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March 31, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:35
March 31, 2010, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Thank you, Johnny.
Thanks, everybody.
And as proud as I am to be part of that unbroken string, I sense a common emotion here, and that is a certain aggregate readiness for Rush to be back.
Well, let me stand shoulder to shoulder with you on that.
I look forward to the Rush Lindbaugh show tomorrow because I won't be hosting it.
I'll be listening to it because Rush will be here back from wherever he is.
There's a tease.
All righty, just a little, speaking of a tease, here's a little preview of what we might do this hour.
One thing we'll definitely do is take some more of your calls at 1-800-282-2882.
We're going to talk about your transportation needs.
Mine are relatively few.
My car.
I have a bicycle.
I like the bike.
Biking is good.
I like walking.
Walking is good.
When government takes action that prods you toward one of these or away from the other or really toward anything or away from anything, results not always great.
And we'll talk a little bit about some of what Transportation Secretary Rayla Hood had to say recently.
Ah, the Postal Service, always the talk show host's friend.
I know a ton of people.
First of all, everybody that does this for a living hosts a show.
You better be kind to your local letter carriers because all they do is listen to you.
And I love these people.
It is incredibly hard work and they're incredibly committed.
And God bless them as people.
Postal Service as an entity, have they made my teeth itch sometimes?
Sure, but what big bureaucracy, public or private, hasn't.
The issue is the Postal Service taking the first formal steps last week toward cutting mail delivery to five days a week.
Goodbye Saturday mail.
I'll start.
Couldn't care less.
I mean, times are tight.
Postal Service needs to save money.
They're talking about getting rid of something that I don't care about at all, getting mail on Saturday.
Now, I want the post offices open on Saturday because while I don't care about getting anything on Saturday, I would love to be able to go in and give them something on Saturday for them to take elsewhere.
And under the proposal, post offices that are now open on Saturdays would remain open and express mail would still be available seven days a week.
Now, the first place for this is the Postal Regulatory Commission, and then Congress would need to approve of the change as well.
Postal Service says the delivery change would save more than $3 billion annually.
Well, you know what, though?
Everything has an effect.
It's like a law of physics.
Every time you find something that seems like a good idea or whatever, take a look.
At what cost does this come?
Letter carriers.
Somebody going to lose some hours on this?
Anybody hurting on that?
Well, I would say about this what I would about anything that a corporation does.
Got to do what you got to do in the current economy.
And I'm sure that sounds cold and heartless, but it is the definition of insanity to have a private entity or a government entity or a hybrid entity like the Postal Service doing stuff that's not warranted in the marketplace or stuff that hurts them financially.
You know, sometimes we got to be big boys and big girls and weather the storm, the vicissitude of an up-and-down economy.
Post office lost almost $4 billion last year, facing projected losses of as much as $7 billion this year.
Other proposals for cutting losses include changes in the financing of retiree health care, uh-oh, and closing some mail handling centers and post offices.
Hmm, okay.
Instantly, the libertarian streak in everybody might say, well, how about if we just have private industry take over this entire thing?
Um, that seems ripped from one of the pages of my own personal book of ideas.
Uh, I tend to prefer it when private industry does virtually everything, except, oh, I don't know, defend our borders, you know, build roads, stuff like that.
Um, this the short list of things that government is actually supposed to do.
Uh, and you know, I'm an enormous fan of the private sector.
Let's follow this down.
If mail were completely private, would they deliver an envelope from my house in Texas to your house in Montana for less than 50 cents?
Because they'll do it now.
And that's a stamp.
I mean, we've all seen stamps.
Okay, quick.
How old are you?
What's the lowest?
What's this?
I remember four cent stamps.
I'm 52.
I remember the four cent stamp.
And I turned my head and it was eight.
And I remember my dad, you know, thinking, oh, it used to be four cents.
Now it's doubled.
And I remember thinking at the time, Dad, it's eight cents.
Well, it's kind of funny because in a way, you can find yourself almost in liberal land.
If just because something doubles, if it still seems affordable, it's not bad that it doubled.
