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Oct. 26, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:03
October 26, 2007, Friday, Hour #3
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Hey, and welcome back.
Third Hour Now up and running on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis doing for Minnesota what Rush has done for the country.
Talent on loan from Rush for me today, right up through, well, the end of the hour anyway.
Rush back on Monday, so don't fear.
Open Line Friday, that's right.
Just because Rush isn't here, it's still Open Line Friday, right, Mike?
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday!
You know, that's when you get to determine what you want to talk about.
I'll throw out a few things like El Rushbo, but you get to talk about anything you'd like.
Debate, talk, converse, about anything, almost anything.
Hey, Hillary Clinton's back at it.
Now, I know Rush talked about this, but the last time I was, no, it wasn't the last time I was in for Rush.
It was last summer, I guess, when I was in for Rush.
H.R. and I were talking about the latex glove guy.
Norman Shu.
That story broke, I guess, in August when I was in for Rush.
And now Hillary Clinton's campaign has been accused of raising huge piles of money in Chinatown coming from donors who can't be located or who were improperly repaid for their contributions.
You know, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Do people really want to go back to all of this?
It's got, you know, guys, it's got to be tough being a Hillary Clinton campaign operative.
I mean, one week you're on the cover of time, the next week you're doing it.
Boom, buddy, boom, just like that.
So Hillary's in the news.
Barack Obama down in South Carolina, trying to get some headway going there, begins a tour of gospel singers around the Bible Belt State.
The gospel music stirred a controversy, I guess, this week because one of the performers was a Grammy award-winning singer, Donnie McClurkin.
He offended gay activists, saying that they can overcome their affliction by turning to God.
So naturally, and this is what I like about the Democrats, you just don't see the pandering you do in the GOP.
Barack, standing on principle, naturally sought to tramp down the criticism from gay rights groups by immediately adding an openly gay minister to deliver the invocation.
Is that the Rainbow Coalition in South Carolina for the Barack Obama campaign?
So the campaign rolls on.
The debate last week, I thought was pretty interesting between the GOP nominees.
Fred Thompson came out with a very, very intriguing immigration bill that the media immediately spiked.
Can you believe that?
I mean, there was nothing on this.
Thompson really hit at the crux of the problem with immigration.
I mean, we've got to have border enforcement, and it's working.
It is starting to work because apparently millions of Mexican immigrants, we are told, aren't sending as much money back home to villages like they used to because of our flagging American economy, probably the housing crunch, but it's not a flagging American economy.
But so there are not many of them coming over the border to take a job and send the money back home.
I suppose somebody could be happy with that, but I'm not.
I like a robust economy.
And speaking of the housing account, could we just let the banks write down their collateralized debt obligations, the securitized products they made from mortgages, take the hit right off the loans, and let us banish the thought.
Let us disabuse ourselves of the thought that the taxpayer ought to bail out anybody who's had their home foreclosed.
Hillary's already offered a $1 billion bailout.
Is there anything these people won't bail out?
Talk about corporate welfare.
The people who are going to get bailed out are the Wall Street banks and firms that are contributing to Democrats.
That's why this thing is moving forward.
Take the hit.
You know, the market will recover.
It's probably already factored in, and we're done with it.
Don't turn this into another SNL disaster where we induce the moral hazard by insuring every bad business decision and have the taxpayer pick it up.
Anyway, Thompson says Those cities that are sanctuary cities where the local authorities will not enforce federal immigration law.
And I'm just wondering what other federal laws they choose not to enforce.
Laws against interstate kidnapping?
Not going to enforce that.
We don't have to.
It's a federal responsibility.
Of course, cities and counties enforce federal law all the time.
But you've got a sanctuary city across the country.
My hometown, Minneapolis is one of them.
Thompson says, you're not going to get federal money if you don't enforce the law as it's written.
And that gets at the larger picture.
And by the way, nobody covered this.
I couldn't believe it.
But Thompson's trying to get at the larger picture.
And that is, you can't just focus on border enforcement, although that's certainly needed and it's starting to work.
You've got to focus on the magnet.
The magnet.
These are not the old Ellis Island immigrants in many cases that come here to start a new business, although many of them do.
And if they do it legally, immigrants are a net plus for this country.
Let us not forget that.
The people are our greatest resource in any country.
You've got more people.
You've got more productivity.
You've got more economic growth.
That's a good thing.
