For those of you who continue to email me, even though I have made the correction, let me make the correction again.
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 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.
But I did err.
He is not black.
He's one of these white European descendants in Ohio.
He's the guy 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 Democratic Party.
But Sherrod 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.
El Rushbow here behind this, the Golden EIB microphone.
We are at 800-282-2882.
President Bush is at this very moment welcoming the Texas Longhorns, the national champions of the NCAA Division I college football program, to the White House.
And it 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 25.
And their manager, Ozzie Guillain, didn't show up.
He was on vacation somewhere.
Bush, hey, I understand being on vacation.
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.
But looks like all of the Longhorns, plus thousands of Texas fans as well and the Longhorn family members are on the White House lawn.
All right.
Can I ask a question about this report on Katrina Aid?
Can I ask you, why is anybody surprised that there's fraud?
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 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.
Government, 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 who it is.
I don't care what party.
But you have so many levels because 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 have to play the game.
But these meetings, 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'm not under any illusion 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.
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, what the hell is New Orleans to begin with?
By law, you couldn't put them in there.
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'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 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 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 specifics.
Well, here, let's, here's Gregory Kutz, K-U-T-Z, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing.
Kutz 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.
And to 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 going to 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 people are turning an issue into a political issue, not an economic one.
So what's Bush going to do?
What's his response?
It's what every president in the 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 $60 billion in counting, $200,000 per evacue.
No end in sight.
And Congress, of course, sees this.
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 going to 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, 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 $2,000 debit cards, money wasted for take-tat-toos, for bail bondsmen, sex toys.
I mean, you name it.
Any surprise in that circle?
Obviously, lots of surprises.
You'd think that with all the public focus, but I guess we were sending so much money that 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 his 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 citizens, but Bush didn't care.
What do you think is going to 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 with 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 spent on this, aid recipients in some instances, as you know, improperly used their debit cards given to them for food and shelter, $400 massages, a $450 tattoo, $150 worth of products at condoms to go.
Condoms to go.
Officials found not only fraud by individuals, but waste by government.
Really?
Really?
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 going to do about it?
Nothing.
Then a congressman is like, oh, gee, hell, lots of surprises.
It should have surprised nobody what happened.
And this is not the end of it, folks.
They're going to uncover because the money is going to keep being doled out because the political pressure will not 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, I just laugh at them.
But this, this has been going on for so long that, 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 going to starve kids and we're going to starve the elderly.
So it's all such poppycock BS.
Just take a look at this.
And we're spending $2.77 trillion in the next fiscal year budget, and we're being told that Bush is being miserly and he's cutting the budget and he's stealing money from people and 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.
But this is, I mean, it is just ridiculous.
You know, I would love for there to be a definitive study.
$2.7 trillion.
And it insults my intelligence to hear about how there are cuts.
It was $2.7 trillion last year.
It's going to be $2.77 trillion this year.
And the Democrats and liberals and the left are running around.
It's unkind.
It's dead on a rival.
It's cuts.
And there are 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.
All of this is just patently absurd.
And I've got more details on the fraud that 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 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 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 condoms to go money.
So we're just exacerbating the problem here by continuing.
And then those trailers.
Just yesterday, a judge said, okay, no more.
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 in reality it's not.
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've 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 anything.
I'm sorry, Mr. Sterner, you're right.
I am going to go to a commercial timeout before I start uttering profanity.
10,777 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 in temporary housing.
Stupidity, utter stupidity.
Yesterday, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal that said the amount of money that's been spent measured against the number of evacuees that are being cared for equals $250,000 per evacue.
Is it per family or per household?
$250,000 per household has been spent so far on all this.
Now, by all means, what would you do if somebody gave you $250,000?
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 into 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 Rushi.
I heard you say that you didn't feel well and that you were in a bad mood.
And 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 T-shirt.
I really didn't catch the hole that you were 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 feel great about it.
I'm just in a foul mood today.
But on Saturday, that was the most fun golf tournament I've ever played in.
And that swing, by the way, is a new swing, and I owe it all to Jim Hardy of Houston, Texas.
He's a golf teacher, and I went down to see him the Saturday before I left.
And what he's, it just made all the difference in the world.
That drive that you saw was 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 on that hole.
The amateur Ts are sometimes as much as 30 and 40 yards up.
We were about 15 yards in front of them on that hole because of the layout, the hole, the green in front of us, 14 and so forth.
But I'll tell you what, I'm glad you saw it.
I looked at it too.
I didn't see all that until I got back and saw it on my own website yesterday.
And we've got it all there, by the way.
If you want to see all the TV coverage, it's all at rushlinbaugh.com on the free site.
I looked at it, and I have to admit, swing looks better than it ever has.
No, I'm just, it has nothing to do with that.
I'd say if golf swings could improve my mood on a long-term basis, then I'd quit and go play golf.
But I know that that's not going to 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 from Ohio residents telling me that I do need to apologize over my error.
They refer to Sherrod Brown as black.
They're urging me to apologize to black people for this error.
I'll take this under advisement, but it was just an error.
