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Dec. 23, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:56
December 23, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Merry Christmas, America.
Seasons, greetings.
America's Anchorman is away today, and this is your undocumented Anchorman sitting in Mark Stein.
Honored to be behind the eggnog-colored EIB microphone for the next three hours.
I'm from the foreign exchange wing of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a terrific program.
Penniless foreign students like me get to come and study at the Limbaugh Institute, and in return, every single Nebraskan gets flown business class to an exclusive private clinic in Geneva for hip replacement surgery, whether they want it or not.
Just one of the benefits of the new fairer, more equitable Senate healthcare reform that's about to pass at 8 a.m. on Christmas Eve.
We're just hours away from it.
Tomorrow, by the way, we'll have a best of rush show for Christmas Eve.
And on Christmas Day, three hours of all EIB-approved Christmas music, just to help your figgy pudding go down a little easier.
And then I'll be back here on Monday, which is Monday the December.
Thank you, HR.
It's known here as December the 28th.
In Britain, it's Christmas Bank Holiday Monday because everybody is still on vacation till the third week in January.
But over here, Monday, December the 28th, is known as December the 28th, I believe, under the American holidays calendar.
So I'll be here then.
And Walter Williams later in the week, lots of great stuff.
Breaking news.
Balloon Boy.
The balloon boy's parents have just been sentenced.
You remember this story?
These guys got everybody whipped up about this cute little boy, and the media cameras chased him as he soared across the land.
And then the hot air balloon came down to earth and they discovered it was entirely empty.
Oh no, wait, that's the Barack Obama story.
Anyway, the balloon boy's parents are being sentenced.
They've just got, I think, four years, something like that.
But I don't know why it's happening just before Christmas.
Presumably the Senate was negotiating it till the last minute or something, something like that.
I had my usual nightmare trip down here to New York to do this show.
It's always terrible.
But this time I got to the airport, my little local airport, and I'm sitting there at the gate.
And the announcement comes over the speaker that the 1 p.m. flight to New York's LaGuardia airport has now been delayed till 3.40 due to pre-existing conditions.
And I look at the businessman slumped in his seat across from me, and he goes, Hang on a minute, pre-existing conditions, isn't that something to do with the healthcare debate?
Not anymore.
Pre-existing conditions, it's for everyone now.
So my flight was delayed due to pre-existing conditions, which turned out to mean the snowfall from four days earlier that at LaGuardia they hadn't finished clearing up after.
So pre-existing conditions, you plant these phrases in the language.
Everybody takes advantage of them now.
So pre-existing conditions, it's not just for healthcare anymore.
Anyway, this is the time of year when, as Al Gore likes to say, those of us in my faith tradition celebrate the birth of a homeless child.
I love that phrase.
By the way, I love that phrase, faith tradition, because as a general rule, one sign that you have a faith tradition is that you don't call it a faith tradition.
I mean, Friday prayers in Mecca, the A-list imams don't say, well, you know, in my faith tradition, we believe in killing all the infidels.
But the grasp that the big shot Democrats have on their faith tradition is always politically variable.
I mean, a few years ago, they decided, like this Al Gore line, that their faith tradition was all about the birth of a homeless child.
I think it was Hillary who said that Christmas is when those of us in that particular faith tradition celebrate the birth of a homeless child.
It was Al Gore who said that 2,000 years ago, a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.
This thing just took off like wildfire.
And it's completely untrue.
They weren't homeless.
They weren't homeless.
They couldn't get a hotel room.
They had to sleep in the stable only because dad had to schlep halfway across the country to pay his taxes in the town of his birth, which sounds like such a crazy, cockamame-y, bureaucratic idea.
It is surely only a matter of time before Nancy Pelosi announces that we're instituting it for the 2010 census.
Except, of course, in New York and California, it's no doubt illegal to rent out your stable without applying for a livestock shelter change of use permit plus temporary maternity ward for non-insured transients license.
So Mary would have been giving birth under a bridge on the interstate somewhere.
But don't worry, don't worry.
They'll give Acorn a license to run the federally accredited stable facilities for the 2010 census.
