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June 20, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:32
June 20, 2008, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Well, there's more good news, bad news for MSNBC, I guess.
The ratings still in the tank.
But hey, Keith Olbermann's Pap smear came back negative.
So that's the good news for MSNBC.
I don't know.
Hi, everybody.
I am Jason Lewis.
Uh good to be in the uh Till of the Hun chair at the Limbaugh Northern Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies and Greetings conversationalists across the fruited plain.
We are up and running.
Rush.
One more day off.
He'll be back on Monday, but it is Friday, and Friday can mean only one thing here on the Rush Limbaugh program each and every Friday.
Live from the Southern Command in Sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday!
Your chance to converse you, the rank amateur.
Your chance today to converse with, well, another rank amateur.
Sounds like those studios at MSNBC a little bit, doesn't it?
Phone lines as always 1800-282-2882.
That's 1800-282-2882.
Rush Limbaugh.com.
Check it out.
Well, let's see here.
What's going on in the world of politics?
Barack Obama, the change candidate.
This really is quite amazing.
Barack Obama is the candidate of change, right?
So he has advocated a windfall profits tax from the 1970s, regulating business, bashing business, get out from the war in Iraq and cut defense, raise taxes on Social Security payroll taxes, turning that program into a welfare program, not a pay as you go pension, as FDR envisioned, and now orchestrating his campaign appearances, telling two Muslim women they can't sit behind him.
Yeah, this is the uh candidate of change, and then yesterday, yesterday, the reformer, the campaign finance reformer, says he's going to be the first candidate since the campaign finance law was passed not to take matching funds with the spending limits in the general election.
This is change?
You've got to be kidding me.
Now he said he's gonna take, he's gonna blow off the spending limits because he expects smears and attacks from Mr. McCain's allies.
Meanwhile, move on.org, their political action committee, not bound by spending limits, are starting to run these anti-MCain TV ads, co-sponsored, according to today's Wall Street Journal by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, otherwise known as your government at work.
You pay the taxes to fund the government, and then they take that money and they give it to the union to fund, well, more government.
Good work, if you can get it.
You know, this this Obama flip-flop is nothing new.
You knew that he was going to flip as soon as he started raising big time money.
He raised some what, 265 million dollars?
Three times the public limit for the general campaign.
If you accept public financing, if you accept that check-off on your income tax, and you get public dollars, which is quite frankly an affront to me anyway, you've got to abide by spending limits.
That was the quid pro quo from the do-gooders, from the sainted Ralph Nader.
Here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna get money out of politics.
Uh didn't work.
You've got George Soros, you've got Moveon.org, and you've got Barack Obama with 265 million dollars.
Can someone say hypocrisy?
I thought these people were the good government folks getting money out of politics.
There is only one solution for this.
Now, McCain, by the way, said he was going to abide by the what, uh uh 84, well no, I want to say 84 million, I think is the spending limit between the convention and November's vote.
And if you abide by that 84 million dollar spending limit, you get the public financing.
Even George W. Bush, who had a plenty of money in 2000, 2004, abided by the spending limits.
Barack, the first, the first candidate ever since the law was passed in the 70s not to take matching funds for the general election.
The candidate of reform.
There's only one way to get money, or shall we say, tainted money, i.e., 527s who don't report their donors out of politics, and that's to do away with all campaign finance law.
Let the market take over.
There should not be one limit, not one on anybody's contribution to a political candidate on one condition.
They disclose it all immediately on the internet.
People forget, before the the Watergate wounded Nixon had to capitulate on campaign finance reform.
You had Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota bring down Lyndon Baines Johnson with the help of three or four millionaires.
The guy was not wealthy, but he had two, three, four, five millionaires behind him, and he brought down a president.
That's letting the little guy into the system.
You know, a lot of rich people may not want to run, but they might want to affrut you.
And if that's the case, all of a sudden the little guy, not some television star, or not somebody who's personally wealthy, to which the campaign limits don't apply, thanks to the uh the I think it was Buckley v.
Valeo, the Supreme Court decision saying you can't restrict somebody's free speech if it's their own money.
So regardless, the only way to get out from under this hypocrisy and out from under this ridiculous attempt at pseudo-sainthood is to say, no, I don't care if if somebody's going to be my sugar daddy if I'm running for Congress, as long as I disclose it, and people can take that into their decision making process.
You know, shine a little light on this, and that way everybody has a shot.
You round up a couple of rich folks, you can run.
