RUSH: All right, a couple lighthearted things here to start with. (story) “Workers at Turkish Airlines –” this is in Istanbul, “Workers at Turkish Airlines celebrated a job well done by sacrificing a camel at Istanbul airport and their boss has now been suspended. The national flag-carrier said on Wednesday maintenance staff killed the camel at Turkey’s busiest airport after sending a batch of aircraft back to the supplier ahead of schedule. Turkish Airlines has suspended the head of plane maintenance pending an investigation, the company said in a statement.” (Laughing) Seattle, eat your hearts out. This is how you celebrate Christmas or whatever it is over in Turkey, sacrifice a camel.
This is cool. “Her competitors, with day jobs including nanny and marketing manager, introduce each other by stage names. … ‘The show is done for the girls, put together by girls, as something that’s a fun, friendly competition,’ said Dana Sterling, 31, who has organized the ‘Amateur Female Jello Wrestling’ competition once a month for the last three years. ‘It’s really hard to explain to my mother,’ said Sterling, who by day works as a lighting designer. ‘It really is a sport, it’s a satire sport.’ Several competing women said the concept of female Jell-O wrestling conjured an image of sleazy men watching naked women roll around, but that Sterling’s event was far from that. ‘We work hard to promote it as a feminist thing and the night is really like a community night in that it is really what the women make of it,’ said Annie Rock, 26, one of the organizers. ‘It’s definitely aggression release. It’s sexy as well, throwing women around in Jell-O,’ King said.”
Where is this place? What is this? “A grungy live music bar on New York’s Lower East Side.” Doesn’t give the name of the bar in the story. Cool. (Laughing.) One of the reporter’s a woman, Michelle Nichols. This is Reuters. Okay, so the woman wants it all to herself.
You know, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve done such a good job of bringing down prices on the flat-panel TVs that Sony is upset now. Here’s the story. “Sony Says TV Prices Are Dropping Too Fast Because of ‘No-Name’ Brands. Television prices are dropping faster than expected, and Sony?s not too happy about it. Prices for liquid crystal display TVs should drop between 25 percent and 30 percent this year. That?s between 5 percent and 7 percent more than Sony anticipated, Stan Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics, said in a meeting with reporters in San Francisco last week. ‘We will stay competitive but we won?t do anything that damages the industry long term,’ said Vandenbree, who added that Sony has a ‘responsibility’ not to accelerate price declines in a way that could hurt the industry.” Now, this all came about, as you know, Wal-Mart said that the flat-panel TVs were going to be the item this year because prices are coming down. Why are prices coming down? Because people like me go out when these things first come out and pay the full boat retail price, which is about five times what the price is today.
All right, now, that’s some of the lighthearted stuff, and there is more lighthearted stuff out there. We’ve got more on Obama. It’s getting funny now with the way the babes in the Drive-By Media are reacting. And, folks, I have to tell you, it’s getting scary. We had stories this week about the Christmas trees in Seattle and the whole controversy over that, and we’ve had people going nuts over the Heart Attack Grill and those things are just harmless and mindless and they’re just distractions. When I see these things happening, it’s evidence of just the country crumbling right in front of our eyes. We’re creating enemies within our own boundaries and borders that don’t exist.
It’s almost like we’re in a cultural civil war all over again, after I thought some progress was being made on this. You can find individual stories that refute the notion of the culture crumbling even at this time of year, and I have some of those in the stack and we’ll get to them. But when you look at what’s going on around the rest of the world and nobody seems to notice it or be upset about it or even be able to place it in proper context, let me just give you some headlines and we’ll discuss this in detail as the program unfolds. Report: “Russia to Ship Nuclear Fuel to Iran.” Headline: “World Leaders Express Outrage on Iranian Holocaust Denial Conference.” I think a lot of people think, “Ah, these nutty Iranians.” Don’t discount this, folks, as cockeyed and out of sync as the world is today, this anti-Holocaust or the Holocaust-never-happened convention in Iran is going to spread.
Here’s another headline. “Muslim Pilgrims Have Been Urged to Complain.” This is an adjunct to the flying imams story. The flying imam story was, no question now, a stunt, it was a setup, it was a dry run. Basically American Muslims making a religious pilgrimage to Mecca are being encouraged to file civil rights complaints if they feel discriminated against by the airlines. There is a war on the airlines by this CAIR group and a number of others, and they’re trying to gum up the whole security apparatus of air travel in this country and intimidate the people of this country into not reporting suspicious things that they see in any process of a plane trip. I think what needs to happen here, particularly in this case, US Airways was the airline involved with the flying imams, they absolutely did the right thing and they need support from as many Americans as possible, all the airlines do.
This is getting out of hand. More details on this as the program unfolds. (story) “Police Suspect 11 Arrested in Spain Were Considering Terror Attack.”
The police have arrested 11 people in Spain, thinking that they were engaged in terrorism. Now, Spain no doubt shocked and stunned at this because they got out of Iraq and they totally changed their government on the premise that Al-Qaeda and the Islamofascists would leave them alone. That has not been the case. Another headline: “Atheists Demand Removal of Church Bells.” This is from Griswold, Connecticut. So here we have atheists in this country trying to tear down, as they always do, anything to do with religion. None of their business. They’re scared to death. If they’re really profoundly strong in their atheism they won’t be bothered by any of this. But it’s not that they’re comfortable and confident, they don’t want anybody else to be celebrating religion, either. This is tyranny of the minority. Add all of these stories up and these are very serious things that represent potential real damage to our culture, the American institutions that have given us our way of life.