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Aug. 30, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
August 30, 2010, Monday, Hour #2
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In my first hour, I talked about the remarkable phenomenon going on of conservatives suddenly organizing, rallying, showing up at meetings, the likely Republican landslide coming this fall, and what's producing all of it.
The Democrats' explanation is that it's a huge wave of hate sweeping across America.
That be it Rush or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity or any of us where talk show hosts, if anybody's listening, why it's obviously because they're a nation of bigots.
We're objecting to the Obama agenda because we resent there being a black president.
This is the line they're offering because they can't bring themselves to the obvious conclusion that what's happening here is opposition to what they are doing.
You have to at least give President Obama credit for this.
He's not pulling his lefty punches.
He's done the things that he believes in.
He thought he could create millions of American jobs by carpet bombing America with stimulus money that he dumped on government.
He believes that the government should run health care.
He believes that the way to have Iran not develop a nuclear weapon is to extend a hand in friendship.
These are the things that he believes, and he's doing them.
The American people are objecting, and some are objecting strongly enough that they're willing to organize and go to meetings and go to rallies.
The American people don't like the fact that they're being told that views that they hold that come from their religion aren't legitimate.
They don't like being told that a federal judge can just snap his fingers and say we're going to have gay marriage.
They don't like a president coming in and pounding on a state that's facing significant problems with illegal immigration and trying to deal with it.
They don't like any of these things.
They're looking liberalism in the eye and they are rejecting it.
And for that reason, since the lefties can't possibly process this as something other than an illegitimate position, they're going to criticize the most outspoken of us.
They're going to criticize those of us who have forms, and they're going to rip into whatever movement that they see out there.
I quoted in the last hour a column today by Paul Krugman, the lefty of the New York Times.
It's going to be ugly if these Republicans actually get any power.
Why just listen to them?
It's so hateful, it's so divisive.
Well, what about the last eight years?
You want to talk about hate?
Look what President Bush was faced with.
Bush lied, people died.
Bush is an idiot, Bush is stupid, Bush can't pronounce this word correctly.
It was one pound after another after another after another.
And now they're worried that people who are showing up at a tea party or at the Glenn Beck rally over the weekend, that they're this terrible to going to be all of this hatred.
There's virtually no hate in any of this.
There's just Americans that are speaking out and expressing their point of view.
This is why the mosque issue is so big.
So many of the commentariat, the elitists, why I can't believe this would be a big deal.
All they want to do is put a mosque in Lower Manhattan, so it's close to ground zero, so what?
And after all, we have freedom of worship in this country, they have every right to do it.
The fact that people are objecting all over America, it's got to be because we're a nation of bigots.
That's not it.
Let me tell you why the mosque deal is a big deal.
It's not just because of the mosque at ground zero.
It's because people are fed up with being told they can't express their opinion on anything.
They're fed up with being forced to accept something that they think is wrong.
Most people don't think that that's the right place to put a mosque.
And we don't like the fact that a bunch of people high above, whether it be the editorial page of the New York Times or USA Today or President Obama are telling them why you have to put up with this.
We're sick and tired of being told the way we're supposed to think, and that we're bigots if we don't think that way.
This is what's creating the unity in the opposition.
The events that we've been talking about here, tea parties, people volunteering to work for political candidates, rallies, speeches, public events.
They have one thing in common.
They are uniting people Who finally find a way to express their point of view with the ratification of many others.
I know Rush has spoken as long as he's been doing his program about how he sees his role as merely ratifying the things that the audience hears.
Face it, before talk radio came around, if you had conservative viewpoints, you had no place to find them represented anywhere in the popular culture.
TV shows didn't reflect them, the movies didn't reflect them.
Dan Rather and Peter Jennings didn't reflect them.
Suddenly here came Rush and he said things that a lot of people agreed with.
Same thing happened with the rest of us that were doing conservative talk radio.
The audience embraced this because they finally found somebody saying what they believe.
