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March 7, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:24
March 7, 2008, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Oh, yeah, it is still cold here at the Northern Command.
I'm telling you, folks, it is freezing in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Russia's Northern Command.
You want to know how cold it was?
Kit and Mike were funny, you guys should ask.
Kit and Mike asking me, how cold was it?
When I was driving into the studio today, on the way in, I saw two squirrels roasting their nuts.
Now, you just do not see that that often.
That's how cold it is.
Hello, once again, everybody.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchorman, Minnesota's Mr. Wright, filling in for America's Mr. Wright, El Rushbo taking a day off, two days off, actually.
Well deserved, I might add.
He's been working hard lately.
He will be back on Monday, even though the king is gone and we are holding down the fort here in the Northern Command.
See, people don't realize that.
Rush has got the Southern Command, but he's got the Northern Command.
He's got command posts all over America, from Milwaukee to Minneapolis to Seattle to San Diego to Dallas.
We just got the Northern Command here.
You see, that's how it worked.
Anyway, even though the King is gone today, it is Friday and the tradition remains.
From the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Live Friday.
That's right.
Your chance, you ranked amateurs, to phone in, call in with your comments, your debate, your discussion with another ranked amateur.
That would be me, Jason, filling in for Rush today.
It is, it is, yeah, it is.
You can be a guest host.
I can be a guest host.
Anybody could be a guest host today on Open Line Friday, I guess.
1-800-282-2882.
That's 1-800-282-2882 on this Open Line Friday, the Rush Limbaugh program up and running.
You know, let me give you up to date on the latest news, campaign, and otherwise.
By the way, before we get to the campaign, apparently, this is getting more interesting.
Curiouser and curiouser, a number of House members were mailed this letter and a photo of the Times Square recruiting station in Manhattan before it was bombed on Thursday morning.
We talked a little bit about this yesterday.
According to House Insiders, quoting the Politico here, House Insiders, the letters were sent, as far as we know now, only to eight House Democrats.
Now, there have been some procedures put in place since the 2001 anthrax scare, so maybe all the letters haven't arrived yet.
But so far, only eight House Democrats from the New York City area received the letters.
Some House aides are telling the press that many more members than that could have received the missives, a 20-page rambling rant.
Is there any other left-wing rant other than rambling?
I suppose a dissembling rant.
Anyway, what's fascinating about this, if it comes out, turns out to be true, that only Democrats are getting what can only be described, frankly, as an ominous threat, really.
I mean, you could say it's a coincidence, I guess, but there's too many things that you can connect here is the fact that maybe the Democrats have created this monster within their own party.
They have kowtowed so long now to the hardcore pacifist, anti-war, anti-Western, anti-American tradition left that they've created a monster within their ranks.
One of the reasons Democrats have had trouble in presidential elections, I mean, believe it or not, Bill Clinton ran as a moderate in 1992, at least before he met Monica, and he won.
Jimmy Carter was the last southern moderate.
Boy, these guys are great con men, aren't they?
But the Democrats, when they run in the primary in the caucuses, they have to appeal to the daily cost.
They have to appeal to moveon.org.
And these people will literally spare no one.
They give no quarter.
They demand outright fidelity, overt fidelity to, frankly, the anti-American viewpoint.
And so you've got these radical groups now, perhaps forgetting about Republicans or mainstream Americans.
They are demanding complete blind loyalty to Democrats.
Talk about, I mean, poetic justice in so many ways.
And, you know, these guys have been coddling left-wing terrorists from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez.
We here in America say Chavez.
Nevertheless, how long can this go on?
I remember there was a survey back in the Reagan era in the Columbia School of Journalism on the most admired leaders.
Now, these were the future anchor men and women, the future reporters for the L.A. Times and the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Oh, okay, I take that back.
The New York Times doesn't have any real reporters, excuse me.
And they said they ranked Fidel Castro, the future journalist, had a higher opinion than Reagan.
So they've been coddling these lefties.
I can remember in the Twin Cities here back in the, what was it, the late 90s, early part of this decade, Kathleen Celia, Sarah Jane Olson, ring a bell, part of the Symbionese Liberation Army on the lamb for a couple of decades, caught in St. Paul.
