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Feb. 14, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
February 14, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Uh for those of you who continue to email me, even though I have made the correction, let me make the correction again.
Uh I erred when I said that Sherrod Brown is black.
I'm confusing him with somebody with a similar name in the Democratic Party somewhere.
But uh we have we have corrected this, and I you know, I'm not going to apologize because I don't think it's an insult to be black.
Uh but I did err.
He is uh he is his he is not uh black.
He's um is uh is one of these uh uh white European descendants uh in Ohio.
He's the guy that uh that the Democrats have kicked Paul Hackett out of the race for the Senate seat in Ohio against Mike DeWine, and it really boils down to a matter of money, plus they don't like military guys in the uh in the Democratic Party, but Sherred Sherid Brown has much more money than Hackett could ever hope to raise.
So that's that.
Greetings.
Nice to have you back here, folks, on the EIB network.
L. Rushbow here behind this, the uh golden EIB microphone.
We are at 800-282-2882.
Uh President Bush is at this very moment welcoming the Texas Longhorns, the uh uh national champions of the NCAA Division I college football program to the White House, and I looks like they're all there, as opposed to yesterday when the Chicago White Sox were invited to the White House, and I think 17 of them showed up out of a roster of twenty-five.
And their manager, Ozzie Geon didn't show up.
He was on vacation somewhere in Bush, hey, I understand being on vacation.
Uh some people are trying to make a big deal out of this as though it's a giant diss.
Some people didn't want to go.
The president has also invited the Pittsburgh Steelers to the White House at date yet to be determined.
Uh but looks like all of the uh all the Longhorns are the plus the thousands of Texas fans, as well in the Longhorn family members are on the White House lawn.
All right, can I ask a question about this report on Katrina Aid?
And I ask you, why is anybody surprised that there's fraud?
What why why is there any surprise, especially if you are a conservative, if you've been a member of the institute, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies for as uh as little as a year you know this.
If you've been here for the entire 18 years of this institution's existence, this shouldn't come as a surprise at all.
The government this is this is classic.
This is a classic illustration of bureaucracy and their ineptitude, and it's the impossibility of a bureaucracy to handle something like this.
I don't care how who it is, I don't care what party.
But the you have so many levels because there I saw something in the report that just let me put it this way.
How many of you have to go to meetings in order to do your jobs?
You know damn well the meetings get in the way.
The meetings are not helpful, and there are a bunch of people engaging in CYA, usually at higher levels than you are.
You try to engage in CYA at the level you are, if you if you have to play the game.
But these meetings, they they're just roadblocks.
I have never had one meeting to do this radio program, and I never will have a meeting to do this radio program.
There is no bureaucracy here.
I'm a benevolent dictator.
But I am not I'm not under any illusion that that the bigger the number of people in a group that the more efficient that they are.
Saw something in the report yesterday that said at various levels of FEMA and homeland security, people were waiting for the event they had planned to happen.
And since Katrina didn't fit any of the models, they were stuck.
They didn't know what to do, because the one thing you don't have in a bureaucracy is entrepreneurship.
If you are in a bureaucracy and you engage in entrepreneurship and you succeed, you're fired.
You become a threat to the existence of the group.
This is one of the problems with the State Department.
One of the problems, I'm sure with the CIA, but really at the State Department, it's just become a bureaucracy.
And everybody's afraid to do anything.
And so doing nothing becomes the standard.
Moving nothing forward, doing nothing, accomplishing nothing is the goal.
That's the objective, because it keeps the bureaucracy going.
And then when you have these disasters like this, okay, then you got to move into CYA mode real fast, and they'll find a fall guy or two, and they'll throw him overboard, Like Paul Hackett's been thrown overboard, and everybody say, okay, fine, we've dealt with that problem.
Now on to the next one.
But when I saw that, everybody was waiting for the event or events that they had planned for.
And when that didn't happen, they didn't know what to do.
None of this surprises me.
And none of the fraud surprises me.
None of the waste.
We have got how many house trailers that have been sitting in the mud.
House trailers that were designed to house victims of Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and Louisiana.
And the house trailers never got there.
You know why?
Because it's illegal to deploy a house trailer in a flood zone.
Well, why what the hell is New Orleans to begin with?
