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Dec. 14, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:23
December 14, 2006, Thursday, Hour #1
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Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 Podcast.
If you have ever doubted what a cold, heartless town Washington, D.C. is feeding frenzy over the unfortunate illness to Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota is the one of the greatest illustrations yet.
I mean, within seconds of the news being reported, nobody cared about him.
All they were concerned about was who was going to control the Senate.
Hi, folks, nice to be with you.
Rush Rushlon bought the excellence and broadcasting network.
And I've just lost all audio in here.
Ah, there we go.
Now it's back.
You playing with buttons in there, Brian?
You playing with buttons in there, snurdly.
Now the audio's back.
I have it now.
It's the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, EIB, L. Rush Ball, and a program that meets and surpasses all audience expectations on a daily basis.
Before we get to the Tim Johnson stuff, and I'm going to spend a whole lot of time on it.
Um I want to give you a little heads up as to what's coming today.
We're going to go back and revisit the Barack Obama situation with Maureen Dowd yesterday.
This is unbelievable.
I didn't spend enough time analyzing this yesterday.
We're going to go back and play the soundbite.
I'll have to translate it for you because it's muddy.
Poverty statistics, interesting analysis here by uh by David Brooks in the New York Times today.
Uh oh, and by the way, uh you people have me in a bit of a quandary here.
I broke the story yesterday on Bill Nelson, uh dim wit senator from Florida going over to uh Damascus in meeting with uh the little tin horn dictator Basher Assad.
And I quoted what uh what Nelson said.
And so I'm getting emails all morning today from Rush, Rush, Rush!
You've got to talk about Bill Nelson.
He went to Damascus.
And I'm sitting here saying, what more do I have to do?
Uh I spent mucho, mucho time on this yesterday.
You people have a responsibility out there.
I mean, I'm holding up my end here to keep you on the cutting edge.
You have to pay attention when you are listening to the program.
These these emails are from people who were listening to the program because they quoted other things in the program.
Why didn't you talk about this?
My friends.
I know it's the holiday season and it's it's uh tempting to get lax out there, but uh snap two.
Also, uh headline here man executed for Miami bar slaying takes 34 minutes to die.
Wrong.
Took 27 years to die.
That is the way to look at this after all of these appeals and uh so forth and so on.
Somebody played a practical joke on the uh the hapless governor of Louisiana, uh Kathleen Blanco.
Uh a chance to dine with her as an auction item.
A chance to dine with Governor Kathleen Blanco fetched a winning bid of one dollar.
A fundraising auction by a group of business leaders, and uh they had to find some guy in the uh in the outer reaches of uh outer Mongolia to save a dolphin.
The guy had the longest arms of any human being in the world, had to reach into the dolphin's stomach through its mouth, and uh and withdraw or remove plastic from their stomachs.
Uh the comment on this coming up as well.
I want you to hear this audio soundbite, a little montage of the media coverage of uh of the uh sad situation involving Tim Johnson, the Democrat Senator from South Dakota yesterday.
Senator Tim Johnson has suffered a stroke.
The Democrats' control of the Senate could be imperil.
It could have enormous political implications.
If Senator Johnson were forced to leave the Senate, his replacement would be picked by the governor of South Dakota, a Republican.
That would mean that it would go back to 50-50 Republicans would control the Senate.
So the narrow control of the Democrats of the Senate would disappear.
Big change may be coming in the balance of power on Capitol Hill.
Senator Tim Johnson may have had a stroke.
What might this mean for the new Senate?
His condition could really determine control of the Senate.
A member of the U.S. Senate has suffered a stroke with control of the U.S. Senate decided by a single vote for the Democrats.
This could affect the balance of power.
There are possible political ramifications here.
His replacement would be chosen by the Republican governor, but this is a political matter, Tim.
And what are the ramifications?
If the Republicans were to become the majority party of the Senate again, Brian, in terms of Iraq policy, Supreme Court nominees, environmental policy, tax policy, very, very significant.
I mean, it didn't take but five seconds for the news to hit, and that's all anybody started talking about.
The media, the drive-by media.
That that town up there is uh it it can be so so cold.
And you know, here's the truth of the matter.
If Tim Johnson doesn't die, the Democrats will keep him on a respirator for two years if they have to to maintain control of the Senate.
