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Nov. 1, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:59
November 1, 2007, Thursday, Hour #3
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And third hour now, up and running on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis reminding you that, yes, Earth is first.
I'm a big believer in Earth First.
We'll mine and log the other planets a little later.
Isn't that the kind of environmentalism we all, you know, where environmentalism has gone astray?
We're all environmentalists to the degree we want to keep the earth healthy for humans, for the benefit of humans.
But someplace along the line, someplace where Jacques Cousteau got really confused, spending days on end in the ocean, we decided that the earth has rights in and of itself above and beyond humankind.
And we are now the problem.
Certainly the problem for the aquatic community in Lake Superior is that it is, you know, environmentalism along with education or government schools.
We might want to refrain from calling these schools public schools quite so often.
Not that I have anything against the public schools, but let's be honest, they're government schools.
I always get a kick out of the ACLU.
We have got to prevent government brainwashing.
We've got to have bans on waterboarding.
We've got to have free speech everywhere.
We don't want the government in our bedrooms.
We want them out.
But we do want our kids to be raised by government-run enterprises.
We do want our kids to be trained by government-run enterprises.
That doesn't quite make much sense.
It wasn't a Disraeli who said tyranny begins in the nursery.
I set this up before I get to Byron in Lansing, Michigan, because a big issue here.
Oh, before I get to that, the school voucher issue in Utah.
That's what I'm getting to.
Hillary Clinton, she's got a new campaign theme.
I think one of the cable stations just revealed her new ad, and it's all about those nasty Democrat boys beating up on her the other night.
I'm not making this up.
This is now the talking point coming out of the Clinton campaign.
That, gosh, look at them pile on.
Look at their vituperative attacks on little old me, Hillary Clinton.
Is this not the Achilles heel of feminism?
I mean, is this not it?
In a nutshell?
You know, if you want to play lumberjack, you've got to hold up your end of the log.
And if you can't take the heat in a debate, you're going to occupy the Oval Office.
And it's not just Hillary Clinton.
It happens every time.
We don't want extra rights.
We just want to be treated equally.
But we want Title IX to make certain we have a girls' rowing team.
And if that means you've got to do away with the boys' baseball team, so be it.
We want special privileges when it comes to these sorts of discrimination laws and the imposition of Title IX and intercollegiate athletics.
We want all of these special privileges, and we want to beat up on some men, so say the feminists, because we're just as good.
If a man can do the job, a woman can do it better.
You go right down the litany of clichés, except when they're fired upon, metaphorically, of course.
Then all of a sudden it's, how dare you beat up on me?
They've got a new ad, the Clinton campaign, and the ad suggests heavily that they were picking on Hillary.
Gee, I wonder if Al-Qaeda's watching.
1-800-282-2882, I got to get to this issue here while I've got my 15 minutes, and that is school choice.
Now, I don't know if you're familiar.
In Utah, there is a big vote coming up in the next few days on school choice, the Parent Choice and Education Act.
It is a voucher program ranging anywhere from $500 to $3,000.
And it depends on household income, which I've always had a problem with.
But nevertheless, something is better than nothing.
And it merely would say, look, we're going to do for K through 12 education what we do and what the liberals proudly proclaim we do for higher education.
What do I mean?
Can anybody say the GI Bill, the Hope Scholarship Programs, they don't tell you you have to go to one school in your hometown.
They give you the money.
The money follows the student, and you redeem those vouchers at any college of your choice.
Now, if it's good enough for higher ed, why isn't good enough, why is it not good enough for K through 12?
Well, I'll give you three words.
The National Education Association.
You see, the schools aren't there in too many cases for the kids anymore.
The kids are there for pawns for the NEA to get a better contract, to get more members.
I mean, look at the way we pay these government teachers by lanes and steps in most school districts, length of service, and how many graduate credits you might have.
Well, you've got a BA plus 15 hours.
You've got an MA plus 15 hours.
You move up whether you're a good teacher or not.
Because you've got to be credentialed.
There is a government monopoly on who can teach.
Henry Kissinger can go teach foreign policy in any college and university, but he can't teach it in your local high school.
Why?
Well, he doesn't have a teacher certificate.
He's not qualified.
It's all about preserving the union.
