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Feb. 14, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
February 14, 2007, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 Podcast.
And hello, thrill seekers, music lovers, and conversationalists.
How are you?
We are back.
We're here at the middle of the week, hump day, as it's uh famously and popularly known on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, L. Rushball, the all-knowing, the all seeing, the all sensing, the old caring, the all everything maha rushy.
And a telephone number if you would like to be on the program today.
As it is every day, 800-282-2882.
The email address is rush at EIB net.com.
What a laugher.
Anyone have any idea who it is that shovels away the snow at Al Gore's house?
I mean, here we are in the this is a fascinating thing to me.
It remains fascinating, even though I know that nothing's going to be said about it.
Here we are in the middle of a genuine blizzard, a record snowfall in Chicago.
There is not one, and there's plenty of news coverage about it, but there is not one reference with a drive-by media to global warming.
And hey, wait a minute.
Maybe there isn't any global warming.
Record snowfall in Chicago.
Blizzard in the Northeast.
Record snowfalls in upstate New York because of those lake effects snow.
It's an incredible.
And yet we've we've got nobody wondering about global warming, which we're told is supposed to occur in the wintertime.
That's when it's supposed to be noticeable.
And how about this?
The subcommittee on energy and air quality hearing scheduled for today, Valentine's Day, uh at 10 o'clock this morning, room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building has been postponed due to inclement weather.
The hearing is entitled Climate Change.
Our greenhouse gas emissions from human activities contributing to a warming of the planet.
They cancel the hearing on global warming because of snow and ice.
It doesn't get any better than this.
And yet there's not one reference to the fact that there might be something uh uh shall we say dishonest about the so-called consensus on uh on global warming, and then near St. Louis, PS de Resistance, Maryville University in St. Louis, is canceling the screening of Al Gore's inconvenient truth today because of a snowstorm.
It's true.
I mean, this poor guy.
Every time he opens his mouth, the temperature drops ten degrees, no matter where he goes.
Uh and yet, not a word, folks, not a word about the fact that uh uh there might be some even even some curiosity, not even some some skepticism, because this is not about science, and it's not about weather, and it's not about warming, it's all about politics.
It's about left versus right, it's about liberal versus conservative, the drive-by media today.
They're no longer really journalists, they're not reporting news.
This is all about left versus right and left triumphing over right.
And that's why when when people say to me, Well, when are you gonna reduce your partisanship and try to get along with uh I'm sorry, partisanship is the battle of the day.
Partisanship is the um is the battle for the future of the country.
Look at this.
Excuse me, I've still got a hacking cough here today.
It's not quite as bad as yesterday.
Went home yesterday, went right to bed, probably went to bed at four o'clock yesterday afternoon, uh, got up about it for 20 minutes just to see if there was any emergency email.
There wasn't.
So went back to bed, got up at 8 15 today.
And nothing you can do for this stuff.
You gotta get a Z pack.
Go get it.
Folks, it's not an i i i i uh infection.
It's uh it's a virus.
There's nothing you can do for it except endure it.
Uh I never I never seek the easy way out of these things.
You get it, you you deal with it, and so forth and so on.
I appreciate all the advice.
I appreciate the help.
So forth, but I have plenty of doctors, and not one of them has suggested a ZPEC.
They've just said, well, a lot of rest, drink fluid, you know the same old thing, and don't bother me unless it gets worse.
Look at this headline.
Democrats' new strategy, force slow end to war.
Now, much is being made about this resolution that is coming up.
The president had talked about this at his press conference today, and this is one of the things that is mystifying to people like me and a number of others.
He had numerous questions from the press.
What do you think about Democrats?
Well, I respect them.
Uh they're they're patriotic people.
Uh You can certainly disagree with my policy and still be patriotic.
But they gave me a warm greeting at the State of the Union.
They allowed me to express my views, and I'm going.
Frustration setting in.
They tee him up.
They give him a chance to destroy these people.
And he won't do it.
It's just not who he is.
He's never done it.
He's not going to do it.
He's not going to get partisan.
It doesn't buy him anything, at least in his battle with them.
