers are now suggesting? Or, more likely and as some of his neighbors have alleged, was he already withdrawing from society and being radicalized in Shelton, or Bridgeport, Connecticut?

10. Finally, as former deputy police commissioner Michael Sheehan has asked, if "home-grown" radicalization is the challenge we believe it to be, why have local police forces in areas with large clusters of young Muslim residents - yes, in Connecticut and New Jersey and Rhode Island -- not mimicked the NYPD by investing at least SOME resources in trying to spot radicalized, potentially dangerous people and prevent terrorist organizations from establishing a presence in their communities? This is not rocket science. As Sheehan argues, we know how to do this.

Until we know the answers to these and other vexing questions surrounding our latest terrorist near-miss, self-congratulation is, to say the least, premature. Let's remember that Faisal Shahzad alleged deadly plot failed not because America's law enforcement and homeland defense systems are effective, but because he was incompetent.

Last Saturday, Americans were again instructed on their political manners by their Moralizer in Chief.

While delivering a commencement address to the University of Michigan's graduating students, President Barack Obama's comments were really meant for the nation's political class. His speech dealt with the importance of "a basic level of civility in our public debate."

"We cannot expect to solve our problems if all we do is tear each other down," Mr. Obama said. He spoke against "demonizing" political opponents or "questioning their motives or their patriotism."

It is "not the hurt feelings or the bruised egos" such rhetoric causes that's problematic, the president assured us. No, this "kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric" discourages "compromise . . . undermines democratic deliberation. . . robs us of a rational and serious debate." It can even "send signals" that "violence is a justifiable response." There is a need in politics, as the president said, to "treat others as you would like to be treated, with courtesy and respect."

A lot is right with those words. But there's a lot wrong with them coming from Mr. Obama, who is contributing to the "slash and burn politics" he preaches against.

If Mr. Obama is serious about his commitment to courtesy and respect, then he will need to demonstrate presidential leadership and rein in the verbal excesses of the leaders of his own party. He could start by having a conversation with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who condemned those with different views on health care as being "un-American." He might also share a word with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who recently accused Republicans of being "anti-American" and wanting to continue to "make love to Wall Street" by pressing for changes in a bill regulating the financial industry.

Mr. Obama can give friendly counsel to the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who authorized a fund-raising email calling conservatives "reptiles" and "fire-breathing tea party nut jobs." Was this in the spirit of "courtesy and respect" Mr. Obama says is vital to our democracy?

Maybe Mr. Obama should sit down with Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, who grabbed public attention when he said "Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick," told former Vice President Dick Cheney to "STFU," and accused Republicans of "being foot dragging, knuckle dragging Neanderthals" who lacked "a conscience." Even a mild White House rebuke of this Democratic backbencher would have helped establish a better tone in Washington.

Mr. Obama should also visit with his White House staff, starting with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. The acerbic Alabamian told reporters that when it came to dealing with BP on the oil disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, the administration would "keep the boot on their throat."

And since Mr. Gibbs credited Interior Secretary Ken Salazar with the memorable phrase, the president should call in his otherwise mild-mannered Interior secretary for a talk about treating people with "courtesy and respect," especially in a moment of crisis.

For a man who is enormously self-aware, Mr. Obama could also use a little bit more self-awareness. He should consider how powerful-and inappropriate-a model he sets by his own frequent coarse and uncivil language.

For example, last week Mr. Obama suggested that Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell was "cynical and deceptive" in arguing that the administration's financial regulation bill would allow more bailouts "when he knows that it would do just the opposite." Does implying the Senate GOP leader is a hypocrite and a liar make reaching compromise easier?

Mr. Obama even draws on the Bible for political attacks. In a teleconference with religious groups supporting health-care reform, he accused opponents of the legislation of "bearing false witness." Or take last September when, in a health-care speech to Congress, the president-in a single paragraph-accused his critics of spreading "bogus claims" and "lies" and of being "cynical" and "irresponsible."

Even if you believe, as the president does, that the concerns of his critics are wrong, why use such sulfuric rhetoric? This is not the kind of thing the president's predecessor, his predecessor's father or President Ronald Reagan did or would allow their staff to routinely do.

If Mr. Obama wants his Ann Arbor words to be taken seriously, then he needs to rein in his party, his staff and himself. Presidential leadership matters as much as presidential words, perhaps more. Mr. Obama should back up his inspiring call to civility with action.

It took Faisal Shahzad trying to set a car bomb in Times Square to get President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to finally use the word "terrorism." (And not referring to Tea Party activists!)

This is a major policy shift for a president who spent a month telling Americans not to "jump to conclusions" after Army doctor Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly jumped on a desk, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and began shooting up Fort Hood.

After last weekend, now Obama is even threatening to pronounce it "Pack-i-stan" instead of "Pock-i-stahn." We know Obama is taking terrorism seriously because he took a break from his "Hope, Change & Chuckles" tour on the comedy circuit to denounce terrorists.

In a bit of macho posturing this week, Obama declared that -- contrary to the terrorists' wishes -- Americans "will not be terrorized, we will not cower in fear, we will not be intimidated."

First of all, having the Transportation Security Administration wanding infants, taking applesauce away from 93-year-old dementia patients, and forcing all Americans to produce their shoes, computers and containers with up to 3 ounces of liquid in Ziploc bags for special screening pretty much blows that "not intimidated" look Obama wants America to adopt.

Second, it would be a little easier for the rest of us not to live in fear if the president's entire national security strategy didn't depend on average citizens happening to notice a smoldering SUV in Times Square or smoke coming from a fellow airline passenger's crotch.

But after the car bomber, the diaper bomber and the Fort Hood shooter, it has become increasingly clear that Obama's only national defense strategy is: Let's hope their bombs don't work!

If only Dr. Hasan's gun had jammed at Fort Hood, that could have been another huge foreign policy success for Obama.

The administration's fingers-crossed strategy is a follow-up to Obama's earlier and less successful "Let's Make Them Love Us!" plan.

In the past year, Obama has repeatedly apologized to Muslims for America's "mistakes."

He has apologized to Iran for President Eisenhower's taking out loon Mohammad Mossadegh, before Mossadegh turned a comparatively civilized country into a Third World hellhole. You know, like the Ayatollah has.

He has apologized to the entire Muslim world for the French and English colonizing them -- i.e. building them flush toilets.

He promised to shut down Guantanamo. And he ordered the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to be tried in the same courthouse that tried Martha Stewart.

There was also Obama's 90-degree-bow tour of the East and Middle East. For his next visit, he plans to roll on his back and have his belly scratched like Fido.

Despite favorable reviews in The New York Times, none of this put an end to Islamic terrorism.

So now, I gather, our only strategy is to hope the terrorists' bombs keep fizzling.

There's no other line of defense. In the case of the Times Square car bomber, the Department of Homeland Security failed, the Immigration and Naturalization Service failed, the CIA failed and the TSA failed. (However, the Department of Alert T-Shirt Vendors came through with flying colors, as it always does.)

Only the New York Police Department, a New York street vendor and Shahzad's Rube Goldberg bomb (I do hope he's not offended by how Jewish that sounds -- Obama can apologize) prevented a major explosion in Times Square.

Even after the NYPD de-wired the smoking car bomb, produced enough information to identify the bomb-maker, and handed it all to federal law enforcement authorities tied up in a bow, the federal government's crack "no-fly" list failed to stop Shahzad from boarding a plane to Dubai.

To be fair, at Emirates Airlines, being on a "no-fly" list makes you eligible for pre-boarding.

Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security should consider creating a "Really, REALLY No-Fly" list.

Contrary to the wild excuses being made for the federal government on all the TV networks Monday night, it's now clear that this was not a wily plan of federal investigators to allow Shahzad to board the plane in order to nab his co-conspirators. It was a flub that nearly allowed Shahzad to escape.

Meanwhile, on that same Monday at JFK airport, approximately 100,000 passengers took off their shoes, coats, belts and sunglasses for airport security.

But the "highly trained federal force" The New York Times promised us on Oct. 28, 2001, when the paper demanded that airport security be federalized, failed to stop the only guy they needed to stop at JFK last Monday -- the one who planted a bomb in the middle of Times Square days earlier.

The federal government didn't stop the diaper bomber from nearly detonating a bomb over Detroit. It didn't stop a guy on the "No Fly" list from boarding a plane and coming minutes away from getting out of the country.

If our only defense to terrorism is counting on alert civilians, how about not bothering them before they board airplanes, instead of harassing them with useless airport "security" procedures?

Both of the attempted bombers who sailed through airport security, I note, were young males of the Islamic faith. I wonder if we could develop a security plan based on that information?

And speaking of a "highly trained federal force," who's working at the INS these days? Who on earth made the decision to allow Shahzad the unparalleled privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen last year?

Our "Europeans Need Not Apply" immigration policies were absurd enough before 9/11. But after 19 foreign-born Muslims, legally admitted to the U.S., murdered 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania in a single day, couldn't we tighten up our admission policies toward people from countries still performing stonings and clitorectomies?

If America's homeland security policies were subject to truth-in-advertising laws, the "no-fly" list would be known around the world by its right and proper name: the "go-fly" list. As in: Go right ahead, jihadists, and fly our planes. All aboard, evil-doers.

While grandmas and grade-schoolers and war heroes patiently pass through a gauntlet of wands, checkpoints and screening obstacles, the nation's safety watchdogs are asleep at the wheel. They've mentally checked out at the check-in counter. And they're in over their heads at federal counterterrorism centers, where "watch list" means putting the names of dangerous operatives into massive databases - then idly watching potential bombers waltz through our airports and onto our tarmacs.

The federal no-fly scheme was bypassed or breached easily by both the Christmas Day bomb plotter and the Times Square bomb plotter. In the former case, Nigerian terror operative Umar Abdulmutallab had been on the counterterrorism radar screen for his radical jihadi threats (which had been reported by his father to U.S. embassy officials in London). But the young, single, rootless Muslim extremist with suspicious travel patterns - ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! - did not meet the standards for watch-listing and didn't even make it onto the second-tier "selectee list" of potential threats who can fly only after additional screening.

By contrast, beleaguered 8-year-old Mikey Hicks of Clifton, N.J., still can't get off the selectee list after years of ridiculous harassment while traveling on family vacations.

In the Times Square case, Team Obama immediately pointed fingers at the airline industry - and Emirates airlines, in particular - for failing to check no-fly list updates. The hindsight cops at the White House are now touting ex post facto rules mandating that the airlines check no-fly alerts every two hours instead of every 24 hours.

But law enforcement officials themselves neglected to contact all airlines directly and red-flag the addition of would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad's name to the government no-fly list. Moreover, despite paying cash for his trip to the Middle East and being listed on the Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list since 1999, Shahzad received no extra screening from the Transportation Security Administration (confirming once again the bureaucracy's own inside joke that TSA stands for "Thousands Standing Around").

The tourism industry certainly shares blame for putting travel profits ahead of national security over the years. But in this case, it was only thanks to airline industry compliance with a post-9/11 procedure requiring plane officials to send passenger manifests to the Department of Homeland Security that the feds caught up with Shahzad (whom they had lost track of in Connecticut) before he jetted off to Dubai.

President Obama has had plenty of time to address the enforcement lapses, database loopholes and technological delays of his predecessor. After the Christmas Day bombing debacle, he pledged to be proactive: "We will not rest." But to this day, TSA still doesn't check all domestic and international airline passenger manifests against the no-fly/go-fly list.

The data are only as good as the people entrusted to collect, process and use the information to protect national security. And without the ability to share and access the information across numerous agencies, the data are useless. Nearly nine years after Sept. 11, there is still no functional interoperability among an alphabet soup of national security and criminal databases - including NAILS, TECS, CLASS, VISAS VIPER, TUSCAN, TIPPIX, IBIS, CIS, APIS, SAVE, IDENT, DACS, AFIS, ENFORCE and the NCIC. The Senate raised questions about understaffed efforts to modernize some of these databases back in March. What are we waiting for? The next jihadi bombing attempt?

The warped priorities of the Obama White House imperil us all. A command-and-control government that squanders its time and our money taking over businesses it has no business running - health insurance, auto manufacturing, banking, student loans - is a government neglecting its most fundamental mandate: providing for the common defense.

Whoops! CO2 has almost nothing to do with global warming, discovers top US meteorologist

The other night I had a nightmare in which a general election was approaching and all three main competing parties had the same suicidal policy. They all believed in this thing called the Big Bad Fairy and were convinced that the only way to drive off the BBF and her evil hordes was by spending huge sums of taxpayers' money - £18 billion a year was, I believe, the figure quoted in the nightmare - and by ruining the country with ugly, spinning Fairy Towers for the bad fairy hordes to nest in.

Seriously, though, what do we do? How we can possibly stop the environmental and energy policy of our next government being based on what US meteorologist Dr Roy Spencer calls "the worst case of mass hysteria the world has known."?

Dr Spencer, formerly senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, now leads the US science team for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSRE) on NASA's Aqua satellite. He co-developed the original satellite method for precise monitoring of global temperatures from Earth-orbiting satellites. He's just the kind of egghead the IPCC claims to represent when it tells us the world is getting dangerously warmer, it's man's fault - the result of CO2 emissions - and it must be urgently addressed.

Except Dr Spencer doesn't agree with any of that. He thinks it's all nonsense, based on a very elementary error he describes in his new book The Great Global Warming Blunder. I summarise his arguments in this article.

Climate change, he shows, is an almost entirely natural process on which human influence is negligible.

Of course, sceptics have been making this point for years, arguing that the quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by man are so tiny that even if they were to double there would still be no dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

What they have been unable to answer convincingly until now, though, is the alarmists' counterargument that CO2 emissions are exaggerated by "positive feedbacks".

One type of positive feedback often cited by alarmists is cloud cover. When CO2 causes the world to warm, they argue, it reduces the number of clouds. Clouds are what help protect our planet from the burning heat of the sun, by reflecting solar radiation.

So even if the effect on climate of CO2 is relatively small, the potential knock-on effect is vast. This is why the predictions of temperature rises made by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports are so large and terrifying.

But according to Spencer, these alarmists have got completely the wrong end of the stick. The mistake they have made is to confuse cause with effect. It's not man-made global warming that is causing cloud cover to grow thinner, leading to a spiral of ever-rising temperatures. Rather, it's natural variations in cloud cover that are helping to cause global warming.

This is what's so annoying about the drivel produced by people like the Conservatives' Shadow Secretary for Energy and Climate Change Greg Clark. I mention him because the likelihood is that this ill-informed buffoon will, this time next week, be in charge of arguably the most important sector of our economy: making decisions on how we power our industry, how much our utility bills are inflated through "green taxes", how much money we waste on windfarms, and so on.

Yet this man's entire ecological world view - his Weltanschauung, if you prefer, because I know how much some of you love it when I come over all German on you - is based on an urban myth.

I'm not necessarily saying "Don't vote Conservative?" But "Don't vote Greg Clark" might be a good start.

PS Telegraph blogs has been having a bit of trouble with the system, so you may need to be patient trying to get your comments in. My guess is that the trolls will be unusually active on this post, and that one of the things they'll rush gleefully to point out is that Roy Spencer is a proponent of Intelligent Design. As if, somehow, that killer fact is so damning it utterly nullifies Dr Spencer's meteorological expertise.

Adam Bustos, a third-generation Mexican-American, has voted Republican since Ronald Reagan ran for president. But he has been reconsidering his party affiliation since Arizona State Gov. Jan Brewer signed the nation’s toughest immigration law last month.

“I’ve been thinking I might leave the party,” said Mr. Bustos, a 58-year-old Arizona native. “A lot of my Latino Republican friends have been talking about it after this law.”

The new Arizona law requires police to question people whom they suspect are in the U.S. illegally. Supporters say the law is necessary to combat rampant illegal border crossings. Opponents say it can’t be enforced without violating civil liberties.

Many Hispanic-Americans say they feel stung by a law they allege invites racial profiling, incites hatred and discriminates against all Latinos.

The law in Arizona was passed by a Republican legislature and signed by a GOP governor. Republican lawmakers in Texas, Utah and several other states have said they would consider introducing laws similar to the one passed in Arizona.

Conservative Hispanic voters, in particular, say they feel betrayed by Republican Party leaders who have supported the law.

<snip>But even some of the most conservative Latinos were jolted by the Arizona law. Deedee Blase, a Mexican-American resident of Phoenix who served in the Air Force, said she favored tighter border security and a conservative political and economic agenda. “Now I feel like we are living in the 1960s, and Arizona is the new Alabama,” she said.

Ms. Blase last year helped found a group called “Somos Republicans,” which translates to “We Are Republicans.” The goal was to raise support for Republicans among fellow Hispanic voters. In a letter urging Gov. Brewer not to sign the bill into law, the group described it as “a direct slap in the face to Hispanic-Americans.”

The widespread rumors of a government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have already had dramatic consequences, perhaps creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Iain Dey and Dominic Rushe, writing for The Times of London, note that, "The two companies lost almost half their market value last week as rumours of a government bail-out swept the stock markets, hammering share prices around the world."

