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Dec. 2, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
December 2, 2008, Tuesday, Hour #2
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And thank you, Johnny Donovan.
You read that introduction just the way I wrote it.
Appreciate it as always.
Jason Lewis here, Minnesota's Mr. Wright filling in for America's real anchor man, Rush Limbaugh.
He is uh out ill today, as you probably know already.
Hopefully back tomorrow we'll hold the fort down until he's recuperated fully.
That's what you get.
That's what you get when winter rolls around.
There's nothing good about winter.
Why do I keep saying this?
And I'm in the coldest spot in the continental United States.
Uh almost anyway.
You know, far more many people die from the cold, far more many than from heat.
Uh consider that when uh the global warming alarmists start uh filling your your airwaves with nonsense.
More on that a little later in the program.
I I I don't want to s focus the whole show on Detroit, because it's more of a symptom than the actual disease.
The disease is the notion that we are now a country of entitlement.
That business is getting into the act.
You know, there are a number of large businesses that just love the idea of Tom Dashell's government run health care.
Uh why?
Well, they can unload all those liabilities off their balance sheet.
They don't care about the taxpayer, they care about their PL.
And if the PL looks good, the balance sheet looks better without those liabilities.
Who cares about capitalism and private property and taxes and and and a flourishing economy, it's good for us.
And that I'm afraid is what liberalism brings to a country.
It brings I'm not going to say we're soft.
You got a lot of brave men and women fighting overseas and elsewhere that would disprove that.
But you you the notion that big business is on the side of markets and capitalism is an absolute myth anymore.
Now, I would argue the last bastion of free market capitalism is the small to medium-sized business.
They don't have the power in the cloud in Washington to get the subsidies, the low interest loans that can only the government will give because nobody else in their right mind would.
Uh they don't have that cloud, so they've got to survive in a marketplace.
But the bigger the business, the more politically correct they get, the the the more they go to Washington and work with government, and the more they rely on bailouts.
And that is, without being too hyperbolic about it, that is in fact similar to the old Soviet five-year plan.
If government could pick winners and losers, Japan would be an economic juggernaut.
The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe wouldn't have collapsed.
The dirty little secret is governments don't have market discipline.
If you waste money in the private sector, then you go bankrupt, or it used to be you went bankrupt.
If you're not fulfilling a need, if your products don't have marginal utility.
But if in the public sector you spew out waste and you're making something nobody wants, you just get another subsidy.
And it goes on in perpetuity.
And of course, that means that everybody pays more for not just what they buy in the in the consumer marketplace, but you got to uh, you know, attach the subsidy to it.
And that's where we are, and it's very, very distressing uh that Americans seem to have bought into this notion that they're entitled to this, they're entitled to success.
We're going to privatize profit but socialize risk.
So it's great if I'm making money, but if I fail, by God, I'm entitled to a bailout.
Uh we it is unsustainable.
You can't bail out everybody.
And what Mary Jane was uh essentially missing was the notion, as I mentioned, that economists have known for since day one, the old guns and butter argument.
There's an opportunity cost.
If you're gonna subsidize one company, that means another company is gonna go without the money that is rightly theirs because you're taxing them.
And if that you've got some sort of Keynesian multiplier, if the government just spends, that money will go through the economy and it will multiply time and time again.
Well, where does the government get the money to spend?
They tax me or you.
And if we would have kept the money and we would have spent it, or better yet, saved it, and in the normal economy, all savings are spent.
That money would have multiplied time over and over again.
The difference is that you and I and millions of people with private knowledge that the government could never have would be choosing what to save on, would be choosing or save for, what to spend on.
And when the government gets the money, when they choose, those decisions are based on political interests.
On what Al Gore wants for green jobs, not what the people want.
That's why you've got to give everybody a seventy five hundred dollar tax credit to buy something like the Chevy Volt, because people are not gonna shell out that kind of money for a car that's got to be recharged so often.
