Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Bad news, America.
It's not just offshore call centers and tech support.
They've outsourced the hosting duties.
Under a new UNESCO agreement to promote cultural awareness, at least two out of five Rush Limbaugh programs will now be hosted by certified foreigners.
The Deputy Fisheries Minister of Belgium will be here tomorrow.
But for today, this is Mark Stein.
When the president said we need immigrants to do the jobs Americans won't do, I thought he meant a little light seasonal fruit picking or a couple of holes as Mayor Bloomberg's golf caddy.
But here I am sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
America's anchorman is away today, so I am your undocumented anchorman for the next three hours.
What a great country.
What a great country.
Assimilation-wise, you can't get more American than being on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm glad to be here.
I live in the great state of New Hampshire.
You don't have to be that great when you're surrounded by Olympia Snow's Maine and John Kerry's Massachusetts and Howard Dean's Vermont and the socialist basket case province of Quebec, but we do our best.
And you can read me in every issue of National Review and every Sunday in the Chicago Sun-Times and Mondays in the New York Sun and Washington Times and a bunch of other places around the world.
If you're ever down in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, I'm in the local paper down there, and that's a great paper too.
Or on the internet at steinonline.com.
Oh, I should mention, by the way, my publisher will be pleased, I've got a new book coming out in a few weeks on the end of the world as we know it.
So if we've got a spare couple of minutes in the third hour, we may do the end of the world.
But a lot to get to before that, too.
A busy day today.
Do you see this thing?
Pluto has been stripped of its status as a planet and recategorized.
I didn't even know you could use terms like this in the scientific establishment today.
Recategorized as a dwarf planet.
Men are from Mars.
No, it's not men are from Mars.
Women are from Venus.
Prince Charming is from Mars.
Snow White is from Venus and the seven dwarves are from Pluto.
So Pluto's been recategorized as a dwarf planet, which I think is the category that comes below failed state.
Joe Biden, speaking of failed states, Joe Biden has now laid out his gloomy five-point plan for Iraq on the grounds that the country is now falling apart, lurching into civil war, etc.
He now says Iraq is hopelessly split from top to toe, as hopelessly divided as Democratic primary voters in Connecticut.
So he's laid out his exciting five-point plan, and you'd be amazed at how familiar some of those five points are.
We'll get to those a little later, too.
And I just saw, just before we came on here, a fantastic flash from Fox News.
Feds arrest Hezbollah media provider for New York area.
And I got all excited because I thought they'd rounded up Bill Keller and Pinch Sulzberger at the New York Times, but it turns out to be some imman with a satellite dish.
You can't get everything.
And we'll talk about Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Katrina.
It's the one-year anniversary.
And do you get the feeling?
Do you get the feeling that the media are going to go bigger on this than the September 11th, fifth-year anniversary?
The fallout from Katrina, the fallout from Katrina.
George W. Bush, according to Reuters, is still grappling with the political fallout from a federal response widely viewed as inept.
I don't think there is any political fallout from Katrina.
This Reuters piece suggests that his approval ratings are something to do with Katrina.
Nobody who cares about Katrina or knows about Katrina thinks it's anything other than a municipal and state-wide responsibility primarily.
You know, it's called the federal emergency management.
They're there as the provider of federal backup support.
They're not still meant to be managing the jurisdiction a year later.
It's not one of these UN things like Kosovo or Bosnia where the international do-gooders move in and never move out again.
If this isn't back in state and local hands now, it certainly isn't George W. Bush's fault a year on.
So we'll talk about that too.
I mentioned New Zealand a minute ago.
I just basically came here from New Zealand.
I was in Auckland, New Zealand, a couple of days ago, and I was at the airport there with half an hour to kill and mooching around the duty free shop.
And I picked out a souvenir snow globe for my little girl.
No snow technically in it, but when you shook it, little stars sparkled around all these cutesy New Zealand sheep.
And the sales clerk swiped my credit card, wrapped up the gift, and then she looked more closely at my credit card and said, Oh, wait, are you flying to America?
And I should have known because she consulted her list of prohibited items and informed me that the twinkly fluid inside the snow globe has now been deemed to count as a liquid.
So snow globes are a national security threat.
