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July 14, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:19
July 14, 2016, Thursday, Hour #2
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All right, here I am at this enormous national platform.
I don't know if it's going to work, but I'm determined to get to the bottom of something.
You know, there's a lot of things happening in our world right now that are very, very hard to understand.
I don't know that in my entire experience as a public commentator or just as a human being, I've ever really seen anything as weird as this Pokemon thing, Pokemon.
thing.
I was preparing for today's show.
I was talking to a few people about it, and I mostly got the reaction of, I see all these headlines, but I have no idea what anybody's talking about here.
You kind of almost have to be part of it, I guess, to grasp what's going on.
I mean, my own experience, staying in New York to do the program, I'm staying at a fine hotel not far from EIB Eastern Command.
I'm taking a shower this morning.
Two people broke into my room.
They said that there was a Pokemon monster on my butt.
They were captured.
That's a stupid joke, but it's not as exaggerated as you think.
I'm looking at the New York Post.
The New York 911 Memorial, the Washington Holocaust Museum.
People are going in when tours are going out of these solemn places with their phones to capture Pokemon monsters that have been placed there.
My radio producer in Milwaukee told me this is going, this went on Sunday in his church.
That people are on the phone during Mass finding Pokemon monsters in the church.
This seems insane.
And I admit, I don't get it.
I don't understand it.
And I'm not sure exactly what's going on.
Here's what I do know.
Nintendo owns Pokemon, which was a stupid video game from a bunch of years ago.
They came out with the Pokemon Go app a few weeks ago.
It has become the fastest downloaded app in history.
It's a free app, so you don't have to pay for it.
Nintendo shares, however, have exploded.
Nintendo stock is up like 40% just since the app has been released, given how many downloads there are of it.
And Nintendo's trying to figure out how to make money off of it.
They're going to probably have to put ads inside the Pokemon thing.
As best I can figure out, this is how it works.
You download the app, and when you have the app, you now have with your phone, kind of like a virtual map, everything you see.
I think you, I'm not sure, I think you use your camera mechanism on the phone, and you run around and you try to catch as many Pokemon monsters as possible.
I know, I can't believe I'm discussing this.
And the Pokemon monsters are all over the place.
I'm looking at today's Wall Street Journal.
Columnist named Joanna Surd.
We're standing at a defining moment in the history of technology.
Me, I'm standing in my pajamas at 10.30 p.m. in front of a townhouse of painted giraffes on its facade.
I'm not alone either.
Four others came out for the same reason to capture the two-headed ostrich-looking monster bouncing around on the sidewalk.
To understand how I ended up in a situation that once could have only been explained by psychedelic drugs, you need to know the events of the past week, how my life has become dominated by a classic video game designed for 10-year-olds.
And then it goes on to describe this.
So I guess what happens is people who have the app place these monsters all over the place, and they're putting the monsters everywhere.
And if you download the app, your goal is to try to catch more monsters than anyone else.
It seems so unbelievably stupid.
But apparently millions and millions of people are doing it, especially millennials.
Now, the reason I want to get to the bottom of this is somewhere in this story, the world is telling us something.
I have no idea what it is.
We live in a world of complete narrow casting.
Nobody watches the same TV shows anymore.
Nobody watches the same sporting events.
People are on a zillion websites.
They're watching all sorts of different things on YouTube.
They're doing things all independent of one another.
And then in the middle of this, here comes this Pokemon thing, and millions of people are doing it all at once, running around trying to catch a monster that isn't even real, but exists only in their phone, and it becomes an obsession for them.
So here's my goal.
If you understand this, if you know how this works, please explain it to us.
I was going to say if you have a kid that's into it and obsessed with it, I'm willing to bet it's probably not just your kid, it's some of you.
Now, I don't know how many people are going to admit it, but I've got a woman who writes for the Wall Street Journal writing about this.
I've got a picture here from the New York Post of someone at the 911 Memorial taking a photo of this purple monster that exists in her phone and as far as she's concerned, in her real life.
Apparently, if these are on one phone, they're on everybody's phone.
So you're trying to catch more monsters.
So here's what I'm going to do.
And I don't know that I'm going to learn any more than I know right now.
I'm going to take the official EIB Command Central Telephone number.
And you got to tell me what's going on with this.
1-800-282-2882.
I tried getting information on this out of the staff.
You know nothing, do you?
Broadcast engineer Mamon, he knows nothing.
Boost Nerdley, not surprisingly, knows nothing.
