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Dec. 23, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:55
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 anchor man is away today, and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in Markstein.
Honored to be behind the eggnog colored EIB microphone for the next uh three hours.
I'm from the foreign exchange wing of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a terrific program.
Uh 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, uh whether they want it or not.
Uh just one of the benefits of the new fairer, more equitable Senate health care reform that's uh about to pass at 8 a.m. on Christmas Eve.
We're just hours away from it.
Uh 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, uh, just to help your figgy pudding go down a little easier.
Uh, and then I'll be back here on uh Monday, uh, which uh is uh w what what it's uh Monday the tw that's right, they call it December thank you, H.R. It's known here as December the twenty-eighth.
It in uh Britain it's Christmas Bank Holiday Monday, uh, because uh everybody is still uh, you know, uh on vacation till the third week in January.
But over here, uh Monday, December the twenty-eighth is known as December the twenty-eighth, I believe, under the American holidays calendar.
So I'll be I'll be here then and Walter Williams later in the week.
Lots of lots of uh lots of great stuff.
Breaking news.
Uh Balloon Boy.
The balloon boy's parents have uh have just been sentenced.
You remember this story.
These guys got uh everybody uh whipped up about this cute little boy, and uh the media uh cameras chased him as he uh soared across the land, and then the hot air balloon uh came down to earth and they discovered it was entirely empty.
Oh no, wait, that's the Barack Obama story.
Uh anyway, the balloon boys' parents are being sentenced.
Uh they've just got, I think, four years, something like that.
Uh, but I don't know why it's uh happening just before Christmas.
Presumably they uh the the Senate was negotiating it till the last minute or something uh something like that.
I had my usual nightmare trip down here to New York to do this show.
It's always it's always uh 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 uh 1 p.m. flight to New York's LaGuardia Airport has now been delayed uh till 3 40 due to pre-existing conditions.
And I I look at the businessman slumped uh uh in his seat uh uh across from me, and he goes, uh hang on a minute.
Pre-existing conditions, isn't that something to do with the health care 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 uh at LaGuardia they hadn't finished uh c uh clearing up uh after.
Uh so pre-existing conditions, you put you plant these phrases in the language.
Everybody takes ex advantage of them now.
So pre-existing conditions, it's not just for health care anymore.
Um anyway, this is the time of year when, as Al Gore likes to say, those of us in my faith tradition uh celebrate the birth of a homeless child.
Uh I love that phrase.
By the way, I love that phrase uh 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, uh 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 uh the the grasp that the big shot Democrats have on their faith tradition is always uh politically variable.
I mean, a few years ago they decided, like this Al Gore line, uh, that their faith tradition was all about the birth of a homeless child.
Uh I think it was Hillary who said that Christmas is when uh uh those of us in that particular faith tradition celebrate the birth of a homeless child.
Uh it was Al Gore um who said that two thousand years ago a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.
I can't, this thing just took off like wildfire.
And it's completely um true.
They weren't homeless.
They weren't homeless.
They couldn't get a hotel room.
They had to sleep in the stable, uh, only because uh dad had to schlep Halfway across the country to pay his taxes in the town of his birth.
Which sounds like such a crazy cockamamy bureaucratic idea.
It is surely only a matter of time before Nancy Pelosi announces that we're instituting it for the uh for the 2010 census.
Except, of course, in 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.
Uh so Mary would have been giving uh birth under a bridge on the interstate uh somewhere.
But don't worry, don't worry, they'll give Acorn a license to uh run the uh Frederally accredited stable facilities for the uh 2010 census.
Uh anyway, now no doubt uh 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 uh the latest state of play on health care.
1-800-282-2882.
Uh they've 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 uh I don't know what this is, the 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, uh blotting out Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore.
It's uh it's heartwarming stuff.
Three baubles on the uh White House Christmas tree, Chairman Mao, a drag queen, and Obama superimposed on Mount Rushmore.
Lovely.
That's what that's what you want at this time of year.
Health care debate.
