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Dec. 31, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:02
December 31, 2012, Monday, Hour #3
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Yes, if you switched off your radio because that guy who came on at 1.30 was droning on, it's safe to switch it back.
It's safe to switch it back on again.
I normally don't, I normally get these complaints when I'm on the air.
I get these emails saying, why does Rush have these Lame-O guest hosts?
This is the first time I've ever done the show where people have said, oh, no, no, no, no, don't, please, don't cut away to the Barack Obama speech.
So I've been, instead of being getting all these emails in the last 1.30 half hour saying, oh, my God, these Rush guests hosts.
Who's this guy now droning on?
These Rush guest hosts are getting worse.
That wasn't me, folks.
That was President Obama.
But I got all these emails saying, oh, this God, this new guy they've gotten on the air is even worse than that panty-waist snot-nosed foreign guy they have on.
But Obama has finished speaking now.
He has finished speaking.
And it turned out to be a big nothing.
Turned out there is no fiscal cliff deal.
Amazingly enough, this is the latest exciting plot twist.
We knew, we thought that on the 11th hour, the 11th day, there would be a fiscal cliff deal.
But now we've had, this is like the moment, you know the moment in the horror movie when they think they've driven the stake through the monster and they've killed the zombie or whatever.
And then they're all like the wholesome teenagers all say, oh, thank God that's all over then.
And then the hand reaches up out from the ground, the rotten hand, and the zombie turns out not to be dead and drags down.
Then they have to go in for the big finish and big kill.
That's the equivalent of this moment.
The fiscal cliff is not yet dead.
It is still, the fiscal cliff is still there.
They do not have a deal.
They do not have a deal.
But President Obama nevertheless assembled an entire chorus line of supporting middle-class dancers pre-selected and pre-screened to announce that they're very close to a deal.
To announce that the deal is within sight.
The fiscal cliff is within sight, but apparently the deal is also within sight.
So it's your choice, America.
They're both within sight.
Do you go for the fiscal cliff or do you go for the deal?
The deal is within sight.
So he called a press conference with carefully demographically selected members of the middle class.
Is that right, H.R.?
They were all women except for one.
There was one guy?
There's one guy.
There's one guy still in the American middle class.
Otherwise, it's like all the professions now.
It's all women, isn't it?
The guys, I don't know, the guys are out there, I don't know what they're doing.
The guys are all on social security disability, and the women are all in the middle class now.
That's the way it works in America.
But anyway, there was one guy, the last guy, still in the American middle class.
He was there standing behind President Obama.
They thought they were going to be there for the historic signing, the announcement of the fiscal cliff deal.
They thought it was going to be as historic as Neville Chamberlain standing there when he was at Heston Aerodrome, 1939.
And he got there and he said, I have here a piece of paper from Herr Hitler.
And they thought Barack Obama was going to be standing there saying, I have here a piece of paper from Herr Boehner announcing peace in our time.
And instead, instead, there's no deal.
There's no deal.
So he doesn't get to be Neville Chamberlain.
He's Neville Chamberlain.
It may happen.
It'll happen around 11 o'clock tonight.
But right now, they are close to a deal.
Here's what Mitch McConnell is complaining about, that after he agreed a deal, he spent all night with Joe Biden.
That's the sacrifice he was prepared to make for this.
He spent all night in a room with Joe Biden.
And he thought when he came out that he had a deal.
And then Obama, who wasn't in the room all night with Joe Biden, I bet you Obama has never spent the night in a room with Joe Biden, said added something else to the deal.
Something to do with sequestration or something.
He said, yeah, the cut, oh, the cuts, he said the cuts have to be put on hold for a year.
And Mitch McConnell had never agreed to that.
And he spent all night in a room with Joe Biden for nothing.
He had said, in fact, Mitch McConnell reached out to the vice president.
He said, I need a dance partner.
That's what he'd explained.
I need a dance partner.
Jeff, there's one thing I loathe more than senators.
It's senators talking folksy.
But I would cut McConnell a pass on this, because he said, I need a dance partner, and he spent all night dancing in a room.
