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Dec. 28, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:46
December 28, 2007, Friday, Hour #3
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Time Text
And it is Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
The telephone number here is one eight hundred two eight two two eight eight two.
I'm the guy from Milwaukee.
Jason Lewis is the guy from Minneapolis.
You'll never keep us straight.
Minneapolis and Milwaukee have been confused forever, but those of you people who are coastal who don't understand anything about the Midwest.
On the other hand, have you noticed that every good talk show host comes from the Midwest?
It's uncanny.
Well, it's true.
You dispute that?
Find an exception.
Where'd Rush come from?
The Midwest.
I come from the It's It's true.
It's just late night television hosts.
They all come from the Midwest too.
Leno, I think is from New York, but other than him, Johnny Carson was in Nebraska.
I think Dick Cavot was from the same state, but I could be wrong about that.
Letterman is from Indiana.
There's something about being from the Midwest that allows you to relate to the rest of the country.
People from California, especially those who are born there, they've been so addled by all that they've had to put up with that they can't relate to the rest of America.
And people from New York, they're too jaded, they can't relate to the rest of America.
People from the Midwest tend to be idealistic, and gradually the world makes them cynical and a little bit more world weary and knowing.
But it's true.
Most good talk show hosts do come from the Midwest, so I'm sure you're going to enjoy Jason Lewis.
He's the guy who was here Wednesday.
I think that was his first time for Rush.
It was not wrong about something.
All right, I'll stop talking about things I don't know anything about and get to other things that I don't know anything about, including the late night.
This is really cool stuff.
The late night talk shows have been off the air because of the writer strike.
They're all going to come back on the air apparently next week or a week and a half from now.
Leno's coming back, Letterman's coming back, they're all going to come back, but they're going to come back without writers, and this is a big deal.
The networks want them back because they want to stop running reruns.
Both Leno and Letterman, however, as writers themselves are members of the writers guild.
So they'd be defying a strike by their own union.
And they don't want to violate any of the rules of the writers' guild, which means they can't do a monologue because a monologue would have to be written.
They can't do any scripted bits because those would have to be written, so apparently they're going to do a lot of things in the audience, man on the street stuff.
They're even concerned that they're going to have a hard time getting gas because celebrities aren't going to want to cross the union picket line to go on the program.
This is one of those stories that you have to relish, because everybody here's a bad guy.
You've got a liberal union striking against a liberal industry and liberal entertainers wringing their hands not knowing what to do.
Well, let me bring you some common sense perspective on this.
This whole notion that it's somehow wrong to cross a picket line has been ingrained in America and nobody ever wants to challenge it.
Well, when one of these TV shows shut down, it isn't just the writers that aren't working.
It's a lot of the technicians, it's the ushers, it's the support people, it's the people who do the catering.
They're all out of work too.
And they aren't getting any money.
I fully support the right of any union to strike.
Just as in my own job situation, if my contract is expired and I don't want to come into work in an attempt to get more money, I have every right to do that.
But would I suggest that it would be wrong for the other people at my radio station to go to work because I'm not working?
So if the writers want to strike, strike.
Why should everybody else have to not work?
If they can figure out a way to make the program work without the writers, so what?
Go to work.
I've always wanted to work for a company that had a strike.
Now I've never been in a union, fortunately.
I am a union basher for those of you not familiar with my Milwaukee program.
That angers a lot of people, but I thought you should know that that I'm not somebody who thinks highly of unions other than the construction trades, which are a different animal.
I have always wanted the opportunity to cross a picket line.
Retail stores struck by a union, those are the stores that I want to go to.
I want to walk past the picket line because it just seems to me the ultimate arrogance To say that because you are choosing as a tactic to get more money to not work, which is your right, that somehow the rest of us are supposed to support your effort to get more money at the expense of everybody who is victimized, everybody who's collateral damage here?
What about all the people who are working in all these programs that are shut down right now, most of whom are contract people, if there is no show, they don't get paid.
Because the writers want to deal themselves in on more profits from online rebroadcasts and all the other stuff that they're arguing about.
Nobody else is supposed to work.
And as for Leno and Letterman, give me a break.
