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Dec. 29, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:51
December 29, 2010, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, America's Anchorman is away today, and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in, Mark Stein.
Honoured to be here.
No supporting paperwork whatsoever.
I'm a foreign exchange student at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a great program.
Guys like me get to study here.
And in return, Mayor Bloomberg gets to do two years at the Equatorial Guinea Institute of Government and Winter Highway Maintenance.
Tis the post-Christmas season at the EIB network, or as I like to think of it, the lame duck session of the Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'll be here tomorrow, and then it's the best of Rush for New Year's Eve.
Ladies and gentlemen, today is an historic day in the annals of communication.
On August 16th, 1858, Queen Victoria in London and President Buchanan in Washington exchanged the first transatlantic telegram message.
In October 1876, Alexander Graham Bell participated in the first two-way long-distance telephone call between Boston and Cambridgeport, Massachusetts.
On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden of Brand Rock, Massachusetts gave the first radio broadcast by transmitting a performance of Handel's Largo to ships in the Caribbean.
And now, on December the 29th, 2010, for the first time in human history, the Rush Limbaugh Show is being broadcast live from northern Grafton County in the state of New Hampshire.
If we were any further north, we'd be in Canada, where this program would be a hate crime.
But instead, we're a little way south of the border in our brand new studio.
Palm Beach, as you know, is EIB's Southern Command.
HR called this Northern Branch Office Ice Station EIB.
But actually, the way things are going, that's a better name for the New York studio at the moment.
Here's how it'll work.
You call 1-800-282-2882, just as you normally would.
It rings out in New York, where we'll email your comment to Mr. Snerdley down in Palm Beach.
He'll fax it to HR at his beach resort in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where it gets put on a steam packet round the Cape of Good Hope and delivered to Victoria, British Columbia, where it will be put on the dog sled of the first Canadian politician heading south to get medical treatment at the Mayo Clinic.
So you won't notice a thing unless the steam packet gets hijacked by Somali pirates, in which case all bets are off.
And if you do notice today some strange silences, odd pauses, don't worry, it's not the satellite delay.
It's just that as a right-wing moron, I'm too slow and dull-witted to respond to the devastating rapier-like wit of the liberal caller.
But otherwise, things should work pretty much as they usually do.
1-800-282-2882.
You know, last week I did the show from New York last week, and I was all worried about how it would go if we were to try and do it from up here in New Hampshire.
And I was thinking, maybe this is too big a gamble, and I should have arranged to do this week's shows from New York City like I did last week.
Thank God I didn't do that.
New York is a catastrophe at the moment.
It's a snow-bound hell.
The reason Mr. Snerdley is down in Florida is because he's unable to fly into New York.
You know, the city that doesn't sleep also doesn't plow, apparently.
Got a huge budget, but apparently can't keep the streets clear of snow or keep the airports open.
I want to wake up in a city that never plows, New York, New York.
If you heard Mark Belling here yesterday, he was talking about how this hot dog cart, abandoned hot dog cart in the middle of 7th Avenue, I think it was, has been there for what is it now, three days.
Still can't get rid of the thing.
There's an amazing video out there on the internet.
I wasn't looking for this, by the way.
I found it at the website of the Daily Telegraph of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
My old friend Tim Blair, I was checking his page at the Daily Telegraph website in Sydney, Australia, and he had a link to this amazing video footage of New York City workers totaling a Ford Explorer.
There's a front loader that's stuck in the snow, supposed to be clearing snow, and it gets sucked.
So another city vehicle comes along, pulls it out.
They know they're sliding into this Ford Explorer, but they go ahead and rip the back of this, they rip the whole back of the van while people are standing around watching, and they don't care.
It's an amazing four minutes of video.
They hear all the crunching as they're totaling this car.
But what do they care?
They're in the union.
They're government workers.
And this is just some, this guy who owns the Ford Explorer, who cares about him?
He's just a private citizen who pays their wages.
So why not total his van?
Amazing example of Mayor Bloomberg's government in action.
