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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 247 Podcast.
Yes, America's anchor man is away today, and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in, Mark Stein, honored 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 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 uh best of rush uh for New Year's Eve.
Ladies and gentlemen, today is an historic day in the annals of communication.
On August the 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 Brandt 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 twenty-ninth, twenty ten, 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 little ways south of the border in our brand new studio.
Palm Beach, as you know, is EIB's Southern Command.
H.R. uh called this Northern Branch Office Ice Station E.I.B. Uh, but actually the way things are going, that's that's a better uh that's a better name for the uh for the New York studio uh uh at the moment.
Here's here's how it'll work.
You you call 1-800-282-2882, just as you normally would.
Uh it rings out in New York, where we'll email your comment to Mr. Snerdley down in Palm Beach.
Uh he'll fax it to uh H.R. 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 uh 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.
Uh and if you do notice today some strange silences, odd pauses, um 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.
Uh but otherwise things should work pretty much uh as they usually do.
1-800-282-2882.
You know, last week I did the show from New York last week, and I was uh oh worried uh about how it would go if we were to uh try and do it from uh from up here in New Hampshire.
And I was thinking maybe this this is too big a gamble, and uh I should have arranged to do uh 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 snowbound hell.
The reason uh Mr. Snerdley is down in Florida is because uh he's unable to fly into New York.
Uh, you know, the uh the city that doesn't sleep also doesn't plough.
Apparently.
Uh got a huge budget, but apparently can't keep the streets clear of snow or keep the airports uh open.
I want to wake up in a city that never plows.
New York, New York.
Uh, if you heard uh Mark Belling uh here yesterday, he was talking about how this hot dog cart, abandoned hot dog cart in the middle of Seventh Avenue, I think it was, has been there for l for uh what it what is it now, three days.
Still can't still can't get rid of the thing.
There's an amazing video out there on the internet.
I wasn't looking for this, uh by the way.
I went, I found it at the uh website of the uh Daily Telegraph of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Uh my uh old friend Tim Blair, I was checking his uh 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.
Uh there's uh a front loader uh that's uh 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 uh while people are standing around watching, and and they don't care.
They hear all the cr 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 bears who pays their wages.
So why not total his van?
Amazing example of Mayor Bloomberg's government in in action.
And uh Mayor Bloomberg, of course, you know, is one of these like uh technocrat geniuses.
Uh the new school of politician, uh, postpartisan, no labels.
He's he's the poster boy for the no labels movement, uh, you know, that uh these no labels guys launched uh a couple of weeks ago.
They got a big theme song.
I forget how 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.
Um he uh what's it what it says here?
He says, uh the rule of thumb is that every every in uh Jason Post, spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, says every inch costs one million dollars.
So that's like the same that's the same as some of the bigger bigger name porn stars, by the way.
Uh every inch costs one million dollars.
Uh believe me, by the standards of New York government, that is actually cheap.
New New York City government spends billions and billions and billions.
It's got a uh I think by uh s various estimates, uh it's it's got a deficit of between between two and four billion dollars.
So a million per inch of snow removal is nothing in the great sucking moor of New York municipal government.
But they couldn't do it.
They couldn't do it.
It was beyond the ability of Mayor Bloomberg uh to clear the streets in an expeditious uh manner.
Now he famously said uh to people, I think this was uh was it yesterday or the day before, he pr he he fa it was Monday that uh that Mayor Bloomberg uh told people, hey, uh 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 by as the equivalent, that's the equivalent of saying let them eat cake.
Queen's Councilman Eric Ulrich, uh, 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.
Uh 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 uh if you if if you did manage to get to Spider-Man, you saw the one functioning part of uh of New York City.
Um Mayor Bloomberg.
I 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 in the photograph.
Michael Bloomberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Remember him, Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Uh he was he was big for 20 minutes during the Gray Davis recall in California.
I don't know, I don't know what's happened to him since then.
Uh but uh Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Bloomberg, the new action heroes.
Uh they're not like these do nothings in Congress.
They're not admired in partisan bickering.
These guys are men of action and they're getting things done.
Uh Bloomberg, we were told by Time Magazine, he was, quote, opening a climate summit and talking about saving the planet, unquote.