Things should cost what they should cost.
You can have a debate all day over what that is, but just because something remains kind of hey, gasoline.
Gasoline goes from $2 a gallon to $4 a gallon.
Europe calls in and says, still cheap, to which I would reply, compared to what?
Not compared to what I was paying last year.
So don't tell me about what a gallon of gas costs in Portofino, Italy, or Oslo, Norway.
I'm buying it in suburban Dallas, Fort Worth.
And if that puppy doubles, we got problems.
So I don't know.
You want all mail?
You just want everything privatized?
I probably don't.
But instantly, the thing arises: well, we're all just subsidizing that, aren't we?
We're all just subsidizing it.
Well, yeah, we are.
But who doesn't mail stuff?
The amount of my tax money that goes to the postal service or goes to what I mean, whatever.
I think I more than make that up in savings by, again, someone carrying my envelope from my house thousands of miles away for 40-some cents.
That's a pretty good deal.
I'm pretty good with that.
How about you?
1-800-282-2882.
Can a business, a hospital even, tell you you can't smoke?
And I don't mean on the job, I mean ever.
Eastern Pennsylvania, Bethlehem PA, St. Luke's Hospital and Health Network in Bethlehem, says they hope to improve the health of its 7,000 employees and reduce health costs.
They are going to stop hiring new employees who are smokers.
Now, before we even get to the collision of rights here, the right of an employer to hire whomever they want, the right of an employee to ostensibly be left alone when they're not on the job, just purely the aesthetics of this.
I will never forget covering the, I do both conventions every year, meaning in 2008, I got to go to Denver for the Barack Olypse, and then I got to go to St. Paul for the Republican convention and all of that, and they were bumped right up against each other.
It was incredibly exciting.
In 2004, I was in New York for the Republicans and in Boston for the Democrats.
Two images are stuck irrevocably in my mind from the 2004 Democrat convention.
One is the Barack Obama keynote speech where everybody looked at everybody else and said, hmm, first black president, what do you think?
And the other bit of imagery was the walk that I had from the subway station to the Fleet Center every morning to do my show.
And it took me through some side streets and behind a major hospital.
Behind a major hospital.
Are you following me here?
Is the imagery taking shape in your mind?
What happens in the back, at the back doors, the loading docks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, of probably every hospital in America?
What can you see there at certain times, let's say early morning, lunchtime, you know, smoke breaks?
That's when everybody comes out in the scrubs wearing the stethoscopes and fires up a Marlboro.
The most shocking disconnect.
And this is, listen, I'm like just self-admitted 52, right?
When I'm a kid, everybody's smoking.
Everybody's smoking in the movies.
They're smoking on TV.
Rob and Laura Petrie are smoking in advertisements.
The Flintstones are smoking in advertisements.
And it's just, it's just understood.
Walter Cronkite at the desk.
Is it when he's announcing that JFK was dead?
Or is that what I'm remembering?
Is that just my most memorable thing?
Or is it some other footage of Walter?
He's sitting there looking at me all black and white and everything with those big glasses he was wearing in the early 60s and smoke is wafting over from his ashtray.
Can you mention Brian Williams sitting there knocking down a Kent Filter King while he's telling us about the latest healthcare developments?
This is really one of the things that's been a massive change in just American imagery.
The smoking is just shocking in some ways and in some context.
So before we even get to the rights issue, it was just, I'll never forget that.
I mean, because it was a lot of them too.
It was a lot of them.
And some may have been doctors, some may have been lurses, nurses, some may have been lab techs, but I'll tell you what they all were, man, is they were smoking like they were in a reggae band.
Cigarettes, I'm presuming, and just visual imagery for you there.
And I walked by and I thought, well, okay, is there something untoward about these people working for and helping us with issues of our own health, holding their own health in such low regard?
Well, I always default to my two favorite words, free country.
And if so, if your lab tech wants to smoke, up to the following point.
If your lab tech wants to smoke, knock yourself out, pal.
You know, it's your life.
It's your body.
But if he comes in, you know, reeking of cool filter kings, you know, while he's trying to stuff me into an MRI, I probably don't need that.