The fine print here, they've as as you may have noticed, the latest the latest aspect of the health care debate to exercise the world's greatest deliberative body is tanning beds.
Tanning beds.
Tanning salons.
Uh can you believe can you believe this is this, by the way, is why uh this government health care system is going to be worse than any government health care system that has ever uh previously been created anywhere on the planet.
When they uh 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 is has never before been tried in human history.
But anyway, the whole thing now is uh you may remember they had the the bow tax, the so-called bow tax.
This was the tax on Botox, um, the uh 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, uh certain influential Democrat players uh took uh took against the bow tax.
Uh and so the bow tax has been replaced now because it would disproportionately fall on women, apparently, the uh the bow tax.
Uh so instead they're gonna have a ten percent tax on indoor tanning services, which the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation Projects says will raise two point seven billion over ten years, uh, compared with the estimated five point eight billion that the boat botox bow tax would have raised.
So, in other words, now they're gonna I believe they're gonna as I understand it, they're gonna tax uh you when you go in to get your artificial tan uh in order to uh subsidize what are they sub what are they subsidizing with the with the bow tax or with the tanning bed to tax HR.
They're be people making $96,000 a year.
Uh families making $96,000 a year.
Uh the health care 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, who's uh from a guy whose daughter's uh j just started work.
She's in her early twenties, and she was trying to find an industry that would pick out a sphere of uh economic endeavor that would uh 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 gonna tax TANS.
Uh So now instead of the bow tax, the bow tax is off.
Instead, we've got the uh the tax on the on the tanning salons.
As I said, I get the I get my worry about this is that I don't think uh 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 who 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 of the m uh at the moment.
Let's say the Republicans have a great night, and in November next year it turns out that uh 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 they've 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 gonna use their moment.
And if you compare it to uh what uh admittedly Republicans never had a 60-seat Senate, but if you compare it to how Republicans use their majorities in the nineties and in the wake of September 11th, uh whatever one feels about this disaster that's going to be inflicted on the country,
uh the fact of the matter is uh that these guys, these guys, uh 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.
Uh y and this idea that, you know, oh well, the public option clause has been taken out uh and uh uh and and uh 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 uh 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 sixty seats, you can take the hit in 2010, and what you'll have will be uh the architecture uh for uh government annexation of a huge chunk uh of of uh uh the individual Americans' life.
And once you do that, it makes small government all but impossible again.
Uh by definition, any government required to administer uh the scale of governmentalization foreseen in this bill will be big government.
So you'll have a choice between big government on of the Barney Frank variety or big government of the Ben Nelson variety or big government of the Olympia Snow variety.
But then aren't going to be a lot of other choices once the architecture for this thing's in place.
And that's what it's uh what's at stake.
And that's what Democrats understand.
And I'm I'm uh saddened in a way that so few uh 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 uh on the night uh what what are we?
The night before the night before Christmas.
R Senator Roland Burris, by the way, was uh was doing his little health care version of the twas the night before Christmas on the floor of the Senate yesterday.
I don't mind I don't mind the sentimental totalitarian control freak big government bill.
But to have send uh to have senators uh being cute about it and doing twas the night before Christmas parody is just adding a pathetic insult to gross injury.
Uh one eight hundred two eight two eight eight two, Mark Stein in for rush on the EIB network.
Uh, in the air there's a feeling of uh Christmas.
Uh Mark Stein in for rush.
Uh Rush uh was uh just named media personality of the decade uh just uh just uh yesterday, I think it was.
And uh if you if you're following these things, I was uh media personality of the third Thursday in March uh in uh in uh 1993, I think it was.
I no, actually, to be honest, I only came third.
I was uh third place runner.
But it was close, and I got I got high hopes.
Uh one eight hundred, two eight two, two eight eight two.
We're talking uh we're talking health care, but it's also, of course, we go Wednesday, uh every Wednesday uh when I happen to be guest hosting, we do like to bring you up to date in Uyghur developments.
Uh well there is Uyghur, there is Uyghur news.
