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Nov. 9, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:17
November 9, 2007, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 podcast.
Hey, hey, we got some political endorsements this week.
You know, Sam Brownbeck endorses John McCain.
Pat Robertson endorses Rudy Giuliani.
And that guy from My Favorite Martian endorses Dennis Kucinich, which I thought was kind of odd, but an endorsements and endorsement.
Hello, once again, everybody, Jason Lewis here behind the Golden EIB Mike in the Gatilla the Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, and I gotta tell you, this is a special day.
As you know, Rush suspended himself yesterday for falling prey to a hoax.
He says so I'm filling in because Rush suspended himself.
Now, kid and Mike, tell me something.
Why do I feel like Al Haig all of a sudden?
I mean, as of now, I'm in charge here at EIB.
So we'll do our best.
You know, as always, Rush may be gone, but it is Friday, and that means only one thing on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
That's right.
1800-282-2882.
Your chance, uh, you rank amateurs, your chance to talk to another well, to another rank amateur today.
I guess Russia's gone.
Rush will be back, of course, on Monday, but this is the uh the day when you get to choose the topics.
We'll throw out a few, but you get to choose whatever's on your mind, you get to chime in at 1800-282-288-2.
You know, speaking of Dennis Kucinich, what have we got?
We've got a war going on.
We've got an economy that's teetering, some might say.
Actually, it's much better than people think.
But Dennis Kucinich is out there pushing an impeachment, an impeachment of Dick Cheney on the floor of the House.
They don't even have their appropriations bills done yet due October first, and he's talking about impeachment.
They were going to reform earmarks, the earmarks are going up.
They were going to adopt a more stringent standard, do more work, and last week they decided, well, we need a four-day work week in the new Democratic Congress.
A four-day work week for members of this new Pelosi Reed Congress.
I know their motto, I know hard work won't kill you, but why take the chance?
But this, you know, this is not going to fly.
And now Joe Lieberman has even had enough.
He painted a dim picture of his party yesterday.
He said, quote, for many Democrats, the guiding conviction in foreign policy isn't pacifism or even isolationism.
It is distrust and disdain of Republicans in general and President Bush in particular.
He was at John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies when he said this yesterday.
He said Democrats are no longer guided by principle, but partisanship.
Now he's referring back to the old days of the hawkish John F. Kennedy or Scoop Jackson Democrats.
John F. Kennedy spent 49% of the federal budget on national defense.
He ran a 1960 on a missile gap.
He wanted to beef up defense as a percentage of GDP.
Where are all those Democrats?
Today we spend 20% of the federal budget on defense, and that is the only thing they want to cut.
And quite frankly, some of my libertarif libertarian friends, and I can be libertarian when it comes to domestic issues.
Uh they they say the same thing.
Well, I got to get a handle on this on this defense spending.
You know and I know the vast majority of the budget is income transfer programs.
Period.
Entitlements, discretionary spending.
And yet we focus on the f the only legitimate function of government.
Let me tell you what the legitimate function of government is.
It is safety and freedom.
That's it.
You know, when the when when our guys were sitting around during the founding, when the framers were sitting around, they didn't say, let's form this new government so they can tax and regulate us.
They weren't saying that.
They were fleeing that.
They were skeptical of the monarchy.
They were also skeptical of pure democracy as well, as James Madison said.
But the point here is they wanted a government, and they were going to give a government the monopoly on force.
Why would you give anybody or anything, any institution a monopoly on force if the goal wasn't to repel only illegitimate force?
Today we have turned the government into what the government is supposed to be fighting with this nanny state liberalism, this entitlement mentality, this cueing up at the trough for every little thing that every community seems to want.
And so we've forgotten the main function of certainly the federal government, and that was handling external threats.
Most internal threats would be handled by the states and local governments.
So Lieberman is dead on.
And he's blasting Democrats like Kucinich and the rest of the party for saying you've forgotten what it means.
And actually what he's really saying is, you know, you can still be a good socialist at home, but you gotta be hawkish on international affairs too.