So anyway, wow, 14 issues in one.
As St. Luke's Hospital and Health Network in Bethlehem PA says, they want to improve the health of their 7,000 employees and reduce health costs.
Beginning May 1st, all prospective employees will be screened for nicotine and will be ineligible for a job if they test positive.
How long does nicotine stay in your body?
Will there be a black market now for some fluid you could drink that makes you are you're sorry, are you peeing in a cup for this?
And I remember a few years ago, someone told me there was a major cottage industry at all the head shops where you need to go in to buy a Scooby-Doo bong and a mirror and some disc golf accessories.
And you can also get, you know, pee-pee-free or whatever the product name was, drink this stuff, and even if you've been, you know, token up like David Crosby, you can pass a drug test.
The word was that those products didn't really work.
Are we going to have that now?
Thank you, Mike.
Well, they never worked for me, okay?
Share your own stories.
No, I never had need for those.
Will that not, okay.
So the imagery arises of an Orwellian employer seeking to peek into every window of your personal life.
Are you smoking at home?
And I could see somebody saying, if I smoke at home, it's none of my employer's business.
Okay.
Is it?
Is it?
Is it something special about that if it's the hospital?
And does the hospital have rights?
Does the hospital have rights to say, you know what?
It's our decision.
If you want to go libertarian here, does a business, is hospital a different kind of business or the same deal of hiring whom they wish?
I'm a big believer in hiring whom you wish.
We don't hire smokers.
Well, you can agree or disagree with that.
You can say that's harsh or unwise or whatever, but can they do it?
You tell me.
A little collision of rights talk is always, always fertile in the always fertile landscape of the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis in for rush today.
What?
We got about 40-some minutes left to spend together.
Let's see what we make of them with your phone calls next.
1-800-282-2882 on the EIB network.
Little ZZ Top on the Rush Limbaugh Show, the top vote-getter when I offer up incredibly informal polls on whom we want here in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to be the halftime show of the next Super Bowl.
We get the next Super Bowl at Jerry World, which is a stone's throw from the room in which I'm sitting in Arlington, Texas, right between Dallas and Fort Worth.
And this is kind of wild.
There's some icon, some iconography here to cover in both of those realms.
How many of you have watched football games from my town here in Dallas-Fort Worth, watched cowboy games over the years?
Texas Stadium, hole in the roof so God can see the cowboys, which was always weird to me because I figured God could probably see through the roof of any building.
But I digress.
Texas Stadium is going to be blown to smithereens.
So Eagles, Giants, and Redskins fans, hop online for this coverage.
Sunday morning, April 11th at 7 o'clock in the morning.
I will be there.
I'm going to sort of cover it just so I can say I was there.
I mean, how do you miss that if it's happening, you know, 10 miles from your house?
Of course, the Cowboys are playing in Cowboy Stadium now and Jerry World and all of that.
And we get the Nextus, what is it, Super Bowl, 45.
And what everybody wants around here is sort of a Texas, I mean, ZZ Top, God Love them, hadn't exactly done anything in a few years anybody cared about, but you know, neither has the Who and they had last year.
Kind of a ZZ Top George Straight.
You know what somebody thought of?
If you want to make Texas acts, how about ZZ Top George Straight Beyonce?
I know.
Kind of makes my head explode too, but it would be good.
The only other way I think to go, they had the Super Bowl in Detroit a few years ago, and that would seem to have Motown written all over it, right?
Was the Rolling Stones?
Well, hey, it's the Stones.
How do you not do that?
So maybe the only thing to do is to find: are there any hugely iconic acts?
Because we've had U2, we've had Springsteen, we've had Tom Petty, we've had Prince.
And listen, all of those were some great halftime shows.
Last week with The Who, last year with The Who was good.
I don't know, a little dicey to me.
Only one name keeps coming up there.
And I don't know how this works.
Does this work?
That would be Elton John.
And please, I owned everything from Empty Sky to Don't Shoot Me Only, the piano player to Goodbye Yellowbrick Road to Rock of the Westies to just all through blue moves.