There is Uyghur news from Nom Penn, Cambodia, visiting Chinese vice president Xi Jinping thanked Cambodia on Monday for deporting twenty Uyghurs while he handed Cambodia one point two billion in aid.
Uh the twenty ethnic Uyghurs deported Saturday were sought by China in connection with anti-government protests.
So the Chinese the Chinese paid Cambodia to get uh these one point uh two billion uh to paid one point two billion to get these twenty Uyghurs.
Twenty Uyghurs one point two billion.
Now if you recall the United States paid Bermuda to take uh the Uyghurs away.
So the Cambodian the Cambodians are savier here.
I'd like the Cambodians to take over the US Treasury, because the Cambodians managed to get the China to pay money to take the Uyghurs, whereas uh the United States government had to pay Bermuda to take the Uyghurs.
Yeah, I'm I'm concerned.
I'm concerned about this.
In fact, if I were those Uyghurs uh that had been uh that are sitting on the beaches of Bermuda, you've got to be concerned that uh some Cambodians are gonna swing by uh 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 than the so-called superpower can.
The humiliations inflicted on this country during the Obama presidency are getting worse and worse and worse.
Twenty uh one point two billion dollars in aid for twenty Uyghurs, and we had to pay money to Bermuda, which isn't even a country, it's a colony, and it's not even it's not even a real country.
We had to pay money to uh 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 gonna do to them.
It's just uh 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 and we'll keep and we'll keep track of of the Uyghur uh situation uh as it develops there.
Uh the this health care business, the tanning salon thing, by the way, it seems like a small little winky-ding.
And you know the way with these two thousand page bills now, and by the time you get to page one thousand eight hundred and seventy-three, 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, even if you think it's right uh that tanning salons should be taxed, this seems to me uh an entirely appropriate uh issue for state jurisdiction.
Now I live in New Hampshire.
In New Hampshire it's winter, ten 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 seventeen years.
Uh 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.
Uh 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 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, be barely any, yeah, that's it.
Plaid basically life in a plaid clad burqa.
That's it.
It's the plaid burqa.
Poor woman there.
She uh 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.
They do it's California, it's the golden tan, it's the sun on your skin.
And uh the poor New Hampshire woman in her plaid burqa, the poor Maine woman in her plaid burqa.
Uh they never the poor Minnesota woman in her plaid burqa.
They they're the ones who need these tanning salons.
It's uh not not your Hawaiians, not your Californians, not your Floridians.
So if there were ever an issue that is appropriate for state uh regulation and for state variability, this is just this is disgraceful that New Hampshire women are going to be taxed now for for their poor few humble moments in the tanning salon uh to subsidize a failed basket case state with great sunshine like California.
This is essentially what's going on now in America.
1800-282-2882.
Fight the tanning tax uh on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Markstein in for rush, lots more straight ahead.
Great to be with you.
Merry Christmas.
Uh 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.
Uh Sean, what's what's your point?
One thing that popped in my mind as I was listening was when government tax businesses out of business, which the National Tanning Association says probably gonna happen in 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 gonna get the revenue to subsidize the money that they're gonna be missing um when businesses go out of business, when these salons go out of business.
Uh who's going to be the next sucker that's going to be taxed on, basically.
Uh I haven't heard anybody say that.
Yeah, when when they're subsidize that.
When they figure on these uh that that it's going to raise a gazillion billion trillion in revenue, uh that figure is predicated on almost everything else staying exactly the same, but you can just add a ten percent tax and no other business considerations will will apply.
But even assuming, for example, uh that uh the that it doesn't impact the business, you're talking about for such small businesses which have far more uh far uh lower profit margins in 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.
Uh 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 uh that uh you can give people a bigger piece of the pie by by making the pie bigger, as Bush was mocked for saying.
But they seem to think you can load all kinds of taxes uh 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 uh health issues here and they want to discourage the use of tanning beds.
So presumably if this thing works, uh that the ten percent tanning tax works, then it won't be paying for Medicare or whatever it's meant to do.