I first noticed the headlines on the internet and the newspapers a few days ago.
Then I've got my producer in Milwaukee telling me we have to do this as a topic that everybody's doing and it was screwing up his church.
His daughters are telling him about it.
Then I'm on the plane to fly out.
There are people on the plane talking about the Pokemon monsters they captured in the airport.
I'm hearing people talk about this.
These aren't 12-year-olds.
This is like a 45-year-old fat guy talking about catching a Pokemon monster in the airport.
There are estimates that as many as 15 million Americans might be doing it right now.
As I said, the download is the fastest download in the history of all apps.
It's the number one download on Android and on Apple.
What I don't know is whether or not anybody's going to be willing to admit that they're part of this.
But if you know about this, if you have a story about this, if you think you understand why people are into it, if you can tell us why this is a fun and exciting thing to do, we're going to be all ears because I want to see whether or not I can't get to the bottom of this.
Does this have anything to do with what's happening to America politically right now?
I don't know.
Does it have anything to do with the paranoia that we have about the world?
I don't know.
Out of all of the apps that exist, what was the big one that the kids were into, Candy Crush and all of this?
Why this one?
Of all characters, why Pokebot?
All right, we've got somebody who says he gets this.
Like I said, I'm all ears.
Winchester, Virginia, Greg, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, how are you doing?
Well, right now I'm a little weirded out about all this.
So you know about Pokemon, huh?
All right, I'm going to try to make it a little clearer.
You know, the Pokemon game came out in its Game Boy version when my kids were like six and four.
Yeah, that was the old Pokemon, right?
That was the old one.
And I fell in love with the game because we had a 12-hour ride from Virginia to Tennessee, and I didn't hear Are We There Yet once.
Because the kids were into the Pokemon, right?
They got into the game.
They loved it.
They played it.
I got involved with it because I wanted to speak the same language that the kids did.
So you have a group of kids that learn Pokemon.
And I think you have a group of involved parents that learn.
Okay, but no, get me to the present.
Get me to this app and people running around.
They're all over New York, and you can see they're on the phone and they're gazing.
You know what?
I know the New York tourist look because when I'm in New York, I'm halfway a tourist and I'm halfway working here.
I can tell you right now on the streets of New York who's doing the Pokemon thing because they're holding the phone at an oddball angle and they're looking at all of these buildings.
They're walking over by Radio City.
They're walking over by St. Patrick's Cathedral.
And I can tell they're trying to find these monsters.
So explain to me how the app works.
So not only can you catch the Pokemon, you can take pictures of Pokemon in their environment, which is kind of fun.
It's like Snapchat.
Okay, but again, tell me how it works.
So you're looking at your phone and what do you see?
All right, there's a whole bunch of levels to this thing, so I'll tell you this as briefly as I can.
First of all, you see about one mile of what you would see on a basic GPS.
You see the street.
So it looks like a GPS and it looks like a street.
It looks like a street.
You can see houses, you can see roads, and then Pokemon appear, and then you can catch them, you can take pictures of them.
You want to collect them all.
You want to build every time you collect them.
So, okay, fine.
I'm looking at this.
Let's suppose I'm on Broadway in New York, which is about as busy a street as you can find on the planet.
And the Pokemons are apparently all over there.
So, what am I seeing on the GPS as I'm looking at Broadway?
Okay, now, okay.
So, in addition to the Pokemon being there, there's PokeStops and there's Pokemon gyms.
The Poke stops, if you get close to them, you can spin them and get Pokeballs, which help you catch the Pokemon.
You understand what you're saying right now.
You realize you sound like you're on LSD.
That's okay.
And that's the whole problem.
I'm pretty buttoned-down guy.
I know, I know, but so your phone shows all those stops and the other things, and they're all just showing up on the phone.
Right.
Now, when you look at the actual thing, when you get there, when you look at the building, not at your phone, obviously you don't see anything.
So, you have to look back at your phone, and then what is your phone showing?
Okay, so either the Poke stops could be, you can turn them into lures, which is why people are gathering, because Pokemon show up in greater numbers, and the more rare ones show up.
So, that's why Times Square, churches, gyms, libraries, heck, and the heroes.
So, can I, as a Pokemon user, leave some of this stuff around myself?
No.
Well, who scattered them all over the place then?
Nintendo?
Well, yeah, the company that developed it.
There was another game that I can't remember.
I know.
So, you're saying that Nintendo.
Okay, I got a little bit of a start on this.
Thank you for the call.
