Rush Limbaugh Program - October 26, 2007, Friday, Hour #2

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Oct. 26, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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October 26, 2007, Friday, Hour #2

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	Well, it is World Series time, everybody.
	So that means the president in World Series parlance is two for two.
	Moments ago, or not long ago, he just vetoed the second version of Hillary Care on the installment plan, the S-CHIPS bill.
	The president says, look, you still want to raise taxes immensely.
	I'm not going to go back on my tax cuts.
	I'm not going to go back on raising taxes.
	It's not going to happen.
	And you still want to insure the quote-unquote middle class up to $60,000 or more, maybe, or more.
	You still want to do that before we insure all of the poor kids that the S-CHIP bill, the state children's health insurance program is turning into a political fraud, my friends.
	In Minnesota, for instance, where I'm from, in the land, the People's Republic of Minnesota, as we affectionately call it up here, the land of 10,000 loons, and that's just the legislature, we already had MinCare, like 10CARE, the failed program in Tennessee.
	We already had MinCare that was insuring all of these people that made more.
	Remember, S-CHIPS wasn't about poor people.
	It never was.
	Medicaid is about poor people.
	The state children's health insurance program, which we didn't even have in this country until 1997, it was a Clinton bill, of course, was about ensuring people that made too much money but still couldn't afford health insurance.
	We might want to make health insurance more affordable.
	Well, the president has vetoed it, and in Minnesota, as I was getting to, it's insuring adults.
	It is insuring pregnant women.
	It is insuring, because of a waiver, yes, illegal immigrants.
	That's what the S-CHIP bill is doing in the People's Republic of Minnesota, occupied territory.
	So that's what it's doing in a number of other states as well.
	This was never about poor kids.
	It was never about the indigent.
	It has been sold as a bill of goods.
	I'm telling you, if a business did this, the state attorneys general would be all over them for fraudulent advertising.
	So good for the president to veto this once again.
	And let's see if the House Republicans can sustain the veto once again.
	I believe they can.
	Unfortunately, I've got to be honest with you, you can't count on Senate Republicans.
	Senate Democrats are gleeful with these pushovers in the Senate.
	I mean, you've got Olympia Snow and Charles Grassley and the ethanol king, the king of corn.
	You've got, unfortunately, Norm Coleman of Minnesota voted for this.
	They're all afraid.
	You know one of the fundamental problems with Republicans these days?
	They actually believe what their enemy says.
	Can you imagine coaching a football team and having the opposing coach say, I really think you ought to do this or else?
	All right, I'll take your advice, coach.
	They afraid they get a nasty editorial in the New York Times or in the Washington Post or the L.A. Times?
	So I don't want to do that.
	I want to inoculate myself from liberal criticism so I know I'll be a new Democrat.
	You got the National Governors Association, you know, led by Governor Poleny up here in Minnesota, and they're confabbing with Sonny Perdue and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlie Crist, who wants the taxpayers to fund any particular calamity in Florida at the national level.
	And they're getting together to form the new Republican.
	We're going to rebrand the party.
	Well, their idea of rebranding the party is more Hillary care.
	It is more silly renewable fuels like ethanol, which is a total bust and costing the taxpayer billions of dollars.
	If the Republican Party doesn't realize that the last successful, really successful, and well, let me put it to you this way, not the last successful, but the most popular Republican president in recent memory was also the most conservative, the Gipper, they are going to be destined for the dustbin of history, as the Gipper used to say.
	I don't know what it is about conservatism that scares the GOP right now.
	If it weren't for the House Republicans, there would be no conservative caucus in the GOP because the Republican governors are behaving horribly.
	Arnold Schwarzenegger cares more about global warming than anything else.
	Well, maybe the wildfires right now.
	But of course, we know that's caused by global warming.
	You know, I got a great idea for you.
	If your child, if your child doesn't do his or her homework, forget about you left your books at home, your bicycle broke down.
	Forget about you had to go to grandma's funeral.
	They don't need that anymore.
	Next time the teacher asks your child, where's the homework, Johnny or Susie?
