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May 15, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:30
May 15, 2007, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Welcome to the Rush Limba program.
And I want to uh give the phone number right off the bat.
1800-282-2882.
Big news in San Diego, and I want to get right to it because today in San Diego, the General Dynamics NASCO people, General Dynamics NASCO, is one of our local shipyards in San Diego, are launching the uh a new bo a new boat, a new ship for the United States Navy.
It's a dry cargo ammunition ship.
And it's uh kind of a hybrid between the old merchant marine and the Navy, so they don't call it the USS uh such and such.
It's USNS or U.S. Naval Ship, civilian manned, but in the service of the United States Navy.
And uh it's to be it's to be well, it's to be named uh after uh Senator Richard Byrd.
It's the USNS Richard E. Byrd launched today in the harbor here in uh San Diego, a Navy ship now named after Sheets Byrd.
Only here on the left coast do we reach these new pinnacles of cultural uh achievement.
We're going to uh today, of course, talk about uh well, we're the left coast uh way of uh doing things here at the Limbaugh Institute, so Paris Hilton will be with us uh and Joe Arpayo together coming up uh the debate tonight with Republican candidates.
What I want to hear from them, and we'll talk a little bit about gas prices and the postal rates going up as well.
But first uh I was in uh Las Vegas, over in Las Vegas, as they say with the left coast orientation uh last weekend to find out that the sports book had the San Diego Chargers nine to two, uh number one uh to win the um Super Bowl next January.
So I thought to just bring you that uh from the uh from the uh mouths of people who put up uh uh millions of dollars.
Are you on is your uh city on this road rage list, according to auto vantages in the driver's seat road rage survey?
I uh uh and this is going to be my theme today, so follow me on this.
Uh uh I'm sorry to report that as uh we were talking about the last time I filled in for Rush, uh, what was it a week or so ago, uh the uh the Liberal left has now gone from you know concern to anger to frustration to rage to fury following the president's veto of the timetable on the war.
The fury, I'm sorry, is being visited on our roads and streets, apparently.
According to Associated Press, the top five cities for instances of road rage are all in blue states.
They are in fact blue cities.
Miami, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. I'm happy to report San Diego is seventeenth.
Certainly below a lot of uh blue states, uh blue state, blue city kind of situations, but uh well above uh the continued uh a cool laid-back uh Hippieville, uh Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Tacoma.
Some of those places are still lower than we are, you know, kind of well, probably because of the illegals.
But in any event, uh we are seventeenth on the list.
I wonder where you are.
But this is the theme today that we are going to pursue because um this instances of rage are cropping up nearly everywhere.
Uh oh, this isn't gonna help.
Paris Hilton in a picture of her uh smoking a joint at the Coachella Festival after she's pled uh with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for a pardon.
By the way, did I uh did you hear did you hear what the petition actually says from Paris Hilton to Schwarzenegger?
Here in part is what she says, quote.
She starts out quote, let me first begin by saying that I grew up as a child enjoying all of your wonderful films.
Now this is just backside bussing of the first order.
This is just good stuff.
Or here's the second sentence.
You really are the truly great action hero for our time.
See, people in Hollywood know what gets other people from Hollywood to move, which is just shameless backside busing.
Here's the third sentence.
You are doing a great job in the state of California.
In any event, uh Paris Hilton is uh going to jail.
Joe Arpayo, of course, the uh America Sheriff.
I love this guy.
You know him from Maricopa County, uh down in uh Phoenix, Arizona, uh Joe Arpayo has made it clear to Clear Channel's Melanie Burkett uh reporterette that uh well uh if there's going to be an overcrowding problem in the LA County jail, which uh they're now saying might have Paris not uh fulfilling her entire uh sentence, uh he has plenty of room.
In fact, uh he's made the this offer.
I have a vacancy sign uh above my tents with two thousand uh in the tents, and I'm if they would like uh her to come here, I told the sheriff and his head of the jails that I would take care of her free of charge.
This is shame the overcrowding problem.
However, I would never use that here.
I just keep putting up tents from here to Mexico.
Wouldn't you love to have that guy as your sheriff?
I sure would.
Ooh, man.
All right, latest uh gallop poll numbers out on the Bush approval rating.
This is all you hear in the mainstream press.
