Second hour now underway on this momentous Monday.
Jason Lewis, Minnesota's Mr. Wright, in for America's Mr. Wright.
That would be El Rushbo.
He's back tomorrow behind the golden EIB mic.
Until then, we'll take our spot at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Just a couple of quick points of this monologue, because we didn't have time for many calls last hour.
I want to get to the calls this segment.
So Bob and Tom and everybody listening, hang on.
We'll get to you in just a second.
But now we get word that Russian forces are moving in on the Georgian capital.
They have taken Gori, which is near the capital of Georgia.
And now remember the history here, friends.
This was, or this breakaway republic, if you want to call it that, in 1991, won its independence as a separate country when the Soviet Union dissolved.
Now, one particular province, South Setia, did not want to go along, and there have been these skirmishes back and forth.
Again, one would argue that that could be a Georgian issue.
What's Russia doing?
What are they involved for?
Well, I mean, are there nefarious plans on the part of the prime minister?
Remember when the handpicked president, Medvedev, or I think it's Medvedev.
I can never get that quite right.
But remember the handpicked successor to Putin.
We were told, well, Putin's going to step down.
He's going to be the prime minister, and now we've got a new Russian president.
Seriously, I've got some real estate for you as well.
The bottom line is Putin's still in charge.
He's leading this.
He's directing this.
And there are a lot of people that have been suspicious of Vladimir Putin for quite some time.
And this gives more cause, more pause, if you will.
One of the things you've got to understand, and I'm not itching to go to war.
I think reasonable people can disagree on the proper use of military might.
I really believe reasonable people, not that the hard left and the Michael Moore, Oliver Stone crowd are reasonable, don't get me wrong, not that the majority of Democrats are reasonable, but there have been reasonable people who have disagreed with America's, oh, I don't know, use of force in the last decade.
People like Bob Novak, whom we're all praying for right now, and others.
And I listened to those people.
Bill Buckley, before he passed away, had concerns about our efforts.
So reasonable people can disagree.
But you've got to take a look at history and take a look at the intentions of America versus the intentions of her adversaries if we can make, and this is vital, judgments about who's right and who's wrong.
You know, the credo of a responsible individual is not, I won't judge you and you won't judge me.
Tolerance.
It is, I'm going to judge you, and I'm prepared to have you judge me.
Judge and be prepared to be judged.
You've got to make a judgment before you can make a choice.
And we've got to make a judgment on who's right or wrong in international affairs, whose system of political economy is just and right and moral.
And I say it's been ours.
So you go back and take a look at the history of the Soviet Union.
And until Roosevelt and Stalin got together at Yalta and literally decided to carve up Europe and sentence those people into 50 years of darkness until we won the Cold War, primarily due to Ronald Reagan's rhetoric and his ability to fund defense and strategic defense, I might add, which we desperately need now.
This is more evidence than ever.
The Soviet Union, you know, we could have taken Western Europe after World War II.
We had occupied territories.
We could have simply annexed.
We did not.
We have never done that in the United States.
But what happened to Eastern Europe?
What happened to Georgia?
It went into Soviet orbit by force, I might add.
Again, thanks to Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Stalin at Yalta and Winston Churchill, who was kind of out of it by then, it seems to me.
But regardless, now they finally broke away, got their freedom back in 1991.
And what everybody's afraid of in the West is what are the intentions of Mr. Putin and Russia again?
Not to mention the strategic importance of the oil pipeline, the transit route from the Caspian Sea going westward.
And that's why Georgia was such a crucial ally.
It's a U.S. ally.
It helped us in Iraq.
And now Putin is bashing the United States today because we airlifted Georgian troops from Iraq back home.
It is a conundrum.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not suggesting there's a simple answer here.
Because what we did, what we did after World War II is we effectively had a tripwire called NATO.
And the tripwire was that, you know, the Soviet, you need to stop.
You need to stop at the Berlin Wall.
You need to stop in this particular sphere of influence.
And if you dare set foot in Western Europe, the United States will join in any effort to defend that territory.
And we had that, quite frankly, through every president.
Reagan personified it by deploying the Pershings in 1982 against, by the way, the criticism of liberal Democrats.
