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April 11, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:25
April 11, 2008, Friday, Hour #2
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And great to be back on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Thank you, Johnny Donovan.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's Mr. Wright, Minnesota's real anchor man filling in for the big guy Rush, who's out until Monday.
He'll be back on Monday, though, everybody, or in the meantime, check out RushLimbaugh.com.
Phone line stays the same, especially considering this is uh what we call here in the broadcast industry, well, actually just the Rush Limbaugh program, an open line Friday.
That's right.
Your chance.
Well, you got it, except it's via New York.
We've got people in New York, we've got people at the Northern Command, we've got people all over, and you don't know where they are.
Your chance to uh debate, to ask questions, to comments.
Your rank, you, the rank amateur, get to take control of the program, hosted by today, well, another rank amateur, one eight hundred to two eighty two, two eight eight two.
You know, look, I'm all for energy independence.
Let there be no doubt about that.
It would be great.
Although, you know, this whole debate about trade, it is rather interesting.
Some people, and some conservatives even are starting to listen to the Democrat protectionists on trade and think, oh, we need to scale back these trade agreements, we need to do that.
Look, I think it's entirely consistent to be a bit of an immigration hawk, realizing there are other issues involved, like our country's culture, the nature of capitalism, the rule of law on immigration, but I don't know a good answer to put up trade barriers.
I really don't.
And I'll put it to you simply.
If there were a foreign product, an import that could save your life if you were sick.
Oh, would you be in favor of a tariff, blocking that import in the name of protecting domestic jobs and national security?
Of course not.
Trade benefits everybody.
That's the beauty of capitalism.
It's a voluntary exchange, whether it's between you in Florida and California, or between America and Colombia.
And both parties, parties always benefit in trade and in markets, otherwise the transaction doesn't occur.
So to say trade benefits one party over another is just plain silly.
The transaction wouldn't occur if both parties didn't think they got a benefit.
And that's why I don't worry about importing oil, whether it's from Mexico or Canada, our biggest suppliers.
What used to be Venezuela before the commie in training down there, Chavez got his hands on the reins of power and is now using that to export revolution, nationalize private property.
But we've got, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, three trillion barrels of oil.
This whole notion of peak oil.
We're running out of oil.
Jimmy Carter said that in 1977.
We will be out of oil in ten years.
Well, Jimmy was wrong on that and so many other things.
We don't have a peak oil crisis.
Every time they say we do, we find more reserves like we did in North Dakota, as I mentioned the first hour.
Anwar, off the count outer continental shelf.
Venezuela, if we had a friendly regime.
There is no peak oil worldwide crisis.
There is a manufactured political crisis that does not allow us to get at something that would make us energy efficient and energy independent.
Instead, we substitute inefficient fuel, which is nothing more than a tax hike.
And then we hear politicians who get contributions from big agriculture.
But wouldn't it be nice if we had the same scrutiny on Archer Daniels Midland and these global warming companies like GE and Starbucks and Duke Energy?
Same sort of scrutiny on their political contributions as we do on tobacco and oil.
Well, of course not.
We can't have that.
We can't have we can't be consistent.
We need the double standard.
You know, I mentioned trade here.
Hillary Clinton.
Apparently the Columbia Free Trade Agreement has been put on hold, which is really a tragedy.
We have got a Marxist revolutionary with some oil revenue, Mr. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, an avowed enemy of the U.S., expropriating private property, much of it from the U.S., exporting revolution.
He's Castro with oil.
And Columbia is doing their part to stop or stem the tide.
So what do the Democrats in Congress do?
They spit in the face of Columbia.
Well, you want to talk about security and jobs.
If you're working for a caterpillar Factory, you might want to think twice.
I didn't realize this until I read it in the journal the other day.
Caterpillar exports more to Peru and Colombia than it does to Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, talking about off-highway trucks, bulldozers.
You talk you know, 50,000 people that work for Caterpillar in the U.S. will now now probably not have as open a market in those countries as they otherwise would have.
But more importantly, it's a national security issue to stem the influence of lunatics like Hugo Chavez.
And yet Hillary Clinton was asked about this the other day.
Oh, how do you explain the fact that your husband got nearly a million dollars in 2005 giving speeches for Bogota based groups that support the Columbia Free Trade Agreement?
She just said, Well, I can't answer that.
How many angels dance on the head of a pin?
What?
Hello?
She literally did not answer the question.
