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There are just a few more things that I want to address you on regarding the nomination of Harriet Miers to be an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, and we can couple this with this fun little exercise that I want to present to you today to help illustrate a point. Now, the Supreme Court this morning heard oral arguments in a big case. This is a case about the assisted suicide law in the state of Oregon. The people of Oregon have twice voted by pretty substantial margins for assisted suicide, letting the medical community "off"...

RUSH: Sylvia in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, welcome, nice to have you with us. CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you? RUSH: Fine, thank you. CALLER: I want to commend you on your interview with the vice president for not caving in to him. I feel exactly the way you do. I feel so disappointed in this nomination. I feel like we've been let down over and over and over again by the Republicans. I, like you, would put up a fight. I'd put the most conservative judge out there, who had even picketed abortion clinics if I could find one and...

RUSH: Here's the president this morning in the Oval Office, a portion of his remarks on the White House counsel Harriet Miers' nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. BUSH: Over the past five years I've spoken clearly to the American people about the qualities I look for in a Supreme Court justice. A justice must be a person of accomplishment and sound legal judgment. A justice must be a person of fairness and unparalleled integrity, and a justice must strictly apply the Constitution and laws of the United States and not legislate from the bench. RUSH: You're going to hear...

RUSH: Crystal in Miami, nice to have you on the program. Welcome. CALLER: Hi, Rush. You often comment that politics have become more partisan over the last decade or two, and I'm only 29 so I really have to take your word for that, but I wonder what you think may have motivated that development and is there anything we can do to effect some kind of change towards less partisan politics. RUSH: Hmm. The second part of that I find a fascinating question, "Is there anything we can do?" Partisanship is not a problem that we can all get...

Last night, even while suffering the ravages of the virus that has overtaken my body, even though I am still here in the process of fighting these ravages, I was diligently preparing for this program. And I ran across what I think is the first written lap dance I have ever encountered. It is a Tina Brown column in the Washington Post. The biggest lap dance ever written is about Bill Clinton. I know lap dances used to be free in the Oval Office, but the guy's gotta get some money somewhere, he's giving away his food and booze,...

RUSH: You know, you cannot escape it, and I guess it's somewhat understandable. There is pessimism all over the country now. Pessimism abounds. You've got the eager excitement of the left. The left is dancing on the grave of George W. Bush all over the place, and there are a few conservatives who are practically calling him dead meat and we may as well forget about him and try to do what we can do here to stanch the damage of the Bush administration. Yes, there are conservatives that are saying this, and I was really tempted today to open...

RUSH: All right, to the confirmation hearings of John Roberts -- and again, folks, it's crucial, while you watch the media reveling in the president's poll numbers and awaiting breathlessly (panting) his speech tonight from Jackson Square in New Orleans, the fact is that his nominee to the Supreme Court is running rings around the best and brightest the left has to offer today and this is reshaping the judiciary, the Supreme Court, and this is the branch of government the left is most concerned about. I know they're covering the Roberts hearings but there's nothing they can do about...

RUSH: We're going to be talking about the first day of questioning of Judge John Roberts today. We have audio sound bites, some of the highlights from things that have occurred this morning. There aren't a whole lot. There are a couple of interesting things. The energy, now, this is unprecedented. It seems to me, it's been 19 years -- no, since 1992, about 13 years since we had a hearing on the Supreme Court justice, whatever. The hearings are going on. Judge Roberts is answering questions at this very moment. Ted Kennedy has left the room and is now...

RUSH: This is Jeannie in Houston. Hi, Jeannie. Welcome to the EIB Network. CALLER: Hi, Rush. It's a pleasure to talk to you. RUSH: Thank you. CALLER: You were talking about the political fallout for the governor and the mayor, but I'm talking about an immediate reaction like a recall. They're going to have a tremendous amount of money pouring into the state, and they've shown at the very least a gross mismanagement and at the worst, huge graft. RUSH: You know, that's an interesting question because let me go back to something I mentioned at the top of the...

Kathleen Blanco is white, correct? George Bush is white, correct? At least according to the pictures I see. The majority of the residents of New Orleans, black, right? According to the census and the pictures I see, right? Yes. Okay. Hurricane comes. Most of the suffering that we are shown is being incurred by black people in New Orleans who are said to be poor, who are said to be black, and about whom it is said Bush is happy this has happened. Bush doesn't care about black people. Kanye West and the rest of the civil rights leadership echoes...

