All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 11, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:09
August 11, 2008, Monday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Is that I I did not know that.
I did not snurlies keeps talking in my ear.
I did know that Barack Obama had a new motto.
Did you know Well, apparently it goes like this.
This is the greatest country on earth.
Now help me change it.
Somehow that just doesn't ring true.
I don't know.
Second hour now underway on this momentous Monday, Jason Lewis, the 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, remember the history here, friends.
This was or this breakaway republic, if you if you want to call it that in 1991, won is independence as a separate country when the Soviet Union dissolved.
Now one particular province, South Osedia, did not want to go along, and there have been these scrimishes back and forth.
One again, one would argue that that could be a Georgian issue.
What's the what's Russia doing?
What's what are they involved for?
Well, uh, I mean, are are there nefarious plans on the part of the prime minister?
Remember when the hand picked president uh Medvedev, or I think it's Medvedev.
I can never get that right quite right.
But remember the handpicked successor to Putin.
We were told, well, Putin's gonna step down.
He's gonna 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.
You know, one of the things you gotta understand, and I'm not, you know, itching to go to war.
Uh I think reasonable people can disagree on the proper use of of military might.
Uh I really believe in reasonable people, not that the 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.
There have been uh reasonable people who have disagreed with with America's um oh, I don't know, use of force in the last decade.
People like Bob Novak, whom we're all p praying for right now, and others.
And I I I listened to those people.
Bill Buckley, before he passed away, had concerns about our efforts.
So reasonable people can disagree.
But you gotta take a look at history and take a look at the 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 the credo of a responsible individual is not I won't judge you and you won't judge me.
Tolerance.
Uh it is I'm gonna judge you, and I prep I'm prepared to have you judge me.
Judge and be prepared to be judge.
You've got to make a judgment before you can make a choice.
And we've got to make a judgment on who's 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, you know, Roosevelt and Stalin got together at Yalta and literally decided to carve up Europe and sentenced those people into fifty 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, the I mean, we could have taken Western Europe after World War II.
We had occupied territories.
We could have said 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 in the 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 this is there's a simple answer here.
Because the 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.
Uh Reagan personified it by deploying the Pershing's in 1982 against, by the way, the criticism of liberal Democrats.
And we finally, you know, 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 were just to give up strategic defense, anti-ballistic missile defense.
Well, they 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, uh people don't realize if uh an adversary, say a rogue nation with an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warheads with a 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 a lot we were relying our security on arms control, most of which was violated by 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 seventy-four years.
No, I think it was Reagan.
I think it was the defense buildup.
I think it was the idea that we don't 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 5400.
And then down on the list it's just in a few hundred for the 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.
Uh, we're trying to deploy them in Europe.
We need to redeploy 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 its tr trajectory and literally a ballistic missile goes up high then comes down on its own volition.
That's a ballistic missile, it spans continents.
Uh you've got about twenty-five minutes to either return fire or watch Washington be incinerated.
And then you get into these first and third strike chess games.
Uh 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 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 in 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 uh St. Lawrence, we're at noon on August the eleventh.
It is seventy-four global warming degrees.
You know, it's normally ninety-four.
In Minnesota, in Minnesota, up north at the lakes, they woke up to about sixty degrees this morning.
Yeah.
Someone call Al Gore.
I uh want to talk about other inconsistencies.
The uh campaign contributions.
There's ads about uh 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 uh uh exploration and and refining, which some could say uh 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 twenty dollars a barrel and at over a hundred dollars a barrel, they're making lots of money, so that party's solution is to tax it and continue to uh restrict exploration and refining.
Who do you think you're going to contribute to?
Yeah, you bring up a great point.
The money on the other hand, yeah.
Go ahead.
Uh David Brooks had an article about uh 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 JP Morgan 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 them out.
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 Mack 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, it'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 ten years and solar flares are much more responsible?
I don't know.
I it's almost as if some in the Republican Party have a death wish.
When you start to believe when you start to believe your enemies, you're done.
And they believe their enemies, they believe the Washington Post, the New York Times, you know, the 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 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, but Barack Obama, according to Reuters, got four hundred thousand dollars 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, uh the people who are contributing to candidates say, oh, that person says this.
I agree with them, the money follows.
That's why money's a good thing in politics.
It enables people to 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's their vote on the basis of a contribution.
They never get around to doing that.
Now there might be some some anecdotal evidence here.
