Now filling in for Rush Limbaugh, it's Mark Stein, Mark Belling, Buck Sexton, Lincoln Chafee, Martin O'Malley, Vladimir Putin.
Aren't you just getting a bit sick of all the guest hosts?
Yeah, well, wait a minute.
No, I'm not going to be Buck Stein.
Buck wouldn't like that.
That's a totally improper suggestion.
He's CIA.
He's hardcore.
He's, as I said the other day, on that masculinity paradigm that they're trying to eliminate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He's off the charts on the masculinity paradigm.
So he wouldn't want to be confused with me.
But this is the final hour of guest hosts because the actual host, whose name escapes me, it's been so long, is returning to the microphone on Monday.
Yeah, Rush is panding to get back and he's going to be guest hosting for the pre-scheduled guest host for a full week of authentic all-American excellence in broadcasting.
And as I always say, I've got no desire to host a radio show because this is like America's number one radio show.
And I love the privilege of just being able to sit in here.
And I owe Rush a great debt for that.
I crossed the border.
I could have just fallen in with the wrong crowd and gone all alohoo Akbar on Americans.
But instead, I got a terrific opportunity.
And I get to guest host here.
And there's no point competing on radio with Rush.
I've never had any interest in it.
But I do have a little television venture.
It's called the Mark Stein Show, so I won't forget the name of it when I'm plugging it.
And it's on the air later tonight.
And Paul Sorvino from Goodfellas is among our guests.
And we have some live music.
Actually, we have some live music from Paul Sorvino, who has a very extensive repertoire.
If you think he's, yeah, if you think he's just like Mr. Mobster, he's actually got a full operatic voice.
And so he can hold his own with basically any big voiced guy singing anywhere on the planet.
And he'll be letting loose his voice.
I don't mean in a me and Jerry yelling at each other way.
He's far more mellifluous than that.
And Paul Sorvino and his lovely wife Dee Dee.
Dee Dee, by the way, predicted Trump's victory five years ago when everybody was just saying, ah, this is the usual thing.
He flirts with running for president, but he's never going to do it.
Well, she predicted that one day he would be president five years ago.
And so she was country when country wasn't cool.
But you can see Paul and Dee Dee Sorvino on the Mark Stein show later today.
We have news out of Fort Lauderdale International Airport.
The gunman is now in custody.
This happened at the baggage claim near Terminal 2.
Three people are dead, multiple injuries.
Everything is apparently calm now after the usual chaos.
The gunman did not, whoever he is, was not inside the secure area, but was outside the secure area.
And I said that I wasn't going to be speculative on this, and I'm going to stick to that.
But I do note that that is exactly the same thing that happened at Brussels Airport just a few months ago, which is now a totally chaotic airport for the European Union's capital.
It's just a nightmare.
They're just trying to – once you have a secure area, then obviously it's far easier for somebody to try and blow up or shoot up the non-secure area.
Why try to get inside the perimeter when there's a ton of people standing up lining up to get inside the perimeter?
You might as well blow them up there.
And so first in Brussels and then at a subsequent attack in Istanbul, people concluded that actually the area outside the security perimeter is actually a very inviting target.
There's just as many people standing around and they're a lot easier to blow up.
And there's not a lot of good answers to that.
In Brussels, they keep trying to move the security perimeter and it's become an absolute nightmare.
I flew out of there a few couple of months ago and the taxi driver doesn't know where to drop you off anymore.
He just drops you off on some bit of abandoned scrub and you wind up wandering around for ages and you see other people and you go halfway up a parking garage and they tell you that then some guy at the door says, no, you've got to go back down.
The place is chaos.
It doesn't function anymore.
And there is a logic to that, that the more secure you make the secure area, the more inviting the insecure area becomes.
But as I said, I'm not going to speculate on what's going on at Fort Lauderdale because we really do not know just yet.
It's now the death toll is climbing, unfortunately.
Now four dead, five dead, according to the latest reports.
This is a serious incident.
And, okay, I'm breaking my self-imposed silence here, but I will say this.
The airport, following 9-11, the airport was supposed to become the most secure place in American daily life.
