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July 17, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:30
July 17, 2009, Friday, Hour #3
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It is the third and final hour of the Friday Rush Limbaugh Show.
Thank you, Johnny.
Thank you, Rush, for the honor of filling the airtime.
Rush is back on Monday.
Between now and then, I hope a thoroughly pleasant weekend is on hand for all of you.
Baseball back in action after the all-star break?
Ah, yes, the all-star break.
Since Friday is kind of a week-in-review thing, I do need to weigh in a little on some of the conversation about President Obama's, the various Obama stories stemming from the All-Star game.
Don't get me started now.
I'll get to that in just a little bit because I've thoroughly enjoyed some of that discourse.
We have calls that we're going to go to here in a second.
And Senator Coburn from Oklahoma talking to Judge Sotomayor about the Second Amendment and a couple of other pieces of unfinished business before we get right back to your calls at 1-800-282-2882.
The Joe Biden quote of the day, we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt.
I do love that.
I do love that.
Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrats-supported health care plan becomes law, the nation will go bankrupt.
And the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money.
The quote.
This is Alexandria, Virginia, yesterday, right there in the shadow of Washington, D.C.
And folks, AARP knows, and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know that the status quo is simply not acceptable.
It's totally unacceptable, and it's completely unsustainable.
Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now, we can't do it financially.
We're going to go bankrupt as a nation.
Now, people, when I say that, look at me and say, what are you talking about, Joe?
You're telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?
The answer is yes.
That's what I'm telling you.
Well, alrighty then.
There is a math question in there.
I know, Friday talk show, there should be no math, no ciphering, Jethro.
No, the math question is what we spend to quote unquote reform healthcare.
Will that number be larger or smaller than the cost, whatever the cost would be, of going about this in free market ways that conservatives would favor?
I asked the same question about the bailouts and about the so-called stimulus.
I know that there were bad things that were about to happen.
There were some banks, maybe a car company or two, and they were about to go under, and that's bad.
But would the total hit to the economy, the total hit to the economy of letting that happen, could that have ever amounted to the level of spending and debt that we have actually willfully brought upon ourselves with bailouts and stimuli?
I mean, come on.
So anyway, let's see.
What else do I want to get to here before we head to your calls?
1-800-282-2882.
Now, let's just do it.
Let's get some folks on the radio.
And then next segment, I promise, Senator Tom Coburn and some telling moments of silence as Judge Sotomayor wonders what in the world to do when asked if the Second Amendment means you get to protect yourself.
All righty, we are in Houston down the road from me.
We are in Houston.
John, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis, how are you?
I'm doing all right.
Sweating it out a little bit.
Oh, indeed so.
I know we'll get no sympathy from many across America, but it's a hundred.
Anytime, John, is your forecast, like mine does, does yours call for actual highs of only about 92 or 93 over the weekend?
I think it might have been a little higher than that.
Anytime 94 is cause for celebration, you know it's been an interesting summer.
What's up with it?
Well, health care inflation having been a problem, according to this current administration in the past, I kind of have to wonder how subsidizing health care and therefore taking away any incentive to make it less expensive for the consumer by making it available to more consumers.
how taking away that incentive is going to help at all.
Well, there will be cost control in Obamacare, but it'll be cost control driven by what government bureaucrats want to spend.
This is a superb point.
I mean, the way to control costs in a free market is with people making wiser decisions, with insurance regulation changing its complexion somewhat where we're not getting the $12 Tylenol and all of those things paid for.
The cost control that comes with free markets always makes sense because it involves people spending and charging what they wish to spend and charge.
When government is controlling costs, that's when they look at your grandmother and say she might not be worth keeping around much longer.
So it's not the absence of cost control, but a differently motivated cost control that is on the list of things to fear from this.
I agree with you on that, but in other economies where healthcare has been government controlled, the general method of cost control hasn't been, well, this Tylenol is too expensive.