And we finally put our foot down and the Soviet economy could not keep up with, and remember, the former Soviets, including Gorbachev, I believe, all admitted the economy could not keep up with the West, especially when it came to Star Wars and strategic defense.
Reagan's best moment was at Reykjavik in 1986 when he walked out of that little house and had that stern look on his face.
They were going to give up.
The Soviets were going to give up all of this.
They're going to have the zero option if Reagan would just give up strategic defense, anti-ballistic missile defense.
Well, he wouldn't do it.
And it ended up breaking the back of the Soviet economy and precipitating the end of the Cold War.
Now we've got the potentiality, the possibility of building strategic defense.
You know, people don't realize if an adversary, say a rogue nation with an intercontinental ballistic missile, with nuclear warheads, with a chemical warhead, if they got a hold of one of these missiles and could launch it, and some would say they're trying, you have no idea what happens.
I mean, mutual assured destruction under McNamara's disaster, I think.
I don't think it, you know, in the era of detente and mutual assured destruction, nuclear weaponry grew.
It didn't shrink.
We were relying our security on arms control, most of which was violated by the evil empire.
It wasn't until we got tough and built SDI that the Soviet Union collapsed.
The liberals say just coincidentally after 74 years.
No, I think it was Reagan.
I think it was the defense buildup.
I think it was the idea that we don't rely on paper security.
We rely on the might and our national defense for our security.
But people forget that the Soviet Union, or I shouldn't say the Soviet Union these days, should I, Russia still has 14,000, 14,000 nuclear warhead.
The United States has about 5,400.
And then down on the list, it's just in a few hundred for the rest of the nuclear family, which is expanding.
Point being, if you're not willing to intervene in these places, and I'm not suggesting we should, but if you're not willing to do that, you better get going on some sort of anti-ballistic missile defense.
We've got some interceptors in Alaska.
We're trying to deploy them in Europe.
We need to deploy them so we can at the very least have a true defense and say if somebody chooses a rogue nation or one of these 14,000 nuclear warheads that Russia has gets lost or heaven forbid something more deliberate.
You know, we don't have the choice of, oh, by the way, we've spotted the ICBM.
It has reached this trajectory, and literally a ballistic missile goes up high, then comes down on its own volition.
That's a ballistic missile.
It spans continents.
You've got about 25 minutes to either return fire or watch Washington be incinerated.
And then you get into these first and third strike chess games.
Reagan was right in 1983 when he circumvented his own bureaucrats and went forward with the famous SDI speech.
Wouldn't it be better to make these nuclear weapons and this nuclear option obsolete by having the ability, at the very least, to put doubt in the minds of the would-be attackers, at the very best to shoot them all down with some sort of certainty?
That is the most peace-loving proposal I can think of.
And yet, once again, you've got the presidential candidate, Barack Obama, opposes more research and deployment of SDI.
This particular conflict in Russia is more evidence than ever that we need it.
So that's the latest on that.
I wanted to bring that to your attention because it is breaking news.
1-800-282-2882.
Back to the phones we go.
And Tom, in St. Louis, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Greetings from St. Louis.
We're at noon on August the 11th.
It is 74 global warming degrees.
You know, it's normally 94.
In Minnesota, in Minnesota, up north at the lakes, they woke up to about 60 degrees this morning.
Someone call Al Gore.
I want to talk about other inconsistencies, the campaign contributions.
There's ads about the amount of money that the energy companies, specifically oil, are contributing to the McCain campaign.
Well, if you're a member of the other party that has done everything in its power to restrict domestic exploration and refining, which some could say raised some issues about long-term supply, which some could say increased prices of oil, and you had companies that were making money when oil was at $20 a barrel and at over $100 a barrel, they're making lots of money.
So that party's solution is to tax it and continue to restrict exploration and refining.
Who do you think you're going to contribute to?
Yeah, you bring up a great point.
On the other hand, David Brooks had an article about who were the major contributors to the Democrats.
Right.
And the companies indicated of the top seven, number one was Goldman Sachs, number three was UBS, number four was JPMorgan Chase, number five was Citigroup, and number seven was Lehman Brothers.