Anyway, now, no doubt, the Democrat faith tradition is all about the lack of affordable maternity facilities.
Mary got turned away because her pregnancy was a pre-existing condition.
It had been pre-existing for the previous eight months and three weeks.
We'll get into the latest state of play on healthcare.
1-800-282-2882.
They've got a Christmas tree at the White House.
I saw this at biggovernment.com.
Lovely Christmas ornaments.
Chairman Mao, a drag queen, and an image of Obama on Mount Rushmore.
That's all.
The baubles at the White House Christmas Tree.
This is like, I don't know what this is, the new Democrat Holy Trinity.
And lo, the angel Gabriel appeared to the drag queen and said, thou shalt conceive a child from Chairman Mao, and his name shall be Barack and the star, and he shall shimmer like a star in the West, blotting out Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore.
It's heartwarming stuff.
Three baubles on the White House Christmas Tree, Chairman Mao, a drag queen, and Obama superimposed on Mount Rushmore.
Lovely.
That's what you want at this time of year.
Healthcare debate.
The fine print here, as you may have noticed, the latest aspect of the healthcare debate to exercise the world's greatest deliberative body is tanning beds, tanning beds, tanning salons.
Can you believe?
Can you believe?
This, by the way, is why this government healthcare system is going to be worse than any government healthcare system that has ever previously been created anywhere on the planet.
When they brought in the British National Health Service thing in 1948, they didn't attempt to regulate tanning beds in that.
The scale of this enterprise has never before been tried in human history.
But anyway, the whole thing now is, you may remember they had the Botax, the so-called Botax.
This was the tax on Botox, which they were going to tax cosmetic surgery and anti-aging injections.
Then, for whatever reason, I don't know, might have something to do with the Speaker of the House or something like that.
But for whatever reason, certain influential Democrat players took against the Botax.
And so the Bow tax has been replaced now because it would disproportionately fall on women, apparently, the Bow tax.
So instead, they're going to have a 10% tax on indoor tanning services, which the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation Projects says will raise $2.7 billion over 10 years, compared with the estimated $5.8 billion that the Botox Botex would have raised.
So in other words, now, I believe they're going to, as I understand it, they're going to tax you when you go in to get your artificial tan in order to subsidize.
What are they subsidizing with the Botax or with the tanning bed tax, HR?
Making $96,000 a year.
People making $96,000 a year.
Families making $96,000 a year.
The healthcare for families making $96,000 a year will be paid for by you going to the tanning salon.
I had a letter, by the way, from a guy whose daughter's just started work.
She's in her early 20s.
And she was trying to find an industry that would pick out a sphere of economic endeavor that would make her less vulnerable to the depredations of government.
And she chose to open a tanning salon two days before the federal government decided that in order to make health care affordable for all, it was going to tax tans.
So now instead of the Bow Tax, the Bow tax is off.
Instead, we've got the tax on the tanning salons.
As I said, I get that.
My worry about this is that I don't think serious conservatives and influential Republican strategists understand the scale of the enterprise here.
The Democrats, I think, are thinking smarter.
They don't care about, what does it matter if you lose a couple of Senate seats in 2010, a few House seats?
Let's say it's a 60-seat Senate for the Democrats at the moment.
Let's say the Republicans have a great night, and in November next year, it turns out that it's only a 53 or 54 seat Senate.
So what?
What does that matter to the Democrats if they've got the architecture for the big government health care project in place by then?
They're doing something that our guys don't do often enough.
They've looked at their 60-seat moment.
They figured the 60-seat moment might not recur again in any electoral cycle for the foreseeable future.
And they have decided they're going to use their moment.
And if you compare it to what, admittedly, Republicans never had a 60-seat Senate, but if you compare it to how Republicans used their majorities in the 90s and in the wake of September 11th, whatever one feels about this disaster that's going to be inflicted on the country, the fact of the matter is that these guys, these guys have decided that they are going to use their moment,
ram this thing through in the teeth of opposition from two-thirds of the American public because they understand the long-term benefits of it.