Today they own or guarantee about half of the country's $12 trillion in mortgage debt, so the free fall of their share prices last week amid concerns that they were undercapitalized has created chaos for Wall Street and Washington.

The dominant role Fannie and Freddie play today is no accident. The companies, Wall Street firms, mortgage bankers, real estate agents and Washington lawmakers have built up an unusual and mutually beneficial co-dependency, helped along by robust lobbying efforts and campaign contributions. In Washington, Fannie and Freddie's sprawling lobbying machine hired family and friends of politicians in their efforts to quickly sideline any regulations that might slow their growth or invite greater oversight of their business practices. Indeed, their rapid expansion was, at least in part, the result of such artful lobbying over the years. And as Fannie and Freddie grew, so did the fortunes of Wall Street, which reaped rich fees from issuing debt for the two companies, as well as the mortgage and housing industries, which banked billions of dollars as the housing market boomed.

UCLA business law professor Steve Bainbridge has been warning about this for years, too. He points to some analysis from LAT Market Beat columnist Tom Petruno:

[I]t is triggering worries that would have been unthinkable even a year ago - including that the U.S. Treasury's debt might lose its AAA credit grade because of heavy blows to the nation's fiscal health from the housing mess.

[...]

Because of their size and importance to the mortgage market, it's inconceivable that Fannie and Freddie would be allowed to fail. But an outright takeover of the companies by the government, as some experts have suggested, could frighten foreign investors - who are big lenders to the Treasury - by, in effect, adding the companies' $5-trillion debt load to the Treasury's massive debt of $9.5 trillion. Nationalizing the companies "would put the full faith and credit of the Treasury at risk," [Allen] Sinai [of Decision Economics] said. "It would make foreign investors think hard about buying U.S. Treasury debt."

Bainbridge sees a "worst case scenario" in which "Foreigners abandon the dollar for the euro, dumping treasuries. The collapse of foreign investment in Treasuries makes our massive current account deficit unsustainable. At which point, things really go to pot. " Uh-oh, indeed.

What's not clear to me, even in the case of a government absorption of Fannie and Freddie, is why we'd add an additional $5 trillion in "debt" by so doing. Sure, we'd be adding some unknown amount of risk. But, presumably, the overwhelming majority of people will be paying back their home loans. So, isn't most of that $5 trillion, then, an asset?

[As an addendum, FNMA and FHLMC now own 96% of America’s mortgages, just 2 years later, and there are no constraints upon their lending practices or on their executive pay, even though these are essentially governmental agencies.]

In late 2004, the leadership of the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA or Fannie Mae) was accused of having engaged in a series of questionable accounting practices that led to an overstatement of its earnings and an understatement of its risk. Although Fannie Mae's top officers denied the accusations, a careful review by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed the allegations. Within a few weeks, Fannie Mae conceded the charges and its top officers were forced to resign. Any doubts about the seriousness of the company's shaky finances were laid to rest on January 19, 2005, when Fannie Mae cut its dividend in half to bolster its cash reserves.

Since then, Congress has held a series of hearings on Fannie Mae's predicament and how to reform it. In the last week of May 2005, the House Committee on Financial Services proposed a series of regulatory changes that it claims would rectify the problem. However, critics of the FNMA, many of its private-sector competitors, and White House officials con-tend that these proposals are too timid and that the new regulatory environment would sustain the pow-erful co-monopolistic position that it shares with the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC or Freddie Mac), which suffered its own accounting and ethical lapses in 2003.

A better and more effective alternative is to phase out their generous federal credit privileges, allowing these financial giants time to adjust to a more compet-itive environment. To implement this orderly with-drawal of federal support, Congress should:

Phase out Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's lines of credit with the U.S. Treasury over five years in annual increments of $500 million for each government-sponsored enterprise (GSE),

Conduct an orderly reduction in their holdings of residential mortgages (the profits from these investments depend largely on their ability to borrow at subsidized rates) and

Concentrate their skilled workforces on secu-ritizing residential mortgages in fair and open competition with the private sector.

These legislative changes would greatly reduce the risk to financial markets and taxpayer expo-sure. They would also restore competition in resi-dential mortgage markets while leaving the housing industry and homeownership opportuni-ties unaffected.

While Members of the 109th Congress are to be commended for taking on these two political pow-erhouses, the legislative package reported out by the House Committee on Financial Services in late May 2005 (H.R. 1461) falls short of what is needed. It will do little to address the fundamental prob-lems associated with these federally supported financial monopolies that provide limited benefit to the housing finance market or homeownership opportunities.

Notwithstanding press reports that the new leg-islation would "create a new more powerful regula-tor for financial services giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,"[1] some GSE reform advocates and Bush Administration officials view it as too weak and contend that the new regulatory system is less restrictive than the current one.[2] In addition, the new proposal would require Fannie Mae and Fred-die Mac to use 5 percent of their profits to fund "affordable " housing programs. This is a clumsy and costly effort to contrive a public purpose for these enterprises, which have long outlived any justification for the valuable privileges that they receive from the federal government.

The failure of Congress to address these broader issues stems from a flawed reform process that focused on Fannie Mae's Enron-like behavior instead of the statutory privileges that have allowed it to amass enormous market power. Together, these two GSEs control half of the residential mort-gage market, deterring competition and forcing the housing and housing finance markets to rely on two financially unstable co-monopolists. With such market power concentrated in the hands of only two companies, the stability of U.S. financial markets could be undermined by financial prob-lems in just one of them. Of course, if a bailout ever becomes necessary, the taxpayers could end up paying the bill.

In recent years, there have been a number of pro-posals to reform these GSEs. Some involve more regulation, others urge the creation of more GSEs to foster competition among government-subsidized entities, and still others would eliminate the statu-tory privileges that tie the GSEs to the taxpayer.

New regulations have attracted the most sup-port, but this could turn out to be a useless and counterproductive approach. If the GSEs provide little or no benefit to society-beyond enriching their leaders and the various contractors who serve them-there is little point in trying to limit their risk with regulations and expose the taxpayers to a costly bailout. The co-monopolists would likely survive and thrive under a regulatory solution that would preserve the unhealthy concentration of risk, privilege, and power in the two companies.

Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have proven exceptionally adept at lobbying Congress to pre-serve and enhance their privileges. Any effort that relies on new regulations will likely perpetuate the risk to the financial market and preserve their dom-inant influence. Indeed, if Armando Falcon, direc-tor of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), had not courageously per-sisted in exposing Fannie Mae's suspect operations, often in the face of congressional hostility, former Fannie Mae President Franklin Raines would still have his job and Fannie Mae's shaky finances and fabricated earnings would still be hidden.

Instead of adopting compromise regulations, the government should begin an orderly process of severing all ties with the GSEs. Their most valuable federal privileges are their $2.25 billion lines of credit (for a total of $4.5 billion) with the U.S. Trea-sury and the Federal Reserve's authority to buy their debt as part of its open market operations. These privileges allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to claim an implicit federal guarantee of their outstanding obligations, which in turn makes them a popular investment for many major institutions, pension funds, and even foreign central banks. By lowering their borrowing costs and giving them access to subsidized credit, this implicit guarantee has allowed them to outcompete their private-sec-tor rivals and establish a monopoly presence in the financial markets.

Fannie Mae was created in 1936 during the Great Depression to provide a secondary market to encourage greater use of the innovative long-term, fixed-rate, level-payment, fully amortized mort-gages that the newly created Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was insuring against loss of principal and interest. The exercise was a success, and this type of innovative mortgage became the standard means of financing the postwar housing boom that raised the homeownership rate from 44 percent in 1940 to 69 percent by 2004.[3]

By the 1970s, the basic purpose of the GSEs had shifted to the role of adding more funds to the hous-ing market by connecting prospective homebuyers with major capital markets. To accomplish this goal, the GSEs use their preferred credit rating to borrow in major financial markets and use the funds raised to acquire residential mortgages from brokers and other mortgage originators, earning profits and cov-ering expenses on the difference in the interest rates earned and paid. The GSEs also package mortgages acquired from originators into "pass through" secu-rities that are collateralized with qualified residen-tial mortgages. Payments of principal and interest made by the homeowners are then "passed through" to the investors holding the securities.

Over much of this period, Fannie Mae and the federal government were minor players in the pro-cess. By 1965, the homeownership rate had risen to 63 percent, but Fannie Mae and the other sources of federal mortgage credit support accounted for only 6 percent of outstanding residential mort-gages.[4] Savings and loan associations, savings and commercial banks, and life insurance companies accounted for most of the rest.[5]

Fannie Mae was restructured as a federally char-tered corporation in 1968, and its shares were sold to the public a year later. Initially, Fannie Mae was limited to investing in residential mortgages insured by the FHA or guaranteed by the Veterans Administration so as to maintain its public purpose of assisting entry-level homebuyers.

A few years after Fannie Mae's "privatization," Congress authorized the creation of another gov-ernment-sponsored mortgage credit facility, Fred-die Mac, as a federally chartered corporation to provide a secondary market for the conventional mortgages written by savings and loans and other lenders and brokers. Over time, the mandates guiding the FNMA and FHLMC were liberalized, and the scope of their activity was expanded sub-stantially to the point that they and the other fed-eral housing finance programs now account for more than half the residential mortgage market in the United States.

Although structured as private companies, both the FNMA and the FHLMC operate with valuable federal privileges that give them a significant com-petitive advantage over other participants in the housing finance market. In particular, they are exempt from state and local income taxes; more important, they have exclusive access to lines of credit from the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Federal Reserve System. Under current law, each is permit-ted to borrow up to $2.25 billion from the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve is authorized to purchase their debt as part of any "open market operation." Although neither of these privileges has ever been requested, the fact that the federal government is authorized to assist these GSEs is interpreted by investors as an implied federal guarantee of their debt, and this interpretation allows them to borrow at interest rates well below those paid by private companies with the best credit ratings and only slightly higher than what the Treasury pays on its own full faith and credit debt.

As quasi-private companies obligated to enrich their shareholders with ever-increasing earnings and dividends, and operating with an implicit fed-eral interest rate subsidy as well as a federal man-date to promote homeownership, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had every reason and opportunity to grow rapidly. By the 1980s and early 1990s, they dominated the housing finance market. By parlay-ing their subsidized borrowing advantage into lower-rate mortgage lending, they gradually pushed life insurance companies and commercial banks out of the less profitable residential mortgage market and squeezed the earnings of the already wobbly savings and loans, which by law could invest only in residential mortgages. While homebuyers benefited from slightly lower borrowing costs, financial mar-kets were put at greater risk as more and more of the housing finance system was concentrated in the hands of two highly leveraged, unsupervised, feder-ally chartered financial institutions.

Many policymakers soon recognized the risk to financial markets posed by such a concentration of market share. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fannie Mae made a bad bet on interest rate trends that left the institution technically insolvent as its net worth briefly turned negative, raising fears of a financial collapse. Fannie Mae later recovered when the Federal Reserve's monetary policy of the early 1980s led to dramatic declines in market interest rates, restoring the value of Fannie Mae's loan portfolio.

After implementing new financial controls and investment practices, Fannie Mae came out of its near-death experience as a better-managed opera-tion. Nonetheless, the possibility that it might fail could disrupt financial markets in general and mortgage markets in particular. This, in turn, led to calls to limit its size, scope, and privileges.

In response to growing concern and criticism, Fannie Mae adopted an aggressive public relations program that was quickly copied by the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) and Freddie Mac, the other housing-related GSEs. With executive pay, bonuses, expense accounts, and other top manage-ment perks, and by promoting its stock to Wall Street analysts, Fannie Mae presents itself to inves-tors as a hard-charging, profit-minded growth company.

Wall Street brokerage firms and investment banks earn more than $100 million in fees annually from the issuance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt instruments and mortgage-backed securities.[6] Wall Street returns the favor with enthusiastic endorsements of their role in the economy and financial markets. However, when protecting itself against the few congressional reformers and mar-ketplace competitors and selling its debt to foreign central banks at favorable interest rates, Fannie Mae poses as a public-purpose government entity that helps America's disadvantaged to become homeowners.

As part of this effort to garner influence, Fannie Mae has hired lobbyists by the score and created the Fannie Mae Foundation, which over the past five years has pumped $500 million into highly vis-ible and heavily promoted local projects and grants.[7] In the process of spreading its message, every interest group is cultivated.

Even America's college professors became objects of Fannie Mae's affection when it created and financed two academic journals-Housing Pol-icy Debate and Journal of Housing Research-that focus (with a notable exception) on a wide range of housing issues. The exception is that both journals generally avoid discussing the GSEs' role in the mortgage market and whether they make much of a difference. With many professors still confronting a publish-or-perish environment in pursuit of ten-ure and promotion, common sense argues against irritating a wealthy and influential publisher. As a result, academia has not been a reliable source of dispassionate inquiry into the GSEs' role in Amer-ica's housing market.

However, independent analysts have looked into the matter and have found little evidence that the FNMA, FMLMC, and FHLB make much of a differ-ence in how many new homes are built or how many Americans become homeowners. In fact, a broad review of the evidence accumulated in the postwar era suggests that their impact on home-ownership is inconsequential.

Specifically, in 1965, when the GSE presence in the mortgage market was slightly above 6 percent, America's homeownership rate was 63.3 percent. In 1990, after outstanding residential mortgage credit had expanded more than tenfold from $220.8 billion in 1965 to $2.6 trillion in 1990 and after the federal and GSE presence in the residential mortgage market had grown from 6 percent in 1965 to 48 percent in 1990, America's homeown-ership rate was at 63.9 percent-virtually identical to the rate 25 years earlier. Expressed another way, the $1.24 trillion increase in federal and GSE involvement in the mortgage market was associated with an increase of less than 0.6 percentage points in the homeownership rate.[8]

In this regard, it is worth noting that America's greatest surge in homeownership took place between 1946 and 1960, when homeownership jumped from the mid-40 percent range at the end of World War II to 62 percent in 1960, when the FNMA's activity was still limited and the FHLMC did not yet exist.

From 1990 to 2003, GSE involvement in out-standing mortgage credit expanded substantially, from $1.0 trillion in mortgages in 1990 to $3.4 tril-lion in 2003. During the same 13 years, total out-standing residential mortgage loans increased almost threefold, from $2.6 trillion to $7.3 tril-lion,[9] and the homeownership rate increased from almost 64 percent in 1990 to 68 percent in 2003.

However, this does not mean the GSEs finally made a difference. Credit instead goes to the Fed-eral Reserve's anti-inflation, pro-growth monetary policies, which drove down the AAA corporate bond rate from 9.32 percent in 1990 to 5.67 per-cent in 2003 and the home mortgage rate from 10.05 percent in 1990 to 5.80 percent in 2003. With the mortgage rate falling to half of its peak level, housing demand soared as monthly mortgage payments fell accordingly. Housing markets in the 1990s also benefited from the significant rise in employment and incomes over the decade, which allowed more families to accumulate the money for a down payment and qualify for a mortgage. As a consequence of these favorable macroeconomic developments, homeownership rose to record lev-els, independent of anything Fannie Mae and Fred-die Mac did over the same period.

While these anecdotes are less than perfect proof of FNMA ineffectiveness, more comprehensive studies by the Federal Reserve Board and the Con-gressional Budget Office have come to similar con-clusions. In 2003, Wayne Passmore, a Federal Reserve economist, wrote that "the GSE's implicit subsidy does not appear to have substantially increased home-ownership or homebuilding" and argued that the GSE's activity slightly lowered mortgage rates for some homeowners.[10] More recently, an article in the prestigious Journal of Eco-nomic Perspectives contends that "it does not appear that the companies' activities have appreciably affected the rate of homeownership in the United States" and cites several other studies that support that view.[11]

One reason for the tenuous connection between a general increase in mortgage credit and increased homeownership is that beyond some point, an increase in mortgage credit availability mostly makes itself felt in higher loan-to-value ratios (lower down payments), higher home prices, and/ or a diversion of mortgage credit to non-housing investments. As the early postwar record indicates, existing private credit markets were perfectly capa-ble of driving the homeownership rate into the mid-60 percent range. However, as more credit is forced into the system through the creation and expansion of subsidized GSEs, mortgage interest rates may fall somewhat, but this encourages pri-vate financial institutions that provide housing credit to look elsewhere for investments with better yields. While the slightly lower interest rates encourage and/or allow some moderate-income borrowers on the margin of eligibility to become homeowners, this stimulative effect may be partly or wholly offset by a credit-induced rise in home prices in excess of the growth in personal incomes.

While finding ways to assist the marginal buyer to become a homeowner has been one of the fed-eral government's important public policy goals for much of the postwar era, relying on the GSEs to help achieve that goal is not an effective way to boost homeownership. As currently configured, the GSEs do not target the loans of marginal buyers but rather provide secondary market support to qualifying or conforming mortgages, most of which are secured by property owned by middle-income and higher-income households that are capable of buying and borrowing without federally sponsored support.