Not not just 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 Seventh 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.
Uh, quote, they're tackling not just the climate, uh, writes Michael Grunwald, uh, because he does certainly does want to give the impression that, you know, Bloomberg is the sort of slacker who bunks off for Gulf after lunch.
No, sir, these new action heroes, quote, are doing things that Washington has failed to do.
Bloomberg coups Gronwold, 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 uh within a uh a certain amount of square uh feet of a building and watch uh and and watch what city workers uh 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 uh they've they've they've got the same level of uh highway clearance now that they have in the high passes of the Hindu Kush uh in Afghanistan, where they're totaled every year by the brutal Afghan winter, because in in five thousand years of push-toon history, nobody thought to invent the snow plow.
And as the Hindu Kush goes, so goes New York City.
New York City projected deficit is uh somewhere between two billion and three point six billion dollars, according to controller John New.
They can't even get the deficit right closest to the nearest uh nearest uh billion dollars.
Uh the their budget for financial year twenty ten, New York City, budget of sixty-three point one billion dollars.
Sixty-three point one billion dollars, but they're complaining because every inch of snow removal now uh 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 plough 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.
Uh Mayor Bloomberg, you thought he was taking all the salt out of your uh out of your fatty fast foods to put it on the uh East River Drive?
No, sir.
He doesn't believe in salt for your cheeseburger uh or for New York City streets.
He's gonna be um he's gonna be uh plowing those streets with uh fair trade, skimmed latte froth, and that'll do magic.
They're now saying that it'll be uh after new years before uh New York City uh infrastructure will be functioning again.
Uh hundreds of abandoned city buses, dozens of ambulances.
By the way, do you uh it's a good thing it's a good thing liberals don't worry about the Iranian nuclear program, because this is a pretty much a pretty much uh pretty much a good glimpse of how things would go if Ahmadinejad ever did manage to pull anything off in uh in New York City.
Uh shutdowns of airports, hundreds of abandoned city buses and dozens of ambulances sitting in the middle of snow drifts.
Uh a baby, a newborn baby died in Brooklyn.
They placed a call.
The woman uh the mother of this child had been forced to give birth in the lobby of her apartment building.
Uh 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.
Uh by the time they finally got through uh to to this the lobby of this building, the baby was unconscious and unresponsive, and the baby died.
This is this is embarrassing.
This is the can do technocrat mayor, the can-do technocrat mayor, uh who who presumes to regulate uh the uh the the trans fat contents of every food item you buy in New York City.
If you go 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 on uh insisted the number of calories be labeled on the cookie when you go into uh Starbucks and you have a cup of coffee and a 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 plough the streets of New York.
He cannot plow the streets in 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 Infor Rush on the EIB network talking talking about what New York City tells us about big government.
Because let's face it, uh you got a right.
If you live in the city of New York, you've got a right uh to complain about them not being able to plough the streets uh when they get a heavy snowfall.
Because you you pay more uh than almost anybody does uh in the United States uh for those for those uh for city and state services.
You know, uh i if you i 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.
Uh Governor Patterson uh in two thousand and nine said, This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression.
So naturally, his response to it was to bring the b in the biggest tax hike uh in New Year in New York uh history, uh, adding uh the little tiny little bits of life that he that weren't yet taxed in New York, uh he decided to to hone in on.
So it's not just that you've got your state tax, he sales tax, your municipal tax.
He he bore uh you got your doubled beer tax, you got your tax on clothing, your tax on cab rides, and iTunes tax on downloads from the internet, a tax on haircuts, a tax on haircuts, a hundred and thirty-seven new tax hikes in all, brought in by Governor Paterson uh last year.
Um uh if you're unclear about uh what uh what three activities in uh the state of New York are not taxed anymore, uh just call 1800 iHeart New York today and uh order your new package of state tax forms uh for just a hundred and ninety-nine dollars ninety-nine plus the twelve percent tax on tax forms tax and the four percent tax form application fee, partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5% tax filling tax.
Uh if you can make it there, you'll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.
In in New York, everything is taxed.
Everything is taxed, everything you do is tax.
Uh I I uh walked into my office the other day.
