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September 14, 2007

Story #1: Rush Heads to Lincoln to See USC-Nebraska

RUSH: I'm gearing up for big trip tomorrow. I'm going to Lincoln, Nebraska, USC-Nebraska tomorrow night -- (interruption) Don't start ripping on Nebraska. Nebraska is the heartland -- (interruption) what are you doing in there? You sound like a lib, "Where's Nebraska?" Let me tell you something. I like USC-Nebraska college football, yeah. I got a big kick when I watched Hawaii and Northern Colorado when I was on the golf trip in Hawaii. That was a kick because that was on the sideline. No, this is going to be a great game and a great time. But Nebraska is the heartland of the country, Mr. Snerdley. Nebraska is the simplicity of life. You can go to Nebraska and you can capture America as it's always been. It's a great place. I've been to Lincoln a couple times. Once for a Nebraska game. They played Notre Dame and creamed 'em, back when Bob Devaney was the coach. I own Nebraska. In fact, on game day at Lincoln, one out of every six Nebraskans is in Lincoln for the game. It's big. It's big. It's an exciting event.

Story #2: Woman Fired for Smelling Like Cigarette Smoke

RUSH: Have you heard about this story? "Odor of Cigarette Smoke Causes School Employee to Lose Job -- The Denton Independent School District has removed an employee from her position because she smells like cigarette smoke. Suzanne Lidster was thrilled when she was recently hired to assist a student with disabilities at L.A. Nelson Elementary" school, then she got canned because she showed up smelling like cigarette smoke. "The Denton Independent School District has removed an employee from her position because she smells like cigarette smoke.

Suzanne Lidster was thrilled when she was recently hired to assist a student with disabilities at L.A. Nelson Elementary. 'It's something that God sent me here to do with this child,' Lidster told FOX 4. 'It's like OK, this fell in my lap.' But after less than two weeks on the job, Lidster said she received a voicemail informing her that she had lost her position. The school's principal left a message on her cell phone Tuesday morning saying that a doctor said the odor of smoke on Lidster had aggravated the student's allergies. The principal also said that Lidster was not a good fit for the job. 'Like getting a voicemail from the school saying hey, don't come back to the school because you stink from smoke.' Lidster said she smokes eight cigarettes a day but never on campus. 'I don't stink,' she said. But she admits that she may be used to the smell after smoking for 32 years. Lidster tearfully told FOX 4 reporter Rebecca Aguilar that she would never do anything that might hurt a child."

Story #3: Will Madam Albright Run Foreign Policy Again?

RUSH: From Davenport, Iowa: "Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright," in my mind another incompetent failure, "said that Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton is the best presidential candidate to repair America's image. She also said Clinton is a caring friend. Albright, speaking at an event in Davenport on Thursday, said the Bush administration has caused many problems, but Clinton could restore America's reputation." Right. Repair the nation's image? I think, folks, this depends on what image one would want to project. If you want to project the image of a broken, cowering, collapsing nation sinking rapidly toward Third World status, then Hillary is your girl -- or man, whatever Elizabeth Edwards said she is. But if the image is a nation that's prosperous, self-assured, battle-ready to defend ourselves, not be shaken by frivolous events or fad theories of impending doom, then I think we have to look elsewhere for a president than under Madeleine Albright's skirt. By the way, is that the primary job of a president, to "repair the nation's image"? Is that what we're to do? We want a PR department running the United States of America, folks?

Story #4: America to Ruskies: Our Bombs Are Bigger

RUSH: By the way, from the "mine is bigger than yours" department, the United States just said that it's got bigger bombs than what the Ruskies just lit off the other day. "The U.S. has a 14-ton super bomb more destructive than the vacuum bomb just tested by Russia, a U.S. general said Wednesday." This is "retired Lt. General McInerney, chairman of the Iran Policy Committee, and former Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. McInerney said the U.S. has 'a new massive ordnance penetrator...'" That's a bomb, for those of you in Rio Linda. When they hear the word penetrator, Rio Lindans -- heh, heh -- they get excited. But we're talking bombs here, for those of you in Rio Linda. "McInerney said the U.S. has 'a new massive ordnance penetrator that's 30,000 pounds, that really penetrates ... Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that we can't penetrate.' He also said the new Russian bomb was not a 'penetrator.'" Also, the Russians said, "Don't worry, our bomb will not destroy the environment. Our bomb will not harm the environment," as they showed videotape of apartment buildings and tanks being blown to smithereens and a giant fire consuming the forest where they set the bomb off.

