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Nov. 4, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:19
November 4, 2005, Friday, Hour #2
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Okay, the ditto cam is on.
It'll be on for the remaining two hours of the program.
We are glad to have you back, Rush Limbaugh, America's anchorman, seated in the prestigious Attila the Hun chair here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's Friday, so let's keep rolling.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday!
Yip, yahoo!
This is your golden opportunity, ladies and gentlemen.
Open Line Friday is where you pretty much choose the things that we discuss on the phones, and it can be anything.
We invite liberals.
I mean, if you, whatever it is.
I mean, I don't want to lead you too much and give you too many ideas, but if you have a question, comment, something hasn't been discussed that you think should be, this is the day to go for it.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address rush at EIBnet.com.
It was just, I don't know how I missed these two stories, Mr. Snerdley.
This is the thing.
Only it bothers me about this.
In the last hour, when I was talking, I got a question asking my thoughts on the riots in the suburbs outside Paris.
I opined, I think, before we get to the end of all of this, I think we will find that the French are so dirty in all of this pre-war intel.
There's so many forged documents running around out there pertaining to this effort by Iraq to purchase yellow cake uranium from Niger.
And I just opine that it wouldn't surprise me a bit if the French were involved in forging some of these documents that are now known to be forgeries that misled people on what was going on at the time.
And the reason I say that is because the involvement that we know Chirok had with Saddam, not just the oil for food program, but other direct country-to-country deals.
And so the editrix of the Limbaugh letter sends me a couple of stories here.
One of them is from the Telegraph, the UK Telegraph, on, I guess, September the 19th of 2004.
And I don't know how I missed this story.
The Italian businessman at the center of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.
The man identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, Giacomo.
His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirmed suggestions that by commissioning Giacomo to procure and circulate documents, France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the U.S. to promote the case for war with Iraq.
Now, how did I miss this?
I pride myself.
Well, I still read the international website.
Now, this is from September of 2004, but maybe I didn't miss it.
Maybe I saw it and it's in my mind somewhere, and that's why I think who knows?
But there you have it.
The French are up to their, you know, what's in this.
And so I think, you know, just wait this long.
There's so much that's going to come out when all this is over that's nowhere near the direction the mainstream press thinks this story is going to go.
A couple of interesting moves by House Republicans.
House Republicans yesterday included a breakup of the San Francisco-based Ninth Circus Court of Appeals in a budget bill that would be immune from Senate filibuster.
This drew complaints from Democrats.
Nancy Pelosi said it doesn't have the support to pass both houses of Congress, so House Republicans are seeking to stifle debate and the Democratic process by inserting a controversial measure into the expedited budget process.
What the measure would do would create a Ninth Circuit covering California, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands and a new 12th circuit that would cover Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Arizona.
Supporters say that the Ninth Circuit, which covers nine states with about 54 million people, is too large to operate effectively.
But opponents allege politics by Republicans angry at some of the court's rulings, like the 2002 opinion that declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional when recited in public schools.
Now, the inefficiency argument is a pretty good one.
This is a lot of people, 54 million people, with access to one appellate court.
That means a lot of cases don't get heard.
A lot of cases just don't make it there.
I have no doubt there's an attempt to bust this court up because of its makeup.
I mean, it would make total sense to me.
But as for Pelosi saying Republicans are seeking to stifle debate and the Democratic process, that's exactly what they do with the creation of such courts.
The fact of the matter is the Democrats want to protect the Ninth Circus because they like its decisions like those that come out of the Ninth Circuit on the Pledge of Allegiance or this idiotic decision that came out this week saying that parents are not the sole entities involved in educating their children on sex.
And these people have found that, you know, given a few years, the sea animals might have standing to sue in federal court if we keep on polluting the oceans and this sort of thing.
I mean, they're just a bunch of wackos out at this court.
And it makes it, you know, I know there's a, yeah, let me get to that right now.
There's another stupid ruling that they came to from cops that's an offshoot of the Rodney King story.