Despite its claims to the contrary, Fannie Mae's basic operating procedures do not target any partic-ular type of buyer/borrower. Indeed, evidence from the federal government indicates that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in fact neglecting first-time homebuyers in comparison to the entire private conventional mortgage market. Between 1999 and 2003, 9.0 percent of the conventional conforming loans (the type the GSEs are authorized to buy) made by the private mortgage market were to first-time minority homebuyers. By contrast, only 4.7 percent of Fannie Mae loans and 3.5 percent of Freddie Mac loans over the same period were to first-time minority homebuyers.[12]

Although one could give Fannie Mae the benefit of the doubt and view this failing as simply one of neglect, other actions by Fannie Mae in late 2004 and early 2005 suggest both that the neglect may be willful and that it reflects the company's bias against prospective lower-income, entry-level homebuyers. In January 2005, coalitions of low-income housing advocacy groups[13] published reports that chal-lenged the value of policies promoting and encour-aging homeownership among poor and moderate-income neighborhoods, arguing that homeowner "benefits may have been overstated" and that "rent-als, public housing and other options may make better economic sense."[14] Although these organiza-tions had previously published a number of papers and reports expressing skepticism about the value of homeownership, the two most recent reports, published in January 2005, were funded by the Fannie Mae Foundation.[15]

Suspiciously, the release of these anti-homeown-ership reports by the Fannie Mae-assisted advocacy groups was followed one month later by the release of a new rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to improve mortgage availability to minority and moderate-income-buyers. In effect, while Fannie Mae was conducting a massive and costly public relations campaign to present itself as the benefactor of moderate-income and minority homebuyers, it was funding studies that under-mined that very goal. In a town awash with insin-cerity, the ambidexterity of Fannie Mae's principles is in a class by itself.

As for the GSEs' ultimate value, competitive improvements in the residential mortgage market have further undermined the connection between mortgage credit and homeownership as the avail-ability of second mortgages on attractive terms and the refinancing of existing first mortgages, com-bined with the provisions of federal tax law, have encouraged the redirection of mortgage credit to non-real estate purchases. With mortgage interest payments still deductible from income for state and federal tax purposes, more and more households use mortgage credit obtained through a mortgage refinancing to buy a car, conduct home improve-ments, consolidate personal debt, or pay for a col-lege education because the interest payment that would otherwise be incurred on debt accumulated directly for these reasons-such as a car loan from a dealer or a student loan from a bank-is not tax-deductible. In part, this privileged use of debt, combined with substantial home price inflation, explains why outstanding residential mortgage credit has nearly tripled since 1990 while housing production and homeownership have expanded at a much slower pace.

With little compelling evidence to indicate that four and a half decades of intrusive GSE activity has made much of a difference in homeownership rates, housing production, or helping the marginal buyer to become a homeowner, one has to wonder whether the costs and risks associated with these enterprises are justified.

Regrettably, from the extensive discussions, hear-ings, proposals, and counterproposals, it appears that Congress and the White House gave little thought to asking whether these entities should exist in the first place or why these for-profit entities should continue to enjoy the extraordinary federal privileges that allow them to maintain their monop-oly status at the potential expense of the taxpayers.

The evidence reveals that Fannie Mae's manage-ment team appears to be the chief beneficiary of the federal privileges and the accounting irregularities that were recently uncovered. For example, in 2003, 749 members of Fannie Mae's management team received a staggering $65.1 million in bonuses, a portion of which was attributable to the overstated earnings that followed from the account-ing irregularities.[16] Over the past five years, the top 20 Fannie Mae executives reportedly received com-bined bonuses of $245 million.[17] This disconnect between reward and mission suggests that any rec-onciliation with the Securities and Exchange Com-mission should also require that the FNMA's management return their bonuses to a fund admin-istered by a bona fide not-for-profit entity, such as Habitat for Humanity, for the purpose of assisting prospective homebuyers of modest means.

Although management's unearned bonuses have generated most of the headlines, the real cost to the nation is not the tawdry looting of the company by its top management team. The real problem is the concentration of risk in the hands of two massive and privileged companies that now dominate America's housing finance markets.

Ironically, Fannie Mae's management has attempted to use the prospect of such risk to pro-tect itself from better government oversight. In response to the U.S. Treasury's effort to improve oversight, former FNMA President Frank Raines admitted in a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow that financial market instability could occur if even the slightest concern about the FNMA's operations were openly discussed: "From the beginning of our discussions, you and I have agreed to avoid disrupting the capital markets by indicating a wish to change Fannie Mae's charter, status, or mission."[18]

Lest one think that such an occurrence would be a distant possibility, the record reveals that federally sponsored financial institutions, including those that the federal government closely regulates and insures, have a knack of frequently exploding in hugely horrific and costly ways. Since the mid-1980s, massive losses have occurred in the federal Farm Credit System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. Worse, the heavily regu-lated and supposedly closely supervised savings and loan industry collapsed more than a decade ago, and repairing the residual damage cost the U.S. taxpayers $130 billion.

Ideas have consequences, as the saying goes, but the process is seldom instantaneous. In June 1990, echoing earlier HUD recommendations, a Heritage Foundation research fellow recommended that Fannie Mae "[c]ease payment of dividends to share-holders, so that all earnings can be applied to reserve accumulation."[19] In January 2005, nearly a decade and a half later, amidst the worst financial scandal in the company's history, Fannie Mae announced that it would cut its dividend in half.

To date, the Bush Administration, through the leadership at the U.S. Treasury and OFHEO, has done an excellent job of exposing the corruption in the GSEs and setting in motion an effective process of improvement. In both the FHLMC and the FNMA, problematic leadership has been forced to resign and the companies' boards of directors have been required to make overdue changes in corpo-rate governance. The January 2005 FNMA agree-ment to cut its dividend to build reserves will add stability to the system.

But much more needs to be done, and most of the responsibility will fall on Congress because the laws governing the GSEs are flawed and need to be changed. The proposals endorsed by the House Committee on Financial Services do not go nearly far enough, and the White House has expressed concern with the timid reform package under consideration.

Enhanced regulations have attracted the most support, and the House Committee on Financial Services has proposed changes in how the GSEs are regulated, but a regulatory approach to GSE prob-lems could easily become useless and counterpro-ductive. With substantial evidence suggesting that the GSEs provide little or no benefit to society, try-ing to prop them up with new regulations makes lit-tle sense. The latest congressional strategy essentially compels taxpayers to bear the risk of a new regulatory regime that would perpetuate the commanding market position of these ineffective co-monopolists.

However, the greater risk is not that additional regulation of the GSEs will render them merely useless, but that it will render them both useless and dangerous. As past practices reveal, it is likely that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will soon co-opt the regulators as they have done so adeptly in the past. The Fannie Mae Foundation's $500 million of goodwill spending will buy the company helpful and influential supporters by the trainload. One merely needs to read the transcript of a recent con-gressional hearing for a sense of the loyal following that Fannie Mae has assembled in Congress.[20]

To correct the situation, Congress should:

End all of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's federal privileges. It would be better for all if the government began an orderly process of severing all of its ties with the GSEs invested in the residential mortgage market.

Immediately eliminate the Federal Reserve's authority to buy their debt as part of its open market operations.

Phase out their U.S. Treasury credit lines over five years. Phasing out Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's $2.25 billion credit lines with the U.S. Treasury in annual increments of $500 million would give them the opportunity to reduce their holdings of residential mortgages in an orderly manner. The profits from these investments depend largely on their ability to borrow at subsidized rates. This plan would also leave them with skilled workforces that could then concentrate on securing residential mortgages in fair and open competition with new entrants from the private sector, which would be attracted to the market by the level playing field.

Limit diversification until privatization is complete. In the event that the GSEs choose to use the opportunity to reform themselves by diversifying their investment portfolios beyond the residential mortgage market, such diversifi-cation should be contingent upon the immedi-ate termination of these privileges to avoid the cross-subsidization of new lines of business by federally supported profits, as occurred during the recent de-federalization of Sallie Mae (the Student Loan Marketing Corporation).

Congress has an opportunity to reduce financial market risk and taxpayer exposure and to restore competition in the residential mortgage market. At the same time, the housing industry and home-ownership opportunity will remain unaffected.

Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association - FNMA) and Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation - FHLMC) are without a doubt the leading economic story in the US over the past month.

* Role: supply funding to banks in order to provide mortgages to the public (called the secondary mortgage market).

* A GSE (federal Government Sponsored Enterprise). As such, FNMA has had an implicit guarantee backed by the US Federal Gov't.

Fannie & Freddie are at risk of going under. Freddie had net worth of -$5.2B at the end of 1Q 2008 (yes, a negative net worth). Their stock has been pummeled because of recently discovered business practices and poor balance sheets (insolvent). This is a huge issue for the US economy since approximately half US mortgages are funded with Fannie & Freddie funds. Indeed, the 2 organizations guarantee $5.2T in mortgage bonds. As of the date of this article (July 28 `08), FNMA's trailing 1 year stock price has fluctuated from 6.68 - 70.57. Freddie's stock price has been in the range: 3.89 - 67.20 (see diagram). Both stocks are trading near their bottoms. Our clients have not held asset-backed bond funds since last summer - avoiding these huge losses.

Although the GSEs had $5.2T in debt, they only had approx $83B in core assets. This represents a leverage / gearing ratio of 65 to 1. This kind of ratio would never be permitted in a commercial bank with AAA credit ratings.

In order to propose an intelligent solution to the problem, one needs to understand the unique situation for Fannie & Freddie. These institutions have been permitted to run amok with tax-payers on the hook - for years. It has been said that the profits were privatized and the risks socialized. This is true in that a large portion of the profits went to share-holders of the companies, but because of an implicit guarantee by the federal government - shareholders knew they would have something of a backstop. Now there is an explicit guarantee being offered by the Federal government in supporting Fannie & Freddie.

Be angry with regulators. While Fannie & Freddie were operating a printing press of profits, they were paying the top 5 Sr. Mgrs $199M combined in 1998 through 2003. To ensure a continued gravy train, top executives paid lobbyists to protect their turf from regulators. The same management would still be pillaging if they were not fired in 2003/2004 for accounting scandals.

Had Fannie & Freddie been allowed to become insolvent and fail (default on debt), foreign investors would bolt from the US bond market - including purchasing US government debt. Since the US federal government continues to finance its budget with foreign capital (living beyond our collective means), we could well have seen the US dollar in a free-fall since no one would be buying our bonds. This in-turn would put pressure on the government to raise interest rates offered on bonds - the opposite to what is needed to stop a recession or depression from occurring.

Because bonds issued by Fannie & Freddie had previously not been explicitly guaranteed by the US government, they paid higher interest rates than treasuries. Fannie & Freddie bonds (like other GSEs) still pay higher interest rates than treasuries, but now they are both explicitly guaranteed by the federal government. Some say this is a free lunch and an opportunity to be paid a higher interest rate for the same risk. Treasuries and bonds from Fannie & Freddie may have similar risk (of default), but you have to be able to withstand the volatile price swings in Fannie & Freddie's bonds. As a result, we're sitting on the fence for another month or two before we start buying mortgage-backed bond funds from a GSE.

• expand business decisions made by government bureaucrats and reduce the number of business decisions made by businesspeople

• remove more of health care from the private sector and put it into the government sector

• place a 15% to 20% carbon sales tax on gas and electric that will hit every American

• all but abolish private lending to students and replace it entirely with government lending

• limiting executive compensation at companies that receive bail-out money, thereby driving the best managers to companies not subject to such limits*

• leaving the credit markets in a state of constant uncertainty by not coming forth with a plan to normalize them

• ignoring a federal law that prohibits FNMA and FHLMC from lending more than 80% of the value of a home without private mortgage insurance; now they have to make loans of up to 105% of of value without private mortgage insurance, in other words, worse subprime loans than the FNMA ar FHLMC ever made before

From the article: “Obama is deliberately trying to cause a prolonged and deep depression” here:

Aaron Klein recently published the book, The Manchurian President, subtitled Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists. He submitted this book to a number of book reviewers and got these responses:

"Never, ever contact me again," wrote Time Magazine senior writer Jeffrey Kluger.

Newsweek deputy editor Rana Foroohar quipped,"This is sensational rubbish that is of no interest to any legitimate publication."

"Absolute crap," replied Evelyn Leopold, a Huffington Post contributor who served for 17 years as U.N. bureau chief for Reuters until recently.

Nancy Gibbs, editor-at-large for Newsweek, fired, "Remove me from your list."

David Knowles, AOL's political writer, responded, "seriously, get a life."

Ben Wyskida, publicity director for The Nation, claimed Klein's book is "so offensive" and "so far afield."

I personally recall when the movie Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed, my sister-in-law, who sends out a mass email every decade or so, sent out a mass email recommending this movie.

However, the reviews were equally fascinating to me. Those who reviewed the movie, gave it one of the lowest ratings in the history of movies. However, At the Movies refused to review this movie publically and they refused to list it as one of the top 10 worst films of that year, even though, ratings-wise, it was rated as one of the worst films of all time.

What was the problem? They simply did not like the content of the movie (which I thought was quite good).

How do you explain that this movie has no one giving it 2 or 3 stars? How is it possible to hate or love the movie only?

Liberals, who make up most of the profession movie and book reviewers, are unable to objectively revi a movie with which they disagree. If you go to www.rottentomatoes.com you will find that this movie is pretty much the worst movie of all time, according to the professional reviewers.

So it appears to be the case with The Manchurian President, which obviously attaches the President to some of the most radical thinking of our time. However, those who will review this book admit that it is thoroughly researched and filled with quotes attributed to real sources.

Barack Obama's presidency has not lacked for crises. But the two that have dominated this week -- a spreading environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a failed car bombing that narrowly missed creating carnage in Times Square -- have produced a delicate challenge of management and message at a moment when the country's mistrust of government is running high.

The particulars of the two situations, which are 1,200 miles apart, could hardly be more different. Yet the crises present some of the same questions for the president and his team: How can they convey a sense that they are on top of a rapidly changing situation? Must they set aside other business on their agenda to reassure the public that they are fully engaged, or does that make them look rattled? Which words must be said -- and which avoided?

There have been times when you could practically hear the gears grinding as administration officials dodged the potholes appearing before them. As questions were raised about whether they recognized the danger in the gulf quickly enough, they put out timelines of what they had been doing behind the scenes, emphasized the resources that were being brought to bear, scheduled a presidential visit to the area after saying Obama had no plans to go, and made sure that "from Day One" was part of everyone's talking points. Nor has anyone from Obama on down missed an opportunity to declare that BP will pick up the whole tab for cleaning up the mess spewing from its oil well.

If, in an echo of the response to the attempted Christmas airliner bombing, the administration was a little slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat in New York, there has been no subtlety in its stampede since then. As late as Monday morning, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was refusing to describe the failed car bomb in New York as "a terrorist incident." In the brief opening statement at his news conference Tuesday, he used the words "terrorist" or "terrorism" eight times.

Ultimately, of course, the president will be judged not on stagecraft, but on results. It remains to be seen whether subsequent examination will reveal lapses or missed signals. There was plenty of dazzling police work in the New York case. But it is undoubtedly awkward to explain how accused Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad managed to be on both the no-fly list and a plane that was about to take off for Dubai.

As one White House official put it: "Actions are more important than words. You can't spin your way out of reality." Handled right, these two crises have the potential to restore an increasingly skeptical public's faith in Obama, much the way that President Bill Clinton's handling of the Oklahoma City bombing did in 1995. Bungled, either or both could go down as his administration's Hurricane Katrina.

In the meantime, though, this is an election year, one in which Obama's party could potentially lose its majority in the House. And that means politics will come to bear as well. In the oil spill and the failed bombing, Democrats and Republicans have been presented with an awkward paradox: Obama has been made less vulnerable to partisan attack by virtue of earlier decisions that alienated his base.

A month before the spill, Obama proposed opening up more areas to offshore drilling. Although the president has put a hold on new drilling until the government gets to the bottom of what happened off Louisiana on April 20 and why, some Democrats are demanding that he scrap the plan. Meanwhile, Republicans -- who made "Drill, baby, drill" their mantra during the 2008 election -- have largely refrained from any criticism of how the administration is handling the crisis. The exception has been the demand for more federal aid by some of the same Southern lawmakers who have often pegged Obama as an avatar of Big Government.

Similarly, Obama's handling of the failed bombing has brought little criticism from the opposition party. But the New York incident appears likely to diminish any remaining possibility that the White House would push ahead with its controversial plan to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. And it might be another setback in Democrats' efforts to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

For many Americans, this could go down as the scariest week of the Obama presidency. But depending on how well Obama and his team do, it might also be an opportunity. After all, this is a White House whose watchword was once summed up by Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

[Can you imagine someone writing a story about President George Bush and Katrina, and saying, you need to fix your messaging here?]

For those of you not watching FoxNews, why not? Do you realize that the difference is about facts and not about ideology?

One of CNN’s more brilliant newscasters discussing the reasons for the Times Square bomber: “If it can be confirmed that his house had been foreclosed on in recent years, I mean, one would have to imagine that brought a lot of pressure and a lot of heartache on that family.” He made no mention of Shahzad’s 13 trips to and from Pakistan. This is another reason why people are not turning to CNN for their news anymore.

