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July 8, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
July 8, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's Anchorman is away this week, and this is your undocumented anchor man, Mark Stein, sitting in.
Mark Davis will be here on Friday.
Mark Belling was here yesterday.
All marked guest hosts, all marked guest hosts.
And until the new fairness doctrine kicks in.
And you're going to be in real trouble then because they're going to say, like, for every mark you have, you've got to have a Kevin.
And then who knows what's going to happen on this show?
So the yeah, Bert on Thursdays.
That sounds like a lame new sitcom.
They've all got names like that now, haven't they?
Bert on Thursdays.
Well, you should pitch that.
HR's got his billion-dollar idea there.
So Mark Davis in on Friday, and then Rush will be back on Monday.
And we're going to talk about the stimulus.
Not the old stimulus.
That's gone.
That's been and done.
That's over.
The new stimulus.
They're now talking that we may need stimulus to stimulus two.
Once you get a taste for it, once you get a taste for just like shoveling all that money down into one big hole and blowing it on nothing, it's so easy to do it again, isn't it?
Why not?
It's like at Vegas.
You burn through the money, you don't win anything, and then you go to a loan shark and you borrow some more money to do that.
That's the thing.
But if you're in the government, you don't have to go and get it from a loan shark.
You can just spend it anyway, and then you can print it, stick it to your grandkids.
There's no problem.
So they're going to do stimulus two.
This is on top of government healthcare, which they supposedly want to do in the next five weeks.
By the way, Senator Max Borkas has put out a press release now claiming that the latest version of his healthcare plan is the one we should pass because he says, quote, it keeps the cost of healthcare legislation under $1 trillion.
I mean, like, that's now the good point.
It's like he's saying, look, there's nothing else in the federal budget anymore that costs under a trillion dollars, but my healthcare plan does.
So that's its unique selling point.
It's a mere trillion, a mere trillion.
You know, that's chump change.
You know, why even bother keeping an accounts book for that?
You know, it's on the line item budget.
We'll just mark it as miscellaneous.
Yeah, it is.
It's a rounding era in the scheme of things.
You know, it's interesting to me for the for the statist ruling class of this nation, a trillion was a kind of psychological Rubicon.
It sounds like odd the first time you say it, because it's not a sum of money you use in any other sphere, a trillion, 1.2 trillion, 3.7 trillion.
It sounds like odd at first, but you'd be amazed how easy it is to get used to it.
You can't relate it to the real world.
I mean, what do you get with a trillion?
A trillion?
What can you buy with a trillion dollars?
Everything in West Virginia that's named after Robert C. Byrd?
Probably not.
You probably need a lot more than a trillion for that.
But once you start saying it, trillion here, trillion there, and it trips off the tongue, and it's now the new benchmark.
So for guys like Max Baucas, no self-respecting congressional hack wants to come off like what's the guy's name, Dr. Evil in Austin Powers, and invite instant derision by urging some nickel and dime billion-dollar boondoggle.
Now to have any credibility, it's got to be at least a trillion dollars.
So we're all supposed to applaud Max Baucas because he's like holding down his healthcare plan to like a trillion dollars.
That's big of him, isn't it?
That's terrific.
That's great news.
The bad news is that on top of this trillion dollars, we may be having another stimulus, another stimulus, because the last stimulus apparently didn't do the job.
Who would have thought it?
Who would have thought it?
The problem here is very simple.
What you need to get the economy moving again is you need to get people spending money.
To spend money, you need to have an environment in which it's profitable to be in business and in which it's profitable and worth your while growing your business.
And they have effectively, the government has instead effectively removed all that.
They're essentially creating an America in which regulation is the profession to be in.
If you've got a kid, if you've got a kid and you're thinking, should my kid be a lawyer?
Should he be an accountant?
Should he be a feed store clerk?
Should he be, don't bother trying to encourage him to start his own business or do anything on his own.
Tell him to be a government regulator.
That's going to be where the big business is in the years ahead.
Why did the first stimulus fail?
Well, in part, it failed because we've only spent 10% of the money.
So in other words, most of the money isn't being spent fast enough to do any good.
And the reason for that isn't hard to work out either, because for it to do any good, people would have to have an assurance that it was a permanent feature of life.
If you are in a situation where your 401k has been cut in half, the value of your home is down 20%, then getting some check for a couple of hundred dollars from the federal government isn't going to suddenly get you out there spending again.
What it's going to do, what does that are permanent changes in the tax rates, permanent changes in the economic environment.