Story #5: Fascinating Robert Rector Interview on Poverty

RUSH: I've asked often: "If you run an important business, is there anybody in government, in the bureaucracy, that you would hire to run it for you?" And the answer is "no." So then why is it that people just assume that when Democrats come out and say they can fix health care, that the health care professionals are screwing up, why does anybody believe 'em? When they come out and say, they know better about what to do in Iraq and the war on terror than four-star generals, why does anybody believe 'em? Now, it's one thing to ask the question. But I, in addition to asking it, provide answers that also provide the reason for the question being asked. Front Page Magazine on Wednesday of this week published an interview with Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who has been doing all of the expert work analyzing the latest census data on poverty. There are a couple of key questions and answers here that I think will illustrate just how government does not work and, therefore, why anybody should turn over the important workings of the private sector in this country to anybody, particularly Democrats, is just ridiculous.

"Question: So it is true that the official poverty rate is stuck at about 12 or 13 percent? Rector: It hasn't varied terribly much since the beginning of the War on Poverty. Question: Despite how many trillions being spent? Rector: Since the beginning of the War on Poverty we have now spent over 11 trillion dollars," to eradicate it. Can I put that another way? That's $11 trillion of the redistribution of wealth. That's $11 trillion in transfer payments. Eleven trillion of your dollars have been spent in the war on poverty, and it hasn't changed in, well, 42 years. "Question: Where did that money go -- and who got it? Rector: Basically, we have spent a lot of money but we spent money in such a way that we displaced the work effort of the poor, so that we did not get very much net increase in income. Rather than bringing people's incomes up, what we've done is supplanted work with welfare. What you need to do in order to truly get improvements is to create a welfare system that requires work and encourages marriage so that the recipient is moving toward self-sufficiency while receiving aid, rather than receiving aid in lieu of his own work efforts."

Now, some of you might think this is cynicism, but it's not. That's precisely the purpose of the War on Poverty! It was precisely the purpose of the Raw Deal. That is, to create the situation where recipients receive aid and don't have to work. Now, we've had welfare reform in the latter part of the nineties and there have been some significant changes there. But, for the longest time, that was the point of it. That's what liberals want to do with virtually every human being they can in this country. "Question: We've known for a long time about these problems with the welfare system. Is there any progress being made to fix them? Rector: In 1996, we reformed one small welfare program -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- by requiring the recipients, or part of the recipients, to perform work in exchange for the benefits. As a result of that, we got a huge decline in welfare rolls, a huge surge in employment and record drops in black child poverty. Unfortunately, the rest of the welfare system -- the remaining 69 programs -- remained unreformed. Until we reform those programs in a similar way, we will make no further progress against poverty."

Now, let me search for one more answer. Oh, here we go: "Rector: The second major reason that children are poor is single parenthood in the absence of marriage. Close to two-thirds of all poor children live in single-parent families. What we find is that if a never-married mother married the father of her children, again, about 70 percent of them would immediately be raised out of poverty," if the father worked. "Most of these men who are fathers without being married, in fact, have jobs and have a fairly good capacity to support a family. Question: How many of those 37 million are children -- and why do they count them as poor people? Rector: They are counted as part of the household -- what they judge is the whole household's income. Part of the reason the Census Bureau is telling us that we have 37 million poor people is that it judges families to be poor if they have incomes roughly less than $20,000 a year. But it doesn't count virtually any welfare income as income. So food stamps, public housing, Medicaid --" get this figure "all of the $600 billion that we spend assisting poor people (per year) is not counted as income when they go to determine whether a family is poor." That's the reason I wanted to read that answer to you: $600 billion a year. That's more than the defense budget, my friends in the left, and we've got nothing to show for it. So my point is, this is clearly an illustration of the ineffectiveness of these kinds of liberal-oriented programs to solve problems. So why, then, give them any more? Why give them the military? Why give them health care? Why give them the retail industry? There is no reasonable answer to that question.