You can't take snow globes on planes anymore.
It's been banned.
It's along with lipstick and all the other stuff, bottles of water.
It's the front line of the snow global war on terror.
You can't take snow globes on planes.
And I see over in England, Birmingham Airport has banned passengers from boarding with gel-filled bras.
This is a fantastic development.
You know, we've been demanding for years that we need to start profiling.
And finally, they're profiling.
At Birmingham Airport, they're profiling women with padded bras.
And that is one great profile.
And the security staff have been trained, trained to spot women who really stand out.
So gel-filled bras are out, and presumably in another year or two after the next crazy thing that these guys pull, we'll be preventing gel-filled breasts from boarding.
And this is why, this is why, unless you're playing a fence in this war, you're losing bit by bit.
No snow globes here, no padded bras there.
And everything you ban only drives these guys on to some new innovation.
If you look at the way in these recently uncovered plots in Toronto and London and Sydney, they've been using converts to Islam, Muslims who don't look like Middle Eastern males.
So the question is whether we can regulate as fast as they can adapt.
So the way to judge whether someone's serious about the war is whether they've got a strategy for playing offense or whether they just want to react to whatever ingenious scheme the jihad cooks up next.
You know, I'm as fed up with the Republican Congress as a lot of Conservatives.
I'm particularly sick of the Senate and Arlen Spector and Ted Stevens and all these other presidents for life of in Cumberland.
But the reality is that one party wants to confront this threat and the other party is only interested in confronting George W. Bush.
I listened to this Democrat yesterday called Michael Brown huffing about why the government wasn't doing anything about homegrown terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.
Well, they did do something about Timothy McVeigh.
They fried him five years ago.
And there don't seem to be a lot of people anxious to follow in his footsteps.
It wasn't Tim McVeigh who blew up Bali or Madrid or the London Tube.
But the Democrats would much rather fight the terrorism we don't have than the terrorism we do have.
They basically chosen to sit out the great question of our age.
Have you seen this book?
Peter Beenart wrote it a couple of months ago called Why Liberals and Only Liberals Can Win the War on Terror.
If a book falls in the forest and nobody hears it, was it ever published?
No, none of his party are interested in this book.
None of his party are interested in winning this war on terror.
And if if that title was true, Why Liberals and Only Liberals Can Win the War on Terror, then we're all done for, because Liberals aren't even interested in getting in the game.
It's like publishing a book in 1943, why Swedes and only Swedes can win World War II, even if it's true they don't want to play.
So I think whatever the faults we have with differences we have with the administration, with the Republican Party, at least they're thinking about these issues.
At least they've got a strategy for it.
At least they're not just pretending there is no war and there is nothing and there's nothing to worry about.
So that's some of the things we're going to be talking about in the next three hours.
I was in Australia for a couple of weeks.
And I must say, I love the way they conduct politics in Australia.
I was having a conversation with the Australian Foreign Minister, and I'm sure he won't mind me saying this.
He will mind for a couple of minutes telling millions of people about it, but then he'll have a good laugh about it because that's the kind of guy he is.
He's the least like a foreign minister that you can find anywhere on the planet.
He's a man called Alexander Downer.
And he was talking about what they call in Australia, what he calls in his department, busted ass countries, which is, I think in America, that's busted ass country, which is what the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs calls failed states.
And you'd be surprised how many busted ass countries the Australian Foreign Minister managed to get through in his meeting with me.
But I love the way they've got a fantastic strategy when it comes to dealing with the politics of the Iraq war, because the Iraq war is unpopular in Australia as it is in America.
But they're very happy when the opposition brings it up and want to talk about Iraq and want to talk about the quagmire because they understand that cutting and running and surrendering is even more unpopular.
And just in that magnificent way that those plain-spoken Aussies have, they've managed to turn Iraq into a political plus for them.
Because unlike George W. Bush and Condi Rice and Tony Blair, they've succeeded in making the issue not whether the nation should have gone to war three years ago, but whether the nation should now agree to lose the war.
And nobody wants to lose the war.
You can have an argument about whether you should have got into the war before you get into it.
But generally speaking, it's a good rule that once you're in the war, you should win it.