And this idea that, you know, oh, well, the public option clause has been taken out and this and that clause has been taken out, it's not about individual clauses.
The whole thing is a public option.
The public option is not page 374, subsection 27B.
The whole bill is the public option because that's where it leads inexorably.
And the smarter Democrats understand this.
They understand that if you ram this thing through with your 60 seats, you can take the hit in 2010.
And what you'll have will be the architecture for a government annexation of a huge chunk of the individual American's life.
And once you do that, it makes small government all but impossible again.
By definition, any government required to administer the scale of governmentalization foreseen in this bill will be big government.
So you'll have a choice between big government of the Barney Frank variety, or big government of the Ben Nelson variety, or big government of the Olympia Snow variety.
But there aren't going to be a lot of other choices once the architecture for this thing's in place.
And that's what's at stake.
And that's what Democrats understand.
And I'm saddened in a way that so few really smart Republican strategists seem to understand the stakes in quite the same clear way.
So we'll talk about that in the hours ahead.
1-800-282-2882 on the night, what are we?
The night before, the night before Christmas.
Senator Roland Burris, by the way, was doing his little healthcare version of the Twas the Night Before Christmas on the floor of the Senate yesterday.
I don't mind the sentimental totalitarian control freak big government bill, but to have sent to have senators being cute about it and doing Twas the Night Before Christmas parody is just adding a pathetic insult to gross injury.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein in for rush on the EIB network.
In the air, there's a feeling of Christmas.
Mark Stein in for rush.
Rush was just named Media Personality of the Decade just yesterday, I think it was.
And if you're following these things, I was media personality of the third Thursday in March in 1993, I think.
No, actually, to be honest, I only came third.
I was third-placed runner.
But it was close, and I got high hopes.
1-800-282-2882.
We're talking healthcare, but it's also, of course, Uyghur Wednesday.
Every Wednesday, when I happen to be guest hosting, we do like to bring you up to date in Uyghur developments.
Well, there is Uyghur.
There is Uyghur news.
There is Uyghur news.
From Nom Penh, Cambodia, visiting Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping thanked Cambodia on Monday for deporting 20 Uyghurs while he handed Cambodia $1.2 billion in aid.
The 20 ethnic Uyghurs deported Saturday were sought by China in connection with anti-government protests.
So the Chinese, the Chinese paid Cambodia to get these 1.2 billion, paid 1.2 billion to get these 20 Uyghurs.
20 Uyghurs, 1.2 billion.
If you recall, the United States paid Bermuda to take the Uyghurs away.
So the Cambodians are savvier here.
I'd like the Cambodians to take over the U.S. Treasury because the Cambodians managed to get China to pay money to take the Uyghurs, whereas the United States government had to pay Bermuda to take the Uyghurs.
Yeah, I'm concerned about this.
In fact, if I were those Uyghurs that had been that are sitting on the beaches of Bermuda, you've got to be concerned that some Cambodians are going to swing by, kidnap you, and sell you to the Chinese.
But this is what it's come to now.
The Cambodians can get a better deal for secondhand Uyghurs than the so-called superpower can.
The humiliations inflicted on this country during the Obama presidency are getting worse and worse and worse.
$1.2 billion in aid for 20 Uyghurs.
And we had to pay money to Bermuda, which isn't even a country.
It's a colony.
It's not even a real country.
We had to pay money for Bermuda to put our Uyghurs up on a lifelong beach vacation, whereas the Cambodians just sell them to the Chinese to have the electrodes clamped to them or whatever the Chinese are going to do to them.
It's just, there's no fiscal responsibility in Washington anymore.
I'm in favor of adopting the Cambodian model for American Uyghur policy from now on.
Anyway, that's our Uyghur Wednesday update.
And we'll keep track of the Uyghur situation as it develops there.
This healthcare business, the tanning salon thing, by the way, it seems like a small little rinky ding.
And you know the way with these 2,000-page bills now.
And by the time you get to page 1,873, your eyelids are beginning to droop and you're not really paying attention.
And the stuff that's in the last-minute deals that are negotiated here and there don't seem that important.
