Rush Limbaugh Program - March 23, 2009, Monday, Hour #2

All Episodes

Previous Next

March 23, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program

36:19

March 23, 2009, Monday, Hour #2

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Yes, America's Anchorman is away today and this is Mark Stein, your undocumented anchorman, sitting in.
	And don't forget, Rush will be here for the rest of the week for a full four days of excellence in broadcasting.
	The EIB has outsourced it to a foreigner for some kind of exotic, foreign, undercut, price, bargain-wise, mediocrity in broadcasting.
	So we're holding our own here and then Russia's going to be back tomorrow.
	Last time I was here, by the way, I just want to get this out of the way.
	I accidentally walked off with the key to the executive men's room and I took it back to New Hampshire with me.
	And there's no executive men's room in New Hampshire.
	I think the nearest one is at Ted Kennedy's office.
	And believe me, I don't want to go there.
	And Mark Belling, who was guest hosting later in the week, was complaining bitterly about this flyby night riffraff guest host absconding with the men's room key.
	So today I'm not allowed to use the key to the executive men's room.
	So if the commercial break seem a little longer than usual, it's because I've got to go all the way down to the regular men's room in sub-basement level five around the back of the furnace.
	So I feel like an AIG vice president.
	I believe I saw Barney Frank on TV announcing that in fact an executive men's room key is now a taxable benefit that will be taxed at the special rate of 90%.
	So it may be in your interest to go all the way down to sub-basement level five and just use the regular men's room because you don't want to find Barney in there levying the 90% taxable benefit rate when you go in.
	We've been talking about in the first hour, I posed this question.
	There were three options really for Obama in November.
	Three models for his presidency.
	There were those who said he was a bipartisan moderate.
	That was what a lot of the Obama cons said.
	He talked a lot of sense and he surely couldn't be so deranged as to govern to the left.
	That's gone.
	Those guys were wrong.
	Those guys were wrong.
	And really, what is seriously at issue here is why David Brooks and the other smart guys were so smart that they fell for this idea that Obama was somehow this sophisticated bipartisan moderate centrist.
	That's gone.
	It's clear he's not.
	Also, as David Warren, who is an old Canadian colleague of mine, he writes for The Ottawa Citizen.
	He's actually, as is so often the case with this president, you often read sharper critiques in the foreign press than you do in the U.S. newspapers.
	He made the point that when you look at where Barack Obama has spent his entire adult life, you know, 20 years in the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in the polytechnic Marxist hothouse of Hyde Park, hanging out with Bill Ayres and that kind of crowd, or just sitting around the kitchen table talking with Michelle Obama about how she's never been proud of anything that's happened in America in her lifetime.
	He has lived in a world of left-wing assumptions.
	So even if he were to govern to the center, his idea of where the center is is well to the left of where most Americans would place it.
	That's simply the reality of his life.
	So then we get on to the other two options.
	Is he just like a doctrinaire leftist who really does want to turn us into Europe?
	And we can do a lot of damage on that front.
	It used to be that the percentage of state spending as a proportion of GDP, which is like a critical economic indicator in the United States, was 34%.
	In other words, 34% of America's GDP was state spending, government spending.
	In the last few years, it's gone up to 40%.
	That's bad.
	That's bad.
	That number needs to go down.
	But if you look at what it is in Sweden, for example, it's 54%.
	54% of the economy in Sweden is government spending.
	That's what happens when you introduce big government programs.
	Everything eventually grows to depend on the government in one way or the other.
	That's simply the reality of how life operates in those countries.
	54% of GDP, of the economy, of the Swedish economy, is government spending.
	And what that means is that you've got to tax people an awful lot to pay for it.
	In Denmark, for example, they've got 60% top personal tax rates.
	If you look at what they call the VAT there, like the national sales tax, that's 25%, 25% national sales tax.
	You're transferring more money, more money from the people to the government until eventually the government becomes an ever bigger part of the economy.
	Now then, if you look at other parts of Europe, in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, government spending counts for between 73 and 78% of the economy.
	Now at that point, you might as well be in Soviet Eastern Europe.
	There's no point being in private enterprise in those jurisdictions.
	That's why people get out.
	There's no point.
	You're either on welfare or you're running some kind of business that has a big government contract.