We don't pay teachers how good they are.
We pay them based on how long they've been in the union.
And so what a voucher presents, and my preference, a tuition tax credit, because I think you're going to get some problems with vouchers when public money goes to private schools.
Then some will say, well, then all of the regulations that have so hamstrung the public schools will now apply to the private school.
That's the danger with a voucher.
But certainly with the tuition tax credit upon which the GIPR ran on in 1980, certainly with that, it would be a threat to the government monopoly.
Now, I know a lot of you listening going, well, my school's okay, Jason, and that's fine.
And I'm glad.
But remember what the raison d'etro for schools, public schools, government schools was to educate poor neighborhoods where parents couldn't afford to educate their kids.
Guess where schools are failing the most?
In poor neighborhoods.
Let me ask you a question.
Does it make any sense for some suburbanite couple making $150,000, $200,000 a year, very good income, to have a free education provided by the government?
Why don't you give them their property tax back, some of their state taxes?
Certainly let's do away with the federal Department of Education.
Radical proposal, isn't it?
Well, that's another thing that Ronald Reagan ran on.
And let them buy their own education.
Let the market flourish.
Well, a voucher does that.
The money follows the student.
So instead of telling you, you're going to go to this government monopoly, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to give you the money and you can pick the school of your choice.
Even for poor folks.
Now, the usual canard that the union and the liberal left, and remember, you know, big government schools creates what?
More Democrat voters.
Creates more government employees dependent upon government and taxation.
And when you've got the bottom 40 million of American federal taxpayers not paying anything when it comes to the income tax, those people are always going to vote for more taxes for the rest of us.
But I digress.
The point here is the schools, if you take a look at the per-pupil spending, say in Utah, where it's about $7,500 per child, the voucher, the maximum voucher is only going to be $3,000.
How could the school lose out when it comes to money?
The usual refrain is we can't have a voucher or a tuition tax credit because then the schools will lose money.
For instance, if you send your child to a private school or a parochial school, better yet, even you homeschool the child, then you shouldn't have to pay twice, once to the state, once for your property taxes for a service you're not using, and then another private tuition.
All we're saying is everybody educates their own child and you pay for your child's education, you know, and what's so unfair about that?
Well, they say, gosh, if you get a tuition tax credit or if you spend money on a voucher and you actually instill some market incentive in education, the schools go without the money.
Where's the $3,000 voucher going to come up?
Or if you get a $3,000 tuition tax credit, where is that going to come up?
I'll tell you where it's going to come up.
It's going to come out of the budget, but the school district budget is relieved of educating a child that's costing them $7,500 a year in Utah.
Now, even by my math, if you take $7,500 a year and that's the money the school district ostensibly saves.
Now, take away fixed income costs, like a building.
You can't realize expenses on that.
So let's say it's $6,000.
The expenses from educating that child are now gone from the school district.
So they save $6,000.
The government pays out $3,000 in a tuition tax credit and or a voucher.
School district's still up $3,000.
It doesn't cost them any money.
And in Utah, the entire $7,500 is going to stay in the public school system.
So their per-pupil expenditures will go up and up and up.
You know it is fall in America, my friends.
You know it is fall.
Not when the World Series ends, not when the football starts, not when the air gets crisp, but when your local school district says, gosh, here we go, another year and we don't have enough money.
We've got to get another operating levy, another bond levy.
We need to raise taxes at the state level because $10,159 per pupil is just not enough.
The annual survey of local government finances from the U.S. Census Bureau just out for 2005, the latest year, shows that in the United States, the average per-pupil expenditure is $10,159.
Now, of course, in D.C., it's almost $18,000.
In New York, it's almost $16,000.
And in other places like Utah, it's a little lower.
But the point being, $10,000, that'll buy you a pretty good private school education.
If you take a look at the United States Department of Education report from last year, 2006, they now say the average tuition at private schools versus the average per pupil spending for public schools shows that the average private school tuition is about a third less than the spending per pupil in public schools.
The spending per pupil in public schools is, you know, in other words, the tuition.
Now, how is that possible?
And how much money do they need?
Could we get an answer from our local school board?
Not a chance.
They're controlled by their local union.
But could you get, and by the way, I don't have anything against unions.
I believe in private sector collective bargaining.