They're not gonna let this happen.
Uh if he were to die, I can tell you right now what's going on.
I just lost the audio here.
Maybe I've got a dead battery.
Let me finish this.
I am now doing the program entirely one.
No, now the audio's back.
Something's going on here, Myron.
I'm talking the broadcast engineer.
Um at any rate.
Um what's happening right now, folks, I guarantee you is that moveon.org and a number of Democrats are getting ready to lobby the South Dakota governor, and you can just hear what they're gonna say.
You can just hear it.
The people spoke in November.
Uh uh the the the governor, you must recognize that the people of this country spoke and want a Democrat-controlled Senate.
The governor in the South Dakota's Republican.
Both houses of the South Dakota government are Republican.
Uh Republicans have been elected there uh recently in in droves.
Uh but the pressure would be brought to bear at all, and the media would join in and dump on this governor and try to pressure him into appointing a Democrat if it if it ever came to that.
Make no mistake this is what's going on uh uh behind the scenes, uh every eventuality being uh uh planned for.
Uh but it's it's still uh misses the point.
You know, he doesn't, I'm sure you've heard this by now.
If he doesn't die, he doesn't have to resign.
There's all kinds of precedent.
He doesn't even have to show up.
Um and you say, well, well, how does he vote?
He passes.
Uh or uh they find a way for him to vote.
I mean, this is this is not an unprecedented thing.
And it's uh it is a sad, sad commentary, I think, just to listen to the the total concern uh for this be the control of the Senate and not for Tim Johnson.
Uh Dingy Harry had a press conference, didn't say much.
We have the audio's I have lost the audio again here, Brian.
Uh ladies and gentlemen, until we get this fixed, I'm not going to be able to take any phone calls because I won't be able to hear anybody.
Uh but let's go to audio number soundbite number five.
Uh if uh if you will add this is Dingy Harry this morning, Capitol Hill about 1135 or so.
I spent yesterday afternoon and uh night with uh Johnson family.
Senator Dasher was with me all that time.
I was uh went home for a few hours last night, came back this morning.
I was in his room with him.
He really he really looks good.
I saw him, he looked great.
Uh to me, he looked very good.
It's that simple.
He looked very, very good.
He looks really good.
I saw him, he looks really good.
He said, I'm not gonna answer any medical questions because no matter what I tell you, it's not gonna be enough for you.
Uh and it it really didn't answer a whole lot of questions.
Everybody coming out of uh brain surgery ends up on the critical list, so there's not a whole lot to read there.
The doctor that treated him issued a statements.
Well, we don't know if he's gonna need more surgery or not.
Uh everybody's hopefully uh hoping for a normal recovery.
Let me take a quick break here, folks, and see if we can figure out this audio problem.
And I will be back in mere moments.
L. Rushboard serving humanity simply by showing up here on the EIB network.
And we are back, and the audio problem fixed itself.
I don't know what went wrong.
It could go wrong again, came back on its own, went out on its own, but it's uh it's held steady here for a while.
Don't need a new cable, Brian.
You can go ahead and get one ready to go, but don't uh have to be in a panicked hurry.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
Uh L. Rushball here, America's truth detector, doctor of democracy, and general all-round, harmless, lovable uh little fuzzball.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-288-2, and the email address is uh rush at eIBNet.com.
You know, I was just thinking, if I'm Tim Johnson, I'm hope he's sedated in the hospital when Dingy Harry showed up.
Uh Dingy Harry showed up there to spend uh I said the whole night, and uh and he had he had Tom Dashell uh with him.
You know, if I if I'm in the hospital and I see Dingy Harry walk in the door, uh I'm thinking the grim reaper has arrived.
Especially with Tom Dashell in Tokus.
Dashell's always reminded me of a mortician.
So uh my my hope is that Senator Johnson is uh is was sedated when Dingy Harry showed up.
Uh Dingy Harry did not say that he had spoken to him.
I want to go back, so I'm hoping he was sedated.
I want to go back to Barack Obama from uh from yesterday, ladies and gentlemen.
As you know, we had exclusive audio here.
There it went again.
You'll have to forgive me, ladies and gentlemen, but we have no clue why this has happened.
Well, bring anyway and try, but I don't think it's a cable.
