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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 couple of hours.
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 back on Monday.
But Mark Stein with you today.
Or as I like to think of myself now, Stein Mark.
When I flew into New York to do the show, I arrived at the airport, arrived at the airport, and this is what was it, Jennifer Napolitano saying?
You know, she's in charge of border security, homeland security, airport security, all security.
So I arrived there, and they say, I say, I think I've got a reservation on the whatever flight it was.
And she goes, oh, no, we got nobody down by that name.
It's just a little 16-seat puddle jumper.
So she runs through and she goes, oh, yes, he goes, I see we've got, for some reason, we've got you down instead of as Mark Stein, as Steinmark.
And so immediately, you know, you know, you're going to be there for hours while that is sorted out.
It's in breach of the Patriot Act.
It's illegal now to go around with your last name first and your first name last.
Can't do that.
Can't do that anymore.
So Steinmark, so she says she doesn't have the power to just correct it there because it does take an act of Congress.
And actually, Senator Leahy has to investigate it.
Because it was a flight out of Vermont, actually.
So that's even more concerned.
If you start 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 there are all kinds of complications here.
So she says she's got to call her supervisor and the supervisor's got to call his supervisor.
And so he's coming out and he's going, oh, don't worry, Mr. Mark.
We'll sort this out in no time.
And he calls the supervisor, the supervisor calls the supervisor, supervisor, supervisor, and he goes, yes, don't worry about it, Mr. Mark.
We're working.
Can I call you Stein?
No, we're working on this.
We're going to sort it out.
And it occurred to me, if I was going to 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 to Steinmark and board the flight.
So it's called, we were talking in the first hour about these with all these marks as the guest host now cuts down on the jingle package factor.
So all we have to do now is reverse the Mark Stein to Steinmark and 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.
He doesn't have any problem getting planes.
He doesn't have any, no screw-ups, even if the guy at USAI, the guy at United, the guy at American, he says, oh, Abdullah Abdullah.
And they say, and they get it the wrong way around.
It's still Abdullah Abdullah.
So he's okay.
He's free to fly.
He's got it all worked out.
And so I had a bit of a problem, but it all worked out.
Changed my name to Steinmark and we're already ready to go now.
Lots of problems living in the 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, which I think is true, that what the Democrats are proposing to do is investigate the previous eight years.
And the great thing about that is that as long as they're investigating the previous eight years, nobody's going to investigate what's going on right now at the moment.
What's interesting to me about Democrats 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 fighting with other foreigners and you're at an airbase in a foreign country, the 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 standing next to Osama bin Laden at the executive latrine in the back of the cave in Waziristan right now, and you're listening to this on shortwave radio from the nearest U.S. military base over the mountains,
be assured that as far as the Democrats are concerned, you, you, are protected by, as a resident of Waziristan and a national of Yemen, 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 to be in what we used to call the United States, the United States Constitution, that doesn't apply now.
You know, that's for the birds.
That's crazy stuff.
It's very interesting to me the way the investigations of the previous eight years work best in political terms as a distraction from what's going on now.
Larry Kudlow has a piece in National Review, TARP, the criminal enterprise.
This is a great opening sentence.
Is the whole TARP plan a criminal enterprise?
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.
Borofsky's investigators reported Monday that they've opened 20 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 the subject of 20 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, we had this the last time I was on, wasn't I?
I get my toxic assets confused with my troubled assets, don't I?
TARP is only troubled assets.
Troubled assets relief program.
There's no toxic assets in TARP, just troubled ones.
That's right, HR.
Yeah, and what about the thing you were going on about earlier?
TALF.
TELF, toxic assets lubricated federalism.
Toxic assets lubricate.
Who knows?
Who knows?
We need an acronym commission, by the way.
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 is fascinating.
Have you read anything in the New York Times on the 20 criminal probes into various TARP-related activities?
Have you seen anything on CNN about criminal probes for TARP-related activities?
TARP, the whole stimulus thing is riddled 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 investigating the memos that some relatively minor official in the Bush administration wrote in the form of legal advice five, six, seven years ago.
And that's right.
HR makes a good point here.
Everyone wants the Cheney Pup Walk.
Have you seen this moveon.org?
They've got Dick Cheney in full snarl, and the snarl comes out, I think, is it 3D?
I think, I don't know whether they, when you're at go to a moveon.org screening, they issue the special spectacles.
But I think the Dick Cheney snarl comes out of the screen at you and just devours you.
And so they want to see Dick Cheney at Gitmo.
And that's the idea.
That's when it'll be working.
And they'll reintroduce waterboarding for that.
