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Aug. 19, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:44
August 19, 2011, Friday, Hour #2
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It is Open Line Friday.
Pleasure to have you here.
There's a delightful freewheeling air that accompanies any Open Line Friday, both in the calls I'm looking at here on the screen and the ideas that are popping into my head.
Plenty more 2012 talk, to be sure.
Plenty more immigration talk.
In fact, we're going to go to calls first.
But then I will get to a gentleman whose story, it's a Florida teacher suspended for some hot opinions on gay marriage that he put on his personal Facebook page.
This is something we probably don't address enough because there needs to be an answer.
It seems like it's a question that should have an answer.
And that answer has been elusive.
That question is: what can you get away with on your personal Facebook page or your personal Twitter account?
Does your employer have a right to take a look at the very visible stance you may take on Facebook if you have a whole lot of friends, or on Twitter if you have a whole lot of followers, and rain down some consequences on you?
Isn't it just like standing up on a soapbox with a megaphone saying stuff?
Does it reflect back on the employer to the extent that the employer can fire you or suspend you or otherwise punish you for things you say that ostensibly seem like your First Amendment rights on your Facebook or your Twitter?
And there's a story of a Florida teacher.
I'll get to here, and if not this segment, then the next, because I'm going to hop onto some calls here on the various other things that we brought up.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Davis filling in from WBAP in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Speaking of Twitter, if you want to hop onto my small growing army of people, just Mark Davis, all one word on Twitter, M-A-R-K-D-A-V-I-S.
Mark Davis on Twitter, and I put stuff up there.
Whenever I'm going to fill in again, I'll give you that alert so you can either rush toward the radio or make other plans.
And just various things going on here in my world.
Mark Davis on Twitter if you want to do that.
M-A-R-K-D-A-V-I-S.
Thank you.
And speaking of the internet, always, even when the guest hosts are in, always make sure you visit rushlimbaugh.com.
All righty, in one of the prettiest sounding towns in America, there between, I guess, Chicago and Rockford, Lake in the Hills, Illinois.
Paul, Mark Davis, in for Rush.
How you doing, sir?
Yeah, good day, Mark.
This new immigration policy is going to have countless bureaucrats deciding who stays and who goes.
Now, some of these will be able to do a good job at it.
Others will be driven by ideology.
But I also believe a significant number will be driven by greed, which means bribes will take place, etc.
And even though we're trying to keep the bad people out, they're going to get in anyway.
I believe this is a really bad idea, and that this should be, as it has been, a job for law enforcement and those that knew what they're doing in the process.
Yeah, exactly right.
I mean, we will find the way we discover illegal immigrants can vary widely.
Sometimes we discover them right after they shoot and kill a cop.
Sometimes we find them just in a traffic stop.
Either way, we have found someone who needs to be ushered out of the country.
And to create this prioritization that the DHS now envisions at Homeland Security, the Janet Napolitano letter said this will enhance public safety by focusing deportation efforts on those who pose a threat.
All illegal immigration poses a threat of varying severity, of course, but this is an attempt to shut down our degree of caring about a huge percentage of illegal immigrants who are just here for our jobs.
Yeah, I just figure what part of illegal do they not understand?
I know.
It's the forgotten word.
We're referred to as anti-immigration.
No one is anti-well, I know a couple of folks who are.
No one is anti-immigration.
We're anti-illegal immigration.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it a lot.
In fact, for a little bit of a snapshot study in this kind of thing and how the language means stuff, have we caught the very odd MSNBC marketing campaign of late, this thing called Lean Forward?
I guess because Lean Left just seems a little too blatant.
And there's a big smiling Chris Matthews, and it's in his supposed handwriting.
And it says, The great, this is a full-page ad in some magazine I read on the plane.
It said, the great thing about America is that the people who tend to be on the right side of things are those who are embracing liberty.
That's funny.
I said, wow, that's a great sentence from Chris Matthews.
I couldn't agree more.
Yeah, well, keep reading.
