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Dec. 31, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
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 is taking a well deserved break during these uh Christmas holidays.
And we'll be back, though, on Wednesday to guide us in through or guide us through the 2008 elections and beyond, as he likes to say.
So uh my pleasure to be sitting in once again for rush.
By the way, I gotta 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 was saying Oh, that's a happy wife, it's a happy life.
Well, nevertheless, I gotta say, congr uh congratulations and happy birthday.
She's 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 gonna party here for the next two hours as well.
By the way, before we get back to Afghan uh to uh Pakistan and the elections coming up, I do want to mention a couple of other issues to uh kick things off at this hour.
The bed bugs.
Oh, I forgot to I gotta 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 bud bag uh bud bud beg, uh 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, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Where is uh for heaven's sakes, friends?
Where's uh Rachel Carson when we need her?
Silent Spring and all that.
Wasn't DDT supposed to be the the 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's sort of 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's 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 that raising the mileage standards up to thirty-six 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, th th this situation, this situation when you you have this sort of of slabish attitude towards the environment.
It hit it does have a link to the Republican uh 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, you know, we're gonna 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 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 very it 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 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 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, we've we've got 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 become energy sufficient through energy conservation.
They've become energy sufficient by exploring new avenues to energy.
Right now we've got twenty-two billion barrels of proven oil reserves.
Twenty-two billion barrels.
In addition, there's probably about a hundred and twelve 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.
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 if, you know, ethanol or all these alternative fuels, windmills and solar panels, are a more efficient and more economical, have at it.
But they're not.
They cannot rely without sub 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 ten 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 we can't we can't grant the oil companies any advantages after all.
They're already subsidized, they're 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, eight to thirteen 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, Conaco, they paid income taxes.
They paid corporate income taxes to the tune of a forty-one percent 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 uh 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 with the uh 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 sixty percent 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 evil the the people are the real problem, and we're gonna we're going to uh simply destin 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 one eight hundred two eight two-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, wait.
I'm the only one that can't be never mind.
1-800-282-2882, Jason Lewis in Ver 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 my call and happy new year.
Uh my c my comments about John McCain, but first I had to respond to the Huckabee supporter who said that he's getting uh 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 everyone.
Actually, 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 you don't it is the end of the Reaganite conservative view.
There is an effort, and I hate to hate to interrupt, but let me just interject this.
People have to understand the Republican Party, and it's in 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.
Uh, my, my comment about John McCain, uh, I'm a little perplexed that everyone in the media gives the conventional wisdom that he, uh, should be benefiting from this terrorist attack.
I think we're forgetting that he's on record as wanting to close Guantanamo, promising to close Guantanamo if he's president.
He's also promising uh to not let interrogities use the methods that they need to use to get vital information.
He's also not not ever been serious about securing our borders, even though just yesterday on this week with Joe Stephan Offelbus, he said, quote, I've never supported amnesty, end quote.
That's McCain's real Achilles heel, isn't it?
The immigration clearly, clearly the McCain bill uh would have granted what most people, most reasonable adults would call de facto amnesty to people.
I mean, the 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 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 that you know and this is herein lies the problem with 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.
That's you know, was 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 uh didn't have anything on him, could not keep him.
Well, wait a minute.
What 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 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 and McCain's solution, he says he's going to close Guantanamo and bring all the uh 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 it's just really scary.
And the fact that he would benefit from this terrorist attack, I I see him as someone I do not want in charge if if our lives are threatened with terrorists who may have information and we can get that information.
Well, he said now in 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 the domestic issues on Mr. McCain are the ones that uh 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 and Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis, in for rush.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, I can't believe you're saying that uh some of the pesticides that we have been using through the past century uh should be uh continued to be used.
And entering enter into our food supply even to the 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 tell you what you do.
You go out and chew on that tree bark that uh Smokey the Bear just uh did his thing on, and then you tell me how healthy it is.
I don't know where you you you suggest that being aw 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 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 and how about bed bugs?
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 and every scientist and 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 cost of these other ones are more expensive?
It was the most efficient.
