Bill Richardson under investigation for taking certain, what, gratuities from an L.A. muni bond contractor, if you will.
Bill Richardson, Tim Geithner, and Tom Daschell.
Change you can believe in.
Not if you're the IRS guy doing the audit.
This is just getting to be too much fun.
Hi, everybody.
Second hour now up and running on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis.
Hi atop the EIB Tower.
Well, okay, I'm in Minnesota.
I thought I'd like to say that, though.
It just sounds good.
Minnesota, where it will be about four degrees today.
More evidence for Al Gore.
I don't know what it is about our friends on the left.
I mean, how long can you run this do as I say, not as I do mantra?
Al Gore, you know, gets his global warming meeting canceled in D.C. because it's a snowstorm.
We've got one of the coldest winters in recent memory.
Temperatures have been declining for 10 years.
And this guy pontificates about global warming, the planet in crisis.
Why?
Because liberals love a crisis, especially a manufactured crisis, a war on terror crisis, a global warming crisis, a health care crisis, an education crisis.
Oddly enough, all of them require more government and more taxes.
Unless, of course, you are Al Gore, Bill Richardson, Tim Geithner, Tom Daschell.
You don't have to worry about the cost of government.
Big government's pretty good to these guys.
But the goal, as I said last hour, is simply to grow government.
It is simply to move us from a market-oriented economic system to a command and control economy.
Pretty soon, we're going to have the equivalent of five-year economic Soviet-style plans.
Look at our energy policy.
We are the Saudi Arabia of coal.
We've got more coal than we know.
We've got more coal than the Mideast does oil.
It is efficient.
It is cheap.
It is abundant.
And it's not nearly as polluting as people would have you believe, especially with the latest technology.
But the EPA just killed a big coal plant in eastern South Dakota that would serve the Dakotas in western Minnesota because Barack Obama wants to kill coal.
Our most abundant energy source for electricity, for power, for your laptop at home, for the more electricity we're all using in our homes.
We're going to kill that.
We're going to not explore offshore for oil or in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
We're not going to do that.
We're not going to drill for natural gas.
That would spoil the western continental United States.
No oil shell in the same region.
So we're taking all of the most abundant, cheap energy sources to grow the economy, and we're moving those or putting those off the shelf or on the shelf.
And what are we doing?
The stimulus bill subsidizes solar panels, windmill, and switchblade grass, whatever the heck that is.
That is what a command and control economy looks like.
You introduce economic distortions, misallocation of resources, in economists speak.
And what happens is we all have lower GDP growth.
We all have a lower standard of living.
But we're all members of the Sierra Club, except for the few, except for the aristocracy.
They fly on their Learjets.
They buy the carbon offsets.
They are the new aristocracy.
They are the new monarchy in this country.
And those are the people in power right now.
They don't abide by the tax rules.
They don't abide by their environmental rules.
They buy themselves out of them.
They don't abide by much of anything except power, except power.
You know, George Washington, when he left, he could have been president for life.
And he left voluntarily.
In fact, he resigned his military commission voluntarily.
He could have been king then or going forward.
But when he was president, after two terms, he got out.
They believed in something called rotation in office in those days.
And the people trusted Washington, and they trusted most of the framers because they trusted people with power who were most willing to voluntarily give it up.
And those people in Washington, these lifelong senators, Kent Conrad and Tom Daschell, he had to be removed, thankfully.
Barney Frank, they have no real skills.
They don't have real jobs.
They've never had a real job.
And they will not be removed from Washington until they go horizontally.
And therein lies part of the problem, a big part of the problem.
Now, there is hope in some areas.
There's something called reality.
And apparently, it's hit the Obama administration vis-a-vis foreign policy.
Have you heard this one?
L.A. Times.
Hmm.
The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered.
Harsh interrogation techniques are off limits.
And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a club gitmo, as Rush likes to say.
Well, guess what?
Remember the executive orders the new president signed?
A new one that didn't get much publicity authorizes the CIA to carry out what is known as rendition.
Rendition is when we return the bad guys to their homeland.
Secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States, in some cases their homeland.
And you know what they do with those folks then?
They don't, you know, they don't invoke the Sixth Amendment, get them a taxpayer-funded attorney, and make certain that due process of law applies to unlawful enemy combatants, which is an absurdity in itself.
