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June 13, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:32
June 13, 2008, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, and conversationalists all across the fruited plain.
Time for another summer spectacular from me, Rush Limbaugh, and this, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and it is Friday.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's Open Line Friday.
And we always celebrate the end of the busy broadcast week, ladies and gentlemen, with Open Line Friday.
And this is where you, lovable, irreplaceable, but nevertheless rank amateurs are granted unprecedented power.
That is when we go to the phones.
The content of the program is up to you.
You can bring up whatever you wish.
Here's the telephone number, 800-282-2882.
And the email address is lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
All right, these floods, these tornadoes that are taking place in Iowa, Illinois, and much of the Midwest, they are just, it's amazing to see this.
It's just, the devastation that's taking place in Cedar Rapids and all of these places.
But as I knew, I knew this would happen, and I've been waiting for it to happen.
It's happened.
The Al Gore crowd is out there saying that all these tornadoes prove man-made global warming, that somehow our continued belching of CO2 is causing all of this.
And I want to assure, and this is not meant to mollify anybody in Cedar Rapids.
It will not.
Or anybody in other areas that are catastrophically flooded.
It's not meant to mollify anybody.
It's just once again to stand up and say, stop.
Stop lying to people about this.
The drive-by media and the American left have already done more than their share to depress a majority of people in this country.
It's happening all over the world, in fact, in the UK, the European Union.
There's a story today, I think, in the International Herald Tribune, about how people are madder than they've ever been, and they're getting in fights with their neighbors.
And they're enraged over everything from mortgages to gas prices.
Gee, I wonder why.
Who could it be fanning the flames of all of this attitude adjustment that's supposed to make everybody mad and depressed and feel lost?
And you add the global warming aspect to this.
We're doomed.
We're causing our own doom.
It is ridiculous.
The Center for American Progress Action Fund has put out a short piece of propaganda.
It took seven creative people to write this little piece of propaganda.
I'm not going to read to you the piece of propaganda.
You can imagine what it says.
But the first thing that you need to know, the first thing that I want you to know is that this tornado season and the Midwest flooding is not due to unusually warm, moist air from global warming feeding thunderstorms.
You cannot have tornadoes like this without severe cold air that mixes with warm air.
In fact, the air over the southern plains, the air over the heart of the country, the midsection, that's feeding these severe thunderstorms has been totally normal in temperature and humidity over this time of year.
Instead, the tornadoes and these repeatedly heavily heavy rains are due to a persistent and unusually cold air mass over the northern plains in southern Canada.
Canada still has not heard that winter is over yet.
So you cannot have tornadoes like this without unusually cold air.
It's not unusually warm air over these locations causing this.
It is, in fact, just the opposite.
Now, these wackos at the Center for American Progress Action Fund also claim that the National Climatic Data Center agrees that severe weather events have increased in the United States.
But what will know?
The only evidence of any kind of increase is a possible increase in the frequency of the heaviest rain events.
But strong tornadoes, on the other hand, have decreased significantly in the last 50 years.
You know, it is just, it is a crying shame to have to sit out here and just and just do nothing but refute a bunch of lies that are repeatedly told by leftist activist groups and then amplified and promulgated by willing accomplices in the drive-by media.
Now, you look at all the storm damage.
And again, I'm not saying any of this to mollify anybody because there's nothing that can.
But you look at the storm damage and everybody's saying, whoa, I mean, look at the damage, hundreds of gazillions of dollars.
Let me tell you why that is.
You know why the storm damage increases?
Because the wealth of the country increases.
People acquire more.
They build more.
And thus there's more to destroy.
A lot of people also have no geographical foundation in terms of education.
It's similar to the vanity of humanity and the proposition that I always put forward, ladies and gentlemen, that most people's historical perspective begins with the day they were born.
And in this case, most people think that the geographic formations on the entire planet have been this way from the beginning and are going to be this way forever, that the planet today is the way God created it, and these rivers that are flooding have been there forever.