They want the luxury, the convenience, and dare I say the safety of the good old American SUV, which Washington has effectively put out of business.
And if Detroit had the the guts to go to Washington and tell them that, I'd probably be cheering the loudest.
Instead, they're going along to get along.
And there's more to come from where that where that's been.
I mean, we've got a trillion dollars in bailouts going to everybody, and everybody's got a trickle down effect, Mary Jane.
I mean, we should have we should have uh should have bailed out Lehman Brothers, because that money that's gone there didn't trickle down.
How is it so many people won't believe in trickle down theory when you cut taxes, but they're the first to believe it when you subsidize something.
The National Bureau of Economic Research said yesterday that America in fact entered a recession in December of 2007.
Now we've yet to go two quarters with negative economic growth, the official hallmark, but the NBER said, Yeah, we've been in a recession for about a year.
Why didn't the experts see that a year ago?
The ones that are telling us we've got to spend all of this money?
Just a thought.
Just a thought.
And now Barack Obama's gonna double down on this.
What did I read in uh where was it?
Uh the New York Times today?
I can't remember.
Maybe the Post.
Washington Post.
You've got a number of quote unquote economists coming to the aid of big government spending.
Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has one thing right.
He says it's not just that the banks are hoarding money, uh putting it into treasury funds.
Isn't that ironic?
Uh the the Treasury injects the banks with money and then they turn around and buy treasury bills, giving the money right back.
That suggests to me all the amount of government or all of the government manipulation in the world won't solve the problem.
There's a there's a a reticence to lend that is a confidence problem, a paralysis because of uncertainty because of exactly what the government has done.
It's panicked.
But then this guy goes on to say that, well, you gotta convince people to get out there and lend and save, and this is quote, the ideal circumstance for going on a public spending binge.
Well, that's what we're doing.
We've got a trillion dollars in bailouts, four trillion total of guarantees.
Uh the president elect Barack Obama is meeting with the state governors today in Philadelphia, promising them $126 billion more.
So we're gonna bail out Arnold Schwarzenegger, we're gonna bail out Ed Rendell, we're gonna bail out everybody that can't seem to run their own fiscal house.
By the way, where does that money come from again?
Oh yeah, yeah, we're gonna rob Peter to pay Paul.
That ought to you know, folks, it is self-evident, or ought to be by now, that government cannot create wealth, it cannot create demand, it can only shuffle around resources.
That's all it can do.
That is not going to start the jumpstart the the economy's engine if you, you know, take money from one pocket and put it in another.
You've done nothing.
You've got to change the incentives.
You've got to make certain capital is out there in private hands to increase productivity of the private sector.
And you do that by making the business climate better, better, by permanent tax reduction, a sales tax holiday or a corporate tax holiday will not do any good, just like the rebate didn't do any good, because it's temporary.
Nobody's going to invest for the long term on a temporary relief.
You need permanent tax reduction.
But think about this.
The opportunity cost principle.
If government is going to go on a spending bidge, whether they tax, borrow, or inflate, the money comes out of the private sector.
That is money that would have been used by a private sector entrepreneur to create a new tool for you on the assembly line, to give the truck driver a new truck, which makes him more productive.
That sort of private sector productivity is the only route for growing incomes, a rising tide.
If all we do is create make work through a government infrastructure spending stimulus plan, you've done nothing.
You've done absolutely nothing at all.
You've simply taken money that would have been spent on private sector productivity, and in fact, you have wasted it on a makework job, might as well hire people to dig ditches and hire other people to fill them up again.
Have you created any wealth?
No, you haven't.
The government will never have the knowledge of millions of entrepreneurs putting the their Assets to their most productive use.
Which is why it's never worked.
It's why it's never worked and it never will, and it won't work this time.
In the last eight years, government spending has gone up by a trillion dollars.
Did that fiscal stimulus help us during the downturn?
Why will this one?
You know, there's been this talk about 401ks getting it.
