Rush Limbaugh Program - December 26, 2012, Wednesday, Hour #2

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Dec. 26, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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December 26, 2012, Wednesday, Hour #2

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	Yes, America's Anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
	No supporting paperwork whatsoever.
	Mark Belling will be here tomorrow, take you through the end of the week, and Rush returns next week to start a brand new year of excellence in broadcasting.
	We're here at Ice Station EIB in far northern New Hampshire.
	Do drop by if you're fleeing the country.
	We're just about five minutes, 20 minutes south of the border.
	And we always love to see you if you're on the one-way express ticket out of here.
	Do make sure you stop in and check us.
	We're the last, I believe there's a big sign on the highway now saying last right-wing talk show host before the border.
	So do, you can't miss us.
	Do come by and say hello.
	We've been talking about this bizarre turn of events in which David Gregory was waving a weapon that is illegal in the District of Columbia on his television show, Meet the Press.
	He was explicitly warned beforehand that it would be illegal, even for him, to demonstrate that this is the kind of big, scary weapon that is out there in America.
	Even for him to show it on TV is illegal, the District of Columbia police warned him.
	They're now investigating the event, so David Gregory may be the Second Amendment martyr, the bitter, clinging gun nut who, even when the police had told him you can't do that, decided in the contrarian spirit to go ahead and do it anyway.
	I was talking, we were, Frank in Tennessee was talking to me, and he was saying people are playing fast and loose with the terms that they use about the weapons that were actually used in Connecticut.
	And he's right.
	It's an extraordinary level of ignorance.
	I pointed out to him that people just use all these terms, semi-automatic, assault weapon, assault rifle, automatic.
	They just use them interchangeably.
	As long as it's basically all it means, it doesn't mean they're referring to anything specific about the weapon.
	It just translates to big, scary gun.
	That's all they're concerned about.
	And I regret to say that in mocking liberal journalists, I made a mistake myself.
	I think I said at one point, because I got some emails complaining about this, that I'd referred to David Gregory brandishing a high magazine clip or a high clip magazine.
	A magazine clip high, by the way.
	That's what struggling writers have when the first time they see their name in print.
	So it gets technically very difficult, but the level of conversation on this is not impressive.
	And it's not, and the idea that somehow this is some, you know, guys decide to turn themselves into one man Robocop, and this is state-of-the-art technology that the Founding Fathers would not have approved of.
	Both the semi-automatic and the automatic go back to their 19th century technology.
	The semi-automatic was invented by some guy in Germany in whatever it was, 1880, I believe.
	So in other words, half a century after the guy who wrote the Second Amendment died, much nearer to his age than ours.
	The technology is 19th century.
	The sensibility in which people now go and gun down schoolhouses, that's the 21st century contribution to it.
	The technology is 19th century.
	Not unrelated to this, by the way, there is breaking news, a story in the New York Post that the Benghazi penalties are totally bogus.
	Now, you recall that Hillary Clinton, she fell down, and so she's unable to testify.
	I forget what the problem is.
	She fell down and she got a concussion and she's unable to apologize.
	Yeah, she's got Benghazi flu.
	That's right, Mr. Surley.
	Benghazi flu.
	So she won't be able to testify this week and she can't testify next week because she's washing her hair.
	So in the absence of that, the official report named four high-ranking officials who are not Hillary Clinton.
	They were assistant deputy, assistant deputy, assistant deputy secretaries of state who were removed, supposedly removed from their posts.
	Now, I'm always interested in this because nobody resigns in the United States.
	No matter how badly you screw up, nobody resigns.
	And we now learn that the so-called sacrificial lambs, according to a story in the New York Post, the four sacrificial lambs, were in fact not removed from their posts.
	The highest-ranking official, Assistant Secretary of State Eric Boswell, has not resigned as officials were reported last week.
	He's just switching desks.
	That's all that's happening.
	The four people who are being held to account for the Benghazi debacle, an international humiliation for the United States, have not resigned.
	They're just being shuffled sideways.
	So the Assistant Deputy Secretary of State will be moved sideways to become Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.
	Okay?
