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Sept. 23, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:48
September 23, 2011, Friday, Hour #3
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Yes, America's Anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in.
No supporting paperwork whatsoever.
Great to be with you.
Rush returns live on Monday.
He will, as he said at the end of yesterday's show, sorry he couldn't be here today to go through all the I don't think he'd be talking a lot about what happened at the Republican debate in Florida.
It kind of demoralizes you to pick it apart piece by piece.
Perry has come out swinging today.
I think he's speaking at CPAC in Florida somewhere, and he said that he doesn't think we need to elect the smoothest debater.
No, no, that's true, but we'd like to elect a guy who it's clear what he's on about.
And it wasn't clear what he was on about when he was asked the call about what he'd do if it turned out the Pakistani nukes had suddenly fallen into the hands of Islamists.
He got the old 3 a.m. call.
It wasn't clear what he was talking about when he said there's one person on this stage that is for Obama's race to the top, and that is Governor Romney.
He didn't explain what race to the top was.
It's one of these latest pointless education boondoggles.
Speaking of which, by the way, education boondoggles from the Associated Press, President Barack Obama is giving states the flexibility to opt out of provisions of the no child left behind law.
Hey, I'd like that, by the way.
Do you like the idea of the flexibility to opt out of laws?
I'd like the flexibility to opt out of Debbie the Secretary's tax law when that gets passed.
I'd certainly like the flex.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, no, it's easy.
Mr. Snurdley says immigration law, but there's actually 30 million people in this country who've already opted out of U.S. immigration law very successfully.
And believe me, by the way, opting into U.S. immigration law is the big mistake here.
Nobody gets given the runaround more than legal immigrants to the United States of America.
And I like this idea now, this concept of the flexibility to opt out of provisions of the law, because that's actually a fascinating.
It's true with Obamacare.
If you know who to call in Washington and get past the switchboard, you can get one of these Obamacare waivers.
You can opt out of that law.
You've been given the flexibility to opt out of the provisions of that law.
You know what this destroys, by the way?
The basic principle of equality before the law, which is actually about as basic a sign of a civilized society as you can have, equality before the law.
And when you have these 3,000-page bills, which is what the depraved government in Washington specializes in these days, when you have 2,000-page bills, 3,000-page bills, you know they're not about equality before the law.
They're essentially about a hierarchy of privilege.
The reason they need to be 2,000 or 3,000 pages is because all these fellas who know who to call in Washington have to get their 10 cents in.
They have to be given the flexibility to opt out of provisions that they happen to find particularly awkward.
And before you know it, the bill is 2,000 or 3,000 pages long.
But President Obama now wants to give states the flexibility to opt out of provisions of the no child left behind law.
Now, this was one of these classic Bush-era bipartisan initiatives.
I mentioned it earlier when he was standing there saying, my good friend Teddy Kennedy, it was passed with bipartisan supports.
It was the reach across the aisle, no child left behind.
Every child, we reached across the aisle and dragged every child in America across with us.
It was classic bipartisan support.
And it's grown, unfortunately, like so many bipartisan great ideas, it's grown increasingly unpopular because what it was going to do was there were going to be measurements that risked labeling schools a failure.
Now, if you're like these schools in Atlanta, where they just, the teachers all got together and they went round to each other's homes of the evening and they got the erasers out and they rubbed out all the incorrect answers that their poorly taught students had filled in and they wrote the correct answers in to ensure they maintained the right standards to qualify for the various federal requirements.
You can do it that way.
But if you're an honest school and you risk being labeled a failure, then that's bad news.
And as more and more schools risk being labeled failures, they're now being allowed to opt out of the provisions of the no child left behind law.
So this law, by the way, this is like all these things.
It's like race to the top.
Race to the top.
Why don't we just try, by the way?
That's unfeasible.
That's totally unfeasible.
If you look where the United States comes in global education rankings, it's not going to be race to the top.
Why don't we try race to the middle?
That might just about be doable.
You know, because on some of these subjects, we're down there between Croatia and Uzbekistan.
And that's kind of embarrassing when you're not really with established members of developed economies, but you're with countries that were basically dictatorial basket cases a decade or so back.
So why don't we try instead?
Why don't we try something more doable, like a race to the middle?
But no, it's got this fantastic name, race to the top, no child left behind.
No child left behind in the race to the top.
And it's supposed to fix failing schools.
That's what they all say they're going to do.
A man in Washington has designed a plan to fix failing schools for 300 million people from Maine to Hawaii.