He spent all night in a closed room dancing with Joe Biden.
How many people have done that?
You know, when Biden called Obama's decision to take out Osama bin Laden the toughest decision that anybody in the history of the planet has ever had to make ever.
I disagree.
I think the toughest decision that anybody has ever had to make ever was Mitch McConnell's decision to spend all night in a room alone with Joe Biden dancing.
So they spend all that night.
They spent the night together dancing.
And this actually sounds like a, I think I saw this film.
It was on Turner Classic Movies, wasn't it?
I think it was Clark Gable and who else was, I forget who was in it now.
Mitch McConnell spent all the night dancing in a closed room with Joe Biden, thought he had a deal.
Now it turns out he hasn't had a deal.
So President Obama was supposed to announce the result of, you know, dancing with the stars in the final.
We got Joe Biden, we got Mitch McConnell.
They were in there in the locked room.
They won.
We have the deal.
Here it is.
I have here a piece of paper from Herr Boehner.
And in the end, the deal is not done.
So we do not yet have a deal on the fiscal cliff.
And just to, when all the theater is said and done, here's the point.
We've already fallen.
Actually, we've already fallen off the fiscal cliff.
We're at the bottom of the fiscal cliff, and we don't know it.
We don't know it.
That's like this little, this, what they call the fiscal cliff is just this little indentation in the ground ahead of us.
We're actually already at the foot of the fiscal cliff.
And the danger is that we're still going to be standing there talking about all this nonsense when an avalanche of multi-trillion dollar debt slides off the fiscal cliff and onto our heads.
And we can't dig ourselves out from that.
That's the point.
That at the moment, because interest rates are historically low, you can borrow a trillion dollars a year, and it doesn't actually cost you anything to borrow a trillion.
I mean, it costs you a third of a trillion or whatever to borrow it.
But compared to what it would cost if interest rates were to return to anything like normal that they were around the turn of the century, then that would be, then we would absolutely just be not drowning in debt, because that goes without saying, but just the interest.
Just the interest on the debt will kill us.
The interest on the debt will enable the Chinese, for example, to quadruple the size of their military and charge it to American taxpayers.
Just the interest on the debt.
So this whole thing, this whole little bit of pointless theater.
And now the word is out that they don't like the deal.
They don't like the deals.
The McConnell thought he had a deal, and then Obama stiffed him because the whole thing was supposed to be that the sequestration cuts, these actually relatively modest cuts, would still be going through.
But Obama suddenly, and that's what he agreed with Joe Biden.
Now Obama says, nope, nope.
That's out.
So they don't have a deal.
I like this tweet on the internet, on Twitter, somebody claiming to be Ankela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany.
Not the real Angela Merkel, though, I don't think.
But this is the sort of, I bet this is the sort of thing that Frau Merkel will be saying in private.
If the fiscal cliff were in Germany, we'd have installed a cable car by now.
That's probably true.
Angela Merkel tweeting about the, or somebody claiming, purporting to be Angela Merkel, tweeting about the fiscal cliff.
So although Obama has spoken and he didn't speak for long, the Dow dropped 40 points apparently while he was speaking, and then he stopped speaking and it stabilized.
And that's like amazing because there's nobody on Wall Street today.
The Dow had fallen, I think, 17 points.
There'd been no movement at all.
The Dow was like Deadsville because all the people who are normally there, they're all skiing in Aspen or whatever.
But they all came back.
They cut short their ski vacations the moment Obama started speaking and the Dow fell 40 points.
So he now has stopped speaking and it's safe to turn on your radio again.
We're talking about that on the Rush Limbaugh Show live coverage.
There is no fiscal cliff deal.
The selected members of the American middle class are now leaving the White House.
They've been shown out the tradesman's entrance and getting back on the Greyhound to wherever they came from.
And they're looking for a whole new bunch of selected members, pre-approved background check members of the middle class to appear with Obama in the event that there actually is a fiscal cliff deal before the clock strikes midnight tonight.
But at the moment, negotiations, Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden thought they had a deal.
Mitch McConnell now feels he's been stiffed on the deal, and so there is no deal.
