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April 7, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
April 7, 2010, Wednesday, Hour #2
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No sooner do I ask, how long is it going to take for the media to start blaming the regime and Obama for the mine disaster in West Virginia than I come across a blog that says the mining company CEO is a Tea Party guy!
They're blaming the Tea Party.
The left is already blaming the Tea Party.
They're blaming, CBS is blaming global warming for the disaster.
And others are blaming capitalism.
The quest for profit is the reason for these mining disasters.
Or this one.
This one, of course.
Greetings, folks, and welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh.
Glad to have you here at 800-282-2882.
Email address, lrushbo at EIBnet.com.
I found this at a blog called JE Deckert or JedEckert.com.
I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
And the blogger says, apparently the left will stoop to any level in order to make a cheap political point with a horrible accident ongoing and the fates of some miners still not known.
The propagandists have already begun linking the West Virginia mining disaster to Tea Party's global warming and capitalism.
At Crooks and Liars, they're the ones that are putting out the notion that this guy Blankenship, by the way, he's committed another crime too.
He's on the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce.
Yeah, that's reported as though that's a strike against him.
Oh, yeah, he's one of those guys, Chamber of Commerce guys.
That means he's for big profit at the expense of the working man.
And they claim that he has been involved with the Tea Party movement, and there's no evidence.
CBS News bashes the mine owner for denying man-made global warming.
The Associated Press, big profits linked to deaths.
Salon headline, how to connect mining disasters and climate change.
This is perfectly understandable.
It's every event, every catastrophe is somehow linked to an agenda item of the regimes.
There's no rest.
There's not a moment's rest that we can take.
As I was saying before I got distracted on a dog story last hour, I was up very late last night, and I don't remember even who I was chatting with.
I have four or five different chats going on, and whoever it was asked me, hey, by the way, what do you think of Obama targeting this cleric over in Yemen with a drone attack?
What do you think of that?
And I said, well, that's an easy call for Obama.
This guy's an American.
Easy to wipe him out.
So I get up today and I read this piece by Andy McCarthy, National Review online, Obama OK's targeted assassination of Owlaki, a U.S. citizen.
This is a guy that, the Imam that counseled the Fort Hood shooter and some of the 9-11 hijackers.
This is obviously the right call, McCarthy says.
We are at war against al-Qaeda, not Islamic extremists, radicals, under an authorization from Congress and war.
Al-Alwaki, a purportedly American-born Islamic cleric who is now operating in Yemen, probably directed the would-be Christmas bomber believed to be orchestrating and recruiting for violent jihad operations against the U.S.
The president is the commander-in-chief with primacy on questions regarding the conduct of war.
Even if we were to accept for argument's sake that an issue is a legal rather than a political judgment, Supreme Court precedent holds that American citizens who fight for the enemy in wartime may be treated as enemy combatants just like aliens.
So, exactly what I said.
Easy call.
The guy's an American.
So, of course, we can wipe him out.
The only reason for calling attention to Obama's targeting of this guy is its demonstration of the illogic of the left's position on treatment of the enemy.
According to the report, a U.S. regime official told Reuters, Olaki is a proven threat and therefore somebody who could properly be targeted for killing.
But by leftist standards, including those urged by Attorney General Eric Holder when he was in private practice, Olaki is most certainly not a proven threat.
He hasn't been convicted in a court of law.
This administration says they haven't done anything until we've convicted him.
Well, this guy hadn't even been charged.
This guy hasn't even read his Miranda rights, and we're going to kill him.
And yet, the guy and his henchmen who blew up the World Trade Center are going to get a civil trial.
Originally, it was going to be in New York City at $200 a year for security costs.
So you tell me, if you're outraged because I said, oh, this is an easy call for the regime, this guy's an American.
Well, American citizens who fight for the enemy may be treated as enemy combatants.
Bamo.
So you send the drone over there and you wipe the guy out.
But if he's not an American, well, you got to memorandize him.
You got to charge him.
And you have to give him a trial in court.
As McCarthy writes, here's the regime's position.
If an alien enemy combatant, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mass murders 3,000 Americans, is then captured outside the U.S. in wartime, we need to bring him here and give him a civilian trial with all attendant due process rights.
