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July 26, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:35
July 26, 2005, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
It is great to be back.
The discovery has blasted off and is in outer space.
The Discovery has taken off.
This is the first space shuttle mission in two years.
A first question I have is, is the Discovery Channel sponsoring this mission?
Is that how it got its name?
You know, they are milking this Lance Armstrong that I had the Discovery Channel on last night.
It's now wall to wall, all Lance all the time, so they'll get a little bit of extra credit, I suppose, for this.
Uh the space shuttle taking off.
Let's conduct a quick pop quiz here.
No need to call in with responses.
Try to answer these questions on your own.
How many astronauts are there?
I'm guessing five percent of you know that the number is seven, ninety-five percent may not.
I know because it's in front of me.
Name just one of the astronauts.
I don't think anyone can.
Family and friends, maybe, folks from the hometown.
What is this mission supposed to accomplish?
What are they doing?
Sometimes they blast satellites into space.
I don't know if they're doing that this time around.
Or are we trying to prove anything other than that NASA can still get a shuttle in the air safely?
The problem that I have is that I think NASA has lost all focus, and it's not the fault of the people who work at NASA.
It's the fault of our government in that we do no longer seem to have a purpose for our space program.
We're told that it's to advance scientific knowledge.
We're told it's for technological advances, we're told that there are all these practical applications, but no one really knows what they are.
And as a result of this, I think the space program has lost all sense of enthusiasm from the American public.
It went up this morning.
Most people didn't pay any attention other than to ask, did they get it in the air safely?
Beyond that, I don't think there's any real interest in it at all, and that's sad.
I think the space program needs to be rededicated to a mission of exploration.
That that needs to be the goal.
It's why it was created.
We need to start thinking about going back to the moon or going to Mars.
If for no other reason than they're there, and don't mock the legitimacy of that being a goal.
The fact that we've never been to Mars, and we may have the ability to go there, is reason enough to try to do it.
That's when the space program captivated people.
We are all fascinated by what is out there.
Whether you are religious or not, whatever your belief system is, we take a look at all the stars and the galaxy and what a tiny fraction that is of the universe, and we wonder what's there.
In the 1960s, we dedicated ourselves to going out and trying to find out.
President Kennedy said in 1961, we're going to go to the moon by the end of the decade, and we made it.
There was disaster in between, there was loss of life in between, but we made it and there was a sense of national purpose.
And I don't think we've had that ever since.
And I think our space program has simply become a bureaucratic type operation.
Go out and achieve certain scientific goals, but has it is no longer capturing the imagination of the American people because we don't seem to have a purpose for it anymore.
And I want to make it clear, I am not knocking the astronauts who are involved in this.
They are incredibly courageous and they are brilliant people.
You watch that blast, this rocket is enormous.
Imagine sitting in an upside-own airplane on top of these two monster rockets being blasted into outer space and then having to pilot this thing knowing that the last time we tried this was a disaster.
They are incredibly courageous people, and the people who work for NASA are the best that we have.
My objection is to the lack of a real mission that inspires anyone.
By that same standard, looking for the new world as the Europeans did in the 14 and 1500s was a waste of money.
Going to the moon Was a waste of money.
Not everything has to come back to us in terms of a tangible economic result.
There's something to be said for doing something because we have the ability to do it, but we've never succeeded in doing it in the past.
In the meantime, I'll try to find out who the astronauts are, and hopefully we'll have that information by the end of the program.
But the sad fact is, and I don't want to sound callous here, but it's a fact.
The sad fact is we learn the name of astronauts, learn the names of astronauts anymore, only if they're killed.
That's the only time we know about them.
Because we no longer really pay attention to what we're doing in space.
Now to the Democrats, going from the best and the brightest to the worst and the dullest.
Columbus, Ohio, several of the Democrats who are running for president, and yes, they are running.
What's more anonymous?
The names of the shuttle astronauts or the Democrats other than Hillary who are running for president.
Better conduct a poll.
Let's do a man on the street.
Where's Jay Leno when we need him?
Who are the name an astronaut, name a Democrat other than Hillary who's running for president?
You might get John Edwards.
Has anybody seen John Edwards lately?
He's just disappeared.
Anyway, they were in Columbus, Ohio last night for a question session in front of a Democratic audience.
Hillary was there.
She did deign to appear with the other rivals for the nomination.
I want to read to you a few quotes from the Democratic candidates for president.
Governor Mark Warner of Virginia, quote, Today's Washington fiscal conservative is someone who thinks that deficits can go on forever, and that you can make the cost of the war go away simply by moving them off the balance sheet.