Now the next step's been taken.
People are actually showing up at rallies.
They're attending events because they're finding other people like themselves.
They no longer feel as though there's something wrong with them for this point of view.
They realize that a lot of people have these beliefs.
The left can't handle this.
They're the ones that are filled with intolerance.
They're the ones that are divisive.
They're the ones that are saying that if we don't agree with the direction being taken in this country, that we should just shut up and go away because after all, we've got no right to dissent.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number at the Rush Limbaugh program.
Let's go now to Annapolis, Maryland, and Ralph.
Ralph, it's your turn on EIB.
All right.
You're on, Ralph.
Uh, Mark.
Yes.
This is Ralph in uh Annapolis, Maryland.
Thanks for taking my call.
Sure thing.
I was at the uh um Glenn uh Beck rally on uh Saturday, and I want to tell you it was uh one of the most uh spiritually moving events in in my life, and uh I cried like a baby a lot of the time, which I normally don't do.
Uh the reason I call it, I had two points to make.
Uh, and that's in how the mainstream media is portraying the event.
Um first of all, it's they're they're calling it a Tea Party event.
It had nothing to do with party.
It didn't have anything to do with a Tea Party.
I'm merely throwing it into that large group of events like this that I think all reflect people coming together that don't have the same point of view as the president and the media elite in this country.
You're right that it didn't have anything to do with the Tea Party, but it is all part, I think, of a general sense out there that people are coming together and they're willing to show up at things to respect to reflect their own points of view, whether it be religious, whether it be honor, which was the term that was used throughout the weekend, or be it overtly political.
I think it's all part of a larger thing that's going on in the country.
Right.
Um but it seems like the the liberal media that's commenting on it never listened to any of what was said there.
Um it was it was a a fundraiser for a scholarship program for fallen the children of fallen soldiers, and it was to restore faith in God and faith in America as the greatest country in the world, a country of giants.
And that's the message that uh Glenn was trying to do that.
But they don't care about what the message is of any of us.
Instead, they do what Krugman did in that piece, they'll find one comment that they find to be inflammatory, throw it out there, provide no context for it and say, see, it's a bunch of bigots.
They have no concern about what what's being said at all because they don't want to engage the debate.
It's their whole thing about their ex explanation as to why such a high percentage of Americans think that the president is a Muslim.
Why it's got to be because of this.
It's got to be because of that.
It can't be because of anything President Obama has said, it can't be because of his beliefs, it can't be because of anything else, it's got to be something based on hate.
That's the way they approach all of this stuff.
And I think every time they do it, they make people feel more determined than ever to say no.
I disagree with you.
Right.
The the other aspect that's infuriating me is they keep harping on the fact that most of the people who attended were white people.
Therefore, it had to be a racist rally.
To me, that doesn't speak the fact that uh most of the people there were white doesn't speak about the people who were there.
To me, what it speaks about is the people Who weren't there?
Well, I don't know if it does or it doesn't.
First of all, you know who's always counting on this?
The lefties.
They're the ones who all well, let's see how many women were there.
How many old people were there?
Were the running union people there?
Why they're mostly white.
The very people who say that we're supposed to move and wasn't that President Obama's message we were supposed to be beyond all of this?
That this was going to be a transracial presidency, that we're moving beyond all of these things, and here they are keeping count.
Why, if there's too many white people, if there's too many men, if there's too many of this, if there's too many that, obviously there's something wrong with the whole thing.
Who cares what the people there were?
What they are are American citizens who have the right to express their opinions.
In this case, it wasn't even all that political, but they've got to come up with some sort of way of delegitimizing it.
If we didn't have the impression that this year this election this year is going to be a repudiation of President Obama and liberalism, I don't think they'd be as concerned.
They consider this to be a bunch of cranks hanging on to the past.
They realize that there is a rejection of everything that the president has done and the entire agenda.
That's why they're so bothered by all of this.
