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April 23, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:18
April 23, 2009, Thursday, Hour #2
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Hey, great to be with you.
America's Anchorman is away today, and this is your undocumented Anchorman flying without any photo identification for the next uh couple of hours.
Uh Mark Davis will be in tomorrow.
As I said, it's an all-mark guest host of Palooza on the EIB network.
And then Rush comes in uh back on Monday.
But Mark Stein with you today, or uh as I like to think of myself now, Stein Mark, when I when I flew uh into New York to do the show, I arrived at the airport, arrived at the airport, uh, and this is uh uh w what was it, Janet Napolitano saying, you know, she's in charge of border security, uh, homeland security, airport security, all security.
Uh so I arrived there, and uh they say, uh I say, I think I got a reservation on the whatever flight it was.
And she goes, Oh no, we got nobody down by that name.
And uh it's just a little sixteen-seat puddle jumper.
But so she runs through and she goes, Oh yes, she goes, I see we've got for some reason we've got you down instead of as Mark Stein as Stein Mark.
And so immediately, you know, you know, you're gonna be there for hours while that is sorted out.
That is it's in breach of the Patriot Act.
It's illegal now to go around with your uh with your last name first and your first name last.
Can't do that.
Can't do that anymore.
Uh it's uh so Steinmark, so she says she doesn't have the power to uh just correct it there because I'm uh uh I it it does take an act of Congress, and actually Senator Leahy uh has to investigate it.
Because it was a flight out of Vermont, actually, so that's even more concern.
If you l it's not letting people get on the plane with Senator Leahy using I mean he wouldn't like it if some guy called Leahy Senator got on and took his seat.
So uh there are there are all kinds of complications here.
So she says she's gotta call her supervisor, and the supervisor's gotta call his supervisor, and uh and so he's coming out and he's going, Oh, don't don't worry, Mr. Mark, we'll sort this out in no time.
Uh and he calls hit the supervisor, the supervisor calls the supervisor supervisor supervisor, and he goes, Yes, don't worry about it, Mr. Mark, we're working on can I call you Stein?
No!
We're working on this, we're gonna we're gonna sort it out.
And uh it occurred to me if I was gonna get here in time to do the show, it'd be a lot quicker just to go to the courthouse and change my name by deed poll uh to Steinmark uh and board and aboard the flight.
So it's called we were talking uh in the first hour about these with all these marks as the guest host now cuts down on the jingle package uh factor.
Uh so all we all we have to do now is reverse the Mark Stein to Stein Mark and uh and uh I'm free to do the plane, board the plane, get on everywhere.
The trick now in the world we live in, very complicated boarding planes now.
The trick is to be like the foreign minister of Afghanistan called Abdullah Abdullah.
Uh he doesn't have any problem getting planes.
He doesn't have any but no screw ups, even if they uh the guy at US Air, the guy at United, the guy at America, and he says, oh, Abdullah Abdullah, and they say, and they get it the wrong way around, it's still Abdallah Abdallah.
So he's okay, he's free to fly.
He's uh he's got it all he's got it all worked out.
And uh so I uh I had uh had a bit of problem, but it all worked out, changed my name to Steinmark and uh and we're already ready to go now.
Uh lots of problems living in the uh post-9-11 world, in ways it's very stressful.
You can understand why all these Democrats want to go back to September the 10th.
We had a very good point in the first hour made, uh, which I think is true that uh what the uh Democrats are proposing to do is investigate uh the previous eight years.
And the great thing about that is that as long as they're investigating the previous eight years, nobody's gonna investigate what's going on right now at the moment.
Uh the what uh what's interesting to me about uh Democrats uh is that they want to observe the letter of the law, even in places where U.S. law doesn't even apply.
So for example, if you're a foreigner uh fighting with other foreigners, uh and you're at an airbase in a foreign country, uh the uh Democrats and a lot of judges in this country want to extend the protections of the United States Constitution to you.
You're not a United States citizen, you're not a United States resident, you've never set foot in the United States, but apparently the Constitution of the United States now applies to the entire planet.
If you're in a cave in Waziristan, if you're uh if you're standing next to Osama bin Laden at the executive latrine in the back of the cave in Waziristan right now, uh and you're listening to this on shortwave radio from the nearest uh U.S. military base over the mountains.
Be assured uh that as far as the Democrats are concerned, you, you are protected by, as a resident of Waziristan and a national of uh Yemen uh standing next to Osama bin Laden at the executive latrine at the back of the cave, you are protected by the United States Constitution.