And then she said, Well, my husband has a point of view on this.
I disagree.
I'm against the Colombian free trade deal.
Everyone is free to express their opinion, though.
Everybody except Mark Penn, who supported this as well.
This really does not redound well to Hillary.
Because, you know, you you've got Clinton and you've got Penn, and you've got these people who who show a little bit of sanity on free trade once in a while, and they support it, and Hillary's running around pandering to the big big labor primarily, pandering to the protectionists just to get elected when everybody around her has a different view.
I think that uh I think that speaks volumes in and of itself.
Let's see what else is going on here.
Katie Couric here.
When will someone admit the truth about Katie Kirk?
Article in the New York Post.
Andrea Pacer.
She said Katie was trotted out to the public less than two years ago and no less the savior of the modern American woman in communications.
And now she's crashed.
Her career has crashed and burned into a wicked witch size puddle.
It's time to say it.
Katie screwed up on behalf of more than just one woman who had trouble reading the teleprompter with conviction.
She screwed up for all of us.
Really?
So Katie screwed up for all women.
I'm not quite certain what this woman means.
Uh, Andrea Pazer of the New York Post, because I mean it's kind of putting a lot on Katie's shoulders.
I don't know what it is about the liberal left.
They can't treat people as individuals.
There are no such things as minority groups.
There's only one minority, and that's the individual.
That's the greatest minority of all.
The individual.
And yet we get caught up in this categorization process of women, blacks, Hispanics, Anglo Saxons.
What does she think that Katie Kirk's fall is somehow I'm surprised she didn't blame the viewers for being misogynistic like Elton John did not long ago.
But then again, what would Hilton John know about misogyny?
So, I mean, it's sooner or later we're going to have a quota system for news anchors, quota system for members of Congress.
There are some in the in minority communities who think that's the case.
They call it categorical representation, that no one should be able to serve a predominantly black district, Hispanic district, female district, than a black, Hispanic, or a female.
Literally a quota system for representation, a quota system for news.
I thought we were a meritocracy.
But apparently this constant uh constant uh baiting of minorities balkanization of special interests is uh tearing us apart, not helping our cohesiveness, as it were.
Follow up to yesterday's program, John McCain, I mentioned yesterday when we were talking about bailouts for uh people who have foreclosed, talking about bailouts for Wall Street, my lazi fair view, of course, is the market is correcting, let it correct, let the companies take their losses, let somebody who's foreclosed upon find a smaller house downsize, and all of a sudden housing prices will stabilize, and voila, we're back to a more normal market.
That's the way markets work.
They self-correct.
John McCain is latched on to a some sort of Democrat light bill now.
He calls it the home program, which would let some homeowners, that means not you, replace their mortgage for one that is more in line with the value of their home.
Does anybody does anybody read the Constitution anymore?
Remember that little line in the Constitution where where it says uh no state shall impair the obligation of contracts.
Remember that?
You know, there's two things fundamentally people learn in law school.
Do not harm other people, tort law, and live up to your agreements, contract law.
That's the basis of our Anglo Saxon legal heritage.
Tort law and contract law.
The federal government and a number of state governments are now set to go in to two individuals who willingly agreed on a contract.
The mortgage is 200,000, 400,000, a million, whatever the mortgage is.
That's the agreement.
Here are the payments.
By the way, we're gonna rewrite this contract after the fact.
If you want to stop commerce in its tracks, if you want to stop anybody from getting a mortgage, this is what you do.
McCain said the plan is designed to reward deserving homeowners, or his staff said that.
Deserving.
That's a euphemism for not you.
So if you're the chump paying your mortgage, doing the right thing, well, you're not behind.
You don't have a problem.
We're not going to subsidize you.
But if you aren't doing that, if you bet the wrong way on housing prices and you bought a second home you can't afford now.
Well, don't worry, we'll come and bail you out, although they do have uh an exception for second homes here, the concept is the same.
And on health care, another I told you so here, gang.
Apparently, in uh one of those lovely single payer systems, whether it be Canada or the UK, uh, there's a problem with waiting times.
I mentioned 17 week waits yesterday in Canada for some procedures, for some surgical procedures and the like.
Now, in the UK, there's supposedly because of this health care system, when you have government fund something, when you have government provide something that's free or subsidized, there's an unlimited demand.
I I made the example or gave you the analogy yesterday if some hamburger shop says, you know, here's free ha hot dogs or free hamburgers, there'd be people lined up around the street.
