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Dec. 27, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:34
December 27, 2007, Thursday, Hour #3
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You know, there's nothing intellectually challenging about being a liberal or a democrat.
In the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, all the Democratic candidates for president now have to speak about this and offer out some platitude.
Hillary is out today saying that the fight for democracy must go on.
Well, she's saying that because it sounds good.
When has she ever fought for democracy?
She still isn't clear as to whether or not she supported this war.
According to her husband, he never supported the war on Iraq.
Where has she fought for democracy?
If you believe that the way to fight terrorism is to try to bring democracy to the rest of the world, well, that means you're going to have to knock off the leaders that are not part of countries that believe in democracy.
When is she ever supported democracy anywhere?
She hasn't.
Yet she says this as if she and Benazir Bhutto have been marching arm in arm the last ten years fighting Al Qaeda, which has claimed responsibility for her death, true or not.
There are a lot of inane things that are going to be said in the wake of things like this, but to be a liberal is just to say the things that you think make you sound good.
It's why most Hollywood types are liberal.
They aren't very smart, they need the approval of others, so they say things that sound good and they can it can make them feel good about themselves.
Now, I understand.
I've taken a couple of physicians today sitting in for rush that seem rather harsh.
so Supported Texas, the one state that's decided against national momentum to keep executing people.
And I also talked about the decline in the housing market as not being entirely bad.
Whether you agree with my take or not, at least give me credit for this.
It's not the easy position to take.
It's real easy to get up there and that, well, we've got to do something about this.
People are hurting, they're in their own homes.
We don't want them to lose their homes.
What we've got to do is figure out a way to ease this.
We don't want the American consumer to slow down its spending.
We don't want to send the economy into a recession.
All those things sound good.
And it's real easy to say it, and it's why politicians say it, and it's why liberals love to say it.
It's a little bit more challenging to say things that don't sound so good, but actually have a little bit of thought behind them.
I've always argued that the difference between liberals and conservatives is liberals support the things that make them feel good, and conservatives like to support things that work.
I've been making the case here that the downturn in the housing market, and I've not said it's good.
You haven't heard me say it's good.
What I have said is that it is not all bad.
I've also said that it is necessary.
And trying to stop it will make the problem worse.
We all know that there's real concern about what's going to happen to the economy, some fear of recession if the housing market keeps declining.
The consumer is strapped, the consumer's spending more money on his mortgage payment, the consumer seeing the value of his house decline, therefore he's going to reign in his spending, and therefore the economy's going to go into a recession.
That's a real fear.
I acknowledge it.
But how do you stop it from happening?
Do you stop it from happening by trying to come in and artificially prop up housing prices?
You know what?
You can't artificially prop up any price of anything.
Prices will always fall or rise to the level that people are willing to pay for them.
What's causing the foreclosure problem now?
It's that people can't get for their houses what they owe on them.
Face it, if you're facing foreclosure and you owe a hundred and eighty thousand dollars that you can't afford to pay, and the house is worth 210, you don't have a problem.
You simply sell the house.
The problem now is that some people owe 180,000 on a house that's worth 16.
So the problem, if it's to be defined as a problem, is that prices have gone down.
Coming in and saying that we're going to artificially make your mortgage payments lower, this five-year freeze on arm tick ups that they've been talking about, doesn't change the real problem, and that is that the person owes more than the house is worth.
The house is going to increase in value only when someone Wants to buy it.
Now I believe this whole debate in the United States over housing has been phony.
I think we're spending way too much time worrying about the lenders that are owed the money.
There's one part of big business that's bipartisan.
And it's Wall Street.
Those guys play both sides of the fence.
Economic advisors from Wall Street have worked in Democratic administrations and Republican administrations.
The Merrill Lynches and City Groups and the rest of them have their tentacles in both political parties.
What the Wall Street firms want is to be like utilities.
They want to be guaranteed a profit by the government.
They don't want to be treated like any other business in which you can not only make money, but you can also lose money.
And understand that in this decade, the brokerages did great.
Their stocks all went up.