How can we cut costs?
It's been, I'm sorry, your pain's not quite bad enough.
No Tylenol for you.
If the government really wanted to cut costs on this and did feel that they needed some kind of cost-cutting measures and, you know, had billions of dollars burning a hole in their pocket, they could offer incentives for research and development and things like packaging or production to lower costs there.
If McDonald's save millions of dollars a year by cutting out a percentage of plastic in their drink cups, I think healthcare can do the same without having to have the government step in and control all of it.
Precisely right.
And the reason that a McDonald's can make that decision is because they're dealing directly with the public.
When I pull up at the drive-thru, it's me and it's them and not a whole lot of intermediaries.
There's going to be insurance, and I know that we have to have insurance.
That's a fact of life, and I understand that.
But when things are a little closer to the bone and people have a sense that what they are paying are real-world costs and insurance no longer has the motivation to go ahead and pay absurdities for little, you know, little tiny things in the hospital, that is when that's free market.
That's real-world cost control as opposed to government.
John, thank you enormously.
Appreciate it very, very much.
We head next to Long Beach, California.
Ken, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis, how are you?
Hey, how are you doing, Mark?
I'm good.
Thank you.
Well, this is my question.
I guess my socialist professor asked me a long time ago.
I don't know quite how to answer it, but I've noticed, you know, living here in Southern California, millions of people, I mean, almost everybody in Mexico, 90% of the population wants to leave Mexico.
Yet Canada, and I'm not saying Canada is a perfect place, but their system seems to work for them.
I noticed very few illegal aliens trying to leave Canada, okay?
A best of both worlds.
Can't we have socialism on some things if it works and capitalism on other things?
Because Canadians must like their system or else they'd be leaving.
Well, I don't, well, not so much.
And for the learned socialist professor, I would only offer the following clarification.
He's set up a bit of a straw man.
If the choices are everything Canada offers versus everything America offers, if Canada's socialized medicine is so bad, why aren't people streaming across to come be Americans?
The answer is essential.
Well, the answer is essentially this.
Canada, by and large, is a pretty great country filled with pretty happy people living in a country that indeed so and some lovely things going for it.
Its health care system is not as good as ours, and that is why Canadians do stream across the border, not to seek asylum or become American citizens, but to get hip replacements.
But not like Mexico.
I beg pardon?
I say not like the Mexicans do.
Well, no, because Mexico, Mexico is a big, struggling third world nightmare that also has some wonderful things going for it and millions of lovely people, please.
Thank you very much.
But the plight of the average Mexican coming across the border into America, their situation is sufficiently dire that they are indeed willing to cash in their lives as Mexicans to either come be Americans legally or illegally.
Of course, you're not an American illegally, but you know what I mean?
Chuck their lives and just come live here.
The average Canadian, even with socialized medicine, on balance, would like to remain a Canadian, enjoy Toronto or Vancouver or anything in between.
But if, you know, if there's some procedure I need, I might need to go to Cleveland or Buffalo or Seattle.
That's the best of all worlds.
Go ahead, sure.
Okay, one last thing.
He also said that you could be so far.
Let me ask your opinion of this.
That you could be so far on the right, you can be on the left.
Do you think politics is like a circle?
I mean, Karl Marx believed in, actually believed in free trade and open immigration.
And so to libertarians, the same thing.
Right.
Okay, the short answer to that is no.
I don't agree with the circle, but I don't agree with the straight line either.
There's some little political quiz that places you left versus right on conservative or liberal or up versus down on libertarian versus statist and stuff like that.
It's not all linear.
It's not all two-dimensional.
There are things that people of supposedly diametrically opposed philosophies can believe.
The radical liberal and the hardcore libertarian will totally disagree on government spending, but will agree on First Amendment issues, let's say.
So you can find, because A agrees with B and B agrees with C does not mean that A agrees with C.
Oh, good lord.
Not only is there no math, certainly no math.