The U.S. Ninth Circus Court of Appeals today, well, yesterday, nullified a California criminal law adopted after the Rodney King beating that made it unlawful for citizens to knowingly lodge false accusations against police officers.
The Ninth Circuit said that the law was unconstitutional because it infringed on speech, because false statements in support of officers were not also criminalized.
So they have basically overturned a law and have made it now possible that citizens can knowingly lie and make false accusations against cops.
Thank you, Ninth Circus.
How long before the various neighborhoods that the Ninth Circus rules over will become like those in Paris now?
You can lodge a false complaint against a cop and they're reasoning.
Well, this was unconstitutional because at the same time, it didn't say that false statements in support of officers were not criminalized.
And so if you're not going to do that, then you can't criminalize false statements against them.
So anyway, there's an attempt there to straighten the court out on that.
Also, the House Republicans are actually now seriously talking, and the Washington Times has the story today about putting a fence, a border fence, to control immigration.
So I think what's happening with this, and I don't know where that's going to end up, but it's exactly what I said two weeks ago that the conservative crackdown or crackup everybody thought was happening is a conservative crack or crack up is now a crackdown.
The conservatives are setting the agenda in this country.
The Democrats, the liberals do not have an agenda.
All they are is whining and moaning and complaining.
They are just the me party and the no party.
They have nothing that they stand for, that they'll admit to any, but they won't admit it.
All they can do is oppose.
Nothing is good enough.
Everybody on the other side of the aisle stinks or sucks, and they've got to get rid of them.
I want to criminalize them.
Yet it is the conservatives moving forward with an agenda that does affect the future of the country.
So all those things are positive signs.
They're all being missed because they don't want to be seen by the people whose job it is to report the news.
So they're reporting what they hope the news will be tomorrow and next week as though it's happening today.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
Your phone calls right around the corner here on Open Line Friday.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
Hi, welcome back, El Rushbaugh, America's Truth Detector, America's Doctor of Democracy, all combined here, one harmless, lovable little fuzzball.
More evidence that the Republicans have come together, that this conservative crackup is just the opposite.
Senate opponents to drilling an Alaska Wildlife Refuge failed yesterday to strip the measure from a massive budget package as supporters of exploration argue that the oil is needed to help break America of its import habit.
Environmentalists who believe strongly that the refuge should continue to be off-limits to oil companies to protect the area's wildlife had acknowledged that it was a long shot to get the provision killed and now are concentrating on defeating the overall budget bill.
So this is an Associated Press story.
And if it sounds like gobbledygook, let me translate it for you.
The Senate yesterday backed drilling in the NWAR refuge, the Alaska Refuge.
Put it in the budget bill.
It's passed.
Well, it hasn't passed evidence in there.
Now the Democrats have to kill the whole budget.
They have to kill the whole budget to kill this.
This leads me to revealing my thoughts.
I mentioned in the first hour of this program, and let me basically rehash this, my friends.
For those of you that are late tuners in or sleep late, whatever in this roaring economy, some of you I know don't have to work and you are living lives of leisure.
It means you get up late.
Let me bring you up to speed from the first hour.
I've been thinking long and hard.
As you know, the past two days, I've been pulling what little hair I have left out, trying to figure out the literal insanity I'm watching day after day of the Democrats in Washington demand another investigation on whether the pre-war intel was manipulated.
There have been three.
All three of these investigations, the most recent one was released in March of this year, indicate that nothing of the sort happened.
We have gone back ourselves and we've quoted Democrats from 98 and 99, Bill Clinton and members of the Senate.
We've quoted members of the media, newspapers, reporters, TV people, what they have said about this.
The idea that Bush lied about this is pure sophistry.
It is juvenile.
And yet, the Democrats shut down the Senate the other day, demanding another investigation.
Now, they have to know.
Just it's as easy to know as I know it.
They know who they are.
They know what they voted for.
They know what they said.
They know that what they said is on the record.
So are they really this pathological?