I want to get a little bit more, and then I'm going to try to find out what in the world is so interesting about doing this.
I don't know how well, I was going to ask that guy how old he was that he didn't say.
He initially said, well, the old game I got started with because my kids were into it, but now he's into it himself.
The stops are here.
What he wasn't communicating to me well, and maybe it was my asking of the question, is when you're looking at your phone, what are you actually seeing?
You're seeing this monster there or the stop or whatever it is.
Then what are you supposed to do?
Do I sound crazy?
You're supposed to swipe when you see it.
I thought that was Tinder.
You could do a lot with swiping, apparently.
You see it and you swipe.
Well, I'm glad that you told me that.
This is the world that we now live in.
I'm Mark Belling, and believe it or not, this is still the Rush Limbaugh program.
Most certainly made the comment that there is an entire country going on right now that he doesn't understand or have.
I don't get selfies.
I don't get people who go to concerts and spend the entire concert videoing the concert just so they can have a recording with really, really tiny audio and seeing everything that's shaking around and all.
People do all of that stuff.
There's a lot of things that we don't get, but I at least sort of understand why some people do get them.
This Pokemon thing doesn't seem to make any sense at all, yet it has touched an American nerve.
I don't know if it's touched an interplanetary nerve yet, but Nintendo stock is exploding.
It used to be, and Trump, I think, is trying to appeal to this old America.
It used to be that if you wanted to make a lot of money, you got to start a factory and come up with some widget or some gizmo or invent something or come, you know, invent a good hubcap or have a good wheel or have a good cog for a machine or come up with something.
Now, some dork working for Nintendo takes a video game that's like 35 years old and creates an app where you run around and you see a fake monster on your phone.
That company's net worth, the company stock valuation rather, has gone up hundreds of millions of dollars to, believe it or not, her name is Candy in Rydal Beach, South Carolina.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Candy Crush was the game that I saw a lot of kids playing a few years ago, but this is taking it all to a totally new level.
So what do you know about this, Candy?
About Pokemon?
Yeah.
Not a whole lot.
My son just introduced it to me about a week ago.
So if you ask me a lot of the questions you're asking, the other guy won't be able to help you.
But I just was calling in to tell you that my son explained it to me that the purpose of the game is to get people out and walking around.
And we use it at night after dinner.
I have three kids, and my husband and I both work full-time.
So we use it to get out and walk around the neighborhood and look for Pokemon and get exercise.
Well, if it's doing that, something positive is happening.
So in other words, millennials are so glued to the inside of the house that the only way you can get them out to engage in actual physical activity is to have them chase around with an app.
But if it means that we'll actually get them to get into actual human society and move around and sweat a little bit, maybe that positive's coming out of it.
You said your kids.
How old are you?
Candy, how old are your kids?
14, 10, and 6.
Do you think this is mostly a kid thing or is it a millennial thing?
No, I don't.
I have some people at work that I know that had been doing this, and I didn't know what it was.
I'm 46, and I think it's sort of interesting because the kids will be driving around, and they'll see things and want me to go over here or go over there and try to find it.
You know, that's sort of fun.
But just for us, it's been a good thing to get us outside.
Okay, thank you for the call.
Let's try Omaha, Nebraska.
Aaron, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, Mark, how are you?
I'm great.
Thanks.
Hey, so I guess my biggest thing is it sounds like you have some questions about Pokemon.
I mean, what's your biggest question about the app?
Well, my biggest question is, why does anybody like doing this?
What is the fun?
No, that's a great question.
And I think it stems back to, I mean, this Pokemon's been around for 20 years.
It's the 20th anniversary.
And the premise of the games has always been you are a character who goes around and captures these monsters and sort of makes them kind of your friends and your allies as you kind of go around and battle with other people's monsters, right?
Yeah, so I mean, what?
So, okay, with the app, we've got all these monsters and these semi-monsters and all this stuff that you're seeing on your phone in all of these public places, and you go out and you try to capture them.
What is fun about that?
That's the part that I'm missing.
A lot of people, it's for them, it's realism, right?
It's immersion.
And it's the idea that, you know, I was limited to a single screen and a place that was kind of foreign, right?
And now you're actually in life, and here it is.
And we're starting to get somewhere on this.
I mean, we've read all of these articles about virtual reality and the incredible potential that it has for human interaction and people literally creating their own worlds inside these bubbles.
It might well be that this app is to virtual reality what the old TVs from the 1940s with the grainy little pictures in the black and white and the bars running through were.
