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Feb. 5, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
February 5, 2009, Thursday, Hour #2
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You know, all good talk show hosts do come from the Midwest.
That's an established fact.
Uh we're also all from the Midwest obsessed with the weather.
We love going to places that aren't as frigid as we are, and they have no idea how cold.
Well, so I came from cold weather to come out here and do the program, and it's cold in New York today, too.
But you don't know the first of it.
Look in here.
The low temperature near Fort Lauderdale, which is just north of Miami Beach last night was 38.
38 degrees.
Tampa 29.
Jacksonville, Florida, 17.
Jacksonville's in Florida.
Seventeen the weather's all screwed up right now.
38 degrees in Miami.
If there had been precipitation, it might have been snow.
You know what we need to do?
We need to find Al Gore.
We've got a lot of power here still at EIB, right?
Can you find Al Gore for me?
I know it was a lot of trouble getting the bathroom situation taken care of, but can you find Al Gore for?
We should take Al Gore right now, grab him, haul him down to Miami Beach, put them on the beach and tell them, okay, Al, take your shirt off now, global warming.
Look at these temperatures.
You know, we haven't had any war, and I don't want to start the whole global warming thing here, although I've been warned that if I talk about the issue I am starting it.
It was warmer, the high temperature yesterday in Calgary was 52.
The low temperature in Miami Beach was 38 degrees.
It was warmer in Calgary, which is in Canada, than it was last night in Miami Beach.
Yet we're worried about global warming.
You know, we haven't had any warming now in five years.
You know that, don't you?
Not in five years.
Uh I want to talk about the uh the official term on the Rush Limbaugh program is porculus, correct?
See, that's a tricky thing for a guest host.
If I just start calling it porculus, you're stealing Russia's material.
If I don't call it porculous, it's like I'm not part of the team and not understanding that I'm on the rush program.
It's actually a very good term.
The porculus bill, the stimulus bill.
For those of you who missed my first hour here, I took the unpopular position that we should be resisting attempts to use the bailout as a pretense to put limits on executive pay, as a pretense to tell businesses that are receiving bailout money how they can spend their marketing budget, and so on.
Everything that's going on right now is nothing more than an attempt by liberals to take advantage of the fact that there are problems out there to start doing all the things that they've ever wanted to do.
They've wanted to limit executive pay forever, so they use the bailout as the pretense to limit executive pay.
Now they use the fact that we are in a recession to carpet bomb America with garbage.
This is their excuse to do everything that they've been denied the chance to do for the last 40 years.
And they simply claim that it's because of the recession and they call it stimulus.
Whatever they want to do right now, they'll just call it stimulus.
That's the name that they're going to attach for every idea they have.
Every campaign contributor that they want to reward, every special interest group that's ever backed them, we're gonna give them something and we're going to call it stimulus.
This is the greatest cover-up of all time.
What you have right now is doing public policy on all sorts of things that ought to have at least some level of review, and throwing it into one thing and claiming that you're stimulating the economy.
There are things that are in this that don't have anything to do with the economy, much less stimulus.
What this is is looting.
When there's a natural disaster, some creeps come out and they start ripping off all the TV TVs out of the uh appliance stores and so on, steal everything they can.
This is looting.
We have an economy in this country that's in trouble, and we have Democrats who now have total power.
There's no cop anymore to stop them.
The Republicans can't do anything other than gripe.
The talk show hosts like me can only Tell the public about it.
They want to do this, they'll have they'll be able to do it.
They're taking advantage of the fact that there is a recession.
To pass a bill that they claim has something to do with improving the economy, but just doing everything they've ever wanted to do.
They're stealing TV sets here.
That's all this is.
Now that we've started to expose some of the things that are in the bill, the public's becoming aware of what it is that's in there.
And they know that the public wants to pass something.
All the polls show this.
Every poll that I've seen.
Should we pass a stimulus bill?
Yes.
Why?
Because we have to do something.
People are scared.
But then you ask them, should we pass this stimulus bill?
This porculus?
Well, no, I don't think so.
It's not 50-50 on that, at best for the Democrat side.
People want to have government action to improve the economy.
But the more they find out about what this government action is, the less support there is for it.
Obama said today, I want to find the quote.
Actually said it in his op-ed in the Washington Post.
He said that if we do not pass this stimulus package now, that the damage to the economy will be irreversible.
Irreversible.
