i said i'm at least 45 minutes to an hour from athens. she said, well, shirley, they want you to pull over to the side of the road and do it. because you are going to be on glenn beck tonight. >> mike barnicle, is it really possible that the federal government, based upon fear of glenn beck, fired an employee, an excerpted clip they saw on cable news? >> unfortunately it is, willie. we spoke about this earlier. it's a horrific indictment of several institutions in this country of how politics is conducted today, of the news media's complicit in this. we ran the thing after the -- the peg of the story for us was after chris called agriculture and found out that tom vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, had fired the woman. vilsack now says he did so without speaking to anyone from the white house. so the logical question to tom vilsack is would you have done