Bush down in one of those polls to 28, another's 35, uh, the rest are in between.
Gallup today is 33.
What is never said in the in the in the drive-by media, what is never said is the approval rating of Congress.
Gallup has the approval rating of Congress, the Democrat-led Congress that represents the people of this country who are demanding an end to the war, who are demanding you know, all that stuff that we heard from Pelosi and Ram Emanuel and all those people.
The congressional approval rating is twenty-nine percent.
Worse than that, the congressional approval rating was um thirty seven percent when the Democrats took over.
It was thirty-seven percent when the Democrats took over.
It's twenty-nine percent today.
Drive-by media never covers the fact that Congress is held in even lower esteem than uh George Bush, which they constantly portray as being uh, you know, a a president without uh without support.
So with Congress at that lower level.
It's not Sheets Bird?
Really?
Wait a minute.
This guy says it's not Sheetsbird.
Wait a minute, let's go to Steve in Virginia Beach, uh, Virginia.
I'm Roger Hedgecock on the Rush Show.
Steve, what do you got?
Hey, you there, Ron?
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I don't have a real well signal.
Yeah, you said that Navy ship was named for Richard E. Byrd.
He was an explorer.
I think he did some exploration up around the North Pole, if I remember correctly.
You know, you know, I'm you're breaking up, but I think you know you may be right.
Let's run that by Google and find out.
Richard E. Bird could not, maybe it's not the senator, maybe it's the explorer, in which case I feel a lot better.
For some reason or other, I thought San Diego was gonna host a ship named after Sheets Byrd.
I don't know.
I got uh I got uh I got the chills this morning looking at this ad.
There's an ad.
Oh, because there have been a big big ceremony today down at the harbor in San Diego, and they're gonna launch the ship.
Maybe it is the explorer, and I've slandered them.
Let's find out.
All right, anyway, back to this.
The uh Senate today, maybe uh later this week, is going to vote on uh the um uh question of whether to cut off money for the Iraq war.
Now look, uh, ladies and gentlemen, I think the Democrats wallowing now in the worst approval rating for Congress since uh Coolidge.
Might as well just make up things like the Liberals do.
This is the worst approval rating for a president ever.
Let's let's just make it up.
This is the worst approval rating for Congress in the history of our Republic.
Uh what are they going to do when faced with having to be honest about their intentions?
Because you know they lied to the liberal left, these guys who got into office and said, we're we're devoted to putting an end uh to the Iraq war.
And of course they haven't done it.
They put surrender dates, you know, in timetables and months from now and next year and blah, blah, blah.
You know, I gotta tell you, uh, Mrs. Clinton, uh, Mr. Obama, and some of you folks who are in the United States Senate who uh talk about ending the war, you can do it tomorrow.
You can do it by cutting off the funds tomorrow.
When the vote comes up, vote honestly on this.
Don't put a deadline of, well, next March, you've got to have the troops deployed somewhere else.
Well, okay.
What do you say to the parents of people who die in that war between now and then?
When you've signaled surrender but made it some other day.
If you're gonna surrender, if you're gonna stop the war, stop it now.
Be honest about it.
Stop being hypocrites.
That vote's coming up.
It's a put up or shut up situation as far as I'm concerned.
Hillary and Obama have got to get it.
Mrs. Clinton and uh uh Mr. Obama have got to get it now.
If there's no there's no more fudging.
There's no more saying one thing to one group and another thing to another group and hoping that your little coalition of uh whack jobs on the left keep together here so you get the nomination of the wackiest McGovernite in the in the in the field.
You've got to stand up now.
You're either in favor of ending this war or you're not in favor of ending this war.
Okay.
And stop it with supporting the troops.
Stop it with that.
I mean, what was it uh I saw that um that John Edwards last Saturday unveiled a website, support the troops and the war.com, suggesting ways of reclaiming patriotism and observing Memorial Day by attending a demonstration to urge the safety of the troops by withdrawing them from Iraq.
This is how we're going to keep them safe by keeping them out of battle.
That's John Edwards.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, when conservatives talk about supporting the troops, we mean doing everything possible to win the war.
Win the war that they're fighting.
Liberals, of course, never talk about victory.
They talk about support.