They went up because it's been a very, very profitable decade for the big banks and the big brokerages, which are now one and the same, in part because they did things like take advantage of the housing rut up, to create these new financial instruments.
They'd take debt that was the equivalent of a junk bond, collateralize it by the housing, package it together, resell it to one another so it showed up profitably on all of their books, and they had a lot of good quarters.
And their stock prices went up.
Well, now they're showing some losses because some of these loans are turning out to be turkeys because people are walking away from homes that they owe more on than the houses are able to be sold for.
So we're supposed to step in and bail them out.
Why?
There are a lot of other businesses that have faced very similar situations.
Demand for their products has gone down for a while.
They don't get a bailout.
There's a great column that appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
It's under the title Breakingviews.com, which is a service that I think is affiliated with the Wall Street Journal.
They quote the biblical parable from Matthew 25, and I'm going to read a brief portion of it.
They write, uh, abridged from Matthew 25 abridged.
The kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.
Five of them were foolish and five were wise.
The foolish took their lamps but did not take any oil with them.
The wise, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.
The foolish ones said to the wise, give us some of our your oil, our lamps are going out.
No, they replied, there may not be enough for both us and you.
Then the column begins.
The biblical parable of the ten virgins is something used to make a financial moral, sometimes used to make a financial morrow.
Those who don't take precautions have to face the consequences.
But if only the real world were like this, as the credit crunch is shown, foolish virgins get bailed out.
The wise ones end up paying the price.
Here's a retelling of the story from modern times.
The first virgin was Stan O'Neill.
He ran Merrill Lynch, an investment bank.
He took big bets with its cash.
For a few years he made good profits.
But then the bets turned sour, and the firm took an $8.4 billion hit.
Luckily, Stan had a nice board.
It said he could take all his stock awards and benefits from previous years without any deduction for the new losses.
Stan retired with 161 million dollars in his back pocket.
The second version was Rock, also known as Northern Rock.
This British bank borrowed lots of money short term because it was cheap and let it out for long-term mortgages.
It pocketed the spread.
That was very profitable for a few years.
But then the funding dried up.
Fortunately, when Rock ran out of money, a charming man from the British government named Alistair Darling provided fifty-six billion through 56 billion euros, or pounds, I believe, 11 billion, 11 billion dollars through loans and guarantees.
The third version, which Charles Prince of Citigroup, he made he played a clever game of lending money without it appearing on the bank's balance sheet.
Better still, he copied Rock's trick of borrowing cheap short-term money and investing it in better yielding long-term assets.
Chuck was so happy He couldn't stop dancing, but then the music stopped.
Chuck lost his job, but not the fat bonuses he'd collected in previous years.
The fourth virgin was Fannie Mae.
She was in the business of lending people money to buy homes.
But she was imprudent with her sums.
She didn't put aside enough cash to back those loans.
She's not too worried, though.
If worse comes to worse, Fanny's rich uncle, Sam, will be sure to come bail her out.
The fifth version was called Virgin was called Hedge.
It was a nickname for his favorite game.
Hedge I win, tails you lose.
He ran a fund.
The deal with investors was that every year he made them money, he'd keep twenty percent of the profits.
For several years, Hedge made a packet.
But then, in one big bet, he lost much of his investors' money.
Of course he didn't refund them twenty percent of the losses.
There were five other virgins.
They worked hard in industry rather than finance, saved rather than borrowed, paid their taxes, didn't speculate on subprime mortgages, and didn't run hedge funds.
They didn't get fat bonuses either during the bubble or during the crunch.
They weren't running risks, or at least that's what they thought.
The snag is that after the Federal Reserve's Ben Bernanke started spraying around cheap cash to bail out Stan, Chuck, Fanny, and the like, inflation started seeping into the economy.
That eroded the real value of the wise virgin's savings.
In the Bible, the bridegroom allows only the wise virgins to come to the wedding feast.
The foolish ones are shut out.
But in this financial version, all ten virgins are invited.
The bridegroom looks around the room and scratches his head.
Which are the real fools.
Now that appeared yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, and they're right.