Now I happen to disagree with old Joe on that.
He's pretty liberal when it comes to domestic affairs, but he's right on defense.
He said, quote, there is something profoundly wrong, something that should trouble all of us when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran's murder of our troops than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.
Close quote.
That's the bad news.
Good news is the uh Senate approved Mukey for the new attorney general.
They should.
Schumer brought him to the table.
I mean, why wouldn't they confirm him?
And hopefully we're done with this nonsensical talk about, oh, is waterboarding torture and this and that.
Folks, there is a difference between a crime and a war.
We have civilian due process rights for criminals that the government prosecutes.
Unlawful enemy combatants have none of those rights because they are not civilian criminals.
They are unlawful enemy combatants, neither protected by the Geneva Convention nor by civilian due process.
They are in limbo land.
What George Washington did to an accomplice of Benedict Arnold.
He didn't give him a trial, not even a military tribunal.
He hanged him.
When we found uh seven or eight Nazi saboteurs in Florida, I believe, in 1942, military tribunal.
Today the ACLU would be apoplectic over this.
And yet we've done it throughout our history.
How is it possible, you know, all these people saying you can't waterboard?
By the way, if you get into this debate about what's torture and what isn't, and there, you know, there are certain limits.
But if you get into the debate, at what point does a coercive interrogation become torture?
I mean, the International Red Cross effectively is saying you can't ask Al Qaeda or the unlawful enemy combatants anything more than their name, rank, and serial number.
Well, great.
That's gonna stop a bomb from going off in New York City or Chicago or LA.
That could be torture if it's coercive, you got to apply, you know, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment.
No, you don't.
This is a war, not a criminal prosecution.
And therein lies the fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans today, and quite frankly, the fundamental difference between Bill Clinton's prosecution of terrorists and George Bush's.
Bush said this is a war, I'm invoking Article II.
We're gonna end this finally.
Bush says, Well, I couldn't get bin Laden because I didn't have enough to hold him.
You know, I could have had him over.
I did not have enough to hold him.
Well, you you need a probable cause.
You needed to appoint him a tax funded attorney.
We didn't, you know, when we shoot the enemy on the battlefield, here's a news flash for you guys.
Call 60 minutes.
We don't read them the Miranda rights first.
We shoot them.
When Harry Truman dropped the bombs at Nagasaki in Hiroshima, sparing sparing God knows how many American lives and Japanese lives as well.
Many more would have died in an invasion of Japan, some historians suggest.
He was concerned not about the Fourth Amendment because he wasn't prosecuting a civilian defendant.
He was prosecuting a war, and I would argue that's what we're doing today.
So perhaps we can put to rest now with the new attorney general passed by the Senate, confirmed by the Senate, these uh silly little arcane debates that only the ACLU seems to do concerned about.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'd be the first to say, look, if you're if this is a civilian trial, this is a civilian prosecution, uh, you've got to apply the Bill of Rights, obviously.
I'm as much as a civil libertarian as anybody.
But, you know, the Bill of Rights do not trump Article II and the president's war making powers.
There is a tension between the constitutional separation of powers.
One does not trump another, and the judiciary cannot fight a war, only the commander in chief can.
Now, would it have been easier had Congress just out and out declared war?
Yeah, perhaps.
But the military author authorization to use force is pretty close to it.
And remember, how many times did Bill Clinton send troops abroad in Bosnia, Somalia, without so much as a congressional imprima or an authorization of force?
He sent troops to Bosnia and said, Well, I got NATO authorization for that.
Well, I didn't know NATO was the legislative branch of government.
And yet not a peep from all the people concerned so concerned about the prosecution of the war on terror, by the way, the troops are still in in that particular region of the world.
So from Bill Clinton.
So on we go with that.
I gotta bring this up because nobody's talking about it, and this just goes to show you fundamentally how corrupt uh the culture of spending has become in Washington.
Uh everybody in Congress today is feeling their oats because they overrode the president's veto of this water projects bill.