But if, unlike the Yellis immigrant crowd, they don't have all these programs.
They got to go out there and work and start a business 100 years ago.
If you've got somebody coming here to have a baby, somebody coming here thanks to a misguided Supreme Court decision in 1982, getting free education, the Office of the Legislative Auditor in Minnesota just revealed not long ago that illegal immigrants, contrary to federal law, were getting welfare right and left in the People's Republic of Minnesota.
If you've got that sort of magnet, quite frankly, you're drawing, in many cases, some of the wrong kind of folks.
It's a massive subsidy for low-skilled labor.
And what Thompson is, I think, effectively saying is you take away some of those magnets, and sooner or later we're going to have to discuss the 14th Amendment and the Citizenship Clause, which has been horribly misinterpreted over the years.
That means that anybody comes here from any country, whatever their immigration status and has a child, they're a citizen.
They're a citizen.
And I know that's the precedent.
That's the law as it stands.
But if you read what the framer said about this and what the amendment says, it's talking about people who are here subject to our jurisdiction, not subject to a foreign jurisdiction.
The framers of the 14th Amendment, the Civil War amendments, were not talking about letting people come here from France and England and have children and then making them citizens.
They had to be subject to our jurisdiction, and they were not.
So I think that's wrong, but that's a huge magnet.
Come here, have a baby.
The baby's a citizen, and you get all sorts of tangential benefits therein.
And if you can take away that magnet, we ought to have open arms for immigrants who want to come here and work.
But there are real fiscal concerns, and it doesn't mean you're a nativist.
It's not xenophobic to say, gosh, we might not be able to handle all of the fiscal impacts of an open borders viewpoint.
And that's what Thompson was getting at.
So I found that to be rather intriguing.
Speaking of the war on terror, I know we weren't, but I needed a segue.
We're doing so well now in Iraq that Joe Klein and others from Time magazine and the usual drive-bys don't know what to write about.
HR gave me this story from Time that was titled the Ramadi Goat Grab.
The Ramadi goat grab.
It's fascinating to watch these people try to spin things around.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, what the plan was trying to get people on the ground to take control and have a stake in their society is working.
The tribes themselves are now, I mean, Shias and Sunnis are coming together and saying, we've had it with al-Qaeda.
You notice how Iraq really hasn't been talked about much in the mainstream media the last couple of weeks, last month or so?
That ought to be a first clue that things are going very, very well.
And then the Iranian sanctions put into place by the president, exactly the right thing to do.
And here's why.
I'm not saying that there could be no time that you don't take military action against Iran.
You always, unlike Jimmy Carter, you absolutely have to reserve the military option.
I remember when Carter said once, I will never, ever, I'm Jimmy Carter.
I will never, ever turn down my thermostat.
No, that wasn't it.
It was, I'll never use a nuclear weapon.
Or as Jimmy would say, a nuclear weapon.
Well, if you're never, ever going to use a nuke, and I know this is going to just make the day of liberals.
Did you hear that right-wing crazy in for rush talking about nuking people?
But the point is, if you're never ever going to use a nuke, and I'm not saying, you know, tactically, then why do we have them?
What's the point?
And Carter made the promise, I'll never use it.
No, I mean, never use it.
Well, you can't say that at any time.
You've got to reserve the military option.
You've got to speak softly, carry the big nuke.
And in the meantime, the idea is to put pressure on Iran.
And that's starting to work.
Squeezing Iran, as the president did yesterday, is precisely you've got to look at Iran the way we looked at Eastern Europe during the Cold War, the way Mr. Reagan and the Pope got together and made it impossible for communism to survive.
You've got to start funding the dissidents.
You've got to start beaming in truth to Iran.
There is, we are told by most accounts, a revolution waiting to happen, or at least a strong resistance.
The president not long ago requested $75 million to maintain existing aid for Iranian human rights groups not long ago.
The U.S. Senate chopped it to $25 million.
The senators, believe it or not, said, well, grantees suspected of receiving U.S. assistance might be harassed by the government of Iran.
The grantees are sitting there, give us the money.
We want to establish some sort of well-funded dissident movement.
We want to overthrow this regime from within.
Don't we all want that?
And the Senate, the Democrats in the Senate saying, we can never ever use military option.
We're not going to start another Iraq war in Iran, are now cutting off funding to the dissidents for all practical means and purposes in Iran.