	Didn't get it done.
	Why not?
	Global warming.
	What?
	Well, it was so hot.
	You know, it's the cause of everything these days.
	It absolutely is.
	You listen to the mainstream media, or as Rush likes to say, the drive-by media.
	And global warming single-handedly is the cause for every malady under the sun.
	I've never seen such a concerted effort, contrived effort on the part of the mainstream media, especially the wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party, MSNBC, and NBC for that matter, to try to get this issue out in front because it is the mother of all liberal crises.
	And if you can get a crises, people are willing to give up their freedom.
	Used to be war was the health of the state.
	Ha!
	Doesn't hold a candle to radical environmentalism these days.
	And with the drive-bys and the, you know, MSNBC, I'll tell you, you watch these people on that.
	I try not to.
	The symbol of the Democratic Party wasn't an ass until Keith Oberman joined.
	Let me put it to you that way.
	It's just amazing how transparent these people can be.
	The motto of Democrats all over the country seems to be now, no tragedy left behind.
	Started up here five years ago this week with the Wellstone Memorial when a memorial attended by Republicans showing their good faith and their sadness for a lost friend was politicized for political gain.
	Fast forward to Hurricane Katrina.
	Fast forward to the casualties of war being politicized and exploited by Cindy Sheehan.
	The bridge in Minneapolis and St. Paul that fell last August.
	You had Congressman James Oberstar demanding a 23.4% or 23.4% gasoline tax on the banks of the Mississippi before the bodies were out, exploiting that tragedy to raise taxes, to grow government.
	All the while, Oberstar is bringing home the pork for his congressional district.
	A couple of years ago, he issued a press release.
	Our esteemed Democrat congressman from northern Minnesota issued a press release saying $12 million out of the 2005 highway bill coming home.
	Except that roughly $10 million was for non-road uses.
	$24 billion in the last highway bill for pork, bicycle paths, pedestrian walkways, you name it, mass transit.
	Oh, actually, not even mass transit because mass transit's got its own account now.
	If you love those light rail systems in your city, whether it's, you know, San Diego or Dallas or Portland, the mother of smart growth, the urban growth boundary Mecca, the People's Republic of Portland, if you like all that money, meanwhile, your congestion is getting worse.
	Take a look at the highway bill.
	$52 billion out of the last highway bill didn't go for roads.
	It didn't go for bridge maintenance.
	It went for the silly smart growth, new urbanist light rail schemes for 2% or 3% of the commuting public.
	Now, you take the earmarks, the pork, $24 billion in the earmarks in the last highway bill.
	You take the $52 billion that came out of there for the mass transit account, in which the federal government extorts states, you will not get your federal gas tax dollars back unless you build a light rail line, which doesn't work for most people.
	And by the way, run deficits that would boggle the mind each and every year, even when you do have ridership.
	You take that, you're looking at $76 billion out of the last highway bill devoted to totally non-road or bridge uses.
	And yet what did the no tragedy left behind folks say?
	Got to have a gas tax increase, state level and federal level.
	You're not paying enough.
	Got to have it for global warming.
	John Dingell says 50 cents a gallon for global warming.
	Carbon tax, raising your utility bills, got to have that because it's a crisis.
	We've got a crisis in bridges now.
	These people love a crises.
	Heck, if you took that $76 billion I just spoke about and you divvied it up among the states, you could fix every bridge.
	It's half of what the whole transportation budget is in a number of smaller populated states.
	But we're told while we waste the money, the budget's been cut to the bone and we've got to raise more revenue, whether it's Charlie Wrangell's new income tax plan, of course, only on successful folks, got to relieve the poor AMT souls down in the Democrat middle class.
	It's just, it's getting insufferable.
	No tragedy left behind, and now we've got the fires.
	Now we've got the wildfires in California.
	And I'll tell you, friends, I will tell you, it is very difficult to watch a million people being evacuated.
	My sister was evacuated out there in San Diego, sister and her husband.
	And you look at this and your heart goes out, obviously.
	It's tough, but the response has been very good, much different than Katrina.
