Aug. 23, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:43
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| Just about all of us who sit in for Rush are named Mark. | |
| We all have our own unique and individual styles. | |
| I like all of us. | |
| I'm here today, me, Mark Belling, Mark Stein was here yesterday, although I intruded on his program to interview him about his book. | |
| I've been talking today about how the American culture, when translated into public policy, has made us the nation that we are. | |
| And how we have a regime, as Rutch calls it, that doesn't believe in that culture and is radically altering public policy, and that's creating the disastrous mess that we're in. | |
| I'm making this point in about 10 or 12 minutes ago, sitting here doing one of the commercial breaks, and my chair starts to shake. | |
| And I'm thinking, okay, I'm drinking too much coffee because I'm all hyped up because I'm talking on national radio here, me, this guy from Milwaukee. | |
| Am I getting woozy? | |
| And then you know your mind starts to race. | |
| I'm in New York. | |
| Is there something going on? | |
| I'm telling you, the chair was shaking, and I felt myself moving. | |
| I'm thinking, is there terrorism attack? | |
| Is something going on? | |
| And I look outside outside the windows, and nothing seems to be going on. | |
| And broadcast engineer Mormon then said, Did you just feel your chair move? | |
| And I said, Yeah. | |
| And for those of you who are taking the Rush Show live and are listening live right now, you're aware there's been an earthquake on the east coast of the United States. | |
| It's centered between Washington and Richmond, Virginia, now being upgraded, believed to be 6.0 on the Richter scale. | |
| Now that's not real, real strong like the disastrous ones. | |
| California, Japan, other places. | |
| Once you get into the sevens and low eights, that's big problem. | |
| 5.8, 6.0 are the two numbers that I've seen reported from the U.S. Geological Survey. | |
| The Pentagon is being evacuated, the Capitol is being evacuated. | |
| Very, very close to the site. | |
| I mean, I we're in New York, as I said. | |
| This is Richmond, Virginia, and we're in a high-rise building here in command central for EIB, the New York headquarters of EIB. | |
| I felt it, and I really felt it here. | |
| If you're feeling it in New York, I imagine up and down the Eastern Seaboard this was felt by a whole lot of people. | |
| Anyway, it happened, we're aware of it, and there's anything that comes of this in terms of damage. | |
| I'll try to pass the information along. | |
| In the meantime, I've been trying to raise a lot of topics today that all tie back to this theme, that there is an American culture, there's an American system, and there's an American lifestyle. | |
| And it's one that tells people, you try to get ahead. | |
| You pay your bills, you pay your taxes, and if everything falls apart for you, your fellow man via government will be there for you. | |
| And we'll take care of you when you get old. | |
| We'll take care of you if you serve in our military and you get injured or you get sick. | |
| And we've all accepted that. | |
| That's been perverted the last two and a half years. | |
| We had a bad economic situation that this president took advantage of to loot the treasury and spend nearly a trillion dollars on his friends. | |
| It hasn't produced an economic recovery, but it's blown up the budget deficit. | |
| Then he goes and creates a brand new entitlement, health care that expands government spending into the future to levels that we can't sustain. | |
| There's no way even a thriving American economy can have a balanced federal budget when you spend the kind of money that Obamacare is going to require. | |
| American businesses who have bounced back from the recession, as I said, many of them have loads of cash, aren't expanding, and they're not hiring because they are fearful of the policies of this president. | |
| And I believe it's because we have a president who doesn't buy into this system. | |
| The government is there as a last resort for people. | |
| He believes the government is the provider of everything. | |
| He thought the recession could be fixed by government spending. | |
| He thinks the problem of paying for health care in the United States can only be solved by a massive government mandate. | |
| He believes that government can solve all of our transportation needs by putting high speed rail around the United States. | |
| He believes that all of these ideas can only come from government, and in fact just the opposite is true. | |
| We still have innovation going on. | |