And those of us who love America nevertheless have to admit that it's an awful long time before since this country has unambiguously won a war with a clear, lasting victory.
And to let this thing be turned into some catastrophic event that would be portrayed as a failure would, I think, have serious consequences.
I think it would end the American moment, and there would be no, there would, in effect, be no hyperpower anymore.
Why would anyone need to take America seriously if you cut and run from Iraq?
So we'll be talking about that, talking about the first anniversary of Katrina.
Lots more to come.
Straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Welcome back.
This is the Rush Limbaugh program.
Mark Stein's sitting in.
Walter Williams will be here tomorrow.
Lots to talk about.
Joe Lieberman's lead over Ned Lamont.
Ned Lamont, the candidate of the Democratic Party, has narrowed to a razor-thin margin in Connecticut.
I think this would be fantastic if Ned Lamont got elected.
He is almost a parodic empty suit.
Nothing he says makes any sense.
He wrote this Blamange marshmallow piece in the Wall Street Journal about his view on the Iraq war.
It was like it was written in invisible ink.
Even as he unrolled the sentences, they faded to nothingness.
And yet he's now closed the gap with Joe Lieberman, apparently, just overnight.
And I don't know if you've ever seen Joe Lieberman campaign.
In the 2004 election, he moved to my state.
Know primary candidates spent a lot of time in New Hampshire in the run-up to the primary day, but he's the only one who actually moved to the state.
He bought an apartment in Manchester, New Hampshire, moved in there, and I think, what did he say?
He got, I think in the end, he got 7%, 7% in the New Hampshire primary.
He announced he was in on primary note that he was in an exciting third-way tie for third place, which was actually very insulting to Wes Clark and John Edwards because I think they got 9 and 10%, and Joe was way down on 7%.
So I'm not persuaded he's the most effective political closer in the land, but you never know, he might yet pull it out the hat.
But I think this Ned Lamont guy would be great.
I wish he could inherit Joe Lieberman's seniority on these Senate committees because it'd be terrific to have to listen to him expound on these complicated issues.
Let's go to John in Louisiana.
I was dissing the local and state response to Louisiana and to Hurricane Katrina a couple of minutes ago.
So let's see what John has to say.
Hi, John.
You're on the air.
Before I talk about that, I want to thank anybody that puts you on the show.
You're very articulate, got very quick wit, and I hope Rush uses you again when he has to take other matters into hands, vacation or whatever.
I really enjoy you.
That's nice of you to say, but you can't be entirely happy with me, John.
Well, what I'm worried about is where you're speaking from.
The bully microphone, which is all-powerful.
I'm worried that a lot of people in America are going to think, well, New Orleans is an old case and everything else.
But until somebody drives down here, drives around and sees the neighborhoods and everything else, no city has suffered the damage this has except for London, Nakasaki, and Hiroshima.
You know, back in the Second World War, if you drive around and you shake your head, so the politicians, sure, our politicians are very inept.
The ones we have is the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of the state of Louisiana.
But neither one of them has ever faced what's going on down here right now.
And it's the first time for them, just like it was the first time when London was bombed, you know, trying to handle all that.
But it was the first time when September 11th had happened.
It was the first time that a mayor of New York City had ever been faced by anything like that.
And Rudy Giuliani rose, and Rudy Giuliani rose to the occasion in the way that local officials didn't.
Now, look, I accept what you say.
I think it's clear that something extraordinary happened.
Something extraordinary happened in New York, too.
They put a big hole in the ground in Lower Manhattan.
And the federal government gave gazillions, gazillions of dollars to fill that hole and put something there.
And again, state and local politics have meant that nothing has been done there.
Flawed plans have been produced.
Disgusting, in many ways disgusting persons managed to hijack the approval process for what was going to be put in that space.
In the end, all the federal government can do in these situations is send money.
The people responsible for building these, rebuilding these communities are the people who have to live there.
The sums quoted initially in the days after Katrina are extraordinary.
$200 billion for half a million displaced families on the Gulf Coast.
That's $400,000 per family.
You could give those families $400,000 and they could build their own beachfront home virtually anywhere in America, apart from next door to Barbara Streisand's place at Malibu.
And so It's not about the allocation of the funds.
It's about how responsibly and effectively and efficiently things can be done on the ground.
