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Jan. 5, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:44
January 5, 2010, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's anchorman returns tomorrow.
Rush will be back tomorrow, but in the meantime, this is your undocumented anchorman, Mark Stein, sitting in.
I flew into Newark, artfully concealed in a pair of Yemeni underpants, and I'm here for the next couple of hours and raring to go.
And speaking of underwear, as we have been in recent days, this is from a British newspaper, underwear fetish mayor Ian Stafford faces prison.
Ian Stafford sparked a climate of fear in his neighborhood after women reported bras, knickers and lingerie missing from their drawers.
Now what is interesting about this is this guy is the mayor of this town in Lancashire, England.
He was caught when a woman whose underwear kept vanishing installed a hidden camera in her home and eventually saw the kinky intruder, as the newspaper puts it, sneaking into her house and stealing her bra and panties.
And when she looked closer at the film, she realized it was in fact the mayor of her town.
So the mayor had been breaking into houses and stealing women's underwear.
And he's going to go to prison for it.
And I don't really see why, because this guy might be just the kind of guy, he's got an interest in underwear.
He might be the kind of fellow we need to actually crack down on the spate of underwear bombers that are going on now, trying to blow up American airliners.
So this is a good example of targeting.
Instead of just imposing blanket bans on everybody, why not hire somebody who's already got a proven interest in the whole underwear area and get this mayor, who likes breaking into his constituents' homes and stealing their bra and panties, get this mayor to install him at Amsterdam Airport, just have him prowling around seeing what kind of underwear catches his eye.
That's as likely to work as anything else that's being attempted.
Byron York has a fascinating piece on the whole psychology.
It's really on the psychology of supporters of the president.
They're a dwindling band, but they're still out there.
Supporters of the president and his coolness, coolness.
A lot of people don't even want a cool president.
I don't know whether you've seen this photograph that's out there, this one that they actually put up at the White House website, which they think makes Obama look like James Bond in black tie, leaning coolly against the wall.
And everybody else seems to think is like something out of the Sopranos.
But the idea of a cool president is a bit problematic when he's quite so cool about death and devastation.
And Byron York in the Washington Examiner quotes Matthew Iglesias, who is a widely read blogger who writes for the Center for American Progress, which was founded and run by Obama insider John Podesta.
And a few days after the Christmas Day attempted bombing, he wrote an article titled Not So Scary Terror.
The Detroit plot was, quote, pretty unserious, Iglesias declared.
Quote, and even if you did manage to blow up an airplane in mid-air, that would be both a very serious crime and a great tragedy, but hardly a first-order national security threat, unquote.
So what this guy is saying, and this is an influential blogger, this isn't some fringe blogger.
This is, relatively speaking, a big shot in left-wing circles and pro-Obama circles.
Matthew Iglesias is saying that let's just say that the Panty bomber had blown up the plane and it had plunged to the ground over Detroit and had killed people on the ground.
it would still be no big deal, hardly a first order national security threat, unquote.
The stupidity of this is twofold, because it underestimates the appeal.
Why do these jihadists try to destroy airliners in the first place?
Because they are symbols of, apart from anything else, of the great Satan's technological superiority.
9-11 was just what they were looking for because you're flying a plane into a building.
You've got Mohamed Atta, a guy goes to flight school, takes pilot training.
He could be pulling down a six-figure salary anywhere in the world, but he tells the flight school guy, I don't need to know about landing the plane because he's only planning on making one flight one time through the office window of the World Trade Center.
And the reason that so delighted the jihadist mindset, that you had all those people jumping up and down in the street, remember on the streets of Ramallah until Yasser Arafat ordered them to cut the feed, they were all jumping up and down in the street, passing out candy.
Oh, aloha Agbah, what a great day.
Happy days here again.
They loved it.
They loved it because it strikes at the heart, the symbolic heart of America's technological superiority.
The masters of modernity, the symbols of modernity, airliners and skyscrapers are brought down by men who have nothing but box cutters but are driven by faith.
And that's why bringing down an American airliner is a hugely important symbolic act to these guys.
It's happened before, of course.
20 years ago, it happened with Pan Am over Lockerbie in Scotland.
But the difference then was that this wasn't part of a sustained campaign.
So now, if Iglesias is saying that to bring down an American airliner after this $500 billion money-no object homeland security apparatus has been erected wouldn't be seen as a great victory.
And you wouldn't have cheering in the streets of Ramallah and a lot of other places too over this symbolic victory is to misunderstand the importance of symbols.
