Every radio show now has to have at least three marks for its guest hosts.
It's some variation of the fairness doctrine.
Not enough marks.
There's not enough marks on the radio.
You know, Air America had marks, yeah, because they were Marxist.
So they had way too much marks.
But just here, we have me, and then we got Mark Belling in tomorrow.
And we were talking about, I said, you know, essentially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the end of the last app that what happened was they were set up to give mortgages to people who wouldn't normally qualify for a mortgage.
And HR got all kind of indignant with me and he said, don't you understand that there is now the human right to a mortgage in America?
And he was like, you know, he didn't really mean that.
But you've got to be very careful when you use these terms.
I mentioned yesterday I ran into some difficulties with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
The Human Rights Commission up in Canada actually thinks there is a human right to a mortgage and that the fact that you earn no money, the fact that you're totally irresponsible, the fact that you have no way of repaying the loan you've taken to get this house should be no obstacle to you getting that house because there should be a human right to a mortgage.
You've got to be always very careful about making jokes about these things because we live in such a crazy world.
You make a joke about something.
Next thing you know, it comes true.
A few years ago when this phrase undocumented immigrant started coming into fashion, I couldn't believe that people could seriously use this thing, undocumented immigrant.
Because one thing, it's not true actually.
They've got tons of documents.
They've got fake drivers' licenses and fake social security numbers.
And actually, a lot of the time, they've got genuine drivers' licenses and genuine social security numbers.
They've got all the documents they need.
But I started, when this phrase undocumented immigrant came in, I started using this phrase undocumented Americans, you know, fine upstanding members of the undocumented American community.
Next thing I know, Senator Harry Reid is there on the floor of the Senate saying we need to pass this amnesty bill so that all these undocumented Americans can come out of the shadows.
The undocumented American phrase jumps from a cheap joke and becomes reality.
You always got to be very careful in this day and age about making a joke about some of these things.
So no, I don't want to accept the human right to a mortgage.
I don't think that's the case.
You interfere with the market and what you do is you in the end destroy the market.
And although most of the blame attaches to people like Barney Frank, in a sense, an element of the Republican Party got suckered because they understood that home ownership is a good thing.
That generally speaking, home ownership is good for society.
When people own their homes, they become interested in economic growth and liberty and the other features that spur economic growth.
If you have a city where most people rent, generally speaking, it becomes a kind of socialist basket case.
So property ownership is explicitly connected with liberty and with economic opportunity.
But if you destroy the basis of home ownership, if you just say there's no, anyone can own a home now, we'll destroy the meaning of the phrase home ownership.
We'll give these ridiculous mortgages at ridiculous rates that bear no relation either to the value of the property or to this guy's ability to repay the loan, then what you're doing is actually undermining, undermining home ownership and destroying the very qualities it brings to an economy.
And we were talking earlier in the last About putting a floor, a floor, as the caller put it, I think it was Bob in Kalamazoo, on the Dave in Kalamazoo, putting a floor on the housing crisis and actually helping bottom out the housing market.
Well, he's a builder and he knows that before you can have a floor, you've got to have a proper foundation, you've got to have struts, you've got to have a sub-floor, and then you put your nice hardwood floor or your wall-to-wall carpet or whatever on top of it.
And the reality is that the actions Congress took undermine the foundation, undermine the foundation of the American property market.
So we've got to bear that in mind too.
Lots of things going on in the Club Gitmo front, by the way.
You may remember that the president has announced his intention to look into the possibility of perhaps setting up a commission to investigate the possibility of looking into the viability of the possibility of closing Gitmo in a year's time.
It's interesting to know now, what's going to happen to all these fellas from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
When I went there, by the way, they were in terrific shape.
I ate the same food when I went to Gitmo as the jihadist seat.
And it was a huge, it's like a huge thing.
And I mentioned yesterday that these tall, thin Afghan men that you see when you wander around Afghanistan, when you go to Gitmo, these are the most corpulent Afghanistan.
I've never seen Afghan guys this overweight.