Some politician would come around and say, look at all the people that need hamburgers.
Therefore, we need a program.
Well, that's their goal for health care.
Make it free.
And sooner or later, people will be lined up.
They'll go to the emergency room to get their hangnail removed.
We're already doing that because fundamentally we have free care with Medicaid and our refusal not to treat, well, non-citizens, for instance.
So they've got this problem in UK where they've got so many people queuing up that they passed a law that nobody waits longer than four hours in an emergency room.
People were going to the emergency room and bleeding, and somebody walked by and said, get to you when we can.
Cup of coffee.
So now they've passed the law, it says, all right, no, no uh nobody waits longer than four hours.
So here's what the ER are doing in the UK.
They're holding people in the ambulances outside the ER because the clock only starts when they walk in or are wheeled into the ER or the emergency room.
I'm not making this up.
This is from the UK telegraph.
Under pressure to meet the four-hour goal, administrators are refusing to let patients enter the ER where the clock would start ticking until the backlogs are cleared.
Last year, more than 40,000 patients sat in ambulances parked outside hospitals for an hour or more before they were allowed to enter the ER and start the clock on their four-hour wait time.
Yeah, but hey, it's free.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for rush on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
1-800-282-2882 on this open line Friday on the Russia Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis, talent on loan from Rush.
He'll be back on Monday to get things going on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network once again.
In the meantime, let's go to Minnesota Becky shoveling her driveway now on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi, Becky.
Hi, Jason.
It's a privilege to be able to talk to you today.
Same to you.
I'm looking out my window and seeing all sorts of snow, and we didn't have school today or last Monday.
More proof of a global warming crisis.
Exactly, exactly.
Well, I wanted to bring up the fact that I had the privilege of attending my husband's annual meeting at work.
He works for the local power utility.
And the company did an excellent job of giving facts and reminding everybody that the cost of electricity is not going to be cheap anymore.
It has been cheap for the past how many years, and now the price is going to go up.
And without getting political in any way, shape or form, when they gave their facts, they brought up the fact that there are several bills in Congress and that are trying to um tax electrical power companies all across the country, and what they want to do is to tax them on their CO2 emissions.
Okay.
And we referred to the Lieberman Warner bill.
Right.
Cap and it's it's what they call cap and trade, where if you're a utility company and you're emitting more CO two than the bureaucrats think is is right, you either pay a fine or you buy a credit from a company that's under their limit.
And oddly enough, Becky, the companies pushing the cap and trade legislation, you know, like Duke Energy and and uh uh uh Beyond Petroleum and Conaco and General Electric and DuPont, all of these groups, that's funny.
They stand to gain from this legislation.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
Well, what I thought was interesting for the average consumer was they brought the fact that this wasn't just the local company saying this, but uh a lot of people have been, you know, putting together facts that the average consumer, if this happens, then yours and my bill will go up anywhere from two thousand to thirty, four hundred dollars per year to pay for this wonderful global warming legislation.
Right.
While you're shoveling your snow today on April 11th.
That's the this is the the unassailable facts.
Uh fossil fuels, oil, coal, natural gas, all of which are relative are are quite clean these days, by the way, but no no matter.
Fossil fuels provide eighty-six percent of the current U.S. energy needs.
Now, to say that something that provides ninety percent of our energy, oh, by the way, overnight, with federal legislation, as well as legislation in your home state of Minnesota last year, which required the utility companies to forcibly adopt renewable sources that costs more is not going to have massive uh you know increases or massive tax implications.
These are taxes.
And when you when they when the government forces a company to charge you more, that's no different than a tax.
And and so to do that, you've got some of the statistics coming in now.
Uh, you know, the art laughers I mentioned, the supply side guru, the economist Arthur Laffold at Laffer just put out a piece last week that this cap and trade legislation could cost the average family ten thousand eight hundred dollars in loss income because as energy becomes more expensive, companies have to pay that, they lay people off, you don't have a job, that's lost income.
The cap and trade is a massive tax.
The National Association of Manufacturers, along with the American Council of Capital Formation, just got done with a study that says the Lieberman Warner bill, that's the cap and trade federal bill you're talking about, would cost the United States one point two to one point eight million jobs by twenty twenty due to higher energy prices.
Energy prices would have ripple impacts on the economy, as I mentioned, and the financial cost would uh would be seven hundred and thirty-nine dollars to two thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven dollars per year by twenty twenty on national households, and that's what your utility is talking about.
