RUSH: Are all you Doubting Thomases out there willing to admit now that I know what I’m talking about? Are you willing to admit that I was right about this whole thing? Greetings and welcome. It’s the Rush Limbaugh program, and here we are, ready to roll, another exciting three hours of broadcast excellence. I am America’s anchorman, here at the distinguished Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies: 800-282-2882 if you’d like to be on the program. E-mail address, Rush@eibnet.com. I have here a column by our old buddy Jim Pinkerton</a>. He’s a columnist at Newsday, also appears on Fox’s media analysis show, and basically… Let me just read the opening here. 
“There’s a paradox in George W. Bush’s nomination of Sam Alito for the court. The coming fight might not be good for Alito but it’s going to be great for Bush.” Well, what did I say when Harriet Miers was nominated? What we need is the fight. The fight’s what we need! We need to go ahead and have the debate. Now guess who’s picked up this theme? No less than the Wall Street Journal, George F. Will, Robert Novak and countless others. Meanwhile, when the nomination of Miers came up and I didn’t go along, you people — some of you, and you know who you are — doubted me, and now look. You would have thought this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened. I told you it was going to come down exactly this way. Let’s go to audio sound bites. Mike, I’m changing my mind. Go to audio sound bite #3. NBC News last night even had the focus on me, America’s anchorman, and what I had to say about the Alito nomination. Here is David Gregory.
GREGORY: On the radio, Rush Limbaugh argued, a fight with Democrats is exactly what this embattled White House needs.
RUSH ARCHIVE: They want the libs to be who they are. We want a debate about the Constitution. We want a debate about the role of the judiciary in our society.
GREGORY: But diverting attention from the Scooter Libby indictment won’t be easy.
RUSH: Mr. Gregory, it’s not what this is about! Nobody’s trying to divert attention from the Scooter Libby indictment. (laughing) This is even better than I thought. They think it’s just a diversion. They don’t think we really mean it. They think this Alito nomination is just intended as a distraction. Oh, folks, I’ll tell you what. The day is going to unfold here — the upcoming days and weeks are going to unfold — even better than you would have thought a mere week ago, and here we have an AP story. David Espo: “Bush Choice of Alito Could Mean a Historic Shift of Supreme Court.” The key line is this: “Republicans said that any attempt to deny Alito a yes or no vote would return the Senate to the brink of a showdown that was avoided last spring only when seven lawmakers from each party brokered a compromise. This time they said they would crush Democrat opposition.” This is the Republicans. You’ve got Specter. You’ve got DeWine. You’ve got Lindsey Graham. You’ve got a number of the Republican members of the gang of 14 fired up ready to crush any Democrat opposition. The Democrat opposition, by the way, they’re having trouble. I told you yesterday, too, “They’re not having a good day.” They’ve had their research people looking into this, and every time they think they find something great against this guy he comes around in another case and surprises them. He’ll go lib one way, conservative another way, and I think this is just setting up very nicely. 
It’s going to be tough to oppose a guy that’s been confirmed twice by a hundred-to-zero votes and been on the federal circuit for 15 years. We will have more on that in just a moment. Have you seen the latest AP story, however, on Alito? Nominee is a big investor in
The president was on TV today and announcing his plans for the big bird flu extravaganza that’s coming up here, announcing his big vaccine plans and so forth — and this is so predictable, too. The left is out there asking, “How dare he! This is just an excuse to funnel big government money to drug companies.” Well, that’s generally what happens, folks. Drug companies provide vaccines; politicians provide bird droppings. Take your pick. You want to go with these politicians and end up with bird droppings or you want a bird flu vaccine? But here’s the thing. Stop and think of this. After Hurricane Katrina, the left was all upset: “Bush didn’t prepare! Bush didn’t care — except to kill the blacks, and except to steer the hurricane there. But Bush was unprepared! FEMA was unprepared! Bush sucks!” Now, Bush goes out, makes a speech (summarizes): “You’ve got a bird flu pandemic out there, perhaps going to hit this country. It could be in big trouble. Here’s my plan.”
“Bush
THE PRESIDENT: There are no reports of infected birds, animals or people in the United States. Even if the virus does eventually appear on our shores and birds, that does not mean people in our country will be infected. Avian flu is still primarily an animal disease, and as of now — unless people come into direct, sustained contact with infected birds — it is unlikely they will come down with avian flu. While avian flu has not yet acquired the ability to spread easily from human to human, there is still cause for vigilance. The virus has developed some characteristics needed to cause a pandemic. It has demonstrated the ability to infect human beings, and it has produced a fatal illness in humans. If the virus were to develop the capacity for sustained human-to-human transmission, it could spread quickly across the globe. Our country has been given fair warning of this danger to our homeland and time to prepare.
