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Jan. 16, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:34
January 16, 2008, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
What do you mean?
What am I going to do today?
I'm going to host a program today.
I'm going to deal with whatever comes up on the program today.
You mean how am I going to top yesterday?
Well, yesterday, everybody said, How's I'm going to top Monday?
It happened, right?
We just we just let it flow.
Just let it flow whatever happens out there.
Great to have you with us.
Fastest week in media.
Here we are already at Wednesday.
And I am Rush Limboy, your highly trained broadcast specialist serving humanity and all living things simply by showing up.
It's that simple.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882.
Email address rush.
Or I'm sorry, L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
We've changed the email address.
And is now L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
Boy, the drive-bys, the drive-bys are beside themselves.
With the results of the Michigan primary last night, they cannot get it through their heads.
They're just skunked.
That Republicans actually voted against McCain.
They cannot believe it.
And so now they it's time to trash Republicans.
I don't care what anybody wants to say.
Mitt Romney is now the frontrunner.
That may not last because this is a very, very fluid situation.
But here you have McCain who lost, and nobody's out saying, well, he's got to win.
He's got a wish South Carolina.
She's gonna wish South Carolina is finished.
She's done.
Nobody's saying that.
They continue to say it about Romney in every primary is leading the delegate count now.
I mean, even some of the commentators on our side uh are a little flummoxed and uh and upset about this.
We'll get into uh full bore analysis of the results last night.
It's really not all that complicated, but it is fascinating in just a second.
A couple little stories here I want to share with you before we get into the uh uh meat and potatoes political stuff.
Uh this is from Reuters.
Some elderly adults may be more susceptible to fraud because of changes in their brain that affect judgment and decision making, according to researchers yesterday.
In a series of tests, they tried to identify common traits among seasoned citizens who had difficulty making decisions and spotting anything misleading to determine what makes them vulnerable to deception.
Our uh our research suggests that senior citizens who fall prey to fraudulent advertising are not simply gullible, depressed, lonely, or stupid.
Rather, it is truly more of a medical or neurological problem, said Natalie Denberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa.
This explains it to me.
This explains seasoned citizen Democrat voters.
Susceptible to fraud, susceptible to deception.
Vulnerable to lies and misrepresentations, by the way.
The uh big story out of California, but then I'll tell you who gets credit for raising this uh story about the utility companies controlling your thermostat uh via remote control.
The American thinker Thomas Lifson's bunch and Lifson himself actually got onto this and uh and and made it public.
Uh, even the New York Times uh credited the American thinker on the bottom line is that uh the uh the people in California trying to get this done have canceled it now.
They've they've rolled this back.
There was just too much of an outcry, and so they're gonna table it for a while to have more public comment about this.
Now, they're not getting rid of it all together.
They're gonna discuss it some more, which means they're gonna try to figure out how they can do this next time with nobody finding out about it.
This is who liberals are.
They want to control your thermostat.
You won't have any control over it.
This is California, and this is big government extraordinaire, sloughing the responsibility off to utility companies.
And all of this based on a hoax, a scientific hoax of man-made global warming.
So it's been beaten back for now, but the thing is you can't ever stop fighting these people because they don't ever go away.
And they're gonna be right now, they're gonna be calculating how they can get this done uh without anybody finding out about it next time until it's too late.
Sort of like what the uh the Senate trying to do with the amnesty bill.
Undercover of darkness, no politics involved, no debate, no committee hearings, no nothing, uh, because they knew it would be opposed dramatically if people found out and people found out.
Have you seen this story?
More babies being born in the United States, unlike the trend in Europe.
The uh the birth rate is up for all groups, but the increase for Hispanics is biggest, bucking the trend and many other wealthy industrialized nations.
United States, this is my newscaster voice.
The United States seems to be experiencing a baby boomlet, reporting the largest number of children born in 45 years.
Experts believe there is a mix of reasons.
Listen to these reasons from the experts why there's a baby boomlet in the United States, a decline in contraceptives use.
Meaning not as many people using condoms.
A drop in access to abortion.
Do you believe we are we're we're producing a lot of baby?