We will talk about that on the Rush Limbaugh Show, 1-800-282-2882.
Don't forget, by the way, we got a best of Rush to start the new year tomorrow.
And then Doug Urbanski will be in on Wednesday.
And Rush returns live on Thursday for another year of excellence in broadcasting.
How bad a state is the environmental movement in?
This story came out a day or two ago.
I thought the Republican Party had the world's worst diversity problem.
The Republican Party, because all the jokes people make about it is it's too old, it's too white, it's all the rest of it.
And it turns out, the environmental movement, environmental activists say their own party is almost as old and white as the Republican Party.
People don't realize this because they call themselves the Greens, but they're not in fact the Green at all.
They're in fact white, pasty white.
If they call themselves the white movement, people would know that.
The Green Movement does not enjoy wide and deep support among Latinos and African Americans.
You should fish where the fish are biting, said former, said Van Jones, the former Green Jobs Advisor to Barack Obama.
This was the guy who had to resign when it emerged.
He was a 9-11 truther who was a member of the Communist Party or whatever.
And by the way, when that came up, I thought he was just one of these guys who was a student in 1968 and joined the commies just like everybody did for 20 minutes back then.
But actually, he didn't join the Communist Party until something like 1996.
In other words, he joined the Communist Party even after the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had given up on him on communism.
Van Jones, former Green Jobs Advisor to Obama, he's actually black.
He's the black green jobs advisor, or the green, black jobs advisor to Obama.
And he said that the new emerging majority in the United States will be a non-white majority.
And the trouble is that the environmental movement doesn't have any diversity.
The green issues are the purview of white liberals.
This is a story from Politico.
So they need to figure out how you make carbon trading sexy to Hispanics.
And they haven't succeeded in doing it yet.
So this is a big problem in the environmental movement, which has suffered already from the lack of global warming and all the other things, now is beginning to look as old and white and unrepresentative and non-diverse as the Republican Party.
That's a shocker to me.
Al Gore, he looks pretty old.
And actually, when you think about it, all these guys, you go along to an environmental thing, the Sierra Club.
Very white, very white.
How many Hispanics?
I mean, it's got a Hispanic name, the Sierra Club, but other than that, how Hispanic is it?
Mark Stein.
Hispanics are uncomfortable with the Sierra Club.
Why are they?
Why would they be uncomfortable with the Sierra Club?
There were no Sierras around until the Hispanics came up with it.
Anyway, we'll talk about that and lots more straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for rush as the fiscal cliff looms.
Let us go to Lauren in Old Forge, Pennsylvania.
Lauren, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Oh, so pleased to be on.
Thank you so much for taking the call, Mark.
My pleasure.
And happy New Year to you, Lauren.
Happy New Year to you.
And it's Lauren.
Oh, is it Laureen?
Okay, even better.
I like that.
I was talking about three years ago on Cap and Trade, and you put me on some kind of list of names.
I don't know what it meant, though.
Yeah, no, no, it's Rush's.
I should check this with HR.
It's because Rush keeps a list of favored women's names.
Is Laureen on there, HR?
Oh, it's gone down a bit to number 15, but it's just bubbling outside the top 10, Laureen.
So you are still on Rush's list of favorite names.
Okay.
The reason I'm calling is because of our state in Pennsylvania.
We're trying to get right to work past here.
And in my district in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, which is, by the way, the pizza capital of the world, we have had consistent strikes held in our district, which are becoming such a nuisance that they actually went on strike two days before the Christmas holiday.
I mean, it's just insane.
They just decide they're going to go on strike.
They haven't had a contract for two years.
And they're getting an average salary here in where our city has about 9,000 residents and 950 students.
That's just an average.
And they're getting paid an average $47,891 a year, according to their fact sheet.
So they get all of their benefits paid for.
And their benefits, which people should look into for health insurance costs in their areas, our health insurance for our teachers is costing us for a single family $7,245 a year and $17,921 for a family coverage.
And that's in the county level, the borough, and in the school district.
That's what we're paying just for health insurance alone for teachers and union workers.
