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Sept. 20, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
September 20, 2013, Friday, Hour #2
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Yes.
America's big voice on the right is away today.
And this is your small furtive sinister foreign accent on the right sitting in.
I'll be here Monday.
Mark Belling is gonna be here Tuesday, and then uh Rush returns Wednesday.
He's coming back from his little break early.
He's taking a break for the autumnal equinox or something.
Uh but he's coming back from it early, and he will be here live Wednesday to take you through the rest of the week with full strength, all American excellence in broadcasting.
But it's the end of the week, and you know what that means.
Live from Ice Station EIB.
It's open line Friday.
Yes, well, you know, Rush yesterday did uh open line Friday on Thursday.
So we're doing kinda semi-open line Friday.
Uh as you know, the the way this works is that uh Monday to Thursday, a highly trained broadcast specialist determines the content of the program.
But then on Friday, anything goes, and you are not required to be an authentic credentialed licensed broadcasting expert.
Anyone can just uh call up and have a go.
1-800-282-2882.
Because Rush did Rush did open line Friday and Thursday, we're doing a kind of semi-open line Friday, uh, in which if you're uh if you're one of these big time dictators in town for the UN, you can talk about anything you want to talk about.
If you're one of the oppressed serfs of that dictatorship, you're free to talk about anything you want to talk about.
But in practice for Obamacare, if you're an authentic free-born American citizen, you've got to be constrained and compliant with every regulatory dictat.
But if you think you can manage that, do call 1800-282-2882, semi-open line Friday on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Uh Wall Street Journal.
Washington, here's the headline.
Washington sees income sore as most of US declines.
Well now there's a surprise.
There's a surprise.
American incomes have tumbled over the last decade, but for many people in Washington, DC, it's been something of a party.
Income for the median household income for the nation as a whole dropped six point six per cent uh from uh fifty-five grand to fifty-one grand.
Uh that's not that's not a small chunk of change, by the way.
For for many people, that's that's the margin between existing uh and having just enough to do something special for your kids, uh to uh to give them some uh special lessons, uh piano lessons or whatever.
It's uh that four thousand, that four thousand dollars a year is not an insignificant sum for most people.
Median household income in the period between two thousand two thousand and twelve dropped six point six per cent.
But in Washington, DC, the income of the typical DC household rose twenty-three point three percent between two thousand and two thousand and twelve.
Why is that?
Why is that?
Go on, take a wild guess.
Because government is now the place to be.
Government is now the place to be in the United States.
Uh access to where government happens is is where the big bucks are.
I've got a little bit about this in uh in my book After America, talking about how the the counties with the highest medium income median income uh are now concentrated against Washington, uh around Washington and other big government state capitals like uh like Sacramento.
If you want to make money, that's where the people who make a lot of money are.
That's where the money is.
People say, Why do you rob banks? 'Cause that's where the money is.
Why do you go to uh uh a suburban county of Washington?
We were talking about Falls Church Virginia, which is where the company uh that uh that US security clearances are outsourced to.
I mean, who would have thought about that, by the way?
I'm a small government guy, but I think actually when you're outsourcing security clearances, that may be uh a stage too far.
But that's basically government security clearances.
The four million government security clearances are outsourced to a company based in Falls Church, Virginia.
Uh, by the way, I don't know who does the security clearance for the company that does the security clearances.
It's not clear to me whether they've got a security clearance that will enable them to give these four million people security clearances.
It's like the old uh nineteen twenties novelty song uh who who uh takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker's busy taking care.
This is the national security version of that.
Uh who does the security clearance on the security clearance company when you've outsourced the security clearance to the security clearance people?
But but why do you think that company is based in Falls Church, Virginia?
Uh because that's that's uh suburban Washington.
That's the place to be, that's where the powerful people are, that's where the lobbyists are, that's where you m where you make money.
And now we see that as household income has declined in the United States, uh in Washington, DC, it's managed to go up twenty-three point three percent.
And I wouldn't mind and I wouldn't mind if you also uh if you I wouldn't bet mind betting if you also looked at those surrounding counties.
They've also uh gone up too.