RUSH: Mike, grab audio sound bite #8. We've got this Pelosi montage here. She actually violated an age-old tradition. She went and had a private conversation with a president and repeated it. That usually doesn't happen. But these people have reached the bottom of the barrel here. But based on what she said and all the other Democrats said, I got a great idea. If the recovery effort is so inept and so horrible, let's stop it. If it's that bad, let's suspend the recovery effort right now and immediately start on the investigations to find out what is wrong....

I don't know how many of you have seen this today. This is all over. When I saw this I asked, "So how does this make as large a story in USA Today as it does?" "Group's TV Ad Uses Storm's Aftermath to Target Roberts -- The televised images of poverty stricken evacuees from Hurricane Katrina are part of a provocative last minute effort by liberal interest groups to divert federal Judge John Roberts' path to confirmation as chief justice. MoveOn.org plans to unveil a TV ad on Monday that questions whether Roberts is sensitive enough to civil rights concerns...

I got this from Power Line. It's another great blog out there and it was also on Free Republic. The Freepers are doing great work on all this. "The New York Times is leading the shameless Bush and Republican bashing with respect to the response to Hurricane Katrina. One of its themes is that Congress didn't pay enough attention to flood control in the Gulf. But Donald Luskin reminds us of this bit of wisdom from the New York Times editorial page earlier this year." If you've been paying attention -- and I don't know how long you can before...

Now, let me give you an example. Here in Florida, I just had this story sent to me. This is from today's Tallahassee Democrat. Is that what the name of the paper is? Yeah, the Tallahassee Democrat. The headline story: "Nelson Calls for Freeze on Gasoline Prices -- Senator Warns of New Bid for Drilling in Gulf." That's... Warns of new drilling in Gulf! This illustrates the point I wish to open with. Liberals have absolutely no answer to the gasoline issue. The Democrats and the Sierra Club-inspired environmentalist wackos and liberals have no answer to the gasoline issue. Bill...

RUSH: I think what's going to drive this is once they get to the hearing stage and if these Able Danger people come out and they're credible and they've got the documentation, it's going to be hard to stop this, because the American people are going to want to know the truth and they're going to be outraged about it, and that could end up driving it. When I said the political class, I don't have anybody particularly in mind. I didn't mean to say it for that reason, and so I don't want to suggest that there is a...

RUSH: A couple of things here on Able Danger: "Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter plans to hold a hearing on the Able Danger allegations and the larger issue of information sharing between the Pentagon and the FBI." Fox News has confirmed this. "Able Danger, the code name for a military intelligence unit that apparently learned a year before the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and other terrorists were already in the United States." So looks like Jamie Gorelick may have found her way back into the news. Senate and House hearings apparently will take...

RUSH: There is a network today that is obsessed with Pat Robertson. This network has called me no less than three times asking me when I'm going to talk about it so they can record it. This network hasn't cared one whit about any of the outrageous assassination threats that George Bush gets from members of the left. They don't care. It's so patently obvious. I knew they're going to be listening, that's why I keep saying, "The mainstream media does not set the agenda of this show!" If you want to find out what I think, report what I...

So we had the news earlier in the week in the Washington Post that the Democrats basically said, "There's nothing we can do about this Roberts guy. He's got 70 votes. He's not worth spending the political capital," and that story was, I am convinced, designed to rabble-rouse the extreme left-wing groups like Ralph Neas at People for the American Way to get in gear and try to change the minds of some of these Democrats who have said that they are tending to vote for Roberts. So all hell broke loose the next day, and demanding that certain Democrats,...

You know that TV crocodile hunting team Steve and Terri Irwin? Well those two can expect some competition in days to come. Scientists in northern Australia have been collecting blood from crocodiles in hopes of saving humans. Studies in the late 90s showed that several antibodies in croc blood killed penicillin-resistant bacteria. More recently it has been discovered that crocodiles’ immune systems can kill the HIV virus. American scientist Mark Merchant says the reptiles “tear limbs off each other, [but] they heal up very rapidly and normally, almost always without infection.” Aussie scientist Adam Britton adds: “The crocodile has an...

RUSH: The headline is really all you need to know: "Clinton: I Would Have Attacked bin Laden." Bill Clinton here, in... I guess New York magazine, got the first post-stroke interview with the former president. He was out in Chicago today at the memorial service for John Johnson, the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines. He was escorting Mrs. Johnson to her seat in the church and you just see (Clinton impression), "I want my legacy, folks. I'm still working on my legacy," in everything he says and does. "Former President Clinton now says that he would have taken out...