It might buy him some goodwill with certain Americans, but for what now, who knows?
He's not running for office.
Again, can't do that.
At any rate, this resolution, uh, Democrats have uh have told the Republicans to go to hell.
They're not going to get an alternative resolution.
They're not going to get a resolution in support of the troops or any of that.
The Democrats are hell-bent on having a non-binding resolution.
Now there will be a binding resolution come up soon, and that's for emergency funding for the troops.
And uh that will where the uh that's where the truth will uh will emerge as to what they're really all about here.
But this story, this is by the way, it's a new website, Politico.com.
It debutted in January.
I know it's debuted, but it's media guys to me it's debuted in January.
Some uh some people, some reporters that have left the Washington Post and other print publications, have gone to where the action is, and that is Internet.
And this new website's called uh Politico.com, and Jim Van Dey is over there, John Harrison guys from the Washington Post.
This story is by Jim Bresnahan, top House Democrats working in concert with anti-war groups.
I'm gonna tell you something, folks.
Uh they are setting themselves up to be McGoverned all over again, and they don't know it.
They uh i it this is almost a replay.
They've been wanting a replay of uh of Vietnam, and by golly, they are going to get it.
Do you know that Muki Al-Sadr has fled Baghdad?
Moktada Al-Sadr has fled the scene.
He's gone to Tehran.
He's uh got family, I guess.
Uh, in uh in Iran.
And he got the hell out of Dodge on the verge of the surge.
Uh now that's a pretty good indication here of uh of what Mukey thinks the chances he knows he's targeted, and he knows he by the way, took his uh upper echelon, so-called leaders and generals with him.
That's pretty in the pretty good indication of uh of Mukey's impression of what uh of what might be in store.
Uh nevertheless, I keep sidetracking myself here.
This is this is key.
Uh the tophouse Democrats working in concert with anti-war groups, have decided against using congressional power to force a quick end to U.S. involvement in Iraq.
Instead, they are going to pursue a slow bleed strategy designed to gradually limit the administration's options, led by Jack Mertha, and supported by several well-funded anti-war groups, the coalition's goal is to limit or sharply reduce the number of U.S. troops available for the Iraq conflict rather than to openly cut off funding for the war itself.
The legislative strategy will be supplemented by a multi-million dollar TV ad, uh TV ad campaign that's designed to uh pressure vulnerable Republican incumbents into breaking with President Bush and forcing the administration to admit that the war is politically unsustainable.
As described by participants, the goal is crafted to circumvent the biggest political vulnerability of the anti-war movement, the accusation that it's willing to abandon troops in the field.
That fear is why many Democrats have remained timid in challenging Bush, even as public support for the president has plunged.
Mertha and Nancy Pelosi decided they must take the lead in pressuring not only Republicans, but also Senate Democrats to take steps more aggressive than non-binding resolutions in challenging the Bush administration.
This strategy's coming right out of the House, being crafted quietly, even as the House is immersed this week in this symbolic debate over resolution uh expressing opposition and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, Mertha, acting with the backing of the House Democrat leadership, will seek to limit the time And the number of deployments by soldiers, marines, and National Guard units to Iraq, making it tougher for Pentagon officials to find the troops to replace units that are scheduled to rotate out of the country.
This is their strategy.
This is their investment in defeat.
This is because they, as I have reminded you countless times here, my friends, they cannot allow a victory to take place.
So now rather than a a a they don't have the guts because their fear the public uh would think that they're not supporting the troops.
So now they're gonna go around the backside, do an end run and a slow bleed by eliminating the number of troops available for rotation duty in Iraq, forcing the president to pull everybody out in uh in that manner.
And they're gonna have a mil multimillion dollar TV ad campaign uh designed to support this in the midst of a surge, which is designed to rout the insurgency out of Baghdad and bring stability to it.
We'll go to the President's press conference, some interesting tetees with various members of the media when we come back after this timeout.
Stay with us.
Ha, how are you?
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchor man with the truth.
You better have courage and be able to face the truth, listening to this program, or you will go bananas, you go nuts.