Well, where have we had a problem lately with the mortgage crisis, people wanting government to bail out the money?
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Are you suggesting that there's a cozy relationship between Wall Street and the Democrat?
Why, the next thing you know, some big mortgage company is going to give a sweetheart deal to Kent Conrad and Chris Dodd, and then they're going to author legislation to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that will benefit that big mortgage company.
Is that what you're suggesting?
Well, why doesn't the party with an elephant suggest that?
Well, that's a good question.
I mean, why is it that some still are on this ethanol scam in the upper Midwest?
Why is it that some Republicans still believe in the nonsense of global warming, even though we haven't had it for 10 years, and solar flares are much more responsible?
I don't know.
It's almost as if some in the Republican Party have a death wish.
When you start to believe your enemies, you're done.
And they believe their enemies.
They believe the Washington Post, the New York Times, the broadcast networks.
And once you go down that road, it's signar.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush Limbaugh.
You're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Yeah, not only do the Democrats get a whole lot of money from Wall Street and now some in the mortgage industry that we are bailing out, Barack Obama, according to Reuters, got $400,000 from big oil contributors that he doesn't mention in his ad saying that, you know, Bush and McCain are tied at the hip with big oil.
By the way, I see nothing wrong with that.
The previous caller does make a great point, though.
Money follows the candidate's position, not the other way around.
The fact of the matter is, and I'll be bipartisan here, whether you're Democrat or Republican, okay, maybe I won't be that bipartisan.
I had to put in the trial lawyers there.
But most of the time, people who are contributing to candidates say, oh, that person says this.
I agree with them.
The money follows.
That's why money is a good thing in politics.
It enables people to manifest their speech, if you will, to pool their resources and have a voice.
It's not a situation where money all of a sudden, in every instance, corrupts, taints, and switches votes.
If that's the case, I want to know the senators out there by all the campaign finance reform types.
I want you to name me the senators who switch their vote on the basis of a contribution.
They never get around to doing that.
Now, there might be some anecdotal evidence here.
I mean, you do have the situation where the single biggest group probably outside of the National Education Association of contributors to Democrats are trial lawyers.
Trial lawyers who are now finding themselves under the, shall we say, under the gun in Mississippi, Dickie Scruggs, who's the strike suit king out in California.
I think he's got some legal problems as well.
These trial lawyers get these massive awards that bear absolutely no connection to justice.
You've got contingency fees coupled with punitive damages that literally is a lawsuit lottery primarily for the lawyers, not the members of the class, if it's a class action suit.
We don't have loser pays, the English rule in America.
Most other countries do.
We have a joint and several system that's out of whack where you could be 30% liable, but end up liable for 100% of the damages.
All of these things contribute to these massive trial lawyers, John Edwards, amassing millions and millions of dollars, and then they go to Democrats so they don't enact tort reform, some of the things I just mentioned.
Now, maybe you could say money corrupts there, but don't count on your local consumer advocate on the 11 p.m. news to point that out.
1-800-282-2882, Sean in San Antonio, Texas.
Welcome to the Rush Lumbaugh Program with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, how are you doing?
I'm doing very well, thanks.
Good.
You know, I'm old and I listen slow, so could you, would it be possible to get that phone over for Congressman Spence again?
Congressman Mike Pence, Mike Pence of Indiana, suggested, and he's absolutely right about this, you need to put pressure on Democrats so they can then put pressure on Pelosi and Reed.
Mr. Pence said, call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Democrat member of Congress.
And if you don't have a Democrat member of Congress, ask for your Democrat senator and put pressure on them and say, look, gang, you keep talking about energy independence.
According to the Minerals Management Service, we've got estimated recoverable oil of around 124 billion barrels domestically all included.
Why don't we go tap that?
Would be a good idea, would it not?
Yes, sir, it would.
Did you get the number?
Yes, sir, I did.
All right, Sean, thanks, buddy.
I appreciate that.
This whole thing about oil is frustrating.
I mean, it's so frustrating.
Speculators are not divorced from the market.
Speculators are the market.
And up until recently, up until recently, they were betting we would not drill.
So speculation is a forward pricing mechanism.
Somebody is saying, I'm going to go short on an oil future or a corn future or whatever.