But there's another reason why this is an objectively disgusting thing too.
Because yes, there's 300 million Americans.
So if you lose a few hundred here or there, it's no big deal because it's a tiny, tiny percentage.
But if you happen to be on that flight, on that Northwest flight, it's 100% of you.
If you happen to be sitting in the next seat to the Pandy Bomber and that plane blows up, that's 100% of you gone.
It's not a tiny peripheral percentage.
So the idea that this is something that the United States can somehow withstand, I mean, there's a level of cynicism here.
The British, during the campaign waged against the RA, British civil servants used to use a phrase called, quote, acceptable level of violence, unquote, which meant that they accepted that occasionally little old ladies were going to have their legs blown off waiting for a bus, but that it was, quote, an acceptable level of violence.
And that meant that people would die in shopping centers, people would die at bus stations, people would die just strolling in the park, and someone happened to have a nail bomb and lots of people got killed.
But we were talking, you know, in those days, you were talking about maybe a dozen people or a couple of dozen people.
There's something very wrong.
There's something very wrong when a guy is saying that symbolic targets of American prestige and power can be blown out of the sky and hundreds of people killed and that it's no big deal.
And the rationale here is entirely the same.
It is to say that the war on terror died with Bush.
It was a Bush concoction.
It was something that Bush and Cheney and Rummy invented as a convenience to themselves.
and has no broader relevance to the modern world.
And I think the problem here is that Obama is defying reality and his apologists in the press are at odds with reality here.
It's the reason that this weakened the president in those days after Christmas.
Little things, if this is a little thing, as Matthew Iglesia says, little things become big things because they illuminate a central truth about a person.
And that's true of all minor little political events get blown out of proportion because they illuminate a central truth.
That's why the bowing to the Saudi king and the Japanese emperor became a big thing because it seemed to indicate a view of America's place in the world as Obama saw it.
And that's the same thing here.
That Obama has spent the last year saying the war on terror is a Bush phenomenon.
I'm outreach.
I'm going in for outreach to the Muslim world.
I go and give a big speech in Cairo in which I say that it's outrageous that some women get disparaging looks because they want to wear the veil in Western countries, which is preposterous.
The big problem in the United States and other Western countries is that young women who don't want to wear the veil, who don't want to go all covered up, who don't want to wear the hijab and the burqa and all the rest of it, are getting honor killed.
They're not getting honor killed in Yemen and Waziristan.
They're getting honor killed in Berlin and Stockholm and London and Toronto and Dallas, Texas.
They're getting killed in the heart of the Western world.
But Obama, as part of his Islamo schmoozing, he stands up, he goes there in Cairo and he says, oh, you know, isn't it outrageous?
Like the fourth wife of a nice, respectable Imam, she likes to go strolling the street in her burqa and she gets disparaging looks.
Well, that's not the American way.
He's done a year of Islamo schmoozing and all we've seen, in fact, is an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.
And all we've seen from the administration is a denial.
For example, Major Hood, Major Hassan at Fort Hood, he kills all these people while shouting Allahu Akbar and, oh, you know, just a rogue incident.
Could happen to anyone.
Just woke up one day and something snapped and he kills all these people.
And no, no, no.
He'd been in contact with all, with this radical Imam back in Yemen.
And he'd had two terrorist anti-terrorist security teams watching him.
Again, it's the money-no-object thing.
In any other country, it'd just be one anti-terrorism team would be monitoring him.
But here he had two.
And they read all his emails to the radical Imam talking about the circumstances in which it was appropriate to kill American soldiers.
And they report back that, quote, this is consistent with his research interests.
Well, maybe when a guy's research interests are about the proper circumstances in which you kill American soldiers, that should tip you off that this guy is not a regular army psychiatrist.
But no, no, no, he's just an isolated extremist.
Then again, President Obama goes on TV after the Pandy Bomber and says, oh, don't worry, it's just an isolated extremist.
No, he's part of the same network.
He was in communication with the same Imam as Major Hassan at Fort Hood.
This is like this is a delusion of the administration.
It's like all jihad is local.
Guy kills a bunch of people here, guy kills a bunch of people there.
What could they possibly have in common?
Just seems to a lot of people, a guy stands on a chair, shouts Allahu Akbar, kills a bunch of people, now guy's on a plane.
Well, they can't possibly be connected.
One guy is killing people from a chair.
The other person is killing people from his underpants.
They've got nothing in common.
Entirely isolated phenomena.
And that is why this has stuck to President Obama because we're very fortunate that hundreds of people weren't killed.
