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Jan. 2, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:13
January 2, 2007, Tuesday, Hour #3
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And happy new year from KOGO Radio in San Diego on the West Coast of the United States and uh wishing for you and yours a healthy and happy 2007.
I know it's going to be a remarkable year here at the EIB network.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh.
Rush returns tomorrow, and of course the latest at Rushlimbaugh.com as well.
And your calls coming up today at 1800-282-2882.
Now let me shift gears, because this story is just too funny.
This story is just too good.
This is an uh in a where does it come from?
Oh, this is our local Pulitzer Prize winning San Diego Union Tribune editorial.
Threatened species.
Subhead, time to address the polar bear decline.
Decline.
This editorial goes on to congratulate the Bush administration for listing the polar bear as, quote, threatened under the Endangered Species Act, which is on its way to being listed as endangered.
And that the whole thing is linked to global warming.
The editorial cites that the polar bear population, believed to be between 20 and 25,000 in five countries, has been shrinking.
And it goes on to deride the Bush administration for not taking global warming more seriously, calling on Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to use the example of the polar bear decline to get the administration on the right side of global warming.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, none of that is true.
Nothing that I said right there, except the name of the Interior Secretary, is true.
That was true, Dirk Kempthorne.
I have no idea who he is either.
But here is the truth.
A little over a year ago, three environmental groups, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Greenpeace, the three of them, sued the Bush administration to force the designation under the Endangered Species Act from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designation as threatened or endangered.
They were going for endangered.
They settled for threatened because the Bush administration rolled over and settled the lawsuit.
So it was on the settlement of a lawsuit that Secretary Kempthorne made last week's press conference announcement.
The facts are that the polar bear is not threatened at all.
Mitch Taylor is a polar bear biologist with the government of Nunavut, a territory I hope I said that correctly.
I don't mean to be satirical about it, a territory in the country of Canada.
Now, to the extent there is still such a country, there is a part of it called Nunavut, or something like that.
And according to biologist polar bear biologist Mitch Taylor, the uh polar bears are well increasing.
In a 12-page report to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Taylor stated, quote, no evidence exists to suggest that both bears and the conservation systems that regulate them will not adapt and respond to the new condition, done quote.
In other words, Taylor said the polar bears adapted from grizzly bears about 250,000 years ago because well, there was global cooling.
There was more ice.
And they developed about uh 125,000 years ago as a distinct species, again because of climate change.
In other words, God's creation adapts.
If it's gonna get warmer or colder, which it has many times over history and prehistory, the polar bear adapts.
In the Toronto Star in May, uh Mitch Taylor, the polar bear biologist with Nunavut, opined, quote, of the thirteen populations of polar bears in Canada, eleven are stable or are increasing.
They are not going extinct or even appear to be affected at the present time.
Now here's the killer.
The article from the Pulitzer Prize winning Union Tribune indicates a reduction.
The polar bear population has been shrinking.
Here is Mr. Taylor.
The current population is, he says, between 22,000 and 25,000.
The problem with that number as a shrinking number is that a half century ago, yes, even before SUVs doomed the planet, there were only 8,000 to 10,000 polar bears.
Now there's 22 to 25,000 and they're being labeled threatened again because of a political agenda that is willing to twist the truth to even twist the scientists into a pretzel to come up with some kind of reason why the Bush administration ought to be slapping higher taxes on you and taking away your vehicle.
That's what this is all about.
The polar bears are not declining.
The polar bears are increasing.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, here's the kicker.
Oh, there's more.
As if you thought that wasn't fun enough.
How about this one?
The United States government, the same one that is now classifying the polar bear as quote, threatened.
The United States government also sanctions the hunting of polar bears by native tribes in the Arctic area.
Let that one just sink in for a minute.
For sensitivity and political correctness reasons, namely that these survivalist tribes have a tradition and heritage of killing baby seals and whales and polar bears and what have you up there, because that's what they eat.
We've got to let them continue, of course, in their native indigenous pre-European oppression ways.
So of course, they're killing polar bears is no problem to the threatened polar bear.