	Hmm.
	I wonder if competent local government has anything to do with that.
	By the way, great Republican victory in Louisiana.
	This young Indian won a Republican victory on reform and ending corruption in New Orleans and Louisiana.
	Impressive.
	But we all know if you really want to get into the blame game, and that's what the liberal Democrats like Oberstar and company do.
	They get into the blame game.
	They take a tragedy and they say, how can we use this to our advantage?
	Wellstone Memorial, Katrina, the casualties of war, the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota over the Mississippi, and now, of course, the wildfires.
	And so you get these whacked out comments from the lieutenant governor of California, Barbara Boxer, literally trying to blame Bush.
	Bush started the fires.
	It was like when the left tried to blame Reagan for illegitimacy.
	I thought, boy, he was busier than I thought, that guy.
	We know what the problem is out there.
	In the 1980s, under the Clinton administration, Clinton and Gore, the Clinton Knights cut back timber harvesting by roughly 80 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal.
	Lawsuits were used to put land off limits.
	And what happened?
	According to the Government Accountability Office, millions of acres out there and in the West are now choked with undergrowth.
	You get high winds, you get a blowdown, or the timber companies can't get in there and remove the log.
	You know what you call the logs and the underbrush in the forest?
	Kindling.
	You got deadwood, infected trees, underbrush, 400 tons of dry fuel per acre at least.
	That's 10 times the manageable level.
	This is what turns the small fires into infernos.
	That's what's going on.
	And it is Is a direct result, my friends, of the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, Natural Resources Defense Council.
	It's another classic case of environmentalism killing people.
	Not just bad for your wallet, killing people.
	In DDT, how many people have died from malaria because of Rachel Carson's ridiculous hypotheses?
	So we take DDT off the markets, and in the third world countries, millions die of malaria.
	Cafe standards, corporate average fuel economy standards, none other than the National Academy of Sciences say if those standards keep going up, requiring more miles per gallon, in the name of energy independence, of course, 2,000 to 3,000 people will die a year than otherwise wouldn't because the only way the automobile manufacturers can get these kind of miles per gallon, 40 miles per gallon, is to make the car smaller and lighter.
	Environmentalism kills.
	And now this, the wildfires.
	I don't know what it's going to take before.
	And that is the elephant in the Republicans' living room right now.
	You've got a lot of these Senate Republicans and too many Republicans nationwide, fearful of the environmental movement.
	I've got to get the endorsement of the Sierra Club.
	How about the endorsement of people who own private property?
	Wouldn't that be refreshing?
	I'm Jason Lewis.
	To the phones we go after this short pause.
	1-800-282-2882.
	You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	We are back on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, having more fun than human beings should be allowed.
	I am Jason Lewis, reminding you I do have the heart of a liberal.
	I keep it in a jar on my desk in my office.
	1-800-282-2882.
	Andrew in St. Paul, Minnesota, my stomping grounds.
	Welcome to EIB.
	Hey, great talk, John, and the big show, Jason.
	Glad to have you.
	You're doing a great job holding down the national audience.
	Thank you, sir.
	Well, my comment is I've been listening to our local logical conservative radio for about the past three or four months.
	I've heard a lot of complaints on the national, on the local level, of people complaining that the Rhinos aren't standing up for their promises and the liberals are running away with everything.
	But what I haven't heard is anyone step up to the plane and say, you know what, I'm going to run against these people.
	Well, that's what it's going to take.
	I mean, if you take a look, the House Republicans in Washington, D.C. are really doing yeoman's work.
	They're standing together.
	They are really holding tough on a number of key issues.
	So Boehner and company are doing a great job out there.
	The senators are just, in many cases, beyond hope.
	I mean, you know, people say, well, gosh, it's always the lesser of two evils.
	They always hang that over your head.
	Well, if you don't vote for this Republican, even though they vote with the Democrats, why, you're going to get a Democrat.
	Then what's going to happen?
	Well, then you're going to get more votes like a Democrat.
	Well, what would be the difference?