I mean, remember, the SLA was bombing police cars.
Remember that?
It was really almost the post-Vietnam era.
They just liked violence.
And she was an accomplice.
She's in prison now.
But when they captured her in St. Paul, all of the local liberals came to her defense.
Well, you know what?
Sometimes be careful what you wish for because now some of these radical left-wing groups may be demanding certain things of Democrats.
Barack Obama, forced to decry an advisor's monster remark of Hillary Clinton, the senior foreign policy advisor to Barack, was forced to apologize yesterday for describing Hillary Clinton as a monster.
Does that mean the rest of us will have to apologize?
Hillary Clinton apparently was described as a monster in an interview with a Scottish newspaper.
Now, this is the Illinois senator, of course, Barack Obama's advisor, who has transcended politics as usual.
He believes in decrying the usual dirty politics.
He wants hope and change, narrowing it right down.
I mean, you just don't get specifics like that from anybody, folks.
What do you stand for?
Oh, I stand for hope and change.
Ooh, very provocative.
Nevertheless, they are apologizing now for calling Hillary a monster.
I don't know where that puts Bill.
And 20% of white Democrat voters say they would defect to John McCain if Obama is the party's nominee.
Now, this is according to a Pew research piece that came out yesterday.
I find this fascinating because I have maintained for some time, growing up in a number of union, well, union communities where the unions have been very strong, whether it's, you know, pick your favorite local, they've been very strong.
For all of the talk from the effete elite in the Democrat Party and in the media, how the Republican Party are Neanderthals.
The Republican Party don't want diversity.
They engage in prejudice.
It's been my personal experience.
If you want to see some virulent racism and you take a look at the history of the labor unions in America, that will be your empirical data to uphold what I'm about to tell you.
Go down to your favorite union hall.
Don't wear a bug.
If they catch you, it could be ugly.
But the fact is, there are a lot of rednecks in the modern Democrat labor movement.
I don't want to traumatize anybody.
The truth hurts sometimes.
And now 20% of white working class Democrat voters say they will defect to McCain if Obama is the party's nominee.
Let's have an investigation of this sort of backwards, potentially race-baited viewpoint.
Not race-baited, I guess, a racial viewpoint on the part of the Democrat Party here.
And the more things change, the more they stay the same.
What's this here?
Yes, Bill Clinton earned 700 grand for his foundation by selling stock he had been given from an internet search company that was co-founded by a convicted felon backed by the Chinese government.
Isn't it great to get back to the 90s?
And you know, if Hillary's elected, back to the future we go.
That's one of the things that amazes me about this and why Barack Obama is not exploiting this.
In your heart of hearts, when you're in that booth, we still have secret ballots for now.
Of course, the labor unions don't want that.
If you're voting to organize at your company, they're demanding an open ballot, i.e. pressure, coercion.
But for now, when it comes to electoral politics, we still have secret ballots.
And when you're in there, I got to believe a lot of people, if Hillary is the nominee, are going to say, do I really want to go back to Filegate, FBI files missing, Rose law firm, billing records missing, Billy Dale, the White House Travel Office, Lippo Group, you know, Indonesian Gardeners giving $400,000, Chinese money.
Again, I haven't mentioned Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, any of that.
Do we really want to go back to that?
And that's something that Barack Obama should be exploiting right now, but he is not.
Apparently, Clinton had gotten the non-publicly traded stock from a corporation, apparently an internet corporation.
Boy, has the internet crowd been kind to Al Gore and Bill Clinton.
He gave a speech, and they gave him all this stock.
And then he sells the 200 shares, 200,000, I should say, shares to an undisclosed buyer in May 2006, an undisclosed buyer.
We don't know much more about this buyer other than his first name is Mao Ordencheng.
Other than that, we have no idea who this buyer is.
The William J. Clinton Foundation declined to identify the buyer.
And they're just, well, it's kind of like what Hillary did in the White House, the foundation and the Clinton Library, stonewalling a la Richard Nixon again.
And one more thing on the campaign.
Florida and Michigan in the Democrat process are coming under scrutiny or, as you know, it looks as though neither.