If an alien enemy combatant is sending emails from outside the U.S. to an al-Qaeda cell inside the country, the Commander-in-Chief needs a judge's permission on a showing of probable cause to intercept those communications.
If an American terrorist, American citizen terrorist outside the U.S., say Olaki in Yemen, is calling or emailing the U.S. or anyplace else, the commander-in-chief needs a judge's permission to intercept those communications.
If we capture an alien enemy combatant conducting war operations against the U.S. overseas, we have to give him Miranda warnings, a judicial right to challenge his detention as a war prisoner, and quite likely a civilian trial.
But, according to the regime now, if the commander-in-chief decides to short-circuit the whole menu of civil rights by killing an American citizen, that's fine.
No due process, no interference by a judge, no Miranda, no nothing.
He's a proven threat because, wait for it, the regime says so.
Now, interestingly, McCarthy says, this is the way we ought to be doing it with all these guys.
So he is begrudgingly giving the regime credit here, while at the same time pointing out the hypocrisy of it all.
New York Times has the story.
The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar El Olaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the U.S. to directly participating in them, say intelligence and counterterrorism officials in the regime.
So that's the story.
That's the backstory to it all.
And so, yeah, kill him.
He's an American.
No problem.
What the law says we can do.
So he's not a native Muslim, you see.
He was born in America, but he's not a Muslim out there.
He became a Muslim when he left the country, supposedly.
I don't know what that's the reasoning.
But nevertheless, I wonder, does Alan Greenspan, has he figured out that he's got no place in the future in this regime?
Because There are hearings going on, a super blue ribbon panel looking into the housing boom, and he told them the truth yesterday.
Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan chastised the critics.
It actually did this this morning by pointing out that Congress pushed the Federal Reserve to make sure lending to poorer Americans kept rising in the 2000s.
In other words, Greenspan told these investigators today, look at Congress, meaning Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and a whole bunch of others, told us to keep the subprime loan process going.
In fact, they told us to ratchet it up.
Greenspan actually told the truth about this whole problem.
You know what happens to people inside Washington who tell the truth about the regime.
This is not good.
He said if the Fed as a regulator had tried to thwart what everybody perceived as a fairly broad consensus that the trend was in the right direction, homeownership was rising, and that was an unmitigated good, then Congress would have clamped down on us.
But they didn't.
There's a presumption here the Fed's an independent agency.
It is up to a point.
But we are a creature of the Congress.
And if we had said we're running into a bubble and we need to retrench and stop this, they would have said we haven't a clue what you're talking about.
He's saying Congress doesn't listen to us anyway.
They do what they're going to do.
So there he is.
What we all know, he just laid this at the feet of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
It's El Rushball with a brief obscene profit break.
Be right back, folks.
Well, it's come to this.
The Los Angeles mayor, Antonio Villarragosa, announced that all city departments except the cops, public safety, and those that make money, I wonder which ones those are, must close two days a week because of the city's budget crisis.
They're out of cash.
On Monday, City Controller Wendy Gruhl warned, we told you about this, that Los Angeles will be unable to pay employees or vendors within a month.
She urged the city to transfer $90 million from its reserves.
City's financial crisis worsened this week after the Department of Water and Power failed to make a $73 million payment to the city.
The agency says it needs to raise rates significantly to make such a what in the hell has gone on out there?
My God, folks, this state is an utter fiscal disaster.
The utility can't pay the 7.
I guarantee you, nobody's not paying the utility.
If somebody's not paying the utility, they're getting cut off.
What's the utility doing with the money that people are paying them?
There's also a story in the stack today that three California pensions are underfunded by a total of $550 billion.
That is over a half a trillion.
The personal employee retirement, the public employee retirement system, in hockey, the pension.
This is the pension and health care.
They don't have the money.
The state teachers retirement retirement system, so it's PERS and STURS.
And there's one other, $550 trillion underfunded in the pensions.
Now, those people that are public teachers and public employees have been contributing to this.
They have directors that oversee both of these agencies to invest and grow the funds in the pension plan.
What the hell has been going on?
Schwarzenegger ordered this review because he wanted to find out what it was all about.
It's worse than anybody imagined.
