Rush Limbaugh Program - August 23, 2011, Tuesday, Hour #2

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Aug. 23, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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August 23, 2011, Tuesday, Hour #2

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	First hour of the program, I talked about how in ripping through the news today and looking at the New York Times, I saw right on top of one another obituaries for two of the greatest American songwriters ever.
	Jerry Lieber, he was the lyricist Lieber and Staller who had just a hit machine, you know, the brill building the whole thing, one after another after another after another, and Nick Ashford, half of the songwriting team of Ashford and Simpson, he and his wife Valerie Simpson.
	And I had one of those V8 moments where, wow, these songs really helped define the American culture.
	Song after song after song after song.
	And whenever you talked about what American music in that era, anywhere from the 50s to the 70s, everybody knew what you meant.
	It was a certain type of music and there was a certain type of sound.
	And it just drew home to me that we have a culture in this country and it is absolutely unique.
	It wasn't anything like American music.
	There's no other music that was close to it.
	British probably the closest, but everyone knew what you meant by that.
	Likewise, the American culture, American society, and even American government and American capitalism.
	Unique.
	And I think that's why it's worked.
	We have in charge right now, the counterculturalists who never have bought into this.
	They've always looked down their noses at the idea of a free market.
	They feel that if you have capitalism that there are going to be millions that are going to be left behind.
	They believe that we shouldn't have a safety net, but simply redistribution of income.
	And they're in charge right now, and they are making a terrible mess of things, to the point that guys like Mark Stein, who hosted Russia's program yesterday, are writing books saying that it may be over for us.
	That America isn't going to lead the world anymore, that we're going to run out of cash, that we're going to have violence and civil insurrection when we have to cut people off because we run out of money, that we may end up defaulting.
	The big default, not a one or two-day default.
	We may end up defaulting and not paying off all you know on our bonds.
	We don't have to accept this.
	There are some people who think that Mitt Romney should be the Republican nominee for president.
	There are other people who think Ron Paul should be the Republican nominee for president.
	Without getting into that, we need to find a candidate who has a different view, who buys into the notion that America does have a safety net provided by government.
	Hardly anybody is against that.
	But that safety net can't be an excuse to destroy the private sector and allow half the country to live off the other half of the country.
	Liberals can't accept a world in which some people get farther ahead than others.
	But it is that desire to get farther ahead than your fellow man that has created everything that we have here.
	This is how it comes into play.
	Back in the last decade, we did have a housing boom, and it was a boom and it became a bubble.
	For a lot of reasons, with the economy doing really really well and interest rates getting really, really low, the value of real estate went up and up and up.
	And a lot of people were doing really well because of that.
	Homeownership got to its higher highest percentage in American history.
	The left couldn't accept that.
	It wasn't good enough.
	So you had Barney Frank and all of the other liberals who got their fingers in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
	They created the Community Reinvestment Act.
	They put pressure on all of the banks.
	Well, yeah, but they're not lending enough to minorities.
	We see a racial, we see a lending gap here.
	Freddie Mack and Fannie Mae were told that they had to start backing subprime mortgages.
	Banks had to lower their lending standards.
	They were under pressure to make sure that everybody was caught up in this housing boom.
	By that tinkering, by bringing government into an outside a private market that was working just fine, that in fact was thriving, we ended up creating all sorts of mortgages that never should have been issued.
	This is where the bad side of capitalism came in.
	The private sector, some of the banks and Wall Street, took advantage of the short-term gain by creating derivatives tied to these mortgages that never should have been issued, and the whole thing fell apart.
	One part of capitalism then worked.
	The companies that were involved in this saw their share prices deflate.
	You own Citigroup stock in 2005 and you were still holding it in 2009, you regretted it.
	Those companies were pummeled and they rightly should have been pummeled.
	That's how capitalism punishes those who make bad decisions.
	But in the process, we created this terrible recession.
	It all started though.
	Its roots came in when liberals came in and they tried to change the rules to force a system that was working to carry everyone along.
	They couldn't leave well enough alone.
	Now, American health care.
	We have the best health care system in the world.
	Quality of care in the United States is better than it is anywhere else.
	It's why, when rich people from other parts of the world get sick, they come to the United States to be taken care of.
