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Sept. 28, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:47
September 28, 2005, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Well, uh good after hello, how are you?
Yes.
Thank you, Johnny Donovan, Tom Sullivan sitting in for Rush Limbaugh just uh for the day.
He is off on a very important secret mission.
They're keeping him at a secret location, and so I am in here for the uh for the duration to talk to the fruit of plains.
And there's plenty to talk about today.
We've got um we've got things oh there's uh the this whole business about gas prices and and about gouging and about the uh question about no bid contracts going on down in the Gulf States area, so there's all these uh economic questions which I love to talk about.
Uh plus we've got uh things that Alan Greenspan's been talking about lately as well.
But I I gotta uh tell you this has been amazing to watch uh Congress is just in their glory right now.
They are enjoying every second of having the the cameras on and the lights trained on them, they just can't get enough of this uh of this stuff.
And yesterday, following up a little bit yesterday with Mike Brown and uh the um I I don't know what you called that.
I don't know what you called that other than that was just embarrassing.
It was embarrassing for everybody.
And as much as Mike Brown, who knows, I it's too early to know if Mike Brown is uh qualified or incompetent, we just don't know.
But I do know that it was embarrassing not only for him to sit there and have kind of a schoolyard type of environment.
I thought it was a hearing.
I thought Congress was supposed to, and a lot of people are saying, well, wait a minute, you can't get Congress to do any investigation.
And and by the way, what happened with the uh the Democrats said they were not going to attend.
They said they weren't going to attend and yet there were a bunch of Democrats there, so I don't know what happened, but Congress says, Well, you got to have an independent group because we can't investigate ourselves.
And they actually, Harry Reed has a pretty good point about that.
Tom Davis today from Virginia is talking about the fact oh no, it's the role of that's what Congress is all about.
Well, it that's fine, Mr. Davis, but would you mind conducting congressional business in a little bit more professional manner?
Would you mind having uh instead of stand uh in a hearing?
I thought what the the hearing was all about was that members of Congress are supposed to sit there and they get their turns to ask questions.
And well, yeah, kind of like what they did with Judge Roberts, but but uh they're they're going to go through the process of they're supposed to be learning from people that have firsthand experience or more experience or knowledge in an area that they don't have, and so you've the idea of a hearing is to hear from the witness.
So that our esteemed members of Congress can come away much more intelligent, and all I saw yesterday was speeches.
That wasn't even speeches.
Like I said, it was kind of schoolyard.
It was your bad.
And the next guy said, Yeah, well, you're worse than bad.
And then the next person would come along and say, and I up the bad, you are even worse.
And it was it was uh it was embarrassing.
It was embarrassing.
Not I think the members of Congress should have been more embarrassed than Mike Brown.
I don't even know why Brown went.
I guess he's still on the payroll for a couple more days, so he's got to uh he's got to go.
And now today Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, is there and uh the Governor Riley and Governor Barber from Mississippi and Alabama are both uh by teleconference.
Uh but she's there and they're and and uh they've been dipping in and out.
I've only picked up little bits of it today, but what I've been able to pick up is that Kathleen Blanco is sitting there first, and we'll get through this today about uh the fact that they're they're uh they're on a wish list.
In fact, the uh Washington Post has a story yesterday an editorial yesterday called the Louisiana Looters.
All of a sudden, this big hearted uh outreach to the people of the Gulf States is turning into everybody's getting kind of greedy about the money and wondering about where the greed factor is in all this.
Anyway, so so Kathleen Blanco today, as they dipped out and dipped back in, she's talking about the fact that well we need uh we need jobs in order to get jobs there, you need to give businesses some sort of t uh incentives, like tax breaks.
And I I thought I shook my head and I thought, is this a is this A Democratic governor talking from the state of Louisiana.
Well, good for her.
Good for her because this, I'll tell you a lot of people haven't openly come out and talked about the fact that that part of our country has for a long, long time been the poorest part of our country.
And you've got all these people like John Edwards and so forth with these think tanks studying poverty.
And you're not going to ever eradicate poverty, but certainly it's a good thing to be able to go out and try to reduce poverty.