| We're going to figure out a better way to power automobiles than gasoline. | |
| I don't know what it's going to be. | |
| I don't know if it's going to be the hybrid car, the electric car, a car running on natural gas, but you've got the private sector working on this stuff. | |
| In the meantime, what does government do? | |
| It mandates the use of ethanol and inferior fuel that simply rewards special interests. | |
| Look at the innovation that we see in technology. | |
| Not a single one of them comes from a government grant. | |
| The guy that created Facebook is sitting up there at Harvard with an idea to make a lot of money. | |
| Google wasn't created with a government grant. | |
| Look at the manufacturing innovations that we're seeing. | |
| Some of the greatest equipment to recover oil from the tar sands of Canada is coming from American manufacturers designing equipment. | |
| We still have all of the best ideas. | |
| We still have all of the best thinkers. | |
| We still are dominant in the entertainment culture. | |
| The sports that we invented are still the ones that most people in the world play. | |
| I know we didn't invent soccer. | |
| Look how international baseball has become it's our game. | |
| Look at how international basketball is our game I don't believe this is a lost cause. | |
| The entitlement mentality that we have is threatening us. | |
| The budget deficits are scary. | |
| Mark Stein who hosted the program yesterday has written a new book titled After America. | |
| He's talking about the period after America is no longer dominant after the American economy has collapsed. | |
| He's saying that's what's going to happen if we don't stop spending so much money. | |
| He's right that is what's going to happen. | |
| But we're not doomed politically we can make policy changes to save ourselves and I say that coming from Wisconsin where we've had radical policy changes that have saved my state and there's no reason we can't use the political process to bring back American policies that are premised on the American system and American capitalism and that doesn't mean we're spitting on all of the people who aren't doing as well. | |
| We can have a safety net. | |
| We can keep Social Security in some form we can keep Medicare. | |
| We're not going to shut down the VA. | |
| We understand that there's a government rule for things but it's got to be reasonable. | |
| And the president of the United States who's sitting there at Martha's Vineyard pretending to come up with an act a plan to revitalize the economy is never going to develop one that's going to work because he doesn't buy into the types of things that have made America what it is enough ranting and raving to Lennox uh Lennox of Kansas and Martha you're on EIB with Mark Belling. | |
| Martha you didn't feel any earthquake out there in Kansas did you? | |
| No, uh but I certainly can't argue with God's aim. | |
| If I were in charge of earthquakes that's exactly where I would sit well there's a lot of collateral damage though here on the East Coast like me. | |
| Well I'm I d yes I I would I would focus it like a laser just on the Capitol You know it's a good thing that Clinton isn't the president right now because if he was up in Martha's Vineyard he would have been empathizing and claming he was feeling it up there too. | |
| So anyway, what's on your mind, Martha? | |
| I just wanted to say that I'm very glad to be on the air, and I know that my husband Joe in Baton Rouge will be listening. | |
| And I just want to say that I think I take a little bit of a different viewpoint about the bailout, I guess. | |
| I think it has failed miserably, and I think Obama hoped and knew, to the extent that he knows anything, that it would fail miserably. | |
| I think that he fears American exceptionalism. | |
| He knows it's out there and he's doing his dead level best to smother it, drown it, siphon off all its energy and and I think it's still alive and I still have a lot of hope for the future. | |
| And I want to say that if he had just if he really believed in redistribution of things he would have taken that huge amount of money and sent it in equal amount I'm happy to take less than someone it has nothing to do with taxes or what I my husband or I earn I'm happy to take just an equal share with every other registered voter in the United States. | |
| If he had sent us our fair share of that money, the American economy, we'd be we'd be in hyperinflation now because it would have taken off so fast and we'd be humming along. | |
| There'd be a thousand jobs for every person applied to the Mr. Well, and he's talking now about extending this uh b business with a payroll tax, the holiday on the payroll tax. | |