	But if you're just like a guy trying to make a living, there's no point trying to make a living in those jurisdictions.
	You're best to just take a cab to the airport and get the hell out and find somewhere where the setup of society is not one massive transfer from the productive, dynamic, entrepreneurial portion of society to an ever bigger, ever more bloated, ever more inefficient state.
	And I think it's an interesting question.
	Every time Obama is off the prompter, off the prompter, every time he's not scripted, he's betraying, he betrays that that is where his inclinations lie, that he thinks it's natural for the state essentially to annex an ever larger part of life.
	It works to his advantage.
	Basically, if you turn freeborn citizens into dependents, if you turn them into junkies with government as the pusher, that's very good.
	That's very good for the permanent governing class.
	And you get a sense of that when you watch Barney Frank on TV right now.
	I mean, who is Barney Frank?
	He's like some no-account congressman.
	You know, I don't want to dredge up past history, but the only time he's ever intersected with any profitable private enterprise, it turned out to be being run without his knowledge from his own apartment.
	As far as I know, that's Barney Frank's only experience of private enterprise.
	And God bless it, God bless it.
	At least that particular business that was being run out of his accommodation wasn't asking for a government bailout.
	They were one of the few enterprises that's apparently able to make it on its own in the economy.
	But Barney Frank, Barney Frank, why is this legislator for life on TV dictating contract terms to executives in private companies?
	Why?
	Because he's from Massachusetts.
	Massachusetts is no longer a functioning democracy.
	It's not just that it's a de facto one-party state in that it elects disproportionately vast numbers of Democrats.
	It's that most political races in Massachusetts are no longer even contested.
	There's no point running anybody against the Democrats.
	So it's becoming a literal one-party state.
	I think it's something like only 17% of races are ever contested in Massachusetts.
	It's got a dysfunctional and uncompetitive political environment.
	And so we're stuck with this guy, Barney Frank, forever, forever.
	He'll be there forever.
	And he's the guy who decides, who goes on TV like some big, comfortable Gulf Emir, president for life of Banana Republic, and starts saying, well, you know, the public's sick of you guys.
	You're going to have to give up your bonuses.
	And if you come quietly, if you come out with your hands up and your bonuses where we can see them and confiscate them, then we're not going to leak your names to the public and give them your street addresses.
	I mean, this is essentially the direction we're heading, where the state annexes such a vast chunk of the economy that there is simply no point in being in any kind of enterprise that isn't connected or dependent on government one way or the other.
	That's the way a lot of European jurisdictions are, and it hasn't worked out for them.
	Now, the other alternative view is that he's not a leftist, he's just an incompetent.
	And, you know, I can go either way on this.
	I can go either way on this.
	Rush sent me an email at one in the morning last night.
	He's away today, but he sent me this thing saying that, essentially saying that he thought, you know, it's not true that this idea of him being an incompetent is a bluff, is a kind of feint, because it doesn't matter.
	It advances his agenda.
	Whatever happens, however bad it appears he's doing, it actually is in his interests that we have a situation where for two months now, what's happened is that he's been eviscerating American wealth.
	And he's been doing this.
	He's been doing this very effectively, basically just talking down the economy, talking down the private sector, talking down the dynamism of the American economy, what keeps things going.
	So in the end, it doesn't really matter whether he's a hardcore leftist or he's just an incompetent, because it leads us to the same direction.
	A sclerotic, bankrupt America where people just want to flee.
	People just want to flee.
	There's no point being in a dynamic, creative, job-generating, wealth-generating sector when you're being subject to retrospective 90% taxation and all kinds of other whims from Barney Frank.
	So we'll get into that.
	1-800-282-2882 and lots more to talk about too.
	There is no precedent in modern American history for a 60-day start to a presidency like this.
	You look at, for example, the Treasury Department.
	They just announced another trillion-dollar thing for toxic assets.
	They're buying up bad banks.
	And you think it's the Treasury Department.
	That sounds big.
	There's nobody in there.
	There's Tim Geithner and the 18 positions underneath him.
	Nobody, but Obama nominated one guy for Deputy Treasury Secretary, and it turned out he had some legal problems.
	I don't know whether it was just the usual tax thing or whether it was something worse.
	I don't know whether he's wanted for a series of unsolved prostitute murders on Down by the Dock in Amsterdam in the 1970s or whatever.
