All Episodes
Feb. 16, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:17
February 16, 2007, Friday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
That's right, Johnny Donovan, but all you ladies out there, I'm already spoken for.
Spoken for for 47 years.
Anyway, we were at the last hour wrapping up and we're talking to Ann from Brooklyn.
Are you still there, Ann?
Yes, I am, and I have to disagree because it's not just the ladies who wish there were hundreds of thousands of you, it's anybody with a brain.
Oh, thank you, Ann.
But you were saying.
Okay.
When I was a child, it was a different world.
And the New York Times would publish charity cases, and people would donate.
Children sent in dollar bills, and wealthy people sent in six-figure checks.
In those days, it was like a seven-figure check.
I remember those March a dime campaigns.
And charity was something that everybody became involved in because the government was not taking away your money at the point of a gun.
And those appeals for charity stopped when the welfare state, the socialist state, started saying, you pay us or you go to jail.
That's right.
And they promoted the idea that one American has the right to live at the expense of another American.
Everybody gives according to somebody else's need.
And when it's voluntary and you want to do it, I believe it's a noble goal.
And when it is forced and stolen from you, I just find it just dreadful.
And look what happened.
All the great museums and hospitals and orchestras, all the great voluntary works of art have just drizzled to almost a halt.
That's right.
The person from Louisville, Kentucky was totally incorrect.
Hospitals may make enormous charges, but simply because the illegal immigrants are causing them enormous losses.
That's absolutely right.
And I thank you for calling in to make those comments.
We need that kind of evidence from yesteryear.
Many of our people in our audience, they were just born or they don't have the experience of knowing the kind of generosity and the liberty that existed in America at one time.
But what I want to do in this last hour, I want to talk about, my colleague Thomas Soule has written several columns and they're available and you can see it from Jewish World Review.
And it's called Global Hot Air.
And I also wrote a column about this as well.
And, you know, Americans are being taken for a ride on this whole global warming issue.
And it kind of reminds me of a quote from Mencken, Henry Mencken, and he warned, and he said, the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
And we have people, the environmental, the radical environmentalist movement, they're kind of talking about, trying to get Americans upset about global warming, and they're becoming quite vicious about it.
And some people, like, I was utterly shocked when I found out that there's a Dr. Heidi Cullen, and she's with the Weather Channel.
She's a climatologist.
And she hosts a program called Climate Code, the Climate Code.
And she advocates, now listen to this.
She advocates that the American Meteorological Society strip their seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about man-made global warming.
There's a Scott Pelley of CBS News 60 Minutes correspondence.
And he compared skeptics of global warming to Holocaust deniers.
And even Vice President, former Vice President Al Gore, he calls skeptics global warming deniers.
And there's one fellow, David Roberts, in his online publication, he said, and get this, get this, folks, he said, when we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the danger, we should have war crimes, war crime trials for these so-and-so's,
it begins with a B, some sort of climate Nuremberg.
Now, there are many highly respectable climatologists that don't buy all this hoopla about man-made global warming.
Now, there's no question that the Earth can warm or cool.
And as my colleague says, it has done this one time or another for thousands of years, even before we had SUVs.
A matter of fact, if there had never been global warming, we wouldn't be able to enjoy the Yosemite Valley today because it was once under ice.
And so how did it become not under ice?
It was through global warming.
And there are a number of climate experts who reject many of the fine findings of the so-called experts today.
And many of the so-called experts are just merely government officials or environmental wackos.
One of those very distinguished climate scientists, he's Robert Litson of MIT.
He publicly repudiated a report on global warming, even though his name was among those used as window dressing on the report.
It's kind of interesting that these people hype up global warming on unusually hot days of summer or when it was near 70 in the northeast.
But have you heard them talking about global warming within the last couple of weeks when much of the country has been under unprecedented freeze?
And they see no implication.
And how about the Blaine Bush business during the hurricanes of 2005?
And they said that it was a couple years ago, they said that these hurricanes, this large number of hurricanes, it was hyped up by the media as being a result of global warming.
And they said that many more hurricanes, and they predicted many more hurricanes would occur the following year and years after.
Now, last year, not one hurricane struck the United States.
Have you heard the media say anything about that?
You know, they've said little or nothing about the false predictions that they made.
And this is very similar to how in the 1970s, I believe, and Thomas Sowell is pointing this out in his column, and actually he has a series of three columns, let's say global hot air, one, two, and three.
And he points out that, and I've pointed out before, that in the 1970s, remember the Club of Rome, it was supposed to be the be-all and end-all of economic growth.
