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Nov. 24, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:24
November 24, 2008, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
You know what I think, folks?
I actually ought to name myself an unofficial Obama advisor because all last week I was asking, where is Obama?
I mean, Rome is burning, and where is Obama?
It's his plan everybody's waiting for.
It's stability from his plan, whether it's a good plan or a bad plan, everybody's waiting for.
Lo and behold, in mere moments, right after this show begins, Barack Obama, the president-select, is going to announce his economic team, ladies and gentlemen.
Greetings and welcome.
It's great to have you here.
Thanksgiving week begins on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, El Rushbo, back at the Southern Command.
Always great to be home.
Telephone number is 800-282.
Right on queue.
There they come.
Right as this program starts, here comes the economic team to stand behind Obama.
Let's see what we have there.
We have Geithner.
We've got, it looks like Christina Romer, who's a big tax cut, babe.
Did you know that?
She's from UC Berkeley, and she writes window dressing, I think, but she's a big, and there he is.
The Messiah has now moved to the podium, ladies and gentlemen.
He's going to make some announcements that everybody already knows are coming.
The stock market today is up a little over 300 points, and this is primarily due to the Citibank bailout.
Folks, this bailout, do you understand the total of these bailouts is now approaching $7 trillion?
By the time, let me, where's the actual number on heavy?
Federal Reserve has pledged $7.4 trillion to ease frozen credit.
$7.4 trillion plus all these bailouts, all these stimulus packages.
I guess Obama and the Democrats think that we're idiots here.
They're repackaging his massive socialist agenda, his massive New Deal, as a job stimulus program that will supposedly jumpstart the economy.
It's just, I'm wondering, well, we know where this is coming from, folks.
Do you realize we are going to face, for all of you who have been hearing from the drive-bys over the last eight years about how high the Bush deficit is and how punitive this is and how we got to balance the budget and so forth, we're looking by the time these people finish, these central planners in Washington, by the time they finish, we're going to have in this fiscal year, which started October 1st, we are going to have a federal budget deficit of $1.3 to $1.4 trillion.
The federal budget in total is just over $3 trillion.
And where are we going to get the money?
We're not printing the money.
You can't just go out and print it.
We are going to borrow it.
We are going to ask people from all over the world, nations all over the world, to help subsidize this debt because our economy still determines the fate of the world economy.
And they just keep saying $700 billion here, $70,000.
It seems like the magic number, like 95% was the magic number on tax cuts and $225,000 or $250,000 was the magic number on tax increases.
Now we have all these bailouts of $700 billion here, $700 billion there.
I am proud to say that I am one of the brave and few in this country not asking for a federal bailout.
And I'm very proud to count myself among those not asking for a federal.
The reason I'm not asking for a federal bailout, Mr. Snirdley, is that I have brains, and I know that I am one of the few, the proud, the brave, that's going to be helping pay for this.
I don't have to register as a bank.
And I'm perfectly happy to be registered as a radio company.
The Democrats, Chuck Schumer, they want to have a stimulus package on Obama's desk in January, the day he's inaugurated of another $700 billion.
Here, listen to Obama describe this.
I said that he's repackaging his massive collectivist agenda as a jobs stimulus program.
This is from the weekly radio address President-elect Obama delivered on Saturday.
We'll be working out the details in the weeks ahead, but it will be a two-year nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy.
We'll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars, and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.
These aren't just steps to pull ourselves out of this immediate crisis.
These are the long-term investments in our economic future that have been ignored for far too long.
And they represent an early down payment on the type of reform my administration will bring to Washington.
A government that spends wisely, focuses on what works, and puts the public interest ahead of the same special interests that have come to dominate our politics.
So much here, but he's laying it out for you.
He is promising you here a collectivist, socialist agenda.
This business, this is right out of FDR and the TVA and all these make work projects, building roads, crumbling roads, bridges, and so forth.
And this is not just a one-step thing.
This is the plan for the future.
Early down payment on the type of reform my administration will bring to Washington, a government that spends wisely.
How in hell can anybody in Washington, I don't care what party they're a member of, how can anybody say that there will be wise spending in Washington?
The spending is out of control.
It's over.
I mean, there's no discipline whatsoever here.
And this is being done by politicians who want to cement their power.
They are trying to create as many of you in need as they can, particularly on the Democrat side of things.
This is a rerun of FDR.
In fact, you know, last week, we harped on the ROM Emmanuel soundbite from last Tuesday about the crisis here being an opportunity.