Those people back there, when they suffer rendition and are sent back to other countries, they behead them.
They stone them.
They execute them.
They don't bother with it.
Now, how is it Mr. Obama, the presidents, could sign on to this?
Isn't it amazing what one intelligence briefing will do to a person when it comes to focusing the mind?
I can just see the president in the Oval Office.
First day, here's your daily intelligence briefing on the war on terror, the terrorists at Gitmo and so forth.
And Obama looks at it and says, huh, these guys are serious.
I didn't know they really existed.
Hell, I thought this was just stuff people were making up.
So now we've got the spectacle that Barack Obama has essentially signed off on rendition, sending these Gitmo terrorists back to whence they came to suffer a much more harsh interrogation or sending them to the United States in a secret trial.
Yeah, the administration has admitted they may need to set up kind of, oh, what's the phraseology I want to use?
Supra-constitutional courts, extra constitutional courts.
We used to call these military tribunals going back to Washington's day.
And certainly, I thought, really, I'll be honest with you, I thought the debate over military tribunals was done with the Civil War.
You know, Lincoln's assassins were tried in a military tribunal.
Lincoln authorized more military tribunals in a week than Bush could possibly think of.
I thought the thing was done then.
But no, the debate reared its ugly head, and they blasted Bush and Cheney for these secret, non-public military tribunals.
Yeah, there's a little problem when you've got classified information that reveals your sources, your contacts, your spies in a public trial.
Somehow, and I'm going out on a limb here, I just don't think the New York Times would keep that quiet.
Can you say foreign intelligence surveillance?
They blew the whistle on that one.
So the administration says, well, let's invoke what every other president has done.
Let's have a military tribunal for unlawful enemy combatants so we can try them in some sort of secrecy, not to reveal our sources.
But most of the other rules of evidence would be very similar, certainly similar to international tribunals that liberals love to invoke.
Well, now President Obama says, yeah, we're going to set up a different court for these people we take back into the United States.
Yeah, Mr. President, it's called a military tribunal.
You bashed Bush over it, and now you're invoking that.
You bashed Bush over rendition, and now you're doing it.
As I say, it's amazing what one intelligence briefing can do to the mind.
I shouldn't be too critical.
This is a step in the right direction.
And I've got a theory as to what Mr. Obama has up his sleeve.
And I'll be honest with you, I think it's pretty smart.
I think he's going to be a bit more moderate on foreign policy issues than some on the right think.
I think he's going to surprise some people and alienate some on the left, which you know has got to be the right direction when it comes to things like getmo or he's still going to he's still going to do some dumb things.
Don't get me wrong.
He's already doing that.
But he's not going to be, you know, it's not going to be Yalta where we give away Eastern Europe to the commies.
It's going to be a more moderate tone, perhaps.
But he's doing it for one reason, so he can lurch to the left.
I mean, lurch to the left domestically, which brings to mind, if we're going to have a defense structure, if we all believe in national defense as a true public good, we've got to remember what we're fighting for.
It really doesn't do us much good to fight for the United States of America if all we're preserving is socialist America, does it?
You know, our friends who have fought so galliantly and bravely in the war on terror and all wars past, they weren't risking life and limb.
They weren't bleeding for.
They weren't risking their own necks for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
They were doing it for liberty.
And so you can be a socialist hawk and be an internationalist, a Wilsonian internationalist, and intervene everywhere around the world.
And by the way, if you take a look at what Clinton did in Somalia and Haiti, wanted to do, Bosnia, I think we're still there in the Balkans.
You take a look at most of the wars in the 20th century, who was in power?
Oh, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Democrats.
So beware of these guys trying to use a more, I'm not going to say hawkish, but a more moderate foreign policy tone to cover their socialist aims at home.
Everywhere from more unionization to more regulation to more lawsuits with something as silly as the Lilly Ledbetter Act.
Have you heard about this one?
The Lilly Ledbetter Act?
You know, apparently this woman didn't realize she was being discriminated against until 20 years later.
Well, there's a little thing called the Statute of Limitations, you know, to protect the defendant.
For instance, if you don't file a suit until 20, 25, 30 years later, the defendant's witnesses may have all expired.