I mean, you do have the situation where the single biggest group, probably outside of uh education, the National Education Association, uh of contributors to Democrats are trial lawyers.
Trial lawyers who are now finding themselves under the um, shall we say, under the gun in Mississippi, Dickie Scrugs, 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 thirty percent liable but end up liable for a hundred percent of the damages.
All of these things contribute to these massive trial lawyers, John Edwards, amassing millions and millions of dollars, and then though they go to Democrats so they don't enact tort reform, some of the the things I just mentioned.
Now maybe you could you could say money corrupts there, but don't count on your local consumer advocate on the eleven PM news to point that out.
1-800-282-2882, Sean in San Antonio, Texas.
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh 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.
Um Mr. Pence said, call the Capitol switchboard at 202, 224, 3121, and 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.
Appreciate that.
This 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.
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, I 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 eighty or eighty-six million and I think uh eighty-five million are produced a day.
We've got a structural deficit.
So the speculators said we foresee shortages.
Ergo, the price is going to go up.
Well, what's happened in the last few weeks is uh for one reason or another, and I happen to think it was the the Republicans getting serious about drilling, the poll numbers changing, the president lifting the executive order that ban going into Anwar.
All of that signaled to the market that 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 what have the speculators done?
Uh prices have lowered.
And you know, it it defies the Democrat logic.
The Democrats have been saying for some time, well, uh you know, supply won't come on board for ten 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 ten years.
Which is like saying, don't save for retirement, you're not going to access that money for ten, fifteen, twenty 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 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.
A uh there are a few questions I have.
First of all, my understanding is uh Alaska, eighty percent 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 uh skull duderous and and and not even accountable with their own.
Well I wouldn't equate I wouldn't equate the two, but go ahead.
Well, do do the American people want the oil companies buying the politicians and running the company uh country?
Or do the American people want to take charge and and take over the country uh let's let's let's start with all look 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, uh the oil company giveaways are not comparable to buying out Bear Stearns or this implicit guarantee in the Treasury buying stock of Freddie Mack and Fannie Mayor extending the 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 and coming to our uh fair state here in a couple of weeks.
This should be rather interesting because uh the city of St. Paul's bending over backwards uh were 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 c a city council that would make uh oh, I don't know, Putin look uh tolerance.
Uh 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.
L Rushbow back tomorrow, 1800-282-2882.
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 it 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 two thousand acres of nineteen point six 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 four dollars a gallon that we cannot even access because of the environmental hysteria, uh which the Czech president calls socialism.
We can't even access two thousand acres.
That's all the oil companies will need to get the oil out of the Arctic 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 any place is going to go into the international markets.
So what?
It's going to lower the the price of oil internationally.
Snurley 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 uh uh 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 and 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 uh get a great lesson in economics as well as uh a few other things.
Well, I appreciate that.
There's a there's been a lot of chatter regarding Governor Tim Pollenty uh for Senator McCain's running mate.
And I know you're you're familiar with the Governor.
I've heard of it.
I'd like to know your thoughts on Governor Plenty and um do you think he'd be a pick that conservatives could rally around?
I think if McCain is looking for his alter ego, albeit couple of a couple of decades younger, uh McCain fits or uh Pelenty fits just right.
I I think they're one and the same.
So are you happy with McCain?
Uh no.
No, I was kind of waiting for uh for his choice of running mates to uh, you know, see if I can enthusiastically and support him.
I mean, I'm probably not the best guy to ask because uh the 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, uh, I am free to criticize him and he's free not to talk to me.
But when you tell, you know, when when you 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 the one 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.
Uh when you want E 85, not just 10 percent ethanol, but 85 percent 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, um a lot of conservatives are going to have pause.
And I've been one of those.
Now in in fairness to Governor Pillenny, uh he did come into office uh fully loaded.
That is, in you know, when he was first elected, there was a big deficit in the state budget, and he he solved that deficit without raising taxes.
But after after two thousand and uh six, basically, well, maybe not six so much, after two thousand and four, really, he he started to take a turn to Portside in my view, and he he got behind a smoking ban.
He got behind a cigarette tax increase that they call a health impact fee.
Uh we had a three billion dollar surplus uh a a uh budget biennium ago, and he gr uh granted he didn't raise taxes, but he spent the surplus or allowed it to be spent.
Um I could go down the list.
Now, is he a horrible choice?
There is a a strategic choice here because he could bring the Midwest to the ticket, uh Iowa Dakotas and all of this.