This bailout coming from the Fed through continued easing of interest rates and listening of the money supply, and urging banks to put a hold on the tick ups in the arms, the rest of us are going to be paying for this.
If we pump too much money into the money supply at a time in which oil is around a hundred dollars a barrel and every other commodity is going up from copper to corn, you run the risk of having real inflation in our country.
So the person who didn't get a mortgage that he couldn't afford, the person who didn't run around and buy sixteen income properties at the top, the person who wasn't a bank who made a bunch of loans to people who weren't able to pay them back.
That person is the one who's going to pay the price of the loss of his assets because of a government mandated bailout and government mandated assistance to people who made financial mistakes.
So who we're really bailing out here isn't the little individual homeowner, because that person's going to be just fine.
If he's being foreclosed upon because he had no equity in his home, well then he was never out anything, because the money that he paid in his mortgage payment would have merely been going for rent anyway.
If he's somebody who bought a home but intends to stay in that home for a few years, that person will be able to ride it out.
The real losers right now are the big investment banks, and they're the ones that we're bailing out, and I don't think it's good public policy.
I know that makes me sound like an ogre.
But I also think I'm right.
1 800 282 2882 is the telephone number.
Someone out there agrees with me too.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh to the guest host gets all the hard to pronounce names.
Alginac, Michigan, Jay, it's your turn on EIB.
Mark, how are you?
Great to great to hear you.
And uh I am one of those people that are out here and agree with you.
Um what's ironic is I'm tied to the housing market from the new side uh construction, and I'm trying to survive Hurricane Jenny here in Michigan.
Um, that's your governor.
That's our governor.
Yeah, I I got that.
It took me three seconds, but I got it.
You know, the the housing decline values it it's only an issue when there's actually three points that's an issue.
One is when you're gonna sell your home.
If you don't sell your home, it's not an issue.
Two is if you want to pull all your equity out of your home.
Well, and I think that's what a lot of people have done.
For people who keep refinancing the house is worth one eighty when they buy it, so they owe that.
Well, now it's worth two tens, so they go up to that, then it's worth two forty, they go up to that and they spend all the way through, and they have nothing To show for the increase in the value of their home, you're right, they're hurting.
On the other hand, what do we want to encourage that?
Which is what a bailout does.
Absolutely not.
Here's the third thing that I've not heard anybody mention yet, though.
In the state of Michigan, our property tax or our taxable values are based on a national average.
When we pull the national average together next year, we're gonna actually have to have a reduction in our taxes due to the fact of home.
I believe in your believe in your state to raise the mill rates, the voters have to approve it, which we don't have in my state, which I wish we would.
But you tax my home based on its value.
Right.
And they're gonna actually have to reduce the value of my home.
Because they can't because they can't adjust the rates.
You're right about that.
The point that I'm making here is that when you're dealing with the price of anything, that there are winners and there are losers.
And what we have done with regard to housing, I think for political purposes, and mostly to bail out the big New York investment banks, is that we've acted as though this is a story that only has negative associated with it.
And I'm not saying that it's good, it's not good.
It just isn't all bad, and it's made worse by stepping into the market and trying to stop the one thing that will work, which is allowing prices to get to the point that a bunch of buyers step in and start buying again to Mantica, California and Mike.
Mike, it's your turn on EIB.
All right, I had two points, and I'm gonna do my second one first, because you just brought that up, and that is that it's not all bad news for people like me in California.
I want to see property value drop because they don't be able to afford to buy a hour.
Well, and that's the point that I was making earlier.
There are a lot of people in some of these markets where housing prices got to be way too high for them.
If you didn't step in the first time around, and you live, let's take you out of California and put you in South Florida.
If you've always dreamed of living in one of those high rises on the ocean that you couldn't afford at 600, if it's now at 375, you might be able to step in and you have an opportunity to live in what for you would be your dream home, which you weren't able to do before.
But until the price gets to a point at which someone like yourself is willing to buy, this problem of the housing slump isn't going to improve.
We're just prolonging it by coming up with all of these ways to keep people in homes that really can't afford to be in there.