Congressman George Miller and Jim McDermott.
Uh they've been hinting.
They haven't come out and said it, but they've been hinting that well, there's got to be a better way to to handle these 401ks.
Three trillion dollars in 401ks.
And they had somebody testify in in one of their committees uh a couple weeks back, talking about ending the tax breaks for 401ks and pulling an Argentina, telling you, well, you're a 401k, we're gonna take it over.
We're gonna take the money, put it in the Social Security Administration, and uh this failed experiment is no longer because everybody's lost on the stock market, and we'll guarantee you something out of the Social Security Administration.
You know what I'm gonna know why this is happening?
Even talk of this insanity is because they're gonna need a bailout for sp the people bailing them out.
They're gonna need to bail out Social Security.
We're gonna need to bail out the government for the bailout of what they're doing right now.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Meanwhile, everybody's recuperating, hopefully, in India from those horrible attacks over the holiday.
What, 174 dead from the terrorists in uh in India?
You know, it's it's it got me to thinking.
If you take a look at uh at what we now know, we now know that the terrorists were actually communicating before the assault via their blackberries.
Think about that for a moment.
Number one, it's a disturbing level of sophistication, I guess, for terrorism.
Uh but number two, remember the great debate over the NSA that the New York Times leaked.
Anybody say the espionage act?
But the New York Times leaked.
Uh the NSA was monitoring international communications out there in the ether.
And they were trying to get tips.
And there was a hullabaloo.
How dare these people have a search and seizure, wiretapping without a warrant.
Can you imagine if somebody might have been monitoring what was going on in Mumbai and heard what was going on or got a text message uh via cell phone or something that might have staved off this?
You know a lot of us on the right have been critical of the Bush administration on spending and rightly so, but you he can leave office with one thing, say, look, we haven't been attacked again.
And a lot of that is due to what they've done domestically, not necessarily overseas.
The military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, which every president has used in one form or another.
Can you say Abraham Lincoln?
Uh I mean, th this whole hullabaloo over Gitmo and the military tribunals and what the Supreme Court has done in trying to rescind the president's war fighting powers.
You know, there is Article II, somebody ought to tell the Supreme Court that if not Joe Biden.
But more importantly, the electronic monitoring of international communications, which by the way, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton both signed executive orders authorizing the same surveillance measures, but they didn't even have an imprimatter from Congress, such as the military authorization to use force.
The point is that was a smart thing to do, and we ought to continue it.
And Barack Obama may continue it.
We'll see what happens now that the the FISA crowd got their wish to have everybody run up in front of these so-called judges before you get a warrant, but it's not practicable when you've got, you know, terrorists on the shore communicating through blackberries that you say, oh, I think I heard somebody going to go into a hotel, somebody says they're going to an attack and hotel.
Hold on, let me go see if I can find a FISA judge and get a warrant.
That's why the administration was doing it, and that's why they were right to do it.
That's part of national security.
It is not gathering evidence for a civilian prosecution, which the Fourth Amendment would restrict.
This is part of the president's war fighting powers.
We used to call it spying, and I'm glad he did it.
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Yes, we are still having more fun than a human being should be allowed, thanks to uh Rush.
Check out Rushlimba.com, 1-800-282-2882, the contact line here.
Back to the phones we go in Chicago.
Mike, thanks for waiting.
Thanks for calling.
You're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Yeah, hi, Mr. Lewis.
Uh I came to this country twenty years ago.
I'm a Polish immigrant.
I left communist Poland when it was still communist.
And I'm feeling that 20 years after that, I came to this country because this was the last country that was really, you know, for freedom and personal liberties.
And now I'm feeling I'm having a deja vu of some sort.
Like we're going back or actually we're going to socialist country, looking at all these bailouts and central planning and all these regulations.
And very soon we're going to have mandatory community service and government rationing.
censorship and all these things.
What do you think about that?
Look along with government bailouts, along with subsidies goes control.