Are they really this ripped apart?
Are they really imploding to that degree?
And something's been gnawing at me.
While it's pleasurable and fun to think that they might be, it's not realistic.
Now, I think there's an implosion, and I do think I'm right when I say they've lost their government back in 1994, and they feel entitled to it.
It's theirs by birthright, and it's got them constructing all kinds of conspiracy theories to explain how this happened because it can't be their fault.
That's how you get to Bush stole the election, voting machines don't work, votes weren't counted, and all that.
So, there's an implosion going on, there's no question.
But when you look, I think the key to find out what they're really doing is in the stories I've shared with you today.
And war past, fence and immigration being discussed now, a border fence, Republicans doing all this.
The Alito nomination, I don't care what they do, they can delay it till January.
By the way, folks, I'm not as upset this has been delayed as some of you in the email today are.
I think this actually has some silver linings in its cloud that the hearings aren't going to start until January of next year.
And the reason we're coming into big-time holiday season here, we're coming into periods of time where nobody pays much attention to anything.
And the hearings would be interrupted.
And I know a lot of you think that the delay is only going to allow the enemies of Alito to come up with more and more dirt, but there isn't any.
He's going to be confirmed.
There's no question about it.
And what have I always said is the most important thing to the left?
Supreme Court.
You may think the most important thing to them is the war, the way they're ranting on and on about it.
And you may think that the real thing they care most about now is the CIA leak case and that investigation, that trial upcoming, and the war in Iraq and all.
But it's the Supreme Court.
And they are just, you know, we got Roberts.
They're going to get Alito.
And that comes close to destroying the balance because their so-called swing vote will be gone.
That would be Sandra Day O'Connor.
And the left cares more about the court because the court is the last chance they've got to keep their ideas alive.
Their ideas cannot win votes.
Their ideas cannot win debates.
Their ideas do not prevail.
They're not winning elections.
And so they've always tried to get liberalism instituted via the court system in this country, where, by the way, it then can't be debated because judges are the final word.
So if a liberal judge has a case in which he can decide in a way that advances liberalism and makes it a matter of law, then it's no longer a subject to debate by the elected representatives of the people.
Hence, they are able to institutionalize it that way.
So a court is the big deal to them.
Yet, the Democrats going nuts here about the lack that we haven't had an investigation and Republicans are stonewalling when we've had all these investigations.
Now, I alluded to this in the first hour.
Snurdley got half of it right.
Snurdley, fundraising.
This is the group, the anti-war left, the kooks.
This is who contribute to the Democrats.
This is where the big fundraising is.
George Soros, these computer geeks at moveon.org and all these wacko blogs and so forth.
I mean, they're numerous and they are voluminous.
And the kook fringe has become the mainstream and the base of the Democratic Party.
Now, those people are clamoring.
And you see what the reaction of those people was when Harry Reid shut down the Senate?
This was unbelievable, too.
Their reaction was, finally, the Democrats are showing some backbone.
Finally, the Democrats are standing up to this president.
Finally, the Democrats have found their voice in all this.
Now, to you and I, who watch this open-mindedly, objectively, we don't think the Democrats ever lost their voice.
The Democrats have been lying.
They have been impugning.
They have been trying to destroy this president for five years with their willing accomplices in the press.
I've seen no evidence of a weak backbone on the part of the Democrats.
I've seen no such evidence.
The fact that their supporters do, though, tells us what's going on here.
If their supporters think that the Democrats, all these efforts, the forged documents by Dan Rather, the Jersey girls and Richard Clark, the 9-11, I mean, these were well-coordinated efforts by the Democrats and the media to get rid of Bush.
And they all failed, but they were done in public, and there was nothing childish or cowardly about them.
And yet their base doesn't see that at all.
Their base, I guess, sees nothing but the losses.
Cindy Sheehan didn't pan out.
Cindy Sheehan's gone down to Argentina.
I know some liberals who think she's crossed the line now.
I really do.
I've heard from a couple.