	Who knows with these guys?
	But the nomination suddenly disappeared and that was gone.
	He was away.
	He hasn't even nominated anyone for the other 17 positions.
	So when it says the Treasury Department, the Treasury, the United States Treasury Department is spending a trillion dollars, it means it's Tim Geithner and 40 other people.
	We don't even know who these 40 people are.
	What are they?
	Interns?
	I don't know.
	It's Tim Geithner and 40 interns are deciding how to spend a trillion dollars.
	Do you know how big a billion-dollar company is?
	How many people would be deciding how to spend a billion dollars?
	Now we've got Tim Geithner and a couple of dozen obscure public servants, civil servants, spending a trillion dollars.
	How can they possibly do that with any efficiency?
	I mean, Tim Geithner is saying, well, look, we've got a half a trillion dollars here.
	I don't have time to deal with this kind of nickel and dime stuff.
	So Tiffany Sue, the nice little intern over down on the third floor, you take care of that half trillion dollars.
	Figure out who it's going to go to.
	There's no, don't you can guarantee that the bulk of this money is going to be wasted because there is simply no structure on earth that could spend a trillion dollars efficiently, even if it wasn't Tim Geithner and three dozen interns in charge of it.
	So we'll talk about that.
	1-800-282-2882.
	This is Mark Stein with lots more straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network at the dawning of the age of the Hopi Change.
	It hasn't started quite like we all thought it was going to be.
	Let us go to Eric in Naperville, Illinois.
	Eric, thanks for waiting.
	You're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Mark, mega Dittos, you're doing a great job filling in for the titular head of the Republican Party.
	Yeah, mega dittos to you too.
	And you're right.
	Rush disavows this title.
	But the fact is, he was right about this guy, Obama, back in the fall, and a lot of the smart guys got suckered.
	And it's important to bear that in mind.
	Now they're telling us when they criticize Rush, basically they'd be better off dealing with the moats in their own eyes on some of these issues.
	They got suckered by this guy back in the fall.
	Anyway, great to have you on the show, Eric.
	Okay, so members of my family have had the questionable pleasure of living under the benevolent rule of people like Bismarck, the first socialist of the 21st century, Roosevelt, Khrushchev, Hitler.
	And that's just a short list.
	They're A-listers.
	What is that?
	Bismarck, Roosevelt, Khrushchev, Hitler.
	That's what hell of a dinner party.
	So how did that work out?
	So they start in where?
	In Germany?
	Your forebears are German.
	Is that right, Eric?
	Eastern Europe in the Baltics.
	Oh, right, right.
	Oh, well, that is tough territory.
	But I'll tell you something.
	I don't know whether you've kept up your Latvian or Estonian citizenship, but a couple of those Baltic states have the old 14% flat tax now.
	They could be looking mighty attractive compared to what you're paying in Naperville.
	I'm leaving my options open.
	That's right.
	We're getting to that stage.
	You know, I don't believe actually in joint citizenship, but I think we're getting to the stage now where it pays to have a couple of spare passports sewn into the lining of your coat.
	Don't let your Estonian citizenship lapse.
	So you're basically your forebears, they thought, Bismarck, wow, Chancellor Bismarck can't get any worse than this.
	And then Herr Reichsfuhrer Hitler shows up and they're thinking, whoa!
	And then Stalin takes over and they holy.
	And so eventually they decide, let's get on the boat to Ellis Island.
	That's what happened, is it, Eric?
	Absolutely.
	It went from better to worse.
	And so now, how do you feel after finally making it to the promised land to find that the president actually, his promises mean no more than his promise to get a dog?
	Absolutely.
	But you know what, Mark?
	My question is that, you know, Obama, you know, we know that John F. Kerry, if he would have been elected, that Soros would have been his puppet master.
	Right.
	And I'm just wondering, since Obama, you know, being such a Marxist-Pollyanna adult who really doesn't understand the consequences...
	Just a minute, I'm writing that down.
	A Marxist-Pollyanna dolt.
	That's not a lot of bipartisan outreach in there.
	You're not exactly reaching across the aisle.
	Okay, by Marxist-Pollyanna adult.
	We'll have it on a bumper sticker before the afternoon is out.
	Carry on, carry on.