And every every local newspaper in your hometown is saying the president or the Senate overrode this popular twenty-three billion dollar water resources bill.
Let me give you the background on this so you know how bankrupt the new Congress is, and quite frankly, a few Rhino Republicans who went along with this.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineer in this water projects bill identified, identified around five billion dollars in civil works that they think needed to be done.
According to the Wall Street Journal, here's what happened.
The Senate passes a bill, not at five billion, fourteen billion.
The House, not to be outdone, of course, they pass a different bill at fifteen billion.
And guess what?
They get together in conference committee.
Each legislative branch or each legislative house passes a bill that got to reconcile the two companion bills in a conference committee before they send it to the president.
So the Army Corps says we need five billion.
Right?
The Senate says, oh, we can up that 14 billion, a little more pork in there.
House says, oh no, no, we want 15 billion.
They go together in conference and compromise.
The bill comes out at 23.2 billion dollars.
In the conference committee, they airdropped 19 earmarks that were not in the original House or Senate bill.
This was something the Democrats said they were going to stop.
Instead, they upped the ante.
This is unbelievable.
Airdropping nearly 20 earmarks, going from authorizing $5 billion to $23 billion.
The local media in your hometown said the popular water projects bill, and they overrode the President's veto yesterday.
You want to know why we've got a problem with spending in Washington?
There you have it, my friends.
We have a culture of spending.
Members of Congress do not get in trouble with their local media when they override a bill or override a veto for more spending.
But if they have the temerity and the courage, I might add, to sustain a presidential veto of the yes chip nonsense, why they're pillaried by their local print scribes and their local 10 PM or 11 P.M. news.
This is the culture of spending, and until we until we get a handle on this, your freedom will be less than what it otherwise would be.
I'm Jason Lewis, Infrared Rushboat today.
Your call's coming right up, so don't go away.
1800-282-2882.
That's the hotline as always, open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Greetings, uh conversationalists across the fruited plane.
That almost sounds like Rush.
Rush suspended.
Self-suspension today.
So I, Jason Lewis from the great state of Minnesota, Minnesota's real anchor man.
I got all the rushisms down.
I'm just trying my best here, gang.
They uh or he will be back on Monday.
I will be doing my best on open line Friday today as we talk about uh well, whatever's on your mind.
Before we get to the phones, let me just add one more thing.
Pretty good article in the journal today by Carl Rove.
And he talks about well, it got me thinking about why people are so concerned on Wall Street.
Uh the market is not having a good week, as you all know.
Why people are concerned about energy, uh, we all know that those problems, oil almost hitting a hundred dollars a barrel, uh, tax increases on the horizon.
Why the economy seems to be I wouldn't say sputtering because it's not.
This is not, as uh Kid Carson says, Carterville, by any stretch of the imagination, when when the prime rate was twenty-one and a half percent, inflation was thirteen percent, uh uh unemployment, the misery index, much higher than Gerald Ford's.
This is we are not in that in that era because we still have incentive to work thanks to the Bush tax cuts.
But let me tell you why I believe why I believe there's some concern on Wall Street, some concern in the economy uh out there right now, some angst, if you will.
Look what's going on.
We've got a weak dollar driven by driven by, quite frankly, uh Wall Street and the credit markets demanding that the Fed ease, giving them their insurance to bail out the big banks so that we can make certain that that those subprime mortgages don't fail on them.
So we're we're trying to, you know, instigate this easy credit and pumping more money into the economy.
And folks, as you know, or you should know, inflation is simply too much money chasing too few goods.
If the if the amount of money in circulation rises faster than the GDP or the number of widgets out there, you will get inflation.
And when you get inflation, and then you couple that with a Democratic Congress hell bent on raising taxes, especially on capital gains and dividends, plus another trillion of tax reform thanks to Charlie Wrangle, you get the specter of stagflation.
High tax rates and inflation, something that wasn't supposed to be supposed to be possible under the old Phillips curve mantra, the old Keynesian argument is exactly what happened during the Carter era.
And the markets are looking at this and saying, let's see.