Evidence may have been destroyed.
So naturally, we have in our common law and statutory law statute of limitations.
If you've been discriminated against, wage discrimination in this case, you probably ought to know it.
And if that's the case, you need to file a suit with some alacrity, some speed.
She didn't.
She waited.
And the Supreme Court rightly said, well, it's right there in the statute.
You got 180 days to file a suit.
You can't go back two decades to say you were discriminated against and use every paycheck for two decades to prove a damage model.
Well, guess what?
The Congress just revised that Supreme Court decision, and now we'll have what is akin to no statute of limitations.
Why you can discover you were discriminated against 20 years after it happens.
And then you can sue, and you can use a ridiculous tobacco-style damage model that they used in the tobacco trials to jack up the punitive damage award.
So who gets a third of that?
Oh, the trial lawyers that, in fact, then contribute to Democrats.
Folks, it's all about power.
It's not about the economy.
It's not about rescuing Wall Street.
It's not about rescuing Main Street.
It is about growing government for permanent, a permanent governing class.
That's what they're up to.
And we'd better wake up.
I'm Jason Lewis in for El Rushbo.
Don't go away.
More on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network coming right up.
You know, speaking of Gitmo, President Obama, as I say, has signed this executive order closing Club Gitmo, but apparently substituting that with rendition.
But look, the EIB, never to be outdone, never to miss a beat, has a new t-shirt that's available for you.
Club Gitmo, When America was safe.
They've added a swimming pool and a diving board to the Club Gitmo logo, along with the labels water and board to identify the pool.
And of course, the diving board for those of you in Rio Linda.
Club Gitmo, When America Was Safe, waterboard.
The shirts are available for purchase now at the EIB store, rushlimbaugh.com.
Check it out.
Back with me, second hour up and running.
I am Jason Lewis filling in for El Rushbo.
To the phones we go, Elizabethtown, Kentucky.
Harry, thanks for waiting.
You're on EIB.
Hey, Jason.
Earlier you had a comment about whether or not there were still self-reliant people in this country.
And I'm here to tell you, we're bought out now.
But if you want to see self-reliance, you look at the people out here in central and western Kentucky.
We don't have a bunch of whiners like in New Orleans wanting the government to come in and give them $2,500 credit cards and fix their houses for them and wipe their backsides.
You've got people out here sawing trees and getting the place cleaned up, stacking lumber and chopping wood and taking care of themselves, taking care of their neighbors, taking care of the community.
Similar thing happened in the Midwest when the floods hit, as opposed to Katrina.
But here's the disconnect, Harry, and it's a great point you make.
But the disconnect is this.
If you watch any particular news program, you talk to any political pundit, the chattering classes inside the Beltway or any place, they think Katrina, and even the president suggested this in the last few days of administration, was horribly handled and it was a mistake that hurt the Bush administration.
And yet, if you talk to real Americans, they think the mistake was a bunch of whiners down there.
They don't think we did too little in Katrina.
They think people did not help themselves.
So you've got this great disconnect.
The news media and politicians, no difference anymore.
They think we didn't do enough.
The average Kentuckian says we did plenty.
It was their fault.
And I agree with you.
I think there's another disconnect, too, and that's in the fact that Kentucky was the first state to go Republican in the presidential election, go big Republican in the presidential election.
And we have a Democrat governor here with a Democrat president.
And they just now, a week later, are getting a federal disaster declaration.
Now, they had an emergency declaration right after it happened.
But if this had been Fletcher, our previous governor, Republican, and President Bush, Republican, they would have been skewered for the past week.
Why don't we have an emergency?
Why don't we have a federal disaster declaration?
But they're getting away with it because I guess it's okay for Democrats not to.
Well, also, let's be honest, and let's look ourselves in the mirror.
We have far too many federal disaster declarations.
I mean, you can get a routine spring flood on a floodplain, and governors will fall all over themselves to get that federal money that comes with the disaster declaration.
So what you've got is the moral hazard where people in floodplains who should have to be paying prohibitive high insurance or move out of the plane just rebuild in the same floodplain, knowing full well, oh, the feds will bail us out.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I just wanted to bring up, I think it's a point of hypocrisy here.