And Mayor Bloomberg, of course, you know, is one of these like technocrat geniuses, the new school of politician, post-partisan, no labels.
He's the poster boy for the no labels movement, you know, that these no labels guys launched a couple of weeks ago.
They've got a big theme song.
I forget, what is it?
Imagine there's no labels.
It's easy if you try.
Not Republican.
We're not Democrat.
We're just can-do technocrats who know how to get the job done.
Bloomberg has failed to get the job done.
Bloomberg has catastrophically failed.
What it says here.
He says, the rule of thumb is that every in Jason Post, spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, says every inch costs $1 million.
That's like the same, that's the same as some of the bigger name porn stars, by the way.
Every inch costs $1 million.
Believe me, by the standards of New York government, that is actually cheap.
New York City government spends billions and billions and billions.
It's got a, I think by various estimates, it's got a deficit of $2 and $4 billion.
So a million per inch of snow removal is nothing in the great sucking maw of New York municipal government.
But they couldn't do it.
They couldn't do it.
It was beyond the ability of Mayor Bloomberg to clear the streets in an expeditious manner.
Now, he famously said to people, I think this was, was it yesterday or the day before, it was Monday that Mayor Bloomberg told people, hey, just because there's a bit of snow falling on the city, don't let that disrupt your plans.
There's never been a better time to see a Broadway show.
See a Broadway show tonight.
And he's being attacked as the equivalent, that's the equivalent of saying, let them eat cake.
Queen's Councilman Eric Ulrich, who was sworn in by Bloomberg when he won his seat in 2009, said the mayor telling New Yorkers to see a Broadway show was like Mary Antoinette saying, let the people eat cake.
It's a tragedy, actually, because Monday, I believe Monday, when he told them to go and see a Broadway show, that was actually the one night that Spider-Man was working.
Unfortunately, the city wasn't working, so if you did manage to get to Spider-Man, you saw the one functioning part of New York City.
Mayor Bloomberg, I recommend all fans of Mayor Bloomberg go back a couple of years.
I think this was in 2007.
Time magazine had a big cover story headlined, The New Action Heroes.
And it showed post together in the photograph, Michael Bloomberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Remember him, Arnold Schwarzenegger?
He was big for 20 minutes during the Gray Davis recall in California.
I don't know what's happened to him since then.
But Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Bloomberg, the new action heroes.
They're not like these do-nothings in Congress.
They're not mired in partisan bickering.
These guys are men of action and they're getting things done.
Bloomberg, we were told by Time magazine, he was, quote, opening a climate summit and talking about saving the planet, unquote.
Not just any bit of the planet, but the whole thing, everything, every bit of the planet west of the Holland Tunnel, Mayor Bloomberg was saving.
Unfortunately, while he was busy saving the planet, he was unable to plow 7th Avenue or the East River Drive or the Triborough Bridge.
Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg.
Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg.
Times Michael Grunwald.
This is a fascinating piece.
Three years ago, The New Action Heroes. Quote, they're tackling not just the climate, writes Michael Grunwald, because he certainly doesn't want to give the impression that Bloomberg is the sort of slacker who bunks off the Gulf after lunch.
No, sir, these new action heroes, quote, are doing things that Washington has failed to do.
Bloomberg, coups Grunwald, quote, also enacted America's most draconian smoking ban and the first big city trans fat ban.
So if you're standing in the middle of the street watching city workers trash your Ford Explorer, you can't even light up a cigarette within a certain amount of square of feet of a building and watch what city workers are doing to your Ford Explorer.
This is big government.
The bigger government gets, the more government tries to do, the less it actually does.
Until like New Yorkers, you wind up waking up in a city that never plows.
They can't do, they've got the same level of highway clearance now that they have in the high passes of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, where they're totaled every year by the brutal Afghan winter.
Because in 5,000 years of pushtoon history, nobody thought to invent the snowplow.
And as the Hindu Kush goes, so goes New York City.
New York City, projected deficit is somewhere between $2 billion and $3.6 billion, according to controller John Newt.
They can't even get the deficit right, closest to the nearest billion dollars.
