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March 12, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
March 12, 2012, Monday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's anchorman is away today, and this is your undocumented anchorman, Mark Stein, just another foreign mercenary in the Republican Party's war on women.
War on women, because we conservatives, you all know this, we conservatives want to round up all the women and put them in a big camp where they won't need contraceptives, because we conservative men are so bad at sex, we couldn't get them pregnant even if we tried.
In this war on women, we're shooting blanks.
The women are like the in they're like the insurgents in Afghanistan and the Sunni Triangle.
They're detonating all these IUDs by the side of the road.
That's what's happening, isn't it?
Was it IUDs, IEDs, EIBs?
I know.
EUDs, that's it, I think.
Explosive uterine devices.
Anyway, we're fighting the good war on women here at the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Rush will be back tomorrow.
He suspended himself for the day to go golfing, but he will be desuspending himself and will be back live behind the EIB microphone tomorrow.
I'm just back from Australia.
I was on a little speaking tour of Australia.
It was a big sellout everywhere we went-from Melbourne to Sydney to Brisbane to Perth to Adelaide.
And I was talking about freedom of speech, because actually, I think almost every issue that confronts us in the Western world today, whether you're talking about something like government spending or government health care or climate change, basically the left doesn't want to talk about it.
The left uses all these phrases like, oh, we need to have the fairness doctrine in radio so we can have a level playing field.
But they'd actually rather there was only one team on the playing field and they could just kick the ball into the other guy's end undisturbed.
And so almost every, I think almost every issue around the Western world today derives, in fact, from the question of the left trying to impose this kind of spurious conventional wisdom on everybody else.
And I used to, one of the things I used to like was the way America had the First Amendment.
Other countries don't have the First Amendment.
You know, they have sort of protections given to speech going back hundreds of years in most of the English-speaking world and slightly more precarious in continental Europe.
But America always had free speech absolutism in the First Amendment.
I used to love the First Amendment.
I think it was two or three years ago when the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal attempted to criminalize my writing.
Senator Larry Craig down here, in the U.S. Senate, Senator Larry Craig, you remember, had that unfortunate run-in with the undercover cop in the adjoining stall in the Minneapolis airport men's room.
He was arrested for sliding his foot under the stall divider and twirling it in a George Michael-like manner, if you recall.
And I was amazed.
At the time I was put on trial up in Vancouver, I was amazed to read in the newspaper a story announcing that Senator Craig's lawyer had filed a brief arguing that the hand and foot gestures he made under the bathroom stall divider were constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment.
What a fantastic country.
In Canada, freedom of speech apparently doesn't extend to my book.
But in America, Senator Craig's men's room semaphore, his little George Michael Foot Twirling Act, is covered by the First Amendment.
I thought, what a great country.
Instead of writing about radical Islam, I would be better off just hitting on imams in bathrooms.
It'd be a lot safer.
But what we have seen in the last few weeks is that, in fact, the First Amendment means nothing if you have a government determined to ride roughshod through it.
That is what the issue is with the decision to force Catholic institutions to violate their consciences and do things that they do not wish to do, but to force them to do it, to use the government, to use the power of the state to force them to do it.
In complete violation of the First Amendment, this shouldn't even be a close call.
Kathleen Sebelius, Commissar Sibelius, the health commissar, says that she's attempting to balance the right to freedom of religion with the alleged right to reproductive choices in health or whatever mumbo jumbo it is.
But there are no such rights.
The Constitution of the United States is very clear on one and has absolutely nothing to say about the other.
So in fact, she's balancing.
Well, you're right, HR, that in fact, she's deciding now that this is something that is good for her, good for the citizenry.
Commissar Sibelius knows what's best for you, and sometimes what's best for you is better than your rights.
And it's not a difficult thing, all this.
Rights, it's been pretty much that way since Magna Carta, which is coming up on its 800th birthday in a couple of years.
Magna Carta, this is what rights are.
