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Dec. 31, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
December 31, 2007, Monday, Hour #2
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And welcome back once again, everybody.
Jason Lewis in for the great one, the big guy, Rush, taking a well-deserved break during these Christmas holidays.
And we'll be back, though, on Wednesday to guide us through the 2008 elections and beyond, as he likes to say.
So my pleasure to be sitting in once again for Rush.
By the way, I got to say happy birthday to my mother-in-law out in Erie, Pennsylvania.
That's exactly.
I mean, happy mother-in-law is a happy life.
That's what I always, that's why I always say, oh, that's a happy wife.
It's a happy life.
Well, nevertheless, I got to say, congratulations and happy birthday.
Believe it or not, she's not.
This is kind of embarrassing, really.
She's not that much older than I am.
I know what you're saying.
I robbed the cradle.
But it's worked out great for me because my wife, my lovely Lee, who I told you about in the first hour, she may be a little bit younger than I am, but the upside is I get along great with her parents.
They're my age.
And so it works out really well.
I don't know about you other guys.
1-800-282-2882.
It is the Rush Limbaugh program.
It is New Year's Eve, Ted Kennedy's favorite night of the year.
And we're going to party here for the next two hours as well.
By the way, before we get back to Afghanistan or to Pakistan and the elections coming up, I do want to mention a couple of other issues to kick things off at this hour.
The bed bugs.
Oh, I forgot to, I've got to get this in, too.
The bed bugs in New York City.
New York Daily News.
I believe it was yesterday, was it not?
Yeah.
Yesterday, a budbag, a bed bug epidemic has exploded in every corner of New York City, according to the Daily News.
Even striking the Upper East Side.
We call that poetic justice.
The bed bugs apparently are having a nocturnal feast on people that come there and go stay in the hotels or stay in an apartment, even people who live there with lots of cash.
Now, get this.
According to the Daily News, a surge in global travel and mobility from all socioeconomic classes combined, and this is key, combined with less toxic urban pesticides and the banning of DDT has created the perfect storm for the revival of the critters.
Well, wait, Where is, for heaven's sakes, friends, where's Rachel Carson when we need her?
Silent Spring and all that.
Wasn't DDT supposed to be the monstrous evil?
We had to ban DDT?
We did, thankfully, because of the environmentalists told us so.
You know, these little bird eggs were having some problems.
So we banned DDT, even though no study had ever shown any carcinogen link in humans.
We banned DDT, and a couple of years later, people were dying from malaria again.
We're banning pesticides because most of the environmental movement doesn't understand the first rule of medicine.
The poison is in the dose.
There's lots of things out there that you consume each and every day deliberately that could kill you.
But as long as the dose is correct, it actually is a good thing.
No, not according to environmentalists.
We've got to have all or nothing, absolutism.
Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine.
That sort of prohibitionist attitude by the Sierra Club crowd is what's given us the resurgence of malaria.
You know, I could go right down the list here, friends, if you really want me to.
Environmentalism, the way it is portrayed today, or the way it manifests itself today, kills people.
It kills people.
Whether it's DDT or the miles per gallon standards, the National Academy of Sciences, USA Today, you know, that famous right-wing think tank, they all admit that raising the mileage standards up to 36 miles per gallon is going to cost a few more thousand lives on the road because the only way you can technologically do this without pricing the car out of the range of most people is to make the car smaller and lighter.
Smaller and lighter cars kill people.
I mean, this situation, this situation when you have this sort of slavish attitude towards the environment, it does have a link to the Republican primaries.
And that is you've got this new redefining of conservatism that's, oh, we've got to be more sensitive about the environment because that's what my advisors tell me.
And so they roll over for the Sierra Club, and instead of challenging the myths of the modern-day environmental movement, what do we do?
We go along with them.
Global warming man-made?
Yep, raise my hand.
They all raise their hand except for a few.
As I mentioned last hour, sooner or later, we're going to have to face the elephant in the GOP's living room.
I love that pun.
And it is this.
Big education and big environment.
You cannot have a limited, small, conservative government.
You can't have more freedom and less taxes and less regulation until you face those two issues.
And the new moderate conservative or moderate Republicans are not interested in facing those issues because it's too difficult.
The poll numbers aren't there.