Their budget for financial year 2010, New York City, budget is $63.1 billion, $63.1 billion.
But they're complaining because every inch of snow removal now costs a million dollars.
So there'd be no possibility.
It would be unreasonable.
It would be unreasonable to expect New York City to be able to plow snow and keep the streets clear in an expeditious manner.
I'm furious at Mayor Bloomberg.
He's a rich man, so he doesn't care about the little people, said New Enrico's car service livery driver, Julio Carpio, speaking in Spanish.
I have to work.
Why aren't people out there plying?
Why does the mayor always go on TV the night before to say, we're all set with a fleet of salt trucks, and then you never see a single truck?
Because those salt trucks, if you see a salt truck in New York under Mayor Bloomberg, is because he's taken the salt out of your cheeseburger and they're trucking it to a landfill over in New Jersey.
Mayor Bloomberg, you thought he was taking all the salt out of your out of your fatty fast foods to put it on the East River Drive?
No, sir.
He doesn't believe in salt for your cheeseburger or for New York City streets.
He's going to be plowing those streets with fair trade, skimmed latte froth, and that'll do magic.
They're now saying that it'll be after new years before New York City infrastructure will be functioning again.
Hundreds of abandoned city buses, dozens of ambulances.
By the way, it's a good thing liberals don't worry about the Iranian nuclear program, because this is pretty much a good glimpse of how things would go if Ahmadinejad ever did manage to pull anything off in New York City.
Shutdowns of airports, hundreds of abandoned city buses and dozens of ambulances sitting in the middle of snow drifts.
A baby, a newborn baby, died in Brooklyn.
They placed a call.
The woman, the mother of this child, had been forced to give birth in the lobby of her apartment building, a snowbound Brooklyn building.
They placed a call to 911 and nobody got to her.
In one of the most densely populated cities in the first world, nobody got to her for nine hours because Crown Heights was not plowed.
By the time they finally got through to the lobby of this building, the baby was unconscious and unresponsive, and the baby died.
This is embarrassing.
This is the can-do technocrat mayor, the can-do technocrat mayor who presumes to regulate the trans fat contents of every food item you buy in New York City.
If you go to a fast food joint in New York now and you want to buy a cookie, Nanny Bloomberg has put the number of calories on the, insisted the number of calories be labeled on the cookie when you go into Starbucks and you have a cup of coffee and a cookie or a sandwich or whatever.
He's got all that.
He's got a vast bureaucracy that can do that, but he cannot.
He cannot plow the streets of New York.
He cannot plow the streets of New York.
When big government tries to do everything, it fails to do its core responsibilities.
We're going to talk more about this because Nanny Bloomberg is in fact a poster child for everything that's gone wrong in American government over the past 75 years.
Mark Stein in for Rush, 1-800-282-2882 live from northern New Hampshire.
Lots more still to come.
Mark Stein in for rush on the EIB network talking about what New York City tells us about big government.
Because let's face it, you've got a right.
If you live in the city of New York, you've got a right to complain about them not being able to plow the streets when they get a heavy snowfall.
Because you pay more than almost anybody does in the United States for city and state services.
You know, if you if you, what's what's the how's the song go?
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
If you can make it there, you're some kind of genius.
Because if you can make it there, they can take it there.
Governor Patterson in 2009 said this is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression.
So naturally, his response to it was to bring in the biggest tax hike in New York history, adding the little, tiny little bits of life that weren't yet taxed in New York, he decided to hone in on.
So it's not just that you got your state tax, your sales tax, your municipal tax.
You got your doubled beer tax, you got your tax on clothing, your tax on cab rides, an iTunes tax on downloads from the internet, a tax on haircuts, attacks on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all brought in by Governor Patterson last year.
If you're unclear about what three activities in the state of New York are not taxed anymore, just call 1-800-i-HeartNew York today and order your new package of state tax forms for just $199.99 plus the 12% tax on tax forms tax and the 4% tax form application fee, partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5% tax.
If you can make it there, you'll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.
In New York, everything is taxed.
Everything is taxed.
Everything you do is taxed.