Well, another point I had was I know there's a lot of people, they're not portraying the so-called victim honestly, because there are a lot of people who were involved in it as speculation.
And uh, I mean, like look at the look at the TV.
They have a show called Flip That Out.
Well, yeah, you turn on television late at night.
There are all these guys that were coming out and telling people you buy the house for no money down, you take advantage of the appreciation in the price of the home, it's like stealing.
I mean, and they were pushing people on this, and some people went out and did it.
They bought five, ten, fifteen, twenty houses.
They had absolutely no equity in any of them, and the prices turned down.
We're supposed to bail that out.
Why should we bail them out any more than somebody who buys a tech stock when it's too high, or for that matter, when somebody buys a brokerage stock when it's too high, we shouldn't be bailing them out.
And I'm not suggesting that it's good that they're now in a position where they're going to lose money, but it's giving somebody else an opportunity to make money.
And the long-term solution to this or any other declining price of anything is to let the prices get to the right level.
But to act as though this is all bad for everyone is simply wrong.
Take the guy who never bought a house, 45, 50 years old, and he hasn't put any money in his 401k, doesn't have any money in his IRA, he's sitting there terrified at what's going to happen to him when he retires.
Maybe now with this decline in housing, that person's gonna buy a house.
He's gonna pay down his mortgage over the next 10 or 15 years, and when he retires, he's going to have something.
When something becomes affordable to people who currently can't afford it, that's a good thing.
And while the overall impact on the economy in the short term might be more negative, it's not entirely negative.
And that's why I object to this notion that we are in a crisis, a word we throw around way too loosely.
This isn't a crisis.
Great depression was a crisis.
This is a downturn in a sector of the economy that affects a lot of people housing.
But when you're talking about a six percent year to year decline.
That is not a crisis.
It may be a problem, but it's not a crisis.
And once we decide to start using that word, the C word, crisis, that means government has to step in, because after all, it's a crisis.
Terrorism's a crisis.
This isn't a crisis.
This is a situation that individuals got themselves into, lenders got themselves into, and the Wall Street crowd really got themselves into, and they ought to be allowed to figure out how to work their way out of it.
When you step in and say that the government is going to come in and try to stop certain things from happening, you stop the solution from occurring.
But for all the people who keep arguing that this is something that's driving people out of houses, those houses aren't going to be empty.
Somebody's going to be living in them.
And in some cases, they are people who never dreamed that they'd have a second opportunity to affordably get into one of these homes.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Russian ball.
Was that a mistake?
You've got an entire country of Rush listeners who are convinced that I did that.
I'll I'll I'll I'll take the hit.
I did that.
The guest host is in, and the wrong theme music, the wrong bumper music started to play.
I've actually never heard that happen when Russia's on the program.
Which is uh uh just the testimony to how good you guys are.
But so I'm hearing it.
Nobody caught it, but when there's a mistake that occurs on the radio, and it's and it's not and it's not my fault.
I am going to jump all over it.
So any of you who are appalled by the content of today's program, do understand I'm not the only guy who's screwed up here.
This minor error.
There are no consequences for that mistake.
It's just like the mortgage thing.
We'll bail you out.
I'll take the it actually added to a humorous little one-eight hundred-282-2882 is the telephone number.
This guy has been holding, according to my screen, for 100 minutes.
Ben in Boston.
You must have something that's really important to say.
I I do, I do.
I feel very strongly about this.
You're on.
It's your turn.
You get your you're I'm now all ears.
Well, I I I just want to say that I've been on decided like a lot of uh Republican voters throughout this entire uh primary.
I I started out thinking maybe Rudy, and then some of the stuff that came out about him turned me off to him, then I thought maybe Romney, and I've just been totally turned off by Mitt Romney recently.
Uh as someone who was probably his loudest supporter in 2002 when he ran for governor here in Massachusetts, I've just um you know the guy's been one of the things that fascinates me about Mitt Romney is to be elected governor of Massachusetts as a Republican without becoming a complete flaming liberal, in other words, just uh Bill Weld, for example, fast governor of Massachusetts.
