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March 30, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:32
March 30, 2006, Thursday, Hour #2
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And greetings once again, thrill seekers, music lovers all across the fruited plan.
Time for the award-winning Thrill Pact, ever exciting, increasingly popular, growing by leaps and bounds, Rush Limbaugh program here on the one and only Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
We are here today at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
There aren't any graduates.
There are no degrees because the learning never stops.
We are.
I'm just so happy to have these two guys in the studio with us today.
Joel Sernow, the creator and executive producer of 24, Howard Gordon, executive producer and the head writer for the series this year.
Series is, you finished writing it.
It's in the can.
How much left to shoot?
We have another month to shoot.
We're shooting episodes 23 and 24 starting next week.
So the six finales next week.
It's fascinating.
I got to go out and visit your set last year.
And I watched, in fact, it was back there last summer, too, and you had this season storyboarded, but you do not know from the day you start shooting it how it's going to end, right?
No, we're happy to know where we're going to start.
That's good enough for us.
And you work three weeks ahead.
We work about three weeks ahead of a time.
It's very much on the fly, and that's kind of what keeps it interesting for us.
Kind of like your show.
Where it's going.
Nothing scripted here.
So one of the questions I always get from people, they watch your show and they'll see a president portrayed a certain way or a chief of staff or a character.
And I'm always asked, since they know that I'm close buddies with you, are they ripping Bush here?
Do you guys bounce off current political events?
Are you sending messages subliminal or otherwise with your scripts?
Specifically, we don't model anybody after any current politicians.
We do follow the post-9-11 world, and our show has become part of that world.
But in terms of specifically taking shots at anybody, we have not done that.
And Greg Idson, the current president, bears a genetic resemblance to Nixon, and that's probably the, it begins and ends there.
Did you do it on purpose or just like the actor when he auditioned?
He's a fantastic actor.
No, it had nothing to do with that.
I guess it does take talent to act like that big a wimp because I don't know anybody who actually is.
Yeah.
We do.
All right, well, where did this idea come from?
I mean, I know, Joel, you've been in television writing all your life.
You worked on Miami Vice.
Where did this idea come from?
And where did you meet Howard?
The idea, I originally had the idea of doing a show in real time.
Most TV seasons are 22 episodes.
I thought, what if you do two more and make them one hour in a day, 24 hours, 24-episode season?
I called my partner, one of my friends who I write with, Robert Cochran, and we originally bandied about the idea and thought, what if you do 24 hours in the day of a wedding and make it a romantic comedy?
And then we scrapped that idea.
We thought, you know, the whole concept of the whole power of doing real time is make it a race against time, have the stakes be really high.
And so then we sort of came up with the idea of a counter-terrorist unit, et cetera, et cetera.
Once the show got picked up for 13 seasons, for 13 episodes, we needed to find a head writer and a writing staff.
What year was this?
This was 2001.
2001.
And Howard.
Pre-9-11?
Pre-9-11.
And Howard had been at the Fox Lot.
He had done four years.
He was sort of the main writing engine behind the first four years of X-Files.
And you can't find a better writer than that.
And we met Howard, and we just instantly had a great chemistry.
So Bob, Howard, and myself became sort of the story engine that first season.
You every season builds on the next, but they're not interconnected.
You can watch seasons independently on DVD.
One of the things that I tell people that most amazes me is your show is five years old.
And about that time, writers wear out, energy just goes.
You've sapped your creativity.
You guys keep setting new plateaus, new expectations.
You elevate them for everybody else, and you meet and surpass the audience expect.
Everybody I talk to has watched the DVDs, thinks every season's better than the previous.
And nothing wrong with the previous.
It just keeps getting better.
How do you, I mean, how many people in the writing staff and how many hours a day are you doing this?
We're doing it kind of 24-7, whether we're actually at the office or not.
The story lives with all of us, and we come in and well, to answer your first point, we just want to keep ourselves interested in the plot.
Otherwise, we couldn't do this kind of work unless we were interested in writing it.
And if we like what we're writing, we have to assume our audience is going to like what they're watching.
And that's our litmus test.