I walked into my office the other day.
I'm always complaining on this show because I made the mistake of hiring an employee in New York.
And I never like to mention her name on the show because she's sensitive about the fact that she's cost us more paperwork, more form filling, more changes of insurance policy than all our other employees in every single state and, in fact, across the planet put together.
So I won't use her real name.
I'll call her Mabel, Mabel.
Let's say Mabel.
I walked into the office and our accountants had belatedly discovered that we're liable for something called New York's quarterly Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax, right?
The quarterly Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax.
My employee in New York, Mabel, the fictitious Mabel, she works from home.
So her commute is from her bedroom to her office within her apartment, from her bedroom to a corner of her living room.
And yet we still have to pay the quarterly Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax.
What actually did it come out at, Tiffany?
I don't want to know.
It's too frightening.
Anyway, we paid the quarterly Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax.
And where is the transportation mobility in New York?
I live in New Hampshire and I'm paying the lousy quarterly Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax for New York City.
And I don't see any transportation mobility in New York City.
The whole lousy town is at a standstill.
What do New Yorkers?
I would love to hear from New Yorkers.
What do you get for the great for having every single activity in your city taxed to the hilt?
What do you get for the lousy Metropolitan Commuter Transportation, quarterly Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax?
I paid it, and I can't even fly into New York today.
There's no transportation mobility in your whole lousy city.
Why are you not embarrassed at the fact that every single activity is taxed to the hilt in New York and you have nothing to show for it?
When you need government, on one of the rare occasions when you need government, it ain't there for you.
It ain't there for you.
You've got stupid taxes on everything.
You've got bagel slicing tax.
Every time you'd buy a bagel at a New York deli, you have to pay eight cents, eight cents slicing tax on the bagel.
What do you get for your eight cents?
Can they plow the street outside the deli so you can get to the deli and pay for your high-tax bagel?
No.
The more government does, the more government tries to do, the less it does what it should be doing.
Mark Stein in for Rush, lots more still to come.
Hey, great to be with you.
By the way, happy Kwanzaa, because I do believe we are still in the middle of Kwanzaa.
And I was reading a story on Kwanzaa in, what is this?
The Gary Post Tribune in Gary, Indiana.
I think I used to be, I think they used to carry my column because they were owned by the same people who owned the Chicago sometimes.
But I do believe this is the all-time perfect picture caption for the age we live in.
It shows a gentleman lighting the Kwanzaa candles.
And the caption is, quote, Jihad Mohammed, that's the name of this gentleman, quote, Jihad Mohammed explains the principles of Kwanzaa while lighting a candle on the Kinara at United Urban Network Inc. Steel City Renaissance, Christmas for the Children, a tribute to Michael Jackson.
Unquote.
That is the perfect picture caption for America in the 21st century.
Jihad Mohammed explains the principles of Kwanzaa while lighting a candle on the Kinara at Christmas for the Children, a tribute to Michael Jackson.
Happy, happy Kwanzaa to anyone who attended the Kwanzaa tribute to Michael Jackson that Jihad Mohammed spoke at in Gary, Indiana.
If you live in Gary, Indiana, and you've got to hear what Jihad Mohammed said, that's a very fetching name, by the way, Jihad Mohammed.
Which what Mr. Jihad's his first name, and Mohammed is his surname.
But if you heard Jihad Mohammed speaking at Christmas for the Children, a tribute to Michael Jackson in Kwanzaa Week in Gary, Indiana, do give us a call.
I'd love to hear how it went.
We've been talking about snowplowing, big government, what big government does.
Because once big government gets big, it's never big enough.
I mentioned this bagel tax they have in New York.
And people don't believe that when you say they've got a bagel tax in New York.
But they have.
In a New York deli, a bagel with cream cheese is subject to food preparation tax, but a plain bagel with no filling is not.
You got that?
In other words, if you have just a bagel with nothing on it, you don't pay the food preparation tax.
But if you have a bagel with cream cheese, that is subject to the eight cents tax.
Except that if the clerk slices the plain bagel for you, then the food preparation tax applies.