That's where the money is.
That's where the power is.
And if you think about it, once upon a time it used to be like uh steel town.
That would be a boom town.
It'd be the towns where where uh where businesses made the things that made America the economic engine of the world.
Uh like Detroit at uh in nineteen fifty uh nine, uh nineteen sixty I think it was, Detroit had the highest median uh income in America.
These were the places to go, because they made things.
Uh and so that's where the money was, and that's where the rich were, and that's where you went uh to lead a life where you could uh work hard and make a big ton of money.
And now what does America make?
America makes government.
So you go to a government town, and that's where the lobbyists and consultants and the people who get the contracts and the people who make things happen are.
So in Washington, DC and in the state capitals, that's where the money is, and they're the boom towns.
That's where you want to go.
That's the towns where they've got the uh big incomes, that's the towns where they've got the elite lifestyle, that's where the elites congregate.
Uh and that's what and that's what's happened.
So as American incomes have declined uh uh and uh median household income has declined, median household income in government towns has gone up because that's what America makes these days, government.
And that's what it's about.
And by the way, when we look at these uh, you know uh stories about uh government health care.
Government health care is not about health care, it's about government.
It's about government.
You read these stories out of California.
Uh there's one today from Lan Hee Chen, who I believe uh works for um the Hoover Institute, uh research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
And he's pointing out that already the rationing has begun.
The the best deal you can get on the California Health Insurance Exchange is Health Net.
Uh but if you enroll in a Health Net plan, you have just access to just two thousand uh three hundred and sixteen physicians in uh Los Angeles County, which is about less than half of the doctors available uh to enrollees in the Kaiser Plan, and about one quarter of the physicians available to enrollees in the um Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield plan.
So the health care plans are changing now.
They the only way uh th as as Obamacare is implemented, uh and as in effect it removes health insurance, because if uh if uh an insurer cannot discriminate against you on the basis of risk, that that is to say,
if you come in and you're riddled with contagious diseases and you're riddled with life-threatening diseases that are going to shorten your lifespan and are going to make it more likely that you'll use far more uh hospital care, and an insurer is prevented by law from assessing you on the basis of that risk, then he's no longer in any sense an insurer.
Um insurers can't vary premiums, for example, based on health status and they have and they can't charge a sixty-four-year-old more than three times as much as they would charge an eighteen-year-old.
Now that's ridiculous.
A sixty-four-year-old generally, unless they're in exceptionally good health, uh, needs health care to a significantly higher degree than the average eighteen year old does.
But government says, no, no, no, you're not in the insurance business anymore.
You're just a middleman between there is no health insurance in this country.
There's nothing nothing now that approximates to anything like health insurance.
Uh a an insurer is basically no more than uh someone who uh im uh uh implements the federal regulations and imposes them on the citizens.
And it's like so much of what's happened to America.
America doesn't really have a private banking system anymore under uh the uh Dodd Frank and all the rest of it.
Basically, banks can compete on the checkbook design and uh banks can uh compete on the colour of the debit card, but they basically cannot uh compete on services anymore because it's a feder federally regulated industry.
And that's what's happened with uh that's happened with mortgages too, mortgages.
So you don't have uh with the uh Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
And it's the same with Blue Cross and Blue Shield, who are basically just like Fanny Cross and Freddie Shield now.
That's what's happened to the health care industry.
There's no private health insurance.
So the point to remember is is where we came in with that uh government health care is not about health care, it's about government, and it's about government control.
And what the Republicans need to bear in mind here is that Obama understands the end game here, and his end game is a one-size government-run health care system from Maine to Hawaii.
So he doesn't care if Obamacare collapses, because it's all unworkable.
Because government never goes back, it only goes forward.
So that all the changes, uh as it's turned out that all the things they've said about Medicare or Medicaid or HMOs or all the other stuff, uh all the barnacles and crust to the Hulk, and they just decide, well, we just need to add a few more barnacles, and then the whole thing's gonna work just fine.
They never go back.
So Republicans need to think about this clearly.
