RE; IMUS AND SANTORUM

[Guest guest]

The following is my own effort to "transcribe" comments made by Don Imus this morning, December 11, 2006:

Imus: I'm looking at the letters in Newsweek, not paying any attention, and, darn, another take on autism. This looks like a long letter....from Diedre Imus.

McCord: You have to admire her persistance.

Imus: Part of the letter reads, "What has caused autism? Why has it grown so much in less than 20 years? The idea its just better diagnosis, is to parents and supporters of the autistic community, like fingernails on a chaulk-board. The epedemic is real and recent. It cannot be explained by saying the diagnostic skills of doctors have suddenly improved in the late 1990's. Or, that a mystery gene miraculously became active in hundreds of thousands of children. A logical suggestion is that something changed in the 1990's. Perhaps the number of mercury containing vaccines given to children tripled?

Imus: I stopped reading at this point. I already expressed my disappointment, in that the CAA that passed was compromised. Although I did talk to my friend Bob and he tried to do the right thing. He's a good guy and God bless him and . You have to walk a couple of miles in their shoes. They're trying to do the right thing. They'll get the money and they'll do this environmental reseach. It's all gotta be done, which is what I have said all along.

Sen. Santorum: The CAA was not perfect but we did get something done.

Imus: Bob has promised me, he don't have to promise me, but, he's pledged to those tens of thousands of parents all over the country, they're going to push to get the 45-50 million dollars to get sent over to the NEIHS to conduct environmental research. So, I take him at his word. He did what he thought was the right thing to do and you can't criticize people for that.

Sen. Santorum: It was one of those things. The House and Joe Barton made some changes in the overrall NIH structure and they wanted to make sure this bill was consistent with that. I didn't necessarily agree with them, the changes were made. But, this is not irreparable damage by any stretch of the word. We're going to continue to work to fund it and getting that environmental study is the piece everyone is concerned about. I know you will be there on the radio, you mobilize, this effort mobilized, literally, hundreds of thousands of people. I suspect there will be very few congressmen who want to go through what Joe Barton went through in the last few months.

Imus: Well, you do have to say Congressman Barton did see the light. While he had said he would never pass a single disease piece of legislation, he apparently felt motivated to do just that.

Santourm then rambled on about Iraq.

Imus: Back to the CAA. As I told Bob, because I felt like I had a say in this, I didn't support reaching a compromise.

Santorum: I thought you were a little tough on Bob and there for a while.

Imus: Well, whatever, it is what it is. It's like the "Unforgiven". Remember that movie? They say to Clint Eastwood, we want you to come in an clean up the town. So, he comes in and cleans up the town. He kills everybody---they say---"Wait a minute, we didn't know you were going to do that". I am what I am. Don't get me involved with this. When I say I don't care, I don't care. I got a lot of this from my wife. I don't have a dog in this poker game. I just want to do what's right. And, believe me, I know what's right. I thought it was idiotic to compromise on this bill, when it was not necessary to give Joe Barton a way out of this. I talked to Bob, and he has a good point, he's a good man, he has a good heart. He thinks he's doing the right thing. I don't agree with him, but, that don't make him a bad person. I just want to make that clear.

Santourm: The bottom line is, the House has rules, particularly at the end of a session, that if a Chairman still wanted to hold this bill and the compromise wasn't made, I can guarantee you that Chairman Barton would not have moved forward and allowed this bill out, because he felt very passionately about it. And, we would have gotten no bill. Now we have a bill. The only thing that happened in this bill, is a compromise in the targeting of funding for different institutions, different places. And that is the appropriations process.

Imus: Stop. I'm begging you, I just want you to stop. Let me just say this and then we'll move onto something else. We could have gone back to the Senate---with Dodd and some others---and got a new bill over at the House by March. I know we could have done that.

Santourm: Yeah, that's probably true. You can still do it if you really wanted to fix it, if you thought that was important. will tell you we just need to get the money.

Imus: I think will do that.