Oh, this is now she's going too far.
You don't go down to Argentina to protest the president.
Really?
Really?
So they've lost her.
I mean, but she was the, I know they got mad when the Democrats wouldn't talk to Cindy Sheehan, like Hillary Clinton and so forth.
And there's real anger at Hillary, and what's it over?
It's over the fact she voted for the war and she won't come out against it.
So what are the Democrats in Washington to do?
Well, here's the other half of the story.
While the Democrats and their base now think that finally the elected Democrats have stood up on their hind legs and they're showing some guts and they're showing some backbone, they're now happy.
Are they not?
The base is happy.
And this is another thing that's difficult to comprehend unless you realize these people are whacked out.
They are happy over nothing.
They're happy over rhetoric.
They think shutting down the Senate has changed the momentum.
They are as out of touch with what's happening in this country as they are out of touch with the war and the whole mainstream population of this country.
But their Democrat elected leaders in the Senate know how closely tied to them they are.
Here's the thing.
That's what I think it is.
You look at all these things that are happening.
Judge Alito, Judge Roberts, the reshaping of the court is taking place and Democrats can't stop it.
The budget and war, we're going to drill.
Democrats can't really stop it.
The Democrats can't stop much of anything.
Didn't get what they wanted in the Katrina aftermath.
They didn't get a hold.
They can't stop anything the Republicans set their mind to doing.
We're going to get some budget cuts.
We're going to get a new budget.
We're going to get work on reform.
The Republicans are moving this country forward.
The Democrats can't stop it.
What does that mean?
It means the Democrats, for the most part, are ineffective.
For all the bluster, the Democrats cannot stop.
They are a minority party in both houses.
I think that what they're doing with all this rigmarole about the war is simply trying to distract their own base from noticing how deeply uneffective, ineffective, and woefully lost the elected Democratic Party actually is in Washington, D.C.
We will be right back.
Stay with us.
So I challenged the staff.
I said, anybody, prove me wrong.
And nobody stepped forward.
In fact, and it's not because they're a bunch of sycophants folks.
You wouldn't believe how often they tell me they think I'm wrong.
It never turns out that they're right, but they still try.
The bottom line is that the Democrats all these years are thinking they haven't gotten their message out.
I remember I was on NBC's post-election coverage, election night coverage in 2002.
And that was after the Wellstone Memorial.
And the Democrats thought they were just going to score huge.
They had gotten their voice back, they thought, with their resolution supporting the war in Iraq and talking about how dangerous Saddam was.
And they had a bunch of reporters on and say, yeah, the Democrats think they just haven't got their message out.
And I told Brokaw and Russert, I said that they're just totally wrong.
They have gotten their message out.
They've gotten their message out for years.
We know exactly what they are.
We know exactly what they think.
We know exactly who they are.
And one of the ways that liberalism gets its message out is the mainstream press.
Whether the Democrats do it effectively or not, the media does.
The media is so liberal that anybody can figure out what they want, what liberals believe, and who liberals don't like.
The idea that their message hasn't gotten out is silly.
They can't win with it.
Now, the Democrats still think they've got to, you know, they go have closed-door meetings to come up with what they believe.
Now, anybody in their core that knows their core beliefs doesn't have to have a meeting to find out what you believe.
Now, if you know what's in your core, but you're afraid people might actually understand that, then you have to have a meeting to figure out how to fool them, how to make them think you believe something else.
And that's what these meetings are all about.
The Democrats continue to have these closed-door meetings with these guys that help them try to rewrite the English language so it befits them.
But the bottom line here is they've got a rabid base that is oriented towards something that is a loser issue for the Democrats themselves.
The Democrats, the only thing they can try to do is to cause so much ruckus that would give them the opportunity in their minds to get away with it with flip-flopping on their votes.
And there may be some of that going on.
Cause so much ruckus about this that people like Rockefeller and Kerry and Hillary could go public and say, I am changing my vote ex post facto, because if I'd have known then what I know now, I would.