Right, exactly.
That's that's potential for the future.
Yep.
And also in our hometown, the good old Sierra Club is coming to protest because the power company is trying to build another coal-burning power plant.
And they don't you see look, they don't want cheap energy because then you might use it and enjoy your life.
They want to drive the cost of energy skyward, then eventually ban it to bring you down to the socialist level with every other impoverished country.
These people, I'm gonna tell you something.
I'm gonna be a little bit radical here.
These environmentalists today are lunatics.
They are socialist lunatics led by one of the great lunatics that it was was a heartbeat away from the presidency, which scares the bejeebers out of me, and they are not going to rest until they have their their environmental noose around every productive citizen's neck in this country.
And for I I just am fed up with this, and I'm fed up with the Republican Party going along with it and their National Governor's Association and the vice presidential wannabes for John McCain.
We've got legislation now, a bipartisan group, here we go again, of twenty senators unveiled a six billion dollar handout, handout to renewable energy producers.
Now these are the companies like GE that are promoting this garbage to feather their own nest.
As I said, there's not there's a difference today in being pro-business.
Democrats are pro-business.
They want to tax you and give subsidies out.
I'm pro-free market.
You want to provide renewable energy, you do it without subsidies.
We've got the cheapest, most abundant form of energy.
It's cleaner than it's ever been in every single category under the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act.
Our air and our water is cleaner than it was ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago.
And yet we are denying to our nation its own resources.
This is a form of national suicide, national insanity in the name of international control.
Because that's what these global warming types, that's what the environmentalists want, and they're not going to rest until they get it.
That's the clear and present danger that we all better be aware of real soon here.
Anyway, we got to take a quick break.
I'm Jason Lewis, 1800-282-2882, more on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network after this.
All right, here we go.
Second hour now up and running on the program.
Jason Lewis in for El Rushbo.
He returns on Monday.
1800, 282-2882 on this open line Friday in beautiful Tucson, Arizona.
No worries about global warming there.
Here's Marlene on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Hi, Jason.
Hi, Marlene.
I'm calling because I heard about Bill Clinton's unleashing on the media about Lambassing Hillary because she misspoke.
Well, I told him I I taught my children that those were actually lies.
But anyway, that's beside the point.
He was saying that it was because she was tired and it was eleven o'clock at night.
Another misspelled because it was eleven o'clock during the daytime in the morning.
But anyway, he said she missed out because it was eleven o'clock at night.
And so she's having hallucinations about Bosnia when she's tired and it's eleven o'clock at night.
How is she going to respond when that phone rings at three o'clock in the morning?
Well, I it's a good question.
What don't you think?
Monica Lewinsky was Bill Clinton's sister?
Which kind of brings in a which kind of brings in a whole different uh angle to this.
Which where I don't want to go.
Right.
Quite frankly.
All right, okay.
All right.
They have very tight family reunions down there.
Yeah.
I mean, uh if misspeaking on both of their parts, he misspoke because he said she only said it one time.
Um but if if it's because she's tired, their whole thing about being ready at the morning, it flies out the window.
If in fact it was three o'clock.
I mean, she apparently she has a problem with the you know AM and PM here, I guess.
Why?
Well, no, he has a problem with AM and PM.
Well, not PM, apparently.
The point here is she is violating the cardinal rule in politics.
When you're in a hole, quit digging.
Right and she keeps compounding these lies with more lies, not unlike her husband.
Now, you know, look, I I think this I think she's in deep doo-doo here.
And I I think um I don't think he wants her to win.
You know, that's funny you should mention that.
It's absolutely do you think can you think of anyone more narcissistic than William Jefferson Clinton?
Can you imagine I'm a better president than you were?
No, I I don't think he wants her to win because he wants to be the only Clinton that was a president.
That's right.
Yeah, I don't think he wants her to win, because if you look at his actions, I mean, because this Bosnia thing had died down.
He was the one who brought it up again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I really d don't think he wants her to win.
Then again, his vice president invented the internet.
So what kind of water they're drinking?
The same water they're drink they're serving at the family reunion.
Anyway, I gotta move on.
Marlene, thanks so much for calling.
Let's go to Bill in Dallas.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, appreciate you taking my call.
Sure.
I'll try to make this quick, but uh I was listening to you earlier, and you said something about balkanization and the separation of interest groups and how everybody's fighting for their own rights, I guess you call it.