Senator Evan Bai of Indiana accused the administration of false bravado and incompetence in the way it handled the war in Iraq and its aftermath.
It's obvious that they have no plan for winning the peace.
Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa criticized the administration as not sharing with us the true reasons for going to war or the true price we would have to pay to continue the war.
Hillary then got up and according to the reports, third the greatest enthusiasm spoke for 30 minutes, covered a broad variety of topics, including foreign policy, domestic security, health care, and education.
If you listen to what they are saying, they're not proposing to do anything.
What's right now the democratic plan for anything?
For anything at all.
Look at the comment from Bai.
Well, the administration is incompetent.
They have no plan for winning the peace.
What's yours, Evan?
Mark Warner.
Washington fiscal conservative is somebody you can just run these deficits forever.
You can simply make the cost of the war go away by putting it into a different account.
Okay, fine.
Do you have any thoughts on dealing with terrorism?
What are your thoughts on the economy?
What are your thoughts on the budget deficit?
They don't have anything to offer right now other than to take these pot shots at the administration.
Which is a particular waste of time when you consider the fact that Vice President Cheney is very unlikely to be the Republican candidate in 2008.
By the time these guys and woman get around to running in'08, the Bush administration will be in its final year.
The presumptive Republican nominee won't even be known.
That will be somebody coming out of the Republican primaries.
And all the Democrats are going to be doing is bashing Bush, bashing Bush, bashing Bush.
They won't be running against Bush.
And unless things change dramatically, they're not going to be running against Cheney.
At some point they've got to develop some sort of message of their own as to what it is that they're going to run on.
What's their program for Social Security?
What's their program to deal with the massive deficits that are going to come in Medicare?
None of them wants to even offer one because they can get the biggest applause at these democratic rallies they go to, populated by the true believers, by just bashing Bush.
But it's not going to get them elected to anything.
The other problem they face is what happened in 2004.
In terms of the electoral map, I don't see changing.
The Democrats can't win the presidency if they get skunked in the South.
Since the Republicans have the Mountain West nailed down, it means that in order for the Democrats to win, they have to take the entire Northeast, the entire industrial Midwest, and keep California with almost no exceptions.
They can only afford to lose one or two of those states and still win if they get skunked in the South.
And history is telling us that Southern voters are completely alienated from the liberal mainstream that is now the Democratic Party.
The last three Democrats to be elected president were from south of the Mason Dixon line.
They're the only ones that's that Southerners seem to be able to relate to Clinton in 92 and 96.
Carter in 76, and then you have to go all the way back to Lyndon Johnson who is from Texas.
I don't think that they will elect a Northerner and that if they don't win in 2008, it's going to be worse for them in 2012.
The way demographics are working right now with so many Northerners moving south even more electoral votes are going to be in Southern states.
Texas is going to have more of them.
Arizona's going to have more Florida, the one Southern state Democrats think they have a chance of winning that's going to become a more important state.
So 08 is their last real chance to win without adopting a strategy that is more palatable to those to those in the South and the only way I think they can do it is to nominate a Southerner preferably a governor.
Now I don't want to help them win here.
The one Democrat who scares me is Mark Warner of Virginia.
He's a moderate he's from a southern state he'll run as a moderate and that's the formula the Democrats have had to win national elections.
If they put Hillary up or Tom Vilsack or even Evan Bay I think they're going to go nowhere.
In the meantime we get two and a half years of listening to them say uh nothing.
The whole question who the Republican nominee is another fascinating question, but one that we'll have to wait.
It's uh my name is Mark Belling and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Gelling sitting in for Rush 1 800 28282 is the telephone number at EIB.
It looks like we have an energy bill we haven't had one since President Bush was elected the first time around he really wanted one and now we have one.
The House passed its own bill then the Senate passed its bill so they create this conference committee in which they try to hash out the differences between the two sides the House has to give up some of its stuff the Senate has to give up some of its stuff they reach a deal and then it's sent back to both chambers for a vote which will happen this week they cut the deal at three o'clock this morning 3 a.mill it was filled with a whole lot of pork and
a whole lot of aid but not a lot that actually deals with the energy needs of the country it's better today in this finalized form that it was yesterday but it still is flawed in that the focus of the bill doesn't seem to be to improve America's energy needs.
Let's start with this.
The cost is over 10 years, $11.5 billion.
So immediately, Congress is put in charge of solving a problem.
They start to spend money.