This is how the flow of rivers changes.
This is how the path of rivers change.
They're constantly, old rivers are winding and shaping and bending different kinds of routes.
And forces far more powerful than us are behind these changes.
We can't control them.
We have to live and work and build near water.
If you look at a map of where most of the population lives, most of it lives near water, either oceans, lakes, rivers, or what have you.
It was necessary back in the old days when technological advances, of course, were not what they are today.
Shipping was the primary form of transportation.
It was necessary.
Well, rivers and lakes and so forth and oceans flood or have hurricanes.
And if you're going to build something near these areas, these kind of things happen.
People are saying, well, it's a 500-year flood.
We don't know that.
It probably is more than a 100-year flood.
But you could have another similar flood next year 100 miles away from Cedar Rapids, and you could not draw any conclusions from it.
And unless these floods happen in the exact same spot year after year after year, you can't draw any conclusions that say we are somehow responsible in causing this.
Now, the 17 heat deaths that have been reported in the East, any heat waves that we have today are nothing compared to those in the late 20s and the 30s.
And besides all that, when heat-related deaths occur, the months after the heat wave typically shows a drop in death rates.
And that's because excessive heat tends to cause premature deaths among the frail and the elderly.
But most cold-related deaths, however, are from accidents, which claim the lives of all ages.
So all things considered, warmer is better anyway.
But the idea that this is related to global warming and that we're causing this, just if you really believe that, ask yourself if you could have stopped any of these tornadoes.
You know, I went on my computer last night when I saw that another line of huge thunderstorms heading through eastern Kansas or western Missouri to Kansas City.
And Google has this pretty neat radar service now called Wonder Map, or Wonder Something, what is it?
Wonder something right.
You can actually get a satellite or Google satellite photo of the area that you want to look at and lay NEXRAD radar over it.
You can zoom in right onto your house to see what the storms are doing.
You can zoom all the way out, see the whole continent of the United States.
And I was watching this stuff go through, and I thought, okay, suppose there are tornado warnings, severe thunderstorm warnings.
What are we going to do to stop it?
There's nothing we can do to stop it.
The idea that we're causing this is just ridiculous.
And I'm really sorry to keep beating a dead horse here, but every time something like this happens, some catastrophic or supposed catastrophic weather event, it just fits the mold of what has been set up, the template that we're causing it.
This is these, these kinds of extreme weather events that never happened before.
Just like the United States and the shape of the United States and the shape of the rivers and the height of the mountains, it's always been what it is now.
All these pristine forests and these pristine redwoods out in California, they've been there since God created a planet.
It's all a myth.
The planet's constantly changing geographically.
It's constantly changing climately or climatically.
It's just, it's, you know, we're stewards here and we're participants.
But it really, it really just gets frustrating sometimes to have to sit here and constantly do nothing but refute the absolute lies and BS that emanate and flow by the hour from the American left and the drive-by media.
And I did a little research on this today, talked to the official climatologist of the EIB network, Roy Spencer.
And by the way, you know something?
This is the last business day before Father's Day.
And if you're still looking for Father's Day gifts, I got some suggestions for you.
We've been talking about them all week long.
Wadamby Spencer's book.
He has a fabulous, fabulous book on global warming.
And Jim Nance always by my side.
He's steadily climbing his relationship with his dad Great Father's Day book.
Of course, there's Allen Brothers.
You can't do any better than that.
And other things I'll be mentioning during the course of the book, because we're here to help.
We're here to provide a public service in all realms of life.
I'm talking to Spencer.
I said, what is your take?
What would you say to people on these floods?
He said, hydrologists really don't have enough information on past floods to really say whether the Cedar Rapids flood's a 500-year event, but it is probably more than a 100-year event.
So I said it would be statistically normal to have a 100-year flood every year, as long as it occurs at a different location every year.
I mean, I lived in Sacramento.