And when the plan to fix the failing schools fails, they say, no, no, don't worry.
We are going to give you the flexibility to opt out of the provisions of the consequences of your failure.
So much for the last great bipartisan Reach Across the Aisle initiative.
Reach across the aisle, no child left behind, race to the top.
It was all about the whole thing about it was supposed to impose national standards that would fix America's failing schools.
You can only fix failing schools, one school, one school district at a time.
And the remorseless centralization of the American education system.
By the way, the federal government isn't to blame for the lousy education system in America.
America spends more per student than any other country except Luxembourg or Switzerland.
And Luxembourg and Switzerland have plenty to show for their education dollars.
We don't because it's basically a cartel by a teachers' union that has benefited from the wholesale centralization of school districts that has occurred since the Second World War.
Before the Second World War, there were about 10 times as many school districts in the United States as there are now.
It's down to 15,000, shrinking, growing ever more centralized every year, and that delivers them more and more into the hands of the centralized bureaucracy.
Doesn't work.
No child left behind, failure.
Race to the top, failure.
You can only fix these things one school, one school district at a time.
Federalism is supposed to be the great experimental laboratory.
You can try something in northern Maine, and if it works there, some guy out in Hawaii might pick it up and try it.
But if you have a centralized guy trying to fix schools for a population of 300 million people, you are guaranteeing failure on a hugely expensive scale.
It is the end of the week, and you know what that means.
Live from Ice Station EIB, it's open live Friday!
Yes, we are here in the mountain vastness of northern New Hampshire.
Mr. Snardly is at the end of a long piece of wet string in southern Florida, and then he is connected to central control at EIB in New York, and from there goes over to California, up to the satellite, and out to you wherever you are.
But this bit from iStation EIB is the technically impressive part of the whole operation because believe me, communications-wise, New Hampshire is like Baghdad outside the green zone.
You know, it's amazing to me this works.
It's truly impressive.
Now, all you have to do is call 1-800-282-2882.
You can talk about anything you want to talk about.
You want to talk about Rick Perry's performance last night?
You can do that.
But if you want to talk about the latest Bushkazi league scores from Jalalabad, you're also welcome to do that.
We'll take your calls on whatever subject you want to talk about.
1-800-282-2882.
Before we leave this education biz, there is a real problem here.
It is not a trivial matter.
The great expensive failure of the American education system is truly horrible.
It's one of the things that ought to be fixed.
I mean, I agree, I actually agree with Rick Perry when he says that race to the top is a waste of, complete waste of time.
Arne Duncan's reforms are a waste of time.
We need to liberate the American education system.
We need to free it from the teachers' unions.
And we need to do that quickly, because otherwise we are simply not going to have a workforce that is going to be able to compete in the global economy.
And that's part of the whole general complacency that is so revolting about some of these debates.
The idea that simply the fact that America has enjoyed an unparalleled period of peace and prosperity since it became the dominant power on the planet in 1950, the fact that that is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and the sky and the sea and the stars is not true.
And if you do what we do in education, which is just throw more and more money down a hole and in fact not just waste money, but actually spend it on destructive, the worst kind of destructive social engineering, the consequences actually catch up with you.
I've got a little bit in my book about an educator who was touring a Midwestern middle school in the early 1990s and walked into the vestibule and was very struck by a banner of all these hands applauding, schoolchildren's hands applauding, under the motto, We Applaud Ourselves.
And she was struck at the sort of horrible narcissistic self-absorption of the American education system in the early 90s.
We applaud ourselves.
Well, those middle schoolers, what do you think they did?
The middle schoolers went to high school and then they went to college to do complacency studies for five and a half years.
And when they'd finished their bachelor's in complacency studies for five and a half years, the kids who grew up with the big banner saying we applaud ourselves went out and voted for a presidential candidate who told them we are the ones we've been waiting for.
There are consequences.
There are consequences for the wasteful, the fiscally profligate, wasteful self-indulgence of the education system.
And we all know that race to the top is a joke.
The title is a joke.
Race to the top.
We're not going to be racing anywhere.
I take that back, what I said about we should call it race to the middle.
You can't race to the middle either.
Inching to the middle.
Why don't they get real and at least call it inching to the middle instead of race to the top?
You're deluding.
You're not deluding yourselves because you know it isn't going to work, but you're deluding all the people out there who are still foolish enough to fall for these stupid bills just because you give it some idiotic name like Race to the Top or No Child Left Behind.