What they mean is they want to turn these soldiers, these veterans, into just another victim group.
A group dependent on government health and welfare services, a group coming back to services and government programs and uh uh a constant victim status.
That's what liberals have in mind for our troops.
What we have in mind for our troops is victory.
So you're not supporting the troops by turning them into a victim class, by turning them into a government program, by turning them into some kind of permanent dependency.
That's not supporting the troops, Senator Edwards.
Are you, Senator Edwards, willing to vote this this week?
When it comes right down to it to cut off the funding for the war?
Or are you not?
Are you honest or are you just a hypocrite?
If you're going to end the war, end it now.
Because if you can't do that, then get out of the way and let some uh group of uh people in Congress lead who can get us to victory in this war.
It's gotta be one or the other.
You know, you know, I I get so frustrated trying to explain this because it's like trying to explain to a four-year-old why Superman isn't real.
I you know, so I guess I'm just blue in the face and I'm gonna stop.
I'm Roger Hedgecock, filling in for Rush Limbaugh, taking your calls at 1800-282-2882 after this.
All right, welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hitchcock filling in for Rush, taking your calls at 1-800-282-2882 coming at you from the left coast here at Radio Station KOGO in San Diego.
Uh, and and we do apologize again.
Richard Byrd, uh, who is name is now on this new uh cargo ammunition ship launched today in San Diego Harbor for the United States Navy, uh, is the explorer, Richard Byrd, and not Sheetsburg.
Gee, I thought we were gonna have to figure out a way to home port this thing in West Virginia, which is gonna be a tough thing to do if you know any geography.
And you don't if you've gone to K-12 recently.
Anyway, back to uh the votes in the Senate this week.
So this week the uh the Russ Feingold bill, which would cut off the funding for the Iraq war now, is up for a vote.
And I'm just wondering if we can't focus on uh Barack Obama uh on Hillary Clinton as they cast their vote.
Are they really and I want you Democrats to focus on this, because apparently the nominating largest portion of voters in this nominating process for the Democratic nomination want this vote over now, this uh war over now?
So are your potential candidates, your potential leaders, going to vote the way you want them to?
Are they going to vote honestly to just cut this war off?
Or are they going to say, no, no, no, no.
What we meant by uh stopping the war is sometime in the future, and a lot of people will die in the meantime, but hey, you know, that's uh no, no, no, no.
If you're against the war, how do you justify somebody dying one more day?
I mean, this is John Kerry's pitch in the Vietnam War.
How do you justify one more death, Mrs. Clinton?
If you're against the war and you think Harry Reed it's lost, how do you j how do you justify not voting for Feingold's cut the war funding now?
Another big vote.
This uh another big vote this week will be on uh apparently on uh immigration.
Uh Senator Martinez out today, Mel Martinez uh Florida talking about uh the uh trying to put together a compromise, the uh post, the Washington Post this morning and their lead editorial talking about the uh what the elements would be in that uh compromise.
And I'll tell you the debate tonight with Republican candidates, here's what I would like to hear.
Uh Britt Hume and the others there who are finally going to get down to some kind of uh uh issues uh beyond trying to uh cripple whatever Republican frontrunner there is uh, you know, by moderators who want Hillary Clinton to be president, uh Chris Matthews.
And what we want to do is uh get some real uh real questions in.
For instance, what is your real plan for the border?
Because Giuliani has spoken often as mayor of uh New York in favor of immigration, whether legal or illegal.
He has uh he has uh changed his tune a bit.
So on abortion, uh they're talking about changing tune.
Well, what about the change of tune in the in the border situation?
What about McCain, who is the architect with Ted Kennedy of the uh of the uh amnesty bill that uh the the uh Congress considered, the Senate considered last year.
Is that just going to come back now with a nod toward border security, a nod toward employer verification, and nothing uh, you know, and then all amnesty all the time.
How do you justify that after the Fort Dix six?
When three of the six who were planning to shoot up our soldiers at Fort Dixon, New Jersey were smuggled across the southern border.
How do you how do you justify that?
Well, anyway, we'll get into all of that uh later uh in the program.
I first want to talk about uh and we'll take some calls as well, but I first want to talk about gas prices.
Because today is the day, and and Rush talked about this yesterday, just uh inundated with people uh urging me not to buy gas today.