The thing that got them angry about the event over the weekend wasn't whether or not it was spiritual or what the nature of it was.
It was the fact that a talk show host who is perceived to be a conservative is the guy who was hosting it.
If Rush was hosting the same event and it was for a scholarship fund, they would have ripped on that.
If another talk show host was doing it without regard to whether or not they're big, popular, or not well known at all, it would have been criticized for the exact same reason.
Glenn's not part of their club.
Rush isn't part of their club.
Lord knows I'm not part of their club, so therefore anybody who goes along must be someone like them.
And we all know all those talk show hosts are racist, they're bigots, they're homophobes, they're Islamophobes, the new word that they use.
Thank you for the call.
Let's go quickly to Pilot Virginia and Peter.
Peter, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Mark.
Hi.
Thanks for uh taking my call and listening to me.
Um I just want to want to tell you uh either you you say you're not part of their club and Rush isn't part of their club or Glenn Beck, but there's a lot of us out here who aren't part of that club.
Um I was um struck by your your comment earlier about the fact that people are participating so much.
And I'm I'm only one person, but um just uh as an example, I I think I may be indicative.
Um I've always voted in every election for the last 35 years, give or take.
Um, but never until the last year, year and a half, have I gotten really involved.
I've been to Tea Party rallies.
I've been to town hall meetings, my congressman.
Um I've contacted my congressman uh for health care and your point is is that this is not the kind of thing you were doing prior to a year and a half ago.
My whole life.
What changed?
What w the the piling on.
You know, the bailout, the stimulus, um, the the health care legislation, you know, a trillion dollars in in uh in deficits.
You mentioned the piling on, the sense that all of the things that you care about were under assault.
Yeah.
Yeah, and uh I take calls like yours on my program in Milwaukee all the time, and we know obviously a lot of people are doing are getting involved who haven't been involved in the past, because there's never been anybody involved in the past.
The only organization to any of this is a few people are saying this is where you can show up.
Nobody can make you show up.
And for all of the people who aren't doing what you're doing, there are as I said earlier, twenty-five of them agree with what you're doing, and you're standing in for them.
This is much bigger, I think, than the left understands, and it doesn't have anything to do with hate or fear or racism.
It has everything to do with people fighting to keep the kind of country that they believe in.
And that's the most of America of things that we can do.
Thank you for the call, Peter.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
The Obama vacation must be over because I just saw him talking, and I think he was actually at the White House.
Said in the Rose Garden, think the vacation is finally over.
He knows, oh, we need to get businesses to start hiring more people.
You know who you blame this on?
Senate Republicans.
All like what?
Eight of them.
Found this in the Los Angeles Times.
This speaks volumes.
Question.
It's one of those question and answer things, this one about housing.
Question.
About a year ago, I found out that a casual friend had been laid off and became homeless.
I let him move into my apartment spare bedroom free of charge.
Now I want my privacy back.
I have asked him to leave, but he doesn't appear to be making any effort to do so.
I can relate.
To a real estate agent says my friend is a trespasser.
Since we have no rental agreement or landlord tenant relationship.
She says I can call the police to have him removed, or I can change the locks on a day when he is away.
I don't want to get into any trouble.
So I'm writing to ask what my legal rights are.
Answer from Martin Eichner, Project Sentinel.
You allow this person to move into your property with your permission.
So he is not a trespasser.
An adult living in a rental property without paying rent or being party to a rental agreement, oral or written, is considered a tenant at will.
Since the law regards him as a tenant, he cannot be locked out or forcibly removed.
Your only legal avenue is to give him written notice of termination of tenancy.
If he doesn't leave voluntarily after receiving written notice, you can file an eviction lawsuit known as an unlawful detainer in court.
Because he is a tenant at will, you need only give him a thirty-day written notice to vacate.
If an unlawful detainer action becomes necessary, consider hiring an attorney who specializes in evictions.
