Posted on 04/29/2005 4:57:56 PM PDT by Yosemitest
Listen to Rush Conduct Broadcast Excellence
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, refused to budge yesterday on his demand that Democrats forego filibusters against all of President Bush's past or present appeals court nominations. Here's just a little bit of what he said.
FRIST: In the spirit of civility and with sincere hope for a solution, I make an offer. This offer will ensure up or down votes on judicial nominees after fair, open, and some might say exhaustive debate. It's a compromise that holds to constitutional principles.
RUSH: Now you got to keep in mind that the root of this proposal is the Democrats filibuster basis has been, "Why, you're cutting off the precious time-honored debate. Why, ending the filibuster will deprive us of the opportunity to debate. Limited the debate. We got to have limitless debate. We got to be able to debate this." Meanwhile they're debating nobody, because their names are not even sent to the floor. There is no debate. So Frist's proposal is designed to focus on the fact there is no debate. So you want debate? Fine. We'll give you one hundred hours a judge. What can you not say about somebody in a hundred hours? A hundred hours is more than anybody needs to debate anything. "Frist's offer to allow senators to retain the right to filibuster district court nominees is part of an arrangement in which confirmation votes would be guaranteed on the nation's highest judgeships after a hundred hours of debate. No filibuster on the appellate judges or Supreme Court nominees, but you could filibuster district court judges all you wanted. The Senate's top Republican also said under his plan, senators would no longer be able to block nominees in the judiciary committee. He said judicial nominees are being denied. Justice is being denied. The solution is simple. Allow senators to do their jobs and vote." Dingy Harry didn't like the idea.
REID: I don't mean to demean the proposal because I'm going to take a close look at it and see if there's any way we can work with it, but I would say for a lack of a better description, it's a big wet kiss to the far right, Mr. President. It just is not appropriate. The rules are the rules. This is unacceptable for a number of reasons. First, this is a slow-motion nuclear option.
RUSH: Are they not exposed? They have been totally exposed because remember now what they said they wanted the filibuster for was debate. We've got to have debate. If you stop the filibuster, you're stopping our ability to debate. Okay. Frist says, "Look, a hundred hours of debate, every judge, a hundred hours. Take it away. We just want to vote." I think this is a tactical move. You know, some people are saying that this is far too complicated for people to understand. I disagree with that. I don't think anything is too complicated. That's what we do here is make the complex understandable. The simplest way to explain this to people is the Democrats are not allowing votes. They talk about counting every vote out in Ohio and in Florida. They're not allowing one vote on these nominees on the floor of the Senate. They talk about Senate rules. Where is the Senate rule that denies nominees a vote? Okay. So what are they afraid of? They're afraid of votes. Because they know they will lose the votes. That's why they want the filibuster. So do this: Either make them go with this plan, which is exposing them as the frauds that they are, because Dingy Harry said, "After a hundred hours of debate, the rights of the minority are extinguished." What? After 100 hours of debate? You haven't had ten minutes of debate on any of these nominees yet on the Senate floor because they haven't come out of committee without your threat of a filibuster. There hasn't been one dime's worth of debate yet. He's been offered a hundred hours of debate and he says, "Well, after a hundred hours, the rights of the minority are extinguished. This has never been about the lengths of the debate. This is about checks and balances." Oh, it's about checks and balances now? They're changing what it's about?