But they can't get away with that because they did know then what they know now.
And that is the intelligence was not manipulated.
So you've got these wacko kooks which send in most of the money demanding the Democrats get a spine.
So Dingy Harry shuts down the Senate and the wackos think, aha, it's Nirvana.
They didn't get what they wanted with Fitzmus, but they got it with Dingy Harry.
Santa Claus finally came.
It was just a week late.
Now they think that their guys have got some guts and some spine and they're standing up and they're really taking it to Bush now.
All right.
We're going to really get.
While the truth is, they can't stop Bush on anything.
They can't stop him.
They can't stop him getting who he wants on the Supreme Court.
Only we can do that.
They can't stop his economic agenda.
They can't stop it.
But they can't dare let that base know.
So this is to cover up their ineffectiveness.
This is to cover up that they are the minority.
This is to cover up that they don't run things.
And you know it's working when you see the base get all fired up about this shutting down the Senate business.
That was a nothing move.
It didn't shift any momentum, but the base thinks it did.
There's a part of me feels sorry for people like Dingy Harry and these guys that have to deal with their voters.
How would you like to have to depend on those people for your political future?
How would you like it?
You need their money.
You need them working in the districts and the precincts to get out to vote, even though they don't even succeed at doing that.
You need them to do, but the last thing you want to do is be seen in public with them.
So, I mean, I look at this, to me, this is just terrific news.
I think the Democrats are doing everything they can to hide from their base just how inept they are, folks, and powerless when you get right down to it to stop the president from doing meaningful things.
Here's David in San Clemente, California.
You're next on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, I see us getting our agenda moving forward, but I think Bush's biggest failure is looking us right in the face.
And I want to go back to the oil industry windfall profit taxes.
I cheered when you were actually excited about their record levels of profitability, but when I hear Republicans, our people, caving to some populist sentiment that this is a good thing to have windfall profit taxes, I'm convinced that President Bush's biggest failure long term is going to be that he has not provided the philosophical advancement of a free market philosophy like Goldwater and Reagan did.
Well, I'm going to agree with you, but I say it a different way.
See, it's not, I think Bush is conservative, but unlike Reagan, and this is, I think, the way you draw the distinction, and there's two things at this, by the way, and I don't agree with you on both of these, but you're right on the vast majority of the points that you made.
Reagan led a movement.
Reagan not only knew he was president, he knew he was leading a conservative movement.
When Reagan made speeches, when Reagan did press conferences, Reagan articulated conservatism.
He always made people know that it was he who had trust in them and that the government was the problem and that conservatism and people taking control of their lives, this was the future of the country.
He invested confidence in people.
He imbued them with confidence, made them realize, think they were important, which we are.
And it led to self-motivation like the country hasn't seen in a long time.
Now, but there are very few people like Reagan.
George W. Bush isn't Reagan.
And while he's conservative, I don't know that his objective has been to lead a movement.
I think his objective has been to keep the conservative base on his side.
But he has reached out to his enemies.
In some people's minds, he's been more friendly to his enemies than he has his supporters.
And that's because of the new tone.
And he wanted to unite the country in Washington and so forth.
I think now, after the Harriet Myers situation and all this, the indictment of Libby, I think you're going to see a little different Bush here in the remaining three years.
Now, the thing about the Democrats are the Republicans signing on this windfall profits tax idea with the oil profits.
You know what that's the larger problem for that is, you know, the real function of that is the media.
And it's media and Washington, D.C.
These people live and work in Washington.
And it's one of the problems that I have often tried to call people's attention to.
You have the media that runs that town.
There is a distinct media or liberal media and social culture in Washington, D.C.
And of course, everybody's favorite enemy is big oil.
So anytime there are big profits at big oil, rather than talk about how it would be wise to invest in big oil, look at how well the stockholders are doing.
This is a great opportunity for people.
What do we do is sit there and whine and moan and take pot shots at big oil and drag in the execs and make them explain these obscene profits and so forth.