I know it doesn't relate to Glenn Beck's rally, and it doesn't relate to the tea parties, and it doesn't really relate to what's going to happen in the November elections, but isn't this kind of what we're talking about here?
This is not the America people want to live in.
They want to be left alone.
They don't think the government has to take over health care.
The people who did support Obama's vague talk about health care reform in 2008 thought he'd make it a little bit more affordable.
He thought he'd make it easier for the people who are working for themselves to be able to buy anything.
They thought he'd make the prescriptions a little bit cheaper.
They didn't look for this.
This is not the kind of country that they want to live in.
They don't believe that if a state votes overwhelmingly not to have gay marriage that a judge can say, okay, you're gonna have gay marriage.
They don't believe that there's anything wrong with authorities in Arizona if they stop someone for something else trying to find out if they're here illegally or not, because they know that if they're here illegally, they are here illegally.
And they certainly don't want to live in a world in which we've passed 19,000 rules and regulations that say if you let a guy stay with you for a couple of weeks, you've got to hire a lawyer and go to court to get rid of him.
All that's going to do is lead to people not being willing to allow friends to stay with them for a couple of weeks.
I now have a ready-made excuse for all of the people who try to leech and stay with me for I uh it's only going to be for a little while.
This is the problem.
People's common sense is being violated.
They think what's happening here from the leftist establishment that runs everything, including the media, is ridiculous.
And there's a backlash to all of it.
Let's go to Jonesboro, is it Georgia or California?
Georgia, Jonesboro, Georgia, and Sean.
Sean, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Mark.
It's a pleasure to talk with you on this greatest of talk shows.
Thank you.
And I wanted to uh say that that about the Paul Krugman piece.
Um, it's no different than uh than what I read first read Paul Krugman decades ago.
He's been doing this a long time.
Yeah, he's a raging lunatic as I described him.
He he he's nuts, but it used to be that we were he's just a nutty liberal.
He's now their main voice.
This is what they think.
I would agree.
And here in Atlanta, uh in the local market, uh, we call the urinal constipation.
Uh we have a lot of little Paul Krugmans now, at least two of them, and Cynthia Tucker and Jay Bookman.
And I think what is happening now that that so many of us are unemployed or underemployed.
I think we can afford a little ideology.
And when I was when I was in school and I I had to read an editorial and comment on it, I was so alarmed by what Krugman said about a young politician named Newt Gingrich, um, that I followed his article, his his column for a little while, and in doing so I noticed a columnist I'd never seen before.
I need you to I need you to get to the point, Sean.
Made a lot of sense.
His name was Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell planted a seed in me that has grown.
I think in a lot of other people too, and I think that is coming to flower now.
Thank you for the call.
I agree with the point that he was making, and that is this that these liberals that keep lecturing us and saying that we're nuts for believing the way that we are believing are creating a stronger conservative movement, and they're allowing people who were in the middle who weren't political before.
I've got to be open to something else because this lefty stuff that I'm seeing, I don't buy it, it's not me.
I'm Mark Elling sitting in for Rush.
The Rush audience probably thinks that I have a Paris Hilton obsession.
I think this might be the fifth time I've sat in here and done a Paris Hilton story.
Really?
Mark Stein does Uyghurs.
Mark Stein is going to be here, by the way, Wednesday and Thursday, Mark Davis on Friday.
Who's doing the show tomorrow?
I I'm doing the show tomorrow.
All five days marks.
There are thirteen marks in the media anywhere in America, but Rush has all of us.
We're all here.
It's easier for the caller.
Um just say mark, and you're probably going to be right if it isn't Rush.
This story's just weird.
Paris Hilton's latest boyfriend is the guy who runs the nightclubs for Steve Wynn at the Wynn Hotels, uh, Wynn and Encore.
According to this story, they were driving down the Las Vegas strip, and they were pulled over because a police officer saw what he presumed to be marijuana smoke coming out of the car and noticed the odor.
The vehicle was moving.