Somebody at Stanford University did the research, did the study.
$550 trillion.
The city of LA shutting a billion, yeah.
Half a trillion.
City of L.A. shutting down two days a week?
The utility in arrears for $73 million to the city?
And I bet this is only the tip of the iceberg.
When you look at the whole state's fiscal situation, good.
Has the whole thing been a house of cards?
Has ever since the left took over and been running that state, has everything been phony?
Have they just been spending money left and right on all their union buddies when their money has never been there in the first place?
That has to have been what's happened.
It's just like what's happening in Washington now.
We don't have any of the money we're spending.
We don't have any money to build schools in Islamic radical Muslim countries.
We don't have money to give them health care.
We don't have money to start building roads and bridges.
We don't even have the money to do it in our country.
The whole state of California must be a house of cards.
Well, I tell you what, I hope you don't have any L.A. municipal bonds, folks.
Nothing's worth anything out there.
Nothing's real.
$550 billion underfunded pension plan.
And these are great and courageous union workers.
Thirdly, the official program observer has a question.
Who else do you think is going to start?
He wants to know if we have to pay for it eventually.
Yeah, I'll tell you what's going to happen.
And I'll tell you why I think some of this is by design.
As we have to bail out the states, as the federal government has to bail out the states, what does that mean?
It means that local control has failed.
This whole process is going to enrich and further expand the already over-the-top, unacceptable power of the federal government.
When we start bailing out states, and that's the only thing we can do here, with money we don't have, now your great-grandchildren's taxes are being spent.
That means that whoever is in charge of the federal government when it happens is, look, you people in California have proven that you can't run the show.
We're going to take it over.
Now, you're still going to have a governor and you're still going to have this, but you want to do anything, you got to get us to sign off on it.
Meanwhile, the federal government is becoming more and more and more unpopular, yet it is amassing all of this power.
And the regime stands to expand itself even further if we have to start bailing out states like California.
I'm going to put this $550 billion in perspective.
I need to find the story.
I'll do that in a break.
But I want to go grab a couple of phone calls here.
We'll start in Sandy Springs, California.
And Mark, great to have you here, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, that's Sandy Springs, Georgia.
You're right.
We have an antiquated, I mean, the font on this thing is like 1988.
You know, like those green screen computers used to be.
And so I'm sorry.
I knew there wasn't a Sandy Spring, California.
No problem.
But the great thing about Sandy Springs is we created this city a few years ago and privatized everything.
So all our public employees are private contracted employees.
We don't have pension problems.
So we're not going to have the problems they have out in California.
What's the population of Sandy Springs?
It's about 90,000.
Really?
You've got a privatized city that big.
That's right.
We are a model.
Did you build from scratch or did you secede from Atlanta?
We seceded from Atlanta.
That is correct.
After 30 years of fighting, we remember this.
Yes.
And we had calls from people in your yet-to-be-named town on this program.
I remember that.
Well, it's been very successful so far, and I expect it to just keep getting better.
Are you accepting new residents?
Sure.
You are.
You say you got good health care there.
I'm sorry.
We got some of the best hospitals in the country here.
Yeah.
Well, I didn't have to fly all the way to Hell's Half Acre to try.
It's right there in Sandy Springs, Georgia.
That's correct.
But, Rush, I wanted to talk about our Treasury clown, Geithner, going out through Asia with hat in hand, begging the Indians and the Chinese and wherever else he's going to buy our debt.
I don't think people really can conceive exactly how much $1.5 trillion is, and that's what our deficit is projected to be this year.
And we're issuing $75, $100 billion of new debt every week.
And after a couple of bad auctions, all of a sudden he's off to Asia and China, you know, begging them to buy our debt.
If they don't keep buying our debt, this country, I mean, you keep saying we don't have any money.
We don't have any money.
They are our bankers.
They're the ones who are providing us with the money to pay our troops, to pay our bills, to build our roads, to do whatever it is the government does.
And if they stop buying our debt, treasuries are going to get hammered, and it's going to be Jimmy Carter years all over again this time on steroids.
And that's just going to lead to massive tax increases.
Even Volcker was out there yesterday saying we need a VAT tax, an energy tax.