	And in severe circumstances, the Assistant Deputy Secretary of State will be downgraded to Assistant Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.
	So you'll have to get a much longer business card.
	But that's the only thing that is going on.
	No real person is resigning.
	Their pensions aren't affected.
	Their salaries aren't affected.
	It's just a bit of desk shuffling.
	They're taking the nameplate off one desk and moving it to another desk on the other side of the room.
	And that's the way this is not unrelated to the discussion on the Second Amendment.
	As I said, the Second Amendment is not about firearms, just firearms.
	It's about a view of state power.
	And it's a view of the state, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.
	A militia isn't an army.
	A militia is our citizen volunteers exercising their responsibilities as citizens.
	And the founding fathers and James Madison, who wrote the Second Amendment, understood that the citizen does not mortgage his security to the state.
	Now, Madison believed in that as a philosophical matter, but what you see in Benghazi, like on the previous 9-11, what you saw in 9-11 too on Benghazi, is that the state is incompetent.
	America spends 44% of the planet's military budget, and it can't rescue a bunch of guys in a rinky-dink town being attacked by a mob, admittedly a well-armed mob, but not a well-armed mob compared to the government of the United States, when they have special forces and planes an hour away in southern Italy.
	Now, do you know how many countries, normally, if your guys get into trouble on the other side of the planet, you don't have people an hour away.
	Most countries, even wealthy Western nations, don't have that, but the United States does.
	And yet, nobody was there for them.
	And in the end, those two guys, two brave men, died on a roof, saving who knows how many lives, calling in, calling in repeatedly to Washington, calling in help that never came.
	That's the same story on 9-11, by the way.
	9-11, the airport, the airline cabin was the most secure facility in American life on September the 11th, 2001.
	And what did that security get you?
	All that mattered was that when something terribly bad and unexpected happened, everyone went like robots through the 1970s skyjacking procedures, thinking that some crazy guys were going to fly them to Cuba or whatever.
	And all the big fancy pants, money-no-object government acronyms, all your FAA, FBI, CIA, INS, all of them failed.
	Failed.
	Failed.
	They weren't there.
	You look at the joke visas that those 9-11 terrorists filled in.
	Address in the United States of America.
	Hotel America.
	Right?
	That's all they gave for address.
	An octogenarian snowbird from Toronto who's been going to Florida every winter for 50 years.
	Can't get away with filling in that kind of rubbish.
	But the 9-11 hijackers did.
	Nobody resigned.
	Can you name one head of an agency who resigned after 9-11?
	Can you name the FBI guy, the CIA guy, the FAA guy, the INS guy?
	None of them.
	None of them.
	Nobody resigned after 9-11.
	They weren't there.
	The only good news on that day was those fellas on Flight 93, the men we have now forgotten, Todd Beamer, who said, let's roll, who understood, who got the message, that in the most government-secure facility in American life on that day, the airline cabin, in the end, when you're up there in the sky, the government isn't up there with you, and you have to act as freeborn men.
	You have to act as freeborn men and women, as citizens, and act in your own defense.
	And that is what connects Todd Beamer with Vicki Soto, the school teacher in Connecticut, with Professor Librescu at the Virginia Tech shooting.
	The only good news of the day comes from self-reliant citizens acting in their own defense and in the defense of the most vulnerable among them and sacrifice and ultimately being prepared to sacrifice their lives.
	And bureaucrats, a big, distant government bureaucracy.
	You think about that, a government bureaucracy that will make all the rules about what's going to happen for schoolhouse security.
	That's going to be as effective as the big government bureaucracy that failed on 9-11 and the big government bureaucracy that couldn't get anybody, that has special forces and planes an hour away when trouble happens in Benghazi and can't get anyone to them.
	In the end, the lessons of Benghazi, of 9-11, of Newtown, Connecticut, and of Virginia Tech are the lessons of the Second Amendment, that it's the self-reliant citizen who is called upon to act in those situations.
	Mark Stein in Farush, we'll take more of your calls in just a moment.
	Boxing Day on the EIB network, Mark Stein in Farush.