That it will never end if we don't pass his bill now.
That's ridiculous.
Whatever happened to, I know two weeks is a real, real long time.
Didn't he say that his victory was the triumph of hope over fear?
What's today's date?
Is it the fifth?
What's the inauguration?
15 days ago, is that right?
All right, 14 or 15 days.
This is the triumph of hope over fear.
So two weeks after his inauguration, he's now trying to scare us to death, so we pass his stimulus bill.
If we don't do this now, the damage to the economy will be irreversible.
Well, what is that if not fear mongering?
They got all over Bush suggesting that President Bush was using the attacks of 9-11 to scare us into doing all sorts of things that we couldn't defend.
Well, 9-11 actually happened.
Here he's creating the ultimate bogeyman.
Our economy will never, ever, ever get better.
Unless we pass this stimulus now.
Oh, okay.
If we don't give several hundred million dollars to liberal social service organizations now, our economy will never recover.
Well, that's ridiculous.
The Republicans in the House, and I can't believe I'm saying this, did something smart.
When they voted unanimously against this bill, they forced an examination of what was in it.
Because prior to that occurring, this was a freight train that was going all the way through to passage without anyone even knowing what was in it.
The reaction that a lot of the talk show hosts have gotten, Rush included, has been, oh, your guys are just going to try to stop President Obama from doing what he wants to do.
You're going to be no different than the Democrats were under Bush.
Obstruct for the sake of obstructing.
Then you have the reality that people really, really want something to happen because a lot of people have been hurt.
The stock market decline really hurt people over the age of 50.
You've been saving all your life, and you see 35, 40, 45% of your savings wiped out.
That's scary.
You have no equity left in your house, no ability to get a home equity loan.
The vacation property that you own declines 50% in value.
These are real things that are happening to people.
Now the layoffs are going on all over the place.
There's fear out there.
We all know that government policy impacts the economy for better and for worse.
So everybody's saying fix it.
So what do the Democrats do?
Do they come in and sincerely attempt to fix it?
Whether you agree that stimulus works or not, and I'm a skeptic, but whether or not you agree it works or not, that was the old John Maynard Kane's belief that you have government spending during economic slowdowns.
If you believe in that concept, there is a way to do it that would be sincere.
This isn't sincere.
This is taking a problem, a real problem, the recession that we are in, and the fear that it's going to lead to something worse.
And taking that problem and using it as your way of doing things that have nothing to do with the problem.
This is just pork.
It's not defensible.
And even though the Republicans have no real ability to block the passage of any of this, it doesn't mean that they should roll over and accept the raping of the federal budget to do a bunch of things that liberals have always wanted to do just because they know now they can get away with it.
Do you know why Obama wants to vote right now?
Because he knows every day that passes, the public learns more about the stuff they're putting into this thing.
The more the public sees what's in here, the less support there is for it.
We're still adding things like crazy.
Dan can't Dan Heninger has a great column in today's uh Wall Street Journal where he itemizes a lot of the stuff that's in here.
None of it on its own is defensible.
We're taking all sorts of spending that never could have been justified on its own, bills that never would have passed if they had to go through the normal hearing process, and throwing them all in here right now.
It's the least defensible stuff.
You know, we still are going to pass a budget in a few months.
There will be an annual federal budget bill.
The things that we're putting in the stimulus are the things that never would have made it in the budget bill.
The items that would go through the normal appropriations process.
They're not in the stimulus.
We're putting in the stimulus all the things that would never survive if we actually found out what they were.
Because we all know that the stimulus is going to be passed now.
We're going to rush forward with it.
We've got to do it right now, now, now.
Nancy Pelosi said, and if you don't believe me, the videos on Drudge, Nancy Pelosi said, every month that goes by that we don't pass a stimulus bill, we are losing 500 million American jobs.
500 million.
There are only 300 million people in this country.
She said we're losing 500 million jobs every month.
Some people have two jobs or three or four.
You imagine if Sarah said anything like that.
I mean, just the dumb thing, I don't know what number she was referring to.
Did she mean five million?
Did she mean 500,000?
I don't know.
They're trying to create a panic so that we don't pay attention at all to what they've got in this thing.
1 800 282 2882 is the telephone number at EIV.
My name is Mark Belling, and I am your guest host today sitting in for Rush.
My name is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
My criticism of the obstructionism of Democrats during President Bush's administration was that they oppose things just for the per for the sake of opposing them and never offered any alternatives.