It's just so out of control.
And you're talking here, you say it's a town of about 9,000 people.
So that's not a big tax base for the public sector workforce to, in effect, be subsidized by.
No, it's not.
As a matter of fact, we had in our county this past year 134 judicial sales.
Now our city got a $5,000 check and they were in the paper.
And our commissioner actually said that it was a win-win for the districts because we got to divvy up all that money from all the homes that were sold on that judicial sale.
I mean, that's the arrogance of the politicians today.
They literally call the taxpayer deadbeats, and they're happy to redistribute that money from the sale of their homes throughout each of the different cities throughout our county.
Now, you know, at some point, people, this is where people should laugh at the president.
When the president starts talking about investing in education, there's enough, by any reasonable standard, about 40%, and Pennsylvania, by the way, comes out relatively high, as you've just explained to us, is one of the high-spending states on education.
We have Philadelphia and Lackawanna and Luzerne County that are controlling the vote here because of the popular vote.
You know, I mean, they have all these areas covered.
There's two areas that you hear of Joe Biden and Barack Obama going to, Philadelphia and Scranton.
And why is that?
Because they have those areas populated to the point where they can win the vote through the popular vote.
They don't need the other counties because we don't look at it through the Electoral College.
We do the popular vote.
No, no.
But Biden in particular, I mean, he was talking to some fourth graders in Pennsylvania.
I think that was in York, Pennsylvania, if I remember correctly.
And he was telling them that teachers were being laid off and there was no money for teachers.
And so the federal government was going to give money for teachers.
That's not the situation at all.
Most by compared to historic norms, compared to global norms, there are far more teachers than there's a rational need for.
And certainly far bigger administrative stuff.
And they're all lavishly remunerated.
Because when you talk about those things for healthcare benefits and everything, everyone assumes that's actually for the lady who's teaching arithmetic and the lady who's teaching history and all the rest of it.
But it actually isn't.
It's not just those people.
It's for this vast administrative apparatus that the teachers, that has exploded in schoolhouses in the last 40 years as well, Lorraine.
Well, I think that the teachers are stuck in the middle of the taxpayer and the unions.
And that's why I believe in Pennsylvania right to work so much.
And once they take that power out of these unions and arbitrators' hands and put it back in the taxpayer and the teachers to negotiate.
Because right now in our contracts here, the current contract does not allow the district to hold an open house for parents.
And we can't be, our contract puts the decision to fill teacher vacancies in the hands of Old Forge Education Association, not the district.
You know, they're taking so much of the power and control away from the teachers and the parents that we really have no say, and it's definite taxation without representation.
No, and the unionization of the American school system has been a disaster.
200 years ago, this young republic achieved unprecedented, unknown rates of literacy.
And teaching was a community.
I have neighbors who are old enough to remember that small one-room schoolhouses and local school boards hiring teachers, and the teacher would then come from a couple of towns away or whatever and would board within the community because that was the way she wanted to teach.
She wanted to teach in a one-room schoolhouse, and that's what they did.
And that is better than having a big unionized bureaucracy increasingly at odds with the community it purports to be a part of.
Yes, fiscal cliff excitement building.
We don't have a deal, but the president gave a speech to announce that we were close to the, he thought he had a deal, and Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden spent the night in a room together.
I think it was at the Econo Lodge, just around the back of the freight yards.
Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell spent the night together in a room dancing and thought they had a deal, but then the President of the United States changed parts of the deal, apparently, and so there is currently no deal.
But even when America goes over the fiscal cliff, some fellas are riding down in the express elevator.
And that is the news that President Obama has signed an executive order increasing the salary of himself, the vice president, and members of Congress.
One Democrat congressman is objecting to the fact that the congressmen have had their salary increased and is calling on Congress to reject it, to reject Obama's executive order increasing their salary.
But right now, it looks like they will be going over the fiscal cliff with their pockets stuffed full of cash.
I have before me the full transcript of President Obama's remarks on the fiscal cliff negotiations.
So if you missed it last hour, I can now do it.
I can't do the accent.
