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June 4, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:24
June 4, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Don't worry, America.
You need not be discombobulated by sinister foreign guest hosts much longer.
The real deal, the man himself, the great rock of Gibraltar of American conservatism for the last quarter century, returns tomorrow for authentic, full-strength, all-American excellence in broadcasting.
But for now, for today, America's Anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
Mark Stein, the last unamnestied immigrant in America, a mere foreign exchange student at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a great program.
Guys like me get to come and study here, and in return, John McCain gets a vacation condo in Syria.
So it all works out.
We're live from Ice Station EIB in far northern New Hampshire.
People say to me, well, why are you in far northern New Hampshire?
Rush is in Palm Beach, and Doug Urbanski is in Beverly Hills.
It just lowers the whole tone of the whole Rush guest host lineup to have some schlub who's in far northern New Hampshire.
And it's true, you know, the weather's lousy.
You can't get a rugler at the general store.
The roads are unpaved.
But when Lois Lerner and the IRS come after you with those really tough questions, there's a disused logging road and you can be across the border in about 20 minutes.
So there is that.
1-800-282-2882 as we discuss America's further evolution into the world's brokest banana republic.
Do call.
Don't be a stranger.
We love to hear from you, especially if you're a Democrat and you love the IRS and you think it's great, Eric Holder is wiretapping the press.
If you dig that stuff, give me a call.
1-800-282-2882.
In the final moments of the show, we had Mike calling from Aspen.
And I got so many emails about Mike.
I think we added just 37 affiliates from just having Mike's positive message on the air.
And so if you're a liberal and you share Mike's positive message, do call us.
1-800-282-2882.
But if you are a liberal, be warned that even your guys are not happy about this.
The IRS hearings are going on right now, even as I speak.
And Charlie Wrangell, Democrat of New York, Charlie Wrangell, has said, we have found a cancer someplace in Cincinnati, and we have to find out what caused this.
It's odd that Charlie Wrangell should be the one Democrat who seems steamed about the IRS.
I wonder what that's all about.
I don't think it's got...
Is the Cincinnati office also responsible for regulating rental income from your vacation place in the Dominican Republic?
I don't know.
We'll have to look into that.
But Charlie Wrangell says we have found a cancer someplace in Cincinnati and we have to find out what caused this.
Nobody knows what caused the cancer in the IRS.
Michael Douglas says his cancer was caused by too much oral sex.
So I would imagine we're about 36 hours from Douglas Schulman and Stephen Miller pleading that same excuse on behalf of the IRS.
A mass outbreak of Michael Douglas disease has afflicted the Cincinnati office of the IRS.
So we'll keep you up to date.
We'll keep you up to date on that.
The outbreak of Michael Douglas disease in the Cincinnati of the IRS.
You may have had different.
You know, I heard whatever it was this morning.
I got an email saying that the big IRS hearings were starting on TV.
So I went to look for them.
And normally the place you can go to to look for great unvarnished hearings, public hearings, congressional hearings, the place that exists for that is C-SPAN.
So I switch on C-SPAN and they've got live coverage of Dick Durbin talking to himself about something or other in the United States Senate.
You know that phony parliamentary coverage that they have in Congress.
It's not like, you know, Prime Minister's questions in the Australian Parliament where there's a great big mob howling and booing and braying and it's all a lot of back and forth and all the rest of it.
It's just like some guy with the camera close on him talking to himself in an empty room and pretending this is some kind of parliamentary debate.
And so there was a live coverage of Dick Durbin talking to himself about something or other on C-SPAN.
So that was C-SPAN 1.
So I switched to C-SPAN 2 and there was a woman talking about mental health awareness raising awareness raising day or whatever it was.
So I go to C-SPAN 3 and there's some guy in uniform testifying on sexual harassment in the United States Coast Guard, which always reminds me of that 1920s novelty song, what is it?
Who Coasts with the Coast Guard's daughter while the Coast Guard's busy coasting guard, whatever it is.
I love that song.
So there's some guy, C-SPAN 3 is covering a guy in uniform testifying on sexual harassment in the United States Coast Guard.
So I don't know whether there's any more.
If you've got C-SPAN 4, C-SPAN 5, C-SPAN 6, I understand it wasn't being covered on any of those channels too.
Apparently, this IRS hearing, I think it's on C-SPAN 27, which you can only get with the really specialized porn cable packages.
So it was hard to find, hard to find.
And I don't know whether, don't get me wrong, I love C-SPAN.