Rather, and the reason we do that, you call it populism.
I don't call it populism.
I call it fear of the media.
Well, it's no different.
It's no different than why any we've talked about this.
Republicans get elected by people like you and me.
They come out and they campaign and they get our votes because they say they're going to do X, Y, and Z.
They get to Washington and all of a sudden they stop acting like winners.
They still act like the Democrats run the show.
They don't fight back the way the Democrats fight, so forth and so on.
And I think that's partly because they're concerned what the Washington Post is going to say about them.
I guarantee you, if a Republican senator stands up for oil profits, he is going to be destroyed in the Washington media.
You can't even articulate a free market philosophy?
Oh, you can articulate it, but they're going to get cream for it.
I'm not excusing them.
I'm just trying to explain to you why, in my opinion, I don't think it's all that Bush has not led a movement.
That would have helped.
I don't disagree with you on that, but that's not the sole reason, is all I'm saying.
Well, look, we lost the prescription drug coverage because he didn't address in 2000 Al Gore's challenge to providing free drugs and how that would lower profits and reduce the R ⁇ D and new drugs, the very pipeline, the golden goose of the American pharmaceutical industry.
Well, Clinton started that.
But again, in that, it's even worse than you describe.
We created our own new entitlement for medical.
It's because we didn't have a philosophical backing to defend free markets in the pharmaceutical industry.
It's not because of that.
We do have.
Not enough people had the courage to stand up for it.
When the president of your party and your country wants to create an entitlement, you don't stand up and oppose him.
And the president was not doing it because he doesn't have a basic understanding of free markets.
He was doing it for politics.
I'm sure there are people who said we can get a bunch of senior citizens' votes.
They miscalculated because senior citizens don't want it.
This is the way of Washington.
And what you're basically saying is that whoever goes there with whatever governing philosophy and core value system, you're saying it can be corrupted.
Well, I'm saying it can be corrupted.
You're saying that they don't possess it in the first place.
I know that they do.
I just, I think that they just get intimidated.
But in that particular case, the Medicare case, that's simply falling in line behind the president more than anything else.
He wants the entitlement, so you go along with him.
That's just, it's one of the reasons people get so cynical about politics, because it doesn't seem like sensible things happen.
But they are sensible if you understand the business.
You may not agree with them, but I mean, within the context of the business, it was sensible what the Republicans did, given the president runs the show.
You're not going to have them undercut.
You realize what a big deal it was, this Harriet Myers thing?
I'll give you an example.
You didn't find any senators who would come out and speak against Harriet Myers.
Not one of them.
They were all quaking in their boots.
I'm going to tell you, not one.
I'm just going to be, when that nomination came down, they were going, oh, God, we've got to vote.
Oh, no.
They weren't going to publicly come out and distance themselves from the nomination.
Not verbally.
They might have taken some action down the road that indicated they had trouble like those two Republican senators asking for documents.
That was to send a message.
We don't have enough to vote for.
It was the way out of this.
But you just, that's the way politics works in the town.
And so it boils down to what I said at first.
The president is, he is a conservative.
It's in his blood, but he doesn't look at the presidency as a political vehicle.
He doesn't look at it as a mechanism for leading a movement.
He looks at it for passing conservative ideas now and then, but he also looks at it as a way to bring people that disagree with him in so we can all be one happy family.
And he's got that idealism about him, I think, that is misplaced when you're dealing with Democrats.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back and continue in mere moments.
Okay, here we go.
We find ourselves somehow stuck back on the oil companies and the gas prices.
You should have seen Snerdley.
I wish sometimes that had Ditto Cam in there because Snerdley was just, what did I just tell you people?
The staff constantly disagrees with me, even though they know they're never right in the end.
They still do.
It's just, and it's because of the freedom that they have here as associates, not employees.
And Snerdley's, you just, you are wrong.
You don't understand how people are about gasoline.
Prices, it's $100 or $200 a month.
If you commute more than 20 miles, it's $100 and $200 a month more than you had to pay.