Please God, no algebra on the Friday show.
So no.
So if there's proof of anything, it is that not everything is neatly placeable on something that is linear.
Many things are.
I mean, most of the big debates of life, how people feel about abortion, how they feel about taxes, how they feel about gun control, how they feel about this or that, sort of involves if there's a spectrum there where over here at the far left is radical leftism, then somewhat more centrist liberals, and then actual people there in the middle.
God only knows what that person looks like.
Someone who's moderately conservative and then hardcore conservative.
And of course, out there on that linear spectrum, there are people who get far enough in either direction that they just lose their minds.
You know, the person who is so hardcore on abortion that they'll kill an abortion doctor, or the person who is, you know, so whacked out in hating the war that they'll, you know, commit some act of violence in support of that.
Thankfully, that's the fringe, and the battles are fought between those points.
And gosh, that keeps us busy in this line of work.
1-800-282-2882, 1-800-282-2882.
Rush Limbaugh's in this line of work, thank heavens, and he's back on Monday.
I'm in this line of work here at WBAP Dallas-Fort Worth, and just blessed to be filling in.
And you and I are back together next on the EIB Network.
It is the Rush Limbaugh Show for a Friday.
I'm Mark Davis filling in.
Let me share with you something a little bit surreal about what it's like.
Let me pull the curtain back a little bit as a way of getting into our next call.
And listen, I promise you, I'm getting to the Coburn audio, but believe you me, you'll understand why I'm moving a guy up in the line a little bit.
I am able to finish the local show that I do here on WBAP in Dallas-Fort Worth, and literally five minutes I turn around and boom, sitting in the same chair, talking through the same microphone, wearing the same headphones.
We just punch up a few different little buttons, and suddenly I'm no longer looking at the producer that I work with here in my sumptuous studios in Arlington, Texas, but I'm hearing Kit and Ed or Mike or whoever's manning the Limbaugh show at the other end of the connection.
And then I fire up an internet screen, which enables me to see the call screening software, who you are and what you're about to say, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And I had sort of noticed peripherally that there's a guy here in Michigan and he wants to hop on to some of the imagery I've been talking about about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 and where we might go next, a dumb to dumb.
And there in the topic area where Kit's entering, you know, what the person wants to talk about, we learned that the caller's name is Jerry.
He's in Traverse City, Michigan.
So far, so good.
Former astronaut.
It is only then, after further explanation, further investigation, we learned that this is Jerry Leninger, veteran of shuttle missions.
I want to say mid-90s to then on.
Let's let him just clear it up for us.
Jerry, what a pleasure to have you.
Hello.
Thank you, Mark.
Hello, man.
I got to agree with you on Apollo.
You know, what a great accomplishment of mankind.
God bless you.
Can I ask you something?
Because I'm thinking, because I remember you've been on it, is it Atlantis once and Discovery twice or the other way around?
That's right.
Atlantis twice in Discovery once.
And I was on the with a Russian space station Mir for about five months in space.
And boy, do I have questions about that?
Are you kidding me?
If we didn't have a talk show clocked, your four hours, your next four hours will be planned, brother.
But here's what I want to ask you.
Ready?
How old are you?
I am now 54.
That's what I wanted to ask because I'm 51.
I said, I want to do that someday.
So you talk about inspiration.
That's what inspired me: watching our guys on the moon.
I remember a black and white TV set.
I was on a camping trip.
I saw Walter Cronkite trying to announce that event with a tear in his eye and he couldn't get through it.
Absolutely.
Fantastic stuff.
Even old pro Walter Cronkite can't talk to that one.
So I see that this is mankind at its best.
And so on Monday, there'll be some attention paid to this, as well it should, at what I continue to believe is the most amazing thing mankind has ever done.
And it's funny, I played on my local show, I played a snippet of what was then the Manned Spacecraft Center.