And that's why the people leading the charge really on corporate subsidies and I love this this line of reasoning you've gotten Mike because you're dead on it hasn't been Republicans traditional conservatives I should say.
They're not always Republicans anymore, sadly.
But it hasn't been the conservative community that's been clamoring for corporate subsidies and yet they get labeled oh you're just a big corporate toady.
I'm forgetting off the back of corporations but I'm also against corporate subsidies.
But I think it's absolutely demonstrable now that the only people demanding corporate subsidies now are the liberal left.
They love it.
I thought they were against big corporations.
They love subsidies and you don't want to know why?
Because then they can control them.
So you think going down this route we're gonna turn to uh next Soviet Union or we're not gonna go that far?
What do you think?
Well if you just look at health care, uh the largest purchaser of health care in the United States is now government at one level or another over fifty percent of health care purchases are done by government.
So that economy is already controlled.
People complain about health care in America, which is still pretty good, but the problems are are directly attributable to the government and third party payments taking the consumer out.
So that one's down you're looking at an environmental jihad that is that that is I don't know what's more astounding the total absence, absence of of opposition to the radical environmentalists or or the the the checking in of I don't know where to go with that because I'm so flustered with with the environmental movement.
It is clearly a movement as Vlakov Kloss says uh dedicated to socialism the new communism if you will and nobody's fighting that you've got governors on the Republican Republican governors association getting on board with the environmental renewable energy mandates and global warming mitigation mandates.
It drives me nuts, you know, having Republicans or conservatives so-called complaining that those CEOs are flying the corporate jets.
Whose business is that this is exactly like the fable that m the Mr. Limbo said about the the goat that what do you want to do with the you know I mean don't wish somebody else this is like a spreading the poverty around like crazy.
No it is right.
Let them make as much money as they want, let them fly the corporate jets when they want, but don't bail them out when they fail.
No.
That's the neutral business policy, Mike thanks for the call and when it comes to the nanny state, you couldn't be more right along with this these subsidies and controls and giving up our liberty for a little safety comes the comes the the nanny state.
We're now told what kind of light bulbs to put into our house by 2012.
We're told in our own bar that we can't smoke.
We're told what food to produce if you're a farmer how much to produce we're told if you're a creditor how much interest you can charge.
If you're an employee and employer, you're told you can't make a voluntary contract without clearing it with the government.
If you want to buy a company or sell a company or merge, you've got to clear it with the Justice Department.
Literally every facet of our lives oh by the way and then we send our children off to government monopoly schools.
Yeah we are in danger of turning over um what was the great shining city on a hill what was the American experiment.
And it's very very sad to see the American people fall for it.
I'm glad you haven't Jack in Savage Minnesota, our old stomping grounds you're on EIB hi.
Hi Jason uh thanks for inviting me along to play on the big show today.
I've got uh some things I keep seeing about these bailouts and things that people keep seeing them are referred to on these financial uh shows where these pundits are talking and I never hear them adequately explained and I wanted to ask you about LIBOR and the mark to market rule.
And how it relates to all this the the LIBOR rate is the the the the rate out of London the the interbank rate that is used to gauge the credit crunch.
And when you've got a large spread on LIBOR then people aren't willing to to um To give everyday credit, revolving credit, the credit that keeps businesses going.
So economists and others, analysts look at the LIBOR rate to say, is the credit crunch thawing?
And when it comes down in the spread lessons, that's an indication that that we've we're starting to see a little more credit flowing.
The mark to market is a very, very interesting point and it's a good one.
What what happens is that that because of Sarbanes Oxley and a few other rules, uh we want total transparency at the moment.
So if you're holding, say, a mortgage backed security, or you're holding a treasury bond or a corporate bond or anything, and interest rates go up and the value of that goes down, should you as a corporation have to mark down that asset?
So if you've got your portfolio, Jack, and you're you own treasury bills or you own um, well, for that matter, a corporate stock, I guess you could make the same argument.