And I don't know whether this is some kind of CIA strategy so that when they're released and they go back to Afghanistan, they're too fat to get the suicide bomber belt around them.
You know, this is a real problem.
They've been in Gitmo for three or four years.
They bulked out.
You know, they're 260 pounds, 280 pounds now, and they go back and the guy says, the head guy in Waziristan says, we'd like you to go to that U.S. military base and blow yourself up.
And they say, oh, I'd love to.
I can't get that.
I don't know what's happened.
I can't.
My old Sentex belt doesn't seem to fit anymore.
But they're living on a terrific diet over at Gitmo.
And a couple of them, I think a couple of them who were returned to Pakistan said about six months later that they really miss Gitmo.
They're having a terrific time there.
Anyway, the Gitmo suspects, detainees who have been returned to productive life in society, they're never not in the news.
This is from the New York Times today.
Dubai.
11 Saudis who were released from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists.
By the way, how likely do you think a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists, how effective would you say that was likely to be?
A Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists are now believed to have fled the country and joined terrorist groups abroad, Saudi officials said Tuesday.
Well, there's a surprise.
So another 11 Saudis released from Guantanamo Bay.
They've now rejoined the Jihad and they're going to be showing up in various bits and pieces at a suicide bombing near you sooner or later.
The fact is, you know, we've been grossly sentimental about these fellas in Guantanamo Bay.
You know, everyone thinks, oh, the poor fellow, he was just some, he was just some pushtoon yakherd who happens to be standing on the wrong battlefield in Afghanistan.
And the next thing you know, he's in Guantanamo and all his rights have been taken away from him.
You know, the average Pushtoon yakherd does not generally have $250,000 in hard currency on him and one of these GPS satellite things.
The thing is, most of the people who are in Gitmo are in a legally dubious zone, but they are dangerous people.
You know, President Obama, when he was talking about the release of Guantanamo detainees, and as I said, we've just seen a typical story.
You can see these stories every couple of days.
11 Saudis who were released from Gitmo, they've now fled the country to rejoin terrorist groups.
President Obama said the other day, can we guarantee that they're not going to try to participate in another attack?
No, Obama said.
Quote, but what I can guarantee is that if we don't uphold our Constitution and our values, that over time, that will make us less safe.
And that will be a recruitment tool for organizations like al-Qaeda, unquote.
So this guy, essentially, the president's argument is saying that, you know, if we don't uphold our Constitution and our values, which by the way means extending the protections of the United States Constitution to everybody on the planet.
You know, the United States Constitution is supposed to apply to the United States and to citizens of the United States and people who live in the United States.
And it doesn't.
It's now a universal thing.
It applies anywhere.
I mentioned Mullers in Space right at the top of the show, this new sci-fi program, I'm pitching to Power Man, Mullers in Space.
And you can bet that if somebody arrested a Mullah on planet Zongo, the first thing that would happen is they would say, well, this, he needs to have his Miranda rights.
He needs to have the full protections of the United States Constitution.
You know, when the Democrats were talking about this thing about the Bush administration eavesdropping on the jihadist phone calls, and they were saying, well, well, you know, some of these calls are on U.S. numbers, and that's in breach of the U.S. Constitution.
So now, apparently, it's not just that U.S. citizens are protected by the United States Constitution, but so is a U.S. telephone number.
It's like, if you've got a 202 number, you've got a 212 number, you know, if you're in Vermont, if you're Howard Dean, you'll have an 802 number.
These numbers, it's like these numbers enjoy constitutional protection.
And like that might have made sense.
I mean, that didn't even make sense.
When I bought my place in New Hampshire, I bought it originally as a vacation place.
So I wasn't living here, but I immediately got a phone line, I got a fax line, I got a private line.
So I had three telephone numbers in New Hampshire.
And if only I'd known that they were protected by the United States Constitution, even though I as a sinister foreigner had taken them out.
And now, a few years later, these phone numbers, you can go and buy a Verizon cell phone that will ring out anywhere on the planet.