What was their alternative in the war on terror?
None ever existed.
There are alternatives here, whether you support stimulus or not or not.
Now, I don't.
I would rather lower taxes.
You lower income tax rates across the board, you cut the corporate tax from 35% down to 15%, the stock market would rally 40% this year.
That's what I believe.
You would have such investment and such optimism, you'd have so much more money back in the hands of the American public that it couldn't help but lift up the economy.
The argument against doing that is that it would blow up the deficit.
But instead they're coming up with a stimulus package that is nothing but a deficit Buster.
If you're going to blow the deficit to the moon, there are better ways to do it than this.
First of all, most of what's in here isn't stimulative.
These are projects that are going to take years.
A lot of this is the write a book, get a million dollars kind of stuff.
No immediate impact on the economy.
So if you're going to buy into the notion that we need to do a stimulus, and I don't, you could still do it better than this.
I'm not endorsing doing any of these things because I don't support stimulus to begin with.
But if you spent money, right, let's imagine we took the stimulus money and used it to subsidize.
Every commercial construction project that presidently is having trouble getting financing.
And again, I'm not advocating that, but that would mean all of those things would begin.
Shovels would go into the ground, people would be hired immediately.
The stimulus bill includes a fortune for public schools, most of which are seeing declining enrollment across the country.
What if we took the stimulus money and used it to expand private and religious schools that right now are in very, very bad facilities and are seeing a greater demand for students?
Again, those would be projects that would immediately put people to work and would have an immediate impact on improving the economy.
Those things won't be done because those aren't interest groups that have backed Democrats.
A lot of people would like to see the money spent to repair highways, city streets, bridges.
I come from Milwaukee.
After this winter, my entire city is potholes.
You're going to see very little of that money put into that.
Because it doesn't buy you any political support from the groups that you've come to Washington to reward.
I mentioned Dan Heninger's column in the Wall Street Journal.
Let me go through a portion of this.
He points out how much of the money is being spent by government on government itself.
Title Six Financial Services and General Government says that quote, not less than six billion billion shall be used for construction, repair, and alteration of federal buildings.
There's enough money there to name a building after every member of Congress.
The Bureau of Land Management gets $325 million to spend fixing federal land, including trail repair, and remediation of abandoned mines or well sites.
The centers for disease control and prevention are getting 462 million for quote equipment, construction, and renovation of facilities, including necessary repairs and improvements to leased laboratories.
The National Institute of Standards gets 357 million.
Think about that.
$357 million for construction of research facilities.
The Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gets $427 million for that.
The country is in an economic meltdown and the federal government is redecorating, writes Heninger.
The FBI gets 75 million for quote salaries and expenses.
Inside the $6 billion $200 million weatherization assistance program, one finds, quote, expenses of $500 million.
Heninger writes, that's the line item.
$500 million listed as expenses under weatherization.
The current Senate amended version now lists, quote, an additional amount to be deposited into the Federal Buildings Fund, 9 billion, 48 million of this, not less than $6 billion, shall be available for measures necessary to convert GSA facilities to high performance green buildings.
High performance.
This is a joke.
There's nothing stimulative about this.
This is creating a massive slush fund, the biggest slush fund in the history of the world.
They brag that it does not include earmarks.
It could actually be improved if you put earmarks in it.
If there were earmarks, there'd be some definition of where it's going to go.
That 500 million in expenses listed under the weatherization program.
That's 500 million that they're just going to figure out as they go along.
By not earmarking it now, it means they can do with it whatever they want.
And Obama says we've got to pass this now, or our economy will never recover.
We don't put 500 million in unspecified expense money for weatherization into action now, our economy will never recover.
It's a joke.
It's just a pretense.
So what do you suggest we do about it?
That's a fair question.
Because when the left criticized Bush, they never offered an alternative.
My answer is you either do stimulus that works, spend the money on projects that begin now and put private sector Americans to work, or give it all back in tax cuts.
But just spending money on a bunch of dumb liberal programs that never would have seen the light of day were it not for this recession is the absolute wrong way to go.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm in here for Rush.
Yeah, it's guest host week on Russia's program.
He's taking his first week-long vacation in a long, long, long time, so I'm back.
They dug me out of the mothballs, and I'm here.
I don't want to sound like a total gloom and doomster, but I'm becoming one.
You know, Mark Stein was on the last two days.