It's an appalling thing what has been done.
It's an unprecedented thing what has been done on the Gulf Coast.
But how efficiently and how effectively it's rebuilt will be determined by the people who live there.
In the end, in the end, that is the great thing about America.
I've lived in highly centralized societies.
In Europe, one guy in Brussels makes the decision on truck weights for the entire continent.
The place is a disaster.
In the end, it's American federalism, American federalism, decentralized government that will determine which jurisdictions work and which don't.
Let's go to Jack in Key Lago, Florida.
Jack, you're on the air.
Hi, Jack.
How are you doing?
I think America should follow the lead of Spain when they got out of the affairs of Iraq and Afghanistan.
They had no more terrorist attacks, proving that, you know, if you don't invade them and make war against them, they won't make war against you.
That's not actually true, Jack.
They've uncovered plots in Spain since.
It's true that they haven't pulled any of those plots off.
You've got to have an awfully benign view of the jihad to figure out that they just want you out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
They want Spain back in the house of Islam.
They want it to be a Muslim state again.
That's one of their core territories.
They're hung up about the fall of Andaluthiya, as they call it, in 1492.
So, yeah, and they basically got their hang-ups about the First World War, about the 1922 peace settlement.
They basically want to get back into Europe and take it over.
They're not going to be content with just taking out a few people in that Madrid bombing.
They're already back in Europe, and they're in America, they're everywhere, and we leave our back door up, and we're running around the world stating countries securing their borders, and we leave our borders wide open.
Well, that's a different issue.
I'm all for securing.
I'm sorry, it's the same issue.
Yeah, but I'm all for securing borders.
But, you know, because if you don't have borders, you don't have a country.
But the reality of the situation is that on that issue, Americans do not get excited enough and angry enough about secured borders.
You know, those people on September 11th, four of them, used the illegal immigrant network.
They got their ID with which they boarded the plane, they got from the illegal immigrant network outside that 7-Eleven in Falls Church, Virginia.
And if that doesn't get people annoyed and sufficiently angry about the subversion of American sovereignty that's being done through illegal immigration, nothing will.
If people can kill 3,000 Americans by acquiring fake ID through the illegal immigrant network and people don't get serious about it, well more fool them.
Thanks very much for your call, Jack.
We'll be back with more in just a moment.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Back soon.
The Rush Limbaugh show on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush.
Jack was complaining about how insecure America's borders are.
They certainly are.
That's why I'm here.
Very grateful to be here.
I came across the hopelessly insecure northern border.
If you're ever up on the Vermont, New Hampshire, in New Hampshire, the one border crossing we have is unmanned for, I think it's 17 hours a day.
You kind of check.
I think there's a video phone they have there.
And it says check in, drive 30 miles south and check in at Beecher Falls, Vermont or something.
It's basically done on the honor system.
Fantastic.
The world's greatest superpower, but you can check in on the honor system.
A marvelous border.
Anyway, that's how I got in.
The guy I gave $100 to, we drove about an hour south, and he said, Well, you can get out the trunk of the car now.
So here I am until they kick me out again.
Walter Williams will be with you tomorrow.
1-800-282-2882.
And we're talking about some of the issues in the news.
The first anniversary of Katrina and some approaches to the war on terror.
And let's go to Leonard in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Leonard, you're on the air.
Hey, Mark.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
I've never heard you before, but you're doing a good job.
Thanks very much, Leonard.
Yeah, I live in Gulfport, Mississippi, just 70 miles away from New Orleans.
And the difference between our recovery here on the Gulf Coast, which is totally devastated, is just 100% different than New Orleans.
And I'd like to attribute to that to the great leaders we have here on the coast who are mostly Republicans.
And the corruption they have in New Orleans in the local politics, and Randeagan, especially, is just indicative of how things are doing so badly in New Orleans.
And it doesn't seem like the national media really recognizes that.
No, I think you're absolutely right there, Leonard.
Haley Barber, I thought, did if you compare him with the hapless governor of your neighboring state, I thought he did a really good job.
I'm surprised he didn't get more.
Well, I'm not surprised, really, because that's the drive-by media for you.
But I'm surprised he certainly should have got a much higher national profile for that.