It happens each and every day.
800-282-2882.
By the way, uh uh the Utah shopping mall shooting, uh Suleiman Talovich, Telovik, a Muslim immigrant from Bosnia, when he went into that shopping center yesterday, had a backpack that was loaded down with ammo.
He had a shotgun and a 38 caliber handgun.
Uh at the time, now yesterday, the Salt Lake uh City law enforcement people said, we uh really don't have a motive here.
We uh don't really see anything odd or strange about this.
Um typical, not you know, wanting to offend anybody.
But now it seems clear to the law enforcement people in Salt Lake City that uh Stulemon Talavic wanted to uh kill as many people as he could.
Uh thankfully deadly force was used against him out there.
Want to bet there's going to be more of this?
Want to bet?
Make you bet right now there's going to be much, much more of this uh this kind of thing.
All right, let's go to the uh the audio sound bites.
Uh first up here is David Gregory uh getting on the president's case about the story that Iraq is having shipped into it uh uh IEDs made by Iran.
Gregory says uh to the president, uh critics uh say that you are using the same quality of intelligence about Iran that you used to make the case for war in Iraq, specifically about WMD, turned out to be wrong, and that you're doing that to make a case for war against Iran.
Is that the case?
I can say with certainty that the cuts force, a part of the Iranian government has provided these uh sophisticated IEDs that have harmed our troops.
I do not know whether or not the cuts force was ordered from the top echelons of government, but my point is what's worse, them ordering it and it happening or them not ordering it and it's happening.
And uh and so we will continue to protect our troops.
Now, the uh uh CNN Zed Henry followed this up later on.
He said, Mr. President, are you saying that today that you don't you do not know of senior members of the Iranian government are in fact behind these explosives?
That contradicts what U.S. officials said in Baghdad on Sunday.
They said the highest levels of the Iranian government were behind this.
It also seems to square with what General Pace has been saying, but contradicts with what you're saying.
Whether Amani Najad ordered the cuts force to do this, I don't think we know.
But we do know that they're there, and I intend to do something about it.
We know they're there.
We know they provided by the cuts force.
We know the cuts force is a part of the Iranian government.
I don't think we know the who picked up the phone and said the cuts force go do this, but we know it's a vital part of the Iranian government.
What matters is is that we're responding.
The idea that somehow we're manufacturing the idea that the Iranians are providing IEDs is preposterous, Ed.
My job is to protect our troops.
Now I'll tell you what the root of all this is.
There's a Boston Globe story uh today.
Uh by the way, happy Valentine's Day to those of you who go out and perform the perfunctory duties demanded of Valentine's Day.
Let's face it.
Most of you people out there doing Valentine's Day stuff, not because you want to, not because it's really in your heart, because if it was in your heart, you'd have done it yesterday.
But you waited till today to do it because this is the perfunctory day.
This is when society says you go give whatever you give to show whatever affection you have.
So if you're out there engaged in this more power too.
You just wanted to acknowledge we too know that it's Valentine's Day here, though we uh we abstain.
Well, I'm speaking for myself.
Dawn, did you abstain?
She's abstaining.
Uh what about you?
No, Brian, well, you're freshly married, you don't have any choice.
Sturdley, do you abstain today from perfunctory Valentine's Day duties?
You you you got you're you're engaging in perfunctory Valentine's Day dua, whoa.
There must be somebody new in Snerdley's life here.
Well.
Okay, so two of the four of us here are abstaining.
And uh the other two are prisoners of convention.
Now, here's this story in the Boston Globe.
Security analysts and critics of the Bush administration are questioning the quality of intelligence presented by three unidentified U.S. officials in Baghdad on Sunday to demonstrate the Iranian government's ties to sophisticated explosives that have killed 170 U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
This is a Boston Globe, no.
And this is where all these questions came from today about this.
Some skeptics also say that U.S. officials in Iraq and their British counterparts have known for more than two years that armor-piercing explosives were being smuggled from Iran, but had never displayed them to the media until Sunday, which they did.
Complete with serial numbers.
Now, get this.