Right now, only the rich can run, only the rich, or only someone who who uh has been in the media, has high name ID, anyway.
We are actually limiting access with campaign finance.
It was always it's the epitome of how regulation fails, by the way.
The Democrats' answer to everything is regulation.
Now they want to regulate uh the commodities futures, the oil speculators.
That'll work.
It never works.
Political regulations are no match for the market.
Uh let the market work, campaign finance hasn't worked, so we ought to get out from under it before it does any more damage.
But I I get a kick out of this because you know, if you take a look at all his his platitudes, his pontification about, and this is like the Clintons, you know, the most ethical administration in history, uh, Barack and his friends are hardly people you really want to uh have your kids look up to.
I mean, the idea now he's raising all this money online, and therefore he's blowing out his campaign finance uh uh plan, the limits that he said he would abide by.
A guy you can trust, the candidate of change.
There's nothing here different.
He's orchestrating his appearances by getting those nasty Muslim women out from behind the stage.
This is just politics as usual.
And if you want more evidence.
How about Fannie Mae's Jim Johnson?
Now, this was the guy who was vetting the vice presidential candidates for Barack Obama.
He was a former CEO of the mortgage financing giant, Fannie Mae, which is a disaster in the making because of our government guarantee or implicit government guarantee.
Uh now this guy would buy a bunch of mortgages that say, oh, I don't know, countrywide financial didn't want.
He didn't want those mortgages, they got to resell them.
It's kind of like the liquidity that speculators bring.
So they resell the mortgages.
Fanny coming off a $10 billion accounting scandal, keeps the mortgages.
They buy them in the secondary market to keep the market liquid.
Problem is when they hold those mortgages and don't pass them through, don't slice them up and pass them through, then they can pay off the loans they've borrowed.
Fannie has to go, they borrow money, and they get a lower rate because everybody knows the taxpayer will bail them out.
They're quasi government agencies, if you will, for lack of a better description.
So they get a lower rate of interest, they go out and buy mortgages.
Oh, what happens if the mortgages go bad?
What happens if interest rates go up and the value of the mortgage goes down?
A mortgage is a bond, and bonds drop when interest rates go up.
Then guess who's on the hook for billions and billions of dollars, maybe as much as twenty-five billion, according to one estimate, you and me.
That's why so many Democrats in Congress are fighting not to reform Fannie Mae.
But I digress.
The point is, countrywide was selling all of those mortgages to Fannie Mae.
The former CEO of the mortgage financing giant, Fannie Mae, which is going to end up in a government bailout if we don't if we don't raise the capital requirements there, was this fellow, Jim Johnson.
Well, Jim Johnson, along with Kent Conrad, gets a below market interest rate from countrywide financial arranged by its CEO, along with Chris Dodd.
This is the campaign finance reform, ethics and government crowd.
So now we have the specter of who knows if there was a quid pro quo, but Fannie under Johnson, buying all these mortgages for countrywide, then getting a sweetheart deal, a below market interest rate mortgage, you know, like Chris Dodd did and Kent Conrad did for his million dollar beach house.
They got All these sweetheart deals from countrywide financial.
Johnson had to resign from the Barack Obama campaign.
This is change.
This is the epitome of Democrat politics as usual.
In fact, if you take a look at the latest filing from the Federal Election Commission of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election donors, now corporations can't contribute, but they can have PACs.
And a corporate PAC includes individual members of the corporation, employees, owners, individuals, immediate families, that sort of thing.
And they can I'm not going to say strong arm, but you'll get an email from the boss, here's our corporate pack.
Why don't you contribute?
But you don't have to.
So if you look at all of those individuals of various corporations through the PAC contributes, the top ten Barack Obama campaign donors, Goldman Sachs, University of California, UBSAG, JP Morgan, Citigroup, National Amusements, Lehman Brothers, Google Inc., Harvard University, and the Sydney or Siddley Austin LLP.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong.
Is there not a 300 billion dollar housing lender bailout working its way through Congress?
Democrats in the House, Chris Dodd in the Senate, that would have the effect of bailing out Wall Street.
You know, you've got a lender and it's a bad mortgage, the debtor's ready to foreclose, and let's say that mortgage on the secondary market is worth fifty cents on the dollar.
Under this scheme, they can hand it over to the government for eighty-five cents on the dollar.
The government insures the mortgage on the assumption that they promise uh the debtor promises to pay the rest of it off.