Because the definition of liberty can be an interesting one, depending on whose brain and whose mouth or whose hand it comes from.
And he then set out a myth of equivalency in the following couple of sentences, saying that the right side of various arguments, the people that tend to make America great, are the people who are taking the right side in these various liberty debates, whether it is rights for African Americans or rights for women or immigrants or gays.
Whoa.
Two of these things are not like the other, to paraphrase, to loosely paraphrase Sesame Street.
This is the myth of equivalency.
And I mention this in the midst of an immigration debate because if you're talking about whether black folks should or should not be slaves, that absolutely is a basic right.
About whether or not there should be a Civil Rights Act in 1964, about whether all manner of basic decency should be afforded people of color.
That's an obvious no-brainer.
When you talk about the basic women's rights, it is shocking to me still how long we went before we gave women the right to vote.
I mean, hello?
So, of course, that's a basic right.
You should not have to be denied the right to vote because you're a woman for crying out loud.
That is a basic right.
But then we venture into things that are not rights.
They're just things that some people feel very passionate about, which is fine.
Gay rights and immigrant rights.
I mean, gay rights, for example, is the perfect example.
We have a big debate going on all over the place all the time about various rights in the gay community.
And that's fine.
Let's have that debate.
But the notion that there is a right, a right, a right for gay marriage to be viewed as the legal equal of heterosexual marriage, that's not a right.
Something does not become a right just because you really want it badly.
It does not become a right.
Immigrant rights, I don't know what the heck they're talking about, except the right to be here illegally.
What immigrant right is denied?
If you are here legally, you've got the same rights as everybody else.
You're here legally.
If you become a citizen, you're a citizen, no matter where you're from.
That's fantastic.
We love that.
I'm the most pro-immigration.
One of my most, one of the proudest things I have ever done.
One of my favorite things I've ever done.
As people who do this for a living will do, we will tend to roll out for some speaking engagements.
Tends to be a lot of political clubs or civic organizations or this or that.
And I'm always glad to do it.
But one of my favorites of the last, I mean, I've been here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area now for like 17 years, whether it was Memphis or Jacksonville or Washington before that, everywhere I've ever worked.
This was one of my favorite things.
I spoke at a naturalization ceremony in Dallas.
I stood, actually, it was in Plano, the suburb north of Dallas, and I looked out over an ocean of a couple of thousand people.
They were here.
They were born in places from Mexico to Malaysia, India to Indonesia, Canada to Calcutta, Morocco to Mexico.
They had one thing in common: they all wanted to be Americans so badly that they followed the rule of law, jumped through the hoops we make people jump through, took the tests, walked through the fire that we established to become an American citizen, and they stood there looking up at me.
And I had to somehow craft words to say to them what their toils had meant to me.
And I clumsily cobbled together some things on the way over.
And I said that I talk a lot on the show about illegal immigration, and it makes people think that I don't like immigrants.
The exact opposite is true.
You guys right here are some of my favorite Americans right now.
I know a lot of people who were born in this country as I was, who I would, you know, I don't give a flip about.
You guys are my favorite Americans today.
I am American just by accident of birth.
My dad was on the Air Force station at Randolph Air Force Base, married my mom, boom, San Antonio, 1957.
I'm born.
I did nothing, nothing to earn or to deserve the unparalleled joy of being an American citizen, except geographic accident of birth.
But you folks, you folks came from other places and wanted to be an American, made a conscious choice to do what's necessary to become American citizens.
And you could have come here illegally.
You could have crawled across the Rio Grande if that's what direction you were coming, or somehow snaked off a plane on the East Coast or the West Coast.
You could have done that because Lord knows it's pretty easy to disappear into the tapestry of America, but you didn't.
You did it right.
You did it legally.
And today, right now, you sit in your chairs looking up at me on this stage, and we are all equally American.
You are just as American as I am, even though I've been American for about 50 years and you've been American for about 10 minutes.
We are all equally American.
And that is what is so great about this country.
You can't go to France and become French.
You can come from everywhere and be American.
And it is the strength of this country.