I have serious reservations, and I always have with government unions.
When I have no choice, if I don't like what's happening at a company because I think they cut too sweetheart a deal with a union, I can withhold my patronage.
I can quit flying that airline.
I can quit buying their product.
Or if I like, for instance, what the UAW did when they got real with the auto companies and signed a reasonable contract, I thought, good for them, I can support them.
I have no such choice when it comes to taxation.
You combine this compulsory unionism in education and in the government where the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees are the people that are really running the show.
I got to fund them.
Because if I don't, I go to jail every April 15th.
There is an inherent conflict of interest in government unions.
And if you don't think so, what's next?
Maybe we ought to unionize the military, huh?
Take that hill.
Well, wait a minute.
We've got to have a steward meeting on this.
17 now after the hour.
I am Jason Lewis in for the great one Rush Limbaugh.
He'll be back tomorrow for Open Line Friday.
This time, I promise Byron, when we come back, write to you in Lansing, Michigan on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
And we are back.
And don't forget to check out rushlimbaugh.com for all the latest on El Rush Bo.
He'll be back tomorrow for Open Line Friday.
In the meantime, I am Jason Lewis from KTLK in the Twin Cities, the People's Republic of Minnesota.
Here is Byron, the patient Byron in Lansing, Michigan.
Thanks, buddy, for hanging on.
Go ahead.
Oh, Jason, God bless you, sir.
Well, same to you.
Yeah, you like Rush, make the complex comprehensible.
I appreciate it.
Well, I'm no rush, but we're doing our best.
Yeah.
This is sort of after the fact.
I want to respond to Bob that you had on last hour.
You finally brought out of him that essentially he believed that it was government's job to take money from me to do eglitarian works.
You know, Jesse James did that.
He would rob from banks and then give money to his friends.
Yeah.
What gives him the right to tell me what I must spend my money on in this supposedly free country?
Did you ever take it?
Right.
I mean, forced charity is an oxymoron.
There's no such thing as forced charity.
It's not virtuous when you've got a gun to your head and somebody says, oh, aren't you wonderful?
We're going to contribute.
Being compassionate with other people's money is the oldest line of liberalism, which is why, as we talked about, the Learjet liberals out there never seem to want to contribute their money unless we do it first.
Yes, it's a false compassion.
The whole school thing is a fine example.
I am forced to pay for schools that do things like issue condoms and birth control to 13, 14, 15-year-old girls.
This is an evil thing.
Yet, if I do not contribute my share of the tax money to do this egregious thing, they come and put me in jail.
And that's compassionate.
Well, their economic argument is based on the slippery slope of a public good.
And this is kind of the fallback provision for all of these myriad of unconstitutional and wasteful government programs that liberalism has brought us.
It's always, well, it's a public good, and they don't understand the difference between a public good and a public benefit.
If a business comes and locates in Lansing, that is a public benefit.
That doesn't mean government should subsidize the business on the basis that, well, gosh, if we subsidize businesses and we pick winners and losers, why they may come to Lansing and they may start to hire your neighbor, and your neighbor may have a business deal with you and see it's a public good.
That is not a public good.
Well, that brings us to the point of who determines what is good.
I would argue that things like giving birth control to underage children is not a good.
If I were to do it out on the street, if I was to find some 15-year-old girl walking by and say, here is some birth control, I would go to jail for that.
Yet they can do it in the schools.
Well, here's the problem.
I mean, the problem is we're stuck in a government monopoly, a statutory monopoly.
Milton Friedman spoke about this at length.
Ronald Reagan spoke about it.
Anybody, any economist worth his or her salt understands what this is.
There is no choice.
I mean, all these Democrats run around talking about choice.
This is the antithesis of choice.
So you're right.
You're locked into a system where if Microsoft did it, the local attorney general would be suing them for an antitrust violation.
Yes, precisely.
The solution to this, short, or long story made short, is for government, for people like you and me, to demand that the government return to its constitutionally mandated jobs instead of going off into this idea of this is for the public good so we can take money and that's for the public good.
No, go back to the Constitution.
Here's a book everybody ought to read.
Charles Murray, the great scholar, wrote a book a few years ago, small little book, easy to read, called What It Means to Be a Libertarian.