You know, you get to the point where you think, gosh, maybe it really isn't about the war on terror.
Maybe the liberal left in this country hasn't changed its stripes from the radicals in the 1960s.
You know, the hey, hey, ho-ho, LBJ has got to go crowd who thought LBJ was too much of a right-winger.
Man, you've got to be on something.
You've got to be in Haight Ashbury to think LBJ was a right-winger.
Nevertheless, maybe they really haven't changed.
And maybe what they really disdain, what they really loathe, is American might anywhere.
Just the use.
Because, you know, in the era of arms control, the liberal left told us we've got to sign this paper security with adversaries who don't keep their word.
Why?
Because we're the problem.
The moral symmetry argument.
We're as much as the problem as they are.
So if we can rein in American projection of our particular interests, why that's good.
It really is.
It comes down to this distrust of America that separates the right and the left when it comes to foreign policy issues.
It's quite amazing.
17 now after the hour, I am Jason Lewis in for Rush.
Back with your calls right after this.
Don't go away.
Talking about some guy in the sports community, HR, just says if he fails again, a general manager of a sports franchise, if he fails again, he'll run for office.
It got me thinking.
You got me thinking, HR, you know, the FBI released statistics the other day that said most criminals were caught last year.
The rest got re-elected, something like that.
So I don't know.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh.
Jack, you've been very patient.
Let's go to Only, Maryland.
And, Jack, you're on EIB.
Hi.
Mr. Lewis, I got to tell you, you're doing an outstanding job behind the E-Colony EIB today.
I'm doing my best to fill the big shoes.
Yeah, you should have your own national show.
Well, that's very nice of you.
Thanks.
All right, Jason, based on an obvious high level of common sense you have, I have to ask you: have you ever been to MediaReform.com?
I have, I don't think I have.
I don't think I have, Jack.
But I certainly think the media needs reform big time.
There's no question about that.
Thanks for checking in.
We got a break there.
Sorry, Jack, on the bad line, but we'll go to let's try oh, Wisconsin.
We got one in Serona, Wisconsin.
Let's try Larry.
You're up next on the EIB network.
Hi.
Yeah.
Hi, Jason.
First time caller, longtime listener to Rush.
I'd like to declare mission accomplished for the aircraft carrier Nimitz.
I'm a retired chief petty officer, Navy, and I had the opportunity to fly to Hawaii and ride the ship back to San Diego.
And I was so proud of the ship and the captain, all the officers enlisted and everything.
They spent five and a half months in the Gulf Area, thousands of flights on to Afghanistan and Iraq, and they never lost a plane or anybody on the ship.
And they came back and pulled into San Diego, and there was, I didn't hear nothing about it from anybody.
You know, Arnold.
You're not going to hear anything about it as you get these successful missions accomplished.
And you couldn't be more right.
We all salute those brave men and women.
You know, HR gave me a story earlier today.
Marines declare war on garbage out of the L.A. Times.
And instead of worrying about roadside bombs these days, they worry about puddles and garbage in Ramadi.
They got parades in Ramadi.
So the news, obviously, as you point out, is much better than you would ever believe.
But, you know, look, why let good news get in the way of a perfect agenda?
Great point.
I'm glad you called.
Let's go to Lenore City, Tennessee.
And John, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Josh, you're up next.
My fault.
Go ahead, Josh.
Kings Bay, Georgia.
Thank you.
I was listening to you talking about ethanol.
And here's the key.
Here's the key.
Right now, everybody's talking about this man-made hype global warming croc.
We need, as conservatives, to grab a hold of it, grab it up, and push nuclear power because we have been making so many advances in hydrogen technology.
And I'm not just talking about fuel cells.
I'm talking about actually being able to take the gas and turn it into a powder mixed with ammonia and then re-release it as a fuel.
If we can get behind that, if we can get behind that, not only will we have a huge domestic energy source for our own use, we'll have a new industry to market to the rest of the world, and we'll be able to take the dollars out of the Middle East that's right now fueling all those terrorists once there is a homegrown, viable alternative that we can export the technology.
Well, do you realize, let's address these things one at a time.
They're all good points.
I'm not one of those conspiracy theorists that think the oil companies or the Trilateral Commission or somebody is stomping on this new technology in favor of oil.
If there's a new technology out there that's going to be more economically efficient, more cost-effective than oil, someone is going to create it and market it to make money.
It may just be the oil companies.