And lo and behold, in Newsweek, big long story here by Michael Hirsch and Daniel Gross entitled Who's Watching the Money.
With the economic news worsening every day, Obama found that he could not ignore the growing power vacuum back east.
So pervasive has the panic become that some critics are starting to point fingers back at Chicago.
Wonder who those critics were.
Wonder who these two guys happen to be listening to.
Who was it last Thursday and Friday was asking, where is Obama?
And lo and behold, Obama has shown up with the naming of his full-fledged economic team.
Let me define spending wisely as Obama means it and as the Democrat Party means it.
Spending wisely means spending everything and then some.
Wise spending is a term for the government running as much as they can get their hands on.
But listen to this paragraph from the Newsweek story.
Some people see political motives in all this foot-dragging.
Obama may want to avoid being linked in any way to the policy failures of the Bush era.
Harvard economist Ken Rogoff, a sometime advisor to McCain, says that by not taking ownership of the problem now, Obama can reappear dramatically as his savior on January 20th, like FDR in 1933, thereby reclaiming the commanding heights of U.S. politics for the Democrat Party.
It's exactly the FDR model, says the McCain advisor.
The market may sink another 10%, but then they can win elections for another 10 years.
It makes sense politically to hang Bush out to dry, but Obama has to hang the economy out to dry at the same time.
Obama, in other words, may want to turn crisis into opportunity.
May want to turn crisis into opportunity.
He is turning crisis into opportunity.
This that he is announcing today with his economic team, his speech on Saturday, his radio address, all of this spending.
This has nothing to do with reform.
It has nothing to do with improving the economy.
It will not work.
Not as you and I define work.
It will work for them.
It will work for Obama and the Democrats.
It will continue to create crisis.
It will not create 2.5 million jobs.
The government can, there's just not private sector jobs.
It will not create 2.5 million private sector jobs.
It may create 2.5 million government jobs.
They could do that overnight if they wanted to.
And that may be what they intend.
A brief timeout here, folks.
We've only just started.
Oh, there's a great story today from the Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times about Thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims, this is the headline of the story.
The Pilgrims were really grave robbers.
The real story of Thanksgiving from some anti-American leftist history person.
Okay, quick timeout.
Back with more right after this.
Two and a half million government jobs would more than double the federal workforce or thereabouts if that's what he has in mind.
By the way, anybody want to continue the discussion that Obama is governing from the center, that Obama is a moderate?
This is full-fledged FDR New Deal collectivism that he is outlining.
And I just, I watched a little bit or listened to a little bit of his announcement ceremony that's taking place today, and it is pretty much what I thought it would be.
He's making these radical proposals, all of this crazy, unaccounted for spending.
But he is doing it with an air of confidence and assuredness that is continuation of the image.
It's sort of like the way FDR mesmerized people with the fireside chats.
It just inspired confidence.
He sounds like he knows what he's doing.
He sounds like he's in charge.
He sounds like he's got his hands in the till on everything, knows what's going on here, ordering his team around, telling them to get back to him, get something done here soon after he's inaugurated.
And given the nature of our society today and population, this kind of confidence at first will garner support for what Obama wants to do.
But let's take this statement of his, this little excerpt that we had from his radio address on Saturday.
We'll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges.
Well, you know, there's a little bit of a problem with that.
Guess what's happening?
And we've had stories of this throughout the past couple of years.
The gasoline price is now, it's less than half what it was this summer.
And you know what that means.
It means that, and people are driving less, even despite the fact that the price has come down.
Gasoline usage is down 5%.
That's not insignificant.
The tax revenue, therefore, is down.
The price is down.
And so people are driving less, even with cheaper prices, which means that all of the gasoline tax revenue, federal and state, is less than projected.
So guess what's now being discussed?
Raising the federal gasoline tax, as we mentioned last week, so much.
It's actually kind of disheartening in one way.
In another way, of course, it's, you know, reach around, pat myself on the back.
But it is so easy.
I know liberals like every square inch of my glorious naked body, and I know what they're going to do.
And they're going to grow government.
And if they have any revenue shortfalls, they're going to find a way to tax those shortfalls back into where they think they ought to be.
So even though gasoline is cheaper, and even though people are using it less, because, by the way, the government has advised them to do this.
The state governments, the federal government told everybody to go out, get rid of the SUV, buy the clunker, go out and buy the tiny little lawnmower with a couple of seats on it, save gas, save the planet, don't pollute as much.
And then when people go out and do that and tax revenue to the states and the feds fall, then they have to talk about, well, what are we going to get this revenue back?