That's when I stopped caring.
So I was a huge Elton John fan as a kid, still kind of am, but I don't know.
I don't know.
And the other thing they're talking about is let's have somebody who's hip and today and a big hit-making thing like the Black Eyed Piece.
I don't know.
I don't know.
All we want is for the Cowboys to be actually in a Super Bowl.
And if it's played here, so much the better.
All righty, to your calls, 1-800-282-2882.
You know something?
I'll tell you what, let's do.
Let me share one thing because rather than, again, I'm a big thing on giving callers short.
No, this should work.
We can do this.
Because, in fact, I mentioned about the five-day delivery.
In Lubbock, Wayne is a letter carrier.
And I said, I don't care if we go to five days of delivery.
And Wayne's point is that maybe some people depend on it.
Tell me who.
Hi, Wayne.
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis filling in.
How are you?
Well, thank you, sir.
It's an I. How are you?
You're doing great.
Who needs six-day delivery?
People with birthdays who want their presence on time.
Netflix.
We've got quite a few businesses here in Lubbock, and I'm sure you do in Dallas as well, that ship out on Saturdays.
And most people know UPS and them don't work Saturdays.
Well, no, but the post offices will still be there.
It's delivery that won't happen on Saturday.
So if somebody has a Saturday or Sunday birthday, get it there by Friday.
Well, you know, you got a point there.
Why, thank you.
It's the Postmaster General that is wanting this.
Him and some of his winky dink advisors up there.
Because I know our union and the AFL CIO is fighting against it.
Well, then let's get right to it in about 30 seconds.
It may not be so much about customer need.
You're looking to protect some hours here.
Will this hurt you?
Well, if they go to five-day delivery, you're looking at anywhere from 50 to 80,000 jobs being cut.
Do you work six days or do some people work Tuesday through Saturday, others Monday through Friday?
Well, we get rotating days off.
So like one week I'll work Tuesday through Saturday.
Gotcha.
The next week I'll work on Monday and then Wednesday through the next one.
So rotate.
Gotcha.
Well, two things, Wayne.
Number one, thanks for the show.
Thanks for your service to the good people up there in Lubbock.
I'm a huge fan of letter carries and God bless you.
And thanks for giving voice to what I was talking about.
We can sit around all day and go, oh, five days, that's fine.
Some folks are going to lose some hours here.
And that's sometimes a byproduct of changes that people need to make in the face of some harsh economic reality, of which they have plenty at the United States Postal Service.
All righty, Mark Davis in for Rush, back with more of your calls next.
Thank you, thank you.
Home stretch half hour.
After this half hour, we are done.
You're done.
I'm done.
We're done with each other.
At least until the next time they go, they keep calling.
I'll keep showing up.
It's an honor, and I know Brother Stein shares me in this, an honor to fill in here on the EIB Network for Rush.
And it'll be a thrill to have him back tomorrow, where I'm sure we will be regaled with stories of where he's been and what he's done.
I, for one, look forward to that and to every other proper vestige of listening to a Rush Limbaugh show actually hosted by Rush.
In the meantime, thanks for hanging out and tolerating me.
It is time to head to some more of your calls here at 1-800-282-2882 for just joining us talking about a wide variety of things.
Of course, the narratives of the slander of Tea Party people by the left, Obamacare observations, always welcome.
Prospects for 2010 and 2012, always a handy well for topical material.
But the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Hospital saying, if you smoke, you can't work for us.
Oh, one thing I promised I didn't get into.
So let me do this before we go to your calls.
If you are driving right now, well, enjoy it while you can.
I don't want to understate or overstate what these people are trying to do, but this was just weird.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has announced that federal transportation policies will no longer favor motorized transportation, in other words, your car, your truck, over non-motorized transportation.
Bikers and people walk, bicyclists and people walking.
What?
It's the end of the era, the end of favoring motorized transportation.
All right.
Ray LaHood, Transportation Secretary, signed this new policy directive about three weeks ago, the same day he attended a congressional reception for the National Bike Summit, a convention sponsored by a bicycling advocacy group, the League of American Bicyclists.