You know, the Communist News Network will be downtown Louisville, Kentucky, interviewing people in shelters.
Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait.
You say, hold on with the hyperbole.
Did you say the Communist News Network?
I'm afraid these days that really doesn't narrow it down much.
Right.
Well, the acronym CNN obviously should.
Ah, I see.
Okay.
All right.
Hey, my friend, thanks for calling.
I understand your angst and frustration, and get prepared for more of it, I'm afraid.
Leslie in Peoria, let's find out what plays there.
You're on EIB.
Hi.
Guy, thanks for taking my call.
I wanted to ask you a question.
Two or three weeks ago, you said government produces nothing and only takes away.
Correct?
Well, yeah, something to that effect, yes.
Okay, I want to give you three of them off my list.
Let me rephrase it for you, as I really said it.
Government cannot produce anything without first taking away.
Okay, they produced and built the TVA.
Yeah.
Okay, nuclear energy came from the government, and the volume production of penicillin comes from the government.
I will dispute the last one.
Let's start with the TVA, though.
Well, the last one.
No, no, let's start with the TVA.
You brought them up.
We'll take them one by one, Einstein.
Listen, the TVA.
Tell me how quickly the New Deal got us out of the depression there, Leslie.
The crash hit in 29, unemployment throughout the 30s.
And by 1938, after 10 years of big government spending, the New Deal, the National Industrial Recovery Act by your buddy FDR, tell me what the unemployment rate was again in 1938.
Well, I don't know.
It was up to about 25%.
No, it wasn't.
It was about 19, 20%.
But the fact is, all of that spending on public works programs did not lift the economy out.
No, but it sure helped a lot of people was on it, and I'm old enough to remember it.
And whose expense?
Who paid for that?
The government.
Well, who's the government?
Well, the federal government take money from taxpayers and give it back to the people who couldn't make it.
Oh, I see.
So it's quite all right to use the organ of government to take money that doesn't belong to them from one taxpayer to whom it does belong and then give it to you or somebody else to whom it does not belong.
Why don't you try that out in the private sector, pal?
You'd be arrested for theft.
No, I want to get to where you talked about penicillin.
Yeah, go ahead.
Okay, tell me where it came from.
Volume production.
Well, Jonah Salk comes to mind.
Yeah, well, Joan of Salk had nothing to do with penicillin.
No, no, but when you talk about vaccines, when you talk about things like the polio vaccine, when you talk about the great inventions, why don't we just have government create everything, Leslie?
Why do we need private sector at all?
You can have them do anything you want, but talking about this penicillin.
Yeah, go ahead.
Quickly, you've got about 30 seconds, so be brief.
Okay, the method for production of penicillin and in aggregate production was developed in the Northern Research Laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, by a man by the name of Andrew J. Moyer.
That's great.
You know what?
I can tell you all the drugs created in the private sector that would dwarf all of those.
If you want to know where we're headed, listen to Leslie in Peoria, folks.
He has absolutely no compunction whatsoever by using the monopoly of force, government, to redistribute wealth, to tax people that have money and give it to those who, you know, need it.
You try that out on the street tonight.
See how far it gets you.
You'll be arrested under your state's criminal code, under the common law, under the Constitution.
You know, the modern welfare state, and that's what this guy's advocating under the guise of the TVA, under the guise of a Jobs Works program, under the guise of penicillin.
You know, you take a look at who discovered penicillin.
I thought a Scottish bacteria, a scientist discovered it back when?
1920s or something like that.
I didn't know the government did it in the 40s, but who am I?
You know, maybe he's right.
The point is, everything the government discovers, everything the government produces, must mean that something else was not produced.
It's the oldest rule in economics.
It's called opportunity cost.
The advantage government has when it builds a bridge to nowhere is you can see the bridge.
Hey, look what we did.
We built this.
What you don't see are all of the things that could have been invented had the money stayed in private hands.
And that's why I asked this particular fellow a moment ago: what would you have?
The government do everything?
Then everything that's been created privately, from the modernization of heating and cooling systems to jet engines, you name it.
And, you know, I love the argument that government created powdered orange juice.
Great.
We got Tang and Velcro, guys.