	Is it perfect?
	No.
	Does it cost too much?
	It costs way too much.
	For a lot of reasons that are going to be very, very hard to solve.
	Every time you come up with a new drug or a new procedure or a new something that improves the quality of people's lives, everybody wants it.
	How do you pay for that?
	It's a problem.
	An acknowledged problem.
	The baby boomers going on to Medicare.
	That's a problem.
	We don't want to just tell people that you have to die at 69 or 70.
	We have to have a way to provide health care for them.
	That is a problem.
	The response, though, from the left has been to create this massive new entitlement in which we just clap our hands and say everybody's taken care of, everybody's going to be covered.
	And you have to buy health insurance whether you want to or not.
	The Constitution, never mind the Constitution.
	That mandate is hanging over this economy.
	Obamacare is a much bigger problem than many people realize.
	Businesses will not expand.
	They will not hire because they see the impact of what's going to happen in 2013 and 2014 when Obamacare kicks in.
	Every one of them has done their projections on what Obamacare means for them.
	It's why so many of the president's friends have already gotten waivers under Obamacare.
	They're trying to get out from underneath the costs associated with this.
	You want the stock market to rally, you want hiring to improve immediately.
	You want the growth rate to jump to at least two and a half percent by next year.
	All the president of the United States has to do is come back from this retreat to Martha's Vinions.
	Oh, if I have my plan, you know he's out there working on his plan.
	Here's my plan.
	I've decided that my health care mandate's a bad idea and we're not going to do it.
	This economy will take off if he simply dropped that.
	That's part of what's hanging over us.
	Being an American doesn't mean that the government is going to take care of you.
	When we try to make that America, we extend ourselves beyond what our private sector can pay for.
	Holding in my hands a report from Fox News, Obama's stimulus program.
	You know when he was going to create all of this hiring?
	He had carte blanche.
	He came in with big margins in both the House and the Senate.
	09.
	They were able to pass stimulus in exactly the form they wanted to.
	This was going to get us out of the recession that he inherited, the one he inherited as he kept telling us over and over and over again.
	It never moved the needle.
	Here's why.
	Federal stimulus grant of nearly 500,000 dollars to grow trees and stimulate the economy in Nevada yielded a whopping 1.72 jobs according to the government's own statistics.
	In 09, the United States Forest Service, as part of stimulus, awarded 490,000 dollars of stimulus money to Nevada's Clark County urban forestry revitalization project.
	Clark County is the Las Vegas era, aimed at revitalizing urban neighborhoods in the county with trees, plants, and green industry training.
	According to Recovery.gov, that's the administration's own site, the U.S. government's official website related to Recovery Act spending, the project created one point seven two permanent jobs.
	This is why stimulus didn't work.
	You could have had a short-term positive, and I'm not a supporter of stimulus.
	I'm not a Keynesian, but you could have had a short-term impact on the economy if you had created stimulus in a way that rewarded private sector businesses for investing in themselves and trying to move forward.
	Instead, you come up with projects like this.
	Plant a bunch of trees around Clark County, Nevada.
	Half a million dollars worth of planning prees, training people in green energy.
	Was it Rahm Emanuel who said never let a crisis go to waste?
	Stimulant, we got a recession.
	Let's do stimulus.
	Let's use stimulus to do all the things that we've always wanted to do.
	This is our candy store.
	And it'll improve the economy.
	Well, they went to the candy store, but it never improved the economy.
	How were you going to improve the economy by planting prees in Las Vegas?
	Half a million dollars worth of trees.
	And the response to all of this is to do more stimulus.
	Instead of having the government spend half a million dollars to plant prees in Las Vegas.
	And the President of the United States telling people not to go to Las Vegas.
	How about encouraging some of those Las Vegas companies to grow and expand and invest in themselves and allow them to keep the profits if they do so?
	There is an alternative way of pursuing the direction of this country.
	We can get out from underneath this, but we've got to cut our spending.
	We've got to cut the entitlements and we've got to slash into the stupidity of some of the discretionary spending.
	And at the same time, we have to encourage private sector growth so that tax revenues increase because companies and individuals are making more money.
	That second part has never been part of the president's approach.