How bad are you if you can't do a show without a writer?
I mean, aren't these guys supposed to be funny themselves?
We'll find out, I'm told.
I mean, I thought they're supposed to be comedians.
And it's a talk show.
What do you need a writer for?
No, well, I can't do a monologue because I'm a member of the writers' guild, and that would be betraying the union.
You're in the writers' guild only because of the requirement that if you do any actual writing, you'll be in the union.
Stand up and show some individuality rather than be bossed around by this old collective union, get up there and tell some jokes, and if you can't figure out, after being off of work for five or six weeks, two or three funny little witticisms to thirl out at the beginning of the program, go back to your fallback.
You know, just rip Bush.
That always gets a cheap laugh laugh.
Then I see here, New York Post yesterday, the Golden Globes may be called off.
They're either going they're considering just making it a webcast or handing out the awards at a private ceremony.
The fear is is that none of the celebrities are going to show up.
They won't have to be able to do any of the routine of how when you present the award, they make a witty little comment and then they read the names of the honoree.
Well, they won't have the witty little comment because there's no writer to write that.
God forbid that the celebrity would be expected to come up with a witty little comment on his own, or here's a radical notion.
How about if you just went up and gave away the award?
But now they're concerned that the celebrities won't show up.
Because these celebrities for whom appearance is everything.
Why do you think they really drive Priuses?
These celebrities for whom appearances are everything don't want to be seen, crossing a union picket line with the cat calls of the writers.
So because the Golden Globes in our field feel that there won't be any celebrities there, they may call the whole thing off altogether.
They're all a bunch of simps.
If they really cared that much, they'd contact their studios that pay them a fortune and say, cut a deal with the writers, cave in.
Well, they're not going to do that.
Leno and Letterman at least, out of their own pockets, paid their staffs during the time that the show has been shut down.
But the rest of these celebrities aren't going to do that.
This whole notion of a writer's strike shutting down a program is silly.
You guys aren't unionized here, are you?
Is this a union operation that I'm part of here?
Well, he is.
Oh yeah, I know about him.
He's the head of the call screeners union, Mo Thacker.
Yeah, I hear Rush refer to him.
Uh let me be a hick Midwesterner.
Is Mo Thacker real or is that a device that Rush uses?
He's very real and don't get on his bad side.
You can tell anything to the guest host and the guest host is going to fall for it.
And in the end, everybody laughs when the guest host leaves, and the next guest host comes in and makes fun of him, and then Rush comes back and says, Well, was the program destroyed when I was gone?
I know how the how the entire deal works.
Let's imagine that you guys were in a union and it's a union shop or whatever, and you've got no choice but to be in the union, the union goes on strike, and I get contacted by the powers that be at EIB and say Russia's going to be on vacation.
Can you fill in for a day or two?
And you guys are out in front of the building carrying your stupid signs.
Do you think for a minute I wouldn't shove you out of the way and walk into the building?
I mean, this whole idea that because someone else isn't I'd like to try that.
I should go back to my own radio station in Milwaukee, decide not to come in for a day because I've got some gripe with management, walk in front of the building and tell everybody else, no, you can't come in, I'm on strike.
I mean, what is that whole thing?
Yet nobody's ever challenged it.
It's the ultimate of arrogance that a bunch of union guys think that because they don't want to work as part of a tactic that somehow there's an obligation for everybody else to not work either.
Solidarity 1-800-282-2882 is the phone number.
The Rush Limbaugh program.
It is open line Friday and it's time for someone else to talk.
Houston and Mark, it's your turn on EIB.
Hi yes, Mark, and on that strike, not to mention you you don't strike when you're in you're supposed to strike when your industry is flourishing and you're not getting part of that.
That's not what's happening.
Yeah, I know.
I actually think they have a valid point.
This is one of those cases in which the industry is a bunch of lefties, the writers are a bunch of lefties, so it isn't the normal kind of union versus co corporation battle that you'd have here.
I think the writers do have a valid point, and there's a huge, huge battle over what happens online.
It's a problem right now with radio stations and podcasts, who owns the copyrights to music that's aired over the internet.