Folks, it's never been about checks and balances. It's always been about debate. They were just offered a hundred hours of debate yesterday and then a vote. They don't want the vote. What this has done is exposed their real intent, to block the nominees. They only have 45 votes in the Senate, and they're asking that those 45 votes -- actually, they're asking for 40. They want 40 votes in the Senate, a 100 member body; they want 40 votes to be able to defeat the nominee, and they talk about rules. Now, folks, is that hard to understand? It's not hard to understand. We all know, 50-50 presidential election, the majority rules. In the popular vote, you determine the winner by who gets the most votes, even if it's by one-tenth of one percent. In other words, if in a presidential race, the loser gets 40% of the race, he doesn't win. The Democrats want 40 votes to be able to block a nominee, because it's going to take 60 to stop their filibuster, which they're not even being required to do. They're not even being made to filibuster. They ought to be set up there and said, okay, you want to talk, talk. You want to debate, debate. The floor is yours. But when you surrender it, this filibuster is over. That's how filibusters work. Filibusters mean that huge-lunged, huge-bladdered senators run to the floor of the Senate and just talk. And they can talk about anything. Doesn't matter. But when they start to filibuster, they hold the floor. They've got to hold the floor and it has to be a quorum for a filibuster to work. If there's not a quorum, you can't do a filibuster. If they stop talking, if they give up the floor, the filibuster is over. Or if somebody comes up with 60 votes to break it, it's over. They don't want these votes to be taken because they'll lose. They're afraid of these people's deeply held personal beliefs.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
A couple more sound bites here. This is from Barbara Boxer. First sound bite, here's Barbara Boxer, I guess this is yesterday on the Fox News Channel with the lovely info babe, Martha McCallum, interviewing Barbara Boxer and it's just funny. The question is this: "You've been listening to this debate, Senator Boxer. This is sort of a moment when we have seen both sides lay out where they stand. Do you think there's room for compromise between these two positions?" This is on the judges.
BOXER: What Harry Reid offered was a sincere negotiation. The press didn't know about it. It was presented to the membership just before he presented it to Frist. We said, "Well take a few of these judges. We don't want to, but we're willing to do that if you back off of this nuclear option, and add a few other factors along with it." I think what Bill Frist offered us is really nothing. The Republicans are throwing a fit, and if my child, you know, started stamping his foot and saying, "Mommy, I want a hundred percent," I'd say, "You know, that's a little arrogant. Go to your room."
RUSH: You would not! You have never punished a child like that, I will bet you. No liberal ever has. The kid wants 100%; you probably gave the kid 120% and asked the government to pay for it. That would be my guess. But besides that, who is it that's been throwing a fit here since 2000? Did the president throw a fit last night? Has Bill Frist been throwing any fits? Haven't seen any Frist fits. I haven't seen a fit from any Republican. Fits are being thrown by all the Democrats. And then the next question was, "I have a number of quotes from other Democrats. For example, Tom Harkin, 'The president, nominee, and all Americans deserve an up-or-down vote.' 'The filibuster rules are not constitutional,' said Tom Daschle. Why the change of heart now, Ms. Boxer?"
BOXER: When I came to the Senate as a freshman in 1993, I was very impatient and wanted everything done. And I thought that I knew everything, and I wanted it my way. And I did vote to end the filibuster. I was absolutely wrong. I was brand-new in the Senate. I didn't understand what I do understand now, and what our founders taught us, that the house is the cup. It gets hot. And the Senate is the saucer, where things cool down.
RUSH: Oh, I'm so sick and tired of that cliché. If I hear that that cliché one more time I'm going to quit talking about what I'm talking about at the time. This is ridiculous. We've got quotes from Leahy. These nominees, I don't care who they are, when they are, all deserve an up-and-down vote on the floor of the Senate. Daschle said it. Senator Boxer voted to end the filibuster. "Hold on. That was a terrible mistake. Youthful exuberance. Irrational demand, irrational desires borne of youth." She wanted a hundred percent. You tell me back 12 years ago she wanted a hundred percent, that she's going to discipline a kid of hers that wanted a hundred percent? So this is exposing them left and right, and this deal that came from David Broder's piece, "Well, we've give you two to three of your nominees, but not the others. They're so extreme." And I've told you why they offered that deal. They just want to preserve the filibuster, and if they can find a couple moderate Republicans, then that's fine with them. It's these seven that they're scared to death of, folks. The president calls it their judicial philosophy and that's right, but they're afraid of who these people are. You know, people say it's a litmus test, you've got a litmus test for your nominees. Now the litmus test is on the left, and if you have a nominee that comes up and is not pro Roe v. Wade or pro-abortion, that nominee, as far as the Democrats are concerned, doesn't stand a prayer, just like a fetus.
END TRANSCRIPT
Read the Articles...
(Boston Globe: Democrats cool to Frist offer on judicial filibusters)
(Weekly Standard: Senatorial Discourtesy - Stephen F. Hayes)
(JWR: Dick Morris: A better option on judges: Bring on a real filibuster)
Warn me before you stick a photo of that wax dummy of Helen Thomas in there! Sure they made it look a little better but, egah!!!!