But you know, when do you look at that every day and say, gosh, I'm now less wealthy, even though the treasury bill I hold is not going to mature for another year, the value of it today went down.
Should I have to tell the world that I'm less wealthy?
Well, if you're gonna hold it to maturity, it really doesn't matter, does it?
No.
And that's why I think it's probably a pretty good idea to look at the mark to market rules and give them a break and say, wait a minute, some of these securities that especially the ones that they were going to hold until maturity should not have to be marked to market every day, and that tends to feed on itself, causing less credit to be available to those people.
All right, here we go on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Uh, welcome back, everybody.
You know, I uh one more thing before we get back to the calls uh at 1 800 282-2882, and that is the the signals that President elect Obama seems to be sending not to us, I mean, he's going to be a big spending liberal president.
I don't think there's any doubt about that.
But on the foreign policy angle, I'm finding this rather intriguing.
Where is the move on.org crowd when you need them?
Excuse me.
I mean, Obama's talking about keeping the NSA spying program.
He's talking about keeping Bush's intelligence team.
He's kept Robert Gates at defense.
When it comes to the anti-Iraq war crowd or the anti-war crowd, so far, all the President elect has said is, well, uh, we need to move the Central Front on the war on terror to Afghanistan, which by the way is going to be a much tougher uh nut to crack there.
But he's not talking about just withdrawing troops, getting out of the war business, the military industrial complex.
He's just talking about a different form of it.
He's talking about going into Afghanistan instead of Iraq.
Uh one particular uh former Afghan interior minister said the other day that it's going to take years, at least ten years to establish any stability in that country.
Quote, it is a theme park of problems.
Now I'm confused here.
Where's George Soros?
Uh where's the the lunacy of Sean Penn?
You know, all of the dilettants out there who thought that this guy was going to be George McGovern.
They thought that this guy was and even McGovern probably isn't quite as bad as what they would hope.
But regardless, they they they're they're silent.
I'm confused.
Are they giving him a pass?
I mean, he's Hillary Clinton, let's be blunt, uh, ran a little bit to the right of Barack Obama on some foreign policy issues, and now she's a Secretary of State.
Where's the anti-war crowd?
And it's especially it's especially delicious when you take a look at the NSA spying program that the left went apoplectic about at the height of the war on terror, the electronic monitoring of international communications, the fight- Do you realize that we had attorneys general throughout the history of this country that could find a national security threat and issue a wiretap once that once that technology was up and running.
Bobby Kennedy, I believe, issued more riotaps at that particular juncture than any other former attorney general in history.
He did not get a warrant from FISA.
The foreign intelligence surveillance court wasn't even around until 1978, thanks to another bungle by Jimmy Carter.
And even Carter's attorney general said FISA did not encroach upon the powers of the president to use, to utilize unauthorized and warrantless wiretaps if for national security.
Now, civil libertarians say, well, yeah, but then they can wiretap you and me.
No, they can't.
If in fact you're wiretapping to get for political gain or to get the goods on some political opponent, that is illegal.
You want a bright line, there you go.
If you're wiretapping to gather evidence for a criminal prosecution of a civilian defendant in a civilian court, that is illegal without a warrant.
There you go.
But if, in fact, the president has a reasonable suspicion of a national security threat, an impending invasion, call it what you will, then the president has the plenary powers, Article II, the war fighting powers to say I'm going to spy on the enemy.
And I don't have to run to the judiciary to implement my constitutional duty of Article II.
You cannot allow the Supreme Court to fight the war.
And now when you take a look at military tribunals, that's going to be even even stickier.
Now that the Supreme Court is weighed in and they want to fight wars, they want to give the writ of habeas corpus to anybody that moves in contravention of everything we've ever done in this country before.
The idea of giving the rid of habeas corpus to unlawful enemy combatants captured on a foreign battlefield who are non-citizens was never ever part of our precedent until recently.