And we love the show.
We're having a great time.
And we just want to keep it going.
How about your budgets every year?
They give you more money to produce it every year significantly?
We do.
I mean, it increases.
I mean, there are built-in increases for, you know, we have about 350 people working on the show, and they all get incremental raises.
Howard was nice enough to defer his salary for the first five years.
We're going to have to have a big balloon payment next season.
There'll be a fun raise.
I didn't mean that personally.
I mean, the reason I ask is we were watching Monday night's episode yesterday afternoon, and it was loaded with things that cost a lot of money to produce.
And you told me it took seven days to shoot Monday's episode with all of that stuff in it.
It's surprising.
It's in the realm of a budget for a normal hour television show.
It is not any more expensive than an hour, and could be even less expensive than an hour of Desperate Housewives, for all we know.
I mean, it's really remarkable.
It's really a testament to our production crew, our producer, and it's very efficient and pretty reasonable by TV standards.
Well, it's amazing because you have so many, you have more plot twist in one episode than most seasons of the show have in their entire run.
And it's just incredible.
I got a couple people who want to answer some questions before the break.
Put your headphones on.
We'll go to Romeoville, Illinois.
And Corey, you're talking to Joel Cernow.
Hello, this is Corey.
Yeah, Corey.
I'm glad to see you guys.
I love the show.
It's the best show I've ever seen on TV.
And there you go.
We can't disagree.
I wanted to say that I wanted to ask why you guys following the show for years, and Michelle and Tony were a couple of my favorite characters.
Any particular reason why they were all of a sudden completely out of a picture?
Okay, I get it.
Yeah, why do you kill off all the stars?
Well, we don't.
The premise of the show is that we are fighting a war on terror, and there are casualties in the war.
And to make it feel real, we have to have people that we've actually cared about die, or else it wouldn't feel real.
It wouldn't feel.
We fundamentally see the show as part drama, part tragedy.
And it breaks our hearts to lose some of these wonderful actors that we've had along the way.
Xander Berkeley, who played George Mason the second season, Penny Johnson, who was Sherry Palmer this year, Edgar Tony.
I mean, these are wonderful actors and friends, but the story is the story, and we have to service that and make it feel like something that is going to have an impact.
And they all know when they sign on, it can happen.
Absolutely.
Do they lobby you?
If they find are going to get written out, do they come lobby?
And if can they change your mind?
You're the head writer.
Can they talk you out of a.
I've been talked out of a couple of deaths.
I have been.
And will you tell us who you say?
Well, I'll tell you most recently is Carlos Bernard, who played Tony, has been dead on the page three different times.
Is that right?
And he came up and we think about it and realized it wasn't time for his character to leave just yet.
So he's really had nine lives.
But most recently, Peter Weller.
Peter Weller was supposed to actually have been the one to die in the chair at CTU in episode 13.
And one day over a couple of cigars, he's been telling him the cigar can bridge a gap, save a guy's life now.
It really can.
Cigars do save lives.
On 24, Cheryl in Wheeling, West Virginia.
You're talking to Howard Gordon and Joel Cernow.
Hello, I love the show.
I'd like to know why you make Kim so hateful toward her father, Kim, the daughter.
Well, Kim's relationship with her father is pretty complicated.
And I don't know if she's as hateful toward her father as she is toward the writers, but she finds herself in a position where she thinks of her father as a bad luck person in her life.
I mean, she probably blames the death of her mother on her dad.
Her dad quote-unquote died and didn't tell her about it for 18 months, and she had to mourn him.
So she's got lots of pent-up issues, and we didn't want to make that a facile, easy relationship.
So she did come off somewhat, I wouldn't call it petulant, but just sort of like she's holding a lot of anger towards her.
She's a teenage girl.
Let me try a theory of this with them, Cheryl.
We're watching the show on Wednesday afternoon, and here we are in the middle of the syntax, it's about to release, be the release of the natural gas pipeline.
All hell's about to break loose.
And Jack pauses, give a nice big, wet kiss to Audrey.
And Joel looks at me and says, We've got to keep the women.
And I say, I know, you cover all the demographics in this show.