It's pretty assured that neither nominee will go into Denver, with 2,024 delegates needed to get the nomination, so they're talking about having another primary in Florida and Michigan.
The DNC decertified these delegates because they were leapfrogging ahead of a normal process.
Everybody wants to be first, ahead of Iowa, ahead of New Hampshire, and Florida and Michigan said, no we're, we're not going to pay attention to what the Democrat National Committee wants.
We're going to put our primary where we want it.
We're going to put our caucus and or primary where we want it.
And so the DNC says, you can do that, but if you do it, your delegates, as a result of that primary, will not have a vote, won't be seated at the convention.
Now there seems to be unanimity that well, you got to do something about Florida and Michigan, because you can't go in there without having those states represented.
You're going to have the superdelegates.
The politicians, the Democrat politicians, decide this.
Why not let the people decide it?
I'm confused here.
You know what this amounts to, and only in the Democrat Party.
I'll tell you what this amounts to, amnesty for Florida and Michigan.
Only in the Democrat Party could they be considering amnesty for lawbreakers, these states, why should they be seated?
These two states knowingly violated DNC rules, they were told.
If they did this, your delegates will not be seated.
They did it anyway and now they're saying, well, we're just kidding, you're gonna get a vote after all.
This is a harbinger of things to come vis-a-vis the border.
I guess if the Democrats get control, the entire control of Washington.
I'm Jason Lewis on this open line Friday in for El Rushbo behind the golden EIB mic in the Northern Command, your phone calls at 1-800-282-2882 coming right up.
After this short pause on EIB, It is Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm back behind the golden EIB Mike in the Attila the Hun chair in the Northern Command at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Hi, I'm Jason Lewis.
Good to be filling in for Rush.
My thanks to Kid and Mike, as always, for making this go so smooth.
Rush will be back on Monday.
In the meantime, your comments, your concerns, your discussion right here at 1-800-282-2882-First Up Today in Tampa, Florida.
Roger, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network with me, Jason.
Hi.
Jason, how are you doing?
I'm doing pretty well, given the fact it's about five degrees up here.
Oh, okay.
Well, I won't tell you what it is here.
No, do not.
I wanted to take issue with you on your previous comments about seating the Florida delegation.
And where are you from again?
Tampa.
I was making a joke there.
Okay.
The issue here is that the Florida legislature and the state of Florida is a constitutionally empowered entity.
It makes laws, and specifically it's entitled to make laws in regard to the holding of elections, the procedures, and the timing.
Yes, you're right.
The Democratic Party is not a constitutionally delegated entity.
It has no such authority, no such power.
And when a private party is not a-stop right there, hold it right there.
You are quite right.
The primary government unit concerning election law and elections in the United States is the state, the state unit of government.
They control election matters in this country for all practical means and purposes.
There are a few federal issues, as we found out in 2000, but fundamentally it's a function of state government.
However, because they are constitutionally charged to decide when they want a primary, when they want a caucus, does not mean a private organization such as the Democrat National Committee has to abide by that.
They can decide when Floridians will vote.
They cannot make the Democrat Party say, oh, okay, you've got to take our delegates now.
Normally, when a private organization has rules that conflict with the law, it's up to the private organization to change its rules to coincide with the law.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You're assuming there is a constitutional right to be a delegate to the Democrat National Convention.
You're assuming there's a constitutional right to, in fact, choose who the Democrat nominee will be.
There is no such right.
These private organizations make their rules, not unlike the Boy Scouts making their rules.
And it is not up to government to run roughshod over private organizations.
In fact, just the opposite is true, Roger.
Well, wait a minute.
As a taxpayer, I paid to hold an election.
And these people that were elected now have an official status.
They are no longer private individuals attending a convention not covered by statute.
Your beef is with the Florida legislature.
That's where your beef is.
They did what the Democrat Party gave them plenty of warning.
And the Republican Party did this to some degree as well.
And it hasn't come to this particular issue because of the early decision.
But bottom line here is how else are these political parties going to control states from leapfrogging?
We'll be having primaries in two years out.
If somebody doesn't get a handle, if the Florida Democrats are upset, they can form their own party.
I still think it's the government's right to set the date of election.