But the central reality of what happened on this plane is at odds with the official Obama fantasy, the official Janet Napolitano fantasy.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Rush is back tomorrow.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein, Infra Rush on the EIB network.
You know, this Washington Post story by Sally Quinn, the doyed of the Washington social scene, who says time for accountability at the White House.
And she's not calling for the firing of Janet Napolitano.
No, she's calling for the firing of Desiré Rogers, who is the White House social secretary.
This story gets funnier and funnier the deeper you read into it.
The third party crasher is the final straw for Sally Quinn, who is horrified that you go to these galas at the White House and you assume the obscure guy sitting across the table from you is like the Prime Minister of India or the President of Uzbekistan or somebody, and it just turns out to be some no-name guy who's trying to get on a reality show.
So she's horrified.
She thinks Obama needs to show he's really in control and command of his administration by firing his social secretary.
That's the priority for Sally Quinn.
She was horrified by this third gate crasher at the party.
What kind of party is that?
Everybody who wasn't anybody was there.
It's ridiculous.
It's outrageous.
Let's go to Vinny in Brooklyn.
Vinny, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, Mark, great to speak with you.
Let me just finish with what I'm about to say is I certainly wouldn't want this to happen in any way, shape, or form.
But you almost think that to get their attention in Washington as to what's going on in regards with the war of terror, you almost think that something has to happen to someone beloved to them or so close to them, like a son or a daughter or whomever you wish to think of as a loved one.
I mean, on a lesser extent, what you just said about Sally Quinn, look at her priorities.
Okay, it took the 20, what did you say, the 28th paragraph until she started talking about the Panty bomber?
Yeah.
I got this from the brilliant call screen.
He reminded me about Daniel Pearl when he was beheaded at the beginning of the war on terror, how the media stood up and really took notice that, gee, this is really hitting home.
Right.
Okay, to a lesser extent, I can even do this with health care.
Would Congress ever even consider going under a one-payer system like they're demanding the populace do?
No, because they're elite and they're Congress and they're above it.
So yeah, if that plane would have blew up over Detroit, and thank God it didn't, okay, the country and the elite and our elected elites in Washington would have took notice for a little while, like they did after 9-11.
After that, it's business as usual.
This is the way I'm feeling.
I'm a little bitter about it.
And in regards to that last idiot that called, we're back to connecting the dots again in this administration.
Bush did kind of straighten that out a bit, so I don't know what he's talking about.
No, no.
You're right, though, that if the elite feel excluded by this, in other words, if they can impose security procedures on us, and occasionally someone will take a plane, but they'll hijack it and blow up the plane over Cleveland or whatever, it's one thing.
But it's an entirely different thing if they were flying a plane into every senator's favorite restaurant inside the Beltway.
In fact, Sally Quinn does betray the right attitude.
That what matters is what the A-listers are in danger of, what's in danger of happening to the A-listers.
And she's got that right.
But you know where you're right to go back to that previous call and to talk about connecting the dots.
I think we look stupid while the other guys look relatively smart.
I mean, they take a highly educated, westernized Muslim man from a very respectable background and they recruit him and then they fly him to Yemen to get his explosives and then they take him to Amsterdam to get him on the plane.
They get him on the plane in the seat where his bomb will do the most damage, whatever it was, Rho 19, and they train him to blow it up just when he's over the city.
That's actually quite a sophisticated, for a bunch of losers in a basket case in the middle of nowhere, that's actually quite a sophisticated operation.
And our elites, by comparison, don't seem to be the least sophisticated about this.
Well, they're certainly not serious about it, that's for sure, when literally, you know, planes are almost falling out of the sky.
So what's it going to take?
And I guess that's where I'm coming from.
What is it really going to take until this country and the people that run it take a serious stance on terrorism and fight it as if they're fighting for their very lives?
Because I can tell you out here in the styx with the rest of us who make the country work, we really feel it's a fight for our lives.
Well, I would say that that is most unlikely to happen because I think the thinking of this administration is that, yes, bad things will happen, like at Fort Hood.
Basically, 14 people, including the unborn baby, 14 people died at Fort Hood because of political correctness.
This guy was basically had spent the previous years going around with a big neon sign on his head saying jihad boy, flashing at everybody and nobody wanted to do anything about it.
Nobody wanted to do anything about it uh, at the hospital where he trained, where he was.
Uh he he, he.
That you give lectures, this guy gives.