	Except for a few, and I don't want to castigate all the Republican senators in Washington, but you know who they are.
	And they are AWOL when it comes to conservatism.
	And it's going to require some primary challenges, not only at the big-time statewide level, but also at your local statehouse level.
	I also just want to say, you know, I was raised to put up or shut up.
	And so I'm here to say that I am planning on running for local office next year because I'm tired of it.
	People want to know why the Republicans had their you-know-what handed to them last November.
	It had nothing to do with conservatism.
	We were trying the moderate approach.
	We increased spending.
	We had McCain fine gold.
	He had a prescription drug benefit.
	Hell, liberals should have been ecstatic with the Republican majority.
	And what happened?
	We lost.
	We lost.
	Conservatism is not only good public policy, it's good politics.
	And you're right.
	The GOP needs to start banding together with one voice.
	Why is it the Democrats can have a litmus test?
	You know, everybody, I mean, give the Democrats credit.
	They're committed socialists.
	We ought to be committed capitalists.
	And those that don't want to play that game, there's another party out there.
	I would rather, I'll tell you what, folks, I would rather be in the minority.
	And this is the problem.
	You take a look at it in a broad, kind of non-partisan way.
	There are two parties out there.
	There's the political class and there's the rest of us, the working class.
	The political class, far too often, is, in some cases, made up of both parties, Liberal Democrats and the rhinos who join them.
	Sounds like a bad Donahue show, doesn't it?
	Next on Donahue, Liberal Democrats and the Rhinos who love them.
	Anyway, they're made up of that class.
	Now you throw in the political consultants.
	If I see one more focus group, I think I'm going to pop a vein.
	I don't care about your focus group.
	It's too small of a sample.
	I have no idea the criteria for picking it.
	After the GOP debate, all we saw was a focus group.
	And I disagreed with everything they said almost.
	So you've got this political class, and their goal is to win.
	My goal is to change the country.
	Your goal is to change the country.
	This is not a game between R's and Ds.
	All we want to do is get people with an R behind their name.
	No.
	What I want to do is get people in Washington that will go back to constitutional government, enumerated powers, federalism, legislative deference if you're sitting in a court someplace, all of the key precepts of what it means to be a conservative.
	And I would rather be in the minority and stand true to that than literally sell my soul just to win an election.
	And frankly, that's part of the problem.
	Got to move.
	Thanks, Andrew.
	Appreciate it.
	Let's go to Pamela in Toledo.
	You're up next on the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
	Hi.
	Hi, Jason.
	I was listening to your catalog of socialist collectivist ills there.
	And, of course, I'm reminded of the old Edmund Burke comment about how for evil to flourish, good men have to do nothing.
	I think it's a little more complicated than the fact that Olympia Snow just doesn't want bad press.
	What I want to know is, why do we keep electing Olympia Snow?
	There's no reason we should be in this position given that Reagan won with as big a majority as he did so many years ago.
	That generation hasn't completely died out yet.
	So why have all us, quote, good people really done nothing?
	I'm not so sure I really blame the Dems all that much.
	They're just being who they are.
	No, no, exactly.
	You expect that from your enemy.
	I expect Democrats, they're put on earth to redistribute wealth.
	We ought to be put on earth to protect it.
	But why aren't we?
	Well, you know, have you ever read Founding Brothers?
	I think it's Joseph Ellis.
	I just got done with that a while ago.
	I reread it.
	And they talk about John Adams and TJ, Thomas Jefferson.
	And the greatest cut when they were going back and forth before they mended ways towards the end, the greatest cut one could level against another was that he was a party man.
	And the framers were terrified of political parties and factions.
	And I really never realized this until the last few years.
	But it's really a bit of psychological analysis.
	When you join a group and you join a group for a cause, Pamela, if you're not careful, sooner or later, the group supersedes the cause.
	And so what happens is people start to value the party more than the principal.
	And so they're told, like good little sheep, come on, get in there, vote for the party, do what you can, instead of understanding the party is a conduit to an end.
	And that end for Republicans has got to be free minds and free markets and less government.