Well, he was a liberal.
He called himself a Republican, but he was a liberal.
To be not be an overt liberal and still be elected as a Republican in your state is kind of a remarkable achievement aside from everything else.
But the reason I mean he would have he wanted to run for re-election in Massachusetts, and he didn't do it because he knew he was going to get crushed, because he really alienated a lot of people in this state.
But getting crushed in Massachusetts might be a recommendation to the rest of the country, if you know what I mean.
Okay, sure.
Sure, but yeah, I mean the thing about Mitt Romney is that he would be complete suicide for the Republicans uh in an election against Hillary.
Um every single strategist that you talk to, every single pollster, and uh, you know, if you read Bob Novak or George Will, they all agree that he is definitely the weakness candidate.
As you might guess, I have minority views on all of that.
First of all, Hillary's not going to be the Democratic nominee for president.
I know a lot of people, including Rush, I think, disagree with that.
She's not going to win.
She's going to lose Iowa, then she's going to lose New Hampshire and she's going to sink like a lead balloon.
Secondly, I hope I'm wrong about that, because any one of the Republicans running will be able to beat Hillary.
She is the most unpopular person running for president in either party.
She has 49% negatives.
But I don't think.
So there's Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney has the highest negatives of running.
Not nationally, and he's not at 49%.
So is the pr so your your point and the reason you waited this long was to trash Mitt Romney.
Not not to trash Mitt Romney, but just to educate people.
And I mean, if you look at his record here in Massachusetts, I mean there's a reason why no Republican leaders in the party uh in Massachusetts are supporting him.
None.
Except for uh well, who do you support?
Um I've jumped on the McCain baden wagon actually recently.
Why?
I I I well, you know, I I kind of abandoned him uh in the summer along with everyone else, but uh just with the success in Iraq, uh I realize how important it is to have somebody who has foreign policy experience, and you know, to his credit, he was right on this from the beginning, even though he was um it wasn't popular.
He was.
John McCain was right on that from the beginning.
The problem I have with Senator McCain is he hasn't been right on anything else really ever as long as he's been in the Senate, he's been the Republican that you could count on to be on the wrong side of the issues.
Now I know a lot of people are giving him a second look in part because nobody in this field has sold the public yet.
I mean, that's just apparent.
Nobody's made the sale to the average Republican voter that I'm the one.
So people are looking around, and for that reason they're giving the second and third look to John McCain.
But John McCain was the guy who shepherded through the asinine public financing law that is a complete mess.
He's the guy supported.
Which he did.
Which he did, and Fred Thompson supported it.
You're right.
The problem that I'm gonna have here with McCain, though, is that I'm not gonna stop at that.
John McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts that have given us a recovery that we are in to this day.
John McCain was the guy who helped cut the deal that obstructed President Bush on the nomination of the federal judges.
If you go back over everything, he's a guy who has posed for holy pictures with the media and the American left, and now you're asking me to accept him because he's been right on Iraq, which by the way, he was right on Iraq, whether it was for political reasons that he set himself apart or because he sincerely believed that the war in Iraq was worth winning and it could be won, he absolutely was right about Iraq.
But you're asking me to ignore everything else that I've observed of the guy throughout the entire time he was in the United States Senate, going all the way back to the Keening Five, and I can't do that.
Thank you for the call, Ben.
But he waited all that time, and he wanted a show for McCain, and I felt I owed it to him.
Now, let's get back to the Democrats.
This is a beautiful story.
Remember the mayor, the outgoing mayor of Philadelphia, John Street.
He's on TV a lot, and the Democrats built him up big, and then the next thing you know, the FBI was investigating him.
He's one of the few politicians that was able to take the fact that he was under federal investigation and turn it into a political positive.
Really did when he was running for re-election, I guess now four years ago, say they're ought to get me, they're ought to destroy another great leader, and he won.
Anyway, one of the ploys he used when running for office was to say that he was not going to accept all of the pay that was due him as mayor of Philadelphia.
