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Dec. 28, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:24
December 28, 2015, Monday, Hour #2
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It's great to be back on the Rush program.
One of the joys that I get in doing this show, well, joy is the wrong word.
It's stressful doing this program.
It's stressful for a guest host.
Why?
He asks.
There's only so good that a guest host can be, whatever that limit is.
And we all aspire to be like, do a really, really good job filling in for Rush.
Best case scenario, you do a really good show and people say, well, gee, I wish Rush was here, but that guy wasn't bad and I learned something that was kind of interesting.
That's the best case scenario.
The worst case scenario is you screw things up so badly, the entire EIB network crumbles.
Rush comes back from vacation.
What did that Belling do?
Why do we have all these complaints?
What are the affiliates up?
You can follow up and you're in here.
There's stress associated with that.
Plus, you really don't want to do a bad job.
The thing about anything in radio, but especially doing a show like that, I was just talking to somebody back home about doing the program and why it is kind of stressful doing it.
It's fun having done it and it is fun doing it while most things that are fun have a little bit of stress associated with it.
But I was talking to somebody, I was trying to explain it to them.
See, it's weird being on radio.
I'm sitting here in this room.
Unlike Rush, I actually get to look at Mike Mamon straight on because Rush is in one place and he's in another.
I happen to be in the place that he's at.
There's Mo Snerdle, who rush these all the time.
Those are the only two human beings that I see.
Here's why it's stressful.
I do get what we're doing here.
We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands and into the millions of people who are listening.
Imagine if, you know, I'm standing in some sort of arena or stadium where there's 800,000.
Be a little nerve-wracked.
Well, that is kind of what I'm doing.
It just doesn't seem like it because I'm really only talking to just you.
Anyway, that's correct.
The feedback is relatively immediate, but not as instantaneous.
I don't get to see the facial reaction.
By the way, the ditto cam is off today.
I went to Rush's site, rushlimbaugh.com, which is always there for you, 24-7.
And if you're a Rush 24-7 member, you get even more.
I went to RushLimbaw.com, and it says right on there, the Ditto cam is off because Mark Belling is here.
That's good.
You should see that thing.
It looks like this is like a high-tech firing squad gun.
It's pointed right at me.
I'm so glad that thing is off.
The stress factor would be enough.
There you'd see me sweating and nervous and drinking the tea and hammering the coffee and pounding the water.
Anyway, one of the joys, where was I?
That's where I was.
One of the joys in doing this program is you get to share things with the audience that maybe has not been on Rush's radar, or I can give you a take on something that I've picked up on, or I can share a story about something that's going on in Wisconsin where we've had very interesting politics the last few years.
I want to share one of those stories right now.
This is something that some of you know everything about and most of you know nothing about, but it's really remarkable.
It's something guys never talk about, but lots of women are into.
Pinterest is like that.
That's the big one for women, isn't it?
Guys don't post on Pinterest.
Women do.
This is sort of like that, except there's a serious component to it.
It's called Etsy.
E-P-S-Y.
Etsy's incredible.
This is an amazing story going on in America.
And a lot of people don't know about it.
And I'm not doing this to advertise for it.
I'm doing it because when you see something like Etsy, you understand that for all the Bernie Sanders stuff out there and all the attempts by Obama to debunk capitalism and entrepreneurialism and the lecturing that we don't have a level playing field and you can't get ahead, the American people keep bouncing back and responding to things that prove that that's just not true.
Here's what Etsy is.
It's just a middleman.
They're a website.
And they sell stuff.
The stuff they sell, they don't make.
Etsy doesn't make anything.
Etsy is a pure middleman.
It's kind of like eBay, except they don't do auctions.
And the product line is generally limited to stuff.
It's broad, but the majority of the stuff on Etsy are arts and crafty sort of things.
And almost everybody who sells their stuff on Etsy is somebody who got into this as a sideline.
I know a few people who've done this, which is how I first became aware of it.
And then I had another experience during the Christmas season here that I want to tell you about.
What Etsy is, is an opportunity for, let's suppose you're good at ceramics.
Some people are.
Okay, you're good at ceramics.
Before Etsy, before the internet, where are you going with that?
You'd make a couple of ceramic dishes and you give them to friends for Christmas, or you'd make something and you got the stuff laying around your own house, or maybe you have a garage sale, or maybe you donate a little bit to a fundraiser.
But otherwise, that's it.
