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Nov. 19, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:27
November 19, 2008, Wednesday, Hour #2
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The views expressed by the host on this show make more sense than anything anybody else out there happens to be saying because the views expressed by the host in this program are the result of a daily relentless unstoppable pursuit of the truth.
By the way, the latest opinion audit is in.
We have an official opinion auditing firm in Sacramento, California, the Sullivan Group, still documented to be almost always right, 98.8% of the time.
Well, but we're now held steady.
I mean, once you're at 98.8%, I mean, even moving to 98.9, you've got to be 100% right in your opinions for like six months.
It's going to be, you know, it doesn't take much to fall off from 98.8, but I mean, to move up from it is going to take an incredible feat.
Telephone number, if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882.
And the email address is lrushbo at EIBnet.com.
Now, a special note to those of you watching on the DittoCam today at rushlimbaugh.com, rush24-7.
You may notice some lighting changes from the first hour to this hour.
That is because we have had to defer to the lighting requirements of ABC.
They are here today with a film crew doing what is called B-roll.
This afternoon, I have an interview with Barbara Walters at a secret undisclosed location for her top 10 most fascinating people in the country.
Is it the country or the world?
The world.
10 most fascinating people in the world for 2008, and it airs on March, December 4th, right after Gray's anatomy.
I got that right.
And whenever people have seen the wire reports placing me in the top 10, they're as mystified as I am as to how it happened.
But I don't know who number one is.
They never tell you who number one is.
But the ABC crew will be here for about, well, the first segment here.
And that's why I appear to be sort of like the moon, half in shadow and half bright.
Facial moon.
Facial moon.
800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
Now, if you missed the first hour, Chuck Hagel, the disgraced and retiring so-called Republican senator from Nebraska, went to Johns Hopkins University to do a seminar to the enlightened students there on American politics.
And he basically did a big cry session because he was criticized by me.
He said, the leader of the conservative movement, he said, if you just let Limbaugh run for office if it's so easy.
Limbaugh does nothing but tear people down.
Let Limbaugh run for office.
Senator Hagel, as I have said countless times, I will not endure the pay cut to run for office.
You ought to try doing talk radio, Senator, if you think handling criticism is such a tough thing.
What are you people in Washington above it for some reason?
When you go join the Democrats more often than your own party, what do you expect to happen to you?
Which gets me to the point.
Okay, so we've lost a couple of elections now.
We lost the midterms in 06.
And I say we advisedly.
The Republicans lost.
I'm conservative first and Republican second.
And of course, we lost the presidential election earlier this month.
So that's two elections.
And now, of course, here come all the people who have our best interests at heart.
Why Chuck Hagel, Republican in name only?
Why, E.J. Deion Jr., drive by a media columnist.
All these liberals are telling us that what we need to do to win elections is become more like them.
That we got to go for global warming.
That we have to understand that we've got to get rid of our social conservatives and understand that abortions are going to happen and we have to defend it.
If we do this, we can win elections.
And I'm mystified by this because these people do not care that we win elections.
They are opposed to our winning elections.
So here they are advising us.
And we even have some of our brilliant pseudo-intellectual conservative intelligentsia in our own media saying that we need to moderate.
And we got the campaign they wanted.
We got the candidate they wanted.
We got the campaign they wanted.
We got a guy who was reaching out to Hispanics.
We got a guy reaching out to moderates, reaching out to Democrats, reaching out to independents.
And he lost in all those sectors.
And of course, the Republicans try to lay the blame here now on Sarah Palin, but that won't fly.
She was the only thing that energized the Republican campaign.
Everybody knows it.
Everybody, both parties know it, which is why they're trying to dump on her and make it look like she was the one who was ineffective.
But here's the point.
Here's the point after this admittedly brilliant setup.
The point is, we won two huge landscapes.
You'll remember this, Katie.
We won two huge landslides in 1980 and 1984.
We did it with Ronaldus Magnus.
I mean, it wasn't even close to your 49 state landslides.
