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Dec. 30, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:48
December 30, 2010, Thursday, Hour #3
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Yes, America's Anchorman is away and this is your undocumented Anchor Man sitting in, entirely unregulated, entirely unlicensed.
My temporary month-long temporary talk show host permit expired in 1983 and I have never renewed it.
So entirely uncredentialed.
We were talking about these curly fry light bulbs and a listener emailed me to say, what happens when the big earthquake hits San Francisco and millions of Curly Fry light bulbs are shattered in the earthquake.
And so they are not disposed of in compliance with the convenient 14-step light bulb disposal program involving the rubber gloves and the pack of playing cards and the mason jar and emptying the persimmon jelly onto the carpet.
They're not disposed of in compliance with the 14-step program.
And so the whole of San Francisco becomes contaminated and uninhabitable.
Well, you're going to have a hell of a class action suit, as we saw with 9-11, from first responders who go and rescue people in these homes with all the shattered Curly Fry light bulbs everywhere.
Five years down the road, you're going to have a hell of a class action suit from all the toxic illnesses they're laboring under.
That is big government at work solving problems that didn't exist until the moral narcissists of big government decided to solve them.
Let us go.
Let us go.
Direct to the guest host of guest hosts.
Walter E. Williams is a favorite guest host of the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Every time I host this show, I always get tons of emails from people saying, oh, well, you're okay if we have to have some sinister illegal immigrant hosting the Rush Limbaugh Show.
But Walter E. Williams is the guest host of guest hosts.
And it's a great honor to have him live with us now to talk about his new book, Up From the Projects.
Happy New Year to you, Walter.
Well, Happy New Year and Merry Christmas to you, Mark.
And that's right.
Belated Merry Christmas to you.
Now, your book, just the title here, Up From the Projects, you grew up in about as poor as poor can get in America, isn't it?
Well, not quite.
Well, you in the Philadelphia ghetto.
But just explain to us the difference between projects as we understand the term now and projects back then.
Yeah, well, the actual name of the project was Richard Allen Housing Project in North Philadelphia.
And matter of fact, in the book, there's a photograph of the building in which we lived.
And if you look at the building, you see no graffiti.
Graffiti was unheard of.
The closest we came to graffiti was drawing hopscotch, you know, taking chalk and drawing hopscotch in the street so we can play hopscotch.
And people used to, there were no bars the window.
We did not go to sleep with the sounds of gunshots in the background.
There weren't bars at windows.
In the hot, humid summer nights, if we behaved ourselves, my mother would let my sister and I sleep out on the fire escape.
And one rather other remarkable thing is that my father, he deserted us when I was three, and a couple years later, my mother finally divorced him.
And when my sister was two.
But among all the people that we knew, my sister and I, we were the only kids without a mother and a father in the household.
Now, today, it would be exactly the opposite.
It would be a rare thing to find a mother-father in the household in the project in which I grew up.
As a matter of fact, most housing projects around the country.
Now, what's the reason for that?
Because LBJ and the Democratic Party thought they were doing black Americans a great favor with the great society 45 years ago.
And it seems to have had certain malign consequences.
Oh, yes.
At least as far as the black families concern.
Oh, yes.
The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery could not have done, what harshest Jim Crow laws could not have done, what the rank discrimination could not have done, and namely break the black family.
That is, back in the late 1800s, in the early 1900s, even up until 1940, in most cities you found upwards of 80% of black kids living in two-parent families.
Today, you'd be hard put to find 20 or 30 percent.
And in some cities, 80 percent, 85 percent of black kids don't have two parents.
And even during slavery, many times marriage was not allowed among slaves, but kids, children lived in households with their two biological parents.
Yeah, and now, as you say, maybe 85 percent don't have any male head of the household.
And if there is, it's often just a kind of transient boyfriend passing through.
That is absolutely right.
And by the way, the illegitimacy rate among black Americans is around 70%.
And I'm not a prude, but if you're born and you find out you don't know who your father is or where he is, that's not a best start on life.
But I would say this, Mark, is that it's not a black thing because in Sweden, and that's the mother welfare states, the illegitimacy rate is 54%.
Right.
Among whites, in the white Americans, the illegitimacy rate is over 25% where it was in the 60s when people started talking about black illegitimacy.
Yeah, and if you make those overseas comparisons, basically you can say that what LBJ did to the black family, the British welfare state did to the family in general, because across the United Kingdom, white families, the mother will be moving from one boyfriend to the next, and he'll be abusing the 14 and 15 year old daughter, and children grow up in complete chaos.