Right.
Uh really their incentive entitlement, not their rights.
But anyway, um I was thinking about that, and it's interesting that you said that because I think if we look at history, we could learn a lot about how uh, you know, countries and empires have fallen in the past, based economically or sociologically, whatever.
But looking at the Roman Empire, when they before they fell down, there's obviously a difference between them uh and us in terms of you know, they're an empire, we're republic, etc.
But they were a republican form of government.
And part of their initial problem, or one of the problems that led to their downfall was they had this vast balkanization of people.
Originally Rome was this this land which even when they took over the lands, they gave people a chance to become Roman.
Uh, just like when people came over to the United States, they became American.
You had this Americana or this Romanitas, they kind of parallel each other, and then eventually you had this separation of people groups where everyone starts buying for their own rights to the exclusion of everybody else, as if no one else exists.
And the individual point.
In fact, it's in scripture.
Look at the the lesson from the Towel of Babel or Tower of Babel.
Yeah, absolutely.
W when you try to inject people that are not assimilating and don't have a common consensus on what society should look like with traditions, values, law, economics, you get balkanization.
And it's especially and this is the key here in America, Bill, it's especially more acute here because if you take a look at Europe, it is divided along what?
Nationalities and bloodlines.
Right.
We do not have bloodlines in America.
We we take the months of every place in the co in the world.
That means we have to have one overarching consensus or commonality that we believe in.
And for two hundred years, it has been Western tradition, it has been Anglo Saxon law, it has been private property and capitalism, and what we're doing now is we are bringing the diverse crowd in, multicultural crowd that does not share that.
That is an impossibility for the United States going forward if we don't get the sorts of assimilation to our values, and especially because we don't have bloodlines that have made America great.
Right, and it's it was a huge problem.
And it's it's naive for us to think that we are what we were a hundred years ago where we were melting pot.
Now we're more like a beef stew with every ingredient staying separate.
We're not adopting a common way of life, whether it be through value systems or economic values, etc.
And it's absurd to think that this won't tear us apart if we don't nip it in the bud.
Well, here's a place to start.
How about a common language?
Yeah, a common language or that's a manifestation of what we're talking about.
Societies have common languages.
Well, even common responsibility, because you look again at the Roman Empire, I don't make too much, there's a difference, obviously, but still they had the rise of the proletariat, which was this group of people, this massive group that depended upon the government for everything, and when their income stopped and they couldn't support this massive group of people, next thing you know, you have revolts in in the city of Rome just because people were like, Well, hey, where's our free meat?
Where's our gladiators or our Coliseum?
You know, it's the same mentality here is well now that special interest groups are taking over and people begin to feel entitled because you know we have so much here uh as they did back then.
You have this.
Well, the wealth the welfare state is exacerbating the situation because people are not coming here to experience the American dream and stand on their own two feet, they're coming here for the goodies, and which obviously dilutes this this consensus I talk about, or or the idea of the melting pot.
Now the Roman Empire's a I wouldn't say it's a stretch, but it's a pretty good analogy, but there are other issues there, primarily overreaching.
Right.
You you can't try to control and that's it.
I mean, we we are not an empire, we should not be an empire.
Right.
We're the United States, but we ought to demand a little fidelity to those values and those customs, those Western values that that this nation was founded upon.
And by the way, that's the essence of the immigration debate.
It's not that that immigrants haven't made the country.
It's not that that immigration, quite frankly, isn't good.
I'll be honest with you, that the things that make the uh that make an economy grow are productivity and people.
The more of each, the more of the economy.
The problem is you cannot assimilate twelve million people overnight.
Right, exactly.
And not not just that, but when someone comes over here and th they come, you know, when you come to a country and you and you come because you have the ability to work and build a life for yourself based upon responsibility and hard work, you have invested in that country and your loyalty to it and your appreciation for it is it it will skyrocket beyond that person who comes just to take the goodies.
Best thing we could do in the immigration crisis, single best thing we could do, eliminate the welfare state in America.
Right.
I agree with that.
I agree with that completely.
Thanks for the call, buddy.
Have a great uh great time down there in beautiful Dallas, a great city.
Let's go to Wichita, Kansas, and Rick up next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, Jason, how are you today, sir?
Thank you.
I'm very good.
How are things in Wichita?
Well, kind of gloomy, a little rainy, uh, but I've had the pleasure of talking to Rush.