Rights are restraints that the subjects place upon the king.
They're not toys.
They're not gifts that the king or Commissar Sibelius bestows on the grateful subjects.
And we've completely distorted that now.
And you see in the current climate, people, by the way, I find it bizarre that people are betting the religious liberty on finding five judges at the Supreme Court on finding five individuals who will be prepared to stick up for the plain meeting of the First Amendment.
I mean, do you really want to bet your liberties on that?
What's going on here is nothing to do with what some judge, the fifth vote, what Anthony, whatever is, what's the one, what's the swing vote, Anthony?
Anthony Kennedy, yeah, he's the big swinger on the court since swinging Sandra Day O'Connor retired.
So he's like the big swinger.
Why would you bet religious liberty on Anthony Kennedy?
All over this country, there are judges willing to torture the plain meaning of the United States Constitution into meaning whatever the hell it is.
We've just seen it actually in this present controversy.
All of this arises.
The present climate of sexual rights in America arises from the Supreme Court in Griswold versus Connecticut, which was about contraceptives, and Roe versus Wade, which was about abortion, in the Supreme Court claiming to have detected a right to privacy.
Privacy.
Okay, I thought I, how do they say it here, HR?
I've been in Australia so long.
Do they say privacy or privacy here?
I've got no privacy.
That's right.
You can't get a right to privacy.
The Supreme Court would never give you that.
You'd have to go to another country to get a right to privacy.
But the Supreme Court claimed to detect a right to privacy in Griswold versus Connecticut and Roe versus Wade.
And what is privacy, as it understood, used to mean that things were private.
And now it means, in fact, that people will be able to, in effect, bill their employers for their sex lives.
And all over this country, thousands and thousands of employers who self-insure will, in effect, be keeping computer records on what that nice Miss Jones on reception, what form of birth control she's on, how much herpes medication she needs.
All these things now, the so-called right to privacy will lead to your employer keeping computerized records of every aspect of your sex life.
It's a very bizarre situation.
But the idea that somehow liberty, liberty, in the most profound sense, in terms of freedom of expression, in the terms of freedom of religion, should now depend, should now depend on Anthony Kennedy's vote on the Supreme Court.
Don't live like this.
In the end, I've gotten less impressed by the First Amendment and the constitutional protections after seeing what a – in democratic societies, all constitutional checks and balances depend on a certain deference and respect and governmental modesty before them.
If you don't have that, you do what President Obama and Commissar Sebelius do.
You ride roughshod over them, even though you know you're doing this.
This isn't a close call.
They know they're basically running the First Amendment through the shredder, and they don't care.
They're quite confident that if it ever comes to court, if it ever comes to court, it's a bit of a toss-up.
You know, it might go 5-4 their way, it might go 5-4 the other way.
But do you realize what they're saying now?
That core basic liberties in the United States depend on one whimsical swinger's vote on a bench of judges?
What kind of, in the end, what kind of liberty is that?
And that's why all this talk about, well, you know, we maybe we'll bring it to the Supreme Court and we'll see what they say.
Don't be ridiculous.
These are hard-fought liberties that people expended their lives on, that people gave their lives for.
The idea that you're just going to file a brief so that Anthony Kennedy can pass judgment on it is completely preposterous.
I've come away, all during my difficulties with the human rights guys up in Canada, I used to think, oh, it'll all be a lot easier in the United States with the First Amendment.
But in the end, in the end, as we've seen these last few weeks, a determined government, basically, we're not even talking here about elected representatives.
We're not even talking about a law that was passed by legislators who put themselves up for election.
We're talking about regulations invented by unknown bureaucrats somewhere in Commissar Sebelius' bureaucracy.
And that's why I was speaking about this stuff down in Australia.
Had great fun down there.
By the way, I'm going to be, if you're in the Buffalo, Niagara area, I'm going to be in Toronto on April 24th doing pretty much my free speech thing.