Bailing out what would be a write down.
This is an incestuous circle.
You've got Wall Street and you've got the usual liberal inclination to bail out somebody who reached too far, who uh leveraged themselves, bought a house when they shouldn't have.
Classic liberalism, and then you've got all these sweetheart deals from countrywide flowing back, and Fannie Mae picking up the guarantee and now the f uh the FHA.
I mean, if this were a Republican, if this were a Republican administration, Republican players, why I bet MSNBC might even cover it.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for El Rushbow today.
To the phones we go and a few more topics, including this nasty oil speculation.
Thank heavens for speculators.
That's coming up next as well.
1-800-282-2882.
You're on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Once again on this open line Friday, Minnesota's Mr. Wright, that's me, Jason Lewis, in for El Rushbow.
He'll be back on Monday, but it's great to be high atop our tower in the Northern Command with talent on loan from Rush, having more fun than a human being should be allowed.
Always a great time to fill in for the great one, and uh I'm glad that they give me the opportunity, and that you do as well.
1-800-282-2882.
Now, speaking of moveon.org, I mean, the very day Barack Obama announces he's blowing out the campaign spending limits to L with campaign finance reform, move on.org is running anti-MCain ads.
I mean, talk about Hutzbub.
Now, the very day that happens, move on.org with their friends at the Sierra Club.
What did I tell you the last time I was feeling in for Rush?
The environmental movement is the most dangerous threat to freedom right now.
Why?
Because everybody knows terrorists are bad.
Everybody knows, in their right mind, taxes and regulation do not produce wealth.
Everybody knows these things.
There's a vibrant opposition.
Up until now, there hasn't been been much of a vibrant opposition to the environmental movement.
Amazing what $4 a gallon gasoline will do.
But the president of the Czech Republic, President Klaus said, look, the threat to freedom is no longer socialism, it is environmentalism.
These people are hellbent on destroying American tradition to the extent that that includes private property rights, and that's why we have a takings clause in the Constitution.
Obviously, we envision private property.
That was the object of government to the framers.
You can read the Federalist Papers and Governor Morris and all the proclamations.
The first object of government is the protection of property, not the redistribution of it.
And yet that's exactly what environmentalism does.
I mean, they literally want to change the way we live, the light bulbs we use, how far we drive, what kind of cars we drive, how big a house we may have, what kind of transit we'll be forced to ride on in socialized transportation as opposed to free market transportation.
That's why it's a danger.
The new urbanism, the smart growth, urban growth boundaries, which says if you live in Portland, if you live in Charlotte, we're gonna literally put up these de facto boundaries that say, guess what?
We're simply not going to allow development outside of this.
We're gonna force everybody back into the uh into the sit into the city.
We're gonna do for the suburbs what we liberals have done for the city.
Destroy them with high crime rates, high rates of taxation, and crummy schools.
You know, this is why you're seeing urban growth boundaries.
They don't want people to escape.
And that's environmentalism.
And finally people are starting to see it.
Well now, with the Sierra Club, and if this isn't more evidence, I don't know what is, they have teamed with their friends at Moveon.org to have an internet petition making certain we don't drill off the coast, 200 miles off the coast.
You know, the folks in Brazil are celebrating.
180 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, what could be one of the largest, perhaps even the largest oil find in the world.
They don't know yet.
You know what the folks in Brazil are doing?
They're saying we're number one, or we're going to be number one.
We're celebrating.
There is no other country on the face of the earth that denies its own citizens access to its own resources, except the United States of environmentalism.
That's what's at stake here.
I mean, we're talking about supplanting Middle East oil.
If you want to do that, now there's a world market for oil, so don't get too don't get too hept up on, you know, we can be self-sufficient and uh we're gonna r eliminate foreign dependence.
I'm not frankly too concerned about that.
What I'm concerned about is the lack of the supply on the world market that is driving the market to price oil in the out years higher than it otherwise would, which brings us to speculation.
I had I almost fell off my seat.
You know, I was watching uh some uh cable news network the other day, and they were highlighting the fact that since the Democrats are totally getting smeared on this issue.
You got a Gallup poll, you got a Wall Street Journal NBC poll, all the polls now show that the American people want to access their own resources.
They want to drill a hundred miles off the coast.
You can't see the oil rig gang.
Katrina didn't elicit any oil spills, the new technology has never been safer, or do you want to go on living with a lower standard of living thanks to environmental defense, the natural resources defense council, and the Sierra Club.