	Great to be with you.
	Fitchburg State University.
	Andrew Dupre, I think that's how you pronounce it, Dupre, Depress.
	He looks pretty depressed, but that's just the look the young people favor these days.
	He's in jail and bail has been set on $50,000, $50,000 because he came to Fitchburg State University, came to school wearing a military-style ammunition belt, a so-called military-style ammunition belt.
	Friends say the belt was a fashion statement, and Dupre's mother told WBZ that her son purchased the belt for $20 off a punk website and had been wearing it to class every day for two years.
	He didn't have any weapons capable.
	He's exactly like David Gregory.
	He didn't have any weapons on him capable of firing those bullets.
	He just had his, ooh, scary word, scary word alert, scary word alert, a quote, military-style ammunition belt, unquote.
	And for that reason, he is now up on an ammo charge, alleged possession of, what is it, facing charges of trespassing and carrying ammunition without a firearms license.
	And he's being held on $50,000 cash bail.
	This is some schlub, some no-account loser who buys a ammo belt for $20 off a punk website, wears it to class every day for two years, and now suddenly at Fitchburg State University, he's been arrested.
	He's looking at, he's in jail, got to find $50,000 bail, hasn't got $50,000 bail.
	The only difference between him and David Gregory is that David Gregory belongs to the ruling class, and this loser belongs to the ruled class.
	So David Gregory committed exactly the same crime as this schlub at Fitchburg State University of Massachusetts.
	Let us go to Bart in Ferndale, Washington.
	Bart, you are live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Great to have you with us.
	Good morning, sir.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	You got into a topic that's really close to my heart, and I'd like to get back to that.
	But I started the call with the intention of speaking to you about how the show opened.
	Basically, the show opened telling the listeners that basically America's in the garbage can.
	And that is just so far from the truth, and no facts support that truth.
	I mean, the facts are the unemployment rate is coming down.
	Real estate market is going up.
	Housing sales are going up.
	Housing starts are going up.
	Retail sales set a record.
	The stock market is more than doubled.
	So I'm just wondering, where does all this rhetoric about America basically being on its ear come from?
	Where does it stem from?
	Well, do you deny this, that the official federal debt of the United States is $16 trillion?
	Oh, I don't deny that at all.
	Well, tell me that.
	Then answer me another question.
	Name another country in the history of the planet that has owed $16 trillion.
	Name another country in the history of the planet that's been as wealthy as America.
	And that's another thing.
	Well, actually, Treasury bonds are still the best-selling deal on the planet.
	Oh, yeah.
	Which country is happy to invest in America?
	Well, okay, okay.
	Which country?
	Hey, Bart.
	Bart, Bart, here.
	Here's a question for you.
	Your federal treasury bonds.
	Which is the, who is the biggest purchaser of United States Treasury bonds on the planet?
	I believe it was probably China.
	No, it's not.
	70%, the Chinese have all the U.S. Treasury debt they need.
	70% of United States Treasury bonds are bought by the Federal Reserve because nobody out there wants them.
	So that's the left hand of the United States buying the debt of the right hand of the United States.
	You should try that in Ferndale, Washington.
	See where it gets you.
	Then explain to me why so many things have improved, like the housing market and the unemployment rate and real estate starts, real estate sales.
	I mean, this is a rebound from the discussion.
	Right.
	We've got 47.7 million Americans on food stamps.
	That's the population of the United.
	Remember when Barack Obama was mocking Rutherford B. Hayes?
	That's the entire population of President Hayes' America.
	If Rutherford B. Hayes came back now, he wouldn't be impressed by the iPod or any of that.
	He'd be impressed that the entire population of the United States from his day is now on food stamps.
	What state are you in, by the way?
	You're in Washington state.
	Okay, did you know the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming?
	What do you say to that?
	$50 million on food stamps?
	I'm not going to deny that America needs to deal with welfare reform.
	I agree with that.
	But I'm also not going to accept the fact that you're saying that America is basically in the trash can because it's not.
	I mean, the biggest welfare reform we need to address is corporate welfare, these big oil subsidies, things like that, these companies that are reporting record profits.