Uh all these things are very, very much up in the air, and the decisions that are made now are going to decide, you know, literally hundreds of millions of dollars in the future.
And the writers may be making a valid point.
And I don't have any problem at all with those writers saying that in order to get a bigger chunk of the profits uh of future kinds of programming that they go on strike.
They have that prerogative not to work, they have that prerogative to use their unionized unionization ability to try to cut themselves a better deal.
What I object to is the notion that others are supposed to not come to work because they aren't working.
Well, anyway, the reason why I call disillory care, if I might take a hard right turn here, you can't found the glitch in that system.
And the problem I found with it is that they're looking at it as it's going to be an option for 25 years and younger.
Um but what's going to happen is as people get out of college and they go hire on to a corporation, and the corporation says, Okay, we're gonna pay you your benefits, we're gonna pay you all this money, we're gonna pay company credit card 401k, and the employee says, Well, what about insurance?
And the corporation says, Well, how old are you?
Well, I'm 23.
Oh, well, come see us in three years if you're still here.
We don't have to provide that, because that is going to be provided for you.
Well, I've got three kids, I've got a wife.
Well, go see Uncle Sam.
He's going to cover that.
The problem is the problem is you cite is the more the government gets into health care, the less desire there will be for private corporations to provide any health care benefit of their own.
So if you're going to try to do this part way, which is what the new version of Hillary Care does, what you're going to end up doing is probably driving more people out of the current health insurance system because companies won't see the need to provide the benefit because there's going to be the fallback of whatever government mandated program is out there.
Right in the news now, a favorable ruling came down that both corporations and unions were looking for that allow them to provide lower health care benefits for their retirees who are over the age of 65.
And the reason why both corporations and the unions supported this is they knew that if they weren't able to provide lower benefits for those over 65, a lot of these companies would simply have had to drop health care entirely for retirees over the age of six over the age of sixty-five.
Well, why are they able to do that?
Because we've got Medicare for people over sixty-five.
Well, Medicare doesn't cover everything, so a lot of these retirees want to keep their policies under their corporations.
So when the government comes in, it provides another reason for the private sector to not provide something.
So if you're going to do health care, and I don't think the government should do it, it makes more sense to simply do it for everyone rather than for some, because if you do it for some, you're going to create a disincentive for those that are providing it for the rest to do it to them, if that made any sense.
My name is Mark Belling, it's Open Mind Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
It's Open Line Friday.
Just remember this.
I'm the guy who said a year ago Edwards would win Iowa.
I'm the guy who still says Edwards is going to win Iowa.
So when Edwards wins Iowa, I will be the guest host, not the guy from Minneapolis who said that Edwards would win Iowa.
If Edwards does not win Iowa, it was Jason Lewis.
Uh 1-800-282-2882 is the telephone number.
I am making up for reading the phone number like once all of yesterday's Program by just reading it incessantly.
Let's go to Wrath.
Oh, come on.
I never get the easy to pronounce cities.
I never hear Rush have to.
Has Rush ever gotten a call from Wrath Drum Idaho?
Wrath Drum Idaho and Julia.
Julia, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Where is that, by the way?
Is that like up in the arm of Idaho or the lower part of it?
It's in North Idaho, uh, just a little north of Cornellane, between Corn Lane and Sandpoint.
Oh, that clears it up for me.
I know actually where Cordaline is.
Cordaline's big silver mining.
Uh, what's in your mind, Julia?
Well, um, I'm a writer, uh I'm a computer book writer, been writing computer books for 15 years, and every time the topic of the writer strike comes up, all I can think of is so what?
Get over it.
None of us get paid very much.
Unless you're Stevel Creaner Stephen King or Michael Crichton, you're not going to get paid a lot of money.
And those guys get paid more in a year than I got paid in probably seven years.
And I just don't have a lot of sympathy for them.
Essentially, like you said, going out on strike and losing other people's jobs.
Well, here's why it's here's why they have some leverage.
The as you might have noticed, the internet is changing the world.
I mean, the internet really is changing the world.
It's upsetting all sorts of industries, including the radio industry that I'm part of.