I always enjoy it when I get to be interviewed by C-SPAN.
I don't quite understand why they weren't covering this hearing.
So I managed to find, as I'm just tootling around, I managed to find a bit of it and hear one of the witnesses.
And this is really compelling stuff.
You know, we had all the officials the last few days.
We've had all these guys who are interchangeable.
We had the former IRS commissioner, Douglas Shulman.
Then we had the former acting IRS commissioner, Stephen Miller.
Then we have the current acting IRS commissioner, you know, whatever his name is.
And they're all like the same to me.
They're all the same kind of shifty weasel.
It's like they're producing them off, they've got some big clone factory out in Shanghai, and the Chinese are producing these shifty weasel androids to be put up at congressional hearings.
And they all say the same thing.
You know, they're asked an interesting question and they have a cupped-hand conversation with the member of their entourage, and then they say, I do not recall.
And you've got all these indistinguishable shifty weasels.
You've got former Weasel Shulman, you've got former acting Weasel Miller, and then you've got the current weasel, whatever his name is, and they're all the same.
Well, this morning we had real American citizens, and they're as various as the population of this great republic.
And their testimony was immensely compelling.
I don't know why C-SPAN would want to cut away from that to show Dick Durbin in a room talking to himself.
But that's what they did.
We have a new report that is out today about what IRS officials have been spending on whooping it up at their so-called training conferences.
By the way, the training conferences work out great because they spend $4.1 million on training conferences, training people to go and hound you over your lousy $1,800 expense claims.
So this $4.1 million training conference, it was in Anaheim, California.
One official stayed five nights.
This report is about to be released sometime during the show.
It'll be released to uniform non-coverage by the American media.
One IRS official stayed five nights in a room that regularly goes for $3,500 a night.
Another stayed four nights in a room that regularly goes for $1,499 a night.
Now, these are like perks.
These would be the sort of things that if you were getting this kind of treatment, if you were being put up in $3,500 a night hotel rooms as a business perk, you would be expected to declare it to the IRS.
But I would be surprised.
Call me cynical, but I would be surprised if any of these senior IRS officials declared any of this stuff as a payment in kind on their tax return.
So on the one hand, we have this.
We have these guys partying, holding pointless conferences where they do their lame Gilligans Island videos, these terrible, leaden, plonking, witless, so-called training videos where they all pretend to be characters in a sitcom and they're enjoying these $3,500 a night hotel rooms.
And then on the other hand, we have the voices of American citizens.
Becky Gerritson of the Wetumpka Tea Party in Alabama was testifying about an hour ago.
And it was very moving what she said.
And I'd like to quote one thing she said because it gets to the heart of it.
She said, and she began to tear up as she said this.
She began choking.
She's got a throb in her throat and she began tearing up as she said this.
I am not here as a serf or a vassal.
I am not begging my lords for mercy.
I am a born-free American woman, wife, mother, and citizen.
And I'm telling my government that you have forgotten your place.
I am not here today as a serf or a vassal.
That's not true, by the way.
Under the law as it stands, we are all serfs or vassals of the IRS.
HR made the point just before the end of the show yesterday that under the IRS, you're basically guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.
They invert law.
They invert the basic, the core principle of English law and turn it on its head.
And they, in fact, invert the balance of English law as it's been for eight centuries, which is the balance between the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury.
Because when the IRS determine that they're going to take out a lien on your house or they're going to freeze your IRA, they're acting as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, all in one, all in one person, all in one person.
If you remember, for example, Eric Holder, nobody likes Eric Holder.
He's the Attorney General.
He's the chief lawmaker of the United States.
But when he wants to read James Rosen's emails at Fox News, when he wants to bug the telephone of James Rosen's parents, even Eric Holder has to go and find a judge who's willing to sign off on that.
These Ms. Richards, to name one of these ladies at the Cancerous IRS office in Cincinnati, Ms. Richards doesn't have to find a judge.
She doesn't have to do what Eric Holder wants to do when he just wants to read James Rosen's emails.
When she wants to destroy the life of an American citizen by taking the home they live in, by freezing the bank accounts of their pensions, of their savings, by freezing their children's bank accounts, she decides that herself.
She doesn't need a judge because she is prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.
So in that sense, we are all serfs and vassals of the IRS.
And one thing that should change, by the way, I'm not just sounding off when I say the IRS should be dissolved.
For start, its name is rubbish.
It's not the internal revenue service.
Most revenue services around the world, revenue agencies, are actually internal.