And the advantage of this is that this is Obama's economy.
Now, this is Obama's world.
When Ahmadinejad talks, he's not talking about Bush.
He's forgotten Bush.
He's talking about the great Satan and Obama.
And it's Obama's foreign policy.
It's Obama's economy.
It's Obama's stimulus.
It's Obama's tarp.
But nobody's going to be talking about this because 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 couple of years, the economy can get worse.
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 story on the news will be, in year four of the investigation into Bush administration CIA lawyer Joe No-Name, we heard today that he approved the possibility of waterboarding.
And the subliminal connection, even though the economy stinks, the foreign policy stinks, the war on terror is going badly, all the rest of it, in the 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.
The challenge for conservatives is to make Obama own the world he and Barney Frank are building.
This is, as I think I said, as I said last time, 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 should be held accountable for the world they're creating.
We hear now that they're going to move on to credit cards, so they're going to move on to chastising credit card companies.
We are told, hear more and more about banks who took TARP money and would like to get out of government control 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 $10,000 to get you out of trouble and you take the $10,000 and 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.
That's the way it's going with these banks that are trying to get out of the TARP scheme that like the head of the guy of Citibank pitifully explaining, oh, well, yes, I took all the government money.
Nobody told me there would be strings attached.
We are witnessing something that is going on in real time right now that is destabilizing markets, killing venture capital, killing the capital markets.
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 instead of according the protections of the United States Constitution to foreign nationals in a foreign country, which is completely ridiculous.
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.
Stein Mark.
I hope I'm that way around on the Homeland Security watch list.
It may delay them surrounding my compound for a couple of days.
I'll look at the paper to see if some poor guy called Steinmark in Idaho has been taken out.
But if you are called Steinmark living in Idaho, beware.
They'll be surrounding your compound any moment now.
Steinmark, in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show, 1-800-282-2882.
GM officials planning a summer shutdown.
Nobody's buying new cars at the moment.
So they're planning on shutting all the...
When I was out there in Detroit a couple of weeks ago, they were just shutting down the third shift of the day.
They'd canceled that.
Now they're going to stop everything for nine weeks in the summer.
But here's the part I don't understand.
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, isn't that more like a summer vacation than being laid off?
That's a very weird thing.
That's a very weird thing to do, isn't it?
I mean, in a sense, I understand General Motors' plan 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 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're going to be bankrupt by June.
HR 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.
Everybody loves it.
If you've got to go bankrupt, do it in June.
Let's go to Laurie in Boise, Boise, Idaho, actually.
I was just alerting 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.
Now we're being targeted by Homeland Security.
What do you mean by that?
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 U.S. Constitution now only applies outside the U.S. That's the way it seems to go.
And you had actually a constitutional point on some of this investigations into torture.
Well, the ridiculous person of our Homeland Security, what's her name, Janet?
Janet Napolitano, yeah.
Yeah, she needs to pick up the Constitution and read her amendments.
It's really disgusting, especially the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are our legal rights against prosecution.
And the retroactivity of taking the Bush's administration and going it's like this.
The Democrats, okay, we don't like this, so we're going to 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.
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.
And as you say, that retrospective criminalization is unconstitutional and actually predates the United States, because if my memory is right, they got that from King George III and the British Parliament, where it was a basic acceptance that you couldn't retrospectively criminalize activity.
In other words, you couldn't pass an Act of Parliament in 1622, and suddenly what some guy had done in 1588 was against the law.
That's what they're opposing.
That's what they're proposing to do here.
And there's a more basic point at work here, Laurie, which is, I think, the ugliest thing about this, is that it is the criminalization of politics.
And essentially, it turns politics into a criminal battle.
That's very dangerous.
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 the Obama administration has done.
In a healthy society, 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 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.
Dick Cheney, 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 a couple of recent summers in Monpelia, Vermont, I've been walking down whatever it is, State Street there, and I've seen him in his shorts.
I don't think he's paddling.
I mean, he's deep.
No, he looks cute in his shorts, but he's very unattractive in what he's doing here, which is the criminalization of dissent and the criminalization of politics.
And that is straight out of banana republic territory.
You have a difference of opinion with Dick Cheney.
You don't then say we're going to get Dick Cheney's opinion ruled illegal.
And that is what's going on here.
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 will be in tomorrow and then rushes back on Monday.
You know, I saw that Carrie Préjon, I don't know, I wish I'd got a definitive pronunciation of her name.
I don't want to think I'm giving her some sissy fide Quebecois pronunciation and she's Americanized it to pre-gene or something.