That they've spent huge amounts of money.
They've created an entire bureaucracy to secure airports.
And they still cannot prevent mass attacks, mass outbreaks of violence at airports.
And so the big security state, in the end, cannot secure you and make you safe to the degree it promises.
We will await further details as they emerge.
But that is coming in.
There is a story out of London that the ex-head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, has said that this is interesting in contrast to these fever swamps about Russia hacking the election.
That is not what has happened.
Everyone has said that there is not a single ballot box anywhere that agents of the Russian state penetrated.
None.
But if there were, I would invite you, if we're going to listen to the so-called intelligence community, to consider the words of Sir John Sawers, former head of MI6, who says, bizarrely, the stubby pencil and piece of paper that you put your cross on in the ballot box is actually much more secure than anything which is electronic.
And there's no dispute about that.
He's absolutely right about that.
That if you have paper ballots, you have the least insecure elections that you can hold.
And that is a useful contribution from the intelligence community to the debate.
All we're seeing at the moment in this fevered narrative is that the word hacking and the words and the idea of subversion of the electoral process, those words are being destroyed by the way they're being banded around.
Nobody has found the slightest evidence of Russians hacking into America's electoral system and changing the result in, for example, a key swing county in Ohio in order to deliver a different result.
Not a single vote was hacked into.
They are right that the Russians may have reached their own conclusions about who they want to win the election.
They may well do.
I don't personally know, looking at the mess that Obama and Hillary have made of the world over the last eight years, why they wouldn't want another four years.
Another four years of Obama and Hillary and Putin would be king of the planet.
But by interfering in the domestic elections of the United States, what do they actually mean by that?
What do they actually mean by that?
Obama interfered in Brexit.
That's a domestic policy question on the ballot before citizens of the United Kingdom in June.
And he stands on the steps of 10 Downing Street with the then Prime Minister, whose name escapes me because he's now gone, and says that he's in favor of Britain remaining in the European Union.
So he took the losing side.
He decided to intervene in the internal affairs of an American ally and wound up on the losing side.
John Kerry said just last week that the Israeli government is far-right wing and is enthralled to its most extreme elements.
And it fell to David Cameron's successor, Theresa May, to rebuke John Kerry by saying that she did not feel it was appropriate for friendly nations to argue against the democratically expressed will of their allies.
The Netanyahu government is the expressed will of the Israeli people.
Who is John Kerry to damn them as extreme and advise people to vote for somebody else?
So interference, if by that you mean persuasion, goes on between sovereign states all over the world to one degree or another, both publicly, as when Obama made a chump of himself and said that he wanted the British people to vote to remain in the European Union, and instead they said, up yours, Mr. Foreigner, we'll do what we want.
Whether it's directly like that or whether it's by leaking information that they may feel may be more favorable to other people.
But that's all that we know about so far in all these fever storms about the so-called intelligence community and the conclusions it has reached on Russian behavior in the election.
As I said, my new year resolution is to take more calls from lefties.
I see some fellow called Jake Jackson has tweeted that Jerry discombobulated my safe space.
He said, oh, did the big bad liberal hurt your fifies?
Guess Carrig behind the EIB mic isn't the safe space you thought it was, huh?
Give me a call, Jake.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm in a good mood today because I'm bored stiff by your labels.
You aren't any good at labeling.
You know, there are people who are good at insults.
The Groucho Marks, Oscar Wilde.
You ain't any good at it.
So if labels are all you got, come on, give me a call.
If this is what 2017 is going to be, I'm going to go to the Bahamas for the year.
I don't care.
I've heard all the labels.
I've heard all the labels.
What else you got?
Give me a call, Jake.
1-800-282-2882.
It's Open Line Friday.
You can talk about anything you want.
Mark Stein for Rush, more straight ahead.
Hey, Mark Stein, in for us on America's number one radio show.
Let us go all the way to St. Catharines, Ontario, which is on the queue, on the Queen Elizabeth Way, just like a stone's throw from Niagara Falls.
If you want to play Know Your Canadian Municipalities, which is our big competition coming up in just a few minutes.
Let's go to Peter, who is in St. Catharines.