Because they can't do with a dime less.
You and I will be asked to do with a lot less.
The government will do with not a dime less.
So we're going to put people back to work on our crumbling roads and bridges.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I travel around the country a lot.
And about the only place I see crumbling roads and bridges is in cities totally run by liberal Democrats.
Cities have been run by liberal Democrats for most of the last 50 years.
I mean, there's some bridges in New York that look, I don't know how they're still standing.
You talk about road conditions and so forth.
And liberals, I don't care who the mayor has been, liberals have run that town for I don't know how long.
And it was the same thing in New Orleans with the levees, Minnesota and that bridge.
But in truth, how many of our roads are crumbling?
How many of our bridges are falling down?
Do we hear about this every day?
We had one bridge, one calamitous collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis, and all of a sudden every bridge in America is in disrepair and is in danger of falling down.
And so we need a $700 billion stimulus package and a bunch of makework jobs to go out and rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges.
Where are they crumbling?
Take a look where they're crumbling and find out who's running the show, and you might have a good idea as to why they are crumbling.
Another thing here, wind farms and solar panels.
There's a story in the stack today from a former head of Aramco, which is a Saudi company that runs the exploration of their oil fields and the production.
He says, we have more oil than anybody in the world can possibly understand.
We have trillions and trillions of barrels of oil.
We are in no danger of running out of oil.
Not just that that we have discovered, but that that we haven't discovered.
There's a lot we've discovered we haven't produced that we could produce.
We've not peaked.
We're nowhere near peaking on oil.
And yet everybody's in panic now because of the oil price going up and now the instability of it coming back down and all this constant never-ending talk about global warming.
And by the way, you see some whales are stuck in ice already up near the Arctic Circle.
It's never happened this early in the season.
We need to send some SUVs up there right now and warm it up.
People need to get some SUVs up to the Arctic Circle and start driving around and warm things up.
You know, a little anecdotal story here, and it's what it is, is anecdotal.
I moved to Florida in January, February 1997.
And for the, and I've still been here 11 years.
You have been able, we have been able to make book here on one meteorological certainty.
And that is sometime in the middle of December toward Christmas, we're going to get our first cold snap.
And it's going to happen.
It always happens.
We always, there's been one year where it was 80 degrees out of these past 11.
I've been here.
One year where it was 80 degrees on Christmas Day.
The rest of the time, you know, it dips down cold here when the humidity goes away as in the 60s and 50s at night.
That's when people bundle up and turn on the fireplaces.
We are currently in the midst of our fourth or fifth cold snap since the 1st of November.
I have never seen this.
I have never, and when I say cold snap, I mean the humidity has gone, low temperatures in the 50s and highs, sometimes not even breaking 70.
And this week, we're going to have a week much like what that Christmas week I just described to you is.
The lows are going to be anywhere from 49 to 55, and the highs are barely going to get into the 70s in a couple days.
Today's going to be nice.
Then another cold front comes in.
I've never seen this.
I've never seen this since I've lived here.
Now, granted, it's just anecdotal.
So as you know, I think the whole global warming thing is a hoax.
It's a myth.
It's just part of the master plan that we see being unveiled today.
It is a reason to tax.
It is a reason to limit people's freedom.
It is a reason to put government in charge of fixing a crisis, a crisis that will destroy the planet, destroy animals.
I mean, we've been through this time and time again.
There's no evidence that man-made global warming exists, that it can be proven.
And yet we're plowing ahead here.
So he talks about wind farms and solar panels and fuel-efficient cars, alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil.
That's not how you do it.
You free yourself from dependence on foreign oil by producing your own.
But given his statement here, something I want you to think about, something I want you to ponder.
Everybody is agreeing that the big three auto execs are overpaid.
But I wonder, maybe they're underpaid.
Maybe the big three auto execs are underpaid.
Look at it this way.
You're the CEO.
You're the boss.
You're the Mr. Big.
And a few little congresspeople with huge egos assign you a term paper that you have to complete during the Thanksgiving vacation.
And here is what the liberals in Congress want answered in 20 pages, more or less, with your new proposal to get your bailout money.
Congress said, show us a plan that will honor all of the overpriced union agreements and wait till you hear the details on how much that actually costs.
I'll get to that in the next segment.
Congress wants to see a plan for the big three to turn out cars that environmental extremists are demanding, like Obama.
They want big three automakers to stop producing cars that customers want.
They want the big three to start manufacturing cars that liberals say you should want or should have.
Every time liberals in Congress change their minds, you have to change your production lines.