Fact of the matter is, if you look under not only the most profound discoveries, but advances to those discoveries that make them commercially viable, it's almost always the private sector.
You take a look at the number of drugs, life-saving drugs, that are developed in the pharmaceutical industry compared to the Institutes for Health.
It's not even close.
But every now and then, they hit it right and they say, see, government works.
Well, here we go again.
You're going to, this is the fundamental question we've got right now.
This is the crossroads at which we find ourselves.
Are we going to allow the power of the invisible hand, literally the decisions of millions and millions of consumers like you, millions of entrepreneurs, to decide which software program to invest in, which business to loan money to, or are we going to have Leslie and his band of new dealers in Washington, D.C. decide?
Well, let's see, we have the private knowledge to know what the people want.
Why is it every time that's been tried in the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union, even in China, who now realize that we can't go down a planned economy?
We're going to liberalize our markets.
That's why they're growing.
That's why Asia is growing.
Why is it it never works?
And yet you get people who place their own personal, greedy interests above freedom, above private property, above everything this country was founded upon.
And I hate to tell you, in Peoria, Leslie's one of them.
George, in Toms River, New Jersey, you are on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis.
How are you doing?
I'm Congressman Adler of New Jersey was on the radio yesterday and said there may be some problems with the bill, but hopefully the Senate will find them.
Now, I find it pretty.
Are you talking about the stimulus bill?
Yes.
And I find it very disturbing that a congressman would pass this.
He's supposed to be representing us.
I think they're trying to bypass the voters.
You know, keep any information out, get this so that there's no opposition and get it passed before we can even find out about it.
And there's an online petition.
It's called nostimulus.com.
They'll send, you sign up for this petition, they're going to send it to every senator asking them to vote no on this stimulus package.
Right.
It's nostimulus.com.
And I think everyone, bipartisan effort, I think Democrats and Republicans should get behind this, tell your Democratic for anything.
I don't know why anybody would want their fingerprints on this other than a liberal Democrat who wants to use the power of government to redistribute wealth.
This is what I can't figure out.
The Senate has a shot and may be killing this, this bill.
Right now it's going to the Senate.
They start, I believe, this week on the stimulus bill.
And Republicans ought to simply take the tact.
Look, you guys say you won the election.
Barack Obama comes to Capitol Hill last week and says, look, guys, in the final analysis, I'm the president.
I won.
Fair enough.
Then you pass it.
There will be no Republican help.
There will be no Republican fingerprints on this thing because we don't want to get the blame.
Instead, you know what's going to happen?
Republicans are already preparing alternative stimulus proposals that would tweak the bill, but then they could vote for it.
How is that going to distinguish the differences between Republicans and Democrats?
This is the same old problem we got into in 06 and 08, where the distinctions between the parties were so blurred that the Republicans got the blame for big government conservatism, as well they should.
In fact, the Democrats actually outmaneuvered the Republicans on spending, believe it or not.
The Republican proposals apparently want to lower taxes in the stimulus bill, but only for the two lowest income brackets.
Well, that'll do nothing to stimulate the economy, because I hate to break it to you, but poor people don't open factories.
And that's not going to be the sort of investment incentive you need to get the jobs machine rolling again.
They also want to increase aid to distressed homeowners.
What, a mortgage cramdown and a bankruptcy bill?
Is that what they want?
They want more mortgage buydowns?
Why is it that we're doing the very same thing now and calling it a stimulus bill or recovery that got us into the mess to begin with?
Folks, we had a stimulus bill.
It was called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
We had a stimulus bill for housing.
You know what it did?
It created malinvestment in housing.
The government made loans available to anybody that had a pulse.
We had absolutely no lending criteria, and some of that because of government mandates, the Community Reinvestment Act, the affordable housing programs, what HUD was doing and telling mortgage lenders, you have to loan here.
And then what we told them, but don't worry, if you make a bad loan, and we did, a number of alt-A loans, subprime loans, if you make a bad loan, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will buy it.
So the taxpayer is on the hook.
So you got a mortgage broker out there.
What's your income?
Is your mortgage payment going to be 25 or 30 percent of your income?
Oh, well, who cares?
Sign the paper, and we're going to hand this off to the government.