You got romance in the middle of terrorism, but it's a business, and you're trying to get all demographics.
You want young people, so you got Kim in there acting like she does.
I mean, that's what's so amazing about this.
You have to factor all these things.
It's a business.
It's your creative life.
You're having fun doing it, but there are business requirements that you have to meet if you want to continue to grow the audience which you have.
Is that not brilliant or what of me to understand that?
Way off.
You're way off.
Let Howard explain the emotional underpinning of the show.
Yeah, I mean, you have to have somebody to, you know, Jack has got to have an emotional context.
He does.
We don't do this just to panda to our audience, a rush.
How dare you say something like that?
This stuff doesn't go in an offices, does it?
No, making out like that.
I've never seen that.
No, but it is true.
It is true.
I mean, if I didn't mean pen.
I don't know.
I know you didn't mean penny.
But the truth is, Jack has got this flesh and blood person in our minds anyway.
And for him to go through all this action, just blowing up a bunch of gas stations to save the rest of us is a lot less meaningful than if he has something to live for.
Why is he a person?
Why is he living on this earth?
And there you go.
These are serious guys, folks.
We have to take a profit center timeout.
We'll be back to continue in just a second.
Don't go away.
And we are back.
Gal Rushball here on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Joel Cernow and Howard Gordon from 24 are here.
We've got about eight or nine more minutes with them.
Back to the phones, Keith in Orlando, Florida.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, Rush, it's a distinct pleasure and honor.
Hey, guys, I love the show, but I have two questions.
One, why is CTO so leaky?
You got more spies in there than you can count.
And two, why have you sort of given a break to the Islamic terrorists this year?
Well, the first question is: why is CTU so a little porous this year?
So easy to infiltrate.
Bad guys seem to get in there with ease.
Howard, why is that?
Well, because this is actually an intelligence gathering bunker somewhere in L.A.
It's a moderate level security.
It's only a level two security facility.
If it were level three, it'd be a lot more difficult to get through.
Yeah.
But.
Actually, you know, so I don't think it's that unusual.
The Pentagon leaks all day long to the New York Times.
The State Department leaks all day to the Washington Post.
I mean, nothing's secure.
We can't secure the porch.
We can't secure the Southern Board.
We can't secure CTU.
And you know what?
Even more importantly, if CT were secure, we wouldn't have an episode.
There you go.
That's the answer.
Dave in Chicago.
You're over Joel Cernow and Howard Gordon of 24.
Good afternoon, guys.
Listen, I love the show.
I wanted to ask real quick: whenever one of the major characters dies, the clock at the end is silent.
And I just think that's beautifully effective.
And I wanted to know who came up with that idea.
That idea actually came to us from one of our editors at the end of, I think it was the show in season three where Jack had to kill Ryan Chappelle in cold blood as part of a part of a deal that they were making with the head terrorist in that season.
And it was such a powerful episode.
And the show ended with Jack killing Chappelle, who was a federal worker.
And the show went to black, and he did not have the clink-clink-clink at the end.
And it was just so powerful, we thought we would use it.
And it's sort of become a staple of the show.
Throughout a signature.
All right.
Kathy in Peoria, Illinois.
You're on with Joel Cernow and Howard Gordon of 24.
Ditto's Rush.
And hi, everybody.
I wonder if President Logan is going to grow a spine.
I'm surprised he can sit in a chair.
Thanks, Kathy, very much.
A great question.
Well, Howard, you should talk about that.
Is Logan going to grow a spine?
I will tell you that you have not seen the full-time.
This is a tough one for him.
They don't want to give anything away.
That is a tough one.
Logan is an important part of this story this year.
Let me just say that there are about three or four episodes in every season where something really revelatory happens and the whole story changes by 45 degrees.
Hell, that happens four times an episode.
But next week's episode, which is next Monday night, which is our 16th episode of the season, is one of those really vital episodes and will really sort of inform the whole Logan story of the season.
And I would say that he's not without a spine.
He's just say watch next week, and then let's have this conversation then.
All right.
But let me ask you a question about the character, not the future.