He is a gloom and doomster.
I know this because I read his books.
Mark Stein is great.
His columns in National Review are really, really good, and every essay he's written, I agree with.
He's a gloom and doomster on this business of the growing power of the Islamist movement.
And I sound like a gloom and doomster with regard to what Obama's going to do with the economy, but I can only call them as I see them.
Uh one of the perks of doing you don't want me to tell this story, do you?
This sounds pathetic.
And if Obama hears about it, I'm sure he's going to take away the right that it even uh here at the EIB studios, there is a bathroom, but you like have to move into a different building and I think go into another area code in order to find it, and it's way, way well, if you do a talk show, you have to drink water, so you need to use the bathroom.
There is a perk that exists here.
Rush has his should I tell people Rush has his own bathroom or not?
All right, I just it it's there's a rush bathroom, and it's not to be used by Rifreff like you guys.
The staff.
It exists.
One of the perks of being the guest host is that you get to use that bathroom.
Now that sounds pathetic that I would want to use Russia's bathroom, but it's right next to the studio, and the other one is it is admitted, it's a long way away.
It's a long way away.
The bathroom, in order to prevent the staff from using it, is locked.
There's a key.
And one of the perks is I get to use that bathroom when I'm here.
Now, I don't think Rush knows about this.
He doesn't know guest hosts are using that bathroom, do you?
I bet after we guest hosts leave, you sanitize that thing and create no impression that we were in there, and I'm hoping Rush isn't listening.
As a general rule, I hope Rush never listens when I'm filling in for the program.
You allowed that guy from Milwaukee to do what on my program.
Well, so I get to use this bathroom.
Can't use it today.
Mark Stein stole the key.
He apparently left went back to Canada or New Hampshire or Vermont or wherever he's from.
He has the key.
Now, this is something of an issue for me because I now have to go to this far away long removed bathroom.
Rush might be back doing the program in New York sometime soon.
You better get that key back from Stein before that happens.
You will.
So if Mark Stein is listening to the program, we happen to know that you stole the he's running around now where explain to me his British accent.
He says he's from Canada and he lives in New Hampshire, yet he sounds like he's from London.
He grew up in Australia, though he's a great guy, and he did a very, very good job.
Um enough of that.
We're talking about the porculus bill, Russia's term, and it's appropriately named, uh, that we are desperately trying to get past now.
And if we don't pass it now, like this week, the economy is going to be irreparably harmed.
Let's go to Baton Rouge and Stan.
Stan, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
Yeah, uh I really don't think this thing is gonna work.
You you don't think so, huh?
You don't you don't think spending a fortune on expanding the size of the bureaucracy and of rewarding the unions and giving a big slush fund to the Democratic governors is going to fix the economy?
Really?
No.
You're so negative.
Very.
No, actually for me, and I I've glanced through it over the last week of what I've seen published on the internet, and I don't see enough tax breaks in it.
Not enough tax cuts.
Well, there are some that are there, but there aren't a lot of them.
Most of the tax cuts are these credits that they have, which go to people without regard to whether whether they do or they don't pay taxes.
Well, I think that sets a bad precedent that we've been on in the past, at least it gets some money in the hands of the public.
The problem with all of this is that even if you buy the notion that spending money by the government stimulates the economy, so much of this spending is on things that don't stimulate.
Five years to renovate a government building doesn't do anything to get cash flowing in the economy now.
When a private sector job is done, you require cash to be spent instantly.
You can't hire a construction company without a lot of front money.
Those people then know that they have jobs and that's out there.
When government spends money on stuff, the payments come out in dribs and drabs.
Even if you accept the notion that for some of these renovations and the greening of these federal buildings that we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on, even if you accept accept that there's something stimulative about that, that money's going to be paid out to those companies over such a long period of time.
Furthermore, have you seen how long it takes government to get any construction project started?
They've got to go through the bidding process, then they've got to make sure that there are enough minority contractors involved.
They won't be starting some of this stuff until 2010 or 2011.
So you're just using the recession as an excuse to do stuff, in this case, making government buildings more energy efficient and more green, that you always wanted to do, but you never could have justified because of the incredibly obscene cost.
This this stimulus is nothing but an excuse to do all the things that they've never been able to do because they were too dumb to think of.
Let's go to San Mateo, California.
Peter, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Uh good morning, Mark, and uh thank you very much uh for the opportunity.