We've got to do something about these deficits.
But they're not going to do anything about these deficits.
Because the problem with the deficits is not taxation and insufficient taxation.
The problem with the deficits is out of control spending by the regime.
Right.
And they're not going to do anything about it.
It's just going to be worse.
And as you say over and over again, it's got to be by design.
And one more point I'd like to make.
You know, I'm all breaking up these big banks and stuff, but the mainstream media line is that Wall Street took over Washington.
That's wrong.
Washington took over Wall Street.
And now they're using Wall Street to take over Main Street.
Exactly right.
Excellent timing.
Great call from Mark and Georgia.
All right, let's put this in perspective out there.
$535 billion shortfall in the state pension plans at the state public employees' retirement system, the state teachers' retirement system, and one other.
$535 billion is more than the gross domestic product of either Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Switzerland, or Poland.
Saudi Arabia, an oil giant, 530, I thought every sheikh had $535 billion, but they don't.
$535 billion, unfunded, underfunded pension.
How does this happen?
And also on a related story, the pension plans at Obama Motors and Chrysler are underfunded by a total of $17 billion and could fail if the automakers don't return to profitability.
And they aren't.
Obama Motors reported a first quarter loss of $4.3 billion.
Now, what the hell was the bailout if not to protect these pension plans?
Wasn't the bailout of GM and Chrysler essentially to make sure that the union's health care plans stayed intact?
What'd they do?
Forget to fund the pensions?
They bailed out these companies for what, $25 or $50 billion.
There's still $17 billion underfunded in the pensions.
Now, back to California.
$535 billion.
It was never real.
It could never have been real.
The money supply in California could never have been real.
They were priving money that, well, they can't print it.
We're spending money they never had.
It's almost like the House Bank.
Back in the old days in the late 80s, didn't matter what your House banks or your salary was.
You could write a check for unlimited amount on your account and never get an overdraft notice.
And it sounds like this is the way the libs in California have been running the state.
How come?
How come these state pension plans, which include health care, are so expensive, and yet the federal health care system is going to be so cheap?
How can the two be in the same sentence?
Oh, yeah, we're going to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars with Obamacare.
Yeah, right.
And yet just the public employees and the state teachers in California pension underfunded $535 billion.
Now, the truth of the matter is, nobody's going to notice if L.A. closes its offices for two days a week.
They're only going to shut down non-essential people, right?
If they're not essential, why are they there in the first place?
Remember when they closed the government because of snowstorms a bunch of times in Washington?
240,000 non-essential people were told don't show up, including Congress.
If they're non-essential, why do you employ them?
Now, they are going to have a problem.
There will be people that will notice L.A. shut down for two weeks.
And that'll be the poor who line up for their benefits, and they're going to be lining up in front of closed offices.
Remember the Rodney King riots?
You remember there was a line that they were using in the state-controlled media after the Rodney King riots.
They called the people standing in line for their welfare checks an example of the indomitable human spirit.
Well, the poor get their checks for a direct deposit now?
Well, what if you don't have a bank?
Everywhere, even if you don't have a bank, they start a bank.
Well, look, I'm just going to tell you something.
I don't, snergly, if you're telling me that people don't line up in welfare offices all over the country, they do.
And that's who's going to notice it when LA shuts down for two days a week.
Otherwise, nobody will.
Now, wait till these health care mandates kick in in California.
I mean, if you think it's bad now, wait till the Obama health care mandates kick in out there because the states are going to have to pick up because of the health care bill.
The states are going to have to pick up an ever-increasing share of Medicaid and Medicare.
All right, back to the phones.
People have been waiting patiently.
East Lansing, Michigan, this is Kurt.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
How are you doing, Rush?
Very well, sir.
Thank you.
As a student in the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, I think I figured out why they're targeting the American cleric in Yemen.
Tell me.
Well, if they arrest him and put him through a civilian trial and the terrorist act that he's associated with happened under Obama's watch, it would only embarrass Obama, wouldn't give them a chance to embarrass Bush.
Well, that's an interesting thought.
I have to give it.
This is what happens to you if you're a daily student here at the Limbaugh Institute.
The reason why we're not going to try this Olaki guy is because his testimony would rip into Obama, the regime.