And he wasn't talking about a large L libertarian.
He's talking about the small L libertarian philosophy, classical liberalism, if you will.
And he has a chapter in there on public goods.
And a public good by default benefits everybody equally.
Now, you know, you can say national defense is a public good because whether we go to war or not, we're free.
We benefit.
The police, a system of courts and jurisprudence, that's a public good.
Whether we use them or not, we benefit from being free.
It becomes much, much less clear as to whether education really, frankly, is a public good that wouldn't come about anyway in a private market.
The people that want an educated workforce are businesses.
They will see to it that it gets done.
But sometimes, you know, you're told to educate if you're single or if you're elderly or if you're paying twice because you're sending your child to a private or parochial or homeschool.
You're told, well, you've got to educate the rest, everybody else's kids because it's a public good and you're going to grow up and benefit from that.
You may or may not.
Somebody may be educated through the system.
They may go on to go into a different field that doesn't affect you at all.
There is an invisible hand that will create an educated populace.
It's called the market, and it will work.
I mean, you know, what about automobile insurance?
That's certainly a public benefit, isn't it?
That everybody have automobile insurance.
And we do mandate it, even though people don't comply.
We do mandate, but we don't pay for it, do we?
And therein lies the difference.
Education is certainly a public benefit.
So is a business locating next to you.
So is automobile insurance.
We only pay for one of those things, even though they're all public benefits.
There's a difference between these, and people are abusing the term a public good right and left on this particular issue.
Byron, thanks for waiting, my friend.
Marshall and Harrisburg, PA, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
How are you?
It couldn't be better.
I'd say you're doing a fabulous job filling some really big shoes.
There's plenty of room to swim in these shoes of Russia's, yes.
I'm a newly re-registered Republican.
I was independent for a lot of years.
And I just wanted to say that you're right on with this returning education to the free market.
If you look at the statistics, since government took control of public education, our scores relative to the rest of the world have been going down and down and down.
What are they afraid of?
What's the problem?
If you've got a good public school and you can get a tuition tax credit or you can get a voucher, that doesn't mean you have to leave the public school.
So what's the union afraid of?
They're afraid of losing their monopoly.
They're afraid of choice and competition, which is precisely why we should have it.
1-800-282-2882, I am Jason Lewis from the great state of Minnesota filling in for the great one, El Rushbow.
He'll be back tomorrow for Open Line Friday.
Stay tuned for all of that.
And always check out RushLimbaugh.com.
Let's go to Rachel in Brooklyn.
She's got a different view on all of this.
You're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
You can hear me?
I can, ma'am.
Great.
I'm a conservative and I'm against vouchers because I've seen in real life how vouchers cause prices to rise.
Because what happens is if people get vouchers, they're getting subsidies and the private people who are selling a certain service, whatever that service is, they will go ahead and raise prices in order to extract more money out of the people who are paying with vouchers.
And that can happen in anything, not just school tuition.
I think that's real life.
Right.
The vouchers in question, I don't know of a single voucher program in the country that's been tried, whether Milwaukee or this experiment in Utah for the past.
Let me finish, Rachel.
Rachel.
Rachel, let me finish.
I don't know of a single program where the voucher is even close to the per-pupil spending at the comparative public school.
Okay, let's take a case, a case, case study out of real life, okay?
In New York City, they have a voucher program for rent.
It's called Section 8.
Right.
I happen to live in a neighborhood where a huge percentage of the people get Section 8 rent vouchers, okay?
Now, you would think that that person could take that rent voucher, give it to his landlord, and be, okay, I'm fine for the month, right?
Wrong.
What the landlord does is he take that, he takes the voucher and then raises the rent so he can still extract more money out of the person who's paying the rent.
You see, the voucher ends up not even somewhere anywhere near covering the rent.
You have a point.
If you take a look at higher education, one of the reasons that we are being price gouged by every university in the country is because every time they want to add another department of social work or another department of the anti-West, Western Civilization Department, they go to the government for a new Pell Grant.
They go there for a new subsidized student loan.
And the third party, the government, bails out the universities who otherwise would be subjected to market forces and have to cut their tuition and cut their expenses.
So in theory, you're correct.