In Britain, it used to be called the Inland Revenue because it referred to income that you brought within the borders of the United Kingdom.
And when countries have revenue agencies called inland and internal, it refers to the fact that you bring it within the borders of Sweden or you bring it within the borders of New Zealand.
The IRS claims global jurisdiction.
It's one of only five countries.
I think it's like Somaliland and Somalia and a couple of others that also do it.
Claims global jurisdiction.
So there's nothing internal about it.
So they should disband this agency and they should replace it with the American Revenue Agency.
And they should remove the powers of lowest learner or any low-level agent simply to act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, and require them when they decide they'd like to take a lien on your house or they'd like to freeze your savings, they are required to go to a judge, not a special judge,
a regular all-American judge who will decide whether or not he is they should at least be required to do what Eric Holder has to do when he has to read James Rosen's emails.
That's the first most basic reform that is required because that's why everybody jumps when they get the IRS because they know when somebody in Cincinnati calls you and asks for your Facebook posts that if you don't send them your Facebook posts, she's going to be freezing your IRA or taking out a lien on your property.
That's the stage that comes next.
So they have to have that power removed from them.
And if Republicans can't get that small tiny reform just to bring these people within the accepted norms and accepted conventions of a land of laws, then this whole thing is a waste of time.
Mark Stein, Infra Rush, 1-800-282-2882.
Lots more straight ahead.
We may need to put Charlie Wrangell in charge of reforming the IRS.
Charlie is steeper about this.
He says a phone call from the IRS is not pleasant.
He explains to one of one of the witnesses.
He's with her.
Now, with the IRS, most of us know that this is an experience.
A telephone call from the IRS is a very, very uncomfortable feeling, says Charlie Wrangell.
As well, he should know.
We may have reached the stage where Charlie Wrangell has to be the next Deputy Acting Associate Commissioner of the IRS.
I was saying earlier that Becky was testifying about an hour ago, Becky Gerritson of the Wetumpka Tea Party in Alabama.
Absolutely, absolutely terrific testimony.
I mean, these are real American citizens.
This is what the enemy's list is now.
The enemy's list isn't this rich guy in California and this rich guy in New York and this rich guy at his Beach Place out on Martha's Vineyard.
The enemy's list now is half of the American people.
That if you happen to have a political disagreement with the ruling party, the ruling party will sick the permanent government on you, permanent bureaucracy on you and make your life hell.
Here's the facts of Becky Gerritson's case.
She applied.
We applied, she said, for our 501c4 in October 2010.
Our $850 application fee was cashed seven days from the date our application was mailed.
That's the thing that doesn't take any time, the $850 application fee.
We received a letter dated November the 2nd stating that our application and user fee payment had been received, and it stated that we could expect to be contacted within 90 days, 9-0.
The IRS did not initiate any contact with us for another 459 days.
And that was when I received a letter from the Cincinnati office dated February the 3rd, 2012.
Now, in other words, this woman applies for her 501c4 application in October, 2010, before the 2010 elections.
And for a year and a half, they say they'll get back to her within 90 days, and they do not hear a word from her for a year and a half.
Now, as I said, that's the complete opposite of Malik Obama, the president's brother, when he mailed his application in from Nairobi in late May, and he was approved in June.
And she very obligingly, Lois Lerner herself, personally backdated it three years, personally backdated it three years.
So she took care of him.
He got excellent customer service.
Now, when they did hear back a year and a half later, Becky Gerritson was told that the application could not be completed unless they filled out the enclosed questionnaire, which requested approximately 90 pieces of additional information or data, and that if the additional information was not returned by February the 24th, that the case would be closed.
Now, again, this is your Americans.
What was the point of your revolution?
Right?
What was the point of your revolution?
You've had a year and a half.
You wait a year and a half for the bureaucracy to get back to you.
They say they're going to, they tell that by their own standards, they're supposed to get back to you within 90 days.
They take a year and a half and then say that you have to get back to them within three weeks or the case will be closed.
What was the point?
What was the point of the revolution?
What was the point of your revolution?
You might as well have stuck with George III.
Because George III, like if you'd said, if you'd sent him the Declaration of Independence on July the 4th, 1776, a year and a half later, he'd have sent you a reply saying he'll think it over.
You know, there's three weeks.
You've got three weeks to reply.
They take a year and a half to reply to you, but you've got to take three weeks to reply to them.
This has got to stop.
This has got to stop.
This agency, it's not a cancer in the Cincinnati office with respect to Charlie Wrangel.