It is important.
In what sane world would the founding fathers of the United States of America ever have foreseen a coast-to-coast federal regulation of tanning salons?
Even if you think it's right that tanning salons should be taxed, this seems to me an entirely appropriate issue for state jurisdiction.
Now, I live in New Hampshire.
In New Hampshire, it's winter, 10 months of the year.
We're all wan and pasty-looking.
Whenever I go and give a speech in California, I'm stunned by how healthy the women are.
They're all walking around bare-armed.
There are three weeks in New Hampshire when it's safe to walk around bare-armed.
I don't see women's arms from one decade to the next.
And then when you do, as I said, they're all wan and pasty, and they're this sort of grey color because they've been under plaid for the previous 17 years.
So when I go to California, I'm seeing all these beautiful-looking women, gorgeous-looking women, terrific-looking women, all walking around with absolutely nothing on.
And so, what are they?
They don't need tanning salons.
If you're in California, your tanning salon is called the sun.
And even Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn't figured out a way to tax and regulate the sun yet.
So you look fantastic.
You don't need a tanning salon.
Whereas the poor New Hampshire woman, she's there up in the great North Woods, barely any, yeah, that's it.
Basically, life in a plaid-clad burqa.
That's it.
It's the plaid burqa.
Poor woman there.
The only way she can compete with these gorgeous.
I wish they all could be California.
Nobody ever says, I wish they all could be New Hampshire girl, do they?
They do.
It's California.
It's the golden tan.
It's the sun on your skin.
And the poor New Hampshire woman in her plaid burqa, the poor Maine woman in her plaid burqa, they never, the poor Minnesota woman in her plaid burqa, they're the ones who need these tanning salons.
It's not your Hawaiians, not your Californians, not your Floridians.
So if there were ever an issue that is appropriate for state regulation and for state variability, this is just, this is disgraceful that New Hampshire women are going to be taxed now for their poor few humble moments in the tanning salon to subsidize a failed basket case state with great sunshine like California.
This is essentially what's going on now in America.
1-800-282-2882.
Fight the tanning tax on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Lots more.
Straight ahead.
Great to be with you.
Merry Christmas.
Even on the eve of the tanning terror that the United States Congress is about to inflict on tanning beds across the land, we can still pause to celebrate Christmas.
Let's go to Sean in Columbus, Ohio.
Sean, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hi, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Great.
I enjoy listening to you when you fill in for the EIB.
Thank you.
Oh, no.
I love being here.
It's a great, it's a great.
Even as the Republic sinks into the same decrepitude as all the countries I've fled, I love being, I love being here.
Sean, what's your point?
One thing that popped in my mind as I was listening was when governments tax businesses out of business, which the National Tanning Association say is probably going to happen and a lot of tanning salons are going to go out of business because of the tax, then your revenue, your taxation to pay this monstrous bill, which is wrong in the first place, were they going to get the revenue to subsidize the money that they're going to be missing when businesses go out of business, when these salons go out of business.
Who's going to be the next sucker that's going to be taxed on, basically?
I haven't heard anybody say that.
Yeah, when they figure on these, that it's going to raise a gazillion billion trillion in revenue.
That figure is predicated on almost everything else staying exactly the same, but you can just add a 10% tax and no other business considerations will apply.
But even assuming, for example, that it doesn't impact the business, you're talking about, for SARS, small businesses, which have far lower profit margins in areas like this.
You're talking about something that may just be the difference between somebody going and deciding to have a tanning session and not having a tanning session.
And the way the – you know, it's interesting that when it comes to economic innovation, the left never thinks you can grow the pie, as they mocked Bush for saying.
They never think you can – they never think that you can give people a bigger piece of the pie by making the pie bigger, as Bush was mocked for saying.
But they seem to think you can load all kinds of taxes and regulations and licenses on small business and the pie will remain the same.
You're right.
In the end, the pie will shrink.
They've already said that they think there are health issues here and they want to discourage the use of tanning beds.
So presumably, if this thing works, the 10% tanning tax works, then it won't be paying for Medicare or whatever it's meant to do.