They want to sell it now.
They want to lock in a price.
Then they think it's high.
If you're going long, you think the price is going up.
And what the speculators were basically doing is saying, we think there's no way we're going to get out from under this oil crunch.
We've got, what, 86 billion barrels are consumed a day, and I think 86 million, and I think 85 million are produced a day.
We've got a structural deficit.
So the speculator said we foresee shortages.
Ergo, the price is going to go up.
Well, what's happened in the last few weeks is, for one reason or another, and I happen to think it was the Republicans getting serious about drilling, the poll numbers changing, the president lifting the executive order that banned going into Anwar.
All of that signaled to the market, oh, maybe we're getting serious about putting more oil on the market.
If the demand is constant, supply goes up, you get, and this is as old as economics, you get a drop in the prices.
Well, gosh, what have the speculators done?
Prices have lowered.
And, you know, it defies the Democrat logic.
The Democrats have been saying for some time, well, you know, supply won't come on board for 10 years, so it won't matter.
Now, that's a little bit of a bait and switch.
We could get it much quicker than that if we streamline the permitting process.
But regardless, supply won't come on for 10 years, which is like saying, don't save for retirement.
You're not going to access that money for 10, 15, 20 years.
So anyway, but therefore, it won't lower the price at the pump.
Well, wait a minute.
The supply demand equation hasn't changed in the last month and the price has gone down.
Why?
Because speculators are estimating what they think the price is going to be for.
This is a signal, and we're getting a better signal now.
If, as Mike Penn said, we could actually get some legislation passed, you would see prices drop like a rock.
Let's go to Rob in Canton, or Bob, I should say, in Canton, Ohio.
You're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
All right, Jason.
There are a few questions I have.
First of all, my understanding is Alaska, 80% of the oil out of Alaska is being shipped to China.
And I got a question for the American people.
Do they want the oil companies and the banks, which have become scaldudgerous and not even accountable with their oil?
I wouldn't equate the two, but go ahead.
Well, do the American people want the oil companies buying the politicians and running the country?
Or do the American people want to take charge and take over the country?
Let's start with, look, I don't know if we'll have time for this, but if you ban speculators, the only people that will be controlling the commodity futures will be people taking delivery, which would be the oil companies.
So the speculators act as a counterweight to all that.
So the Democrats on that particular issue are just dead wrong.
Secondly, oil company giveaways are not comparable to buying out Bear Stearns or this implicit guarantee in the Treasury buying stock of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mayer, extending a line of credit, I should say, because the oil companies don't get a subsidy from anybody.
They pay taxes.
Well, that's right.
Just getting the protesters warmed up in the Twin Cities for the Republican National Convention coming to our fair state here in a couple of weeks.
This should be rather interesting because the city of St. Paul is bending over backwards.
Were it not for the cops and a few others, I don't know what they would do because the city of St. Paul is run by, well, by a city council that would make, oh, I don't know, Putin look of tolerance.
So look out at the Republican National Convention for all these protesters in the Twin Cities.
It should be quite a show.
I am Jason Lewis from the Twin Cities filling in for Rush today.
He'll be back tomorrow.
El Rushbo back tomorrow, 1-800-282-2882.
Now, as to the previous caller's point about the oil we produce domestically, well, it's just going to be sold internationally anyway.
I have a collective answer for that, or I want to get a collective answer from all of you listening that know anything about global economics.
Are you ready?
Let's all do it together.
Duh.
What do we want?
Farmers not to sell wheat or corn or soybeans internationally?
Should we go back to the Jimmy Carter grain embargo?
What is it about world markets that seems to be so hard to understand amongst those who want to find any excuse not to drill in 2,000 acres of 19.6 million?
Let me be clear about this.
This is the extremism of the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the Democrat Party, and a few wayward global warming and viral Republicans.
And that is this.
We have come to the point when gasoline is at $4 a gallon that we cannot even access because of the environmental hysteria, which the Czech president calls socialism.
We can't even access 2,000 acres.
That's all the oil companies will need to get the oil out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge of $19.6 million.
So that footprint is just too large.
It's like Dulles Airport compared to the state of Virginia, I've been told.
