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July 7, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:49
July 7, 2009, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 podcast.
Here's a question I'm going to ask on today's program.
Are we a bunch of wimps?
Do we have what it takes to fight the battle to save our country?
Are we a bunch of sissies?
Have we been beaten back by an opposition that's simply willing to play by rules that we don't have the guts to play by?
I'm going to get to that a little bit later on in today's program.
I don't know if Russia does Rush do this often, like tip off a topic that he doesn't get to for a long, long time.
I hear him do it from time to time.
Sometimes he doesn't get to it.
I promise you I will get to this unless I don't.
But it's something that I really want to talk about, so I probably will.
We've got a lot of things that I want to deal with on today's program.
This is the second day in a row, but also the last day in a row that I get to sit in for Rush.
He is gone this week.
This is his annual gulfing vacation.
So you're putting up with guest hosts who are doing everything in our power to try to uphold the standards that Rush leaves for us.
Mark Stein will be in tomorrow.
You know, I get mail when Mark Stein is on the program.
It's confusing, Mark and Mark.
People will email me if you know they don't agree with something that Mark Stein wrote, and I'll email back.
I didn't do the show today.
They'll email me this.
You really, really made a great point today, Mark.
Thank you.
That was a great point.
So when Stein is good, I kind of benefit from that.
There's something going on right now that you're probably aware of.
You cannot turn on any of the cable channels today, any of the all news radio stations without being overwhelmed with Michael Jackson coverage.
That is not what this program is about.
Russia's show is on in Milwaukee right before my show is on.
I listen to him every day.
I know what the standards of Russia's program are, and I know what kinds of things he likes to address on the show.
This is not a tabloid radio program.
This is not the celebrity news of the day program.
This isn't the dumbing down of the news.
It's not what this show is all about.
On the other hand, I do feel a need at the beginning of the program, since this memorial service is starting right about now, to address the incredible media coverage surrounding Michael Jackson.
I want to do it, I want to share my thoughts, and then move on to everything else that's going on in the world.
What I've noticed is everybody's trying to take this story and make it either black and white, ebony and ivory, one or the other.
You have a lot of people who say, like, I was a pervert, I don't know why we're making such a big deal about it.
I wish that they just bury them and move on.
And then you have others that are treating this as this massive, incredibly important event.
They act as though they've lost a dear person in their own lives.
I was just talking to our chief of staff who said, he's looking at the TV and he said to me, you know, he I guess he really meant a lot to a lot of people, and I said, No, he didn't.
They're pretending that he did.
He didn't mean a lot to a lot of people unless you're a really screwed up person.
I think about the artists and the musicians and the actors that have made a real impact on me that I've loved to listen to.
I was for a long time really into Springsteen.
I mean, 70s and 80s, that's all I listened to.
I mean, I loved Bruce Springsteen.
Could recite the lyrics from all of the songs, but he didn't mean a lot to me.
He was an artist whose music I really really liked and appreciated.
But people are acting as though they've lost someone that's important to them.
If Michael Jackson was important to you, your priorities are all screwed up.
Do you not have a family?
Do you not have friends?
Do you not have people in your own community?
You've got police officers that are laying their lives on the line for you.
You've got soldiers that are fighting all over the world to protect you.
You have all sorts of people who are making incredible sacrifices.
This guy made music.
That's all he did.
He doesn't have any connection to you, and people who are trying to glom onto this.
I think they're just faking it.
They're pretending that they really care.
If they cared all that much, they would have been more deeply bothered by his 15-year descent into the sewer.
So I just reject this notion that he really, really meant all this of all these people.
There are people who are trying, I think, to add to their own lives by making themselves seem like they were intimates of Michael Jackson when they were not.
So how do we address him?
How do we deal with him?
What is his legacy?
Again, I just think people are trying to have this and put it in one of two categories.
Either he was an evil, evil, terrible person, or he was the greatest cultural force of all time.
And the answer is neither.
All I can do is tell you how I'm going to remember Michael Jackson and how I categorize him.
I think he was an extremely powerful force in the popular culture.
Very few people change the art form that they're in.
The Beatles did it.
I think the Who did it.
I think Led Zeppelin did it.
To some extent Dylan did it.
Maybe even Pearl Jam did it in the late 80s, early 90s.
Not many do it.
He changed things.
Michael Jackson was probably the last great artist who appealed to both a black and a white audience.
He somehow managed to take disco, RB, soul, and rock, and turn them all into the same thing.
And he had changed music.
It was a magical period when he was at his creative peak.