How do you like that one?
Oh, and as a r this business about the loss of the sea ice habitat, we've all seen on TV, I saw this story on this that followed the environmentalist wacko position showing the polar bear running across the uh bare earth with just patches of ice, like he's lost.
I mean, if he didn't have ice, he'd be lost.
Ladies and gentlemen, the polar bear, like everyone else, would rather be warm.
That's why he has a fur coat about 25 inches thick.
You know, he only weighs about 94 pounds, but it looks like he weighs about 800 pounds, because that's the fur coat he's wearing.
Because it's damn cold up there, and he's had to adapt to it.
By the way, this business of the Greenland ice melt, the Greenland ice cap is melting, depriving the uh, as say the environmentalist groups, depriving the polar bear of his traditional hunting grounds where he can use the ice shelf to hunt the seals.
Wait a minute, I thought we were protecting the seals.
Anyway, don't get me off onto that.
Let's go back to the ice melt.
Greenland ice was melting at a more rapid rate in 1991 than in 2005.
The Greenland ice cap is actually think uh uh thickening.
The Greenland ice cap is actually thinking.
Thickening.
Now, it is thickening in a part.
By the way, why is it called Greenland class?
Why is it called Greenland?
Why do we call this place covered with ice green land?
Because a thousand years ago, when the Vikings discovered it, it wasn't covered with ice.
Archaeologists have uncovered Viking settlements with uh agriculture, including, including grape vines, for crying out loud.
Now, grape vines don't traditionally grow in the Arctic.
They're traditionally a warmer kind of thing.
Now I'm no farmer, but you know, give me a break.
I think I've seen grape vines in like Mediterranean countries and Napa Valley and maybe even upstate New York for a couple of months.
But this stuff is so crazy about Greenland.
Why do you think it's called Greenland?
There wasn't any ice a thousand years ago when the Vikings found it.
And indeed, there is a climatological people, climatological people will tell you this.
Evidence that several times, uh maybe more than several times during the course of time, Greenland has been covered and uncovered by ice.
It comes and goes.
My goodness.
By the way, there's nothing we can do to stop it.
It kind of comes and goes on its own.
It freezes up and it melts down.
And neither you nor your SUV can do anything about it.
The arrogance of the idea that humans can slow down, stop, or reverse.
Such long-term monumental geop, you know, physical things like whether or not Greenland is getting more icy or less icy is the is the height of arrogance.
And by the way, is there a reason why it appears that in some respects the globe is getting warmer?
It's the oldest reason in the existence of our planet.
It's the oldest reason in the existence of our planet.
This in the telegraph from the UK over the weekend, quote, headline.
The truth about global warming, it's the sun that's to blame.
Here's the story.
Quote, global warming has finally been explained.
The earth is getting hotter because the sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past thousand years.
Oh, really?
When was the last time it burned brightly?
A thousand years ago.
The last time Greenland was green.
The polar bears, by the way, survived that meltdown a thousand years ago, and they'll survive now.
The real question is, will our common sense survive?
Will our freedoms survive?
Will our choice of an SUV to drive survive the current madness about global warming?
I'll take your call at 1800-282-2882 after the Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh rush back tomorrow here on the EIB network.
I was just watching CNN's coverage of the demonstrations against Saddam Hussein's execution.
They had to keep taking the scope of the you know the picture down narrower and narrower because it kept showing blank spaces in behind because there's only about 20 guys in the demonstration.
Yikes.
All right, Patrick and San Luis Obispo, you're next on the Roch Limbaugh program.
Hi, Patrick.
Hi, how's it going?
Good.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you.
I was uh little uh against your optimism about the American people and how smart they are.
Uh maybe it's not that they're not smart, but they kind of just don't care anymore.
I I uh do high speed internet.
And I go into many different uh you know, values of income of life of people and uh San Luis Obispo County and Sonoma County, uh all over.
And my consensus is people are just happy with the little piece of pie or the bigger piece of pyre or the biggest piece of pie that they have.
And um they really don't care too much about who's elected.