Those who believe that the economy could collapse includes a very large majority of Democrats:

If you are still interested in FNMA and FHLMC, here is another mouthful (29 pages). One of the conclusions, which I agree with wholeheartedly, is When a firm is too large to fail, it should be broken up into smaller pieces that can be allowed to fail--especially in the financial sector:

What does it say when 11 men who perish on an exploding oil platform, or 30 poor souls who die in a 1,000-year Tennessee flood, get less coverage than two oil-soaked birds? It says news is driven from the left.

April is the biggest month for tax collection for the feds, and so, April almost always shows a healthy surplus of money. However, this is not so for April 2010 and April 2009. And where are the stories on this? Nowhere!

Al Gore tells us that the CO₂ being spilled into the atmosphere is much worse than the gulf oil gusher:

RUSH: Has anybody looked at Obama's fingers? We're told that the 1,000-point drop in the market yesterday was because of fat fingers. Somebody entered a B for billion on a trade when they meant to enter M for million on a trade involving Procter & Gamble, and this caused automated sell orders to kick in, and we were doing the play-by-play on this. Here's the thing you have to understand. At no time will the stock market wild fluctuation, at no time will the stock market decline ever be attributed to Obama. It can't be. The stock market going down when Obama's in the White House is just not possible. So it has to be some fat-fingered screwball, some trader who is probably entering the trade on his iPhone and hit the B instead of the M. That's what they're trying to tell us. So my question is could fat fingers explain Obama's budget deficit? Has anybody looked at his fingers lately? Are his fingers fat? We already know Obama is somewhat clumsy, but could it be that he has been ramping up government spending by typing billions when he just meant millions? I mean it's as good an explanation as anything else for what's happening.

This is not a technical glitch. I mean, there might have been one yesterday but that doesn't explain what's going on here. We're down for the fifth straight day and some of the headlines, like CNNMoney.com, the problem in America is debt. Oh, really? Really? You have come to that conclusion, have you? Now, let's compare Greece and the United States here for just a second, because we're looking at private versus public financial crises. Here in our country we had a financial crisis in the private sector. In Greece they are having a financial crisis in the public sector. Now, which has turned out worse? By all means, you'd have to say it's turned out worse in Greece. We don't have any people setting themselves on fire. We don't have riots in the streets yet. But the only reason for that is we have not faced our crisis in public sector yet, but it surely is coming, all those unfunded pension plans all over the country. How many Greek states do we have: California, New York, Michigan, Illinois, I mean there are a lot of potential Greeces among our states. And worse than that, the federal government, the equivalent of the European Union here in this analogy cannot be seen as much of a backstop since it's almost in as bad shape, our government is, as Greece itself.

We haven't even begun to face the music for Social Security, Medicare, and now Obamacare. We haven't even gotten close to the real trauma that we are about to face in coming years. Now, last night, Brian Williams, anchor of the NBC Nightly News was on Letterman's show. I saw this and I was stunned. I wish he had said it on Leno so more people woulda heard it, but I'm going to repeat it to you because over the past month, maybe longer than that, you are aware, I have been asking the question about California and the unfunded pensions and is anything real? Has any of this been real because nobody has any money. No government has any money, no state government, no city government, the federal government, doesn't have any money. Everybody's overdrawn, everybody is in deficit, everybody's borrowing. Nobody has any money. And the reason for it, largely, is irresponsible spending on the part of government officials at every level.

One of the reasons for the irresponsibility has been making sure to take care of public sector union employees, promising them all kinds of nice salaries now and exorbitant retirement funds in exchange for constant campaign donations and constant across-the-board votes for Democrats. And so we've had a bunch of elected officials putting their own election, their own entitlement, their own attachment to power ahead of the country, thinking that if there is a problem they will be long gone when we hit the wall. So when I saw what Brian Williams said last night, I was kind of stunned because you don't expect this from the anchor of a State-Run Media network. Letterman said, "Greece, this is the other reason the world is coming to an end. What happened in Greece? They got any money? They're bankrupt."

WILLIAMS: I felt a sickness in the pit of my stomach, kind of 9/11 sickness in the pit of my stomach. Our stock market went into a deep decline, a bottomless dive. On every television set at the NYSE this afternoon was the live picture of police beating demonstrators in Greece. One fire on a sidewalk turned out to be three people on fire. Here's the daisy chain: Greece to Portugal to Italy. Someone said on television this afternoon as part of the cable coverage, the dirty little secret is the world has no money, and the emperor has no clothes. If I wasn't a tad too close to this I'd probably not leave the house. But that's how bad it is.

RUSH: The world has no money. This is a comedy show, now, that he's appearing on, a comedy show. The world has no money, the emperor has no clothes. So Brian's losing it over the stock market collapse, but he's not wrong. And whose the emperor of the world right now? Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm. The world doesn't have any money. Has any of this been real? The only place where things have been real is in the United States private sector. Nothing in the government sector, nothing in the public sector is real. It has not been paid for. And a lot in the private sector. Consumer debt there is pretty high, too. That's why there's foreclosures. So has any of it been real? What's amazing to me -- actually, it shouldn't be amazing, but it is -- we are witnessing what happens with socialism. We're seeing it throughout the European Union. Greece, Portugal, Spain, the UK, we're seeing it. This is what happens when the public sector grows and grows and grows, when more and more people become dependent on it, when the public sector grows and dwarfs and overshadows the private sector, which is where wealth is created. Remember, the government, the public sector, doesn't have a dime before it confiscates or taxes what is produced.

Morton Kondracke has a piece in Roll Call today. He says, "I don't think Obama is a socialist; I just think he's a liberal who hasn't the slightest idea how wealth is created." Mort, you're getting close, you're getting warm. Socialist, fascist, communist, whatever, Mort, all you have to know is Barack Obama resents wealth creation. He resents how it happens in this country. That's why he is attempting to redistribute it all and return the nation's wealth to its, quote, unquote, rightful owners, which to him are people of color and people who are traditionally minorities and working families, which means members of unions. That conflagration consists of the nation's rightful owners in his mind. He's never created any wealth on his own, he probably doesn't understand it, but I do know that he resents it. He resents how it happens, and that's the bottom line. He resents the creation of wealth. It makes him mad. He thinks it is unfair. He thinks it is unjust. So he's not at all unhappy about what's happening here. All this tumult and chaos is going to lead to the further growth of government. This is the way Obama plays it. Stock market in trouble? Need more power for me, need bigger government, more regulations to prevent this from happening in the future. We gotta get rid of all these cycles. All right, a quick time-out. We'll come back and listen to the regime explain how the unemployment number going from 9.7 to 9.9% is great news.

RUSH: All right, we have some Barack Obama sound bites coming up in which he addresses the unemployment number. The reason a lot of people are saying that 9.7, 9.9% is good news is that it means more people are back in the market looking for work. The number of people who have given up is down. And so when you have more people -- remember, people who leave the job market and not trying to find a job don't get counted in the unemployment number that's released by the Labor Department, U3. The U6 number they do. So what they're trying to say now is that more people have entered the job market again because everything is so exciting out there to find a job, and so they're willing to be counted again, so it went up, but this is actually good news because people are hiring now and people are back trying to find jobs. That's the spin on this.

Now, when we get to the sound bites, what you are going to hear -- trust me on this, you gotta read between the lines, be able to see the stitches on the fastball -- what Obama is doing in his little White House press appearance today around 11 o'clock is whipping up the argument for tax increases. Higher taxes, that's next, that's why they've run up all the debt, and then higher taxes, that's how you theoretically get more government money to redistribute to your buddies.

Now, Greece. Greece is a microcosm of what happens when people like Barack Obama run a country unchecked, when nobody is there to stop them, when there is no check or balance, Greece is what happens when you have a regime similar to Obama in charge. What is happening around the world -- take a look at any stock market you want -- the communists and the anarchists, the union people all over the world are getting exactly what they want, folks. They are driving down the financial markets worldwide. They are hurting capitalism. There is a worldwide assault on capitalism, and the illustration of where does Obama stand on this can be illustrated by a question. Take yourself back to the videotape and look at the riots in Greece. People setting themselves on fire, people setting other things on fire, you've got protesters and you've got the cops, you've got the barricades. If Obama were in Greece, on which side of the barricades would he be if he was a Greek? Where would Obama be? President Obama would be with the cops. Obama would be doing everything he could to encourage more unrest, tumult, and chaos. For that matter, on which side of the barricades is Obama here? He's not on the side of the barricades with the people. Barack Obama sides against the American people, governs against the will of the American people every day.

One of the things -- this is so funny. Well, it's funny because it's ironic. One of the things that the Greek government is being told to do by the European Union, which is bailing them out, is to privatize their health care system. I'm going to say it again. The European Union, which is trying to bail out Greece, is demanding that they privatize their health care system, get it out of the government. Where are we headed? You look at Greece, you see us, you look at Venezuela, you see us. You don't have to time travel. It's right in front of us. What is potentially awaiting us if things do not change here? Which side of the barricades in Greece would Obama be on? As I said yesterday, I would love to hear Barack Obama tell us where Greece went wrong that led to all of this unrest.

RUSH: Let me put this in perspective for you in Greece. The European Union is gonna give Greece $139 billion to bail 'em out, $139 billion to bail out Greece.

Now, a lot of the State-Controlled Media saying, "Rush, why do you keep harping on Greece? Greece is tiny. I mean, it's not even the size of New York." It's a domino. It is a microcosm. It's what happens when people like Barack Obama run a country. It is where we are headed. Okay, so the EU is gonna give 'em $139 billion to bail 'em out. That is chump change compared to the numbers we are going to need to bail ourselves out. That wouldn't even come close to covering California's pension shortfall. California's total pension shortfall in the Public Employees Retirement System, the State Teachers Retirement System, approaches $500 billion, half a trillion. That's one state. One-hundred-thirty-nine billion to bail out Greece and that isn't going to do the job, but we can't even approach this. So we're not Greece? We're not Greece? Oh, no. No, no, no. It is a devastating circumstance that we're looking at here, and Greece is a microcosm, and yet the regime's out there telling us today what great economic news is happening and what great economic circumstances exist, and of course patting themselves on the back for all of this great news.

At the end of the day, 15.3 million Americans are outta work, the unemployment rate's up 9.9% from 9.7%. I'll go through these numbers again. Counting people who have given up looking for work and part-timers who would prefer to be working full time, the so-called underemployment rate rose to 17.1% last month. That's close to the record high of 17.4% in October. It shows just how difficult it is for job seekers to find work, and yet the regime's telling us they're so excited, they're entering the job market, they're so excited, it's happening out there, and they're out there looking for work. AP, just how difficult it is for them to find work. And then the number of people outta work six months or longer, 6.7 million in April, a new high. And that 6.7 million made up 45.9% of all unemployed people, also a record high. Yet, we got great news out there, taking credit for how swell things are, Obama outside the White House today.

RUSH: Stuart Varney, last night, Fox News special report, Bret Baier. Stuart Varney's at Fox Business Channel as well, and Bret Baier said, "First Fox Business Network correspondent Stuart Varney in New York to tell us how a simple typo may have sent the market into a nosedive. What happened?"

VARNEY: Do not make the mistake of thinking that this was all just an unfortunate error, an unfortunate human mistake. The underlying cause is much more serious. The financial system of Europe today was really quaking. The euro was on the verge of collapse. And, Bret, if I can go one step further, you could say that today we saw the failure of the European model: High taxes, cradle-to-grave financial security and entitlement programs, and the government dominating the economy. That model is now failing.

RUSH: Right on, right on, right on, right -- Stuart Varney, we're watching the failure of socialism. Greece, Spain, Portugal, throughout the European Union.

RUSH: Now, this spin -- we got these sound bites coming up -- US News & World Report, "Why a Rising Unemployment Rate is Good News", by Rick Newman. And the theory is, "It's so exciting out there! People are looking for work now! They're willing to be counted again!" How do they know more people are looking for work? How do we know this? Because somebody at Newsweek says it? Because Obama says so? Couldn't these just be people who got knocked off unemployment when the benefits ran out (unintelligible) before last? How do we know more people are looking for work?

In the AP story, "Jobs up 290,000" -- In the private sector, the real number is 66,000, not 290. "Jobs up 290,000; jobless rate rises to 9.9 pct." State-Controlled AP tries really hard to start off here with great news, but if you keep reading, which I always do, the last half of the AP article is very bad news. And three to four years ago, the last half of this article would have been the lead if George W. Bush were the president. Here's a quote at the end of the article: "All told, 15.3 million people were out of work in April." You take a look at a chart of employment, unemployment, from any. it's horrible. There's no good news at all, folks, in this cycle. It has been since the Great Depression that we've had this kind of problem, and it looks this bad on a chart. Very rarely do I wish this were a television show, but I wish this were a show so I could show you this chart because it would dispel all of the myths here about how great the employment news is today.

"Counting people who have given up looking for work and part-timers who would prefer to be working full time, the so-called underemployment rate rose to 17.1 in April." This you read in the second half of the AP story. "That's close to the record high of 17.4 percent in October and shows just how difficult it is for jobseekers to find work. Another grim statistic:" -- from the second half of the AP story: -- "The number of people out of work six months or longer reached 6.7 million in April, a new high." So we've got all kinds of bad records being set in April, and yet the lead is, (paraphrase) "290,000 new jobs, unemployment up to 9.9%, the economy's turned a corner, we're back from the brink." And there's also a section in the second half of the story about wages and how they aren't anything to write home about. So the truth is the truth, and this is the place for it, we disseminate it.

All right, here are the audio sound bites, ladies and gentlemen. This is Obama this morning outside the White House.

OBAMA: From the first days of this administration amidst the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression I've said that the truest measure of progress would be whether or not we were creating jobs. Today I'm happy to report that we've received encouraging news. In April the economy added 290,000 jobs with the majority coming from the private sector. This is the largest monthly increase in four years.

RUSH: From the Associated Press story that, again, the first half of which regales this news as Obama just did, it's great, it's the best news in four years, why, we're back. "High unemployment and sluggish wage gains are likely to prevent consumers from going on spending sprees any time soon. Small businesses, which usually help drive job creation during recoveries, are having trouble getting loans. That tight credit is crimping their ability to expand operations and hire. ... Many economists think it will take until at least the middle of the decade to lower the unemployment rate to a more normal 5.5 percent to 6 percent." Lawrence Summers, one of President Obama's economic advisors said back on April 30th, "This is the new norm." Nine to 10% unemployment is the new norm. Learn it, love it, live it, get used to it. Obama is going to have to create another 6.6 million jobs to get us back to where we were four years ago. He can start pounding the table here, 290,000, which 66,000 are actually private sector.

I know I never criticize Customs. Not once did I criticize Customs yesterday. I went out of my way to praise these people. I've only had one bad encounter with a couple of them here in Palm Beach and everybody knows about that so I don't go to Palm Beach anymore when I have to go to Customs, I avoid it like the blue plague. Everywhere else I go they're nice as they can be, thorough, professional. The only question I asked yesterday was how come we're not being told what the Customs guys did? Everybody was asking me and I said, "What does it matter?" "Well, it matters, Rush, because the administration is trying to hide something from us." Okay, well, fine. What's new about that? Here's the next sound bite. This is Obama putting forward this notion that higher unemployment is a sign of progress.

OBAMA: The unemployment rate ticked up slightly from 9.7 to 9.9. Given the strength of these job numbers, this may seem contradictory but this increase is largely a reflection of the fact that workers who had dropped out of the workforce entirely are now seeking jobs again, encouraged by better prospects.

RUSH: How do we know this? How do we know this? Again, counting people who have given up looking for work and part-timers who would prefer to be working full time, the so-called underemployment rate rose to 17.1% in April. That's close to the record high of 17.4% underemployment in October, and it shows just how difficult it is for job seekers to find work. And yet, man, it's so exciting out there, people can't wait, they're getting back in the job market, they're really encouraged out there by better prospects. Another grim statistic, the number of people out of work six months or longer reached 6.7 million in April. That is a new high. These people made up 45.9% of all unemployed people, also a record high.

So you read the whole AP story, and you find out that we're looking at chronic unemployment, and it is not improving, there's no reason to celebrate here, and there's been nothing done to create an overwhelming market of job creation. Just the exact opposite. We're no different than Greece. We're not doing anything to spur job creation in the private sector. And if they want to credit the stimulus for this, if they want to try, fine, okay, you guys go ahead, you credit the stimulus. Never before has so much been spent to create so little as Barack Obama's stimulus plan to create jobs. Look, you know me, I'm not saying all this to be partisan, critical of back home, but these guys are out there trying to paint a picture here that doesn't exist, it's not right, and all of this, don't forget, all of this is simply whipping up the argument for higher taxes, which is coming down the pike. Here's another sound bite. This is Obama addressing the market and the crisis in Greece.

OBAMA: I want to speak to the unusual market activity that took place yesterday on Wall Street. The regulatory authorities are evaluating this closely with a concern for protecting investors and preventing this from happening again. And they will make findings of their review public along with recommendations for appropriate action. I also spoke this morning with German Chancellor Merkel regarding economic and financial developments in Europe. We agreed on the importance of a strong policy response by the affected countries and a strong financial response from the international community. I made clear that the United States supports these efforts and will continue to cooperate.