Oh, at the same time, you're doing all this to satisfy these people who have no idea how to run your business.
You have to make a profit.
These guys aren't overpaid.
There isn't enough money in the world to pay anybody to play the game.
The auto execs are having to play with a bunch of neophytes who have no idea to run the auto business.
They're just trying to turn it in to the latest branch of the environmentalist wacko movement.
We'll be back.
Well, I don't know what to make of this.
When Barack Obama started his news conference, the announcing of his economic team, by the way, no specifics in the economic plan he announced.
He was asked by reporters, could you give us a number?
How big is your stimulus package going to be?
Well, I'm going to wait for my recommendation from my team before I get into any of that.
I've spoken to Bernanke and I've spoken to President Bush.
The auto companies, he said they got to get back to him.
They got to get back to him on how they're going to retool and how they're going to structure themselves for long-term sustainability.
We're not just going to kick the can down the road with the bailout.
Man, can I read that right?
That means these guys are going to have to bend over, grab the ankles.
Okay, you want us to go total green?
We'll go total green.
You want us to make cars people don't want?
That's what we'll do.
You want us to do all of this stuff that you want people to drive that they don't want to drive?
Fine, that's what we'll do.
That's the pressure that's being put on the automobile companies today.
Now, when Obama started, the stock market was at 325.
He started his press conference right as this program began.
That is not an accident.
Ladies and gentlemen, the stock market now is down to just over 200, 204.78, so it's down 120 points, 125 points or so since the Messiah began his meeting announcing his economic team.
But once again, there were no specifics announced.
And that, I think, is going to be pretty common.
What he's trying to do is sell what he will not tell us he's going to sell us with an air of authority and confidence and assuredness.
Don't worry, everything's going to be all right.
I'm on it.
My team is on it.
And this will work at first.
This will give people some pause.
Well, I don't know.
I may be speaking out of turn.
It doesn't appear that it has calmed Wall Street.
Wall Street's coming back a little bit now, 226, so it's down 100 points.
We should specify that the reason the markets launched up today was the Citigroup bailout, not the anticipation of Obama's team.
Obama's press conference caused a spike.
It was as low as 150 points.
But, folks, stop and think about what the auto industry has to do here.
And let me find that little story here about how much it costs the auto industry to pay people who are not working.
Well, too many stacks here today.
I will find it in just a second.
But the fact of the matter is, when you look at what the auto industry is being asked to do here, show us a plan that will honor all these overpriced union agreements, show Congress this plan, turn out cars, the environmental extremists demand, stop producing cars customers want, manufacture cars liberals say people should be driving.
And then every time the liberals in Congress change their mind, you have to change your production lines and retool.
And while doing all of this, you have to make a profit.
It is clear.
I mean, I would not want to be a CEO of a big automaker these days.
What is headed their way, given their needs?
They're going to have to bend over a whole bunch of times, grab the ankles for whatever sustenance they get from the government.
Let's start on the phones.
Are you ready in there to transcribe things as we go?
Yes.
Bill in Illinois, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
How you doing, Rush?
Just fine, sir.
Thanks.
Hey, I've got an answer to why the roads are falling apart and crumbling.
Tell me.
Roads are designed to be maintained after so many years, to be resurfaced.
And throughout the years in different states and places, they've deferred the maintenance to save the money or spend the money on other places.
So because maintenance hasn't been done throughout the years like they should have been, the roads and bridges are crumbling.
Well, but are they crumbling?
See, that's my question.
Are the roads and bridges really crumbling?
Minneapolis Bridge, that was not a design problem.
It was an engineering problem.
That was not from neglect.
It wasn't that nobody maintained that bridge.
They finally did an investigation.
They studied it and they found that it was an engineering error from the get-go, a design error.
Years before in Connecticut, they had a bridge collapse because it wasn't maintained.
There's a lot of issues with maintenance of these structures that haven't been done that we've got to catch up on.
Otherwise, you will see it.
It's money that should have been spent at first that wasn't spent where it should have been.
There is merit to what you're saying here in the sense that give liberals a pile of money and they'll spend it buying votes before that they a lot of politicians will frankly, spend it mining votes before they spend it on its intended purpose bill.
Thanks for the call, appreciate it.
Uh, let's see who's next.
This is Steve And Lul.
Steve, great to have you on the EYE Network sir, hello.
Well, thank you Rush, it's good to be talking to you too, appreciate it?
Uh, Rush.
I'd like to explain to your audience a little bit more specifics.
My wife and I, we are freelance proposal writers for construction companies.