Rush can do a great Obama accent.
And I love the way he does.
Rush is back live on Thursday, by the way, and he can do the Obama accent.
I can't do it, so I'll just do it.
Hello, everybody.
Applause.
Thank you.
Please, everybody, have a seat.
Welcome to the White House.
And then a middle-class person says, thank you for having us.
And there's laughter.
Actually, I can't do it.
I'm not going to do that.
If I do this, I might do it in a Scottish accent.
Okay.
Obama says, hello, everybody.
Oh, no, that's more Irish.
I'm not going to do it in any accent.
The point is what he said here.
Again, he's talking about millionaires.
And as we made the point earlier, if you are a public sector retiree and you have a pension of $40,000, you have the equivalent net worth of a millionaire.
Kevin Williamson, I quoted Randall Hoeven's piece in The American Thinker.
It's a wonderful piece that explains that, because most of us don't think in terms of our net worth.
He keeps talking about millionaires.
We actually think of a millionaire as someone who goes around with, you know, a million dollars in large bills in his wallet.
But that is not what a millionaire is.
A millionaire is a reference to net worth.
And if you are a public sector retired teacher, a unionized teacher, 55, and you've got a pension of 40,000, you've got the net worth of a millionaire.
And in fact, Kevin Williamson over at National Review points out that even that is an underestimate.
In fact, Randall Hoeven at American Think is underestimating it.
And in fact, the average Illinois public sector retiree actually has the equivalent of a net worth of $2.4 million.
So in other words, he's distinguishing here.
When the president says he wants millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share, he actually wants the non-productive class, he wants the productive class, the producers in society, to pay more.
He's not talking about government paying more.
He's not talking about government workers or he's not talking about people who work in those jobs where the actual take-home pay at the end of the month is relatively modest, but the bulk of the salary is actually long-term in benefits and pensions and health care and all the rest of it.
He's not talking about that.
So the President of the United States said nothing new.
He came on to ask, he said, he used the word folks a lot.
He said, preventing that tax hike has been my top priority because the last thing folks like the folks up here on this stage can afford right now is to pay an extra $2,000 in taxes next year.
Well, they're going to have to.
They're going to have to.
Because right now the problem is that America has a more progressive tax system than socialist countries in Europe because people think that you can just, that in fact you're not sticking it to the wealthiest 1%.
You're sticking it to your children and grandchildren.
And eventually that bill becomes due.
But he used the word folks a lot, so people think he cares.
Mitt Romney never used the word folks.
So people thought Mitt Romney was just some guy in a top hat and a monocle strapping America to the railroad track and twirling his moustaches as the fiscal train bore down on it.
But in fact, it's not enough just to say the last thing folks like the folks up here on the folksy stage, he got all the folksy folks from the folksy middle class.
He got his selected members of the middle class.
But he is actually peddling a delusion.
There are not enough rich people in this country to fund this level of spending and there never will be.
And one of the great clarifying aspects of life under big government in Europe is that people understand that if you spend at this level, you have to raise taxes at this level.
There's nothing difficult about it.
You don't even have to be European.
Most countries, most functioning societies manage to more or less raise what they spend.
Some even do a little better.
Swaziland.
Swaziland spends about 34% of GDP on government.
That's rather less than the United States.
And they raise 36%.
So they actually have a budget surplus.
But most people are basically in the ballpark.
Slovenia spends a little more than the United States does.
They spend about 44% of GDP, but they raise in taxes about 38%.
In other words, their point is, they understand that the point of government spending is to raise enough money to cover the spending.
I'm just looking through the list alphabetically here.
Slovenia, that was Slovenia, Slovakia, which is next to them.
If you're having trouble differentiating between Slovenia and Slovakia, Slovakia has a much smaller government than Slovenia.
They spend about 35% of GDP on government, but they raise 30%.
So there, again, they're in the ballpark.
We are not.
We spend 41%, 42% on government, and we only raise 24% in revenues.
And you cannot close that gap with billionaires.
There aren't enough Warren Buffetts.
There aren't enough Bill Gates.