In my experience, it's hard to get it to ring out when you're actually in the United States, but apparently on the rest of the planet, it works fine.
So you can, what you have is that people go up and buy huge numbers of Verizon cell phones, other American company cell phones.
There were some fellas in Michigan, near Dearborn, Michigan, who were stopped mysteriously.
They had something like 4,000 cell phones in the trunk.
Now, what was all that about?
Well, that's the point.
The guy sitting in the cave in Raziristan, he has a U.S. cell phone number.
And the Democratic Party, so when he calls to arrange the next terrorist outrage, a Bali nightclub bombing, a Madrid train bombing, London tube bombing, he's using his 202, 212, whatever it is, U.S. area code telephone number.
And the Democrats wanted to extend the constitutional protections of the U.S. Constitution to telephone numbers that can be used now anywhere on the planet.
The point is, Gitmo is serious business.
You can be the kind of moral narcissist who says we need to close Gitmo and return these guys.
But when they're returned, They rejoin the jihad and they do bad things.
They're two kinds of the idea that there are a lot of innocent people caught up in there is not credible.
By the way, one thing I like about Gitmo is there's some people they don't want to return to their home countries because they're wanted for various activities there.
So they want to go back home.
So America's been trying to find somebody that will take these take these jihadists.
And obviously, the easiest thing, because you just stick them on the greyhound, is to send them to Canada.
So the idea was that we'd be sending all these jihadists up to Canada where they could live productive lives as part of Canadian society.
Because, you know, the average jihadist is almost as anti-American as the average Canadian.
So they'd fit in quite well there.
And what happened was the Canadians go, Canadians are normally suckers for this kind of thing.
It's like all the radioactive material they found in Iraq, for some reason, the Americans shipped it to Canada.
I never figured out what that was about.
Canadians are normally suckers for these kind of things, but they go, oh, wait a minute, you're proposing to resettle hundreds of jihadists in Canada because they can't go back to their home country?
Well, you know, wait a minute, they're in America.
Wouldn't it be, as they're already in America, wouldn't it be more convenient for them to like stay with you in America?
The reality is nobody wants these people.
They're dangerous people.
They're going to join cells.
They're going to be this idea that they're just, you know, high on the hill was a lonely goatherd.
And then, alas, the 4th Infantry Division came along and picked him up and took him to Gitmo.
These are not lonely goatherds.
These are bad men who do bad things.
And if you look at the percentage of them that have re-offended, as the criminal justice people would say, you would know that when you release these guys from Gitmo, these last die-hards from Gitmo, they are going to go back to doing what they do best, which is waging war against the great Satan.
We'll talk about that and lots more straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
More to come.
Mark Stein on the Rush Limbaugh Show from the EIB Network.
You know, I mentioned that story in the New York Times about these guys released from Gitmo who have now believed to escape from Saudi Arabia and join terrorist groups abroad.
I love this quote from the chief spokesman of the Interior Ministry in Saudi Arabia, General Mansour al-Turki.
He's appealed for these Gitmo jihadists to return to Saudi Arabia and turn themselves in.
Quote, they will, of course, be interviewed and investigated and prosecuted for any crimes they may have committed, said General Mansoor al-Turki.
But by turning themselves in before committing any crime, they will have a better chance to be returned to their families, unquote.
That's great.
That's great.
If you don't commit any crime in Saudi Arabia, you'll have a better chance of being returned to your family, as opposed to, you know, spending the next 30 years down in the basement with the electrodes clamped where you don't want them clamped.
Now do you begin to understand why these jihadists were having such a great time enjoying the baklava from the specially flown-in pastry chef in Gitmo?
I mean, this was a good life for them.
And now we've got this out-of-side out-of-mind policy where we're returning them to the likes of General Mansour al-Turki.
And you can bet that the average jihadist, if you've got a choice between Gitmo or being returned to General Mansour al-Turki's care, you're going to get out of General Al-Turki's care and go rejoin the jihad.
This is going to put more dangerous guys out there in the world who are going to be back doing the old Death to the Great Satan dance as soon as they can.