We've got we've got easy money, we've got a weakening dollar, gold price of gold going way up.
We've got the specter of massive spending increases and tax increases, which crowd out not only incentive, but they crowd out capital.
So when you have less incentive to produce, and you don't have the capital investment.
This is crucial.
And that's why supply side economics is nothing more than a restatement of neoclassical economics.
You've got to have capital to produce.
The truck driver is a lot more productive with the truck.
Well, guess what?
Who gives him the truck?
Investors who buy the stock.
The company gets the money, they buy the truck.
If investors don't have a return because the capital gains tax is going to go up, they don't do it.
And if the truck driver doesn't have the truck, guess what, friends?
He's not very productive.
You get lower economic growth, you get high inflation with the easy money.
Now you add add to this the fact that we are the only nation, and Rush was talking about this yesterday.
We are the only nation in the world that is right now, thanks to the insanity over global warming and the environment that is denying ourselves our own resources.
This is not just heresy.
This is a total neglect of duty by our officials.
We are the only country that says, well, gosh, we've got trillions of natural gas off the outer continental shelf.
Nope, can't get at it.
We've got as much oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and we only need about a two thousand acre footprint to get into nineteen million.
It's dark fifty-six days out of the year.
We've got enough oil up there nearly to replace our imports imports from Saudi Arabia.
Nope, can't get at it.
The Sierra Club says no.
And all the members of Congress.
So we are in the process now of driving up deliberately.
Because I got a news flash for you.
Ethanol is not going to replace oil.
Cellulistic ethanol is not going to replace oil.
Wind power is well, enough about Congress.
Wind power is not going to replace fossil fuel, coal.
None of it is.
We are deliberately in an energy crunch.
We are deliberately debasing the currency, and we are deliberately talking about raising taxes on capital and on entrepreneurial investment.
And you wonder why the markets are a bit jittery right now.
By the way, these are all liberal, liberal prescriptions.
And it happens every time.
It's amazing that people don't learn their lesson, but here we go again.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush today in Newport Beach, California.
Deanna, you're first up today on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi there.
Hi, Deanna.
How are you?
Just fine, but I want to remind everyone that November 11th is Sunday, Veterans Day, Remembrance Day, and it's very important.
And I wish the Congress and Pelosi and Reed and all of them would give our troops what they need.
The money.
Whose side are they on?
We need this money.
We can't send our armies out there and not support them.
And we must all remember veterans and remembrance day, which is Sunday, November the 11th.
Well, that's a great point.
Absolutely a great point.
You know, i it becomes it becomes bizarre to watch the new Congress, the Reed Pelosi Congress, attach a definite pull-out date to every Iraq appropriation.
And that's that's what's holding these things up.
They don't even have their other appropriations done for domestic discretionary, let alone getting the war up and running.
This is a total dereliction of duty.
So your angst should be directed at the new members of Congress.
It is, definitely.
You got it.
Whose side are they on?
You said it.
Deanna, thanks so much.
Glad you called.
Let's go to uh ready in Pennsylvania and Bill, you're next up on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
Uh you mentioned about we're denying our own resources and absolutely on oil.
It's it's outrageous gone on Sierra Club has tied our hands.
It's time now.
Can we take a full court press on the Congress to finally get off the duff and start drilling for oil offshore and an Anwar.
We just we're we're it we're shooting ourselves in the foot, and the Sierra Clubs had their way for too many years.
Let me tell you something.
Environmentalism is becoming a disease anymore.
It really is.
I think it is a sickness.
I shouldn't say that.
They'll qualify for a federal benefit someplace if they have a mental illness called environmentalism.
But it it is the most it is the most counterproductive uh movement in my lifetime.
And the problem you've got is there there is no opposition here.
I want to expand on this when we come back.
You bring up a great point, but there is no opposition.
Who's fighting the Sierra Club?
You've got too many, quite frankly, moderate Republicans trying to get their endorsement, Bill, and that's a huge problem.
We need to get real on this and explore our own resources.
Yes, exploit them, or we're gonna have serious energy problems going forward.