So once government takes an interest in you, and once government decides to do you a favor, it can be pretty bad news for basic societal building boards.
Well, it's a basic economic principle.
That is, if you tax something, you're going to get less of it.
And if you subsidize something, you're going to get surpluses of it.
And it's just a fact of business that we have been subsidizing slovenly behavior.
Now, let's, because I said before the break, you understand, everyone knows you understand macroeconomic theory and this is.
And macroeconomics.
And this book applies it to your own life.
But there are kind of fascinating glimpses of the difference between then and now.
There was a story in the New York papers a couple of weeks ago about how cab drivers were that the TSA may not be willing to profile at American airports, but New York cab drivers say they're going to profile because it's life-threatening not to profile.
You started as a cab driver.
That's right.
Back in the 1950s in Philadelphia, and when you used to get tired in your shift at 2 or 3 in the morning, you'd just pull over and take a nap in the cab.
Nobody would do that in Philadelphia these days.
That is right.
I would take a nap at a cab stand.
I worked from 12 to 8 shift sometimes.
And there's nothing doing, so I'd sleep in the cab.
The hot summer times, the windows would also be open, and I'd get a customer, maybe a tap on the glass and say, driver, can you take me so-and-so?
But if anybody did that today, they might be accused of attempting attempted suicide.
Right.
And what is the reason for that, Walter?
Is it the fact that, I mean, when you look, as you say, when you look at the project you grew up in, there's no graffiti.
It's clean, it's well-maintained, it's not crime-ridden.
What happens?
Is it the fact that we turn huge populations into dependents and tell them that they no longer have the dignity of self-reliance?
What is the reason for it?
Well, I think, again, just plain economic theory, the cost of various kinds of behavior, our anti-social behavior, has been reduced.
That is, criminals go free.
You know, at one time in the United States, rape was a crime punishable by death.
Today, rape, you can rape a woman and maybe get out in five years, four years, and maybe not even that.
So it's a lower cost of all kinds of criminal activities.
And so you expect people to engage in it more.
Well, you started out, as you say, you weren't at the very bottom, but you were, by any conventional understanding, you were poor.
You did the kind of jobs.
Suddenly, Barack Obama never had the need to work as a cabby on the night shift in Philadelphia.
And you became a professor at George Mason.
Do we still have that level of social mobility?
Or are we getting into the situation of the countries that many of us thought we'd left behind where you actually have a transgenerational underclass just mired at the bottom?
Yeah, well, I think one of the things that one of the great things about our country is, and makes us unique among all nations, and that is just because you know where a person ended up in life, you cannot be sure about where he started.
That is, there's such upward mobility in our country that you don't have to start at top.
But, you know, and matter of fact, according to the Forbes 100 richest Americans, all that's new blood.
You don't find the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Goulds, and it's the Steve Jobs, it's the Bill Gates and others who are first-generation, very wealthy people.
And so it's a lot of income mobility.
It's not like Europe.
If you don't start at top in Europe, you're not going to get to the top.
Well, hold that thought, Walter, because I want to explore that a bit with you when we come back.
Because take your circumstances now and apply it today.
If, say, you start off in life without a male role model in your household, if you're leading a kind of transient existence where the pillars of your family are not secure and you're growing up in dependency and on welfare, can you jump from that rung of the ladder and get yourself up into that Forbes 500 list?
We'll talk about that and other questions with Walter when we return on the Rushlimbo Show.
One show, twice the guest host, Mark Stein in for Rush, talking to Walter Williams about his new book, Up From the Projects, which is a fascinating glimpse at Walter's own life.
And Walter has kind of intersected with key American institutions at kind of every step along the way because you were in the Army, Walter, in tumultuous times.
If I was.
During the desegregation period.
That's right.
I was drafted from Philadelphia and sent to Fort Stewart, Georgia, without a very good orientation on the southern way of life.
I had some adjustment problems.
And matter of fact, I was just a plain troublemaker while I was in the Army.
And actually, they trumped charges on me, trumped up charges, Article 92, which is failure to obey a direct command.
And I was court-martialed.
And I warned the court-martial.
And in fact, it's in the book.
I forget what page it's on, but it shows the court martial documents, not guilty of all charges and specifications.
And I brought charges against the company commander that court-martialed me for undue hardship on a person subject to his command.