Here are going to be able to listen to us try to fix this.
The uh in the process.
Oh my gosh, it looks like 14 snakes he's brought in here.
Now it's back.
You hand me the cable is not connected and it's back.
What do you want me to do with this?
Plug it into my unit?
Yep.
All right.
And I'll have to.
Please bear with me on this, ladies and gentlemen.
We have uh we don't play music here, well, we do, but we're not going to here.
Kind of unplugged.
And don't look up my dress down there, Brian.
Whatever you do.
Okay.
Got nothing.
Oh, now we get there we go.
There we go.
Okay.
Uh we're back.
Uh hopefully it was the cable and this is the fix.
And I apologize once again for this, uh, ladies and gentlemen.
This was not happening prior to the show at all.
Now, if I were a liberal Democrat, I would suspect sabotage.
I would say I was a sabotage on the on the part of, you know, the moveon.org or some uh sinister organization uh attempting to corrupt the integrity of today's uh excursion into broadcast excellence.
All right, here's here we go with Barack Obama.
As you know, he was up in New Hampshire.
Do you know, by the way, TV ads for Barack Obama are gonna start airing this weekend?
Presidential ads for Barack Obama in New Hampshire start airing this weekend, and Hillary, I think is starting to get panicked because she's called up all of Bubba's old buddies, Carville and Bagala and Joe Lockhart, uh, she had them over to dinner uh and uh to discuss what to do about this.
Uh her team wasn't there, of course, not they're all one team, of course, but uh publicly Carville and Bigala have said, well, we'll help, but we're not officially on the uh on the team.
That allows them to have more movement and uh and latitude under the radar.
Anyway, Obama up in New Hampshire being treated like a god making a speech.
Now, apparently, before he made the speech, Maureen Dowd had written something about his big ears.
And Obama, after the speech, made a beeline for Maureen Dowd, who was in the audience to tell her that he didn't appreciate her writing about his big ears.
Now the audio, there's a lot of noise here, and it's very muddy.
I'll translate it for you, but here's how it sounded.
Talk about my put you on notice.
I'm very sensitive about what I told him, was I was pleased relentlessly when I was a kid about my beings.
Trying to toughen you up.
We're just trying to toughen you up.
Here is what Barack Obama said.
Talk about my ears.
So I just want to put you on notice.
I'm very sensitive about what I told them was that I was teased relentlessly when I was a kid about my big ears.
Now there are many aspects of this, folks, that we need to delve into and explore.
For one thing, I mean, you know me.
If the guy's sensitive about his big ears, we need to give him a new name.
Like Dumbo.
But that doesn't quite get it.
You know, just d calling him calling him that just how about Barack Hussein Odumbo?
Uh well, if he's sensitive, but stop and think about this.
This is a this is a this is a man being lauded as the savior of the country, a presidential candidate ready to be anointed, and he can't handle being teased about his big ears.
And he goes out to Maureen Dowd and says, I am putting you on notice.
Is that a threat?
I want to put you on notice.
Can you imagine, like I said yesterday, if if uh let's say something about me, uh I'm very sensitive about whatever it is, X. And the papers write about it and make fun of.
Can you imagine if I sought out Maureen Dowd or anybody and said, you know, I'm gonna put you on notice.
I've been teased about that ever since I was a kid, and I don't like it, and I don't want that would be the whole column the next day about how thin skinned I am, how I can't take it, this and that, and I am a complainer and a whiner, and I was trying to influence uh uh objective journalists and so forth, but instead Modo says, We're just trying to toughen you up.
But this is revealing on a lot of levels.
It is an overt threat uh to to go out and say I'm putting you on notice.
I wonder what would happen if McCain did that.
And McCain, right?
You don't say that about me.
I'm putting you on notice right now.
You hear, sister?
You hear it.
Can you imagine what the reaction will be if any Republican went up or any any conservative went up to member of the media?
I'm putting you on notice right now.
Uh how bullied can the drive-by media be by these candidates?
And of course, what we Hillary has her testicle lockbox uh and and it works.
Uh she gets kid glove treatment, softball questions wherever she goes, uh, and we've already attributed this to the to the uh testicle lock box that she has.
But here's the next thing, and this is something that everybody seems to be deaf about.
He seems fragile.