I'm always complaining on this show, because I'm I made the mistake of hiring an employee in New York.
And I never like to mention her name on on the show because it's uh she's sensitive about the fact that she's she's cost us more uh paperwork, more form filling, more uh changes of insurance policy than all our other employees in every single state and in fact across the planet put together.
Uh so I won't I won't use her real name, I'll call her uh Mabel, Mabel, let's say Mabel.
Uh I walked into the office and uh 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?
Uh 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 York 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 New I can't even fly into New York today.
There's no transportation mobility in your whole lousy city.
What 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 you've got stupid taxes on everything.
You've got bagel slices tax 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 can they plow the street outside the deli so you can get to the deli and pay your high t 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 uh Kwanzaa uh in uh what is this?
The Gary Post Tribune in um in Gary, Indiana.
I I think I used to be care my c I think they used to carry my column because they were owned by the same people who own the Chicago Sun Times.
But I do believe this is the all-time perfect picture caption for the uh the age we live in.
Uh it shows a gentleman uh lighting uh 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 uh 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 uh if you live in Gary, Indiana and you got to hear what uh Jihad Mohammed said, uh that's a very fetching name, by the way, Jihad Mohammed.
Um what uh Mr. Jihad Jihad's his first name and Mohammed is his surname.
Uh but if you heard Jihad Mohammed speaking at Christmas for the children, a tribute to Michael Jackson in Kwanzaa Week in Gary, Indiana, do uh uh do give us a call.
I'd love to hear uh I'd love to hear how it went.
We've been talking about snow plowing, big government, what big government does.
Because once big government gets big, it's never big enough.
Uh I mentioned this bagel tax they have in New York.
Uh and people don't believe that when you say they've got a uh a bagel tax in New York.
Uh but they have.
In uh 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, uh if you if you have just a bagel with nothing on it, you don't pay the food preparation tax.
Uh but if you have a bagel with cream cheese, that is subject to the ta 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 gonna 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, uh, they are one of the sixteenth brokest cities in the United States of America.
They're so broke they need Oh, uh they need their uh nine cents per sliced uh bagel.
I thought it was eight cents, I think I said, but in fact it's nine cents.
Uh and their bagel inspectors are cracking down, and that's probably why uh they couldn't get anybody to the apartment lobby uh in uh uh Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for nine hours, because uh their bagel inspectors were out because you know when it's snows heavily, it's nice to be able to go to a New York Delhi and get a nice slice bagel uh with a bit of cream cheese on it, uh warm the cockles of your heart on a snowy wintry day.
So the bagel inspectors were doubtless out in force uh cranking down on any bagel tax infractions in uh in in this in the city of New York.
Now Bloom 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 ta can-do technocrat.
If you're in New York City uh and uh and you agree with his assessment of the situation that things are just swell in New York, and the last seventy-two hours uh uh have been a perfect advertisement for the uh for the Bloomberg can-do technocracy, uh, then give me a call, because I'd uh 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.
Uh this was by Diane Cardwell.
Uh 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 eleven 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, eleven city agencies uh 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 m uh 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?
Uh in other words, you you you've made it uh 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 uh 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, uh is con uh a fawning story by Diane uh Cardwell on how there were now so many bureaucracies dealing with just opening a restaurant in New York,
uh, that the city had set up a new bureaucracy uh 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 eleven separate agencies and thirty separate permits.
You need uh for the privilege of opening uh 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 twenty-first 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 two hundred and fifty people inside it.
Because as you know, the FAA has determined that uh 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 and a plane that won't be able to serve us any uh 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, uh, that as one freeborn citizen to another freeborn citizen, uh, I could hire whoever I wanted to uh uh uh whoever I wanted to to do whatever job I wanted to.
Uh no, the New the State of New York and the City of New York imposes 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, Well, 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 uh you give them a paycheck at the end of the week, and uh 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 employ a to get a head hunting 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 York again.
It would have been cheaper for me to move her to Connecticut uh or or New Jersey.
This is the state uh the one of the great cities of the world has uh has come to uh under Mayor Bloomberg.
1800-282-2882.
We've heard the Bloomberg version.