The choice is clear.
Barack Obama says windfall profits, go after speculators.
The rest of the sane people in the world say, well, you know, if we're short on supply and demand is stagnant or rising, the only way to get the price down would be to increase supply.
This is this is rocket science.
No, it's not.
This is old Alfred Marshall, supply and demand curve, economics 101.
So they're bankrupt on their response to this, and we're finally getting over the environmental hump.
We can actually defeat these anti-capitalists.
We can defeat these busybodies who block progress in the name of Mother Earth.
We can do it if we stay the course.
So they're bankrupt and they're going back to this new bogeyman they found.
Speculators.
Why, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Senator Maria Cantwell and Company from uh Washington, you people ought to be proud out there, wants to regulate, wants to regulate uh domestic commodity futures trading.
The commodity futures trading commission, they say is too lax.
There are no action letters to overseas energy trading platforms and the like.
So they have a hearing.
And they have bring up all of these anti-market people to say it's the speculators that are driving up the price of oil.
It's not supply and demand.
That's not it.
It's a speculators.
Folks, are you sitting down?
You'll never guess who they brought up to testify.
You'll never guess who the idiots at MSNBC in their fatuous ways thought would be a good sound bite.
Are you ready?
Try George Soros, one of the greatest currency speculators of our time.
Now, let me get this straight.
They want a hearing on the on the vagaries or the the nastiness of speculation, uh, how deleterious it can be.
So they bring up George Soros, the great currency speculator.
What did he do?
He shorted the British pound for one day for a billion dollars, something like that.
These people have no shame.
Now let me tell you what speculation is.
Speculation is the marketplace.
This is a little bit like Nancy Pelosi saying the president's plan to drill off the outer continental shelf, a hundred miles out, fifty miles out.
You won't see it, folks.
His plan, though, could have been written by the oil companies.
Now that is the same thing as saying the president's plan could have been written by, well, American capitalists.
And we'll have none of that here as long as I'm speaker.
I want the oil companies to drill.
I want them to profit.
Profits are good.
Truth of the matter is there's really no such thing as a profit.
Profits are the salaries to investors.
And if a company doesn't have a profit, it gets no investors.
The oil companies get no money, and there's no oil.
Is that a good idea?
Speculation is the market.
And what the speculators are doing in driving up the price of oil is simply saying, you know what?
We're betting on the environmental cartel to keep the supply down.
And as long as they are as powerful as they are, we think the price is going to go up and up and up.
It's a signal.
It's a forward pricing mechanism that's vital to the markets.
All right, here we go.
1 800 282 2882 on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Excellence and broadcasting network up and running for an open line Friday in New York City.
Joe, you are first up today, and welcome to the show.
Hi, Jason.
Hi.
Say uh you're talking about Obama suddenly going for the uh non cont whatever you call it, non-contribution uh.
Well, they just blew out the campaign finance reform spending limits, right?
Yeah.
Well, you know, suddenly it seems to me that big oil is trying to make oil the central issue of this election via the high prices that they've been tying for this moment for two years now.
So big oil is actually a Bill Clinton fan.
Big oil's a Bill Clinton fan?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, by your own standard, because in the nineteen nineties, oil was so underpriced, inflation adjusted, it was much cheaper than in the seventies or the eighties.
So the the the manipulators, speculators in big oil, must have dropped the price, undervalued it all throughout the nineteen nineties to get Bill Clinton elected and re-elected, huh?
No, they just raised it now.
It's kind of like the one they had in the 70s, the oil crisis.
Yeah.
Yeah.
After uh as they came out of that crisis, uh suddenly I noticed brand new stainless steel gas trucks all up and down the coast.
So let me let me get this straight.
The windfall profits tax that Jimmy Carter imposed had no impact on somebody's incentive to drill or produce.
Uh you had a whole host of of OPEC problems in the nineteen seventies, had runaway inflation.
All of that had nothing to do with it.
It must have been the oil companies.
But you you you've actually skipped over my point.
If in fact the oil companies are manipulating for the benefit of defeating a Democrat today, then what were they doing by keeping the prices so low throughout the nineteen nineties?
And by the way, oil was a very poor investment compared to the rest of the market in that decade.
Why were they doing that?
Would they like Bill Clinton?
No, and what happened was the the uh the Republicans pretty much sold America to the Chinese and the Chinese then the Chinese became rich, and then they started to get all the oil, and now they're jacking up they're they're they're gouging us on top of the all on top of the increased uh demand of the gouging.