	Why don't these people love Barack Obama?
	They've never been richer.
	Yeah, well, why don't you tell that?
	Why don't you tell it before you go on about scary oil?
	What about big oil, big oil, and all those guys, the bad guys?
	What about big Google?
	Big Google.
	The Google guy, as Rush was talking about the other day, keeps all his profits in the Bahamas via an Irish subsidiary.
	This is neat.
	You could do this, Bart.
	It'd be great.
	And then you don't pay any tax.
	And you can do this.
	And Obama offered the Google guy the job of Treasury Secretary.
	So that way we'll all be able to keep our money in the Bahamas and we'll be rolling in it.
	Let me tell you something.
	Let me ask you something else, Bart.
	How big's your family?
	There's you, how many family members you've got?
	My wife, myself, and five kids.
	Well, that's great.
	So you've got a big family.
	You've got seven people.
	Do you know what your share of the total national debt of the United States is?
	I would imagine you're going to say around three-quarters of a million times five.
	No, no, what you've got is $1.4 million.
	That's your family's share of the debt.
	That's what your family, that's what your five kids between them have been saddled with a million dollars of debt.
	Talk.
	What do you mean it's just talk?
	It's just talk.
	Yeah, that's like your MasterCard statement at the end of the month is just talk.
	No, it's not just talk.
	I'm saying that so many things are improved in America.
	You're improving yourself right into the abyss.
	There's no precedent.
	Nobody has ever been this broke ever.
	And you're in denial.
	If you look around you, if you look around you, Bart, and you think that this is what it means, that the sun has already come out tomorrow, and this is the happy ending, you are in serious denial, Bart.
	I've given you the numbers, and if you don't want to address those numbers, that's fine.
	But when you've got the, when you say, oh, housing starts, 90%.
	The United States government has a hand now in 90%.
	There's a story this morning.
	In 90% of the mortgages in this country, it was 50%.
	They're now trying to get debt relief back for the beyond the Fanny and Freddie thing.
	We'll talk about that in just a moment.
	Lots more still to come.
	The Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Mark Stein on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
	Yes, Rush returns next week to start another year of excellence in broadcasting.
	But don't forget, if you go to rushlimbaugh.com and you're a Rush 24-7 guy, you can get transcripts, you can get audio, you can get video from the TV days.
	You need not be discombobulated by sinister foreign guest hosts whatsoever.
	It's as if Rush has never gone away.
	I love this line in the Washington Post from the first paragraph of a story by Lisa Rhine.
	Federal workers feel unease over potential layoffs, furloughs unleashed by fiscal cliff.
	By the way, this is why newspapers are dying.
	It's this, it's this, this, uh, it's, it's this kind of effete lingo that uh the J school guys from Columbia teach you to to use.
	Federal workers feel unease over potential layoffs.
	Federal employees have been skeptical.
	I mean, if you're gonna, if you're potentially going to be laid off, you're not gonna feel uneasy about that.
	That's not what unease means.
	Federal employees have been skeptical for months that the biggest cuts to government spending in history could really happen.
	But with the fiscal cliff a week away, workers are now growing increasingly alarmed.
	This is the bit I like.
	This is the bit I like.
	Workers are now growing increasingly alarmed that their jobs and their missions could be on the line, their missions.
	So being a government bureaucrat now is like a mission.
	Your mission, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ramp up the number of disabled workers in America to a new record in December, 8,827,795.
	That's an all-time record, one of many records.
	I mentioned to Bart, Bart in Ferndale, Washington, who loves that.
	He thinks this is great.
	We've got record numbers of disabled.
	We've got record numbers on food stamps.
	Who's better than us?
	USA, USA.
	We have got like 50 million people on food stamps.
	Do you realize there are only 20 million Australians?
	So they couldn't have 50 million people on food stamps.
	That's how lousy they are.
	But the United States, it's got the population of what?
	It's got the entire population.
	You take every Australian and every Canada, every Canadian, every Australian, every Canadian, and you put them on food stamps.
	That's Obama's America.
	And I mentioned to him this.