Well, if the poll numbers aren't with you, that means the populace isn't educated and you need to educate them.
Whether it's DDT and the resurgence of bed bugs and malaria or the whole notion that we can't drill for oil in our own country.
You know, we talk a lot about, and Rush talks a lot about Middle Eastern politics and why we're there and this sort of thing.
And yet we get politician after politician talking about weaning ourselves from foreign oil.
So what do we get from that?
Well, we get ethanol and farm subsidies, driving the cost of food to stratospheric levels, the cost of bread, milk, you name it.
I don't know why we keep going down this road, friends.
I don't know why we keep spending.
Look at the reserves we've got for oil in the United States of America that could provide us cheap energy that will save lives.
Costly energy.
No country has ever, has ever become energy sufficient through energy conservation.
They've become energy sufficient by exploring new avenues to energy.
Right now, we've got 22 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, 22 billion barrels.
In addition, there's probably about 112 billion barrels that could be recovered with more expansive drilling and production technology.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which has been off limits for a number of decades, thanks to the environmentalists, we may have, I mean, literally, we've got enough in Anwar to offset our imports from Saudi Arabia.
And by the way, you know, the idea that, well, you can't rely on oil forever.
Oil just happens to be the most efficient mode of transportation and energy that we know so far.
If, you know, ethanol or all these alternative fuels, windmills and solar panels, are more efficient and more economical, have at it.
But they're not.
They cannot rely without, cannot rely in a free market or they cannot survive in a free market.
They've got to rely on subsidies.
The idea that we've got to go there anyway, even though it costs us more money, is a little bit facile because the world's proven reserves are now at 1.4 trillion barrels of oil.
That's up 12% in the past 10 years.
We have got plenty of oil.
We've got plenty of cheap energy.
We are now situated in a country that is denying its inhabitants access to its own resources.
And we're doing it in the name of the environmental movement, in the name of the Sierra Club.
As I said, the proven oil reserves.
And of course, we can't grant the oil companies any advantages.
After all, they're already subsidized.
They already have these great tax breaks.
Let me give you a few facts on big oil.
Do you know that there's not been one FTC study, one Federal Trade Commission study, that has ever pronounced big oil gouging at the pump?
The latest one was after Katrina and all of the media hype about price gouging.
The FTC found, no, we had supply disruptions, duh, after Katrina, which drove the price up.
They've never found it.
The net profit margin on big oil, 8 to 13 cents a gallon of gas.
However, if you take a look at what the federal government collects on a gallon of gas, the Tax Foundation reports that from 1977 to 2002, oil industry profited $640 billion.
Not bad.
Pretty good profits.
Government profits in the form of gas taxes, $1.34 trillion.
The government made far more, more than two times more than the oil industry did in the last 25 years.
And in 2005, according to SEC reports, the big three, I'm talking about Exxon, Chevron, Conoco, they paid income taxes.
They paid corporate income taxes to the tune of a 41% rate, which means they had to have some deductions and credits taken away to get higher than the statutory rate.
So, you know, sooner or later, we're going to have to realize that for now, for now, that is the most economical way to drive an economy.
If you choose to interrupt the markets, if you choose to raise taxes to support ethanol and wind power and cap and trade, which is nothing more than a subsidy to those alternative methods, you will have a lower standard of living than you otherwise would have.
You will have higher gasoline prices.
You will have higher heating and home fuel costs.
The use of any energy, whether it's your computer at home or whether it's any particular appliance you've got in your house, is going to cost you more, all in the name of what?
Weaning ourselves from foreign oil.
We can do that right here at home.
We can do it with the technology offshore on the continental shelf.
We can do it in Anwar.
We can do it in Canada and North America.
Right now, we get about 60% of our energy from North America.
But we can't.
Why?
Because of global warming myths and because we've got to be friendly to the environment.
The day of reckoning is here.
We're either going to take on these left-wing lobbies and educate the public, or we're going to go down to this sort of Malthusian view of the world that people are the real problem, and we're going to simply destine our children to a lower standard of living in the name of being at one with nature.
Well, nature can take a hike.
I should say 1-800-282-2882.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush.
Your call's coming right up when we return.
We're already having a good time here on New Year's Eve.
