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June 20, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:29
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 rating's 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.
Good to be in the 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 ranked amateur.
Your chance today to converse with, well, another ranked amateur.
Sounds like those studios at MSNBC a little bit, doesn't it?
Phone lines as always, 1-800-282-2882.
That's 1-800-282-2882.
Rushlimbaugh.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 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 going to take, he's going to blow off the spending limits because he expects smears and attacks from Mr. McCain's allies.
Meanwhile, MoveOn.org, their political action committee, not bound by spending limits, are starting to run these anti-McCain 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 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, three times the public limit for the general campaign.
If you accept public financing, if you accept that checkoff 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 going to do: we're going to get money out of politics.
Didn't work.
You've got George Soros, you've got moveon.org, and you've got Barack Obama with $265 million.
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, 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 spending limit, you get the public financing.
Even George W. Bush, who had 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 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 front 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, I think it was Buckley v. Vallejo, 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 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 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.
How they want to regulate the commodities futures, the oil speculators.
That'll work.
It never works.
Political regulations are no match for the market.
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 get a kick out of this because if you take a look at all his platitudes, his pontification about, and this is like the Clintons, you know, the most ethical administration in history.
Barack and his friends are hardly people you really want to 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 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.
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.
Fanny 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 25 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 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 PAC.
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 10 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 Siddeley Austin LLP.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong.
Is there not a $300 billion 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 50 cents on the dollar.
Under this scheme, they can hand it over to the government for 85 cents on the dollar.
The government insures the mortgage on the assumption that 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 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 FHA.
I mean, if this were a Republican, if this were a Republican administration, Republican players, why, why, I bet MSNBC might even cover it.
I'm Jason Lewis in for El Rushbo today.
To the phones we go on 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 in Broadcasting Network.
Once again, on this Open Line Friday, Minnesota's Mr. Wright, that's me, Jason Lewis, in for El Rushbo.
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 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 hell with campaign finance reform, moveon.org is running anti-McCain ads.
I mean, talk about chutzpah.
Now, the very day that happens, moveon.org with their friends at the Sierra Club.
What did I tell you the last time I was filling 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 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 Kloss, said, look, the threat to freedom is no longer socialism.
It is environmentalism.
These people are hell-bent 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 will 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 going to literally put up these de facto boundaries that say, guess what?
We're simply not going to allow development outside of this.
We're going to force everybody back into the city.
We're going to 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 hepped up on.
You know we can be self-sufficient and we're going to eliminate foreign dependence.
I'm not frankly, too concerned about that.
What I'm concerned about 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 almost fell off my seat.
You know, I was watching some 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 100 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 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 Washington, you people ought to be proud out there, wants to regulate, wants to regulate 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 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 the 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 soundbite.
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 vagaries or the nastiness of speculation, 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, 100 miles out, 50 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 company is getting 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 in 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, you're talking about Obama suddenly going for the non-contribution, whatever you call it, non-contribution.
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 1990s, oil was so underpriced, inflation adjusted, it was much cheaper than in the 70s or the 80s.
So the manipulators, speculators, and big oil must have dropped the price, undervalued it all throughout the 1990s 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.
As they came out of that crisis, suddenly I noticed brand new stainless steel gas trucks up and down the coast.
So let me get this straight.
The windfall profits tax that Jimmy Carter imposed had no impact on somebody's incentive to drill or produce.
You had a whole host of OPEC problems in the 1970s.
You had runaway inflation.
All of that had nothing to do with it.
It must have been the oil companies.
But you 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 1990s?
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?
Did they like Bill Clinton?
No, and what happened was the Republicans pretty much sold America to the Chinese.
Then the Chinese became rich, and then they started to get all the oil.
And now they're jacking up.
They're gouging us on top of the increased demand.
They're gouging.
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 a bushel of corn today?
It's gone up quite a bit.
Gone up quite a bit, about almost $8 a bushel.
What was it a year ago?
I don't know the exact number.
What was it three or four years ago?
I mean, a couple of years ago was $2 a bushel, $2.50 a bushel.
It's gone up eight much faster than the commodity even of oil in percentage terms.
Now, is Big Farm gouging us, manipulating us?
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 a monopoly now.
They can do whatever they want.
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 LBJ anyway, about 50% of the federal budget.
We're nowhere near that, 20% of the federal budget.
So that industrial complex of yours has actually shrunk in real and aggregate terms.
I could tell you all the facts and figures.
The world consumes 87 million barrels a day.
We only produce 85, 86.
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.
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 saved about $600 over the last couple of years doing that, which I guess is a windfall profit, so I'm doubly 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.
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 speculating.
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 going to sit it on the shelves in the hope of reselling it.
You know what we call that?
Speculating.
Right.
It is the market.
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 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 market came to fruition.