But if you have the misfortune uh to be in uh what we used to call the United States, uh the United States Constitution, that uh that doesn't uh that doesn't apply now.
You know, there's uh that's that's that's for the birds.
That's crazy stuff.
Uh it's very interesting to me uh the the way the uh investigations of the previous eight years work best in political terms as a distraction from what's going on now.
Larry Cudlow has a has a piece in National Review.
TARP, the criminal enterprise.
This is a great opening sentence.
Is the whole TARP plan a criminal enterprise?
Uh sounds far-fetched, I suppose, but after reading about Special Inspector General Neil Borofsky's report, it may well be that TARP is just one big criminal problem.
Uh Borofsky's investigators reported Monday that they've opened twenty criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax law violations, insider trading, and mortgage modification fraud related to TARP.
Think about this.
TARP, which is now linked to substantial criminal activity, has ballooned to the size of a second federal budget and represents the biggest government-directed intrusion into the economy in history, vastly bigger than the New Deal.
It's only been around for what, three, four, five months.
And it's already it's already the subject of twenty criminal probes.
This is fantastic.
Even by Democrat standards, normally it doesn't have like Blagojevich, he was in office for a couple of years before he became the target of any criminal probes.
This TARP, which is uh we had this the last time I was old, wasn't it?
I'm gonna get I get my toxic assets confused with my troubled assets, don't I?
TARP is only troubled assets.
Troubled assets relief program.
Uh there's no toxic assets in TARP, just troubled ones.
That that's right, H.R. Yeah.
And and and what about the uh the thing you were going on about earlier.
Ta ta TALF.
Then, Telph, Toxic Assets uh lubricated federalism.
Toxic assets lubricated.
Who knows?
Who knows?
We need an acronym connection, by the way.
I re I reckon there are way too many acronyms in this country.
I want an acronym commission to crack down on the number of cocker baby acronyms there are going on in government at the moment.
But this this is fascinating.
Have you read anything in the New York Times on the 20 criminal probes uh into uh into various TARP-related activities?
Have you seen anything on CNN about criminal uh probes uh for TARP-related activities?
Uh TARP uh uh the the whole stimulus thing is riddled uh not just now with the possibilities for fraud, but with actual fraud, with actual criminal activity.
And nobody's paying any attention to it because we're all uh investigating the memos that some uh relatively minor official in the Bush administration uh wrote in the form of legal advice five, six, seven years ago.
Uh and that uh and i uh and uh that's right, HR makes uh good point here.
He wants uh everyone wants the Cheney Purp Walk.
Have you seen this move on dot org?
They've got they've got uh Dick Cheney in full snarl, and the snarl comes out, I think it is it 3D?
I think I don't know whether they when you're at GoToAMoveOn.org screening, they issue the special spectacles.
But I think the the Dick Cheney snarl comes out of the uh the screen at you and just uh devours you.
Uh and so they want to see they want to see the Dick they want to see Dick Cheney at Gitmo.
Uh and that's that's the idea.
That's what it'll be working.
And they'll reintroduce waterboarding for that.
Uh but uh but the and and the advantage of this is that uh this is uh Obama's economy now, this is Obama's world.
Uh when when uh Akwadinijad talks, he's not Talking about, he's not talking about Bush, he's forgotten Bush.
He's talking about the great Satan uh and Obama.
And uh it's Obama's foreign policy, it's Obama's economy, uh it's Obama's stimulus, it's Obama's TARP, uh, but nobody's gonna be talking about this because uh we're too busy investigating the waterboarding memos.
And this is a great advantage to the Democrats, because what it means is that for the next uh for the next couple of years, the economy can get worse, uh companies will close, people will be kicked out of their houses, the unemployment will go up.
That'll be the first story on the news.
And the second new uh story on the news will be uh in year four of the investigation into Bush administration CIA lawyer uh Joe No Name, uh we heard today uh that he approved the possibility of waterboarding in certain and that'll be and and the subliminal connection,
even though the economy stinks, the foreign policy stinks, uh the war on terror is going badly, all the rest of it uh uh in in in the top in top story in the news, the second story in the news that we're still investigating some ringy-ding lawyer from the Bush administration will reassure people that it's all still Bush's fault.
Uh the the challenge for Conservatives uh is to make Obama own the world he and Barney Frank a building.