Well now, if if Barack's going to close down Guantanamo, do you know what he's also already talking about?
And again, where's the left?
He's talking about setting up all right, we're going to close down Guantanamo.
Uh we we can't we can't utilize rendition, sending them back to their own host countries, because then they'll be beheaded there.
So we'll bring them back to the United States.
And I say if you bring them back to the United States, you ought to plop everybody from Guantanamo in Henry Waxman's district.
Then see how they like it out in Beverly Hills.
The point is, though, Barack has already signaled, well, we may have to set up a special court to try some of these terrorists if we're going to bring them back outside the usual parameters of a civilian court that would reveal classified information.
What he's talking about is a military tribunal light.
The same thing that Bush had done, only Bush was more straightforward and quite frankly a little bit more honest about it.
We we have been engaged in military tribunals since George Washington.
Every president has upheld that power.
Only now are we rethinking that, and I think erroneously, the point is, and I hope Barack continues down this path, but I'm you know, i if his economic plans are any indication, I'm sure we'll all be disappointed because he's certainly going on the big spending.
You know, speaking of that, before I get off this topic, Barney Frank the other day.
But he said he wants to cut cut the Department of Defense by twenty-five percent.
Cut the Department of Defense by twenty-five percent.
Doesn't that have a trickle down effect?
Doesn't that have a stimulus aspect to it?
Why is it the Democrats only love spending programs for economic stimulus packages that have nothing to do with defending the country?
But above and beyond that, I'm sure there's waste in the Department of Defense.
They're immune to market discipline just like every other government operation.
So I'm sure we could find some cuts there if we wanted to.
But I say, Barney, well then what should we do with the Department of Energy?
There's twenty-four billion.
The Department of Agriculture, there's twenty-two billion, the Department of Education, there's fifty-seven billion, HHS, seventy-two billion, HUD, thirty-seven billion, uh the you know, go right down the list, transportation, sixteen billion, the EPA, eight billion.
You know, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, weren't even around prior to Jimmy Carter.
Twenty-five percent.
Why don't we eliminate them?
The Department of Housing and Urban Development wasn't around prior to Lyndon Baines Johnson, didn't stop the mortgage fallout.
Why don't we cut or eliminate them?
You want to cut twenty-five percent.
Why is it you're talking about cutting defense twenty-five percent, but you can't cut any other cabinet level agency by that amount, Barney?
Because you want to dole out goodies just like you doled them out in the affordable housing crowd to Fanny and Freddie, just like you protected the those those corrupt institutions and the millions they paid in bonuses, and now the House of Cards has fallen all over the United States, and you're the guy that's gonna lead us out of it?
Talk about Hutzpah.
I mean, the very guy, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, that kept protecting Fanny and Freddie, assimilating all those bad subprime mortgages, knowing full well we would bail them out.
And Barney kept doing it because he wanted that affordable housing slush fund he could dole out to Acorn and everybody else.
And Fanny and Freddie were supposedly part of that affordable housing schematic.
And yet we protected them until they became insolvent, and now we've bailed them out two hundred billion dollars, another six hundred billion is gonna buy more of their bad assets.
And who's going to lead us out of this?
The guy that got us into it, Representative Barney Frank.
Sometimes it's just too much to take, my friend.
Steve in Toledo, Ohio, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, sir.
How about you?
I I you know, after listening to uh after listening to this introduction, I have so many other things I'd like to comment on, but quite frankly, going to the automotive uh uh uh the automotive aspect of of this bailout situation or the loans that the big three are actually looking for.
Um one of the things that I that you know when you had commented about uh uh about how how absolutely ridiculous it's gonna be for uh uh for these guys to take this money and and and then in in turn have to have the uh the oversight of Congress in running their organizations.
One of the things that most people don't recall, unless you you you are are tied to the automotive industry, Lee Kakoka when he went in for and took the uh the initial loan that Chrysler had taken back uh back twenty years ago, actually paid that loan off early, and the ri and the re the reasoning behind why he paid it off was because he couldn't take the obstructive aspects of of the government in terms of him being able to run Chrysler.