This guy actually seems fragile.
He is expecting not to be teased about th what are the editorial cartoonists gonna do with this now.
Oh, they'll do this some of them will, Mr. Snerdley.
Some of some of them will that you know you were wrong yesterday, and you're gonna be wrong today.
I bet you yesterday that this Tehran Holocaust didn't happen convention would blossom and uh and and and leave uh Iran, and it has.
People seriously debating this now in little, you know, little oddball corners of the world.
Uh but the I I think I've already seen editorial cartoons, maybe on conservative websites that are parodying uh uh that that's what editorial cartoonists do.
They exaggerate the slightest physical characteristic.
But at any rate, how fragile can he be?
Uh he has been given cr uncritical, not only uncritical, but fawning positive press coverage for a couple of years now, then one liberal columnist quips about his ears.
His ears, and he's fretting about it, and he can't wait to go put her on notice and tell her he doesn't like it because he's been made fun of about it uh uh ever since his kid.
If he's if he's so sensitive about his ears, imagine how his tent will fold when he gets deep into a campaign.
Wait a hillary pulls out the tech testicle lockbox for him in the middle of a campaign.
Wait till Hillary Clinton really gets down and dirty and the guns start blazing.
What's this guy gonna do?
We may have discovered an Achilles heel for this guy.
He's not tough enough for this.
He I mean, to be really, I'm not I'm not overestimating this, nor am I exaggerating this.
I mean, to go out there and say, I was teased relentlessly when I was a kid about my big years, I'm I'm very sensitive about we're just trying to toughen you up.
That alone means that they know he needs toughening up and that they're gonna try to help him along with it.
I just there's a lot to learn in this.
One little episode, and nobody but us, nobody but me is playing this audio for the very reasons that you and I have discussed.
Plus, it's tough to hear uh because it is uh it's so it's so muddled.
Uh Ray in New York City, uh grab a quick call here before the break.
Nice to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Uh good afternoon, Rush, and Diddle some the big apple.
Thank you, sir.
I was just wondering, uh, it's i it's my understanding that uh that the senatorial term ends and that uh for him to uh continue, he's going to have to take the uh oath of office again at the uh beginning of his new term in office, and uh if he doesn't have the real authority uh understand what he's doing, how is he going to uh uh uh take his oath?
Yeah, minor problem.
Uh he serves a six-year term.
Uh only he uh can resign that term or do something to be you know thrown out of the Senate on an ethics charge, and that's not that's not relevant here.
Uh the oath-taking ceremony that you all see in public is is basically ceremonial.
It's it's done uh in private in uh in on on another occasion.
Uh that we know this because the the controversy that arose over whether or not Keith Ellison from Minnesota was going to take the oath of office uh on a Bible or on the Quran.
Uh that was a big controversy that uh that swirled.
But uh that that's that's that's a that's a minor problem will have no effect on this because already has taken the oath of office as a senator uh uh six years ago.
He's only got two years to go in uh in this term.
So, you know, that's that's don't don't look for anything like that.
There aren't any technicalities here, uh, folks.
There's all kinds of uh precedent.
Uh and believe me, if they have to, the the Democrats will keep the poor guy on a respirator for two years.
Uh if if it comes to that in order to maintain their control, because that's obviously all they really care about here.
With talent on loan from God.
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
Uh, ladies and gentlemen, let me also apologize in advance, if necessary here.
I'm a little hoarse today.
Uh feeling great, feeling fine, no illness, was up late last night consuming adult beverages.
Uh and uh some for some reason normally uh uh not getting much sleep does not affect my voice, but uh just uh just a slight bit hoarse today.
Before before I had a big meeting yesterday afternoon, and when I finished that, I went home, and before I went out to the thing I had to do last night, I um I watched Sylvester Stallone's new movie, uh Rocky Balboa.
Uh as a powerful influential member of the media, I am shown these things in private in my own home theater.
And uh, you know, I before I put it in a machine to watch it, I said, what else is there to tell in this story?
What if there's been Rocky through Rocky V. Uh and I have to tell you, I was I was I was surprised.
I was uh I was dumb that's a great movie.
And I'm not a movie critic, so I can't I can't that that probably is good.
Uh I just look at it as as a normal consumer.
But I it's going to appeal to all demographics.