Daniel Serwer, a specialist at the U.S. Institute for Peace, a Washington-based left-wing think tank, said he was not convinced that the Iranian government had decided at the highest levels to provide weapons to target U.S. troops, as the three U.S. officials told reporters.
The question is not so much about whether there are Iranian weapons inside Iraq, said Serwer, who, by the way, served as an executive director of the Iraq Surrender Group.
Said, sure there are.
The question is whether there is a conscious policy by the Iranian government or some part of the Iranian government to support lethal attacks against Americans.
I haven't seen any proof of that yet.
Well haven't seen it.
Uh General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also downplayed accusations against the Iranian government.
He told reporters yesterday in Indonesia that all the material from Iran had been used in the bombs.
Uh quote, that does not translate that the Iranian government per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this, which is what the uh president was saying uh today.
And, you know, the root of this, and in in both of these questions from David Gregory and from uh Ed Henry at CNN, and I told you this was going to happen a long time ago.
The so-called faulty intelligence touting weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
War opponents who are opposed to it on principle, people that are anti-America, blame America first crowd, are going to use this to question any use of the U.S. military in the war on terror anywhere else.
If the intelligence was quote unquote wrong, uh that led us into Iraq, and of course, we'd have to rewind the clock here and go back to all the reasons we went to Iraq.
WMD was not sole reason, but it was focused on as the major reason.
Uh, nevertheless, we're we're now hamstrung.
Uh hands are tied.
It's going to be very difficult here to live this down for the longest time because there are going to be critics who are going to say, well, what about the intelligence?
I mean, you got the intelligence totally wrong back in uh 2003 going into Iraq, 2001, 2002, got it totally wrong.
Well, we can't trust this now.
And that's why these administrations are hedging uh officials are hedging their bets.
Well, we we know they're coming from Iran, but we don't know if they're coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government.
What does it matter?
What does it matter if it's coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government or not?
I mean, in the real world, what does it matter?
Uh but the real world is in suspension.
And we are we finding ourselves in a in the in the midst of an alternative universe here where the uh morality seems to support Democrats and their slow bleed strategy for defeat.
Uh reality is suspended when it comes to such things as global warming, which cannot be proved by science.
It can only be established by consensus.
Uh in the midst of record cold, record snow, record ice.
Nobody questions whether or not could the scientists be wrong.
Yet let there be a hot day in September.
Ha ha!
Global warming!
See, it's happening.
Let it be sixty degrees in January in New York, which happens every year, by the way.
Aha!
Global warming.
See it's happening.
But when there's record cold, when there should be warming, it's totally ignored.
It's an alternative universe we're in.
Try to stay sane back in a second.
Hang on, folks.
I just printed a page on the internet that prints ten pages to get the one you want.
Still printing.
Hang on, this is unbelievable.
I kid you not.
Page five is where I tell you these novices that send me stuff in the email and they just do not know.
You know, send me the print edition.
Saves time.
All right.
Yes, the Salt Lake shooter was a Bosnian Muslim.
I just want to read you the story here from where's this from now?
Sweetness and light.com, which is a uh a blog, a a website.
Um Ashley Hayes uh reporting as investigators continue to search for answers into the tragic shooting at Trolley Square, the mall reopens this morning.
Um it's unclear how many stores will be open for business.
While the mall as a whole reopened around eight, mall spokeswoman said that it would be left up to the individual restaurants and businesses whether they want to reopen.
Earlier this morning we saw security guards milling around and lights coming on inside various stores.
We also saw the police tape being removed from around the mall.
In the meantime.
Police uh officers still trying to determine uh why Monday night's deadly shooting happened.
Even the family of the shooter can't seem to answer that question.
Suleiman Telovic's family is baffled at what happened when we spoke with his aunt, she couldn't believe her nephew was capable of killing so many people.
Akjah uh O'Nerovic, gunman's aunt, says, Well, we we want to know what happened just like you guys.
We have no idea.
It was such a good boy.
We just don't know what happened.
Said there were no early warning signs that Talavic was planning on attacking people at the mall.