It wasn't the Johnson Space Center yet, reading the morning news update to the astronauts on this date in history, July 17th, 1969.
They're 50, 60,000 miles out on their way to the moon.
And one of the stories was that Vice President Agnew, we remember him, had said, you know what we ought to do?
We ought to have footprints on Mars by the year 2000.
I remember thinking, and I bet you did too, shoot, if we can get to the moon in eight years from the Kennedy speech to the footprints, even with the Apollo one fire intervening and stopping us all down, if we can do this in eight years, surely we can get to Mars in 30.
Well, Jerry, that didn't happen.
Absolutely.
You know, there's something very disturbing that 40 years after Apollo, we still refer to it whenever we're faced with something that's seemingly impossible, you know, some insurmountable obstacle.
We always say, hey, you know, we walked on the moon, didn't we?
We can do this.
You know, what's happened in that intervening 40 years?
And I'm not just talking about the space program.
I was part of that.
I think we did some great things.
I mean, right now we got 13 people up there by the International Space Station docking.
You know, it's pretty amazing what we've done.
But, you know, why are we walking around now with our heads down and thinking, you know, this recession is going to end the greatness of America?
And, you know, it just bugs me.
And that's really why I called you.
You know, let's quit moping.
Realize this is the country that sent people to the moon 40 years ago.
And we can overcome anything.
It's the greatest land on Earth.
The opportunity we have, the superior infrastructure, superior technology.
You know, let's quit moping around and use our creativity and our greatness, some leadership here and there, and, you know, start doing great things again.
It just, it gets me mad, actually.
Well, I have to tell you, to hear this from anyone is inspiring.
The words themselves are great.
To hear it from someone who has climbed to the top of the shuttle and ridden that rocket of fire into Earth orbit, one of those times spending five months in basically the beat-up 69 Dodge Dart that is the Mir space station.
I can't tell you what this means.
90-second lightning round, okay, real quick.
How many Gs are you pulling in a shuttle launch roughly?
Not that many, but they're sustained.
You pull about three Gs for about two and a half minutes.
So any fighter pilot that pulls seven or eight Gs, and I've done that in Navy jets before, it's on, they're off.
Now, between Jake Garn.
It's like someone sitting on your chest for about the last two and a half minutes.
Great.
Between Jake Garn and John Glenn, we've had 70-ish guys.
So it's rigorous, but it's not, it's something that eventually tourists will do.
Absolutely.
You know, we can do it.
You know, you're talking about the older guys, the astronauts, astronaut John Young.
And I just have to tell you this, too.
I had the privilege of having dinner with him, his wife.
I got about 40 seconds.
40 seconds.
Go right ahead, please.
He said, one thing he said to me, Jerry, we've never went up there and buried sacks of money on the lunar soil.
You know, we paid engineers, we paid scientists, we paid some guy running a tool and die shop, making nuts and bolts in Peoria, Illinois.
You know, it moved us forward, it lifted our spirits.
He just never understood it.
And I guess I'm back to modern-day stimulus.
I know.
Well, Jerry, God bless you.
You get banged for your buck than something like that moving American.
A veteran of STS 6481 and 84 Michigan Zone.
Jerry Leninger, thank you very, very much.
You honor us.
Man, my day is made.
I got to tell you.
All right, everybody, let's pause, come back, regroup, and talk some more.
I'm Mark Davison for Rush.
All right, everybody, it is the home stretch, the final half hour of the show.
And Rush is back on Monday.
Make sure you know that.
And here comes the Tom Coburn audio.
If I don't get to this now, you will storm the gates.
But before I do, I just want you to appreciate the guy we just talked to.
And not just for the innate reasons that he's an astronaut and we all love that, but Jerry Leninger in particular.
And God, can we get him back on the phone?
I'm only half kidding.
Because if we'd had a few more minutes, we would have gotten to the STS-81 mission January 1997.
That's where he went to the Mir, the Russian Mir space station to spend five months there.
