Obama's gonna go ahead and release more interrogation photos to prove what a rotten, mean bunch of SOBs the U.S. military and the CIA is.
There's no law requiring him to do this.
It's not Obama has to, it's not Obama must, it's Obama wants to.
I guarantee you there is nothing good that can come from this.
And that's precisely why he's gonna do it.
Greetings, Rushlin Ball, the EIB network.
Great to have you here, folks.
As we have more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address Lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
So the Senate is debating, ladies and gentlemen, uh the uh of credit card reform legislation.
I mean, they're gonna get really tough with these credit card companies out there, and they're gonna they're gonna stabilize interest rates, they're gonna stabilize this, they're gonna get rid of the fraud, get rid of the uh abuse uh on the part of the evil credit card companies, and it'll happen nine months after it's signed.
Now, this, if if it is signed, which it will be, of course, this is the same United States Senate that all during the 90s passed a whole bunch of bills designed to get those mean cable companies to treat you fairly and to lower your cable prices.
And I just want you to go back, and I want you to remember from the 90s through today how your cable bills have gotten cheaper, and how you're happier and how boy, you're so glad the U.S. Senate fixed that problem.
Any of you had your cable bills getting cheaper other than by giving up service?
And then how many of you actually gave up service just to keep your bill the same?
It doesn't, it's not gonna get cheaper.
It's all it's all just PR gobbledygook, and I really, you know, during the break, I went and did some research on sugar.
There are very few times, ladies and gentlemen, where I think and have thought in the 20 plus years I've hosted this program that I'm wasting my time.
But I'm on the brink of thinking, if I've got to explain sugar to people, I'm wasting my time.
And then I realize, no, you're not wasting your time.
And that's even more depressing.
There's a f I found uh found a piece here by uh a blogger named Laurie Bebe or BB at uh well, I don't even know what the site is.
Health fitness.
Uh it's easinearticles.com.
Easine articles.
At any rate, when did sugar start getting such a bad rap?
Unlike many herbs and supplements, which are touted for being safe and healthy because they're natural, people forget that sugar comes from the sugar cane plant or from sugar beets.
Sugar is as natural as your favorite herb.
In a survey uh where people were asked how many calories are in a teaspoon of sugar, the answers went as high as 200 calories or more.
Do you know how many calories are in a teaspoon of sugar?
Sixteen.
How the hell did you know this, thirdly?
You knew it, you Rachel knew it.
Sixteen calories in a teaspoon of sugar.
So how did sugar get a reputation for being fattening, causing diabetes, contributing to the obesity epidemic?
Well, many people don't use sugar or for many other foods uh for that matter in moderation.
In fact, a teaspoon of sugar on your morning cereal or grapefruit and another in your coffee, and a third teaspoon in your iced tea will add up to less than 50 calories.
How can that be a hazard to your health?
Then people start thinking, well, donuts, don't start talking about the donuts.
Sugar in donuts is not what's fattening.
It's not where the calories come from.
It's the fat, it's the grease.
Donuts are fried.
It's not the sugar.
But the idea that that sugar leads to diabetes.
If you eat too much sugar, you're gonna get diabetes is just that is another one of these myths.
That diabetes results from a problem in the pancreas resulting from insulin.
And there are many different kinds of people hear the term blood sugar, you know, and they think, oh, that's a little dominoes granules floating around in my blood.
It's not that at all.
But you get you get these these wacko leftists who just want to manage everybody's lives.
They're not content to manage their own.
They have to drum up things.
Somebody show me.
Where do you go?
We just had a caller say that there's withdrawal symptoms from sugar.
When's the last person that went to a sugarholics anonymous meeting?
I want to know.
If it's that addictive, if it's just as addictive as cocaine, just as addictive and just as destructive.
If she said more so than heroin cocaine or what have you.
And of course, it's just it's just patent patently false.
My father had diabetes.
And it wasn't, it wasn't because he ate a lot of sugar, you didn't have a sweet tooth at all.
I don't have a sweet tooth.
And my dad didn't.
I remember once when uh when he was diagnosed with, I think it was type one when he was in his uh mid-50s, and he was having to shoot up insulin.
Pancreas just wasn't making it.
It didn't matter what he ate.