But when you do that, one of the one of the opportunities to do that is to give people, give companies, give those evil businesses some sort of incentive to say this is an opportunity to not only rebuild Louisiana and Alabama, Mississippi, the areas that were hit, but it's also an opportunity to do it in a different form rather than put it back the way it was.
Why not go in there and give businesses the an incentive, a reason that when they relocate a factory, when they want to add some more uh production someplace, when they want to move a regional office somewhere, that they have an incentive to go to Louisiana or Texas or Mississippi or Alabama or those areas that have been hit by this storm, the storms.
It makes all the sense in the world.
And she's right.
Kathleen Blanco is right about about the fact that you can have economic rebuilding, but you can't have it without jobs.
You've got to have the jobs go there, and when the jobs are there, then and only then do you get economic prosperity.
So how do you get jobs there?
The government doesn't create jobs.
The only thing the government can do is give you incentives to move to the the next time you expand your production facility.
Why not do it there?
And the way you do it is exactly what she was talking about.
I only heard a little bit of it, so I don't want to sit here and say I'm endorsing whatever it was that she said today before Congress.
But the little bit that I heard, I thought, well, well, good for her.
And now the trick behind this, and this gets this gets to be a little dicier, is all right.
So you're going to go out there and you're going to say, businesses, businesses of America, move your next facility or your expansion plans to West to East Texas, Louisiana, to Mississippi, wherever in these areas, we're going to have this economic zone.
And you're going to have all kinds of tax breaks if you do that if you bring jobs there.
The other problem is education and the lack of education and the notoriously low education level in that part of the world.
So what kind of jobs can you bring there?
Can you bring high-tech jobs there?
Can you bring uh some?
Some.
But they're low pay, and so all the livers out there start going, uh, well, you're just bringing these low-pay jobs there.
And then you're going to suspend the uh some of the work rules that the unions love, and that's gonna why they're gonna be no, you want jobs there, you want to get jobs there of any kind.
I don't care what kind of jobs they are.
Because the people can get jobs, and they can also with with many employers, especially big employers, will help them with uh going back to school, paying for their education, or at least uh somehow giving them some money for their education.
That's the kind of program that any economist worth his or her salt will tell you works, and yet bit and yet government seems to have a hard time struggling with all of this uh as they all sit there in Washington, and instead of asking questions, they are simply lecturing like little school kids in all this process.
So we've got uh we've got uh that whole process to go through of of um of getting that place rebuilt and doing it in a really fairly simple way.
It's not going to happen overnight.
It's not gonna happen within two weeks, but we can get there.
In addition, you've got uh the big investigations now, everybody is going to start an investigation about the no-bid contracts.
And we've got investigations uh that they want to start about uh price gouging.
And I want to I want to bring up something about price gouging as we go through the go through the program today because of the fact that gouging, there's a there was a great piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago about uh in praise of gouging.
No, don't look at me like that.
I've it's it's in praise of gag gouging works.
You'll have to stick with me on this because it uh I will explain the method to my madness, but it wor again.
Economists will tell you that this is a a process that actually works in the instead of putting on sweaters and doing all the things that uh President Bush is kind of alluding to.
That was kind of a Jimmy Carter moment everybody's talking about.
It kind of was.
Anyway, the uh yeah, driving tips from the president.
Drive less.
Get your get your Oh, you can't do the firewood thing because of the environmental rules.
You got the sweater on.
Get the sweater on and sit in your house and don't move.
Uh so we got the investigations going on uh on everything here.
And we've got this this no bid contract stuff.
So I think when it comes to this no bid contract stuff, and oh, by the way, yesterday I heard Rush talking about this, and uh I found out about this myself, this uh Shaw Company.
One of the big companies involved uh is Shaw, and uh the got one of the guys that Shaw was somehow somebody that used to work for FEMA under the Bush administration, and so therefore it's another one of these Bush taking care of his buddy sort of stories until they found out that the CEO of Shaw Company is a big giant contributor and party activist.
In fact, at one time I think he ran the Democratic Party in Louisiana and a big supporter of Governor uh Kathleen Blanco.
And all of a sudden there's a story today that uh came out about all the no bid contracts and how everybody's looking at all these companies, and they mentioned Halliburton, of course, you gotta throw that in.