How do you know do you know how the commodity markets work, Joe?
You live in New York City.
I mean, New York, Chicago, the head of the trades.
I mean, you ought to know something about it.
What's the price of uh uh bushel of corn today?
It's gone up quite a bit.
Gone up quite a bit, about almost eight dollars a bushel.
What was it uh a year ago?
I don't know the exact number, but was it three or four years ago?
I mean, a couple of years ago it was two dollars a bushel, two fifty a bushel, it's gone up eight much faster than the commodity even of oil when you in percentage terms.
Now, is big farm gouging us, manipulating us?
I I think we're I think we're missing the point.
The point is what Eisenhower warned us about beware the military industrial complex.
Right now, we've got the military helping big oil get big oil.
That's not even ours.
Yeah, right.
That's the military industrial complex being too big, and they have they have a monopoly now.
They can do whatever they want.
You know you're not obviously you're not going to be persuaded by facts, my friend.
I mean, John F. Kennedy spent much more on the military than any president since then or since uh LBJ anyway, about fifty percent of the federal budget.
We're nowhere near that, twenty percent of the federal budget.
So that industrial complex of yours is actually shrunk in real and aggregate terms.
I could I could tell you all the facts and figures.
The world consumes eighty-seven million barrels a day.
We only produce eighty-five, eighty-six.
It's a simple supply and demand.
But if you've been watching Oliver Stone movies, if you're reading Michael Moore, there's nothing I can say to you, Joe, except some folks are living proof we still haven't won the war on drugs.
In Chicago, Dan, you're next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi there.
I think I'm part of the problem.
Um I live in Michigan and keep my house with propane.
And what my propane company allows us to do, all its customers is to speculate and buy their propane that they need for the winter during the summer when the price is low.
Exactly.
And when demand goes up in the winter, I save money.
In fact, I save about six hundred dollars over the last couple of years doing that, which I guess in the windfall profits on double A bad.
I'm at the gas pump the other day, right here in the People's Republic of Minnesota, and I noticed a couple of people brought gas cans to the pump and were filling up their car and then filled up a couple of gas cans.
Oh, yeah.
And you know what the first thing I thought of, Dan?
First thing I thought of is why there's a couple of speculators.
What are those guys doing?
They were betting that the price was going to go higher, so they were going to get the inventory now.
They're speculators.
If you've got a business in Chicago, Dan, let's say you're a wholesaler or a retailer, and you buy inventory, and you're gonna sit it on the shelves in the hope of reselling it.
You know what we call that?
Speculating.
Right.
Yeah.
It is the market.
Let I mean, let's disabuse ourselves of this notion that there's the market, and then there are speculators.
Any wholesaler or retailer is betting that the inventory they buy put on their shelves, a, they can resell, and B, they can resell at a higher price.
That's speculating, and it keeps a liquid market going.
The the virtue of speculation is twofold.
As Dan points out, it allows insurance.
If you didn't have speculation, the farmer would have to wait until October to get his price for corn or soybeans or anything else, pork bellies, orange juice, whatever, whenever the the market came to fruition, they wouldn't be able to lock in today those eight dollar a bushel prices or seven dollar a bushel prices.
So it's an insurance.
If you go, for instance, i if you decide as a a seller you're gonna go short on corn futures, which have been driven up by this insane ethanol policy because we're diverting inefficient fuel or in or efficient food, corn, to inefficient fuel.
But regardless, if you go short as a seller, uh and and you're you're betting that the price might go lower in the fall, so you're gonna lock in today's price.
That's an insurance contract.
We wanna we want to regulate that out of existence.
We want to do that.
Second of all, this is crucial for liquidity.
Imagine if there were no speculators.
I told you about a secondary market in in everything, really.
Think about certificates of deposit.
Uh think about student loans.
Think about almost anything.
If you had to wait, if you had to wait until you actually had to sell your product to the end user, the price would be lower, and you'd have a hard time finding them.
What speculators allow, what traders allow, and this is why they're a key function in the liquidity of markets, is for you not to have to wait.
They're the lubricant.
So a farmer can go to the grain bin and say, I'm gonna sell it right now.
I'm gonna lock in the price.
Instead of waiting till October, see what the price is, then finding somebody who's actually going to use the corn.
Is that what we want to do?
Why is oil any different?
It isn't.
In Orlando, Florida, Jim, you're next up on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, how are you doing?