Now, I don't remember.
And then let's talk 2000.
Well, let's blow that out because that was the Democrats think that we stole that.
Let's go to 2004 with the haughty John Kerry.
In fact, 2002 as well.
2002, after the Wellstone Memorial, the exit polls in 2002 said the Democrats didn't retake the Congress because they were wrong on values.
They had to go out and court values voters, which is the social conservatives, as far as Democrats are concerned, you hayseed hicks that live in the South and the Southeast.
And so for a week or so, there was lip service.
Yeah, we got to shore up our relationship here with the all-God crowd.
We got to shore up our relationship here with religious people.
But it was just lip service.
They didn't, of course, do anything because their constituencies that comprise the Democrat Party would not stand for it for very long.
Even after 2004, so we got 80, 84, 2004 with the haughty John Kerry, who served in Vietnam.
The same thing the Democrats started saying that it was slick marketing and packaging that was responsible.
It was not issues.
I don't remember when we wiped the floor with the Libs.
I do not remember the Libs rejecting their theories and their ideas and their policies.
I didn't see them reevaluate who they are.
I didn't see them say the era of FDR is over.
I didn't hear them say or do, you know, we've got to change who we are.
We've got to go out and try to attract those southern conservatives.
We have to go out and try to attract those pro.
They don't do that.
The left never waters themselves down.
They don't water down liberalism.
They don't say the era of FDR is over.
All of a sudden, when we lose, we're supposed to do that.
We're supposed to throw away everything we believe in.
We're supposed to toss aside every conservative principle we believe in because the Republicans lost.
Conservatism did not lose except when it wasn't on the ballot.
When conservatism, traditional American values and institutions were on the ballot, Prop 8.
Can you believe in California, the whole concept of marriage being something other than between a man and a woman was defeated?
How can that be if this country has moved so far left?
If this country is such now anti-tradition, anti-conservative, in California, how can a ballot initiative that defines marriage as that between a man and a woman only, how can it win big if this country's gone so far left?
The Mormons did.
Of course, the Mormons did it, and the blacks did it.
The Mormons and the Blacks, yeah, 70% of the blacks who voted in California voted for Prop 8 to keep marriage defined as that between a man and a woman.
So, my point is, the left never starts saying they have to change who they are.
They have to water down what they believe in.
They just chalk it up to the stupidity of American people.
When they lose, they tell American people stupid.
Or Rush Limbaugh did something to poison the minds of the American people.
But they just chalk it up to the American people who are dumb and stupid, got tricked by slick conservative marketing and packaging.
Was events and circumstances that are beyond their control.
It was never their failures.
Now, their guy, Barack Obama, gets 52% of the vote.
We conservatives are supposed to drop everything we believe.
We're supposed to drop who we are.
Not only will that not happen, it can't happen because conservatives are believers.
We're not policy wonks.
We don't form our beliefs based on where should we be on this policy, and where should we be on this policy?
And how should we approach that group?
And how should we approach this?
We don't do that because our policies and core beliefs deal with everybody.
Our policies and core beliefs lift everybody.
This is a nation founded on the concept of individual liberty and freedom.
You give as much of that to everybody.
And it's been shown, it's been proven to work, 80 and 84.
The problem is, there are too many people in government, both parties who are frightened by too much individual liberty on the part of the American people.
We believe in our principles, and that's why the E.J. Deion Jr. of the world and the Chuck Hagels of the world, the David Brooks, the Frums, all the rest of them don't get it and never will.
And this is why they don't matter to conservatives and never will.
And they think they're going to help redefine conservatism, but you can't.
Conservatism is what it is.
The era of Reagan is not over.
Well, Rush Reagan's agenda, a whole different set of matters.
Doesn't matter what the agenda is, conservatism applied to it works.
I can't tell you how many times people have said to me, you know, you don't sound rushed.
And these are friends of mine, but you don't sound like you're deferential enough to the historical consequences and nature of Obama's victory.
What do you mean?