And we're sober.
1-800-282-2882, Jason Lewis.
Okay, I'm sober.
No, no, no.
I'm the only one that can't be.
Never mind.
1-800-282-2882.
Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh.
Rush the big guy back on Wednesday to the phones we go this hour in Baton Rouge.
Here's Jeff.
You're on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Hi.
Yes.
Hey, thanks for taking the call and happy new year.
My comments about John McCain, but first I had to respond to the Huckabee supporter who said that he's getting a bum wrap by the media.
I said he came out last week that showed actually of all the presidential candidates on the Republican side, he got the most positive media coverage of anyone.
Actually, second only to Obama among all candidates.
I happen to believe that the mainstream media think it's a win-win with, say, a Huckabee and Obama race, Huckabee and Hillary race.
I mean, you don't, it is the end of the Reaganite conservative view.
There is an effort, and I hate to interrupt, but let me just interject this.
People have to understand the Republican Party, and frankly, the epicenter may be the National Governors Association and the Republican Governors Association, but there is an effort in this party, led by a few wayward governors, to redefine what conservatism means.
And Rush talks about this all the time.
But there is a concise effort.
This new book by Michael Gerson, the former speechwriter for the president called Heroic Conservatism, is all about big government conservatism, which is an oxymoron.
I agree.
I agree.
My comment about John McCain, I'm a little perplexed that everyone in the media gives the conventional wisdom that he should be benefiting from this terrorist attack.
I think we're forgetting that he's on record as wanting to close Guantanamo Nemo, promising to close Guantanamo if he's president.
He's also promising to not let interrogators use the methods that they need to use to get vital information.
He's also not ever been serious about securing our borders, even though just yesterday this week with George Stephanophobus, he said, quote, I've never supported amnesty, end quote.
That's McCain's real Achilles heel, isn't it?
The immigration.
Clearly, the McCain bill would have granted what most people, most reasonable adults would call de facto amnesty to people.
I mean, the Z visas would have allowed people to stay here indefinitely.
And he's got a problem with that.
And it's a matter of trust amongst conservatives.
And when it comes to torture, yes, you're right.
He's leading the charge, bashing the administration for using these coercive techniques.
And herein lies the problem with the whole torture debate.
This is not a crime.
This is a war.
And now, I don't know what you call dropping a bomb on people, but that's pretty heinous stuff.
Is that torture?
Well, don't we read them their Miranda rights first?
In wartime, there are methods used that some might call brusque, but there are methods used that we would never countenance in a criminal prosecution where the Bill of Rights is invoked.
And that's the problem with some of these people who are trying to micromanage the commander-in-chief's prosecution of a war.
They look at this like Clinton did as a crime.
You remember, I'm certain, Jeff, when Bill Clinton was asked ad nauseum, even though the mainstream media really didn't focus on it, why he didn't get bin Laden from the Sudan when he could.
Didn't have anything on him.
Could not keep him.
Well, wait a minute.
Who says you needed to have anything on him?
It wasn't like we were apprehending a defendant where there was a warrant out there.
Yet that's exactly the way the Justice Department looked at it.
And frankly, that's the way that McCain and a few others are looking at these coercive techniques.
And yes, I'm talking about waterboarding.
The International Red Cross even went so far as to say, you really couldn't engage in any coercive interrogation of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Well, why don't we hire him a tax-funded lawyer then, too?
Exactly.
And McCain's solution, he says he's going to close Guantanamo and bring all the detainees and all the terrorists and enemy commandants onto U.S. soil where they'll definitely be granted the rights of U.S. citizens and be given representation.
And I mean, it's just really scary.
And the fact that he would benefit from this terrorist attack, I see him as someone I do not want in charge if our lives are at threat with terrorists who may have information and we can get that information.
Well, he said now, in his defense, he said he was the only guy calling for a surge before it was fashionable.
Granted, granted.
Yeah.
I think the domestic issues on Mr. McCain are the ones that people have problems with.
I really do.
Thanks for checking in.
I do appreciate it.
In Dunkirk, New York, Dan is next up on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis, in for Rush.
Hi.
Hey, Jason.
I can't believe you're saying that some of the pesticides that we have been using through the past century should be continued to be used and enter into our food supply even to make sense.