This is a sickness, a systemic sickness in the heart of one of the core responsibilities of government.
There's lots of things government is monkeying around with in this country that it shouldn't be doing.
It's wasting money on it.
It's doing this and it's doing that and it shouldn't be doing it.
But revenue collection is one of the core functions of government.
Even small government people believe there has to be a revenue collection agency to pay for the few things the state should be doing.
And when the revenue collection agency is as out of control as this organization is, it actually has to have a stake driven through its heart and it has to be replaced by something that is fairer and has fewer powers.
Yes, Rush returns live tomorrow to take you through the end of the week with full-strength excellence in broadcasting.
You remember yesterday I was talking about Richard Windsor, the fake identity of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson.
She isn't a man.
Apparently she's a woman, but she likes to play a man in her email interchanges with other members of the Obama administration, like Cass Sunstein.
This is apparently normal behavior now in the United States government.
Cabinet members have fake identities that they use to flirt with Obama's head of regulatory reform, like Cass Sunstein.
It turns out that this is fairly widespread now, and the Associated Press applied to find out the names of all the other secret identities.
I think Lisa Jackson had said that she'd picked her name because it was the name of her first name of her dog and the last name of a town in New Jersey.
This is like, you know, when you pick your porn star name, you picked the name of your pet and the name of your favorite town in New Jersey.
So as I said yesterday, I worked for the 70s in the 70s for a period in straight-to-video gay porn as Butch Weehawken.
But apparently Lisa Jackson's been doing it too, and she was Richard Windsor, which is a much classier name because it sounds like a minor member of the royal family.
Apparently, this is widespread now throughout the government.
And the Associated Press, digging themselves out from being bugged by Eric Holder, applied to find out about the other fake identities and email addresses of political appointees under the so-called Freedom of Information Act, under which they're entitled to this information.
The Labor Department replied that it could provide them with the names with these email addresses and the information it was seeking if the AP paid them $1.03 million.
In other words, they wanted to charge a one for the, under the Freedom of Information Act, the information is free, but the processing will cost $1.03 million.
You know, it's like the infomercials.
You apply for, you can, if you order now for one set of Freedom of Information Act information, we'll find a second act of Freedom of Information Act information, and you'll just play processing and handling.
But in this case, the processing and handling costs $1.03 million.
This is your government laughing in your face.
Let's go to Kate in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
Kate, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us today.
Oh, hey, Mark.
It's so lovely to talk to you.
My pleasure.
What's on your mind, Kate?
Well, I just have to say something because I've heard a lot of people say the same thing.
Whenever Rush says he's going away, millions of us just go into a deep, deep depression and a funk.
And the only antidepressant that works is when I hear that you're coming in for him.
Well, that's very sweet of you.
But there's millions more who are like itching for the real deal who will be back tomorrow.
It's a pleasure.
But I just want you to know that I'll sponsor you if you ever want to give up being an undocumented.
Oh, gosh, don't do that.
Right now, I'm not within the Canada.
I'm worried you're thinking about it.
No, no, I'm not in the great advantage about being undocumented and living in the shadows is you never have to worry about the IRS having you in the database.
For God's sake, don't ever, don't bring me out of the shadows, Casey.
Okay, I'll keep it quiet.
It's just between us.
But listen, I have to talk about Congressman Wrangell.
I think it's very prophetic, and I'm going to refer to him as Dr. Wrangell, because I think what he's saying about the IRS investigations is a metaphor or foreshadowing of what we're going to see in Obamacare.
First of all, Dr. Wrangel seems to have made a very shotgun diagnosis.
He didn't worry about tests or hearings or anything.
They've just started, but he's already identified that we have a cancer in Cincinnati.
So he's quick to jump to a conclusion.
He's ignoring all the new data.
We've already now seen multiple letters and emails that have come from other IRS offices in California and D.C., but he's ignoring that.
And his solution, probably like Obamacare, isn't to cut or to act or to resolve the thing or even to try to prevent it.
He's going to look at it.
So I think what we have here is a foreshadowing of the prototype for how Obamacare is going to work too.
Yeah, you're right that this may be, this in fact may be more significant than we'd thought.
But you know, you're right too in your larger point that in a sense, Charlie Wrangell is a week behind the story here.
And that's not unaccidental.
Right.
The Democrats want it to seem like it's rogue agents in Cincinnati.
And we already know that that isn't the case, that it goes way, way, way up.