Somebody said that he was the contemporary Fred Astaire.
He's probably the greatest dancer the last 30 or 40 years.
Musically, he was an incredible innovator.
I remember when Thriller came out, the album.
Billy Jean on it.
That was being played everywhere.
I think for a long time it was the biggest selling album of all time.
To this day, you go into a dance club, whether it's a dance club aimed at people in their twenties or their 50s, you put Billy Jean on and people go to the dance floor.
It's just so infectious, it touches people.
He was a great, great, great force.
He put on incredible shows.
That was all true, and you can't deny that that was there with regard to Michael Jackson.
On the other hand, the candle didn't burn all that long.
From about 1990 on, creatively he's been a zero.
He's been a nothing.
And his creative demise, I think coincided with this total embrace of weirdness.
I mean, he's the very definition of being a weirdo.
Nobody had desires like him.
I think the guy's problem was that he fell in love with himself.
And I don't want to evangelize here.
That's not what Rush's program is about.
But I think that he was a victim of his own hedonism.
He had this desire to look a certain way.
Maybe it was the obsession with Diana Ross, I don't know.
So he started doing these plastic surgeries.
And the great irony is the more he tried to look better, the worse he started to look.
He turned himself into a freakish caricature in an attempt to make himself look perfect because he was so in love with himself, he wanted to look the best that he could look.
And he's chasing this unreachable goal of becoming the most beautiful person in the world, and he became one of the ugliest.
Then he's looking for personal peace and personal satisfaction, the ultimate square peg trying to fit into a round hole, and he couldn't find it.
I mean, what was Neverland?
It was just a bizarre place.
I mean, he's living with monkeys, he wants to sleep with children.
He's chasing all these oddball, goofy desires because he's trying to find some sense of personal contentment or happiness that was never going to be there.
He would have been better off biting the bullet and doing what all the rest of us have to do in our daily lives and simply trying to conform.
Instead of chasing this magical nirvana that he was chasing after, if he would have simply accepted that, okay, we're all a little bit different, we all like different things, but I'm going to conform with the standards of the rest of the world.
I think he would have been a lot less miserable than he turned out to be.
It's a mistake that a lot of people make.
And again, I don't want to turn this into a religious thing, but they're looking to find heaven on earth.
They're looking to find ultimate happiness here.
They want to find some sort of perfection.
It's not going to be here, and you're not going to find it.
I think we can live very, very contented lives.
I think we can find happiness.
I think we can find peace.
I think we can enjoy ourselves.
We can have fun.
We can become more educated persons, but you're not going to find everything.
And he was chasing perfection.
And the great irony was that the more he chased total happiness, the more miserable and unhappy he became.
Does anyone think Michael Jackson was anything other than deeply depressed and deeply miserable?
And in the end, he did some very, very bad things.
I mean, there were just too many settlements with families of children that he was attached to.
There were too many times that he contact families and invite them to have their kids live with him.
There were the trials, there was the other odd behavior.
He had desires that were morally wrong.
And I have a problem with thousands and thousands and thousands of people flocking to a memorial service to celebrate that life.
If you want to celebrate his music and mourn his passing, then listen to a couple of the CDs.
Go back and watch some of the videos.
But to go to a memorial service for a guy who made choices that were creepy and rotten, I think is a little warped.
And this coverage that's going on on all the cable channels and all over the media is excessive.
He's a celebrity who died.
How he died, we still don't know for sure, but there's a pretty good chance that some of the choices that he made in life led us led him to that.
Can't we just accept that and move on rather than turn this into this enormous story?
Now, I dedicated the first segment here of the program to share my thoughts on it.
I'm sure there are a lot of people who like to argue and either agree with me or disagree with me, but I just don't think that that's what Russia's show is all about.
If you want to focus on Michael Jackson, trust me, it's everywhere else other than this program.
But for the next two hours and forty minutes today, we're going to get into a lot of things going on in the world.
I want to talk about talk about Afghanistan.
I want to talk about Iran.
I want to talk about Joe Biden and Obama, maybe a little cap and trade.
And I want to ask that question that I mentioned at the beginning of the program.
Have we become, as a movement?
And even for people who aren't in any kind of a movement, you just have simply conservative beliefs.
Have we become too wimpy to survive, given how aggressively and viciously the left is willing to fight?
We'll get into all of that in today's program.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Is that a gift over there?
The red box with the card?
That's a gift.
It's for Rush, isn't it?
Rush isn't here, right?
I'm filling in.