And they mentioned Bechtel, anybody that had any ties to the Republican Party, but they've all of a sudden no reference to the Shaw Company anymore.
So I say, let's uh let's get let's uh uh all-all-illsome free, we give up.
You're right, we're wrong.
Let's go through the government bid process so that we keep this all nice and clean.
Now, for those of you in the Gulf states that are listening to this program sitting in some FEMA trailer.
Well, we'll get to you in about three or four years once the bidding process is all taken care of.
So if you can wait while we do the government bidding process, it would sure be appreciated by us.
Phone number to join the program today, eight hundred two eight two eight eight two.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Rush Limbaugh Radio Program Welcome back.
Tom Sul uh Sullivan sending in for uh Rush just for the uh day to day.
He'll be back again tomorrow.
You can get all the action at Rushlimbaugh.com just looking over this uh Washington Post piece about Louisiana looters saying that uh, you know, the congressional people are uh some of them are dropping proposals for more tax cuts, some have suggested removing pork from the transportation bill, uh, but this forbearance has not touched the Louisiana congressional delegation.
They want two hundred fifty billion dollars without blinking.
And the Washington Post says, like looters who see six televisions when their homes only have room for two, the Louisiana legislators are out to grab more federal cash than they could uh possibly spend usefully.
For example, thirty-five million for seafood marketing, twenty-five million for sugar cane research lab.
It's the equivalent they say of New York responding to the attacks on the World Trade Center by insisting upon a federally financed stadium in Brooklyn.
And they said that it uh New Orleans did not flood because of the Army Corps of Engineers having insufficient money to build flood protection.
It was because the money was allocated by a system of political patronage.
And so that's I think one of the biggest problems that a lot of people have looking at uh at Louisiana is all right, great.
We're we're willing to help.
We're willing to help, but but you've got to assure us that we're not going to give the money to the people that have taken money in the past and misused it.
And that makes no sense.
None whatsoever.
And Jeff Flake, this uh congressman from from uh Arizona uh wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal today about the year of spending dangerously, and about the hundreds of billions of dollars uh that it will take to rebuild the hurricane ravaged communities.
But in that uh debate is a two billion dollar house resolution for a bill to establish an interagency committee to coordinate federal manufacturing research, two billion.
And he says getting back to business after a trag uh tragedy is is nice.
But uh Republicans, what happened to Republicans?
Lavish spending on questionable programs should have been out of step with Republican principles before the hurricane strike.
And he said, how did we get here?
The same party that just ten years ago insisted on dollar for dollar spending offsets for the $15 billion that went to California for the North Ridge California earthquake.
This is the same party that is now going to go back, and Jeff Flake's worried about this.
Midterm elections coming up next year.
And the question is, are people going to say, well, what are you doing for?
Is the Republican control?
There's a debate in the Republican Party about all of this.
About, well, we we have to have all these pork programs.
And there's there's uh reports about the fact that some of the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress are saying to these people like Jeff Flake, hey, you better zip your mouth.
You better stop talking about all this cutting of uh spending because we need to have these port programs, we need to have this spending in order for us to be successful in our local communities across this country so that we will get re-elected.
And Jeff Flake and that wing of the Republican Party is saying, wait a minute.
You mean you mean people might get concerned if we actually told them we're for smaller government, we're for spending less, we're for cutting back.
And he's his thinking is people would like that.
And I'm with him.
I'm with Jeff Flake.
So we may have a little uh Republican civil war starting to brew here about just exactly who is the Republican Party.
Flake said in the Wall Street Journal piece, he says when we refuse to consider postponing a prescription drug benefit that we could ill afford prior to the devastation, and we won't reopen the highway bill, how can we blame voters for questioning our fiscal bona fide uh uh uh credentials?
And then he goes on to talk about after 9-11, we set a very dangerous precedent that any victim of any terrorist act will be made whole.
And that is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure.
Now we're getting into the new fiscal role of the federal government, that it is the federal government's role to make sure that anybody that is a victim of a natural disaster be made whole as well.
And some people will you may argue, well, yeah, let's make them whole.
I don't.
I I've I've got a different idea on it.
But I don't think anybody is saying, well, let's make them whole and oh, by the way, let's fund all their pet projects on top of that.