You have a good point.
Where only the rich can afford the natural foods and then basically ruin the lives of the poor.
Well, I'll tell you what you do.
You go out and chew on that tree bark that Smokey the Bear just did his thing on, and then you tell me how healthy it is.
I don't know where you suggest that being en natural is so healthy.
It is not healthy at all.
But let me go back to your first point, and that is, well, these pesticides that are killing us.
What's the life expectancy in the United States and what's happened to it in the last decade?
Okay, that is a very logical argument, but the point is government should be looking out for the common good for the common man in this country.
Yeah, and how about bedbooks?
Is that part of the common good?
There's nothing wrong with that, except the problem with you environmentalists is you never engage in a cost-benefit analysis.
Is it worth it to, and every scientist and a lot of people who are on the left side of the political spectrum now admit that malaria has made this raging comeback in Africa because the costs of these other ones are more expensive.
It was the most efficient.
Now, is that worth it?
Are the lives of those people worth being a charter member of the Sierra Club to you?
I'm not going to pull a liberal stunt here where you switch gears, where we're on a topic, but what is wrong with increasing the cafe standards where the average person who's paying over $3 a gallon of gasoline can drive further because if the gallon of gasoline is $10 a gallon, the rich, it doesn't matter.
They're less deposited.
What is it about marketplace economics you don't get, Dan?
I mean, listen to me.
If, in fact, having a car that goes 30 or 40 miles per gallon is so advantageous, they would be produced.
There's nothing in the marketplace that is keeping anybody from buying a car, riding a scooter, or walking or bicycling.
The fact of the matter is the only thing Detroit has been successful at in the last few years has been producing these larger vehicles, these SUVs that get lower miles per gallon, but they can't compete with the high MPG coming in from imports.
And so what this particular bill is going to do is going to put Detroit out of business.
And that's why even Democrats like John Dingell have reservations on it.
Well, Toyota saw this coming, and they produced a good car that got better gas miles.
And Detroit said, okay, we'll produce the larger, safer vehicle that doesn't get as good a gas mileage, but that people want.
Now, where is it written that government should tell me I can't buy that vehicle?
What I'm saying is, what do you need market intervention for?
You can buy your high MPG car.
I'll buy my low MPG car, and we'll all be happy as clams.
That's not good enough for the nanny state environmentalists.
They want a one-size-fits-all.
It's my way or the highway.
And by the way, the National Academy of Sciences say that you get these smaller, lighter cars, more people will die, will die on the highway.
Is that what environmentalism means to you?
You don't get me going on the environment because I really do think that is one of the biggest obstacles to freedom that we face worldwide.
And that's why liberals love this talk about the environment.
I always tell my friends, isn't it a coincidence that all of the solutions to global warming just happen to be, well, the same solutions liberals were talking about before global warming.
In fact, during the ice age scare in the 1970s, raising the gas tax, going after utility companies, going after big oil.
Now they think they've got an excuse, except they don't.
They don't.
2007 could be the year of global cooling.
You know, in 2007, hundreds of people died to weather-related issues, except it was from the cold, not warming.
In fact, that's a great point.
Do you realize many more people die from cold weather?
When we came out of, we're coming out of the little ice age now in the medieval warming period was the most prosperous period we had.
All we're doing now is coming out of the little ice age, and people are all worried about a 0.7 degrees Celsius uptick.
It's been warmer before.
We've had going literally, literally hundreds of years ago, it's been not only warmer than it is today, we've had higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere than we have today.
Now, how is that possible according to these global warming models?
But if you take a look at South America this year, they experienced one of the coldest winters in decades.
The unexpected bitter cold has swept the entire southern hemisphere in 2007, from Johannesburg, South Africa to New Zealand, you name it, Australia.
In January, last January, what, a billion and a half worth of produce lost in California due to a devastating five-day freeze.
Arnold Schwarzenegger immediately called for another panel on global warming after that.
In April, he had, what, 95% of South Carolina's peach crop destroyed in a killing freeze.
Here in the upper Midwest, in Minnesota, on the upper Great Plains, you've had a record cold December.
St. Cloud, Minnesota set a new record low of 15 below on December 7th.
Korea set record lows.
I mean, I could go right down the list.