Shouldn't I be able to fill in with regard to the receipt of the gifts?
Yeah, okay.
Well, I where did that go?
Belling stole your present, Rush.
That's the end of him filling in.
All right, let's shift gears as much as you possibly can.
Let's literally go all the way around the world to Afghanistan.
Tragic day for American soldiers.
Let me just quote from the story in the New York Times.
NATO forces said Tuesday, three foreign troops died in a helicopter helicopter crash on Monday.
Already the deadliest day for American forces in Afghanistan in nearly a year as the war against the Taliban intensifies.
Of seven United States soldiers killed Monday, said Captain John Stock, an American military spokesman, four died along with two Afghan bystanders in a roadside bomb explosion in the northern Kunduz province, and two American soldiers were killed in an explosion in southern Afghanistan.
The seventh American soldier died during a firefight with insurgents in the country's northeast.
On the same day at a base in Zabel in southern Afghanistan, a helicopter crashed on takeoff, killing two Canadians and a Briton, NATO officials said.
A preliminary inquiry had established that the helicopter was not brought down by enemy fire.
Also on Monday, a car bomb exploded near the main NATO air base at the Kandahar Airport early in the morning in what was said to be a suicide attack, Afghan military officials said.
At least two civilians were killed and two Afghan army soldiers and twelve civilians were wounded.
The attacks come as 4,000 American troops supported by British and Afghan forces, move against the Taliban in the Southern Helmund region, and as insurgent attacks in several parts of the country claim more casualties.
Well, of course there are going to be more casualties.
We have escalated the war in Afghanistan.
After sitting back and policing the country for several years, President Obama has moved us toward a more toward a more aggressive posture in Afghanistan.
And as you start taking the fight to the enemy, there are going to be casualties, which leads to the giant question.
Is this a surge?
Is that what we're doing in Afghanistan?
Is it a surge?
They'll never use that word, because that was the word associated with President Bush.
But I think the evidence is undeniable that what we are doing in Afghanistan is an attempt to replicate what we did in Iraq.
It would be nice, it's not going to happen.
If the supporters of President Obama, who I presume, therefore support what we're doing in Afghanistan, acknowledge the success of the war in Iraq.
And the war in Iraq was a success.
It was a two-pronged war.
The first part of the war, the war, the war that Rumsfeld was in charge of, was a brilliant success.
We based, we moved through Iraq, based outside of Baghdad, took the city in two days, brought an end to the Saddam Hussein regime in less than a week.
It was brilliant.
What wasn't so brilliant was sitting back and passively, allowing a lot of the gains to be taken away over the next several years.
And that's when the policy was corrected.
We sent more troops in rather than sitting back and acting as targets.
We went after the insurgency.
We went after the leftover Saddam supporters, found them, rooted them out, chased them into the countryside, and then we killed them.
The end result is an Iraq that is right now, by and large, at peace.
The same strategy is being attempted in Afghanistan.
So does that mean that President Obama, who ridiculed the search, said it would not work in Iraq, is now acknowledging that not only that it did work, it's so brilliant that he's going to steal the play out of President Bush's playbook.
What we're doing in Afghanistan right now is very similar to what we did in Iraq.
This is putting the average liberal in a very difficult situation.
They are not used to rooting for American forces at war.
When's the last time they were in that situation?
Their normal template, their default is we're at war, that means we're bad.
We've got to stop killing people.
Well, guess who it is that's out there killing people now?
It's Barack Obama.
It's their party.
This is now their war.
Even when we were fighting in Iraq, the Democrats led by Obama all said that the really important war was Afghanistan.
They never argued against Afghanistan.
They said that that was the war that had to be won, that that was the cause worth fighting for.
So now if you're a liberal, what do you want?
Do you want us to win?
Do you want us to win?
Or do you go back to the position that you're normally in?
You want us to lose.
And admit it, you wanted us to lose in Iraq.
It kills you that President Bush managed to win the Iraq war, but now it's your guy.
The one is fighting this war.
This has got to be causing incredible pains for the average lefty.
For the first time, maybe ever, they're rooting for victory in a war.
But that seems so unseemly.
In any event, it's what's happening right now.
With the death yesterday of Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, there was a lot of discussion about what went wrong in Vietnam and why the war was lost.
I personally am not sold on Afghanistan being the be all and end all of American foreign policy.
I don't know how important it is to stop the Taliban from regaining some sort of a foothold in Afghanistan.
To me, the priority is not to allow Afghanistan to become another base for terror.