On Etsy, you make your ceramic thing, you take a photo of it, and you put it on the internet, and you sell it.
Other people will take like jewelry stuff, handmade little rings or lockets, bracelets.
They make this stuff themselves.
They sell them.
Photography, that's a big one.
There are people who take beautiful photographs.
I mean, really, really good stuff.
Where were they going to go with that before?
Prior to the internet, you take those photos.
There was no way for you to turn this into money.
And there was no way for anybody else, for that matter, ever to say it.
There are people who are making a lot of money.
When I say a lot, that may be misleading.
Decent money, either supplementing their family income or, in some cases, living off of something that in the past had been a hobby.
There's a lot of bad that comes out of the internet.
There's a lot of exploitation.
There's a lot of people who are ripped off.
There's, I think, a desensitization of the culture with the amount of porn that's out there.
People take advantage of the internet to try to get children to do bad things.
There's a lot of bad things that come out of the internet, but there are also a lot of good things.
And one of the things the web has done is it's empowered people not only to be able to speak out.
Everybody talks about how with Twitter and Facebook, everybody has a forum, everybody has a microphone, that we now live in a world in which everyone can talk and everyone can put out a point of view.
It isn't just that.
Everyone could also sell something now.
So what Etsy does is it serves as a middleman.
And suppose I want to buy something from one of these vendors.
The money I send is sent to Etsy.
And Etsy doesn't pay the vendor until they know that I've sent my stuff.
There are sites that sell sports tickets like this, StubHub and some of the others.
It's a model that a lot are able to emulate.
Anyway, on Etsy, you have people who had a hobby that they were very, very good at.
And they saw this site develop serving as a middleman.
And they decided to try it.
No guarantee of success.
If your stuff doesn't look good, probably you're not going to sell any.
There's a zillion people that are out there selling their wares on Etsy.
So you're competing with a lot of other people.
But people have found a market.
Christmas.
I have a niece who's into some of this stuff, lockets and jewelry and stuff like that.
In the past, a goof like me, what am I supposed to do?
You're going to go to a jewelry store, you're going to go somewhere, you're going to go to a craft shop and try to find something.
Well, who made all of that stuff before?
It was mass-produced stuff put out by a company.
You want to find something unique.
There's nothing more unique than something that was made by one person that nobody else even knew that they made it.
You would not believe the amount of material that's out there.
Themed stuff, individual creations.
It's kind of extraordinary.
I'm guessing right now the website's probably being, what's that called?
Etsy, E-T-S-Y.
It's not an attempt to advertise it.
I want to make a political point here.
Where there is a will, there is a way.
We can tell people all they want that capitalism is dead, entrepreneurialism is dead.
Yet again and again and again, people on their own figure out a way to make money.
In some cases, these are probably people who were real well off, maybe some are, who said, hey, I could sell some stuff here.
And then you get good at it and you work harder at it.
And you sell more, and you sell more, and you sell more.
It's a way of not only lifting some people up, this is the true capitalist system.
People have an opportunity to buy things that they never would have been able to find before.
We're able to move away from a mass-produced assembly line, somebody's version of art, or some jewelry store's determination of this is what your jewelry will look like, or go to an art store and find some reproduction of a photograph that they sold a million copies of.
Or you can go out and get something that's individual and unique.
The entrepreneurial spirit in this country is just overwhelming.
This is what people want.
And this thing which is serving a need, selling items, often rather inexpensive, to people who like them and making money for the people who create them and giving an outlet that didn't exist before for creative people to be able to share with others and make some money off of their art.
There isn't an involvement anywhere in here of government.
Barack Obama didn't give some stupid grant to create Etsy.
We didn't go out and provide any alternative energy credits or green energy credits.
There aren't any minority set-asides there.
This was simply capitalism at work.
The internet just happened.
People have created apps.
People have created websites.
People have created just about anything that you can think of.
People are selling music.
People are creating art.
They're doing all sorts of things.
And this website is just one of them.
But there's no way you can go on it without marveling at how much stuff is out there.
And by the way, I bought some of this stuff for my niece.
I mean, one of them, there's some guy in Arizona.
Then there's like a woman in Louisville.
And they all say who the vendor is.
And they send you out a little thing that indicates when your thing is being shipped.
So the stuff is coming like from everywhere.
It's coming from all across the country.
And you can just see these are regular moms, in some cases, dads, maybe some kids, maybe some empty nesters.
There are people just out there creating their own stuff.
It's an extraordinary thing.