RUSH: Yeah, what are those efforts? What did Merkel do yesterday? Merkel joined in in bashing

the banks. Merkel joined in in bashing the private sector. That's why Obama's happy. Make no mistake about what's going on here, folks. The communists, the anarchists are getting what they want. They are driving down the financial market. There's an all-out assault on capitalism all over the world. That's why Obama's happy about this, and he's happy to welcome Angela Merkel here to the little party that they're having. So here we are, for Obama, 9.9% is success. That's the bottom line. Obama can spin it all he wants, 9.9% unemployment is great news to Obama. Let's put the headline out there. "Obama: Great News, 9.9% Unemployment." The American people should take note the White House had a celebration today. Obama went out and took credit for 9.9% unemployment. Okay, so the Democrats and Obama in November can run on 9.9% unemployment as a great accomplishment. And maybe someday Obama can tell us where he thinks Greece went wrong.

I want to hear Obama tell us, where did Greece go wrong? Did they not tax the rich enough? Did the government not grow big enough? Did they not have enough public sector union people? Did they wait too long to go nationalize on their health care? What did they do wrong? So you Democrats, you're all happy, your president goes out there today, sings the praises, 9.9% unemployment. So I guess if we get to 10% unemployment in August, you'll really be happy, I mean the streets will be filled with joy because the definition of success, according to our own regime, is rising unemployment, 9.9%.

Christina Romer, this is on CNBC's Squawk on the Street, she is the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. Erin Burnett said, "The unemployment rate is climbing, I guess because more people seeing hiring going on re-enter the job market?"

ROMER: Absolutely. It's something we've, again, been anticipating, that a lot of people in a recession this bad drop out of the labor force, a sort of natural part of the recovery. As we start to add jobs, those people come back in. And we had some 800,000 workers come back into the labor force in April. So that is certainly a consequence of that is that the unemployment rate did tick up.

RUSH: Yeah, goes up to 10%, even better, right, because more people are looking for work and are willing to be counted again as out of work. So remember, and this is from the regime's own wire service, AP, "counting people who have given up looking for work and counting part-timers who would prefer to be working full time, the so-called underemployment rate rose to 17.1%." So the unemployment rate rose to 9.9%. The underemployment rate rose to 17.1% in April, close to the record high of 17.4% in October, and shows just how difficult it is for job seekers to find work. They're celebrating people starting to look again, not celebrating people finding jobs. Another statistic: the number of people out of work six months or longer reached 6.7 million in April. That's a new high. So 15.3 million people out of work in April, unemployment, 9.7 to 9.9%. Underemployment rose to 17.1%. The number of people out of work six months or longer reached 6.7 million in April, a new high, and the regime threw a party outside the White House this morning.

RUSH: Here is a montage, by the way, just to show you how the coordination with the regime and the State-Controlled Media works. Real Pravda type stuff here. This is a montage of all the State-Run Media repeating the mantra that unemployment went up, a good sign because more people are looking for work.

STUART VARNEY: Workers flooded back into the labor market and pushed the unemployment rate up to 9.9%.

PETER COOK: (outdoor noise) That unemployment rate hitting nine point nine percent moving higher. It reflects more Americans trying to go out and find a job right now.

PETER BARNES: (outdoor noise) We saw a huge jump in the number of people who previously were out of the work force and wanted to get back in and start looking for work.

BILL HEMMER: The unemployment rate is up in April, hitting almost double digits, 9.9%, more than 800,000 Americans jumping back into the market.

JENNA LEE: Unemployment rate also moving higher to 9.9%. Now, that can mean that there's actually more people entering the labor force looking for work and that could actually be a positive sign.

RUSH: There you have it. Or it could not be, but this is how it's being spun. A lot of that was even the Fox News Channel, some of that was even the Fox Business Network.

CALLER: Hello, it's a privilege to talk with you. I've been trying to get through for about 15 years.

CALLER: And here I am. Today's the day. I got a comment on the unemployment rate, but first, I got introduced to you in 1992 right after Clinton was elected.

CALLER: I was serving on a submarine in the Pacific Ocean, and part of being on a missile submarine is you have to continually monitor communications. So we had the advantage of capturing radio signals as well. And our commanding officer, while I was up in control driving the submarine, he'd buzz me, and he'd say, "Come right ten degrees," so I'd take the submarine right ten degrees, and then he'd buzz me a little bit later and it would be, "Come left ten degrees," and we finally figured out what he was doing. He was tuning the antenna to pick up your radio show.

RUSH: Thank you very much. You probably can't identify the ship because it's nuclear, right?

CALLER: Ballistic missile submarine, I'm sure we weren't the only ones, but it was a good time. I've since retired from the Navy and here I am.

RUSH: Well, I once got a tour in Pearl Harbor of the USS Indianapolis which was a nuclear sub, and I asked to see the water desalination, "Oh, no sir, we'd love to but we can't show you the reactor." Oh, I'm sorry I asked. It was obviously a very secure area. But you people that serve on submarines are a unique breed.

CALLER: Here's on the unemployment rate. Here's something that's just an observation and maybe it's connecting some dots, but yes, the people are out looking for work, right before recess for Congress we just extended unemployment benefits for those that previously had tapped out or maxed out of their unemployment benefits, and I'm sure some of those are running back for more. Thus the numbers go up.

RUSH: A-ha. So let me make sure I understand this. You think the only reason they're back looking is because benefits have expired?

CALLER: Well, they did stop looking because they had maxed out on the number of weeks they could collect.

CALLER: And now there's a longer timeline they can collect so it's back to the line again.

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. It takes somebody like you to figure that out. I'm glad you called. This has been a great call. You have made my day, a submarine being steered in the Pacific Ocean to capture the EIB Network. Yes! Gosh, I love the military. I just do.

RUSH: All right, folks, I need to issue a warning or make an explanation here. This is a totally -- I don't know what, biorhythms, karma, I don't know what it is, but nothing about this day is making sense to me. I'm not sure that I'm actually conscious and awake, living in a dream here. (interruption) No, no, no. I don't know how to explain this. But in the news today, I've got all kinds of people saying this and that. None of what anybody thinks is interesting is interesting to me. And the stuff that does interest me, I'm still not sure why it does. So this is going to be very, very weird today because I look at the stacks of stuff here and maybe in five stacks I got three things here I really care about. The rest of it is, "Okay I gotta do a service here and get involved in this because this is news that needs to be discussed, analyzed as only I can," but it's tough to explain here. It's not that I don't care about it. It's that I'm confused. I've got all kinds of people all fired up about all kinds of stuff and I can't for the life of me understand why. (interruption) No, Snerdley, I do get confused at times. It's just that I never admit it. Here I am admitting it.

Anyway, Rush Limbaugh here, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, telephone number is 800-282-2882.

I'll give you an example. There's a column today in the New York Daily News. Michael Daly wondering why we have not been told the names of the customs officers that pulled Nosehair Shadegg, whatever his name is, off the airplane, Faisal Shahzad. We've met the T-shirt vendor, we've met the cops, we've met everybody, this guy is wondering why we haven't met the customs guys. I couldn't care less why we haven't met the customs guys, I don't understand why anybody cares about it. The only thing I can come up with is that the administration is trying to say they were on the case from moment one, when they weren't, that really blind luck is all that enabled us to get hold of this guy for his bomb not to go off, and maybe they're not introducing us to the customs guys because doing so would focus on how little the administration actually did. But that's not news. This administration looks at all of this as an annoyance. Anything that gets in the way of advancing the transformation of American society and the transformation of our economy is simply an inconvenience to them. Terrorism is an inconvenience, Afghanistan's an inconvenience, they really rather not have to deal with it and when they do deal with it they'd rather not have to talk about it. They just want to take credit for everything when it goes right, when they had nothing to do with it.

Here's an LA Times story that we would never see if a Republican were in the White House. Now, let me put this in perspective. This oil spill in the Gulf, the media, the administration and their allies have been talking about this as an apocalyptic disaster, right? It's bad. It is horrible. It is, oh, my God, this is going to destroy so many things, what are we going to do? Here's the LA Times headline: "Oil Spill Seen as Energy Opportunity for Obama." Now, you and I all know that he does look at every crisis as an opportunity to expand his power and to grow the government, there's no question about it, but here you have the media actually pointing out that in an encouraging way. "The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico could give the president new momentum for his stalled climate bill, environmentalists say. 'He needs a response which is as big as the spill is,' said Wesley Warren, program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington."

So here you have a bunch of environmentalist wackos who are supposedly distraught and just beside themselves over the ecological disaster here and the destruction and they see an opportunity for Obama to advance more legislation to give him more power and control and expand the federal government. They're exposing their agenda right before our very eyes. They're not doing anything to hide it here, and the media falling right in line with this. We've had 11 deaths here, but let's say 9/11 happens again and the media says, "This is a great opportunity for Obama to burnish his skills as an anti-jihad, pro-American president," or what have you. Maybe one of the things that's bothering me today is that I don't feel like I'm in my country. Remember that piece we had the other day that was written in the American Thinker, somebody said, "I finally figured out how I feel like a foreign force is occupying our country, none of it seems comfortable or familiar."

There's a story out there that yesterday, Cinco De Mayo, some American school kids wearing T-shirts or clothes with the American flag were sent home. Can you imagine on the Fourth of July if a bunch of Hispanic students show up at an American high school wearing a Mexican flag they'd be sent home? No, I'm not kidding, they were sent home, three or four students were sent home or told to change clothes because on Cinco De Mayo they were wearing a T-shirt with the American flag on it. Now, you know damn well that on July 4th, there's no school on July 4th but if on July 4th some Hispanic student showed up somewhere with a Mexican flag, do you think they'd be sent away or sent home? No. So we've got this tragedy out here in the Gulf, and everybody's looking at it as an opportunity for Obama to advance more power and legislation to control the country. Nobody's concerned about the effects of the spill. Some of the media are taking great steps here to blame Dick Cheney for this. So what we're learning here is that when there is genuine destruction, they don't care.

They're illustrating and telling us without a doubt what the real agenda is here. "Oh, yeah, we got a big spill out there, we got a massive explosion, why, this is going to really help. Maybe we can cement the idea of no more oil wells, no more drilling by Americans anywhere around the world, especially in our own territory, and an opportunity for Obama to get new momentum for his stalled climate bill." Now, if you have to say that Obama needs new momentum, you're admitting he doesn't have any. So a crisis that is doing great harm to this country and the people of this country is looked at as an opportunity, for the president of the United States to capitalize on a disaster to advance an agenda. So it really doesn't matter to me why I don't know the names of the customs guys that took the jihadist off the plane. And when we have American kids with an American flag on Cinco De Mayo kicked out of school, it doesn't really matter to me who the customs guys are or a lot of other things. I've got the stuff in the stack here, and we're going to get to all of it. Some of it's funny, some of it's hilarious, some of it is eye opening.

"While Oil Slick Spread, Interior Department Chief of Staff Rafted with Wife on 'Work-Focused' Trip in Grand Canyon." This is ABC News' Jake Tapper. "Though his agency was charged with coordinating the federal response to the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico..." and they were on this at day one, don't forget, they say the Coast Guard was there. The Coast Guard is down there every day. The fact that they show up doesn't mean Obama called anyone. Obama didn't do anything for 12 days. And after 12 days, they're surveying this, "How can we turn this to our advantage? How can we turn damage, destruction, loss of animal life, loss of economic opportunity for Gulf fishermen, how can we turn this into a political opportunity for the president of the United States? That's what's got everybody salivating in the media, all excited, maybe Obama can rebound here, maybe we got the climate bill back on track, cap and trade, yeah, all based on a hoax.

"Though his agency was charged with coordinating the federal response to the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Department of the Interior chief of staff Tom Strickland was in the Grand Canyon with his wife last week participating in activities that included white-water rafting, ABC News has learned. Other leaders of the Interior Department were focused on the Gulf, joined by other agencies and literally thousands of other employees. But Strickland's participation in a trip that administration officials insisted was 'work-focused' raised eyebrows among other Obama administration officials and even within even his own department, sources told ABC News." The top official in charge of analyzing terror threats did not cut short his ski vacation after the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber nearly blew up an airliner on Christmas Day. See, this stuff is just an annoyance to them or an opportunity. They're either on ski trips or they're rafting in the Grand Canyon, "work related."

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I was just making a point here about the customs officials. I know exactly what's going on here. They want bureaucrat heroes. They want to fight the perception that government employees aren't of any use. Remember, that's one of the things that Clinton said, that the right is trying to criminalize government employees, remember? He's out there doing all this. So these customs and border protection guys are heroes -- that's what the administration wants to convey -- for doing their jobs. Now, you know, I run into customs people all the time, and 99.9% of them are salt of the earth, some of the greatest people I've ever run into. So the administration trying to keep these names under wraps is precisely because they're trying to downplay the fact that the Obama administration had nothing to do with foiling the plot. They were the last to arrive at the party. That's why. It's very simple.

RUSH: Another Emirates Airline flight, ladies and gentlemen, has been called back to the gate at JFK airport because of a security concern. Sources tell NBC Eyeball News "that Emirates flight 204 was ready to take off for Dubai when it was told to return to the gate. Customs and border protection blocked the plane from taxi on the runway and there are reports the flight was asked to return because a passenger on board is on the federal no-fly list." This must be the white male in his forties that they found on videotape in Times Square on Saturday. I'm sure they've been looking for this guy. By the way, a lot of people said, "Rush, look at the smiling picture of this jihadist. They always put the smiling picture of this guy, Shahzad, on there. Where's his mug shot?" Federal mug shots are not permitted to be broadcast. Federal mug shots are not released. I asked Andy McCarthy that question this morning. The answer is a federal charge is a serious thing, it can be damaging to your reputation. They don't release mug shots. That's why we're seeing the smiling family man shot of -- (interruption) well, state charges. But it's a DOJ thing, it's a long-standing thing. They don't release federal mug shots, other than at trial after conviction, is what I was told. So another Emirates jet stopped prior to takeoff at JFK because somebody on board was on the no-fly list. Now, this guy has been on the no-fly list since 2009. I'm sure it's this forties white male guy that was changing his shirt that they have been desperately looking for to hang this crime on.

RUSH: Whippany, New Jersey, as we return to the phones, Rich, thank you for calling, sir, great to have you here.

CALLER: You got me ranting before on a rant I've given friends at work and relatives that are unlucky to hear me, but the idea the government is inherently almost fraudulent in that it never delivers what its citizens deliver. You look at the systems we have in place to prevent terror, you look at the systems in place to prevent financial ruin, you look at our State Department, it just, by default, takes your money up front, and doesn't deliver on what it says it's going to give you, ever. And Clinton and Obama don't seem to get that point.

CALLER: Even when government's good it doesn't deliver what it says it's going to deliver. It just delivers it in a good-enough fashion. You look at the failed experiments of welfare, the list just goes on and on. I could go on for a half hour about how it never does what it says it's going to do, and then even when it does a okay job, it's still not delivering what it said it would deliver.

RUSH: Right. As I've noted on previous occasions, you're looking at the wrong thing. You're supposed to examine their good intentions, not the results. You're racist if you examine the results. Only their good intentions matter. And Obama said it yesterday. The good works necessary in life, private individuals and private companies are just not going to do, government has to do it.

RUSH: Well, I know, look, it is maddening to me, it is frustrating. I agree with you a hundred percent. Why, who, what kind of mush brain does it require on the part of any American to think that of all the people out of the 300 million people that live here that Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm is singularly qualified to run the American health care system? Where does this come from? Why do we believe that a bunch of blowhards in the United States Senate know more about the financial business, the financial industry in this country than the people who do it and are in it? And why do we think that elected representatives know more about everything than the people who are experts in those fields? And why do so many people put their unlimited faith in an institution which, as the caller says, demonstrates daily its inability and its incompetence to do anything it claims to do, other than win wars? And even that now, given the regime and their objective here, is something we sometimes question.

RUSH: I just saw this one up on MessNBC, so I had to go get it. Here's the headline: "Rove, GOP Plot Vast Network to Reclaim Power -- The Republican Party's best-connected political operatives have quietly built a massive fundraising, organizing and advertising machine based on the model assembled by Democrats early in the decade, and with the same ambitious goal -- to recapture Congress and the White House." Who knew? Who knew? Well, yeah, since I am Republican leader Rush Limbaugh, I must have known about this. We were hoping to keep the fact that we want to reclaim power secret. I don't know how it leaked. Can you imagine? We did everything we could to keep the fact that we want to try to win back the House and the White House! We didn't want anybody to know that and somehow it's leaked out and now the whole plan's blown to smithereens because they know that's what we want to do.