And that's the one thing that the Obama administration and people like Barney Frank in Congress are not putting on the table because they don't want you spending your money.
In the famous words of President Clinton, when in the good old days of the surplus back in the 1990s when he said we could return the money to you, but you might not spend it in the right way.
And that's what matters to people who take a statist view of how societies work, that you spend the money in the right way.
A conservative and a capitalist takes the view that if you let 300 million people make individual decisions, that the balance, the pluses and the minuses will all even out.
But the statist takes the view that all that matters is whether you spend it in the right way.
And the trouble with Barack Obama's way of spending is that it does nothing to stimulate anything other than government control, government bureaucracy, and government regulation.
And that's all it's about.
That's basically what it's about.
The stimulus is not stimulating anything.
I saw a and picked up a newspaper.
I was in Vermont a couple of months ago.
And it had, you know, newspapers are pretty thin these days.
They're having a tough time.
That's why they want government money because they had no idea that they depend so much on things like real estate ads and car dealer ads.
And so once the government's taken over the car industry and the real estate industry has collapsed, they've got a lot less advertising in.
But they had this quarter-page ad from something called SEVCA.
And I had no idea what it was.
Sevka turned out to be the Southeastern Vermont Community Assistance.
In other words, a community action.
In other words, they're community organizers, just like President Obama.
And they were, quote, seeking applications for several positions funded in full or part by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, unquote.
That's the stimulus to you and me.
So in other words, the stimulus money has gone to fund these positions at these community organizing groups.
What is it funding?
The first job they were advertising was for something called the ARA Projects Coordinator.
So the first new job created by the stimulus was a job coordinating other programs funded by the stimulus.
That's great news, isn't it?
The second job was something called a grant writer, a grant writer, who would be responsible for writing grant applications to augment ARA funds.
So the second new job created by stimulus funding would fund someone to write to people asking for additional funding for projects funded by the stimulus.
The third job was a marketing specialist to increase public awareness of ARA-funded services.
In other words, a marketing specialist to market public awareness of stimulus-funded projects.
I mean, this stimulus, the reason the stimulus failed is because of stuff like this.
That it's great if you happen to be done, if you went to Harvard and did a degree in stimulus coordination, you're set up for life because the jobs funded by the stimulus are the job of head stimulus coordinator with responsibility for promoting and funding the stimulation of the promotion and the funding and the marketing of stimulus promotion projects funded by the stimulus.
That's all the stimulus is funding.
But it's not doing anything out in the real world where real people live.
And that is the action required to change the economic, the core economic dynamic in America at the moment to prevent us tipping into the post-prosperity era, which is where we're heading if this keeps up, would require, for example, changes in corporate tax rates, changes in corporate tax rates.
America has the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world, and the Obama administration's plan is to increase them.
The other day I noticed that Tim Horton's Donuts, which is a donut chain that operates on both sides of the border, of the U.S.-Canadian border, but it's incorporated in Delaware.
And it announced that it was reorganizing itself as a Canadian corporation, quote, to take advantage of Canadian tax rates, unquote.
To take advantage of Canadian tax rates.
What kind of crazy phrase is that?
When did American executives start saying things like, to take advantage of Canadian tax rates?
That's a phrase that probably never passed any American executive's lips until Barack Obama became president.
But these guys know that if you look at Obama's plans down the road, where he's essentially imposing double taxation on multinational companies that earn money, American companies that operate multinationally and bring it back, that if you look at, for example, the difference between corporate tax in Canada and corporate tax in the U.S., in the U.S., it's basically about 35%.
In Canada, it's 21%, and the government is planning to reduce it to 15 in the next couple of years.
So in other words, you will have a corporate tax rate north of the border that is less than half of what it is south of the border.
We are destroying, we are eviscerating the economic base of the United States to advance nothing but government regulation.
Now, when you look at the problems in the property market, look at the problems in the property market.
What is the government solution?
Cap and trade.
They're going to make it more expensive for you to sell your home.
So on the one hand, they're driving, they're making it harder to operate a business in the United States.
And on the second, they're making it more expensive just to live here.
You can have paid off your home, you can have provided for your retirement, but you won't be able to sell that home unless you bring it up to some ludicrous, arbitrary environmental standard imposed by a guy in Washington, which will then change equally arbitrarily upwards, ever more tightly regulated in a couple of years' time.
The great thing about this country, what I always loved about this country, and I think it's the measure of a civilized society, by the way, is how easily you can insulate yourself from the worst aspects of life.