Uh they need to understand that if if uh Obamacare collapses, uh Obama w won't care, 'cause that will be just an excuse for full-scale socialized uh universal health care, and he'll blame Republicans for the collapse too.
So Republicans have to start thinking about what comes after Obamacare, what's better than Obamacare?
What doesn't tell you uh what doctor it is you can see, what what doesn't restrict your access to health care?
Uh what doesn't involve a vast centralized Edward Snowden secured database keeping records of how many bisexual drug addicts you have sex with uh and all the other behavioral by the way, anyone who says by the way, anybody who gives this information to the to their doctor.
I I was in uh I I went to the doctor uh uh last year, and I was supposed to be seeing the so-called nurse practitioner.
The doctor was away, so I had an appointment with the nurse practitioner.
But when I got there, the nurse practitioner wasn't there, so the receptionist practitioner was filling in the form with me uh while I'm standing there in reception, and there's the little old lady sitting around uh in in reception area, and she goes, uh do you wear a seatbelt when you drive?
Do you own guns?
Do you smoke?
Uh then she comes to the uh are you sexually active?
And I looked at her and I said, You first.
This is nothing to do with why I'm going to the doctor.
Uh and and uh these questions the the the sudden practice of asking these questions in the last couple of years and the degeneration of American health care into this pointless box checking is for no other reason than that the federal government is paying these people to collect this information and to store it in the big centralized data bank that will be uh as secure as all America's other centralized data banks,
which is to say that Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning or whatever she's called this week, or someone else is going to come along, and all that stuff is going to be on the front page of The Guardian in London and Le Monde in Paris and uh the South China Morning Post.
Uh every there will be an and all your not just your health care information, but your behavioral information uh will be in one big insecure government database.
1-800-282-2882, semi-open line Friday continues on the EIB network.
Mark Stein in Farush on the EIB network.
Uh the New York Post reports that uh mayoral frontrunner Bill de Blasio offered no real solution Thursday when confronted with statistics revealing an alarming rise in gun violence following uh a federal judge's ruling against the uh New York Police Department's stop and frisk program.
Uh shootings are up thirteen percent since this uh judge's order.
And Bill De Blasio was asked about this, and he said uh we must restore the relationship between the police and community.
It's all about relationships to Bill De Blasio.
It's uh that's nice when you're uh when you're on the sharp end down on the street in uh Brooklyn or the Bronx and uh and you'd like it if there was uh the you you can't have a gun in uh gun free New York, uh but the other guy mysteriously has one, and uh you'd like to uh uh you'd like it if there was a police officer there, but the police officer is back at headquarters working on his relationships.
They could do with uh working on their relationships in Chicago, too.
Thirteen people shot, including a three year old.
Uh Thursday night.
I think actually there were twenty-three people shot overall in Chicago last night.
Twenty-three people shot.
This is Obama land.
This is the community he organized.
Up to thirteen people were shot in Chicago Thursday night, including a three-year-old.
Uh the uh the this was uh at about ten fifteen PM at a basketball court in the back of the city's back of the yard neighborhood on the south side.
Uh witness Julian Harris, who said his three year old nephew was wounded in the cheek.
I don't know quite why a three year old is at a basketball court at ten fifteen on a Thursday night.
But uh but thirteen people shot in this one incident.
Twenty-three shot in uh in Chicago la This happens every nobody cares.
Nobody cares it's not like Trayvon's hoodie.
The Smithsonian aren't interested in buying the hoodies of these guys who get shot night after night after night in Chicago.
Nobody cares about them.
Uh but that's the w that's Obama World.
That's the community he organized.
Uh and uh they they obviously the police the police are working on their relationships too in Chicago.
Let's go to Suzanne in Fountain Inn, South Carolina.
Suzanne, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with.
Hello.
Can you hear me?
Oh, I can hear you loud and clear, Susan.
Okay.
Um I have a question for you, but first I want to say I admire you because your brain is so full of knowledge and insight, it's all wrapped up tight like a rubber band ball.
And I could listen to you for hours.
Yeah, the the I think my the rubber band of my brain is wrapped too tight.
Now you mention it.
I gotta l I gotta I gotta step out and loosen it, Suzanne.