He had to go and get permission to be able to use the corporate jet in order to run the business, if there was anything that is outside of the scope of what they they had allotted for during that law and he had to get permission to do that.
Uh you know, as as as you had stated, why we are allowing someone like Barney Frank to have any sort any sort of input on anything other than maybe where the bathroom is or maybe helping sign his resignation is is beyond me because these people are just absolutely abhorrent.
Yeah, it it really is how members of Congress get a free pass on this.
These are all the same people that brought us to the edge of this so-called depression, and we're not in a depression, and I don't think we're gonna go into one at all.
But uh these are the same people that got us into the quote unquote mess, and now we have re-elected them and a few more.
Well w what is wrong with with with this picture here.
Because most people that that that are going to pull a lever for that democratic uh that that democ the Democrats andor their their uh their liberal theory is is are are gonna be a group of people that actually don't want to have to fend for themselves.
It's it's it's blatantly obvious.
If if you are a hard working, taxpaying American, you want the government off your back.
I don't I don't know anybody that wants to step up to the line outside of maybe a Michael Moore who pops off and says, Yes, I want to pay more in taxes.
Uh you know, uh get up, you know, they they need to get off of our backs, let us, you know, let us do the things that we need to do and enjoy our freedoms.
But not unlike Don Corleone, the Democrats, when they get in power, I, you know, have have taken uh taken a uh uh page out of the Mafia playbook, and believe me, they use that to their uh to their advantage.
Well, yeah, they're extorting they're extorting Detroit over the green initiatives to get the bailout.
That's exactly right that what they're doing.
There's no question about that.
Name me one group that they don't extort anything from.
Well, that's true.
Now, the real tragedy is short of a few Republicans, uh the reason the Republican Party cannot generate traction among its base anymore is they've thrown in the towel too.
Yeah, and I think and I think they're a step behind where, you know, they needed it, they needed it to to fight this the the financial bailout.
The automotive ba bailout, I don't even think it's an automotive bailout.
I I uh you know, I I I hate using that with regard to the automotive companies because they have fought for so long and and have done such an absolutely stellar job at managing the business that and and and dealing with the with the with the the hand of garbage that they have been handed by federal regulations, by the UAW, by uh the greenies and it's just you sit back and you and you know, honestly.
But they're not fighting it anymore.
I gotta go, but they're not they're they're not well, they need to do that.
They that's what every American needs to do.
And that's what every Republican needs to do if you want to reclaim the mantle of conservatism or the mantle of Reagan who said in this present crisis government is not the solution, it is the problem.
And you would get resounding cheers.
You look at the poll numbers for John McCain, especially when energy was on the front burner, and he was three, four, five points up until when?
September eighteenth, the bailout capitulation.
The American people are far ahead of the so-called experts on this.
U i you're you're right about that.
And I don't know what it's going to take for a few Republicans to to get their epiphany to get religion here.
But you got a few.
You got the Republican Study Committee.
You got a few governors, Mark Sanford and Bobby Gindle sounds pretty good, and and Rick Perry in Texas.
They don't want the uh a state bailout.
All of these guys, but you've got a ton of them.
You got it like Schwarzenegger, uh Minnesota's governor uh on the environment anyway.
Uh you you've got Sonny Purdue.
You got all these guys, Charlie Christ.
They're just more than happy to say, Well, we're David Brooks Republicans, which means you're not a Republican at all.
You're just a liberal that wants to call yourself a Republican, so you can get that token slot at the New York Times.
I'm Jason Lewis on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
1-800-282-2882, the contact line for today's uh Northern Command Show, the Rush Limbaugh program up and running for a terrific Tuesday.
I am Jason Lewis filling in for El Rushboat today.
To the phones we go once again.