And if you look at most Western European countries, it's actually quite hard to.
If you live in a bad neighborhood, it's hard to move into a nice neighborhood.
It's expensive there, it's difficult.
The great thing about the United States is that this is the cheapest country in the Western world just to buy a nice plot of land and live there in a simple accommodation.
When I was in Crawford, Texas, I noticed that the price of a double wide on a two-acre lot was something like $12,000.
And you can say, oh, yeah, well, that's just because Bush moved in and there goes the neighborhood.
But that's typical of all kinds of places all over this country.
It's the cheapest country in the Western world to buy a nice lot, build a nice house, live there, raise your family.
And what this cap and trade legislation is doing is saying you cannot escape regulation.
No matter what you do, no matter how old your home is, no matter how long you've lived there, the government can reach inside your property and regulate every aspect of your life.
And if you want to stimulate regulation, if you want to stimulate government bureaucracy, if you want to stimulate government control, this is a great way to do it.
But if you want to get the economy moving again, this is a disaster.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein in Farush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Morgan Stanley's chief economist says, quote, America's long-awaited fiscal train wreck is now underway.
It's left the station, and this isn't a stopping service.
This is the express.
This is the express train one-way ticket.
The fiscal train wreck is now underway.
Let's go to Pam in Mansfield, Ohio.
Pam, is Ohio a fiscal train wreck right now?
Now, let me tell you about it.
I was 30 years old, actually about 29, when the Carter administration basically handed the Reagan administration something less, or I should say not as intense or not as bad as what we've just, the liberals claim Bush-handed Obama.
Right.
And I did an interview for ABC out at our local GM plan at that time on the upcoming election, interviewing people.
And of course, you could see blue-collar guys sweating.
We're letting people go and all.
Well, guess what?
As we speak today, they just pulled that GM plant.
Right.
So you've got double-digit unemployment in Ohio.
We not only have double-digit unemployment, one of our big base corporations, GM, is gone.
Right.
We've got a, by the way, we've got a proud Democratic hometown boy by the name of Sherrod Brown.
Right.
And we've got a we you'd think we'd have the pipeline.
We've got a Democratic mayor, we got a Democratic senator, we got a Democratic governor.
So you ought to, you ought to be on the central sluice pipe for stimulus funding.
If it's doing anything, it would be coming straight to your big Democratic Party fiefdom, wouldn't it?
They can't do a thing.
They're running scared.
It's not working, and they know it.
Yeah, that's...
And I've got to tell you, that's the scariest part of all.
It...
It has nothing to do with partisan.
It has everything to do with failed fiscal policy, and it's so frightening.
And you're talking to your average American who, by the way, went out and called the city this morning and said, we've got storm sewers collapsed all over to come out and look at it.
And the response was, man, we don't have any money or we don't have any manpower to fix it.
You're talking basic local infrastructure.
Yeah, and that's...
We're talking your average living in America here.
But you know, that's the great lesson.
There are things that the town government should do, things that county governments should do, things that state government should do, and things that federal government should do.
But they're all very limited in number.
And the more they try to do everything, the less likelihood there is that they'll be doing those core responsibilities well.
Pam, thanks for your call.
You know, that is the point.
That is absolutely the critical point, that if government does a few things, the few enumerated responsibilities, its core responsibilities, it should be able to do them well.
But when you tell government to do everything, it will just spend enormous amounts of money and waste that money and will suck it from the dynamic part of the economy.
And that's what's happening all over as we see.
Essentially, this is a massive transfer of wealth from the productive sector of the economy to the non-productive and wasteful sector of the economy.
And it really is quite disgraceful when someone like Joe Biden goes on TV and says, well, we had no idea how bad it was.
Your president, your president, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the guy you work for, was going around saying this is the worst economy, worst economic crisis since the Depression, since the 1930s.
So if you didn't know how bad it was, were you not listening to him?
Or is it worse than that?
I mean, he was saying, oh, it's the worst thing since the 19th.
Is it the worst thing since the Black Plague, the Black Death?
Is it worse thing since the Great Plague killed?
What are we talking about here?
Worst thing since the fall of the Roman Empire?
He was going around telling everybody it was the worst thing since the 1930s.
And now Joe Biden says, oh, no, no, no.
It's way worse than that.
We didn't know the half of it.
We're talking Armageddon.
Thank you very much, Vice President Biden.
It's Mark Snyder sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbo Show.
1-800-282-2882.
More straight ahead.
Hey, great to be with you.