Well, okay.
Uh I'll buy it tomorrow.
Uh buy it yesterday, I'll buy it two days from now.
Uh the question is not buying it, the question is reducing the demand.
Since we're not going to have another refinery built, not because of evil big oil, but because the environmentalists, I don't know about your state, but in my state, in about four or five languages, they will tell you that you can't build anything anywhere at any time.
That's a banana print principle.
So uh don't build anything anywhere in any okay.
Anyway, so that's that's the uh that's the current um atmosphere.
No wonder there's not an evil oil refinery has been built in this country for thirty some years.
Now, I I think we've still been selling cars.
Like there's five times as many cars as there were thirty years ago, so or something like that.
So here we are with a demand much higher, the supply artificially restricted by environmental concerns and wondering why the price is going up.
That's you know, ladies and gentlemen, people in this institute don't have that problem.
They know that when you restrict supply and demand is encouraged, prices are gonna go up.
Now, what do you do about it?
Well, you know, I've been driving less.
That's all.
I've been driving less.
There's something else you can do about it, though.
And I thought about this today.
There's something else you can do about this.
And it was occasioned by I heard this crazy ad, apparently run for Sitco on uh uh Sitco Oil, these stations uh that are owned by Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelans and all that.
Uh uh running on uh my local station here, and we'll just play a little bit of it so you get a flavor of this.
Apparently, in conjunct Sitco in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal of all things.
This is the Venezuelan Hugo Chavez-owned oil company, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, doing this ad.
Just imagine what you can accomplish today.
You can start your own company.
Not in Venezuela.
Or cook a gourmet.
No, you can't.
No food.
Every day we're free to accomplish all kinds of fascinating things.
Not in Venezuela.
For generations, the people of Citco have been providing energy for our achievements.
Big and small.
With access to the largest crude reserves in the Western hemisphere.
Yeah, in Venezuela.
Okay, enough enough.
So my idea was I heard this out of.
Are you kidding?
This is a company.
Now, if if I'm wrong again about this, I apologize immediately.
But as far as I know, since 1990, this uh sitco, CITGO uh brand, uh City of the Old City Services, uh, is uh owned by corporations that are controlled by the government of Venezuela.
It is Hugo Chavez's business interest in the United States of America.
7 Eleven has decided that uh they're not going to renew their sitco uh, you know, in some places.
I'm not renewing my sitco either.
So if you want to boycott something today, why don't we just put Hugo Chavez out of business and not patronize Sitco?
Just just a thought.
If you want to do something about high gas prices, why don't we pick on a company we should be picking on for a number of reasons and not just high gas prices?
Postal rates going up too.
And I got a little suggestion about that, and I want to get your reaction coming up on the Rush Show after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Uh we are hard at it today, as uh Rush would have us do.
Let's take some calls and get you into the mix.
Roger in Pittsburgh is next.
Roger, welcome to the program.
Hi, hi.
You know what burns me up about the Dems the most is that they really have no respect for our armed services at all when they try to pass bills for funding our arms services and include in there such things as spinach, pineapple, their sewage bill.
You know, that that's what burns me up.
They that's we'll let it do it on their own merit, with the military on its own.
Well, now wait a minute.
You you're you're not talking about the Democrats who wanted to get rid of earmarks and were accusing the Republican majority as recently as last fall's election campaign cycle that uh the Republicans and earmarks were a culture of corruption uh favoring their their their wealthy benefactors and so forth and so on.
I mean, it can't you can't be talking about the same Democrats.
Oh, I'm talking about these these crummy Democrats.
All right, Roger, thanks for the call.
You know, that's absolutely right.
What what is the difference?
You know, uh hail the new boss, meet the new boss, same as the old boss, right?
The who the who record.
This is this is what we're this is why they have a 29% approval rating in this latest Gallup poll, because it's apparent to everybody that the big agenda of reform as recently as what, last January?
Where was it?
Minimum wage.
Where's that?
Uh reform.
We're not going to have the old Abramoff uh uh K Street lobbyists controlling us anymore.
Same firms, by the way, have just hired liberal Dems to go in and represent their clients, and guess what?
They're getting their way, as this caller pointed out, with something like twenty-two billion dollars of earmarks on the hundred and four billion or whatever it was that uh Bush wanted for the war.