Good for them.
Love bikers.
Good for that.
What's the term?
Bicyclist, right?
Because bikers is a kind of Harley, right?
Anyway, so bicyclists, love them.
There should be more of them.
I should be more of one.
You should be more of one.
It's healthy.
It's great.
Now, talk about talk show fodder for the lazy host.
Plug into that show like, hey, motorists, what do you think of those bicyclists?
And then just watch the phones go insane.
Yes, there are.
I need none of that, by the way.
Thank you.
Of course, there are issues.
I've got a big old car.
You're on a spindly something or other.
And you need to be aware of me.
I need to be aware of you.
I get it.
But policy matters are another deal.
Ray LaHood writes, Today I want to announce a sea change.
People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning.
This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.
What in heaven's name does that mean?
Well, it envisions the CNS News has a little summary of this.
LaHood's policy statement envisions the development of a transportation system in which people walk and bike for short distances and then rely on mass transit for longer trips.
Really?
And again, I like walking.
I like biking.
I've been in places that had good public transportation.
I'm kind of a subway dork.
I like subway systems.
Don't tell me I've got to ride it.
If I can drive there and I need to drive there, I won't drive there.
Walking and bicycling are efficient transportation modes, he says, for most short trips.
And where convenient intermodal systems exist, these non-motorized trips can easily be linked with transit to significantly increase trip distance.
Okay, here's where we settle everything.
Everybody do what you want.
How about that?
I know it's radical, it's hateful.
I'm probably joining a militia at this point.
Everybody do what you want.
And once we have, once we see the behaviors of everybody walking that wants to walk from whatever point A to whatever point B they wish, everyone bicycling from wherever they are to wherever they want to go, and everybody, God forbid, getting in their cars and driving, you know what you'll have a portrait of?
You'll have a portrait of everyone in an atmosphere of liberty making choices they wish to make.
It is from that That our nation, our states, and our cities should evaluate what our transportation needs are.
That's let people do what they want to do first and then accommodate what people want to do.
Yeesh.
Okay, so there's that.
1-800-282-2882.
We are in Clearwater, Florida.
Dennis Mark Davis in for Rush.
How are you?
Hi, I'm fine.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thank you.
I was just thinking about the fact of the story about the bullying incident and nine kids or people being charged, and it's a tragic story.
A girl lost her life.
But I'm getting the opinion that this government of ours is trying to bully us as individual citizens.
We've got Henry Waxman summoning these people into Washington, challenging them because they expressed their opinion about this crazy cost of this healthcare fiasco.
And it's like we're trying to be intimidated because we disagree, and we simply want to exercise our basic right to express our opinions just because we don't agree with most of what's going on in Washington.
And I think it's wrong.
Maybe one of the most uncomfortable juxtapositions of news stories in my history of guest hosting.
But if we leave the sad story of Phoebe Prince over here and let that be where it is, and God rest her soul, absent that, if you'd have called and said, does this seem like bullying in a general sense?
Yeah, it does.
And that's what one-party rule will sometimes do for you.
But you know, I'd like to think that if Republicans ran everything, let me just pause and dream for a moment, or as I like to call it, 2013, that we wouldn't be jamming stuff down people's throats.
I mean, that's the whole point.
We're the people that want, supposedly, when Republicans are conservative, what are we?
We're the people who want to do less for you so that you can do more for yourself.
And I pray that if and when we get this opportunity again, that the things that we offer are things we think people actually want.
More freedom, more liberty, more personal responsibility, less government, lower taxes.
And when we bring those about, I hope that the public reaction to them is, wow, my buddy Dennis Prager is right.
The larger the government, the smaller the citizen.
And so government getting its boot off my neck gives me opportunities and avenues I didn't have before.
I hope that's the way it works out anyway.
And quickly, there's no fair imbalance at all.
My wife and I attended the 9-12 project in Washington, D.C., and we were standing with a sign, and it said, no Obama MD, which said master of deceit, not medical doctor.