They are in the same class of Ugly. ;)
The debate is the minority right. The vote is the majority right. If the Democrats want more "rights" they should win more elections.
-PJ
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Senator Boxer On Judicial Nominees:
Senator Barbara Boxer: Let These Names Come Up, Let Us Have Debate, Let Us Vote. Mr. President, I am very glad that we are moving forward with judges today. We all hear, as we are growing up, that, Justice delayed is justice denied, and we have, in many of our courts, vacancies that have gone on for a year, 2 years, and in many cases it is getting to the crisis level. So I am pleased that we will be voting. I think, whether the delays are on the Republican side or the Democratic side, let these names come up, let us have debate, let us vote. (SenatorBarbara Boxer, Congressional Record, January 28, 1998)
Boxer Told Her Fellow Senators That Nominees Deserve An Up Or Down Vote. I make an appeal: If we vote to indefinitely postpone a vote on these two nominees or one of these two nominees, that is denying them an up-or-down vote. That would be such a twisting of what cloture really means in these cases. It has never been done before for a judge, as far as we know--ever. Again, it would undermine what Senator Lott said when he said these people deserve an up-or-down vote. (Senator Barbara Boxer, Congressional Record, March 9, 2000)
That pic of Babs revealed very similar features. I won't be able to look at her the same way. Well, I needed an excuse not to look at her, that'll do.
It really is that simple.
All those ugly democRATS look (and act) alike!
Ugly is as Ugly looks/does
Listen to Rush Conduct Broadcast Excellence
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
You know, the president can sit there and praise FDR all he wants but he's not fooling me. He may be fooling some of the liberals out there, but he's not fooling me. I know full well what Social Security was for and the Democrats today confirm my knowledge. The purpose of Social Security -- stop and think of this, folks. It all came about in the New Deal, when everything crashed and burned. Had it not been for the New Deal, would we have Social Security? And I know this is an "if" question and "if" is for children, but stop and think of what Social Security is. Social Security is said to be a retirement plan. Well, it never was portrayed as that, but it was portrayed as insurance in your retirement, the golden years, whatever. When it started out, it used people's own money. They were taxed, and it's a Ponzi scheme. The early recipients scored really huge. They contributed like 24 bucks and got $28,000 back. Today it's just the opposite. You contribute $28,000; you'll get $24 back of your own money. Everybody else will make up the difference. But still, what's the concept?
The concept is that somewhere along the line, we're going to start taxing your earnings, and we're going to save that money for you so that when you can't work anymore, that money gets given back to you from whom? The government. Who's in charge of your retirement? The government is in charge of your retirement. Why didn't somebody say at the outset, why didn't FDR say at the outset, "You know what? This New Deal has taught us a lesson here. People need nest eggs." You can lose everything overnight. You can lose your job, but if you have a nest egg, that's some insurance against it, so we're going to require a forced savings plan from every citizen. You're going to have to take X amount of your paycheck and put it in an investment plan that you control, that you run, that you manage, it grows and grows and grows as time goes on. You can track the history of the stock market over the number of years we're talking about. The stock market always goes up, never goes down. Number of years we're talking about. By the time you start working till you retire, the stock market is going to be up, guaranteed. No matter what period of time you look at. Now, why, all of a sudden, did somebody say, "No, we can't do that. We're going to bring this money to the government. We're going to take this forced savings plan and we're going to tax people and we're going to take the money to the government, and then when they get 62 to 65, whatever it is--" and, by the way, when Social Security was first formed, nobody lived until retirement age, or very few did, so there weren't that many payouts. This was a welfare program from the get-go. But more than that, it was a program designed to literally attach, with an almost umbilical cord, citizens to their government. Citizens would become dependent on the government for their retirement. Even though the citizen actually had to earn the money and have it taxed, the idea was Social Security is my government caring about me.