I mean, it's a convenient, I don't know what it is, it's a convenient seven-hour drive or whatever from Buffalo.
So it's not going to be far from me.
There's a guy, by the way, on our Buffalo station, Tom Bowerly, who claimed to me that he listens to me when I fill in for Rush and he does a great impression of me.
So I don't know whether that's true, but if he's there, if he does and you listen to those guys, I'm going to be speaking on this issue in Toronto, a big old rallying thing for free speech.
Because almost everything, if you notice, the left wants to say, it doesn't matter whether it's with Rush, the Rush, Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem and The other great liberal, what's her name, Robin Morgan, announced that they want the FCC to take Rush off the air.
In other words, they don't want to have a discussion.
The debate is over.
They've won the debate.
They want your side to shut up and go away.
The climate change consensus, guys.
They've won.
They've won the debate.
They don't want to hold a debate anymore.
They've decided what the correct answer to the debate is.
They just want you guys to go away.
And that's what almost every challenge facing developed societies boils down to.
It's like multiculturalism in Europe, where people weren't consulted about mass Muslim immigration that has been transformative in the Netherlands and Germany and all kinds of places.
And the ruling class says, no, you can't talk about it.
Jane Fonda says, no, you can't talk about it.
She doesn't want to hear Rush.
She doesn't have to think about what Rush says.
She'd rather the FCC just banned Rush.
She compared, she compared Rush to Joseph Goebbels, the sophisticated propagandist.
And so she's asking the government to the FCC to ban Rush.
She doesn't even seem to know that Dr. Goebbels, he wasn't a radio host in Germany.
He was the FCC of his day.
He's the guy who banned a zillion radio shows, who burned thousands of books, who banned movies he didn't like and operas he didn't like.
He was the FCC of his day.
But the left is so invested in the purity and inviolability of its own ideas that it says, no, that's it.
We don't need to have a debate because we're right and you're wrong and you guys should shut up and go away and not be heard from.
That's what I was talking about down in Oz.
That's what I'll be talking about in Toronto.
So if you're in Buffalo and you've mastered that excellent impression that Tom Bowery on our Buffalo affiliate does of me, it's a convenient, what is it, nine-hour ride up the Queen Elizabeth Way or whatever.
So come and come and see me there.
I want to say a quick word about the current state of play in the United States presidential election because there were some developments over the weekend.
So we'll get into that and take more of your calls.
1-800-282-2882.
Hey, Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
The primary campaign staggers on.
Over the weekend, Rick Santorum won Kansas and Mitt Romney won the Northern Mariana Islands.
Not the whole island chain itself, just whatever it was, the primary or the caucus they had there.
So I don't know how many delegates that adds up to.
And we got this week, I think we got Alabama that Newt is optimistic about and Mississippi.
Let's go to Sharon in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Sharon has been following the other side of the election campaign, Sharon.
Yes, I have.
Hey, Mark.
Hey, good to have you with us.
Thank you.
Good to be with you.
I would like to know why it is that Obama can campaign in North Carolina.
He has time to pick up the phone and congratulate Ms. Fluck, but he has not stepped foot in one of the tornado-ravage states.
Nor could he pick up the phone and congratulate the mother who lost both her legs protecting her children in one of those tornadoes.
No, it's interesting, that, isn't it?
It's like all the stuff that goes on around the world and the phone call that the President of the United States finds time to make.
Maybe he should call those villages in Kandahar where those bereaved families are over the weekend.
Maybe he should get some long-distance satellite phone or get their cell phone numbers and call them.
That he can do.
That he can do.
He can make his phone call to whatever her name is.
Can we say her name?
I don't know whether we can.
I'll call her Mabel.
Yeah, I'm going to call her.
We'd like to remain a name, Sandra Friezone.
So I'm going to call her Mabel for the rest of the show.
Yeah, he's got time.
The President of the United States has caught time to call Mabel to check how Mabel's holding up.