And before I could get the charges written out or processed, they shipped me to Korea.
Right, right.
So this is like way more, you had way more trouble than any of the don't ask, don't tell guys.
You basically went in there as a young hotshot and, as you say, a troublemaker.
But you came out.
I mean, you've got, I think, you learned a lesson from an Army chaplain that you knew during the Korean.
That occurred in Korea.
They sent me to this black Army chaplain, and because I was still raised, I was raised in hell.
Matter of fact, give you an idea.
When I landed in Korea, we landed on LSTs.
There was no port like it is now.
And a long line of guys waiting to go through the process.
And you had to fill out these personnel, you know, give your age, your next to the kin, your religion, and race in there.
And under race, I put Caucasian.
And this chief warrant officer asked me, he said, you made a mistake.
I said, no, I didn't.
And so I said, I'm Caucasian.
And so he asked me, why did I put down Caucasian?
Because I said, well, if I put down Negro, I'll get the worst job over here.
Now, I never changed it.
He probably did.
But this chaplain, he told me, he says, you know, Williams, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
And my response to him, I didn't actually say it because he's an officer.
I said that Uncle Tom so-and-so.
But actually, it turns out later on, I witnessed, I agreed many years later, that he was absolutely right.
And I was wrong.
Right, right.
And it takes.
But the big thing, Mark, is that what happened to me, I had a lot of time by myself.
I had a job just all by myself because nobody wanted to work with me.
And I was 24 years old, and I said to myself, if I don't get started soon, I'm never going to be anything.
So my wife and I, we agreed, exchanging letters.
As soon as I get out of the Army and we saved $700, we're going to move to Los Angeles and I'm going to go to college.
And I got out of the Army July 3rd.
I had my job back with the taxi cab company July 7th.
And December 1st, my wife and I, we had saved $900, and we hooked up a four by six U-Hauled trailer to my 1951 Mercury with all of our worldly possessions in it, and it wasn't even full.
And we headed off to Los Angeles.
Now, you bring us back to what we were talking about earlier, in a way, because you have a wonderful line about Mrs. Williams in the book.
And Mrs. Williams is a familiar figure until her death to millions and millions of listeners to this show who used to love when you would talk about your wife on the show.
You have a wonderful phrase there.
You say she was a civilizing and humanizing influence in my life.
Oh, yes, she was.
And that is really, in some sense, the big purpose of marriage when it's working: that man is a crazy beast like you in the Army.
He's a barbarian.
Yeah, he's a barbarian, and the civilizing figure is the woman who domesticates him and, as in your case, gets him to kind of get his life together and pack up and move up and make something of himself.
You figured that out at 24, thanks in part to your wife.
But a lot of guys don't seem to, a lot of 24-year-olds now are still crazy teenagers.
Well, you know, you know, Mark, my wife and I, she was very popular and very highly likable, and she's getting invited to parties, and I got invited because that's the only way they can get her, is take me, because I was not that agreeable person.
But we would get home at one o'clock at night and two o'clock at night, and you know what a young man would like to be doing at one and two o'clock at night.
But I'm getting a lecture from her.
She's saying, Walter, do you always have to prove that you're smarter than everybody else?
Did you have to say that to the person?
Well, blah, blah, blah, blah, you could have let that go by.
And I started getting lectures to kind of civilize me.
And as you say, that's actually what you need because if you're unlucky, you don't get that at 24, and you figure it out in the ruins of your life when you're 38 or you're 43 and time has passed you by.
That's right.
So actually, that's one of the most important things you get.
How long were you married for?
48 years.
And if my wife had lived two more months, we would have been together as a couple for a half a century.
That's pretty amazing.
And it is a kind of tragedy that if you went back to your corner of Philadelphia, it will be increasingly rare to find people who are able to say that.
Oh, yes.
And as you were saying before we went to the break, as you were saying, there are opportunities for kids to get out do not exist when the opportunities that I had because of things like the minimum wage law, all kinds of regulations, and all kinds of labor laws that cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.
And kids and young people do not have the opportunities to get out that I had.
No, a lot of things have changed, and a lot of things seem easier than they were then and fairer than they were then.
But in a lot of ways, the breaks are harder.
So the book is called Up from the Project.
It's the autobiography.
Give us the name of the publisher, Walter.
Well, it's the Hoover Institution, and Amazon carries it.
And they might be, they said they have it out of stock, but they'll be reordering it soon.
But you can get it from the Hoover Institution.