The co-workers at Aramark uniform services said he was at work Monday afternoon but acted normal.
A family friend who didn't want to be identified told us that Talavic's upbringing may have played a role.
He was a Muslim Bosnian born in war-torn Bosnia.
Talabik has lived in Utah for the past several years, dropped out of high school in 2004.
Uh and yet this fact wasn't even considered worthy of a headline or any emphasis.
He was a Muslim-born Bosnian, born in Bosnia, and Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that you can't put that in there.
You can't you can't do that.
Doesn't even rate the mention the headline while people are still trying to figure out what happened.
Oh well.
Let's go to the phone and see what's percolating there.
Bruce Alexandria, Virginia, welcome, sir.
Nice to have you with us.
Yes, sir.
Thank you for taking my call.
My first question, sir, is if to my understanding, there are a hundred and thirty to a hundred and forty thousand troops on the ground there in Iraq.
And with the president third of uh twenty-one thousand additional, what difference is twenty-one thousand more troops on the ground uh is going to make.
And my second question is today on his his uh his speech, he specifically said that you can disagree with his policy and notably his his and still support the troops when you all have adamantly been saying, how can you not uh how can you support the truth?
Let me just tell you let me just say strongly disagree with the president on that.
Okay.
Uh I think the president's just going out of his way to be nice to you people for whatever reason I can't understand.
On national T V to be a good one.
You know, the president is not a partisan guy.
He is not going to tell you that you're threatening the success of the mission.
He just killed the American people what they want to do.
Well, he leaves it up to people like me to do it, which frankly gets a little tiresome, but I'm telling you, he's a president of the state.
But if you are gonna go out there and rip the troops, you can't at the same time support them.
I don't know.
But you say they're putting the president is lying.
I hear you hate Borsha.
You're trying to take comfort and solid in what he says about you.
That's a that's an incorrect statement.
It's not an incorrect statement.
I know who you people are.
I've been following you for all my years behind the microphone.
So you're saying that the president is lying to the American people.
I'm saying the president is nice.
No, you think that's the same thing.
I'm saying the president is not a good thing.
He is not listen to this, Bruce.
The President is president of all the people.
He is not gonna sit there and tell you that you are being unpatriotic while at the same time, people like you are calling him Hitler and calling him a dunce and calling him the biggest dealer.
You're incorrect of your assumption of me.
You know absolutely nothing about me.
You don't know whether I'm in support of the president or against the president.
Yes, I can tell by the tone of your question.
No, sir.
You're a lib and libs are all the same.
I'm only making a general observation.
You're not making a general observation.
I specifically made an observation about what the president did say.
You're doing a good job of it because I'm on a short fuse today because I feel rotten.
Well, sir, that's your problem.
That is not our problem.
I've only made it away.
You know, my only problem is people like you.
I love the country, and you just agree with you.
Now you're looking for an out for the president.
This is amazing to me.
With all due respect, this is the right.
You don't respect me.
Stop saying that you do.
This is you just don't I don't want to hear that kind of garbage.
This is what the president said.
All right, start at the beginning.
I forgot what you said.
What were we talking about?
Well, my first question was, there are 130,000 to 140,000 trees on the ground.
Oh, yeah.
Let me answer that.
Let me answer that because I talk to the generals every week.
We have a hundred and thirty actually five, hundred and thirty troops that are stationed at various places around the whole country.
No, sir.
On the ground in Iraq today, there are about a hundred and thirty to a hundred and forty thousand troops.
What did I just say?
You said around the country.
Yes.
I'm talking about Iraq specifically.
That's what I'm What is Iraq?
Iraq is a country.
You said around the country.
I said around which is Iraq is a country.
No, no, no.
You say around the country.
When you say around the country, that means other countries other than Iraq.
No, no.
We're talking about Iraq specifically.
This is a you cannot be this dumb.
Oh well, smarter than you, sir.
You cannot be this dumb.
Sir, you absolutely know nothing about my background.
As far as you know, I could have a P. I know.
Well, no, I know you don't have a PS.
Oh, sir.
Oh, well, that's where you're wrong.