And I got interviewed by a CBS camera crew, and the guy came up with the microphone and the camera crew.
And I had never protested anything.
I'm 64 years old.
I'm not quite retired, if you will.
Never protested, served in the Army and all that.
My community is a volunteer fireman.
And we were just incensed at what was going on, my wife and I.
So we traveled on a bus to Washington.
They never aired what we told them, which was simply that we wanted accountability.
We wanted them to fix Social Security and Medicare before they got into this health care fiasco.
And none of it was ever on the air.
Well, I mean, well, I mean, we'd all, if we have a camera in our face, we'd all like to be on TV that night.
But I obviously watched a bunch of the coverage that night.
And while some of it seemed to be like reporters stepping onto the surface of Mars to interview the locals, I certainly saw some snippets from those who got their point in a 10-second soundbite.
I mean, so maybe it wasn't you, but it was a kindred spirit.
We're not intimidated.
We're going to be August 28th with Glenn Beck at Washington this next coming summer.
Well, and every single time, and here come a bunch of things, April 15th for tax day.
And every single, there are two things that will happen at every single one of these.
Camera crews will arrive as if they are interviewing the natives on a desert island, and someone will grotesquely underestimate the number of people who are there.
So thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
I think the award, does Frederica Whitfield at the CNN get the award for that?
Because out in Searchlight, Nevada, right?
And there's Sarah Palin and others at the Big Tea Party Express event.
I think at one point, and it was some number of thousands in the low tens of thousands or something, I said, well, whatever.
And bless Frederica.
There are dozens, maybe hundreds of people out there.
Hey, thanks a lot for that.
Okay, here's some numbers that are true.
The phone number to this show, 1-800-282-2882, and a statement that is provably true.
Mark Davis, Info Rush, and back in a moment.
It is the Rush Limbaugh Show for a Wednesday.
Tomorrow will be the Rush Limbaugh Show for a Thursday.
The difference is he'll be here for it.
Rush returns with stories of where he's been and what he's been up to.
Mark Davis, filling in from WBAP Dallas, Fort Worth.
It's been great.
Room for a few more of you here on the phone at 1-800-282-2882.
I started the show with a bit of a rant or two about the ongoing slander of conservatives, you know, Tea Party folks, 9-12 folks, people who like the Constitution, you know, heaven forbid, and how we're all being branded as David Duke starter kits.
And I shared my column from the Dallas Morning News and told you where to go to go get it.
But here's an easier way to go get it.
And that is, I'm so grateful.
Thanks for letting me plug this every time I'm here.
Follow me in the world of Twitter if you want to.
Mark Davis, all one word, M-A-R-K-D-A-V-I-S, Mark Davis, all one word.
I just stuck it up on the Twitter page.
It just says, I will not be insulted.
And then offers you the link.
So there you go.
Mark Davis, all one word, in the world of Twitter.
All righty.
In the world of Rush Limbaugh Show, phone calls is 1-800-282-2882.
Let us head to Charleston, South Carolina.
Susan, hi.
Mark Davis, Infor Rush.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
I actually was calling because I have no problem with the smoking ban at the hospital, but for a different reason than they're actually doing it.
I myself am not a smoker, but my husband just recently quit smoking.
Now, I find it offensive every single time I go to the hospital or a doctor's appointment.
They ask me if I smoke, if I smoke around my kids, and they lecture me on the dangers of smoking.
Meanwhile, 10 minutes after my appointment's over, I leave the hospital and I see the same doctor that lectured me outside smoking.
If nothing else.
It's not for me.
Why isn't it good enough for him?
It prevents hypocrisy.
Yeah, I think that's where most folks are going to come down, Susan.
I think that most folks are that a lot of us think that our employers, that what we do when we're away from work is not our employer's business.
And in majority of ways, I don't think that it is.
But if it's something.
And if you want to smoke, if you want to waste your money, if you don't think it's a waste, you want to spend your money on that, more power to you.
But don't lecture me about the dangers of smoking if you're going to sit there and do it.
Well, let me ask you this.