	I'd seen this story this morning that the government now has a hand in nine out of ten mortgages.
	This is from Reuters.
	US May Expand Mortgage Refinance Program.
	The U.S. government, this is from the Wall Street Journal, I believe.
	The United States government is considering expanding its mortgage refinancing program to include borrowers whose mortgages are not backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
	As you know, since the housing market fell off the cliff in 2008, people who got their mortgages through Fannie and Freddie, they've been refinanced on very favorable terms by the government.
	But they're now planning on that.
	So they've taken care of the Fannie and Freddie guys.
	But you might be one of these old-fashioned people who didn't go to Fannie and Freddie.
	You might have gone to the First National Bank at Dead Moose Junction for your mortgage, and now you find your house is underwater and it's not worth as because in the good times, you went and you bought your house, you paid, you got a half a million dollar mortgage and it's now worth $17,000.
	You're rusting double white.
	But it looked pretty good back in the day.
	You took out a half million dollar mortgage on it.
	It looks well.
	But now it's just 17 grand.
	And so the refinancing program is now going to be expanded to include, quote, underwater borrowers.
	Remember, in Nevada, at one point, two-thirds of homeowners, so-called, heavy on the quote marks there.
	Yeah.
	Exactly.
	You're absolutely right, Mr. Snurley.
	This is a government monopoly on home ownership.
	This is government housing now, in effect.
	Combined with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy loans and repackage them as securities for investors, Washington's footprint, and this is the sentence that astonished me.
	Washington's footprint in the market has grown to account for nearly nine out of every 10 mortgages.
	So in other words, the government has a hand in nine out of ten mortgages.
	Now, that's basically the same level as the Soviet Union.
	The Soviet Union did not have private home ownership.
	They didn't have mortgages, but basically the Soviet Union said, you can live here and you can live there and we're going to put you down.
	You've got a family of seven living in a one-room apartment and we're going to put you down and see if we can get you a two-room apartment or whatever.
	But basically, we are now in a covert bureaucratized form, have dramatically weakened property rights in this country.
	You cannot even buy, if you walk into a realtor's and you've got $200,000 in cash and you want to buy a house, and you say, I don't want a mortgage.
	I don't want to need to go to Fanny or Freddie or the First National Bank of this or whatever.
	Here's the 200 grand.
	Here's the money.
	Give me the house.
	I want to move into it.
	They still have to file a statement with HUD, HUD, what's it, Housing and Urban Development?
	One of those cabinet agencies that shouldn't exist.
	And you don't have to be anywhere near any urban development.
	You can be buying a cabin in the woods.
	You can be buying a plot of land for nothing.
	And by law, even if you buy it, you don't want a mortgage.
	You don't want financing.
	You don't want anything.
	You just want to buy it, move into it, live there.
	You can't do that now without having to file a statement with HUD and all the rest of it.
	So we have, this is one reason, by the way, just to go back to what Bart was talking about, why the United States is in big trouble.
	The Canadian house market didn't nosedive in 2008 because they don't have subprime mortgages.
	There's no Canadian Fanny or Freddie.
	There is no such thing.
	You go across the board and say, well, I'd like to buy a house.
	I'd like to buy a $600,000 home and I don't have any means of support, but I thought there'd be like a Fanny or Freddie kind of thing up here in Winnipeg.
	And maybe you could make it work for me.
	I get a couple of hundred dollars in welfare check every month, but I thought I'd like to live in a three-quarter million dollar home.
	You can't do that in Winnipeg.
	You can't do that in Moose Jaw.
	You can't do that in Swift Current, Saskatchewan.
	And that's why the Canadian housing market is not in the same situation as the American.
	This sentence, Washington's footprint in the market has grown to account for nearly nine out of every 10 mortgages.
	Well, is this some bizarro America?
	The federal government is in nine out of every...
	What's up with that?
	And Bart, that's Bart's recipe for the big happy ending, for the way the world, everything is, as he said, housing starts are up, housing prices are up, housing this, housing that is up.
	What we are actually seeing is a weakening of property rights through the bureaucratic governmentalization of property ownership.