And they were predicting in the 1970s that we need to halt overpopulation and that because it was going to lead to mass starvation around the planet in the 1980s.
But nobody goes back to the Club of Rome and say, hey guys, nobody's starving.
And if there's a health problem, at least in the Western world, it's obesity.
People are eating too much.
There's too much food available.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're being sold a bill of goods about man-made causes of global warming.
Now, keep in mind that, you know, so far as as long as the Earth has been around, there have been cooling periods and there have been warming periods.
And these cooling periods and warming periods are a result of forces that have little or nothing to do with mankind.
I mean, if you look at the warming that causes the Gulf Stream to go by Europe, well, if the Gulf Stream did not go by Europe, Europe would be like Antarctica.
It would be uninhabitable.
So these people, they're selling us a bill of goods, and we ought to be very, very disappointed by their desire not just to make the argument, but they want to suppress and intimidate skeptics.
They want to call them global warming deniers.
And interestingly, in the U.S. news today, U.S. Soda is pointing out that in Germany, a court sentence a guy to five years in prison for denying the Holocaust.
Now, I'm wondering whether the global warming people, the environmental wackos, they're also willing to send people to jail for denying the man-made causes of global warming.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back.
Walt Williams filling in for Rush.
And, you know, there's another issue that in addition to global warming, and actually, these people who are pushing this global warming bit, they're really after control of our lives.
That is, they want government control.
That is, communism has lost all respectability except at some college campuses in the United States.
And so the new word for communism is environmentalism.
That is, both talk about controlling the lives of ordinary citizens.
There's another issue that maybe we just have a few minutes to talk about as well.
And that is Congressman Charlie Wrankl from New York.
He's trying to, he has plans, and I don't know whether he's done so in the first hundred hours or the first several days of the new Congress to reinstate the military draft.
And he says that there's no question in his mind that this president would not have gone to war in Iraq if we had a draft.
I think that's utter nonsense because we had a war in Vietnam, and we did have a draft.
But, you know, there's a pet peeve of mine.
I don't call it a draft.
I hate to call it a draft.
What I call it is a confiscation of labor services.
That is the government comes along and confiscates one's labor services.
So I think draft is just kind of euphemism for that act.
But however, the Army or the military can get all the soldiers that they want.
They don't need a draft.
They can just raise pay.
Matter of fact, there is a wage that they can pay me today and I will sign up.
But I caution you, it's a pretty high wage.
But the volunteer army has been very, very successful as a way of managing our military.
And one of the good things about the voluntary Army is that you minimize the number of misfits that you get in the Army.
That is, you minimize the number of people that are in the Army who don't want to be there.
And I speak from experience because in 1959, my labor services were confiscated.
And I was earning about $400 a month driving a taxi cab in Philadelphia.
And I got this letter saying I had to begin making $68 a month.
And the only way they can get me to switch that way is to threaten me with imprisonment.
And it turned out that I was quite a misfit in the Army.
And I was sent down to Fort Stewart, Georgia, without a very good orientation on the Southern way of life.
And I had some adjustment problems.
Adjustment problems that included a court-martial, which I did win, and investigations, and the FBI investigating Mrs. Williams and all this, a lot of problems that I had in the Army.
But by the way, folks, I have an honorable discharge.
Anyway, I think that anybody talking about the draft, we ought to boo them away.
But let's go back to the phones.
Let's go to Edmund.
How do you pronounce your Las Cruces?
New Mexico.
Las Cruces, yeah.
Yeah, right.
Great, great.
Okay.
Welcome to show.
But look, Corner is Rich, and that tells you all about who he's trying to appease with the trusters and all the things that they're doing.
Nothing surprising.
I don't get it.
They're putting that thing in the bars.
There's one more thing that rules like this.
Oh, I see.
Oh, okay.
Okay, great.
Okay, that's what you talked about.
Okay, great.
Now, I do want to go back to the word that you were using about how the Democrats try to say that you're given a right.
Yeah.
You need to change the make the system deserve.
Well, even if you deserve it, you don't have a right to live at the expense of another person, do you?
No, that's it.
So, what I called you about, Dr. Williams, is I think you and I share something about Milton Friedman.
And I'm just wondering how you feel about the statement that I'll make to you that he was probably the most significant man of the 20th century.
Well, he was surely the greatest economist of the 20th century.
But he did so many other things.
He talked about draft like you do.
In fact, I just think you're kind of an extension of Dr. Friedman.
Well, I've been highly influenced by him.