RUSH: The pompous 9/11 Commission, this bunch of brainiacs out there thinking they're saving the world with their work on this commission, and their work basically was to what? They were a commission on "connecting the dots." They were out there trying to find out where the dots weren't detected, right? And now we learn that they missed a huge dot. This is the Able Danger group, the Defense Intelligence Agency unit that was surveilling Mohamed Atta, had him under surveillance, knew he was in Brooklyn with three of the other hijackers one year before 9/11. Ten days before they...

RUSH: This NARAL ad, you know, if I were an American woman, I would be outraged at this, because this NARAL ad is setting women back 50 years. I mean, the ad is not only false, it's misleading and dishonest. It is an assault on women. It's a setback to all the progress women have made over the years. Every negative cliché, every cheap shot that demeans women comes back big time in this ad and women everywhere can thank that ad, NARAL and the NAGs for getting so upset about Roberts, but the main thing is the ad is...

RUSH: All right, now to this 9/11 business. We have some audio sound bites here from Congressman Curt Weldon to go along with this story. I've got two versions of the story, one is by the Associated Press, the other is in the New York Times. I wanted to give you highlights of both. The AP story: "The Sept. 11 commission will investigate a claim that U.S. defense intelligence officials identified ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as a likely part of an al-Qaeda cell more than a year before the hijackings but didn't forward the information to law...

RUSH: Now, I want to get back to this gasoline business because I, ladies and gentlemen, was a bit flippant with a caller from Farmington, New Mexico -- and her name was Elizabeth, and she was upset at the price of gasoline, and I wasn't flippant... Well, I was flippant. We had a call from an Exxon station owner. What was his name? I'm having a brief mental block on his name. Brett, what was the Exxon gas station owner's name? Okay. Well, whatever. This guy, it's a good thing he called this program, because if he'd have called a...

I hate to throw cold water -- actually I love to throw cold water -- on all this spin, but I have here the latest Gallup poll, and the headline here of the latest Gallup poll is this: "Election 2008: Republican Candidates Fare Better in Early Trial Heats." Subheadline: "Public's View of John Kerry Growing More Negative." Oh, and we just had a new star born yesterday in the Democrat Party, right? John Kerry, Jr., trying to hide his ultraliberalism behind a military uniform, and this is the "new star" of the Democratic Party. If this is the new star...

RUSH: Here's Doug in Peoria. Doug, welcome to the program. Nice to have us with us. CALLER: Hi, Rush, happy anniversary. Thanks for taking my call. RUSH: You bet sir, thank you. CALLER: Hey, I talked to you last fall and I just want to let you know you're still playing in Peoria. I have a quick story and then I have a question. I know your time is limited. I just wanted to thank you for always be optimistic. That's one tenet of your show that you don't talk about as much as I think you should. It's easy...

RUSH: All right, folks. Let me cut to the chase. I'm just going to cut straight to the chase. Here is all you have to know about the president's Supreme Court nomination. I have a quote here for you from Dingy Harry, who is the Senate Democratic leader. "Isn't it interesting how the subject has changed from the White House administrative staff to the court today, isn't it? It's interesting there has been no question here about a CIA operative being outed." Greetings, my friends, and welcome. It is the award winning, thrill packed, increasingly popular Rush Limbaugh program, and...

RUSH: "A Senate panel was told there was no torture at G'itmo." Club G'itmo featured no torture whatsoever. "The military investigation of interrogations at Club G'itmo found no torture occurred but one high-value al-Qaeda operative was subjected to abusive and degrading treatment when he was forced to wear a bra, do dog tricks, and stay awake for 20 hours a day. 'We look at this very, very carefully. No torture occurred,' Air Force Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt testified yesterday before the Senate Armed Services Committee. 'Detention and interrogation operations across the board looking through all the evidence that we could,...

Michael Goodwin, writing in the New York Daily News today, perfectly describes the mainstream media in Washington today. They are an opposition party. They are not in any stretch of the imagination about fairness or anything else. He further theorizes that maybe the press is acting the way they are because the Democrats aren't, and so the press has to pick up the slack that the Democrats are leaving around by not being vociferous and demanding Rove resign. I don't know where he's getting this, but he is right about the fact that what we're witnessing here -- and as...

RUSH: Mrs. Clinton, Hillary Rodham, was in Aspen and she went on the attack against President Bush in a speech yesterday, "accusing him of damaging the economy by overspending while giving tax cuts to the rich," and here we go again. The same old class envy business and from a playbook that is 30 to 40 years old. Mrs. Rodham "accused Bush of depriving US soldiers of equipment needed to fight the war in Iraq and cutting funding for scientific research. 'I sometimes feel that Alfred E. Newman is in charge in Washington,' Ms. Rodham said, referring to the Mad...