And it's the environmentalists won't get the blame for that, but of course they should.
I want to talk about that uh when we come back a little bit because Anwar, the outer continental shelf, there's more oil there than we know what to do with.
Talent on loan today from Rush.
He'll be back on Monday in the meantime, Jason Lewis here trying to hold the fort down on this open line Friday.
You know, Bill and in Redding made an excellent point.
I mean, why are we denying ourselves our own resources?
Well, actually I made that point, but then he he concurred with that, especially when it comes to Anwar.
Folks, let me tell you what is in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
We've got nineteen million acres of frozen tundra.
No one goes there except a few people from the Sierra Club to hold a press conference.
Uh it's dark, fifty-six, fifty-seven days out of the year.
There will be no footprint.
But here's the here's the real kicker.
With the new technology, the oil companies can go up to Anwar and on nineteen million acres, they can explore about one point five million acres to get ten billion barrels of oil by mo by most estimates, and they only have to use a footprint of about two thousand acres.
Now, you know, you're looking at oil accessible through about a two thousand acre footprint, estimated to produce a flow almost equal to our daily imports from Saudi Arabia.
And what's our our stated public policy?
Well, let's double the price of corn and duh and and gouge the taxpayer so we can have inefficient ethanol.
But let's not get the oil.
Let's not explore off the Florida coast, you know, Governor Charlie Christ might be traumatized over that.
Let's not do that because, well, two hundred miles out, fifty miles out, somebody might see an oil rig.
Meanwhile, oil is a hundred dollars a barrel getting there.
Uh the markets are teetering.
Now, look, the economy is good thanks to the Bush tax cuts.
But there there are warning signals going on right now, and this is what this presidential race should be about.
Mark and Warren, Michigan, you're up this segment, or uh first up this segment, I should say, on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hello, Jason.
And let me just say I love when you fill in for Rush, and and it's it's from Jackson, Michigan.
But my point is Warren Jackson, you figure it out.
My point is it seems to me that the Anwar vote took place first quarter of two thousand and three.
And several months after the vote on one of our local radio talk shows, we had one one of our liberal Democrat representatives defending the vote, not to drill an Anwar, and one of the points he made was well, does everybody realize it would have taken us six years to get the first drop out of there anyway?
And I would just like to remind people that we're approaching five years, and a little over one year from now, had the Anwar vote gone through.
Do you realize the freedom this country would have not having to depend on Middle East or Venezuelan oil anymore?
Just yeah, I I it boggles my mind just thinking what we could do as a country if we had that oil flowing in the bottom.
It's a little bit it's a little bit like these new urbanists out in, you know, Portland and Seattle and Charlotte and the twin cities across the country who have a policy of deliberate congestion.
They don't build the roads to keep up.
They know that.
They're deliberately doing it to try to force you into mass transit inside an urban growth boundary, and they're being and they're successful.
And the same with the environmental uh environmentalists when it comes to energy.
It is a policy of energy deprivation, and and they're being successful.
Now, you bring up an excellent point.
Uh it's it's called a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yes, if you keep putting off going into Anwar or out the on the outer continental shelf or any place else, uh, yeah, the day you'll get the oil will be, you know, we'll will be pushed back in perpetuity.
But that's a ridiculous argument.
Yeah, I was I was listening to him, and unfortunately I wasn't able to get through through because I wanted to give him an airful, but it was Jimmy Carter that first put this up for debate.
Had we gone in then, we would be a wash, as you say.
The the Congress debated uh the opening of Anwar back in nineteen ninety.
Had we gone in then, we'd have more oil than we know what to do with.
They even debated it in two thousand and five briefly, and we at least have a start then.
So, you know, I I I'm very I'm very shocked that uh that nobody is taking on the Democrats and the Liberals and the environmentalists on this that said, Wait a minute, we've got the energy we need.
You want to talk about independence from foreign sources, here it is.
But they don't because they want to get the Sierra Club endorsement, environmental defense.
We end up, as conservatives and free market Republicans, we end up feeding our own enemies.