It could be anybody.
But take a look at a country like France.
And I talked a moment ago about how the UK seemed more conservative than we were on this global warming, this High Court decision, pointing out the obvious mistakes and an inconvenient truth.
Now you've got France deriving 70% of its power from where?
Nuclear.
Nuclear.
I'm not saying we need more regulation.
I'm saying if we conservatives grab a hold of the issue and start telling people to shut up, here's your new nuclear plant.
I couldn't look.
You don't want us to build gas.
You don't want us to do it.
Here's your new nuke plant and take the politics out of nuclear power.
We will have the ability and the extra energy available to do this.
You are correct.
There's no doubt about that, but you've got to be willing to do that.
You've got to be willing to make the sale.
I mean, there was a utility executive that wrote an op-ed in Minnesota not long ago, one of the papers in Minnesota, that said, look, if you go down this renewable fuel mandate, specifically telling utility companies, and this is so ridiculous, they've got to derive 15 to 20% of their power from solar and wind when it's about 2% or 3% now.
Here's what's going to happen: your electricity bills and your heating and gas bills are going to go up about $400 a year, roughly to that figure, depending on the size of your house, of course.
So the obvious alternative is nuclear.
But in, again, I hate to refer to Minnesota, but it's where I live.
In Minnesota, guess what's on the books, Josh?
Guess what's on statutorily on the books in the People's Republic of Minnesota?
A law that has a prohibition, a moratorium on building any new nuclear power plant.
Now, as long as you have the anti-nukes in control, so let's see, they don't like fossil fuels, they don't like oil, they don't like nuclear.
What do they like?
Oh, I know only the thing, only the things that are going to bring us back to a Luddite era.
These people are Luddites.
This is absolute insanity what we're doing in energy.
And by the way, we already get 60% of our oil and oil from North America.
You include Mexico.
You include the United States.
You include Canada.
We could be much more energy independent with the same traditional fuels, as I said earlier, if we were allowed to get them.
I mean, we're looking at over 100 billion barrels in America, someplace right now that is off limits.
Outer continental shelf, Anwar, the Rocky Mountains, you name it.
So if you really want energy independence, you can have it.
But that's not what they want.
They want to bring our economy to a crashing halt.
They want to make certain everybody lives their life just the way they want them to live, the environmentalists and the liberal left.
And most importantly, they want to make things really expensive for the decadent, the rich, to equalize, to equalize lifestyles.
But I'm a big advocate of nuclear.
I mean, France relies on nuclear?
I know that's a very conservative country.
I know it's run by big business and corporate, you know, corporate interests, but France, 70% of their power is nuclear, and we're not even close, not even anywhere near close to that.
We absolutely need to do that.
And then, as you point out, you call them at their own game.
All right, you don't want fossil fuels?
Let's go nuclear.
Oh, we don't want that either.
Really?
What is it you do want?
And we are back.
Welcome.
It's Open Line Friday.
I have the honor once again filling in for Rush, another excursion into broadcast excellence here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Rush is back on Monday, 1-800-282-2882, trying to get in as many calls as we can on this Friday.
Hope your day is going well.
Hope your weekend's shaping up to be a good one.
Let's go to Roy in Dana Point, California.
You're up next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, Jason, smoke choke between the fire dittos from Dana Point, California.
Yes, sir.
I hope you're, you know, we really need to get the EPA out there because last I saw, there was a lot of smoke there, and it had to be due to global warming.
Well, it's been got me a little under the weather.
But my comment is: I'm a lifelong California resident, spent a lot of time up in the mountains.
And by and large, the healthiest forests here are the ones run by private industry.
Example, Southern California Edison and the Central Sierras.
They clear the underbrush, they thin the trees, they do controlled burns every year.
One time, my son and I were trolling on a lake, and we got cold, and we went up and played in the fire for about an hour to warm up.
And they do an excellent job.
The forests are gorgeous because they manage them correctly.
Isn't it amazing how the profit motive, the lowly profit motive, can focus the mind and be a better steward of our natural resources than any distant, dissembling bureaucrat?
Well, yeah, and fire is a natural part of the whole process.
And by choking it off, they totally disrupt the natural order of things.
And then, you know, you go 20, 30, 40 years with no fires, and you get these infernos that burn everything.
The houses that love the houses that survived out here around in San Lake Arrowhead, they had cleared their lots and cleared out under the trees, and you didn't get these big treetop fires that burned everything.