Eat anything, uh, and your blood sugar is is going to skyrocket.
Certain things you can't eat so forth, but a lot of things that get broken down as sugar you can eat as a diabetic.
And everything does get broken down into one form of a sugar or another in the whole metabolic process.
But one of the problems he had was regulating his insulin.
If you inject too much insulin, you go into insulin shock.
Have you ever seen somebody in insulin shock?
Well, they start shaking and coughing, and you think they're gonna die.
And you know what the cure for it is?
A glass of orange juice, which is loaded with sugar.
Orange juice from the tree, loaded with sugar.
Drink that, and you'll and you'll nullify it if you happen to take too much uh too much insulin.
Look, I'm not, I'm not a doctor on this stuff.
I just I just I just know that uh sugar is getting a bad rap.
But the reason we're talking about this is because the United States Senate is going to start taxing drinks that have sugar in it, and this is nothing more than the left's attempt to establish guilty behavior.
The reason they're going to tax sugar, they tell you, is because they want to improve your lifestyle.
They want you to stop eating it till you get healthier.
That's not why.
It's because sugar is in everything.
And once you start taxing coke and Gatorade and Pepsi and 7up and Sprite and all those other things, then you can start taxing donuts and anything else that's got sugar.
Everything in the world is gonna kill us.
Do you understand that every day we get up and something's gonna kill us?
As though we're never gonna die.
Do you realize, folks, we would live forever if we didn't do all these horrible things the left warns us against every day?
We'd all live forever.
I mean, that's the logic that they put forth.
Everybody's gonna die.
Your time comes.
I know people who have exercised.
They have done everything that they have been told to do.
They have exercised, they have moderated their diet, they eat roots and berries and trees, and they have a miserable life.
And then all of a sudden they had some pain on the right side of the body.
They went in there and they found uh a benign polyp or tumor on the liver.
All the exercise and all of the eating the berries and the roots and the garbage, the bland crap that was supposed to keep you healthy did not stop the tumor.
In fact, we're now learning that drinking coffee might stave off type 2 diabetes.
I got the story in the stack today.
Three cups of coffee might reduce your chance of getting type 2 diabetes by 50%.
I think that's BS2.
Who the hell knows that?
They can't, but this is the kind of stuff we live with every day.
We are now told also that uh caffeine.
Oh, caffeine's the enemy, but caffeine's only 2% of coffee.
Coffee has thousands of different biological organisms in it that's good for us.
And coffee can also maybe prevent Parkinson's disease.
Now, how Alzheimer's too.
Now, how many of you have been told that coffee's gonna kill you because it's gonna do something to your blood vessels and cause you to have a heart attack.
Remember the jogger Jim Fix.
Well, here's a guy who did everything right.
He ran around, he ran.
He ran and he ran around.
He worked hard, he played hard, ate all the right stuff, drank all that stupid papaya juice, all that rot gut crap that nobody likes that they convince you to eat.
And he plops over from a heart attack at what, age 49.
Did everything right.
That's just one example.
That's the rare example of the exception to the rule, Mr. Limbo.
No.
No, it boils.
We're all different.
And we are all made different.
We all have different makeups or DNA is the same, but we all have something that's gonna get us.
We are not the same.
We cannot be made uniform.
And they're trying to make everybody uniform, they're trying to make everybody the same.
It just it it it just it irritates me to no end, especially when people get it's like coconut oil and popcorn.
These clowns, these these two anorexics at the Center for Science and the Public Interest who have a fax.
Do you ever see these people on TV?
They need to put them in a horror movie with no makeup.
And these people are out there giving us lectures on this and that's gonna kill us, and they actually have succeeded in getting products banned.
And one of the products they got banned from commercial use was coconut oil, because it was supposedly gonna clog your arteries more than anything in the world would.
And they later found out no, no, coconut oil actually is a very healthy oil, much healthier than trans fats, in fact.
Coconut oil, you know why coconut oil was used in popcorn?
There were two reasons.
Well, it tasted good, and it made it made the when you walked in a movie theater in the old days that was the coconut oil, it made it smell the way it smelled.
It wasn't the popcorn.
Go pop popcorn at Weston oil, and I guarantee your house isn't gonna smell like a movie theater.