Honesty in legislative nomenclature, actually.
Why don't we pass that bill?
Why don't we pass that bill?
Say what you like about the Tea Act, but it was an act about tea.
Race to the Top isn't about racing and it isn't about getting to the top.
Mark Stein and Farush, lots more straight ahead.
Obenline Friday, Mark Stein in Farush.
Let's go to Tom in Essex Junction, Vermont, a town I know well.
I'm sad to say.
Great to have you with us on the show, Tom.
Greetings from across the Connecticut in New Hampshire.
What's on your mind today?
Well, Mark, it's the idea that you I've heard in the past a number of people talk about a flat tax.
I heard Herman King talk about that, but not too many of these major candidates running now.
I can't see how anybody could complain and say that's not fair because if they had a tax, say at 9% as an example, to everyone, regardless of what you made for an income, they couldn't complain and say the rich aren't doing their fair share because their fair share at 9% would be fair regardless of what your income is.
What do you think of that idea, Mark?
Well, you're absolutely right.
That's what some of the Baltic states, and I think it's Slovakia and some of the other post-Soviet states have introduced flat taxes.
And the great advantage of a flat tax is that everyone knows what it is, and it's generally said at a rate where there's no incentive to start monkeying around and figuring out little dodges and weaves to get around it.
That the president, when he keeps talking about loopholes, is actually proposing to add more loopholes because he wants to complicate the tax code.
By the way, when the tax code gets to the other reason, by the way, if we're going to go back to this Warren Buffett secretary thing, what was her name?
Debbie the Secretary.
Debbie, the last secretary in America.
Warren Buffett is embarrassed that his secretary pays more taxes than he does.
It's actually easy to pay more taxes than Warren Buffett because he owes a billion dollars to the United States Treasury.
So basically, most of us pay more taxes than Warren Buffett.
He may be the least taxed guy in the country by now.
But the reason for that is that Debbie the Secretary, apart from anything else, doesn't have access to the kind of advice that the accounting advice that Warren Buffett has.
The minute you have a complicated tax code, what you do is you reward people who can afford to hire the best people to negotiate the way through that tax code.
So the longer a tax code gets, the less democratic it gets.
That's why you can go, as you know, Tom, if you were to drive from where you are in northwestern Vermont, drive due east over to me in New Hampshire, you would meander through several little broken down Vermont towns where the gas station is closed and the general store is closed, but has still got some guy with a shingle hanging out outside his door saying he's the local representative of HR Block.
Because no town in Vermont is so broken down and decrepit that it doesn't need a guy to help people who earn very low salaries with their taxes.
That's fundamentally unfair to go back to the point you were making.
But you know, Tom, it's not difficult to figure out why Obama and the Democrats wouldn't want a flat tax.
I mean, why do you think they don't want it?
Well, I don't know.
I suppose it isn't just a flat tax, it's a loophole more than anything else.
But at any rate, the only thing I can think, I can't think why he wouldn't want it, but it just seems it would be absolutely fair for everybody.
I can't see how anybody could possibly.
But that's why he doesn't want it.
That's why he doesn't want it.
Because the entire model of government, it's as he said to Joe the Plumber, he thinks it's better when you spread the wealth around.
So if you, Tom, in Essex Junction, Vermont, happen to have earned some wealth, and if you have in Vermont, that in itself is quite an impressive achievement, given the state of the Vermont economy these days.
But if you, Tom, in Essex Junction, happen to have earned some wealth, the President of the United States thinks he has the right to spread it around and disperse it to other people.
What's the name of this lady who's running across against Scott Brown in Massachusetts, Mr. Snerdley?
What's her name?
Elizabeth Warren.
Rush was talking about Elizabeth Warren.
Her model is that nobody genuinely creates wealth.
Elizabeth Warren's thing is the factory owner has only managed to create wealth by exploiting the infrastructure that everybody else has put in place.
And that's why the top, what is it now?
The top 1% of taxpayers in this country pay more than the bottom 50% of taxpayers.
So if you had a flat tax, it would be fair.
And because it's fair, that's why Obama and the Democrats don't want it.
But here's the thing.
Eventually, you reach the point where you have totally disincentivized genuine wealth creation in this country.
In this country, the incentive to have a company that makes more than $50,000 in profits is significantly dented by the fact that you're up against the 35% tax rate when you get to that point.