Because a lot of people are curious about, you talk about you have to have Jack have something to live for so you have some reality.
Right.
And when it comes to a character like Logan, I think a lot of viewers are curious.
They don't know presidents intimately, but they can't imagine ever having had a president that's actually that way.
We may have and don't know it.
So where do you get in your creative juice the idea to make a character out of a president that is that?
Well, he was created kind of in some ways out of the rib of David Palmer.
I mean, David Palmer, who was this stolid, wonderfully morally grounded character, and we invented a president last year at the tail end of the year to inherit or to rise through the tragedy of President Killer's downed Air Force One situation.
We needed a president who wasn't up to the task.
So he was born out of that.
Anti-Palmer in a way.
Yeah, really.
So his character, we loved the actor, loved the character, and we've gotten to know him a little bit better.
And to a certain degree, Greg Idson, who played the character of Logan, helped create this character.
I mean, he brought mannerisms and characteristics to his performance that we began to write to.
Great.
All right, here's Bill in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
You're on with Joel Cernow and Howard Gordon at 24.
Hey, Rush, Mega Air Force dittos to you.
Thank you, sir.
Guys, great show.
My question for you is: is there plans to the rumor that there's a movie coming out that'll start off next season?
That rumor is true.
We want to do a 24-movie.
We want to write it this year and shoot it after next season's production, which would be next summer, to air the following summer after that.
So that would be 2008.
2008.
But, you know, we're in the very first steps of a long, long journey on this thing, and we have to basically prove it all along the way.
We have to write a great script that they're going to want to make.
How are you going to do a movie, 90 Minutes or Two Hours?
How are you going to do the concept of 24 hours?
Well, the thought for the movie is that the whole movie would take place in a 24-hour period.
It wouldn't be a two-hour real-time period.
It would be three segments of real-time in the course of one day.
And this way, it allows us to travel more and not be grounded in Los Angeles.
We want to do a much more international story for the movie.
Awesome, you have a plot idea.
Oh, we do.
Oh, great.
Okay.
So it's farther along than we knew.
Houston, Texas.
And Greg, you're on with Joel Cernow and Howard Gordon.
Well, it's great to talk about one American show and another great American show.
Thank you.
I had a question.
Do y'all ever, I mean, all the shows seem to be sequential in each season.
Do y'all ever plan or have the idea to go and fill in between seasons?
And this could be an opportunity to bring back, you know, favorite characters who have been killed off.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
The 24-video game takes place between season two and season three.
We do some DVD extras where we do sort of between season story scenes.
They're not really full storylines, but we had originally thought of going backwards at one point and doing a season that took place 10 years ago in Jack Bauer's life or five years ago, but that really didn't work out.
But the ancillary things, we now have comic books, video games, and things like that that are mining some of that territory.
Okay, guys, look, I know you have to run.
I want to thank all of you who called for questions.
They were great questions.
Thanks so much for coming by here.
You guys are in your business, in the entertainment business, you're making history with your format, with your writing, production values, and so forth.
And I don't know if you have time to reflect on it because you're too busy doing it.
So I wanted to pass on to you my thoughts on that and how great it is as somebody who is, I'm just marvel at creativity.
And the way you keep exceeding everybody's expectations is profound.
You've got a great show, and we're happy to have had you here.
Thank you for having us on Rush.
Joel Cernow and Howard Gordon from 24.
We'll take a brief timeout, ladies and gentlemen, and be back and continue on the EIB Network.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I have to send out a just a if I were any other boss, this would be a firing episode.
But those of you watching on the Ditto Cam, all the people that are here with Joel and Howard from 24, Mary Lynn Raishka is here, who plays Chloe.
And they all came in.
Yes, yes, yes.
Mr. Schneider's going, yes, yes.
And they came in, and they wanted a picture here, as most everybody does when they're here of behind the golden EIB microphone.
And Brian, I'm sure, trying to protect everybody's privacy, killed the Ditto Cam feed.
And I even widened it out, Brian, so that they could see everybody on that.
Yeah.
We didn't know what I'm going to do in here, he says.
What in the world have you ever seen me doing here?