Our birth rate replacement levels were suffering.
Uh you factor in abortion, and our replacement birth rates were suffering, and they have been for a while.
We were baby uh barely uh reproducing enough little crumb crunchers to keep the population steady, particularly with all these illegals uh, you know, flooding the country.
So now that good news has to be turned into bad news.
And the bad news is, well, yeah, but there's a drop in access to abortion.
I mean, that that explains it.
How sick.
How absolutely sick.
This is the associated press.
Oh, there's two other reasons.
Why the baby boomlet uh is happening according to experts, poor education and poverty.
So having kids, if you're poorly educated or in poverty, why that's bad.
And of course, minorities and the poor, hardest hit here, not to mention women.
Uh there are cultural reasons as well.
Hispanics as a group have higher fertility rates, about 40% higher than the U.S. overall, and experts say Americans, especially those in Middle America, view children more favorably than people in many of the westernized countries.
What a just say this and chalk it up to experts, and we're supposed to sit here and go, oh, okay.
Americans, especially those in Middle America, you know what the drive by us think of you people in Middle America.
You're not much higher on the scale than those hayseed hicks in the South.
You just like them, except you don't sound like you're from the South, so you're at least a little bit more tolerable.
If you don't sound like these people from Mississippi and Nolans and Alabama.
Iowans don't sound that way.
And Missourians, well, some of them sound that way, but not very many.
Uh so you're a little bit more tolerable.
But you people in the middle America, middle of America, you view children more favorably than people in many other westernized countries.
What is view children more favorably?
Uh Nan Marie Stown, associate professor of population, family, and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University says, Why, yes, Americans like children.
We're the only people who respond to prosperity by saying, Let's have another kid.
We're the only people who respond to prosperity by saying let's have another kid.
So what do we have?
No, it didn't work.
It didn't work with me.
No, when prosperity takes many different forms than uh than having children for me.
Uh what?
I'm Yeah, we are prosperous.
We're prosperous in the middle of a recession.
We're prosperous.
We're having all these kids.
We're very prosperous.
And yet there's a recession descending.
Uh demographers say it's too soon to know whether the sudden increase in births is the start of a trend.
Yeah, we have to wait and see.
For now, I'd call it a noticeable blip, said Brady Hamilton, a static.
You know, this just upsets them All to hell.
And what upsets them all to hell here is their claim that abortion access is more difficult, and that's why we're having too many damn kids.
If you ever doubted the um the uh the pro-aborts uh and what they're, you know, how sick they are in terms of moving their cause.
This story goes a long way to uh helping uh understand that.
The 2006 fertility rate, 2.1 children, the highest level since 1971.
Fertility rates often rise among immigrants who leave their homelands for a better life.
An example, the rate among Mexican-born women in the U.S. 3.2, but the overall rate for Mexico just 2.4, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
Yeah, they're more optimistic about their future here, said a Pew Center demographer.
All right.
Well, that's that.
That's the um that's not the sum total of the non-political news, but it's a good start.
We'll take a brief time out.
We'll take a look at Michigan and the audio sound bites when we come back, sit tight.
Well, you know, it was a Democrat debate last night.
It was out in Las Vegas, it was on PMS NBC, and it was bad.
It was rotten.
Mrs. Clinton was back to looking like Nurse Ratchet.
Uh, all of these people look bored as they can be.
It's a 90-minute debate felt like 90 years, and it was amazing to watch these Democrats sat there and explained in great detail, either with their stimulus package or what they're gonna do to save the subprime market, or how they were going to ruin the United States economy.
And they were doing it with glee.
Now, that's not what they were saying, of course, but that's if you know how to read the stitches on the fastball as do I, then that's exactly what they were saying.
Um bad news for Mrs. Clinton in Michigan last night.
She was the only one, well, I think Kucinich was on the ballot and Gravelle were out of ballot, but those votes don't count in Michigan because there were no delegates awarded.
The uh state has been disqualified by the Democrat National Committee for violating the committee's desire on the date of the primary.
But still the Democrats could vote.
Uh and and Mrs. Clinton, she didn't do that.