	There has been nothing in his economic policies that are aimed at companies increasing their profits.
	And without that, he'll never have the recovery that he needs in order to be re-elected.
	Phone number on the Rush Limbaugh program is 1-800-282-2882.
	We're talking about this theme of a uniquely American culture and how it ties in to the public policy decisions we're making right now.
	I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
	This is EIB.
	Russia's on vacation this week.
	I'm Mark Belling, one of the rotating group of Russia uh of Marx that sits in for uh Rush.
	Almost everything works really, really smoothly here at EIB, with one exception.
	This bathroom key issue.
	I I ought to be hired as a consultant to solve our bathroom key issue.
	Everybody who's ever been the guest host of this program has had an issue with the bathroom key.
	I went home with it once.
	Stein went home with it once.
	Bo Snerdly apparently went left home with it once, and he just came in and asked me.
	First of all, my understanding that the bathroom key is for the host of the program, but Bo Snerdly's been apparently long enough that he gets to use the Rush Limbaugh bathroom as well.
	Didn't know that was the case, but I guess it is the case.
	All right, let's go to Houston, Texas.
	This is the Rush Limbaugh program.
	I'm Mark Belling, and Pat it's your turn on EIB.
	Good afternoon.
	Good afternoon, Mark.
	How are you?
	I'm great.
	Um I would like to say that the innovativeness of America is actually being undermined culturally.
	Okay.
	And the way that I know this for a fact is that um 11 years ago, I invented the Nintendo Wii controller.
	Okay.
	I'm on the patents for it.
	Um I've actually got video evidence for it.
	And no one knows about it.
	I think that's because everyone assumes that the Japanese were the ones that came up with it.
	They're the only ones that could come up with such an idea.
	All right.
	Now uh w w whether or not whether or not you're right about this or not, uh, let's work with you.
	Uh so you're like you're you're like the Van Winkel bosses of uh uh of Facebook.
	It was really you and and not somebody at Nintendo that did the we.
	So where we where are we going there for with this, Pat?
	Well, I think that The assumption is that America is on the decline and that innovation is on the decline, and it's just accepted that innovation comes from elsewhere and not here.
	You're right.
	That is accepted.
	That's become an accepted thought.
	It's not true, but it is accepted.
	Absolutely.
	And I think that's a huge problem.
	Um not just personally.
	I mean, I I think that's gonna cost America a lot.
	It has already.
	What you're describing, what you're describing without regard to your dispute over whether or not you got credit for the we or not, and uh Mr. Snerdley went into great detail with you about that, whether you're right or wrong about that, your point is that the United States still has the ability to produce remarkable innovation and great ideas.
	This is why we aren't doomed.
	Mark Stein in his book is implying that if we don't fix our governmental problems, we are doomed, and there are a lot of Americans who see that China has taken over everything and that innovation is occurring everywhere else.
	That isn't true.
	Thanks for the call, Pat.
	That isn't true.
	Almost every significant idea, be it technology, industrial, manufacturing, communications, they're all still coming from the United States.
	That's the reason we can be optimistic.
	All we're saying is you've got to tell those people who have those ideas that they get to make a lot of money if their ideas work.
	You put those ideas to work, and we can hire people.
	You've got to that not, however, regulate those people to death.
	You've got to tell them that they don't have to manufacture their stuff in China because if you manufacture it here, you're subject to nineteen million government regulations, let's start with OSHA, and let's get to Obamacare and let's get to the pollution laws, and then let's make sure that there's no sexual harassment in the workplace.
	All of these things have driven jobs away.
	And when you're an American company that comes up with an idea for a great new airplane like Boeing's Dreamliner, you're not going to have the National Labor Relations Board threaten to shut them down if they add a few jobs in South Carolina because those aren't union jobs.
	This is the problem that I'm referring to.
	We have innovation, we have ideas, we've got Americans that are willing to roll up their sleeves and get ahead.
	We're not falling behind in terms of our ideas or even our work ethic.
	What's falling behind is this mentality of government that we've got to keep raising taxes so that we can create this welfare state that provides all of these services for everyone else.
	That's why we have the deficit we have, that's why our economy is stagnating, but it is not because of any lack of ideas or initiative or desire to make money on the part of American people or businesses.