Most of the things that need to be done wouldn't cost the government a penny.
If your goal is to make America more energy independent and to wean us off of foreign oil, Most of the things that you could do to encourage themselves that wouldn't cost the government anything.
On the other hand most of those things don't make any special interests happy so let's go through some of the things that they do in fact I'll give you a good and a bad list here.
They eliminate a proposal that would have required utility companies to produce by the year 2020 10% of their energy from alternative sources.
That's out that's a good thing that Got knocked out.
They have a mandate for ethanol.
That's bad.
It's in, and in fact, they expanded the ethanol mandate.
It will require that by the year 2012, the oil companies will have to have 7.5 billion gallons a year of ethanol in gasoline blends.
That's about double what we have right now.
There is no protection for the oil companies for lawsuits dealing with MTBE.
This requires a little bit of background.
Several years ago, when the government mandated that areas of high air pollution have so-called cleaner burning gasoline, they gave them two alternatives.
You could water the gasoline down with ethanol, or you could add something called MTBE.
The oil companies really liked MTBE, so they added it.
Some areas it was ethanol, most areas got MTBE.
Guess what?
MTBE, which the environmentalists loved, has turned out to be an environmental disaster.
When it leaks out of these underground tanks, it gets into the groundwater and it is believed to be a carcinogen.
So now you've got a lot of lawsuits being filed against the oil companies.
They were looking for protection from these lawsuits, they didn't get it.
So now anyone who feels as though they were damaged by MTBEs are going to be able to sue oil companies with no limits as to what they can recover.
Is this going to help lower the price of gasoline in the United States?
Or is it just one more windfall for trial lawyers?
Congress did approve upgrading the permitting process for LNG facilities.
That's liquefied natural gas.
When you bring in natural gas from overseas, when you bring it in by ship, it has to be liquefied.
We don't have any facilities that can take it in.
There now will be, and it won't be as easy for local governments to be able to block them.
This is a good thing.
They also encourage moving forward with nuclear power plant construction.
First time in 25 years.
There are incentives in there for that.
That's good.
And finally, nothing about Anwar, the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which is oil and natural gas rich.
It is our Saudi Arabia.
The House had earlier passed legislation allowing drilling for oil and natural gas in Alaska.
The Senate said we don't want it, no way.
The Senate prevailed, there's nothing in there that deals with drilling in Alaska.
On balance, it's probably a better bill than if we did nothing at all.
But most of this stuff doesn't really address the energy problems that we have.
You don't have a national energy policy, and you're not addressing the problems that we have with energy unless you open up Alaska for drilling.
And to go into all of these other things, including mandating the use of ethanol without allowing drilling for oil and natural gas in Alaska really misses the point unless your goal here is to buy votes rather than actually come up with an energy policy that works.
Now, on the program yesterday, I kind of ripped on ethanol and said it's a lousy fuel, which angered the farmers who grow corn that they like to convert into ethanol.
Whether it is or it isn't, and you can accept my point on that or you can disagree with it.
The fact that ethanol is now going to be mandated is the real problem here.
If ethanol was part of the answer, you wouldn't need to have a government mandate in order to get it into full production.
By having the government step into the private energy market and say, you must use this, I don't think you're solving anything.
When's the last time the government mandated something that it turned out to be a good thing?
Fluoridation of water mainly.
Maybe, maybe.
No callers who oppose the fluoridation of water, by the way.
We do not want to get into uh fluoridated water.
The fact that this is a mandate from the federal government tells you how flawed the entire idea of ethanol is.
Ethanol's not the answer to anything here.
What it is is a way for politicians to gain a lot of votes by appealing to people who are looking for one more market for an American agricultural product.
So if you take a look at this thing in total, I don't really see it solving anything.
There are good things in here.
I happen to think we ought to be moving back toward nuclear power.
It's the one energy source that we don't have to worry about supply.
You don't have to drill for nuclear.
You don't have to buy it from the Saudi Arabians.
We have a limitless supply of it.
That's a good thing.
I like the fact that they moved away from mandating alternative energy.
That's a good thing.
But the requirement of ethanol is merely a SOP to the corn growers of America and doesn't address what the real energy needs of the country are.
I do want to debate that though.
1-800-282-2882 is the telephone number.
I'm Mark Belling and for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for the vacation in Rush Limbaugh.
Well, Rush is away, we're going to be podcasting the guest host shows, including me from members of Rush 24-7, adding some podcast bonus material, including exclusive audio of Rush's unedited interview with Rudy Giuliani.