Everybody has to give a lecture and normally you do a lecture on a medical theme, so you'll be giving a lecture about hip replacements or hernias or something.
This guy gave a lecture about jihad, and everybody's sitting there sort of nervously glancing at each other, thinking, you know, maybe if I report this, if I report this guy, it'll turn up on my record and I might not get promoted.
It would look bad.
They wanted to kick him out because he was trying to convert patients at the hospital to Islam.
And they thought about somebody complained and they said, well, we can't kick him out.
He's a Muslim.
It'll look bad.
So 14 people died because of political correctness.
And to go back to that phrase I used from the IRA campaign, the acceptable level of violence, I think, in a very cynical way, people have concluded that that is an acceptable level of violence.
The people will die, but it will just be people on the fringes of the map and in the dozens or maybe the hundreds every now and then.
But there is no war and there is no strategy for taking this war to the enemy and throttling the ideology, which is the only way you'll win this war.
Mark Stein, in for us on the EIB network, don't forget, Rush returns to the golden EIB microphone tomorrow.
Don't miss it.
Great to be with you.
Rush returns tomorrow, but in the meantime, your undocumented anchor man sitting in.
Have you seen this thing out in New York?
Nanny Bloomberg, who won't let you smoke anywhere, can you smoke in the city of New York, HR now?
You're not aware of any you can't, because you can't, the thing where people used to stand on the sidewalks, you can still stand on the sidewalks and smoke.
Okay.
But not near a door.
But you could stand on a rotting wharf sticking out into the East River and have a cigarette.
Why doesn't he clamp down on that?
That guy.
That Nanny Bloomberg, he's supposed to be so concerned about people's health.
People lighting up cigarettes on rotten wharfs sticking out into the East River.
That's the problem.
But on the other hand, Nanny Bloomberg has issued this leaflet to teach heroin users how to shoot up correctly.
So you can't have a cigarette.
You can't have a cigarette in New York, but the city of New York will send you this.
If you're a heroin user and you don't know how to do it properly, because let's face it, it's like pretty complicated.
It's not like having a cigarette and just sticking it in your mouth.
You've got to get this needle, you've got to find the vein.
The New York City, New York City, Nanny Bloomberg, has now provided this attractive illustrated leaflet on how to shoot up correctly.
Don't blunt your needle by poking a hole in your sterile water container.
Warm your body, jump up and down to show your veins.
That's great, isn't it?
So you can have a nice warm body if you're a New York City heroin user, they tell you how to warm your body, jump up.
Actually, that's what you do with the cigarette, isn't it?
If you're having a cigarette out on the streets of New York in the last couple of days, jump up and down to avoid freezing your butt off.
But when you're a heroin user, you jump up and down to show your veins.
Yes, that's right.
And then it says, the next tip is find the vein before you try to inject.
Because otherwise, you could just be randomly jabbing it in anywhere, couldn't it?
You know?
No, no.
I know.
I hate it when, you know, I hate it when you're in New York City and you're trying to shoot up heroin and you just jab the needle into your eyeball because you've forgotten instruction number seven.
Try and find a vein before you jab the needle randomly into body parts.
And don't always inject in the same spot.
So the city that banned smoking in bars and nightclubs has the highest cigarette tax in the United States.
But for heroin users, the city will spend taxpayers' money teaching you how to shoot up correctly.
That's wonderful, wonderful news.
Thank you very much, Nanny Bloomberg.
And there's an important lesson in that, by the way.
Because a libertarian would make the argument that whether you want to smoke a cigarette or whether you want to shoot heroin, you should be allowed to do both.
A radical libertarian would say you should be free to make your own decisions on either of those things.
But the point about big government and big government is that, and the nanny state in particular, the soft totalitarianism of people like Nanny Bloomberg, is that tyranny is always whimsical.
There's never any logic, there's never any logic to it.
So cigarettes, oh, Nanny Bloomberg can't have that.
Nanny Bloomberg can't have that.
You can't be seen smoking anywhere near an open doorway.
But on the other hand, heroin, heroin, that's something he feels differently about.
So he'll provide leaflets, illustrated leaflets showing you how to shoot up correctly.
Where is this going to take us?
Mike Bloomberg, he doesn't, I don't think he actually is a Republican anymore.
Didn't he run as an independent?
He, I think in the last election, wasn't, he wasn't, he was, I think he might as run us both.
He was a Republican and an independent.
But how can that be?
Because I thought if you're an independent, you're independent of political parties.
So how can you be an independent?
Because isn't that right running as an independent and a dependent?