I mean, you've got to you've at some point.
What are we going to do?
We asked after the next tornado in Kansas or the next wildfire in Arizona.
Those communities will rightfully call up the treasury and say send us a bunch of billions of dollars.
So he's he's lamenting the the uh the failure to discipline itself and the Republican Party about spending.
But this uh this business about what do we uh what do we do?
Now, if you are damaged, if I'm damaged somehow by a natural disaster, and you come along and give me some help.
I I come from the school that says my my response is to say to you, thank you.
Thank you for whatever you gave me.
Thank you for the shoes or the shirt on my back that you the new shirt you got me, or thank you for giving me a few bucks.
And I do want to help.
I do want to reach out.
I do want to help these people, and I think we can do it through incentivizing businesses to move their jobs to that part of the country.
And that will have that will be more long-term beneficial than coming along and doing short-term uh handouts right now.
Everybody in Washington, including the president, is doing everything they can possibly do to prove to the country, see, we care.
We care.
We got our checkbook open and we care.
But we can't afford every disaster to make everybody whole and then some.
I mean, part of it is if I get damaged by a natural disaster, I I've got to I've got to go back to square one and start over again.
I know that.
Not fun, not nice.
But I don't think it's your responsibility to put me back exactly as I was before whatever came along came blowing through or an earthquake or a fire or whatever it was that uh that damaged me.
I just don't think that way.
My thinking is to say thank you for whatever it is that you gave to me.
So we've got that, and I do want to talk about gouging as well and these all the investigations.
So and we'll take your phone calls when we come back.
The phone number 800 282 2882.
And uh the price of gouging is on my list.
We've got uh the governor of uh Missouri, Matt Blunt, writing to the Wall Street Journal about uh about uh uh about his view of of gouging gouging a little may be okay in his view.
Well, I'm kind of I'll read his words for you.
And about the fact that we don't have any refineries.
We have no new refineries in this country for twenty-nine years.
We'll talk about that as well.
So stick around.
Tom Sullivan sitting in on the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the excellence in podcasting network.
Welcome back.
Tom Sullivan uh in for rush today, just uh watching the uh news conference by the doctor in charge of uh what it what is his title.
You know H.R., the doctor down there in Louisiana that was uh he's talking about the fact that there was a uh no th again reiterating no homicides at the Superdome.
No homicides at the convention center.
I mean asked last late as yesterday there were still reports about no, no, no, no, no.
No, I saw photos.
There were people uh no.
I don't know what he is, uh kind of the health director or something like that in Louisiana.
He's saying nope, none.
Zero.
Man, speaking about embarrassing, where is the embarrassment on the reporting of all of this?
I know Rush has gone over this, but I just uh you gotta wonder.
I don't think I've ever seen anything that's been so badly misreported than what was going on in uh New Orleans.
Let's get some phone calls in here before we uh continue on the on with the uh the topics of the day.
How about uh Roxanne in uh Roanoke, Virginia?
Roxanne, hello, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
Thank you very much, Mr. Sullivan.
I talked to your call screener and told him that uh I don't understand why we're not uh making these people who were affected by this tragedy uh be responsible and involved in this cleanup.
Why can't the jobs be made into apprentice positions to teach these people to build houses and to put in plumbing and to paint and to do electric you know, electrical work.
I mean, isn't the philosophy of if you feed a man a fish, he will eat for a day.
If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime.
Right, and that's what I'm that's what I'm in implying too, is not only Well the It's it's not a it's not a wealthy part of this country.
Uh, you draw a circle around that area down there, and I spent some time when I was in Uncle Sam's army, I spent some time in Louisiana and uh East Texas, and it's uh you get you get a lot of poverty in that area, and I don't know how you do it other than to go ahead and to uh just give businesses the opportunity to go and and say,
I'm going to move a business there, I'm gonna w move a plant, I'm gonna move an office, I'm gonna move a call service center, I'm gonna move whatever it might be to that part of the country.
And yeah, I mean, these people there are going to be plenty of jobs, pl and I'll get into this as we go through the program today, but there's going to be plenty of jobs that will be added, they're gonna build, for example, fifty thousand homes in that area over the next six months.
50,000 homes.