We had a 100-year flood out there.
Hadn't happened since, but it just happened here in Cedar Rapids.
And by the way, here's these floods do not mean, this is another thing.
These floods do not mean that there was more rain on the earth.
Doesn't mean there's more water all of a sudden.
That makes up the entire mixture here of things that equal our planet, our geography, and climate.
It just means that the rain that would normally be spread over a broad area has been persistently occurring over one area.
It also means that other areas have had their rain stolen from them.
You can say that other areas are not getting their normal amounts of rain because it's all concentrated in these one areas.
And one of the culprits is that unusually cold air mass over the northern plains.
This is another thing.
I watch the weather forecasts and I read drive-by media reports and they always talk about the planes.
And I wonder how many Americans know where the hell the planes are.
Do you know where the planes start and stop?
Do you know where the Rust Belt is?
If something is happening in the planes, do you actually know, other than you people who live there, do you actually know where the planes are?
The upper plains, the southern plains.
Anyway, this cold air mass is still lingering in the northern plains, still lingering over Canada, and that's the root of all this.
Anyway, my brief time out here, lots to do.
On Open Line Friday, the left continuing now to set me up as the villain, as the bad guy in the Obama-Michelle Obama so-called tape, where she trashes white people.
We'll be back in just a second.
Stay with us.
Ha, how are you?
Open Line Friday, Rush Limbaugh wrapping up another stellar week of unparalleled and unequaled broadcast excellence.
800-282-2882, if you want to be on the program to the audio soundbites, we go.
This is, I was going to say it's amazing.
It's not amazing.
Had taken a two-week old story, the Drive-By Media and the Obama campaign working in solidarity.
A two-week-old story that has been put to bed.
There is no Michelle Whitey tape.
The Obama campaign has said so.
Nobody is, after the Obama campaign said that, after Obama himself said it, nobody's out there claiming that there is.
The first guy that said there was was a Democrat by the name of Larry Johnson, who was also discredited earlier on when he said that Karl Rove had been indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald.
A Democrat started the rumor.
The rumor was given foundation by another Democrat, the lovable and huggable Bob Beckle on the Fox News Channel's early morning show, Fox and Friends.
And he went out there and he said, I don't like to repeat rumors.
I'm not going to specify what this is, but I'm worried about it.
I'm really worried about this thing.
I'm worried it's going to drop tomorrow, the day after some series of primaries.
Two or three weeks old here.
This, of course, caused some to say, woo, look at what Beckle said.
This has been classic Ropa Dope on the part of the Democrats in conjunction with the drive-by media yesterday.
Jay Carney, who I have spoken to, who has interviewed me, it was earlier this year, and it was in Time magazine.
And he was on the phone, and he was very nice, very polite.
He said, by the way, my wife, Claire Shipman, would love to talk to you for her ABC show.
I said, be willing to talk to her.
AP comes out with this story two days ago or three now that says right-wing bloggers and Rush Limbaugh are spreading this rumor.
Now, other people are saying that I not only spread the rumor, I said the rumor was true, which I never did.
The Obama campaign now has a website refuting all this, and there's my name right there at the top.
And I know frankly why, me and the bloggers.
And they're doing this because they know that the mention of my name agitates their supporters like nothing else does.
Maybe only the president's name agitates them even more.
But here again is a totally fallacious story.
The people in the drive-by media, from Jay Carney to the Associated Press to whoever, know it is a non-story that nobody in the blogosphere or me or on talk radio has ever said this tape existed, has ever said that it was real.
And yet they continue to try to get mileage out of it.
To me, I think it's a very defensive move on their part, trying to keep this alive.
It means they want to distract people from some of the other weaknesses of their little candidate, Barack Obama.
And now there's another rumor going around out there, by the way.
And I got a note yesterday from a fellow talk show host, a friend.
He said, I've been listening to you every day.
I haven't heard you mention the latest rumor on Barack Obama.