So they pull her, they pull the car over, her boyfriend is driving the car, they ask her to get out of the passenger side, and as she's getting out, a baggie of cocaine falls out of her purse.
I'm not an expert on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, nor am I an expert on the ways of transporting cocaine.
Doesn't that seem a little weird?
If you were driving in a car, riding in a car and you had cocaine, wouldn't it be closer to the bottom?
How does it just fall out when the cop is there?
I am not a conspiratorialist.
We have to be open at least to the possibility that this was deliberate.
I mean, she needs to be in the media at least once every six months.
She's been able to get away with drug stuff in the past.
I think she was nailed in South Africa for marijuana or something during the World Cup and she said it wasn't hers.
The cocaine falls out of her purse.
The mugshot, she's posing in her mugshot.
You know how people who, when they're nailed for drugs or drunk driving, the mugshot, you always look terrible.
You just Glenn Campbell had one like ten years ago that was just really, really bad.
She looks better in this mug shot than most people look when the uh boyfriend's been fired from his job at the Wynn Hotel, but by 2 30 in the morning she was on her Twitter account saying she was watching Family Guy on TV.
She presumes she's going to wiggle out of this.
What does this have to do with anything?
I'm not sure.
But doesn't it speak to this whole what kind of a country we are thing?
If I'm right, that this might have been a little bit intentional, that she was looking for a little bit more street cred.
Yeah, Paris has a little Lindsey Lohan in her.
That this is the way of impressing a lot of people.
I don't know.
I want to give a PS and kind of my closing comment on what uh we spent the first half of the hour on the program on.
And that is the new sense of community in the conservative movement.
Tea parties, people volunteering to work for political candidates, certainly more callers than ever to conservative talk radio programs, huge ratings for shows like Rush's and mine, the Glenn Beck Rally over the weekend, other events like it.
I have one fear, and that is that people are going to believe that this speaking out and organizing is an end in itself.
It's not.
In a democracy, you have the right to speak out.
But that gives you no power.
In the type of government we have, the only power citizens have is the election.
Now there are a lot of people who don't like to hear that because they don't like the choices.
Well, the Republicans are as bad as the Democrats.
There's nobody out there, they're all in the same thing.
The reality is this.
The politicians would totally ignore you were there not elections.
this If we didn't have congressional elections every two years and a presidential election every four years, the people who are showing up at rallies and showing up at tea parties, they'd be the equivalent of those poor souls at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Just get steamroll it over by the government.
The Chinese government ignored them.
The Iranian government ignored the pro-democracy protesters of last summer.
They paid them no mind because they have no power, because they have no ability to change anything.
Politicians pay attention to public opinion only because they think that public opinion might translate into votes.
When they see a lot of people take, and I don't care if you're talking about a local community with a city council election or the presidency.
Politicians respond to the public only when they think it threatens their political power and viability.
Whether you like the choices you're faced with this fall or not, if after all of this backlash and all of this organizing and all of this speaking out, if the Democrats come through this election unscathed, they are going to interpret all of this as a great big nothing.
See, this was all just hot air.
This was all manufactured.
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid tried to tell themselves last year that the people who are showing up at the town hall meetings and objecting to health care that they weren't indicative of anything.
Well, they'll be proven right.
If these elections result in the Democrats losing 15 seats in the House and maybe two or three Senate seats, they're going to say, see, we're just fine.
We don't have anything to lose.
In fact, they're going to step on the accelerator pedal.
They're going to nationalize even more stuff.
They're going to take, even though it results in small losses for them, they're going to take the election as a mandate.
Well, that's all the right had to come with.
There isn't any real opposition to what we're doing.
There's a lot at stake in this fall's elections.
Not only is it the only vehicle for trying to put a halt on the leftward lurch that this Congress and President have taken us on.
If they don't sustain significant losses, they are going to be emboldened to go even farther.
Furthermore, I think the organizing and the rallying that we've seen will come to an end because people will say it didn't do any good.