Just for that one knife cut, just for putting a knife cut in the bagel, you have to pay the food preparation tax.
Because as a progressive caring society, New York has advanced from tax cuts to taxing your cuts, at least if they're cuts made in bagels.
Oh, and if he doesn't slice the plain bagel, but you decide you're going to eat it in the deli anyway, the food preparation tax also applies, even though no preparation was actually required of the food.
You got that?
You got all that?
If you own a deli in New York, you better have, because New York is so broke.
They are one of the 16th brokest cities in the United States of America.
They're so broke, they need, oh, they need their nine cents per sliced bagel.
I thought it was eight cents, I think I said.
In fact, it's nine cents.
And their bagel inspectors are cracking down.
And that's probably why they couldn't get anybody to the apartment lobby in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for nine hours, because their bagel inspectors were out.
Because, you know, when it snows heavily, it's nice to be able to go to a New York deli, get a nice sliced bagel with a bit of cream cheese on it, warm the cockles of your heart on a snowy, wintry day.
So the bagel inspectors were doubtless out in force cranking down on any bagel tax infractions in the city of New York.
Now, Bloomberg has just gone on TV and announced that 96% of New York's highways are cleared.
So he's fighting back.
He's saying, I am the can-do technocrat.
If you're in New York City and you agree with his assessment of the situation, that things are just swell in New York and the last 72 hours have been a perfect advertisement for the Bloomberg can-do technocracy, then give me a call because I'd love to hear from you.
Now, on the very day of the snowfall, the New York Times ran a fascinating story called A New Team Help Steer Restaurateurs Through a Thicket of Red Tape.
This was by Diane Cardwell.
Quote, opening a restaurant in New York City can be as frustrating as trying to brown a wet sirloin.
Given worries over fire safety, foodborne illness, and waste disposal, a new restaurant may have to contend with as many as 11 city agencies, often with conflicting requirements, secure 30 permits, registrations, licenses, and certificates, and pass 23 inspections.
And it will still have to go to the state to get a liquor license.
Okay, you got that?
11 city agencies with conflicting requirements, 30 permits, registrations, licenses, and certificates, and pass 23 inspections.
So, what's the solution to this problem?
The city has formed a new bureaucracy to help you negotiate your way through the multiple other bureaucracies.
They've formed a new business acceleration team, which is a new bureaucracy intended to help restaurateurs through the bureaucratic maze of the existing bureaucracies, right?
That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
In other words, you've made it almost as difficult to open a restaurant in New York City as it would be to open a restaurant in the most corrupt Nigerian province.
But instead of actually cutting back, rolling back, trimming back, streamlining, simplifying the bureaucracy, you create a whole new bureaucratic agency whose only purpose is to help you negotiate through the maze of existing bureaucracies.
And so, this is the story on New York City that the New York Times, which is a newspaper based in, based in anyone?
Anyone?
Yes, you at the back?
Anyone?
Yes, New York City.
New York Times, it pretends to be a national newspaper, but in fact, it's a Manhattan-centric paper.
And this was the story they were running on their own backyard on the day all the snow fell.
Is a fawning story by Diane Cardwell on how there were now so many bureaucracies dealing with just opening a restaurant in New York that the city had set up a new bureaucracy for the sole purpose of helping you navigate through the other bureaucracies.
That's New York City in a snowfall.
New York City in a snowfall, but don't worry, they've set up a new bureaucracy to streamline the process for getting through the 11 separate agencies and 30 separate permits you need for the privilege of opening a restaurant where you'll be levied a nine-cent bagel tax if you slice a bagel or put a bit of cream cheese on it.
This is the city that doesn't sleep, one of the great cities of the world at the dawn of the 21st century.
America, and it's not just a New York issue, Americans should be embarrassed by all this.
A Cafe Pacific plane sat on the runway for eight hours.
But don't worry, there were only 250 people inside it.
Because as you know, the FAA has determined that when we're told to just go on sitting in a freezing plane out on the runway for hour after hour after hour, and don't and a plane that won't be able to serve us any food or give us any refreshment, we just have to sit there and take it because the FAA, the FAA, has determined that that's what we have to do as freeborn citizens.