Now, the whole concept of this is something designed to empower government and make the citizens dependent. FDR was no schlock. He was no fool. And he was a Democrat. He tried to pack the Supreme Court. He was an ideologue. He knew what he was doing. In his mind, he was setting the Democratic Party up for 50 plus years of power and majority status. Because the more citizens you make dependent on the government, the more citizens that are always going to vote for you to keep it coming back. And, by the way, it didn't stop with Social Security. Then we had all kinds of welfare programs and you know the rest. That's why it's taking a long time to turn this around and the reason why the president is determined on this, the reason why the president's going to fix this, is because he knows what he's up against. The Democrats, Social Security and the judges are the two things that scare them to death. If they lose the government control over Social Security, and if they loose the ability to institutionalize liberalism by way of activist judges inventing and writing law from the bench, if they lose those two things, they have lost two of the three legs of the stool on which they're sitting. They may lose the whole stool. They may not be sitting on a stool when that happens. That's why they're scared. They're not concerned about you when it comes to Social Security and they're not concerned about you and your retirement. They're not concerned about anything. If they were, the NAACP would be the first people supporting the president's plan, but the NAACP is actively opposing it because they're liberals. They're big government types. They're not out for the advancement of colored people. Ask Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice if they're out for the advancement of colored people. (Interruption) Yeah, look at Kweisi Mfume. They're trying to shaft Kweisi now, right? Kweisi wants to run for the Senate in Maryland and somebody's got some dirt on him that he showed favoritism with a female staffer, more than one, favoritism with a bunch of female staffers when he was running the NAALCP himself. So ask Kweisi if they're for the advancement of -- he ran the place and they're trying to sabotage Kweisi. So all you have to do, folks, the president's plan, individual retirement accounts, the plan announced last night, let's really help the poor with it. My gosh, who is going to benefit more? The black population in this country has the lowest life expectancy. They don't live as long. So they don't get to retirement age. They pay all these taxes and Social Security. Some don't live long enough to get all the benefits or even part of it. So the president wants to accelerate that. The NAACP, black caucus ought to be first in line supporting the plan if they really cared about black people and their economic circumstance, but, no, no, no, no. They're big government types. They want the power of running the government.
If your agenda revolves around growing the government and controlling people with government, you need to control the government to do it, and they don't, and that's another reason for their panic. This whole Social Security thing was a wolf in sheep's clothing from the beginning, but it's been around as it is for all these years and all those years it's sort of inculcated itself into people's minds as some great government plan to guard people against poverty in their old age. There are so many better ways of doing that. If you're going to tax people's income all along their lives and put it in an account, let them run the account where it's really going to grow and amount to something. But, oh, no, no, no. No we can't have people in charge of their own retirement. We can't have people in charge of their own success. We want the government and Democrats to be credited with the reason people have a retirement, and that's why this fight's going on. That's why they oppose whatever the change the president offers. Anything that takes some of this money away from government and puts it in private hands, they're going to oppose it.
Same thing with the judges. It's really no more complicated than this, folks, and that's why I say they're corkscrewing themselves into quicksand because they're on the precipice of losing all this and they've lost their number-one megaphone, the mainstream press, to continue this charade with people. So they've lost the ability to actually do all the mesmerizing and all the propagandizing and all the demagoguery. I mean they still have people out there doing it, but they're not reaching as many people and there are counter-arguments waged all the time. So they're in full-fledged panic about this. You can guarantee -- any proposal that comes along, common sense proposal that empowers individuals in this country -- you can count on liberal Democrats in this country opposing it in a screeching, childlike tantrum-type fashion, stamping their foot like Barbara Boxer and her kid.
END TRANSCRIPT
Read the Articles...
(FoxNews: Bush Clarifies Social Security, Energy Plans)
(NRO: The Bush approach to Social Security reform is tactically quite inspired)
(WSJ: Why is Harry Reid acting like David Koresh? Because conservatives are winning)
Very Nice! I believe you should send these directly to her, let her know that we know.
A small example:
RUSH: ...Can you give us a sneak preview, and your thoughts on the melding of the editorial page and the front page that happened in the 60s?
SCHWEIKART: Okay, but let me preface this by saying I already have a contract for my next book with sentinel, which is: A Patriot's History of the American Soilder: Why Americans Win Wars.
RUSH: You just gave us a preview.