Well, because and this is uh I guess uh maybe you're saying the same thing I am, uh, because as the polls are showing, the that people generally speaking are very happy with what they're doing personally.
They think, for instance, that as in terms of looking at the economy in 2007, that they're very optimistic the economy will be very good as to them, but many of them say, but it probably won't be very good overall, uh, because they've been led by the propaganda of the drive-by media to believe we're suddenly in some terrible uh economy when it's uh, of course, a very good economy.
So, you know, I don't know, uh Patrick, that that you would not have faith in the American people.
All I was saying is I think the that the majority of Americans continue to espouse the typical American and I think unique American philosophy of optimism, of hope, of feeling that yes, this year will be better than last because last year was better than the year before, that yes we have adversity, yes we have things to overcome, and the more the better because we can't overcome them in freedom.
There are opportunities to in this country not available elsewhere.
People can rise to uh whatever level they want to rise to.
So, I mean, that's what I was saying, and I've you know I'll stick with that, see if anybody else disagrees.
Here's Ron and Gregory, uh, is it Michigan?
Ron, go ahead.
Yeah.
Um nice talking to you.
Let's work on a year, 1953 at the North Pole at Thule Air Force Base.
And the ice cap gets bigger every year, believe me.
It melts in the summertime because the sun is shining twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for for four months.
Right.
Then there's two months where it changes.
Right now it's thirty below zero at Thule Air Force Base, and when a storm comes, it comes a hundred miles an hour, and it covers valleys, it covers everything with another six or eight or ten feet of snow.
Well, there you go.
Now, Ron, you haven't been there since nineteen fifty-three, though.
You don't know that it it's it doesn't have a lawn out there today.
Believe me.
All the water in Gulf of Mexico where I go and different places, the Detroit River, uh it's lower than it's ever been.
And it's the ice cap, if it it just ain't going to melt.
Well, you know, it melts and then it freezes, and this is what it does, as you point out, uh, because of the soak of the seasons.
Now I would remind people it's warmer in the summer and cooler in the winter, and this is true on the planet Earth, and therefore when you're seeing these melting pictures uh in the summertime, that's natural and it happens.
There'll also be a refreezing in the winter time.
We had a river up there that was a hundred feet wide, two foot deep, and ran twenty-five miles an hour in the summertime.
In the wintertime, there is no water in that in that river.
It's empty.
There's nothing, just rock.
All right, Ron, thanks.
Thanks for the call.
I appreciate it.
By the way, if you thought that uh human beings are so knowledgeable and you know everything's been discovered and everything is we know about our planet, and we know enough to know that it's our greenhouse gases and cowflatulence that's causing the uh, you know, the warming and the green land is becoming green again and all the rest of that nonsense.
Uh in 2006, scientists around the world found uh hundreds, perhaps thousands, of um new species.
In fact, scientists now say uh animal species that had previously not been documented.
New frogs and toads and fishes and snakes and all the rest of it.
Of the world's estimated uh uh th that in fact, I'm I'm reading now again from the Pulitzer Prize winning Union Tribune here in San Diego.
In fact, scientists estimate that only one tenth of the world's estimated ten million species are actually known.
So all the time we're finding out new plants and animals that have previously not been documented.
Don't you think that flies in the face of the idea that a m that that the we know so much about our planet?
We know how it works, we know how it heats up, we know how it how it cools down, we know about the weather, we know about everything because we're human beings and we know everything, and I know that the tailpipe of your SUV, plus that cow out there in the pasture, is causing uh green land to melt.
See how absurd global warming sounds when you actually talk about facts?
What do you think?
1 800-282-2882.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush.
Here's Greg in Farner, Tennessee.
Hi, Greg, welcome.
Hi, Roger, good to talk to you.
I was just uh listening to your earlier remarks, and it just seems to me that every time you talk about the left, and it doesn't matter if you're talking about news or you're talking about so-called scientists, it seems like instead of starting off with research and then getting conclusions based on facts and then formulating an agenda based on those facts, the leftists will get an agenda and then they'll say, Well, we need this collusion conclusion to to support this agenda, and then we go out and we do research.