Uh this this is uh as I think I said it's I said last time, the old uh the old GQ cover story on Sinatra.
It's Frank's world, we just live in it.
It's Barney Frank's world, we just live in it, and he and Obama uh should be held accountable uh for the world uh they're creating.
Uh we we hear now that they're gonna move on to credit cards, so they're gonna move on to chastising uh credit card companies.
Uh we we are told uh hear more and more about banks who took TARP money and would like to get out of government control uh and are being denied the possibility of doing it.
This is like taking this is real loan shark stuff.
This is when the guy you get into trouble and you're local this is how it works in Chicago, you get into trouble, and one day a guy comes by and he offers to loan you ten thousand dollars uh uh to get to get you out of trouble, and uh and you take the ten thousand dollars and uh you you uh you get out of trouble and you get the money back and you want to pay him back.
But no, no, no, he doesn't.
He wants you still there.
He wants you still there dependent on him, still there part of the racket.
Uh that's the way it's going with these banks that are trying to get out of the uh the TARP scheme that that uh like the head of Guy of Citibank pitifully explaining, oh well, yes, I took all the government money.
Nobody told me there would be strings attached.
Uh we are we are witnessing uh something that is going on in real time right now that is destabilizing uh markets, uh killing uh venture capital, killing the capital markets.
Uh it is government's direct responsibility, it's not happening thousands of miles away at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
It's happening right here in your hometown, and that's what we should be investigating uh instead of uh according the uh protections of the United States Constitution to foreign nationals in a foreign country, which is completely ridiculous.
Uh more straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh show, Mark Stein's sitting in.
Now, filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Stein.
Mark.
Excellent.
They've got the name right at last.
Steinmark.
I hope I hope I'm that I hope I'm that way round on the uh of the Homeland Security watch list.
It may delay them surrounded by compound for a couple of days.
I'll I'll look I'll look at the paper to see if uh some poor guy called Steinmark in Idaho has been taken out.
But if you if you are called Steinmark living in Idaho, beware they'll be surrounding your compound any bo any moment now.
Uh Steinmark in for rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show, 1-800-282-2882.
Uh GM officials planning a summer shutdown.
Nobody nobody's buying new cars at the moment.
Uh so they're planning on shutting all the uh well, I was out there in Detroit uh a couple of weeks ago, they were just shutting down the uh third shift of the day.
They'd canceled that.
Uh now they're gonna uh stop everything uh for nine weeks in the summer.
But here's the part I don't understand.
Uh all the thousands of people who will be laid off will still be paid.
So if you're getting nine weeks off in the summer but paid uh isn't isn't that more like a summer vacation than being laid off.
That's a very weird thing.
Uh that's a very weird thing to do, isn't it?
I mean, in a sense I understand General Motors' plan, uh, because they lose money.
They lose thousands of dollars on every vehicle.
So actually paying the guys but telling them, whoo, don't make any more cars makes a lot of sense.
Makes a lot of sense.
But I still find that very odd that a a company is cutting back by closing the plants but still paying the workers.
That seems very strange to me.
A lot of talk that they'll uh that they're going to be bankrupt by June.
H.R. said to me he thought that was very nice.
They're planning a June bankruptcy.
Nice June bankruptcy.
The summer's nice the summer's nice for it.
Another bride, another June you know, that's going bankrupt.
It's uh everybody loves it.
If you've got to go bankrupt, do it in do it in June.
Let's go to Laurie in uh Boise, Boise, Idaho actually I was uh just uh alerting uh listeners in Idaho just a moment ago.
Laurie in Boise, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Well hello, thank you very much, and God bless you and Rush and the Hannity's out there.
Thanks, thanks a lot.
We need all that support now we're being targeted by Homeland Security.
Amen by that I I absolutely love your comment earlier on the Constitution and how wonderful that everybody else gets constitutional rights outside of the United States.
That's right, but it doesn't apply in the the U.S. Constitution now only applies outside the U.S. That's the that's the way it seems to go.
And uh and and you had actually a constitutional point on uh on some of this uh uh investigations into uh into torture.
Well the ridiculous person ever homeland security what's her name, Janet?
Janet Napolitano, yeah.
Yeah she needs to pick up the Constitution and read her amendments.
Uh it's really disgusting, especially the Fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments are our uh legal rights against prosecution and it the retroactivity of taking the Bush's administration and going i it's like this.
The Democrats okay we don't like this so we're gonna change all the laws to conform to us.
Right.