Now I've had the pleasure of talking to you.
I think you do a good fine job when he he's gone.
Thank you.
I'm calling about the light bulbs.
I went out about a year ago, I started researching how many light bulbs I was using a year.
So I calculated it out and started buying cases of 40 watts, 60 watts, 100 watt, floodlights, everything inconsistent to make sure that I had enough light bulbs left me the rest of my life.
W well wait a minute now, what's the shelf life on an incandescent?
I understand they don't last forever if you don't use them.
Well, the yeah, the they they ain't no there's no uh There's no problem.
No, no problem there.
Because when I went to order 'em, they said, Why are you doing this?
And I said, Well, have you ever read the fine print of your uh fluorescent light bulbs?
It says to only run them four hours a day to meet the warranty for them to last five years.
And I said, I guess I'd have to dial nine one one every time I changed one in case I dropped it, so I could have the hazardous waste material people here to help me clean it up.
Where have we arrived?
I mean, just think about this.
Think about the insanity of what we're talking about.
W we have now arrived at the United States of America.
We have now, you know, they say war is the health of the state uh because everybody's willing to give up their freedom in the sake of winning a war, getting things first.
Right, everybody's apparently willing to give up their freedom for the sake of this fictitious global warming crisis because we are now we are now at a point where the federal government is reaching into your house telling you what light bulb to screw in.
You know, and Jason, it's kind of like in nineteen fifty-two or fifty-three when Khrushchev said it went to the UN and said the United States is going to destroy itself from the inside, and I think that's what we're doing right now.
And big business is getting behind it.
I mean, you've got GE and Phillips pushing this nonsense.
They're gonna make money.
Uh the the the wholesaler may make a little bit more money, and yet you, the consumer, are going to get the short end of the deal.
Right, and I don't like the fluorescent lights I have in my workshop.
So when I come from my workshop in to the house, my li my eyes got to readjust.
And I don't like that light out there, and I said, I'll be doggone if I'm gonna have the government tell me what kind of light bulbs I can screw into my sockets in my house.
Well, go on go online and look up uh Representative Bachman's light bulb choice bill.
And everybody in the country, uh, within earshot ought to get behind that to make a claim and demand that this be removed, if nothing else from this odious piece of legislation last year, th the energy bill, which was quite frankly, was and is and will be a disaster for the United States.
Thanks for the call, Rick.
Good luck on all of that.
I'm Jason Lewis, and I'm in for rush, back with more right after this short pause.
1 800 282 2882, the Rush Limbaugh program up and running for an open line Friday.
I am filling in for Rush today, Jason Lewis.
He'll be back on Monday.
In the meantime, don't forget to check out Rushlimbaugh.com.
Uh back to my old stomping ground, Cedar Falls, Iowa, otherwise known as Vacation Land.
Here's Dave on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Jason.
Hi Dave, how are you?
Great.
How are you doing?
Good show today.
Uh my battery might be running a little low on my cell phone.
I don't want to lose you, so I'll be quick here.
Uh I keep hearing that most of our oil imports are really coming from Mexico and from Canada.
Nothing.
North America accounts for about sixty percent.
That's right.
Yeah, okay.
Well Canada and Mexico are both benefiting greatly from this increase in oil prices.
What a windfall for those companies or for those countries.
We know what's happening in Mexico.
They're corrupt and uh you know, they're not gonna do anything with this money.
But all our money seems to be going to Canada.
We are paying for their health care system through our exorbitant fuel costs, and they still can't provide the services that we provide in this country.
Well, you know, uh we are we have to increase our own taxes at a time when all of our expenses are going up and try to take care of this problem for our entire country.
Well, let me give you an example.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say the next time the University of Northern Iowa, located in Cedar Falls, the Northern Iowa Panthers have a game, they don't charge anything for it.
You think you'd have a sellout?
Yeah.
You know, people and not not only are they not going to charge anything for it, people are going to flock into the unidome and they're gonna get a free hot dog as well.
Uh of course you'd have a sellout.
Well, the same system works with health care.
When something is free or subsidized, you will never ever be able to keep up with unlimited demand.
And so eventually, government run health care or a single payer system results in rationing as they do in Canada.
First, what they do is they start to eliminate the prices to the providers.
And that's what the Democrats want to do in Washington.
They say, Well, here's how we're gonna save Medicare, uh, which is already tapping into general funds, by the way.
We're gonna simply not pay the doctors.