But the problem is in Utah, for instance, and I bet the voucher you're talking about in any school vouchers in play, they're talking about $500 to $3,000.
The average per-pupil spending in the United States of America is over $10,000 in the public system.
So a voucher of $3,000 is not going to bid up anybody.
They're still going to have to come back and make up the difference.
If the public schools are broken, don't punish the people who choose to send their kids to private schools now.
I have four kids in private schools.
If you start giving those public school parents vouchers, they're going to mess up what I'm paying right now for my kids.
It's going to mess up the whole system.
Rachel, with all due respect, you're right and you're wrong.
I do agree with you that I don't think a voucher system is the best way to go, but for a different reason.
I don't think it's going to bid up the price of education any more than a mortgage interest deduction is bidding up the price of homes.
You get a tax break for that, too.
You're not willing to take that away.
We ought to have tax breaks for health care expenditures, tax deductions.
That's not necessarily going to bid it up as long as we have reasonable public policy.
But here's where the real danger comes in and why there are a number of people, such as yourself, and also out in California where the school voucher plan went down, because there fear that the voucher system will, for lack of a better word, publicize what they otherwise have now in a good private school.
All of a sudden, all the Title I requirements will be in play.
All the special ed requirements will be in play.
All of the rules that have so debilitated the public system and caused the bureaucracy will now apply because the courts will rule that a voucher is public money, and if it's public money, why then you have to comply with government regulations.
And I think that is a legitimate concern on your part and others, which is why I happen to be in favor of tuition tax credits.
For anybody that pays taxes and pays twice for education, once in the government system and wants to educate their own child, ought to be able to file a tax credit on their return so that they're not paying twice.
And tax credits historically have not been considered by the courts to be the equivalent of public money.
100%.
I agree with you on that.
And the whole tax fraud thing is a separate issue.
But yes, don't, I mean, my only points I want to say is don't punish the people that already are now sending kids to private schools and the government involved in private schools.
The government can't run anything correctly.
So you don't have EMV.
Is anything efficient over there?
So what we want to do is we don't want the government in our private schools.
Do you think the GI bill has worked pretty well?
I don't have any knowledge of it.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's worked pretty well.
Hope's going to be well.
What I'm telling you is you are being punished.
You are paying $17,000 a year to educate every other child in New York, and you're paying on top of that to educate your own.
You are paying twice now.
That, I think, on a moral level is wrong.
And that's my point.
Now, if I had my drothers, Rachel, here's what I would do.
I would instill a universal tuition tax credit.
A universal tuition tax credit is one where anyone who pays the tuition of a homeschooling situation or anyone who pays the tuition at a parochial school, a Catholic school, a private school, they get the tax credit.
So if I want to do it for my neighbor and I pay the tuition, then I get the tax credit on my tax return and the neighbor's son or daughter gets to go to school at my expense.
Here's what would happen.
You would have every business in the country getting on board.
They would all of a sudden say, oh, as a benefit of working here at XYZ Corporation, you have access to this particular school.
And you would have a flourishing market of new private schools out there, affordable.
And then the business could take the universal tuition tax credit, the UTTC has some way called it not long ago.
And you would have a market system for education.
Right now, we have a pure government-sanctioned monopoly.
And all the money we spend, and it keeps going up.
You talk about expenses.
It keeps going up each and every year.
Every year, every fall, there's another referenda on your local ballot to raise more money.
The union gets out.
They have their vote yes campaigns.
Do it for the children.
They hide behind the kids.
The teachers' union gets a new contract.
And what happens?
Our international test scores are stagnant at best.
I'm telling you, it's broken.
Rachel, thanks for the call in Longmont, Colorado.
On the front range, here's Lynn on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi, Lynn.
Hi, Jason.
Hey, one thing quickly.
When I used to live in Minnesota, I always called it the red star of the North.
Well, I understand Colorado is getting pretty, shall we say, we're trying to get Longmont and Northern Boulder separated from Boulder, which is the city in Boulder County.
Let me guess here.
Let me tell the folks what Boulder is like.
I've got some experience in Boulder.
Let me tell you what Boulder is like.
Boulder will be the only city in America that goes for Dennis Kucinich because they've all been on the same spacecraft.
And I wish they'd go back.
What's your point here, Lynn?