	And if you start to worship the party more than the principal, then it doesn't matter who's running in the party.
	You're going to end up supporting them.
	And that, my friends, is a recipe for disaster.
	1-800-282-2882, I am Jason Lewis in for El Rushboat today.
	He'll be back on Monday.
	So no fear there, friends.
	No fear at all.
	Back to the phones we go in Newark.
	Here's Beth.
	You're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network with Jason Lewis.
	Hi.
	Hi, Jason.
	Hi, Beth.
	I just had a thought concerning the fires in California.
	What if the landowners and the homeowners sued the Sierra Club and some of the other special interest groups that wouldn't allow the controlled burning?
	It would be interesting.
	Now, understand, if they prevail in a lawsuit, I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the radio.
	So first of all, you've got to have standing to sue.
	So you've got to have damages.
	And certainly, if your home has perished, you've got standing to sue.
	There's been a damage in your mind.
	So you probably have standing.
	Now, if the lawsuit prevailed and the government upheld the Sierra Club lawsuit, whether it's to protect a snail darter or an owl or the kangaroo mouse, whatever, or it's to keep the wilderness pristine, it would be, in effect, an act of the government.
	And there is something called qualified immunity or sovereign immunity that stems from, as I recall, the common law, the king is sovereign, which says if government officials acting in good faith execute their job, they are immune from lawsuits.
	Isn't that amazing?
	Meanwhile, we're suing the heck out of obstetricians and businesses right and left, thanks to the trial lawyers and their Democrat buddies.
	But regardless, now it doesn't apply all the time.
	School districts can be sued for certain things, and certainly there'll be lawsuits over the 35W bridge collapse.
	The lawyers are already salivating there.
	But in some cases, it does.
	So that would be the only obstacle I would see.
	But boy, I'd love to see it, if nothing else, as a matter of staking your claim, because I will tell you, people don't understand how much environmentalism costs folks to begin with.
	I mean, when you go buy that football helmet for Johnny and realize the cost for your school district, it's due to the, or not the football helmet, but if you take a look at the cost of almost anything to build a house, to do any of those things, the price has gone up exponentially because of environmentalism, but it also kills people.
	So I don't know about the lawsuit, but we've got to disabuse ourselves of this notion that there's no cost to regulating land.
	You know, the government has been the landlord.
	They own over 50% of the land west of the Mississippi.
	Who has been running the forest service?
	There's been the environmental lobby.
	I gave you this data about the Clintons cutting back on logging.
	The dirty little secret here, friends, is you've got to get in there and clear out the underbrush.
	And in many cases, you've got to go in there and harvest, whether it's underbrush or not.
	I can't remember the situation, and I wish I could, but there was an experiment done up in Maine, I believe, where they took a swath of forest and they let humans, nasty humans, manage it.
	And then they left another swath untouched by a human footprint.
	And they came back years later and they found that the swath of forest managed by humans was actually healthier than Mother Nature.
	But when you've got the media on your side and they are, instead of being watchdogs and checking to see if the environmentalists are overreaching, they are mere cheerleaders for the environmental movement, it becomes very difficult to make any headway.
	Anyway, thanks so much.
	Lauren in Nashville, Tennessee, you're on the EIB network.
	Hi.
	Hey, how you doing, Jason?
	Doing wonderful.
	Good.
	Just want to make a quick comment on the forest thing.
	If we look at most of the fires that are going on now in Southern California, there's no timber around there.
	And I'm all with you on the whole thing about the media.
	But in this case, I think the forest fires in Southern California are just a combination of three simple things.
	We've got heat, we've got dryness, and we've got wind.
	Now, those Santa Ana's, if you look at the map that's online for the city of Santa Clarita, that fire went right through the middle of the city.
	And there's no timber there.
	And basically, it's the winds, the embers, and the dryness that are just tearing that area up.
	But they had to start someplace.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	No doubt.
	They don't start on concrete.
	Right, right.
	Now, and we probably got an arsonist on hand there somewhere.
	Well, what do you think the arsonist ignited?