But he hasn't got time to call these tornado-ravaged areas in the United States.
That presumably he leaves to FEMA.
He can leave to great parts of the bureaucracy.
But you know, why then?
This is the interesting question, Sharon.
There's two theories around at the moment.
One is that the Republicans have been entirely inept over the last few weeks.
They had Obama on the ropes, the economy is lousy, and then they spend the whole time given the impression that they just want to stop Americans having sex lives.
And the whole thing becomes about contraception and all the rest of it.
And the Republicans look like a bunch of uptight squares.
And what do you know, Obama's cruising to victory?
And against that, we have the theory is that the Republicans, yes, the Republicans have been characteristically inept over the last few weeks.
But look at Obama.
The result of that is Obama's got 50% disapproval ratings.
This is what he does when Republicans are sort of staggering from one alleged disaster to another.
So which of those do you kind of run with, Sharon?
Do you think Obama's in pretty good shape for re-election?
Or do you think, in fact, if he can't even, if his numbers are like this after the Republicans have had a really bad four or five weeks, what'll they be like when we get near November?
Well, Mark, I think that everyone underestimates just how many mothers there are out there like me, like my circle of friends, who are proud, beyond proud, that we have raised daughters, the antithesis of Miss Mabel or whatever.
Oh, no, don't mention, don't say that, Sharon.
You know, we Republicans are just, we misogynist men just want to wage war on women.
I can't wait.
I'm a conservative man.
I can't wait to wage war on you and your daughters, Sharon, because that's what conservative men do.
We hate women.
We're so misogynist, we can't even spell misogynist.
M-I-S-S-E-D-Who knows?
But that's the kind of guys we are, Sharon.
Conservative men just want to wage war on women.
Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem have just said, have just told us so.
Oh, well, and we put so much stock in what Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem say.
Jane Fonda is such a feminist.
Why does she spend so much time trying to look 20 years younger than she is?
Oh, saucer of milk for Sharon.
Meow.
Thank you.
Thank you for calling.
Now, Dow.
She was a fine-looking woman back in her hadoying Jane days.
Hannoying Jane, the face that launched the thousand boat people.
Boy, was she, boy, was she great then.
Thanks for your call, Sharon.
Mark steited for Rush.
Lots more straight ahead.
Yes, Rush has suspended himself for the day, but he will return tomorrow.
If you go to rushlimbore.com, you need not be discombobulated by any sinister foreign guest hosts.
You can be a Rush 24-7 subscriber.
And RushLimbore.com, it's got it all.
It's got it in print transcripts.
It's got audio.
It's got video from the TV show.
It's got all kinds of stuff at rushlimbore.com.
You know, I mentioned these developments, exciting developments over the weekend.
Mitt Romney won the Northern Mariana Islands caucus or primary or whatever it was.
And I was thinking back to the old days.
And my favorite, the way they used to do it before we got into these primary season business, and in 1848.
Anyone remember the 1848 election?
In those days, they didn't do the sort of non-stop campaign 1848 on Fox News and CNN and all that.
It was all much more casual.
The Whig party nominated Zachary Taylor as their presidential candidate without telling him, basically.
They did this in, I think it was June.
And then they sent him a letter saying that they'd notified him, a letter telling him, you know, notifying him that he'd won the nomination, but they forgot to put a stamp on it.
So when it reached his home, it had 10 cents postage due.
And he sent, so there was the letter.
He had to pay 10 cents to get the letter.
So he told the postmaster, nuts to that.
You can take it away.
I'm not paying 10 cents to get that letter.
So he didn't actually find out that he was the presidential nominee of the Whig party until whatever it was, six or seven weeks later, when the letter had got all the way back to Washington on the stagecoach.
And then they'd put the 10 cent stamp on it and send it all the way back.
And I can't help thinking that actually things would be a lot better if we'd stuck to that way.