We are a nation of immigrants, legal immigrants who followed the law to be here the right way.
There was no honor greater than addressing that naturalization ceremony.
So I will be damned, if you'll excuse me, if anyone will point some finger at me because of my conservatism and my feelings about illegal immigration and call me anti-immigrant.
And on that ridiculous Chris Matthews full-page ad, but you know, you got to be on the side of liberty, the side of freedom for people.
You know, the blacks and women stuff, yeah, that was about, you know, not being a slave and being able to vote.
You bet.
Those are basic rights.
But what exact kind of immigrant rights are we talking about?
What?
The right to be here illegally?
I don't think so.
And as far as gay folks, to get back into the 2012 race, Rick Perry's right about this too.
It's a state's rights issue.
If New York wants to have gay marriage, they can have gay marriage.
Don't like that?
Move to New York.
Fight against it.
Get it overturned.
In your state, when it comes to your state capital, your state legislature, guess what?
You get to make the same call.
Have gay marriage as the legal equal to heterosexual marriage or not.
The people make the choice.
That's what the Constitution says.
So, a lot to tie together there, issue-wise.
So let me go ahead and take a break, come back, get some calls in.
And also, more calls in.
And also, the Florida teacher.
Speaking of gay marriage, a Florida teacher shares an opinion or two about gay marriage on the occasion of the New York adoption of it and gets in trouble because of his Facebook posts.
Tell you about that next.
Mark Davis on the EIB Network filling in for Rush.
It is the Friday Rush Limbaugh show, and that is always Open Line Friday, even when the guest hosts take over.
Only when asked.
Mark Davis from WBAP, Dallas, Fort Worth.
Great to be with you.
And it will be great to be with you Thursday and Friday of next week.
Rush is off all next week.
Mark Stein will be in on Monday.
I look forward to the other marks.
We seem to mutually admire each other.
And Mark Stein is great on Monday.
Mark Belling will be in on Tuesday, Wednesday.
Always enjoy him.
And then you and I are back together on Thursday and Friday.
Let's take care of a call or two, and then we'll go to the Florida teacher stung by Facebook.
We are headed first to McAllen, Texas.
Ben.
Hi, Mark Davis in for Rush.
How are you?
How you doing, Mark?
Great.
Hey, about the illegal immigration, plain devil's advocate here, but it is a necessary evil.
Why?
I mean, it's like being here in the valley in the border town where I see it.
I've worked growing up side-by-side illegal immigrants.
They're the hardest working people that I've ever come across.
No doubt.
The ones that do have, and even they have problems with the people that are coming to leech off the system.
Because they lower the standards for the Americans.
That system, like the welfare system, it's set for American citizens that are here that come and fall upon hard times.
But when you have these women, illegal women, that come and have four or five babies, one right after the other, and I'm not lying.
I mean, I've seen it.
Please, you have no trouble convincing me.
And you're going to the store, HEB or Walmart, wherever, to buy whatever groceries you have to buy, and you see these ladies with their lone star cards or food stamps buying pieces of meat, and you're buying the cheapest that you can.
That is very upsetting.
And right there, and right there is the perfect evidence of why we can't go picking and choosing the illegals we're going to be cavalier about.
I mean, I know, and down in McAllen, which for the uninitiated is down.
I mean, we're talking down hard by the border.
You're talking right there.
You can walk to the Rio Grande from there, and it's a beautiful part of Texas and a great part of Texas and a very controversial part of Texas.
And I know that there are plenty of folks who are coming across the border a mile from where you're sitting right now, and they don't intend to commit any crimes, and they don't really want to be a burden to the system.
They're going to come, they're going to work hard and send the money back to the family and not violate a single other law of ours.
But the one that they have violated merely by being here is the one that we have to be serious about.
Because if we're unserious about it, along with that noble guy, you know, from Juarez who comes across to El Paso or wherever, along with that guy who has no criminal intent other than violating our immigration laws, along with him through that porous border, come people who do indeed have to be able to do it.