The Politico, they're really on the case. The Politico's discovered it. I don't know who's leaking, it might have been Rove; it could have been Gillespie. I don't know who is leaking this. Doesn't everybody know that the only way that you can get the White House back is to make sure nobody knows that's what you're trying to do? Doesn't everybody know the only way we can win the House back is to make sure that nobody has any idea that that's our objective? But somebody in our group is talking! (interruption) Well, I will deal with them harshly when I find out who it is. I mean, imagine, folks! We've been working on this -- I myself -- for 20 years. I've been working for 20 years on amassing power at the highest levels of the government, and somebody has blown the scheme now by saying this is what we want to do! (sigh) Let's see what else this story says.

What else am I going to have to deal with here? "The new groups could give Republicans and their allies a powerful campaign apparatus separate from the Republican National Committee. Karl Rove, political architect of the Bush presidency, and Ed Gillespie, former Republican Party chairman, are the most prominent forces behind what is, in effect, a network of five overlapping groups, three of which were started in the past few months. The operating assumption of Rove, Gillespie and the other organizers is that despite the historical dominance of Republican fundraising and organizing, the GOP has been outmaneuvered by Democrats and their allies in recent years, and it is time to strike back. 'Where they have a chess piece on the board, we need a chess piece on the board,' said Gillespie," who's talking; tisk, tisk.

"'Where they have a queen, we shouldn't have three pawns.' The network, which doesn't have a name, attempts to replicate the Democracy Alliance, an umbrella group -- founded in 2005 and funded by George Soros and other billionaires -- and to borrow tactics from liberal groups established to help Democrats regain power after eight years of the Bush administration. ... Rove, currently on a book tour," to disguise his movements "has provided 'a laying-on of hands' for the groups -- as one organizer put it -- by encouraging major Republican donors to support them as part of the GOP's path to revival. 'Karl has always said: People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we're really a half-[baked] right-wing conspiracy,' he said. 'Now, he wants to get more serious.'" Well, I've read the whole story, and my name has not surfaced, nor has the time of our next meeting, nor has the location of our next meeting been leaked.

If it's been leaked, The Politico didn't publish that. (sigh) Man I don't know, folks. I told you this day started off strange, that everything that everybody else thought was interesting was boring to me and I didn't quite understand what the relevance was. Now my life's work, defeating Democrats, has leaked. For 20 years, I've managed to keep that a secret. For 20 years, my plot to regain political power has been a secret that nobody knew. But now somebody in our group is talking, and here it is right in the headline: "Rove, GOP Plot Vast Network to Reclaim Power." We wanted them to think we were happy, you know, being chump change. (tearing up article) Now they know that what we want to do is win elections. I don't know how this happened, but I'm going to have to really work on it. I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board on this, because when that kind of stuff leaks out -- when somebody as powerful as The Politico realizes that our objective here is to win elections -- we got a problem.

RUSH: You know, it's a shame that the producers, the owners of the rights to the movie Downfall, where Hitler discovers that it's all falling apart on him, what a great Hitler Downfall tape this would be, the discovery by the Politico of a sinister plan hatched by me and Rove and Gillespie to win elections. Can you imagine Hitler going berserk when his aides tell him that instead of just sitting idly by and accepting defeat we were actually going to try to win an election or two, and Hitler blowing up. Oh, yes, my friends, it was a sinister plot that we had concocted. We kept it secret here for a number of years, but those intrepid reporters at The Politico have uncovered our master plan, our secret plot.

RUSH: The floods in Tennessee. I have been waiting to see if there was going to any reaction to it in the media, and there hasn't been any. I mean, to speak of. It hasn't even approached the news coverage of, say, the oil spill. There's a blog here: Newsreel.com. "Worst The Worst Disaster Since the Civil War But Not as News Worthy as an Oil Spill." It's by Rhonda Robbins, and the pull quote: "The Left loves victims. Victims they can use, that is. Preferably, victims that depended on the government, but the system failed. Therefore, a call for more, bigger, and better government is the topic of choice in a disaster situation of any proportion." That's exactly right. She's exactly right. It's what Obama's doing with the oil spill. Whatever catastrophe there is, "We need a bigger government! I need more power," Obama says. "If I had more power and bigger government, this would not have happened."

But in Tennessee -- which, by the way, is not insignificant. Tennessee is "flyover country." People on the coasts and people in government could not care less. It's flyover country. Also in Tennessee, "There is no story of the 'haves' taking advantage of the 'have-nots,' only neighbors and churches and communities across the bible-belt pulling together. No one is calling for a faster cape-clad Uncle Sam. We're not blaming Obama, Bush, the Tea Party or any corporation. So what's a leftist media to cover? Conclusion," there's a massive flood, there are 31 people dead, property values and property destroyed, but "no real story here," because the necessary ingredients for a big-time news media story aren't there. There are no victims, there are no racial victims, there are no "haves" or "have-nots;" there are no "haves" taking advantage of the "have-nots."

We got people working together. The people there are not complaining. They're not saying, "Where's FEMA?" They're not on the rooftops demanding helicopters show up and pick them up. They're not anywhere demanding their goodies. They're not saying, "Where is my check?" They're not saying, "Where's my bus ticket to Houston?" They're just working together to figure it out. "In an excellent article by Nashville native, Patten Fuqua, entitled 'We Are Nashville' Fuqua abandons his usual topic of hockey and ponders the same question. Why so little media coverage? Fuqua writes: 'If you live outside of Nashville, you may not be aware, but our city was hit by a 500-year flood over the last few days. The national news coverage gave us 15 minutes, but went back to focusing on a failed car bomb and an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"While both are clearly important stories, was that any reason to ignore our story? The Cumberland River crested at its highest level in over 80 years. Nashville had its highest rainfall totals since records began. People drowned.It is the single largest disaster to hit Middle Tennessee since the Civil War. And yet.no one knows about it.'" Folks, I'm sorry: ESPN did cover this. They said that there might have been a foot of water in the service level at the football stadium there where the locker rooms are, and then they had photo journalist fly over the stadium and they said, "We can't even see the Titans' logo in the end zone." That's how bad it is, and then they ran a story, "Don't worry. The locker rooms are not that flooded. They're not that damaged." So ESPN's been on the case, reporting on the relatively slight damage to the football stadium -- and we can now see the Titans' logo in the end zone, which is good because the water is receding.

"It seems bizarre that no one seems to be aware that we just experienced what is quite probably the costliest non-hurricane disaster in American history. The funds to rebuild will have to come from somewhere, which is why people need to know. It's hard to believe that we will receive much relief if there isn't a perception that we need it. A large part of the reason that we are being ignored is because of who we are. Think about that for just a second. Did you hear about looting? Did you hear about crime sprees? No...you didn't. You heard about people pulling their neighbors off of rooftops. You saw a group of people trying to move two horses to higher ground. No ... we didn't loot."

[Robinson] "That does say a lot about our city. There are no mass crime sprees, no mass looting. But what kind of story is that? The Left loves victims. Victims they can use, that is. Preferably, victims that depended on the government, but the system failed. Therefore, a call for more, bigger, and better government is the topic of choice in a disaster situation of any proportion. There is no story of the 'haves' taking advantage of the 'have-nots,' ... No one is calling for a faster cape-clad Uncle Sam. ... So what's a leftist media to cover? Conclusion," 31 deaths, massive property destruction, but "no real story here." It is interesting.

This is unbelievable. In the Washington Post here's the headline: "Oil Spill, Failed Bombing Offer Obama a Challenge of Message, Management." I'm not going to bother excerpting the entire story for you, but summarizing it, they ask the question here, "How can Obama convey a sense of competence?" They're asking the question, okay, he's got an opportunity here, an opportunity to convey competence, thereby admitting he's not conveying competence right now. Karen Tumulty says it's very easy, just list all the successes. And then when you look in the story for her successes, you don't find any. You don't find very many. "For many Americans, this could go down as the scariest week of the Obama presidency. But depending on how well Obama and his team do, it might also be an opportunity. After all, this is a White House whose watchword was once summed up by Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as: 'You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.'" Exactly right. As I said yesterday, there are no solutions. There are only demons. State-Run Media, Karen Tumulty, Washington Post, desperately hoping Obama can somehow convey competence in this.

So let's look at where we are here. David Obey: No mas! No mas! Obama, we learn, turns out to be the biggest recipient of British Petroleum BP money. He was also the biggest recipient of Goldman Sachs cash, and he's out there lecturing about the evil of big corporations and the need to silence them during political campaigns. The Supreme Court had their ruling these people can now get involved in politics. The Democrats, "Oh, no they can't, we're going to write legislation countermanding the Supreme Court ruling," and yet Obama is out there taking all this big money from BP and Goldman Sachs, then lectures us about the evil of big corporations and the need to shut 'em up. I've been thinking about this, folks, ever since this brilliant monologue of yesterday, which we're going to turn into a timeline at The Limbaugh Letter. I got in touch with the editrix there, when she's taking time off from using her whips and chains on the staff, Diana Schneider, and I said, "We want to add the timeline here of no solutions, only demons, to the next issue of The Limbaugh Letter." And so she said, "Fine," which of course she's obligated to do, so we're going to have that done in the next issue.

I've been thinking about this. We have people -- folks, seriously, now -- we have people doing all they can to keep this country safe. We really do. The NYPD, the FBI in this terrorist case, men and women who are working day and night to stop this oil spill in the Gulf, they have absolutely no leadership from Washington, no leadership from Obama. They only have demonization from the White House. The White House is now trying to dump it off on Emirates Airlines. This guy flew back and forth to Pakistan 13 times, what's the no-fly list worth? How many people keeping up with this story? You ought to be at your wits' end. Here is this guy on a no-fly list, or maybe not on the no-fly list, should be, back and forth to Pakistan 13 times, is able to call on the way, make a cash reservation for a seat. Meanwhile, you're stripping down to your underwear and getting wand and securitized with the rest of the grandmothers, and this guy, smooth sailing wherever he wants to go, Pakistan. We still can't find what religion this guy is if you read the State-Controlled Media. All you find out is this guy is an American citizen. And now we learn he's ticked off at Obama's drone campaign.

So Obama's creating new terrorists out there, isn't that what they said about Bush going into Iraq? Oh. Oh. Oh. Yeah. This Shabazz Nosehair, whatever his name is, we all know who I'm talking about. Let me get it. Faisal, Faisal or Faisal Shahzad, is that it? Well, Nosehair was the guy that got in there and Meir Kahani. At any rate, yeah, he hated Bush, folks. The State-Controlled media is now saying that this terrorist hated Bush. We called this yesterday. Predicted this was going to happen. Foreclosed on, blamed Bush for a whole bunch of stuff, blamed Bush for the war on terror, now upset at our drone attacks in Pakistan. So we have all of these people, we're not showing them enough appreciation because we're all following the template from the White House, which is, how can we give Obama credit for competence in the oil spill and in these terrorist mishaps, rather than focusing on 11 people died in the Gulf in this rig explosion. We have people from BP and a number of others trying to stem the tide of the oil. The NYPD and the FBI are working 24/7 to keep New York safe and who is their biggest obstacle? The incompetent people in this administration, in this regime.

They get no leadership from Washington. They get no leadership from Obama. What did we get? We get press statements. We get self-serving talking points leaked to friendly media. "Oh, yeah, we were on this from day one, we're on the case, we know exactly what we're doing here, why, this is a one-off. We have total competence here, know exactly what we're doing." What we have here is weakness in leadership all across the country. New York, Bloomberg is no Giuliani. Bloomberg has made a literal, ahhh, of himself. It is absolutely breathtaking. It's beyond comprehension. (imitating Bloomberg) "Oh, yeah, Katie, no question this guy is a tea partier, white guy, probably ticked off, mid-forties, probably ticked off at the health care bill." He didn't even have the sense to blame it on Arizona's immigration law. Then after it's discovered who this guy really is, "I'm not going to tolerate any backlash against Muslims or Middle Easterners in New York." I know Giuliani and Bloomberg get along, but sorry, Bloomberg is no Giuliani.

Obama has not surrounded himself with people of experience or skill, and that's saying something. He's the least qualified guy in whatever room he walks into, including all the people he has surrounding him, department heads, cabinet secretaries, czars or whatever, not one of them with any practical experience in any of these areas: in oil, in energy, anything in the private sector. And the only people he's got at the FBI and over at State Department and the Pentagon that he's put there don't agree with our position on the war on terror. You want to have a trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan? He's surrounded by leftist hacks, deer-in-the-headlight eyes types, as big sis out there, Janet Napolitano. There is no expertise. Lotta really, quote, unquote, smart people, lotta smart people, they think, but no practical expertise at the highest levels. Obama himself is incapable of real leadership, folks. He blames Bush for this, he blames Bush for that, he blames BP for this or that.

He never grabs events by the horns and takes control over them. He's not redistributing wealth or grabbing power. He is without the ability to act. If he is taken off of his agenda, if anything comes along to distract him from his agenda of the transformation of America from a capitalist to a socialist economy, he's lost. He doesn't know how to handle it. So you gotta blame BP -- see, there is no solution to anything. There are only demons. If Obama had done something effective or substantive -- now, listen to me. I'm dead serious about this. I'm not saying what I'm saying here to be partisan against Obama. These are serious things happening here. I'm just going to come out and say it, and I don't mean this to be casting aspersions on the NYPD or the FBI but this case, the more I look at it, this Faisal Shahzad, dumb luck, pure dumb luck at every step of the way in this case. No competence from the administration, no leadership whatsoever. If Obama had done something effective or substantive or even useful, for example, on day one or day two or day three of the oil spill, his staff would have already leaked it and the feigning media would have already reported it and we would have pictures of Obama in the Situation Room, we woulda had Obama surrounded by oil wells as he's learning about what happened here.

If he had done anything substantive, we woulda known about it. But we get nothing other than, "Oh, yeah, we've been on this from day one." We're not told how. We're not told what he's doing. Because he didn't do anything. He's clueless. And worse yet, he's too arrogant to learn. He doesn't think he has anything to learn. He thinks he knows it all. Just like your kids. At one point didn't your kids think they knew it all and you're the biggest idiot in the world? Well, Obama is the kid we're the parents and he doesn't have anything else to learn, and we don't know what we're talking about. Times Square affair, he's not in charge. He's not even taking charge. Other people are working on this. Look at the health care. He passed this massive government-run health care bill, and he's done with it. He's done, unless he decides he wants to expand it. Okay, that's over, how can I next transform the country? All the problems, all the issues that are with it now and will arise from the health care, well, he doesn't care. It doesn't matter to him at all. Now it's just on to the next thing.

RUSH: Fox News reported this morning that Nosehair Shahzad returned to Pakistan 13 times over the last 10 years. He still wasn't on any watch list. The first time he went on a watch list was Saturday at 12 p.m. Meanwhile, all of us practically get stripped searched at whatever airport we head into, and this guy's not even on the no-fly list despite all of these trips back and forth to Pakistan. You couple that with everything else that's known about the guy. There's literally no competence. Nobody has any idea what is happening. This administration, I was talking a moment ago about how they think they're the smartest and their media buddies think they're the smartest. Well, what the media considers "smart" is what the ancient Greeks used to call "sophistry." You've heard me use that word: "Sophistry."

The "sophists" were just teachers of rhetoric, like George Lakoff (rhymes with) is a sophist. All they do is teach rhetoric -- and Biden isn't even good at that! You couldn't even put him up to the level of being a sophist. David Obey. David Obey. Not only, ladies and gentlemen, is David Obey the retiring now-chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. David Obey is the guy who brought the gavel down when health care reform passed on that awful Sunday in Washington -- and he used the same gavel as the one used to gavel Medicare -- and now, not even six months later, David Obey, "No mas! No mas!" Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm, mmm, mmm! What'd he say last week? At some point you don't need any more money? Something like that.

Okay, so he's the leading recipient of campaign cash from British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs. Could we say to President Obama: At some point you, do you think you've raised enough money? Do you think you have enough campaign cash, Mr. President? You're gonna sit there and tell Americans, 'At some point don't you think you have enough money? At some point you got enough?" Don't you think you've raised enough, Mr. President? It's astonishing to me, ladies and gentlemen, when we have a serious challenge as a nation -- we have two of them right now -- no one really thinks Obama's up to it or has anything to say to rally the people or can lead. Nobody! Nobody thinks Obama's up to it. That's why Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post today: It's a golden opportunity for Obama to "convey competence." If you gotta convey it, it must mean you're not doing it now. Her solution to that is: Yeah just start listing your successes! Except there aren't any that the American people support.

RUSH: You know the smartest thing Obama coulda done when his oil rig blew up? Call Sarah Palin and her husband. Do you realize that Sarah Palin and her husband have a gazillion times the knowledge and experience in the oil business than does Barack Hussein Obama. Mmm...mmm...mmm? What does Obama do? What does he actually do, folks? I don't care what happens. You can have a disaster, you could have a near terrorist bomb go off, you have the oil spill. What does Obama do? He still goes out, and all he can do is talk about what should be and what can be if only he were more powerful and if the government were bigger. If he is forced to actually address real-world events and issues, he is without direction. He doesn't have any experience. He is entirely lost. Unless there's somebody can put a paragraph or two on the teleprompter, he can't come up with it himself.