The whole thing is going to be in the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter.
Also, you can check out the Club Getmo gallery at Rush Limbo dot limbaugh.
I mispronounced Russia's name.
Oh man.
I'm done.
I'm done at Rush Limbaugh.com and keep those pictures coming.
You can buy Club Git Maw stuff at the EIB store at uh rushlimbaugh.com.
Let's get back to the energy bill.
Scott, in Dayton, Ohio, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Mark, thanks for taking my call.
Uh Active Duty Air Force Officer here in Dayton, stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
Hey, I happen to agree with you that uh mandating um ethanol methanol usage is probably the wrong thing to do.
What's your opinion, though, on why the Senate um didn't want to include exploration in Anwar uh and include that in the bill.
It's the same problem that we have with the Senate on just about everything else.
It's the same problem that we had with the Senate on not being willing to use the nuclear option.
You just have a lot of moderates in the Senate who have cold feet and don't support what the majority of Americans support.
I mean, the that problem that has been in the United States Senate is apparently going to be there permanently unless some conservatives replaced moderate senators.
They can't get past the fact that the environmentalists will run these TV ads showing incredible beauty in Alaska and tremendous wildlife in Alaska and say, Do you want to foul this with these oil rigs?
Whereas in fact Anwar is rock, where there isn't an animal within hundreds of miles, you're drilling into solid rock, it's wasteland, but you have too many Republican senators who aren't aren't willing to bite on that.
If we started to drill in Anwar, there would be no political fallout at all.
No one really cares.
And if they actually saw where the drilling sites were, they were they would be particularly not bothered by this.
So I just think it's the great failing of this energy bill that it doesn't deal with that issue when you have a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican president, we still take one of the most oil and natural gas rich regions of our country and keep it off limits.
Are there a lot of smart folks that agree that um there's uh uh say a 30-year supply or an endless supply of oil right now on underneath that area?
I don't I don't know what the supply is, but it is massive.
And it's not just oil, it's natural gas.
And if you think we're facing a problem with oil shortages right now, at least we can import it and pay exorbitant rates.
It's very hard to import natural gas, which is why natural gas rates have gone through the rough.
Thanks for the call, Scott.
Do appreciate it and thanks for your service.
Shepard Montana Art, Art, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Uh, I agree with you uh on ethanol as it is produced right now, because it's produced using natural gas to provide the heat to raise it from the twelve percent to the ninety-five percent uh that you get from distilling.
And then everybody forgets that to bring it from ninety-five percent pure to a hundred percent pure, you have to use benzene, which is a carcinogen.
Well, the whole irony of ethanol is that it was touted by the environmentalists as being environmentally friendly because you aren't burning oil.
The problem is you use more energy in converting the corn to ethanol than is actually gained when the ethanol is burned in your automobile.
Secondly, because ethanol doesn't produce the same miles per gallon as this gasoline, you have to burn more of it, meaning you're emitting you're emitting more than if you were simply burning gasoline.
So the only advantage left to ethanol is the fact that we have a lot of corn in the United States.
You don't have to import it and it's another market for American farmers.
Those are the only positives but environmentally there's nothing there for it.
And since you consume as much energy as you do in order to produce ethanol we're not really solving any energy problems.
But what we are doing is we're adding to the cost of the energy bill.
You're right about that the if the nuclear part goes through at least we can use the electricity produced from nuclear to make ethanol.
But everybody also forgets that in World War II the Germans made uh all their gasoline and kerosene that they used on the eastern front from coal.
And since uh Kodak is doing away with its uh producing film anymore we can convert those plants that Kodak had like Tennessee Eastman into producing gas all right I have to warn you we have just gotten a call from Dick Durbin.
He's alert to any references to Germany in World War II.
I thank you for your call.
Let's go to Maryland and Harriet.
Harriet you're on EIVI Mark Belling.
Well I happen to be a farmer's wife and I don't know what statistics you are using probably the 25% 25 year old statistics and uh I would suggest that maybe you talk to somebody who might be with a National Corn Growers Association who could give you some more up to date statistics on what you're using.
But for nothing else but for a moral reason I would not want my money and my dollars to go to an Arab state if I could keep it here in America going.
I'm not advocating that we could be an energy independent nation if we wanted to be we are rich in oil.
We are rich in natural gas.
We don't have to be dependent on foreign oil to say that it's either ethanol or buying from the Saudis is a false argument.