What's on your mind today?
Uh I would like to ask you we know how the president's picking and choosing who gets Obama care and who doesn't.
Even the immigrants got exempt out.
How can we fight this?
Wait, wait, wait a minute.
What what is that immigrant exemption you're talking about, first of all, Susan?
The illegal immigrants.
Oh, the illegal Oh, yeah, that's right, that's right.
They're exempt from it.
That means No, no, no, I know.
You you got me you got me worried there, because uh one of the curses of of not being an illegal immigrant is that you have to be part of Obamacare.
But if you're if I'd just like done what everybody else does, I'd have my big exemption.
So I won't make that mistake.
It's kind of unlawful, isn't it?
I mean, well, it it it is.
You know, you know what it's stri what it's about is equality before the law, Suzanne, because uh laws laws are meant to apply to everybody.
You know, you don't have a situation where there's a thirty mile hour speed limit, but if you're a union that happens to donate to Obama, you can go sixty-seven miles an hour.
Uh you don't have a thirty mile per hour speed limit, but if you're a uh green energy solutions crony who knows who to call uh in the White House and s gets through to Valerie Jarrett, you can go seventy-eight miles an hour.
The thirty mile per hour speed limit is supposed to apply to everybody.
Laws are supposed to apply for everybody.
And and the reason we are disfigured now by these like three thousand page bills uh is because these are not laws.
Uh and they have to be three thousand pages long, and then you have to have all this extra stuff about who's exempt and who's got a waiver and who's got an opt-out.
Because uh nobody uh there is no equality before the law, and they do not apply to everybody.
They apply to how connected you are.
And in particular, and this is something, by the way, uh Rush is Rush uh talks a lot about the Founding Fathers, and he's got his book uh coming uh out uh and uh the reason why it's worth thinking about them is because one thing that would horrify them, uh would horrify these guys,
is that so much of the business of government now deals not between the government and the citizen, but with all these plugged in connected institutions whom the government eventu uh effectively says you represent these designated groups.
You know, when it comes to women, we'll deal with you.
Uh when it comes to Hispanics, we'll deal with you.
When it comes to the LGBT community, we'll deal with you.
And what it what it means is that uh less and less is there equality before the law, and more and more is this, you know, whether you can who how deep you can penetrate the White House switchboard and persuade Obama to give you the opt-outs.
And this'll kill this is killing self-government in the United States of America.
Yes, Rush returns live next week.
He's taking a couple of days uh off, but don't forget if you go to Rush Limbaugh.com, you need not be discombobulated by any sinister foreign guest hosts, because if you're a Rush 24-7 subscriber, you get Rush any time you want it.
Rush was uh talking to some caller uh I think it was yesterday or the day before, who was uh saying that he discovered Rush, in fact, through the website through Rush Limbaugh.com, and it is a great uh website if you uh if you haven't checked it out.
I like the uh the the um Rush uh quote uh quote of the day thing uh feature uh on there.
Rush Limbaugh.com and you need not be discombobulated by sinister foreign guest hosts.
Now, I um I mentioned this, I've been talking about the high-tech security uh that is now advancing from the NSA through the IRS to your health records, because effectively Obamacare uh represents the uh nationalization of your bladder, the nationalization of your colon.
All your body parts are now under the regulatory regime, uh just like Pat's Great Dane that he was talking to us about in the previous hour from Colorado, it's now under the regulatory regime of the same United States government that led Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden walk away with all its secrets.
The Pentagon.
The Pentagon is not short of money.
The Pentagon is not short of money.
It's responsible for over forty percent of the planet's military budget.
It it spends more the Pentagon spends more uh than uh Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Australia, all the middle ranked military powers combined combined.
But its fax machine has broken down.
Uh this is from uh ours Technica.
Uh the office of the Secret that by the way, when I say the fax machine, I mean just that.
It the the despite uh being responsible for over forty percent of the planet's military budget, it only has one fax machine.
And the Office of the Secretary of Defense's fax machine is responsible for freedom of information requests.
If you want to make a f freedom of information request uh from the Pentagon, you have to fax it in.