Uh Thomas in Pasco, Washington.
Thanks for pulling over.
You're on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Hi, how are you, buddy?
I'm doing great, thanks.
I just want to preface this by saying that I am a Canadian living in the States, so I'm a little bit more lefty than uh probably most of your listeners, but uh I have to tell you, it's really not the it's nothing to be scared of, I promise you.
But um I'm calling just to let you know that's the same.
Well, I offer subsidies as long as they're mine.
Oh, sorry?
I'm all for subsidies as long as they're mine.
There you go.
Well, um I just wanted to c comment on your uh on your comment about the need to spy on communications, and and you cited the terrorists in India there.
Right I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but all of k all of the uh blackberry traffic within India is actually spied upon by the Indian government.
Without a warning.
Wait, without a warrant.
It is, yes.
It's because the Indian government works differently.
RIM is a Canadian company, and all of their traffic is uh encrypted, and the Indian government um said, Well, we won't let your product on the market unless you open up your encryption so we can listen to all of it.
And in America, those companies would be sued by civil libertarians saying they violated somebody's Fourth Amendment rights.
And that was the point I was making.
Frankly, I'm glad you called it because I wasn't aware of that.
But the the point still stands.
The point is that that at least another government says, Well, it's a good idea.
At least we might be able to get a head start if we can monitor these communications out there in the ether.
Right.
Might and maybe, but obviously it wasn't that effective.
Well, right, right.
I'm I'm personally not afraid of having my communications monitored because I know that I don't do anything illegal.
Well, that's not really to be fair, I'll sound like a lefty here for you.
You ready?
To be fair, Thomas, that's not a good reason to allow it.
For people to say, Well, I don't care if the cops bust down my door because I'm not doing anything illegal.
That's not the reason for the Fourth Amendment, so that everybody makes certain things because inevitably they're gonna bust down somebody's door uh who who who may be doing something illegal.
That doesn't give them carte blanche to bust down my door.
I'm absolutely opposed to government uh eavesdropping or go or or searches and seizures without a warrant if they are gathering evidence to put me in jail in a criminal prosecution.
Oh, but I don't disagree with you on that.
I just want to let you know that they they were listening to or have at least the ability to listen to that.
So a lot of times it's not as effective as people would think, especially in that in that particular example, you know what I mean?
Certainly a fair point.
Certainly a fair point, my friend.
However, one thing I want to let you know is that nationalized health care is nothing to be afraid of, and it's a great thing.
I'm not a big proponent of two-tier health care, but at least have some sort of government uh government level uh uh health care system.
It's really not that scary.
If you raise some of the rights to actually move to a country for a while, now Thomas, you had me going there for a while, now you're losing me.
Uh the nationalized health care is great, as long as the next door country is the United States.
Uh go go to Canada and count how many MRI machines you have, how many CAT scan machines you have, and then find out where they go for the real medicine when they really get sick.
Uh, you can go right down the list.
So let's we can go over waiting periods, we can go over all of that.
Uh I would argue that without the safety valve of the United States, and we can talk about reimporting drugs.
You get cheap drugs because we pay for the research and development here in the United States.
All of those tertiary benefits that accrue to Canada do so because we are next door.
Without that, uh you might be singing a different tune, like a number of other countries that have tried it and failed.
But but I I think your point on on the surveillance is a good one, and I'm glad you brought that to my attention.
I would only say I would only say this that it may not work all the time, but it's much, much better to have that option.
It's a little bit like the old adage: better to have a gun and not need it than to need one and not have it.
I'm Jason Lewis, and you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Okay, we'll continue with this uh next hour, 1-800-282-2882.
Also got to get to uh the environment.
The global warming uh delegates are at it.
They're meeting, I believe, today, today or tomorrow, uh, in uh Poland.
190 countries will have representatives there to figure out the next Kyoto Accord to solve global warming.
I know, windmills.
That ought to do it.
That's coming up next hour.
More of your calls.
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