Elections have consequences.
And while you can say there's no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, and you can say that John McCain was a terribly flawed Republican presidential candidate in 08, as he was, I don't think we would have had this kind of stimulus were President Obama not in power.
I don't think the health care bill would have been as bad that we'd be looking at the same kind of government takeover.
There are consequences to these elections, and the election is still the only thing that we can do to make our voices heard.
It's the only power Americans have.
One of the positive developments of this year has been that in Republican primaries, insurgent candidates have emerged who challenge the Republican status quo as much as the Democratic status quo.
There's still a recount going on, but it looks like Lisa Murkowski, who is part of the old guard in Alaska, will have lost.
Even Bob Bennett out in Utah, who was relatively conservative, was tossed out, didn't even survive his own party's convention, because it was perceived as he was too institutionalized, too much a part of the political establishment.
Look at Florida.
Charlie Crist was just anointed as the Republican candidate for the United States Senate, He had to leave the party.
Running as a so called independent, what he's running at is as is a Democrat called independent.
Marco Rubio forced him out, and Marco Rubio can now win that general election.
I think he will.
This is positive.
It's people not only saying we're objecting to President Obama, we want an actual alternative in the Republican Party.
We don't want an Obama light.
We want something other than that.
The point that I'm making, though, is that this can only be done through the political process.
As alienated as people may be to politics, as alienated as they as they may be to both political parties, it's only elections that allow you to have any real power or influence.
We don't conduct issues by referendum in this country.
The House, the Senate, the President, your state legislatures, your governors, they're the ones that make public policy.
And we're stuck with their decisions.
And the election is the only shot that we have.
Whether you're enthused about your choice, or it's merely the lesser of two evils.
If you don't vote for that choice as opposed to the person who voted for Obamacare, the person who voted for stimulus, the person who wants to nationalize everything, the person who looks down their nose at you, then nothing will have been accomplished in all of this backlash, and Obama is going to come out of this claiming, I've got a mandate.
People like what I'm doing.
It's only these handful of congressmen that lost their seat.
We're moving forward.
That's how much there is at stake this fall.
I happen to think the American people realize that, and I happen to think that there's going to be a landslide.
I think it's going to be an avalanche.
I think that you're going to be looking at senators who were never thought to be vulnerable losing.
I think they're going to have more house seats go down than even some of the pundits are predicting.
But if I'm wrong about that, the liberals are going to take this as acceptance of the radical direction they've taken our country.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush on EIB.
The media has a way of missing a lot of things because they're blind to them.
When you don't want to see something, you don't see it.
There's something going on right now on an issue that I think is really important.
And it tells you that 2010 is a different year.
One of the initiatives of the Obama administration has been high speed rail.
Take existing Amtrak lines and convert them to these 110 to 115 mile an hour trains and put these train lines places where there isn't Amtrak service right now.
They're pushing this all over America.
It's extremely expensive.
All over the country, you're seeing states that you would think would support these train lines because they're getting the trains are objecting.
They're objecting on the basis that it costs too much.
We all know what the problem with political pork is.
Everybody says they're against it, but everybody wants their own piece of pork.
It's why Congressmen and Senators of both parties have tried to deliver the mail back home.
Well, I know we spend too much money, but I want to make sure that our state gets its fair share.
So we object to everybody's bridge to nowhere until we get a bridge to nowhere.
We object to every building named after a congressman across the United States until that building is in our own area and it's for something that we like.
This has been the problem all along.
Earmarks occurred and congressional pork occurred because Congressmen benefited politically from bringing that stuff back home.
But now that we are spending ourselves blind, and people are truly terrified that we don't have a way of digging out from underneath this debt.
They understand the numbers.
They don't have to be actuaries.
They realize the baby boomers are aging, that this large group of taxpayers is going to be transitioning to people who are going to be on the dole collecting Medicare and Social Security and not paying as much in taxes.