And then the any facts or any people we come across that don't agree with our with our conclusions or our agenda, we just basically throw them out, and we we insert f either make up facts out of whole cloth or take stuff that seems to support it.
I mean it just seems to be a common thread through through all of it.
Well, there's a lot of that.
Uh there's also a lot of this that uh you'll find that a study will come out saying uh this and back in the 70s it was global cooling, you know, we're going into a new ice age.
And whatever it is, it's seized upon by the left as another reason why government ought to get bigger, taxes ought to be higher, and you ought to be restricted with some further regulation of your uh of uh your impossibly irresponsible behavior in order to uh uh to uh uh uh uh uh further the public good.
And it doesn't matter what they seize upon.
It's if it's cooling, it's uh the same story.
If it's warming, it's the same story.
Government always has to get bigger, taxes get higher, regulations have to increase because you just aren't responsible enough to live your own life and decide where your paycheck ought to go.
In other words, it doesn't matter what the subject is.
The answer is always bigger government, more intrusive government, a government that can give you everything you want and need, And as President Ford pointed out when he was president, such a government can also take from you everything you have.
I'm Roger Hedgecock, in for Rush Limbaugh.
Rush, of course, uh will be here tomorrow.
Uh we're going to uh continue with open phones uh with all kinds of uh discussion we've got oh this is one of my favorite ones.
I'm just warming up to this.
One of my favorite topics on this environmentalist crusade is people deciding what you should eat.
Is there anything more insulting to common sense and a sense of personal responsibility that somebody else is going to tell me what I should eat?
I mean, not just give me recommendations, not just say, hey, this is better than that, and here's a study and so forth.
No, you cannot eat this in this city.
People are doing it all over the country.
We're gonna fight back right after this.
All right, before we get to the latest nanny state direction of what food you can eat and what you can't.
Here's Art in uh Shepard, is it uh Montana?
Mart, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program and happy new year.
Same to you, Roger.
I haven't talked to you in about seven months, but you were one hundred percent about right about everything except how Greenland got its name.
Oh, how did it get its name then?
Well, I said the Vikings a thousand years ago.
Well, they did.
It was the Vikings.
In fact, it was all of Norse land.
People forget that the Norse controlled everything down to Normandy and all the way up and including Finland and part of Russia today.
Right.
Right.
But anyways, at that time it was regarded that people had to have a certain amount of land once they to be a sire of a family or something so on.
And Denmark controlled both Iceland and Greenland.
But Greenland could not absorb the population growth that was occurring throughout all of Scandinavia and Normandy.
So that what they did was they called Iceland, Iceland, which was basically pretty nice land, and called Greenland, Greenland, in order to get people to move to Greenland.
Because it was farther away from it was farther away for one thing.
Right.
It's a lot of road their way.
But the land was basically equivalent to what New England is today with a lot of rocks on it and not very good for agriculture, but good for raising animals.
And what they did, if you d do examine the archaeological detail up there in Greenland, you will find that it looks very much like New England today with the rock walls all around the landholders, and inside that they planted where they had good ground.
They planted their grapevines, as you said.
They planted their crops and uh other types of crops in other places which didn't require as fertile as soil.
But then my point was my point was Art that they didn't have to dig through ice to do all that.
There wasn't any ice.
No, they didn't.
They I mean the ice cap was much farther back.
It was uh good land.
Uh in fact uh the archaeologists that examine the people that came there, they were the huge Norsemen that you think of when you think of the invaders to uh England.
Right.
Uh but when they uh uh civil when the population started dropping at the end, they had lost quite a bit in stature.
In fact, they lost over a foot in height because the amount of food available was no longer not longer there.
Uh well, but here's my point.
My point is today we're being sold that the uh melting of the Greenland ice, the retreat of this ice uh uh uh field is uh bec uh uh caused by human beings and by George Bush personally, and it's uh it's a harbinger of uh disaster to come.
That's right.
Uh by if you look into all the scientific data that is available to the general public right now, you will fan find that man is number nine in the cause of global warming.