	Let's go now to Woodridge, Virginia, and Mike.
	Mike, it's your turn on the IB.
	Great.
	You know, this is uh deja vu all over again.
	The American spirit was destroyed once before by a Democrat Jimmy Carter.
	And Ronald Reagan was able to successfully rebuild it.
	I think there is a uh on the slate of Republican candidates for 2012, there are those who can rebuild it.
	Michelle Bachman being one, Sarah Palin another, perhaps uh Rick Pay Perry, but that's gonna be the job of the Republican candidate who's a very good thing.
	Well, I agree, and that's what the debate in the campaign I think should be.
	People can disagree about a lot of the different ways that these candidates approach it, but you want somebody who buys into it.
	What you say is correct.
	The great thing that came out of the Jimmy Carter presidency, which was disastrous, was that it was so bad that the American people were open to Reagan.
	I mean, you were around at the time, I was around at the time.
	Reagan was ridiculed when he first ran in night in 1976.
	The media elite said he's way too conservative.
	He's a Hollywood actor, he's you know, he doesn't have any depth of knowledge, he's way too extreme.
	But the Carter approach drove us so far into the ground that people were open to going in a fundamentally different direction, a conservative direction of Reagan.
	One of the reasons that you can be optimistic, kind of the opposite approach that Mark Stein is taking in his book, by the way, is it's a great book.
	That you can be optimistic is you sense that something happened when Obama created health care and after he created the stimulus.
	The Tea Party movement wasn't something that was manufactured by the Republican Party.
	It came from the American people themselves that there was something that rose up there and said we are going in the wrong direction.
	If that can be accepted by the majority of Americans that there's another way that we can go, we don't have to spend ourselves to death, that we can re-embrace the private sector, we can re-embrace the profit motive, and we can re-embrace the notion of individuals taking care of themselves rather than looking to government to take care of them, that we can turn this thing around.
	I know from my own experience in Wisconsin with our great governor there that it is only when the other side really screws things up that the public opens its mind to the notion of a completely different approach, and maybe we can get that kind of a response from the Obama presidency.
	The last caller from Virginia made a really good point about how we've been through this before.
	Remember when Carter came back from, I think he went off to Camp David and came down and wearing a stupid sweater and talked about the national malaise that we had, and we have to expect to be a nation that doesn't have all the resources and assets that we've had in the past.
	It's the same kind of mentality that exists here about this sacrificing that we have to make from Obama, that the rich have to pay more, that we have to tax ourselves more to pay for this whole welfare state.
	People are tuning him out.
	The good thing about this is, and there is a good thing.
	The good thing about it is that the alternate point of view, the one that I'm expressing, the one that I'd like to see some Republicans running for president express themselves, that people are willing to turn toward it.
	I mentioned going into the last break, my experience in Wisconsin.
	Our governor there came up with a totally different approach, and he was able to do so and survive because the Democratic governor who preceded him was a disaster.
	We had a huge budget deficit.
	Our economy was lagging behind that of other states.
	We were raiding funds.
	We had huge indebtedness.
	We had a governor who therefore had the ability to come in and try something totally different with the public empowering him to do so.
	The same thing can happen here.
	Obama's making such a mess of things that I think people are open to another idea.
	Here's proof of that.
	There's a congressional race going on next month.
	The campaign's underway right now.
	It's Anthony Wiener's seat.
	It's an overwhelmingly democratic district.
	Kind of divided between Queens and Brooklyn here in New York, and I'm doing the show from the EIB New York Studios.
	It's a bit of a big Democratic district, three to one, four to one Democratic margins.
	There's a Republican running, though.
	I'm not saying he's going to win.
	He's doing way better than anyone would have anticipated.
	A poll from Siena College shows him down only like four or five points.
	Internal Republican polls have it at 10 points.
	This is as blue a district as you're going to find.
	mind.
	Reading the New York media coverage of this race, they're quoting Democratic voters as saying that Obama doesn't get it, we're spending too much on Medicaid.
	We've got to try something else.
	The Democrat, as I said, may well win because it's such a democratic district.
	But when you see districts, a district that could produce a nut like Anthony Wiener is very, very liberal.