There aren't enough Mitt Romney.
So you have to be honest.
If you want big government, you've got to have, if you want European-sized government, you've got to have European-sized taxes.
And they're not even trying.
This is why the whole system is dysfunctional.
There's no, even Obama, Obama wants the spending.
The Republicans supposedly want spending cuts.
So there's no reason for them to try and make this arithmetic add up.
There's no real reason for them to try and close that gap.
But the Democrats are the guys who want this spending.
Well, you've got to close the gap.
You spent this money.
You've been spending it now for years.
You keep spending this money and you're barely raising half of the money you need to cover it.
So what's your plan.
How do you make that arithmetic add up?
There's nothing in this ridiculous speech by this guy came out and gave a totally pointless speech.
And you should demand, you should, if Americans were still the Americans of 1776, they would deduct from their taxes next year, on April the 15th, the amount of time they wasted watching the president give this totally bogus speech with pre-selected members of the American middle class.
Supposedly they're supporting him because he's not trying to close that gap.
And if he's, as long as he's not trying to close that gap, he's just screwing over your kids and grandkids.
And that's as I said that's.
Big government types in Europe at least are honest about it they're.
The Swedes are honest about it, the Norwegians are honest about it, the Danes are honest about it, the Belgians are honest, the Dutch are dishonest.
Our big government guys are worse than those guys because they're lying about it.
They're saying you can have European size government and American size taxation.
There is no way it can be done.
And we?
That is why we have the worst gap between revenue and spending of any developed nation, and at some point that has to mean something, because if it doesn't mean anything, then the dollar collapses and that's a real, you know that that's.
That's a real fiscal cliff.
Then that's not just a bit of theater in which Mitch McConnell gets to enjoy the benefits of a night holdup in a room with Joe Biden.
That's, that's a real fiscal cliff, but they're not even talking about it.
They're not even talking about it.
So here we are now.
It's just over an hour since the president went out because he thought he had a deal on the fiscal cliff and it turns out that he had no deal.
And Mitch McConnell is wandering around saying he's basically thought he had a deal with Joe Biden.
And then the president tossed these, insisted that the discretionary spending cuts that the Democrats don't want, apart from defense I mean, Obama's quite happy to cut the size of the military, but the other discretionary spending cuts had to be removed.
And so Mitch McConnell is now feeling he got stiffed on that.
Marksty in for rush on New Year's Eve.
As the deadline looms, lots more still to come.
New Year's Eve at the S Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Let's go to John in Hebron, Nebraska.
John, you're live on the Rushlinbaush show.
Great to have you with us, Mark.
It's great to be with you.
Just want to say, your wit and humor make these discussions even possible.
Appreciate it.
It's small consolation in the abyss of despair that I thank you.
I thank you for your kind words, John.
The fact that we have two people McConnell and someone as smart as Biden sitting in a room that get to decide who gets to keep what in this country is it's insulting to me.
I can't believe that more people don't think along the lines of why do why do we even have this event?
Why is it that two people get to decide who gets to keep what and who gets to get taken from one person handed to another citizen?
I think that is, by definition, a lack of liberty that this Fact even takes place.
Actually, when you put that in the middle of it, my grandparents grew up in a different country than what I'm growing up in.
People accept these things as legitimate, and they're not.
Our government was never designed to have these people have this much influence in our lives.
No, and when you put it like that, John, you're right.
If people said, Well, you know, Mitch McConnell has been holed up in a room all night with George III or Lord North negotiating your future, people would rightly think nuts to that.
That's not the American way, and you're right.
It's not.
And in a sense, it's it's a negation of the American spirit.
But people think that I mean, by the way, John, just to back up on that point, I was talking about those other big government countries over in Europe.
It is absolutely incredible to me that we are sitting here in the afternoon of December 31st and that nobody can tell you what the tax rates of the United States will be tomorrow.
That in itself is also, you know, I understand no taxation without representation, but no taxation without a little bit of notice would also come in handy, too.
I mean, that is also an American, John.
That's right.
You know, I take this back to the Declaration of Independence.
It says that we were given life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by our Creator.