And they want some answers for us.
Well, I tried to give the answers yesterday.
Well, you're the only one that can do it.
You don't think those, there isn't any free market under it.
Caller was right.
There's no free market understanding.
Charles Grassley, you think he can explain it?
And actually, I do, but I don't think, fuck, it boils down to what I said.
Charles Grassley's not going to go back to Iowa, the senator.
He's not going to go back to Iowa and talk to his farmer constituents and try to tell them why it's okay that gasoline costs him $100 more this month than last.
He's just not going to take that on.
It's easier for him to pile on the oil company and to make those farmers think that he's on their side.
Now, you can call that populism.
I call it fear.
It's fear of something.
It's fear of the voter or it's fear of the media or fear of the D.C. culture.
Well, I don't have that fear because I don't get votes.
Now, I do appreciate your listening to this program, and I do understand I run the risk.
If you think I'm out of touch on all this, you might, as I got an email today, you lost me.
I've been listening for all these years and I subscribed to your website, but when you start comparing oil to ketchup, I'm out of here.
I don't put ketchup in my car to heat my home and to get myself to work so I can feed my family.
I understand that.
I was just, it was a discussion yesterday that the gallon price of ketchup is far more than gasoline.
But see, I can beat my head against the wall here on it.
Perhaps that's not the best analogy.
And I'm not defending anybody.
I'm not in anybody's back pocket.
I just, I've marveled at how the oil companies get so kicked around when they're one of the most regulated businesses.
The gouging, folks, if you want to look at who really makes the obscene profits off oil, take a look at your federal and state governments.
For God's sakes, folks, do they ever lower their taxes?
Do they ever suspend them?
Do they ever do it?
Hell no, not on any phase of energy.
The profit per gallon of gasoline compared to the taxes per gallon federal and state is so vast you wouldn't believe it.
A dime.
It's the average profit from big oil on a gallon of gasoline.
It's about 46 cents as of August of this year, combined federal and state taxes.
And then there are taxes at every level of the sale of an energy product, not just at the retail level.
They tax it so many damn times.
I'm just giving you retail taxes at the pump.
It's like tobacco.
The government couldn't survive without tobacco taxes, and yet they want you to think they hate big tobacco.
I mean, the energy policy of this country is not set by big oil.
It is set by the U.S. government.
They tell them where they can put the pipelines to distribute.
They tell them where they can drill.
They tell them where they can't.
They tell them where they can ship it.
They tell them what kind of ship they can ship it on.
They tell them what kind of port the ship can go into and what kind of port it can't go into.
And right at the root of all this is your little favorite little weenie environmentalist wackos who got everybody stymied on all this.
So, I mean, I'm not anybody's back pocket.
I'm not making excuses.
I'm just telling you, just as the price for things go up and the price for things go down, the same thing happens in oil.
Oil price goes up, it comes down.
Gasoline price goes up, it comes down.
It's coming down right now.
I could have understood, I could have more understood this level of outrage if the price were still averaging 285 or 3 bucks a gallon.
But it's down to, it's, what is it, 225 now for 100 regular?
It's coming down.
It's coming.
It doesn't make any sense to get mad now.
Okay, it was 129.
When was it 129?
Seven months.
Okay.
Before that, it was 109.
And before that, it was 89.
And before that, it was 59.
At what point are you going to say, wait a minute, before that, it was 29.
Yeah, I can tell you when gas was 25 cents.
You can tell me what it was a buck 09.
Okay, so it's 250 today, but it was over three bucks just three weeks ago or four weeks ago.
Back in a moment.
I'm going to get some help on this.
We got an economics professor from Ryder University.
We'll get to him in the first section in the next hour.
The Hutch, my buddy from Seattle now getting in on this, has some questions for me about the various types of fuels that get refined from oil and why they are priced the way they are.
Gasoline in New Jersey today is lower than it was pre-Katrina, my friends, but there's an even larger question.
Hang on for that.
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