I wrote back, I hadn't heard about this rumor till you mentioned it to me.
The rumor is, are you standing by Obama website?
Are you standing by Drive-By Media?
Let me repeat the rumor.
The rumor, and I don't know who's spreading this.
I don't know who started this.
The rumor is that Barack Obama was not born in America.
Therefore, he's not an American citizen.
Therefore, he's not qualified to be the Democrat Party presidential nominee, nor is he qualified to be president.
So right on queue, the Obama website produces a copy of the certification of birth, showing he was born there, what his dad's name was, his name, his mom's name, the time of death, time of birth, so forth.
It was 7.24 in the evening on whatever date it was.
Now, bloggers fear say, wait a minute, this doesn't tell a whole story.
A certification of birth is not a birth certificate.
The Obama campaign may be.
So they are feeding these kinds of things to get people to report these rumors.
It's just like, Obama is a Muslim.
Obama is whatever.
All these other rumors.
They're finally not countering these things.
One of the theories is that the haughty John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, did not respond quickly enough.
And so the truth stuck.
What upset Kerry was was when people were telling the truth.
What upsets every liberal?
What upsets every leftist, upsets every Democrat.
A personal attack is when you tell the truth about him.
So a quick audio soundbite here.
This is Julia.
No, no.
Suzanne.
Sorry.
Suzanne Malvo.
CNN Situation Room on the Obama's new anti-smear website and me.
Barack Obama has had enough.
While he's been dogged by rumors over the internet for months, it was the claim that his wife, Michelle, was on videotape in church, referring to someone as Whitey that propelled his campaign to fight back.
His new website, www.fightthesmears.com, takes on that rumor first.
It cites conservative Republican blogs and talk show host Rush Limbaugh as the sources behind the smear.
They're waiting to use it in October of Michelle going nuts in the church, too, talking about whitey this and whitey that.
The website counters the truth is no such tape exists.
Did you hear that?
Did you hear how they took my comment out of context?
I was describing for you in this audience what supposedly the tape says.
They sliced up what I say.
This is Robert J. Fox or Michael J. Fox all over again.
This is a coordinated effort.
Pathetic though it is, a coordinated effort, but the drive-by, I never said that like that.
I said it, but in the context of explaining what others were saying about this tape.
We never said it existed.
You people are pathetic.
Turn it up.
Bo Diddley.
I had his funeral this week or last week and heard it was a rocking, rocking funeral for the late and great Bo Diddley.
You know, you Obama people, you're going to have to wise up to something here.
And those of you in the drive-by media who are in the tank for Obama, we all know it.
Everybody can see it.
Here's the dirty little secret, you people.
We don't have to make up things about the Messiah.
And you know it.
This is all a deceitful plan designed to create in the eyes and the image of the minds of as many Americans that partake of the drive-by media as possible that every criticism of Obama is a lie.
That's what this is all about.
And the reason they're doing that, because they know this guy is vulnerable on all kinds of things, from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers to Tony Rezco to his lack of experience to the fact that he cannot speak without a teleprompter.
And they're trying to inoculate and present or prevent any kind of criticism of Obama at all.
Can't talk about his mother.
Can't talk about his dad.
Can't talk about his race.
Can't talk about his middle name.
Can't talk about his wife.
Can't talk about Rezco.
Can't talk about his grandmother.
We can't talk about him being liberal.
We can't talk about his past associations.
All that is the politics of distraction, the usual politics that we must change and get beyond.
All those things about Obama are true.
He has a lot of baggage.
And they are trying to suggest that any criticism of Obama at all is just rumors.
It's just truth, just lies made up by the usual right-wing noise machine.
So that's why they're making all this noise about this so-called rumor that nobody on the right ever said they had seen.
Nobody on the right ever said it was true.
It was Democrats that started this for the express purpose of luring a bunch of people in.
And so now that it worked, it lured a bunch of people.
It did not lure me in.
Never once said this thing was real.