My guess is that listening to me right now are some of you who bought from Etsy, or maybe even somebody who are out there creating things and selling on them.
If so, I'd love to hear from you and hear your experiences.
The phone number on the Rush program is 1-800-282-2882.
I know this sounds like a girly topic, doesn't it?
This is the economy.
This really is what the economy is.
Somebody seeing a need for a product and somebody creating that product.
And again, who would have known?
Before there was an internet 20 years ago, well, gee, I really think I'd like to have somebody's handmade jewelry from a state 1700 miles away.
Nobody knew that need existed.
Somebody just figured out that maybe somebody wants this thing that I have, and people do want it.
This is the pure raw economy.
This is capitalism in its purest form.
And there is nothing but good out of what happens on a site like this.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Bellingham for Rush Limbaugh.
Let's go to some calls.
Let's try Rochester, New York.
John, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hey, I've never heard anybody mention Etsy.
I've known about it for quite a while.
I think it's an absolutely fantastic site.
I'm into jewelry.
I've bought several pieces.
As a matter of fact, I was looking around to try to replace a ring that I had years and years ago, found it on the site.
I ended up buying three from the young lady.
I actually spoke to her on the phone.
She was very accommodating.
When I wear the stuff, people say, where did you get that?
Because I've never seen that.
Because they want something like it, and they can't because you'll probably have, she probably made about five or six pieces that look just like that.
And that's it.
So you get something that's completely unique that people ask you about.
And it really wasn't possible before.
Mike Mamon was telling me that his wife is into arts and crafts and used to do the flea market scene and so forth.
Now everything's online.
She uses eBay, similar concept.
It's a way for people to be able to get things that they never would have gotten before.
As I said when I introduced the topic, it's something that some people have heard about for years, and it's part of their life, but most people have never once, and there's a lot of other websites and operations that have developed through the web since we've had an online world that have done the same kind of thing.
eBay is the biggest.
They're all a little bit different.
But what they've done is they've created an opportunity for people to buy things that they never would have found before and for people to sell things that they didn't have an outlet for before.
And it's happened entirely without government involvement, which is precisely why you've got this big push to sales tax everything on the internet.
The government does want to have a piece of this.
Let's go to Oceanside, California and Noel.
Noel, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
How are you doing, Mark?
I'm great.
Pleasure to hear you, and thanks for taking my call.
I'm a retired environmental scientist, and I've been following this global warming hysteria very closely.
And one of the things that nobody is talking about is the carbon cycle.
Now, according to the IPCC, 150 gigatons goes into the atmosphere from natural sources each year.
And simultaneously, 150 gigatons goes back to the oceans and the land.
It's called the carbon cycle.
Now, compare that to five gigatons per year from all man-made sources.
So the point of these two numbers is that a tiny change in 150 gigatons is much greater numerically than a large change in five gigatons.
In other words, a slight change in the natural cycle of carbon is going to have more of an impact than anything that man produces or causes.
Is that the point you're trying to give me, Noel?
Exactly.
And you'll notice that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is flat over the past year.
That's because carbon dioxide is a function of temperature.
Temperature is not a function of carbon dioxide.
And we know this.
We don't need any theory.
We know that carbon dioxide, the solubility of carbon dioxide in water, is a strong inverse function of temperature.
Now, you said you're a retired environmental scientist.
The thing that's just fascinating about that, Noel, is we keep getting told that the science is clear.
The only people who don't believe it are kooks.
Yet you spent your entire career working on this, and you have a different point of view.
They're trying to marginalize you or say that you don't exist as if only one set of people can determine what truth is here, yet you present a very strong case based on your expertise, and they want to pretend that you don't exist, that every scientist has drawn the opposite conclusion.
But it's going to be patently obvious that my side is correct or this is a correct observation because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will go down as the Earth cools.
It always has and it always will.
In other words, the cause and effect that they've been citing, you're claiming they have exactly wrong, that it's simply an effect and a cause, that they're seeing things that are coincidental and they think that one has caused the other, whereas it's the other way around.
Thank you for the call.
That's a fascinating point that he makes.
The whole notion of carbon emissions, at the same time that we're preaching that we need to live in a natural world and we've got to stop using chemicals and we've got to stop, you know, we have to eat organic, natural, natural, natural.
Is there anything more natural than carbon?
It's an element.
It's part of the earth.
It's what we emit.
It's human beings.
I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush Limbaugh.