I'll be here today and tomorrow.
And Mark Davis comes in on Friday, rush back on.
Well, that's, what's that?
That's Motown, isn't it?
Heatwave.
Are we playing that in honor of Michael Jackson or something?
What is that?
That's Al Gore.
It's Heat Wave, isn't it?
It's Heat Wave.
Yeah, Al Gore.
It's the Global Warming Song.
We're having a heat wave.
Great.
We got no summer in my part of New Hampshire, and they had snow up in, I had some complaint that they had snow up in, I think it was North Dakota the other day.
So it's like, great, snow on 4th of July parade.
That's really what you like.
That's really so much for the global warming.
We've been talking about what's happening to the economy.
Joe Biden, Joe Biden has said, well, look, the stimulus was a bust because we didn't know the half of it.
We didn't know how bad it was.
When President Obama was going around telling everybody that this is the worst economic crisis since the 1929 Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, he was just trying to put a happy face on things.
That we didn't really know how bad it was.
We didn't really know how bad it was.
This is it.
This is like the Great Plague, the Black Death, the end.
This is the way of Joe Biden's talking up the market.
I think the Dow's fallen 7% since he went on the Sunday talk show, so he's doing a great job.
And Henry Waxman, the guy, this guy, Waxman, he's one half of this Waxman-Markey cap and trade thing, isn't he?
Henry Waxman, Congressman Henry Waxman, Democrat California, says that Republican opposition to climate change legislation and the stimulus indicates that they're cheering against the good old USA.
They want the USA to fail.
They've got that Rush Limbaugh thing where they're rooting for America to fail.
Because if you don't support cap and trade, if you don't support stimulus, if you don't support government health care, you're anti-American.
Hang on a minute, where does it say that?
Is that in the Constitution?
So if you're opposed to imposing a national regime of economic sclerosis that will make this country seize up from Maine to Hawaii, you're anti-American.
I saw a thing today in the Wall Street Journal that Obama's latest plan is to take over the airlines, apparently.
He's in the Wall Street Journal's talking that Obama may have to wind up running the airlines.
That's great because he's like, he's taken over the car industry.
Well, the passenger rail Amtrak, that's already government-owned.
So if he takes over United and US Air and Continental, basically, I think you can still get a non-government bicycle.
If you want to use private sector transportation, you should get a bicycle, or you should get a horse and buggy.
That's the state of America in the year 2009.
Congressman Waxman has it absolutely backwards.
What we are seeing is a sustained war on the animating principles of the American idea.
And it shouldn't be my position as some wacky foreigner to have to point this out.
But this is the precise inversion of everything that the United States was founded on.
The principles of limited government and a self-reliant citizenry that is allowed to live life to its full potential.
And this is the antithesis of the world that Congressman Waxman is building for us.
And I will say this, by the way, for the left.
If you go back and you read that Obama piece from 1983, where he's espousing his Peter Tosh, Rastafarian reggae view of social justice, when the left take power, they don't waste any time.
It's very difficult, actually, to keep track of everything that's going on because it's coming so fast.
Most moderate centrist administrators finding themselves in government in January would not say, well, we're going to do cap and trade, we're going to do stimulus, we're going to do nationalization of the automobile industry, and we're going to do government health care and a ton of other stuff all in the first few weeks.
But Obama knows that if he just keeps throwing this stuff at the wall, That in the end, a lot of it will slip through unscrutinized, like these 1,200-page bills that nobody bothers to read, or that cap-and-trade one, which actually didn't exist in written form at the time they voted for it.
What did they vote for?
They voted for a concept that existed in Nancy Pelosi's head.
It was 1,200 pages that they were throwing so much pork at that the little tippy-tappy typing fingers of the poor congressional stenographers couldn't type as fast as Democratic congressmen can spend.
That's what it's come to now: is that they're spending your money faster than the congressional typing pool can keep track of it in writing.
They voted for a 1,200-page bill that has no corporeal form.
It's like that ghost of Michael Jackson that was supposedly seen wandering through Neverland on the footage on Larry King Live or whatever it was the other night, where Larry thought he saw the spectral form of Michael Jackson hovering down in one of the hallways.
That's what this bill is.
It's like it's the ghost of Michael Jackson with a huge great price tag stuck to it.
It has no corporeal existence, but they voted to spend it anyway.
This bill is the, and again, this is where Congressman Waxman is wrong.
It's not un-American to demand that your legislators read their legislation.
It's not un-American to demand that the legislation be written, be in a written form that you can actually know what you're voting on at the time you vote for it.