And you look and you wonder how backward that was, but it was the first indication that it was starting and going somewhere.
And maybe that's what this is.
It sounds like you're telling me that people are creating their own reality and they're allowing and they're able to mix that in to the world and they're into that.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing they love about it, right?
I mean, the goal for everyone who's ever played this game, they want it to be real, right?
They want to be able to hold it.
And when you're saying, when you're looking at your phone, it looks like the monster is there, right?
Yes, yes, absolutely.
So in other words, if I hold my phone towards St. Pat's or something like that in New York, I'm seeing a monster maybe sitting on the steps, and otherwise it looks exactly like what I'm seeing with my own eyes, except the Pokemon monster's there, right?
Yes, correct.
And here's my question.
Do you think in six months anybody will still be doing this or we will move on to something else?
That's a great question.
Give me a quick answer.
I think it will definitely die down a little bit.
I think a lot of people will still be playing, but I think it's always moving on.
That's kind of what everybody said about the appeal of Donald Trump.
Well, give it a few months and it'll die down.
I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush.
Let me tell you real quickly about the Limbaugh letter, which is sitting conveniently enough right here on the console for me.
Is this placed here?
So, thank God, there's a hammer and sickle on here.
What were you supposed to give me?
Is it the bumper sticker?
I have that.
I have that.
This is not to be announced yet, or is it?
The Never Hillary bumper sticker is out.
I've got the Limbaugh letter in front of me.
I'm inundated with all things Rush.
And the only way I know to get the Limbaugh letter other than, say, coming into the Eastern Command studio where I am and stealing a copy and taking it home is to subscribe.
And you can subscribe by going to rushlimbaugh.com.
All right, now in the first half hour here of this hour, I was talking about this Pokemon thing that is sweeping the nation like some sort of swarm of insane locusts.
We had a caller who pretty much understood it and explained it fairly well.
I still don't really have the why anybody wants to do it.
There's another business story in the news right now that is part of a technology that is very controversial and no one knows where that is going either.
And that's the whole controversy over Tesla and autopilot.
You read all these articles and I get every car magazine I think that exists.
Okay, I'm a geek.
I'm not into Pokemon.
I'm into reading about cars.
Classic stereotype that I am.
And they all are on this, the driverless car, the autonomous car, the driver assist, the safety features that are being put into automobiles.
Tesla is one of the first to have an advanced form of autopilot, and they call it autopilot.
You know what happened in Florida a couple of months ago?
The story has been all over the news.
A guy is driving his Tesla in autopilot, apparently, according to a report, watching a Harry Potter movie on his tablet, not paying attention to the road because autopilot is driving the car.
Autopilot is supposed to be able to detect any hazard that's coming, slow down if you're approaching to a car that's coming near you, brake if you have to, and so on.
So the guy's not paying any attention, and the next thing you know, drives full blast into the side of a semi and is killed.
The explanation was that the white side of the semi and the glare and the fact that the semi was high in the air, the trailer was high in the air, that the autopilot saw literally right underneath it and didn't recognize it.
The National Transportation Safety Board has started an inquiry.
Tesla is not the only car now with features like this.
Mercedes is touting its new E-Class.
The Mercedes E-Class is a fairly big selling automobile.
It has the same types of features on it.
According to Mercedes, the car will drive itself.
If you're on a freeway, a country road, even in traffic, it does require you to do something every 90 seconds, which apparently is as little as simply touching the steering wheel or making some sort of driver move.
If that's all you do, the car will drive itself.
Yet, here we see that these systems clearly aren't foolproof.
Tesla says, well, look, our autopilot was never meant to be something in which the driver wasn't going to pay attention.
Well, what do you mean it wasn't meant for that?
Then why are you calling it autopilot?
The premise certainly is that that was the purpose of it.
The same thing with regard to the system that Mercedes is putting in place.
If it is able to drive the car without a person doing anything and will stay in that mode unless you touch the steering wheel every 90 seconds, the point apparently is that it's supposed to drive the car.
So we're now getting a lot of criticism of Tesla drivers who out there using autopilot.
Tesla itself says that autopilot is much safer than people actually driving themselves because autopilot is paying more attention than the individual driver has, but it's supposed to be something that supplements the individual driver.
I think the reason for the confusion is apparent because I'm confused.
Are they marketing these systems as systems that can drive your car?
If not, what's the point?
What's the point of having something that can drive your car unless it's going to drive your car?
If it's merely a feature that if you don't see something, it will slow the car down for you.