Um there's something uh in the historical uh uh sense that uh fits in here and shows uh how some of these uh great ideas turn sour.
Uh at the time of World War II, one of the things that uh Roosevelt and Morgan Fall decided was to sell war bonds to take money out of the economy and also to be able to finance the war and and the war effort.
And um in in their discussions, they wanted to make sure that we didn't have inflation with peop with too much money in people's hands with all the people working in the factories and chasing too few goods.
Uh and one of my professors at Stanford I need you to get to the point though, Peter.
What?
G bring us to the point as to how this relates to the porculus stimulus bill.
Uh a man by the name of Professor Fagan uh was part of their brain trust, and he argued uh with Morgan Fall and Roosevelt, and they they said it doesn't make any difference how big the debt gets, we owe it to ourselves.
Uh Fagan said it does make a difference about who owns the debt.
And he said that if you I get I understand your point now.
You're suggesting that what we're doing here with this porculus is in create creating a much larger both deficit and national debt.
That's true.
I'm one of those people who thinks that we've overstated concern about the debt for a long time because it's never really created a su created a problem for us because it was always manageable because we did largely owe it to ourselves.
The problem here is is that it's an implication that any debt would be manageable.
This is so large, it's requiring such printing of money that it can't help but devalue the dollar in terms of whether or not we can handle all this debt.
Understand that the baby boomers, the largest single demographic in the population, are aging here.
The younger workers, The high income workers behind them aren't going to be able to handle this.
We had Democrats lecture us for eight years that Bush had these huge deficits.
He was ballooning the debt, ballooning the debt, ballooning the debt, and now we act as though that no debt, no matter what the size will be a problem at all.
Well, how did we get into this mess?
The whole problem that created the recession was we had borrowing that should not have occurred, chasing an asset that was accelerating in price too rapidly.
This problem was created by loans that shouldn't have been made and borrowing that shouldn't have been done.
So the answer is going to be to fuel this massive deficit by spending money literally on anything.
You've got guys that are making this up as they go along.
Nancy Pelosi's running down the aisles of the House when they passed it on the Democratic side, and when they passed the House version and said and said to each member, those that were favored, getting to have more on the wish list, what would you like in it?
What would you like in it?
What would you like in it?
It, like I said before, this was looting, and it's larding up the debt with all sorts of things that don't have anything to do with stimulating the economy.
The thing that's fascinating about this is you are finding absolutely no vocal support of the specifics of this bill from liberals.
They are all saying we've got to stimulate the economy, you Republicans have to stop obstructing.
Find one of them defending the things that are actually in the bill.
All I'm doing here is talking about what's in the bill.
The reason Rush's terminology of this porculus was so appropriate is that's what the bill actually is.
Just because you call it stimulus doesn't mean that that's what it is.
If they wanted to go on a massive public works construction spree, pump all sorts of money into the economy by taking care of the nation's infrastructure needs there would be some stimulus to that i wouldn't support it because i think it would explode the debt and i don't think that it's the best way of stimulating but at least you could you could claim that this was stimulus this
This is taking a bunch of stupid democratic liberal ideas, calling them stimulus, and saying if you don't pass it, you're going to send the country into a depression.
Every day that goes by, more people find out what's in the bill, which is precisely why Obama is trying to rush this to a vote, while the Senate is trying to rush this to a vote.
As for the Republicans in the Senate, they're trying to buy off a few moderates, the Susan Collins crowd, get a give her a little bit of what she wants so that they can get this thing passed and have some Republican support because the nightmare for Obama is this bill is passed, rammed through by Democrats in the Senate after being rammed through by Democrats in the House.
The public eventually sees all the garbage that was in it, and they have to run for reelection after having voted for 19 zillion bridges to nowhere and 19 zillion Lawrence Welk museums, none of which are going to do anything to stimulate the economy.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Is this change?
Serious, is this change?
We're going to take a whole bunch of pet projects, throw them into a giant bill, pass them without anybody knowing what's in it.
Is that change?
I thought that was the exact thing Obama ran against.
If anything costs the Republicans support other than the war in Iraq, it was the impression that they were recklessly spending money.
it's the thing that caused a lot of conservatives to sour on the Republicans in Congress.
Obama railed against this.
So this now is change, pass a lot of pork.
If that worked, we wouldn't have had the we wouldn't be in a recession in the first place.
Lord knows we've passed a lot of pork in our time.