And, you know, if people, if organizations like the Democratic Party don't want to follow the law, then they probably should organize outside the state of Florida.
Well, what else should the state of Florida pass with regard to edicts for private organizations?
I mean, the state of Florida should set the primary schedule for the Democrat Party.
They should set the primary schedule for the Republican Party.
Guess what the state of Iowa is going to say?
Guess what the state of New Hampshire is going to say?
They're going to say the opposite.
You do not, this is an eternally frustrating thing for me as a freedom-loving American.
You do not have the right.
You are not entitled to have access to private organizations with a particular viewpoint.
You are not entitled to a job.
You're not entitled to compel any particular private organization to do anything in America.
It's called voluntary association.
And you don't have it if the government can say, well, we've decided to make a law to govern your process.
And the same is true for political parties.
We disagree on this.
Roger, have a great time down there this weekend in beautiful Tampa.
Bob in Dayton, Ohio, you're up next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi.
Hello, sir.
Your way.
Yes, you are.
You are.
Are you guys getting it today with snow?
Oh, God, yes.
We're supposed to have four tomorrow afternoon anywhere from 10 to 12 inches.
Well, somebody email Al Gore.
Yeah.
Come on, global warming.
Anyway, my question for you is, it's my observation that the falling dollar is leading the oil price up.
Well, I don't think there's any doubt about that.
There was a report today that suggests we might be reaching another asset bubble instead of the tech stocks, instead of housing.
Now it could be the price of oil because, believe it or not, supplies are up and consumption is down.
The marketplace is working just the way it should.
As gasoline prices go up, U.S. consumption, and to a degree, worldwide consumption is actually down when it comes to oil, and yet the price is $104 per barrel.
I think that is an inflation phenomenon, especially when you consider the price of gold is also going up, the price of corn.
I think corn's at $5 a bushel.
You can go right across the commodity spectrum and you're seeing all these prices.
So if there's an asset bubble, I'm not altogether certain it's just in oil.
It is in all the commodities, which are the other major currency when we debase the dollar.
You can always compare whether we've got an inflationary scenario here by looking at the most solid of currencies, gold probably being the easiest, but you can have, it can be pork bellies.
It can be any other commodity that people flee to in spite of or in lieu of the falling dollar.
So I think you're right, Bob.
I don't think there's any doubt about this.
In fact, if we don't get a handle, as we talked about yesterday, on this, you know, and I got a guy up here that wants to ask me, when did U.S. dependency start?
When did we go to the entitlement mentality?
And I think a clear line of demarcation would be something called the New Deal, when Franklin Roosevelt packed the Supreme Court, you know, the switch in time that saved nine in order to get the New Deal legislation that guaranteed all of these things for us.
But you've got this dependency also when it comes to monetary policy now, believe it or not.
We think we should never have a credit crisis.
We think we should never have a housing price decline.
We think things should always be good.
So we inflate and we inflate and we inflate.
And right now, we're seeing the results of that.
Commodity prices sky high.
That's right.
Talent on loan from Rush this Thursday and Friday, Friday being Open Line Friday, of course.
I am Jason Lewis, Rush Back on Money.
Lots of things to talk about today.
I want to get to health care, this vote demanding that insurers cover under ERISA anyway, mental health issues.
We'll do nothing but raise the cost of health insurance in America.
I want to get to that.
I want to talk about Brett Favre a little later and tie that into the Democrats' redistributionist fantasies.
We've got some mortgage default news going on and the sanctity of contracts.
A ton of stuff coming up on this Open Line Friday.
But in the meantime, your calls as well, 1-800-282-2882.
Let's go to Tracy's Landing, Maryland.
And John, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi.
Hey, Mega Dittis to you, Jason, up there in the frigid north, our northern outpost, so to speak.
Colder than a conservative's heart up here.
Let me put things in proper context.
I'm a staunch conservative.
I'm retired.
I am malt-sipping, sailing, cabana-smoking sailor, you know, and I really enjoy that lifestyle, and I'm concerned right now.
But let me get to the point that I told your screen.
I agree with a lot of the things that you're saying concerning the Democratic Party and everything.