There are eight other causes ahead of it.
I could list them for you if you're interested.
Uh you can list one through eight.
What are they?
One through eight.
Number one is the sun.
Number two is the seventy-one percent of the earth that's covered with either water or ice, and that water vapor in the air.
Uh number three is carbon dioxide, which has always been.6 percent in the atmosphere.
The next one is ozone.
Then comes uh anaerobic bacteria, insects, then comes basically forest fires, and after that comes geothermal events, and then comes man.
Okay, so volcanoes and then man.
That's right.
Unbelievable.
All right, good uh good work.
Uh thank you.
I appreciate it, Art.
Here's David in Lowell, Massachusetts.
David, welcome to the Rush Show and Happy New Year.
Thank you, and happy new year to you, and thank uh God for um uh audible media as opposed to print invisible.
Um that's where I get the truth.
Um what I found out through listening to the radio is that uh scientists uh uh you know have obviously landed on Mars and it's being talked about audibly you know the stuff that we need to know is you know anyway I said that already but um the um the ice gaps on Mars are getting smaller and that you know they landed on Mars and they've been studying Mars for a long time you know they find out of what what is the reason for that obviously the Earth does not export any heat to Mars, you know it's it's cyclical sunspot activity.
You know, and, you know, this has clued me in on this argument for a long time.
You know, it's the same reason here, you know.
This is a great point, Mark.
This is a great point, David.
I think that what you're talking about is that as scientists look at the other planets and they see impact from this increase in solar energy, the sun is now burning more brightly than at any time during the past thousand years, according to a study by Swiss and German scientists out of the Max Planck Institute.
Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen Germany or something like that.
Uh the the uh the fact is that the sun is simply shining a lot brighter a lot hotter things around the sun are warming up I hope everybody's following this now and therefore you can look not only at this planet but at other planets for the impact of that planets where they don't have humans or SUVs.
Mark in Nashville, Tennessee next hi Mark Low, proud owner of a Shivi suburban I spent uh four winters up in Alaska and I learned a little bit about the North the difference between America and Canada Nunavut's in Canada uh they don't have the marine mammals uh and fish act I believe is what it's called.
Right.
And and what that means is is if you and I save up our pennies, we can go to Canada and we can hunt polar bears.
Yep.
And then we can bring the hides back.
Um polar bears the big ones eat the little ones and hunters that pay tens of thousands of dollars to hunt they don't shoot little polar bears.
So as a result there can be more polar bears in Canada theoretically that can than there can be north of Alaska because you and I can't pay any amount of money to hire a native to take us hunting polar bear in Alaska like we could in Canada.
In the US that's right.
As a result that you'll see a big difference in the natives around Nome in that area versus the the natives up in a barrow that actually can hunt whales.
Those people up there are hunters and they could only benefit from us going up there and being allowed to hire them to hunt polar bears like is done in Alaska and the polar bears would benefit too well so far as I understand it and the polar bear scientists are weighing in on this the Bush administration is just flat wrong that the polar bear population is going down.
The polar bear population in fact is going up it is uh it is increasing f uh almost double in the last hundred uh hundred years according to this scientist uh who uh who made his uh uh uh his his research known who was hired by the Canadian government.
Now you on the left are going to have a difficult time refuting this argument because I know that you hold the Canadian government in very high esteem dating back to the Vietnam war protesters uh haven in Canada days I know that you believe Canadians are actually civilized Americans.
I know that you probably believe that anything the Canadian government is doing has got to be right and and here's a Canadian government scientist telling you polar bears are not only not threatened, they're in a population boom that polar bears in fact have very well adapted to previous eras of either warming or cooling and they are adapted today to uh the situation that's going on whatever that situation might
be.
I think what it is is in the wintertime it's pretty much frozen.
In the summertime it thaws out a bit I hope that science doesn't beyond people who have been recently the K twelve system.
I'm Roger Hedgecock at uh Rush Limbaugh at 1800 282882 Russia back tomorrow by the way and all the information all the latest at Rushlimbaugh.com.
Here's uh Vern in Covington, Louisiana.