| And a lot of Republicans are thank you for the call, uh, Martha. | |
| A lot of Republicans are objecting to that, and you know, they're probably going to have to come around to his point of view because politically it's a winner. | |
| The problem with it is is that no business and no individual makes any significant decision on the basis of anything that's temporary. | |
| All right, we don't forget the Social Security tax or the Medicare tax to the full extent for a few more months or another year. | |
| That's not going to get anyone to make a significant investment. | |
| It doesn't result in translating anything into the economy. | |
| It doesn't create any new jobs. | |
| What does create jobs is the expectation that you can keep as much as you hope for of the money that you make, and that's the thing that the president isn't willing to do. | |
| Instead, we all know that he's going to run the 2012 campaign as a referendum on whether or not they're going to raise taxes or not. | |
| He wants to run this on a class warfare battle in which he suggests that the rich are getting to keep all of their money when the middle class is falling farther behind that same old tired rot. | |
| That's what he wants to run on. | |
| And that's why the economy hasn't recovered. | |
| Because the fear is is that he's going to win and do just that. | |
| To the extent that his reelection becomes m less and less likely, the economy will recover. | |
| In fact, you can f if if you want to to plot a graph right now, plot the likelihood of Obama being re-elected and economic growth. | |
| And as the top number of the Obama likelihood goes down, you're going to see economic growth start to pick up because there's a lot of money out there on the sidelines that isn't being invested in our economy for fear that the president is going to be re-elected and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and he are going to have a whale of a second term. | |
| I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush. | |
| I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush. | |
| I started this whole thing reading about the deaths of Jerry Lieber of Lieber and Stoller and Nick Ashford of Ashford and Simpson. | |
| Imagine if one of them had written like Shake Rattle and Roll or a whole lot of shaking going on. | |
| Would have brought it all together, but they didn't. | |
| Uh Lieber and Stoller did write Kansas City, another just classic American sawing. | |
| I want to tie all of this in at some point to our policy toward Libya and what's going on in the Middle East. | |
| But first let's go to Raleigh, North Carolina and uh Jerry. | |
| Jerry, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling. | |
| Thank you, Mark. | |
| You know, there's no more interesting contrast to making the point that you have made this afternoon than the comments of Maxine Waters as compared with those of uh Michael Nutter, the mayor of Philadelphia. | |
| Maxine is a statist, and she wanted a government solution to what she rightfully regards as a disproportionate unemployment problem among black people. | |
| Michael Nutter, in his homily Sunday before last, told him to buy a belt and pull up their pants and take the pick out of the back of their hair and go get a job. | |
| We need to tell people who Nutter is for those not familiar. | |
| He's the mayor of Philadelphia, and he's responded to some of the problems of black youth in Philadelphia. | |
| Nutter himself is black, by suggesting that they need to start behaving, dressing properly, showing respect, speaking better, pull your pants up, not walking around with your underwear showing and the whole thing. | |
| And he's gotten a fair amount of backlash for that. | |
| But he said, look, you know, we have to be responsible for our own culture. | |
| We have to be responsible for ourselves, and we need to get our act together. | |
| Rarely have we had black leaders speak that bluntly. | |
| Bill Cosby's done it, a few others, but Nutter's comments made news because he directly took on what he felt were cultural problems among young black males. | |
| And that was the point that you were making, correct? | |
| As as regards the uh the backlash which he has received, the Democrats ought to buy a clue and emblazon across the head of the DNC, the saying of JFT, ask not what your country can do for you. | |
| But get a job and pay taxes. | |
| Well, you know, the Democrats love the Kennedys, but it was Kennedy that essentially espoused the values that we're talking about here when he said that you shouldn't be looking to government to solve all of your problems, and that's what that ask not what your country can do for you quote was all about. | |