This is actually un-American, just saying, well, we're voting on this and we'll tell you what's in it afterwards.
And we don't know, but like five or six staffers got together in the back rooms of the corridors of power, and that should be enough for any of you.
Yeah, we completely trust them.
They write the bill and we'll just vote on it.
This is the opposite of a republic of citizen legislators.
And it is not un-American to stand up and say, no, this is enough of this stuff.
This is enough of it.
So this is a serious crisis, actually, for the American idea.
Because the choice that a man like Congressman Waxman presents us with is whether we are going to go down, go all the way and make the same mistakes the European governments made a generation ago.
And by the way, if you look, for example, at statistics such as the amount the government spends as a proportion of GDP, America is going up.
The other countries are coming down.
If you look at countries like Sweden, they ramped up their big spending back in the 70s and 80s, and they realized that it's unsustainable, that you can't do it.
And they had to back off and come down from that.
They get it.
Sweden's corporate tax rates are lower than America's.
Now, how did that come to pass?
How did it come to happen that America's tax rates are not competitive with avowedly socialist statist societies?
It's not un-American to want to draw the line at that and to say, oh, well, you know, can't we be at least as entrepreneurial and dynamic as Sweden?
Is that too much to ask for?
Congressman Waxman is attempting to demonize the opposition to this bill, to this level of spending, which is now widespread.
And it's not going to work because enough Americans still get it.
They understand that certain people have to make the money before you spend it.
And the Obama administration has already spent more money than we're making, so that these numbers don't add up.
You can only make them add up by introducing something like a national sales tax or by taxing our children and grandchildren into poverty.
And both of those options are unacceptable to the American people.
Mark Stein, 1-800-282-2882.
Rush will be back on Monday, fighting fit and rare and to go.
And Mark Davis comes in on Friday.
I'll be here today and tomorrow.
1-800-282-2882.
More straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Let's go to Mark in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mark, you're on the EIB network.
First of all, Mark, I really love when you sit in.
But listen, if these guys think they're going to force me to upgrade my house, my old house, before I sell this thing, they're nuts.
There's going to be a mysterious gas leak.
I'm going to burn this thing to the ground, let the insurance company pay me for it.
Then I'm going to sell the lot and let somebody else worry about it.
I'll go buy myself a new house.
Yeah, and actually, that's the quickest way to be in compliance, isn't it?
I'm telling you.
It is.
Because whoever has to build a new house will be in compliance.
It won't be an issue.
Okay, well, you're thinking ahead.
That's the way, in bureaucratically oppressive nations, that's the way people start thinking.
Yeah, why bother getting, if your roof isn't up to the new environmental standards imposed by Washington, why bother the cost of fixing it up?
Why just sell it?
Burn the house down, sell it as an empty lot.
You are a genius, Mark.
One thing to remember, though, don't give the quote that a neighbor of mine did when his old decrepit farmhouse caught fire and the local reporter covering the story went to interview him and he said, quote, unfortunately, we didn't manage to get everything out before the fire started, unquote.
That line rather gives the game away.
Mark, you're right.
Where do you think all this stuff is?
Do you think people are going to think like you, or do you think they're going to put up with this nonsense?
You know, there are certain people that are going to put up with it, but, you know, this has got to stop.
This is getting out of hand.
And I think very shortly, it just keeps going on.
People are going to put a stop to that.
Mark Belling on yesterday's show was talking about whether conservatives are wimps, that in the end, we always expect people to get outraged and all the rest of it.
But in the end, we never do.
In the end, we just take this stuff.
We take it incrementally.
We put up with the government doing this bit by bit, bit by bit, and people get used to it and they don't rise up against it.
Well, you do run into empathetic people like that.
Now, I grew up in Chicago.
I knew better about this guy, but nobody would listen to me.
But you got people from the inner cities that won't put up with this, and eventually we're going to have enough and it'll stop.
But you do have empathetic people out there, unfortunately.
But hopefully they'll put a stop to it.
Okay, that's Mark in Las Vegas.
I believe he's one of the few marks in the lower 48 who is not a certified guest host on the Rush Limbaugh show now.
You were just – HR was – you were just trying him out and seeing whether he – yeah, he did.
He did okay.
Let's pencil him in for Thursday.
Okay, that's great.
We could always use more guest hosts called Mark on this show.
Let's go to Marion in Moorhead, Minnesota.
With a name like that, Marion's got no chance of guest hosting on the Rush Show.