Let's go to James in Atlanta, Georgia.
James, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Yes, sir.
Thank you for having me.
My pleasure.
Yes, sir.
Well, you know, I'm a little off course here.
You're talking about Gitmo, and I agree with you on that.
Feel free to wander off topic.
It's like an illegal open line Friday.
The place is going to hell while Russia's away.
Cheers, cheers.
That's wonderful.
Yeah, I was studying last night with my 10-year-old son, and of course, the $9 billion supposed bailout comes to mind.
And we were talking about the Revolutionary War, and we're starting for his little test that he had to take today.
And it was interesting because we talked about the Patriots, the guys who developed our country.
They got us to where we are today.
And we talked about one particular reason what generated the whole concept of the Revolutionary War, and it all came down to tax.
Right.
Right.
And go figure, go figure.
And it was a tax on tea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And here we are talking about taxing Americans to limit, to probably the most that they've ever been taxed in their life in history.
And everyone's standing by and saying, okay.
And I guess on the word of change.
And you make a very good point.
You know, everyone talks in high-flown ideas about America.
But America was founded on an economic argument, apart from anything else.
Essentially, you talk about the Boston Tea Party.
The British tried to distort the market.
They tried to say to the American colonists, it wasn't a buy-American policy like the Obama administration is trying to enforce.
It was a buy-british policy.
They had certain tea companies that they wanted to have a hammer lock on trade with the colonies.
And the colonists, bless them, had other ideas.
And in those days, people felt strongly enough about it to say, hey, you know, big government, you don't know best about what economic decisions to make.
Those of us living here, living on the ground, we know best what economic decisions to make.
And they told big government in the form of George III to go take a hike.
The trouble is now that if George III had been running in the November election alongside Barack Obama and John McCain, George III would have been the small government candidate.
That's how bad things have got in the two centuries since the founding of this republic.
I'm not arguing for a restoration of George III.
I'm just saying that, boy, we could use a guy like that today.
Now, we'll talk.
No taxation without representation.
That is a great slogan.
You know what we're getting now?
We're getting the opposite.
We're getting people who don't pay any taxes, but who vote.
And it looks like on present course, 51% of the American electorate won't be paying any federal income tax come the next election.
Well, then maybe we ought to introduce the slogan, no representation without taxation.
You pay something to the federal treasury, and then you get your say.
We'll talk about that and lots of other stuff straight ahead.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show from the EIB network.
More following the half-hour break.
Still got a few seconds to go.
Got to get more professional at this kind of thing.
Great to be with you.
Mark Belling will be in tomorrow on the Rush Limbaugh Show, and Rush returns on Tuesday.
Lots more still to come.
I got an email from a listener called Gail, who was objecting to my criticism of this lady out in California who's had these eight extra babies.
And she's going, where's freedom of choice, people?
Doesn't a woman have a right to her body?
Isn't that what freedom of choice people say?
Wouldn't it be the lady who had six children, then made a personal decision to have eight more?
Wouldn't that fall under the Freedom of Choice Act?
And, you know, that's a fair enough point.
What she's doing, though, this woman out of California, is it's the taxpayers of California who are going to be paying for these extra eight kids.
And that's the reality there.
If you have six kids and you want to have in vitro fertilization to have another eight, I'm all in favor of you doing that if that's really what you want to do.
But you should do it on your own dime.
As far as I can understand, this woman is now touting these babies in hoping of getting some $2 million, $4 million deal that will pay for all the diapers and things she needs.
And maybe that's the solution to jump-starting the economy.
Maybe if we all had in vitro fertilization, I'll include me in this, because wasn't there that cockamamie story about the guy who gave birth to a baby?
Maybe I should have in vitro fertilization.
And if I have eight kids and then someone's prepared to give me $4 million to do them, that's as likely to work as anything in this stimulus package.
So maybe you're right.
Maybe I've been too hard on this woman out in California when I've been mocking the in vitro fertilization of the economy.