That's why you're wrong, Mr. Lemon.
How do you think that's a good thing?
That's why you're wrong.
Let me ask you a question.
How do you spell star?
I'm sorry.
How do I spell what?
Star.
Okay.
I I don't understand your question, and I and I'm absolutely not going to be able to do that.
How do you spell star?
I am absolutely not going there.
You are trying to avoid the question.
No.
You won't deal with answer the question.
What more would 21,000 troops make in the president?
I tried to answer it and you purposely misunderstood us.
There are a hundred and thirty-five thousand troops that are stationed and positioned throughout the country of Iraq.
They are not all in Baghdad.
They can't be recalled from various areas of the country.
They have duties that are assigned that go on daily.
We have a different strategy in Baghdad today.
What's happening different today than the past, we would go in and clear out neighborhoods and then leave without leaving security forces behind, leaving the neighborhoods open for the bad guys to come and retake.
Okay.
21,500 troops?
21,000 additional troops is not going to make that much difference if there are 130,000 to 140,000 troops in Iraq today.
You just, you know something, this is a, this is, I am, I am answering your specific question and you're calling the obfuscate, and I'm tired.
It was fun for a while.
It was fun for a while, but I'm really questioning my IQ.
The longer I speak to you, the lower it's going to go, and I can't afford that to happen since I feel so rotten today anyway.
Nice try, it was fun while it while it lasted.
But I'll tell you one thing I took away from your call.
I think I think you ought to be ashamed.
The first thing you want to know is whether or not you can feel patriotic, but President Bush says that you are, even when you disagree with his policy.
Yet day in and day out, you have been massacring this guy, you and your people and all of your supporters, you people on the left, have been doing everything you can to destroy this guy.
Now you want to take solace in the fact that he doesn't think ill of you.
Well, that's big.
That is really big.
It's also gutless and timid.
You ought to go try to get a PhD, then you can spell star for me.
Stephen in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Welcome to the program.
Hi, Rush.
I I want to make a comment on uh global warming.
Good.
Okay.
If you look at the way the satellite photos have showed the breakouts of the intercontinental ice shelf.
They haven't shown that, it's BS.
Well, all right, all right.
All right.
Think of the way the ice flows southward as it melts.
That would mean that it would cause colder temperatures as it reaches that destination.
Okay, so it takes it it can take a while to take effect.
I reside in Connecticut.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
I think I understand now.
What we're having, the glaciers are breaking apart up there in the Arctic Circle.
And if the gracials break apart, they're they're flowing south uh on the ocean, and that's bringing cold air further south.
So actually the warming that's causing the melting is causing the freezing temperatures in the ice uh over North American Canada.
That's another factor.
It's what?
That's I would call that another factor.
Another the warming of the ice at the North Pole, the Arctic Circle, is causing the melting of glaciers and the glaciers are bringing the cold air south and s see folks, this is how they have done it.
Every weather extreme is related to uh global warming.
Look at uh Stephen, I you're a nice guy, and I'm glad you called and so forth.
I'm up against it here on time.
Do do one thing for me.
You sound like you've got you sound you sound young, you sound like your mind is still open.
There's no science in this global warming.
It's politics and consensus.
And you have to understand you're not capable, I'm not capable, none of us are capable of destroying the planet.
And all this is in an attempt to make you feel guilty for the efforts you are undertaking via an advanced lifestyle to destroy the planet, so you'll go for big government and big taxes.
Uh to supposedly fix what isn't broken.
Back in just a second.
I know that it uh frustrates some of you people when you get these idiot left wingers on the on the phone.
I have to I enjoy it.
You you have to understand, and that the the whole point of this program is for me to enjoy myself, because if that doesn't happen, you aren't gonna enjoy it either.
And some of these guys are just they're just too much fun to toy with.
Uh you know, and I get emails, get this idiot off the phone.
I'm sick in time closing to something else.
You gotta be patient here, folks.
Remember, all of this stuff has a point.
I mean, every opportunity we have to illustrate the folly, the ignorance, the idiocy of these people, we will take it.
That's why we put them to the front of the line.