	Oh, it's all scrub brush.
	It's called white chaparral.
	Right.
	It's all scrub brush.
	No, that aspect is true.
	And by the way, the environmentalists have been trying to prevent that from being cleared out as well.
	So, I mean, it's just, I mean, you make a good point on not all of it being forests.
	I agree.
	But the chaparral is not being cleared out either due to protecting the natural habitat here.
	Look, we went through the same thing in 2002 with this when you had much more of the forest burning.
	Anybody, in northern Minnesota, there was a blowdown years ago.
	You had dead trees and limb literally kindling in the boundary water canoe areas on the Canadian border, and you couldn't get in there to take it out.
	All I'm saying is, I think you've got a very good point.
	Don't get me wrong.
	I agree.
	But all I'm saying is this whole forest management has got to be rethought as to whether we're going to allow the Sierra Club to manage a forest and have these wild.
	They're the ones that said, you know, first of all, you've got to put out every single fire when it starts, and you can't have a controlled burn, and now you've just got to let them run wild.
	We've tried this.
	It doesn't work.
	Anyway, Lauren, it's a fair point, and I'm glad you called on a sale in Indiana.
	Here's Jason on the Russian Limbaugh program.
	Hi.
	Hey, Jason, like the name.
	I'm kind of an ethanol chillier.
	I'm a farmer, a truck driver here.
	Shocking.
	Yeah, imagine that.
	The thing that gets me is everybody's also quick to throw it under the bus, but we're just at the starting point, I think.
	I mean, what if, you know, we get these corn companies to develop a hybrid that would just double your yield all of a sudden or, you know, add 50 bushel an acre.
	The price would come down, the supply would go up, and then it'd be viable.
	I mean, if we're at the starting point.
	Well, let's take you at your word.
	We're at the starting point for ethanol.
	And by the way, I mean, you're talking about billions of dollars in subsidies to get us to the starting point to begin with.
	Not only subsidized with the 51 cent gallon tax break at the pump, but also the tariffs on imported ethanol.
	So it's really not about energy.
	It's about, well, propping up guys like you.
	But if we're at the start and we've already doubled the price of corn, which is rippling through the economy in meat, milk, soap, popcorn, everything's going up because we've doubled the price of corn.
	I don't want to see the finish here, Jace.
	Right, that's what I'm saying.
	I don't want to see the price of corn doubled.
	If you double die.
	Why is the price of corn doubled?
	Because the genetics aren't there yet to grow more corn.
	You either need more land or more yield.
	Everybody always jumps on the bus and throwing ethanol under it, and we can't have enough land.
	Well, let's just increase the yield sum.
	I mean, it's coming, but if everybody writes it off now, we'll never get to that point.
	We're going to have a bumper crop as it is.
	We've got land being put back into tilling that was idle.
	You just literally do not have the physical resources to take a product that's great for food, and it's a horribly inefficient fuel.
	You know, you throw E85 in your car, I got news for you.
	You get about 25 to 30 percent less miles per gallon.
	Why are we subsidizing this?
	If you think it's a good product, it can stand on its own two feet.
	We don't need the billions for ethanol plants.
	The cost of ethanol you get in that E85 car is less.
	You get it for the same dollars per mile, it's the same.
	You're putting cheaper fuel in it but getting less mileage.
	You're going for the same dollars per mile.
	Ethanol has not dropped the price of gasoline.
	Ethanol prices, right?
	I mean, right now you've got a glut, but ethanol hasn't dropped the price of gasoline.
	And one of the reasons there is you can't ship it through the pipelines because it doesn't ship well.
	You don't have enough people at the pumps.
	Look, let me just ask you this.
	If the goal is energy independence, why don't we allow the sugar-based ethanol to be imported from South America?
	I think you should.
	That's what I'm not saying.
	I'm not saying that corn ethanol is it.
	I mean, you can make it out of grass or corn stalks or cane or whatever you want to make it out of.
	Let's not just focus on, you know, corn-based.
	That's what I'm saying.
	Ethanol could be viable if we just don't throw it under the bus this quick.