Do you realize 70% of the black vote in Michigan voted uncommitted, voted against her?
In fact, you you might say that that Mrs. Clinton, in fact, Meghan Kendall last night on Foxes describing these exit polls before they had called the uh uh Republican side for Romney said, Oh, yeah, Mrs. Clinton was running against Mr. Uncommitted.
And I was thinking that made perfect sense.
You know, single women, single women are one of the targets of Mrs. Clinton.
The poorer the better, the stupider the better, and single women, they are very familiar with that guy, Mr. Uncommitted.
I am that guy.
Well, I have been.
Um by the one other observation, that I got an email note from somebody.
This is actually a great point.
They s they did, by the way, maintain the truce last night in the uncivil war in the Democrat debate.
But remember, one of the things this is all about is uh is Obama trying to capture the uh uh the the magic and the image of Martin Luther King Jr.
Uh and Mrs. Clinton saying, screw that.
Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn't have got anything done if it weren't for a president, Lyndon Johnson.
So you can know all the great civil rights leaders in the world that you want, but without a president that can get things done, it wouldn't have mattered.
And of course, that offended everybody on the black side, because well, how dare you put down Martin Luther King?
And I'm not putting down Martin Luther King.
I'm saying what he did was great, but it wouldn't have happened without LBJ.
So the question is this.
How come next Monday the nation's gonna for the most part shut down for Martin Luther King Day?
How come LBJ Day is not a national holiday?
How come in all of the well you go up to Harlem, Martin Luther King Boulevard?
I haven't found Lyndon Baines Johnson Boulevard anywhere up in Texas.
You know, you just didn't I mean, do we need an LBJ Day now, Mrs. Clinton?
And by the way, Mrs. Clinton, you are no LBJ, and I got no brief for LBJ.
But LB, the only reason the Civil Rights Act passed was because LBJ was able to get some Republicans.
A greater percentage of Republicans in the Senate voted for the Civil Rights Act than did Democrats.
And Hillary Clinton's not going to get Republicans to join much of what uh she wants to do.
All right, On the Republican side, you look at these exit polls on the Republican side last night.
Mitt Romney beat Mike Huckabee among evangelicals.
Now we've been living under a bunch of misconceptions that have been put out there by the drive-bys, and that is that the evangelical vote is monolithic.
And the evangelical vote is mad.
They have been ignored, they have been used, they have been abused, they've been discarded by the Republican establishment.
And so they're flocking, and no pun intended, to Governor Huckabee.
Not in Michigan.
It happened in Iowa, did not happen in New Hampshire.
Did not happen in Wyoming, certainly, and it didn't happen in Michigan.
Romney beat Huckabee among evangelicals.
Romney beat McCain among those who support the Iraq war.
Now, how do you figure, I mean McCain's out there trying to sell his leadership and his prescience on advocating the surge, and yet Romney beat McCain among those who support the Iraq War.
Romney also won big over conser over McCain and conservatives.
McCain got 11% of the conservative vote in Michigan yesterday.
11%.
But in addition to that, Romney won among people who cared more about the issues.
And he came in a statistical tie with McCain, with those people who care more about character.
McCain, you know, his independents and Democrats is who gave him the vast majority of his support, but it wasn't enough.
And this is a state McCain won in 2000.
And the Democrats were free to do whatever they wanted in Michigan yesterday because their votes of the Democrat side didn't count.
So all these moderates and independents that gave McCain Michigan in 2007 could have done the same thing, crossed the line, gone in there and voted for McCain.
They did not.
Most of them ended up voting for Hillary or uncommitted.
Now the drive-bys, uh and even some on our side uh are just beside themselves with this.
Here, listen to Mort Kondraki last night on Fox News election coverage.
He said this about Mitt Romney and a Republican.
His great advantage is that the regular Republican conservatives are the people who rule the Republican Party.
And he seems to be ahead among them in the primary so far.
Really, Morton, why is this a surprise?
I'm sitting here, I'm watching all of this analysis last night, not just on Fox all over the place.
And I, you know, I get sometimes frustrated because I've been saying ever since Iowa and New Hampshire, folks, wait until Republicans start voting in these things.