Let's go to Joe in Minneapolis, which is strangely enough, it's not just Larry Craig Central, it's Jihad Central.
Strange, bizarre riot in, I think it was in St. Paul the other day, where you had a Hammers mob and a fatter mob battling each other on the streets of St. Paul.
I don't know why.
I feel a bit like Henry Kissinger of the Iran-Iraq War.
It's a shame both of them can't lose, but for some reason, Minneapolis is now the easternmost part of the West Bank.
I don't know what that's all about.
Joe in Minneapolis, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Good to have you with us.
Hi, Joe.
Are you there?
No, this is Daryl.
Yo, Daryl.
Okay.
Well, Daryl, that's close enough.
Daryl from Pennsylvania.
Daryl from Pennsylvania.
Joe from Minneapolis.
You know, let's not get hung up on details.
Daryl, it's great to have you with us.
I just wanted to mention that I think the $500,000 limits on CEO pay is a great idea, providing, let's not just stop there, we do the same thing for any former congressmen or senators after they leave.
They can only make $500,000 a year also.
I think that's a great idea.
That would solve a lot of Daschell's problems right off the bat.
Yeah, you're right.
He's basically made $5 million in nothing flat for doing work.
No one can quite explain what it is they do, what it is they do.
He's a consultant.
I don't even know what he's consulting on.
He says he's not a lobbyist.
He works for a law firm, but he's not a lawyer.
But he's a consultant.
When I first came to Washington, I'm a naive young fella, just straight off the boat.
And I used to go and meet people in Washington.
I'd say, what do you do?
And they'd say, oh, I'm a consultant.
And I used to assume that this was some sort of CIA cover.
The CIA guys in Washington call themselves consultants.
But eventually you meet so many consultants, you think there can't be that many CIA agents in deep cover in Washington.
And you realize that it's just a way for a lot of fellas like Tom Dashle, who happened to have been elected to a couple of times in Congress, to cash in on their Rolodex.
And you're right, if the issue is that people should not enrich themselves on the taxpayer's dime, which is what it is when we look at these companies that have been taken over by the taxpayer and the guys, the flop chairman and chief executives of these companies still want to make the $10 million bonuses.
If that law does apply to these companies that are now on the taxpayers' dime, maybe it ought to apply also to fellas like Tom Daschell.
You ought to be limited and constrained in cashing in on the value of your government service.
Thanks for the call, Darryl from Pennsylvania.
And sorry I mistook you for a Minnesotan.
Let's go to Tony in Washington, D.C., Stimulus Central.
Stimulate us, Tony.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Hi, Mark.
How are you?
I'm good.
Good to have you with us.
I just wanted to call a comment on the remarks you made regarding terrorist use of cell phones, basically.
Right.
You got it all wrong.
I'm a former NSA employee, and I still do consulting in the intelligence community.
And the phone numbers is not what is protected under the Fourth Amendment, Executive Order 12333, and several of the United States Civil Intelligence Directives.
It is protecting the U.S. telecommunication companies because they are owned by U.S. persons for the most part.
So because they're using a service provider, then we have to go to the court and get the FISA warrant in order to be able to do our job.
But it's not the phone number itself.
It's just the fact that it's a U.S. service provider.
No, and I take your point.
But the point I was making was really on the practical effect of this.
That as you say, you use the term U.S. person, which is a legal term to cover not just U.S. citizens, but people who are in the United States legally.
So you can be a green card holder, or even I understand, according to some of the debate, that Mohamed Atta, who was just here on a little flight student visa when he was here in Florida, and obviously not doing the full course.
He was only learning to take off, not out of land, and all the rest of it.
That Mohamed Atta, according to some definitions, would be regarded as a, quote, U.S. person in legal terms because he was here on some kind of student visa or whatever.
So that's a legal definition.
As you say, these companies, Verizon, U.S. Cellular, and whatever, are owned by U.S. persons.
But they don't just sell to U.S. persons.
If you're a Belgian or you're a Fijian, you can buy a cell phone from these companies and use it anywhere you want to use it.