Don't ask me why, it's the government.
Don't question the government.
Are you insane?
The government must have reasons for doing this.
The government must have reasons for saying if you want to have a make a freedom of information request, it has to be done by facsimile transmission only, and it has to be faxed to the one fax machine that the Pentagon owns.
Uh and uh by the way, this doesn't surprise me.
Uh a few years ago I was at a a lunch in Washington that uh Don Rumsfeld spoke at.
He was he was Secretary of Defense.
This is uh I guess uh seven or eight years ago, something like that.
And and the conditions for Don Rumsfeld uh uh telling us all this stuff is that the lunch is off the record, and he's gonna make some remarks, and none of us uh to say anything uh or tell anything to anyone about what he said.
So he gets up and he starts to speak, and about five minutes into his speech, he uh he points at this little thing that no one's noticed before, sitting uh just on the window sill, uh, which is like a uh uh uh uh uh uh some crappy old uh cassette recorder that costs about twenty bucks from Radio Shack.
And he goes very sternly, who is that?
And you can't hear a pin drop.
Because we all think, oh no, some idiot, the uh some some idiot at the lunch hasn't respected the confidential off the record thing, and he's put his crummy little twenty dollar Radio Shack cassette recorder uh on the windowsill and is illegally recording Don Rumsfeld's remarks.
And at that point some guy from the b uh uh uh pack uh uh from the back of the room, a Pentagon official at the back of the room stands up and says, uh actually, sir, that's ours.
And Rumsfeld is uh astonished that uh the Pentagon is recording his remarks for posterity and proceeds with the rest of his speech.
The rest of us are astonished that the Pentagon, which spends more than, you know, as I said, forty-three percent of the planet's entire military budget needs a crummy old twenty dollar uh cassette recorder from Radio Shack to record the I mean, don't they have a drone overhead recording it?
Don't they have a satellite in outer space?
Why do they need to go to Radio Shack and buy but that was apparently the Pentagon's cassette recorder?
The Pentagon had one cassette recorder and it has one fax machine.
And the fax machine on which you, the free born citizen of the United States, are uh permitted to make freedom of information requests to find out what the government is doing.
The fax machine of the office of the Secretary of Defense has broken down, has broken down.
And so it it is no longer accepting freedom of information requests uh until uh they have either repaired the uh fax machine, uh which they hope to do sometime in October, although it says it could extend into November.
Uh but if that doesn't work, they they'll and they have to order a new fax machine, uh then that can't happen until the start of the new fiscal year, which, as we've just heard, uh the mean spirited Republicans by voting to block Obamacare uh uh uh uh have now threatened the ability of the Pentagon, the Pentagon.
This the Pentagon, these are the guys with drones, they can they can eavesdrop on a guy in a cave in Waziristan, they can do that, but they can't they don't have the money to buy a new fax machine to hear your freedom of information request.
They won't be able to, if the fax machine can't be repaired, maybe as simple as just it needs a new roll of paper, maybe a paper jam, maybe a paper jam.
But you know what that's like at the Pentagon, it has to be sent away to some distant to whoever they've outsourced, it's probably Haliburton, a subsidiary of Halliburton probably has the contract to uh to to take out the jammed paper at the Pentagon fax machine.
So they won't be able to they won't be able to uh replace the f uh Pentagon fax machine until maybe next year.
This is the government of the United States, and they are telling you seriously that the Pentagon fax machine uh is broken and can't take your freedom of information requests and won't be repaired until November.
That's the government.
That's big government.
The bigger government gets, the worse it gets.
The bigger government that tries to do everything ends up not being able to do anything.
Uh and when they tried to take over health care, which is something that is, you know, the si basically the size of the French economy.
So it's basically a G7 economy.
It's like going to a G7 meeting and the President of the United States looking across the table and saying, Hey, you know what, we're gonna swallow you whole.
Let's see how that works out.
So how's it working out?
Uh Home Depot.
Uh home Home Depot has uh told twenty thousand part-time workers uh that it they're no longer gonna be covered by its limited liability medical plan.
Twenty thousand part-time workers.