Peanut warehouses, stuff like that in the twenty-two billion.
Is that a change?
Is that less of a culture of corruption?
Well, the mainstream media would have you believe it.
I don't.
Here's uh here's the postal hike thing.
The price of um first class postage, as you know, yesterday rose for the fourth time since 2001.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I love my mail carrier, and I'm glad that they're there and all that.
But uh this guy, uh John E. Potter, who is the Postmaster General, in a question and answer format in the LA Times recently, uh, was trying to kind of slip by the uh obvious here.
The Postal Service budget, seventy-eight percent of it, is labor costs.
That's as compared to 60 percent at UPS and about 40 percent at Federal Express.
Now, there's differences between those, but if you take the gross generalization of comparing the private sector delivery of stuff to your door to the public sector delivery, a quasi public sector delivery of the Postal Service, then you get a situation in which you obviously have to point to what is their overhead.
Well, their overhead in the Postal Service is the fact they have four major unions.
And you can't fire people, and you can't uh you know, if there's less work to do, you simply have to raise the price of the work that you remaining work you do.
Imagine that in the private sector.
Well, I'm selling fewer widgets, so each of them is gonna cost twice as much.
What would actually happen?
You'd sell far fewer, wouldn't you?
Which of course is what happening, is what's happening, slow motion, to the uh Postal Service.
When I can send free email and attach pictures and this and that and the other to it, why would I send a first class stamp?
The only reason can I just get to the bottom line?
I think everybody understands this.
The only reason the Postal Service is still in business is is business junk mail.
And maybe Christmas cards.
But even there, I love these sites on the on the web where you can go and send uh send cards.
So what's the What's happening uh is even worse than another yet another raise to 41 cents for the first class.
Because now it's not just that.
It's It's going to be more than that if your first class is not one ounce but two ounces and all that stuff.
Now it's by weight on terms of the first class mail.
And then it's worse than that.
Because what they're talking about at the Postal Service is making it harder for you to even mail from home.
Because if you're I don't know whether you have a scale at home that's between one ounce and two ounce.
I mean, maybe you do.
Uh to the post office itself physically, waste our gas.
Right, to uh have the thing weighed so that we can pay the proper thing.
And then if you don't want to do that, you get the 41 for uh 41 cent forever stamped.
Have you heard about this?
The 41 cent forever stamp.
Now, either it means that the bureaucracy of the Postal Service just wants to admit that like any other government program, they're there forever, or that the price of of the first class stamp will be going up forever.
So you might as well buy uh and cap your price now.
In other words, stock up on two million of our stamps here at 41 cents because for the rest of your life you'll be capped and you won't have to pay the uh extra.
Now you know the promise like that will be broken within what?
Three, four years?
Can we give that three or four years?
What a complete ripoff.
I don't know about you, and again, I love my letter carrier and all that, but am I postman, because he is a man.
Uh but but but come on.
Wouldn't we be better privatizing this whole thing and doing away with the monopoly?
Why should the government be the only one who can come on my property and stick something in my mailbox?
And I have to have the UPS guy put the put the box next to my door and ring the doorbell and interrupt me, and I have to sign you know, all that stuff.
I don't get that.
Do you?
1 800 282 2882.
Here's uh John in Crofton, Maryland.
Hi, John.
How are you doing, Roger?
Can you stay sir?
What's up?
I'm a little burnt up about the latest increase.
Uh I guess it's about a five percent increase.
And from what you said, it's probably because of their labor and probably because of the unions.
And my father was uh a mailman in Newark, New Jersey, made post officer 40 years.
Yeah.
And every time they raise the first class rate, he said they shouldn't be raising the rate on first class.
It affects, you know, all us consumers.
They should be raising it on junk mail.
Nobody wants the junk mail, but they give them a bargain, which encourages more junk mail that we don't want.
That's exactly right.
First class, by the way, mail volume declined 5.8% since 2001.
Uh the Postal Service still has uh 800,000 employees, by the way, the th get this.
The Postal Service is the nation's third largest employer.
Guess who the f top two are?
Department of Defense and Walmart, and then the Postal Service, to 800,000 employees to deliver less mail than they used to at a higher price.