Iowa, you had a bunch of independents that are allowed to vote.
Democrats in New Hampshire, of course, you could bust in from out of state if you wanted to.
I said, this is these uh the drive-bys are propping up these two guys that Republicans are not going to vote for and are not voting for, and that's Huckabee and McCain.
Wait till we get to states or Republicans to go out and vote and see what happens.
And you see what happened last night.
And yet the drive-bys are stunned, uh, more angry about it than anything.
Somebody even last night said, Well, yeah, this is good for uh Romney, but it just puts him back to square one.
Puts him back to square one.
He has won two primaries, come in second in two primaries, he's ahead in a delegate count.
You have to say Romney right now is the front runner.
Now it's not going to hold up.
Dick Morris has a piece today, the Republican Party's in chaos.
Uh, you don't have anybody that's taking over.
One guy wins here, one guy wins there.
We might not have a candidate or a nominee, Morris says after Super Tuesday on February 5th.
Who knows what's going to happen?
But this the notion that the Republican Party is in chaos, it's the Democrats who are in chaos.
It's the Democrats who can't keep everybody under reservation.
Republican Party only appears to be in chaos because the drive-bys in their pre-analysis have been totally misunderstanding.
Who votes in Republican primaries?
Conservatives do.
And when conservatives dominate a Republican population in a state, guess what's going to happen?
It ain't going to be McCain.
And it's not going to be Governor Huckabee.
And now they're saying, well, you know, Huckabee's a lock to win South Carolina.
Why?
How do we know this?
Well, you know, Mitt's not going to get a Bounce out of uh Michigan, it just isn't going to translate.
Really?
McCain didn't get a bounce out of New Hampshire.
I'd venture so far as to say McCain may be cooked.
Let me join the analysis.
Everybody's saying Romney doesn't win New Hampshire is finished.
He doesn't go on to New Hampshire, why he's done.
If Romney doesn't take Michigan, why he's out of there.
We're never hearing that about McCain or Huckerby.
But what, you know, McCain won Michigan in 2007.
What happens if he goes down South Carolina, which he also, you know, has high hopes for what if he doesn't win there?
His last great hope may be Arizona.
His home state, and that's not even a lock.
Huckabee.
He can't get more than 15 or 16% once you get out of Iowa.
You know, where the death knells for Hookerby.
Huckerby doesn't do well in the South Carolina.
It could be done.
I mean, these people doing the analysis on our side of the aisle and of our side are blowing this big time and they're risking their professional reputations here by uh by getting this so wrong.
They're doing it on purpose because they're trying to depress conservative turnout.
Here's a break, we'll be back.
Democrats are just salivating, along with the drive-by's, overconvincing you that we are in a recession.
Not that it's imminent, but that we're in it.
And last night in the Democrat debate, and I haven't had a chance to read in detail uh the audio soundbite roster.
We might have we got some sound bites of the debate last week.
I gotta tell you something, folks.
I'm really, it was so boring.
Uh and it dragged on so long.
It was a funereal.
I mean, it it just was.
The lighting was horrible.
It would just, it was just it just just it was it was so bad it was good.
And one of the things they kept talking about, they got into arguments, but a stimulus package.
Gotta stimulate the economy.
Hell yes, Limbaugh, we're going into a recession.
So Mrs. Clinton's proposing all kinds of things.
A $70 billion stimulus package.
Big whoop.
She also proposed a freeze in foreclosures, a freeze in uh uh mortgage interest rates and so forth.
She would destroy the mortgage industry.
She would destroy it.
I don't know if she'd actually implement this stuff, but this is the this is the is it it's the epitome of pandering to people in this.
And then, you know, a lot of people are really, really worried that the equity in their house, the value is plummeting, even though they're paying their mortgages, they're concerned uh about this.
I think more so than the price of gasoline.
So the Democrats pander here.
But notice what Democrats or anybody, and people talk about stimulus packages all the time.
The greatest stimulus package on the face of the earth is a tax cut.
It is a tax cut.
I mean, we were talking about health care yesterday with the guy in the last hour that called from Pinehurst, North Carolina.