It's gonna smell like wesson oil.
Go pop it in Crisco or Mazzola, and I'm sorry, it's just not as good.
You pop it in coconut oil, and now you're talking.
It also holds the popcorn.
You can pop a batch, if you're if you're selling popcorn commercially to real estate establishment like a movie theater or in a ballpark in a concessionaire, you can pop, you can pop gobs of it and serve it for two to three days, it's still fresh.
It doesn't go bad with coconut oil.
They found this out using it.
All you have to do is put it back in the uh in the cups you're gonna serve it after you stored it in bags, put it under heat lamps, it's just like it's been popped.
Can't do that with Mazzola, you can't do that with Crisco.
Something about coconut oil holds the popcorn.
And the people who are in business to provide quality and service.
I mean, they're not doing this, it's it's expensive stuff.
They're not they're not doing this simply out of altruism because they want that they're doing it because they want you to be satisfied with the product.
Now I know they put a little bit too much salt on it, so you go buy a $25 Coke at Yankee Stadium while you're eating the popcorn, but still it holds the popcorn.
These people that come up with these things do it for a reason.
It actually saves expenses when you can pop a bunch of popcorn.
You don't have to guess how much you'd eat every night and throw away what you don't use.
Might rain, crowd might be not as big, movie might stink, people might not show up.
What do you do with all the popcorn?
You can't pop it to order, people be standing at the concession line all day.
I just so many things that have happened in this country for good are just based on good old-fashioned trial and error common sense, and here come a bunch of people that could no more run a movie theater or run the car business or run the health care business, telling us they have fixed it in two days.
A guy who's done nothing but organize a bunch of radical malcontent Protesters in his whole life in Chicago.
A guy whose records in school will not be released.
A guy who's not managed one thing, a guy who can't even keep his own White House military office from taking Air Force One out on a joy ride.
We're being told is going to fix health care in two days, fix the car business, fix the banks, fix the credit cards, fix it's all gonna be fixed.
Oh, and after that, we're gonna save the freaking planet.
And we're gonna make sure the sea levels stop rising.
All of it, this is gonna be done inside of a year.
Meanwhile, all of the people who really have expertise in this are being scared to death in the shutting up and going along is like the Chamber of Commerce guy.
Get this quote.
Chamber of Commerce says LA Times health care groups join Obama at negotiating table.
Well, the Chamber of Commerce, which is not known for going along with a bunch of panty waste liberals.
If you don't get in this game, then you're on the menu.
Meaning, if you don't get in there and say, okay, I'll play with you, Mr. President, then the president's gonna eat you.
The president's gonna destroy you.
You're on the menu.
So to protect your interests, you have to go in there and play ball his way, because nobody's got the guts to stand up to the guy.
Two trillion dollars in savings?
Please, where is your natural skepticism?
How much money were you gonna save on your cable bill?
How much money were you gonna save and all these other things the government got involved to make it right?
There's a there's a column today in the Atlantic.
Actually, it was yesterday by Meghan McCardell.
Obama's magical mystery tour of health care savings.
Obama and the unions and various corporate entities involved with health care provision in a room and got them to promise to slash 150 basis points from the annual rate of increase in health care spending.
How will we achieve this?
Whitehouse.gov has a fact sheet which outlines concrete proposals that came out of the meeting.
You may recognize these proposals.
They're recycled from the Obama budget.
Estimated cost savings, 215 billion over 10 years.
That leaves just 1.785 trillion for the stakeholders to find.
In other words, the $2 trillion in costs are not spelled out.
All that's spelled out is because there won't be any two trillion dollars in savings.
I gotta take a break, as you know, but I don't know how many times people running the government have said we're gonna reduce the cost here, we're gonna reduce the cost of the Social Security, we're gonna fix that.
We're gonna be nothing ever gets fixed.
It only gets broken worse.
Uh be back.
800-282-2882, when we go back to the phone.
Sit tight.
Here's the last paragraph of Melon Megan McArdle's piece in the Atlantic.
It's all very well as political theater.
Politicians convene never never working groups all the time, but perhaps being too cynical, I suspect that the announced plan to save two trillion dollars is gonna be used to sell Obama's health care plan as if we'd already found the two trillion dollars.