I'm sorry, I can't even I can't even put that together.
It doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.
So uh, you know, maybe it's explained a little bit in Ezra Klein's op-ed piece in the LA Times called Give Bigger Government a chance.
Give big You know what I love it when liberals come clean.
And that's why I was asking them to come clean on this war vote.
If you really believe you should end the war, end the war now.
Don't end the war in September or next March or two years from now, end the war now.
If you really believe government ought to be bigger, come out and tell us why.
Tell us why we ought to take more money out of our paycheck and give it to the government for programs, and Ezra Klein has done this in the LA Times.
You ought to go look at this.
It's uh LA Times, when did he do this?
May 13th, a couple of days ago.
And he actually comes out and says that it is, and I'm quoting now, it is really we who have failed government, depriving it of the revenue, the conscientious management, and the attention needed for it to succeed.
We have failed Government.
He says, with Proposition 13 and the famous California tax revolt, and with presidents whose entire domestic programs amounted to mindless tax cutting, and with Congresses that have been happy to pass cuts and stack deficits, we have systematically deprived the government of the revenues it needs to provide basic services, even as we've come to need it to do so much more.
Unquote.
Now to believe that, Ezra, you have to believe that night is day and day is night.
The federal government today is taking a bigger portion of the gross domestic product than at any time in the history of our republic.
More money is going partially because of tax cuts, mind you.
More money is going to the federal government than ever before.
Maybe with the exception of a spike in World War II.
as a percentage of our economy, and as an absolute number.
You know, if the Dow Jones Industrial Average is, as it's doing again today, hitting new highs every day, government spending is hitting new highs every day.
The idea that we have strangled government, the idea that we have systematically deprived the government of revenues it needs to provide basic services, is just a lie.
It's just not true.
The tax cuts, he writes, quote, have robbed the Treasury of 200 billion dollars in revenue.
Robb the Treasury.
There has never been a tsunami of revenue to this Federal Treasury as there is now because of the tax cuts.
The rates have gone down, the amount of money has gone up.
You have to absolutely lie.
Night is day, day is night in order to come to these conclusions.
And then he goes on, worse yet, to say that because Congress is uh constantly uh cutting things that we need, there will have to be cuts uh at the state and local level picking up the slack, and they'll have to cut police and schools and jails and Pell Grants and all that.
Well, I don't know about your area, your neighborhood, your city, your county.
I don't know where you are, but where we are, it is also true that the state and local government is spending more than ever.
The Prop 13 did not cut expenditures in this state.
They went up because other taxes went up.
We cut property taxes, and the state uh uh and and local governments, by the way, even on property tax revenue because our property uh values were going up, property tax revenue recovered within two years of nineteen seventy-eight when Prop 13 still he's still flogging Prop 13.
This was 1978.
Within two years of Prop 13, revenues in the city of San Diego from the lowered property tax rate came back up to the pre-78 level, and since then they've gone nothing but skyrocket.
We are many times the prop pre-PROP 13 revenue level in uh San Diego, and yes, we're cutting services because like everywhere else in government, most of this money, and maybe the Postal Service, most of this money has gone into outrageous benefits and salaries for the bloated feather-bedded bureaucracy.
There, I've said I feel so much better.
Roger Hedgecock filling in for rush, taking your calls right after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hedgecock filling in for rush coming at you from the uh studios of KOGO Radio in San Diego on the left coast and right at the busiest border crossing in the world.
We'll talk more about immigration in the next hour.
The uh Republican candidates set in South Carolina to debate tonight.
And one of the major categories of debate questions will be immigration, and we'll be talking about what I would like to hear from them later in the uh program and get your thoughts as well.
In the meantime, here's Rob in Jacksonville, Florida on the Rush Program.
Hi, Rob.
How are you today, sir?
I'm doing fine, sir.
Go ahead.
Okay, uh this has some uh comments about the uh postal service.
I am a letter carrier here in Jacksonville, and some of the things that the numbers don't reflect the reality of a situation sometimes.
Um people don't realize, yes, we you know, we have 800,000 employees or whatever, but we're also the only quote company that's uh congressionally mandated to do universal delivery to every person in the continental United States.
Okay.
That takes that takes people.
I understand.
Uh as far as uh a private company, a lot of things that we do would end up costing people a lot more.
