RUSH: Greetings to you, music lovers, thrill-seekers, conversationalists, and devotees of controversy, Rush Limbaugh back, firmly planted in the prestigious Attila the Hun chair here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. A shortened week because of the Presidents Day holiday yesterday. But nevertheless, we’ve got lots to do, lots of stuff has been building up since I was last with you on Thursday. And remember when I was last with you on Thursday, I was finding it difficult to complete two sentences without a coughing spasm, and I still have the ingredients that create those coughs, still have this chest congestion. It’s lessening somewhat, but it’s going to be an experiment today to see if the irregular breathing patterns required to host this program at optimum level lead to the coughs again. I’ve never had whatever I have. This was not a cold. Whatever it is
I took a Z-Pack, didn’t make much difference, slept 17 hours a day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and even yesterday I was thinking I might not be able to get back today. It’s just one of these crazy things that’s lingering. I still have the sniffles, hope you still find those cute, but so far, so good, it seems. So anyway, thanks for all of the cards and letters hoping that I got well — from you libs, hoping that I died. I appreciate all of those. Here’s the telephone number — (interruption) I did, “I hope you die and find out what a miserable, slow death is like, you mean, rotten, cruel SOB.” Oh, they’re all over the place, especially after the clips of myself and Ann Coulter as president and vice president on “The 1/2 Hour News Hour”. When those hit YouTube and Michelle Malkin’s website, Hot Air, oh, you should have seen the lib comments. It’s hilarious to read these things. At any rate, here’s the phone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address is Rush@eibnet.com. 
Let me give you a heads-up here on some of the exciting things coming in the Lifestyle Stack today. ?Study: Men Hard-Wired to Ignore Their Wives.? Headline, ?Why Praise Can Be Bad for Kids.? You?re going to love this one. Another one, this from Slate.com, by a guy, Steven Landsburg, the headline, ?Women are Chokers, Studies Show They Cave Under Pressure. Why?? This is a lib publication, and the comments this guy got from Slate.com readers after this story were funny in their own right. ?Survey: Sports May Not Build Character.? I’ve been collecting this stuff in the seven or so hours I was awake on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I was working. Sports may not build character? Maybe not, but it’s given us a few. ?SUV Fatally Strikes Man in Wheelchair.? Nowhere in this story — this is from San Jacinto, California, it’s a CBS story — is there any mention of a driver, nowhere. ?New York City Councilman Crafts Credo Calculating Caffeine.? He wants caffeine ingredients and quantities listed on every beverage and food served in New York. ?Minnesota Lawmaker Wants to Tax Facelifts and Botox Injections.? ?Wanted: A Pill to Cure Liberalism,? and ?Feeding Your Brain, New Benefits Found in Chocolate.? That’s just the lifestyle section. Details coming up.
We’ve got a whole global warming section coming up. Still a lot of controversy roiling out there over debit cards for immigrants and credit cards for immigrants. It’s really peculiar, and it’s a great way to money launder. Nobody else can go get a credit card without a Social Security number. This is the Bank of America thing. The Supreme Court today really stuck it to the anti-smoking Nazis. The Supreme Court ruled this morning 5-4 in favor of Philip Morris. The Supreme Court just threw out a $79.5 million punitive damages claim against Philip Morris USA in a smoking lawsuit. Here’s the majority opinion, and the majority opinion was written by none other than Stephen Breyer, who is one of the libs’ favorite justices on the court. ?In an opinion by Breyer, the high court said that punitive damages awards based in part on a desire to punish a company for actions that harm people not involved in a particular lawsuit amounts to a taking of property from the defendant without due process.? A lib wrote this! Breyer, how can he write this and have the same opinion in the Kilo case when it comes to eminent domain?
But anyway, this is a lib writing the majority opinion, sticking it to the anti-smoking Nazis. And of course this bunch of pretending clowns that smoke cigarettes, join these class-action suits trying to get a big, giant payday, trying to pretend that they had no idea of the dangers. It is odd that a lib Supreme Court justice would write the majority opinion on this, but he did. Also in other court news, Club Gitmo detainees may not challenge their detention in US courts, that according to a federal appeals court. ?The DC District Court of Appeals today ruled 2-1 that civilian courts no longer have the authority to consider whether the military is illegally holding foreigners.? Unbelievable. It has been an attempt, as you know, ongoing by the judicial community and the left in this country to take as many powers from the commander-in-chief as possible during wartime including using the judiciary. ?Barring detainees from the U.S. court system was a key provision in the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a system to prosecute terrorism suspects.? This is the old military tribunal thing.
The judges on this case, ?Randolph and Judge David B. Sentelle ordered that the hundreds of cases pending in the lower courts be dismissed.? The dissenting judge, a Clinton appointee, ?Judge Judith W. Rogers dissented, saying the cases should proceed.? Both of the judges in the majority here appointed by Republicans, one — maybe both appointed by Reagan. Now, everybody concludes that this will automatically go to the United States Supreme Court. Not so fast. Nothing says they have to take it. If four of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court say they will take it, then they will take it, but if they don’t, they don’t. It could stand. Did you see yesterday the BBC story, “US-Iran attack plans revealed”? ?US contingency plans for air strikes on Iran extend beyond nuclear sites and include most of the country’s military infrastructure, the BBC has learned. It is understood that any such attack – if ordered – would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres. The US insists it is not planning to attack, and is trying to persuade Tehran to stop uranium enrichment. The UN has urged Iran to stop the programme or face economic sanctions.?
Now, let me ask you people a question. How does a story like this get in the newspaper? How does a story like this find its way to the BBC? There are multiple ways. It could be that an intrepid journalist for the BBC, digging deep, using sources, using old-fashioned journalism techniques actually dug up the story. The odds of that are zero, since it doesn’t happen anymore. The second possibility is that some quasi-traitor in the Bush administration leaked the story to the BBC in hopes of quelling and destroying any opportunity of surprise or any chance that the program might be initiated, as we have seen during the Iraq war buildup 2002, Pentagon, state department leaks to the New York Times and the Washington Post. The third possibility is that the administration itself planted this story as a means of keeping pressure on that wacko idiot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. My vote is the latter. I think the administration plotted this or planted this with the BBC. I don’t think this is a leak. I think this is an attempt to ratchet up pressure. There’s a lot of pressure, of course, between Iran and the US over Iranian presence in Iraq, not just weapons, but advisors and so forth.
A quick time-out here. We’ll be back and continue with all this plus your phone calls. Again the number 800-282-2882 — oh, by the way, I’ve also been getting e-mail from people that are telling me as though I have anything to do with it, ?Rush, I’m really sad about this season of ?24.? Something just doesn’t seem right in this season of ?24.? I can’t pinpoint it, Rush, but something here is not working.? Some people say there’s too much torture, other people say that there’s not enough realism. For example, there weren’t any traffic jams in LA after a nuke went off in Valencia. That?s because if a nuke went off in Valencia, nobody would care and the people in Valencia wouldn’t be able to get out because they’d just been nuked. But anyway, I hope you saw last night’s episode because if you saw last night’s episode any of you who have any fears or concerns that ?24? just isn’t what it has been, those fears should have been allayed after last night.