Everything is now hunky-dory in New York, uh, and we will go to your calls, and we can go to your calls uh when we return.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein Infarush.
Mark Stein in Farush.
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.
Uh Greg, are you actually uh are you actually in Chicago or you are you in Chicago in the sense of Rahm Emanuel is you have a r spend four nights a year there, but you have a rental property and you swing by once every uh half a decade to run for mayor.
Is it that kind of residency or you actually physically in you're physically in Chicago as we speak?
I'm physically in Chicago, and Mark uh a friend of mine who does our snow plowing told me that his business partner sent out uh three snow plows to New York a few years ago when they had another heavy snow.
Right 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.
Right.
And they only paid him for sixty-five percent of what they owed him.
So if you wonder why all these surrounding places aren't sending their snow plows to New York, it's because they don't want to get stiffed again by New York City.
Yes, you know, this is this is fascinating to me, because I bet if you uh from an adjoining jurisdiction uh and you decided, right, we'll send our plows.
Or me, you know, in New Hampshire, we we uh we plowed our way out uh on the Monday in uh so we got tons like a small town highway departments who could be sending their drivers uh down to New York.
Uh but 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 uh saying, Will you you're you're now liable for the uh 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 save Mayor Bloomberg's ass uh would would would would wipe out any profit margin you did.
So you're lucky that you uh uh your friend only actually got uh sixty percent of it.
But you know the other thing they do, because I I used to think that was actually one of the most moving sites uh that when there was a disaster, uh people would chip in uh from all over the continent, uh really.
I mean, if you take uh 911, uh, for example, a lot of uh Canadian firefighters who went down there to help out.
It's uh it's the sort of brotherhood of first responders that uh when something happens, you all go, uh you all flock to where the disaster is and help each other out.
Uh fascinating glimpse of what we're turning into.
Hurricane Katrina swept in, devastated uh the Gulf Coast, and volunteer firemen, whoops, whoops, firefighters, volunteer firemen from across the map, all headed uh south to help with disaster relief.
And uh FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency dispatched them to uh go on, take a take it take ta take a guess.
Where do you think they dispatch them to Oh, is he has he gone?
He's left us from Chicago?
He's uh he's gone.
Okay.
Uh d dispatch them to New Orleans, Gulfport?
No, no.
FEMA dispatch these volunteer firemen to Atlanta for diversity and sexual harassment training.
Uh w yeah which which most of the Mr Sadley can't believe this.
No, it's obviously you can't because most in most uh uh fire departments are you gotta get undergo all that rubbish back home.
So most of them have already undergone diversity and sexual harassment training, but it wasn't federally compliant uh disaster uh diversity and sexual harassment training and you can't be too careful because uh heaven 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.
New York City.
This is the genius of Bloomberg government.
By the way, do you is that true his claim that ninety six percent of New York City streets are now cleared?
That's that's uh yeah exactly you uh Mr Snerdly points out that if you uh if you actually try to go out in New York City streets to see the ninety six percent of streets that are now cleared you're apparently stuck in the four percent you your your nice little residential road happens to be one of the four percent 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 uh you uh y now snow in Minnesota you you've got snow uh you you have snow in Minnesota don't you yeah it's actually about waist high here right now it just never melts and we're getting ready for an uh another storm to come in tomorrow so right and Cambridge Minnesota is coping with that oh yeah yep everyone's got their shovels 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 MBC nightly news and they interviewed all these people complaining about how the snow had been removed and they looked physically capable of of shoveling.
And then they go 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, 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?
Uh 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 to shovel out the sidewalk and uh 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 I've never been to New York but I was in New Orleans shortly after uh 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 got to walk a few hundred feet to save themselves instead of they're waiting for the government to come pick them up.
I think it was, I don't know which governor it was uh for the football game last night.
Right.
So it's always we've become a country of I can't remember the exact words that he used, but it's still Yeah, we we we uh we we sit around waiting.
We got we gotta run, we gotta take a profit break here, but I will return to that point, Jerry, uh, when we come back.
Mark Stein Inforush on the EIB network, one-eight hundred-282-2882.
Mark Stein Inforush on the EIB network, live from New Hampshire.
We've been uh 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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