We should have, every candidate on the Republican side at least, should be committed to putting a huge al-Qaeda-type suicide bomb under the United States tax code, blowing it into confetti and starting from scratch again.
They did that in the Baltic states.
They did that in, I think it was Slovakia, because they had the great advantage of emerging from a Soviet dictatorship since the end of the Second World War.
And they, in a sense, they found it easier to start from scratch.
But if we don't do it, if we just continue to add more barnacles to the U.S. tax code, the president now is proposing in his ridiculous In the Past My Jobs Bill Jobs Bill, was proposing to add a tax credit if you happen to give an employee a raise.
In other words, he's not simplifying taxes.
He's adding more pages to an already revoltingly long, fundamentally diseased and profoundly undemocratic tax code.
The longer a tax code gets, the more it's an affront to basic fairness, because never mind Debbie the secretary, Warren Buffett's secretary, spare a thought for Margie the waitress and Cindy the part-time house cleaner.
None of those have the advantages that come with a complicated tax code.
Yes, Rush returns Monday to start another week of excellence in broadcasting.
Before we're done today, though, I will be interested to know.
It says low probability, according to NASA, low probability that satellite debris may hit United States.
So with a bit of luck, it'll just take out one of those foreign countries.
But this is this dead six-ton satellite.
It isn't falling as fast as NASA had expected, apparently.
It's not falling as fast as the Dow or the U.S. employment market or any stuff like that.
It's coming down.
The reason, the technical reason, what is the technical reason?
Solar activity is no longer the major factor in the satellite's descent.
Rather, its orientation has changed.
Well, there's a lot of that about these days.
Its orientation has changed.
No, it's not.
I have no idea what that means, Mike.
I don't want to suggest the satellite swings both ways, but if it swings both ways, I hope it drops on the Chinese Treasury and takes out the safe with all the American IOUs in it.
Good luck to the Politburo in proving we still owe them all that money.
Anyway, who knows?
The satellite may land before we're done today at the top of the hour.
It might land on Ice Station EIB.
So if you hear a dull thud, don't worry about it.
That's just my normal guest hosting style.
But if you hear a fiery bust, that means the satellite has dropped on us and taken out the show.
Let us go to Bruce in Alpine, New York.
Which part of New York is Alpine New York in, Bruce?
New Jersey.
Alpine, New Jersey.
Okay, it's Alpine, New Jersey.
That's great.
Okay, that's a great start.
Okay.
What's on your mind, Bruce?
Well, I was on a drudge report Wednesday morning, and I noticed that they announced that they had put to death this gentleman, or this gentleman, this person in Atlanta, who had shot that 27-year-old police officer about 22 years ago.
And then I remembered that there were protests, thousands and thousands of protests around the world to spare his life, and most of them were because they were opposed to the death penalty.
And about three stories later on the drudge report, there was a story that Texas had executed the same day this diabolical white supremacist who had dragged that poor man behind his pickup truck with a chain for three miles.
And there were no people protesting him being put to death.
And I'm just curious as to your opinion as to if you're really opposed to the death penalty.
Is that for everybody or just certain select people that you particularly think ought to be spared?
Right.
So here we have a situation where two people are put to death on the exact same day.
And we have principled people who supposedly object to the death penalty in principle.
And in principle means that you're not in favor of frying anyone.
You're not in favor of shooting the juice to any.
You don't care who it is.
You are opposed to the state engaging in judicial execution for everybody.
So we've got two people who are put to death on the same day.
One of them gets a ton of publicity, ton of demonstrations, ton of protests.
And the other one, Zippo.
No one cares.
He's dispatched through the gates of hell and he checked the no publicity box.
Nobody cares about him.
Why do you think that is, Bruce?
Obviously, no loss to Planet Earth, but I mean, you know, if you're, like I said, if you're that opposed to the death penalty, where is Amnesty International or all the rest of these people on this case?
I'm perfectly satisfied with the fact that Texas did what it did, but they're a little hypocritical, I think.
Well, yes, because in the first case, this was a man who had killed a police officer.
And in the second case, in the Texas case, James Bird Jr. was dragged behind the truck by this white supremacist, Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white man, killed a black man.
A lot of people made a lot of, got a lot of political mileage out of this.
It turned up in, what was it, an NAACP commercial against George W. Bush in the 2000 campaign, I think I'm right in saying, if my memory is right, it was a big case at the time.
It was a much bigger case.
It was nationally known.
It figured in the presidential race.
And yet suddenly, and yet suddenly, so what's the reason for that, Bruce?