And you may have noticed that I referred to that as the big 1969 Dodge Dart that is the Mir space station.
If you thought that I was being unkind to our Russian friends, let's recount a little bit of what happened aboard the Mir space station while Jerry was on board it.
We had the failure of various onboard systems, the oxygen generators, the carbon dioxide scrubbing, the cooling line loop leaks, the communication antenna tracking ability.
The urine collection broke.
I don't even want to think about that.
The processing for same.
They nearly collided with a resupply cargo ship because some of the settings were off.
They had a loss of station electrical power.
They had a loss of attitude control that resulted in a slow, uncontrolled tumble through space.
And they had a fire.
The most severe fire ever aboard an orbiting spacecraft.
So here's Jerry and his Russian crewmates fighting through this about 12 years ago.
And Jerry also, as a distinction, he is the first American to conduct a spacewalk from a foreign space station in a Russian-made space suit.
So right offhand at that point, I'm glad, and I'm sure Jerry's glad too, that he's just alive to call us from Michigan.
So God bless you, sir, Jerry Leninger.
And it's kind of funny.
I certainly kept a running tally when I was 12 of how many people had actually flown in space.
He mentioned John Young, just, gosh, a veteran of Gemini, of Apollo.
He and Bob Crippen were the first crew of the shuttle.
John Young is like 78 years old.
I've had the pleasure of speaking with him.
He let me wear him out on the show for about 10 or 12 minutes.
But then after that, I mean, after Apollo was done and then they had three Skylab missions and then the shuttle starts at that point, we got shuttle missions every few months and we don't care and we lose track except when one blows up or doesn't re-enter, then we all of a sudden care again.
I've always cared.
And heroes like Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, who we recall 40 years ago, and heroes like Jerry Leninger, names you don't know, people you could walk into a store and not recognize.
There have been a lot of people who have punched into that past the envelope of Earth and into space so that, and I know we talk about spin-offs all the time.
Well, what the moon landings do for us?
And you talk about Teflon and calculators and all of that.
You know what it did?
You know what it did?
It expanded the human horizon.
That's what it did.
It blazed a trail for where our destiny may lie.
And I'm not talking about some bad science fiction movie where Earth is reduced to an ash heap by some nuclear holocaust and we all have to go live on one of the moons of Saturn.
I mean, we'll want to because we can.
There'll be people staying here on Earth, and that'll be a wonderful thing.
And there'll be people maybe going to live on a moon colony, which we're going to try to go start doing.
Or maybe on some other land that is even beyond this solar system.
The Armstrongs, the Aldrins, the Collinses, the John Youngs, the Gene Cernans, the Tom Staffords, the Pete Conrads, the Alan Beans, the Jerry Leningers and the shuttle veterans have blazed that trail for us.
And God bless every single one of them.
Okay, Tom Coburn.
A head-snapping change of direction.
Here is, what was this?
Was this Thursday?
Was it Wednesday?
I want to say late Wednesday.
Tom Coburn, Senator from Oklahoma, is also a doctor.
He is also a really big fan of the Second Amendment.
He's kind of crazy this way.
He really thinks the Second Amendment means he gets to own a gun to protect himself.
I guess I am too.
I don't know.
It's one of those wacky notions we have that the words in the Constitution actually mean what they say.
Well, with Sonia Sotomayor sitting in front of him, Dr. slash Senator Coburn of Oklahoma sought to see if maybe this woman, whose entire life from here on out will be professionally devoted to honoring that Constitution, does she believe those words that are in there?
As a citizen of this country, do you believe innately in my ability to have self-defense of myself, personal self-defense?
Do I have a right to personal self-defense?
I'm trying to think if I remember a case where the Supreme Court has addressed that particular question.
Is there a constitutional right to self-defense?
And I can't think of one.
Well, I can hear you yelling D.C. versus Heller at the radio.
So let me just step in and ease your pain.