But in fact, it will be making people have fewer tans and thereby raising less revenue.
And then they'll have to figure out some other small business to tax.
So what do you think they're going to go for next, Sean?
Either that or they'll print the money, one of the two, which is bad in the first place.
Yeah, and even the printing the money thing isn't going to work much longer because the next big penny to drop in this catastrophe is going to be the artificial protection that the United States dollar gets because it's the global reserve currency.
The dollar's been plunging across the world at the moment, but it hasn't plunged as far as it has because it remains the global reserve currency.
At some point, the Chinese and the Saudis and a couple of others will decide to pull the rug out from under that, and then it isn't going to make any difference how much money how many dollar bills they're printing, because even if they're pumping them out of the building while the ink's still wet, it isn't going to be fast enough to prevent the deterioration in value that's going to come with that.
That's going to be the next penny to drop is the collapse of the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Sean, great to, well, we always said we've gotten on to really cheery stuff now, Sean.
Thanks for, are you going to get yourself a tan for Christmas?
Oh, Sean's got, maybe he's already got to get a tan.
Here's the way to do it, though.
I was thinking about this, that if these tanning salons go out of business, so it is increasingly hard to get a go-to a tanning salon on Main Street.
I would recommend that in the government hospitals now, they simply put tanning lamps in the corridors.
If you go to any Canadian or British hospital, if you go to, there's a fantastic film, by the way, it won the Oscar a couple of years ago, Barbarian Invasions.
A friend of mine's in it, but don't let that mislead you.
Everybody behind this film are like Canadian lefties.
They're all socialists.
It's safe for your Liberal friends to watch.
And it is a devastating indictment of Canadian healthcare.
These opening scenes where the camera, there's a guy being treated for supposedly being treated in quote marks for cancer in a Montreal hospital.
But he's not being treated.
He's basically just lying on a gurney in the corridor.
And this opening scene where the camera weaves its way to his bed through an endless maze of corridors clogged with patients lying on gurneys hooked up to tubes, snaking their way down the hallways to wherever the overflow started.
It looks like a Victorian workhouse in the middle of a Third World War zone.
It's an amazing scene.
But you think about it, that's like a classic scene in any Canadian British hospital.
People lying in the corridors on gurneys.
All you've got to do is put the tanning heat lamps up in the ceilings of those corridors, and then when you're lying there for days on end, waiting for your operation or waiting to be seen, never mind the operation, just waiting to be seen by the doctors, you're lying in the corridor for days on end or just waiting to be checked in by the receptionist.
You can just lie there on the gurney getting a really nice tan from the heat lamps in the ceiling.
So I'm just trying to think ahead here for what Congress might like to consider after it successfully put all the small business tanning salons out of the game.
This clause is not unimportant because it gets to the heart of the scale of government that is assumed now to justify government health care.
The advantage of government health care to a left-wing mindset is that it provides a justification for regulating every aspect of life, for regulating everything you do.
And that is why it is so attractive.
And that's why they don't care.
That's why the smart guys like Barney Frank don't care that it in some of these polls it shows 65, 72 percent, in some states 78 percent opposition to this monstrosity.
What do they care?
Once they get it in place, it's a done deal.
Because how are you going to get it out of there?
I put this point to Karl Rove the other day.
You know, what in the end do Republican Congresses overturn?
What do they reverse?
You take a little nothing thing like the Federal Department of Education, the Federal Department of Education, the Republicans have opposed ever since it was set up.
They've been opposing it for 30 years and they're nowhere near ever, ever, ever getting that thing out of the education game.
And in fact, what's happened is that once it's there, it increases its power, it increases its budget, it increases its bureaucracy year on year.
This thing will be like the Federal Department of Education on steroids.
That once it's there, who are you going to look to to roll this thing back?
Olympia Snow and Orion Hatch?
Dream on.
Dream on.
That's what's at stake here.
And that's what these Democrats understand.
You get the architecture in place and the natural ratchet effect of big government will grow.
It doesn't matter whether they get abortion, doesn't matter whether they get the public option, doesn't matter whether they get the death panels now.