But the one thing I haven't seen, and my colleagues, when we gather around a smoky table playing car, just how we discuss this, it's the unbelievable, awesome disparity in the turnouts at these polls between Republicans and the Democrats.
What I'd like to see is some reference to that every now and then and pump up the troops, get the troops fired up about this problem.
Because if you look at the turnouts, Jason, one could easily conclude that there's some apathy, some disinterest to a certain extent on the Republican side.
Maybe it's because let me get into that because talk radio is taking a beating a little bit for not going or not supporting John McCain.
I mean, they're circling the wagons.
The establishment GOP crowd is circling the wagons saying we should all just shut up and get on board.
And really, the question is always a question of judgment in this.
I mean, we were told to vote for Gerald Ford, that Ronald Reagan was, you know, he was an apostasy to the establishment, that Reagan was a renegade.
He was trigger happy, could not do it, shut up and vote for Ford.
We were told to vote for Bush 41.
Again, you can say that about Bush 43 if you don't like some of his open border policies, if you don't like some of his McCain or Kennedy education policies.
The bottom line is I think conservatives have finally reached a tipping point where they're just saying, look, I'm not going to be fooled again.
If I were to ask you who said this, quote, I believe America is going to enter into negotiations to try to reach a global agreement on Kyoto.
If I were to ask you who said this, I don't think the governor's tax cut is too big.
It's just misplaced.
It goes to too many wealthy Americans.
I'm not giving tax cuts for the rich.
The answer to that for both of those would be John McCain.
I understand that.
That's why conservatives are a bit lukewarm right now.
Yeah, but do you think, well, that's what's bothering me, though, Jason, is because it's the lesser of two evils, quite frankly.
At least there are some attributes of John McCain, some positions he takes that I'm in total agreement with.
True, I disagree with others.
I wasn't a McCain supporter, okay?
But I'll tell you what, I went to the polls and voted.
I'm not telling people how to vote.
Don't get me wrong.
No, no, no.
I'm saying, but, you know, what they have to consider is the alternative, the obvious outcome.
Here's the judgment you need to make.
If, in fact, there is a massive difference between candidates, even if you don't agree with your particular candidate, whether it's GOP or whether it's the Democrat, you're going to vote for them because you're not willing to sacrifice principal for that much damage.
But if the difference between the candidates starts to become blurred, if the Republican moderates get their candidates up there, the rhinos, people are not going to sacrifice their principle for a tiny little difference between the candidates.
And forget about what McCain has said.
I'm just describing why conservatives are concerned about him.
Forget about what he said.
If you look at his record, his quotes, his previous votes on tax cuts, both he and Hillary Clinton were opposed to the Bush tax cuts.
On global warming, both he and Hillary support some sort of measure globally to get a handle on this fictional crisis.
On campaign finance reform, he and Russ Feingold partnering up.
On immigration, he and Ted Kennedy.
He's against waterboarding.
He's opposed to estate tax relief.
Now, you know, the gang of 14 on judges, you say it's a lesser of two evils.
Some people might be asking how much of a lesser of two evils.
I agree.
You're preaching to the choir as far as all those things you just said.
No, the only point I'm trying, I'm trying to cut through all that chafe and this blurring, you know, and all that.
As a staunch conservative, what I'm looking at is, you know, a far, I mean, an extreme left candidate in Barack, a little lesser to the left in Clinton, and, you know, moderate, you know, somewhere around the moderate, you know, a little bit left, some to the right.
I understand.
Look, let me explain this again.
Let me see if I can't explain this again.
There are a number of ways freedom-loving people like yourself and myself, I hope, a number of ways our freedoms and privileges and immunities can be jeopardized.
Obviously, by invading armies.
Obviously, by the terrorist threat we now face.
The war in Iraq is where McCain will be steady.
I think everybody agrees on that.
Those are areas where people say you can't vote for the Democrat.
And I think they're onto something there.
However, your freedom can also be taken away by global warming regulations, by growing governments, by open borders, by a whole host of campaign finance regulations, not a serious enough loyalty to reduction in taxes.
And so what conservatives are saying this time around, I believe, is that we want the whole package because it doesn't do us any good to preserve our freedom internationally if right back here at home, it's going to be consumed by government.