Well it's what we're doing and if you think about the lobbying of the oil industry uh and the money that they have compared to the farmers who don't have an organized line labor per se are that's why they're mandating that this is my thought anyway of why they're mandating it from the Congress is because we don't have a lobby to support like the oil industry does and they know what you do you know what you do have Harriet?
You've got the Iowa caucuses.
And because they're first in the nation and because every candidate running for president has to sell his soul and say ethanol this ethanol that I'll drink ethanol you end up with uh you know politicians who have really are be beholden to the industry including pre including President Bush.
I don't think that you can defend the notion of saying that we're going to mandate that the oil companies use it.
Is that the kind of government intervention in the free markets that you want or that has ever worked well actually because the farmers don't have an arm in the government and because they're not as strong as the oil lobby that's my my own thought on this of course is that's the reason they're mandating it because the oil lobbies would come would probably defeat it in the long run.
And incidentally, you know the country of Brazil right the oil companies own gas stations they sell ethanol they're not all that opposed to it other than that it isn't that it isn't a very good fuel.
My problem is is that we de we have an energy problem in this country we've got sixty dollar a barrel oil nationally we're paying the global the global market rate to import a lot of that oil because we don't produce enough here.
We have natural gas shortages so our natural gas rates are going through the roof.
We haven't altered our energy policy in years and the big initiative that comes out of this policy is to simply say that we're going to go out and use ethanol which could never survive in the marketplace on its own I just think that we're missing the point here.
I would much rather have us start drilling in Alaska making a full embrace of nuclear and encourage the use of hybrid technology which people love those cars are s are rolling out of the dealerships right and left than coming in and mandating the use of a fuel that most consumers really don't have that much of an interest in.
Well, because you live on the East Coast, obviously.
Actually, I live in Wisconsin and we have a lot more corn than we do buildings.
Thanks for the call, Harriet.
Appreciate it.
David in Georgia, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hello.
Uh I want to say that first of all, I agree we ought to go to the body.
I gotta stop you for a second.
I gotta stop you for a second, David.
This does mark the first time that I have ever been accused of being part of the Eastern Media Elite.
Uh so here Harriet was calling from Maryland for crying out loud, and she's accusing me of being on the East Coast.
Okay, go ahead, David.
Uh I I agree.
That that that was kind of ironic.
Uh I have a brother who's a petroleum geologist.
And so a lot of what I say is based on my brother's uh input.
And to give you an idea of his uh uh background, he was the principal petroleum geologist that was taken to China by the major international oil companies when it went when they went over there to evaluate Chinese oil holdings.
Mm-hmm.
Uh first of all, I want to say we ought to drill an NWA, but what's really on my mind is your uh love affair with nuclear power.
Nuclear power, if you check the stats, you will find that no nuclear power plant has ever been built for what it was projected.
That's true.
That no nuclear power plant has ever produced the power that it was supposed to produce.
That's also true.
I grant you both points.
The worst thing about nuclear power is what do you do with the waste.
And when we hear people talk about building nuclear waste disposal units that are supposed to last for 10,000 years.
My brother tells me that any geologist that can make a prediction like that is a fraud.
That there's a lot I don't dispute any of those things.
But we don't have a power source for which there isn't a problem.
If you pr it we we're rich in coal, but everyone knows that coal pollutes.
Oil costs a fortune and we have to import a lot of it.
We haven't figured out a way.
Natural gas, we have shortages.
Come natural gas power plants are the most expensive of all to operate.
There are problems with all of them.
The advantage to nuclear being part of the mix is that we have a limitless supply of it.
Now you are right.
The costs of building those plants are always extremely high, largely because of government regulations.
They never produce as much as they're supposed to, but we have nuclear power.
It's not like this is some sort of vague idea.
It's not like we're talking solar panels and maybe we can get it in a broad use in America.
There are nuclear power plants all over this country.
They're working.
They never have any problems.
As for the waste problem that you cite, yes, it's real, but we do have the ability to bury it.
We do have the ability to put it in sealed locations in which no one can get at it.
It's real, but if you're asking me to say that is nuclear power perfect, the answer is no, it is not perfect.
But name an energy source that is.
In the meantime, we're paying sixty dollars for a barrel of oil.
People are paying $2.50 for gasoline, and your electric bills are going up all the time because all of this stuff carries a cost.
Nuclear power does work.
It shouldn't be exclusive, but I do like the fact that we are finally reopening the door to allowing companies to go out and build nuclear plants, which will probably be small, but we'll add to our energy usage without having to buy from the Saudis or anyone else.
Thank you for the call.