And the Fifth Amendment goes on to describe what that pursuit of happiness means.
It says that without due process, you cannot be deprived of life, liberty, or property.
The pursuit of happiness is our property.
What people work for, what they spend their life and their energy, their efforts, their talents to create and get paid for, that's their property.
And everyone, every one of us, is turning over that property to two people sitting in a room.
They don't know my name.
They don't know what I make, what my family's needs are, what health care needs I would like, what education I'd like for my kids, and yet they get to make all these decisions.
Why can't my neighbors stand up and realize this is not liberty?
This is not freedom.
This is a soft tyranny.
And until people decide to put it in those terms, we're never going to vote differently.
And you're right, actually, to put it in due process terms, because if it's going to come down to the wire now, it's going to come down to 11.59 p.m., it's going to come down to Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden going back into their room to know whether you're going to have 35% or 39.6%, whatever it is, confiscated.
There has been no due process there.
And actually, Mitch McConnell, all this, there is something, if these guys want to do it, why don't they just do it out there in the open?
This is public policy.
These are tax rates for the citizenry.
Why is that something?
We're not talking about negotiating a deal with the Taliban in some murky part of Waziristan.
We're talking about public policy for the citizens of this country.
Why is that something that can only be done in a closed room?
Why can't we talk about this up front?
Your point is absolutely right, John.
Where's the due process?
If I'd like to make one last point for all my liberal friends out there, and you and I, we all have them.
They don't understand why we talk about the Constitution and why we revere that word.
And it comes down to something very simple.
James Madison, who's said to be the father of that document, said that if men were angels, we wouldn't need government.
And if angels were to govern men, we wouldn't need the Constitution to put limits on what those people elected can do to us.
And because we have strayed from the Constitution and we are no longer anchored by it, there are now no limits.
These people are sitting there in a room deciding what you and I get to keep.
They want to decide what we can eat, whether or not we can have a weapon in our home.
They want to decide what kind of vehicle we can drive.
And for some reason, the liberal friends of ours, they don't see this.
They don't equate the people that they vote for with removing these liberties.
Well, thank you for speaking up for the United States Constitution, John, and Happy New Year to you.
I should add that if you disagree with John, there is a piece in the New York Times today written by a guy who has taught constitutional law for 40 years and who says, oh, Madison, forget him.
The U.S. Constitution, forget it.
It just gets in the way.
Why should the people, why should Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden, when they're negotiating how much of your wealth they're going to confiscate, why should they have to be hamstrung by this ridiculous two-century-old document that ought to be decaying in some museum vault somewhere?
So that's how people think.
They, in fact, accept the premise of what Madison was saying, that government, that angels do run the government, that if you believe in big government, you are an angel.
And for that reason, you don't need to be hamstrung by the United States Constitution.
That's how these guys think.
Thank you very much for your call, John.
The good news is that after today, we will no longer have to hear the word fiscal cliff because we'll either be at the bottom of it or this fake crisis will have gone away and we'll be on to the next fake crisis, whatever it is, the debt ceiling coming up in a couple of weeks' time.
But we won't have.
I never liked the term fiscal cliff anyway.
It always sounds to me like it ought to be a male stripper, fiscal cliff.
Is Fiscal Cliff the guy who's the father of Kim Kardashian's child?
I don't know.
Kim.
Yeah, no, we're still waiting on that.
Anyway, Kim and Fiscal Cliff Kardashian are expecting a baby.
Mark Stein in for us on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
The Senate is lurching toward a deal.
The President of the United States stands ready to give another press conference with selected pre-screened, pre-approved, demographically representative members of the middle class.
Don't wait till midnight to go over the fiscal cliff, folks.
If you go over now, if you go over now, it's 3 p.m. Eastern, you can still get the early bird special.
So think about that.
You don't want to be there in the midnight rush.
If you're going to go over the fiscal, I'm flooring it for the fiscal cliff when we're off the air right now.
Best of Rush tomorrow, Doug Urbanski, Wednesday, Rush returns on Thursday.
Always an honor to be here on America's number one radio show.
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