Yes, he should have.
And the problem we're having right now, and they're doing a three-day expose in the local newspaper, the Sun Herald, on how Louisiana is detracting from our problems over here.
And when the hurricane first hit, they asked for billions and billions of dollars.
And Haley Barber says, well, you know, the Congress is going to get sticker shock, and we're going to have a shockwave effect from it.
And that's what happened.
Exactly.
I think that's exactly right, Leonard.
You know, the fact is, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city.
Yes, and most Americans understood that the more that was revealed about it, the more that was revealed about Mayor Nagan, the more that was revealed about his incompetent police force, large numbers of whom deserted.
There were no equivalent stories coming out of Mississippi.
No, none at all.
And the people down here are really kicking butt.
They're holding their chins up, and there's places popping back up on the beach.
People are saying, well, if the insurance company won't take care of it, I'll build it myself.
And we see a lot of that going on and just people move forward here.
It's unlike New Orleans, where people sit on their porch and complain that the government wouldn't have picked their garbage up out of the front yard.
That's the American way, Leonard.
You know, when people built their first homes when they settled this continent and they got wiped out by those tough winters, they didn't complain when the roof fell in that they were waiting for the insurance company.
When it's extreme circumstances, you can't rely on government and officialdom.
You just got to get on with it.
And it is municipal responsibility for first responders.
Two days after the storm, we had all the food, ice, and water we needed.
I mean, albeit there were MREs, but it was food.
And I slept on my porch for two weeks.
But I didn't blame the government.
And we had plenty here.
It was totally mismanagement in New Orleans.
And that's why there's a difference, the disparity between how we recovered and what they're still going through over there.
Absolutely.
You know, the issue in almost all these things is never how much is given, but how effectively it's dealt with on the ground.
The problem With Hurricane Katrina, it is not that people were stingy, but how effectively the people responsible for using the funds behave on the ground.
I mean, there are all kinds of horror stories.
It's actually very hard to be generous these days.
A lady from the State Department was telling me that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the British government had managed to give all this beef and hamburgers for people to eat.
And they were about to distribute it to people in the Gulf Coast area when they realized that it's illegal to import British beef because of mad cow disease.
So you're sitting there as the waters are rising and you're starving.
But because of the one in a 10 billion chance you might get mad cow disease, they couldn't give you that food.
And to the best of my knowledge, it's still rotted.
They had to find somewhere to warehouse it.
The government had to pay to find, because they didn't want to give it back, because that looks like dissing your allies.
And they were worried, you know, Tony Blair would pull out of Iraq or something.
So they had to find, and then they thought, well, maybe we could give it to a third world country.
And then they thought, no, no, that's only going to insult them because it looks like this stuff isn't good enough for Americans to eat, but we can give it to some starving people in Rwanda.
And it's actually very hard these days to just be uncomplicatedly charitable.
Just giving large amounts of money is never the answer.
The question is how efficiently it's spent on the ground.
Do you remember the 1998 ice storm that afflicted the Northeast?
I was in the province of Quebec, and when you listened to the radio up there, everyone there was whining about how, oh, the government should do this and the government should do that, and power was out and all the rest of it.
I drove over the border.
You never heard that on the radio in New Hampshire.
People were just talking, offering their own advice on how to deal with all these fallen trees and power outages and all the rest of it.
And it's sad to say that there's some equivalent of that down on the Gulf Coast, where people in Louisiana seem to be taking that, I'm waiting for the government to help me, and people in Mississippi are just getting on with it.
But maybe I'm being unfair.
Let's go to Lawrence from Lake Charles, who may well feel differently.
Lawrence, you're on the air.
Yeah, hi, Mark.
It's wonderful to talk to you.
It's great to be able to put a voice to the articles in National Review and a little bit more of a personality.
Oh, right.
Thank you.
I hope the personality comes through on the page, but the voice is a bonus today.
It does, but you can't hear a laugh.
But I'm from my native town is Cameron, Louisiana, which was about 85% destroyed in 1957 with unfortunately 500 souls lost, some of whom would have been my classmates, my schoolmates.
My late father's best friend who was able to compare recovery from Audrey to recovery from Rita.
Rita was even worse destruction with thankfully no loss of life.