If you missed it, uh this is the guy that was rather accusatory of me on what he said was my wealth, which insulates me in his mind uh from the hardships of life.
And if I've lost my way.
These things come up periodically, uh, you know, that you're out of touch.
At first, the first time it ever happened was some caller from Nacadochis, Texas.
And his company, you don't have any trouble paying electric bill, you don't know what life's like out here.
And I, you know, I just blew up.
I and I blew up yesterday at this guy.
So I made a hundred thousand dollars one year and my wife don't make any, we don't make anything in that.
Would you just save anything?
You know, a hundred thousand dollars isn't bad.
I never made a hundred thousand dollars until I was over forty.
Well into my forties.
And I just turned 57 last week.
Anyway, stimulus package, best thing you can do is cut taxes.
We were talking about health care with this guy yesterday.
You don't know what it costs, and I guess I do because I pay for it.
I don't want to mess with the insurance because it's a hassle.
I'm lucky.
I've had to mess with it in the past, didn't want to.
Uh I I pay for a lot of other people's health insurance, folks, in addition to my own.
I am an employer.
Don't tell me I don't know this stuff.
But I had an interesting thought.
I want I want some of you to check this next time you have a chance.
Find out how many of you uh just check and see if your property tax every year is higher than what you're paying for health insurance.
Not what your benefit is.
I don't care if your company provides you 80% of your what your out-of-pocket health care expenses are.
Find out if your property tax is higher than your health care.
Yours isn't, Brian.
You know what your property tax.
Well, you must live in a dump.
You bought what?
The house?
Well, okay.
Well, my property tax, I'd be ashamed to tell you.
But it dwarfs my health care coverage.
And I'll bet a lot of people's property tax is higher than what you're paying on health care.
And would you ever stop to think, well, maybe, maybe somebody ought to do something about your property tax and cutting that?
What kind of stimulus would that be?
Or maybe further income tax rate reductions or making these current tax cuts permanent?
Instead of Mrs. Clinton wants to give 250 or 300 bucks per person.
Big whoop.
We've been through this before.
The last time somebody came up with this point, who was it?
George H. W. Bush did a stimulus package?
Or was it a Clinton's?
I forget what it was.
But it was enough to go out and buy a muffler.
You know, for your car.
Another thing with a stimulus package, you know what's gonna happen?
Most people are gonna take it and retire debt with it.
They're not gonna, they're not gonna well, that's what happened last time anyway, statistically.
Um the oh yeah, home insurance here in Florida could be just as much as health care.
And then if you got to go out and get other kinds of insurance, a hurricane and all this, look at your insurance and what that's costing you and what your property taxes are compared to health care, and I'll bet you that you'll be stunned to learn that in most of your cases, not all of you, of course, but in most cases, you're being taxed or charged far more for other things in life than your health care is costing you.
Check that out.
Now, um, here is uh Nora O'Donnell.
We're gonna go back the audio soundbites and the drive-by's dealing with Michigan.
Uh this is well, she says you gotta call them traditional Republicans.
When you take a look inside the exit polls, you see that a major reason is that those considered traditional Republicans turned out in big numbers while independents and Democrats were just not the factor that they had been for John McCain in New Hampshire, or quite frankly, what they were eight years ago in Michigan when McCain beat George W. Bish.
Well, duh.
Why?
You these are supposedly the smartest, the most informed people on the face of the earth, and they are ignorant.
They just assume because they love McCain that everybody else does.
And then when real Republicans finally traditional Republicans, and they say that with disdain, show up at a primary and McCain gets 11%.
Well, the drive-by just can't believe this.
And so they conclude we're all just stupid.
Or we have some kind of incorrect animus, a r uh false animus against McCain.
We don't like McCain for some reason.
When you take a look inside the exit polls, you see a major reason is those considered traditional Republicans turned out in big numbers.
Wonder why.
You people have been driving turnout.
You've been infuriating and insulting Republicans in a whole primary process.
And Republicans finally had a chance to not only tell you what for, but to vote for somebody they really want.
Rather than let you elect our candidate.