Never once said I had seen it.
Never once passed it off as something, but the Democrats all did this.
I want you to listen to how this shaked out, shook out on Larry King Half Alive.
Last night on CNN, he was talking with townhall.com's Amanda Carpenter about Obama's new anti-smear website and me.
Also, Stephanie Miller, waif-like liberal talk show hostess with a dwindling audience.
Well, it's hard to dwindle from nothing, but nevertheless, was also a guest.
A lot of the things on that website blame conservative blogs for perpetuating this rumor about Michelle Obama making this remark, when actuality it was started by a blogger named Larry Johnson, who's a former Hillary supporter on a blog called No Quarters.
Then other people picked it up, but that's where it started.
And so I think that we're going to have a fight over where the smear came from, probably because he made this website that he might not want to talk about.
Stephanie?
Well, you know, but then what happens is then Rush Limbaugh repeats it.
And see, this is the era we're in, or that we're in, Larry, that you have to have a website to refute things that aren't true.
Repeats untruths.
Did you hear that?
Did you hear that?
Larry King says you mean Rush repeats untruths.
This is easily explainable.
Larry King is jealous.
He has been jealous ever since this national program started.
Larry King used to be the so-called king of talk radio when nobody listened to it from midnight to six in the morning.
My show came up.
They moved Larry to the afternoons, three to six, because they found out, maybe we can make money with Larry's show.
Larry Show never made money.
It was a loss leader for mutual radio.
Larry got skunked in his outer radio because of me.
He's never gotten over it.
He's just a jealous little beady-eyed little host here who has a lot of fun talking to people who are two feet from the grave, occasionally gets his liberal bloggers and liberal talk show hosts in there to make him feel at home, but he's just jealous.
I don't take any of this stuff personally.
Hey, the gloves are coming off here, folks.
Gloves are because I do not tell untruths.
Larry King knows it, as do all of the liberals.
They all know it.
So, you know, they want to have a little fun here talking about this and that and the other thing.
Hey, Larry, have you gotten back to a million viewers a night, pal?
And are any of them under 70, Larry?
I love the Prep H commercials.
Okay, to the phones, it's open like dawn.
Dawn's hyperventilating in there.
I've never seen this sight of you.
Get used to it.
Here's Karen in Greeley, Colorado.
Karen, hi, nice to have you on the EIB network.
It's such a pleasure, Fresh.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm a former executive professor of finance at the University of Northern Colorado, the business school.
It's the only business school to get the Malcolm Baldridge Award of Excellence in the United States, by the way.
And I always taught that the premier example of a windfall profit was the real estate taxes that states and localities charge.
A homeowner does everything to increase the value of his house.
They reassess it upwards.
You get taxed more.
That's a windfall tax.
Yes.
And since you are a former executive professor of finance, explain to the audience here.
And if you would, I did this the other day.
I want you to back me up, define a windfall profits that you just did, but put it in actual words.
Well, it's a profit on something that you had no participation in.
The windfall profits, so-called, of oil companies, that's not windfall because that's their business.
So it's just a normal profit.
Right.
But if it's something that you take no participation in, that you had nothing to do with, that's a windfall profit.
Well, a windfall profits tax is portrayed, again, by lying little people in the Democrat Party and the drive-by media as too large and fair.
A windfall profit results from people being screwed, people being shafted by big oil.
And we therefore have to focus and target them and make sure that they pay their fair share of that windfall profit to the lovable and benevolent United States government.
May I make another point?
We moved here from New York City after 9-11 and bought a lovely house.
And it wasn't until seven months later we realized we're on oil and gas.
That's when we started getting checks from an oil company.
I consider myself smarter than a caribou.
If I don't know we're on oil and gas, I doubt the caribou's would know either.
Well, in fact, where the Alaskan pipeline is concerned, one of the original concerns was that the pipeline would upset the caribou population and it would reduce it.