We end up funding our own enemies.
I gotta be a good environmentalist to get elected from this district.
And so we have these problems that are a direct result of quite frankly, government and environmentalism run amok.
Let's go to uh beautiful Memphis, Tennessee, Beale Street, the River Walk, or not the river walk, what do they call that, Joseph, in Memphis down on uh down on the Mississippi where you've got that little model of the Mississippi down there?
It's a fabulous spot.
Joseph in Memphis, you're up next.
Hi.
How are you doing, Jason?
I'm doing great.
I love Memphis.
I've got a question for you.
If this global warming mess is really a hoax, just a big scam, can we get that Nobel Peace Prize strip from Al Gore?
Not a chance.
Take a look at the take a look at a few other folks that have won the Nobel Peace Prize in the past.
I know I was about to say we could give it to somebody who really deserves it, but that's that's a big joke anyhow.
They never give it to anybody that really deserves it.
Speaking of global warming being a scam, have you heard about the founder of the Weather Channel, now a weatherman in San Diego, John Coleman?
Well, guess what?
He's he he's gonna join us next hour.
Great.
This guy, and this is so delicious because the weather channel is off its rocker.
You've got Heidi Cullen, you know, abusing her position by uh spewing out agent prop disguised as a weather forecast when it comes to global warming.
Now you got the founder of the station of which she works saying this thing is the greatest hoax I've ever seen in my life.
So we will talk to John Coleman coming up in a little later.
Joseph, thanks for checking in.
Let's go to Joe and Raleigh, North Carolina.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, thanks very much for taking my call and enjoy your show very much.
Uh a couple of points I think is the economy.
That's on a lot of people's minds now, but the economy, the American economy, is very, very strong right now.
And if you look at the uh uh many metrics, uh you you can see that interest rates are low.
Uh the Fed recently cut interest rates.
Uh employment is strong.
Unemployment is very low, I think less than what it was during the Clinton administration.
Check me out.
Uh GDP continues growing.
We're not going to have a recession.
I don't see a recession happening.
Uh uh and the stock market.
I think you're go ahead.
Go ahead.
By the way, I think you're mostly right.
I mean, take a look at the unemployment rate of about 4.7% today.
That is lower than the average during the Clinton years of 5.2%.
And all the glowing reports from the Clinton years seem to be missing here.
Isn't that something?
And you're right.
The stock market, even though it's taken a beating this week is still high.
Uh, you've got uh productivity at 4.9%.
Business spending has been up.
Uh interest rates are low, but let me tell you something.
The Fed can't control long-term interest rates.
And when they keep cutting and cutting and cutting and throwing out easy money, the credit markets eventually are gonna say, you know what?
Uh five percent on the dollar is not gonna do it for me because the dollar's gonna be worth less in twenty years.
I want eight percent.
It will long-term rates will go up if we keep up the policy of easy money.
If we raise taxes and soak up capital and incentive by the the the liberals in Congress, if we don't get real about energy policy, while the economy is strong thanks to the Bush tax cuts, we are in the pro in the process of repealing those policies.
And that's my concern.
Well, exactly.
And I'll tell you, I guarantee you, the Democrats, the Democratic Party uh policies are definitely gonna pull the stock market down.
Uh, they're just salivating to s to raise taxes on what?
Interest, raise it on dividends, raise it on capital gains, uh you name it.
They love higher taxes.
That will slow the economy.
And a point I would like to make is uh all Americans should ask, what uh what leader is going to do the best job to create the economy and grow the economy so our kids can have good jobs someday when they grow up.
We got to think beyond ourselves.
Our kids are gonna need jobs, and they're gonna need jobs where when they go to work and get a paycheck, it's not all confiscated away from them in higher taxes.
And uh I don't see the Democrats having any answer uh to this at all.
Well, you're you're right.
I mean, t the reason you want lower rates of taxation and regulation for that matter is not the byproduct of prosperity.