I do appreciate it.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for rush.
House and Senate negotiators, three o'clock in the morning, cut a deal on an energy bill.
They'll vote on it in both the House and Senate this week, expected to pass.
Better than doing nothing at all.
But a lot of problems in there with some positives.
Tucson, Arizona, Steve.
Steve, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Oh, hey, how are you doing?
I'm great, thank you.
Yeah, I gotta say all this this fuel and oil uh conversation is i I hate to say it for me, it's a big joke.
Um has anyone out there ever heard of a steam engine?
You don't need to run it on gas, you don't need to run it on oil, you don't need to run it on methanol.
You can run it on powderized garbage, wood, anything.
Uh it's not I'm not talking, you know, some antique, you know, uh uh Stanley steamer thing with some pressure kettle boiler.
Use a a modern day flash boiler, produce usable steam in the same amount of time it takes to warm up.
To do what smart plugs.
To do what?
To run your car.
You want to run your car on steam.
You want to run your power plant as a fancy boiler to run an old-fashioned steam engine to generate power.
Yeah, yeah.
And why and why do you figure then that nobody's doing this?
Why is Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Mercedes, why are none of them building steam-powered automobiles?
I don't know.
I'll be honest.
I can't.
If only they had you, Steve, consulting them, we'd have all of our energy problems solved.
No, not the problem.
The problem with all of this looking for a silver bullet is that there isn't one.
Every energy, every energy source that we have poses problems.
Now, I happen to think that leaving the free market alone to solve this is the best way to go.
I'm very encouraged by hybrid engines.
You were able to get better fuel efficiency and better horsepower by developing these hybrid engines.
This is a free market solution that isn't being mandated by government.
But to call up and talk about steam or wind or the sun is just living in a fantasy world, and it's frankly a waste of time, Steve.
Let's go to Naples, Florida.
Arthur, Arthur, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Go ahead, Arthur.
Goodbye, Arthur Philadelphia, Don, you're on EIB.
Hi, good afternoon.
How are you?
I'm great, thanks.
Yeah, I didn't want to go off on steam power, but maybe the impetus of mandating these new types of fuels might lead to the development of a better internal combustion engine.
Well, except ethan ethanol, which is the only one that's being mandated here.
That's right.
You know, it runs on an internal combustion engine.
All ethanol is is another another form of gasoline that is very expensive to produce.
But what I'm getting at is the internal combustion engine for your automobiles or for anything else, basically hasn't changed in about a hundred years.
Maybe it's time for some um mind storm to just come out with a new way to burn it.
And do you think and do you think government mandates is the best way to accomplish that?
Based on the law, based on the long history of success that we have had with government mandating things.
Take a if you put in one category, scientific and technological innovation that has been produced by the free market.
And in the other category, scientific and technological innovation produced by government mandate, one of those columns is going to be longer than the other.
the most exciting thing we've got going right now is hybrid engines the government didn't mandate that that was developed by business executives looking for a better way And looking for a product that would sell.
If you can come up with a product that a gas an automobile that has is more fuel efficient, burns less gasoline, yet produces greater power, the market's going to buy it.
But coming in and mandating all of these things that Congress seems to want to do in order to buy votes isn't the answer.
I gotcha.
Great.
Thanks for the call.
When we come back, a blast from the past, believe it or not, we do have Jane Fonda to kick around anymore.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I love this.
Jane Fonda says she's going to take a cross-country bus tour to oppose the war in Iraq.
It's the first war she says she's opposed since the Vietnam War when she was over in Hanoi cooing up to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops.
She says she's going to take along her daughter, families of Iraq war veterans.
She says she's going to take cross-country bus tour, and the bus is going to run on vegetable oil.
See now, in our discussion on our whole energy debate, I didn't really consider the potential for vegetable oils.
What's she gonna do?
Take this semi, go across country, fill her up with Crisco.
Instead of stopping at a shell station, she's gonna go to an A and P. Uh run it on uh vegetable oil.
Uh she does say she wants to be very, very careful about how she does this because her career suffered after because of her opposition to the uh Vietnam War and the uh funneling of the Via Kong gun turret, she doesn't want to do that.
So I guess this time around she's going to coup up to some suicide bombers.
Visit Saddam Hussein in prison.
Come to think of it, Saddam Hussein and Tom Hayden do look somewhat similar.
I don't know where Ted Turner fits into this, but we're gonna have Jane back on the road as she tries to make herself once again relevant in her vegetable oil tour of America to oppose the war in Iraq.
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