Since I'm working in these, I'm not trying to make any money for anybody and shill for a website.
I'm sharing experiences here.
Louis, a few people have asked me, what am I talking about?
It's called Etsy, E-T-S-Y.
Let me do another plug here.
Ever hear of the Limbaugh Letter?
Has ever been mentioned on this program?
Yeah, you picked up on that.
Anyway, coming up in Russia's issue with the January edition of the Limbaugh Letter, Rush is going to reveal Obama's plan for his final last shot against the country and what you can do to survive it.
Think about this.
His last year.
That's what starts in January.
It's really a year and one month, but his last year.
You know, you know this isn't going to be good.
This is his last chance to get away with all of the stuff that he wants.
Anyway, Rush is going to give you what Obama's plan is.
Rushlimbaugh.com is where you can order the Limbaugh Letter.
I don't think Rush is going to have an article on Etsy.
If he'd like a contributor, you know, I fill in.
I could write a little column in there or add something in.
People are going to just think that I'm the wussiest guy.
Okay.
And here's the guy from Milwaukee who's going to write about Etsy.
I have to do a football topic real, real fast, or my manhood's going to be.
We've had interesting topics on the show.
Let's talk about some of them.
Back to the phones.
To Belle Harbor, New York.
Sean, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, thanks for taking my call.
Sure, thank you.
Very quickly, I just want to say about political correctness.
About 14 years ago, after working all night, I'm a battalion chief for the New York City Fire Department.
I came home, got a cup of coffee at my local label place, and Mohammed said he was crying.
And he said, Thanks very much.
And the other day I saw him again, and he said to me, Merry Christmas.
And political correctness?
You okay?
Yeah, what did you take?
What did you take for the fact that he said Merry Christmas this time around?
I'm sorry, we have a fair connection here.
Yeah, that's okay.
You said that he said Merry Christmas this time, and in the past, he didn't say that.
No, no, no.
That was the thing.
It never occurred to him not to say the word Christ.
He said Merry Christmas.
And years ago, he actually cried when he thought about what happened in the name of his religion.
That's the point that I make.
Thank you for the call.
I just think that most people who aren't Christian are not bothered by Christmas and a lot celebrated.
Now, he mentions a Muslim who he does business with who said Merry Christmas.
Clearly, it didn't bother that guy.
We bend over backwards to avoid offending people who aren't offended in the first place.
Other than those who just like to claim that they're offended.
This is what's going on in American college campuses right now.
You have an entire class of victimhood.
People are listening as hard as they can to hear something offensive so they can then claim that this was hurtful and they're damaged.
So we need a safe zone.
You try as hard as you can to be offended, so you're now a victim that has to be listened to.
Well, we're doing that with the entire country, really.
By the way, that guy said he's a New York City firefighter.
I've got a story to share about this.
I actually have, believe it or not, a New York City fire department story that I was going to do today.
This is what we call in radio a segue.
The story is from today's New York Post: a woman who six times failed the physical to become a New York firefighter is being given another chance.
And this time, critics say the fix is in.
She'll graduate, no questions, as said an FDNY member.
The department doesn't want another black eye.
The story is about a woman named Wendy Tapia, who was allowed to continually graduate from the fire academy on May 17th, 2013, even though she had failed the running test.
After swearing her in, they gave her five more chances to run the required one and a half miles in 12 minutes or less, but she couldn't do it.
She quit, never having worked a tour of duty.
Now, 34 years old, she's getting yet another chance to join.
She's among a group of emergency medical technicians promoted to probationary firefighters and set to start the 18-week training academy today.
Her return comes as the fire department of New York has quietly eased its standards to admit more women.
They've been facing bias allegations there.
Here's the thing about that.
Whenever we lower standards or change standards or bend the rules to allow women access to jobs that they might not have gotten into, were the standards not changed, who have we really hurt?
There's going to be a victim here.
Who have we really hurt?
I'll tell you who we've hurt.
We've hurt the women firefighters of New York City, all of the women who were able to achieve the standard.
Because now people will presume that they're firefighters because somebody bent the rules for them.
The women who belong on the New York Fire Department are the women who can achieve at the level that is set for everyone.
And it may not be as easy for a woman to lift a certain amount or run at a certain speed.
All the more reason they ought to celebrate the people who do it.
I met a few weeks ago, I don't remember when it was.
It's when some basketball game was on TV.
I was out.
I was in a bar.
And a friend of mine who's in the military came over and she was with another friend who's in the military.