Doing fine, sir.
How are you?
But I'd like to let you know that I'm I'm a veteran of DAV from World War II.
Republican all my life.
And I went to bat for Bush uh both Bushes.
And the last one I worked for George W. Uh I've I've worked for him for eight years, and I mean worked for him and rooted for him and voted for 'em, and uh I was real proud of them.
But now he is letting me down on a couple of issues, and I can't understand why, and he won't tell us the truth.
I wish he would let us know the facts and don't give us this thing about, well, he's trying to uh work with the Democratic Party.
So stupid when it's in his in his last uh year, and here he is giving us that that stuff.
So anyway, I know where you're going with it.
My point was that why he doesn't tell us it's the money.
There's no question I've heard recently about what's going to happen to our economy and everything else if the price of gasoline goes down.
Well, obviously he has the power because of his dad putting that embargo on the drilling and so forth.
Well, that's that's half right.
And he he could he could actually open up the drilling tomorrow, or you know, at least the law.
I understand that he could, that he has the authority as president.
There are fundamentally two moratoriums on offshore drilling, and I think Anwar as well, but offshore drilling for sure.
And the two moratoriums are a the executive order, the ill-advised executive order that the environmental president uh Bush 41 wanted to be worshiping at the shrine of the Sierra Club, which has gotten us into this pickle.
Uh that executive order of which you speak could be lifted by this president, and you're right.
It should be, but primarily for symbolic reasons because the other moratorium is a congressional ban.
Now remember, Congress overturned Anwar in 1995, and Bill Clinton vetoed that.
Had we gone in in the mid-90s, we'd be getting a million barrels a day out of one one hundredth of the land in Anwar.
One uh excuse me, one one hundredth of a percent.
We're talking about two thousand acres out of nineteen point six million.
That's the only footprint we need to get ten point four billion barrels out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
By my calculation, that's one one hundredth of a percent of the land that the Sierra Club thinks is is pristine.
It's dark sixty days out of the year.
In the summer it's almost inhabitable because of these flying mosquitoes that are the size of gophers or what have you.
The point the point is you're right.
Uh the president done the right thing at his uh news conference in the Rose Garden this week and simply said, you know what, to show you my good faith, I am going to rescind this ridiculous executive order that frankly my dad signed.
And I'm going to uh open it up, and now the only thing standing in the way of the United States effectively replacing the amount of oil we get from Saudi Arabia with our own resources on one one hundredth of a percent of land in Anwar, two thousand acres out of nineteen million is all they need to access on the horizontal drilling and the new technologies.
The only thing standing in the way is the Democrat controlled Congress.
He didn't do that.
You're right.
Uh he should have.
I'm Jason Lewis, InfoRush 1800-282-2882 on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
We are back on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchor man having more fun than a human being should be allowed.
Filling in for El Rushbo, he'll be back on Monday.
In the meantime, check out Rush Limbaugh.com to the phones we go once again in Washington State, home of Maria Cantwell.
My apologies.
Here's Mark on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Well, I accept your apologies for that.
And Patty Murray as well.
As well, you should have to do that.
Um my point w uh with a campaign uh the public funding for the president presidential election is uh I think when one of the uh candidates work owes their eighty-four million, then it should be given to the other candidates.
I mean, there's an obvious reason why they've given it up, and that's because they've got a ton of money, so let's make it fair and three times as much.
I think he's raised two hundred and sixty-five million.
That's not a yeah, if in fact the pseudo-saints, like Ralph Nader and company want to make it fair, so money doesn't, you know, money's not speech.
In fact, money is speech.
The idea that we can pool our money and have a voice is precisely what the first amendment is all about.
But regardless, uh you're right.
If that's the case and it ought to be equal, then uh we ought to just simply divide all the money they both raise in in you know in half and they each get half of it.
Right.
Yeah, the money's there because the people gave it at through their taxes, you know, when they filed their income taxes, so the money is there, spend it, use it.
But don't shed crocodile tears for John McCain.
Guess who started this?
Yeah.
I mean McCain Feingold.
I mean now he's seen uh his now he's getting his own comeuppance for this silliness called campaign finance reform.
Uh the problem is campaign finance reform, not campaigns or money.
That's true.
I th I think it was funny when Barack said that he wanted to uh you know make sure he had enough money to fight off the attacks and then right away uh move on dot org is attacking McCain, so it it's very, very delicious if you think about the irony here.