And I people know that you're you guys in the drive-bys are doing this because we know when you elevate a Republican, it's not a conservative.
And when you start trying to trash certain Republicans, we know that they are, in your mind, conservatives.
So, you know.
And these people just they're they're they're flummoxed by this.
They just don't understand it.
And to explain it to themselves to start insulting you and me and what a bunch of blockheads we are, and how we we just don't understand how how wonderful McCain and Huckabee are and what they might mean for the country.
Um among evangelicals, here are the numbers.
Romney 34%, Huckabee 29.
Among evangelicals.
Drive-by's don't believe that either.
How can that be?
Why, Huckabee is the think they're all, you know, a bunch of idiots and monolithic.
Uh and they'll respond to all this stuff.
Uh Romney also beat McCain among registered Republicans 40 to 26%.
Drive-by say that could bode well for Ma uh Romney.
Really?
It could bode well that Republicans prefer a conservative to somebody who's not?
None of this is a surprise.
If these people would just listen to me more often, their jobs would be much easier.
They would understand things that they apparently don't.
Now, we've talked on this program on many occasions about our old buddy at the Associated Press, Ron Fournier.
I didn't know until last night that Mr. Fournier, a reporter, also is a columnist for the Associated Press at random times.
And the title of his column is on deadline.
Now, I thought you were either a reporter, or as Bob Woodruff says, a reporter, or you were a columnist, but I didn't think that you combined the two.
Now I know a lot of columnists go out there and report for their columns.
But a reporter is a beat writer following around.
I didn't know you turned those guys into columnists whenever you wanted to.
Nope, nope, nope, it's not analysis, uh, HR.
Here's the editor's note at the end of this piece.
Ron Fournier covers politics of the Associated Press.
On deadline is an occasional column.
Doesn't say Fournier occasionally attempts analysis and usually gets it wrong.
It says on deadline's a column.
You want to hear how this thing starts?
Authenticity lost.
Mitt Romney's victory in Michigan was a defeat for authenticity in politics.
The former Massachusetts governor pandered to voters, distorted his opponent's record, and continued to show why he's the most malleable and least credible major presidential candidate.
And it worked.
Aw dam it, Ron, it's politics.
What are you gonna do?
None of this happens on the Democrat side.
That whole debate last night was a giant pander.
Ron, the whole Democrat campaign is a giant pander.
The man who spoke hard truths to Michigan lost.
Of all the reasons John McCain deserved a better result Tuesday night, his gamble on the economy stands out.
The Arizona Senator had the temerity to tell voters that a candidate who says traditional auto manufacturing jobs are coming back is either naive or is not talking straight with the people of Michigan and America.
Instead of pandering, McCain said political leaders must embrace green technologies.
That's the future.
That's what we want.
Romney jumped all over McCain, playing the fears of voters in a state with a nation's highest unemployment rate.
I've heard people say the auto jobs are gone and are not coming back.
Romney told his audiences, well, baloney.
I'm gonna fight for every single good job.
Of course he'd fight for every job.
So would McCain or any future president.
But how goes on to trash Romney.
Now that's fine.
You know, free press.
But then this guy crosses over, goes back to reporting.
I'm never going to believe another thing this guy says.
Well, that's not right.
I'm just going to filter it through what I already knew existed anyway, a huge liberal bias.
Anyway, uh I must have a take a brief time out here because I just noticed the clock is zipping by.
Your phone calls next after this.
Don't go anywhere.
I don't believe this.
I do not believe that.
Listen to this.
Hillary Clinton has put out a press conference.
Hillary Clinton.
Or a press release.
Hillary Clinton, joined by New Jersey Governor John Corzon and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, discuss solutions for the American economy on a conference call today.
This is absurd.
She's going to have a conference call with two governors whose states are fiscal basket cases to discuss how to improve the economy.
It's worse than absurd.
It is stupid.
And she just had a shocking night in Michigan last night.
I mean, you know, sixty-nine, seventy percent of the African American vote went over there and voted for Mr. Uncommitted.
Not her.
I mean, people in Michigan, you believe this?
Hillary on a press conference call?