Now, keep in mind, my wife is originally from Mexico.
I married her.
We went through the whole legal process, like you're saying.
It is a time and lengthy process, but it is costly.
Now, people from Mexico, they barely have enough to scrape to eat.
I mean, I know this because, you know, my wife's family members, I send food on a monthly basis over there for her family members.
God bless you.
I mean, and it's like, hey, you know, they can't scrape enough to eat, but yet they're expected to pay thousands in immigration costs, lawyers' costs, all that.
I mean, there's got to be a better way.
Well, I tell you what.
And on that, I've always felt, first of all, you're completely right.
And I've always felt as a hardliner about illegal immigration.
I've always felt that there ought to be something we can do to make it easier for the kind of folks we want who have skills we need and attributes we admire to become Americans legally.
Was it Herman Kane who talked about the thing about high gates and wide fences or high fences and wide gates?
I'll step in and join you in a stipulation that it is too hard to become an American legally.
It is.
And so I will join with anybody who wants to try to figure this all out.
And Ben, thank you for weighing in from the most significant place geographically that you could, right there from the Texas-Mexico border, that if we are going to be hardliners, if we're going to deport the living daylights out of people, which I absolutely want to do, let us, with what is left of our brain space on this issue, figure out a way to welcome a few more of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
And I'll tell you, I'm more than willing to do it, but it's got to be in a certain order.
We absolutely have to be serious about enforcing our borders.
We have to get seriously conscientious about deporting those who are here illegally.
And then, and then I believe we can and should start to take a look at how bone-crushingly hard it can be to become an American legally.
It's funny, just to go back to the anecdote that I just shared about speaking at that naturalization ceremony of the story.
We all gathered in the lobby.
They had a little coffee, little reception, everybody waving their American flags, no matter where they had been from.
It was just the most moving and wonderful thing.
And almost everyone I spoke to had a couple of stories to tell.
The first and most important story was how proud they were to be an American that day.
How they still loved and felt a connection to the country of their birth, but they wanted to become an American.
And that is where their allegiances would lie from that day forward as proud, naturalized Americans.
And that's a story told by every single one of them.
The other story told by virtually every single one of them is they can't believe how hard it was.
Said it was worth it.
They do it again.
I mean, they do it in a heartbeat.
I mean, of course, totally worth it.
But man, it was hard.
And they asked me, they said, should it be that hard?
Should it be that hard?
That's a very, very good question that we can address in what's left of our time together today on the Friday Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'm Mark Davis filling in on the EIB Network.
Back in a moment.
It is Open Line Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
More of your calls, just a moment.
Mark Davis filling in from WBAP, Dallas, Fort Worth, proud limbaugh affiliate since, oh my.
Well, since I pretty well got here, roughly 1994.
All right, more of your calls here in a second, but let's share the story of Jerry Buell, who teaches American history at Mount Dora High School, Lake County, Florida, just up there northwest of Orlando, right there, smack dab in the center of that beautiful state.
Now, I'm going to share this story, and it will probably get your ideological juices flowing, and that's fine.
That's great.
But then I have a consistency check for you on the other side.
So just follow me along here and we'll see what we think because the bottom line, the overall theme here is, what should you be able to get away with in terms of hot political rants that you put on your Facebook and your Twitter?
Obviously, you have the First Amendment right to blather whatever you like, you know, without being jailed for it.
That's what the First Amendment's all about.
A lot of people totally mistake the First Amendment.
You remember when people tried to defend the Dixie chicks?
When the enormously talented but politically stunted Natalie Mains stepped out on a stage in Florida, that's Florida, stepped out on a stage in England and said, just so y'all know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.
Oh, really, honey?
Let's see what happens to that career.
Well, obviously, they've done quite well because they're enormously talented.
They're still selling records and, you know, do with that as you may.
But for a while there, country radio, I don't know if the Dixie chicks are even played on country radio hardly anywhere anymore.
And that's probably cost them a few bucks.
And I remember when we were talking about that, people said, hey, First Amendment, First Amendment.