About 95% destruction.
It's terrible.
But one of the big problems is the town's not coming back.
And it's not for lack of anyone's desire to rebuild.
It's from the government getting in the way.
We have, after Hurricane Audrey, you might have, to knock down a damaged house in order to build something else, you'd probably have two, maybe three guys and a tractor, a front-end loader and a dump truck.
And the job would have been done in a day.
And they'd have moved on to something else.
People are being paid a lot of money, $10, $12 an hour, which is high hourly wage for our area, to stand around in a Dagolo yellow vest and direct non-existent traffic.
A dozen people to do in 2006 what would have taken two or three people to do in 1957.
That's an excellent point, Lawrence.
But if you just compare the ease with which you can clear out, rebuild, move on, it's all much more complicated now.
Well, also, they're making real difficult stipulations as to rebuilding.
People have lived on that low ridge where the Caucasus River empties into the Gulf of Mexico since prehistory.
But now it seems evident that the government doesn't want people to live there because poor folks who won't be able to rebuild according to the new codes.
Oh, and another thing that really must be said, and you never hear about it, is after Hurricane Rita, the good people of Cameron Parish, the whole lower part of the parish was wiped out.
And people, there are casualties from the storm.
The elderly die.
They just die.
I talked to a young man who was a son of a fellow that I graduated with from the high school there.
He lost both of his grandfathers to heart attacks just from the stress.
It's really dreadful.
And one of the problems is they can't move on.
There are roadblocks that keep them from simply reestablishing a home where their home should be.
Thanks for your call, Lawrence, because this is absolutely the critical core element of a community.
It's resilience.
People live in tough parts of the world.
They get battered.
They're able to move on.
The minute you've got a ton of government corruption, government paperwork, and just government lethargy getting in the way, all you're doing is suppressing your ability to move on, which will not do you good in the long run.
This is Mark Stein, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh, 1-800-282-2882.
Back with more in just a moment.
Mark Stein for Rush Limbaugh on the EIB network.
Sitting in for Rush.
Walter Williams will be here tomorrow, having a great time.
Let us go to, I was dissing Pittsburgh, New Hampshire, the good Pittsburgh, the good Pittsburgh, a couple of minutes ago.
Mark from Pittsburgh has called in.
Welcome to the show, Mark.
I'm shocked to see the call screeners have put an H on the end of your Pittsburgh, because you're Pittsburgh without the H on the end, aren't you?
Yes, that's true.
You'll have to correct them.
Anyway, Mega Dittos, and nice to talk to another Mark from New Hampshire.
And, oh, a year or so after 9-11, our representatives and senators from New Hampshire here did get the border manned 24 hours a day.
So it is manned all the time.
Oh, okay.
Well, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
The jihad I sell en route from Montreal to cross over that unmanned border crossing.
They're about 20 minutes away now.
So fortunately, they'll be able to turn back and go back to Montreal without being stopped at that border crossing.
That's great.
So you've got a guard there 24 hours a day now.
Oh, yes.
In fact, they are bringing in extra border guards and so forth from other areas to make sure that it is manned 24 hours because it is rather sparsely traveled.
It gets rather boring up there, especially in the city.
It's not.
It's the most fantastic.
If you're ever up on that border crossing, folks, that is a great one.
You've got the upper Connecticut lakes, you've got moose everywhere, and then you've got that little border post on the hill that just swoops down the hill into Canada.
It's a pretty spectacular, it's spectacular scenery, isn't it?
Oh, it's beautiful.
And I retired up here from New Jersey and just love it.
I can't get enough of it.
Well, thank you very much for letting me on to get that.
No, no, that's great.
You live in a great part of the world.
You know, there was a house up there.
I think, in fact, it was in Pittsburgh, what they used to call the Indian Stream Republic, where the border was rather messily drawn.
There was a house that was straddled the U.S.-Canadian border.
And in fact, the double bed straddled the U.S.-Canadian border.
And I think it was the man slept in America and his wife slept in Canada.
So that could be really complicated if you get out of bed the wrong side the morning.
But fantastic part of the world.