Well, first they wanted to put out every fire as soon as it started.
And now the answer from the environmental left is, well, we just got to let them burn willy-nilly.
Well, they've got to be controlled.
And where that's done correctly, the forests are gorgeous.
Usemi National Park, they now have young redwood trees again because they're letting the fires go through it, open up the cones, and the ceilings contaminate.
What you're talking about in a philosophical context is the tragedy of the commons, and that's the notion when everybody owns something, i.e. the government, nobody owns it.
There is no interest.
Some of the most dirty places in the world are publicly owned, public parks.
Why?
There's no profit motive.
There's no shareholder saying, I want this clean.
I want it to be revenue-producing.
You know, I mean, you could, you could.
It's not a coincidence, let me put it this way, that you've got trouble in the West when the federal government's the biggest landowner.
Yeah.
And like I said, the best, healthiest forests are where the Sierra Clubbers don't have access to choking off every human inroad.
You know, one of the things that's always bothered me about the Sierra Clubbers and those types is they've got millions in foundation grants and the like.
I mean, they're really wealthy organizations.
They're a bunch of trust fund brats, really.
And they've got all this money.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the whole gang.
If they're concerned about habitat, they're concerned about the forests.
They're concerned about the lake.
Buy the property.
Well, speaking of habitat, Ducks Unlimited has put more habitat for ducks into preserves than any other organization in the entire world.
And it's a hunting organization.
You know, if it wasn't for them, our duck numbers would be way down.
They buy up and preserve the breeding grounds up in Canada.
Did I say the environmentalists were anti-human?
Yes, yes, you did.
That's what I thought.
Well said, my friend.
Thanks for checking in.
Let's go to Omaha.
And Jack, you're up next.
You disagree with me, Jason, on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Go ahead.
Yes, I also heard you say that the environmental movement is essentially anti-human.
Yes.
Do you ever actually listen to your show on tape afterward and wonder why you say such stupid things?
What environmental group do you belong to, Jack?
The human race.
Oh, no, no, no.
Don't feel bad about answering the obvious question.
What environmental group do you belong to?
I don't feel bad.
I feel like you're going to be able to.
Well, then try answering the question.
Which one?
I'm not answering any questions.
Oh, really?
What are you?
Are you on trial?
You're going to plead the fifth next?
Gee, the hate.
Can't we just all get along?
Of course they're anti-human because they create crises after crises where none exist.
And the only solution to almost any environmental crises is a restriction on human behavior, Jack.
Why do you think the Bible of the environmental movement this year, the best-selling book, is What the World Would Be Without Us.
Without Us.
Why do you think every single environmental restriction is on human activity?
Why are people told that they can't have their acre lot in the suburbs with their garage and their car because it infringes upon urban sprawl?
Why have the wacko new urbanists in Portland, Oregon put up urban growth boundaries, driving up the cost of land in Portland, spending billions on mass transit subsidies and light rail that is doing nothing to relieve congestion from Beaverton to downtown?
Why do you think they do that?
It has nothing to do with the environment.
It has everything to do with controlling humans and refraining humans from activities they don't approve.
If that isn't anti-human, Jack, I don't know what is.
I could go right down the list.
In North Carolina, why, every time they need an ozone violation, you know, you go down to the Carolinas and they say, oh, this particular area isn't under EPA attainment rates for ozone.
So they meet the attainment rates.
And ozone, the air is cleaner than it's ever been.
So what do they do?
They put in more monitors and they lower the threshold.
How many people know that?
You read the Charlotte Observer.
Oh, we're out of ozone attainment rates.
The air and the smog are killing us.
They don't tell you that they've lowered the threshold time after time after time.
That if you used the old threshold, they would all be in attainment.
Now, I exaggerate there only for effect.
They don't tell you that when they need more ozone violations or smog violations, they put up more monitors in the place where they think they can get them.
Why?
What is the goal?
The goal is to make certain that big business remains bad, that the human footprint is bad, that humans are destroying the planet.
If that isn't anti-human, Jack, I got some property in Omaha for you there, bud.
Kathy in Winter Springs, Florida, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
May potatoes, Jason.
Thank you, ma'am.
I wanted to say as much as I enjoy hearing people make fun of Hillary Clinton and how mannish she is, I think that they are also, when they do that, they are alienating a great many women because a lot of women who like Hillary Clinton are very plain themselves and they identify with her and that's why they want to vote for her.