There's no doubt whether you look at the nineteen twenties, the nineteen sixties, the nineteen eighties, or the Bush tax cuts coming out of a a high tech bubble that you know Bush inherited a recession that's unknown to most people.
Then you had 911.
And still these tax cuts, you know, let the economic engine fly.
And we've had we have had an astounding recovery.
By any measure you want to you want to use the same statistics you use to measure the Clinton era, apply them to Bush, and we've had an amazing recovery.
But the reason you want tax cuts and less regulation is not the byproduct of prosperity.
It's a moral issue.
It's your money.
We fought a great war in the nineteenth century over over somebody having the right to keep the fruits of their own labor.
Do we want to enslave everybody now with high rates of taxation?
That's what we're talking about here.
We're talking about freedom.
And that's the real, the real emphasis when it comes to tax reduction.
18 in front of the hour.
I'm Jason Lewis sitting in for a self-suspended Rush Limbaugh today on EIB.
It's open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis from uh Minnesota.
That's where I have my evening show Monday through Friday, but always a pleasure to be behind the golden EIB mic, sitting in the Attila the Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies while Rush is suspended today.
Self suspension, friends.
I'm not pulling an Al Haig as of now.
I'm in charge here at EIB.
No, no, no.
Self suspension for uh falling prey to a hoax.
He'll be back on Monday, of course.
Back to the phones we go on open Friday in Columbus, Columbus, Indiana, I should say.
It's Joe.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
How are we doing?
Could not be better, sir.
It's a uh open line Friday.
I would like to disagree with your previous caller there about regarding the trying to compare the economy with uh George W. Bush against Bill Clinton.
Uh if you want to look at the stock market, I think you or your caller said about the stock market, how much growth we've had.
Well, if you look at the starting number of where it was seven years ago when Bush took over, we haven't had that much growth in that in the in the in that seven years.
Uh we had an initial drop as soon as within the first six, seven months he was there, and then of course we had nine eleven and we had a drop.
Right.
But it was already going down when when uh uh Bush had had nine eleven.
So then it's back up.
I love these arguments.
I love these arguments.
I'm glad you called.
Uh number one, according to the National Economic Bureau of Research or the National Economic Bureau, as it's called sometimes, uh the recession started before Bush took office.
So I don't believe they would go ahead, I'm sorry.
Well, I'm just saying it's it's a fact by most economists.
So Bush inherits a recession.
That can't be laid at the doorstep of Bush.
The tax cuts didn't take effect until 2003 when they were accelerated.
So you can't judge that policy at 2000 to 2003.
You've got to judge it at 2003 to today.
And it's been a remarkable turnaround, three percent over three percent GDP growth.
The market has gone up in a dramatic way, unemployment lower than Clinton's, and by the way, by the way, wage is now going way up and personal net household wealth way, way up.
Now, I'm just I'm just saying, and there's another thing you need to know as well.
I'll give Bill Clinton credit for for letting Alan Greenspan do what he had to do in trying to keep a lid on inflation.
I'll give him credit for cutting the capital gains tax in his second term.
But after his stimulus package was trying to get passed, after Hillary Care failed, you know, from the day he took office from nineteen ninety-two to nineteen ninety-four, the economy was totally stagnant, and then nineteen ninety-four when the Republicans took over, the long bond was eight percent.
You did not get a recovery until the markets knew that Greenspan was holding the line on inflation, which Clinton didn't have anything to do with, and the Republicans were gonna stop the spending, which they did with the stimulus package and the Hillary care plan.
Well, uh far as the recession part of it, Bush was talking recession a year before the election, and that's what he kept saying.
He if we had a recession, he talked he talked the country into it.
He the mindset was Joe, now you're just grasping at straws.
I'm giving you facts here.
Uh and and that I I'm sorry, I you know, I don't want to burst the bubble.
I'm not saying everything was wrong in the nineteen nineties.
I think Clinton cutting the capital gains tax, which the Democrats now want to repeal, was a good thing.
I think the monetary policy in the second term was a good thing.