So in practical terms, when we're dealing with the actual product, the product is used by all kinds of people who aren't U.S. persons.
That was basically the point I was making there.
Yeah.
And Mohamed Atto was protected and defined as a U.S. person because he was here on a tourist visa.
So the minute somebody lands in the United States, it's no longer the mission of the National Security Agency and the Department of Defense who controls National Security Agency.
It's an SPI issue at that point.
Right, but you're saying that if you land on a tourist visa, in other words, if you're a Swedish businessman who shows up at a JFK or LAX to spend three days here in business meetings, for that period in law, you count as a U.S. person.
In terms of the Fourth Amendment and electronic surveillance, yes.
Right.
And that's why the system is so messed up and we need to do something about it.
And I wholeheartedly agree with you and Rush and other conservatives on our stance on GitMo and other things.
You know, everybody wants to say, oh, it's civil liberties, civil liberties.
Like I said, I was an NSA employee.
I'm still involved in the U.S. intelligence community.
We don't care about whatever politicians are doing.
We care about protecting the nation, and that's it.
Mark, thank you for your time.
And thank you for protecting the nation.
That's the priority.
People get complacent.
It's a famous line about terrorism that the IRA's message to Mrs. Thatcher after they failed to kill her at the Conservative Party conference in England in whatever it was, 1981, I think it was.
And the IRA said when she survived the attack, you have to be lucky every day.
We only have to be lucky once.
And there's a reverse of that when you flip it around.
That if you've been lucky every day, as America has for seven and a half years now, since September 11th, 2001, people get complacent.
Don't realize that it isn't luck.
That in fact, the reason that the Jihad hasn't been able to pull off an attack and kill thousands of Americans as they did on September 11th is because systems have been put in place not to make it impossible, but to make it a lot more difficult for them to kill thousands of Americans on the American mainland.
And the longer that goes by, the more people say, Well, there isn't any war on terror.
It's just some thing that Bush and Cheney cooked up to boost the Halliburton share price, and there isn't really any war.
And people get complacent.
They don't realize that there's a reason why thousands of Americans haven't died in an attack in one of these 50 states since September 11th, 2001.
And in part, it's because every single day, agencies of the government that Bush motivated after September 11th are making sure that it's a lot harder for the Jihad to pull that stuff.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh show from the EIB network.
We will have more for you straight ahead.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.
I was talking about George III 10 minutes ago.
I was saying, you know, if he'd been running in November against McCain Obama, he would have been the small government guy.
The other thing I forgot about George III is that after he lost the American colonies, he went kind of mad because it upset him, obviously.
You know, it would upset you if you'd lost all this nice prime real estate in the Atlantic seaboard.
And he went a little insane.
But the odd thing is, George III insane is not as insane as Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi sane.
So even as a gibbering lunatic, George III still makes more sense than Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank do.
Let's go to Ginny in Las Vegas.
Ginny, thanks for waiting.
You are on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Good to talk to you.
Well, you are a delight.
I've had so much merriment listening to you the last few days.
Wonderful.
I'm calling about the February 16th Forbes magazine.
Right.
Cover story, Tim Geisner.
Right.
And on page 34, the second column, nothing surprises this 76-year-old anymore, but this did kind of get a reaction.
There's just two sentences here.
Some question his technical skills.
He doesn't like math, says one junior friend said of staff for referring to the sort of PhD-level number crunching practice by economists.
Yeah.
Can you believe that?
Yeah, well, that's the great thing.
If you don't like math, Treasury Secretary is a terrific job to do.
If you don't like math, if you don't like math, being Speaker of the House is a terrific job to do.
If you don't like math, heading up a big congressional committee is because there's no, you know, you know, like I wasn't a big fan of math myself, and when they teach it now, it's all a lot more loosey-goosey than it was in my days.
But like when you were doing fractions, you were supposed to get it right.
It wasn't good enough just to be in the ballpark.
It wasn't good enough to say, well, you know, 73 and 34, what is that?
It's not a satisfying answer to say, well, it's somewhere north of 100.