	When you see in districts like that, people now willing at least to listen to the Republican candidate, it's a sign that things might be turning.
	And that turn has to come from us.
	I've been talking about how when things are dictated above, when they come from government that they never worked, this story, this is from the AP.
	New York City's special investigation commissioner says allegations of grade changing and test hampering by city teachers and school administrators have more than tripled since 2003.
	Cheating on the mandatory tests.
	Whether it be no child left behind, which came out of a Republican administration, or Democratic grants from the Department of Education, public schools are under enormous pressure to do well on these test scores.
	If you don't do well in the test scores, there are going to be sanctions, and sometimes the money is cut off.
	The idea behind mandatory testing and standards is good, that we aren't going to keep rewarding failure.
	But when implemented by government, instead of improving the overall quality of education, what you end up with is a lot of teachers teaching to the test, teaching the specific things that are going to be tested, and when the kids still do badly, mess around and inflate the test scores.
	This is a pretty big story.
	If it's happening in New York, it's probably...
	probably happening in a lot of other places there was a scandal I believe in Atlanta over manipulating these numbers let's go back to the phones Plymouth Michigan which I'm almost positive is near Detroit maybe noty you're on the Rush Limbaugh program where is Plymouth it's halfway between Detroit and Ann Arbor.
	Yeah I was saying I was I was thinking of Pontiac initially but Plymouth is right out there.
	It has to be near Detroit in between directly in between closer to Ann Arbor how are you doing Andy?
	Real good, Mark.
	Go, Mark.
	People have to charge up.
	This is crazy.
	We've been under this repression since we started a tea party here locally back in April of, I think, 2008.
	And I think that is what makes America exceptional is that here are a bunch of people that I didn't even know two years ago, and I'm some of my best friends.
	We gathered around downtown.
	We stood up and had 1,200 people and said, no, we're done with this.
	You guys are starting out wrong.
	You're going to tax us.
	And they made fun of us.
	Well, they're not taxing you.
	They didn't change taxes.
	Well, no, they're going to.
	It was the way we were going.
	We could see that.
	And here are a bunch of people that didn't even know each other gathered around the Constitution and from different demographics all across the country did the same thing all at the same time simultaneously without knowing one another.
	Yeah, and it happened for a reason.
	You're right.
	It happened for a reason.
	People were alarmed at what was happening.
	You know, the original reaction from Nancy Pelosi, remember when she said it was astroturf, that this is being manufactured.
	It really wasn't.
	First, they thought it was a reaction only to Obamacare.
	it wasn't that now the Tea Party movement itself is one that a lot of people still have problems with you know Democrats are tagging Republican candidates or president he party candidate and they're making keep the Tea Party out to be you know a bunch of nuts.
	But whether they try that or not my point is is that it is awakening a lot of people who in the past otherwise hadn't been active because they're fighting back because they don't want to lose our country and if you lose the economy you lose the country there isn't a nation in the world whose economy tanks in which the country itself doesn't tank look at Greece.
	Greece is falling apart because they've been forced to make austerity measures and the public isn't tolerating it.
	They're fighting back the rioting over the most minor of measures that can happen here if we don't get our house in order and I think that the Tea Party movement and the quest on the part of a lot of us who are conservatives for a Republican candidate for president who buys into a message of embracing reform and spending less money and encouraging economic growth these are all real things.
	There is an alternative vision to the one that Obama and Reed and Pelosi and the rest of them have been handing us and we don't have to simply accept that we're going to be a debtor nation.
	We don't have to accept that the entitlements are going to kill us.
	We don't have to accept that Social Security are going to go bankrupt and that there's nothing that we can do about it.
	We don't have to accept that the ec that all of the products that are offered in the world are made overseas we don't have to accept accept that there isn't going to be any innovation anymore.
	We can if we turn to ourselves and go back to the values that in the past have worked save this country thank you for the call let's go to same neighborhood Dearborn Michigan and Debbie Debbie it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	Hello I'm so glad you're on this rant it is kind of a rant it's a rant and I don't it all started when I read about the you know the deaths of these two great songwriters Jerry Lieber died and Nick Ashford died and it just wow these are Americans.