By the way, remember the uh sunlight before signing pledge Obama made in the uh campaign?
It was always the one that got a big applause line.
He would sign no bill that passed Congress within five days.
Five days would have to pass before he would sign any piece of legislation other than emergency legislation.
Obama's signing the SCHIP bill this afternoon.
The SCHIP is the uh state children's health insurance program, three point thirty-two point eight billion dollars in additional funding.
That passed yesterday.
Obama's signing it this afternoon.
Second bill was Obama's going to sign without allowing the public the full five days to review it.
Last week he signed the Lily Leadbetter Fair Pay Act only two days after final passage in the House.
So that five day thing that he had, that's just another one that we're just going to pretend never happened and he never said he was going to do it.
Well, what's the great rush to get S Chip signed?
If they pass this porculus bill, he's going to sign that fifteen seconds after it clears the conference committee.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mike, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Mark, thanks for taking my call.
You mentioned that uh you'd like to hear some uh senators uh defending this bill.
Well, this morning on uh WJR radio in Detroit, uh our esteemed Senator Carl Levin actually was on uh with a straight face claiming that there was no pork in this bill.
That there was uh no spending in there that was directly related back to any individual member of Congress.
Did the uh did the uh lobster institute get taken out before uh before Levin's interview?
I don't know.
No, it's not pork.
That's lobster.
Yeah, right.
Part of the problem here is that so much of this money is unspecified.
For example, as Henninger pointed out in the column that I shared a few moments ago, They mentioned five hundred million listed as expenses under a line item in the weatherization program.
So in other words, that becomes pork once they start spending the five hundred million, since we're not going to put apparently any listing of what that's actually going to be spent on the all of the greening of these buildings, making them more energy efficient.
That will become pork once they actually start spending the money.
But since they don't define where the money is going to go in many instances, it gives them cover to claim that this isn't this isn't any pork.
If that's the case, by the way, why is Levin why are Levin and the Democrats in the Senate so determined to get Republican support for this bill?
They want to get Republicans to vote for it.
Why do they need Republicans?
They've got what, fifty-eight senators?
They haven't seated Franken yet, have they?
You know, you know he's just in Washington, banging on that door every day.
I won the recount, let me in.
Will Al Franken be seated by the United States Senate before or after Obama signs the porculus bill.
What will happen first?
Let's go to uh oh man.
Cohasset California.
Mike, you're on EIB.
How'd I do on the name there, Mike?
Yeah.
Uh I hit it.
Cohasset, okay.
Yeah.
Little town outside of Chico.
Yeah, so far we have one good thing that's came out of this package.
And that's that we're finally getting the American people up in arms over it.
The more that comes to light, the golden boy's starting to lose a little bit of his shiny.
I mean, when you think about this, this is a guy who came in, he had a mandate.
Uh you know, he didn't win by a landslide, but he won by a solid margin.
He had a mandate.
The country wanted him to do well, and he had the advantage of coming in during a time in which people wanted the their government to act because they're afraid.
He's only two weeks into this administration, and already they're sputtering.
Their stimulus bill is being exposed as something other than that.
He's nominated three tax cheats for the cabinet.
He had to withdraw another nomination because there's a federal inquiry going on into Bill Richardson.
This thing is sputtering away on him after only two weeks.
The honeymoon that Obama has been looking for, maybe literally maybe frittered away.
He has an opportunity here with this stimulus, and I'd like to give him advice, not that he's going to accept it.
If Obama stands up to the Congress now and says, I and says, I don't want pork in here.
I want everything in here to be able to be justified as stimulus now.
He'd be immensely popular, and it would be very hard for Republicans to vote against it.
The reason he won't do it is he's from the same mindset as those senators themselves.
He wants this to be nothing more than pork and payback himself.
He could make a major statement about what his administration is going to be like if he puts some standards in what they're going to put into this legislation.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
On the next hour of the program, we're going to be talking about why Democrats don't like to pay their taxes.
Before I leave the subject of stimulus, though, there is a way we could stimulate the economy.
Take the trillion dollars that the Congress wants to pass, give it all to Bill Clinton, tell him he can't leave the country for 90 days and he has to spend all 1 trillion within that 90-day period.
We know where the money would start, but once all the girls and everybody else had it, that money would start to turn over.
You want to stimulate the economy?
Let Clinton have the money.
He'll put it to work.
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