I mean, I don't think there's any apology necessary, but if there is one, I will apologize to black people of Ohio for referring to Sherrod Brown 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, 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 200,000 homes, just buy them and tear them down, just buy 200,000 homes from people in New Orleans.
There are only 36,000 homes that are uninsured, but that doesn't matter to the Libs.
The Libs just want to buy every home.
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 taxpayer money is being spent.
It's not going to be rectified.
It says there's no way it's going to 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 caliber handgun for $1,300 and a diamond engagement ring for $1,100.
There was little or no verification of the names, addresses, or social security numbers of applicants registering by phone or the internet for the $2,000.
And of course there wasn't.
There never was going to be.
All it would take is for one fraud victim or one 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 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 my Social Security number and they said I didn't qualify.
Look at me.
I don't have any clothes.
And look at my baby.
I don't have any clothes and my baby's starving and my baby is dying of dehydration and I can't get in.
And they didn't want that to happen.
So you called, you got the loot.
This happened in 9-11, too.
You know, all these 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 is classic.
I can't understand why anybody's surprised about this.
The FBI has shut down 44 questionable websites that purported to be involved in relief.
The Secret Service has shut down 16 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 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.
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 Honoré 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 to nationalize health care and give the same bureaucracy the power over life and death when it comes to health and medicine in this country.
The idea that we want to nationalize anything is just absurd.
You want to put the same bunch of bureaucracies in charge of your health.
You go right ahead, but I am not playing.
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 you, 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 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 is happening.
That's why everybody loved General Honoré.
He was done.
He was an entrepreneur.
He said, okay, we're going to fix this.
You'd go over there and do that.
You go over and do that.
I don't care what the book says.
You go get that done.
And everybody went, eh?
I don't believe this either.
You know that story we had this Walmart was not stocking morning after pill.
And I said, oh, this is big trouble.
It's in Massachusetts.
Because the last place you want to be is between a liberal woman and her morning after pill.
You don't want to be in her path if she needs her morning after just get out of the way.
And 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 is 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've 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 of 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 going to 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 have to comment on this.
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.
As lovebirds enjoy a romantic meal together, you could be spending the night in front of the TV with a meal for one.
Yeah.
Laura DeFelis, Laura DeFelis, 32, doing just that.
Yes, I'm ripping 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 of these 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 roses 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.
It's not a holiday.
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 Stouver people, they're all from Kansas City, by the way.
Then the Russell Stouver people got involved and it all broke loose.
And 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?
I mean, what is, I don't understand, I'm plenty romantic when the mood strikes me, but I'm not going to sit here and have my mood dictated by what I'm obligated to do because it's Valentine's Day.
Look at this.
However many single people in this country are going to be in the fits of depression tonight simply because, well, well, Snerdley won't, I won't be.
I've got some people coming over for dinner tonight.
A couple family members are in town.
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.
These are just little manipulative tricks that our society plays.
And don't Laura Defelis.
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 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've never understood Valentine's Day.
I have never understood it.
Oh, as a teenager, it's different.
You don't know anything and you think this kind of stuff actually works.
This doesn't work.
But women expect this stuff.
You don't gain anything.
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 obviously, 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.
Here 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, Hush.
Yeah, thank you, sir.
I just wanted to mention to you, add to your frustrations this morning, I just heard that there's a group of illegal immigrants here in Florida that are suing FEMA because they won't supply them housing after the storms.
That's true.
That's ever so true.
That's just amazing to me.
Why?
It's not amazing.
Well, it's not, it's just anybody can file a lawsuit, but what will 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 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 to 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.
It doesn't matter what 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.
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.
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 immigrants, according to the lawsuit.
You know, what's really insulting about this is there are people with insurance and so forth still at Beverro Beach.
Their roofs are still not fixed and so forth.
FEMA money hasn't come through for a lot of people, but $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 Slide Dale, Louisiana.
Hello.
Welcome to the program.
Hello, Rush.
Hi.
Hi.
I am very, I mean, I'm not up.
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 thought about the war zone.
I really do.
Please tell me how you do that.
Because it still looks bad.
I met somebody from the North Ward.
He still tried to pick up pieces of his house.
And he doesn't have Mardi Gras.
Yeah, I have mixed emotions about this.
I mean, I love Mardi Gras Rush.
I really do.
But it's going to be really scaled back.
It's like one-third its normal size.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
It's going to be very scaled back because, I mean, they're just not, some of the crews are not rolling.
I did say they got Britney Spears.
Yeah, I heard.
Britney Spears is going to be there.
Look, there's a part of me that says, go ahead and do Mardi Gras.
I mean, what needs to happen down there is that the private sector needs to get things in gear.
The whole purpose of this FEMA report is to illustrate the government cannot do this.
Folks, stop and ask yourself a question.
When I travel a lot, and 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 going to put Denver there and then we're going to move people there and it's going to have this many people.
We're going to 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.
Individual, 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, you got to take another top of the hour break here, folks, but we will be back in no time and continue onward on today's excursion into broadcast excellence.