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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 uh 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, uh I I do need to weigh in a little on some of the conversation about President Obama's uh the various Obama stories stemming from the All-Star Game.
Um that don't get me started now.
I'll get to that in just a little bit, because I've I've thoroughly enjoyed some some of uh some of that discourse.
Uh we have calls uh that we're gonna go to here in a second, and Senator Coburn from Oklahoma talking to Judge Sotomayor uh 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.
Uh the Joe Biden quote of the day, we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt.
I 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 unsuccess 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, all righty then.
There is a math question in there.
I know.
Friday talk show, there should be no math.
No ciphering, Jethro.
No, uh the the math question is uh what we spend to quote unquote reform healthcare health care.
Will that number be larger or smaller than the cost uh that that whatever the cost would be of going about this in free market ways uh that that conservatives would favor.
I asked this 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?
Um, let's just do it.
Let's get some folks on the radio, and then next segment, I promise uh Senator Tom Coburn and some telling moments of silence as Judge Sotomayor wonders what in the world to do when asked if a 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, in indeed so.
I know we'll get no sympathy from many across America, but it's a it's a hundred go and any time the John, is your forecast like mine does.
Does yours call for actual highs of only about ninety-two or ninety-three over the weekend?
I think it might have been a little higher than that.
But any time ninety-four is cause for celebration, you know it's been an interesting summer.
What's up with you?
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 uh regulation changing its complexion somewhat where we're not getting the twelve dollar Tylenol and all of those things paid for.
Uh the the 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 of things to uh things to fear from this.
I agree with you on that, but in other economies where health care has been government controlled, the general method of cost control hasn't been, well, this Tylenol is too expensive, how can we cut cost?
It's been I'm sorry, your your pain's not quite bad enough, no Tylenol for you.
Is 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 in things like packaging or production to lower costs there.
If McDonald's can 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 then we have to have insurance.
That's that's a fact of life, and I understand that.
But when things are a little closer to the bone and the and and and and people have a sense that what they are paying are real world costs and insurance doesn't no longer have the motivation to to go ahead and pay absurdities for little, you know, little tiny things in the hospital.
That is when that that's that's free market, that's real world cost control as opposed to 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?
Uh I'm good, thank you.
Well, uh this is my question, uh I guess my uh socialist uh a socialist professor asked me a long time ago.
I don't know quite how to answer it, but you 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 notice very few illegal aliens uh trying to leave Canada, okay.
Uh uh 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, the that's uh I don't well, not so much.
And the for the learned socialist professor, I would only offer the following clarification is he he's set up a bit of a straw man.
Uh if the cho the choices are everything Canada offers versus everything America offers, uh if Canada's socialized medicine is so bad, why aren't people streaming across to come be Americans?
Uh the answer is essential.
The the well, the answer is essentially this.
Uh Canada, by and large, is uh is a pretty great country filled with pretty happy people living in a country that that by the i i indeed so and some lovely things going for it.
The it's it's it's 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.
Uh but but th the the the plight of 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.
Uh of course you're not an American illegally, but you know what I mean, and ch 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 uh you know, if there's some procedure I need, I might need to go to Cleveland or Buffalo or Seattle.
That's the best.
That's the that's the b that's the best of all worlds.
That's go ahead, sure.
Okay, one last thing.
He also said that uh 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 uh believed in free actually believed in free trade and open immigration.
And so libertarians.
The same thing.
Right.
I I I f okay.
The short answer to that is no.
I don't agree with I I don't agree with the circle, but I don't agree with the straight line either.
There is um there's 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.
Um the radical liberal uh and the hardcore libertarian will totally disagree on government spending, but will agree on First Amendment issues, let's say.
Uh it's so you can you can find it 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, I certainly no math, please God no algebra on the Friday show.
So uh no.
So if there's proof of anything, it is that the 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 it 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 in either direction that they they just lose their minds.
You know, the person who is so hardcore on abortion that they'll kill an abortion doctor, uh, or the person who is uh, you know, so whacked out in hating the war uh that that they'll you know commit some act of violence in support of that.