And Kate, what I find interesting about this is that when the IRS call you up, if they call up Kate in Valley Forge and Pennsylvania and they ask for something, they can go back.
I think you've got to keep all your stuff for seven years.
So they can, well, what are we now?
2013.
So they can call you up this afternoon and ask for something from 2006, and you're expected to be able to put your hands on it immediately and give it to them.
Nobody's asking to go back seven years here.
We're just asking for paperwork that goes back two years.
And they keep saying that they're unable to tell us the name of the person.
At some point, a human being in the Internal Revenue Service issued the order that this thing was a go and that Tea Party groups were to be stonewalled and certain Tea Party groups were to be referred from Cincinnati to Washington for additional stonewalling.
And there's a paper trail.
They've got the paperwork on this.
And when they call you up and ask for your paperwork from 2006, you're expected to be able to produce it in nothing flat.
When you and your representatives in Congress ask these guys for their paperwork from 2010, mysteriously, nobody knows where it all went.
Nobody knows who signed off on this.
There's no piece of paper with the signature on it.
If they call you up and say, oh, you transferred a million dollars out of your bank account to the Cayman Islands and you didn't tell us, you'd be expected.
You can't say, oh, I'll look into that and I'll try.
Nobody in my house knows how that happened.
Nobody knows who actually did it.
The IRS wouldn't accept that excuse from you, but you're expected to accept it from them.
Well, and I think the backdrop is how is it that people who are intelligent are watching this and accept it, that nobody remembers anything, no one was there.
You know, it was at an Easter icon.
That's why he went.
I agree that this response, like Charlie Wrangell, is scripted, just like those hearings, the questions for the Democrats were.
And even if Cincinnati was closed down and turned into Dunkin' Donuts, that doesn't solve the issue, which frankly I think, like even if this long kabuki of A.G. Holder, if he ends up resigning, that's not the end of it.
They're all little pieces of it, but there's a great big picture that's blooming.
I mean, like, with all the stuff that went on, and Fox is the only TV station that talked about Benghazi and IRS and AP, et cetera.
Isn't it a coincidence that their reporter has been, you know, brought up on these Trump charges or all of that?
There's just big pieces that have to be put together, and I'm afraid we're concentrating on the small little crumbs.
Yeah, that's true.
There is a reason.
They don't want people.
It's not because they're big fans of MSNBC or anything like that.
They'd rather people didn't follow this stuff at all.
You know, I was just like tuning around the dial last night, and I come across all kinds of things, didn't even know were out there.
I came across a celebrity look-alikes edition of Family Feud, of all things.
I don't think I'd seen Family Feud in.
I was shocked to find Richard Dawson wasn't still hosting it, but apparently it's still out there, and they have a celebrity look-alikes edition of Family Feud.
And then there was Katie Couric, who was interviewing former child stars who were now doing good work.
And that's what they want.
They don't actually want people even following the left-wing version of the story.
They just rather you had no idea there was a story.
There is a story.
They'd rather you watch the celebrity look-alikes edition of Family Feud.
Thanks for your call, Kate.
And you're right.
I think Dr. Wrangell was a bit hasty in his misdiagnosis.
And Kate's, in honor of Kate, I think we should adopt that and now refer to him as Dr. Wrangell.
If Joe Biden's wife can be Dr. Jill Biden, everyone refers to her as Dr. Biden.
Dr. Biden, this, Dr. Biden, that.
Dr. Jill Biden will see you now.
I think the least we can do is start referring to Charlie Wrangell as Dr. Wrangell.
He diagnosed a bad case of Michael Douglas disease in the Cincinnati office of the IRS.
Mark Stein in for rush following the IRS hearings, which are live as we speak, you may be able to find them out there somewhere.
I think they're on C-SPAN 27, which if you have really recherche, recondite, abstruse porn tastes, may be in your cable package.
But that's all you can see them on.
C-SPAN 27.
The live IRS hearings, there's some very compelling testimony from them, and we will continue to follow that and lots more of the day's news straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein in for rush on the EIB network.
Breaking news.
James Holmes, the Colorado movie theater, has just had his insanity plea accepted by the judge.
Lois Lerner will be trying that in a couple more weeks.
Let's go to Stephanie.
Stephanie is calling from New Jersey, the very same state which Lisa Jackson uses to construct her fake identities from at the EPA.
What town are you calling from, Stephanie?
Hi, I'm calling from a little town called Matuchin.
Matutchin, that is a great porn star name.
I was saying that whatever the formula was for Porn Star Dave, your favorite dog and your favorite New Jersey town.