Now, true enough, a lot of the oil we will drill offshore or in Anwar or anyplace is going to go into the international markets.
So what?
It's going to lower the price of oil internationally.
Snerdley reminds me yesterday on one of the Sunday morning shows, Carl Levin was saying, We need that Iraqi oil.
They're producing oil.
They're getting oil revenues.
Why don't we get it?
Well, wait a minute.
You want them to supply us with oil, but you don't want American oil to be sold internationally?
It's all going in the same pot, folks.
What we need to do and what America could do by drilling domestically is massively increase the amount of global oil, which would put a price down on the global price per barrel, and hence all of the ancillary products, i.e., gasoline, will come down as well.
This is not rocket science.
1-800-282-2882, Rich in Sacramento, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
It's a real pleasure to speak with you, Jason.
Same to you, my friend.
Every time you're on, I get a great lesson in economics as well as a few other things.
Oh, I appreciate that.
There's been a lot of chatter regarding Governor Tim Palenti for Senator McCain's running mate.
And I know you're familiar with the governor.
I've heard him.
I'd like to know your thoughts on Governor Palenti.
And do you think he'd be a pick that conservatives could rally around?
I think if McCain is looking for his alter ego, albeit a couple of decades younger, McCain fits or Palenti fits just right.
I think they're one and the same.
So are you happy with McCain?
No.
No, I was kind of waiting for his choice of running mates to see if I can enthusiastically support him.
I mean, I'm probably not the best guy to ask because the governor and I, I suppose we're on speaking terms, although we haven't spoken for months and months.
He's pretty upset with me.
I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal criticizing him.
And I understand that.
I mean, I am free to criticize him and he's free not to talk to me.
But when you tell, you know, when you form a global warming commission in the state of Minnesota and you tell them that Jimmy Carter was right, we should have listened on running out of oil.
When you enact one of the most strict, strict renewable energy mandates in Minnesota, it is like the emissions bill that was defeated in Washington, D.C., except we got it passed in Minnesota that says we've got to use so much wind, so much solar, so much biofuel.
When you want E85, not just 10% ethanol, but 85% ethanol, and you're pushing gas stations to put that in.
When you say that school choice, quote, can't be the only education idea for Republicans, as though it ever was.
School choice is the only free market idea.
When you say the era of small government is over, a lot of conservatives are going to have pause.
And I've been one of those.
Now, in fairness to Governor Poleny, He did come into office fully loaded.
That is, when he was first elected, there was a big deficit in the state budget, and he solved that deficit without raising taxes.
But after 2006, basically, well, maybe not six so much, after 2004, really, he started to take a turn to Portside, in my view.
And he got behind a smoking ban.
He got behind a cigarette tax increase that they call a health impact fee.
We had a $3 billion surplus, a budget biennium ago, and granted, he didn't raise taxes, but he spent the surplus or allowed it to be spent.
I could go down the list.
Now, is he a horrible choice?
There is a strategic choice here because he could bring the Midwest to the ticket, Iowa, Dakotas, and all of this.
But he's not, and he's not a horrible choice, don't get me wrong, but he's not a movement conservative.
Do you think he could rally conservatives?
Well, to the extent that conservatives are already rallying around John McCain, yes.
For those principled conservatives.
What are you laughing for, Snerling?
Sterling Mike are.
I said to the extent, I didn't say they were.
I said to the extent that conservatives are rallying around McCain, yes, that will continue with Poleny.
If you're already disgruntled and you're concerned about especially this environmental, alternative energy, biofuel obsession, then the answer would be in the negative.
Does that answer your question?
Yeah, I think it does.
He's pretty much more of the same.
Well, look, you know, he went to the National Press Club last week and said the Republican Party has to reform itself.
There's a great internecine war going on within the GOP, as you well know right now.
And you've got the old standby traditional conservatives led by people like Mike Pence and Jeff Flake and Michelle Bachman, for that matter, of Minnesota, the Republican Study Committee, who say the problem is they've abandoned Reaganism.
And then you've got the Republican Governors Association, Sonny Perdue and Poleny and Schwarzenegger and all of these, who say, well, we need a third way.