A lot of companies have to hire folks like us because of the mounds of paperwork, the requirements.
Before they dig anything into the ground.
The government requires feasibility studies, impact studies diversity hiring, all kinds of things.
Now, these things didn't exist.
Back in the 1930s, if they wanted to build a new road, they simply hired contractors and they built the road.
Today, over the past 50 years, all of this stuff has to be uh, has to go through tons of approvals before they can do anything right, and this is one of the reasons we don't build as much anymore.
You look at the 30s, the great Depression.
Look what went up, the Hoover Dam Empire, State Building and the two bridges.
Out in the Bay area and we have here in.
In my hometown Louisville, there's been an effort to build a bridge across the river for 20 years now, under And Northup, who was a Republican.
After about 20 years they were finally starting to actually build a few things, but then, after a Democrat took Northup's place it, it stopped.
Now that's what's going on and in fact, rush.
The bulk of my work that my wife and I do is not even here in the United States.
Most of it's in the Middle East, in Dubai.
I just got back from the Middle East to Bahray.
There is tons of work going on over there.
We could Do it, but we've got all these rules and regulations here in the United States, and it is next to impossible to even dig one hole in the ground.
Well, and then it's interesting then if we're going to rebuild bridges and crumbling roads and so forth, how will the federal government react to its own regulations when it starts out doing this?
My guess is they'll just overlook them or broom them for a while because Obama's got to show action.
And if we're going to rebuild roads and bridges, then we better damn well see a lot of people out there on the roads and bridges and not drinking coffee every 10 minutes.
If we're going to rebuild the roads and bridges, don't you think the American people better see a lot of them being rebuilt?
There better be a lot of video footage of a lot of chain gangs and whoever else is going to be out there building these roads or filling potholes or what have you.
And the same thing with maintaining bridges and our precious infrastructure.
We'll see, ladies and gentlemen, this is what it's a campaign promise.
And I know he's going to continue governing in campaign mode.
Now, I think Obama's timing is perfect here because he's acting today like Santa Claus.
He has all kinds of goodies that he's going to give every one of you.
Of course, you're going to pay for these presents, but he makes you feel good.
You're happy to see him show up.
Always asking you what you want, but in the end, we know the truth, don't we?
Whatever we say we want, we are going to pay for.
What of the hundreds of billions in taxes we pay on gasoline that was supposed to go into a highway trust fund for maintaining and building federal roads?
What happened to all of that?
What happened?
We already have these systems in place for maintenance of our precious infrastructure.
What happened to the money?
What happened to all that tax revenue?
Well, clearly, it's been spent like every other dime has been spent, plus dimes and dollars in the billions and soon to be trillions that they never had in the first place.
John in Libertyville, Illinois, nice to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Hey, thank you for taking my call.
You said something really interesting that I think is kind of really shows why the conservative mindset has failed and continues to fail.
You said that Barack Obama and the Democrats are going to force the auto industry in the United States to make cars that nobody wants.
Now, the reality is that given the fact that we now know that gas prices can be manipulated to shoot up to almost $5 a gallon, that the reality in Detroit is that they're already making cars that nobody wants.
You can't sell an SUV in this country to save your life.
And making fuel-efficient cars makes commercial sense.
It's not an ideological thing.
But it sounds, but you turn on the Rush Limbaugh show, and what you hear is, no, they just need to keep on making gas guzzling sport utility vehicles and everything will be fine.
And it's crazy.
That's not what you hear.
That's what you think you hear.
What you're missing that is implicit in my statements on this is that I believe in freedom.
And I think if somebody wants to go buy an SUV, they ought to be able to buy one.
I just bought one last week.
So nobody's buying SUVs.
People are buying SUVs.
There are people.
Millionaires can buy SUVs.
No, Now, come on now.
I'm trying to have an intelligent discussion with you about the concept of freedom.
That's what this is about.
I don't want to have to drive one of these little p-brain cars that Obama thinks everybody ought to be in.
I don't want to drive a hybrid unless it's an SUV hybrid.
I do not want to drive.
I do not want to drive one of these newfangled electric things.
I just don't.
And I don't want to be forced to have to buy one one day.
Not in the land of the home, land of the free, home of the brave, and all that, where we have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Of course, they're going to mandate.
The federal government's going to bail this business out, theoretically.
Look at how they run the school lunch program.
Look at how they run the curricula at schools.
Once their money is involved, they can tell the auto companies what to do.
And there's no question that the greening of the auto industry is one of the objectives here.