They wouldn't be able to lock in today those $8 a bushel prices or $7 a bushel prices.
So it's an insurance.
If you go, for instance, if you decide as a seller, you're going to go short on corn futures, which have been driven up by this insane ethanol policy because we're diverting inefficient fuel or efficient food, corn, to inefficient fuel.
But regardless, if you go short as a seller and you're betting that the price might go lower in the fall, so you're going to lock in today's price.
That's an insurance contract.
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.
Now, I told you about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
I told you about a secondary market in everything.
Really, think about certificates of deposit.
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 going to sell it right now.
I'm going to lock in the price.
Instead of waiting until October, see what the price is, and 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?
I'm very getting through to you, but I'd like to let you know that I'm a veteran of DAV from World War II.
And I've went to bat for Bush, both bushes.
And the last one I worked for George W. I've worked for him for eight years.
And I mean, worked for him and rooted for him and voted for him.
And I was real proud of him.
But now he has let me down on a couple 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 work with the Democratic Party.
So stupid when it's in his last year.
And here he is giving us that stuff.
So anyway, I know where you're going.
My point was that why he doesn't tell us is 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.
Obviously, he has the power because of his dad putting that embargo on the drilling and so forth.
Well, that's half right.
And he could actually open up the drilling tomorrow or 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, Bush 41, wanted to be worshiping at the shrine of the Sierra Club, which has gotten us into this pickle.
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 1-100th of the land in Anwar.
Excuse me, 1-100th of a percent.
We're talking about 2,000 acres out of 19.6 million.
That's the only footprint we need to get 10.4 billion barrels out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
By my calculation, that's 1-100th of a percent of the land that the Sierra Club thinks is pristine.
It's dark 60 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 is, you're right.
The president done the right thing at his news conference in the Rose Garden this week and simply said, you know what, to show you my good faith, I'm going to rescind this ridiculous executive order that, frankly, my dad signed, and I'm going to 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, 2,000 acres out of 19 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.
He should have.
I'm Jason Lewis, InforRush, 1-800-282-2882 on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
We are back on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchorman having more fun than a human being should be allowed, filling in for El Rushbow.
He'll be back on Monday.
In the meantime, check out RushLimbaugh.com to the phones we go once again in Washington State, home of Maria Cantwell.
My apologies.
Here's Mark on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Well, I accept your apologies for that, and Patty Murray as well.
As well, you should.
Yeah, my point with the campaign, the public funding for the presidential election, is I think when one of the candidates foregoes their $84 million, that 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.
Yeah, three times as much.
I think he's raised $265 million.
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, you're right.
If that's the case and it ought to be equal, then we ought to just simply divide all the money they both raise in half and they each get half of it.
Right.
Yeah, the money's there because the people gave it through their taxes when they filed their income taxes.
So the money is theirs.
Spend it, use it.
But don't shed crocodile tears for John McCain.
Guess he started this.
Yeah.
I mean, McCain Feingold.
Now he's seen his, now he's getting his own comeuppance for this silliness called campaign finance reform.
The problem is campaign finance reform, not campaigns or money.
That's true.
I think it was funny when Barack said that he wanted to make sure he had enough money to fight off the attacks and then right away move on.org is attacking McCain.
Oh, it's very, very delicious if you think about the irony here.
Barack Obama is quickly proving that far from being the change candidate.
Windfall profits tax?
Have you people had a new idea in 50 years?
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 solved the fundamental demographic problem of Social Security.
Where are the new ideas?
Where's the beef?
The candidate have changed my foot.
James in San Antonio, you're on EIB.
Hi.
How you doing, sir?
Thanks for having me.
Sure.
Now, my only comment is I'm wondering why nobody has mentioned King Abdullah's comments when President Bush was over there a couple weeks ago asking him about supply and demand if he could 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 trading.
They've been all over the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for a number of years.
But look, he's just trying to rationalize that he wanted to keep the supplies lower than he could.
I think he spit out, what, 500,000 more barrels?
What I find interesting about this, James, is that when that happened, the price of oil actually dropped.
And 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?
500,000 barrels, or you're talking about this minor disruption in Alaska last year that caused the future price to spike.
They're a pittance compared to 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 100th of a percent of this Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or we opened up the outer continental shelf, we've got in total, according to the, where's the figure I had here?
I want to make certain I'm accurate on this.
It was the Mineral Management Association.
I think it's from I'll get it for you in a second here.
Anyway, the figure was 112 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.
112 billion barrels.
Let's see.
Yeah, here it is.
This is from the Minerals Management Service, MMS.
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, 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 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 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 in 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, you keep driving these prices up and we'll nationalize the oil industry.
There's your grand conspiracy.
Somebody's moving the price up.
Some evil George Soros typo world Federalist 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 dilettante Thomas Friedman of the New York Times proclaim the virtue of four $5 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 going to 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?
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