The problem with Afghanistan, and the reason we went to war there in the first place, is that's where Al Qaeda was headquartered.
They had free reign in a nation.
They were using the resources of a country to plot global terrorism.
We manage to drive them out of there.
I don't know that bringing democracy to Afghanistan, achieving everything that we've achieved in Iraq is necessary.
I think all we have to do is make sure that Al Qaeda doesn't come back in, that they don't have a base of operations there.
I do fear that because of the terrain in Afghanistan, the mountains and so on, that this could become Obama's Vietnam, that it could become a guerrilla war, the kind of war in which we fight and fight and fight without a whole lot of accomplishment.
I have that fear, and it would certainly be ironic if it was the Democrats that got us into the war that as it turns out we can't win.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
You want to have a really fun conversation.
Try to figure out what the dumbest liberal idea of the last five years is.
I mean, that takes in a lot of territory.
I always like to throw an ethanol.
Nationalized health care is really, really bad.
But you can make a real strong case for cap and trade.
I can't stress to you how terrible this is and how stupid it is.
But I'm optimistic.
I think there's a good chance they're not going to win on this.
They barely got this measure through the House.
The House of Representatives has an overwhelming democratic majority.
Yet Democrats from swing districts were going up to Nancy Pelosi and begging to be allowed to vote against the bill.
They passed it with only four or five votes to spare.
I know it was like a ten or twelve vote margin, but that means if five or six had switched around, they would not have passed this.
There are a lot of Democrats from my part of the country from the industrialized Midwest who voted for this who are fearful that it's going to harm them when they run for re-election.
Now it goes over to the Senate.
They can talk about a filibuster proof Senate now that Franken has been seated, but that means that every single Democrat has to hold ranks here.
I'm not sure they can pull that off.
Because the more people find out about cap and trade, the more they are appalled by it.
Once again, you have a term that's applied that sounds so nice, so friendly.
Cap and trade.
What this all is is a massive tax that will kill the American economy.
And you can't accuse critics of it of overstating things when you realize what's in the legislation.
The problem that you face is you don't know which way to attack it.
The premise for cap and trade is false, and the way of approaching cap and trade is destructive to the economy.
Since I only have a few opportunities to join you on Russia's program, I just think I can't let this go pie without talking about what it would mean to the part of the world that I'm from, which is the upper Midwest.
Cap and trade would kill us.
It would absolutely kill us.
I live in a part of the country that still has manufacturing.
We don't make much in this country anymore.
We make some things.
We have some manufacturing industries that are still there.
But a lot of our manufacturing has moved overseas.
You want to kill it all?
Past cap and trade.
Do you want to make it impossible for Americans to be able to afford to live a quality of life that they're used to?
Then double and triple the cost of gasoline and home heating, all of which cap and trade would do.
Because the part of the world that I come from has a whole lot of coal plants.
And coal plants will be crushed under cap and trade.
What is it?
Cap and trade is this simple thing that we're going to establish taxes based on your carbon footprint.
And you have the ability to trade for credits from states where there isn't as Large of a carbon footprint, and we're going to establish a massive, huge government bureaucracy to oversee the entire thing and decide what is going to be taxed, what's worthy of a credit, and what is it?
The goal here, of course, isn't to reduce emissions, and the goal isn't to fight global warming.
That's never the goal.
The goal is control.
Control is what liberals are all about.
What they want to do is be able to control the American industry and decide which industries can do what and be in charge of everything.
They want to be able to control whether or not Americans are going to have coal plants, they want to control whether or not Americans are going to drive SUVs.
Cap and trade is all about that.
But before you even get there, don't we have to at least force them to prove that there's a problem that this is addressing?
We have to save the planet.
There is no global warming going on.
Global warming stopped in 2001 if it had ever been going on in the first place.
If we are to accept the arguments of Al Gore and all the advocates of climate change and all the people who believe in climate change and global warming, they are citing the numbers from the 1980s and the 1990s that did show a modest increase in global temperatures.
I'm not denying that that happened.
But since that's been their entire basis here, why we're warming up the planet.
Look at this.
The 80s and the 90s saw some of the warmest years on record.
If we are to use those numbers, how can you ignore the elephant in the room?
And the elephant in the room is that it stopped in 2001.
There has been no warming this decade, and the decade is almost over.
Some people think the decade ends in 2009, others think it ended ends in 2010.
Either way, we're almost to the end of it.
And this decade, the decade of the zeros, was the decade in which there was no global warming.
Every measure they use shows temperatures are stagnant or if anything, declining a little bit.