Just as when I made the mistake of thinking when I hired my New York employee Mabel, that as one freeborn citizen to another freeborn citizen, I could hire whoever I wanted to, whoever I wanted to, to do whatever job I wanted to.
No, the state of New York and the city of New York impose a huge ton of regulations that has the cumulative effect of making it exorbitantly expensive to hire anybody in New York.
I will never hire a New Yorker again, by the way.
I had no idea about that.
I thought hiring someone in New York was like hiring someone in New Hampshire.
I thought, you know, you just said, hey, would you like a job?
And they said, wow, sure, that sounds great.
I've been out of work for months.
Sign me up right now.
And they start work on Monday morning and you give them a paycheck at the end of the week.
And that's how it is.
No, no, no, it doesn't work like that in New York.
In New York, it's all about the paperwork.
It's all about the commuter mobility tax.
It's easier.
It's easier for me as a New Hampshire employer to employ somebody from the jungles of New Guinea to get a headhunting agency to find me a real New Guinean headhunter hunting heads in the jungles of New Guinea and hire them.
It involves less time-consuming paperwork, less regulations, less commuter mobility tax, and all the other junk.
Anybody who hires anybody in New York who doesn't have to, who doesn't live in the state of New York, is crazy because I will never hire another New Yorker again.
It would have been cheaper for me to move her to Connecticut or New Jersey.
This is the state that one of the great cities of the world has come to under Mayor Bloomberg.
1-800-282-2882.
We've heard the Bloomberg version.
Everything is now hunky-dory in New York.
And we will go to your calls.
And we can go to your calls when we return.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein Infra Rush.
Mark Stein Infra Rush.
The weather outside is frightful, but the taxes and regulations are so delightful.
It's why we love New York City.
Let's go to Greg in Chicago, Illinois, the next bankrupt domino to fall.
Greg, are you actually in Chicago, or are you in Chicago in the sense that Rahm Emmanuel is?
You spend four nights a year there, but you have a rental property and you swing by once every half a decade to run for mayor.
Is it that kind of residency?
Or are you actually physically in Chicago as we speak?
I'm physically in Chicago, and Mark, a friend of mine who does our snowplowing, told me that his business partner sent out three snow plows to New York a few years ago when they had another heavy snow.
And they did all sorts of plowing for days.
He put the guys up in hotels.
He gave them per diem.
It cost him an arm and a leg.
And after all that, and he did everything by the book like New York wanted him to do.
And after all that, he didn't get paid until May.
And they only paid him for 65% of what they owed him.
So if you wonder why all these surrounding places aren't sending their snowplows to New York, it's because they don't want to get stiffed again by New York City.
Yes, you know, this is fascinating to me because I bet if you were from an adjoining jurisdiction and you decided, right, we'll send our plows.
Or, you know, in New Hampshire, we plowed our way out on the Monday.
So we got tons like small town highway departments who could be sending their drivers down to New York.
But you're right.
You wouldn't get paid for eight months.
And they wouldn't pay you, by the way, until you'd filled in the paperwork saying, you're now liable for the commuter mobility transportation tax.
So you'll have to fill that in.
And you've got to fill in your form to show you're compliant with the Bureau of Compliance.
And the amount of paperwork you would have to fill in for having helped dig out New York City and saved Mayor Bloomberg's ass would wipe out any profit margin you did.
So you're lucky that your friend only actually got 60% of it.
But you know the other thing they do, because I used to think that was actually one of the most moving sites that when there was a disaster, people would chip in from all over the continent, really.
I mean, if you take 9-11, for example, there were a lot of Canadian firefighters who went down there to help out.
It's the sort of brotherhood of first responders that when something happens, you all go, you all flock to where the disaster is and help each other out.
Fascinating glimpse of what we're turning into.
Hurricane Katrina swept in, devastated the Gulf Coast, and volunteer firemen, whoops, whoops, firefighters, volunteer firemen from across the map all headed south to help with disaster relief, and FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, dispatched them to...