Uh thankfully that's the fringe and the battles are fought between those points.
And um, 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 I and listen, I promise you I'm getting to the Coburn audio, but b 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, uh 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 uh sumptuous studios in Arlington, Texas, but I'm hearing Kit and Ed or Mike or whoever's, you know, manning the the Limbaugh show uh at the other end of uh of the connection.
And then I fire up a 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 uh and I'd sort of noticed peripherally that there's a guy here in Michigan and 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, d-dumb-da-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 or further uh investigation, we learned that that this is Jerry Leninger, veteran of shuttle missions.
I I want to say mid-90s to 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 gotta agree with you on Apollo.
You know, what a great accomplishment of mankind.
God bless you.
Can I can I ask you something?
Because I'm I'm thinking because I remember you you've been on uh is it Atlantis once and Discovery twice or the other way around?
Uh that's right.
Atlantis twice in Discovery once, and I was on the uh with a Russian space station mirror 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 clock, you're four hours, your next four hours will be playing, brother.
But here's what I want to ask you.
Ready?
How old are you?
I am now fifty-four.
That's what I wanted to ask, because I'm fifty one.
Four years old, looking up at the moon, and uh I said, I want to do that someday.
So you talk about inspiration.
That's what inspired me is 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 uh old pro Walter Cronkite can't talk to that one.
So I think this is uh mankind at its best.
And so on Monday, there'll be some attention paid to this as well it should, uh, at what I continue to believe is the most amazing thing mankind has ever done.
And and it's funny, I I played uh on my local show, I played a snippet of uh uh of what was then the man spacecraft center, wasn't the Johnson Space Center yet, uh, reading the morning news update to to the astronauts on this date in history, July 17th, 1969.
They're fifty, sixty thousand 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 two thousand.
And 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 thirty.
Well, Jerry, that didn't happen.
Absolutely.
You know, it's there's something very disturbing that forty years after Apollo, uh, 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 what's happened in that intervening forty years?
And 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 thirteen 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's gonna end the greatness of America?
And you know, I just it just bugs me, and that's really why I called you, you know.
Let's quit moping.
Realize this is a country that sent people to the moon forty 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 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 and and ridden that rocket of fire into Earth orbit one of those times, spending five months in in in basically the beat up 69 Dodge Dart that is the Mir space station.
I can't tell you what this means.
Ninety second lightning round, okay, real quick.
How many G's are you pulling in a shuttle launch, roughly?
It's not that many, but they're sustained.
You you pull about three Gs for about two and a half minutes.
So any fighter pilot that pulls seven or eight G's, and I've done that in Navy jets before, it's on, they're off.
Now between Jake Garn.
Great.
Between Jake Garn and John Glenn, we've had 70-ish guys.
It's is so it's rigorous, but it's not it's you know 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.
He you know, I I had the privilege of having dinner with him, his wife and I've got to be a good one.
I got about forty seconds, forty 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 you know, modern day stimulus, you know, one of the things that we're doing.
I know.
Well, Jerry, God bless you.
A veteran technology forward.
A veteran of STS 64, 81, and 84 Michigan zone Jerry Lininger.
Thank you very, very much.
You you honor us.
I uh man, my day is made.
I gotta tell you.
All right, everybody, let's uh 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 a rush is back on Monday.
Make sure you know that.
And uh all right, here comes the Tom Coburn audio.
If I don't get to this now, the you will storm the gates.
But but before uh 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 and we all love that.
But Jerry Leninger in particular.
And and God, can we get him back on the phone?
I'm I'm only half kidding.
Because if we'd had a few more minutes, we would have we would have gotten to the STS-81 mission, January 1997.
That's where he went to the Mir, sp the the Russian Mir space station to spend five months there.
And you may have noticed that I referred to that as the 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.
Uh the processing for same.
They nearly collided with a resupply cargo ship because some of the settings were off.
Uh 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 twelve years ago.
And um Jerry also has a 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 and uh it's kind of funny.