But it it in fact will be making people have fewer tans uh and thereby uh raising uh less revenue.
And then they'll have to figure out some other small business to tax.
So what do you think they're gonna 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 and and the even the printing the money thing uh isn't isn't gonna work much longer because the next big penny to drop in this catastrophe is gonna be uh the 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 gonna make any difference how much money uh that uh how may how many dollar bills they're they're printing, because even if they're pumping them out of the building while the ink's still wet, it isn't gonna be fast enough uh to to pr pr prevent the deterioration in value that's gonna come with that.
That's gonna be the next penny to drop is the uh the uh the the the the collapse of the dollar is the global reserve uh currency.
Sean, great to oh, we always uh we've gotten on to really cheery stuff now, Sean.
Thanks, uh thanks for uh are you gonna get a t get yourself a tan for Christmas?
Oh Sean Sean's uh Sean's gone, maybe he's already maybe already got to get a tan.
Uh here's the way to um here's the way to do it, though.
Uh I was thinking about this, that if these tanning salons go out of business, so it is uh increasingly hard to get a go to a tanning salon on Main Street.
I would recommend that in the in the government hospitals now, they simply put tanning lamps uh in the corridors.
If you go to any uh 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, uh Barbarian Invasions.
Uh a f a friend of mine's uh in it, but don't uh don't let that mislead you.
Everybody behind this film are like Canadian lefties.
They're all socialists.
That's safe for your liberal friends to watch.
And it is a devastating indictment of Canadian health care.
These opening scenes uh where the uh the the camera uh there's a guy being treated for supposedly being treated in quote marks for cancer in a Montreal hospital, uh 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 uh hooked up to tubes, uh snaking their way down the hallways uh to wherever the overflow started.
Uh it looks looks like a uh a Victorian workhouse in in in the middle of a third world war zone.
It's an amazing scene.
But you think about it, that's like that's like a classic scene in any uh in any Canadian British hospital, people learn in the corridors and 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 uh waiting for your operation, uh or waiting to be seen, never mind the operation, but just waiting to be seen by the doctors, you're lying in the corridor for days on end, or wait just waiting to be checked in by the receptionist.
Uh you can just lie there on the gurney getting a really nice tan from the uh from the heat lamps in the ceiling.
So I'm just trying to think ahead here uh for what Congress might like to consider after it's successfully put all the uh the small business tanning salons uh out of the game.
Uh this this clause is not unimportant uh because it gets to the heart uh of the scale of government that is assumed now in uh to 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 uh in some of these polls it shows sixty five, seventy-two 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 gonna get it out of there?
I put this point to uh to Karl Rove the other day.
Uh I said, you know, what in the end do uh 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 thirty years, and they're nowhere near ever, ever, ever, uh, getting that thing out of the education game.
Uh so you uh 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 is like uh will be like the Federal Department of Education on steroids.
Uh that once it's there, who are you gonna look to to roll this thing back?
Olympia snow and Orin Hatch?
Dream on.
Dream on.
Uh that's 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.
Uh when when they talk about the uh this uh the uh health care being a sick for the U.S. economy, that doesn't really that doesn't really convey the scale of it.
This is an uh essentially the nationalization of the entire French economy, for example.
That would be equivalent to what's going on in uh the United States Senate right now.
In other words, you take a G seven, any G seven economy, other than uh the 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.
This no one in human history has ever attempted the level of government control that the 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 uh British and Canadian systems you hear about.
No, it's going to be on an entirely different scale.
You look at these stupid little ity bitsy uh special deals they're doing, you know, giving Chris Dodd his own private hospital for a hundred million dollars, uh telling uh everybody in Nebraska you're not going to have to pay for anything ever, we're gonna stick it to everybody else who's gonna have to pay for you.
You look at the great uh bureaucratic uh spaghetti that is that is uh in place even in the creation of this monstrosity and then you you've got to figure out you take the British National Health Service, the Canadian health system, and you multiply it uh two hundred times and you maybe have a sense of the disaster that is about to befall this nation uh with this system.