Government is a threat to freedom.
And that's the big debate.
John McCain, what he has to do going forward, and this is his big $64,000 question, does he veerport side already and try to get those independents that the New York Times tells him to get, further alienating the conservative base, or does he come out with a very, very bold, and by the way, one of the things that I've been suggesting is while the Democrats battle it out, and that's certainly good for the GOP, while they battle it out,
McCain ought to be coming forth with conservative, bold proposals, boom, one after another.
And you know what he's going to have to do?
He's going to have to backtrack, do a 180 on some of his previous statements, on some of his previous votes, and back it up by promises and legislation.
Now, if he does that and appoints the right VP, he will get talk radio and he will get people to unite behind him.
But if he keeps listening to the Republicans in name only, if he keeps listening to the establishment crowd, if he keeps listening to the media who say he's got to reach out to the middle, you've got to do something about more education spending.
We've got to have more activist global warming legislation.
This angst amongst the conservatives is not going to go away, and frankly, nor should it.
Thanks for the call in Sugarloaf, Pennsylvania.
Here's Drew gearing up for the April 22nd primary up there.
Hi, Jason.
I have a question for you.
I'm enjoying the chaos that's been going on with the Democratic Party.
And I had a thought because I really don't understand how the delegate system works completely.
Now, obviously, they are going to get to the convention and have to go through the convention to get a candidate.
Now, the delegates that are there, they are not required to actually vote for the candidates that their state voted for.
Well, there are some pledge delegates, and then there are some uncommitted, especially through the caucus system, where those people can switch anywhere along the process.
Because here's a thought I came up with.
Now, in theory, anybody can actually go to that convention, can't they?
And if they want to, they can put their name into the hat to be elected to be given the nomination.
Well, I'm not an expert.
I'm not an expert on the Democratic rules, but once you go two, three, four times, you entertain two, three, four ballots, you do have a free-for-all where anybody could be nominated in a generic sense of both conventions, really.
The likelihood of that is probably pretty small, but conceivably it could happen.
Anybody with enough juice to actually get votes would have been running in the first place.
The reason if Democrats get so tied between these two candidates, they can't decide, and they don't seem to really want to vote for either of them.
What happens if a guy like Al Gore goes there and just throws his name in?
Well, that's simple.
That's simple.
I moved to Australia.
That's not going to happen.
I really do not believe that's going to happen.
Barack Obama and or Hillary Clinton will, or I should say, or Hillary Clinton will be the frontrunner.
They may have a joint ticket.
We don't know about that.
But this thing is going to be settled.
The Democrats know they are in big trouble right now.
They can't afford this internecine warfare that's going on.
We'll be one of those two.
Now, you're right about some of these delegates, but Clinton would have to win 94% of all the remaining pledge delegates to hit the magic number.
So she's not going to go in there, in my view, and perhaps not even if they revote Florida and Michigan because of the Democrats' proportionality or it's not a winner-take-all system.
Even if you lose a primary, you still get a bunch of delegates.
So by almost every analysis, it seems to me, neither one of them goes in there with the 2024.
It will be up to the superdelegates, and they're going to have a, well, hopefully a 1968-style convention.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
You know, speaking of voting, I mean, forget about the Democrat delegate process for a moment, although it is enjoyable to watch these guys going after one another.
The big question is going to be voter fraud in 2008.
A lawsuit filed yesterday in federal court in New York by Latino immigrants seeks to force immigration authorities to complete hundreds of thousands of stalled naturalization petitions in time for new citizens to vote in November.
Can you say deja vu?
Shades of 1996 when all of those applications were expedited so that Clinton could get all of these new immigrant votes?
The class action suit was brought by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Now, you've got a situation here where the people have been waiting for some time for the Federal Citizenship and Immigration Service Agency to finish their applications.
So they're making a due process claim, which is rather odd because while certainly immigrants and illegal immigrants have some due process rights, i.e. you've got to go through due process to make certain they're illegal in that particular case, otherwise you could be punishing an illegal citizen.
They don't have all the rights of citizens.
I mean, that's why we can deport them.
You can't deport a citizen for all practical means and purposes.