One more question and answer from Robert Rector. This is also fascinating in trying to illustrate here how the government does not work. "Question: I've read that the national poverty rate declined steadily until it hit about 13% in 1965, it's been stuck there since? Is this true, and why? Rector: Yes. Poverty was declining rapidly before the war on poverty was created in the mid-1960s, but since that time, the poverty rate has basically stagnated and there are two reasons for it. One is that none of the poverty spending is counted as income, so that it can't have an anti-poverty effect." That's profound, folks. I have known this, but that is really profound. If you have a family making less than 20 grand and you give them 20 grand worth of benefits every year for whatever reasons, but you don't count what you give them as income, you're able to count them in poverty, and really the rate ought to be much lower than it is. The second most important reason, though, is all these programs discourage work and marriage so that they, in fact, are pushing people deeper into poverty at the same time that they are giving them aid.

Story #6: UK Man Refused Care Because He Smokes

RUSH: If you want to know what Hillary Care would look like, let me give you this story from the UK Daily Mail: "A man with a broken ankle is facing a lifetime of pain because a Health Service hospital has refused to treat him unless he gives up smoking. John Nuttall, 57, needs surgery to set the ankle which he broke in three places two years ago because it did not mend naturally with a plaster cast." He's a builder, by the way. "They have told him they will treat him only if he gives up smoking. But the former builder has been unable to break his habit and is now resigned to coping with the injury as he cannot afford private treatment. He is in constant pain from the grating of the broken bones against each other and has been prescribed daily doses of morphine. Mr Nuttall, of Newlyn, Cornwall, broke the ankle in a fall in 2005. Initially he refused surgery because he had caught [a staph infection] at a different hospital four years earlier, and was terrified of history repeating itself. ...

"Mr Nuttall said: 'I am in agony. I have begged them to operate but they won't. I have tried my hardest to give up smoking but I can't. I got down to ten a week at one point but they said that was not good enough. ... I have paid my dues as a taxpayer -- and now the NHS won't treat me.'" Control, folks. That's what liberalism is all about. This is a little microcosm of the kind of health care you would get under Hillary Care, or Edwards Care, or Obama Care, or anything of the sort, if the government takes it over... People ask, "Well, Rush, how come it won't work? Why do you say it won't?" Well, aside from the fact that none of these people are qualified? Somebody show me Mrs. Clinton's résumé. Show me her experience in the health care field.

"But, Rush, she cares!" I don't care. She can care all she wants. The things she cares about scare me, but she can care all she wants. Care doesn't accomplish anything. "But, Rush, she really wants to fix the system." Show me the résumé. Show me where John Edwards has expertise in the health care system. Show me! Same thing with Barack Obama. Show me this. You can't. "But, Rush, they care so much." Let me tell you what's going to happen if this all happens. The expressed purpose of these people will be to get you as dependent on government as possible -- and, by the way, for those of you who hate the rich and hate the wealthy and you want to get even with them? It ain't going to fly in health care, either.

What's going to happen is when the government runs the show and there aren't any competitors and you get sick and you break your ankle and they won't fix it because you smoke, where are you going to go? You are SOL, folks. There is nowhere for you to go. "What about the rich?" The rich will have their own private doctors. The rich are not going to mess around with this gunk of a Hillary Care system. Believe me, the market will be there for it for people who can afford it. The doctors will be glad not to participate. "But, Rush, what if Mrs. Clinton tells the doctors they have to participate in order to get Medicare?" The doctors will say, "Screw it! I'll gladly get out of Medicare if I can get a good clientele of people that will pay what I have to charge in order to treat them," and that's exactly what's going to happen, and the very people that the poor and the left want to get even with, the rich, are not going to be subjected to all this, but the average, common, ordinary, everyday American will have nowhere else to go because you can go to your government bureaucrat and say, "I need a heart transplant," or whatever and they'll say, "Well, go stand in line like at the Department of Motor Vehicles or go stand in line at the Post Office. We'll get to you when we can." They're not going to care because they have no incentive to care! Where else are you going to go? Go to Canada. It's how it works there. Go to the UK. It's exactly how it works there. You note in this story about the builder. He says he can't afford private care. There are people who do and who can and who are getting it even in the UK. The same thing would happen here, folks.