So I want to be Butch Matutchin now.
That is the all-time great New Jersey Porn Star Dave.
Great to have you with us on the show, Stephanie.
What's on your mind today?
Well, I'm calling because every time I hear on television in regard to the IRS scandal or really basically anything that's happening in the world these days regarding government officials, they always trot out the old term public servant.
And it's always applied to the people who are in the positions of power, that they're the public servants.
But in reality, I feel like we, the people, are the public servants.
I think we really are in a vassal or feudal system, and the term public servant is being misapplied.
You know, somewhere along the line, it's kind of gone upside down.
And there is public servitude, but it's all of us.
You know, we're the public servants.
And I'm just hoping that someday, you know, someone actually in a position of power admits to that and really gives a true definition of the word.
Well, you see it in your state and other states across the nation because the most you're right.
This whole term public servant is outmoded because what it means is that you can have two people living next door to each other and the so-called public servant doing the government job will retire in her 50s and have fabulous pension and fabulous benefits.
And the guy next door who is running the hardware store has to go and work till he drops dead at 78 or 79 to pay for the so-called public servants' lavish benefits.
In Illinois, in the state of Illinois, the shortfall in public pensions alone is one-tenth of a trillion dollars.
In other words, that's the size when we talk about these various European economies that are in trouble.
That's the size of a developed nation-state's budget shortfall.
And yet it's just for one pension fund in Illinois.
They've awarded themselves such a lavish pension fund that they've managed to, this year, they've got a one-tenth of a trillion-dollar shortfall in just one public pension fund in one American state.
And that's, yeah, there's nothing very self-sacrificing about public service when you're awarding yourself those kind of benefits, Stephanie.
Yes, I actually know somebody, well, pretty much everyone in my town, aside from myself and a few others, almost everybody who lives in this town does work for the government in some capacity.
There are a lot of people who work for the schools, a lot of people who work for the public works department.
And I know one friend of mine, you know, a very nice woman.
Her family is lovely.
But the father had worked for the railroad.
He worked for 20 years, but he's been retired now for 40.
So he's been retired twice as long as he worked, and he receives full benefits.
Right, right.
And that's basically what public service is.
It's not a great job, you know, unless you have all the fun of chastising and flaying conservatives applying for 501c4 status.
It's not terribly interesting work.
But the great advantage is you get the last three decades of your life as a long holiday weekend with very lavish benefits.
And that whole idea, as you say, it's backwards.
It's backwards.
And it came out of a particular idea, Stephanie.
You know, once upon a time, what we can now call public servants were servants of the crown.
They were servants of the king.
They were literally the king's servants.
And then as democracy took over, we adopted the idea that they were the people's servants, public servants, which is what they are.
They work for us.
We pay them.
They work for us.
Yet somehow we've managed to turn the thing onto its head now.
So they're in fact just like the sort of paramilitary wing of the bureaucracy, where they have immense powers to basically kick your door down and ruin your life.
And you're right.
We ought to stop this whole idea.
Oh, a lifelong career in public service, a selfless, devoted public servant.
You're right, Stephanie.
We need to stop doing all that stuff.
I mean, do you think any politician will ever be able to actually speak the truth since they're always voting themselves raises on the public dime?
I mean, who in his right mind would ever actually state the obvious?
No, and when you do, you're demonized.
I mean, that was one of the most depressing things of a very depressing election campaign, is that Mitt Romney is demonized.
Somehow, a guy like Bill Clinton, who has lived in public housing all his life, except for whatever it was, six months in the early 1980s when he didn't have a public job in Arkansas, he's been a devoted public servant all his life.
And yet, mysteriously now, he's a multi-gazillionaire.
Nobody quite knows how that happened.
Harry Reid, Harry Reid, again, has become a multi-millionaire, even though he's been a selfless, devoted public servant all his life.
I got to run, Stephanie, because we're not in public service, so we've got to make time for an EIB profit center break here.
But thanks for your call, and that's a very good point.
We'll discuss that and lots more straight ahead on the Russian Bosch.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
I mentioned a moment ago this pension shortfall.
It's a story in the Chicago Tribune today out of Illinois, Illinois, Barack Obama's home base.
The public pension shortfall there is $100 billion.
In other words, that's about the same as the total finances of Greece.
Greek revenues are about 86 billion euros.
That's like a 100 billion dollars, give or take.
And their budget deficit, the Greek budget deficit, is just under 20 billion euros.
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