And everything that you've done before that law was there.
Now we're going to go back?
Isn't that against Constitution?
Yeah, you're right.
It is unconstitutional.
You're saying, in effect, it's like making a law that sets the speed limit at 30 miles an hour.
And if you'd been driving at 40 miles an hour two years before the new law was brought in, they would be prosecuting you for speeding.
Essentially, this is retrospective punishment for what is the Democrat administration's view of the war rather than the administration that was in power at the time.
as you say uh that retrospective criminalization i is uh unconstitutional uh and uh actually predates the United States because if my memory's right they got that from um the uh King George the third in the British Parliament where it was a basic acceptance that you couldn't retrospectively uh criminalize activity.
In other words you couldn't pass an act of parliament in in sixteen uh twenty-two and suddenly what some guy had done in fifteen eighty eight was against the law.
Yet that's what the that's what they're opposing uh that's what they're proposing to do here.
And there's a more basic point at work here, Laurie, which is uh I think the the ugliest thing about this is that it is the criminalization uh of politics.
And essentially it turns politics into a a uh a criminal battle.
That's very dangerous.
Uh that that is the sort of thing that happens in banana republics.
You know in banana republics this week's President for life takes over and he decides that all the fellows who supported last week's President for life are now criminals and he prosecutes them.
And that's what that's what uh the Obama administration uh has done.
In a healthy society uh this is where the moveon.org has just infected the Democratic Party in deeply ugly ways because they don't like Dick Cheney.
That's fair enough.
They don't like George W. Bush that's fair enough.
What they don't realize is that they have a difference of opinion uh with Bush and Cheney.
That's not enough for them.
They have to actually make what Bush and Cheney did illegal.
And that is where we are heading into Banana Republic territory.
Because it's not uh Dick Chain and and shame on Patrick Leahy by the way, who is one of the most deeply unattractive senators.
And I don't just mean in the sense that uh a couple of recent summers in Montpelier, Vermont, I mean walking down whatever it is, State Street there, and I've seen him in his shorts.
Uh I don't I don't think he of paddling I mean, he's deep I've got now he looks cute at his shorts, but his he's uh very unattractive in what he's doing here, which is the criminalization of dissent and the criminalization of politics.
Uh and that is straight out of banana republic territory.
Uh, you have a difference of of opinion with Dick Cheney.
You don't then say we're gonna get Dick Cheney's opinion ruled illegal.
And that is what's going on here.
Uh more straight ahead, Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.
More to come.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Don't forget Mark Davis uh will be in uh uh tomorrow and then rushes back on on Monday.
You know, I saw that uh Carrie Prejon, I don't know whether I wish I'd got a definitive pronunciation of her name.
I don't uh want to think I'm giving her some sissified Quebec pronunciation and she's Americanized it uh to pregene or something.
Uh but uh but uh whatever Eddie Carey, Miss California, I saw a big interview.
She is like uh she expanded on the answer she'd given on this gay marriage thing and actually gave a terrific terrific answer.
It makes far more sense than the Megan McCade who's like getting these uh million dollar book deals and all the rest of it.
Uh I don't know, why don't we have Carrie Prechamp as uh guest host?
That would solve all this multiple marks problem.
She seems to be a smart cookie.
It'd be safe to turn the ditto cam back on uh when she's sitting here.
I mean, she is like one smart she's one smart lady.
We would uh uh we would benefit.
Uh I think we would benefit from her.
She could be a great asset to the cause.
As I said, certainly makes a lot more sense than uh Meghan McCain.
Uh but Mark Davis is going to be in tomorrow and then rush back on Monday.
Uh let us go to Bob in uh Jackson, Michigan.
Uh Bob, uh it's great to have you with us on the EIB network.
Uh hi how are you doing today?
I'm doing good.
Uh and uh how are things in Michigan these days?
Because you've got the I think uh the highest unemployment rate in the nation and uh few other problems.
How are things in your part of the state?
Uh it's it's so far it's not really as bad as you might think.
I paint filt for a living like houses and things.
All right.
And uh the work's been not that good in Michigan for several years 'cause uh car industry really hasn't been that good for real long and it slowed things down, but it really doesn't seem as bad as I found.
So you so you're managing to weather uh even with your uh genius Canadian governor and everything, you're you're still uh holding your own there.
Okay, Bob.
You did you didn't uh you didn't uh you didn't call us up to talk about Governor Gradham, though.