So I'm sorry, folks.
I purposely, I widened the range so that you could see everybody because Joel's wife is here and Joel's agent.
And yeah, we got a bunch of people.
We'll make it up to you.
We'll put the picture on the website.
Mary Madeline was here.
She's flying to Arkansas to make a speech tonight.
So that's right, Brian.
You've saved yourself with that idea.
Put the picture up.
All right.
Where were we?
Oh, yes.
Illegal immigration.
There is port news.
I'm coming to it, but I have to respond, you know, the nice guy from Palm Beach County, George, actually from Palm Beach, who is the agribusiness guy who was making it clear what the divisions are on the Republican side when it comes to, I mean, he made the point that only illegals will pick his crops.
He tried to say that legals come in and are more qualified than illegals and so forth.
But the point about that is that he's asking, I'm sure I love the guy, but he's asking to be subsidized.
He's asking for taxpayers to subsidize his business by looking past the law so that he can hire people below for a low wage or what have you.
I mean, George, frankly, I know you're out there, and I know this is going to make you mad, George.
I'm just, you're a great call, and I got to respond to it.
But George is the kind of guy that was supposed to be fined under the Simpson-Mazzoli Act back in 1986 for hiring illegals.
And they promised that that would happen and so forth.
And it hasn't.
So I wanted to mention that.
And there are two other story.
Snerdley is asking me, what are you supposed to do, go out of business?
You know, do you hear yourself?
Do you actually hear yourself asking me these questions?
You are saying, okay, the only option these people have to stay in business is to continue to allow illegal immigration.
That's essentially what you're saying.
If this keeps going the way it's going, the American people are going to let themselves be known on this at the ballot box one way or the other.
Now, you know, after the rallies last weekend, there's some people out there feeling their oats.
Let's see, up in Jupiter, right up the road here, the stars and stripes have been replaced by the Mexican flag at Chasewood North.
I guess it's a junior high or a high school residence of, no, no, no.
I guess a condo community.
And the residents of the condominium community off Central Boulevard and Jupiter puzzled as to who made the switch.
Yeah, I woke up Sunday morning.
I looked up from my patio and I realized the American flag wasn't on the flagpole.
Said Sue Miller, a Chasewood North board member.
What happened?
And what captured my attention were the colors.
At first, I thought it was the Italian flag.
One of our residents said, no, it's the Mexican flag.
So I went to the flagpole to see if the American flag was maybe on the ground, but they took it.
And they cut the rope to get the American flag down and put the Mexican flag up.
A couple practical jokers, because everybody was going on about how many Mexican flags were seen at the protest.
And from Houston, from the Houston Chronicle, Reagan High School principal Robert Pambello was ordered to remove a Mexican flag Wednesday morning that he had hoisted below the U.S. and Texas flags that typically fly in front of his scruel, a symbol he agreed to fly to show support for his predominantly Hispanic student body.
At nearby Hamilton Middle School, child was asked to wipe off Mexican and U.S. flags painted on his face.
Hundreds of other students carried Mexican flags during walkouts on Wednesday, acts of protest that they vow to continue until Congress rejects legislation that would further restrict immigration.
So, you know, there's a now there's beginning to be an in-your-face attitude that's springing up with this now.
And this is this is it's going to be interesting.
At some point, as I have theorized recently, there will be a backlash.
Now, the ports deal, new legislative, this is amazing.
It's amazing because look at all that isn't being done to secure the border on illegal immigration.
Look at this silly bill that will have very little enforcement added to it.
This guest worker/slash, they don't want to call it amnesty bill.
New legislative proposals responding to the scandal, the scandal over a Dubai-owned company's attempted takeover of major who wrote this?
I guess this is AP.
What a lead.
New legislative proposals responding to the scandal over a Dubai-owned company's attempted takeover of major operations at some major U.S. is totally wrong, which touched off a political firestorm, are getting attention in Congress today.
Measures coming before committees in the House and the Senate aim to strengthen U.S. cargo security and port safety and to bring the federal panel to approve the DP World ports deal under tighter oversight by Congress.