So how are we going to ever pay off this debt.
How are we ever going to get an economy that has a balanced budget?
How are we ever going to be able to survive without paying the entire GDP out and servicing our own debt?
And they're now open to rejecting pork.
This isn't isolated.
In my own state of Wisconsin, Obama is pushing a high-speed rail line between the cities of Milwaukee and Madison.
They're only 75 miles apart when traffic is terrible, it's a 90-minute drive.
When it's terrible, it's usually a little bit less than that.
It's an annoying drive, but it's doable.
He wants to put a high-speed bullet train there.
And it'll go 115 miles an hour, and maybe you'll be able to complete the trip in an hour.
The cost for this line, which is a little over 80 miles, is $810 million, paid for by the federal government.
The Republican leading Republican candidate for governor in my state, Scott Walker, is running television ads saying he'll kill the train if you elect him.
Those ads are resonating across Wisconsin.
He's saying, if you elect me, I'll kill this pork they're trying to give us.
And he sees it as a winning political issue.
First of all, he recognizes that our state Wisconsin will be on the hook for the operating costs for this train.
He also realizes that those operating costs will have to be taken out of his own state budget and will mean less money for roads, less money for local buses.
The point that I'm making is that he has a winning issue here, he perceives, by opposing federal money.
The Democratic candidate for governor, the mayor of Milwaukee, is saying, Well, if we don't take this money for the train, they're just going to give it to another state.
People aren't buying that.
They'd rather not have the pork at all than have it wasted in their own area.
This is a fundamental change.
I think people are now open to considering that all of this government spending is bad even if they get it.
They look at stimulus.
$816 billion that supposedly is being spent.
They can't find any example of it in their own daily lives.
They don't see any jobs being created.
They've they're turning their noses up at the notion that the government should just keep spending and spending and spending and spending and spending without any consequence at all.
If they're willing to object to rail, they may be willing to object to a lot more pork.
But more importantly, I think it tells you that there was a change in attitude going on in this country.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush.
Let's go to Elliot Maine and Kevin.
Kevin, it's your turn on EIB.
Hey, how are you doing, Mark?
I'm great, thanks.
We're going through something similar that you were talking about up in uh Wisconsin.
Um we have uh two bridges down here in uh Maine going into New Hampshire, and the main GOP just sent out a letter.
Um that's very uh they're very upset with our Democratic Governor Baldacci, uh, that he hasn't filled out the forms correctly to get the uh stimulus money to rebuild the bridge from the well, it's they don't call it the stimulus money called the Tiger II, which is basically stimulus money, and they're you know, they're they're looking for this cookie that's on the table, and they gotta get it before someone else takes it.
You know, and the point the point that I'm making is that I think a lot of people are now willing to say, maybe I don't want the cookie, even if it means somebody else is going to get it.
Now they don't think anybody should be getting that cookie, but I think people are now open to this notion that just because they say, well, if you don't take it, they're going to give it to somebody else that people may say I we don't want it at all.
This is bad for America.
Thank you for the call.
Believe it or not, there is another Democratic member of Congress who's been caught violating the rules.
Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Eddie is a woman, steered thousands in scholarship dollars to relatives and children of top aides, according to a Texas newspaper.
Dallas Democrat, nine-turn member of the U.S. House, awarded 15 congressional black caucus scholarships to her grandchildren and great nephew among others.
The Black Caucus, which Johnson once chaired, Has anti-nepotism rules that prevent directing funds to caucus members' relatives.
Furthermore, the scholarship recipients live outside her Dallas district, another violation of the rules.
Johnson first skirted the question of favoritism when asked by the Dallas Morning News days later, she issued a statement saying she unknowingly violated the rules and said she would work to rectify the financial situation.
So now you've got Wrangle and Maxine Waters, and now Eddie Bernice Johnson using black caucus funds to give scholarships to all of her grandchildren.
Ponder the coverage this story would get, were this a Republican member of the House?
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