Um but you're he's not he's 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 for those principled conservatives, what are you laughing for, Snurley?
I 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 Pilene.
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 I think it does.
He he's pretty much more the same.
Well, look, you know, he went to the to uh 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 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 Purdue and Palenny 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 the Dick Morris strategy.
The best way to to 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, i is is simply this.
Or not Jim, I'm sorry, Rich.
What they're saying is in order to win, we need to act act more like Democrats.
I'm not enamored with that policy.
I that's not why I get involved in politics, why I'm a talk show host, why why I had a quixotic run for Congress years ago.
I 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's still the last holdout on drilling, is it?
Anyway, I digress.
I gotta 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 talk great to hear you're very articulate.
We always enjoy you.
Thank you.
The thing that uh I want to bring forward is that the just the the permitting of the drilling is the least part of problem that the oil companies have.
The EPA has them absolutely handcuffed.
By the time they they go through all the permitting process to drill well, they can't ever comply.
There have been leases that have been out there for 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 uh known about for over fifteen 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 US allowed the companies that the US companies that had those those uh leases in place to start to drill.
So we gotta 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 of ability to go ahead and and uh exploit.
Once again, 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 these biofuels, ethanol, which takes the place of refining for uh 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 are have been government mandates, and now Barack Obama wants a windfall profits tax uh on big oil, that's gonna encourage them to expand uh those supplies.
There's also another economic aspect working here.
If you're sitting on on uh 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 are you gonna sell all your tennis balls at today's price when you have every reason to believe that uh uh six months from now the price is gonna be higher?
Exactly.
You leave the oil in the ground because you see no reason to 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 'cause better to sell it now before the price falls.
So you know the Democrats run around saying, What about all these 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 than it is today.
I would leave my inventory in the ground too.
It's it's so much economics involved and so much illiteracy involved in Washington, DC.
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 Gorye, they've captured Gorey, according to the latest news reports, getting close to the Georgian Capitol, 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 uh I'm not certain as to how long he's gonna 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, uh one of the things I want to point out, uh and I don't and 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's costing too much, we're gonna be passing that on to our kids.
We've got uh Social Security we gotta save because we gotta do that for the children, yeah, we gotta have that around for the children.
Um everything we hear about is always for the children.
Well for once we've got an opportunity to do something for the children, you know, even if you believe the fact that uh, you know, ten years from now it's gonna take us to to see the the oil if we poke a hole in the ground today.
Well, you know, ten years from now, my two teenage daughters are gonna be starting out on their own.
Right.
And you know, it's not gonna cost the taxpayers one cent to poke a hole in the ground.
And for the children, uh, you know, they might see the benefits of it in ten years.
You know, it's costing me right now, you know, I can deal with it, but you know, we 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 gonna 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.
The the the 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 Vaclov or the uh the Czech president, uh Kloss says that said that uh global warming and the environment has replaced socialism, has this command and control economy.
If they can control your energy consumption, certainly the the the Uber wealthy will be the first ones that will be ha that will have to cut back, equalizing their lifestyle with the rest of us uh impoverished plebs.
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 the the uh capital formation, say it's going to cost us four million jobs by twenty thirty due to higher energy costs if we just adopted the uh the Lieberman Warner bill.
The EPA says the reduction in real GDP by 2050 could be five trillion dollars.
Now, does anybody seem to care about that?
No, Fred.
They're just saying, well, we gotta do it.
We gotta do it for the children.
We have to live, you know, back in the in a tree for the children.
So their view of what is a good life, a prosperous, uh free life, is entirely, 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 four dollars a gallon ten years from now?
Which is a it's it's ludicrous to believe that anyway, because they can move a platform in a year and have 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 uh out in uh 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 demanding you know, sequestration, the idea can have no carbon dioxide emissions because of this, again, faulty hyperbole over 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, 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, I you're obviously you're right.
Don't get me wrong.
You're 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 Rushlin ballpoint.
All right, wrapping up second hour of the program.
Coming up in the third hour, a a guy running for Congress, I think you're gonna find very, very fascinating down in Florida's 22nd district.
This guy's resume is unbelievable.
Uh Colonel Alan West will join us a little later in the uh 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.
Uh, we're gonna talk with Alan when we come back after uh the break at the top.
I also want to get into this renewable energy stuff because that seems to be the fallback.
We gotta go to renewables.
▲
Export Selection