Countrywide was big time into this, and countrywide just happened to make sweetheart loans to Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad and Jim Johnson and all of the Franklin Rains, I believe, was in on some of this stuff.
All of the people who wanted to protect the status quo.
So what was the result?
We had a massive infusion of capital into one sector in the economy to stimulate it.
Well, housing prices got so high, they outpaced incomes.
And it was an artificial boom, an artificial bubble.
It had to burst.
And it did when the prices got higher than incomes.
When it burst, the natural thing that markets do when they correct is for prices to come down equilibrium, the market clears, and then guess what?
People can afford houses again.
Do you know what we're doing now?
We're trying to reflate the housing bubble.
Freddie and Fannie have just been authorized to buy even more of junk mortgages out in the market.
The Federal Reserve, in an inscrutable monetary policy, has a federal funds rate of zero, trying to keep interest rates artificially low.
And now we're going to have direct aid to homeowners with mortgage modifications, which basically say you bought the house for $300,000, you signed on the doubted line.
Oh, guess what?
You don't want to pay your lender back.
You can stay in the house and just pay him $200,000.
You know, talk about impairing the obligation of contracts for crying out loud.
Now, what is that going to do?
Those people, by the way, are still going to have problems down the road.
The loan modifications we've already done.
The controller of the currency said that most of them end right back in foreclosure anyway.
So it's going to be counterproductive, but that's not the point.
The point is you've got to let the market correct.
And we are hell-bent on trying to keep this artificial boom, artificial bubble going.
And as long as we're doing that, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to prolong the recession because nobody knows whom to lend to or to whom to lend.
Nobody knows with certainty what's going to happen in Detroit, what's going to happen in the housing market.
If you want to get out from under this, this downturn, you use the tools we have and we've used for years and years.
You let the market correct.
You let bankruptcy run the day instead of bailouts, and the market will clear.
The people who survive will have great credit.
The credit markets will fall and we will recover.
But we're going to do just what we did in the New Deal.
We're going to have a recession of uncertainty and economic paralysis because government is in control and nobody knows how anybody else's balance sheet really looks.
Something that Leslie apparently hasn't quite comprehended yet.
I had to get that last shot in there and it felt good back after this on the Rush Limbaugh program.
All right, 1-800-282-2882 as we carry on here with the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis with Talent on Loan from El Rushbo.
Glad to be back in the Attila the Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
To the phones we go once again, South Florida, beautiful South Florida.
Brian, you are on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
How you doing, Mr. Lewis?
Well, I'm colder than you are right now.
Yeah, it's actually very nice down here.
I have two points.
I'm going to make them as quick as I can.
Throughout my liberal schooling, you know, hearing the praises of Roosevelt and Kennedy, there was one guy that I latched onto more than anything, and that's Charles Darwin and survival of the fittest.
And I really wish that Obama would re-examine natural selection because we don't need this stimulus package.
We've got a business down here that's made it through the last recession in the 80s, and it's going to make it through this recession.
We've got to cut back and we've got to limit our spending and monitor things better.
But we're going to make it through this recession.
We don't need a bailout that's going to end up crippling us.
Well, the dirty little secret here that nobody wants to admit, and we just don't want to man up on this, is that an artificial government-induced housing stimulus must correct.
We don't want to go through a correction.
We've become such an entitlement mentality or entitlement society that we don't think correction should occur.
Well, we could, I mean, we could use, I mean, the corporate taxes, we got the highest corporate taxes in the world.
We could use a break there.
That might stimulate things.
But, you know, in April, I go off to the Marine Corps, and I know that when I get back in four years, I know that my family's business is still going to be here because it's what we do.
We get it done.
We don't want to.
By the way, what are you going to fight for?
What is the principle that would motivate a young, healthy guy to leave South Florida and his family's business to go fight for the country?
Are you fighting just for a geographical area?
Are you fighting for a nation state and the government?
What are you fighting for?
I honestly don't know.
I'm going to fight because, I mean, I'm still proud to be an American.
Laura, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
Are you fighting for the stimulus program to preserve the stimulus program?
I'm praying to God it doesn't pass.
No, exactly.
It's been bothering me a lot.
That's the point, Brian, and thanks for calling.
You're fighting for freedom and free markets.
That's what distinguishes the American patriot from every other patriot.