There was a story, in fact, I think Mark mentioned this the other day.
There was a story out of a fella in England who happened to be, is not a particularly conservative fella.
The guy's name is David Whitehouse, and he's got a website called The New Statesman, or I should say it's on the website of The New Statesman, which is a left-leaning British weekly.
And they're now suggesting that the world temperatures rose sharply from 1980 to 1998.
Remember, they cooled from the mid-40s to 1976, and then they rose from 76.
Now they're saying to 1998, but have leveled off since then, according to David Whitehouse's reading of the U.S. and the United Kingdom government statistics.
This is kind of interesting stuff here.
I mean, I've heard this before from others who suggest that, look, the reason the global warming fanatics want to get Kyoto passed, want to implement all of these economy-killing, and fundamentally, folks, at the very least, if it doesn't kill the economy, it will raise the cost of living.
You will be poorer so you can have your charter membership to the Environmental Defense Fund.
But I've read a number of skeptics say 1998 may be the watershed, and that we may be getting colder, or at the very least, leveling off now, even as CO2 rises.
And if that's the case, no wonder they're in such a tizzy to get this stuff passed, because in a decade, the egg could be on their face, and it may already be happening.
We need to think about these things before we, in a knee-jerk way, say, ooh, if I could get the endorsement from the Sierra Club, I could be a thoughtful Republican.
No, you would be a thoughtless Republican.
1-800-282-2882, Jason Lewis in for rush.
Let's go to Minot, North Dakota, my vacation spot.
And Jeff, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hey, Jason.
Say, I just heard you talking a few minutes ago about ANWAR and the need to increase oil production here in the States.
And just wanted to let you know, here in North Dakota, we're doing our part.
They're not calling it a boom.
I think there's some reluctance to call it a boom right now, but it's every bit as much as busy now as it was during the 1980s.
Using new technologies coming in, they're drilling all over the place.
They're coming in old fields and bringing in wells that are making thousands of barrels a day.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
Think of, look, you've got horizontal drilling techniques.
If you take a look at Anwar, there's about 19 million acres up there.
And we could get at it by accessing just 2,000.
A 2,000-acre footprint with the new drilling technologies is roughly all we need in Anwar to access, you know, God knows how many barrels of oil.
And I'm glad to hear that in North Dakota.
But yet, the Energy Department predicts that next year, in fact, this just came down last week, the Energy Department now says, Jeff, that next year oil prices will go higher, forcing gas prices higher to about $3.11 nationwide.
That's up about 10%.
Now, why is it going higher?
Well, it's the infrastructure.
Right now, the pipelines here are running at capacity, and the pipeline companies are struggling to get additional lines in.
Add to that the fact that there hasn't been a new refinery built anywhere in the country since sometime.
1976.
1976.
We almost had one in Arizona this year, and guess who shut it down?
The Sierra Club.
I don't know if it's the Sierra Club per se, but it was a number of environmental organizations that got so many lawsuits going that in effect it's been shut down.
Now, we have one of the local Indian reservations here that has on their development plans to build a refinery on Indian land.
And they've been working on environmental studies and impact studies for the last several years.
I think they're getting very close to probably getting approvals to build it.
And if so, that'll be the first refinery built.
Look, the dirty little secret is, the dirty little secret here is we've got so much, we're awash in oil, that there is no peak demand theory.
That oil, in fact, some geologists are now saying that oil replenishes itself, but I'm not going that far because I don't know enough about it.
But the bottom line is, as I mentioned earlier, we've got worldwide reserves now at 1.4 trillion barrels.
Here in the United States, we've got access to 112 billion barrels that could be recovered with the existing drilling you're talking about.
87 of those are located in Anwar.
The U.S. Outer Continental Shelf has got 85 billion more barrels of oil.
So why is it that we can't get at it?
Except in, you know, look, I'm glad that's going on in North Dakota, but it's going to be, in the grand scheme of things, a smaller than, a relatively small fine, wouldn't you say?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
But add to that our coal production, our coal-fired electricity.
We even have a plant here that produces natural gas from coal, and one of their byproducts is CO2.
And you know what they're doing with the CO2?
They're piping it up into Canada.
It's being injected into oil fields and used for boosting production out of oil fields.