| You know, for people who've embraced the Kennedys the way that they have, they've really disassociated themselves from JFK's ideas. | |
| The point that we were making with regard to Michael Nutter and his comments about the kids in Philadelphia, he essentially was saying that you've got to conform. | |
| Nobody wants us to be a country that says that everybody has to come from a cookie cutter, that we're going to be a bunch of automatons. | |
| We're not going to be a nation like China in which everyone was required to th is required to think a certain way and believe a certain way and that no one can speak out. | |
| We're not going to be one of those autocracies where you've got to be a certain way. | |
| We've always encouraged individuality. | |
| But within that overall scheme of things, you've got to allow people to be able to excel. | |
| You've got to follow certain rules. | |
| The way that we handle and deal with failure, people who don't have enough money to eat, people who don't have enough money to pay for their health care, can't be to create all of these entitlements that tell them that there's no responsibility on their part. | |
| There can be a safety net, but it can't be one that busts us all out and bankrupts the country. | |
| Want to bring you up to date on the uh earthquake that's hit the eastern part of the United States. | |
| And this is all happening as I speak here. | |
| 5.9 magnitude now on the Richter scale, centered near a city in Virginia named Mineral, Virginia, felt as far away, I'm told now as Detroit, they've shut down a nuclear power plant in the state of Virginia. | |
| They've evacuated the State Department, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. | |
| Uh cities up and down the East Coast, all the way to New York City, where I'm I'm doing the program from uh I don't know if they've evacuated Detroit. | |
| Smart smart aleck, I said I don't know. | |
| I would you know. | |
| Smart Alec comment from Mr. Snurley, how would you know if they've evacuated Detroit? | |
| Detroit is already avacu. | |
| You know, Detroit actually has a mayor who I think gets it. | |
| Dave Bing, the uh ex-basketball player, he's trying to encourage free market free market entrepreneurialism in Detroit, and he's getting a lot of heat from the political establishment there, but he's somebody who I think does get it. | |
| Anyway, uh there was an earthquake. | |
| We haven't gotten any reports of significant damage uh anymore. | |
| Umwords have been evacuated at the airports in Newark and JFK, two of the three Metropolitan New York airports, if they've evacuated the control towers, my guess is is that planes aren't coming in and out, so you're going to see a disruption in airline travel uh da in the United States. | |
| Well, I wasn't I I wasn't I wasn't going I wasn't going anywhere today. | |
| Uh I'm doing the program tomorrow. | |
| Again, I want to bring you up to speed on that um because this earthquake again uh just happened about 25, 30 minutes ago, and I felt it here in the EIB studios. | |
| Let's go to Texarkana, Texas, where I'm sure you didn't feel anything. | |
| Greg, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling. | |
| Hey, Mark, nice talking to you. | |
| Now I didn't feel it down here in Texas. | |
| Um I just want to comment about the uh all the Tea Party flack they've been giving us with Janine DeFloppio and Maxine Waters, like she's somebody that we should listen to. | |
| By the way, Janine Garofalo is precisely what I'm talking about here about somebody who's not bought into this notion of an American culture and Amer an American system and belief in entrepreneurialism and individualism and personal responsibility. | |
| She's somebody who just doesn't buy it. | |
| And the fact of the matter is is that her crowd is in charge right now. | |
| That's you know, that that's the crowd that President Obama comes from. | |
| Exactly. | |
| But her her opinion means less than nothing to me. | |
| I mean, I'd rather take somebody off the street that really, you know, all the Tea Party people. | |
| Well, look, uh they said that we were a uh what was it AshroTurf? | |
| Right. | |
| Were they right? | |
| No, they were wrong. | |
| You know, we're just normal people that I've never been belonged to any group in the past at all. | |
| Anyway, the reason I called was, you know, they they like to throw out their favorite weapon as racist. | |
| You're a racist. | |
| You know, you must be a racist. | |
| I lived in Florida a few years back, and I was there for about ten years, and I hired this guy who was Mexican, and uh he was a great guy. | |
| Uh he worked really, really hard. | |
| Um I really liked the guy, and uh I thought he was a national citizen. | |