The multi-agency panel called a committee on foreign investment in the United States would be required to investigate any proposed transaction that involved a foreign government or critical infrastructure of the country.
The president would be allowed to suspend or block a transaction if it's deemed to threaten or impair national security under the bill, which is expected to be approved by the Senate Banking Committee.
So we are still having conniptions over the port deal.
And we still have members of Congress running.
And I'll tell you why they're doing it, because they think you're demanding it.
They think they're pandering once again.
They think that you are paying attention.
You're going to love them and you're going to appreciate them.
And you're going to understand that they are tough on terrorism.
And they're not going to let our ports be corrupted.
They're not going to let our port security be overtaken by scandal-plagued Arab-owned countries.
No, sir, read Bob.
And yet, the same people are paying no such similar attention to the security of the southern border in regards to the immigration problem.
Now, you figure it out.
I can tell you why all this is, but you figure it out.
Here's Tony in Ellsworth, Maine.
Tony, I'm glad you called.
Welcome to the program.
The rush, one o'clock cigar deals to you.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate that.
I agree with the immigration, that illegal immigration is definitely a problem, and we definitely need to secure the borders.
But I have to disagree with you on the guest worker program.
I think it would actually bring some order to a burgeoning problem in this country.
We have 11 million people that are, you know, supposedly 11 million people that are here illegally, and we have no tracking of them or anything.
I think this guest worker program would give us some control over those.
And anybody that is not suitable, we can deport them.
There's a whole, when President Bush announced this several months ago, it was last year sometime, at first I had the reaction of, oh, you know, it's amnesty.
But then I thought about it more, and I said, you know, that's actually probably a brilliant plan because then we can get rid of the people that are undesirable.
Well, here we go.
Guest worker program.
Guest workers.
Amnesty.
It's amnesty.
Okay, well, we'll call it guest worker.
Are you disagreeing with me on this, Nurtle?
Okay, okay, all right.
No, not this part.
Now, again, Tony, let me ask you a question about this.
We got the guest worker program, blah, blah, blah, and we're going to track them now.
They got to show what is going to, what's going to force them, what's going to motivate them, inspire them to actually show up and register.
What if they don't?
I really don't know the answer.
I mean, I think a lot of the people that come here come here, honestly, they want to work, they want to better their lives.
And I think the majority of people that are here illegally, they want to do that because of the economic opportunities.
They want to be part of the American dream.
And like Mark Belling said yesterday, it's actually easier for somebody to get here illegally than it is legally.
And I think that, you know, like I said, I don't disagree.
Well, yeah, I mean, but that's the way it's supposed to be.
That's another absurdity.
But all these do not add up to excuses for not doing anything about it.
They just, you can't justify it with any of the excuses that I have heard so far.
I think actually what people are trying to do with this legislation is remove the word illegal.
If they could, they'd legalize these people tonight to get rid of the issue.
But they come up with a typical bloated bureaucratic piece of legislation that requires for its enforcement the people who are the targets of this bill to actually do all the work.
You got to show up.
You've got to pay a fine.
You've got to go to English class.
The question is, and you say you want to track them and so forth and keep track of their movements and find out how they're doing, assimilating, they are or not.
If they don't show up, if they don't show up and register and pay the fine, I don't know what we're going to do to find them because the argument we can't deport them, and I understand one of them, it's a large number.
But if we're not going to try to track them down now when they're already illegal, what in the world makes anybody think we're going to, and by the way, the figure 11 million, 12 million, it is a guesstimate.
It's a total guesstimate.
I mean, there's some statistical projection behind it to get to it, but it's still a guesstimate.
So how are we, we're never going to really know if they've all shown up or not.
We won't even know if 75 or 80% of them show up.
And if I my guess is far fewer than that will, and then those that don't, how are we going to know they even exist?
How are we going to know where they are?
What are we going to do to try to track them down?
This is all the enforcement side, and I'm telling you the answer is zip zero nada.
You know, folks, I'm not trying to beat this into a dead horse.
I'm really not.
But I have these almost visceral reactions when I hear these arguments.
Well, we have to understand them.