	It's the same thing that happened when the government took over all student loans.
	It's the same thing that when the government has taken over healthcare.
	And that's why in the end, housing, property, safest houses, oh, buy invest in property.
	You can't go wrong.
	Yes, you can when the government so distorts the market.
	Get an education.
	You can't go wrong.
	Get an education.
	You always have something to fall back on.
	You won't have anything to fall back on if you take out a six-figure loan because the government has so jiggered the price of an education that it bears no resemblance to reality now.
	So you take out a six-figure loan to do four years of navel-gazing studies at Complacency University, and you're never going to be able to pay that off.
	And then with the health care, oh, take care of your healthy congregation.
	You can take care of your health, but if you don't make arrangements for your bladder and for your liver that meet the approval of the state commissar of health, then you will be fine.
	You basically, all the three things that provide real security for people as they go through life have been weakened by this government.
	Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
	We've been, and that's again, that's a Second Amendment issue.
	We were talking about the Second Amendment.
	I said it's not just about firearms.
	It's about a view of the state.
	And Madison's view of the state is that you cannot, even if it was a good idea even if you thought it was a good idea, you cannot mortgage your security to the state.
	The state will not be there for you, and it doesn't matter.
	That's what ties, as we've been talking about, that's what ties Newtown, Connecticut to Virginia Tech, to what happened even in Benghazi.
	Even if you're government employees, when you're out there at the far end of the chain, in Benghazi and something bad happens, and you've got all the high-tech devices, and they've got unmanned drones, and they can see what's happening to you in real time, they still can't do anything for you.
	And same thing at Newtown, Connecticut.
	20 minutes.
	I don't even understand that.
	And I understand that the left was rightly berated for being opportunistic about this appalling act of mass slaughter in the days afterwards when they wanted to have the big gun control issue.
	But at some point, if I lived in that town, I would want to know why it took 20 minutes to get anybody to get police and first responders to the school.
	That seems a long in we're not talking about remote, isolated communities here.
	We're talking about suburban Connecticut.
	But it teaches the same lesson, and it teaches the most important lesson, which is that individual, self-reliant citizens, in the end, have to be there.
	You have to take charge of your destiny, as the teacher did in Connecticut, as the professor did in Virginia Tech, as those two brave guys on the rooftop in Benghazi did, and as the passengers on Flight 93 did.
	What yokes them together is they acted as Americans in defense not only of themselves, but of the most vulnerable people around them.
	And that's what matters.
	That's the American spirit, and that's the America that isn't going into the dumpster, to return to the point Brad was making.
	Mark Stein and Farush, more straight ahead.
	Mark Stein for Rush, let's go to Mike in Bay City, Michigan.
	Mike, thanks for waiting.
	Great to have you with us on the Rush Limbusha.
	Well, Merry Christmas to you, Mark.
	I got changed subject a little bit.
	Baynard is the worst Speaker of the House this country ever had, and he has to be replaced.
	I mean, 98% of this Fisco Cliff deal, Baynard got.
	I mean, do you know the difference between Obama and Baynard?
	What's the difference between Obama and Baynard?
	This better have a good punchline, Mike.
	What is it?
	One kisses the ass and the other one gets his ass kissed.
	Okay, it's boxing day.
	I'll be generous.
	That's not the greatest joke in the world.
	But you know, what Bader did that I think was a mistake is he made himself the issue.
	He should have just said on the November, the November the 6th, he should have said, the people have spoken.
	Now, if Obama wants to spend 25% of GDP at the federal level, he can figure out a way to pay for it.
	I'm going back to my state to work on my tan.
	And he should have done that.
	I think any congressman that votes for him for Speaker better be looking over his back because there's going to be a conservative representative to challenge him or her in the primary.
	I believe Michelle Bachman or other conservatives, even Mike Cox, or I think it's Peter King from New York, would be a much better Speaker of the House or hire Newt.
	I mean, anyone would be better than him.
	So, if necessary, contract it out to Newt, basically outsource it.
	Look, this is undeniable.