Oceanic temperatures are not going up.
Atmospheric temperatures are not going up.
Temperatures in the desert are not going up, temperatures in the plains are not going up.
Every measure they use shows that global warming stopped in 2001.
Despite that, carbon emissions have been increasing right along the way.
So if man is causing global warming, how come the temp the planet isn't continuing to warm up since 2001?
Now my answer is that man never had anything to do with the rising temperatures in the 1980s and the 1990s, that this was all made up as an excuse to go after American industry.
This planet's temperatures have fluctuated as long as the planet has existed.
And we had a period in the 80s and the 90s where it went up.
We now have a period where the temperatures are not going up.
What will the next decade hold?
I don't know and neither do they.
Every prediction that Gore and his people made 10 years ago has turned out to be false.
I remember what they were saying.
They were predicting a major increase in hurricane activity.
After Katrina occurred, which, as you recall, they tried to blame on Bush.
Look at all the hurricanes we have, it's because of climate change.
The last several years since that bad year for hurricanes, we have had below average hurricane activity.
They predicted in 2001 that the rate of global warming would actually increase in this decade.
Go back and do a Google search on it.
It's what Gore and all of those people said in 2001.
That not only is warming going on, it's intensifying.
The 80s warmed up and the 90s got even warmer than that, and the zeros will be even warmer.
Wrong.
It didn't happen.
They have been arguing forever that there was going to be an increase in sea levels.
It hasn't happened.
Remember Gore's stupid movie in which he showed the oceans wiping out Miami Beach?
Sea levels aren't rising at all.
Every prediction they made ten years ago has failed to come true.
Not a single one of them.
So how are we supposed to believe that they know what temperatures are going to be in 2020 and 2030 and 2040 and 2050 if they couldn't even get the next 10 years right?
So we're going to do all of this to the American economy.
We're going to pass this major change that's going to be so devastating to so many sectors of the country that's going to cost the American consumers so much money because we're going to fight global warming, which isn't even occurring.
They claim that Bush rushed us into the war in Iraq.
Yet they are rushing us into the destruction of the American economy to fight a problem that they can't even prove exists anymore.
The momentum on this issue is now on the side of the global warming dissidents.
There were several years there where climatologists were literally threatened with their academic standing if they dared to speak up and question global warming.
You're ridiculed.
The great tactic was, oh, this is settled science.
This is settled science.
This is settled science, which was all an attempt to shut up to hush up people who might have had some questions and raised some doubts about this.
You should see the number of prominent scientists that are now questioning this.
The Heartland Institute, which is a really, really good conservative think tank recently held a global warming seminar.
Outstanding individuals, Nobel Prize winners, climatologists from around the world from some of the most prestigious universities in the world were at this thing.
They are all raising these questions, and the question that they keep asking that cannot be answered, is prove that it's still going on.
Instead, their answer is we are having a pause.
There is an overwall overall warming trend that is now pausing and it's going to resume.
Well, they have an answer for everything, therefore.
So now, if you're going to accept the pause argument, we're supposed to take this on faith.
They argue that creationists are trying to substitute faith for science.
Well, what are they doing with global warming?
We should just trust them that the planet is going to stop start warming up again, even though there's now been no warming for the last nine years.
Well, we need to be safe.
We need to be safe.
Consider what this is going to do to our nation.
If you put massive costs on industries located in states where a large portion of their electricity comes from coal plants, you will make it impossible for them to be competitive in their industries.
They will do the only thing that they're able to do to survive, which is they're going to move those jobs and that production to a country that isn't stupid enough to pass cap and trade.
You want to send every last manufacturing job to China, then drive up the cost in American industry.
You want to kill the American consumer, then triple the cost of gasoline.
You want to really hit the poor, then double or triple the cost of electricity.
All of which will happen in states that are heavily based on coal.
And for what?
Well, to clean the planet.
Really?
Is the only carbon footprint in the world here in the United States?
If we have heavily regulated industries in the United States that have carbon emissions, and we drive them to China, where there is almost no regulation on carbon emissions, are we not going to produce more carbon emissions than we have now?
Or is the only pollution that you care about the pollution that's coming from the United States?
If they truly believe the carbon emissions are causing global warming, why are they not demanding that the Chinese and India and Africa pass their own restrictions on pollutants?
The answer is because this has nothing to do with global warming.
It's all about killing American industry and controlling it.
1-800-282-2882 is the telephone number of the Russian Limbaugh program.
My name is Mark Belling.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
There are some states who think there are going to be winners under cap and trade, You know which ones they are?