And if you go to my webpage, WalterEWilliams.com, it's a link to the Hoover Institution there.
Right.
And you can also order it direct if you go to Hoover.org, whose book's so excellent.
Walter, it's a terrific book.
And if you've listened to Walter when he's sitting in here, this tells you the story, where he came from, and how he got to be who he is.
Happy New Year to you, Walter, and it's been great to have you on the show.
More from the Rush Limbaugh Show coming up in just a moment.
Yes, it's guest host Gogo at the Rush Limbaugh Show.
You just heard Walter Williams.
The new book is called Up from the Projects.
It's his autobiography and a vivid portrait of a lost world when you look at the Philadelphia he grew up in and in his Tales from the Army days.
You can get it by going to the Hoover website at Hoover.org.
Walter's great point is that, which is the most basic conservative lesson of all, is that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it.
And that's what government does.
It subsidizes bad behavior.
And that's why we end up with more of it.
And Somebody wrote to me, I think, two or three years ago, just before the whole Lehman Brothers meltdown started, and said, Oh, why bother about that?
We're rich enough to afford to be stupid.
And that's how the Western world thought up to the fall of 2008, that we were rich enough to afford to be stupid.
We could just throw money at these problems, in a sense, just for flattering ourselves and for bumping up our moral vanity.
And that's what we did.
And there were huge, terrible human consequences to the stupid things we did.
You know, that is actually the essence of leftism, is that it doesn't matter whether it does whether so-called humanitarianism does anything for the person on the receiving end of the humanitarianism, but that it makes the humanitarian feel good about himself.
And that's the history of the welfare prod.
Welfare programs and entitlements and all the rest of it.
Welfare was enormously destructive, transgenerational welfare enormously destructive.
But hey, it made middle-class people feel good because they demonstrated how kind and virtuous they were by being willing to throw money at the problem.
It had real-life consequences, exactly the same as the stupidity that's going on in New York today.
Let's go to Thomas in Macon, Georgia.
Thomas, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
It's great to be on the show, Mr. Stein.
I'm a student of chemistry, and I just wanted to add on to the talk about the cleanup of the mercury from the curly fry light bulbs.
In the cleanup of it, during some mercury spills that I've seen, some of the cleanup is, in addition to wearing the gloves and some of the other safety equipment, you have to dust the area.
The area is also dusted with sulfur dust, which causes the mercury to stick together.
It sort of causes it to stick together because it's still a liquid.
And so then it is scraped into a container, a glass container, where then it can be put into a secure storage facility where it can be processed by proper chemical companies that have the proper facilities.
Now, when you say, you use this phrase sofa dust.
Sulfur dust.
So what's it called?
It is sulfur.
Sulfur dust.
Oh, sulfur dust.
Right, right.
Sulfur dust is something powderized.
Okay, okay, right, right.
Now, is there any chance?
That's presumably why I think that the Maine Department of Environmental Protection said you then have to, after you've done all the business with the gloves and the playing cards and the mason jar, you've got to go around with strips of duct tape just picking up, presumably, the particles of sulfur dust.
Is that right then?
In the kit, now I think the duct tape that they're talking about is to actually pick up the bits of the mercury.
Oh, right.
I'm not exactly sure if these kits that they're talking about issuing actually have sulfur in them.
But one of the other things, too, is that you have to be careful when you're cleaning up the mercury that you're not wearing any some metals such as gold.
Mercury can bind in with the gold.
And so if you had a ring on, for example, a gold ring, then it would bind with some of the mercury, and you'd be, every time you wore that ring, you would be exposing yourself to mercury.
So remove your ladies, if you're listening to this and you drop the light bulb, remove your wedding ring and your engagement ring before you attempt to clear up the light bulb, before you get the gloves, before you get the playing cards, before you get the mason jar, before you get the persimmon jelly uh, also remove.
I don't know why the state of Maine irresponsibly declined to inform people that they needed to take off there.
I guess it's a rural state so they don't have a lot of gangster rappers in the Great North Woods, because if you're nobody yeah, in Maine nobody has any any, any gold.
They're just wearing, you know, ornamental engagement rings made from moose horns.
You know, you don't have to worry about the gold.
But any visiting gangster rapper, say he's lying low after the East-West rap wars and he's holed up in the North Main Woods, remove the bling.
If you drop your curly fry light bulb, take your bling off before you bend down to pick it up.
Is that right, Thomas?