It is it's a it's a great love story.
There is a fabulous scene in this movie uh between Rocky and his son, and it's really poignant because the son really doesn't like Rocky because Rocky is so big, lives in Philadelphia.
Rocky's so huge that the kid can't get out from under his shadow, he doesn't think.
And uh uh without giving away the plot uh too much, uh Rocky's kid begs him not to do something that would put him more and more in the spotlight again.
Uh come on, Dad, it's my turn.
You've had your turn.
You've got to let me out of your shadow.
Now, in today's age, the odds are good that a father, oh, oh, I don't want to hurt my son.
Oh, okay, son.
Well, I'll I'll just slink away into the background and I don't I don't want to get in your way, you know, how we're all touchy-feely like Barack Obama is portraying himself to be with his big ears.
Uh but Rocky, and this is this occurs on the street in Philadelphia, Rocky just gives this kid an inspirational tongue-lashing, like you um like like it it it surprised me, given the uh movie climate and the Hollywood climate and the whole cultural climate that we uh that we're in today.
And it looks like all the other Rocky movies.
They haven't jazzed it up at a whole bunch of computer uh generated bells and whistles and uh and things like this.
I was really surprised.
I did not what else can they tell in this story?
But they um they have found it.
Stallone wrote it, I guess, it's and directed it.
It uh really good.
I was I was surprised.
But anyway, uh ladies and gentlemen, I I hope here that by continuing to exercise the uh the vocal cords uh that they will strengthen during the uh the course of the program.
During the break, snurdly continuing to argue with me that editorial cartoonists nor anybody else will uh uh make fun of Obama over his long-held sensitivity since childhood over his uh dumbo type ears, his elephant ears.
And uh Snurley says, You don't understand how this is gonna play out.
His whole method here is to portray himself as just an average guy.
And when he goes out there and actually admits that he's sensitive, and he was made fun of as a child?
Well, that's everybody can relate to that.
Yes, but that's not how you deal with crisis.
You don't deal with adversity by basing my feeling.
Stop it.
That's that's you know, you you can be Oprah Winfrey and you can just be a star on the Oprah show, but you cannot uh be elected president with that kind of uh of behavior.
Uh so anyway, Barak Hussein no dumbo.
And besides, you know what?
He did not go public with this ear sensitivity thing.
He didn't talk, he he sought Modo out in the audience, and nobody aired that.
Well, somebody, I guess it was on C SPAN, but nobody's picked it up from C-SPAN except, of course, I and he tried he he didn't know the microphone was still on when this happened.
He thought he was in a private moment with her.
So he hasn't gone out there and uh tried to build this bridge, this bond of relatability with average schlubs over the face.
You think it's gonna play well at Union Headquarters?
How many of those guys out there worrying about the things they were made fun of?
They just smash people that made fun of them.
They just get rid of them.
Jimmy Hoffa.
Concrete, giant stadium.
Six every woman with a child.
What?
Every woman with a child, what?
We'll relate to it.
Oh, well, fine, then we stop women from voting in 06 or 08.
If not Don't be silly in there.
Uh Richie, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, you're next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Yeah, Rush.
Uh first and foremost, this is a huge honor.
Thank you very much, sir.
Appreciate it.
I'm glad you called.
With Tim Johnson thing, it's like with all these pundits and whatever, it's like first and foremost, let's get this guy healthy.
You know, I don't like Tim Johnson.
Um I've never voted for him.
I'm an NRA member.
Pro-life.
I'm as Republican as you can get, I believe.
But let's get him healthy.
Let's pray for him and his family that everything's gonna be fine.
He's gonna be upright and we can knock him out of the Senate with votes.
Let's be honest about this, shall we?
Sure.
Let's just be honest about this.
The first in Washington, in Washington, this is not everybody there, but well, the moment this news broke, the first thing that went through a lot of Democrats' mind was, oh no, we might lose the majority.
What about Tim Johnson?
I don't care.
We're gonna lose the majority.
And there are probably some Republicans going, oh, right, all right, we get to screw the Democrats again.
That's that uh it it it is human nature.
That town is very cold, the media, the drive-by's, they are just beside themselves because they think they engineered this majority for the Democrats.
And so they are that's the that's the first area of thought uh that uh that they experienced.