Now, is that worth it?
Are the the lives of those people worth being being a charter member of the Sierra Club to you?
I I'm not gonna 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 three dollars a gallon of gasoline can drive further because if the gallon of gasoline is ten bucks a gallon, the rich it doesn't matter.
They're willing to pay ten dollars.
What is it about m marketplace economics you don't get, Dan?
I mean, let's be i if in fact having a car that goes thirty or forty 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 uh imports.
And so what this this particular bill is going to do is gonna put Detroit out of business.
And that's why even Democrats like John Dingle 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 when 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 give 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 uh the ice age scare in the 1970s, raising the gas tax, uh, going after utility companies, going after big oil.
Now they think they've got an excuse, except they don't.
They don't.
Two thousand and seven could be the year of global cooling.
You know, in two thousand and seven, hundreds of people died uh to 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 uh or coming out of the little ice age now in the middle evil 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 point seven degree 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 CO two 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 uh January, last January, uh 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, you had what, 95% of South Carolina's peach crop destroyed in a killing freeze?
Here in the 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 fifteen below on the December seventh.
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 uh conservative fella.
The guy's name is David Whitehouse, and he's got a website called the The New Statesman, or I should say it's on the website of the New State 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 United Kingdom government statistics.
This is kind of interesting stuff here.
I mean, I've heard this before from others who suggest that look, uh, the reason the global warming fanatics want to get Kyoto passed, want to implement all of these these uh economy killing, and 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 CO two 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 my not 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 uh Anwar and and uh the need to uh increase uh uh oil production here in the States and just want to let you know here in North Dakota we're doing our part.
Uh there's they're not calling it a boom.
I think there's some reluctance to call it a boom right now, but um it's every bit as much uh as busy now as it was during the nineteen eighties uh using new technologies coming in.
Uh they're drilling all over the place in in uh old fields and bringing in wells that are making thousands of barrels a day.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
Think think of look, you've got horizontal drilling techniques.
If you take a look at Anwar, there's about nineteen million acres up there, and we could get at it by accessing just two thousand.
A two thousand acre footprint with the new drilling technologies is roughly all we need in Anwar to access, you know, uh 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 three dollars and eleven cents nationwide.
That's up about ten percent.
Now, why is it going higher?
Well, the it's the infrastructure.
Right now it's the oil uh the pipelines here are running at capacity, and 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 in the country since sometime.
1976.
1976.
We almost had one in Arizona this year, and guess who shut it down?
The Sierra Club.
Uh the in I don't know if it was the Sierra Club uh per se, but it was a number of environmental organizations that got so many so many lawsuits going that in effect it's been shut down.
Now we have one of the uh uh local uh Indian reservations here that uh has uh has uh on their uh development plans to build a refinery on Indian land.
And uh 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 sold, that'll be the first refinery built.
Uh look, the dirty little secret is the dirty little secret here is we've got so much we're a wash in oil that there is no peak demand theory uh 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 uh reserves now at 1.4 trillion barrels.
Here in the United States, we've uh 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 eighty-five billion more barrels of oil.
So why is it that that we can't get at it?
Except in, you know, then look, I I'm glad that's going on in North Dakota, but it's going to be i in uh in the grand scheme of things, a smaller than a relatively small fine, wouldn't you say?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Uh but add to that our our uh coal production, our uh coal-fired electricity.
Uh we even have a uh a plant here that that uh 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 uh for uh boosting production out of oil fields.
CO2 is a good thing.
It's uh 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, eighty-five to eighty-six billion barrels of oil.
Anwar has sixteen, not not eighty-five, that's a continental shelf.
Anwar has sixteen 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, fifty-seven 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 of 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 ninety-six percent in every emission, and if you average them out since nineteen seventy.
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 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, accept a lower standard of living, you know, a Jimmy Carter version of energy conservation, put on your cardigan.
You know, we've got an era of malays coming.
Your children are gonna have to make do with less.
Well, 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 uh Finlay, Ohio.
And Chris, you're on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, how are you doing?
Could not be better.
It's New Year's Eve.