Uh I certainly kept a running tally when I was twelve, you know, of how many people had actually flown in space.
He mentioned John Young, just uh gosh, uh uh a veteran of uh of of Gemini of Apollo.
You uh he and Bob Crippin were the first crew of the shuttle.
John Young is like seventy-eight years old, I've had the pleasure of speaking with him.
Uh he let me wear him out on the show for about 10 or 12 minutes.
And uh 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, uh and and we don't care and we lose track uh except when one blows up or doesn't re-enter, then we all of a sudden care again.
I've always cared.
And and p heroes like like Armstrong Aldrin and Collins, whom we recall 40 years ago, and heroes like Jerry Lininger, uh uh names you don't know, people you could walk into a store and not recognize.
Uh there have been a lot of people who have uh who've who've uh uh uh punched into that uh past the envelope of Earth and into space so that I know we talk about spin-offs all the time.
Well, what'd 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, you know, 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, and or maybe on some other land that is even beyond this solar system.
The Armstrong's the Aldrons, the Collinses, the John Young's, the Gene Cernans, the Tom Staffords, the Pete Conrads, the Alan Beans, the Jerry Liningers 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 um 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 Sotomayora sitting in front of him, uh 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 uh uh the honoring that Constitution, does uh she believe those words that are in there?
As a citizen of this country, uh 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 uh 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.
I'm no, I mean, please.
Her IQ and her resume are 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 pass by states.
And I'm also trying to think if there's any federal law that um includes a self-defense provision or not.
I just can't.
What I was attempting to explain is that um 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 this all of the state's laws.
I'm intimately familiar with New York.
But do you have an opinion or Senator Coburn uh 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, uh that that your your answer 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?
I c as I said, I don't know about you.
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?
Could the second amendment mean something under the 14th Amendment?
Does what the Constitution well 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?
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 uh those are the kind of things people would like for us to answer and would like to know.
Uh not how you would rule or what you're going to rule, but and and specifically what you think about, but just yes or no.
Do we have that right?
I know it's difficult to to deal with someone as a like a judge who who is so sort of whose thinking is so cornered by law.
Some unintentional comedy from Judge Sotomayor.
No, it's it's you know, and it's not frustrating to talk to someone who whose mind is is consumed with law.
In fact, I wish to God Senator Coburn were talking to someone whose mind is so guided by law.
Uh it here's the deal.
I I know that there's been a lot of talk about grilling Judge Sotomayora about how she feels about things, or or or discussing how she feels about things, how she feels about Latinas versus white guys, for example.
And uh someone told me on the show earlier on the local show, that they asked, they said, Mark, uh you can't have it both ways.
I mean, you seem to be saying that that uh that that uh 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 or whatever, in order to look hard at the law.
Who's before you uh 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 Glarus.
Well, New Glaris is a lot more fun than Madison and people are not.
I find that I find that impossible to believe.
I'm teasing.
No, but I mean, are you farther north into the hinterlands of the upper Midwest?
We're like about uh I don't know, 20, 30 miles from the Illinois border.
Well, between cheese, beer, and good people, love me some Wisconsin.
What's going on?
Well, I think uh 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.
Please, uh, a year that will stand in infamy as the word these words entered the Constitution.
The Congress.
Or Senators were directly elected.
Yep.
The 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 thirty percent taken out of our hands on average, you know.
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.
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 think.
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.
The law of the case.
But the thing the thing that prevents the thing that prevents equally applied, that's the same thing.
I know, I know, I know, I know.
You're preaching to the converted, I get you.
The un the unanimity that you would predict, however, i is would be forestalled by the fact that at least sixty 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 w the the country somehow managed to survive for most of its history without an income tax, and could again, if we sought to, um 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 um I don't know.
I'd I'd uh well enough for 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 uh 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.
Uh because for the next week, uh we'll all be talking more about Judge Sotomayora, 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 we all do.
Uh I do.
But remember sort of where humanity was forty 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 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 us.
Have a good weekend.
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