I uh um the reason I called was uh the uh um thing with the uh um Bush administration and uh and uh waterboarding and all that kind of stuff.
Uh um I think the Democrats are bringing this up because the next big election is like what a year and a half for Senate and House.
Isn't that about that far away?
Yeah.
So you're if they spend the next year and a half putting the words Bush, Cheney, terror, waterboards together, they can make themselves look a lot better heading towards that election.
So you're thinking the game plan here is to get a uh special prosecutor or one of these uh uh these commissions, uh so-called bipartisan commissions where they're on CNN all the time, hearings, hearings, hearings, uh into this, and then it'll all be in the three, four months coming to a head, three or four months before the two thousand ten elections, and uh nobody will be paying any attention to what Obama's doing with the multi-trillion dollar deficits.
In a sense, they're providing they'll provide the cover for all the stuff he wants to just get on with quietly in the dark.
Yeah, and as much as possible, make all the Democrats running for office look good in the Senate and the House.
And uh and since the Liberal is a liberal, whether he's uh either he's a plumber or a painter, or a newsman or a politician, the liberals of the entire world and all the news, TV, radio, everywhere will be talking about nothing but those three names.
Bush, Cheney, torture, waterboards, you know, four names there.
Yeah, yeah.
And they'll they'll be the bad guys, and then the Democrats, whatever they're doing won't be as bad.
Well, don't don't fe don't forget that it's not just Bush Cheney waterboard torture.
It's Bush Cheney waterboard torture Republican.
Uh that's the way they're gonna do it.
They're gonna every every guy r running with an R after his name uh will effectively have a W after the R saying this is the party of waterboarding.
Now they've made a political calculation on this.
I don't even know whether it's gonna work.
Uh because actually when you ask when you ask Americans about this, and as we heard in the first hour, uh they're they're cool with waterboarding.
Uh they're they are perfectly happy if you've got some guy, you pull some guy out of Pakistan or Indonesia, and you get him in your custody, and you think he's behind some plot.
Uh for example, the plot uh to have a 9-11 on Los Angeles, the plot to blow up the uh U.S. airliners flying from uh Heathrow to the United States.
These are active plots that are disrupted by intelligence.
They're disruptive.
The alternative to doing it this way, by the way, is uh e i there's there's two alternatives.
You can do it this way, where you you you you monitor, you eavesdrop, you li you listen to the chatter on the internet, you hear keywords like Brooklyn Bridge uh that don't translate easily into Arabic, and you pull some guy out from uh some cell in Pakistan uh and you get the information out of him.
The alternative to that there are two.
You can either bomb and kill tens of thousands of people, among whom uh those suspects are lurking, uh, or you can just sit back and let your cities get hit.
You can let that Heathrow plot uh succeed and all those people die in uh airliners uh flying to the United States.
You can get the Los Angeles plot succeed uh and let Los Angeles be hit on a 9-11 scale.
You can let the Brooklyn Bridge be blown up uh with the attendant impact on the economy.
Uh but uh but you're right that uh that uh uh the the idea to tag the party as the party of uh Republican Party is a party of waterboarding.
I'm not even sure it's that smart politics.
You know, we we use this word torture.
Let's just be clear from from uh what we're talking about in the first hour.
Pain is off the table.
Uh you don't you don't cause pain.
That's you don't uh stab somebody, uh you don't hurt somebody, you don't chop off fingers, uh, you don't burn them, cover them in burn marks.
What you're doing, what you're doing, is taking all that off the table uh and just using psychological disruption, essentially.
Waterboarding, you're not actually drowning somebody, uh you're giving them the psychological impression of waterboarding.
And the left say, the Democrats say, oh no, no, no, you can't do that.
Then you have sleep deprivation, and you say, no, no, no, no, no, we can't have sleep uh we can't have sleep deprivation.
That is a form of torture.
Uh imagine uh and then they say, oh no, you can't play the Celine Dion Christmas album to these people.
That is also a form of torture.
Uh you can't do that.
You can't do that.
You can't play the Barney.
They were playing the Barney the Dinosaur song, which actually is a form of torture, and if it isn't in the Geneva conventions, it ought to be.
Uh I'm with the uh Democrats on that.
Uh uh but but uh a lot of this other stuff is kind of, you know, when it gets to playing Selene Dion, they were playing uh my old friend Jim Dale reading the Harry Potter books to the guys at Gitmo as a form of torture.