I went to Democrat Underground, one of the Kook websites uh this morning, and you know what they think?
They are speculating, it's not just one or two of them either.
They are speculating that just as the GOP was behind the death of Paul Wellstone, so is the GOP perhaps involved in the illness of uh South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson.
Ron in Detroit, uh glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hey, thanks, Russ.
Big fan.
Thank you.
Uh just before your show came on, I heard that uh there's solar winds today, supposed to be messing everything up as far as audio and stuff.
Yeah, it was solar flare spot, Sunspot 930 that uh in in Sunspot 930 yesterday uh hit a giant solar flare.
Uh there was so much radiation uh that that was uh uh emitted from this flare that they had to move the astronauts to the uh most well-protected areas of the shuttle and the space station up there.
Uh and and it was aimed right at Earth.
Everything just aligned in a way as this flare just was aimed right at us.
And it all it means the flare's not gonna reach us, but there's all kinds of radiation.
Now, it if it depending on the angle at which the radiation hits, it could miss the earth, bounce off the atmosphere, or plunge right through it.
It could destroy some satellites at the worst.
It could uh it could take a lot of electrical grids offline at the worst, uh, or it could just cause interruptions.
Um so that then that I think that all all during the day today that this is a this is a possibility, but I haven't heard any news about any such interruptions.
Uh but no, they've mapped the sun.
Everything won Every sunspot has a number.
And they know when these things happen, it was huge.
I mean, you know, the the sun, uh this is another thing when we start talking about global warming and the universe.
All you have to do is learn a smidgen about the sun to learn how insignificant we are.
The power in the sun.
You ever do any of you ever stop to think when you hear that the earth is billions and billions of years old?
Or if you don't be the believe that, that it's millions and millions of years old.
If you don't believe that, if you think it's 12,000 years old.
Stop and think, though.
For whatever number of years greater than any of us can comprehend, the sun has kept exploding.
It's just a giant, never-ending nuclear explosion.
This doesn't just happen out of thin air.
Do you ever think one night you go to bed?
What if the sun goes out tonight?
What if it just stops?
And there's no daylight tomorrow.
Do you ever think about what would happen?
That would be the end of us.
It would be the end of us.
Don't know how long it would take, but it would be the end of us.
So we've mapped the sum of study the scientists have studied this, and all these sunspots have the um have identifiers.
This uh this particular uh uh explosion, uh, and by the way, that we're in a period here of extreme uh sunspot activity.
Some people even speculate that it is a factor, and I wonder why that the sun might actually be a factor in uh in global warming.
Uh uh it's uh it's a risky assessment, of course, since uh the sun is our only heat source on this plant.
To think that it might have a relationship to global warming is a risky scientific step to take because nobody's gonna give you money to fund your research grant based on that.
Anyway, quick timeout, we'll be back and continue with uh much more right after this on the EIB network.
Lots of weird things happening out there today.
Um teacher in New Jersey has been hospitalized after opening a letter she received with a strange substance, the substance has not been identified yet, and uh school, uh high school in Dallas has been evacuated for reasons unknown at the time.
Uh well, I don't know.
They they can't find the E. coli.
They thought it was the green onions.
Now it wasn't the green onions.
Then they thought it was the white onions, not the white onions.
Now they think the E. coli is in the lettuce.
Uh they can't find it.
They can't find the um the source of this.
David Brooks in the New York Times today gives out his annual Sydney Awards, and there's an interesting little passage.
You know, we talk about capitalism, socialism, big government socialism, and uh poverty on this program quite a bit.
And uh it's always been interesting to me that no matter what we do to resolve poverty, the percentages of people who remain in poverty are consistent.
Uh ever since the war on poverty began, which is 1965, uh, the number of people that uh uh expressed as a percentage are in poverty doesn't change.
However, their lifestyles have uh measurably.
It's in uh it's uh listen to the details here.
He uh Brooks here quotes uh uh Nicholas Eberstat who um had a peach recently in the uh policy review magazine called the mismeasure of poverty.
He goes back and looks at how the poverty rate is calculated, and he finds that it is based on idiosyncratic assumptions about how the economy and family budgets worked in 65.
In other words, the way we calculated and defined poverty when we started the war on poverty has not changed.