Peter, it's great to have you on the show.
Mark Stein, what an honor and pleasure to talk to you, sir.
Oh, no, it's a pleasure for me.
What's on your mind, Peter?
Listen, Open Line Friday with Rush.
I want to bring the conversation back to the situation.
First of all, I think Trump will, over time, become one of the greatest presidents the U.S. has had and will have.
I think he has the goods to make that happen.
And yes, he might be a normal mortal individual.
However, I think from what he has stated and what he plans to do, I think we can get there if we stay on the Trump train.
But my argument to you, sir, today is, and I know you are a fellow Canadian, I want to issue my own clarion call to Canadians and to the U.S. that we in Canada pose your biggest threat today.
The Canadian government, under the Liberal government, is Canada, is the United States' biggest problem, and Trump will realize that very shortly if he has not yet.
Look, we could use the word radical Islam.
You could use whatever term we want to use.
I am someone that have been on this train arguing against what is happening, the raping across Europe, the killings.
Oh, the refugees, the refugees in Europe, attacking women and all the rest of it.
Yes.
Okay.
That's what I'm referring to.
Right.
And the problem is that in Canada, as you would know, we have let 25 to 30,000 into Canada already with a plan for many, many more.
And the argument I've been making, and many others, is this.
We looked on at the FBI and the CIA and the NSA and the United States who stated in hearings that they could not vet the people that Obama bought and was bringing.
And my argument is: how could we in Canada have done that then?
We are taking the same refugees, the same.
In fact, these people are not even refugees coming from Syria.
We are seeing that they're coming from all different organizations, all different nations, and are not even legitimate refugees.
No, absolutely, absolutely not.
Everyone, you're absolutely right, Pete.
I mean, I spend a lot of time this summer with refugees, including a few days in a refugee house in Reutlingen in Germany.
Everybody is Syrian, and everybody is 16 or 17 years old.
So you will have 30-year-old Yemenis and 30-year-old People from Kenya or Somalia pretending to be, everyone's a 16 or 17 year old Syrian, because that's how you, if you're a 16 or 17 year old in most European countries, your nationality doesn't matter because you're a minor, so you're treated exactly the same as a 16 or 17 year old Swede or German.
So all these refugees, like the fellow who shot up Ohio State University with the receding hairline, he was supposedly 19.
He had the receding hairline of a 30-year-old.
That's what half these refugees look like.
They're 16 and 17 years old officially.
It's basically the new version of the sound of music in the new Europe.
I am 16 going on 28.
You are 17 going on 47.
I've never seen such old 16 and 17 year olds.
And some of them don't even pretend to be the minute the doors closed, they're perfectly upfront about who they were.
I asked these guys with West African accents, I said, what are you?
And they said Syrian.
And then they smiled.
I said, come on, you're not Syrian.
Where are you from?
You're from Ghana, Nigeria, the Gambia?
They were from the Gambia.
And they're pretending to be, they're guys in their late 20s from the Gambia pretending to be 16-year-old Syrians and gaming the system.
And they got through, they went in the human sort of smuggling route all the way to Libya.
And then one of those ports that Hillary Clinton delivered to the control of ISIS, they put on a ship to Europe.
They didn't know where they were going to go.
And then when they get to Italy, they find out they're going to Germany.
And all they have to do is pretend to be 16-year-old Syrians.
And then they get all the welfare gravy.
They were having a grand old time.
And I like, personally, I like Gambians.
So we were talking about Bathurst, which is what the capital of the Gambia used to be called, Banjul, in the old colonial imperialist days.
So I just put on my piff helmet and sang Land of Hope and Glory.
And we had a good old imperialist conversation between me and the Gambians.
They're very benign fellows.
But they embody the reality of this situation, which is that these fake refugee programs, nobody has a clue who's coming in.
Not only are they not checking, they don't even pretend to check.
And sometimes when they do check, and this again goes back to the intelligence committee, how many separate bureaucracies gave a clean bill of health to the San Bernardino guy's bride?
Was it two or was it three?
Money, no object.
Maybe if we'd had a fourth bureaucracy check her out, then we might have caught her.