Matter of fact, when I was a graduate student at UCLA, I got my doctorate from UCLA, and Milton Friedman, he visited.
Matter of fact, he taught a class on monetary theory.
And I was afraid to take the class of credit.
I just audited it because I was just there, gee, this great big giant.
And we've been, matter of fact, I've had Milton Friedman on the show a couple times, on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple times, and we've been talking.
I've been so caught that.
I think he was.
So much about him done on PBS, which I don't think would have been the optimal channel, but they did do a pretty decent job.
They still got a few jabs in.
For the most part, I think they treated him pretty well.
Well, I think his series, free to choose, and I think the book that he and his wife Rose Friedman wrote, I think that's an excellent reference for you to kind of get an idea of some of his more public work.
But he's a very distinguished economist as an economist.
He's done path-breaking work on the consumption, what we call the consumption function.
And he virtually single-handedly discredited much of many of the Keynesian ideas that ruled economics for a very, very long time.
And the kind of Keynesian, the ideas that Keynes introduced, these are ideas that politicians had been looking for a long time.
That is, ways to tax and spend.
And he and others thoroughly discredited notions such as the Phillips curve, the idea that there's a trade-off between unemployment and inflation.
And then finally, I think some of his most notable work has been done in the area of monetary economics, where he has pointed out to people that inflation is not caused by rapacious businessmen or greedy unions.
It's caused by an increase in the money supply.
And who's in charge of the money supply?
It's the central bank.
So when you see an inflation, what that means is that there's an increase in the money supply.
And that's the only way that you can get an inflation anywhere in the world at any time.
We'll be back.
We're going back to the phones.
Let's go to Dick in Gardneville, Nevada.
Good afternoon, Doctor.
First, may I thank you for the gift of your knowledge and humor, which is on some occasion almost caused a car wreck for me.
But nonetheless, I do appreciate it.
Well, I'll pay the deductible if that happens.
I was going to call earlier about that because I understand the cost shifting and whatnot.
But I talked to HR, and we have paid close attention to this issue of global warming.
And one man who is a very renowned climatologist from Montreal, whose name now escapes me, after viewing Al's movie, said, yes, it's truly absurd, isn't it?
So I told my wife that the wackos have been very disappointed and that when the ice receded, as you pointed out, there was not a pterodactyl driving an SUV that they could attribute it to.
And the absolute truth is the ice gaps are melting in Mars and there isn't a capitalist insight up there.
That's absolutely right.
And in terms of emitting CO2, carbon dioxide, mankind's contribution is trivial compared to other sources of carbon dioxide.
For example, three volcanic eruptions, one in 1883 in Indonesia, another in Alaska in 1912, and another in Iceland in 1947, spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxides in the atmosphere than all of mankind's activity in his entire history.
And you probably know this too, that Science magazine, the November 1982 edition of Science Magazine, it reported that termites annually generate more than twice as much carbon dioxide as mankind does burning fossil fuels.
And matter of fact, there's one termite that emits 600 metric tons of formic acid into the atmosphere.
And so maybe what the environmentalists ought to recommend to Congress is to put lids on top of volcanoes or either kill all the ants because they sure emit more carbon dioxide than mankind does.
But I never cease to be amazed at the arrogance of mankind in the following sense.
That is, we think that we can make significant parametric changes to the Earth.
The Earth is a massive body, not as massive as many other bodies, but it's massive.
And, you know, for example, ask your environmentalist friend, suppose everybody on Earth started jumping up and down.
Do you think that would throw the Earth out of the orbit?
Or suppose everybody started blowing?
Do you think that we would go around the sun a little bit faster?
I mean, there's, I mean, mankind is relatively insignificant to many, many to other forces such as the wind, the sea, the sun.
He has a far smaller impact on the parameters of the Earth than these other influences.
Let's go to Dan in Grass Valley, California.
Welcome to the show, Dan.
Yes, thank you for taking my call.
I have a problem with all of this, whether it's global warming or not.
I have children, and my children's children are going to have...
I'm worried about what we're leaving for them.
I have a son who's in the military who swam in the ocean in a harbor.
He just got water on his lips, and he was in the hospital for three weeks and almost died.
If you have a problem with cleaning up the environment, I think that the people that do have a problem with that should go live next door to a coal burning plant.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Look, we can clean up the environment.
We can make it clean.
That is, for example, tomorrow morning, if you make me the mayor of Los Angeles, Los Angeles has smog.
Tomorrow morning, I could have clean air in Los Angeles.
If you gave me the power to, I can say, make a law saying there shall be no more driving, no more factories operating, and no other sources of pollution.