	It was American music and that's when with a little bit of prodding from Mr Snurley's you're on to something here.
	We've got an American culture and that's what we're fighting about.
	This is a cultural thing in addition to being economic and political.
	And it's based upon assimilation when our forefathers came Here and determined that they would become Americans.
	And I am so sick to death of this PC mentality that requires us to act as if anything other groups do when they get here to force us to do it their way in this country makes us racist.
	And I profoundly reject that.
	We are the frog that's boiling.
	Multiculturalism in Europe has failed.
	We need to take back we need to be more like the Australians and say, this is how we do it here.
	If you don't like it, don't come here.
	Well, but a lot of things.
	You know, Debbie though, a lot of the people who have come here though, th they buy that.
	I mean, Mark Stein was talking about that yesterday.
	He came from somewhere else.
	He came here because he bought into this message.
	Some of the most patriotic Americans are those who did come from somewhere else.
	B because they wanted to be part of that that is American.
	But the one thing that I want to disagree with you a little bit on, it's not just people who are coming here from somewhere else that are that are, you know, trying to change our values.
	A lot of it is Americans themselves who've never bought into any of this, and that's what I refer to with Obama.
	These are people who don't believe that the capitalistic free market system ever is going to be fair.
	They believe in redistributionism.
	They believe that we've got to keep taxing and taxing and taxing in order to make sure that wealth gets wealth gets down to people who aren't doing as well.
	They are the ones that don't buy into it.
	It's not just people who've come here from other countries, but it's a group of Americans who've never bought into this notion that you can have a fr uh a system premised on the free market that will have enough economic growth that we can have a decent safety net and we can all get ahead.
	So it isn't just outsiders.
	This caller from Plymouth, my children were raised there.
	About five years ago, pork was removed from the public schools.
	Removed because Islam required it.
	That's radical.
	We keep using the word radical Islam as if there's a difference.
	There's no difference.
	I lived in Dearborn in the mid-sixties.
	It's been it's been being pushed and pushed and pushed down our throats since then.
	And it's a plan.
	It's a plan that requires the West to bend.
	And you know what?
	We're gonna have a trail of cheers in this world.
	We will be the plains Indians.
	But why do you think that the the American leaders that are telling us that we have to bend that we can't offend atheists, that we can't offend this group or that group.
	Why do you think they're always telling us that we have to bend?
	It's because they've never really bought into our attitudes and our mentality.
	They're the ones that look down their noses at it.
	They're you know, whenever somebody s dares to stand up and profess a little bit of patriotism or write a patriotic song, they're called a bunch of jingoists, they're called stupid, they're called backward.
	Well, it's those ideas that got us where we were.
	We've been the dominant nation in the world for better than a hundred years, not only economically, but socially, internationally, militarily.
	There's a reason for that.
	And it all starts with a system of values that we have and translating that into public policy that encourages people and corporations to go out there and make some money and move forward.
	And that's what this president is rejecting.
	His policies, you know, spend money like crazy because the only way we can dig out from underneath our mess is if government spends money and then tax people on the high end and tax them and tax them and tax them and tax them to support all of these social services that he wants to create.
	Can you imagine, given the fact that we're facing a crisis with the baby when we're setting on to Social Security and Medicare, that anybody would be nutty enough to create another entitlement?
	Well, he did.
	And there are consequences for it.
	And if you don't believe me, look at the comments of Steve Wynne, Win Resorts, Democrat.
	He's talked about how the presidency of Obama is killing the economy.
	He calls it a wet blanket on the economy.
	No business wants to expand or do anything here because they fear him, that he's the problem, his policies, and the threat, the biggest threat that they face.
	The thing that is scaring off companies some hiring.
	The biggest threat that's out there, it isn't just Obamacare, it's that he might have a second term.
	I'm telling you, if he loses, you will see the stock market start to improve next year as his loss becomes apparent.
	If he loses, you're going to see a hiring explosion by American businesses.
	There's capital, there's a ton of capital on the sidelines.
	The American Corporations are loaded with cash.
	Look at their balance sheets.
	They just aren't putting it to work because they fear that if they put that cash to work and they produce profits, it's going to be taxed away from them.