You can have patriots in Japan and in Germany and Russia and elsewhere.
Lots of patriots.
If you define patriotism as paying taxes and fighting just for your nation state, we have a different ideal in America.
It was what Thomas Paine called the American Experiment.
And what this is about, the father of American independence, Mr. Payne, said, it's about liberty.
That's what we fight for.
And if we're not fighting for that, if we're fighting to preserve TARP and the stimulus program, we have lost our way.
And the only difference I would urge you to reconsider, Brian, is the notion that we are trying to preserve some sort of Darwinian doggy dog free market economy.
The free market is the antithesis of Darwin.
It is the antithesis of Dog Eat Dog.
Unlimited government and mob rule, what we're coming close to now, where the majority can run roughshod over the minority, that is Darwinian.
That is dog eat dog.
That is survival of the fittest.
If you win the election, you can do anything you want to the people who lost.
Like prosecute former administration officials, for instance.
That's a banana republic stuff.
That's Darwinian.
Free markets are predicated upon the preservation of a higher law, the rule of law, that says the strong may not prey on the weak.
Private property.
We have to have voluntary transactions, which is the heart of American capitalism.
That is the antithesis of dog eat dog.
But short of that, you're dead on, my friend.
Thanks for calling.
Marilyn in Dallas, Texas.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
Same to you, ma'am.
I'm calling about the Lily Leadbetter bill.
We followed it closely because in Texas, our senators tried very hard to get this thing changed or killed, actually.
But it's modeled also after the asbestos lawsuit.
Right.
And it has the potential of being devastating because an interested third party can file these suits.
And also...
Ooh, kind of like the tobacco sovereign third party and third party liability nonsense.
Yeah.
Well, and then a lawyer can go in with one person's permission and look at the payroll during discovery and file for all of the people, women that were on there.
The person themselves do not even have to be on the lawsuit or try to, you know, you have to remember this was a gift to the trial lawyers.
They love class action lawsuits because the more people they can get in the class, the higher the award.
And lawyers usually take a third of the award in contingency fees.
Right.
And if it follows the model of the asbestos, it will put so many businesses out of business that eventually the government will do as they did in the asbestos.
They will move it out of the courts and move it to an arbitrary board that the government puts in there, and they will determine the payments.
They can get to what living wage they want.
They can do that.
Just to prove your point.
Just to prove your point.
The asbestos litigation was so out of control that the Supreme Court finally said at one point, Congress, you've got to settle this.
We can't figure out what this is.
These are claims going back decades.
Witnesses are dead or evidence is gone.
Look, you have to remember that Democrats live and breathe based upon frivolous lawsuits, the litigious nature of society.
And this was a gift to all those trial lawyers who got their billions in the tobacco lawsuit with this ridiculous sovereign third party where states could sue tobacco companies, even though states had no standing to sue because they didn't suffer from tobacco.
They were collecting taxes from it.
So that's what this is all about.
More lawsuits, less private sector production.
But again, it's not about restoring the economy.
It's not about markets.
It's about power.
I'm Jason Lewis on the Rush Limbaugh Program.
All right, coming up to the top of the hour, but no fear.
One more hour coming right up here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Jason Lewis filling in for the big guy today.
Carl in Charleston, South Carolina, you're next up on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Yeah, a quick point.
Governments don't create jobs, never have.
If you take the defense program that got two computers to talk together, that program turned out to be the internet, but only when Al Gore released it to the public sector or the private sector.
Once the private sector got a hold of it, that's where they generated their massive revenue from capital gains.
Everybody and their brothers started building computers, modems, cables, et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
They add what economists call marginal utility, that you can have something that anybody can create in a government lab to make it worthwhile requires the incentive and the entrepreneurship of the private sector.
And the other thing is, look, if the government invests in 1,000 companies and they get one right, that is not a rationale for government investment.
You know, and this is what the defenders, the apologists, seem to say.
Well, you know, we billed out Chrysler and they paid it back.
See, it worked.
Well, it just so happens Chrysler's back on the door knocking again.
But that's not the point.
The point is, once you kind of pierce the government veil and allow them to get into equity investing, allow them to get into Capital markets where they have no expertise, even if they guess right once in a while,