And that is my cheery news for you this Christmas.
So you know it's beginning to look a lot like cloche.
Everywhere you go we'll talk more about that 1 800 28282.
Lots more straight ahead on the Rush Libror show.
That's that's rude for that's my least favorite Christmas over what is that'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 that's not don't worry on the uh so on the Christmas Day broadcast, which is all EIB approved Christmas music, the Paul McCartney simply having a wonderful Christmas th that's uh that's that's gonna be NYX.
That's out of there.
Don't worry about that.
Won't wreck your Christmas day.
You won't be choke choking on your figgy pudding when uh Paul McCartney uh comes up.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
I love I love the way all the all the papers around the country are now reporting what they've got or they think they've got out of the health care bill.
Uh 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 uh I was told all during the 2008 campaign by a lot of people that Massachusetts had solved the health care 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 uh of all government healthcare 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 di 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 back here, shut up then he did his usual thing the time for talk is past and uh and he says we're going to pass this thing so we don't have to just keep talking about healthcare reform all the time.
No, the minute you pass it, that's all you're gonna be talking about forever and ever and ever.
Go to any uh election campaign in Canada or Britain or even in France and it's all about uh it's all about the health care.
Hell uh the Secretary for health becomes the most important cabinet position.
Secretary of Defense, foreign minister, all that stuff's irrelevant.
Uh 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 uh of that.
So the great Massachusetts solution to it uh to health care that solved all the problems now, what are we, two, three years later and and uh it needs federal protection of some kind.
But don't worry because the health care bill in the Senate, quote, also includes five hundred million dollars 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 got he's surely got more per constituent than Ben Nelson, uh Ben Nelson did.
Oh, and he's also got the uh the Botox tax, Botox got scrapped, which would have uh John F. Kerry would have been badly affected uh by the Botox Botox.
Uh but presumably the tanning bed tax doesn't uh affect him because he's got so many homes all over the place.
So he can he's uh like he's off the coast of Martha's Vineyard and he's windsurfing in the buttock hugging uh 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 uh w which is actually some eighth century barn that he had flown over uh timber by the creek.
Yeah, that that's he's devo he's diverted a creek to improve the property and flood three neighboring villages flur full of low-income housing, so that worked out well for him.
And uh and he'll be able so he'll be able to uh he had all this 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 uh that's the look you want.
And uh and then he had himself flown out Botox Dyrow by Botox eyebrow out to Colorado to enjoy a ski vacation.
He won't have to worry about the tanning salon tax.
But what what gets to me is this way we look at it, the Boston Globe, these are trained reporters, these are people who've done twelve years in journalism school or whatever they do to be able to write like that.
And they put it includes five hundred million dollars in extra money for the state.
And nobody thinks, hey, where did that come from?
Five hundred million dollars in extra money.
It j 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 five hundred 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 that is responsible for generating the extra money?
Clearly it's no longer one of the fifty states.
Where is it?
Is it Guam?
Does does the five hundred million dollars in extra money qu come from Guam?
No.
No.
It comes from 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 a disaster, far bigger, far more bureaucratic than anything conceived by any of your Euro-Canadian health care systems.
Because they don't do stuff in this kind of nutty way.
They don't have uh the trade-offs where some Botoxed up to up to his scalp senator says, Well, I don't like the sound of this Botox tax, and so in some uh uh smoke-filled tanning raid back room somewhere, they say, well, okay, we'll divide we'll tax the tanning beds instead.
You don't get those kind of trade-offs in uh in a straightforward parliamentary system.
So you get at least an equality of awfulness.
That is the hallmark.
Whatever you feel about the Canadian situ 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 where ever you are, coast to coast.
Uh there's no there's no there's no big deal about it.
That's the thing.
And people say people whenever I used to write about this, complaining about this in Canadian papers, you'd get these letters a couple of days later, say, 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.
Uh uh 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 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 Inforush.
Lots more straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882.
Christmas on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein Inforush.
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