You know, you just the party decides who's going to be the nominee.
They mail him the letter.
He sends the letter away.
Seven weeks later, it comes back with the stamp and he discovers, oh, gosh, I'm the presidential nominee.
I better campaign.
Oh, it's only a couple of weeks now to the election.
Of course, Zachary Taylor wound up winning that election.
He'd been a war hero in the Mexican war.
And so he used to get all this mail from people who admired him as a war hero and also mail, you know, asking him for various stuff because he was a big-time war hero.
So he used to get tons of postage due mail because stamps were expensive in that day.
So he got used to basically rejecting all the mail, 90% of the mail that showed up to his house.
He told the postmaster, take it away again.
He didn't want to know.
So when the Whig party nominated him for the presidency of the United States and forgot to put the stamp on it, he sent that away.
So he didn't find out until six or seven weeks later.
I'm not sure we wouldn't be better off going back to that system.
Let's go to Bill in Mexia, Texas.
Bill, you are live on the Rushling Bush.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, Mark, it's just great to hear you.
Hey, good to hear you too, Bill.
That's right.
What's on your mind today, Bill?
Well, I try to get into a little bit of a political mind here down here in central Texas.
Beautiful 68-degree sunshiny type day.
Oh, God.
I have great difficulty getting people to debate with me.
The left just seems to want to leave all their news articles as to be the way things are.
And if anybody would like to engage in a civilized conversation about that, they don't engage.
They don't talk about it.
No, I think that's the purpose of left-wing orthodoxy.
The whole idea of, you know, all climate change, I think we should, I think we need to save the planet.
The whole point about all that is like they're not to the left.
That's not politics.
That's the sort of default position.
It's like the air that we breathe.
And so the great advantage of those opinions as far as the left is concerned is that once you've decided that's the view you hold, you don't need to waste time debating it.
It's just it's not an opinion.
It's not a point of view.
It's something more than that.
It's basically something that is beyond questioning.
And that's why when the state determines that Catholic institutions have to provide contraceptives or the state decides that it needs to regulate you out of your car and onto the bus system, that's not something it wants to have a genuine, honest debate about.
It would rather just actually clear the other side off the field.
It would rather demonize them as racists, as sexists, Islamophobes, homophobes.
If necessary, they'll do what they did to Juan Williams when he accidentally wandered off the reservation and made and expressed some misgivings about people saying Allahu Akbar on aeroplanes.
And the woman who fired him from NPR said that the poor guy was mentally ill.
That's exactly what they do in the Soviet Union.
They say, oh, don't worry about it.
We'll just put you in the straight jacket, take you off to re-education camp, and you'll soon be feeling fine.
And that's the way, that's their whole approach to it.
And you're probably finding difficulty, Bill, when you're like with your neighbors who take that position, is they don't want their bubble, they don't want anybody else inside their little fluffy princess fairy pants liberal cocoon with them.
Well, is it also possible that they're unable to articulate their argument?
Well, I think there might be something of that.
There's a very funny account.
There's a fella called Viscount Moncton, who's a British fellow who's not on board with the whole climate change thing.
He's a climate skeptic.
And he was speaking at Schenectady in New York, I think, just a couple of days ago.
And there was a hilarious account of him encountering the college students who are all like very pretty little airheads.
They're all running up six figures of debt to fill their heads with pretty little nonsense.
And this lovely little blonde girl, blonde woman, I should say, I don't want to be any more beastly in the war on women than I have been.
This blonde woman, who's head of the College Environmental Faction, she had all these recycled boxes that she duct taped together to save the planet.
And she was just yelling at him, there's a consensus, there's a consensus.
Whatever he said, she'd just yell, there's a consensus.
She'd shriek it like this.
And this guy, Lord Monckton, who's like some PG Woodhouse toff from out of the House of Lords, he goes, That, madam, is intellectual baby talk.
Haven't you heard of Aristotle's codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medievalists would later describe as the argumentum ad populum or the headcount fallacy?