The one thing that the internet and the new era of media that we are moving into is going to demand is quality content.
Whether it's a website or a radio program or something that you're watching on your TV, which might be merged with your computer, you still have to provide something that people want to read or see or listen to.
And not everybody has ability.
There's a reason why there's a zillion talk show hosts in the world, but there's only one rush.
There's a re there's a reason why there have been a zillion sitcoms, but Seinfeld was the one that broke through.
Content is still important.
And the writers understand that without them, there is no content, and they are unionized, and that's why they negotiate with the industry.
The problem that I have with the whole process is is that this contract that they're signing treats all writers the same.
As is the case with talk show hosts or football players or anything else.
Some writers in the movie and television industry are good, and the vast majority are just hacks.
The problem with you know, collectively bargaining rather than if they simply disbanded their own union and all went out as independent contractors, is that you're carrying along the people who aren't as talented and giving them the same contractual rights as as those that are.
But you're right.
In most of the writing world, it's real, real hard to make a buck.
It's why people self-publish books and all of those things.
Yep.
So now you're a computer, right?
Do you know why my Yahoo homepage knows that it's in New York City rather than in Milwaukee, which is where my I signed I put that together.
Do you know why that would be?
No, I don't have a clue.
I don't do browsers and I don't do Yahoo!
Okay, thanks, Julia.
Let's go.
Thank you, Julia.
Let's go to Lexington, Lexington, Kentucky, and Mike.
Mike, it's your turn on EIB.
Hey um, nice job filling in for the big guy.
Thank you.
Um I'm curious about Ron Paul.
He seems to have all this grassroots support.
He's all over the news and and talk shows and whatnot.
Science form are everywhere, but his poll numbers just aren't there, and I'm wondering what you think why why that may be.
Well, Ron Paul is another one of those when the Republican race started, there were the candidates that got all the attention Giuliani, uh, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and then there was the pack of four or five of the others of them, Duncan Hunter, Huckabee, Ron Paul, a couple of others who are also running, uh, Tom Tancreto, Tommy Thompson, uh uh senator from uh Kansas, Sam Brown back.
The guy that broke out was Huckabee, and I think what has happened is there was only room for one guy to break out and get a lot of attention.
You've got to understand that we're talking about the 2008 election in 2007.
You're asking a lot to get people to focus on this, and I think that there's only so much multitasking that people can do.
They, you know, you turn on the TV and you watch these debates.
There's nine people or ten people standing there.
They each get about thirty seconds.
They they all talk maybe three or four times, and then the debate is over.
I think the reason that Huckabee broke out is because he is such a great orator.
He is very glib.
He was able to express himself, and he got people's attention.
So he was the guy that broke out of the pack.
I don't think it's a coincidence that only one person did break out of the pack, that the others, like Duncan Hunter, uh Tencredo, I think is virtually out of the race, Brownback dropped out, Tommy Thompson dropped out, only one guy broke out of the pack.
Uh Ron Paul has very, very devoted supporters.
They're adamant, they show up everywhere.
What it hasn't translated into is the kind of popular support that Huckabee got when he broke out of the pack.
So I guess my answer to that is if Huckabee had not run, if there was no Mike Huckabee, maybe that guy would have been Ron Paul.
But there is a Huckabee, and that's kept Ron Paul and some of the others who started at a lower level from really breaking through and getting bigger numbers.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm doing the program from the EIB studios in New York.
I'm from Milwaukee.
So far as I can tell, there's a blizzard in Milwaukee today, meaning my flight's either going to be delayed for 800 hours or it's going to be canceled and I'm not going to get back.
Now most people would say, well, that's great.
You get to spend an extra day in New York.
Why wouldn't you like I only packed for two days, and New York is one of those cities where you kind of can't see in Milwaukee, we can get away with wearing the same clothes like three days in a row.
You can do that.
Can't really do that in New York.
So I'm if only I could find a picket line across, then I would be happy.
Yes.
There is an item in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday.
This is this is really good stuff.
The Wall Street Journal does this thing in which they find one or two pieces out of other publications and kind of do the reader's digest version and condense them.