But whatever, Eddie Carrie, Miss California, I saw her being interviewed.
She is like, 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 Megan McCade, who's like getting these million-dollar book deals and all the rest of it.
I don't know, why don't we have Carrie Prayjon as a 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 when she's sitting here.
I mean, she's like one smart, she's one smart lady.
We would benefit.
I think we would benefit from her.
She could be a great asset to the cause.
Said, certainly makes a lot more sense than Megan McCain.
But Mark Davis is going to be in tomorrow and then rush back on Monday.
Let us go to Bob in Jackson, Michigan.
Bob, it's great to have you with us on the EIB network.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing good.
And how are things in Michigan these days?
Because you've got the highest unemployment rate in the nation and a few other problems.
How are things in your part of the state?
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 the work's been not that good in Michigan for several years because the 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 saw.
So you're managing to weather, even with your genius Canadian governor and everything, you're still holding your own there.
Okay, Bob.
You didn't call us up to talk about Governor Gratham, though.
The reason I called was about the thing with the Bush administration and the waterboarding and all that kind of stuff.
I think the Democrats are bringing this up because the next big election is like about a year and a half for Senate and House.
They're not that far away.
Yeah.
So 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 special prosecutor or one of these commissions, so-called bipartisan commissions, where they're on CNN all the time, hearings, hearings, hearings into this.
And then it'll all be in the three, four months, coming to a head, three or four months before the 2010 elections, and nobody will be paying any attention to what Obama's doing with the multi-trillion dollar deficits.
In a sense, 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 since the liberal is a liberal, whether he's a plumber or a painter or a newsman or a politician, the liberals in 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.
And they'll be the bad guys, and the Democrats, whatever they're doing, won't be as bad.
Well, don't forget that it's not just Bush-Cheney waterboard torture.
It's Bush-Cheney waterboard torture Republican.
That's the way they're going to do it.
Every guy running with an R after his name will effectively have a W after the R saying, this is the party you're waterboarding.
Now, they've made a political calculation on this.
I don't even know whether it's going to work.
Because actually, when you ask Americans about this, and as we heard in the first hour, they're cool with waterboarding.
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.
For example, the plot to have a 9-11 on Los Angeles, the plot to blow up the U.S. airliners flying from Heathrow to the United States.
These are active plots that are disrupted by intelligence.
The alternative to doing it this way, by the way, is there's two alternatives.
You can do it this way, where you monitor, you eavesdrop, you listen to the chatter on the internet, you hear keywords like Brooklyn Bridge that don't translate easily into Arabic, and you pull some guy out from some cell in Pakistan 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 those suspects are lurking, or you can just sit back and let your cities get hit.
You can let that Heathrow plot succeed and all those people die in airliners flying to the United States.
You can get the Los Angeles plot succeed and let Los Angeles be hit on a 9-11 scale.
You can let the Brooklyn Bridge be blown up with the attendant impact on the economy.
But you're right, that the idea to tag the party as the party of the Republican Party is the party of waterboarding.
I'm not even sure it's that smart politics.
You know, we use this word torture.
Let's just be clear from what we're talking about in the first hour.
Pain is off the table.
You don't cause pain.
You don't stab somebody.
You don't hurt somebody.
You don't chop off fingers.
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 and just using psychological disruption, essentially.
Waterboarding, you're not actually drowning somebody.
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, oh, no, no, no, no, we can't have sleep.
We can't have sleep deprivation.
That is a form of torture.
Imagine, 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.
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.
I'm with the Democrats on that.
But a lot of this other stuff is kind of, you know, when it gets to playing Celine Dion, they were playing my old friend Jim Dale reading the Harry Potter books to the guys at Gitbo as a form of torture.
And then what happened is the details at Gitbo got into Harry Potter.
Yes.
And actually, that's a great strategy because now they're all, instead of planning to blow up the Empire State Building, they're saying, oh, I wonder what Hermione will be doing in the next book.
Don't get offended by my culturally stereotype-y accent, by the way.
I'm just, you know, just fellas I've met from Waziristan and Yemen and all the rest of it.
But the, but the, yeah, so they played the Harry Potter, and then they got hooked up the Harry Potter.
They got hooked on the Harry Potter.
So that doesn't work.
So you've got to give them, so you've got to say, okay, we can't play them.
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.
Maybe the Celine Dion Christmas album 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 that.
You can't do that.
Caterpillar's off the table.
We've got to have the cat.
We've got to draw a clear line that Americans, this is not in keeping with our best tradition.
And together, there's nothing about caterpillars in the US Constitution.
Now, 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.