But it had nothing to do with the Clinton tax increase, the stimulus package, and Hillary care or the health care, which actually slowed down the economy in the first few years of the Clinton administration.
And I'm saying Bush, who inherited the recession, and then 9 11, the greatest attack on American soil.
If we wouldn't have cut taxes in 2003, actually accelerated the 2001 tax cut, you wouldn't have had the recovery.
And then you'd be saying, well, see, it's Bush's fault.
So I respectfully disagree, but I do appreciate the opportunity to straighten you out.
Joe, thanks for calling, buddy.
Have a great weekend in Houston, Texas.
Emmett, you're on the EIB.
Hi, Jason.
Thanks for taking my call.
It's great to talk to you.
I comment on the energy policy.
You know, the Sierra Club shows uh unmitigated hypocrisy.
If you look at what happened down here two years ago when Hurricane Katrina and Rita came through the Western Gulf, there were no oil spills.
Ninety-five percent of oil spills occur in the transport of oil, not in the direct the production.
And the second thing is that the environmental controls uh in the United States, continental United States, are far, far tighter and reliable than the controls in Ecuador or Peru or offshore Mexico, where the Sierra Club would prefer us to drill.
Not only that, those nations in China and Cuba, as we know, are drilling.
I mean, so they're they're providing their citizens with enough energy to move the economy forward and help the impoverished.
But we have a stated policy, thanks to the Sierra Club running Congress that oh, we can't do that.
We're gonna deny ourselves these resources.
Let me tell you, I'm I'm an old Bush supporter.
I'm from Houston and had him as governor.
But one of my big disappointments is his lack of the ability to articulate this domestic energy production need that if he was more articulate to explain to the general public to understand that there's no reason we shouldn't be drilling off of Florida, off of California in Anwar.
There's no reason we shouldn't expand our nuclear power.
Guess who's fighting guess who's fighting George Bush in Florida for offshore drilling of fifty to two hundred.
The Republican governor.
I understand.
But I The problem is in our party on this.
Of course, Democrats hate business.
They think profit is a dirty word.
They're going to be the enemy on on going forward with a growing economy and and providing energy for our children and our posterity.
But you shouldn't expect it from the GOP, should you?
Well, we should expect the GOP to articulate the energy policy needs of this country in a better way than they've done so far.
The other problem, I mean you're you're dead right, of course.
I mean, you you've got you you I don't know why if it's okay to do it in Galveston, it's not okay to do it in California or Florida, but it's pure politics.
It's pure political pandering.
Plus you've got, Emmett, where I'm from in the upper Midwest, the Republican Party has decided, you know, our ticket of you know, the the Democrats have the welfare queens.
Oh, we need to be sugar daddy to somebody, and they've decided to be sugar daddy to the farm lobby.
And so we've for forsaken the cheaper, more efficient energy, which I got news for you, as Rush said yesterday, it's still crude, and it's going to be crude for the foreseeable future on a grotesquely inefficient energy called ethanol.
Well, they put 53 cents per gallon uh tax on Brazilian ethanol, so they're not really even being consistent with that.
Right, they're not competing for the cheaper sugar-based ethanol.
You've got this this uh subsidy domestically in addition to that tariff, you're quite right.
And by the way, it gets about uh twenty-five to thirty-five percent less gas mileage.
It's doubled the price of corn, so it's not even inexpensive anymore, as though it never would be.
It's you know, sopping up all the water in the in the aquifers, and it's just it's insane.
But let me tell you something.
Every member of Congress, from Charles Grassley to Norm Coleman, and Republicans, Democrats, doesn't matter, is an ethanol booster.
In the meanwhile, we're bashing big oil, the most efficient energy.
It makes no inner it's not an energy policy, Emmett.
It is a political policy we have right now.
And as you know, therein lies the problem.
I got a break.
We'll be back with more.
Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh today on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Hey, coming up next hour, the top of next hour, we'll talk with John Coleman.
Now, he's the founder of the Weather Channel, now a San Diego weatherman, and he made big news.
Rush talked about it yesterday.
He calls global warming the greatest scam in history.
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