RUSH: Okay, up to that point, libs are okay. This is cool. But this is where, for them, it all fell apart…
THE PRESIDENT: I’m also asking Congress to remove one of the greatest obstacles to domestic vaccine production: the growing burden of litigation. In the past three decades, the number of vaccine manufacturers in America has plummeted as the industry has been flooded with lawsuits. Today there’s only one manufacturer in the United States that can produce influenza vaccine. That leaves our nation vulnerable in the event of a pandemic. We must increase the number of vaccine manufacturers in our country and improve our domestic production capacity. So Congress must pass liability protection for the makers of life-saving vaccines.
RUSH: This was after he had suggested $2.8 billion for such development, and of course since the money is going to go to the drug company, “Why, we can’t have that! Why that’s just too much! Bush
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, I went back to my website today because we last discussed this flu vaccine business about a year ago, October 14th of 2004. This is when there were presidential debates going on. Doesn’t that seem like a long time ago? The presidential debates were going and there was a flu vaccine shortage and of course John Kerry was trying to score points. The president was out there suggesting (paraphrased), “You know, not everybody needs a flu vaccine shot. Just take the risk. Don’t run out there if you don’t really need one. Don’t get one. Save the stock that we have for the elderly and the young, those who are most vulnerable.” All hell broke loose!
“How dare he! What do you
RUSH ARCHIVE TEXT
This instance, this reality, ironically that we are short of a flu vaccine is the best medicine that we could get right now for fixing the problem and to illustrate how our health delivery system in the hands of liberals sounds great but doesn’t work. Do you remember something called the Clinton Government Vaccine Buying Program? It was sold to us as a way to get prices down and get more children vaccinated and, of course, to keep the evil drug companies from making an evil profit. The Wall Street Journal says today, “Companies that decided to run these regulatory traps also know that they’ll be doing so for very little reward. Before her big health care reform crashed and burned in ’94, Hillary Rodham Rodham managed to get Congress to pass a government vaccine buying program for children. Her sales pitch was free vaccines for all kids and higher immunization rates. If we would give this stuff away, she said, more children would be immunized.” 
Oh, goody, wonderful, wonderful. Thus, as a result of Hillary’s plan, the government now buys about 60% of all pediatric vaccines, forcing huge discounts and imposing price caps. The manufacturers were told, ”You can only make so much profit, and you’re gonna make this amount, and we’re gonna give it away.” What all this did was screw up the whole private sector mechanism of manufacturing and distributing vaccines. In 2001, the private sector cost of immunizing children with the 20 recommended doses of vaccines was $600 per child. The government price was just $400 per child, with the vaccine makers swallowing the difference. What has this achieved? Vaccination rates for two-year-olds have stagnated at about 74% for the past several years while adult rates are significantly lower, and with the profit margin squeeze to practically zero, some manufacturers have simply said, “We’re not making the stuff anymore. It doesn’t make sense. We’ve got this government program that tells us the maximum we can charge, regardless what it costs to make, we’re going to be threatened with lawsuits the first time somebody gets sick for whatever vaccine. Screw it!”
And that’s why American companies are out of the business and why we have to import vaccines from Great Britain, a combination of Hillary’s plan that put a cap on profits, put a cap on prices, and nothing to do with the manufacture price. You combine that with the fact that these manufacturers are subject to constant lawsuits and they said, “Screw it. We’re not going to make the stuff anymore,” and that’s why there is a shortage. This can be traced back to Hillary Clinton’s great sounding, compassionate idea, to make sure that every child had a flu shot and every child had a vaccination against various childhood diseases. Well, the fact is only 74% of kids do because there’s not enough vaccine. This is not the first real shortage, but because American manufacturers have thrown up their hands and said, “It makes no sense. We are in business, and we don’t give things away, and we’re certainly not going to take a loss on this.” They said, “We’ll get out of the business.