All he can say to everything that happens is, first, whatever happens, demonize somebody on the terror bomb -- demonize Emirates Airlines, demonize whoever, demonize British Petroleum, demonize the oil industry in general -- and then say (doing impression), "If we had more power, if I had the ability to do things I can't now do, the government bigger, weeeell, this would never happen." That's his sole approach to everything. Whatever goes wrong it's because government isn't big enough, and he doesn't have enough power. We see this with unemployment. Obama likes to say that we are in an economic recovery and that he has saved the nation from the brink. But there is no recovery -- and there was no brink, by the way! He says these things because they are entirely and purely self-serving. When you look...

Honestly, now, ladies and gentlemen. When you look at the real world implications of what Obama has done, he has killed jobs and job creation for years to come. He has bankrupted the nation. Take a look at Greece. Greece: One-third of the workforce in Greece are workers for the government. Greece is about the size of New York state in terms of population. The unions, public and private, will not make any concessions whatsoever. Now there are riots over "austerity," even after bailouts. All around us we see our future. Wherever we look in the world, we can see it. Even within our own borders. We can see it if Arizona doesn't act, regarding immigration. We can see it in California regarding pensions and other unfunded liabilities. We can see it in Venezuela. We can see it in Greece throughout the European Union.

We can see our future precisely because of the lack of leadership and the total devotion to ideology that we have in the White House today: Saved jobs, created jobs, brought us back from the brink? In the real world he has killed jobs. He's killed job creation for years to come. He has bankrupted the country. He has been a complete and total disaster. This is why I wanted him to fail. He has succeeded in making a disaster. He cannot and he will not fix anything because of his ideology. It will not allow him to change course -- and besides that, folks, Obama's actions were never about fixing or reforming anything. They were all about advancing his ideology. Look at him today. Does he seem concerned, has he ever seemed concerned about high unemployment? Does he do anything destructive about it other than ask for more power or hold more summits or do more town hall meetings?

Is there ever anything that he does that experience has taught us works in terms of job creation? Zilch, zero, nada. In fact, he has used a recession to strike one blow after another against the country and he accomplishes nothing. Another case is immigration. Obama could not wait to jump on Arizona. He could not wait to jump on the governor. He couldn't wait to jump on the legislators out there. He couldn't wait to jump on the people of Arizona to lie about their law, to race bait. This is what he does. That does not require any skill or knowledge. That is sophistry: A person of pure rhetoric. He has failed to address the border problem in any effective way and he's incapable of it.

His ideology will not permit it. "What do you mean by that, Rush?" 'Cause he looks at people of color as disadvantaged minorities; he looks at people of color all over the world as having been oppressed. He looks at people of color as the genuine owners of the world's wealth who have been shut out of it. So if you've heard people say, "Rush, well, these people around the world, they just want a better life." Yeah, they want a better life and they need a better life and they would have a better life if it hadn't been for the United States. That's Obama. His ideology will not allow him in any way, shape, or form to permit corrective action on any of our problems. So the border will remain porous and the conditions dangerous.

But when it comes to demagoguing the issue, he will blame others. He will attack the state of Arizona, he will attack the governor, he'll attack the people. He'll send Clinton out to attack talk radio and he'll attack the tea party, but he will accomplish nothing positive for the country. Can somebody tell me one thing positive for the country he has accomplished? I'm serious. One thing positive. It isn't there. Everybody that gets in the way of his agenda is demonized. Every problem that arises has no solution. In many cases Obama's ideology tells him that the problem is a genuine deserved problem, that we have to understand why these people are doing what they're doing 'cause it's our fault. We have created all of this animus against us around the world.

RUSH: Phil, Minneapolis, great to have you, sir. You're up first today on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.

CALLER: It is truly an honor to speak with you, sir, and truly an honor to lead off the show. You are so brilliant. So quickly, I just wanted to point out that your observation that Obama simply stands in front of people and talks and continues to campaign is a textbook Chicago neighborhood organizer move. That's what they do. They just run around neighborhoods and yell and point fingers, with no substance.

RUSH: Oh, exactly. Sophistry, pure sophistry. Whatever happens, Obama says it wouldn't happened if the government was bigger. British Petroleum, it's their problem, it's their fault. Emirates Airlines, it's their problem. Follow the ambulance, it's their problem. All we need to do is more power for me and a bigger government and that is what I'm out there doing. Everything that goes wrong is an opportunity to grow government, is a crisis to maximize opportunities and to find and portray new demons. Here is Gretchen in the Gulf Coast. It's great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.

CALLER: My thing is listening to you -- I've been trying to call in for a couple days because I want to scream into the phone, the oil spill and all the arguments and the senator whatever in Florida, we're not going to drill here offshore, you're right. They're making the perfect case for onshore drilling, baby, and there it is. It's so much easier to drill, to get oil out of the ground onshore, put it in the truck and haul it to the refinery that it is underwater. It's a logistic nightmare dealing with underwater. And on land -- I mean I just think all these people who are screaming about no offshore drilling are making a wonderful argument for onshore drilling.

RUSH: Well, they may be but of course what they're trying to do is shut down all drilling. This is their ultimate objective and they have dummkopfs like Schwarzenegger and Bill Nelson is the Senator from Florida that you're talking about. So while these guys shout, "No more drilling, no more drilling, no more drilling," ChiComs continue to drill in the Gulf, the Angolans, even the Vietnamese are drilling, all with deals with the Cubans. And of course the Mexicans are not slopping off on their drilling. They got a new big find. And we're paying, what is it, Brazil $10 billion to drill for oil offshore Brazil. So we're the only ones stopping ourselves, nobody else.

RUSH: Hey, you know, after this oil spill, just to illustrate my point about Obama, where is all the action now on nuclear plants that were to be started? I know we can't have a nuclear plant up and running by now, but wouldn't you think here that, okay, big oil spill, opportunity to push -- he wants nuclear plants. Time to do it, right? What's he doing to clear away all the obstacles to nuclear plants? Zip, zero, nada. What's doing about anything other than making it worse? Nothing.

CALLER: I'm not going to give it to you today so you're safe here. Hey, I've been finding that the left is kind of -- it's getting to the point where there's just no-holds-barred. This morning we've got a radio talk show host here in Chicago, she's one of I think Ed Schultz little lieutenants, I don't know if you want me to say her name or not.

RUSH: Stephanie Miller, I know who she is. She used to be at Fox, she's let herself go.

CALLER: This morning, and I quote, she was disappointed that the bomber wasn't a white guy.

RUSH: Wait a second. Is this station -- I don't want you to give the call letters --

RUSH: Is this station actually in Chicago or is it a suburban station 40 miles outside of town with a 5,000 watt stick?

CALLER: Let me say this, too. On Friday, God is a Democrat because of the oil spill, because this way they can stop offshore drilling.

RUSH: Well, I've got some sound bites coming up of leftists on TV going nuts with what I've said about the oil spill.

RUSH: Well, yeah, it's your show, go ahead. I'm just sitting here like a potted plant, have at it.

CALLER: -- Arizona, railing on this Arizona thing, too, and they're saying papers and Nazis and stuff like that. I would consider, when you're pulled over, you're asked for a driver's license and proof of insurance, that's not Nazism. And the name La Raza is "the race."

CALLER: So for "the race" to be calling other people's Nazis, it's the height of hypocrisy. It's the height.

RUSH: Well, I know but you gotta look past it. It's like this "God is a Democrat" business. What that comment means, God's a Democrat, oh, good an oil well blows up so that we will not have any more oil wells. We will go ahead, we will pollute the Gulf, we'll kill a bunch of birds, we'll cause all kinds of economic disaster and we will celebrate that so we don't have any more oil wells dug. I am being accused of saying exactly that when it's Democrats and liberal people that are saying it. Now, I have a story here from Brian Maloney, Radio Equalizer, that says it was the hapless Contessa Brewer who was on the Stephanie Miller show, who I said used to be at Fox but she's let herself go, it's too many appearances on Larry King. Contessa Brewer was on the Stephanie Miller show and she said: "I get frustrated... There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country. . There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry."

So it was the hapless Contessa Brewer of MessNBC who was expressing sadness that a white tea party person was not responsible for the near explosion in Times Square. So there's that. When we come back I'm going to spend some time here analyzing or letting you hear Government-Run Media try to essentially blame me for the oil spill. I know, I know, I know there's an e-mail chain going on about this. It's the St. Louis Rams thing all over again. It's Michael J. Fox all over again. It never works, but it's just amazing. Twenty-one years and it never stops. They never debate me on what I actually say. They have to lie about things I didn't say and put that out there to try discredit me.

RUSH: Let's go to the audio sound bites. There's a giant e-mail chain letter going around start from the news media to blogs to try anything to take the attention away from the regime on their incompetence regarding the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, what I'm saying about it is absolutely horrible. What I am saying about it -- and even what I'm not saying about it but yet what they say I'm saying about it even though I haven't said it -- is far worse than the spill itself. It's far worse than the inaction or the incompetence of Obama and anybody on down the line. Here are some examples of it. Last night Chris Matthews on MessNBC had Mother Jones magazine's Washington bureau chief David Corn talking about the oil spill.

MATTHEWS: Rush Limbaugh, talking about the timing of the oil rig explosion and his theories about what caused it. What a ridiculous comment to make. I mean, we -- we're talking about the worst environmental disaster in so many years where a whole part of our world we live in could be destroyed for years and years, and -- and here's this blowhard saying it might have been sabotage by the environmentalists who care more about the habitat than anybody.

MATTHEWS: (interrupting) What is these...? What do these words he speaks mean anymore?

CORN: (snickering) Well, nothing. You've heard of oil exploration. This is oil exploitation. You know, anything that comes along, you twist it, you turn it --

MATTHEWS: (screaming) But these Dittoheads, they're bobbing their heads to this stuff!

RUSH: No, no, no. (laughing) In the first place, he has not listened to this program nor read the transcripts. I didn't assign any sabotage on this until the regime sent SWAT teams in there -- and I never accused the administration of blowing up the rig. I said it appears the regime may be open to some sort of attack. Had I said ecoterrorism there wouldn't have been any question here but I don't think in those terms. I just think Senate bill blew it up and they send SWAT teams? The regime is sending SWAT teams? "Even the regime," I said, "must be open to the idea that this was not an accident and they're looking into it." All of a sudden now it is I, El Rushbo, claiming that wackos blew it up on purpose, when in fact a bunch of wacko let's have on the radio are saying, "God is a Democrat" for blowing up the oil well because this will prevent future oil wells -- and, by the way, Chris, you are damn right.

Look at all the money, look at all the effort being spent to save the birds and the habitat from the oil, and yet old people? Obama, on ABC: Give the hundred-year-old woman a pain pill. Don't start talking to me about this stuff. I mean, there aren't... Chris, do you really believe that there are environmentalist nuts who are not happy that this happened? I'm not saying they did it. But when Bill Nelson, senator from Florida, comes out there and says, "Well, that's just it! No more drilling! Absolutely no more drilling," do you think they have scored a home run here, Chris, the environmentalist wackos? Then you have Schwarzenegger. He's sitting at home or his office watching it on TV, he puts out a statement (doing impression), "No more oil drilling. It's not going to happen." Well, whether they did it on purpose or whether it's an accident, the environmentalist left is ecstatic about this. There's no question. I'm not the one happy about it in any way, shape, manner, or form. But I have nothing to do with it anyway. I'm not running the country not dealing with it. I'm not the one that waited 12 days before taking it seriously. This isn't my Katrina! I haven't had one Katrina, anyway. So here's more, here's Matthews following up David Corn who was incoherent in his response.

MATTHEWS: There's a teaching moment here. We people are responsible for our habitat. It's possible for mankind to destroy our habitat. This is an example. It is God-given but God's not keeping it here!

MATTHEWS: It's staying in our hands. It's in our hands, and we can destroy our habitat.

RUSH: (sigh) Uh, "destroy" means "wipe out." We didn't destroy Prince William Sound. Lightning destroys more habitat than man does. These guys are just... This is the problem. These people are not thinkers; they are reactionaries. They are not curious anymore, they simply have templates and narratives of their, you know, various stories to advance their agenda. Whenever something comes up just plug in, and it works. Same show, Cynthia Tucker, an editor of the Atlanta Urinal-Constipation newspaper said this.

TUCKER: Back to the political impact here and right-wingers trying to find a way to blame the president. Because this is happening in real time, it's going to be very hard for them to take people's attention away from BP. This is BP's responsibility. People know President Obama wasn't on that oil rig, and sabotage is out of the question. BP has not suggested that. First of all it's pretty -- it's pretty far down for any, quote, "environmental wackos," quote, to get to, to blow up an oil rig. But people understand because it's happening in real time you can watch the footage of this disaster taking place that the responsibility falls squarely on BP.

RUSH: Has Ms. Tucker forgotten? You know, these people do not understand satire, parody, sarcasm. Has she forgotten how George Bush steered the hurricane to New Orleans? How George Bush coulda stopped it and didn't? George Bush didn't want to save black people. George Bush didn't put FEMA into action down there fast enough 'cause he didn't care that black people were dying. Have they forgotten all this? Do they not understand that we are making fun of them by calling it -- and, by the way, it was not any bunch of right-wingers that first came up with the phrase "Obama's Katrina." That was State-Controlled Media that first came up with that. Finally, to close this out, on MSNBC, Chris Matthews one more time.

MATTHEWS: I hear Rush Limbaugh and the others on the right trying desperately to swim away from this horror. They're talking up conspiracies with sabotage and all the rest. I understand that part. When you're a Dittohead, let's face it, it's just one more moronic idea to bob your head to. Yes, sir. Good point! Sure, Rush. Could be. I'll have my oil now."

RUSH: (laughing) You do not know the delight it is to drive these people nuts! (laughing) The Dittoheads bobbing their heads to whatever I say. (laughing) That's the thing. If he had an audience he wouldn't have a problem here, but he knows he doesn't have an audience. Remember they said Bush blew up the levees! Have you forgotten Jesse Jackson said Bush blew up the levees! Bush blew up the World Trade Center! Have these people forgotten all of this that they said? It even continued over to CNN. Here's what I said yesterday in context. This is after I played the Gene Taylor sound bite where he says, "The spill will break up." Gene Taylor (Democrat-Mississippi) was the guy flowing over it and said, "Yeah, you look down there, it looks like a bunch of chocolate milk but it's breaking up. The sea will take care of it. It's not Armageddon; it's not Katrina." Here's me talking about that.

RUSH ARCHIVE: [H]e is saying something that happens. The oil spill will break up. I'm not trying to minimize it here. But ecology does take care of itself, the planet does. Why all the panic? Oh, a crisis. Well, it's gonna break up. It's not going to be a giant glob when it hits, but it's going to pose problems. I'm not gonna say it's not going to pose problems, but he's saying that as it breaks up it will break down. You know, seawater is pretty tough stuff. Try living in it for a while. Oil has a tough time surviving. This many gallons of oil seep from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico every day, just spread out over the whole floor of the Gulf and it never surfaces 'cause it gets eaten alive, but it seeps from the ocean floor at this amount. Not as concentrated obviously as coming from this well.

RUSH: Anderson Cooper says, "Gene Taylor and Rush Limbaugh both say there's nothing to worry about here."

COOPER: There's been some truly weird talk about the Gulf oil spill and it's coming from both sides. Rush Limbaugh, Gene Taylor say this is just going to break up naturally. A, is that true; and B, does it mean we should just let nature take its course?

OTT: It's going to break up naturally, same as in Alaska. We're going to probably wait 40 years or 50 years before it all "breaks up naturally," and what we're going to see here probably in Louisiana with a little bit warmer temperature, maybe a little bit more rapid degradation. Maybe a little less than 50 years but who knows how much less

RUSH: What's this 50 years garbage? She's talking about Prince William Sound, and I'm going to put some researchers on this because Drive-By Media was stunned at how quickly it turned around. They were stunned. Remember the story about the otter. They sent an otter out there after cleaning up the otter. They sent it back out there to reintroduce it into its habitat a killer whale surfaced and ate the thing in front of a bunch of high school kids playing a band celebrating the event? The insurance company was upset because it cost them a whole bunch of money to, you know, de-oil the otter and a number of other things. These people were out there on the rocks with Dawn dishwashing detergent, paper towels wiping the rocks because this stuff attacks grease, they say. We'll have to do the research on this. Fifty years the place is...? The Wall Street Journal, by the way, has a great editorial today talking about the risk of oil wells leaking or having accidents, versus tankers having problems. It said the more oil wells we had here the actual safer we would be because the less we would need tankers traversing the oceans, which are the real risk of giant oil spills, such as the Exxon Valdez.

RUSH: Audio sound bites, here is the hapless Contessa Brewer. Now, we just heard Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper expressing outrage that I was saying environmentalist wackos did this. How could I dare do that? Contessa Brewer on the Stephanie Miller Radio Show in suburban America this morning.

BREWER: The thing is -- is that, and I get frustrated. There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry. And so there was part of me that was really hoping this would not be the case, that here would be somebody who's not defined.