Fine, then market it as such.
But that isn't autopilot.
When I think of autopilot, I think of the car literally piloting itself.
What I think we have here is a technology that is moving us toward this notion of autonomous vehicles.
And there's a lot of speculation that eventually you're going to have a lot of cars in which there's no driver in the car.
The car is simply going to drive you wherever you program it to go.
That it's going to stop and start and switch lanes and speed up and slow down and make all the turns that it needs to without any human involvement at all.
And we are not there yet.
But what we have here is the very infancy of this technology.
But they've put that infant technology into some of the vehicles now.
You've got some things like this already on Chevys and Toyotas, but within the next two to three years, they're almost all going to have things similar to what Tesla has with the autopilot.
Is this giving people a false sense of security that they don't have to pay any attention to their driving?
As it is, half the country isn't paying attention.
I mentioned in the last hour the Pokemon game.
There are no freeway signs in my state of Wisconsin.
Those freeway advisory signs up there, take your eyes off the Pokemon and pay attention to the road.
So people are playing the Pokemon game while driving.
We know a lot of people are Facebooking and texting while driving.
You can argue that these systems offer a level of redundancy that helps given how few people are paying attention.
But if people think that this means the cars are going to drive themselves and they don't have to pay any attention, they won't.
If the car companies are going to put this stuff on and advertise that the car will drive itself for you, I don't know that we should be shocked when people then let the car drive itself for them and an accident occurs.
The problem isn't with the technology, because undeniably the technology is going to make the vehicle safer.
If Tesla or Mercedes or Toyota or whomever it is has technology in place that sees when a kid is running across the street or a vehicle is coming in front of you and that's a technology that offers a level beyond the driver's own paying attention, that's undeniably a good thing.
But if we're moving in the direction of autonomous cars, driverless cars, where the car is driving itself, where the car becomes a robot, a self-driving machine, we clearly aren't at that point yet, but it seems to me that they're creating the impression that we are.
They're saying the car can drive itself.
They're saying that the car can do all of these maneuvers.
The Mercedes advertising campaign says that you only have to touch the wheel to do this or that every 90 seconds.
Now they still tell you, yes, but we want you to pay attention.
You still are in charge of the vehicle.
You still have to look.
But if it can do all of those things on its own and it's supposed to be foolproof, why would anyone look?
You get anecdotal evidence that, or at least if you check the message boards, all sorts of Tesla drivers are saying that they never pay attention anymore.
And prior to the accident in Florida, there hadn't been a disclosure, at least by Tesla, of anyone having been injured, of people who have the Tesla models that have this autopilot on.
How many of them when driving right now are indeed not paying attention?
I don't know the answers to any of those questions, but what I think we have here is a company in the case of Tesla and then the imitators that are using Tesla-like technology that are putting in place stuff that we can't even imagine how it could work.
The car is driving itself.
The car is seeing this.
The car is switching lanes.
The car is speeding up.
The car is slowing down.
They're putting it in there.
And they're putting it in there with a message that this stuff works.
Whereas in fact, it doesn't yet work all the time.
It may work better than the average adult attention deficit driver, but it doesn't work all the time.
And the impression some people may have is that it's supposed to work all the time.
This is the brave new world that we are in.
And if it seems like it's moving too fast to keep up with, well, it is moving too fast to keep up with.
We've got people running around every city in the United States with their phones finding fake monsters that are sitting on a church stoop.
Now you've got cars that are crashing where the car is driving itself and the driver apparently is watching a movie instead of driving the vehicle.
This is still only 2016.
And I haven't even begun to discuss the millennials yet, which no one understands.
Somewhere deep down, there's an explanation in this that has something to do with the presidential race.
Is it a coincidence that with all of these things happening so fast, both parties are nominating 70-year-old candidates for president?
I don't know.
I just reach out and I try to strive and find these answers.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush from Pokemon to autopilot to the vice president of the United States.
I want to stress right now that this is not confirmed information.
But several news organizations are now reporting that Donald Trump has chosen Indiana Governor Mike Pence to be his vice presidential running mate.
The Trump campaign just put out a tweet saying that there's been no decision yet, that this is all premature.
Roll Call, which is a longtime Washington, D.C. newspaper and now primarily website, and it's a credible news organization.
They have reported as fact that Trump has chosen Pence.
In addition to that, the Indianapolis Star, which is the daily newspaper in Indianapolis, obviously the largest city in Indiana where Pence is from, is reporting that Pence is now dropping his campaign for re-election as governor and has accepted Trump's selection to be his vice presidential running mate.