So when you're making fun of her.
All right, enough about the Stepford wives.
Let's talk about real women.
They're mindless in that regard.
She's a woman.
She must be for our interests.
Look, you've got a fair point on personal attacks.
I think sometimes they can backfire.
But the opponents of Hillary care, the opponents of the socialist agenda, if you will, they ought to be focusing on Hillary is anti-woman, or her policies being anti-woman.
For instance, she proposes a tax increase on the quote-unquote rich, just like Charlie Wrangell did yesterday, just like Barack has done.
Now, who is that going to hit the hardest, Kathy?
I'll tell you who's going to hit.
You've got a husband that's been worked hard.
He's successful.
He makes $100,000.
He makes $150,000, maybe even $200,000 a year, which is not uber-rich these days.
The Clintons make a lot more than that.
But the point here is, now you've got a woman who wants to realize her feminist roots.
And she says, I can't stay at home anymore.
I want to be my own woman.
I want to go out and work.
Well, God bless her.
Go out and work and do what you want to do in America.
That's what makes it great.
But all of her income is piled on top of the husband's income, which means instead of starting out at the 10% bracket and then going to the 15% or the 20, the 28, what have you, she starts out in the highest bracket.
All of the woman's second income is taxed at a much higher rate.
Talk about a marriage penalty.
Now, is that pro-woman or anti-woman?
Oh, that's definitely anti-woman.
And another thing about our present administration is, look up in space, we've got a lady running the shuttle and a lady running the space station.
So how can anybody say that Republicans, under Republicans, women don't get a fair break?
Because they're all about, I mean, they're not the right kind of women, perhaps.
It's Condoleezza Rice.
I mean, talk about, you know, she meets every classification, every protected classification.
She's black.
She's a woman.
She's under 5'10.
I don't know.
I made that one up.
But the point here is they can't stand her.
They couldn't stand Margaret Thatcher.
It's not about, you know, the gender politics isn't about gender.
It's about liberalism versus conservatism.
In fact, they loathe the Clarence Thomases.
And by the way, I just started this book, fabulous, fabulous read.
They loathe the Clarence Thomases and then the Condoleezza Rice's and the Margaret Thatchers because they look at them as a betrayer of the cause.
So it's all about liberalism, Kathy.
It's not about promoting women.
Well, thank you very much for taking my call.
My pleasure, my dear.
Thank you.
Have a nice day down there in beautiful Winter Springs.
Let's go to Escondido, California, just northeast of San Diego.
And Mark, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, this is Mark.
You're doing a great job today.
Listen, I was just thinking, we were evacuated, by the way, and a lot of our friends lost their homes.
We're all back.
They opened up most of the areas.
A lot of people are down here now saying that they're going to send money down here.
And I started to think that most of the money is already ours.
I mean, it's tax money that went in, and they're turning a small portion.
We've paid taxes for many, many years.
And the people that are really aiming are the corporations.
I'm retired.
I don't have an axe to grind.
But, you know, Walmart stepped up million dollars.
Home Depot did an A corporation.
They've all taken out all their profits voluntarily.
Gee, I didn't think that was possible without government doing it.
You know, the government, I mean, they're all saying, here, we're going to write this check to you.
It's our money.
They're giving a small part of our own money back.
And, you know, all the fires started in the federal land area.
They didn't start with the private project.
Well, who are you suggesting is giving your money back again?
Well, I mean, the state, the local people, the federal, everybody, anybody we pay taxes to.
They're grandstanding, saying, here, I'm going to write this check.
I'm going to send you all this money.
It's not their money.
Well, there are states that get more back in federal dollars than they pay in.
And there are states that get less back.
Look, I have no problem with this sort of natural catastrophe and people coming to the aid, but we do not want to induce the moral hazard as it's known.
And that is, if you start suggesting that with any calamity, with any disaster, we will immediately be there in a floodplain, for a drought, for an earthquake, for a wildfire, even for a terrorist attack in some cases.
You start to tell people, don't worry about buying insurance.
Don't worry about buying subsidized crop insurance, subsidized flood insurance.
We will declare a disaster declaration and the government will come in and insure you with taxpayer dollars.
And what you are encouraging people is to behave irresponsibly.
You've got to start suggesting to people that, look, in the final analysis, where you choose to live in a hurricane alley or anywhere, take precautions.