Home Depot is a good employer.
And uh they provided health care for part-time workers, they're no longer going to be able to do that.
After December the thirty-first, uh those plans will no longer be offered under the Obamacare law, so they have to be shifted over to the public exchanges where there's more options.
Uh American universities likewise.
That's just today.
These these stories every day they don't get any attention because everybody's doing them.
It doesn't matter.
It's fast food places.
It's colleges.
It's everybody.
Because it's the equivalent of the government taking over the French economy and then saying, oh, don't worry, there'll be a few glitches in implementation, but otherwise it'll all be done harmoniously.
and that's why they have these stories every day.
And and Suzanne was asking me, and I think it's worth uh it's worth taking that question seriously.
What do you have to do to get a waiver?
Well, the honest answer is most of us can't get a waiver because we don't know anyone.
We don't know who to call.
We don't have it in.
We don't know who to we we're not powerful enough to get a waiver.
And what it's gonna mean, I don't know what it does for California, but but it's gonna mean on the East Coast, for example, uh the people are going to be setting up cash transaction medical facilities, which will be outlawed here soon, by the way.
I notice in California, a friend of mine, she's just uh started she's a doctor and she just takes checks.
She doesn't want to deal with Anthem Blue Cross or any of the intermediary bodies or any of the federal regulations or whatever.
So if you come in with a broken leg, she says, sure, I'll patch it and write me a check.
And you can uh pay her a retainer as you would for a certain amount of services per year.
Uh but she just wants checks and cash, and she doesn't want to have to deal with any of these third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh parties uh that that uh that are now part of the system.
Uh and you'll be seeing that I think uh they'll eventually make that illegal here.
So what you're gonna be seeing is that there will be health care tourism.
There's there's health care tourism currently in India, uh, but it's going to move a lot closer.
It'll they'll be building hospitals in Bermuda, they'll be building hospitals in the Bahamas, they'll be building hospitals in in the Turks and Caicos for people who just want to go and get the broken leg reset.
They don't want to be part of some government vast government bureaucracy that wants to know whether they wear a seatbelt uh or whether they have had sex with bisexual men uh that just wants to reset the broken leg.
And it doesn't matter where you know how many bisexual drug addicts and smokers and non-seatbelt owners that you've had sex with, they're just gonna reset the leg.
No complications.
Everything will be focused on resetting the leg, putting the leg in plaster, putting you on the plane, and shipping you back again.
There'll be no uh and I think there's gonna be uh that's that's gonna be the world of the future.
So for most of us, the only opt-outs are gonna be offshore.
The only opt-outs are gonna be out of the country.
Uh and compared, and by the way, those are going to be very competitively priced compared to uh compared to some of the the way these insurance plans are going to end up before the whole thing collapses.
Mark Stein in for Rush, semi-open line Friday, we'll go to your calls in just a moment.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Before we uh we we leave this Obamacare thing, by the way, Rush did a montage uh the other day of all these Democrats saying, It's the law of the land.
Obamacare is the law of the land.
How dare you question the law of the land, the law of the land, the law of the land?
It's their new talking point.
Obamacare is the law of the land.
So what?
Obama doesn't care it's the law of the land.
He says, Oh, I don't like this paragraph.
We're not going to implement that for another year or two.
His Majesty King Barack says uh no, no, no, this section here we're not going to be implementing uh for the the employer mandate, we'll put that on hold.
We'll give an opt-out here, we'll give an opt-out there.
It's i if the law of the land is flexible for his majesty the king to pick and choose what bits of it he likes, it's flexible enough for his subjects and their elected representatives in Congress to pick and choose uh which bits of it they like too.
Anyone can play that game.
Uh that's uh the that that the the royal prerogative exercised by Obama on this, that only the bits of the law of the la the law of the so-called law of the land, he'll implement the bits he likes here and there and other laws of the land he won't implement.
Uh but even with this one that's the law of the land, uh, he it's i he decides which bits of it he's gonna implement and which he's not.
Let's go to Rich in Baltimore.
Rich, uh you are live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
It's an honor.