Now, if there aren't enough I mean, for those of you that swing a swing a hammer for a living, y you're looking for a job.
There's a I mean, uh there's a place to go.
Now obviously you're talking about Roxanne, the people that are already there.
Well, a lot of them have business.
They had jobs.
Uh the ones that do will go back to the jobs that they had as soon as they can get the businesses rebuilt.
For those who did not, that's why I said we need to bring uh give incentives for businesses to move there.
Rob and Boca Raton.
Hello, Rob, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
Hey, thanks very much.
After hearing all the uh Democrats for years and years and years talking about uh tax cuts for corporations and evil Republicans just helping out their friends.
It's amazing to hear a Democratic governor saying that that's the solution to one of the problems in her area that's been devastated.
Yeah, and uh is it David O'Bay is uh where's he from?
Wisconsin, I think he's I mean there's a number of Democrats.
I'm starting to I'm starting to get a little dizzy because there's uh there are Republicans that are touting spending and Democrats that are touting tax cuts.
Yeah, it's backwards, isn't it?
I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little confused here.
It uh it's amazing what this what this says made out of strange bedfellows uh in in at the post Katrina post-reader period.
But uh yeah, there are people talking about that.
Like I said, I didn't hear all of what to what Kathleen Blanco had to say today.
But the idea that either but I just heard your comments on it seemed kind of backwards to me.
It's uh it's different than why I would have expected as well, but at the same time, you know, whenever you dangle two hundred billion dollars out there, people will get uh all of a sudden will get religion in a very fast way.
I appreciate your call.
Kimberly and Augusta, Georgia.
Hello, Kimberly, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Tom.
Hi.
Um my biggest concern in listening to some of the hearings um from yesterday last night is that the Congressman asking the questions they don't seem to understand the law and the roles of the first responders and the local evacuation plan.
They seem to think it's FEMA's role to evacuate, call in the National Guard, etc.
I um I picked that up as well, and so did Michael Brown, and that's why I say it's too early to burn him at the stake.
I mean, he may be he may be competent, he may not be.
I don't know.
Uh it was embarrassing the way that they belittled him instead of asking him questions, but of the areas where there was one congressman who did talk about the fact of why didn't you uh do this, why didn't you do that, why didn't you do that?
And then exactly a lot of those points that you're talking about, Kimberly, is that they said, sorry, uh we d we are not the first responders.
We don't do evacuation, we don't do law enforcement.
We come in later.
And for anybody who's ever lived in an area, and and and I do, where there has been uh flooding or fires or earthquakes or hurricanes.
I uh I I don't I see it's a it's a much deeper view of how you look at government.
And what I I have never held FEMA to high standards.
And I don't ever want to hold FEMA to high standards.
What I want them to do is to come in and to set up the processes of getting people uh back on their feet, getting them uh some sort of temporary from here to there, but they're not the first ones in the door, and they're not the immediate uh rescuers, and it comes to the view of government, and my view of government is that it it should be slow and bureaucratic and plotting.
I don't want a fast government, as much as uh most things I like efficient and fast and productive.
Friend of mine who uh is a uh congressman, a Democratic Congressman told me many years ago, he said you do not want government to move too fast.
You want it to be kind of this slow plotting dinosaur that moves along.
You don't want them making quick, swift changes.
So in that regard, I look at FEMA and I look at government and I say that it goes back to what we've all been told and all have heard about for years and years and years.
You need to have an emergency kit, you need to have a go bag, you have to have something in your house and in your place of work, maybe something in your car, so that you have um go down to the store and buy those bott a case of bottled water.
I I mean, how long does it take to buy to drink a case of bottled water if you're if you're if you're sipping slowly, I think a case of bottled water would last you a long time.
And get some get uh one of those old uh uh camping uh can openers and a bunch of canned stuff.
Yeah, it won't taste like a five-star meal, but it will get you through whatever the period is until the rescuers can get to you.
Or they can turn power back on, or they can turn the sewer back on, or they can turn the water back on and have it clean.
So it's not going to be, you cannot put back into effect the infrastructure of an of a community overnight.
And yet I there's another article I saw today about people are still waiting for aid, and I thought, what do you mean they're waiting for aid?