Of course, they could handle that.
I mean, they could take care of that.
They could bring the guy in and they say, look, if you want a lighter sentence, you just do what all the others do and blame Bush.
Just do that.
And we'll look the other way at sentencing them.
I find it just hysterical that we even come up with these kind of theories to explain the regime.
But make no mistake.
I mean, I'm not being facetious.
I'm not even really being cynical.
The law says we can kill an American citizen who joins the enemy.
We can kill.
We can't do that with an enemy who did not leave America.
We have to give him trials.
Who's next?
Scott in Santa Cruz, California.
Great to have you, sir, with us on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
How are you?
Very well, sir.
Thank you for having me on the show.
You bet.
How is the Czech Republic?
How did you know?
Well, you gave us some hints, and I put two and two together and figured out where you went.
What were the hints?
Well, you told us how far you were flying out and back, and you told us you were looking for health care.
And from my personal experiences, I know that the Czech Republic offers affordable health care for foreign customers.
And I did a little math and figured out how far you could get with that amount of flying time.
And, well, it just lined up.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Here we are.
You compute the flying time, but at what speed?
Well, airliners all fly at about the same speed.
It varies a little bit because of headwind or tailwind going across the Atlantic.
And you specified that your flight time out was actually shorter than your flight time back, which works out perfectly with going across the Atlantic as opposed to going west.
Yeah.
You're a smart guy.
Well, thank you.
I've studied physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and I know that you've...
They actually taught you physics?
Yeah, actually.
It's a very good program.
And I wouldn't say that for every program that they have, but the physics program is actually very good.
That's shocking.
That is shocking.
Well, the way you've calculated this is brilliant.
So, personally, I've been trying to start a family for five years with no luck and found that the cost of in vitro fertilization in this country is incredibly high.
And my insurance, which I pay over $500 a month for, just for myself, I might add, won't cover a dime of it.
So part of the reason that I knew about the Czech Republic is because that's where my wife has been going for our infertility treatments.
No kidding.
It's cheaper there than it is here.
Much.
For one cycle of in vitro fertilization at my local clinic here in Santa Cruz, or actually San Jose, if you want to be specific where the clinic is, $30,000.
Czech Republic, including flying there, staying at a hotel, the whole shebang cost me about $10,000.
Wow.
That's amazing.
The Czech Republic is actually a really bright spot on the globe, politically, ideologically, it really is.
But I didn't know that in vitro was that expensive here or that cheap over there.
I had no clue.
They don't tell you that at the breast center.
Now, Mark Stein, who was filling in for you, talked a lot about your trip, and I was a little surprised that you didn't fill us in when you got back on Friday.
He also said that whoever figured out who, sorry, whoever figured out where you went would get to be a guest on your show.
No, no, no.
That's not what he said.
And even if he had said it, if I don't say it, it doesn't have any credibility or weight whatsoever.
This show doesn't happen.
But you have, look at, you've gotten more time than most guests, well, we rarely have them, get anyway.
I'll get myself out to Florida.
Give me a shot, Rush.
I'm not going to hold you to what Mark said at all, but, you know, give me a shot.
Oh, geez.
You know, let's do this one, okay?
You talk about poor science.
Well, I'm a scientist, and guess what?
I don't agree with the global warming consensus.
Well, that certainly qualifies.
Global warming.
That certainly qualifies you.
But I don't want you to take this personally.
I really don't want you to take this personally.
But I often say that don't try this at home.
Don't try.
The great make everything they do look easy.
And one of the ways to offend the great is for people that can't do it to assume it's easy.
Now, you have not offended me, but you have to understand that I have a tremendous amount of respect for the audience and for the program.
And I'm only going to put seasoned broadcast veterans on the air who've had a lot of experience at it as guest hosts.
There's too much at stake here to run auditions on this.
That's what small radio stations are for.
I appreciate your spirit, and I appreciate your willingness to ask for what you want.
You might, the cable news networks, a few of them serve the same purpose as small radio stations, proving grounds.
Most people never get out of them, but some do and escape the surly bonds and the greatness.
Anyway, we're a little long here.
Got to take a brief time out.