And Barack Obama is is quickly proving that far from being the change candidate.
Windfall profits tax, have you people had a new idea in fifty years?
Windball windfall profits like no drilling, raise taxes on the wealthy, raise social security payroll taxes, which we've tried ad nauseum, and it hasn't s f solved the fundamental demographic problem of social security.
What where are the new ideas?
Where's the beef?
The candidate of changed my foot.
James in San Antonio, you're on EIB.
Hi.
How are you doing, sir?
Thanks for having me.
Sure.
Uh No, my only comment is I'm wondering why um nobody has mentioned King Abdullah's comments when uh President Bush was over there a couple weeks ago asking him about supply and demand if he could, you know, open up more open up the reserves, start pumping out more oil a day.
And I noticed he was the one that originally started this speculation talk.
Well, that's not entirely true.
The Democrats have been all over this.
They've been all over uh trading, they've been all over uh the Commodity Futures Trading Commission uh for for uh a number of years.
But look, he's just trying to rationalize the that he wanted to keep the supplies lower than he could.
I think he spit out what, five hundred thousand more barrels.
U what I find interesting about this, James, is that when that happened, the the price of oil actually dropped.
And what was was it the pipeline up in Prudhoe Bay that had a minor disruption last year and you saw oil futures spike?
Guess what, folks?
Guess what?
You'd five hundred thousand barrels, or or you're talking about this minor disruption in Alaska last year that caused the the future price to spike.
They're a pittance compared to what how much oil we could get in Anwar or off the outer continental shelf.
So if those small amounts of oil move the market, can you imagine what the speculation would be if we opened up one one hundredth of a percent of this Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or we opened up, you know, the outer continental shelf.
We've got in total, according to the uh where is the figure I had here?
I want to make certain I'm accurate on this.
There was the Mineral Management Association, I think it's from I'll get it for you in a second here.
Anyway, the the figure was a hundred and twelve billion barrels that we have of recoverable oil.
Now it's not a proven reserve, it's what everybody agrees is probably out there and we could get if we would only do it.
Hundred and twelve billion barrels.
Let's see.
Yeah, here it is.
This is from the Minerals Management Service, M MS. They evaluated the outer continental shelf as well as Alaska offshore and Alaska onshore.
And when you add them all up, when you add them all up, you are looking at this.
The U.S. total reserves, 124 billion barrels on 112, 124 billion, more than the proven reserves of Iraq, Kuwait, UAE, Venezuela, or Mexico.
Now, you don't think that's going to have an impact on the markets?
The speculators right now are betting that the Sierra Club will win, that the environmental cartel will keep its stranglehold on reducing the supply in a period of rising demand.
If for one reason uh the GOP and the Republicans actually discover a spine and start going after the greenies, and by the way, the polls say they should.
All of a sudden, here's what will happen.
If we get on top of this issue, and it looks like we're going to drill, and the legislation moves forward, the speculators will now say we're betting on increased supplies, and you will see the the market price drop.
You don't have to wait for this stuff to come online.
The very criticism of the speculators by the liberal left today is the very reason the price will drop long before it comes online in seven or or eight years.
That's the point here.
I got a break, but I'm Jason Lewis, and I'm in for rush on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Hey, we're getting a few conspiracy calls today.
Always fun on a Friday.
It must be open line Friday, which will continue, obviously.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for rush.
If you really want to talk about the grand conspiracy, my friends, what did Representative Maurice Hinchy of New York say, member of the House Appropriations Committee?
We, the government, should own the refineries.
Then we can control how much gets out to the market.
Maxine Waters a couple of weeks back.
Well now you keep driving these prices up and we'll nationalize the oil industry.
There's your grand conspiracy.
Somebody's removing the price up, some some evil George Soros type world federalist uh control doctor evil lunatic driving the price up so then they can take control.
That would be government.
You know, maybe you know how many times have you heard the energy dilettant, uh Thomas Friedman of the New York Times proclaim the virtue of four five dollar a gallon gasoline in his columns that very few people read.
How many times have you heard that?
This is what the liberal left wants.
They've been pining for high gasoline prices.
Why?
To get us out of our homes, out of our cars, off the highways, in mass transit, Soviet-style condos in the inner city.
This is the conspiracy, and now they're gonna nationalize the oil companies, nationalize the refineries?
Hey, Michael Moore, make a movie about that one.
Oliver Stone.
That would be a good little flick, wouldn't it?
There's your grand conspiracy.
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