	Okay, so he doesn't really understand the consequences of his philosophy like maybe my parents and my grandparents did.
	I just wonder who his puppet master is, and if he doesn't have a puppet master, is it just a case of Obama being acting as his own lawyer?
	No, I think you said it was George Soros with John Kerry.
	I think it's clear it's the, you know, it's the teleprompter here.
	I think it's like that.
	What was that machine in 2001, a space odyssey?
	The computer in 2001 and space?
	How the computer in 2001, a space odyssey.
	It's the teleprompter.
	It's the teleprompter here.
	This is some rogue teleprompter that's actually running the show.
	But you're right.
	I mean, those of us who've come here from elsewhere, this is nothing new.
	We've seen all this stuff and we know where it leads.
	And a lot of people came to America because they lived under this kind of regime in other parts of the world and they understood that it effectively meant there was no opportunity.
	You were penalized.
	If you were someone who worked hard and generated wealth, you were penalized for doing that.
	You were penalized the way that Obama talks when he's off the prompter and he starts talking about confiscating profits of pharmaceutical companies or starts talking about how ExxonMobil aren't going to give up their profits that easily.
	He's got this schoolboy view of economics that rich people, when you talk about ExxonMobil, that they make money and then they stick it in a big mattress under the bed.
	It's like Uncle Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck's uncle.
	If you remember, he used to drive around with the big tractor and he had a warehouse that was piled with dollar bills and he just used to drive and he'd take a big pile of dollar bills and drive it over and stick it in the other pile.
	That is how Obama thinks what people do with their money.
	They don't.
	They don't.
	They spend their money.
	If you've got a restaurant, it's people with money to spend who eat out.
	If you don't have money to spend, you don't eat out.
	And he's the guy who thinks in this way, has this pathetic, deformed view of economic reality, that rich people just hoard their money.
	That's not what it's about.
	So is he a leftist or is he just an incompetent?
	We'll carry on with this discussion a little later.
	Mark Stein sitting in for Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
	And we have lots more straight ahead at the start of another great week on the EIB network.
	Yeah, great to be with you at the start of another week of Excellence in Broadcasting.
	This is Mark Stein, your toxic asset.
	And no amount of bailout money is going to change that.
	Rush will be back tomorrow.
	The last non-toxic asset in the United States.
	Rush is going to be here tomorrow.
	Take you through the end of the week.
	When everything else is bailed out, when everything else has been submitted to rule by Barney Frank and 90% punitive tax, there will still be Rush, the last non-toxic asset, this show in the United States.
	I was out in Palm Springs a couple of days ago.
	This is really, it goes back to the point that Eric was making.
	You know, Eric's family came here.
	They were in the Baltic states, which had a hellish 20th century.
	Just one bad turn after another.
	got from Bismarck, as he was saying, from the German Empire to the Third Reich, to the Soviet Union, and now actually very pleasant places with these 12-14% flat tax rates.
	And that's great.
	And I mean the flat tax, by the way, because that's Eastern Europe that's got the flat tax.
	In Western Europe, they have the flatulence tax.
	They have announced plans.
	The European Union, this is Al Gore's doing, by the way.
	You know, you can blame Al Gore for everything, and I see no reason not to do that.
	So Al Gore, let's blame Al Gore for the flatulence tax.
	What it is, is that if you own a cow in Ireland, you will be levied 13 Euros to pay for the flatulence emissions of each cow you have.
	And that sounds pretty stiff.
	You've got like a big herd of cow.
	That is an awful lot of taxable flatulence that's coming out there.
	But if you're in Denmark, it's 80 euros per cow, 80 euros per cow for your flatulence emissions.
	And the reason is, apparently, that bovine flatulence was not factored into the carbon offset trade.
	Apparently, it's the one thing you can't trade.
	You know, if you go on a plane, if you like take a flight to Europe, if you take a flight to Europe, you can say you can buy an offset.
	That's what Al Gore does.
	When he flies across the world to give a speech warning against global warming, his flight is carbon neutral because he's traded some carbon credits to, say, a terrorist mastermind who lives in a cave in the Pakistani tribal lands and who can't fly anyway because of the way things are at the moment.
	So they trade off, and so Al Gore's flight is carbon neutral.
	But apparently the one thing that isn't covered by these carbon trading things is bovine flatulence.