You know, insurance markets are great regulators of behavior if you allow them to function.
They tell you where to locate and where not to locate.
If we keep subsidizing the relocations, we keep subsidizing disaster declaration aids, which are being used for political footballs, not maybe in this case, but in many cases, we tell people to behave irresponsibly and we shouldn't be in that business.
I'm Jason Lewis, In for Rush on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Narrated film strips.
Man, HR is almost, HR and Mike in the studio.
You're almost as old as I am.
Nobody knows what you're talking about.
You talk about film strips.
We're talking off the air about film strips.
Film now, you know, DVDs, film strips.
Those are the ones where, you know, the nuns would have the record player out, and then you'd have a film strip with no audio.
They'd turn on the record, and one, a single still picture would come up, and then the record would go ding, and the next one would come up.
Ding.
Man, oh, boy, that's a long way back there.
1-800-282-2882.
Jason Lewis in for rush on this Open Line Friday.
Let's go to Prescott, Arizona.
Terry, you're on EIB.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing fine.
How are you?
Great.
One of the places where they did the experiment you made reference to earlier is in the forests of Montana, and they did it at what's called the Lubreck Experimental Forest.
That's part of the forestry program at the University of Montana.
And the idea that the environmental movement holds on to, that the way to manage a resource is to ignore it to death, is a horrible idea.
And it's been proven empirically by any study of the forest.
You have to manage the forest.
And the forest used to be managed by wildfire strikes.
The second biggest liar in the federal government is Smokey the Bear, who says only you can prevent wood fires.
99% of forest fires are caused by lightning strikes.
And in the old days, they just burned.
And I'd like to recommend to all of your readers a wonderful book on the fires in Yellowstone.
It's called Playing God in Yellowstone.
It's by an author in Montana, a fellow named Alston Chase.
And it is just a definitive work on understanding how you can love a resource to death if you approach it emotionally rather than empirically.
Well, the back to nature folks, you know, the Smokey the Bear gang, what is their goal then?
I think the empirical evidence on this is pretty clear, whether it's the experiment in Montana or in Maine.
But what is their goal then?
Well, I think you have to go read what they actually write.
If you read Paul Ehrlich, and I can remember when he came to the University of Montana when I was a freshman, and he said that by the year 2000, the world population would be 12 billion, and the number one medical problem in America would be starvation.
Now, the world population in 2000 was 6 billion.
Number one medical problem was obesity.
He only missed it by a little bit.
Right.
Yeah.
You got that right.
If you listen to these guys, they're always wrong.
And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense.
That's just factually correct.
But what they want, the guy who founded the Sea Shepherd organization, who used to be the co-founder of Greenpeace, he has called for the immediate reduction of the Earth's population by 5 billion people.
I think the environmental movement has become a front for an anti-human movement.
No, did you say anti-human?
I wish I would have thought of that.
Of course, they're Malthusian in nature because every single solution they come up with after a trumped-up crisis is all about restricting humans, and the ultimate restriction is controlling the population.
And you couldn't be more correct.
And it's transparent for anybody to see.
It's just that it's become so fashionable, Terry, to be green.
And that, by the way, that is directly attributable to the dereliction of journalism in America today, especially the broadcast media.
There is absolutely no curiosity.
They talk about intellectual curiosity.
Zip Zero Nada when it comes to green causes.
They are on board.
They are cheerleaders.
And why?
Because this is a fashionable movement.
It has nothing to do with science at all.
And it doesn't matter how many times they've been wrong, the next coming ice age.
If you want to get educated on global warming, go to the History Channel and watch this series that they keep running called The Little Ice Age.
You want to know what's going to be deleterious to humans.
It has nothing to do with warming.
It has everything to do with the coming of another ice age.
That's what we ought to be worried about if you care about humans, which can't be taken for granted these days.
Great call, Terry.
Thanks so much.
I'm Jason Lewis, and you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
All right, wrapping things up on this Open Line Friday, my thanks to Rush, of course, and to HR and Mike helping me out as we wrap things up.
You know, this article, a page two headline in the November 2nd edition of The Washington Post, Arctic Ocean getting warm, seals vanish, and icebergs melt.
Great masses of ice have now begun to be replaced by earth and stones.
Glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Out of the Library of Congress, the headline was from the November 2nd, 1922 edition of the Washington Post.
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