	That the fact that the media has spent the last six weeks, the six weeks between the election and Christmas, talking about John Boehner this, John Boehner, that, what will Boehner do?
	What will the Republicans concede on?
	What will the it should all have been between Obama and Harry Reid?
	They should be, they're the ones who are spending it.
	They should be made to own it.
	They're spending it on programs that Republicans, officially, at any rate, are not in favor of.
	They're spending at a rate that officially, anyway, Republicans are not in favor of.
	And the trick between the election and Christmas was just to sit back and say, you've won.
	The playing field is yours.
	You dominate the landscape.
	You figure out a way to make this math add up.
	If ever there was a time to say it's not my problem in that great American formulation, or even better, you know, I don't need this in my life right now, which Boehner would have been within his rights to do, this would have been the time to do it.
	Where did you think he really went wrong then, Mike?
	Was it the concession on millions?
	No, the budget deals, I mean, to raise the debt limit.
	But before you raise the debt limit, let's have a budget.
	Okay?
	No, no budget, no raising of debt.
	We have to find out where the money is spent.
	How about get Geithner in Congress to testify where he's spending the money?
	What is this quasitative easing all about?
	Quantitative easing.
	And Chrysler and GE is not paying corporate taxes.
	The thing about that is that conversation could go on for years.
	Here's where Boehner, but you're right.
	At a certain point, to be real, you have to be talking about real money.
	Boehner in the debt ceiling thing emerged and said he'd negotiated $7 billion of real savings.
	And the Congressional Budget Office said, no, it's only a billion.
	It doesn't really matter which of these it is.
	They're both ridiculous.
	This country, the United States government spends $188 million every single hour.
	I gave this number last time because the newspapers and the network news shows are insane about this.
	They come away with some big-sounding number that actually is entirely irrelevant.
	If you have saved, if the net result of your weeks and weeks of negotiations is that you've come up with a billion dollars worth of savings, as Boehner did in those debt ceiling talks, that works out to what the United States government borrows in five hours.
	So if you've wasted six weeks negotiating five hours worth of savings, you're an idiot.
	And you should just have gone to the Bahamas for the whole summer and left things to play out as they could.
	And I think actually on November the 6th, the entire Republican leadership would have been better off going to the Bahamas.
	Would things, would the Republican Party be in any worse shape than if they, on November the 7th, they just booked a cheap ticket out to the Bahamas and said, we'll see you.
	We'll be back in the new year.
	No, it would have made no difference whatsoever.
	Thank you for your call, Mike.
	At some point, we've got to get real about these numbers, though.
	If you're not talking about the T word, trillions, trillions, and not over a decade, not over a decade, because nobody knows what's going to be.
	Who knows the state of the world in 2023?
	None of us do, any more than we knew about the world in 1998 that we were going to be waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq five years later.
	You don't know.
	So the idea of making spending plans for 2023 is an idiot.
	It's an idiotic thing to do.
	It's a complete waste of time.
	You want to save the money?
	You've got to start saving the money now.
	Mark's time for us.
	Lots more still to come.
	David Gregory being investigated by police for breaching District of Columbia laws with a proper news TV show.
	Timothy Carney at the Washington Exhibitor has just tweeted that next week for his next trick, next week, David Gregory is going to appear on Meet the Press holding up a 100-watt incandescent light bulb.
	Come and get me copper.
	You'll never take me alive.
	I think after that, by the way, for two weeks' time, he should host Meet the Press sitting on a toilet with an illegally sized tank, whatever it was.
	What was it, the old four-gallon flush tank that Al Gore managed to get rid of?
	I think having said now stood up for gun rights by taunting the District of Columbia police, he should then go the whole way and stand up for the right to own a four-gallon flush toilet.
	And he should sit, he doesn't have to do anything.
	He just sits there and hosts the show on that.
	And he's already in trouble with the District of Columbia, so it doesn't really matter now if they pile up multiple offences on him because he's going down for like five to fifteen years anyway.
	But David Gregory, David Gregory, the ultimate gun kook, the Second Amendment gun nut, who he was told by police he couldn't show this weapon on television and he took it on TV anyway.

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