	So they have they're taxing, proposing to tax cow emissions in Europe.
	And yet at the same time, this is again where big government gets you.
	The European Union has decreed that while Ireland and Denmark have to decrease their bovine flatulence, Hungary and Romania can increase their bovine flatulence by 20%.
	I don't even understand that.
	That's bureaucracy for you.
	Some guy in Brussels has decided that the Balkans is not flatulent enough.
	The North Sea, the flatulence, apparently, like the cloud of flatulence over the North Sea has got to be directed over the Balkans because the Balkans is insufficiently flatulent.
	So some flatulent Irishman, because there's no trading in it, the flatulent Irish guy cannot trade his emissions to the guy in Romania.
	Anyway, that's big government.
	That's big government for you.
	And that is where we're headed.
	Now you go back to medieval times.
	You go back to medieval times.
	If you were some gnarled old peasant living in a hut in the middle of nowhere, and some guy in the full doublet and hose rides up on a horse and he says, hey, hither, get thee hence, peasant.
	I'm here to collect the bovine flatulence tax of three groats per cow.
	Hurry up and I'll be on my way.
	Even in medieval times, even medieval times, the gnarled old peasant would have said, oh, I don't know, that don't sound right to me.
	The king is taxing me for the flatulence of my cows.
	Yeah, you're pulling my leg, aren't you?
	That's like the medieval peasant, medieval peasant in primitive society.
	He gets it.
	Now, 21st century, you say to a guy in Denmark, he's standing in his field with a bunch of Holsteins and you say, hey, we're here to collect the flatulence tax of 80 euros per cow.
	And he says, oh, sure, why not?
	If it helps the environment, here, here.
	You know, we're in danger of forgetting why this country rebelled against King George III.
	And it's important, all these tea parties over the country.
	I like to think if you'd gone back to 1776 and King George III had announced that he was taxing colonial cattle on their flatulence, that in Boston they would have had a big old Boston baked bean party in Boston Harbor.
	They would have had the Boston Bean Party and they would have told the king where to get off.
	That at some point, at some point, we have to remember, we have to remember that we are free-born citizens and every crazy idea does not suddenly become legitimate because Barney Frank or Nancy Pelosi or some other figure like that is on TV announcing it as if it's perfectly normal.
	And that's what's wrong with this.
	That's what's wrong with this present thing.
	When they say, you don't like AIG's bonus, you don't like AIG's bonus.
	Barney, when Barney Frank is on TV and they're saying, well, this is unacceptable and we're going to attack them at 90%, that's worse.
	That is worse than anything King George III attempted to do to colonial settlers in colonial New England in the 18th century.
	People have got to get real about this.
	Otherwise, we're going to be wafted into La La Land on clouds of bovine flatulence.
	That is what is at issue here.
	It is time to reclaim the principles of citizenship and liberty and not simply accede to the absurd encroachments of big government every day.
	This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush.
	Lots more of your calls straight ahead at the start of another week of excellence in broadcasting.
	Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
	Let us go to Jim in Shager Heights, Ohio.
	Jim, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
	Thanks for waiting.
	Great to talk with you.
	Mark Stein, dog musher, eh?
	Yeah, that's right.
	Does dog flatulence count?
	It'll be next.
	I'm sure.
	Barney Frank, 90% tax on dog flatulence in the Northeast.
	That is coming.
	And we all know what that can be.
	Anyway.
	You want a well-ventilated house, Jim.
	I don't think Obama really wants to be president.
	I think he just wants to play one on television.
	Every time he has a job, he farms it out to somebody else.
	For instance, he turned the stimulus package over to Congress to become the porculus.
	Right.
	And then he demanded that it be passed right away.
	Get it done.
	On my desk.
	Friday it was on his desk and he didn't sign it till Monday.
	Yeah, he went off on a long weekend and came back and got to it eventually.
	You're right.
	He's like a kind of, I think of him like a kind of showbiz impresario.
	He wants to be there as the kind of front man getting the credit.
	But he doesn't basically want to be on top of any of these issues.
	When you look at him actually trying to talk about toxic assets or credit default swaps, you can see him thinking credit default swaps.
	It's CDS.
	It's not default swap credits.
	It's because he's messed up when he's trying to remember some of these terms in these technical terms and get them in the right order.