Wow, it's the first black president.
I mean, this is a seminal moment.
This is huge.
Look at what we've overcome.
I said, I got past that the second day after the election.
What do you mean?
Because I don't care what Obama's skin color is.
I don't care what anybody's skin color.
I'm speaking now, by the way, as a conservative and as an American.
I don't care what anybody, when I look at a group of people, I see Americans.
I don't see, ooh, there's some blacks.
We got to do what we can to make them like us.
And oh, there's some women in there.
We've got to do what we can to make them like us.
And look, there's some Hispanics.
Oh, we better not insult them.
We got to make them.
I don't see people like that.
I see people as human beings with all kinds of potential depending on their own ambition and desire and willingness to work hard, do whatever it is to realize their dreams.
So, yeah, Obama's the first black president.
Yeah, it happened and so forth.
But now that doesn't give him a pass as far as what his ideas are.
And if his ideas are bad, if he gets into office and starts doing things that I think are damaging the country, I'm going to say so.
I'm not going to be afraid to do so on the basis that he's black, the first black president.
I mean, that's.
We got to get rid of this identity politics.
We have to get rid of all of this group and victim, victimization politics and realize that we're all human beings and that we're all Americans.
This hyphenated stuff just doesn't work.
And that's what conservatism is.
And I find it fascinating.
All these pseudo-conservatives who want to now start looking at people the way liberals do.
Female Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Walmart Americans, NASCAR dads, soccer moms.
I mean, why do we have to segregate the country this way in order to progress?
Because it doesn't cause progress at all.
It just creates unnecessary animosities and rivalries.
So I'm not going to listen to the Hagels.
And I'm not going to listen to all of these on our side who claim that the era of Reaganism or conservatism is over, that we need to adapt to the modern era and understand what it is.
But basically, we need our own version of big government too.
We just need to do it smarter and better, passing out the goodies to the right people.
And that's a recipe.
You may as well just join the Democrat Party and have that argument with them because there's no room on the rights for that kind of argument to make government the central theme of people's lives.
I know there's no argument.
There's no argument on conservatism about what it is.
There's an argument among pseudo-conservatives about what conservatism ought to become.
At any rate, I got to take a quick time out here, my friends.
We'll be back.
We'll continue.
Again, your phone calls at 800-282-2882 right after this.
Okay, people have been patiently waiting.
By the way, Ted Kennedy has asked Mrs. Clinton to head up the Senate health care team, and this is also causing a dilemma for Mrs. Clinton regarding the acceptance of the offer from President-select Obama to be Secretary of State.
So this cabinet business is just, it's the Clinton team.
It's a Clinton administration headed up by Barack Obama.
Back to the phones we go.
This is Brian in Philadelphia.
And it's great to have you here, Brian.
Welcome.
Thank you, Rush.
Nice talking to you.
You bet, sir.
Well, we have a new group in Philadelphia of people who need bailed out.
And I didn't know if you heard about it, but it's the students and graduate students with student loans who feel that when these banks and Stanie May and Freddie Mac have been bailed out, that they deserve the same that they have to pay back their loans immediately and without any conditions.
Can you blame them?
No, actually, I can't.
I mean, if we're going to bail out people who can't pay their mortgages, although that appears to be off the table now, I don't know what we're doing with that.
This whole bailout thing has turned into the auto companies.
And that's going to happen.
Obama's going to do this.
If it doesn't happen before this lame duck session is over, Obama will do it.
So they're going to get bailouts.
Can you blame students wanting to be bailed out on their student loans?
Can you blame anybody for calling Washa?
Hey, what about me?
No, absolutely not.
I don't say where it would end, though.
Well, I'll tell you where it ends.
It ends with the government in charge of everything they can be in charge of.
Now, Barney Frank said yesterday, when asked the same question, where does it end?
He said, well, it ends when it stops working.
The bailouts end when they stop working.
Somebody tell me when they work.
Right.
That would be news.
When was the last bailout that worked?