Turns out the caribou have multiplied because they like the warmth that surrounds the pipeline.
And so, well, this is great.
You're absolutely right, Karen.
And I'm glad you called.
You said you're a former professor.
Are you retired now?
Yes.
Well, I spent my entire career on Wall Street.
I was a commodities floor trader.
And the business school here had...
Now, wait a second.
What?
Wait a second.
You may be someone in whom I can tap further information.
Okay.
Commodities trader.
Commodities floor.
Were you a speculator?
No.
Well, yes, technically, because there are two types of trades, hedging, which, let's say, a farmer might do, or a speculator.
And we take the risk away from the hedgers.
So that's what a speculator does.
And yes, I was a speculator.
You were a speculator.
Yes, as a floor trader.
I provided liquidity for people who wanted to do business in various commodities.
Okay, so when you see the latest assault and the most recent assault has come from Senator Lieberman and Senator McCain and Schumer on the speculators as culprits.
And these people are artificially jacking up the price of oil.
And I guess peanuts and soybeans or whatever else.
What's your reaction as somebody who's...
Well, that's stupid.
The first rule in commodities trading is the trend is your friend.
So if the trend is up, any speculator is going to be buying.
But usually when there's a bubble, and I believe we are in a bubble right now, when they break, they break very violently.
And if President Bush could somehow announce that we were going to start drilling in Anwar, for example, I would bet that we would be limit down in oil, or oil would be down $30 to $40 a barrel immediately, just because anyone who had bought on speculation would want to get out.
There wouldn't be enough room getting through the doorway.
Wait a second there, Karen.
I agree with you.
I think if we announced that we were going to drill anywhere, Anwar, the Outer Continental Shelf, or wherever, I think the price would reflect it.
But $30 to $40 a barrel on one day or a week, that's significant because we're not going to drill for 10 years.
We're not going to have any results for 10 years if we go to Anwar.
So they say it may be less than that.
Don't forget, commodities traders look ahead to the future.
So I would be looking at what the trend is going to be.
The trend then will be downward.
So I wouldn't want to be long.
I wouldn't want to own futures contracts, especially over a weekend or overnight.
Maybe during the day, but not overnight.
Excellent.
What's your husband do?
My husband was actually chairman of two stock exchanges until he got blown out of the World Trade Center on 9-11.
And that's why we came out here.
And he was a professor, an executive professor of finance also at the University of Northern Colorado.
Wow, so you now end up buying a house on tracks of oil and gas that you didn't know were there when you bought.
Nobody told you?
No, no.
We didn't understand about mineral rights and all that stuff.
You know, who knew being from New York?
Super quiet.
New Yorkers know everything.
Ask her to Sleewa.
Well, actually, the people out here are very, very nice and very lovely people.
But yeah, apparently the checks kept going to the previous owners.
And when their mail forwarding expired, the oil company tried to find out who and got the checks back.
You mean the people selling you the house didn't tell you that this was...
No, no, uh-uh.
Sonny, it's amazing.
All right.
Well, look, I've got to run here because the time, Karen's been great.
Thank you so much for calling.
Thank you, sir.
Excellent.
We'll be back.
Continue Open Line Friday in mere moments.
Open Line Friday, El Rushbow, and more fun than a human being should be allowed to have doing the job of the Larry Kings of the world, average Americans who are more informed than the so-called Dean of Talk Show hosts on television.
Average Americans who take more time to learn rather than sit in their clichéd waste.
A caller to C-SPAN's Washington Journal today from Myrtle Beach said this about Obama's new anti-smear website and El Rushball.
I want to say something about the comment.
I don't know whether it was from you or from the bloggers or something about Rush Limbaugh starting a comment about the Whitey that Miss Michelle Obama was talking about.
The thing that Rush Limbaugh, he just pointed it out, this was something that Bob Beckle put out on Fox News, and he wasn't sure.
So for you to say that the right-wing bloggers, all people like Rush Limbaugh and these talk show hosts, all they do is repeat what Democrats say.