Then we might have stopped her.
And this is why these programs can never secure the country.
And even if you accept the logic that it's only a tiny, tiny percentage of these people who want to drive a truck over you in a Christmas market or blow you up in a gay nightclub or gun you down at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, even if you accept it's only 0.0000001%, the logic of that is still nevertheless, and this is how percentages work.
The more you let in, the more killers you have.
So again, it breaks the most basic definition of statecraft, as I said to Jerry.
You don't consciously make things worse.
And by the way, now that the Syrian civil war is over and Assad's in power for good, then all these bright young men, all these strapping young 16 and 17-year-olds with the full beards and the receding hairlines, there's no reason for them not to be going back home to Aleppo and the other Syrian towns.
Hey, great to be with you.
But even greater is the news that Rush returns after the agonizing hell and torment of the season of guest hosts.
We are in the final 26 minutes.
Rush returns live Monday for authentic full strength all-American excellence in broadcasting.
Don't forget, you need never again be discombobulated by a sinister foreign guest host because you can always subscribe to the Limbaugh letter.
And then the minute you hear some strangulated, creepy foreign accent leaking out of your radio at five past the hour, when Rush is away, you can simply prop your feet up and read the Limbaugh letter.
It's got great stuff in there, not just written by Rush himself, but he also interviews a lot of fascinating figures.
And in the current issue, this is how Rush is his finger on the pulse.
He's interviewing Tucker Carlson, who's the hottest thing in cable TV right now.
He's basically like the Putin of cable.
He just dominates it, swaggering bare-chested over the cable news landscape because he is taking over Megan Kelly's slot, 9 o'clock, Fox News, on Monday, and mainly due to his feisty, combative interviewing style.
He wouldn't let Jerry get away with any of that stuff Jerry was getting away with in the last hour.
And Rush interviews Tucker Carlson in the current issue of the Limbaugh Letter.
If you subscribe today, you will get 13 issues, 13 monthly issues of the Limbaugh Letter for your one-year subscription.
That's a hell of a deal.
You also get Rush's bonus report.
Keep fighting.
All you got to do is go to rushlimbaugh.com.
You'll see the little Limbaugh Letter button there on the homepage.
And just click it, subscribe today, and you will get 13 monthly issues of the Limbaugh Letter for the price of a one-year subscription.
I can't handle this three hours work every day.
It's tough if you're just a guest host.
You've got to pace yourself.
And today I've also did a TV show, which is called the Mark Stein Show.
And you can find out more about that at marksteinshow.com.
Little light TV work just to kind of decompress after three hours of grueling radio.
So it's not too bad.
And if you go to marksteinshow.com, you can find out all about it.
Paul Sorvino is one of the guests from Goodfellas and with his lovely wife there too.
I mentioned earlier, we have a developing story in Fort Lauderdale.
The death toll now is up to five people.
Five dead, eight wounded in a shooting at the Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport in Florida at a baggage claim inside Terminal Two.
The situation is apparently now under control.
The gunman has been taken into custody, and the governor of Florida, Governor Scott, is en route to the airport.
It's obviously a huge tourist hub in the United States.
And at this time of year, when people are still kind of going back after the Christmas New Year break, it's extremely busy.
The Associated Press and others are showing photographs of victims arriving at the Broward Health Trauma Center.
And there are hundreds of people lined up outside on the tarmac, not on the runways, but on the tarmac waiting for police to clear the air terminals.
They're standing around outside Terminal 2 on the tarmac.
But we do know that the gunman has been taken into custody, that so far five people are dead, and that eight are in custody.
And as soon as we get more actual real news, we will bring you that real news.
But in these early hours, it is always speculative.
It is always speculative.
And people rush in and they immediately go to their they default to their standard tropes about gun violence in America or whatever it is.
We don't know what it is, but we will bring you any actual news between now and the top of the hour.
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting story today.
Vacancy rates rise at shopping centers.
And basically the gist of the story is that people built huge shopping malls all around every American city throughout the suburbs.
Very glamorous shopping malls, very large malls, expecting in the wake of the boom of the 1980s that there will always be retail outlets who wanted to fill these malls.