I've saved this and the response to it for today, Open Line Friday, to share with you. This woman is a subscriber at RushLimbaugh.com. She said, "Rush..." Her name is Anita. "Rush, I'm a die-hard fan. Though I was raised to support a woman's right to choose, since becoming a mother and listening to you over these many years, I've come to strongly believe that abortion is wrong. But because I'm conservative and believe in property rights, I can't reconcile the government's involvement in the ultimate property right to your own body. Can you help me?" So I thought about...

RUSH: Have you heard some of the quotes coming out of LIVE 8? Bob Geldof -- Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof – said, "Something must be done; anything must be done, whether it works or not." Something must be done whether it works or not? Sir Bono of U2 said that 3,000 Africans, mostly children, are dying every day from mosquito bites. I ran the numbers. You know, 3,000, that's 1.365 million a year. That's just children, mostly children from mosquito bites. If you add AIDS and genocide to it, there ought not be anybody left in Africa. So we shouldn't...

RUSH: All right, now, I know the judge deal is a big thing but it's not going to happen for a while. I know a lot of people are worked up about this. I'm one of them. But I must be honest with you. I have a little bit of a different attitude about this than I thought I was going to have. I don't find myself all worked up about it yet because nothing that has happened is unpredictable. You have -- and I'm going to mention it. You have Chuck Schumer demanding a judge summit with the White...

RUSH: Here we go, heading off to a holiday weekend. Whether you are a Propane-American or a Charcoal-American, it's the Fourth of July weekend, Independence Day, and of course the weekend news cycle has been sparked. I really hope you are not among these people that needs news to spark your Fourth of July weekend. I certainly don't. I got a note from a friend today, "Oh, wow, boy, O'Connor is retiring! This is going to really spark up the weekend," and my reply was, "I am fortunate I don't need news to spark up my weekend." Greetings, my friends,...

RUSH: I have to read you the most touching e-mail that we got at Rush 24/7. One of our members, one of our subscribers sent an e-mail to the Rush comments line, and the subject line is: "Take Rush To War With You." It's about our podcasts, but that's not the main point here. Dear Rush, As a charter member of 24/7, I thought I'd be missing out on all the great benefits when I left for Iraq last December. I finally got into a satellite system over here that will allow me to play your MP3 files of the...

RUSH: In audio sound bite #12 which we recently played for you, Senator Durbin was talking about you people that drive hummers. Well, actually he said that in audio sound bite #13. In audio sound bite 12 he proposed over the next 20 years to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 40%, and he said, "Hey, we can do it. It may not even be as great a challenge as the Manhattan Project, when President Roosevelt said [sic], 'Develop an atomic bomb that will end World War II.'" I wonder if some president today, if we didn't have...

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, was the latest court hearing on the attempt by the Palm Beach County state attorney to get my medical records, to see what, if anything, might be in there that they could charge me with. They're on a fishing expedition and by their own admission I am guilty and have to prove myself innocent. They have no idea what to charge until they see the medical records and there was a hearing yesterday. What we've done on the website is we've posted the motion that we filed with the court yesterday, and it's a pdf file....

RUSH: So Howard Dean's out in San Francisco, and he opens his mouth, and he continues to put his foot in it. He goes on the Today Show today to defend it, and you've got stories, "Well, there's some Democrats out there, 'Ah, he shouldn't be saying this kind of stuff.'" You don't see anybody making a move to get rid of him, do you? You don't. In fact, you've got a lot of Democrats like Bill Richardson saying, "Well, you know, these are the kind of things... You know, he's doing a good job as a chairman. Sometimes he's...

RUSH: Let's start with this Watergate stuff. Get this. This is a story from WBAL TV, Channel 11 in Baltimore. "The former FBI official who revealed himself this week as Deep Throat apparently also leaked information to The Washington Post about two of the biggest stories in Maryland in the 1970s. Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote in Thursday's paper that Mark Felt told him in the spring of 1972 during the Watergate investigation that the FBI had some information that Vice President Spiro Agnew had received a $2,500 bribe. The tip produced no story, but Agnew resigned in 1973 upon...

RUSH: (AP) "W. Mark Felt, who retired from the FBI after--" Have you ever heard of him, Mr. Snerdley? I haven't heard of him either but MSNBC, Chris Matthews, "Oh, yeah, yeah, long been one of the suspects." Come on, Chris, nobody ever heard of this guy. First time I've ever heard of his name. "W. Mark Felt, who retired from the FBI after rising to its second most senior position, has identified himself as the 'Deep Throat' source quoted by The Washington Post to break the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon's resignation. 'I'm the guy they used...