Don't go away.
By the way, about the underfunded pension plans at Cal PERRS and Cal Sturrs, do you know who's liable for that?
Who do you think is liable?
Meaning, who do you think has to make up the shortfall?
The taxpayers of the state of California.
And that $535 billion, do you think that's been added to the state's deficit?
And if we have to bail that state out, and this is just one state, New York is almost in as bad a shape as California is in.
Now, I can see the day we're coming where we have to bail out or partially bail out some of these states, and that's just going to expand the reach and the power of the regime in Washington.
Pure and simple.
Now, I checked email during the break.
Some of you think I was rude to the last caller who wanted a shot at guest hosting the program.
Ladies and gentlemen, that wasn't rude.
I'm just speaking straight up.
I mean, having somebody with zero experience asking to host the most listened-to media presentation in the country.
I mean, that would be just like some unskilled, unexperienced person wanting to be president.
And look where that got us.
I refuse to do to this show, what Obama has done to this country.
No way, shape, manner, or form.
By the way, we, the taxpayers, the United States government, we are all liable for the underfunded pensions at Obama Motors and Chrysler.
It's on us.
Of course, everything the federal government does is on us.
They don't have any money until they private or tax it or confiscate it from us.
Now, to show you just how, I mean, literally insane some people on the left are.
Or if not insane, we're not even on the same planet.
I want you to listen to the first two paragraphs of a recent column by Hurricane Katrina Vandenhoe in the nation.
The challenge for progressives and Democrats in these turbulent times is how to consistently and clearly explain the real causes of our current economic condition.
One problem is that we live in a center-left country with a center-right media that consistently misinforms people about the perils of debt, deficits, and tax increases, and purveys misinformation about a good but modest health care bill that right-wing talk radio, Tea Partiers, and Republicans would have Americans believe is a socialist power grab.
Center-left country with a center-right media that consistently misinforms people about the peril of debt, deficits, and tax increases.
So let's go to the audio sound bites.
This is Chris Matthews last night on Hardball, and he had the Washington Bureau Chief of the magazine Mother Jones on there.
Her name is David Korn.
So keep in mind what Katrina Vandenhoevel just said, and listen to Matthews here.
The problem is that we don't think in terms of what would the country would be like if we didn't have Medicare for our parents as they get very old, in their 80s, for example, and they're still alive, and they need health care, a lot of it, and they don't have any source of income.
They're not working every morning.
They're not making a paycheck.
What would it be like in this country?
Calcutta, poor people all over the place, old people lying in the streets.
I mean, we don't think about what it would be if we didn't have health care, if we didn't have Social Security for people at the age of 65, if we didn't have unemployment compensation, if we didn't have a progressive income tax.
There's a lot of things we don't think about.
And the right-wing just pounds and pounds away at this idealistic notion of a cowboy country where everybody's self-reliant.
I think the progressives, for all their power on their blogosphere, have not done a positive case for the advantages of some kind of social state.
Well, Obama hasn't either.
So there you have it.
Matthew is admitting for all who watch MSNBC, of course, a much wider audience he's reaching now with his soundbite, that They haven't, they have a good enough job, they haven't been doing a good enough job explaining the social state, the positive case for the advantages of some kind of social state.
Chris, I talk to you a lot on this program.
Let me explain to you why.
It's not that they haven't done a good job, it's that they don't dare be honest that that's what they're doing.
If they had run the election on all the wonderful social schemes that you just described here, Obama wouldn't have gotten 30% of the vote.
If he had said, we're going to socialize health care so that we don't look like Calcutta, and we're going to expand on all these other programs that have made people dependent on the state, and we're going to tax further the people who stupidly continue to work to pay for all this, he wouldn't have gotten 30% of the votes.
You people on the left who run for office have to lie through your teeth about what your plans are.
You go back and you look at what Obama was projecting and promising versus what we're getting, and you'll see my point.
You know, something just occurred to me.
I got cited by the town of Pound Beach for having too many lights on.
I got told to turn four of my outdoor sconsons off, and yet a turtle, which is supposed to be distracted by and go the wrong way when they see light, nevertheless showed up on my beach right by my house and laid an egg or built a nest when my lights were on.
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