And of course, the reality is that one of the side effects of people like Amazon coming along and taking up more and more of the retail market is that a lot of these storefronts are now empty.
And you can't actually find big anchor department stores like Macy's or whatever to come and be the bedrock of a big glamorous shopping mall.
And it has all kinds of knock-on effects because if you're in these suburbs, then the commercial space provides a big chunk of your property taxes, which enables you to hold down the rate for your residents and your voters.
So it has all kinds of implications.
And it's about – what's interesting to me about it is that it's how small developments like electronic commerce in the 1990s when it started and people think it's interesting.
Oh look, I can go online now and buy a book.
Oh, I don't know about that.
I still like going to a bookstore and browsing the books and coming across something I haven't read before and maybe picking it up.
And that's always the dream with bookstores.
But in fact, one reason why those bookstores went bust is because they were highly politicized.
There's all kinds of people, and I know this, nowhereof I speak, you can have a best-selling book and in these left-wing bookstores, they still don't want to have you in the front of the window or whatever.
So it's actually easier to get certain kinds of books.
If Rush ever again writes another book like he did when he did his grown-up books, I'm not talking about Rush Revere.
Rush Revere books, as you know, have been hugely successful among kids and whatever.
But even then, if you go into a children's book department, you'll find all kinds of far less readable and unwanted children's books taking up all the prime real estate because the kind of clerks who run those bookstores want to put Rush Revere books right on the bottom shelf, tucked away at the back, propping up the wonky leg with all the unsold books, children's books that they're trying to get rid of.
So we no longer have these big, glamorous anchors, and the malls are getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
And the reason I mention this is because this absolutely connects with where we're going, the next stage of what is going to happen unless Trump and other Western nations manage to turn this thing around.
Basically, after manufacturing went south, people moved to a service center model.
So people used to do manually, they'd work at the mill or they work at the factory, now do service center jobs, lousy service jobs at the mall.
Well, when the mall's drying up, because the mall doesn't need these big bricks and mortar places now, because everything's being, more and more is being done online.
You can get the color of the dress you want online.
You can get the particular book you want online rather than they don't have it and do you wait a week or do you go.
So more and more of it is being done online.
So eventually, aside from stuff you actually physically need to be there for, and Amazon is now delivering fast food online.
So whether the taco bells and Dunkin' Donuts will even be there is worth questioning.
Because if Amazon get good at delivering tacos and donuts, there ain't even going to be any service jobs.
The number of service jobs is going to fall.
What comes next?
What comes next?
What do people do?
The left's answer to this is that as long as you give people big enough welfare checks, they don't mind having pointless lives where they just sit at home and do nothing and take heroin or whatever else they've got to do.
The traditional view is that the devil makes work for idle hands.
And that applies whether you're a jihadist or whether you're some punk in Chicago who wants to beat up some disabled guy because he's an effing white person.
The devil makes works for idle hands.
Almost all the jihadist trouble in Europe, including people who were involved in the 9-11 thing, came from people who'd been living high off the hog and Euro welfare.
And maybe if they'd actually had to get up in the morning and go and work at a mill or go and work at a factory or do back-breaking work at a farm, they'd be too exhausted to strap on the suicide bomber belt and go and plot jihad with their mates in the evening.
And maybe if people had to actually do the kind of jobs that people were expected to do before they all began opting out of the workforce participation rate, they'd be too tired to go and beat up some handicapped guy in the evening.
But these long-term trends are things that they're not explicitly political.
They're not about Republicans.
They're not about Democrats.
They may not even be about Trump.
Because who knows what the answer to this are, but they are determining the kind of world we live in.
My daughter and I, four years ago, we were in Reading, Berkshire, which is a rather grim and ugly town in the United Kingdom.
She said to me she wanted to go to this thing called Zombie Shopping Mall.
It's like a theme park experience where you get to fight zombies.
There are zombies everywhere and you get to fire paintballs or whatever at them and beat the zombies.
And I said, okay.
What amazed me when I dropped her off at the shopping mall is it was actually a real shopping mall.
So she was.
It was one of these shopping malls the Wall Street Journal is talking about.