And then when, oh darn, the Service Employees International Union doesn't agree to hold down wages or eliminate jobs, pharma companies ratchet up the average price it charges the private sector to make sure it doesn't lose too much and its mandatory Medicaid discounts.
Well, we'll all just have to dig in our pockets and pay for it, won't we?
There won't be any cost cuts.
Byron New York today has a story on the D.C. examiner.
Obama's dangerous budget leaves GOP at loss for words.
What he's doing is so monstrous, so large, so out of the ordinary that Republicans they have no way to explain this in a way that people can comprehend it.
Really?
The Republican if is Byron right about this?
They're looking at, they're looking at the budget that Obama's put forth, the health care is oh my God.
How do we even explain this to people?
How do we explain how bad this is?
Well, the New York Times has a story that 45 conservative Democrats in the House are not happy with this budget.
I know it's only 45.
But there are some Democrats who are gonna have to get reelected in 2010 who are worried about it.
It may only be 45 if the number is accurate here.
But there are some who worry about it, which means that there's got to be some way to explain this dangerous budget.
Dangerous budget leaves GOP at lost for words.
Well, okay, then here's the solution.
Time to start talking principles again.
Time to start talking about individual freedom and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It's time to start talking about how this budget is going to so choke off the private sector that the opportunity for jobs and wage increases and prosperity is being eaten up by this budget.
There are infinite number of ways of ruining this budget and reminding people, warning them of the horrors that await after this thing is passed.
We'll be back.
And we're back.
Go back to the phones to Nick, 19 years old Allegheny, New York.
Hi, Nick.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes.
I just wanted to get back to the sugar tax.
Yeah.
I think it's just totally ludicrous that they're taxing.
Like even healthy people that can like afford to intake the sugar.
Well, see, the this is the point.
They the the belief in taxing sugar is that it makes everybody unhealthy.
Yeah, but then you see like all the people walking around that are skinny as whatever, and they can drink all the sugar they want, you know.
Exactly.
It's just an excuse to tax people.
Take the sugar out of it.
And they're coming at it the same way they come at everybody.
I've been watching some idiot on television just now during the break.
Yes, we must we must rave vif tax on sugar so that we make people healthier and lower our health care costs.
Well, of course, who doesn't want lower costs on everything?
And who doesn't want healthier people?
Okay, if I so we'll raise taxes on changes, it's just tax raises.
It's just increases in taxes, and they're gonna find ways to increase them left and right no matter where you go and what you do.
And they're gonna justify it at every turn on making it it's better for you.
You don't know what's good enough for yourself, but these people care about you, and they're gonna make it better for you to live in America.
And it's uh it's just these people are trying to take away as much liberty and freedom as they possibly can to control as much of your life as possible.
If you start tack Nick's got a good point here.
A lot of healthy people eat a lot of sugar.
And yet they're gonna get taxed on the basis that they're unhealthy.
Next is gonna come the salt tax.
Now you want to talk about something, now there's something that's related to high blood pressure, they say, and water retention.
Well, no, a lot of people don't like water retention, don't we?
We have to deal with that often, don't we?
Oh, it just ruins the day sometimes when there's water retention.
Well, what salt can do that.
And we have uh a lot of other things that can be said to be unhealthy.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, if you really want to know what this is all about, take a look at our good old beloved California, where everybody now is getting on the bandwagon to make marijuana legal.
Because they have computed that there's billions of dollars in tax revenue to collect.
Now, this is what Daniel Patrick Moynihan always described as defining deviancy down.
Okay, you can't control some kind of harmful behavior, you call the harmful behavior natural behavior natural.
And in this case, uh they're so strapped for money, they'll start taxing, and they'll be in charge of the growth and the sale of marijuana.
Now, somebody somebody want to talk to me about the relative dangers and risks posed to people who a use sugar or who use marijuana.
And leave the pain people out.
I mean, the people that say they're smoking for medicinal purposes, I'm not informed enough.
I don't want to get an argument about it.
I don't have any phone calls from those people, certainly.
No worries, but just leave them out of this.
But the the recreational use of marijuana, you be the judge.
I mean, you you if if if that's gonna be okay, then we're gonna tax that.
Sugar is gonna be the called as harmful or what have you, but uh it's like tobacco.