By law, you couldn't put them in there.
This is but this is it's laughable, but it's not a surprising thing.
This is classic.
This is why the founding father said we're not going to have 535 commanders-in-chief, and we're not going to have 535 secretaries of state.
But I mean, the house trailer, it's tons of them that they got down there, and they they're in the mud now, but they can't move them because it's illegal to put them where they were going to put them because it's a flood zone.
So why deploy them in the first place?
Who came up with this brilliant idea?
A bureaucracy did.
Is there anybody?
I love to ask this question.
Is there anybody in government you would hire to run your business?
There isn't.
And it's not the it's not so much the person in government's fault, it's the bureaucracy.
It's the last place that you can be entrepreneurial.
Everybody's afraid of not upstaging the boss.
But everybody at the same time wants to make their mark.
So you want to stand out, but you're afraid to stand out.
And you've got to go through all these procedures.
You've got a you've got a you've got a red tape book here and a red tape book over there, and you've got to go through the and you know how these bureaucracies are writing regulations.
You can't understand them when you do have the book in front of you.
Now here's some of the specific well, here.
Let's here here's here's um here's Gregory Cutz, KUTZ, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing.
Cuts is of the government accountability office.
He testified, he said this about the way the victims handled their FEMA money.
We believe that thousands of individuals misused social security numbers.
Really?
FEMA also clearly made payments to many individuals using bogus property addresses.
Really?
Some cards were used for purposes that are inconsistent with the intent of disaster relief programs.
Like how?
For example, debit cards were used for adult entertainment?
No.
Tattoos, no.
Bail bond services, no pay for prior traffic violations.
No kidding.
You mean to tell me that there are people who wanted to scam the system when they learned that all we were gonna do was flood the zone with endless greenbacks.
I want to take you back to what I warned on September 8th of last year on this very program about Hurricane Katrina victims and FEMA money.
You have a circumstance here where uh people are turning an issue into into a political issue, not an economic one.
So what's Bush gonna do?
What's his response?
It's what every president in history of this country's response is.
You start writing a check.
Okay, you want to say I want these people to die?
You say that I don't care about these people.
Watch this.
We're up to sixty billion dollars in counting, two hundred thousand dollars per evacuee, no end in sight.
And Congress, of course, sees this and says, Well, we got to get in it too.
We want credit for this.
So nobody opposes it.
You know, there ought to be some controls on where this money is going.
It would be impossible when a bureaucracy is in charge of this.
Think of this story, and then go to any government program, and I'm gonna tell you you'll find the same type of fraud in Medicare.
You'll find the same type of fraud in Medicaid.
You'll find the same type of fraud in virtually every government program that hands out money to people.
Now you would think the people in Washington would understand this, but on Good Morning America Today, Charlie Gibson was talking to Chris Shays, uh, Republican in name only from Connecticut.
And Gibson said, Your report indicates that the government didn't have Much of a clue at all levels on how to respond.
There's now another report out talking about millions of dollars wasted after the storm, money being given away, really helter-skelter to people in those two thousand dollar debit cards, money wasted for take tattoos for bail bondsmen, sex toys, I mean you name it.
Any surprise in that, sir?
Obviously, lots of surprises.
You'd think that with all the public focus, but I guess we were sending so much money that uh the controls just disappeared.
There weren't any controls because nobody cared about any controls the delivery of the money was all that mattered because the press was in the process of saying Bush caused the hurricane, Bush blew up the levies, he wanted people to die, particularly black people in New Orleans.
He wanted New Orleans to become a red state, get all those Democrat voters out of there.
Mike Brown at FEMA was incompetent, the federal government didn't do anything, but the great mayor, Ray Nagan, and the great governor, Kathleen Blanco, they were doing everything they could to save the lives of their own citizen, but Bush didn't care.
What do you think's gonna happen?
Just send the money down there.
Show as much prosperity as possible to show that you care, and that's one of the problems with government.
Giving money away has become a sign that we care.
It's been what's wrong with the great society from the get-go.
It's been what's wrong for the the the war on poverty from the get-go.
Just give away money.
That's how we show we care.
That's not how we should show we care.
The way we should show we care is by showing how many people no longer need these handouts.