So this piece started in the New Statesman.
The New Statesman is a liberal publication from Britain.
Let me just read this to you.
This is huge stuff.
Has global warming stopped?
The Earth's temperatures have held steady since 2001, says a veteran science writer.
A pattern that raises questions about the intense efforts underway to stem the impact of greenhouse gases.
What is indisputable, says David Whitehouse on the website of the New Statesman, a generally left leaning British weekly, is that the amount of gases such as carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has been increasing steadily for decades as human burns more humans burn more fossil fuels.
Scientists believe those gases absorb outgoing infrared radiation from the Earth's surface, causing heat to be retained.
In principle, that produces the greenhouse effect that is the fundamental theory behind global warming.
The world's temperatures rose sharply from 1980 to 1998, but have leveled off since then.
According to White House's reading of U.S. and United Kingdom government statistics.
In other words, he says global warming has ceased.
While scientists have proposed a variety of theories for the recent plateau and temperature, those explanations are inadequate, says White House, who spent 18 years covering the sciences at the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and holds a doctorate in astrophysics.
The working hypothesis of global warming remains a good one, says White House, but it doesn't fully explain what is occurring in the Earth's atmosphere.
Quote, something else is happening, and it is vital that we find out what?
Or risk wasting billions of dollars on the wrong solutions.
White House's observations didn't go over well with many news statesmen readers.
Well, a few posted comments to the website applauding his skepticism.
Others said factors such as melting glaciers and rising sea levels had to be taken into account.
They also criticized White House for, and I love this, drawing conclusions based on a short time frame.
Rush speaks a lot about how global warming has become a religion.
And he is right.
Tell somebody who buys into this that you're not convinced that global warming is happening, and even if it is happening, you don't think man is responsible.
And you'll get the same responses that rabid Islamic fundamentalists give if you dare to challenge their view of God and the world.
It's the same reaction.
They don't want to hear it.
They get emotional.
They put their fingers in their ears and they deny it and they rely on old canards like, oh, you're anti science, you're ignoring the evidence, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
This guy, who writes for a liberal magazine and worked for the BBC, is look, global temperatures haven't been rising for ten years.
Yeah, they did rise between eighty and ninety-eight.
But they're not rising now.
So maybe the rise between eighty and ninety-eight didn't have anything to do with carbon emissions.
Maybe the greenhouse effect had nothing to do with it.
Now, this is something the people on my side have been arguing for a long time.
If there is any warming, of which I'm not sure there is, you can't necessarily link it to carbon emissions since the planet has warmed and cooled as long as there's been a planet.
So he posts this thing, and the website of the New Statesman has a place for people to comment.
And of course, the global warming true believers, the zealots, they all start attacking the guy and they go, why you can't base a trend on what's going on for the last seven or eight years.
But that's what Al Gore and that crowd have done.
They've taken statistics from the last 80 years of a planet that if you are a creationist like myself believes is about 10,000 years old, or if you're somebody who believes that the planet is billions of years old, it's still a very short period of time.
And you're extrapolating it out and extrapolating it out and turning into this hedge theory that somehow the planet is warming up.
Well, they're basing it on about 80 years, and they've been hyping the movement of the last 20 years.
Well, this guy points out, yeah, but for 10 years it's barely moved at all.
Well, that's too short term.
So in other words, it's wrong to take short-term numbers when it debunks your theory, but it's proper to take short-term numbers when you're trying to sell a book or make a movie or alter economic policy in the entire free world.
The fact of the matter is we don't know what's going on with global temperatures because we've only been able to take temperatures for about 120 years.
We only had rudimentary ratings for the first 80 of those years.
We didn't have weather stations in the oceans in the 1800s.
We don't really know.
We have observed an increase in temperature over the last several decades, but it appears to be slowing, just as global temperatures have moved all over the place as long as there's been a globe.
What I believe is that within, and I think this is going to happen sooner rather than later, within a few years, the left is going to move off this.
You're going to see a couple of years in which global temperatures decline.
If there's a Democratic president, you'll really see them move off of it.
Does a Democratic president really want to unilaterally sign on to a global warming treaty that handcuffs all American industries, including heavy industries, which are unionized?