I have no idea.
Well, the reason is obviously they're hypocritical, they're selective in their indignation about what it is that they oppose.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's also, and of course, it also plays into certain aspects of racial politics in the United States.
In this case, you've got a white supremacist killing a black guy.
What was it in the other case, Bruce?
It was a black man who shot an off-duty police officer.
Yeah, and it's funny about, and that's a funny business, isn't it?
It's like the Free Moumia thing in Philadelphia.
In 2000, just about the same time that the NAACP was running all these ads in which James Bird Jr. was somehow, the death of James Bird Jr. was somehow being linked to George W. Bush.
He was the guy in the pickup truck, apparently.
There were also, outside the Republican convention, all these demonstrations by these Free Mumia guys.
Somehow it's fascinating that principled opposition to the death penalty manifests itself more when a black guy kills a white cop than when a white supremacist drags a black guy behind the truck.
but that gets into simply hierarchies of victimhood.
If you remember the Matthew Shepard, do you remember the Matthew Shepard case in Wyoming, Bruce, where some gay guy was...
The gay man that was tied up to the fence was beaten to death.
Yes, I do.
Yeah, exactly.
And there have been a ton of plays and TV movies and pop songs written about this guy.
Now, you imagine if they decided to put those guys to death, those guys who hung Matthew Shepard on a fence.
I don't think there'd be a lot of protests by the principal death penalty people there on that either, because it gets to, again, it gets to the whole liberal view of things, which is that there is a hierarchy of victimhood, and what counts is which membership of identity groups you happen to belong to.
And that's why Lawrence Russell Brewer is never going to be the poster child for the ban abolish the death penalty movement, whereas some guy who offs a white cop on the other side of the country, he is.
And that's why you can have two guys executed by the state on the exact same day, but only one of them is the pin-up child for the anti-death penalty movement.
By the way, Bruce, thank you for your call.
You know how bad things are in Rick Perry's, Texas?
This guy who killed James Bird Jr., he ordered his last meal, and he asked for two chicken-fried steaks, a triple meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a pizza, a pint of ice cream, a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts.
And prison officials declined to give him any of it.
There is no...
Really?
He didn't eat any of it.
Oh, I misunderstood the story.
So they served him.
They served him the last meal.
I get you.
I get you, because this is just more government waste, isn't it?
We could probably reduce...
Mr. Snedley has corrected me.
He ordered all this stuff.
Lawrence Russell Brewer.
He ordered his two chicken-fried steaks, triple meat, bacon, cheeseburger, and all the rest of it, and then declined to eat any of it.
And as a result, a state senator has now got the death row in Texas.
You don't get your last meal.
Every guy sitting on death row in Texas who doesn't get his last meal, he'll just get what the kitchen agrees to serve him.
So if Michelle Obama gets her way and you're just going to get the lentil soup that day, you will be going through the gates of hell on a tasty, nutritious bowl of lentil soup, courtesy of Michelle Obama, because they ain't giving you your last meal requests anymore.
Budget.
Well, no, he didn't.
I think he was just mocking the system.
He could have, obviously, he could have had a spoonful of his peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts, but he was just mocking.
He was just making a mockery of the system.
Anyway, so there's no last meal in Texas.
I don't suppose you get your last cigarette either or whatever it is.
But that's how Lawrence Russell Brewer met his end.
He did not take his last meal.
Let's quickly go to Anne in Lake City, Tennessee, and your live on the Russian Boar Show.
Thank you, Mark.
Great to have you with us.
You mentioned Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts.
Obama knew he could never get her confirmed, so he went around the Congress and appointed her to be in charge, being controlled of the TARP fund, which was almost $900 billion.
The banks have essentially paid that back with some of them interest rates as high as 12%.
I have called both my senators, Alexander and Corker, several of my representatives.
Nobody knows where that money went.
And I think that's Congress's job is to be oversight committees to keep control of where this money is going, but yet nobody seems to know where it went.
And when you were talking about the lost generation, I have five grandchildren in college.
It is very expensive.
And I told them before they would take a loan from this administration that would be in control of their life, I will sell a kidney.
Well, don't sell a kidney just yet, Anne.
But you're right.
This is just shy of a trillion dollars that has supposedly been repaid.
And again, this gets back to the point we were discussing earlier in the show about government accounting.
If it's been repaid, where is it?
What account is it sitting in?
Is there a TARP repayment account somewhere at the Federal Reserve, somewhere at the United States Treasury?