And I started reading the article and they were talking about they don't have power back on in some of the rural areas.
No kidding.
I don't know what you expect government to do, but I but they are not going to be there quickly.
The only people that can be there semi quickly are your local police and fire.
That's their job.
Stan in Los Vegas.
Stan, hello, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
Hi.
Um you're talking about all this government aid that's going to be in there and everything.
I'm I'm wondering what is the role of the insurance companies.
And uh are we gonna make them whole also?
Uh no, we're uh suing them.
Uh who was it?
Who was it uh oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The attorney general uh in uh in Mississippi is suing the insurance companies because of the fact that they uh misled the public.
The public did not know that they had to buy uh flood insurance, even though flood everybody knows forever and ever flood has been uh an exclusion of every homeowner's policy I've ever seen, and that's why the government got in the business of actually having flood insurance through FEMA, and they've had that for thirty seven years.
But you take the private insurance companies and the fact that uh they offered you flood insurance and you turned it down, this uh this uh um attorney general in Mississippi is going to is going to file a lawsuit against them.
And you gotta you've got to hold your head and go, wait a minute.
The insurance companies, first of all, are gonna be paying out billions and billions of dollars to people that did have insurance.
And they are going to be part of the a big part of this process.
So yeah, we've got hundreds of almost a billion dollars worth of donations from you and me.
Red Cross, I think said eight hundred plus million and climbing.
Uh you've got the insurance companies with billions of dollars, and Congress, in an effort to show everybody in this country that they care, uh, is dangling this two hundred, two hundred and fifty billion dollars out there, and now they're going to have investigations into finding out whether or not these uh no bid contracts were given to somebody that was a political insider.
A lot of the companies that are getting these no bid contracts are companies that have done business with the government before and have done a good job.
Now you can go through the bidding process if you want to.
But like I said, if you'll if you if you're patient enough, you you really don't want the government bidding process in a time like this.
You want somebody that puts boots on the ground.
We're gonna take a short break and come back, take more of your phone calls, and we've got uh stick around because I'm going to prove to you why gouging is such a good deal when we get back.
The phone number 800 28282.
My name is Tom Sullivan.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program.
Welcome back.
Tom Sullivan in for uh rush today.
He'll be back again uh tomorrow.
Just uh crossing the wires, Tom DeLay has been indicted by a Texas grand jury, along with two of his political associates, and this all goes uh back to uh some campaign finance issue.
And uh that well, he's been th this is all run by uh the Texas uh grand jury, the uh district attorney who runs it, you know how grand juries are.
The DA goes in and says uh here's the deal.
And um and so they uh uh uh the the district attorney's a Democrat and Delay is saying, yeah, he's a Democrat and he's pursuing this for political reasons.
So so the rules say that Delay gets he still keeps his seat as a congressman, but he has to step aside temporarily from his leadership post.
So say the rules.
I that we'll see that they follow that, but that's what the rules say.
So uh score one for the Democrats, and uh they're now they've got the layout.
Now they just need to get frisked.
If they can get if they can get him too, then uh then they'll not only oh that'll be a great one because then they can get, you know, it might be a presidential candidate, you never know.
But uh the mud throwing uh on that is already there on this whole business about whether he had an insider Martha Stewart issue going with with uh the stock in the family company.
And uh we can get into that as we go through the program too.
I'd I've looked at that inside and out uh and it's uh it's it's much to do about nothing from what I can see.
You don't know.
I we're gonna have to find out more information about just exactly who said what to whom, but uh the HCA stock, a lot of people were bailing out at the same time, and uh well, that's another whole show.
Right now we're talking about the uh the money, and people are lining up for money in Washington, and Jeff Flake, the congressman from Arizona is just mad as can be about the fact that the Republican Party will not watch its P's and Qs on the financial side of the equation.
And there's another group of Republicans that are saying we need to keep pork spending going because of the fact we need to make sure that people love us.
And no bid contracts are going to investigate that, but uh this is also it's all political hardball spin trying to deface the other side so that they can win the next election.
Max in Atlanta, Georgia.
Hello, Max, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Tom Sullivan.
He's gone.
All right.
Well, Max uh he was out driving somewhere.
I wonder if he did what the president said and he just uh parked his car.