This woman's story is extraordinary.
She's a lieutenant in the Navy.
She's on the Navy's marksman squad.
Whatever the highest level of marksmanship that you can achieve in the Navy, she has that.
And she showed me whatever it is, like a badge or a medallion that demonstrates that she's at the highest level of marksman in the United States Navy.
She told me that she can hit her target.
And I don't mean some big, giant, fat target.
She's able to hit her bullseye, and I don't know what size that is, but it's small at 300 yards without a scope.
How do you even see 300 yards?
She's able to hit it at 300.
And I could tell she wasn't lying.
This wasn't somebody that was hosing me because there was another member of the military that was sitting right next.
And military people don't like it when other military people exaggerate their accomplishments.
I could tell she was telling the truth.
Beautiful woman, by the way.
A lieutenant of the Navy, female, who's able to do that.
That's a hero.
That's somebody who's really good.
When you lower standards, supposedly to help out women, you're only victimizing the women who didn't need those standards lowered in the first place because people end up judging them as something less than accomplished because the presumption is that the standards were lowered for everyone.
I was a New York City firefighter female, I'd resent the fact that they're allowing this woman to get to try to pass the test five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven times.
Back to the phones to, I believe it's Caro, Caro, Michigan.
Sean, you're on the Russian Limbaugh program.
Go ahead, Sean.
Go ahead, Sean.
Hi, you were talking about Etsy a little bit ago, and just kind of wanted to say that my wife and I had started a shop on Etsy.
Actually, my wife started it back in May.
And it's been great for us.
What does she make?
It's been great.
This past Christmas, I was telling that we had to shut down for almost two weeks before Christmas because we couldn't keep up with the orders.
What does she make, Sean?
She makes jewelry.
I can stand personalized jewelry.
Give me an idea of the kind of money that she charges for them.
The average item is probably about $20 to $25.
We do have, you know, some things like sets of keychains, personalized keychains are a little bit cheaper, maybe $14, $15.
Necklaces and bracelets up to about $25, $30.
When I was on the site, that's pretty much what I saw.
Almost every, not everything, but almost everything is in that price range.
And it's very hard to go into a retail store spending that kind of money and get high quality for a lot of reasons.
If you're at a retail store, there's about six or seven different levels of people that had to be paid.
At your level, Etsy probably gets a cut of whatever the price is.
They have an upcharge or something.
Otherwise, you and your wife get the remainder of the money.
Can you give me an idea of about how many items she's selling now a month?
Just a ballpark figure?
Without the holidays, again, we just started it in May.
And when she first opened up, we only had a handful of items posted on there.
Now she's got probably about 150 different items.
We were probably doing before the holidays around 200 items a month.
I think we did six or seven hundred items in November.
And she's making all of them herself.
Yeah, well, actually, she was when she opened up, she was running a daycare out of our home.
She had to close a daycare.
I'm a carpenter.
I've been a carpenter pretty much my whole life.
You know, we've done okay.
We managed to pay our bills and so forth.
But when things started to pick up and get busy, I had to quit my job.
My boss was great about it.
He said, you know, if things slow down and I need to come back, that's great.
But I'm now working out of our home with my wife full-time.
And we're working seven days a week, sometimes till one, two o'clock in the morning from eight, nine o'clock in the morning.
And I'm making more doing this than I was doing Carpenter.
Think about that.
This is why I brought up the topic.
I mean, this is what's going on.
And what this is, is pure for all the knocking the left likes to do about it.
This is pure raw capitalism.
This is you and your wife creating something that someone else wants, the person who wants it paying you and your wife, and the two of you now having a better quality of life and a better standard of living with more money coming in.
And this never could have happened until something like Etsy came around.
That's a great story.
Thank you for calling, Sean.
That's why I brought this up.
I mean, we can talk all we want about.
Remember Obama's stimulus where we carpet bombed the country with billions of dollars and threw it around to all these social service organizations saying that this was what was going to lift us out of our miserable recession?
Didn't do any good.
It's things like this.
And admittedly, Etsy is going to do you no good, and eBay is going to do you no good if you can't make anything or you don't know how to make anything or you don't have the wherewithal to be able to do it.
True.
But things like this have done far more to generate income for people and it gives people an opportunity for a better life.
The guy's a carpenter.
His wife was running a daycare.
Now combined, just selling jewelry off of Etsy, they're making way more money than they ever had before.
That's American.
That's a good thing.