That's the definition of compassion, helping people to become fulfilled and whole on their own.
But this doesn't accomplish that.
This was, as I say, there was nothing economic in mind about this.
This was purely political.
Some of the other things that were that were spent on this, aid recipients in some instances, as you know, improperly use their debit cards given to them for food and shelter, four hundred dollar massages, a four hundred and fifty dollar tattoo, a hundred and fifty dollars worth of products at condoms to go.
Condoms to go.
Officials uh uh found not only fraud by individuals, but waste by government.
Really?
Really, what you know what amazes me more than anything about this is how quickly we were able to quantify this.
How come we can't quantify this kind of fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, War and poverty, and all these other programs?
Hmm.
Food stamp program, how come?
We can find out how much fraud occurred here.
What are we gonna do about it?
Nothing.
Let a Congress of surprises.
It should have surprised nobody what happened.
And this is not the end of it, folks.
They're gonna uncover because the money is gonna keep being doled out because the political pressure will not uh let up in any way, shape, matter, or form.
This is the kind of stuff that angers me.
You know, this press stuff I've gotten so used to that I just laugh at them.
But this, this has been going on for so long that and and I when I when I hear about budget cuts, and I hear the damn Democrats talking about how we're starving people and we're pulling them a school lunch program, and we're gonna starve kids, and we're gonna starve the elderly.
So it's all such poppycock BS.
Just take a look at this.
We're spending 2.77 trillion dollars in the next fiscal year budget, and we're being told that Bush is being minuserly, and he's cutting the budget, and he's stealing money from people, and he's he's forcing students to not be able to get their student loans.
What about the fraud in that program?
How about the number of people that never pay them back?
And who's paying all this?
All of us, collectively, aggregately.
We just never see a bill for it, and we don't pay attention to what we pay in taxes because yours are withheld.
Well, I think a lot of people are I'm wrong about that.
More and more people are concerned about taxes every day.
Uh, but this is I mean, it is just ridiculous.
You know, I I I I would I would love for there to be a definitive study when we 2.7 trillion dollars.
And it insults my intelligence to hear about how there are cuts.
It was 2.7 trillion last year.
It's gonna be 2.77 trillion this year, and the Democrats and Liberals and the left are running around, it's unkind, it's dead on arrival, it's cuts.
And they're not cuts.
Go back and look what the budget was five years ago compare it to today.
Tell me where there are cuts.
There are not cuts.
There is no reduced spending.
I want to know how much fraud is in 2.77 trillion dollars.
It this is j all of this is just patently absurd.
And I've got more details on the fraud that it just surprises me this was necessary anyway, because I thought, you know, New Orleans has been run by liberal Democrats for how many years?
It should have been a panacea.
It should have been it should have been utopia.
There should have been no racism, no unemployment, no unhappiness, no misery, no racism.
And yet, what did we hear about the place after it was wrecked and uh partially evacuated?
Why, the lesson we learned here is that liberalism is a flat-out lie, as we've always known it's a flat-out lie.
And so how are we covering up for it?
We are trying to do exactly what caused New Orleans to be in an economic doldrum before this.
We are making it so that people don't have to develop themselves.
We're making it so that fathers don't have to stay home with their kids.
They don't have to know their kids.
The government will become daddy.
The mother will have the burden of raising the kids and the grandparents and so forth, but no dad's necessary because he's out doing whatever he wants with his tattoo money and his uh condoms to go money.
So we're just we're just exacerbating the problem here by continuing through and then those trailers.
Now just yesterday a judge said, okay, no more.
You don't the federal government doesn't have to pay the hotel bills for 12,000 evacuation.
I didn't know we still were.
It's only been six months.
It's only been six months.
The six months is enough time to get yourself back in gear.
What do you mean no it's not?
Well, I know I know in reality it's not.
Um and that's the problem.
We don't have any expectations of anybody to be able to do anything.
We have no expectations.
And that's the way libs look at people.
Oh, you poor people of New Orleans.
We know you're a bunch of schlubs, and we know you're incompetent, and we know that you can't live without us.
But we got to pull the hotel money away from you because there's too much pressure on it.
That's right.
They have no expectations of anybody being able to do it.
I'm sorry, Mr. Sterley, you're right.