SCHWEIKART:Right. And it is going to be, in essence, applying Victor Hanson to the United States. I think he is right, but he doesn't go far enough. I have a lot of contacts in the military who feed me information. It is really remarkable what are armed forces are doing.
But regarding this other book that you are referring to, let me give you a brief history of the media up to the 50s. In the 1820s as a result of the Missouri Compromise, Martin Van Buren -- and you're going to love this, Rush -- founded a political party. The sole goal of this political party was to gain and hold power. It was not interested in any principles.
Van Buren's focus for this political party was to avert civil war, an altruistic motive. The party's purpose was not to talk about slavery, so we wouldn't have a war. They were going to reward people who would run for office and hold office who would not talk about slavery. So if you think about it, the foundation for this party was essentially very base. It was, ideas don't count, ideology doesn't count; only money counts. And if we wave enough money in front of you, you will forget about your principles. Guess which party that was?
RUSH: The Democratic Party!
SCHWEIKART: Exactly.
RUSH: I would gat an "A" in your class.
SCHWEIKART: Yes. This party went on to found dozens and dozens of newspapers for the specific purpose of getting candidates elected. They were very honest. They called themselves names like The Arkansas Democrat. Guess which party it supported? The Richmond Whig. Guess which party it supported? They only carried news about their own candadates. They weren't interested at all in objective news. It was strictly to advance the party's propaganda.
RUSH: It doesn't sound like anything has changed.
SCHWEIKART: No, it hasn't. But what did change was in the Civil War, people were desperate for facts. I have a quotation from one editor in the 1860s: "Facts, facts, facts -- that is all people care about anymore." They needed to know information on the war. Was Johnny killed? What is the 14 Pennsylvania regiment doing? Where is Robert E. Lee? And this created a style you may recognize. We used to call it the "who, what, when, where, why" reporters' questions. It created what is called the inverted pyramid style of reporting, where you begin with the most important facts, and then you get down to the drivel. I challenge you to read any paper today, whether it is USA Today or The Washington Post -- what do they always start with? A human interest story: "Twenty years ago, Marge Schott had her little dog on the sidewalk until it was hit by a car, and then blah, blah, blah." Three or four paragraphs down you will get to the key information. You are always mentioning this on your show. You will say, "The nut of this is buried 20 paragraphs down."
RUSH: They bury the lead.
WEIKART: Right. Well, in the Civil War they didn't bury the lead. They started moving the lead to the very front. All they would report is facts. From about 1860 to about 1900, this became entrenched in almost all the major papers. For a lot of reasons, some it having to do with business, most of them became objective. They viewed reporting the news as separate from the editorial content. They tried to get both sides of the story and they tried to be fair and balanced.
Were there exceptions? Of course. You had the yellow press. But basically this model held until about 1960. Now currently I am doing some research with a conservative journalism professor at Dartmonth -- I won't give his name away in case he gets blackballed -- and a guy from the American Enterprise Institute named John Lott. We are working on the question, Can we pin down exactly what caused this change?
My theory is that it was not Vietnam or Watergate that caused the change. I think you see clear indications of this change happening earlier. My gut feeling is it involves John Kennedy. That the press, especially the males in the press, so identified with Kennedy that they started to throw fairness out the window and became terribly attached to his Administration, creating the whole Camelot myth. So by the time Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson came in, and the Vietnam War, they were already moving in the other direction. Vietnam just accelerated something that had already happened, in my view, but I can't prove that just yet.
....
I'm too tired to continue, but the point is the start of the Democratic Party and it's lack of any values except to hold power.
These are the Senators to call to help President Bush get a vote on his embattled judicial nominees:
Senator John McCain (R-AZ)
Washington, DC: (202) 224-2235
Phoenix, AZ: (602) 952-2410
Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
Washington, DC: (202) 224-2921
Providence, RI: (401) 453-5294
Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME)
Washington, DC: (202) 224-5344
Augusta, ME: (207) 622-8292
Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE)
Washington, DC: (202) 224-4224
Omaha, NE: (402) 758-8981
Senator John Warner (R-VA)
Washington, DC: (202) 224-2023
Roanoke, VA: (540) 857-2676
Bleah! Imaging waking up with a terrible hangover and looking over at that!
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