	Throw it under the bus.
	We've done just the opposite.
	We've got legislative mandates in the Senate energy bill mandating renewable fuel use, not telling people they have a choice, mandating that we have to produce X amount of ethanol, and they just raise that again.
	That's not throwing it under the bus.
	You got the 51 cent a gallon credit that gasoline doesn't get.
	You got the tariffs on competition coming from South America.
	How can you say it's been thrown under the bus?
	It has been propped up.
	If ethanol is this good, Jason, can it survive without the subsidies?
	I think we ought to try it.
	Well, then you and I agree.
	Then you and I agree.
	Frankly, we disagree on the efficacy of ethanol, but we agree on if this thing had its push, it now ought to stand on its own two feet or go, you know, go back to food production for corn.
	Anyway, Jason.
	Go ahead.
	Well, look, all I'm saying is that we have done more to get this ethanol boom up and running with intervention in the marketplace.
	We tax, you know, how is it that we tax the bejeebers out of big oil?
	Contrary to what people believe, if you take a look at the Securities and Exchange Commission statements from the big three oil companies, they pay close to a 40% corporate tax rate.
	If you take a look at gas taxes on oil, going back to 1977, they pay about three or four times their profits.
	I think $1.34 trillion is the total amount of gas taxes collected on big oil in the last 25 years or so, and their profits don't even come close to that, around $600 billion.
	We tax big oil.
	put anwar off limits we can't oh charlie chris the governor of florida i'm here as a good republican to make certain that low taxes no No.
	A choice in school?
	Haven't heard much from Charlie on that one.
	Oh, to make certain that we don't drill off the coast of Florida.
	So everybody's in this parochial mindset, Jace.
	We're subsidizing ethanol to the chagrin of consumers when it comes to food.
	It's not an efficient fuel.
	And then we turn around and tell everybody we can't have access to our own petroleum or natural gas resources on the outer continental shelf in Anwar.
	You know, in Anwar, you've got 19 million acres.
	19 million acres.
	We could go in there and get as much oil almost as we import from Saudi Arabia a day on a 2,000-acre footprint.
	And the environmentalists won't get us back.
	Look, the bottom line here is we've got plenty of natural energy right here in North America if we could just get at it and we could save the consumer and the taxpayer a whole lot of money.
	Jace, thanks for the call.
	I am Jason Lewis and in for the great one, El Rushbo on EIB, back right after this.
	We are back on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	I am Jason Lewis.
	The honor of the privilege to sit in for El Rushbo today.
	He's back on Monday and can always go to rushlimbaugh.com for all the latests.
	Let's see.
	Let's get back to the phones, though, before we continue with ethanol.
	I could go on for that for hours because I live in ethanol country in the upper Midwest, and you can't run for dog catcher without preaching fidelity or worshiping at the shrine of all things ethanol.
	And meanwhile, it's causing real havoc in the food markets for consumers.
	Iowa State University just said it has raised the cost of food about $50 per person so far in the last 12 months because we're displacing corn, which is a very good, efficient product for food, obviously.
	And we're trying to make it into something that shouldn't be, which can't be done without huge subsidies.
	And the people on the coast are paying for this because ethanol doesn't do you any good out there.
	We banned MTBE, so now we're going to this other renewable when good old unleaded gasoline is so much cleaner than it was just 30 years ago.
	We ought to be focusing on tapping in the innumerable resources we have right here in North America for our energy independence.
	But we don't want to do that.
	The Sierra Club might not give you your endorsement.
	Stephen Dallas, you're next up on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	Hi.
	Hey, Jason, how are you doing today?
	Thank you for filling in.
	Thank you, sir, for calling.
	Listen, Tom Dashall, a couple of years ago, changed the law in South Dakota where they could clean up the forest.
	Why didn't anybody raise any chain about that?
	Where's this year a club about that?
	Well, he's a Democrat or was.
	Well, I knew the answer, but I just wanted everybody in America to hear it.
	There was a minor tweaking, as I recall, because that was coming out of the 2002 fires, right?