And then what happened is the uh D-Ta-Dees at Gitmo got into Harry Potter.
Yes.
And uh actually that's a great strategy, because uh now they're all uh now that there's instead of planning to uh blow up the Empire State Building, they're saying, oh, I uh wonder what Hermione will be doing in the next book and all the rest.
Uh don't get offended by my culturally stereotypey uh accent, by the way.
I'm just I'm just you know, just fellows I've met from Wasirastad, uh Yemen and all the rest of it.
But the but the uh the uh yeah, so they they played the Harry Potter, and then they got hooked on the Harry Potter.
They got hooked on the Harry Potter.
So that doesn't work.
So you've got to give them some so you've got to say, well, okay, we can't play them uh we can't, but the Barney the Dinosaur song is torture, but you play them Jim Dale reading Harry Potter, they start to enjoy it too much.
Uh maybe the Celine Dion Christmas album uh is culturally insensitive.
But this idea that you shouldn't be able to psychologically discombobulate them, one iota is preposterous.
This guy they're all upset about.
He had a fear of insects.
So they put him in a room with a caterpillar, Right.
And everyone's like, no, no, you can't get out the caterpillar.
The CIA has got secret farms around the world where they're breeding caterpillars.
You can't do you can't do that.
Caterpillars off the table.
We've got to have the c we gotta draw a clear line that Americans, this is not in keeping with our best tradition and the together there's nothing about caterpillars in the US Constitution.
Now, uh try this in any other country in the world.
Say the head torture guy, the head torture guy of the United States government, they're having like a UN torture conference with all the big time torturers.
And the head torture man of the United States government flies in, and there's the Syrian torture guy, and there's the Iranian torture guy, and there's the North Korean torture guy, and there's the Sudanese torture guy, and they're saying, Hey, welcome to the club, great to see you here.
Uh so what you been doing lately?
And they say, Well, we had this guy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in, and we had to get out the caterpillar.
I mean the Syrian The Syrian and you know the way the Syrian guy the Syrian torturer is going to be taking him seriously, is he?
There's the Iranian torturers are gonna be thinking this guy's a joke.
There's no caterpillars.
If you're in a Syria let me tell you now, if you they did this to some Canadian, some Canadian guy got uh wound up getting shipped to a uh jail in Damascus.
And I can tell you something there.
He sued the government of Canada and got twenty million dollars uh for spending six months in the care of the Syrian government.
Uh and I can tell you something, what they did to him there, there were no caterpillars involved.
They didn't get now, I'm sure Peter, Peter or uh Peter are great with this.
They're probably Peter would say blameless American caterpillars should not be made complicit in torture.
It's like Celine Dion and all these pop stars don't like having their records played to the guys at Gitmo.
They're now saying well, look, there's a lice there ought to be a separate licensing clause for torture.
You know, you shouldn't just be allowed to play the Celine Dion C D to these guys.
Now, uh the caterpillar people will be saying, too, w if this doesn't work, Peter will be saying, Look, it's uh it's cruel to caterpillars, we cannot breed caterpillars uh for use for torturing uh terrorists.
It's just uh it's just irresponsible.
And then uh the Democrats will get involved, and next thing you know, there'll be union unionized caterpillars, and you can bet that somewhere in the stimulus package, it'll be like General Motors, where ev all the all the plants are being shut down and they're being laid off uh but the guys are still getting paid.
These caterpillars who actually live on plants, the plants will be shut down, but the caterpillars will still be getting paid.
There'll be unionized caterpillars uh and the and the whole thing.
So this is this is what we're arguing now.
We've taken pain off the the we've taken pain off the table.
Uh we're saying you can't uh give them sleep deprivation, you can't play them uh Jim Dale reading Harry Potter, and now you can't get out the caterpillar.
That is American torture in the year two thousand and nine.
More straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show from the EIB network.
Mark Stein on the Rush Limbaugh Show from the EIB network.
Let's go to Max in San Francisco.
Uh Max from uh Pelosi Central.
Pleasure to speak to you.
Hey, great to hear from you, Max.
Yeah.
Um I have a two-part question that I know I'm gonna ask you to explain to me.
Uh when Mr. Reagan uh figured out uh that deficits didn't matter and Mr. Bush used that to r run up a ten trillion dollar deficit.
Uh why isn't Obama getting a free pass?
Uh well, I I let's let's take the premise of that question because I in a sense I support it.
Uh I I always take the view that actually the deficit is not what uh matters.