It was full of closed JC Pennys and closed price choppers and closed payload shoe sources, the British equivalents.
But now the abandoned shopping mall had been taken over by zombies and you were to rush through the storefronts, the JCPenney and the Macy's and all the rest of it, trying to dodge the zombies.
And it impressed me actually.
It was way more exciting than being in a theme park, being in an actual abandoned shopping mall as grim and depressing as it was that's been taken over by zombies.
And the Wall Street Journal today is basically saying that's where we're headed.
Unless somebody comes up with an answer to the way the economics of a globalized world are going, we're all going to be living in zombie shopping mall.
Mark Stein for Rush, it's Open Line Friday.
We will take anything you want to talk about.
All you've got to do is call 1-800-282-2882.
We have some late-breaking news on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Apparently, Donald Trump has won the presidential election.
You can take that to the bank because Vice President Joe Biden has declared, quote, it is over, unquote, after the third challenge lodged by a House Democrat.
This was during the official congressional certification of the president.
He is the president.
Joe Biden has said so.
Sally Field disagrees.
So it is for Sally Field and Joe Biden slug it out on Dancing with the Never Trumpers, which is the hit new ABC series.
Joe Biden goes on to face Sally Field in the final.
Let us go to Brian in Tampa, Florida.
Brian, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, Mark, Merry New Year.
And by the way, anxious to see the TV show because I like you.
I really like you.
But you're forewarned here.
I'm speaking from what you would call, I think, the pansy center.
You've talked on this broadcast how Orwell highlighted the pansy left.
I'd be really embarrassed about being a pansy centrist, except for the fact that once I was going through one of my rants against this or that societal ill, and my late lady friend up in Seattle, Marcy, said, you know, Brian, at least you're not an intellectual coward.
And she was right.
But I do share with you an interest in Broadway musicals, particularly films.
And my favorite happens to be Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
I know you know it intimately, but did you know actually shot, of course you knew it was shot in CinemaScope, but it was also shot a second time for a never used, a never-released, regular aspect ratio version of it.
And that means that there's at least two versions of what I think is the greatest dance sequence in cinematic history.
I'm not talking about barn raising or the barn dance.
I'm talking about the lonesome pole cat sequence, which has Michael Kidd choreographing axes swinging next to the singers' heads.
You want to seen the alternate take of that?
And what do we got to do to get it on YouTube?
No, you're right.
It's a very unusually butch sequence.
I know Buck Sexton is probably curling up in disgust.
My fellow butch guest host, Buck Sexton, but it actually is unusually butch for a musical film dancing.
It's like the seven guys are all lonesome polecats, whatever the lyric is, lonesome, sad and blue because I ain't got no feminine polecat.
And I have never seen it in the – they did it in the big cinemascope so you can get all the seven brothers in.
I don't know if you did in regular aspect, whether you just got the three brothers in, but I've never seen that, Brian.
And I thank you for bringing that to my attention because I honestly had no, I should have known that there is another version of that.
So I will see if I can find some Hollywood buddy to sneak me an illegal version of that.
By the way, I like the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but I just saw the new ISIS remake the other day, and it is so much, the dancing is so much more spectacular.
They've got a much bigger cast because it's actually 28 Brides for Seven Brothers.
It's the new Muslim version.
You'll love it.
Mark Steinen for Rush.
We'll close it out in just a moment.
As you know, while we were on the air just after one o'clock Eastern, a mass shooting occurred at Fort Lauderdale International Airport.
So far, the death toll is at five with eight injured.
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, Democrat Senator, I had the pleasure, if that's the word, of appearing before him in the United States Senate about a year ago.
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida has identified the shooter as Esteban Santiego, Esteban Santiego, and Senator Nelson said Mr. Santiego was carrying a military identification.
There are also reports that there is a second shooter still at large in a parking garage.
It's always very confused in the immediate aftermath of a shooting, but Rush will break it all down for you when he returns live on Monday.
The season of guest hosts has come to an end, and Rush himself will be back for authentic, full-strength, all-American Excellence on Broadcasting on Monday.
I will see you tonight on the telly with special guest Paul Sorvino.