I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush Limbaugh.
Mike Mamon, you're just a font of information on all of this.
Mark Bellingham for Rush, he tells me, and I didn't know this, that these sites like Etsy, eBay, and a few others, in which people are creating their own, really creating their own stuff and selling them on the web has gotten so big that Amazon has created something, what do you call it, Amazon handmade?
Amazon wants to get out of the action too, and they're offering it.
All of it is just an attempt to connect people handmade at Amazon.
So, I mean, so now you have Amazon, which has become a giant corporation.
They want to get in on the action.
One of the things that this does tell you, though, is that in the economy that we are in, you have to know how to do something.
People who lack skills, and that's some people that are in the manufacturing sector, you see corporations, they just want to not pay people who don't bring anything special to the table.
But if you can do something that most people can't, if you can weld, if you're a draftsman, if you have any kind of engineering ability, if you can fix things, if you're a plumber, if you can create jewelry, if you're a good photographer, there is an opportunity for you.
But if you lack any skill whatsoever, that's what's going to be rough.
We keep shoving, yeah, well, maybe demise.
Yeah, I mean, Bo Starly saying that's the EBT card.
That's if you don't have a skill, you've got nothing.
And the mistake we make with young people is, first of all, we tell them that there's no chance for them, that you may as well just go to college, rack up all the student loan debt, and then you'll never be able to pay it back, and you're going to be living with mom forever and ever and ever.
There are a lot of kids who shouldn't be going to college because they're going to be in over their head.
They aren't going to get the four-year degree.
They're just going to rack up all of this debt and then they're going to be bitter.
What we ought to do is if people have any kind of an interest to move them into that.
And I'm not saying don't go to college.
I'm saying that college isn't for everyone.
But there are people who can do things with their hands.
There are people who can create.
There's all sorts of skills out there.
And there is a way for them to make money in this country.
It isn't the dead end that some liberals want to tell us that it is.
There is still opportunity here.
I want to take a call.
Let's go to Wichita and Jerry.
Jerry, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Glad to talk to you.
I've been watching a lot of television lately, mainly Fox News.
And I've been seeing a lot of polls.
And one night they showed a poll with 1,000 polls, people that they polled.
And I got to thinking.
Let's say, for instance, that there's 100 million people in the United States that are eligible to vote.
And what does that 1,000 represent?
Well, it represents 1,100,000th of 1%.
That's a very minuscule number.
It is.
And it's one of the problems with polling.
Yeah, and when you look at the lesser candidates, I say the lesser candidates, those that can't get up to at least 10%, they're always saying that, well, they don't believe in polls anyway.
And frankly, I don't either.
But just with 1,000 people, that doesn't give much of a cross-section of what the talking points that the television networks and even talk radio has, for that matter.
Yeah.
If I can respond to that for a second, Jerry.
The problem that I have with the polling that has gone on this year is that it's become the first primary.
The first primary or caucus isn't Iowa anymore.
And New Hampshire is not the first actual primary.
The first primary is the nationwide polls.
We're talking about, look at the number of candidates that have had a dropout because they haven't fared well in the polls in 2015.
We're not even in the election year.
Also, with so many people being exposed to a lot of these candidates for the first time, the polls are very fickle.
My own governor from Wisconsin, Scott Walker, at one point was winning.
Three months later, he's out of the race altogether.
Ben Carson appears to be free falling right now after doing extremely well just a little while ago.
What we've done is we've allowed these national polls to weed the field out before anyone has voted.
One of the good things about the Iowa caucuses and then New Hampshire and what comes after it, we're actually going to have people voting and deciding what's going on here rather than everybody playing the national polls.
I'm Mark Belling on EIB.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Seems like whenever I do this program, somebody noteworthy dies.
One of the, I don't want to sound cold because I don't mean it that way, but one of the positive things that happens when a famous person dies, when it's somebody who's been out of the limelight for a while, is it does give occasion to remember that person.
We probably ought to do it when they're alive, but we don't.
Meadowlark Lemon died.
If you're of a certain age, he was as big as it gets.
Meadowlark Lemon was the star of the Harlem Globeshrotters right when the Globeshotters started showing up on television all the time.
He was a phenomenal basketball player and a phenomenal showman.
He was an inventor.
He was a creative guy.
Here's the most amazing thing about Meadowlark Lemon.
He died, by the way, at the age of 83.
Native of North Carolina.
You know what his real name is?
Meadow Lemon.
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