You can't do that when you're doing grade three math class.
But you can, if you're Treasury Secretary, if you speak with the House, you can.
You say, well, we need a ballpark figure here.
What's the best kind of ballpark figure?
One with 12 zeros at the end.
Who needs to know about math?
If he's lousy at math, being Treasury Secretary of the United States is the perfect job for him.
It's not even like filling in your tax return where you've got all those difficult questions like, oh, you know, is my kid's summer camp a legitimate business expense?
There's nothing on that.
It's like, just add, just add a few more zeros to it.
You know, I saw a call today saying that, you know, we really need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible.
There's a guy in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who says, because we really need that $10 billion a month that we're spending in Iraq, supposedly.
$10 billion a month is nothing.
It's nothing.
We're talking now, we have effectively got a whole new scale of government expense that we've introduced in the last four months.
You know, I keep mentioning this business of Zimbabwe devaluing its currency because they've got the highest inflation in the world.
We still have a real currency.
It's like if you go to your, like if I go to my little general store in my town in New Hampshire and I buy a cup of coffee and a newspaper, it'll cost me just over a buck.
So a dollar is still a dollar in kind of realish terms in the real America.
But a buck isn't anything if you're in Congress.
If you're in Congress, you're dealing with this wacky new Zimbabwean unit that doesn't count for anything unless it's got 12 zeros on the end of it.
If you're like Robert C. Byrd, you know, Robert C. Byrd, there's apparently still two acres of West Virginia that hasn't got a building named for Robert C. Byrd in it.
So if you're Robert C. Byrd and you're going to, and you're you've been bringing pork back to West Virginia for decade after decade after decade, billions and billions of dollars, and you go back there now and you say, well, I brought you billions of dollars of pork, and they'll say, hey, get lost, loser, bring us trillions of dollars of pork.
Essentially, that is now the answer.
You know, more and more zeros.
It's not if you take a $1 billion, if you've got a little earmark, little government program, got a little, you know, the Robert C. Byrd Institute for this, Institute for that.
Actually, I believe there is a Robert C. Institute for this and a Robert C. Institute for that.
But if, you know, if it's just a mere billion-dollar expense, it's pork.
It's an earmark.
But you add another three zeros to it, and boom, by magic, pork is transformed into stimulus.
And that's essentially what we've done now.
We've got a real dollar that you use when you go to your general store and you buy a newspaper and a cup of coffee.
And then they've got this Zimbabwean dollar that they're now using to work out the federal budget.
No good is going to come of that.
Thank you very much.
Thanks very much for your call, Ginny.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show, and we'll have more straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush Limbaugh.
Well, let's quickly hear from Jim in San Diego before you go.
Jim, we're pushed for time here.
What's your opinion?
The question is, and the point is, Obama wants to put in a bipartisan cabinet.
He's putting in Democrats and Republicans.
So far, I can't find any problems with any of the Republicans for taxes that he's pointing in there, but he still keeps coming up with these Democrats that have a problem.
So why not just put in all Republicans and it's all taken care of?
Well, you're right.
It is a bipartisan cabinet.
It's got people who don't pay their taxes and it's got people who do pay their taxes.
This is a tremendous.
This is what he means by reaching across the aisle.
He's reached across the aisle to Rayla Hood and Judd Gregg, who do pay that.
Boy, Judd Gregg, you know, must feel like a real idiot.
I mean, he must be thinking, wow, why did I get the same deal that this Tim Geithner got?
You know, but having said that, I do really feel sorry for poor old Tom Dashall because he timed things.
He didn't even raise the question of, you know, he might have a few concerns until Obama got the nomination.
Then he didn't even start notifying people about the concerns until Obama had won the election.
And only when he got offered the nomination did he stick that great big six-figure sum and toss it down the huge sucking moor of the Federal Treasury.
And he didn't even get the job.
You've got to feel sorry for Tom Daschell after the way things panned out for him.
He's down to six-figure sum and he's still not a cabinet secretary.
This has been Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.