| His English was perfect, you know. | |
| And uh he was always a you know a beat guy, and I saw that he was really depressed, and he wouldn't tell me about it. | |
| And finally I asked his wife about it, and she said that he was being deported, that he was here under a work visa. | |
| And when they went to the INS office in Okeechobee, the w they they told him that your work visa is not being uh updated anyway. | |
| And he wanted to be here. | |
| My whole thank you for the call, and I've got to cut him a little bit short because I'm up against the clock here. | |
| But the point that I think that he was making is is that this is somebody who came to the United States because he wanted to work and he wanted to be part of it. | |
| My whole problem with the whole immigration policy in our country is that we punish guys like the one that that caller was referring to who are trying to enter the United States legally and play by the rules, whereas if you come in illegally, you have all sorts of people who want to give you all of the benefits that belong to Americans. | |
| I think that was the point that he was driving at. | |
| Again, my name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush. | |
| You know, if Bush were still president, they'd be blaming this earthquake on him. | |
| You'll notice that I haven't tried to pin any of the blame on this on President Obama. | |
| Uh there was there's been an earthquake in the eastern part of the United States, centered between Washington, D.C. and Richmond, Virginia. | |
| Mineral, Virginia is the closest uh city. | |
| They pinpointed to this, and there's a lot of disruption as a result of it. | |
| Uh, we're told now that this has been felt as far away as Detroit and Chicago. | |
| Uh all up and down the eastern part of the United States. | |
| I felt it here uh in New York at the EIB studios. | |
| Lasted about ninety seconds or so, right around one fifty-three or so uh Eastern time uh this afternoon. | |
| All three of the New York airports are now shut down, no flights coming in or out. | |
| Uh a lot of cell phone service has been reported as being uh disrupted. | |
| A number of the government buildings in Washington, DC uh were evacuated as they checked to see whether or not there's any damage. | |
| I haven't gotten any reports here yet of significant damage anywhere, but again, this just happened uh less than thirty-five or forty minutes ago, and apparently it was felt by a lot of people. | |
| Uh we've got a geologist on the line right now calling from New York City. | |
| George, George, it's your turn on EIB. | |
| Thanks for calling. | |
| Yes, hi, Mark. | |
| Are you one of the Marx brothers? | |
| I'm one of the Marks who does the show, yes. | |
| Okay. | |
| The uh uh yeah, the uh uh Ramapo fault line, it runs up and down the eastern seaboard. | |
| It's uh it's centuries old. | |
| This is not Bush's fault. | |
| And uh it's usually sedentary. | |
| It was put uh more active uh a century or so ago, but it's still there, and every once in a while we get these things. | |
| They they can be felt as far away as the Anarondix and all the way down to the middle Atlantic states. | |
| So it's five point nine, and you don't normally think of five point nine as being uh a huge thing, but I suppose given where the fault line is and it runs right along the East Coast, it just goes through so many of these population centers. | |
| And it's very deep. | |
| It's very deep, so that's why it's felt uh in a while longer range. | |
| Now you're you're you're calling f uh from New York City. | |
| Did you feel it? | |
| Uh no, I I felt it when you felt it, I mean uh you know, uh sympathetically, but not not physically. | |
| And I and and uh in Russia's studio here were a number of floors off the ground, so maybe that would be one of the reasons why. | |
| Oh, I'm on the second floor and I would have been likely I would have been likely to do it. | |
| So what which fault what you what did you say the name of the fault line was again? | |
| Ramapo, like Ramapo, New Jersey, R-A-M-A-P-O. | |
| And it and it runs how how long? | |
| Oh, it's it's all the way from the middle Atlantic states all the way up to the northeast here. | |
| Uh you know, uh Connecticut. | |
| Has it ever produced a major earthquake when with the city? | |
| Only centuries ago. | |
| I don't recall uh my degree was thirty-five years ago. | |
| I've kept up, but I I've worked in another field, but I love geology and I I get periodicals and stuff. | |
| Okay, thanks for the information. | |
| Uh uh, that's George. | |
| He is a as I as he said, he's a geologist giving us some information about this. | |