We must get to know them.
And they're poor.
And they so want to come here and improve their lives.
Okay.
Just because people want to come here, what does it have to do with setting immigration policy?
We know people want to come here.
That's not the question.
We don't have an immigration policy because we don't have problems getting people.
We know they want to come here.
I mean, everybody'd like to have four cars or a giant big house.
Well, okay, let's pass a law.
Allowing yourself, you just go move into somebody else's.
Just go move into somebody else's house and we'll let it happen because you want it.
You can come up with all kinds of analogies to this that illustrate the folly of it.
One of the things that is not being contemplated in this piece of legislation, we all admit that we have an illegal immigration problem, regardless what you think about how to fix it.
Do we all agree, ladies and gentlemen, in class today that we have an immigration problem?
All right.
We want to solve it.
Part of the solution here is creating disincentives to it.
And there are no disincentives.
I mean, this piece of legislation is pretty much just the opposite.
This is an incentive to keep coming in illegally.
Now, disincentive would be punishing those who facilitate it, like businesses, which was the core enforcement mechanism in Simpson-Mazzoli, and it went by the wayside.
Three employers, corporations, were fined when they told us they were going to capture 4 million illegals this way.
They never do enforce this stuff.
You have to deny them driver's licenses.
You have to deny them in-state tuition to colleges and so forth.
There are incentives to come here legally.
No system-wide punishment, free public school education, free medical care on the taxpayers' expense.
I mean, we're incentivizing this, not disincentivizing.
It's not complicated.
What's lacking here is simply will and leadership.
This is tough to lead on because they see a lot of votes out there.
And even if they don't see votes in the illegals, and the Democrats do, they don't see votes in the illegals, they still are afraid of upsetting the Hispanic community.
It's here legally as a voting bloc, which is larger than the African-American.
They're larger than number one minority in the country.
It's no accident that the swimmer, Ted Kennedy, is calling this the new civil rights movement.
You know, the Democrats and liberals look past, look back, look to the history, and try to recycle their great glory days rather than moving forward.
So it's no accident he's calling this illegal immigration bill he's got, amnesty, whatever you want to call it, guest workers, the new civil rights movement.
He's talking to the biggest minority in the country.
Here's Corey in Watertown, South Dakota.
You're next on the program.
Hi, an honored to be with you, sir, today.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
Well, I just had a point I wanted to bring up to one of your earlier callers.
He said he couldn't stay in business without illegal immigrants.
To me, that sounds like the same argument that was used about 200 years ago just before the Civil War.
We can't keep our economy going without slavery.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
This whole idea that you can't keep your business going without having somebody you can pay less than minimum wage and not give them a decent living is absolutely ridiculous.
It's indentured servitude.
That's all it sounds like it is to me.
No, It's an opportunity.
It's an opportunity, Corey, for people of the deprived places in the planet to come and experience and get their toes and feet wet, planting the seeds of their American dream.
That's how it's portrayed.
I'm being cynical.
You're absolutely right.
But I'm being cynical with you just as a way of agreeing with you.
But George from Palm Beach, and I know I'm making him mad out there, and I'm not trying to do that, but it is a stretch to me when you say that your business can't operate without illegals.
I got to take a quick time out, my friends.
We'll be back and continue.
Stay with us.
All right, folks.
Remember at the beginning of the program, I issued a warning to the terrorists around the world that listen to this program on Armed Forces Radio and on the Internet.
I know terrorists are tuning in here.
Tell you, you beat or be scared.
Your time is up.
Dingy Harry and Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Party, say they're going to capture Osama.
They've made it a promise.
They've made it a pledge.
See, nobody's trying to do that now.
And so I'm sure the terrorists are quaking in their boots, their sandals out there on their caves, rat holes, wherever they are, because Dingy Harry's coming after them.
Well, Ronald Brownstein in the LA Times has dissed the Democrats' plan.
And when Ronald Brownstein disses the Democratic plan, you know that the whole mainstream press thinks the thing sucks.
This is going to be funny to watch.
I'll have details when we can.
Palm Beach County screwed up another election, this time with 122 voters.
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