Nobody ever.
But if you have an average American, they call it a C-SPAN who knows more than Larry King does.
And Larry King makes $7 million a year at CNN.
Everything CNN spends a waste of money.
Get a crew that knows news, you people at CNN.
It's about, aren't you embarrassed after years and years and years of utter embarrassingly defeat by the Fox News Channel and you can't do anything about it?
Do you maybe think it's time to get rid of the tired retread has-bins and get some people in there who understand and know what's going on outside your newsroom?
And by the way, about Obama, if Obama is not accusing people of editing tapes, isn't that what he did?
Obama went out there, accused people of snippeting, taking snippets of Reverend Jeremiah Wright when he was first saying, oh, that's not a Jeremiah Wright.
I know.
I never heard any of that.
And now the Obama people in the drive-by media are editing tapes of me.
Nothing about Jeremiah Wright was edited.
These were from Jeremiah Wright's own sermons and own DVDs at the church.
But I'm on a snipper fire from the Obama camp.
That's exactly right.
Snipper fire aimed at me.
I mean, I'm really, this is quite telling.
I'm an innocent bystander.
I had nothing to do with this.
For two weeks, I had nothing to do with this.
It's so predictable.
These people are just, I'm talking, when I say these people, the drive-by media, leftists, they're just anything but the truth.
Anything but the truth.
And remember, all this is designed to discredit people who tell the truth about Obama.
One thing more on the speculators, and we talked about this earlier in the week.
And I'm glad we had the call from Greeley, Colorado.
She's a former speculator, and she validated what I had told you.
There is a letter to the editor in the New York Times today also.
It is by Donald Boudreau.
Donald Boudreau, Chairman, Department of Economics at George Mason University.
To the editor.
Regarding Senator Lieberman's efforts to reduce speculation, whenever commodity prices behave in ways that government officials dislike, and especially when these prices reflect the costs of ill-advised government policies, such as we can't drill here, officials invariably blame speculators.
This is a conveniently nebulous group of investors whose financial expertise, being greater than that of the average literature professor, enables demagogues to portray them as practitioners of a dark art.
In fact, though, speculation is nothing more than betting on the future course of prices.
If done profitably, it makes resource supplies more predictable and smooths out changes in prices.
A speculator who correctly predicts, say, the price of oil will be higher tomorrow than it is today, buys oil today for resale tomorrow.
That is, he buys oil when it's relatively abundant and makes it available when it's in shorter supply.
He's doing so raises today's price of oil, lowers tomorrow's price.
Without successful speculators, markets would be more volatile and resource supplies less certain.
Speculation done unprofitably, of course, hurts no one as much as it does the speculators themselves.
Senator Lieberman is demagoguing an issue about which he knows nothing.
He was joined by Senator McCain at the town hall event last night in New York City.
An unidentified guy said, prices with oil are skyrocketing because of the stock market, because a lot of people are trading in the stock market for investments to jack up the price and nobody's looking into it.
Why has that happened?
Please, Senator, do something for this.
I believe there needs to be a thorough and complete investigation of speculators as to find out whether speculation has been going on and if so, how much it has affected the price of a barrel of oil.
I also think that the whole international global financial system, the world financial system that we are in, that we need to understand that there's a lot of things out there that need a lot more transparency and consequently oversight.
No.
I am very angry, frankly, at the oil companies, not only because of the obscene profits they've made, but their failure to invest in alternate energy to help us eliminate our dependence on foreign oil.
They're making huge profits.
Oh, oh.
Get somebody who understands economics talking to you, please.
Does it frustrate you as much as it frustrates me?
We got callers to C-SPAN that know more about what's going on in this country than Larry King.
We got average Americans who know more about economics than what Obama and McCain know combined.
And they have supposedly the best and brightest minds surrounding them.
Because they sure as hell don't have them on their own, that's for damn sure.
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