	Yes, sir.
	Yeah, as I recall.
	I'm glad we're having this debate because the environmentalism at every level needs to be exposed for what it is.
	It is fundamentally anti-human.
	I don't understand why more people don't stand up and just say no.
	I guess you could vote people in and out, but with the social media.
	You got all these soccer moms and soccer dads in the suburbs who drink the Kool-Aid.
	They watch the Today Show and they listen to the PTA and you've got this great institutional consensus.
	You know, the liberals own all the institutions, Steve, whether it's academia, the media, the nonprofit sector.
	It's amazing we get a word in edgewise.
	And most people, they don't have core convictions and don't do a little homework.
	They just kind of go with the flow.
	It's kind of the madness of the crowds, if you will.
	And there's no other view to take.
	Well, thank God for Jason and Rush Limbaugh that's getting the voice out.
	We appreciate you.
	Well, thank God for you and everybody else out there that's trying to do yeoman's work uphill.
	We've got news anchors in the Twin Cities that have said in emails, in fact, one in particular, I will not cover the other side of global warming.
	There's no other side.
	Now, he never bothers to tell us why we've had these 15-year cycles in warming and cooling long before man was around.
	Doesn't bother to focus on that.
	He doesn't bother to explain why during the Great Depression, when man-made CO2 dropped, overall CO2 still went up, which tells you our impact isn't that great.
	He doesn't bother to explain on the verge of the greenhouse gas explosion in 1940, well, in the next 26 years, temperatures went down.
	He doesn't bother to answer why an English court now says that Al Gore's inconvenient truth is pure propaganda, and it's got to have a disclaimer.
	How do we get out-conservatized, if you will, by the Brits?
	God bless the Brits.
	But I mean, you get to the day when the liberal socialist UK has more common sense on this stuff than we do.
	You know the end is near.
	So, you know, you bring up a great point.
	It just doesn't get out.
	It doesn't get out enough.
	But you could make the same point on corporate average fuel economy standards, how they kill people.
	That right-wing think tank known as USA Today a couple of years ago pointed out that when you make cars smaller and lighter to increase the environmentally mandated fuel economy standards so everybody doesn't burn Burn so much gasoline, you kill people.
	People will die.
	When you ban DDT, people die of malaria.
	Remember the story about the Columbia space shuttle?
	Wasn't there a situation there?
	I'm not certain that one was nailed shut, but we had to, because of environmental concerns, they had to replace the foam or something.
	That's probably a poor example, but the rest of them are dead on.
	There's a cost to all of this stuff.
	There's a cost to being green.
	You know, the Bible of the environmental movement this year is this new book, The World Without Us.
	Guy writes a book who's this environmental loony bird.
	And he says, wouldn't the world be great?
	And here's what would happen.
	How long it would take the world to clean itself up if humans were extinct?
	These people are anti-capitalist.
	They're anti-private property.
	So the next time your moderate or liberal GOP member of Congress or member of the statehouse says, you know, I can get the endorsement of the Sierra Club.
	Run for your wallet.
	Run for your life.
	In Olney, Maryland, here's Jack on EIB.
	Oh, Jack, hold the line.
	I got to move because I'm behind the clock.
	Thank you, Mike.
	I'll be back right after this, and we'll get to some more calls on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	More excursions into broadcast excellence coming up next hour.
	Jack, we're a little bit behind time here, so we'll put you off until next hour, and we'll get to the rest of the calls as well at 1-800-282-2882.
	Jason Lewis in for Rush.
	I'm a little non-plussed as to this obsession over ethanol, friends.
	I mean, we've got a $286 billion farm bill that subsidizes corn growing.
	You had another $5.5 billion for ethanol over the last few years, more than 200 ethanol tax breaks and subsidies.
	So the taxpayer, and by the way, Richard Luger, Republican from Indiana, and Tom Harkin, Democrat from Iowa, corn growing states, are now co-sponsoring a bill that would raise the ethanol mandate to 60 billion gallons by 2030.
	It's going to cost us an arm and a leg.

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