I don't know if one.
Chrysler, yeah, but that was a loan and they paid it back.
That was a loan, and they remember that that was Lee Iroco's big, big claim to fame here, that they paid back the loans.
That ended up not being a bailout.
You bail out the student loans, the students are basically saying, forgive the loans.
But my point, how can you blame?
This was predictable, this was going to happen.
The minute the government starts bailing out Wall Street, the minute government starts bailing out banks, when they start bailing out the auto industry, it isn't going to be long before you start giving away money and you're going to create a long line for it.
And I'm not so sure that some of this just isn't by design because none of this, nobody with a brain would be doing what they're doing.
Nobody understood the consequences of doing what they're doing unless they have a different objective than what is stated.
Frank in Gilbert, Arizona, you're next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Great to have you here, sir.
Rush, I love you, man.
I just wanted to make a quick point.
You're right, we do not need to reach out to the Hispanic community.
I'm just going to pinpoint them because my mom is Brazilian, so she listens to two stations on TV, you know, Univision and Telemundo.
But you're right, we don't have to reach out for them simply because the two biggest points, gay marriage, they're against.
Abortion, they're against.
But in the next four years, Rush, if we don't come out with a Fox Spanish network to inform, not doctrinate, my mom has been indoctrinated and duped by those stations for years.
That's the reason she voted for Obama.
She actually said to me, I'm voting for Obama because the Democrats are for poor people and the Republicans are for the rich.
If we, we only have four years left.
I am so sorry right now.
Let me tell you something.
How old are you?
I am 39.
39?
Well, I'm about 18 years older than you are, Frank.
And my whole life, I have heard that the Democrats are for the guy, a little guy, and the poor, and the Republicans are for the rich.
And that is a derivative of the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and 50 years or more of media promoting the whole concept.
It's, of course, flat out false now, but people think it, and particularly the way they grow up.
We could do a Spanish version of Fox.
I don't know who's going to do it.
If anybody would.
But I don't know that that's the way to go about this.
I wouldn't oppose it.
Don't misunderstand.
I just don't know about the likelihood of it.
But then you get down to this point.
You say the bunch of Hispanics are opposed to abortion and they're opposed to the other thing that you said.
Obama got the majority of the Catholic vote.
And Obama's for infanticide.
Obama's for partial birth abortion.
And he got over half the Catholic vote.
And the Catholic vote's not all watching Spanish language television.
So there's more at work here than saying you got to go, you get the Hispanics because they oppose abortion and they oppose, again, I forgot what the other game, Gary, gay marriage.
The party that's for gay marriage was supported two to one by Hispanics.
The party that is for abortion was supported two to one by Hispanics.
And 52% of the Catholic vote votes for Obama.
Now, you can come up with your own explanation.
I have my explanation for this.
I just, I think whether you do it in English, whether you do it in Spanish, the population of the Hispanics watching Telemundo may be such that you might have to do some of this in Spanish.
I just don't think that we've had anybody in our party unabashedly, proudly, articulately run a conservative campaign or even govern that way.
And that's what's going to turn all this around.
It's really not complicated, and it's really rather simple.
What's hard is convincing somebody to stick with it.
They can't handle the criticism.
Mr. Snirdley tells me we're being inundated with people who want to talk about the auto bailout, and that will do that.
That's cool, in fact.
And we'll start on your phone calls out here in just a second.
I want to go back to yesterday, though, for some testimony from a couple of CEOs, Alan Malally of Ford, CEO there, Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors, First Malally, and this is a portion of his remarks.
We suggest the loans be structured in a revolving format so exposure to the taxpayer would be limited.
And if used, we would repay them, of course, with interest.
We at Ford are hopeful that we have enough liquidity, but we also must prepare ourselves for the prospect of further deteriorating economic conditions in 2009.
In addition, the collapse of one of our competitors would have a severe impact on Ford and our transformation plan because the domestic auto industry is highly interdependent.
To hear that, the collapse of one of their competitors would have a severe impact on Ford and their transformation plan.