Tobacco, they say kills.
They don't ban it.
I don't know what made me think of this.
It's totally unrelated.
Something about tobacco made me think of this.
Let me see if I can find it in this about Madonna and tattoos.
Ah, here it is.
Of all the luxury.
That's it.
It's not about Madonna and tattoos.
I'm gonna I'm gonna make it about Madonna and tattoos.
Of all the luxuries Americans could give up in today's hard times, an $80 tattoo of a cr of a French quote from Albert Camus, or Camus, sure seems like a no-brainer.
Where the hell did this story run?
I don't even know where this ran.
I can't tell you where this ran.
Uh despite having a full-time job at Boston, I guess it's Boston newspaper, despite having a full-time job at Boston's Huntington Theater Company, Natalie Kearns feels the pinch of recession.
In fact, the recent college graduate living with her parents to save money.
But she's not going to do without her tattoo.
The whole point of this story is tattoo is despite the economy, repay remain a must-have accessory.
Even in the recession.
What I was going to say about this is...
At least it's a better accessory than what Madonna's doing and running around adopting African babies.
That's the latest accessory de jure of the Hollywood left.
Look, we're talking about health care and socialized medicine.
The Republicans don't know what to do about it.
I would suggest that the Republicans check AskHeritage.org.
The insiders at the Heritage Foundation keep their ear to the ground on what the Beltway crowd's talking about.
Socialized medicine is the buzz of the day.
Obama had a meeting yesterday, a meeting today, and voila, it will be fixed.
But the uh the Heritage Foundation is reporting that it's on the minds and tongues of the liberal establishment in Washington, not on the liberal mind informing you about the long lines and ration care, which typifies socialized medicine up in Canada.
In fact, they're trying to leave Canada out of it.
They're trying to say we're going to be more like Spain.
Think of us like but we're not Spain.
In Spain and in a lot of other countries, you can use your own money if you have it to go to a private hospital or private doctor.
But once Medicare becomes nationalized for everybody in this country, according to Obama's desire, you're not going to be able to go out and buy your own doctor.
Any doctor taking Medicare patients will not be able to take private patients.
They're going to totally wipe out the private sector.
This is what you can learn.
And that's a that's a simple way of selling this or the opposition to socialized medicine.
The uh Heritage Foundation is a great resource here.
They've been doing their homework on socialized medicine.
You can find it all at Askheritage.org.
If you want the truth, not the drive-by media spin.
If the Republicans can't come up with a way to put this in perspective, go to Askheritage.org and see what Obama has planned for socialized medicine.
If you want the facts and a plan on actually fixing the current health care system, that's available at Askheritage.org as well.
There are things to do that could fix this that do not involve socialization, nationalization, uh government run, single payer, or any of this.
Ask heritage.org.
It's a gold mine of data.
Rob, sorry, Bob in Columbus, Ohio.
Hi, and welcome to the EIV network.
Hey, Rush.
Uh, conservative Cincinnati bear cat dittoes to you.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Hey, you don't have to worry about uh a Democratic Congress taxing the uh sugar.
It uh once they discover how unpalatable it's gonna make that Kool-Aid for their minions that they've been dishing out.
Uh that'll that'll be shelf.
I wanted to get back to a point that you made.
It was a good one about the uh health care costs.
Uh really reaching the level that they should be.
Uh allowing free markets to work.
Um years ago, there was an association founded to pay for hospital costs only.
Uh it ultimately evolved into the blue cross association.
Uh the ultimate concept of insurance.
You know, a lot of people putting away a little money every so often into a bucket, and then when I got sick, it had to go to the hospital anyway.
They used it.
And the buckets were full everywhere.
And there's a lot of reasons the bucket's empty, but one of the big ones um is that insurance companies started to uh invoke a practice of medical underwriting.
So instead of just saying, uh, if you're single, here's how much it costs, you know, for a single policy each month, or if you're a uh family policy, here's how much it costs, they started asking a handful of questions, and you know, it got to be more and more intricate over the years as to what they would ask and how they would adjust the rates based on that.
But when the premiums, the the amount you paid for this coverage were simply based on whether you were single or family, and certain guidelines were put into effect, like you know, you had to have 75% of the uh employees uh at a company participate, it worked out very well.