CO2 is a good thing.
It's not a pollutant.
It's a good thing.
It greens the world.
We produce more food.
Everybody lives longer.
What's the problem?
Anyway, Jeff, thanks so much.
As I said, the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, 85 to 86 billion barrels of oil.
Anwar has 16, not 85, that's the continental shelf.
Anwar has 16 billion barrels of oil that is off limits.
And then Congress turns around and says we can't drill there, and we're going to dictate the type of gasoline, 57 different gas blends in the summer season with these boutique fuels that have to have ethanol in them, that have to have all these sorts of anti-Clean Air Act pollution requirements in there.
Do you realize, folks, how much progress we've made in tailpipe emissions since 1970?
How about this?
We've reduced tailpipe emissions 96% in every emission, and if you average them out, since 1970.
Now, remember, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
I don't care what the EPA says.
It is a necessary fact of life is what it is.
And yet, we've got these dictates from the Clean Air Act mandating these fuels from May to September, which are very, very difficult, A, to refine and B, to ship.
So you've got pipelines that would be dedicated to resupplying areas that have shortages of oil, gasoline, unleaded gasoline, that now have to be taken over or supplanted to ship ethanol, which doesn't ship very well to begin with.
We have imposed on ourselves an energy crisis.
And the only answer the environmental left has is shut up and use less, except a lower standard of living, a Jimmy Carter version of energy conservation, put on your cardigan.
We've got an era of malaise coming.
Your children are going to have to make do with less.
Boy, that's an inspirational message, isn't it?
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbo on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Ah, a little celebration music for Cheryl out in Erie, Pennsylvania on this New Year's Eve.
All right, that's my mother-in-law.
Now, what do I get in return?
Oh, nothing.
I did it out of the kindness of my heart.
1-800-282-2882, I'm Jason Lewis in for El Rushbo.
He's back on Wednesday to Finlay, Ohio.
And Chris, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, how you doing?
Could not be better.
It's New Year's Eve.
Good.
Hey, you know, global warming is global groupthink.
And the more that candidates like Giuliani and Huckabee get behind Al Gore and the Kool-Aid line, the more they're going to see their nominations go up in smoke.
It's not just Huckabee and Giuliani.
I think, unfortunately, I believe when they had that famous handraising episode in Des Moines of the debate, it was Romney and McCain also got their hand up.
There is this ⁇ it's not the easy way out because we've let the Sierra Club educate the populace on global warming.
And if you let the leftists educate, what do you think the polls are going to show?
So what you need are candidates are going to buck the trend and say, wait a minute, how about some evidence here?
Well, that's yeah, that's why I predict Fred Thompson will win for the Republicans.
But the reason I called is who I think the Democrats will elect.
And I call it a bold prediction because I really haven't heard this put out there yet.
But I think Edwards is going to win.
And the reason...
Was that an ambulance I just heard?
Oh, never mind.
Well, the liberals may need one right now.
But I began thinking, and we know how liberals think.
They think in terms of classes and in terms of races, and they separate people.
So essentially what they have at the top right now are a minority in Barack Obama and a woman in Hillary Clinton, both of which they look at as victims.
So in order to pick a viable candidate, one that can actually win, I think, ironically, the Democrats are going to pick John Edwards.
Well, he's also the most, believe it or not, if this is possible, I'm not certain if it is physically possible, but I think it is in the Democrat Party even today.
He's also the most liberal.
I mean, John Edwards is the rankest of political candidates amongst the bunch because he's the Elmer Gantry of the political arena.
He's a fall populist.
But he keeps wanting to prove his bona fidees by advocating more and more socialism.
So he will do whatever it takes, and that means destroying the economy of the country.
He doesn't care.
He's been suing for fun and profit for years.
But you bring up an interesting point that is very uncomfortable for Democrats to talk about.
And that is, gosh, what was the party in control of the Jim Crow South again?
Yeah, it was, yeah, the Democrats.
What did the Roosevelt Agricultural Department do to black farmers in the South when FDR was running the country?
There is a history of this sort of class viewpoint.
I mean, the liberals today and the Democrats today love to cast aspersions upon everybody else.
And we're the enlightened ones.
We're multicultural.