Uh we do a lot of stuff free charge for that same forty one cents.
And when you when you add up how many how much an actual uh just an average citizen of this country spends in postage every year, that two cents is probably gonna end up to about a dollar and a half a year.
What do you guys what do you guys do for free?
Uh we hold mail, forward mail, uh all the services we do uh as far as handling stuff like that.
It's all done, you know, it doesn't cost the customer anything.
I thought that was included in the 41 cents, which is up four times since two thousand one.
Right.
But how uh but also when you look at the percentage it's up in the last two hundred years, you're really not talking nearly as much as yours anything else in the country.
Ooh, two hundred years.
How about since World War II?
Okay.
What do you think it is?
Well, I know when I joined the Navy in seventy six, it was tw uh ten cents to deliver a letter.
Okay.
So you know, when you c cross out and want the uh you know even back uh say two hundred years ago, it was what two cents two cents the mail a letter.
You know, and it really hasn't increased as much percentage per cap, you know across uh two cents to somebody two hundred years ago was a major amount of money.
You know, 41 cents today is nothing.
All right.
Well, Rob, we got to the letter carrier point of view in, and I appreciate your call.
Oh boy.
There is an endless parade of reasons why we ought to continue to do that, which does not make any common sense, and and I'm sure we'll hear all of them, because that's how America is largely run today by people who have to jettison common sense and fact in order to get to their point and to prevail in any kind of way.
We just heard Ezra Klein talking about how government isn't big enough and isn't taking enough money out of your paycheck.
Then the letter carrier saying, hey, that forty-one cents, all that stuff we do for you, I mean, that's all free.
Well, what is the 41 cents for then?
Jerry in uh Corvallis, Montana, is it?
Uh Jerry, go ahead.
Yes.
Good morning.
Hi, welcome to the Rush Show.
Go ahead.
Um, I just want to make a comment on um the Democrats and uh how they're wanting to fold up and you know, Harry Reid going around saying we've lost the war.
Yeah.
And I really think that this type of rhetoric has emboldened um the terrorist to and and that's what precipitated the the kidnapping of our soldiers over there.
You know, these people, the Democrats and some of the more uh liberal Republicans at Caved, uh uh say that we should negotiate with these people.
If we only treat them better, uh they'll treat us better, etc.
etcetera.
Now say your your NFL team, for instance, is down at the half, fourteen to ten.
And you come back from the uh the halftime uh ceremony to start the third quarter, and the team that's got ten, half of them stand uh over on the side of the team who has fourteen saying, Well, we've lost, so we we just want to tell you that uh we've lost and we're just gonna hang back here and kind of stand and cheer on your side of the you know, everyone in America would understand Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute.
You've got a whole half to play yet.
You've got uh, you know, these these things go back and forth.
You're you're giving up now.
Uh it doesn't make any sense.
But that's what we're doing in Iraq.
Absolutely.
And it reminds me of the Jimmy Carter syndrome, you know.
Uh don't do anything, try to negotiate with these people and they'll do something.
And of course they didn't do anything until uh Mr. Reagan was uh elected and they post haste released them because they had uh doing the let's not forget that one.
That's exactly right, Jerry.
Thanks for the call.
Yeah, in fact, uh here we are beating with the uh Iranians on a day in which the uh LL Baradai from the United Nations uh is now putting out a report and he's been you know low-keying this stuff all the way along.
Today's report is hey, they're enriching uranium faster than ever.
Enriched uranium.
You know what that means?
Atomic bombs on North Korean missiles with 1800 mile range.
Hello, Europe, are you listening?
I'm Roger Hitchcock.
We'll be back with more on the Rush Show after this.
Well, apparently they worked till midnight last night uh between the Bush administration, the Senate uh and uh uh Mr. Kyle and uh some of the others who are Mr. Martinez, who are working on uh a compromise on the immigration law.
What are we likely to see in that as Americans?
And, by the way, what are we likely to hear from the Republican candidates debating later today in South Carolina?
Well, I'll tell you what I'd like to hear from them in terms of fixing the immigration uh situation.
We'll get to that, particularly in the wake of the Fort Dick Six situation.
We're going to talk about the uh war vote as well.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh, 1-800-282-2882.
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