So they don't have all of the rights.
The idea that they have the right to make certain these things are expedited suggests to me something's going on here.
And I wonder where the pressure is being put.
Now, remember, the Supreme Court has heard already the arguments, I believe, in getting ready to issue their opinion on the Indiana voter ID case.
A number of lower courts, an appellate court, has upheld these, thankfully.
And I believe the majority of the Supreme Court may be ready to uphold the Indiana law requiring voters to show voter identification.
Naturally, the same sorts of quote-unquote civil rights folks are out there saying this will disenfranchise people to have to prove that they're eligible to vote.
You know, one of the things I've never understood about this in cracking down on voter fraud, and it is ubiquitous in America.
I know people talk about Florida in 2000.
Go to Dade County, go to Cook County, go all over the country where Acorn is being investigated.
What is it?
This Acorn group, the so-called grassroots group that, you know, for a long time in California wouldn't pay their workers minimum wage.
The American Community Organization for Reform Now, I believe, or Associations for Community Organized for Reform Now, some ridiculous acronym.
They have been caught literally registering people ineligible to vote for years.
It is a cottage industry and primarily of the left wing.
And all of the people that trot out these old civil rights shibboleths about, oh, you're disenfranchising people.
Hey, folks, if you allow people who are not eligible to vote, you're disenfranchising me.
You're disenfranchising you, the people that play by the rules.
You're diluting the legal votes.
So cracking down on voter fraud, it's a tall order to suggest it violates the Voting Rights Act, although that's the claim they'll make.
Because you can't disenfranchise legal voters in order not to disenfranchise quote-unquote illegal voters.
If you're getting my drift, in Las Vegas, here's John.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason and I. Hey, Jason, how are you doing today?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm sitting on my patio.
It's 55 degrees.
Do not start with me.
Do not go there.
Hey, I was curious, when did America decide that they wanted to abdicate their rights and freedoms to go to the government, to have the government control everything?
Well, can you say Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
Yeah.
You know, there's two things that happened that come to mind.
Galveston, Texas, in the early 1900s was wiped out by a hurricane.
San Francisco was wiped out by a pretty bad earthquake.
I know where you're going with this.
I don't recall the government coming in and rebuilding and getting everything going.
The people did it.
Was it not October 1871, the great Chicago fire when old Leary's cow kicked over the lantern, so the fable goes?
Yeah.
How did those places get rebuilt without federal disaster aid declarations?
What happened to entrepreneurship?
Well, look, you can't have a flood or a drought for a month without a president of either party holding the press conference, declaring a federal disaster area, and then FEMA goes in there, we rebuild in the same floodplains, and then we wonder why the next time around there's a larger cost when it comes to damages.
I'm at a loss as to why all this is going on.
It just boggles my mind.
Well, let us, we've been co-opted as a people.
I mean, let's go back, maybe, maybe it goes back.
One of the reasons I'm not a big Teddy Roosevelt fan was because he kind of heralded in the progressive era.
Big, bad business has got to be stopped.
You know, don't crucify us on a cross of gold and the William Jennings-Bryant nonsense.
You go right down to the progressive era at the turn of the century was probably the start of this.
It came to fruition with Roosevelt, though, when literally he had to pack the Supreme Court to make certain that every misfortune that befalls any other human being in this country was your responsibility in Las Vegas, John.
And that's where it started.
And it started with a total subversion of what the role of the federal government should be in this republic.
And it started, I could go right through the cases for you.
I mean, there were literally a number of cases involving the federal minimum wage.
There were a number of cases involving Social Security.
There were a number of cases involving all of those where the Supreme Court had said, sorry, this is not in the Constitution.
You may like this program, but the federal government can't do it.
Roosevelt changed the character of the United States, and I don't think for the better.
I got to take a short pause back right after this.
You know, just when did we turn into this sort of collectivized enterprise?
The caller from Las Vegas asked me, by the way, welcome back, Jason Lewis in for Rush on this open line Friday.
I mean, it has been a systematic process, and the Supreme Court has helped.
Obviously, liberal politicians have dreamed of this, to redistribute wealth.
You can go right back to all these decisions, and it's not the same country.
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