Nah, not a First Amendment issue.
That's a marketplace issue.
Stations can play whatever they want.
You remember John Rocker, controversial pitcher, had a bunch of things.
He had a lot of thoughts.
He had a few thoughts about immigration himself, as you may recall.
And he was punished by his employer in baseball.
And people said, hey, First Amendment, First Amendment.
I knew.
And new.
All the First Amendment is about is your right to say something without being jailed.
The First Amendment does not shield you from the consequences of what you say.
And there may be people out there saying things you agree with.
There may be people out there saying things you disagree with.
But if, let's say, their employers are freaked out by it, they can absolutely be sanctioned.
But wait a minute.
What if it's on their own personal time or their own personal Facebook or Twitter?
Uh-huh.
Social networking, providing a talk show cornucopia.
So here's the latest story.
Jerry Buell, a veteran American history teacher at Mount Dora High School in Florida, removed from his teaching duties this week as school officials in Lake County investigate allegations that what he posted was biased on homosexuality.
We took the allegation seriously, said Chris Patton, communications officer with Lake County Schools.
This is from FoxNews.com.
All teachers are bound by a code of special ethics, and this is a code ethics violation investigation.
Huh?
All right.
Ethics.
Interesting.
So if you are a teacher in this county or anywhere, are you ethically bound to keep your political, your hot political views to yourself for fear of alienating, I don't know, students or the community or something like that?
So Chris Patton, sort of the spokesman for the school system, said they received a complaint on Tuesday about something that Buell had written last July when New York legalized same-sex unions.
The very next day, he was temporarily suspended from the classroom and reassigned.
He has taught for 22 years, has a spotless record, was selected as that high school's teacher of the year, but now his job is on the line for his opinions about gay marriage.
A quote from him, he said he was stunned by the accusations.
It was my own personal comment on my own personal time on my own personal computer in my own personal house, exercising what I believed as a social studies teacher to be my First Amendment rights.
Okay, so far the guy's won me over.
I'm thinking, okay, I mean, do you, if you're a teacher, no matter who you are, do you completely Do you shed any trappings of liberty in terms of expressing yourself in your own public space?
Now, here's the thing: your own public space used to be your house.
Your own public space used to be a gathering of friends in your backyard, or maybe a meeting after church with five or ten or maybe thirty people gathered around if you were lucky to get that many people to pay attention to you.
Now, on Facebook and Twitter, hundreds, thousands of people can hang on your every word.
Well, what if those words are, shall we say, controversial?
Well, the school system declined to comment on what exactly he had put on Facebook, but I'll tell you what it was.
You ready?
July 25th, 5:43 p.m.
He was eating dinner, watching the evening news, and there was the news about New York giving legal equality to same-sex unions.
Mr. Buell, veteran American history teacher, teacher of the year, Lake Mount Dora High School, Lake County, Florida, puts on his Facebook page as follows: I'm watching the news eating dinner when the story about New York okaying same-sex unions came on, and I almost threw up.
And now they show two guys kissing after the announcement.
If they want to call it a union, go ahead, but don't insult a man and a woman's marriage by throwing it in the same cesspool of whatever.
God will not be mocked.
When did this sin become acceptable?
Yeah, you're starting to see how this becomes a story.
So, again, if you're just joining us, Teacher of the Year, Mount Dora, Florida, throws down some hot opinions about gay marriage on his Facebook and gets in trouble.
Oh, he wasn't done.
Three minutes later, by the way, if one doesn't like the most recently posted opinion based on biblical principles and God's laws, then go ahead and unfriend me.
I'll miss you like I miss my kidney stone from 1994, and I'll never accept it because God will never accept it.
Romans chapter one.
Well, alrighty then.
So, according to the school system, what Mr. Buell wrote on his private account was disturbing.
They were especially concerned that gay students at the school might be frightened or intimidated walking into his classroom.
And then Mr. Patton of the school system, the spokesman, disputed the notion that Buell's Facebook account is private.
Quote, he has more than 700 friends.