While China and the third world, Africa, where much of the production that we are seeing in the world is already going to, does a Democratic president really want to do that and watch that imbalance in manufacturing get worse under his or her watch?
I doubt it.
So they're going to be looking for some cover, and the first scientific evidence that they can find that maybe global warming isn't happening after all, and suddenly we'll be this is the term they always use.
We'll be rethinking all of this.
They're going to drop this.
They were trying to sell us the new ice age in the 70s.
Now they're on this.
They're going to drop it.
It is not a coincidence that this theory was advanced during the time that Bush has been president of the United States.
So they can bash Bush because he wouldn't sign the Coyote Treaty.
If it was a Democratic president who didn't commit economic suicide by saying we're going to strangle the United States with a bunch of environmental rules that the Chinese don't have to follow, there never would have been the same criticism.
This is why currently, when people try to debunk or challenge or question anything having to do with global warming, they're met with some emotionalism.
If God forbid the Democrats win the White House, you watch and see how stories like this are given more prominence and how skepticism And challenging of all of the theories behind global warming are advancing.
Global warming is an issue because it allows people to act sanctimoniously holier than thou.
You know, there are a lot of cars out there that are running with hybrid engines.
Why is the only one that the celebrities drive the Prius?
The reason is the Prius is the car that everybody knows what it is.
No car looks like a Prius.
And I'm not critical of Toyota.
I think Toyota's a great company, and I even like the Prius.
Not because I think it's environmentally friendly because it's not, but because it's a product that gives people good gasoline mileage.
There's nothing wrong with it.
But there are a lot of hybrid engine cars out there.
Honda had a bunch of them.
They just use the regular cars that they had and they offered a hybrid version of it.
The Prius, with its bubble like look, allows everybody who drives it to say, look at me, I'm driving a Prius.
Why do you think Larry David in his program is driving a Prius?
So you can see that it's a Prius.
If he's driving a hybrid version of something else, then it kind of defeats the point.
So let's pretend to be environmental.
Let's pretend to save the planet so we can rip the Republicans, rip the bad guys who don't care as much as us.
And once this is taken away from them, they'll do what they always do.
They will move on.
That's why they call themselves Moveon.org.
They'll just move on to something else.
Open Line Friday, time to take a telephone call.
Pittsburgh and David, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey Mark, how are you doing?
I'm great, thank you.
I feel like I'm gonna beat a dead horse with I I'd love to get into the global warming thing with you, but with the writer's strike.
Yes.
Uh one of the things I was it it it just dawned on me is that I think it's a little bit uh unfair, and maybe somebody should bring this up to them, or maybe the intellectuals and the scientists and the researchers all ought to go back to their companies, form a union, and say, we want to have royalties based on everything that we developed for you that you said we do not have rights to.
Because every researcher and every uh uh guy that ever did anything for Bell Labs or for Lucent or for any of those companies, okay, they are told, you know, right away that uh that belongs to the company, not to them.
Well, you're you're into really theoretical territory.
Who owns an idea?
In the entertainment in the entertainment industry, the notion of copywriting has been that the creator owns the idea.
For example, when records are played in jukeboxes or on radio stations, for years later, BMI and ASCAP represent the copyright of the songwriter.
The artist doesn't get any extra money if you're playing the music 30 or 35 years later.
And that's what in the television and movie industry, the writers want to maintain as well.
They want to retain these ownership rights to the property they create.
As somebody who is in the business of creating something himself, it'd be a nice racket to get into.
If every idea that Rush threw out that was then parroted by someone else, Rush was able to say, hey, give me a nickel when someone repeats my point.
Think about what kind of an operation he'd be able to run.
On the other hand, if writers don't have any protection for this, there's no real value for the stuff that they create if what they put out can simply be co-opted and taken away by other people and passed along as their own.
So I'm not unsympathetic to their cause.
What I disagree with is the notion that as they use the tactic of the strike that everybody else is supposed to honor that tactic.
But you're right.
There are a lot of other industries in which people create a create something.