Good.
Hey, uh, you know, global warming is global groupthink, and uh the more the candidates like uh Giuliani and uh Huckabee get behind Al Gore and the Kool-Aid line, the more they're gonna see their nominations go up in smoke.
It's not just it's not just Huckabee and Giuliani.
I think uh unfortunately, I believe when they had that famous hand raising episode in in Des Moines of the debate, it was uh Romney and McCain also got their hand up.
I mean, 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 the leftists educate, what do you think the polls are gonna show?
So what you need are candidates are gonna buck the trend and say, wait a minute, how about some evidence here?
Well, that's yeah, that's why I predict uh Fred Thompson will win for the Republicans, but uh the reason I called is uh what I think the who I think the Democrats will elect.
And uh I call it a bold prediction because I really haven't heard this uh this put out there yet.
But I think uh Edwards is gonna win.
And the reason Was that an ambulance I just heard?
Oh, never mind.
Well, the the liberals may need one right now.
What I began thinking, and we know how liberals think.
They think in terms of uh classes and in terms of uh 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 uh Hillary Clinton, both of which they look at as victims.
So in order for to pick a viable candidate, one that can actually win, I think ironically, the Democrats are gonna 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 uh I think it is in the Democrat Party even today.
He's also the most liberal.
I mean, he John Edwards is the rankest of political candidates amongst the bunch because he is a he's the Elmer Gantry of the political arena.
He's he's a fall populist.
But he's and he keeps wanting to prove his bona fide ease by by advocating more and more socialism.
So he will do whatever it takes, and if that means destroying the the economy of the country, he doesn't care.
He's been suing for front and profit for years.
But you you're 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 uh Yeah, the Democrats.
What what did the Roosevelt agricultural department do to black farmers in the South when FDR was running the country?
There is a history of of this sort of class viewpoint.
I mean, the liberal liberals today and the Democrats today love to cast aspersions upon everybody else, and we're the enlightened ones.
We're we're multicultural.
You know, as long as ballots are are cast in a closed environment, as long as we have secret ballots, what you say may have some some currency.
Now, I'm not altogether certain that that that's going to happen, but I I do think that 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.
And once he gets through the South, I think he's really going to carry some momentum.
Interesting point, I gotta move.
Interesting point, Chris, I 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 uh when it comes to his policy prescriptions, and the Democrats, which are wholly owned wholly owned subsidiary of Marxism, uh are going forward the real thing.
Uh so that may be part of it too.
And I hope, frankly, they do, because I think Edwards would be would be probably the easiest to beat in a general election.
Anyway, thanks for checking in.
I appreciate it.
Let's uh move onward and upward.
Let's go to Houston, Texas.
And Emmett, you're on the Jason, or 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 on 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, air quality standards.
If everybody drives an eight miles 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 uh gasoline consumption for the same air quality standards.
There 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 uh there's no particulate in it?
Well, most people would say no.
They're they're willing to say, you know what, uh, 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 with some of this in order to have food on the table, and which is why poor countries are that are have the most uh environmental problems because they literally it costs money to be pristine.
So the problem I have the problem with the environmentalists in my view is they they have no idea what the cost would be.
The other aspect of your point is I would bet you a uh you know, a steak dinner or a beer at Gilly's that that you take a look at the EPA figures from Houston in two thousand and seven, go back to nineteen fifty-seven, sixty-seven, seventy-seven, 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 uh we continue to grow, you know, 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, let me I'll tell you what I would do legally or philosophically.
I would go back to the old common law.
Prior to the the the advent of a one-size-fits-all EPA, which I think has been uh in many ways uh overkill, uh 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 uh 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 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 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 uh 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, you'll get to give you an example.
Miles per gallon that you talked about.
There is absolutely no evidence, Emmett, zip zero nada, that increasing the miles per gallon uh the the cafe standards as Congress just did in this ridiculous energy bill that the entire thing should have been vetoed, uh, will will reduce consumption.
In fact, you know what happens when miles per gallon goes up?
People drive more.
So uh, you know, I 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.
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