Okay, the thing I found out, and we've educated our kids in private school, Lutheran school, K through eighth grade.
Started at a public school here in Boulder County and found out that if they ask you if anybody in your household, for whatever reason, speaks a language other than English in your household, they can speak you in English as a second language.
Right.
They didn't have it to my kids, but a friend.
They get an extra like $5,000, $6,000 from the government.
They will put anybody in there.
It doesn't make any difference if you're fluent in English.
It doesn't make any difference.
But those are classes that you don't learn as much because they have to do everything twice, once in English and once in whatever other language.
But they get extra money for that.
So when you're going down your list of charges, you know, that they're offsetting, they get a whole bunch of other stuff.
Every kid is a cash cow.
And they look at all the different little places they can stick them to get more money for those kids.
Those kids are not to be educated.
Those kids are to pull money into the school.
Well, you've got to you bring up an interesting point because when it comes to special ed, the establishment, the status quo says, well, the reason the private schools can do a better job and do it cheaper is they don't have to educate everybody.
And my response to that is, you know what?
If you want to expel kids who bring guns to school or are constant troublemakers, I think we ought to rethink some compulsory education laws.
And I think you ought to be able to expel them.
The parents had their shot, and now they can go educate their own child elsewhere.
And then they say, oh, no, We've got to save every child.
So when they complain about special ed or disruptive kids, they complain and use that as an excuse.
And then when you give them out, they say, oh, no, no, no, we can't get rid of them precisely because they want the money.
The state and federal funding formulas from Title I, the state federal, or the state funding formula that goes to every district.
You couldn't be more correct.
Yeah, and another thing I was thinking about from what you said earlier, wouldn't it be fun if kids had to, in eighth grade, had to pass the same test that people have to pass to become citizens?
Might be an interesting endeavor.
You know, because that would at least force the teachers to teach the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the history that they just don't always do in the public schools.
Well, this is where I'm a radical on this issue.
I mean, charter schools are a move in the right direction, and everybody talks about those.
But I don't think you can tinker with a fundamentally broken system, a government-sanctioned monopoly.
I think you've got to change the paradigm.
And the paradigm here is market forces.
If you want to send your child with a tuition tax credit, you want to means test public education.
I guess you could do that, and the rest of us could get our property taxes back.
Now, that's a real radical view.
Well, what I'm saying is that let the parents and the market determine what's to be taught.
Let them determine the teacher pay scales, not the union.
Let them determine what's best for their child.
And right now, too many kids are trapped.
I've got to move 17 in front of the hour.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Don't go away.
Winding things up on a Thursday.
I hope everything's going well for you.
It will be even better tomorrow, I should say.
Rush will be back for Open Line Friday right here for another excursion into broadcast excellence.
In the meantime, I'm Jason Lewis behind the golden EIB mic in the Attila the Hun chair and honor, a privilege, once again, to do my best to fill the shoes of L. Rushbo.
Tony in Orange Park, Florida, you're on excellence in broadcasting.
Jason, first off, it's a real pleasure listening to you today.
You've just about hit everything right on the head.
What do we do about elected Republicans who just don't want to do what they've been elected to do?
Do you want to leave Charlie Crist out of this?
No, I don't want to leave Charlie Christ out of this.
Charlie Crist is becoming a real disappointment down there in the Sunshine State.
I mean, he's become a global warming fanatic, just like the rest of these Republican rhino governors.
He wants the taxpayer everywhere across the country to have some hurricane insurance plan, which is going to put the federal government on the hook.
He's talking about no offshore drilling whatsoever, which may play well down there in his defense, but the fact of the matter is we want to be energy independent.
We've got more natural gas and more oil in North America than we know what to do with if we could get at it.
So what do we do?
I think in the final analysis, Tony, you've got to take a look at what people have done previously and not what they say they're going to do.
I mean, look at the presidential candidates.
I'm tired of hearing this is what I'm going to do.
No, Mr. Romney, what did you do when you were in Massachusetts?
Or, Mayor Giuliani, what was your record in New York?
Fred Thompson.
I mean, Fred Thompson has a very consistent conservative record when he was in the Senate.
I think, you know, you take a look at that, and then it comports with what he's saying now.
That lends credibility.