	We can turn this around, but we've got to cut our spending, and we've got to re-embrace the notion that the free market is the path to success for all of us.
	I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush.
	I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
	This all said it, as I said when I read about the deaths of Jerry Lieber and Nick Ashford.
	Think about some of these songs and think about the themes.
	Ain't No Mountain High Enough, which was written by Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson.
	Was that Diana Ross and the Supremes that made it a hit?
	Think so.
	Ain't no mountain high enough and ain't no valley low enough to keep me from you.
	Big it went, yeah, it was Marvin Gay and Tammy Terrell.
	You're right.
	Big ideas.
	Soaring thoughts.
	I recently finally saw Jersey Boys.
	I love Frankie Valley in the four seasons.
	I can't believe it took me this long to see Jersey Boys.
	I saw Jersey Boys when it came to Milwaukee, which is probably probably means the national tour is about over.
	We're the last place is going to come.
	Great show.
	Walk like a man, a uniquely American song.
	You're just too good to be true, can't take my eyes off of you.
	That when people talk about American music, they knew that there was an American culture, that there was an American style, there was an American way of thinking.
	Why do you think liberals hated Bush?
	It's because they saw him as a guy with this Texas swagger that he was a cowboy.
	They really hate Rick Perry because he's a re he's the real deal.
	Bush was a Northeasterner whose family relocated to Texas.
	Perry is a Texas cowboy.
	I mean, this is a guy that wears a gun while jogging.
	That swagger that so many lefties just hate about Texas.
	They don't like it because it's a proud affirmation of one's Americanism.
	Well, we need to stop running away from that.
	And start re-embracing it.
	I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
	I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
	I I know some of you probably think I'm nuts to begin with.
	I'm sitting here in the studio and during the last break, uh I felt dizzy and lightheaded, and my chair was shaking.
	And I thought, am I losing it here?
	Am I because of the pressure I'm on?
	And broadcast engineer Mamon said to me, after two minutes, you feel your chair moving?
	And I said, Yeah, something going on.
	Now I'm doing the show here in New York City.
	I'm thinking, we can't be having an earthquake here.
	But the building was shaking.
	I'm telling you, I'm not losing it.
	I'm looking at uh story just breaking.
	Unconfirmed earthquake hits Washington, D.C. I'm in New York.
	I felt this.
	We're high up in uh a building in Manhattan in the Rush studio.
	Uh a five that's not strong on the Richter scale.
	That's not like awful or anything.
	And they're saying it was centered somewhere near DC.
	South of DC.
	Uh well, it I'm telling you, it had to be felt all the way along the eastern seaboard because I'm in New York and we're in a high rise and I could feel my chair shaking.
	It was weird.
	Uh I've never been, I've never been in an earthquake.
	I'm from Wisconsin.
	We don't have earthquake.
	We don't have earthquakes.
	People in California, oh yeah, we we we get this stuff all the time.
	Just getting more information.
	5.8.
	This and again, this just happened during this last break.
	That I felt the chair moving.
	It's only because I'm filling in.
	So if you're in the eastern part of the United States, if you feel felt something shaking, again, uh unconfirmed earthquake hitting near Washington, D.C. I'm in New York, which is about what, 400 miles north, 300 miles north?
	I don't even know.
	Um strong enough to feel it here in a high-rise building here.
	We just had uh we had an earthquake, uh getting reports that it was felt at the Capitol.
	Uh now reading felt on Times Square, Lower Manhattan and Beyond.
	For those of you who take the uh feed from the program live, which is most of the EIB affiliates.
	Again, this just happened uh right around uh 53 minutes after the hour.
	Um I can give the time, right?
	Right around 153 or so, 50 53 or so Eastern time.
	Uh that I felt it here in the uh here in the studios.
	So it it it's not all about me.
	It had nothing to do with anything that I was doing.
	I wasn't causing anything to shake, rattle or roll.
	Something was going on uh all places.
	Earthquake strike earthquake strikes Washington, D.C. He's been here for two and a half years.
	There's no reason for the ground to start shaking now.
	Maybe it's a sign that uh it's the beginning of the end.
	Maybe this will be the thing that gets him to come back from vacation.
	Well, we're all settled in and I'm around for another hour.

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