How would you like that?
We could have clean air, couldn't we?
But at a huge cost, couldn't we?
It would be a huge cost.
Yeah, okay.
So the issue is, the issue is not perfectly clean air or perfectly dirty air.
It is how much clean air are we going to have at what price and are we willing to pay for it?
I think it's a quality of life we're talking about.
Of course it's a quality of life.
And one more little thing.
I was in Chicago area and we took the kids to a park and there was acid rain into the river that was leaking down into the water.
It was coffee colored and there was a sign on the beach that said, sorry, it's polluted.
The water's polluted today.
We can't swim today.
Oh, that's a shame.
Well, you know what?
We need to clean up the air.
It's just clean enough.
You want to go to China and see how they're running amok over there.
They have no controls.
They have environmental quality.
Right.
And moreover, they're exempt from Kyoto.
But one of the points is that the capitalist countries have the cleanest air.
I mean, the countries where they control the economy, Russia and China.
Matter of fact, I think it's some river or lake in Russia where they have signs, don't throw your cigarettes in the river or the lake because you could cause a fire.
That's all I'm saying.
And what I'm saying...
Whether it's global warming or not, we need to clean up the environment.
Oh, well.
Well, what do you mean by clean up the environment?
That is, we've gone a long way.
That is, cars are far more fuel efficient than they've ever been.
I agree.
And we have cleaner air than there ever has been.
Well, you drive in any major city anywhere in the United States in the summertime, and there are signs out.
Sorry, today, you know, it's not a good day to be out.
You should stay inside.
Can you deny that?
Well, no, I don't deny it, but it was worse a long time ago.
It was worse along.
Look, clean air is a result of wealth.
It is a result of wealth.
That is, if you're rich like we are, you can afford to make those sacrifices and use those technological instruments to have cleaner air and cleaner water.
I mean, see, many people want us to want government control over our economy.
And you look at the places where there's significant government control, China and Russia, good examples, and there's very dirty air.
And on the other hand, if you look at rich countries, there tends to be cleaner air.
And the rich countries, I would include some of our socialist neighbors in Europe.
They have cleaner air, and there's government control, significant government control over their lives, but they're richer and they have cleaner air.
We'll be no, no, no, no.
We can take one more call, right?
Okay, let's go to Tom in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Hi.
Welcome.
Thank you.
I just wanted to say that I concur with you on everything that you were saying earlier about the global warming and that it's not man's fault as much as a lot of people claim.
And I've got a quick little paragraph from one of my textbooks that I have in my possession.
I'm a meteorology climatology student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln down here.
And anyways, I'd like to quickly read a paragraph from this textbook.
And it says there's general warming of climate until the Atlantic climate stage, which was reached about 8,000 years ago, lasting about 3,000 years, had an average air temperature somewhat higher than those of today when this textbook was published back in 1978.
And it said perhaps on the order of 2.5 degrees Celsius or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher.
And they call that a climactic optimum.
Well, that's consistent with what the climatologists that I know have said.
Guys like Fred Singer, and there's a fellow at the University of Virginia, I forget his name, but these are sensible climatologists and they question the standard rhetoric that we hear about global warming.
But the real tragedy for Americans is not who says what.
It's one group of people backed by government who are trying to silence the dissenters.
And that's what we should worry about.
We'll be back with your call for this.
Walt Williams here holding forth.
And keep in mind, ladies and gentlemen, Roger Hedcock will be in on Monday.
And we hope that Rush has recovered, and we wish him a speedy recovery.
And he'll be back on Tuesday, we hope.
And let's go back to the phones.
And Pat in Pennsylvania, welcome to the show, Pat.
Hi, Dr. Williams.
I called to say you're my hero, and I'd like to ask you how you get a wife to stay with you for so long after you make her cut grass and shovel snow.
I didn't have any luck with that.
Well, you know, it's very interesting you bring that up because just before the show started, we have a couple of television screens here.
And I was watching Fox News, and they were giving all kinds of suggestions about improving your marriage.
And you know what?
They didn't say anything about wives being obedient to their husbands.
And that's the key thing.
I got married under the old contract, you know, where love, honor, and obey.
And all I have to do is cherish, and I just cherish her.
And my wife is very, very obedient.
And one of the, you see, now you might call this chauvinistic of me, but sometimes I see wives talking while their husband is talking.
And I told Mrs. Williams right off when we got married that she can't talk while I'm talking because that's an insult.
That's like saying what I'm saying is not important.
And what I say is very, very important.