Now, that's fascinating.
If I'm in the, I mean, I'm a little me, I'm just a neophyte here at this kind of stuff, but my competitors go out of business.
I happen to love it.
In fact, I'm trying to drive them out of business.
I mean, I thought that was the point.
But, but that's just me.
That's just me.
Here is Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors.
What exposes us to failure now is not our product lineup, is not our business plan, is not our employees and their willingness to work hard, is not our long-term strategy.
What exposes us to failure now is the global financial crisis, which has severely restricted credit availability and reduced industry sales to the lowest per capita level since World War II.
What would it mean if the domestic industry were allowed to fail?
The cost would be catastrophic, and jobs lost, income lost, government tax revenue lost, and a huge blow to consumer and business confidence.
The key there is government tax revenue loss.
That's what members on Capitol Hill heard.
Oh, oh, government will lose tax revenue.
We can't afford to lose tax revenue.
Everybody exists to provide taxes for some revenue in Washington.
You know what nobody's talking about?
I'm fascinated here by Rick Wagoner laying out what their problem is.
It's not the business plan.
It's not employees, not their willingness to work hard.
And by the way, full disclosure, General Motors is a sponsor in good standing of this program, and we are having a phenomenal relationship with them.
And our advertising is working for General Motors.
If they'd been with us for years and years and years, they wouldn't be in this situation.
But they've only been with us for a year and a half.
So at any rate, CEO Rick Wagoner says it's not the employees, it's not the business plan, it's not our long-term strategy.
What exposes us to failure is the global financial crisis, which has severely restricted credit availability and reduced industry sales to the lowest per capita level since World War II.
You know what nobody is mentioning here in all of this is oil.
I think people have forgotten because now you can find gasoline at under two bucks a gallon in certain pockets of the fruited plan.
Sir, it's in New Jersey.
In Florida, you're still over three bucks in some places.
That's because I live there and they know I live there and whatever.
But the gasoline's coming down, but it was at four bucks.
That was the tipping point.
Would you look at what happened when gasoline hit four bucks and it was just for a month that it was there?
People started worrying about what they could.
We got stories about people can't eat.
We had follow-up stories about ethanol causing all kinds of food shortages related to corn and so forth.
It was a month of sheer disaster.
And not much of it was wrong.
I mean, $4 a gallon gasoline as quickly as it rose was a shock to this country in ways we haven't been shocked.
And it shut people down.
And among other things, remember how people started making mad dashes to get rid of their SUVs?
Do you remember the story?
The multiple stories, the end of the SUV, funeral for the SUV.
Look at how reactionary everybody is.
Got to $4 a gallon, and everybody thought it was going to keep going up.
And so they tried to get rid of the SUVs.
They were trying to move into smaller cars.
Some could, some couldn't.
They were not going to eat as much.
They're going out to eat.
They weren't going to movies as much.
There was sheer anger and panic over this.
And I'll lay you a dollar to a donut that that's had as much an impact on people buying new cars as anything in the global financial market or the credit crunch.
Because I will wager that you can still go and buy a car today.
And I'll bet you you can get it financed.
I will bet you that dealerships are still open.
And I will bet you that you can get a traditional loan or financing for a car.
I'll bet you don't have to put 50% down.
I'll bet you don't.
I'll bet you can still go out and get zero financing in some place.
I bet you can do it.
I'll bet in some places you can get the employee discount.
Okay, Rush, well, how come auto sales haven't picked up if gasoline and oil have come down?
Because once it got to $4 as fast as it did, people aren't taking any chances.
Nobody understands how any of this happened.
Most people think everything but the market was involved here.
How do you go from an average oil price of $90 to $100 to $150 in six weeks and then have it stay there for 30 days and then back down to where it's now under 55?
How does this happen?
People may not know how it happens, but they know it ain't the market.
It ain't solely and strictly the market.
So once the price of gasoline got up there to four bucks, stick with me on this, folks.