I am going to go to a commercial timeout before I start uttering profanity.
10,000 777 trailers stuck in the mud and unusable.
10,777 trailers.
In a place called Hope, and they aren't even deployable because it's a flood zone and you can't put them there.
In other words, you can't redeploy evacuees back in a flood zone and in temporary housing.
Stupidity, utter stupidity.
Yesterday there was a story in the Wall Street Journal that said um the amount of money that's been spent measured against the number of evacuees that are being cared for equals two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per evacuee.
Is it per family or per household?
Two hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per household has been spent so far on all this.
Now, by all means, though what would you do if somebody gave you two hundred and fifty grand?
Would you go to tattoo parlor?
Would you go to condoms to go?
What would you do with it?
Well, if you had been pampered and cared for by liberals all of these years, you wouldn't have any expectations of yourself either.
So a tattoo parlor visit, that's cool because you see them on TV.
And condoms to go, hey, I don't want to get any diseases, but hey, I've got to have my sex life.
You wouldn't think about investing in yourself.
Let me go to the phones there.
I'm going to get in trouble if I keep up.
Orlando, Florida.
Bob, I'm glad you called.
Welcome.
Nice to have you with us.
Maha Rashi.
I heard you say that you didn't feel well and that you were in a bad mood, and I I'll tell you, when I saw you Saturday on TV, and you're the I just flipped the channel on, and they were just showing your tee shot.
I really didn't catch the hole that you're on.
And I kind of crossed my fingers after feeling like you're one of the family for a while.
You really ought to be in a good mood after coming off a swing like that on national TV, really.
Oh, I had two swings like that on National TV.
I thought I feel great about that.
I'm just in a I'm just in a foul mood today.
But uh on Saturday, I was that that was the most fun golf tournament I've ever played in.
And that that swing, by the way, is a new swing, and I owe it all a Jim Hardy of Houston, Texas.
He's uh he's a golf teacher, and I went down to see him the Saturday before I left.
Uh and um it it what he's it just did made all the difference in the world.
Uh that drive that you saw was on the on the 15th hole.
That drive was 290 yards.
It was 40 yards in front of the pros.
And our T box was not that far in front of them uh on that hole.
We're, you know, the uh amateur tees are sometimes as much as 30 and 40 yards up, but we were about 15 yards in front of them on that hole because of the layout, the whole the green in front of us 14 and so forth.
But uh tell you what, I'm glad you saw it.
I looked at it too.
I I I didn't see all that until I got back and saw it on my own website yesterday.
And uh we've got it all there, by the way.
If you want to see all the TV coverage, it's all at Rush Limbaugh.com on the free side.
I looked at it, and uh I have to admit uh uh swing looks better than it ever has.
No, I'm just that don't do with that.
If I'd say if golf swings could could could improve my mood on a long-term basis, then I'd quit and go play golf, but I know that that's not gonna happen.
My golf swing disappoints me more than it makes me happy.
Anyway, quick time out here, folks.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
I'm getting emails uh from Ohio uh residents telling me that I need to I do need to apologize over my error.
Um I refer to Sherrod Brown as black.
Uh they're urging me to apologize to black people.
Um for this error.
Um I will I'll take this under advisement.
But it was just an error.
I mean, there's no I don't think there's any apology necessary, but if there is one, I will apologize to uh black people of Ohio for referring to Sherrod Brown as as uh as being black in a story about Paul Hackett being kicked out of his own Senate race by his own party because he doesn't have any money and because he's a veteran and those two things just don't work in the Democratic Party.
Get this.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that the Liberals in Congress want the federal government to buy off two hundred thousand homes.
Just buy 'em and tear them down.
Just just buy the buy two hundred thousand homes from uh uh from people in New Orleans.
There are only thirty-six thousand homes that are uninsured, but that doesn't matter to the libs.
The libs just want to buy every home.
All these all these homes that are damaged, even though the vast majority of them have insurance.
Overcharges, poor accounting and abuses will take months or years to rectify the government accountability office and the Homeland Security Department's inspector general concluded in preliminary reports on how billions of dollars in tax parry taxpayer money is being spent.
It's not gonna be rectified.
It says it there's no way it's gonna be rectified.