Say a few minutes ago you put out kind of a throwaway line that the government should run the security clearance process.
I used to run the Oh, yeah, we were talking about this this farm, yeah.
That made the government system work.
And uh that was before that was for something called the DSS, which was before whatever this company is called, now they did it.
Right.
And uh as someone who's One of the four million that has a security clearance.
Believe me, the process right now is so much better than it was before.
When I ran it, it could shut down at a moment's notice, and we would have no idea how to fix it for weeks.
Uh the backlogs were for years to get a security clearance, and now nowadays it takes four or five months, which is a normal amount of time they should take to get to get get a clearance.
So I guess all I really got to say is you put your faith in the government that the government can do something better.
But this is actually a case where they used to do it.
They decided other people could do it better, and believe it or not, they were right.
Other people do it a lot better.
Okay, I'll I'll ask you, I'll ask you.
I take your point there, Rich.
I was making m the point I was making was this that I don't think four million people uh should have security clearances.
If you if you look at uh everyone got excited by WikiLeaks, for example, when all that stuff was dumped in the hands of the Guardian in London and all the rest of it, and they had all these exciting uh diplomatic cables that said, oh, you know, Gaddafi, when you get close to him, he is very bad skin and he likes to wear women's dresses.
I mean, the bulk of the stuff uh that they were the that they were leaking was actually stuff that it wasn't worth keeping secret in the f in the first place.
And you had to go through the newspaper editors had to go through that stuff to find the nuggets of gold in amongst all the dross.
So why is it that four million people is isn't it the case that a lot of the stuff we you require security clearances for isn't worth keeping secret in the first place, Rich?
No comments.
He's one of the four billion that's a fair point, D. Uh, that that's what the that's the system that the government Look, I I'm a big I'm a believer in small is is best on this stuff.
For example, if you take the chemical weapons thing, the the red line of Obama, uh the first inkling that that in fact the Syrians had crossed his red line and a bunch because originally he said it wasn't using chemical weapons, it was a bunch of chemical weapons being moved around.
And it turned out to be British and French intelligence that reported that chemical weapons were being moved around.
And okay, you can say, well, the French were the colonial power in Syria.
That's seventy years ago.
Uh there is no particular reason at uh, for example, given the comparative budgets why French intelligence on Syria should be better than US intelligence.
So I'm in favor of I I don't believe big is best when it comes to intelligence.
And uh and I uh the idea of uh uh four million people with security clearances, I think is uh uh essentially renders large parts of the process uh completely pointless.
And and the scandal, by the way, the scandal of Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden isn't a hero, and uh the sex change guy uh isn't a hero, uh none of those guys are heroes.
But what ought to be the disgrace is that these guys were able to walk out with the stuff so easily.
Uh and that's uh and that's part of that's a big part of the problem too.
Now uh the the other point which uh which I think is uh is fair enough too, is that w when you actually look at it, uh there's there's about eighteen hundred new security clearances.
They take about four or five months, but basically eighteen hundred are being approved every day of the week.
And uh the issue here is whether anybody could seriously approve uh uh any company has the resources to approve eighteen hundred security clearances every single day of the week, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days uh days a year.
Uh we've been talking about the state of security and how that's gonna work when it's by to health care and lots of other stuff.
Don't forget it's semi-open line Friday, and we'll take your calls at 1800, 282-2882.
Republicans are uh cutting 40 billion in the house, cutting 40 billion from the food stamp program over the next ten years, uh, which is in other words, that's nothing.
That's uh that's four billion dollars a year, which would be uh big chunk of change in in most countries, but it's a rounding area in the food stamp budget.
Uh, but they want to cut off able-bodied adults who don't find or train for jobs.
Uh this this is the fastest growing group in the food stamp program are able-bodied adults without dependents, who've increased from one point seven million in two thousand and seven to four point five million in two thousand eleven.
That's because of the unemployment people with not even looking for work anymore, uh people doing part time jobs and all the rest of it.
This is now the fastest growing group in the food stamp program.
Uh, are able-bodied adults without children receiving food stamps from the federal government.
Obama was serious when he said he was going to transform this country.
He he he is.
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