Once the price of gasoline got up there to four bucks, I don't care.
And everybody knew the market could not sustain that for long.
The market could not sustain $150 barrel in oil.
And they were talking back then about how it was going to go to 200 barrels in oil, dollars a barrel.
And nobody expected the market to be able to sustain.
The airline business would have to ground airplanes even more than they did.
And look what they did do that, by the way.
Look at all of the drastic, I mean drastic overnight moves that businesses and people made once oil hit $150, jet fuel hit whatever it was costing, depending where you buy it, and gasoline was $4.
Now oil is $55, gas is under $2.
But there's not a mad dash to go buy cars.
They're not a mad dash to resume lifestyles that existed prior to this massive increase to $4.
And that's because everybody instinctively doesn't trust this price drop because they don't understand what caused it to skyrocket in the first place.
I mean, market forces were largely in play, but people, it's still, that kind of volatility has not been seen before in most people's lifetimes.
kind of instability, that erraticism, the market generally doesn't allow that to happen, both up and down.
So what we need to do, the best thing we could do for the oil or for the auto industry, without getting into the debate of bailing them out or letting them go bankrupt, because they're going to get bailed out.
Obama's going to do it.
If this Congress doesn't, Obama will do it.
It will happen.
It'll be a payoff to the unions.
It'll be a payoff to Jennifer Grandholm, the state of Michigan.
It's going to happen.
And it'll be a bailout of the unions.
It will not be a bailout of the big three automakers.
That's why it's going to happen.
So I don't even want to debate that.
But if you want, if you want stability in the automobile industry and every other stability, then we have to continue doing what was a conservative talking point during the election, and that is drill here and drill now.
We have got to, as a nation, develop and increase our own independent sources of fossil fuels.
Because there isn't any alternative.
I don't care what the president-select tells you is going to happen in the next 10 years.
There's no alternative to running your car.
They may have the Chevy Vault, the electric car, even if it's a big hit, they're not going to be able to produce enough of them fast enough for everybody to get it and it wants to be.
And there's going to be a line of people to get these things.
Oil is the fuel of the engine of freedom, and it will be for the foreseeable number of decades.
We need our own supply.
We need not forget.
My point is this.
Simply because gasoline's down to two bucks now or on its way there in a lot of places and the oil price is back down to, and they, by the way, the OPEC gang is now saying oil is going to go to 40.
See that today?
Oil price may go to 40 or below.
Now, you might be saying, oh, yeah, all right, all right, all right, fine and dandy, but I'm telling you, the people, well, go ahead and celebrate all you want.
I'm just telling you, the people in the oil business are going to be in the same, they're not going to ask for bailouts, but they're going to be in the same circumstance.
Everybody else is, how can we do business?
How can we make commitments to find more oil?
How can we make commitments to drill more oil when the price is this volatile?
You know, we were talking about shale oil in Colorado and other places and the Bakken field.
Well, guess what?
All of a sudden at 55 and 40 bucks, can't go get it.
Doesn't cost enough.
Their record profits are not going to be invested in losses.
The record oil company may have had record profits, but they're not going to invest it in losses.
And they have said so when they came up to Washington and testified, they said so.
And they pretty much pointed out, look at, forget the oil companies.
I'm just talking about as consumers and as a country and for the auto business, I am just saying I am convinced that whatever you want to chalk up in a global financial crisis, which is basically houses, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Democrat Party is basically that.
If that's led to a global financial crisis, so be it.
But I maintain that it was gasoline shooting up to four bucks that caused the most damage to the automakers.
They were already having trouble at the same time, but look at how their sales plummeted when that happened.
Look at their sales figures for the quarter in which gasoline hit four bucks.
And just because it's now down to two, that doesn't mean people are going to pretend that the $4 never happened.
They're going to be more guarded since they see how rapidly it can climb.
So, bottom line, again, to make a long story short, I'm sorry for the diarrhea of the mouth here.
But the best thing we could do for the domestic auto business is to ramp up the domestic oil business.