900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants for aid who received aid, based their requests on duplicate or invalid social security numbers or false addresses and names.
The $2,000 debit cards issued to evacuees were often used for purchases unrelated to disaster aid, including adult entertainment, gambling, a 45 uh caliber handgun for thirteen hundred bucks, and a diamond engagement ring for eleven hundred dollars.
There was little or no verification of the names, addresses, or social security numbers of applicants registering by phone or the internet for the two thousand dollars, and of course there wasn't.
There never was gonna be.
All it would take is for one fraud victim or one one one uh perpetrator to come up and start raising holy hell to some reporter, and let's not forget the media attitude.
The media was making this place sound like it was aft it was a nuclear disaster zone.
The media was telling lies about how bad it was down there, all it would have taken, but one poor person getting on I applied for my aid.
I gave them a social security number, and they said I didn't qualify.
Look at me.
I don't have any clothes, and look at my baby didn't have any clothes, and my baby's starving, and my baby is dying of dehydration, and I can't get in it.
And that they didn't want that to happen, so you called, you got dilute.
This happened in 9-11, too.
You know, all the people all over the country that had nothing to do with being in the zone where we were hit on 9-11 got aid.
This classic.
I can't understand why anybody's surprised about this.
The FBI has shut down forty-four questionable websites that purported to be involved in relief.
The Secret Service has shut down sixteen websites in which the people operating them were accused of trying to get data for identity theft and fraud.
Auditors found that federal money paid for $375 a day beachfront condos.
And then here's the here's the note that the 10,777 trailers stuck in the mud and unusable.
Susan Collins of Maine, once again, FEMA failed to adequately plan for the very type of disaster that occurs virtually every year.
It wasn't just FEMA.
Nobody did anything right in this thing.
Nobody, not one person today.
Well, I take it back.
I take that back.
Oh, I have to have a major correction here.
What is the one and only entity that worked properly in this disaster?
That's right, General Honore and the military.
The military is what succeeded day in and day out, and the military getting on the scene is what began to turn this whole thing around.
What failed big time?
Domestic programs, domestic agencies, including at the local, state, and federal levels.
And now they're telling us we need a nationalize health care and give the same bureaucracy the power over life and death when it comes to health and medicine in this country.
It's a the idea that we want to nationalize anything is just absurd.
You want you want to put the same bunch of bureaucracies in charge of your health.
You go right ahead, but I am not playing it.
If you want to go ahead and have a recession, you go have one.
I'm not participating.
Now, of course, FEMA.
Let me tell I think FEMA's FEMA reorganization is going to be a surface show of pictures only.
They're going to rearrange some people.
They're talking about leaving it in Homeland Security, taking it out of Homeland Security.
They're not going to reorganize anything.
When do bureaucrats get fired?
When do jobs in the federal government actually get reduced?
There's too many people gumming up the works.
For crying out loud, you you are a bureaucrat.
You've got how many hundreds of thousands of people above you?
You've got an operations manual would take you six months to read in the midst of a disaster.
And whatever's written doesn't apply to whatever disaster's happening.
That's why everybody loved General Honore.
He was down, he was an entrepreneur.
He said, okay, we're going to fix this.
You'd go over there and do that, you go overdo that.
I don't care what the book says, you go get that done.
And everybody went, I don't believe this either.
This uh you know that story we had this uh uh some some uh Walmart was not stocking uh uh morning after pill.
And I said, Oh, this is this is big trouble.
It's in Massachusetts.
Uh because the you the last place you want to be is between a a liberal woman and her morning after pill.
You don't want to be in her path when if if if she needs her morning afterwards, get out of the way, and then Walmart didn't stock them.
Well, the state board that oversees pharmacies voted Tuesday to require Walmart to stock emergency contraception pills at its Massachusetts pharmacies.
This, according to a spokeswoman at the Department of Public Health, the unanimous decision by the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy comes two weeks after three women sued Walmart in state court for failing to carry the so-called morning after pill in its Walmart and Sam's Club stores in the state.
Walmart does carry the pill, but in Illinois only, where it is required to do so under state law.
The company has said that it chooses not to carry many products for business reasons.
But of course, that doesn't matter because you got bureaucrats in Massachusetts that can tell Walmart what they have to carry.