And they're buttressed by the former Bush speechwriters like Michael Gerson and David Brooks, who wasn't a speechwriter, but he's certainly a liberal Republican in my view.
And they're saying, well, we've got to follow the Dick Morris strategy.
The best way to have the Republican Party rise is to co-opt a few of these Democrat issues, kind of like Clinton did on welfare reform.
Well, what they're saying here, Jim, is simply this, or not Jim, I'm sorry, Rich.
What they're saying is in order to win, we need to act more like Democrats.
I'm not enamored with that policy.
That's not why I get involved in politics, why I'm a talk show host, why I had a Quixotic run for Congress years ago.
I think we ought to change things, not merely try to figure out or sell the party to what people want.
Sometimes the masses are wrong.
And a statesman goes to the masses and says, you know what?
I think we need to change our view on this, and here's why.
And you start to move the polls.
A politician looks at the polls and then tailors their message to the polls.
And that's what bothers me about this new Republicanism that all these governors are talking about.
I mean, it's not a coincidence that Schwarzenegger is still the last holdout on drilling, is it?
Anyway, I digress.
I got to move.
Let's go to Jimmy in the Woodlands down by Houston.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, how are you?
Great to hear.
You're very articulate.
We always enjoy you.
Thank you.
The thing that I want to bring forward is that just the permitting of the drilling is the least part of the problem that the oil companies have.
The EPA has them absolutely handcuffed.
By the time they go through all the permitting process to drill a well, they can't ever comply.
There have been leases that have been out there for years and years and years, and they were never allowed to drill.
There's a big new trend in the Gulf of Mexico that was known about for over 15 years, and they didn't start to drill it until Castro floated his first offshore rig down there about two years ago, and then the U.S. allowed the companies, the U.S. companies that had those leases in place to start to drill.
So we've got to get rid of the EPA somehow.
We've got to get them out of this mix before the oil companies can have any kind of ability to go ahead and exploit.
Once again, you highlight a government-induced energy crisis, a government-induced problem.
We're not building nuclear power plants because of the environmental lawsuits.
That's government.
We've got this ridiculous EPA permitting process.
That's government.
We're mandating these biofuels, ethanol, which takes the place of refining for petroleum and unleaded gasoline.
That's government.
It's more costly.
It doesn't ship well because there's so much water and ethanol.
All of these problems have been government mandates.
And now Barack Obama wants a windfall profits tax on big oil.
That's going to encourage them to expand those supplies.
There's also another economic aspect working here.
If you're sitting on a prize commodity, Jimmy, let's say you're sitting on, who knows, it could be tennis balls, and they're in short supply.
Are you going to sell all your tennis balls at today's price when you have every reason to believe that six months from now the price is going to be higher?
Exactly.
You leave the oil in the ground because you see no reason to get rid of it.
If the oil companies were convinced that we were going to drill more and there was going to be an abundant supply, oil would all of a sudden come on the market because better to sell it now before the price falls.
So, you know, the Democrats run around saying, what about all these wells that are capped?
They're not even going in there.
Why should they?
You're threatening to tax the bejeebras out of them, and that was going to cause an energy shortage.
The price is going to be higher than it is today.
I would leave my inventory in the ground, too.
It's so much economics involved and so much illiteracy involved in Washington, D.C. Great point.
I'm Jason Lewis, and you're on the Rush Limbaugh Program.
And here we go.
1-800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh Program.
Momentous Monday with all the comings and goings in Georgia.
The Russians are now in Gori.
They've captured Gori, according to the latest news reports, getting close to the Georgian capital.
So this is going beyond the breakaway province, and this crucial U.S. ally with the crucial oil pipeline is now in the news big time.
What a conundrum.
And McCain is really coming out forcefully on this all day long.
I think Barack Obama has issued one statement, although I'm not certain as to how long he's going to stick with that.
To the phones we go once again in Kansas City, Missouri.
Fred, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, thanks for taking my call.
Sure.
Hey, one of the things I want to point out, maybe you can get the dialogue going on this, but for the last two years, all we've heard about from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid is that we've got a, you know, the war is costing too much.
We're going to be passing that on to our kids.