Story #7: Calories Underestimated at "Healthy" Restaurants

RUSH: This, amazingly, is from Reuters: "People who opt for a meal at a 'healthy' restaurant often consume more calories than they would dining at fast food joints that make no health claims, a new study shows. The researchers found that individuals underestimate the calorie content of foods served at restaurants they see as healthier, to a degree that could easily lead to weight gain. For example, 'People think that the same 1,000-calorie meal has 159 fewer calories if it comes from Subway than if it comes from McDonalds,' Dr. Pierre Chandon, at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, told Reuters Health. 'If they choose to consume this fictitious 'calorie credit' on other food, and it they eat at Subway twice a week, they could gain an extra 4.9 pounds a year.'" You know, it doesn't surprise me. We can't trust big business. The health industry, Big Health, is out there misleading everybody. I can play liberal, too, on this. Now, along the same lines here, you know, we are surrounded by these health Nazis. They're all leftists. It's one thing if they want to go out and eat watercress vinaigrette and they go prowl around the forests and eat berries falling from the trees, fine and dandy, but don't tell the rest of us we have to do this. They run around and say, "It's healthier, it's healthier, and it's good for the health care system of the country," and so forth and so on.

Story #8: O.J. Claims He Was Conducting Sting Operation

RUSH: I haven't talked about the this, folks: O.J. Simpson might be arrested out in Las Vegas for being involved in an armed holdup of sports memorabilia that he says is his. Now it has just been reported that Simpson told AP he was conducting a sting operation to get his own belongings. (laughs) You really have to question the wisdom of people at times. O.J. Simpson has to know this. He just has to know! Maybe as a star athlete all these years and what he's gotten away with, maybe doesn't know it, but you just have to know you have one shot at it, and if you ever get dragged before a court, a judge or jury again, there will be reciprocity. You're not going to get two of these. To risk this, even if it is your own memorabilia that you say was stolen from you, to go about getting it back this way? Because I guess somebody has a tape of the attempted holdup here and somebody says, "Put the gun down," which, everybody is assuming, "Okay. It was an armed holdup here and that O.J. was involved." We've been waiting for three hours for the press conference of the Las Vegas cops. The Drive-Bys having running that little crawl: "Breaking news! Waiting for news conference of Las Vegas police!" It's been the entire time we have been on the air here.

Story #9: Canadian Kids Living With Parents Longer

RUSH: This is from Canada.com. I'll bet it's true here, or if not yet, will soon be. "Young adults are living with their parents in ever increasing numbers, according to data from the most recent census released Wednesday by Statistics Canada, but sociologists attribute a large part of the latest rise to choice rather than necessity. Staying in school longer and difficulty finding a stable, full-time job are historical reasons behind a trend that has been on the upswing for the last two decades. But experts believe the most recent rise has been in large part fuelled by shifting family values -- both traditional and liberal. On the one hand, newcomers to Canada often expect their children to remain in the family home until they marry, said Marc Molgat, a sociology professor at the University of Ottawa. But on the other, he said, baby boomers often have a relationship with their adolescent and adult children that is more akin to friendship compared to past generations." I can believe that, and that's the threat to America. It is. That's the threat to America, these Baby Boomers that raise their kids as their friends and say to the friends, "Why would you want to leave home?" Most kids can't wait to get away from their parents, but if the parents have gone out of the way to make 'em their friends... Anyway, "Twenty years ago, just shy of a third of young adults between 20 and 29 lived with their parents." That many? We're talking about Canada here. In 2006, 43.5% of the 4 million Canadians in that age bracket lived with their parents. Unreal. Unacceptable. Unbelievable.

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