The programs that cause the deficit are.
Uh so you so I I think these things would be wrong even if they didn't cause a deficit.
And uh I think I said last time, if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover this at the end of every month, it would still be wrong.
Uh and for m for f fellows like me, it's wrong because it uh grows the power of the state uh at the expense of uh uh of other areas of society.
So uh that's a good answer.
I well, uh thank thank Thank you, Max.
Excuse me, I ask you the other question.
I may no, no, let but just just to go back, by the way, to what um uh uh t to to the Reagan era deficits and to George W. Bush's deficits.
Now I I didn't agree uh with the with the reasons for running up the Bush deficits, and I certainly didn't support uh what was done by Hank Paulson in full uh last year.
So I'm consistent on this.
There's nothing to do with uh whether there's a Democrat or a Republican uh in the White House or in Congress.
I want these fellas spending less money.
Uh but there is a difference in scale that's going on now.
And uh uh you you were you are right to uh come at us guys on the right and say, hey, where's your consistency?
But there's an inconsistency on the left, too.
Uh the the people have got quite a lot of traction attacking Bush uh for these uh for these deficits uh during uh the in the years after 911 because Clinton had run surpluses.
I don't believe government should be running surpluses either.
The government should not be taking more money than it needs.
But but uh the scale of the deficit now is completely different from anything uh that we have seen uh in the United States in the previous two hundred and thirty years.
And that takes us at the very least, and this is nothing to do with whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, it puts a big, big question mark uh over how those deficits are going to be reduced and how that national debt uh is going to be paid down.
Uh I think uh I think actually in a sense this situation is insoluble for big macroeconomic issues uh to do with the fact that uh uh essentially most of the Western world is kaput and there are not going to be young people to pay off these debts.
Japan is the oldest uh country on the planet, Germany is not far behind, Italy, Spain not far behind.
In other words, major uh advanced OECD economies will have no y insufficient numbers of young people around to pay off uh to pay off the debt.
And that would be my big macroeconomic thing.
But but Max, as I'm doing so well and as I'm gonna come out and give a big speech in San Francisco now, because all the all the Liberals like my first answer.
G give us your second question.
Well, uh to give you full exposure, if I may, I I didn't vote for Mr. Rabon.
I Obama, I don't believe in his policies, and my liberal friends are horrified that I listen to this show and and actually say, well, I do learn something, and I I'd like to hear both sides, and I I wasted twenty years as a liberal.
Well I don't support you know these people anymore because of the.
Well, don't hey, hey, hey, hey, that's good.
That's good that's a good that's a good start, Max.
But having wasted twenty years as a Liberal, don't waste another twenty years as a moderate.
Just come over to the extreme right wing nut bar side with the rest of us.
Get on the uh get on Janet Napolitado's Homeland Security watch list.
There's no point taking the slow stopping service.
Get the express flight direct.
Get the express flight from Pelosiville to Crazyville without spend wasting another twenty years in the middle of Moderateville.
That's just I can ask you this question if I may.
Okay.
Why should the achievers, as Rush calls them, and I and they are, who provide jobs and the taxpayers, why should the American people make a gift of their taxes to the private stockholders of the Federal Reserve so they can just reward us with bailout, looting their own subsidiaries on Wall Street, and uh uh uh roller coaster economy that essentially rewards us with poverty and homelessness.
Well, you know, uh th that's that's a a big question.
But let me let me put it this way.
I don't believe uh I don't believe the uh government should be in the business of rewarding anyone, which is why I I believe in a so-called uh fair tax.
If a guy earns ten thousand a year and he and he pays tax at five percent, uh he he gives left's money to the government than a guy who earns a hundred thousand a year or a guy who uh earns ten million a year.
Uh the th essentially if you leave the market to decide the winners and losers, uh that all works out over the long term.
Because if if people with ten million dollars they don't hoard it, they don't stick it under the mattress.
Uh it's uh it's not like uh what's he's not called Donald Duck's uncle, uh who who d like kept it all in a warehouse and drove his tractors shoveling dollar bills around.
Rich people put that money out into the economy in effective ways, and the government doesn't.
More straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
An Earth Day report from the United Kingdom says that overweight people cause uh global warming.
So uh say what you like about uh Kim Jong-il starving millions of people in uh in North Korea, but at least their carbon footprints aren't out of control.
Uh so that's great news.
More straight ahead with Mark Stein on the EIB network, rush back on Monday.
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