Maybe that's what it was.
Lucas in Jackson, Mississippi.
Hi, Lucas, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thank you for taking my call.
Yeah, I just want to make a comment on your uh you were talking about the attorney general of Mississippi suing the insurance companies.
Yeah.
Um what that's actually about is these insurance companies are trying to get out of these claims because they're saying that it was a flood instead of wind coming.
And we had a local talk show host uh kind of talking about this, and it's kind of like when a tornado comes, you know.
I mean a tornado can pick up a toothpick and throw it hard enough to destroy uh you know a window or something.
Right.
You know, I mean the toothpick actually did the but the window.
I saw I saw that where uh one of the who's that big tort lawyer down there that uh Dickie somebody or other.
Dicky's anyway Dickie Scrugs, yeah.
Well Dickie uh says uh yeah, well the water, yeah, the water got in my house because the wind sent it there.
Is that what you're saying?
Absolutely.
I mean you got a hundred and seventy five mile an hour wind blowing the water.
I mean, you know, yes, the water did the damage, but the reason the water's there is because of the wind.
And these insurance companies are trying to get out of it saying that it was flooded.
Yes, it was flooded, but you know, then again, the reason it was flooded was because of the hurricane.
And I mean, you know, I work for attorneys and I mean attorneys are supposedly as evil as all get out, but insurance companies aren't too far behind them.
And you know, as far as I know.
Insurance companies do everything they can, it seems like to to not honor claims, but th th what you're bringing up though, Lucas, is it's a very good uh now we're getting into the definition of what's a flood.
I mean, uh of you know, because insurance companies sits there and says, Well, you got water in your house, that's a f uh you know, that's flood.
Uh you got uh but but uh you and in the the the case you're talking about says, yeah, well the water came sideways into the house.
It did uh the the water, the creeks did not rise.
Actually, there's an interesting situation in your state because one of the problems with the with the you want to blame FEMA for something.
They've got these flood maps around and and they have them in Mississippi, they have them here in California, they have them all over the place where they say, Well, this is a flood zone.
And so if you're gonna get a a loan, the mortgage company's gonna require you to get flood insurance because you live in a flood zone.
The problem is is that the water got into places that are not considered flood zones because of the fact that, like you said, the big uh wall of water that came roaring in much further than anybody ever would have guessed.
So uh the water went places where it wasn't considered to be a flood zone, so people did not have flood insurance.
Well, it'll take years of uh uh in the courts.
That that's where it's going to go.
But I um the insurance companies, the bottom line is the insurance companies are gonna be paying a lot of money.
But yeah, they're gonna they're not like the government.
They are going to be very persnickety.
Very persnickety about what it is that they spend their money on, and they're gonna make sure that the claim is legitimate.
If the claim is legitimate, they'll write the check.
And in fact, that's what insurance companies generally do is they write the check to make you whole.
We'll be back.
Tom Sullivan sitting in on the Rush Limbaugh Radio program.
There's nothing like a bag of two hundred billion dollars to get your attention, and uh they're lining up uh lobbyists are lining up for all c even the airlines have sent their lobbyists to go line up for relief from their pension obligations because of the hurricanes.
I'm insist it's getting uh.
If you uh uh you might want to take a few moments after the show today and sit down and think about how you can get yours too.
There's gotta be a way to get some of that two hundred billion dollars.
Terry in uh St. Charles, Missouri.
Hello, Terry, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Tom, how are you doing?
Doing great.
That's good.
Say, I have to very, very strongly agree with the uh Congressman from Arizona.
I'm I'm ashamed to uh call myself a registered Republican anymore.
There's uh very little difference between 'em.
Uh and we do have to have accountability.
It's not the government's job to be your nanny.
And uh the Mississippi uh Attorney General is uh working very hard now to abrogate the insurance policies that that clearly state uh they don't carry flood insurance.
That's FEMA's role.
Yeah, I it's uh don't be embarrassed.
Just work just work for for the for your view in the Republican Party.
The Republican Party has had long standing principles that for some reason have been shoved aside about the fact that uh pork is good and spending is good instead of actually having some fiscal responsibility.
I don't know uh why, but the leadership in Washington has got it all wrong.
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