Vern's been waiting a long time on another topic.
Go ahead, Vern.
Good afternoon, Roger.
Enjoy your program.
Thank you.
Uh I enjoyed the comments about the uh murders in California as compared to what's going on in Iraq.
And I flew in Vietnam and during that period of time, when our media was cheering on the 50,000 deaths in Vietnam.
Here in the United States, we had a hundred and fifty thousand deaths due to drug-related uh crimes.
And uh it's just interesting that uh the media is doing the same thing again.
Absolutely the same thing.
It's what I'm pointing out, Vernon.
I'm glad you brought it up again because it's what I'm pointing out absolutely.
This playbook, uh, as Rush points out it repeatedly, the playbook is the same on the left.
It's the defeat of the United States, it's the defeat of the Republicans.
It's the same playbook they played in the early 70s.
It's ignoring all the other facts, focusing on just one fact, and in effect by by omission, lying about what's going on.
Because there isn't any question about that.
Now, I wanted to get to segue from the polar bear thing.
Let me get into another one of my favorites on the wackos on the uh on the left in the uh environmentalist community on the food issue.
In Britain now, which is often even more wacko than we are, according to the Scotsman, a newspaper in uh in Britain.
Uh there's a new regulation introduced by the government's television regulator called OFCOM, OFCOM, OFCOM.
Banning broadcasters in the UK from advertising cheese during children's TV programs or shows with a large number of child viewers.
You may not advertise cheese to children.
Cheese and children just don't go together in the UK.
Huh?
Cheese for crying out loud.
Uh cheese is go is branded in effect the the the the power to do this in British law is that cheese has now been branded as quote junk food, unquote.
Cheese.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, if there was ever going to be a line drawn against against the uh crazies who are going to tell you, and I don't know if this is happening in your community, but out here in San Diego, we have a city uh councilwoman, uh Donna Fry, who has introduced a bill to ban foie gras.
Foie gras.
Now I had to research, but I did, to come up with what the hell she's talking about.
And it's some kind of goose or duck liver in which the animal is, quote, force fed.
I found out that the force feeding uh goes uh a couple times a day, maybe five seconds worth of, uh, that it is does not harm the duck because the farmer doesn't want to hurt the duck because the duck is his uh living.
Uh that it is in fact an imitation of nature because the food is not forced into the stomach, but into an enlarged esophagus, which uh this uh migratory bird in its evolution developed in order to fatten itself to and and store the food in the esophagus to make for the two thousand mile flight it's going to make.
So the bird itself knows how to fatten itself up for this flight.
And in imitation of that, going back to, by the way, the Egyptians in 2800 BC, the earliest hieroglyphic record of force feeding ducks in order to have fatty liver, uh a delicacy not invented by Martha Stewart.
So, ladies and gentlemen, uh you know, I've had it.
I will come up with my own information.
I will eat that which I believe I should eat, and no one is going to tell me what to eat.
Is this unreasonable?
We'll get your calls after this.
Welcome back, Roger Hitchcock in for Rush Limbaugh, 1800 282882.
Rush back tomorrow and all the information about uh his return at Rush Limbaugh.com.
Let's uh let's go to Rich in Barrington, Illinois.
Rich, happy new year.
Hi, Roger.
Hi.
Happy New Year.
Yes, sir.
What's up?
Uh uh just in response to the uh uh the environmental issues that Rush and you talk about are uh our kind of knee-jerk in your face reaction all the time is our right to buy a BAV, and I mean by that a big ass vehicle.
Uh SUVs, they're neither neither sporty nor utilitarian, really.
I mean, we the way we use them around here in Barrington, we get down to the store and uh put a few grocery bags in the back and drive them back.
I don't it doesn't seem like progress to me that we develop vehicles that use more gasoline rather than less.
Well, now wait a minute, Rich, Rich Rich.
Yeah.
What car do you own?
Uh uh VW, GTI.
Good Okay.
Now good.
Now, here's my point.
Yeah.
You have a right to come to the conclusion that that's a better vehicle for your purposes.
Right.
