RUSH: It’s not the best analogy, but it’s close. The Hobby Lobby thing. I mean, here you’ve got these four lib justices, and they don’t care about the Constitution. To them, the Constitution’s in the way, it’s an obstacle, and you have three of ’em here just madcap feminazis.

This Hobby Lobby thing, they hate ’em, doesn’t matter how it goes. On the other side you’ve got four conservatives. They respect and revere the Constitution, don’t think it should be trampled on, religious freedom is key to the founding of the country and the government can’t force anybody to violate their religious freedom, whether making a profit or not. And then here we have Anthony Kennedy in the middle. People are trying to get an idea on how he’s gonna vote by examining his questions in oral argument. Well, depending on when you tuned in you could think Kennedy’s going to vote against the Hobby Lobby, gonna vote for ’em, because he asked questions both ways.

It’s exactly what’s gonna happen with this NSA spying business. The Republicans, I don’t know if they’re ever gonna be able to come up with a strategy to deal with this, other than win the Senate. That’s probably the best thing they could do for this, because what’s gonna happen, you know, you’ve got these Millennials, these young Democrat voters, and the one issue, according to polling data, that has them riled up more than anything else, is the NSA spying on ’em. They just don’t think the government should be doing that. Government can do socialistic stuff and take care of people, raise taxes, and give out welfare all at once, but spying on us, nah, nah, nah, nah, we’re not gonna put up with that. We don’t want you to know where we’re going. We don’t want you to know what mass transit bus we’re riding or whatever the hell they’re doing.

They’re really offended by it. And, you know, Zuckerberg, who represents the Millennials, calls up Obama and bitches about it, and Obama doesn’t give him any satisfaction. Zuckermanberg says: Well, it’s gonna be a long time to get this fixed. Then Obama has a meeting on Friday with all these tech CEOs where they collectively complain to him about it and then, lo and behold, while Obama is over mucking things up at The Hague, he comes out and says: You know what? I’m gonna just propose that we just eliminate this massive metadata phone collection that we’re doing.

And these Millennials and the Zuckerbergs and all these young kids go, “Yay, yay, yay, yay,” because they hear Obama responding to ’em. They hear Obama hearing them, reacting in a positive way, Obama realizes. He didn’t do it, see. This a holdover from those evil Republicans in the Bush years and they started all this spying, but Obama, he finally has seen the problem ’cause he’s a smart guy and he cares about us and he’s gonna stop the spying.

So what Obama then does after making this announcement is prepare a piece of legislation and send it over to the Senate. The Democrats go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we think the NSA is spying way too much and we agree with the president.” So then it goes to the Republicans in the House, in this case the adults, and the Republicans say, “Wait a minute, we can’t broom this program. We need this program for national security. We’ve gotta be able to track the phone conversations of people who intend this country harm.”

The way it’s gonna end up politically is Republicans are the obstacle to eliminating spying on citizens. Or, put another way, Republicans want to continue spying on you. So Obama proposes a fix, absolves himself, knowing full well that adults in the House on the Republican side in no way are gonna support it. Nobody in their right mind would support brooming the program. But Obama proposes it and the low-information, Millennial crowd go, “Yay,” and it ends up with the Republicans getting the blame and Republicans being perceived as the spy masters. And, ergo, they’d be hated even more than they are now.

The strategery of this is to secure the Millennial vote and keep it in the Democrat Party. But it’s not axiomatic that the Republicans would oppose it. What if they don’t? NBC News today: “House Intel Panel Unveils NSA Metadata Overhaul Bill — The two top members of the House Intelligence Committee unveiled a bill Tuesday that would end the government’s bulk collection of metadata under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), including telephone, email and internet metadata. The bill, according to committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Ranking Member Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., is ‘very, very close’ to what the White House is proposing related to metadata collection.”

So it appears that the Republican strategery is to agree with Obama to a point and thereby head him off at the pass so that they don’t get blamed for it. Hanging in the balance is the surveillance (laughing) the very surveillance program that does indeed ferret out conversations between terrorists who intend us harm. It does do that. Nothing’s flawless, but it’s better to have it than not to have it. So this is just the latest on that. And of course Anthony Kennedy is in the same situation. He gave indications he could go either way on the Hobby Lobby case. It’s just gonna depend on how he feels.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Doug in Denver, great to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Good morning. Thanks for taking my call, Rush.

RUSH: You bet. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Do you realize that the White House, by pushing the metadata that was collected, you talked about in your first hour, back on the phone companies, they removed one of the safeguards that was built into the system to protect people’s rights.

RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute, the phone companies removed one of the safeguards, did you say?

CALLER: Well, by the White House pushing the metadata back to the phone companies rather than stored through the NSA, they removed one of the safeguards, and it works this way. The NSA was collecting the metadata, which are just purely numbers. You can go to that facility and say, “Tell me everything you know about Rush Limbaugh or Bo Snerdley.”

RUSH: Well, you can actually learn quite a bit about somebody from metadata. The fact that you —

CALLER: Yeah, but it’s not identifiable with the individual. It’s not identifiable as you or anybody else. You have to go through two more steps to find out who the individual is. Now by pushing that metadata back to the phone company, it becomes one stop shopping for the government.

RUSH: What do you mean?

CALLER: Because now when the government has a suspicious phone number or a phone number that’s flagged, they go to one place and get both the name and all the metadata and all the details all at one time. This was built such that you could not query the system about an individual, but you could query the system about a phone number.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: You had to go through two more steps to get the identity of the individual.

RUSH: So if you’ve got a phone number, for example, if you got a phone number that’s calling a brothel and a massage parlor and a marijuana farmer three or four times a day, you can pretty much figure out what somebody on the other side of that number is doing, just with the metadata, but you don’t know who that person is?

CALLER: But you can’t figure out who it is.

RUSH: Well, but you have a good idea. I mean, you’re close, anyway, you know whose number it is.

CALLER: No —

RUSH: Once they tell you.

CALLER: And that’s the whole idea. The way the system worked is you did not know whose —

RUSH: But your point is now they are identifying the names associated with the numbers. Is that what you’re saying now?

CALLER: Now they’re gonna keep all the data in the same place, the name that’s associated with the subscriber and the metadata in one place.

RUSH: And you’re opposed to this; is that right?

CALLER: I don’t have a feeling on it.

RUSH: Okay. That’s all I want know. Cool. All right.