And I have, you know, talked to people at General Motors, and they have, you know why they're making these cars that you described?
I didn't describe any kind of car.
You're the one describing cars.
I'm saying, why wouldn't it make sense?
Why wouldn't it make commercial sense to make a sport utility vehicle that gets better gas mileage?
Why is that a problem for you?
It's not.
I don't have a problem with that.
But how come you have this imaginary idea that Barack Obama is going to force Detroit to make cars nobody wants?
It seems to me everybody would want that, wouldn't they?
Well, I don't see them making mad dashes out to buy them, is the point.
And they are available, as you said.
I don't see them taking over the market.
We don't have an oil shortage.
You see, the premise for all these new kinds of cars is flawed and a lie.
We're not destroying the planet.
There is no man-made global warming.
All of these automobiles, SUVs are not changing the climate.
And this has been what has forced General Motors to retool because enough Americans have bought into this silly notion that they're saving the planet by driving some of these little cars.
They have to give the customers what they want, but this is not what they want to make.
Well, Americans have bought into the notion also, and I think quite rightly, that gas prices can shoot up at a moment's notice for artificial reasons.
And that's going to make them say to themselves, why should I buy a car that gets eight gallons, you know, eight miles to the gallon?
There's no logic in that.
And I mean, it just sounded crazy for you to say he's going to make them make cars nobody wants.
I'm telling you, they're making cars nobody wants right now.
They have been trying to get them to build cars that nobody wants for years, starting with Al Gore's electric car and and all these these other things.
But if you misunderstand.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
What did the Bush administration do to try to get Detroit to make more fuel-efficient cars?
I know.
I know it's all silly.
Look at this.
This is ideological in the sense that people who want the government to be the answer to everything who want to exercise government power, in Bush's case, he's just pandering.
He was just pandering to people amidst all the pressure that was mounting on him.
None of this fits under the rubric of liberty.
You got the president of the United States, the president-elect for crying out loud, John, wake up.
The president of the United States and members of Congress are going to tell the auto industry how to run their damn business in order to get some bailout money.
And if they didn't have to pay people that weren't working for them, wait till you hear the numbers, it wouldn't be as bad a problem as it is.
Union regulations, I mean, I don't understand why you aren't frightened of this.
If the federal government can tell the auto industry how in the world it must operate, Obama just said this.
We're not going to give them the money until they give us a long-term plan of sustainability, and it's going to be on his terms.
That's not in the Constitution, my buddy.
The President of the United States does not have or shouldn't have that kind of power.
And we are surrendering it left and right, both corporately and privately and independently.
And it scares the hell out of me.
Let me just quote from Obama's own radio address on Saturday.
We will put people back to work, rebuilding roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, building wind farms and solar panels.
Who is this we business?
These are all the things, except for the schools and solar, wind farms and solar panels.
That's a private sector business.
Once again, if people want it, we're going to mandate they have solar panels and wind farms.
We will put people back to work making fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from dependence on foreign oil.
How's he going to do that if he doesn't order the auto companies to do it?
This is a freedom issue, folks.
The way this works is not complicated whatsoever.
It's, I don't know, you just let if you let supply and demand work, ladies and gentlemen, then whatever consumers want, Detroit will build.
That's how they make money.
The only reason for the government to get involved is to force Detroit to make cars people do not want.
By definition, you leave it alone.
People will buy what they like, and that's how cars get made.
But then you put government regulations, cafe standards, mileage, emissions, all this, and all of a sudden, you change the game.
The government's telling the automobile business how to run the business.
And then you give them 15 different gasoline formulations they have to make engines for and all this rock gut.
And now here's Obama saying, we're going to produce, we're going to have a fuel-efficient car.
And he doesn't know the first thing about doing it himself.
By the way, Chicago Tribune, today, SUV sales stir as gas prices sink.
SUV sales stir.
Consumer tastes are changing.
Yes, but people are starting to buy SUVs again, despite our previous caller.
If you think, if you think that this is a recipe for making all this work, the big three automakers used to be able to play poker with the government all day long.
They held the cards.
As GM goes, so goes America.
After being skewered by Congress and lampooned on Saturday Night Live, the CEOs of Detroit's three automakers, they end up making their return trip to Washington by car as they seek a federal bailout, and they're going to carpool.
They are going to carpool.
Auto industry planning carpool to Washington to ask for bail.
If you think this is not done out of abject fear of the federal government by a private industry, then you don't understand what's going on.
GM factories building SUVs are working overtime to meet the demand even now.
Details coming up.
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