I don't think you have a right to tell me, and by the way, I'm hybrid.
Okay, but but you don't have a right to tell me what car I can.
In other words, you do you don't live in a free you don't live in a free country if the government can tell me because of some cockamamy theory about global warming that isn't true that I can't order the car of my choice.
No, I believe that.
I I believe that.
I I think I told maybe I just told a screener.
I don't believe in legislating these out.
I just be in I it would be a more intelligent uh discussion to realize that these things are not really practical vehicles for w th the use that we put them to day to day.
I mean I'm well and many many consumers may come to that conclusion and may shift to other vehicles, uh Rich.
And in fact uh I have done so, you have done so, others have done so.
That's fine.
Yeah, but I feel I feel well our defense is a defense of freedom, not a defense of of your particular choice.
Absolutely.
But it comes out as kind of a childish reaction.
I believe in the right to buy an SUV, and I uh these are not it's it's in my mind a stupid choice, but you're right.
Everybody in the United States has a uh in these uh United States have a free right to choose the vehicle that they want to.
But uh there you go.
And I think as the facts come in, and you know, people have to adjust to uh gas prices and to other kinds of characteristics, they're going to select certain vehicles.
What I want you to notice, Rich, is that the selection of vehicles that we have in this country now, because of free trade, because of our ability to look at the whole world as a as a marketplace, we have a remarkable range of choice of vehicles now, better than we've ever had.
Oh, absolutely right.
Absolutely right.
Okay, well, that's our that's our point, Rich.
I appreciate the call.
Casey in Beaver, Utah is next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Casey.
Hi, Roger.
Hey, uh, I'm a professional geologist.
I've been for about twenty years.
And uh that means I look at rocks for a living.
And uh imagine that.
What a great job.
Uh I understand.
I understand.
Go ahead.
Uh this this uh th this global warming debate is so absolutely absurd.
I mean, there have been hundreds and hundreds of these cycles, uh, warming and cooling, going back four to five hundred million years.
You can see them in the rocks.
You don't have to be uh a liberal or a conservative to see the evidence and say, you know, that's got to be what caused it.
Two hundred and fifty million years ago, there was continental glaciation on Pangaea, and I don't think that it mattered what people in Illinois were driving.
No, you're absolutely right.
Now, Casey, this is the thing.
I think the science is overwhelming that these cycles of warming and cooling have uh uh uh have uh have gone on since the planet was born, apparently.
Uh but there's but there's uh uh now a twist, a spin to that in the in the left saying, well, yeah, but the the the cause this time that uh that mankind uh and what we're doing and cow flatulence and some other whatever the hell else is uh is contributing uh because we have been so uh we have abused the planet so badly, blah, blah, blah, to what's happening now.
Now, the earlier caller said, you know, mankind has had an influence, maybe number nine on the on the list of things that influence uh the the temperature of the of the air surrounding the planet.
I I don't know, what do you think about that?
Well, uh when when somebody brings up that part of the debate, you can find and you can actually see for yourself evidence that the polar caps on Mars are retreating.
Are we causing that?
Yeah.
Yeah, we are.
The SUVs, the reach.
You don't understand how this does.
When we pollute something, we pollute everything in the neighborhood.
Venus, Mars.
I'm gonna jump in my SUV and meet my wife for lunch, and I'm gonna cause more retreat on the ice cap for the ice caps on Mars.
Casey, thanks for the call.
I appreciate it.
I'm Roger Hitchcock, Infor Rush.
Short break back after this.
Thanks, Rush Limbaugh for letting me fill in uh today, the first broadcast day of two thousand seven, another great year coming up for the United States of America and for all of us who believe in freedom, free markets, free peoples uh everywhere on this uh planet.
It has been uh a wonderful and remarkable day to get as a lot of stuff off my chest.
Let me just say this with the uh stock exchanges up, uh crude oil about the same as it was a year ago.
All of these crises manufactured by the left to make us believe America's in a decline are all nonsense.
And we've talked about a lot of them today.
I know Rush will continue that as we continue the relentless pursuit of truth.
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