And then there's something else I don't tolerate.
And that's when I scold Mrs. Williams, I don't tolerate looking me in the face while I'm scolding her.
I call that reckless eyeballing.
And so she looks down when I'm scolding her.
But you guys would understand all this.
I'm a very handsome man and very desirous of women.
And those of you who don't have a website, internet access to get to my website to see my photograph, matter of fact, it's waltwilliams.com.
You can kind of picture me as a brown Tom Cruise.
That's what you can kind of, yeah, a lot taller.
And Mrs. Williams, we've been married for 47 years and we've known each other two years.
We're going on a half a century knowing one another.
Matter of fact, I was telling Mrs. Williams the other day that she did much better in our marriage than I did.
I mean, she came out a winner in our marriage.
So, anyway, but I think you have to do these kind of things to make sure that wives obey.
And matter of fact, the minister that married, those of you in Philadelphia, John Logan, he married us, and he read St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians, and I think it's chapter 20, verse 5.
And it says, Wives, be unto your husbands as your husband is unto Christ.
And so that's the relationship.
She has to treat me kind of like I'm Christ.
And so we get along very, very well.
But anyway, that's enough of these tips because Rush doesn't pay me to give this kind of advice.
I only get the minimum wage for doing the show.
And so, but I'm giving much more than I'm being paid.
But let's go.
Oh, there's another pat from Vera Beach, Florida.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, Dr. Williams, I really appreciate your hosting to the show.
I think you do a great job.
Okay.
Are you married?
Well, I was until recently.
Oh, okay.
Well, she didn't understand the proper relationship, apparently.
Yeah, right.
And it's probably your fault, too.
Well, in her mind, no, actually, it was entirely her fault.
Okay.
But you didn't call the show, talk about that.
Well, you were talking to somebody earlier who seemed to be changing the subject from global warming to pollution.
I think you give him too much credit for being well-informed.
I think the full court press by the media to misinform people and to make them equate carbon emissions with soot coming out of smokestacks.
These people think that global warming is associated with pollution in general.
Yeah.
It's intentional, just like the use of phrases like global warming denier.
I mean, this is intentional.
It's a full court press going on in the media.
This summer, USA Today ran a series all week long about global warming, front-page stories, plus the blurbs on each state.
Each single story was global warming related.
This is for a week.
I mean, this is not accidental.
Have you heard them talk about global warming this week?
No, not too much.
They're being a bit quiet.
I wonder why that is.
Because it's global freezing, I guess.
But however, a lot of folks don't remember that, don't recognize that CO2 is a food.
It's a food for what?
It's for plants.
As plants use CO2, and their waste product is what?
Oxygen.
Oxygen, right.
And we need and we love oxygen.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
Okay, we're back for the last few minutes.
By the way, when I was mentioning that Fox news, I should have also mentioned that there's the open of a new Fox TV show that features Rush as the President of the United States.
You can check it out just by going to rushlimball.com.
And while you're there, sign up for the 24-7 and hear Rush's monologues.
And you can also get your own America's Anchorman mouse pad.
And that's at therushlimball.com.
And let's go to Sean in Ogden, Utah.
Welcome to the show.
Hi, Dr. Williams, Dittos.
I know that Rush doesn't pay you to dispense advice.
You've already stated that.
I was hoping that the minimum wage would go up so he can pay me more.
There you go.
I was just kind of wondering what you gave Mrs. Williams for Valentine's Day.
Well, you're going to be very disappointed.
What I did, I normally don't give out Valentine's Day gifts because I don't believe in spoiling the help.
But this year, I did give her some very, very nice roses, and she really enjoyed it.
It came quite as a surprise because during our 40 years, seven years of marriage, I have not believed in doing things that would spoil the help.
Okay?
That's great.
Okay, thanks.
Let's take one more call.
Bob and Clovis, New Mexico.
Welcome to the show.
Hi, Dr. Williams.
It's an honor to speak to you.
Hey, I was wondering if you'd heard, you know, we have a large Hispanic population out here in New Mexico.
I was wondering if our urinals were going to be bilingual.
Well, no, what you have to do, you have to let me know that because I'm not going out to New Mexico to find whether that is.
But maybe it's something like, you know, push one if it's English and push two if it's Spanish.
We hear of all that kind of stuff.
So I don't know.
I would hope that they're bilingual.
And if my fellow Mexican Americans find that they're not bilingual, they should just bring suit.
Or maybe actually go to the company and translate, you know, give them a free translation so that they can be bilingual.
But anyway, I am not going out there to do the research.
Export Selection