You know, as long as ballots are cast in a closed environment, as long as we have secret ballots, what you say may have some currency.
Now, I'm not altogether certain that that's going to happen.
But I do think that there is much more narrow-mindedness amongst our Democratic friends than they would have us believe.
He's virtually pulled into a dead heat with Clinton and Barack already in Iowa.
Once he gets through the South, I think he's really going to carry some momentum.
Interesting point, I got to move.
Interesting point, Chris.
I've got to move.
I mean, that also may be due to the fact that Edwards, again, is running literally to the left.
I mean, Edwards is gone off the deep end.
He's starting to make Karl Marx blush when it comes to his policy prescriptions.
And the Democrats, which are wholly owned subsidiary of Marxism, are going for the real thing.
So that may be part of it, too.
And I hope, frankly, they do, because I think Edwards would be probably the easiest to beat in a general election.
Anyway, thanks for checking in.
I appreciate it.
Let's move onward and upward.
Let's go to Houston, Texas.
And Emmett, you're on the Jason, I should say the Rush Limbaugh Show with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
It's great to talk to you.
I wanted to pick a little bone with you.
I agree with you almost completely on global warming, all this other stuff as well.
But living in Houston, where we have an extremely automobile-dependent culture that's very effective, I think we're the most mobile city in the country.
But from a pollution standpoint, not CO2, just particulates and air quality standards.
If everybody drives an eight-mile-per-gallon suburban, which a lot of people down here do, I think we're the truck capital of the country, it really adversely affects the air quality.
And the same way that I'm not allowed to burn leaves in my backyard like people did when I was a kid because of air quality, we need to have some rules about gasoline consumption for the same air quality standards.
You bring up a couple of fair points here.
And you've got to remember that, A, there's a cost-benefit analysis to everything.
Are you willing to give up your job in order to have air that is so pristine that there's no particulate in it?
Well, most people would say no.
They're willing to say, you know what?
I want clean air.
I don't want air that's going to impact my health in a concrete way, but I'm willing to put up with some of this in order to have food on the table, which is why poor countries have the most environmental problems because literally it costs money to be pristine.
So the problem with the environmentalists, in my view, is they have no idea what the cost would be.
The other aspect of your point is I would bet you a steak dinner or a beer at Gilly's that you take a look at the EPA figures from Houston in 2007, go back to 1957, 67, 77, and Houston is demonstrably cleaner today than it was then.
There's no question of that.
Today's a beautiful day, by the way, and there's no question the air is cleaner now than it was.
But we continue to grow.
Texas added half a million people in population in the last year.
And as much as I'm for the market dictating everything, I think sometimes there's a place for government to guide the market at least a little bit.
Well, I'll tell you what I would do legally or philosophically.
I would go back to the old common law.
Prior to the advent of a one-size-fits-all EPA, which I think has been in many ways overkill, you literally would have to prove your case in a court of law.
If you live downstream from somebody and they polluted the stream and that stream, obviously, came into your backyard and then the water rights were yours, and you could prove that it was killing the fish or was harming you.
You had to prove harm.
That's the nasty thing about courts.
You've got to prove you have damages.
Then you take that person to court.
And there were precedents, and that's how environmental disputes were settled.
This is a simplistic explanation, but it suffices for now.
And we've gone from that to a regulatory state where we've got special interest groups making these decisions instead of courts of law where you have all of the defenses if you're a defendant and where the burden of proof is on the prosecution.
And I'm all for somebody in a court of law taking action against somebody who's harming them vis-a-vis pollution.
I'm not for this overwielding regulation that hurts the economy and has no basis, in fact, and many times is junk science.
Now, I'll just give you an example.
Miles per gallon that you talked about, there is absolutely no evidence, zip zero nada, that increasing the miles per gallon, the CAFE standards, as Congress just did in this ridiculous energy bill that the entire thing should have been vetoed, will reduce consumption.
In fact, you know what happens when miles per gallon goes up?
People drive more.
So, you know, I don't think that's the way to go.
That's all I'm saying.
Thanks for the call.
Back with more right after this.
Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh today, New Year's Eve.
We'll come back next hour.
More of your calls at 1-800-282-2882.
Also want to talk about some smoking bans.
Speaking of environmental pollution, that and much more coming right up.
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