We've got Social Security we've got to save because we've got to do that for the children.
You know, we've got to have that around for the children.
Everything we hear about is always for the children.
For once, we've got an opportunity to do something for the children.
Even if you believe the fact that 10 years from now, it's going to take us to see the oil if we poke a hole in the ground today.
Well, you know, 10 years from now, my two teenage daughters are going to be starting out on their own.
And, you know, it's not going to cost the taxpayers one cent to poke a hole in the ground.
And for the children, they might see the benefits of it in 10 years.
You know, it's costing me right now.
You know, I can deal with it.
But, you know, we've got the potential for her to make a decision and say, all right, let's go ahead and okay this, and my kids will see the benefit of it.
And you know what?
A really crazy byproduct is that as soon as they do it, I'm going to see the benefit of it too, and it doesn't cost us anything.
My friend, you're operating on a false premise.
And that premise is that liberals and the environmental lobby, which owns the Democrat Party, cares about energy.
This is not about energy with vis-a-vis the Democrats and or the liberal left and the Sierra Club crowd.
This is about strangling the economy so we live like a bunch of Luddites and we can get back to a more just society back to nature.
This is why Voclov or the Czech president, Kloss, said that global warming and the environment has replaced socialism, has this command and control economy.
If they can control your energy consumption, certainly the uber wealthy will be the first ones that will have to cut back, equalizing their lifestyle with the rest of us impoverished plebes.
The bottom line here is look at the global warming debate.
The National Association of Manufacturers admit now, or their study, along with the American Alliance for the Capital Formation, say it's going to cost us 4 million jobs by 2030 due to higher energy costs if we just adopted the Lieberman-Warner bill.
The EPA says the reduction in real GDP by 2050 could be $5 trillion.
Now, does anybody seem to care about that?
No, Fred.
They're just saying, well, we've got to do it.
We've got to do it for the children.
We have to live back in a tree for the children.
So their view of what is a good life, a prosperous, free life, is entirely at odds with, I think, mainstream America.
So you're never going to convince them of that.
It'd be nice to see us throw that back in her face then and say, hey, you want to do something for the children?
How about poking a hole in the ground so they don't have to pay $4 a gallon 10 years from now?
Which is a ⁇ it's ludicrous to believe that anyway, because they can move a platform in a year and have oil off the shore.
But we don't hear anybody saying that.
If your goal is cheap, abundant energy, we are the Saudi Arabia of coal.
We've got that.
There's a coal-fired power plant out in eastern South Dakota that ostensibly would serve the Dakotas and western Minnesota.
There are a number of environmental lawsuits brought by the usual crowd, a number of Minnesota regulators, because they have to sign off on this too, who are in effect, for all practical means and purposes at this point anyway, blocking the coal-fired power plant.
Now, that's the cheapest form of energy, and it's clean coal, but they're demanding sequestration.
The idea can have no carbon dioxide emissions because of this, again, faulty hyperbole overwarming.
And so what happens?
So we block coal.
Well, now they go to natural gas.
Guess what?
We're already getting warnings in the upper Midwest that natural gas prices, home heating oil, are going to spike this winter.
This is a policy of a deliberate tax, a deliberate inflation on the American household put forth by liberal Democrats and environmental Republicans, I have to say.
And that includes, by the way, those who believe that biofuels and ethanol and biodiesel do anything except disrupt food markets.
So, you know, obviously you're right.
Don't get me wrong.
You're dead right in your analysis.
But just don't forget, the premise is not about cheap, abundant energy for the opponents of what you and I believe.
Their premise is about an entirely different lifestyle, a transformative agenda that sets us back when it comes to prosperity, but makes us all equal.
Back with more right after this on the Rush Limbaugh.
All right, wrapping up second hour of the program.
Coming up in the third hour, a guy running for Congress, I think you're going to find very, very fascinating down in Florida's 22nd District.
This guy's resume is unbelievable.
Colonel Alan West will join us a little later in the third hour of the program to talk about his run for Congress.
He's a black conservative, and unbeknownst to the media, they do exist.
We're going to talk with Alan when we come back after the break at the top.
I also want to get into this renewable energy stuff because that seems to be the fallback.