	So you're right on that, that I think essentially he wants to be president.
	He's happy being president.
	He likes going on TV.
	I don't understand, by the way, why would a guy think it's his priority to be on Jay Leno?
	I don't understand it.
	Now you say to him, you say he likes playing one on TV.
	I think it's more than that.
	I think it's when you see him with Henrietta Hughes at these pseudo-town meetings.
	I don't think of them as real town meetings, by the way, because if you live in New Hampshire, a town meeting is where some cranky old Kooten Plaid gets up because the town wants to spend $500 on a fence for the town dump and you talk about it for three hours until the cranky old Kooten Plaid gets everyone to vote it down to $325.
	That's what a town meeting is.
	He likes these pseudo-town meetings where Henrietta Hughes says, oh, you know, I really need, I'm hurting for a new house, and we need a fitted kitchen, and we need a bathroom.
	And he says, hey, don't worry about it, sweetie.
	Call 1-800 Obama and we'll take care of it.
	I think he enjoys.
	That's, by the way, not the relationship between a citizen and an elected leader.
	That is the relationship between a subject and a monarch.
	And so I'm not so sure he enjoys playing president.
	I think he actually enjoys playing Emperor Barack.
	It's a little more than that.
	Yeah, I think this Gertner problem, he has 15 empty offices that haven't been filled.
	That's right, 17.
	Well, Obama's got to fill those.
	Gertner's a techie.
	He's not going to do staffing.
	He's going to do bank techie stuff.
	And Obama is just dropping that ball like a rock.
	Yeah, I don't even understand this because the Republicans in late January were basically of a mood to confirm anybody.
	They'd checked the no publicity box.
	They didn't want to be bothered.
	And essentially, this guy could have nominated anyone and they could all be in position now.
	You know, the G20 summit is in London in a couple of weeks.
	And Sir Gus O'Donnell, who is the senior British civil servant, gave this interview, actually gave a speech in which he said, the problem with the United States Treasury is that you call and nobody answers the phone.
	It's literally that there's nobody there.
	There's nobody to talk to.
	We're two months into the administration and the global superpower has nobody in key positions.
	So when we were talking about he enjoys playing a president on TV, it's not even as if he feels the need to have a full supporting cast.
	He's happy for, you know, he's happy to leave those positions empty for another couple of months.
	I have a terrible feeling that Sarah Palin would have done a lot better job than Jimmy Bobby Jindal.
	Yeah.
	They're into staffing.
	They're into getting things done, not into palming things off on somebody else.
	No, you're absolutely right, Jim.
	Thanks for your call.
	You make a good point there.
	Governor Palin was the one with the executive experience.
	There were three senators on the ticket in November and one person with executive experience.
	She runs a state.
	Geographically, it would be one of the biggest countries in the world if it was a country.
	It's a difficult place to run.
	It's got kind of all kinds of special things going on.
	And people mocked her for it.
	They said, this is, again, the absurdity.
	The people who told us that Obama was the smart guy who could get things done.
	A guy, by the way, who has never, who has never done, this is like his first full-time job in his life.
	This is the first job he's done where he has to turn up at 8 in the morning and make decisions.
	And they told us, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin, what is she?
	She was mayor of Wozilla and then governor of Alaska.
	That's nothing.
	That's not experience enough to run for president.
	She knows nothing about foreign policy.
	Not like Barack Obama, the one who sends Hillary Clinton off to Moscow with the Staples Easy button.
	Supposedly, they've got one word on it.
	And the geniuses in the Obama administration who are the most sophisticated, smartest administration ever, they're all the Ivy League guys.
	They can't translate one word into Russian.
	They can't buy the British Prime Minister a DVD which works on a British DVD player.
	But no, no, no, it was Sarah Palin who was the ditz, who was the moose-hunting ditz who knew nothing about foreign policy.
	Sarah Palin, remember her joke at the convention in her convention speech?
	She said she was mayor of Wozilla.
	And she said, that's kind of like being a community organizer, except with, you know, actual responsibilities.
	Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, she would have gotten into office on January the 20th and she would have begun governing like an executive.
	And it wouldn't have been about flying out to Burbank to Kibbitz and do your special Olympic shtick with Jay Leno on the on the tonight show.
	Let's go to Bob, who is in Port Charlotte, Florida.