They had raised the pay a couple of times, and I'm not going to accept these pay raises.
Now he's leaving office.
This is just this is this is beautiful.
He's saying he's wants all those pay raises he didn't take, he wants to be given all of them now and back pay.
I never really gave the money back.
I just deferred it.
So John Street, the mayor of Philadelphia, is going to get 11,000 in deferred pay.
All the pay raises that he didn't accept when he was the mayor, he's now going to get an alump sum when he leaves.
You know, as Hutzpa goes, you've got to give him credit for that.
Uh big story in today's New York Times.
These stores that Apple has set up all over the country.
They're packed at like two in the morning.
A lot of them are open twenty-four hours a day, including in a number of the big cities, including the big one in Manhattan.
They're packed with people.
According to the story, twenty percent of Apple's sales are now in their own stores, even though they don't have that many of them.
That's one in five dollars that Apple makes in sales is generated by their own retail stores.
And the story indicates that the Apple devotees will come there and they'll just hang out.
Or they'll work on the gadgets.
They'll talk to the salespeople who they call trainers for hours.
Nobody does that at other stores.
I have This figured out.
If you've ever met anyone who uses an Apple product, be it a Mac or an iPod or an iPhone.
They're a cult.
You can say what you want about Mitt Romney's Mormonism.
The people who are into Apple are nuts over this.
And this operation is one of them.
Everywhere I turn, there's like a Mac.
You guys are all into the, you've all sip the Mac Kool-Aid, right?
Well, I know Rush likes it.
And everybody who has a Mac loves Macs.
And they become devoted to Apple products.
I have this understood.
They feel as though they're getting a strong product, and they identify themselves because they were smart enough not to go the route of the PCs like the rest of us.
So what you have with Apple is remarkable loyalty.
It's kind of like the Starbucks thing where people go into the Starbucks and they like don't leave.
Another thing that I've never gotten.
You go in, you buy your coffee, you leave.
Who wants to hang in the store?
Some people hang in the Starbucks, Starbucks.
That's their hangout.
They're doing this with Apple.
What I think this is a sign of, and I don't know if it's because of 9-11 or something else.
But there has been a real desire on the part of a lot of Americans to be part of something.
To be part of community.
Some sort of community.
Look at the websites right now that have regular users.
What do they call them?
They call them online communities.
Like this is their town.
Almost this is their family.
Their identification with the product, or in that case the website, is so strong that it becomes part of them.
Everybody, I think, wants to be part of something.
We live in a very alienated society.
Harsh, cold, cruel world out there.
The terrorists want to kill us.
Jammed in here.
It's a harsh world.
But people want to belong to something.
And there are certain products, and I think certain politicians that have been able to figure this out.
I mentioned Apple.
Apple users feel as though they're part of something.
I mentioned some of the online communities.
I think Rush has done this very well.
Rush has created a program here in which many of the listeners feel as though they are part of something.
And that's important to people.
It's not just something that's being sold to you.
It's something that you can be part of.
And the people who have figured this out have created something that's very real.
And I think Huckabee's doing this.
Huckabee in his Us Against Them is speaking to a lot of Christians who are sick and tired of being ridiculed for being Christian.
I mean, we live in a society in which you're not supposed to say Christmas.
Everybody's got to say happy holidays.
The retail stores try to deny that it's Christmas.
You can't put up a manger scene in a public square.
But we have to somehow tolerate every nutcake belief that's out there.
We have to somehow continue to say that Islam is a religion of peace.
We have to be so tolerant of everyone else, yet if you're a Christian, you have to continue to apologize for who you are.
And Huckabee has realized that a lot of Christians don't like that.
So here he comes out, puts Christian leader in all of his ads, does the TV commercial with the floating cross saying, look, I'm one of you and I'm not ashamed of it.
And I think that's the reason there is such loyalty that is developing from some of his supporters toward him, even if he himself shouldn't be the object of the loyalty.
He's creating a sense of community too.
That's why they hang in the Apple store.
It's why some people linger in the Starbucks.