So you've got to take a look at what they've done, not what they say they're going to do.
What is driving the angst of the average conservative like Tony in Orange Park is I'm tired of getting bamboozled by these Republicans who say they're conservatives and they get in office and all of a sudden the office changes them.
Isn't that right?
Well, I don't know.
Do you think it's just a lack of imagination?
They really don't know how to confront crazy liberalism when they get up there or they're just too afraid.
You do it and Rush does it.
Now, Rush is great at it.
He just shows how absurd all this stuff really is.
But Republicans that are elected won't do it.
It took Tom Tancredo and Jeff Sessions to get the Republicans to get off this crazy immigration bandwagon.
And they were just following Rush, basically.
I mean, I'm sure they probably felt that way, but no other elected Republicans really had the strength and testimonial fortitude to get up there and stop something that's goofy.
Well, the single most important attribute for a great conservative candidate is the courage of their convictions, actually believing the stuff.
It doesn't matter about whether they're Einstein or not or a nuclear physicist like Jimmy Carter or whatever he was.
He ended up writing down the schedule for the White House tennis court.
It got so ridiculous in the White House in those years.
But it doesn't matter.
What matters is why Reagan was so popular is people listen to the guy and say, you know, I really think he believes this.
And he did.
And when you believe something, you're not swayed by your opponents.
When you're kind of doing this to build your resume, you're doing this to assume the office, not to change the office, you start listening to the pundits, listening to the pollsters, and listening to your enemy.
So if the enemy, whether it's the New York Times or one of the networks, says, oh, people want more action on global warming.
They want more money for education.
They want this or that.
Oh, well, if you don't have core convictions, you're going to listen to these people and say, well, I better do that.
I better follow the polls instead of changing the polls.
Well, you know, I just hope Bobby Jindal's election will give some of these Republicans some spine stand up for what they believe in.
The new governor of Louisiana, great point.
Let's squeeze in a bill in Morrow Bay, California before the next break, which is coming right up, by the way.
Bill, fire away, my friend.
Okay.
By the way, you're doing a great job filling those shoes.
Thank you.
In the private schools, they can refuse certain students certain disciplinary problems, leaving the problem kids in the public schools and therefore requiring more special skills of the teacher, requiring more pay.
Well, I don't think their pay scale has nothing to do with that.
Their pay scale is based on length of service and graduate credits and degrees.
But I do believe let me just challenge you on the premise.
Why?
Where is it written that we ought to allow one child out of 25 to disrupt the educational mission of the other 24?
What I'm telling you is that we ought to start expelling more kids.
We ought to rethink compulsory education laws and say to the parent, if your child is interrupting the education of the rest of the kids, you've got your chance for a free public school education.
If you or the child blows it, you're going to have to find another place to educate the child on your own dime.
Oh, that's absolutely ideal if they do it.
Well, guess who fights that?
The unions.
Right.
Exactly.
They sit there and complain about disruptive kids, which is valid.
They complain about all of the mandates, which is valid.
They complain about special ed, which is valid.
And each and every time in Washington or your state capitol, they fight to keep them because there is money attached.
And therein lies the big problem.
Bill, thanks for the call.
I'm Jason Lewis.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
When we return, we'll wrap it up on EIB.
All right, once again, thanks to everybody that's helped this program get on the air today.
Mike and Kid and the rest of the gang, and of course, the big guy, El Rushbo.
What a treat to fill in for the man that saved AM radio, doing the same for FM stations all across the country, including the one I'm on in Minneapolis, St. Paul, K-T-L-K.
You know, this whole education thing, if this were any other product, this would be a no-brainer.
If Burger King or McDonald said, you know, you're going to have to buy X amount of our product every month, whether you just choose to eat it or not, we're going to bill you and you're going to pay every quarter, every month, every year.
And then you can go to another restaurant if you want, but you're still going to pay us.
I mean, people would be going apoplectic.
They would be apoplectic.
But because it's for the kids and for the children, we can spend $536 billion a year, much more than national defense, and never wonder where the money is going.
Sooner or later, we're going to have to get real on this and say we ought to be pro-choice in education and let people choose to send their kids where they think it's appropriate.
And you know what?
Let the money follow the child.
We'll see you next time.
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