| And again, if you live in the eastern part of the United States, uh a lot of precautions are being taken as a result of this. | |
| Uh it's been felt in a lot of places, including as I said here in New York where I am, uh Washington, DC, much closer to the uh uh to the point at which the quake occurred. | |
| Uh they've evacuated a number of government buildings. | |
| Uh if you're planning on any air travel today, good chance that your flight might be disrupted because some of the airports in the eastern part of the country are being shut down at least temporarily. | |
| Uh Mr. Snerdley's wondering if this is a total overreaction. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I uh it would strike me that there would be no reason to evacuate a building because there was an earthquake in Virginia. | |
| I mean, we didn't we didn't evacuate here. | |
| I don't know why they needed to evacuate the Pentagon, but unless there's damage here that we're not aware of, I mean, we're still only about 40 minutes into this thing, unless there's damage out there that I'm not aware of, and I haven't gotten any reports any. | |
| All the cable channels are showing shots of New York City, and there's I'm looking out the window here, there's no problems, the cars are moving, people are fine. | |
| Uh this is not the San Francisco earthquake back in the uh was that '87, the earthquake that occurred during the World Series between San Francisco and the Giants and Oakland were playing in the World Series. | |
| Uh, I think that was who was in it then. | |
| I i we don't think that this is anything serious or severe, but a whole lot of precautions are being taken, including shutting down a lot of air travel, and so on. | |
| 5.9 is the magnitude on the Richter scale. | |
| Uh the what did they call it the epicenter? | |
| Is that that what they call the uh what at which an earthquake occurs? | |
| About 83 miles from Washington, D.C., about 40 miles from Richmond, Virginia, uh Philadelphia International Airport also now reporting. | |
| Um suspension of uh flights. | |
| Don't know when they're going to resume. | |
| I want to cover a couple of other topics here that generally relate to this theme that I've been on today, about what it means to be American, that there is an American philosophy, and so on. | |
| The Libyan story actually ties into this. | |
| The last we've heard, the rebels in Libya, and this is like 35 or 40 different groups, they're all bonded together for the purpose of toppling Qaddafi, that they've gotten control of Qaddafi's inner compound. | |
| Now there's been a lot of misinformation coming out of Libya over the last 24 to 48 hours. | |
| Initially, it was stated by the rebels that they had captured both of Qaddafi's sons who are involved in the government there, including the one who is believed to have been his heir apparent. | |
| That turned out not to be true. | |
| That son, in fact, held a news conference yesterday bragging that they were going to crush the rebels and so on. | |
| But it now appears as though the compound in Tripoli, where Qaddafi had the heavy armor and a lot of the artillery and his top security people, that the rebels may have taken control of that. | |
| Whether it happens today or a month, whether or not there's a lot of fighting back, whether there's a counterinsurgency, I don't know, but it does seem as though Qaddafi's going to fall. | |
| This is being described as a victory for President Obama. | |
| I don't know what he had to do with it. | |
| He did support the NATO mission, but only after our allies shamed him into it. | |
| My thought on it is this. | |
| There's no denying that Muammar Gaddafi was a terrible person. | |
| He's an evil human being. | |
| In the 80s, he was the leading state sponsor of terrorism. | |
| The Pan Am bombing occurred. | |
| The atrocities that occurred throughout the world happened, and they're real. | |
| In Libya itself, there has been total repression. | |
| The society has been held back, people have been tortured and killed. | |
| He's a terrible person. | |
| That's not deniable. | |
| The point that I'm making is I'm not sure we have any idea what's going to happen next. | |
| Unlike Egypt, where there was a strong military that supported the rebels there and kind of guaranteed that there would be a sort of smooth transition, and Egypt was a nation in which there was a government that tolerated at least some degree of opposition. | |
| Here in Libya, you've got tribes, there's no other political party, since there has been no dissent at all allowed, there isn't any real structure to fall back on. | |
| It's not like they have a constitutional government or a parliament that they can use to try to order themselves. | |