They're the states that have a lot of nuclear power plants.
Because nuclear power plants have virtually no carbon footprint.
It's the cleanest Energy we have.
But the same people who are pushing cap and trade and want to reduce carbon emissions are the ones who have essentially killed the nuclear power industry.
They don't want any solutions here, which is why I don't believe that this has ever had anything to do with global warming.
I don't think most of these people care about global warming at all.
If they did, they'd be so ecstatic that global warming stopped in 2001.
It's about killing American industry and controlling it.
They believe in what they only believe in the kinds of jobs that they hold.
They want us all to work for Acorn or the National Resources Defense Council or be public school teachers and walk around and be part of the same mindless people following the robotic instructions from above.
They don't like the American private sector, and that's why they come up with this convoluted thing to kill it.
Let's go to uh the Chicago area and Paul.
Paul, it's your turn on the Russian Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yeah, good afternoon, Mark.
Uh, you're doing a great job out there.
I'm looking at these cap and traders uh and Al Gore in particular, and I consider him the modern equivalent of the snake oil salesman.
He's preying on the emotions and fears and offering a solution that, oh, just give us this amount of money.
I I'm curious, you know, the government is going to be obviously doing a lot of uh profit from this, but who are also the contractors and the people in the stock markets that are going to be trading these credits and who's already set up to make all of this money?
Uh you know, it's it seems to me like it's a classic follow the money scenario.
Well, follow the money.
A lot of it is going to go to government itself to fund all the overspending that Obama is going to do.
But you're right, with regard to these credits, somebody is going to have to establish who has credits and how many credits they have.
Then if I'm a manufacturer in let's suppose I'm a manufacturer that has carbon emissions and a lot of my electricity comes from coal.
How much do I really owe?
How many credits do I have to buy?
And there's going to be a massive government bureaucracy overseeing and policing all of that.
Do you not think the special interests are going to be all over that?
The amount of campaign contributions to influence, whomever it is that is the president who will appoint the government agency that will oversee all of this trading, and this is all wasted money.
It's money that doesn't go to create anything, it doesn't go into money that's invested in anything.
It's just moving money around from productive companies and into an unproductive part of the economy.
But the thing that it's really going to do is it's going to take all those manufacturers who are on the bubble right now, including Obama's own General Motors.
Obama's going to have to face the it let's suppose we pass cap and trade.
Obama who controls General Motors is going to have to decide in order to be this make this company profitable.
Should I move more jobs overseas so I don't have to comply with the cap and trade that I want to sign?
It's just such a huge job killer.
I do think our side can win on this.
Because it's got to eventually dawn on the blue-collar wing of the Democratic Party, including a lot of those people from the South and the Upper Midwest who represent unionized districts that this is going to kill manufacturing for companies that have any kind of carbon emissions at all, or in states that have a lot of coal plants.
It's devastating.
You are going to take all these jobs out of this country and not only send the jobs, you're just sending the pollution somewhere else where it's even less controlled than it is here.
It is so unbelievably stupid that it's amazing we're at this point where we actually had this legislation pass the House.
My name is Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
EIB, I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Let's go to St. Louis and Ben.
Ben, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Mark, how are you?
I'm great, thanks.
Hey, this cap-and-trade thing, if this drives up the cost of fuel and electricity enough, the Libs can just tax a new sector of the economy and start new programs to help pay for people to be able to afford electricity and fuel.
In fact, why stop there?
Just nationalize the whole electrical grid and uh and uh fuel systems as nobody can afford it.
Well, the bit the affordability thing that you raise is really correct.
There are estimates that are out there, and I'm not making these up.
The Heartland Institute is one of the think tanks that's been way ahead in fight on this.
They've talked about in the upper midwest, two hundred percent increases in gasoline.
That's two hundred, not one hundred, two hundred, that's a tripling.
One hundred and seventy percent increase in electricity Based on the current formulas that are being talked about for cap and trade.
The left always talks about the disproportionate impact of costs like this on the poor.
Things like gasoline and electricity are things that all people have to use.
Wealthy people don't use much more than low-income people.
The only way to deal with the cost, the cost on this for low-income people is to give them more tax money, so we're just going to keep chasing tax money in an attempt to deal with the ramifications of cap and trade, which doesn't make any sense in the first place.
This is a fight conservatives can win.
And once we win it, it will show that it's going to be possible to stop Obama on health care and all the other things that he wants to do.
We have the facts on our side, and the public will come around to our side when they realize how stupid this idea really is.
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