That's from what I know.
It can bind in with the metal.
Okay.
Right.
Then go and have a seafood.
Then go and have a seafood dinner, says Mr. Snurdley, so that any of the mercury that's blended in with your bling will then leak into the lobster and some giant mercury poison toxic lobster will be rampaging down the Made Coast.
Thank you, Thomas, for that.
So the state of Maine is wrong.
It's not a simple 14-point disposal procedure for removing the, if you break the curly fry light bulb.
It is, in fact, up to, what are we now?
to 16 or 17 points now take off your wedding band and remove all your I'm so glad I'm relieved Sammy Davis Jr. didn't live to see this because this would have been a disaster.
This would have been a disaster for him if he had.
In fact, I wouldn't mind if they went back and investigated it, that he probably died from premature poisoning from a prototype of this curly fry light bulb.
Oh, yeah, gold fillings.
Yeah, yeah.
What about gold fillings?
That's true.
Maybe you should remove those.
Maybe before attempting to remove the light bulb, you should just find a dent.
I would go outside because they say you've got to go outside for 15 minutes and wait until it's safe to re-enter after you've opened the window.
So I would, if you've got gold fillings in your teeth, I would, while you're outside, tie a piece of string to the garage door and the other end to your tooth and then walk down to the end of the driveway, pop up the automatic garage door opener and let it yank your gold tooth out.
And then, and only then, when you've removed all the gold teeth from your mouth, will it be safe for you to re-enter the house and attempt to dispose of the curly fry light bulb?
This is America in the 21st century.
This is what we did to the great iconic invention of Thomas Edison.
I forget who it was who said that the most important invention of the 19th century was the idea of invention.
But they were right.
They were right.
Everything, if you look, if you compare the first half century of the 20th century to the second half, it takes longer to fly transatlantic.
It looks longer to fly from New York to London now than it did in 1960.
You know, we went in the first half century of air travel, we went from Wilbur and Orville Wright to biplanes to transatlantic jetliners in the first half century, and now the whole process has seized up.
We are living through the sclerosis of America.
We don't invent things.
We regulate the life out of stuff we have already invented.
And unless we liberate, reliberate American potential, unless we stop making it difficult for people actually to develop new products and get them to market, we will become a nation of regulators.
Every single activity that you can think of is now regulated.
We have huge regulatory agencies wandering into hardware stores and fining people because they're offering free coffee to their customers.
We have become a nation of regulators instead of a nation that actually rewards innovation.
Let's go to Dan in Cookville, Tennessee.
Dan, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Great to have you with us.
Thanks for having Dr. Williams.
I always enjoy him.
I would have called you yesterday if I could have gotten to a phone.
But on Tuesday, I watched a thing on C-SPAN about James Oberstar, who's our chairman of the Transportation Committee and all that.
And it was just a marathon love fest for Oberstar, how he seemed to have fixed everything in the world.
And later on that night on the History Channel, I saw this thing about the crumbling infrastructure in America.
And it said, we're turning into a third world country.
That's right.
They talked about dams, levees, roads, and the electrical grid.
Yeah, because we close dams.
That's what we do.
We don't build dams.
You think Obama's going to put up a Hoover Dam?
If you're lucky, if you're lucky, he'll put up a wheelchair ramp for the Hoover Dam.
That's all.
And what got me really irate was that they had an engineer on there who practically apologized.
He says, oh, we could fix all this.
We could fix all this.
And it kind of made you think, well, wait a minute, who's been in charge?
Well, it's the government.
On the electrical grid, now, that is mostly privately owned, but it's heavily regulated by the government.
And all these failures, I thought, well, you know, here it comes, here it comes.
They're going to say we need more taxes.
But, you know, as soon as they say we need more taxes, then it kind of puts a spotlight on the government is the culprit and not the savior of all of our problems.
No, it's the inability to make things happen in a timely fashion.
I don't think you can get the Caledonian record of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom and Northern New Hampshire in Cookville, Tennessee, Dan.
But if you could, you would see that Vermont's chief stimulator, Vermont's Stimulus Czar, has explained that there was no new infrastructure building done by the stimulus.
The stimulus was a complete failure in Vermont, as everywhere else, because nothing is shovel-ready in the United States.
Shovel-ready, as Obama's admitted, is just a phrase.
It has no meaning in reality because America is no longer shovel-ready.
That's the infrastructure problem in the United States.
Mark Steinen for Rush, more to come.