In the last 41 years, we still calculate poverty in the same static fashion that we always have.
He then observes two realities that are masked by our current statistics.
One is heartening and one is disheartening.
The first is that people living under the poverty line poverty line are materially much better off than they were three decades ago.
The people who live below the poverty line today live in much bigger homes.
Three-quarters of the people who live below the poverty line own at least one motor vehicle.
They spend roughly twice as much as they report as income, and not because they're going into debt.
In general, poor people today live, and this is the money statistic here.
Poor people today live at about the same standard of living as middle class people did in this country in the 1960s.
Now, what's the negative aspect of this that Mr. Eberstat found?
Well, they live with great insecurity.
In fact, relatively few people live permanently in poverty, but nearly a third of the U.S. population dips into poverty from time to time.
And this is true of every income quintile.
If you break income down into five levels, five categories called quintiles, uh, and put people in there, you'll find people move in and out of those quintiles over the course of their lives, families and individuals routinely.
Uh, and yet to many on the left and Democrats, life's a zero-sum game.
You're born to poverty, you're stuck in poverty, which is why they uh for the longest time advocated abortion in the case of poverty.
Well, who would want to want to why why why bring a child into the world in abject poverty stricken conditions?
Which prompted uh people like me to go out and look at all the great achievers in the world who were born to poverty.
Most people are, in fact, in the uh course of human history, most people have been born into circumstances that you and I clearly would consider to be poverty stricken.
That wasn't a reason.
Uh, but the people are never what that you give a tax cut, uh, that means government gets less revenue.
It's just the exact opposite.
They think the pie never gets bigger, and only the rich are getting an increasingly bigger share of the pie.
Not true in uh in any fashion.
In fact, I've got uh Alan Reynolds at uh at Wall Street Journal today has an interesting piece on that as well, which I will get to later on in the program.
Milton Friedman had a great quote on poverty.
He said, if you pay people to be poor, you will have a lot of poor people.
Uh it just can be borne out in actual experience.
If you build a homeless shelter or a food kitchen in a neighborhood, ask it any beat cop, the place will be overrun inside of a three or four-day period.
Then there were people there before.
You start giving it away, you'll have a lot of people taking it.
And if you start paying people to be poor, you will have a lot of poor people.
Uh for some people it's easier to not have to do much to accept very little rather than go out and work hard, be industrious to try to prosper.
Just it's just human nature, and this has always been the argument I have used to establish the fact that conservatism is the ultimate ideology of compassion, because it is the one that trusts people, it has confidence in people, not doesn't view people with a condescending contempt, uh, and wants the very best for people, and we conservatives understand that that's brought about by people acting in their own self-interest, which is not selfishness.
John in Canton, Ohio, I'm glad you waited.
You're next on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Yes, it's an honor.
I understand that, sir.
Thank you.
Yes, with Harry Reid giving his expert medical opinion on Senator Johnson, I was wondering if he had stopped by Terry Schiavo's room if he would have felt that she looked like she was in good shape.
I knew this was gonna I I just I I knew that the comparisons to Shivo were going to be coming.
And the reason, by the way, folks, if you might think this to be rather insensitive, uh, but that Shivo case, uh that that that uh uh ruffled a lot of feathers uh in in practically every segment of society, and of course, the Democrats are out there, let her die.
Let her die.
The the the all of the medical information is that she's a vegetable.
Let her die.
And of course, the other side said, No, no, no, no, we can't just indiscriminately kill life.
Uh husband stands to make big insurance money, whatever the arguments were.
So now here we are, and we don't even know if these are these if similar circumstances doctors have not indicated they are.
I mean, they the the the the uh preliminary indications are that uh this is not as bad as originally feared, certainly was not a stroke.
So now people, whoa, what if Tim Johnson ends up the same way?
Will the Democrats uh be willing to only if the family wants it?
So you can't leave the family uh angle out of this.
Look, let me just put this to bed again once and for all.
If if Harry Reed has to keep Tim Johnson on a respirator for two years to maintain control of the Senate, that's what will happen, folks.
I just got a very interesting email from a guy who is participating in a gallop poll via email that mentions me.
And I can't go by without mentioning this to you.
So we'll do that when we get back from the top of the hour timeout here.
Be patient, folks.
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