The Trump campaign has said that there will be a formal announcement tomorrow morning in Manhattan, I think at Trump Tower, of the running mate.
The indications that this was moving toward Pence were pretty strong the last several days.
Newt Gingrich said this morning that he expected to be told this afternoon whether or not he would be in or out.
Well, don't know that he would have said that if he thought that he was going to be the guy.
Chris Christie was doing several interviews as well.
Pence, on the other hand, has been in silent mode for the last 18 hours or so, not doing interviews.
Implication that maybe it indeed is him.
If the selection is Pence, it would mean that Trump, the ultimate non-traditional candidate, is choosing a longtime Republican with executive experience.
I suspect that a lot of people don't know who Mike Pence is and haven't heard anything about him until his name popped up just in the last few days in which all this speculation started rolling that he was on the short list for Donald Trump.
Mike Pence, in fact, was a member of the House of Representatives, considered a reformer.
He was one of the first to crusade against earmarks, sought the minority leader position while in the House of Representatives, was considered to be from the conservative wing of the party while in Congress.
When Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, chose not to run for reelection, I believe, and I'm working off memory now, in 2012, Pence decided to run for governor.
Daniels himself was a conservative Republican, and Pence ran essentially to continue those types of policies.
He's been the governor of Indiana, again, I believe it was 12 that he was elected, which would mean about three and a half years.
Since then, he did propose a significant cut in Indiana taxes, got some of what he's wanted, and is highly regarded in Indiana as a strong executive.
He was urged to Trump by a lot of prominent Republicans who felt that Trump, who was coming from outside, needed to have someone who had at least some insider experience without necessarily endorsing the selection of Pence.
He does, they talk about people who tick the boxes.
He ticks off a lot of boxes.
He is a social conservative, longtime strength within the pro-life movement.
That helps in an area where Trump isn't especially strong.
He has experience in national policy, having been in Congress for a number of years, knowledgeable in foreign affairs, knowledgeable in domestic policy, and has executive experience.
He's actually run something.
He's been the governor of a medium-sized state, Indiana, for a number of years.
It's always debatable how much a vice presidential candidate helps or hurts a candidate.
People still argue whether or not Paul Ryan helped Romney, whether or not Sarah Palin helped or hurt John McCain, and so on.
What Trump has done here is sent a signal that his administration would be a conservative administration.
And remember, there are still a lot of conservatives who have doubts about that.
Well, you don't pick a clearly conservative governor with a clearly conservative record in the House to be your running mate and the person, should anything happen to you, be the president of the United States, unless you intend to have a conservative administration.
Now, Newt Gingrich's name was out there for quite some time, and Gingrich himself said that he was one of the two finalists.
The problem with choosing Gingrich is that you would have a 70-year-old man choosing a 73-year-old man.
Politically, that might be perceived as difficult.
Also, Gingrich, not having been involved in government for the last 20 years, would have the same sort of outsider role as Trump.
If Trump is trying to bring balance in terms of diversity of experience, he clearly has accomplished that.
And again, that's presuming that Pence is a choice.
And I'm certainly not reporting this as fact.
We have Roll Call, The Wall Street Journal, the Indianapolis Star, and several other news organizations all reporting that it is Pence.
Obviously, a number of others have not been able to confirm it and have not picked up on the story.
So if it is Pence, he's the guy.
And you have a Trump-Pence ticket.
I don't know if that has a ring to it or not.
Obviously, we'll analyze this as the program goes along, but I did want to bring you up to speed on this story, which appears to be developing as we speak.
Several news organizations reporting that Donald Trump is choosing the governor of Indiana, Mike Pence, as his vice presidential running mate.
Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
We spent some time in the first hour of the program talking about presidential politics.
I shared my own thoughts on Hillary Clinton and my personal decision, after some reservations, to support Donald Trump for president of the United States.
We have a lot of developing political stories going on right now, the convention in Cleveland next week, and this breaking news not confirmed that Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, is Donald Trump's selection to be his vice presidential running mate.
A little bit more information.
I was correct.
He was elected as governor of Indiana in the election of 2012.
He served in the House of Representatives from 2000 until 2012, elected in the election of 2000 House of Representatives.
He was the choice in a straw poll of the Value Voters Summit to be their top choice for president.
He's been affiliated with the Tea Party movement and is an anti-spender who has called for spending reform.
He is described as being a member of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, for whatever that's worth.
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