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Remember last year everybody talking about the only manufacturer outside of the country was in Great Britain, and we had to import it, but then we had problems importing that because it somehow was — I forget, what was wrong with it? Tainted? Yeah, their license was revoked. So they were a, quote, unquote, “tainted company.” So here we are. We’re back now, and we’ve got this avian flu thing out there, and then the president’s trying to ramp up and plan for this, and we’ll just sit patiently by and wait for the left to consult the 30-year-old page that’s appropriate in their playbook to figure out how to respond to this. But it’s very predictable what they’re going to do. “Bush wants to funnel $2.8 billion to Big Pharmaceutical on an epidemic that hasn’t even hit the country yet. It’s not even here, and even he said it might not be here. So he just wants to funnel a bunch of big money to Big Pharmaceutical and create a panic — all to divert attention from the Scooter Libby indictment,” and it’s so easy to predict what they’re going to do — and then after that, they will talk about how Bush is trying to overreact to gain political ground from all that he lost during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. So the fun just keeps on, folks. There’s no stopping it. There’s no limit to it. The good times just keep on rolling.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, so on this bird flu vaccine. We stand for health care. They, the liberals, stand for trial lawyers. The liberals talk about national health care all the time, do they not? They come out and say, “It’s an unconscionable crime that we have so many people uninsured, unvaccinated, uncared for, cast aside by the rich and powerful who would rather not have to deal with them anyway!” Yet when the president comes out, acts against a possible epidemic, and the libs are out there looking for the trial lawyers and their buddies, “Hey, you gotta stop that! We can’t get rid of these lawsuits.”
“What do you mean?”
“What if somebody takes a bird flu examination and grows a beak? What if somebody takes a bird flu examination and starts bird dropping? What if somebody gets sick? We need to be able to sue Big Pharmaceutical.”
That’s their concern. Their concern is 
Did you hear Dingy Harry called up Howard Dean yesterday? (paraphrasing) “Hey, Howard. Tone it down on Alito. I don’t think we got as big a target here as we thought.”
And Dean basically said, “Screw you,” and went out there and started trashing Alito, and the Democrats and their kook websites are continuing this. Larry in Chicago, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. I was bringing up a point that not only — you’re talking about the bureaucracies getting in the way of each other. The Securities and Exchange Commission has put out rules on accounting that preclude the vaccine manufacturers from recording the revenues of all these billions of dollars’ worth of vaccines that the government wants them to produce and stockpile; they want them to sit on them and they’re going to force them to recognize the cost of making them but not recognize any revenue from the sales of them so the vaccine manufacturers have said that’s kind of a nonstarter for them.
RUSH: Yeah, you’re talking about <a target=new href=”http://www.sarbanes-oxley.com”>Sarbanes-Oxley</a>, are you not?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Yeah. I know what these people are talking about.
CALLER: It hurt their shareholders. On the one hand, the government wants to say, “We’re going to give you these billions of dollars to make vaccines,” but on the other hand the Securities and Exchange Commission stops them from being able to do it. It would hurt their shareholders.
RUSH: Well, I know, and it’s a classic example of what happens. So we had the Enron scandal and we have the media making a big deal of all the people that got hurt in the Enron scandal — which is a big deal; it’s no minor thing. But then we got a giant piece of federal legislation that attempts to treat all corporations as Enron and makes the assumption that they’re all a bunch of crooks and comes up with these new accounting rules and so forth that Larry here is talking about, that just add up to more and more regulations that limit the ability of entrepreneurs to do their work — and this happens within an atmosphere, the left trying to trash the reputations of entrepreneurs and corporations in the first place. Something tells me — and I can’t place this. I may be wrong. It could have been a dream for all I know, but somebody told me that. I think we were discussing this Sarbanes-Oxley, this whole thing that was the outgrowth of the Enron scandal is going to be done away with at some point. It hasn’t worked out; it’s not working like we people want. People are not happy about it. I could be dreaming. It seems to me I’ve heard this discussed at some point. David in Allentown, Pennsylvania. We own Allentown. We’ve owned Allentown for decades on this program. Welcome, sir. Nice to have you.
CALLER: Thank you. It’s an honor to have a chance to talk to you.
RUSH: I appreciate that.
CALLER: Mega dittos. You are truly a great American.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I don’t know how to say it in any other way. Just a quick segue to Alito — and I had a question for you that just came to mind here. What exactly is the reason that you think DeWine of Ohio and Graham of South Carolina have suddenly flipped on the nuclear option issue and the filibuster issue?
RUSH: Well, I’m just wild-guessing here. I think there are two reasons. I think both DeWine of Ohio and “Vice President” Graham of South Carolina have heard it in droves for joining the gang of 14 — and DeWine, didn’t his son lose?
CALLER: Yeah, he did.