	Bob, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
	Megadittos, Mark, and thanks for taking my call.
	My pleasure, Bob.
	A quick comment on the AIG fiasco, and then perhaps a question you could answer for me.
	I find it incredulous that the Democrats created the $787 billion Porculus bill.
	They passed it without any Republican participation, crammed it down the voters' throat in a rush, and now Obama signs it, and now they're all playing stupid like they didn't know what was in it.
	Yeah.
	You know?
	This is fantastic.
	Everyone, you're right.
	This is two stages.
	The guys go, well, you know, we need to sign this bill now, 24 hours.
	Got no down away.
	You've got to pass this bill.
	Pass this bill.
	So they all pass this bill.
	None of them have read.
	None of them are read.
	Exactly.
	And they pass it and they sign it.
	And a couple of weeks go by, and suddenly there's a big fuss because some guys get bonuses for it.
	And the bonuses are specifically provided for in the legislation.
	And they say, well, I can't have been expected to know anything about that.
	Oh, what do you think?
	I'm the kind of guy who reads legislation before I vote on it.
	And what's even more pathetic is you point out that the guy who, one of the guys going on cable TV and huffing and a puffing about how outrageous these bonuses are, is the guy who actually introduced the clause that specifically provides for these bonuses.
	And he's saying, well, I can't be expected to know every rinky-ding little bit of trillion-dollar legislation that's introduced in my name.
	You know, Obama's people call my people, and some intern down on the third floor introduces some boilerplate lingo in my name, and the bill passes.
	And you can't expect a big-time congressman or senator like me to have read that bill or gone anything near it.
	This is the death of Republican government, Bob.
	You should be ashamed of this is the death of the American idea being played out live 24-7 on TV.
	It's scary.
	What's worse is the Fed said last week they're going to buy up to a trillion dollars worth of Treasury notes.
	Right.
	I mean, this is basically printing money, just like what the Weimar Republic of 1920s Germany did, until it got to the point that a wheelbarrow of money, it took a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread.
	That's right, that's right.
	And how does the Fed get to spend a trillion dollars without congressional approval?
	Buying up trillion.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's the same way.
	I write for a living.
	So it's like me publishing a book and then buying a million copies myself, and then I'll have a million seller.
	Yeah, fantastic.
	Why didn't I?
	Thanks a lot.
	What a terrific idea, Bob.
	That's brilliant.
	I must do it.
	Thanks for your call.
	This is Mark Snyder on the EIB Network.
	And we got lots more straight ahead.
	So you get for Rush.
	1-800-282-2882.
	That's the number on the Rush Limbaugh show.
	1-800-282-2882.
	Mark Stein.
	Your toxic asset in today.
	And then Rush comes in tomorrow, take through the rest of the week.
	This Congressional Budget Office story is interesting.
	The CBO is predicting that the deficits – now, these are like government bureaucrats.
	They've got no – They got no dog in this fight.
	The CBO is predicting that deficits could be $2.3 trillion higher than the White House has admitted so far.
	There is no precedent for this scale of spending and this level of expansion of government.
	That's what I was talking about, by the way, when I said I was in Palm Springs a couple of days ago.
	I was just driving through the California desert, beautiful part of the world.
	You come down Dinoshaw Drive, turn on a Bob Hope Drive, turn on a Frank Sedanta Drive, turn onto Ginger Rogers Drive.
	Lovely part of the world.
	It's very reasonable.
	There's a lot of foreclosed property there.
	Very easy to buy a nice house there these days.
	It's not out of the reach of a lot of Americans.
	But it's going to be out of the reach of our children and grandchildren.
	They are going to live in what Peggy Noonan calls post-prosperity America if we stay on this present track.
	They're going to be like Germany.
	When people say the Europeans have got all the right answers, you go to Europe and they live in smaller apartments.
	They have smaller cars.
	They do not live the kind of life that the American middle class do.
	And that is the kind of life that our children and grandchildren are going to be having to get used to.
	They're not going to live in those, they won't have the possibility of dreaming of living in those houses.
	So we won't have the American dream as we've known it these past couple of centuries.
	We'll have something closer to the Belgian dream.
	And if you're thinking, hey, the Belgian dream, that doesn't sound quite right.
	That's because there isn't one, folks.

▲