How private is that?
Social media can be troubling if you don't respect it and know that just because you think you're in a private realm, it's not private.
Now, wait a cotton picking minute.
The definition of private has changed just because your audience grows in social networking?
Isn't I mean, it's weird.
It is still your private world, right?
My Facebook page, my Twitter account, yours.
Those are your private comments, your private realm.
You set it up privately in your personal space.
The only thing that's changed is the enormous expansion of our personal space that social networking has created.
All of a sudden, things that really are your private business do come across with the magnitude of public pronouncements.
Mr. Buell's attorney says the school district is being anti-straight, anti-First Amendment, and anti-personal liberty.
The idea that public servants have to wholeheartedly endorse homosexual marriage is repugnant to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Okay, hang on there, Mr. Counselor.
I don't think anybody is saying that he has to embrace it.
It's just that if he's not going to embrace it, he may not be able to spew about it on his Facebook page.
Is that problematic?
Let me ask you the following question.
Then we'll hit the break.
We'll come back, take calls on this, and everything else we've talked about.
After all, it is Open Line Friday.
Now, here's the deal: imagine if you're sitting there thinking Mr. Buell has been horribly wronged here.
He has every right to toss out those opinions, and maybe you're thinking that way because you agree with him.
Okay, that's fine.
Would you have the same protective instinct for someone, for a teacher or whoever, who had thrown down views that you disagree with?
If, let's say, somebody had said, let's say there's a teacher who says, you know, socialism, not bad.
Let's say there's a teacher who says, you know, Obamacare, fantastic.
And the wealthy should pay a whole lot more taxes than they do.
They're leeches on the system.
Let's say there's all kinds of things.
Or let's say that, hey, you know, Republicans are anti-immigration.
They're anti-black.
They're anti-woman.
They're anti-planet.
Again, I'm just offering up a wide spate of what might be the blatherings of a teacher revealing some fairly common liberal thoughts.
And let's say a school suspended that teacher.
Would you rush to that teacher's defense and say, hey, hey, hey, that's his own personal space.
That's his own face.
Does consistency require you to?
Does consistency require you to seek to protect the job of the teacher who gets vocal on Facebook or Twitter about things you disagree with?
Seems like it's got to be one or the other, doesn't it?
That you either believe that employees need to be, that you need to be careful about your Facebook and your Twitter because if it reflects badly on the employer, it makes the employer uncomfortable, they can rain down on you.
Or the opposite is true, and it's your personal deal.
No employer should ever be able to touch you for anything you say on your own personal Facebook or Twitter, which is it.
Let us add that to the topical mix on this Open Line Friday.
Mark Davis filling in for Rush on the EIB network.
It is Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Davis filling in.
Let's do some calls.
Got a lot of stuff on immigration, a lot of stuff on 2012.
But just on the little bit of the when Facebook and Twitter rear up and bite you, let us head in.
Okay, very good.
Then while we were going to go to Fort Wayne, Adam, if you get us back, you can, because he added a little bit of an anecdotal story about some of that.
Secondly, then, why don't we head to Los Angeles?
Say hi to Eric.
Eric, Mark Davis, on for Rush.
How are you?
Hey, very good.
Thank you, Mark.
The point I was wanting to make was that something that's often missed in the conversation about illegal immigration, I respect the call that came in earlier from the Texas border.
And that's a fairly small population base there and a lot different than the impact that illegal immigration is having on areas, let's say, like Los Angeles.
There's entire swaths of Los Angeles that are filled with completely unassimilated people that have absolutely no motivation to assimilate.
It so happens they're Mexican.
I don't care if they're Irish or German or Norwegian or black.
The fact that there's a large unassimilated population with no motivation and no incentive to assimilate into our system, I mean, all the other economic things aside and all the other cultural impacts that they have aside, the fact that they're unassimilated and they will not assimilate is a problem for this country, especially when we have politicians that are now pandering to them, even though they can't vote.
And they think they're ingratiating themselves to someone with a Hispanic surname because they're.