| Now you've got all of these different groups, some of whom come from different parts of the nation of Libya, some of them have very different agendas. | |
| They've got to try to figure out who's in charge. | |
| And you know, Libya is an oil-rich nation. | |
| It's in an important part of the world, and there's a whole lot of uncertainty as a result of this. | |
| The United States was involved tacitly by supporting the NATO operation there. | |
| Whether or not Qaddafi falls or not, I'm still not sure I've understood why. | |
| Changing the government of Libya was something that we perceived to be in our interest. | |
| While Qaddafi was a truly rotten person, he wasn't posing any threat to the United States. | |
| The bigger picture out of this is that you have another Middle Eastern autocrat tyrant falling. | |
| You get the impression it's going to keep happening. | |
| Libya is not all that important other than its oil. | |
| Syria becomes more important because of its support of terrorism. | |
| But Iran's the big one. | |
| There isn't all that much difference between Libya and Syria and Iran. | |
| True, Iran is more civilized, it has a more educated population. | |
| It has a stronger economy. | |
| It's been somewhat better managed, but it's the same thing where individuals have been denied basic freedom and basic rights. | |
| If the Libyan government can fall, the Iranian government can fall. | |
| But our president has done nothing to encourage that to happen. | |
| Iran is the big problem. | |
| They're sitting at all of those nukes. | |
| There's an e the potential of having all of those nukes. | |
| They're sitting at all of that nuclear research is what I was trying to say. | |
| They pose a major threat to the peace, freedom, and security of the entire world. | |
| That's the ultimate destabilizer. | |
| Since we now know that tyrants in the Middle East can fall. | |
| And we now understand that the populations in these nations chafe under this kind of iron fisted rule. | |
| We need to open ourselves up to the notion that we can pursue American interests by encouraging the destabilization of that government. | |
| Something that President Obama has had so far no stomach for. | |
| What's the role of the United States in all of this? | |
| I don't know that we had a role in Libya. | |
| I don't know that there needed to be a rule. | |
| Syria, perhaps more important, but the Iranian question, because of the terrorism implications, because of Iran's potential to go nuclear, that is a real thing. | |
| And that's the area that I think that we need to be prioritizing on. | |
| With regard to Libya, I don't know what's going to come next. | |
| I think it is very possible that Libya is going to be ungovernable for the next several years to come. | |
| Fortunately, the oil supply from Libya isn't crucial to the global oil supply. | |
| It's important, but it's not all that important. | |
| And Libya doesn't have significant weapons of mass destruction, but they do have enough weaponry that they can cause problems, and who's going to be controlling that and who's going to be patro controlling the surface to air missiles they have, all of this is going to be an issue. | |
| I'm not suggesting it's a bad thing that Qaddafi is falling. | |
| What I am saying is nobody really knows what's going to happen next. | |
| And nobody has any real confidence that the president or his Secretary of State have any ability to manage our interests in the middle of this. | |
| Again, earthquake centered in Mineral, Virginia hit about fifty minutes ago. | |
| Much of the eastern part of the United States felt it. | |
| No reports of significant damage yet, but a number of airports that are shut down and a lot of government buildings that have been evacuated. | |
| And I felt it here. | |
| I'm Mark Belling sitting in for rush. | |
| Who wrote I feel the earth move under my feet? | |
| Who wrote that? | |
| Carol King wrote that. | |
| So all started when started talking about Libra and Staller and Ashford and Simpson. | |
| Paul Ryan says he's not running for president despite being begged to by a number of conservative leaders. | |
| Sarah Palin still sitting on the silence. | |
| Carl Grove says he thinks she's getting in. | |
| If she's not getting in, this is sure one giant tease. | |
| I mean, she's going back to Iowa around Labor Day weekend. | |
| I don't know what she's doing, but it sure looks to me like she's running. | |
| Why else would she keep hanging around? | |
| I mean, if she isn't running, and I love Sarah Palin, but if she isn't running, this is one giant exercise in self-indulgence where look at me, look at me, look at me as I go to the state that has the first caucus. | |