If they're trying to prevent the imagery of the doctor who just told you not to smoke out back puffing on a lucky, they can prevent that by simply saying you can't smoke here.
This Bethlehem, Pennsylvania story is about St. Luke's Hospital and Health Network saying, you can't smoke on your back patio at home because we're going, well, new employees, they're going to screen them for nicotine.
Is that a bit much?
It is, and it isn't.
I mean, I can understand them doing that because, you know, if you're going to sit there and lecture people on their health, you should be living that proper lifestyle as well.
And whether you're visible out in the break room or not.
It's a principle thing.
Susan, thank you.
You appreciate it.
The statement from, pardon me, the statement from the hospital, their senior VP of HR, Bob Zimmel, we decided as an organization, the right thing to do for us is to screen these applicants.
And if they test positive for nicotine, they will not be eligible for hire at that point in time.
So apparently, they're not shutting down the existing smokers rioting in the hallways of this hospital.
Interesting.
Interesting.
This all starts on the 1st of May.
All right, we also talked about five-day.
We're always in touch with what government does for us and what they don't do for us and what's a better way to do something or whatever.
Postal Service moving toward five-day delivery.
Retired carrier Vic joins us from his cell phone in Missouri.
How are you, sir?
Mark Davis in for Rush.
How are you doing?
I'm just fine, Mark, and I trust you are the same.
You bet.
I think the time has long passed to discontinue Saturday delivery.
And moreover, more importantly, I think it's time for privatization, probably.
Post office, the mail delivery has undergone a gamut of changes.
No doubt.
No doubt.
But if we go to the end, listen, where you're preaching to the converted totally, except let's talk about one thing in the roughly minute that we have because I'm privatization.
Love it.
It's a song I'll sing all day.
Is any private company going to be interested in taking my letter from my house in Texas to somebody else's house in Idaho for 40-some cents?
May not do it for 40-some cents, but somebody will do it.
Well, I know, but if the opposition will keep the price reasonable, somebody is taking fuel from Texas to Missouri as an example.
They're doing it because we need it, and we use it.
Same thing with delivering mail.
Somebody would do it.
There was a time when your ancestors in Texas and mine in North Dakota had to go to town to get the mail.
And I don't exactly view that nostalgically.
I don't either.
I do remember the air mail stamp, however.
Yeah, indeed.
I mean, you are right.
I mean, if you tell me the marketplace will take care of it, I know that you're right.
What will that look like?
Will we have three companies offering to do it?
Okay, the letter that'll now go from Texas to North Dakota, what, was it 42 cents now?
I got the forever stamps.
I don't even know what postage is right now.
Maybe there are three companies that'll do it, and they'll all do it for roughly a buck and a half.
And then one company will say, tell you what, let's go for a buck $20.
And then another one will go, how about a buck $10?
Okay, how about a buck?
How about would it ever get down to 40-some?
Maybe not.
And if so, maybe that's what it costs to do this.
Okay, Mark Davis in for us.
Oh, I got to scoot.
I'm criminally late.
I'm sorry.
Mark Davis in for us.
Be right back.
Don't move.
All righty, let's mosh on out the door, shall we?
It is the Wednesday Rush Limbaugh show about to come to an end.
Giving way to the Thursday Rush Limbaugh show, for which Rush is in the chair and back tomorrow to the glee of all involved.
Just to bring things full circle a little bit, because it started out today's show, spent a lot of time talking about the slander, the ginned-up imagery of hate that doesn't exist and hateful acts that don't exist and criminal activity that doesn't exist.
Now, the Hatari, that apparently exists.
The occasional abortion clinic bomber, that exists.
And there are people who have, from criminal behavior to outlandish, insulting behavior on the left, we've got our, we all have our fringes and our misbehaviors.
But to the Frank Riches and the various other columnists who find hate in every Tea Party rally, the only hate you're going to find in those places is a hatred of an America gone astray.
And you're going to find constructive ideas on how to make that better.
Agree with them or disagree with them, but stop mischaracterizing them.
Just cut it out.
Cut it out.
Mark Davison for us.
Thanks, everybody.
Have a fantastic day.
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