Now, this is a big problem for the Libs because here they're trying to put Walmart out of business.
Walmart's one of the biggest enemies that the Libs have in this country.
And now all of a sudden, here you had a couple lib babes, three of them needed a morning after pill and wanted to go to Walmart.
What I would do if I were Walmart here.
I would stock one bottle.
You're gonna make me do this?
Okay, we'll put one bottle and we're charging a thousand bucks a pill.
That's what I would do.
And I'm sorry, folks, I uh I have to comment on this.
Uh story from CNN out of London.
Valentine's Day, lonely time for singles.
If you don't receive a dozen red roses this Valentine's Day, don't fret.
You're not alone.
The love season's a lonesome time for many.
Flowers, chocolates, and red hearts flaunted around can make it hard to ignore your single status.
Ha ha.
Has Lovebirds enjoy romantic meal together.
You could be spending the night in front of the TV with a meal for one.
Yeah.
Laura DeFelice.
Laura DeFelise 32 doing just that.
Yes, I'm renting an action video.
I'm having Lebanese takeaway takeout and switching my phone off.
As a single woman, Valentine's Day reminds me of what I haven't got, a partner and a loving relationship.
Well, Laura, you need to call this program and call this program fast because you are falling prey to a giant marketing trick.
Do you know how many couples out there having dinner tonight are doing it because they think they have to?
How many boxes of chocolate, how many cards, how many dozens of rose are being sent, not because anybody wants to, but because if they don't, they'll catch hell because it's Valentine's Day and you're supposed to do it.
So this is a day of obligation.
This is not a day of love, and you're falling prey to it.
If you're going to run out and feel lonely on Valentine's Day, but you're not lonely the day before or the day after, you're falling for the trick.
You're falling into the trap.
This is another thing I refuse to play by.
They want to schedule we get too many obligatory holidays like this.
This is not a holiday.
Uh but nobody will convince me that Hallmark isn't behind this in a conspiracy going back to the 1400s.
The descendants of the Hall family in Kansas City, they probably started all this.
Then the Russell Stover people are all from Kansas City, by the way.
Then the Russell Stover people got involved, and then it all broke loose, and uh then they found a saint to associate with it.
And what why am I not more who says I'm not more romantic?
What is romantic about acting romantic on Valentine's Day when you are supposed to?
What in the what in a what what it the I mean I what what is I don't under I'm plenty romantic when the mood strikes me, but I'm not gonna sit here and have my mood dictated by what I'm obligated to do because it's Valentine's Day.
Look at this.
We got a we got however many single people in this country are gonna be in the fits of depression tonight simply because well well, Snerdley won't and I won't be.
Uh I I've got some people coming over for dinner tonight.
Uh a couple family members are in town.
Uh, but there's not going to be any reference to Valentine's Day, I'm telling you.
I told them to get that out of the way before they show up.
And I it just these are just little manipulative tricks that our society plays.
And I it don't Laura De Fel, somebody call her.
She's 32.
Tell her it's not worth it.
It's not worth getting depressed.
Lebanese takeouts, fine.
Action movie is fine, but uh if that's what you want to do, then don't let anybody tell you that what you're doing is not good simply because you're alone.
This is just all this manipulation going.
Really, really, I I've never understood Valentine's Day.
I I have never understood it.
Oh uh as a teenager it's different.
You don't know anything and you think this kind of stuff actually works.
This doesn't work.
The women expect this stuff.
You don't gain anything.
You don't all you do is fulfill an obligation.
He sent me roses on Valentine's Day.
Yeah.
Yeah, and would he have sent them on February 14th if it weren't some obligation?
But he did.
Yeah, okay, fine.
But but uh obviously it it's it doesn't score you any points.
Whoever remembers a Valentine's present, unless it's an engagement.
Sometimes you never forget those.
Back in just a second.
And we go to Orlando.
This is Lee.
Lee, welcome to the program.
Nice to have you with us.
Thank you.
It's good to talk to you again, Raj.
Yeah, thank you, sir.
I I just uh wanted to mention to you after your frustration this morning.
I I uh just heard that uh there's a group of illegal immigrants here in Florida that are suing FEMA because they won't uh supply them housing after the storms.
That's true.