Now, as to this thing one thing seriously that uh that he said.
What's twenty-one thousand more troops gonna do?
What what difference is it gonna make?
These are the same people.
These are the same liberals who insist that an increase in domestic spending is a cut.
These are the same people that despite the trillions that we have spent on their social welfare programs over the last seventy years, that if we just spend billions more and pour it down the same crapshoot, it's somehow gonna make a difference.
So we're supposed to have open ended resources for the war on poverty or any other social program, but no more resources for the war on terrorism.
They are hypocrites of the um of the first order.
In fact, that reminds me.
Let me find a story in the stack here on the budget.
This is gonna shock you.
It may not, because so many of these things, many of these stories have come down to pike in uh in recent years.
It's basically a a a story on just how much of the budget is actually left over after it's all going after it all goes to Ah, yes, it's a Bob Samuels, no, it's not.
Yes, Bob Samuels column in the um in the Washington Post, who um I quote feverishly regularly.
Uh he's on a he's on a roll lately, says when are we gonna finally admit in the United States that we are a welfare state?
We hide behind such terms as uh uh entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, all of these nice sounding terms at what an effect we have.
Social insurance entitlements, all we have is a welfare state.
You take the whole federal budget, and after payments to people and defense and debt interest, one seventh of the budget is what's left.
One seventh of the budget is discretionary.
Sixth well, you say defense is discretionary too, because it comes up for debate every year, but sixth sevenths of the budget is already allocated.
And two point nine trillion dollars.
Yes, we're skirting the edges here of three trillion dollars.
He says that spend a moment studying the adjacent table.
I don't have the adjacent table here in the uh web version of the column printed out.
But he says it eliminates uh uh why another of our annual budget battles seems so fruitless and repetitious.
Every year we hear complaints about it counting gimmicks and unrealistic assumptions.
There's a ferocious crossfire of charges and countercharges.
Hardly anything ever gets resolved.
Budgets almost always remain in deficit, 41 out of the 47 years since 1960.
And something that I don't think he says here is that every year, despite spending gobs and oodles more, I mean 2.9 trillion, we hear about draconian cuts.
We hear about hardships on certain groups of people.
The table shows the rise of the American welfare state.
In 1956, defense dominated the budget.
The Cold War buildup was in full swing.
The welfare state, which is what payments to individuals signifies in this table that he's talking about, was modest.
Now everything's reversed.
Despite the war in Iraq, defense spending is only a fifth of the budget.
So-called entitlement payments to individuals are almost 60% and rising.
In fiscal 2006, the federal government spent almost 2.7 trillion.
Social Security, 544 billion, Medicare, 374 billion, and Medicaid, 181 billion dominated.
There was 199 billion more for payments to the poor, including the earned income tax credit and food stamps.
Almost no one wants to slash these programs.
They've got huge constituencies.
They're popular.
Paradoxically, their invulnerability and size also protect them much of the rest of the budget.
Look again at the table.
After payments to individuals, defense spending and interest on the debt, which has to be paid, only amount to about a seventh of the budget remaining.
Many of these remaining programs are widely supported.
Does anyone really want to end the National Institutes of Health?
28 billion, uh 41 billion dollars we spend to support the federal courts, prosecutors and the cops like the FBI, the DEA, the Border Patrol, and so forth.
He says it might help if Americans called welfare programs by their proper name.
Rather than by the soothing and misleading labels of entitlements and social insurance.
Excellent points.
He's been writing about this for a long time.
So when I hear these guys, you know, whine and moan about the amount of money we're spending in Iraq and so forth, and they keep demanding we spend ever, never-ending sums down the black hole of social welfare programs that have not ended poverty and never will.
Uh burns me up.
I just have to tell you.
And your tax rates are going to start climbing.
Mine can't get any higher unless they raise them, which they're going to do that, by the way.
So sit tight.
Seems I've upset some of the Valentine's Day crowd out there.
Well, we'll deal with that.
And CNN and its uh interpretation of the disappearance of Muki Al Sadr, all coming up in the next hour.
Be right back with that.
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