Hello.
I realize it was an entire year ago, but the District of Columbia versus Heller was the landmark case that did exactly that.
The Supreme Court of the United States held that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm for private use.
How does the talk show guy know this and the Supreme Court nominee not know it?
My thought is that this is not a stupid woman.
No, I mean, please, her IQ and her resume are not in question and all of that.
But we remember what we seek to remember, and we see things the way we wish to see them, and we believe things as we wish them to be.
So let's let this peculiar interchange continue for a moment.
Again, this is Senator Coburn seeking to ask Judge Sotomayor, do you think, not let's review 14 cases, but do you think that the Second Amendment contains a right for citizens to arm themselves for self-defense?
Could be wrong, but I can't think of one.
Generally, as I understand, most criminal law statutes are passed by states.
And I'm also trying to think if there's any federal law that includes a self-defense provision or not.
I just can't.
What I was attempting to explain is that the issue of self-defense is usually defined in criminal statutes by the state's laws.
Wow.
And I would think, although I haven't studied all of the state's laws, I'm intimately familiar with New York.
But do you have an opinion?
Senator Coburn, when I was playing this on my local show, I said, is this just intolerable audio?
Is this just torture we're going through here?
Or is this just unbelievable clarity that we are arriving at here?
So Senator Coburn's about to say, ma'am, you're answering.
I don't know what question you are answering, but it's not the one that I asked you.
Or can you give me your opinion of whether or not in this country I personally, as an individual citizen, have a right to self-defense?
As I said, I don't know if you don't know if that legal question has been ever presented.
I wasn't asking about the legal question.
I'm asking about your personal opinion.
But that is sort of an abstract question with no particular meaning to me outside.
Wow.
Well, I think that's what American people want to hear, Your Honor.
They want to know, do they have a right to personal self-defense?
Does a Second Amendment mean something under the 14th Amendment?
Does what the Constitution, how they take the Constitution, not how our bright legal minds, but what they think is important.
Is it okay to defend yourself in your home if you're under attack?
In other words, the general theory is, do I have that right?
And I understand if you don't want to answer that because it might influence your position that you might have in a case, and that's a fine answer with me.
But those are the kind of things people would like for us to answer and would like to know.
Not how you would rule or what you're going to rule, and specifically what you think about it.
But just yes or no, do we have that right?
I know it's difficult to deal with someone like a judge who's so sort of whose thinking is so cornered by law.
Yeah, some unintentional comedy from Judge Sotomayor.
No, and it's not frustrating to talk to someone whose mind is consumed with law.
In fact, I wish to God Senator Coburn were talking to someone whose mind is so guided by law.
Here's the deal.
I know that there's been a lot of talk about grilling Judge Sotomayor about how she feels about things or discussing how she feels about things, how she feels about Latinas versus white guys, for example.
And someone told me on the show earlier on the local show that they asked, they said, Mark, you can't have it both ways.
I mean, you seem to be saying that she should put aside her feelings in order to be a judge.
And here's Senator Coburn asking her about her feelings.
Clever caller, that one.
The difference was you are supposed to put aside what you feel about gays or blacks or whites or Jews or Latinas or whatever in order to look hard at the law.
Who's before you?
It doesn't matter.
Who wins when the law is the deciding factor?
That's what matters.
So in that way, you put aside your irrelevant feelings about their race or sex or gender or whatever.
Your feelings about the Constitution, your feelings about whether it says what it says or not, are essential to the job that you will do as a justice.
So a doctor, Senator Coburn, nice job, sir.
Oklahoma and America are proud.
1-800-282-2882.
There, I finally got to it.
Finally.
Got the rest of the show to ourselves, all 15 minutes of it.
Let's see what we make of it upon our return.
Mark Davis in for Rush on the EIB Network.
It is the Friday Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'm Mark Davis filling in from WBAP Dallas Fort Worth.
Let's see how many folks we can take care of before we break camp here and get into the weekend.