You know, the extraordinary thing when we talk about the borders is back then, if you'd say, crossed at one Vermont crossing and you were turned away because you were a jihadist terrorist, and you went 10 miles east and tried to cross at another one, they had no way of knowing in their computer that you'd been turned down just 10 minutes down the road at the other border crossing.
Amazon.com.
You know, if you're an Algerian terrorist and you go to order a book online at Amazon.com, they'll say in there, we have suggestions for you.
They'll know that you bought the A to Z of infidel slaying two years ago.
So in there, we have suggestions for you, they'll say, well, why don't you try buying suicide bombing for dummies?
Amazon.com is a more efficient miner of data than United States Customs and Immigration was on September the 11th.
Let's go to Shane, another dissatisfied caller from Louisiana.
Entire states seem to be dropping off the map from my casual slurs earlier in the hour.
Shane, you're on the air.
How are you doing today?
Good, good, thanks.
You're doing a great job there.
I'm a Republican and I'm from the New Orleans area.
I'm actually a drug rep, so I'm sure I'm hated by a lot of people for that as well.
All right, no problem.
Big farmer.
Yeah, well, I kind of take offense at some of the statements from Gulf Court and also from you regarding the recovery in the New Orleans area.
You know, what people failed to remember is that in the Gulf Coast, the water came in and then it left within eight hours and people were able to walk on their property that afternoon.
The problems in New Orleans lasted for four to five weeks where no one had access to their homes to start a recovery.
And that's a time where people had to pay rent in other areas.
They had relying on FEMA to live out of the state in a hotel room and whatever else.
And then, on top of that, they decide the water receives, they decide they do want to come back to New Orleans and give the American try and start putting their shoulders behind the work.
Well, the problem with that is the FEMA maps were delayed until May.
Yeah, I...
No one could even start rebuilding their houses and their properties.
What you're saying is that all of these small businesses that really drove the economy in the New Orleans market, they were away from their homes, unable to have housing of their own.
They're paying a mortgage on it, and they can't even touch it until May because of the irresponsibility of the FEMA, the federal government response, not the local government response.
Shane, Shane, this is a problem, though, with the expectation that in a sense the federal government is there to save you.
And this is the same issue, really, as on September 11th.
September 11th, we had all this government regulation, and unfortunately, the passengers on those first three planes realized in the end that the government wasn't up there with them.
The passengers on that fourth plane understood and were able to act in their own defense.
And at a certain level, that is a lesson not just for terrorism, but for life.
That in effect, when terrible things happen, the government is unlikely to be there for you.
And if it is going to be there for you, it's all but impossible that it will be there for you swiftly and efficiently.
That's just the reality of it.
It's the most efficient, inefficient spender of money.
No matter how many billions of dollars are involved, it still will not spend it efficiently or get it to you efficiently.
And so the difference is, I agree there are geographical differences, but it would have made an enormous amount of difference if the state of Louisiana had had a functioning state and municipal government in those areas.
And sadly, unfortunately, voters don't seem to be learning the lessons, and they seem all too anxious to re-elect some of those people.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush, 1-800-282-2882.
Walter Williams will be here tomorrow, back with more after this.
The Rush Limbaugh program.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush, 1-800-282-2882.
Addison in Mobile.
You're on the air.
Well, good morning.
I want to take strong exception to the previous caller concerning about how New Orleans fared poorer than everybody else and all their problems.
I was an emergency worker down there.
I've been in Florida all over the place on emergency work.
New Orleans actually fared better than anywhere else.
It was hit by Katrina or any of the other hurricanes that hit in the Gulf Coast.
If you go to Mississippi, there's not even hardly a foundation left.
People have nothing to come back to.
Him saying five weeks or eight weeks or whatever he said is absolutely incorrect.
They were able, most people, not all, but most people were able to get back to their homes right after the area was pumped out.
So, you know, the guy's just typical of all the people in New Orleans, a bunch of whiners, a bunch of losers.
And if you come down here, I dare anybody to come down here and really look.
Mississippi is absolutely devastated, and yet you don't hear these people whining.
You only hear the people in New Orleans whine.
Okay, okay, thanks, Addison.
I'm sure we'll be hearing from the whiners and losers down in the New Orleans area.
Even Rush listeners in that part of the world have a tendency to whine, according to Addison.