Of course, she just looked baffled at him and went back to shrieking, there's a consensus, there's a consensus, there's a consensus.
And that's what it means in left-wing arguing.
You get your slogan, you write the slogan on the cardboard, and you shriek it over and over and over and over.
And that's all they want to do.
And that's why, you know, I really don't care.
And if you, by the way, if you're a liberal and you disagree with this, give me a call, 1-800-282-2882.
Because I love talking to liberals on this show.
I love talking to liberals who actually want to debate the facts, who actually don't want to just shriek the silly little slogans.
All those little Occupy Wall Street slogans that seemed so great when they were raking in all those six-figure donations.
And now they're broke and busted and have only three weeks before they're completely bankrupt unless Obama gives them the old General Motors type federal bailout.
All those people with all those cute little slogans that seem so, oh, they're so idealistic.
Look, look, look, they're so idealistic.
They've got slogans.
That's a sign of their idealism.
They've got a slogan.
They've got like a three-word slogan, like this little blonde cutie, the little blonde co-edit Schenectady, who's the president of the Environmental Club, who's shrieking, there's a consensus, there's a consensus, there's a consensus.
Okay, are there any other words to the song?
Has the song got any additional choruses, any new verses?
Could we get into something else?
Look, if you're a liberal and you disagree with me on this, call me.
Call me 1-800-282-2882.
I'm interested in talking to liberals.
I'm not interested in lefties who just want to do as Jane Fonda does and get the FCC to take you off the air or just want to do as the climate change types like Al Gore say, oh, I don't debate denialists and wants to compare them to Nazi Holocaust deniers and all the rest of it.
If you want to hold the debate, we can hold the debate, but too much left-wing thought just boils down to saying we don't need a debate because we're right and you guys shouldn't even be allowed into the debating room.
Mark Stein Infarush, 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein Inferush.
By the way, it's Mahea.
I think it's Mahea, Texas.
Bazillion and One aggrieved Texans have just corrected me.
Look, I'm in a room full of Americans.
I thought it would be too much to ask HR and the gang to spell these exotic American names phonetically.
HR, why did nobody tell me it's Mahea?
It's Mahea in Texas.
It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not, that's not a good, that's not a good excuse.
Texas, they pronounce the X in Texas, do they?
It's not Teheas or anything, is it?
You've got me rattled now.
I'm just like a foreigner bluffing my way through here.
Okay.
Well, let's go to Laurie.
Laurie is in PA, PA.
That's Pennsylvania, right?
I'm just checking now.
I'm nervous.
And she's in the city of Petesisboro.
Petesasboro.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
It looks like Pittsburgh, but I'm not going to be caught out again.
Laurie, great to have you with us on the show.
Thank you.
I wanted to just say, as someone who lives in Pennsylvania, I am thrilled that I feel like it's the final four and I finally get to make my vote count.
I'm a later primary state in the whole presidential primary.
So in past years, the candidates decided before it ever got to my state.
I didn't get to make a decision, and I'm really excited it's going this long because it gives everybody who is registered a chance to say, this is the candidate I want.
It's not people up in Iowa or New Hampshire or the Super Tuesday state saying, this is who our candidate's going to be.
I think it's wonderful.
And everybody gets a chance to vote for the president for who they want to be the Republican nominee.
I'm thrilled about it.
I kind of can see your point about it because I know as someone who lives in New Hampshire that the rest of the country hates us and says, you know, when it's like a typical primary season and there's Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, and then boom, it's over, people resent it because they feel, you know, people live in states that have got a lot more people in them and a lot more demographically varied and all the rest of it.
And they don't like the Iowa and New Hampshire wrapping up the whole thing.
But you're still in the same situation, Laurie.
I mean, whatever there were, there were like whatever it was, eight or nine candidates in Iowa, and now, in fact, may have even been more than that.