I mean, what's the deal with that?
HR says he thinks he ran as an independent and a Republican.
But we don't know.
Anyway, he's semi-detached from the Republican Party.
He's on the way out the door, if he's still there at all.
How are things going to be looking this November?
According to David Brooks in the New York Times, David Brooks is the token conservative in the New York Times.
And his basic point today is that the Tea Party people are basically knuckle-dragging morons, but they're having an impact.
They're at war with the educated class, as he calls it.
And the most interesting point about this is actually a statistic that according to a Rasmussen poll of independent voters asking whom they would support in a generic election between a Democrat, a Republican, and a Tea Party candidate, the Tea Party candidate won with 33% of the vote.
So he's saying the Tea Party is a real phenomenon and its dissatisfactions are real.
And as he sees it, it's at war against the elite.
As he puts it, quote, the educated class believes in global warming, so public scepticism about global warming is on the rise.
The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them.
The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.
His thing is that the educated class has to put up now, has to take account of these knuckle-dragging morons out there who happen to have the impertinence to disagree with this.
I wouldn't mind this particularly if so many of these brilliantly ingenious, educated people that he's been praising since he first was smitten by Barack Obama haven't proved so pathetically stupid in practice.
And by the way, a lot of these educated people don't sound that smart when you get right down to it.
This is the guy, David Brooks in the New York Times, who as I mentioned when I was here a few months ago, the New Republic ran a story, a profile of David Brooks.
And on the bromance, which I think is, isn't that the word they use now?
Bromance?
Bromance, what is that?
That's some metrosexual toe.
That's brotherler.
Yeah, they make movies about it.
These new Hollywood guys, they make movies about bromances and things.
I don't know.
I don't think, you know, a real movie star like Gary Cooper wouldn't go in for a bromance, would he?
I can't see that happening.
But these new guys, they do all these things about bromances.
And so the New Republic ran a feature on the bromance between David Brooks and Barack Obama.
If I'd been David Brooks' publicist, that's a story I would have wanted to kill.
You know, I wouldn't, I don't know whether that would be something I'd want there.
But the opening image, the opening paragraph is fantastic.
It begins, that first encounter is still vivid in David Brooks's mind.
I remember distinctly an image.
We were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, Brooks says.
And I'm thinking, A, he's going to be president, and B, he'll be a very good president, unquote.
Because David Brooks was sitting there and looking at Barack Obama's quote, perfect, I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant.
This is now, but if I'd been, if I was Barack Obama, maybe I'm kind of just uptight, I'm insecure about my sexuality or whatever.
But if I call, if I'm giving an interview to a New York Times guy and he's staring at my pant leg, I would, I'm not sure I'd be entirely comfortable with that.
Now, you know, I said I was suggesting earlier that this mayor in Lancashire, England, who's just been convicted of breaking into his constituents' homes and stealing ladies' underwear, that he should be the new underwears controlling all the homeland security underwear at airports.
I'm now revising that, and I think that actually David Brooks should be the guy manning the check-in line at airports and looking for that perfectly creased pant.
Here's a guy with an eye for a perfectly creased pant, and clearly if you've got like the crotch bomber, if you've got like some explosives there, the chances are it might dimple your crease a bit.
And a guy who knows a perfectly creased pant leg like David Brooks would be the guy to spot it.
So anyway, yeah, boy, oh boy.
We're not letting you on board the plane.
You're going to have to go over and get those press before we see to you on Connie Endel.
So anyway, David Brooks is the guy who was smitten by Barack Obama, or at any rate his trousers.
And he's now saying that the Tea Party crowd is real.
The Tea Party phenomenon is created.
They're a ghastly bunch of people.
They're knuckle-dragging morons in uncreased trousers.
Properly, their pant legs are atrocious, but they do represent something real.
He says it's an amateurish movement with mediocre leadership.
But several bright and politicians like Marco Rubio of Florida and Gary Johnson of New Mexico are unofficially competing to become its de facto leader.
Moreover, the Tea Party movement has passion.
Think back on the recent decades of American history, the way the hippies defined the 1960s, the feminists, the 1970s, the Christian conservatives, the 1980s.
American history is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life.
And I think this is actually a very important point he's making.
That the wind doesn't blow with the majority.
The majority can just be shuffling along, ambling along, not particularly interested, not particularly interested in this or that or whatever.
If you have passion and you have intensity, you can make the running.
This goes back in a way to what we were talking about earlier.
If you look at Islam, people keep talking about moderate Muslims.