Rush will be back on Monday.
All righty, let us take a trip to Wisconsin.
Pat is there, and it's a pleasure to have you on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis filling in.
How are you, sir?
Greetings from New Glaris.
New Glarus, Wisconsin.
I've been to Madison.
I have never been to New Glaris.
Well, New Glaris is a lot more fun than Madison, and people are not going to be able to do it.
I find that impossible to believe.
I'm teasing.
But I mean, are you farther north into the hinterlands of the Upper Midwest?
No, we're totally.
We're like about, I don't know, 20, 30 miles from the Illinois border.
Well, between cheese, beer, and good people, Love Mesome, Wisconsin.
What's going on?
Well, I think we need to ban the 16th Amendment.
We need to repeal it.
And I just don't see how any politician could possibly stand against it.
Well, okay.
Well, let's spend a moment on that.
1913, a year that will stand in infamy as these words entered the Constitution.
The four senators were directly elected.
Yep, indeed.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived without apportionment among the several states and without regard to any census or enumeration.
There we are.
There's your income tax.
Okay, let's say we wave a wand and it's repealed tomorrow.
How does the government get money that even conservatives must admit it needs to do some things?
Let the chips fall where they may.
I suggest that there's going to be a lot more community referendums as people with a lot of money now in their hands, which currently we're getting about 30% taken out of our hands on average.
People will suddenly have a lot more money on their hands.
And if they want to take that money and put it into their businesses, if they want to take that money and put it in their communities, those are local decisions, and they can be made largely through referendum.
And let me offer this, that the greatest stimulus package we could give the nation is to take the money out of the hands of the federal government, who's largely misappropriating it.
I think most of us agree on this.
I think probably at least 70% of all Americans would agree that we should just get rid of the national income tax.
And I don't know how a politician can vote against it if we can just succeed in making it a lot of money.
I wish that were true.
I mean, people have said that of term limits, so it's obviously not true.
People have said it about immigration reform, obviously not true.
Well, let me just say, okay, I'm a politician against any person sitting in Congress right now, okay?
That's what I say.
I favor getting rid of all income taxes right now, banishing the IRS.
And I can give you reasons why we have to do it.
Oh, and surely so.
But the thing that prevents equally applied.
That's the person.
I know, I know, I know, I know.
You're preaching to the converted.
I get you.
The unanimity that you would predict, however, would be forestalled by the fact that at least 60 senators would step forward and paint stories of people starving and dying in the streets because the government wouldn't have enough money.
You and I know that would be BS.
The country somehow managed to survive for most of its history without an income tax and could, again, if we sought to.
Boy, just a thought to keep in your head.
Things are rarely as obvious as you think and arguments rarely as easy to win as you think.
But I don't know.
Well, enough from me about that.
Let's take a pause, come back, and see what we need to do in our final, final segment for the week on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis filling in on the EIB Network.
Right back.
The final moments of the Friday Rush Limbaugh Show, and thus my final moments with you until the phone rings again, which I always appreciate.
Thanks to Rush for letting me do this.
Thanks to Kit Carson, Ed Robinson, the pleasant voices through the headphones as I get to do so.
If there's anything I want to leave you with, I bet you can guess what it is.
Because for the next week, we'll all be talking more about Judge Sotomayor.
We'll all be talking more about health care as well we should.
But from Monday on and Monday in particular, remember where we were.
I'm not so much remember where you were.
We all do.
I do.
But remember sort of where humanity was 40 years ago this week as the first human footprints on another world.
Now, you don't have to be a space dork like me to have an appreciation for that and realize that this was an example of what happens, not just when America, but when humans put their goals, they make them lofty, but then they do what they need to do to achieve them.
That kind of resiliency, that kind of remarkable drive.
It is humanity, not just America, but humanity at its best.
So on that note, Mark Davis filling in for Rush.
Have a good weekend.
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