You get this thing, you get across the bridge, you burn the bridge behind you, and you have got in place the architecture for the biggest government of all.
When they talk about the healthcare being a sixth of the U.S. economy, that doesn't really convey the scale of it.
This is essentially the nationalization of the entire French economy, for example.
That would be equivalent to what's going on in the United States Senate right now.
In other words, you take a G7, any G7 economy other than the United States and a couple of others, and you nationalize the entire country, everything in the country.
You nationalize everything in Canada.
This is bigger than that.
You nationalize everything in France.
This is bigger than that.
You nationalize everything in Spain.
This is way bigger than that.
No one in human history has ever attempted the level of government control that the Democrats in the Senate and the House are attempting with this thing.
And if you think it's just going to be as bad as those lousy British and Canadian systems you hear about, no, it's going to be on an entirely different scale.
You look at these stupid little itsy bitsy special deals they're doing, you know, giving Chris Dodd his own private hospital for $100 million, telling everybody in Nebraska, you're not going to have to pay for anything ever.
We're going to stick it to everybody else who's going to have to pay for you.
You look at the great bureaucratic spaghetti that is in place even in the creation of this monstrosity.
And then you've got to figure out you take the British National Health Service, the Canadian health system, and you multiply it 200 times and you maybe have a sense of the disaster that is about to befall this nation with this system.
And that is my cheery news for you this Christmas.
So, you know, it's beginning to look a lot like cloture.
Everywhere you go, we'll talk more about that.
1-800-282-2882.
Lots more straight ahead on the Rush Lidmore Show.
That's rude.
That's my least favorite Christmas song.
What is it?
It's Paul McCartney simply having a wonderful Christmas time.
How could a grown man sit down and write that as a simply have?
That's my least favorite.
Is that EIB approved Christmas music, Mike?
Okay, that's not.
Don't worry.
So on the Christmas Day broadcast, which is all EIB approved Christmas music, the Paul McCartney simply having a wonderful Christmas time.
That's going to be nixed.
That's out of there.
Don't worry about that.
It won't wreck your Christmas Day.
You won't be choking on your figgy pudding when Paul McCartney comes up.
Mark Stein for Rush on the EIB network.
I love the way all the papers around the country are now reporting what they've got or they think they've got out of the healthcare bill.
So for example, the Boston Globe reported that the healthcare bill that the Senate is expected to pass on Christmas Eve has protections that ensure Massachusetts pioneering health insurance overhaul will remain intact.
Now for a start, this is interesting to me.
I was told all during the 2008 campaign by a lot of people that Massachusetts had solved the healthcare problem by its fantastic health care reform.
But suddenly the healthcare reform in Massachusetts is now so vulnerable that it requires some kind of federal protection.
That in itself is interesting because that's, by the way, the consistent feature of all government health care systems.
That once you pass them, you spend the rest of your life endlessly reforming them and trying to fix them because you're trying to correct all the things that you got wrong in it when you passed it originally.
One of the funniest speeches that Barack Obama ever gave was the one he said in September where he said, predecessors of mine have been talking about this issue for ages.
He did his usual thing, the time for talk is past.
And Rush wasn't there to say, as he does when he plays the tape bag here, shut up then.
But he did his usual thing.
The time for talk is past.
And he says, we're going to pass this thing so we don't have to keep talking about healthcare reform all the time.
No, the minute you pass it, that's all you're going to be talking about forever and ever and ever.
Go to any election campaign in Canada or Britain or even in France.
And it's all about healthcare.
The Secretary for Health becomes the most important cabinet position.
Secretary of Defense, Foreign Minister, all that stuff's irrelevant.
That's just something you pass through on the way to the big time gig, which is Secretary of Health.
And you have, like you have in Canada, these endless royal commissions that are trying to fix the mess that was created, trying to investigate how they can cut back waiting times for your MRI from three years only to two years.
That's all you talk about at the political level forever and ever and ever.
And what's happened in Massachusetts is a microcosm of that.
So the great Massachusetts solution to it to healthcare that solved all the problems now, what are we?