We'll be back after this day with us.
And we are back.
Great to have you with us, El Rushbaldy, Excellence in Broadcasting.
Now, one more thing here about this oil business.
Now, I know what I said.
It makes sense.
Here's the problem with it, though.
No matter what happens, whether the news is bad or whether the news is good, we are going to have a leftist-dominated government.
A leftist-dominated government exists to tax things.
So, when the oil price goes down to where it is, 57,55, whatever it is, and if it goes down to 40, let's say gasoline goes below two bucks everywhere across the country.
Do you know what the left is going to do?
Raise taxes on it.
And it raised taxes under what concept and what precept.
Well, we can't have people return to their old bad habits.
We can't return to this profligate use.
It'll destroy the climate.
It'll destroy the planet.
In fact, the Washington Post, in an editorial on Sunday called Raise the Gas Tax.
Let me read to you here, ladies and gentlemen, the salient paragraph.
In a perfect world, we would like to see a gas tax that was the equivalent of oil at $100 per barrel.
This would send a loud and clear signal to drivers to continue eschewing gas guzzlers.
Now, Mr. Snirdley says that not everybody did know the price of gasoline and oil would come down, that I was one of the few that predicted it.
Okay, it's come down.
I don't care how many people knew it was going to come down or not.
The point is, it's come down.
If people don't trust, it's going to stay down.
So, I don't think people are going to, it's going to have to stay down for quite a while before people resume their old habits.
But they're not going to have the money to resume their old habits because by the time it would take for confidence to settle in, new tax increases are coming down the pike.
And I guarantee you, the left will see these lower oil prices and they'll see an opportunity for higher taxes.
And they'll see an opportunity for higher taxes on gasoline as well.
What?
What?
Right, that when prices go back up, they're not going to take the taxes off them.
If the Washington Post, which will have an ear in the Obama administration, if the Washington Post is advocating that taxes be raised so that people are paying the equivalent of $100 per barrel of oil, well, what was the price of gasoline at $100 a barrel?
Probably around $350.
So they want the Washington Post and the left is advocating a constant price of $3.50 for a gallon of gasoline.
National average.
So then you do that.
Price is going to go up again on oil.
As the global financial crisis eases and people begin to invest and relive and start taking more risk and so forth, it is going to go back up again.
They will lower the, take advantage of the lower oil price to raise taxes, raise revenue, make expensive alternates supposedly less expensive.
It's just so much opportunity out here.
And all of it is just waiting to be taxed by people who live to tax you.
Here's Cheryl in Columbus, Ohio.
Cheryl, I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hi, Rush.
I've listened to you for almost 18 years, so I almost consider you like an old friend, and yet I'm so nervous, you'd think I'd be a little calmer talking to an old friend.
Well, you sound not nervous at all.
Hey, I just wanted to cover with you.
I was watching C-SPAN yesterday, the Senate hearings, and there was this professor from a Maryland University who was testifying why the government shouldn't give the automakers their bridge loan.
But I was so struck by his hypocrisy because, first of all, tenure is better than any union.
And then, second of all, he was talking about how the automakers' expenses were making them uncompetitive.
But has anyone checked how college tuition has gone up?
I mean, it's something like 400% over a certain period of years.
Yeah, and you know, you know what's interesting about that?
We never hear the left take their rips at big education.
Big education can raise their tuition, can raise every expense they've got.
They can go out and collect all these donations called endowments from all of these rich egomaniacs who just want their name on the next building at Harvard or wherever.
Tuition can skyrocket an increase in multiple percentages.
And all we'll ever hear from the left is we've got to find a way to make sure everybody can afford to go to college, but it never involves ripping big education to lower their tuition.
There's a reason for this.
Big education is a bunch of libs.
Big education pays themselves lots of money off of high tuition, endowments, and so forth.
And big education, big government, they are identical people, same thing.
Even CNN saying it now, Big Oil's decision to hold off on new production now seems rather wise.
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