Scientists, as you mentioned, inventors, anybody who comes up with a good idea in the workplace, they don't get paid after the idea is implemented the first time around.
Thanks for the call.
That was a good call.
My name is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
It's been fun to be here.
Jason Lewis will be here on uh Monday, but never fear.
There's more program coming.
Let's go to Brian in Chicago.
It's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Uh hey, what's up, Mark?
I have a questionslash comment for you about the uh writer's strike.
Yes.
I want to know who writes your monologues for three hours a day when you come and do your shows.
Who writes the monologue?
Obviously, somebody that I don't pay very much because all you got was what you heard here.
Exactly.
Who scripts out Rush Rush's shows?
Who scripts out hands?
Actually, I do that.
I send this material to Rush.
I've been the guy behind him all these years.
Rush is just a mouthpiece.
It's always been me all I'm I'm kidding, by the way.
Oh, is that the secret?
Yes.
My point is, You know, if guys like you can go out on the air and do three hours, and there are some of the local guys here that are really good, at least in Chicago, that do up the five hours that are brilliant in what they do for five hours straight of original material, and you're gonna tell me that people in Hollywood can't do an hour of original material at night on their own.
Well, that's what's the joke about all of this.
Are Letterman and Leno really saying that they can't be funny in that kind of a format without writers?
Now, in fairness to them, they are members of the union themselves.
Because they do write some of their own material, they're required as part of the union contract to join the writers' guild, and if they do something that could be construed as having been written, they're violating their own contract of the union that they're in.
So I do have some sympathy for the position that they're that they're in.
Well, that's my point.
That's that's my point.
Well, that is a that is a fine line.
If you tell a joke that sort of occurred to you prior to the show, was it written or not?
I mean, when you did for something to be written, does it actually have to be written on a cue card?
Well, what if you have an idea for a routine and you just keep it in your head and go tell it?
Have you violated the terms of that strike?
That's why it's all just a joke.
In my ideal world, Leno and Letterman would have the stones to simply ignore the union, go out and do whatever material they want and say, what are you going to do about it?
But I'm an individualist and I don't much like the night the idea of unions in the first place.
Thank you for the call.
Bergen County, North New Jersey.
Bill, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Bill.
Hello.
Hi.
I uh had a comment on the old notion of when you have to reduce taxes, it has to be paid for in some manner.
Yes, that's the liberal version of tax policy.
I had an extended question on that.
Why does the same logic not apply to the increase in spending bills over and above the budget?
Why do they not have to be paid for by reducing other spending?
Well, you know what the answer is?
That's different.
That's their answer.
By the way, there's an interesting thing that I think is going to happen over the next couple of weeks, uh, Bill.
President Bush has been railing since Congress passed this latest spending bill about the fact that it's loaded up again with earmarks.
What a surprise.
The Nancy Pelosi Congress has just as many earmarks as the Republican Congress did.
It's loaded up with earmarks, and earmark, of course, is a special uh demand written for a special project outside the budget that the agencies are compelled to go out and fund and their projects that the Congressman then go back into their home districts and get all the credit for I got this put into the budget.
Bush specifically ripped the earmarks as he signed the bill.
President Bush doesn't need the Congress anymore.
He's only got a year left, and he did the Democrats have made it clear they're not going to give him anything anyway.
I think he's looking for something legacy-wise on the spending issue.
I believe Bush is going to tell the agencies not to fund the items that were earmarked.
Since the earmarks aren't in the actual budget, the agencies may have the earmark there, but it's the president that controls, for example, the Transportation Department and HUD and HEW.
He's going to T HHS now.
He's going to tell those agencies, I believe don't fund this.
They may have passed these earmarks.
We're not going to appropriate the money.
We're not going to send the checks out.
It isn't going to get done.
Let the Congress then squeal, in which they demand that Bush fund their earmarks.
I think he's laying for a fight on this one, and it's a good one for him to pick.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Really enjoyed being here.
Hope to talk to you again.
There's some real drama tomorrow.
The New England Patriots are playing for that perfect season when they play the New York Giants.
They're going to be as many Patriot fans there as Giant fans, all these people from Boston are going down and snatching up the tickets.
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