But the reality is that moderate Muslims are basically quiescent Muslims, and the running in that particular demographic strand is made by the radicals.
And so they often wind up getting what they want.
They wind up getting laws that go their way.
They wind up getting very favorable accommodations by governments they put pressure on simply because they're the noisiest.
And that's why it's important to have a protest movement that has passion and intensity and that is prepared to take to the streets.
Not because they necessarily represent 51% of the people in very particular, but because they can often you need people who are noisy and passionate demanding that stuff be dragged 38% in their direction.
You need people making that much noise just to persuade the moderate squishy people in the center to drag things 2% in your direction.
So I think the story from last year, the Tea Parties and that movement, is actually critically important to the year ahead.
People have got to stay on the streets, people have got to go to the town meetings, and people have got to stay up to date and up to speed on that.
And that passion and that enthusiasm has got to ride all the way to November so that all those people, whoever they're voting for, but that Tea Party movement and those town hall meeting guys are there in the voting booths in November.
So we'll talk about that straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for rush.
Don't forget, Rush is back Wednesday.
Mark Stein in for rush.
Looking at the year ahead, this healthcare bill that was passed in the Senate, the interesting thing about this is what Mr. Transparency, Mr. Reach Across the Aisle, Mr. Postpartisan Healer, this is what it boils down to in practice.
There's not going to be an open conference or debate on merging the House and Senate health care bills.
They both pass these monstrosities, but they're kind of slightly incompatible monstrosities.
And normally that's resolved in Congress in conference.
But they want to prevent Republicans from delaying the bill as they see it.
So instead of having the traditional conference committee, they're going to have talks in private between the leaders of both the House and the Senate.
That means Nancy Pelosi and Dingy Harry and their cronies.
So if you don't know what's in the bill now, you can imagine what you're not going to know what's in it by the time these people have cooked it up in private.
So what they're doing here is they're turning, in effect, open parliamentary debate into a sham.
It's a circus.
What will happen is they'll cook it up in private and then they'll undergo sham votes and sham debates after everything's been decided.
So much for transparency and so much for Barack Obama's as he sold himself to David Brooks admiring his pant leg, as he sold himself to David Brooks as a post-partisan healer who would be governing from the center.
Not at all governing from the center.
They've frosted out the Republican Party entirely.
So if you don't think you know what's in the Senate bill or the House bill, you're really not going to know what's in the bill they concoct together by the time they're through with it.
Interestingly, health spending grew at the slowest pace in 48 years in 2008.
In other words, until we decided this was the crisis that we have to address, normal market forces, in fact, Reigned back the so-called explosive growth of health costs to their lowest in half a century.
The growth of health spending slowed to the slowest pace in half a century in 2008.
In the private sector, that is.
As usual, government, federal government spending on health care searched.
Federal Medicaid spending increased 8.4%, the highest rate of growth since 2003, while national health care spending grew only 4.4%.
In other words, federal Medicaid spending grew at twice the rate of private health care spending.
Now, what does this tell you about the way it's likely to go once it's all governmentalized?
You're going to have more government health care, so you're going to have more healthcare spending increasing at the rate of federal Medicaid spending and less private health care.
Healthcare costs are going to explode under this scenario.
And this is a very good example of how if you just let market forces do their work, market forces will respond to changes in the environment.
2008, certainly the last part of it, wasn't a great year.
And so the healthcare spending declined to reflect that.
But the government spending, whoa, that was way up.
And that's the way it's going to go.
We'll talk more about that and about the Democrats' plans to rush these big 2,000-page bills through in the dead of night in the heart of darkness and lots more straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Don't forget Rush will be back tomorrow.
And you can go to rushlimbaugh.com and see the video of his press conference if you haven't seen it yet.
I've just seen this.
This actually stunned me.
Michael Yon, who is a terrific blogger who's been embedded with the troops out in Iraq and Afghanistan, does great military blogging from out in the field in these combat areas.
He was arrested at the airport at Seattle for refusing to say how much money he made.
He was handcuffed.
They handcuffed the guy for refusing to tell a border guard from the United States how much money he made.
That is, I wouldn't answer that question.
If I landed at JFK or if I landed at LAX and the guy asked me how much money I earned, that's between me and the IRS.
We have to resist these outrageous intrusions on liberty and stand up to them.
This is nothing to do with national security.
This is an incompetent bureaucracy that just takes delight in bullying people who are no security threat whatsoever for the sake of it.
And it should be resisted every time it happens.
It's a disgrace.
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