And and it's a situation that could work out well again because it would reduce premiums that would allow more people to be covered.
It's uh it's simply one that's probably not being brought up because of the uh the lobbying power of the insurance industry.
Well, I don't you know this is a this a toughie.
Um I know is that everybody involved on the provider and insurance side of the health care and the patient side hates the system.
Everybody hates it.
The only people who like it are the people trying to fix it and make it worse than what it is by building on what already exists that everybody hates.
And by that I mean Obama relishes the opportunity to get his hands around this and make it single payer, government provided, public option, no private option.
That's what they're shooting for.
You're gonna hear some Democrats stand up and say, I will not stand for no private options being available.
That's just a smoke screen.
They're going for public option only, meaning government registered government paid for government.
They're still gonna have insurance companies at your business doing it, but it's all going to be funneled and controlled by the government.
It's about control.
It's being sold to us on the basis it's going to streamline, it's gonna make it more efficient, it's gonna make it cheaper.
None of that will happen.
Wherever this has been tried, Canada, Great Britain, Cuba, it doesn't work.
It's a triumph of emotion over common sense to think that just because we're gonna do it the same way these people have tried it, it's somehow gonna work.
It's not.
I would think everybody involved in this would love to get back to a system where it's market-driven, where the consumer in normal everyday medical care, we're not talking about catastrophic injury, those are that's where you need the big time insurance.
Auto accidents, catastrophes, uh uh major diseases that require a lot of hospitalization, but normal everyday health.
When this broke down is when people demanded insurance for a $60 checkup.
When every time you wanted to go to the doctor for a sore throat, you wanted somebody else to pay for it.
Once that started, it was over.
That's the kind of stuff if you just price it and a hospital room.
Just price it to what people can afford.
But we've long passed that that that point in time.
I mean, how many of you have looked at your hospital bill and you've seen a band-aid for what, a hundred and fifty bucks?
Oh, sorry, five hundred bucks for a band-aid in Wellington.
And you ask yourself, how in the world?
Can this band-aid cost five hundred dollars?
Well, there is an economic reason for it, and it is not greed, because I'll guarantee you the hospital charging five hundred bucks is still losing money at the end of the year on gross operations.
They still need to go out and find wealthy people to donate the such and such cancer wing.
Or the such and such diabetes wing.
Five hundred bucks for a band-aid.
They are forced To charge that from people who can pay because of all the people who refuse to pay from illegal immigrants and others who refuse to pay at the emergency room.
A band-aid costs $500 because not everybody's paying for what they get.
And the cost of other procedures is uh is plus medical malpractice and all of these things get rolled in tort lawyers.
It is such a convoluted mess.
And there is no fix that involves the biggest convoluted mess in the world, the United States government getting its hands on it even more.
Here's Chris in Dayton, Ohio.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Yeah, hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
Great.
I just wanted to kind of make a few points if I wanted to disagree with how a lot of people or a lot of uh individuals compare Obamacare to the Canada health care system, European health care system.
I disagree.
We don't need to use that as an example.
We have good examples here in America.
Obamacare is pretty much a single payer system that's been proposed.
Well, we have something like that already in place.
America pays veterans' health care.
We have a veterans' health care system that is a single payer system, regulated health care.
If you want to see how how special that health care is, all it takes is a quick trip down to the medical health care center to sit in line, wait for your care, avoid being seen, see nonproviders, and even then being refused care when the money runs out at the end of the fiscal year.
The second example we have is also we have a current health care system for the military.
Uh several years ago, the institute something called TRICARE.
If you recall, there was a guaranteed health care for retirees, and they basically reneged on that.
And they said we had to go outside.
Exactly right, exactly right.
That is an excellent point.
And I'll add a third one.
The VA is constantly complaining about what government promised and government run health care.
That's an excellent point.
You don't have to go to Canada or the U.K. It's actually what I've been the point I've been trying to make.
People have been running this already, have have broken it, and now they come along just like every other disaster claiming they're going to fix what they broke, and they're only going to break it worse.
What?
No, no, no.
Of course I'll be back tomorrow.
Why would I not be back tomorrow?
Well, Snerdley's apologizing for some of the calls today.