And I think it's why Huckabee has been able to use his Christianity to gain the support of a lot of people who might not agree with him on much of anything.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
The NFL has buckled that game Saturday night is going to be on regular over-the-year television.
If you haven't been following the controversy, the NFL has created its own cable Network called NFL Network.
The problem is most cable systems in the United States don't carry it.
I believe it's available right now in about 43 million homes, and there are 113 million possible cable as satellite homes.
It's on the two major satellite services, uh Dish Network and Direct TV, and some cable systems, but not most of the big ones.
And the problem is that they simply have not been able to make the deal.
The NFL network wants to be on the basic tier, meaning it's on the tier that everyone gets.
If you have cable, it would be there.
That puts them in the maximum number of homes.
The cable systems have said, look, we'll put you on, but we're gonna have you on one of the additional tiers where if people want it, they'll pay extra.
Well, the NFL wants to be in every one of these homes, and the NFL figured it had a lot of leverage.
It's got this handful of games that they're showing on Thursday and Saturday night, and people will want this, and they're gonna call the cable companies and demand that the cable companies add this channel.
The cable companies, look, it's only a handful of games, as it is, most people don't see all games anyway.
We don't want to raise our rates, which we're going to have to do if we add this channel at the price that the NFL is asking for, and they've been at loggerheads.
The NFL network started last year.
Most cable systems haven't picked it up, and they hadn't picked it up through all of this year.
Well, as it turns out, the Saturday night game involving New England and the New York Giants is scheduled for NFL Network.
If New England wins, they'll be the first team since 73, I think, that the Dolphins ran the table.
They're playing for a perfect regular season.
So the game now has a lot of significance, and most of the country wasn't going to be able to watch it.
If the NFL had won this, the pressure on the cable companies to finally add this channel would have been overwhelming.
But the pressure was never there.
In fact, most of the pressure appeared to be on the NFL to take this game off of NFL Network and put it on regular TV so that people could watch and see whether or not New England would get the perfect season.
And the NFL today caved.
Either today or last night, the game is going to be shown on both NBC and CBS, in addition to the NFL network.
It's the first game that's going to be simulcast by two regular over-the-air broadcast networks since the first Super Bowl.
In addition to that, both NBC and CBS are going to carry NFL network's broadcast of the game.
It'll be the NFL network crew and the NFL network announcers.
So the NFL is saying, well, at least we're going to be able to expose our product to this mass audience, even though I think it's the league that buckled.
And I think next year the NFL is going to lower its demands and allow itself to be put on these cable systems as an additional channel, because if they couldn't get the cable companies to relent over this game, they're never going to get them to relent.
Now, I have one of the satellite services, so I've been watching the games on NFL Network for the last couple of years.
I do have to warn you about something.
For those of you who've never seen the games shown on NFL Network, you have you're going to think I'm overstating this.
After you watch the game on Saturday night, you will say that I understand it.
Well, I know you said that it would be this, but I didn't know it would be that much this.
What's this?
You have no idea how bad Bryant Gumble is.
Bryant Gumble, who's a lefty, does the play by play on NFL Network.
I'm just warning you in advance that you are going to be shocked at how many mistakes he makes, how little command he has, and how terrible the whole overall thing is.
So as my service to you, go in and expect to see history, but expect to be annoyed by the left-wing on-air commentary.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush, like it or not, I'll be back tomorrow for open line Friday.
I started the program today talking about the assassination of Venezir Budo, and I think I've rightly described her as a martyr in the cause of anti-terrorism.
I don't want to overstate the point, but when you consider that she was willing to return to her country, yes, for power, but also to Take that stand that her nation needs to be tougher against terrorists, knowing what the risks were.
It really is a profile in courage.
Now you compare that to what's passing for political leadership in the Democratic Party now, in which they vote for a war when public opinion polls are eighty-five percent in favor of it, but when the polls turn against the war, suddenly they all trip over one another, claiming that they were a that they were against that war.
Benazir Bhutto didn't take any polls or change her opinion.
She was willing to stand by a position even if it meant her life.
Contrast that to the Democratic Party today.
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