Now that we're down to four, we didn't stick it out.
They didn't stick it out.
If they saw that that was how it was going to be and that they said, I'm going to get out based on that, then they didn't have confidence that the rest of the country might see something they liked in those candidates.
So, you know, it was their decision to pull out.
They didn't stay for the long haul.
And maybe, you know, it all shuffles up.
It's kind of like the final four with the NCCA.
I'm sorry.
NCAA, where you have a bracket of candidates and they start, you know, you have layoffs and you have teams playing against each other.
You have the candidates playing against each other in different states.
And they decided to get out.
They didn't stay for the long haul.
And I'd rather have the candidate who stayed for the long haul and said, I'm going to try to do this and try to win this, because to me, that's a candidate that is going to stay for the long haul and basically wants to be president and wants to take this, you know, wants to say I'm in it for the long haul.
I'm not getting out.
It doesn't look good.
I'm going to get out.
That's a candid I prefer to have as president because it shows.
This is someone who can handle the hard stuff, can handle when it's good and bad.
I think it says a lot for the candidates that are still there.
Yeah, well, that's good.
If you feel that way, the final four in like the brackets, good for you.
And you're right.
This year, your vote counts.
Hey, speaking of Pennsylvania, Laurie, Harrisburg is about to skip $5.3 million of its debt payment.
It has $326 million of debt.
This is a city of 50,000 people due to the expensive repairs of its trash incinerator.
So the state of Pennsylvania, or at any rate, its capital city, is in a pretty powerless position at the moment, Laurie.
We worry about the national government having $16 trillion of debt.
But when you look at the debts held by your capital city there in Pennsylvania and other bankrupt cities, the smallest city in the smallest state, Central Falls, Rhode Island, is also bankrupt, I learned from national review.
You can't say the problem is all at the national level.
You've got state and municipal problems in Pennsylvania too, haven't you?
Absolutely.
And I think one of the things I'm just going to throw out here for that is that Pennsylvania are, unfortunately, is a very, very strong union state.
We're kind of like Wisconsin in a lot of ways with our unions, and they have chokeholds on these municipalities with pensions and health care and such as that.
And I think that becomes a huge factor because they're going to be fault on that debt.
But I wonder what their debt is because of the cost of the cost of our government here in Pennsylvania with all the pensions and all the people taking early.
No, no, no, no, no.
You're right.
Normally we hear that with these cities, it's their pensions obligations.
This is a new one on me, that in fact the trash incinerator in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is about to swallow the entire city.
Have you used the trash facilities in Harrisburg, Laurie?
No, I have once, actually twice.
Yes, I have.
Years ago, though.
Years ago.
You've used them twice.
Okay.
Well, I hope you got your $326 million worth.
Great to talk with you, Laurie.
This, by the way, is not a small point.
You know, we talk about the $16 trillion debt and the debt ceiling thing that's going to come up just before we've hit the debt ceiling early, funnily enough.
And we're going to have another round of debt ceiling negotiations all during the election campaign.
But actually, that is only the tip of the iceberg.
When you look at the number of municipalities that are also kaput, the level of indebtedness of the entire United States is breathtaking.
And this is why sometimes the Greek comparisons and all the rest of it don't actually do the situation justice, because most other nations, France, for example, is an entirely centrally governed society.
So most other nations don't distribute their debt between the national government, between regional governments, between municipal governments to the degree the United States does.
When you add up the total government debt of the United States plus the liabilities, the unfunded liabilities in Medicare, you get not $16 trillion, but a figure that's actually closer to 10 times that, about $150 trillion.
This is not small potatoes.
Markstein in for us, more straight ahead.
Amazing results from the Swiss referendum yesterday.
The Swiss, there was a ballot measure to raise the minimum paid vacation each year to six weeks, like many other European nations, to six weeks paid vacation a year in order to alleviate stress, workplace stress.
The Swiss people, to their credit, rejected it.
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