RUSH: His son lost a congressional primary in Ohio because DeWine went out there and joined the gang of 14 and upset the base in Ohio that had elected him — and then I think Lindsey Graham also heard a cacophonous response from South Carolinians, so much so that he talked about it. The second thing is, I think they’re looking at this judge as a human being. The whole notion that somebody could be nominated by a Republican that would be “extreme” anyway is offensive to me. That Republicans even go along with that premise! But the seven members on the Republican side of the gang of 14 went along with that notion. “Okay, you can filibuster if somebody nominates somebody that’s extreme, in ‘extreme circumstances.'” I mean, the idea that only Republican presidents are capable of that is absurd, but they went along with it, and I think now that you got this guy Alito… I mean, he’s been confirmed twice by unanimous votes of 100 to zip. He has served on the Circuit Court for 15 years. There is no way the criteria for a filibuster is anywhere close to being met here. I think these guys are coming out now and saying, “We dare you. Go ahead. You want to nuke it? You give it a shot. We are going to crush you if you try it,” and I’m telling you, folks, this is the difference.
This whole pick has turned everybody except me, because I don’t waver. My optimism is there, but there were a lot of people who were cowering in the corners and going, “Oh, woe is us! Oh, it’s over,” and some of you in this audience were doing it, too — and you know who you are. But I never did, and now everybody because Harriet Miers is no longer on the scene. We’ve got this guy that’s been chosen. The Fitzmas indictment was not as bad as people thought it was going to be, so all of a sudden now… See, these are people that determine their moods on the basis of the news everyday. That’s not what I did but they do, and so the news has been favorable recently. Economic growth is going through leaps and bounds; the president seems to be back firmly in control of his agenda and appears to be ready to ramrod it down the throats of the liberals. I guess he’s decided that his real enemies are the Democrats on the left now, and so they’re feeling emboldened and they’re feeling confident, and I think it’s welcome. It’s about time. But I think there’s reason to feel this way
CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Okay, so I was listening to Barbara Boxer today on Fox News, and the thing that just gets me is she’s going on and on about, you know, we’re just so concerned about our individual rights and the Constitution and we’re going to say good-bye to those rights if Judge Alito is confirmed, and yada yada yada, and I’m sitting here thinking to myself, “If she’s so concerned with constitutional rights, why doesn’t she at least acknowledge the fact that majority rules in this country?” If a majority confirms Judge Alito, I don’t know why she’s whining and complaining.
RUSH: Well, you’re misreading. Well, I don’t think you’re misreading her, but when she says, “Republicans will rue day,” when she says the things that you quoted her as saying, those are playbook utterances. She went back to the playbook, “This is what you say when we’ve got a Republican nominee: ‘He’s going to take away our individual rights. He’s going to destroy freedom. He’s going to have women forced in the back alley.'” All this. It’s
It isn’t going to fly. The polling data on Alito is pretty good. It doesn’t fly. The Democrats are not able to gin up all this fear. But, look, let’s try a different tack here. Let’s try a different tack here. Let’s put this in more stark terms, shall we? This is a battle between conservatism and liberalism. That’s why you see Barbara Boxer saying what she’s saying. You’re making the mistake of assuming that she’s actually saying it about Alito. She’s not. She’s saying Alito is simply a symbol for conservative Republicans — who she hates — and so she just has a prepared statement to react to anything any conservative Republican says. This is a battle between conservatism and liberalism. This is a battle — the Alito nomination and everything else that we’re going through right now, folks, is a battle — between those who support representative government and those who support judicial tyranny because they can’t win at the ballot box; so they want liberal judges on courts to pass laws that they can’t get passed in legislatures. This is a battle between those who respect the will of the people and trust them and those who seek to crush it because the will of the people is resulting in their defeat time and time again. This is a battle between those who believe individual liberty and those who believe in big government. It is a battle between those who cherish the Constitution and those who are afraid of it and try to reject it. The Democrats have moved so far to the left that they once votes unanimously for Scalia! The Democrats voted unanimously for Scalia in the Senate, yet today 22 of them couldn’t even bring themselves to vote for John Roberts. 
Now, if they can’t support John Roberts, they can’t support and won’t ever support
We should have this debate and have this fight at every opportunity it is presented. Chuck Schumer’s litmus test is that only liberal activists can serve on the bench. That’s his litmus test, meaning that no Republican president can ever appoint anyone to the Supreme Court unless they share Schumer’s radicalism. Well, Schumer’s a loser. Schumer doesn’t get to determine who goes to the court. He’s not even the ranking Democrat on that committee. Senator Pat Leaky Leahy, “Senator Depends,” is — and it needs to be said, too, because it rarely is, that Schumer… Folks, I want you to know this. Chuck Schumer currently holds the job of running the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee. That means that Schumer is in charge of electing Democrats to the Senate. It’s his job to get the current Democrats reelected and to go find good candidates to run for senators; Democrat senators who are retiring or maybe in open seats or some such situation. That’s probably likely in the Senate. But nevertheless with Schumer running the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee, he is clearly almost in charge with the responsibility now of putting political activism and politics
She can say it because she’s a liberal. What more do you need to know?
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