Mark Steinen for Rush, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has lost or misplaced more than $8 million in property, losing track of items, including computer and video equipment, government ordered to say.
But don't worry, I don't think they've lost any of the vials of anthrax or smallpox or anything like that.
So you don't have to, supposedly, you don't have to worry about that.
They've just lost $8 million worth of stuff that isn't particularly toxic.
There were no light bulbs in there, so you don't have to worry about it.
Massachusetts, Massachusetts sets target to slash carbon emissions because that's the priority for the state of Massachusetts.
Part of the plan includes a pilot program linking car insurance premiums to the miles driven, a pay-as-you-drive program.
That's wonderful, isn't it?
You know, restrictions on freedom of movement.
You used to have to be a big old-time communist or fascist dictator in El Presidente for Life type to introduce that.
But if you introduce it in the name of saving the environment, people will volunteer to have their movement restricted.
Pay-as-you-drive.
Pay-as-you-drive in Massachusetts to cut back on unnecessary travel.
And let's face it, you're not like Al Gore, are you?
Pretty much everything you do is unnecessary.
Why don't you just stay home?
And instead of, you don't really need to ramp up all the miles on the car.
You don't really need a light bulb, do you?
After all, you're pretty much in the dark on everything anyway.
What do you need the washer for?
Why don't you go and take your clothes and beat them on the rocks down by the river with the native women while singing multicultural chants all mornings long?
It'll be a much more rewarding multicultural experience.
Pay as you drive, coming to Massachusetts.
That would be bad news for the 200,000 miles old Scott Brown's ramped up on his pickup, wouldn't it?
Oh, Texas.
Texas is also gone for the Texas, Houston, Texas.
A long-standing tit-for-tat between Texas and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over pollution regulation has grown fierce in recent months.
The EPA is going to directly issue greenhouse gas permits to Texas Industries beginning in January after the state openly refused to comply with new federal regulations.
Good for the state of Texas.
Who elected the Environmental Protection Agency?
Were they on the ballot on November the 2nd?
No.
The guys who are on the ballot, the guys who are on the ballot on November the 2nd, the guys you vote for, the Environmental Protection Agency has slipped beyond their control.
Regulation is a bigger threat to the United States of America than pollution is.
This country will regulate itself to death long before it pollutes itself to death.
And the message for 2011 is that you need to make the Tea Party message, you need to make the people's message heard not just by your legislators, but by these insulated, insulated regulators living in a world of their own.
For example, Kathleen Sebelius, they stripped the death panel provisions out of the Obamacare bill.
They stripped them out of the Obamacare bill, but Kathleen Sebelius put them back in there anyway, because the bureaucracy can do that.
In the end, it doesn't matter what the legislators legislate, because the bureaucracy and the regulators will just regulate it into being anyway.
This is the critical issue facing the United States in the years to come.
November the 2nd sent a message to the legislative class.
What we need to do in 2011 is reel in the regulatory class because regulatory tyranny is a bigger threat to the United States than any environmental pollution in Houston, Texas, or anywhere else.
Mark Stein, in for rush, more to come.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network.
I'm about to change a light bulb here in our new facility at Ice Station EIB.
So I've got my rubber gloves, I've got my pack of playing cards, I've got my mason jar, I've removed my bling, and I find myself recalling the words of Sir Edward Gray, the British Foreign Secretary, glancing out of his window at dusk on August, I think it was August the 3rd, 1914, on the eve of the Great War.
And he said, he looked at the lamplighters in the London dusk and he goes, the lamps are going out all over Europe.
We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
The lights are going out all over America, but we did it to ourselves.
We're regulating ourselves into the dark by banning Edison's iconic light bulb.
And this really is the big takeaway from what we've been discussing today.
That the left would rather solve fictitious problems.
And because of their control of the media, they do a great job at stampeding the Republicans into going along with it.
And so we've got to stampede back.
That's what happened on November the 2nd, that the right, this is a 70-30 nation.
When you take the polls, 70% of Americans believe in small government and a self-reliant citizenry that can fulfill its own opportunities.
But we don't have a 70-30 elite culture.
So we pushed back on November the 2nd, and we have got to do even more pushback to make sure the Republicans don't go all wobbly and soft-spined and reach across the aisle-y, because when they reach across the aisle, they enact stuff like this curly fry light bulb legislation.
So we've got to keep the pressure up all through 2011.
I will see you Monday, and look forward to it.
Have a great new year.
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