For your listening pleasure, courtesy of the Right Scoop, the first 15 minutes of today’s show. If you can’t spare the time, watch the last three minutes of the second clip for his big finish about Saul Alinsky’s America and then two minutes of the first clip starting at around 2:45 for the bombshell about his very strange bedfellow in the bid. Rush says he knew nothing about it until yesterday and even now seems unsure that Soros is definitely involved. I googled around to see where the story started and kept coming back to this Bloomberg piece, which … doesn’t say much:

Limbaugh’s group is led by former Madison Square Garden President and current St. Louis Blues and Real Salt Lake majority owner Dave Checketts, who brings a wealth of sports industry contacts, know-how and credibility. Checketts also brings big-time backers like George Soros, who financed the duo’s failed attempt to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2003.

Checketts’s ownership of hockey’s Blues is backed by, among others, TowerBrook Capital Partners, which was formerly known as Soros Private Equity Partners before it was spun off from Soros Asset Management Group in 2005.

Much depends on what “brings” means. Is Bloomberg merely saying that Soros has partnered with Checketts before and therefore might be involved this time or are they saying he is involved and they know it for a fact? Hard to tell. If it’s the latter then it’s exceedingly odd that Checketts never mentioned it to Rush in order to feel him out on whether he was okay with partnering with Soros. It’s also odd that Soros wouldn’t have used his influence on the left to call off the media dogs this week against Limbaugh: Now that they’ve purged Rush, conservatives will demand that Soros be purged too and Georgie boy surely knows it. Which is why I suspect that he’s not involved in the bid (and, needless to say, won’t be involved going forward).

Limbaugh goes out of his way in the second clip to say he’ll remain a huge fan of the NFL, so if you’re thinking about a boycott, it sounds like you’re on your own. Exit question: Why did Checketts assure him that he was prepared for the media firestorm when he obviously wasn’t? Maybe he thought at the time that Soros was coming aboard and that the two would “balance” each other for left/right media purposes?