| She may well be getting into this. | |
| Whomever does get in. | |
| For me, there are two or three tests. | |
| Obviously the first one, can they beat Obama? | |
| If you can't beat Obama, I don't want any part of you. | |
| He has to be beaten. | |
| The second test, are you willing to embrace real entitlement reform? | |
| If you're not willing to embrace it on the campaign trail, you won't have a mandate to be able to do it once you're in the White House. | |
| Again, I speak from my experience with Governor Walker in Wisconsin. | |
| He said he was going to balance the budget, and he said he was going to make employees, start paying for their benefits. | |
| He said that when he was campaigning. | |
| So when he was elected, he merely said that I'm doing what I said I was going to do. | |
| Are they willing to embrace entitlement reform? | |
| But thirdly, do they buy into this notion that America is a country that will encourage economic growth, that will encourage prosperity, that will encourage profits, that will encourage corporate expansion, that will encourage people to get ahead, will encourage entrepreneurialism, or not. | |
| And my hang up with one of the prominent candidates, Romney, is that I'm not sure he buys into that third part. | |
| A guy who invented government health care in Massachusetts. | |
| Doesn't strike me as somebody who believes in this concept that Americans primarily have to take care of themselves. | |
| We've got a campaign to play this thing out. | |
| But Mitt Ron, the problem that I, and I think a lot of other conservatives have with Mitt Romney, is we're not sure that he buys into the stuff that we stand for. | |
| Let me try to work in a call real quickly before I'm up against the break. | |
| Viola in Santa Maria, California, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program. | |
| Hello. | |
| Hi. | |
| I'm I would like the government to leave the Social Security alone and go after the Medicaid. | |
| Medicaid is welfare. | |
| Yeah, Medicaid is health care for low income, not to be confusing Medicare. | |
| And the most people who are benefiting is the illegals. | |
| There's even illegals in the union. | |
| Well, Medicaid, Medicaid is going to be abused because you're telling people that any time you have a sniffle, you can get treated for free, and we haven't tried. | |
| We obviously have to have a way of taking care of people who are desperately ill who are low income, but you're right, Viola. | |
| We the program is being terribly abused, and the cost of the states and the federal government is going through the rough. | |
| And there hasn't been any effort by this president to deal with it at all, other than to under reimburse doctors and hospitals for their care by not paying medic paying for Medicaid patients on the basis of what the care actually costs. | |
| Thank you for the call. | |
| The point that she makes with regard to Social Security and Medicare, I think everyone understands that you can't alter benefits for the people that are currently on the system. | |
| The Ryan plan, which I support, says, look, if you're on Medicare right now, you're going to keep it. | |
| If you're on Social Security right now, we're not going to alter it. | |
| But for those 55 and under, we're going to reform this system so that we can afford to pay for it. | |
| That's the only way that you can do it because you can't go and take away benefits right now from people that are currently receiving it. | |
| Politically, it's a non starter. | |
| But we've got to fix this system because when the baby boomers are all old, it's going to be too late to fix it then. | |
| I'm Mark Billing sitting in for Rush Limbaugh. | |
| I think there were two defining moments in the Obama presidency. | |
| The first was the passage of O when he pushed for Obamacare and got it through. | |
| The other was when he and his wife and Oprah went and fought for it to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago and they finished in last place. | |
| They thought by their mere presence that the world was going to fall all over them and award us the Olympics. | |
| And he was slapped right down, and he realized that every time he spoke, everyone wasn't going to swoon. | |
| Well, this is what it's gotten to. | |
| The United States now says we aren't even going to try to bid for the Olympics anywhere in the United States in 2020. | |
| This is what happens when you give up on American exceptionalism and the American idea. | |
| I will try not to have a program so powerful tomorrow that the world literally starts shaking and rattling around. | |
| Hope you enjoyed the show. | |
| Talk to you tomorrow. |
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