RUSH: Whose skin color is a certain way? Tell me, what way is black? What way is white? At any rate, that's just a minor point. I don't pay attention to words. So she's admitting, "Oh God, please don't let it be a Middle Eastern, please, please let it be a white Republican, please let it be a conservative who is part of the tea party." That's what she was hoping, and she is an anchor and an infobabe at MessNBC.

RUSH: We had this sound bite a couple minutes ago. I'm not going to go back to it. I don't remember what number it was or where it was, but it was some expert saying that it takes 50 years for the environment to clean itself up after an oil spill and I said, "We're going to sick our researchers on this to find out just how quickly and surprisingly quickly Prince William Sound rebounded," and that has happened. From NOAA: "Resiliency of the Sound -- Recolonization at Herring Bay -- What we have found is that, despite the gloomy outlook in 1989, the intertidal habitats of Prince William Sound have proved to be surprisingly resilient. Many shorelines that were heavily oiled and then intensively cleaned now appear much as they did before the spill." What's the date of this? Well, I don't have the date. But whatever the date, it certainly isn't 50 years from 1989.

"Most gravel beaches where the sediments were excavated and pushed into the surf zone for cleansing have returned to their normal shape and sediment distribution patterns. Beaches that had been denuded of plants and animals by the toxic effects of oil and by the intense cleanup efforts show extensive recolonization and are similar in appearance to areas that were unoiled." Then they have two pictures here of the Herring Bay shoreline 1989 shortly after the spill and in 1996, seven years after the spill the sight was oiled but not treated. So we're talking about ten years. Ten years, not 50. So, I think it was CNN goes out and find these dip excrement experts, environmental experts. "Limbaugh doesn't know what he's talking about! Fifty years at least. Now, maybe warmer down in the Gulf, maybe not 50 years, maybe 40." These people do not know what they're talking about. The level of ignorance, disinformation, misinformation on purpose in the United States media is akin to medical malpractice. This is no different than a doctor knowing that you need open-heart bypass surgery amputating your right foot. That's one way of explaining what's happening here.

RUSH: Let's go through some things here, shall we, folks? For every problem, there is not a solution but there is a villain, unless Islamic extremists are involved. Let me repeat that. As

far as this regime concerned, for every problem, there is not a solution, but there is a villain, unless Muslim terrorists are involved. For example, the lesson here, if you see something say something, unless you see it in Arizona, then shut up. Fruit of the Loom bomber. Fort Hood, Muslim jihadist, the Arkansas military recruiting center attack, the Times Square attempted bombing possibly by a Muslim extremist. The regime has downplayed the significance of all of these events when the rest of the country knew exactly what was going on. The regime is fashionably late to the party. No rush to judgment there because these events don't advance their agenda. The Fruit of the Loom bomber, the Fort Hood Muslim jihadist, the Arkansas military recruiting center attack, and the Times Square attempted bombing do not advance Obama's agenda. And so we've done everything we can to, yeah, acknowledge it but then sweep it away when it doesn't fit our agenda.

In this case the agenda is Republicans did it, angry, old, white Republicans who are showing up at tea parties who are upset at health care and taxes in Arizona. That's what they wanted. That's what Obama wanted, that's what the regime wanted. The media was desperately hoping for it. They didn't get it. So it's time to move on now. Fruit of the Loom bomber, doesn't advance the agenda, Fort Hood Muslim jihadist, doesn't advance the agenda. Arkansas military recruiting center attack doesn't advance the agenda, nor does this thing in Times Square. The regime loves villains, unless Islamic extremists are involved. That's the one time that the regime does not go out of its way to find a villain. Ditto the press. Domestic terrorism, especially by Muslim terrorists, is apparently an unwanted distraction to be swept under the rug, if possible.

Here are the real problems facing Obama as he looks at it and he defines it. Toyotas. Act now, stop driving 'em, we're gonna fine 'em out of business. Buy General Motors or Chrysler. Insurance premiums going up due to increasing costs, act now, blast the insurance companies, and get Obamacare passed. Wall Street? Big bonuses? Attack now, for a problem Democrats caused and get the Dodd bill passed. British Petroleum, another domestic enemy, just like Wall Street, a domestic enemy, just like Toyota, a domestic enemy, just like insurance companies, domestic enemies, just like Walmart, domestic enemy. Gotta act now. We gotta villainize, we have to demonize, we have to move our agenda items based on our demonizing of these domestic problems. British Petroleum, keep the boot on their throat, distract from the regime's incompetence in responding to the oil spill. Limbaugh? Attack now. Associate Limbaugh with things he has nothing to do with, put words in Limbaugh's mouth he never said before Limbaugh derails our agenda.

Obama's agenda is not ours, folks. Look at the polling data and you will see it. The Obama agenda is not ours. Our problems, your problems, my problems, everybody's problems are their opportunities to advance their agenda, not to fix what is obviously broken. So for every problem that surfaces that the AP can write an analysis and wring their hands, "Oh, it's so sad, it's so unfortunate, no president has ever been faced with these kinds of no win situations." For every problem there's not a solution. There's not a solution in the Gulf. There's a villain, British Petroleum. There's not a solution to Wall Street, there's a villain, Goldman Sachs, et al, and there's a savior, Chris Dodd in the financial regulatory reform bill. Toyotas? No, no, no, we don't have a safety problem there, we've got an opportunity, we got a villain. Frog march 'em up to Congress, put 'em on trial in front of Henry Waxman and the boys. The regime will get you one way or the other. For every problem, no solution, only a villain, except when Muslim terrorists are involved, and then it's a distraction.

So let's review. Shall we, ladies and gentlemen? Where are we at this moment? The lesson of the Times Square attack, Obama praising average, ordinary citizens. You see something, say something, unless you see it in Arizona, then you shut up. All of a sudden now, after two quick references to this this morning, Obama can't wait to turn his laser-like focus on jobs. Audio sound bite number seven, right after he just spent about 50 seconds reassuring us that nothing had happened and nothing will happen, everything's okay in New York, Obama then said this.

OBAMA: I've said since the very beginning of my administration, we can't just rebuild the economy to where it was. We're going to have to rebuild it stronger than before. We've gotta rebuild it on a new foundation of lasting growth. We have to tackle structural problems, from education, to energy, from our financial system to our health care system, from our trade imbalance to our fiscal imbalance.

RUSH: Stop this. If he's reelected in 2012, he's going to be saying the same thing six years from now. He's going to see we need a laser-like focus on lasting growth. We need to tackle our structural problems from education to -- even after six years of doing nothing. Six years of being in charge, here's gonna still say the same things, because there are no solutions. There's only tumult and chaos and there is the desire for you to think they care, the desire for you to think that they are moving and taking action on this. Well, it's been almost a year-and-a-half, and every one of these things he cites has only gotten worse, and yet he keeps promising a laser-like focus. Here's the next sound bite. Government will do those things for the public good that private industry won't. So here comes the demonization again.

OBAMA: Government can build the infrastructure that allows products and services to reach customers. Government can create incentives and clean energy, for example, that promote innovation and exports. These things are public goods that no business, no individual, is gonna provide on their own. But they create a favorable environment in which everybody, companies across the country, can open and expand.

RUSH: Yeah, right, 'cause you see, private individuals, private industry, cheats, rotten low down skunks, government is angelic and good, government can do all these things. Private citizens won't. No, no. Private citizens are not charitable. They're selfish, greedy pigs, and they're stealing from the rightful owners of the country. Only government can stop that from happening. Only government can fix oil spills. Ahem. Only government can clean up after a hurricane. Ahem. Only government can clean up an economic mess. Ahem. The way I look at it, it's all getting worse because we got a guy with a five-minute career here who I don't care what room he walks into is the least qualified to do anything. So he can't wait to turn his laser-like focus on jobs. If only, my friends, we had our boot on the throat of terrorism and the rest of the enemies who are trying to destroy our country instead of our own international cartels which are trying to produce energy so that we can all improve our lifestyles and our standard of living.

I'm just reviewing this thing to close it up here before we go to the break. If Faisal Shahzad was foreclosed on, where did he get the money to fly back to Pakistan? It was cash. Where did he get the money to buy the 15 bags of fertilizer, the gun, and a bunch of clips? So he flies home to Pakistan, he comes back five minutes later with the money to rent or even buy a house in Bridgeport, then he paid $1,300 or 1,800, I don't know what it was for this SUV on Craigslist, where's he getting this money? How come he's a bungling little idiot who couldn't even set an alarm clock straight? Where did he get the money to buy the propane, the rest of the supplies? Where did he get the money to put gasoline in the SUV? We all know what that costs. We don't even know where he worked, if anywhere. Then we have the mayor telling the perky Katie Couric, "Oh, yeah, no doubt some kook, domestic, homegrown, probably upset about health care bill, yeah, betcha 25 cents." We're all owed 25 cents from the guy, and he can afford it. Then he comes out and says, "All right, fine, it wasn't who I wanted it to be, but we're not going to tolerate any backlash against Muslim New Yorkers. A few bad apples among many groups."

He cited New York's long history of accepting cultures from around the world, except try going there and being a conservative and see how you're respected. Bias against tea baggers, tea party people, bias against people opposed to enforcing the law on immigration, bias against people who opposite this abomination of a health care bill, that's perfectly acceptable. The media can be biased for 24 hours, 12 hours in predicting who was the criminal here. Elected officials can lead that charge, media repeats it, then they can acted disappointed it wasn't a tea party guy that set the bomb and the SUV. Don't be surprised, ladies and gentlemen -- in fact, let me put it this way. Bloomberg was out there betting everybody 25 cents that it was a tea party person upset with the health care bill. Stupid fool. If you're going to cite a current political issue you shoulda said the guy's upset with the Arizona immigration bill. Health care's long gone.

So I will bet 25 cents the media jumps on the mortgage angle and tries to justify this guy's radicalism because of being ruined by the Bush housing meltdown because he was foreclosed on, and that's what alienated him. Yeah, poor immigrant, he came here for a better life despite knowing what was stacked against him, his Middle Eastern heritage, but he loved America so much that he came here and he ends up buying a tenement up there in Bridgeport, and it was foreclosed on because the Bush housing bubble happened, anybody would go nuts and try to blow up Times Square, that's what the media will say. I'll betcha in fact they'll say this poor guy was tricked into a mortgage he couldn't afford. I'll betcha they'll say that. Yes, he was tricked by evil Wall Street bankers into a mortgage he couldn't afford. Why, I could go on and on and on. I betcha I could even make myself feel sorry for the guy before this show is over.

RUSH: All right, friends. The media are doing their level best here to make this a cause to raise the concern for domestic terrorism. Look how they're stressing that this "gentleman" is an "American citizen." So they're describing him in this order: One, "American citizen;" two, "from Connecticut;" three, "an SUV owner;" and, "Oh, yeah! Four: He's back and forth from Pakistan and mighta known a Taliban guy we thought we killed. But that doesn't matter. He has an SUV. As soon as we find out what radio station he listens to, yeah! Then we'll have the guy!" CNN was unreal this morning on American Morning. Jim Acosta, the fill-in host, said this about Faisal Shahzad.

ACOSTA: If it can be confirmed that his house was foreclosed on in recent years, one would have to imagine that that brought a lot of pressure and a lot of heartache on that family.

RUSH: Did I not tell you? I had not dug this deep into the roster yet, and Cookie says, "You've got what you're saying. They have done it. It's sound bite number ten." So I looked at it during break; it is number ten. His family's not even here. They're in Pakistan. So he was foreclosed on. That coulda driven anybody nuts! Anybody foreclosed on would go get an SUV on Craigslist, put a bunch of bombs in it and then screw upsetting the alarm clock by 12 hours to blow up Times Square.

RUSH: We're going to start in Jacksonville, Florida, this is Martin. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Rush, it's a pleasure to be on the show. It's an honor to meet you. Thank you for allowing me on the show.

CALLER: Well, first I want to start off by saying that I appreciate you talking about the New York City bomber, what's going on with that. You're not doing what a lot of these other folks are. I was listening to Fox NewsTalk driving back across the state yesterday, and some guy was giving the game away. I don't know who comes on about the same time this time as you do.

CALLER: I heard it, and I'm like pulling out my hair and I'm like, "Are you serious? Are you discussing what he screwed up because these guys are going to tighten up their game the next time." There will be a next time.

CALLER: I will say this. I am a part-time soldier but I am a full-time patriot thanks to you.

CALLER: Yes. Yes. I'm one of those guys. I put on the suit; I work the robot. That's who I am.

CALLER: There's something else that's going on in the United States military. I don't know if many people are talking about this, but I want to go ahead and just let you know. The Constitution is not being taught.

CALLER: In the US military. I just came back from an Army leaders school, and we went into this whole thing of Army ethics. My ears perked up once I saw that the Constitution was in there, and I'm thinking, "Okay, good. Maybe there isn't a lot of bad stuff going on." We covered the preamble for ten seconds and then moved on. We spent maybe two hours on riot control, but all the Constitution got was ten seconds of coverage. We're sworn to support and defend this document.

CALLER: Apparently it is. I mean, they're more concerned about teaching us live control and --

RUSH: Were there any American-Pakistanis or American-Afghanis or American-Iranians in the military class that you were in?

RUSH: Jerry in Bay Village, Ohio. You're up next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush, for taking my phone call. I've been recently listening to you a lot, but I had heard your comment earlier while I was out driving doing my job about how the left would spin this into something that wasn't that popular, that this man might have -- that the newscaster said that they foreclosed on his home and he probably was just a little depressed and this might be the act of a depressed man. And I thought to myself, in the last year I believe there's probably three or four million people that have been foreclosed on, so I think it might be our civic duty to warn New York, there may be three or four million SUVs parked in the city this week with explosives packed in there and I think we should warn them. And then I thought the other side of that is that maybe Obama can then come out after that does happen and say that car sales are up four million, fertilizer bags have been sold at 12 million and the right's not doing anything about it.

RUSH: Right, and the economy is rebounding at the same time all because of the stimulus bill, stimulus money buying the fertilizer bags, stimulus money buying the SUVs from General Motors and Chrysler because we've run Toyota out of business or we're close to. Yeah, it probably would be a public service to warn the mayor of New York, His Honor, Michael Bloomberg, to be on the lookout for a whole bunch of SUVs when people have been foreclosed on. Here, if you didn't hear the sound bite, this is number ten this morning on CNN, the fill-in host Jim Acosta talking about Faisal Shahzad.

ACOSTA: If it can be confirmed that his house was foreclosed on in recent years, one would have to imagine that that brought a lot of pressure and a lot of heartache on that family.

RUSH: Yeah. (laughing) So if it weren't so outrageous, I mean it would just be... do these people realize, I don't think they do, how absolutely dumb and stupid they sound, how utterly predictable. The cofounder of CNN is worried that CNN's becoming a joke, and you, Mr. Acosta, are exhibit A. The cofounder thinks CNN's becoming a joke, and it's comments like this that contribute to people thinking that.

RUSH: You gotta hear this. You know, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went to the UN yesterday and said, "The US, you need to be sanctioned and penalized because the US threatens to use nuclear weapons, any nation that does that," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Today he's on a rant saying that the Zionists in Israel are like a rotting tree, the next storm comes along, the tree is going to fall. So last night Charlie Rose interviewed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Rose said, "Why are you attacking the United States all the time?"

AHMADINEJAD: (through translator) Mr. Bush, how many threats, and we kept defending ourselves. When exactly have attacked...

AHMADINEJAD: Allow me, Mr. Charlie Rose. Are there Iranian forces around US borders or are there American troops around Iran borders?

AHMADINEJAD: Allow me. Mr. Bush four times officially threatened Iran with a military attack. Four times. And his policy, the declared policy was regime change in Iran. He said it officially many times.

ROSE: But Mr. Bush is no longer president. You need to stop suggesting that there's no difference between President Obama and President Bush. You say that all the time.

RUSH: Oh, come on, Mahmoud, come on Mahmoud, please, can't you just stop criticizing Obama? Obama is not Bush! Charlie Rose's feelings are hurt. Last night on PBS. It's not Bush. Come on, Mahmoud, he's not Bush. Can't you see they're different guys? It's laughable.

Only 6,662,000 more jobs needed for Obama to fulfill his promise (the point is not that Obama is wrong or that his economic experts are a little off; their estimates are nowhere close to reality):

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.

Judith Miller is one of the moderate and fairly level-headed voices for FoxNews:

Conservative New Media (it is so-so; I must admit to getting tired of seeing the interviewer high-fiving Carly Fiorina 3 or 4 times during an interview):

Army Ranger Michael Behenna sentenced to 25 years in prison for 25 years for shooting Al Qaeda operative

Maybe the White House does not need to hold press conferences? It releases exclusive articles daily right here:

This is quite helpful; it is a list of all leftist groups, with links to background information on each of these groups (when I checked, 879 groups were listed). This is a fantastic resource.

One of the more radical people from the right, calling for the impeachment of Obama:

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a free enterprise site (there are several videos on the flat tax):

This is a pretty radical site which alleges that Obama is a Marxist hell-bent in taking over our country:

1982 interview with Larry Grathwohl on Ayers' plan for American re-education camps and the need to kill millions

This is an interesting site; it seems to be devoted to the debate of climate change:

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.