The sad fact is that they are.
And this makes me crazy.
Can I have some of my Hispanic brothers and sisters explain this to me, why so many of you are lackadaisical about what Eric is talking about in Los Angeles?
How does it not make you insane if you are here from Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, and are here legally or even became a citizen?
How are you not the loudest protesters at the sight and sound of people who look like you and come from where you came from and have names that sound like yours breaking the laws of the United States in order to cut in line?
How does that not make all of you crazy?
It does.
Some of you, I know plenty of conservative Hispanics, but you don't even have to be conservative.
You can be liberal on all kinds of issues and have this make you nuts.
I don't know why it doesn't.
Well, what kind of credibility do we have as a country and as a people when we look at someone from, say, South Korea who doesn't share a border with us and tell them you have to wait so many years and it costs you so much money to come here.
I know.
And then they look at us and say, well, what about these millions of people that you let in and let work and give welfare to?
Where's our credibility?
It is shot full of holes, Eric, and thanks for the great points.
Thank you.
I talked about consistency a moment ago.
Laws have to speak with a voice of consistency and clarity.
We are either serious about who's in this country legally or we are not.
If we're not, then throw open the borders and we can just stop talking about this and see what happens to the fabric of America when we just stop caring about these things.
And believe you me, there are plenty of people who would love for us to take that very step.
But for those who care about the rule of law and for those who care about letting into America only those who are willing to obey our laws to get here, then we'd best step up and get serious about that.
And I'm really glad that Eric mentioned assimilation because no matter where you live, well, I mean, there are some places it's easier to find than others.
My heart is properly warmed by people who come here from other lands and learn our language.
Can you imagine how tough it is to learn English?
Many of the people who are born here don't have quite the handle on it, so I can only imagine if you're coming here from China or Vietnam or Mexico or Sweden, I don't care, and your job is to learn English, whew, I will, I am prepared to give you some time to master this tricky, tricky tongue of ours.
But you do have to try.
And I'm also properly enriched by the vast rainbow of cultures that people bring to this country.
You are from Africa, from Asia, from Europe, from Latin America somewhere.
You bring part of that with you to infuse and add flavor to the type of American that you're going to be.
But you'd better be willing to become an American.
And becoming an American doesn't mean purging where you came from or never speaking your native tongue again.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Just participate in the country you've chosen to occupy.
That's all.
And in far too many communities, you find enclaves, cocoons, bubbles where everybody's talking to each other in that other tongue.
And there's no need to speak English.
There's no need to interact with the English-speaking world outside that bubble.
And I'm sorry, that tears at the fabric of any country.
So I love that everybody's from somewhere else.
I love that.
But once you are from somewhere else, you better get hip to the fact that you're here and let us welcome the things that are different about all of us.
But along with that comes the responsibility to latch onto some of the things that give us a commonality, common language being near the top of the list.
Not necessarily all common values.
We don't have to agree on everything, but a certain common appreciation of the American story and American history and American exceptionalism, if I may invoke that.
All right, I'll invoke some other things too here in just a moment.
I bet you will too.
1-800-282-2882-Mark Davis in for rush on the EIB network.
All righty, less than a minute left in this hour.
Mark Davis filling in for rush.
We will return after the top of the hour break and getting some folks on the teacher suspended because of his Facebook comments.
We'll put folks to a consistency check there.
Got some more 2012 talk, some more immigration talk.
Stocks have drifted lower.
I don't know how psychologically important this is to you, but it's not a huge drop right now.
About 70 down, about 70 points down.
But that does take us below 11,000.
Some of the techs, Hewlett-Packard and such, plunging 20%, dragging some of the blue chips.
So a little stock update as we keep track of that roller coaster.
Meanwhile, Mark Davis in for rush on the EIB network.
Stick around.
We'll come back.
It's funny because we've talked so much immigration and the Facebook and Twitter, what can you get away with in your workplace issue, that we haven't gotten to a lot of 2012 talk.
Oh, we will.
We will.
Mark Davis in for rush.
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