That's uh ever so true.
That's just amazing to me.
Why it's not amazing.
Well, yeah, it's it's it's not a now, it's just anybody can file a lawsuit, but but uh what'll be amazing is if they win it.
Well, they'll probably win.
A coalition of Florida farm workers has sued FEMA, alleging that the government refused to help undocumented farm workers displaced by hurricanes with housing because of their immigration status.
Many farm workers who were denied federal aid after their homes were destroyed were forced to live in cars and other dangerous situations, while trailers intended for emergency housing went unused, according to a lawsuit filed uh last week.
FEMA spokeswoman Debbie Wing on Monday declined to comment on the case.
The workers were denied short-term disaster housing during the hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, including relocation of mobile homes or hotels because they didn't meet the government's definition of qualified alien.
See, it's their fault if they'd have gone out and just given a social security number.
Doesn't matter what they they were honest.
They said, Well, here's who we are, we're illegal.
Well, sorry you don't qualify.
But if they just gone out and gotten in the fraud game, everything would have been fine.
And now they're suing.
Now they're suing.
No, I'm not kidding.
I'm not making it up.
I'm reading it right here from the Associated Press.
Uh emergency aid from the government would have mitigated the effect of the storms on farm worker communities, according to the lawsuit, which asked the court to review FEMA's actions in withholding or delaying relief to undocumented farm workers.
Uh here we go.
Hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 ravaged much of the housing used by farm workers and the rural poor.
In one instance, FEMA brought 92 trailers to a mobile home park destroyed in 2004, but more than 40 of them were left unoccupied because of restrictions on their use by undocumented uh immigrants, according to the lawsuit.
You know what's really insulting about this is there are people uh with insurance uh and so forth, still at Bavero Beach.
Roofs are still not fixed and so forth.
FEMA money hasn't come through for a lot of people, but uh 250,000 per household in New Orleans.
And we still hear whining and moaning from Mary Landrew and all the people down there.
We're doing enough.
Sherry in Slydale, Louisiana.
Hello, welcome to the program.
Hello, Raj.
Hi.
Hi.
Um I am very I mean, I'm not ups.
I'm upset because we're actually doing Mardi Gras.
I want to know how you cover up a war zone.
I know you put a wooden facade over it, roll it over and say, doesn't that look pretty?
Then come back and say, Well, we need money now after we roll it back and see how ugly it looks.
I mean, I want to know how you cover that war zone.
I really do.
Please tell me how you do that.
Because it still is bad.
I met somebody from the North Ward.
He still tried to pick up pieces of his house.
And you're gonna have Mardi Gram.
Yeah, um I guess I have mixed emotions about this.
I mean, I love Mardi Grabage.
I really do.
As do I. It's but it's gonna be really scaled back.
It's like one third its normal size.
It is, it is.
It's gonna be very scale back, because I mean they're just not some of the crews are not rolling.
But I do I did say they got Brittany Spears.
Yeah, I heard.
Brittany Spears is gonna be there.
I look, uh, there's a there's a part of me that says, go ahead and do Mardi Gras.
I mean, what what needs to happen down there is that the the private sector needs to get things in gear.
We do we just the the the whole purpose of this FEMA report is to illustrate the government cannot do this.
Folks, can you stop and ask yourself a question?
When I travel a lot, and I I I see so many cities, large cities.
We all have, we've all been to them.
Did you ever stop to think how they happened?
Did the government decide that we're gonna put Denver there, and then we're gonna move people there, and it's gonna have this many people, we're gonna build this many houses.
Did the government do all that?
It just happened.
It's one of the miracles of the free market.
It's one of the miracles of human freedom and entrepreneurism that this country exists as it does.
The very idea that a government can rebuild a city is absurd.
It's totally absurd.
Travel anywhere.
Ask yourself, how did this city come to be?
Why are there people here?
Aside from the geographic reasons.
How did these buildings get built?
How did these systems that sustain everybody's lifestyle get built?
The government didn't come in and do it, folks.
Individu except you go look at where the government did build housing, and you tell me if you'd want to live in it.
We'll be back in just a second.
Okay, got to take another top of the hour break here, folks, but we will uh be back in no time and continue onward on today's excursion into broadcast excellence.
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