Top talk radio host Rush Limbaugh called on DNC chief Howard Dean to release his medical records yesterday, after Dean said he was standing by his false allegation that Limbaugh was a cocaine addict. "It might be helpful if we could see his medical records," the radio host told his audience. "It might be helpful if we could get Dean's medical records and plaster them all over CNN because we won't really know the truth about anything until we get these medical records." Citing an interview last year where Dean admitted he had a drinking problem during his college days,...

The Florida Supreme Court paved the way, and now prosecutors looking to investigate Rush Limbaugh for "doctor shopping" have filed paperwork seeking to open his medical records. Rush has never been charged with a crime, yet in 2003, authorities seized his medical records in order to ascertain whether or not he doctor shopped - i.e. went to different doctors at the same time to get overlapping prescriptions - for painkillers. At 8:30 Monday morning, Palm Beach Circuit Judge Jeffrey Winikoff will hold a hearing to decide what to do with Limbaugh's heretofore personal, confidential records, reports Florida's Sun-Sentinel paper. The...

RUSH: I want you to go back. We got two bites from Durbin, April 26 and April 27, both of them on the floor of the US Senate. DURBIN: We are not going to set out to close down the Senate or to close down the government. Senator Reid, our Democratic leader, and all the members of the Senate feel as I do. That shutting down of the government was the hapless tactic of the Gingrich revolution. It was a terrible idea. Rush Limbaugh was the only American applauding it every day, but the American people knew better. They want...

Let's head on now to the ongoing Newsweek story. This is a Washington Post story. The Washington Post has, at least as far as I count, three stories today on this. The first one I want to call your attention to by Howard Kurtz, our old buddy who is their media analyst there. "The debate over a retracted Newsweek report broadened yesterday into an argument about media and government ethics." What debate? What debate is there that's going on? Newsweek retracted a story. Would somebody tell me what there is to debate? Well, Howard says that the debate here is...

If you're a welfare recipient just getting up, and you may have missed the first hour of the program, once again, we're talking about the judicial nomination harangue going on in the Senate. Roll Call magazine is suggesting that Trent Lott, Republican, Ben Nelson, Democrat, are approaching six senators from each of their respective parties with a deal and the upshot of the deal is that the Democrats would get what they want. They get to cream three of the seven current nominees, the other four would be given floor votes and future nominees would not be filibustered unless a...

Well, have you heard the news? "After three years of rising federal budget deficits, a surge of April tax receipts brought unexpected good news to fiscal policymakers -- the tide of government red ink appears to be receding. The Treasury Department this week reported..." This is how much money we're talking about. "The Treasury Department this week reported there would be a $54 billion swing from projected deficit to surplus in the April-to-June quarter, after an unanticipated gush of tax payments poured into the Treasury before the April 15 deadline. That prompted private forecasters to lower their deficit projections for...

This goes back maybe two weeks ago. There was an attempt in a piece of Senate legislation to shelve forever a scandal involving the IRS and Henry Cisneros and a number of other things. Well, enough attention was called to this that it has failed, the effort to cover it up has failed. (story) "A Senate rider inserted in an emergency appropriations bill in the dead of the night, which would close a rare window into political foul play at the Internal Revenue Service, was quietly removed Tuesday in Senate-House negotiations. That offers full disclosure of a major scandal that...

RUSH: Former President Bill Clinton and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee today announced the launch of a ten-year initiative to combat childhood obesity; they call it a national epidemic. This is what Clinton said about it today. CLINTON: I think having a lot of support and having easy options and also having parents and school officials regard guide their eating habits. I think the system is now rigged to aggravate obesity, and a lot of school diets and vending machines and the quality and the kinds of food offered in eating establishments, particularly in fast food establishments, we have to change...

What is Hillary going to do? Hillary tried with her renowned national health care program, womb-to-the-tomb health care, that bombed out so she needs a new program, while Clinton is out there fighting childhood obesity. I found a story in the New York Times, right up Hillary's alley, she could fight childhood ugliness. The headline in the New York Times: Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift. Well, this is made to order for Hillary because if you're going to go out there and fight childhood obesity, you've got to actually blame the parents and you've got to get on...

I know a number of you would like to have an update on our Cure-A-Thon last Friday. We set a record. You people came through. I cannot thank you enough. We set an all-time record. Just as of the close of business on Sunday, the whole weekend, we raised a grand total of over a million dollars, a million sixty-two thousand dollars in three hours on Friday. If you add up the total time in those three hours that we were talking about our Cure-A-Thon, we maybe totaled an hour of the three. You folks are amazing out there, simply...