Would Jennifer Granholm to discuss solutions to the economy.
Martin in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Speaking of the devil, welcome to the EIB network, sir.
Great to have you here.
Hey, Rush, Megadetto.
Thank you.
Hey, I was curious about your opinion.
Um, I kind of find it as to be like non-conservative, really, for a couple of the Republican uh you know, are are running about Michigan's uh one state recession and what they're gonna do to fix it too.
But that to me that goes right against conservative principles as far as you know, small government versus big government and everything else.
It's I don't see it as being a federal government problem without or you know what uh what specifically you're referring to out there, Martin.
Uh I'm 99% sure Romney and Huckabee uh have both talked about, you know, Michigan's one state recession and what they want to do to fix it and save the you know running down the state.
If you're if you're talking about Romney saying he wanted to inject 20 billion dollars a year of federal money into revitalizing the auto industry, uh is that is that is that what you're referring to?
I guess.
I mean, uh it just sounds to me like popular or populism like you've been talking about, like it just sounds like I don't mean to be don't don't take this the wrong way, but if you're gonna call here and be upset over the injection of big government populism in the campaign and not be able to tell me what it is, I'm a little suspicious.
Well, no, that's that is what it is.
Okay.
You know, I don't blame the I don't blame our state's problems on the federal government.
I I mean I got strong views as far as why we have the problems that we have.
Amen.
Your problem is it's not the federal government, and it's not the president, so I I don't I don't like hearing them running.
Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait just a second.
Wait just a second.
Part of your state's problem could in fact be laid at the feet of the federal government.
Okay.
And that's their attempt to run the auto industry with miles per gallon standards and all these other regulations that they have put on that industry.
I agree with that.
And also the health care mess that is out of control because the government is involved in it.
I know GM and Chrysler Ford, they made all kinds of bad decisions, but they're in the health care business.
They're not in the auto business anymore.
There's so much, and a lot of this you can trace directly to the federal government.
In fact, I've I looked something up the other night.
I uh remember this off the top of my head.
The first implementation of cafe standards, mileage standards, was uh in the in the 70s with uh with uh Nixon during the uh the the contrived oil shortage days, and that's when the federal government started mandating these cafe standards, and at that time, I think we imported thirty-five percent of our oil.
Now follow me on this.
First CAFE standards, 1970, 71, something that we imported 35% of our oil.
Since then, we've had two or three more incremental additions to cafe standards.
And yet, and mileage, by the way, the the the fleet mileage in America's go way up.
If you average all the cars manufactured here and all the cars sold on the highways, you'll find that the average mile per gallon is much greater than it was in the 1970s.
So cafe standards have given us more cars uh and more opportunity for people to want to buy them that get greater miles per gallon than in the nineteen seventies, and yet with the fleet, overall fleet miles per gallon going up, we now import sixty percent of our oil.
Now, is is there a disconnect here?
The cafe standards were supposed to reduce the imports.
Cafe standards are supposed to save fuel.
They were supposed to get people more economical uh uh uh energy expenses, travel costs, greater miles per gallon.
And what happened?
Well, people did more driving.
See, the and and now we're gonna repeat the mistake.
More cafe standards, more demands in the auto business that they produce cars with even greater miles per gallon, and people are gonna be driving more because it's gonna be cheaper at the pump, even though the pump price is going up.
It's only two dollars and eighty cents in the last 40 years, by the way, but still, when you get more mileage, people drive more, and so we're using more energy.
Guess what?
And so we need more imports.
So you might ask yourself a question.
Are these cafe standards actually counterproductive?
We keep doing the same thing, and guess what?
We keep importing more oil.
We're telling ourselves we're saving gas, we're protecting the environment, we're really being good citizens and stewards of the planet, Mr. Limbois.
And yet we're importing twice as much oil today as we did when the first cafe standards were put into place.
What do you think of that?
I'm gonna tell you what's next.
Once these cafe standards don't accomplish anything, once they don't achieve their goal, you know what's next?
They're gonna have to limit the number of cars people can own and drive.
As they continue down this path, they'll do anything but drill, they'll do anything but refine.
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