But we are glad to have you on the air, Marion.
Great to have you with us.
Hi, Mark.
It's nice to talk to you.
If I can't have Rush, I'd rather talk to you then.
Oh, that's very close enough.
You can talk to Rush again.
He'll be back on Monday.
Okay.
Yeah, I was just going to comment on this fact that they didn't even write a bill before they want people to vote on it.
And I'm a nurse, and I, you know, I went to school a long time ago, and I think they still have this rule.
When you work in the operating room like I did, you had to have all the blanks filled out, all the forms filled out before you had surgery.
Right.
So, you know, they didn't take your arm off instead of your leg.
No.
No, or the right side or whatever.
No, no, no.
Once we have the nationalized health care, there'll be a lot of that because they have those stories in Britain quite a lot where you go in, you know, you go in because you've got a slight cyst on your back and you wake up the following morning and they've taken your leg off.
That happens all the time over there.
So don't worry, we'll be getting that too.
But you say your point is that when you go, when you're doing, you know the end game, you know what you're there for.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And plus the fact that all the blanks have to be filled out.
Now I'm given to understand that on this bill, there's one line that says, well, they have the right to add something else.
Nobody knows what it is.
So that's not right.
I mean, nobody knows what's even going to go on there.
No, and that actually is a very good definition of tyranny.
That's an absolute, that is, in fact, an absolute monarchy, where you've passed a bill that's got a big open hole in it and says, we'll fill in the blanks later.
You don't need to know what it is.
And that's what's wrong with letting people legislate in this way.
I think the least, for a start, I would ban 1,200-page bills.
If it's 1,200 pages, chances are you shouldn't be voting for it.
And what it does is it actually demoralizes and de-energizes the citizenry because it's saying to people, look, this stuff is all too complicated for you little people to figure out.
So why don't you just leave it to the experts?
And the experts aren't anyone you can vote in or vote out.
They're just these anonymous aides, these congressional aides who wind up writing all the legislation.
And in fairness, when they used to do these things, you know, back in the bad old days when it was George III, if you look at when the Parliament passed the law about the taxes on tea that led to the Boston Tea Party, that was a fairly straightforward bill.
You knew it was about tea.
You didn't need to read through 1,100 pages of it and discover that tea was subclause 573 on page 1131.
I mean, by definition, when it gets to 1,200 pages, it's not compatible with a legislative system that is accountable to the public.
So you want it to be like medical procedures.
They've got to dot all the I's and cross all the T's before they go in there, Marion.
Yeah, and it's one page long.
One page.
Yeah.
It's only one page long.
Say, you know, how are we going to get them to fix it?
I mean, couldn't the people, the Republicans, refuse to even put up with it, to sign it?
Or how do you get them to quit this?
Well, you can't refuse to sign it when it does.
At the moment, the Republican Party doesn't even know, as John Boehner did when he was on the floor of the House.
He said, who are the people?
There's no one in this room who's read this.
There's no one in the room who knows what's, who can reliably say what's in it, who knows what we're voting for.
And he wound up dropping it on the floor, and there was a huge crash and the sound.
If things had gone the way it should have, the entire Capitol would have cracked asunder and the dome would have fallen to the ground and we could have started from scratch again.
But this is not compatible with a truly free society, 1,200-page bills that the legislators don't bother reading.
Well, I like the fact that he gave his little speech, but I think it should have gone beyond this little speech because now what?
I mean, it didn't do anything in the end.
No, but what it has done, I think, is it has reframed the debate.
And I think it's put a certain amount of pressure on people, particularly a lot of these so-called blue dog Democrats.
I don't think they're really conservative in any meaningful sense, but a lot of them are in red states and represent conservative districts.
And if they want to get re-elected, they know that at some point they've got to draw a line under this.
Thanks very much for your call, Marion.
Great to have you with us.
Mark Stein, sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.
Lots more straight ahead.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Let's go quickly to Neil in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Neil, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hey, Mark.
Good afternoon.
I just want to let you know I'm a longtime listener, first-time caller, and I think that you do an excellent job whenever you fill in for Rush.
First, I want to give some credit to my friend Matt Hagelston, who turned me, I am an admitted reformed liberal.
You're a reformed liberal at this Fred persuaded you to see the light.
We're going to have to leave it there, Neil, because we're way out of time on this hour.
I tell you what, can we keep Neil?
We'll keep Neil over.
We'll keep Neil and get back to him in the next hour because we're right up against the clock here.
We'll talk to Neil in a moment on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
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