Go on, take a guess.
Where do you think they dispatched them to?
Oh, has he gone?
He's left us from Chicago?
He's gone.
Okay.
Dispatched them to New Orleans, Gulfport?
No, no.
FEMA dispatched these volunteer firemen to Atlanta for diversity and sexual harassment training.
Yeah, which most of the, Mr. Sadley can't believe this.
No, obviously you can't because in most fire departments now, you've got to undergo all that rubbish back home.
So most of them have already undergone diversity and sexual harassment training, but it wasn't federally compliant disaster diversity and sexual harassment training.
And you can't be too careful because heaven forbid that a waterlogged granny should be rescued by an insufficiently non-homophobic fireman.
My word, that would be terrible, wouldn't it?
So all these firemen from across the map drive down south to help with Hurricane Katrina, and FEMA dispatches them to Atlanta for diversity and sexual harassment training.
And I'm sure it's like that if you decide to help out New York City and send somebody down there to help plough them out, that they'd want to check that any snacks you brought with you on your plough were properly labelled so that they were legal in New York City and carefully itemised all the trans fats on whatever Twinkies and doughnuts you had on the passenger seat of your snowplough as you drove to New
York.
York City.
This is the genius of Bloombergian government.
By the way, is that true, his claim that 96% of New York City streets are now cleared?
That's exactly.
Mr. Snerdley points out that if you actually try to go out in New York City streets to see the 96% of streets that are now cleared, you're apparently stuck in the 4%.
Your nice little residential road happens to be one of the 4% that hasn't cleared.
Let's go to Jerry in Cambridge, Minnesota.
Jerry, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Greetings, Mark, from Minnesota.
Hey, good.
Now, snow in Minnesota, you've got snow.
You have snow in Minnesota, don't you?
Yeah, it's actually about waist high here right now.
It just never melts.
We're getting ready for another storm to come in tomorrow.
Right.
And Cambridge, Minnesota is coping with that.
Oh, yeah.
Yep.
Everyone's got their shovels to help out their neighbors after the last storm.
And I guess that's what I was kind of calling about is last night I got mad.
I was watching the NBC nightly news, and they interviewed all these people complaining about how the snowline had been removed, and they looked physically capable of shoveling.
And then they got to Bloomberg right away and he's telling them to quit their complaining instead of appealing to them to maybe help themselves out a little bit.
No, no, no, no, no.
No, no, Jerry, they're right.
Because Mayor Bloomberg doesn't think that you're responsible enough to decide for yourself whether you should eat food with high salt content or whether you should eat a high-calorie cookie.
He thinks those decisions should be made by his government.
So what's the point of being a fully functioning adult in New York City?
Nanny Bloomberg says you're a child.
Nanny Bloomberg says leave it to Nanny to tell you what to eat.
Leave it to Nanny to determine the salt content of the food you eat.
So why should a person raised in Nanny Bloomberg City be expected to shovel out the sidewalk and be a self-reliant citizen?
Nanny Bloomberg has told him he's a child in the Bloomberg nursery.
Why should he be expected to shovel his way out when snow falls?
Nanny takes care of that just as Nanny Bloomberg determines his diet, Jerry.
Well, I've never been to New York, but I was to New Orleans shortly after Katrina about six months later because I had a high school friend that was a banker down there.
And he was telling me that New Orleans, a lot of those people could have walked a few hundred feet to save themselves instead of they're waiting for the government to come pick them up.
And I think it was, I don't know which governor it was, for the football game last night.
Right.
So, you know, we've become a country of, I can't remember the exact words that he used, but it's still.
Yeah, we sit around waiting.
We got to run.
We've got to take a profit break here.
But I will return to that point, Jerry, when we come back.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network, 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein Infra Rush on the EIB network, live from New Hampshire.
We've been unpacking this claim by Mayor Bloomberg that 96% of New York City streets are now cleared.
And we've been digging a little deeper into that breezy claim of his, and we will unpack it a bit more when we return.
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