Where is the TARP money that was paid back?
That's a very good point.
Has it gone into the general fund?
If so, is it...
Well, they paid down the deficit.
I know the president of the Bank of America said they were paying 12% interest on that money.
We're talking about real money.
Yeah, yeah.
Paying 12% interest.
When you say, is it going to pay down, it's not obviously going to pay down the debt because that's just gone up, so no debt has been paid down.
Yeah, where is it?
Somewhere in the accounts, there ought to be this money coming in and it to be reducing, it's showing, being accredited to certain U.S. bank accounts.
Where is it?
We'll look into that.
Thank you, Mark.
That is a fascinating point.
Nobody, as far as I know, nobody actually knows where the TARP money is that was paid back.
But we'll look into where it's gone.
Thanks for your call.
This is Mark Stein, Infra Rush Open Line Friday, more to come.
Mark Stein, Infra Rush, Open Line Friday.
Let us go to Richard in Albany, the state capital of the great state of New York, and I believe also the capital of the New York State Bureau of Compliance, which declared that I was in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance.
So you don't work for the New York State Bureau of Compliance, do you, Richard?
I do not.
Nice talking to you, Mark.
I actually work for Corporate World.
I'm an insurance adjuster, so that's beyond that.
I'm very busy up here.
I just got a quick question, a quick point to make.
The quick question is: Perry and Romney both used to be Democrats, and now they're Republicans, and they're these wishy-washing folks kind of like McCain.
Why is the Republican Party entertaining them as a possible contender if they're not even sure what they want to be, if they want to be a Democrat or they want to be a Republican in the long run?
That's my question to you, but my point also that I want to make was something you touched on about the gay rights in the military.
I want to know what they're going to do with the Uniform Court of Military Justice.
Being a former Marine myself, there's a loan that says no sodomy, so I guess we can automatically kick all the gay people out right now, anyway.
Well, I think I don't think so, because the Marines were somewhere, they were somewhere down in Florida.
It's not just that they're, I think what happened, the reason the question came up is I think this week is the first week that gays are allowed to serve openly.
The bill was passed in December, but this is the first week that they're allowed to apply.
And as usual, it's not just with all this cockamamie diversity stuff, it's not just a question of like sitting there at the recruiting office and waiting to see who happens to stroll in and apply to be a Marine.
The United States Marines were at some gay bar somewhere in Florida, actually actively setting up a stand to recruit gays.
And none of the gays, they were just looking for a few gay men, and they didn't get them.
None of the gays met the qualifications to be in the United States Marines.
So they're still looking for the requisite number of gay and lesbian Marines.
So if you're out there and you'd like to be a gay Marine, the U.S. Marines would like to come and meet you.
So that's on the gay thing, Richard.
But the fascinating point, by the way, yeah, Romney and Perry, it is interesting that they have emerged as the two in this particular time, in this particular time, that the two lead candidates in the Republican primary are a guy, Rick Perry, who was a Democrat not so long ago, and Mitt Romney,
a guy who has certainly held Democrat positions during his extremely brief electoral time in electoral office.
He's used phrases that one does not normally associate with members of the Republican Party.
For example, his whole business about he would support a woman's life to choose.
That was when he was running for statewide office in Massachusetts, first for the Senate race in, I think it was 1994.
And then again, when he ran for governor in 2002, he was an openly pro-choice candidate.
He did the usual sort of mealy-mouth thing.
He said he rejected labels like pro-life or pro-choice and said he was committed to preserving a woman's right to choose or whatever it was.
He used that phrase.
He basically took the Democratic line.
This is as recently, by the way, we're not going back to his 1994 Senate race.
We're going back to the 2002 governor's race.
Now, again, with Rick Perry, again, Rick Perry, a former Democrat.
And it just seems odd to me.
I mean, I think this is an interesting point, Richard, that it would seem to me statistically improbable that the two lead candidates for the Republican Party nomination are, in effect, both people who have very recently, and in Rick Perry's case, and in effect, in Romney's case, essentially been running as Democrats.
And it's odd to me, because in this election of all elections, we need a choice, not an echo, a choice, not an echo.
And that is what this country needs right now.
More to come.
Hey, thanks for being with me on this Open Line Friday.
Mark Stein, your undocumented anchor man.
Had a great time, but Rush returns live for another week of excellence in broadcasting Monday on the EIB network.
Have a great weekend!
Watch out for falling satellites and rising debt.
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