Two, three years later, and it needs federal protection of some kind.
But don't worry, because the healthcare bill in the Senate, quote, also includes $500 million in extra money for the state, Senator John F. Kerry said yesterday.
Senator Kerry, whose vote wasn't even in doubt, it's not like Ben Nelson.
He nevertheless managed.
In fact, I think he must have, he's surely got more per constituent than Ben Nelson did.
Oh, and he's also got the Botox tax.
Botax got scrapped, which would have John F. Kerry would have been badly affected by the Botox Botax.
But presumably the tanning bed tax doesn't affect him because he's got so many homes all over the place.
So he can, he's like he's off the coast of Martha's Vineyard and he's windsurfing in the buttock-hugging yellow spandex and he's getting a great tan and then he can fly to the ski.
He's got this ski lodge in Colorado, is it, which is actually some 8th century barn that he had flown over timber by – yeah, that's – he's diverted a creek to improve the property and flood three neighboring villages full of low-income housing.
So that worked out well for him.
And he'll be able to, he had all this eighth century barn flown out timber by timber from England to build his ski lodge.
Because of course nothing looks more natural in Colorado than an eighth century medieval ski lodge.
That's the look you want.
And then he had himself flown out Botoxed eyebrow by Botox eyebrow out to Colorado to enjoy a ski vacation.
He won't have to worry about the tanning salon tax.
But what gets to me is this way we look at it.
The Boston Globe, these are trained reporters.
These are people who've done 12 years in journalism school or whatever they do to be able to write like that.
And they put, it includes $500 million in extra money for the state.
And nobody thinks, hey, where did that come from?
$500 million in extra money.
Does it come from the Department of Extra Money on the third floor in Washington somewhere?
You just go to the Department of Extra Money and take out $500 million?
No.
At some point, you can give the special deals to Massachusetts or Nebraska or wherever, but somebody's got to pay for all this extra money.
Is there a jurisdiction that is responsible for generating the extra money?
Clearly, it's no longer one of the 50 states.
Where is it?
Is it Guam?
Does the $500 million in extra money come from Guam?
No.
No.
It comes from you.
It comes from ordinary individual Americans who are now sluicing money through Washington to be sluiced back to individual states for the most preposterous boondoggles.
And that's why, as I said, this thing is going to be a disaster far bigger, far more bureaucratic than anything conceived by any of your Euro-Canadian healthcare systems.
Because they don't do stuff in this kind of nutty way.
They don't have the trade-offs where some Botoxed up to his scalp senator says, well, I don't like the sound of this Botox tax.
And so in some smoke-filled tanning raid back room somewhere, they say, well, okay, we'll tax the tanning beds instead.
You don't get those kind of trade-offs in a straightforward parliamentary system.
So you get at least an equality of awfulness.
That is the hallmark.
Whatever you feel about the Canadian system.
In the Canadian system, everyone gets treated equally, equally awfully.
Unless you're a cabinet minister or a hockey player, you get the same crummy, cruddy treatment wherever you are, coast to coast.
There's no big deal about it.
That's the thing.
And people say, whenever I used to write about this, complaining about this in Canadian papers, you'd get these letters a couple of days later saying, well, the great thing about our system is that a big shot like Mark Stein, and that's really a sad comment on Canada too.
A big shot like Mark Stein has to wait in line with all the rest of us for history.
The equality of awfulness.
So you can't dodge your way around it.
We're setting up something that will not even have the same virtue of equality of awfulness, but instead has these boondoggles for Nebraska, for Chris Dodd, for Botox Central at Martha's Vineyard with John Kerry.
And so you're not even going to have the redeeming virtue of the equality of awfulness.
This is going to be worse on a bigger scale of worseness than anything ever seen in the history of the planet.
Mark Stein in for rush.
Lots more.
Straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882.
Christmas on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein in for rush.
We'll have a best of rush for Christmas Eve tomorrow.
EIB approved Christmas music on Christmas Day.
And back live with me and Walter Williams and lots more in the week after Christmas.
Stick around.
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