We're gonna not pay the providers.
And pretty soon then they decide, ironically, not to work.
And all of a sudden you've got shortages, and then you're gonna they're going to say, Well, in order to get a handle on these shortages and these global budgets, we are going to tell you, Dave, you really don't need that operation.
You can get by without it.
Besides, you're already fifty.
Yeah, you're like, you know, you don't have that much of your life left.
And they start rationing as they're doing in Canada, as they're doing in the UK in this emergency room example I I gave you not long ago.
So socialism never works no matter how much money you pour into it.
I agree.
The other the other problem that I see with all of this is once they get some of these taxes in place, the programs never go away, or the program goes away, but the taxes don't.
They kill they keep going on, just are redirected into something else.
I know how politicians work.
Uh and I don't like it.
You've got to remember you've got to remember one axiom when it comes to modern day politics and the modern day entitlement state.
The goal is not to have the program work.
The goal is just to get everybody in the program.
Absolutely.
I agree.
Dave, thanks for checking in.
Let's go to Mountain View, California.
Mylan, you're up on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi, Jason.
I hope you're staying warm back there in Minnesota.
Well, I've got a little sore back from shoveling this morning.
Of course, that was right after I did a couple of hours of charity work.
Okay.
Yeah, I got to get out and mow the yard and weed the garden here after I get off.
No, you you.
Anyway, the the comment I had was concerning the uh representative from Missouri.
And the one point that I found most telling and just drives me crazy is when you asked him why they wouldn't drill.
And the answer was the environmentalists won't let us.
Right.
Well, who's running the government, the environmentalists or the representatives?
You know, if if the environmentalists won't let him enact legislation to drill, you know, why not just let the environmentalists run the country?
It seems like they're the ones that have all the power.
They are.
In fact, we have here's the fundamental problem.
We've let the Sierra Club educate the world on the environment and global warning warming, and then a bunch of poll-following Republicans, sadly to say.
Now, the Democrats love this stuff because it's an expedited way to get to socialism.
But Republicans who should know better look at the polls and say, gosh, uh, you know, people like Lewis can talk on the radio all they want.
Rush can talk on the radio all they want.
But the fact of the the fact of the matter is the polls show people believe in this.
Well, they they believe in it because the politicians have thrown in the towel on trying to educate the voters otherwise.
Exactly.
And the Sierra Club on on Anwar.
I did some research, and it turns out that the visitors to Anwar per year are like fifteen hundred to two thousand people.
And only forty-eight, fifty percent of them go to the uh coastal plain area.
Right.
One of the biggest groups that go up there are the Sierra Club, sponsors eight to ten groups a year of about ten people to go up there and get all enthused and indoctrinated to uh continue to push the no-drilling in Anwar.
So the bigger one.
But what's so insane about that, by the way, is you've got nineteen million, uh 19 million acres of frozen tundra, dark fifty-six days out of the year.
No one lives there.
Alaskans want to drill there.
We could r we could replace nearly all the imports from Saudi Arabia with the estimated uh recoverable oil, and you only need a footprint due to the new drilling technologies of two thousand acres out of nineteen million.
Yeah, yeah.
And you gotta who's the radical here.
You've got an environmental group so dogmatic that they won't allow us two thousand acres in frozen tundra.
I here's my view.
Every single trip by an environmentalist or some weaselword politician to the Arctic to watch global warming or Anwar must occur between the months of December and February.
If you want to go up there and look at the the ice melt, go up there now, because the ice is reformed, gang in the Arctic.
You ever notice you don't see any expeditions to the Arctic now or to Anwar now?
We're waiting.
Mylan, thanks for the call.
I'm Jason Lewis on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
All right, coming up next hour, one more hour to go on this open line Friday.
We'll get to your calls.
Uh, Gil from Philly's got a good point on this nonsense called smart growth and new urbanism.
This is the new architecture of urban land use planning due to global warming.
Uh we've got we've got to solve that.
So we've got to tell people where to live and high-rise condos right by a light rail station.
This is happening all over the country, from San Diego to uh to Charlotte uh to the Twin Cities, you name it.
So we'll get to that.
All the while, global temperatures are actually decreasing a bit.
The World Meteorological Organization Secretary General said last week, in fact, he told the BBC that uh the temperatures have plateaued since nineteen ninety-eight, and that global temperatures for two thousand and eight will be cooler than last year.
Why, what's next?
Snow in Baghdad and China?
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