RUSH: Did you guys turn your lights on Saturday night 8:30? Boy, I did too! I lit up the whole place. I couldn’t legally light up the back because of the stupid turtles, but I lit up the inside of the house as much as I could, and I got a lot of e-mails from people saying they did, too. And guess what? I got a couple charts here, I could link to at RushLimbaugh.com. Anthony Watts has a blog, and on his blog are two graphs of power demand — one for Saturday, the next one for Sunday — and they show no difference. No difference whatsoever, no observable decrease in energy consumption in California, during Earth Hour on Saturday night — and in Toronto, the environmentalists there declared success with the same kind of graph, not realizing there is a drop in demand every day during the time of Earth Hour.
In some places going dark for an hour and then firing everything back up actually increased the output of CO2, the carbon footprint because the surge in powering back up at 9:30 after this thing wiped out any gain — and even the organizers know it’s just symbolism. It’s just symbolism. It’s just to show how we can ‘come together’ and so forth. This is the tug, the tug of popular sentiment that gets people involved in doing meaningless, silly, symbolic things that make themselves feel like they matter, and make themselves feel like they’re making a difference. Those kinds of things are easy. Well, it’s easy using these things to suck people in on the idea that your meaningless life now has meaning. ‘You have taken action by going dark for an hour! You have taken action to save your planet,’ and this is how you get the youngsters, the brain dead, and others, ladies and gentlemen, to whom you want to reach to create your majorities.
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RUSH: By the way, lights out, Earth Hour on Saturday night, on Saturday night, WNBC-TV Channel 4 sent their ace correspondent, Tom Llamas, down to Times Square to report on what was happening at Earth Hour. Here’s what he filed.
LLAMAS: The World Wildlife Fund says that they hope to have this in more cities next year, and as you know, climate change has become a political issue and conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh said on Earth Hour tonight he planned on getting a Christmas tree and putting on his Christmas lights. So not everybody participating, not everybody excited about the Earth Hour. Reporting live in Times Square, I’m Tom Llamas, News 4 New York.
MORGAN: All right, Tom giving us both sides of the story. Thank you, Tom.
RUSH: Wow, what a great job, gave us both sides of the story, what a great job, Tom Llamas, Channel 4, WNBC-TV in New York, great job, both sides of the story. I sat around Saturday night, and I was wondering, the people who do things, I mean I know them, I know them like the back of my hand, I know who these people are, and I give such thanks I’m not one of them. I give such thanks my life is not so empty and meaningless that participating in empty, symbolic matters like this is a big thrill, a rush, if you will. (interruption) Oh, really? Dawn just sent me a little note here. Her daughter was running around the house turning all the lights off and Dawn was running around turning them back on. By the way, I never got around to getting a Christmas tree, but I made sure the house was lit up like one. I lowered the air-conditioning to 68 degrees. I turned on every television set. I turned on the volume. I turned on every computer and I logged onto websites using as much CPU requirement as possible, flash video, all kinds of animation. I loaded it up out there, folks, and tried to cancel out five or six other people who had gone dark.
It depresses me to see so many people behave like sheep, mindless, moldable sheep, lemmings, under a misguided premise. ‘Well, Rush, what’s wrong? If they feel good doing it, what’s wrong?’ It’s because of where it leads, because of where it will lead them, and where it will lead our country. Folks, if you’re new to this program, let me give you an umbrella to try to help you understand everything that happens for the most part or every point that’s made, every story we focus on, one of the things that I value most is my personal liberty and freedom, enshrined by our founding documents, Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. And with someone like Obama and his pals running the United States, it is our individual liberty and freedom that is under assault. We say capitalism’s under assault, the private sector is under assault. Well, it’s liberty. It’s all about freedom. It’s about having the ability to do whatever you want to do, the best you can do it to be the best you can be, to work in your own self-interest, which is not selfishness. And so if you listen to this program and you are new to it, and you listen to me review the Obama takeover of the GM plant, understand it has nothing to do with a personal animus against Obama
It’s about the fact that 62 million Americans fear, by virtue of those who voted against Obama, we love and we fear the loss of our liberty, the loss of our freedom. We fear a government tyranny. We fear any form of a dictatorship. We fear the notion that government has all the answers and will do everything necessary to solve every problem for individuals. It scares us. So all of the things that happen to be highlighted on this program and all of the comments, criticism aimed at the Obama administration, for those of you new to the program, understand, we’re all about trying to persuade people here not to give up their freedom, not to give up their liberty, not to give up their pursuit of happiness, and that’s why I cringe when I see so many people mindlessly, blamelessly, turn off the lights for a meaningless, symbolic act that will change nothing other than empower the people who want to usurp our freedom and liberty.