So what you've 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 isn't going to be taking him seriously, is he?
The Iranian torturer is going to 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 wound up getting shipped to a jail in Damascus.
And I can tell you something there.
He sued the government of Canada and got $20 million for spending six months in the care of the Syrian government.
And I can tell you something.
they did to him there there were no caterpillars involved they didn't get now i'm sure peter peter are 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 now say, well, look, there ought to be a separate licensing clause for torture.
You know, you shouldn't just be allowed to play the Celine Dion CD to these guys.
Now, the caterpillar people will be saying, too, if this doesn't work, Peter will be saying, look, it's cruel to caterpillars.
We cannot breed caterpillars for use for torturing terrorists.
It's just irresponsible.
And then the Democrats will get involved, and next thing you know, they'll be unionized caterpillars.
And you can bet that somewhere in the stimulus package, you'll be like General Motors, where all the plants are being shut down, and they're being laid off, 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 and the whole thing.
So this is what we're arguing now.
We've taken pain off the table.
We're saying you can't give them sleep deprivation.
You can't play them Jim Dale reading Harry Potter.
And now you can't get out the caterpillar.
That is American torture in the year 2009.
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.
Max from Pelosi Central.
It's a pleasure to speak to you.
Hey, great to hear from you, Max.
Yeah, I have a two-part question that I know I'm going to ask you to explain to me.
When Mr. Reagan figured out that deficits didn't matter and Mr. Bush used that to run up a $10 trillion deficit, why isn't Obama getting a free pass?
Well, let's take the premise of that question because in a sense, I support it.
I always take the view that actually the deficit is not what matters.
The programs that cause the deficit are.
So I think these things would be wrong even if they didn't cause a deficit.
And 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.
And for fellows like me, it's wrong because it grows the power of the state at the expense of other areas of society.
That's a good answer.
Well, thank you, Max.
May I ask you the other question?
No, no.
But just to go back, by the way, to the Reagan-era deficits and to George W. Bush's deficits.
Now, I didn't agree with the reasons for running up the Bush deficits, and I certainly didn't support what was done by Hank Paulson in fall last year.
So, I'm consistent on this.
It's nothing to do with whether there's a Democrat or a Republican in the White House or in Congress.
I want these fellas spending less money.
But there is a difference in scale that's going on now.
And you are right to come at us guys on the right and say, hey, where's your consistency?
But there's an inconsistency on the left, too.
People got quite a lot of traction attacking Bush for these deficits in the years after 9-11 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 the scale of the deficit now is completely different from anything that we have seen in the United States in the previous 230 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 over how those deficits are going to be reduced and how that national debt is going to be paid down.
I think actually, in a sense, this situation is insoluble for big macroeconomic issues to do with the fact that 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 country on the planet.
Germany is not far behind.
Italy, Spain, not far behind.
In other words, major advanced OECD economies will have no insufficient numbers of young people around to pay off the debt.
And that would be my big macroeconomic thing.
But Max, as I'm doing so well, and as I'm going to come out and give a big speech in San Francisco now, because all the liberals like my first answer, give us your second question.
Well, to give you full closure, if I may, I didn't vote for Mr. Robana.
Obama, I don't believe in his policies, and my liberal friends are horrified that I listen to this show and actually say, well, I do learn something, and I like to hear both sides, and I wasted 20 years as a liberal.
I don't support these people anymore because of the future.
Well, don't.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, that's good.
That's a good start, Max.
But having wasted 20 years as a liberal, don't waste another 20 years as a moderate.
Just come over to the extreme right-wing nutbar side with the rest of us.
Get on Janet Napolitano'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 wasting another 20 years in the middle of Moderatville.
That's just a special.
I can ask you this question, if I may.
Why should the achievers, as Rush calls them, 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 a roller coaster economy that essentially rewards us with poverty and homelessness?
Well, you know, that's a big question.
But let me put it this way.
I don't believe the government should be in the business of rewarding anyone, which is why I believe in a so-called fair tax.
If a guy earns $10,000 a year and he pays tax at 5%, he gives less money to the government than a guy who earns $100,000 a year or a guy who earns $10 million a year.
Essentially, if you leave the market to decide the winners and losers, that all works out over the long term.
Because if people with $10 million, they don't hoard it.
They don't stick it under the mattress.
It's not like what's now called Donald Duck's uncle, who 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 global warming.
So say what you like about Kim Jong-il starving millions of people in North Korea, but at least their carbon footprints aren't out of control.
So that's great news.
More straight ahead with Mark Stein on the EIB network.
Rush Back on Monday.
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